At ŽIŽEK.UK, he explains Lacanian poetry.

[P]erhaps the best way to approach Lacan is to ask a very simple, almost detective question. Lacan obviously knew Heidegger very well: why, then, did he stick to the notion of the subject? Why didn’t he drop subject? I mean, as the name for the core of – inhuman core of – human being? I think the reason is – and here, again, from a weird perspective I approach one of the big topics of Alain, where I agree with him – the relationship between language and truth. Where I support Alain fully is in his – the way I understand it – anti-hermeneutic trust of not identifying truth with – the one who developed this most radically was Heidegger, arguably – this idea that truth is ultimately the historically destined horizon of being which dwells – is inscribed- by our language.

In this historicized transcendental mode, a Heideggerian would have said, ‘this is the unsurpassable horizon of our access to truth.’ The ultimate- the furthest- you can go is to reflect on the horizon of how things appear to you, of how being is disclosed. For example, you can make – I don’t know how many speculative quantum physics discoveries, but – in order to pursue them you already have to have a certain historically destined – embodied in language – pre-understanding of being. So, all we can do, then, is to think – the event, not in the Alain’s sense, but as Heideggerian ereignis?, this totally abysmal game of new destinies of being- this totally abysmal game of evental occurrences of, modes of, disclosure is the ultimate horizon. So, in this sense, for Heidegger, language is the house of being. What lacan does here, basically, I think, is just to add something- a dimension missing in Heidegger (for Lacan). To put it in cynical terms, for Lacan, language is not just the house of being, it’s the torture house of being. We are basically tortured by language – that’s the topic of castration, distortion, and so on.

We are never at home in the house of being- it’s a traumatic discourse – and, again, the name of this discourse is jouissance. So, here I come to Alain; I don’t like Elfriede Jelinek- her style is too dirty for me- but she said something that I deeply agree with, a wonderful phrase; she said “language should be tortured to tell the truth”. I think that this would be the second counterpart: that we should drop all this hermeneutic trust into – you know, the access to truth is to open yourself to the message which is in language – no! We should torture language. And, I think, maybe we should even read poetry and art in this way: as different modes of torture.

What is poetry? It’s a great torture of language.

The google voice transcriber did a great job on this one. My favorite is Katrine Malibu.   ¶ 7:34 AM