Zizek on conflict (mental, metaphorivisual)

But far from announcing a kind of “pathological fissure,” the frontier separating the “two” substances, i.e., the thing that appears clear to an objective look and the “substance of enjoyment” that can be perceived clearly only by “looking awry,” is precisely what prevents us from sliding into psychosis. Such is the effect of the symbolic order on the visible. The emergence of language opens up a hole in reality, and this hole shifts the axis of our look; language redoubles “reality” into itself and the void of the Thing that can be filled out only by an anamorphic gaze from aside. (35)

…the Lacanian definition of the threatening gesture: it is not a gesture that is interrupted, i.e., a gesture intended to be carried out but prevented from reaching its goal by an external obstacle. It is, on the contrary, something that way already begun in order not to be accomplished, not to be brought to its conclusion. The very structure of the threatening gesture is thus that of a theatrical, hysterical act, of a split, self-hindered gesture, of a gesture that cannot be accomplished not because of an external obstacle but because it is in itself the expression of a contradictory, self-conflicting desire…. (49)

- Slavoj Zizek, "Looking Awry." 1989

Zizek on the femme fatale

The destiny of the femme fatale in film noir, her final hysterical breakdown, exemplifies perfectly the Lacanian proposition that “Woman does not exist.” She is nothing but “the symptom of man.” Her power of fascination masks the void of her nonexistence, so when she is finally rejected, her whole ontological consistency is dissolved. But precisely as nonexisting, i.e., at the moment at which, through the hysterical breakdown, she assumes her nonexistence, she constitutes herself as a “subject.” What is waiting for her beyond hysterization is the death drive at its purest. (54)

What is so menacing in the femme fatale is not the boundless enjoyment overwhelming the man and making of him woman’s plaything or slave. It is not Woman as the object of fascination causing us to lose our sense of judgment and moral attitude but, on the contrary, that which remains hidden beneath this fascinating mask, what appears when the mask falls off-- the dimension of the pure subject fully assuming the fact of the death drive. To use Kantian terminology, woman is not a threat to man insofar as she embodies pathological enjoyment, insofar as she enters the frame of a particular fantasy. The real dimension of the threat is revealed when we “traverse” the fantasy, when the coordinates of the fantasy space are lost through hysterical breakdown. In other words, what is really menacing about the femme fatale is not that she is fatal for men but that she presents a case of a “pure,” nonpathological subject fully assuming her own fate. When the woman reaches this point, there are only two attitudes left to the man. Either he “cedes his desire,” rejects her, and regains his imaginary, narcissistic identity… or he identifies with the woman qua his symptom and meets his fate in a suicidal gesture…. (55)

- Slavoj Zizek, "Looking Awry." 1989

Zizek on desire's creations and temptation's failures

What we have here are thus two realities, two “substances.” On the level of the first metaphor, we have the commonsense reality as “substance with twenty shadows,” as a thing split into twenty reflections by our subjective view; in short, as a substantial “reality” distorted by our subjective perspective (inflated by our anxiety, etc.). If we look a thing straight on, from a matter-of-fact perspective, we see it “as it really is,” while the look puzzled by our desires and anxieties (“looking awry”) gives us a distorted, blurred image of the thing. On the level of the second metaphor (anamorphosis), however, the relation is exactly the opposite: if we look a thing straight on, i.e., from a matter-of-fact, disinterested, “objective” perspective, we see nothing but a formless spot. The object assumes clear and distinctive features only if we look at it “from aside,” i.e., with an “interested” look, with a look supported, permeated, and “distorted” by a desire. This is precisely the Lacanian objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, an object which is, in a way, posited by the desire itself. The paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., an object that can be perceived only by the look distorted by desire, an object that does not exist for an “objective” look. In other words, the objet petit a is always, by definition, perceived in a distorted way, because, outside this distortion, “in itself,” it does not exist, i.e., because it is nothing but the embodiment, the materialization of this distortion, of this surplus of confusion and perturbation introduced by desire into so-called “objective reality.” Objet petit a is “objectively” nothing, it is nothing at all, nothing of the desire itself which, viewed from a certain perspective, assumes the shape of “something.” … Desire “takes off” when “something” (its object-cause) embodies, gives positive existence to its “nothing,” to its void. This “something” is the anamorphic object, a pure semblance that we can perceive clearly only by “looking awry.” It is precisely (and only) the logic of desire that belies the notorious wisdom that “nothing comes from nothing.” In the movement of desire, “something comes from nothing.” It is true that the object-cause of desire is a pure semblance, but this does not prevent it from triggering off a whole chain of consequences which regulate our “material,” “effective” life and deeds. (34)

As soon as the subject becomes aware that the other gazes at it (that the door is meant only for it), the fascination if over. (43)

- Slavoj Zizek, "Looking Awry." 1989.