the neighbor's drive

Zizek writes:

What if, however, this very choice between the dissolution of a symptomal knot and its acceptance as a positive condition is, again, a false one? What if the very structure of a drive (as opposed to instinct) provides a solution? We are stuck on a knot around which drive circulates, yet it is this very stuckness that pushes us again and again forward to invent ever new forms to approach it. Every 'openness' has thus to be sustained by a 'knot' which stands for a fundamental impossibility. The excess of humanity with regard to the animal is not (only) an excess of dynamism, but rather an excess of fixity: a human remains 'stubbornly attached,' fixated, to an impossible point, returning to it on account of a compulsion to repeat, unable to drop it even when it reveals itself as unattainable. Consequently, is the 'theological' dimension--without which, for Benjamin, revolution cannot win--not the very dimension of the excess of drive, of its 'too-muchness'? Is a solution, then, to change the modality of our being-stuck into a mode that allows, solicits even, the activity of sublimation?

Why does stuckness push us to invent new forms of approach?
Why doesn't stuckness just push to approach again and again?
What accounts for the "new" and the "forms"?
Is the theological dimension the only dimension of drive or does the possibility of changing the modality of stuckness suggest other ones (aesthetic?)/
How would change be possible?
How would the activity of sublimation be solicited?

Comments

[Jennifer Cascadia]

Some people are stuck and some people cannot afford the modality of stuckness. For example, mens' rights activists are stuck in the theological dimension of the great man with the great phallus. Women who are denied abortion rights, who cannot even earn a fair day's pay for a fair day's work (a very modest liberal agenda) are given no public expression for their symptoms, and must look elsewhere than in the field of publically contending ideologies for recourse. Their task is to build a sense of moral outrage from the ground up.

[hubert]

Zizeks lecture with Cornel West below struck me as one of the better ones lately. It's really a display of the variety of levels at wich Z:s theorization of ideology/belief works, and especially the sense in witch his elaborations are orientated towards a materialist understanding of ideology; while Wests comments regarding Z:s still Modern outlook strikes a bit of a diffrent tone than the usual appropriation of Z as some kind of simple pomo/PC-heckler.

[hubert]

...and the link to the lecture of course
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2EIvQo9m0

[Joe Clement]

This was a really great talk. Thank you for sharing it, Hubert.

[Bianca Isaki]

It strikes me that Lauren Berlant's "cruel optimism" work addresses some of the ways and means that optimism, as a kind of stuckness, pushes for the invention of new forms of managing attachments (i.e. anxieties and expectations oriented by and toward that which one is "stuck" to or optimistic about). From her latest (nov08) blog: Attachment reveals our dependency on something, our need for reciprocity and recognition, and the place of fantasy in managing life. One strategy of managing this is sometimes to pretend that our feelings aren’t mixed. Then when the world disappoints us we can say that we were true while the other was false. Another way to manage this is to claim that we are complex while the other people are disappointing, limited, and deserving of critique and complaint.
I'd be curious if optimism could be a cipher for the kind of "stuckness" that Zizek is discussing.