Fallen Into Knowledge

I have again picked up Zizek’s Parallax View, in hopes of finishing it this time ’round, and also because this passage has been on my mind since I first encountered it months ago:

So what is the Master-Signifier?  Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous “quilting point,” which stabilizes the situation again and makes it readable; the university discourse which then elaborates the network of Knowledge which sustains this readability by definition presupposes and relies on the initial gesture of the Master.  The Master adds no new positive content - he merely adds a signifier which, all of a sudden, turns disorder into order, into “new harmony” as Rimbaud would have put it. […] all fears are exchanged for one fear; that is to say, it is the very fear of God which makes me fearless in all worldly matters.  The same reversal that gives rise to a new Master-Signifier is at work in ideology: in anti-Semitism, all fears (of economic crisis, or moral degradation…) are exchanged for the fear of the Jew…. And is this same logic also discernible in a horror film like Spielberg’s Jaws?  I fear the shark, my friend, and have no other fears…. -Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, pg 37

it would be easy to see the Master-SIgnifier as relating only to ideologies we don’t like - political ideologies - democracy, freedom, terrorist all have approached the status of Master Signifier in recent memory. We fear the terrorist in large part because he (presumably) is unknown, a shadowy figure.  This is the genius of the horror film; the monster we don’t see is scarier than the monster we do see because we can project all sorts of anxieties on the unseen and unknown.

I wonder, however, if it is nearsighted to see the master-signifier as only a way to criticize political ideologies we don’t like.  Nearsighted firstly because such use tempts us pretend that there are areas of life that external to ideology - the objectivity temptation.  But nearsighted also because Christian Theology spends much of its time explicating the meaningfulness (readability) Christian Discourse in light of its Master Signifier, and that crises in Theology are most often crises in the content of the Master-Signifier.  It is just this content which at once is so important and is normally treated as a given (what is the definition of terrorist - or of freedom?).  To be a heretic, also, is to be differently disposed as to the content of the Master-Signifier - Jesus was not wholly Man, etc.

What other areas can be explicated by means if this Master-Signifier, and what are the limits of this idea?

Partly because I’ve been tagged by David, and partly because I haven’t updated this site for too bloody long!

1. One movie that made you laugh:
Thank You For Smoking

2. One movie that made you cry:
Dancer in the Dark

3. One movie you loved when you were a child:
The Swiss Family Robinson - seriously, what’s cooler than living in a treehouse?

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once:
Serenity

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it:
Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior

6. One movie you hated:
300

7. One movie that scared you:
Blue Velvet - and just about anything by David Lynch

8. One movie that bored you:
Being John Malkovich

9. One movie that made you happy:
Kung Fu Hustle

10. One movie that made you miserable:
Crash - David Cronenberg’s verson.

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see:
Donnie Darko

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with:
Ana Pascal, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Stranger than Fiction

13. The last movie you saw:
The Counterfeiters (highly recommended)

14. The next movie you hope to see:
Up the Yangtze, or maybe Noise