Unable to Identify..

Following a post at I Cite, I've been giving some thought to the notion of 'overidentification'. Jodi has provided a wonderfully lucid definition of this concept in her comments. I hope to post something considered on this soon. I have the sense, for now, that 'identification' itself is a kind of impossible point or optical illusion, in the sense that we seem to have only incomplete identification or over-identification: as we approach full identification, this suddenly flips over into overidentification. Identification - as some median point - constitutively eludes us in our very attempt to approach it. It is a spectre floating in front of us or a mirage glimped in arrears. And is this not because we identify with that which is non-identical with itself? Anyway, none of this doubtless makes any sense at this stage. So, for the moment, here's something I found by Zizek on overidentification, using the usual pop-culture egs:

MASH and An Officer exhibit the two versions of the perfectly functioning military subject: identification with the military machine is supported either by ironic distrust, indulgence in practical jokes and sexual escapades (MASH), or by the awareness that behind the cmel drill-sergeant there is a 'warm human person', a helping father-substitute who only feigns cruelty (in An Officer and a Gentleman), in strict analogy with the - profoundly anti-feminist - myth of a hooker who, deep in her heart, longs to be a good mother. Full Metal Jacket, on the other hand, successfully resists this ideological temptation to 'humanize' the drill sergeant or other members of the crew, and thus lays on the table the cards of the military ideological machine: the distance from it, far from signalling the limitation of the ideological machine, functions as its positive condition of possibility. What we get in the first part of the film is the military drill, the direct bodily discipline, saturated with the unique blend of a humiliating display of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy (at Christmas, the soldiers are ordered to sing 'Happy birthday dear Jesus . . .') - in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest. This part of the film ends with a soldier who, on account of his overidentification with the military ideological machine, 'runs amok' and shoots first the drill sergeant, then himself; the radical, unmediated identification with the phantasmic superego machine necessarily leads to a murderous passage a l'acte.

The second, main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier (Matthew Modine) who, throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic 'human distance' towards the military machine (on his helmet, the inscription 'Born to kill' is accompanied by the peace sign, etc. - in short, it looks as if he has stepped right out of MASH!), shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has fully succeeded; he is the fully constituted military subject. The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'