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