ΖΙΖΕΚ”On the level of discourse analysis, it is not difficult to articulate the network of symbolic overdetermination invested in the figure of the Jew. First, there is displacement: the basic trick of anti-semitism is to displace social antagonism into antagonism between the sound social texture, social body, and the Jew as the force corroding it, the force of corruption. Thus it is not society itself which is ‘impossible’, based on antagonism–the source of corruption is located in a particular entity, the Jew. This displacement is made possible by the association of Jews with financial dealings: the source of exploitation and of class antagonism is located not in the basic relation between the working and ruling classes but in the relation between the ‘productive’ forces (workers, organizers of production…) and the merchants who exploit the ‘productive’ classes, replacing organic co-operation with class struggle….”
This displacement is, of course, supported by condensation: the figure of the Jew condenses opposing features, features associated with lower and upper classes: Jews are supposed to be dirty andintellectual, volumptuous and impotent, and so on. What gives energy, so to speak, to the displacement is therefore the way the figure of the Jew condenses a series of heterogeneous antagonisms: economic (Jew as profiteer), political, (Jew as schemer, retainer of a secret power), moral-religious (Jew as corrupt anti-Christian), sexual (Jew as seducer of our innocent girls)…. In short, it can easily be shown how the figure of the Jew is a symptom in the sense of coded message, a cypher, a disfigured representation of social antagonism; by undoing this work of displacement/condensation, we can determine its meaning.
But this logic of metaphoric-metonymic displacement is not sufficent to explain how the figure of the Jew captures our desire; to penetrate its fascinating force, we must take into account the way ‘Jew’ enters the framework of fantasy structuring our enjoyment. Fantasy is basically a scenario filling out the empty space of a fundamental impossibility, a screen masking a void. ‘There is no sexual relationship’, and this impossibility is filled out by the fascinating fantasy-scenario — that is why fantasy is, in the last resort, always a fantasy of the sexual relationship, a staging of it. As such, fantasy is not to be interpreted, only ‘traversed’: all we have to do is experience how there is nothing ‘behind’ it, and how fantasy masks precisely this ‘nothing’. (But there is a lot behind a symptom, a whole network of symbolic overdetermination, which is why the symptom involves its interpretation.)
It is now clear how we can use this notion of fantasy in the domain of ideology proper: here also ‘there is no class relationship’, society is always traversed by a antagonistic split which cannot be integrated into the symbolic order. And the stake of social-ideological fantasy is to construct a vision of society which *does* exist, a society which is not split by an antagonistic division, a society in which the relation between its parts is organic, complementary. The clearest case is, of course, the corporatist vision of Society as an organic Whole, a social Body in which different classes are like extremities, members each contributing to the Whole according to its function–we may say that ‘Society as a corporate Body’ is the fundamental ideological fantasy. How then do we take account of the distance between this corporatist vision and the factual society split by antagonistic struggles? The answer is, of course, the Jew: an external element, a foreign body introducing corruption into the sound social fabric. In short ‘Jew’ is a fetish which simultaneously denies and embodies the structural impossibility of ‘Society’: it is as if in the figure of the Jew this impossibility has acquired a positive, palpable existence–and that is why it marks the eruption of enjoyment in the social field.
The notion of sexual fantasy is therefore a necessary counterpart to the concept of antagonism: fantasy is precisely the way the antagonistic fissure is masked. In other words, *fantasy is a means for an ideology to take its own failure into account in advance
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