Zizek Enjoy Your Symptom
Enjoy Your Symptom. - Zizek, Slavoj (Highlight: 176; Note: 0.
2020 - Pandemia: covid-19 e a reinvenção do comunismo
2019 - A coragem da desesperança: crônicas de um ano em que agimos perigosamente
2017 - Acontecimento: uma viagem filosófica através de um conceito
2017 - Interrogando o Real
2017 - O Sujeito incômodo: o centro ausente da ontologia política
2015 - O sofrimento de Deus: inversões do apocalipse
2015 - Problema no Paraíso: do fim da história ao fim do capitalismo.
2015 - O absoluto frágil: Ou Por que vale a pena lutar pelo legado cristão?
2014 - A monstruosidade de Cristo
2014 - Violência.
2013 - Menos que nada: Hegel e a sombra do materialismo dialético
2013 - Alguém disse totalitarismo?
2012 - O amor impiedoso: ou sobre a crença
2012 - O ano em que sonhamos perigosamente
2012 - Vivendo no fim dos tempos
2011 - Primeiro como tragédia, depois como farsa
2011 - Em defesa das causas perdidas
2010 - Como ler Lacan
2009 - Lacrimae Rerum: ensaios sobre cinema moderno
2008 - A visão em paralaxe
2005 - Às portas da revolução: escritos de Lenin de 1917
2003 - Bem-vindo ao deserto do Real.
1996 - Um mapa da ideologia
1991 - O Mais Sublime dos Histéricos
1991 - O Mais Sublime dos Histéricos
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Introduction: Impossible Absolute Knowledge
Book I: Hegel with Lacan
1: “The Formal Aspect”: Reason versus Understanding
The story of an appearance
Wanting to say and saying
Zeno’s paradoxes
Truth as loss of the object
2: The Retroactive Performative, or How the Necessary Emerges from the Contingent
One-grain-more, one-hair-less
The Witz of the synthesis
Hegel and the contingent
Necessity as a retroactive effect
From king to bureaucracy
3: The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (1): The One of Self-Reference
The “quilting point” .“point de capiton”.
The dialectical return-to-the-self
The universal as exception
The subjectified structure
The Hegelian “one One”
4: The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (2): The Real of the “Triad”
Lalangue and its boundary
Coincidentia oppositorum
The missed encounter is the object
Forbidding the impossible
Thesis-antithesis-synthesis
5: Das Ungeschehenmachen: How is Lacan a Hegelian?
The three stages of the symbolic
Das Ungeschehenmachen
Crime and punishment
The “beautiful soul”
6: The “Cunning of Reason,” or the True Nature of the Hegelian Teleology
Failure in Austen
The Hegelian subject versus the Fichtean subject
The “reconciliation”
“The spirit is a bone”
“Wealth is the self”
7: “The Suprasensible is the Phenomenon as Phenomenon,” or How Hegel Goes Beyond the Kantian Thing-in-Itself
Kant and McCullough
The ne explétif
“The suprasensible is the phenomenon as phenomenon”
8: Two Hegelian Witz, Which Help Us Understand Why Absolute Knowledge Is Divisive
The signifying reflection
The other’s lack
The symbolic act
“… that integral void that we also call the sacred”
How “Absolute Knowledge” is divisive
Book II: Post-Hegelian Impasses
9: The Secret of the Commodity Form: Why is Marx the Inventor of the Symptom?
Marx, Freud: the analysis of form
The commodity form in the unconscious
Marx, inventor of the symptom
Fetish and commodity
The “subjects who supposedly …”
10: Ideology Between the Dream and the Phantasy: A First Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism”
The Real in ideology
Surplus jouissance .plus-de-jouir. and surplus value
The totalitarian phantasy, the totalitarianism of phantasy
11: Divine Psychosis, Political Psychosis: A Second Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism”
“Argue … but obey.”
The obscenity of the form
Kant with Kafka
“The Law is the Law”
Forced choice
Radical evil
Divine prehistory
12: Between Two Deaths: Third, and Final, Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism”
The second death
Benjamin: revolution as repetition
The “perspective of the last judgment”
The totalitarian body
“The People does not exist”
13: The Quilting Point of Ideology: Or Why Lacan is Not a “Poststructuralist”
The “arbitrariness” of the signifier
The One and the impossible
Lacan versus “poststructuralism”
“There is no metalanguage”
14: Naming and Contingency: Hegel and Analytic Philosophy
Kripke the Hegelian
Descriptivism versus anti-descriptivism
Speech acts, real acts
The impossible performative
I and a
References
Index
2010 - Como ler Lacan
Introdução
- Gestos vazios e performativos: Lacan se defronta com a conspiração da CIA
- O sujeito interpassivo: Lacan gira uma roda de orações
- De Che vuoi? à fantasia: Lacan De olhos bem fechados
- Dificuldades com o real: Lacan como espectador de Alien
- Ideal do eu e supereu: Lacan como espectador de Casablanca
- “Deus está morto, mas Ele não sabe”: Lacan brinca com Bobók
- O sujeito perverso da política: Lacan como leitor de Mohammad Bouyeri
2011 - Primeiro como tragédia, depois como farsa
Sobre Primeiro como tragédia, depois como farsa
Créditos
Sumário
Prefácio à edição brasileira
Introdução: As lições da primeira década
- É a ideologia, estúpido.
Socialismo capitalista?
A crise como terapia de choque
A estrutura da propaganda inimiga
Humano, demasiado humano…
O “novo espírito” do capitalismo
Entre os dois fetichismos
Comunismo outra vez. - A hipótese comunista
O novo cercamento das áreas comuns
Socialismo ou comunismo?
O “uso público da razão”
…no Haiti
A exceção capitalista
Capitalismo de valores asiáticos… na Europa
Do lucro à renda
“Nós somos aqueles por quem estávamos esperando”
E-books da Boitempo Editorial
2012 - O amor impiedoso: ou sobre a crença
Introdução
“Economia, Economia, Horácio .”
Contra a heresia digital
Você deveria se importar (com essa merda) .
“Pai, por que me abandonaste ?”
2013 - Menos que nada: Hegel e a sombra do materialismo dialético
Introdução – Eppur si muove
Parte I - Hegel
1 - Ainda é possível ser hegeliano?
Interlúdio 1 - Marx como leitor de Hegel, Hegel como leitor de Marx
2 - Parataxe: figuras do processo dialético
Interlúdio 2 - Cogito na história da loucura
3 - “Não só como Substância, mas também como Sujeito”
Interlúdio 3 - Rei, populaça, guerra… e sexo
4 - Os limites de Hegel
Parte II - Lacan
5 - Objetos, objetos por toda a parte
6 - O não-Todo, ou ontologia da diferença sexual
7 - O quarteto da luta, historicidade, vontade… e Gelassenheit
8 - A ontologia da física quântica
Conclusão - A suspensão política do ético
2014 - Violência
Sobre Violência - por Jorge Luiz Souto Maior
Introdução O manto sangrento do tirano
1 - Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo
SOS violência
Violência: subjetiva e objetiva
Os bons homens de Porto Davos
Uma vila comunista liberal
Sexualidade no mundo atonal
2 - Allegro moderato – Adagio
Teme o teu próximo como a ti mesmo.
A política do medo
A coisa próxima
A violência da linguagem
3 - Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile
“Está solta a maré escura de sangue”
Um caso estranho de comunicação fática
Ressentimento terrorista
O sujeito suposto saquear e estuprar
4 - Presto
Antinomias da razão tolerante
Liberalismo ou fundamentalismo? Uma praga sobre as casas de um e de outro.
O círculo de giz de Jerusalém
A religião anônima do ateísmo
5 - Molto adagio – Andante
A tolerância como categoria ideológica
A culturização da política
A universalidade efetiva
Acheronta movebo: as regiões infernais
6 - Allegro
Violência divina
Benjamin com Hitchcock
O que não é a violência divina…
… e o que, afinal, é a violência divina.
Epílogo - Adagio
Posfácio - Violência, esta velha parteira: um samba-enredo
2017 - Interrogando o Real
Section One Lacanian Orientations
The Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in
Yugoslavia: An Interview with Éric Laurent
Lacan – At What Point is he Hegelian?
‘The Most Sublime of Hysterics’: Hegel with
Lacan
Connections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy
and Popular Culture
Lacan Between Cultural Studies and Cognitivism
Section Two Philosophy Traversed by
Psychoanalysis
The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to
Psychoanalysis
A Hair of the Dog that Bit You
Hegel, Lacan, Deleuze: Three Strange
Bedfellows
The Eclipse of Meaning: On Lacan and
Deconstruction
The Parallax View
Section Three The Fantasy of Ideology
Between Symbolic Fiction and Fantasmatic
Spectre: Toward a Lacanian Theory of Ideology
Beyond Discourse Analysis
Re-visioning ‘Lacanian’ Social Criticism: The Law
and Its Obscene Double
Why is Wagner Worth Saving?
The Real of Sexual Difference
Enjoy Your Symptom
Introduction
1 Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?
1.1 Death and Sublimation: The Final Scene of City Lights
The trauma of the voice
The tramp’s interposition
The separation
1.2 Imaginary, Symbolic, Real
Imaginary (mis)recognition
Symbolic circuit I: “There is no metalanguage”
Symbolic circuit II: Fate and repetition
The real encounter
2 Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?
2.1 Why is Suicide the Only Successful Act?
The act as an answer of the real
Germany, Year Zero: The word no longer obliges
Europa ’51: Escape into guilt
Stromboli: The act of freedom
2.2 The “Night of the World”
Psychoanalysis and German idealism
The fiction of reality
The fascination of the sacrifice
3 Why is Every Act a Repetition?
3.1 Beyond “Distributive Justice”
Why was Chandler’s Playback a failure?
“Distributive justice” and its exception
Sacrifice, traditional and utilitarian
Le Père…
…ou pire
Repetition: imaginary, symbolic, real
Repetition and postmodernity
“Either/or” redoubled
3.2 Identity and Authority
The “exception reconciled in the universal”
The vicious circle of dialectics and its remainder
Identity and fantasy
Socrates versus Christ
The paradoxes of authority
The “impossible” performative
Kierkegaard’s materialist reversal of Hegel”
Lacan versus Habermas
4 Why Does the Phallus Appear?
4.1 Grimaces of the Real
The “phantom of the opera“: A spectroscopy
The voice qua object
From the modernist sinthome …
… to the postmodernist Thing
4.2 Phallophany of the Anal Father
The anal father
Phallophany versus phallic signifier
Class struggle in the opera
The subject of the Enlightenment
5 Why Are There Always Two Fathers?
5.1 At the Origins of Noir: The Humiliated Father
The paranoiac Other
“Woman as the symptom of man” revisited
From Ned Beaumont to Philip Marlowe
From Philip Marlowe to Dale Cooper
5.2 Die Versagung
The “sacrifice of the sacrifice”
Die Versagung, castration, alienation
“Subjective destitution”
“Tarrying with the negative”
6 Why is Reality Always Multiple?
6.1 Is There a Proper Way to Remake a Hitchcock Film?
The Hitchcockian sinthom
The Case of the Missing Gaze
Multiple Endings
The Ideal Remake
6.2 The Matrix, Or; the Two Sides of Perversion
Reaching the End Of the World
The “Really Existing” Big Other
“The Big Other doesn’t Exist”
Screening the Real
The Freudian Touch
Staging the Fundamental Fantasy
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Introduction to the Revised Edition
The piece, a good Lacanian partial object, asks the it the obvious Che vuoi? question: “What do you want of me?”’ “‘Nothing’” is the answer. “‘What do you need from me?’” asks the piece, putting its bets on the distinction between demand and need. Again, “‘Nothing.’” “‘Who are you?’” ‘I am the big O,’” in short, the primordial, noncastrated big Other who, as such, wants nothing. “‘Maybe I am your missing piece?’” asks the piece, to which the big O answers,: “‘But I am not missing a piece. There is no place you would fit.’ ‘That is too bad,’ “says the missing piece. “‘I was hoping that perhaps I could roll with you …” ‘You cannot roll with me,’” says the big O, “‘but perhaps you can roll by yourself.’ ‘By myself? A missing piece cannot roll by itself.’ ‘Have you ever tried?’ ‘But I am not shaped for rolling.’ ‘Corners wear off and shapes change,’” says the big O, and rolls away. Alone again, the missing piece lifts itself, flops over, and slowly learns to roll; its edges begin to wear off, and soon it goes on carelessly rolling instead of bouncing, rejoining the big O, accompanying it, attached to it as a small sphere on the border of the large sphere, the small other clinging, like a parasite, to the big Other, the two together forming a perfect example of the “inner eight,” the matrix of the self-perpetuating repetitious circulation of the drive.
Introduction
in his programmatic text What Is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant provides the famous definition of Enlightenment as “man’s release from his selfincurred tutelage,” i.e., his courage to make use of his understanding without direction from another, he supplements the motto “Argue freely.” by “Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey.” This and not “Do not obey but argue.” is, according to Kant, the Enlightenment’s answer to the demand of traditional authority, “Do not argue but obey.” We must be careful here not to miss what Kant is aiming at—he is not simply restating the common motto of conformism, “In private, think whatever you want, but in public, obey the authorities.” but rather its opposite: in public, “as a scholar before the reading public,” use your reason freely, yet in private (at your post, in your family, i.e., as a cog in the social machine) obey authority. This split underlies the famous Kantian “conflict of the faculties” between the faculty of philosophy (free to indulge in arguing about what it will, yet for that reason cut off from social power—the performative force of its discourse being so to speak suspended) and the faculties of law and theology (which articulate the principles of ideological and political power and are therefore devoid of the freedom to argue).
In theory (in the academic practice of writing) deconstruct as much as you will and whatever you will, but in your everyday life, play the predominant social game.
letter, woman, repetition, phallus, father)
The tramp’s interposition
denouement
Michel Chion
tramp
diegetic
purveyors
The letter arrives at its destination when we are no longer “fillers” of the empty places in another’s fantasy structure, i.e., when the other finally “opens his eyes” and realizes that the real letter is not the message we are supposed to carry but our being itself, the object in us that resists symbolization
The separation
William Rothman
When in his L’éthique de la psychanalyse,12 Lacan emphasizes Freud’s restraint toward the Christian “love for one’s neighbor,” he has in mind precisely such embarrassing dilemmas: it is easy to love the idealized figure of a poor, helpless neighbor, the starving African or Indian, for example; in other words, it is easy to love one’s neighbor as long as he stays far enough from us, as long as there is a proper distance separating us. The problem arises at the moment when he comes too near us, when we start to feel his suffocating proximity—at this moment when the neighbor exposes himself to us too much, love can suddenly turn into hatred
Imaginary (mis)recognition
we can easily imagine God easing His mind when some big sinner commits his crime: “Finally, you did it. I have been waiting for it for the whole of your miserable life.” And to convince oneself of how this problematic bears on psychoanalysis, one has only to remember the crucial role of contingent encounters in triggering a traumatic crackup of our psychic balance: overhearing a passing remark by a friend, witnessing a small unpleasant scene, and so forth, can awaken long-forgotten memories and shatter our daily life—as Lacan put it, the unconscious trauma repeats itself by means of some small, contingent bit of reality. “Fate” in psychoanalysis always asserts itself through such contingent encounters, giving rise to the question: “What if I had missed that remark? What if I had taken another route and avoided that scene?” Such questioning is, of course, deceitful since “a letter always arrives at its destination”: it waits for its moment with patience—if not this, then another contingent little bit of reality will sooner or later find itself at this place that awaits it and fire off the trauma. This is, ultimately, what Lacan called “the arbitrariness of the signifier
Symbolic circuit I: “There is no metalanguage”
On a symbolic level, “a letter always arrives at its destination” condenses an entire chain (a “family” in the Wittgensteinian sense) of propositions: “the sender always receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form,” “the repressed always returns,” “the frame itself is always being framed by part of its content,” “we cannot escape the symbolic debt, it always has to be settled,” which are all ultimately variations on the same basic premise that “there is no metalanguage.”
A hysteric continually complains of how he cannot adapt himself to the reality of cruel manipulation, and the psychoanalytic answer to it is not “give up your empty dreams, life is cruel, accept it as it is” but quite the contrary “your moans and groans are false since, by means of them, you are only too well adapted to the reality of manipulation and exploitation:” by playing the role of helpless victim, the hysteric assumes the subjective position which enables him to “blackmail emotionally his environs,” as we would put it in today’s jargon.26
In short, Hitchcock’s “sadism” corresponds exactly to the superego’s “malevolent neutrality:” he is nothing but a neutral “purveyor of truth,” giving us only what we wanted, but including in the package the part of it that we prefer to ignore.
. “There is no metalanguage” insofar as the speaking subject is always already spoken, i.e., insofar as he cannot master the effects of what he is saying: he always says more than he “intended to say,” and this surplus of what is effectively said over the intended meaning puts into words the repressed content—in it, “the repressed returns.”
The Lacanian “logic of the signifier” supplements this hermeneutical thesis with an unheard-of inversion: the “horizon of meaning” is always linked, as if by a kind of umbilical cord, to a point within the field disclosed by it; the frame of our view is always already framed (re-marked) by a part of its content. We can easily recognize here the topology of the Moebius band where, as in a kind of abyssal inversion, the envelope itself is encased by its interior
The best way to exemplify this inversion is via the dialectic of view and gaze: in what I see, in what is open to my view, there is always a point where “I see nothing,” a point which “makes no sense,” i.e., which functions as the picture’s stain—this is the point from which the very picture returns the gaze, looks back at me. “A letter arrives at its destination” precisely in this point of the picture: here I encounter myself, my own objective correlative—here I am, so to speak, inscribed in the picture; this ontic “umbilical cord” of the ontological horizon is what is unthinkable for the entire philosophical tradition, Heidegger included.
Apropos
The real encounter
The fascinating image of a double is therefore ultimately nothing but a mask of horror, its delusive front: when we encounter ourselves, we encounter death. The same horror emerges with the fulfillment of symbolic “destiny,” as is attested by Oedipus: when, at Colonnus, he closed the circuit and paid all his debts, he found himself reduced to a kind of soap bubble burst asunder—a scrap of the real, the leftover of a formless slime without any support in the symbolic order. Oedipus realized his destiny
Am I made man in the hour when I cease to be?
“you can never get rid of the stain of enjoyment”—the very gesture of renouncing enjoyment produces inevitably a surplus enjoyment that Lacan writes down as the “object small a.
When, with the advent of capitalism, the symbolically structured “community” was replaced by the “crowd,” community became in a radical sense imagined: our “sense of belonging” does not refer anymore to a community we experience as “actual,” but becomes a performative effect brought about by the “abstract” media
The act as an answer of the real
The point is not to arrive at the factual truth of some long-forgotten event—what is effectively at stake here is, quite literally, the recollection of the past, i.e., the way this remembrance of the past bears on the subject’s present position of enunciation, how it transforms the very place from which the subject speaks (is spoken). Herein lies the “effect of truth” intended by the psychoanalytic cure: when I draw a childhood trauma out of the shadowy world of “repression” and integrate it with my knowledge, this radically transforms the symbolic horizon that determines my present “self-understanding”—after accomplishing it, I am not the same subject as before.
Germany, Year Zero: The word no longer obliges
logic of act qua identification with a mask, qua assuming a symbolic mandate
Germany, Year Zero is a story about Edmund, a boy of ten living with his elder sister and sickly father in the ruins of occupied Berlin in the summer of 1945. He is left to the street and keeps his family by way of petty street crimes and black-market peddling. He falls more and more under the influence of his homosexual Nazi teacher, Henning, who fills him with lessons on how life is a cruel struggle for survival where one must deal mercilessly with the weaklings who are just a burden to us. Edmund decides to apply this lesson to his father who constantly moans and groans that he will never recover his health and that he wants to die, since he is only a burden to his family: granting his request, he mixes a fatal dose of medicine into the father’s glass of milk. After the father’s death, he wanders around aimlessly among the ruins of the Berlin streets; a group of children refuse to let him join their game, as if they have somehow guessed his horrible deed, so he awkwardly plays hopscotch alone for a few moments, but he is unable to let himself go in the game—childhood is lost for him, he is already cut off from human community. His sister calls him, but he can no longer accept her solace, so he hides from her in an abandoned, half-ruined apartment house, walks to the second floor, closes his eyes and jumps. The last shot of the film shows his tiny body lying amidst the concrete ruins. The scene for which the entire film was shot is of course the final wandering of Edmund in the ruins of Berlin and his suicide. Wherein lies the meaning of this act? The reading which offers itself immediately is quite obvious: the film is a story of how the morally corrupted Nazi ideology can spoil even a child’s innocence and induce him to accomplish parricide. Once he becomes aware of the true dimension of his deed, he kills himself under the pressure of unbearable guilt.
He falls more and more under the influence of his homosexual Nazi teacher, Henning, who fills him with lessons on how life is a cruel struggle for survival where one must deal mercilessly with the weaklings who are just a burden to us
re of unbearable guilt.
Is this reading the only one possible? A closer examination quickly reveals a series of uneasy details that disturb this image. True, Edmund acts, he passes over to the act, while the teacher just chatters pathetically about the right of the strong, so that when Edmund tells him about his parricide, the teacher shrinks back in horror. Are we, however, for all that, justified in asserting that Edmund simply took the lesson of his teacher literally and consequently acted upon it? Was his act really caused by the teacher’s word, so that we are concerned with a causal chain linking words and deeds? The least we can add is that, by means of his act, Edmund not only complies with the teacher’s lesson, “applying” it to his own family, but at the same time meets his father’s explicit will to die. His act is therefore somehow indeterminable, it cannot be properly located, being at the same time an act of supreme cruelty and cold distance and an act of boundless love and tenderness, attesting that he is prepared to go to extremes to comply with his father’s wishes. This coincidence of opposites (cold, methodical cruelty and boundless love) is a point at which every “foundation” of acts in “words,” in ideology, fails: this “foundation” simply falls short of the abyss announced in it. Edmund’s act, far from “taking literally” and realizing the most corrupted and cruel ideology, implies a certain surplus which eludes the domain of ideology as such—it is an act of “absolute freedom” which momentarily suspends the field of ideological meaning, i.e., which interrupts the link between “words” and “deeds
It is for this reason that in Edmund’s parricide, pure evil coincides with the most perfect childish innocence: in the very act of murdering his father, Edmund becomes a saint
Edmund watches his father with an inexpressive, tired, pale gaze, with no trace of fear, compassion, regret, or any other sentiment. Any kind of “identification” with Edmund is thereby thwarted—we, the viewers, cannot shiver with Edmund, feel his tension, regret, or horror at his act: “Edmund, who in a more conventional film would be the focus of audience identification, here seems rather a kind of null set, an empty integer, a focal point of effects.”8 The null set, the empty integer, these are Lacanian names for the subject of the signifier, i.e., for the subject, insofar as it is reduced to an empty place without support in imaginary or symbolic identification
True, we can call this—the distance taken from the Other—also “psychosis,” but what is “psychosis” here if not another name for freedom?10 So when, after the parricide, Edmund tells his teacher: “You just talked about it, I did it.” this utterance in no way suggests a shift of responsibility to the teacher, i.e., an argument in the manner of “Don’t blame me, it was you who told me to proceed this way.” but quite to the contrary, a cold, impassionate ascertaining of the above-mentioned absolute gap that separates words and deeds.
haven
What propels him to act is no voice, no superego imperative, but precisely the accepted distance from all voices.
When the homosexual couple strangles their best friend, they do it to win recognition from professor Caddell, their teacher who preaches the right of Supermen to dispose of the useless and weak (the same as Henning in Germany); when Caddell is confronted with the literal realization of his doctrine—when, following the Lacanian definition of communication, he gets back from the other his own message in its inverted, true form—he is shaken and shrinks back from the consequence of his words, i.e., he is not prepared to recognize in them his own truth (again, the same as Henning in Germany). Hitchcock, however, remains at this insight: the “rope” from the film’s title is the rope linking words and deeds, and the film turns out to be an admonition against “playing with words”—never play with dangerous ideas since you can never be sure that there won’t be a psychotic taking them “literally”; nobody in the film, neither the professor nor the murderous couple, is capable of breaking this bond and attaining the point of freedom.
Europa ’51: Escape into guilt
Edmund’s suicide has therefore nothing whatsoever to do with remorse: he just lets himself be drawn into the vertiginous abyss he discovered in committing the parricide.
Europa ’51 is the story of Irene, the wife in a rich Roman family, whose young son desperately seeks contact with her, while she is more interested in receptions and social life. Her son suddenly attempts suicide (by throwing himself into the void in the middle of a spiral staircase) and soon afterward dies from a blood clot. His death brings about in Irene an all-pervasive feeling of guilt, as if it had been her insipid life and neglect of her son which drove him to death; she breaks completely with her former way of life and sets out to search for new meaning in sacrifice and helping people: following the advice of her cousin, a Communist, she gets a low-paid job in a factory; she seeks an answer in the Church and tries helping the poor and working among them, but nothing can satisfy or appease her. When she tries to persuade a small robber from the neighborhood to surrender to the police instead of reporting him herself, she finally transgresses the law; the court of law finds her irresponsible due to the shock caused by the death of her child and sends her to a psychiatric ward for observation. After a series of tests, a cold and distanced psychiatrist proclaims her insane; the family leaves her and, at the end of the film, we see her alone in a sterile cell, while in front of the hospital, the poor whom she tried to help gather and hail her as a new saint…
better for me to assume guilt quickly than for the other’s (father’s, the loved woman’s) stupidity, impotence, etc., to come into public view—love is easily recognizable precisely by way of this readiness to assume the role of the scapegoat
in the psychoanalytic cure, his very presence functions as a kind of pawn, it guarantees that the inconsistent string of “free associations” will retroactively receive meaning. At the same time, however, the presence of the analyst materializes a menace to the analysand’s enjoyment, it threatens to rob him of his enjoyment through the dissolution of his symptoms—when the analytic cure approaches its final stage, it usually provokes in the analysand a paranoiac fear that the analyst is after his innermost treasure, his kernel of secret enjoyment … As can immediately be perceived, the reassuring and the threatening aspects are not symmetrically disposed: the supposed subject assures the analysand of the meaning and menaces his enjoyment
if nobody “really believed,” and if everybody knew that nobody believed, what was then the agency, the gaze for whom the spectacle of belief was staged? It is here that we encounter the function of the “big Other” at its purest. In everyday reality, life may be dreadful and dull, but all is well as long as all this remains hidden from the gaze of the “big Other.” It is for his gaze that the spectacle of the happy and enthusiastic people must be staged again and again. If the “big Other” in the first meaning of the term functions as a “subject supposed to know,” here it functions on the contrary as the “subject supposed not to know,” as the agency from which vulgar everyday reality must be hidden
Moments like the mass rally in Bucharest when “the spell was broken,” i.e., when the “big Other” disintegrated, exemplify perfectly how we can lose something we never possessed. Was not the crucial turning point in the decomposition of Eastern European “really existing socialism” the sudden awareness of the subjects that, in spite of the tremendous force of the apparatuses of repression, the Communist party is actually powerless, that it is only as strong as they, the subjects, make it, that its strength is their belief in it? And is this turning point not best rendered by the paradox that the Party thus lost what it never had?
Stromboli: The act of freedom
Stromboli is a story about Karin, an Estonian épmigrée who, at the end of the Second World War, finds herself in a refugee camp in Italy. After repeated failures to obtain an Argentinian visa, she marries a poor Italian fisherman from the volcanic island of Stromboli as a last desperate attempt to escape the camp. Life on the island goes on within the confines of a closed community where a primitive patriarchal atmosphere reigns: there is “authentic” contact with nature, but also customary beating of women … Karin is soon stifled by her new life and resolves to run away: she takes a long walk across the mountain with the crater to the island’s other shore, where a boat leaves for the mainland. As Karin ascends the volcano, however, smoke and fumes from the crater surround and choke her and she fades away
To use Hegelian terms: the previous experience of a loss is converted into the loss of a loss itself—now, she is aware that what, a moment ago, she was so afraid to lose, is totally null, i.e., is already in itself a kind of a loss.
After we pass through the “zero point” of the symbolic suicide, what a moment ago appeared as the whirlpool of rage sweeping away all determinate existence changes miraculously into supreme bliss—as soon as we renounce all symbolic ties. And the act in the Lacanian sense is nothing but this withdrawal by means of which we renounce renunciation itself, becoming aware of the fact that we have nothing to lose in a loss.21 What Karin didn’t have the courage to finish the previous night is precisely this act of symbolic suicide, this withdrawal from symbolic reality which is to be opposed strictly to the suicide “in reality.” The latter remains caught in the network of symbolic communication: by killing himself, the subject attempts to send a message to the Other, i.e., it is an act that functions as an acknowledgment of guilt, a sobering warning, a pathetic appeal (like the recent Lithuanian political self-incinerations), whereas the symbolic suicide aims to exclude the subject from the very intersubjective circuit.
Antigone’s “No.” to Creon, to state power; her act is literally suicidal, she excludes herself from the community, whereby she offers nothing new, no positive program—she just insists on her unconditional demand.
The fiction of reality
tarrying
We already know how the negative is converted into being: through language as name-giving power, i.e., through the emergence of the symbolic order. Hegel’s statements on how understanding breaks up the living organic whole and confers autonomous existence on what is effective only as a moment of concrete totality are to be read against the background of the fundamental Lacanian notion of the signifier qua the power which mortifies/disembodies the life substance, “dissects” the body and subordinates it to the constraint of the signifying network. Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence—by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present—but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word “quarters” the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being. The power of understanding consists in this capacity to reduce the organic whole of experience to an appendix to the “dead” symbolic classification. In our everyday attitude, we are “spontaneous Bergsonians”: we bemoan the fate of immediate life experience, we point out how the fullness of life flow escapes forever the network of language categories, we laugh at those who become so entangled in the fictitious world of symbols that they lose the taste of effective life.
Precisely insofar as it is a “dead scheme,” we must presuppose it as an ideal point of reference which, in spite of its inexistence, is “valid,” i.e., dominates and regulates our actual lives. In a somewhat poetic manner we could say that man is the animal whose life is governed by symbolic fictions. This is the way “tarrying with the negative” takes place, this is the way negativity as such acquires positive, determinate being: when the very actual life of a community is structured by reference to symbolic fictions.
The fascination of the sacrifice
In the last pages of his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan directly opposes psychoanalytic experience to the fascination of the sacrifice: the heroism demanded by psychoanalysis is not the heroic gesture of assuming upon oneself the sacrifice, of accepting the role of sacrificial victim but, on the contrary, the heroism of resisting the temptation of the sacrifice, of confronting what the fascinating image of the sacrifice conceals.
In its most fundamental dimension, sacrifice is a “gift of reconciliation” to the Other, destined to appease its desire. Sacrifice conceals the abyss of the Other’s desire, more precisely: it conceals the Other’s lack, inconsistency, “inexistence,” that transpires in this desire. Sacrifice is a guarantee that “the Other exists”: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice. The trick of the sacrifice consists therefore in what the speech-act theorists would call its “pragmatic presupposition”: by the very act of sacrifice, we (presup) pose the existence of its addressee that guarantees the consistency and meaningfulness of our experience—so, even if the act fails in its proclaimed goal, this very failure can be read from within the logic of sacrifice as our failure to appease the Other.
Fred Walton’s When a Stranger Calls
nothing liberates as well as a good Master, since “liberation” consists precisely in our shifting the burden onto the Other/Master. So-called “free associations” in a psychoanalytic cure are the supreme proof of it: by means of them, the analysand liberates himself from the pressures and constraints of censorship, he can prattle freely—but only because he can rely on the analyst, the “subject supposed to know,” the “master of signification” (as Lacan put it in the 1950s) whose very presence guarantees him that retroactively, at the end, his prattle will obtain meaning and consistency. The freedom attained by the act is the very opposite of this freedom: by undergoing it, all the burden falls back upon the subject since he renounces any support in the Other.
The very term “act” is extremely interesting from the Lacanian perspective: the multiplicity of its meanings condenses the whole Imaginary-Real-Symbolic triad—Imaginary: fake, show, performance; Real: doing, exertion, stroke; Symbolic: edict, decree, ordinance, enactment. In German, where one of the meanings of “Akt” is also “the painting of a nude human body,” we can even imagine an entire scenario: first, we are seduced by the image of a naked woman; then, we “accomplish the (sexual) act”; finally, we inscribe our conquest in the list, i.e., in an act (the stage which was crucial for don Giovanni)
The homology between the subjective position of the psychoanalyst and that of the saint runs like a thread through the last years of Lacan’s teaching: in both cases, we assume the position of an object-excrement, of a remainder which embodies the inconsistency of the symbolic order, i.e., of an element which cannot be integrated into the machinery of social usefulness, of a point of pure expenditure. True, we often encounter with Lacan also statements which point in the opposite direction, like those which put psychoanalytic associations in the same series as concentration camps—but is the opposition here really insurmountable? Is it not rather that the moment “saints” endeavor to “socialize,” to “go marchin’in” and organize themselves as a social order, we get monasteries: a totally regulated world which can serve as a model for concentration camps, with the exception that, instead of torturing their victims, monks torture themselves, assuming the heavy burden of abstinence? Were not the Jesuit missions in seventeenth-century Paraguay (“reducciones” (reductions), as they were called at that time) concentration camps of a sort with their most thorough regulation of one’s entire life, including its most intimate details (Hegel ironically recalls that Jesuits even rang a bell at midnight to remind their Indian subjects of their marital duties)?
Why was Chandler’s Playback a failure?
yet the function of this escape into psychology is, as always, to allow us to elude the inherent logic of the failure.
William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice
The traumatic original situation takes place in a German concentration camp where a Nazi officer confronts Sophie with an impossible choice: she has to choose one of her two children to survive, while the other will be sent to a gas chamber; if she refuses to make the choice, both of them will die. Driven into a corner, Sophie chooses the younger son, thus contracting a burden of guilt which drives her into madness. At the end of the novel, she exculpates herself by means of a suicidal gesture: torn between her two loves, a psychotic failed artist to whom she is indebted for saving her life after her arrival in America, and a young beginning writer, she chooses the first and together they commit suicide
“Distributive justice” and its exception
distributive justice
Sacrifice, traditional and utilitarian
The utilitarian sacrifice implies on the contrary a cynical-manipulative attitude: the organizer of the scape-goating in no way believes in the victim’s guilt, his point is simply that one has to give preference to the interests of the community over the rights of the individual—the individual’s sacrifice is acceptable insofar as it prevents the disintegration of the social fabric.
Did the prosecutors really believe in their victim’s guilt?
” is far more difficult and ambiguous than it may seem. A “true” Stalinist would probably say: even if, on the level of immediate facts, the accused are innocent, they are all the more guilty on a deeper level of historical responsibility—by the very insistence on their abstract-legal innocence, they have given preference to their individuality over the larger historical interests of the working class expressed in the will of the Party … This argument clearly resumes the paradox of the sacred space at work in traditional sacrificial logic: as soon as a man finds himself occupying the place of the sacred victim, his very being is stigmatized and the more he proclaims his innocence, the more he is guilty—since his guilt resides in his very resistance to the assumption of “guilt,” i.e., the symbolic mandate of the victim conferred on him by the community. What the victim has to do in order to be “equal to his task” is therefore to assume the burden of guilt in full consciousness of his innocence: the more he is innocent, the greater is the weight of his sacrifice.
I know very well (that the victim is innocent), but nevertheless …” This continuous passage is rendered possible by their common feature: the assumption that “sacrifice pays,” which results from the foundation of ethics in the common Good
Le Père…
At this precise point, a reference to psychoanalytic theory comes to our assistance: the fundamental insight behind the notions of the Oedipus complex, incest prohibition, symbolic castration, the advent of the Name of the Father, etc., is that a certain “sacrificial situation” defines the very status of man qua “parlêtre,” “being of language.” That is to say, what is the entire psychoanalytic theory of “socialization,” of the emergence of the subject from the encounter of a presymbolic life substance of “enjoyment” and the symbolic order, if not the description of a sacrificial situation which, far from being exceptional, is the story of everyone and as such constitutive? This constitutive character means that the “social contract,” the inclusion of the subject in the symbolic community, has the structure of a forced choice: the subject supposed to choose freely his community (since only a free choice is morally binding) does not exist prior to this choice, he is constituted by means of it. The choice of community, the “social contract,” is a paradoxical choice where I maintain the freedom of choice only if I “make the right choice”: if I choose the “other” of the community, I stand to lose the very freedom, the very possibility of choice (in clinical terms: I choose psychosis). What is sacrificed in the act of choice is of course the Thing, the incestuous Object that embodies impossible enjoyment—the paradox consisting in the fact that the incestuous Object comes to be through being lost, i.e., that it is not given prior to its loss. For that reason, the choice is forced: its terms are incomparable, what I cede in order to gain inclusion in the community of symbolic exchange and distribution of goods is in one sense “all” (the Object of desire) and in another sense “nothing at all” (since it is in itself impossible, i.e., since, in the case of its choice, I lose all). This is the point which clearly marks the specificity of psychoanalysis: all other theories conceive the incest prohibition as a term in an act of exchange which ultimately “pays,” whereby the subject gets something in return (cultural progress, other women, and so forth), whereas psychoanalysis insists that the subject gets nothing in exchange (and also gives nothing).9 In short, this renunciation is “pure,” a pure negative gesture of withdrawal which constitutes the space of possible gains and losses, i.e., of the distribution of goods: women become an object of exchange and distribution only after the “mother thing” is posited as prohibited. Therein consists the psychoanalytic reading of Kant: the primacy of Justice over the Good implies that the supreme Good (the Thing in itself qua incestuous Object) is posited as impossible/unattainable.
the subject “gives way as to his desire,” and thus contracts an indelible guilt (as Lacan says, the only thing that the subject can be guilty of in psychoanalysis is to give way as to his desire).10 This guilt constitutive of the subject, which is at the root of what Freud calls the “discontent” that pertains to culture, can help us to explain why the Lacanian mathem for the subject is $, that is to say: the subject crossed off, evacuated, reduced to the empty gesture of a forced choice. Which is why the time for the subject is never present: the subject constitutes himself when, all of a sudden, the presubjective X is posited as the one who has already chosen; social reality is “subjectivized” when, all of a sudden, it is imputed to the subject as something that he has freely chosen
the “madman” (the psychotic) is the subject who has refused to walk into the trap of the forced choice and to accept that he has “always already chosen”; he took the choice “seriously” and chose the impossible opposite of the Name of the Father, i.e., of the symbolic identification which confers us a place in the intersubjective space. Which is why Lacan insists that psychosis is to be “located within the register of ethics”: psychosis is a mode “not to give way as to our desire,” it signals our refusal to exchange enjoyment for the Name of the Father
…ou pire
The original position of man qua being of language is decidedly that of alienation in the signifier (in the symbolic order): the first choice is necessarily that of the Father, which marks the subject with the indelible guilt pertaining to his very (symbolic) existence. This alienation is best exemplified by the Kantian moral subject: the split subject subordinated to the moral imperative, caught in the vicious circle of the superego where he is all the more guilty the more he obeys its command. Yet Lacan’s wager is that it is possible for the subject to get rid of the superego pressure by repeating the choice and thus exculpating himself of his constitutive guilt. The price of it is exorbitant: if the first choice is “bad,” its repetition is in its very formal structure “worse” since it is an act of separation from the symbolic community: Lacan’s supreme example is here of course Antigone’s suicidal “No.” to Creon.
Repetition: imaginary, symbolic, real
Repetition: imaginary, symbolic, real
every attempt to restore some past intense experience is doomed to result in an anticlimax—even if, on the level of “reality,” the thing is exactly the same (Kierkegaard goes to the same restaurants and theaters, visits the same friends), it now leaves him cold and indifferent …
Repetition is a sign of maturity when the subject has learned to avoid the twin traps of impatient hope in the New and of nostalgic memory of the Old: we find satisfaction in the return of the Same, like the happy marital couple who has overcome the yearning for exotic adventures, yet is still able to avoid melancholic remembrance of past passions
The structure of subjective time is such that, from hopeful expectations, from “too early,” we are thrown all of a sudden into melancholic remembrance, into “too late.” In other words, the self-referential paradox consists in the fact that the ideal point between hope and memory is present precisely and only in the mode of hope or memory: in youthful zeal we hope to find peace in a beloved spouse one never gets tired of; in old age we remember the happy time fulfilled with the reliable rhythm of repetition …
This is how Lacan conceives the difference between repetition of a signifier and repetition qua traumatic encounter with the Real: the repetition of a signifier repeats the symbolic trait unaire, the mark to which the object is reduced, and thus constitutes the ideal order of the Law, whereas “traumatism” designates precisely the reemergent failure to integrate some “impossible” kernel of the Real.
“Either/or” redoubled
Hegel’s dictum that the true source of evil is the very neutral gaze which perceives Evil all around.
The “exception reconciled in the universal”
The rigorous and determinate exception who although he is in conflict with the universal still is an offshoot of it, sustains himself … The exception who thinks the universal in that he thinks himself through; he explains the universal in that he explains himself. Consequently, the exception explains the universal and himself, and if one really wants to study the universal, one only needs to look around for a legitimate exception. The legitimate exception is reconciled in the universal
Hegelian state, Adorno’s theoretical edifice
The vicious circle of dialectics and its remainder
Fichte’s and Hegel’s philosophy
Identity and fantasy
And is not the same paradox of identity at work in the way fantasy guarantees the consistency of a socio ideological edifice? That is to say, “fantasy” designates an element which “sticks out,” which cannot be integrated into the given symbolic structure, yet which, precisely as such, constitutes its identity. The psychoanalytic clinic detects its fundamental matrix in the so-called “pregenital” (anal) object: according to Freudian orthodoxy, the fixation on it prevents the emergence of the “normal” (genital) sexual relationship; in the Lacanian theory, however, the “object is not what hinders the advent of the sexual relationship, as a kind of perspective error makes us believe. The object is on the contrary a filler, that which fills in the relationship which does not exist and bestows on it its fantasmatic consistency.”27 Sexual relationship is in itself impossible, hindered, and the object does nothing but materialize this “original” impossibility, this inherent hindrance; the “perspective error” consists in conceiving it as a stumbling block to the emergence of the “full” sexual relationship—as if, without this troublesome intruder, the sexual relationship would be possible in its intact fullness
“Law is law.” “It is so because I say so.” etc.—identity becomes “authoritarian” the moment we overlook, in a kind of illusory perspective, that it is nothing but the inscription of pure difference, of a lack.29 In this sense, authority is far from being a kind of leftover of the pre-Enlightenment: it is inscribed in the very heart of the Enlightenment project. Not till the Enlightenment did the structure of authority come into sight as such, against the background of rational argumentation as the foundation of enlightened knowledge. It is a symptomatic fact that the first to render visible the outlines of “pure” authority was precisely Kierkegaard, one of the great critics of Hegel.
Socrates versus Christ
The crucial text in which Kierkegaard delineates the break between the traditional and the “modern” (i.e., for him, Christian) status of knowledge is his Philosophical Fragments. At first sight, this text does not belong to philosophy but rather to an intermediate domain between philosophy proper and theology: it endeavors to delimitate the Christian religious position from the Socratic philosophical one. Yet its externality to philosophy is of the same kind as that of Plato’s Symposion: it circumscribes the discourse’s frame, i.e., the intersubjective constellation, the relationship toward the teacher, toward authority, which renders possible the philosophical (or Christian) discourse
The paradoxes of authority
the ultimate and only support of a statement of authority is its own act of enunciation: “But now how can an Apostle prove that he has authority? If he could prove it physically, then he would not be an Apostle. He has no other proof than his own statement. That has to be so; for otherwise the believer’s relationship to him would be direct instead of being paradoxical.
Therein consists the paradox of authority: we obey a person in whom authority is vested irrespective of the content of his statements (authority ceases to be what it is the moment we make it dependent on the quality of its content), yet this person retains authority only insofar as he is reduced to a neutral carrier, bearer of some transcendent message—in opposition to a genius where the abundance of his work’s content expresses the inner wealth of its creator’s personality. The same double suspension defines the supreme case of authority, that of Christ: in his Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard points out how it is not enough to know all the details of the teacher’s (Christ’s) life, all he has done and all his personal features, in order to be entitled to consider oneself his pupil—such a description of Christ’s features and deeds, even if truly complete, still misses what makes Him an authority; no better is the fare of those who leave out of consideration Christ qua person and concentrate on His teaching, endeavoring to grasp the meaning of every word he ever uttered—this way, Christ is simply reduced to Socrates, to a simple middleman enabling us the access to the eternal truth. If, consequently, Christ’s authority is contained neither in his personal qualities nor in the content of his teaching, in what does it reside? The only possible answer is: in the empty space of intersection between the two sets, that of his personal features and that of his teaching, in the unfathomable X which is “in Christ more than Himself”—in this intersection which corresponds exactly to what Lacan called objet petit a.
The “impossible” performative
. A signifier is by definition a pure representative which “has nothing to do with its signified content, but has only to deliver it” (to conceive the meaning of the word “fish,” one has to obliterate all its immediate physical features); the necessary reverse of this is, however, the signifier’s constitutive authority: in the symbolic order, the purely formal network of differential features has priority over the content (the “signified”) of its individual components, i.e., its “signified” is ultimately posited as secondary and indifferent
The Lacanian S1, the “Master signifier” which represents the subject for other signifiers, is therefore the point of intersection between performative and constative, i.e., the point at which the “pure” performative coincides with (assumes the form of) its opposite.
Kierkegaard’s materialist reversal of Hegel”
authority and Enlightenment
Enlightenment, Marxism and psychoanalysis, both refer to the authority of their respective founders (Marx, Freud). Their structure is inherently “authoritarian”: since Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical field which sets the very criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the test the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their followers; if there is something to be refuted in their texts, these are simply statements which precede the “epistemological break,” i.e., which do not belong under the field opened up by the founder’s discovery (Freud’s writings prior to the discovery of the unconscious, for example). Their texts are thus to be read the way one should read the text of a dream, according to Lacan: as “sacred” texts which are in a radical sense “beyond criticism” since they constitute the very horizon of veracity. For that reason, every “further development” of Marxism or psychoanalysis necessarily assumes the form of a “return” to Marx or Freud: the form of a (re)discovery of some hitherto overlooked layer of their work, i.e., of bringing to light what the founders “produced without knowing what they produced,” to invoke Althusser’s formula.
we have to put the blame on us and ask ourselves what was wrong with our approach to the film—such an attitude clearly articulates the transferential relationship of the pupil to the teacher: the teacher is by definition “supposed to know,” the fault is always ours … The disturbing scandal authenticated by the history of psychoanalysis and Marxism is that such a “dogmatic” approach proved far more productive than the “open,” critical dealing with the founder’s text: how much more fecund was Lacan’s “dogmatic” return to Freud than the American academic machinery which transformed Freud’s oeuvre into a collection of positive scientific hypotheses to be tested, refuted, combined, developed, and so on. Lacan’s scandal, the dimension of his work which resists incorporation into the academic machinery, can be ultimately pinned down to the fact that he openly and shamelessly posited himself as such an authority, i.e., that he repeated the Kierkegaardian gesture in relationship to his followers: what he demanded of them was not fidelity to some general theoretical propositions, but precisely fidelity to his person—which is why, in the circular letter announcing the foundation of La Cause freudienne, he addresses them as “those who love me.” This unbreakable link connecting the doctrine to the contingent person of the teacher, i.e., to the teacher qua material surplus that sticks out from the neutral edifice of knowledge, is the scandal everybody who considers himself Lacanian has to assume: Lacan was not a Socratic master obliterating himself in front of the attained knowledge, his theory sustains itself only through the transferential relationship to its founder. In this precise sense, Marx, Freud, and Lacan are not “geniuses,” but “apostles”: when somebody says “I follow Lacan because his reading of Freud is the most intelligent and persuasive,” he immediately exposes himself as non-Lacanian.45
This dilemma comes forth at its clearest apropos of the role of transference in psychoanalytic cure. Insofar as we remain within the domain of the Socratic logic of remembrance, transference is not an “effective” repetition but rather a means of recollection: the analysand “projects” past traumas which unconsciously determine his present behavior (the repressed and unresolved conflicts with his father, for example) onto his relationship to the analyst; by means of the deft manipulation of the transferential situation, the analyst then enables the analysand to recall the traumas which were hitherto “acted out” blindly—in other words, the task of the analyst is to make evident to the analysand how “he (the analyst) is not really the father,” i.e., how the analysand, caught in the transference, used his relationship to the analyst to stage the past traumas … Lacan’s emphasis is, on the contrary, throughout Kierkegaardian: transferential repetition cannot be reduced to remembrance, transference is not a kind of “theater of shadows” where we settle with past traumas in effigia, it is repetition in the full meaning of the term, i.e., in it, the past trauma is literally repeated, “actualized.” The analyst is not father’s “shadow,” he is a presence in front of which the past battle has to be fought out “for real.”
Lacan versus Habermas
The point of the preceding argumentation, of course, is not to defend blind submission to authority, but the fact that discourse itself is in its fundamental structure “authoritarian” (for that reason, the “discourse of the Master” is the first, “founding” discourse in the Lacanian matrix of the four discourses; or, as Derrida would say in his writings of the last years, every discursive field is founded on some “violent” ethicopolitical decision)
. This accounts for the difference between Habermas and Lacan as to the role of the Master: with Lacan, the Master is an impostor, yet the place occupied by him—the place of the lack in the structure—cannot be abolished, since the very finitude of every discursive field imposes its structural necessity. The unmasking of the Master’s imposture does not abolish the place he occupies, it just renders it visible in its original emptiness, i.e., as preceding the element which fills it out. Therefrom the Lacanian notion of the analyst qua envers (reverse) of the Master: of somebody who holds the place of the Master, yet who, by means of his (non)activity, undermines the Master’s charisma, suspends the effect of “quilting,” and thus renders visible the distance that separates the Master from the place it occupies, i.e., the radical contingency of the subject who occupies this place.
For that reason, their strategy of subverting symbolic authority is also fundamentally different. Habermas simply relies on the gradual reflective elucidation of the implicit, nonreflected, prejudices which distort communication, i.e., on the asymptotic approaching to the regulative ideal of free, unconstrained communication. Lacan is also “antiauthoritarian,” he is as far as possible from any kind of obscurantism of the “ineffable,” he too remains thoroughly attached to the space of “public communication”—this unexpected proximity of Lacan to Habermas is corroborated by a procedure, proposed by Lacan, which caused a great amount of resistance even among some of his closest followers: la passe, the “passage,” of an analysand into the place of the analyst
The “phantom of the opera“: A spectroscopy
the phantom’s primordial trauma was that, as a child, he was so ugly that even his own mother found him repulsive (when he approached her for an embrace, she pushed him aside with disgust and asked him to put on his mask),4 whereas in the television series, nobody could stand his distorted face—with the exception of his mother to whom he seemed nice and normal and who constantly caressed his face, while entertaining him with her heavenly voice (this is why he is later obsessed with opera: he is desperately seeking the repetition of his mother’s voice among the singers)
The voice qua object
, Lacan determines the object small a as the bone which got stuck in the subject’s throat: if the exemplary case of the gaze qua object is a blind man’s eyes, i.e., eyes which do not see (we experience the gaze qua object when a partner in conversation suddenly takes off his black glasses, exposing us to the uneasy depthless white of his eyes), then the exemplary case of the voice qua object is a voice which remains silent, i.e., which we do not hear.9
Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin
Therein consists the most elementary formal definition of psychosis: the massive presence of some Real which fills out and blocks the perspective openness constitutive of “reality.”
according to Lacan, the only substance ascertained by psychoanalysis is enjoyment
From the modernist sinthome …
From the modernist sinthome …
the notion of anxiety in its strict Lacanian sense, i.e., as the affect which registers the subject’s panic reaction to the overproximity of the object-cause of desire
… to the postmodernist Thing
…to the postmodernist Thing
This shift comes forth exemplarily apropos of Foucault’s profoundly modernist treatment of the relation between sexuality and sex—in what consisted the reversal in their relation that exerted such fascination on the theoretical public? Instead of reducing sexuality (i.e., the series of discursive—legal, medical, ethical, economical, etc.—practices in which sex is “actualized”) to the external secondary effect of a unique cause (“sex” qua substantial entity), Foucault conceived sex as the effect of this series of practices. “Sex” is not an object given in advance, prior to its discursive actualizations and guaranteeing their consistency: it comes to be as a constructed unique reference of these practices, as a result of their hegemonic articulation: “The notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures, and it enabled the use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle.”15 From the Lacanian perspective, however, Foucault overlooks here the inherently “antagonistic” status of sex, the “antagonistic” relation between sex and sexuality qua plurality of discursive practices: these practices endeavor again and again to integrate, to dominate, to neutralize, “sex” qua traumatic core which eludes their grasp. “Sex” is therefore not the universality, the neutral common ground of discursive practices which constitute “sexuality,” but rather their common stumbling block, their common point of failure. In other words, “sex” pertains to the register of the Real: it is an “effect” of sexuality (of symbolic practices), but its antagonistic effect—there is no sex prior to sexuality, sexuality itself produces (“secrets” in all the meanings of the term) sex as its inherent stumbling block (the same as with the notion of trauma in psychoanalysis, which is a retroactive effect of its failed symbolization). Therein consists the ultimate paradox of the Lacanian notion of the cause qua real: it is produced (“secreted”) by its own effects.
The anal father
The anal father
This postmodern shift affects radically the status of paternal authority: modernism endeavors to assert the subversive potential of the margins which undermine the Father’s authority, of the enjoyments which elude the Father’s grasp, whereas postmodernism focuses on the father himself and conceives him as “alive,” in his obscene dimension
the father qua Name of the Father, reduced to a figure of symbolic authority, is “dead” (also) in the sense that he does not know anything about enjoyment, about life substance: the symbolic order (the big Other) and enjoyment are radically incompatible.17 Which is why the famous Freudian dream of a son who appears to his father and reproaches him with “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” could be simply translated into “Father, can’t you see I’m enjoying?”—can’t you see I’m alive, burning with enjoyment? Father cannot see it since he is dead, whereby the possibility is open to me to enjoy not only outside his knowledge, i.e., unbeknownst to him, but also in his very ignorance.
This is why the image of a double so easily turns into its opposite, so that, instead of experiencing the radical otherness of his similar, the subject recognizes himself in the image of radical otherness
It is therefore clear why vampires are invisible in the mirror: because they have read Lacan and, consequently, know how to behave—they materialize objet a which, by definition, cannot be mirrored.
when I find myself face to face with with my double, when I “encounter myself” among the objects, when “I myself” qua subject appear “out there,” what am I at that precise moment as the one who looks at it, as a witness to myself? Precisely the gaze qua object: the horror of coming face to face with my double is that this encounter reduces me to the object-gaze.
As a rule, one focuses on the horror of being the object of some invisible, unfathomable, panoptical gaze (the “someone-is-watching me” motif)—yet it is a far more unbearable experience to find oneself at this very point of a pure gaze. The lesson of the dialectic of the double is therefore the discordance between eye and gaze: there certainly is in the mirror image “more than meets the eye,” yet this surplus that eludes the eye, the point in the image which eludes my eye’s grasp, is none other than the gaze itself: as Lacan put it, “you can never see me at the point from which I gaze at you.”
Phallophany versus phallic signifier
It is the same with fury: we enter the phallic dimension when we surmount the external opposition of outbursts of noisy rage and of restrained silence, so that cold silence itself starts to function as something infinitely more threatening than violent roars
Therein consists the ultimate paradox of what Lacan calls “the dialectic of desire”—the renunciation of desire as the very form of appearance of its fulfillment—the paradox which gets lost as soon as the phallus begins to “appear.”
The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction—conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.”
Class struggle in the opera
Class struggle in the opera
The subject of the Enlightenment
To exemplify this split between “subject” and “person,” one has only to evoke one further figure in the series of legendary “monsters”: Kaspar Hauser. On 26 May 1828, a young man appeared in the central square of Nuremberg, singularily dressed, of stiff, unnatural gestures; his entire language consisted of a few fragments of the Lord’s prayer learned by heart and pronounced with grammatical errors, and of the enigmatic phrase “I want to become such a knight as was my father,” the design of an identification with the Ego Ideal; in his left hand, he carried a paper with his name—Kaspar Hauser—and the address of a captain in the Nuremberg cavalry. Later, when he learned to speak “properly,” Kaspar told his story: he had spent all his life alone in a “dark cave” where a mysterious “black man” procured food and drink for him, until the very day when he dressed him and took him to Nuremberg, teaching him on the way a few phrases … He was confided to the Daumer family, quickly “humanized” himself and became a celebrity: an object of philosophical, psychological, pedagogical, and medical researches, even the object of political speculation about his origin (was he the missing Prince of Baden?). After a couple of quiet years, on the afternoon of 14 December 1833, he was found mortally wounded with a knife; on his deathbed, he announced that his murderer was the same “black man” who had brought him to the central square of Nuremberg five years ago …
This is the way the Enlightenment project has gone wrong: the Enlightenment philosophers wanted to pour out of the bathtub the dirty water of corrupted civilization and to retain only the healthy, unspoiled, natural child-ego, yet what they inadvertently threw out in the process was precisely the ego, so that they were left with the dirty water of a monster.37 In short: the pure “subject of the Enlightenment” is a monster which gives body to the surplus that escapes the vicious circle of the mirror relationship. In this sense, monsters can be defined precisely as the fantasmatic appearance of the “missing link” between nature and culture: as a kind of “answer of the real” to the Enlightenment’s endeavor to find the bridge that links culture to nature, to produce a “man/woman of culture” who would simultaneously conserve his/her unspoiled nature. Therein consists the ambiguity of the Enlightenment: the question of “origins” (origins of language, of culture, of society) which emerged in all its stringency with it, is nothing but the reverse of a fundamental prohibition, the prohibition to probe too deeply into the obscure origins, which betrays a fear that by doing so, one might uncover something monstrous …
We enter postmodernism the moment we get rid of this perspective illusion: what appears, within modernism, as the limit impeding the subject’s self-expression, is actually the subject himself.40 In other words, we enter postmodernism when we pass from the “emptied subject” to the subject qua the emptiness of substance (homologous to the reversal from the matter qua substance which curves space into matter qua the curvature of space in the theory of relativity): in its most radical dimension, the “subject” is nothing but this dreaded “void”—in horror vacui, the subject simply fears himself, his constitutive void.
Far from displaying the subject’s horror at the prospect of losing himself, the scream is therefore the very gesture by means of which the dimension of subjectivity is inaugurated—(what, through the scream, will become) the subject shrinks from what is “in him more than himself,” from the Thing in himself, i.e., he assumes a minimal distance from it.
Let us just recall the face of Virginia Woolf: its ethereal, refined sublimity pertains to its anamorphotic extension, as if the reality of her face itself were protracted by a crooked mirror. To ascertain this link between anamorphosis and sublimity, it suffices to “retrench” this face to its “normal” measure by means of a simple computer treatment, i.e., to accomplish an operation homologous to that of reshaping the soft, “melted” watches from Dali’s famous painting back into their “normal” contours—what we get is, of course, a “healthy,” chubby face without any trace of the unretouched photo’s sublimity. The status of sublimity is therefore ultimately that of a “grimace of reality” (as Lacan puts it in Television); Lacan’s definition of the sublime (“an object elevated to the level of the Thing”) could be rendered as “the sublime is an object, a piece of reality, upon which the Real of desire is inscribed by means of an anamorphotic grimace.”
The paranoiac Other
• a woman or a couple whose gaze is transfixed on some point external to the painting (in Hopper, the couple never looks straight into each other’s eyes—a kind of visual equivalent to the “modernist” couples in Marguerite Duras’s novels who can find love only by concentrating on some external task—the search for a third person, e.g.);
“Woman as the symptom of man” revisited
Woman is a symptom of man” seems to be one of the most notoriously “antifeminist” theses of the late Lacan. There is, however, a fundamental ambiguity as to how we are to read it: this ambiguity reflects the shift in the notion of the symptom within the Lacanian theory.10 If we conceive the symptom as it was articulated by Lacan in the 1950s—namely as a cyphered message—then, of course, woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man “gave way as to his desire.” For Freud, the symptom is a compromise formation: in the symptom, the subject gets back, in the form of a cyphered, unrecognized message, the truth about his desire, the truth that he was not able to confront, that he betrayed.
If, however, we conceive the symptom as it was articulated in Lacan’s last writings and seminars—as, for example, when he speaks about “Joyce the symptom”—namely as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance), then the entire relationship is reversed: if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, “woman is a symptom of man” means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is “externalized” in his symptom. In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies “out there,” in woman. Woman, on the other hand, does not exist, she insists, which is why she does not come to be through man only—there is something in her that escapes the relation to man, the reference to the phallic signifier; and, as is well known, Lacan attempted to capture this excess by the notion of a “not-all” feminine jouissance. In this way, the relationship to the death drive is also reversed: woman, taken “in herself,” outside the relation to man, embodies the death drive, apprehended as a radical, most elementary ethical attitude of uncompromising insistence, of “not giving way as to …” Woman is therefore no longer conceived as fundamentally “passive” in contrast to male activity: the act as such, in its most fundamental dimension, is “feminine.” Is not the act par excellence Antigone’s act, her act of defiance, of resistance? The suicidal dimension of this act is self-evident, so that when Lacan says, in another provocative statement, that the only act which is not a failure, the only act stricto sensu, is suicide, he thereby reconfirms the “feminine” nature of act as such: men are “active,” they take refuge in relentless activity in order to escape the proper dimension of the act. The retreat of man from woman (the retreat of the hard-boiled detective from the femme fatale in film noir, for example), is thus effectively a retreat from the death drive as a radical ethical stance: we are now at the exact opposite of Weininger’s image of woman as incapable of a proper ethical attitude.13
From Ned Beaumont to Philip Marlowe
In the very last page of his Seminar XI, Lacan says that “any shelter in which may be established a viable, temperate relation of one sex to the other necessitates the intervention—this is what psychoanalysis teaches us—of that medium known as the paternal metaphor.”19 This is what is ultimately at stake in the noir universe: the failure of the paternal metaphor (i.e., the emergence of the obscene father who supplants the father living up to his symbolic function) renders impossible a viable, temperate relation with a woman; as a result, woman finds herself occupying the impossible place of the traumatic Thing. The femme fatale is nothing but a lure whose fascinating presence masks the true traumatic axis of the noir universe, the relationship to the obscene father, i.e., the default of the paternal metaphor—all the usual babble about “latent homosexuality” misses completely the primordial dimension of this relationship.
From Philip Marlowe to Dale Cooper
the ultimate humiliation of saying to themselves, in retrospect, “Now that I have believed or desired this, I can never be what I hoped to be, what I thought I was. The story I have been telling myself about myself … no longer makes sense. I no longer have a self to make sense of. There is no world in which I can picture myself as living, because there is no vocabulary in which I can tell a coherent story about myself.” For Winston, the sentence he could not utter sincerely and still be able to put himself back together was “Do it to Julia.” and the worst thing in the world happened to be rats. But presumably each of us stands in the same relations to some sentence, and to some thing
aphanisis bears witness to the irreducible discord between the fantasmatic hard core and the texture of symbolic narrative: when I risk confrontation with this hard core, “the story I have been telling myself about myself no longer makes sense,” “I no longer have a self to make sense of,” or, as Lacan puts it in his Seminar VIII, the big Other (the symbolic order) collapses into the small other, objet petit a, the fantasy object
dénouement
In order to conceive the logic of this shift, one has to turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, more precisely, to the difference between the beautiful and the sublime deployed in its first part. What concerns us here is their opposition as to the possibility of representation and/or symbolization: although the suprasensible Idea/Thing cannot be represented in a direct, immediate way, one can represent the Idea “symbolically,” in the guise of beauty (in other words, the beautiful is a way to represent to ourselves “analogically” the good in the phenomenal world); what the chaotic shapelessness of sublime phenomena renders visible, on the contrary, is the very impossibility of representing the suprasensible Idea/Thing. The sublime thereby reveals itself as something uncannily close to evil: the dimension that announces itself in the sublime chaos (the rough sea, mountain rocks, and so forth) is the very dimension of radical evil, i.e., of an evil whose nature is purely “spiritual,” suprasensible, not “pathological.” What one should bear in mind here is the asymmetry between good and evil: the fact that “evil is not beautiful” means that it cannot be represented, not even symbolically, in an intermediate way, by means of an analogy, i.e., that it is in a sense more purely “spiritual,” more suprasensible than good—radical evil is something so terrible that it is barely conceivable as a pure mental possibility and not in any way representable
The “sacrifice of the sacrifice”
Rhapsody (1954, Charles Vidor)
She leaves the violinist when he lets her know that his career as a virtuoso has priority in his life and that she has to subordinate herself to its demands; she disdains the pianist whom she marries out of revenge and drives him to the brink of a breakdown precisely because he neglects his career on account of his blind devotion to her—she returns to him only after he stands the ordeal by proving that he is capable of surviving without her (he performs successfully on his debut although, immediately before it, she let him know she is leaving him for good). This is, then, what “a woman wants” (within this fantasy logic): neither a man to whom his profession means more than she, nor a man who neglects his profession because of her, but a man to whom she means most, more than his profession, yet who, for all that, is prepared to sacrifice her on account of allegiance to his profession
What we encounter here is the fundamental dimension of the subject’s “alienation” in the signifier: without any active guilt or knowledge on his part, the subject contracts a debt which weighs down on him and outlines his fate.
sacrificing this sacrifice itself: in a most radical sense, we “break the word,” we renounce the symbolic alliance which defines the very kernel of our being—the abyss, the void in which we find ourselves thereby, is what we call “modern-age subjectivity.” This void opens up only insofar as, prior to it, we subordinated the entire wealth of our being to the symbolic obligation affected by Versagung—in other words, our “betrayal” counts only insofar as we renounce the object of our highest love and devotion; otherwise our act of betrayal is not the “sacrifice of the sacrifice,” but simply reinstates the primacy of “pathological” pleasures which we were not prepared to renounce, i.e., to sacrifice for the sake of the symbolic obligation
Die Versagung, castration, alienation
Die Versagung, castration, alienation
renunciation of renunciation
The first thing which strikes the eye here is the asymmetry, i.e., as Lacan puts it, the “strange conjugation of a minus which is not redoubled by any plus.”36 That is to say, insofar as “castration” is defined as an act of exchange, one would expect the subject to obtain something in exchange for the renunciation (cultural progress, symbolic recognition, material goods, or the like); yet all that the second part of this strange act of exchange brings about is an additional loss—in thanks for handing over “everything,” for sacrificing the very kernel of his being, the object in himself, i.e., that which is “in himself more than himself,” the subject himself is made into an object, becomes an object of exchange. Such a formulation as qualifies the sacrificed object as objet petit a, the object in the subject, the hidden treasure, agalma, which confers dignity upon the subject, makes somewhat clearer the sense in which castration, after all, is an act of exchange: the exchange of an object for another—in exchange for the lost object-cause of desire, the subject himself becomes object.
We can see, now, why castration is symbolic: by means of it, the subject exchanges his being (an object) for a place in the symbolic exchange, for a signifier which represents him. Conceived in this way, castration is strictly homologous to alienation—not only in the Lacanian sense of alienation in the signifier’s order, but also in the Marxian sense of alienation which pertains to the status of a proletarian. A proletarian is deprived of the very kernel of his being, of his productivity, of the surplus value brought about by it (Lacan modeled the term plus de jouir, surplus enjoyment, after the Marxian surplus value), and in exchange for it he gets what? He is himself reduced to labor force, an exchangeable object-commodity that can be bought on the market. To a connoisseur of structuralism, it is not difficult to discover the homology between this paradox of “castration” and the elementary formula of the transformation of myths proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss:38 the two subjects/agents not only exchange an object, one of them is himself exchanged, i.e., he passes from the status of subject to that of object. In the act of “castration,” the subject donates all to the Other, and in exchange for it he is himself exchanged/donated: as if, in Hegelese, exchange, by a kind of “reflection into itself,” would render exchangeable the very subject of exchange.
kind of “reflection into itself,” would render exchangeable the very subject of exchange. This is what we encounter in the case of the proletarian: the proletarian designates the moment of “reflection into itself” of the exchange society, i.e., the moment when the subject of exchange offers on the market not only an object (his product/commodity), but himself as a commodity. Dialectical analysis conceives such a reflective inversion as a necessary consequence of the universalization of the exchange function: as soon as the exchange of commodities becomes universal and predominant, the labor force itself must appear on the market as a commodity. The crucial point not to be missed here, however, is that this becoming an object of exchange coincides with the emergence of pure subjectivity. That is to say, the whole point of Marx is that, in the opposition between the capitalist and the proletarian, it is the proletarian who stands for the pure subjectivity: it is precisely because he is reduced to pure, substanceless subjectivity (i.e., because he is devoid of all objective conditions of the productive process—all he owns is his labor power) that the proletarian has to exchange himself (his labor power) on the market. As a good Hegelian, Marx knew that pure subjectivity is strictly correlative to becoming an exchangeable object—in other words, the paradox is that what is alienated (the dimension of subjectivity) is literally constituted by way of the process of alienation
“Subjective destitution”
Lacan takes as the third term that concludes the “trilogy of desire” in the Western drama, i.e., that comes after Antigone and Hamlet, the Coufontaine trilogy of Paul Claudel; The Measure Taken, the crucial “learning play,” serves perhaps even better to exemplify the tragic dimension of modern subjectivity.
“microphysics of power,” of patterns of behavior, of the rituals which materialize ideological propositions. What we have here is the reverse of the Kantian freedom to argue—within the confines of the “public use of reason,” argue as much as you want, but, insofar as you are a cog in the (social) machine, obey: Brecht’s aim was to render visible this logic of “private” obedience.42 Herefrom his request that the actors interchange parts, each of them successively assuming the role of the young comrade—does this request not bring to mind Foucault’s fascination with the homosexual sado-masochist practices whose crucial feature is precisely the interchangeability of roles?
The subject “is” only insofar as there is this “ply” of the universal which emerges not against the ethical obligation but as its ultimate fulfillment. In other words, what Brecht is aiming at is not the standard opportunist attitude which compels us to follow our interests, to tell the truth when it does not hurt, to tell a lie when the lie profits us, etc., but an inherent self-negation of ethics, i.e., an ethical injunction which suspends ethical universality. It is precisely because of this “suspension of the ethical,” because of this split between honor and ethics (an ethical injunction to behave dishonorably), that Versagung is an eminently modern phenomenon.
ply
obliterate the obliteration itself, i.e., renounce the obliteration qua pathetic gesture of self-sacrifice—this supplementary renunciation is what Lacan called “destitution subjective.”
The fundamental lesson of it is that there is more truth in the mask than in the face beneath it: the young comrade is lost (politically and ethically) the moment he takes off the mask
Foucault was adamantly opposed to this ethics of true self-expression: he strictly delimited his ethics of the subject’s self-construction from what he called the “Californian ethics” still subordinated to the truth regime—some expert or initiatic knowledge tells us “what we truly are” and thus impels us to realize our “true self.
An identification with what psychoanalysis calls the “anal object,” a remainder, an amorphous leftover of some harmonious Whole—Lacan quotes Luther’s sermons: “You are the excrement which fell on the earth through the Devil’s anus.”48 In The Measure Taken, this identification with excrement is carried to the extreme in the precise sense of identification with the paradoxical position of the legendary member of a cannibal tribe who ate the last cannibal so that there would be no cannibalism
This excrement—this “impossible” object, this exception by means of which universality is simultaneously established and suspended—is the objectal equivalent of the Lacanian subject: what we have here is the subjective position of a “vanishing mediator,” of somebody who in advance takes into account that the process he initiated will ultimately sweep him away. And it is precisely this notion of the subject qua constitutive suspension of universality which enables us to approach in a new way the relationship between Foucault and Lacan.
Contemporary doxa conceives them as the two exemplary representatives of anti-Enlightenment “postmodernism” (Foucault: the mechanisms of discipline and control, Panopticon, etc., as the hidden reverse or the actual content of the Enlightenment’s universal Reason; Lacan: the “décentrement” of the Cartesian subject). Yet both of them inscribed their theoretical activity within the confines of the Enlightenment project (Foucault in his last years; Lacan constantly—suffice it to mention the cover text of Ecrits which locates Lacan’s endeavor in the continuation of le débat des lumières). In both cases, the crucial reference is Kant’s transcendental turn as the apogee of the Enlightenment (Foucault elaborates it in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”; Lacan in his écrit “Kant avec Sade” in which Kant is explicitly conceived as the starting point of the process in the “history of ideas” which led to the emergence of psychoanalysis).49 In both cases, this reference to Kant hinges upon the notion of the subject; yet the elaboration of this notion brings about two completely different, mutually exclusive results: with Foucault, we get a subject who shapes himself without guarantee in a heteronomous, superior universal Reason—implying an ethics of “proper measure,” of self-masterhood, of the self qua harmonization of the antagonistic forces; with Lacan, we get $, a split/barred subject, subjected to an impossible imperative—implying an ethics of the incommensurate, of a constitutive imbalance, in short, of the real-impossible. Foucault quotes as one of the historical prototypes of his ethics of the “care for the self” the Renaissance ideal of the personality qua work of art; in this sense, one is tempted to conceive the opposition of Foucault and Lacan as the repetition of another opposition, that between Renaissance humanism and Protestantism, or, to fill in the names, between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther. For that very reason, Lacan in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis refers to Luther who (as we have already seen) counters Erasmus’s humanism with the identification of man to God’s excrement—what we have here is the opposition between a harmonious work of art and the queer remainder which sticks out
We can see, now, how Foucault is thoroughly justified in comparing his “esthetics of existence” to the Kantian turn: in his Critique of Judgment, Kant diagnoses esthetic judgments as a case of “universality without concept”—although without the guarantee in a previously established concept, they contain a claim to universal validity (when we say that something is beautiful, we do not know why it is beautiful, and yet we implicitly claim that everybody should find it beautiful). This is, then, the Foucauldian subject: a capacity of “self-relating,” of shaping out of one’s life an esthetic object, a “work of art,” of instigating out of oneself the universal rule one is to follow—the aim is no longer to recognize one’s place in the preordained structure of the cosmos, since every positing of a norm has its ground in the subject’s self-constitution, it manifests a specific way the subject relates to himself. In other words, every ontology is ultimately an “ontology of the present”: as universal and supratemporal as it may appear, it hinges upon the subject’s incessant (re)construction of his own present, of the present historical moment.
desire in its pure state, that very desire that culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one’s human tenderness—I would say, not only in the rejection of the pathological object, but also in its sacrifice and murder. That is why I wrote Kant avec Sade
A homologous inversion takes place in the domain of pleasures: the very renunciation to pleasures brings about a paradoxical surplus enjoyment, an “enjoyment in pain,” in displeasure, baptized by Lacan jouissance, the “impossible”/traumatic/painful enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle. If we read these two theoretical gestures together, the conclusion which imposes itself, of course, is that Law, in its most radical dimension, is the “superego,” i.e., an injunction to enjoyment with which it is impossible to comply
Foucault’s implicit reproach to Lacan concerns the latter’s allegedly negative conception of Law as the force of prohibition54—yet Lacan’s concept of the superego designates precisely law in its positive, productive dimension.55 The split, therefore, does not take place between moral law and pathological desires, but between enjoyment and pleasure: on the one hand, there is the mad-obscene law which is incommensurate with our well-being insofar as it derails the psychic equilibrium by way of ordering enjoyment; on the other hand, there is the tension between the pleasure principle and its externally imposed limitations, i.e., the dialectic of the pleasure and reality principles, the art of the “proper measure” of containing pleasure which assures its long-term preservation.
how much more difficult it is to be truly evil. And is Foucault’s image of antiquity ultimately not the mythical notion of an age in which we had a subject not yet caught in these annoying paradoxes of surplus enjoyment, a subject still capable of finding peace and harmony in the esthetic formation of his self?58 That is to say, is not the fundamental paradox of the Christian logic of confession which Foucault wanted to get rid of that it extracts enjoyment out of the very renunciation/denunciation of the “pleasures of the flesh,” is not this surplus enjoyment what drives a Christian believer into ever new renunciations?
Perhaps, these two notions of the subject, the Foucauldian and the Lacanian, are not after all so exclusive as it may appear: the construction of the self without a guarantee in the universality of Reason is possible only against the background of Versagung. If there was ever a theoretician sensitive to the latent ascetic dimension of the “esthetics of existence,” it was Foucault: the Foucauldian “culture of the self” is ultimately nothing but a constant endeavor to set measures to the monstrous excess called “the Kantian subject,” to introduce a semblance of harmonious design into it, i.e., to master, to contain, to reduce to a bearable level its incommensurability. The problem, of course, is that this endeavor is ultimately doomed to fail since the imbalance is constitutive: the Foucauldian subject is synonymous with the successful subjectivization, with the formation of the self qua an esthetic whole; the Lacanian subject is synonymous with its failure, i.e., it is correlative to the anal object, to the excrement which is the leftover of every subjectivization.
“Tarrying with the negative”
To elucidate this crucial distinction, let us recall two examples. According to the famous proposition from Marx’s Communist Manifesto, all hitherto history is a history of class struggles; yet—in an apparently contradictory move—Marx never ceases to insist that the bourgeoisie is the first “class” stricto sensu: the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the first class antagonism which “appears as such,” not camouflaged by the rich texture of casts, guilds, etc.—thus, it enables us to decipher the preceding social antagonisms as concealed forms of class struggle. It is similar with Claude Lefort’s famous definition of democracy as a system in which the locus of power is “empty,” i.e., a system founded on an unsurpassable gap separating the symbolic locus of power from real political agents who, temporarily, occupy it (“exert power”): Lefort’s point is not that it was only with democracy that the locus of power was evacuated—it always already was empty, anyone who purported to be its possessor always already was an impostor, yet this void became actual and visible only by the advent of democracy. This is, ultimately, what the Hegelian couple in itself—for itself is about, i.e., it is in this sense that the dialectical process forms a “closed circle” where a thing “becomes what it already was.”
the dialectical maxim “the cleaner you are, the dirtier you are” is in force: the more “truly” you return to oriental wisdom, the more your effort contributes to the transformation of oriental wisdom into a cog in the Western social machine …
utes to the transformation of oriental wisdom into a cog in the Western social machine … The reverse of it is that those who preach “multicultural decenterment,” “openness toward non-European cultures,” etc., thereby unknowingly affirm their “Eurocentrism,” since what they demand is imaginable only within the “European” horizon: the very idea of cultural pluralism relies on the Cartesian experience of the empty, substanceless subjectivity—it is only against the background of this experience that every determinate form of substantial unity can appear as something ultimately contingent.
6.1 Is There a Proper Way to Remake a Hitchcock Film?
In any large American bookstore, it is possible to purchase some volumes of the unique series Shakespeare Made Easy,1 a “bilingual” edition of Shakespeare’s plays, with the original archaic English on the left page and the translation into common contemporary English on the right page. The obscene satisfaction provided by reading these volumes resides in how what purports to be a mere translation into contemporary English turns out to be much more: as a rule, Durband tries to formulate directly, in everyday locution, what he considers to be the thought expressed in Shakespeare’s metaphoric idiom; “To be or not to be, that is the question” becomes something like, “What’s bothering me now is: Shall I kill myself or not?” And my idea is, of course, that the standard remakes of Alfred Hitchcock’s films are precisely something like “Hitchcock Made Easy”: although the narrative is the same, the “substance,” the flair that accounts for Hitchcock’s uniqueness, evaporates. Here, however, one should avoid the jargon-laden talk on Hitchcock’s unique touch, and approach the difficult task of specifying what gives Hitchcock’s films their unique flair.
The Hitchcockian sinthom
There is one memorable scene in the otherwise dull and pretentious Robert Redford’s A River Runs through It. Of the two preacher’s sons, we are all the time aware that the younger one (Brad Pitt) is on a path to self-destruction, approaching catastrophe because of his compulsive gambling, drinking, and womanizing. The thing that keeps the two sons together with their father is fly fishing in the wild Montana rivers—these Sunday fishing expeditions are a kind of sacred family ritual, a time when the threats of the life outside family are temporarily suspended
Best known is the motif of what Sigmund Freud called Niederkommenlassen, “letting oneself fall down,” with all the undertones of melancholic suicidal fall:3 a person desperately clinging by his hand onto another person’s hand, as in the Nazi saboteur clinging from the good American hero’s hand from the torch of the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur; the final confrontation of Rear Window, the crippled James Stewart hanging from the window, trying to grab the hand of his pursuer who, instead of helping him, tries to make him fall;
We are dealing here with the level of material signs that resists meaning and establishes connections not grounded in narrative symbolic structures: they just relate in a kind of presymbolic cross-resonance. They are not signifiers, neither the famous Hitchcockian stains, but elements of what, a decade or two ago, one would have called cinematic writing, écriture. In the last years of his teaching, Jacques Lacan established the difference between symptom, and sinthom: in contrast to symptom which is a cipher of some repressed meaning, sinthom has no determinate meaning; it just gives body, in its repetitive pattern, to some elementary matrix of jouissance, of excessive enjoyment. Although sinthoms do not have sense, they do radiate jouis-sense, enjoy-meant
The Case of the Missing Gaze
I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. This window, if it gets a bit dark, and if I have reasons for thinking that there is someone behind it, is straight-away a gaze.
Milan Kundera, in La Lenteur, presents as the ultimate sign of today’s false aseptic pseudovoluptuous sex the couple feigning to have anal sex at the side of a hotel pool, in view of the guests in the rooms above, faking pleasurable cries but effectively not even accomplishing the penetration; to this he opposes the slow galant intimate erotic games of eighteenth-century France
Since the couples knew that not making love was considered an act of sabotage to be severely punished, and since, on the other hand, after a fourteen-hour workday they were as a rule too tired to effectively have sex, they pretended to make love in order to dupe the guardian’s attention: they made false movements and faked sounds. Is this not the exact inverse of the experience from the prepermissive youth of some of us, when one had to sneak into the bedroom with the partner and do it as silently as possible, so that parents, if they were still awake, would not suspect that sex was going on? What if, then, such a spectacle for the Other’s gaze is part of the sexual act—what if, since there is no sexual relationship, it can only be staged for the Other’s gaze?
Does not the recent trend of “web cam” sites that realize the logic of The Truman Show (in these sites, we are able to follow continuously some event or place: the life of a person in her apartment, the view on a street, etc.) display this same urgent need for the fantasmatic Other’s gaze serving as the guarantee of the subject’s being? “I exist only insofar as I am looked at all the time.” (Similar to this is the phenomenon, noted by Claude Lefort, of the TV set that is left on all the time, even when no one effectively watches it, serving as the minimum guarantee of the existence of social link.) The situation is here thus the tragicomic reversal of the Bentham-Orwellian notion of panopticon society in which we are (potentially) “observed all the time” and have no place to hide from the omnipresent gaze of the power: here, anxiety arises from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his being …
The Ideal Remake
Yet what is crucial in this tradition is the equation of labor with crime, the idea that labor—hard work—is originally an indecent criminal activity to be hidden from the public eye. The only place in Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity are when the action hero penetrates the master criminal’s secret domain and locates there the site of intense labor (the manufacture and packaging of drugs, the construction of a rocket that will destroy New York). When, in a James Bond movie, the master criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist proud presentation of the production in a factory?17 And the function of Bond’s intervention, of course, is to blow up this site of production, allowing us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with a “disappearing working class.”
socio-political
The icon of today’s subject is perhaps the Indian computer programmer who, during the day, excels in his expertise, while in the evening, upon returning home, lights a candle to a Hindu divinity and respects the sacredness of the cow.
the way they are shooting soap operas in Mexico: because of the extremely tight schedule (the studio has to produce each day a half-hour installment of the series), actors do not have time to learn their lines in advance, so they simply have hidden in their ears a tiny voice receiver, and a man in the cabin behind the set simply reads to them the instructions on what they are to do (what words they are to say, what acts they are to accomplish). Actors are trained to enact immediately, with no delay, these instructions.
Car je est un autre. Si le cuivre s’éveille clairon, il n’y a rien de sa faute
selfhood
Reaching the End Of the World
Reaching the end of the world
The idea of the hero living in a totally manipulated and controlled artificial universe is hardly original: The Matrix just radicalizes it by bringing in virtual reality (VR). The point here is the radical ambiguity of VR with regard to the problematic of iconoclasm. On the one hand, VR marks the radical reduction of the wealth of our sensory experience to not even letters, but the minimal digital series of 0 and 1, of the passing and not-passing of the electrical signal. On the other hand, this very digital machine generates the “simulated” experience of reality that tends to become indiscernable from the “real” reality, with the consequence of undermining the very notion of “real” reality—VR is thus, at the same time, the most radical assertion of the seductive power of images.
Among the predecessors of this notion, it is worth mentioning Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic California city of the late 1950s gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him satisfied
The “Really Existing” Big Other
What, then, is The Matrix? Simply the Lacanian “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This dimension of the “big Other” is that of the constitutive alienation of the subject in the symbolic order: the big Other pulls the strings, the subject doesn’t speak, he “is spoken” by the symbolic structure. In short, this “big Other” is the name for the social substance, for all that on account of which the subject never fully dominates the effects of his acts, that is on account of which the final outcome of his activity is always something else with regard to what he aimed at or anticipated. However, it is here crucial to note that, in the key chapters of volume 11 of his Seminar, Lacan struggles to delineate the operation that follows alienation and is in a sense its counterpoint, that of separation: alienation in the big Other is followed by the separation from the big Other. Separation takes place when the subject takes note of how the big Other is in itself inconsistent, purely virtual, “barred,” deprived of the thing—and fantasy is an attempt to fill out this lack of the Other, not of the subject (i.e. to (re) constitute the consistency of the big Other). For that reason, fantasy and paranoia are inherently linked: paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an “Other of the Other”, into another Other who, hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture, programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency: beneath the chaos of market, the degradation of morals, and so on, there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot. This paranoiac stance acquired a further boost with today’s digitalization of our daily lives: when our entire (social) existence is progressively externalized/materialized in the big Other of the computer network, it is easy to imagine an evil programmer erasing our digital identity and thus depriving us of our social existence, turning us into non-persons
“The Big Other doesn’t Exist”
we search in vain for the ultimate expert opinion
And the point is not simply that the real issues are blurred because science is corrupted through financial dependence on large corporations and state agencies; even in themselves, sciences cannot provide the answer. Ecologists predicted fifteen years ago the death of our forests—the problem is now a too-large increase of wood. Where this theory of risk society is too short is in emphasizing the irrational predicament into which this puts us, the common subjects: we are again and again compelled to decide, although we are well aware that we are in no position to decide that our decision will be arbitrary
Contemporary experience again and again confronts us with situations in which we are compelled to take note of how our sense of reality and normal attitude toward it is grounded in a symbolic fiction, that is how the big Other that determines what counts as normal and accepted truth—what is the horizon of meaning in a given society—is in no way directly grounded in “facts” as rendered by the scientific “knowledge in the real.”
n a certain way, being treated as a madman, being excluded from the social big Other effectively equals being mad. “Madness” is not the designation that can be grounded in a direct reference to “facts” (in the sense that a madman is unable to perceive things the way they really are, since he is caught in his hallucinatory projections), but only with regard to the way an individual relates to the “big Other.” Lacan usually emphasizes the opposite aspect of this paradox in that “the madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king,” that madness designates the collapse of the distance between the symbolic and the real, an immediate identification with the symbolic mandate; or, to take his other exemplary statement, when a husband is pathologically jealous, obsessed by the idea that his wife sleeps with other men, his obsession remains a pathological feature even if it is proven that he is right and that his wife effectively does sleep with other men. The lesson of such paradoxes is clear: pathological jealousy is not a matter of getting the facts false, but of the way these facts are integrated into the subject’s libidinal economy. However, what one should assert here is that the same paradox should also be performed as it were in the opposite direction: the society (its socio-symbolic field, the big Other) is “sane” and “normal” even when it is proven factually wrong. (Maybe it was in this sense that Lacan designated himself as “psychotic”: he effectively was psychotic insofar as it was not possible to integrate his discourse into the field of the big Other.)
Screening the Real
From another standpoint, The Matrix also functions as the “screen” that separates us from the real, that makes the “desert of the real” bearable. However, it is here that we should not forget the radical ambiguity of the Lacanian real: it is not the ultimate referent to be covered/gentrified/domesticated by the screen of fantasy; the real is also and primarily the screen itself as the obstacle that always already distorts our perception of the referent, of the reality “out there.”
the thing in itself is ultimately the gaze, not the perceived object.
The emergence of excremental objects that are out of place is thus strictly correlative to the emergence of the place without any object in it, of the empty frame as such. Consequently, the real in contemporary art has three dimensions, which somehow repeat within the real the triad of imaginary/symbolic/real. The real is first here as the anamorphotic stain, the anamorphotic distortion of the direct image of reality—as a distorted image, as a pure semblance that “subjectivizes” objective reality. Then, the real is here as the empty place, as a structure, a construction that is never here, experiences as such, but can only be retroactively constructed and has to be presupposed as such—the real as symbolic construction. Finally, the real is the obscene excremental object out of place, the real “itself.” This last real, if isolated, is a mere fetish whose fascinating/captivating presence masks the structural real
Staging the Fundamental Fantasy
The final inconsistency concerns the ambiguous status of the liberation of humanity anounced by Neo in the last scene. As the result of Neo’s intervention, there is a “system failure” in the matrix; at the same time, Neo addresses people still caught in the matrix as if he is the savior who will teach them how to liberate themselves from the constraints of the matrix—they will be able to break the physical laws, bend metals, fly in the air. However, the problem is that all these “miracles” are possible only if we remain within the VR sustained by the Matrix and merely bend or change its rules. Our “real” status is still that of slaves of the matrix; we, as it were, are merely gaining additional power to change our mental prison rules. So what about exiting from the Matrix altogether and entering the “real reality” in which we are miserable creatures living on the destroyed earth surface?
Why does the matrix not immerse each individual into her own solipsistic artificial universe? Why complicate matters with coordinating the programs so that the entire humanity inhabits one and the same virtual universe?) The only consistent answer is: the matrix feeds on the human’s jouissance—so we are here back at the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs the constant influx of jouissance.
The intimate connection between perversion and cyberspace is today a commonplace. According to the standard view, the perverse scenario stages the “disavowal of castration”: perversion can be seen as a defense against the motif of death and sexuality, against the threat of mortality as well as the contingent imposition of sexual difference. What the pervert enacts is a universe in which, as in cartoons, a human being can survive any catastrophe; in which adult sexuality is reduced to a childish game; in which one is not forced to die or to choose one of the two sexes. As such, the pervert’s universe is the universe of pure symbolic order, of the signifier’s game running its course, unencumbered by the real of human finitude. In a first approach, it may seem that our experience of cyberspace fits perfectly this universe: Isn’t cyberspace also a universe unencumbered by the inertia of the real, constrained only by its self-imposed rules? And is it not the same with virtual reality in The Matrix? The “reality” in which we live loses its inexorable character, becomes a domain of arbitrary rules (imposed by the matrix) that one can violate if one’s will is strong enough. However, according to Lacan, what this standard notion leaves out of consideration is the unique relationship between the Other and the jouissance in perversion. What, exactly, does this mean?
In “Le prix du progres,” one of the fragments that conclude The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer quote the argumentation of the nineteenth century French physiologist Pierre Flourens against medical anesthesia with chloroform: Flourens claims that it can be proven that the anaesthetic works only on our memory’s neuronal network. In short, while we are butchered alive on the operating table, we fully feel the terrible pain, but later, after awakening, we do not remember it. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this, of course, is the perfect metaphor of the fate of reason based on the repression of nature in itself: his body, the part of nature in the subject, fully feels the pain; it is only that, due to repression, the subject does not remember it. Therein resides the perfect revenge of nature for our domination over it: unknowingly, we are our own greatest victims, butchering ourselves alive. Isn’t it also possible to read this as the perfect fantasy scenario of interpassivity, of the Other scene in which we pay the price for our active intervention into the world? There is no active free agent without this fantasmatic support, without this Other scene in which one is totally manipulated by the Other.26 A sadomasochist willingly assumes this suffering as the access to being.
TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES
Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno
Being and Event, Alain Badiou
On Religion, Karl Barth
The Language of Fashion, Roland Barthes
The Intelligence of Evil, Jean Baudrillard
I and Thou, Martin Buber
Never Give In., Winston Churchill
The Boer War, Winston Churchill
The Second World War, Winston Churchill
In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda
A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Cinema I, Gilles Deleuze
Cinema II, Gilles Deleuze
Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin
Discourse on Free Will, Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther
Education for Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire
Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm and Karl Marx
To Have or To Be?, Erich Fromm
Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer
All Men Are Brothers, Mohandas K. Gandhi
Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard
The Essence of Truth, Martin Heidegger
The Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer
The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer
Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre
After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre
Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri
Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere
Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure
An Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski
Building A Character, Constantin Stanislavski
Creating A Role, Constantin Stanislavski
Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Žižek
Some titles are not available in North America.