Zizek - "Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing"

Slavoj Zizek.

1.     “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing”  

a.     Courtly love defines the parameters of how the two sexes relate to each other, even though permissiveness is common.

b.     To understand courtly love one needs to read history retroactively.

c.     The Masochistic Theatre of Courtly Love

                                               i.     The lady should be perceived as an elevates spiritual longing, rather than a sublime object.

                                             ii.     A woman is not admired for herself, just for the ideal.  She is hollow.

                                            iii.     The knight is the subject, the lady is the bondsman.

                                            iv.     She functions as an unhuman partner, an automation or a machine.

                                             v.     Courtly love has to do with cultural constructs, not passion.

                                            vi.     In sadism we encounter direct negation.

                                          vii.     In masochism negation assumes the form of disavowal, a suspension of reality.

                                         viii.     Sadism is reflective of the power structure of abuser abusing victim.

                                            ix.     Masochism is the victim seeking abuse. 

1.     It is the man looking to the woman to humiliate him.

2.     Violence is never carried out.

3.     Masochism tends to be more theatrical.

                                              x.     Masochism implies there is more truth in the mask we wear, in the “fiction” we obey and follow.

                                            xi.     Women beating escalates when the man realizes the woman enticed him into beating her.  Although his original intent was to teach her a lesson.

2.     The Courtly “Imp of the Perverse”

a.     It is not simply that we set up additional convention hindrances in order to heighten the value of the object: external hindrances that thwart our access to the object are the precisely to create the illusion that without them, the object would be directly accessible. 

b.     The lady functions as a black hole around the man’s desire.

c.     The point is that the aim of the prohibition is not to raise the price of an object by rendering access more difficult, but to raise this object itself to the level of the thin, of the black hole around which desire is organized.

d.     The official desire is to sleep with the woman, our fear is that she’ll say yes.

                                               i.     The object of desire itself coincides with the force that prevents its attainment.

                                             ii.     The phallus is the signifier of enjoyment and castration.  It reflects that which entices us to search for enjoyment induces us to renounce it.

e.     Approaches to language.

                                               i.     Every proposition, including a constative, already is a performative, as one of the two moments of the whole is simultaneously is the whole.

                                             ii.     Every predicate possess, over and above its informative value, an argumentative value.

f.      More points on why women are evil rationalized by duplicate and paired meaning of what we think we understand but refuse to realize.

3.     Exemplifications

a.     From the thirteenth century to modern times, we encounter numerous variations of courtly love.

                                               i.     Examples were given.

4.     From the Courtly Game to the Crying Game.

a.     It provides a variation on courtly love.

                                               i.     Long example given.

5.     The Crying Game Goes East

a.     The movie is a confused bundle of male fantasies about women, not a true relationship with a woman.

b.     It’s about homosexual love for the transvestite.

c.     The film is dishonest.

6.     A summary of the previous outline is provided.

            Works Cited

Zizek, Slavoj. “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing.”  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al.  2^nd ed. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2010.  2402-2427. Print.

---. Epistemology of the Closet. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al.  2^nd ed. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2010.  2470-2477. Print.