Amorous Acts: Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, and Queer Theory 9781503625297

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AMORO US

ACTS

FRANCES

L.

RESTUCCIA

Amorous Acts Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, and Queer Theory

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD,

CALIFORNIA 2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Restuccia, Frances L., dateAmorous acts : Lacanian ethics in modernism, film, and queer theory I Frances L. Restuccia. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8o47-sr82-x (cloth: alk. paper) r. Lacan,Jacques, 190I-r98r. 2. Love. 3· Love in literature. 4· Love in motion pictures. 5· Queer theory. I. Title. BFI75·5·L68R47 2006 8o9'.933543 -dczz

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Typeset by BookMatters in rolr4]anson

To Kalpana

Contents

I.

Acknowledgments

lX

Preface

Xl

The Paradox of Lacanian Ethics: Ethical Erogenous Zones

I

Modernism's Lacanian Ethics: Compensating for the Lack of a Sexual Relation

z8

Impossible Love in Contemporary Film: Mystifying Hysteria

69

4·

The Taming of the Real: Zizek's Missed Encounter with Kieslowski's Insight

95

5·

Queer Ascesis: It's a Queer World, After All

II9

Notes Works Cited

157 165

Index

171

2.

3·

Acknowledgments

Dozens of friends, colleagues, and students have assisted me in the writing of this book. Amorous Acts reflects a great deal of the teaching I have done over roughly the past ten years, on the graduate as well as the undergraduate level, mainly at Boston College; in many ways it is the product of interactions with my bright and engaging theory students (Rani Neutill, Avak Hasratian, Amanda Chaloupka, Cristina Laurita, Erica De Santo, Corinna Lee, Meg Toth, Susan Cook, Jenny LaFrance, and Erin Paszko), to name just a few now on their distinctive ways to a Ph.D. of their own. I also owe another large debt (again) to the Humanities Center at Harvard University (and therefore to its ingenious former director, Marge Garber) and to Judith Gurewich, whose Lacanian Workshop there ignited, over a decade ago, my lasting passion. The seminar I now co-chair with Dr. Humphrey Morris at Harvard's Humanities Center-"Psychoanalytic Practices"-has enabled me to bring to various lively seminar and dinner tables psychoanalytic theorists such as Parveen Adams, Slavoj Zizek, Joan Copjec, Renata Salecl, Bruce Fink, Russell Grigg, and Dany Nobus as well as queer/psychoanalytic theorists such as Lee Edelman, all of whom had a rich and powerful impact on my thinking and writing. My colleague and dear friend Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks has been present in one way or another in almost all of the conceptualizing of this book; Charlie Shepherdson generously supported this project and forced me to make vital improvements. Talking theory with these two brilliant theory experts is pure bliss. Samir Dayal, Todd McGowan, Rael Meyerowitz, Kevin Ohi, Chris Pye, Bill Richardson, S. ]., Min Song, Judith Wilt, and especially Jean Wyatt likewise have greatly enhanced my work. I feel blessed to have such excruciatingly intelligent friends. The mentally capacious John ix

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Limon deserves my gratitude for always being there to answer any question of general knowledge or language. The late Serge Andre's exquisite spirit suffuses Chapters One through Four. Finally, I want to thank Norris Pope, the humanities editor at Stanford University Press, for his gracious and delightful treatment of me and my project, and Helen Tartar for her interest in the first place. An early draft of Chapter One titled "Ethical Erogenous Zones" appeared in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 3, no. 2 (Fall r998). A section of Chapter Two was previously published in Religion and the Arts 7, no. 4 (2003), as an article titled "Graham Greene's Lacanian Encore: The End of the Affoir." A section of Chapter Three was previously published in literature and psychology 47, nos. r & 2 (2oor), as an essay titled "Impossible Love in Breaking the Waves: Mystifying Hysteria." A piece of Chapter Four came out in "The Symptom," the on-line journal of Lacanian Ink (http://www.lacan.com), issue no. 2 (Spring 2002), as an essay titled "The Taming of the Real." And a short piece now included in Chapter Five appeared in Between the Psyche and the Social, edited by Kelly Oliver and Steve Edwin (Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2002). Thanks to all the editors who graciously offered permission to use this material. ·

Preface The course of true love never did run smooth. LYSANDER, 1N

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Amorous Acts: Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, and Queer Theory ulti-

mately uses psychoanalytic concepts to suggest how queer theory is operating to put in place a nonheterosexist, radically desiring Symbolic. After working through the controversial and problematic relations among desire, Love, and ethics in Lacan, as they are presented mainly in Lacan's Ethics seminar (VII), The Four Fundamental Concepts (XI), and Encore (XX), this study finally poses the issue of whether Lacan's concept of self-shattering Love might be useful politically. A central question, then, is whether the sort of self-annihilation or Lacanian desubjectivation that queer theorists now celebrate can serve as a way of transforming the current (heterosexist) social order. Might a Lacanian "ethics of desire" -founded on the concept of self-shattering Love, an encounter with death-operate, more effectively than it does for the human subject, at the level of culture? Chapter One, "The Paradox of Lacanian Ethics: Ethical Erogenous Zones," begins by clarifying Lacan's ethics of (not ceding) desire as distinct from what has been dubbed his ethics of jouissance, this latter position having been taken up by a "cadre of psychoanalytic critics of culture" called "the new Lacanians," led mainly (if, as I shall mention, ambivalently) by Slavoj Zizek. 1 So-called new Lacanians "emphasize Lacan's late notions of drive, jouissance, and the real at the expense of his early concepts of desire, the imaginary, and the symbolic" (Mellard, 1998, p. 395). They stress the importance of unreservedly accepting the death drive as part of one's "striving for radical self-annihilation" (Zizek, 1991, p. 64). I derive my more paradoxical (and less drastic) emphasis from Lacan's Ethics seminar, xi

Xii

PREFACE

which continues to be misread as championing Antigone's defiance and selfdestruction (her jouissance) as a model of ethical behavior. Blind to Lacan's double analogy between (r) Antigone and the analyst and (2) the spectator of Antigone and the analysand, such reading misses Lacan's critical distinction between sublime desire or Love (tantamount to the death instinct) and the desire of the subject (itself based on, but distinct from, death, sublime desire, or Love). Lacanians have hesitated to distinguish desire from Love in Lacan, which is understandable given that occasionally Lacan appears to employ the terms desire and love interchangeably (just as the Greek word eros means both interpersonal love as well as desire). Nevertheless, the two can, and need to be, disentangled, Love being aligned with death as well as the sublime desire of the saint and desire being what Lacan urges us not to cede. Despite my reading of Lacan's ethics as an ethics of desire, however, it is the case that Chapter One already inaugurates an emphasis on an encounter with death-for an ethical, "radical desire" to ensue. (This doubleness-of desire and death-too is echoed in the queer theoretical position I finally arrive at.) It is impossible Love-e.g., Antigone's incestuous Love for her dead but unburied brother-that gives birth to desire. It is impossible Love that "allows jouissance to yield to desire," to quote from Lacan's unpublished Anxiety seminar (March 13, 1963, lecture)-e.g., the visible desire of the spectator for Antigone-and therefore not at all that the violence of the drive and jouissance is irrelevant. The setting up of an ethics of desire and an ethics of jouissance as a binarism has unfortunately made those of us who accept Lacan's statement that to be ethical one must not cede one's desire seem to shut out jouissance and the Real. Here, I am in full agreement with Nestor Braunstein, who posits that desire and jouissance are not at all "mutually exclusive but intimately connected: two real keys for our reflection and for the practice and the ethics of psychoanalysis." As Braunstein elaborates in his essay "Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan," in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan: Regrettably, after Lacan's death in 1981 and with the passage of time, Manichean formulations have arisen that tend to oppose the two terms, provoking a forced choice loaded with hidden agendas between the first Lacan (the Lacan of the signifier and of desire, allegedly a "primitive" or "archaic" Lacan), and the second Lacan (the Lacan of jouissance and

PREFACE

Xiii

the objet a, who would be the desired one, a point of arrival that only "advanced" Lacanians could reach). It is important, therefore, to emphasize the ethical basis of these two propositions taken together [2003, p. n4]. To offer my version of such an "ethical basis," interweaving the two propositions of desire and jouissance: although ethical acts in Lacan are not finally self-annihilating (desubjectifying), they cannot transpire without exposure to annihilation. I am arguing, then, that recent claims made by Zizek and others in support of an "ethics of jouissance" are based on a misreading of Lacan and hence need to be rejected in favor of his "ethics of radical desire" that exposes the porousness of the border between desire and jouissance. Perhaps surprisingly inspired by Foucault-who is here given a major voice in characterizing modernism's relation to madness, death, and the Real-Chapter Two, "Modernism's Lacanian Ethics: Compensating for the Lack of a Sexual Relation," illustrates the contribution of literary modernism to coming to terms with the impossibility of Lacanian Love, which I take to be tantamount to Lacan's impossible sexual relation. Again, as in Antigone, desire in modernist texts is enflamed by various encounters with Love. Radical desire-which by definition encounters death, to achieve its radicality-is held up as a worthy psychoanalytic goal. Attempting to pull off the tricky business of suturing radical desire to the drive while prying it loose from the death drive, Chapter Two continues the book's theoretical elaboration of Lacanian ethics as a matter of not ceding desire. Radical desire, as I indicate from the start, must be looped together with the drive; a naked death drive is not what Lacan is advocating. Through readings of literary texts from British modernism-by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Graham Greene-Chapter Two tries to be precise about how the stress on enjoyment alone as the aim of analysis misses Lacan's conception of radical (ethical) desire. Lacan's radical desire is neither unattached to the drive and Sadean jouissance nor equivalent to them. As such, it may be located in the poetic prose of modernism that walks the line between the Symbolic and the Real and that therefore goes a long way toward compensating for the lack of a sexual relation. "What constitutes the basis of life, in effect," Lacan tells us in Encore, "is that for everything having to do with the relations between men and women, ... it's not working out ... and a large part of our activity [as a consequence] is taken up with saying so" (1998, p. 32). It is this "element of

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darkness," to use Foucault's phrase, that the novels I examine attempt but ultimately fail fully to illuminate, reanimating the inert in the process, by virtue of their linguistic beauty, and so fulfilling at the level of the signifier the conditions of both Foucault's and Lacan's sense of the ethics of radical desire. Chapter Three, "Impossible Love in Contemporary Film: Mystifying Hysteria," on Breaking the Waves, Seventh Heaven, and Damage, keeps very much alive the notion of the impossibility of Love, an impossibility that follows from the incommensurability of the "man" (tied to desire) and t¥e) 2 "Woman" (tied to jouissance). We continue to observe that desire is never for what appears to be its aim, which is precisely what makes desire possible and Love (which insists on achieving what it aims for) impossible. The three figures from film central to Chapter Three hysterically yet uniquely negotiate this "problem." That they do so in contemporary film is this chapter's emphasis. Here the shift from modernist novels to this postmodern and less diegetically inclined genre is marked as a way of better accessing what exceeds the Symbolic. Where the Symbolic chain is broken, the inarticulable is freed. Desire gives way to jouissance; the Lacanian "encounter" with Love is presented, the Real indexed, at the same time as all three films confirm in myriad ways that Love remains impossible to sustain. The hysteric turns to Love-which forever eludes the subject-in vatn. Chapter Four, "The Taming of the Real: Zizek's Missed Encounter with Kieslowski's Insight," confronts the struggle, the suffering and failure, haunting Chapters Two and Three. Here we bear down on the alternatives that psychoanalytic theory offers to the relatively healthy subject, the proverbial "normal" neurotic. Although psychoanalysis has proven effective in bringing the "subject of pathology" to desire, it seems to reach a philosophical impasse with that achievement. Desire leaves one unsatisfied; jouissance leaves one desubjectified. The stimulating and nourishing work of Slavoj Zizek has ironically led me to such a critique. Despite his having been labeled one of the "new Lacanians," if not the leader of the pack, Zizek actually oscillates between the "ethics of desire" and the "ethics of jouissance," at one point concluding that Lacan himself is torn between these two ethical stances. At the center of this debate is Zizek's concept of "the authentic act": the risking of a gesture that courts or pursues death. Through an analysis of Krzysztof Kieslowski's film White (one of the films in the renowned

PREFACE

XV

Polish director's Three Colours trilogy), I propose that Zizek misses the film's insight that the "authentic act" fails to solve the problem of the philosophical impasse at the heart of psychoanalytic theory. But what founders at the level of the subject unexpectedly makes a comeback at the level of culture. Perhaps cultural formations, in contrast to human subjects, can afford both to undergo dissolution and, more important, maintain a subsequent state of radical desire. In Beyond Sexuality, Tim Dean writes that "in pushing psychoanalysis beyond psychology, Lacan also pushes it beyond the couch-that is, beyond a framework comprising specific interactions between persons. And hence Lacan's account of symbolic subjectivity contributes more to social theory than to psychological theories of the individual" (zooo, p. z). For years, the question of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis in the cultural arena has been hotly debated. Many, especially clinicians, have held the view that importing psychoanalytic ways of thinking into the cultural field is to misuse and thereby ruin a system meant to illuminate the human psyche. But queer theory acts on the proposition that at least the authentic act, encountering the Real, and traversing a fundamental fantasy can operate on the cultural level to effect vital transformations. My final chapter, "Queer Ascesis: It's a Queer World, After All," features six queer theorists who work at the intersection of psychoanalysis and queer theory: David Halperin (Foucault comes in through the door of Halperin's Saint Foucault), Leo Bersani, Tim Dean, Judith Butler, and Lee Edelman. Through their myriad emphases-the assault on any sort of definitive identity; mysticism; masochism; the Woman who doesn't exist; the turd and the Real; incoherence; the drive-these queer thinkers situate gay sexuality in the place of Lacanian Love. It is as though they wish to make Lacan's encounter a permanent way of life. Finally, through an engagement with the dynamic debate in Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality between Butler and Zizek, Amorous Acts reads queer theory itself as an authentic act meant to traverse the fundamental fantasies on which heterosexism is based. Queer theorists working in the field of psychoanalysis at least put their social strategy in terms of new, desubjectifying forms of (Lacanian) Love. Having pitched its mansion in the place of excrement, queer theory-refusing to cede its desire and thereby enacting Lacan's ethics of radical desire, after all-makes the buried point that relentless contact with the Real, through the intense work of Love that

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PREFACE

verges on the superhuman, has the potential to result in a reconfigured, queer Symbolic. Amorous Acts does more than merely balance the psyche with the social. It envisions a major transformation of the social governed by the principles of psychoanalysis, conceiving finally of a queer Symbolic Order in which an act of Love such as Antigone's sprinkling of dust to bury Polyneices would be the absolute foundation of desiring relations. That Antigone is "not quite queer," to Butler in Antigone's Claim, is all the more reason in my book-given that "not quite" is what queerness is all about-to proclaim her capacity to inaugurate a radically desiring, queer Symbolic. Like Edelman's sinthomosexuals, "my" queer Antigone "insist[s] on the unintelligible's unintelligibility, on the internal limit to signification and the impossibility of turning Real loss to meaningful profit in the Symbolic without its persistent remainder: the inescapable Real" (2004, pp. w6-ro7). 3 Queer theory is our contemporary Antigone.

AMORO US

ACTS

CHAPTER ONE

The Paradox of Lacanian Ethics

Ethical Erogenous Zones We are all completely agreed that love is a form of suicide.

The Seminar ofJacques Lacan: Book I

Contemporary theory is periodically charged with obfuscating, missing, canceling the "real world." But it is possible to believe, and even to know, that the view of the real world devoid of the lens of "theory" results in an impoverished notion of what actually operates within that real world, that with theory we can access the real world in all its many layers of strange complexity, whereas without it we remain clueless. As Joan Copjec writes, a bit audaciously, in her book Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, "psychoanalysis is the mother tongue of our modernity and ... the important issues of our time are scarcely articulable outside the concepts it has forged. While some blase souls argue that we are already beyond psychoanalysis, the truth is that we have not yet caught up with its most revolutionary insights" (zooz, p. ro). Psychoanalytic theory-and, I will argue, Lacanian theory in particular-can facilitate our comprehension of relationships, experiences, works of art, politics, and all sorts of human interaction that one is left oblivious to if deprived of its methodology. I hope to demonstrate this 1

2

CHAPTER ONE

premise in the course of this book. To give a random but I think telling example: engaged in an affair, an obsessional (whose case was taken up in my own "Psychoanalytic Practices" seminar) had an anxiety attack over, he thought, his potential losses were the affair to be found out. Had he known more about anxiety-that it flares up when a person lacking lack or desire stands at the threshold of desire that in turn stands at the threshold of jouissance, 1 as Jacques Lacan defines it in his Anxiety seminar-he would have realized that the source of his anxiety was entirely different from his commonsense assumption. It was not exactly fear of losing familiar objects that plagued him (apparently they were securely in place) but panic over being in a state of lack/desire for an unfamiliar object, an object that, in the artificial context of an affair, rendered his (obsessional) "impossible desire" possible, in completing it with enjoyment. But, being an obsessional, he balked at the prospect of becoming a desiring subject, mistaking his anxious state. As Roberto Harari notes about the anxious subject, she or he "fervently desires something, but when faced with the threat of actually carrying it out, ... anxiety is not long in making an appearance: desire has reached a terrain in which the approach to and of jouissance is unbearable" (zoor, p. 102). As Charles Shepherdson explains, in his foreword to Harari's book on Lacan's Anxiety seminar: "Anxiety is not a response to the loss of the object, but is fundamentally the affect that signals when the Other is too close, and the order of symbolization (substitution and displacement) is at risk of disappearing"; anxiety, to Lacan, is "the threshold that the subject must cross on the way toward desire and symbolic mediation" (zoor, p. xxxii). Psychoanalytic theory, to put it lightly, can come in handy (which is not to imply quick fixes). For no one is removed entirely from issues of love and desire, two central concerns of psychoanalysis, needless to say; even to be detached from them is "suspect." And although Love may ultimately be "impossible," as Lacan defines it in his twentieth seminar, Encore, it is by no means impossible to grasp what Lacan has to say about it and all its vicissitudes. People toss around the word love to the point that it has been evacuated of meaning; that assertion itself is now a cliche. Those of us who try to remain sensitive to the worth, even the sacredness, of the term may feel that it eludes us in all its opacity, striking us dumb before it. Nonetheless, love is a profound psychic experience that one might wish to explore, an intense

THE PARADOX OF

LACANIAN ETHICS

3

rocking of one's subjectivity (it has even been dubbed "pathological"). 2 Leo Bersani has written in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" that most folks are averse to sex; I would plug in here Love and venture to say that most folks would prefer to avoid Love and that Lacan's understanding of this desubjectifying experience can enlighten us as to why this is the case. Perhaps it takes a certain "death-driven" personality to handle Love-someone like Antigone, for example. It is no mystery why people tend to think they are losing themselves when they fall in Love. From a Lacanian perspective, this is precisely what Love effects: desubjectivation, an earthquake within one's subjectivity. Lacan can tell us why, when in Love, we feel shaken to the (empty) core, in terms that no reader must fear (which is not to say that the experience, as blissful as it can be, need not be feared). Love is dangerous and can be devastating. To invoke a modernist novel, in part about one of the founders of modernism, for quick reinforcement of this point: looking at a photo of Felice's niece, Dr K. in Sebald's Vertigo thinks: "What love could have been sufficient to spare the child the terrors of love, which for Dr K. stood foremost among all the terrors of the earth?" (2002, p. 167). As Mladen Dolar implies, the experience of Love might be likened to that of transference in analysis, with the potential therefore to alter one's psychic structure, hurl one into desire in relation to death, or leave one shattered. Drive, desire, Love, the sublime desire of the saint, and radical desire-all these terms will be clarified and distinguished in the pages of this book, as well as put into relation with Lacan's curious but compelling conception of ethics. Being "out of his depth," the anxious person I speak of worried only about conventional morality-assuming his "guilt" to be banal rather than typical of the obsessional psyche-and failed to take into account (or perhaps I should say was unconsciously incapable of taking into account) Lacan's idea that it is "ethical" not to cede one's desire. "What I call cider sur son desir is always accompanied in the destiny of the subject by some betrayal. ... Either the subject betrays his own way ... or, more simply, he tolerates the fact that someone with whom he has more or less vowed to do something betrays his hope" (Lacan, 1992, p. 321). As shall be explored throughout this text, and in the supportive words of Alenka Zupancic, desire in Lacan "(as distinct from wish, need and demand) is not the opposite of the ethical, quite the contrary, it is its kernel" (1994, p. 6o). 3

4

CHAPTER ONE

We begin in a rather skewed way, which seems to me appropriate since we are dealing with Lacan, who always looks awry (as Slavoj Zizek has underscored, beginning with his pleasurable and informative Lacanian primer Looking Awry). That is: providing a theoretical base for Amorous Acts, this chapter starts off by interpreting Lacan's eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts-usually read for its focus on the gaze as well as the four fundamental concepts of repetition, the unconscious, transference, and the drive-as a narrative about love. It is my contention that love appears in this Lacanian text in three guises: naively, though perhaps self-contentedly, in the Imaginary; seductively in the Symbolic; and impossibly in the Real. This may seem like a compact and therefore easily absorbed three-tiered sentence, but it contains a novel, complex triple conception of Lacanian love. My theory of Lacan's Three Loves not only attempts to expose a coherence in Lacan's thinking about love specifically in The Four Fundamental Concepts (seminar XI) but also enables us to comprehend, in retrospect, Lacan's ideas about the ethics of psychoanalysis in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (seminar VII), and paves the way for an in-depth treatment of Encore (seminar XX), where, in fact, Lacan urges us to read him backwards. "What is nice about what I tell you-don't you agree?-is that it's always the same thing. Not that I repeat myself, that's not the point. It's that what I said before takes on meaning afterward" (1998, p. 36). In particular, the distinction Lacan makes between desire and Love in seminar XI-a fundamental differentiation we will start out with, before entangling the two concepts as we proceed-allows us to apprehend the Love in Antigone as destructive, impossible, an absolute condition that can itself be "ethical" only insofar as it gives rise to desire that one must not cede. However, to my knowledge Lacan's "ethical desire" that must not be relinquished has not been disarticulated, as it needs to be, from the overpowering, incestuous Love that Antigone feels for her brother(s), one in the place of a father. I say "as it needs to be" because an underlying concern of this chapter and book is what sort of value psychoanalysis could possibly have in the practical arenas of the clinic or social change were its ethics to be defined as tantamount to jouissance and the death drive, resulting in an unqualified glorification of "those who go crazy through a trance" (Lacan, 1 99 2 ,

P· 32 3)·

THE PARADOX OF

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5

Love: A Devil ofa Job Love, while it is a passion that involves ignorance of desire, nevertheless leaves desire its whole import. When we look a bit more closely, we see the ravages wreaked by this. JAc

Q

uEs

LA

c A N , Encore

Lacan's idea oflove begins to emerge, albeit obliquely, in his eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts, where he comments that Freud's work on transference "led Freud to take the question of what is called true love ... further perhaps than it had ever been taken" (1981lr973, p. 12 3). Lacan later draws his own parallel between love and transference-through deception. Transference, he proposes, gives us the opportunity of depicting the fundamental structure of love, which is that in love we persuade "the other that he has that which may complement us," in an effort "to continue to misunderstand precisely what we lack" (1981lr973, p. 133). Lacan is famous for his assertion in seminar VIII that love is giving what one does not have. That is, to forge a quick link between these two points: the beloved can only offer what she or he doesn't have because what we love in her or him is always something that exceeds the beloved. In his discourse on the drive, Lacan again relies on transference to generate thoughts on love. First he states that "transference is what manifests in experience the enacting of the reality of the unconscious, insofar as that reality is sexuality" (Lacan, 1981lr973, p. 174). Then he asks, how can we be sure that "sexuality is present in action in the transference?" His answer is "in so far as at certain moments it is manifested in the open in the form of love" (1981lr973, p. 174). All of this adds up to a view that Lacan articulates in the form of a question: "Does love represent the summit, the culminating point, the indisputable factor, that makes sexuality present for us in the here and now of the transference?" (1981lr973, p. 174). The implication seems to be that it does, that love enables the presence of sexuality. It makes sense, then, that love-as the foundation of the striving of the sexual-is affiliated with the drive, the drive being what instigates love (rather than being synonymous with it), and that love in turn appears interchangeable with desire. That is, being the base of the sexual, love might then seem to be synonymous with desire, though it is clearly distinct in

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its role as desire's foundation. The last full paragraph of chapter 14 ("The Partial Drive and Its Circuit," in seminar XI) is critical for establishing these relations. There we read that "the subject has a constructive relation with [the] real only within the narrow confines of the pleasure principle, of the pleasure principle unforced by the drive, [and] this is ... the point of emergence of the love object" (Lacan, I98IIr973, p. r86; my emphasis). One implication of this passage seems to be that a different sort of relation-a nonconstructive, destructive relation-with the Real would be produced if that relation were generated outside of, or beyond, the pleasure principle. Another is that the emergence of the love object-from the point of a constructive relation to the Real (confined within the pleasure principle) to someplace else-just might offer such a damaging rapport. But what is precisely the point of emergence of the love object? It would appear to be at the point where the drive puts pressure on the pleasure principle. 4 Drive-or what pursues overwhelming or excessive satisfaction-upsets the pleasure principle or the subject in his or her homeostatic mode; the love object thereby emerges. At this stage, as Lacan writes, "The whole question is to discover how this love object may come to fulfill a role analogous with the object of desire-upon what equivocations does the possibility for the love object of becoming an object of desire rest?" (r98IIr973, p. r86). In any case, whatever the equivocations, the order would seem to be "from love to the libido" -the title of the subsequent chapter. The (obsessional) "man in the street" tends simply to polarize desire and love (mistresses and wives), but here again Lacan seems to be theorizing that love fuels desire; desire is based on love, and the object of desire is tied to the "object of love." We might say that the object of desire is sewn together with the object of the drive-which serves as a basis for one's love pursuit. Drive encircles objet a. 5 We fall in love with-although our perception of love blinds us to this strange attraction, essentially to Nothing, to a structural gap in our subjectivity-the objet a, that is, with what the beloved does not possess. Hence objet a becomes the never attainable object of desire. Drive, love, desire: this would seem to be the trajectory. Yet, as if plagued by his conception of Freud's conception of love, Lacan also becomes willing to acknowledge a mirror love in a sense without a trajectory. He eventually splits love into two forms. What I refer to as first-order love is played out in the "narcissistic field," and so it would seem to overlap with Freud's notion. Freud stresses that "in order to conceive

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of love, we must necessarily refer to another sort of structure than that of the drive" (Lacan, 1981h973, p. 190). To Freud, the drive comes from the heart; love from the belly, the world of "yum-yum" (Lacan, 1981h973, p. 189). The love object even appears to be for Freud an object at the level of autoeroticism. Juliet Flower MacCannell supports this idea in commenting that "Freud modelled bliss entirely on an autoeroticism that took self-sex organ-pleasure as its model, limitingjouissance to the masculine final choice of 'my Mother or myself"' (1994, p. 28). To Lacan, "there is a radical distinction between loving oneselfthrough the other-which, in the narcissistic field of the object, allows no transcendence to the object included-and [love produced via] the circularity of the drive, in which the heterogeneity of the movement out and back shows a gap in its interval" (1981h973, p. 194). In other words, you might look dreamily into your beloved's eyes only egotistically to envision yourself reflected in a pleasing image. Or you might be propelled in your "love" by the motion of a drive seeking out an objet a that seems to dwell in an object of your desire. Your love in this second scenario carves out a critical gap. The intriguing term in Lacan's passage on these two distinct forms of love is "transcendence": in nonnarcissistic love, what I refer to as second-order love, there is "transcendence to the object"; in first-order (narcissistic) love, there is not. An obvious meaning is that when one is in love narcissistically, the beloved does not emerge beyond oneself. As Dolar writes about love at first sight, "surely the paramount case" of such love "is constituted by the recognition of one's own image in the mirror, the kernel of the famous Lacanian 'mirror phase"' (1996, p. 135). But I take Lacan's distinction also to suggest that the real/Real love object in second-order love is more than-or exceeds, transcends-the person beloved. In either reading, then, the ostensible beloved is wiped out. The love object is someone who is, in a way, not-not there (except transcendently), even as its present absence is absolutely, paradoxically, necessary for the love. In second-order love, the subject may consequently pursue what it loses in sexuality, the lamella, an organ whose "characteristic is not to exist" (Lacan, 19811I973, pp. 197-198), in myriad localizations of, again, the objet a. Such pursuit-though I refer to it as "second-order love," because it is so often, in commentary on Lacanian love, referred to as loveis technically desire. Love that "aims at" something (or perhaps I should say at Nothing, at objet a) as in the sentence "If love aims at the extimate-the

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intimate external kernel-it is also a protection against it" (Dolar, 1996, p. 14z) is once again, especially as it implies lack, a lack of what it aims for, technically desire. Whereas for Freud "loving" and "being loved" are reciprocal, for Lacanand at this point our story takes a bizarre and at least ostensibly perverse turn-the subject in "love" must engage in "pure activity" in the field of the Other (1981h973, p. zoo). Lacan gives as an instance of such activity the exercise of any drive-a masochistic drive, for example-that "requires that the masochist give himself ... a devil of a job" (1981h973, p. zoo). Hence we are led to ask: How much is masochism a mere example here, as opposed to being integral to Lacan's paradigm of love? It would seem that "the mystery of love" entails the devilish job of searching for a lost part of oneself (Lacan, 198111973, p. zos). Addressing Freud, it appears that Lacan wants to say: love operates in the field of the drive joined with the field of the Other. Mediated by love, the objects of the drive get appropriated as objects of desire. To reiterate, love is not synonymous with drive but serves as a mediator between drive and desire. "Ethical desire," to clarify a critical link, necessarily hooks up with the drive, or, as ZupanCic phrases it, "ultimately gives place to the emergence of drive" (1994, p. 67). Ethical desire's necessary embrace of the drive was part of Lacan's notion of ethics as early as seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts) and, as I see it, implicit in seminar VII (Ethics). But what (we need to ask), in more detail, more fully, is the devilish job given to the subject by such a transfer-of drive to desire? As desire emerges that "gives place to the emergence of drive" -that is, when the beloved houses the objet a (rather than the ego of the lover)-the "object" becomes "a bad object," because for one thing she or he really isn't the object. The "object" is "bad" insofar as it is separate from what actually lures the lover, for, as Lacan emphasizes, when I love you I "inexplicably ... love in you something more than you-the objet petit a-[and so] I mutilate you" (1981h973, p. 268). We could say, consequently, that there really is no object of love/desire, only its semblance. In The Plague of Fantasies, Zizek puts it this way: "The automatism of love is set in motion when some contingent, ultimately indifferent (libidinal), object finds itself occupying a pre-given fantasy-place" (1997b, p. 39). There is an object-cause of desire located in a false object, and therefore (again) no actual object of love/desire. This form of love, then-what I regard as desire (founded on Love that

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mediates between drive and desire, but what I am also calling second-order love)-has us questing for something our ostensible object of desire is not. Yet no matter how much Lacanian theory we master, we pursue, even at times relentlessly, the false object. 6 Herein lies the crowning point of all the intricate work we have done thus far: since the true object of love would have to be the missing part, encountering it would be, if it could happen, an encounter with the gaze. This is what Lacan implies in his chapter "In You More Than You" (still in seminar XI), where he reminds us that the gaze is "the most characteristic term for apprehending the proper function of the objet a" (198Ih973, p. 270). That is, if the subject were to recognize himself or herself at this point of lack, at the point of the objet a, he or she would encounter the absent love object constitutive of subjectivity-the gaze. This too is why Lacan resists designating the "good object ... as an object of love." We see desire as "agitated in the drive," but we link love to "a good object" (Lacan, I981h973, p. 243). Nevertheless, Lacan would seem to be heading in the opposite direction, tying Love as well to "bad objects" that give the subject a devilish job. The final two paragraphs of The Four Fundamental Concepts clinch this idea of Love-a third-order Love-as more than dangerous, as potentially annihilating, as is the gaze. In defense of himself against critics who believe that Lacan has downgraded love, he posits Love in a "beyond." However, he also in turn writes-as if Love is so invitingly traumatic that a qualification must immediately ensue-that "any shelter in which may be established a viable, temperate relation of one sex to another necessitates the intervention ... of ... the paternal metaphor." Such a shelter or relation must be in a place, I take him to mean, other than the "beyond" of love. Through analysis, transference, and the intervention of the analyst's "desire to obtain absolute difference," Lacan implies, one can arrive at this place, enter this shelter or viable relation, so that "the signification of a limitless love" may emerge (198Ih973, p. 276). In other words, it is due to the self-destructiveness of such an encounter, between the subject and his or her constitutive absent love object (object-cause of desire), that Lacan states that "the fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation is the maintenance of the distance between the !-identification-and the a" (198Ih973, p. 273). The analyst's task (to Lacan) is to revive, or perhaps in some cases to initiate, the analysand's desire by supporting the separating a-via an encounter with the Real. In "At First Sight," Dolar offers a superb explanation of how this

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process works when the analyst's challenge is to dissolve a Love that leaves the subject miserable, redirecting the analysand's desire: Psychoanalysis, with its mechanism of transference, makes love appear as a symptom, it aims at the emergence of the object not covered by sense and recognition, of the object as alien. It is ultimately the process of baring the mechanism that produced that love, thus making it appear in its very contingency. Its conclusion is precisely the realization of the contingency of the object that has up to then covered "the lack in the Other," and thereby the crumbling of the Other that appears in its utter unfoundedness-hence Lacan's descriptions of that concluding moment as "the falling out of the object a" embodied in the analyst ... or the "subjective destitution"; or the "crossing of the fundamental fantasy." [1996, p. 1491·

Though it is the case that at the very end of The Four Fundamental Concepts Lacan celebrates a limitless Love that exceeds desire (since desire is dependent on the very limits of the law to thrive) and in effect flags jouissance (necessarily beyond the limits of the law) as an aim of analysis, "limitless love" can emerge only in the reduced form of signification, in the realm of desire. In her 1996 article in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Renata Salecl situates love between drive and desire, and I concur, as I've explained. She writes that "the game of courtship is always marked by the allure of the inaccessibility of the object of love, which brings love close to the logic of desire. [At the same time] ... the logic of love goes beyond the logic of desire and touches on the logic of the drive. We can even say that love is placed between desire and drive as an impossible mediator between the two" (p. 91). Yet Salecl's "love" here appears so tame, in its merely mediating capacity, that it seems distinct from, less ferocious than, what Lacan refers to as limitless Love at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts. Perhaps we should distinguish Salecl's love (or desire?) from limitless Love by referring to the former as moving toward a love object (loving/desiring) and the latter as the achievement of Love. (Likewise, I take the notion of Salecl and Zizek that "true love aims at the kernel of the real, at what is in the object more than the object itself" [1996, p. 3] to be about desire's trajectory, aiming at objet a, the subject's missing piece.) To be in Love in this latter sense is to achieve dissolution, the loss of sanity, for it is to cross into the "beyond," to defy the limit of the law, exceeding the

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desire such law produces-and so it gives one a devil of a job. It is to annex to oneself this missing part that one must miss or lack to maintain subjectivity. Therefore it is impossible-as Lacan says in Encore, "love is impossible" (1998, p. 87)-providing entry into the impossible Real. Being limitless, "outside the limits of the law," such a Love may "live," Lacan writes-and I add, can "be lived"-only "there" (r98rlr973, p. 276). Moving toward a love object, second-order love or desire, then, is as a consequence excitingly painful, or perhaps masochistic, since to be in love in this way (loving/desiring) is necessarily to be deprived of the Real love object, object a. As Lacan's opening line in his chapter "Aristotle and Freud: The Other Satisfaction" in Encore states, "All the needs of speaking beings are contaminated by the fact of being involved in an other satisfaction ... 'that those needs may not live up to"' (I998, p. sr). But achieving Love too is painful, or masochistic-the ultimate masochistic act, in a way-in that it requires one's own blissful obliteration, as Antigone/Antigone monstrously demonstrates, and as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet likewise conveys through its excessively passionate, death-driven Italian lovers, committed from the outset to a wedding with death. Although I occasionally refer to desire as love, then, second-order love is essentially desire; what I refer to as third-order Love, the Love Antigone demonstrates for her brother, is Real Love. Dolar comes around to this view too, in "At First Sight," curiously in addressing the topic of the double: "This extreme situation," he claims, "embodies 'true love,' a love too true to be bearable (not till death do us part, but till death do us unite)" (1996, p. r4r). (I might note here as well that it is as "an extreme situation" that Agamben characterizes love in Remnants ofAuschwitz [1999, p. 69].) In "Love Outside the Limits of the Law," MacCannell puts her version of this same idea in terms of the risk of uniting sex and love, discerning like Dolar the threat of a collision of doubles: "In sexed love the object and its double collide" (1994, p. 41). MacCannell elaborates on "why sex is dangerous, precarious, too hot to handle when it is linked to love": "The tension between the beloved object and the object a ... is the very cause of our existence ... in each sex act where love is implicated, that love is put on the line by confronting love with its own object a" (1994, p. 42). Collapsing into her object a, Antigone falls into the abyss of Real Love, which fails to mediate between her drive and a desire she might have acted on in the world. Her demise underscores the incestuous quality of "true love" as well as its potential to be fatal.

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The Passion ofAntigone What is desire? ... realizing one's desire is necessarily always raised from the point of view of an absolute condition. It is [the] trespassing of death on life that gives its dynamism to any question that attempts to find a formulation for the subject of the realization of desire. LAc AN,

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

If we take into account Lacan's three orders of love-Imaginary, Symbolic, Real-and specifically the distinction I have highlighted between desire (or "loving") and Love ("being in love," the achievement of Love), we are better able to understand what Lacan means when he acknowledges that Sophocles' Antigone is a turning point in the field of ethics as well as his proposition that Antigone illustrates in particular the ethics of psychoanalysis. But before proceeding, we must undo some work that has had widespread influence. It is not that Antigone, propelled by a "death drive," refuses to cede, or give ground on, her desire and thereby commits an ethical act. This seems to be the dominant Lacanian view of what Antigone represents, at least in the United States. She is taken as a model for the subject, as if in order to be most ethical we all ought to cling passionately to an object-cause of desire to the point of killing ourselves over it. Zizek leads readers astray, in stating in Looking Awry, that "the femme fatale embodies a radical ethical attitude, that of 'not ceding one's desire,' of persisting in it to the very end when its true nature as the death drive is revealed" (1991, p. 63) and in turn that Carmen is "an ethical figure of the lineage of Antigone" (1991, p. 63). Carmen and Antigone are here yoked together, in Zizek's mind, by an ethical attitude that-he mistakenly writes-"we could describe (according to the Lacanian reading of Antigone) as an unreserved acceptance of the death drive, as a striving for radical self-annihilation" (1991, pp. 63-64). I say "mistakenly" for one thing because, according to Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it is jouissance (and not desire) that implies "the [unreserved] acceptance of death" (1992, p. 189; keep in mind that Zizek claims that Antigone has not ceded her desire). Jouissance satisfies a drive; it contains "unconscious aggression," a "frightening core of the destrudo" (Lacan, 1992, p. 194). A death drive would point directly to the site of the Thing; and at that site desire could hardly thrive but would be extin-

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guished. Zizek's femme fatale, Carmen, Antigone, Christ-all have a craving for death. Rather than desire, it is jouissance they refuse to cede, and nowhere does Lacan assert that not to cede one's immersion in jouissance is ethical. Zizek is mistaken in his particular reading of Antigone as ethical also insofar as Lacan sets up a significant parallel between the play and the ethics of psychoanalysis. Lacan focuses on analysis-what he considers to be "an invitation to the revelation" of the subject's desire (1992, p. 221)-at the beginning of his full-fledged discussion of the Sophoclean tragedy. Punning, in "The Splendor of Antigone," he makes an analogy (one critics have disregarded) between Greek tragedy and the more mundane tragedy "in the forefront" of the experience of analysts (Lacan, 1992, p. 243). By attending to Greek tragedy, in particular Antigone, one can, Lacan more than implies, learn better how to alleviate its analogous crisis in everyday life. Lacan, as I shall elaborate, pairs Antigone not with the desiring (or potentially desiring) subject but with the analyst, while he pairs the spectator of the play with the analysand. Catharsis is the key (although not quite Aristotle's kind) where a purgation of pity and fear takes place, or even a purification. Lacan's notion of catharsis is more akin to what Aristotle speaks of in book VIII of the Politics, where Aristotle illustrates the concept through disturbing music that turns the stomach over, that elicits Dionysian frenzy. It is by ecstatically dipping into the pool of jouissance, after a crisis in another dimension, that one's desire is generated or restored. Lacan approaches the problem of catharsis, he writes, "from the perspective imposed on us by what we have articulated on the subject of the proper place of desire in the economy of the Freudian Thing." Lacan's work on desire, he believes, allows us to comprehend tragedy anew; and it seems, conversely, that the play has something to teach us about desire. As Lacan asserts, ''Antigone reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire" (1992, p. 247). But whose line of sight is Lacan referring to here? It is decidedly not Antigone's, for this line of sight defining desire arrives at a mysterious image, one we can barely look at, that forces us to close our eyes the instant we glimpse it. It is of course the central image of Sophocles' tragedy: "the fascinating image of Antigone herself." We are riveted on "Antigone in her unbearable splendor. She has a quality that both attracts and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us"

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(Lacan, 1992, p. 247; my emphasis). Devoted ultimately to death rather than desire, Antigone stands in the place of the gaze, both beckoning and frightening us. In The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan ties fascination to the gaze: "The subject," he contends, "is strictly speaking determined by ... the fascinatory element introduced by the gaze" (1981lr973, p. rr9). As the nonapprehensible gaze, Antigone is privileged in the operation of desire. But what this means-since through a distant relation to the gaze the subject may sustain himself or herself in desire-is that the ethical question about Antigone is, How does she sustain the subject-that is, the spectator-in the function of desire? How does she purge or purify us of, for one thing, the order of the Imaginary? Lacan writes that It is in connection with this power of [Antigone's] attraction that we should look for the true sense, the true mystery, the true significance of tragedyin connection ... in particular, with the singular emotions that are fear and pity, since it is through their intervention ... that we are purged, purified of everything of that order. And that order ... is ... the imaginary. And we are purged of it through the intervention of one image among others [1992, pp. 247-248; my emphases]. Antigone effects such a catharsis-a purgation of the Imaginary-through her beauty, which necessarily, Lacan reveals, emerges in its relation to death. Antigone's splendor derives from her condemnation to the "cruel punishment" of "being buried alive in a tomb" (1992, p. 248). Because Antigone's life overlaps the realm of death, a zone is created in which we may observe, if not experience, the "effect of beauty on desire" (Lacan, 1992, p. 248). At first Lacan describes a reflection and a refraction of desire: "It is when passing through that zone that the beam of desire is both reflected and refracted till it ends up giving us that most strange and most profound of effects" (1992, p. 248). Desire, he proposes, is evoked; this magnificent zone "draws it on." In considering the relation of the audience to the play, as the audience is struck by Antigone's beauty, Charles Shepherdson arrives at a similar conclusion: "Beauty now moves from the imaginary register and takes on the function of a veil, which restrains and even prohibits" (1999,

p. 67). That is, as Antigone's status changes from half-dead to wholly dead, our excitement is rejected, and there is "no longer any object" (Lacan, 1992, p.

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249). This, I suggest, is a precarious moment: Antigone in the end is lost to us. In the course of the play, her morbid beauty draws out our fascination, as the analyst attracts the analysand; but she vanishes, just as the analyst is eventually exposed as a false love object. It is from "idealization," Lacan writes in The Four Fundamental Concepts, "that the analyst has to fall" (198Ii1973, p. 273). What is crucial, however, is that the seeds of desire have been planted. The spectator/analysand (to uphold Lacan's own analogy) is now psychically dilated, open to an object of desire, having encountered and embraced lack. Lacan describes the spectator in a state of Triebregung, a highly charged condition well beyond being moved or emotional, a state in which one has lost more than "his head"-"something closer to the middle of the body, 'his means"' (1992, p. 249). It is a powerful moment of loss coupled with intense arousal. Especially given that we are examining the effects of a play about mourning, about a figure who is overwhelmed by grief and then told that it is illegal for her to mourn and who subsequently yields to melancholia's attraction to death instead of mourning, we might further consider that the loss of Antigone produces the danger of incomplete mourning. Is not the end of the play a critical moment in which we must (obviously this is what I think Lacan insinuates) accept, rather than encrypt, the loss of Antigone and allow her as gaze to sustain us from a distance in desire? It is a moment of powerlessness in the face of a loss that might result in dissolution of subjectivity, or on the brighter side metamorphose into a constitutive lack, upholding subjectivity. Lacan's catharsis is, ideally, our castration. As Zupancic points out, "The 'ethics of psychoanalysis' ... could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration" (2003, p. 177). In other words, Lacan's ethics is the ethics of refusing melancholia, as Antigone herself refuses to do. The spectator becomes enraptured by the fading image of Antigone, one that correlates with Freud's famous Thing, "that prehistoric, that unforgettable Other" (Lacan, 1992, p. 56), what "establishes the orientation of the human subject to the object" (p. 58), what is "characterized by its absence, its strangeness" (p. 63)-at the center insofar as it is excluded, the "first thing that separated itself from everything the subject began to name and articulate" (p. 83). In this experience of rapture, the spectator is by no means alone. His or her fascination is modeled on that of the Chorus. On hearing that Antigone will be buried alive in a tomb, the Chorus, Lacan paraphrases,

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"says in so many words: 'This story is driving us mad; we are losing our grip; we are going out of our minds; as far as this child is concerned we are moved to ..."' (1992, p. 268). The Greek term that Lacan points to here in the place of this ellipsis- lJ.LEpo~-is one, he informs us, that Plato employs in the Phaedrus to signify desire: that is, "the relationship of man to his lack of being" (p. 298). Desire has been "made visible" (p. 268). Modeling the spectator's catharsis or castration, the Chorus is moved to visible desire-because Antigone has breached "the limits of the field of the conflagration" (p. 269). So the Chorus breaks out into a series of songs. Antigone possesses the status of das Ding that inflames the Chorus and enamors the spectator; she represents the Thing in the sense, as ZupanCic articulates it, that she "gives body to the emptiness or void at the core of desire" (2003, p. 185). What is the spectator of Antigone "a spectator of"? Lacan asks. "What is the image represented by Antigone?" (1992, p. 252). To stress that he is referring to a special image rather than spectacle as a whole, Lacan responds to his own questions about Antigone's image, "in passing," through a cryptic allusion to Fellini's La Dolce Vita, in which appears a "disgusting object ... caught by a net in the sea" -a dead blob of a mammal whose mouth and anus are indistinguishable but, despite its state of inertness, whose eye gazes with penetration at the glamorous people surrounding it. This Cyclopean blob is a kind of "goal" that the jet-setters in the film magnetically head toward, and that Lacan's seminar members associate with his "famous Thing." "Now we are ready for Antigone" (1992, p. 253), Lacan writes. Fellini's monster is meant to prepare us, to assist us in regarding Sophocles' "monster." Completing Goethe's reading of Antigone, Lacan explains that it is for Goethe not a question of right versus right, as Hegel sees the tension of the play, but a wrong versus "something else." Not a matter of the sacred rights of the family and the dead (as most readers assume), this something else is Antigone's "passion." To illuminate this passion ("I will try to tell you which one it is" [1992, p. 254]), Lacan explicates and expounds on the controversial passage in which Antigone stresses that she would not have defied the city's law had she lost a husband or child, that it is specifically a brother for whom she has been impervious to Creon's edict. Lacan emphasizes that "The Greek term that expresses the joining of oneself to a brother or sister recurs throughout the play, and it appears right away in the first line when Antigone is speaking to Ismene" (1992, p. 255).

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In other words, an impassioned Antigone has shut out desire predicated on lack, from the beginning. It is not that in the course of the play Antigone transgresses Creon's law and as a result is infused with desire that, by culminating in suicide, exposes the death drive underlying all desire. Creon's law is foreclosed from the start. It is, I would stress, two brothers-one simultaneously in the place of a father-for whom she has preempted the city's law. Antigone earns the status of the Thing through the scandalous incestuous nature of her passion. No desiring subject, bereft of an object of desire (Haimon holds no interest for Antigone), this tragic heroine goes straight to the source-of pathological jouissance-accessing the Thing to coalesce with it. Without interruption, Antigone takes on the devilish job of attempting to annex to herself the missing part that one must lack to maintain subjectivity; and in a sense she succeeds. Her Love is therefore "impossible," catapulting her straight into the impossible Real. From this angle as well, then, we see that Lacan does not hold up Antigone as a model of ethics in not ceding desire, at least Lacanian desire as we know it as "the relationship of man to his lack of being" (the locus of the gaze)-although she very well may enact the ethics of the saint who administers desire-for she is "the one who shows the way of the gods," the one "who is made for love," to quote Lacan, the one who (like Christ) attracts to herself "all the threads of our desire" (1992, p. 262; my emphasis). Again, we can turn to Shepherdson's erudite analysis of Antigone for a complementary perspective. It is the link to her brother, Shepherdson italicizes, that enables us to make sense of Antigone's "status as the tragic heroine, the ethical nature of her position, ... her relation to death, and so on. How then are we to understand this singular, triumphant, and catastrophic attachment? Lacan insists on one word: 'love."' 7 Shepherdson elaborates in a way that buttresses my conception of Antigone as an embodiment of incestuous Love, beyond the Law, in the place of das Ding or Being: The way of the gods is the way of love, and Antigone is guided by their unwritten law ... which not only binds her to her brother but governs the entire course of the dramatic action, determining Antigone's relation to every other figure within it: to Creon, Haemon, Ismene, her father, and thus to politics, marriage, family, and even the unfortunate past, the evil that descends from Oedipus (ap Oidipou kakon, z), transmitting across the generations the legacy of a crime that she did not commit, but that she

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(the child of incest) chooses to assume as her own, as her own destiny or fate. She announces her decision in terms oflove in the opening lines of the play, using the word ph ilia, which she repeats in many places. And after her condemnation, as she is about to be "shut in a tomb" ... cast aside unburied and unmourned, the third choral ode tells us that she goes forth like a goddess and a warrior, and that her face is radiant and shining.... [She is the shining of the "Thing," in Lacan's vocabulary] and what shows in her eyes is love [1999, p. 64]. Antigone establishes the limit, Ate; but it is a limit she crosses, into the realm of annihilation. Lacan mentions that one can spend only a brief time beyond this limit but that Antigone wishes to reside there, in this "beyond," for she cannot bear being subject to Creon's law. Lacan's description of Antigone as "made for love" fits with his later conception of Love in The Four Fundamental Concepts as that which "can be posited only in ... [the] beyond." Antigone is unwilling to accept the paternal metaphor or the incest taboo (Oedipus himself can hardly issue one), the intervention of which would have halted the progress of her limitless Love, "outside the limits of the law, where alone it may live" (Lacan, 1981h973, p. 276). Yet by passing into the beyond, she establishes a limit or break for us. Shepherdson too acknowledges such generosity, which he understands in terms of Antigone's love and beauty. It is "as if [Antigone's] love for her brother were somehow handed over to us: a gift in the form of tragic experience" (1999, p. 68). It is through this transmission of Antigone's Love for her brother to us as a gift that Antigone, or tragedy, indicates the ethics of psychoanalysis. Lacan is not inclined to prescribe or even celebrate martyrdom: "Believe me," he warns, "the day when the martyrs are victorious will be the day of universal conflagration. The play is calculated to demonstrate that fact" (Lacan, 1992, p. 267). However, harking back to what Aristotle says of catharsis through music in chapter VIII of the Politics, we realize that our short-lived experience of such conflagration can restore us to desire lost in crisis. In "Antigone Between Two Deaths," Lacan identifies Antigone as one of Sophocles' heroes whose "race is run" and then proceeds to take up anamorphosis. Rather than being in the place of the desiring subject whose anamorphotic looking awry enables her desiring line of sight, Antigone is the anamorphotic image itself. Through tragedy, Antigone becomes

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an image of passion on which our eyes are fixed. Looked at head on, she appears to fight sensibly and admirably for a sister's right to bury her brother, as well as for divine law over social; looked at awry, she too can be seen (collapsed with Polyneices) as a corpse, as death. In dying, Antigone passes beyond the very limit she has left in her wake, for the sake of her brother who himself has, Lacan notes, "descended into the subterranean world" for the sake of "blood relations," a brother who came from the same womb and bore the same relation to the same father (and brother)-"that criminal father," Lacan highlights, "the consequences of whose crimes Antigone is still suffering from" (1992, p. 279). Antigone's numinousness beckons us and hence offers us "a certain relationship to a beyond" (Lacan, 1992, p. 281). In speaking about "beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty that has been called the splendor of truth," Lacan writes, "It is obviously because truth is not pretty to look at that beauty is, if not its splendor, then at least its envelope .... It stops us, but it also points in the direction of the field of destruction" (p. 217). We are blinded by such beauty, for it is on the threshold of the gaze; but as a result, given that it "points in the direction of the field of destruction," "the unspeakable field of radical desire" (pp. 217, 216), it generates our radical desire, providing the necessary objet a, a concept unformulated in the Ethics seminar but one for which this seminar holds a pregnant place. 8 In contrast (to us), the only thing Antigone "desires," Lacan writes, is death. Her attraction to, and moreover her achievement of, death and Love situate her as our anamorphotic image, in "the field of the Other" (1992, p. 277), so that she can constitute a beautiful blinding focus for the erection of a line of sight of our desire. In fact, Lacan repeats that Antigone is propelled not by a drive but by a "death instinct," making her craving for death seem so elemental that death appears to be co-extensive with her, her badge of identification: "In effect, Antigone herself has been declaring from the beginning 'I am dead and I desire death.' When Antigone depicts herself as Niobe becoming petrified, what is she identifying herself with, if it isn't that inanimate condition in which Freud taught us to recognize the form in which the death instinct is manifested? An illustration of the death instinct is what we find here" (Lacan, 1992, p. 281; my emphases). Identifying with death, Antigone may very well be doubly removed from desire predicated on death, given that in the Ethics seminar Lacan distinguishes the drive from instinct on the grounds that the drive is "deeply

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marked by the articulation of the signifier" (1992, p. 293), while "lnstinkt is not far from the field of das Ding" (p. 90). The formidable lingering question, however, would seem to be how the death instinct can be reconciled with Antigone's desire. Perhaps Lacan solves this dilemma of seeming to attribute desire to Antigone by describing, in "The Paradoxes of Ethics," the goal of the saint as "access to sublime desire and not at all his own desire, for the saint lives and pays for others" (p. 322; my emphasis). Saintliness entails payment, in the form of suffering; someone must pay for desire, with jouissance.

Clinical Ethics: Measuring Love Lacan commences his discussion of Antigone with a comparison of psychoanalysis and tragedy: they share an ethics. Especially in the final section of the Ethics seminar ("The Tragic Dimension of Psychoanalytic Experience"), Lacan is intent on closing in on the ethics of the analyst in a way that subtly reinforces his sense of Antigone's position. In the field of the Other, Antigone would appear to be in the specific place of the "mOther," as the analyst himself or herself so often is. Indeed, Lacan identifies Antigone with Jocasta (mother of four "unique offspring" and possessor of "criminal desire") in asking whether Antigone's desire is linked to that of her mother. Shouldn't Antigone's desire, he queries, "be the desire of the Other and be linked to the desire of the mother?" By way of reply, Lacan states further that "the text alludes to the fact that the desire of the mother is the origin of everything" (1992, pp. 282-283). How I would put all this is that, having inherited the sublime desire, the Love, the incestuous passion of the mOther (both women commit suicide by hanging, in one way or another due to incestuous passion), Antigone in turn, now herself in the field of the mOther, immortalizes the limit that enables our desire-ironically, in part, by relinquishing actual motherhood. If this is the case, Antigone may be taken as representative of the original object-cause of desire, the one whose lack of existence, whose Being-by virtue of being withdrawn and in a sense interdicted-gives birth to the desiring existence of the subject. Antigone's jouissance provides therefore a basis for the spectator's phantasm, which serves as a barrier to the very jouissance that supports it. Likewise (we may deduce, as I have assumed all along, from Lacan's analysis

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of Antigone the proper task of the analyst), the analyst must give-not "the good" that Creon attempts to offer his subjects but-an encounter with the "limit in which the problematic of desire is raised" (Lacan, r992, p. 300). To return to transference love, the analyst does so, I suggest, first by offering an "encounter": "the illusion that the sexual relationship stops not being written-an illusion that something is ... inscribed in each of our destinies, by which, for a while-a time during which things are suspended-what would constitute the sexual relationship finds its trace and its mirage-like path in the being who speaks." It is to this "point of suspension" that all love is attached (Lacan, r998, p. r45). I am quoting now from the end of Encore, where Lacan offers us a glimpse of unsignifiable Love. I use Lacan's description of Love there to suggest here how transference duplicates the structure of Love, how it enables us to persuade ourselves that we can persuade the beloved that our lack may be filled. Antigone is in the place of the analyst, in the field of the Other or mOther, who attempts to be for the analysand in the place of the Thing. Speaking of the art of the analyst, Lacan explains: "It is doubtless possible to achieve for a single moment in this act something which enables one human being to be for another in the place that is both living and dead of the Thing. In this act and only at this moment, [the analyst] may simulate with his flesh the consummation of what he is not under any circumstances" (r992, p. 300). Through the transference, through transference love, the analysand (like the spectator of tragedy) receives a limit that shapes life at the point when something connected to misfortune is encountered and let go. The spectator/analysand is eventually purged of this, in an act of cathartic separation. In Lacan's reading of Antigone as allegory of Lacanian psychoanalytic technique this idea is even more fully played out. It is not that Antigone as the unbarred Other/mOther immediately, without turmoil, fades away and dies. She also has a misleading moment of worldly desire. Despite his stress on Antigone's incestuous passion as well as her death instinct, Lacan notes at one remarkable point that, having "affirmed herself to be," having established that "she is in the kingdom of the dead" -now that this idea is "consecrated"-having accepted her elimination from the living world, Antigone laments what she is about to lose: a tomb, a dwelling place, a friend to mourn her, marriage, a conjugal bed, children. In contrast to some commentators who have regarded such an outburst as inconsistent with Antigone's coldness and frigidity, Lacan accepts this complaint from

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Antigone as consistent with her character, since "from Antigone's point of view life can only be approached, can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side. But from that place she can see it and live it in the form of something already lost" (1992, p. 28o). It is from this place that "desire ... visibly emanates from the eyelids of this admirable girl" (pp. 280-281)-that is, after she has crossed the limit, only when she is on the other side. Such desire, contained within the field of the Other (a field, I argue, Antigone has occupied from the beginning), is perhaps exactly that: the desire of the mOther. At this moment, do we not witness the necessary lack in the mOther that our lack must encounter for desire to ensue? The Four Fundamental Concepts establishes that, at the point of separation, two lacks are superimposed on one another: "A lack is encountered by the subject in the Other" (Lacan, 1981lr973, p, 214). As a result, the subject may come unconsciously to assume the desire of the Other as the subject's own desire. The Other's desire, in other words, becomes the subject's objectcause, the subject's object a. It might be said, in fact, that Antigone cedes her desire in order not to cede her Love or sublime desire; and from this, we are prompted to cede our incestuous Love so as not to cede our desire. As a result, we can deduce from Lacan's interpretation of Antigone that the ethics of psychoanalysis entails the analyst's eventual gift of desire to the analysand, a gift predicated on the gift of Love (the apparition of which is momentarily encountered but) that finally is withheld. For Love, as Antigone/Antigone demonstrates (and as Ismene warns, in telling Antigone to beware of attempting the impossible), is unsustainable, subjectivityshattering, lacking the gap or distance required for existence. Drive, Love, desire (clinically too) would seem to be the trajectory. Atttigone ultimately fails to overcome her death instinct, to progress from drive to drive-infused desiring subjectivity; instead she falls into the crater of Love between, radiating the desire of the mOther momentarily before expiring. The analysand must not join the analyst in a Love relation, although she or he may for a time aspire to. 9 What the analyst has to give, in the end, is "nothing other than his desire ... an experienced desire" (Lacan, 1992, p. 300), that is, lack or what the analyst does not possess. Likewise, the spectator's unimpeded fascination with Antigone terminates as she or he, having had an encounter with death, completes viewing the play, accepts loss, and moves on-objet a now having been established-in turn completing mourning as Antigone

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herself is unable to do. Through this analogy of tragedy, or aesthetics, and psychoanalysis, wherein the subject gains knowledge of death through the signifier, Lacan covertly makes the point that mourning is ethical. "The function of desire must remain in a fundamental relationship to death," Lacan writes in "The Moral Goals of Psychoanalysis" (1992, p. 303). But to identify with death as Antigone does is to lose, or more accurately to lose out on, desire-to cede, or rather to pre-cede, one's desire. The relationship to death instead must be preserved. Antigone forgoes the tension of desire dependent on a relation to a signifier that would have constructed her subjectivity through "a break, splitting, or ambivalence" (Lacan, 1992, p. 317); she follows "unwritten" laws. Rather, Antigone chooses to wed wholeness, the Thing, incestuous passionate attachments that one must relinquish for the sake of desire, all of which implicitly makes the peculiar point that incestuous passion itself is "unethical." Clinging to original passionate attachments is precisely what causes the subject to cede desire. Keeping all of this in mind, we can accept Lacan's axiom that "from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire" (1992, p. 319). Lacan certainly means to rule out acting in the name of the good as ethical (Creon misconstrues the ethical act); but to underscore Creon's error need not-ought not-lead to an unqualified celebration of the death drive, or death instinct for that matter-which point is of course absolutely not meant to sever desire from death. This chapter throughout has tried to keep firmly in mind Lacan's statement that the "question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real" (1992, p. II)-Antigone's register. However, while-what we will eventually term "radical" -desire is founded on death, unmediated "desire" for death-that is, identification with death, accessing the Thing-is not in fact the desire of the desiring subject but rather the rare, sublime desire of the saint. As will be demonstrated through readings of various texts in this book, it is the sublime desire of the saint, the passion/Love of the analyst-figure, if not the analyst himself or herself, that gives rise to the radical desire of the subject. I put sublime desire in the category of Love-what Antigone feels for Polyneices-and distinguish the ordinary desire of metonymy (what so many non-Lacanians mistakenly think Lacanian desire is all about, the mere play of the signifier) from radical desire that can emerge only through an encounter with death. It is

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this radical desire-that we should avoid fleeing-that Lacan believes the subject benefits from enacting. Desire supports, and is necessarily supported by, an unconscious theme, Lacan tells us. Articulating this theme "roots us in a particular destiny, and that destiny demands insistently that the debt be paid" (1992, p. 319). Antigone (I assert this well aware of its irony) fails to pay her debt but takes her passion freely and purely; at the same time, she pays for ours, just as, Lacan points out, "an analyst has to pay something if he is to play his role" (p. 291). Obviously Antigone does not walk the common path, which is a way of giving up on one's desire, but she flies off the cliff. Psychoanalytic "ethical guidance" would lead us to realize that desire emerges in the gap between "what we are" and "what we are not" (p. 321). Antigone founds for us what we are not, so that we can find our measure. Again my position-here, on Lacan's weighty concept of desire-overlaps with ZupanciC's: "Desire," she postulates, "is nothing but this 'infinite measure,' or, to borrow Kant's term, a 'negative magnitude.' In this perspective, to realize one's desire means to realize, to 'measure' the infinite, and to give body to this negative magnitude" (2003, p. 184). Although Zizek in Looking Awry mistakes Antigone's supposed death drive as desire that Antigone refuses to cede, at the very end of The Plague of Fantasies he curiously verges on coming around, in general, to the perspective I elaborated on the ethics of psychoanalysis. Zizek has located a surprising Aristotelian streak in Kant, which leads him to comment that approached from this Kantian standpoint, Lacan's ne pas ceder sur son desir (the ethical injunction not to compromise on one's desire) in no way condones the suicidal persistence in following one's Thing; on the contrary, it enjoins us to remain faithful to our desire as sustained by the Law of maintaining a minimal distance towards the Thing-one is faithful to one's desire by maintaining the gap which sustains desire, the gap on account of which the incestuous Thing forever eludes the subject's grasp. Translated into ethical terms, the opposition between desire and drive is thus the opposition between the attitude of "No trespassing," respecting the secret of the Other, stopping short of the lethal domain ofjouissance, and the reverse attitude of "going right to the end," unconditional insistence which follows its course irrespective of all "pathological considerations" [1997, p. 239].

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This statement might seem simply to represent Kant's Aristotelian stance (rather than Zizek's), except that Zizek, still in The Plague of Fantasies, subsequently associates drive with modernity and desire with postmodernity (I myself would reverse these associations, which at another point Zizek himself does) and then proceeds to write about the postmodern attitude what he might have written, years ago, about Antigone: that it is characterized by "the radical ambiguity of the subject's impossible relationship to the Thing-we can derive energy from it, but if we approach it too closely its lethal attraction will swallow us up." Zizek goes so far as to appear to admonish the subject that she or he "must learn the artifice of surviving the experience of a radical Limit, of circulating around the lethal abyss without being swallowed up by it" (1997, p. 239). In referring to "a radical Limit," can Zizek possibly not have Antigone's Ate in mind?

Terrorism

Lacan's notion of the ethics of psychoanalysis has been misconceived for understandable reasons. His discussion does not cleanly distinguish between desire that Lacan attempts to define throughout seminar VII in relation to death and sublime desire or Love (the death instinct), engagement with which serves as a kind of prerequisite for radical desire. In other words, Lacan does not sufficiently clarify the difference between the ethics of desire-that of the spectator, analysand, or subject-and the ethics of the "saint" or analyst. The latter cedes desire (gives it up as a gift) paying the price of jouissance-a relation to which is "required" for the desire of the former. "There is no other good," Lacan specifies in the Ethics seminar as his "fourth proposition" under the rubric of ethical guidance, "than that which may serve to pay the price for access to desire" (1992, p. 32 1). In a sense, we have here the operation of two intensely imbricated ethical acts, on two distinct levels. Frustrated by his inability to convey his distinction between the hero and the subject (in fact, at one point he puts them "in opposition"), Lacan writes that "it is precisely to the extent that the hero guides himself correctly ... that he experiences all the passions in which the ordinary man is entangled, except that in his [the hero's] case they are pure and he succeeds in supporting himself fully" (1992, p. 320). The "ordinary man" is entangled

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in those pure passions in which the hero is immersed. Likewise, after defining the hero as "someone who may be betrayed with impunity," Lacan unambiguously asserts that such heroism is "something that not everyone can achieve" (p. 321). But what we must equally not lose sight of is his central point that desire is more than the simple "modulation of the signifying chain"; it is "that which flows beneath it as well." It is "what we are as well as what we are not" (p. 321). It is what entanglement with the hero can help us realize. This conception of desire leads to the paradox of Lacanian ethics. To experience desire, the subject must enter the zone of "those who go crazy through a trance, through religious experience, through passion or through anything else," but he or she must return, pull out, having gained a sense of what he or she is not, which is precisely what Lacan believes Antigone founds for us: that is, what we are not (1992, p. 323). Social acts of violencecult suicides, self-immolation, kamikaze terrorism, take your pick-on the model of Antigone's extravagance, her death instinct, would be justified by the so-called "ethics of jouissance" that certain Lacanians CZizek for instance-much of the time, anyway) assume is the meaning ofLacan's seventh seminar. But this deduction is based on an insufficiently nuanced reading of passion in La can. Effective political change on the model of Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis would spring from various encounters with such acts, which in turn would provide political motivation propelled by radical desire: what the United States might have effected had it allowed itself to reap the benefits of September II, 2001, to "question our own innocence" CZizek, 2002, p. 142). Had the United States embraced this "Event" (to use Badiou's central concept in his intense study Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil) as its own authentic act, as Zizek argues in Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, September II could have enabled the United States to traverse its fantasy of consumerism. It is not that the September II terrorists committed an ethical act (nor does Zizek exactly say this, although his reading of Antigone might tempt readers to assume that he does). 10 But they created an opportunity (unseized, insofar as the reaction of the United States was an "unprecedented strengthening of American hegemony" [Zizek, 2002, p. 144]) for the United States to confront its death drive (as Zizek conceptualizes it), expressed prior to September II entertainingly as a fantasy of self-annihilation in one film after another presaging the Real Thing-the

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chance to shape an admirable, radical political desire. Using analysis as the paradigm for all of this, it is helpful to remind ourselves that: "If there is an ethics of psychoanalysis, ... it is to the extent that analysis in some way or other ... offers something that is presented as a measure of our action" (Lacan, 1992, p. 3rr). Lacan is no terrorist.

CHAPTER TWO

Modernism's Lacanian Ethics

Compensating for the Lack ofa Sexual Relation He moans, weeps. In dreadful love. And, weeping, he makes love. At first, pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changed, slowly drawn away, borne toward pleasure, clasped to it. The sea, formless, simply beyond compare.

I asked him to do it again and again. Do it to me. And he did, did it in the unctuousness of blood. And it really was unto death. It has been unto death.

Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death, as they both call it. MARG

uERIT

E

n u R A s , The Lover

Initially by way ofFoucault's early study Madness and Civilization, this chapter entertains the idea that modernism-by which I mean what is known as early twentieth-century, European "high modernism"-bears historically a new relationship to the beyond, the Real, and death, and that its main effort is to negotiate that relationship through writing. My inclination is to read modern art as affiliated with desire and postmodern art with the drive. Zizek lends support to this view in The Fragile Absolute in observing that postmodern art objects tend to fill in "the sacred place of the Thing" with some sort of "excremental object, a piece of trash that can never be 'up to its task,"' whereas modern art keeps open the gap in the structure, preserving "the empty ('sacred') place of the Thing exempted from the circuit of everyday economy" (2ooo, p. 26). 1 Reading modernist novels, one has the 28

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sense that their words are either striving to capture the inarticulable, the chaos or madness beyond their order or struggling to fend it off, to preclude implosion of the fragile, poetic, linguistic network trying to hold its own against the potentially invading tide of opacity. Modernism's own density might be read as a bold attempt at reflection of an ultimately unsignifiable "reality." Or again, it might be taken as a dam against the deluge of madness/the Real. In Looking Aw1y, Zizek conveys this latter idea through a reading of a science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession ofJonathan Haag. Zizek too is talking about a "frontier," which separates what appears objectively from "the 'substance of enjoyment"' that can be perceived only by "looking awry." Language (like desire) saves us from the "void of the Thing that can be filled out only by an anamorphotic gaze from aside" (I99I, p. I3). Without going into meticulous detail about the Heinlein story, I'll simply mention that at one point a couple in a car choose to disregard a prohibition against opening their car window. When they do roll it down, they encounter "Nothing but a grey formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life," a grayness that begins to drift into the car. Zizek reads this "grey formless mist" as emblematic of the unsignifiable Real, "the pulsing of the presymbolic substance in its abhorrent vitality" (I99I, pp. I4-I5). Modernism would seem to be replete with such moments, some rather prolonged-think of "Time Passes" in Woolf's To the Lighthouse-in which, one could claim, the Lacanian Real, via the semiotic signifier deployed so deftly by the modernist writer, begins to seep through, osmotically to penetrate the walls of the Symbolic. Modernism, I suggest, is fascinated with the Real-Lacan's register of the unsignifiable; the "mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious" (I998, p. I3I)-and in particular with the form it takes of the lack, or impossibility, of a sexual relation, as we shall see. In Encore, Lacan insists that "the sexual relationship cannot be written [ne peut pas s'ecrire]," that "everything that is written stems from the fact that it will forever be impossible to write, as such, the sexual relationship," and that "it is on that basis that there is a certain effect of discourse, which is called writing" (I998, p. 35). All writing may, as Lacan proposes, stem from this impossibility, but modernism in particular wrestles with the paradox of articulating the inarticulable.

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Foucault's Modernist Sublime But before addressing the question of modernism's marking of the failure of the sexual relation, I want to locate Lacanian premises in Foucault to substantiate the idea that modernism bears a special rapport with the "beyond," which takes (in Foucault) the form of madness. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault traces multiple conceptions of madness through historical periods, to show how madness metamorphoses as it is historically configured and reconfigured. Madness starts off in the Middle Ages as a force through which man confronts the secret powers of the world. Madness was, in Medieval times, not silent; nor was it sequestered. Rather, it was ubiquitous. By the end of the Middle Ages, Foucault tells us, madness had become a gigantic figure. But by the time of the Renaissance, animality reveals the truth of man, that is, the sterile madness of men's hearts; and the animal that begins to haunt man is his own nature. Already, as folly comes to the fore, madness is no longer linked to the subterranean forms of the world but to man and his foibles, dreams, illusions. Although an externally tragic experience of madness emerges in Shakespeare, where madness does occupy an extreme place, Foucault emphasizes that by the time of that era madness had insinuated itself within man. His narcissistic presumption causes madness, which has become a commonplace spectacle. By the seventeenth century, madness is no longer considered in its tragic reality but in the irony of its illusions. The distressing forms of Bosch's paintings have shed their violence. In a way, as Foucault expresses it, the seventeenth century is "hospitable" to madness. It confines it in a place that is ostensibly a hospital of the mad: the madhouse. With the prodigious houses of confinement of the seventeenth century, madness is reduced to silence. Oddly enough, not connected to a medical concept, the General Hospital of Paris is founded through power established by the king, in (as Foucault sees it) an order of repression. The monarchical and bourgeois order-a police matter-is in part organized as a network of general hospitals spread throughout France to become a phenomenon of the classical period. No longer is there a mingling, as there once was in the Renaissance, of madness and reason. Now, madness discloses the secret of animality; and animals are seen as an antinatural threat to order. Even the madness of the Cross and Christ, who had sanctified madness, begins to fade. Perceived as a darkness that could be engulfing, an absolute freedom, madness is

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chained, moved to the level of unreason, as part of Reason's attempt to strangle it. 2 Eventually, guilt and punishment are linked to madness, as psychology and morality form a bond. In the nineteenth century, with scientific psychiatry, the hospital stresses not curing but correcting. Madness, now considered a weakness, deserves regulation and punishment. With the birth of the asylum, madmen were made to feel morally responsible, to recognize the Other, and to accept the judgment and surveillance of the keeper. In his argument against psychoanalysis, Foucault italicizes the emphasis on the family and the perception of the mad person as a child enveloped in a "parental complex," not to mention patriarchy. Madness is seen as a rebellion against the Father, a social failure (rather than a fall). Hence silence is used to humiliate the mad; the mad undergo abasement, as they are asked to judge themselves, to internalize morality and guilt. A juridical and moral authority, the physician looms large as a figure who imposes his authority for the sake of restoring order. Yet emerging as a pathology-that is, by the time of Freud with his linkage of madness to disease-madness has at least been peeled away from mere unreason. For this, Foucault is grateful to psychoanalysis (although he critiques it for sustaining the fundamental structure of confinement): "Freud demystified all the other asylum structures: he abolished silence and observation, he eliminated madness's recognition of itself in the mirror of its own spectacle, he silenced the instances of condemnation. But on the other hand he exploited the structure that enveloped the medical personage; he amplified its thaumaturgical virtues, preparing for its omnipotence a quasi-divine status" (1988, p. 277). Distancing psychoanalysis (which here Foucault ludicrously shrinks and severely distorts) from the Modern Period, Foucault concludes with his notion of a grand breakthrough of madness as chaos and apocalypse. With the onset of modernism, madness breaks free from all the sundry confinements of the past. The nothingness of unreason is, Foucault writes, "rediscover[ed]" (p. z8z; my emphasis), through philosophers and artists such as Nietzsche and Artaud. Foucault also leaves us with a compelling, and I think Lacanian, assertion that "where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth" (pp. 288-289). I read this conception of the relation of art and madness as a version of

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what I was trying to convey early on: that modernist art (like desire) fends off madness (as Woolf, in particular, is so well known to have deployed her art to do), chaos, the Real, the beyond. At the same time, modernist art (again like radical desire) is tethered to madness, braided together with it in a way that no other artistic movement has known. Foucault extends this idea by congratulating the Modern Period for turning man's relationship to madness around. With Goya, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Nerval, Artaud, madness is no longer measured; it measures man. It no longer has to justify itself; the human subject must justify himself or herself in the face of its power. Ruse and new triumph of madness: the world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness, since in its struggles and agonies it measures itself by the excess of works like those of Nietzsche, ofVan Gogh, of Artaud. And nothing in itself, especially not what it can know of madness, assures the world that it is justified by such works of madness [Foucault, 1988, p. 289]. I am struck by Foucault's depiction of madness as a presiding, persistent, triumphant force that exceeds the various confines in which most eras tried to contain it. He seems to favor certain historical periods that allow madness to expand into its true proportions, enabling it to detach itself from mere unreason, which conception is used to reduce madness. It does seem that, for Foucault, something called madness is there or is not there-beyond cultural construction-that can be and has been diminished, rather than madness being merely produced and reproduced ex nihilo period by period. Admittedly, each era Foucault speaks about has its own cookie cutter, so that the shape of madness continues to vary; but no cookie cutter cuts all the dough. Madness and Civilization presents a transhistorical concept whose excess, beyond history, could be glimpsed by one period alone (Foucault stops short of postmodernism). When Foucault arrives at modernism, he seems not inclined merely to add another term to the history of the cultural construction of madness. He seems to endorse the historical discovery of a condition not itself historical, but beyond humans and their cultural fabrications, even judging humans and their cultural fabrications. Modernist madness, in Foucault, is incommensurable with other forms of madness because it is itself the measure.

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Madness ceases to be susceptible to human ordering. What according to Foucault modernists discovered through their confrontation with madness is what Lacan calls "the beyond," that which is produced by virtue of the formation of the Symbolic. Having had these insights, Madness and Civilization serves as a springboard into the topic of modernism's relation-or failed, desiring relation-to Lacan's register of the Real. In an elegant, petite book, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, John Rajchman offers a lucid and valid account of modernism seen through the lens of Foucault. Rajchman specifically defines a concept of the abstract or modernist sublime whose formula becomes "to represent the unrepresentable" (1985, p. 17). This genre, the modernist sublime, articulates that the world hinges on a fundamental Nothingness that must not be denied. It is modernist angst in particular, Rajchman suggests, that, by defamiliarizing "all-that-is," manages to confront "us with the Nothing behind all the familiar 'things' in the world" (p. 19). Foucault refers to this empty form from which the work of modern art springs, as Rajchman points out. In a couple of passages in The Order of Things, the Nothing that is represented in modernism, in a sense by default, is characterized specifically. Foucault writes that classical values are overturned in the modernist period as the "'scandalous, the ugly, the impossible' become the object of an almost religious quest. Literature discovers death, anxiety, and nameless desit·e as the limits and truth of experience" (Rajchman, 1985, p. 16; my emphases). Struggling with the oxymoron of modernism bespeaking these unspeakables, Foucault articulates it this way: "Modernist art 'performs' something we believe we cannot represent in ordinary discourse-our own death, our object-less angst, our nameless desire, our fitful 'eroticism"' (Rajchman, 1885, p. 17; my emphasis). These things forever fall short of representation (as Foucault reminds us) insofar as they mark the very limit of what can be represented. Yet somehow too, modernism finds its very freedom in this region where, as Foucault puts it, "death prowls, where thought is extinguished, where the promise of origin interminably recedes" (p. 17)-which is, I think, as fair a definition of Lacan's undefinable register of the Real as any other. With its focus on the backdrop of Nothingness that modernism so intensely measures itself against, Rajchman's study reinforces my emphasis on modernism's attunement to the abyss. As Rajchman points out, this unrepresentable or non discursive realm is variously described as "antibour-

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geois, post-Cartesian, Dionysian, or pre-Oedipal," depending on which modernist master one privileges: Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche, or Freud. Had Rajchman added Lacan, of course, the Real would be next in line. But despite Rajchman's omission of Lacan in this particular list, he offers us plenty of compelling assertions in support of the idea that it is Lacan who might be seen as the modernist master out of whose theory emerges the most appropriate term to describe the indescribable realm that modernism is pressed up against. To Rajchman, Lacan "transformed psychoanalysis into the great theory of modernist culture" (I985, p. I I). "In Lacan's work from the I93os," Rajchman proposes, "we may now read the ingredients of the transformation of psychoanalysis into a practice that matches modernist poetic experience" (p. 21). Rajchman perceives Lacan and literary modernism mutually upholding the point "that a technocratic normalizing psychotherapy, symbolized by America, is the source of the betrayal of psychoanalysis as literary science," a betrayal of its status as "a theory of la lettre" (p. 21). Psychoanalysis is the theory of modernist culture, just as modernist poetics inheres in psychoanalysis.

The Real Event in E. M. Forster's A Room with a View In his study, Rajchman blends his own conception of modernism with Foucault's to produce a theory that generally prepares for an analysis of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View as a modernist text that presents the impossibility of the sexual relation as tantamount to death/the Real, even as it binds desire ("our nameless desire, our fitful 'eroticism"') to that impossibility, to death and the Real/beyond. A Room with a View traces the birth of desire in its young heroine as it is enflamed by her guardian's relentless wielding of the law, in conjunction with this heroine's own brush with death, crime, the blood of murder, smeared up against art. Lucy thereby becomes a being-for-death, one who resists ceding her desire and as a result can be seen as committing an ethical act. Cognizant of "the radiance that lies behind all civilization" (Forster, I9o8, p. I 56), A Room with a View flaunts its modernist assumption of a "beyond" in its very title. The novel divides people into those "ignorant" enough not to have a view and those "knowledgeable" enough to possess one-that is, into "two classes-those who forget views and those who remember them." Mr.

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Emerson establishes the "one perfect view" as "the view of the sky straight over our heads," of which "views on earth" serve Platonically as "bungled copies." Another time, he tells George and his mother that views are like "crowds-crowds of trees and houses and hills-and are bound to resemble each other, like human crowds-and that the power they have over us is sometimes supernatural" (p. 182). This idea causes Lucy's lips to part, which is oddly enough an appropriate response given that A Room with a View, in a Lacanian gesture, insists on a connection between erotic love-love grounded in the body, in the blood that rushes through the body-and the "beyond." Desire, in Forster as in Lacan, is necessarily anchored in the Real, well beyond the pleasure principle. Forster establishes this point in part by contrasting desire with his version of courtly love. Forster backs up Lacan in exposing courtly love as an act of sublimation that attempts to colonize das Ding through an Imaginary scheme. The courtly lover deludes himself into thinking that his Lady, his object, is on the level of das Ding, which of course is a delusion insofar as das Ding can never really be imagined, signified, or embodied. If anything, emptiness alone can represent the Thing, which Lacan at one point regards as "a beyond of the sacred" (1992, p. 140). But feudal society puts woman in this position even as her "effective position" is "nothing more than a correlative of the functions of social exchange, the support of a certain number of goods and of symbols of power" (p. 147), an apt description of Lucy's value for Cecil. It is no doubt by emptying the feminine object of all substance (as Lucy is evacuated in Cecil's conception of her) that courtly love manages to appear to encircle the Thing in the figure of the Lady. Fully in the spirit of this reading of him, Cecil murmurs to Lucy: "So you do love me, little thing?" (p. 137; my emphasis). This ideology, as Lacan spells out and Forster illustrates through Cecil, is fundamentally narcissistic. Correlatively, the barrier between this courtly lover and his Lady, the barrier of her purity, is revealed in the novel to be totally inadequate for galvanizing desire as compared with the "true barrier that holds the [desiring] subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction" (Lacan, 1992, p. 216). Lacan discusses this limit (his Ate), as we know from Chapter One, in terms of beauty: "It is obviously because truth is not pretty to look at that beauty is, if not its splendor, then at least its envelope" (p. 217). Forster prefigures Lacan's emphasis-on beauty as what stops us from fully entering,

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at the same time as it points in the direction and partakes of, destructive jouissance. We will work back up to this topic of the limit of beauty by first engaging Forster's Lacanian understanding of the function of the Law. According to Lacan, one can know of the Thing only through the Law. Without the commandment, the Thing is dead. Yet not only is the Thing dependent on the Law, but of course desire (also dependent on das Ding) is as well. Lacan attributes to the Law against coveting our desire to covet. He writes, "The dialectical relationship between desire and the Law causes our desire to flare up only in relation to the Law" (Lacan, 1992, pp. 83-84). To violate an interdiction is to attain a relationship to desire, even to introduce "an erotics," Lacan claims, "above morality" (p. 84). In A Room with a View, it is unmistakably Charlotte Bartlett who presents a "law" against desire that causes Lucy's desire to flare up. From the start, Charlotte is depicted as "repressing Lucy," in particular when Mr. Emerson discusses his and George's invaluable "view." Given the discussion topic, it is as though Charlotte wants to deprive Lucy of access to the beyond/the Real, where her desire might be unleashed. Yet, in fact, Charlotte might be said to generate Lucy's desire, even specifically for George, by disapproving prudishly of her occupying his room with a view-as if to sleep in his room is to sleep with him. Miss Bartlett looms large on various occasions to interrupt Lucy and George engaged in intimate talk or kissing. She seems to have an instinct for their desire; yet my point is that her interdiction of their desire is what causes their instinct. After George kisses Lucy the first time, amid a "profusion" of violets, Miss Bartlett, emerging seemingly out of nowhere, breaks the silence and stands "against the view" (Forster, 1908, p. 78)-as if to block their access to the excess they were participating in, ironically as a result of her role as impediment. Charlotte continues to intervene, and the novel provocatively and provisionally entertains the idea that her disapproval of desire leads to a loveless world. But as Salecl has argued forcefully and well in (Per)versions ofLove and Hate, such social disapproval actually is responsible for inducing an opposite effect. A Room with a View is quite explicit about this inverse relation by the time of the second kiss, since Lucy blames Charlotte for its occurrence. At the end Lucy and George, now united, come to the realization that Charlotte contributed to their relationship all along, though (and through) fighting them on the surface. As George remarks, "she kept [him]

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alive in [Lucy] all the summer; ... she gave [Lucy] no peace" (Forster, 19o8, p. 242). In an essay titled "'I Can't Love You Unless I Give You Up,"' Salecl exposes the illusion about love "that prohibition and social codes prevent its realization" (1998, p. 6). Studying the role of institutions, rituals, and social codes in relation to human love, she basically shows that rather than preventing love the institution enables it. But Lacanian love/desire is not just a question, as Salecl surely knows, of a social code producing an inaccessible object. In a sense, that is what we have in courtly love. The constraint of the social symbolic may very well enhance desire; but when Lacan writes that '"the divine place of the Other' consecrates the relationship between subjects, as long as the providence of the desire of the loved one inscribes itself in this divine place" (Salecl, 1998, p. 17), he is not referring to the big Other or Symbolic Order-which is hardly (in) a divine place. Salecl may need to reconcile her sense of the function of the big Other producing desire with her awareness of Lacan's proposition that in "love" (secondorder love/desire) the other loves you "for something ... in you more than yourself" (1998, p. 29). InA Room with a View, the two-the social, symbolic law, as put into effect by Charlotte, and the absence or das Ding at the heart of the desiring relation-operate in tandem. Had Lucy experienced only Charlotte's various expressions of disapproval and disruptive interventions, her desire, though it may have flared up, would not have sprouted roots or (Platonically) taken wing(s). As Lacan writes about the "channel in which desire is located," it is more than the modulation of the signifying chain; it is "that which flows beneath it as well," "what we are as well as what we are not, our being and our non-being" (1992, p. 321). Lacan's thesis in the Ethics seminar is that the moral law, "insofar as it is structured by the symbolic, is that through which the real is actualizedthe real as such, the weight of the real" (1992, p. 20). Lacan stresses that what he is getting at is the relation "of the subject to something primordial, its attachment to ... the most archaic of objects for which [the] field of das Ding, defined operationally, establishes the framework" (p. 106); Lacan zeroes in on "an emptiness at the core" (p. 163). "One's desire," then, as we have seen in Chapter One, "is necessarily always raised from the point of view of an absolute condition" (p. 294; my emphasis). Even more directly pertinent to the raising up of desire in A Room with a View is Lacan's assertion that "it is this trespassing of death on life that gives its dynamism

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to any question that attempts to find a formulation for the subject of the realization of desire" (1992, p. 294). Put simply and bluntly: "The function of desire must remain in a fundamental relationship to death" (p. 303). To experience, if not secure, such a relationship (to death), one must at least momentarily exceed the limit. Lacan offers Oedipus as an example of someone who enters "that zone," crosses the limit, and consequently becomes a "being-for-death." Although in a way it sounds ludicrous to make this comparison (since Oedipus seems so much weightier than Forster's heroine), Lucy Honeychurch in Forster's novel is presented as undergoing a similar transformation, through her engagement with annihilation. Lucy crosses the limit in confronting death in the murder scene in the square in Florence. Mortality would appear to be the "message" that the murdered man opens his lips to deliver, as a "stream of red" pours forth from them (Forster, 1908, p. 48). By this act Lucy is transformed: "It was not exactly that a man had died; something had happened to the living" (p. 52). A great deal has happened to Lucy: she has encountered annihilation, and her desire has attached itself to George, as he at the time of the encounter with the murdered victim gazes at her "across the spot where the man had been." As if to suggest a traversal of Lucy's fundamental fantasy, Forster stresses, "across something" (p. 48): like the dying man, Lucy, we are told, "had crossed some spiritual boundary" (p. 49). Lucy exceeds the limit, traverses a boundary, and so is able to cathect George as a love object; George becomes the cause of her desire, objet a. Forster also reflects his own novelistic transfer of the death in the Florence square into art, as the blood of the murdered man splatters onto Lucy's art prints. By subsequently throwing the photos (as they are called) into the river, George bridges art and death, as death is emblematized in the "almost black" Arno rushing beneath them (Forster, 1908, p. 51): "For the real event-whatever it was-had taken place, not in the Loggia, but by the river" (p. 68). The idea of a signifier of beauty being produced out of all the murderous turmoil, a signifier that provides linkage with, as well as protection against, the Real, is clinched at the end of chapter 4 when Lucy "hears" the River, "whose roar was suggesting some unexpected melody to her ears" (p. 52). In a quintessentially modernist movement, from the chaotic flow emerges aesthetic form. Later, in the violet-kissing scene, a scene of desire made possible by the death in the square ("I have cared for you since that man died," George testifies to Lucy [p. 192]), beauty still bears such an

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intimate relation with the Arno River that beauty has the capacity to gush "out to water the earth" (p. 78). Flowers "beat against [Lucy's] dress in blue waves" (p. 78)-as though beauty is so new, just born, that it is vulnerable to collapsing back into its wet origin. But a complete traversal of Lucy's fundamental fantasy-which I think the novel insinuates is bound up with Lucy's father, since he is for her the original bestower of a view-does not occur until she undergoes pseudoanalysis (albeit very crude) with pseudoanalyst Mr. Emerson. He is introduced early in the novel (by a "little old lady") as the sort of person who does things indelicately but at the same time beautifully (p. I2); in the place of beauty (like Lacan's Antigone), Mr. Emerson also serves as Lucy's subject-supposed-to-know. 3 In the paternal position, he can draw transferentially her love for her now-dead father, who built Windy Corner with its garden and "dear view" (p. 224), a home "transfigured by the view beyond, for Windy Corner was built on the range that overlooks the Sussex Weald" (p. roo; my emphasis). Toward the end of A Room with a View, when Lucy seems to lie frantically to everyone, including herself, she faces the truth calmly with Mr. Emerson because he is "so dignified in his approach to the gulf" (p. 232). Out of their shared entry into that gulf, the darkness, and muddle emerges Mr. Emerson's gift to Lucy of his desire, when he ejaculates the words, "You love George!" (p. 233). Mr. Emerson's epiphany might be read as bespeaking the desire of the Other, the analyst's desire, which the analyst has to give. The analyst offers, Lacan writes in the Ethics seminar, "nothing other than his desire, like that of the analysand, with the difference that it is an experienced desire" (Lacan, 1992, p. 300). Mr. Emerson pontificates on love, espousing that "love is eternal" and that "love is of the body" (Forster, 1908, pp. 233-234). As he speaks, darkness is "withdrawn, veil after veil," and Lucy sees "to the bottom of her soul" (p. 234). Again depicting Mr. Emerson as analyst, the text refers to him as having "the face of a saint who understood"; "he had shown her the holiness of direct desire" (p. 236). Through Mr. Emerson, Lucy avoids ceding her desire and instead discovers and acts in conformity with it. Although Lacan does not write about or conceive of an ethical subject per se, Lucy's behavior might allow us to regard her as acting ethically. Lacan defines the ethics of psychoanalysis as a relationship between action and desire that results from "a triumph of death," meaning "a triumph of being-for-death that is formulated in Oedipus's ...

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negation that is identical to the entrance of the subject supported by the signifier" (1992, p. 313). Lacan states that the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the Real, but he is (as I have argued) by no means advocating permanent occupation of the Real. Ethics entails a room with a view; it is articulated from the point of view, a position of desire, the position of a subject with an eye on death. With her eye on death, as she is "conscious of a love more mysterious than" hers with George, a (third-order) Love associated in the final line of the text with "the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean" (Forster, 1908, p. 242), Lucy ethically refuses to bear "false witness against das Ding, that is to say, the place of desire" (Lacan, 1992, pp. 109-no). Forster's narrator puts it this way: Lucy refuses to sin "against passion and truth ... Eros and against Pallas Athene," so that those "allied deities" do not have to be avenged (1908, p. 201). Yet despite all their passion, Lucy and George by no means achieve a sexual relation. The modernist texts I analyze in this chapter all work out ways of compensating for the impossibility of such a "relation." A Room with a View amounts to a compensatory paradigm in which each partner is in the place of objet a for the other, in a "subject-to-subject relationship," as Lacan describes it in Encore, of mutual desire that is inscribable (1998, p. 144). Lucy and George coincidentally experience death, along with interdiction of their desire, that transforms them into desiring subjects-for-death. With his access to a "view," George is poised to house Lucy's paternally shaped objet a; Lucy is poised to offer George a female substitute for his melancholic mother, enabled, that is, by all of this mutual psychic experience to peel George away from the maternal Thing into which he is so vulnerable to collapsing. Rather than a sexual relation (the Real Thing), A Room with a View finally represents a marriage of desire (itself a literary fantasy) that could only "be" a sexual relation in the place of the view, that is, at the vanishing point of the trajectory of the view, in the River Arno, so to speak, in the "beyond."

Desire for Death Recent work in psychoanalytic theory has set aside Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis as it is spelled out in seminar VII as an ethics of not ceding one's

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desire. In an Umbra article, "Desire and the Drives," based on the final chapter of his second book, Bruce Fink begins by declaring that Lacan's stress on desire, which leads readers to think that "the ultimate goal of analysis is to dialectize the analysand's desire and then free it from the death-grip of the Other's desire," was part of an early stage. To Fink, Lacan graduates from the belief"that analysis could be brought to a successful end via the Symbolic Order, desire being a phenomenon of language." Again to Fink, Lacan moves beyond even the idea that the analysand "must learn not 'to give up on his or her desire"' (1997, p. 35). Lacan eventually realizes that rather than being a "radical, revolutionary force" (Fink fails to consider the notion of radical desire grounded in an encounter with the Real), unconscious desire is subservient to the law. If desire seeks what the law prohibits, according to Fink's logic, then desire is "entirely dependent on the law (that is, the Other) that brings it into being," and so cannot free itself from the Other. Yet the subject to Lacan-that is, in Fink's conception-is "someThing else" (1997, p. 37). But does the subject as someThing else preclude desire? Would or could such a "subject" be enthralled by jouissance uninterruptedly? Does Lacan devalue desire? Does desire operate merely in the Symbolic? Isn't the subject's status as someThing, after all, psychically linked to his or her own das Ding or lost object/Other and in turn to the capacity to desire (which is why a relation to the gaze, one's constitutive lack, enables desire)? Fink's self-imposed task at this point in his argument is to describe this someThing else as more than (mere) lack that constitutes desire. As a result, he points to Lacan's shift to identifying the subject with the drive. "Satisfaction," rather than metonymic desire, becomes Lacan's focus, Fink argues, along with reformulation of the concept of the drive, which is freed, theoretically, "to pursue object a" (1997, p. 39). Hence the subject as Real emerges; the analysand, Fink proposes, is allowed to "enjoy his enjoyments" (p. 41). An ethics of enjoyment or jouissance is born. Perversion is permitted. I more than accept-! insist-that Lacan moves beyond metonymic desire and that the drive's pursuit of objet a as well as the desiring subject's relation to the Real becomes central, but a subject entirely in the Real is an oxymoron. A subject might confront momentarily his or her annihilation, meet the gaze, but this would be in a moment of desubjectivation-a provisional state of disarray like the analytical state Lacan talks about as necessary for subsequent emergence of desire predicated on knowledge of

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death-rather than a desirable permanent condition. Fink's joyful account of the aim and ethics of psychoanalysis furthermore depathologizes jouissance, turning it into pure Dionysian revelry. Though it must be granted that Lacan thought traversal of one's most basic fantasy allows the subject to live out the drive, this proposition does not translate into a drive of one's own, glorification of jouissance, or the jettisoning of desire; at the same time it is the case, as Fink presumes, that desire is more than mere lack, even more than transgression of the law, as I have tried to demonstrate in my analysis of A Room with a View. Can one even have a drive of one's own? As Shepherdson has laid out in various contexts, the drive is as wedged between "nature" and culture as is psychoanalysis itself. In his introduction to Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis, Shepherdson explains that when the "drive" is "understood in terms of the alternative between biological essentialism and historical construction, the basic vocabulary of psychoanalysis has already been abandoned" (zooo, p. 4). Salecl defines the drive "as a leftover of the operation by which the subject becomes the subject of the signifier and is incorporated into the symbolic structure." She asserts that the "subject is determined on the one hand by ... partial drives, and on the other by the field of the Other, the social symbolic structure," yet reads the drive as paradoxical since "what is left out in the process of symbolization" is "link[ed] with the field of the Other" (1997, p. ros). Salecl is willing to acknowledge that the analysand must deal with his or her drive, which means to her abandoning "the endless perturbations of the Other's desire" (p. ro7). Even so, she posits the subtle (and I think smart as well as valid) idea that "at the end of analysis, the subject finds the answer, which is that the desire of the Other is actually the subject's own desire" (p. ro8). Zupancic nicely handles this same fraught issue differently: Lacan's phrase that desire is the desire of the Other does not exclude the ethical maxim: "do not give up on your desire." In other words, the dimension of the Other does not exclude the authenticity of the subject's desire. The desire of the Other does not present itself in the form of an answer or a commandment ... but-as Lacan points out-in the form of a question or an enigma, comparable to the one that the Sphinx posed to Oedipus .... The statement "desire is the desire of the Other" postulates the Other as the site where the question of desire originally emerges [zooob, p. 164].

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Jacques-Alain Miller also helps to clarify the relation of the drive to the Other: "The drive is not primitive and 'pre-Oedipal drives' are not prelinguistic. What Lacan called the Other is already there in the drive. Thus the drive is cooked. Not only is it not raw, but all of Lacan's demonstrations regarding the drive show that the drive is, indeed, very sophisticated" (1996, P· 315). In addressing the fourth of his four fundamental concepts-the driveLacan clarifies that, although "there seems to be here . . . a reference to some ultimate given, something archaic, primal," his teaching invites us to "renounce" "such a recourse" if we "are to understand the unconscious." This drive is "essentially manifested," he states later in The Four Fundamental Concepts, "on the side of this living being," which he has defined as the "Other," that is, "the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject" (Lacan, 1981h973, p. 203). Drive is not, Lacan establishes here, "essentially organic" (p. 162). As part of his effort to counter the idea of developmental stages in his theory, Lacan explains that it is the intervention of the demand of the Other that causes a move from one drive to the next. My argument with Fink is not, however, one of sheer opposition, since desire is beyond mere metonymy insofar as it must be imbricated with the drive. But to locate in Lacan's theory of the ethics of psychoanalysis a conception of the subject as someThing, it is not the case that we must move solely to drive and dispense with desire. Lacan's idea of desire is not as flat or subjected to law as Fink indicates. Lacan states unequivocally in The Four Fundamental Concepts that the object of desire "that is the cause of desire is the object of the drive-that is to say, the object around which drive turns." All desire, except what Lacan designates as "empty," is "agitated in the

drive" (1981h973, p. 243). This is what I take to be the desire that Lacan urges us not to cede. It is a mistake to position jouissance and drive on the one side and desire on the other, as locked into a binarism where each is antagonistic to, or prohibitive of, the other. The analyses I offer in this book are predicated on the notion that desire is more than a mere transgressing of a law. It is necessarily an encounter with the Real, often through a figure-such as an analyst, Antigone, the murdered man in Florence in A Room with a View, Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, Sarah Miles in The End of the Affoir, and Bess in Breaking the Waves-situated beyond the limit. Again to turn to

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ZupanCiC's The Ethics of the Real for reinforcement of my point: "The perspective according to which we aim directly at the Real ... -which thus becomes the 'explicit object of our desire' -leads us towards the attitude in which our own death or a general catastrophe begins to function as the ultimate horizon of our desire" (woob, p. 237). Before examining Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, where this dynamic between death and desire again may be discerned, I want to invoke further support of my position on Lacanian ethics as an imbrication of desire with death/the Real by turning to a chapter on the film Suture in Seshadri-Crooks's powerful, and I think potentially transformative, book on race and psychoanalysis, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian analysis of race.

"Looking Alike: Or the Ethics of Suture" sheds beams oflight on Lacan's conception of ethics by preserving the power of desire through exposing desire's connection to death. Seshadri-Crooks extracts from Lacan's seminar VII neither a light, metonymic desire floating free nor a meek desire cowering before the law. Nor does she miss the role of drive in Lacan's seventh seminar. Again, drive is put in the service of desire, harnessed by desire: "ethical desire" accesses death, without collapsing to the level of the death drive. Seshadri-Crooks is acutely aware that Lacan defines ethics "as that which is 'articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real' (VII: n)" (Seshadri-Crooks, woo, p. rn). She commences with this line, which I hope is beginning to acquire the status of a refrain in my own treatment of psychoanalytic ethics. She then proceeds to read Vincent-one of two brothers in the film Suture locked in a deadly relationship with one another-as propelled by a death drive, reminding us of Lacan's warning about vague obstacles for "whoever enters the path of uninhibited jouissance, in the name of the rejection of the moral law" (Lacan 1992, p. 177) as well as of Lacan's conception of jouissance as evil (p. r84). "Looking Alike: Or the Ethics of Suture" reminds us too that jouissance bears its own relation to the law; Lacan wrote that "transgression in the direction ofjouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law" (p. 177), so it is not as if one is subserviently yoked to the law if one takes the path of desire but escapes it in jouissance. Yet it is also not as though desire is possible without transgression, which in the context of the seventh seminar has to do with exceeding the limit. As Seshadri-Crooks points out, "Through his audacious pairing of

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Kant and Sade (VII: I88)," Lacan suggests that it is Sade who "teaches us, in the order of symbolic play, how to attempt to go beyond the limit" (zooo, p. 109). Ruled by the death drive, Vincent is riveted to das Ding. In SeshadriCrooks's reading of Suture, Vincent hopes to obtain the jouissance his father denied him and so shows a "will to go beyond the moral law, which Lacan specifies is endemic to the death drive" (woo, p. no), the death drive being "the absolute 'will to destruction"' exemplified by the Sadean hero (p. III). However, it is by virtue of Vincent's death drive that Clay, Seshadri-Crooks's "ethical subject of (race)," may "come into being in a certain relation to the limit, where 'the problematic of desire' is raised as a desire in relation to death" (p. III). As Seshadri-Crooks perfectly summarizes, in sync with my own sense of the two poles between which Lacanian ethics stands, "Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis is not the simple ethics of the pleasure principle, but neither is it an advocacy of jouissance or the Sadean death drive" (p. III). Next follows a series of claims that formulate precisely Lacan's conception of the ethics of psychoanalysis: "Such an ethics addresses death as a constitutive factor in both drive and desire." But whereas "the death drive is the negation of negation, the desire for death is the affirmation of the subject as he/she assumes his/her mortality" (Seshadri-Crooks, woo, p. I I I). Finally: "For Lacan, such an assumption of one's own mortality, where desire is constituted 'in a fundamental relation to death' (VII: 303), is the proper site for the emergence of the ethical subject who finds his/her location 'in relation to the real' (VII: II)" (p. III). It is not, in either Seshadri-Crooks's argument or mine, that the evil drive and its wicked partner jouissance skulk off in one direction while virtuous desire ascends in another. In terms of the film Suture, SeshadriCrooks reads Clay as crossing finally to the level of the drive in order to "assume his desire in relation to death." This is essentially what happens, Seshadri-Crooks points out, in The Four Fundamental Concepts, where Lacan defines traversing the fundamental fantasy as such a stitching of the drive into desire. Here too, near the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan returns to Kant avec Sade and also directly to the question of ethics, which might be put in terms of the injecting of Sade's focus on murder and sacrifice into Kant's moral law or "desire in its pure state" (I98IIr973, p. 275). The argument I am making about modernism grows out of this concep-

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tion of Lacan's ethics, whether it is called an ethics of desire or an ethics of the Real. Modernist novels seem both preoccupied with and founded on death or the "equivalent" register of the Real, within which they explore the boundary of their desire.

Mrs. Dalloways Gift of Love Louis A. Sass too correlates modernism and madness in an enormous study titled Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. Sass looks at schizophrenic artists, artists with schizoid qualities, and schizoid traits in various forms of modern art. According to Sass, probably "the most famous interpretation of schizophrenic thinking was formulated some fifty years ago by Kurt Goldstein, a neurologist who treated brain damaged casualties from World War I" (1994, p. 122). Virginia Woolf's brain-damaged casualty, Septimus Smith, clearly exhibits numerous schizoid traits highlighted by Sass: "a certain passivity and disengagement from habitual modes of acting, along with exacerbation of a kind of conscious awareness," "a profound and utter detachment" (1994, p. 65), "ontological anxiety," "the crumbling of normal sensory and emotional reality" (p. 67), and "hyperconsciousness and compulsive deliberation" (p. 69). Septimus suffers from both rifts that Sass underscores: "the rift in one's connection to the world" and "the rift in the self's relation to itself" (p. 90). Septimus shows "an apparent asociality and indifference," "exquisite sensitivity and consequent withdrawal," "disharmony, a proneness to fragmentation and conflict, both with the world and within the self" (p. 109). Septimus takes such withdrawal to the nth degree; he rejects societal norms unequivocally. Woolf's Septimus Smith is Lacan's Empedocles. The latter hurls himself into Mount Etna; the former flings himself "vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer's area railings" (Woolf, 1925, p. 149). Lacan discusses Empedocles' "symbolic act of his being-for-death" in "Function and Field of Speech and Language" (or his 1953 "Rome Discourse") as a way of being forever present in "the memory of men" (in Lacan, 1977, p. 104). To Lacan, such a sacrifice of life (as in the case of Antigone) gives to life its measure: "The first symbol," he points out, "in which we recognize humanity in its vestigial traces is the sepulture." Lacan notes further that "the intermedi-

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ary of death can be recognized in every relation in which man comes to the life of his history" (p. 104). This is the only life that endures, writes Lacan, as opposed to that of the animal where the individual fades into the species. Rats and horses merely pass from life to death, but Empedocles commits a symbolic act that ties an "individual" life to death. To Lacan, the subject's existence "takes on all the meaning it has" from death or "what is primordial to the birth of symbols." This (rather than promotion of the death drive) is what Lacan has in mind when he asserts that "it is in effect as a desire for death that [the subject] affirms himself for others" (p. 105)· Speaking clinically, to enact such an Empedoclean act for the analysand, the analyst must undergo "a long subjective ascesis" (1953, in Lacan, 1977, p. ro5). This is the analogous place of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway for Clarissa Dalloway, who suffers from a lack of desire. Given her prudishness, her impenetrability, as Peter comments, Clarissa lacks something. What she lacks is lack, although it seems quite plausible that Clarissa is governed by the pleasure principle. "Pleasure," writes Lacan, "limits the scope of human possibility-the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis. Desire, on the other hand, finds its boundary, its strict relation, its limit, and it is in the relation to this limit that it is sustained as such, crossing the threshold imposed by the pleasure principle" (Lacan, 1981lr973, p. 31). Clarissa is filled with delight in London, in small things, in being alive; she gives her party "to kindle and illuminate" (Woolf, 192 5, p. 5). We are told "it was her nature to enjoy," that "she enjoyed life immensely" (p. 78), but Clarissa's "enjoyment" is not Lacan's "enjoyment" or jouissance, for at the same time we are told: "It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut, and there among the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds' nests how distant the view had looked, and the sounds came thin and chill" (p. 47). Mrs. Dalloway lacks a "view"-that is, a relation to her mortality. Her repetitive quoting of a song of death from Cymbeline-"Fear no more the heat o' the sun/Nor the furious winter's rage" -suggests that she has by no means come to terms with death and instead disavows it: "How unbelievable death was! that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant" (p. 122). Instead of ceding her desire for Peter or Sally, it appears that Clarissa is blocked in accessing desire in the first place. She looks down on passion,

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calls it horrible, and prefers instead a certain privacy associated in her mind with a "mystery," embodied by the old lady whom Clarissa watches moving "from chest of drawers to dressing-table" (p. 127). Clarissa needs to bring her "solitude to realization," as Lacan would put it, by assuming her "beingfor-death" (1953, in Lacan, 1977, p. 105). Upon hearing of Septimus's suicide at her party-"Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death." (Woolf, 1925, p. 183)-Clarissa imaginatively reenacts Septimus's plunge. "Always her body went through it first" (p. 184). The news leads her to contemplate, "A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter." To Clarissa, it is this "thing" that Septimus preserves, for he has, the narration implies, "reach[ed] the centre which, mystically, evaded them" (p. 184). Clarissa in turn embraces Septimus's suicide as her own: "Somehow it was her disaster-her disgrace" (p. 185). On encountering annihilation in this way, she is catapulted into happiness, made to feel "beauty" and "fun" (p. 186). Clarissa is now, in Lacanian parlance, a living being who "has fallen under the blow of individual death" (Lacan, 198111973, p. 205). Just as Lacan implies, in The Four Fundamental Concepts, that death "spring[s] fully armed into treatment" (p. 257), here death "fully armed" springs into the Dalloway party, facilitating Clarissa's encounter with das Ding. Septimus Smith serves as the skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors that "reflects our own nothingness" and hence affords us "an obvious relation with desire" (Lacan, 1981ll973, p. 92). Through Septimus's suicide, enabling her brief encounter with the Real, Clarissa enters "the locus of the Other," where she can begin "to constitute that truthful lie by which is initiated that which participates in desire at the level of the unconscious" (Lacan, 198111973, p. 144). There was an obstacle, a strange emptiness-which was not the lack tantamount to desire but the blankness of melancholia-the "black" "sun" that at one point in the novel appears in "the Strand" (Woolf, 1925, p. q8). In the end, however, as Clarissa confronts the heat of the sun, "the heart in the body" (p. 139)-because through Septimus she has faced a certain aporia-her objet a is released to inhabit anyone. The text itself, however, seems well ahead of Clarissa, in that Mrs. Dalloway interlaces death with its more vital subject matter from the onset. The novel implicitly intertwines Clarissa with Septimus on page one in presenting the plunge she used to make "at Bourton into the open air"

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(Woolf, 1925, p. 3). Who and what are we to think of, at least upon rereading, but Septimus and his plunge, especially when we register that Clarissa apprehended "that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling" (p. 3; my emphasis). The novel itself accesses death not only in making Septimus its kernel but by referring and alluding through its subtle symbolic network to what it is not, to the eternity on which time seeks to impose itself, to the sky on which the airplane attempts to imprint language, to the "love" that the voice of an ancient spring sings of and leaves a stain in relation to, to "the unseen part of us, which spreads wide," that might even haunt "certain places after death" (p. 153). Although the "gift" of Clarissa's party, as it is based on her disbelief in death, is no gift of Lacanian Love, no gift of what Clarissa lacks-until news of Septimus's death ruptures it-Woolf's novel may be regarded as such a gift, spun in a way that seems to hover just over its own absence/Being. Annexed to death, Mrs. Dalloway might therefore be read as an "ethical text" that refuses to cede its desire.

The Perilous Act ofLady Chatterley's Lover In The Order ofThings, Foucault characterizes "the whole of modern thought" as "imbued with the necessity of thinking the unthought," "of ending man's alienation by reconciling him with his own essence," and "of lifting the veil of the unconscious, of becoming absorbed in its silence, or of straining to catch its endless murmur" (1994, p. 32 7). It is the ethics of modern thought, in fact, that to Foucault impels it to restore language to what is mute, to illuminate "the element of darkness that cuts man off from himself," to reanimate the inert. "It is all this alone," rather than a proposed morality, that constitutes to Foucault "the content and form of the ethical" for modern thought. Consequently, he understands the ethics of modern thought as "in itself an action-a perilous act. Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille have understood this on behalf of those who tried to ignore it; but it is also certain that Hegel, Marx, and Freud knew it" (Foucault, 1994, p. 328). The ethics of modern thought as Foucault describes it is uncannily consonant with Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis as itself an effort to reanimate the inert. As if aware that his conception of modern thought is congruent

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with the emphases and aims of psychoanalysis, Foucault in fact concludes The Order of Things with a not very often remarked paean to psychoanalysis, by describing psychoanalysis as setting itself the same task as that of modernism: "of making the discourse of the unconscious speak through consciousness." Like modern thought, psychoanalysis points to what is "hidden, towards what exists with the mute solidity of a thing, ... of a blank space in a visible text" (Foucault, 1994, p. 374). Foucault himself finally directly intertwines modern thought and psychoanalysis: the movement of psychoanalysis, he proposes, shows us that the three figures of Death, Desire, and Law are "the very forms of finitude ... analyzed in modern thought" (p. 375). Here too we return to Foucault's early topic of Madness and Civilization-madness-only by now Foucault has come around (as he was unwilling to do in the earlier study) to envisioning psychoanalysis as modernism's partner in recognizing madness as "its truth and its alterity" (1994, p. 375). Foucault subsequently seems to turn against psychoanalysis-stating that it cannot be deployed as a general theory of man-but he gets its aim exactly right: to liberate one from the lost object as well as from "the ever-repeated proximity of death" by (paradoxically) "making him understand that one day he will die" (1994, p. 376). Foucault's correlation of modern thought and psychoanalysis in The Order of Things-through his specific conception of their linkage of Law, Desire, and Death-sets the stage for this chapter's analysis of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence's most explicitly erotic novel unleashes desire that seems to pour over the representational boundaries that give rise to it. It also keeps us from ignoring that class lines operate in modern novels to fuel desire (as in A Room with a View, Mrs. Dalloway, The End of the Affoir). And Lawrence's novel brings to the fore the central role of war in producing within modernism a horror beyond representation that enables confrontation with death that in turn leads to a plethora of orgasms, orgasmic love, if not Lacan's third-order Love. Lawrence moreover seems to have anticipated Lacan's sexuated "man" and "Wmftan'>'~: we read in the novel that men "can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may" (1928, p. 42) and that "a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self"; "a woman could take a man without really giving herself away" (p. 40). This matches Lacan's sense in Encore of two forms of jouissance-phallic jouissance and Other jouissance-that situate man on the side of desire (or phallic jouissance) and Wor/tan on the side of Love (or Other jouissance).

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In Encore, the problem of Love is put more specifically in terms of the impossibility of a sexual relation between a man and a Worjlan. Whereas The Four Fundamental Concepts implies that all subjects risk devastation upon achieving Love, in Encore it is the unfeasibility of the sexual relation-because of the incommensurability of the man and t¥e Woman-that makes Love impossible. It is also impossible for the man and t¥e Woman in different ways. Lawrence understands that a sexual relation ultimately cannot exist and that such incommensurability is why-even as he pushes for one, attempting to circumvent the problem through a double desubjectivation. Hovering between desire and jouissance, Lady Chatterley's Lover is able to gesture toward someThing else, for which it compensates and into which it at least gives the illusion of provisionally entering. Law operates in Lady Chatterley's Lover in the strict and suffocating form of two marriages and a well-publicized class boundary. So firmly undergirded, the interdiction against a romance between Lady Chatterley and a gamekeeper as well as the son of a miner, Oliver Mellors, is potent enough to produce a passionate desire to transgress it. Connie and Mellors are up against the implicit edict of tradition: "There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall Village, none .... Gulf impassable, and a quiet sort of resentment on either side." Mellors originates from the colliers, compared to whom the Chatterleys are "another species altogether" (Lawrence, 1928, p. 48). Yet Mellors's continuous use of his Derbyshire dialect when conducting his affair with Connie shows that the class boundary dividing them only enhances the tender passion uniting them. Rather than being a barrier, class difference here is a conduit of erotic life, despite Connie's occasionally expressed apparent dislike of the excess of vernacular in Mellors's speech. Likewise, Mrs. Bolton, formerly the wife of a collier, makes "a man" of Sir Clifford (p. 153) and is "in some way in love with him" (p. 145). Lawrence was preoccupied with eroticism born of class crossings, as Mark Scharer's introduction to the Grove edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover usefully points out. In a late love scene, immediately after we read about Connie's hatred of "the dialect: the thee and the tha and the thysen" and her insulting secret thought that "this man was so assured of himself he didn't know what a clown other people found him, a half-bred fellow," we observe Connie clinging to Mellors "with uncanny force," in terror of his drawing away, and whispering in "blind frenzy," "Don't go! Don't leave me!" Connie's own

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inner resistance to Mellors is part of what renders him so appealing. Because of it she can "melt in marvellous peace ... in his arms," "let herself go to him," yield "with a quiver that was like death" (pp. 228-229). Showing his own delight in class transformation, Mellors dubs his penis "Sir John" and knights it, to wed Connie's "Lady Jane" (p. 289), bespeaking the inextricability of Connie's higher social status and his erotic attraction to her (albeit through genital names that are perhaps meant through their class crossing to assist the two lovers to escape the law). However, as mentioned earlier in relation to Salecl's point that repressive social institutions generate desire, such social law is insufficient to enflame Lacan's radical desire, which requires something more. "More" in this novel is provided by World War I, which, as we read on the first page, brings "the roof down over [Constance Chatterley's] head," in part by bringing Clifford home "more or less in bits" (p. 37). Clifford can be read as a kind of Septimus Smith figure who reflects the destruction and death of the War ("Too much death and horror"; p. 45) as well as standing for industrialization, modernization, mechanization-all of which are seen in Lady Chatterley's Lover as responsible for swarms of half-corpses now populating England. Connie and Mellors exceed the limit and confront annihilation through all of this, especially as it is embodied by Clifford's paralysis. "As the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror coming up, and spreading" in Clifford. "And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her" (p. 88), just as this same "bruise of the false inhuman war" manifests itself as the colliers at Tevershall talk again of a strike (p. 89). Yeats's lines, quoted in Archibald MacLeish's opening letter, expressing that human love has "raised its mansion in/The place of excrement," might have served as the perfect epigraph for Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which the wind carries to Wragby "a stench" from the burning pit-bank at Tevershall, "of this sulphurous combustion of the earth's excrement" (p. 47) as the lower-class male protagonist feels "compassion" flame "in his bowels" for Lady Chatterley (p. r62). A powerful combination of the major obstacles, then, some literally legal, in conjunction with the witnessing of death in the form of Clifford, and everything destructive he emblematizes, produces passion-a perilous act-that verges on exceeding the very bounds of the text that makes up for Love's ultimate impossibility. Christened into desire by the seemingly contagious "bruise of fear and horror" festering in Clifford (Lawrence, 1928, p. 88), Mellors and Connie

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insert themselves, so to speak, prefiguratively into Lacan's sexuation graph. In possession of a seemingly inexhaustible penis capable of multiple erections and climaxes per each lovemaking session, insatiable Mellors is clearly on the side of the man, propelled by phallic jouissance. Connie assumes the side of t¥e Woman, being described as losing "herself to herself," as becoming "effaced" (p. 185). The novel might be classified as a Bildungsroman that follows Connie's trajectory into Lacanian Woq'lanhood that doesn't exist. Connie dissolves into the gaze as she looks unconsciously into Mellors's "all-seeing eyes"; she is thereby transported beyond time and circumstances, ecstatically. Her love of Mellors is imbricated with death, along with the death of her subjectivity. Connie lets Mellors "have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death" (p. 312). Passages relating Connie's "masochistic," jouissance-producing desubjectivation are themselves plentiful: "She yielded with a quiver that was like death ... all open to him." She "let go everything," as "further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself." "She was gone," we read, "she was not, and she was born: a woman" (p. 229)-born a Woman who is not, who does not exist, but is, writes Lawrence, "beyond everything" (p. 232). In a fascinating article, "New Reflections on the Taboo of Virginity," Serge Andre comments on a related case in which a man encounters a woman whose love for him seems "ecstatic." After making love one day, she confides to the man, "You have made a woman of me!" Hearing this from his patient, Andre issues a warning to him: "You're heading for serious trouble" (1995, p. 13). The woman is "madly" in love, while the man (only) desires the woman, producing the Lacanian asymmetry. Terribly anxious, he refuses to consider a serious relationship; the woman commits suicide. The man is perplexed, but Andre explains that despite the fact that he was not her first lover his patient "deflowered" the woman. Andre picks up on Freud's distinction between a woman's first experience of intercourse and her first orgasm, pointing out its pertinence to how we think today: "The notion of virginity is no longer linked to defloration, as it was commonly conceived of in 1918, but rather to the first encounter with jouissance" (1995, p. 20). He thus rereads virginity as fundamentally tied to the incomprehensibility of Woq'lan, to the radical alterity of femininity. The point

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seems to be that at the moment of (this new conception of) defloration the woman is both joined with and disjoined from the man: hence "her irreparable division where the man is concerned" (p. 20). Andre in turn poses the impossible "question of knowing just what a woman's jouissance actually is," given that orgasm would seem to be based on "the masculine model ... of the appeasement of an excitation" (p. 2r). Andre's implicit, technical response to this question-that "the mystery of feminine sexuality" is "the metonymy" that "occurs from the clitoral zone to the vaginal wall" (p. 24)-harmonizes with Lacan's idea of "the woman who does not exist." As Andre explains, to Lacan a Wor/Ian is "always not-all," because she is "divided between her subjection to the phallus as master signifier of sex, and her openness to a beyond of the phallus, in the form of a jouissance which no signifier can account for" (p. 25). Lacan's formulae of sexuation in Encore lead us to realize it is the very subjection to phallic sexuality that, rather than rendering the woman phallic, brings out its beyond. Andre likewise defines the virginity of a woman as presupposing an encounter with a man but at bottom being about the woman's discovery of herself as "radically other than herself" (p. 2s). Privileging, as Andre does, jouissance over "the first time," Lady Chatterley's Lover offers a hair-splitting account of the differences among female orgasms. Clitoral orgasm is described condemningly, through Mellors, as grinding one's own coffee, as a woman's having sensation only in "the top of her beak, the very outside tip, that rubbed and tore" (Lawrence, r928, p. 26r). Then there is the sort of climax that Connie experiences early on with Michaelis, brought on by keeping him inside her "while she was active ... coming to her own crisis" (p. 65). Because this "orgasmic satisfaction" is achieved through Michaelis's "hard, erect passivity," it might be seen as exemplifying Lacan's notion of t¥e Woman being beyond the phallic function. However, if Andre is right that Lacan's Wor/Ian's not-all status reflects her being both governed by the phallic function and beyond it-"She [must be] there in full (a plein). But there is [also] something more (en plus)" (Lacan, r998, p. 74)-Connie's experience of jouissance with Michaelis would not serve as an illustration of Lacan's Woq'J.an that is notall, since Connie only uses Michaelis and thereby cancels out the phallic function, cuts herself off from it, rather than yielding to it. Lacan himself lays out this combination of fullness and "something more" in terms of types of female orgasm. After establishing that not all

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women experience a jouissance that "belongs to that 'she' (elle) that doesn't exist and doesn't signify anything" but that women who do experience it know it when "it comes" (1998, p. 74), Lacan refers to two forms of jouissance. He mentions clitoral orgasm and "the other one," stating that it is the latter he is trying to get us "to approach by a logical pathway, because ... there is no other." In the paragraph after that, Lacan is (somewhat reluctantly) willing to call this latter jouissance "vaginal" (p. 75). Has he been reading D. H. Lawrence? I pose this question, albeit facetiously, because Lawrence's descriptions of Lady Chatterley's sexual experiences verge on capturing the doubleness of Worftan, as both a castrated subject of desire and not-all, as well as expressing Lacan's inexpressible vaginal jouissance. First, Lawrence sets up and refutes the vaginal jouissance that Connie experiences through her use of the Irish playwright Michaelis's body. This is by no means an "encounter" with Love or a provisional sexual relation. With this disjointed experience in the background, Lawrence offers us "a jouissance that is beyond" but that is experienced without a closing off of (Mellors's) phallic desire. Connie "had needed this phallic hunting out, she had secretly wanted it." "What one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality." "She saw her own nakedness in his eyes, immediate knowledge of her" that "seemed to flow to her from his eyes and wrap her voluptuously" (Lawrence, 1928, p. 313; my emphasis). "I love," writes Lacan, "the person I assume to have knowledge" (1998, p. 67). Hence Connie, "unconscious in passion," can cling to (rather than bypass) Mellors, who in turn enables her to feel "strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, ... pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling ... till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries" (p. 183). Without the benefit of perversion to access Other jouissance, Lawrence accomplishes what he can with his pen, describing "new strange thrills rippling inside" Connie, "like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination" (p. 183). Lawrence conveys the couple's silent reserve, absence, and blankness, their mutual desubjectivation behind this scene of signification: Connie and Mellors "lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost" (p. 184); "he was still with her, in an unfathomable silence along with her. And of this, they would never speak" (p. 231). It is in this paradoxical way-speaking to the point

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where the unspeakable seems to come into being-that Lady Chatterley's Lover enacts its self-reflexive idea of the "importance of the [modern] novel": to "reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening" (p. 146). Lawrence thereby performs both Foucault's ethics of modern thoughtreanimating the inert-and Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis, insofar as he presents "the relationship of man to his lack of being" (Lacan, 1992, p. 298), an encounter with the inarticulable. Connie is to Mellors "the soft marvellous thing he could go into, beyond everything" (Lawrence, 1928, p. 232), while she lies still, in awe of"the wonder oflife, and ofbeing" (p. 233). Mellors even entertains the idea that he has some "woman" in him. When Connie praises him for having "more than most men," Mellors reveals that people used to say he had "too much of the woman" in him and then ambiguously refutes the charge by claiming it is not that he is a woman because he doesn't want to shoot birds, make money, and so on -as if his womanliness has another source (p. 344). Here, it is as though Lawrence tried to circumvent the impasse between Lacan's man and Woqhn by having Mellors too move into t¥e Woman's position. How else can mutual desubjectivation occur? As Lacan writes in his Ethics seminar, speaking of the fact that "psychoanalysis makes the whole achievement of happiness turn on the genital act": "It is doubtless possible to achieve for a single moment in this act something which enables one human being to be for another in the place that is both living and dead of the Thing" (1992, p. 300). Yet it is not as if this "perilous act" (which in the context of Lacan's Ethics seminar is the analyst's to perform) can be sustained. As a result, Lady Chatterley's Lover ends self-consciously with writing, specifically with Mellors's letter, written at the Grange Farm, to Connie, pregnant with his child in Scotland. Although his letter has an interminable quality to it-it runs on for about five pages, noting its own abundance of words, and seems desperate not to end: "Now I can't even leave off writing to you" (Lawrence, 1928, p. 375)we are left finally with a written allusion to, rather than demonstration of, "a higher mystery, that doesn't let even the crocus be blown out" as well as with a written memory of their having "fucked a flame into being" as a function of that higher mystery (p. 374). Through Mellors, Lawrence ironically piles up words as he strains to articulate "Lacan's" inarticulable Love in the "beyond": "I believe in your being with me," philosophizes Mellors. "A man has to fend

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and fettle for the best, and then trust in something beyond himself. You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us" (p. 373). We are left, in other words, with Mellors's desire-phallic jouissance-now inscribed in a rambling letter, meant as writerly compensation for the lack of a sexual relation. Mellors himself just about spells this out: "Well, so many words, because I can't touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle" (p. 374).

An Encounter: Greene's Noche Oscura Desire (or phallic jouissance) leads the subject to aim at the gap between himself and the Other, while Love is at the place of Being, adhering to what slips away in language. Love itself therefore cannot be articulated. Lacan insists that "one cannot speak about it. 'Talk to me of love' -what a lark! I spoke of the love letter (la lettre d'amour), of the declaration oflove-not the same thing as the word of love (la parole d'amour)" (1998, p. 12). The stumbling block is the impossibility of a relation between the One and the Other. And so the man through fantasy places an object in the position of what cannot be glimpsed of the Other. But for t~e Woman, something beyond objet a is at stake in what comes to compensate for the sexual relation that does not exist. A Worflan enters into a menage atrois, often making God the third party in the business of love. For the man, the act of love entails approaching the cause of his desire, objet a. But t~e Woman goes beyond the phallic function; she is something more, acting on a jouissance of the body surpassing the phallus. Hers is a jouissance that belongs to t~e Woman, that is, to the Woman who doesn't exist. Hence she is a mystic, one who has a sense that there is "a jouissance that is beyond" (Lacan, 1998, p. 76). 5 In "A Love Letter," Lacan describes woman as the Other in the sexual relationship, the Other being what is missing, what cannot be added to the One. Where the woman is whole-the place where man sees her-she has an unconscious; but her jouissance is "in the realm of the infinite" (Lacan, 1998, p. 103). On the male side, then, there is the reduction of the jouissance of the Other to objet a; on the female side, there is the enigmatic. All love/desire is attached to the illusion that the sexual relation may stop not being written. Yet "true love" (p. 146) resides not in writing but in Being.

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In What Does a Woman Want? Andre poses the question of whether it is possible to know anything about Other jouissance, making a suggestion that through suffering one might access jouissance. Andre's suggestion returns us to the topic of masochism as well as to Saint Teresa, who Lacan tells us does not herself know what she is experiencing. Would such suffering not include, or even be, the desubjectivation that t~e Woman undergoes when she is in Love? If this is the case, it may appear that there are two dominant forms of masochism operating in Lacan: one we might align with man, in the form of perversion; and the other with Worftan, in the form of desubjectivation. In fact, Andre believes that the only way the man can begin to approach the Woman who doesn't exist is through perversion, because "the man who gets himself humiliated, insulted, whipped by his confederate is really seeking to take her place as t~e Woman. He offers himself as object in a typical masculine fantasy scenario only in order to experience the remainingjouissance not mastered by that fantasy." Perversion offers "a kind of mimetic caricature of feminine jouissance." Indeed, the first time Lacan dealt with the question of the jouissance of the body, "he framed it in terms of the jouissance of the slave" (Andre, 1999, p. 270). Though there is a fine line here, what Andre wishes to stress is that, even if the masochistic position shares an aim with the feminine position, they are distinct, one the caricature of the other. The masochist posits the Other; t~e Woman is in the place of the Other. The pervert "slip[s] into the skin of this Other body, like a hand into a glove"; t~e Woman attests to the "impossible subjectivation of the body as Other" (p. 272). Technically, we must consider Saint Teresa, for example, a mystic rather than a masochist, or a suffering mystic rather than a masochistic pervert. 6 Beyond what we designate her is the question of her representation. Andre even comments about Saint Teresa that her self-description of being "carried away," "ravished," "seized" irresistibly makes her as much a caricature as the masochistic pervert. Can Worftan's jouissance or a Worftan in Love ever be represented? Is all such signification ridiculously inadequate to what cannot be written? We return now to Encore to pick up on its linkage of God to the impossibility of a sexual relation, as preparation for an analysis of that impossibility as it is (and is not) expressed in Greene's The End of the Ajfoir. Lacan perceives "the desire to be One" -the impulse of second-order love-to be what "leads us to the impossibility of establishing the relationship between 'them-two' ... 'them-two sexes"' (1998, p. 6). Such a relationship is impos-

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sible to establish, just as it is impossible to capture in speech or writing. Again in Lacan's words, "What constitutes the basis of life, in effect, is that for everything having to do with the relations between men and women, ... it's not working out ... and [as a result] a large part of our activity is taken up with saying so" (p. 32). In a sense, then, although things aren't working out, something works out-signification: "we must articulate what makes up for ... the sexual relationship qua nonexistent" (p. 45). In fact, it is because a sexual relation fails to exist between the sexes that what compensates for the sexual relation is able to be enunciated: "The epithalamion, the duet (duo)-one must distinguish the two of them-the alternation, the love letter, they're not the sexual relationship. They revolve around the fact that there's no such thing as a sexual relationship" (p. 57). Desire too "works out." Lacan asserts that "men, women, and children are but signifiers," but he also founds the problem of no sexual relation on the man being sought out by the woman as a signifier and the woman being sought out by the man insofar as "there is always something in her that escapes discourse" (1998, p. 33). She is in part not-whole, beyond discourse, in the "beyond" (not-all); and so he desires her in the form of objet a. Worflan is therefore "that which has a relationship to that Other" (p. 8r), divine being or God being the Other, with whom she has a relationship. Lacan does not shy away from God. In "God and Worflan's Jouissance," he writes that he wants now to show "in what sense the good old God exists" (Lacan, 1998, p. 68; my emphasis). God exists, for Lacan, in this sense: as "the third party in this business of human love" (p. 70). He "exists" insofar as feminine jouissance exists: it is in the "opaque place of jouissance of the Other, of this Other insofar as woman, if she existed, could be it, that the Supreme Being is situated" (p. 82). Worflan has a relationship to God, Lacan explains, "insofar as her jouissance is radically Other" (p. 83). But also conversely, it is jouissance that "makes it such that God is the Supreme Being" (p. ru). And neither jouissance-God's jouissance or feminine jouissance-if I may put it that way, is in proportion to the sexual relation, forever a phantom, which in a sense always has to contend with the side of the man. It is therefore on the basis of this disproportion that what fills in for the lack of a sexual relation can be enunciated-for example, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. This late modernist novel is a Lacanian text par excellence, a literary avatar of Encore: On Feminine Sexuality/The Limits of Love and Knowledge

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(I972-1973). To begin with an illustrative distraction: if we consider Neil Jordan's film The End of the Affair, based on the book, we can glimpse by contrast my analogy between Greene's novel and Lacan's twentieth seminar on Wor;fl.an's jouissance, Love, and God. Jordan's film misses the mark precisely because it fails to take into account the Lacanian dimension of Greene's work. Viewers of]ordan's film tend to agree on its primary flaw, which exposes the filmmaker's non-Lacanian mind-set. As one reviewer writes, Jordan cut[s] the heart out of his movie in its last twenty-five minutes by having Sarah renege on her promise to God. She resumes the affair ... it is a dramatic, artistic mistake. The force of Sarah's character, her fate (and that of the two men in her life), and the central irony and piteousness of the story, all flow from Sarah's determination to keep her promise. Jordan dumps all this and opts instead for simple domestic pathos .... This made Sarah's promise over Bendrix's (seeming) corpse nothing but a temporary stumbling block to the affair and not, as Greene intended, a transformation of it into a crucible. [Greene's] Sarah is ... a worldly creature who stumbles on transcendence but, once awakened, clings to her divine lover even as her heart yearns for the earthly one. This is precisely what gives the novel its cruel, creepy strength. Neil Jordan's Sarah is just another sensual, good-natured person-one of us, glamorized [Alleva, 2000, p. I9). This critic, Richard Alleva, is by no means a Lacanian. Nevertheless, he puts his finger on the very flattening aspect of the film that precludes it from being about the impossibility of a sexual relation. From this, Alleva astutely deduces that Jordan's The End of the Affair fails, in the most banal sense of the term: fails to mark the failure of the sexual relation, which failure the novel successfully devotes itself to conveying. Offering us a Saint Teresa figure (perhaps Lacan's favorite in his drama on love) in the guise of Sarah Miles, Greene's novel puts forth Lacan's idea of Love as impossible at the level of human interaction. As Samir Dayal explains, in analyzing Jane Campion's film The Piano, "The sexual relation is 'impossible' because sexual difference is enigmatic, because it is as though feminine desire and masculine desire were not speaking the same tongue. But beyond this always failing love is something else that we can trace, an inhuman love" (zoor, p. 3). This "inhuman love" would seem to be what

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I. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Used by kind permission ofJeffery Howe, Boston College.

Figure

Saint Teresa, as represented by Bernini's statue in Rome, experiences but does not know: "you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she's coming. There's no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it" (Lacan, 1998, p. 76). The End of the Affoir approaches Lacan's concept of impossible Love asymptotically through writing that accesses Sarah's relation to God. In turn, Greene and Lacan approach a conception of God through Worjlan, through her jouissance, which in a Lacanian sense guarantees the failure of the sexual relation-which itself in a sense guarantees Greene's exquisite writing as it is tortured by Love's impossibility. Greene offers us Lacan's "signification of a limitless love," signification that marks that failure. The End of the Affoir comes up to that mark. With its novelist narrator, on the brink of fame, The End of the Affoir is as much about writing, or signification, as anything else. In fact, it intertwines creative writing with the "affair" from the novel's beginning to its end, being very much about beginnings and endings- predominantly through the idea that an "affair" may

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be defined as having a beginning and an end. Dining together for the first time, at Rules, Bendrix and Sarah fall in love by living out a scene from one of his novels that they mutually acknowledge as successful writing. 7 Although at this point of the inception of their affair, there is "no pursuit and no seduction" but rather mutual instantaneous desire-"I'm in love. Me too" (Greene, 1951, p. 43)-it is as if the affair, by emerging out of writing, suggests two things: that, more hopefully, it will evolve into a sexual relation that in turn gets written; and, less hopefully, if not, then this affair, insofar as it is signifiable, will serve as what makes up for this impossibility. While the affair progresses, Bendrix has no trouble writing; writing and the affair continue to be intermeshed. He also writes retrospectively the very novel we are reading, compensating with The End of the Affair itself for the loss of a sexual relation with the now-dead and cremated Sarah Miles. Hinting at his awareness that to write is to avoid fulfillment but maintain desire, Bendrix makes a parallel between spending the entire night with Sarah and writing the last word of a book, implying in a Lacanian vein that to consummate love/desire is to complete or stop writing. A sexual relation-what never stops not being written-being impossible, it is only what leads up to, and fails to be, a sexual relation-that is, an affair, time-bound, with a beginning and end-that may be written. Greene's novel plays out the discrepancy between Lacan's sexuated man, caught up in phallic jouissance, in this case writing as he makes love, and Lacan's sexuated Woq'J.an. Distinguishing between desire and Love, Sarah espouses all along that the affair will end but that her Love, which she claims is "absolute," will never terminate. She imagines fairly early on an "end of sex," as she records in her diary: "I get so tired of trying to convince him that I ... shall love him for ever. ... Sometimes after a day when we have made love many times, I wonder whether it isn't possible to come to an end of sex" (Greene, 1951, p. 94). Sarah seems to anticipate Lacan's sense that "when one loves, it has nothing to do with sex" (Lacan, 1998, p. 25). Heading in the direction of Other jouissance, surpassing phallic jouissance, Sarah seems to intuit the beyond-sex of sexuation as well as its corollary of the impossibility of a man and a Woq'J.an having a sexual relation. All along, Sarah's Love has been disproportionate to "the affair." She and Bendrix on occasion reflect on the difference between their two forms of love, his being more attuned to the affair and, as it is time-bound, also more open to the idea of an ordinary marriage with kids. Sarah professes to love

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Bendrix as she has "never loved anybody or anything." Hers is a "certain" love: "She had no doubts" (Greene, 1951, p. 51). She fully abandons herself both "on the hardwood floor" and in conversation over a sandwich. Her abandonment seems to Bendrix to touch "that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space. What did time matter." Bendrix realizes that he is lying when he tries to match Sarah in her love, that he does not love her "in that way": "She had so much more capacity for love than I had," he admits (p. 52). Fearful and finite, Bendrix is caught in desire, or phallic jouissance; he is able nevertheless to glimpse Sarah's achievement of Other jouissance, as he tries to articulate her location in a timeless and spaceless zone. Sarah's participation in the affoir with Bendrix (not unlike Connie's with Mellors in Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover) demonstrates how Lacan's Woq'lan surpasses the impasse of female castration in Freud. For Lacan, writes Andre, "castration is no longer the rock on which woman must run aground; on the contrary, it becomes a path to its own transcendence" (1999, p. 251). Sarah seems to enter into a beyond of Love through her affair of desire with Bendrix, as if the affair is the requisite stepping-stone. At one point in the novel, in fact, Sarah considers in a letter to God whether she did not love God instead of"Maurice" (Bendrix) all along, even as she has a sense of the necessity ofBendrix: "Did I ever love Maurice as much before I loved You? Or was it really You I loved all the time? Did I touch You when I touched him? Could I have touched you ifl hadn't touched him first ... ?" (Greene, 1951, pp. 129-130). Bendrix demonstrates the failure of the sexual relation for the man; Sarah demonstrates it in relation to the not-all. For Bendrix, Sarah becomes and remains a heartbreaking objet a; and it is because of her attachment to Other jouissance that Sarah is the inaccessible woman who enflames Bendrix's desire. She provides him with a fantasy-object by having something else in the place of a fantasy-object of her own. After Smythe, opponent and demystifier of religion and love, offers his pragmatic view of love ("The desire to possess in some, . . . the desire to surrender, to lose the sense of responsibility, the wish to be admired. Sometimes just the wish to be able to talk, to unburden yourself to someone who won't be bored. The desire to find again a father or a mother. And of course under it all the biological motive"), Sarah, sounding like a Woman who doesn't exist finally unveiling something (albeit something nebulous) on behalf of Other

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jouissance, thinks, "It's all true, but isn't there something over?" She then proceeds to make the connection to God: "I've dug up all that in myself, in Maurice too, but still the spade hasn't touched rock. 'And the love of God?"' (Greene, 1951, p. rn). "This absence of a sexual relation leaves the woman as unsatisfied as the man," writes Andre. "But, for her, something other than the fantasy-object makes up for the lack. What is it, then, that takes the place of what La can in his diagram of sexuation designates as S($.,)?"Lacan's matheme for the lack in the Other or (since lack is tantamount to desire) the signifier of the Other's desire. "It's God, he suggests" (Andre, 1999, p. 256)-which is exactly where Sarah is headed from the onset of the novel. Sarah leaves Bendrix for God, taking God on as a lover, preferring the third party in their menage a trois. Reading her letters to God, Bendrix assumes they are addressed to a lover. God is Sarah's final subject-supposedto-know, to whom she writes that she has no need to write to him because he knows everything. Extending the abandonment she offered to Bendrix, now she wants to abandon everything-for God. Whereas before Sarah had written "between the lines" to Bendrix, "this latest love," thinks Bendrix, "had burst the cage oflines" (Greene, 1951, p. 54). Sarah is explicitly unequivocal about her kind of Love being tantamount to Love of God. Struggling to persuade Bendrix that her Love for him is interminable, and that it does not matter if they are or are not in close proximity, she makes an analogy to Love of God. "People go on loving God ... all their lives without seeing Him," Sarah argues. Bendrix retorts, "That's not our kind of love," at which point Sarah reveals that to her there is no other kind (Greene, 1951, p. 71). In harmony with Lacan's notion of t¥e Woman who pursues "God" instead of a fantasy-object, Sarah implies in her diary that by eliminating her affair with Bendrix she is on her way to not existing. "If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens," she queries, "if you drop all the things that make you I?" as if contemplating her slide into being a (Lacanian) Woman who does not exist (p. 107). Sarah has fallen into belief just as she has fallen in Love: the two "falls" dovetail in this book. Sarah's decline or flight, depending on how one looks at it, entails all the jouissance, bliss laced with pain, that we will observe in a similar process of desubjectivation in Breaking the Ul{Tves, as Bess too becomes enthralled

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horrifically with God. Sarah's is an entirely and literally self-destructive trajectory, as it must be, since the jouissance of the Other cannot be subjectified. In a sense it is the failure of Love that produces subjectivity, and Love's "success" that leads to subjective obliteration. There is no question but that in The End ofthe Affoir Sarah's downfall is tinged with a masochistic form of mysticism. She is ambiguously presented through various incidents in the novel as a possible saint. Smythe surreptitiously snips a lock of hair off Sarah's corpse, as if obtaining a relic; Sarah's mother mentions that her daughter "could have been a saint" (Greene, 1951, p. 179). Possible miracles (that I will not enumerate) performed by Sarah abound. She follows in the blessed footsteps of Saint Teresa: "Dear God," Sarah prays, "You know I want to want Your pain" (p. 94). In the central traumatic scene, where Sarah prays to God to save Bendrix, she presses her nails into the palms of her hands until she feels nothing but pain and vows to give up Bendrix forever. She subsequently takes on "the agony of being without him" (p. wo; my emphasis) and proceeds to fall to "pieces" (p. 104). She defines her God as a vapor, as "something vague, amorphous, cosmic," and assumes that "one day [she] too would become part of that vapour," escaping herself forever (p. II4). For Sarah, it is not a question of Catholic artifacts, statues, the crucifix, and so on but a concept as impersonal as Heinlein's grey mist. (Sarah's cremation, if we accept the notion that her attraction is to the Real, is more appropriate, after all, than a Catholic burial.) Conceiving of herself as a "vapour," Sarah realizes the impossibility of uniting with a "scar," which is her trope for Bendrix and his love for her-the incommensurability of vapor and scar being the text's metaphor for the lack of a sexual relation. Sarah wants "that scar to exist through all eternity," but wonders if her "vapour" could "love that scar" (Greene, I95I, p. us). Instead, Sarah locates God in the pain that her nails drive into her palms. She exposes her ill self to rain, gets soaked and chilled, refuses a doctor-all to become intimate with God, to vaporize. Her drive to get beyond herself even leads to an explicitly expressed identification with Christ: "Dear God, if only you could come down from your Cross for a while and let me get up there instead. HI could suffer like you, I could heal like you" (p. 126), as if to desubjectify is to be

healed. This last note sounds conclusive, but there is a lingering Lacanian issue. At the end of Encore, in the same section in which Lacan asserts that

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"love ... approaches being ... in the encounter" (1998, p. 145), he takes up "hatred" in relation to "the extreme of love, true love." It is "true love," Lacan claims, that "gives way to hatred" (p. 146). Anyone who has read The End of the Ajfoir even a single time is struck by and recalls Bendrix's continuous expression of his feeling of "hate" for Sarah Miles. He seems obsessed with it. Page one of the novel greets us with "So this is a record of hate far more than of love" (p. 1). Shortly thereafter, Bendrix discloses that he feels a resurgence of his hatred as he writes of 1939 and then suggests a kinship between hate and love in that "hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions" (p. 24). When Bendrix thinks he has uncovered (through Mr. Parkis, his private detective) that Sarah is seeing another man (who turns out to be God), he compares his hatred to physical love, with "its crisis and ... periods of calm." Reading Parkis's report, Bendrix experiences "the orgasm of [his] hatred" (p. 63)-a jouissance of hatred. Bendrix hates Henry, himself, and God, he announces, as well. But if he hates God, given that he conceptualizes hate as the twin of Love, are we to assume that he also Loves God? Adding to our inkling that perhaps Bendrix too approaches the beyond through Love (that he, like Mellors, has a bit of t~e Woman in him), Sarah expresses her occasional hatred of Maurice, which she sees as the flip side of love for him. (Even in the novel itself, in other words, hate is a sign of love.) It is no hyperbole to say that Bendrix, who quizzes himself on how he could feel such an emotion for someone he loves, agonizes over his hatred for Sarah. It is interesting that his question leads him to assume he hates himself, as if he is "Woq'J.anly" Sarah. It is arguable that Bendrix simply has come up against what Lacan calls the a wall: "a compound of objet a and the wall that this object sets up in front of the grasping of being" (Andre, 1999, p. 289). Andre claims that what is apt to cause love to transform into hate is the perpetual bumping up against the (a) wall, missing out on the fantasy object, and therefore growing increasingly frustrated. Andre further imagines the frustrated lover reaching the desperate point of wanting to reduce the beloved "to a corpse or to devour it, to swallow it in a real way" (1999, p. 290). But rather than craving to eat or murder Sarah, Bendrix seems to be so passionately in love that his own death instinct is activated. That is, Bendrix too, at least on occasion, transcends phallic jouissance. Complementing this

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experience, he even waxes philosophical in writing about the impossibility of conveying happiness in love-as well as about the threat of love to identity-and in reminding us that the "act of love itself has been described as the little death" (Greene, 1951, p. 47). It is Hendrix who begins book II with the assertion that "happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity" and then reminds us that "The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so ... we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace" (p. 47). Hendrix's thoughts then flip from peace to war. War and death, in fact, seem to set the proper context for this tremulous affair for both Sarah and Hendrix. He informs us that air raids and death hardly mattered once he and Sarah lay down in bed together: In the early days I even used to pray for [death]: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the watching her torch trail across to the opposite side of the Common like the tail-light of a slow car driving away. I have wondered sometimes whether eternity might not after all exist as the endless prolongation of the moment of death, and that was the moment I would have chosen, that I would still choose if she were alive, the moment of absolute trust and absolute pleasure [Greene, 1951, p. 72]. Given that shortly after this meditation Hendrix is wounded in an air raid and thought to be dead, it seems perversely reasonable to imagine that what really is sad here is that although Hendrix's death wish is fulfilled, Sarah-foolishly through prayer-causes his revival. Sarah gives us further cause to think along these lines, as she explains to God that both Hendrix and she spent all their love, "even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington," that they mutually learned their lesson from God "to squander" so that soon nothing would be left but love of God (Greene, 1951, p. 130). Hendrix himself formulates the same point this way: they "had begun to look beyond love" (p. 157)-to inhuman Love or Love in the "beyond," Love beyond the Law. The End ofthe Affoir is an exquisite work of art that, like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, exceeds mere presentation of the skewed relation of the Lacanian man with the Lacanian Worftan, although it clearly does

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accomplish that. Greene's novel attempts to represent the encounter of Love, an encounter with "something ... which momentarily gives the illusion that the sexual relationship stops not being written ... that something is ... inscribed ... by which ... what would constitute the sexual relationship finds its trace and its mirage-like path in the being who speaks" (Lacan, 1998, p. 145). In a way it succeeds, as the intensity of the novel testifies. Greene's writing too finally reaches the limit that renders impossible full expression of a sexual relation-which limit results in the inscription of its impossibility in the form of The End of the Ajfai7' itself. But the text must be credited with pointing to, even for staging, a kind of literary, ethical encounter with the blissful agony, the jouissance, of Love in the "beyond": beyond the limits of the law.

CHAPTER THREE

Impossible Love in Contemporary Film

Mystifying Hysteria The cinema substitutes for our gaze-a world more in harmony with our desires. AND R

:E

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Sustaining Graham Greene's emphasis, not to mention Lacan's, on God and Woq'J.an's jouissance in analyzing the first of three contemporary films, this chapter engages Lacan's theory of hysteria, since it is the hysteric who turns to Love, to compensate for her lack of feminine identification. It focuses on hysteria to examine in particular Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves, Benoit Jacquot's Seventh Heaven, and Louis Malle's Damage, all of which move us more deeply into the concept of Love. As we change our focus from modernist novels to contemporary film, desire is (to put it simply) less under control. Whereas modernism tends to negotiate the relation to the gaze, postmodernism, in particular through the genre of film, crosses the border between the Symbolic and the Real in a way that risks provoking psychotic collapse. A shift takes place in the direction of jouissance as the visual displaces language and film grapples with the temptation of exceeding the limits of signification, specifically with the lure of presenting Love. As Mac Cannell 69

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proposes in a chapter titled "Love Outside the Limits of the Law" in her book The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject, Lacanian Love edges over into "the same unspeakable jouissance Lacan designated as the 'feminine' one" and opens "where the Symbolic chain is broken down, revealing something unsayable, even transcendent that escapes its range." An "impossible quest," it puts one "eyeball to eyeball with the Thing" (2ooo, p. 236). The historical corollary of the generic transition from Chapter Two to Chapter Three is that I take the modernist novel to be the exemplum par excellence of modernism, and contemporary film to be the exemplum par excellence of postmodernism, as it makes a more determined raid on the trans-Symbolic, as it puts the spectator eyeball to eyeball with the Thing. Because the artist attempting to express Love is trying to convey what is by definition beyond words, filmmakers have the advantage. Unlike novelists, they can avoid the contradiction in using language to access what exceeds it, so that film can give us a better purchase on desubjectivation as well as on the impossibility of Love that produces that shattered condition. Through film, one can more easily catch a glimpse of the inarticulable. In Intimate Revolt, Julia Kristeva offers an explanation for this achievement through her emphasis on the relation of the visible and the drives. Why, she asks rhetorically, "does the visible lend itself to a primary and fragile synthesis of drives, to more supple, less controlled, riskier representability of instinctual dramas, the games of Eros and Thanatos?" (Kristeva, 2002, p. 69). Kristeva in fact puts what I am suggesting about the intimate connection between film and the impossibility of Love in the extreme terms of psychosis, regarding cinema as constantly offering "a vision of this trial of sexual difference ... this collision with our impossible identities to the point of psychosis." She is thinking in particular of a certain cinema that "explores the specular, that reproduces it most closely to its untenable logic, or that preserves only its strident, discordant, ironic logic: Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Pasolini" (p. 73). The specular per se is not my emphasis here, but it seems worth mentioning Kristeva's stress on the fascination of the specular "because it bears the trace-in the visible" of, as she formulates it, a "nonsymbolized, nonverbalized, and thus nonrepresented drive" (p. 74), drive being intimately imbricated with jouissance as well as the force propelling Love.

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Breaking the Waves I situate-and why shouldn't I -God as the third party in this business of human love. Even materialists sometimes know a bit about the menage a trois, don't they? LA

cAN

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Encore

Breaking the Waves depicts an "hysterical" Wor/J.an in Love, a "masochistic," mystical Wor/J.an-that is, a Woman who doesn't exist-in Lacanian Love, in a sense with God. I am interested in elaborating Lacan's third-order Love, Love in the "beyond," as well as in comprehending Breaking the Waves as an attempt at representing this unrepresentable, impossible Love. I am likewise interested in how the heroine of Breaking the Waves becomes mired in the internal contradiction of her hysterical logic and as a result falls into the pit of Love. Bess thereby enables the desire of the Other at the price of her subjectivity, as she coalesces with, rather than simply poses as, objet a. But first we need to touch on the rudiments of hysteria. It is the hysteric who often finds herself, or I should say, loses herself in the realm ofLove in an effort to solve her problem of femininity. And it is the case that the heroine of the film I want to examine (because it attempts to represent a Wor/J.an in Love) exhibits hysterical symptoms as she emerges from a family apt to generate such symptoms, with its missing father, recently dead brother, and cold, stern mother. It is Bess's mother who accuses Bess of having "a fit of hysterics," even as the mother exudes an abject jouissance especially threatening to her daughter desperately seeking feminine identification. To Lacan, hysteria is a failure of repression that results in the obliteration of the boundary between the sexual and nonsexual. But there is another failure prior to this one. The hysteric's father typically fails her by not offering the support she counted on. Being structurally impotent, the father was not able to grant her what she needed to establish her femininity. Because she lacks such a signifier, the hysteric's body image cannot entirely clothe and eroticize the Real of her body. She can, in fact, go so extravagantly far as to become ill due to the father's deficiency. She may devote herself to repairing him, sometimes sacrificing her entire life, in particular her love life, in the process. She may denounce phallic impotence only "in

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the name of a more powerful phallus; she [consequently] wants more and more" (Andre, 1999, p. 125). The hysteric therefore might remain contentedly unsatisfied in the pursuit of one master after another, exposing their insufficiencies one by one in an ongoing, persistent effort to flaunt-and thereby convince herself of-her own desirability as well as to avoid "the danger of experiencing the satisfaction of utmost pleasure, a pleasure that, were [s]he to experience it, would make [her] crazy, ... dissolve or disappear" (Nasio, 1998, p. 5). The trouble comes when her unrelenting pursuit of a feminine identification leads to creation of a "fantasy of a monster whom we call the other, now strong and all-powerful, now weak and ill, always immense" (p. 5). She finds herself confronted with the a-sexuated Real of the body in some form of phallic potency, which of course she cannot manage as it would be an excess on top of her own constitutive, unrepressed excess. That is, although we would expect the hysteric to flee in the opposite direction of the Real (as hysterics are wont to do), forever pretending to wish to plug the lack in the Other, which pretense keeps her, as well as the Other, in a state of perpetual unsatisfied desire, it is in pursuing phallic potency-at first in ordinary men who inevitably fail her and then in superhuman sources-that she can become nothing, not-all. This is the potential pitfall in hysteria. A woman's demand that tribute be paid to her femininity may lead her exactly where she does not want to be. Wanting more than the ordinary phallus, she can get entangled in the internal contradiction of her logic, both wanting and really not wanting to plug the lack in the Master or Other. Looking to seal over the breakdown of her body image through her dream of an all-powerful phallus, she may be drawn into an ever greater devotion to the Other, where she ends up sacrificing everything for Him. In this scenario, then, she shifts from having a textbook hysterical reaction to her lack of feminine identification-from, in other words, her game of offering and not offering herself to the Other, in which her expectation is to receive "a frustrating non-response" (Nasio, 1998, p. 3)-to seeking and finding Love to solve the problem of this inadequacy, that is, to becoming a Woman who doesn't exist, paired with a Man beyond castration. What the hysteric only pretends to want to do-to "constitut[e] herself as the object that makes the Other desire, since as long as the Other desires, her position as object is assured" (Fink, 1997, p. uo)-the Woman who does not exist carries out.

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This is the trajectory in Breaking the Waves, on which the heroine, Bess, a young, apparently half-witted, fatherless, Scottish woman, turns to Love as the surest way, in Lacanian terms, to repair the Other, since (thirdorder) Love (were it to exist) would more than compensate for the genital drive that fails to unite the One with the Other. Bess chooses as a partner an Englishman Qan), a stranger working on a North Sea oil rig; yet, as Lacan indicates in Encore (and as we have witnessed in The End of the Affair), the feminine position is ultimately addressed to God, with the man as the phantasmatic placeholder. It is interesting in this connection, though, that once Jan has been paralyzed from the neck down so that Bess and Jan no longer have what we ordinarily mean by a sexual relationship and therefore are in a sense able to have a "sexual relation" as Lacan conceives of it-as having nothing to do with sex-Bess has trouble accessing God in her periodic prayer sessions. Bess seems to progress in the film from attempting to meet the demands of a strict, chastising God to a Lacanian "sexual relation" with Jan, which in turn ("Jan and me, we have a spiritual contact," Bess proclaims) paves the way to a supreme being who can make her all, or not-all, Woqhn. After the accident on the rig, Bess and Jan's relationship would seem to exemplify the sort of rare "encounter" that Lacan briefly alludes to at the end of Encore as, again, what "momentarily gives the illusion that the sexual relationship stops not being written-an illusion that something is not only articulated but inscribed, inscribed in each of our destinies, by which, for a while-a time during which things are suspended -what would constitute the sexual relationship finds its trace and its mirage-like path in the being who speaks" (1998, p. 145). Is theirs not a Love "that approaches being as such in the encounter" (p. 145)? Is film the place where Love that cannot stop not being written can be conveyed? Is the muteness of Breaking the Waves especially conducive to this brief encounter achieving an elusive expression? (The same question may be asked of Jane Campion's The Piano, in which mute Ada and illiterate Baines engage in an encounter with Love.) Lacan's assertion that "no relationship gets constituted between the sexes in the case of speaking beings, for it is on that basis alone that what makes up for that relationship can be enunciated" (1998, p. 66) would seem to imply a "relation" between nonspeaking beings. Paralyzed, Jan offers the hystericized Bess a provisional feminine iden-

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tification. His "prick" can in her verbal fantasies always be huge, filling her up as a successful substitute for the structurally impotent father/ Other whom she is dedicated to repair through such replacement. Jan's now rigid body almost seems to be the space into which his phallus has expanded-the corpselike mass through which Bess confronts the asexuated Real of the body. Bess lights up on hearing that Jan, although severely paralyzed, will live, seeming to have no thought about their lost sex life; by encountering the phallus in full like this, she is catapulted beyond the phallic function. She is devastated when Jan, much more attuned to such a loss, urges her to take a lover. "It often happens," writes Nasio about hysteria, "that love is transformed into devotion to a sexless other (an invalid, a priest, or a psychoanalyst)" (1998, p. 105). As Jan seems to want Bess to have sex with other men and subsequently to narrate to him the erotic details, her jouissance of being is further generated and manifested in her suffering sex and violence at the hands of strange men, indirectly enhancing a kind of "impossible" sexual relation between the two of them Qan and Bess). Having filled Jan's lack to the point of rendering him a fully phallic Man beyond castration (Bess feels absolutely responsible for Jan's accident on the rig), she sacrifices her subjectivity for Jan as she collapses into the asexuated Real of her tortured body. She enacts, in other words, Lacan's proposition that "being is the jouissance of the body as such, that is, as asexual" (1998, p. 6). In turn, she sacrifices for God as well. On the boat the fatal second time, sailing out to put herself at the mercy of exceedingly brutal, knifehappy, sadistic men, Bess prays, accesses God, and offers one of her crazed smiles, her face completely aglow as if made radiant by her connection to God, a God Himself beyond the Law. Challenging her Presbyterian church leaders, toward the end of the film, Bess cries out her incomprehension over how one could love a Word, or a Law even of God. Instead, to Bess, to love a human being and in turn to love God beyond language and the Law is divine "perfection." To achieve such excruciating perfection, Bess desubjectifies herselfthrough her experience of the jouissance of being-to the extent that eventually "she comes up against the limit of the 'nothing' to which she is [apparently] condemned" (1999, p. 128), to borrow Andre's description of a possible vanishing point of the hysteric's story. In the end, Bess experiences the fatal nature of "perfect" Love and thereby demonstrates the relation of

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Emily Watson in Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996).

Love to the death instinct. In encountering her lovers as a (capital M) Man and in turn as God, vicariously through men who violate her, Bess destroys herself, as she must be destroyed by such a "limitless love," beyond the Law. When Bess's sister-in-law tries to explain to Jan that Bess isn't right in the head, Jan replies, cryptically but knowingly, "she just wants it all''- having everything being an exclusion of nothing, an exclusion of lack, which puts Bess in the place of Other jouissance, paradoxically (that is) in the place of not-all, in the place of t¥e Woman who is "there in full" at the same time as "there is something more" (Lacan, 1998, p. 74). Clinching the idea that she is a postmodern Antigone moved by the "sublime desire" of the saint or mystic, Bess, enacting the ethics of the saint, enables the miraculous resurrection of Jan at the end. Bess, who so poignantly at the start of the film wanted Jan to want her, wanted, in other words, to convince him that she could fill his lack-"Have me now?" Bess asks coyly in the public bathroom at her wedding party, only minutes after being married-now has "successfully" become his objet a, the object cause of his desire, just what every hysteric seems to want to be. "Rather than taking the object for herself, as in obsession, the hysteric seeks to divine the Other's desire and to become the particular object that, when missing, makes the Other desire. She constitutes herself on the subject side of the 'equation' as object a" (Fink, 1997, p. 120). Sprawled out naked on Dr. Richardson's bed later on, Bess utters essentially the same pathetic question, "Don't you want me?" reminding us that despite her early, ostensible

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sexual fulfillment with Jan, her craving to be the object of the Other's desire persists. With Dr. Richardson, Bess is still primarily trying to satisfy Jan, as she is at the end with the men on the ship, to one of whom she asks, "What do you want?" or Lacan's famous "Che vuoi?" Bess's sexual satisfaction fails to satisfy her. In the terms of Juan-David Nasio, the hysteric may "offer herself to orgasm, but nonetheless [may] not abandon herself to the pleasure in openness." She may thus retain a kind of "fundamental virginity" (Nasio, 1998, p. 36), as Bess certainly seems to do up to the point in the film of disappearing from the sea, in which Jan buries her coffinless body, to float up to heaven. Having sought throughout the film ways of pleasing the Other (her sisterin-law comments to Bess, "You'd give anything to anybody," as she informs Jan, "You could getherto do anything you want to"), in the end Bess collapses into the Real absence of objet a. She thereby fulfills the hysteric's fantasy, the fantasy the hysteric wants to remain a fantasy, although it is also the case that objet a is in the position of truth for the hysteric-as Fink puts it, "the truth of the hysteric's discourse, its hidden motor force, is the real" (1995, p. 134)-and so in a way it makes sense that objet a is her destination. Having taken on "a devil of a job," having been stabbed to death, Bess desubjectifies herself, having apparently sought out such sacrifice through her pursuit and, one might say, achievement of Love, which gift of Love, Love in the "beyond" (having put Jan into relation with the Real) inspires Jan's unconscious desire to resist his paralysis, to rise up from his deathbed and live. It would seem that Love entails the destruction of one's existencewhich is another way of putting Lacan's claim that Love is giving what one lacks, one's constitutive absence necessary for existence-even as it blows vitality into the beloved. This is perhaps why Lacan, in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, regards the analyst, engaging countertransferentially in the analysand's transference love, as a saint: "There is no better way of placing [the psychoanalyst] objectively than in relation to what was in the past called: being a saint" (1990, p. 15). To give what one lacks, in other words, is to give one's lack and so no longer to exist as that "one," as that particular subject. It would seem too that while Love is "always mutual" (Lacan, 1998, p. 4), being impossible, it cannot last for long; inevitably it breaks apart into either suicide or dejection on the one side and desire on the other.

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Ziiek's Fantasy And yet this Other, this body that flees like Achilles' tortoise, is definitely there and definitely real! Let's take up our questions again from a different angle, starting out not from the subject, but from the Other. In this displacement of the question the term "feminine jouissance" can find its only reality.... If the subject cannot enjoy the Other, might the Other, for its part, be enjoying a

jouissance that the partner can't manage to get for himself? Put in these terms, our question plays on the ambiguity of the expression ''jouissance 'of' the Other." Up to now we have understood it as an objective genitive: now let's take it in its subjective sense, where it's the Other who is doing the enjoying. AN DR

E , What Does A Woman Want?

Before zeroing in on the relation of the hysteric and the mystic, I want to address Zizek's view that feminine jouissance is a male fantasy. In The Indivisible Remainder, he states unambiguously that the "position of woman as Exception ... is a masculine fantasy par excellence" (Zizek, 1996, p. rss); he works out this idea later on through an interpretation of Bt·eaking the Waves. Focusing on Bess, in "Femininity Between Goodness and Act," Zizek demonstrates how to avoid what he assumes to be the fatal misreading of feminine jouissance as something outside the phallic order. Zizek begins by laying out the standard Lacanian reading that the "nonall . . . of woman means that not all of a woman is caught up in phallic jouissance: She is always split between a part of her which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man, attracting the male gaze[!], and another part of her which resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said" (r999a, p. 29). Yet Zizek's position is that women primarily cooperate with male desire insofar as they attempt to be seductive, elusive of its operations, to play the game of resisting the dialectic of male desire. It is important to note as well that "the allusion to some unfathomable mysterious ingredient behind the mask is [to Zizek] constitutive of the feminine seductive masquerade" (p. 29). He offers this observation as a key step in his attempt at demystification of feminine jouissance. "Inherent to phallic

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economy," Zizek wants to stress, "is the reference to some mysterious X which remains forever out of its reach" (p. 29). But not only does this assertion fail to wipe out the concept of an enigmatic feminine jouissance independent of the phallic order; it also exemplifies what Lacan says happens on the male side. That is, the man through fantasy places an object in the position of what cannot be glimpsed of the Other, and in this way the man approaches the object-cause of his desire. Insofar as a man does so, however, he does nothing to affect, or effect, what happens on the side of t¥e Woman. Zizek, in other words, seems to assume that what happens on the left side ofLacan's sexuation graph (the side of the man) accounts for the phantasmatic existence of the right (the side of t¥e Woman); but this is simply to tell one side, the man's side, of the story. As we know, and as Andre has written, it is difficult to comprehend anything about feminine jouissance; perhaps it takes perverse suffering for a man to approach it. But to assert that feminine jouissance is hard or even impossible to access is not tantamount to saying that it is a masculine fantasy. Moreover, although it may appear that exposing feminine jouissance as male fantasy (were this valid) saves women from the sexism, if not the misogyny, entailed in a conception of Wor;O.an as "beyond," as "something more," as mystical, and, worst of all, as not existing, in my view it only diminishes Wor;O.an as it appropriates the concept, absorbs the "woman's pole" (as always) into the man's, and collapses part of the sexuation graph, explaining the right side as a figment of the left's phantasmatic power. In Encm·e, however, Lacan clearly presents the woman's pole as standing on its own, as having an ontology of its own, even though "we can't talk about Woman (La femme)" (1998, p. 73). "Thet·e is a jouissance ... of the body," Lacan writes, "beyond the phallus." "There is a jouissance that is hers (a elle), that belongs to that 'she' (elle) that doesn't exist and doesn't signify anything. There is a jouissance that is hers about which she herself perhaps knows nothing if not that she experiences it-that much she knows" (p. 74; my emphases). It is because the ontology ofWor;O.an is Being rather than existence that her jouissance does not exist, not because men have fabricated it. Zizek locates every speaking being on one side, whereas Lacan conceives of two discrete sides: "Every speaking being situates itself on one side or the other" (Lacan, 1998, p. 79). In "A Love Letter," after explaining the side of man, where fantasy motivates the barred subject to pursue an objet

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a, Lacan focuses on "the other side," relating Woq'Ian "to the signifier of A insofar as it is barred" (1998, p. 8o). Here, on the right side, the side of the mystic, the topic of feminine masquerade is not even broached, Lacan now being focused on what is beyond it as well as beyond the phallic function it is caught within. In fact, working against the view that "feminine jouissance" is merely a male fantasy, La can grounds feminine jouissance loosely in biology, as he establishes that the Other, "to which woman is fundamentally related," is "that to which half- ... also roughly the biological proportion-half of all speaking beings refer" (p. 8r). One could argue that mystical feminine jouissance is Lacan's fantasy, but Lacan does not present it as such. Rather, Lacan accords Being to feminine jouissance, stating his belief in it as if reciting his version of the Nicene Creed: "I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra ...." Here Lacan would seem to be on a theologicallevel-"Why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?" (1998, p. 77)-rather than simply describing what men invent behind feminine masquerade. Lacan's mysticism, Lacan professes, "is something serious." It is the mystic, not the man propelled by phallic jouissance, who has "the idea or sense that there must be a jouissance that is beyond" (p. 76). The concept of woman's jouissance is much broader and weightier than the mere fabricated reference on the part of the man to some mysterious, forever elusive X, although it is crucial to keep in mind that the latter (male fantasy) necessarily taps into the former (feminine jouissance). Feminine jouissance has to do with much more than man's sense of an enigma behind a feminine masquerade: Woq'Ian's jouissance is in fact an enigma because it is more than what the man can conceptualize. As we have seen demonstrated in Breaking the Waves, it is "insofar as her jouissance is radically Other that woman has more of a relationship to God" (p. 83). It is in designating woman's jouissance as S(/f,.) that Lacan indicates "God has not yet made his exit" (p. 84). Ironically, though, Zizek's own argument testifies to a feminine jouissance that subverts the integrity of the phallic function (by fully yielding to it). In making the point that the phallic order is undermined by Bess's unconditional sacrifice, her full dedication to her partner's fulfillment, and her immanence, Zizek implies paradoxically that Bess is "beyond," at least beyond male fantasy. Responding to his self-posed question of "In what ... does the feminine jouissance 'beyond the phallus' consist?" Zizek writes paradoxically that "she undermines the phallic economy and

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enters the domain of feminine jouissance by way of her very unconditional surrender to it, by way of renouncing every remnant of the inaccessible 'feminine mystique,' of some secret beyond which allegedly eludes the male phallic grasp" (r999a, p. 29). It may seem that at this point Zizek and I are in agreement, together believing that there is a feminine jouissance that does not owe itself to male fantasy. But the question that still divides us is whether Bess's jouissance (as representative of feminine jouissance) exceeds or is immanent within the phallic order. Does Bess renounce the "beyond" (as Zizek proposes) or enter it? Although Bess has little to do with the feminine masquerade (she is never seductive, nor does she attempt to be), the mystical Bess hardly renounces Mystery. Nor does she disturb the phallic economy. (Recall that Zizek reads Bess as illustrating that, deprived of "the fantasizing about some mysterious Beyond avoiding its grasp," "the phallic economy disintegrates" [1999a, p. 30].) In fact, her mysterious disappearance, her final absence, like Antigone's at the end of the play, produces visible desire. It is only at this late stage in the film that Jan is overcome by a craving, an intense desire to fuse with his lost love, whereas earlier, though loving enough, Jan had taken her somewhat for granted, even been somewhat parentally patronizing. It is Bess's attachment to the "beyond," her impossible Love (like that of the analyst's), that enables her to support the desiring phallic economy; being "beyond," she has the capacity to galvanize that economy. Therefore, to reduce Bess as mystic to male fantasy is dangerously to risk crippling the system, which Bess and the Besses of the world, Antigone, analysts, uphold. But we need not worry, for it is simply to be on the side of the man, who can think only in terms of objet a, and who, especially if he is an obsessional, refuses typically to recognize the "object as related to the Other" (Fink, 1997, p. n8) but must neutralize or annihilate her/the Other. (Zizek is no pervert.) 1 In sacrificing herself for Jan, Bess becomes his objet a. Through literal transcendence (in the film, Bess ascends to heaven) rather than immanence, she becomes the mystery that keeps him upright. Rather than Bess being Jan's production, her death is responsible for his resurrection. Moreover, there is just one of this kind ofWorftan. Nowhere does Lacan indicate that there is a mysterious woman whom men fantasize into existence and in addition a completely ingratiating, accommodating, unmysterious woman subversive of, while incorporated within, the phallic system. I am absolutely

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not denying that the Woman who doesn't exist takes the form of fantasy for men. But I am arguing that man's fantasy is a reduced form of (as it is predicated on) the truth, to Lacan, of the Being of the Woman who doesn't exist. Zizek's insistence on the status ofLacan's Woqhn as a mere rib of the man fails to account for Her power over him, for the idea that she is "something more."

Mystical Hysteria, Hysterical Mysticism A peerless or fatherless ... excitability leads hysterics to crack the phallic framework that supports their cognitive congruence. They counteract it with an exuberant affect that can be either distressing or ecstatic, but whose upsurge comes forth through a lack of symbolic synthesis. And then hysterics disintegrate this acquired, cultivated, and fawned-upon coherence in order to oppose it to the woeful delights of their unnameable bodies, if not to the ineffable night of the mystics or the cult of disconnection or death. KR I

sT

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New Maladies of the Soul

I want now to take a harder theoretical look at the relation between the Woman who doesn't exist-that is, the mystic, or t¥e Woman in Love-and the hysteric. At the end of his essay on Breaking the Waves, Zizek makes a suggestion as to how a married woman can avoid falling into psychosis/mysticism (she must accept her partner's castration and fantasize about "Another Man who would be the phallus itself'' [r999a, p. 37]). I did not think psychosis could be fallen into; nevertheless, the pitfall Zizek describes is precisely the one I have been pointing to as the hysteric's self-made trap. At the end of "Femininity Between Goodness and Act," Zizek describes "the consequences of actually encountering" "Another Man who would be the phallus itself'' as "catastrophic" (p. 37). Because Breaking the Waves seems to wed t¥e Woman in Love and the hysteric (for all the reasons I have given) as well as because the hysteric turns to Love as a way of solving her problem of the missing signifier of femininity, I have tried to put the hysteric into relation with t¥e Woman in Love. It is the case, however, and it must be granted at the outset, that because Love resides in the Real the hysteric-intent upon dissatisfoc-

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tion-veers toward the Symbolic side oflove/desire. Then how can a woman devoted to dissatisfaction, that is, to the lack of fulfillment of desire, be located in Other jouissance? It would seem a blatant contradiction. Nasio,

in fact, puts the hysteric, who "clashes with and injures herself against the limit of an impossible sexual relation," inevitably finding herself "drawn toward discontent," on the one side and the mystic on the other (1998, p. 36). Nasio regards the ecstatic experience of the mystic as an abandonment to exactly what even a sexually orgasmic hysteric refuses: infinite pleasure. Nonetheless, as my analysis of Bess is meant to illustrate, the hysteric may very well similarly abandon herself as she is sucked into "an ever greater dedication to the Other" (Andre, 1999, p. 128). That is, insofar as the hysteric fails to fail, she succeeds in becoming a mystic by sacrificing all for Love. Her ostensible wish all along, after all, has been to coalesce with the Master's power. She may injure herself so severely or thoroughly-by coming up against the bounds of the impossible sexual relation-that she passes into one. So again we can speak at least of a trajectory from hysteria to mysticism or Love, while keeping the two concepts (hysteria and Love) distinct. However, in thinking even somewhat commonsensically about hysteria and femininity, the latter being the condition achieved by the mystic, the Woman who doesn't exist, or Woq'J.an in Love, we might very well imagine that hysteria, being a psychic structure more common among women than men, would correlate with Lacan's "femininity." In his seminar The Psychoses, Lacan comments that "the woman-hysteric" poses the question "What is it to be a woman?" (1993, p. 175). It is a feminine identification, we must recall, that the hysteric is desperately seeking. Although in A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis Fink stresses the hysteric's dedication to a lack of fulfillment of desire, Fink himself, in his first book, The Lacanian Subject, mentions that because "feminine structure proves that the phallic function has its limits and that the signifier isn't everything," this structure "bears close affinities to hysteria as defined in the hysteric's discourse" (1995, p. 107). That is, like the hysteric eager to locate the lack in the Other, femininity exposes the inadequacy of the phallic function and its accompanying signifier. Is the hysteric not the Woman who does, and does not, want to exist? She wants a feminine identification, while to achieve one by becoming a Woq'J.an is not to be identified. Is then the relation of the hysteric to

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femininity paradoxical? The hysteric wants it; yet it is the last thing she wants. Also, if desire is to Lacan "a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance" (1977, p. 322), might we not conversely think of jouissance as a defense against desire-a defense that the hysteric in a sense puts up paradoxically to avoid satisfied desire? One might conceive of the hysteric's so-called defense against desire as always already intrinsic to desire. "It can be argued," as Andre reminds us, "that the very nature of desire entails something hysterical" (1999, p. 130)-yet not all desiring subjects are hysterics. Desiring nonfulfillment, the hysteric, one could posit, avoids desire and wallows in a jouissance of dissatisfaction. In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva presents Jeanne Guyon (1649-1717), "one of the last great French mystics," as her first example of an hysteric. Guyon, not surprisingly, "took pleasure in pain," in her pursuit of love that entailed submission to God (1995, pp. 64-65). Kristeva highlights the hysteric's quest for "a maximal symbolic and psychic jouissance," as the hysteric postulates the futility of her desire (p. 70). The paradox would seem to be that although the hysteric refuses to obtain satisfaction by consummating desire, she obtains dissatisfaction, a variation on the very satisfaction or jouissance she desperately avoids. In the spirit of my own explication of hysteria thus far, Julien Quackelbeen directly addresses the question of the relation of desiring subjectivity and hysteria by distinguishing what is pathological about hysteria. Quackelbeen's "Hysterical Discourse: Between the Belief in Man and the Cult of Woman" suggests that the hysteric surpasses a state of confinement with "the Freudian father of Totem and Taboo," with "the exception that determines the rule," in that "she also demands that every man be its embodiment. . . . [For the hysteric] believes in the hidden existence of a totalizing knowing about the truth of her object a, although she has never had the least experience of it" (1994, p. 131). Making the relation of the hysteric to the Woman who doesn't exist more than merely a potential trajectory, Quackelbeen proposes that the hysteric thus renders the impossible in a way possible, by claiming that "the other possesses the unifying signifier for Woman"; and so "she becomes devoted to the cult of Woman" (p. 131), refusing the nonexistence of the sexual relation. Of course, to insist on such a signifier from the place of t¥e Woman is a contradiction, and therefore the hysteric is engaged in a losing battle. Likewise, her belief in Man forever remains just that: a belief. At the risk of seeming to attenuate

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the spiritual meaning of Breaking the Waves, this is, in fact, how I take Bess's statement "I can believe," spoken boldly as an answer to Dr. Richardson's question, "What's your talent?": that is, as testimony to her hysterical/mystical faith in a (Lacanian) sexual relation. The objet a always falsely promises the existence of a sexual relation. But in the case of the hysteric-for whom, again, the objet a is written into the place of truth, the place she may disastrously come to occupy-this dream is insisted on. Instead of facing the truth, the hysteric complains about, blames, the Other; there is to her no sexual relation only because the Other continues to be inadequate, after all. Hence her fantasy persists and can be in a sense forced to materialize, as she falls into the hole of the Other. Offering herself as a phallicized object, as what will complete the Other, "install him as Other without flaw" (Quackelbeen, 1994, 136), the hysteric is in danger of becoming a Woman who doesn't exist, a Wor{lan in Love, a Wor{lan in a sexual relation with God.

Seventh Heaven When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that- You never look at me from the place from which I see you. LAc AN,

Four Fundamental Concepts

Of course, the hysteric has other "options"; she is by no means compelled to become a Woman who doesn't exist, in a sense the last sort of woman she wants to Be. Whereas Bess in Breaking the Waves plunges from hysteria into feminine jouissance, in the exquisite, fascinating, and explicitly Lacanian film Seventh Heaven by Benoit Jacquot (the director of Television, when it was broadcast on television), we find a much less mystical hysteric, one who falls backward rather than forward, also suffering from a lack of feminine identification. Plagued by the death of her father, Mathilde begins to investigate her suspicion that he committed suicide. The film implies that he did, over jealousy of his wife's (Mathilde's mother's) flirtations with other men. The film insinuates further that Mathilde's father thereby failed to offer Mathilde a feminine signifier: she tells her analyst that he left her "nothing," while he bestowed on her mother a law firm.

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One might imagine that a husband's generosity and love toward a wife would produce a healthy Oedipal obstacle, sending the daughter elsewhere to seek a paternal substitute. But in this case it is the mother who stands in the place of the phallic signifier, who seems to have stolen it from the father; this "theft" appears to have triggered in Mathilde her own habit of stealing, meant to claim what her father failed to give her in the first place. Mathilde is driven to steal toys from department stores and has apparently stolen a ring from her father, again as if to secure what her mother stole from Mathilde's father-only to throw it away. The mother's lack of interest in Mathilde's father shuts down another possible avenue through which Mathilde might have acquired desire. Had her mother desired her father, that is, Mathilde then could have picked up the signifier of desire of the mOther. Instead, Mathilde's mother took-"stole," according to Mathilde's unconscious-the father's desire (phallus) from Mathilde and offered none in return as a model for her daughter's subjectivity. All of this conforms rather well with the two dominant etiologies (actually they are intimately imbricated) of hysteria most referred to within Lacanian theory in general. The former, as stressed in my analysis of Breaking the Waves, points to a deficient father. The hysteric wants to attribute to her partner everything her father failed to offer. In The Clinical Lacan, Joel Dor lays out a useful explanation of "the subjective alienation of the hysteric in ... relation to the other's desire." The hysteric feels as though she has been "unjustly deprived" of the phallus (Dor, 1997, p. 76); and so she must look to the Other, a Master, to achieve it. As Dor also pertinently points out, "The situation becomes complicated fairly often, especially when the person enthroned as master shows no aptitude for the role" (p. 78), which is clearly the situation in Seventh Heaven. But hysteria is also a question of the mother's desire, since the "father attains his full function as symbolic father when the mother acknowledges his word as the only one that can mobilize her desire" (p. 72). Deprived of the phallus by her nondesiring (and undesirable) father as well as by her mother, who took her enjoyment in places unconnected to her husband or daughter, and finally by her inadequate husband, Mathilde is unconsciously driven to kleptomania, which in Seventh Heaven is often followed by her fainting, an act her analyst refers to with the term "raptus," signifying, I think it's fair to assume, rapture, enjoyment, jouissance. Mathilde is unable to be orgasmic with her husband because she is bound

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through stealing and fainting to her Imaginary father-that is, on the unconscious level, compelled to seize her father's desire, to get what he failed to give, what her mother stole in a sense from her, and then psychically to climax over it. In A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Fink mentions that the female hysteric "prefers to exclude sexual satisfaction" in her involvement with a man, although "she may nevertheless find great sexual satisfaction with women . . . , in masturbation, in eating, in drug or alcohol use, or in other activities" (1997, p. 127), among which I would include stealing. Mathilde's analyst must hypnotize her so that she will no longer steal, in order to enable her to have an actual orgasm-as she will not allow herself to achieve one so long as she is engaged in the process of stealing, which brings on fainting. Once the analyst removes her compulsion to steal as well as frees Mathilde from her attachment to her father's ring, she may achieve orgasm in a less pathological fashion, as she does. First, she has what I think we can assume is a vaginal orgasm while sitting in a chair during analysis; she subsequently begins to enjoy herself, to reach orgasm during intercourse with Nico, her husband. Mathilde in a way then succeeds in getting cured, but only to throw out of whack a marriage predicated on her hysterical frigidity-again underscoring the Lacanian axiom of the impossibility of the sexual relation. Director Jacquot seems to be looking at this impossibility, as one would expect him to, from at least two angles. Having received the signifier of her femininity (withheld by her father and promiscuously employed by her mother, with no benefit to Mathilde) from her analyst, Mathilde in turn becomes a threat to her obsessional husband, who wants her to remain (merely) a distant stand-in for the lost object of his desire, if even that. In any case, she must not be an active eroticized partner, either in the form of a desiring subject or throbbing with Other jouissance, that is, the Woman who doesn't exist, exceeding phallic jouissance. Fitting the category of the obsessional, Nico basically has a masturbatory sexuality, in which the Other is neutralized, if not annihilated. The moment "a feeling is his," Lacan explains, the obsessional "starts annulling it." Dispersing and refracting a fundamental aggressivity into the world, he is compelled to mortify himself. Alive in his ego alone, he evades his own desire, according to Lacan, to stay dead for his master (1991h978, pp. 268-269). Hence his strategy, as Fink would put it, must be to insist on "No jouissance for the Other!" (1997, p. uS), since that could suck him in.

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Through the hypnotism deftly employed by her analyst, however, Mathilde (like Bess in Breaking the Waves) does get drawn into the very pool of jouissance from which her frigidity was no doubt meant in the first place to protect her. Here we have a woman who, cooperating with her analyst, lends herself to Otherness and-to return to Nico-thereby overwhelms the man, whose unconscious prohibits him from making love to or in feminine jouissance, who runs scared as most men must, tethered as they are to a fantasy oflost jouissance that by definition rules out an encounter with it. In fact, as mentioned earlier, it seems that Nico possesses the obsessional's abnormally intense resistance to a sexual relation with a Worftan who might swallow him up, being set on his own lack of lack. As Fink observes, "The obsessive ... views himself as a whole subject (designated by the letter S without a bar through it), not as ... someone subject to lack. He fiercely refuses to see himself as dependent on the Other, attempting to maintain a fantasmatic relationship with a cause of desire that is dependent on no one. . . . The obsessive is complete unto himself.... He is led to annihilate any actual partner, ensuring that he or she not become an elective cause of sexual excitement" (1997, pp. 122-123). In Seventh Heaven, fitting this profile, Nico deludes himself into thinking that he needs nothing from Mathilde except that she lie still, flat on her back for him to plow, that she need have no relation whatsoever to the Other, taking himself to be his own cause of desire: SO a. Ironically, Nico's false sense of self-sufficiency renders him the very incompetent master that freezes Mathilde's hysteria in a state of icy stagnation (which in a way works out for him, because it removes the threat of her desire). Consciously as well as unconsciously convinced that he is adequate unto himself, Nico also resists analysis-behavior again typical of the obsessional. When his newly desiring wife, in flaunting her desire for him, implies by virtue of this very desire that he must be missing something she might give after all, he begins to withdraw and turn aggressive. Nico must remain at the level of his ego, refusing to allow Mathilde to transform him into a desiring/lacking subject; in this way he must remain "dead," efface his enjoyment, or else undergo anxiety. But we can look at Mathilde's husband's plight another way, less clinically, more theoretically, and yet ironically more in sympathy with his disorientation. What Nico may very well save Mathilde (or them both) from-by, in the end, reversing everything that her analysis propped up in an effort to

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assist her to have a vaginal orgasm through sexual intercourse-might be indicated by the case (previously referred to in Chapter Two) that Andre discusses in "New Reflections on the Taboo ofVirginity," the one in which Andre learns from one of his patients that a woman the patient made love to subsequently announced to him: "You have made a woman of me!" (1995, p. 13). Andre is correct in sensing impending disaster: the couple's attempt at forcing a unity out of two necessarily incommensurable sexuated positions leads to the girlfriend's suicide. Like this suicidal woman, Mathilde in Seventh Heaven represents today's "virgin" who loses her virginity upon exceeding the pleasure of sexual intercourse, by entering a beyond that is about t¥e Woman "discovering herself at a moment when she is radically Other than herself" (p. 25). It is this feminine Otherness, Other jouissance, that-totally distraught, as if coming unglued-Mathilde's husband, for fear of being drawn into it, protectively recoils from, through his impotence in the face of it. It is surely no secret or rarity that such feminine alterity is apt to be horrifying to men. The male psychiatrist with whom Nico gets chummy in a Parisian bar somehow knows that Nico's marital troubles now stem from Nico's inability to cope specifically with his wife's jouissance. (This confidant too ties Mathilde's hypnosis to such jouissance.) He proceeds to suggest that Nico feels unworthy of and guilty over his wife's sexual enjoyment; Nico rules out that explanation, not taking into account that Freud himself "hypothesizes that obsession is caused by an early sexual experience resulting in too much pleasure (and a subsequent feeling of guilt, which in turn leads to avoidance behavior-guilt and avoidance being later understood as the retroactive effects of a second experience in which the person learned the social/sexual meaning of the first event)" (Fink, 1997, p. 161). As I see it, "the problem" between Nico and Mathilde is intrinsic to their hystericobsessional mismatch, and the filmmaker, Jacquot, is using this exaggerated yet typical conjoining of man and Woq'lan again generally to convey the impossibility of a sexual relation, of a relation between the One and the Other, male phallic jouissance and the Other jouissance of the Woman who doesn't exist, t¥e \Voman who can occupy seventh heaven, desubjectified. In the final the, Mathilde opts to go back to sleep, which is exactly where Nico wanted her early on after one of her fainting spells, when he told her, as she lay calmly in bed, not to wake up. In the end, as Mathilde joins Nico, who prompts her not to undress, for sleep, she seems to relapse into an

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hysterical state, one in which she acquiesces to his obsessional requirement that she be his undesiring object, that she serve merely as his masturbatory assistant, that she not, in sum, disturb his egoistic mastery. Strangely enough, in his book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek explains the danger Nico finds himself facing and then dodging: "When a man is having sex with a 'real' woman, he is using her as a masturbatory prop to support his fantasies about the nonexistent Woman .... The catastrophe occurs when the two women collapse into one, when the 'ordinary' partner is elevated to the dignity" of La femme, the Woman who does not exist, "the phantasmatic supplement of male masturbatory phallic jouissance" (2004, pp. 4r -42), all this from a Lacanian who posits the possibility of Love, as we shall see in the following chapter. Hence Mathilde transforms herself back into the dead object, the prop that is all Nico seems to want. To do so, Mathilde renounces her desire for the "desire" of the Other; she gives preference to Nico's identification with the phallus. In this way she at least achieves her hysterical aim of dissatisfied desire. Instead of more typically setting herself up to be the alluring object that can fill Nico's lack, since Mathilde has discovered the punishment (Nico's withdrawal and violence) that this move poses, she agrees to be the object that helps him delude himself that he is not lacking. She yields to a quite inert form of hysteria, without the glamour of seduction. The question we are left to ponder is when she will begin stealing again.

Damage In Louis Malle's Damage, however-to consider through a third contemporary film a third contemporary outcome for the hysterical woman up against the impossibility of the sexual relation- the male protagonist, Stephen Fleming, sick of his oppressive obsessional routine, has a craving for the intensity of Other jouissance, for feminine alterity that can be especially terrifying to the man who has inadequately severed himself from the maternal body. Stephen seems to think that his conventional, banal life of marital, familial, and professional success (both the product and enabler of his control) is worth sacrificing for the loss of control, for passion, and even the desubjectivation of Love. "Who are you? Who are you?" he agonizingly implores the enigmatic Anna, whose periodic gaze invites him to submerge

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himself within her, to the point that there is no longer a subject to be beckoned. But Stephen too is bound to fail. He finds himself unwittingly, and totally without training, in the role of the analyst vis-a-vis a badly damaged, unconsciously opportunistic, if not predatory femme fatale doubly carrying the weight of her unknown (inadequate) father in the form of an incestuous passion for her equally incestuously driven brother. Anna and Stephen immediately enter the encounter of Love: what "momentarily gives the illusion that the sexual relationship stops not being written" (Lacan, 1998, p. 145). Havoc is wreaked, especially on Stephen, who loses his bearings as he wished to, but to a degree too gruesome for his taste for disruptive pain. The psychoanalytic story here, as I see it, is that Anna's "phallic narcissism," to borrow Dor's label, hysterically takes "the spectacular and unmodulated form of 'putting on a show,' that is, of staging a performance in which [her] primary goal is to offer [herself] ... as the embodiment of the ideal object of desire." That Anna is quite deliberately and self-consciously staging a film-noir "show" comes out especially in the last scene that she constructs in the vacant apartment, as she fastidiously arranges flowers, music, and food. The hysteric's seduction, Dor explains in a way that makes perfect sense, is always "fundamentally in the service of the phallus. . . . What must happen ... is to cause the other to desire, to make him desire this fascinating object that is displayed as the object that can satisfy his lack." But more important, the other must be kept "in suspense"; the hysteric must maintain the fantasy. The moment the other ceases to pursue and "actually wants to do something about his desire, he usually runs the risk of being shown the door." As Dor writes, confirming what we have seen and said all along, "Hysterics are, in effect, masters at not getting what they want" (1997, p. 81), which is I think simply a more technical way of putting Anna's warning to Stephen that damaged people are dangerous since they know they can survive. Hysterics (damaged people), to spell out this point, have the capacity to be very damaging. Damage is a profound study in the curious contagiousness of maladies of the soul that through Love, which inevitably entails transference, seem to have the insidious power to alter a fundamental fantasy, a psychic structure, to rip subjectivity apart or at least shrink it, remove an encrypted lost object from one psyche only to install one in another. The stabilizing of one subjectivity appears to require the destabilizing of the Other. Damage dramatizes its belief in the possibility of the transference of an encrypted

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object in the highly wrought scene toward the end where Stephen asks his wife, Ingrid, to impregnate within him, as if physically she could do it, the dead son (killed because of the father's affair with Anna) she seems now to be clinging to in a psychic melancholic possession with the potential to squelch her desire for life interminably. Feeling utterly responsible and guilty, Stephen wants desperately to do the work of melancholic mourning for her. Through Anna's "incestuous" affair with her fiance's father (Stephen), fatherless Anna is able to traverse the fantasy of her brother, who has become her pathological objet a. Stephen bears the burden of being the semblance of this objet a, replacing it, then displacing it. Because of the nature of the catastrophe that ends their affair-her fiance's (Martin's) death over witnessing the scene of her "incestuous" lovemaking with his father, which removes the necessary obstacle to mutual jouissance or Love-Anna is able to accept the demise of the affair. That is, she manages to carry on, while Stephen is devastated. Through the affair Anna confronts death literally and we might say enters the Real, out of whose ashes her Phoenix-like existence can rise up. This psychic opportunity occurs for Anna insofar as Stephen accepts the role of Lacan's saint, whose business Lacan writes is not caritas but trashitas: "He acts as trash" (1990, p. 15). By adopting the role of the subject supposed to know, in whom Anna confidentially pours the details of her former traumas, Stephen allows Anna, "the subject of the unconscious, to take him as the cause of [her] own desire" (p. 15). Lacan proceeds, in Television, to explain the role of the analyst in a way pertinent to this scene of (dangerous) amateur analysis: "It is through the abjection of this cause that the subject in question has a chance to be aware of [her] position, at least within the structure. For the saint, this is not amusing" (p. 15). It is not at all amusing for Stephen Fleming: "The saint is the refuse of jouissance" (p. 16). His family destroyed, his wife infuriated to the point of delirium, not to mention the trauma of his own daughter (in terms of the phallic signifier that he fails to leave her), Stephen moves away to a desolate country, thrown away, himself a waste product, "the refuse of jouissance." Incarcerated in a prison of double melancholia, he is left to sit and stare at a hugely enlarged photo of the three of them (Martin, Anna, himself), frozen in the horror, destruction, and death of this now psychically incorporated menage a trois. Stephen has undergone the "long subjective ascesis" that Lacan

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assumes is required for the psychoanalyst (1977, p. ros). Not being an analyst, however, Stephen actually slides into desubjectivation, a nonfictional ascesis. The analyst "provides his body," as Jacques-Alain Miller explains in "Microscopia" (Miller's playful preface to Television), as Stephen fully provides his. But the analyst "holds the place of what cannot be said," incarnating "the impossible," and becomes "the real" as a ruse, whereas Stephen plays no game, is dead serious (Lacan, 1990, p. xxx). All three films-Von Trier's Breaking the Waves, Jacquot's Seventh Heaven, and Malle's Damage-point to the impossibility of the sexual relation, whether one attempts to achieve it through the use of an analyst or not. The analyst, in the role of objet a, must perform in the place of the Real; that is his or her professional task, ethically to facilitate the analysand's entry into desiring subjectivity. A lover cannot remain in that place, cannot access his or her objet a for long without severe damage. This is what Anna, at least through her experience with her brother who kills himself in response to her having sex with someone else, knows all too well. Understandably, she also shrewdly refuses to marry Stephen, that is, to let the Love of their affair be suffocated by the structure within which Stephen early on wishes to contain it-an order that is necessarily transgressed to generate this Love. Anna states plainly and wisely that, by putting her in the place oflngrid, he would only gain, and at the same time destroy, what he already has. The Lacanian lesson we inevitably seem to return to, whatever the narrative, is the incommensurability of the One and the Other. So long as the woman plays the role of the phallus, signifying her partner's desire, giving up or refusing femininity or Other jouissance, relations in their desiring disunity may persist. Once "she" enters Other jouissance (whether she is a biological woman or not), again a sexual relation cannot form, must oftentimes in its inchoate state explode, do damage, sometimes long-term, or even result in death. In the film Damage, so long as Martin lives, affording a structure of sorts outside of which the jouissance of Stephen and Anna's relation can dwell, it can even flourish, as its exciting incestuous quality is produced by the very union of the legal tie between Martin and Anna. Anna explicitly expresses this point of the necessity of the Law for jouissance to flow by questioning Stephen as to whether he had the deranged thought that she would marry Martin were she not able to carry on with Stephen, just as she is clear about not wanting Stephen without marriage to Martin. Fulfilling her implicit prophecy, at the moment of Martin's demise, or even

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at the slightly earlier moment of his vision of the two impassioned lovers, their enjoyment turns to poison. It can only thrive in relation to the Law, even (or especially) if the relation is illegal. On its own, it is ... well, I was about to say lethal; but in this case, on its own, since the enjoyment of Anna and Stephen is only a semblance of incest, hinging on Martin's connection to Anna, it is really nothing at all, empty, in the most banal sense. Stephen is shown at the end, then, to be the banal nothing that objet a inevitably inhabits. In Breaking the Waves, Lacan's inhuman Love is shared appropriately by a mystical Wmpan and God. After Jan is paralyzed, he graduates from phallic jouissance to something more but is soon revealed to be merely a stand-in for a much more formidable lover, God. The sexual relation, then, is dehumanized; it is shown finally to fail on the human level, to be humanly impossible. In Breaking the Waves, the challenge to the Symbolic is ultimately outside the domain of Lacan's man. In Seventh Heaven, by contrast, relations stay human; there is no God or figure tantamount to God with whom Mathilde can merge (except possibly her analyst, yet that relation goes unexplored). By insisting on the participation of the man, Seventh Heaven faces the challenge that Breaking the Waves circumvents; but this film ends up revealing the impasse of the sexual relation. Phallic jouissance obtrudes and remains an obstacle. As MacCannell writes in "Love Outside the Limits of the Law," the masculine subject who wishes to join the feminine object raised to the level of das Ding must relinquish '"the phallus' to take on woman, facing with her the other jouissance" (20oo, p. 254). Nico is psychically terrified by this prospect, so that the film conveys a lopsided relation that underscores the impossibility of a sexual relation as well as the pathological sacrifices that result from the clash between the two parties. However, in Damage, perhaps because the man's obsessionality has reached its limit, he is able to give up the phallus and join t¥e Woman beyond words and desire, in a passionate encounter. Silent, graceful but strange, eerie scenes of bodily harmony-with a hint of SIM to ensure conveyance of the beyond of the pleasure principle-are this film's means of capturing Love outside the limits of the Law. Anna and Stephen do seem, at least provisionally, to confront the Real of their existence, mutually. 2 Contemporary film's intrinsic relation to the Real would seem to facilitate such a presentation. As Todd McGowan writes in the introduction to the collection Lacan and Contemporary Film, "One of the salient features of

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Figure 3· Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche in Louis Malle's Damage (1992).

recent cinema is its proclivity for staging an encounter with the traumatic Real" (2004, p. xviii). In fact, McGowan wants Lacanian film theory to move beyond its emphasis on the Imaginary, so that it can "regain the proper turf of psychoanalysis, where it can recognize the power of jouissance in the cinema and uncover the lure of the spectral object there in order to become cognizant of the Real" (p. xxii). McGowan and the essays in his and Sheila Kunkle's edited collection make a strong case for the view that "the encounter with the kernel of the Real that psychoanalytic interpretation calls for is particularly appropriate when we approach contemporary cinema" (p. xxiii). Such Lacanian readings of contemporary film can expose and foster this postmodern genre's unusual capacity to fathom the lack in meaning, the beyond of the signifier, and the N othing of Love. 3

CHAPTER FOUR

The Taming of the Real

Zizek's Missed Encounter with Kieslowski's Insight The whole progress of the subject is then oriented around the Ding ... the first outside. It is clearly a probing form of progress that seeks points of reference, but with relation to what?-with the world of desires. It demonstrates that something is there after all, and that to a certain extent it may be useful. Yet useful for what?-for nothing other than to serve as points of reference in relation to the world of wishes and expectations; it is turned toward that which helps on certain occasions to reach das Ding. That object will be there when in the end all conditions have been fulfilled-it is, of course, clear that what is supposed to be found cannot be found again. It is in its nature that the object as such is lost. It will never be found again. LAcAN ,

Ethics

This chapter eventually concentrates on Krzysztof Kieslowski's White, one of the films, in addition to Blue and Red, in his famous Three Colours trilogy. All three films, Blue, White, and Red, stage traumatic loss and missed vital opportunities, crying out for psychoanalytic interpretation. Beyond interpretation: by reading White along the lines of Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis, we will observe that this film poses a critical theoretical problem. On the one hand, White illustrates the psychoanalytic idea that it is necessary to break out of the vicious cycle of law and transgression through some form of ethical "authentic act" (as Greene's The End of the Affair demonstrates through the passion of Sarah Miles, and as we also observed in Breaking the Waves, texts in which the heroine's emotional and spiritual intensity turns extremely self-destructive). White on the other hand may be read as featur95

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ing such an authentic act not for its own sake but for the benefit of reconsolidating subjectivity in relation to newly found radical desire (the emphasis traced earlier in modernist novels by Forster, Woolf, and Lawrence). However, both of these psychoanalytic outcomes-roughly speaking, the latter modernist, the former postmodernist-are presented in White as running up against the psychoanalytic precept that there is no such thing as a sexual relation, which we have just seen illustrated flagrantly in all its violence in Breaking the Waves, Seventh Heaven, and Damage, despite especially Malle's masterfully stunning presentation of the encounter with Love. For what purpose, to put it starkly, does one achieve desiring, even radically desiring, subjectivity, if it necessarily leaves one finally in a state of dissatisfaction? Yet, given the intrinsic inadequacy of desire, if one resorts to the authentic act per se, there is nothing but symbolic suicide. While such a "self" -shattering might be said to "position" one to have a sexual relation, it nevertheless must fail to yield one, since the sexual relation in Lacan is not sustainable. White thereby allows us to confront what may be the largest lacuna in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis itself of course has not been entirely oblivious to it. Featuring Slavoj Zizek, this chapter in large part addresses what Lacanians have to say about this ambivalence within psychoanalytic theory over compensation -language, literature, beauty, desire, lack, the pursuit of objet a-on the one side and desubjectivation on the other.

A Theoretical Crisis In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis rgsg-rg6o, seminar VII, Lacan clearly promotes the view that moral action must be "grafted on to the real." Such a graft serves as a way of injecting "something new into the real" and thereby opening up "a path"; psychoanalysis, Lacan proposes, paves such a way (I992, p. 2 I). Lacan links our search for an "archaic ... quality of indefinable pleasure" -jouissance-which animates the "unconscious instinct as a whole," with what is morally satisfying (p. 42). Hence, to reiterate, it makes perfect sense to call Lacanian ethics an ethics of the Real: "the question of ethics," La can asserts, "is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real" (p. I I). In her book The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, ZupanCic explains the notion this way:

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The heart of all ethics is something which ... goes by several different names-for Lacan, it is 'the Real'; for Badiou, 'the event.' These terms concern something which appears only in the guise of the encounter, as something that 'happens to us,' surprises us, throws us 'out of joint,' because it always inscribes itself in a given continuity as a rupture, a break or an interruption. According to Lacan, the Real is impossible, and the fact that 'it happens (to us)' does not refute its basic 'impossibility': the Real happens to us (we encounter it) as impossible, as 'the impossible thing' that turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the reconfiguration of this universe. Hence the impossibility of the Real does not prevent it from having [an] effect in the realm of the possible. This is when ethics comes into play, in the question forced upon us by an encounter with the Real: will I act in conformity to what threw me 'out of joint,' will I be ready to reformulate what has hitherto been the foundation of my existence? ... For Lacan, the accent is to be placed, first, on desire ('Have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you?'), for it is desire that aims at the impossible, the Real [2ooob, p. 235]. In a statement that no doubt has given rise to Zizek's thinking on the topic of Lacanian ethics, Lacan points out that ethics begins beyond man's submission to the law of the unconscious. His thesis is that, instead, the moral law is articulated with relation to the Real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing. It is by accessing das Ding in this way that we open up the flood gates of desire. The process seems inevitably to be painful, if for no other reason than that encountering the Thing involves unbearable pleasure: "To the degree that it involves forcing an access to the Thing," Lacan tells us, "the outer extremity of pleasure is unbearable to us" (1992, p. So). Providing grist for Zizek's ethical mill, Lacan stresses that we must rediscover our relation to das Ding beyond the law. Ordinary desire, then, would appear to be in the Imaginary, an act of delusory sublimation. "At the level of sublimation," Lacan tells us, "the object is inseparable from imaginary and especially cultural elaborations. It is not just that the collectivity recognizes in them useful objects; it finds rather a space of relaxation where it may in a way delude itself on the subject of das Ding, colonize the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes" (1992, p. 99). For an ethical act to transpire, however, das Ding is to be penetrated rather than colonized. "Fundamentally narcissistic in character" (1992, p. 151), courtly love, which Lacan offers as a supreme example of sublima-

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tion, attempts to colonize das Ding by deliberately raising up an object, the Lady, to the dignified level of das Ding. As Lacan writes in Encore, "Courtly love is, for man ... the only way to elegantly pull off the absence of the sexual relationship" (1998, p. 69). In so doing, however, courtly love stops short of embracing death, which act Lacan posits is necessarily implied in any ethical engagement with jouissance. Lauding knowledge of death rather than elegance, Lacan chastises Kant for assuming that-no matter how compellingly seductive the beloved-the gallows would deter everyone from satisfying sexual desire. What Kant misses, Lacan reveals, is that it is "not impossible that under certain conditions the subject ... will not so much offer himself up to be executed ... but will at least consider doing so" (1992, p. 108). Passion, or the exaltation of Love, Lacan explains, might lead one to entertain this option. One might even be driven, Lacan also mentions, to accept this "eventuality on his leaving-for the pleasure of cutting up the lady concerned in small pieces, for example" (1992, p. 109). In general, here Lacan is trying to convey his notion of morality on the level of das Ding. In this register of morality, the subject hesitates to bear "false witness against das Ding," which is for Lacan the originary site of desire (1992, pp. 109-IIo). It is this intense (radical) form of desire, as we know-born necessarily from das Ding-that Lacan urges us ethically not to cede. Yet we are left hanging: Is (merely) to consider accepting the gallows for the sake of sleeping with one's object of passion not to bear false witness against das Ding? Or must one go to extremes? Is cutting the lady into pieces despite the gravity of the punishment synonymous with not ceding one's desire? But surely Lacan is not advocating perversion, murder, or literal suicide. Is the example of chopping up the lady, then, a metaphor for the sort of act against what one holds most dear that one needs to commit to achieve in turn the kind of symbolic suicide that Zizek promotes? Lacan discusses an unbearable approach to a center, an absolute zero (that sounds like whiteness), as well as ostentatious forms of destruction. Does Karol in Kieslowski's film White himself reach such an absolute zero point-whiteness-through the jouissance he finally is able to give to Dominique, at the expense of her imprisonment and apparent imminent death (the film's figural equivalent of Lacan's pervert's cutting the lady into pieces) in addition to the at-least-temporary shattering of his own subjectivity? Then does such desubjectivation itself ultimately work on behalf of Karol's radicalized

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desire? La can seems to locate in Sadean crime the benefit of sweeping aside, to "force nature to start again from zero" (1992, p. 260). In his analysis of Antigone, Lacan is preoccupied with the limit of the "second death," which he regards as tantamount to the phenomenon of the beautiful (as elaborated in Chapter One). Antigone's living corpse emblematizes her second death, a sphere in which death encroaches upon life, suspending all transformation and generation, explains Lacan. Such a trespassing of death on life is necessary for the realization of desire; it is the second death that subtends life. One must have knowledge of the death instinct, Lacan tells us, knowledge the spectator gains by experiencing Antigone's demise, which is why at the end of analysis the analysand is meant to be in a state of"absolute disarray" (1992, p. 304). There must be, if desire is to be realized, some beneficial crossing of the limit that establishes a fundamental relation to death. Perhaps it is at this point in the Ethics seminar that we learn what it might mean to consider accepting the gallows as payment for sleeping with one's passionate object, since Lacan stresses the signifier-"in its most radical form" -as our method of accessing knowledge of death: "It is in the signifier and insofar as the subject articulates a signifying chain that he comes up against the fact that he may disappear from the chain of what he is" (p. 295). It is to underscore the function of the signifier in enabling the subject's access to death that Lacan has urged his ethics seminar members to locate death in aesthetic form, in particular through the beautiful-which inheres in the signifying chain even as it resides on the edge of the Real. The triumph of death as well as the being-for-death that Lacan attributes to Oedipus's negation is, he comments, identical to the emergence of the subject supported by the signifier. Acting in conformity with one's desire now appears not to mean getting hanged. Rather, it is to enter a zone from which one withdraws, paying a price of jouissance for the asset of desire. Although Zizek occasionally puts emphasis on desiring subjectivity, he for the most part gives Lacan's ethics a different spin-preferring the gallows, after all, so to speak. In Enjoy Your Symptom! Zizek unequivocally distances himself from Lacanians who "reduce psychoanalysis to a kind of heroic assumption of a necessary, constitutive sacrifice-those for whom psychoanalysis ends when the analysand is able to accept a fundamental renunciation as a condition of access to desire ('symbolic castration')" (1992, p. s8). Zizek insists that Lacan's "subjective destitution" has nothing to do

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with sacrifice (which would position the Other as addressee) but is "an act of abandonment which sacrifices the very sacrifice" (p. 59). In The Fragile Absolute, as in many of his publications, Zizek celebrates the "authentic act" per se, a traumatic event that occurs between Time and Eternity, as against its use-value in producing desire. Such an act or event "designates the direct intervention of the noumenal dimension in phenomenality" (Zizek, zooo, p. 95). In The Ticklish Subject, as part of a debate with Judith Butler, he clarifies that "to desire something other than its continued 'social existence,' and thus to fall 'into some kind of death,' to risk a gesture by means of which death is 'courted or pursued,' indicates precisely how Lacan reconceptualized the Freudian death drive as the elementary form of the ethical act" (Zizek, 1999b, p. 263). To Zizek, this is "the whole point ofLacan's reading of Antigone: Antigone effectively risks her entire social existence, defying the socio-symbolic power of the City embodied in the ruler (Creon), thereby 'falling into some kind of death' (i.e. sustaining a symbolic death, exclusion from the socio-symbolic space)'' (1999, p. 263). Antigone's admirable feminine gesture of "No!" to Creon, and in turn to state power, carries value in and of itself: "her act is literally suicidal, she excludes herself from the community, whereby she offirs nothing new, no positive program-she just insists on her unconditional demand" (Zizek, p. 46; my emphasis). In Enjoy Your Symptom! Zizek likewise commends Romeo and Juliet for not giving way on their "desire": "by means of their suicidal gesture, they repeated the fundamental choice into which they were born by disowning their respective Names, separating themselves from the totality of S1-S2 and thereby choosing themselves as 'worse"' (p. 76). In Enjoy Your Symptom! Zizek goes so far as to propose that to Lacan "psychosis is a mode 'not to give way as to our desire,"' since "it signals our refusal to exchange enjoyment for the Name of the Father" (p. n). Zizek is also now infamously known for holding up the gesture of Keyser Soeze in The Usual Suspects of shooting his wife and daughter being held hostage as a way of changing, as Zizek puts it, "the co-ordinates of the situation" (zooo, p. 150). What this act represents to Zizek is a cutting loose from the hero's most precious object(s), to gain "free action" (p. 150). The point, to Zizek, is the importance of renouncing "the transgressive fantasmatic supplement" that attaches us to a given social reality (p. 149). In the spirit of Zizek's thinking, we might assume furthermore that through his radical act of separation the protagonist of The Usual Suspects (as

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well as, anachronistically, the Greek heroine Antigone-who relinquishes marriage, home, and family-not to mention Romeo and Juliet) "unplugs," in a Pauline, Christian vein. Perhaps the most striking aspect of The Fragile Absolute has to do with Zizek's reading of Pauline agape as love "that enjoins us to 'unplug' from the organic community into which we were born" (p. 121). It is from Christianity that Zizek derives his sense of the value of separation or of attaching to something that disturbs the balance of All, of "throw[ing} the balanced circuit of the universe offthe rails" (p. 121). Defined in Zizek's terms, then, agape would appear to be what Karol achieves in Kieslowski's White upon destroying Dominique, upon maneuvering so that she becomes imprisoned and thereby removed from him, as well as from the world. No doubt Dominique is Karol's most precious object, from which he cuts himself loose. By the end Karol would seem to have undergone a Christian uncoupling like what Zizek describes as possessing the power to suspend the obscene supplement of the laws of the Symbolic Order. Let us retrace the steps to this possibility. I am not sure that he has credibility, but Karol tells the judge at his divorce hearing that he bestowed pleasure upon his wife before they were married. On getting married, though, Karol is unable to express his desire or give his wife "pleasure." To use a skewed analogy, marriage would seem to exert the sort of counterproductive pressure on Karol that the existence of Viagra, as Zizek points out, puts on men today (you can, therefore you must). Karol seems caught up psychically in the law/transgression syndrome, in wanting to behave transgressively in the face of a law. When his desire for Dominique is "illegitimate," his body suffers with desire; when his desire is legitimate, his body wilts. Perhaps more to the (theoretical) point is the idea that Karol's "desire" for Dominique at first is merely that of Imaginary sublimation: in a colonizing psychic gesture, he has raised her to the level of das Ding. But he has not yet experienced the pain necessary for opening up to the limit or obtained the knowledge of death required for production of radical desire. By the end, however, we are in a position to observe that there is no scarcity of "second deaths" in this film. White seems to be preoccupied with them. Karol's Polish friend invites Karol to shoot him, to put him out of his misery of excessive psychic pain; but Karol fakes the first shooting, and on asking Mikolaj a second time if he is certain that he wants to die, Karol is told no. Having "died," or seemed to have died, having entered a zone in which death appears to have trespassed on life, Mikolaj is infused with new

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life. He behaves like a boy filled with exuberance, as he and Karol slide on ice and shout for joy. Karol's shrewd, compassionate handling of the shooting of his friend enables the friend to encounter death, to wedge himself for a few seconds between life and death, to be a kind of living corpse, and hence to rise again. (This, it will become clear later, is an instance of what it means to Lacan to love thy neighbor.) By faking his own death, locating a Russian corpse to stand in for his dead body, and arranging his own funeral, Karol too appears to undergo death without actually dying, to walk the line between life and death. Because he has led people to assume that he is dead, Karol seems toward the end to be the walking dead, about to fly off to Hong Kong, having extricated himself from everything precious to him. It does appear that Karol goes to the limit by "renouncing what is most precious" to him, to use Zizek's words. Moreover, his funeral operates to reignite Dominique's love for him, and he finally gives her unmistakable "pleasure"-that is, the jouissance of whiteness. Here film again performs the Real when Dominique reaches orgasm and the screen goes fully blank/white. Instead of attempting to start up again with Dominique, by straightening out the mess he has made by feigning death and in turn revealing Dominique's innocence, Karol leaves her in prison, now assumed to be at least implicated in Karol's death. In the last scene, Dominique signals to Karol through a prison window that she is about to be hanged and then to ascend a staircase to heaven, where (if I am reading her hand gestures correctly) Karol may join her to "marry" her (again). Now Dominique is situated in the same place as Antigone when the Greek heroine becomes a living corpse. Tears streaming down his face, Karol is deeply moved by this image of her. He seems located in the position of Sophocles' chorus, when it is driven mad by the drama, going out of its mind, as it is moved to "desire made visible." "This is what appears at the moment when the long scene that leads up to the punishment takes place," Lacan writes (1992, p. 268). Dominique at first tries to explain to the police that Karol is still alive, but she enigmatically seems to acquiesce to their idea of his being dead, as if she knows that the only venue where she and Karol can have a (Lacanian) sexual relation is in heaven. At this moment, in other words, it seems as though "something beyond the limits of Ate has become [Dominique's] good" (Lacan, 1992, p. 270). We might even read Dominique, as Lacan does Antigone, as an "image of charity" (p. 2 78), which brings us back to Zizek's

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Figures 4 and 5· Julie Delpy in KrzysztofKieslowski's White (1993).

Christian conception of agape. But this image works, adds Lacan, so long as "we confer on the word charity a savage dimension" (p. 278). Here we have an "uncoupling," of Karol and Dominique, that involves a terrible violence, which we might loosely accept is that of the "death drive, of the radical 'wiping the slate clean' as the condition of the New Beginning" (Zizek, zooo, p. 127). Like Romeo and Juliet, this pair oflovers has undergone an unplugging, beyond the confines of the Law, in the domain of Love.

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Zizek reads Lacanian Love in Encore "in the Pauline sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its transgression," which he regards as "masculine/phallic." Love is, on the other hand, feminine, involving, as Zizek writes, "the paradoxes of the non-All" (woo, p. 147). Lacan's "impossible love" can come into being only in the "beyond" (meaning, non-All), since a sexuated Lacanian man and a sexuated Lacanian Worfian are defined in a way that precludes them from coalescing in the Symbolic. It therefore seems to make paradoxical sense to locate Love beyond the phallic function in the place of the Woman who doesn't exist-even as a sexual relation would need to be between a man and a Worfian. In any case, the conclusion of the film White might be read as pointing in this Zizekian direction: moving from a radical unplugging to a· beyond in which Dominique and Karol, no longer subjectified, will finally find Love, beyond the Law, within the illogic of the non-all. My guess is that this extreme direction seems Zizekian because Zizek finds the position of desire, even radical desire, to be insufficient. Wanting more, he concentrates on, pours his energy into, and glorifies the notion of the liberating "authentic act" without paying much attention to where it leads. To Zizekin most of his work, sheer commission of such an act is acting ethically, as if an ethical act has to be an ultimate act-to be ethical-a non-functional act, a fragile absolute. 1 On the other hand, the ending of White can also be interpreted as pointing in a less extreme, though not necessarily less ethical, direction (depending on where one places the emphasis in Lacanian ethics): to the desire and renewed subjectivity of the protagonist, Karol. These two possible conclusions-which exemplify the clash between an ethics of jouissance and an ethics of desire-bring to a theoretical crisis point the perplexing problem of what the subject is to do: plunge into satisfaction at the price of subjectivity or reconcile himself or herself to a state of desire, even radical desire, where he or she is forever hungering for satisfaction? To what end? How could one accept a state of even radical desire after the bliss of whiteness with Dominique?

Banalizing the Real A book as "cutting edge" as Parveen Adams's The Emptiness of the Image, on the relation of psychoanalysis and representation (Adams reads a variety of

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disturbing pieces of modern art in conjunction with the analytic scene), opts for the latter state: that is, radical desire over jouissance. In a completely nonna"ive fashion, Adams shows chapter by chapter that releasing oneself from the object, confronting absence, and accepting lack are the keys to desirable desiring subjectivity. As her title hints, Adams is preoccupied with the emptying out of meaning, but emptying out is strictly a means of separating. Once separation is achieved, "the subject has the space of desires. This separation involves the recognition of two lacks, lack in the subject, and lack in the object." Hence the subject is enhanced: "The separation of the subject from this object is not a deprivation of the subject, for the object had sustained desire only through its constitutive loss" (Adams, 1996, pp. so, 51). Denial of castration, to Adams, only imposes "high costs" (p. 55). In fact, to Adams, anyone-or any text for that matter-attempting to shut down the relation of loss and desire is apt to be perverse, resistant to the incest taboo (as Adams accuses Catherine MacKinnon's Only Words of being). Adams reads Mary Kelly's Interim as if it functioned like the analyst who "must fall from idealisation and become the support of objet petit a" or "embody the function of lack" (p. 79). Offering "moments of blindness" for the spectator to encounter, Kelly's art allows "desire to emerge in the subject" (p. 89). Watching Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, we are freed from the pervert's "scenario": again the object falls for the viewer. By detaching the gaze from the image and in turn us from that image, Francis Bacon's artwork too effects castration. The Zizek I have been presenting is in the jouissance camp, in fact, but it is also possible to read him as akin to Adams. This is because actually Zizek is torn (not just in The Fragile Absolute) between promoting agape (uncoupling) for its own sake and supporting the notion of a desiring subject. Fairly early in The Fragile Absolute, Zizek distinguishes between desire and love by explaining that there is "always a gap between the object of desire and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable," whereas in the case of love the object is not split off from its cause. With love, "the very distance between object and cause collapses" (Zizek, zooo, p. 2I). Then, in his subsequent line, Zizek seems to give away, albeit obscurely and in economic terms, a preference for desiring subjectivity: "And-back to Marx-what if his mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when

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it was deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus-value)?" (p. 21), implying, I think, that once object and cause are conflated, as they are in Love, there is nothing but collapse. Here, then, despite his stated aversion to the psychoanalytic idea of symbolic castration as the condition of access to desire, Zizek overlaps with at least the Adams of Emptying the lmage. 2 Existing as a lacking subject is preferable to not existing. This position also extends Zizek's own thinking at the end of The Plague of Fantasies (as we have seen), where he states that Lacan's ne pas cider sur son desir "in no way condones suicidal persistence in following one's Thing; on the contrary, it enjoins us to remain faithful to our desire as sustained by the Law of maintaining a minimal distance towards the Thing-one is faithful to one's desire by maintaining the gap which sustains desire, the gap on account of which the incestuous Thing forever eludes the subject's grasp" (1997b, p. 239). Zizek subsequently puts the ethical difference between "stopping short of the lethal domain ofjouissance, and the reverse attitude of 'going right to the end', unconditional insistence which follows its course irrespective of all 'pathological' considerations," in terms of the distinction between desire and drive. By this stage in his discussion (although he qualifies the earlier comment on being faithful to desire as sustained by the Law with the phrase "approached from a Kantian standpoint"), Zizek would seem to be reading drive as pathological and (again) desire as the trajectory to be on. In his penultimate sentence in The Plague ofFantasies, we are urged again to desire through encircling the abyss rather than drive into it. But at the last moment, Zizek wavers, as he surmises Lacan wavers. "Is not," Zizek writes, "Lacan's entire theoretical edifice torn between these two options: between the ethics of desire/Law, of maintaining the gap, and the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing?" (1997> p. 239). Perhaps it is out of Zizek's impulse to break this stalemate that yet a third possibility comes into play in The Fragile Absolute. One emphasis is clearly on a terrifyingly violent uncoupling entailed in symbolic death, in distinguishing between idealization and sublimation, but Zizek also issues what sounds like a quite mundane injunction, as he celebrates the ordinariness, compassion, and effort of love: True love accepts the beloved the way she or he is, merely putting her/ him into the place of the Thing, the unconditional Object. As every true

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Christian knows, love is the work oflove-the hard and arduous work of repeated "uncoupling." . . . Through the Christian work of compassionate love, we discern in what was hitherto a disturbing foreign body, tolerated and even modestly supported by us so that we were not too bothered by it, a subject, with its crushed dreams and desires [zooo, pp. r28-r29]. We "magically love the beloved one for itself, finding in it the very point from which [we] find it worthy of love" (Zizek, 2ooo, p. 2r). 3 Clearly not a question of symbolic suicide, is this so-called love theoretically in fact desire, radical desire, a version of courtly love (that is, Imaginary desire), or something new? In a very intriguing conference paper titled "Signs and Lovers" (published in Lacanian Ink), Zupancic shares Zizek's emphasis on what she calls "possible love," where jouissance is humanized. 4 Finding in comedy (rather than tragedy) a paradigm for Lacanian love, ZupanCic conf!ates loving someone with loving someone "for what he is," which to her (somehow) involves moving "directly to the Thing." This, to ZupanCic, "always means to find oneself with a ridiculous object, an object that sweats, snores, farts and has strange habits." Yet it also signifies continuing to find in this object "something more." There is a third step: "To love means to perceive this gap or discrepancy and ... to have an irresistible urge to laugh at it." To experience "real love" is not to be "dazzled or blinded by the object"- that would be "sublime love"-but to take in "its ridiculous, banal aspect." ZupanCiC's point is that transcendence must be preserved in the accessibility of the beloved. ZupanCic holds high what she calls "love as sublimation," which involves the banal and sublime perceived simultaneously on the same level. The "miracle of love" for her consists in "falling ... because of the real which springs from the gap introduced by this 'parallel montage' of two semblances or appearances" (ZupanCic, 2002, pp. 7r-73). This last description, in fact, resembles what Parveen Adams italicizes in her analyses in The Emptiness of the Image: the dilation of a gap that, to Adams, unveils castration. The mobility of synaesthesia, specifically the hearing of a scream in Francis Bacon's "Head VI," overthrows "the dayto-day fluency of the world and our place in it," so that a gap is opened up. My reason for reinvoking Adams here is to bring into relief that, while Zupancic and Adams agree that Lacan favors the subject of lack, Zupancic oddly deduces from her own stress on falling-due to the Real that results

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from the gap introduced by the juxtaposition of the banal with the sublime-a possible love. ZupanCic reads Adams's (and my) sense of Lacanian desire as "love." The Real must not be disavowed, cautions ZupanCic, which means to her that the impossible happens. The impossible therefore must not be rejected. Zupancic contrasts desire, where the other remains unattainable, with love, which to her renders the Real of desire accessible. She bases this conclusion on a statement in Lacan's Anxiety seminar, in which he asserts: "Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire." 5 It is this proposition alone that ZupanCic reads as indicating love humanizes jouissance. Yet curiously it turns out that to Zupancic such "love-sublimation" is actually desublimation, pertaining to drive (rather than elevating an object to the level of das Ding as in courtly love). That is, desublimation that allows drive to find satisfaction different from its aim is, to Zupancic, what happens in love: "In love, we do not find satisfaction in the other that we aim at, we find it in the space, or gap, between ... what we see and what we get (the sublime and the banal object)" (2002, p. 77). At the very end of her essay, ZupanCic speaks oflove in a way that overtly returns it to the status of desire. Love, she asserts, transforms jouissance into "something that we can actually desire" -but, I would argue, desire has always been desire for jouissance, at least ostensibly located in an actual object. Moreover, ZupanCic invokes the well-known Lacanian notion that "love 'makes up for the sexual relationship (as nonexistent)'" (p. 78). But since Lacan also features in Encore his point that language compensates for the sexual relationship, that "what is at stake for us is to take language as (comme) that which functions in order to make up for the absence of the sole part of the real that cannot manage to be formed from being (se former de l'etre)-namely, the sexual relationship" (1998, p. 49), it is hard not to read love here again as desire, since for Lacan Love exceeds language, never gets written. "Love," Lacan has famously informed us, "is impossible," which proposition gives way to his idea immediately following (within the same sentence) that "the sexual relationship drops into the abyss of nonsense" (p. 87).6 Yet perhaps ZupanCic deserves credit for locating in Lacan a possible "love" situated between desire for objet a and impossible Love, impossible love being the Love that Lacan refers to at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts, where he pays homage to a Love that he insists he has by no means

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downgraded but posits "in that beyond." Here, as we know, Lacan speaks of "a limitless love" that can emerge only inadequately in signification, since Love is actually "outside the limits of the law, where alone it may live [or thrive]" (1981, p. 276). To grasp a possible love between desire and impossible Love-courageous love, I will call it, which ZupanCic may be on to-we need to examine the last section of Encore. Here, Lacan first explains that (and why) there is no such thing as a sexual relationship: "because one's jouissance of the Other taken as a body is always inadequate-perverse, on the one hand, insofar as the Other is reduced to object a [the side of the man], and crazy and enigmatic, on the other [the side of t¥e Woman]." Next Lacan describes what puts love to the test: that is, confronting this very impasse-of the lack of the sexual relationship (as just explained)-confronting in other words "this impossibility by which a real is defined." "Regarding one's partner," Lacan informs us, all that love can "actualize" is "called ... courage with respect to this fatal destiny" (1998, p. 144). Courage subsequently gives way to recognition. What appears to be recognized, in this form of love, is how the sexual relationship ("now ... become a subject-to-subject relationship") "stops not being written" (p. 144)J Lacan has already associated this formulation with contingency, as opposed to necessity, the latter of which "doesn't stop being written." At this stage, we must then distinguish between a sexual relationship that stops not being written, or is on the verge of being written, but is not quite yet written (contingency) and one that does not stop being written, that is, always gets written (necessity). Though it seems peculiar to align the sublime with the contingent, perhaps in this distinction between contingency and necessity we can find a rough analogue of ZupanciC's distinction between what "we see," the sublime, and what "we get," the banal, which distinction she says defines the gap in which we experience love. In the last part of Encore, in acknowledging the encounter that "momentarily gives the illusion that the sexual relationship stops not being written" (1998, p. 145), Lacan describes a confrontation with the abyss that Adams locates in the viewer's engagement with an anamorphotic element in a work of art and that Zizek writes about in terms of agape or unplugging. But these are not states in which a subject may remain a subject (they are instead deliberate moments of desubjectivation), so that any Love encountered through them (subsisting, as Lacan writes, "on the basis of the 'stops not being written"') that wishes to be maintained eventually must shift to

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"doesn't stop being written" -must slide, in other words, from contingency (the encounter) to necessity. This is the substitute, Lacan tells us, that "constitutes the destiny as well as the drama of love." All of this may still sound vaguely like a confirmation of ZupanciC's point that love hovers in the space between the sublime and the banal. But if we look closely, we see that Lacan is referring now to a substitute-whose "path" is that of "existence" and "not of the sexual relationship, but of the unconscious, which differs therefrom" (1998, p. 145). The unconscious knows nothing of Other jouissance, which (as Colette Soler writes) is "manifest in the experience of the sexual relationship and also in mystical love," which "cannot be measured," because it is "beyond the subject" (Soler, 2002, p. 107). Our choices seem to remain the same as those with which we began, those emphasized in modernist novels (where desire ultimately reigns supreme) and in postmodernist, contemporary film (where desubjectivation, jouissance, and the Real are paramount), both of these alternativesdesubjectivation for its own sake and radical desire-being sketched in Kieslowski's White. To assume the oxymoronic possibility of lasting Love is to attempt to have exactly what Lacan proclaimed a fantasy at best: a sexual relation that doesn't exist. It is to presume to materialize the immaterial Real. Though he may seem to, Lacan never budges on the issue of the nonexistence of the sexual relation, which he unequivocally defines as "that which 'doesn't stop not being written.' There is an impossibility therein" (1998, p. 144); and we can hardly conceptualize or experience Love without one. We may encounter a sexual relation in a moment in which it "stops not being written" (contingency); but because it "doesn't stop not being written," we must accept a substitute (necessity)-the "doesn't stop being written" -which (again) Lacan qualifies as being on the path of the unconscious rather than on that of the sexual relation. Perhaps it is at this point, then, that we can comprehend what it means to accept a sublimated love that, Lacan says, "makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire,'' 8 still missing out on impossible Love, as impossible Love is on the path of the inarticulable sexual relation. That is, we are left to write ceaselessly about the Love that ultimately cannot stop not being written, for "the sexual relation cannot be written [ne peut pas s'ecrire]" (Lacan, 1998,p. 30· With their emphasis on love as work, and the need to accept the beloved's defects, ZupanCic and Zizek banalize Lacan to the point of nonrecogni-

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tion. 9 Are the labor of love and openness to the beloved's defects (sweating and snoring) what the tempestuous authentic act-the denuding of one's subjectivity-comes down to? ZupanCic enjoins her reader not to disavow the impossible; yet to humanize it is to channel it in a way that leaves a remainder from which we are subsequently entirely distracted. Once the Real is transformed into the possible, it is lost again-a new residue forms. 10 To humanize the Real is to disavow it.

The Real Fright of Dissatisfaction Strengthening the categories of affective normativity produces disturbing results. LAc A N,

Ethics

At times, then, Zizek joins ZupanCic in advocating acceptance of the beloved, "the way he or she is" -a stance that falls, I would say, neither in the category of the ethics of desire nor in that of the ethics of jouissance but perhaps in that of the ethics of the banal. In an issue of Lacanian Ink, he expresses great indebtedness to Zupancic for offering him her formula of love as "accessible transcendence." In an article titled "Il n'y a pas de rapport religieux," Zizek plays his usual cute trick of trying to lure the reader into a perspective that he eventually exposes as erroneous. This time it's that Lacan appears to fit perfectly the logic that "illusory fullness of the imaginary fantasy" covers "up a structural gap" and that psychoanalysis asserts "the heroic acceptance of the fundamental gap and/or structural impossibility as the very condition of desire." "Is this, exactly," Zizek proceeds teasingly to say, "not the 'ethics of the Real' -the ethics of accepting the Real of a structural impossibility?" (Zizek, zoorb, p. 85) But, in an about-face, he then sets us straight: Lacan, it turns out, aims at just the opposite. Let's take the case of love. Lovers usually dream that in some mythical Otherness ("another time, another place"), their love would have found its true fulfillment, that it is only the present contingent circumstances which prevent this fulfillment; and is the Lacanian lesson here not that one should accept this obstacle as structurally necessary, that there is NO "other place" of fulfillment, that this Otherness is the very Otherness

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of the fantasy? No: the "Real as Impossible" means here that THE IMPOSSIBLE DOES HAPPEN, that "miracles" like Love (or political revolution: "in some respects, a revolution is a miracle," Lenin said in 1921) DO OCCUR. From "impossible TO happen" we thus pass to "the impossible HAPPENS"-this, and not the structural obstacle forever deferring the final resolution, is the most difficult thing to accept: "We'd forgotten how to be in readiness even for miracles to happen" [Zizek, 2001b, p. ss]. Over the years, however, Zizek has been at least as invested in promoting symbolic death (as we have seen, and as he is still doing in this Lacanian Ink piece), although now symbolic death operates for the bathetic sake of accepting others or even for "reintegration into the social universe." This is how, in any case, in his book on Kieslowski, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Between Theory and Post-Theory, Zizek reads all three films, Blue, White, and Red. To Zizek, Karol in White initially is "reduced to nothing, robbed of his wife and all his possessions"; but on staging his own funeral, Karol moves toward "reintegration," regaining "his wealth and his wife" (zoma, pp. I6I-I6z). (In fact, Karol regains his wealth prior to his fake funeral, and this film offers no evidence of sustained reunion with his wife, Dominique.) 11 Zizek's reading of Blue, in which Julie progresses from symbolic death to a reassertion of life, could lead us to consider that what Zizek wishes to get at is a move from jouissance to desire. To Zizek, in the end Julie lovingly embraces others-"she is reconciled with the universe" (zoma, p. 171). But on second thought, how is such reconciliation tantamount to, or even compatible with, a state of radical desire? Zizek translates agape as an unplugging into an agape that promotes a mere plugging away. Not only does Julie's supposed full embrace of the universe sound totalizing (Imaginary) but reconciliation bears no trace of the self-destructive experience of Zizek's agape as uncoupling, as an encounter with death. From Zizek's book on Kieslowski, I do sense that he finds powerfully seductive and philosophically (if not practically) compelling-despite the lipservice paid to reconciliation with the universe and "reintegration" -what he calls "mission." Zizek believes that the ethical choice Kieslowski offers is between "calm life" and "mission" and that Kieslowski himself opted for the latter. The filmmaker's choice was that of the Polish Weronika, in the

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film The Double Life ofVe1'onique: "aware of his heart condition," Kieslowski nevertheless pursued "art/vocation" -(film making)-and then died of a heart attack (Zizek, zoo1a, p. 137). In contrast, the French Veronique compromises her desire, choosing life over "the cause" -ethical betrayal. Zizek spends a great deal of time in The Fright ofReal Tears exposing how various films (not only Kieslowski's) lay out the choice between what he also calls morality versus ethics (life versus mission), "the pleasure principle and the (death) drive beyond the pleasure principle: between a 'good life' oriented toward happiness, the 'care of the self', the wisdom of moderation, etc., and a life caught in a compulsion which we are compelled to follow irrespective of our own good" (p. 149). Zizek's very articulation of the alternatives gives away his preference, although it is a preference he eventually argues Kieslowski surpasses. Initially, Zizek reads Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy as giving rise to desire-"realized" but not "fulfilled" desire, "actualized, rendered visible, a~ desire." In particular, in these Kieslowski films "feminine desire" is born out of "the spirit of mourning and melancholia" (Zizek, 2001a, p. 16o). But this is just one level, Zizek clarifies; the more radical level on which the Colours trilogy signals a rupture has to do with a third term, beyond the dichotomy of life and mission. We have already referred to it at length: symbolic death, entry into or "passing through" the domain between two deaths. (Mission turns out to be a problematic death-driven compulsion, as opposed to the preferable symbolic death.) In the trilogy, according to Zizek, Paulinian agape as symbolic death is given "its ultimate cinematic expression" (p. 169). However, what all this turmoil eventually boils down to is "reconciliation," "successful reintegration into the social space" (p. r65). Julie, in Blue, is shown in the last shot of the film as being on the verge of such a mourning, which translates into restoring her "fantasy frame" (p. r69). Questions abound. First, How does Julie graduate from this Hegelian night of the world to "loving acceptance of others," to reconciliation with the universe? Second, How does such reconciliation, Julie's "boundless expansion" (Zizek, zoora, p. r7r), "restitute" her fantasy frame? The former would seem to involve her stance toward the world ("a Yes! to life in its mysterious synchronic multitude"; p. 172), the latter her particular psychic structure. Julie's affirmation of life, solidarity, would appear to have little to do with a new phantasmatic supplement that protects her from the lack

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of a sexual relation. Zizek reads Julie as moving from the "void of the pure Gaze" to "mystical communion" or "the sublime mystical vision of agape" (2001a, pp. 175-176), that is, to a Paulinian vision of love that in turn somehow constructs what Zizek seems to me simply to tack on: a protective fantasy. But, then, third, How distinct is such a protective fantasy-where the raw Real is tamed, as Zizek says it is-from what "life" stands for in the aforementioned antithesis or choice between life and mission? Have we not come full circle back to the earlier downgraded "'care of the self,' the wisdom of moderation," and so on, what was supposedly inferior to mission? As the figures in Kieslowski's trilogy move from the fright of real tears to outbursts of fictional or staged tears-"tears of regained distance" (Zizek, 2001a, p. 178)-are they not merely "renormalized," as Zizek characterizes the Judge at the end of Red (p. 179)? Although Zizek claims that in order to arrive at the "mystical communion of agape, we have first to pass through the zero-point of 'the night of the world'" (p. 175), he offers no conception of the bridge between the two or even of how one serves as a catalyst for the other. In tracing Julie's psychic journey, Zizek implies that she simply loses her fantasy's protective shield after the car accident and needs to reconstruct it. Traversal of fantasy is not the point. Zizek is explicit about this: we are tempted to regard the trajectory of Blue, he writes, "not as the traversing of fantasy, but as the gradual reconstitution of the fantasy that allows us access to reality" (p. 176). Julie must "simply" duplicate what she has lost, making engagement with the dark night of the world seem superfluous, a vehicle that merely catapults her back to where she started. Zizek concludes The Fright of Real Tears with a fairly cryptic statement that the choice Kieslowski offers-between "resignation at the missed encounter" that posits the gap and "the closed loop of fantasy" that fills the gap (p. r8r)-is a nonchoice. He seems to believe that we must adopt a protective fantasy, but since he regards the following statement as "the most concise version of the ultimate paradox of the Kieslowskian multiple universe" (p. r8r), it appears that the two choices are imbricated. Speaking of the long, happier version of Decalogue 6, Kieslowski commented, as Zizek notes, that "Possibilities are open, in the cinema version. The ending is such that everything is still possible, although we already know that nothing is possible" (p. r8r). I take this to suggest that, operating fetishistically, fantasy protects us from the knowledge that we have missed the encounter.

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(Fetishistically: we are and are not protected.) Zizek's footnote about a Maugham short story, "The Colonel's Lady," reinforces this interpretation. An old gentleman discovers poems by his wife that seem to expose a recent affair, but she explains that the young lover is actually the old gentleman himself as she recalls him from the early passionate days of their relationship. The couple is reconciled happily, recoupled. Zizek's implication seems to be that the old gentleman is offered a protective fantasy on the edge of the truth that his wife's response is a falsehood. We have traveled far from Zizek's exaltation of Antigone as the queen of ethics. That is, I bring all this up to highlight the gap between Zizek's authentic act and what he has it resulting in here: a fantasy shield that thinly veils a sordid deception. Defined as unplugging, agape would no longer seem to be in the picture (agape as plugging into the universe also seems to have dropped out), except insofar as it mysteriously, automatically transports the subject to a position of (r) missed encounter or (2) protective fantasy, or perhaps best of all, (3) protective fantasy that barely covers over the missed encounter-all of which (to me) lead to the Real fright of perpetual dissatisfaction. The subject is either obliterated (agape as unplugging) on the one hand or reconciled to missing the encounter and/or locked in fantasy on the other. This is the dilemma that White astutely poses. One can have enjoyment-whiteness in the film-at the expense of existence, or one can have dissatisfied existence, which Karol seems to have achieved at the end, as he draws his newly charged psychic energy from his imprisoned wife. Having accessed das Ding that in turn opens wide the doors of his desire, Karol is finally launched on a trajectory founded on a now-lost Dominique in the place of the gaze, rather than being in the (white) void of the gaze, as he was while immersed in the overwhelming enjoyment of his encounter with Love. This state of things, it seems to me, rather than (as Zizek indicates) joy over his new protected position of distance, is more likely to be what Karol sheds tears over: the impossibility of Love.

Courtly Love in the Real Imprisoned in her tower, Dominique might seem to some viewers to stand for the Lady of courtly love, raised to the dignity of das Ding. In my earlier treatment of courtly love, however, I called attention to Lacan's Imaginary

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sense of it in the Ethics seminar. Lacan refers to "the element of idealizing exaltation that is expressly sought out in the ideology of courtly love" that brings out its fundamental narcissistic character (1992, p. 151). This conception of courtly love would of course challenge whether it is possible after all for Karol to be at the end of TVhite in the place of the courtly lover vis-a-vis Dominique, given that he has undergone a "second death" and so has exceeded psychically the Imaginary. However, if we turn to Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World-a study that Lacan in both Ethics and Encore recommends to his reader, noting in the latter text that "it gets red hot!" (Lacan, 1998, p. 75)-we recall that certain manifestations of courtly love were indeed death-oriented. Karol seems to have undergone such a manifestation and, in a sense unfortunately, survived. Fueled by eros-in opposition, Rougemont writes, to agape (!)-courtly love, as it is expressed for example in the central myth of Tristan, exposes the link between passion and death, implying the destruction of anyone who yields himself or herself to passion. Yet more than anything, it was passion that courtly lovers wished to preserve. (One should have no trouble imagining lovers such as these at the very least considering the consequences in Kant's gallows scenario.) Rougemont calls Tristan's "inclination for a deliberate obstruction" "a desire for death" (1983, p. 45)-a phrase that recurs in Lacan's Ethics seminar: Unawares and in spite of themselves, the lovers have never had but one desire-the desire for death! Unawares, and passionately deceiving themselves, they have been seeking all the time simply to be redeemed and avenged for "what they have suffered"-the passion unloosed by the love-potion. In the innermost recesses of their hearts they have been obeying the fatal dictates of a wish for death; they have been in the throes of the active passion of Darkness [Rougemont, 1983, p. 46; my emphasis on "desire for death"]. In an explication of this notion of "desire for death" that corresponds well, I think, with what Lacan takes it to mean, Rougemont points out that death's approach acts as a "goad to sensuality," aggravating desire (1983, p. 53)Y But the Tristan myth reveals that death is the real end, what passion yearns for from the beginning; for this reason, the erotic and the mystical speak the same language. This myth simultaneously veils and articulates "a longing for death" (Rougemont, 1983, p. 63).

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Stirring up further trouble for Zizek, Rougemont characterizes the "cultivation of passionate love" that began in Europe in the twelfth century as a reaction against Christianity, in particular its doctrine of marriage (1983, p. 74). Christians who yielded themselves to the Christian concept of agape were, in Rougemont's assessment, strangers to passion/eros. They aspired to a human love that was a happy love, able to attain, in a worldly setting, the fullness of its own status. Agape was not directed toward a union that can only occur once life has ended; it "brings no fusion or ecstatic dissolving of the self in God" (p. 71). Following St. Paul's words that "it is better to marry than to burn," twelfth-century Christians, as Christians today are supposed to do, accepted the other "as he or she really is" (which phrase the words of "the Christian Zizek" echo). Zizek's agape as unplugging would seem to have no pertinence here; Rougemont describes agape as a "pure Christian emotion" of "elemental chastity and simplicity" (p. 155), by no means a source of mystical jouissance. A "Christian askesis leads the soul back to happy obedience, to acceptance of creature limitations, albeit with a spirit renewed and a freedom regained" (p. 169). However, with his emphasis on agape as loving embrace of the universe (which is more akin to Rougement's idea of Christianity than to the courtly lovers' desire for death), Zizek inappropriately imposes orthodoxy on Lacan. This third move, neither desire nor jouissance but reconciliation, seems entirely out of sync with a theory of ethics that insists on not ceding one's desire (for death). Persistent passion, rather than some low-level form of satisfaction, was the aim of Rougemont's courtly lovers; at the same time, with courtly love also comes the idea of destruction as fulfillment. Describing in his own terms the requisite desubjectivation for a sexual relation, or what I call Lacan's third-order Love, Love in the "beyond," Rougemont elaborates a doubleness-fulfillment in destruction-that plagued courtly lovers as it plagues Karol in White, as no doubt at some level it plagues us all: Drawn to a death remote from the life that has been spurring them on, the lovers are doomed to become the voluptuous prey of conflicting forces that will cast both into the same headlong swoon. For they can never be united till, bereft ofall hope and ofall possible love, they reach the heart of utter obstruction and experience the supreme exaltation which is destroyed in being fulfilled [1983, p. 53; my emphasis].

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"What we pursue is what promises to uplift and excite us, so that in spite of ourselves we shall be transported into the 'real life' spoken of by poets. But this 'real life' is an impossible one" (p. 51). Passion in courtly literature such as the Romance ofTristan was not the full, elemental Christian life but "a kind of naked and denuding intensity," "a bitter destitution" (p. 145). Impossible love, as Rougemont too calls it, created a thirst that only death could quench. With this metaphor of thirst, once again we encounter-and now end this chapter with-the impasse of either destitute desire or nonexistent satiety. 13

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Queer Ascesis

It's a Queer World, After All Queer politics involves not only the negative effort to resist norms, but also the positive work of intense, almost superhuman loving. r I M DE A N,

Beyond Sexuality

This chapter is founded on the premise that Lacan's conception of Love finds a central place in queer theory. That is, Lacan's self-shattering Love appears to be the aim for which certain prominent queer theorists are striving, as if it can be accomplished. I have in mind here especially the work of David Halperin's Saint Foucault, David Halperin himself, Leo Bersani, Tim Dean, Judith Butler, and Lee Edelman. Foucault's emphasis on ascesis; Bersani's on desubjectivation; Dean's on the impersonal, excess, and the Real; Butler's on incoherent identity; and Edelman's on the death drive lead to my sense of a stress in queer theory on what in Lacanian parlance might be called the "beyond," defined as being "outside the limits of the law" (r98r, p. 276)-where Lacan situates Love. As Zizek puts it, this time in The Puppet and the Dwarf, Lacan's discussion of Love in Encore opposes "the dialectic of the Law and its transgression: this ... dialectic is clearly 'masculine'/phallic, it involves the tension between the All (the universal Law) and its constitutive exception, while love is 'feminine,' it involves the paradoxes of the non-All" (2003, p. rr6). Similarly insisting on Love's lawless119

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ness, jouissance, and emptiness, Lee Edelman distinguishes between a love that offers the promise of eventual totalization, which he depreciates, and Lacan's Love that exceeds philanthropy, which Edelman exalts. Edelman clearly prefers this latter Lacanian Love-which explodes any "Imaginary totalization" of the subject, by unleashing "negativity" that "evacuates the subject" and yields a capacity to inhabit emptiness (2004, pp. 84-85), not to advance to All but to be "not-All." However, if we look to an article such as Paul Morrison's "End Pleasure" for a consideration of the relation of queer theory and psychoanalysis, we discover a divide, a feud, an oppositional relation if any at all. Morrison presents mainly Freud, but also briefly Lacan, as reinforcing the idea of the normalcy of the heterosexual matrix through the dynamics of the Oedipal complex, at the expense, needless to say, of homosexuality. In Morrison's perception, homosexuality is conceived in psychoanalysis as what undergirds heterosexuality and is at the same time regarded as a pathology in need of cure. To Morrison, "The Freudian narrative of psychosexual development ... construes homosexuality as a simple failure of teleology, as sexual impulses that have yet to find resolution and stabilization (psychoanalysis is always the promise of conversion) in proper object choices and organ specificity" (I993-94, p. ss). Morrison interprets Freud as proposing that heterosexual genitality is recuperative (to find a love object is always to refind it), whereas homosexual regression "exhausts the meaning of love" (p. 64). In addition, Morrison takes some early assertions of Lacan (which is not to say that I reject them)-that the Law serves desire through the incest taboo and that desire reproduces one's relation to a lost object-to indict Lacan as well for replicating the Oedipal familial organization that institutes the entire process entangling Law and desire. "The overt coercion of an older familialism is simply translated into an ideology of desire itself," writes Morrison (p. 66), which, in the context of Morrison's work, unequivocally militates against a conception of homosexuality as anything but regressive, if not perversely pathological. Curiously, though Lacanian theory on the whole avoids conflating homosexuality and perversion, Morrison slips into an acceptance of the term "perverts" to describe homosexuals, as if he learned this lesson from psychoanalysis. Yet theoretically as well as clinically speaking, a "homosexual" is as apt to have the psychic structure of an obsessional or hysteric as she or he is apt to have a perverse psychic structure. Likewise, a "heterosexual" is as apt to have a perverse psychic structure as is a "homosexual."

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Like many non-Lacanians, Morrison makes the mistake of treating early Lacan as all of Lacan and therefore misses the Lacanian spotlight on the Real. Within queer theory (I am saying nothing about "actual homosexuals"), however, there is an emphasis on what I have designated as Lacan's third-order Love. I want first to establish this emphasis, in queer theory, and then engage its provocative implications. What fails on the level of the subject may be just the "thing" on the level of culture.

s

David Halperin and Halperin Saint Foucault Queer theory is indebted to Foucault in major and multifarious ways, so that it cannot be said that David Halperin's study Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography was exactly necessary for the bridge between Foucault and queer theory to be built or acknowledged. At the same time, it is worth keeping in mind that Foucault reportedly stated that his "work has had nothing to do with gay liberation" (Halperin, 1995, p. 31). In any case, I read Saint Foucault as an impressive elaboration of why Foucault might be regarded as the father (or daddy) of queer theory. Halperin quite helpfully lays out the rationale behind the assumption that one cannot practice queer politics without engaging The History of Sexuality, volume I in particular. I applaud Halperin in general for drawing from Foucault's work a theory and politics of resistance as well as for linking Foucault's interest in S/M rituals to his neo-Greek philosophy, and moreover for explicating how a theorist and critic of disciplinary power could consistently advocate a ritualized aesthetics of existence and practice the highly disciplined art of pain. For now, though, I want to take the liberty of examining Halperin's Saint Foucault solely for its projection of Foucault as a queer theorist of Love in the "beyond"- "outside the limits of the law." Foucault famously attacked the repressive hypothesis, but he also-in a Lacanian vein, I would say-congratulates psychoanalysts for linking power and desire "in a more complex and primary way than through the interplay of a primitive, natural, and living energy welling up from below," and even for having the insight "that sex is not 'repressed"' (1978, p. 81)! Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, and The History of Sexuality, volume I, all contain evidence of Foucault's ambivalent attitude toward Freud and psychoanalysis in general. As I hope I have shown convincingly in Chapter

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Two on modernism-by tracing in Madness and Civilization a transhistorical concept of madness that seems akin to Lacan's register of the Real-a significant Lacanian strain of thought runs throughout at least Foucault's early work. That strain- especially if Halperin's portrait ofFoucault, with its emphasis on ascesis, is valid-reappears in the last volumes of The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Setp The Foucault Halperin admits he worships-"the guy was a fucking saint" (1995, p. 6)-is presented in Saint Foucault as a kind of mystic. There is even a "not-all quality" to Halperin's sense of "the homosexual," who according to Halperin is defined as "an identity without an essence" (p. 61). Halperin is on his way here to his "definition" of queer. He derives it (although he does not limit it to homosexuals) from his sense of homosexual identity as supplementary, as constituted not at all substantially but by where and how it operates, sheerly by its "positionalityvis-a-vis the normative" (p. 62). Halperin weaves this notion of queer together with (and no doubt derives it from) Foucault's conception of homosexuality. Foucault saw homosexuality itself as "a historic opportunity to open up new relational and affective potentialities ... not in virtue of qualities intrinsic to the homosexual, but because the position of the homosexual [is] 'off-center'" (Halperin, 1995, p. 67). This conception of the off-center homosexual leads Halperin to Foucault's preoccupation with ancient ethics, ethical self-fashioning, or "an aesthetics, or stylistics, of existence" (1995, p. 68). Here too, in the domain of ancient ethics, we can locate Foucault's "queer theory" as at least potentially akin to Lacan's theory of Love, given that through this hoped-for appropriation Foucault wanted Greek ethics to obtain a contemporary meaning insofar as Foucault was pushing for "'new forms of relationships, new forms of love'" (p. 73). Foucault's Greek aesthetics of existence, as Halperin interprets it, identifies "the self with the soul," which is not "a principle of personal individuation but an errant particle of the Divine" (p. 74). Halperin attributes to Foucault an interest in "the site of a radical alterity: ... the space within each human being where she or he encounters the not-self, the beyond" (my emphasis). Foucault's devotion to ancient ethics leads him to the possibility of "actualizing or instantiating an impersonal essence," to "an ascetic art, a spiritual exercise designated to empty the self of precisely those passions and attachments that make the self, according to the modern view, something individual, personal, and unique" (p. 75). Foucault's cultivation of the self,

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on the Greek model, involves going "beyond oneself" to an impersonal level of personal life, "the capacity to 'realize oneself' by becoming other than what one is" (p. 76). Again in the eyes of Halperin, to Foucault this is the path "for self-transformation in gay sex" (1995, p. 76). Halperin sums it up with the term used by Foucault-"ascesis"-which entails transforming oneself"to attain a certain mode of being" (p. 77). Foucault's modern form of ascesis is meant to be a way of "constructing other forms of pleasures, of relationships, coexistences, attachments, loves, intensities." Foucault favored "'a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent ... a manner of being that is still improbable,"' to quote Foucault, and to yield "new possibilities oflove," to quote Halperin (pp. 78-79). In Halperin's interpretation, Foucault felt that our task was to become queer in these ways, even rather than concentrating on lesbian and gay rights or resisting social norms and negating established values. Foucault preferred the challenge of"'mak[ing] ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasures"' (Halperin, 1995, p. 81). Foucault's emphasis on "pleasures" (well beyond Freud's homeostatic pleasure of Beyond the Pleasure Principle) prompts Halperin to invoke Foucault's strategic use of sadomasochistic eroticism. He points out that Foucault saw "queer praxis" as tied to S/M, as a deliberate means of producing pleasure. Foucault contrasts S/M with social power, viewing S/M as an acting out of power dynamics, a strategic game of sorts, a form of pleasure over power. Foucault even speaks in terms of a "desexualization of pleasure," which involves eroticization of nongenital areas of the body. This emphasis might be seen as a challenge to, or at least alteration of, phallocratic culture, if not a challenge to the phallus itself. Halperin's Foucault favors sexual activity that is devirilizing, a decentering and even mortifying of the penis, as he seeks a masculinity in a "devirilized form," masculinity constituted ''performatively" (1995, p. 90). Aiming at pleasure(s) beyond the sexual, or beyond sexual pleasure, Foucault seems headed in the direction ofLacan's Other jouissance (leaving behind phallic jouissance), which raises the question of his use, consciously and quite deliberately strategic, of perversion (by which I mean S/M, not homosexuality) to access Other jouissance. It does appear that Foucault's "pleasure" is consonant with Lacan's jouissance. According to Halperin, "Foucault liked to complain to his friends [that] the nineteenth century had invented myriad species of perverse sexual desire, but virtually noth-

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ing new in the way of sexual pleasure had been created for millennia" (p. 92). Halperin insists on Foucault's distinction between pleasure and desire, quoting Foucault as conceiving of pleasure beyond pathology and abnormality, "'outside the subject,' or at the limit of the subject" (p. 94). Foucault wrote, specifically of bathhouses, that they "'afford an exceptional possibility of desubjectivization, of desubjection .... It's not the affirmation of identity that's important, it's the affirmation of non-identity"' (Halperin, 1995' p. 94). In distinguishing desire from pleasure and opting for pleasure, Foucault "holds out the promise of ... a disaggregating experience." Halperin thinks that Foucault associates desire with a "subject's individuality, history, and identity as a subject," whereas pleasure is "desubjectivating, impersonal: it shatters identity, subjectivity, and dissolves the subject" (1995, p. 95). Again it seems accurate to link Foucault's desire with Lacan's desire (although technically desire and subjectivity, rather than "identity," are akin in Lacan) and Foucault's pleasure with Lacan's jouissance. To Halperin's Foucault, by consolidating subjectivity desire renders one vulnerable to social regulation. Pleasure, by contrast, dissolves the subject in a way (and to many this may not sound Foucauldian) that enables invulnerability to power. It is not easy, then, to articulate (or discover) what identity exactly is invulnerable. Halperin interprets "queer culture" as having "political efficacy" insofar as it reverses "mechanisms of sexuality" and makes "strategic use of power differentials, physical sensations, and sexual identity-categories," resulting in a destabilizing of identity itself (p. 96). Although Halperin has been read (in particular by Tim Dean in "Sex and Syncope") as diverging from Bersani in various respects, to uphold his idea that a strategic employment of power differentials can destablize identity Halperin quotes Bersani in "The Gay Daddy" (chapter 3 in Bersani's Homos) as summarizing Foucault's position on resistance to disciplinary power as follows. Bersani, writes Halperin, reads Foucault as advocating a counterproductivity through playing with new "intensities of pleasure." This form of counterdiscipline Halperin calls "a technique of ascesis" (p. 97). Halperin-and now I am speaking of him alone as a queer theorist in his own right (rather than as an interpreter of Foucault)-defends queer sex (Love?) for opening up an impersonal self, which he regards as "the substance of ongoing ethical elaboration-and thus as the site of future transformation" (p. 97). Halperin reads Foucault, then, as proposing the practice of what he reminds us Bersani calls ")ouis-

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sance as a mode of ascesis"' (and so he is puzzled that Bersani puts forth this notion as one that opposes Foucault's view). In other words, Halperin at least perceives a conceptual convergence among Foucault, himself, and Bersani on the topic of queer Love. Halperin conceives of queer politics, obviously in his mind in the spirit of Foucault, as "a kind of spiritual exercise, a modern practice of the self" (p. rOI), again through an excess of pleasure. Halperin invokes Gayle Rubin to help explain his sense of how S/M in particular offers the pleasure of excess. It is not simply a question of new or especially intense physical sensations but of"'a great deal of attention, intimacy, and trust,"' as Rubin states. S/M involves encountering the "not self," as Halperin puts it, through and with another person. Halperin describes this encounter as an experience of the Other at the kernel of our subjectivity, which can be correlated with Lacan's idea of Love as an encounter with the gaze, our constitutive lack. Halperin seems to be approaching this idea in stressing "our own otherness to ourselves" (p. ros). What Halperin advocates as "a homosexual ascesis" is frightening, risky, exhilarating, and ultimately transformative, because it comes about through psychological and social rupture and disintegration, just as Lacan's Love-beyond specular (or narcissistic) love as well as beyond desire (operating through the pursuit of objet a)-is potentially annihilating, as is the unmediated gaze. To be in Lacanian Love, just as to experience homosexual ascesis, is to experience dissolution, for it is to defy the limits of the law. Andre captures this notion of (queer) Love in terms of a "conjunction of love and death ... undoubtedly intrinsic to passion ... as 'having one's being,' even [if] this entails its no longer being" (1999, p. 290).

Leo Bersani In the extreme spirit of Andre's words just cited, the "queer theory" of Leo Bersani (which I put in quotation marks since Bersani worries that queer theory degays gayness), beginning with "Is the Rectum a Grave?" and arriving at Homos, moves at least more explicitly, if not graphically, toward defying the limits of the law. Bersani starts his "Rectum" essay provocatively by asserting that most people do not like sex; he is interested in a certain aversion to sex. Oddly enough, through a discussion of MacKinnon's and

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Dworkin's feminist condemnations of pornography, in conjunction with Foucault's work on the Greek taboo on "'passive' anal sex in ancient Athens" ("To be penetrated is to abdicate power"; 1987, p. 212), Bersani zeroes in on what is to him "the inestimable value of sex" -that it is, not just in its pornographic forms, "anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving" (1987, p. 215). Foucault, MacKinnon, and Dworkin (albeit strange bedfellows) bring out Bersani's point that sexual pleasure and the exercise ofloss of power are "indissociable" (p. 216). Bersani is focused, if not fixated, on this association, for he wants to promote the view that powerlessness or loss of control has a strong allure. He therefore objects to phallocentrism for denying the value of powerlessness in the form of a "radical disintegration and humiliation of the self" (p. 2 17). Moreover, Bersani ties these conditions, through Bataille, to mysticism. Bersani likewise gleans from Freud's Three Essays on the Theory ofSexuality "that sexual pleasure occurs whenever a certain threshold of intensity is reached, when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensation or affective processes somehow 'beyond' those connected with psychic organization" (p. 217). An entirely different sort of queer-theorist reader of Freud from Morrison, Bersani finds in Freud the idea that "the sexual" "emerges as the jouissance of exploded limits, as the ecstatic suffering into which the human organism momentarily plunges when it is 'pressed' beyond a certain threshold of endurance." It is for this reason that Bersani has claimed that sexuality is perhaps "a tautology for masochism" (p. 217). Bersani draws mysticism from Bataille and masochism from Freud to give us, once again, mystical masochism or masochistic mysticism as a kind of sexual goal. But it is not that Bersani glorifies power relations-although he may seem to-in that he stresses the pleasure of the powerless and discerns in MacKinnon and Dworkin on pornography the truth about sexuality, that it is antiegalitarian. Instead, Bersani believes that heterosexual "relations" "condemn sexuality to becoming a struggle for power" (p. 218), which he disdains, whereas the elevation of the sexual to desubjectivation rules out the question of power. If no person is posited, there can be no war. Bersani (like Foucault and Halperin) would seem to be "for" self-erasure in sex and seems to think that real sex only occurs with self-erasure, or in Lacanian terms that real sex is in the Real. Defending the sexual act as having the "terrifying appeal of a loss of the ego, of a self-abasement" (p. 220), Bersani answers the question posed by

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his title "Is the Rectum a Grave?" by reasoning that "if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared-differently-by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death" (p. 222). Bersani clearly supports the idea of the death of subjectivity, which he imagines being deposited into the grave of the rectum in homosexual sex. By thus discarding subjectivity, the gay man, according to Bersani, ruins his "identification with a murderous judgment against him," since such a judgment is necessarily grounded in "the sacrosanct value of selfhood" (p. 222). Bersani may be na!vely overlooking here the homophobe's persistent self enabling him or her to do violence to the gay man rendered vulnerable through dissolving his selfhood in a bath of jouissance. Nevertheless, Bersani ends his essay by italicizing the importance of male homosexuality for the sake of advertising "the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self." Male homosexuality thereby "proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis" (p. 222). 2 In Homos, Bersani favors a withdrawal from relationality itself, implying a power differential among all subjects. Homo-ness is a way too of questioning the value of community; Bersani's hope is that erotic desire for the same might alter our understanding of how the human subject is socially implicated. Like Halperin, as we know, Bersani turns to Foucault, in particular to the end of The History of Sexuality, volume I, where Foucault calls for "a different economy of bodies and pleasures," for support of his view that a gay lifestyle might lead to a new organization of the body's pleasure. Basically, Bersani wants relations of power structured differently, an antifascist rethinking of power structures. He therefore turns to masochism for the self-shattering that enables the ego to renounce its power over the world. S/M, then, can have this radical function, especially insofar as one takes masochism to be primary within it. S/M, writes Bersani, "strips away defenses against the joy of self-dissolution" (1995, pp. 96-97). Interestingly too, Bersani argues for a distinction between masochism and the death drive. Bersani's is a joyful jouissance, not pathological or death-driven. Bersani at least would seem to want us to compare his masochistic jouissance with the mystical masochism that Lacan associates with Saint Teresa, rather than with the death-driven masochism of the conventional psychoanalytic notion of perversion. Like Halperin's! Foucault's queer mysticism, Bersani's shattered homosexual may be allied

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with Lacan's Woman who doesn't exist, with my conception of Lacan's Worftan in Love. Bersani values (rather than machismo) the very prospect that to him the homophobic male's fearful excitement points to: "a man becoming a woman." Through gay males, Bersani proposes, straight men can "recognize the otherness in themselves" (p. 28). Like Lacan's Woman who doesn't exist, Bersani's "homo" is beyond castration: he possesses a subjectivity that offers the bliss of discarding it. Bersani attests to an "incorporation of woman's otherness" as a source of "desiring material for male homosexuals" (p. 6o). In identifying with woman and imitating men, gay men break down the sexual binarism and produce "a diversified desiring field" (p. 6I)-to enter an outlaw existence, beyond relationality. It is as though Bersani wants to make a lasting lifestyle out of the Lacanian encounter. Bersani takes his point about the shattering of boundaries and consequent indistinguishability of homosexual lovers to an extreme in analyzing Genet. He argues that through the act of rimming in Funeral Rites (inspired by the death of one of Genet's lovers) perfect symbiosis occurs. Genet plays here with a fantasy of total penetration, where the beloved is devoured and later expelled as waste by the lover/devourer's body. Such an amorous attack eliminates differences. Jean "is fantasized as responding to Genet's oral cannibalism with a rectal cannibalism that devours Genet. The two have become one" (Bersani, I995, p. I58). Plenitudinous penetration leading to a devouring of the beloved would seem to fulfill Lacan's idea of Love in the beyond, the fusion of two desubjectified beings through a disaggregating experience. Bersani's emphasis on waste too might be read as a sign of the lovers' emergence into the Real: what the Symbolic excretes. Bersani in fact locates an "originary" waste product in what serves for him as a kind of primal scene for gay love in the case of the Wolf Man. Bersani focuses on the Wolf Man to show how his "theory of love," grounded in the "impossibilities" of sexuality (I995, p. w8), can offer resistance to power, to its violence and avidity, in human negotiations. Bersani reads the Wolf Man as offering us a "genealogy of gay love" (p. II2) insofar as the Wolf Man as a child expresses concern for his father's loss of power, rather than setting himself up as a rival to the father. Instead of a father and son polarized "by a threat of violence that forces the repression of love," this case presents a "gentler exchange" between father and son. The son's power is improvised, Bersani proposes, "as a response to the vulnerability inherent

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in the very position and exercise of power" (p. n2). While observing his parents make love, at the moment when his father's penis disappears theone-and-a-half-year-old Wolf Man feels compassion for his father because of his father's loss, and so passes a stool. Bersani reads the stool as a gift, as the boy's way of compensating his father for the father's loss. He finds an analogy to this "primal scene" in the scene of gay sex, when the penetrated man offers his visible penis as a replacement for the invisible penis lost within him. Lurking behind this adult gay scenario are for Bersani the shadowy figures of loving little boy and father, which parallel turns the gay man's visible penis into a metaphorical stool that stands for the gift of love between men engaging in the risky business of self-dissolution.

Tim Dean Bersani concludes Homos with his focus on human waste, on literature as "cultural droppings," which he believes is all we can work with given the constitutive nature of oppression in current social structures (1995, p. r8r), just as Tim Dean (an admirer ofBersani's work) attempts in his book Beyond Sexuality to show a shift in Lacanian theory away from the phallus in the direction of "the turd." I see the phallus (signifier of desire) and objet a (object-cause of desire) as having different theoretical functions and therefore question whether it can be said that one concept replaces the other. (Dean argues throughout Beyond Sexuality that "whereas the phallus implies a univocal model of desire ... object a implies multiple, heterogeneous possibilities for desire, especially since object a bears no discernible relation to gender"; 2000, p. 2 so.) I am nevertheless interested in Dean's emphasis on excrement, excess, and the Real in his coming to terms as a queer theorist with (here I believe I have to say ambiguously, since he does not peel them apart) desire/love in Lacan. In general, what Dean describes as "desire" in Lacan- which he finds compatible with queer theory since it is, in his reading ofLacan, not tied to sex or what he calls gender-resembles what I have termed Lacan's third-order Love. What we find, in Dean's work, in particular is a conception of perversion, based on Freud in Three Essays on the Themy of Sexuality, that reads it as a form of polymorphous Love in the "beyond." Dean attempts to rescue Lacan for queer theory by featuring Lacan's statement in Encore that "quand on aime, il ne s'agit pas de sexe." While I read

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this line as signifying that Love is beyond sexuation, "outside the limits of the law," Dean understands it as indicating that the gender of object-choice is irrelevant in desire/love but still in a way that locates, as I do, Lacanian Love in a place beyond sexual difference, or I would say sexuation. Since "desire" in Lacan, according to Dean, is detached from gender, because it is not determined by object-choice but by objet a, Dean reads Lacan as liberating desire from normative heterosexuality. Dean has a looser sense of the function of objet a than I do (I accept Fink's understanding of this concept as "a last reminder or remainder of the hypothetical mother-child unity to which the subject clings in fantasy to achieve a sense of wholeness, ... as that 'part' of the mother the child takes with it in separation"; 1995, p. 84); I am concerned, however, with Dean's focus on desire, fantasy, and the Real (all three!) as queer-meaning, opposed to the normal, in excess of sexuality, sexual practices, sexual identities. It is, again to Dean, Lacan's register of the Real that enables Lacan to challenge heteronormativity. The Real, insofar as it deessentializes and despecifies abstractness, "resonates with the notion of queer underlying queer theory" (Dean, 2ooo, p. 231). The Real, like the notion of queer underpinning queer theory, Dean proceeds to say, is also oppositional, subversive rather than substantive. In fact, even as he embraces Lacan, Dean, in his role as queer theorist, wants to leave behind psychic structures such as "the hysteric," "the psychotic," and especially "the pervert" because, he says, they reinscribe "a typology of desire" (p. 233), which is another reason-that is, Dean's assumption that desire is apt to make political waves-! think Dean is writing about Love. Insofar as Lacan conceives of perversion in terms of structure, he reinstitutes "a subjective identity," writes Dean, which Dean sees as problematic, as reinscribing "a typology of desire" rendered proleptically retrograde by Freud's account of perversion (p. 233). Dean quotes Sedgwick's definition of queer to reinforce his sense of Freud's sense that we are all potentially queer and that perversion is the norm. In Tendencies, Sedgwick writes that "'queer' can refer to ... the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically" (1993, p. 8; my emphasis on "excesses"). Rather than being annexed to gender or sex specificity, or even the specificity of an individual "face," desire, in Dean's view (clearly in sync with Bersani's), needs to be depersonified

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and impersonalized, in order to retain its "originary perverse force" (2ooo, p. 2 39). Dean does not exactly consider perversion in terms of a lack of lack; yet neither does he accept the idea that desire is predicated on (or, as I see it, synonymous with) "lack." He goes to great lengths to put Lacan's concept of desire into alignment with Deleuze and Guattari's. Dean's preference is to situate desire in relation to excess rather than lack. In the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari, Dean conceives of desire as operating within a "calculus of abundance rather than scarcity" (20oo, p. 249). To Dean, desire is multiple, pluralistic. But where Deleuze and Guattari reject Lacan's sense of desire as tethered to lack and castration, Dean presents Lacan's account of desire as depending on excess, which brings it into line, in his mind, with Deleuze and Guattari's conception. Although I think that desire's dependence on excess is one thing (an idea I support) and desire as excess is another (Dean's implication), still what matters to me here is that Dean pushes desire in the direction, if not into the place, of excess. I also think that when he argues that excess is the precondition of, rather than alternative to, lack, he misses that he has not disturbed the idea that desire is lack, lack of the lost excess. But Dean assumes that he has established a harmony, if not a unity, between desire and excess. He accepts the odd idea (which I don't quite recognize as Lacanian) that an excess of signification is objet a, which he insists takes multiple forms and to which the subject has multiple relations-all of which reinforces Dean's sense of desire as multiple, pluralistic, metonymic, excessive. Dean himself slides metonymically from mobile desire to the sexuality that the mobility of desire makes it difficult to localize, to the Real, which is the only term by which sexuality can be "explained," given that sexuality is unlocalizable. Placing desire in the Real, Dean moves it close to (if he does not make it synonymous with) Lacan's Love. 3 Beginning with an epigraph from Deleuze and Guattari that "every love is an exercise in depersonalization" (2ooo, p. 264), Dean's penultimate section of "Lacan Meets Queer Theory" invites us to find in his final section, "The Triumph of Love," an articulation of the place of love in Lacanian theory. He then reminds us that Lacan locates objet a (cause of desire, situated on the border between the Real and the Symbolic) paradigmatically in scat. Dean quotes Lacan as saying that "the organ of what is incorporeal in the sexuated [sexue1 being is that part of the organism the subject places

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when his separation occurs .... In this way, the object he naturally loses, excrement, and the props he finds in the Other's desire-the Other's gaze or voice-comes [sic] to this place" (p. 264), in order to stress that the turd (and not the phallus) stands for subjective loss in Lacan. The turd is to Dean the universal object-cause of desire (which he believes the phallus cannot be). This object-cause of desire has the added benefit of giving rise to desire before "sexual difference." Dean mainly wants to highlight that not only for Yeats but also for him, for Dean as a queer Lacanian, Love has raised its mansion in the place of excrement.

Judith Butler Although the work of Judith Butler does not explicitly present itself as a theory of love, it implies one. Because Butler's thinking is so intricately elaborated as well as central to queer theory, I want to take my time analyzing it, in an effort finally to unveil what I consider to be her emphasis on desubjectivation (similar to Foucault's, Halperin's, Bersani's, and Dean's) that in this case results from a successful mourning of a homosexual lost love. This is a theoretical affair, in the theoretical domain of homosexuality, that heads once again in the direction of (what Butler calls) desire but that in Lacanian terms seems immersed in what has an uncanny resemblance to jouissance. In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Butler proposes that subject formation depends on the relinquishing of passionate attachments, to which one is nevertheless forever subjected, and that such psychic subjection renders one vulnerable to a social subjection to power. (Foucault has failed to address the question of what psychic form power takes; Butler therefore wishes to respond to that question through a reconciliation of psychoanalytic and Foucauldian theories of subject formation.) Psychic dependency of the subject on the family renders the subject "exploitable" by society. Butler claims that the subject is constituted in primary vulnerability and consequently pursues subordination as the promise of social existence. One's subjection to one's original others, to give the point more spin, appears to result in a susceptibility to Foucault's Power-all of which apparently needs to be resisted. As Zizek has pointed out, however, Butler makes a mistake in conflating two resistances: social and psychoanalytic.

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He elaborates in The Ticklish Subject on how subjectivity is not the same as subjugation. It is "theoretically and politically crucial to distinguish between the primordial phantasmic 'passionate attachment' that the subject is compelled to repress/disavow in order to gain socio-symbolic existence, and subjection to this very socio-symbolic order, which provides the subject with a determinate symbolic mandate (a place of interpellatory recognition/identification). While the two cannot simply be opposed as 'good' and 'bad' ... they nevertheless function according to different logics" (Zizek, 1999, pp. 267-268; my emphasis). Following her focus on devouring passionate attachments, Butler mistakenly takes up melancholia as if it were the constitutive condition of all subjects. Butler universalizes the debilitating pathology of melancholia and in the process (r) alters the dominant theory of melancholia, established by Freud and Kristeva; (2) conflates melancholic loss with Lacanian lack; and (3) finally points theoretically to an oxymoronic, supposedly desiring, yet incoherent nonsubjectivity, placing her ideal subject in a state that has the markings of Lacan's third-order Love. Butler needed to articulate more fully what she means by lamenting that the subject is primarily dependent, passionately attached (especially in light of the fact that she yokes passionate attachment to social vulnerability). Is Butler proposing that we no longer, as children, passionately attach, or that we no longer passionately ever detach? She proposes rather nebulously that the subject is produced through a "foreclosure" of his or her early objects of love, so that the I is "fundamentally threatened by the specter of this (impossible) love's reappearance and remains condemned to reenact that love unconsciously, repeatedly reliving and displacing the scandal, that impossibility, orchestrating that threat to one's sense of 'I"' (1997, pp. 8-9). Another question too is whether such a structure institutes desire for subjection, as Butler sees it, or is the very means by which one becomes a desiring subject, having accepted lack, or as Tim Dean (oddly enough) phrases it the "ineluctable law" of castration? Would "desire" for subjection even be desire, or would it rather be a form of masochistic jouissance, produced as a result of a blockage of subjectivity? But it turns out that the primary loss Butler has in mind, the foreclosed loss that produces our subjugation in subjectivity, is that of a homosexual love, experienced by the heterosexual subject-the only kind of subject Butler acknowledges. What Butler initially presents in The Psychic Life of

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Power as an apparently lacking or desiring generic subject is later in the introduction identified as a heterosexual melancholic prohibited from loving the homosexual beloved. "The formula 'I have never loved' someone of similar gender and 'I have never lost' any such person predicates the 'I' on the 'never-never' of that love and loss. Indeed, the ontological accomplishment of heterosexual 'being' is traced to this double negation, which forms its constitutive melancholia, an emphatic and irreversible loss that forms the tenuous basis of that 'being"' (Butler, 1997, p. 23). Butler regards this foreclosure of "someone of similar gender" never loved and so never lost as a function of "the melancholia that grounds the subject" (p. 23). Such a loss, she believes, "inaugurates the subject," the "heterosexual 'being."' Far from being unaware of her reduction of subjectivity in general to masochistic "subjectivity" -where desire equals desire for subjection-Butler endorses it, substituting melancholia for masochism. But first, how does one make sense of Butler's slide from lost passionate attachments within the family to this lost, yet never lost because never loved, object of the same gender? Is it that this unloved object of the same gender is always linked to the (or a) lost familial passionate attachment? I don't believe that Butler lays out why it would be or even that it is; and the man's lost attachment to the father's body is an unbroached issue. Second, if the homosexual is the lost object, why isn't the subject in pursuit of it in the form of objet a? In other words, why aren't all heterosexual subjects seeking their lost homosexual loves? Although Foucauldian Power may forbid this pursuit of same-sex love (at least subsequent to the Greek and Roman eras), what we are forbidden to desire in Lacanian theory constitutes exactly what molds our objet a. Third, if foreclosure is somehow consistent with uncompleted grief or melancholia, as it appears to be in Butler, can it also be the case, in accordance with Freudian and Kristevan theories of melancholia, that the lost homosexual love is somehow incorporated so as not to be lost after all? Incorporation certainly seems to be what Butler has in mind when she contends that such a loss haunts and thereby threatens the subject. Yet is foreclosure incorporation, or rather can a rigorous barring, a preemptive loss, possibly be consistent with incorporation? 4 All of which returns us to the central question of whether melancholia can serve as a paradigm for subject formation, since the very lack or loss required for subject formation is incorporated, swallowed, consumed in melancholia and thereby jeopardizes subjectivity. Butler herself writes, "Melancholia refuses

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to acknowledge loss, and in this sense 'preserves' its lost objects as psychic effects" (1997, p. 182). Hence melancholia blocks eros, while subjectivity implies lack or desire. At the end of "Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification," Butler presents her unfortunately underelaborated hypothesis that "only by risking the incoherence of identity is connection [between heterosexuality and homosexuality] possible." (Precisely what is meant by "connection," the crux of Butler's idea, needs to be explained.) This hypothesis, she points out, correlates with "Leo Bersani's insight that only the decentered subject is available to desire" (Butler, 1997, p. 149). Here Butler discloses her own belated, or at least belatedly clarified, sense that the melancholic structure of "subjectivity" that she has been developing cancels desire. Desire is then, after all, in Butler's view too, distinct from "desire" for subjection. It turns out that the surprising, very much understated implication of Butler's work is that her "ideal subject"-that is, her nonsubjugated incoherent identities-have not yet for the most part been formed, or allowed to come into existence, and will not be until rage is redirected against the lost other. Butler accepts the notion that in mourning the object is "killed" to preserve life. Yet the lost other of the heterosexual subject is, to Butler, the homosexual love: must rage be directed against one's lost homosexual love? Peculiar (not to mention politically problematic) as this might seem, it is the logical implication of Butler's psychoanalytic argument. She seems to wiggle free of it, though, by reidentifying what gets entombed as a diseased conscience or the ideal of "Law," so that when it comes time for rage to defile, the "appropriate" incorporated object is defiled and cast out. Despite these complications, I think it is clear that Butler supports the idea of completed mourning (in her terms, to activate desire)-only curiously, from a psychoanalytic point of view, for the sake of achieving incoherent identity rather than subjectivity. Toward the end of The Psychic Life of Power, she states that she favors "avowing the trace of loss that inaugurates one's own emergence" (1997, p. 195). This would appear to mean avowing the lost homosexual love, and thereby enacting the rebellion of melancholia that has been, to Butler, suppressed. Her entire theory of melancholic subjectivity therefore turns out to seem contradictory insofar as Butler initially describes subject formation of melancholic nonsubjects as well as because what Butler wants, in the end, is a "cure"-of heterosexual melancholiaand not the interminable melancholia that she initially seems to present as

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inevitable, if not desirable, given that subjectivity, to Butler, can be achieved in no other way. Butler is not trying to recuperate melancholia, to conceive of it as an ethical form of "subjectivity" that puts one into intimate contact with an internalized but cast-out alterior. 5 Instead, it seems that to Butler all (necessarily subjugated) subjects are sad, diminished, and self-berating and will be until they assume an incoherent, decentered identity of true "desire," which will emerge once homosexual loss is avowed and mourned-that is, no longer lost and consequently no longer incorporated to counter loss. Forfeiting autonomy-which is tantamount in Butler to forfeiting melancholia-enables survival, since an exclusionary foreclosure, upon such forfeiture, no longer operates in order that the ego can emerge "on the condition of the 'trace' of the other." Autonomy, to Butler, forgets this trace. Not to forget it, she writes, is "to embark upon a process of mourning."6 Because avowing loss means to Butler avowing what has been foreclosed, mourning curiously leads here to possession rather than acceptance of dispossession. Avowing loss in psychoanalytic theory usually means relinquishing an attachment and accepting lack, but it does not carry this meaning for Butler. Moreover, she assumes that lack is not required for desire to ensue. Butler believes there is "no necessary reason for ... desire to be fueled by repudiation" (1997, p. 149). She instead assumes that submitting to the Law produces a loss/lack that holds one down, that subjugates, and that degrades what becomes externalized. As Butler announced in a talk on Antigone at the Humanities Center at Harvard University, she opposes the assumption that desire is radically determined by a Law. Antigone's agency, to Butler, emerges through the tragic heroine's act of breaking the Law-a position missing the point that breaking the Law to obtain agency in its own way fortifies the idea that desire is determined by a law. Butler defines subjectivity as melancholia and is therefore prompted to promote a notion of incoherent identity that would seem to be (although incoherent) devoid of lack even as it is capable of desire. Such a fantasy of plenitude, especially given Butler's references to Antigone to construct it, leads me to suggest that Butler too is a queer theorist whose work heads in the direction of Lacan's third-order Love. She would seem to be founding her version of "subjectivity" -or what shall we call it, since subjectivity is, for Butler, contaminated with heterosexist melancholia?-her incoherent

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identity on Love that embraces the lost homosexuallove(r) whose foreclosure founds heterosexual subjectivity. Again, queerness is in the place of jouissance, outside the limits of the Law. With its stress on incoherence, this notion resonates with Halperin's definition of queer-that it is not "grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality," that it "does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object," but is "whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant" (1995, p. 62)-as well as with Michael Warner's conception that queer "suggests the difficulty in defining the population whose interests are at stake in queer politics" (1994, p. xxvi). Compared to most of the queer theorists taken up here who zero in on Love via gay men's sexual experience, Butler's philosophical focus may seem to be especially capacious and therefore perhaps more radical. She brings the concept of queer to its logical extreme conclusion for all: into alignment with Lacanian Love-which, like Butler's unique brand of mourning, entails coalescing with one's constitutive lack.

Lee Edelman Not all queer theorists are alike. I want now to deduce from the work of Lee Edelman a theory of subjectivity that does not conceptualize it in terms of a heterosexual foreclosure of homosexuality; that rejects the view that homosexuality is essentially affixed to the drives, the death drive, jouissance, excess, or what is beyond meaning; that points to a conception of the queer subject as radically desiring (although Edelman himself-as he ties desire to the condemned future and does not engage the concept of radical desire-does not put it this way); and that may even help us to read the ethical psychoanalytic subject as queer and, vice versa, the queer subject as ethical, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. In "Hitchcock's Future," an essay on Hitchcock's The Birds, Edelman claims that heterosexuals tend to close off the drives, the death drive, and jouissance and that the need for such a "disavowal" to maintain subjectivity is what in a sense justifies homophobia, since homosexuality is aligned with all of these concepts. Such an association evolves into Edelman's neologism "sinthom-osexuality," which he defines as a "child-aversive, future-negat-

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ing force" that answers "to the inspiriting needs of a moribund familialism." Sinthomosexuality figures "a threat to meaning insofar as meaning is invested in reproduction's promise of coming-in a future always deferred" (Edelman, 1999, pp. 240-241). To illustrate how this new concept functions, Edelman locates in The Birds an abyss that is filled "by a force that is contra naturam: the force of the death drive as figured and displaced by sinthom-osexuality" (p. 243). Edelman points out that the birds emerge from San Francisco and that they "display a strong predilection for children" (p. 243). But this does not mean that the birds represent homosexuality; rather, "the meaning of homosexuality remains intimately bound to what the film so memorably figures in the birds: the unnatural access to jouissance that comes out with their attacks" (p. 247). It is, again, this connection that Edelman wishes to expose as both false and destructive. In reading Edelman initially, I thought the point could be made that, because he suggests that heterosexuals close off the drives, the death drive, and jouissance, Edelman himself was unwittingly aligning homosexuals with these concepts. Homosexuals, I thought he was implying, have access to the drives in a way that heterosexuals do not. But this is a misreading for two reasons. It is not as if the meaning of homosexual is easy to pin down. In Homographesis, Edelman complains that "modern Western culture insists on both the psychic and visual determinacy of 'homosexuality,' and thus on its availability to (phobic) representation (often expressed dialectically through the claim of its non-availability) as a category of being that serves to contain, in both senses of the word, the unknowability of the sexual" (1994, p. xv). Moreover, Edelman insists on the possibility of all subjects, regardless of sexual preference, engaging what he calls the death drive; actually, all sexuality is sinthomosexuality. When Edelman laments that normative sexuality disavows jouissance (this is a preferable way of putting it, since to propose that heterosexuals disavow jouissance is to run the risk of seeming to imply that "homosexuals" never do), I take him not to be collapsing normative sexuality with all heterosexual sex, so that I think he is opening up two crucial possibilities not available in Butler's The Psychic Life of Power: (1) nonnormative sexuality between men and women that engages the drives/jouissance, and (2) nonnormative, same-sex sexuality that-from a position of subjectivity-engages the drives/jouissance, without being entirely submerged within them/it. This last stipulation would have to be the crux of Edelman's argument in his article on The

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Birds, because to assume such a submergence is to fortify the notion of homosexuality as (not just a figure for) sinthomosexuality. In Edelman as opposed to Butler, "homosexuals" can be subjects who temporarily dissolve, and heterosexuals are not so adamantly subjectified that they cannot dissolve. Edelman offers a solution to the problem in Butler of situating homosexuality in the abject outskirts of the Symbolic; and he puts at least Foucault's, Halperin's, and Bersani's emphasis on "the homosexual" engagement with the Real in perspective. The perspective he offers is compatible with, if not tantamount to, what I have laid out in earlier chapters as Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis. We recall that Lacan's sense of ethics preserves the power of desire by unveiling desire's potential attachment to death. When desire harnesses the drive, desire is radicalized; insofar as it is propelled by the drive, it thereby accesses death. As we know, Lacan articulates the ethics of psychoanalysis "from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real" (1992, p. n; my emphasis). The proper site for the emergence of the ethical subject (as Seshadri-Crooks writes in words with which I completely concur) is "where desire is constituted 'in a fundamental relation to death' (VII: 303)" (2ooo, p. n1)J I read Edelman's essay on The Birds as drawing from the emphasis on jouissance in the work of Foucault, Halperin, Bersani, Dean, and Butler, to continue a line within queer theory that challenges a certain sexual complacency, that militates against a kind of homeostatic pleasure principle in nonqueer sex, where the threat (or thrill?) of sexual experience or desubjectivation is avoided. (As Bersani asserts, most people are averse to sex.) But Edelman does not stop there, primarily because the idea of a "homosexual identity," especially if it is based on incoherence or death, makes Edelman justifiably nervous. He does not wish to see enjoyment of desubjectivation tied exclusively to homosexuality. On the other hand, Edelman objects to "the narrative teleology of the subject who only comes into being at the expense ofjouissance" (1999, p. 247). In a way, this objection sounds anti-Lacanian; within Lacanian theory, jouissance is the necessary expense of-is expended by-subject formation. But Edelman, like Lacan, seems to be promoting a relation to jouissance: what he wants is acknowledgment of what "regimes of normativity ... disavow," "the antisocial bent of sexuality" (1999, p. 252). The lack of restraint that certain homophobes-such as, according to Edelman, Alan Keyes, a

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conservative radio talk show host and occasional Republican candidate for president-associate with homosexuality Edelman wants avowed, recognized, and engaged in general, rather than seen as part of a pathological or abject domain of a particular kind of sexuality. Edelman values excess "that betrays ... the intractable force of a drive that breaks, again and again, like the waves in which the bird attacks seem to come, against and within the reality that meaning means to erect." He favors its coming out, denuding the drive that symbolic reality "closets in itself," so that it can no longer be projected onto "sinthom-osexuals made to figure [what is taken to be a pathological]jouissance" (p. 252). Unlike Butler, Edelman does not locate a particular kind of sexuality on either side of the fence-that is, on the side of jouissance or the side of subjectivity. Lacan and queer theory are hardly at odds. Celebrating the Woman who doesn't exist (Dean's version of which is the pervert who doesn't exist), the not-all, the mystic, and masochistic mysticism (rather than a strict psychoanalytic notion of perverse masochism), queer theory approaches an articulation of Lacanian Love, beyond subjectivity. Yet by annexing Edelman to my observation of this emphasis on Lacanian Love in Foucault, Halperin, Bersani, Dean, and Butler, I mean to suggest another relation to Lacan, where queer involves engaging, rather than fully occupying, the Real, an encounter with Love-in order to announce "the constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social order itself" (Edelman, 2oo4, p. 5). In fact, Edelman ends up urging queers to "accede," as he writes, "to our cultural production as figures-within the dominant logic of narrative, within Symbolic reality-for the dismantling of such a logic and thus for the death drive it harbors within" (p. 22). In No Future, Edelman explains that with his "infelicitous term" sinthomosexuality he now means to suggest that homosexuality, understood as a cultural figure, as the hypostatization of various fantasies that trench on the antisocial force that queerness might better name, is made-that is, both called forth and compelled-to carry the burden of sexuality's demeaning relation to the sintho me, the burden of what Lacan describes as the absence of a sexual relation: the absence, that is, of a complementarity to naturalize relations between the sexes insofar as all sexuality suffers the mark of the signifier as lack [2004, p. 39].

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Queers really are not the only sinthomosexuals in town; but it has become their task to unveil "the antisocial bent of sexuality," so that sexuality's relation to death is no longer Symbolically disavowed. Actually, Foucault, Halperin, Bersani, and Dean may be read in terms of Edelman's emphasis on access to excess "in the social order itself," rather than as glorifying jouissance for its own sake in an arena hermetically sealed off from the social. Despite his insistence in No Future on stamping out futurity, Edelman's argument casts this light on their work (which is not at all to conflate what follows with Edelman's position-not all queer theorists really are the same). If we attune our eye to their fine print, these queer theorists can be seen as emphasizing both rupture and rapture and a queered subjectivity in some new, radical form. In Halperin's work we find a stress on Foucault's interest in shifting homosexuality "from the position of an object of power/knowledge to a position of legitimate subjective agency" (1995, p. 57). At the same time, Halperin highlights Foucault's sense of gay liberation as a creative process, which introduces Halperin's emphasis on antinormative queerness, through Foucault's emphasis on homosexuality as "off-center," as we've seen. Reflecting his dual focus on subjectivity and something more destabilized than subjectivity in queer theory, Halperin quotes Edelman, from Homographesis, as privileging dislocations of "identity" and a zone of possibilities in which the subject might be experienced but otherwise than as bourgeois. Tim Dean's work likewise carries this doubleness. He interprets Lacan's register of the Real as operating constantly to undermine social and sexual identities, stresses queer theory's situating of desire more in relation to excess than lack, and titles his book Beyond Sexuality. Yet Dean refuses "the loneliness of psychosis, foreclosed from all social ties" and promotes "access to alternate forms of community and other social ties-perhaps even other forms of social tie, different ways of knotting the subject to society and community" (2ooo, p. 227). Dean's reference here to an innovative way of knotting the subject into place, like Edelman's neologism sinthomosexuality, evokes Lacan's concept of the sinthome whose very job is to bring the subject into contact with a residue or element heterogeneous to the Symbolic that also enables the subject to resituate himself or herself in the Symbolic. 8 Perhaps what therefore ought to be stressed is queer theory's aim of

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escaping social regulation through increased susceptibility to pleasures (or unwillingness to disavow them) in order to undo subjectivity and in turn sociality as we know it in the wake of such a new susceptibility. To Halperin, the very technique of ascesis is a form of counterdiscipline-but with the potential of effecting transformation, that is, permitting new forms of life to emerge. Halperin is trying to make the very case that Love-encountering the not-self, through an excess of pleasure-is a form of political resistance that can lead to subjective or social renovation. Edelman fervently rules out the very thought of "a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow" (2004, p. 31), but he too offers the slightest glimpse of another world. "By assuming the 'truth' of our queer capacity to figure the undoing of the Symbolic, and of the Symbolic subject as well," Edelman comments, "we might undertake the impossible project of imagining an oppositional political stance exempt from the imperative to reproduce the politics of signification (the politics aimed at closing the gap opened up by the signifier itself), which can only return us, by way of the Child, to the politics of reproduction" (p. 27)-an impossible project, but is it not one that must be undertaken all the same? In Bersani too, we find the barest implications that sexual practices can work for pleasure and politics simultaneously. Bersani wants a homosexual subject who enjoys desubjectivation with the aim of transforming our understanding of how the human subject is socially implicated. Bersani champions the bliss of self-shattering "homo-ness" for the sake of a full withdrawal from relationality with the distant goal in mind of producing a radically altered sociality. As an act of social transformation, Bersani's jouissance of self-loss goes further than merely providing invisibility and therefore escape from surveillance. Bersani seeks a drastic social erasure through the sexuality he advocates-a confrontation with the absence at the heart of human existence-for the sake of reinventing relationality. But he entertains this possibility quietly. At the end of Homos, Bersani merely alludes to restarting relational activity after a certain massive murder or suicide of humanity in its current form. In Genet, Bersani glimpses the birth of a new world: the product of the rimmer who through his jouissance has "demi-urgic powers. Genet is orally impregnated by eating his lover's waste. Having eaten Jean as death, Genet expels him as a world of new images" (1995, pp. 178-179).

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Traversing the Fundamental Fantasy ofHeterosexism Precisely because of this internality of the Real to the Symbolic, it is possible to touch the Real through the Symbolic-that is the whole point of Lacan's notion of psychoanalytic treatment; this is what the Lacanian notion of the psychoanalytic act is about-the act as a gesture which, by definition, touches the dimension of some impossible Real. This notion of the act must be conceived of against the background of the distinction between the mere endeavour to 'solve a variety of partial problems' within a given field and the more radical gesture of subverting the very structuring principle of this field. An act does not simply occur within the given horizon of what appears to be 'possible' -it redefines the very contours of what is possible.

Z 1 z E K, Contingency, Hegemony,

Universality

Queer theory makes desubjectifYing moves on the level of the social that replay Lacan's on the level of the psyche. Queer theory's buried point seems to be that contact with the Real might eventually result in a reconfigured, queer Symbolic Order-which is after all where we have to live. This statement might even be applied to Edelman's work (though I suggest this with great hesitation) if we consider that-even as he condemns a Symbolic that denies the "nothingness" it is founded on, its constitutive excess-in articulating his point precisely that way, he leaves open the slightest possibility of another Symbolic not in such denial (2004, p. 31). This idea of entering the Real, or the hole in the Symbolic, as a way of traversing fantasy for the sake of a political goal accords with what Yannis Stavrakakis advocates as a political strategy for bringing about radical democracy. Political thinkers influenced by Lacan (Laclau, Zizek, and the queer theorists taken up here) tend to move in a similar direction: toward an ethics that refuses to cover over lack in the Symbolic with phantasmatic, ideological constructs or to ignore division and disharmony-that is, antagonism. Stavrakakis even ends his book Lacan & the Political on the note of ascesis. Adopting a Lacanian point of view, he concludes that "a real and pure democracy 'does not exist"' and that therefore the "radicalisation of democracy can only be the result of a continuous ascesis" that will put us

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beyond both conformity and utopianism (1999, p. 140). Stavrakakis insists on the traversal of the fantasy of social harmony through confrontation with "the political" -a modality in which "we experience an encounter with the real" as a "cut of dislocation threatening all symbolisations of the social, ... the ultimate subversion of any sedimentation of political reality" (p. 75). Perhaps the thickest sedimentation that will be loosened in the process of a full-fledged avowal of "the antisocial bent of sexuality," to quote Edelman, is the fantasy of reproductive heterosexual normality. Just as Bersani celebrates Genet's oral/rectal cannibalism, a form of confrontation with the refuse or waste on which a human life is based, we might say that psychoanalysis urges confrontation, "in a kind of 'Thou Art That' experience, (with) the excremental remainder that secretly sustains the dignity of ... symbolic identification," the effect of which is to turn around "the process of symbolic identification" (Zizek, 2000, p. 49). If we were to put "the social" on the couch in accord with this statement of Zizek, could the result of its experiencing queer/Lacanian Love, Love in the Real, that is, facing its excremental leftover, be to demystify or wipe out the fundamental fantasy of heterosexual reproduction on which the social is currently predicated, hence necessarily collapsing the historically heterosexist Symbolic regime? It is this kind of psychoanalytic thinking-in terms of a social traversal of heterosexist fantasy or Edelman's futurity as it is obsessed with the Child-that helps us understand the necessity of the absolute plunge into jouissance on the part of queer theory. It is no doubt premature socially to jump to (what I persist in emphasizing) radical desire, given that the transformation of a heterosexist Symbolic to a nonheterosexist or queer Symbolic will entail such a massive metamorphosis. Reflecting the necessity of acknowledging the drive, jouissance, death, and the Real, Edelman (as we have seen) has withdrawn his support from working against the pernicious assumption of an essential relation between homosexuality and the death drive to call for a queer embrace of the figure of the sinthomosexual. Edelman favors "embodying, within the historical moment that imposes upon [queers] such a figural association, the unsymbolizable remainder of the real produced by the order of meaning as the token of what that order is necessarily barred from being able to signify" (1998, p. 27; my emphasis). Edelman bravely and provocatively accepts the idea that "queer sexualities, within the framework of the social text [queers] inhabit, figure the gap in

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which the symbolic confronts what its discourse can never know" (p. 28). He resolutely insists on "no future for queers" since such a future is merely a postponement of an encounter with this gap. Edelman promotes affirming the negativity of the figural determination of the queer. It seems that now is not the time "to cede that figural position and its abjection" (Edelman, 2002, pp. 184-185). Even to think in such temporal terms is anathema to Edelman, given the pervasiveness of the problem, which is itself imbricated with the very notion of futurity. The only politics Edelman supports is one without a fantasy of the future. Queerness for Edelman "is never a matter of being or becoming "but only" of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order" (2004, p. 25). It seems that in his book No Future Edelman cannot make that emphatic enough: "What is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively-to insist that the future stop here" (p. 31). Testifying to the magnitude of the effort required, before any sort of new, queer culture might be envisioned, Warner announces in Fear of a Queer Planet that the range and seriousness of the problems that are continually raised by queer practice indicate how much work remains to be done. Because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embedded by now in an indescribably wide range of social institutions, and is embedded in the most standard accounts of the world, queer struggles aim not just at toleration or equal status but at challenging those institutions and accounts. The dawning realization that themes of homophobia and heterosexism may be read in almost any document of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how widespread those institutions and accounts are [1994, p. xiii]. Warner's words here echo Sedgwick's cardinal idea in Epistemology of the Closet: that "an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition" (1990, p. 1). A radical approach is necessary simply because of the pervasive privilege that lies in heterosexuality's exclusive power to read itself as society. Monique Wittig reiterates this point in expressing her position that heterosexuality is tantamount to the

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social contract: "Heterosexuality is always already there within all mental categories" (1992, p. 43). In a nutshell, as Warner asserts, following Hannah Arendt, who equates society with conformism, "queer politics opposes society itself" (1994, p. xxvii). Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman keep alive this emphasis on the need for a major overhaul by elaborating on Queer Nation's disclosure of "how thoroughly the local experience of the body is framed by laws, policies, and social customs regulating sexuality" (1994, p. 195). Berlant and Freeman too favor a widespread revolt that targets sexual identity, as they exult in Queer Nation's exploitation of "the symbolic designs of mass and national culture in order to dismantle the standardizing apparatus that organized all manner of sexual practice into 'facts' of sexual identity" (p. 196). It is no accident, then, that one's dominant impression is that queer theory's main impulse is to erase humanity rather than resignify. The central question that therefore needs to be pursued further is why we find in queer theory a celebration of desubjectivation that seems tantamount to Lacan's impossible sexual relation. Why are incoherence and futurelessness, as well as a kind of mystical self-shattering, so well sustained in queer theory? The fact that it is easy to neglect a constructive step adumbrated in the work of Foucault (who calls for an emptying out of the self of passions and attachments that render the self individual and personal), Halperin (who urges a destabilizing of "identity itself"), Bersani (who glorifies masochism for enabling an encounter with the Other at the kernel of subjectivity), Dean (who holds up the Real as a challenge to heteronormativity), as well as Butler (who leaves identity in her goal of incoherent identity entirely without qualities), and nearly impossible to locate one in Edelman clinches the point that what currently matters is a process of disaggregation, a razing of the current order, a thorough traversal. Queer theory appears to serve as a contemporary manifestation of Lacan's Woman who doesn't exist, the mystic, as "she" is located beyond castration, where sexual relations verge on the condition of an impossible sexual relation, enjoying Love. Situating itself in the (Lacanian) place of "failure" (that is, where the Symbolic and the signifier fail), queer theory has pitched its mansion in the place of excrement, on the "'rock of impossibility' on which every 'formalization' of sexual difference founders" (Butler, Laclau, and Zizek, zooo, p. 309), so that eventually either new or perhaps no such formalizations may emerge. Edelman conceptualizes queer theory

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itself similarly, as constituting "the site where the radical threat posed by irony, which heteronormative culture displaces onto the figure of the queer, is uncannily returned by queers who no longer disown but assume their figural identity as embodiments of the figuralization, and hence the disfiguration, of identity itself" (2004, p. 24). This angle on queer theory would explain the current preoccupation of psychoanalysis with this new field, ironically taking the place of Lacan's fascination with Christian mysticism as exemplified by Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. But, again, where does this conception of queer theory leave us, and how does Lacanian theory join together with queer theory to escort us there? Butler has been debating Zizek for some time now on the question of which philosophical strategy has the potential to do the most effective political work. Proceeding primarily from a Foucauldian base, Butler promotes resignification within what she labels "the social" (regarding Lacan's Symbolic as too intractable to permit the kind of new kinship formations she would like to see sanctioned). But what Lacanians have to say on this question is that, as Zizek puts it in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, "Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention" than Butler's Foucauldian position. The Lacanian notion of traversing the fundamental fantasy is "not a mere displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring 'principle' of the existing symbolic order." Such a traversal "aims radically to disturb the very 'passionate attachment' that forms, for Butler, the ultimately ineluctable background of the process of resignification" (Butler, Laclau, and Zizek, 2000, p. 220). The undoing of heterosexism-so deeply entrenched, so passionately attached to its ideology, its fundamental fantasies, as Warner, Sedgwick, Wittig, Berlant, and of course many more here unmentioned queer theorists attest-will require more than a gradual metonymic slide. This, I suggest, is what Halperin with his Saint Foucault, Dean with his Real turd, and Bersani with his mystical masochism seem to know, as they attempt theoretically to commit an "authentic act." "Bersani's project," Dean points out, "entails changes far more fundamental than those proposed in familiar arguments for 'subversion' or 'resignification"' (1996, p. 74). Lee Edelman too, needless to mention, is well beyond resignification, especially in promoting in No Future embodiment of the impossibility and

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inhumanity of the sinthomosexual as "the ethical task for which queers are singled out" (2004, p. 109). He calls attention to his view of the inadequacy of resignification in his candid criticism of Butler for her faith in an "everwidening horizon of inclusiveness," for sustaining "intelligibility" even if it is in "new schemes" (since Butler describes them as "legitimate and recognizable"), for burying Antigone, and for burying in Antigone "the sinthomosexual who refuses intelligibility's mandate and the correlative economy that regulates what is 'legitimate and recognizable"' (2004, pp. 104-105). In his chapter "Compassion's Compulsion," Edelman, in stark contrast, zealously celebrates sinthomosexuality, the site where the structuring fantasy that undergirds and sustains "the subject's desire, and with it the subject's reality, confronts its beyond in the pulsions of the drive whose insistent circulation undoes it, derealizing the collective logic of fantasy by means of which subjects mean, and giving access, instead, to the jouissance, particularized and irreducible, that registers the unmasterable contingency at the core of every subject as such" (2004, p. 73)-for its ability to free the subject from what holds off access to jouissance. Loving one's neighbor, in this context-that is, in the context of North by Northwest and Lacan's retelling of the legend of Saint Martin-means to evacuate one's neighbor's subjectivity, to help that neighbor to "advance into emptiness" (2004, p. 85, Edelman quoting Lacan). The cruel choice to love thy neighbor is to crack him or her open into jouissance. Edelman characterizes Hitchcock's Leonard in Nortb by Northwest-representative sinthomosexual-as a saint, one who "forsakes all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms," preferring the "the act of repudiating the social, of stepping, or trying to step, with Leonard, beyond compulsory compassion, beyond the future and the snare of images keeping us always in its thrall" (p. 101). Lacan's Saint Teresa becomes in No Future Edelman's Saint Leonard-sinthomosexual. The risk of this process of desubjectivation in queer theory may very well be initially to reinforce the perception of a fundamental connection between the death drive/jouissance and homosexuality (the very alignment that Edelman in his work on The Birds detests and protests; in the last chapter of No Future, Edelman reiterates emphatically that his "point is not to equate the birds with homosexuality"; 2004, p. 132). But in the end such an alignment would be moot, in a queer world that has no stake in preserving either heterosexual or homosexual identity, since queer by definition

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dissolves such designations as well as such a division. Interestingly, in this connection Edelman writes (albeit qualifiedly) that it is the "demystification of queerness [itself] ... , were it ever possible to achieve, [that] would mark a traversal of the fantasy that gives meaning to the social order through futurism" (1998, p. 184). The critical question, then-one we have already speculated about-would seem to be, What is the fundamental fantasy that the heterosexist Symbolic is predicated on? With their clean sweep, queer theorists of desubjectivation seem to be aiming at any and all of them-all the fantasies on which heterosexism is founded. Yet it would no doubt be wise to think harder along these lines by elaborating Edelman's sense of the fantasy of reproduction as the linchpin of heterosexuality. That is, to Edelman futurity depends on reproductive logic; it is the fantasy of heterosexual love that elevates the reproductive couple. Hence the "collective fantasy that invests the social order with meaning by way of reproductive futurism" needs to be traversed (2004, p. 28). Is the removal of the stigma of childlessness the path to a queer world? Will new reproductive technologies and arrangements, new kinship structures, support such a traversal of the fantasy of "natural" heterosexual reproductive intercourse? Or is heterosexism more deeply embedded (beyond the cache of reproduction) in the binary sexual identities that Butler has exerted strenuous effort to dissolve by insisting on the equation of sexual difference and culturally constructed gender roles? Sedgwick proposes that gender itself is the bathwater that must be tossed out with the baby, since "a damaging bias toward heterosocial or heterosexist assumptions inheres unavoidably in the very concept of gender" (1990, p. 31). I have featured in Chapter Four the dilemma that jouissance or the authentic act leaves one desubjectified even as desire leaves one unsatisfied. What fails to offer a solution at the personal level, however, might work as cultural analysis. Regarding the former "failure," it needs to be questioned whether the job of psychoanalysis is philosophically to solve the problem of personal dissatisfaction; Lacan was neither dedicated to nor responsible for ensuring human happiness. Lacan pursued psychoanalytic "truth," which he saw eluding articulation and by no means guaranteeing happiness. As Lacan remarks in seminar XVII: "Ce que la verite, quand elle surgit, a de t•esolutif, fa peut etre de temps en temps heureux-et puis, dan d'autres cas, desastreux. On ne voit pas pourquoi la verite serait forcement toujours binefique" (1991, p. 122). In Beyond Sexuality, as mentioned much earlier, Dean

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comes to a similar conclusion about the effectiveness of psychoanalysis in the social arena: "In pushing psychoanalysis beyond psychology, Lacan also pushes it beyond the couch-that is, beyond a framework comprising specific interactions between persons. And hence Lacan's account of symbolic subjectivity contributes more to social theory than to psychological theories of the individual" (20oo, p. 2). Perhaps cultural formations, in contrast to human subjects, can afford both to undergo dissolution and to maintain subsequently a condition of radical desire predicated on dissolution (a process of intermittent turmoil that invokes Edelman's idea of the cultural function of the figure of the queer-always to disrupt). Not ceding its desire might be an apt psychoanalytic way of putting culture's very state of progress. Human subjects eventually suffer from lack, but society can advance only through such an ethical attempt to improve itself, undergoing one ascesis after another (exceeding the exhaustibility threshold of any single human subject). I want now to explore a psychic/social form of such ethical improvement on the cultural level one final time. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Butler comments on a certain "haunting" of "politics predicated upon" certain exclusions, a haunting that becomes "politically effective precisely in so far as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and rearticulation of the basic premisses [sic] of democracy itself" (zooo, p. rr). Butler has been pushing for a long time now the idea that exposing a constitutive aporia serves the project of counterhegemony, further radicalizing democracy. When she ponders exactly how something new is consequently produced through such unveilings, seeking something other than its own structurally identical repetition, her thinking seems to be on the brink of discovery or acknowledgment of the sociopolitical function of Zizek's authentic act. Butler herself (supposedly on the side of resignification) in The Psychic Life ofPower seems as cognizant of the severity of what is radically necessary as any of the others, insofar as she too promotes (as the result of mourning that entails avowal of the heterosexual subject's constitutive lack or homosexual lost love) an incoherence beyond subjectivity. Here Butler appears to be engaging a theory of subversion at least akin to that of the subversion of the historically heterosexist Symbolic by the Real beyond the "mere" possibility of resignification implied by performativity (although perhaps Butler's refusal to acknowledge a register beyond the Symbolic should give me pause here). That is, only through an encounter with the lack on which the Symbolic depends

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can the Symbolic be reconstituted in a way that avoids the "structurally identical repetitions" that Butler justifiably fears. This is why Zizek proclaims that the current politics of multiple subjectivities is inadequate in concerning itself simply with what is excluded within a given field rather than with the "fundamental exclusion" that sustains the field (Butler, Laclau, and Zizek, 2ooo, p. 108). It is crucial to grasp that between these theorists, two levels are operating: (r) Butler's, in which particular content (that is, the homosexual lost love) is excluded (or perhaps I should say swept away into the gutters of the Symbolic) and (2) Zizek's/Lacan's, where a fundamental impossibility, a constitutive aporia, undergirds the entire Symbolic structure, whatever forms, including binarisms. Over "historicism" that "deals with the endless play of substitutions within the same fundamental field of (im)possibility," Zizek champions "historicity," which "makes thematic different structural principles of this very (im)possibility." Only through historicity will "the very global structuring principle of the Social" be transformed (Butler, Laclau, and Zizek, 2000, p. II2). I appreciate Zizek's theoretical distinction (between historicism and historicity) as well as the view that the Real must not be assigned any specific content. Nonetheless, Butler's interest in the collapse of the social with its exclusions is clearly more akin to Zizek's idea of historicity than is her notion of (mere) resignification or performativity. In fact, I think that this queer theoretical move on her part-that is, her insistence on the inclusion of leftovers-might be conceived of as a version (or perhaps as being on the verge of) of Lacan's traversal of fundamental fantasy. Even as I take into account the full extent of what Zizek means when he proposes that an "act does not merely redraw the contours of our public symbolic identity, it also transforms the spectral dimension that sustains this identity, the undead ghosts that haunt the living subject, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted 'between the lines,' through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic texture of his or her identity" (zooo, p. I24i my emphasis), I feel compelled to consider (while continuing to challenge her diagnosis of melancholia) Butler's forbidden and therefore lost homosexual love as an undead ghost that haunts the living subject. Might not avowal of this undead ghost be said to have the capacity to transfigure "the very coordinates of the disavowed phantasmic foundation of our being" (p. I24)? Unleashing more than resignification, does the act of avowal that Butler

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promotes not disturb the Symbolic field, as Zizek claims it must, ''from the standpoint of [the] inherent impossibility, stumbling block, which is its hidden, disavowed structuring pr'inciple" (p. I 2 5; emphasis in original)? (How dissimilar is such disturbance from what Edelman hopes to effect through a queer embodiment of sinthomosexuality-also meant to draw attention to what heterosexuals tend to disavow?) That is, Butler conceives of homosexual lost love both as a "stumbling block"-to a desiring incoherent identity-and as a "disavowed structuring principle" -which installs the "melancholic" heterosexual subjectivity that Butler hopes eventually will undergo mourning. Were that "mourning" to be effected, a new "phantasmic foundation" would necessarily emerge. Zizek may be trying to get outside of the entire hetero-homo divide that Butler posits-putting the hetero-homo constellation over X, as he complains that Butler improperly plugs "homo" into the place of the Real (X)-but once homo coalesces with the hetero in the Symbolic, a new X by necessity will be produced. Although Butler's stress is on recognizing the human trace that formalism leaves behind, a leftover that is to her on the Left, the kind of destabilization that such a recognition would establish-if Zizek's Lacanian reasoning is sound, as I believe it is, that a leftover is inevitable-might be managed in a way that yields a vacancy, rather than a new trace. As a result, the social/Symbolic will necessarily alter-in a profound rather than superficial way. It will be queered, maintaining a continuous relation to an evacuated X, a state of permanent engagement with the radicality (the drive, the jouissance, the Real, Love) founding its desire. In No Future, Edelman at one point makes the cynical claim that "the signifying order will always necessitate the production of some figural repository for the excess that precludes its ultimate realization of the One" (2004, p. 27). But from a Lacanian point of view, it is appropriate to conceive of this excess as a Void, paradoxically lacking lack, the Real. Our social goal may be, then, to keep this Void emptied conceptually, especially of living things. Queer theory itself, I argue, serves as the authentic act meant to effect this evacuation, a flushing out of all sorts oflmaginary ideological fantasies, especially that of "natural" heterosexual reproduction. With "queer," rather than heterosexuality, eventually in the numerator's position, hovering over the Real denominator (what I have designated "X"), meaning would no longer be invested in "reproduction's promise of coming, in a future always

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deferred" (Edelman, 1999, pp. 240-241). The queered Symbolic paradoxically would reflect the interplay of desire and jouissance in Lacanian ethics, sustaining Antigone's unintelligibility, nonmeaning, as well as the "antisocial bent of sexuality," without setting up a particular group to stand for it. Berlant is right in remarking that "achieving the utopian promise of a queer Symbolic will involve more than a story of a multicultural sewing circle sewing the scraps of a pink triangle onto the American flag" (1994, p. 215). Instead, it will entail a prior and subsequently ongoing social encounter with the Real through queer theory's "positive work of intense, almost superhuman loving," its "new forms of relationships, new forms of love" -through various queer acts of Lacanian Love.

Reference Matter

Notes

PREFACE

r. For an actual naming of names here, though I cannot vouch for its accuracy, see James Mellard's "Lacan and the New Lacanians," published in PMLA in 1998. 2. See note 5 in Chapter Two. 3· In No Future, Edelman reads Butler's conception of Antigone in Antigone's Claim as sustaining an orthodox future after all. He thinks that Butler's Antigone fails to decline intelligibility as well as (fails to decline) "to cast off the meaning that clings to those social identities that intelligibility abjects" (2004, p. 106).

CHAPTER ONE

r. Jouissance is a complex term with multiple meanings in Lacan. But perhaps I should say here, borrowing from Fink's first book, that Lacan sees the subject as adopting a stance in relation to "a primal experience of pleasure/pain or trauma. The subject comes into being as a form of attraction toward and defense against a primordial, overwhelming experience of what the French call jouissance: a pleasure that is excessive, leading to a sense of being overwhelmed or disgusted, yet simultaneously providing a source of fascination" (1995, p. xii). Jouissance, then, is "what the subject orchestrates for him or herself in fantasy" (p. 6o). For a more complex breakdown of this term, see Braunstein (2003). 2. Referring to transference as "a love artificially produced," Mladen Dolar writes, "If [transference] seems pathological, one should keep in mind that love itself is a highly pathological state" (1996, p. 146). Dolar's essay "At First Sight," like several others invoked in this study, is part of a rich collection titled Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek. 3· This quote is from ZupanciC's essay "What's Love Got to Do with Id?" which appears in a substantial issue, guest edited by Renata Salecl, of New Formations on "Lacan and Love." 4· Umbr(A): A Journal ofthe Unconscious has devoted an entire issue to the topic of the drive (number 1, 1997). The drive is correlated with objet a. As Salecl comments 157

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in her contribution to that volume, the drive can be understood as a "leftover of the operation by which the subject becomes the subject of the signifier" (p. ros). At the same time, though, the drive is never raw but imbricated with the signifier. Salecl also describes the drive as a pressure, as it circulates around objet a, producing the painful satisfaction of jouissance. (It is therefore beyond the pleasure principle.) A less theoretical, more mundane, and perhaps more useful way of putting this is that "for Lacan, drive is essentially what splits the subject, what is his or her 'true will' (but not a conscious one); as such 'drive is something the subject can't help or stop in him[self] or herself"' (Salecl, 1997, p. ro8); it is what attracts us to the other. 5· To help clarify the meaning of objet a for my non-Lacanian readers: Lacan proposes in Encore that the Other qua locus does not hold up and that therefore "there is a fault, hole or loss." Object a functions "with respect to that loss" (1998, p. 28). He addresses this concept again later in the same seminar: "Object a is the void presupposed by a demand." That is: "In the desire of every demand, there is but the request for object a, for the object that could satisfy jouissance." Objects are laid claim to and made into the cause of desire or object a "as substitutes for the Other" (p. n6). Yet we delude ourselves into thinking that the object of desire embodies this substitute, even as objet a only haunts that object. In his extremely useful first book, The Lacanian Subject, Bruce Fink offers a neat explanation of the concept. It is a rift in the hypothetical mother-child unity that leads to the advent of objet a. It is the "remainder produced when that hypothetical unity breaks down, as a last trace of that unity, a last reminder thereof. By cleaving to that rem(a)inder, the split subject, though expulsed from the Other, can sustain the illusion of wholeness; by clinging to object a, the subject is able to ignore his or her division" (1995, p. 59). 6. In the introduction to Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, what co-editors Salecl and Zizek refer to as love-"a lure, a mirage, whose function is to obfuscate the irreducible constitutive 'out-of-joint' of the relationship between the sexes" (1996, p. 2)-is also in my schema desire (or second-order love). When they refer to "falling in love" because of a certain voice or gaze, they use the term love, from my point of view, loosely; they are actually speaking about the trajectory of desire, set off by a voice or a gaze-the pursuit of which serves as compensation for the lack of a sexual relation (as will be discussed at length over the course of this book). 7· I have omitted the phrase "her persistence in her desire," since it muddies the waters here. Shepherdson seems mainly riveted to Antigone's love for Polyneices; note what follows from him in my text. However, it is the case that Shepherdson takes Antigone's Love for her brother as a basis of her status as a "heroine of desire" (1999, p. 68), and insofar as he does, we part ways, unless he has in mind the notion of "sublime desire" of the saint or that of the lack/desire in the mOther, both of which I elaborate later in this chapter. 8. This position puts me in agreement with Zizek, who claims, in his 1997 Umbra article on the drive and desire, that desire and jouissance are coupled in object a, so as "to guarantee a minimum of jouissance within the space of desire" (1997a, p. 150). Here too desire and jouissance are conjoined rather than opposed.

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9· In "Love Between Desire and Drive," Salecl views transference love similarly, commenting that "the proper response of the analyst is to insist that there is nothing in him or herself worthy of love, that the object the other perceives in him is pure nothingness, emptiness .... He or she does not return love and does not position him- or herself as the ideal with which the analysand should identify" (1996, p. 90). 10. Zizek in fact links the World Trade Center attacks with Antigone's act. They share an undermining of "the 'servicing of goods,' the reign of the pleasurereality principle" (2oo2, p. 142). Nevertheless, we can read Zizek's view of the terrorist attacks on the WTC as a traumatic invitation to the West, comparable to Antigone's invitation to the spectator to come to terms with absolute negativity. For a full treatment of the relation between Lacanian theory (in particular Zizek's idea of the "authentic act") and terrorism, see Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (2002); see also his more recent Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004), along with Butler's Precarious Life (2004).

CHAPTER TWO I. It is the case, however, that at the end of The Plague of Fantasies, as already mentioned, Zizek reads the uncompromising modernist rigor that implores us to go "right to the end" as different from postmodern ambiguity that teaches us "the artifice of surviving the experience of a radical Limit, of circulating around the lethal abyss without being swallowed up by it" (1997b, p. 239). 2. Sounding strangely Lacanian, Foucault subsequently ties madness to discourse, making the cryptic point that language is a structure of madness. Yet madness is likewise conceived of as a plenitude that culminates in the void, even as it is "always absent." In this classical world, Foucault states, madness was a sign of nonbeing, a conception brought out by confinement, which depicts madness as nothing. 3· In his chapter "God and Worftan's Jouissance" in Encore, Lacan links transference and love to his formulation "the subject supposed to know." One loves the person whom one assumes has knowledge of one's unconscious (1998, p. 67). 4· See next note. 5· "Woman can only be written [therefore] with a bar through it. There's no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal. There's no such thing as Woman because ... she is not-whole" (Lacan, 1998, pp. 72-73). As a result "she has a supplementary jouissance" (pp. 72-73). 6. In an exquisite study titled What Lacan Said About Women (in my contemporary theory series at Other Press), Colette Soler expresses her sense of the distinction between Lacan's mystic and masochistic sacrificial passion. Soler points out that when Lacan wishes to evoke woman's jouissance disconnected from the phallus he considers mystical experience. Then Soler clarifies that although it is well known "that the mystic's ecstatic love subtracts from her creaturely interests and from all

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common desires," this has nothing to do "with the masochistic passion for sacrifice. The mystic testifies that she renounces the world joyously, not from a taste for suffering," but because the Other thing captivates her: "the temptation-perhaps the dream-of abolishing oneself in the jouissance of an infinite love" (p. 85). 7· The scene, duplicated in life, conveys a "sense of passion through [a] common simple episode," involving steak and onions. "Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions?" Bendrix muses. Though improbable, this is exactly what they do. Bendrix says, "It's a good steak" and hears "like poetry her reply, 'It's the best I've ever eaten"' (Greene, 1951, p. 43).

CHAPTER THREE I. MacCannell complains in a similar vein about Zizek's treatment of courtly love: "What is missing in Zizek's analogy between the Dame and the mother is that he does not characterize the possibility of the act's desirability and enjoyability from the other side, so to speak-from the Lady's own position" (2ooo, p. 245). 2. Samir Dayal makes a similar argument about Ada and Baines in Jane Campion's The Piano, which he reads as imagining "a radical reconceptualization of love-between subjects that are no longer merely subjects of desire" (2001, p. 14). 3· In an article just completed, "Kristeva's Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular," I read Lynch's Mulholland Drive as unveiling the gap between a supposed object of desire and the objet a (or cause of desire) that renders the object alluring-in other words as antifetishistically cognizant of the Nothing on which Love is founded, at the same time as this film reveals, in the spirit of Christian Metz's imaginary signifier, the illusory nature of film itself. I suggest that this analogy points to why cinema is enthralled with the topic of Love. In revealing the absence on which Love and film are predicated, Mulholland Drive attempts to explode the fetishistic ideas of the verisimilitude of film as well as the fulfillment or satisfaction of Love. Lynch's film, then, offers a full disclosure about cinema (that it is not full!), puncturing the fetishism of film, again in the Metzian sense. (Metz specifies that the "unique position of the cinema lies in [the] dual character of its signifier: unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree, and from the very outset. More than the other arts, or in a more unique way, the cinema involves us in the imaginary: it drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonetheless the only signifier present" [1977, p. 45].) Mulholland Drive effects such a puncturing via a complex narrative about a (lesbian) love affair, offering the revelation that the unsignifiable founds them both.

CHAPTER FOUR I. Now Zizek appears to have relinquished his insistence on the "feminine" being merely a man's fantasy. His recognition and perhaps even glorification of the

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feminine as the locus of Love here seems inconsistent with his earlier obsessional unwillingness to acknowledge the ontology of the right side of Lacan's sexuation graph. 2. I say "at least the Adams of Emptying the Image" since it seems that Adams has shifted her focus from desire to the Real in her latest collection, Art: Sublimation or Symptom (2003), part of my contemporary theory series at Other Press-although even here it is a matter of indexing, or at most partaking of, the Real. 3· This assertion gives me pause, for when we desire, do we not then too take the beloved to be one with the cause? But can the beloved ever actually be united with the cause of our desire, the cause of our desire being a structural matter, the missing piece, objet a? 4· This talk was given at the May woo Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. In Lacanian Ink, it appears as "On Love as Comedy." 5· March 13, 1963, lecture. 6. Nevertheless, in an essay called "The Perforated Sheet," Zupancic reduces "love" to performing separation that facilitates a "new subjectivation" (2oooa, p. 288). So again, Adams's castration/separation as the enabler of desire comes into odd alignment with ZupanciC's "love." 7· Forster's A Room with a View illustrates this paradigm of a subject-to-subject relationship. 8. March 13, 1963, lecture. 9. I couple Zizek and Zupancic here, but we must note their difference from one another. Zizek speaks of an endless oscillation between unplugging and plugging, whereas Zupancic has found laughable love through accessing the gap between unplugging and plugging. 10. A philosophical account of a similar position may be found in the work of Alain Badiou. In "What Is Love?" Badiou proposes that love is not a substitute but a supplement, not a relation but a production-of the truth that Two are "at work in the situation" (woo, p. 266). Love negotiates the paradox of the truth of radical disjunction, making a truth of dis-conjunction, without a third position. Love is declared; a void is invoked-that is, the unknown of the disjunction. But how does the disjunction retain its disjointedness upon encountering this void? Are the problems of the impasse produced by the dissatisfaction of desire on the one hand and the impossibility of Love (desubjectivation) on the other solved here? Badiou argues for the simultaneity of Twoness and infinity, without facing that the Two cannot enjoy infinity, or even an encounter with it, unless they dissolve as Two. How do Two partake of the unified truth of the amorous without dissolving into a nonquotidian Real threatening to their two distinct knowledges that Badiou insists on? Like Zupancic, Badiou, in attempting to access the Real, "disavows" it, as he pushes out the Real beyond the boundary that he makes visible. Copjec takes a closely related stance in Imagine There's No Woman. She proposes that love "renders what the other is loveable," rather than being for something ineff-

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able or unfathomable in the beloved. Copjec points out that "everything depends on how one interprets the 'something more'" in Lacan's phrase "I love in you something more than you." Whereas she believes the "something more" is "accessed through love," I see it as an '"inaccessible more'-I love your inaccessibility, what I cannot reach in you," as my reader is now keenly aware. Copjec fails to explain why, "if one were to receive identical gifts or identical reports of an event one has unfortunately missed both from an acquaintance and from a beloved friend, one would get more, a surplus satisfaction, from the latter" (2002, pp. 42-43). Like Badiou, Copjec claims that to Lacan "the One of love does not fuse the two in love-subject and object; or lover and beloved, of whatever sex; or man and woman-into one, but exposes their disjunction" (p. 64). Copjec's emphasis on dissymmetry in Lac an's conception of love fails to support her bald claim that "Erotic love [as distinct from desire] does exist" (p. 62); but I encourage my reader to take a look at her scrupulous argumentation. I I. It is true that Karol and Dominique enigmatically appear together (exiting a ferry after a crash in a storm in the English Channel) at the end of Kieslowski's film Red. But I take this final scene, which includes the dominant characters of his trilogy, as presenting nondiegetically the main cast of characters from all three films, rather than as offering major hints about the future of his characters. 12. Lacan reads Antigone as pushing "to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death. She incarnates that desire." As presented in Chapter One, incarnating desire for death in this way, Antigone enables desire in the spectator; she establishes, in Lacan's words, "a certain relationship to a beyond of the central field ... for us" (1992, p. 281). 13. See Dayal's work on Campion's The Piano for a conception of courtly love that "allows us to negotiate the question of satisfaction, jouissance, in connection with the status and significance of the body" (2001, p. 24).

CHAPTER FIVE I. I find reinforcement of my sense of a Lacanian dimension in Foucault also in Shepherdson's book Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, where he juxtaposes Lacan's "art criticism" with Foucault's. In his chapter "History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan," Shepherdson reads Foucault's work in general as displacing (as does psychoanalysis) "the common alternative between the 'universalism' of theory and the 'particularism' of history," in part by reading Foucault's writing as "aimed at the real" (20oo, pp. r82-183). Shepherdson points out that Lacan believes that "'The picture does not compete with the appearance, it competes with what Plato designates as beyond appearance, as the Idea' (SXI, ru)" (20oo, p. 155) and notes that Foucault writes similarly, "By the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself" (p. 153). For an in-depth assessment of Foucault's ambivalence toward psychoanalysis, see also Christopher Lane's "The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis"

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(in Lacan in America). Lane points out quite usefully that Madness and Civilization is split between its thesis in chapter 6, where psychoanalysis is congratulated for engaging with unreason, and its conclusion, where psychoanalysis is condemned for not hearing the voices of unreason. It is the former position, Lane demonstrates, that Foucault picks up on in The Order of Things. Much of Lane's essay is dedicated to showing that "the difficulty of establishing where psychoanalysis stands relative to experience and its interpretation" both "haunted" and "partly determined" Foucault's career (p. 322). Lane attributes to Foucault the idea that "'the experience of the outside' is neither silent nor serene; it is real, in the Lacanian sense" (p. 334). 2. It would seem Bersani is implying that jouissance as a mode of ascesis comes about in particular through gay men's sex. Or are women too (more than men, who are obviously further entangled in the heterosexual ideal of masculine subjectivity) involved to enjoy such self-shattering? Can anyone enjoy it, as Bersani's frequent way of looking at gay men's sex as expressing something about sex in general would appear to imply? My best guess is that homosexuality in particular facilitates the achievement of ascesis because, at least to Bersani, homosexuality would seem to entail a deliberate relinquishing of masculinity/subjectivity. 3· Fantasy likewise to Dean "involves a strategy of de-egoization or impersonalization" (2ooo, p. 257), whereas I regard fantasy in Lacan as upholding a unique subjectivity. Dean picks up the term desubjectivization from a passage in Laplanche and Pontalis to make the point that "fantasy impersonalizes the subject" (p. 261). Fantasy, to Dean, like the term queer (which, Dean points out, etymologically derives from an Indo-European root meaning "across"), permits "identifications across a number of socially regulated boundaries-between active and passive, masculine and feminine, gay and straight, black and white, perhaps even the boundary between the living and the dead" (p. 262). Fantasy's logic is thus queer, as well as to Dean the logic of perversion, oblivious both to actual persons and to gender. 4· Foreclosure is a problematic term here. Not only does it seem incompatible with melancholia, unless it manages somehow to be compatible with incorporation, but it is also usually employed in psychoanalytic theory to indicate the psychotic's shutting out of the Law of the Father. Moreover, Butler uses it, she clarifies, to suggest a rigorous barring, a preemptive loss, but how rigorously barred is the homosexual beloved? And if homosexual love is preemptively lost, doesn't Butler end up doing what in Gender Trouble she blames Kristeva for doing: accepting "the structuralist assumption that heterosexuality is coextensive with the founding of the symbolic" (1990, p. 84)? 5. Butler is not, in other words, thinking along the lines of Ewa Ziarek, who, in "Kristeva and Levinas: Mourning, Ethics, and the Feminine," seizes on the "negative" side of Kristeva's ambivalence about maternal alterity by stressing "that the encounter with the (m)other does not automatically spell our suicide but, on the contrary, it is our being-toward-death that might offer us a chance to learn respect for alterity." Ziarek regards such respect, in the spirit of Levinas, as a way of replacing "an ethics of individuation" with "an ethics of otherness" (1993, p. 75).

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6. Here, however, Butler qualifies her comment about the desirability of mourning by adding that it will "never be complete, for no final severance could take place without dissolving the ego" (1997, p. 196). No final severance of what exactly? Must the homosexual be somewhat unsevered-incorporated rather than avowed-after all? Why is Butler suddenly anxious about dissolving the ego, after arguing against coherent identity, given that identity entails a necessary exclusion? And not to sever one's tie to the other, and hence not to complete mourning, would be, at least in my book, to wallow in melancholia. 7· Seshadri-Crooks speaks of the death drive as "the negation of negation," and "desire for death" as "the affirmation of the subject as he/she assumes his/her mortality" (woo, p. 1u)-reminding us that Edelman's "death drive" needs to be replaced with "death." In No Future, Edelman quotes Lacan to establish that "there is another name that designates the unnameability to which jouissance would give us access," and that name is "death." But then, in the following sentence, Edelman makes a concluding point about "the death drive," as though death and the death drive were synonymous (2004, p. 25). Edelman also conflates the death instinct (which is "raw") with the death drive (which is "cooked"). See my previous discussion in this book on the differences. 8. For a substantial collection of essays on the sinthome, see Re-Inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, edited by Luke Thurston, a text in my contemporary theory series published by Other Press (2001).

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Index

Adams, Parveen, I04-9 Aesthetics of existence, I22-2 3 Agamben, Giorgio, I I Agape, IOI, I03-4, II2-I7 Alleva, Richard, 6o The Ambassadors (Holbein), 48 Analysis, psychoanalytic: Antigone and, IS, 2I-22; desire and, 9-w, 22, 4I-42. See also Psychoanalyst Anamorphosis, I 8 Andre, Serge, 53-54, 58, 63, 64, 66, 77, 83, 88, I25 Antigone, I2-2o; analysis and, IS, 21-22; and death drive, I2, I9; and impossible Love, xii, I7; Lacan on, I3-I4, I6-23; misconceptions about, I2-I3; as queer, xvi Antigone (Sophocles), xii, II, I2-2o; Lacan on, 99-wo; White and, I02 Anxiety, 2 Aristotle, I 3, I 8 Art: and madness, 3 I -3 2; modernist, 33 Ascesis, I23-25, I27, I42, I43, I6yz2 Bacon, Francis, IDS Badiou, Alain, I6uno Banality, love and, w7- I I Bataille, Georges, 126 Bazin, Andre, 69 Beauty, I9, 35-36 Berlant, Lauren, I46, I 53 Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 6 I Bersani, Leo, xv, 3, II9, I24-29, I35, I42, I46-47, I63122

Beyond, love and the, 9-u, I8, II7, II9-2I, I25, 128-30, I36 The Birds (Hitchcock), I 37-39 Blue (K.ieslowski), II 2-I4 Braunstein, Nestor, xii-xiii Breaking the Waves (Von Trier), 7I-77, 93 Butler, Judith, xv, wo, II9, IF-37• I46-52, I63n4 Campion, Jane, 6o, 73 Carmen, I2 Castration, IS-I6, 63, ws-6 Catharsis, I3-I4, I8 Ceding one's desire, not, 3, 12, 4I-43 "The Colonel's Lady" (Mangham), us Comedy, love and, I07 Copjec, Joan, I, I6I-62mo Courtlylove,97-98, IIS-I8 Culture: ethical improvement and, I so; psychoanalysis and, xv

Damage (Malle), 89-94 Dayal, Samir, 6o Dean, Tim, xv, II9, I24, 129-32, I4I, I46-47, I49-5o, I631z3 Death: courtly love and, I I6; desire and, 23, 37-38, 44, 99; in The End of the Affoir, 66-67; in Lady Chatterley's Lover, 52-53; and meaning, 46-47; in Mrs. Dalloway, 48-49; symbolic, II2-I3; in White, IOI-2 Death drive: Antigone and, I2, I9; death and, I64n7; jouissance and, I2-I3, 45; U.S. and, 26 171

172

INDEX

Deleuze, Gilles, I 3 I Democracy, I43, ISO Desire: analysis and, 9-Io, 22, 4I-42; Antigone and, I4-I6; and death, 23, 37-38,44, 99; as desire of the Other, 42; drive and, 43; and excess, I3I; jouissance and, xii-xiii; law and, 4I -4 3; love versus, xii, 5-I I, ro8, I 58n6; as measure, 24; modernism and, 28; and Real, 43-44; subject and, ros. See also Ethical desire Desubjectivation: in Breaking the Waves, 74, 76; in Damage, 89, 92; in The End of the Ajfoir, 6s; film and, 70, rro; Foucault and, I 24-2 5; homosexuality and, I39, I42; in Lady Chatterley's Lover, SI, 53, 55, 56; love and, 3, 58, ro9, II7, I25; queer theory and, I46, I48-49; sex and, I26; Woman and, 88 Ding, see Thing Dolar, Mladen, 3, 7, 9-ro, I I La Dolce Vita (Fellini), I 6 Dor,Joel, 85,90 Drive: definition of, I57n4; desire and, 43; love and, s-6, 8; one's own, 42; and Other, 42-43; postmodernism and,28 Duras, Marguerite, 28 Dworkin, Andrea, I26

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (Bernini), 6I Edelman, Lee, xv, II9-2o, I37-42, I44-49, Ip, I64n7 Empedocles, 46-47 Encore (Lacan), 4, I I, 29, 40, so-si, s8-6o,6s-66,73,78,98, I08-9, II6, I29 The End of the Affoir (film, Jordan), 6o The End of the Affoir (novel, Greene), 59-68 Ethical desire: as central in La can, 3; death and, 44; and drive, 8; political role of, xi Ethics: Antigone and, I2; jouissance and, I 2-I 3; of modern thought, 49-50; of psychoanalysis, 25-27, 39-42,45, I39; and Real, 96-97; and refusal of melancholia, I 5; and the Thing, 98; tragedy and, 20; Zizekon, I2-I3, 24-25,97,99-IOO, I04, II3.Seeako Ethical desire

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 4, 8, I9, 56,96,99, II6 Excrement, I28-29, I3I-32, I44 Fantasy, I63n3 Fascination, I3-I4 F ellini, Federico, I 6 Femininity, hysteria and, 82-83 Film: and the inarticulable, 70; and love, I6on3; and psychosis, 7o; and Real, 93-94 Fink,Bruce,4I-43,82, 87, I30, I58n5 Forster, E. M., A Room with a View,

34-4°

Foucault, Michel, xiii, xiv, xv, 28, 30-33, 49-50, II9, I2I-25, I4I, I46, I62637ZI The Four Fundamental Concepts (Lacan), 4, 5, 8-Io, I4, I5,22,43,45,48, I08-9 Freeman, Elizabeth, I46 Freud, Sigmund: on hetero/homosexuality, rzo; and love, s-8; and obsession, 88; and perversion, I29; and Thing, IS Gay sex, I28-29, I63n2 Gaze, 9, I3-I4 Genet,Jean, I28, I42 God: in Breaking the Waves, 73-74; in The End of the Affoir, 59-6I, 63-65; Lacan on, 57, 59-6I, 64, 7I, 79; love and, 7I; woman and, 57, 59-6I, 63-65 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, I 6 Greene, Graham, The End of the Ajfoir, 59-68 Guattari, Felix, I 3 I Guyon, Jeanne, 83 Halperin, David, xv, II9, I2I-25, I37, I4I-42, I46-47 Harari, Roberto, 2 Hatred, 66 Hegel, G. W. F., I6 Heinlein, Robert, 29 Heroes, 25-26 Heterosexuality: and closing off of drives, I37-38; and mourning of homosexual love, I 32-3 7; the social predicated on, I44-46, I49; and the Symbolic, I44 Historicity versus historicism, I 5 I Hitchcock, Alfred: The Birds, I37-39; Nm-th by Northwest, I48

INDEX

Holbein, Hans, 48 Homophobia, I39-40 Homosexuality, and subjectivity, I 27-2 8, I33-35, I39, I52, I63n2 Hysteria: in Breaking the Waves, 71-76; in Damage, 9o-94; etiologies of, 85; and femininity, 82-83; love and, 69, 7I-76; mysticism and, 82-84; in Seventh Heaven, 84-89 Imaginary, catharsis and the, I4 Impossible Love, xii, I 7 Inarticulable: film and, 7o; Lady Chatterley's Lover and, 5s-s6; modernism and, 29 Incest, I6-I7, 20 lnto·im (Kelly), IOS Jacquot, Benoit, Seventh Heaven, 84-89, 93 Jordan, Neil, The End of the Affoir, 6o Jouissance: and death drive, I2-I3; definition of, I57ni; desire and, xii-xiii; ethics and, I 2-I 3; as evil, 44; Foucault's sadomasochism and, u 3; male fantasy and, 77-8I; two forms of, so, 88, I23; woman and, 53-55, 58, 77-8I Kant, Immanuel, 24-25,45,98 Kelly, Mary, Interim, Io5 Keyes, Alan, I39 Kieslowski, Krzysztof, I I 2-I 3; Blue, II2-I4; Three Coloun Trilogy, II3; White, 95-96,98, IOI-4, II2, IIS-I6 Kristeva,Julia, 70, 8I, 83 Lacan,Jacques: on Antigone, I3-I4, I6-23, 99-Ioo; on desire, I2, 4I-43; Encore, 4, II, 29, 40, so-si, s8-6o, 65-66,73,78,98, Io8-9, II6, I29; The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 4, 8, I9, s6, 96, 99, I I6; The Four Fundamental Concepts, 4, 5, 8-ro, I4, IS, 22, 43, 45, 48, Io8-9; on God, 57, 59-6I, 64, ?I, 79; on love, I, 5, 84, Io8-Io (see also Beyond, love and the); and modernism, 34; reading, backwards, 4; on sexual relations, 58-59; Television, 76, 9I; on Thing, 95; on Woman, 54-57, 78-79, I597l5

173

Lady Chatterley's Lover (Lawrence), 50-57 Lane, Christopher, I62-63ni Law: in Damage, 92-93; desire and, 4I4 3; in Lady Chatterley's Lover, 5 I-52; queer theory and, I I9; in A Room with a View, 36-37; in White, IOI Lawrence, D. H., Lady Chatterley's Love1·, 5o-57 Limitless love, IO-II Love: as agape, IOI, I03-4, II2-I7; Antigone and, I?-I8; Badiou on, I6Inro; and the beyond, 9-I I, I8, II?, II9-2I, US, u8-30, I36; in Breaking the Waves, 7I-76; comedy and, ro7; Copjec on, I6I-62nro; courtly, 97-98, I Is-I 8; desire versus, xii, s-rr, ro8, IS8n6; and desubjectivation, 3, 58, I09, II7, US; drive and, s-6, 8; in The End of the Affoir, 62-68; film and, I6on3; gender and, 57; hatred and, 66; hysteria and, 69, ?I?6; impossible, xii, I?, Io8-9; Lacan on, I, 5, 84, Io8-Io; limitless, Io-rr; meaning of, 2-3; queer theory and, rr9-42; Real, I I; sexuality and, 5, I I; sexual relation and, 5 I; third-order (see Beyond, love and the); transference and, 5, 2I, I59n3; tripartite theory of, 4, 6-I I; Zizek on, 8, 89, roi, 103-7, IID-I7, II9 Love in the Westenz World (Rougemont), II6-I7 Lynch, David, Mulholland Drive, I6on3

MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 7, I I, 69-70, 93 MacKinnon, Catherine, Io5, us-26 Madness: art and, 3 I-3 2; historical development of, 30-31; modernism and, 28-29, 3 I-33, 46 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 30, 32 Malle, Louis, Damage, 89-94 Masochism, 8, II, s8, I26-27, I591Z6. See also Sadomasochism Maugham, Somerset, "The Colonel's Lady," II5 McGowan, Todd, 93-94 Melancholia, I 33-36 Metz, Christian, I6on3 Miller,Jacques-Alain, 43, 92

174

INDEX

Modernism: art of, 33; definition of, 28; and desire, z8; ethics of, 49-50; Lacan and, 34; and madness, 28-33, 46; and psychoanalysis, so; and sublime, 33 Morality, see Ethics Morrison, Paul, 12o-21 Mourning, I 5, 23 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 46-49 Mulholland Drive (Lynch), 16on3 Mysticism: hysteria and, 82-84; and jouissance, 57, 79; Saint Teresa and, 58, 6I; sex and, Iz6; woman and, 1591l6 Narcissism, 6-7 Nasio, Juan-David, 74, 76, 82 New Lacanians, xi North by North1vest (Hitchcock), I48 Objet a: in Breaking the Waves, 75-76; drive and, 6; gaze and, 9; love and, 8, 57; meaning of, I 30, I 58n5; phallus and, I 29; and a wall, 66 Obsession, 86-88 Orgasm, 53-55 Other: desire as desire of the, 42; drive and, 42-43; hysteria and, 72, 75-76, 84; masochism and, 58; woman as, 57- 58,88 Paul, Saint, 101, I03-4, II7 Peeping Tom (Powell), 105 Perversion, 58, I2o, I23, I29-31 Phallus: femininity as exposure of, 82; Foucault's challenge to, 123; hysteria and, 7I-72, 74, 85, 90; objet a and, 129; phallic jouissance, so, 53, 57, 62-63; woman as beyond, 54-55, 57, n-81 The Piano (Campion), 6o, 73 Pleasure, I 23-2 5 Pleasure principle, 6 Politics: ethical desire and, xi; Lacanian influence on, I43; queer theory and, 124-25, 142, I43-53; and the Real, I43 Postmodernism: and drive, 28; film and, 70; and Symbolic/Real border, 69 Powell, Michael, Peeping Tom, I05 Power: father-son relation and, 128-29; sex and, I26-27

Psychoanalysis: and culture, xv; ethics of, 2 5-27, 39-42, 45, I39; Foucault on, 50, r62-6yzr; and modern thought, so; queer theory and, no; value of, I-2 Psychoanalyst: and Real, 92; as saint, 76. See alm Analysis, psychoanalytic Quackelbeen, Julien, 8 3 Queer, definition of, 130, 137 Queer Nation, I46 Queer theory: Bersani and, I 2 5-29; Butler and, I32-37; Dean and, 129-32; and desubjectivation, 124-27, 146, I 48-49; Edelman and, I 37-42; Foucault and, I2 1-2 s; Halperin and, I 2 I-2 5; versus heterosexism, xi; and Lacanian love, n9-42; and politics, 124-25, 142, 143-53; and psychoanalysis, 120; and the Real, r 30; and transformation of social, xv-xvi, I50-)3 Radical desire, xiii, 2 3, 52 Rajchman, John, 33-34 Real: desire and, 43-44; ethics and, 96-97; film and, 93-94; impossibility of, 97; love and, 7; modernism and, 28-29; psychoanalysis and, 143; queer theory and, 130; A Room with a View and, 34-35; and sexual relation, 29; Symbolic and, I43, 145 Reproduction, 149, 152-53 Resignification, 147-48, r5o-5r Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), I I A Room with a View (Forster), 34-40 Rougemont, Denis de, Love in the FVestern Wodd, I I6-I7 Rubin, Gayle, I 25 Sa de, Marquis de, 45 Sadomasochism, 12 3, I2 5, I 27 Saint Foucault (Halperin), I2I-25 Saints, 20, 2 3, 76, 9I Salecl, Renata, To, 36-37,42, 157n4 Sass, Louis A., 46 Schizophrenia, 46 Sebald, W. G., 3 Sedgwick, Eve, I30, I45, 149 September II, 2 oo I, 26 Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana, 44-45

INDEX

Seventh Heaven Oacquot), 84-89, 93 Sexuality, 5, I I Sexual relation: Bersani on, 125-26; in Breaking the Waves, 73; impossibility of, 5I, 58-62, 86, 92, 96, ro8, IIO; modernism and, 40; Real and lack of, 29; woman and, 57 Shepherdson, Charles, 2, I4, I?-I8, 42, I62ni Signification: The End of the Affoir and, 6I-62; impossibility of sexual relation and, 59, 6I-62; resignification, I47-48, ISO-SI Sinthomosexuality, I 37-4I, I48 Soler, Colette, I Io, I 59116 Stavrakakis, Yannis, I43-44 Subject/subjectivity: desire and, ros; drive of, 41-42; ethical choices for, I04-5; homosexuality and, 127-28, I33-35> I39> I 52; melancholia and, I33-36; subjection to power and, I32-33; Zizek on, 99-ror. See also Desubjectivation Sublimation, 97-98 Sublime, 33 Sutzn·e (film), 44-45 Symbolic: alteration of, I 52; heterosexist, I44, I49> 150; law and, 37, IOI; love and, ro4; queer, I43, 153; Real and, I43> 145 Television (Lacan), 76, 91 Teresa, Saint, 58, 6r Thing, IS-I?, r6, 2I, 35-36,95,97-98, Io6 Third-order love, see Beyond, love and the Three Colours trilogy (Kieslowski), I I 3 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 29 Tragedy, I3-I4, 20 Transcendence, 7

175

Transference, love and, 5, 2I, 159n3 Tristan, Ir6, II8 United States, death drive of, 26 The Unpleasant Profession ofJonathan Haag (Heinlein), 29 The Usual Suspects (film), roo

Vertigo (Sebald), 3 Virginity, 53-54, 88 Von Trier, Lars, Breaking the Waves, ?I-n, 93 Warner, Michael, I37, I45-46 Waste, see Excrement White (Kieslowski), 95-96, 98, IOI-4, II2, IIS-I6 Wittig,A1onique, I45-46 WolfA1an, 128-29 Woman: gay males and, 128; and God, 57, 59-6I, 63-65; and hysteria, 71-72; and jouissance, 53-55, 58, 77-8r; Lacan on, 54-57, 78-79, I59115; and love, 57; male masochism and, 58; as Other, 57-58, 88. See also Woman who doesn't exist Woman who doesn't exist, 53, 55, 57-58, 63, ?I, 72, 78, 8I-84,86,88-89, I04 Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse, 29; Mn Dalloway, 46-49 Zizek, Slavoj: on Butler, I32-33; on desire, ros-6; and ethics, xiii; on ethics, I2-I3, 24-25, 97, 99-roo, I04, II3; on female jouissance, 77-8I; on historicity, I 5 I; on La can, 4; on love, 8,89, IOI, I03-7, IID-I7, II9;on modernism/postmodernism, 28-29; as new Lacanian, xi, xiv; on the Real, I43; on subjectivity, 99-IOI, IOS-6 Zupancic, Alenka, 3, 8, IS, 24, 42, 44, 96-97, IO?-I I