Dva totalitarizma

Piše: Slavoj Žižek

Nužno je zauzeti poziciju i tvditi da je fašizam fundamentalno “gori” od

komunizma. Alternativa, ideja da je uopšte moguće racionalno porediti dva
totalitarizma, teži da proizvede zaključak – eksplicitan ili implicitan – da
fašizam predstavlja manje zlo, razumljivu reakciju na komunističku opasnost.
Kada je septembra 2003. Berlusconi izazvao snažnu reakciju svojom
opservacijom da Mussolini, za razliku od Hitlera, Staljina ili Saddama
Husseina, nikada nikoga nije ubio, pravi skandal je bio u tome što je ovaj iskaz,
daleko od izraza specifičnog Berlusconijevog pogleda na stvarnost, bio deo
tekućeg projekta da se promene uslovi posleratnog evropskog identiteta, koji su
do tada bili zasnovani na antifašističkom jedinstvu

U novinama se 3. februara 2005. pojavila mala beleška – očigledno ne nešto za

naslovne strane. Kao odgovor na poziv za zabranu javnog isticanja svastike i drugih
nacističkih simbola, grupa konzervativnih članova evropskog parlamenta, uglavnom
iz bivših komunističkih zemalja, zahtevala je da se isto primeni i na komunističke
simbole: ne samo na srp i čekić, već i na crvenu zvezdu. Ovaj predlog ne treba olako
shvatiti: on sugeriše duboku promenu u evropskom ideološkom identitetu.

Do sada, pravo govoreći, staljinizam nije bivao odbacivan na isti način kao nacizam.
Potpuno smo svesni njegovih monstruoznih aspekata, ali još uvek nalazimo da je
Ostalgie (nostalgija za istokom, prim. prev.) prihvatljiva: možete snimiti film kao
Goodbye Lenin, ali Goodbye Hitler je nezamisliv. Zašto? Da uzmemo drugi primer,
u Nemačkoj je lako naći mnoge CD-ove sa starim istočnonemačkim revolucionarnim
i partijskim pesmama, od “Stalin, Freund, Genosse”, do “Die Partei hat immer
Recht”. Mnogo je teže naći kolekcije nacističkih pesama. Čak i na ovom
anegdotskom nivou, razlika između staljinističkog i nacističkog univerzuma je jasna,
baš kao i kada se setimo da su za vreme staljinističkih montiranih procesa optuženi
morali da javno priznaju svoje zločine i objasne zašto su ih počinili, dok nacisti
nikada ne bi očekivali da neki Jevrejin prizna da je bio umešan u zaveru protiv
nemačke nacije. Razlog je jasan. Staljinizam je smatrao da dolazi iz prosvetiteljske
tradicije, prema kojoj je, pošto je istina dostupna svakom racionalnom čoveku, bez
obzira na njegovo stanje, svako smatran odgovornim za svoje zločine. Međutim, za
naciste je krivica Jevreja bila činjenica njihove biologije: nije bilo razloga da se
dokaže da su oni bili krivi, jer su oni bili krivi samim tim što su bili Jevreji.

U staljinističkoj ideološkoj imaginaciji, univerzalni um je objektifikovan u obliku

neumoljivih zakona istorijskog progresa, kome svi služimo, uključujući tu i vođu.
Nacistički vođa je posle završenog govora stajao i tiho prihvatao aplauz, ali pod
staljinizmom, kada bi obavezni aplauz eksplodirao na kraju vođinog govora, on bi
ustajao i pridruživao se aplauzu. U filmu Ernsta Lubitcha To Be or Not to Be Hitler
na nacistički pozdrav odgovara podižući ruku, uz reči “Hajl meni!” Ovo je čisti
humor, jer se nešto slično nikada nije moglo dogoditi u realnosti, dok Staljin zaista
jeste “pozdravljao samog sebe” kada se pridruživao aplauzu. Tu je i činjenica da su
Staljinu za rođendan telegrame sa čestitkama slali zatvorenici iz najmračnijih gulaga;
nemoguće je zamisliti da bi neki Jevrejin poslao sličan telegram Hitleru iz Aušvica.
Ovo je neukusna distinkcija, ali podržava tvrdnju da je pod Staljinom vladajuća
ideologija pretpostavljala prostor u kome vođa i njegovi podanici mogu da se sretnu
kao sluge Istorijskog Razuma. Pod Staljinom su, teoretski, svi ljudi bili jednaki.

U nacizmu ne postoji ekvivalent komunističkim disidentima koji su rizikovali živote

boreći se protiv onoga što su smatrali “birokratskom deformacijom” socijalizma u
SSSR-u i njegovoj imperiji; niko se u nacističkoj Nemačkoj nije zalagao za “nacizam
sa ljudskim licem”. Tu se krije greška (i predrasuda) svih pokušaja, poput onih
konzervativnog istoričara Ernsta Noltea, da se zauzme neutralan stav – to jest, da se
zahteva da se isti standardi primene i na komuniste i na naciste. Ako se Heideggeru
ne oprašta flertovanje sa nacizmom, zašto se Lukácsu, Brechtu i drugima oprašta
njihov mnogo duži angažman u vezi sa staljinizmom? Ova pozicija redukuje nacizam
na reakciju i ponavljanje praksi koje su već postojale u boljševizmu – teror,
koncentracioni logori, borba na smrt protiv političkih protivnika – tako da je
“prvobitni greh”, greh komunizma.

Krajem 1980-tih, Nolte je bio Habermasov glavni oponent u takozvanom

Revvisionismusstreit, tvrdeći da nacizam ne treba posmatrati kao neuporedivo zlo
XX veka. Ne samo da se nacizam, odvratan kakav jeste, pojavio nakon komunizma:
on je bio preterana reakcija na komunističku opasnost, a svi njegovi užasi su bili
samo kopije užasa već počinjenih pod sovjetskim komunizmom. Nolteova ideja je da
komunizam i nacizam dele isti totalitarni oblik, a da se jedina razlika između njih
sastoji u razlici između empirijskih činilaca koji popunjavaju svoje određene
strukturalne uloge (“Jevreji” umesto “klasnog neprijatelja”). Uobičajena liberalna
reakcija na Noltea bila je da on relativizuje nacizam redukujući ga na sekundarni eho
komunističkog zla. Međutim, čak i ako ostavimo po strani beskorisno poređenje
između komunizma – neuspelog pokušaja oslobađanja – i radikalnog zla nacizma,
moramo se složiti sa osnovnom Nolteovom tezom: nacizam je u suštini bio reakcija
na komunističku pretnju; on je zamenio klasnu borbu borbom između arijevaca i
Jevreja. Ovde se susrećemo sa izmeštanjem u frojdovskom smislu reči
(Verschiebung): nacizam dislocira klasnu borbu na rasnu borbu, i time zamagljuje
svoju pravu prirodu. Ono što se menja u prelasku od komunizma ka nacizmu je
pitanje forme i tu se krije nacistička ideološka mistifikacija: politička borba je
naturalizovana kao invazija stranog (jevrejskog) tela koje remeti harmoniju arijevske
zajednice. Nije tačno da, kako Nolte tvrdi, ovde u oba slučaja imamo istu formalnu
antagonističku strukturu, već je mesto neprijatelja popunjeno različitim elementom
(klasa, rasa). Klasni antagonizam je, za razliku od rasne razlike i konflikta, apsolutno
inherentan i konstitutivan za društveno polje; fašizam dislocira ovaj suštinski
antagonizam.

Onda je prikladno priznati tragediju Oktobarske revolucije: kako njenog jedinstvenog

emancipatorskog potencijala, tako i istorijsku nužnost njenog staljinističkog
rezultata.Trebalo bi da pošteno priznamo da su staljinističke čistke bile na izvestan
način “iracionalnije” od fašističkog nasilja: njihovo preterivanje je nepogrešiv znak
da je, za razliku od fašizma, staljinizam predstavljao slučaj autentične revolucije koja
je otišla u potpuno pogrešnom pravcu. Pod fašizmom je, čak i u nacističkoj
Nemačkoj, bilo moguće preživeti, održati privid “normalnog” svakodnevnog života,
ukoliko se neko nije bavio opozicionim aktivnostima (i, naravno, ukoliko nije bio
Jevrejin). S druge strane, pod Staljinom kasnih 1930-ih niko nije bio bezbedan: bilo
ko je u svakom trenutku mogao da bude optužen, uhapšen i streljan kao izdajnik.
Iracionalnost nacizma je bila “kondenzovana” u antisemitizmu – uverenosti u
jevrejsku zaveru – dok je iracionalnost staljinizma prožimala čitavo društveno telo.
Zato su istražitelji nacističke policije tragali za dokazima i tragovima aktivne
opozicije režimu, dok su se staljinistički istražitelji zadovoljavali time da fabrikuju
dokaze, izmišljaju zavere, itd.

Takođe bismo morali da priznamo da još uvek nemamo zadovoljavajuću teoriju

staljinizma. Zato je skandalozno da Frankfurtska škola nije uspela da proizvede
sistematsku i temeljnu analizu ovog fenomena. Izuzeci su vrlo rečiti: Behemoth
(1942) Franza Neumanna, koji sugeriše da su tri velika svetska sistema – kapitalizam
Nju dila, fašizam i staljinizam – težili istom birokratskom, globalno organizovanom,
“administriranom” društvu; Soviet Marxism (1958) Herberta Marcusea, njegova
najmanje strastvena knjiga, jedna čudno neutralna analiza sovjetske ideologije bez
jasnog zauzimanja stava; i, konačno, pokušaji nekih habermasovaca tokom 1980-ih,
koji su, razmišljajući o izranjajućem fenomenu disidenstva, pokušali da razviju
koncept građanskog društva kao mesta otpora komunističkom režimu – što je sve
zanimljivo, ali nije globalna teorija specifičnosti staljinističkog totalitarizma. Kako je
jedna škola marksističke misli, koja je tvrdila da se fokusira na uslove propadanja
emancipatorskog projekta, mogla da ne analizira noćnu moru “realno postojećeg
 socijalizma”? I nije li njeno fokusiranje na fašizam bilo tiho priznavanje neuspeha u
suočavanju sa pravom traumom?

Ovde treba da izvršimo izbor. “Čisto” liberalno stanovište prema levom i desnom
“totalitarizmu” – da su oba loša, zasnovano na netoleranciji političkih i drugih
razlika, odbacivanju demokratskih i humanističkih vrednosti, itd. – je a priori
pogrešno. Nužno je zauzeti poziciju i tvditi da je fašizam fundamentalno “gori” od
komunizma. Alternativa, ideja da je uopšte moguće racionalno porediti dva
totalitarizma, teži da proizvede zaključak – eksplicitan ili implicitan – da fašizam
predstavlja manje zlo, razumljivu reakciju na komunističku opasnost. Kada je
septembra 2003. Berlusconi izazvao snažnu reakciju svojom opservacijom da
Mussolini, za razliku od Hitlera, Staljina ili Saddama Husseina, nikada nikoga nije
ubio, pravi skandal je bio u tome što je ovaj iskaz, daleko od izraza specifičnog
Berlusconijevog pogleda na stvarnost, bio deo tekućeg projekta da se promene uslovi
posleratnog evropskog identiteta, koji su do tada bili zasnovani na antifašističkom
jedinstvu. To je pravi kontekst u kome treba razumeti poziv evropskih
konzervativaca na zabranu komunističkih simbola.

Slavoj Žižek: Intelektualac u tranziciji

U svojoj najnovijoj knjizi „Čudovišnost Hrista”, koja se u ovom obliku pojavila
jedino na srpskom jeziku (Otkrovenje, 2008) Žižek, na tragu Hegelove filozofije
hrišćanstva, iz Hristove žrtve danas izvodi smisao revolucionarne zajednice.
 Slavoj Žižek

Inteligencija obavezuje više negoli plemstvo, više čak i od siromaštva, a njeni

plodovi mogu pleniti više i od erotskog užitka. U „Etici”, Spinoza nije uzalud tvrdio
da razmišljanje pruža zadovoljstvo.

Okretnom i pronicljivom duhu mi se divimo čak i kad pripada nekoj nemoralnoj,

zločinačkoj prirodi. Uzmimo za primer romanesknog i filmskog junaka, serijskog
ubicu Hanibala Lektora, eruditu i estetu. Ironičan i precizan, gotovo genijalan um
njegove psihopatske ličnosti ushićuje nas, iako se gnušamo njegovih
nepočinstava. U „Nikomahovoj etici”, Aristotel govori o veličini koja i u zlu postoji
kao što postoji u dobru.

To, dakako, ne znači da su mudri i etični karakteri, po prirodi stvari, monotoni i

neprovokativni. Sokrat, sa demonom svog genija, bio je upravo bujna,
blagoglagoljiva, neumorno istraživačka, radoznala, provokativna i polemička
priroda. Čudni su putevi inteligencije.

Slavoj Žižek – za koga se, sa dobrim razlogom, gotovo obavezno kaže da je

danas planetarna filozofska zvezda, kao što se za Madonu ili Breda Pita kaže da
su megazvezde Holivuda ili šou-biznisa – nesumnjivo je jedan od
najinteligentnijih živućih filozofa čiji su plodovi radoznalosti i gneva za nas među
najinteresantnijima. Ma o čemu da govori – a on istom „geometrijskom” metodom
govori i o istini i o trivijalnostima, o remek-delima i petparačkim pričama, o
Hegelu, Lenjinu, Čestertonu, Agati Kristi, Hičkoku, braći Marks i holivudskim
blokbasterima, o Miloševiću, Bušu, papi, o profitu i sirotinji trećeg sveta – tamo
gde je ovaj globalno angažovani intelektualac, neizostavno je i provokativni,
štaviše ustanički duh filozofije koja se bavi upravo onim što se u svetu smatra
već poznatim i dobro uzglobljenim. U tom svom svetskom pozorištu i poprištu
filozofije, a u postojanom radikalnom nastojanju da neizbežnim malim
(partikularnim) iluzijama potkrepi istinu do koje mu je stalo, Žižek neumorno i
smelo pokušava da ukaže na velike iluzije potkrepljene malim (partikularnim)
istinama. Istina je, naime, da sredstva za proizvodnju, ni po kakvom etičkom
načelu, ne treba da pripadaju samo određenim grupama, kao što je istina i da je
drastična socijalna nejednakost na planeti nešto protiv čega se valja boriti. Da bi
to pokazao, Žižek upotrebljava i ideološke premise komunizma i sofizme u
zaključivanju, doduše na briljantan način i uvek provocirajući divergentno
mišljenje.

U svojoj najnovijoj knjizi „Čudovišnost Hrista”, koja se u ovom obliku pojavila

jedino na srpskom jeziku (Otkrovenje, 2008) Žižek, na tragu Hegelove filozofije
hrišćanstva, iz Hristove žrtve danas izvodi smisao revolucionarne zajednice.
Štaviše, on tvrdi da revolucionarna zajednica kao „borbeni kolektiv povezan
ljubavlju”, ne bi mogla postojati bez umiranja Boga u Hristu.

„Ukoliko Hrist nije vaskrsnuo, naša je vera besmislena”, to je stav svih

hrišćanskih vernika. Žižek, međutim, vaskrsnuće identifikuje sa činom umiranja
na Krstu. Vaskrsnuće, kao i pitanje večnog života – Žižek, zapravo, u potpunosti
ignoriše.

Na Krstu, u smrti Isusa Hrista istovremeno umire i, sa sinom jednosuštni, Bog.

Ono što ostaje, svet je bez Boga, nad kojim lebdi senka ove smrti u vidu Svetog
duha. No, Sveti duh nije nešto postojeće, jer „zaista postoje jedino pojedinci koji
se organizuju”, on je duh koji se uspostavlja kao relacija tamo gde postoji ljubav
po ugledu na Hrista.

Bog se žrtvovao i umro kao čovek. Žrtvovati se zarad dobrobiti potlačenih, to je

čovekov zadatak po ugledu na Boga koga više nema. Tako Žižek smisao
hrišćanstva otkriva za Marksovu teoriju razotuđenja.

Suština Hristove žrtve zapravo je ateizam, herojski oblik života bez Boga, a sa
milošću ljubavi koja se ostvaruje samo ukoliko čovek i sam voli. Kad je ljubav
među vama, ja ću biti tu, kaže Hrist. U tome „leži srž 'večite Ideje' emancipatorne
Partije” (str. 133) tvrdi Žižek i zatim postavlja pitanje: „Zašto naš zadatak ne bi
bio prepoznavanje Ruže u Krstu 'stroge socijalističke diktature'?” (str. 138)

Emancipatorsku partiju i strogu socijalističku diktaturu Žižek razlikuje od prakse

boljševičke diktature, tako što ovu potonju vidi u službi Velikog Drugog, kao
propisane paradigme do koje treba stići. Žižekov revolucionarni angažman
podrazumeva sada odsustvo ove paradigme. Bog je umro, mrtav je i Veliki Drugi,
to je zapravo tajna Božje smrti i komunizma. Ono što postoji jeste organizovana
revolucionarna delatnost u znaku žrtve. Ali, i ovako koncipirana, ova delatnost
podrazumeva pozitivno određenje slobode čoveka (ne, dakle, ono što on ne sme
da čini, nego ono što on treba da čini) te iznova otvara put uskraćivanju
individualnih sloboda. Tu bi se bauk Velikog Drugog pojavio, ako nikako drukčije,
ono, najpre, u „molekularnom” svom obliku.

Na kraju, treba reći da Žižek, u ovoj knjizi, o Hristu, poput vernika, govori kao o
Božjem Sinu. Ukoliko Žižek veruje u ovu pretpostavku kao u stvarni događaj, u
čemu je onda tu razlika u odnosu na one koji u pretpostavku vaskrsenja takođe
veruju kao u događaj? Tu onda Žižek takođe veruje u Hristov hod po vodi.
Ukoliko, međutim, Žižek govori o metafori – a on se o tome ne izjašnjava – onda
čitava ontologija revolucionarne zajednice koju je imao u vidu, ovde pada u vodu.

Kao što često koristi filmske sekvence, u narativnom smislu, kao slučaj pogodan
za psihoanalizu ili filozofsko zaključivanje, a nikada ne govori o njihovom
estetskom efektu, Žižek sada, na isti način, upotrebljava hrišćanstvo lišeno čuda
(i uopšte religioznog iskustva) da bi ilustrovao duh revolucionarne zajednice. A
božansko poreklo Hrista ili se negira ili se potvrđuje jedino u odgovoru na pitanje
o Vaskrsenju.

Zlatko Paković, Politika KUN

Pasija – obična ili bez kofeina? - Slavoj Žižek

Preveo: Višeslav Kirinić (inače veliki direktor, vidjeti pod Antologija anarhizma  )

Čini se da su svi oni koji su kritizirali Pasiju Mela Gibsona i prije nego što je film javno
prikazan zapravo u pravu: nije li opravdan njihov strah da bi film fanatičnog katolika,
koji je poznat po povremenim antisemitskim ispadima, mogao raspiriti antisemitske
osjećaje?

Općenitije govoreći, nije li Pasija manifest jednog od naših (zapadnih, kršćanskih)

fundamentalista? Nije li utoliko dužnost svakog zapadnog sekularista da se ogradi od
filma i jasno dade do znanja kako mi nismo prikriveni rasisti koji napadaju isključivo
fundamentalizme drugih kultura (na primjer, muslimanske).

Papina dvojbena reakcija na film dobro je znana: nakon što ga je pogledao, duboko
potresen rekao je: Tako je i bilo – pri čemu je izjavu odmah opovrgnuo službeni
glasnogovornik Vatikana. Papina spontana reakcija zamijenjena je službenim
"neutralnim" stavom, da nitko ne bi bio povrijeđen. Taj potez, uvjetovan politički
korektnim strahom od mogućeg vrijeđanja nečijih vjerskih osjećaja, jasno otkriva slabu
točku liberalne snošljivosti: iako u Bibliji stoji kako je židovska svjetina zahtijevala
Isusovu smrt, ta zgoda na filmu ne smije biti vjerno prikazana, nego je valja ublažiti i
kontekstualizirati da bi svima bilo jasno kako se Židovi ne mogu kolektivno osuđivati za
Raspeće. Problem kod takva pristupa jest taj što se njime samo potiskuju agresivne
vjerske strasti koje bujaju pod površinom te, lišene mogućnosti da budu otpuštene, sve
više jačaju.

Barbari – oni koji ozbiljno shvaćaju svoja uvjerenja

Spomenuto zabranjivanje da se vjera živi s potpunim žarom objašnjava nam zašto je u

današnje vrijeme religija dopuštena tek kao određena "kultura" ili sastavnica životnog
stila, a ne kao supstancijalni način života. Više ne vjerujemo doista , nego samo slijedimo
(neke) vjerske rituale i običaje iz poštovanja prema životnom stilu zajednice kojoj
pripadamo. Može li činjenica da svakog prosinca u svakoj kući možemo vidjeti okićeno
božićno drvce biti išta drugo nego odraz kulturalnog životnog stila , uzme li se u obzir da
nitko od nas ne vjeruje u Djeda Božićnjaka . Možda je, stoga, "kultura" pojam kojim
imenujemo sve one stvari koje prakticiramo a da u njih doista ne vjerujemo, a da ih ne
shvaćamo ozbiljno . Nije li to razlog zbog kojeg vjerske fundamentaliste odbacujemo kao
"barbare", kao prijetnju kulturi – oni su se, naime, drznuli ozbiljno shvatiti svoja
uvjerenja . Mogli bismo zaključiti kako u današnje vrijeme kao prijetnju kulturi vidimo
sve one ljude koji neposredno žive vlastitu kulturu, bez odmaka prema njoj.

Jacques Lacan definirao je ljubav kao "davanje nečega što nemamo" . Često se,
međutim , zaboravlja nastavak rečenice: "...nekome tko to ne želi ". To potvrđuje naše
najelementarnije iskustvo kada nam netko neočekivano izjavi strastvenu ljubav: nije li
reakcija, prije mogućeg potvrdnog odgovora, osjećaj da nam se nameće nešto opsceno i
nasilno? To je razlog zbog kojeg je u konačnici pasija politički nekorektna; iako se čini
kako je u našoj kulturi sve dopušteno, zapravo se jedna vrsta zabrane zamjenjuje drugom.

Truplo – idealan seksualni partner

Uzmite, na primjer, slijepu ulicu u koju su zašle seksualnost i umjetnost. Ima li išta
dosadnije i sterilnije od upornog izmišljanja novih umjetničkih transgresija – izvedbeni
umjetnik/ca masturbira na pozornici, kipar izlaže ljudski izmet? Neki radikalni krugovi u
Sjedinjenim Državama predložili su da se razmisli o pravima nekrofila. Ako već ljudi
potpisuju dopuštenja da se nakon njihove smrti njihovi organi mogu koristiti u
medicinske svrhe, zašto im se ne bi omogućilo da potpisom prepuste svoje tijelo
nekrofilima? Prijedlog je savršen primjer realizacije Kierkegaardova uvida prema kojemu
je dobar susjed samo mrtav susjed. Truplo je idealan seksualni partner snošljivom
subjektu koji nastoji izbjeći svaki oblik strastvene interakcije.

Današnje tržište preplavljeno je proizvodima koji su lišeni inherentne im malignosti :

kava bez kofeina, vrhnje bez masnoće, pivo bez alkohola. Popis se nastavlja: virtualni
seks kao seks bez seksa, doktrina Colina Powela o ratu bez žrtava kao ratu bez rata,
politika redefinirana kao stručna uprava kao politika bez politike. Snošljivi liberalni
multikulturalizam današnjice želi iskusiti Drugo lišeno njegove Drugosti (idealizirano
drugo koje pleše zadivljujuće plesove i pristupa stvarnosti u duhu ekološkog holizma,
dok problemi poput zlostavljanja žena ostaju izvan vidokruga). Snošljivost nam, sukladno
spomenutom, donosi dekofeinizirano vjerovanje, vjerovanje koje nikoga ne vrijeđa i od
nas ne iziskuje predanost.

Čokoladni laksativ

Hedonizam današnjice združuje užitak s ograničenjima. Više se ne govori Pijte kavu, ali
umjereno! , nego Pijte kavu do mile volje jer je ionako lišena kofeina. Najsvjetliji primjer
je čokoladni laksativ koji počiva na paradoksalnoj pretpostavci: Imate li problema sa
zatvorom? Ova čokolada će vam pomoći! – riječ je, naime, o proizvodu koji izvorno
uzrokuje zatvor.
Strukturu čokoladnog laksativa , proizvoda koji sadrži agens vlastita dokinuća, moguće je
pojmiti kroz optiku suvremene ideologije. Uzmimo, primjerice, način na koji pristupamo
kapitalističkom profiterstvu: profiterstvo je u redu AKO je združeno s humanitarnom
djelatnošću – prvo zgrnete milijune, a onda dio svote vraćate onima kojima je to
potrebno. Isto vrijedi za rat i sveprisutnu logiku humanitarnog militarizma: rat je OK ako
donosi mir i demokraciju ili stvara uvjete za raspodjelu humanitarne pomoći. Ne vrijedi li
isto za demokraciju i ljudska prava?

OK je "prevrednovati" ljudska prava tako da uključuju mučenja i trajno stanje

pripravnosti, ako će se time demokraciju iščistiti od populističkih "ekscesa".

Znači li to da bismo se, umjesto lažne snošljivosti liberalnog multikulturalizma, trebali

okrenuti vjerskom fundamentalizmu? Apsurdnost Gibsonova viđenja jasno otkriva
nemogućnost takva rješenja. Gibson je izvorno htio snimiti film na latinskom i
aramejskom, te ga objaviti bez titlova. Izvrgnut pritisku, pristao je na titlove, ali taj
kompromis nikako nije bio tek ustupak zahtjevima tržišta. Provedba izvorne zamisli
pretjerano bi očito pokazala samo-dokidajuću narav Gibsonova projekta: film koji bi se
bez titla prikazivao u golemim trgovačkim centrima obrnuo bi izvornu religioznu
dimenziju u njezinu opreku – nepojmljivi egzotični spektakl.

Opiranje kapitalizmu

No, onkraj vjerskog fundamentalizma i liberalne snošljivosti postoji i treća pozicija.

Zašto naglašavati distinkciju između islamskog fundamentalizma i islama, kao što to
neprestano čine Bush i Blaire, hvaleći islam kao veliku religiju ljubavi i snošljivosti koja
nema nikakve veze s odurnim terorističkim zlodjelima. Valja skupiti hrabrost i napokon
priznati očitu činjenicu da je islam premrežen nasiljem i nesnošljivošću – da, drugim
riječima, u njemu postoji nešto što se opire liberalno-kapitalističkom poretku. Prenesemo
li taj problem u samu jezgru islama, spomenuto opiranje otkriva se kao prilika: ono ne
mora nužno dovesti do islamo-fašizma , nego bi moglo poprimiti izraz socijalističkog
projekta. Tradicionalni europski fašizam bio je krivo usmjeren čin opiranja okovima
kapitalističke modernizacije. Kod fašizma NIJE bio pogrešan (kako nam to liberali
neprestano govore) njegov san o narodnoj zajednici koja će nadići kapitalističko
nadmetanje posredstvom duha kolektivne discipline i žrtve, nego način na koji su ti
motivi izobličeni u sklopu specifičnog političkog zahvata. U određenom smislu, fašizam
je ono najbolje pretvorio u najgore.

Umjesto da se etička jezgra religije traži u prostoru političkih manipulacija tom jezgrom,
valjalo bi samu jezgru podvrgnuti žestokoj kritici – i to u SVIM religijama. Kako u
današnje vrijeme same religije (od New Age duhovnosti do jeftinog spiritualističkog
hedonizma Dalaj-lame) više nego rado služe postmodernom traganju za užitkom, čini se
da – paradoksalno – jedino korjeniti materijalizam sadrži istinski asketsku, militantnu i
etičku dimenziju.

I am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Slavoj Zizek

Interview by Doug Henwood, Intro by Charlie Bertsch
Bad Subjects; Issue #59, February 2002

It's hard to become a superstar in the world of scholarly publishing. Most of the people
who read its products can also write them. To stand out in a crowd this smart requires
both luck and perseverance. Slavoj Zizek has demonstrated plenty of both. When
Yugoslavia started to break up in the aftermath of the Cold War in 1990, pristine
Slovenia was the first of its republics to declare independence. We were thrilled to be
witnessing the rebirth of "nations" that had disappeared into Germany, the Soviet Union,
or, in the case of Slovenia, first the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then Yugoslavia. As
this little-known land's leading thinker, Zizek basked in an aura of novelty. His work,
simultaneously light-hearted and deep, invoked the dream of a post-Cold War world in
which free thinking would transcend all borders.

A decade later, we know how quickly that hope turned to despair. But Zizek's star hasn't
dimmed. If anything, it has grown brighter. People who started reading Zizek because
they couldn't believe that Communist Europe could produce such a supple thinker read
him now for the simple reason that he is Zizek. For anyone who has tired of the dumbing
down of mainstream political discourse in the West, who finds it hard to believe that the
bone-dry American leftism of a Noam Chomsky represents the only possibility for
resistance, who wants to critique global capitalism without falling back on faded Marxist
slogans, Zizek's work flashes the promise of something better. From his ground-breaking
1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology to his trenchant 1999 critique of Western
governments' intervention in the former Yugoslavia, titled NATO as the Left Hand of
God?, Zizek has never failed to stimulate thinking. And what more can we ask of an
intellectual? As Zizek himself suggests in the interview here, philosophy helps us, not by
"purifying" our thought, but by making it more complex.

What really sets Zizek apart from other major scholars is his willingness to take risks. If
you were to read all of his books in rapid succession, you would see that they sometimes
contradict one another. But you would also see how the tension between them reflects
Zizek's real purpose: to make us see the world with fresh eyes. Unlike the vast majority
of academic thinkers, Zizek is not worried about being "careless." He roots around in the
realm of ideas looking for whatever will prove useful. It doesn't matter if his findings
come from different intellectual traditions, if they are, in some sense, philosophically
incompatible. Zizek's writing forces them to collaborate. Marx, Freud, Hegel, Kant,
Lacan...and Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and the Slovenian electronic agit-prop band
Laibach all come together in a delightful mix. This delight, finally, is what seals the deal
for Zizek's readers. It's one thing to illuminate contemporary political concerns with the
help of dense philosophical points; it's another entirely to make that insight fun. Zizek
does.

Left Business Observer editor and Wall Street author Doug Henwood talked with Zizek
prior to the September 11th terrorist attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, then
asked a few follow-up questions in its aftermath. In the days following the attack, Zizek's
take on its significance — an incredibly moving essay titled "Welcome to the Desert of
the Real" circulated on e-mail lists worldwide. Unlike the vast majority of commentators,
Zizek was not content to express disbelief and outrage. His words offered an antidote to
the mindless drivel on the major networks, CNN, and Fox News. Reflecting on the many
"previews" of the tragedy in American movies, Zizek refused to blunt his critical edge:
"In a way, America got what it fantasized about."

This interview is excerpted from BS editor Joel Schalit's anthology The Anti-Capitalism
Reader, forthcoming from Akashic Books in the summer of 2002.

BS: In general, anarchism plays a big role in American radical politics and
countercultures. Do you have any thoughts on this influence?

Zizek: I certainly can understand where the appeal of anarchism lies. Even though I am
quite aware of the contradictory and ambiguous nature of Marx's relationship with
anarchism, Marx was right when he drew attention to how anarchists who preach "no
state no power" in order to realize their goals usually form their own society which obeys
the most authoritarian rules. My first problem with anarchism is always, "Yeah, I agree
with your goals, but tell me how you are organized." For me, the tragedy of anarchism is
that you end up having an authoritarian secret society trying to achieve anarchist goals.
The second point is that I have problems with how anarchism is appropriate to today's
problems. I think if anything, we need more global organization. I think that the left
should disrupt this equation that more global organization means more totalitarian
control.

BS: When you speak of a global organization, are you thinking of some kind of global
state, or do you have non-state organizations in mind?

Zizek: I don't have any prejudices here whatever. For example, a lot of left-wingers
dismissed talk of universal human rights as just another tool of American imperialism, to
exert pressure on Third World countries or other countries America doesn't like, so it can
bomb them. But it's not that simple. As we all know, following the same logic, Pinochet
was arrested. Even if he was set free, this provoked a tremendous psychological change
in Chile. When he left Chile, he was a universally feared, grey eminence. He returned as
an old man whom nobody was afraid of. So, instead of dismissing the rules, it's well
worth it to play the game. One should at least strategically support the idea of some kind
of international court and then try to put it to a more progressive use.

America is already concerned about this. A few months ago, when the Senate was still
under Republican control, it adopted a measure prohibiting any international court to
have any jurisdiction over American citizens. You know they weren't talking about some
Third World anti-imperialist court. They were talking about the Hague court, which is
dominated by Western Europeans. The same goes for many of these international
agencies. I think we should take it all. If it's outside the domain of state power, OK. But
sometimes, even if it's part of state power. I think the left should overcome this
primordial fear of state power, that because it's some form of control, it's bad.
BS: You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups as being authoritarian. Yet,
the model popular with younger activists today is explicitly anti-hierarchical and
consensus-oriented. Do you think there's something furtively authoritarian about such
apparently freewheeling structures?

Zizek: Absolutely. And I'm not bluffing here; I'm talking from personal experience.
Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it's not limited to some mysterious Balkan
region. I have contacts in England, France, Germany, and more — and all the time,
beneath the mask of this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten
rules as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the sense that people
pretended that they were equal, but they all obeyed him. The catch was that it was
prohibited to state clearly that he was the boss. You had to fake some kind of equality.
The real state of affairs couldn't be articulated. Which is why I'm deeply distrustful of this
"let's just coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion." I'm more of a pessimist. In order to
safeguard this equality, you have a more sinister figure of the master, who puts pressure
on the others to safeguard the purity of the non-hierarchic principle. This is not just
theory. I would be happy to hear of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.

BS: We've seen over the last few years the growth of a broad anti-capitalist — or as we
say in the U.S., anti-corporate or anti-globalization — movement, a lot of it organized
according to anarchist principles. Do you think these demonstrations are a sign of any left
revival, a new movement?

Zizek: Mixed. Not in the sense of being partly good and partly bad but because the
situation is undecided — maybe even undecidable. What will come out of the Seattle
movement is the terrain of the struggle. I think it is PRECISELY NOW — after the
attack on the World Trade Center — that the "Seattle" task will regain its full urgency!
After a period of enthusiasm for retaliation, there will be a new (ideological) depression,
and THAT point will be our chance!!!

BS: Much of this will depend on progressives' ability to get the word out.

Zizek: I'm well aware of the big media's censorship here. For example, even in the
European big media, which are supposed to be more open, you will never see a detailed
examination of the movement's agenda. You get some ominous things. There is
something dark about it. According to the normal rules of the liberal game, you would
expect some of these people to be invited on some TV talk shows, confronted with their
adversaries, placed in a vigorous polemic, but no. Their agenda is ignored. Usually
they're mocked as advocating some old-fashioned left-wing politics or some
particularism, like saving local conditions against globalism. My conclusion is that the
big powers must be at least in some kind of a panic. This is a good sign.

BS: But lots of the movement has no explicit agenda to offer. Why is the elite in such a
panic?

Zizek: It's not like these are some kind of old-fashioned left-wing idiots, or some kind of
local traditionalists. I am well aware that Seattle etc. is still a movement finding its shape,
but I think it has potential. (Even though) there is no explicit agenda, there is nonetheless
an outlook reproaching this globalization for being too exclusionary, not a true
globalization but only a capitalist globalization.

BS: At the same time this movement was growing, there was a string of electoral
victories for the right — Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia in Italy, Jorg Haider's Freedom
Party in Austria, our own Bush. What do you make of these?

Zizek: They're not to be underestimated. I'll put it in my old-fashioned Stalinist terms:

there are two deviations to be avoided here, left and right. The right-wing deviation is to
fully endorse their liberal opponents, to say, "OK, we have our problems with Gore or
Blair but they're basically our guys, and we should support them against the true right."
We should also avoid the opposite mistake, which is that they're all the same. It doesn't
really matter if it's Gore or Bush. From this position it's only one step to the position that
says, "so it's even better we have Bush, because then we see the true enemy."

We should steer the right middle course: while maintaining our critical distance towards
the moderate left, one shouldn't be afraid when certain issues are at stake, to support
them. What is at stake is the following: it looked in the 1990s that after the disintegration
of socialism, the Third Way left represents the universal interests of capital as such, to
put it in the old Marxist way, and the right-wing parties represent only particular
interests. In the U.S., the Republicans target certain types of rich people, and even certain
parts of the lower classes — flirting with the Moral Majority, for example. The problem
is that right-wing politicians such as Haider are playing the global game. Not only do we
have a Third Way left; we now have a Third Way right too, which tries to combine
unrestrained global capitalism with a more conservative cultural politics.

Here is where I see the long-term danger of these right wingers. I think that sooner or
later the existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its own
formal democratic rules. For example, in Europe, the tendency behind all these
movements like Holocaust revisionism and so on, is an attempt to dismantle the post-
World War II ideological consensus around anti-fascism, with a social solidarity built
around the welfare state. It's an open question as to what will replace it.

[*Ed Note: Such as the new emergency powers granted the U.S. government for domestic
surveillance purposes following the WTC/Pentagon attacks, which suspend habeas
corpus rights for immigrants, allow security services to monitor your telecommunications
activities, and review your student and bank records without permission from a judge]

BS: What about the transition from Clinton to Bush? What's significant about this from
your point of view?

Zizek: The sad thing is that Clinton left behind him a devastated, disoriented Democratic
Party. There are people who say that his departure leaves some room for a resurgence of
the party's left wing, but that will be difficult. The true problem of Clinton is his legacy;
there is none. He didn't survive as a movement, in the sense that he left a long-term
imprint. He was just an opportunist and now he's simply out. He didn't emerge as a figure
like Thatcher or Reagan who left a certain legacy. OK, you can say that he left a legacy
of compromise or triangulation, but the big failure is at this ideological level. He didn't
leave behind a platform with which the moderate liberals could identify.

BS: A lot of readers of American underground publications read Noam Chomsky and
Howard Zinn, and the stuff coming out of small anarchist presses. What would they get
from reading your work that they might be missing?

Zizek: Martin Heidegger said that philosophy doesn't make things easier, it makes them
harder and more complicated. What they can learn is the ambiguity of so many situations,
in the sense that whenever we are presented by the big media with a simple opposition,
like multicultural tolerance vs. ethnic fundamentalism, the opposition is never so clear-
cut. The idea is that things are always more complex. For example, multiculturalist
tolerance, or at least a certain type of it, generates or involves a much deeper racism. As a
rule, this type of tolerance relies on the distinction between us multiculturalists, and
intolerant ethnic others, with the paradoxical result that anti-racism itself is used to
dismiss IN A RACIST WAY the other as a racist. Not to mention the fact that this kind
of "tolerance" is as a rule patronizing. Its respect for the other cannot but remind us of the
respect for naive children's beliefs: we leave them in their blessed ignorance so as not to
hurt them...

Or take Chomsky. There are two problematic features in his work — though it goes
without saying that I admire him very much. One is his anti-theorism. A friend who had
lunch with him recently told me that Chomsky announced that he'd concluded that social
theory and economic theory are of no use — that things are simply evident, like
American state terror, and that all we need to know are the facts. I disagree with this. And
the second point is that with all his criticism of the U.S., Chomsky retains a certain
commitment to what is the most elemental ingredient of American ideology,
individualism, a fundamental belief that America is the land of free individuals, and so
on. So in that way he is deeply and problematically American.

You can see some of these problems in the famous Faurisson scandal in France. As many
readers may know, Chomsky wrote the preface for a book by Robert Faurisson, which
was threatened with being banned because it denied the reality of the Holocaust.
Chomsky claimed that though he opposes the book's content, the book should still be
published for free speech reasons. I can see the argument, but I can't support him here.
The argument is that freedom of the press is freedom for all, even for those whom we
find disgusting and totally unacceptable; otherwise, today it is them, tomorrow it is us. It
sounds logical, but I think that it avoids the true paradox of freedom: that some
limitations have to guarantee it.

So to understand what goes on today — to understand how we experience ourselves, to

understand the structures of social authority, to understand whether we really live in a
"permissive" society, and how prohibitions function today — for these we need social
theory. That's the difference between me and the names you mentioned.

BS: Chomsky and people like him seem to think that if we just got the facts out there,
things would almost take care of themselves. Why is this wrong? Why aren't "the facts"
enough?

Zizek: Let me give you a very naive answer. I think that basically the facts are already
known. Let's take Chomsky's analyses of how the CIA intervened in Nicaragua. OK, (he
provides) a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything fundamentally new? It's exactly
what I'd expected: the CIA was playing a very dirty game. Of course it's more convincing
if you learn the dirty details. But I don't think that we really learned anything
dramatically new there. I don't think that merely "knowing the facts" can really change
people's perceptions.

To put it another way: Chomsky's own position on Kosovo, on the Yugoslav war, shows
some of his limitations, because of a lack of a proper historical context. With all his facts,
he got the picture wrong. As far as I can judge, Chomsky bought a certain narrative —
that we shouldn't put all the blame on Milosevic, that all parties were more or less to
blame, and the West supported or incited this explosion because of its own geopolitical
goals. All are not the same. I'm not saying that the Serbs are guilty. I just repeat my old
point that Yugoslavia was not over with the secession of Slovenia. It was over the
moment Milosevic took over Serbia. This triggered a totally different dynamic. It is also
not true that the disintegration of Yugoslavia was supported by the West. On the contrary,
the West exerted enormous pressure, at least until 1991, for ethnic groups to remain in
Yugoslavia. I saw [former Secretary of State] James Baker on Yugoslav TV supporting
the Yugoslav army's attempts to prevent Slovenia's secession. The ultimate paradox for
me is that because he lacks a theoretical framework, Chomsky even gets the facts wrong
sometimes.

BS: Years ago, you were involved with the band Laibach and its proto-state, NSK (Neue
Slovenische Kunst). Why did you get involved with them?

Zizek: The reason I liked them at a certain moment (which was during the last years of
"really existing socialism") was that they were a third voice, a disturbing voice, not fitting
into the opposition between the old Communists and the new liberal democrats. For me,
their message was that there were fundamental mechanisms of power which we couldn't
get rid of with the simple passage to democracy. This was a disturbing message, which
was why they got on everyone's nerves. This was no abstract theoretical construct. In the
late 1980s, people got this message instinctively — which is why Laibach were more
strongly repressed by the new democratic, nationalist powers in Slovenia than previously
by the Communists. In the early 1980s, they had some trouble with the Communists, but
from the mid-1980s onward, they didn't have any trouble. But they did again with the
transition of power. With their mocking rituals of totalitarian power, they transmitted a
certain message about the functioning of power that didn't fit the naive belief in liberal
democracy. The miracle was that they did it through certain stage rituals. Later, they tried
to change their image (to put it in marketing terms) and they failed.
BS: You talk and write a lot about popular culture, particularly movies. How does your
thinking about pop culture relate to your thinking about politics?

Zizek: We can no longer, as we did in the good old times, (if they were really good)
oppose the economy and culture. They are so intertwined not only through the
commercialization of culture but also the culturalization of the economy. Political
analysis today cannot bypass mass culture. For me, the basic ideological attitudes are not
found in big picture philosophical statements, but instead in lifeworld practices — how
do you behave, how do you react — which aren't only reflected in mass culture, but
which are, up to a point, even generated in mass culture. Mass culture is the central
ideological battlefield today.

BS: You have recently been speaking about reviving Lenin. To a lot of politically active
young people, Lenin is a devil figure. What do you find valuable in Lenin, or the Leninist
tradition?

Zizek: I am careful to speak about not repeating Lenin. I am not an idiot. It wouldn't
mean anything to return to the Leninist working class party today. What interests me
about Lenin is precisely that after World War I broke out in 1914, he found himself in a
total deadlock. Everything went wrong. All of the social democratic parties outside
Russia supported the war, and there was a mass outbreak of patriotism. After this, Lenin
had to think about how to reinvent a radical, revolutionary politics in this situation of
total breakdown. This is the Lenin I like. Lenin is usually presented as a great follower of
Marx, but it is impressive how often you read in Lenin the ironic line that "about this
there isn't anything in Marx." It's this purely negative parallel. Just as Lenin was forced to
reformulate the entire socialist project, we are in a similar situation. What Lenin did, we
should do today, at an even more radical level.

For example, at the most elementary level, Marx's concept of exploitation presupposes a
certain labor theory of value. If you take this away from Marx, the whole edifice of his
model disintegrates. What do we do with this today, given the importance of intellectual
labor? Both standard solutions are too easy — to claim that there is still real physical
production going on in the Third World, or that today's programmers are a new
proletariat? Like Lenin, we're deadlocked. What I like in Lenin is precisely what scares
people about him — the ruthless will to discard all prejudices. Why not violence?
Horrible as it may sound, I think it's a useful antidote to all the aseptic, frustrating,
politically correct pacifism.

Let's take the campaign against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more
suspicious phenomenon than it appears to be. First, deeply inscribed into it is an idea of
absolute narcissism, that whenever you are in contact with another person, somehow he
or she can infect you. Second, there is an envy of the intense enjoyment of smoking.
There is a certain vision of subjectivity, a certain falseness in liberalism, that comes down
to "I want to be left alone by others; I don't want to get too close to the others." Also, in
this fight against the tobacco companies, you have a certain kind of politically correct
yuppie who is doing very well financially, but who wants to retain a certain anti-capitalist
aura. What better way to focus on the obvious bad guy, Big Tobacco? It functions as an
ersatz enemy. You can still claim your stock market gains, but you can say, "I'm against
tobacco companies." Now I should make it clear that I don't smoke. And I don't like
tobacco companies. But this obsession with the danger of smoking isn't as simple as it
might appear.

BS: You've also left some of your readers scratching their heads over the positive things
you've been writing about Christianity lately. What is it in Christianity you find worthy?

Zizek: I'm tempted to say, "The Leninist part." I am a fighting atheist. My leanings are
almost Maoist ones. Churches should be turned into grain silos or palaces of culture.
What Christianity did, in a religiously mystified version, is give us the idea of rebirth.
Against the pagan notion of destiny, Christianity offered the possibility of a radical
opening, that we can find a zero point and clear the table. It introduced a new kind of
ethics: not that each of us should do our duty according to our place in society — a good
King should be a good King, a good servant a good servant — but instead that
irrespective of who I am, I have direct access to universality. This is explosive. What
interests me is only this dimension. Of course it was later taken over by secular
philosophers and progressive thinkers. I am not in any way defending the Church as an
institution, not even in a minimal way.

For an example, let's take Judith Butler, and her thesis that our sexual identity isn't part of
our nature but is socially constructed. Such a statement, such a feminist position, could
only occur against a background of a Christian space.

BS: Several times you've used the word "universalism." For trafficking in such concepts,
people you'd identify as forces of political correctness have indicted you for
Eurocentrism. You've even written a radical leftist plea for Eurocentrism. How do you
respond to the PC camp's charges against you?

Zizek: I think that we should accept that universalism is a Eurocentrist notion. This may
sound racist, but I don't think it is. Even when Third World countries appeal to freedom
and democracy, when they formulate their struggle against European imperialism, they
are at a more radical level endorsing the European premise of universalism. You may
remember that in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the ANC always
appealed to universal Enlightenment values, and it was Buthelezi, the regime's black
supporter in the pay of the CIA, who appealed to special African values.

My opponent here is the widely accepted position that we should leave behind the quest
for universal truth — that what we have instead are just different narratives about who we
are, the stories we tell about ourselves. So, in that view, the highest ethical injunction is
to respect the other story. All the stories should be told, each ethnic, political, or sexual
group should be given the right to tell its story, as if this kind of tolerance towards the
plurality of stories with no universal truth value is the ultimate ethical horizon.
I oppose this radically. This ethics of storytelling is usually accompanied by a right to
narrate, as if the highest act you can do today is to narrate your own story, as if only a
black lesbian mother can know what it's like to be a black lesbian mother, and so on.
Now this may sound very emancipatory. But the moment we accept this logic, we enter a
kind of apartheid. In a situation of social domination, all narratives are not the same. For
example, in Germany in the 1930s, the narrative of the Jews wasn't just one among many.
This was the narrative that explained the truth about the entire situation. Or today, take
the gay struggle. It's not enough for gays to say, "we want our story to be heard." No, the
gay narrative must contain a universal dimension, in the sense that their implicit claim
must be that what happens to us is not something that concerns only us. What is
happening to us is a symptom or signal that tells us something about what's wrong with
the entirety of society today. We have to insist on this universal dimension.

Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and psychoanalyst, is currently Senior Researcher at

Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, in Essen, Germany. His latest publications are On
Belief, (Routledge, 2001) and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (Verso, 2001).

What Makes Us Moral

If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have
been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human
mind—though it can be a black and raging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn't lie in
the transcendent goodness of that mind—one so sublime, we fold it into a larger "soul."
The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and the
splendid, can exist in one creature, one person, often in one instant.
We're a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another,
romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we
willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the
same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal
equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a
trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we've visited untold horrors on
ourselves—in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan,
London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an
Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania—all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest,
most principled species the planet has produced. That we're also the lowest, cruelest,
most blood-drenched species is our shame—and our paradox.
The deeper that science drills into the substrata of behavior, the harder it becomes to
preserve the vanity that we are unique among Earth's creatures. We're the only species
with language, we told ourselves—until gorillas and chimps mastered sign language.
We're the only one that uses tools then—but that's if you don't count otters smashing
mollusks with rocks or apes stripping leaves from twigs and using them to fish for
termites.
What does, or ought to, separate us then is our highly developed sense of morality, a
primal understanding of good and bad, of right and wrong, of what it means to suffer not
only our own pain—something anything with a rudimentary nervous system can do—but
also the pain of others. That quality is the distilled essence of what it means to be human.
Why it's an essence that so often spoils, no one can say.
Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn
that it's not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it's not. If the rule is
lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. But if the same teacher says
it's also O.K. to push another student off a chair, the child hesitates. "He'll respond, 'No,
the teacher shouldn't say that,'" says psychologist Michael Schulman, co-author of
Bringing Up a Moral Child. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule
against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone
in authority countenances it. That's the difference between a matter of morality and one
of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately.
Of course, the fact is, that child will sometimes hit and won't feel particularly bad about it
either—unless he's caught. The same is true for people who steal or despots who
slaughter. "Moral judgment is pretty consistent from person to person," says Marc
Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of Moral Minds.
"Moral behavior, however, is scattered all over the chart." The rules we know, even the
ones we intuitively feel, are by no means the rules we always follow.
Where do those intuitions come from? And why are we so inconsistent about following
where they lead us? Scientists can't yet answer those questions, but that hasn't stopped
them from looking. Brain scans are providing clues. Animal studies are providing more.
Investigations of tribal behavior are providing still more. None of this research may make
us behave better, not right away at least. But all of it can help us understand ourselves—a
small step up from savagery perhaps, but an important one.

The Moral Ape

The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the
understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego
notwithstanding, it's a quality other species share.
It's not surprising that animals far less complex than we are would display a trait that's as
generous of spirit as empathy, particularly if you decide there's no spirit involved in it at
all. Behaviorists often reduce what we call empathy to a mercantile business known as
reciprocal altruism. A favor done today—food offered, shelter given—brings a return
favor tomorrow. If a colony of animals practices that give-and-take well, the group
thrives.
But even in animals, there's something richer going on. One of the first and most
poignant observations of empathy in nonhumans was made by Russian primatologist
Nadia Kohts, who studied nonhuman cognition in the first half of the 20th century and
raised a young chimpanzee in her home. When the chimp would make his way to the roof
of the house, ordinary strategies for bringing him down—calling, scolding, offers of food
—would rarely work. But if Kohts sat down and pretended to cry, the chimp would go to
her immediately. "He runs around me as if looking for the offender," she wrote. "He
tenderly takes my chin in his palm ... as if trying to understand what is happening."
You hardly have to go back to the early part of the past century to find such accounts.
Even cynics went soft at the story of Binta Jua, the gorilla who in 1996 rescued a 3-year-
old boy who had tumbled into her zoo enclosure, rocking him gently in her arms and
carrying him to a door where trainers could enter and collect him. "The capacity of
empathy is multilayered," says primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University, author
of Our Inner Ape. "We share a core with lots of animals."
While it's impossible to directly measure empathy in animals, in humans it's another
matter. Hauser cites a study in which spouses or unmarried couples underwent functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they were subjected to mild pain. They were
warned before each time the painful stimulus was administered, and their brains lit up in
a characteristic way signaling mild dread. They were then told that they were not going to
feel the discomfort but that their partner was. Even when they couldn't see their partner,
the brains of the subjects lit up precisely as if they were about to experience the pain
themselves. "This is very much an 'I feel your pain' experience," says Hauser.
The brain works harder when the threat gets more complicated. A favorite scenario that
morality researchers study is the trolley dilemma. You're standing near a track as an out-
of-control train hurtles toward five unsuspecting people. There's a switch nearby that
would let you divert the train onto a siding. Would you do it? Of course. You save five
lives at no cost. Suppose a single unsuspecting man was on the siding? Now the mortality
score is 5 to 1. Could you kill him to save the others? What if the innocent man was on a
bridge over the trolley and you had to push him onto the track to stop the train?
Pose these dilemmas to people while they're in an fMRI, and the brain scans get messy.
Using a switch to divert the train toward one person instead of five increases activity in
the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—the place where cool, utilitarian choices are made.
Complicate things with the idea of pushing the innocent victim, and the medial frontal
cortex—an area associated with emotion—lights up. As these two regions do battle, we
may make irrational decisions. In a recent survey, 85% of subjects who were asked about
the trolley scenarios said they would not push the innocent man onto the tracks—even
though they knew they had just sent five people to their hypothetical death. "What's going
on in our heads?" asks Joshua Greene, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard
University. "Why do we say it's O.K. to trade one life for five in one case and not
others?"

How We Stay Good

Merely being equipped with moral programming does not mean we practice moral
behavior. Something still has to boot up that software and configure it properly, and that
something is the community. Hauser believes that all of us carry what he calls a sense of
moral grammar—the ethical equivalent of the basic grasp of speech that most linguists
believe is with us from birth. But just as syntax is nothing until words are built upon it, so
too is a sense of right and wrong useless until someone teaches you how to apply it.
It's the people around us who do that teaching—often quite well. Once again, however,
humans aren't the ones who dreamed up such a mentoring system. At the Arnhem Zoo in
the Netherlands, de Waal was struck by how vigorously apes enforced group norms one
evening when the zookeepers were calling their chimpanzees in for dinner. The keepers'
rule at Arnhem was that no chimps would eat until the entire community was present, but
two adolescents grew willful, staying outside the building. The hours it took to coax them
inside caused the mood in the hungry colony to turn surly. That night the keepers put the
delinquents to bed in a separate area—a sort of protective custody to shield them from
reprisals. But the next day the adolescents were on their own, and the troop made its
feelings plain, administering a sound beating. The chastened chimps were the first to
come in that evening. Animals have what de Waal calls "oughts"—rules that the group
must follow—and the community enforces them.
Human communities impose their own oughts, but they can vary radically from culture to
culture. Take the phenomenon of Good Samaritan laws that require passersby to assist
someone in peril. Our species has a very conflicted sense of when we ought to help
someone else and when we ought not, and the general rule is, Help those close to home
and ignore those far away. That's in part because the plight of a person you can see will
always feel more real than the problems of someone whose suffering is merely described
to you. But part of it is also rooted in you from a time when the welfare of your tribe was
essential for your survival but the welfare of an opposing tribe was not—and might even
be a threat.
In the 21st century, we retain a powerful remnant of that primal dichotomy, which is
what impels us to step in and help a mugging victim—or, in the astonishing case of
Wesley Autrey, New York City's so-called Subway Samaritan, jump onto the tracks in
front of an oncoming train to rescue a sick stranger—but allows us to decline to send a
small contribution to help the people of Darfur. "The idea that you can save the life of a
stranger on the other side of the world by making a modest material sacrifice is not the
kind of situation our social brains are prepared for," says Greene.
Throughout most of the world, you're still not required to aid a stranger, but in France
and elsewhere, laws now make it a crime for passersby not to provide at least the up-
close-and-personal aid we're good at giving. In most of the U.S., we make a distinction
between an action and an omission to act. Says Hauser: "In France they've done away
with that difference."
But you don't need a state to create a moral code. The group does it too. One of the most
powerful tools for enforcing group morals is the practice of shunning. If membership in a
tribe is the way you ensure yourself food, family and protection from predators, being
blackballed can be a terrifying thing. Religious believers as diverse as Roman Catholics,
Mennonites and Jehovah's Witnesses have practiced their own forms of shunning—
though the banishments may go by names like excommunication or disfellowshipping.
Clubs, social groups and fraternities expel undesirable members, and the U.S. military
retains the threat of discharge as a disciplinary tool, even grading the punishment as
"other than honorable" or "dishonorable," darkening the mark a former service person
must carry for life.
Sometimes shunning emerges spontaneously when a society of millions recoils at a single
member's acts. O.J. Simpson's 1995 acquittal may have outraged people, but it did make
the morality tale surrounding him much richer, as the culture as a whole turned its back
on him, denying him work, expelling him from his country club, refusing him service in a
restaurant. In November his erstwhile publisher, who was fired in the wake of her and
Simpson's disastrous attempt to publish a book about the killings, sued her ex-employer,
alleging that she had been "shunned" and "humiliated." That, her former bosses might
well respond, was precisely the point.
"Human beings were small, defenseless and vulnerable to predators," says Barbara J.
King, biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary and author of
Evolving God. "Avoiding banishment would be important to us."

Why We Turn Bad

With so many redundant moral systems to keep us in line, why do we so often fall out of
ranks? Sometimes we can't help it, as when we're suffering from clinical insanity and
behavior slips the grip of reason. Criminal courts are stingy about finding such
exculpatory madness, requiring a disability so severe, the defendant didn't even know the
crime was wrong. That's a very high bar that prevents all but a few from proving the
necessary moral numbness.
Things are different in the case of the cool and deliberate serial killer, who knows the
criminality of his deeds yet continues to commit them. For neuroscientists, the iciness of
the acts calls to mind the case of Phineas Gage, the Vermont railway worker who in 1848
was injured when an explosion caused a tamping iron to be driven through his prefrontal
cortex. Improbably, he survived, but he exhibited stark behavioral changes—becoming
detached and irreverent, though never criminal. Ever since, scientists have looked for the
roots of serial murder in the brain's physical state.
A study published last year in the journal NeuroImage may have helped provide some
answers. Researchers working through the National Institute of Mental Health scanned
the brains of 20 healthy volunteers, watching their reactions as they were presented with
various legal and illegal scenarios. The brain activity that most closely tracked the
hypothetical crimes—rising and falling with the severity of the scenarios—occurred in
the amygdala, a deep structure that helps us make the connection between bad acts and
punishments. As in the trolley studies, there was also activity in the frontal cortex. The
fact that the subjects themselves had no sociopathic tendencies limits the value of the
findings. But knowing how the brain functions when things work well is one good way of
knowing where to look when things break down.
Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of us never run off the moral rails in remotely as
awful a way as serial killers do, but we do come untracked in smaller ways. We face our
biggest challenges not when we're called on to behave ourselves within our family,
community or workplace but when we have to apply the same moral care to people
outside our tribe.
The notion of the "other" is a tough one for Homo sapiens. Sociobiology has been
criticized as one of the most reductive of sciences, ascribing the behavior of all living
things—humans included—as nothing more than an effort to get as many genes as
possible into the next generation. The idea makes sense, and all creatures can be forgiven
for favoring their troop over others. But such bias turns dark fast.
Schulman, the psychologist and author, works with delinquent adolescents at a residential
treatment center in Yonkers, New York, and was struck one day by the outrage that swept
through the place when the residents learned that three of the boys had mugged an elderly
woman. "I wouldn't mug an old lady. That could be my grandmother," one said.
Schulman asked whom it would be O.K. to mug. The boy answered, "A Chinese delivery
guy." Explains Schulman: "The old lady is someone they could empathize with. The
Chinese delivery guy is alien, literally and figuratively, to them."
This kind of brutal line between insiders and outsiders is evident everywhere—mobsters,
say, who kill promiscuously yet go on rhapsodically about "family." But it has its most
terrible expression in wars, in which the dehumanization of the outsider is essential for
wholesale slaughter to occur. Volumes have been written about what goes on in the
collective mind of a place like Nazi Germany or the collapsing Yugoslavia. While killers
like Adolf Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic can never be put on the couch, it's possible to
understand the xenophobic strings they play in their people.
"Yugoslavia is the great modern example of manipulating tribal sentiments to create mass
murder," says Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of
Virginia. "You saw it in Rwanda and Nazi Germany too. In most cases of genocide, you
have a moral entrepreneur who exploits tribalism for evil purposes."
That, of course, does not take the stain of responsibility off the people who follow those
leaders—a case that war-crimes prosecutors famously argued at the Nuremberg trials and
a point courageous people have made throughout history as they sheltered Jews during
World War II or refuse to murder their Sunni neighbor even if a militia leader tells them
to.
For grossly imperfect creatures like us, morality may be the steepest of all developmental
mountains. Our opposable thumbs and big brains gave us the tools to dominate the planet,
but wisdom comes more slowly than physical hardware. We surely have a lot of killing
and savagery ahead of us before we fully civilize ourselves. The hope—a realistic one,
perhaps—is that the struggles still to come are fewer than those left behind.

With reporting by Tiffany Sharples and Alexandra Silver / New York

A Pervert's Guide to Family •

.........Slavoj Zizek
When Sophie Fiennes approached me with the idea to do a "pervert's guide" to
cinema, our shared goal was to demonstrate how psychoanalytic cinema-
criticism is still the best we have, how it can generate insights which compel us to
change our entire perspective. The "pervert" from the title is thus not a narrow
clinical category; it rather refers to perverting - turning around - our spontaneous
perceptions.

The usual reproach to psychoanalytic criticism is that it reduces everything to

family complexes: whatever the story, it is "really about" Oedipus, incest, etc.
Instead of trying to prove that this is not true, one should accept the challenge.
The films which are furthest from family dramas are catastrophe films, which
cannot but fascinate the viewer with a spectacular depiction of a terrifying event
of immense proportions. This brings us to the first psychoanalytic rule of how to
read catastrophe movies: we should avoid the lure of the "big event" and re-focus
on the "small event" (familial relations), reading the spectacular catastrophe as an
indication of the family trouble. Take Steven Spielberg: the secret motif than runs
through all his key films - ET, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List - is
the recovery of the father, of his authority. One should remember that the family
to whose small boy ET appears was deserted by the father (as we learn in the
very beginning), so that ET is ultimately a kind of "vanishing mediator" who
provides a new father (the good scientist who, in the film's last shot, is already
seen embracing the mother) - when the new father is here, ET can leave and "go
home."

And the same story goes on and on. Empire of the Sun focuses on a boy deserted
by his family in the war-torn China and surviving through the help of an ersatz-
father (played by John Malkovich). In the very first scene of Jurassic Park, we see
the paternal figure (played by Sam Neill) jokingly threatening the two kids with
a dinosaur bone - this bone is clearly the tiny object-stain which, later, explodes
into gigantic dinosaurs, so that one can risk the hypothesis that, within the film's
fantasmatic universe, the dinosaurs' destructive fury merely materializes the rage
of the paternal superego. A barely perceptible detail that occurs later, in the
middle of the film, confirm this reading. The pursued group of Neill with two
kids take refugee from the murderous carnivorous dinosaurs in a gigantic tree,
where, dead tired, they fall asleep; on the three, Neill loses the dinosaur bone
that was stuck in his belt, and it is as if this accidental loss has a magic effect -
before they fall asleep, Neill is reconciled with the children, displaying warm
affection and care for them. Significantly, the dinosaurs which approach the three
next morning and awaken the sleeping party, turn out to be of the benevolent
herbivorous kind... Schindler's List is, at the most basic level, a remake of Jurassic
Park (and, if anything, worse than the original), with the Nazis as the dinosaur
monsters, Schindler as (at the film's beginning) the cynical-profiteering and
opportunistic parental figure, and the ghetto Jews as threatened children (their
infantilization in the film is eye-striking) - the story the film tells is about
Schindler's gradual rediscovery of his paternal duty towards the Jews, and his
transformation into a caring and responsible father.

And is The War of the Worlds not the last installment of this saga? Tom Cruise
plays a divorced working class father who neglects his two children; the invasion
of the aliens reawakens in him the proper paternal instincts, and he rediscovers
himself as a caring father - no wonder that, in last scene, he finally gets the
recognition from his son who, throughout the film, despised him. In the mode of
the 18th century stories, the film could thus also have been subtitled "A story on
how a working father finally gets reconciled with his son"... One can effectively
imagine the film WITHOUT the blood-thirsty aliens: what remains is in a way
"what the film really is about," the story of a divorced working-class father who
strives to regain the respect of his two children. Therein resides the film's
ideology: with regard to the two levels of the story (the Oedipal level of the lost
and regained paternal authority; the spectacular level of the conflict with the
invading aliens), there is a clear dissymmetry, since the Oedipal level is what the
story is "really about," while the external spectacular is merely its metaphoric
extension.

And the same goes for the most successful film of all times: is Cameron's Titanic
really about the catastrophe of the ship hitting the ice-berg? One should be
attentive to the precise moment of the catastrophe: it takes place when the two
young lovers (Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett), immediately after
consummating their amorous link in the sexual act, return to the ship's deck.
This, however, is not all: if this were all, then the catastrophe would have been
simply the punishment of Fate for the double transgression (illegitimate sexual
act; crossing the class divisions). What is more crucial is that, on the deck, Kate
passionately says to her lover that, when the ship will reach New York the next
morning, she will leave with him, preferring poor life with her true love to the
false corrupted life among the rich; at THIS moment the ship hits the ice-berg, in
order to PREVENT what would undoubtedly have been the TRUE catastrophe,
namely the couple's life in New York - one can safely guess that soon, the misery
of everyday life would destroy their love. The catastrophe thus occurs in order to
safe their love, in order to sustain the illusion that, if it were not to happen, they
would have lived "happily forever after"...

But even this is not all; a further clue is provided by the final moments of di
Caprio. He is freezing in the cold water, dying, while Winslet is safely floating on
a large piece of wood; aware that she is losing him, she cries: "I'll never let you
go!", and, while saying this, she pushes him away with her hands - why? Beneath
the story of a love couple, Titanic tells another story, the story of a spoiled high-
society girl in an identity-crisis: she is confused, doesn't know what to do with
herself, and, much more than her love partner, di Caprio is a kind of "vanishing
mediator" whose function is to restore her sense of identity and purpose in life,
her self-image (quite literally, also: he draws her image); once his job is done, he
can disappear. This is why his last words, before he disappears in freezing North
Atlantic, are not the words of a departing lover's, but, rather, the last message of
a preacher, telling her how to lead her life, to be honest and faithful to herself,
etc. What this means is that Cameron's superficial Hollywood-Marxism (his all
too obvious privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel
egotism and opportunism of the rich) should not deceive us: beneath this
sympathy for the poor, there is another narrative, the profoundly reactionary
myth, first fully deployed by Kipling's Captain Courageous, of a young rich person
in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality restored by a brief intimate contact with the
full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is
their vampiric exploitation.
The ridiculous climax of this Hollywood-procedure of staging great historical
events as the background of the formation of a couple is Warren Beatty's Reds, in
which Hollywood found a way to rehabilitate the October Revolution itself,
arguably the most traumatic historical event of the XXth century. That is to say,
how, exactly, is the October Revolution depicted in the film? The couple of John
Reed and Louise Bryant are in a deep emotional crisis; their love is re-ignited
when Louise watches John who, on a platform, delivers an impassionate
revolutionary speech. What then follows is their love-making, intersected with
archetypal scenes from the revolution, some of which reverberate in an all too
obvious way with the love-making; say, when John penetrates Louise, there is a
cut onto a street where a dark crowd of demonstrating people envelops and
stops a penetrating "phallic" tramway... all this against the background of a
singing of the International. When, at the orgasmic climax, Lenin himself
appears, addressing a packed hall of delegates, he is more a wise teacher over-
seeing leading the couple's love-initiation than a cold revolutionary leader. Even
the October Revolution is OK, if it serves the re-constitution of a couple...

When the catastrophe is more spectacular, threatening the life on earth itself, one
can safely presume that the familial deadlock is also more unsettling, going
beyond ordinary love troubles. In Mimi Leder's Deep Impact (1998), a gigantic
comet is threatening to hit the Earth and to extinguish all life for 2 years; at the
film's end, the Earth is saved due to the heroic suicidal action of a group of
astronauts with atomic weapons; only a small fragment of the comet falls into the
ocean east of New York and causes a colossal, hundreds of yards high wave that
flushes the entire north-east coast of the USA. This comet-Thing also creates a
couple, but an unexpected one: the incestuous couple of the young, obviously
neurotic, sexually inactive TV-reporter (Tea Leoni) and her promiscuous father,
who has divorced her mother and just married a young woman of the same age
as his daughter (Maximilian Schell). It is clear that the film is effectively a drama
about this unresolved proto-incestuous father-daughter relationship: the
threatening comet obviously gives body to the self-destructive rage of the
heroine.

The entire machinery of the global catastrophe is thus set in motion so that the
father's young wife will abandon him, and the father will return (not to his wife,
the heroine's mother, but) to her daughter: the culmination of the film is the
scene in which the heroine rejoins her father who, alone in his luxurious seaside
house, awaits the impending wave. She finds him walking along the shoreline;
they make peace with each other and embrace, silently awaiting the wave; when
the wave approaches and is already casting its large shadow over them, she
draws herself closer to her father, gently crying "Daddy!", as if to search for
protection in him, reconstituting the childhood scene of a small girl safeguarded
by the father's loving embrace, and a second later they are both swept away by
the gigantic wave. The heroine's helplessness and vulnerability in this scene
should not deceive us: she is the evil spirit who, in the underlying libidinal
machinery of the film's narrative, pulls the strings, and this scene of finding
death in the protective father's embrace is the realization of her ultimate wish...
This scene is to be read against the background of the standard Hollywood motif
(rendered famous in Fred Zinneman's From Here to Eternity) of the couple making
love on the beach, brushed by waves (Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr): here,
the couple is the truly deadly incestuous one, not the straight one, so the wave is
the gigantic killing wave, not the modest shake of small beach waves...

Interestingly enough, the other big 1998 blockbuster-variation on the theme of a

gigantic comet threatening Earth, Armageddon, also focuses on the incestuous
father-daughter relation. Here, however, it is the father (Bruce Willis) who is
excessively attached to his daughter: the comet's destructive force gives body to
his fury at her daughter's love affairs with other men of her age. Significantly, the
denouement is also more "positive," not self-destructive: the father sacrifices
himself in order to save Earth, i.e. effectively - at the level of the underlying
libidinal economy - erasing himself out of the picture in order to bless the
marriage of his daughter with her young lover.

And this brings us to the two Hollywood productions released to mark the 5th
anniversary of the 9/11: Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone's World
Trade Center. The first thing that strikes the eye is that both try to be as anti-
Hollywood as possible: both focus on the courage of ordinary people, with no
glamorous stars, no special effects, no grandiloquent heroic gestures, just a terse
realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is
undoubtedly a touch of authenticity in the films - recall how the large majority of
critics unanimously praised the film's avoiding of sensationalism, its sober and
restrained style. It is, however, this very touch of authenticity which raises some
disturbing questions.

The first thing one cannot but note is how both films tell the story of an
exception: United 93 is about the only one of the four kidnapped planes in which
the terrorists failed, which did not hit its destination; WTC tells the story of the
two of those twenty who were saved from the ruins. The disaster is thus turned
into a kind of triumph, most notably in United 93, where the dilemma the
passengers confront is: what can they do in a situation in which they know for
sure they will die? Their heroic decision is: if we cannot save ourselves, let us at
least try to save others' lives - so they storm the pilot's cabin to bring the plane
down before it will hit the target intended by the kidnappers (the passengers
already knew about the two planes hitting the Twin Towers). How does this
telling the story of an exception function? A comparison with Spielberg's
Schindler's List is instructive here: although the film is undoubtedly an artistic
and political failure, the idea to choose Schindler as a hero was a correct one - it
is precisely by presenting a German who DID something to help Jews that one
demonstrates how it was possible to do something, and thus to effectively
condemn those who did nothing claiming that it was not possible to do anything.
In United 93, on the contrary, the focus on the rebellion serves the purpose of
preventing us to ask the truly pertinent questions. That is to say, let us indulge in
a simple mental experiment and imagine both films with the same change:
American 11 (or another flight which did hit its target) instead of United 93, the
story of its passengers; WTC remade as the story of two of the firefighters or
policemen who did die in the rubbles of the Twin Towers after a prolonged
suffering... Without in any way justifying or showing an "understanding" for the
terrible crime, such a version would confront us with the true horror of the
situation and thus compel us to think, to start asking serious questions about
how such a thing could have happened and what does it mean.

The second feature: both films restrain not only from taking a political stance
about the events, but even from depicting their larger political context. Neither
the passenger on United 93 flight nor the policemen in WTC have a grasp on the
full picture - all of a sudden, they find themselves thrown into a terrifying
situation and have to make the best out of it. This lack of "cognitive mapping" is
crucial: both films depict ordinary people affected by the sudden brutal intrusion
of History as the absent Cause, the invisible Real that hurts. All we see are the
disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can
easily imagine exactly the same film in which the Twin Towers would have
collapsed due to a strong earthquake. Or, even more problematically, we can
imagine the same film taking place in a big German city in 1944, after the
devastating Allied bombing...

Or what about the same film taking place in a bombed high-rise building in
southern Beirut? That's the point: it CANNOT take place there. Such a film
would have been dismissed as a "subtle pro-Hezbollah terrorist propaganda"
(and the same would have been the case with the imagined German film). What
this means is that the two films' ideological-political message resides in their very
abstention from delivering a political message: this abstention is sustained by an
implicit TRUST into one's government - "when the enemy attacks, one just has to
do one's duty..." In it because of this implicit trust that United 93 and WTC differ
radically from the pacifist films like Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, which also
depict ordinary people (soldiers) exposed to suffering and death - here, their
suffering is clearly presented as a meaningless sacrifice for an obscure and
manipulated Cause.

This brings us back to our starting point, to the "concrete" character of the two
films, depicting ordinary people in a terse realistic mode. Any philosopher
knows Hegel's counter-intuitive use of the opposition between "abstract" and
"concrete": in ordinary language, "abstract" are general notions, as opposed to
"concrete" really existing singular objects and events; for Hegel, on the contrary,
it is such immediate reality which is "abstract," and to render it "concrete" means
to deploy the complex universal context that gives meaning to it. Therein resides
the problem of the two films: both are ABSTRACT in their very "concreteness."
The function of their down-to-earth depiction of concrete individuals struggling
for life is not just to avoid cheap commercial spectacle, but to obliterate the
historical context.

Here, then, is where we are five years later: still unable to locate 9/11 into a large
narrative, to provide its "cognitive mapping." Of course, there is the official story
according to which, the permanent virtual threat of the invisible Enemy
legitimizes preemptive strikes: precisely because the threat is virtual, it is too late
to wait for its actualization, one has to strike in advance, before it will be too late.
In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too
visible protective measures of defense. The difference of the War on Terror with
previous XXth century world-wide struggles like the Cold War is that while, in
the preceding cases, the enemy was clearly identified as the positively-existing
Communist empire, the terrorist threat is inherently spectral, without a visible
center. It is a little bit like the characterization of the figure of Linda Fiorentino in
The Last Seduction: "Most people have a dark side... she had nothing else." Most
regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side ... the terrorist threat has nothing
else.

The power which presents itself as being all the time under threat and thus
merely defending itself against an invisible enemy, exposes itself to the danger of
manipulation: can we really trust them, or are they just evoking the threat to
discipline and control us? The paradoxical result of this spectralization of the
Enemy can thus be a reversal of role: in this world without a clearly identified
Enemy, it is the US themselves, the protector against the threat, which is
emerging as the main enemy... as in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient-
Express in which, since the entire group of the suspects is the murderer, the
victim itself (an evil millionaire) should turn out to be the criminal.

The lesson is thus that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for the
state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying
the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK
governments in the last decade, reaching their climax in the tragicomedy with
the Iraqi weapons of mass destructions. Recall the August 2006 alert apropos the
thwarted terrorist attempt to blow a dozen planes on their flight from London to
the US: no doubt the alert was not a fake, to claim this would be too paranoiac -
but, nonetheless, a suspicion remains that all of it was a self-serving spectacle to
accustom us to a permanent state of emergency, to the state of exception as a way
of life. What space for manipulation open up such events where all that is
publicly visible are the anti-terrorist measures themselves? Is it not that they
simply demand from us, ordinary citizens, too much - a degree of trust that those
in power had long ago forsaken? THIS is the sin for which Bush, Blair, and their
consorts should never be forgiven.

Third feature: in both films, there is a key moment which violates this terse
realistic style. United 93 starts with kidnappers in a motel room, praying, getting
ready; they look austere, like some kind of angels of death - and the first shot
after the title-credits confirms this impression: it is a panoramic shot from high
above of Manhattan in the night, accompanied by the sound of the kidnappers'
prayers, as if the kidnappers stroll above the city, getting ready to descend on
earth to ripe their harvest... Similarly, there are no direct shots of the planes
hitting the towers in WTC; all that we see, seconds before the catastrophe, when
one of the policemen is on a busy street in a crowd of people, is an ominous
shadow quickly passing over them - the shadow of the first plane. These shots
confer on both films a strange theological reverberation - as if the attacks were a
kind of divine intervention.

Recall the first reaction of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the 9/11 bombings,
perceiving them as a sign that God lifted up its protection of the US because of
the sinful lives of the Americans, putting the blame on hedonist materialism,
liberalism, and rampant sexuality, and claiming that America got what it
deserved... In a hidden way, United 93 and WTC tend to do the opposite: to read
the 9/11 catastrophe as a blessing in disguise, as a divine intervention from above
to awaken us from moral slumber and to bring out the best in us. WTC ends with
the off-screen words which spell out this message: terrible events like the Twin
Towers destruction bring out in people the worst AND the best - courage,
solidarity, sacrifice for community. People are shown to be able to do things they
would never imagine of being able. It is as if our societies need a major
catastrophe in order to resuscitate the spirit of communal solidarity. This is why,
again, United 93 and WTC are not really about the War on Terror, but about the
lack of solidarity and courage in our permissive late-capitalist societies...

...and about the redemptive power of family love - United 93 cannot restrain from
repeatedly showing a passenger who, close to death, calls a spouse or a closest
relative with the message "I love you." Does, however, this really mean that "love
turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down
and the screen goes black," as Martin Amis put it in his celebration of the film? A
suspicion remains here: is this desperate confession of love also not a fake, the
same kind of fake as the sudden turn to God of someone who faces the proximity
of death - a hypocritical opportunistic move made out of fear, not out of true
conviction? Amis himself, the author of a scathing book about Stalin, should
know how many of the condemned at Stalinist show trials faced the firing squad
professing their innocence and their love for Stalin, a pathetic gesture which
aimed at redeeming their image in the eyes of the big Other. Why should there
be more truth in what we do in such desperate moments? Is it not rather that, in
such moments, the survival-instinct makes us betray our desire?

This brings us to what would have been a true ethical act: imagine a wife
phoning her husband in the last seconds of her life, telling him: "Just to let you
know that our marriage was a fake, that I cannot stand the sight of you..."

Censorship Today: Violence, or

........ Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses •
............. part 1

..............Slavoj Zizek
• CENSORSHIP TODAY... part 1

The lesson to be fully endorsed is thus that of another environmental scientist

who came to the result that, while one cannot be sure what the ultimate result of
humanity's interventions into geo-sphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity
were to stop abruptly its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take
its balanced course, the result would have been a total breakdown, an imaginable
catastrophe. "Nature" on Earth is already to such an extent "adapted" to human
interventions, the human "pollutions" are already to such an extent included into
the shaky and fragile balance of the "natural" reproduction on Earth, that its
cessation would cause a catastrophic imbalance. This is what it means that
humanity has nowhere to retreat: not only "there is no big Other" (self-contained
symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning); there is also no Nature
qua balanced order of self-reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, thrown
off the rails, by the imbalanced human interventions. Indeed, what we need is
ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very
notion of nature we rely on.

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is a vision of what would have happened
if humanity (and ONLY humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth -
natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually regaining human artefacts.
We, humans, are reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence.
(As Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to
be reduced to a, the gaze which observes the world in the condition of the
subject's non-existence - like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one's own
conception, the parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one's own burial, like
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. A jealous child likes to indulge in the fantasy of
imagining how his parents would react to his own death, putting at stake his own
absence.) "The world without us" is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the
Earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans
spoiled it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example comes
from the catastrophe of Chernobyl: the exuberant nature taking over the
disintegrating debris of the nearby city Pripyat which was abandoned, left the
way it was.

Against this background, one should also render problematic Badiou's distinction
between man qua mortal "human animal" and the "inhuman" subject as the
agent of a Truth-procedure: man is pursuing happiness and pleasures, worrying
about death, etc., it is an animal endowed with higher instruments to reach its
goals, while only as a subject faithful to a Truth-Event does it truly raise above
animality. The problem with this dualism is that it ignores Freud's basic lesson:
there is no "human animal," a human being is from its birth (and even before)
torn out of the animal constraints, its instincts are "denaturalized," caught in the
circularity of the (death-)drive, functioning "beyond the pleasure principle,"
marked by the stigma of what Eric Santner called "undeadness" or the excess of
life. This is why there is no place for "death drive" in Badiou's edifice, for the
"distortion" of human animality which precedes fidelity to an Event. It is not only
the "miracle" of a traumatic encounter with an Event which derails a human
subject from its animality: its libido is already in itself derailed. One should thus
turn around the usual criticism of Badiou: what is problematic is not the quasi-
religious miracle of the Event, but the very "natural" order disturbed by the
Event.

So, back to the prospect of ecological catastrophe, why do we not act? It is too
short to attribute our disbelief in the catastrophe to the impregnation of our mind
by scientific ideology, which leads us to dismiss the sane concerns of our common
reason, i.e., the gut sense which tells us that something is fundamentally wrong
with the scientific-technological attitude. The problem is much deeper, it resides
in the unreliability of our common sense itself which, habituated as it is to our
ordinary life-world, finds it difficult really to accept that the flow of everyday
reality can be perturbed. Our attitude here is that of the fetishist split: "I know
very well (that the global warming is a threat to the entire humanity), but
nonetheless... (I cannot really believe it). It is enough to look at my environs to
which my mind is wired: the green grass and trees, the whistle of the wind, the
rising of the sun... can one really imagine that all this will be disturbed? You talk
about the ozone hole - but no matter how much I look into the sky, I don't see it -
all I see is the same sky, blue or grey!"

And therein resides the horror of the Chernobyl accident: when one visits the site,
with the exception of the sarcophagus, things look exactly the same as before, life
seems to have deserted the site, leaving everything the way it is, and nonetheless
we are aware that something is terribly wrong. The change is not at the level of
the visible reality itself, it is a more fundamental one, it affects the very texture of
reality. No wonder there are some lone farmers around the Chernobyl site who
continued to lead their lives as before - they simply ignore all the
incomprehensible talk about radiations. Do these farmers not behave like the
madman in the old joke circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of
the Other's knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken
to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him
that he is not a grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is
not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately
comes back very trembling of scare - there is a chicken outside the door and that
he is afraid that it would eat him. "Dear fellow," says his doctor, "you know very
well that you are not a grain of seed but a man". "Of course I know that," replies
the patient, "but does the chicken know it?" The chicken from the joke stands for
the big Other which doesn't know. In the last years of Tito's life, he was effectively
such a chicken: some archives and memoirs show that, already in the mid-1970s,
the leading figures around Tito were aware that Yugoslavia's economic situation
was catastrophic; however, since Tito was nearing his death, they made a
collective decision to postpone the outbreak of a crisis till his death - the price
was the fast accumulation of external debt in the last years of Tito's life. When, in
1980, Tito finally dies, the economic crisis did strike with revenge, leading to a 40
per cent fall of standard of living, to ethnic tensions and, finally, civil and ethnic
war that destroyed the country - the moment to confront the crisis adequately
was missed. One can thus say that what put the last nail in the coffin of
Yugoslavia was the very attempt by its leading circle to protect the ignorance of
the Leader, to keep his gaze happy.

Is this not what, ultimately, culture is? One of the elementary rules of culture is to
know when (and how) to pretend NOT to know (or notice), to go on and act as if
something which happened did not happen. When a person near me accidentally
produces an unpleasant vulgar noise, the proper thing to do is to ignore it, not to
comfort him: "I know it was an accident, don't worry, it doesn't really matter!"
We should thus understand in the right way the joke about the chicken: a
madman's question is a quite pertinent question in many everyday situations.
When parents with a young child have affairs, fight and shout at each other, they
as a rule (if they retain a minimum of decency) try to prevent the child to notice
it, well aware that the child's knowledge would have had a devastating effect on
him - so what they try to maintain is precisely a situation of "We know that we
cheat and fight and shout, but the child/chicken doesn't know it." (Of course, in
many cases, the child knows it very well, but merely feigns not to notice anything
wrong, aware that in this way his parents' life is a little bit easier.) Or, at a less
vulgar level, recall a parent in a difficult predicament (dying of cancer, in
financial difficulties), but trying to keep this secret from his nearest and dearest...

And this is also our problem with ecology: we know it, but the chicken doesn't
know it... The problem is thus that we can rely neither on scientific mind nor on
our common sense - they both mutually reinforce each other's blindness. The
scientific mind advocates a cold objective appraisal of dangers and risks involved
where no such appraisal is effectively possible, while common sense finds it hard
to accept that a catastrophe can really occur. The difficult ethical task is thus to
"un-learn" the most basic coordinates of our immersion into our life-world: what
usually served as the recourse to Wisdom (the basic trust in the background-
coordinates of our world) is now THE source of danger.

One can learn even more from the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge - the
expression, of course, refers to the well-known accident in March 2003, when
Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the
relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns.
These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to
say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown
unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to
add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns," things we don't know
that we know - which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge
which doesn't know itself," as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main
dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the "unknown unknowns," the threats
from Saddam about which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we
should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the "unknown
knowns," the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of
adhering to ourselves. In the case of ecology, these disavowed beliefs and
suppositions are the ones which prevent us from really believing in the possibility
of the catastrophe, and they combine with the "unknown unknowns." The
situation is like that of the blind spot in our visual field: we do not see the gap, the
picture appears continuous.

If the Freudian name for the "unknown known" is the Unconscious, the Freudian
name for the "unknown unknowns" is TRAUMA, the violent intrusion of
something radically unexpected, something the subject was absolutely not ready
for, something the subject cannot integrate in any way. In her Les nouveaux
blessés (The New Wounded), Catherine Malabou proposed a critical
reformulation of psychoanalysis along these lines. Her starting point is the
delicate echoing between internal and external Real in psychoanalysis: for Freud
and Lacan, external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, due their
properly traumatic impact to the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic "psychic
reality." Malabou rereads along these lines Lacan's reading of the Freudian
dream of "Father, can't you see I'm burning?" The contingent external encounter
of the real (the candle collapses and inflames the cloth covering the dead child,
and the smell of the smoke disturbs the father on a night-watch) triggers the true
Real, the unbearable fantasy-apparition of the dead child reproaching his father.
In this way, for Freud (and Lacan), every external trauma is "sublated,"
internalized, owing its impact to the way a pre-existing Real of the "psychic
reality" is aroused through it. Even the most violent intrusions of the external real
- say, the shocking effect on the victims of bomb-explosions in war - owe their
traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse masochism, in death-
drive, in unconscious guilt-feeling, etc. Today, however, our socio-political reality
itself imposes multiple versions of external intrusions, traumas, which are just
that, meaningless brutal interruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of
subject's identity. First, there is the brutal external physical violence: terror
attacks like 98/11, the US "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq, street violence,
rapes, etc., but also natural catastrophes, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.; then, there
is the "irrational" (meaningless) destruction of the material base of our inner
reality (brain-tumors, Alzheimer's disease, organic cerebral lesions, etc., which
can utterly change, destroy even, the victim's personality; finally, there are the
destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence (social exclusion, etc.). (Note how
this triad echoes the triad of commons: the commons of external nature, of inner
nature, of symbolic substance.) Basically, Malabou's reproach is that Freud
himself succumbs here to the temptation of meaning: he is not ready to accept
the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks - they destroy the psyche of the
victim (or, at least, wound it in an unredeemable way) without resonating in any
inner traumatic truth. It would be obviously obscene to link, say, the psychic
devastation of a "Muslim" in a Nazi camp to his masochism, death-drive, or guilt
feeling: a Muslim (or a victim of multiple rape, of brutal torture...) is not
devastated by unconscious anxieties, but directly by a "meaningless" external
shock which can in no way be hermeneutically appropriated/integrated.

For Freud, if external violence gets too strong, we simply exit the psychic domain
proper: the choice is "either the shock is re-integrated into a pre-existing libidinal
frame, or it destroys psyche and nothing is left." What he cannot envisage is that
the victim as if were survives its own death: all different forms of traumatic
encounters, independently of their specific nature (social, natural, biological,
symbol...) lead to the same result - a new subject emerges which survives its own
death, the death (erasure) of its symbolic identity. There is no continuity between
this new "post-traumatic" subject (suffering Alzheimer's or other cerebral lesions,
etc.): after the shock, literally a new subject emerges. Its features are well-known
from numerous descriptions: lack of emotional engagement, profound
indifference and detachment - it is a subject who is no longer "in-the-world" in
the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death
as a form of life - his life is death-drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic
engagement; and this holds for henchmen no less than for his victims. If the
XXth century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the
worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochist) vicissitudes of the libido, will
the XXIst century be the century of such post-traumatic disengaged subjects
whose first emblematic figure, that of the Muslim in concentration camps, is not
multiplying in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural
catastrophes, of family violence...? The feature that runs through all these figures
is that the cause of the catastrophe remains libidinally meaningless, resisting any
interpretation.

The constellation is properly frustrating: although we (individual or collective

agents) know that it all depends on us, we cannot ever predict the consequences
of our acts - we are not impotent, but, quite on the contrary, omnipotent, without
being able to determine the scope of our powers. The gap between causes and
effects is irreducible, and there is no "big Other" to guarantee the harmony
between the levels, to guarantee that the overall outcome of our interactions will
be satisfactory. The problem is that, although our (sometimes even individual)
acts can have catastrophic (ecological, etc.) consequences, the big Other prevents
us from believing in it, from assuming this knowledge and responsibility:
"Contrary to what the promoters of the principle of precaution think, the cause of
our non-action is not the scientific uncertainty. We know it, but we cannot make
ourselves believe in what we know." This situation confronts us with the deadlock
of the contemporary "society of choice" at its most radical. In the standard
situation of the forced choice (a situation in which I am free to choose on
condition that I make the right choice, so that the only thing left for me to do is
the empty gesture of pretending to accomplish freely what is in any case imposed
on me). Here, on the contrary, the choice really is free and is, for this very reason,
experienced as even more frustrating: we find ourselves constantly in the position
of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but
without a proper foundation in knowledge - as John Gray put it:

we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New

technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved.
At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to
live as if we were free.

It is thus not enough to vary the standard motif of the Marxist critique: "although
we allegedly live in a society of choices, the choices effectively left to us are trivial,
and their proliferation masks the absence of true choices, choices that would
affect the basic features of our lives..." While this is true, the problem is rather
that we are forced to choose without having at our disposal the knowledge that
would enable a qualified choice.

The lesson is thus the old Lacanian one: there is no big Other. The first to get it
was Job - after Job is hit by calamities, his theological friends come, offering
interpretations which render these calamities meaningful, and the greatness of
Job is not so much to protest his innocence as to insist on the meaninglessness of
his calamities (when God appears afterwards, he gives right to Job against the
theological defenders of faith). The function of the three theological friends is to
obfuscate the impact of the trauma with a symbolic semblance.

This need to discover a meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or

actual catastrophes, from AIDS and ecological disasters to holocaust: they have
no "deeper meaning." The legacy of Job prohibits us such a gesture of taking a
refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret Master who knows
the meaning of what appears to us as meaningless catastrophe, the God who sees
the entire picture in which what we perceive as a stain contributes to global
harmony. When confronted with an event like the holocaust or the death of
millions in Congo in the last years, is it not obscene to claim that these stains
have a deeper meaning in that they contribute to the harmony of the Whole? Is
there a Whole which can teleologically justify an event like the holocaust? Christ's
death on the cross thus means that one should drop without restraint the notion
of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our
acts, the guarantee of historical teleology - Christ's death on the cross is the death
of this God, it repeats Job's stance, it refuses any "deeper meaning" that
obfuscates the brutal real of historical catastrophes.

And the lesson of ecology is that we should go to the end here and accept the non-
existence of the ultimate big Other, nature itself with its pattern of regular
rhythms, the ultimate reference of order and stability.

However, this lack of the big Other does not entail that we are irrevocably caught
in the misery of our finitude, deprived of any redemptive moments. In his The
Cattle Truck, Jorge Semprun reports how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload
of Polish Jews at Buchenwald; they were stacked into the freight train almost 200
to a car, traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the
war. On arrival all in the carriage had frozen to death except for 15 children, kept
warm by the others in the centre of the bundle of bodies. When the children were
emptied from the car the Nazis let their dogs loose on them. Soon only two
fleeing children were left:

The little one began to fall behind, the SS were howling behind them and then the
dogs began to howl too, the smell of blood was driving them mad, and then the
bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller...
together they covered a few more yards... till the blows of the clubs felled them
and, together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all
eternity.

One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed: while the soundtrack
renders what goes on in reality (the two children are clubbed to death), the image
of their hands clasped freezes, immobilized for eternity - while the sound renders
temporary reality, the image renders the eternal Real. It is the pure surface of
such fixed images of eternity, not any deeper Meaning, which allows for
redemptive moments in the bleak story of the Shoah. One should read this
imagined scene together with the final shot of Thelma and Louise: the frozen
image of the car with the two women "flying" above the precipice: is this the
positive utopia (triumph of the feminine subjectivity over death), or the masking
of the miserable wreck the car IS in reality at that time? The weakness of the final
shot from Thelma and Louise is that the frozen image is not accompanied by the
soundtrack depicting what "really" went on (the car crash, terrible cries of the
dying women) - strangely, this lack of reality undermines the very utopian
dimension of the frozen image. In contrast to this scene, our imagined filmed
scene from Semprun would fully assert the Platonic duality of temporal empirical
reality and eternal Idea.

What this means is that, without shame, in conceiving art, we should return to
Plato. Plato's reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown
out of the city - a rather sensible advice, judging from my post-Yugoslav
experience, where ethnic cleansing was prepared by poets' dangerous dreams
(the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic being only one among them). If the
West has the industrial-military complex, we in the ex-Yugoslavia had a poetic-
military complex: the post-Yugoslav war was triggered by the explosive mixture
of the poetic and the military component. So, from a Platonic standpoint, what
does a poem about the holocaust do? It provides its "description without place":
in renders the Idea of holocaust.

Recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh:
when you see in front of you a voluptuous feminine body, imagine how it will look
in a couple of decades - the dried skin, sagging breasts... (Or, even better, imagine
what lurks now already beneath the skin: raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-
digested food and excrements...) Far from enacting a return to the Real destined
to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the escape from
the Real, the Real which announces itself in the seductive appearance of the
naked body. That is to say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of
the sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance
with is the Real, and the decaying body which is reality - we take recourse to the
decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the Real which
threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance.

• CENSORSHIP TODAY... part 2

Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird
experience: when, in an article, he once used the word "capitalism," the editor
asked him if the use of this term is really necessary - could he not replace it by a
synonymous one, like "economy"? What better proof of the total triumph of
capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3
decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to
capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of
politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists - even of social scientists... But
what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years?
Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how
this movement also succumbs to "the temptation to transform a critique of
capitalism itself (centered on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization,
and profit extraction) into a critique of 'imperialism'." In this way, when one talks
about "globalization and its agents," the enemy is externalized (usually in the
form of vulgar anti-Americanism). From this perspective, where the main task
today is to fight "the American empire," any ally is good if it is anti-American,
and so the unbridled Chinese "Communist" capitalism, violent Islamic anti-
modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus may appear as
progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms... What we have here is thus another
version of the ill-famed notion of "alternate modernity": instead of the critique of
capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the
imperialist "excess," with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms
within another, more "progressive," frame.

So what is the problem here? It is easy to make fun of Fukuyama's notion of the
End of History, but the majority today is "Fukuyamaian": liberal-democratic
capitalism is accepted as the finally-found formula of the best possible society, all
one can do is to render it more just, tolerant, etc. The only true question today is:
do we endorse this "naturalization" of capitalism, or does today's global
capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which will prevent its indefinite
reproduction? There are three (or, rather, four) such antagonisms:

1. Ecology:
In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute
ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of
capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved
fundamentally precludes a market solution - why? Capitalism only works in
precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the objectivized/"reified"
mechanism of the market's "invisible hand" which, as a kind of Cunning of
Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the
common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change. Till now,
historical Substance played its role as the medium and foundation of all
subjective interventions: whatever social and political subjects did, it was
mediated and ultimately dominated, overdetermined, by the historical Substance.
What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective
intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically
disturbing its run by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful
biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No
longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no
longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human
history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even
interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we
can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived "not only as
Substance, but also as Subject." This is why, when confronted with singular
catastrophic prospects (say, a political group which intends to attack its enemy
with nuclear or biological weapons), we no longer can rely on the standard logic
of the "Cunning of Reason" which, precisely, presupposes the primacy of the
historical Substance over acting subjects: we no longer can adopt the stance of
"let the enemy who threatens us deploy its potentials and thereby self-destruct
himself" - the price for letting the historical Reason do its work is too high since,
in the meantime, we may all perish together with the enemy. Recall a frightening
detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear
war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet
B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27 1962. The destroyer dropped depth
charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a
nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the
conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers
agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship.
Two of them said yes and the other said no. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the
world," was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident.

2. Private Property:
The inappropriateness of private property for the so-called "intellectual
property." The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is thus:
how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of
profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of
music)? And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same
direction? Phenomena are emerging here which bring the notion of property to
weird paradoxes: in India, local communities can suddenly discover that medical
practices and materials they are using for centuries are now owned by American
companies, so they should be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies
patentizing genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic
components, are already copyrighted, owned by others...

The crucial date in the history of cyberspace is February 3 1976, the day when Bill
Gates published his (in)famous "Open Letter to Hobbysts," the assertion of
private property in the software domain: "As the majority of hobbysts must be
aware, most of you steal your software. /.../ Most directly, the thing you do is
theft." Bill Gates has built his entire empire and reputation on his extreme views
about knowledge being treated as if it were tangible property. This was a decisive
signal which triggered the battle for the "enclosure" of the common domain of
software.

3. New Techno-Scientific Developments:

The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially
in bio-genetics) - Fukuyama himself was compelled to admit that the biogenetic
interventions into human nature are the most serious threat to his vision of the
End of History.
With the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which it
is simply nature itself which melts into air: the main consequence of the scientific
breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its
construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to
manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus "desubstantialized," deprived
of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called "earth." This compels us to
give a new twist to Freud's title Unbehagen in der Kultur - discontent,
uneasiness, in culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from
culture to nature itself: nature is no longer "natural," the reliable "dense"
background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any
point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.

4. New Forms of Apartheid:

Last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. On September
11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th,
1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9th announced the "happy '90s," the Francis
Fukuyama dream of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy had, in
principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global, liberal world
community lurks just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-
Hollywood happy ending are merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of
resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over). In contrast
to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the forthcoming era in which new walls are
emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European
Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.

So what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the
new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially
in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American
capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia,
is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. It is effectively surprising
how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the
proletarian revolutionary subject: they are "free" in the double meaning of the
word even more than the classic proletariat ("freed" from all substantial ties;
dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a
large collective, forcibly thrown together, "thrown" into a situation where they
have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any
support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.

While today's society is often characterized as the society of total control, slums
are the territories within a state boundaries from which the state (partially, at
least) withdrew its control, territories which function as white spots, blanks, in
the official map of a state territory. Although they are de facto included into a
state by the links of black economy, organized crime, religious groups, etc., the
state control is nonetheless suspended there, they are domains outside the rule of
law. In the map of Berlin from the times of the now defunct GDR, the are of West
Berlin was left blank, a weird hole in the detailed structure of the big city; when
Christa Wolf, the well-known East German half-dissident writer, took her small
daughter to the East Berlin's high TV tower, from which one had a nice view over
the prohibited West Berlin, the small girl shouted gladly: "Look, mother, it is not
white over there, there are houses with people like here!" - as if discovering a
prohibited slum Zone...

This is why the "de-structured" masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated
in a non-proletarized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons
of the politics to come. If the principal task of the emancipatory politics of the
XIXth century was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by way of
politicizing the working class, and if the task of the XXth century was to
politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal
task of the XXIth century is to politicize - organize and discipline - the "de-
structured masses" of slum-dwellers. Hugo Chavez's biggest achievement is the
politicization (inclusion into the political life, social mobilization) of slum
dwellers; in other countries, they mostly persist in apolitical inertia. It was this
political mobilization of the slum dwellers which saved him against the US-
sponsored coup: to the surprise of everyone, Chavez included, slum dwellers
massively descended to the affluent city center, tipping the balance of power to
his advantage.

How do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a qualitative

difference between the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included and
the other three antagonisms, which designate three domains of what Hardt and
Negri call "commons," the shared substance of our social being whose
privatization is a violent act which should also be resisted with violent means, if
necessary: the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of
"cognitive" capital, primarily language, our means of communication and
education (if Bill Gates were to be allowed monopoly, we would have reached the
absurd situation in which a private individual would have literally owned the
software texture our basic network of communication), but also the shared
infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc.; the commons of external
nature threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural
habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of
humanity). What all these struggles share is the awareness of the destructive
potentials, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, if the capitalist logic of
enclosing these commons is allowed a free run. It is this reference to "commons"
which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of Communism - or, to quote Alain
Badiou:

The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we
have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all
in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this
Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a
philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking
about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some
ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However,
to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we
should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and
State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation,
is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.

So where do we stand today with regard to communism? The first step is to admit
that the solution is not to limit the market and private property by direct
interventions of the State and state ownership. The domain of State itself is also
in its own way "private": private in the precise Kantian sense of the "private use
of Reason" in State administrative and ideological apparatuses:

The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about
enlightenment among men. The private use of one's reason, on the other hand,
may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress
of enlightenment. By public use of one's reason I understand the use which a
person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that
which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to
him.

What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there is a privileged
social group which, on account of its lacking a determinate place in the "private"
order of social hierarchy, directly stands for universality: it is only the reference
to those Excluded, to those who dwell in the blanks of the State space, that
enables true universality. There is nothing more "private" than a State
community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep the
Excluded at a proper distance. In other words, in the series of the four
antagonisms, the one between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one,
the point of reference for the others; without it, all others lose their subversive
edge: ecology turns into a "problem of sustainable development," intellectual
property into a "complex legal challenge," biogenetics into an "ethical" issue. One
can sincerely fight for ecology, defend a broader notion of intellectual property,
oppose the copyrighting of genes, while not questioning the antagonism between
the Included and the Excluded - even more, one can even formulate some of these
struggles in the terms of the Included threatened by the polluting Excluded. In
this way, we get no true universality, only "private" concerns in the Kantian sense
of the term. Corporations like Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor
among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is
that they sell products that contain the claim of being politically progressive acts
in and of themselves. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair-
market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that provide
good benefits for their customers (according to the corporation's own standards),
etc. Political action and consumption become fully merged. In short, without the
antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves
in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting against
poverty and diseases, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist
mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.
When politics is reduced to the "private" domain, it takes the form of the politics
of FEAR - fear of losing one's particular identity, of being overwhelmed. Today's
predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics - an awesome example
of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: "post-political" is a
politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus
on expert management and administration, while "bio-politics" designates the
regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primal goal. It is clear
how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes,
what remains is only the efficient administration of life... almost only that. That is
to say, with the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and
coordination of interests as the zero-level of politics, the only way to introduce
passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear, a basic
constituent of today's subjectivity.

No wonder, then, that the by far predominant version of ecology is the ecology of
fear, fear of a catastrophe - human-made or natural - that may deeply perturb,
destroy even, the human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan measures that
would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has all the chances of developing
into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the
masses replacing the declining religion: it takes over the old religion's
fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can
impose limits. The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude: we
are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded
in a bio-sphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of
natural resources, we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our
Earth with respect, as something ultimately Sacred, something that should not be
unveiled totally, that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a power we
should trust, not dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery over our bio-
sphere, it is unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it
will run amok, swiping us away in the process. This is why, although ecologists
are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying
this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of
progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of
triggering a catastrophe.

It is this distrust which makes ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic
ideology, since it echoes the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of large
collective acts. This distrust unites religious leaders and environmentalists - for
both, there is something of a transgression, of entering a prohibited domain, in
this idea of creating a new form of life from scratch, from the zero-point. And this
brings us back to the notion of ecology as the new opium for the masses; the
underlying message is again a deeply conservative one - any change can only be
the change for the worst - here is a nice quote from the TIME magazine on this
topic:

Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic life is the intuition that
nature (or God) created the best of possible worlds. Charles Darwin believed that
the myriad designs of nature's creations are perfectly honed to do whatever they
are meant to do - be it animals that see, hear, sing, swim or fly, or plants that feed
on the sun's rays, exuding bright floral colours to attract pollinators.

This reference to Darwin is deeply misleading: the ultimate lesson of Darwinism

is the exact opposite, namely that nature tinkers and improvises, with great losses
and catastrophes accompanying every limited success - is the fact that 90 percent
of the human genome is 'junk DNA' with no clear function not the ultimate proof
of it? Consequently, the first lesson to be drawn is the one repeatedly made by
Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency of our existence. There is no Evolution:
catastrophes, broken equilibriums, are part of natural history; at numerous
points in the past, life could have turned into an entirely different direction. The
main source of our energy (oil) is the result of a past catastrophe of unimaginable
dimensions. One should thus learn to accept the utter groundlessness of our
existence: there is no firm foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely
count. "Nature doesn't exist": "nature" qua the domain of balanced reproduction,
of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally
throwing off the rails its circular motion, is man's fantasy; nature is already in
itself "second nature," its balance is always secondary, an attempt to negotiate a
"habit" that would restore some order after catastrophic interruptions.

With regard to this inherent instability of nature, the most consequent was the
proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: since nature is changing
constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of humanity
impossible in a couple of centuries, the collective goal of humanity should be not
to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth ecology even more
forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth's change, so that its ecology will remain
basically the same, thus enabling humanity's survival. This extreme proposal
renders visible the truth of ecology.

The Liberal Utopia •

........ section I: Against the Politics of Jouissance
.........Slavoj Zizek

AGAINST THE POLITICS OF JOUISSANCE

Yannis Stavrakakis' The Lacanian Left, 1 an attempt to supplement Laclau's and

Mouffe's project of "radical democracy" with Lacanian theory, develops a harsh
critique of my work - no wonder that, in a blurb on the cover, Dany Nobus wrote:
"Zizek is dead!" The basic reproach to my work is that (not me personally, but)
my writing displays a perverse structure: I practice the fetishist disavowal,
clinging to a religious notion of act as the miraculous positivity of pure Real,
ignoring negativity and the symbolic contextualization of every act... i.e., ignoring
all the things that I know very well:

I have no intention to teach Zizek Lacanian commonplaces. I take it for granted

that he knows them very well, better than I do. But this is exactly why it causes
me great concern when Zizek himself seems to forget or abandon them. It is not
by coincidence that I have used the psychoanalytic term 'disavowal' to describe
this attitude. As is well known, disavowal, as the fundamental operation of
perversion, involves the simultaneous recognition and denial of something - in
the clinic, of castration. In fact, Zizek's response seems to come under this
description. (130)

The sleigh of hand is here truly breathtaking: every counter-argument of mine is

in advance devalued. I am accused of claiming A; I quote proofs that I am NOT
claiming A, and the answer is that I merely disavow my sticking to A, that my
reasoning is: "I know very well that A does not hold, but, nonetheless, I continue
to act as if A holds..." So when Stavrakakis writes "Why does /Zizek/ bypass the
whole Lacanian theorization of another (feminine) jouissance?"(144), there is no
sense in defending myself by referring to dozens of pages in which I deal precisely
with jouissance feminine - such defence would have been in advance devalued as
a perverse "recital of absurdity"(133)...

This brings us to the political wager of Stavrakakis' book: to "combine an ethical

attitude that reinvigorates modern democracy with a real passion for
transformation, capable of stimulating the body politic without reoccupying the
obsolete utopianism of the traditional Left"(16). Such a combination has to enact
a "delicate balancing act"(18), avoiding both extremes of passionless egalitarian
democracy a la Habermas and of passionate totalitarian engagements. The
balance is the one between lack and excess: the lack is articulated in the discourse
theory, while the excess points towards enjoyment as a political factor. For
example, in the recent debates about European identity, "the neglect of the
affective side of identification leads to a displacement of cathectic energy which is
now invested in anti-European political and ideological discourses"(222).

Modern society is defined by the lack of ultimate transcendent guarantee, or, in

libidinal terms, of total jouissance. There are three main ways to cope with this
negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic. The first one
(totalitarianisms, fundamentalisms) tries to reoccupy the ground of absolute
jouissance by attaining a utopian society of harmonious society which eliminates
negativity. The second, democratic, one enacts a political equivalent of
"traversing the fantasy": it institutionalizes the lack itself by creating the space for
political antagonisms. The third one, consumerist post-democracy, tries to
neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration:
individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert
social administration. Today, when democracy is gradually evolving into
consumerist post-democracy, one should insist that democratic potentials are not
exhausted - "democracy as an unfinished project" could have been Stavrakakis'
motto here. The key to the resuscitation of this democratic potential is to re-
mobilize enjoyment: "What is needed, in other words, is an enjoyable democratic
ethics of the political."(269) The key question here is, of course, WHAT KIND OF
enjoyment:

Libidinal investment and the mobilization of jouissance are the necessary

prerequisite for any sustainable identification (from nationalism to
consumerism). This also applies to the radical democratic ethics of the political.
But the type of investment involved has still to be decided. (282)

Stavrakakis' solution is: neither the phallic enjoyment of Power nor the utopia of
the incestuous full enjoyment, but a non-phallic (non-all) partial enjoyment. In
the last pages of his book, trying to demonstrate how "democratic subjectivity is
capable of inspiring high passions"(278), Stavrakakis refers to the Lacanian other
jouissance, "a jouissance beyond accumulation, domination and fantasy, an
enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole"(279). How do we achieve this jouissance?
By way of accomplishing "the sacrifice of the fantasmatic objet petit a" which can
only "make this other jouissance attainable" (279):

The central task in psychoanalysis - and politics - is to detach the objet petit a
from the signifier of the lack in the Other /.../, to detach (anti-democratic and
post-democratic) fantasy from the democratic institutionalization of lack, making
possible the access to a partial enjoyment beyond fantasy. /.../ Only thus shall we
be able to really enjoy our partial enjoyment, without subordinating it to the
cataclysmic desire of fantasy. Beyond its dialectics of disavowal, this is the
concrete challenge the Lacanian Left addresses to us. (280-282)

The underlying idea is breathtakingly simplistic: in total contradiction to Lacan,

Stavrakakis reduces objet petit a to its role in fantasy - objet a is that excessive X
which magically transforms the partial objects which occupy the place of the lack
in the Other into the utopian promise of the impossible fullness of jouissance.
What Stavrakakis proposes is thus the vision of a society in which desire
functions without objet a, without the destabilizing excess which transforms it
into a "cataclysmic desire of fantasy" - as Stavrakakis puts it in a symptomatically
tautological way, we should learn to "really enjoy our partial enjoyment."

For Lacan, on the contrary, objet a is a(nother) name for the Freudian "partial
object," which is why it cannot be reduced to its role in fantasy which sustains
desire; it is for this reason that, as Lacan emphasizes, one should distinguish its
role in desire and in drive. Following Jacques-Alain Miller, a distinction has to be
introduced here between two types of lack, the lack proper and hole: lack is
spatial, designating a void WITHIN a space, while hole is more radical, it
designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the
"black hole" in physics). 2 Therein resides the difference between desire and
drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a
hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of drive
obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between
the two points is not a straight line, but a curve: drive "knows" that the shortest
way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. (One should bear in
mind here Lacan's well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive:
while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the
endless continuation of this circulation as such.)

Miller also proposed a Benjaminian distinction between "constituted anxiety"

and "constituent anxiety," which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to
drive: while the first one designates the standard notion of the terrifying and
fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal circle which threatens to
draws us in, the second one stands for the "pure" confrontation with objet petit a
as constituted in its very loss. 3 Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the
difference which separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the
status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the
object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we only get the constituent
anxiety when the subject "traverses the fantasy" and confronts the void, the gap,
filled up by the fantasmatic object. However, clear and convincing as it is, this
Miller's formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet a: when he
defines objet a as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the
very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to
voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains
within the horizon of desire - the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by
its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet a is also the
object of drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although, in both
cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet a as the
object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides
with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of objet a as the object
of drive, the "object" IS DIRECTLY THE LOSS ITSELF - in the shift from desire
to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the
weird movement called "drive" is not driven by the "impossible" quest for the lost
object; it is a push to directly enact the "loss" - the gap, cut, distance - itself. There
is thus a DOUBLE distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet a in its
fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic
domain itself, between the lost object-cause of desire and the object-loss of drive.

The weird thing is that Stavrakakis' idea of sustaining desire without objet a
contradicts not only Lacan, but also Laclau, his notion of hegemony: Laclau is on
the right track when he emphasizes the necessary role of objet a in rendering an
ideological edifice operative. In hegemony, a particular empirical object is
"elevated to the dignity of the Thing," it start to function as the stand-in for, the
embodiment of, the impossible fullness of Society. Referring to Joan Copjec,
Laclau compares hegemony to the "breast-value" attached to partial objects
which stand-in for the incestuous maternal Thing (breast). Laclau should
effectively be criticized here for confounding desire (sustained by fantasy) which
drive (one of whose definitions is also "that what remains of desire after its
subject traverses the fantasy"): for him, we are condemned to searching for the
impossible Fullness. Drive - in which we directly enjoy lack itself - simply does
not enter his horizon. However, this in no way entails that, in drive, we "really
enjoy our partial enjoyment," without the disturbing excess: for Lacan, lack and
excess are strictly correlative, the two sides of the same coin. Precisely insofar as
it circulates around a hole, drive is the name of the excess that pertains to human
being, it is the "too-much-ness" of striving which insists beyond life and death
(this is why Lacan sometimes even directly identifies drive with objet a as
surplus-jouissance.)

Because he ignores this excess of drive, Stavrakakis also operates with a

simplified notion of "traversing the fantasy" - as if fantasy is a kind of illusory
screen blurring our relation to partial objects. This notion may seem to fit
perfectly the commonsense idea of what psychoanalysis should do: of course it
should liberate us from the hold of idiosyncratic fantasies and enable us to
confront reality the way it effectively is... this, precisely, is what Lacan does NOT
have in mind - what he aims at is almost the exact opposite. In our daily
existence, we are immersed into "reality" (structured-supported by the fantasy),
and this immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that
another repressed level of our psyche resists this immersion. To "traverse the
fantasy" therefore paradoxically means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy -
namely with the fantasy which structures the excess resisting our immersion into
daily reality, or, to quote a succinct formulation by Richard Boothby:

Traversing the fantasy' thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons
its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic
'reality,' but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the
symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in
the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in
the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core
of the fantasy that transcends imaging. 4

Boothby is right to emphasize the Janus-like structure of a fantasy: a fantasy is

simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which
enables us to endure the abyss of the Other's desire) AND shattering, disturbing,
inassimilable into our reality. The ideologico-political dimension of this notion of
"traversing the fantasy" was rendered clear by the unique role the rock group Top
lista nadrealista (The Top List of the Surrealists) played during the Bosnian war
in the besieged Sarajevo: their ironic performances which, in the midst of the war
and hunger, satiricized the predicament of the Sarajevo population, acquired a
cult status not only in the counterculture, but also among the citizens of Sarajevo
in general (the group's weekly TV show went on throughout the war and was
extremely popular). Instead of bemoaning the tragic fate of the Bosnians, they
daringly mobilized all the clichés about the "stupid Bosnians" which were a
commonplace in Yugoslavia, fully identifying with them - the point thus made
was that the path of true solidarity leads through direct confrontation with the
obscene racist fantasies which circulated in the symbolic space of Bosnia, through
the playful identification with them, not through the denial of this obscenities on
behalf of "what people really are."
No wonder, then, that, when Stavrakakis tries to provide some concrete examples
of this new politics of partial jouissance, things go really "bizarre." He starts with
Marshal Sahlins' thesis that the Paleolithic communities followed "a Zen road to
affluence": although deeply marked by divisions, exchange, sexual difference,
violence and war, they lack the "shrine of the Unattainable," of "infinite Needs,"
and thus the "desire for accumulation". In them,

enjoyment (jouissance) seems to be had without the mediation of fantasies of

accumulation, fullness and excess. /.../ they do show that another world may, in
principle, be possible insofar as a detachment of (partial) enjoyment from dreams
of completeness and fantasmatic desire is enacted. /.../ Doesn't something
similar happen in the psychoanalytic clinic? And isn't this also the challenge for
radical democratic ethics? (281)

The way the Paleolithic tribesmen avoided accumulation was to cancel the lack
itself - it is the idea of such a society without the excess of "infinite Needs" which
is properly utopian, the ultimate fantasy, the fantasy of a society before the Fall.
What then follows is a series of cases of how "political theorists and analysts,
economists, and active citizens - some of them directly inspired by Lacanian
theory - are currently trying to put this radical democratic orientation to work in
a multitude of empirical contexts."(281) For example: "A group of cooperative
workers /Byrne and Healy/ have examined tried to restructure their enjoyment
in a non-fantasmatic way"(281) - it would be certainly interesting to hear in detail
how this "restructuring" was structured! Then come Robin Blackburn's proposal
for the democratization of Pension Funds, Roberto Unger's proposal to pass from
a family to a social inheritance system, Toni Negri's proposal of a minimum
citizenship income, the projects of participatory budgeting in Brazil...(282) - what
all this has to do with jouissance feminine remains a mystery. The vague
underlying idea is that, in all these cases, we are dealing with modest pragmatic
proposals, with partial solutions which avoid the excess of radical utopian re-
foundation - definitely not enough to qualify them as cases of jouissance feminine
which is precisely Lacan's name for an absolute excess.

Stavrakakis's attempt to relate Lacanian concepts like feminine jouissance,

signifier of the lack in the Other, etc., to concrete socio-political examples is thus
thoroughly unconvincing. When he quotes Joan Copjec's precise thesis on how
suppléance "allows us to speak well of our desire not by translating jouissance
into language, but by formalizing it in a signifier that does not mean it but is,
rather, directly enjoyed"(279), he reads it as a "way to think of enjoyment and the
production of a signifier of lack in a democratic perspective"(279) - but does
Copjec's description not fit perfectly also nationalism? Is the name of our Nation
not such a suppléance? When a passionate patriot exclaims "America!", does he
thereby not produce a signifier which "does not translate jouissance into
language, but formalizes it in a signifier that does not mean it but is, rather,
directly enjoyed" - when "America!" is passionately exclaimed, it is the signifier
itself which is enjoyed?
Stavrakakis' political vision is vacuous: it is not that his call for more passion in
politics is in itself meaningless (of course today's Left needs more passion), the
problem is rather that it resembles all too much the joke quoted by Lacan about a
doctor asked by a friend for a free medical advice - reticent to render his service
without payment, the doctor examines the friend and then calmly states: "You
need a medical advice!" Paradoxically, with all his (justified) critique of Freudo-
Marxism, Stavrakakis' position can be designated as "Freudo-radicaldemocracy":
he remains within Freudo-Marxism, expecting from psychoanalysis to
supplement the theory of radical democracy in the same way Wilhelm Reich,
among others, expected psychoanalysis to supplement Marxism. In both cases,
the problem is exactly the same: we have the appropriate social theory, but what
is missing is the "subjective factor" - how are we to mobilize people so that they
will engage in passionate political struggle? Here psychoanalysis enters,
explaining what libidinal mechanisms the enemy is using (Reich tried to do this
for Fascism, Stavrakakis for consumerism and nationalism), and how can the Left
practice its own "politics of jouissance." The problem is that such an approach is
an ersatz for the proper political analysis: the lack of passion in political praxis
and theory should be explained in its own terms, i.e., in the terms of political
analysis itself. The true question is: what is there to be passionate about? Which
political choices people experience as "realistic" and feasible?

Notes:

1 Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

2007. The numbers in brackets refer to pages in this book.

2 See Jacques-Alain Miller, "Le nom-du-père, s'en passer, s'en servir," available
on http://www.lacan.com.

3 See Jacques-Alain Miller, op.cit.

4 Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, New York: Routledge 2001, p. 275-

276.

• section I: Against the Politics of Jouissance

THE MARKET MECHANISM FOR THE RACE OF DEVILS

One of the "proofs" of my practice of fetishist disavowal is the alleged "perverse

paradox" of me rejecting utopias and then nonetheless claiming that today "it is
more important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative
open"(142) - as if I did not repeatedly elaborate different meanings of utopia:
utopia as simple imaginary impossibility (the utopia of a perfected harmonious
social order without antagonisms, the consumerist utopia of today's capitalism),
and utopia in the more radical sense of enacting what, within the framework of
the existing social relations, appears as "impossible" - this second utopia is "a-
topic" only with regard to these relations. Utopia as simple imaginary
impossibility (the utopia of a perfected harmonious social order without
antagonisms, the consumerist utopia of today's capitalism), is not utopia in the
more radical sense of enacting what, within the framework of the existing social
relations, appears as "impossible" - this second utopia is "a-topic" only with
regard to these relations.

The core of a Lacanian notion of utopia is: a vision of desire functioning without
objet a and its twists and loops. It is utopian not only to think that one can reach
the unencumbered full "incestuous" jouissance; it is no less utopian to think that
one can renounce/sacrifice jouissance without this renunciation generating its
own surplus-jouissance. In this sense, Marx's "scientific Socialism" itself has a
clear utopian core. Marx perceived how capitalism unleashed the breath-taking
dynamics of self-enhancing productivity - see his fascinated descriptions of how,
in capitalism, "all things solid melt into thin air," of how capitalism is the greatest
revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity; on the other hand, he also clearly
perceived how this capitalist dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or
antagonism - the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling
productivity) is the Capital itself, i.e. the capitalist incessant development and
revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional
spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to
escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction. Marx's fundamental mistake
was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social order
(Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise
to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing
spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent
obstacle/contradiction, is again and again thwarted by socially destructive
economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard
Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the "condition of
impossibility" of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its
"condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of
capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally
delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to
be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism - if we take away the
obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates... (Therein would
reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous
overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance). - Furthermore,
utopian is not only the conservative dream of regaining some idealized Past
before the Fall; no less utopian is the liberal-pragmatic idea that one can solve
problems gradually, one by one. John Caputo recently wrote:

I would be perfectly happy if the far left politicians in the United States were able
to reform the system by providing universal health care, effectively redistributing
wealth more equitably with a revised IRS code, effectively restricting campaign
financing, enfranchising all voters, treating migrant workers humanely, and
effecting a multilateral foreign policy that would integrate American power
within the international community, etc., i.e., intervene upon capitalism by
means of serious and far-reaching reforms. /.../ If after doing all that Badiou and
Zizek complained that some Monster called Capital still stalks us, I would be
inclined to greet that Monster with a yawn. 1

The problem here is not Caputo's conclusion: if one can achieve all that within
capitalism, why not remain there. The problem is the underlying "utopian"
premise that it is possible to achieve all that within the coordinates of the present
global capitalism. What if the particular malfunctionings of capitalism
enumerated by Caputo are not only accidental disturbances but structurally
necessary? What if Caputo's dream is a dream of universality (the universal
capitalist order) without its symptoms, without its critical points in which its
"repressed truth" articulates itself?

So, after denouncing all the "usual suspects" for utopias, perhaps, the time has
come to focus on the liberal utopia itself. For liberalism, at least in its radical
form, the wish to submit people to an ethical ideal that we hold for universal is
"the crime which contains all crimes," the mother of all crimes - it amounts to the
brutal imposition of one's own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder.
Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first
condition is to get rid of "moral temptation": politics should be thoroughly
purged of moral ideals and rendered "realistic," taking people as they are,
counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations. Market is here
exemplary: human nature is egotistic, there is no way to change it - what is
needed is a mechanism that would make private vices work for common good
(the "Cunning of Reason"). In his "Perpetual Peace," Kant provided a precise
formulation of this key feature:

many say a republic would have to be a nation of angels, because men with their
selfish inclinations are not capable of a constitution of such sublime form. But
precisely with these inclinations nature comes to the aid of the general will
established on reason, which is revered even though impotent in practice. Thus it
is only a question of a good organization of the state (which does lie in man's
power), whereby the powers of each selfish inclination are so arranged in
opposition that one moderates or destroys the ruinous effect of the other. The
consequence for reason is the same as if none of them existed, and man is forced
to be a good citizen even if not a morally good person. The problem of organizing
a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils. 2

One should follow this line to its conclusion: a fully self-conscious liberal should
intentionally limit his altruistic readiness to sacrifice his own good for the others'
Good, aware that the most efficient way to act for the common good is to follow
one's private egotism. The inevitable obverse of the Cunning of Reason motto
"private vices, common good" is: "private goodness, common disaster."

Here, however, we encounter the basic paradox of liberalism. Anti-ideological

stance is inscribed into the very core of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives
itself as a "politics of lesser evil", its ambition is to bring about the Èleast evil
society possible,Ç thus preventing greater evil, since it considers any attempt to
directly impose a positive Good the ultimate source of all evil. Churchill's quip
about democracy as the worst of all political systems, the only problem being that
all others are worse, holds even more for liberalism. Such a view is sustained by a
profound pessimism about human nature: man is egotistic and envious animal, if
one builds a political system which appeals to his goodness and altruism, the
result will be the worst terror (both Jacobins and Stalinists presupposed human
virtue). However, the liberal critique of the "tyranny of the Good" comes at a
price: the more its program permeates society, the more it is turning into its
opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser of evils, once asserted as the
principle of the new global order, gradually takes over the very feature of its
enemy it wanted to fight. The global liberal order clearly asserts itself as the best
of all possible worlds; the modest rejection of utopias ends with imposing its own
market-liberal utopia which will become reality when we will properly apply
market and legal Human Rights mechanisms. Behind all this lurks the ultimate
totalitarian nightmare, the vision of a New Man who left behind the old
ideological baggage.

As every close observer of the deadlocks of Political Correctness knows, the

separation of legal Justice from moral Goodness - which should be relativized-
historicized - ends up in a stifling oppressive moralism full of resentment.
Without any "organic" social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell
approvingly referred to as "common decency" (all such standards are dismissed
as subordinating individual freedom to proto-Fascist organic social forms), the
minimalist program of laws which should just prevent individuals to encroach
upon each other (to annoy or "harass" each other) reverts into an explosion of
legal and moral rules, into an endless process of legalization/moralization called
"the fight against all forms of discrimination." If there are no shared mores that
are allowed to influence the law, only the fact of "harassing" other subjects, who -
in the absence of such mores - will decide what counts as "harassment"? There
are, in France, associations of obese people which demand that all public
campaigns against obesity and for healthy eating habits be stopped, since they
hurt the self-esteem of obese persons. And so on and so on: incest-marriage,
consensual murder and cannibalism... The problem is here the obvious
arbitrariness of the ever new rules - let us take child sexuality: one can argue that
its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one can also argue that
children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go
on here: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually
support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest
against the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies, worry when
someone condemns members of foreign cultures who live among us for doing
exactly this (say, Gypsies - preventing children from attending public schools),
claiming that this is a case of meddling with other "ways of life"... It is thus for
necessary structural reasons that this "fight against discrimination" is an endless
process endlessly postponing its final point, a society freed of all moral prejudices
which, as Jean-Claude Michea put it, "would be on this very account a society
condemned to see crimes everywhere." 3

The ideological coordinates of such a liberal multiculturalism are determined by

the two features of our "postmodern" zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist
historicism (all values and rights are historically specific, any elevation of them
into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its
most violent) and universalized "hermeneutics of suspicion" (all "high" ethical
motifs are generated and sustained by "low" motifs of resentment, envy, etc. -
say, the call to sacrifice our life for a higher Cause is either the mask for a
manipulation of those who need war for their power and wealth, or a pathological
expression of masochism - and this either/or is an inclusive vel, i.e., both terms
can be true at the same time). Fighting "patriarchal" culture is the consequence of
these premises. What Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the first
chapter of The Communist Manifesto "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the
upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations." - is still
ignored by those Leftist cultural theorists who focus their critique on patriarchal
ideology and practice. Is it not the time to start to wonder about the fact that the
critique of patriarchal "phallogocentrism" etc. was elevated into a main target at
the very historical moment - ours - when patriarchy definitely lost its hegemonic
role, when it is progressively swept away by market individualism of Rights?
What becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue his parents for
neglect and abuse, i.e., when family and parenthood itself are de iure reduced to a
temporary and dissolvable contract between independent individuals?

We encounter here again a coincidence of the opposites: in our predominant

ideology, radical historicism coincides with ruthlessly measuring all the past with
our own standards. It is easy to imagine the same person who, on the one hand,
warns against imposing on the other cultures our Eurocentric values, and, on the
other hand, advocating that classics like Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer - Huck Finn
novels should be removed from school libraries because they are racially
insensitive in their portrayal of Blacks and Native Americans...

Years ago, Habermas made a perspicuous critical observation about those who
see as the predominant feature of our era a drift towards new forms of
"totalitarian" bio-power (rise of torture, ethnic slaughters, police control, mass
extermination in concentration camps, etc.): it is not only that there is more
torture and killing in reality; in most of the cases, we simply perceive more of it
because of the media coverage and, above all, because our normative standards
are higher. Can we even imagine a World War II in which the Allies would have
been measured by today's standards? We are now learning that there were
serious tensions among the British and the US headquarters concerning the
(predominantly British) tactics of ruthlessly bombing German civilian centers
which were of no military value (Dresden, Hamburg...); even in the UK itself,
many officers, priests and intellectuals were asking the question if, by doing this,
the UK is not starting to resemble the Nazis. The whole debate was totally hushed
up and never reached the public. On the US side, recall the ignominious
dispossession and internment of the entire Japanese ethnic population: while
today, there are even Hollywood films condemning this act, nobody, including
the Left, protested in 1942. (Or, in the opposite direction, what if Colombia,
Afghanistan, and other opium producing nations were to apply to the US the
same logic as the British Empire and other Western powers did in the 1840s
against China as a pretext for the Opium War? China was attacked for refusing to
allow free import of opium, since opium was catastrophic for the health of the
thousands of ordinary Chinese: those who reject free trade are barbarians who
should be forced to accept civilization... Imagine, then, Colombia and others
issuing the same ultimatum addressed at the USA!

The same goes not only for the historical dimension, but also for different
countries today: the very fact that Abu Ghraib tortures turned into a public
scandal which put the US administration in a defensive position was in itself a
positive sign - in a really "totalitarian" regime, the case would simply be hushed
up. (In the same way, let us not forget that the very fact that the US forces did not
find weapons of mass destruction is a positive sign: a truly "totalitarian" power
would have done what cops usually do - plant drugs and then "discover" the
evidence of crime...) The widespread protests of the US public, especially
students, against the US engagement in Vietnam was a key factor in causing the
US withdrawal - however, is the very fact of such a protest in the middle of a war
not in itself a proof of high US ethical and freedom standards? Imagine a similar
movement, say, in England when it joined the World War I: Bertrand Russell was
interned for his pacifism, and for years he had to submit the manuscripts of his
books to a state censor. (He mentions this fact in the foreword to the later new
edition of his popular History of Western Philosophy, ironically admitting that
the censor's remarks where often insightful and helped him to make the
manuscript better.) When Leftists today complain about the violations of human
rights in Guantanamo, the obvious counter-question is: do we all not know that
there must be dozens of much worse places in China, Russia, in African and Arab
countries? The standard Rightist-liberal complaint that the critics of the US
"apply different standards", judging the US much harsher than other countries,
misses the point, which is that the critics tend to judge each country by its own
standards.

The "regulative idea" that underlies today's global liberal justice is not only to
bring out all past (acts which appear from today's standards as) collective crimes;
it also involves the Politically Correct utopia of "restituting" past collective
violence by payment or legal regulations (paying billions of dollars to the US
Blacks for the consequences of slavery, etc.) This is the true utopia, the idea that a
legal order can pay back for its founding crime, thereby retroactively cleansing
itself of its guilt and regain its innocence. What is at the end of this road is the
ecological utopia of humanity in its entirety repaying its debt to Nature for all its
past exploitation.

There is a problem with this liberal vision of which every good anthropologist,
psychoanalyst, or even perspicuous social critic like Francis Fukuyama, is aware:
it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is
usually referred to as "socialization" which it is simultaneously undermining,
thereby cutting off the branch on which it is sitting. On the market - and, more
generally, in the social exchange based on the market - individuals encounter
each other as free rational subjects, but such subjects are the result of a complex
previous process which concerns symbolic debt, authority, and, above all, trust
(into the big Other which regulates exchanges). In other words, the domain of
exchanges is never purely symmetrical: it is an a priori condition for each of the
participants to give something without return so that he can participate in the
game of give-and-take. For a market exchange to take place, there has to be
subject here who participate in the basic symbolic pact and display the basic trust
in the Word. Of course, market is the domain of egotist cheating and lying;
however, as Jacques Lacan taught us, in order for a lie to function, it has to
present itself and be taken as truth, i.e., the dimension of Truth has to be already
established.

Marcel Mauss, in his "Essai sur le don", 4 first described the paradoxical logic of
potlatch, of the reciprocal exchange of gifts. A true gift is by definition an act of
generosity, given without expecting something in return, while exchange is by
definition reciprocal - I give something, expecting something else in exchange.
The mystery here is: if the secret core of potlatch is reciprocity of exchange, why
is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the "mystified" form
of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of
generosity? Marshall Sahlins proposed a salient solution: the reciprocity of
exchange is thoroughly ambiguous - at its most fundamental, it is destructive of
social link, it is the logic of revenge, tit-for-tat. 5 If, upon receiving a gift, I
immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an
extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the
other's gift - recall those embarrassing moments when old people forget and gave
us next year the same present back... To cover up this aspect of exchange, to make
it benevolent and pacifying, one has to feign that the gift of each of us is free and
stands on its own. The key feature that opposes potlatch to direct market
exchange is thus the temporal dimension. In the market exchange, the two
complementary acts occur simultaneously (I pay and I get what I paid for), so
that the act of exchange does not lead to a permanent social bond, but just to a
momentary exchange between atomized individuals who, immediately
afterwards, return to their solitude. In potlatch, on the contrary, the time elapsed
between me giving a gift and the other side returning it to me creates a social link
which lasts (for a time, at least): we are all linked together with bonds of debt.
From this standpoint, money can be defined as the means which enable us to
have contacts with others without entering in proper relations with them. This
atomized society where we have contacts with others without entering in proper
relations with them, is the presupposition of liberalism.

The problem of organizing a state thus cannot be solved "even for a race of
devils," as Kant put it - that it can be is the key moment of the liberal utopia.
There is in liberalism, from its very inception, a tension between individual
freedom and objective mechanisms which regulate the behaviour of a crowd - it
was already Benjamin Constant who formulated clearly this tension: everything is
moral in individuals, but everything is physical in crowds; everybody is free as
individual, but a cog in a machine in a crowd. Nowhere is the legacy of religion
clearer: this, exactly, is the paradox of Predestination, of the unfathomable
mechanism of Grace embodied, among others, in a market success. The
mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of
individuals as well as of their merits - to quote Kant again:

The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature
(natura daedala rerum). In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to
produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their
discord.

This is ideology at its purest. One can claim that the notion of ideology was
posited "for itself" only in the liberal universe, with its founding distinction
between ordinary people immersed in their universe of Meaning, of (what
appears from the properly modern perspective) the confusion between facts and
values, and the cold rational realistic observers who are able to perceive the world
the way it is, without moralistic prejudices, as a mechanism regulated by laws (of
passions) like any other natural mechanism. It is only in this modern universe
that society appears as an object of a possible experiment, as a chaotic field on
which one can (and should) apply a value-free Theory or Science given in advance
(a political "geometry of passions," economy, racist science). Only this modern
position of a value-free scientist approaching society in the same way as a natural
scientist approaches nature, is ideology proper, not the spontaneous attitude of
the meaningful experience of life dismissed by the scientist as a set of
superstitious prejudices - it is ideology because it imitates the form of natural
sciences without really being one. "Ideology" in a strict sense is thus always
reflexive, redoubled in itself: it is a name for neutral knowledge which opposes
itself to common "ideology." (Even in Stalinist Marxism, which - in total
opposition to Marx - uses the term "ideology" in a positive sense, ideology is
opposed to science: first, Marxists analyse society in a neutral scientific way;
then, in order to mobilize the masses, they translate their insights into "ideology."
All one has to add here is that this "Marxist science" opposed to ideology is
ideology at its purest.) There is thus a duality inscribed into the very notion of
ideology: (1) spontaneous self-apprehension of individuals with all their
prejudices; (2) neutral, "value-free" knowledge to be applied onto society to
engineer its development - this latter is ideology because it presupposes that
ideas can rule the world: one can master society by way of applying to it a
theoretical project.

What is missing here is what, following Marx, one can call the "base" of freedom.
The properly Marxist notion of "base" should not be understood as a foundation
which determines and thus constrains the scope of our freedom ("we think we are
free, but we are really determined by our base"); one should rather conceive it as
the very base (frame, terrain, space) OF and FOR our freedom. "Base" is a social
substance which sustains our freedom - in this sense, the rules of civility do not
constrain our freedom, but provide the space within which our freedom can only
thrive; the legal order enforced by state apparatuses is the base for our free
market exchanges; the grammatical rules are the indispensable base for our free
thought (in order to "think freely," we have to practice these rules blindly); habits
as our "second nature" is the base for culture; the collective of believers is the
base, the only terrain, within which a Christian subject can be free; etc. This is
also how one should understand the infamous Marxist plea for "concrete, real
freedom" as opposed to the bourgeois "abstract, merely formal freedom": this
"concrete freedom" does not constrain the possible content ("you can only be
truly free if you support our, Communist, side"); the question is, rather, what
"base" should be secured for freedom. A classic example: although workers in
capitalism are formally free, there is no "base" that would allow them to actualize
their freedom as producers; although there is a "formal" freedom of speech,
organization, etc., the base of this freedom is constrained.

In a perspicuous short essay on civility, Robert Pippin 6 elaborated the enigmatic

in-between-status of this notion which designates all the acts that display the
basic subjective attitude of respect for others as free and autonomous agents,
equal to us, the benevolent attitude of making the step over the strict utilitarian
or "rational" calculation of costs and benefits in relations to others, of trusting
them, trying not to humiliate them, etc. Although, measured by the degree of its
obligatory character, civility is more than kindness or generosity (one cannot
oblige people to be generous), it is distinctly less than a moral or legal obligation.
This is what is wrong in Politically Correct attempts to moralize or even directly
penalize modes of behaviour which basically pertain to civility (like hurting
others with vulgar obscenities of speech, etc.): they potentially undermine the
precious "middle ground" of civility. In more Hegelian terms, what gets lost in
the penalization of un-civility is "ethical substance" as such: in contrast to laws
and explicit normative regulations, civility is by definition "substantial,"
something experienced as always-already given, never imposed/instituted as
such. Pippin is right to link the crucial role of civility in modern societies to the
rise of the autonomous free individual - not only in the sense that civility is a
practice of treating others as equal, free and autonomous subjects, but in a much
more refined way: the fragile web of civility is the "social substance" of free
independent individuals, it is their very mode of (inter)dependence. If this
substance disintegrates, the space of individual freedom is foreclosed.

Notes:

1 John Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, New York: Columbia
University Press 2007, p. 124-125.

2 Available online at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm.

3 See Jean-Claude Michea, L'empire du moindre mal, Paris: Climats 2007, p.

145.
4 See Marcel Mauss, "Essai sur le don," Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: PUF
1973.

5 See Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Berlin and New York: Walter De
Gruyter 1972.

6 See Robert Pippin, "The Ethical Status of Civility," in The Persistence of

Subjectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, p. 223-238.

• Ideology I: No Man is an Island... •

. . . . . . . . Slavoj Zizek

In his review of Badiou's Ethics, Terry Eagleton wrote:

There is a paradox in the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deep-seated

enough, it might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus
making it unintelligible to us. But if it is intelligible, it might be because the
transformation was not radical enough. If we can talk about the change then it is not full-
blooded enough; but if it is full-blooded enough, it threatens to fall outside our
comprehension. Change must presuppose continuity - a subject to whom the alteration
occurs - if we are not to be left merely with two incommensurable states; but how can
such continuity be compatible with revolutionary upheaval? [1]

The properly Hegelian solution to this dilemma is that a truly radical change is self-
relating: it changes the very coordinates by means of which we measure change. In other
words, a true change sets its own standards: it can only be measured by criteria that result
from it.

Deleuze often varies the motif of how, in becoming post-human, we should learn to
practice "a perception as it was before men (or after) /.../ released from their human
coordinates" (Cinema 1, 122): those who fully endorse the Nietzschean "return of the
same" are strong enough to sustain the vision of the "iridescent chaos of a world before
man"(ibid., 81). Although Deleuze resorts here openly to Kant's language, talking about
the direct access to "things (the way they are) in themselves," his point is precisely that
one should subtract the opposition between phenomena and things-in-themselves,
between the phenomenal and the nolumenal level, from its Kantian functioning, where
noumena are transcendent things that forever elude our grasp. What Deleuze refers to as
"things in themselves" is in a way even more phenomenal then our shared phenomenal
reality: it is the impossible phenomenon, the phenomenon that is excluded from our
symbolically-constituted reality. The gap that separates us from noumena is thus
primarily not epistemological, but practico-ethical and libidinal: there is no "true reality"
behind or beneath phenomena, noumena are phenomenal things which are "too strong,"
too intens(iv)e, for our perceptual apparatus attuned to constituted reality –
epistemological failure is a secondary effect of libidinal terror, i.e., the underlying logic is
a reversal of Kant's "You can, because you must!": "You cannot (know nolumena),
because you must not!" Imagine someone being forced to witness a terrifying torture: in a
way, the monstrosity of what he saw would make this an experience of the noumenal
impossible-real that would shatter the coordinates of our common reality. (The same
holds for withessing an intense sexual activity.) In this sense, if we were to discover films
shot in a concentration camp among the Musulmannen, showing scenes from their daily
life, how they are systematically mistreated and deprived of all dignity, we would have
"seen too much," the prohibited, we would have entered a forbidden territory of what
should have remained unseen. This is also what makes it so unbearable to witness the last
moments of people who know they are shortly going to die and are in this sense already
living-dead – again, imagine that we would have discovered, among the ruins of the Twin
Towers, a video camera with magically survived the crash intact and is full of shots of
what went on among the passengers of the plane in the minutes before it crashed into one
of the Towers. In all these cases, it is that, effectively, we would have seen things as they
are "in themselves," outside human coordinates, outside our human reality – we would
have seen the world with inhuman eyes. (Maybe the US authorities do possess such shots
and, for understandable reasons, are keeping them secret.) The lesson is here profoundly
Hegelian: the difference between the phenomenal and the noumenal has to be
reflected/transposed back into the phenomenal, as the split between the "gentrified"
normal phenomenon and the "impossible" phenomenon.

In his critical remarks on psychoanalysis, Pippin reduces it to yet another mode of the
"substantial" determination of the subject which thus misses the Kant-Hegelian
dimension of reflexivity that sustains subject's autonomy and self-responsibility: as a
subject, I cannot refer to the Unconscious that determines me as a direct motivation – if
unconscious motifs effectively determine me AS AN AUTONOMOUS SUBJECT, I
should be the one who freely endorses the force of such motifs, who ACCEPTS them as
motifs - in short, every reference to the irresistible direct force of such motifs has to
involve a minimum of what Sartre called mauvaise foi... What if, however, it is Pippin
himself who misses here a crucial homology between the reflexivity inscribed into very
heart of the Kant-Hegelian subjectivity, and the "reflexivity" of desire elaborated in detail
by Lacan? What we have in mind here with regard to Kant is the so-called "incorporation
thesis," the inextricable normativity of even the most elementary perceptions: even when
I merely state the obvious, making the most elementary statement of fact "a table is there
in front of me," I am not purely passive, I also DECLARE a fact, I reflectively signal that
I UPHOLD this statement. This, however, is exactly what Lacan has in mind when he
insists that, in every statement, the subject's position of enunciation is inscribed: when I
state "I wear stoned jeans," my statement always also renders how I relate to this fact (I
want to appear as having a down-to-earth attitude, or following a fashion...). This
inherent reflexive moment of "declaration" (the fact that every communication of a
content always simultaneously "declares itself" as such) is what Heidegger designated as
the "as such" that specifies the properly human dimension: an animal perceives a stone,
but it doesn't perceive this stone "as such." This is the "reflexivity" of the signifier: every
utterance not only transmits some content, but, simultaneously, renders how the subject
relates to this content (in the terms of German Idealism, that every consciousness is
always-already self-consciousness). [2]

In a scene from Break Up, the nervous Vince Vaughn angrily reproaches Jennifer
Anniston: "You wanted me to wash the dishes, and I'll wash the dishes – what's the
problem?" She replies: "I don't want you to wash the dishes – I want you to WANT to
wash the dishes!" This is the minimal reflexivity of desire, its "terrorist" demand: I want
you not only to do what I want, but to do it as if you really want to do it – I want to
regulate not only what you do, but also your desires. The worst thing you can do, even
worse than not doing what I want you to do, is to do what I want you to do without
wanting to do it… (This brings us to civility: an act of civility is precisely to feign that I
want to do what the other asks me to do, so that my complying with the other's wish does
not exert pressure on him/her.)

Pippin is sympathetic to Manfred Frank's rejection of "neustructuralism" as unable to

account for subjectivity, meaning, but critical of Frank's version of prereflexive self-
acquaintance as crucial dimension of subjectivity. Pippin sees this dimension in the Kant-
Hegelian reflexivity – autonomy – self-responsibility, [3] but what he fails to see is how
this Kantian reflexivity opens up a space for the Lacanian subject of the unconscious. The
Freudian "unconscious" is inscribed into this very reflexivity; recall the case of someone
whom I "love to hate," like the villain in a Hitchcock film: consciously, I just hate his
guts, yet unconsciously I – not love him, but – love to hate him, i.e., what is unconscious
is the very way I reflexively relate to my conscious attitude. (Or the opposite case of
someone whom I "hate to love" - like the hero in film noir who cannot hedlp loving the
evil femme fatale, but hates himself for loving her.) This is what Lacan means when he
says that man's desire is always a desire to desire: in exact formal replica of the Kantian
reflexivity, I never simply and directly desire an object, I always reflexively relate to this
desire, I can desire to desire it, I can hate to desire it, I can be indifferent to this desire of
mine, just tolerating it neutrally... The philosophical consequence of this reflexivity of
desire is crucial: it tells us how the opposition conscious/unconscious is related to the
opposition consciousness/selfconsciousness: the Unconscious is not some kind of
prereflexive, pre-thetic, primitive substrat later elaborated by conscious reflexivity; quite
on the contrary, what is most radically "unconscious" in a subject is his self-
consciousness itself, the way he reflexively relates to his conscious attitudes. Therein
resides Lacan's thesis: the Freudian subject is identical to the Cartesian cogito, or, more
precisely, to its later elaboration in the Kant-Hegelian self-consciousness. That is to say,
for Hegel, "self-consciousness" in its abstract definition stands for a purely non-
psychological self-reflexive ply of registering (re-marking) one's own position, of
reflexively "taking into account" what one is doing. Therein resides the link between
Hegel and psychoanalysis: in this precise non-psychological sense, "self-consciousness"
is in psychoanalysis an object – say, a tic, a symptom which articulates the falsity of my
position of which I am unaware. Say, I did something wrong, and I consciously deluded
myself that I had the right to do it; but, unaware to me, a compulsive act which appears
mysterious and meaningless to me "registers" my guilt, it bears witness to the fact that,
somewhere, my guilt is remarked.

"If the Absolute were only to be brought on the whole nearer to us by /our/ agency,
without any change being wrought in it, like a bird caught by a limestick, it would
certainly scorn a trick of that sort, if it were not in its very nature, and did it not wish to
be, beside us from the start." This passage – the key claim that the Absolute itself "wishes
to be beside us," with us, present to us, to disclose itself to us, is read by Heidegger as
providing Hegel's own formulation of the old Greek notion of parousia. Rather than
dismissing this claim as a proof of how Hegel remains prisoner of the "metaphysics of
presence," one should draw attention, first, to the fact that Heidegger himself provides a
further variation of this same topic with his notion of Dasein as das Da des Seins, the
"there" of Being itself, which means that Being itself "needs" a man as its only "there,"
and that, in this sense, in spite of all of its withdrawal, it also "wants to be with us."
Furthermore, this "wish to be with us" is more enigmatic and complex than it may appear
– it is to be conceived along the lines of the famous conclusion of Kafka's parable on The
Door of the Law, when the man from the country finally, at his deathbed, learns that the
Door was there only for him and that now, upon his death, it will be closed. All the
mystery of withdrawal, of the inaccessibility of what the Door was concealing, was thus
there only for the Man, to fascinate his gaze – the Door's reticence was a lure destined to
obfuscate the fact that the Door "wished to be with the man." In other words, the trick of
the Door was the same as that of the anecdote about the competition between Zeuxis and
Parrhasios: the Door was like the painting of a curtain on the wall, it was here to evoke
the illusion that it is concealing some secret.

There is a shot of Judy's face in Vertigo, its left half completely dark, and its right half in
a weird green (from the neon light outside the room). Instead of reading this shot as
simply designating Judy's inner conflict, one should confer on it its full ontological
ambiguity: as in some versions of gnosticism, Judy is depicted here as a proto-entity, not
yet ontologically constituted in full (a greenish plasm plus darkness). It is as if, in order to
fully exist, her dark half waits to be filled in with the ethereal image of Madeleine. At this
very moment when Judy is reduced to less-than-object, to a formless pre-ontological
stain, she is subjectivized – this anguished half-face, totally unsure of itself, designates
the birth of the subject. Recall the proverbial imaginary resolution of Zeno's paradox of
infinite divisibility: if we continue the division long enough, we will finally stumble upon
a point at which a part will no longer be divided into smaller parts, but into a (smaller)
part AND NOTHING – this nothing "is" the subject. And, is this, exactly, not the
division of Judy in the above-mentioned shot? We see half of her face, while the other
half is a dark void.

Subjects are literally holes, gaps, in the positive order of being: they dwell only in the
interstices of being, in those places where the job of creation is not done to the end: the
very existence of a subject is a proof that God was an idiot who bungled the job of
Creation. Far from being the Crown of Creation, a subject bears witness to the fact that
there are spots of unfinished reality in the order of things: the objective correlate of a
subject is a proto-real spectral object-stain which is not yet fully actualized as part of
positive reality. The problem is that, when we are in front of a human being and see only
the visible half, we automatically de-subjectivize it by way of filling in the void, by way
of projecting onto the darkness the imaginary wealth of personality: the de-subjectivized
other becomes a full "person," the face turned into a Levinasian fetish, the sign of the
abyssal depth of the person's inner life, and the two halves (the outer face and the inner
psychic life) are combined into the rounded Whole. What is difficult is not to perceive the
wealth of personality beneath the face, but to avoid this trap, to ABSTRACT from the
mirage of this wealth and to acquire the ability to see the de-fetishized reality of the
subject: to see the gap, the darkness, without filling it in with the fantasmatic content of
"inner life" that is supposed to shine through it. In other words, the difficult thing is to see
reality in its pre-ontological status, as not fully constituted, to see the nothing where there
is nothing to see.

Or, to put it in more speculative Schellingian terms, subjectivity is the unique point at
which the dimension of ontological openness, obfuscated by the passage from "quantum"
proto-reality, explodes again in the midst of the fully constituted reality. Which is why, in
contrast to constituted reality, in which actuality is more than potentiality, present more
than future, in subjectivity, potentiality stands "higher" than reality: subject is a
paradoxical entity which exists only as ex-sisting, standing outside itself in an ontological
openness.

"The secret of the Other is the secret for the Other itself" – but crucial in this redoubling
is the self-inclusion: what is enigmatic for the Other is MYSELF, i.e., I am the enigma
for the Other, so that I find myself in the strange position (like in detective novels) of
someone who all of a sudden finds himself persecuted, treated as if he knows (or owns)
something, bears a secret, but is totally unaware WHAT this secret is. The formula of the
enigma is thus: "What am I for the Other? What for an object for the Other's desire I
am?"

Because of this gap, the subject cannot ever fully and immediately identify with his
symbolic mask or title; the subject's questioning of his symbolic title is what hysteria [4]
is about: "Why am I what you're saying that I am?" Or, to quote Shakespeare's Juliet:
"Why am I that name?" There is a truth in the wordplay between "hysteria" and
"historia": the subject's symbolic identity is always historically determined, dependent
upon a specific ideological constellation. We are dealing here with what Louis Althusser
called "ideological interpellation": the symbolic identity conferred on us is the result of
the way the ruling ideology "interpellates" us – as citizens, democrats or Christians.
Hysteria emerges when a subject starts to question or to feel discomfort in his or her
symbolic identity: "You say I am your beloved – what is there in me that makes me that?
What do you see in me that causes you to desire me in that way?" Richard II is
Shakespeare's ultimate play about hystericization (in contrast to Hamlet, the ultimate play
about obsessionalization). Its topic is the progressive questioning by the King of his own
"kingness" – what is it that makes me a king? What remains of me if the symbolic title
"king" is taken away from me?

I have no name, no title,

No, not that name was given me at the font,
But 'tis usurp'd: alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!
O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water-drops!

In the Slovene translation, the second line is rendered as: "Why am I what I am?"
Although this clearly involves too much poetic license, it does render adequately the gist
of it: deprived of its symbolic titles, Richard's identity melts like that of a snow king
under sun rays. - The hysterical subject is the subject whose very existence involves
radical doubt and questioning, his entire being is sustained by the uncertainty as to what
he is for the Other; insofar as the subject exists only as an answer to the enigma of the
Other's desire, the hysterical subject is the subject par excellence. In contrast to it, the
analyst stands for the paradox of the desubjectivized subject, of the subject who fully
assumed what Lacan calls "subjective destitution," i.e. who breaks out of the vicious
cycle of intersubjective dialectics of desire and turns into an acephalous being of pure
drive. With regard to this subjective destitution, Shakespeare's Richard II has in store a
further surprise in store for us: not only does the play enact the gradual hystericization of
the unfortunate king; at the lowest point of his despair, before his death, Richard enacts a
further shift of his subjective status which equals subjective destitution:

I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix'd
With scruples and do set the word itself
Against the word:
As thus, 'Come, little ones,' and then again,
'It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle's eye.'
Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars
Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endured the like.
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing. Music do I hear?

(The music plays.)

Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,

When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is,
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours: but my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack o' the clock.
This music mads me; let it sound no more;
For though it have help madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world."

It is crucial to properly grasp the shift in modality which occurs with the entrance of
music in the middle of this monologue. The first part is a solipsistic rendering of a
gradual reduction to nothingness, to the pure void of the subject ($): Richard starts with
the comparison of his cell with the world; but in his cell, he is alone, while the world is
peopled; so, to solve this antinomy, he posits his thoughts themselves as his company in
the cell - Richard dwells in the fantasms generated by a mother (his brain) and father (his
soul). (The pandemonium he thus dwells in, in which the highest and the lowest co-exist
side by side, is exemplified by a wonderful Eisensteinian montage of two biblical
fragments, "Come, little ones" (reference to Saint Luke 18,16, Saint Matthew 19,14, and
Saint Mark 10,14) counterposed to "It is as hard to come as for a camel to thread the
postern of a small needle's eye" (reference to Luke 18,26, Matthew 19,24, and Mark
10,25). If we read these two fragments together, we get a cynical superego God who first
benevolently call us to come to him, and then sneeringly adds, as a kind of second
thought ("Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that…"), that it is almost impossible to
come to Him…) The problem with this solution is that, if he with his thoughts is a
multitude of people, then, caught in this shadowy unsubstantial world, the substantial
consistency of his Self explodes, he is forced to play "in one person many people." And,
he concludes, he effectively oscillates between being a king, a beggar, etc., the truth of it
and the only peace to be found is in accepting to be nothing.

In the second part, music as an object enters, a true "answer of the Real." This second
part itself contains two breaks. First, in his usual rhetorical vein, Richard uses this
intrusion to, yet again, form a metaphor: the playing of the music out of tune reminds him
how he himself was "disordered" (out of tune) as a king, unable to strike the right notes in
running the country and thus bringing disharmony – while he has great sensitivity for
musical harmony, he lacked this sensitivity for social harmony. This "out of joint" is
linked to time – the implication being that, not merely is time out of joint, but time as
such signals an out-of-jointness, i.e., there is time because things are somehow out of
joint. – Then, no longer able to sustain this safe metaphoric difference, Richard enacts a
properly psychotic identification with the symptom, with the musical rhythm as the
cipher of his destiny: like an alien intruder, music parasitizes, colonizes, him, its rhythm
forcing on him the identification with Time, a literal identification, psychotic, where he
no longer needs a clock but, in a terrifying vision, he directly BECOMES the clock (in
the mode of what Deleuze celebrated as "becoming-machine"). It is as if Richard is
driven to such extreme of painful madness with this music that, for him, the only way to
get rid of this unbearable pressure of music is to directly identify with it… In one of the
episodes of the 1945 British horror omnibus Dead of the Night, Michael Redgrave plays
the ventriloquist who becomes jealous of his dummy, gnawing with the suspicion that it
wants to leave him for a competitor; at the episode's end, after destroying the dummy by
way of thrashing its head, he is hospitalized; after reawakening from psychic coma, he
identifies with his symptom (the dummy), starting to talk and contorting his face like it.
Here we get the psychotic identification as the false way out: what started out as a partial
object (the dummy is a doll stuck on his right hand, it is literally his hand acquiring an
autonomous life, like the hand of Ed Norton in Fight Club) develops into a full double
engaged in a mortal competition with the subject, and since the subject's consistency
relies on this symptom-double, since it is structurally impossible for him to get rid of the
symptom, the only way out of it, the only way to resolve the tension is to directly identify
with the symptom, to become one's own symptom – in exact homology to Hitchcock's
Psycho at the end of which the only way for Norman to get rid of his mother is to identify
with her directly, to let her take over his personality and, using his body as a ventriloquist
uses his dummy, speaking through him.

Finally, there occurs an additional shift towards the end of the monologue, in the last
three lines: music, which first is experience as a violent intrusion that drives Richard to
madness, now appears as a soothing "sign of love" - why this shift? What if simply the
return to real music that he hears: it is a "sign of love" when separated from the
metaphoric dimension of recalling the disharmony of his kingdom. The designation of
music as "a sign of love" has to be understood in its strict Lacanian sense: an answer of
the Real by means of which the circular-repetitive movement of drive is reconciled with –
integrated into – the symbolic order.

"Woman is a symptom of man" – does this mean that a woman comes to ex-sist only
when a man picks her up? So what is she prior to it? What if we conceive the idea of a
symptom that pre-exists what it is a symptom of, so that we can consider women as
symptoms wandering around in search of something to attach themselves to as symptoms
– or even just being satisfied with their role as empty symptoms? [5] One can effectively
claim that a woman who withdraws from sexual contact with men is a symptom at its
purest, a zero-level symptom – a nun, for example, who, rejecting to be the symptom of a
particular man (her sexual partner), posits herself as the symptom of Christ, THE man
(ecce homo).

This notion of the paradoxical pre-existence of a symptom can also be given a

Benjaminian twist. Tchaikovsky, "Francesca da Rimini": in the middle (11 minutes into
it), a passage ALMOST like Bernard Hermann, a kind of flight into the future; then
standard Romanticism recuperates itself. It is really as if Tchaikovsky produced here a
symptom in the early Lacanian (or Benjaminian) sense of a message that is coming from
the future, of something for which the time when it was written was lacking the proper
means to hear/understand it properly. (This is how modernism works: what were
originally fragments of an organic Whole gets autonomized. The same in Miro's
paintings.) No wonder that THIS is the music used for the balet sequence at the end of
Torn Curtain – a kind of revenge of Herrmann whose score Hitchcock discarded, a scene
in which the "repressed returns." (Did he chose this piece?) [6]

There is a nice anecdote about a Latin-American poet who accomodated the political
tenor of his poetry to his most recent mistress: when his mistress was a proto-Fascist
Rightist, he celebrated military discipline and patriotic spirit of sacrifice; when he got
involved with a pro-Communist mistress, he started to celebrate guerilla warfare; later, he
passed on to a hippy mistress and wrote about drugs and transcendental meditation...
THIS is what "woman as a symptom of man" means, not that man merely uses a woman
to articulate his messagfe – on the contrary, woman is the determining factor: man orients
himself towards his symptom, he clings on it to give consistency to his life.

Insofar as a symptom is inherently related to its interpretation, i.e. insofar as it functions

somehow like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, as an attempt to take into account and answer in
advance its possible interpretations, it involves an intricate structure of temporal loop: a
symptom is a purely reflexive entity, a pre-emptive reaction to its own future effects.

In an old Christian melodrama, a temporarily-blinded ex-soldier falls in love with the

nurse who takes care of him, fascinated by her goodness, forming in his mind an
idealized image of her; when his blindness is cured, he sees that, in her bodily reality, she
is ugly. Aware that his love would not survive the permanent contact with this reality,
and that the inner beauty of her good soul has a higher value than her external
appearance, he intentionally blinds himself by looking for too long into the sun so that his
love for the woman will survive… if there ever was a false celebration of love, this is it.

Hegel uses the term Begriff (notion) in two main opposed meanings, "notion" as the very
core, the essence, of the thing, and "notion" as "mere notion" in contrast to "the thing
itself", and one should bear in mind that the same goes for his use of the term "subject":
the subject as elevated above the objective, as the principle of life and mediation of
objects, and the subject as designating something "merely subjective", a subjectively-
distorted impression in contrast to the way things out there really are. It is all too simple
to oppose these two aspects as the "lower" one, pertaining to the abstract approach of
Understanding (the reduction of the subject to the "merely subjective"), and the "higher"
one, involving the truly speculative notion of the Subject as the mediating principle of
Life of reality; the point is, rather, that the "lower" aspect is the key constituent of the
"higher" one. One overcomes the "merely subjective" by, precisely, fully endorsing it –
here, for example, is how, in the famous passage from the Preface to his Phenomenology,
Hegel celebrates the disjunctive power of "abstract" Understanding:

To break up an idea into its ultimate elements means returning upon its moments, which
at least do not have the form of the given idea when found, but are the immediate
property of the self. Doubtless this analysis only arrives at thoughts which are themselves
familiar elements, fixed inert determinations. But what is thus separated, and in a sense is
unreal, is itself an essential moment; for just because the concrete fact is self-divided, and
turns into unreality, it is something self-moving, self-active. The action of separating the
elements is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most astonishing and greatest
of all powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle, which is self-enclosed and at rest,
and, qua substance, holds its own moments, is an immediate relation, the immediate,
continuous relation of elements with their unity, and hence arouses no sense of
wonderment. But that an accident as such, when out loose from its containing
circumference, — that what is bound and held by something else and actual only by
being connected with it, — should obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and
independence on its own account — this is the portentous power of the negative; it is the
energy of thought, of pure ego.

Hegel does not overcome the abstract character of Understanding by substantially

changing it (synthesis instead of abstraction, etc.), but by perceiving in new light this
same power of abstraction: what first appears as the weakness of Understanding (its
inability to grasp reality in all its living complexity, its tearing apart of the living texture
of reality) is its greatest power.

NOTES

[1] Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent, London: Verso, 2003, p. 246..

[2] This self-declaratory reflexivity is also discernible in the domain of fame: people can
be famous for this or that, but they can also be famous simply for being famous. Recall
the phenomenon of Paris Hilton, an absolute repulsive nobody of who trash media are
full, reporting on her every step. She is not famous for doing or achieving or being
something special – the dialectical reversal in her case consists in the fact that media
report on her most stupid accidents – jumping over a car in a crowded parking lot, eating
a hamburger, shopping at a discount store – because he is a celebrity. Her ordinariness,
vulgarity even, is directly transubstantiated into the feature of a celebrity.

[3] On "Not Being a Neo-Structuralist" in Pippin's The Persistence of Subjectivity.

[4] Lacan identifies hysteria with neurosis: the other main form of neurosis, obsessional
neurosis, is for him a "dialect of hysteria".

[5] And what is then a man for a woman? A catastrophe, as Lacan conjectures
somewhere? What if, bearing in mind the couple symptom/fantasy, man is a fantasy of a
woman? Does Lacan not point in this direction when he claims that don Juan is a
feminine fantasy? Both woman and man, not only woman, are thus co-dependent on each
other, like Escher's two hands drawing each other. The trap to be avoided here is to
conceive this relationship as somehow complementary – as if, once a man finds his
symptom in a woman and the same woman her fantasy embodied in a man, there finally
is a kind of sexual relationship. What one should bear in mind is that fantasy and
symptom are structurally incompatible.

[6] However, Hitchcock's discarding of Herrmann's score cannot be simply dismissed as

his concession to Hollywood commercial pressure. In the DVD edition of Torn Curtain,
one can also watch some scenes accompanied with the Herrmann score, among them the
Gromek murder. In the released version, this scene has no musical accompaniment, all
we hear are the occasional grunts and groans – how much more efficient is the scene this
way, how much efficiently it renders the oppressive REAL PRESENCE of the painfully
prolongated activity of trying to kill Gromek, than Bernard's standard score of the
Wagnerian brassy ostinati!

• Ideology II: Competition is a Sin •

. . . . . . . . Slavoj Zizek

How can an individual stand for the big Other? One should not think primarily of the
leader-figures who directly embody/personify their community (king, president, master),
but, rather, of the more mysterious figures of protectors of appearances – like a child
whom his otherwise corrupted adult parents and relatives desperately try to keep in
ignorance about their deprived lives, or, if a leader, then a leader for whom Potemkin’s
villages are raised.

Today, it seems that appearances no longer have to be protected. We all know the
innocent child from Andersen’s "The Emperors New Clothes" who publicly proclaims
the fact that the emperor is naked – today, in our cynical era, such a strategy no longer
works, it lost its disturbing power, since everyone is publicly saying all the time that the
emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are
fought for profit, etc. etc.), and nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just
goes on functioning as if the emperor has his clothes on...

When the lovers meet for the last time at the desolate train station in David Lean’s Brief
Encounter, their solitude is immediately disturbed by Celia Johnson’s noisy and
inquisitive friend who, unaware of the underlying tension between the couple, goes on
prattling about ridiculously insignificant everyday accidents. Unable to directly
communicate, the couple can just desperately stare in front of themselves. This common
prattler is the big Other at its purest: while it appears as an accidental unfortunate
intruder, its role is structurally necessary. When, towards the film’s end, we see this scene
for the second time, accompanied by Celia Johnson’s voice-over, she tells us that she did
not listen to what her friend was saying, not understanding even a word of it – however,
precisely as such, this prattling provided the necessary background, a kind of safety-
cushion, to the lovers’ last meeting, preventing its self-destructive explosion or, even
worse, its turn into banality: the insignificant prattling has to go on in order to prevent the
catastrophe, so the intruding friend arrives exactly the right moment. That is to say, on
the one hand, it is this very presence of the naïve prattler which "understands nothing" of
the true tension of the situation that enables the lovers to maintain a minimum of control
over their predicament, since they feel compelled to "maintain the proper appearances" in
front of this gaze. On the other hand, one should recall that, in a couple of words the
lovers succeed exchanging in privacy prior to being interrupted, they come to the edge of
confronting the unpleasant question: if they really love each other so passionately that
they cannot live without each other, why don’t they simply divorce their spouses and part
together? The prattler arrives just at the right moment, enabling the lovers to maintain the
tragic grandeur of their predicament – without this third intruder, they would have to
confront the banality and the vulgar compromise nature of their predicament. The shift to
be made in a proper dialectical analysis is thus the one from the condition of
impossibility to the condition of possibility: what appears as the "condition of
impossibility," as the obstacle, is a position, enabling, condition to what it appears to
threaten.

Two further As If’s in Brief Encounter; first, one in Roald-Dahl-style: what if Celia
Johnson were all of a sudden to discover that Trevor Howard is a bachelor who
concocted the story of his marriage and two children to add a melodramatic-tragic flavor
to the affair, and to avoid the prospect of long-term commitment? Then, one in Bridges-
of-the-Madison-County-style: what if, at the end, Celia Johnson were to discover that her
husband all the time knew in all detail about the ongoing affair, just pretending not to
know anything in order to safeguard the appearances and/or not to hurt, not to put
additional pressure on, his wife?

When someone is in a traumatic shock, possessed by the wish just to disappear, to fall
into the void, the superficial external intrusion, like someone near him going on in his
prattle, is the only thing that stands between him and the abyss of self-destruction: what
appears as a ridiculous intrusion is a life-saving device. So when, alone with her
companion in a carriage compartment, Celia Johnson complains about the incessant
prattle and even expresses the desire to kill the intruder ("I wish you would stop
talking. /.../ I wish you were dead now. No, that was silly and unkind. But I wish you
would stop talking."), we can well imagine what would have happened if the intruding
acquaintance were effectively to stop talking: either Celia Johnson would immediately
collapsed, or she would be compelled to utter a humiliating plead: "Please, just go on
talking, no matter what you are saying..."

Is this unfortunate intruder not a kind of envoy of (a stand-in for) the absent husband, his
representative (in the sense of Lacan’s paradoxical statement that woman is one of the
Names-of-the-Father)? She intervenes at exactly the right moment to prevent the drift
into self-annihilation (as in the famous scene in Vertigo where the phone rings precisely
at the right moment, stopping the dangerous drift of Scottie and Madeleine into too much
of erotic contact).

The husband and the prattler are effectively two aspects of one and the same entity, the
big Other, the addressee of Celia Johnson’s confession. The husband is the ideal
confessor, dependable, open, understanding, but the one who should not know about what
is to be confessed and thus cannot be told the truth – he should be protected from truth,
he is the subject supposed NOT to know: "Dear Fred. There’s so much that I want to say
to you. You’re the only one in the world with the wisdom and gentleness to understand it.
/…/ As it is, you are the only one in the world that I can never tell. Never, never. /.../ I
don’t want you to be hurt." The prattler as the unreliable gossiping acquaintance is the
wrong person at the right time and place: Celia Johnson wants to confess to her, but
cannot: "I wish I could trust you. I wish you were a wise, kind friend instead of a
gossiping acquaintance I’ve known casually for years and never particularly cared for."

Brief Encounter is a cult film among gays, on account of the way it recalls the
atmosphere of gay couples secretly meeting in the darkness of the train stations at night;
however, what if its libidinal structure is more that of a lesbian affair (in which, as we
know from Lacan, the Third who guarantees it is the paternal figure)?

The supreme example of what Lacan called the "empty speech," the speech whose
denotative value (explicit content) is suspended on behalf of its functioning as an index of
intersubjective relations between speaker and hearer, is the Stalinist jargon, the object of
the science of "Kremlinology":

Before the Soviet-era archives opened wide, foreign scholars trying to make out what had
happened, and what might come to pass, took abuse for relying upon hearsay: so-and-so
had heard from so-and-so, who in turn had heard from someone in the camps, who was
sure that ... [insert fantastic particulars here]. Critics of such hearsay-scholarship had a
point. But what few people seem to realize, even now, is that the salient issue might not
be the reliability in Stalin's Soviet Union of word of mouth and political divination, but
its pervasiveness. Kremlinology arose not at Harvard, but in and around the Kremlin. /.../
this was how the entire regime operated, and it was what everyone in the Soviet Union
did to a degree, the more so the higher up. Amid the inter-ministerial warfare and
Moebius-strip intrigues, Stalinist life and death remained opaque, no matter where you
stood or whom you knew. It was at the same time formulaic and indeterminate.

In April 1939, /the nominal head of Comintern Georgi/ Dimitrov frets over his sudden
omission in Pravda's coverage of one honor presidium and in Izvestiya's of another. His
agitation eases when he learns that his portraits were borne aloft at the May Day parade,
which quieted the ominous chitchat about him. But then it happened again. ‘For the first
time on International Women's Day I was not elected to the honor presidium,’ he records
on March 8, 1941. ‘That, of course, is no accident.’ Ah, but what did it mean? Dimitrov -
who could scarcely have been closer to the Kremlin - was an inveterate Kremlinologist,
studying Mausoleum choreography, divining omens, drowning in rumors. [1]

Another comical detail along these lines: the public prosecutor in the show trial against
the "United Trotskyte-Zinovievite Centre" published a list of those that this "Centre" was
planning to assassinate (Stalin, Kirov, Zhdanov…); this list became "a bizarre honor
since inclusion signified proximity to Stalin." [2] Although Molotov was on good
personal terms with Stalin, he was shocked to discover that he is not on the list: what did
this sign mean? Just a warning from Stalin, or an indication that soon it will be his turn to
be arrested? Indeed, the secret of the Egyptians were secrets also for the Egyptians
themselves. It was the Stalinist Soviet Union which was the true "empire of signs."

A story told by Soviet linguist Eric Han-Pira provides a perfect example of the total
semantic saturation of this "empire of signs," the semantic saturation which, precisely,
relies on the emptying of direct denotative meaning. For many years, when the Soviet
media announced the funeral ceremonies of a member of high Nomenklatura, used a
cliché formulation: "buried on Red Square by the Kremlin wall." In the 1960s, however,
because of the lack of space, most of the newly deceased dignitaries were cremated and
urns with their ashes were placed in niches inside the wall itself – yet the same old cliché
was used in press statements. This incongruity compelled fifteen members of the Russian
Language Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to write a letter to the Central
Committee of the Communist Party, suggesting that the phrase be modified to fit the
current reality: "The urn with ashes was placed in the Kremlin wall." Several weeks later,
a representative of the Central Committee phoned the Institute, informing them that the
Central Committee had discussed their suggestion and decided to keep the old
formulation; he gave no reasons for this decision. [3] According to the rules that regulate
the Soviet "empire of signs," the CC was right: the change would not be perceived as
simply registering the fact that dignitaries are now cremated and their ashes placed in the
wall itself; any deviation from the standard formula would be interpreted as a sign,
triggering a frenzied interpretive activity. So, since there was no message to be delivered,
why change things? One may oppose to this conclusion the possibility of a simple
"rational" solution: why not change the formulation and add an explanation that it means
nothing, that it just registers a new reality? Such a "rational" approach totally misses the
logic of the Soviet "empire of signs": since, in it, EVERYTHING has some meaning,
even and ESPECIALLY a denial of meaning, such a denial would trigger an even more
frantic interpretive activity – it would be read not only as a meaningful sign within a
given, well established, semiotic space, but as a much stronger meta-semantic indication
that the very basic rules of this semiotic space are changing, thus causing total perplexity,
panic even!

It would be interesting to re-read, from this perspective, the model post-WWII Soviet
textbooks on dialectical materialism, Mark Rozental’s The Marxist Dialectical Method,
whose first edition appeared in Moscow in 1951. In later reprints, long passages were
omitted or rewritten; however, these changes had nothing whatsoever to do with author’s
further reflections on immanent philosophical problems – they are all to be read strictly in
kremlinological terms, as signals of the shifts in the ideologico-political lines. The book,
of course, relies on Stalin’s "systematization" of the four "main features" of dialectical
method (the unity of all phenomena; the dynamic nature of reality; the permanent
development of reality; the "revolutionary" nature of this development which proceeds
through sudden jumps, not only through continuous gradual change), from which,
significantly, the "law" of the "negation of negation" is absent. (See Stalin’s "On
Dialectical and Historical Materialism.") In the subsequent edition of Rozental’s book,
the description of these four "main features" subtly changes: at some point, "negation of
negation" is silently readmitted, etc. etc. These changes are kremlinological signals of the
shifts in ideological-political constellation, the shifts of de-Stalinization which,
paradoxically, began under Stalin himself under his instigation (see his two late essays on
linguistics and economy, which paved the way for recognizing the relative autonomy and
independence from class struggle of – some- sciences). The fact that "negation of
negation" is posited as a fundamental ontological feature of reality, which appears as a
claim about the basic ontological structure of reality, has thus nothing to do with the
cognition of reality and all with shifts in ideologico-political constellation.

Is then Kremlinology not a kind of obscene double of Sovietology: the latter studies the
Soviet regime objectively, through sociological data, statistics, power shifts, etc., the
former as an obscure semiotic system...

Till recently, traces of such semantically totally saturated space survived in the Chinese
official discourse; in philosophy, they are sometimes comically combined with other
features which bear witness to the "organized" and plannified character of philosophical
research. I was told by a friend who visited the philosophy institute in one of (for us,
Europeans) anonymous 2-4 millions Chinese cities, that, surprised, he discovered in the
entrance hall a large display board, reporting on the achievements of the last 5-years-plan
of philosophical research – which ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, etc. topics were
clarified. So imagine a conversation with a member of this institute who, when asked
about the existence of the table in front of him independently of his mind, he glibly
answers: "Sorry, I cannot yet give you the definitive answers: according to our 5-years-
plan, this topic will be dealt with only in 2008!"

Pierre Corneille, Medée II/6: "Souvent je ne sais quoi qu’on ne peut exprimer / Nous
surprend, nous emporte et nous force d’aimer." ("Often an I-don’t-know-what which one
cannot express / surprises us, takes us with it and compels us to love.") Is this not the
objet petit a at its purest – on condition that one supplements it with the alternate version:
"... and compels us to hate"?

On Badiou: The central problem of Parsifal is that of a ceremony (ritual): how is it

possible to perform a ritual in the conditions where there is no transcendence to guarantee
it? As an aesthetic spectacle?
The enigma is here: what are the limits and contours of a ceremony? Is the ceremony
only that which Amfortas is unable to perform, or is part of the ceremony also the
spectacle of his complaint and resistance and final acceptance to perform the ceremony?
In other words, are Amfortas’ two great complaints not highly ceremonial, ritualized? Is
not even the "unexpected" arrival of Parsifal to replace him (who, nonetheless, arrives
just in time, i.e., in the just moment, when the tension is at its highest) part of a ritual?

Do we not find a ritual also in Tristan, in the great duet that takes most of the Act II? The
long introductory part consists of the emotional rambling of the couple, and the ritual
proper begins with So sterben wir um ungetrennt... with its sudden shift to a
declamatory/declaratory mode – from this point on, it is no longer the two individuals
who sing/talk, it is a ceremonial Other which takes over. One should always bear in mind
this feature which perturbs the opposition between the domains of the Day (symbolic
obligations) and the Night (endless passion): the highest point of Lust, the immersion into
the Night, is itself highly ritualized, it takes the form of its opposite, of a stylizied ritual.

And is this problem of a ceremony (liturgy) not also the problem of all revolutionary
processes, from the French Revolution with its spectacles of the people, to the October
Revolution? Let us recall the staged performance of "Storming the Winter Palace" in
Petrograd, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1920.
Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists worked round the clock,
living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea and frozen apples, and preparing the
performance at the very place where the event "really took place" three years earlier; their
work was coordinated by the Army officers, as well as by the avant-garde artists,
musicians and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold. Although this was acting and not
"reality," the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves - many of them not only
actually participated in the event of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the
real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city
under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food. A contemporary commented on
the performance: "The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest
and most brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting"; [4] and the formalist theoretician
Viktor Shklovsky noted that "some kind of elemental process is taking place where the
living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical." [5]

Why is this liturgy necessary? Precisely because of the precedence of non-sense over
sense: liturgy is the symbolic frame within which the zero-level of sense is articulated.
The zero-experience of sense is not the experience of a determinate sense, but the
absence of sense, more precisely: the frustrating experience of being sure that something
has a sense, but not knowing what this sense is. This vague presence of a non-specific
sense is sense "as such," sense at its purest – it is primary, not secondary, i.e., all
determinate sense comes second, it is an attempt to fill in the oppressive presence-
absence of the that-ness of sense without its what-ness. There is thus no opposition
between liturgy (ceremony) and historical opening: far from being an obstacle to change,
liturgy keeps the space for radical change open, insofar as it sustains the signifying non-
sense which calls for new inventions of (determinate) sense.
In other words, far from being an obstacle to the living experience of meaning, the
presence of such "enigmatic signifiers" which emanate unknown meaning, i.e., this very
obstacle to a full transparency of meaning, is what make as given symbolic space truly
alive, engaged in a passionate struggle to unearth meaning, it is the ultimate source of its
vitality. Once this obstacle is eliminated (or, rather, domesticated), once we get fully
accustomed to a symbolic space, so that this space loses its enigmatic opaqueness and
starts to function in a totally smooth and transparent way, it in a way dies – as already
Hegel knew, a system can die not only on account of external shocks that perturb its
functioning, but also on account of its total "habituation": ""Human beings even die as
result of habit – that is, if they have become totally habituated to life, and spiritually and
physically blunted." [6]

So what about the cases – exemplarily those of a modern subject being confronted by
hieroglyphs - in which the signifier of which we know that it has a meaning without
knowing what this meaning is, belongs to a past civilization in which its meaning was
clearly understood? In such cases (analyzed by Eric Santner), [7] enigmatic signifier is
effectively not an index of vitality, but of the fact that a way of life is dead. In a powerful
and perspicuous interpretive move, Santner links such experiences to Benjamin’s notion
of "natural history" as re-naturalized history: it takes place when historical artifacts loose
their meaningful vitality and are perceived as dead objects reclaimed by nature or, in the
best case, as monuments of a past dead culture. (For Benjamin, it was in confronting such
dead monuments of human history reclaimed by nature that we experience history at its
purest.) The paradox here is that this re-naturalization overlaps with its opposite, with de-
naturalization: since culture is for us, humans, our "second nature," since we dwell in a
living culture, experiencing it as our natural habitat, the re-naturalization of cultural
artifacts equals their de-naturalization: deprived of their function within a living totality
of meaning, they dwell in an inter-space between nature and culture, between life and
death, leading a ghost-like existence, belonging neither to nature nor to culture, appearing
as something akin to the monstrosity of natural freaks, like a cow with two heads and
three legs.

How, then, are we to distinguish these two modes of enigmatic signifiers: the signifiers
which sustain the vitality of a symbolic space (their openness is turned towards the
future, they trigger the generation of new meanings), and the signifiers which are the
remainders of a dead symbolic space, i.e., whose openness is turned towards the past
(they are indeterminate because we no longer know their meaning)? A Kleinian approach
would, of course, identify the latter as the ruins of the lost maternal body: we all live in
the ruins of the maternal body which, in its incestuous totality, is prohibited on our
entrance into culture. (And does Lacan also not define the Name-of-the-Father, this
enigmatic-empty signifier par excellence, as the metaphor of the desire of the mother, i.e.,
as the signifying substitute of the primordially lost incestuous Object?) From this
perspective, the signifier of death is primordial with regard to the signifier of vitality: all
our productivity turned towards the future, all our attempts to generate new meanings, is
ultimately a form of appearance of its opposite, of a longing to regain the lost incestuous
Thing – insofar as we dwell in culture, we effectively live among ruins, among the
scattered fragments-remainders of the lost jouissance.

What if, however, this entire topic relies on a presupposition (of some lost incestuous
Object that one tries to regain) which has to be abandoned? In Lacan’s theory, this
abandonment has a precise name: drive. Therein resides the paradox or, rather, ambiguity
of objet a: does it function as the object of desire or of drive? When we define objet a as
the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so
that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic
figurations of the void, of nothing), we remain within the horizon of desire – the true
object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan
emphasizes, objet a is also the object of drive, the relationship is here thoroughly
different: although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case
of objet a as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which
coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of objet a as the
object of drive, the "object" IS DIRECTLY THE LOSS ITSELF – in the shift from desire
to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird
movement called "drive" is not driven by the "impossible" quest for the lost object; it is a
push to directly enact the "loss" – the gap, cut, distance – itself. This is what Lacan means
by the "satisfaction of drives": a drive does not bring satisfaction because its object is a
stand-in for the Thing, but because a drive as it were turns failure into a triumph – in it,
the very failure to reach its goal, the repetition of this failure, the endless circulation
around the object, generates a satisfaction of its own. To put it even more pointedly, the
object of drive is not related to Thing as a filler of its void: drive is literally a counter-
movement to desire, it does not strive towards impossible fullness and, being forced to
renounce it, gets stuck onto a partial object as its remainder – drive is quite literally the
very "drive" to BREAK the All of continuity in which we are embedded, to introduce a
radical imbalance into it, and the difference between drive and desire it precisely that, in
desire, this cut, this fixation onto a partial object, is as it were "transcendentalized,"
transposed into a stand-in for the void of the Thing.

And this brings us back to Hegel: what if the lesson of the Hegelian Aufhebung is that the
loss itself is to be celebrated? The fundamental operation of Aufhebung is reduction: the
sublated thing survives, but in an "abridged" edition, as it were, torn out of its life-world
context, reduced to its essential feature, all the movement and wealth of its life reduced to
a fixated mark. It is not that, after the abstraction of Reason does its mortifying job with
its fixated categories or notional determinations, the speculative "concrete universality"
somehow returns us to the fresh greenness of Life: once we pass from empirical reality to
its notional Aufhebung, the immediacy of Life is lost forever. There is nothing more
foreign to Hegel than the lamentation of the richness of reality that gets lost when we
proceed to its conceptual grasping – recall Hegel’s unambiguous celebration of the
absolute power of Understanding from his Foreword to Phenomenology: "The action of
separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most
astonishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power." This celebration is
in no way qualified, i.e., Hegel’s point is not that this power is nonetheless later
"sublated" into a subordinate moment of the unifying totality of Reason. The problem
with Understanding is rather that it does not unleash this power to the end, that it takes it
as external to the thing itself - like, in the above-quoted passage from Phenomenology,
the standard notion that it is merely OUR Understanding ("mind") that separates in its
imagination what in "reality" belongs together, so that the Understanding’s "absolute
power" is merely the power of our imagination which in no way concerns the reality of
the thing so analyzed. We pass from Understanding to Reason not when this analyzing,
tearing apart, is overcome in a synthesis which brings us back to the wealth of reality, but
when this power of "tearing apart" is displaced from "merely our mind" into things
themselves, as their inherent power of negativity.

The same mortification occurs in historical memory and monuments of the past where
what survives are objects deprived of their living souls – here is Hegel’s comment
apropos Ancient Greece: "The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has
flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone." [8] As with the passage
from substantial God to Holy Spirit, the properly dialectical re-animation is to be sought
in this very medium of "grey" notional determinations:

The understanding, through the form of abstract universality, does give /the varieties of
the sensuous/, so to speak, a rigidity of being /.../; but, at the same time through this
simplification it spiritually animates them and so sharpens them. [9]

This "simplification" is precisely what Lacan, referring to Freud, deployed as the

reduction of a thing to le trait unaire (der einzige Zug, the unary feature): we are dealing
with a kind of epitomization by means of which the multitude of properties is reduced to
a single dominant characteristic, so that we get "a concrete shape in which one
determination predominates, the others being present only in blurred outline": [10]

the content is already the actuality reduced to a possibility (zur Moeglichkeit getilgte
Wirklichkeit), its immediacy overcome, the embodied shape reduced to abbreviated,
simple determinations of thought. [11]

The dialectical approach is usually perceived as the one which tries to locate the
phenomenon-to-be-analyzed into the totality to which it belongs, to bring to light the
wealth of its links, and thus to break the spell of fetishizing abstraction: from a dialectical
perspective, one should not just see the thing in front of oneself, but this thing as it is
embedded in all the wealth of its concrete historical context... This, however, is the most
dangerous trap to be avoided: for Hegel, the true problem is the opposite one, the fact
that, when we observe a thing, we see TOO MUCH in it, we fall under the spell of the
wealth of empirical details which prevents us from clearly perceiving the notional
determination which forms the core of the thing. The problem is thus not the one of how
to grasp all the wealth of determinations, but, precisely, the one of how to ABSTRACT
from them, how to constrain our gaze and teach him to grasp only the notional
determination. - Hegel’s formulation is here very precise: the reduction to the signifying
"unary feature" reduces/contracts actuality to possibility, in the precise Platonic sense in
which the notion (idea) of a thing always has a deontological dimension to it, designating
what the thing should become in order to fully be what it is. "Potentiality" is thus not
simply the name for the essence of a thing as the potentiality actualized in the multitude
of empirical things of this genre (the idea of a chair is a potentiality actualized in
empirical chairs). The multitude of the actual properties of a thing is not simply reduced
to what the inner core of this thing’s "true reality"; what is more important is that it
accentuates (profiles) the thing’s inner potential. When I call someone "my teacher," I
thereby outline the horizon of what I expect from him; when I refer to a thing as "chair," I
profile the way I intend to use it in my future. When I observe the world around me
through the lenses of a language, I perceive its actuality through the lenses of the
potentialities hidden, latently present, in it. What this means is that potentiality appears
"as such," becomes actual as potentiality, only through language: it is the appellation of a
thing that brings to light ("posits") its potentials.

Here a surprising link with Heidegger offers itself. In his reading of "essence" /Wesen/ as
a verb ("essencing"), Heidegger provides a de-essentialized notion of essence: while,
traditionally, "essence" refers to a stable core that guarantees the identity of a thing, for
Heidegger, "essence" is something that depends on the historical context, on the epochal
disclosure of being that occurs in/through language as the "house of being." The
expression Wesen der Sprache does not means "the essence of language," but the
"essencing" done by language,

language bringing things into their essence, language ‘moving us’ so that things matter to
us in a particular kind of way, so that paths are made within which we can move among
entities, and so that entities can bear on each other as the entities they are. /.../ We share
an originary language when the world is articulated in the same style for us, when we
‘listen to language,’ when we ‘let it say its saying to us.’ [12]

For example, for a medieval Christian, the "essence" of gold resides in its incorruptibility
and divine sheen, which make it a "divine" metal, while for us, it is either a flexible
resource to be used for industrial purposes or the stuff appropriate for aesthetic purposes.
(Or, the castrato voice was for the Catholics the very voice of angels prior to the Fall,
while for us today is a monstrosity.) There is thus a fundamental violence in this
"essencing" ability of language: our world is given a partial twist, it loses its balanced
innocence, one partial color gives the tone of the Whole The operation designated by
Laclau as that of hegemony is inherent to language.

So when, in his Logique des mondes, in order to designate the moment of pure subjective
decision/choice which stabilizes a world, Badiou proposes the concept of "point" as a
simple decision in a situation reduced to a choice of Yes or No, he implicitly refers to
Lacan’s point de capition, of course – and does this not implicate that there is no "world"
outside language, no world whose horizon of meaning is not determined by a symbolic
order? The passage to truth is therefore the passage from language ("the limits of my
language are the limits of my world") to LETTER, to "mathemes" which run diagonally
across a multitude of worlds. The postmodern relativism is precisely the thought of the
irreducible multitude of worlds each of them sustained by a specific language-game, so
that each world "is" the narrative its members are telling themselves about themselves,
with no shared terrain, no common language between them; and the problem of truth is
how to establish something that, to refer to terms popular in modal logic, remains the
same in all possible worlds.

NOTES

[1] Stephen Kotkin, "A Conspiracy So Immense", The New Republic Online, 02.13.06.

[2] Simon Montefiore, Stalin. The Court of the Red Tsar, London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson 2003, p. 168.

[3] Alexei Yurchak’s wonderful Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More,
Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006, p. 52.

[4] Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, p.
144.

[5] ibid

[6] G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Par. 151, Addition

[7] Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2006.

[8] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 455.

[9] G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 611.

[10] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 17.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger, NYC: W.W. Norton, 2006, p. 94-95.

• Ideology III: To Read Too Many Books is Harmful •

. . . . . . . . Slavoj Zizek

In Krzysztof Kieslowski's passage from documentary to fiction cinema, we do not simply

have two species of cinema, documentary and fiction; fiction emerges out of the inherent
limitation of the documentary. Kieslowski's starting point was the same as the one of all
cineasts in the Socialist countries: the conspicuous gap between the drab social reality
and the optimistic, bright image which pervaded the heavily censored official media. The
first reaction to the fact that, in Poland, social reality was "unrepresented," as Kieslowski
put it, was, of course, the move towards a more adequate representation of the real life in
all its drabness and ambiguity - in short, an authentic documentary approach. Then,
however, the obverse experience set in, best captured by the end of the documentary
First Love (1974), in which the camera follows a young unmarried couple during the
girl's pregnancy, through their wedding, and the delivery of the baby, the father is shown
holding the newly born baby in his hands and crying - Kieslowski reacted to the
obscenity of such unwarranted probing into the other's intimacy with the "fright of real
tears." So there is a domain of fantasmatic intimacy which is marked by a "No trespass!"
sign and should be approached only via fiction, if one is to avoid pornographic obscenity.
This is the reason why the French Veronique in The Double Life of Veronique rejects the
puppeteer: he wants to penetrate her too much, which is why, towards the film's end, after
he tells her the story of her double life, she is deeply hurt and escapes to her father. [1]

The "concrete universality" is a name for this process through which fiction explodes
FROM WITHIN documentary, i.e., for the way the emergence of fiction cinema resolves
the inherent deadlock of the documentary cinema. (Or, in philosophy, the point is not to
conceive eternity as opposed to temporality, but eternity as it emerges from within our
temporal experience – or, in an even more radical way, as Schelling did it, to conceive
time itself as a subspecies of eternity, as the resolution of a deadlock of eternity.) One of
the mysteries of cinema history is the sudden eclipse of western in the mid-1950s; part of
the answer is the fact that, at the same moment, space opera rise as a genre – so one can
venture the hypothesis that space opera took the place of Western in the late 1950s. The
dialectical point here is that western and space opera are not two subspecies of the genre
"adventure"; one should shift the perspective and start ONLY with western. In its
development, western then encounters a deadlock and, in order to survive, has to
"reinvent" itself as space opera – space opera is thus structurally the sub-species of
western, in the same way that, for Kieslowski, fiction nis a sub-species of documentary.

And does the same not hold for the passage from State to religious community in Hegel?
They are not simply two species of the genre "large socio-ideological communities"; it is
that State, in its particular forms, cannot ever resolve the deadlock inscribed into its
notion (to adequately represent and totalize community), in the same way that, for
Kieslowski, documentary cannot adequately render the core of social reality, so the only
way to do it is to pass over to another notion, that of Church. Church is, in this sense,
"more State than State itself," it actualizes the notion of State by shifting to another
notion. The paradox is here the same as the one when, in ethnic cliches, one sometimes
characterizes some group as "more X than X themselves": Norvegians are freedom-
loving, but Islanders are "more Norvegian than Norvegians themselves"; for us, Slovenes,
Scots are THE nation of misers, but we, Slovenes, are "more Scots than Scots
themselves"...

In all these cases, universality is located in the enchainment/overlapping of

particularities: A and B are not parts (species) of their encompassing universality; A
cannot fully becoime A, actualize its notion, so, in order to do it, it passes into B, which
is formally its sub-species, but a sub-species which undermines the very species to under
which it is formally subsumed. Every species contains a sub-species which, precisely
insofar as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame: space opera
is "a western at the level of its notion" and, for that very reason, no longer a western.
Instead of a universality subdivided into two species, we thus get a particular species
which generates another species as its own sub-species, and the true ("concrete")
universality is nothing but this movement in the course of which a species engenders a
sub-species which negates its own species.

Elisabeth Lloyd (in her The Case of the Female Orgasm) suggests that female orgasm has
no positive evolutionary function: it is not a biological adaptation with evolutionary
advantages, but an "appendix" like male nipples. Male and female both have the same
anatomical structure for the first two months in the embryo stage of the growth, before
the differences set it – the female gets the orgasm because the male will later need it, just
like the male gets nipples because the female will later need them. All the standard
explanations (like the "uterine upsuck" thesis – orgasm causes contractions that "upsuck"
sperm and thus aid conception) are false: while sexual pleasures and even clitoris ARE
adaptive, orgasm is not. The fact that this thesis provoked a furor among feminists is in
itself a proof of the decline of our intellectual standards: as if the very superfluity of the
feminine orgasm does not make it all the more "spiritual" – let us not forget that,
according to some evolutionists, language itself is a by-product with no clear
evolutionary function.

This brings us to the general conclusion, made, among others, by Jonathan Lear, on how,
far from providing the natural foundation of human lives, sexuality is the very terrain
where humans detach themselves from nature: the idea of sexual perversion or of a
deadly sexual passion is totally foreign to the animal universe. Here, Hegel himself
commits a failure with regard to his own standards: he only deploys how, in the process
of culture, the natural substance of sexuality is cultivated, sublated, mediated – we,
humans, no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process
of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the
spiritual bond between a man and a woman, etc. However, what Hegel misses is how,
once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but,
much more radically, changed in its very substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to
reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby
explodes into an infinite, properly meta-physical, passion. The becoming-cultural of
sexuality is thus not the becoming-cultural of nature, but the attempt to domesticate a
properly un-natural excess of the meta-physical sexual passion. THIS is the properly
dialectical reversal of substance: the moment when the immediate substantial ("natural")
starting point is not only acted-upon, trans-formed, mediated/cultivated, but changed in
its very substance. We not only work upon and thus transform nature – in a gesture of
retroactive reversal, nature itself radically changes its "nature." (In a homologous way,
once we enter the domain of legal civil society, the previous tribal order of honor and
revenge is deprived of its nobility and all of a sudden appears as common criminality.)
This is why the Catholics who insist that only sex for procreation is human, while
coupling for lust is animal, totally miss the point, and end up celebrating the animality of
men.

The even more general conclusion concerns the status of universality: a universality
arises "for itself" only at the site of (through) a thwarted particularity. Within a social
edifice, a universal claim can only be made by a group that is prevented from realizing its
particular identity – women thwarted in their effort to realize their feminine identity,
ethnic group prevented from asserting their identity, etc. This is why, for Freud,
"everything has sexual connotation," why sexuality can infect everything with its
meaning: not because it is "the strongest" component of human lives, exerting hegemony
over other components, but because it is the one most radically thwarted in its
actualization, marked by "symbolic castration" on account on which, as Lacan put it,
there is no sexual relationship.

Every universality that arises, that is posited "as such," bears witness to a scar in some
particularity, it remains forever linked to this scar.

Prosopopeia, "a figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as

speaking or acting." The attribution of speech to an entity that is commonly perceived as
unable to speak (nature, commodity, truth itself…), is for Lacan the condition of speech
as such, not only its secondary complication. Does Lacan’s distinction between the
"subject of the enunciation" and the "subject of the enunciated" not point in this
direction? When I speak, it is never directly "myself" who speaks – I HAVE to have
recourse to a fiction which is my symbolic identity. In this sense, ALL speech is
"indirect": "I love you" implies the structure of "my identity as lover is telling you that it
loves you..."

There are two correlative traps to be avoided here, the Rightist and the Leftist deviation.
The first one, of course, is the pseudo-Hegelian notion that this gap stands for a "self-
alienation" which I should strive to ideally abolish and to fully assume my speech as
directly my own. Against this version, one should assert that there is no I which can,
ideally even, take the word "directly," by-passing the detour of prosopopeia. Wearing a
mask can thus be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is
more truth in the mask that in what we assume to be our "real self." Recall the proverbial
impotent shy person who, while playing the cyberspace interactive game, adopts the
screen identity of a sadistic murderer and irresistible seducer - it is all too simple to say
that this identity is just an imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from his real life
impotence. The point is rather that, since he knows that the cyberspace interactive game
is "just a game," he can "show his true self," do things he would never have done in real
life interactions - in the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated. Therein
resides the truth of the charming story like Alexandre Dumas’ The Man Behind the Iron
Mask: what if we should turn around the topic according to which, in our social
interactions, we wear masks covering out hidden true face? What if, on the contrary, in
order for us to interact in public with our true face, we have to have a mask somewhere
hidden, deposed, a mask rendering our unbearable excess, what is in us more than
ourselves, a mask which we can put on only exceptionally, in the carnevalesque moments
when the standard rules of interaction are suspended? In other words, what if the true
function of the mask is not to be worn, but to be kept hidden?
The opposite trap is to elevate "that through which I speak" into an authentic site of
Truth, so that "something in me deeper than myself, the Truth itself, speaks through me."
This is the Jungian version: the distinction between me Ego and the Self, a much broader
ground of my subjectivity, with the task to progress from my Ego to my true Self.
Against this version, one should assert that that which speaks through me is
fundamentally a lie. (And there is the third, postmodern, temptation, the most dangerous
one: the claim that there is no site of truth, that there are only prosopopeias beneath each
other like levels of the onion, that every truth which speaks through a mask in
prosopopeia is already another prosopopeia.)

The temptation here, of course, is to say that it is not the other through whom I speak, but
that the Other itself speaks through me: the ultimate prosopopeia is the one in which I
myself am the other, the means used by X to speak. Is, then, the key dialectical reversal
apropos prosopopeia the one from the subject talking through others to the subject itself
as the site through which the Other speaks? The shift from me speaking through some
figure of the Other to the I itself as prosopopeia? From "I cannot tell the truth about
myself directly; this most intimate truth is so painful that I can only articulate it through
another, by adopting the mask, talking through the mask, of another entity" to "truth itself
is talking through me"? This reversal involves the dialectical shift from predicate to
subject - from "what I am telling is true" to "truth is talking through me." - And,
furthermore, is this shift also not clearly sexualized? Woman is man’s prosopopea: she is
man’s symptom, she has no substance of her own, she is a mask through which man
speaks (more precisely, as Otto Weininger demonstrated, a mask through which the fallen
nature of man speaks). Women cannot relate to truth as an inherent value, she cannot tell
the truth; however, truth can speak in/through her. The reversal from "I speak the truth"
to "I, the truth, speak" occurs with woman’s identification with the truth: men tell the
truth, while in woman, truth itself speaks.

The "primordial prosopopea" is effectively that of the symbolic order itself, of the subject
(constituting itself through) assuming a symbolic mandate – or, as Lichtenberg put it in
one of his aphorisms: "There is a transcendent ventriloquism that makes people believe
that something that was said on earth came from heaven." In one of the Marx brothers'
films, Groucho, when caught in a lie, answers angrily: "Whom do you believe, your eyes
or my words?" This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the
symbolic order in which the symbolic mask matters more than the direct reality of the
individual who wears this mask. This functioning involves the structure of what Freud
called "fetishist disavowal": "I know very well that things are the way I see them, that the
person in front of me is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully,
since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the law itself which
speaks through him". So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes. This is
where the cynic who believes only hard facts falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in
a way more truth in his words (the words of the institution of law) than in the direct
reality of the person of judge; if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses
the point. This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his les non-dupes errent (those in the
know err): those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic fiction and
continue to believe their eyes only are the ones who err most. What a cynic who believes
only his eyes misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction
structures our (experience of) reality. A corrupted priest who preaches about goodness
may be a hypocrite, but if people endow his words with the authority of the church, they
may instigate them to perform good deeds.

To introduce some order in this conundrum, one should take note of a certain paradox. It
is precisely when "I speak" – when I perceive myself as the agent of my speech - that,
effectively, "the big Other speaks through me," that I am "spoken," since my speech acts
are totally regulated by the symbolic order in which I dwell. And, conversely, the only
way for me to bring to word my subjective position of enunciation, is to let myself be
surprised by what I say, to experience my own words as a case of "it speaks in/through
me." This is what happens in the case of a symptom: in it, my true subjective position
finds a way to articulate itself against my will and intention. The opposition is thus not
directly between "I speak" and "the Other speaks through me": the two are the two sides
of the same coin. When "it speaks" in/through me, it is not the big Other which speaks:
the truth that articulates itself is the truth about the failures, gap and inconsistencies of the
big Other. (One should note here a shift in Lacan: while, for the Lacan of the 1950s, the
Unconscious is the "discourse of the Other," the moment he introduced the key notion of
the "barred Other" and draws its consequences, the Unconscious turns into the discourse
that registers the gaps ands failures of the Other.)

In Charles Russell's The Mask with Jim Carrey (1994), the story of a weak common bank
teller again and again humiliated by his peers and women, who acquires extraordinary
powers when he puts on an old mysterious mask found on a city beach. A series of details
are essential to he story's background. When the mask is thrown on the sea-shore, it sticks
to the decaying slimy remainders of a corpse, bearing witness to what remains of the
"person behind the mask" after he totally identifies with the Mask: a formless slime like
that of Mr Valdemar from E.A. Poe's story when he is resuscitated from death, this
"indivisible remainder" of the Real. Another crucial feature is that the hero, prior to
acquiring the mask, is presented as a compulsive cartoons-watcher on a TV: what
happens to him when he puts on the Mask and when the green wooden Mask takes
possession of him, is that he is able to behave, in "real life," as a cartoon hero (dodging
the bullets, dancing and laughing madly, sticking his eyes and tongue far out of his head
when he is excited) - in short, he becomes "undead," entering the spectral fantasmatic
domain of unconstrained perversion, of "eternal life" in which there is no death (and sex),
in which the plasticity of the bodily surface is no longer constrained by any physical laws
(faces can be stretched indefinitely; I can spit out from my body bullets which were shot
into me; after I fell from a high building, flattened on a side-walk, I simply reassemble
myself and walk away...). (In a nice bit of irony, just before he puts on the mask, the hero
watches on TV a talk show in which a distinguished psychiatrist dr. Arthur Newman,
author of a best-seller The Masks We Wear, presents his standard Freudian theory: "We
all wear masks, metaphorically speaking. We suppress the Id, our darkest desires, and
adopt a more socially acceptable image." What the film demonstrates is the exact
opposite: the Id, our darkest desires, dwell in the masks we put on.) This universe is
inherently compulsive: even those who observe it cannot resist its spell. Suffice it to
recall perhaps the supreme scene of the film in which the hero, wearing his green mask, is
cornered by a large police force (dozens of cars, helicopters): to get out of the deadlock,
he treats the light focused on him as spotlights on a stage and starts to sing and dance on
a crazy Hollywood musical version of Latino seductive song - the policemen are unable
to resist its spell, they also start to move and sing as if the are part of a musical number
choreography (a young policewoman is shedding tears, visibly fighting back the power of
the Mask, but she nonetheless succumbs to its spell and joins the hero in a common
dance-and-song number...). Crucial is here the inherent stupidity of this compulsion: it
stands for the way each of us is caught in the inexplicable spell of idiotic jouissance, like
when we are unable to resist whistling some vulgar popular song whose melody is
haunting us. This compulsion is properly ex-timate: imposed from the outside, yet doing
nothing but realizing our innermost whims - as the hero himself puts it in a desperate
moment: "When I put the mask on, I lose control - I can do anything I want." 'Having
control over oneself' thus in no way simply relies on the absence of obstacles to the
realization of our intentions: I am able to exert control over myself only insofar as some
fundamental obstacle makes it impossible for me to "do anything I want" - the moment
this obstacle falls away, I am caught into a demoniac compulsion, at a whim of
"something in me more than myself." When the Mask - the dead object - comes alive by
way of taking possession of us, its hold on us is effectively that of a "living dead," of a
monstrous automaton imposing itself on us - is the lesson of it not that our fundamental
fantasy, the kernel of our being, is itself such a monstrous Thing, a machine of
jouissance?

This mask is thus the partial object, death drive, at its purest: something that takes over
the subject with its idiotic superego injunction and compels it to act against its conscious
standards, in an obscene way that embarrasses it. More precisely, it is not something that
takes over the subject, since it designates the very emergence of the subject: prior to
putting on the mask, the hero is an individual, a person, the spiritual correlate to his body;
once the body is colonized by the mask, the individual person is transubstantiated into a
subject proper.

This logic of death-drive repetition as a matter of surface, deployed by Deleuze in his

Difference and Repetition, is to be opposed to the Bataillean notion of violent
transgression as the act of tearing-apart the cobweb of appearances and forcing one’s way
into the raw heart of the Real, of its palpitating flesh. Recall the old Catholic strategy to
guard men against the temptation of the flesh: when you see in front of you a voluptuous
feminine body, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades – the dried skin, sagging
breasts… (Or, even better, imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin: raw flesh
and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrements…) Far from enacting a return
to the Real destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the
escape from the Real, the Real announcing itself in the seductive appearance of the naked
body. That is to say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of the sexualized
body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance with is the Real, and
the decaying body which is reality – we take recourse to the decaying body in order to
avoid the deadly fascination of the Real which threatens to draw us into its vortex of
jouissance.
The same goes for contemporary art where we encounter often brutal attempts to 'return
to the real', to remind the spectator (or reader) that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken
him from the sweet dream. This gesture has two main forms which, although opposed,
amount to the same. In literature or cinema, there are (especially in postmodern texts)
self-reflexive reminders that what we are watching is a mere fiction, like the actors on
screen addressing directly us as spectators, thus ruining the illusion of the autonomous
space of the narrative fiction, or the writer directly intervening into the narrative through
ironic comments; in theatre, there are occasional brutal events which awaken us to the
reality of the stage (like slaughtering a chicken on stage). Instead of conferring on these
gestures a kind of Brechtian dignity, perceiving them as versions of extraneation, one
should rather denounce them for what they are: the exact opposite of what they claim to
be - escapes from the Real, desperate attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself, the
Real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle.

Even Lacan himself, in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, comes dangerously close to this
standard version of the "passion of the Real." [2] Do the unexpected echoes between this
seminar and the thought of Georges Bataille, THE philosopher of the passion of the Real,
if there ever was one, not unambiguously point in this direction? Is Lacan's ethical maxim
"do not compromise your desire" (which, one should always bear in mind, was never
used again by Lacan in his later work) not a version of Bataille's injunction "to think
everything to a point that makes people tremble," [3] to go as far as possible – to the
point at which the opposite coincide, at which infinite pain turns into the joy of the
highest bliss (discernible on the photo of the Chinese submitted to the terrifying torture of
being slowly cut to pieces), at which the intensity of erotic enjoyment encounters death,
at which sainthood overlaps with extreme dissolution, at which God himself is revealed
as a cruel Beast? Is the temporal coincidence of Lacan's seminar on the ethics of
psychoanalysis and Bataille's Eroticism more than a mere coincidence? Is Bataille's
domain of the Sacred, of the "accursed part," not his version of what, apropos Antigone,
Lacan deployed as the domain of hate? Does Bataille's opposition of "homogeneity," the
order of exchanges, and "heterogeneity," the order of limitless expenditure, not point
towards Lacan's opposition of the order of symbolic exchanges and the excess of the
traumatic encounter of the Real? "Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock." [4]
And how can Bataille's elevation of the dissolute woman to the status of God not remind
us of Lacan's claim that Woman is one of the names of God? Not to mention Bataille's
term for the experience of transgression – impossible – which is Lacan's qualification of
the Real...

The philosophical background of this notion of the Real is the Nietzschean opposition of
the Apolinical and the Dionysiac: one should take the risk of disturbing the peaceful
Apolinic harmony and penetrate to its savage Dionysiac foundation... In clear contrast to
the space of this opposition, the Lacanian Real is, rather, the monstrous aspect of the
Apoliniac itself, the Apoliniac-gone-awry, exploding in its autonomy.

Robert Pippin is the only one today who heroically defines as his goal to promote
"bourgeois philosophy," i.e., the philosophy of legitimizing and analyzing the
"bourgeois" way of life centered on the notion of autonomous and responsible individuals
leading a safe life within the confines of civil society. The problem, of course, is the
skeleton in the closet of every bourgeois society: Pippin as a Hegelian (THE US
Hegelian) should have known how, for Hegel, the modern bourgeois society could only
have arisen through the mediation of the revolutionary terror (exemplified by Jacobins);
furthermore, Hegel is also aware that, in order to prevent its own death from habituation
(immersion into the life of particular interests), every bourgeois society needs to be
shattered from time to time by war. (Not to mention the obvious case of the XXth century
ethical catastrophes like holocaust and gulag: it would be obscene to legitimize them as
necessary steps on the path to ethical progress.

The problem "can excesses like Auschwitz be justified, economized, as necessary detours
on the road of the progress towards a free society?", can they be aufgehoben as moments
of historical progress, is therefore, from a strict Hegelian perspective, a wrong one: it
presupposes a position of external substantial teleology that it precluded by Hegel. There
is no substantial historical Spirit which in advance weighs the costs and benefits of the
prospect of a historical catastrophe (is the unprecedented peace and prosperity of the
post-WWII Europe worth the price of killing European Jews?): it is only actual men who,
caught in a historical process, generate a catastrophe which then, (can) give(s) birth to
new ethico-political awareness, without any claim that this non-intended result in any
way "justifies" or legitimizes the enormous suffering that led to it. Measured in this way,
NO historical progress is "worth the price": all one can say is that the ultimate outcome of
historical catastrophes is sometimes a higher ethical awareness which one should accept
with humility and memory of the blood spilled on the path to it. Such "blessings in
disguise" are never guaranteed in advance (say, there was no such progress resulting from
the Mongol ruthless destruction of flowering civilizations and cities during their invasion
of Eurasia).

The true legacy of Christianity survived outside the Church as an institution – which,
however, does not mean that it survived in intimate authentic religious experiences which
have no need for the institutional frame; it rather survived in OTHER institutions, from
revolutionary political parties to psychoanalytic societies...

What seems to characterize the Muslim symbolic space is an immediate conflation of

possibility and actuality: what is merely possible is treated (reacted against) as if actually
took place. At the level of sexual interactions, when a man finds himself alone with a
woman, it is assumed that the opportunity was used, that they did it, that the sexual act
took place (which is why sometimes, after finding themselves by accident in such a
situation - caught in an elevator which broke down, etc. -, the Muslim women commit
suicide out of sense of shame). At the level of writing, this is why Muslims are prohibited
to use paper at the toilet: it MAY HAVE BEEN that verses of Quran were written or
printed on it...

The latent dream-thoughts are the material which the dream-work transforms into the
manifest dream. /.../ The only essential thing about dreams is the dream-work that has
influenced the thought-material. We have no right to ignore it in our theory, even though
we may disregard it in certain practical situations. Analytic observation shows further
that the dream-work never restricts itself to translating these thoughts into the archaic or
regressive mode of expression that is familiar to you. In addition, it regularly takes
possession of something else, which is not part of the latent thoughts of the previous day,
but which is the true motif force for the construction of the dream. This indispensable
addition /unentbehrliche Zutat/ is the equally unconscious wish for the fulfillment of
which the content of the dream is given its new form. A dream may thus be any sort of
thing in so far as you are only taking into account the thoughts it represents – a warning,
an intention, a preparation, and so on; but it is always also the fulfillment of an
unconscious wish and, if you are considering it as a product of the dream-work, it is only
that. A dream is therefore never simply an intention, or a warning, but always an
intention, etc., translated into the archaic mode of thought by the help of an unconscious
wish and transformed to fulfill that wish. The one characteristic, the wish-fulfillment, is
the invariable one; the other may vary. It may for its part once more be a wish, in which
case the dream will, with the help of an unconscious wish, represent as fulfilled a latent
wish of the previous day." [5]

Every detail is worth analyzing in this brilliant passage, from its implicit opening motto
"what is good enough for practice – namely the search for the meaning of dreams – is not
good enough for theory," to its concluding redoubling of the wish. Its key insight is, of
course, the "triangulation" of latent dream-thought, manifest dream-content and the
unconscious wish, which limits the scope of – or, rather, directly undermines – the
hermeneutic model of the interpretations of dreams (the path from the manifest dream-
content to its hidden meaning, the latent dream-thought), which runs backwards the path
of the formation of a dream (the transposition of the latent dream-thought into the
manifest dream-content by the dream-work). The paradox is that this dream-work is not
merely a process of masking the dream’s "true message": the dream’s true core, its
unconscious wish, inscribes itself only through and in this very process of masking, so
that the moment we re-translate the dream-content back into the dream-thought expressed
in it, we lose the "true motif force" of the dream – in short, it is the process of masking
itself which inscribes into the dream its true secret. One should therefore turn around the
standard notion of the deeper-and-deeper penetration to the core of the dream: it is not
that we first penetrate from the manifest dream-content to the first-level secret, the latent
dream-thought, and then, in a step further, even deeper, to the dream’s unconscious core,
the unconscious wish. The "deeper" wish is located into the very gap between the latent
dream-thought and manifest dream-content. (A similar procedure is at work in the
metaphoric dimension of everyday language. Let us say I am an editor who wants to
criticize a submitted manuscript; instead of brutally saying "the text needs to be rewritten
so that at least its most stupid parts will disappear," I ironically hint that "the text will
probably need some fumigating" – does this metaphoric substitution not introduce a
much more ominous reference to germs and insects, to killing, etc.?)

NOTES

[1] see Chapter 1 of Slavoj Zizek, The Fright of Real Tears, London: BFI 2001.

[2] Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge 1992.

[3] Michel Surya, Georges Bataille, London: Verso Books 2002, p. 479.

[4] Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, Manchester: Manchester University Press 1985,
p. 154.

[5] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books 1973, p. 261-262.

.• PHILOSOPHY •
.........Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and... Badiou!

.........Slavoj Zizek

INTRODUCTION

One of the unwritten rules of today's academia from France to the US is

the injunction to love Spinoza. Everyone loves him, from the Althusserian
strict "scientific materialists" to Deleuzean schizo-anarchists, from
rationalist critics of religion to the partisans of liberal freedoms and
tolerances, not to mention feminists like Genevieve Lloyd who propose to
decipher the mysterious third type of knowledge in Ethics as feminine
intuitive knowledge surpassing the male analytic understanding... Is it,
then, possible at all not to love Spinoza? Who can be against a lone Jew
who, on the top of it, was excommunicated by the "official" Jewish
community itself? One of the most touching expressions of this love is
how one often attributes to him almost divine capacities - like Pierre
Macherey who (in his otherwise admirable Hegel ou Spinoza), against the
Hegelian critique of Spinoza, claims that one cannot avoid the impression
that Spinoza had already read Hegel and in advance answered his
reproaches... Perhaps, the most appropriate first step to render
problematic this status of Spinoza is to draw attention to the fact that it
is totally incompatible with what is arguably the hegemonic stance in
today's Cultural Studies, that of the ethico-theological "Judaic" turn of
deconstruction best exemplified by the couple Derrida/Levinas - is there
a philosopher more foreign to this orientation than Spinoza? Or, even,
more foreign to the Jewish universe which, precisely, is the universe of
God as radical Otherness, of the enigma of the divine, of the God of
negative prohibitions instead of positive injunctions? Were, then, the
Jewish priests in a way not RIGHT to excommunicate Spinoza?

Yet, instead of engaging in this rather boring academic exercise of

opposing Spinoza and Levinas, what I want to accomplish is a
consciously old-fashioned Hegelian reading of Spinoza - what both
Spinozeans and Levinasians share is radical anti-Hegelianism. My
starting hypothesis is that, in the history of modern thought, the triad of
paganism-Judaism-Christianity repeats itself twice, first as Spinoza-
Kant-Hegel, then as Deleuze-Derrida-Lacan. Deleuze deploys the One-
Substance as the indifferent medium of multitude; Derrida inverts it into
the radical Otherness which differs from itself; finally, in a kind of
"negation of negation," Lacan brings back the cut, the gap, into the One
itself. The point is not so much to play Spinoza and Kant against each
other, thus securing the triumph of Hegel; it is rather to present the
three philosophical positions in all their unheard-of radicality - in a way,
the triad Spinoza-Kant-Hegel DOES encompass the whole of
philosophy...

(This simplified picture should, of course, be further elaborated. What

about the interesting mediate role of Lyotard who passed from paganism
to the celebration of Jewish Otherness? And do we not find in Derrida's
development a shift symmetrical to that of Lyotard, from Hegel back to
Kant? That is to say, in his otherwise unreadable professorial What Is
Neo-Structuralism?, Manfred Frank was right at one point: in his
insistence on the link between Derrida's differance and the Hegelian self-
differentiating movement of the absolute Concept - in the early Derrida,
there is no place for "deconstruction as justice" in the sense of justice-to-
come, of justice as the the "indeconstructible condition of
deconstruction," of the Messianic promise of total redemption... One of
the commonplaces about Lacan is that the same goes also for him: the
Lacan of the early 1950s was Hegelian (under the influence of Kojeve and
Hyppolite, of course), often directly designates the analyst as the figure of
the Hegelian philosopher, the work of analysus as following the Hegelian
"cunning of reason," the end of analysis as "absolute knowledge," the
mediation of all particular content in the universal symbolic medium,
etc.; in clear contrast, the "Lacan of the Real" asserts some traumatic
core of the Real which forever resists being integrated into the Symbolic -
and he does this by way of linking the Freudian das Ding with the
Kantian Thing-in-itself. 1 We can clearly discern here the contours of the
Lacan of symbolic castration: the Thing is prohibited, and this
prohibition, far from thwarting desire, sustains it - in short, the symbolic
order functions like Kant's transcendental screen through which renders
reality accessible and simultaneously prevents our direct access to it?

Seminar XI, Lacan struggled to overcome this Kantian horizon - the

clearest indication of it is his reactualization of the concept of drive.
Drive functions beyond symbolic castration, as an inherent detour,
topological twist, of the Real itself - and Lacan's path from desire to drive
is the path from Kant to Hegel. This shift in late Lacan from the
"transcendental" logic (symbolic castration as the ultimate horizon of our
experience, emptying the place of the Thing and thus opening up the
space for our desire) to the dimension "beyond castration," i.e., to a
position which claims that, "beyond castration," there is not only the
abyss of the Night of the Thing which swallows us, also has direct
political consequences: the "transcendental" Lacan is obviously the
"Lacan of democracy" (the empty place of Power for whose temporary
occupancy multiple political subjects compete, against the "totalitarian"
subject who claims to act directly for the Other's jouissance), while Lacan
"beyond castration" points towards a post-democratic politics. - There are
thus three phases in the relationship of Lacan towards the tension
between Kant and Hegel: from the universal-Hegelian self-mediation in
the totality of the Symbolic, he passes to the Kantian notion of the
transcendent Thing which resists this mediation, and then, in an
additional twist, he transposes the gap that separates all signifying
traces from the Otherness into the immanence itself, as its inherent cut.)

SPINOZA

So what is Spinoza? He is effectively the philosopher of Substance, and

at a precise historical moment: AFTER Descartes. For that reason, he is
able to draw all (unexpected, for most of us) consequences from it.
Substance means, first of all, that there is no mediation between the
attributes: each attribute (thoughts, bodies...) is infinite in itself, it has
no outer limit where it would touch another attribute - "substance" is the
very name for this absolutely neutral medium of the multitude of
attributes. This lack of mediation is the same as the lack of subjectivity,
because subject IS such a mediation: it ex-sists in/through what
Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, called the "dark precursor," the mediator
between the two different series, the point of suture between them. So
what is missing in Spinoza is the elementary "twist" of dialectical
inversion which characterizes negativity, the inversion by means of
which the very renunciation to desire turns into desire of renunciation,
etc. What is unthinkable for him is what Freud called "death drive": the
idea that conatus is based on a fundamental act of self-sabotaging.
Spinoza, with his assertion of conatus, of every entity's striving to persist
and strengthen its being and, in this way, striving for happiness, remains
within the Aristotelian frame of what a good life is - what is outside his
scope is the what Kant calls "categorical imperative," an unconditional
thrust that parasitizes upon a human subject without any regard for its
well-being, "beyond the pleasure-principle," and that, for Lacan, is the
name of desire at its purest.

The first philosophical consequence of this notion of Substance is the

motif on which Deleuze insists so much: the univocity of being; among
other things, this univocity means that the mechanisms of establishing
ontological links which Spinoza describes are thoroughly NEUTRAL with
regard to their "good" or "bad" effects. Spinoza thus avoids both traps of
the standard approach: he neither dismisses the mechanism which
constitutes a multitude as the source of irrational destructive mob, nor
does he celebrate it as the source of altruistic self-overcoming and
solidarity. Of course, he was deeply and painfully aware of the
destructive potential of the "multitude" - recall THE big political trauma
of his life, a wild mob lynching de Witt brothers, his political allies;
however, he was aware that the noblest collective acts are generated by
exactly the same mechanism - in short, democracy and a lynching mob
have the same source. It is with regard to this neutrality that the gap
which separates Negri and Hardt from Spinoza becomes palpable: in The
Empire, we find a celebration of multitude as the force of resistance,
while in Spinoza, the concept of multitude qua crowd is fundamentally
ambiguous: multitude is resistance to the imposing One, but, at the
same time, it designates what we call "mob," a wild, "irrational" explosion
of violence which, through imitatio afecti, feeds on itself and self-propels
itself. This profound insight of Spinoza gets lost in today's ideology of
multitude: the thorough "undecidability" of the crowd - "crowd"
designates a certain mechanism which engenders social link, and THIS
VERY SAME mechanism which supports, say, the enthusiastic formation
of social solidarity, also supports the explosive spread of racist violence.
What the "imitation of affects" introduces is the notion of trans-individual
circulation and communication: as Deleuze later developed in a
Spinozean vein, affects are not something that belongs to a subject and
is then passed over to another subject; affects function at the pre-
individual level, as free-floating intensities which belong to no one and
circulate at a level "beneath" intersubjectivity. This is what is so new
about imitatio afecti: the idea that affects circulate DIRECTLY, as what
psychoanalysis calls "partial objects."

The next philosophical consequence is the thorough rejection of

negativity: each entity strives towards its full actualization - every
obstacle comes from outside. In short, since every entity endeavors to
persist in its own being, nothing can be destroyed from within, for all
change must come from without. What Spinoza excludes with his
rejection of negativity is the very symbolic order, since, as we have
learned already from Saussure, the minimal definition of the symbolic
order is that every identity is reducible to a bundle (faisceau - the same
root as in Fascism!) of differences: the identity of signifier resides solely
in its difference(s) from other signifier(s). What this amounts to is that
the absence can exert a positive causality - only within a symbolic
universe is the fact that the dog did not bark an event... This is what
Spinoza want to dispense with - all that he admits is a purely positive
network of causes-effects in which by definition an absence cannot play
any positive role. Or, to put it in yet another way: Spinoza is not ready to
admit into the order of ontology what he himself, in his critique of the
anthropomorphic notion of god, describes as a false notion which just
fills in the lacunae in our knowledge - say, an object which, in its very
positive existence, just gives body to a lack. For him, any negativity is
"imaginary," the result of our anthropomorphic limited false knowledge
which fails to grasp the actual causal chain - what remains outside his
scope is a notion of negativity which would be precisely obfuscated by
our imaginary (mis)cognition. While the imaginary (mis)cognition is, of
course, focused on lacks, these are always lacks with regard to some
positive measure (from our imperfection with regard to god, to our
incomplete knowledge of nature); what eludes it is a POSITIVE notion of
lack, a "generative" absence.

It is this assertion of the positivity of Being which grounds Spinoza's

radical equation of power and right: justice means that every entity is
allowed to freely deploy its inherent power-potentials, i.e., the amount of
justice due to me equals my power. Spinoza's ultimate thrust is here
anti-legalistic: the model of political impotence is for him the reference to
an abstract law which ignores the concrete differential network and
relationship of forces. A "right" is for Spinoza always a right to "do," to act
upon things according to one's nature, not the (judicial) right to "have,"
to possess things. It is precisely this equation of power and right which,
in the very last page of his Tractatus Politicus, Spinoza evokes as the key
argument for the "natural" inferiority of women:

/.../ if by nature women were equal to men, and were equally distinguished by force of
character and ability, in which human power and therefore human right chiefly consist;
surely among nations so many and different some would be found, where both sexes
rule alike, and others, where men are ruled by women, and so brought up, that they
can make less use of their abilities. And since this is nowhere the case, one may assert
with perfect propriety, that women have not by nature equal right with men. 2

Rather than score easy points with such passages, one should oppose
here Spinoza to the standard bourgeois liberal ideology, which would
publicly guarantee to women the same legal status as to men, relegating
their inferiority to a legally irrelevant "pathological" fact (and, in fact, all
great bourgeois anti-feminists from Fichte up to Otto Weininger were
always careful to emphasize that, "of course," this does not mean that
the inequality of sexes should be translated into inequality in the eyes of
the law...). Furthermore, one should read this Spinozean equation of
power and right against the background of Pascal's famous pensee:
"Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make
might obey right, they have made right obey might. As they could not
fortify justice they have justified force, so that right and might live
together and peace reigns, the sovereign good." 3 Crucial in this passage
is the underlying FORMALIST logic: the FORM of justice matters more
than its content - the form of justice should be maintained even if it is,
as to its content, the form of its opposite, of injustice. And, one might
add, this discrepancy between form and content is not just the result of
particular unfortunate circumstances, but constitutive of the very notion
of justice: justice is "in itself," in its very notion, the form of injustice, i.e.
a "justified force." Usually, when we are dealing with a fake trial in which
the outcome is fixed in advance by political and power interests, we
speak of a ãtravesty of justice" - it pretends to be justice, while it is just a
display of raw power or corruption posing as justice. What, however, is
justice is "as such," in its very notion, a travesty? Is this not what Pascal
implies when he concludes, in a resigned way, that if power cannot come
to justice, then justice should come to power?

Kant gets involved into a similar predicament when he distinguishes

between the "ordinary" evil (the violation of morality on behalf of some
"pathological" motivation, like greed, lust, ambition, etc.), the "radical"
evil, and the "diabolical" evil. It may seem that we are dealing with a
simple linear graduation: "normal" evil, more "radical" evil, and, finally,
the unthinkable "diabolical" evil. However, upon a closer look, it becomes
clear that the three species are not at the same level, i.e., that Kant
confuses different principles of classification. 4 "Radical" evil does not
designate a specific type of evil acts, but an a priori propensity of the
human nature (to act egotistically, to give preference to pathological
motivations over universal ethical duty) which opens up the very space
for "normal" evil acts, i.e., which roots them in human nature. In
contrast to it, "diabolical" evil does designate a specific type of evil acts:
acts which are not motivated by any pathological motivation, but are
done "just for the sake of it," elevating evil itself into an apriori non-
pathological motivation - something akin to Poe's "imp of perversity."
While Kant claims that "diabolical evil" cannot actually occur (it is not
possible for a human being to elevate evil itself into a universal ethical
norm), he nonetheles asserts that one should posit it as an abstract
possibility. Interestingly enough, the concrete case he mentions (in Part I
of his Metaphysics of Mores) is that of the judicial regicide, the murder of
a king executed as a punishment pronounced by a court: Kant's claim is
that, in contrast to a simple rebellion in which the mob kills only the
person of a king, the judicial process which condemns to death the king
(this embodiment of the rule of law) destroys from within the very form of
the (rule of) law, turning it into a terrifying travesty - which is why, as
Kant put it, such an act is an "indelible crime" which cannot ever be
pardoned. However, in a second step, Kant desperately argues that in the
two historical cases of such an act (under Cromwell and in the 1973
France), we were dealing just with a mob taking revenge... Why this
oscillation and classificatory confusion in Kant? Because, if he were to
assert the actual possibility of "diabolical evil," he would found it
impossible to distinguish it from the Good - since both acts would be
non-pathologically motivated, the travesty of justice would become
indistinguishable from justice itself. And the shift from Kant to Hegel is
simply the shift from this Kantian inconsistency to Hegel's reckless
assuming of the identity of "diabolical" evil with the Good itself. Far from
involving a clear classification, the distinction between "radical" and
"diabolical" evil is thus the distinction between the general irreducible
propensity of human nature and a series of particular acts (which,
although impossible, are thinkable). Why, then, does Kant need this
excess over the "normal" pathological evil? Because, without it, his
theory would amount to no more than the traditional notion of the
conflict between good and evil as the conflict of two tendencies in human
nature: the tendency to act freely and autonomously, and the tendency
to act out of pathological egotistic motivations 5 - from this perspective,
the choice between good and evil is not itself a free choice, since we only
act in a truly free way when we act autonomously, for the sake of duty
(when we follow pathological motivations, we are enslaved to our nature).
However, this goes against the fundamental thrust of the Kantian ethics,
according to which the very choice of evil is an autonomous free decision.

Back to Pascal: is his version of the unity of right and might not
homologous to Nietzsche's amor fati and eternal return of the same?
Since, in this unique life of mine, I am constrained by the burden of the
past weighing on me, the assertion of my unconditional will to power is
always thwarted by that which, in the finitude of being thrown into a
particular situation, I was forced to assume as given. Consequently, the
only way to effectively assert my will to power is to transpose myself into
a state in which I am able to freely will, assert as the outcome of my will,
what I otherwise experience as imposed on me by external fate; and the
only way to accomplish this is to imagine that, in the FUTURE "returns
of the same," repetitions of my present predicament, I am fully ready to
assume it freely. However, does this reasoning not also conceal the same
formalism as that of Pascal? Is its hidden premise not "if I cannot freely
chose my reality and thus overcome the necessity which determines me,
I should formally elevate this necessity itself into something freely
assumed by me"? Or, as Wagner, Nietzshe's great nemesis, put it in The
Twilight of Gods: "Fear of the gods' downfall grieves me not, / since now I
will it so! / What once I resolved in despair, / in the wild anguish of
dissension, / now I will freely perform, gladly and gaily." And does the
Spinozean position not rely on the same resigned identification? Is
therefore Spinoza not at the extreme opposite of the Jewish-Levinasian-
Derridean-Adornian hope of the final Redemption, of the idea that this
world of ours cannot be "all there is," the last and ultimate Truth, that
we should stick to the promise of some Messianic Otherness?

The final feature in which all the previous ones culminate is Spinoza's
radical suspension of any "deontological" dimension, i.e., of what we
usually understand by the term "ethical" (norms which proscribe us how
we should act when we have a choice) - in a book called Ethics, which is
an achievement in itself. In his famous reading of the Fall, Spinoza
claims God had to utter the prohibition "You should not eat the apple
from the Tree of Knowledge!" because our capacity to know the true
causal connection was limited: for those who know, one should say:
"Eating from the Tree of Knowledge is dangerous for your health." This
complete translation of injunction into cognitive statements again
desubjectivizes the universe, implying that true freedom is not the
freedom of choice but the true insight into necessities which determine
us - here is the key passage from his Theologico-Political Treatise:

/.../ the affirmations and the negations of God always involve necessity or truth; so
that, for example, if God said to Adam that He did not wish him to eat of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil, it would have involved a contradiction that Adam should
have been able to eat of it, and would therefore have been impossible that he should
have so eaten, for the Divine command would have involved an eternal necessity and
truth. But since Scripture nevertheless narrates that God did give this command to
Adam, and yet that none the less Adam ate of the tree, we must perforce say that God
revealed to Adam the evil which would surely follow if he should eat of the tree, but did
not disclose that such evil would of necessity come to pass. Thus it was that Adam took
the revelation to be not an eternal and necessary truth, but a law - that is, an ordinance
followed by gain or loss, not depending necessarily on the nature of the act performed,
but solely on the will and absolute power of some potentate, so that the revelation in
question was solely in relation to Adam, and solely through his lack of knowledge a law,
and God was, as it were, a lawgiver and potentate. From the same cause, namely, from
lack of knowledge, the Decalogue in relation to the Hebrews was a law. /.../ We
conclude, therefore, that God is described as a lawgiver or prince, and styled just,
merciful, etc., merely in concession to popular understanding, and the imperfection of
popular knowledge; that in reality God acts and directs all things simply by the
necessity of His nature and perfection, and that His decrees and volitions are eternal
truths, and always involve necessity. 6

Two levels are opposed here, that of imagination/opinions and that of

true knowledge. The level of imagination is anthropomorphic: we are
dealing with a narrative about agents giving orders that we are free to
obey or disobey, etc.; god himself is here the highest prince who
dispenses mercy. The true knowledge, on the contrary, delivers the
totally non-anthropomorphic causal nexus of impersonal truths. One is
tempted to say that Spinoza here out-Jews Jews themselves: he extends
iconoclasm to man himself - not only "do not paint god in man's image,"
but "do not paint man himself in man's image." In other words, Spinoza
moves here a step beyond the standard warning not to project onto
nature human notions like goal, mercy, good an evil, etc. - we should not
use them to conceive man itself. The key words in the quoted passage
are: "solely through the lack of knowledge" - the whole
"anthropomorphic" domain of law, injunction, moral command, etc., is
based on our ignorance. What Spinoza thus rejects is the necessity of
what Lacan calls "Master Signifier," the reflexive signifier which fills in
the very lack of the signifier. Spinoza's own supreme example of "God" is
here crucial: when conceived as a mighty person, god merely embodies
our ignorance of the true causality. One should recall here notions like
"flogiston" or Marx's "Asiatic mode of production" or, as a matter of fact,
today's popular "postindustrial society" - notions which, while they
appear to designate a positive content, merely signal our ignorance.
Spinoza's unheard-of endeavor is to think ethics itself outside the
"anthropomorphic" morality categories of intentions, commandments,
etc. - what he proposes is stricto sensu an ontological ethics, an ethics
deprived of the deontological dimension, an ethics of "is" without "ought."
(What, then, is the price paid for this suspension of the ethical
dimension of commandment, of the Master Signifier? The psychoanalytic
answer is clear: superego. Superego is on the side of knowledge; like
Kafka's law, it wants nothing from you, it is just there if you come to it.
This is the command operative in the warning we see everywhere today:
"Smoking may be dangerous to your health." Nothing is prohibited, you
are just informed of a causal link. Along the same lines, the injunction
"Only have sex if you really want to enjoy it!" is the best way to sabotage
enjoyment...).

Notes:

1 It was Bernard Bass who articulated in detail such a Kantian reading

of Lacan - see Bernard Baas, De la Chose a l'objet, Leuven: Pieters 1998.

2 Baruch Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise,

New York: Dover Publications 1951, p. 387.

3 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1965, p. 51.

4 I rely here on Alenka Zupancic, The Ethics of the Real, London: Verso
2001.

5 According to Kant, if one finds oneself alone in the sea with another
survivor of the sinken ship, near a floating piece of wood which can keep
afloat only one person, moral considerations are no longer valid - there is
no moral law preventing me from fighting to death with the other
survivor for the place on the raft, I can engage in it with moral impunity.
It is here that, perhaps, one encounters the limit of the Kantian ethics:
what about someone who would willingly sacrifice himself in order to give
the other person a chance to survive - and, furthermore, is ready to do it
for no pathological reasons? Since there is no moral law commanding me
to do this, does this mean that such an act has no ethical status proper?
Does this strange exception not demonstrate that the ruthless egotism,
the care for personal survival and gain, is the silent "pathological"
presupposition of the Kantian ethics - i.e., that the Kantean ethical
edifice can only maintain itself if we silently presuppose the
"pathological" image of man as a ruthless utilitarian egotist?

6 Spinoza, op.cit., p. 63-65.

KANT

It is at this precise point that Kant, the Kantian break, sets in. What
Spinoza and Kant share is the idea that virtue is its own reward, and
needs no other: they both reject with contempt the popular idea that our
good deeds will be renumerated and our bad deeds punished in the
afterlife. However, Kant's thesis is that the Spinozean position of
knowledge without deontological dimension of an unconditional Ought is
impossible to sustain: there is an irreducible crack in the edifice of
Being, and it is at this crack that the "deontological" dimension of
"Ought" intervenes - the "Ought" fills in the incompleteness of "Is," of
Being. When Kant says that he reduced the domain of knowledge in
order to make space for religious faith, he is to be taken quite literally, in
the radically anti-Spinozist way: from the Kantian view, Spinoza's
position appears as a nightmarish vision of subjects reduced to
marionettes. What, exactly, does a marionette stand for - as a subjective
stance? In Kant, we find the term "Marionette" in a mysterious
subchapter of his Critique of Practical Reason entitled "Of the Wise
Adaptation of Man's Cognitive Faculties to His Practical Vocation", in
which he endeavours to answer the question of what would happen to us
if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an sich:

... instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations
and in which, after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God
and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. /.../ Thus
most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from
hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the
person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist
at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be
changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would
gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures. 1

So, for Kant, the direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us
of the very "spontaneity" which forms the kernel of transcendental
freedom: it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today's
terms, into "thinking machines." - The basic gesture of Kant's
transcendental turn is thus to invert the obstacle into a positive
condition. In the standard Leibnizean ontology, we, finite subjects, can
act freely IN SPITE OF our finitude, since freedom is the spark which
unites us with the infinite God; in Kant, this finitude, our separation
from the Absolute, is the POSITIVE condition of our freedom. In short,
the condition of impossibility is the condition of possibility. In this sense,
Susan Neiman is right to remark that "the worry that fueled debates
about the difference between appearance and reality was not the fear
that the world might not turn out to be the way it seems to us - but
rather the fear that it would." 2 This fear is ultimately ethical: the closure
of the gap between appearance and reality would deprive us of our
freedom and thus of our ethical dignity. What this means is that the gap
between noumenal reality and appearance is redoubled: one has to
distinguish between noumenal reality ãin itself" and the way noumenal
reality APPEARS within the domain of appearance (say, in our experience
of freedom and the moral Law). This tiny edge which distinguishes the
two is the edge between sublime and horrible: God is sublime for us,
from our finite perspective - experienced in itself, it would turn into a
mortifying horror.

However, one should be very careful not to miss what Kant is aiming at.
In a first approach, it may appear that he merely assumes a certain place
prefigured by Spinoza: unable to sustain the non-anthropomorphic
position of true knowledge, he proclaims the substantial order of Being
inaccessible, out of bounds for our reason, and thus opens up the space
for morality. (And, incidentally, is the same stance not clearly discernible
in today's neo-Kantian reactions to biogenetics? Basically, what
Habermas is saying is: although we now know that our dispositions
depend on meaningless genetic contingency, let us pretend and act as if
this is not the case, so that we can maintain our sense of dignity and
autonomy - the paradox is here that autonomy can only be maintained
by prohibiting the access to the blind natural contingency which
determines us, i.e., ultimately, by LIMITING our autonomy and freedom
of scientific intervention.) However, things are more complex. In his ,
Foucault introduced the notion of "empirico-transcendental doublet": in
the modern philosophy of subjectivity, the subject is by definition split
between an inner-worldly entity, empirical person, object of positive
sciences and political administration, and the transcendental subject,
the constitutive agent of the world itself - the problem is the umbilical
cord that links the two in an irreducible way. (And it is against this
background that one can measure Heidegger's achievement: he grounded
the "transcendental" dimension (Dasein as the site of the opening of the
world) in the very finitude of man. Mortality is no longer a stain, an index
of factual limitation, of the otherwise ideal-eternal Subject, it is the very
source of its unique place. There is no longer any place here for the neo-
Kantian (Cassirer) assertion of man as inhabiting two realms, the eternal
realm of ideal values and the empirical realm of nature; there is no
longer any place even for Husserl's morbid imagine of the whole of
humanity succumbing to a pest and the transcendental ego surviving it.)
One should insist here on the split between this doublet and the pre-
Kantian metaphysical problematic of particular/sensual/animal and
universal/rational/divine aspect of man: the Kantian transcendental is
irreducibly rooted in the empirical/temporal/finite, it is the trans-
phenomenal AS IT APPEARS WITHIN THE FINITE HORIZON OF
TEMPORALITY. And this dimension of the transcendental as opposed to
noumenal is what is missing in Spinoza.

Consequently, do we not find the distinction between how things appear

to me and how things EFFECTIVELY appear to me in the very heart of
Kant's transcendental turn? The phenomenal reality is not simply the
way things appear to me, it designates the way things "really" appear to
me, the way they constitute phenomenal reality, as opposed to a mere
subjective illusory appearance. Consequently, when I misperceive some
object in my phenomenal reality, when I mistake it for a different object,
what is wrong is that I am not aware not of how things "really are in
themselves," but of how they ãreally appear" to me. One cannot
overestimate the importance of this Kantian move - ultimately,
philosophy as such is Kantian, it should be read from the vantage point
of the Kantian revolution: not as a naive attempt at "absolute
knowledge," at a total description of the entire reality, but as the work of
deploying the horizon of pre-understanding presupposed in every
engagement with entities in the world. It is only with Kant (with his
notion of the transcendental) that true philosophy begins: what we had
before was a simple global ontology, the knowledge about All, not yet the
notion of the transcendental-hermeneutic horizon of the World.
Consequently, the basic task of the post-Kantian thought was "only" to
think Kant to the end. This is what, among others, Heidegger's intention
was in Being and Time: to read the history of ontology (Descartes,
Aristotle) backwards from Kant - say, to interpret Aristotle's physics as
the hermeneutic deployment of what being, life, etc. meant for the
Greeks. (Later, unfortunately, Heidegger renounced this idea of pursuing
to the end the Kantian breakthrough, dismissing Kant's transcendental
turn to a further step in the course of the subjectivist forgetting of Being.)
And the ultimate irony is that Deleuze was in a way fully aware of this
fact: in his 1978 lectures on Kant, he claims that, for Kant, "there is no
longer an essence behind appearance, there is rather the sense or non-
sense of what appears"; what this bears witness to is "a radically new
atmosphere of thought, to the point where I can say that in this respect
we are all Kantians." 3

HEGEL

So what does Hegel bring to this constellation? Let us approach this

question through an unexpected detour: a profoundly Hegelian motif of
Deleuze, his reversal of the standard relationship between a problem and
its solution(s), his affirmation of an irreducible EXCCESS of the problem
over its solution(s), which is the same as the excess of the virtual over its
actualizations:

In Deleuze's approach the relation between well-posed explanatory problems and their
true or false solutions is the epistemological counterpart of the ontological relation
between the virtual and the actual. Explanatory problems would be the counterpart of
virtual multiplicities since, as he says, 'the virtual possesses the reality of a task to be
performed or a problem to be solved'. Individual solutions, on the other hand, would be
the counterpart of actual individual beings: 'An organism is nothing if not the solution
to a problem, as are each of its differenciated organs, such as the eye which solves a
light problem. 4

The philosophical consequences of this "intimate relation between

epistemology and ontology" are crucial: the traditional opposition
between epistemology and ontology should be left behind. It is no longer
that we, subjects of a scientific investigation, engaged in the difficult
path of getting to know objective reality, gradually approaching it,
formulate and solve problems, while reality just IS out there, fully
constituted and given, unconcerned by our slow progress. In a properly
Hegelian way, our painful progress of knowledge, our confusions, our
search for solutions - that is to say: precisely that which seems to
SEPARATE us from the way reality really is out there - is already the
innermost constituent of reality itself. When we try to establish the
function of some organ in an animal, we are thereby repeating the
"objective" process itself through which the animal "invented" this organ
as the solution of some problem. Our process of approaching constituted
objective reality repeats the virtual process of Becoming of this reality
itself. The fact that we cannot ever "fully know" reality is thus not a sign
of the limitation of our knowledge, but the sign that reality itself is
"incomplete," open, an actualization of the underlying virtual process of
Becoming. 5
Such a reflective twist by means of which the subject assumes the
inexistence of the big Other defines the subjective position of the analyst,
what Lacan calls the "discourse of the analyst" - and he does give a clear
hint that this, effectively, is Hegel's position. In his Seminar XVII
(L'envers de la psychanalyse), Lacan, in an apparently inconsistent way,
first designates Hegel as the "most sublime of hysterics," then, a couple
of pages later, as an exemplary figure of the Master, and, finally, a dozen
or so pages later, as the model of the discourse of university 6 - and it is
easy to see how each of these designations is justifiedn in its own terms:
Hegel's system is the extreme case of the all-encompassing university
Knowledge, allocating each particular topic to its own proper place; if
there ever was a figure of the towering Master in the history of
philosophy, it is Hegel; and Hegel's dialectical procedure can best be
determined as the permanent hystericization - hysterical questioning - of
the hegemonic figure of the Master. So which of these three positions is
the "real" Hegel? The answer is obvious: the fourth one, the discours of
the analyst - as if to point in this direction, Lacan - in this seminar
dedicated to the four discourses - applies on Hegel the first three
positions (Master, Hysteric, University), leaving out the fourth position.
Do we not get here a clear case of the logic of the borrowed kettle,
mentioned by Freud in order to render the strange procedure of the
dreams, namely the enumeration of mutually exclusive answers to a
reproach (that I returned to a friend a broken kettle): (1) I never borrowed
a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was
already broken when I got it from you? For Freud, such an enumeration
of inconsistent arguments of course confirms per negationem what it
endeavors to deny: that I returned you a broken kettle - or, in Hegel's
case, the he occupies the position of the analyst. A further proof of this
fact is Lacan's claim that the discourse of the analyst is not simply one
among the four - it is simultaneously a discourse which emerges when
we pass from one to another discourse (say, from that of the Master to
that of the University). If, then, the discourse of the analyst is located in
the very passage, shift, from one to another discourse, is the true
position of Hegel, who is a Master, a Hysteric, and the agent of the
discourse of University, not that of an incessant passage between these
three - that is to say, that of the analyst?

It is here that we can clearly pinpoint what is arguably Deleuze's crucial

misunderstanding of Hegel's move against/beyond Kant: Deleuze
continues to read Hegel in a traditional way, as the one who returned
from Kant to absolute metaphysics which articulates the totally self-
transparent and fully actualized logical structure of Being. Already in
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze interpretes Kant's transcendental
Ideas from the perspective of his notion of "problematicity" as the excess
of the question over answers to it: a transcendental Idea designates not
an ideal, but a problem, a question, a task, which no answer, no
actualization, can fully meet. So Deleuze can only read the excess of the
problem over its solutions as an anti-Hegelian motif, insofar as he
perceives Hegel as the one who as it were filled in the gaps of the Kantian
system and passed from Kant's openness and indeterminacy to the
notion's complete actualization/determination. 7 What, however, if Hegel
does not ADD any positive content to Kant, does not fill in the gaps, what
if he just accomplishes a shift of perspective from which the problem
already appears at its own solution? What if, for Hegel, "absolute
Knowing" is not the absurd position of "knowing everything," but the
insight into how the path towards Truth is already Truth itself, into how
the Absolute is precisely - to put it in Deleuzean terms - the virtuality of
the eternal process of actualization?

We are thereby in the very heart of the problem of freedom: the only way
to save freedom is through this short-circuit between epistemology and
ontology - the moment we reduce our process of knowledge to a process
external to the thing itself, to an endless approximation to the thing,
freedom is lost, because "reality" is conceived of as a completed,
ontologically fully constituted, positive order of Being. The inconsistency
of Kant apropos freedom is here crucial in its structural necessity. On
the one hand, the subject is free in the noumenal sense - its freedom
attests to the fact that it does not belong to the domain of phenomenal
enchainment of causes and effects, that it is capable of absolute
spontaneity; on the other hand, spontaneity is transcendental, not
transcendent, it is the way the subject appears to itself - as we learn in
the final paragraphs of the Part I of Critique of Practical Reason, it may
well be that, in itself, at the noumenal level, we are just marionettes in
the hands of the all-powerful God. The only solution is here the Hegelo-
Deleuzian (sic!) one: to transpose the incompleteness, openness (the
surplus of the virtual over the actual, of the problem over its solution(s)),
into the thing itself.

It is in this precise sense that one should agree with Brecht who once
wrote that there is no dialectics without humor: the dialectical reversals
are deeply connected to comical twists and unexpected shifts of
perspective. In his book on jokes, Freud refers to the well-known story of
a middleman who tries to convince a young man to marry a woman he
represents; his strategy is to reinterptrete every objection into a praise.
When the man says "But the woman is ugly!", he answers: "So you will
not have to worry that she will deceive you with others!" "She is poor!"
"So she will be used not to spend too much of your money!", and so on,
until, finally, when a man formulates a reproach impossible to
reinterprete in this way, the middleman explodes: "But what do you
want? Perfection? Nobody is totally without a fault!" 8 Would it not also
be possible to discern in this joke the underlying structure of the
legitmization of a Real Socialist regime? "There is not enough meat and
rich food in the stores!" "So you don't have to worry about getting fat and
suffering a heart attack!" "There is not enough interesting theatrical and
cinema performances or good books available!" "Does this not enable you
to cultivate all the more the art of intense social life, visiting friends and
neighbors?" "The secret police exerts total control over my life!" "So you
can just relax and lead a life safe from worries!", and so on, till... "But the
air is so polluted from the nearby factory that all my children have life-
threatening lung diseases!" "What do you want? No system is without a
fault!"

So what, precisely, is the thin line which divides tragedy from comedy,
the final tragic insight from the final twist of a joke? In many a good joke,
the unexpected final twist occurs when the position of enunciation itself
falls into the enunciated content - recall the well-known story about a
Pole and a Jew sharing the same train compartment, with the Pole
starting the conversation by asking the Jew: "Tell me, how do you Jews
manage to squeeze the last bit of money from the people?" "OK," replies
the Jew, "but this will cost you 10 $!" Upon getting the money, the Jews
goes on: "Well, at midnight, you go to the cemetery, you burn there a fire
of special wood..." "What wood?" eagerly asks the Pole. "This will call you
another 10$!" snaps back the Jew, and so on endlessly, till the Pole
explodes: "But there is no final secret, no end to this story, you are just
trying to squeeze all the money from me..." "Now you see how we Jews..."
replies the Jew calmly. In short, what the poor Pole, eager to learn and
focused to the secret to which he expected to be initiated, forgot to take
into account was the very process into which he was involved while
searching for the secret. The question is: what would make such a story
(if not a tragedy proper, then at least) a non-joke, a story with a painful
final twist which brings no release in laughter? Would it be enough for
the Pole himself to come to the insight, so that, at a certain moment, HE
exclaims: "My god, now I know how you Jews..."? Or would a simple
more dramatic twist be sufficient - imagine the Pole deprived of his last
penny, his family ruined, he himself lying ill and anouncing that he no
longer has any money, when the Jew (caricaturized as the evil figure)
tells him with a vicious smile: "There is no secret! I just wanted to taught
you a lesson and really show you how we Jews..."? Or, to ask the same
question the other way around, since the Oedipus story involves a
homologous twist (in his search, the hero forgets to include himself),
what change would suffice to make it a comedy? One can effectively
imagine a similar story along the lines of The Marriage of Figaro, with the
hero all of a sudden discovering that the older rich widow he married
because of her money is effectively his own mother... Would it not be
possible to retell in this way the elementary story of Christianity, namely
as a joke with the final unexpected twist? A believer is complaining: "I
was promised contact with god, divine grace, but I am now totally alone,
abandoned by god, destitude, suffering, with only a miserable death
awaiting me!" The divine voice then answers him: "You see, now you are
effectively one with god, with Christ suffering on the cross!"

If we take into account the radical consequences of this elementary

dialectical move, then the Hegelian "absolute knowing" itself appears in a
new light: no longer as a madly megalomaniac claim by the individual
called "Hegel" who, in 1820s, stated that he "knows and is able to deduce
everything there is to know," but as an attempt at delineating the radical
closure/finitude of a knowledge grounded in its historical constellation.
In "absolute knowing," the limitations of our knowledge are correlated to
the limitations of the known constellation itself, its "absolute" character
thus emerging from the intersection of these two limitations.

Hegel's stance is thus not any kind of "mediatior" between the two
extremes, Spinoza and Kant; on the contrary, from a truly Hegelian
perspective, the problem with Kant is that he remains all too Spinozean:
the crack-less, seamless, positivity of Being is just transposed into the
inaccessible In-Itself. In other words, from the Hegelian standpoint, this
very fascination with the horrible Noumenon in itself is the ultimate lure:
the thing to do here is not to rehabilitate the old Leibnizean metaphysics,
even in the guise of heroically forcing one's way into the noumenal "heart
of darkness" and confronting its horror, but to transpose this absolute
gap which separates us from the noumenal Absolute into the Absolute
itself. So when Kant asserts the limitation of our knowledge, Hegel does
not answer him by claiming that he can overcome the Kantian gap and
gain access to Absolute Knowledge in the style of a pre-critical
metaphysics; what he claims is that the Kantian gap already IS the
solution: the Being itself is incomplete. THIS is what Hegel's motto "one
should conceive the Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject"
means: "subject" is the name for a crack in the edifice of Being.

THE TORSION OF MEANING

The standard topos of the critique of idealism is that, at the point where
the conceptual deployment/presentation (logos) fails, touches its limit, a
narrative (mythos) has to intervene - this holds from Plato through
Schelling (who, in his Weltalter, aimed at supplementing the Hegelian
conceptual self-development with the narrative of the Absolute prior to
logos) up to Marx (the narrative of the primordial accumulation of the
capital) and Freud (the narrative of the primordial horde). In the face of
the constant theological motive of the ineffable obscure mystery in the
very heart of the divine, of what Chesterton called "a matter more dark
and awful than it is easy to discuss /.../ a matter which the greatest
saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach," 9 one is tempted to
propose the opposite path: far from pointing towards the dimension of
the "irrational," this mystery irrepresentable in the form of a narrative
(except in the terms of a "heretic" notion (of God himself as the source of
Evil, etc.) is simply the negative of the clarity of the Concept itself, i.e.,
the only way the self-division that characterizes the immanent self-
movement of the Concept can be represented in the medium of a
narrative. In other words, when (what Hegel called) the thought
constrained to the domain of Representation and/or Understanding
mentions the Ineffable, a Beyond which eludes its grasp, one can be sure
that this Beyond is nothing but the oncept itself - it is the highest irony
of the "mere Understanding" that it prerceives as "irrational" Reason
itself. 10

And here Hegel rejoins Spinoza: Spinoza's opposition of imagination and

true knowledge becomes the opposition of mere Vorstellung
(representation) with its 'stories' and the self-development of a Notion. It
is the irony of the history of philosophy that it is Schelling, the one who
is considered a "Spinozean" among the German Idealists, who
accomplishes the return to (philosophy as) narrative. In what does
Schelling's true philosophical revolution consist? According to the
standard academic doxa, Schelling broke out of the idealist closure of the
Notion's self-mediation by way of asserting a more balance bi-polarity of
the Ideal and the Real: the "negative philosophy" (the analysis of the
notional essence) must be supplemented by the "positive philosophy"
which deals with the positive order of existence. In nature as well as in
human history, the ideal rational order can only thrive against the
background of the impenetrable Ground of "irrational" drives and
passions. The climax of philosophical development, the very standpoint
of the Absolute, is thus not the "sublation /Aufhebung/" of all reality in
its ideal Notion, but the neutral medium of the two dimensions - the
Absolute is ideal-real... Such a reading, however, obfuscates Schelling's
true breakthrough, his distinction, first introduced in essay on human
freedom from 1807, 11 between (logical) Existence and the impenetrable
Ground of Existence, the Real of pre-logical drives: this proto-ontological
domain of drives is not simply "nature," but the spectral domain of the
not-yet fully constituted reality. Schelling's opposition of the proto-
ontological Real of drives (the Ground of being) and the ontologically fully
constituted Being itself (which, of course, is "sexed" as the opposition of
the Feminine and the Masculine) thus radically displaces the standard
philosophical couples of Nature and Spirit, the Real and the Idea,
Existence and Essence, etc. The real Ground of Existence is
impenetrable, dense, inert, yet at the same time spectral, "irreal,"
ontologically not fully constituted, while Existence is ideal, yet at the
same time, in contrast to the Ground, fully "real," fully existing. 12 This
opposition - between the fully existing reality and its proto-ontological
spectral shadow - is thus irreducible to the standard metaphysical
oppositions between the Real and the Ideal, Nature and Spirit, Existence
and Essence, etc. (And one should recall here how the space for this
spectral domain of the pre-ontological "Undead" was opened up by the
Kantian transcendental revolution.) In his late "philosophy of revelation,"
Schelling withdraws from the difficulty of thinking to the end this
opposition, and "regresses" (retranslates it) into traditional ontological
couples of essence and existence, ideal and real, etc. 13 The triangle of
Spinoza-Hegel-Schelling is thus not as unambiguous as it may appear:
although Spinoza and Hegel are solidary in their effort to formulate the
truth of religion in conceptual form, there is nonetheless a level at which
Spinoza is solidary with Schelling - more precisely, instead of Schelling,
let us mention Richard Wagner, who, with regard to our topic, shares
Schelling's fundamental attitude. Recall the famous beginning of
Wagner's Religion and Art:

One could say that when religion becomes artificial it is for art to salvage the essence of
religion by construing the mythical symbols which religion wants us to believe to be
literal truth in terms of their figurative value, so as to let us see their profound hidden
truth through idealized representation. Whereas the priest is concerned only that the
religious allegories should be regarded as factual truths, this is of no concern to the
artist, since he presents his work frankly and openly as his invention. 14

Everything is false here, in this passage which is anti-Kierkegaard par

excellence: its disgusting aestheticization of religion, its misleading anti-
fetishism, i.e., its rejection of the belief in the factual/literal truth on
behalf of the "inner" spiritual truth... what if the true fetishism is this
very belief in the "profound hidden truth" beneath the literal truth? -
Wagner is here the oppposite of Spinoza who, in his Theologico-Political
Tractatus, was the first to propose a historico-critical reading of the Bible
grounded in the Enlightenment notion of universal Reason: one should
distinguish between the inner true meaning of the Bible (accessible to us
today through philosophical analysis) and the mythical, imaginary,
narrative, mode of its presentation which is conditioned by the immature
state of humanity in the period when the Bible was written. As Spinoza
puts it pointedly: if someone holds to the rational inner truth of the
Bible, while ignoring its explicit narrative content, he should be counted
as a perfect believer; and vice versa, if someone slavishly follows all
ritualistic prescripts of the Bible, while ignoring the rational inner truth,
he should be counted as unbeliever. It is against such a stance that one
should reassert the Jewish obedience of rules. Even more pointedly, it is
against such a stance that one should with all force assert the
Kierkegaardian point of pure dogma: even if one follows all the ethical
rules of Christianity, if one does not do it on account of one's belief that
they were revealed by the divine authority of Christ, one is lost.

Although opposed, these two readings are complementary in that they

both search for a "deeper" truth beneath the figurative surface: in one
case, this truth is the inner ineffable spiritual message, in the other case,
it is the rational conceptual insight. What they both miss is, to put it
with Marx, the level of form as such: the inner necessity of the content to
assume such a form. The relationship between form and content is here
dialectical in the strict Hegelian sense: the form articulates what is
repressed in the content, its disavowed kernel - which is why, when we
replace the religious form with the direct formulation of its "inner"
content, we feel somehow cheated, deprived of the essential. 15 What is
missing in both Spinoza and Wagner is thus the inner torsion by means
of which the form itself is included (or, rather, inscribes itself) into
content - and this, perhaps, is the minimal definition of an EVENT. This
is why, neither in Spinoza nor in Wagner, is there any space for an Event
proper, for a shattering intervention that would introduce a radical cut in
the substantial content. As we shall see, it follows now the crucial
reference to Alain Badiou - THE philosopher of the Event.

Notes:

1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan

1956, p. 152-153.

2 Susan Neuman, Evil in Modern Thought, Princeton: Princeton

University Press 2002, p. 11.

3 Gilles Deleuze, Seminar 1, available on the internet at

www.deleuze.fr.st.

4 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, New York:

Continuum 2002, p. 135.

5 This is also how Deleuze determines the difference between philosophy

and science: science aims at solutions, while philosophy tries to extract
problems which orientate scientists in their search for solutions. There
is, however, a fundamental ambiguity in how Deleuze characterizes
philosophy as syntagmatic, in contrast to Kuhn's notion of a scientific
paradigm, i.e., of science as paradigmatic: science is a slow-motion,
freeze-frame procedure, reduction to a fixed system of functional
coordinates, in contrast to philosophical acceleration of motion; on the
other hand, Deleuze claims that science operates in a serial time (linear
development, rupture, reconnection), while philosophy operates
according to a "stratigraphic" time in which what comes after is always
superimposed on what comes before. But is serial time not precisely
SYNTAGMATIC (linear succession in time), in contrast to the
"stratigraphic" crystallization, i.e., PARADIGMATIC superimposition? The
key resides in the exact implications of these two modalities of time: the
"stratigraphic" paradigmatic superimposition is precisely the ultimate
result of time catching up with itself in an inner fold, of a past crystal-
image superimposing itself on a future image, while the time of science is
that of linear temporal movement of the constituted reality IN time,
which means, precisely, WITHIN a certain given paradigm of what reality
is. The true opposition is thus not simply between movement and static
structure, but between movement IN time, correlative to a paradigmatic
order, and movement OF time itself in a short-circuit of past and
present. The ultimate movement, the ultimate subversion of static order,
is the very "stratigraphic" stasis in which past and future coincide in a
superimposed crystallized image.

6 See Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVII: L'envers de la

psychanalyse, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1991.

7 For a succinct account of the complex, shifting, and often inconsistent

way Deleuze relates to the triad of Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, see
Christian Kerslake, "The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem
of Immanence," in Radical Philosophy 38.

8 It is interesting to note that, when, in his Seminar V on Les formations

de l'inconscient (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1998), Lacan retells this story,
he omits the final inversion - the very feature which appears to us today
as its properly "Lacanian" point, and just says that the game of critical
remarks and answers goes on indefinitely. Is this slip not the best proof
of how, in that period (mid-1950s), Lacan was still in the thrall of the
signifying process of endless interpretation, unable to properly
conceptualize the structural necessity of a cut which interrupts this
unending signifying drift..

9 G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1995, p.

145.

10 What is a concept? It is not only that, often, we are dealing with

pseudo-concepts, with mere representations (Vorstellungen) posing as
concepts; sometimes, much more interestingly, a concept can reside in
what appears to be a mere common expression, even a vulgar one. In
1922, Lenin dismissed "the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who
think they're the brains of the nation. In fact, they're not its brains,
they're its shit." (Quoted in Helene Carrere D'Encausse, Lenin, New York:
Holmes & Meier 2001, p. 308.) As Badiou did apropos of Sartre's
(in)famous claim that "anti-communists are dogs," one should, instead of
shamefully ignoring this statement, take the risk and elaborate the
underlying CONCEPT of shit.

11 See F.W.J. Schelling, "Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of

Human Freedom and Related Matters," in Philosophy of German Idealism,
ed. Ernst Behler, New York: Continuum 1987.

12 The notion of pre-ontological Real is crucial not only with regard to

the history of ideas, but even with regard to art and our daily experience
of reality. Is the entire contemporary popular (but not only popular)
culture not populated by entities located in this pre-ontological domain?
Recall, from Stephen King horror tradition, the spectral figure of a young
boy, not yet sexualized, who is "undead," a living dead, utterly corrupted
AND innocent, infinitely fragile AND all-powerful, the embodiment of Evil
in his very purity. Do we not encounter the same figure in modern art a
century ago, from the poems of Georg Trakl to the paintings of Edvard
Munch, in the guise of the asexual spectral young boy, this "unborn"
who stands simultaneously for vulnerable innocence and utter
corruption?

13 And does, as we have already seen, the same not go also for Deleuze?
In The Logic of Sense, he deploys the opposition of corporeal Being - the
complex network of causes and effects - and the separate level of
Becoming - its pure effect, the sterile impassive flow of immaterial Sense
-, the opposition irreducible to the traditional ontological couples; later,
however - with Anti-Oedipus -, in order to avoid the difficulty of
sustaining this position, he reinscribes it into the traditional couple of
Becoming versus Being, of the dynamic productive movement versus the
"reified" order of its effects..

14 Quoted from Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord, New York: Henry Holt
and Company 2000, p. 281.

15 Which is why Wagner's or Spinoza's reading of the bible has nothing

whatsoever to do with psychoanalysis, with psychoanalytic
interpretation. If one wants to learn what a truly psychoanalytic reading
is, one should look for it in, say, the dialogue between Joseph K. and the
Priest which, in Kafka's The Trial, follows the "parable" on the door of the
law.

BADIOU 1: EVENT AND ACT

What, already in a first approach, Alain Badiou shares with Gilles

Deleuze is that both their philosophies focus on the notion of Event
which cannot be reduced to the positive order of Being. We already saw,
apropos a series of examples, from Italian neo-Realism to political
revolutions, how, for Deleuze, an Event (the emergence of the New)
transcends its positive causes; along the same lines, for Badiou, Event
introduces a radical break into the order of Being. The difference between
them is that, while Deleuze remains a vitalist who asserts the absolute
immanence of the Event to Being, the Event as the One-All, the
encompassing medium of the thriving differences of Life, Badiou, in a
"dualist" fashion, posits Event as radically heterogeneous with regard to
Being. However, instead of this difference, they both perform the same
paradoxical philosophical gesture of defending, AS MATERIALISTS, the
autonomy of the "immaterial" order of the Event. As a materialist, in
order to be thoroughly materialist, Badiou focuses on the IDEALIST
topos par excellence: How can a human animal forsake its animality and
put its life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the
"transubstantiation" from the pleasure-oriented life of an individual to
the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause occur? In other words, how is a
free act possible? How can one break the network of the causal
connections of positive reality and conceive of an act which begins by
and in itself? In short, Badiou repeats within the materialist frame the
elementary gesture of idealist anti-reductionism: human Reason cannot
be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a
heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of
Truth; etc. And, against the false appearance that this gesture is aimed
at also psychoanalysis (is not the point of the notion of "sublimation"
that the allegedly "higher" human activities are just a roundabout
ãsublimated" way to realize a "lower" goal?), therein resides already the
big achievement of psychoanalysis: its claim is that sexuality itself,
sexual drives which pertain to the human animal, cannot be accounted
for in evolutionary terms. 1 This makes clear the true stakes of Badiou's
gesture: in order for materialism to truly win over idealism, it is not
enough to succeed in the ãreductionist" approach and demonstrate how
mind, consciousness, etc., can nonetheless somehow be accounted for
within the evolutionary-positivist materialist frame; on the contrary, the
materialist claim should be much stronger: it is ONLY materialism which
can accurately explain the very phenomena of mind, consciousness, etc.;
and, conversely, it is idealism which is "vulgar," which always-already
"reifies" them.

Badiou identifies four possible domains in which a Truth-Event can

occur, four domains in which subjects emerge as "operators" of a truth-
procedure: science, art, politics, love. This theory of the four "conditions"
of philosophy allows us to approach in a new way the old problem of the
"role" of philosophy. Often, other disciplines take over (at least part of)
the "normal" role of philosophy: in some of the 19th century nations like
Hungary or Poland, it was literature which played the role of philosophy
(that of articulating the ultimate horizon of meaning of the nation in the
process of its full constitution); in US today - in the conditions of the
predominance of cognitivism and brain studies in philosophy
departments -, most of "Continental Philosophy" takes place in
Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, English, French and German
departments (as they are saying, if you analyze a rat's vertebra, you are
doing philosophy; if you analyze Hegel, you belong to CompLit); in
Slovenia of the 1970s, the "dissident" philosophy took place in sociology
departments and institutes. There is also the other extreme of philosophy
itself taking over the tasks of other academic (or even non-academic)
practices and discipline: again, in the late Yugoslavia and some other
Socialist countries, philosophy was one of the spaces of the first
articulation of "dissident" political projects, it effectively was "politics
pursued with other means" (as Althusser put it apropos Lenin). So where
did philosophy play its "normal role"? One usually evokes Germany -
however, is it not already a commonplace that the extraordinary role of
philosophy in German history was grounded in the belatedness of the
realization of the German national political project? As already Marx put
it (taking the cue from Heine), Germans had their philosophical
revolution (the German Idealism) because they missed the political
revolution (which took place in France). Is, then, there a norm at all? The
closest one can comes to it is if one looks upon the anemic established
academic philosophy like the neo-Kantianism 100 years ago in Germany
or the French Cartesian epistemology (Leon Brunschvicg, etc.) of the first
half of the XXth century - which was precisely philosophy at its most
stale, academic, "dead," irrelevant. (No wonder that, in 2002, Luc Ferry, a
neo-Kantian, was nominated the Minister of Education in the new
Center-Right French government.) What if, then, there is no "normal
role"? What if it is exceptions themselves which retroactively create the
illusion of the "norm" they allegedly violate? What if not only, in
philosophy, exception is the rule, but also philosophy - the need for the
authentic philosophical thought - arises precisely in those moments
when (other) parts-constituents of the social edifice cannot play their
"proper role"? What if the "proper" space for philosophy ARE these very
gaps and interstices opened up by the "pathological" displacements in
the social edifice? Along these lines, the first great merit of Badiou is
that, for the first time, he systematically deployed the four modes of this
reference of philosophy (to science, art, politics, and love).

Here the first critical reflection imposes itself: one is tempted to risk the
hypothesis that Badiou's first three truth-procedures (science, art,
politics) follow the classic logic of the triad of True-Beautiful-Good: the
science of truth, the art of beauty, the politics of the good) - so what
about the forth procedure, love? Is it not clear that it sticks out from the
series, being somehow more fundamental and "universal," always
possible to break out. There are thus not simply four truth-procedures,
but three plus one - a fact perhaps not emphasized enough by Badiou
(although, apropos sexual difference, he does remark that women tend to
color all other truth-procedures through love). What is encompassed by
this fourth procedure is not just the miracle of love, but also
psychoanalysis, theology, and philosophy itself (the LOVE of wisdom). Is,
then, love not Badiou's "Asiatic mode of production" - the category into
which he throws all truth procedures which do not fit the other three
modes? This fourth procedure also serves as a kind of underlying formal
principle or matrix of all of them (which accounts for the fact that,
although Badiou denies to religion the status of truth-procedure, he
nonetheless claims that Paul was the first to deploy the very formal
matrix of the Truth-Event). 2

Insofar as, for Badiou, the science of love - this fourth, excessive, truth-
procedure - is psychoanalysis, one should not be surprised to find that
Badiou's relationship with Lacan is the nodal point of his thought. How,
exactly, does Badiou's philosophy relate to Lacan's theory? One should
begin by unequivocally stating that Badiou is right in rejecting Lacan's
"anti-philosophy." In fact, when Lacan endlessly varies the motif of how
philosophy tries to "fill in the holes," to present a totalizing view of the
universe, to cover up all the gaps, ruptures and inconsistencies (say, in
the total self-transparency of self-consciousness), and how, against
philosophy, psychoanalysis asserts the constitutive
gap/rupture/inconsistency, etc.etc., he simply misses the point of what
the most fundamental philosophical gesture is: not to close the gap, but,
on the contrary, to OPEN UP a radical gap in the very edifice of the
universe, the "ontological difference," the gap between the empirical and
the transcendental, where none of the two levels can be reduced to the
other (as we know from Kant, transcendental constitution is a mark of
our - human - finitude and has nothing to do with "creating reality"; on
the other hand, reality only appears to us within the transcendental
horizon, so we cannot generate the emergence of the transcendental
horizon from the ontic self-development of reality). 3

This general statement does not allow us to dispense with the work of a
more detailed confrontation. It was Bruno Bosteels who provided the
hitherto most detailed account of the difference between Badiou's and
the Lacanian approach. 4 What the two approaches share is the focus on
the shattering encounter of the Real: on the "symptomal torsion" at
which the given symbolic situation breaks down. What, then, happens at
this point of the intrusion of utmost negativity? According to Badiou, the
opposition is here the one between impasse and passe. For Lacan, the
ultimate authentic experience (the "traversing of fantasy") is that of fully
confronting the fundamental impasse of the symbolic order; this tragic
encounter of the impossible Real is the limit-experience of a human
being: one can only sustain it, one cannot force a passage through it. The
political implications of this stance are easily discernible: while Lacan
enables us to gain an insight into the falsity of the existing State, this
insight is already "it," there is no way to pass through it, every attempt to
impose a new order is denounced as illusory: "From the point of the real
as absent cause, indeed, any ordered consistency must necessarily
appear to be imaginary insofar as it conceals this fundamental lack
itself." Is this not the arch-conservative vision according to which, the
ultimate truth of being is the nullity of every Truth, the primordial vortex
which threatens to draw us into its abyss? All we can do, after this
shattering insight, is to return to the semblance, to the texture of
illusions which allow us to temporarily avoid the view of the terrifying
abyss, humbly aware of the fragility of this texture... While, for Lacan,
Truth is this shattering experience of the Void - a sudden insight into the
abyss of Being, "not a process so much as a brief traumatic encounter, or
illuminating shock, in the midst of common reality" -, for Badiou, Truth
is what comes afterward: the long arduous work of fidelity, of enforcing a
new law onto the situation. 5 The choice is thus: "whether a vanishing
apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful
transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou)":

the problem with this /Lacan's/ doctrine is precisely that, while never ceasing to be
dialectical in pinpointing the absent cause and its divisive effects on the whole, it
nevertheless remains tied to this whole itself and is thus unable to account for the
latter's possible transformation. /.../ Surely anchored in the real as a lack of being, a
truth procedure is that which gives being to this very lack. Pinpointing the absent cause
or constitutive outside of a situation, in other words, remains a dialectical yet idealist
tactic, unless this evanescent point of the real is forced, distorted, and extended, in
order to give consistency to the real as a new generic truth.

Bosteels recalls here Badiou's opposition between Sophocles and

Aeschylus. Not only Lacan, psychoanalysis as such in its entire history
was focused on the Sophoclean topic of the Oedipus' family: from
Oedipus confronting the unbearable Thing, the horror of his crime, the
horror impossible to sustain - when one becomes aware what one did,
one can only blind oneself -, to Antigone's fateful step into the lethal zone
between the two deaths, which provokes Creon's superego rage destined
to conceal the void of the Thing. To this Sophoclean couple of
superego/anxiety, Badiou opposes the Aeschylean couple of courage and
justice: the courage of Orestes who risks his act, the justice
(re)established by the new Law of Athena. Convincing as this example is,
one cannot avoid asking the obvious question: is not this new Law
imposed by Athena the patriarchal Law based on the
exclusion/repression of what then returns as the obscene superego fury?
However, the more fundamental issue is: is Lacan really unable to think
a procedure which gives being to the very lack? Is this not the work of
sublimation? Does sublimation not precisely "give being to this very
lack," to the lack as/of the impossible Thing, insofar as sublimation is
"an object elevated to the dignity of a Thing" (Lacan's standard definition
of sublimation from his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)? This
is why Lacan links death drive and creative sublimation: death drive
does the negative work of destruction, of suspending the existing order of
Law, thereby as it were clearing the table, opening up the space for
sublimation which can (re)starts the work of creation. Both Lacan and
Badiou thus share the notion of a radical cut/rupture, "event,"
encounter of the Real, which opens up the space for the work of
sublimation, of creating the new order; the distance which separates
them is to be sought elsewhere - where? Here is how Bosteels describes
the modality of the truth-procedure:

Setting out from the void which prior to the event remains indiscernible in the language
of established knowledge, a subjective intervention names the event which disappears
no sooner than it appears; /it/ faithfully connects as many elements of the situation as
possible to this name which is the only trace of the vanished event, and subsequently
forces the extended situation from the bias of the new truth as if the latter were indeed
already generally applicable.

The key words in this faithful rendering of Badiou's positions are the
seemingly innocent "AS IF": in order to avoid the Stalinist desastre,
which is grounded in the misreading of the new truth as directly
applicable to the situation, as its ontological order, one should only
proceed AS IF the new truth is applicable... can one imagine a more
direct application of the Kantian distinction between constitutive
principles (a priori categories which directly constitute reality) and
regulative ideas, which should only be applied to reality in the AS IF
mode (one should act AS IF reality is sustained by a teleological order,
AS IF there is a God and immortal soul, etc.). When Badiou asserts the
"unnameable" as the resisting point of the Real, the "indivisible
remainder" which prevents the "forceful transformation" to conclude its
work, this assertion is strictly correlative to the AS IF mode of the post-
evental work of forcing the real: it is because of this remainder that the
work of truth cannot ever leave behind this conditional mode.

So when Bosteels claims that "there is something more than just

awkward in the criticism according to which Badiou's Being and Event
would later get trapped in a naive undialectical, or even pre-critical
separation of these two spheres - being and event, knowledge and truth,
the finite animal and the immortal subject," one can only add: yes, and
that "more" is that this criticism is up to the point. Already for Kant,
there is no subjective impurity (such a position is accessible only to a
saint, and, due to its finitude, no human being can attain this position):
the Kantian subject is the name for an interminable ethical work, and
purity is just the negative measure of our everlasting impurity (when we
accomplish an ethical act, we cannot ever pretend or know that we were
effectively not moved by some pathological motivation). And it is Badiou
who is deeply Kantian in his gap between the "eternity" of, say, the idea
of justice, and the interminable work of forcing it into a situation. And
what about Badiou's repeated insistence that "consequences in reality"
do not matter, that - say, apropos of the passage from Leninism to
Stalinism - one cannot conceive of Stalinism as the revealed truth of
Leninism? What about his insistence that the process of truth is not in
any way affected by what goes on at the level of being? For Badiou, a
certain truth-procedure ceases for strictly inherent reasons, when its
sequence is exhausted - what matters is sequence, not consequence.
What this means is that the irreducible impurity has its measure in the
eternity of the pure Truth as its inherent measure: although the Idea of
egalitarian Justice is always realized in an impure way, through the
arduous work of forcing it upon the multiplicity of the order of being,
these vicissitudes do not affect the Idea itself which shines through
them.

The key to Badiou's opposition of Being and Event is the preceding split,
within the order of Being itself, between the pure multitude of the
presence of beings (accessible to mathematical ontology) and their re-
presentation in some determinate State of Being: all of the multitude of
Being cannot ever be adequately represented in a State of Being, and an
Event always occurs at the site of this surplus/remainder which eludes
the grasp of the State. The question is therefore that of the exact status
of this gap between the pure multitude of presence and its representation
in State(s). Again, the hidden Kantian reference is crucial here: the gap
which separates the pure multiplicity of the Real from the appearing of a
"world" whose coordinates are given in a set of categories which
predetermine its horizon, is the very gap which, in Kant, separates the
Thing-in-itself from our phenomenal reality, i.e., from the way things
appear to us as objects of our experience. The basic problem remains
unsolved by Kant as well as by Badiou: how does the gap between the
pure multiplicity of being and its appearance in the multitude of worlds
arise? How does being appear to itself? Or, to put it in "Leninist" terms:
the problem is not if there is some reality beneath the phenomenal world
of our experience; the true problem is exactly the opposite one - how
does the gap open up within the absolute closure of the Real, within
which elements of the Real can appear? Why the need for the pure
multitude to be re-presented in a State? When Bosteels writes that the
state of a situation is "an imposing defense mechanism set up to guard
against the perils of the void," one should therefore raise a naive, but
nonetheless crucial, question: where does this need for defense come
from? Why are we not able to simply dwell in the void? Is it not that there
already has to be some tension/antagonism operative within the pure
multitude of Being itself? In other words, is Badiou, in his overlooking of
this topic, not close to Deleuze, his great opponent? Furthermore, in
contrast to the pure indifferent multitude of Being, there is a conflicting
multiplicity of States of Being; an Event emerges at the site of the
interstices of States - the second key issue is thus the nature of the
conflicting co-existence of States.

Badiou's oscillation apropos of the Event is crucial here: while linking the
Event to its nomination and opposing any mystical direct access to it,
any Romantic rhetorics of immersion into the Nameless Absolute Thing,
Badiou is nonetheless continuously gnawed by doubts about the
appropriateness of nominations (say, apropos of Marxism, he claims that
we still lack the proper name for what effectively occurred in the
revolutionary turbulences of the last centuries, i.e. that "class struggle"
is NOT an appropriate nomination). This deadlock appears at its purest
when Badiou defines the "perverse" position of those who try to behave
as if there was no Event: Badiou's "official" position is that the Event is
radically subjective (it exists only for those who engage themselves on its
behalf); how, then, can the pervert ignore something which is not there
at all for him? Is it not that the Event must then have a status which
cannot be reduced to the circle of subjective recognition/nomination, so
that also those who, WITHIN the situation our of which the Event
emerged, ignore the Event, are affected by it? In short, what Badiou
seems to miss here is the minimal structure of historicity (as opposed to
mere historicism), which resides in what Adorno called die
Verbindlichkeit des Neuen, "the power of the New to bind us/" 6 : when
something truly New emerges, one cannot go on as if it did not happen,
since the very fact of this New changes the entire coordinates. After
Schoenberg, one cannot continue to write musical pieces in the old
Romantic tonal mode; after Kandinsky and Picasso, one cannot paint in
the old figurative way; after Kafka and Joyce, one cannot write in the old
realist way. More precisely: of course, one can do it, but if one does it,
these old forms are no longer the same, they have lost their innocence
and now appear as a nostalgic fake. - From these remarks, we can return
to Bosteels basic reproach, according to which, psychoanalysis

collapses into an instantaneous act what is in reality an ongoing and impure procedure,
which from a singular event leads to a generic truth by way of a forced return upon the
initial situation. Whereas for Zizek, the empty place of the real that is impossible to
symbolize is somehow already the act of truth itself, for Badiou a truth comes about
only by forcing the real and by displacing the empty place, so as to make the impossible
possible. 'Every truth is post-evental,' Badiou writes.
The first misunderstanding to be dispelled here is that, for Lacan, the
Event (or Act, or encounter of the Real) does not occur in the dimension
of truth. For Lacan also, "truth is post-evental," although in a different
sense than for Badiou: truth comes afterwards, as the Event's
symbolization. Along the same lines, when Bosteels quotes the lines from
my Sublime Object about "traversing the fantasy" as the "almost nothing"
of the anamorphic shift of perspective, as the unique shattering moment
of the thorough symbolic alteration in which, although nothing changed
in reality, all of a sudden "nothing remains the same," one should not
forget that this instantaneous reversal is not the end, but the beginning,
the shift which opens up the space for the "post-evental" work; to put it
in Hegelese, it is the "positing of the presupposition" which opens the
actual work of positing. 7

BADIOU 2: THE FOUR DISCOURSES

Nowhere is the gap which separates Badiou from Lacan more clearly
discernible as apropos four discourses; through a criticism of Lacan,
Badiou recently (in his last seminars) proposed his own version of the
four discourses. At the outset, there is the hysteric's discourse: in the
hysterical subject, the new truth explodes in an event, it is articulated in
the guise of an inconsistent provocation, and the subject itself is blind
for the true dimension of what it stumbled upon - recall the proverbial
unexpected outburst to the beloved "I love you!" which surprises even its
author. It is the master's task to properly elaborate the truth into a
consistent discourse, to work out its sequence. The pervert, on the
contrary, works as if there was no truth-event, it categorizes the effects of
this event as if they can be accounted for in the order of knowledge (say,
a historian of the French Revolution like Francois Furet who explains it
as the outcome of the complexity of the French situation in the late XVIII
century, depriving it of its universal scope). To these three, one should
add the mystical discourse, the position of clinging to the pure In-Itself of
the truth beyond the grasp of any discourse.

There is a series of interconnected differences between this notion of four

discourses and Lacan's matrix of four discourses; 8 the main two
concern the opposition of Master and Analyst. First, in Lacan, it is not
the hysteric but the Master who performs the act of nomination: he
pronounces the new Master-Signifier which restructures the entire field;
the Master's intervention is momentary, unique, singular, like the magic
touch which shifts the perspective and all of a sudden transforms chaos
into the New Order - in contrast to the discourse of University which
elaborates the sequence from the new Master-Signifier (the new system
of knowledge). 9 The second difference is that, in Badiou's account, there
is no place for the discourse of the analyst - its place is held by the
mystical discourse fixated on the unnameable Event, resisting its
discursive elaboration as unauthentic. For Lacan, there is no place for an
additional mystical discourse, for the simple reason that such a mystical
stance is not a discourse (a social link) - and the discourse of the analyst
is precisely a discourse which takes as its "agent," its structuring
principle, the traumatic kernel of the real which serves as an irreducible
obstacle to the discursive link, introducing in it an indelible antagonism,
impossibility, destabilizing gap. Therein resides the true difference
between Badiou and Lacan: what Badiou precludes is the possibility to
devise a discourse which has as its structuring principle the unnameable
"indivisible remainder" eluding a discursive grasp, i.e. for Badiou, when
we are confronted with this remainder, we should either name it,
transpose it into the master's discourse, or stare at it in the mystifying
awe. What this means is that one should turn Badiou's reproach to
Lacan back against Badiou himself: it is Badiou who is unable to expand
the encounter of the Real into a discourse, i.e., for whom, this encounter,
in order to start to function as a discourse, has to be transposed into a
Master's discourse.

The ultimate difference between Badiou and Lacan thus concerns the
relationship between the shattering encounter of the Real and the
ensuing arduous work of transforming this explosion of negativity into a
new order: for Badiou, this new order "sublates" the exploding negativity
into a new consistent truth, while for Lacan, every Truth displays the
structure of a (symbolic) fiction, i.e., it is unable to touch the Real. Does
this mean that Badiou is right - namely in his reproach that, in a
paradigmatic gesture of what Badiou calls "anti-philosophy," Lacan
relativizes truth to just another narrative/symbolic fiction which forever
fails to grasp the "irrational" hard kernel of the Real?

One should recall here that the Lacanian triad Real-Imaginary-Symbolic

reflects itself within each of its three elements. There are three modalities
of the Real: the "real Real" (the horrifying Thing, the primordial object,
from Irma's throat to the Alien), the "symbolic Real" (the real as
consistency: the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like the
quantum physics formulas which can no longer be translated back into -
or related to - the everyday experience of our life-world), and the
"imaginary Real" (the mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable
"something" on account of which the sublime dimension shines through
an ordinary object). The Real is thus effectively all three dimensions at
the same time: the abyssal vortex which ruins every consistent structure;
the mathematized consistent structure of reality; the fragile pure
appearance. And, in a strictly homologous way, there are three
modalities of the Symbolic (the real - the signifier reduced to a senseless
formula -, the imaginary - the Jungian "symbols" - and the symbolic -
speech, meaningful language), and three modalities of the Imaginary (the
real - fantasy, which is precisely an imaginary scenario occupying the
place of the Real -, the imaginary - image as such in its fundamental
function of a decoy -, and the symbolic - again, the Jungian "symbols" or
New Age archetypes). Far from being reduced to the traumatic void of the
Thing which resists symbolization, the Lacanian Real thus designates
also the senseless symbolic consistency (of the "mathem"), as well as the
pure appearance irreducible to its causes ("the real of an illusion").
Consequently, Lacan not only does supplement the Real as the void of
the absent cause with the Real as consistency; he adds a third term, that
of the Real as pure appearing, which is also operative in Badiou in the
guise of what he calls the "minimal difference" which arises when we
subtract all fake particular difference - from the minimal "pure"
difference between figure and background in Malevitch's "White square
on black surface," up to the unfathomable minimal difference between
Christ and other men.

In Le siècle, 10 Badiou deploys two modes of what he calls the "passion

of the real" as the defining passion of the XXth century, that of
"purification" (of violently discarding the deceiving layers of false reality
in order to arrive at the kernel of the real) and that of "subtraction" (of
isolating the minimal difference which becomes palpable in the
symptomal point of the existing order of reality) - is it not, then, that we
should supplement Badiou's two passions of the Real (the passion of
purification and the passion of subtraction) with that of scientific-
theoretical FORMALIZATION as the third approach to the Real? The Real
can be isolated through violent purification, the shedding away of false
layers of deceptive reality; it can be isolated as the singular universal
which marks the minimal difference; and it can also be isolated in the
guise of a formalization which renders the subjectless "knowledge in the
Real." It is easy to discern here again the triad of Real, Imaginary,
Symbolic: the Real attained through violent purification, the Imaginary of
the minimal difference, the Symbolic of the pure formal matrix.

The political consequences of this deadlock are crucial. In Le siecle,

Badiou seems to oscillate between the plea for a direct fidelity to the
XXth century "passion of the real," and the prospect of passing from the
politics of purification to the politics of subtraction - while he makes it
fully clear that the horrors of the XXth century, from the holocaust to
gulag, are a necessary outcome of the purification-mode of the "passion
of the Real," and while he admits that protests against it are fully
legitimate (see his admiration for Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales), he
nonetheless stops short of renouncing it - why? Because the consequent
following of the logic of subtraction would have forced him to abandon
the very frame of the opposition between Being and Event: within the
logic of subtraction, the Event is not external to the order of Being, but
located in the "minimal difference" inherent to the order of Being itself.
The parallel is here strict between Badiou's two versions of the "passion
of the Real" and the two main versions of the Real in Lacan: the Real as
the destructive vortex, the inaccessible/impossible hard kernel which we
cannot approach too much (if we get too close to it, we get burned, as in
Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun, the movie about a Soviet hero-
general caught in a Stalinist purge and "burnt by the sun" of the
Revolution), and the Real as the pure Schein of a minimal difference, as
another dimension which shines through in the gaps of the inconsistent
reality.

If Badiou were to accomplish this step, he would, perhaps, choose to

conceive of the XXIth century as the displaced repetition of the XXth
century: after the (self)destructive climax of the logic of purification, the
passion of the Real should be reinvented as the politics of subtraction.
There is a necessity in this blunder: subtraction is possible only after the
fiasco of purification, as its repetition, in which the "passion of the Real"
is sublated, freed of its (self)destructive potential. In the absence of this
step, Badiou is left with only two options: either to remain faithful to the
destructive ethics of purification, or to take refuge in the Kantian
distinction between a normative regulative Ideal and the constituted
order of reality - say, to claim that the Stalinist desastre occurs, that the
(self)destructive violence explodes, when the gap which forever separates
the Event from the order of Being is closed, when the Truth-Event is
posited as fully realized in the order of Being.

Along these lines, Badiou recently proposed as (one of) the definition(s) of
Evil: the total forcing of the unnameable, the accomplished naming of it,
the dream of total Nomination ("everything can be named within the field
of the given generic truth procedure")- the fiction (the Kantian regulative
Idea?) of the accomplished truth-procedure is taken for reality (it starts
to function as constitutive). According to Badiou, what such forcing
obliterates is the inherent limitation of the generic truth-procedure (its
undecidability, indiscernability...): the accomplished truth destroys itself,
the accomplished political truth turns into totalitarianism. The ethics of
Truth is thus the ethics of the respect for the unnameable Real which
cannot be forced. 11 However, the problem here is: how to avoid the
Kantian reading of this limitation? Although Badiou rejects the
ontological-transcendental status of finitude as the ultimate horizon of
our existence, is his limitation of truth-procedure ultimately not
grounded in the fact that it is the finite Significantly, Badiou, the great
critic of the notion of totalitarianism, resorts here to this notion in a way
very similar to the Kantian liberal critics of the "Hegelian totalitarianism."
subject, the operator of the infinite truth-procedure, who, in an act of
pure decision/choice, proclaims the Event as the starting point of
reference of a truth-procedure (statements like "I love you," "Christ has
arisen from the dead"). So, although Badiou subordinates subject to the
infinite truth-procedure, the place of this procedure is silently
constrained by the subject's finitude. And does Badiou, THE anti-
Levinas, with this topic of the respect for the unnameable not come
dangerously close precisely to the Levinasian topic of the respect for
Otherness - the topic which is, against all appearances, politically totally
inoperative? Recall the well-known fiasco of Levinas when, a week after
the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut, he participated in a radio
broadcast with Shlomo Malka and Alain Finkelkraut. Malka asked him
the obvious "Levinasian" question: "Emmanuel Levinas, you are the
philosopher of the 'other.' Isn't history, isn't politics the very site of the
encounter with the 'other,' and for the Israeli, isn't the 'other' above all
the Palestinian?" To this, Levinas answered:

My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbor, who is not
necessary kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you're for the other, you're for the
neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what
can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy,
or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is
wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong. 12

The problem with these lines is not their potential Zionist anti-
Palestinian attitude, but, quite on the contrary, the unexpected shift
from high theory to vulgar commonsensical reflections - what Levinas is
basically saying is that, as a principle, respect for alterity is
unconditional, the highest one, but, when faced with a concrete other,
one should nonetheless see if he is a friend or an enemy... in short, in
practical politics, the respect for alterity strictly means nothing. No
wonder, then, that Levinas also perceived alterity also as radical
strangeness which poses a threat and where hospitality is suspended, is
clear from the following passage about the "yellow peril" from what is
arguably his weirdest text, "The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic"
(1960), a comment on the Soviet-Chinese conflict:

The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it
involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there
does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past. 13

Does this not recall Heidegger insistence, throughout the 1930s, that the
main task of the Western thought today is to defend the Greek
breakthrough, the founding gesture of the "West," the overcoming of the
pre-philosophical mythical "Asiatic" universe, against the renewed
"Asiatic" threat - the greatest opposite of the West is "the mythical in
general and the Asiatic in particular"? 14 Back to Badiou, what all this
means is that there is a Kantian problem with Badiou which is grounded
in his dualism of Being and Event, and which has to be surpassed. The
only way out of this predicament is to assert that the unnameable Real is
not an external limitation, but an ABSOLUTELY INHERENT limitation.
Truth is a generic procedure which cannot comprise its own concept-
name that would totalize it (as Lacan put it, "there is no meta-language,"
or, as Heidegger put it, "the name for a name is always lacking," and this
lack, far from being a limitation of language, is its positive condition, i.e.,
it is only because-through this lack that we have language). So, like the
Lacanian Real which is not external to the Symbolic, but makes it non-
all from within (as Laclau put it: in an antagonism, the external limit
coincides with the internal one), the unnameable is inherent to the
domain of names. (This is why, for Badiou as for Heidegger, poetry is the
experience/articulation of the limits of the potency of language, of the
limits of what we can force through and with language.) THIS and only
this is the proper passage from Kant to Hegel: not the passage from
limited/incomplete to full/completed nomination ("absolute knowledge"),
but the passage of the very limit of nomination from the exterior to the
interior.

The materialist solution is thus that the Event is NOTHING BUT its own
inscription into the order of Being, a cut/rupture in the order of Being on
account of which Being cannot ever form a consistent All. There is no
Beyond of Being which inscribes itself into the order of Being - there "is"
nothing but the order of Being. One should recall here yet again the
paradox of Einstein's general theory of relativity, in which matters does
not curve the space, but is an effect of the space's curvature: an Event
does not curve the space of Being through its inscription into it - on the
contrary, an Event is NOTHING BUT this curvature of the space of Being.
"All there is" is the interstice, the non-self-coincidence, of Being, i.e., the
ontological non-closure of the order of Being.

Badiou's counter-argument to Lacan (formulated, among others, by

Boostels) is that what really matters is not the Event as such, the
encounter with the Real, but its consequences, its inscription, the
consistency of the new discourse which emerges from the Event... one is
tempted to turn this counter-argument against Badiou himself, against
his "oppositional" stance of advocating the impossible goal of pure
presence without the state of representation: one should gather the
strength to Ètake overÇ and assume power, no longer just to persist in
the safety of the oppositional stance. If one is not ready to do this, then
one continues to rely on state power as that against which one defines
one's own position. What this means at the ontological level is that,
ultimately, one should reject Badiou's notion of mathematics (the theory
of pure multitude) as the only consistent ontology (science of Being): if
mathematics is ontology, then, in order to account for the GAP between
Being and Event, one should remain stuck in dualism OR dismiss the
Event as an ultimately illusory local occurrence within the encompassing
order of Being. Badiou is here anti-Deleuze, but he remains within the
same field: while Deleuze asserts the substantial One as the background-
medium of the multitude, Badiou opposes the multitude of Being to the
One-ness of the singular Event. Against this notion of multitude, one
should assert as the ultimate ontological given the gap which separates
the One from within.

Notes:

1 This is how one should locate the shift from the biological instinct to
drive: instinct is just part of the physics of animal LIFE, while drive
(DEATH drive) introduces a meta-physical dimension. In Marx, we find
the homologous implicit distinction between working class and
proletariat: "working class" is the empirical social category, accessible to
sociological knowledge, while "proletariat" is the subject-agent of
revolutionary Truth. Along the same lines, Lacan claims that drive is an
ETHICAL category.

2 Furthermore, is there not a key difference between love and other

truth-procedures, in that, in contrast to others which try to force the
unnameable, in "true love," one endorses-accepts the loved Other ON
BEHALF OF THE VERY UNNAMEABLE X IN HIM/HER. In other words,
"love" designates the respect of the lover for what should remain
unnameable in the beloved - "whereof one cannot talk about, thereof one
should remain silent" is perhaps the fundamental proscription of love.

3 Perhaps, along these lines, one should even take the risk of proposing
that psychoanalysis - the subject's confrontation with its innermost
fantasmatic kernel - is no longer to be accepted as the ultimate gesture
of subjective authenticity

4 See Bruno Boostels, "Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject: The

Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?" (2001), in The Warwick
Journal of Philosophy.

5 Badiou's notion of subjectivization as the engagement on behalf of

Truth, as the fidelity to Truth-Event, is clearly indebted to the
Kierkegaardian existential commitment "experienced as gripping our
whole being. Political and religious movements can grip us in this way,
as can love relationships and, for certain people, such 'vocations' as
science and art. When we respond to such a summons with what
Kierkegaard calls infinite passion - that is, when we respond by
accepting an unconditional commitment - this commitment determines
what will be the significant issue for us for the rest of our life."(Hubert
Dreyfus, On the Internet, London: Routledge 2001, p. 86) What Dreyfus
enumerates in this resume of Kierkegaard's position are precisely
Badiou's four domains of Truth (politics, love, art, science), PLUS religion
as their "repressed" model.

3 See Theodor W. Adorno, "Verbindlichkeit des Neuen," Musikalische

Schriften V, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1998, p. 832-833.

7 Not to mention the obvious fact that, in the psychoanalytic treatment,

truth is not an instant insight, but the "impure" process of working-
through which can last for years.

8 As to this matrix, see See Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVII:

L'envers de la psychanalyse.

9 In philosophical terms, Lacan introduces here a distinction, absent in

Badiou, between symbolic truth and knowledge in the Real: Badiou
clings to the difference between objective-neutral Knowledge which
concerns the order of Being, and the subjectively-engaged Truth (one of
the standard topoi of the modern thought from Kierkegaard onwards),
while Lacan renders thematic another, unheard-of, level, that of the
unbearable fantasmatic kernel. Although - or, rather, precisely because -
this kernel forms the very heart of subjective identity, it cannot ever be
subjectivized, subjectively assumed: it can only be retroactively
reconstructed in a desubjectivized knowledge. As to this crucial
distinction, see the first chapter in my The Plague of Fantasies, London:
Verso Books 1997.

10 See Alain Badiou, Le siècle, Paris; Seuil, 2002.

11 It also seems problematic to conceive of "Stalinism" as a too radical

"forcing" of the order of being (the existing society): the paradox of the
1928 "Stalinist revolution" was rather that, in all its brutal radicality, it
was not radical enough in effectively transforming the social substance -
its brutal destructiveness has to be read as an impottent passage a
l'acte. Far from simply standing for a total forcing of the unnameable
Real on behalf of the Truth, the Stalinist "totalitarianism" rather
designates the attitude of absolutely ruthless "pragmatism," of
manipulating and sacrificing all "principles" on behalf of maintaining
power.

12 The Levinas Reader, Oxford: Blackwell 1989, p. 294.

13 Emmanuel Levinas, Les imprevus de l'histoire, Fata Morgana 1994, p.

172.

14 Martin Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom, Athens:

Ohio University Press 1985, p. 146.

Leninism Today: Zionism and the Jewish Question •

.........Slavoj Zizek
The fate of Joze Jurancic, an old Slovene Communist revolutionary, stands out as
a perfect metaphor for the twists of Stalinism. In 1943, when Italy capitulated,
Jurancic led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners in a concentration camp on the
Adriatic island of Rab: under his leadership, 2000 starved prisoners single-
handedly disarmed 2200 Italian soldiers. After the war, he was arrested and put
in a prison on a nearby small Goli otok ("naked island"), a notorious Communist
concentration camp. While there, he was mobilized in 1953, together with other
prisoners, to build a monument to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 1943
rebellion on Rab – in short, as a prisoner of Communists, Jurancic was building a
monument TO HIMSELF, to the rebellion led by him… If poetic (not justice but,
rather) injustice means anything, this was it: is the fate of this revolutionary not
the fate of the entire people under the Stalinist dictatorship, of the millions who,
first, heroically overthrew the ancient regime in the revolution, and, then,
enslaved to the new rules, are forced to build monuments to their own
revolutionary past? This revolutionary is thus effectively a "universal singular,"
an individual whose fate stands for the fate of all. [1]

What makes the position of this revolutionary more than simply tragic is a kind
of convoluted, second level, "reflexive" betrayal: first you sacrifice everything for
the (Communist) cause, then you are rejected by (the bearers of) this Cause itself,
finding yourself in a kind of empty space with nothing, no point of identification,
to hold on. Is there not something similar in today’s position of those who, a
decade and a half ago, when US was fully supporting Saddam in his war against
Iran, were drawing attention to Saddam’s use of the WMD and his other horrors,
and were ignored by the US state apparatus – and who now have to listen to the
mantra of Saddam-a-brutal-criminal-dictator turned against themselves? The
problem with the claim about Saddam being a war criminal is not that it is false,
but that the US administration has no right to utter it without admitting its own
responsibility in Saddam’s stay in power – the surprised late discovery that
Saddam is a brutal dictator sounds like Stalin’s surprised discovery, in the late
1930, that Yezhov, the head of NKVD who organized the terror, was responsible
for the death of thousands of innocent Communists...

The ultimate dimension of the irony of such a convoluted situation – that of being
reduced to a prisoner building monuments to oneself - is nonetheless something
inherent to Stalinism, in contrast to Fascism: it is in Stalinism only that people
are enslaved on behalf of the ideology which claims that theirs is all power. The
first thing one cannot but take note of apropos the Stalinist discourse is its
contagious nature: the way (almost) everyone likes to mockingly imitate it, use its
terms in different political contexts, etc., in clear contrast to Fascism. Not only
this: in the last decade, we are witnessing in most post-Communist countries the
process of inventing the Communist tradition. The Communist past is recreated
as a cultural and life-style phenomenon, products which, decades ago, were
perceived as a miserable copy of the Western "true thing" (the Eastern versions of
cola-drinks, of hand lotions, the low quality refrigirators and washing machines,
the popular muisic...) are not only fondly remembered and sometimes even
displayed in museums – sometimes, they are even successfully put on the market
again (like the Florena hand lotion in the GDR). The political aspect of the
Communiust past – in its good and bad aspects, from the emancipatory dream to
the Stalinist terror - is erased, replaced by everyday objects which evoke the
vision of a simple and modest, but for this very reason more happy, content,
satisfying life than the stressful dynamics of capitalism. The process of the
creation of new Nation-States out of the disintegration of Communist "empires"
thus follows the logic of what, with regard to the rise of capitalism, Marx
described as the priority of the formal subsumption of the forces of production
under the capital over the material subsumption: a society was first formally
subsumed under the Nation-State, and then followed by elaborating its
ideological content (fabricating the tradition that grounds this Nation-State). - In
short, Stalinism is not prohibited in the same way as Nazism: even if we are fully
aware of its monstrous aspects, one finds Ostalgie acceptable: Goodbye Lenin is
tolerated, "Goodbye Hitler" not – why? Or, another example: in today's Germany,
there are on the market many CD's with old DDR revolutionary and party songs,
from "Stalin, Freund, Genosse" to Die Partei hat immer Recht - but we look in
vain for a CD with the Nazi party songs...

Already at the anecdotal level, the difference between the Fascist and the Stalinist
universe is obvious; say, in the Stalinist show trials, the accused has to publicly
confess his crimes and to give an account of how he came to commit them – in
start contrast to Nazism, in which it would be meaningless to demand from a Jew
the confession that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation.
This difference points towards the different attitude towards Enlightenment:
Stalinism still conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, within
which truth is accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved he is,
which is why he is subjectively responsible for his crimes, [2] in contrast to the
Nazis, for whom the guilt of the Jews is a direct fact of their very biological
constitution; one does not have to prove that they are guilty, they are guilty solely
by being Jews – why? The key is provided by the sudden rise, in the Western
ideological imaginary, of the figure of the wandering „eternal Jew" in the age of
Romanticism, i.e., precisely when, in real life, with the explosion of capitalism,
features attributed to Jews expanded into the whole of society (since commodity
exchange became hegemonic). It was thus at the very moment when Jews were
deprived of their specific properties which made it easy to distinguish them from
the rest of the population, and when the "Jewish question" was "resolved" at the
political level by the formal emancipation of the Jews, i.e., by granting Jews the
same rights as to all other "normal" Christian citizens, that their "curse" was
inscribed into their very being – they were no longer ridiculous misers and
usurers, but demoniac heroes of eternal damnation, haunted by an unspecified
and unspeakable guilt, condemned to wander around and longing to find
redemption in death. So it was precisely when the specific figure of the Jew
disappeared that the ABSOLUTE Jew emerged, and this transformation
conditioned the shift of anti-Semitism from theology to race: their damnation
was their race, they were not guilty for what they did (exploit the Christians,
murder their children, rape their women, or, ultimately, betray and murder
Christ), but for what they WERE – is it necessary to add that this shift laid the
foundations for the holocaust, for the physical annihilation of the Jews as the
only appropriate final solution of their "problem"? Insofar as Jews were
identified by a series of their properties, the goal was to convert them, to turn
them into Christians; but from the moment that Jewishness concerns their very
being, only annihilation can solve the "Jewish question."

It is none other than Nietzsche who proposed the correct materialist intervention
destined to "traverse the /anti-Semitic/ fantasy": in No. 251 of Beyond Good and
Evil, he proposed, as a way to "breed a new caste that would rule over Europe,"
the mixing of the German and the Jewish race, which would combine the German
ability of "giving orders and obeying" with the Jewish genius of "money and
patience." [3] The ingenuity of this solution is that if combines two fantasies
which are a priori incompatible, which cannot meet each other in the same
symbolic space, as in the English publicity spot for a beer from a couple of years
ago. Its first part stages the well-known fairy-tale anecdote: a girl walks along a
stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and, of course, the ugly
frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn't over
yet: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her towards himself,
kisses her - and she turns into a bottle of beer which the man holds triumphantly
in his hand... We have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer -
what we can never obtain is the "natural" couple of the beautiful woman and man
- why not? Because the fantasmatic support of this "ideal couple" would have
been the inconsistent figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. This, then, opens
up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through the
very over-identification with it, i.e. by way of embracing simultaneously, within
the same space, the multitude of inconsistent fantasmatic elements. That is to
say, each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing -
the girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the
girl who is really a bottle of beer. What modern art and writing oppose to this is
not objective reality but the "objectively subjective" underlying fantasy which the
two subjects are never able to assume, something similar to a Magrittesque
painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with a title "A man and a woman" or
"The ideal couple". And is this not exactly what Nietzsche does in his proposal? Is
his formula of the new race mixed from Germans and Jews not his "frog with a
bottle of beer"?

It is precisely on account of the legacy of Enlightenment that, as Jean-Claude

Milner put it, comparing Rousseau to the Stalinist show trials, "in the matter of
confessions, Geneva does not necessarily win over Moscow." [4] In the Stalinist
ideological imaginary, the universal Reason is objectivized in the guise of the
inexorable laws of historical progress and we are all its servants, the leader
included – which is why, after a Nazi leader delivers a speech and the crowd
applauds, he just stands and silently accepts the applause, positing himself as its
addressee, while in Stalinism, when the obligatory applause explodes at the end
of the leader's speech, the leader stands up and joins others in applauding. [5]
Recall the wonderful detail from the beginning of Lubitch's To Be or not to Be:
when Hitler enters a room, all the Nazi officers in the room raise their hands into
a Nazi salute and shout their »Heil Hitler!«; in reply to it, Hitler himself raises
his hand and says: "Heil myself!" - in Hitler's case, this is pure humor, a thing
which could not happen in reality, while Stalin effectively could (and did) "hail
himself" when he joined others in applauding himself. For this same reason, on
Stalin's birthday, the prisoners were sending telegrams to Stalin, wishing him all
the best and the success of Socialism, even from the darkest gulags like Norilsk or
Vorkuta, while one cannot even imagine Jews from Auschwitz sending Hitler a
telegram for his birthday... Crazy and tasteless as this may sound, this last
distinction bears witness to the fact that the opposition between Stalinism and
Nazism was the opposition between civilization and barbarism: Stalinism did not
cut the last threat that linked it to civilization. This is why the biggest war of the
XXth century, the World War II, was the war in which Stalinist Communist AND
capitalist democracies fought together against Fascism. [6] This is also why we do
not find in Nazism anything that could be compared to the "humanist" dissident
Communists, those who went even up to risking their physical survival in fighting
what they perceived as the "bureaucratic deformation" of Socialism in the USSR
and its empire: in the Nazi Germany, there were no figures who advocated
"Nazism with a human face"… Therein resides the flaw (and the secret bias) of all
attempts a la Nolte to adopt a neutral position of "objectively comparing Fascism
and Stalinism," i.e., of the line of argumentation which asks: "If we condemn
Nazis for illegally killing millions, why do we not apply the same standards to
Communism? If Heidegger cannot be pardoned his brief Nazi engagement, why
can Lukacs and Brecht and others be pardoned their much longer Stalinist
engagement?" In today’s constellation, such a position automatically means
privileging Fascism over Communism, i.e., more concretely, reducing Nazism to a
reaction to - and repetition of - the practices already found in Bolshevism
(struggle to death against the political enemy, terror and concentration camps),
so that the "original sin" is that of Communism.

The proper task is thus to think the TRAGEDY of the October Revolution: to
perceive its greatness, its unique emancipatory potential, and, simultaneously,
the HISTORICAL NECESSITY of its Stalinist outcome. One should oppose both
temptations: the Trotskyte notion that Stalinism was ultimately a contingent
deviation, as well as the notion that the Communist project is, in its very core,
totalitarian. In the third volume of his supreme biography of Trotsky, Isaac
Deutscher makes a perspicuous observation about the forced collectivization of
the late 1920s:
 

/…/ having failed to work outwards and to expand and being compressed within
the Soviet Union, that dynamic force turned inwards and began once again to
reshape violently the structure of Soviet society. Forcible industrialization and
collectivization were now substitutes for the spread of revolution, and the
liquidation of the Russian kulaks was the Ersatz for the overthrow of the
bourgeois rule abroad. [7]

Apropos Napoleon, Marx once wrote that the Napoleonic wars were a kind of
export of revolutionary activity: since, with Thermidor, the revolutionary
agitation was quenched, the only way to give an outlet to it was to displace it
towards the outside, to re-channel it into war against other states. Is the
collectivization of the late 1920s not the same gesture turned around? When the
Russian revolution (which, with Lenin, explicitly conceived itself as the first step
of a pan-European revolution, as a process which can only survive at accomplish
itself through an all-European revolutionary explosion) remained alone,
constrained to one country, the energy had to be released in a thrust inwards… It
is in this direction that one should qualify the standard Trotskite designation of
Stalinism as the Napoleonic Thermidor of the October Revolution: the
"Napoleonic" moment was rather the attempt, at the end of the civil war in 1920,
to export revolution with military means, the attempt with failed with the defeat
of the Red Army in Poland; if anyone, it was Tukhachevsky who effectively was a
potential Bolshevik Napoleon.

The twists of contemporary politics render palpable a kind of Hegelian dialectical

law: a fundamental historical task that "naturally" expresses the orientation of
one political block can only be accomplished by the opposite block. In Argentina
a decade ago, it was Menem, elected on a populist platform, who pursued tight
monetary politics and the IMF-agenda of privatizations much more radically than
his "liberal" market-oriented radical opponents. In France in 1960, it was the
conservative de Gaulle (and not the Socialists) who broke the Gordian knot by
giving full independence to Alger. It was the conservative Nixon who established
diplomatic relations between the US and China. It was the "hawkish" Begin who
concluded the Camp David treaty with Egypt. Or, further back in Argentinean
history, in 1830s and 1840s, the heyday of the struggle between "barbarian"
Federalists (representatives of provincial cattle-owners) and "civilized"
Unitarians (merchants etc. from Buenos Aires interested in a strong central
state), it was Juan Manuel Rosas, the Federalist populist dictator, who
established a centralist system of government, much stronger than Unitarians
dared to dream. The same logic was at work in the crisis of the Soviet Union of
the second half of the 1920s: in 1927, the ruling coalition of Stalinists and
Bukharinists, pursuing the policy of appeasement of the private farmers, was
ferociously attacking the Left united Opposition of Trotskists and Zinovievists
who called for the accelerated industrialization and the fights against rich
peasants (higher taxes, collectivization). One can imagine the surprise of the Left
Opposition when, in 1928, Stalin enforced a sudden "Leftist" turn, imposing a
politics of fast industrialization and brutal collectivization of land, not only
stealing their program, but even realizing it in a much more brutal way they
dared to imagine – their criticism of Stalin as a "Thermidorian" Right-winger vall
of a sudden became meaningless. No wonder that many Trotskytes recanted and
joined the Stalinists who, at the very moment of the ruthless extermination of the
Trotskist faction, realized their program. Communist parties knew how to apply
"the rule which permitted the Roman Church to endure for two thousand years:
condemn those whose politics one takes over, canonize those from whom one
does not take anything." [8] And, incidentally, there was the same tragic-comic
misunderstanding in Yugoslavia of the early 1970s: after the large student
demonstrations, where, along the calls for democracy, accusations that the ruling
Communists pursue the politics which favors the new "rich" technocrats were
heard, the Communist counter-attack that stifled all opposition was legitimized,
among others, by the idea that Communists heard the message of the student
protests and were meeting their demands… Therein resides the tragedy of the
Leftist Communist opposition which pursued the oxymoron of the anti-market
"radical" economic politics combined with the calls for direct and true
democracy.

So where do we stand today? Is the deadlock complete? A century ago, Vilfredo

Pareto was the first to describe the so-called 80/20 rule of (not only) social life:
80 % of land is owned by 20 % of people, 80 % of profits are produced by 20 % of
the employees, 80 % of decisions are made during 20 % of meeting time, 80 % of
the links on the Web point to less than 20 % of Web-pages, 80 % of peas are
produced by 20 % of the peapods… As some social analysts and economists
suggested, today’s explosion of economic productivity confronts us with the
ultimate case of this rule: the coming global economy tends towards a state in
which only 20 % of the workforce can do all the necessary job, so that 80 % of the
people are basically irrelevant and of no use, potentially unemployed.

This 80/20 rule follows from what is called "scale-free networks" in which a
small number of nodes with the greatest number of links is followed by an ever
larger number of nodes with an ever smaller number of links. Say, among any
group of people, a small number of them know (have links to) a large number of
other people, while the majority of people know only a small number of people –
social networks spontaneously form "nodes," people with large number of links to
other people. In such a scale-free network, competition remains: while the overall
distribution remains the same, the identity of top nodes changes all the time, a
late-comer replacing the earlier winners. However, some of the networks can
pass the critical threshold beyond which competition breaks down and the
winner takes it all: one node grabs all the links, leaving none for the rest – this is
what basically happened with Microsoft which emerged as the privileged node: it
grabbed all the links, i.e., we have to relate to him in order to communicate with
other entities. The big structural question is, of course: what defines the
threshold, which networks tend to pass the threshold, above which competition
breaks down and the winner takes it all? [9]
If, then, today's "postindustrial" society needs less and less workers to reproduce
itself (20 % of the working force, on some accounts), then it is not workers who
are in excess, but the Capital itself. – However, unemployed are only one among
the many candidates for today’s "universal individual," for a particular group
whose fate stands for the injustice of today’s world: Palestinians, Guantanamo
prisoners… Palestine is today the site of a potential event precisely because all the
standard "pragmatic" solutions to the "Middle East crisis" repeatedly fail, so that
a utopian invention of a new space is the only "realistic" choice. Furthermore,
Palestinians are a good candidate on account of their paradoxical position of
being the victims of the ultimate Victims themselves (Jews), which, of course,
puts them in an extremely difficult spot: when they resist, their resistance can
immediately be denounced as a prolongation of anti-Semitism, as a secret
solidarity with the Nazi "final solution." Indeed, if – as Lacanian Zionists like to
claim – Jews are the objet petit a among nations, the troubling excess of Western
history, how can one resist them with impunity? Is it possible to be the objet a of
objet a itself? It is precisely this ethical blackmail that one should reject. [10]

However, there is a privileged site in this series: what if the new proletarian
position is those of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises? The
explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World
megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through
Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the
crucial geopolitical event of our times. [11] The case of Lagos, the biggest node in
the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to
Ibadan, is exemplary here: according to the official sources themselves, about two
thirds of the Lagos State total land mass of 3.577 square kilometers could be
classified as shanties or slums; no one even knows the size of its population –
officially it is 6 million, but most experts estimate it at 10 million. Since,
sometime very soon (or maybe, given the imprecision of the Third World
censuses, it already happened), the urban population of the earth will outnumber
the rural population, and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the
urban population, we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon. We are
thus witnessing the fast growth of the population outside the state control, living
in conditions half outside the law, in terrible need of the minimal forms of self-
organization. Although their population is composed of marginalized laborers,
redundant civil servants and ex-peasants, they are not simple a redundant
surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways, many
of them working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with
no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is
the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap
food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) They are
the true "symptom" of slogans like "Development," "Modernization," and "World
Market": not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost
logic of global capitalism. [12]

No wonder that the hegemonic form of ideology in slums is the Pentecostal

Christianity, with its mixture of charismatic miracles-and-spectacles-oriented
fundamentalism and of social programs like community kitchens and taking care
of children and old. While, of course, one should resist the easy temptation to
elevate and idealize the slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class, one should
nonetheless, in Badiou’s terms, perceive slums as one of the few authentic
"evental sites" in today’s society – the slum-dwellers are literally a collection of
those who are the "part of no part," the "surnumerary" element of society,
excluded from the benefits of citizenship, the uprooted and dispossessed, those
who effectively "have nothing to loose but their chains." It is effectively surprising
how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the
proletarian revolutionary subject: they are "free" in the double meaning of the
word even more than the classic proletariat ("freed" from all substantial ties;
dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a
large collective, forcibly thrown together, "thrown" into a situation where they
have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any
support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.

Of course, there is a crucial break between the slum-dwellers and the classic
Marxist working class: while the latter is defined in the precise terms of economic
"exploitation" (the appropriation of surplus-value generated by the situation of
having to sell one’s own labor force as a commodity on the market), the defining
feature of the slum-dwellers is socio-political, it concerns their (non)integration
into the legal space of citizenship with (most of) its incumbent rights – to put it in
somewhat simplified terms, much more than a refugee, a slum-dweller is a homo
sacer, the systemically generated "living dead" of global capitalism. He is a kind
of negative of the refugee: a refugee from his own community, the one whom the
power is not trying to control through concentration, where (to repeat the
unforgettable pun from Ernst Lubitch’s To Be Or Not to Be) those in power do
the concentrating while the refugees do the camping, but pushed into the space of
the out-of-control; in contrast to the Foucauldian micro-practices of discipline, a
slum-dweller is the one with regard to whom the power renounces its right to
exert full control and discipline, finding it more appropriate to let him dwell in
the twilight zone of slums. [13]

What one finds in the "really-existing slums" is, of course, a mixture of

improvised modes of social life, from religious "fundamentalist" groups hold
together by a charismatic leader and criminal gangs up to germs of new
"socialist" solidarity. The slum dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly
emerging class, the so-called "symbolic class" (managers, journalists and PR
people, academics, artists, etc.) which is also uprooted and perceives itself as
directly universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene
academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his camps). Is this the new
axis of class struggle, or is the "symbolic class" inherently split, so that one can
make the emancipatory wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the
"progressive" part of the symbolic class? What we should be looking for are the
signs of the new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum
collectives: they will be the germs of future.
Notes:

[1] What this means is that, precisely on account of the unbearable horror of
Stalinism, any direct moralistic portrayal of Stalinism as evil misses its target – it
is only through what Kierkegardian called "indirect communication," by way of
practicing a kind of irony, that one can render its horror.

[2] Another sign of the Enlightenment legacy: if there is one proposition which
condenses Stalinist politics, it is the "anti-essentialist" motif, repeated endlessly
in his works: "Everything depends on circumstances."

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Oxford: OUP 1998, par. 251.

[4] Jean-Claude Milner, Le periple structural, Paris: Editions du Seuil 2002, p.

214.

[5] The mutual fascination between Stalin and the Russian writers who are today
perceived as "dissidents," displays not only Stalin’s belief in the secret wisdom of
poets but, even more, the weird conviction of the writers themselves that Stalin,
this total Master, a kind of Freudian primordial father (Ur-Vater), detains a
mysterious insight into the ultimate secrets of life and death. In April 1930, Stalin
unexpectedly phoned Bulgakov to convince him not to emigrate; after assuring
him that he will get a job at the Art Theater, he added: "We should meet, to talk
together." Bulgakov immediately replied: "Yes, yes! Iosif Vissarionovich, I really
need to talk to you." After this, Stalin unexpectedly cut the conversation. (Quoted
from Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin, New York: Little, Brown 2004,
p. 90.) A similar thing happened to Pasternak in June 1934, when he got a phone
call from Stalin, asking him about Mandelstam who was at that time out of mercy
and in exile: "This is Stalin. Are you interceding on behalf of your friend
Mandelstam?" Fearing a trap, the confused Pasternak replied: "We were never
actually friends. Rather the reverse. I found it difficult dealing with him. But I’ve
always wanted dreamed about talking to you. About life and death." Stalin cut
here the conversation short, reprimanding Shostakovich for not standing for his
friend: "We old Bolsheviks never deny our friends. And I have no reason to talk to
you about other things."(Volkov, op.cit., p. 106.) The same ambiguous fascination
is clearly discernible in Shostakovich and Meyerhold, and even in Mandelstam.

[6] One of the standard arguments of rabid anti-Communists concerns the

number of secret agents in, respectively, Communist countries and the Nazi
Germany: the ex-GDR, with its ten million inhabitants, had 100.000 fully
employed secret police agents to control its population, while Gestapo covered
ENTIRE Germany with cca 10000 fully employed agents... However, what this
argument demonstrates is rather the opposite: the degree of participation of the
"ordinary" Germans in the political terror – there was no need of a larger number
of agents for the massive network of denunciations to function, since Gestapo
could rely on the cooperation of the wide circles of civil society. In other words,
the massive moral corruption was much stronger in Nazism than in Communism.
[7] Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, London: Verso Books 2003, p. 88.

[8] Jean-Claude Milner, Le periple structural, p. 213.

[9] See Chapters 6 and 8 in Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked, New York: Plume
2003.

[10] Elie Wiesel sees the holocaust as equal to the revelation at Sinai in its
religious significance: attempts to 'desanctify' or 'demystify' the Holocaust are a
subtle form of anti-Semitism. In this type of discourse, holocaust is effectively
elevated into a unique agalma, hidden treasure, objet a of the Jews – they are
ready to give up everything except holocaust... Recently, after I was attacked by a
Jewish Lacanian for being a covert anti-Semite, I asked a common friend why
this extreme reaction? His reply: "You should understand the guy – he does not
want the Jews to be deprived of the holocaust, the focal point of their lives..."

[11] See the excellent report of Mike Davis, "Planet of Slums. Urban Revolution
and the Informal Proletariat," New Left Review 26 (March/April 2004).

[12] Are then slum-dwellers not to be classified as that what Marx, with barely
concealed contempt, dismissed as "lumpen-proletariat," the degenerate "refuse"
of all classes which, when politicized, as a rule serves as the support of proto-
Fascist and Fascist regimes (in Marx’s case, of Napoleon III)? A closer analysis
should focus on the changed structural role of these "lumpen" elements in the
conditions of global capitalism (especially large-scale migrations).

[13] The precise Marxian definition of the proletarian position is: substanceless
subjectivity which emerges when a certain structural short-circuit occurs - not
only producers exchange their products on the market, but there are producers
who are forced to sell on the market not the product of their labor, but directly
their working force as such. It is here, through this redoubled/reflected
alienation, that the surplus-object emerges: surplus-value is literally correlative
to the emptied subject, it is the objectal counterpart of $. This redoubled
alienation means that not only "social relations appear as relations between
things," as in every market economy, but that the very core of subjectivity itself is
posited as equivalent to a thing. One should be attentive here to the paradox of
universalization: market economy can only become universal when working force
itself is also sold on the market as a commodity, i.e., there can be no universal
market economy with the majority of producers selling their products.

• Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault

and then Lacan •
.............Slavoj Zizek
The 'antagonism' of the Kantian notion of freedom (as the most concise
expression of the antagonism of freedom in the bourgeois life itself) does not
reside where Adorno locates it (the autonomously self-imposed law means that
freedom coincides with self-enslavement and self-domination, that the Kantian
"spontaneity" is in actu its opposite, utter self-control, thwarting of all
spontaneous impetuses), but "much more on the surface": [1] for Kant as for
Rousseau, the greatest moral good is to lead a fully autonomous life as a free
rational agent, and the worst evil subjection to the will of another; however, Kant
has to concede that man does not emerge as a free mature rational agent
spontaneously, through his/her natural development, but only through the
arduous process of maturation sustained by harsh discipline and education which
cannot but be experienced by the subject as imposed on his/her freedom, as an
external coercion:

Social institutions both to nourish and to develop such independence are

necessary and are consistent with, do not thwart, its realization, but with freedom
understood as an individual's causal agency this will always look like an external
necessity that we have good reasons to try to avoid. This creates the problem of a
form of dependence that can be considered constitutive of independence and that
cannot be understood as a mere compromise with the particular will of another
or as a separate, marginal topic of Kant's dotage. This is, in effect, the antinomy
contained within the bourgeois notions of individuality, individual
responsibility... (Pippin – 118-119)

One can effectively imagine here Kant as an unexpected precursor on Foucault's

thesis, from his Discipline and Punish, of the formation of the free individual
through a complex set of disciplinary micro-practices - and, as Pippin doesn't
wait to point out, this antinomy explodes even larger in Kant's socio-historical
reflections, focused on the notion of "unsocial sociability": what is Kant's notion
of the historical relation between democracy and monarchy if not this same thesis
on the link between freedom and submission to educative dependence applied to
historical process itself? In the long term (or in its notion), democracy is the only
appropriate form of government; however, because of the immaturity of people,
conditions for a functioning democracy can only be established through a non-
democratic monarchy which, through the exertion of itrs benevolent power,
educates people to political maturity. And, as expected, Kant does not fail to
mention the Mandevillean rationality of the market in which each individual's
pursuit of his/her egotistic interests is what works best (much better than direct
altruistic work) for the common good. At its most extreme, this brings Kant to the
notion that human history itself is a deployment of an inscrutable (?) divine plan,
within which we, mortals, are destined to play a role unbeknownst to us – here,
the paradox grows even stronger: not only is our freedom linked to its opposite
"from below", but also "from above", i.e., not only can our freedom arise only
through our submission and dependence, but our freedom as such is a moment of
a larger divine plan – our freedom is not truly an aim-in-itself, it serves a higher
purpose.
A way to clarify – if not resolve – this dilemma would have been to introduce
some further crucial distinctions into the notion of "noumenal" freedom itself.
That is to say, upon a closer look, it becomes evident that, for Kant, discipline and
eduction do not directly work on our animal nature, forging it into human
individuality: as Kant points out, animals cannot be properly educated since their
behavior is already predestined by their instincts. What this means is that,
paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and
self-responsibility), I already have to be free in a much more radical, "noumenal",
monstruous even, sense.

Daniel Dennett draws a convincing and insightful parallel between an animal's

physical environs and human environs,; not only human artefacts (clothes,
houses, tools), but also the "virtual" environs of the discursive cobweb: "Stripped
of /the 'web of discourses'/, an individual human being is as incomplete as a bird
without feathers, a turtle without its shell." [2] A naked man is the same
nonsense as a shaved ape: without language (and tools and...), man is a crippled
animal - it is this lack which is supplemented by symbolic institutions and tools,
so that the point made obvious today, in popular culture figures like Robocop
(man is simultaneously super-animal and crippled), holds from the very
beginning. How do we pass from "natural" to "symbolic" environs? This passage
is not direct, one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary
narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of "vanishing
mediator," which is neither Nature nor Culture - this In-between is not the spark
of logos magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his
supplementary virtual symbolic environs, but precisely something which,
although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be "repressed" by
logos - the Freudian name for this monstrous freedom, of course, is death drive.
It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the "birth of man" are
always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what
will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a
"being of language," bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly
"perverted," "denaturalized", "derailed" nature which is not yet culture. In his
anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs
disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny "unruliness" which seems to be
inherent to human nature - a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly
on one's own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this "unruliness" that the
human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this
"unruliness," not the animal nature in man.

In Hegel's Lectures on Philosophy of History, a similar role is played by the

reference to "negroes": significantly, Hegel deals with "negroes" before history
proper (which starts with ancient China), in the section entitled "The Natural
Context or the Geographical Basis of World History": "negroes" stand there for
the human spirit in its "state of nature," they are described as a kind of perverted,
monstrous child, simultaneously naive and extremely corrupted, i.e. living in the
pre-lapsarian state of innocence, and, precisely as such, the most cruel
barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly
manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by
the raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards... [3] This In-between is the
"repressed" of the narrative form (in this case, of Hegel's "large narrative" of
world-historical succession of spiritual forms): not nature as such, but the very
break with nature which is (later) supplemented by the virtual universe of
narratives. According to Schelling, prior to its assertion as the medium of the
rational Word, the subject is the "infinite lack of being /unendliche Mangel an
Sein/," the violent gesture of contraction that negates every being outside itself.
This insight also forms the core of Hegel's notion of madness: when Hegel
determines madness to be a withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the
soul into itself, its "contraction," the cutting-off of its links with external reality,
he all too quickly conceives of this withdrawal as a "regression" to the level of the
"animal soul" still embedded in its natural environs and determined by the
rhythm of nature (night and day, etc.). Does this withdrawal, on the contrary, not
designate the severing of the links with the Umwelt, the end of the subject's
immersion into its immediate natural environs, and is it, as such, not the
founding gesture of "humanization"? Was this withdrawal-into-self not
accomplished by Descartes in his universal doubt and reduction to Cogito, which,
as Derrida pointed out in his "Cogito and the history of madness", [4] also
involves a passage through the moment of radical madness?

This brings us to the necessity of Fall: what the Kantian link between dependence
and autonomy amounts to is that Fall is unavoidable, a necessary step in the
moral progress of man. That is to say, in precise Kantian terms: "Fall" is the very
renunciation of my radical ethical autonomy; it occurs when I take refuge in a
heteronomous Law, in a Law which is experience as imposed on me from the
outside, i.e., the finitude in which I search for a support to avoid the dizziness of
freedom is the finitude of the external-heteronomous Law itself. Therein resides
the difficulty of being a Kantian. Every parent knows that the child’s
provocations, wild and "transgressive" as they may appear, ultimately conceal
and express a demand, addressed at the figure of authority, to set a firm limit, to
draw a line which means "This far and no further!", thus enabling the child to
achieve a clear mapping of what is possible and what is not possible. (And does
the same not go also for hysteric’s provocations?) This, precisely, is what the
analyst refuses to do, and this is what makes him so traumatic – paradoxically, it
is the setting of a firm limit which is liberating, and it is the very absence of a firm
limit which is experienced as suffocating. THIS is why the Kantian autonomy of
the subject is so difficult – its implication is precisely that there is nobody
outside, no external agent of "natural authority", who can do the job for me and
set me my limit, that I myself have to pose a limit to my natural "unruliness."
Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this
should not deceive us: what Kant aims at is not the philosophical commonplace
according to which, in contrast to animals whose behavioral patterns are
grounded in their inherited instincts, man lacks such firm coordinates which,
therefore, have to be imposed on him from the outside, through a cultural
authority; Kant’s true aim is rather to point out how the very need of an external
master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself
the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility. In this precise
sense, a truly enlightened "mature" human being is a subject who no longer needs
a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations.
This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by Chesterton:
"Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire
limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice." [5]

The lesson here is thus Hegelian in a very precise sense: the external opposition
between freedom (transcendental spontaneity, moral autonomy and self-
responsibility) and slavery (submission, either to my own nature, its
'pathological' instincts, or to external power) has to be transposed into freedom
itself, as the "highest" antagonism between the monstrous freedom qua
"unruliness" and the true moral freedom. - However, a possible counter-
argument here would have been that this noumenal excess of freedom (the
Kantian "unruliness", the Hegelian "Night of the World") is a retroactive result of
the disciplinary mechanisms themselves (along the lines of the Paulinian motif of
"Law creates transgression", or of the Foucauldian topic of how the very
disciplinary measures that try to regulate sexuality generate "sex" as the elusive
excess) – the obstacle creates that which it endeavors to control. Are we then
dealing with a closed circle of a process positing one's own presuppositions?

Madness and (in) the History of Cogito

This paraphrase of the title of Derrida’s essay on Foucault’s Histoire de la folie

has a precise stake: madness is inscribed into the history of Cogito at two levels.
First, throughout entire philosophy of subjectivity from Descartes through Kant,
Schelling and Hegel, to Nietzsche and Husserl, Cogito is related to its shadowy
double, pharmakon, which is madness. Second, madness is inscribed into the
very (pre)history of Cogito itself, it is part of its transcendental genesis.

In "Cogito and the History of Madness," (Writing and Difference) Derrida states
that

the Cogito escapes madness only because at its own moment, under its own
authority, it is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad. /
…/ Descartes never interns madness, neither at the stage of natural doubt nor at
the stage of metaphysical doubt. (55)

Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. /…/ even if the totality of the world does
not exist, even if nonmeaning has invaded the totality of the world, up to and
including the very contents of my thought, I still think, I am while I think. (56)

Derrida leaves no doubt that, "/a/s soon as Descartes has reached this extremity,
he seeks to reassure himself, to certify the Cogito through God, to identify the act
of the Cogito with a reasonable reason." (58) This withdrawal sets in "from the
moment when he pulls himself out of madness by determining natural light
through a series of principles and axioms" (59). The term "light" is here crucial to
measure the distance of Descartes from German Idealism, in which, precisely, the
core of the subject is no longer light, but the abyss of darkness, the "Night of the
World."

This, then, is Derrida’s fundamental interpretive gesture: the one of "separating,

within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be
enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of
exceeding every finite and determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in
Descartes’s philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito
or the Husserlian Cogito as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure"
(60).

Here, when Derrida asserts that "/t/he historicity proper to philosophy is located
and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite
structure, /…/ in the difference between history and historicity" (60), he is
perhaps too short. This tension may appear very "Lacanian": is it not a version of
the tension between the Real – the hyperbolic excess – and its (ultimately always
failed) symbolization? The matrix we thus arrive at is the one of the eternal
oscillation between the two extremes, the radical expenditure, hyperbole, excess,
and its later domestification (like Kristeva, between Semiotic and Symbolic...).
Illusionary are both extremes: pure excess as well as pure finite order would
disintegrate, cancel themselves... This misses the true point of "madness," which
is not the pure excess of the Night of the World, but the madness of the passage
to the Symbolic itself, of imposing a symbolic order onto the chaos of the Real.
(Like Freud, who, in his Schreber analysis, points out how the paranoiac "system"
is not madness, but a desperate attempt to ESCAPE madness – the disintegration
of the symbolic universe - through an ersatz, as if, universe of meaning.) If
madness is constitutive, then EVERY system of meaning is minimally paranoiac,
"mad."

Recall Brecht's 'what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new
bank?' - therein resides the lesson of David Lynch's Straight Story: what is the
ridiculously-pathetic perversity of figures like Bobby Perou in Wild at Heart or
Frank in Blue Velvet compared to deciding to traverse the US central plane in a
tractor to visit a dying relative? Measured with this act, Frank's and Bobby's
outbreaks of rage are the impotent theatrics of old and sedate conservatives...

This step is the properly "Hegelian" one – which is why Hegel, the philosopher
who made the most radical attempt to THINK TOGETHER the abyss of madness
at the core of subjectivity AND the totality of the System of meaning. This is why,
for very good reasons, "Hegel" stands for the common sense for the moment at
which philosophy gets "mad," explodes into a "crazy" pretense at "absolute
knowledge"...

So: not simply "madness" and symbolization – there is, in the very history of
philosophy (of philosophical "systems"), a PRIVILEGED point at which the
hyperbole, philosophy’s ex-timate core, directly inscribes itself into it, and this is
the moment of Cogito, of transcendental philosophy. "Madness" is here "tamed"
in a different way, through "transcendental" horizon, which does not cancel it in
an all-encompassing world-view, but maintains it.

In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with
the madman: /…/ the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby
authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease." [6]
However, what about psychoanalysis? Is psychoanalysis not precisely the point at
which the "man of reason" reestablishes his dialogue with madness, rediscovering
the dimension of TRUTH in it? And not the same ("hermeneutic"-mantic) truth
as before, in the pre-modern universe? Foucault deals with this in History of
Sexuality, where psychoanalysis as the culmination of "sex as the ultimate truth"
confessionary logic...

In spite of the finesse of Foucault’s reply, he ultimately falls prey to the trap of
historicism which cannot account for its own position of enunciation; this
impossibility is redoubled in Foucault’s characterization of his "object," madness,
which oscillates between two extremes. On the one hand, his stategic aim is to
make madness itself talk, as it is in itself, outside the (scientific, etc.) discourse on
it: "it is definitely not a question of a history of ideas, but of the rudimentary
movements of an experience. A history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in
its vivacity, before knowledge has even begun to close in on it." [7] On the other
hand, the (later) model deployed in his Discipline and Punish and History of
Sexuality compels him to posit the absolute immanence of the (excessive,
transgressive, resisting…) object to its manipulation by the dispositif of power-
knowledge: in the same way that "/t/he carceral network does not cast the
unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside"; [8] in the same way that
the "liberated" man is itself generated by the dispositif that controls and regulates
him; in the same way that "sex" as the unassimilable excess is itself generated by
the discourses and practices that try to control and regulate it; madness is also
generated by the very discourse that excludes, objectivizes and studies it, there is
no "pure" madness outside it – Foucault here "effectively acknowledges the
correctness of Derrida’s formulation", [9] namely of il n’y a pas de hors-texte,
providing his own version of it.

When Foucault writes "Perhaps one day /transgression/ will seem as decisive for
our culture, as much part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an
earlier time for dialectical thought." [10] So, does he not thereby miss the point,
which is that this day has already arrived, that permanent transgression already
IS the feature of late capitalism? His final reproach to Derrida’s il n’y a pas de
hors-texte: [11] textual analysis, philosophical hermeneutics, no exteriority...

reduction of discursive practices to textual traces; elision of the events which are
produced in these practices, so that all that remains of them are marks for a
reading; inventions of voices behind the texts, so that we do not have to analyze
the modes of the implication of the subject in the discourses; the assignation of
the originary as /what is/ said and not-said in the text, so that we do not have to
locate discursive practices in the field of transformations in which they effectuate
themselves. [12]

Some Marxists even, as if Foucault/Derrida = materialism/idealism. Textual

endless self-reflexive games versus materialist analysis. BUT: Foucault: remains
HISTORICIST. He reproaches Derrida his inability to think the exteriority of
philosophy – this is how he designates the stakes of their debate:

could there be something prior or external to the philosophical discourse? Can

the condition of this discourse be an exclusion, a refusal, an avoided risk, and,
why not, a fear? A suspicion rejected passionately by Derrida. Pudenda origo,
said Nietzsche with regard to religious people and their religion. [13]

However, Derrida is much closer to thinking this externality than Foucault, for
whom exteriority involves simple historicist reduction which cannot account for
itself (to what F used to reply with a cheap rhetorical trick that this is a "police"
question, "who are you to say that" – AGAIN, combining it with the opposite, that
genealogical history is "ontology of the present"). It is easy to do THIS to
philosophy, it is much more difficult to think its INHERENT excess, its ex-timacy
(and philosophers can easily dismiss such external reduction as confusing genesis
and value). This, then, are the true stakes of the debate: ex-timacy or direct
externality?

Foucault versus Derrida, or Foucault on Descartes

Cogito, madness and religion are interlinked in Descartes (génie malin), in Kant
(distance from Swedenborg, who stands for madness, etc.) Simultaneously,
Cogito emerges through differentiation from (reference to) madness, AND
Cogito itself (the idea of Cogito as the point of absolute certainty, “subjective
idealism”) is perceived (not only) by common sense as the very epitome of the
madness of philosophy, crazy paranoiac system-building (philosopher as
madman – (not only) late Wittgenstein). And, also simultaneously, religion
(direct faith) is evoked as madness (Swedenborg for Kant, or radical
Enlightenment rationalists, up to Dawkins), AND religion (God) enters as the
solution from (solypsistic) madness (Descartes).

Foucault and Derrida: polemic, in which they share the key underlying premise:
that Cogito is inherently related to madness. The difference: for Foucault, Cogito
is grounded in the exclusion of madness, while, for Derrida, Cogito itself can only
emerge through a “mad” hyperbole (universalized doubt), and remains marked
by this excess. Before it stabilizes itself as res cogitans, the self-transparent
thinking substance, Cogito as a crazy punctual excess.

In Foucault there is a fundamental change in the status of madness took place in

the passage from Renaissance to the classical Age of Reason (the beginning of
17th century). In Renaissance (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Erasmus, etc.), madness
was a specific phenomenon of human spirit which belonged to the series of
prophets, possessed visionaries, those obsessed by demons, saints, comediants,
etc. It was a meaningful phenomenon with a truth of its own. Even if madmen
were vilified, they were treated with awe, like messengers of sacred horror. - With
Descartes, however, madness is excluded: madness, in all its varieties, comes to
occupy a position that was the former location of leprosy. It is no longer a
phenomenon to be interpreted, searched for its meaning, but a simple illness to
be treated under the well-regulated laws of a medicine or a science that is already
sure of itself, sure that it cannot be mad. This change does not concern only
theory, but social practice itself: from the Classical Age, madmen were interned,
imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals, deprived of the full dignity of a human being,
studied and controlled like a natural phenomenon.

In his Histoire de la folie, Foucault dedicated 3-4 pages to the passage in

MEDITATIONS in which Descartes arrives at Cogito, ERGO SUM. Searching for
the absolutely certain foundation of knowledge, Descartes analyses main forms of
delusions: delusions of senses and sensible perception, illusions of madness,
dreams. He ends with the most radical delusion imaginable, the hypothesis that
all that we see is not true, but a universal dream, and illusion staged by an evil
God (Malin Génie). From here, he arrives at the certainty of Cogito (I think):
even if I can doubt everything, even if all I see is an illusion, I cannot doubt that I
think all this, so Cogito is the absolutely certain starting point of philosophy. -
Foucault’s reproach is that Descartes does not really confront madness, but
avoids to think it. He EXCLUDES madness from the domain of reason: "Dreams
or illusions are surmounted within the structure of truth; but madness is
inadmissible for the doubting subject" In the Classical Age, Reason is thus based
on the exclusion of madness: the very existence of the category 'madness' is
historically determined, along with its opposite 'reason'; that is, it is determined,
through power relations. Madness in the modern sense is not directly a
phenomenon that we can observe, but a discursive construct which emerges at a
certain historical moment, together with its double, Reason in the modern sense.

In his reading of Histoire de la folie, Derrida focused on these 4 pages about

Descartes which, for him, provide the key to the entire book. Through a detailed
analysis, he tries to demonstrate that Descartes does not EXCLUDE madness, but
brings it to EXTREME: the universal doubt, where I suspect that the entire world
is an illusion, is the strongest madness imaginable. Out of this universal doubt,
Cogito emerges: even if everything is an illusion, I can still be sure that I think.
Madness is thus not excluded by Cogito: it is not that the Cogito is not mad, but
Cogito is true even if I am totally mad. The extreme doubt, the hypothesis of
universal madness, is not external to philosophy, but strictly internal to it. It is
the hyperbolic moment, the moment of madness, which GROUNDS philosophy.
Of course, Descartes later “domesticates” this radical excess: he presents the
image of man as thinking substance, dominated by reason; he constructs a
philosophy which is clearly historically conditioned. But the excess, the hyperbole
of universal madness, is not historical. It is the excessive moment which grounds
philosophy, in all its historical forms. Madness is thus not excluded by
philosophy: it is internal to it. Of course, every philosophy tries to control this
excess, to repress it – but in repressing it, it represses its own innermost
foundation: "Philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of
being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness" (59).

In his reply, Foucault first tries to prove, through a detailed reading of Descartes,
that the madness evoked by Descartes does not have the same status of illusion as
sensory illusions and dreams. When I suffer sensory illusions of perception or
when I dream, I still REMAIN NORMAL AND RATIONAL, I only deceive myself
with regard to what I see. In madness, on the contrary, I myself am no longer
normal, I lose my reason. So madness has to be excluded if I am to be a rational
subject. Derrida’s refusal to exclude madness from philosophy bears witness to
the fact that he remains a philosopher who is unable to think the Outside of
philosophy, who is unable to think how philosophy itself is determined by
something that escapes it. Apropos the hypothesis of universal doubt and the Evil
Genius, we are not dealing with true madness here, but with the rational subject
who feigns to be mad, who makes a rational experiment, never losing his control
over it.

Finally, in the very last page of his reply, Foucault tries to determine the true
difference between himself and Derrida. He attacks here (without naming it) the
practice of deconstruction and textual analysis, for which “there is nothing
outside the text” and we are caught in the endless process of interpretation.
Foucault, on the contrary, does not practice textual analysis, but analyses of
DISCOURSES. He analyses “dispositifs”, formations in which texts and
statements are interlinked with extra-textual mechanisms of power and control.
What we have to look for are not deeper textual analyses, but the way discursive
practices are combined with practices of power and domination.

... and then Lacan

The philosopher who stands for one of the extremes of “madness” is Nicholas
Malebranche, his "occasionalism". Malebranche, a disciple of Descartes, drops
Descartes's ridiculous reference to the pineal gland in order to explain the
coordination between the material and the spiritual substance, i.e. body and soul;
how, then, are we to explain their coordination, if there is no contact between the
two, no point at which a soul can act causally on a body or vice versa? Since the
two causal networks (that of ideas in my mind and that of bodily
interconnections) are totally independent, the only solution is that a third, true
Substance (God) continuously coordinates and mediates between the two,
sustaining the semblance of continuity: when I think about raising my hand and
my hand effectively raises, my thought causes the raising of my hand not directly
but only "occasionally" - upon noticing my thought directed at raising my hand,
God sets in motion the other, material, causal chain which leads to my hand
effectively being raised. If we replace "God" with the big Other, the symbolic
order, we can see the closeness of occasionalism to Lacan's position: as Lacan put
it in his polemics against Aristoteles in Television, [14] the relationship between
soul and body is never direct, since the big Other always interposes itself between
the two. Occasionalism is thus essentially a name for the "arbitrary of the
signifier", for the gap that separates the network of ideas from the network of
bodily (real) causality, for the fact that it is the big Other which accounts for the
coordination of the two networks, so that, when my body bites an apple, my soul
experiences a pleasurable sensation. This same gap is targeted by the ancient
Aztec priest who organizes human sacrifices to ensure that the sun will rise again:
the human sacrifice is here an appeal to God to sustain the coordination between
the two series, the bodily necessity and the concatenation of symbolic events.
"Irrational" as the Aztec priest's sacrificing may appear, its underlying premise is
far more insightful than our commonplace intuition according to which the
coordination between body and soul is direct, i.e. it is "natural" for me to have a
pleasurable sensation when I bite an apple since this sensation is caused directly
by the apple: what gets lost is the intermediary role of the big Other in
guaranteeing the coordination between reality and our mental experience of it.
And is it not the same with our immersion into Virtual Reality? When I raise my
hand in order to push an object in the virtual space, this object effectively moves -
my illusion, of course, is that it was the movement of my hand which directly
caused the dislocation of the object, i.e. in my immersion, I overlook the intricate
mechanism of computerized coordination, homologous to the role of God
guaranteeing the coordination between the two series in occasionalism. [15]

It is a well-known fact that the "Close the door" button in most elevators is a
totally disfunctional placebo, which is placed there just to give the individuals the
impression that they are somehow participating, contributing to the speed of the
elevator journey - when we push this button, the door closes in exactly the same
time as when we just pressed the floor button without "speeding up" the process
by pressing also the "Close the door" button. This extreme and clear case of fake
participation is an appropriate metaphor of the participation of individuals in our
"postmodern" political process. And this is occasionalism at its purest: according
to Malebranche, we are all the time pressing such buttons, and it is God's
incessant activity that coordinates between them and the event that follows (the
door closing), while we think the event results from our pushing the button...

For that reason, it is crucial to maintain open the radical ambiguity of how
cyberspace will affect our lives: this does not depend on technology as such but
on the mode of its social inscription. Immersion into cyberspace can intensify our
bodily experience (new sensuality, new body with more organs, new sexes...), but
it also opens up the possibility for the one who manipulates the machinery which
runs the cyberspace literally to steal our own (virtual) body, depriving us of the
control over it, so that one no longer relates to one's body as to "one's own". What
one encounters here is the constitutive ambiguity of the notion of mediatization:
[16] originally this notion designated the gesture by means of which a a subject
was stripped of its direct, immediate right to make decisions; the great master of
political mediatization was Napoleon who left to the conquered monarchs the
appearance of power, while they were effectively no longer in a position to
exercise it. At a more general level, one could say that such a "mediatization" of
the monarch defines the constitutional monarchy: in it, the monarch is reduced
to the point of a purely formal symbolic gesture of "dotting the i's", of signing and
thus conferring the performative force on the edicts whose content is determined
by the elected governing body. And does not, mutatis mutandis, the same not
hold also for today's progressiver computerization of our everyday lives in the
course of which the subject is also more and more "mediatised", imperceptibly
stripped of his power, under the false guise of its increase? When our body is
mediatized (caught in the network of electronic media), it is simultaneously
exposed to the threat of a radical "proletarization": the subject is potentially
reduced to the pure $ (the divided subject), since even my own personal
experience can be stolen, manipulated, regulated by the machinical Other.

One can see, again, how the prospect of radical virtualization bestows on the
computer the position which is strictly homologous to that of God in the
Malebrancheian occasionalism: since the computer coordinates the relationship
between my mind and (what I experience as) the movement of my limbs (in the
virtual reality), one can easily imagine a computer which runs amok and starts to
act liker an Evil God, disturbing the coordination between my mind and my
bodily self-experience - when the signal of my mind to raise my hand is
suspended or even counteracted in (the virtual) reality, the most fundamental
experience of the body as "mine" is undermined... It seems thus that cyberspace
effectively realizes the paranoiac fantasy elaborated by Schreber, the German
judge whose memoirs were analyzed by Freud: the "wired universe" is psychotic
insofar as it seems to materialize Schreber's hallucination of the divine rays
through which God directly controls the human mind. In other words, does the
externalization of the big Other in the computer not account for the inherent
paranoiac dimension of the wired universe? Or, to put it in a yet another way: the
commonplace is that, in cyberspace, the ability to download consciousness into a
computer finally frees people from their bodies - but it also frees the machines
from "their" people... This brings us Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy: much
more than Berkeley's God who sustains the world in his mind, the ULTIMATE
Matrix is Malebranche's occasionalist God.

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, i.e. 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 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
Analysis, 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, etc., 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.

Following the same paranoiac twist, the thesis of The Matrix is that this big Other
is externalized in the really existing Mega-Computer. There is - there HAS to be -
a Matrix because "things are not right, opportunities are missed, something goes
wrong all the time," i.e. the film's idea is that it is so because there is the Matrix
that obfuscates the "true" reality that is behind it all. Consequently, the problem
with the film is that it is NOT "crazy" enough, because it supposes another "real"
reality behind our everyday reality sustained by the Matrix. One is tempted to
claim, in the Kantian mode, that the mistake of the conspiracy theory is somehow
homologous to the "paralogism of the pure reason," to the confusion between the
two levels: the suspicion (of the received scientific, social, etc. common sense) as
the formal methodological stance, and the positivation of this suspicion in
another all-explaining global para-theory.

Notes:

[1] Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath,

Cambridge: CUP, 2005.

[2] Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, New York: Little, Brown and
Company 1991, p. 416.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of World History, Introduction:

Reason in History, Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1975, p. 176-190.

[4] Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the history of madness", in Writing and
Difference, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1978.

[5] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, FQ Publishing, 2004.

[6] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, London: Tavistock 1967.

[7] Michel Foucault, Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie à l’age classique, Paris:
Plon 1961.

[8] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books

1977.

[9] Robert Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: the Other Side of Reason, London:
Unwin Hyman, 1990.

[10] Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Oxford: Blackwell

1977.

[11] "Reading /.../ cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other
than it. /.../ There is nothing outside the text." (Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1976.

[12] Michel Foucault, "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu," Histoire de la folie à l’age
classique, Paris: Gallimard 1972.

[13] Foucault, op.cit.

[14] Jacques Lacan, "Television", in October 40 (1987).

[15] The main work of Nicolas Malebranche is Recherches de la vérité (1674-75,

the most available edition Paris: Vrin 1975).

[16] As to this ambiguity, see Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press 1995.

..• Madness and Habit in German Idealism:

.............Discipline between the Two Freedoms - Part 1 •

.........Slavoj Zizek

The shift from Aristotle to Kant, to modernity with its subject as pure autonomy:
the status of habit changes from organic inner rule to something mechanic, the
opposite of human freedom: freedom cannot ever become habit(ual), if it
becomes a habit, it is no longer true freedom (which is why Thomas Jefferson
wrote that, if people are to remain free, they have to rebel against the government
every couple of decades). This eventuality reaches its apogee in Christ, who is
"the figure of a pure event, the exact opposite of the habitual". [1]

Perhaps, this Hegelian notion of habit allows us to account for the cinema-figure
of zombies who drag themselves slowly around in a catatonic mood, but
persisting forever: are they not figures of pure habit, of habit at its most
elementary, prior to the rise of intelligence (of language, consciousness, and
thinking). [2] This is why a zombie par excellence is always someone whom we
knew before, when he was still normally alive – the shock for a character in a
zombie-movie is to recognize the former best neighbor in the creeping figure
tracking him persistently. (Zombies, these properly un-canny (un-heimlich)
figures are therefore to be opposed to aliens who invade the body of a terrestrial:
while aliens look and act like humans, but are really foreign to human race,
zombies are humans who no longer look and act like humans; while, in the case
of an alien, we suddenly become aware that the one closest to us – wife, son,
father – is an alien, was colonized by an alien, in the case of a zombie, the shock
is that this foreign creep is someone close to us…) What this means is that what
Hegel says about habits has to be applied to zombies: at the most elementary
level of our human identity, we are all zombies, and our "higher" and "free"
human activities can only take place insofar as they are founded on the reliable
functioning of our zombie-habits: being-a-zombie is a zero-level of humanity, the
inhuman/mechanical core of humanity. The shock of encountering a zombie is
not the shock of encountering a foreign entity, but the shock of being confronted
by the disavowed foundation of our own human-ness.

There is, of course, a big difference between the zombie-like sluggish automated
movements and the subtle plasticity of habits proper, of their refined know-how;
however, these habits proper arise only when the level of habits is supplemented
by the level of consciousness proper and speech. What the zombie-like "blind"
behavior provides is, as it were, the "material base" of the refined plasticity of
habits proper: the stuff out of which these habits proper are made.

As Catherine Malabou notes, Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit begins with the study
of the same topic that Philosophy of Nature ends with: the soul and its functions.
This redoubling provides a clue to how Hegel conceptualizes the transition from
nature to spirit: "not as a sublation, but as a reduplication, a process through
which spirit constitutes itself in and as a second nature." The name for this
second nature is habit. So it is not that the human animal breaks with nature
through the creative explosion of spirit, which then gets "habituated," alienated,
turned into a mindless habit: the reduplication of nature in "second nature" is
primordial, it is only this reduplication that opens up the space for spiritual
creativity.

Habit is conceived by Hegel as unexpectedly close to the logic of what Derrida

called pharmakon, the ambiguous supplement which is simultaneously a force of
death and a force of life. Habit is, on the one hand, the dulling of life, its
mechanization (Hegel characterizes it as a "mechanism of self-feeling"): [3] when
something turns into a habit, it means that its vitality is lost, we just mechanically
repeat it without being aware of it. Habit thus appears to be the very opposite of
freedom: freedom means creative choice, inventing something new, in short,
precisely breaking with (old) habits. Think about language, whose "habitual"
aspect is best emphasized by standard ritualized greetings: "Hello, how are you?
Nice to see you!" – we don’t really mean it when say it, there is no living intention
in it, it is just a "habit"...
On the other hand, Hegel emphasizes again and again that there is no freedom
without habit: habit provides the background and foundation for every exercise
of freedom. Let us, again, take language: in order for us to exercise the freedom in
using language, we have to get fully accustomed to it, habituated (in)to it, i.e., we
have to learn to practice it, to apply its rules "blindly," mechanically, as a habit:
only when a subject externalizes what he learns into mechanized habits, he is
"open to be otherwise occupied and engaged." [4] Not only language, a much
more complex set of spiritual and bodily activities have to be turned into a habit
in order for a human subject to be able to exert his "higher" functions of creative
thinking and working – all the operations we are performing all the time
mindlessly, walking, eating, holding things, etc.etc., have to be learned and
turned into a mindless habit. Through habits, a human being transforms his body
into mobile and fluid means, soul’s instrument, which serves as without us
having to focus consciously on it – in short, through habits, the subject
appropriates his body, as Alain points out in his commentary to Hegel:

When freedom comes it is in the sphere of habit. /…/ Here the body is no longer a
foreign being, reacting belligerently against me; rather it is pervaded by soul and
has become soul’s instrument and means; yet at the same time, in habit the
corporeal self is understood as it truly is; body is rendered something mobile and
fluid, able to express directly the inner movements of thought without needing to
involve thereby the role of consciousness or reflection. [5]

More radically even, for Hegel, living itself (leading a life) is for us, humans,
something we should learn as a habit, starting with birth itself. Recall how,
seconds after birth, the baby has to be shaken and thereby reminded to breath –
otherwise, it can forget to breath and die… Effectively, as Hegel reminds us, a
human being can also die of a habit: "Human beings even die as result of habit –
that is, if they have become totally habituated to life, and spiritually and
physically blunted." [6] Nothing thus comes "naturally" to human being,
including walking and seeing:

The form of habit applies to spirit in all its degrees and varieties. Of all these
modifications, the most external is the determination of the individual in relation
to space; this, which for man means an upright posture, is something which by
his will he has made into a habit. Adopted directly, without thinking, his upright
stance continues through the persistent involvement of his will. Man stands
upright only because and insofar as he wants to stand, and only as long as he wills
to do so without consciousness of it. Similarly, to take another case, the act of
seeing, and others like it, are concrete habits which combine in a single act the
multiple determinations of sensation, of consciousness, intuition, understanding,
and so forth." [7]

Habit is thus "depersonalized" willing, a mechanized emotion: once I get

habituated to standing, I will it without consciously willing it, since my will is
embodied in the habit. In a habit, presence and absence, appropriation and
withdrawal, engagement and disengagement, interest and disinterest,
subjectivization and objectivization, consciousness and unconsciousness, are
strangely interlinked. Habit is the unconsciousness necessary for the very
functioning of consciousness:

"/…/ in habit our consciousness is at the same time present in the subject-matter,
interested in it, yet conversely absent from it, indifferent to it; /…/ our Self just as
much appropriates the subject-matter as, on the contrary, it draws away from
it; /…/ the soul, on the one hand, completely pervades its bodily activities and, on
the other hand, deserts them, thus giving them the shape of something
mechanical, of a merely natural effect." [8]

And the same goes for my emotions: their display is not purely natural or
spontaneous, we learn to cry or laugh at appropriate moments (recall how, for the
Japanese, laughter functions in a different way than for us in the West: a smile
can also be a sign of embarrassment and shame). The external mechanization of
emotions from the ancient Tibetan praying wheel which prays for me to today’s
"canned laughter" where the TV set laughs for me, turning my emotional display
quite literally into a mechanic display of the machine) is thus based in the fact
that emotional displays, including the most "sincere" ones, are already in
themselves "mechanized." - However, the highest level (and, already, self-
sublation) of a habit is language as the medium of thought – in it, the couple of
possession and withdrawal is brought to extreme. The point is not only that, in
order to "fluently" speak a language, we have to master its rules mechanically,
without thinking about it; much more radically, the co-dependence of insight and
blindness determines the very act of understanding: when I hear a word, not only
do I immediately abstract from its sound and "see through it" to its meaning
(recall the weird experience of becoming aware of the non-transparent vocal stuff
of a word – it appears as intrusive and obscene…), but I have to do it if I am to
experience meaning.

If, for Hegel, man is fundamentally a being of habits; if habits actualize itself
when they are adopted as automatic reactions which occur without subject’s
conscious participation; and, finally, if we locate the core of subjectivity in its
ability to perform intentional acts, to realize conscious goals; then, paradoxically,
the human subject is at its most fundamental a "disappearing subject".

This habit’s "unreflective spontaneity"(70) accounts for the well-known paradox

of subjectively choosing an objective necessity, of willing what unavoidably will
occur: through its elevation into a habit, a reaction of mine which was first
something imposed on me from outside, is internalized, transformed into
something that I perform automatically and spontaneously, "from inside":

If an external change is repeated, it turns into a tendency internal to the subject.

The change itself is transformed into a disposition, and receptivity, formerly
passive, becomes activity. Thus habit is revealed as a process through which man
ends by willing or choosing what came to him from outside. Henceforth the will
of the individual does not need to oppose the pressure of the external world; the
will learns gradually to want what is."(70-71)

What makes habit so central is the temporality it involves: having a habit involves
a relationship to future, since habit is a way which prescribes how I will react to
some events in the future. Habit is a feature of economizing the organism’s
forces, of building a reserve for the future. That is to say, in its habits, subjectivity
"embraces in itself its future ways of being, the ways it will become actual."(76)
This means that habit also complicates the relationship between possibility and
actuality: habit is stricto sensu the actuality of a possibility. What this means is
that habit belongs to the level of virtuality (defined by Deleuze precisely as the
actuality of the possible): habit is actual, a property (to react in a certain way)
that I fully posses here and now, and simultaneously a possibility pointing
towards future (the possibility/ability to react in a certain way, which will be
actualized in multiple future occasions).

There are interesting conceptual consequences of this notion of habit.

Ontologically, with regard to the opposition between particular accidents and
universal essence, habit can be designed as the "becoming-essential of the
accident"(75): after an externally caused accident repeats itself, it is elevated into
the universality of the subject’s inner disposition, i.e., into a feature that belongs
to and defines his inner essence. This is why we cannot ever determine the
precise beginning of a habit, the point at which external occurrences change into
habit – once a habit is here, it obliterates its origin and it is as if it was always-
already here. - The conclusion is thus clear, almost Sartrean: man does not have a
permanent substance or universal essence; he is in his very core a man of habits,
a being whose identity is formed through the elevation of contingent external
accidents/encounters into an internal(ized) universal habit. - Does this mean that
only humans have habits? Here, Hegel is much more radical – he accomplishes a
decisive step further and leaves behind the old topic of nature as fully determined
in its closed circular movement versus man as a being of openness and existential
freedom: "for Hegel, nature is always second nature"(57). Every natural organism
has to regulate the exchange with its environs, the assimilation of the environs
into itself, through habitual procedures which "reflect" into the organism, as its
inner disposition, its external interactions.

The ontological consequences of this (self-)reflection of the external difference

into inner difference are crucial. In one of the unexpected encounters of
contemporary philosophy with Hegel, the "Christian materialist" Peter van
Inwagen developed the idea that material objects like automobiles, chairs,
computers, etc. simply DO NOT EXIST: say, a chair is not effectively, for itself, a
chair – all we have is a collection of "simples" (i.e., more elementary objects
"arranged chairwise" – so, although a chair functions as a chair, it is composed of
a multitude (wood pieces, nails, cushions…) which are, in themselves, totally
indifferent towards this arrangement; there is, stricto sensu, no "whole" a nail is
here a part of). It is only with organisms that we have a Whole. Here, the unity is
minimally "for itself"; parts effectively interact. [9] As it was developed already by
Lynn Margulis, the elementary form of life, a cell, is characterized precisely by
such a minimum of self-relating, a minimum exclusively through which the limit
between Inside and Outside that characterize an organism can emerge. And, as
Hegel put it, thought is only a further development of this For-itself.

In biology, for instance, we have, at the level of reality, only bodily interacting.
"Life proper" emerges only at the minimally "ideal" level, as an immaterial event
which provides the form of unity of the living body as the "same" in the incessant
change of its material components. The basic problem of evolutionary
cognitivism - that of the emergence of the ideal life-pattern - is none other than
the old metaphysical enigma of the relationship between chaos and order,
between the Multiple and the One, between parts and their whole. How can we
get "order for free," that is, how can order emerge out of initial disorder? How
can we account for a whole that is larger than the mere sum of its parts? How can
a One with a distinct self-identity emerge out of the interaction of its multiple
constituents? A series of contemporary researchers, from Lynn Margulis to
Francisco Varela, assert that the true problem is not how an organism and its
environs interact or connect, but, rather, the opposite one: how does a distinct
self-identical organism emerge out of its environs? How does a cell form the
membrane which separates its inside from its outside? The true problem is thus
not how an organism adapts to its environs, but how it is that there is something,
a distinct entity, which must adapt itself in the first place. And, it is here, at this
crucial point, that today's biological language starts to resemble, quite uncannily,
the language of Hegel. When Varela, for example, explains his notion of
autopoiesis, he repeats, almost verbatim, the Hegelian notion of life as a
teleological, self-organizing entity. His central notion, that of a loop or bootstrap,
points towards the Hegelian Setzung der Voraussetzungen:

Autopoiesis attempts to define the uniqueness of the emergence that produces

life in its fundamental cellular form. It's specific to the cellular level. There's a
circular or network process that engenders a paradox: a self-organizing network
of biochemical reactions produces molecules, which do something specific and
unique: they create a boundary, a membrane, which constrains the network that
has produced the constituents of the membrane. This is a logical bootstrap, a
loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the
network that produces the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what's unique
about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed.
This entity has produced its own boundary. It doesn't require an external agent to
notice it, or to say, 'I'm here.' It is, by itself, a self-distinction. It bootstraps itself
out of a soup of chemistry and physics. [10]

The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the only way to account for the
emergence of the distinction between the "inside" and "outside" constitutive of a
living organism is to posit a kind of self-reflexive reversal by means of which - to
put it in Hegelese - the One of an organism as a Whole retroactively "posits" as its
result, as that which it dominates and regulates, the set of its own causes (i.e., the
very multiple process out of which it emerged). In this way - and only in this way
- an organism is no longer limited by external conditions, but is fundamentally
self-limited - again, as Hegel would have articulated it, life emerges when the
external limitation (of an entity by its environs) turns into self-limitation. This
brings us back to the problem of infinity: for Hegel, true infinity does not stand
for limitless expansion, but for active self-limitation (self-determination) in
contrast to being-determined-by-the-other. In this precise sense, life (even at its
most elementary: as a living cell) is the basic form of true infinity, since it already
involves the minimal loop by means of which a process is no longer simply
determined by the Outside of its environs, but is itself able to (over)determine the
mode of this determination and thus "posits its presuppositions." Infinity
acquires its first actual existence the moment a cell's membrane starts to
functions as a self-boundary.

Back to habits: because of the virtual status of habits, to adopt a (new) habit is
not simply to change an actual property of the subject; rather, it involves a kind of
reflexive change, a change of the subject’s disposition which determines his
reaction to changes, i.e., a change in the very mode of changes to which the
subject is submitted: "Habit does not simply introduce mutability into something
that would otherwise continue without changing; it suggests change within a
disposition, within its potentiality, within the internal character of that in which
the change occurs, which does not change." [11] This is what Hegel means by self-
differentiation as the "sublation" of externally imposed changes into self-changes,
of external into internal difference - only organic bodies self-differentiate
themselves: an organic body maintains its unity by internalizing an externally
imposed change into habit to deal with future such changes.

If, however, this is the case, if all (organic, at least) nature already is second
nature, in what, then, does the difference between animal and human habits
consist? Hegel’s most provocative and unexpected contribution concerns this
very question of the genesis of human habits: in his Anthropology (which opens
Philosophy of Spirit) we find a unique "genealogy of habits" reminding us of
Nietzsche. This part of Philosophy of Spirit is one of the hidden, not yet fully
exploited, treasures of the Hegelian system, where we find the clearest traces of
what one cannot but name the dialectical-materialist aspect of Hegel: the passage
from nature to (human) spirit is here developed not as a direct outside
intervention of Spirit, as a direct intervention of another dimension disturbing
the balance of the natural circuit, but as the result of a long and tortuous
"working through" by means of which intelligence (embodied in language)
emerges from natural tensions and antagonisms. [12] This passage is not direct,
i.e., Spirit (in the guise of speech-mediated human intelligence) does not directly
confront and dominate biological processes – Spirit’s "material base" forever
remains the pre-symbolic (pre-linguistic) habit.

So how does habit itself arise? In his genealogy, Hegel conceives habit as the
third, concluding, moment of the dialectical process of the Soul, whose structure
follows the triad of notion – judgment – syllogism. At the beginning, there is Soul
in its immediate unity, in its simple notion, the "feeling soul": "In the sensations
which arise from the individual’s encounter with external objects, the soul begins
to awaken itself."(32) The Self is here a mere "sentient Self," not yet a subject
opposed to objects, but just experiencing a sensation in which the two sides,
subject and object, are immediately united: when I experience a sensation of
touch, this sensation is simultaneously the trace of the external object I am
touching and my inner reaction to it; sensation is a Janus-life two-faced entity in
which subjective and objective immediately coincide. Even in later stages of the
individual’s development, this "sentient Self" survives in the guise of what Hegel
calls "magical relationship," referring to phenomena that, in Hegel’s times, were
designated with terms like "magnetic somnambulism" (hypnosis), all the
phenomena in which my Soul is directly - in a pre-reflexive, non-thinking way -
linked to external processes and affected by them. Instead of bodies influencing
each other at a distance (the Newtonian gravity), we have spirits influencing each
other at a distance. Here, the Soul remains at the lowest level of its functioning,
directly immersed in its environs. (What Freud called the "oceanic feeling," the
source of religious experience, is thus for Hegel a feature of the lowest level of the
soul.) What the Soul lacks here is a clear self-feeling, a feeling of itself as
distinguished from external reality, which is what happens in the next moment,
that of judgment (Urteil – Hegel mobilizes here the wordplay of Urteil with Ur-
Teil, "primordial divide/division"):

The sensitive totality is, in its capacity as an individual, essentially the tendency
to distinguish itself in itself, and to wake up to the judgment in itself, in virtue of
which it has particular feelings and stands as a subject in respect of these aspects
of itself. The subject as such gives these feelings a place as its own in itself. [13]

All problems arise from this paradoxical short-circuit of the feeling of Self
becoming a specific feeling among others, and, simultaneously, the encompassing
container of all feelings, the site where all dispersed feelings can be brought
together. Malabou provides a wonderfully precise formulation of this paradox of
the feeling of Self:

Even if there is a possibility of bringing together feeling’s manifold material, that

possibility itself becomes part of the objective content. The form needs to be the
content of all that it forms: subjectivity does not reside in its own being, it
‘haunts’ itself. The soul is possessed by the possession of itself. (35)

This is the crucial feature: possibility itself has to actualize itself, to become a fact,
or, the form needs to become part of its own content (or, to add a further
variation on the same motif, the frame itself has to become part of the enframed
content). The subject is the frame/form/horizon of his world AND part of the
enframed content (of the reality he observes), and the problem is that he cannot
see/locate himself within his own frame: since all there is is already within the
frame, the frame as such is invisible – or, as the early Wittgenstein put it: "Our
life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."(Tractatus
6.4311) Like the field of vision, life is finite, and, for that very reason, we cannot
ever see its limit – in this precise sense, "eternal life belongs to those who live in
the present" (ibid.): precisely because we are WITHIN our finitude, we cannot
step out of it and perceive its limitation. The possibility to locate oneself within
one’s reality has to remain a possibility – however, and therein resides the crucial
point, this possibility itself has to actualize itself qua possibility, to be active, to
exert influence, qua possibility.

There is a link to Kant here, to the old enigma of what, exactly, Kant had in mind
with his notion of "transcendental apperception," of self-consciousness
accompanying every act of my consciousness (when I am conscious of something,
I am thereby always also conscious of the fact that I am conscious of this)? Is it
not an obvious fact that this is empirically not true, that I am not always
reflexively aware of my awareness itself? The way interpreters try to resolve this
deadlock is by way of claiming that every conscious act of mine can be potentially
rendered self-conscious: if I want, I always can turn my attention to what I am
doing. This, however, is not strong enough: the transcendental apperception
cannot be an act that never effectively happens, that just could have happened at
any point. The solution of this dilemma is precisely the notion of virtuality in the
strict Deleuzian sense, as the actuality of the possible, as a paradoxical entity the
very possibility of which already produces/has actual effects. One should oppose
this oppose Deleuze's notion of the Virtual to the all-pervasive topic of virtual
reality: what matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual
(which, in Lacanian terms, is the Real). Virtual Reality in itself is a rather
miserable idea: that of imitating reality, of reproducing its experience in an
artificial medium. The reality of the Virtual, on the other hand, stands for the
reality of the Virtual as such, for its real effects and consequences. Let us take an
attractor in mathematics: all positive lines or points in its sphere of attraction
only approach it in an endless fashion, never reaching its form - the existence of
this form is purely virtual, being nothing more than the shape towards which
lines and points tend. However, precisely as such, the virtual is the Real of this
field: the immovable focal point around which all elements circulate. Is not this
Virtual ultimately the Symbolic as such? Let us take symbolic authority: in order
to function as an effective authority, it has to remain not-fully-actualized, an
eternal threat.

This, then, is the status of Self: its self-awareness is as it were the actuality of its
own possibility.

End of Part 1

Notes:

[1] Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, temporality and

Dialectic. NYC: Routledge, 2004.

[2] I owe this observation to Caroline Schuster (Chicago).

[3] Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Spirit, Par. 410, Remark.

[4] Encyclopaedia, Par. 410. .

[5] Alain, Idées, Paris: Flammarion 1983, p. 200 (quoted from Malabou, p. 36).

[6] Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Par. 151, Addition.

[7] Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Spirit, Par. 410, Addition.

[8] Encyclopaedia, Par. 410, Addition.

[9] Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1990.

[10] Francisco Varela, "The Emergent Self," in John Brockman, ed. The Third
Culture, New York: Simon and Schuster 1996, p. 212.

[11] Felix Ravaisson, De l’habitude, Paris: Fayard 1984, p. 10; quoted from
Malabou 58.

[12] Hegel makes this point clear in his Logic: "The activity of thought which is at
work in all our ideas, purposes, interests and actions is, as we have said,
unconsciously busy /…/ [E]ach individual animal is such individual primarily
because it is an animal: if this is true, then it would be impossible to say what
such an individual could still be if this foundation were removed."(Science of
Logic, p. 36-37).

[13] Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Spirit, Par. 407.

What "haunts" the subject is his inaccessible noumenal Self, the "Thing that
thinks," an object in which the subject would fully "encounter himself." (Hume
drew a lot – too much – of mileage out of this observation on how, upon
introspection, all I perceive in myself are my particular ideas, sensations,
emotions, never my "Self" itself.) Of course, for Kant, the same goes for every
object of my experience which is always phenomenal, i.e., inaccessible in its
noumenal dimension; however, with the Self, the impasse is accentuated: all
other objects of experience are given to me phenomenally, but, in the case of
subject, I cannot even get a phenomenal experience of me – since I am dealing
with "myself," in this unique case, phenomenal self-experience would equal
noumenal access, i.e., if I were to be able to experience "myself" as a phenomenal
object, I would thereby eo ipso experience myself in my noumenal identity, as a
Thing.

The underlying problem here is the impossibility of the subject to objectivize

himself: the subject is singular AND the universal frame of "his world," i.e., every
content he perceives is "his own"; so how can the subject include himself (count
himself) into the series of his objects? The subject observes reality from an
external position, and is simultaneously part of this reality, without ever being
able to attain an "objective" view of reality with himself in it. The thing that
haunts the subject is HIMSELF in his objectal counterpoint, qua object. – So
when Hegel writes:

The subject finds itself in contradiction between the totality systematized in its
consciousness, and the particular determination which, in itself, is not fluid and
is not reduced to its proper place and rank. This is mental derangement
(Verruecktheit). [1]

Hegel has to be read here in a very precise way. His point is not simply that
madness signals a short-circuit between totality and one of its particular
moments, a "fixation" of totality in this moment on account of which the totality
is deprived of its dialectical fluidity – although some of his formulations may
appear to point in this direction. (Is paranoiac fixation not such a short-circuit in
which the totality of my experience gets non-dialectically "fixated" onto a
particular moment, the idea of my persecutor?) The "particular determination
which, in itself, is not fluid" and resists being "reduced to its proper place and
rank" is THE SUBJECT HIMSELF, more precisely: the feature (signifier) that re-
presents him (holds his place) within the structured ("systematized") totality, and
since the subject cannot ever objectivize himself, the "contradiction" is here
absolute.

(Upon a closer look, it becomes clear that the Hegelian notion of madness
oscillates between the two extremes which one is tempted to call, with reference
to Benjamin’s notion of violence, constitutive and constituted madness. First,
there is the constitutive madness: the radical "contradiction" of the human
condition itself, between the subject as "nothing," as the evanescent punctuality
and the subject as "all," as the horizon of its world. Then, there is the
"constituted" madness: the direct fixation to, identification with, a particular
feature as an attempt to resolve (or, rather, cut short) the contradiction. In a way
homologous with the ambiguity of the Lacanian notion of objet petit a, madness
names at the same time the contradiction/void and the attempt to resolve it.)

With this gap, the possibility of madness emerges – and, as Hegel puts it in
proto-Foucauldian terms, madness is not an accidental lapse, distortion, "illness"
of human spirit, but something which is inscribed into individual spirit’s basic
ontological constitution: to be a human means to be potentially mad:

This interpretation of insanity as a necessarily occurring form or stage in the

development of the soul is naturally not to be understood as if we were asserting
that every mind, every soul, must go through this stage of extreme derangement.
Such an assertion would be as absurd as to assume that because in the
Philosophy of Right crime is considered as a necessary manifestation of the
human will, therefore to commit crime is an inevitable necessity for every
individual. Crime and insanity are extremes which the human mind in general
has to overcome in the course of its development. [2]
Although not a factual necessity, madness is a formal possibility constitutive of
human mind: it is something whose threat has to be overcome if we are to emerge
as "normal" subjects, which means that "normality" can only arise as the
overcoming of this threat. This is why, as Hegel put it a couple of pages later,
"insanity must be discussed before the healthy, intellectual consciousness,
although it has that consciousness for its presupposition" [3] – Hegel evokes here
the relationship between the abstract and the concrete: although, in empirical
development and state of things, abstract determinations are always-already
embedded in a concrete Whole as their presupposition, the notional
reproduction/deduction of this Whole has to progress from the abstract to the
concrete: crimes presuppose the rule of law, they can only occur as their
violation, but must be nonetheless grasped as an abstract act that is "sublated"
through the law; abstract legal relations and morality are de facto always
embedded in some concrete totality of Customs, but, nonetheless, The
Philosophy of Right has to progress from the abstract moments of legality and
morality to the concrete Whole of Customs (family, civil society, state). The
interesting point here is not only the parallel between madness and crime, but the
fact that madness is located in a space opened up by the discord between actual
historical development and its conceptual rendering, i.e., in the space which
undermines the vulgar-evolutionist notion of dialectical development as the
conceptual reproduction of the factual historical development which purifies the
latter of its empirical insignificant contingencies. Insofar as madness de facto
presupposes normality, while, conceptually, it precedes normality, one can say
that a "madman" is precisely the subject who wants to "live" - to reproduce in
actuality itself – the conceptual order, i.e., to act as if madness also effectively
precedes normality.

We can see, now, in what precise sense habits form the third, concluding,
moment of this triad, its "syllogism": in a habit, the subject finds a way to
"possess itself," to stabilize its own inner content in "having" as its property a
habit, i.e., not a positive actual feature, but a virtual entity, a universal disposition
to (re)act in a certain way. Habit and madness are to be thought together: habit is
the way to stabilize the imbalance of madness.

Another way to approach this same topic is via the relationship between soul and
body as the Inner and the Outer, of their circular relationship in which body
expresses the soul and the soul receives impressions from the body – the Soul is
always-already embodied and the Body always-already impregnated with its
Soul:

What the sentient self finds within it is, on the one hand, the naturally
immediate, as ‘ideally’ in it and made its own. On the other hand and conversely,
what originally belongs to the central individuality /…/ is determined as natural
corporeity, and is so felt. [4]

So, on the one hand, through feelings and perceptions, I internalize objects that
affect me from outside: in a feeling, they are present in me not in their raw
reality, but "ideally," as part of my mind. On the other hand, through grimaces,
etc., my body immediately "gives body" to my inner Soul which thoroughly
impregnates it. However, if this were to be the entire truth, then man would have
been simply a "prisoner of his state of nature"(67), moving in the close loop of
absolute transparency provided by the mutual mirroring of body and soul.
(Physiognomy and phrenology remain at this level, as well as today’s New Age
ideologies enjoining us to express/realize our true Self.) What happens with the
moment of "judgment" is that the loop of this closed circle is broken – not but the
intrusion of an external element, but by a self-referentiality which twists this
circle into itself. That is to say, the problem is that, "since the individual is at the
same time only what he has done, his body is also the expression of himself which
he has himself produced." [5] What this means is that there process of corporeal
self-expression has no pre-existing Referent as its mooring point: the entire
movement is thoroughly self-referential, it is only through the process of
"expression" (externalization in bodily signs) that the expressed Inner Self (the
content of these signs) is retroactively created – or, as Malabou puts it concisely:
"Psychosomatic unity results from an auto-interpretation independent of any
referent."(71)

The transparent mirroring of the Soul and the Body in the natural expressivity
thus turns into total opacity:

If a work signifies itself, this implies that there is no ‘outside’ of the work, that the
work acts as its own referent: it presents what it interprets at the same moment it
interprets it, forming one and the same manifestation. /…/ The spiritual bestows
form, but only because it is itself formed in return."(72)

What this "lack of any ontological guarantee outside the play of

significations"(68) means is that the meaning of our gestures and speech acts is
always haunted by the spirit of irony: when I say A, it is always possible that I do
it in order to conceal the fact that I am non-A – Hegel refers Lichtenberg’s well-
known aphorism: "You certainly act like an honest man, but I see from your face
that you are forcing yourself to do so and are a rogue at heart." [6]

The ambiguity is here total and undecidable, because the deception is the one
that Lacan designates as specifically human, namely the possibility of lying in the
guise of truth. Which is why it goes even further than the quote from Lichtenberg
– the reproach should rather be: "You act like an honest man in order to convince
us that you mean it ironically, and thus to conceal from us the fact that you really
ARE an honest man!" This is what Hegel means in his precise claim that, "for the
individuality, it is as much its countenance as its mask which it can lay aside": [7]
in the gap between appearance (mask) and my true inner stance, the truth can be
either in my inner stance or in my mask. What this means is that the emotions I
perform through the mask (false persona) that I adopt can in a strange way be
more authentic and truthful than what I really feel in myself. When I construct a
false image of myself which stands for me in a virtual community in which I
participate (in sexual games, for example, a shy man often assumes the screen
persona of an attractive promiscuous woman), the emotions I feel and feign as
part of my screen persona are not simply false: although (what I experience as)
my true self does not feel them, they are nonetheless in a sense "true." Say, what
if, deep in myself, I am a sadist pervert who dreams of beating other men and
raping women; in my real-life interaction with other people, I am not allowed to
enact this true self, so I adopt a more humble and polite persona – is it not that,
in this case, my true self is much closer to what I adopt as a fictional screen-
persona, while the self of my real-life interactions is a mask concealing the
violence of my true self?

Habit provides the way out of this predicament – how? Not "true expression," but
by putting the truth in "mindless" expression: Hegel’s constant motif, truth is in
what you SAY, not in what you MEAN to say. Exemplary is here the enigmatic
status of what we call "politeness": when, upon meeting an acquaintance, I say
"Glad to see you! How are you today?", it is clear to both of us that, in a way, I "do
not mean it seriously" (if my partner suspects that I am really interested, he may
even be unpleasantly surprised, as though I were aiming at something too
intimate and of no concern to me - or, to paraphrase the old Freudian joke, "Why
are you saying you're glad to see me, when you're really glad to see me!?").
However, it would nonetheless be wrong to designate my act as simply
"hypocritical," since, in another way, I do mean it: the polite exchange does
establish a kind of pact between the two of us; in the same sense as I do
"sincerely" laugh through the canned laughter (the proof of it being the fact that I
effectively do "feel relieved" afterwards). This brings us to one of the possible
definitions of a madman: the subject who is unable to enter this logic of "sincere
lies," so that, when, say, a friend greets him "Nice to see you! How are you?", he
explodes: "Are you really glad to see me or are you just pretending it? And who
gave you the right to probe into my state?"

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Orlando is passionately in love with Rosalind

who, in order to test his love, disguises herself as Ganymede and, as a male
companion, interrogates Orlando about his love. She even takes on the
personality of Rosalind (in a redoubled masking, she pretends to be herself, i.e.,
to be Ganymede who plays to be Rosalind) and persuades her friend Celia (also
disguised as Aliena) to marry them in a mock ceremony. In this ceremony,
Rosalind literally feigns to feign to be what she is: truth itself, in order to win, has
to be staged in a redoubled deception – in a homologous way to All’s Well in
which marriage, in order to be asserted, has to be consummated in the guise of an
extramarital affair.

The same overlapping of appearance with truth is often at work in one’s

ideological self-perception. Recall Marx’s brilliant analysis of how, in the French
revolution of 1848, the conservative-republican Party of Order functioned as the
coalition of the two branches of royalism (orleanists and legitimists) in the
"anonymous kingdom of the Republic." [8] The parliamentary deputees of the
Party of Order perceived their republicanism as a mockery: in parliamentary
debates, they all the time generated royalist slips of tongue and ridiculed the
Republic to let it be known that their true aim was to restore the kingdom. What
they were not aware of is that they themselves were duped as to the true social
impact of their rule. What they were effectively doing was to establish the
conditions of bourgeois republican order that they despised so much (by for
instance guaranteeing the safety of private property). So it is not that they were
royalists who were just wearing a republican mask: although they experienced
themselves as such, it was their very "inner" royalist conviction which was the
deceptive front masking their true social role. In short, far from being the hidden
truth of their public republicanism, their sincere royalism was the fantasmatic
support of their actual republicanism – it was what provided the passion to their
activity. Is it not, then, that the deputees of the Party of Order were also feigning
to feign to be republicans, be what they really were?

Hegel’s radical conclusion is that the sign with which we are dealing here, in
corporeal expressions, "in truth signifies nothing (in Wahrheit nicht bezeichnet)."
[9] Habit is thus a strange sign which "signifies the fact that it signifies
nothing"(67) – what Hoelderlin put forward as the formula of our destitute
predicament, of an era in which, because gods have abandoned us, we are "signs
without meaning," acquires here an unexpected positive interpretation. And we
should take Hegel’s formula literally: the "nothing" in it has a positive weight, i.e.,
the sign which "in truth signifies nothing" is what Lacan calls signifier, that which
represents the subject for another signifier. The "nothing" is the void of the
subject itself, so that the absence of an ultimate reference means that absence
itself is the ultimate reference, and this absence is the subject itself. - This s why
Malabou writes:

Spirit is not that which is expressed by its expressions; it is that which originally
terrifies spirit. (68)

The dimension of haunting, the link between spirit qua the light of Reason and
spirit qua obscene ghosts, is crucial here: spirit/Reason is forever, by a structural
necessity, haunted by the obscene apparitions of its own spirit.

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its
simplicity - an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none
belongs to him - or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that
exists here - pure self - in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around
it, in which here shoots a bloody head - there another white ghastly apparition,
suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night
when one looks human beings in the eye - into a night that becomes awful. [10]

Again, one should not be blinded by the poetic power of this description, but read
it precisely. The first thing to note is how the objects which freely float around in
this "night of the world" are membra disjecta, partial objects, objects detached
from their organic Whole – is there not a strange echo between this description
and Hegel’s description of the negative power of Understanding which is able to
abstract an entity (a process, a property) from its substantial context and treat it
as if it has an existence of its own? - "that the accidental as such, detached from
what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others,
should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom – this is the
tremendous power of the negative." [11] It is thus as if, in the ghastly scenery of
the "night of the world," we encounter something like the power of
Understanding in its natural state, spirit in the guise of a proto-spirit – this,
perhaps, is the most precise definition of horror: when a higher state of
development violently inscribes itself in the lower state, in its
ground/presupposition, where it cannot but appear as a monstrous mess, a
disintegration of order, a terrifying unnatural combination of natural elements.
With regards to today’s science, where do we encounter its horror at its purest?
When genetic manipulations go awry and generate objects never seen in nature,
freaks like goats with a gigantic ear instead of a head or a head with one eye,
meaningless accidents which nonetheless touch our deeply repressed fantasies
and thus trigger wild interpretations. The pure Self as the "inner of nature" (a
strange expression, since, for Hegel, nature, precisely, has no interior: its
ontological status is that of externality, not only externality with regard to some
presupposed Interior, but externality with regard to itself) stands for this
paradoxical short-circuit of the super-natural (spiritual) in its natural state – why
does it occur? The only consistent answer is a materialist one: because spirit is
part of nature, and can occur/arise only through a monstrous self/affliction
(distortion, derangement) of nature. Therein resides the paradox of the
materialist edge of cheap spiritualism: it is precisely because spirit is part of
nature, because spirit does not intervene into nature already constituted, ready-
made somewhere else, but has to emerge out of nature through its derangement,
that there is no spirit (Reason) without spirits (obscene ghosts), that spirit is
forever haunted by spirits.

And this brings us back to our starting question: the change from animal to
properly human habit. Only humans, spiritual beings, are haunted by spirits –
why? Not simply because, in contrast to animals, they have access to universality,
but because this universality is for them simultaneously necessary and
impossible, i.e., a problem. In other words, while, for human subjects, the place
of universality is prescribed, it has to remain empty, it cannot ever be filled in by
its "proper" content. The specificity of man thus concerns the relationship
between universal essence and its accidents: for animals, accidents remain mere
accidents; only human being posits universality as such, relates to it, and can
therefore reflectively elevate accidents into universal essence. THIS IS WHY man
is a "generic being" (Marx): to paraphrase Heidegger’s definition of Dasein, man
is a being for which its genus is for itself a problem: "Man can ‘present the genus’
to the degree that habit is the unforeseen element of the genus."(74)

This formulation opens up an unexpected link to the notion of hegemony as it

was developed by Ernesto Laclau: there is forever a gap between the universality
of man’s genus and the particular habits which fill in its void; habits are always
"unexpected," contingent, an accident elevated to universal necessity. The
predominance of one or another habit is the result of a struggle for hegemony, for
which accident will occupy the empty place of the universality. That is to say, with
regard to the relationship between universality and particularity, the
"contradiction" in the human condition – a human subject perceives reality from
the singular viewpoint of subjectivity and, simultaneously, perceives himself as
included into this same reality as its part, as an object in it – means that the
subject has to presuppose universality (there is a universal order, some kind of
"Great Chain of Being," of which he is a part), while, simultaneously, it is forever
impossible for him to entirely fill in this universality with its particular content,
to harmonize the Universal and the Particular (since his approach to reality is
forever marked – colored, twisted, distorted – by his singular perspective).
Universality is always simultaneously necessary and impossible.

As to Ernesto Laclau's concept of hegemony which provides an exemplary matrix

of the relationship between universality, historical contingency and the limit of
an impossible Real - one should always keep in mind that we are dealing here
with a distinct concept whose specificity is often missed (or reduced to some
proto-Gramscian vague generality) by those who refer to it. The key feature of the
concept of hegemony resides in the contingent connection between intrasocial
differences (elements WITHIN the social space) and the limit that separates
Society itself from non-Society (chaos, utter decadence, dissolution of all social
links) - the limit between the Social and its exteriority, the non-Social, can only
articulate itself in the guise of a difference (by mapping itself onto a difference)
between elements of social space. In other words, radical antagonism can only be
represented in a distorted way, through the particular differences internal to the
system; external differences are always-already also internal, and, furthermore,
that the link between the two is ultimately contingent, the result of political
struggle for hegemony.

The standard anti-Hegelian counter-argument here is, of course: but is this

irreducible gap between the Universal (frame) and its particular content not what
characterizes the Kantian finite subjectivity? Is not the Hegelian "concrete
universality" the most radical expression of the fantasy of full reconciliation
between the Universal and the Particular? Is its basic feature not the self-
generation of the entire particular content out of the self-movement of
universality itself? Against this common reproach, one should insist on how
Laclau's notion of hegemony is effectively close to the Hegelian notion of
"concrete universality" in which the specific difference overlaps with the
difference constitutive of the genus itself, as in Laclau's hegemony in which the
antagonistic gap between society and its external limit, non-society (the
dissolution of social link), is mapped onto an intra-social structural difference.
Laclau himself rejects the Hegelian "reconciliation" between Universal and
Particular on behalf of the gap that forever separates the empty/impossible
Universal from the contingent particular content that hegemonizes it. If,
however, we take a closer look at Hegel, we see that - insofar as every particular
species of a genus doesn't "fit" its universal genus - when we finally arrive at a
particular species that fully fits its notion, the very universal notion is
transformed into another notion. No existing historical shape of State fully fits
the notion of State - the necessity of dialectical passage from State ("objective
spirit," history) into Religion ("absolute spirit") involves the fact that the only
existing State that effectively fits its notion is a religious community - which,
precisely, is no longer a State. Here we encounter the properly dialectical paradox
of "concrete universality" qua historicity: in the relationship between a genus and
its subspecies, one of these subspecies will always be the element that negates the
very universal feature of the genus. Different nations have different versions of
soccer; Americans do not have soccer, because "baseball IS their soccer." Se also
Hegel's famous claim that modern people do not pray in the morning, because
reading the newspaper IS their morning prayer. In the same way, in the
disintegrating socialism, writers' and other cultural clubs did act as political
parties. Perhaps, in the history of cinema, the best example is the relationship
between western and sci-fi space operas: today, we no longer have "substantial"
westerns, because space operas OCCUPIED THEIR PLACE, i.e. space operas
ARE today's westerns. So, in the classification of westerns, we would have to
supplement the standard subspecies with space opera as today's non-western
stand-in for western. Crucial is here this intersection of different genuses, this
partial overlapping of two universals: western and space opera are not simply two
different genres, they INTERSECT, i.e. in a certain epoch, space opera becomes a
subspecies of western (or, western is "sublated" in space opera)... In the same
way, "woman" becomes one of the subspecies of man, Heideggerian
Daseinsanalyse one of the subspecies of phenomenology, "sublating" the
preceding universality.

The impossible point of "self-objectivization" would have been precisely the point
at which universality and its particular content would have been fully harmonized
– in short, where there would have been no struggle for hegemony. And this
brings us back to madness: its most succinct definition is that of a DIRECT
harmony between universality and its accidents, of the cancellation of the gap
that separates the two – for a madman, the object which is my impossible stand-
in within objectal reality loses its virtual character and becomes its full integral
part. - In contrast to madness, habit avoids this trap of direct identification by
way of its virtual character: the subject’s identification with a habit is not a direct
identification with some positive feature, but the identification with a disposition,
with a virtuality. Habit is the outcome of a struggle for hegemony: it is an
accident elevated to "essence," to universal necessity, i.e., made to fill in its empty
place.

Notes:

[1] Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Spirit, Par. 40.

[2] Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Spirit, Par. 408, Zusatz.

[3] ibid

[4] Encyclopaedia, Par. 401.

[5] Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 185.

[6] Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 193.

[7] Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 191.

[8] See Karl Marx, "Class Struggles in France," Collected Works, Vol. 10, London:
Lawrence and Wishart 1978, p. 95.

[9] Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 191.

[10] G.W.F. Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie," in Fruehe politische Systeme,

Frankfurt: Ullstein 1974, p. 204; translation quoted from Donald Phillip Verene,
Hegel's Recollection, Albany: Suny Press 1985, pp. 7-8. – In Encyclopaedia also,
Hegel mentions the "night-like abyss within which a world of infinitely numerous
images and presentations is preserved without being in consciousness"
(Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Spirit, Par. 453). Hegel’s historical source is here
Jacob Bohme.

[11] Phenomenology, p. 18-19.

• Only a Suffering God Can Save Us •

.............Section 1: Hegel

.............Slavoj Zizek

The key question about religion today is: can all religious experiences and
practices effectively be contained within this dimension of the conjunction of
truth and meaning? The best starting point for such a line of inquiry is the point
at which religion itself faces a trauma, a shock which dissolves the link between
truth and meaning, a truth so traumatic that it resists being integrated into the
universe of meaning. Every theologian sooner or later faces the problem of how
to reconcile the existence of God with the fact of shoah or similar excessive evil:
how are we to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent and good God with the
terrifying suffering of millions of innocents, like children killed in the gas
chambers? Surprisingly (or not), the theological answers build a strange
succession of Hegelian triads. First, those who want to leave divine sovereignty
unimpaired and thus have to attribute to God full responsibility for shoah, first
offer (1) the "legalistic" sin-and-punishment theory (shoah has to be a
punishment for the past sins of humanity – or Jews themselves); then, they pass
to(2) the "moralistic" character-education theory (shoah is to be understood
along the lines of the story of Job, as the most radical test of our faith in God – if
we survive this ordeal, our character will stand firm…); and, finally, they take
refuge in a kind of "infinite judgement" which should save the day after all
common measure between shoah and its meaning breaks down, (3) the divine
mystery theory (facts like shoah bear witness to the unfathomable abyss of divine
will). In accordance with the Hegelian motto of a redoubled mystery (the mystery
God is for us has to be also a mystery for God Himself), the truth of this "infinite
judgement" can only be to deny God’s full sovereignty and omnipotence. The next
triad is thus composed of those who, unable to combine shoah with God’s
omnipotence (how could He have allowed it to happen?), opt for some form of
divine limitation: (1) first, God is directly posited as finite or, at least, contained,
not omnipotent, not all-encompassing: he finds himself overwhelmed by the
dense inertia of his own creation; (2) then, this limitation is reflected back into
God himself as his free act: God is self-limited, He voluntarily constrained his
power in order to leave the space open for human freedom, so it is us, humans,
who are fully responsible for the evil in the world – in short, phenomena like
shoah are the ultimate price we have to pay for the divine gift of freedom; (3)
finally, self-limitation is externalized, the two moments are posited as
autonomous - God is embattled, there is a counter-force or principle of demoniac
Evil active in the world (the dualistic solution).

This brings us to the third position above and beyond the first two (the sovereign
God, the finite God), that of a suffering God: not a triumphalist God who always
wins at the end, although "his ways are mysterious," since he secretly pulls all the
strings; not a God who exerts cold justice, since he is by definition always right;
but a God who – like the suffering Christ on the Cross - is agonized, assumes the
burden of suffering, in solidarity with the human misery. [1] It was already
Schelling who wrote: "God is a life, not merely a being. But all life has a fate and
is subject to suffering and becoming. /.../ Without the concept of a humanly
suffering God /.../ all of history remains incomprehensible." [2] Why? Because
God’s suffering implies that He is involved in history, affected by it, not just a
transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: God’s suffering means that
human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real struggle,
the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is
the philosophical background of Dietrich Bonhoffer’s deep insight that, after
shoah, "only a suffering God can help us now" [3] – a proper supplement to
Heidegger’s "Only a God can still save us!" from his last interview. [4] One should
therefore take the statement that "the unspeakable suffering of the six millions is
also the voice of the suffering of God" [5] quite literally: the very excess of this
suffering over any "normal" human measure makes it divine. Recently, this
paradox was succinctly formulated by Juergen Habermas:

Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave
irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine
commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost. [6]

Which is why the secular-humanist reactions to phenomena like shoah or gulag

(AND others) is experienced as insufficient: in order to be at the level of such
phenomena, something much stronger is needed, something akin to the old
religious topic of a cosmic perversion or catastrophy in which the world itself is
"out of joint" - when one confronts a phenomenon like shoah, the only
appropriate reaction is the perplexed question "Why did the heavens not
darken?" (the title of Arno Mayor's book). Therein resides the paradox of the
theological significance of shoah: although it is usually conceived as the ultimate
challenge to theology (if there is a God and if he is good, how could he have
allowed such a horror to take place?), it is at the same time only theology which
can provide the frame enabling us to somehow approach the scope of this
catastrophy – the fiasco of god is still the fiasco of GOD.

Recall the second of Benjamin’s "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "The past
carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a
secret agreement between past generations and the present one." [7] Can this
"weak messianic power" still be asserted in the face of shoah? How does shoah
point towards redemption-to-come? Is not the suffering of the victims of shoah a
kind of absolute expenditure which cannot ever be retroactively accounted for,
redeemed, rendered meaningful? It is as this very point that God’s suffering
enters: what it signals is the failure of any Aufhebung of the raw fact of suffering.
What echoes here is, more than the Jewish tradition, the basic Protestant lesson:
there is no direct access to freedom/autonomy; between the master/slave
exchange-relationship of man and god and the full assertion of human freedom,
an intermediary stage of absolute humiliation has to intervene in which man is
reduced to a pure object of the unfathomable divine caprice. Do the three main
versions of Christianity not form a kind of Hegelian triad? In the succession of
Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism, each new term is a subdivision, split
off of a previous unity. This triad of Universal-Particular-Singular can be
designated by three representative founding figures (John, Peter, Paul) as well as
by three races (Slavic, Latin, German). In the Eastern Orthodoxy, we have the
substantial unity of the text and the corpus of believers, which is why the
believers are allowed to interpret the sacred Text, the Text goes on and lives in
them, it is not outside the living history as its exempted standard and model - the
substance of religious life is the Christian community itself. Catholicism stands
for radical alienation: the entity which mediates between the founding sacred
Text and the corpus of believers, the Church, the religious Institution, regains its
full autonomy. The highest authority resides in the Church, which is why the
Church has the right to interpret the Text; the Text is read during the Mass in
Latin, a language which is not understood by ordinary believers, and it is even
considered a sin for an ordinary believer to read the Text directly, by-passing the
priest’s guidance. For Protestantism, finally, the only authority is the Text itself,
and the wager is on every believer’s direct contact with Word of God as it was
delivered in the Text; the mediator (the Particular) thus disappears, withdraws
into insignificance, enabling the believer to adopt the position of a "universal
Singular," the individual in a direct contact with the divine Universality, by-
passing the mediating role of the particular Institution. These three Christian
attitudes also involve three different modes of God’s presence in the world. We
start with the created universe directly reflecting the glory of its Creator: all the
wealth and beauty of our world bears witness to the divine creative power, and
creatures, when they are not corrupted, naturally turn their eyes towards Him…
Catholicism shifts to a more delicate logic of the "figure in the carpet": the
Creator is not which directly present in the world, His traces are rather to be
discerned in details which escape the first superficial glance, i.e., God is like a
painter who withdraws from his finished product, signaling his authorship
merely by a barely discerning signature at the picture’s edge. Finally,
Protestantism asserts God’s radical absence from the created universe, from this
gray world which runs as a blind mechanism and where God’s presence only
becomes discernible in direct interventions of his Grace which disturbs the
normal course of things.

This reconciliation, however, only becomes possible after alienation is brought to

the extreme: in contrast to the Catholic notion of a caring and loving God with
whom one can communicate, negotiate even, Protestantism starts with the notion
of God deprived of any "common measure" shared with man, of God as an
impenetrable Beyond who distributes grace in a totally contingent way. One can
discern the traces of this full acceptance of God’s unconditional and capricious
authority in the last song Johnny Cash recorded just before his death, The Man
Comes Around, an exemplary articulation of the anxieties contained in the
Southern Baptist Christianity:

There's a man going around taking names and he decides

Who to free and who to blame every body won't be treated
Quite the same there will be a golden ladder reaching down
When the man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up at the terror in each

Sip and each sup will you partake of that last offered cup
Or disappear into the potter's ground
When the man comes around

Hear the trumpets hear the pipers one hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to a big kettledrum
Voices calling and voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
Its alpha and omegas kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn trees
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn trees
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks
Till Armageddon no shalam no shalom

Then the father hen will call his chicken's home

The wise man will bow down before the thorn and at his feet
They will cast the golden crowns
When the man comes around

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still

Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still
Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still

The song is about Armageddon, the end of days when God will appear and
perform the Last Judgment, and this event is presented as pure and arbitrary
terror: God is presented almost as Evil personified, as a kind of political informer,
a man who "comes around" and provokes consternation by "taking names," by
deciding who is saved and who lost. If anything, Cash’s description evokes the
well-known scene of people lined up for a brutal interrogation, and the informer
pointing out those selected for torture: there is no mercy, no pardon of sins, no
jubilation, we are all fixed in our roles, the just remain just and the filthy remain
filthy. In this divine proclamation, we are not simply judged in a just way; we are
informed from outside, as if learning about an arbitrary decision, if we were
righteous or sinners, if we are saved or condemned - this decision has nothing to
do with our inner qualities. And, again, this dark excess of the ruthless divine
sadism – excess over the image of a severe, but nonetheless just, God – is a
necessary negative, an underside, of the excess of Christian love over the Jewish
Law: love which suspends the Law is necessarily accompanied by the arbitrary
cruelty which also suspends the Law.

Martin Luther directly proposed an excremental identity of man: man is like a

divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus. One can, of course, pursue the question into
how the deep crises that pushed Luther towards his new theology, he was caught
in a violent debilitating superego cycle: the more he acted, repented, punished
and tortured himself, did good deeds, etc., the more he felt guilty. This made him
convinced that good deeds are calculated, dirty, selfish: far from pleasing God,
they provoke God’s wrath and lead to damnation. Salvation comes from faith: it is
our faith alone, faith into Jesus as saviour, which allows us to break out of the
superego impasse. However, his "anal" definition of man cannot be reduced to a
result of this superego pressure which pushed him towards self-abasement –
there is more in it: it is only within this Protestant logic of man’s excremental
identity that the true meaning of Incarnation can be formulated. In Orthodoxy,
Christ ultimately loses his exceptional status: his very idealization, elevation to a
noble model, reduces him to an ideal image, a figure to be imitated (all men
should strive to become God) - imitatio Christi is more an Orthodox than a
Catholic formula. In Catholicism, the predominant logic is that of a symbolic
exchange: Catholic theologists enjoy dwelling in scholastic juridical arguments
about how Christ paid the price for our sins, etc. – no wonder that Luther reacted
to the lowest outcome of this logic, the reduction of redemption to something that
can be bought from the Church. Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as
real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in his act of Incarnation, freely identified
Himself with His own shit, with the excremental real that is man – and it is only
at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended,
as the love for the miserable excremental entity called "man."

It is in this sense that, with regard to Christ, Hegel points forward to some key
Kierkegaardian motifs (the difference between genius and apostle, the singular
evental character of Christ) with his emphasis on the difference between Socrates
and Christ. Christ is NOT like the Greek "plastic individual" through whose
particular features the universal/substantial content directly transpires (as is
exemplarily the case with Alexander). What this means is that although Christ is
Man-God, the direct identity of the two, this identity also implies absolute
contradiction: there is NOTHING "divine" about Christ, even nothing exceptional
– if we observe his features, he is indistinguishable from any other human
individual:

If we consider Christ only in reference to his talents, his character and his
morality, as a teacher, etc., we are putting him on the same plane as Socrates and
others, even if we place him higher from the moral point of view. /…/ If Christ is
only taken as an exceptionally fine individual, even as one without sin, then we
are ignoring the representation of the speculative idea, its absolute truth. [8]

These lines rely on a very precise conceptual background. It is not that Christ is
"more" than other model figures of religious or philosophical or ethical wisdom,
real or mythical (Buddha, Socrates, Moses, Mohammad), "divine" in the sense of
the absence of any human failures. With Christ, the very relationship between the
substantial divine content and its representation changes: Christ does not
represent this substantial divine content, God, he directly IS God, which is why
he no longer has to resemble God, to strive to be perfect and "like God." Recall
the classic Marx brothers joke: "You resemble Emmanuel Ravelli." "But I am
Emmanuel Ravelli." "No wonder, then, that you resemble yourself!" The
underlying premise of this joke is that such an overlapping of being and
resembling is impossible, there is always a gap between the two. Buddha,
Socrates, etc., resemble Gods, while Christ IS God. So when the Christian God
"manifests himself to other men as an individual man, exclusive and single /…/
like a man excluding all others," [9] we are dealing with the singularity of a pure
event, with contingency brought to extreme – only in this mode, excluding all
effort to approach universal perfection, God can incarnate itself. This absence of
any positive characteristics, this full identity of God and man at the level of
properties, can only occur because another, more radical, difference makes any
positive differential features irrelevant. This change can be nicely rendered as the
shift from the upwards-movement of the becoming-essential of the accident to
the downwards-movement of the becoming-accidental of the essence (119): the
Greek hero, this "exemplary individual," elevates his accidental personal features
into a paradigmatic case of the essential universality, while in the Christian logic
of Incarnation, the universal Essence embodies itself in an accidental individual.

Another way to make this point is to say that the Greek Gods appear to humans in
human form, while the Christian God appears as human TO HIMSELF. This is
the crucial point: Incarnation is for Hegel not a move by means of which God
makes himself accessible/visible to humans, but a move by means of which Gods
looks at himself from the (distorting) human perspective: "As God manifests
himself to his own gaze, the specular presentation divides the divine self from
itself, offering the divine the perspectival vision of its own self-presence."(118)
Or, to put in Freudian-Lacanian terms: Christ is God’s "partial object," an
autonomized organ without a body, as if God picked his eye out of his head and
turned it at himself from the outside. We can guess, now, why Hegel insisted on
the monstrosity of Christ.

Kino-Eye /Kino-glaz/, Dziga Vertov's Soviet silent classic from 1924 (one of the
highpoints of revolutionary cinema) takes as its emblem the eye (of the camera)
as an "autonomous organ" which wanders around in the early 1920s, giving us
snippets of the NEP ("new economic politics") reality of the Soviet Union. Recall
the common expression "to cast an eye over something," with its literal
implication of picking the eye out of its socket and throwing it around. Martin,
the legendary idiot from French fairy tales, did exactly this when his mother,
worried that he will never find a wife, told him to go to church and cast an eye
over the girls there. What he does is go to the butcher first, purchase a pig eye,
and then, in the church, throw this eye around over the girls at prayer – no
wonder he later reports to his mother that the girls were not too impressed by his
behavior. This, precisely, is what revolutionary cinema should be doing: using the
camera as a partial object, as an "eye" torn from the subject and freely thrown
around – or, to quote Vertov himself:

The film camera drags the eyes of the audience from the hands to the feet, from
the feet to the eyes and so on in the most profitable order, and it organises the
details into a regular montage exercise. [10]

We all know the uncanny moments in our everyday lives when we catch sight of
our own image and this image is not looking back at us. I remember once trying
to inspect a strange growth on the side of my head using a double mirror, when,
all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of my face from the profile. The image
replicated all my gestures, but in a weird uncoordinated way. In such a situation,
"our specular image is torn away from us and, crucially, our look is no longer
looking at ourselves." [11] It is in such weird experiences that one catches what
Lacan called gaze as objet petit a, the part of our image which eludes the mirror-
like symmetrical relationship. When we see ourselves "from outside," from this
impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I am objectivized, reduced to
an external object for the gaze, but, rather, that it is my gaze itself which is
objectivized, which observes me from the outside, which, precisely, means that
my gaze is no longer mine, that it is stolen from me. There is a relatively simple
and painless eye-operation which, nonetheless, involves a very unpleasant
experience: under local anesthesia, i.e., with the patient’s full awareness, the eye
is taken out of the socket and turned a little bit around in the air (in order to
correct the way the eye-ball is attached to the brain) – at this moment, the patient
can for a brief moment see (parts of) himself from outside, from an "objective"
viewpoint, as a strange object, the way he "really is" as an object in the world, not
the way one usually experiences oneself as fully embedded "in" one’s body. There
is something divine in this (very unpleasant) experience: one sees oneself as if
from a divine viewpoint, somehow realizing the mystical motto according to
which, the eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees
himself. Something homologous to this weird experience, applied to God himself,
occurs in the Incarnation.

In the Strugatsky brothers' novel The Roadside Picnic, on which Andrei

Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker is based, the "Zones" - there are six of these
secluded areas - are the debris of a "roadside picnic," i.e. of a short stay on our
planet by some alien visitors who quickly left it, finding us uninteresting. In the
novel, Stalkers are more adventurous and down-to-earth than in the film, not
individuals on a tormenting spiritual search, but deft scavengers organizing
robbing expeditions, somehow like the proverbial Arabs organizing raiding
expeditions into the Pyramids (another Zone) for wealthy Westerners - and,
effectively, are Pyramids not, according to popular science literature, traces of an
alien wisdom? The Zone is thus not a purely mental fantasmatic space in which
one encounters (or onto which one projects) the truth about oneself, but (like the
planet Solaris in Stanislav Lem's novel of the same name, the base of another
Tarkovsky’s sci-fi masterpiece) the material presence, the Real of an absolute
Otherness incompatible with the rules and laws of our universe. Because of this,
at the novel's end, Stalker, when confronted with the "Golden Sphere" - as the
Room in which desires are realized is called in the novel -, does undergo a kind of
spiritual conversion, but this experience is much closer to what Lacan called
"subjective destitution": an abrupt awareness of the utter meaningless of our
social links, the dissolution of our attachment to reality itself - all of a sudden,
other people are derealized, reality itself is experienced as a confused whirlpool of
shapes and sounds, so that we are no longer able to formulate our desire.

It is to this incompatibility between our own and the Alien universe that the
novel's title (The Roadside Picnic) refers: the strange objects found in the Zone
which fascinate humans are in all probability simply the debris, the garbage, left
behind after aliens have briefly stayed on our planet, comparable to the rubbish a
group of humans leaves behind after a picnic in a forest near a main road. The
typical Tarkovskian landscape (of decaying human debris half reclaimed by
nature) is in the novel precisely what characterizes the Zone itself from the
(impossible) standpoint of the visiting aliens: what is to us a Miracle, an
encounter with a wondrous universe beyond our grasp, is just everyday debris to
the Aliens. Is it then, perhaps, possible to draw the Brechtian conclusion that the
typical Tarkovskian landscape (the human environment in decay reclaimed by
nature) involves the view of our universe from an imagined Alien standpoint?
And, again, the same goes for the Incarnation: in it, the divine object coincides
with human debris (a common destitute preacher socializing with beggars,
whores, and other social losers).

It is therefore crucial to note how the Christian modality of "God seeing Himself"
has nothing whatsoever to do with the harmonious closed loop of "seeing myself
seeing," of an Eye seeing itself and enjoying the sight in this perfect self-
mirroring: the turn of the eye towards "its" body presupposes the separation of
the eye from the body, and what I see through my externalized/autonomized eye
is a perspectival, anamorphically distorted image of myself: Christ is an
anamorphosis of God.

Another indication of this externality of God with regard to Himself is pointed

out by G.K. Chesterton in his "The Meaning of the Crusade," where he quotes
with approval the description he got from a child in Jerusalem of the Mount of
Olive: "A child from one of the villages said to me, in broken English, that it was
the place where God said his prayers. I for one could not ask for a finer or more
defiant statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew."
If, in other religions, we pray to God, only in Christianity God himself prays, that
is to say, addresses an external unfathomable authority.

The crucial problem is: how to think the link between the two "alienations," the
one of the modern man from God (who is reduced to an unknowable In-itself,
absent from the world subjected to mechanical laws), the other of God from
Himself (in Christ, incarnation) – they are THE SAME, although not
symmetrically, but as subject and object. In order for (human) subjectivity to
emerge out of the substantial personality of the human animal, cutting links with
it and positing itself as the I=I dispossessed of all substantial content, as the self-
relating negativity of an empty singularity, God himself, the universal Substance,
has to "humiliate" himself, to fall into its own creation, to "objectivize" himself, to
appear as a singular miserable human individual in all its abjection, i.e.,
abandoned by God. The distance of man from God is thus the distance of God
from Himself:

The suffering of God and the suffering of human subjectivity deprived of God
must be analysed as the recto and verso of the same event. There is a
fundamental relationship between divine kenosis and the tendency of modern
reason to posit a beyond which remains inaccessible. The Encyclopaedia makes
this relation visible by presenting the Death of God at once as the Passion of the
Son who ‘dies in the pain of negativity’ and the human feeling that we can know
nothing of God. [12]

This double kenosis is what the standard Marxist critique of religion as the self-
alienation of humanity misses: "modern philosophy would not have its own
subject if God’s sacrifice had not occurred." [13] For the subjectivity to emerge –
not as a mere epiphenomenon of the global substantial ontological order, but as
essential to Substance itself -, the split, negativity, particularization, self-
alienation, must be posited as something that takes place in the very heart of the
divine Substance, i.e., the move from Substance to Subject must occur within God
himself. In short, man’s alienation from God (the fact that God appears to him as
an inaccessible In-itself, as a pure transcendent Beyond) must coincide with the
alienation of God from himself (whose most poignant expression is, of course,
Christ’s "Father, father, why have you forsaken me?" on the cross): finite human
"consciousness only represents God because God re-presents itself;
consciousness is only at a distance from God because God distances himself from
himself. [14]
This is why the standard Marxist philosophy oscillates between the ontology of
"dialectical materialism" which reduces human subjectivity to a particular
ontological sphere (no wonder that Georgi Plekhanov, the creator of the term
"dialectical materialism," also designated Marxism as "dynamized Spinozism"),
and the philosophy of praxis which, from young Georg Lukacs onwards, takes as
its starting point and horizon collective subjectivity which posits/mediates every
objectivity, and is thus unable to think its genesis from the substantial order, the
ontological explosion, "Big Bang," which gives rise to it.

So when Catherine Malabou writes that Christ’s death is "at once the death of the
God-man and the Death of the initial and immediate abstraction of the divine
being which is not yet posited as a Self," [15] this means that, at Hegel pointed
out, what dies on the Cross is not only the terrestrial-finite representative of God,
but God himself, the very transcendent God of beyond. Both terms of the
opposition, Father and Son, the substantial God as the Absolute In-itself and the
God-for-us, revealed to us, die, are sublated in the Holy Spirit.

The standard reading of this sublation – Christ "dies" (is sublated) as the
immediate representation of God, as God in the guise of a finite human person, in
order to be reborn as the universal/atemporal Spirit – remains all too short. The
point this reading misses is the ultimate lesson to be learned from the divine
Incarnation: the finite existence of mortal humans is the only site of the Spirit,
the site where Spirit achieves its actuality. What this means is that, in spite of all
its grounding power, Spirit is a virtual entity in the sense that its status is that of a
subjective presupposition: it exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists. Its
status is similar to that of an ideological cause like Communism or Nation: it is
the substance of the individuals who recognize themselves in it, the ground of
their entire existence, the point of reference which provides the ultimate horizon
of meaning to their lives, something for which these individuals are ready to give
their lives, yet the only thing that really exists are these individuals and their
activity, so this substance is actual only insofar as individuals believe in it and act
accordingly. The crucial mistake to be avoided is therefore to grasp the Hegelian
Spirit as a kind of meta-Subject, a Mind, much larger than an individual human
mind, aware of itself: once we do this, Hegel has to appear as a ridiculous
spiritualist obscurantist, claiming that there is a kind of mega-Spirit controlling
our history. Against this cliché about the "Hegelian Spirit," one should emphasize
how Hegel is fully aware that "it is in the finite consciousness that the process of
knowing spirit’s essence takes place and that the divine self-consciousness thus
arises. Out of the foaming ferment of finitude, spirit rises up fragrantly." [16] This
holds especially for the Holy Spirit: our awareness, the (self)consciousness of
finite humans, is its only actual site, i.e., the Holy Spirit also rises up "out of the
foaming ferment of finitude."

We can see apropos this case how sublation is not directly the sublation of the
otherness, its return into the same, its recuperation by the One (so that, in this
case, finite/mortal individuals are reunited with God, return to his embrace).
With Christ’s incarnation, the externalization/self-alienation of divinity, the
passage from the transcendent God to finite/mortal individuals is a fait accompli,
there is no way back, all there is, all that "really exists" are from now on
individuals, there are no Platonic Ideas or Substances whose existence is
somehow "more real." What is "sublated" in the move from the Son to Holy Spirit
is thus God himself: after Crucifixion, the dead of the incarnated God, the
universal God returns as a Spirit of the community of believers, i.e., HE is the one
who passes from being a transcendent substantial Reality to a virtual/ideal entity
which exists only as the "presupposition" of acting individuals. The standard
perception of Hegel as an organicist holist who thinks that really-existing
individuals are just "predicates" of some "higher" substantial Whole,
epiphenomena of the Spirit as a mega-Subject who effectively runs the show,
totally misses this crucial point.

For Hegel, this co-dependence of the two aspects of kenosis – God’s self-
alienation and the alienation from God of the human individual who experiences
himself as alone in a godless world, abandoned by God who dwells in some
inaccessible transcendent Beyond – reaches its highest tension in Protestantism.
Protestantism and the Enlightenment critique of religious superstitions are the
front and the obverse of the same coin. The starting point of this entire
movement is the medieval Catholic thought of someone like Thomas Acquinas,
for whom philosophy should be a handmaiden of faith: faith and knowledge,
theology and philosophy, supplement each other as a harmonious, non-
conflictual, distinction within (under the predominance of) theology. Although
God in itself remains an unfathomable mystery for our limited cognitive
capacities, reason can also guide us towards Him by way of enabling us to
recognize the traces of God in created reality – therein resides the premise of
Acquinas’s five versions of the proof of God (the rational observation of material
reality as a texture of causes and effects leads us to the necessary insight into how
there must be a primal Cause to it all; etc.). With Protestantism, this unity breaks
apart: we have on the one side the godless universe, the proper object of our
reason, and the unfathomable divine Beyond separated by a hiatus from it. When
confronted with this break, we can do two things: either we deny any meaning to
an otherworldly Beyond, dismissing it as a superstitious illusion, or we remain
religious and exempt our faith from the domain of reason, conceiving it as an act
of, precisely, pure faith (authentic inner feeling, etc.). What interests Hegel here
is how this tension between philosophy (enlightened rational thought) and
religion ends up in their "mutual debasement and bastardization"(109). In a first
move, Reason seems to be on the offensive and religion on the defensive,
desperately trying to cut out a place for itself outside the domain under the
control of Reason: under the pressure of the Enlightenment critique and the
advances of sciences, religion humbly retreats into the inner space of authentic
feelings. However, the ultimate price is paid by the enlightened Reason itself: its
defeat of religion ends up in its self-defeat, in its self-limitation, so that, at the
conclusion of this entire movement, the gap between faith and knowledge
reappears, but transposed into the field of knowledge (Reason) itself:

 
After its battle with religion the best reason could manage was to take a look at
itself and come to self-awareness. Reason, having in this way become mere
intellect, acknowledges its own nothingness by placing that which is better than it
in a faith outside and above itself, as a Beyond to be believed in. This is what has
happened in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte. Philosophy has made
itself the handmaiden of a faith once more. [17]

Both poles are thus debased: Reason becomes a mere "intellect," a tool for
manipulating empirical objects, a mere pragmatic instrument of the human
animal, and religion becomes an impotent inner feeling which cannot ever be
fully actualized, since the moment one tries to transpose it into external reality,
one regresses to Catholic idolatry which fetishizes contingent natural objects. The
epitome of this development is Kant’s philosophy: Kant started as the great
destroyer, with his ruthless critique of theology, and ended up with – as he
himself put it –constraining the scope of Reason to create a space for faith. What
he displays in a model way is how the Enlightenment’s ruthless denigration and
limitation of its external enemy (faith, which is denied any cognitive status –
religion is a feeling with no cognitive truth value) inverts into Reason’s self-
denigration and self-limitation (Reason can only legitimately deal with the
objects of phenomenal experience, true Reality is inaccessible to it). The
Protestant insistence on faith alone, on how the true temples and altars to God
should be built in the heart of the individual, not in external reality is an
indication of how the Enlightenment anti-religious attitude cannot resolve "its
own problem, the problem of subjectivity gripped by absolute solitude." [18] The
ultimate result of the Enlightenment is thus the absolute singularity of the subject
dispossessed of all substantial content, reduced to the empty point of self-relating
negativity, a subject totally alienated from the substantial content, including of
ITS OWN content. And, for Hegel, the passage through this zero-point is
necessary, since the solution is not provided by any kind of renewed synthesis or
reconciliation between Faith and Reason: with the advent of modernity, the
magic of the enchanted universe is forever lost, reality is here to stay grey. The
only solution is, as we have already seen, the very redoubling of alienation, the
insight into how my alienation FROM the Absolute overlaps with the Absolute’s
self-alienation: I am "in" God in my very distance from him.

Notes:

[1] Franklin Sherman, "Speaking of God after Auschwitz," in A Holocaust Reader,

ed. By Michael L. Morgan, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001.

[2] F.W.J. Schelling, "Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human

Freedom," in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. by Ernst Behler, New York:
Continuum 1987, p. 274.

[3] Quoted in A Holocaust Reader, p. 237.

[4] Martin Heidegger, "Only a God Can Save Us," in The Heidegger Controversy,
ed. By Richard Wolin, Cambridge: MIT Press 1993.

[5] David Tracy, "Religious Values after the Holocaust," in A Holocaust Reader,
p. 237.

[6] Juergen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Cambridge: Polity Press
2003, p. 110.

[7] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books 1969, p. 254.

[8] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, New York: Dover
Publications 1956, p. 325.

[9] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, Berkeley:
University of California Press 1985, p. 142.

[10] Quoted from Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory,
London: Routledge 1988, p. 92.

[11] Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing,
London: Faber and Faber 2002, p. 142.

[12] Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, New York: Routledge 2005, p. 103.

[13] Malabou, op.cit., p. 111.

[14] Malabou, op.cit., p. 112.

[15] Malabou, op.cit., p. 107.

[16] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, p. 233.

[17] G.W.F. Hegel. Theologian of the Spirit, Peter C. Hodgson, editor,

Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1997, p. 55-56.

[18] Malabou, op.cit., p. 114.

It was without any doubt Kierkegaard who pushed to extreme this divine parallax
tension, best encapsulated in his notion of the "teleological suspension of the
ethical." In "The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern," a chapter of
the Volume I of Either/Or, [1] Kierkegaard proposed his fantasy of what a
modern Antigone would have been. The conflict is now entirely internalized:
there is no longer a need for Creon. While Antigone admires and loves her father
Oedipus, the public hero and savior of Thebes, she knows the truth about him
(murder of the father, incestuous marriage). Her deadlock is that she is prevented
from sharing this accursed knowledge (like Abraham who also could not
communicate to others the divine injunction to sacrifice his son): she cannot
complain, share her pain and sorrow with others. In contrast to Sophocles’s
Antigone who acts (buries her brother and thus actively assumes her fate), she is
unable to act, condemned forever to impassive suffering. This unbearable burden
of her secret, of her destructive agalma, finally drives her to death in which only
she can find peace otherwise provided by symbolizing/sharing one’s pain and
sorrow. And Kierkegaard’s point is that this situation is no longer properly tragic
(again, in a similar way that Abraham is also not a tragic figure). - Furthermore,
insofar as Kierkegaard’s Antigone is a paradigmatically modernist one, one
should go on with his mental experiment and imagine a postmodern Antigone
with, of course, a Stalinist twist to her image: in contrast to the modernist one,
she should find herself in a position in which, to quote Kierkegaard himself, the
ethical itself would be the temptation. One version would undoubtedly be for
Antigone to publicly renounce, denounce and accuse her father (or, in a different
version, her brother Polynices) of his terrible sins OUT OF HER
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE FOR HIM. The Kierkegaardian catch is that such a
PUBLIC act would render Antigone even more ISOLATED, absolutely alone: no
one – with the exception of Oedipus himself, if he were still alive – would
understand that her act of betrayal is the supreme act of love… Antigone would
thus be entirely deprived of her sublime beauty – all that would signal the fact
that she is not a pure and simple traitor to her father, but that she did it out of
love for him, would be some barely perceptible repulsive tic, like the hysteric
twitch of lips of Claudel’s Sygne de Coufontaine. This tic on Sygne de
Coufontaine’s face no longer belongs to the face: it is a grimace whose insistence
disintegrates the unity of a face.

It is precisely on account of the parallax nature of Kierkegaard’s thought that,

apropos his "triad" of the Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious, one should bear in
mind how the choice, the "either-or," is always between the two. The true
problem is not the choice between aesthetical and ethical level (pleasure versus
duty), but between ethical and its religious suspension: it is easy to do one's duty
against one's pleasures or egotistic interests; it is much more difficult to obey the
unconditional ethico-religious call against one's very ethical substance. (This is
the dilemma faced by Signe de Coufontaine in Claudel's The Hostage, this is the
extreme paradox of Christianity as THE religion of modernity: how – as with
Julia in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited - to remain faithful to one's unconditional
Duty, one should indulge in what may appear aesthetic regression, opportunistic
betrayal.) In Either/Or, Kierkegaard gives no clear priority to the Ethical, he
merely confronts the two choices, that of the Aesthetic and of the Ethical, in a
purely parallax way, emphasizing the "jump" that separates them, the lack of any
mediation between them. The Religious is by no means the mediating "synthesis"
of the two, but, on the opposite, the radical assertion of the parallax gap
("paradox," the lack of common measure, the insurmountable abyss between the
Finite and the Infinite). That is to say, what makes the Aesthetic or Ethical
problematic are not their respective positive characteristic, but their very formal
nature: the fact that, in both cases, the subject wants to live a consistent mode of
existence and thus disavows the radical antagonism of human situation. This is
why Julia’s choice at the end of Brideshead Revisited is properly religious,
although it is, in its immediate appearance, a choice of the Aesthetic (passing love
affairs) against the Ethical (marriage): what matters is that she confronted and
assumed fully the paradox of human existence. What this means is that her act
involves a "leap of faith": there is no guarantee that her retreat to passing love
affairs is not just that – a retreat from the Ethical to the Aesthetic (in the same
way there is no guarantee that Abraham’s decision to kill Isaac is not his private
madness). We are never safely within the Religious, doubt forever remains, the
same act can be seen as religious or as aesthetic, in a parallax split which cannot
ever be abolished, since the "minimal difference" which transubstantiates (what
appears to be) an aesthetic act religious cannot ever be specified, located in a
determinate property.

However, this very parallax split is itself caught into a parallax: it can be viewed
as condemning us to permanent anxiety, but also as something inherently
comical. This is why Kierkegaard insisted on a comical character of Christianity:
is there anything more comical than Incarnation, this ridiculous overlapping of
the Highest and the Lowest, the coincidence of God, creator of the universe, and a
miserable man? [2] Recall the elementary comical scene from a film: after the
trumpets announce the entry of the King into the royal hall, the surprised public
sees a miserable crippled clown who enters staggering… this is the logic of
Incarnation. The only proper Christian comment on Christ’s death is thus: La
commedia è finita... And, again, the point is that the gap that separates God from
man in Christ is purely that of parallax: Christ is not a person with two
substances, immortal and mortal. Perhaps, this would also be one way to
distinguish between pagan Gnosticism and Christianity: the problem with
Gnosticism is that it is all too serious in developing its narrative of ascent towards
Wisdom, that it misses the humorous side of religious experience – Gnostics are
Christians who miss the joke of Christianity... (And, incidentally, this is why Mel
Gibson’s Passion is ultimately an anti-Christian film: it totally lacks this comic
aspect.)

As is often the case, Kierkegaard is here unexpectedly close to his official big
opponent, Hegel, for whom the passage from tragedy to comedy concerns
overcoming the limits of representation: while, in a tragedy, the individual actor
represents the universal character he plays, in a comedy, he immediately IS this
character. The gap of representation is thus closed, exactly as in the case of Christ
who, in contrast to previous pagan divinities, does not "represent" some universal
power or principle (as in Hinduism in which Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva, etc., all
"stand for" certain spiritual principles or powers – love, hatred, reason): as this
miserable human, Christ directly IS god. Christ is not also human, apart from
being a god; he is a man precisely insofar as he is god, i.e., the ecce homo IS the
highest mark of his divinity. There is thus an objective irony in Pontius Pilatus’
Ecce homo!, when he presents Christ to the enraged mob: its meaning is not
"Look at this miserable tortured creature? Do you not see in it a simple
vulnerable man? Have you not any compassion for it?", but, rather, "Here is God
himself!"
However, in a comedy, the actor does not coincide with the person he plays in the
way that he plays himself on the stage, that he just "is what he really is" there. It
is rather that, in a properly Hegelian way, the gap which separates the actor from
his stage persona in a tragedy is transposed into the stage persona itself: a comic
character is never fully identified with his role, he always retains the ability to
observe himself from outside, "making fun of himself." (Recall the immortal Lucy
from I Love Lucy whose trademark gesture, when something surprised her, was
to bent slightly her neck and cast a direct fixed gaze of surprise into the camera –
this was not Lucille Ball, the actress, mockingly addressing the public, but an
attitude of self-estrangement that was part of "Lucy" (as a screen persona)
herself.) This is how the Hegelian "reconciliation" works: not as an immediate
synthesis or reconciliation of the opposites, but as the redoubling of the gap or
antagonism - the two opposed moments are "reconciled" when the gap that
separates them is posited as inherent to one of the terms. In Christianity, the gap
that separates god from man is not effectively "sublated" directly in the figure of
Christ as god-man, but only in the most tense moment of crucifixion when Christ
himself despairs ("Father, why have you forsaken me?"): in this moment, the gap
that separates god from man is transposed into god himself, as the gap that
separates Christ from God-Father; the properly dialectical trick is here that the
very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with
God.

For Hegel, what happens in comedy is that, in it, the Universal directly appears, it
appears "as such," in direct contrast to the mere "abstract" universal which is the
"mute" universality of the passive link (common feature) between particular
moments. In other words, in a comedy, universality directly ACTS – how?
Comedy does not rely on the undermining of our dignity with reminders of the
ridiculous contingencies of our terrestrial existence; comedy is, on the contrary,
the full assertion of universality, the immediate coincidence of universality with
the character’s/actor’s singularity. That is to say, what effectively happens when,
in a comedy, all universal features of dignity are mocked and subverted? The
negative force that undermines them is that of the individual, of the hero with his
attitude of disrespect towards all elevated universal values, and this negativity
itself is the only true remaining universal force. And does the same not hold for
Christ? All stable-substantial universal features are undermined, relativized, by
his scandalous acts, so that the only remaining universality is the one embodied
in Him, in his very singularity. The universals undermined by Christ are
"abstract" substantial universals (presented in the guise of the Jewish Law), while
the "concrete" universality is the very negativity of undermining abstract
universals.

According to an anecdote from the May ’68 period, there was a graffiti on a Paris
wall: "God is dead. Nietzsche" Next day, another graffiti appeared below it:
"Nietzsche is dead. God" What is wrong with this joke? Why is it so obviously
reactionary? It is not only that the reversed statement relies on a moralistic
platitude with no inherent truth; its failure is deeper, it concerns the form of
reversal itself: what makes the joke a bad joke is the pure symmetry of the
reversal – the underlying claim of the first graffiti ("God is dead. Signed by
(obviously living) Nietzsche") is turned around into a statement which implies
"Nietzsche is dead, while I am still alive. God". Crucial for the proper comical
effect is not difference where we expect sameness, but, rather, sameness where
we expect difference, which is why, as Alenka Zupancic [3] pointed out, the
properly comic version of the above joke would have been something like: "God is
dead. And, as a matter of fact, I also do not feel too well…" – is this not a comic
version of Christ’s complaint on the cross? Christ will die on the cross not to get
rid of his mortal envelope and rejoin the divine; he will die because he is god. No
wonder, then, that, in the last years of his intellectual activity, Nietzsche used to
sign his texts and letters also as "Christ": the proper comical supplement to
Nietzsche’s "God is dead" would have been to make Nietzsche himself add to it:
"And, as a matter of fact, I also do not feel too well..."

From here, we can also elaborate a critique of the philosophy of finitude which
predominates today. The idea is that, against the big metaphysical constructs,
one should humbly accept our finitude as our ultimate horizon: there is no
absolute Truth, all we can do is accept the contingency of our existence, the
unsurpassable character of our being-thrown into a situation, the basic lack of
any absolute point of reference, the playfulness of our predicament... However,
the first thing that strikes the eye is here the utmost seriousness of this
philosophy of finitude, its all-pervasive pathos which runs against the expected
playfulness: the ultimate tone of the philosophy of finitude is that of ultra-serious
heroic confrontation of one’s destiny – no wonder that the philosopher of finitude
par excellence, Heidegger, is also the philosopher who utterly lacks any sense of
humor. Significantly, the ONLY joke – or, if not joke then, at least, moment of
irony – in Heidegger occurs in his rather bad taste quip about Lacan as "that
psychiatrist who is himself in the need of a psychiatrist"(in a letter to Medard
Boss). (There is, unfortunately, also a Lacanian version of the philosophy of
finitude: when, in a tragic tone, one is informed that one has to renounce the
impossible striving for full jouissance and accept "symbolic castration," the
ultimate constraint of our existence: as soon as we enter symbolic order, all
jouissance has to pass through the mortification of the symbolic medium, every
attainable object is already a displacement of the impossible-real object of desire
which is constitutively lost...) Arguably, Kierkeggard relied so much on humor
precisely because he insisted on the relationship to the Absolute and rejected the
limitation to finitude.

So what is it that this emphasis on finitude as the ultimate horizon of our

existence misses? How can we assert it in a materialist way, without any resort to
spiritual transcendence? The answer is, precisely, objet petit a as the "undead"
("non-castrated") remainder which persists in its obscene immortality. No
wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid of
this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive
at its most radical, i.e., death drive. In other words, the properly Freudian
paradox is that what explodes the constraints of our finitude is death drive itself.
So when Badiou, in his disparaging dismissal of the philosophy of finitude, talks
about the "positive infinity," and, in a Platonic way, celebrates the infinity of the
generic productivity opened up by the fidelity to an Event, what he fails to take
into account from the Freudian standpoint is the obscene insistence of the death
drive as the true material(ist) support of the "positive infinity."

Of course, according to the standard view of the philosophy of finitude, the Greek
tragedy, tragic experience of life, signals the acceptance of gap, failure, defeat,
non-closure, as the ultimate horizon of human existence, while the Christian
comedy relies on the certainty that a transcendent God guarantees the happy
final outcome, the "sublation" of the gap, the reversal of failure into final
triumph. The excess of the divine rage as the obverse of the Christian love allows
us to perceive what this standard view misses; the Christian comedy of love can
only occur against the background of the radical loss of human dignity, of a
degradation which, precisely, undermines the tragic experience: to experience a
situation as "tragic" is only possible when a victim retains a minimum of dignity.
This is why it is not only wrong, but also ethically obscene, to designate a
Musulmann in the concentration camp or a victim of a Stalinist show trial as
tragic – their predicament is all too terrible to deserve this designation. "Comical"
also stands for a domain which emerges when the horror of a situation outgrows
the confines of the tragic. And it is at this point that the properly Christian love
enters: it is not the love for man as a tragic hero, but the love for the miserable
abject to a man or woman is reduced after being exposed to the outburst of the
arbitrary divine rage.

This comical dimension is what is missing today, in the fashionable Oriental

spirituality - our present predicament finds its perfect expression in Sandcastles.
Buddhism and Global Finance, a documentary by Alexander Oey (2005), a
wonderfully-ambiguous work which combines commentaries from economist
Arnoud Boot, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher
Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche. Sassen and Boot discuss the gigantic scope, power,
as well as social and economic effects of global finance: capital markets, now
valued at an estimated $83 trillion, exist within a system based purely on self-
interest, in which herd behavior, often based on rumors, can inflate or destroy the
value of companies - or whole economies - in a matter of hours. Khyentse
Rinpoche counters them with ruminations about the nature of human
perception, illusion, and enlightenment; his philosophico-ethical statement
"Release your attachment to something that is not there in reality, but is a
perception," is supposed to throw a new light on the mad dance of billion-dollars-
speculations. Echoing the Buddhist notion that there is no Self, only a stream of
continuous perceptions, Sassen comments about global capital: "It's not that
there are $83 trillion. It is essentially a continuous set of movements. It
disappears and it reappears..."

The problem here is, of course, how are we to read this parallel between the
Buddhist ontology and the structure of virtual capitalism’s universe? The film
tends towards the humanist reading: seen through a Buddhist lens, the
exuberance of global financial wealth is illusory, divorced from the objective
reality - the very real human suffering created by deals made on trading floors
and in boardrooms invisible to most of us. If, however, one accepts the premise
that the value of material wealth, and one's experience of reality, is subjective,
and that desire plays a decisive role in both daily life and neo-liberal economics,
is it not possible to draw from it the exact opposite conclusion? Is it not that our
traditional life world was based on the naïve-realist substantialist notions of
external reality composed of fixed objects, while the unheard-of dynamics of
"virtual capitalism" confronts us with the illusory nature of reality? What better
proof of the non-substantial character of reality than a gigantic fortune which can
dissolve into nothing in a couple of hours, due to a sudden false rumor?
Consequently, why complain that financial speculations with futures are
"divorced from the objective reality," when the basic premise of the Buddhist
ontology IS that there is no "objective reality"? The only "critical" lesson to be
drawn from the Buddhist perspective about today’s virtual capitalism is thus that
one should be aware that we are dealing with a mere theatre of shadows, with
non-substantial virtual entities, and, consequently, that we should not fully
engage ourselves in the capitalist game, that we should play the game with an
inner distance. Virtual capitalism could thus act as a first step towards liberation:
it confronts us with the fact that the cause of our suffering and enslavement is not
objective reality itself (there is no such thing), but our Desire, our craving for
material things, our excessive attachment to them; all one has to do, after one
gets rid of the false notion of substantialist reality, is thus to renounce one’s
desire itself, to adopt the attitude of inner peace and distance... no wonder such
Buddhism can function as the perfect ideological supplement of today’s virtual
capitalism: it allows us to participate in it with an inner distance, with our fingers
crossed as it were.

Already for decades, a classic joke is circulating among Lacanians to exemplify

the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of
seed is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally
convince him that he is not a grain but a man; however, when he is cured
(convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the
hospital, he immediately comes back very trembling of scare - there is a chicken
outside the door and that he is afraid that it would eat him. "Dear fellow," says his
doctor, "you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man". "Of
course I know that," replies the patient, "but does the chicken know it?" Therein
resides the true stake of psychoanalytic treatment: it is not enough to convince
the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms, the Unconscious itself
must be brought to assume this truth. It is here that Hannibal Lecter himself, this
proto-Lacanian, was wrong: not the silence of the lambs, the ignorance of
chickens is the subject’s true traumatic core... Does exactly the same not hold for
the Marxian commodity fetishism? Here is the very beginning of the famous
subdivision 4 of the Chapter 1 of Capital, on "The Fetishism of the Commodity
and its Secret":
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its
analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical
subtleties and theological niceties. [4]

These lines should surprise us, since they turn around the standard procedure of
demystifying a theological myth, of reducing it to its terrestrial base: Marx does
not claim, in the usual way of Enlightenment critique, that the critical analysis
should demonstrate how what appears a mysterious theological entity emerged
out of the "ordinary" real-life process; he claims, on the contrary, that the task of
the critical analysis is to unearth the "metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties" in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object. In other words,
when a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity
fetishism, the Marxist's reproach to him is not "The commodity may seem to you
to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified
expression of relations between people." The actual Marxist's reproach is, rather,
"You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of
social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to
a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you - in
your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear
witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical
object endowed with special powers." In other words, we can imagine a bourgeois
subject visiting a course of Marxism where he is taught about commodity
fetishism; however, after the finished course, he comes back to his teacher,
complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells
him "But you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions
of social relations, that there is nothing magic about them!", to what the pupil
replies: "Of course I know all that, but the commodities I am dealing with seem
not to know it!" This situation is literally evoked by Marx in his famous fiction of
commodities that start to speak to each other:

If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men,
but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects,
however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to
each other merely as exchange-values. [5]

So, again, the true task is not to convince the subject, but the chicken-
commodities: not to change the way we speak about commodities, but to change
the way commodities speak among themselves… Alenka Zupancic goes here to
the end and imagines a brilliant example that refers to God himself:

In the enlightened society of, say, revolutionary terror, a man is put in prison
because he believes in God. With different measures, but above by means of an
enlightened explanation, he is brought to the knowledge that God does not exist.
When dismissed, the man comes running back, and explains how scared he is of
being punished by God. Of course he knows that God does not exist, but does God
also know that? [6]
And, of course, this, exactly, is what happened (only) in Christianity, when, dying
at the Cross, Christ utters his "Father, father, why did you forsake me?" – here,
for a brief moment, God Himself does not believe in himself – or, as G.K.
Chesterton put it in emphatic terms:

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the
crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was
forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds
and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of
inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god
who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human
speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one
divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed
for an instant to be an atheist. [7]

It is in this precise sense that today's era is perhaps less atheist than any prior
one: we are all ready to indulge in utter scepticism, cynical distance, exploitation
of others "without any illusions," violations of all ethical constraints, extreme
sexual practices, etc.etc. – protected by the silent awareness that the big Other is
ignorant about it: "the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only
she can remain unchanged in the Other (in the symbolic as the external world in
which, to put it in Hegel’s terms, the subject’s consciousness of himself is
embodied, materialized as something that sill does not now itself as
consciousness). In this case, the belief in the Other (in the modern form of
believing that the Other does not know) is precisely what helps to maintain the
same state of things, regardless of all subjective mutations and permutations. The
subject’s universe would really change only at the moment when she were to
arrive at the knowledge that the Other knows (that it doesn’t exist)." [8]

Niels Bohr, who gave the right answer to Einstein’s "God doesn’t play dice"
("Don’t tell God what to do!"), also provided the perfect example of how a
fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology: seeing a horse-shoe on his door,
the surprised visitor said that he doesn’t believe in the superstition that it brings
luck, to what Bohr snapped back: "I also do not believe in it; I have it there
because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!" What this
paradox renders clear is the way a belief is a reflexive attitude: it is never a case of
simply believing – one has to believe in belief itself. Which is why Kierkegaard
was right to claim that we do not really believe (in Christ), we just believe to
believe – and Bohr just confronts us with the logical negative of this reflexivity
(one can also NOT believe one’s beliefs...).

At some point, Alcoholics Anonymous meet Pascal: "Fake it until you make it."
However, this causality of the habit is more complex than it may appear: far from
offering an explanation of how beliefs emerge, it itself calls for an explanation.
The first thing to specify is that Pascal’s "Kneel down and you will believe!" has to
be understood as involving a kind of self-referential causality: "Kneel down and
you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!" The second thing is
that, in the „normal" cynical functioning of ideology, belief is displaced onto
another, onto a "subject supposed to believe," so that the true logic is: "Kneel
down and you will thereby MAKE SOMEONE ELSE BELIEVE!" One has to take
this literally and even risk a kind of inversion of Pascal’s formula: "You believe
too much, too directly? You find your belief too oppressing in its raw immediacy?
Then kneel down, act as if you believe, and YOU WILL GET RID OF YOUR
BELIEF – you will no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already ex-
sist objectified in your act of praying!" That is to say, what if one kneels down and
prays not so much to regain one’s own belief but, on the opposite, to GET RID of
one’s belief, of its over-proximity, to acquire a breathing space of a minimal
distance towards it? To believe – to believe "directly," without the externalizing
mediation of a ritual - is a heavy, oppressing, traumatic burden, which, through
exerting a ritual, one has a chance of transferring it onto an Other… If there is a
Freudian ethical injunction, it is that one should have the courage of one’s own
convictions: one should dare to fully assume one’s identifications. And exactly the
same goes for marriage: the implicit presupposition (or, rather, injunction) of the
standard ideology of marriage is that, precisely, there should be no love in it. The
Pascalean formula of marriage is therefore not "You don’t love your partner?
Then marry him or her, go through the ritual of shared life, and love will emerge
by itself!", but, on the contrary: "Are you too much in love with somebody? Then
get married, ritualize your love relationship, in order to cure yourself of the
excessive passionate attachment, to replace it with the boring daily custom - and
if you cannot resist the passion's temptation, there are extra-marital affairs..."

This brings us to so-called "fundamentalism," the opposite of the "tolerant"

attitude of displaced beliefs: here, the "normal" functioning of ideology in which
the ideological belief is transposed onto the Other is disturbed by the violent
return of the immediate belief – they "really believe it." Or do they? What if the
neo-obscurantist faith in all its versions, from conspiracy theories to irrational
mysticism, emerges when faith itself, the basic reliance on the big Other, the
symbolic order, fails? Is this not the case today?

This brings us to the formula of fundamentalism: what is foreclosed from the

symbolic (belief), returns in the real (of a direct knowledge). A fundamentalist
does not believe, he KNOWS it directly. To put it in another way, both liberal-
sceptical cynicism and fundamentalism thus SHARE a basic underlying feature:
the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them,
religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge:
fundamentalists accept them as such, while skeptical cynics mock them. What is
unthinkable for them is the "absurd" act of DECISION which installs every
authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of "reasons,"
in positive knowledge: the "sincere hypocrisy" of somebody like Anna Frank who,
in the face of the terrifying depravity of the Nazis, in a true act of credo qua
absurdum asserted her belief in the fundamental goodness of all humans. No
wonder than religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital
hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest results of
sciences: for them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the
same modality of positive knowledge. (In this sense, the status of "universal
human rights" is also that of a pure belief: they cannot be grounded in our
knowledge of human nature, they are an axiom posited by our decision.) One is
thus compelled to draw the paradoxical conclusion: in the opposition between
traditional secular humanists and religious fundamentalists, it is the humanists
who stand for belief, while fundamentalists stand for knowledge – in short, the
true danger of fundamentalism does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to
secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic
belief itself.

Notes:

[1] Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Volume I (New York: Anchor Books, 1959),
137-162.

[2] See The Humor of Kierkegaard. An Anthology, edited and introduced by

Thomas C. Oden, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004.

[3] On whose "Concrete Universal’ And What Comedy Can Tell Us About It" (in
Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. by Slavoj Zizek, London: Verso Books 2005) I
rely here.

[4] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1990, p.
163..

[5] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, p. 176-7.

[6] Alenka Zupancic, op.cit.

[7] G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1995, p. 145.

[8] Alenka Zupancic, op.cit.

.• Radical Evil as a Freudian Category •

.............Slavoj Zizek

From Political Evil...

When one talks about the political evils of the XXth century, one usually brings
them together under the heading of the "totalitarian" radical Evil. However, the
first thing one cannot but take note of apropos the Stalinist discourse is how it is
not prohibited in the same way as Nazism: even if we are fully aware of its
monstrous aspects, one finds Ostalgie acceptable: "Goodbye Lenin" is tolerated,
"Goodbye Hitler" not – why? Already at the anecdotal level, the difference
between the Fascist and the Stalinist universe is obvious; say, in the Stalinist
show trials, the accused has to publicly confess his crimes and to give an account
of how he came to commit them – in start contrast to Nazism, in which it would
be meaningless to demand from a Jew the confession that he was involved in a
Jewish plot against the German nation. This difference points towards the
different attitude towards Enlightenment: Stalinism still conceives itself as part
of the Enlightenment tradition, within which truth is accessible to any rational
man, no matter how depraved he is, which is why he is subjectively responsible
for his crimes, in contrast to the Nazis, for whom the guilt of the Jews is a direct
fact of their very biological constitution – one does not have to prove that they are
guilty, they are guilty solely by being Jews. For this same reason, on Stalin's
birthday, the prisoners were sending telegrams to Stalin, wishing him all the best
and the success of Socialism, even from the darkest gulags like Norilsk or
Vorkuta, while one cannot even imagine Jews from Auschwitz sending Hitler a
telegram for his birthday... Crazy and tasteless as this may sound, this last
distinction bears witness to the fact that the opposition between Stalinism and
Nazism was the opposition between civilization and barbarism: Stalinism still did
not cut the last threat that linked it to civilization. This is why the biggest war of
the XXth century, the World War II, was the war in which Stalinist Communist
AND capitalist democracies fought together against Fascism.

Since the Fascist fixation on Blut und Boden is perceived as its original sin, one
should start with a simple observation: we are so used to the syntagm "Blut und
Boden" that we tend to forget the split signalled by the "und". The relationship
between the two is that of what Deleuze called "disjunctive synthesis" - what
better proof than Jews themselves who are precisely the people of Blut ohne
Boden, supplementing the lack of land with the excessive investment into blood
relations? It is as if the first and foremost effect of migration is to foreground
even more the blood relations, thus violating the basic territorial definition of a
modern state: the member of a state is not defined by his/her "blood" (ethnic
identity), but by being fully acknowledged as residing in the state's territory –
and the state's unity was historically established precisely by the violent erasure
of local blood links. In this sense, the modern state as such is the outcome of an
"inner migration," of the transubstantiation of one's identity: even if, physically,
one does not change one's dwelling, one is deprived of a particular identity with
its local color – or, to put it again in Deleuze's terms, state's territory is by
definition that of a reterritorialized deterritorialization. And, perhaps, as was
made clear in Fascism, violence explodes precisely when one tries to deny the gap
and bring together the two dimensions of blood AND soil into a harmonious
unity; this bringing-together accounts for the "innocent" tautological formulas of
today's neoracists: le Pen's entire program can be summed up in "France to the
French!" (and this allows us to generate further formulas: "Germany to
Germans!", etc.) - "We do not want anything foreign, we want only what is
ours!"...

The first thing that such a "fundamentalist" view cannot see is how a foreign gaze
is inscribed into the very establishment of "our" identity. Say, Argentinean
identity formed itself in the middle of 19th century, when its main mythical
motifs were established (the gaucho melancholy, etc.); however, all these motifs
were already formulated in the memoirs European travelers a couple of decades
earlier – what this means is that, from the very beginning, the Argentinean
ideological self-identity relied on an alienating identification with the Other’s
gaze. The same holds even more for modern Greece: Athens were in 1800 a
provincial peasant village of 10.000 inhabitants, they were not even the first
capital of independent Greece. It was under the pressure of Western powers
(mostly Germany and England) that the capital was moved to Athens where a
series of neoclassic government buildings were constructed by Western
architects; it was also the Westerners, fascinated by the Antiquity, who installed
in Greeks the sense of continuity with Ancient Greece. Modern Greece thus
literally arose as the materialization of the Other’s fantasy, and, since the right of
fantasy is the fundamental right, should one not draw from it the extremely non-
PC conclusion that not only should Germany and England return to Greece the
ancient monuments they plundered and which are now displayed in the
Pergamon Museum and the British Museum – Greeks should even voluntarily
offer to Germany and Greece whatever old monuments they still possess, since
these monuments only have value for the Western ideological fantasy.

The second thing that such a "fundamentalist" view cannot see is its own split
nature, the gap that separates the explicit ideological text from its obscene
undertext. In his reaction to the photos showing Iraqi prisoners tortured and
humiliated by the US soldiers, rendered public at the end of April 2004, George
Bush, as expected, emphasized how the deeds of the soldiers were isolated crimes
which do not reflect what America stands and fights for, the values of democracy,
freedom and personal dignity. However, what about the clear contrast between
the "standard" way prisoners were tortured in the previous Saddam’s regime and
the US Army tortures? In the previous regime, the accent was on direct brutal
infliction of pain, while the US soldiers focused on psychological humiliation.
Furthermore, recording the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators
included into the picture, their faces stupidly smiling side by side with the twisted
naked bodies of the prisoners, is an integral part of the process, in start contrast
with the secrecy of the Saddam tortures. When I saw the well-known photo of a
naked prisoner with a black hood covering his head, electric cables attached to his
limbs, standing on a chair in a ridiculous theatrical pose, my first reaction was
that this was a shot of some latest performance art show in Lower Manhattan.
The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a
kind of tableau vivant, which cannot but bring to our mind the whole scope of
American performance art and "theatre of cruelty," the photos of Mapplethorpe,
the weird scenes in David Lynch’s films...

To anyone acquainted with the reality of the US way of life, the photos
immediately brought to mind the obscene underside of the US popular culture -
the initiatic rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo in order to be
accepted into a closed community. Do we not see similar photos in regular
intervals in the US press, when some scandal explodes in an army unit or in a
high school campus, where the initiatic ritual went overboard and soldiers or
students got hurt beyond a level considered tolerable, forced to assume a
humiliating pose, to perform debasing gestures (like penetrating their anal
opening with a beer bottle in front of their peers), to suffer being pierced by
needles...

Recall Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, a court-martial drama about two US
marines accused of murdering one of their fellow-soldiers; the military
prosecutor claims that the act was a deliberate murder, whereas the defense
(composed of Tom Cruise and Demi Moore – how could they fail?) succeeds in
proving that the defendants followed the so-called "Code Red," the unwritten rule
of a military community which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a
fellow-soldier who has broken the ethical standards of the Marines. Such a code
condones an act of transgression, it is "illegal," yet at the same time it reaffirms
the cohesion of the group. It has to remain under cover of the night,
unacknowledged, unutterable – in public, everyone pretends to know nothing
about it, or even actively denies its existence. While violating the explicit rules of
community, such a code represents the "spirit of community" at its purest,
exerting the strongest pressure on individuals to enact group identification.

Are thus the Abu Ghraib tortures not part of the Code Red rules? Abu Ghraib was
not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being
submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively
initiated into American culture, they got the taste of its obscene underside which
forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity,
democracy, and freedom. No wonder, then, that it is gradually becoming clear
how the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not a limited case, but part
of a widespread practice.

In a recent debate about the fate of Guantanamo prisoners on NBC, one of the
arguments for the ethico-legal acceptability of their status was that "they are
those who were missed by the bombs": since they were the target of the US
bombing and accidentally survived it, and since this bombing was part of a
legitimate military operation, one cannot condemn their fate when they were
taken prisoners after the combat – whatever their situation, it is better, less
severe, than being dead… This reasoning tells more than it intends to say: it puts
the prisoner almost literally into the position of living dead, those who are in a
way already dead (their right to live forfeited by being legitimate targets of
murderous bombings), so that they are now cases of what Giorgio Agamben calls
homo sacer, the one who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law,
his life no longer counts. If the Guantanamo prisoners are located in the space
"between the two deaths," occupying the position of homo sacer, legally dead
(deprived of a determinate legal status) while biologically still alive, the US
authorities which treat them in this way are also in a kind of in-between legal
status which forms the counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, their
acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law – they operate in an empty
space that is still within the domain of the law. And the recent disclosures about
Abu Ghraib only display the full consequences of locating prisoners into this
place "between the two deaths."

Bush was thus wrong: what we are getting when we see the photos of the
humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens and front pages, is precisely a direct
insight into the "American values," into the very core of the obscene enjoyment
that sustains the US way of life. These photos therefore put into an adequate
perspective Samuel Huntington’s well-known thesis on the ongoing "clash of
civilizations": the clash between the Arab and the American civilization is not a
clash between barbarism and respect for human dignity, but a clash between
anonymous brutal torture and torture as a mediatic spectacle in which the
victims’ bodies serve as the anonymous background for the stupidly smiling
"innocent American" faces of the torturers themselves. At the same time, one has
here a proof of how, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, every clash of civilizations is
the clash of the underlying barbarisms.

And, finally, the third thing the anti-fundamentalist humanitarianism itself

doesn’t see is its own politicization. Rony Brauman who, on behalf of the Red
Cross, coordinated the help to Sarajevo, made a pertinent observation about how
the very presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as "humanitarian," the very
recasting of the political-military conflict into the humanitarian terms, was
sustained by an eminently political choice, that of, basically, taking the Serb side
in the conflict. Especially ominous and manipulative was here the role of
Mitterand:

The celebration of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Yugoslavia took the place of a

political discourse, disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. /.../ It was
apparently not possible, for Francois Mitterand, to express his analysis of the war
in Yugoslavia. With the strictly humanitarian response, he discovered an
unexpected source of communication or, more precisely, of cosmetics, which is a
little bit the same thing. /.../ Mitterand remained in favor of the maintenance of
Yugoslavia within its borders and was persuaded that only a strong Serbian
power was in the position to guarantee a certain stability in this explosive region.
This position rapidly became unacceptable in the eyes of the French people. All
the bustling activity and the humanitarian discourse permitted him to reaffirm
the unfailing commitment of France to the Rights of Man in the end, and to
mimic an opposition to Greater Serbian fascism, all in giving it free rein. [1]

From this specific insight, one should move to the general level and render
problematic the very depoliticized humanitarian politics of "Human Rights" as
the ideology of military interventionism serving specific economico-political
purposes. Such humanitarianism presents itself as something of an antipolitics –
a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of
the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of
culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations
or instantiations of collective power against individuals. However, the question
is: what kind of politicization those who intervene on behalf of human rights set
in motion against the powers they oppose. Do they stand for a different
formulation of justice or do they stand in opposition to collective justice projects?
Say, it is clear that the US overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in the
terms of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, not only was motivated by other
politico-economic interests (oil), but also relied on a determinate idea of the
political and economic conditions (Western liberal democracy, guarantee of
private property, the inclusion into the global market economy, etc.) that should
open up the perspective of freedom to the Iraqi people. The purely humanitarian
anti-political politics of merely preventing suffering thus effectively amounts to
the implicit prohibition of elaborating a positive collective project of socio-
political transformation.

And, at an even more general level, one should problematize the very opposition
between the universal (pre-political) Human Rights which belong to every human
being "as such," and specific political rights of a citizen, member of a particular
political community; in this sense, Etienne Balibar argues for the "reversal of the
historical and theoretical relationship between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’" which
proceeds by "explaining how man is made by citizenship and not citizenship by
man." [2] Balibar refers here to Hannah Arendt’s insight apropos he XXth
century phenomenon of refugees: "The conception of human rights based upon
the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment
when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with
people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except
that they were still human." [3] This line, of course, leads straight to Agamben’s
notion of homo sacer as a human being reduced to "bare life": in a properly
Hegelian paradoxical dialectics of universal and particular, it is precisely when a
human being is deprived of his particular socio-political identity which accounts
for his determinate citizenship, that he, in one and the same move, is no longer
recognized and/or treated as human. In short, the paradox is that one is deprived
of human rights precisely when one is effectively, in one’s social reality, reduced
to a human being "in general," without citizenship, profession, etc., that is to say,
precisely when one effectively becomes the ideal BEARER of "universal human
rights" (which belong to me "independently of" my profession, sex, citizenship,
religion, ethnic identity...).

We thus arrived at a standard "postmodern," "anti-essentialist" position, a kind

of political version of Foucault’s notion of sex as generated by a multitude of the
practices of sexuality: "man," the bearer of Human Rights, is generated by a set of
political practices which materialize citizenship – is, however, this enough? What
if one should rather endorse the paradox of the inhumanity of human being
deprived of citizenship, and posit the "inhuman" pure man as a necessary excess
of humanity over itself, its "indivisible remainder," a kind of Kantian limit-
concept of the phenomenal notion of humanity? So that, in exactly the same way
in Kant’s philosophy the sublime Noumenal, when we come too close to it,
appears as pure horror, man "as such," deprived of all phenomenal qualifications,
appears as an inhuman monster, something like Kafka’s odradek.

Jacques Rancière [4] clearly outlined the "ontological trap" into which the
Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of "biopolitics" as the culmination of the entire
Western thought ends up getting caught: concentration camps appear as a kind of
"ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp.
Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any
political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap." When, in
a shift from Foucault, Agamben identifies sovereign power and biopolitics (in
today’s generalized state of exception, the two overlap), he thus precludes the
very possibility of the emergence of political subjectivity.

Rancière proposes a very elegant and precise solution of the antinomy between
Human Rights (belonging to "man as such") and the politicization of citizens:
while Human Rights cannot be posited as an unhistorical "essentialist" Beyond
with regard to the contingent sphere of political struggles, as universal "natural
rights of man" exempted from history, they also should not be dismissed as a
reified fetish which is a product of concrete historical processes of the
politicization of citizens. The gap between the universality of Human Rights and
the political rights of citizens is thus not a gap between the universality of man
and a specific political sphere; it, rather, "separates the whole of the community
from itself", as Rancière put it in a precise Hegelian way. Far from being pre-
political, "universal Human Rights" designate the precise space of politicization
proper: what they amount to is the right to universality as such, the right of a
political agent to assert its radical non-coincidence with itself (in its particular
identity), to posit itself – precisely insofar as it is the "surnumerary" one, the
"part with no part," the one without a proper place in the social edifice – as an
agent of universality of the Social as such. The paradox is thus a very precise one,
and symmetrical to the paradox of universal human rights as the rights of those
reduced to inhumanity: at the very moment when we try to conceive political
rights of citizens without the reference to universal "meta-political" Human
Rights, we lose politics itself, i.e., we reduce politics to a "post-political" play of
negotiation of particular interests. - What, then, happens to Human Rights when
they are reduced to the rights of homo sacer, of those excluded from the political
community, reduced to "bare life" – i.e., when they become of no use, since they
are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, are treated as inhuman?
Rancière proposes here an extremely salient dialectical reversal:

/.../ when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their
old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in
their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived
of medicine, clothes, and rights. It is in this way, as the result of this process, that
the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of
bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of
existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact
them, the victims of the absolute denial of right. For all this, they are not void.
Political names and political places never become merely void. The void is filled
by somebody or something else. /…/ if those who suffer inhuman repression are
unable to enact Human Rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else
has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is
called the "right to humanitarian interference" – a right that some nations
assume to the supposed benefit of victimized populations, and very often against
the advice of the humanitarian organizations themselves. The "right to
humanitarian interference" might be described as a sort of "return to sender": the
disused rights that had been send to the rightless are sent back to the senders. [5]

The reference to Lacan’s formula of communication (in which the sender gets
back from the receiver-addressee his own message in its inverted, i.e. true, form)
is here up to the point: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian
interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the
victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment
Human Rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to
change to ethics: reference to the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil has to
be mobilized. Today’s "new reign of ethics", clearly discernible in, say, Michael
Ignatieff’s work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying to
the victimized other political subjectivization. No wonder, then, that the
advocates of such humanitarianism like to refer to the notion of a transpolitical
radical Evil.

... to Radical Evil

Those who perceive shoah as the ultimate manifestation of radical Evil seem to
obtain an argument in Lacan’s thesis on "Kant avec Sade." "Kant avec Sade"
effectively names the ultimate paradox of modern ethics, positing the sign of
equation between the two radical opposites: the sublime disinterested ethical
attitude is somehow identical to, or overlaps with, the unrestrained indulgence in
pleasurable violence. A lot is at stake here: is there a line from the Kantian ethics
to the cold-blooded Auschwitz killing machine? Are concentration camps and
killing as a neutral business the inherent outcome of the enlightened insistence
on the autonomy of Reason? Is there at least a legitimate lineage from Sade to
Fascist torturing, as is implied by Pasolini's film version of 120 Days in Sodom,
which transposes it into the dark days of Mussolini's Salo Republic?

The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Adorno and Horkheimer
in the famous Excursion II ("Juliette or Enlightenment and Morals") of
Dialectics of Enlightenment: A/H's fundamental thesis is that "the work of
Marquis de Sade displays the 'Reason which is not led by another agency', that is
to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature." [6]
Some fifteen years later, Jacques Lacan (without knowing about A/H's version)
also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), [7] and then in the écrit "Kant with
Sade" of 1963. [8]

A/H locate Sade in the long tradition of the orgiastic-carnivalesque reversal of the
established order: the moment when the hierarchical rules are suspended and
"everything is permitted." This primordial jouissance recaptured by the sacred
orgies is, of course, the retroactive projection of the human alienated state: it
never existed prior to its loss. The point, of course, is that Sade announces the
moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself
loses its sacred/transgressive character and is reduced to a rationalized
instrumental activity. That is to say, according to A/H, the greatness of Sade is
that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejects any
metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledges the price one has to pay for
it: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of the
(sexual) activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later
baptized by Marcuse "repressive desublimation": after all the barriers of
sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we
get is not raw, brutal, passionate satisfying animal sex, but, on the contrary, a
fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting
match. The Sadean hero is not a brute animal beast, but a pale, cold-blooded
intellectual much more alienated from the true pleasure of the flesh than is the
prudish, inhibited lover, a man of reason enslaved to the amor intellectualis
diaboli - what gives pleasure to him (or her) is not sexuality as such but the
activity of outstripping rational civilization by its own means, i.e. by way of
thinking (and practicing) to the end the consequences of its logic. So, far from
being an entity of full, earthly passion, the Sadean hero is fundamentally
apathetic, reducing sexuality to a mechanical planned procedure deprived of the
last vestiges of spontaneous pleasure or sentimentality. What Sade heroically
takes into account is that pure bodily sensual pleasure and spiritual love are not
simply opposed, but dialectically intertwined: there is something deeply
"spiritual," spectral, sublime, about a really passionate sensual lust, and vice
versa (as the mystical experience teaches us), so that the thorough
"desublimation" of sexuality also thoroughly intellectualizes it, changing an
intense pathetic bodily experience into a cold, apathetic mechanic exercise.

How, then, does Lacan stand in regard to the A/H version of "Kant with Sade"
(i.e. of Sade as the truth of Kantian ethics)? For Lacan also, Sade consequently
deployed the inherent potential of the Kantian philosophical revolution, although
Lacan gives to this a somewhat different twist - his point is that Sade honestly
externalizes the Voice of Conscience (which, in Kant, attests the subject's full
ethical autonomy, i.e. is self-posited/imposed by the subject) in the Executioner
who terrorizes/tortures the victim... The first association here is, of course: what's
all the fuss about? Today, in our postidealist Freudian era, doesn't everybody
know what the point of the "with" is - the truth of Kant's ethical rigorism is the
sadism of the Law, i.e. the Kantian Law is a superego agency that sadistically
enjoys the subject's deadlock, his inability to meet its inexorable demands, like
the proverbial teacher who tortures pupils with impossible tasks and secretly
savors their failings? Lacan's point, however, is the exact opposite of this first
association: it is not Kant who was a closet sadist, it is Sade who is a closet
Kantian. That is to say, what one should bear in mind is that the focus of Lacan is
always Kant, not Sade: what he is interested in are the ultimate consequences and
disavowed premises of the Kantian ethical revolution. In other words, Lacan does
not try to make the usual "reductionist" point that every ethical act, as pure and
disinterested as it may appear, is always grounded in some "pathological"
motivation (the agent's own long-term interest, the admiration of his peers, up to
the "negative" satisfaction provided by the suffering and extortion often
demanded by ethical acts); the focus of Lacan's interest rather resides in the
paradoxical reversal by means of which desire itself (i.e. acting upon one's desire,
not compromising it) can no longer be grounded in any "pathological" interests
or motivations and thus meets the criteria of the Kantian ethical act, so that
"following one's desire" overlaps with "doing one's duty." Suffice it to recall
Kant's own famous example from his Critique of Practical Reason:

Suppose that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired object and
opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passions if, in
front of the house where he has this opportunity, a gallows were erected on which
he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust. We do not have to guess
very long what his answer may be. [9]

Lacan's counterargument here is that we certainly DO have to guess what his

answer may be: what if we encounter a subject (as we regularily do in
psychoanalysis) who can only fully enjoy a night of passion if some form of
"gallows" is threatening him, i.e. if, by doing it, he is violating some prohibition?
Mario Monicelli's Casanova '70 (1965) with Virna Lisi and Marcello Mastroianni
hinges on this very point: the hero can only retain his sexual potency if doing "it"
involves some kind of danger. At the film's end, when he is on the verge of
marrying his beloved, he wants at least to violate the prohibition of premarital
sex by sleeping with her the night before the wedding - however, his bride
unknowingly spoils even this minimal pleasure by arranging with the priest for
special permission for the two of them to sleep together the night before, so that
the act is deprived of its transgressive sting. What can he do now? In the last shot
of the film, we see him crawling on the narrow porch on the outside of the high-
rise building, giving himself the difficult task of entering the girl's bedroom in the
most dangerous way, in a desperate attempt to link sexual gratification to mortal
danger... So, Lacan's point is that if gratifying sexual passion involves the
suspension of even the most elementary "egotistic" interests, if this gratification
is clearly located "beyond the pleasure principle," then, in spite of all appearances
to the contrary, we are dealing with an ethical act, then his "passion" is stricto
sensu ethical. [10]

Kant gets involved into a difficult predicament when he distinguishes between

the "ordinary" evil (the violation of morality on behalf of some "pathological"
motivation, like greed, lust, ambition, etc.), the "radical" evil, and the "diabolical"
evil. It may seem that we are dealing with a simple linear graduation: "normal"
evil, more "radical" evil, and, finally, the unthinkable "diabolical" evil. However,
upon a closer look, it becomes clear that the three species are not at the same
level, i.e., that Kant confuses different principles of classification. "Radical" evil
does not designate a specific type of evil acts, but an a priori propensity of the
human nature (to act egotistically, to give preference to pathological motivations
over universal ethical duty) which opens up the very space for "normal" evil acts,
i.e., which roots them in human nature. In contrast to it, "diabolical" evil does
designate a specific type of evil acts: acts which are not motivated by any
pathological motivation, but are done "just for the sake of it," elevating evil itself
into an apriori non-pathological motivation – something akin to Poe's "imp of
perversity." While Kant claims that "diabolical evil" cannot actually occur (it is
not possible for a human being to elevate evil itself into a universal ethical norm),
he nonetheles asserts that one should posit it as an abstract possibility.
Interestingly enough, the concrete case he mentions (in Part I of his Metaphysics
of Mores) is that of the judicial regicide, the murder of a king executed as a
punishment pronounced by a court: Kant's claim is that, in contrast to a simple
rebellion in which the mob kills only the person of a king, the judicial process
which condemns to death the king (this embodiment of the rule of law) destroys
from within the very form of the (rule of) law, turning it into a terrifying travesty
– which is why, as Kant put it, such an act is an "indelible crime" which cannot
ever be pardoned. However, in a second step, Kant desperately argues that in the
two historical cases of such an act (under Cromwell and in the 1973 France), we
were dealing just with a mob taking revenge… Why this oscillation and
classificatory confusion in Kant? Because, if he were to assert the actual
possibility of "diabolical evil," he would found it impossible to distinguish it from
the Good – since both acts would be non-pathologically motivated, the travesty of
justice would become indistinguishable from justice itself.

Lacan's further point is that this covert Sadean dimension of an "ethical (sexual)
passion" is not read into Kant by our eccentric interpretation, but is inherent to
the Kantian theoretical edifice. If we put aside the body of "circumstantial
evidence" for it (isn't Kant's infamous definition of marriage - "the contract
between two adults of the opposite sex about the mutual use of each other's
sexual organs" - thoroughly Sadean, since it reduces the Other, the subject's
sexual partner, to a partial object, to his/her bodily organ which provides
pleasure, ignoring him/her as the Whole of a human Person?), the crucial clue
that allows us to discern the contours of "Sade in Kant" is the way Kant
conceptualizes the relationship between sentiments (feelings) and the moral Law.
Although Kant insists on the absolute gap between pathological sentiments and
the pure form of moral Law, there is one a priori sentiment that the subject
necessarily experiences when confronted with the injunction of the moral Law,
the pain of humiliation (because of man's hurt pride, due to the "radical Evil" of
human nature); for Lacan, this Kantian privileging of pain as the only a priori
sentiment is strictly correlative to de Sade's notion of pain (torturing and
humiliating the other, being tortured and humiliated by him) as the privileged
way of access to sexual jouissance (Sade's argument, of course, is that pain is to
be given priority over pleasure on account of its greater longevity - pleasures are
passing, while pain can last almost indefinitely). This link can be further
substantiated by what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of
another, ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and
nonetheless magically retains its beauty (see the standard Sadean figure of a
young girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her deprived
torturer and somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same way Tom
and Jerry and other cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous ordeals intact).
Doesn't this fantasy provide the libidinal foundation of the Kantian postulate of
the immortality of the soul endlessly striving to achieve ethical perfection, i.e., is
not the fantasmatic "truth" of the immortality of the soul its exact opposite, the
immortality of the body, its ability to sustain endless pain and humiliation?
Judith Butler pointed out that the Foucauldian "body" as the site of resistance is
none other than the Freudian "psyche": paradoxically, "body" is Foucault's name
for the psychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul's domination. That is to say,
when, in his well-known definition of the soul as the "prison of the body,"
Foucault turns around the standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as
the "prison of the soul," what he calls "body" is not simply the biological body, but
is effectively already caught into some kind of pre-subjective psychic apparatus.
[11] Consequently, don't we encounter in Kant a secret homologous inversion,
only in the opposite direction, of the relationship between body and soul: what
Kant calls "immortality of the soul" is effectively the immortality of the other,
ethereal, "undead" body?

A look at Wagnerian heroes can be of some help here: from their first
paradigmatic case, The Flying Dutchman, they are possessed by the
unconditional passion for dying, for finding ultimate peace and redemption in
death. Their predicament is that, some time in the past, they have committed
some unspeakable evil deed, so that they are condemned to pay the price for it
not by death, but by being condemned to a life of eternal suffering, of helplessly
wandering around, unable to fulfill their symbolic function. This gives us a clue to
the exemplary Wagnerian song, which, precisely, is the complaint (Klage) of the
hero, displaying his horror at being condemned to a life of eternal suffering, to err
around or dwell as the "undead" monster, longing for peace in death (from its
first example, Dutchman's great introductory monologue, to the lament of the
dying Tristan and the two great complaints of the suffering Amfortas).

Wagner's solution to Freud's antagonism of Eros and Thanatos is thus the

identity of the two poles: love itself culminates in death, its true object is death,
the longing for the beloved is the longing for death. Is, then, this urge which
haunts the Wagnerian hero what Freud called the "death drive", Todestrieb? It is
precisely the reference to Wagner which enables us to see how the Freudian death
drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the
return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension. Death drive does NOT reside
in Wagner's heroes' longing to die, to find peace in death: it is, on the contrary,
the very opposite of dying - a name for the "undead" eternal life itself, for the
horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around
in guilt and pain. The final passing-away of the Wagnerian hero (the death of the
Dutchman, Wotan, Tristan, Amfortas) is therefore the moment of their liberation
from the clutches of the death drive. Tristan in Act III is not desperate because of
his fear of dying: what makes him desperate is that, without Isolde, he cannot die
and is condemned to eternal longing - he anxiously awaits her arrival so as to be
able to die. The prospect he dreads is not that of dying without Isolde (the
standard complaint of a lover), but rather that of the endless life without her...
The paradox of the Freudian "death drive" is therefore that it is Freud's name for
its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an
uncanny EXCESS of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the
(biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. The ultimate
lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never "just life": humans are not
simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess,
passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of
things. Such a striving to experience life at its excessive fullest is what Wagner's
operas are about. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of
a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die
(apart from Tristan's and Amfortas' wound, there is, of course, THE wound, the
one from Kafka's "A Country Doctor"): when this wound is healed, the hero can
die in peace.

At the end of the day what this means is that there is absolutely no link or
continuity between the philosophical topic of radical Evil (and its Freudian
version, the death drive), and the "totalitarian" excesses of the XXth century. It is
significant how, apropos of the holocaust, Primo Levi reproduces the old paradox
of prohibiting the impossible: "Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not,
understand what happened" [12] - do we not hear here the old inversion of Kant's
"You can, because you must!", namely "You cannot, because you must not!",
which abounds in today's religious resistance to genetic manipulations: "One
cannot reduce the human spirit to the genes, which is why one should not do it!"
What, however, nonetheless distinguishes Levi from the fashionable elevation of
the holocaust into an untouchable transcendent Evil is that, at this very point, he
introduces the distinction (on which Lacan relies all the time) between
understanding and knowledge - he pursues: "We cannot understand it, but we
can and must understand from where it springs /.../. If understanding is
impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again."
[13] For this reason, one should turn around the standard notion of holocaust as
the historical actualization of "radical (or, rather, diabolical) Evil": Auschwitz is
the ultimate argument AGAINST the romanticized notion of "diabolical Evil," of
the evil hero who elevates Evil into an a priori principle. As Hannah Arendt was
right to emphasize, the unbearable horror of Auschwitz resides in the fact that its
perpetrators were NOT Byronesque figures who asserted, like Milton's Satan,
"Let Evil be my Good!" - the true cause for alarm resides in the unbridgeable GAP
between the horror of what went on and the "human, all too human" character of
its perpetrators.

Notes:

[1] Rony Bauman, "From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism," South Atlantic

Quarterly 103:2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004), p. 398-99 and 416.

[2] Etienne Balibar, "Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible?", op.cit., p.
320-321.

[3] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Meridian 1958, p.
297.

[4] Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, South Atlantic
Quarterly 103:2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004), p. 297-310.

[5] Rancière, op.cit., p. 307-309.

[6] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklaerung,

Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag 1971, p. 79.

[7] See especially chapter VI of Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre VII: L'éthique
de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil 1986.

[8] Jacques Lacan, "Kant avec Sade," in Écrits, Paris: Seuil 1966, p. 765-790.

[9] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan, 1993),
p. 30.

[10] " /.../ if, as Kant claims, no other thing but the moral law can induce us to
put aside all our pathological interests and accept our death, then the case of
someone who spends a night with a lady even though he knows that he will pay
for it with his life, is the case of the moral law."(Alenka Zupancic, "The Subject of
the Law," in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. by Slavoj Zizek, Durham: Duke UP
1998, p. 89).

[11] Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press
1997, p. 28-29.

[12] Primo Levi, If This Is a Man - The Truce, London: Abacus 1987, p. 395.

[13] Levi, op.cit., p. 396.

• Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance •

.............Slavoj Zizek

Is the post-68’ drive to jouissance - to reaching the extreme of forms of sexual

pleasures that would dissolve all social links and allow me to find a climax in the
solipsism of absolute jouissance - not the very opposite of the consummation of
the commodified products promising jouissance? The first (best exemplified by
the work of Foucault) stands for a radical, "authentic," subjective position, while
the second signals a defeat, a surrender to market forces... Is, however, this
opposition effectively so clear? Is it not all too easy to denounce jouissance
offered on the market as "false," as providing only the empty package-promise
with no substance? Is the hole, the void, in the very heart of our pleasures not the
structure of every jouissance? Furthermore, is it, rather, not that the
commodified provocations to enjoy which bombard us all the time push us
towards, precisely, an autistic-masturbatory, "asocial," jouissance whose
supreme case is the addiction to drugs? Are drugs not at the same time the means
for the most radical autistic experience of jouissance and a commodity par
excellence?

The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing

means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory "sequence" of
1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option
left was a kind of direct, brutal, passage à l’acte, push-towards-the-Real, which
assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance;
Leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.) whose
wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed into the
capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer
operative, so that only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence - l’action directe
- can awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner
experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from
concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real.

The problem with today’s superego injunction to enjoy is that, in contrast to

previous modes of ideological interpellation, it opens up no "world" proper - it
just refers to an obscure Unnameable. Even the Nazi anti-Semitism opened up a
world: by way of describing the present critical situation, naming the enemy
("Jewish conspiracy"), the goal and the means to achieve it, Nazism disclosed
reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire a global "cognitive
mapping," inclusive of the space for their meaningful engagement. This is why
Badiou recently started to elaborate this topic of world, the "logic of worlds":
what if the impetus came from his deeper insight into capitalism? What if the
concept of world was necessitated by the need to think the unique status of the
capitalist universe as world-less? Badiou recently claimed that our time is devoid
of world - [1] how are we to grasp this strange thesis?

Perhaps, it is here that one should locate the "danger" of capitalism: although it is
global, encompassing the whole worlds, it sustains a stricto sensu "worldless"
ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful
"cognitive mapping." The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that
capitalism is not a name for a "civilization," for a specific cultural-symbolic world,
but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates
with Asian values as well as with others, so that Europe's worldwide triumph is its
defeat, self-obliteration, the cutting of the umbilical link to Europe. The critics of
"Eurocentrism" who endeavor to unearth the secret European bias of capitalism
fall short here: the problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but
the fact that it REALLY IS UNIVERSAL, a neutral matrix of social relations.

In what, more precisely, does this "worldlessness" consist? As Lacan points out in
his Seminar XX, Encore, jouissance involves a logic strictly homologous to that of
the ontological proof of the existence of God. In the classic version of this proof,
my awareness of myself as a finite, limited, being immediately gives birth to the
notion of an infinite, perfect, being, and since this being is perfect, its very notion
contains its existence; in the same way, our experience of jouissance accessible to
us as finite, located, partial, "castrated," immediately gives birth to the notion of a
full, achieved, unlimited jouissance whose existence is necessarily presupposed
by the subject who imputes it to another subject, his/her "subject supposed to
enjoy."

Our first reaction here is, of course, that this absolute jouissance is a myth, that it
never effectively existed, that its status is purely differential, i.e., that it exists
only as a negative point of reference with regard to which every effectively
experienced jouissance falls short ("pleasurable as this is, it is not THAT!").
However, the recent advances of brain studies open up another approach: one
can (no longer only) imagine the situation in which pain (or pleasure) is not
generated through sensory perceptions, but through a directly excitation of the
appropriate neuronal centers (by means of drugs or electrical impulses) – what
the subject will experience in this case will be "pure" pain, pain "as such," the
REAL of pain, or, to put it in precise Kantian terms, the non-schematized pain,
pain which is not yet rooted in the experience of reality constituted by
transcendental categories.

"Neurotheologians" applied this insight to religion, by way of identifying the

brain processes which accompany intense religious experiences: when a subject
experiences himself as timeless and infinite, part of the cosmic All, delivered of
the constraints of his Self, the region of his brain which processes information
about space, time, and the orientation of the body in space "goes dark"; in the
blocking of the sensory inputs which occurs during intense meditative
concentration, the brain has no choice but to perceive the self as endless and
intimately interwoven with everyone and everything. The same goes for visions:
they clearly correspond to abnormal bursts of electrical activity in the temporal
lobes (the "temporal-lobe epilepsy"). The counterargument here is: while, of
course, everything we experience also exists as a neurological activity, this in no
way resolves the question of causality. When we eat an apple, we also experience
the satisfaction of its good taste as a neuronal activity, but this in no way affects
the fact that the apple was really out there and caused our activity. In the same
fashion, it is totally undecided whether our brain wiring creates (our experience
of) God, or whether God created our brain wiring… Is, however, the question of
causality not simple to resolve? If we (the experimenting doctor) directly
intervene in the appropriate parts of the brain, causing the brain activity in
question, and, if, during this activity of ours, the subject "experiences the divine
dimension," does this not provide a conclusive answer? The further question here
is: how will the subject who is aware of all this subjectivize his religious
experience? Will he continue to experience it as "religious" in the appropriate
ecstatic sense of the term? The extreme solution is here that of a US religious sect
which claims that God, who observes us all the time and took note of the lack of
authentic religious experiences among his believers, organized the discovery of
drugs which can generate such experiences… Further experiments show that
when individuals are able to directly stimulate their neuronal pleasure-centres,
they do not get caught into a blind compulsive drive towards excessive pleasure,
but provide themselves pleasure only when they judge that they "deserved" it (on
account of their everyday acts) – however, do many of us not do the same with
pleasures provided in a "normal" way? What all this indicates is that people who
experienced directly generated pleasures do not suffer a breakdown of their
symbolic universe, but integrate smoothly these pleasure experiences into it, or
even rely on them to enhance their experience of sacred meaning. However,
again, the question is what disavowals do such integrations involve: can I really
accept that the industrially fabricated pill that I hold in my hand provides a
contact with god?

Today's achievements of brain sciences thus seem to fulfill the prospect envisaged
by Freud of sciences supplanting psychoanalysis: once the biological mechanisms
of pain, pleasure, trauma, repression, etc., will be known, psychoanalysis will no
longer be needed, since, instead of intervening at the level of interpretation, one
will be able to directly regulate the biological processes that generate pathological
psychic phenomena. Hitherto there were two ways psychoanalysts replied to this
challenge:

either they took recourse to the standard philosophico-transcendental gesture of

pointing out how a positive science cannot ever encompass and account for the
very horizon of meaning within which it is operative ("even if brain sciences will
succeed in totally objectivizing a symptom, formulating its bioneuronal
equivalent, the patient will still have to adopt a subjective stance towards this
objectivity..."). However, this self-complacent answer is all too short: the success
of the brain sciences, if really subjectively assumed, would undermine our very
status as subjects of meaning. [2]
or they desperately cling to the parallels or structural homologies between
posychoanalysis and brain sciences ("see, we were right, there is a neuronal
process that corresponds to repression").

Both these approaches – which supplement each other in their two respective
excesses, thed first one with its abstract arrogance, the second one with its
subservient modesty – fall short of the challenge of brain sciences: the only
proper reply to this challenge is to meet the brain sciences neuronal Real with
another Real, not only to ground the Freudian semblant within the neuronal
Real. In other words, if psychoanalysis is to survive and retain its key status, one
has to find a place for it within the brain sciences themselves, from their inherent
blanks and impossibilities. – However, within cognitive sciences themselves,
things are no less confused when one tries to account for the emergence of
consciousness - whither consciousness? The surprising thing is how "everything
goes," all possible answers coexist, from dismissing the question as meaningless
through evolutionist accounts of it up to declaring it an unsolvable mystery and
proposing that consciousness has no (evolutionary) function at all, that it is a by-
product, not a central phenomenon, but an epiphenomenon. What strikes the eye
is how evolutionist or cognitivist accounts always seems to stumble upon the
same deadlock: after we construct an artificial intelligence machine which can
solve even very complex problems, the questions pops up "But it can do it
precisely as a machine, as a blind operating entity - why does it need
(self)awareness to do it?" So the more consciousness is demonstrated to be
marginal, unnecessary, non-functional, the more it becomes enigmatic - it is
consciousness itself which is here the Real of an indivisible remainder. –
Generally, this multitude can be reduced to four main positions:

1. radical/reductive materialism (Patricia and Paul Churchland): there simply are

no qualia, there is no "consciousness," they only exist as a kind of "naturalized"
cognitive mistake. The anti-intuitional beauty of this position is that it turns
around subjectivist phenomenalism (we are only aware of phenomena, there is
no absolute certainty that anything beyond them exists) – here, it is pure
phenomenality itself which does not exist!
2. anti-materialism (Chalmers): consciousness-awareness cannot be accounted
for in the terms of other natural processes, it has to be conceived as a primordial
dimension of nature, like gravity or magnetism.
3. the position of "cognitive closure" which asserts the inherent unknowability of
consciousness (McGinn, even Pinker): although consciousness emerged out of
material reality, it is necessarily unknowable.
4. non-reductive materialism (Dennett): consciousness exists, but is the result of
natural processes and has a clear evolutionary function.

These four positions obviously form a Greimasian semiotic square: the main
opposition is the one between 2 and 4, idealism and materialism; 1 and 3 each
give to materialism or idealism a cognitive twist. That is to say, both 2 and 4
believe in the possibility of the scientific explanation of consciousness: there is an
object ("consciousness") and its explanation, either accounting for it in the terms
of non-conscious natural processes (materialism) or conceiving it as an
irreducible dimension of its own (idealism). For 1, however, the scientific
explanation of consciousness leads to the result that the object-to-be-explained
itself does not exist, that it is an epistemological mistake like old notions of
flogiston; 3 inverts this position: what disappears here is not the object but
explanation itself (although materialism is true, it a priori cannot explain
consciousness).

These cognitivist impasses bear witness to the fact that today's sciences shatter
the basic presuppositions of our everyday life-world notion of reality. There are
three main attitudes one can adopt towards this breakthrough.

- The first one is simply to insist on radical naturalism, i.e., to heroically pursue
the logic of the scientific "disenchantment of reality" whatever the cost, even if
the very fundamental coordinates of our horizon of meaningful experience are
shattered. (In brain sciences, Patricia and Paul Churchland most radically opted
for this attitude.)
- The second one is the attempt at some kind of New Age "synthesis" between the
scientific Truth and the premodern world of Meaning: the claim is that new
scientific results themselves (say, quantum physics) compel us to abandon
materialism and point towards some new (Gnostic or Eastern) spirituality – here
is a standard version of this motif: "The central event of the twentieth century is
the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nation,
wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and
significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force
of things." [3] This line of reasoning stands for ideology at its worst: what the
reinscription of proper scientific problematic (the role of waves and oscillations
in quantum physics, etc.) into the ideological field of "mind versus brute things"
obfuscates is the true paradoxical result of the notorious "disappearance of
matter" in modern physics: how the very "immaterial" processes lost their
spiritual character and become a legitimate topic of natural sciences.

- The third option is that of a neo-Kantian state philosophy whose exemplary case
today is Habermas. It is a rather sad spectacle to see Habermas trying to control
the explosive results of biogenetics, to curtail the philosophical consequences of
biogenetics – his entire effort betrays the fear that something would effectively
happen, that a new dimension of the "human" would emerge, that the old image
of human dignity and autonomy would survive unscathed. The very excessive
reactions are symptomatic here, like the ridiculous over-reaction to Sloterdijk's
Elmau speech on biogenetics and Heidegger, [4] discerning the echoes of Nazi
eugenics in the (quite reasonable) proposal that biogenetics compels us to
formulate new rules of ethics. What this attitude towards scientific progress
amount to is a kind of "temptation of (resisting) temptation": the temptation to
be resisted is precisely the pseudo-ethical attitude of presenting scientific
exploration as a temptation which can lead us into "going too far" - entering the
forbidden territory (of biogenetic manipulations, etc.) and thus endangering the
very core of our humanity.

The latest ethical "crisis" apropos biogenetics effectively created the need for
what one is fully justified in calling a "state philosophy": a philosophy that would,
on the one hand, condone scientific research and technical process, and, on the
other hand, contain its full socio-symbolic impact, i.e., prevent it from posing a
threat to the existing theologico-ethical constellation. No wonder those who come
closest to meeting these demands are neo-Kantians: Kant himself was focused on
the problem of how, while fully taking into account the Newtonian science, one
can guarantee that there is a space of ethical responsibility exempted from the
reach of science; as he himself put it, he limited the scope of knowledge to create
the space for faith and morality. And are today’s state philosophers not facing the
same task? Is their effort not focused on how, through different versions of
transcendental reflection, to restrict science to its preordained horizon of
meaning and thus to denounce as "illegitimate" its consequences for the ethico-
religious sphere?

It is interesting to note how, although Sloterdijk was the target of a violent

Habermasian attack, his proposed solution, a "humanist" synthesis of the new
scientific Truth and the old horizon of Meaning, although much more refined and
ironically-sceptical than the Habermasian "state philosophy," is ultimately
separated from it by an almost invisible line of separation (more precisely, it
seems to persist in the ambiguity between the Habermasian compromise and the
New Age obscurantist synthesis). According to Sloterdijk, "humanism" always
involves such a reconciliation, a bridge between the New and the Old: when
scientific results undermine the old universe of meaning, one should find a way
to reintegrate them into the universe of Meaning, or, rather, to metaphorically
expand the old universe of Meaning so that it can "cover" also new scientific
propositions. If we fail in this mediating task, we remain stuck in the brutal
choice: either a reactionary refusal to accept scientific results, or the shattering
loss of the very domain of meaning. Today, we confront the same challenge:
"Mathematicians will have to become poets, cyberneticists philosophers of
religion, /medical/ doctors composers, information-workers shamans." [5] Is this
solution, however, not that of obscurantism in the precise sense of the attempt to
keep meaning and truth harnessed together?

/.../ the simplest definition of God and of religion lies in the idea that truth and
meaning are one and the same thing. The death of God is the end of the idea that
posits truth and meaning as the same thing. And I would add that the death of
Communism also implies the separation between meaning and truth as far as
history is concerned. "The meaning of history" has two meanings: on the one
hand "orientation," history goes somewhere; and then history has a meaning,
which is the history of human emancipation by way of the proletariat, etc. In fact,
the entire age of Communism was a period where the conviction that it was
possible to take rightful political decisions existed; we were, at that moment,
driven by the meaning of history. /.../ Then the death of Communism becomes
the second death of God but in the territory of history. /.../ Today we may call
‘obscurantism’ the intention of keeping them harnessed together – meaning and
truth. [6]

What underlies this split between truth and meaning is capitalist globalization -
what is capitalist globalization? Capitalism is the first socio-economic order
which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning (there is no
global "capitalist world view," no "capitalist civilization" proper – the
fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate
itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu and Buddhist); its global
dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the
"real" of the global market mechanism. Consequently, insofar as capitalism
already enacts the rupture between meaning and truth, it can be opposed at two
levels: either at the level of meaning (conservative reactions to re-enframe
capitalism into some social field of meaning, to contain its self-propelling
movement within the confines of a system of shared "values" which cement a
"community" in its "organic unity"), or to question the real of capitalism with
regard to its truth-outside-meaning (what, basically, Marx did). Of course, the
predominant religious strategy today is that of trying to contain the scientific real
within the confines of meaning – it is as an answer to the scientific real
(materialized in the biogenetic threats) that religion is finding its new raison
d’être:

Far from being effaced by science, religion, and even the syndicate of religions, in
the process of formation, is progressing every day. Lacan said that ecumenism
was for the poor of spirit. There is a marvellous agreement on these questions
between the secular and all the religious authorities, in which they tell themselves
they should agree somewhere in order to make echoes equally marvellous, even
saying that finally the secular is a religion like the others. We see this because it is
revealed in effect that the discourse of science has partly connected with the
death drive. Religion is planted in the position of unconditional defense of the
living, of life in mankind, as guardian of life, making life an absolute. And that
extends to the protection of human nature. /…/ This is /…/ what gives a future to
religion through meaning, namely by erecting barriers – to cloning, to the
exploitation of human cells – and to inscribe science in a tempered progress. We
see a marvellous effort, a new youthful vigour of religion in its effort to flood the
real with meaning. [7]

So when the Pope opposes the Christian "culture of Life" against the modern
"culture of Death," he is not merely exploiting in a hyperbolic way different
attitudes towards abortion. His statements are to be taken much more literally
and, at the same time, universally: it is not only that the Church harbors "good
news," the trust in our future, the Hope that guarantees the Meaning of Life; the
couple culture of Life / culture of Death has to be related to the Freudian
opposition of Life and Death drives. "Life" stands for the rule of the "pleasure
principle," for the homeostatic stability of pleasures protected from the stressful
shocks of excessive jouissance, so that the Pope’s wager is that, paradoxically, not
only is religious spirituality not opposed to earthly pleasures, but it is ONLY this
spirituality that can provide the frame for a full and satisfied pleasurable life.
"Death," on the contrary, stands for the domain "beyond the pleasure principle,"
for all the excesses through which the Real disturbs the homeostasis of life, from
the excessive sexual jouissance up to the scientific Real which generates artificial
monsters...

This simple, but salient, diagnosis ends up in a surprising paraphrase of

Heidegger, defining the analyst as the "shepherd of the real." However, it leaves
some key questions open. Is the death drive for which science stands, which it
mobilizes in its activity, not simultaneously an EXCESS OF OBSCENE LIFE, of
life as real, exempted from and external to meaning? One should not forget that
death drive is a Freudian name for immortality, for a pressure, a compulsion,
which insists beyond death (and let us also not forget that immortality is also
implicitly promised by science).

From here, we can also elaborate a critique of the philosophy of finitude which
predominates today. The idea is that, against the big metaphysical constructs,
one should humbly accept our finitude as our ultimate horizon: there is no
absolute Truth, all we can do is accept the contingency of our existence, the
unsurpassable character of our being-thrown into a situation, the basic lack of
any absolute point of reference, the playfulness of our predicament… However,
the first thing that strikes the eye is here the utmost seriousness of this
philosophy of finitude, its all-pervasive pathos which runs against the expected
playfulness: the ultimate tone of the philosophy of finitude is that of ultra-serious
heroic confrontation of one’s destiny – no wonder that the philosopher of finitude
par excellence, Heidegger, is also the philosopher who utterly lacks any sense of
humor. [8]

There is, unfortunately, also a Lacanian version of the philosophy of finitude:

when, in a tragic tone, one is informed that one has to renounce the impossible
striving for full jouissance and accept "symbolic castration," the ultimate
constraint of our existence: as soon as we enter symbolic order, all jouissance has
to pass through the mortification of the symbolic medium, every attainable object
is already a displacement of the impossible-real object of desire which is
constitutively lost...) Arguably, Kierkeggard relied so much on humor precisely
because he insisted on the relationship to the Absolute and rejected the limitation
to finitude. - So what is it that this emphasis on finitude as the ultimate horizon
of our existence misses? How can we assert it in a materialist way, without any
resort to spiritual transcendence? The answer is, precisely, objet petit a as the
"undead" ("non-castrated") remainder which persists in its obscene immortality.
No wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid
of this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for
drive at its most radical, i.e., death drive. In other words, the properly Freudian
paradox is that what explodes the constraints of our finitude is death drive itself.
And it is here, in Freudian meta-psychology, that one should look for what one is
tempted to call materialist theology.

Notes:

[1] Alain Badiou, "The Caesura of Nihilism," lecture delivered at the University of
Essex, September 10 2003.

[2] Its mauvaise foi is clear already from the oscillation on the critics of brain
sciences between two extremes: they as a rule combine the quick
"transcendental" answer ("science a priori cannot objectivize our subjective
attitude towards objectivity") with empirical arguments against - and rejoicing at
- the specific failures of scientific accounts of the brain: this very form of specific
argumentation is only meaningful against the background of the possible success.

[3] George Glider, quoted in John L. Casti, Would-Be Worlds, New York: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1997, p. 215.

[4] See Peter Sloterdijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag 1999.
[5] Peter Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet, p. 365.

[6] "A Conversation with Alain Badiou," lacanian ink 23 (New York 2004), p.
100-101.

[7] Jacques-Alain Miller, "Religion, Psychoanalysis," lacanian ink 23 (New York

2004), p. 18-19.

[8] Significantly, the ONLY joke – or, if not joke then, at least, moment of irony –
in Heidegger occurs in his rather bad taste quip about Lacan as "that psychiatrist
who is himself in the need of a psychiatrist"(in a letter to Medard Boss).

• Do We Still Live in a World? •

.............Slavoj Zizek

In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan invokes the "point of the
apocalypse," the impossible saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance,
the full immersion into massive jouissance. The same point can be made in
Nietzschean terms - what is effectively Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same?
Does it stand for the factual repetition, for the repetition of the past which should
be willed as it was, or for a Benjaminiam repetition, a return-reactualization of
that which was lost in the past occurrence, of its virtual excess, of its redemptive
potential? There are good reasons to read it as the heroic stance of endorsing
factual repetition: recall how Nietzsche emphatically points out that, when faced
with every event of my life, even the most painful one, I should gather the
strength to joyfully will for it to return eternally. If we read the thought of eternal
return in this way, then Giorgio Agamben’s evocation of the holocaust as the
conclusive argument against the eternal return retains its full weight: who can
will it to return eternally? What, however, if we reject the notion of the eternal
return of the same as the repetition of the reality of the past, insofar as it relies on
an all too primitive notion of the past, on the reduction of the past to the one-
dimensional reality of "what really happened," which erases the virtual
dimension of the past? If we read the eternal return of the same as the
redemptive repetition of the past virtuality? In this case, applied to the nightmare
of the holocaust, the Nietzschean eternal return of the same means precisely that
one should will the repetition of the potential which was lost through the reality
of the holocaust, the potential whose non-actualization opened up the space for
the holocaust to occur.

In order to grasp properly what takes place here, one has to take a detour through
what Lacan called la jouissance de l’Autre – what is this mysterious jouissance?
Imagine (a real clinical case, though) two love partner who excite each other by
verbalizing, telling to each other, their innermost sexual fantasies to such a
degree that they reach full orgasm without touching, just as the effect of "mere
talking." The result of such excess of intimacy is not difficult to guess: after such a
radical mutual exposure, they will no longer be able to maintain their amorous
link – too much was being said, or, rather, the spoken word, the big Other, was
too directly flooded by jouissance, so the two are embarrassed by each other’s
presence and slowly drift apart, start to avoid each other’s presence. THIS, not a
full perverse orgy, is the true excess: not "practicing your innermost fantasies
instead of just talking about them," but, precisely, TALKING about them,
allowing them to invade the medium of the big Other to such an extent that one
can literally "fuck with words," that the elementary, constitutive, barrier between
language and jouissance breaks down. Measured by this standard, the most
extreme "real orgy" is a poor substitute.

And it is this dimension of the jouissance of the Other that is threatened by the
prospect of "pure" jouissance. Is such a short-circuit not the basic and most
disturbing feature of consuming drugs to generate experience of enjoyment?
What drugs promise is a purely autistic jouissance, a jouissance accessible
without the detour through the Other (of the symbolic order) – jouissance
generated not by fantasmatic representations, but by directly attacking our
neuronal pleasure-centers? It is in this precise sense that drugs involve the
suspension of symbolic castration, whose most elementary meaning is precisely
that jouissance is only accessible through the medium of (as mediated by)
symbolic representation. This brutal Real of jouissance is the obverse of the
infinite plasticity of imagining, no longer constrained by the rules of reality.
Significantly, the experience of drugs encompasses both these extremes: on the
one hand, the Real of noumenal (non-schematized) jouissance which by-passes
representations; on the other hand, the wild proliferation of fantasizing (recall
the proverbial reports on how, after taking a drug, you imagine scenes you never
thought you were able to access – new dimensions of shapes, colors, smells...).

There is, however, another problem with the eternal return of the same. What
would the digital virtualization of our lives, the shift of our identity from
hardware to software, our change from finite mortals to "undead" virtual entities
able to persist indefinitely, migrating from one to another material support, in
short: the passage from human to posthuman, mean in Nietzschean terms? Is
this posthumanity a version of the eternal return? Is the digital posthuman
subject a version (a historical actualization) of the Nietzschean "overman"? Or is
this digital version of posthumanity a version of what Nietzsche called Last Man?
What if it is, rather, the point of indistinction of the two, and, as such, a signal of
the limitation of Nietzsche’s thought? In other words, is the eternal return rooted
in the human finitude (since the gap between virtuality and actuality only persists
from the horizon of finitude), or does it stand for our uncoupling from finitude?

When today’s subjectivity is celebrated as rootless, migratory, nomadic, hybrid,

etc., does not digitalization provide the ultimate horizon of this migration, that of
the fateful shift of hardware into software, i.e., of cutting the link that attaches a
mind to its fixed material embodiment (a single individual’s brain), and of
downloading the entire content of a mind into a computer, with the possibility of
the mind turning into a software that can indefinitely migrate from one to
another material embodiment and thus acquiring a kind of undeadness. The
metempsychosis, the migration of souls, thus becomes a question of technology.
The idea is that "we are entering a regime as radically different from our human
past as we humans are from the lower animals": by uploading yourself into a
computer, you become "anything you like. You can be big or small; you can be
lighter than air; you can walk through walls." [1] In the good old Freudian terms,
we thus get rid of the minimum of resistance that defines (our experience of)
reality, and enter the domain in which pleasure principle reigns unconstrained,
with no concessions to the reality principle, or, as David Pearce put it in his quite
appropriately titled book The Hedonistic Imperative:

/.../ nanotechnology and genetic engineering will eliminate aversive experience

from the living world. Over the next thousand years or so, the biological
substrates of suffering will be eradicated completely," since we shall achieve "the
neuro-chemical precision engineering of happiness for every sentient organism
on the planet. [2]

(Note the Buddhist overtones of this passage!) And, of course, since one of the
definition of being-human is that disposing of shit is a problem, part of this new
posthumanity will also be that dirt and shit will disappear:

/.../ a superman must be cleaner than a man. In the future, our plumbing (of the
thawed as well as the newborn) will be more hygienic and seemly. Those who
choose to will consume only zero-residue foods, with excess water all evaporating
via the pores. Alternatively, modified organs may occasionally expel small, dry
compact residues. [3]

Next comes the confused functions of our orifices: is the multi-purpose mouth"
not "awkward and primitive"? – "An alien would find it most remarkable that we
had an organ combining the requirements of breathing, ingesting, tasting,
chewing, biting, and on occasion fighting, helping to threat needles, yelling,
whistling, lecturing, and grimacing" – not to mention kissing, licking and
sucking, thioralerotic confusion… Is the ultimate target here not penis itself, with
its embarrassing overlapping of the highest (insemination) with the lowest
(urination)?

With the prospect of the biogenetic manipulation of human physical and psychic
features, the notion of "danger" inscribed into modern technology, elaborated by
Heidegger, turned into a common currency. Heidegger emphasizes how the true
danger is not the physical self-destruction of humanity, the threat that something
will go terribly wrong with biogenetic interventions, but, precisely, that
NOTHING will go wrong, that genetic manipulations will function smoothly – at
this point, the circle will in a way be closed and the specific openness that
characterizes being-human abolished. That is to say, is the Heideggerian
danger /Gefahr/ not precisely the danger that the ontic will "swallow" the
ontological (with the reduction of man, the Da /here/ of Being, to just another
object of science)? Do we not encounter here again the formula of fearing the
impossible: what we fear is that what cannot happen (since the ontological
dimension is irreducible to the ontic) will nonetheless happen… And the same
point is made in more common terms by cultural critics from Fukuyama and
Habermas to McKibben worried about how the latest techno-scientific
developments (which potentially made the human species able to redesign and
redefine itself) will affect our being-human – the call we hear is best encapsulated
by the title of McKibben’s book: "enough." [4] Humanity as a collective subject
has to put a limit and freely renounce further "progress" in this direction.
McKibben endeavors to empirically specify this limit: somatic genetic therapy is
still this side of the enough point, one can practice it without leaving behind the
world as we’ve known it, since we just intervene into a body formed in the old
"natural" way; germline manipulations lie on the other side, in the world beyond
meaning. When we manipulate psychic and bodily properties of individuals
before they are even conceived, we pass the threshold into full-fledged planning,
turning individuals into products, preventing them from experiencing themselves
as responsible agents who have to educate/form themselves by the effort of
focusing their will, thus obtaining the satisfaction of achievement - such
individuals no longer relate to themselves as responsible agents… The
insufficiency of this reasoning is double. First, as Heidegger would have put it,
the survival of being-human of humans cannot depend on an ontic decision of
humans. Even if we try to define the limit of the permissible in this way, the true
catastrophe already happened: we already experience ourselves as in principle
manipulable, we just freely renounce to fully deploy these potentials. But the
crucial point is that, not only will with biogenetic planning our universe of
meaning disappear, i.e., not only are the utopian descriptions of the digital
paradise wrong, since they imply that meaning will persist; the opposite,
negative, descriptions of the "meaningless" universe of technological self-
manipulation is also the victim of a perspective fallacy, it also measures the
future with inadequate present standards. That is to say, the future of
technological self-manipulation only appears as "deprived of meaning" if
measured by (or, rather, from within the horizon of) the traditional notion of
what a meaningful universe is. Who knows what this "posthuman" universe will
reveal itself to be "in itself"? What if there is no singular and simple answer, what
if the contemporary trends (digitalization, biogenetic self-manipulation) open
themselves up to a multitude of possible symbolizations? What if the utopia – the
pervert dream of the passage from hardware to software of a subjectivity freely
floating between different embodiments - and the dystopia - the nightmare of
humans voluntarily transforming themselves into programmed beings - are just
the positive and the negative of the same ideological fantasy? What if it is only
and precisely this technological prospect that fully confronts us with the most
radical dimension of our finitude?

Today’s politics is more and more the politics of jouissance, concerned with the
ways of soliciting or controlling and regulating jouissance. Is the entire of
opposition between the liberal/tolerant West and the fundamentalist Islam not
condensed in the opposition between, on the one side, the woman’s right to free
sexuality, inclusive of the freedom to display/expose oneself and provoke/disturb
man, and, on the other side, the desperate male attempts to eradicate or, at least,
keep under control this threat (recall the ridiculous Taliban prohibition of metal
heels for women – as if, even if women are entirely covered with cloth, the
clinging sound of their heels would still provoke men)? And, of course, both sides
ideologically/morally mystify their position: for the liberal West, the right to
provocatively expose oneself to male desire is legitimized as the right to freely
dispose of one’s body and to enjoy it as one wants, while for Islam, the control of
feminine sexuality is, of course, legitimized as the defense of woman’s dignity
against the threat of being reduced to an object of male sexual exploitation. So
while, when the French State prohibited women to wear veils in the school, one
can claim that, in this way, they were enabled to dispose of their body, one can
also point out how the true traumatic point for the critics of Muslim
"fundamentalism" was that there were women who did not participate in the
game of making their bodies disposable for sexual seduction, for the social
circulation/exchange involved in it. In one way or another, all other issues relate
to this one: gay marriage and their right to adopt children, divorce, abortion…
What the two opposite attitudes share is the extreme disciplinary approach,
which is in each case differently directed: "fundamentalists" regulate in detail the
feminine self-presentation to prevent sexual provocation; PC feminist liberals
impose a no less severe regulation of behavior aimed at containing different
forms of harassment.

In some "radical" circles in the US, a proposal to "rethink" the rights of

necrophiliacs (those who desire to have sex with dead bodies) recently started to
circulate – why should they be deprived of it? So the idea was formulated that, in
the same way people sign permission for their organs to be use for medical
purposes in the case of their sudden death, one should also allow them to sign the
permission for their bodies to be given to necrophiliacs to play with them… Is this
proposal not the perfect exemplification of how the PC stance realizes
Kierkegaard’s old insight into how the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor? A
dead neighbor – a corpse – is the ideal sexual partner of a "tolerant" subject
trying to avoid any harassment: by definition, a corpse cannot be harassed; at the
same time, a dead body DOES NOT ENJOY, so the disturbing threat of the
excess-enjoyment to the subject playing with the corpse is also eliminated...

However, one should add a qualification here. What we have today is not so much
the POLITICS of jouissance but, more precisely, the REGULATION
(administration) of jouissance which is stricto sensu post-political. Jouissance is
in itself limitless, the obscure excess of the unnameable, and the task is to
regulate this excess. The clearest sign of the reign of biopolitics is the obsession
with the topic of "stress": how to avoid stressful situations, how to "cope" with
them. "Stress" is our name for the excessive dimension of life, for the "too-
muchness" to be kept under control. (For this reason, today, more than ever, the
gap that separates psychoanalysis from therapy imposes itself in all its brutality:
if one wants therapeutic improvement, one will effectively get a much faster and
efficient help from a combination of behavioral-cognitivist therapies and
chemical treatment (pills).
How, then, are we to draw the line of distinction between the two excesses: the
excess of the Fascist spectacle, of its passion with regard to the "normal"
bourgeois life, or, today, the excess that pertains to "normal" capitalist
reproduction itself, its constant self-revolutionizing; and the excess of Life itself?
This duality reflects itself in the ambiguous status of the "undead": undeadness is
simultaneously the name for the excess of drive AND the name for the vampyric
pseudo-excess covering up the fact that "we are not really alive." Perhaps, the way
to distinguish the constitutive ontological excess from the obscene excess-
supplement is, again, by means of the logic of non-all, i.e., with regard to its
relationship to the presupposed "normality": the obscene excess is the excess of
exception which sustains "normality," while the radical ontological excess is a
"pure" excess, excess to nothing, the paradox of an excess "as such," of something
which is in itself excessive, with no presupposed normality.

The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant’s Du

kannst, denn du sollst! (You can, because you must!) – it relies on a "You must
because you can!". That is to say, the superego aspect of today’s "non-repressive"
hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go to the
end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance
necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance. However, the question here is: does
the capitalist injunction to enjoy effectively aim at soliciting jouissance in its
excessive character, or are we ultimately rather dealing with a kind of
universalized pleasure-principle, with a life dedicated to pleasures? In other
words, are the injunctions to have a good time, to acquire self-realization and
self-fulfilment, etc., not precisely injunctions to AVOID the excessive jouissance,
to find a kind of homeostatic balance? Are Dalai-Lama’s advices not advices how
to maintain a balanced "proper measure" and avoid the disturbing extremes? The
situation is here more complex: the problem is that, although the immediate and
explicit injunction calls for the rule of pleasure-principle that would maintain
homeostasis, the effective functioning of the injunction explodes these
constraints into a striving towards excessive enjoyment.

Addendum on Badiou and his Logics of Worlds (Logiques des

mondes)

There is no final solution on the horizon today, Capital is here to stay, all we can
hope for is a temporary truce. That is to say, undoubtedly worse that this
deadlock would have been a pseudo Deleuzian celebration of the successful revolt
of the multitude.

There is a nice Hitchcockian detail in Finding Nemo: when the monstrous

daughter of the dentist enters her father's office in which there is the aquarium
with fishes, the music is that of the murder scene from Psycho. The link is more
refined than the idea that the girl is a horror to small helpless animals: at the
scene's end, Nemo escapes by being thrown into the wash basin hole. This is his
passage from the world of the humans to his own life world (he ends up in the sea
close to the building, where he rejoins his father), and we all know the key role of
the motif of the hole in which water disappears in Psycho (the fade out of the
water disappearing in this hole to Marion's dead eye, etc.). The hole in the wash
basin thus functions as a secret passage way between the two totally disparate
universes, the human one and the one of the fishes. This is true multiculturalism,
this acknowledgement that the only way to pass to the Other's world is through
what, in our world, appears as the shit exit, as the hole into the dark domain,
excluded from our everyday reality, into which excrements disappear. The radical
disparity of the two worlds is noted in a series of details-say, when the father
dentist catches the small Nemo into his net, he thinks he saved Nemo, from
certain death, failing to perceive that what made Nemo so terrified that he
appeared on the brink of death was his own presence... However, the wager of the
notion of Truth is that this obscene-unnameable link, secret channel, between
worlds is not enough: there is a genuine "universal" Truth that cuts across the
multitude of worlds.

Badiou's elaboration of the topic of world, the "logic of worlds" comes from his
deeper insight into capitalism. The concept of world was necessitated by the need
to think the unique status of the capitalist universe as worldless. He declares that
our time is "devoid of world," [5] showing a distinct perception of how to
understand the notion of capitalist globalization. Capitalism is the first socio-
economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of
meaning (there is no global "capitalist world view," no "capitalist civilization''
proper, the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can
accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu and Buddhist); its
global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth without meaning, as
the "real" of the global market mechanism. Consequently, insofar as capitalism
already enacts the rupture between meaning and truth, it can be opposed at two
levels: either at the level of meaning (conservative reactions to re-frame
capitalism into some social field of meaning, to contain its self-propelling
movement within the confines of a system of shared "values'' which cement a
"community" in its "organic unity") , or to question the real of capitalism with
regard to its truth-outside meaning (what, basically, Marx did).

Another problem arises apropos truth: if, for Badiou, the truth event is always
local, the truth of a determinate historical world, how are we to formulate the
truth of a worldless universe? Is, as Toscano seems to indicate, this the reason
why, 'in spite of his acknowledgment of the "ontological" break introduced by
capitalism, Badiou avoids the topic of anti-Capitalist struggle, even ridiculing its
main form today (the anti-globalization movement), and continues to define the
emancipatory struggle in strictly political terms, as the struggle against (liberal)
democracy as today's predominant ideologico-political form? "Today the enemy
is not called Empire or Capital. It is called Democracy." [6]

Alberto Toscano's critique of Badiou at this point nonetheless falls short:

In this respect, we disagree with Badiou's strong claim /.../ This is emphatically
not because we think that Badiou's attack on the fetishism of democracy is
problematic, but rather because we contend that despite chattering battalions of
smug idolaters and renegade ideologues Badiou overestimates the inhibiting
force, as an 'ideological, or subjective, formalization,' of the liberal democratic
notion of equality. It is not the principle of democratic representation that
hampers the political emancipation of subjects, but rather the deep-seated
conviction that there is no alternative to the rule of profit. The cynicism of today's
'democratic' subjects, who know full well that they play a negligible role in the
management of the commons and are entirely aware of the sham nature of the
apparatuses of representation, is founded on the perceived inevitability of
capitalism, not vice versa. [7]

What one should add here, in defence of Badiou, is that it is not directly "the deep
seated conviction that there is no alternative to the rule of profit" which "hampers
the political emancipation of subjects": what prevents the radical questioning of
capitalism itself is precisely the belief in the democratic form of the struggle
against capitalism. Here, Lenin's stance against "economism" as well as against
"pure" politics is crucial today, apropos of the split attitude towards economy in
(what remains of) the Left: on the one hand, the "pure politicians" who abandon
economy as the site of struggle and intervention; on the other hand, the
economists, fascinated by the functioning of today's global economy, who
preclude any possibility of a political intervention proper. Today, more than ever,
we should here return to Lenin: yes, economy is the key domain, the battle will be
decided there, one has to break the spell of the global capitalism but the
intervention should be properly political, not economic. Today, when everyone is
"anticapitalist," up to the Hollywood "socio-critical" conspiracy movies (from The
Enemy of the State to The Insider) in which the enemy are the big corporations
with their ruthless pursuit of profit, the signifier "anticapitalism" has lost its
subversive sting. What one should problematize is rather the self-evident
opposite of this "anticapitalism": the trust in the democratic substance of the
honest Americans to break up the conspiracy. this is the hard kernel of today's
global capitalist universe, its true Master Signifier: democracy. And are the latest
statements of Negri and Hardt not a kind of unexpected confirmation of this
Badiou's insight? Following a paradoxical necessity, their very (focusing on) anti-
capitalism led them to acknowledge the revolutionary force of capitalism, so that,
as they put it recently, one no longer needs to fight capitalism, because capitalism
is already in itself generating communist potentials-the "becoming-communist of
capitalism," to put it in Deleuzian terms...

What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian il n'y a pas de
rapport...: if, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper,
there is no relationship between economy and politics, no "meta-language"
enabling us to grasp from the same neutral standpoint the two levels, although-
or, rather, because-these two levels are inextricably intertwined. The "political"
class struggle takes place in the midst of economy (recall that the very last
paragraph of Capital III, where the text abruptly stops, tackles the class struggle),
while, at the same time, the domain, of economy serves as the key enabling us to
decode political struggles. No wonder that the structure of this impossible
relationship is that of the Moebius band: first, we have to progress from the
political spectacle to its economic infrastructure; then, in the second step, we
have to confront the irreducible dimension of the political struggle in the very
heart of the economy.

It is this parallax gap that also accounts for the two irreducible dimensions of
modernity: "political" is the logic of domination, of regulative control
("biopolitics," "administered world"); "economic" is the logic of the incessant
integration of the surplus, of constant "deterritorialization." The resistance to the
Political domination refers to the "supernumerary" element which cannot be
accounted for in the terms of the political order but how are we to formulate
resistance to the economic logic of reproduction through excess? (And, let us not
forget, this excess is strictly correlative to the excess of power itself over its
"official" representative function.) The Leftist dream throughout the XXth
century was activated through the subordination of the economic to the political
(State control of the process of production). In their last works, Negri and Hardt
seem to succumb to the opposite temptation, to shifting the focus on economic
struggle, in which one can rely on State.

And therein resides the deadlock of Badiou's politics, after he proclaimed the end
of the Jacobinian revolutionary paradigm:-while he is aware that the anti-Statist
revolutionary Party politics which aimed at taking over and demolishing the State
apparatus is exhausted-he refuses to explore the revolutionary potentials of the
"economic" sphere (since, for him, this sphere belongs to the order of Being and
does not contain potential "evental sites"); for this reason, the only way left is that
of a "pure" political organization which operates outside the constraints of the
State and, basically, limits itself to mobilizable declarations... The only way out of
this deadlock is to restore to the "economic" domain the dignity of Truth, the
Potential for Events.

Notes:

[1] J. Storrs Hall, quoted in Bill McKibben, Enough. Staying Human in an

Engineered Age, New York: Henry Holt and Company 2004. p. 102.

[2] Quoted in Enough, p. 102-103.

[3] Robert Ettinger, quoted in Enough, p. 110.

[4] op. cit..

[5] Alain Badiou, "The Caesura of Nihilism," lecture delivered at the University of
Essex, 09/10/2003.

[6] Alain Badiou, "Prefazione all'edizione italiana," in Metapolitica, Napoli:

Cronopio, 2002, p. 14.

[7] Alberto Toscano, "From the State to the World? Badiou and Anti-Capitalism,"
Communication & Cognition, vol. 36, 2003.

biography

He was born the only child of middle-class bureaucrats (who hoped he

would become an economist) on 21 March 1949 in Ljubljana, the capital
of Slovenia and, at that time, part of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was, then,
under the rule of Marshal Tito (1892-1980), one of the more 'liberal'
communist countries in the Eastern Bloc, although, as Zizek points out,
the freedoms the regime granted its subjects were rather ambivalent,
inducing in the population a form of pernicious self-regulation. One
aspect of state control that did have a positive effect on Zizek, however,
was the law which required film companies to submit to local university
archives a copy of every film they wished to distribute. Zizek was,
therefore, able to watch every American and European release and
establish a firm grasp of the traditions of Hollywood which have served
him so well since.

Zizek's interest in the films of Hollywood was matched only by a dislike

for the films and, particularly, the literature of his own country. Much
of Slovenian art was, for him, contaminated by either the ideology of
the Communist Party or by a right-wing nationalism. Slovenian poetry
specifically is still, according to Zizek, falsely venerated as "the
fundamental cornerstone of Slovene society". Consequently, from his
teenage years onwards, Zizek devoted himself to reading only literature
written in English, particularly detective fiction. Pursuing his own
cultural interests, Zizek developed an early taste for philosophy and
knew by the age of 17 that he wanted to be a philosopher. Studying at
the University of Ljubljana, Zizek published his first book when he was
20 and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts (philosophy and sociology) in
1971, and then went on to complete a Master of Arts (philosophy) in
1975. The 400-page thesis for the latter degree was entitled "The
Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism", a work
which analysed the growing influence of the French thinkers Jacques
Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gilles
Deleuze. Unfortunately, although Zizek had been promised a job at the
university, his thesis was deemed by the officiating panel to be
politically suspicious and he therefore lost the job to another candidate
who was closer to the party line. According to his fellow Slovenian
philosopher Miaden Dolar (b. 1951), the authorities were concerned that
the charismatic teaching of Zizek might improperly influence students
with his dissident thinking.

Disappointed by this rejection of his talents, Zizek spent the next couple
of years in the professional wilderness, undertaking his National
Service in the Yugoslav army, and supporting his wife and son as best
he could by occasionally translating German philosophy. However, in
1977 several of his influential connections secured him a post at the
Central Committee of the League of Slovene Communists where,
despite his supposedly dissident politics, he occasionally wrote
speeches for leading communists and, during the rest of the time,
studied philosophy. In these years, Zizek became part of a significant
group of Slovenian scholars working on the theories of the French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and with whom he went on to
found the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana. This
group, among whose best-known members are Dolar and Zizek's
second wife Renata Salecl (b. 1962), established editorial control over a
journal called Problem! (in which Zizek was not afraid to author bad
reviews of his own books, or even to write reviews of books that did not
exist), and began to publish a book series called Analecta. Zizek himself
is unsure as to why so many Lacanians should have gathered in
Ljubljana, but he does point out that, in contrast to the other countries in
the former Yugoslavia, there was no established psychoanalytic
community to hamper or mitigate their interest in the usually
controversial work of the Frenchman.

. Although still disbarred from a traditional university position, in 1979

Zizek's friends procured him a better job as Researcher at the University
of Ljubljana's Institute for Sociology. At the time, Zizek thought that this
was an intellectual cul-de-sac in which the communist regime placed
those who were inconvenient to them. As it transpired, however, this
job, which would be the envy of most academics, meant Zizek was able
to pursue his research interests free from the pressures of teaching and
bureaucracy. It was there that, in 1981, he earned his first Doctor of Arts
degree in philosophy. It was also in 1981 that Zizek travelled to Paris for
the first time to meet some of the thinkers he had been writing about for
so long and writing to - (he has several books by Jacques Derrida, for
example, dedicated to him). Although Lacan was chief among these
thinkers, he died in 1981 and it was actually Lacan's son-in-law,
Jacques-Alain Miller, who was to prove more decisive in Zizek's
development.

Miller conducted open discussions about Lacan in Paris (and he still

does), but he also conducted a more exclusive thirty-student seminar at
the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne in which he examined the works of
Lacan on a page by page basis. As the only representatives of Eastern
Europe, both Zizek and Dolar were invited to join this seminar and it is
there that Zizek developed his understanding of the later works of
Lacan which still informs his thinking today. Miller also procured a
teaching fellowship for Zizek and became his analyst. It was during
these analytical sessions with Miller, which often only lasted ten
minutes, that Zizek learned the truth of his oft-reported assertion that
educated patients report symptoms and dreams appropriate to the type
of psychoanalysis they are receiving. The result of Zizek's fabrication
was that the sessions with Miller often ended up as a game of
intellectual cat-and-mouse.

This game ended in something of an impasse when Zizek completed his

second Doctor of Arts (this time in psychoanalysis) at the Universite
Paris-VIII in 1985. Miller, with whom Zizek had successfully defended
his thesis, was the head of a publishing house but he delayed
publishing Zizek's dissertation and so Zizek had to resort to a publisher
outside the inner circle of Lacanians. This second major disappointment
of his professional career threw Zizek back on his own resources. These
resources were already being put to more obvious political ends back in
Slovenia where Zizek became a regular columnist in a paper called
Mladina. Mladina was a platform for the growing democratic opposition
to the communist regime, a regime whose power was gradually
diminishing throughout the second half of the 1980s in the face of
growing political pluralism in both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In
1990, the first democratic elections were held in Slovenia and Zizek
stood for a place on the four-man Presidency - he came a narrow fifth.
Although he stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate, this position was
more strategic than a matter of conviction as he was attempting to
defeat the conservative alliance between the nationalists and the ex-
communists. Zizek does not, as he has often said, mind getting his
political hands dirty. Nor did he mind becoming the Ambassador of
Science for the Republic of Slovenia in 1991.

Although Zizek continues to provide informal advice to the Slovenian

government, his energies over the past decade have been firmly geared
towards his research. Indeed, since 1989 and the publication of The
Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek has launched over 15 monographs, and
a number of edited works written in English, on an eager public. He has
also written books in German, French and Slovene, as well as having his
work translated into Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish,
Slovak, Serbo-Croatian and Swedish. The prolific intensity of Zizek's
written output has been matched by his international success as a
lecturer where he has faithfully transcribed the molten energy of the
word on the page to the word on the stage across four different
continents. Apart from his post at what is now the Institute for Social
Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Zizek has also held positions at
SUNY Buffalo; the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; the Tulane
University, New Orleans; the Cardozo Law School, New York;
Columbia University, New York; Princeton University; the New School
for Social Research, New York; and at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor since 1991. He also maintains his editorial role for the Analecta
series in Slovenia, as well as helping establish Wo es war (a series based
on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism) and SIC (a series devoted to
Lacanian analyses of culture and politics) in German and English.

At all stages in Zizek's life, then, we can detect the insistence of a theme.
When he was growing up he preferred the films of Hollywood to the
dominant culture of poetry in his own country. As a student he
developed an interest in, and wrote about, French philosophy rather
than the official communist paradigms of thought. When he began his
professional career he preferred to read Lacan in terms of other
philosophers rather than adhering to the orthodox Lacanian line. And,
as we have seen, as a philosopher himself, he constantly refers to
popular culture rather than those topics customarily studied by the
subject. In each case, therefore, Zizek's intellectual development has
been marked by a distance or heterogeneity to the official culture within
which he works. He has always been a stain or point of opacity within
the ruling orthodoxy and is never fully integrated by the social or
philosophical conventions against which he operates.

The point is that although Zizek's unauthorized approach has cost him
the chance to become part of the established institutions on at least two
occasions (once with his Master's thesis and once with his second
Doctorate), he has defined his position only in his resistance to those
institutions. This is not necessarily a question of Zizek initiating some
kind of academic rebellion, nor even of proving how in the long run his
talents have surpassed the obstacles erected against them, but rather of
claiming that the character or identity of Zizek's philosophy is
predicated upon the failure of the institutions to accomodate his
thought. The eventual success of Zizekian theory proceeds partly from
its clearly failure, from the fact that Zizek was able to perceive himself
as alien to the system in which he worked. It was this alienation, this
difference to the discourse of philosophy of which it was and is a part,
which forged the identity of Zizek's own thought. Because Zizekian
theory was no part of the objective system, it was in itself subjective.
The reason that this is so pertinent is that Zizek describes the formation
of what is known as the "subject" in a similar way. Indeed, one of
Zizek's main contributions to critical theory is his detailed eleboration of
the subject.

INFLUENCES

The three main influences on Slavoj Zizek's work are G.W.F. Hegel, Karl
Marx and Jacques Lacan

1. Hegel provides Zizek with the type of thought or methodology that

he suse. This kind of thinking is called dialectical. In Zizek's reading of
Hegel, the dialectic is never finally resolved.

2. Marx is the inspiration behind Zizek's work, for what he is trying to

do is to contribute to the Marxist tradition of thought, specifically that of
a critique of ideology.

3. Lacan provides Zizek with the framework and terminology for his
analyses. Of particular importance are Lacan's three registers of the
Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Zizek locates the subject at the
interface of the Symbolic and the Real.

The Imaginary
The basis of the imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the
"mirror stage". Since the ego is formed by identifying with the
counterpart or specular image, "identification" is an important aspect of
the imaginary. The relationship whereby the ego is constituted by
identification is a locus of "alienation", which is another feature of the
imaginary, and is fundamentally narcissistic. The imaginary, a realm of
surface appearances which are deceptive, is structured by the symbolic
order. It also involves a linguistic dimension: whereas the signifier is the
foundation of the symbolic, the "signified" and "signification" belong to
the imaginary. Thus language has both symbolic and imaginary aspects.
Based on the specular image, the imaginary is rooted in the subject's
relationship to the body (the image of the body).
The Symbolic
Although an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply
equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is involved also in
the imaginary and the real. The symbolic dimension of language is that
of the signifier, in which elements have no positive existence but are
constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. It is the realm of
radical alterity: the Other. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other
and thus belongs to the symbolic order. Its is also the realm of the Law
that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. Th symbolic is both the
"pleasure principle" that regulates the distance from das Ding, and the
"death drive" which goes beyond the pleasure principle by means of
repetition: "the death drive is only the mask of the symmbolic order."
This register is determinant of subjectivity; for Lacan the symbolic is
characterized by the absence of any fixed relations between signifier
and signified.

The Real
This order is not only opposed to the imaginary but is also located
beyond the symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of
oppositions such as "presence" and "absence", there is no absence in the
real. The symbolic opposition between "presence" and "absence" implies
the possibility that something may be missing from the symbolic, the
real is "always in its place: it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what
might exile it from there." If the symbolic is a set of differentiated
signifiers, the real is in itself undifferentiated: "it is without fissure". The
symbolic introduces "a cut in the real," in the process of signification: "it
is the world of words that creates the world of things." Thus the real
emerges as that which is outside language: "it is that which resists
symbolization absolutely." The real is impossible because it is
impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order.
This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the
real its traumatic quality.

THE SUBJECT
Unlike almost all other kinds of contemporary philosophers, Zizek
argues that Descartes' cogito is the basis of the subject. However,
whereas most thinkers read the cogito as a substantial, transperent and
fully self-conscious "I" which is in complete command of its destiny,
Zizek proposes that the cogito is an empty space, what is left when the
rest of the world is expelled from itself. The Symbolic Order is what
substitutes for the loss of the immediacy of the world and it is where the
void of the subject is filled in by the process of subjectivization. The
latter is where the subject is given an identity and where that identity is
altered by the Self.

Reading Schelling via Lacan

Once the Lacanian concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real
are grasped, Zizek, in philosophical writings such as his dicussion of
Schelling, always interprets the work of other philsophers in terms of
those concepts. This is so because "the core of my entire work is the
endeavour to use Lacan as a privileged intellectual tool to reactualize
German idealism". (The Zizek Reader) The reason Zizek thinks German
idealism (the work of Hegel, Kant, Fichte and Schelling) needs
reactualizing is that we are thought to understand it in one way,
whereas the truth of it is something else. The term "reactualizing" refers
to the fact that there are different possible ways to interpret German
idealism, and Zizek wishes to make "actual" one of those possibilities in
distinction to the way it is currently realized.
At its most basic, we are taught that German idealism believes that the
truth of something could be found in itself. For Zizek, the fundamental
insight of German idealism is that the truth of something is always
outside it. So the truth of our experience lies outside ourselves, in the
Symbolic and the Real, rather than being buried deep within us. We
cannot look into our selves and find out who we truly are, because who
we truly are is always elsewhere. Our selves are somewhere else in the
Symbolic formations which always precede us and in the Real which we
have to disavow if we are to enter the Symbolic order.
The reason that Lacan occupies a privileged position for Zizek's lies in
Lacan's proposition that self-identity is impossible. The identity of
something, its singularity or "oneness", is always split. There is always
too much of something, and indivisible remainder, or a bit left-over
which means that it cannot be self-identical. The meaning of a word, i.e.,
can never be found in the word itself, but rather in other words, its
meaning therefore is not self-identical. This principle of the
impossibility of self-identity is what informs Zizek's reading of the
German idealists. In reading Schelling, i.e., the Beginning is not actually
the beginning at all - the truth of the Beginning lies elsewhere, it is split
or not identical to itself.

How, precisely, does the Word discharge the tension of the rotary
motion, how does it mediate the antagonism between the contarctive
and the expansive force? The Word is a contraction in the guise of its
very opposite of an expansion - that is, in pronouncing a word, the
subject contracts his being outside himself; he "coagulates" the core of
his being in an external sign. In the (verbal) sign, I - as it were - find
myself outside myself, I posit my unity outside myself, in a signifier
which represents me. (The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling
and Related Matters)

The Subject of the Enunciation and the Subject of the Enunciated

The subject of enunciation is the "I" who speaks, the individual doing
the speaking; the subject of the enunciated is the "I" of the sentence. "I"
is not identical to itself - it is split between the individual "I" (the subject
of enunciation) and the grammatical "I" (the subject of the enunciated).
Although we may experience them as unified, this is merely an
Imaginary illusion, for the pronoun "I" is actually a substitute for the "I"
of the subject. It does not account for me in my full specificity; it is,
rather, a general term I share with everyone else. In order to do so, my
empirical reality must be annihilated or, as Lacan avers, "the symbol
manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing". The subject can
only enter language by negating the Real, murdering or substituting the
blood-and-sinew reality of self for the concept of self expressed in
words. For Lacan and Zizek every word is a gravestone, marking the
absence or corpse of the thing it represents and standing in for it. It is
partly in the light of this that Lacan is able to refashion Descartes' "I
think, therefore I am" as "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I
think not". The "I think" here is the subject of the enunciated (the
Symbolic subject) whereas the "I am" is the subject of the enunciation
(the Real subject). What Lacan aims to disclose by rewriting the
Cartesian cogito in this way is that the subject is irrevocably split, torn
asunder by language

The Vanishing Mediator

The concept of "vanishing mediator" is one that Zizek has consistenly
employed since For They Know Not What They Do. A vanishing mediator
is a concept which somehow negotiates and settles - hence mediating -
the transition between two opposed concepts and thereafter disappears.
Zizek draws attention to the fact that a vanishing mediator is produced
by an assymetry of content and form. As with Marx's analysis of
revolution, form lags behind content, in the sense that content changes
within the parameters of an existing form, until the logic of that content
works its way out to the latter and throws off its husk, revealing a new
form in ots stead. Commenting Fredric Jameson's "Syntax of Theory"
(The Ideologies of Theory, Minnesota, 1988), Zizek proposes that

The passage from feudalism to Protestantism is not of the same nature

as the passage from Protestantism to bourgeois everyday life with its
privatized religion. The fisrt passage concerns "content" (under the
guise of preserving the religious form or even its strengthening, the
crucial shift - the assertion of the ascetic acquisitive stance in economic
activity as the domain of manifestation of Grace - takes place), whereas
the second passage is a purely formal act, a change of form (as soon as
Protestantism is realized as the ascetic acquisitive stance, it can fall off
as form). (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political factor)

Zizek sees in this process evidence of Hegel's "negation of the negation",

the third moment of the dialectic. The first negation is the mutation of
the content within and in the name of the old form. The second negation
is the obsolescence of the form itself. In this way, something becomes
the opposite of itself, paradoxically, by seeming to strengthen itself. In
the case of Protestantism, the universalization of religious attitudes
ultimately led to its being sidelined as a matter of private
contemplation. Which is to say that Protestantism, as a negation of
feudalism, was itself negated by capitalism.

THE FORMULAS OF SEXUATION

Jouissance
The pleasure principle functions a a limit of enjoyment; it is a law that
commands the subject to "enjoy as little as possible". At the same time,
the subject constantly attempts to trangress the prohibitions imposed on
his enjoyment, to go "beyond the pleasure principle". The result of
transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since
thre is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear.
beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this "painful pleasure" is
what Lacan calls jouissance: jouissance is suffering. The term expresses
the paradoxical satisfaction the subject derives from his symptom, that
is the suffering he derives from his own satisfaction.

Woman
Lacan in Encore states that jouissance is essentially phallic: "jouissance,
insofar as it is sexual, is phallic, which means that it does not relate to
the Other as such." However, Lacan admits a specifically feminine
jouissance, a supplementary jouissance which is beyond the phallus, a
jouissance of the Other. This feminine jouissance is ineffable, for women
experience it but know nothing about it. Going beyond the phallus, it is
of the order of the infinite, like mystical ecstasy.
"Woman doesn't exist", la femme n'existe pas, which Lacan rephrases as
"there is no such a thing as Woman", il n'y a pas La femme. Lacan
questions not the noun "woman", but the definite article which precedes
it. For the definite article indicates universality, and this is the
characteristic that woman lacks: "woman does not lend herself to
generalisation, even to phallocentric generalisation." He also speaks of
her as "not-all", pas toute; unlike masculinity - a universal function
founded upon the phallic exception (castration), woman is a non-
universal which asmits no exception. "Woman as a symptom" (Seminar
RSI) means that a woman is a symptom of a man, in the sense that a
woman can only ever enter the psychic economy of men as a fantasy
object, the cause of their desire.
For Zizek, woman is what sustains the consistency of man; woman non-
existence actually represents the radical negativity which constitutes all
subjects. The terms "man" and "woman" do not refer to a biological
distinction or gender roles, but rather two modes of the failure of
Symbolization. It is this failure which means that "there is no sexual
rapport". See Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father, or how Not to
misread Lacan's formulas of sexuation for Zizek's position vis-à-vis
sexuation.

POSTMODERNITY

For Zizek, present society, or postmodernity, is based upon the demise

in the authority of the big Other. Continuing the theorists of the
contemporary risk society, who advocate the personal freedoms of
choice or reflexivity, which have replaced this authority, Zizek argues
that these theorists ignore the reflexivity at the heart of the subject. For
Zizek, lacking the prohibitions of the big Other, in these conditions, the
subject's inherent reflexivity manifests itself in attachments to forms of
subjection, paranoia and narcissism. In order to ameliorate these
pathologies, Zizek proposes the need for a political act or revolution -
one that will alter the conditions of possibility of postmodernity (which
he identifies as capitalism) and so give birth to a new type of Symbolic
Order in which a new breed of subject can exist.

The Law
Zizek refers to the law throughout his work. The term "the law" signifies
the principles upon which society is based, designating a mode of
collective conduct based upon a set of prohibitions. However, for Zizek,
the rule of the law conceals an inherent unruliness which is precisely
the violence by which it established itself as law in the first place.
"At the beginning" of the law, there is a certain "outlaw", a certain real of
violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the
reign of the law... The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself
must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive
condition of the functioning of the law. (For They Know Not What They
Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor)

The authority of the law stems not from some concept of justice, but
because it is the law. Which is to say that the origin of the law can be
found in the tautology: "the law is the law". If the law is to function
properly, however, we must experience it as just. It is only when the
law breaks down, when it becomes a law unto itself, and it reaches the
limits of itself, do we glimpse those limits and acknowledge its
contingency by reference to the phrase "the law is the law".

The Desintegration of the Big Other

One key aspect of the universalization of reflexivity is the resulting
desintegration of the big Other, the communal network of social
institutions, customs and laws. For Zizek, the big Other was always
dead, in the sense that it never existed in the first place as a material
thing. All it ever was (and is) is a purely symbolic order. It means that
we all engage in a minimum of idealization, disavowing the brute fact
of the Real in favor of another Symbolic world behind it. Zizek
expresses this disavowal in terms of an "as if". In order to coexist with
our neighbors we act "as if" they do not smell bad or look ridiculous.
The big Other is then a kind of collective lie to which we all individually
subscribe. We all know that the emperor is naked (in the Real) but
nonetheless we agree to the deception that he is wearing new clothes (in
the Symbolic). When Zizek avers that "the big Other no longer exists" is
that in the new postmodern era of reflexivity we no longer believe that
the emperor is wearing clothes. We believe the testimony of our eyes
(his nakedness in the Real) rather than the words of the big Other (his
Symbolic new clothes). Instead of treating this as a case of punctuting
hypocrisy, Zizek argues that "we get more than we bargained for - that
the very community of which we were a member has disintegrated"
(For They Know Not What They Do). There is a demise in "Symbolic
efficiency".
Symbolic efficiency refers to the way in which for a fact to become true
it is not enough for us just to know it, we need to know that the fact is
also known by the big Other too. For Zizek, it is the big Other which
confers an identity upon the many decentered personalities of the
contemporary subject. The different aspects of my personality do not
claim an equal status in the Symbolic - it is only the Self or Selves
registered by the big Other which display Symbolic efficiency, which
are fully recognized by everyone else and determine my socio-economic
position. The level at which this takes place is not

that of "reality" as opposed to the play of my imagination - Lacan's point

is not that, behind the multiplicity of phantasmatic identities, there is a
hard core of some "real Self", we are dealing with a symbolic fiction, but
a fiction which, for contingent reasons that have nothing to do with its
inherent structure, possesses performative power - is socially operative,
structures the socio-symbolic reality in which I participate. The status of
the same person, inclusive of his/her very "real" features, can appear in
an entirely different light the moment the modality of his/her
relationship to the big Other changes. (The Ticklish Subject: the Absent
Center of Political Ideology)

The Return of the Big Other

Besides the construction of little big Others as a reaction of the demise
of the big Other, Zizek identifies another response in the positing of a
big Other that actually exists in the Real. The name Lacan gives to an
Other in the Real is "the Other of the Other". A belief in an Other of the
Other, in someone or something who is really pulling the strings of
society and organizing everything, is one of the signs of paranoia.
Needless to say that it is commonplace to argue that the dominant
pathology today is paranoia: countless books and films refer to some
organization which covertly control governments, news, markets and
academia. Zizek proposes that the cause of this paranoia can be located
in a reaction to the demise of the big Other:
When faced with such a paranoid construction, we must not forget
Freud's warning and mistake it for the "ilness" itself: the paranoid
construction is, on the contrary, an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull
ourselves out of the real "illness", the "end of the world", the breakdown
of the symbolic universe, by menas of this substitute formation. Looking
Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture)

Paradoxically, then, Zizek argues that the typical postmodern subject is

one who displays an otright cynicism towards official institutions, yet at
the same time believes in the existence of conspirancies and an unseen
Other pulling the strings. This apparently contradictory coupling of
cynicism and belief is strictly correlative to the demise of the big Other.
Its disappearance causes us to construct an Other of the Other in order
to escape the unbearable freedom its loss encumbers us with.
Conversely, there is no need to take the big Other seriously if we believe
in an Other of the Other. We therefore display cynicism and belief in
equal and sinceres measures.

Postmodernism: An Over-Proximity to the Real

One of the ways in which Zizek's understanding of the postmodern can
be characterized is as an over-proximity of the Real. In postmodern art
(or postmodernism) Zizek identifies various manifestations of this, such
as the technique of "filling in the gaps". What Zizek means by this can
be seen in his comparative analysis of The Talented Mr. Ripley (book and
film). In Patricia Highsmith's novel, Ripley's homosexuality is only
indirectly proposed, but in Anthony Minghella's film Ripley is openly
gay. The repressed content of the novel, the absence around which it
centers, is filled in. For Zizek, what we lose by covering over the void in
this way is the void of subjectivity:

By way of "filling in the gaps" and "telling it all", what we retreat from is
the void as such, which is ultimately none other than the void of
subjectivity (the Lacanian "barred subject"). What Minghella
accomplishes is the move from the void of subjectivity to the inner
wealth of personality. (The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski
between Theory and Post-Theory)
In Highsmith's novel the status of Ripley's sexuality is. at most,
equivocal. As such, the book remains "innocent" in the eyes of the big
Other because it does not openly trangress one of its norms. While we
can interpret the clues in the story as indicating Ripley's homosexuality,
we do not have to do so. The film, on the other hand, "shows it all",
Ripley is here objectively homosexual. So whereas in one instance the
reader can decide subjectively whether or not Ripley is gay, the film
allows no such room for manoeuvre and the viewer is forced to accept
Minghella's reading of the text.

IDEOLOGY

For Zizek, we are not so much living in a post-ideological era as in an

era dominated by the ideology of cynicism. Adapting from Marx and
Sloterdijk, he sums up the cynical attitude as "they know that, in their
activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it".
Ideology in this sense, is located in what we do and not in what we
know. Our belief in an ideology is thus staged in advance of our
acknowledging that belief in "belief machines", such as Althusser's
Ideological State Apparatuses. It is "belief before belief."

Pinning Down Ideology with Points de Capiton

One of the questions Zizek asks about ideology is: what keeps an
ideological field of meaning consistent? Given that signifiers are
unstable and liable to slippages of meaning, how does an ideology
maintain its consistency? The answer to this problem is that any given
ideological field is "quilted" by what, following lacan, he terms a point
de capiton (literally an "upholstery button" though is has also been
translated as "anchoring point"). In the same way that an upholstery
button pins down stuffing inside a quilt and stops it from moving
about, Zisek zrques that a point de capiton is a signifier which stops
meaning from sliding about inside the ideological quilt. A point de
capiton unifies an ideological field and provides it with an identity.
Freedom, i.e, is in itself an open-ended word, the meaning of which can
slide about depending on the context of its use. A right-wing
interpretation of the word might use it to designate the freedom to
speculate on the market, whereas a left-wing interpretation of it might
use it designate freedom from the inequalities of the market. The word
"freedom" therefore does not mean the same thing in all possible
worlds: what pins its meaning down is the point de capiton of "right-
wing" or "left-wing". What is at issue in a conflict of ideologies is
precisely the point de capiton - which signifier ("communism", "fascism",
"capitalism", "market economy" and so on) will be entitled to quilt the
ideological field ("freedom", "democracy", Human rights" and son on).

The Two Deaths

The fact that for Zizek the apparently all-inclusive whole of life and
death are supplemented, by both a living death and a deathly life,
points to the way in which we can die not just once, but twice. Most
obviously, we will suffer a biological death in which our bodies will fail
and eventually disintegrate. This is death in the Real, involving the
obliteration of our material selves. But we can also suffer a Symbolic
death. This does not involve the annihilation of our actual bodies, rather
it entails the destruction of our Symbolic universe and the
extermination of our subject positions. We can thus suffer a living death
where we are excluded from the Symbolic and no longer exist for the
Other. This might happen if we go mad or if we commit an atrocious
crime and society disowns us. In this scenario, we still exist in the Real
but not in the Symbolic. Alternatively, we might endure a deathly life or
more a kind of life after death. This might happen if, after our bodies
have died, people remember our names, remember our deeds and so
on. In this case, we continue to exist in the Symbolic even though we
have died in the Real.
The gap between the two deaths, Zizek argues, can be filled either by
manifestations of the monstrous or the beautiful. In Shakespeare's
Hamlet for example, Hamlet's father is dead in the Real, however, he
persists as a terifying and monstrous apparition because he was
murdered and thereby cheated of the chance to settle his Symbolic
debts. Once that debt has been repaid, following Hamlet's killing of his
murderer, he is "completely" dead. In Sophocles' Antigone, the heroine
suffers a SYmbolic death before her Reak death when she is excluded
fom the community for wanting to bury his traitorous brother. This
destruction of her social identity instils her character with a sublime
beauty. Ironically Antigone enters the domain between the two deaths
"precisely in order to prevent her brother's second death: to give him a
proper funeral that will secure his eternalization" (The Ticklish Subject:
the Absent Centre of Political Ontology). That is, she endures a Symbolic
death in order that her brother, who has been refused proper burial
rites, will not suffer a Symbolic death himself.

The Spectre of Ideology

Zizek distinguishes three moments in the narrative of an ideology.
1. Doctrine - ideological doctrine concerns the ideas and theories of an
ideology, i.e. liberalism partly developed from the ideas of John Locke.
2. Belief - ideological belief designates the material or external
manifestations and apparatuses of its doctrine, i.e. liberalism is
materialized in an independent press, democratic elections and the free
market.
3. Ritual - ideological ritual refers to the internalization of a doctrine, the
way it is experienced as spontaneous, i.e in liberalism subjects naturally
think of themselves as free individuals.

These three aspects of ideology form a kind of narrative. In the first

stage of ideological doctrine we find ideology in its "pure" state. Here
ideology takes the form of a supposedly truthful proposition or set of
arguments which, in reality, conceal a vested interest. Locke's
arguments about government served the interest of the revolutionary
Americans rather than the colonizing British. In a second step, a
successful ideology takes on the material form which generates belief in
that ideology, most potently in the guise of Althusser's State
Apparatuses. Third, ideology assumes an almost spontaneous existence,
becoming instinctive rather than realized either as an explicit set of
arguments or as an institution. the supreme example of such
spontaneity is, for Zizek, the notion of commodity fetishism.
In each of these three moments - a doctrine, its materialization in the
form of belief and its manifestation as spontaneous ritual - as soon as
we think we have assumed a position of truth from which to denounce
the lie of an ideology, we find ourselves back in ideology again. This is
so because our understanding of ideology is based on a binary
structure, which contrasts reality with ideology. To solve this problem,
Zizek suggests that we analyze ideology using a ternary structure. So,
how can we distinguish reality from ideology? From what position, for
example, is Zizek able to denounce the New Age reading of the
universe as ideological mystification? It is not from the position in
reality because reality is constituted by the Symbolic and the Symbolic
is where fiction assumes the guise of truth. The only non-ideological
position available is in the Real - the Real of the antagonism. Now, that
is not a position we can actually occupy; it is rather "the extraideological
point of reference that authorizes us to denounce the content of our
immediate experience as 'ideological.'" (Mapping Ideology) The
antagonism of the Real is a constant that has to be assumed given the
xistence of social reality (the Symbolic Order). As this antagonism is
part of the Real, it is not subject to ideological mystification; rather its
effect is visible in ideological mystification. Here, ideology takes the
form of the spectral supplement to reality, concealing the gap opened
up by the failure of reality (the Symbolic) to account fully for the Real.
While this model of the structure of reality does not allow us a position
from which to assume an objective viewpoint, it does presuppose the
existence of ideology and thus authorizes the validity of its critique. The
distinction between reality and ideology exists as a theoretical given.
Zizek does not claim that he can offer any access to the "objective truth
of things" but that ideology must be assumed to exist if we grant that
reality is structured upon a constitutive antagonism. And if ideology
exists we must ne able to subject it to critique. This is the aim of Zizek's
theory of ideology, namely an attempt to keep the project of ideological
critique alive at all in an era in which we are said to have left ideology
behind.

RACISM AND FANTASY

Fantasy as a Mask of the Inconsistency in the Big Other
One way at looking at the relationshipbetween fantasy and the big
Other is to think of fantasy as concealing the inconssistency of the
Symbolic Order. To understand this we need to know why the big
Other is inconsistent or structured around a gap. The answer to this
question is that when the body enters the field of signification or the big
Other, it is castrated. What Zizek means by this is that the price we pay
for our admission to the univerdal medium of language is the loss of
our full body selves. When we submit to the big Other we sacrifice
direct access to our bodies and, instead, are condenmned to an indirect
relation with it via the medium of language. So, whereas, before we
enter language we are what Zizek terms "pathological" subjects (the
subject he notates by S), after we are immersed in language we are what
he refers to as "barred" subjects (the empty subject he notates with $).
What is barred from the barred subject is precisely the body as the
materialization or incarnation of enjoyment (jouissance). Material
jouissance is strictly at odds with, or heterogenous to, the immaterial
order of the signifier.
For the subject to enter the Symbolic Order, then, the Real of jouissance
or enjoyment has to be evacuated from it. Which is another way to
saying that the advent of the symbol entails "the murder of the thing".
Although not all jouissance is completely evacuated by the process of
signification (some of it persists in what are called the erogenous zones),
most of it is not Symbolized. And this entails that the Symbolic Order
cannot fully account for jouissance - it is what us missing in the big
Other. The big Other is therefore inconsistent or structured around a
lack, the lack of jouissance. It is, we might say, castrated or rendered
icomplete by admitting the subject, in much the same way as the subject
is castrated by its admission.
What fantasy does is conceal this lack or incompletion. So, as we saw
previoulsly when alluding to the formulas of sexuation, "there is not
sexual relationship" in the big Other. What the fantasy of a sexual
scenario thereby conceals is the impossibility of this sexual relationship.
It covers up the lack in the big Other, the missing jouissance. In this
regard, Zizek often avers that fantasy is a way for subjects to organize
their jouissance - it is a way to manage or domesticate the traumatic loss
of the jouissance which cannot be Symbolized.

The Window of Fantasy

For Zizek, racism is produced by a clash of fantasies rather than by a
clash of symbols vying for supremacy. There are several distinguishing
features of fantasy:
1. Fantasies are produced as a defence against the desire of the Other
manifest in "What do you want from me?" - which is what the Other, in
its incosnsistency, really wants from me.
2. Fantasies provide a framework through which we see reality. They
are anamorphic in that they presuppose a point of view, denying us an
objective account of the world.
3. Fantasise are the one unique thing about us. They are what make us
individuals, allowing a subjective view of reality. As such, our fantasies
are extremely sensitive to the intrusion of others.
4. Fantasies are the way in which we organize and domesticate our
jouissance.

Postmodern Racism
Zizek contends that today's racism is just as reflexive as every other part
of postmodern life. It is not the product of ignorance in the way it used
to be. So, whereas racism used to involve a claim that another ethnic
group is inherently inferior to our own, racism is now articulated in
terms of a respect for another's culture. Instead of "My culture is better
than yours", postmodern or reflexive racism will argue that "My culture
is different from yours". As an example of this Zizek asks "was not the
official argument for apartheid in the old South Africa that black culture
should be preserved in its uniqueness, not dissipated in the Western
melting-pot? (The Fragile Absolute, or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth
Fighting For) For him, what is at stake here is the fethishistic disawoval
of cynicism: "I know very well that all ethnic cultures are equal in value,
yet, nevertheless, I will act as if mine is superior". The split here
between the subject of enunciated ("I know very well...") and the subject
of the enunciation ("...nevertheless I act as if I didn't") is even preserved
when racists are asked to explain the reasons for their behavior. A racist
will blame his socio-economic environment, poor childhood, peer group
pressure, and so on, in such a way as to suggest to Zizek that he cannot
help being racist, but is merely a victim of circumstances. Thus
postmodern racists are fully able to rationalize their behavior in a way
that belies the traditional image of racism as the vocation of the
ignorant.

The Ethnic Fantasy

If "ethnic tension" is a conflict of fantasies, what is then the racist
fantasy? For Zizek there are two basic racist fantasies. The first type
centers around the apprehension that the "ethnic other" desires our
jouissance. "They" want to steal our enjoyment from "us" and rob us of
the specificity of our fantasy. The second type proceeds from an
uneasiness that the "ethnic other" has access to some strange jouissance.
"They" do not things like "us". The way :they" enjoy themselves is alien
and unfamiliar. What both these fantasies are predicated upon is that
the "other" enjoys in a different way than "us":

In short, what really gets on our nerves, what really bothers us about
the "other", is the peculiar way he organizes his jouissance (the smell of
his food, his noisy songs and dances, his strange manners, his attitude
to work - in the racist perspective, the "other" is either a workaholic
stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labor. ( Looking Awry: an
Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture)

So ethnic tension is caused by a conflict of fantasies if we regard fantasy

as a way of organizing jouissance. The specificity of "their: fantasy
conflicts with the specificity of "our" fantasy".
For Zizek, the perception of a threat, by "them" as well as by "us",
remains strong. The last two decades have witnessed a marked rise in
racial tension and ethnic nationalism. Following Lacan and Marx, Zizek
ascribes this rise to the process of globalization. This process refers to
the way in which capitalism has spread across the world. displaceing
local companies in favor of multinational ones. The effects of this
process are nor necessarily just commercial, for what is at stake are the
national cultures and politics bodies which underpin, and are
supported by, resident industries. When McDonald's opens up in
Bombay, for example, it is not just another business, but represents a
specifically American approach to food, culture and social organization.
The more capitalism spreads, the more it works to dissolve the efficacy
of national domains, dissipating local traditions and values in favor of
universal ones.
The only way to offset this increased homogeneity and to assert the
worth of the particular against the global is to cling to our specific
ethnic fantasy, the point of view which makes us Indians, British or
Germans. And if we try to avoid being dissolved in the multicultural
mix of globalization by sticking to the way we organize jouissance, we
will court the risk of succumbing to a racist paranoia. Even if we
attempt to institute a form of equality between the ways in which we
aorganize enjoyment, unfortunately, as Zizek points out, "fantasies
cannot coexist peacefully" (Looking Awry

The Ethics of Fantasy

For Zizek is the state that should act as a buffer between the fantasies of
different groups, mitigating the worst effects of thoses fantasies. If civil
society were allowed to rule unrestrained, much of the world would
succumb to racist violence. It is only the forces of the state which keep it
in check.
In the long term, Zizek argues that in order to avoid a clash of fantasies
we have to learn to "traverse the fantasy" (what lacan terms "traversing
the fantôme). It means that we have to acknowledge that fantasy merely
functions to screen the abyss or inconsistency in the Other. In
"traversing" or "going through" the fantasy "all we have to do is
experience how there is nothing 'behind' it, and how fantasy masks
precisely this 'nothing'". (The Sublime Object of Ideology<)
The subject of racism, be it a Jew, a Muslim, a Latino, an African-
American, gay or lesbian, Chinese, is a fantasy figure, someone who
embodies the void of the Other. The underlying argument of all racism
is that "if only they weren't here, ife would be perfect, and society will
be haromious again". However, what this argument misses is the fact
that because the subject of racism is only a fantasy figure, it is only there
to make us think that such a harmonious society is actually possible. In
reality, society is always-already divided. The fantasy racist figure is
just a way of covering up the impossibility of a whole society or an
organic Symbolic Order complete unto itself:

What appears as the hindrance to society's full identity with itself is

actually its positive condition: by transposing onto the Jew the role of
the foreign body which introduces in the social organism disintegration
and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent,
harmonious whole is rendered possible. (Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques
Lacan in Holliwood and Out)

Which is another way of saying that if the Jew qua fantasy figure was
not there, we would have to invent it so as to maintain the illusion that
we could have a perfect society. For all the fantasy figure does is to
embody the existing impossibility of a complete society.

Books:
 

2007 In Defense of Lost Causes

New York: Verso.

How to Read Lacan

New York: W.W. Norton.

On Practice and Contradiction (Revolution!)

with Mao Zedong, New York: Verso.

Virtue and Terror (Revolution)

with Maximilien Robespierre New York: Verso.
 

2006 The Parallax View

Cambridge: MIT Press.

The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology

Eric Santner, Keith Reinhard and SZ. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 

The Universal Exception

New York: Continuum.
Slavoj Zizek's Third Way - intro by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens

Interrogating the Real: Selected Writings

New York: Continuum.
 

2004 Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

New York: Verso.

Conversations with Zizek

Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, London: Polity Press.
 

2003 Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences

New York, London: Routledge.
  2002 Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory
SZ editor. London: Routledge.

Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917

New York: Verso.

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

Cambridge: MIT Press

2001 Repeating Lenin

Zagreb: Arkzin.

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Essays in the (Mis)Use of a Notion

London; New York: Verso.

The Fright of Real Tears, Kieslowski and The Future

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

On Belief
London: Routledge.

Opera's Second Death

with Mladen Dolar, London: Routledge.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

New York: The Wooster Press.
 

2000 The Fragile Absolute, Or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For
London; New York: Verso.
The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, On David Lynch's Lost Highway
Walter Chapin Center for the Humanities: University of Washington.

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and SZ. London; New York: Verso.

Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out

second expanded edition, New York: Routledge.
 

1999 NATO As The Left Hand Of God

Zagreb: Arkzin.

The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre Of Political Ontology

London; New York: Verso.
  1998 Cogito and The Unconscious
SZ editor. Durham: Duke University Press.

The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!

Zagreb: Arkzin.
  1997 The Abyss Of Freedom - Ages Of The World
with F.W.J. von Schelling, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

The Plague Of Fantasies (Wo Es War)

London; New York: Verso.

1996 Gaze And Voice As Love Objects

Renata Salecl and SZ editors. Durham: Duke University Press.

The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay On Schelling And Related Matters

London; New York: Verso.
 

1994 The Metastases Of Enjoyment: Six Essays On Woman And Causality (Wo Es War)
London; New York: Verso.

Mapping Ideology
SZ editor. London; New York: Verso.
 

1993 Tarrying With The Negative: Kant, Hegel And The Critique Of Ideology
Durham: Duke University Press.
  1992 Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood And Out
London; New York: Routledge.

Everything You Always Wanted Yo Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock)
SZ editor. London; New York: Verso..
 

1991 Looking Awry: an Intoroduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As A Political Factor
London; New York: Verso.
 

1989 The Sublime Object of Ideology

London; New York: Verso.
 
Articles:
  2007

Notes on Ideology
Lacan dot com.

From objet a to Subtraction

lacanian ink 30, Fall, pp. 130-141.

On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes

Lacan dot com.

Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses

Lacan dot com.

The Liberal Utopia: Against the Politics of Jouissance

Lacan dot com.

The Liberal Utopia: The Market Mechanism for the Race of Devils
Lacan dot com.

Philosophy: Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and... Badiou!

Lacan dot com.

Madness and Habit in German Idealism

Lacan dot com.

Only a Suffering God Can Save Us

Lacan dot com.

Radical Evil as a Freudian Category

Lacan dot com.

Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance

Lacan dot com.

Cogito, Madness and Religion

Lacan dot com.

Zionism and the Jewish Question

Lacan dot com.

Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?

Lacan dot com.
A Pervert's Guide to Family
Lacan dot com.

Do We Still Live in a World?

Lacan dot com.

"Ode to Joy," followed by Chaos and Despair

The New York Times, 12/24.

Tolerance as an Ideological Category

Critical Inquiry, Autumn

Resistance is Surrender
LRB November 15.

From Che vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut

Lacan dot com.

Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien

Lacan dot com.

Ego Ideal and Superego: Lacan as a Viewer of Casablanca

Lacan dot com.

STALINISM
Lacan dot com.

Gorgias, Not Plato Was the Archi-Stalinist

Lacan dot com.

A Letter Which Did Not Reach its Destination (and thereby saved the world)
Lacan dot com.

Shostakovich in Casablanca
Lacan dot com.

The Ideology of Empire and its Traps

Lacan dot com.

A Pervert's Guide to Family

Lacan dot com.

Materialism, or the Inexistence of the Big Other

lacanian ink 29, Spring, pp. 140-159.

Deleuze and the Lacanian Real

Lacan dot com.

Deleuze's Platonism: Ideas as Real

Lacan dot com.
The True Hollywood Left
Lacan dot com.

Blows Against the Empire

Lacan dot com.

Can One Really Tolerate a Neighbor?

Video - Tilton Gallery.

The Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason

Video - Tilton Gallery.

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema - 1, 2, 3

directed by Sophie Fiennes, presented by Slavoj Zizek.

Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule

Lacan dot com.

Robespierre or the "Divine Violence" of Terror

Lacan dot com.

Knight of the Living Dead

The New York Times, 03/24.

Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth

The New York Times, 01/05.
 

2006 A Letter Which Did Arrive at its Destination

lacanian ink 28, Fall, pp. 82-99.

Against the Populist Temptation

Lacan dot com.

Five Years After: the Fire in the Minds of Men

Lacan dot com.

The Cunning of Reason: Lacan as Reader of Hegel

lacanian ink 27, Spring, pp. 130-141.

The Fundamental Perversion: Lacan, Dostoyevsky, Bouyeri

lacanian ink 27, Spring, pp. 114-129.

The Parallax View

lacan.com.

Hegel - Chesterton: German Idealism and Christianity

The Symptom, Issue 7

Badiou: Notes of an Ongoing Debate

International Journal of Zizek Studies, Fall.
Why Pragmatic Politics are Doomed to Fail in the Middle East
In These Times, August 30.

Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses

Lacan dot com.

A Glance into the Archives of Islam

Lacan dot com.

The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason

Lacan dot com.

Love Without Mercy

Video - Deitch Projects, NYC 03/10/2003
Lacan dot com, Winter.

Introduction to Zizek's "Love Without Mercy"

Video - Deitch Projects, NYC 03/10/2003
Lacan dot com, Winter.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Video - Tilton Gallery, NYC 11/14/2001
Lacan dot com 26, Winter.

Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father,

or how Not to misread Lacan's formulas of sexuation
lacanian ink 10, Fall 1995.

Freud Lives!
LRB May 25.

Nobody has to be Vile

LRB April 6.

Smashing the Neighbor's Face

Lacan dot com.

Reloaded Revolutions
Lacan dot com.

Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency

In These Times, January 27.

Biopolitics: Between Terri Schiavo and Guantanamo

Artforum, December 2005.
 

2005 Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters
1. Violence, Irrational and Rational

2. The Terrorist Resentment

3. Escape from New Orleans

4. The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape Revisited

5. C'est mon choix... to Burn Cars

6. Class Struggles in France, Again

Lacan dot com, Fall.

The De-Sublimated Object of Post-Ideology

lacanian ink 26, Fall, pp 118-125.

Anxiety: Kierkegaard with Lacan

lacanian ink 26, Fall, pp 102-117.

Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Lacan dot com, Fall.

The Obscenity of Human Rights: Violence as Symptom

Lacan dot com, Fall.

With or Without Passion - What's Wrong with Fundamentalism? I

Lacan dot com, Fall.

Move the Underground! - What's Wrong with Fundamentalism? II

Lacan dot com, Fall.

The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape

In These Times, October 20.

Against Human Rights

New Left Review 34, pp 115-131.

Lenin Shot at Finland Station

LRB, August 18

Give Iranian Nukes a Chance

In These Times, August 11.

Over the Rainbow Coalition!

Lacan dot com, Spring

Against Enlightened Administration

In These Times, June 19.

The Constitution is Dead

The Guardian, June 4

The Act and its Vicissitudes

The Symptom 6, Spring

Revenge of Global Finance

In These Times, May 21.
The Pope's Failures
In These Times, April 8.

Where to Look for a Revolutionary Potential?

Adbusters, March-April

The Politics of Jouissance

lacanian ink 24/25, Spring, pp 126-135.

Odradek as a Political Category

lacanian ink 24/25, Spring, pp 136-153.

The Two Totalitarianisms

LRB, March 17

The Not-So-Quiet-American
In These Times, February 14.

The Empty Wheelbarrow

The Guardian, February 19
 

2004 Christians, Jews and Other Criminals: A Critique of Jean-Claude Milner

lacan.com.

The Iraqi Borrowed Kettle

lacan.com.

Henning Mankell, the Artist of the Parallax View

lacan.com.

Are We Allowed To Enjoy Daphnée du Maurier?

Centre for Theology and Politics.

Entretien avec SZ, le nouvel philosophe

Le Nouvel Observateur, jeudi 11 novembre.

Hooray for Bush!

LRB, December 2.

The Liberal Waterloo

(Or, finally some good news from Washington)
In These Times, November 5

Will You Laugh for Me, Please

lacan.com.

Will She Ever Die

lacan.com.
On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love:
an interview with Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Journal of Philosophy & Scripture, Spring.

A Cup of Decaf Reality

lacan.com.

Jews, Christians and other Monsters

lacanian ink 23, Spring, pp 82-99.

Death's Merciless Love

lacan.com

On Opera: Walhalla's Frigid Joys

lacan.com

On Opera: La Clemenza di Tito, or the Ridiculously-Obscene Excess of Mercy

lacan.com

On Opera: The Sex of Orpheus

lacan.com

Over the Rainbow

LRB, November 4.

The Politics of Redemption: Richard Wagner

Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Fall.

The Free World... of Slums

In These Times, September 23.

On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love

Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Spring.

Somewhere over the Rainbow

Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, September 17.

A Plea for Ethical Violence

Umbr(a), 2004

Knee-Deep
LRB, September 9.

Passion in the Era of Decaffeinated Belief

The Symptom, 5, Winter

The Parallax View

New Left Review 25, pp 121-134.

Between Two Deaths

LRB, June 3.
What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know that He Knows about Abu Ghraib
In These Times May 21.

What Does Europe Want?

In These Times May 1.

Passion: Regular or Decaf?

In These Times February 27.

What Is To Be Done (with Lenin)?

In These Times January 21.

Iraq's False Promises

Foreign policy January/February.
 

2003 The State of Emergency Called Love

lacanian ink 21, Spring, pp 72-83.

The Iraq War. Love Without Mercy: A Fragment

lacan.com

The Act and its Vicissitudes

in Rosemarie Trockel, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln

Today Iraq, Tomorrow... Democracy

In These Times, March 26.

Paranoids Reflections
LRB, 3 April.

Liberation Hurts
interview with Eric Dean Rasmussen, University of Illinois at Chicago, September 29.

Ideology Reloaded
In These Times, 6 June.

How Much Democracy Is Too Much?

In These Times, 19 May.

Too Much Democracy

Columbia University, April 14.

Learning to Love Leni Riefenstahl

In These Times, 10 September.

The Marx Brother.

How a philosopher from Slovenia became an international star
Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, May 5.

Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket

LRB, May 22.
Homo Sacer as the Object of the University Discourse
lacan.com

Heiner Mueller Out of Joint

lacan.com

The Iraqui MacGuffin

lacan.com

Hitchcock's Organs Without Bodies

lacanian ink 22, Fall, pp 124-139.

Catastrophes Real and Imagined

In These Times, 28 February.

Not a desire to have him, but to be like him

LRB, 21 August.

Parallax
LRB, 20 November.
 

2002 Homo Sacer in Afghanistan

lacanian ink 20, Spring, pp 100-113.

A Plea for Leninist Intolerance

Critical Inquiry, Winter.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

The Symptom 2, Spring.

The Real of Sexual Difference

in Barnard, S. & Fink, B., Reading Seminar XX, New York: SUNY>

Revolution Must Strike Twice

LRB, 25 July.

Seize the Day: Lenin's Legacy

LRB, July 25.

Are We in a War? Do We Have an Enemy?

LRB, May 23.
 

2001 Il n'y a pas de rapport religieux

lacanian ink 18, Spring, pp 80-107.

Can Lenin Tell Us about Freedom Today?

lacan.com

Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the XXI Century?
Rethinking Marxism, vol. 13, no. 3/4.
The Only Good Neighbour is a Dead Neighbour!
lacanian ink 19, Fall, pp 82-103.

The Desert and the Real

lacan.com, September 17.

The Desert and the Real II

In These Times, 29 October.

Self-Deceptions. On Being Tolerant and Smug

Die Gazette, Israel, 27 August.

The One Measure of True Love is "You Can Insult the Other"
Spiked, 17 November.
 

2000 Desert of the Real

lacanian ink 16, Spring, pp 64-81.

No Sex Please! We Are Post-Humans

Lacan.com

Why We All Love to Hate Heider

New Left Review 2, March-April, pp 37-45

From Proto-Reality to the Act

Centre for Theology and Politics

Postface: Georg Lukacs as the philosopher of Leninism

in Lukacs G., A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, London: Verso.

Lacan between Cultural Studies and Cognitivism

Umbr(a), pp 9-32.

Run, Isolde, Run

lacanian ink 17, Fall, pp 78-99.

Ideological Fraud
The National Interest, Washington, Winter.
 

1999 Femininity Between Goodness And Act

lacanian ink 14, Spring, pp 26-40.

Laugh Yourself to Death: the new wave of Holocaust comedies!

Lunds Universitet, December 15.

The Thing from Inner Space

Mainview, September.

You May
LRB, March 18.
Against The Double Blackmail
lacan.com.

@rkz!n
Slavoj Zizek's: "The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around"

CTheory: Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality

A Conversation with Slavoj Zizek.

NATO, the Left Hand of God

Nettime, June 29.

Surplus-Enjoyment
lacanian ink 15, Fall, pp 98-107.

The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion

Inside the Matrix: International Symposium, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, October 28

Attempt to Escape the Logic of Capitalism

LRB, October 28.

When the Party Commits Suicide

New Left Review 238, Nov.-Dec., pp 26-47

Human Rights and its Discontents

Olin Auditorium, Bard College, November 16.
 

1998 The Lesbian Session

lacanian ink 12, Spring, pp 58-69.

For a Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy

Journal of Political Ideologies, February

The Interpassive Subject

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Traverses
French version

Risk society and its discontents

Historical Materialism 2, pp 143-64.

A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism

Critical Inquiry, Summer

Psychoanalysis and Post-Marxism: the case of Alain Badiou

The South Atlantic Quaterly, Spring

From "Passionate Attachments" to Dis-identification

Umbr(a), 1998.

Kant And Sade: The Ideal Couple

lacanian ink 13, Fall, pp 12-25.
Hysteria And Cyberspace
Interview with Slavoj Zizek.
 

1997 The Supposed Subject Of Ideology

Critical Quarterly, Summer, pp 39-59.

From Joyce-the-Symptom to the Symptom of Power

lacanian ink 11, Fall, pp 12-25.

The Big Other Doesn't Exist

Journal of European psychoanalysis, Spring-Fall.

Multiculturalism, or The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism

New Left Review 225, Sept.-Oct., pp 28-51.

Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge

Umbr(a), pp 147-152.
 

1996 Re-visioning "Lacanian" social criticism: The Law & its obscene double
Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 1.

Love beyond Law

Centre for Theology and Politics.

There Is No Sexual Relationship, Wagner As A Lacanian

New German Critique, Fall, pp 7-35.
 

1995 "Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father"

lacanian ink 10, Fall, pp 24-39.

Reflections of Media, Politics and Cinema

interview by Geert Lovink, Inter Communication no. 14

The Audiovisual Contract - Noise Surrounding Reality

Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie, pp 521-533.
 

1994 It Doesn't Hve to Be a Jew

interview by Josefina Ayerza, Lusitania vol.II no.4

Kant As A Theoretician Of Vampirism

lacanian ink 8, Spring, pp 19-34.
 

1993 The Sublime Theorist Of Slovenia

P. Canning in Artforum, March, pp 84-89.
The Inner Civilization Of Human Rights (Slovenia) And The Other Barbarism (The Rest Of The
Balkans)
Du-Die Zeitschrift der Kultur, pp 26-28.

Hegels Logic As A Theory Of Ideology

lacanian ink 7, Spring, pp 29-48.

From Courtly Love to The Crying Game

New Left Review 202, Nov.-Dec., pp 95-108.

Es Gibt Keinen Staat In Europa

Ljubljana, 1993.
 

1992 Hidden Prohibitions And The Pleasure Principle

Josefina Ayerza in Flash Art, March-April, pp 68-70.

Eastern European Liberalism And Its Borderlines

Oxford Literary Review, pp 25-44.

The Ideological-Practical Core Of The Fundamental Operation In Hegel's Logic Of Reflection

Filosofski Vestnik-Acta Philosophica, pp 9-25.

Cogito And The Sexual Difference

American Journal of Semiotics, pp 5-32.

Ethnic Dance Macabre

The Guardian, Manchester, August 28

In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large

lacanian ink 6, Fall, pp 25-42.

Kant - The Subject Out Of Joint

Filozofski Vestnik-Acta Philosophica, pp 233-248.
 

1991 Why Does A Letter Always Arrive At Its Destination?

lacanian ink 2, Winter, pp 9-28.

Formal Democracy And Its Discontents

American Imago, pp 181-198.

Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears

October 58, Fall, pp 44-68.
 

1990 Eastern Europe Republics Of Gilead

New Left Review 183, Sept - Oct, pp 50-62.

Rossellini: Woman As Symptom Of Man

October, Fall, pp 18-44.
Death And Sublimation: The Final Scene Of City Lights
American Journal of Semiotics, pp 63-72.

The Logic Of The Detective-Novel

Pamietnik Literacki, pp 253-283.

The Detective And The Analyst - The Shift From Detective-Story To Detective-Novel In The 1920s
Literature and Psychology, pp 27-46.
 

1989 Looking Awry - Pornography

October, Fall, pp 31-55.

 
Books and articles on SZ:

  2007 Everything You Wanted to Know about Zizek but Were Afraid to Ask Alfred Hitchcock
Laurenc Simmons, London: Routledge.
  2006 Play Fuckin' Loud: Zizek versus the Left
Rex Butler and Scott Stephens
The Symptom 7, Spring - Lacan dot com.
  2005 Slavoj Zizek's Third Way
Rex Butler and Scott Stephens
Introduction to The Universal Exception
New York: Continuum.
  2004 Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory
Rex Butler for lacan.com

Slavoj Zizek: What is a Master-Signifier

Rex Butler for lacan.com

Slavoj Zizek: A Primer

Glyn Daly for lacan.com

Slavoj Zizek: Risking the Impossible

Glyn Daly for lacan.com

Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real

Matthew Sharpe, Hants: Ashgate

Slavoj Zizek: An Introduction

excerpts from Ian Parker, The Symptom 5, Winter.

Zizek: Ideology, the Real and the Subject

Glyn Daly, London: Sage.

Slavoj Zizek: A Critical Introduction

Ian Parker, London: Pluto Press.

Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory

Rex Butler, London: Continuum.
 
2003 Zizek: A Critical Introduction
Sarah Kay, London: Polity.

Slavoj Zizek
Tony Myers, London: Routledge (Routledge Critical Thinkers).
 

2002 I am a fighting atheist: interview with Slavoj Zizek

Doug Henwood, Bad Subjects, 59.
  2001 Enjoy your Zizek: An excitable Slovenian philosopher
examines the obscene practices of everyday life, including his own
Linguafranca: The Review of Academic Life 7.

Never Mind the Bollocks

G. Mannes Abbott, The Independent, May 3.

The Last Analysis of Slavoj Zizek

Edward O'Neill, Film-Philosophy, 5, June

Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with SZ

Christopher Hanlon, New Literary History, 32
 

2000 An Interview with Slavoj Zizek

M. Beaumont & M. Jenkins, Historical materialism, 7, pp 181-97.
  1999 The Zizek Reader (Blackwell Readers)
Elizabeth Wright and Edmund Wright (eds.), New York: Blackwell Publishers.
  1998 Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation
Denise Gigante, New literary History,/i>, 29
  1991 Lacan in Slovenia: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek & Renata Salecl
P. Dews & P. Osborne, Radical Philosophy 58, pp 25-31.

 Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European
Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan
and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in
1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has lectured at universities
around the world. He was analysed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan's son in law,
and is probably the most successful and prolific post-Lacanian having published over
fifty books including translations into a dozen languages. He is a leftist and, aside from
Lacan he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel and Schelling. In temperament, he
resembles a revolutionist more than a theoretician. He was politically active in Slovenia
during the 80s, a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990; most
of his works are moral and political rather than purely theoretical. He has considerable
energy and charisma and is a spellbinding lecturer in the tradition of Lacan and Kojeve.

Zizek has cast a very long shadow in what can only be termed "cultural studies" (though
he would despise the characterization). He is an effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief,
and, as a follower of the French "liberator" of Freud, Zizek's Lacan is almost exclusively
transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables. That he has an
encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop
cultural currents — and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the
stockpot of his imagination — is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and
confounded his critics for over ten years.

Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates of the liberal hegemony that
permit excess and aberration insofar as it does not threaten the true coordinates. He
suggests as well that the true coordinates are much better hidden than we realize. The
production of cultural difference is to Zizek the production of the inoperative dream — a
dream that recalls perhaps Orwell's 1984 or even Terry Gilliam's Brazil where a kind of
generic pastoralism or a sexualized nature substitutes for authentic freedom — the flip
side of this is film noir. Zizek has determined that late-modern capitalism has engendered
a whole range of alternative seductions to keep the eye and brain off of the Real. The
Real only exists as a fragment, fast receding on the horizon as fantasy and often phantasm
intercede. These dreams and nightmares are systemic, structural neuroses, and they are
part of the coordinates of the hegemonic. The hegemony — the prevailing set of
coordinates — always seeks to "take over" the Real, and, therefore, this contaminated
Real must be periodically purged.

In his essay "Repeating Lenin" (1997) — ever the trickster, he convened a symposium on
Lenin in Germany in part to see what the reaction would be — Zizek sets up a
deconstruction of the idea of form to effectively liberate the idea of radical form:

"One should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-
multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of 'narratives'
-not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives,
stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to
guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist,
in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to
tell his story. The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibilty of
this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with 'formalism,' with the idea of a
neutral Form. Independent of its contingent particular content; it rather stands for the
traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which 'colors' the entire field in
question.Ö"

He is interested in discerning the Lacanian Real amid the propaganda of systems. In

appropriating "Lenin" he is also looking for the moment when Lenin realized that politics
could one day be dissolved for a technocratic and agronomic utopia, "the [pure]
management of things". That Lenin failed is immaterial, since Zizek is extracting the
signifier "Lenin" from the historical continuum, which includes that failure — or the
onslaught of Stalinism. The version of Lenin that Zizek often chooses to re-enscribe into
radical political discourse is ostensibly (by his own admission) the Lenin of the October
Revolution, or the Lenin that had the epiphany that in order to have a revolution "you
have to have a revolution."

In his critique of contemporary capitalism Zizek finds not simply the conditions that
Marx anathematized but those same conditions reified and made nearly intangible:
"A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous history, perceived as
a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very
principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of
a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions, that is
to say, in which the thing can only survive as its own excess, constantly exceeding its
own 'normal' constraints […] Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the
opposition between use- and exchange-value: in capitalism, the potentials of this
opposition are fully realized, the domain of exchange-values acquires autonomy, is
transformed into the specter of self-propelling speculative capital which needs the
productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its dispensable temporal
embodiment."

In the era of globalization, then, the main question is: "Does today's virtual capitalist not
function in a homologous way — his 'net value' is zero, he directly operates just with the
surplus, borrowing from the future?"

"In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully
realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence
-it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the
present and the future, we are — as if by Grace — for a brief time allowed to act AS IF
the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed.
Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness
and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future
happiness and freedom already cast their shadow — in it, we already are free while
fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how
difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontian wager, an act suspended
in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the
present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own
truth."

Zizek's agenda is to foster and engender a withering critique of the structural chains that
enslave late-modern man. His nostalgia is for very large gestures: the meta-Real, the
Universal, and the Formal. "This resistance is the answer to the question 'Why Lenin?': it
is the signifier 'Lenin' which formalizes this content found elsewhere, transforming a
series of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation."

Zizek was a visiting professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis, Universite Paris-VIII

in 1982-3 and 1985-6, at the Centre for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Art, SUNY
Buffalo, 1991-2, at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, 1992, at the Tulane University, New Orleans, 1993, at the Cardozo Law
School, New York, 1994, at the Columbia University, New York, 1995, at the Princeton
University (1996), at the New School for Social Research, New York, 1997, at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998, and at the Georgetown University,
Washington, 1999. He is a returning faculty member of the European Graduate School. In
the last 20 years Zizek has participated in over 350 international philosophical,
psychoanalytical and cultural-criticism symposiums in USA, France, United Kingdom,
Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Netherland, Island, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Norway,
Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Brasil, Mexico, Israel, Romania, Hungary and Japan.
He is the founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.