If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between “either accepting reality or choosing fantasy” is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. (Slavoj Žižek)
One of Žižek’s most sustained engagements with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is The Plague of Fantasies (1997). In Plague, Žižek analyzes the flood of pseudo-concrete images that bombard contemporary subjects. By analyzing postmodern culture in light of Lacanian concepts like fantasy, the unconscious, the Name of the Father, symbolic castration, …
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