Slavoj Zizek-Bibliography/From “Passionate Attachments” to Dis-Identification/Lacan Dot Com

According to standard feminist cinema theory, in the classical noir, the femme fatale
is punished at the level of the explicit narrative line. She is
destroyed for being assertive and undermining the male patriarchal
dominance and for presenting a threat to it. Although she is destroyed
or domesticated, her image survives her physical destruction as the
element which effectively dominates the scene. The subversive character
of the noir films is exhibited in the way the texture of the film belies
and subverts its explicit narrative line. In contrast to this classic
noir, the neo-noir of the 80s and 90s, from Kasdan’s Body Heat to The Last Seduction, at the level of explicit narrative, openly allows the femme fatale
to triumph, to reduce her partner to a sucker condemned to death – she
survives rich and alone over his dead body. She does not survive as a
spectral “undead” threat which libidinally dominates the scene even
after her physical and social destruction. She triumphs directly, in
social reality itself. How does this affect the subversive edge of the femme fatale
figure? Does the fact that her triumph is real not undermine her much
stronger spectral/fantasmatic triumph, so that, instead of a spectral
all-powerful threat, indestructible in her very physical destruction,
she turns out to be just a vulgar, cold, manipulative “bitch” deprived
of any aura?

Perhaps what one should do here is change the terms of the debate by,
first, pointing out that, far from being simply a threat to the male
patriarchal identity, the classic femme fatale functions as the
“inherent transgression” of the patriarchal symbolic universe, as the
male masochist-paranoiac fantasy of the exploitative and sexually
insatiable woman who simultaneously dominates us and enjoys in her
suffering, provoking us violently to take her and to abuse her.[9] The
threat of the femme fatale is thus a false one. It is effectively
a fantasmatic support of patriarchal domination, the figure of the
enemy engendered by the patriarchal system itself. In Judith Butler’s
terms, femme fatale is the fundamental disavowed “passionate
attachment” of the modern male subject, a fantasmatic formation which is
needed, but cannot be openly assumed, so that it can only be evoked on
the condition that, at the level of the explicit narrative line –
standing for the public socio-symbolic sphere – she is punished and the
order of male domination is reasserted. Or, to put it in Foucauldian
terms, in the same way that the discourse on sexuality creates sex as
the mysterious, impenetrable entity to be conquered, the patriarchal
erotic discourse creates the femme fatale as the inherent threat
against which the male identity should assert itself. And the neo-noir’s
achievement is to bring to light this underlying fantasy: the new femme fatale
who fully accepts the male game of manipulation, and as it were beats
him at his own game, is much more effective in threatening the paternal
Law than the classic spectral femme fatale.