If x-ray had stopped at the end of the quote, she would have secured her point. This statement about Roark comes from Nietzsche's Overman, his ubermensch. To stay in context Rand is still reading Nietzsche, (going on about 20 years now) making entries in her Journal during the planning and writing of Fountainhead.
Now to move on to Zizek!
The entire article is here.
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The_ Actuality of Ayn Rand- The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
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Ayn Rand'. Slavoj Zizek. Ayn Rand's fascination for male figures displaying absolute, unswayable determination of their Will, seems to offer the best ...
Ayn Rand'. Slavoj Zizek. Ayn Rand's fascination for male figures displaying absolute, unswayable determination of their Will, seems to offer the best ...
The properly subversive dimension of her ideological procedure is not to be underestimated. Rand fits into the line of "overconformist" authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it. Her over-orthodoxy was directed at capitalism itself, as the title of one of her books (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; Rand 1967) tells us; according to her, the truly heretical thing today is to embrace the basic premise of capitalism without its communitarian, collectivist, welfare, etc. sugar-coating. So what Pascal and Racine were to Jansenism, what Kleist was to German nationalist militarism, what Brecht was to Communism, Rand is to American capitalism. (The Actuality of Ayn Rand;Slavoj Zizek;JARS 3,no.2;215-227.)
....We have thus Roark as the being of pure drive in no need of symbolic recognition (and as such uncannily close to the Lacanian saint - only an invisible line of separation distinguishes them), and the three ways to compromise one's drive: Wynand, Keating, Toohey. The underlying opposition here is that of desire and drive, as exemplified in the tense relationship between Roark and Dominique, his sexual partner. Roark displays the perfect indifference towards the Other characteristic of drive, while Dominique remains caught in the dialectic of desire, which is the desire of the Other: she is gnawed by the Other's gaze, i.e., by the fact that others, the common people totally insensitive to Roark's achievement, are allowed to stare at it and thus spoil its sublime quality. (218)
Here in Zizek's article he takes on Rand's characterization of Dominique at the level of desire in the dialectic.
The only way for her to break out of this deadlock of the Other's desire is to destroy the sublime object in order to save it from becoming the object of the ignorant gaze of others:
You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all.....I never open again any great book I've read and loved. It hurts me to think of the other eyes that have read it and of what they were."(F 143-44 )
And is this not what Sasha is saying about Barthes: The Lover's Discourse:
Owning Roland Barthes
Doesn't this resonate with Kristen Stewart's refusal to discuss her relationship with Robert Pattinson? "They covet him," she says. "Why would I discuss something that means the world to me with a perfect stranger?"1. POSSESSIONTwo of my friends are currently reading Roland Barthes. One keeps hurling invectives at the page. The other, whom I see almost every day, likes to send out snippets on Twitter, professing her endless love for Barthes’ words, swearing against life itself that this book is hers, it knows her, no other writer could come close to what she tries, in vain, to say about love. This friend asks me, “You remember what he said about absence?” And I itch to rid of the conversation, of her questions, of her testimonials about how fated she and this book are. She offers, “It’s so hard to talk about, no? It’s so personal.” And I itch to rid of the conversation. I think her unworthy, I think her views unworthy, I think her identification with my words unworthy. I think anyone undeserving of this book. I think of everyone who comes to A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments as an intruder to my love affair with it, its captivation of me, my willing enslavement to it. I have known this for four and a half years, perhaps felt it for longer:A Lover’s Discourse is mine.
These "other eyes" are the Evil Gaze at its purest, which grounds the paradox of property: if, within a social field, I am to possess an object, this possession must be socially acknowledged, which means that the big Other who vouchsafes this possession of mine must in a way possess it in advance in order to let me have it. ....this gaze of the Other that oversees me in my desiring capacity is in its very essence "castrative," threatening.
....So, for Dominique, the greatest sacrilege is to throw pearls before swine: to create a precious object and then to expose it to the Other's Evil Gaze, i.e., to let it be shared with the crowd. And she treats herself in precisely the same way: she tries to resolve the deadlock of her position as a desired object by way of willingly embracing, even searching for, the utmost humiliation _ she marries the person she most despises and tries to ruin the career of Roark, the true object of her love and admiration. .....she will become his true partner only when her desire for him will no longer be bothered by the Other's gaze _ in short, when she will accomplish the shift from desire to drive.
Shifting now to Atlas Shrugged:
What the hystericized prime mover must accept is thus the fundamental existential indifference: she must no longer be willing to remain the hostage of the second-handers' blackmail. ("We will let you work and realize your creative potential, on condition that you accept our terms"). She must be ready to give up the very kernel of her being, that which means everything to her, and to accept the "end of the world," the (temporary) suspension of the very flow of energy that keeps the world running. In order to gain everything, she must be ready to go through the zero-point of losing everything. (And here we have Nietzsche! Emphasis mine.) And, far from signaling the "end of subjectivity," this act of assuming existential indifference is, perhaps, the veryb gesture of absolute negativity that gives birth to the subject. What Lacan calls "subjective destitution" is thus, paradoxically, another name for the subject itself, i.e., for the void beyond the theater of hysterical subjectivizations.This subject beyond subjectivization is free in the most radical sense of the word.. This is why Rand's "prime movers" are not characterized primarily by their positive properties (superb intelligence, etc.); their innermost feature is their lack of the false guilt feeling, their freedom from the superego vicious cycle - when you are caught in this cycle, you are guilty whatever you do. (Z;222)