Fight Club and the Paradox of Desire: The First Rule is to Give Up What We Don't Need!

Our Desire is the Desire of the Other!

The character Jack (Edward Norton) suffers from serious sleep problems (insomnia) in his monotonous life. To overcome this, he joins therapy groups on the advice of his doctor. These therapy groups consist of people who are suffering from testicular cancer (Jack goes to other therapy groups later on). Jack's aim here is to observe people who have bigger problems than his own and to compare his pain with theirs. In this case, Jack's problem is minor compared to the people in therapy. This creates a kind of complacency.

Jack finally starts to sleep well. Later, a woman (Marla) joins the therapy groups. Marla has no health problems. Marla is someone who started attending therapies for the same reasons as Jack. However, Marla's presence causes Jack to confront the feeling of lying that he hides behind his participation in the therapies. Jack and Marla don't have the same disorders as the people in therapy, and their presence together shatters the illusion Jack has created for himself. Jack states that because Marla is there, her lie reflects his own lie and he suddenly feels nothing. Thus, the effect of the therapies fades.

Later, Jack meets Tyler (Brad Pitt) during a plane trip. Things develop between them and eventually they organize fighting tournaments under bars at night and form a "fight club". Afterwards, Tyler says the following words to the members of the club, which stick in our minds:

(...) I see the strongest and smartest men living here, I see potential, but it's wasted. A whole fucking generation pumping gas. They are waitresses or white-collar slaves. They're chasing cars and clothes because of the commercials. We work jobs we hate and buy things we don't need. We are the middle children of history. We have no purpose and no place. We have not lived through the Great War or the Great Depression. Our war is a spiritual war; our greatest crisis is our lives. Growing up with television we believed that one day we would be millionaires, movie stars or rock stars, but we are not. We are slowly learning that and we are very, very angry.

All the things that we desire here are not really ours, as Tyler said, and we are made to believe in them. We think that everything we desire to have is directly our desire. We want to get things we don't need as if we need them. But as Lacan says:[1] "Man's desire is the desire of the Other."

Paradox of Desire

We think that every object we will obtain from the Other will lead us to the objet petit a ("indeterminate object of desire"), a concept used by Lacan. Because the subject wants to fulfill its fundamental lack and seeks it in the Other. However, the Other cannot fulfill this demand. Because the cracks in the structure of the Big Other are precisely the places where this lack itself cannot be filled. The whole purpose of the Other is the promise that every object we desire will bring us absolute fulfillment and complete us. But the objet petit a that the subject seeks is something that the Other does not have.

To give an example: The capitalist system tells us that we always have the right to be happy. But the underlying mode of capitalist functioning is that the subject is ultimately unsatisfied. This is what Tyler rebels against and wants us to realize. Jack thinks that by renovating all the furniture in his house he is buying things that will make him feel good all the time. But this is not the solution to feeling good and being absolutely satisfied. It revives the desire to get what the system imposes on us and what we don't have. This in itself creates a paradox. This gives rise to revolutionary movements against the existing order. The social order needs subjects to produce and desire in order to survive, but this is only possible if there are gaps in the ideology. But this also threatens the functioning of the social order.

What is it that Jack is looking for by renovating his house? We can explain it like this: The objet petit a (indeterminate and impossible object) is the cause of the subject's desire, but it is not directly the object of desire. This is because the object of desire is related to certain things and the subject is satisfied when "that" thing is reached. For example, if you want to drink a bottle of Coke, this is your object of desire. From the moment you reach it, you are satisfied. But it is the objet petit a that triggers and leads us to coke. The satisfaction when we reach the cola is the satisfaction of reaching the object. But fundamentally desire is unsatisfied. But precisely because of our unsatisfaction here, we seek satisfaction. The absolute fulfillment of desire leads to its ultimate loss. But this search for desire always continues.

Slavoj Zizek defines this situation as the paradox of desire. In addressing the paradox of desire, Zizek takes Zenon's most famous paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles starts behind the turtle, and in order for Achilles to overtake the turtle, he must first travel half the distance he has traveled, and then half the distance he has traveled again. Thus Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise. In fact, we know that Achilles will catch up with the turtle because he is fast. There is a paradox here that is always keeping its distance.

Based on Lacanian theory, what is important is that the object is unattainable. Here it shows us the relationship between the subject and the object-cause of desire, which we can never catch. The object-cause is always elusive. The only thing to do here would be to circle it. This is because the object of the originary desire is ambiguous. As we have just mentioned, Lacan calls it the objet petit a. The law, which creates the allure of mystery and a quality that distinguishes it from other things, makes the situation in which the object is to be reached special and intriguing with the boundaries it draws.

Freedom Fist

Fight Club, apart from fighting, has also succeeded in attacking big corporations. This is a kind of anti-capitalist action. But we see it in its most brutal and destructive form. We also see this action, which wants to get out of the context of being a slave, in the scene where Jack punches himself in his boss's office. In order to get a paycheck from his boss, Jack sets up a trick on him and beats him until he is covered in blood. In this sequence, before the end of the movie, we clearly see that Tyler is not a second character, but a fictional character in Jack's mind.

Zizek offers the following explanation of this scene: Jack's action here, as opposed to his attempt at reactionary fantasies or masochism, is one in which he is unshackled: freedom. He (Jack) is where the fist is. To defeat the enemy, we must first strike ourselves. To break free from the conditions that chain us as slaves to the authoritarian structure, we must first confront ourselves.

Also, what the subject's beating himself up represents here is a reference to the working class who have nothing much to lose. With the act of beating himself up, he actually cleanses himself of the symbolic/social structure that does not value him much and gets his freedom. Because he would rather be a "free" who beats himself than a slave who is beaten by the master. In beating himself, he actually beats what he depends on his master for.

At the end of the movie, Jack kills Tyler with the gun he fires at himself and thus gets rid of the act of beating himself. It is no longer himself he has to beat, but the system.