translated by Gianmaria Senia

In the contemporary world the preeminent model of dominance is the spectacle.1 This is a collection of images disengaged from the direct experience of life, which induce a subdued passive contemplation. Separated from reality, from the attrition and the risks this brings, the spectacle creates the seduction of an existential marketing that becomes the vehicle of an unprecedented form of social control. Combined with the tendentiously totalizing medicalization of human behavior, as we shall see, today the spectacle promotes the notion of an equally spectacular health as a primary factor of bio-politics.
From this perspective, the Lacanian notion of semblance is antithetical to spectacle. The spectacle makes language turn around in vain, defusing it from its potential of actuation and neutralizing it within the sphere of pure administrative entertainment. Semblance, on the other hand, in interaction between man and woman, in the play of parade or masquerade, opens the way to what’s really at stake, to jouissance.
The semblance of the object, which in the discourse of the analyst occupies the place of the agent, is thus quite distinct from spectacular simulation - the passive apotheosis of a form of communication void of content—and is the point of resistance which jams the communicative mechanism to lead language to manifesting itself as a sign of jouissance.
In clear contrast with the useful, with the spectacular, with the phantasmagoric orgy of communication, jouissance is the reason why psychoanalysis cannot be considered exclusively a therapy.

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