The Digital Perversion

... et pourtant, il revient dans le réel

The first paradox of this retreat of the big Other is discernible in the so-called "culture of complaint," with its underlying logic of ressentiment: far from cheerfully assuming the inexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other for its failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn't exist, i.e., as if impotence is no excuse—the big Other is responsible for the very fact that it wasn't able to do anything: the more the subject's structure is "narcissistic," the more he puts the blame on the big Other and thus asserts his dependence on it. The basic feature of the "culture of complaint" is thus a call, addressed at the big Other, to intervene and to set things straight (to recompense the damaged sexual or ethnic minority, etc.)—how, exactly, is this to be done is again a matter of different ethico-legal "committees." Is thus the "culture of complaint" not today's version of hysteria, of the hysterical impossible demand addressed to the Other, a demand which effectively wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds his/her existence in his/her complaint—"I am insofar as make the Other responsible and/or guilty for my misery"? The gap is here insurmountable between this logic of complaint and the true "radical" ("revolutionary") act which, instead of complaining to the Other and expecting it to act, i.e., displacing the need to act onto it, suspends the existing legal frame and itself accomplishes the act... So what is wrong with the complaint of those who are really deprivileged? The fact that, instead of undermining the position of the Other, they still address themselves to it: by way of translating their demand into the terms of legalistic complaint, they confirm the Other in its position in the very gesture of attacking it.

Furthermore, a wide scope of phenomena (the resurgent ethico/religious "fundamentalisms" which advocate a return to the Christian patriarchal division of sexual roles; the New Age massive re-sexualization of the universe, i.e., the return to pre-modern pagan sexualized cosmo-ontology; the growth of "conspiracy theories" as a form of popular "cognitive