Kantor’s Symptom or Grotowski’s Fantasy? Towards a Theatre of the Political

Abstract

It is a common misperception of psychoanalysis these days to expect a theorist to unearth the personal idiosyncrasies of an artist in order to reveal the ‘truth’ behind a particular work of art. The basic Žižekian intervention proposes the opposite task. In Lacan’s conception of the Symbolic (the big Other, language, etc.), as Žižek would argue, what is at stake is not the private traumatic conflicts suffered by an individual — which form the basis of their public expression — but rather that our identity in the Symbolic order cannot be reduced to our individual psyches: it is in fact the process of signification that forms our ‘intimate psychic idiosyncrasies’.¹ Here, Žižek has reinterpreted two key Lacanian terms, fantasy and symptom, as a mode for interpreting ideology today. Understanding that desire derives from a constitutive lack, and that fantasy seeks to obfuscate this lack, the symptom is that which reminds us of the Real. If fantasy further functions as the screen which tries to suppress the Real, then the symptom is the embodiment of jouissance; it is the way in which the Real comes back to disturb our fantasy of consistency or harmony. It is for this reason that Žižek looks at the figure of the Jew in anti-Semitic discourses such as German fascism as a symptom — the whole notion of social harmony can only be sustained if it appears to be threatened by the presence of an alien intruder. However, this conception of the symptom should not be misread as the actual antagonism that prevents social cohesion.