Imagination
What better description could one offer of the power of imagination in its
negative, disruptive, decomposing aspect, as the power that disperses
continuous reality into a confused multitude of ‘partial objects’, spectral
apparitions of what in reality is effective only as part of a larger
organism? Ultimately, imagination stands for the capacity of our mind to
dismember what immediate perception puts together, to ‘abstract’ not a
common notion but a certain feature from other features. To ‘imagine’ means
to imagine a partial object without its body, a colour without shape, a shape
without a body: ‘here a bloody head – there another white ghastly apparition
’. This ‘night of the world’ is thus transcendental imagination at its
most elementary and violent – the unrestrained reign of the violence of
imagination, of its ‘empty freedom’ which dissolves every objective link,
every connection grounded in the thing itself: ‘ For itself is here the
arbitrary freedom – to tear up the images and to reconnect them without any
constraint.
Imagination VS. Understanding/Real impossible as pure imagination
How, then, does the opposition between imagination and understanding relate
to that between synthesis and analysis (in the sense of disrupting,
decomposing, the primordial immediate unity of intuition)? This relation can
be conceived as working both ways: one can determine imagination as the
spontaneous synthesis of the sensuous manifold into a perception of unified
objects and processes, which are then torn apart, decomposed, analysed by
discursive understanding; or one can determine imagination as the primordial
power of decomposition, of tearing-apart, while the role of understanding is
then to bring together these membra disjecta into a new rational Whole. In
both cases, the continuity between imagination and understanding is
disrupted: there is an inherent antagonism between the two – it is either
Understanding that heals the wound inflicted by imagination, synthesizing its
membra disjecta, or Understanding mortifies, tears the spontaneous synthetic
unity of imagination into bits and pieces.
At this point, a naive question is quite appropriate: which of the two axes,
of the two relations, is more fundamental? The underlying structure here, of
course, is that of a vicious cycle or mutual implication: ‘the wound can be
healed only by the spear that inflicted it’ – that is to say, the multitude
that the synthesis of imagination endeavours to bring together is already the
result of imagination itself, of its disruptive power. This mutual
implication none the less gives precedence to the ‘negative’, disruptive
aspect of imagination – not only for the obvious commonsense reason that
elements must first be dismembered in order to open up the space for the
endeavour to bring them together again, but for a more radical reason:
because of the subject’s irreducible finitude, the very endeavour of ‘
synthesis’ is always minimally ‘violent’ and disruptive. That is to say,
the unity the subject endeavours to impose on the sensuous multitude via its
synthetic activity is always erratic, eccentric, unbalanced, ‘unsound’,
something that is externally and violently imposed on to the multitude, never
a simple impassive act of discerning the inherent subterranean connections
between the membra disjecta. In this precise sense, every synthetic unity is
based on an act of ‘repression’, and therefore generates some indivisible
remainder: it imposes as unifying feature some ‘unilateral’ moment that ‘
breaches the symmetry’. This is what, in the domain of cinematic art,
Eisenstein’s concept of ‘intellectual montage’ seems to aim at:
intellectual activity brings together bits and pieces torn by the power of
imagination from their proper context, violently recomposing them into a new
unity that gives birth to an unexpected new meaning.
Kant’s break with the previous rationalist/empiricist problematic can thus
be located precisely: in contrast to this problematic, he no longer accepts
some pre-synthetic zero-ground elements worked upon by our mind – there is
no neutral elementary stuff (like elementary sensory ‘ideas’ in Locke)
which is then composed by our mind – that is, the synthetic activity of our
mind is always-already at work, even in our most elementary contact with ‘
reality’. The pre-synthetic Real, its pure, not-yet-fashioned ‘multitude’
not yet synthesized by a minimum of transcendental imagination, is, stricto
sensu, impossible: a level that must be retroactively presupposed, but can
never actually be encountered. Our (Hegelian) point, however, is that this
mythical/impossible starting point, the presupposition of imagination, is
already the product, the result, of the imagination’s disruptive activity.
In short, the mythic, inaccessible zero-level of pure multitude not yet
affected/fashioned by imagination is nothing but pure imagination itself,
imagination at its most violent, as the activity of disrupting the continuity
of the inertia of the pre-symbolic ‘natural’ Real. This pre-synthetic ‘
multitude’ is what Hegel describes as the ‘night of the world’, as the ‘
unruliness’ of the subject’s abyssal freedom which violently explodes
reality into a dispersed floating of membra disjecta. It is thus crucial to ‘
close the circle’: we never exit the circle of imagination, since the very
zero-level mythic presupposition of synthetic imagination, the ‘stuff ’ on
which it works, is imagination itself at its purest and most violent,
imagination in its negative, disruptive aspect.
Preponderance of the Objective as the subject’s failed desire
What if what eludes our grasp, what is ‘in the object more than the object
itself ’, are the traces of what, in past history, this ‘object’ (say, a
historical situation the subject endeavours to analyse) might have become,
but failed to do so? To grasp a historical situation ‘in its becoming’ (as
Kierkegaard would have put it) is not to perceive it as a positive set of
features (‘the way things actually are’), but to discern in it the traces
of failed ‘emancipatory’ attempts at liberation. (Here I am, of course,
alluding to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the revolutionary gaze which
perceives the actual revolutionary act as the redemptive repetition of past
failed emancipatory attempts.) In this case, however, the ‘preponderance of
the objective’, that which eludes our grasp in the Thing, is no longer the
excess of its positive content over our cognitive capacities but, on the
contrary, its lack, that is, the traces of failures, the absences inscribed
in its positive existence: to grasp the October Revolution ‘in its becoming
’ means to discern the tremendous emancipatory potential that was
simultaneously aroused and crushed by its historical actuality. Consequently,
this excess/lack is not the part of the ‘objective’ that is in excess of
the subject’s cognitive capacities: rather it consists of the traces of the
subject himself (his crushed hopes and desires) in the object, so that what
is properly ‘unfathomable’ in the object is the objective
counterpart/correlative of the innermost kernel of the subject’s own desire.
Universal as the power of negativity
In order not to misread the properly Hegelian flavour of the opposition
between abstract and concrete universality, one should ‘crossbreed’ it with
another opposition, that between positive Universality as a mere
impassive/neutral medium of the coexistence of its particular content (the ‘
mute universality’ of a species defined by what all members of the species
have in common), and Universality in its actual existence, which is
individuality, the assertion of the subject as unique and irreducible to the
particular concrete totality into which he is inserted. In Kierkegaardese,
this difference is the one between the positive Being of the Universal and
universality-in-becoming: the obverse of the Universal as the pacifying
neutral medium/container of its particular content is the Universal as the
power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular
constellation, and this power comes into existence in the guise of the
individual’s absolute egotist self-contraction, his negation of all
determinate content. The dimension of Universality becomes actual (or, in
Hegelese, ‘for itself ’) only by ‘entering into existence’ as universal,
that is, by opposing itself to all its particular content, by entering into a
‘negative relationship’ with its particular content.
Stubborn Attachment
The notion that best illustrates the necessity of a ‘false’ (‘unilateral
’, ‘abstract’) choice in the course of a dialectical process is that of ‘
stubborn attachment’; this thoroughly ambiguous notion is operative
throughout Hegel’s Phenomenology. On the one hand, it stands for the
pathological attachment to some particular content (interest, object,
pleasure … ) scorned by the moralistic judging conscience. Hegel is far from
simply condemning such an attachment: he emphasizes again and again that such
an attachment is the ontological a priori of an act – the hero’s (active
subject’s) act by means of which he disturbs the balance of the socioethical
totality of mores is always and necessarily experienced by his community as a
crime. On the other hand, a far more perilous ‘stubborn attachment’ is that
of the inactive judging subject who remains pathologically attached to his
abstract moral standards and, on behalf of them, condemns every act as
criminal: such a stubborn clinging to abstract moral standards, which could
legitimize us to pass judgement on every active subjectivity, is the ultimate
form of Evil.
As for the tension between ethnic particularity and universalism, ‘stubborn
attachment’ describes simultaneously the subject’s clinging to his
particular ethnic identity, which he is not ready to abandon under any
circumstances, and a direct reference to abstract universality as that which
remains the same, the unchangeable stable framework in the universal change
of all particular content.The properly dialectical paradox, of course, is
that if the subject is to extract himself from the substantial content of his
particular ethnic totality, he can do so only by clinging to some radically
contingent idiosyncratic content. For that reason, ‘stubborn attachment’ is
simultaneously the resistance to change–mediation–universalization and the
very operator of this change: when, irrespective of circumstances, I
stubbornly attach myself to some accidental particular feature to which I am
bound by no inner necessity, this ‘pathological’ attachment enables me to
disengage myself from immersion in my particular life-context. That is what
Hegel calls the ‘infinite right of subjectivity’: to risk everything, my
entire substantial content, for the sake of some trifling, idiosyncratic
feature that matters more to me than anything else. The paradox, therefore,
lies in the fact that I can arrive at the Universal-for-itself only through a
stubborn attachment to some contingent particular content, which functions as
a ‘negative magnitude’, as something wholly indifferent in itself whose
meaning resides entirely in the fact that it gives body to the subject’s
arbitrary will (‘I want this because I want it!’, and the more trifling
this content, the more my will is asserted … ). This idiosyncratic feature,
of course, is in itself contingent and unimportant: a metonymy of void, of
nothingness – willing this X is a way of ‘willing Nothingness’.
Death Drive, Sublimation
So we are back at the problematic of ‘stubborn attachment’, since it is
absolutely crucial to bear in mind the co-dependence between detachability
from any determinate content and excessive attachment: to a particular object
that makes us indifferent to all other objects – such an object is what
Lacan, following Kant, calls ‘negative magnitude’, that is, an object
which, in its very positive presence, acts as a stand-in for the void of
Nothingness (or for the abyss of the impossible Thing), so that wanting this
particular object, maintaining one’s ‘stubborn attachment’ to it come what
may, is the very concrete form of ‘wanting Nothingness’. Excess and lack of
attachment thus stricto sensu coincide, since excessive attachment to a
particular contingent object is the very operator of lethal dis-attachment:
to take a rather pathetic example, Tristan’s unconditional, excessive
attachment to Isolde (and vice versa) was the very form of his
dis-attachment, of the severing of all his links with the world and his
immersion into Nothingness. (A beautiful woman as the image of death is a
standard feature of male phantasmic space.)
One can see how this paradox perfectly fits Lacan’s notion of sublimation as
the elevation of some particular positive object to ‘the dignity of the Thing
’: the subject becomes excessively attached to an object insofar as this
object starts to function as a stand-in for Nothingness. Here, Nietzsche on
the one hand, and Freud and Lacan on the other, part company: what Nietzsche
denounces as the ‘nihilistic’ gesture to counteract life-asserting
instincts, Freud and Lacan conceive as the very basic structure of human
drive as opposed to natural instincts. In other words, what Nietzsche cannot
accept is the radical dimension of the death drive – the fact that the
excess of the Will over a mere self-contended satisfaction is always mediated
by the ‘nihilistic’ stubborn attachment to Nothingness. The death drive is
not merely a direct nihilistic opposition to any life-asserting attachment;
rather, it is the very formal structure of the reference to Nothingness that
enables us to overcome the stupid self-contended life-rhythm, in order to
become ‘passionately attached’ to some Cause – be it love, art, knowledge
or politics – for which we are ready to risk everything. In this precise
sense, it is meaningless to talk about the sublimation of drives, since drive
as such involves the structure of sublimation: we pass from instinct to drive
when, instead of aiming directly at the goal that would satisfy us,
satisfaction is brought about by circulating around the void, by repeatedly
missing the object which is the stand-in for the central void. So, when a
subject desires a series of positive objects, the thing to do is to
distinguish between objects which are actually desired as particular objects,
and the object which is desired as the stand-in for Nothingness: which
functions as a ‘negative magnitude’ in the Kantian sense of the term.
Subject as empty signifier
Again, we can easily see the homology with Nietzsche: a Will can be a ‘Will
to Will’, a willing which wants willing itself, only insofar as it is a Will
which actively wills Nothingness. (Another well-known form of this reversal
is the characterization of Romantic lovers as actually being in love not with
the beloved person, but with Love itself.)
Crucial here is the self-reflexive turn by means of which the (symbolic) form
itself is counted among its elements: to Will the Will itself is to Will
nothing, just as to steal the wheelbarrow itself (the very form-container of
stolen goods) is to steal Nothingness itself (the void which potentially
contains stolen goods). This ‘nothing’ ultimately stands for the subject
itself – that is, it is the empty signifier without signified, which
represents the subject. Thus the subject is not directly included in the
symbolic order: it is included as the very point at which signification
breaks down. Sam Goldwyn’s famous retort when he was confronted with an
unacceptable business proposition, ‘Include me out!’, perfectly expresses
this intermediate status of the subject’s relationship to the symbolic
order, between direct inclusion and direct exclusion: the signifier which ‘
represents the subject for other signifiers’ is the empty signifier, the ‘
signifier without signified’, the signifier by means of (in the guise of)
which ‘nothing (the subject) is counted as something’ – in this signifier,
the subject is not simply included into the signifier’s network; rather, his
very exclusion from it (signalled by the fact that there is no signified to
this signifier) is ‘included’ in it, marked, registered by it.
Religion as Modern
This double nature of the foundational act is clearly discernible in
religion: Christ calls on his followers to obey and respect their superiors
in accordance with established customs and to hate and disobey them, that is,
to cut all human links with them: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate
his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters –
yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14: 26). Do we not
encounter here Christ’s own ‘religious suspension of the ethical’? The
universe of established ethical norms (mores, the substance of social life)
is reasserted, but only insofar as it is ‘mediated’ by Christ’s authority:
first, we have to accomplish the gesture of radical negativity and reject
everything that is most precious to us; later, we get it back, but as an
expression of Christ’s will, mediated by it (the way a Sovereign relates to
positive laws involves the same paradox: a Sovereign compels us to respect
laws precisely insofar as he is the point of the suspension of laws). When
Christ claims that he did not come to undermine the Old Law, but merely to
fulfil it, one has to read into this ‘fulfilment’ the full ambiguity of the
Derridean supplement: the very act of fulfilling the Law undermines its
direct authority. In this precise sense, ‘Love Is the Fulfilment of the Law
’ (Romans 13: 10): love accomplishes what the Law (Commandments) aims at,
but this very accomplishment simultaneously involves the suspension of the
Law. The notion of belief which fits this paradox of authority was elaborated
by Kierkegaard; this is why, for him, religion is eminently modern: the
traditional universe is ethical, while the Religious involves a radical
disruption of the Old Ways – true religion is a crazy wager on the
Impossible we have to make once we lose support in tradition.
What is properly modern in Schmitt’s notion of exception is thus the violent
gesture of asserting the independence of the abyssal act of free decision
from its positive content. What is ‘Modern’ is the gap between the act of
decision and its content – the perception that what really matters is the
act as such, independent of its content (or ‘ordering’, independent of the
positive determinate order). The paradox (which grounds so-called ‘
conservative modernism’) is thus that the innermost possibility of modernism
is asserted in the guise of its apparent opposite, of the return to an
unconditional authority that cannot be grounded in positive reasons.
Consequently, the properly modern God is the God of predestination, a kind of
Schmittian politician who draws the line of separation between Us and Them,
Friends and Enemies, the Delivered and the Damned, by means of a purely
formal, abyssal act of decision, without any grounds in the actual properties
and acts of concerned humans (since they were not yet even born). In
traditional Catholicism, salvation depends on earthly good deeds; in the
logic of Protestant predestination, earthly deeds and fortunes (wealth) are
at best an ambiguous sign of the fact that the subject is already redeemed
through the inscrutable divine act – that is, he is not saved because he is
rich or did good deeds, he accomplishes good deeds or is rich because he is
saved … Crucial here is the shift from act to sign: from the perspective of
predestination, a deed becomes a sign of the predestined divine decision.
Badiou’s Truth Event
The axis of Badiou’s theoretical edifice is – as the title of his main
work indicates – the gap between Being and Event. ‘Being’ stands for the
positive ontological order accessible to Knowledge, for the infinite
multitude of what ‘presents itself ’ in our experience, categorized in
genuses and species in accordance with its properties. According to Badiou,
the only proper science of Being-as-Being is mathematics – his first
paradoxical conclusion is thus to insist on the gap that separates philosophy
from ontology: ontology is mathematical science, not philosophy, which
involves a different dimension. Badiou provides an elaborated analysis of
Being. At the bottom, as it were, is the presentation of the pure multiple,
the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is
given; this multitude is not a multitude of ‘Ones’, since counting has not
yet taken place. Badiou calls any particular consistent multitude (French
society; modern art … ) a ‘situation’; a situation is structured, and it
is its structure that allows us to ‘count [the situation] as One’. Here,
however, the first cracks in the ontological edifice of Being already appear:
for us to ‘count [the situation] as One’, the ‘reduplication’ proper to
the symbolization (symbolic inscription) of a situation must be at work: that
is, in order for a situation to be ‘counted as One’, its structure must
always-already be a meta-structure that designates it as one (i.e. the
signified structure of the situation must be redoubled in the symbolic
network of signifiers). When a situation is thus ‘counted as One’,
identified by its symbolic structure, we have the ‘state of the situation’.
Here Badiou is playing on the ambiguity of the term state: ‘state of things
’ as well as State (in the political sense) – there is no ‘state of society
’ without a ‘state’ in which the structure of society is
re-presented/redoubled.
This symbolic reduplicatio already involves the minimal dialectic of Void and
Excess. The pure multiple of Being is not yet a multitude of Ones, since, as
we have just seen, to have One, the pure multiple must be ‘counted as One’;
from the standpoint of the state of a situation, the preceding multiple can
only appear as nothing, so nothing is the ‘proper name of Being as Being’
prior to its symbolization. The Void is the central category of ontology from
Democritus’ atomism onwards: ‘atoms’ are nothing but configurations of the
Void. The excess correlative to this Void takes two forms. On the one hand,
each state of things involves at least one excessive element which, although
it clearly belongs to the situation, is not ‘counted’ by it, properly
included in it (the ‘non-integrated’ rabble in a social situation, etc.):
this element is presented, but not re-presented. On the other hand, there is
the excess of re-presentation over presentation: the agency that brings about
the passage from situation to its state (State in society) is always in
excess with regard to what it structures: State power is necessarily ‘
excessive’, it never simply and transparently represents society (the
impossible liberal dream of a state reduced to the service of civil society),
but acts as a violent intervention in what it represents.
This, then, is the structure of Being. From time to time, however, in a
wholly contingent, unpredictable way, out of reach for Knowledge of Being, an
Event takes place that belongs to a wholly different dimension – that,
precisely, of non-Being. Let us take French society in the late eighteenth
century: the state of society, its strata, economic, political, ideological
conflicts, and so on, are accessible to knowledge. However, no amount of
Knowledge will enable us to predict or account for the properly unaccountable
Event called the ‘French Revolution’. In this precise sense, the Event
emerges ex nihilo: if it cannot be accounted for in terms of the situation,
this does not mean that it is simply an intervention from Outside or Beyond
– it attaches itself precisely to the Void of every situation, to its
inherent inconsistency and/or its excess. The Event is the Truth of the
situation that makes visible/legible what the ‘official’ situation had to ‘
repress’, but it is also always localized – that is to say, the Truth is
always the Truth of a specific situation.
(As Badiou perspicaciously notes, these four domains of the Truth-Event are
today, in public discourse, more and more replaced by their fake doubles: we
speak of ‘culture’ instead of art, of ‘administration’ instead of
politics, of ‘sex’ instead of love, of ‘know-how’ or ‘wisdom’ instead
of science: art is reduced to an expression/articulation of historically
specific culture, love to an ideological dated form of sexuality; science is
dismissed as a Western, falsely universalized form of practical knowledge on
an equal footing with forms of pre-scientific wisdom; politics (with all the
passion or struggle that this notion involves) is reduced to an immature
ideological version or forerunner of the art of social gestion …)
Subject-language
Badiou calls the language that endeavours to name the Truth-Event the ‘
subject-language’. This language is meaningless from the standpoint of
Knowledge, which judges propositions with regard to their referent within the
domain of positive being (or with regard to the proper functioning of speech
within the established symbolic order): when the subject-language speaks of
Christian redemption, revolutionary emancipation, love, and so on, Knowledge
dismisses all this as empty phrases lacking any proper referent (‘
political-messianic jargon’, ‘poetic hermeticism’, etc.). Let us imagine a
person in love describing the features of his beloved to his friend: the
friend, who is not in love with the same person, will simply find this
enthusiastic description meaningless; he will not get ‘the point’ of it …
In short, subject-language involves the logic of the shibboleth, of a
difference which is visible only from within, not from without. This,
however, in no way means that the subject-language involves another, ‘deeper
’ reference to a hidden true content: it is, rather, that the
subject-language, ‘derails’ or ‘unsettles’ the standard use of language
with its established meanings, and leaves the reference ‘empty’ – with the
‘wager’ that this void will be filled when the Goal is reached, when Truth
actualizes itself as a new situation (God’s kingdom on earth; the
emancipated society … ). The naming of the Truth-Event is ‘empty’
precisely insofar as it refers to the fullness yet to come.
The undecidability of the Event thus means that an Event does not possess any
ontological guarantee: it cannot be reduced to (or deduced, generated from) a
(previous) Situation: it emerges ‘out of nothing’ (the Nothing which was
the ontological truth of this previous situation). Thus there is no neutral
gaze of knowledge that could discern the Event in its effects: a Decision is
always-already here – that is, one can discern the signs of an Event in the
Situation only from a previous Decision for Truth, just as in Jansenist
theology, in which divine miracles are legible as such only to those who have
already decided for Faith. A neutral historicist gaze will never see in the
French Revolution a series of traces of the Event called the ‘French
Revolution’, merely a multitude of occurrences caught in the network of
social determinations; to an external gaze, Love is merely a succession of
psychic and physiological states … (Perhaps this was the negative
achievement that brought such fame to François Furet: did not his main
impact derive from his de-eventualization of the French Revolution, in
adopting an external perspective towards it and turning it into a succession
of complex specific historical facts?) The engaged observer perceives
positive historical occurrences as parts of the Event of the French
Revolution only to the extent that he observes them from the unique engaged
standpoint of Revolution – as Badiou puts it, an Event is self-referential
in that it includes its own designation: the symbolic designation ‘French
Revolution’ is part of the designated content itself, since, if we subtract
this designation, the described content turns into a multitude of positive
occurrences available to knowledge. In this precise sense, an Event involves
subjectivity: the engaged ‘subjective perspective’ on the Event is part of
the Event itself.
Event and its Naming
Badiou none the less provides a precise criterion for this distinction in
the way an Event relates to its conditions, to the ‘situation’ out of which
it arose: a true Event emerges out of the ‘void’ of the situation; it is
attached to its élément surnuméraire: to the symptomatic element that has
no proper place in the situation, although it belongs to it, while the
simulacrum of an Event disavows the symptom. For this reason, the Leninist
October Revolution remains an Event, since it relates to the ‘class struggle
’ as the symptomatic torsion of its situation, while the Nazi movement is a
simulacrum, a disavowal of the trauma of class struggle … The difference
lies not in the inherent qualities of the Event itself, but in its place –
in the way it relates to the situation out of which it emerged. As for the
external gaze that bears witness to the Truth of the Event, this gaze is able
to discern that Truth only insofar as it is the gaze of the individuals who
are already engaged on its behalf: there is no neutral enlightened public
opinion to be impressed by the Event, since Truth is discernible only for the
potential members of the new Community of ‘believers’, for their engaged
gaze.
In this way, we can paradoxically retain both distance and engagement: in the
case of Christianity, the Event (Crucifixion) becomes a Truth-Event ‘after
the fact’, that is, when it leads to the constitution of the group of
believers, of the engaged Community held together by fidelity to the Event.
There is thus a difference between an Event and its naming: an Event is the
traumatic encounter with the Real (Christ’s death; the historic shock of
revolution; etc.), while its naming is the inscription of the Event into the
language (Christian doctrine, revolutionary consciousness). In Lacanese, an
Event is objet petit a, while naming is the new signifier that establishes
what Rimbaud calls the New Order, the new readability of the situation based
on Decision (in the Marxist revolutionary perspective, the entire prior
history becomes a history of class struggle, of defeated emancipatory
striving).
Subjective Stances toward Truth-Event
When, in his unpublished course of 1997/98, Badiou elaborated the four
possible subjective stances towards the Truth-Event, he added as the fourth
term to the triad of Master/Hysteric/University the position of the Mystic.
The Master pretends to name, and thus directly translate into symbolic
fidelity, the dimension of the act – that is, the defining feature of the
Master’s gesture is to change the act into a new Master-Signifier, to
guarantee the continuity and consequences of the Event. In contrast to the
Master, the Hysteric maintains the ambiguous attitude of division towards the
act, insisting on the simultaneous necessity and impossibility (ultimate
failure) of its symbolization: there was an Event, but each symbolization of
the Event already betrays its true traumatic impact – that is to say, the
Hysteric reacts to each symbolization of the Event with a ‘ ce n’est pas ça
’, that’s not it. In contrast to both of them, the perverse agent of
University discourse disavows that there was the event of an act in the first
place – with his chain of knowledge, he wants to reduce the consequences of
the act to just another thing that can be explained away as part of the
normal run of things; in other words, in contrast to the Master, who wants to
ensure the continuity between the Event and its consequences, and the
Hysteric, who insists on the gap that forever separates an Event from its
(symbolic) consequences, University discourse aims at ‘suturing’ the field
of consequences by explaining them away without any reference to the Event (‘
Love? It’s nothing but the result of a series of occurrences in your
neuronal network!’, etc.).
The fourth attitude Badiou adds is that of the Mystic, which is the exact
obverse of perverse University discourse: if the latter wants to isolate the
symbolic chain of consequences from their founding Event, the Mystic wants to
isolate the Event from the network of its symbolic consequences: he insists
on the ineffability of the Event, and disregards its symbolic consequences.
For the Mystic, what matters is the bliss of one’s immersion in the Event,
which obliterates the entire symbolic reality. Lacan, however, in contrast to
Badiou, adds as the fourth term to the triad of Master, Hysteric and
University pervert the discourse of the analyst: for him, mysticism is the
isolated position of the psychotic immersed in his/her jouissance and, as
such, not a discourse (a social link) at all. So the consistency of Lacan’s
entire edifice hinges on the fact that a fourth discursive position is
possible, which is not that of a Master, that of the Hysteric, or that of the
University. This position, while maintaining the gap between the Event and
its symbolization, avoids the hysterical trap and, instead of being caught in
the vicious cycle of permanent failure, affirms this gap as positive and
productive: it asserts the Real of the Event as the ‘generator’, the
generating core to be encircled repeatedly by the subject’s symbolic
productivity.
Politics and Signifier
In other words, politics exists because ‘society doesn’t exist’:
politics is the struggle for the content of the empty signifier which
represents the impossibility of Society. The worn-out phrase ‘the politics
of the signifier’ is thus fully justified: the order of signifier as such is
political and, vice versa, there is no politics outside the order of the
signifier. The space of politics is the gap between the series of ‘ordinary
’ signifiers (S2) and the empty Master-Signifier (S1).
Knowledge, Truth, Death Drive
In a way, everything seems to hinge on the relationship between Knowledge
and Truth. Badiou limits Knowledge to a positive encyclopaedic grasp of Being
which is, as such, blind to the dimension of Truth as Event: Knowledge knows
only veracity (adequation), not Truth, which is ‘subjective’ (not in the
standard sense of subjectivism, but linked to a ‘wager’, to a
decision/choice which in a way transcends the subject, since the subject
himself/herself is nothing but the activity of pursuing the consequences of
the Decision). Is it not a fact, however, that every concrete, socially
operative field of Knowledge presupposes a Truth-Event, since it is
ultimately a kind of ‘sedimentation’ of an Event, its ‘ontologization’,
so that the task of analysis is precisely to unearth the Event (the
ethico-political decision) whose scandalous dimension always lurks behind ‘
domesticated’ knowledge?13 We can also see now the gap which separates
Badiou from Laclau: for Badiou, an Event is a contingent rare occurrence
within the global order of Being; while for Laclau (to put it in Badiou’s
terms), any Order of Being is itself always a ‘sedimentation’ of some past
Event, a ‘normalization’ of a founding Event (for example, the Church as
the Institution of Order is sedimented from the Event of Christ, say) –
every positive ontological order already relies on a disavowed
ethico-political decision.
Laclau and Badiou nevertheless share a hidden reference to Kant. That is to
say, the ultimate philosophical question that lurks behind all this is that
of Kantian formalism. The horizon of Laclau’s central notion of hegemony is
the constitutive gap between the Particular and the Universal: the Universal
is never full; it is a priori empty, devoid of positive content; different
particular contents strive to fill this gap, but every particular that
succeeds in exerting the hegemonic function remains a temporary and
contingent stand-in that is forever split between its particular content and
the universality it represents … Do we not encounter here the paradoxical
logic of desire as constitutively impossible, sustained by a constitutive
lack (the absent fullness of the empty signifier) that can never be supplied
by any positive object, that is, by a constitutive ‘out of joint’ of the
Particular with respect to the Universal …? What, however, if this
impossible desire to make up for the lack, to overcome the ‘out of joint’,
is not the ultimate fact? What if, beyond (or, rather, beneath) it, one
should presuppose not the fullness of a Foundation, but the opposite
striving: an uncanny active will to disrupt? (It was Hegel who, apropos of
Understanding, emphasized how, instead of complaining about the abstract,
negative quality of Understanding, how Understanding replaces the immediate
fullness of life with dry abstract categories, one should praise the infinite
power of Understanding that is capable of tearing asunder what belongs
together in nature, positing as separate what remains in reality joined
together.) And is not the Freudian name for this active will to disrupt the
death drive? In contrast to desire, which strives to regain the impossible
balance between the Universal and the Particular – that is, for a particular
content that would fill the gap between itself and the Universal – drive
thus actively wills and sustains the gap between the Universal and the
Particular.
Disavowals of Politics
‧arche-politics: ‘communitarian’ attempts to define a traditional close,
organically structured homogeneous social space that allows for no void in
which the political moment-event can emerge;
‧para-politics: the attempt to depoliticize politics (to translate it into
police logic): one accepts political conflict, but reformulates it into a
competition, within the representational space, between acknowledged
parties/agents, for the (temporary) occupation of the place of executive
power;
‧Marxist (or utopian Socialist) meta-politics: political conflict is fully
asserted, but as a shadow-theatre in which events whose proper place is on
Another Scene (of economic processes) are played out; the ultimate goal of ‘
true’ politics is thus its self-cancellation, the transformation of the ‘
administration of people’ into the ‘administration of things’ within a
fully self-transparent rational order of collective Will;
‧the fourth form, the most cunning and radical version of the disavowal (not
mentioned by Rancière), is what I am tempted to call ultra-politics: the
attempt to depoliticize the conflict by bringing it to an extreme via the
direct militarization of politics – by reformulating it as the war between ‘
Us’ and ‘Them’, our Enemy, where there is no common ground for symbolic
conflict – it is deeply symptomatic that, rather than class struggle, the
radical Right speaks of class (or sexual) warfare.
(The metaphoric frame we use in order to account for the political process is
thus never innocent and neutral: it ‘schematizes’ the concrete meaning of
politics. Ultra-politics has recourse to the model of warfare: politics is
conceived as a form of social warfare, as the relationship to ‘Them’, to an
Enemy. Arche-politics prefers to refer to the medical model: society is a
corporate body, an organism; social divisions are like illnesses of this
organism – that is, what we should fight, our enemy, is a cancerous
intruder, a pest, a foreign parasite to be exterminated if the health of the
social body is to be re-established. Para-politics uses the model of
agonistic competition which follows some commonly accepted rules, like a
sporting event. Meta-politics relies on the model of scientific-technological
instrumental procedure, while post-politics involves the model of business
negotiation and strategic compromise.)
Four Levels of Appearance
‧appearance in the simple sense of ‘illusion’, the false/distorted
representation/image of reality (‘things are not what they seem’
platitudes) – although, of course, a further distinction needs to be
introduced here between appearance qua mere subjective illusion (distorting
the transcendentally constituted order of reality) and appearance qua the
transcendentally constituted order of phenomenal reality itself, which is
opposed to the Thing-in-itself;
‧appearance in the sense of symbolic fiction, that is, in Hegelese,
appearance as essential: say, the order of symbolic customs and titles (‘the
honourable judge’, etc.) which is ‘merely an appearance’ – if we disturb
it, however, social reality itself disintegrates;
‧appearance in the sense of signs indicating that there is something beyond
(directly accessible phenomenal reality), that is, the appearance of the
Suprasensible: the Suprasensible exists only insofar as it appears as such
(as the indeterminate presentiment that ‘there is something beneath
phenomenal reality’);
‧finally (and it is only here that we encounter what psychoanalysis calls
the ‘fundamental fantasy’, as well as the most radical phenomenological
notion of ‘phenomena’), the appearance which fills the void in the midst of
reality, that is, the appearance which conceals the fact that, beneath the
phenomena, there is nothing to conceal.
(Simulacrum vs Appearance: This crucial distinction between simulacrum
(overlapping with the Real) and appearance is easily discernible in the
domain of sexuality, as the distinction between pornography and seduction:
pornography ‘shows it all’, ‘real sex’, and for that very reason produces
the mere simulacrum of sexuality; while the process of seduction consists
entirely in the play of appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes
the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing.)
Subject(ification) of Desire, Drive
To those versed in Hegelian philosophy, these two features of drive –
its temporal loop; the pitiless and inexorable identification of the subject
with the inaccessible Thing whose lack or withdrawal sustains the space of
desire – cannot but evoke two fundamental features of the Hegelian
dialectical process: does not Hegel reiterate again and again how the
dialectical process displays the circular structure of a loop (the subject of
the process, the absolute Idea, is not given in advance, but is generated by
the process itself – so, in a paradoxical temporal short circuit, the final
Result retroactively causes itself, generates its own causes); and,
furthermore, how the basic matrix of the dialectical process is that of the
subject’s self-recognition in the In-itself of its absolute Otherness
(recall the standard figure of Hegel according to which I have to recognize
my own substance in the very force that seems to resist and thwart my
endeavour).
Does this mean that ‘drive’ is inherently metaphysical, that it provides
the elementary matrix of the closed circle of teleology and of
self-recognition in Otherness? Yes, but with a twist: it is as if, in drive,
this closed loop of teleology is minimally displaced on account of the
failure that sets it in motion. It may appear that drive is the paradigmatic
case of the closed circle of auto-affection, of the subject’s body affecting
itself within the domain of Sameness – as we have seen, does not Lacan
himself suggest, as the supreme metaphor of drive, lips kissing themselves?
One should bear in mind, however, that this reflexive reversal-into-self
constitutive of drive relies on a fundamental, constitutive failure. The most
succinct definition of the reversal constitutive of drive is the moment when,
in our engagement in a purposeful activity (activity directed towards some
goal), the way towards this goal, the gestures we make to achieve it, start
to function as a goal in itself, as its own aim, as something that brings its
own satisfaction. This closed loop of circular satisfaction, of the
repetitive movement that finds satisfaction in its own circular loop, thus
none the less relies on the failure to achieve the goal we were aiming at:
drive’s self-affection is never fully self-enclosed, it relies on some
radically inaccessible X that forever eludes its grasp – the drive’s
repetition is the repetition of a failure. And – back to German Idealism –
is not the same failure clearly discernible in the very fundamental structure
of Selbst-bewusstsein, of self-consciousness? Is it not clear already in Kant
that there is transcendental self-consciousness, that I am aware of ‘myself
’ only insofar as I am ultimately inaccessible to myself in my noumenal
(transcendent) dimension, as the ‘I or He or It (the Thing) that thinks’
(Kant)? So the basic lesson of the transcendental self-consciousness is that
it is the very opposite of full self-transparence and self-presence: I am
aware of myself, I am compelled to turn reflexively on to myself, only
insofar as I can never ‘encounter myself ’ in my noumenal dimension, as the
Thing I actually am.
We can now pinpoint the opposition between the subject of desire and the
subject of drive: while the subject of desire is grounded in the constitutive
lack (it ex-sists insofar as it is in search of the missing Object-Cause),
the subject of drive is grounded in a constitutive surplus – that is to say,
in the excessive presence of some Thing that is inherently ‘impossible’ and
should not be here, in our present reality – the Thing which, of course, is
ultimately the subject itself. The standard heterosexual ‘fatal attraction’
scene is that of male desire captivated and fascinated by a deadly jouissance
féminine: a woman is desubjectivized, caught in the self-enclosed cycle of
acephalous drive, ignorant of the fascination she exerts on man, and it is
precisely this self-sufficient ignorance which makes her irresistible; the
paradigmatic mythical example of this scene, of course, is that of Ulysses
captivated by the Sirens’ song, this pure jouis-sense. What happens,
however, when the Woman-Thing herself becomes subjectivized? This, perhaps,
is the most mysterious libidinal inversion of all: the moment at which the ‘
impossible’ Thing subjectivizes itself. In his short essay on the ‘Silence
of the Sirens’, Franz Kafka accomplished such a reversal: his point is that
Ulysses was in fact so absorbed in himself, in his own longing, that he did
not notice that the Sirens did not sing, but just stared at him, transfixed
by his image. And again, the crucial point here is that this reversal is not
symmetrical: the subjectivity of the subjectivized Sirens is not the same as
the subjectivity of the male desire transfixed by the irresistible look of
the Woman-Thing. When desire subjectivizes itself, when it is subjectively
assumed, the flow of words is set in motion, since the subject is finally
able to acknowledge it, to integrate it into its symbolic universe; when
drive subjectivizes itself, when the subject sees itself as the dreadful
Thing, this other subjectivization is, on the contrary, signalled by the
sudden onset of silence – the idiotic babble of jouissance is interrupted,
the subject disengages itself from its flow. The subjectivization of drive is
this very withdrawal, this pulling away from the Thing that I myself am, this
realization that the Monster out there is myself.
The Empty Law
Yet another, much more uncanny assertion of the big Other is discernible,
however, in the allegedly ‘liberating’ notion of the subjects compelled to
(re)invent the rules of their coexistence without any guarantee in some
meta-norm; Kant’s ethical philosophy can already serve as its paradigmatic
case. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze provides an unsurpassable formulation
of Kant’s radically new conception of the moral Law:
the law is no longer regarded as dependent on the Good, but on the contrary,
the Good itself is made to depend on the law. This means that the law no
longer has its foundation in some higher principle from which it would derive
its authority, but that it is self-grounded and valid solely by virtue of its
own form … Kant, by establishing THE LAW as an ultimate ground or principle,
added an essential dimension to modern thought: the object of the law is by
definition unknowable and elusive … Clearly THE LAW, as defined by its pure
form, without substance or object of any determination whatsoever, is such
that no one knows nor can know what it is. It operates without making itself
known. It defines a realm of transgression where one is already guilty, and
where one oversteps the bounds without knowing what they are, as in the case
of Oedipus. Even guilt and punishment do not tell us what the law is, but
leave it in a state of indeterminacy equalled only by the extreme specificity
of the punishment.
The Kantian Law is thus not merely an empty form applied to a random
empirical content in order to ascertain if this content meets the criteria of
ethical adequacy – the empty form of the Law, rather, functions as the
promise of an absent content (never) to come. This form is not the
neutral-universal mould of the plurality of different empirical contents; it
bears witness to the persisting uncertainty about the content of our acts –
we never know if the determinate content that accounts for the specificity of
our acts is the right one, that is, if we have actually acted in accordance
with the Law and have not been guided by some hidden pathological motives.
Kant thus announces the notion of Law which culminates in Kafka and the
experience of modern political ‘totalitarianism’: since, in the case of the
Law, its Dass-Sein (the fact of the Law) precedes its Was-Sein (what this Law
is), the subject finds himself in a situation in which, although he knows
there is a Law, he never knows (and a priori cannot know) what this Law is –
a gap forever separates the Law from its positive incarnations. The subject
is thus a priori, in his very existence, guilty: guilty without knowing what
he is guilty of (and guilty for that very reason), infringing the law without
knowing its exact regulations …What we have here, for the first time in the
history of philosophy, is the assertion of the Law as unconscious: the
experience of Form without content is always the index of a repressed content
– the more intensely the subject sticks to the empty form, the more
traumatic the repressed content becomes.
The gap that separates this Kantian version of the subject reinventing the
rules of his ethical conduct from the postmodern Foucauldian version is
easily discernible: although they both assert that ethical judgement
ultimately displays the structure of aesthetic judgement (in which, instead
of simply applying a universal rule to a particular situation, one has to
(re)invent the universal rule in each unique concrete situation), for
Foucault this simply means that the subject is thrown into a situation in
which he has to shape his ethical project with no support in any
transcendent(al) Law; while for Kant this very absence of Law – in the
specific sense of a determinate set of positive universal norms – renders
all the more sensible the unbearable pressure of the moral Law qua the pure
empty injunction to do one’s Duty. So, from the Lacanian perspective, it is
here that we encounter the crucial distinction between rules to be invented
and their underlying Law/Prohibition: only when the Law qua set of positive
universal symbolic norms fails to appear – do we encounter the Law at its
most radical, the Law in its aspect of the Real of an unconditional
injunction. The paradox to be emphasized here lies in the precise nature of
the Prohibition entailed by the moral Law: at its most fundamental, this
Prohibition is not the prohibition to accomplish some positive act that would
violate the Law, but the self-referential prohibition to confuse the ‘
impossible’ Law with any positive symbolic prescription and/or prohibition,
that is, to claim for any positive set of norms the status of the law –
ultimately, the Prohibition means that the place of the Law itself must
remain empty.
To put it in classic Freudian terms: in Foucault, we get a set of rules
regulating the ‘care of the Self ’ in his ‘use of pleasures’ (in short, a
reasonable application of the ‘pleasure principle’); while in Kant, the
(re)invention of rules follows an injunction which comes from the ‘beyond of
the pleasure principle’. Of course, the Foucauldian/Deleuzian answer to this
would be that Kant is ultimately the victim of a perspective illusion which
leads him to (mis) perceive the radical immanence of ethical norms (the fact
that the subject has to invent the norms regulating his conduct autonomously,
at his own expense and on his own responsibility, with no big Other to take
the blame for it) as its exact opposite: as a radical transcendence,
presupposing the existence of an inscrutable transcendent Other which
terrorizes us with its unconditional injunction, simultaneously prohibiting
us access to it – we are under a compulsion to do our Duty, but forever
prevented from clearly knowing what this Duty is … The Freudian answer is
that such a solution (the translation of the big Other’s inscrutable Call of
Duty into immanence) relies on the disavowal of the Unconscious: the fact
which usually goes unnoticed is that Foucault’s rejection of the
psychoanalytic account of sexuality also involves a thorough rejection of the
Freudian Unconscious. If we read Kant in psychoanalytic terms, the gap
between self-invented rules and their underlying Law is none other than the
gap between (consciously preconscious) rules we follow and the Law qua
unconscious: the basic lesson of psychoanalysis is that the Unconscious is,
at its most radical, not the wealth of illicit ‘repressed’ desires but the
fundamental Law itself.
(According to the standard narrative of modernity, what distinguishes it from
even the most universal versions of premodern Law (Christianity, Judaism,
etc.) is that the individual is supposed to entertain a reflected
relationship towards ethical norms. Norms are not there simply to be
accepted; the subject has to measure not only his acts against them, but also
the adequacy of these norms themselves, that is, how they fit the higher
meta-rule that legitimizes their use: are the norms themselves truly
universal? Do they treat all men – and women – equally and with dignity? Do
they allow free expression of their innermost aspirations?, and so forth.
This standard narrative gives us a subject who is able to entertain a free
reflexive relationship towards every norm he decides to follow – every norm
has to pass the judgement of his autonomous reason. What Habermas passes over
in silence, however, is the obverse of this reflexive distance towards
ethical norms expressed by the above quote from Deleuze: since, apropos of
any norm I follow, I can never be sure that it is actually the right norm to
follow, the subject is caught in a difficult situation of knowing that there
are norms to follow, without any external guarantee as to what these norms
are … There is no modern reflexive freedom from the immediate submission to
universal norms without this situation of a priori guilt.)
The Act
the act in its traumatic tuche is that which divides the subject who can
never subjectivize it, assume it as ‘his own’, posit himself as its
author-agent – the authentic act that I accomplish is always by definition a
foreign body, an intruder which simultaneously attracts/fascinates and repels
me, so that if and when I come too close to it, this leads to my aphanisis,
self-erasure. If there is a subject to the act, it is not the subject of
subjectivization, of integrating the act into the universe of symbolic
integration and recognition, of assuming the act as ‘my own’, but, rather,
an uncanny ‘acephalous’ subject through which the act takes place as that
which is ‘in him more than himself ’. The act thus designates the level at
which the fundamental divisions and displacements usually associated with the
‘Lacanian subject’ (the split between the subject of the enunciation and
the subject of the enunciated/statement; the subject’s ‘decentrement’ with
regard to the symbolic big Other; etc.) are momentarily suspended – in the
act, the subject, as Lacan puts it, posits himself as his own cause, and is
no longer determined by the decentred object-cause.
For that reason, Kant’s description of how a direct insight into the Thing
in itself (the noumenal God) would deprive us of our freedom and turn us into
lifeless puppets if we subtract from it the scenic imagery (fascination with
the Divine Majesty) and reduce it to the essential (an entity performing what
it does ‘automatically’, without any inner turmoil and struggle),
paradoxically fits the description of the (ethical) act perfectly – this act
is precisely something which unexpectedly ‘just occurs’, it is an
occurrence which also (and even most) surprises its agent itself (after an
authentic act, my reaction is always ‘Even I don’t know how I was able to
do that, it just happened!’). The paradox is thus that, in an authentic act,
the highest freedom coincides with the utmost passivity, with a reduction to
a lifeless automaton who blindly performs its gestures. The problematic of
the act thus compels us to accept the radical shift of perspective involved
in the modern notion of finitude: what is so difficult to accept is not the
fact that the true act in which noumenal and phenomenal dimensions coincide
is forever out of our reach; the true trauma lies in the opposite awareness
that there are acts, that they do occur, and that we have to come to terms
with them.
In the criticism of Kant implicit in this notion of the act, Lacan is thus
close to Hegel, who also claimed that the unity of the noumenal and the
phenomenal adjourned ad infinitum in Kant is precisely what takes place every
time an authentic act is accomplished. Kant’s mistake was to presuppose that
there is an act only insofar as it is adequately ‘subjectivized’, that is,
accomplished with a pure Will (a Will free of any ‘pathological’
motivations); and, since one can never be sure that what I did was in fact
prompted by the moral Law as its sole motive (i.e. since there is always a
lurking suspicion that I accomplished a moral act in order to find pleasure
in the esteem of my peers, etc.), the moral act turns into something which in
fact never happens (there are no saints on this earth), but can only be
posited as the final point of an infinite asymptotic approach of the
purification of the soul – for that reason, that is, in order none the less
to guarantee the ultimate possibility of the act, Kant had to propose his
postulate of the immortality of the soul (which, as can be shown, effectively
amounts to its very opposite, to the Sadeian fantasy of the immortality of
the body) – only in such a way can one hope that after endless
approximation, one will reach the point of being able to accomplish a true
moral act.
The point of Lacan’s criticism is thus that an authentic act does not – as
Kant assumes on misleading self-evidence – presuppose its agent ‘on the
level of the act’ (with his will purified of all pathological motivations,
etc.) – it is not only possible, even inevitable, that the agent is not ‘on
the level of its act’, that he himself is unpleasantly surprised by the ‘
crazy thing he has just done’, and unable fully to come to terms with it.
This, incidentally, is the usual structure of heroic acts: somebody who, for
a long time, has led an opportunistic life of manoeuvring and compromises,
all of a sudden, inexplicably even to himself, resolves to stand firm, cost
what it may – this, precisely, was how Giordano Bruno, after a long history
of rather cowardly attacks and retreats, unexpectedly decided to stick to his
views. The paradox of the act thus lies in the fact that although it is not ‘
intentional’ in the usual sense of the term of consciously willing it, it is
nevertheless accepted as something for which its agent is fully responsible
– ‘I cannot do otherwise, yet I am none the less fully free in doing it.’
Consequently, this Lacanian notion of act also enables us to break with the
deconstructionist ethics of the irreducible finitude, of how our situation is
always that of a displaced being caught in a constitutive lack, so that all
we can do is heroically assume this lack, the fact that our situation is that
of being thrown into an impenetrable finite context; the corollary of this
ethics, of course, is that the ultimate source of totalitarian and other
catastrophes is man’s presumption that he can overcome this condition of
finitude, lack and displacement, and ‘act like God’, in a total
transparency, overcoming his constitutive division. Lacan’s answer to this
is that absolute/unconditional acts do occur, but not in the (idealist) guise
of a self-transparent gesture performed by a subject with a pure Will who
fully intends them – they occur, on the contrary, as a totally unpredictable
tuche, a miraculous event which shatters our lives. To put it in somewhat
pathetic terms, this is how the ‘divine’ dimension is present in our lives,
and the different modalities of ethical betrayal relate precisely to the
different ways of betraying the act-event: the true source of Evil is not a
finite mortal man who acts like God, but a man who denies that divine
miracles occur and reduces himself to just another finite mortal being.
Two Death Drives
Crucial here is the inherent stupidity of this compulsion: it stands for the
way each of us is caught in the inexplicable spell of idiotic jouissance, as
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 in a demoniac compulsion, at
the whim of ‘something in me more than myself ’. When the mask – the dead
object – comes alive by taking possession of us, its hold on us is
effectively that of a ‘living dead’, of a monstrous automaton imposing
itself on us – is not the lesson to be drawn from this that our fundamental
fantasy, the kernel of our being, is itself such a monstrous Thing, a machine
of jouissance?
On the other hand, against this stupid superego injunction to enjoy which
increasingly dominates and regulates the perverse universe of our late
capitalist experience, the death drive designates the very opposite gesture,
the desperate endeavour to escape the clutches of the ‘undead’ eternal
life, the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of
jouissance. The death drive does not relate to the finitude of our contingent
temporal existence, but designates the endeavour to escape the dimension that
traditional metaphysics described as that of immortality, the indestructible
life that persists beyond death. It is often a thin, almost imperceptible
line which separates these two modalities of the death drive: which separates
our yielding to the blind compulsion to repeat more and more intense
pleasures, as exemplified by the adolescent transfixed by the video game on
the screen, from the thoroughly different experience of traversing the
fantasy.
So we not only dwell between the two deaths, as Lacan put it, but our
ultimate choice is directly the one between the two death drives: the only
way to get rid of the stupid superego death drive of enjoyment is to embrace
the death drive in its disruptive dimension of traversing the fantasy. One
can beat the death drive only by the death drive itself – so, again, the
ultimate choice is between bad and worse. And the same goes for the properly
Freudian ethical stance. The superego injunction ‘Enjoy!’ is ultimately
supported by some figure of the ‘totalitarian’ Master. ‘ Du darfst! /You
may!’, the logo on a brand of fat-free meat products in Germany, provides
the most succinct formula of how the ‘totalitarian’ Master operates. That
is to say: one should reject the standard explanation of today’s new
fundamentalisms as a reaction against the anxiety of excessive freedom in our
late capitalist ‘permissive’ liberal society, offering us a firm anchor by
providing strong prohibitio