ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the analysis of Slavoj Zizek's interpretation of Althusser via the "Graph of Desire," showing how his treatment of the subject results in an antinomic conception of the relation between Symbolic and Real. This condemns Zizek to lurch between these antinomic poles, hesitating between the alternatives of total complicity with "obscene enjoyment" or a catastrophic rupture with existing symbolic structures. Drawing on the Lacanian theory of the subject, Zizek explains the mechanism of ideological interpellation with reference to Lacan's "Graph of Desire". Designed to replace the Freudian topography of the ego, superego and id, Lacan's topology formalises the fundamental structure of the "subject of the signifier". Zizek is in danger of making the "loop of enjoyment," the second level of the Graph of Desire, rotate solely around the ideological sinthome. The sinthome is supported by fantasy, which, as an unconscious sequence of material letters, is immune to every interpretive demystification.
