The Ugly Jouissance of Genocide

Jacques Lacan refers to the Holocaust as a time when people acted as if they were under the power of some monstrous spell, when they sacrificed themselves to kill and torture for an Other who commanded tasks of extermination and loyalty (Four 275). While in the hold of this monstrous spell, the very ontology of the subject's universe seemed to alter, as limits of time, being, and motion changed and he entered an in-between existence, where life and death became fused.1 It is during such episodes that the subject is transformed into an uncanny replicant of his former self, and is compelled to commit acts that later will seem strange and inexplicable to him. From the collective acts of mass killing in genocide to the torturer's cutting of flesh and breaking of bones in political prisons, the perpetrator acts, often savagely, in a repetitive and deadly manner so as to experience the only kind of pleasure possible when the crucial space between reality and the Real closes: the pleasurable pain of an excessive and ugly jouissance.

Slavoj Žižek discusses this “ugly jouissance” in his analysis of Schelling's philosophy, which posits “the ugly” in topological terms, as that which is larger than its representation, an object out of joint, in the wrong place (Abyss 21-29). In this essay, I discuss what happens when subjects leave the world of meaning and subjectivity as we know it and enter the uncanny dimension of the Real, where “the ugly,” becomes “the lack that also functions as an excess, the excess of a ghostly, spectral materiality in search of a ‘proper,’ ‘real’ body” (Abyss 23). It is a place where das Ding, the Thing, makes its appearance, which “opens up the totality of our drives and all of the transgressive impulses in us” (Jaanus 4). It is the Thing, which is “the cause of the most fundamental human passion” (Lacan, Ethics 97), and “for which we will kill, suffer, die, work and sweat” (Jaanus 7). The Thing, in the words of Maire Jaanus, is not something we can ob