Desert Of The Real

Zizek, a talented Slovenian philosopher, is prominent as a successor of Lacanian theory, He earns his fame by applying psychoanalysis to explaining the phenomena different fields, including politics, movies, literature, ethics, etc.. His academic scope is so widely open that he is praised as a new star in the field of Western philosophy.Following French psychoanalysis, ?i?ek lays emphasis on the late Lacan. ?i?ek published his first English masterpiece the Sublime Object of Ideology, in which he stressed the centrality the Real which cannot be represented and the underlying forces of trauma and enjoyment, since then his most works are published in English.In contrast to postmodernists, ?i?ek claims that all identification is driven by the need to escape falling into the traumatic void at the centre of every identity. The void is the subject which all structures try to fill up.From this perspective, the traditional understanding of ideology as false consciousness and illusion comes to its end. The mark of ideology is that it attempts to conceal a traumatic void. What ideology offers is the construction of social reality itself as a way to escape the horrifying condition of lack in the Real.In this dissertation, the author will have a careful and systematic study on Zizek's theory of ideology and examine the inner mechanism of ideology. Through the interpretation of symptom and grasping the inner mechanism of ideology, ?i?ek leads us to cross the fantasy of ideology and to the desert of the Real. The desert is a place of nothingness, of barrenness, of emptiness. There is nothing behind the ideological fantasy but the traumatic core—the Real . In this sense, the Real is just like the desert, a place of nothingness. After the systematic description of his theory, the author gives reflective thoughts and comments on it, pointing out its great contributions and defects.