Exam II - ENG 311

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Eros and Ananke

Freud; the sex drive and the work drive; they are in conflict and create lots of problems.

Thanatos

Freud; the death drive; the source of the Superego’s sadistic drive.

Oedipal Complex

Freud'; the child’s desire to have sex with its mother and kill its father; those desires conflict with the reality principle, so they must be repressed to create a gendered ego.

Sublimation

Freud; the transformation of socially unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable actions; resolves internal conflict between primal desire and the reality principle, creating a healthy ego.

Scapegoating

Freud; a human tendency to project aggression onto some outsider; becomes further evidence of Thanatos (the death drive).

Ambivalence

Freud; what you most fear, you unconsciously desire, and what you most desire, you unconsciously fear; we fear death, yet we are unconsciously drawn to it.

The Lacanian Superego’s demand

Lacan; “Enjoy!”; if we fail to enjoy, we feel guilty.

Repressive Desublimation

Marcuse; when the Superego is made to say "Yes!” instead of “No!”; late-capitalism encourages us to “Just Do It’” which lessens our ability to think critically.

One-Dimensional Society

Marcuse; a shallow society resulting from repressive desublimation; critical thinking needs sublimation, which causes some discontent, but adds dimension to a life.

According to Henry Miller, “great art

Miller; should be just a little boring,” allowing us to meet it halfway; great art should allow for active contemplation.

Repressive Tolerance

Marcuse; when the exercise of tolerance serves domination and neutralizes oppression; allowing marginalized groups to speak freely but not inciting any help or change to their circumstances.

Struggle for existence

Marcuse; a natural human condition that can be overcome by political change; the “pacification of existence” allows for a just and free society that allows for full human capacity development.

Marcuse on “self-actualization”

Marcuse; requires a degree of alienation and sublimation OR “the negation of the negation”; you need to be a bit alienated and repressed to see what is alienating and repressing about society.

“No Future for White Men”

Brown; there is no futurity in white male ressentiment because it aims to restore order seen in the past to “make America great again”; “traditional views” go against equality but follow a desublimated, resentful, and nihilistic will to power.

Condensation

Freud; when the dreamwork collapses several thoughts into one symbol; Lacan says this functions like metaphor.

Displacement

Freud; when the dreamwork transfers energy of a disturbing thought to a less disturbing one; Lacan says this functions like metonymy.

Fetishism

Freud; a fetish is a substitute for the mother’s missing penis; the substitute becomes what the child saw right before they realized/witnessed the mother’s lack of a penis (ex. feet, lingerie, hair, etc.).

Class Conflict

Marx; the foundation of capitalism, as the workers (proletariats) and capitalists (bourgeoisie) are at odds; workers want the production and profit public, while capitalists want them private.

Reificaiton

Marx; the tendency to reduce complex historical processes, social relations, or spiritual phenomena to the status of things; “time is money!” mentality under capitalism.

Ideology

Marx; making the evils of capitalism seem necessary so that masses accept economic injustice as natural; culture and private interest masquerading as nature and public interest.

False Consciousness

Marx; the effect of ideology and cultural hegemony on working class minds; making them buy into capitalist class interest instead of their own.

Surplus labor

Marx; uncompensated labor that capitalists profit from; work the worker does after he meets his wage and does not get paid for.

Surplus value

Marx; the “phantom” value made by surplus labor; primary source of capital/profit.

Cultural Hegemony

Marx; capitalist ideology causing the interest and worldview of the ruling class to become the accepted cultural norm; low/middle class students objecting to tuition-free college funded by high class tax payers.

Overdetermination

Althusser; influence of two or more causes in a single superstructural effect; there’s never a moment when the economy is the sole determining factor.

Althusser’s short definition of ideology

Althusser; the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence; allows people to understand their place in the world.

Religious Fetish

Althusser; an object believed to have supernatural powers because it’s inhabited by a spirit; it functions as a substitute for that deity.

Lacan’s theory of desire

Lacan; desire is predicated upon lack; there is always another “Signifier” that can be added, so the “signified” is always lacking.

The Real

Lacan'; the Order which cannot be symbolized or imagined; we can never look directly at the Real because there is always a gap.

Little other (l’autre, objet petit a)

Lacan; the Imaginary other as unattainable object of desire; a projection of the ego made to symbolize otherness.

Big Other (l’Autre)

Lacan; the authority behind the Symbolic Order, or something/someone that stands for the for the Symbolic Order; like the Law, God, Society, etc.

Enjoyment/jouissance

Lacan; an ambiguous excess of pleasure or pain that ignites desire; allows someone to be ‘the one’ that we may do irrational things for.

Slavoj Zizek’s central thesis

Zizek; the truth of something is elsewhere, its identity is somewhere outside itself; brings up the question, “what if reality in itself isn’t fully real?”.

Parallax

Zizek; the gap between two perspectives; holding up a finger and closing one eye, then switching eyes - the Real lies within the gap between both those viewpoints.

Butterfield’s definition of ideology

Butterfield; someone else’s religion; we see the gaps in other people’s ideologies, but we cannot see the gap in our own.

The gap in language

Zizek; between the meaning of what you say and the meaning of you saying it, there is a contradiction; “it doesn’t matter who gets to eat the fish, the point is to perform the empty gesture of passing it from mouth to mouth.”

Zizek’s video game metaphor

Zizek; our ideological relationship to the Real in which the programmers of a game didn’t code the scenery to appear real if you get too close; you aren’t supposed to get too close, which represents how ideology functions to frame our experience and hide its own limits.

Zizek’s hamster metaphor

Zizek; a friend of Zizek’s who fetishized his late wife’s hamster, which was the embodied disavowal of her death; when the hamster died, he experienced the reality of the Real - his wife dying.

Suture

Lacan; what closes over the ‘gap’ of the Real, marking the site with a permanent scar'; it can be a fetish, like Zizek’s friend’s fetishized hamster.

Liberating/Discriminating Tolerance

Marcuse; exercising “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left" as a response to repressive tolerance; aims to create a democratic society without oppression.