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