The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within 9780823293209

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THE SINGULARITY OF BEING

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PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERVENTIONS

e

Esther Rashkin and Peter L. Rudnytsky, series editors Series Board: Salman Akhtar Anne Golomb Hoffman Peter Loewenberg Humphrey Morris Lois Oppenheim Henry Sussman

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THE SINGULARIT Y OF BEING Lacan and the Immortal Within

e Mari Ruti

Fordham University Press New York

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2012

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Copyright © 2012 Mari Ruti All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruti, Mari. The singularity of being : Lacan and the immortal within / Mari Ruti. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Psychoanalytic interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8232-4314-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8232-4315-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981. 2. Psychoanalysis. 3. Self. 4. Subjectivity. I. Title. bf109.l23r88 2012 150.19′5—dc23 2011051347 Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12

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First edition

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Contents

Author’s Note Introduction Part i: 1. 2. 3. 4. Part ii: 5. 6. 7. 8.

ix 1

The Call of the Immortal The Singularity of Being The Rewriting of Destiny The Ethics of the Act The Possibility of the Impossible

13 36 59 83

The Echo of the Thing The Jouissance of the Signifier The Dignity of the Thing The Ethics of Sublimation The Sublimity of Love Conclusion: The Other as Face

105 127 148 168 189

Notes

217

Works Cited

245

Index

249

vii

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For BJ, who quilted me to Lacan

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Author’s Note

In this book, I use the lower-case other to refer to the intersubjective other (the other person). When the word is capitalized, it refers to the Lacanian big Other (the symbolic order). Many of the authors I quote do not adhere to this distinction, but their usage should be clear from the context. I have opted for the pronoun it when referring to the human “subject” in order to avoid unnecessary gendering. Otherwise, he and she are used randomly, depending on context and author’s whim. Lacan’s seminars are cited by reference to the year in which he delivered the lecture in question.

ix

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THE SINGULARITY OF BEING

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Introduction

From a Lacanian viewpoint, human subjectivity entails a constant negotiation of the three principal registers of being: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. The symbolic interpellates us into the normative regulations of the social order. The imaginary founds our conception of ourselves as individuals who possess unique personalities and the potential for exceptional existential trajectories. And the real intrudes into our lives as an unruly vortex of bodily jouissance and unintelligibility that disturbs the reassuring (yet ever-fragile) coherence of our symbolic and imaginary configurations alike. The fact that this trinity coincides loosely with the Freudian distinction between the superego, the ego, and the id is not a coincidence, nor is the fact that Lacan focused on the tensions and antagonisms between these three components of being. In his early work, Lacan tended to privilege the symbolic over the imaginary and the real, linking the “truth” of the subject’s desire to the signifier and banishing jouissance to the realm of “impossibility.” In his later seminars, in contrast, it is the real—the kernel of ontological “impossibility” that nevertheless causes tangible psychic effects—that takes center stage.1 It is on the level of the real that I want to locate the topic of this book: the singularity of being. At the risk of oversimplifying, one might say that subjectivity, for Lacan, is aligned with the symbolic, personality with the imaginary, and singularity with the real. The “subject” comes into existence through symbolic law and prohibition. “Personality” can never entirely transcend the narcissistic fantasies of wholeness, integration, and extraordinariness that buttress the subject’s imaginary relationship to the world. “Singularity,” in turn, relates to the rebellious energies of the real that elude both symbolic and imaginary closure. It opens to layers of being that exceed all social categories and classifications. If personality 1

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Introduction

stipulates the kind of person a given individual is (e.g., timid, reserved, outgoing, charismatic), singularity expresses something about the specificity of the subject’s basic life-orientation on the level of the drives and unconscious desire, particularly as these solidify around the fundamental fantasy and the repetition compulsion. Eric Santner articulates the matter perfectly when he declares that the singular self—“that in a human being which can most truly say ‘I’” (2001, 86)—persists as a nonnegotiable kernel of the real beyond all social predicates, taxonomies, generalizations, and economies of comparison. Singularity escapes the logic of parts and wholes, of cultural systems of exchange where elements gain significance from being weighed against each other within the parameters of a broader structure. Singularity, Santner asserts, is “a non-relational excess which is out-of-joint with respect to . . . any form of teleological absorption by a larger purpose” (2005, 96). It endures when all particulars, all classifiable factors, have been accounted for. Or, to put the matter in Lacanian terms, after the subject has been divested of its symbolic and imaginary supports, there is still something that remains: the real of being. The lifting of the subject’s sociofantasmatic investments reveals the unremitting pulse of the real— what Santner (loosely but evocatively) depicts as a kind of oversupply or exaggeration of “being.” This “peculiar surplus of insistence over existence” (2001, 80) agitates the subject with a relentless urgency, pressure, or necessity that overflows its symbolic mandate. Notably, this hyperbolic real is not some kind of a substantive or nonalienated core that persists beneath normative sociality, but rather “a rising to consciousness of a non-symbolizable surplus within an otherwise intelligible reality, a sort of stain on the horizon of cultural intelligibility” (74).2

The “Perseverance in Being” Santner’s account recalls a distinction that Emmanuel Levinas makes between the subject of social life on the one hand and the singularity of being on the other. Referring to the subject’s enmeshment in impersonal (social) language, Levinas writes: It is only at this price that man can become a “moment” of his own discourse. Such is, in fact, man reduced to his accomplishments, reflected in his works, man past and dead who is totally reflected in that discourse. Impersonal discourse is a necrological discourse. Man is reduced to the

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Introduction 3

legacy of man, absorbed by a totality of the common patrimony. . . . Man becomes—not, to be sure, a thing—but a dead soul. This is not reification; this is history. (1991, 25)

Impersonal discourse is necrological in the sense that it draws man into a network of collective significations that reduces him to a list of his accomplishments. Through such discourse, man is overrun by the social totality, reduced to an inconsequential slice of history, and categorized as a person with culturally classifiable (and thus personally meaningless) attributes. He becomes a part of a whole—someone who can be compared to other constituents of the system through a set of universally applicable generalizations. Fortunately, though, this is not the entire story, for man also possesses a singularity that keeps him from becoming a “dead soul”—someone who is dead while still living.While the various “things” of the world let themselves be “taken by surprise” by concepts (1991, 10), human beings contain a uniqueness that transcends conceptual capture. “Generalization is death,” Levinas postulates, whereas the “irreplaceable singularity of the I comes from its life” (27). More specifically, man’s singularity emerges from an immediacy of existence—from “a perseverance in being” (189)—that cannot be grasped by abstractions. It represents “a gap in the horizon” (10) of conceptual understanding, so that man’s identity cannot be constituted entirely by reference to others but contains elements that resist all systems of collective designation. Both Levinas and Santner therefore envision singularity as a kind of breach in the horizon of cultural intelligibility. It is through this breach that something of “life” in its excessive “perseverance in being” seeps into the domain of social subjectivity. In an elemental sense, this “perseverance in being” is what prevents the subject from becoming a mere “moment” of discourse; it keeps the subject from being completely swallowed up by the collectivity. Singularity, according to this account, slides into view from within the fissures of social subjectivity, puncturing the subject’s coherent organization of being. Characterized by fleeting glimpses of negativity rather than by any fullness of personality, it destabilizes the subject on the level of its bodily “perseverance”—on the level of what one might, in more Lacanian terms, describe as the drive energies of the real. It would of course be incorrect to posit that the Lacanian drives express the subject’s immediacy of being in the Levinasian sense, for they

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Introduction

invariably carry the imprint of the social—a theme I will develop later in this book. But they do exhibit the kind of stubborn perseverance (or insistence) that both Levinas and Santner align with singularity. In this sense, singularity does not represent an opening to some sort of an idyllic or harmonious life, but rather gives rise to a fundamental existential bewilderment. “To put it paradoxically,” Santner remarks, “what matters most in a human life may in some sense be one’s specific form of disorientation, the idiomatic way in which one’s approach to and movement through the world is ‘distorted’” (2001, 39). In other words, singularity arises from the fact that social subjectivity is by necessity disfigured by the “distortion” introduced to it by the energies of the real—by energies that cannot be either wholly incorporated into, or depleted by, the normative structures of the symbolic establishment. The first half of this book is devoted to mapping out the implications of this way of conceptualizing singularity. It places Santner’s observaˇ izˇek and Alain Badiou (among tions in the context of work by Slavoj Z others) in order to highlight the ways in which post-Lacanian theory has in recent years been revitalized by its close attention to Lacan’s later seminars—the phase of Lacan’s thinking that focused on the real. This element of post-Lacanian theory offers an intriguing avenue for analyzing subjective singularity, provided that we do not take too literally Santner’s assertion that the singular self articulates “that in a human being which can most truly say ‘I.’” If we locate singularity on the level of the real, we must forgo the idea that it could ever “say” anything about itself in a coherent or cognitive manner. But this does not mean that it does not “speak” or “express” meaning (along with nonmeaning). What the spirit of Santner’s statement conveys is the idea of exigency— the idea that the singular self “utters” something about the “reality” of the subject’s being that is more fundamental, more irrepressible, than its symbolic and imaginary attempts to maintain a consistent sense of self. Singularity, on this view, relates to those pieces of being that stick out of, interfere with, undermine, or otherwise disturb the subject’s pursuit of stable self-identity. It is the “inhuman” (or not fully human) excess (existential overstatement, as it were) that—like the “nervous tic” that contorts the face of Sygne de Coûfountaine in Claudel’s The Hostage (Lacan 1965, 324)—mutilates the subject’s “humanity,” divorcing it from both the comforts and challenges of social existence.

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Introduction 5

What Subjective Destitution Can Do The critique of hegemonic sociality that underpins this approach runs through much of the theorizing of the last hundred years, animating not only phenomenology, the Frankfurt school, poststructuralism, and some strands of psychoanalysis, but also much of deconstructive feminist and queer theory as well as ethnic and postcolonial studies. On the one hand, this emphasis has given rise to some of the most far-reaching theoretical thinking of the post-Freudian, and particularly of the post-Holocaust, era, increasing our understanding of the various ways in which human beings are subjected to the very structures of power and meaning production that found their existence as socially intelligible creatures. On the other, it has tended to generate a quasi-paranoid discourse about the seamlessness of human disempowerment and lack of agency, so that there are times when the only options available seem to be either a descent into abject hopelessness (an apathetic giving up) or a radical stance of uncompromising defiance whereby the subject emphatically dissociates itself from the social world (a suicidal or mutinous “no” to the ˇ izˇek establishment).We will discover that prominent Lacanians, such as Z and Lee Edelman, have advocated the latter as a kind of culmination of Lacanian ethics, so that the subject who is willing to destroy itself in a vehement act of “subjective destitution”—an act that represents an absolute break with the dominant establishment—attains the heroic status of someone who is ready to sacrifice his or her social viability for the sake of a larger cause (or sometimes, quite simply, because he or she has “had enough”). I have chosen to dedicate the first half of this book to an exploration of this vein of Lacanian theory because it represents an original, and at times quite promising, way of rethinking key concerns from agency and freedom to ethics and political action. Perhaps most importantly, it offers an alternative to the early Foucauldian belief—a belief that has in complex ways been revived by recent attention to Agamben’s argument about the pervasiveness of sovereign power and the state of exception— that there is no way out, that no matter what we do, the power structure will in the end “get” us. At the same time, I tend to be slightly wary of this interpretation of Lacan, in part because its absolutism renders it largely impracticable outside of dramatically revolutionary contexts, and in part because there is a certain emptiness to it in the sense that I do

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Introduction

not see its advocates rushing to relinquish their positions of institutional and intellectual authority. Moreover, this approach tends to replicate one of the biggest stumbling blocks of posthumanist theory, namely the propensity to universalize human disenfranchisement to the degree that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the general “human condition” (in the existential sense) and more historically specific kinds of traumatization. In other words, it makes it hard to make sense of what I have elsewhere described as the divide between constitutive and circumstantial forms of alienation (Ruti 2006) and what Dominick LaCapra (2001) has brilliantly analyzed as the distinction between structural and historical trauma. To be sure, our constitutive alienation by the discourse of the Other (the symbolic order) provides the structural basis for more circumstantial varieties of alienation so that, for instance, the sense of deprivation caused by poverty sits atop a more foundational deprivation, and a racist slur adds insult to the more universal “injury” that underlies human life. But it would be a mistake to equate the acute impact of poverty or racism with the more slow-burning impact of constitutive alienation. Personally, I do not lie awake at night worrying about the fact that the discourse I speak is not my “own,” that the signifier robs me of agency, that there is no Other of the Other, or that my self-understanding is, by necessity, incomplete and misleading. Perhaps I should. But, frankly, I am much more likely to wonder how it is that I might be able to revise a situation I find either personally difficult or ethically repugnant. I might agonize over some detail of my daily life or over a specific social injustice—such as gender inequality, gay bashing, or ethnic profiling— that I find nauseating. Undoubtedly, it is my constitutive alienation that allows (or forces) me to worry about these things to the point of insomnia. Undoubtedly, the fact that I have been “split” by language is one of the things that distinguishes me from my neighbor’s adorable cat, who is able to sleep in the middle of the sidewalk amidst the commotion of cars, bicycles, pedestrians, skateboards, and baby carriages. And, undoubtedly, the problems that keep me up are often directly caused by the hegemonic aspects of the Other. But they usually have to do with the highly unequal ways in which this hegemony manifests itself in the context of particular subject positions rather than with the universal alienation caused by language and social subjectivity; they have to do with the uneven distribution of disciplinary power rather than with the ubiquitous stamp of this power.

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Introduction 7

When we opt to interpret the social order as thoroughly hegemonic in the manner that is customary in the brand of Lacanian theory I have been outlining, it is easy to lose track of the fact that lacking secure ontological foundations, being “wounded” by the signifier, and having no choice but to utilize the impersonal discourse of the Other are not, in the larger scheme of things, that difficult to bear. Furthermore, looking at singularity exclusively through the lens of subjective destitution (as a sudden eclipse of social hegemony) does not sufficiently capture the psychic densities of our tendency to experience it as a social phenomenon, as something that complicates our ongoing relationships with others rather than as a rebellious act that releases us from having to take stock of the reactions of others; it does not sufficiently capture the tension between our singularity and our responsibility to others. That the boundaries between the demands of singularity and those of sociality are not always easy to negotiate is reflected in the fact that many of us are most aware of our singularity when it causes us social embarrassment—when we regret having acted recklessly, idiotically, irrationally, or inappropriately. Indeed, it is precisely because we know that displays of singularity within social contexts frequently carry a high price that we tend to defend against it, some of us more tightly than others, but most of us to an arguably astonishing degree.3 On the more constructive side, we might find ourselves pondering how our singularity might empower us to bring something new or inventive into being, how we might, in however modest a fashion, make a contribution to the cultural capital of the world.

What Sublimation Can Do Concerns such as these are why the second half of this book locates the question of singularity within Lacan’s analysis of sublimation. As much as I appreciate recent efforts to connect singularity to acts of subjective destitution, I think that this approach can lead to conceptual dead ends that squander some of the most robust potentialities of Lacanian theory. More specifically, it can sideline the possibility that singularity—and the resistance to social hegemonies that singularity, almost by definition, implies—is not always a function of a categorical rupture with the symbolic order, but can also operate within this order. While there are certainly components of Lacan’s thinking—such as his reading of Antigone as a heroine who refuses to “cede on” her desire—that support the idea that resistance, for Lacan, is a matter of an adamant “no” to the establish-

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Introduction

ment, there are other components that point towards the importance of being able to creatively intervene in symbolic systems of signification. To state the matter simply, Lacan’s account of sublimation illustrates that we are not merely the passive recipients of cultural meanings, but have the power to actively reformulate these meanings. Moreover, his reading of James Joyce in Seminar 23—his late seminar on the sinthome (see chapter 5)—explicitly links singularity to linguistic innovation, for Lacan proposes that Joyce is a singular individual precisely to the extent that he is able to manipulate language in poetic, polysemic, and pioneering ways. Far from interpreting the signifier as a mere minion of the big Other, Lacan suggests that language can draw upon and intermingle with the chaotic energies of the real to such a degree that it becomes a malleable tool of counterhegemonic meaning. When it comes to protecting a sliver of singularity against the hegemonic dictates of the social establishment, there are basically two ways to go: One can either reject the social or one can try to reconfigure it from within. My aim in this book is to show that the Lacanian real lends itself to both of these strategies. As tempting as it may be to locate singularity entirely beyond the predicates of sociality and signification, doing so limits us both personally and politically, for many of us are not willing (or able) to forgo our pursuit of social belonging, love and intimacy, ethical accountability, and collective solidarity. Indeed, I would assert that, in the final analysis, it is our embeddedness within the social that makes singularity meaningful to us in the first place, for as much as cultural codes of intelligibility constrain us, in their absence we would have no framework for making sense of our lives, let alone for living out our idiosyncratic (singular) passions. In addition, while collective norms can be coercive and life draining, there are other aspects of sociality and intersubjectivity that sustain, augment, and deepen our existence, allowing us to achieve more multidimensional shades of aliveness. Such affirming forms of sociality enable us to step into the current of our lives much more effectively than we would be able to through a self-annihilating plunge into the (arguably psychotic) wilderness of the real. In the most elementary sense, singularity is what renders each of us irreplaceable and unexchangeable. It is what makes it impossible to substitute one subject for another, or to mistake one person for another.The “content” of a given subject’s singularity may remain largely opaque.Yet we are usually aware of its aura whenever we encounter it. At this early point in my analysis, when I can only give a provisional definition, I

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Introduction 9

would say that singularity is less a nameable quality than an inscrutable intensity of being that urges the subject to persist in its unending task of fashioning or reiterating a self that feels viscerally “real” (meaningful, compelling, or appropriate). From this perspective, singularity can never be fixed into a steady configuration of attributes, but rather communicates something about the volatility of the constant process of composing and recomposing a self that, by definition, characterizes the human predicament. That is, singularity is never something that the subject achieves once and for all, but an ongoing, ever-renewed, and alwaysprecarious exploration of potentialities that is undertaken in relation to rapidly shape-shifting and capricious external influences as well as in relation to the equally unpredictable drive energies and unconscious directives that galvanize the subject’s psychic “destiny.” As such, it cannot be the exclusive province of either the symbolic or the real, but rather arises from an always more or less tumultuous encounter between the two. Along related lines, if we take it for granted that resistance is often a vital ingredient of singularity—as I do in this book—it would be overly simplistic to situate it wholly within the real, as some sort of a default antisymbolic entity. Instead, I would look for the potential for resistance in the complex interface between the symbolic and the real for, like so many other interfaces, this one is charged with powerfully transformative energies.

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1.

The Singularity of Being

In the opening chapter of his famous seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan draws a contrast between Aristotle’s “science of character” and psychoanalysis. He explains that while Aristotle’s method of selffashioning is centered on the cultivation of habits, psychoanalysis defines itself “in terms of traumas and their persistence” (1959, 10). At first glance, this distinction may appear misleading, for what could be more habitual than the persistence of trauma? What Lacan is getting at, however, is the distinction between habits that are intentionally cultivated and others that motivate the subject’s life choices without its conscious awareness. He stresses that psychoanalysis is interested in how the involuntary repetition of trauma shapes the subject’s destiny independently of its willful efforts either to develop a character or to arrive at particular existential outcomes. If the habits that Aristotle talks about arise from the subject’s deliberate attempt to manipulate the contours of its being, the “habits” of trauma determine its actions and overall life-direction in ways that are neither logically explainable nor rationally containable. They give rise to repetition compulsions that unfailingly guide the subject to specific goals, hopes, and modes of meeting the world at the expense of others, thereby ushering it onto the trajectory of its distinctive “fate,” “fortune,” or “destiny.” Five years later, Lacan prefaces his outline of the four fundamental principles of psychoanalysis by positing that though Freud is a Cartesian in the sense that, like Descartes, he “sets out from the basis of the subject of certainty” (1964, 35), he does not define this subject by its capacity for rational thought, but rather by its relationship to the unconscious: It is because the unconscious secretes indisputable and stubbornly insistent signs of life that the subject can be absolutely sure of its own existence. In this manner, Freud alters our basic understanding of what it means to 13

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The Call of the Immortal

be a human being. By declaring “the certainty of the unconscious” (36), he shifts our attention from what we can know to what, by necessity, remains partially unknown. And he reorients us from the self-governing and relatively autonomous subject of metaphysics to the irrational and profoundly vulnerable subject of psychoanalysis. Some of the most influential theory and philosophy of the twentieth century was devoted to unpacking the enormous implications of this reorientation and, in some ways, we are still reeling from it. The unconscious and the repetition of trauma are of course linked. On the one hand, insofar as the unconscious retains a clandestine record of painful experiences that cannot be adequately named, let alone affectively claimed, it crystallizes around trauma. On the other, it is exactly those affects that remain unconscious that persistently return in the form of traumatic repetitions. In this sense, the prolonged trauma of repetition—the trauma of not being able to break an agonizing cycle of being haunted by the hungry and persistent ghosts of the past—builds upon and elaborates the foundational (most strongly crystallized) traumas of subjectivity, producing a layered psychic landscape wherein sediments of injury gradually accumulate to engender a highly personalized tapestry of pain. Even though the subject’s affective trajectory (or destiny) may appear largely accidental, it is in fact driven by its characteristic way of experiencing and coping with trauma. In a way, nothing distinguishes one subject from another more decisively than the particularity of its approach to suffering. Trauma, as it were, resides at the root of the subject’s distinctive and more or less inimitable character—what I have in this book chosen to call “the singularity of being.”

Repetition as Destiny To fully understand this connection between trauma and singularity, it is useful to start with the repetition compulsion as an articulation of unconscious desire. One might say that the repetition compulsion functions like a train that has been placed on a highly specific set of rails that control its trajectory. This train always aims at its designated destination, even if it has already reached it a thousand times or (and this may be even more exasperating) even if this destination keeps receding indefinitely. To turn the train around would be impossible and to derail it would be immensely destructive. Consequently, the best the train can do is to maintain its steady course and to obediently stop at a number of pre-

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The Singularity of Being 15

selected stations along the way. These stations, which house the subject’s most symptomatic fixations, are likely to carry names such as Anxiety, Depression, Disenchantment, Weariness, Sorrow, Bitterness, and Misery. If the train consistently stops at them, it is because something in their vicinity remains unresolved or unprocessed. Although I am here taking liberties with Lacan’s idea that desire situates each of us “in a given track,”1 my analogy speaks to the power of the repetition compulsion to transport us, over and again, to the same destination, even when we are doing our very best to arrive at a different one: We may be desperately trying to get to New York but keep arriving in Boston instead. The repetition compulsion translates desire into a mechanical, fully automatic force that eludes our efforts to redirect it. It responds neither to rational argumentation nor to emotional persuasion, sweet-talking, coaxing, or blackmail. It holds its course through the various changes we undergo in our lives, persisting beneath the densities of our loves, losses, families, friendships, careers, triumphs, hardships, and fleeting moments of delight.When we least expect it—when we believe that we have finally outrun it—it catches up with us, emerging from a dark tunnel or from behind a sharp curve. At such moments, we may feel blindsided and betrayed by our own constitution, but there is not a lot we can do to foil the train’s repetitive itinerary. We can learn to cope with the repetition. And we may even be able to work through some of its causes. But we usually cannot entirely erase it or even in any significant measure diminish its dogged perseverance. This is, arguably, one of the main things that sets human beings apart from the rest of the animal world: We tend to compulsively return to the same nexus of (largely unfulfillable) desires, the same messy tangle of existential aporias. This can be annoying, to say the least. But there is also a “functional” side to it, for it is precisely this compulsion that introduces a modicum of consistency to our lives—that, over time, allows us to attain a sense of continuity. In a way, the repetition compulsion (as a way of binding desire) is one of the basic supports of our being, which is why we cling to it, why, when all is said and done, we tend to “love” our ˇ izˇek). symptoms more than we love ourselves (to paraphrase Z As much as the repetition compulsion disturbs the smooth unfolding of our lives, its obliteration might have even more catastrophic consequences in the sense that we would be left without our customary moorings; we would, as it were, lose the comfort of knowing our destination (or destiny). No matter how disorienting the “life-orientation”

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The Call of the Immortal

that the repetition compulsion offers us, having this orientation is more reassuring than not having it, for the latter would mean that we would need to actively rethink our entire existential approach. We would no longer be able to count on the inevitability, or at least the high probability, of certain outcomes, but would, rather, need to face the abyss of utter unpredictability. This is why many of us keep choosing the “substance” of our symptoms over the “nothingness” of their absence. If the phenomenological (say, Heideggerian) subject alleviates the anxiety of nothingness by espousing the (falsely reassuring) complacency of the social collectivity, the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) subject does the same by embracing the (equally false) security of its symptoms. Vital, in this context, is Lacan’s claim that the repetition compulsion gives structure to the subject’s jouissance so that the latter becomes more manageable. It translates the amorphous (or polymorphously perverse) pressure of jouissance into the relatively stable “organization” of desire, thereby transforming the uncontrollable urgency of the drives to the more mediated discomfort of symptomatic fixations. Without this organizational consistency of desire, we would be compelled to ride the wave of bodily jouissance in ways that would keep us forever caught at the junction of excessive pleasure and excessive pain. As aggravating as it can be to arrive in uptight Boston when we want to explore the bohemian possibilities of Greenwich Village, the sheer reliability of the repetition compulsion is an immensely effective defense against the explosive intensity of jouissance. Paradoxically enough, even when our desire takes us in pathological directions, it protects us by barring our access to the kind of unmediated enjoyment that we would experience as unbearable. On this view, while the “destiny” that the repetition compulsion offers us is a trap, it is at the same time also a protective shield without which our lives would be much more difficult to handle.

Desire, Drive, Jouissance But if this is the case, we must recognize that desire and the drive are inexorably linked, that underneath desire courses the unstoppable force of the drive. In other words, if desire rescues us from the excesses of jouissance, the reverse must also be the case: Desire—and the repetition compulsion that expresses this desire—must, by necessity, carry a trace of the drive, of the very bodily jouissance, that it is designed to contain.

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The Singularity of Being 17

The easiest way to grasp this is to consider one of Lacan’s best-known discussions of the relationship between desire and the drive: Take the experience of the beautiful butcher’s wife. She loves caviar, but she doesn’t want any. That’s why she desires it.You see, the object of desire is the cause of the desire, and this object that is the cause of desire is the object of the drive—that is to say, the object around which the drive turns. . . . It is not that desire clings to the object of the drive—desire moves around it, in so far as it is agitated in the drive. But all desire is not necessarily agitated in the drive. There are empty desires or mad desires that are based on nothing more than the fact that the thing in question has been forbidden to you. By virtue of the very fact that it has been forbidden to you, you cannot do otherwise, for a time, than think about it. That, too, is desire. But whenever you are dealing with a good object, we designate it . . . as an object of love. (1964, 243)

The object of desire is also the object of the drive. Or, if we follow the dizzying twists of Lacan’s rhetoric, if the object of desire is an object around which the drive turns, desire also “moves around” the object of the drive. This is because both desire and the drive ultimately aim at the same object, namely das Ding, or the Thing, as a site of primordial deprivation.2 The Thing, as Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, functions as a melancholy object of loss that can never be recovered for the simple reason that it was never (in reality) lost in the first place.Yet its fantasized loss engenders a whole host of important psychic effects, bringing into existence the Lacanian subject of lack—a subject who is forever plagued by the sense of having been robbed of something unfathomably precious. To be specific, it is because the subject cannot have the Thing that it feels compelled to reach for its echo through the various objects of desire, the objets a, that it encounters in the world; it is because the subject cannot have the sublime object that it is driven to look for its luster in more mundane substitutes.3 What is significant in the present context—what the quotation about the butcher’s wife highlights—is that there is a distinction between “empty” or “mad” desires that are fanned by the sheer fact that the objet a in question is somehow unavailable and other (“truer”?) desires that aim directly at the sublime object and that are consequently “agitated in the drive.” Desire, so to speak, gains its “fullness” (robustness, vitality) from its proximity to the drive. “Empty” desires do not relate to the

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Thing or only relate to it from such a distance that their objects cannot even begin to reincarnate the original (non)object. In contrast, desires that remain faithful to the Thing—and that therefore automatically intertwine with the drive’s trajectory—attach themselves to objects that in one way or another evoke the Thing. Even though desire is always obligated to approach the Thing obliquely, through the tangible objects it stumbles upon in the world, some of these objects come closer than others to capturing the unique aura of the Thing. Those closest to this aura are also the ones closest to the drive (and thus capable of animating not only desire but also the drive). The drive and desire therefore want to the same Thing. But the drive is closer to the Thing than desire can ever be because the drive conveys the pulse of the bodily real, whereas desire, while obviously still connected to the body, is a function of the signifier and, as such, twice removed from the Thing. This should not be taken to mean that the drive can be equated with some sort of an “inborn” instinct for, far from expressing the “natural” rhythm of the body, its relentlessness—not to mention its deadly aspect—wars against the most basic needs of the body, forcing the body into a state of overagitation and excess stimulation even when it seeks rest and equilibrium. As Lacan explains, “The constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is . . . that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force” (1964, 165).This unremitting, even merciless, force of the drive ensures that drive and instinct “have nothing in common” (49). As a result, the (always rather nebulous) distinction between the drive and desire is not one of nature versus culture, but merely of relative nearness to the Thing. This becomes even more evident when we discern that the drive, like desire, is always organized in relation to the symbolic Other. Although the drive’s unfaltering pressure acts as an obstacle to the subject’s seamless symbolic actualization, making it impossible for the subject to completely realize its social calling, it is always already quasi-social in the sense that it has been molded in response to the signifiers of the Other. After all, the way in which the signifier cuts into, perforates, dissects, or carves up the “substance” of the body is always highly specific, having to do with the particulars of each subject’s relationship to the social and intersubjective world that surrounds it; each subject’s drive energies are channeled into a latticework of conduits that reflects the coordinates of

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The Singularity of Being 19

its cultural setting.4 This implies that even the most entrenched kernel of the subject’s being (the drives that define the trajectory of its jouissance) is partially “disciplined,” linked to the historically specific desire of the Other, and therefore entirely incongruous with any notion of intrinsic humanness. Despite our culture’s obsessive efforts to naturalize the drive by, for instance, hypothesizing (usually maddeningly stereotypical and reductive) distinctions between male and female sexuality, the drive is always somewhat sociohistorical. This, in turn, suggests that a different sociohistorical context would provide an opening for different configurations of the drive.

The Crisis of Consciousness If the drive already exhibits a degree of consistency, desire does so much more explicitly: We are aware that there is a peculiar persistence to our desires—that there is an (il)logic of sorts to what we, over time, find desirable. This is the case because desire arises when the drive encounters social prohibition (the loss of the Thing): The relative fixity of desire results from a faithful and fate-defining meeting of drive and prohibition.5 The Other blocks our direct access to jouissance so that it can only be approached in the roundabout way I alluded to above, through (more or less) socially recognizable objects of desire. This is why no object can ever grant complete satisfaction, why no object can entirely fulfill the directives of desire. The object is, quite simply, never the “real” thing, the sublime Thing of unmediated jouissance. At the same time, as I have begun to suggest, this unattainability of unadulterated jouissance is what makes social life possible, for as enthralling as the elusive Thing may be, it is—like the Kantian sublime to which it bears a close conceptual relationship—also terrifying, overwhelming, and potentially devouring. The task of desire, then, is to keep us at a reassuring distance from the Thing while at the same time allowing us to fantasize about attaining it. Fantasy, through desire, usurps the place of jouissance. This is why Lacan claims that “desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance” (1966, 699).6 To the degree that jouissance overagitates us, preventing us from living within (the relatively harmonious) purview of the pleasure principle, we are forever attempting to purge ourselves of it even as we tirelessly aim for it. Desire, and the social order that brings desire into being, is a means of arbitrating this process.The Other is therefore not merely what

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cheats us of jouissance and imposes a distressing self-division, but also a way to alleviate our constitutive helplessness in relation to the excess energies of the real. Indeed, insofar as the Other generates a fantasy of jouissance as a lost state that we might one day recuperate, it protects us from the disillusioning realization that jouissance is antithetical to subjectivity not so much because we have been unfairly deprived of it, but because we are inherently incapable of managing it. This does not mean that we should meekly submit to the normative dictates of the Other without any attempt to resist or reconfigure their hegemonic dimensions. But it does clarify what Lacan means when he states that the drive is a “fundamental ontological notion” connected to “a crisis of consciousness” (1960, 127). If Freud’s analysis of the unconscious already shook the foundations of the rational subject of (Cartesian) consciousness, the realization that we are constitutionally incapable of coping with the force of our drives adds yet another layer of deep ontological vulnerability to human existence. Lacan’s increasing emphasis on the real towards the end of his career was designed to foreground this much more than has been recognized by those who have focused exclusively on his early theories of language and the unconscious. It is true that, in the Lacanian universe, the sacrifice of jouissance to the signifier is what causes the subject’s lack-in-being—what brings into existence the (barred) subject as a site of pure negativity. Nevertheless, what is ultimately the bigger calamity is that the dissection or dismemberment of the real by the signifier can never be fully accomplished. The remaining traces, scraps, residues, or leftovers of jouissance continue to destabilize the subject, threatening to dismantle it from within even as they simultaneously animate and support its embodied existence. This, I would concede, is an existential “crisis” of potentially formidable proportions. If desire results from the foundational lack caused by the signifier, the drives persist as a surplus of enjoyment that continues to bubble up into the symbolic, allowing remnants of the real to seep into the domain of ˇ izˇek signification and sociality in a highly explosive manner. As both Z and Alenka Zupancˇicˇ have pointed out, the trouble with jouissance is less that we cannot attain it than that we cannot free ourselves of its excess.7 We are, to borrow from Jonathan Lear, condemned to cope with a “too muchness” of energy that haunts our being, perpetually bringing us to the brink of a breakdown. Such breakdowns, Lear specifies, are characterized by a “breaking-through of quantity without quality”

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(2000a, 109), by a defeat or eclipse of meaning by the inexorable (and meaningless) force of the drives. This uncontrollable breaking-through of surplus energy proves that life without inner agitation is inherently forbidden to human beings. Such agitation does not aim at anything in particular, but merely demonstrates the psyche’s intrinsic inability to keep things stable and unchanging. Despite the protection offered by social structures and the fixations of desire, we have no choice but to live in a constant dread of imminent disequilibrium. This is why the drive is an important “ontological notion,” changing our conception of the parameters of human life.

The “Undeadness” of the Drives Undoubtedly our lives would be less complicated if we could figure out how to manage the excess jouissance of the drives. Yet my analysis thus far also suggests that our singularity is inextricably aligned with this excess—that our constitutive instability is merely the flipside of the fact that we are never completely absorbed by symbolic and imaginary processes of subjectivization. This is why it would be a mistake to confuse singularity with our usual understanding of personality. Even though there are conceptual linkages between the model of singularity I am developing and our intuitive sense of what it means to possess a distinctive individuality, disposition, or temperament, Lacanian singularity cannot be equated with what we typically refer to as a given individual’s “personality.” If we choose to envision singularity as a function of the real, we must admit that it is more likely to transmit sudden flashes of eccentricity and idiosyncrasy than to support the performative play of masks that comprises personality in its conventional sense. To the extent that singularity communicates something about the indelible imprint of the real—that it articulates the “fragmented and panic-stricken” agitation of the drive (Lacan 1960, 301)—it by necessity relates to what is aberrant and socially anomalous about the subject. Singularity thus relates to those parts of the drive that manage to ooze through the sieve of the various systems of organization that are designed to stabilize human life. These parts are, as it were, the “inhuman” (not fully socialized) element that chafes against the “reasonable” façade of subjectivity and personality, lending the subject’s character an uncanny “monstrousness” beyond its symbolic and imaginary mandates. They in fact align it with the disquieting pulsation of the death drive, for

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not only is the drive always ultimately the death drive,8 but the fixations of desire (the repetition compulsions) that come to house components of the drive are an indication of the psyche’s self-destructive attempt to bind life in the deadly grip of symptoms. The fact that desire can never cover the entire territory of jouissance, that it can never completely substitute itself for the drive, does not mean that it fails to participate in the drive’s deadly march towards self-annihilation. The compulsion to repeat is simply one aspect of this march—one that is distinguished from the death-driven thrust of jouissance only by its greater degree of orderliness. Singularity, in the Lacanian sense, is therefore not a particularly consoling or reassuring concept. Rather, it reproduces the ambivalent status of jouissance as what at once animates the subject’s being and carries the destructive momentum of the death drive; in the same way that jouissance breathes life into the subject even as it contorts and torments its being, singularity resides within the shadowy interstices of the enigmatic region that (barely and inconsistently) separates life-giving vitality from the deadliness of the drives. Or, to express the matter in a slightly different way, the deadly aspect of jouissance is merely the inverse of a ˇ izˇek and paradoxical kind of immortality or incapacity to die—what Z Santner characterize as a grotesque “undeadness” that infuses the subject with an uncontrollable vitality. Lacan’s portrayal of the lamella as a libidinal force that “survives any division”—and that stands for “immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life” (1964, 197–98)—is perhaps the clearest articulation of this undeadness. This description allows us to appreciate the full weight of Santner’s contention that “what accounts for the singularity of a human existence, what ultimately makes a human life irreplaceable, is not this or that positive attribute . . . but rather the utter alterity of death which installs in life a fundamental nonrelationality, a dense core of existential loneliness that in some sense is who we are” (2001, 72). Santner is here not talking about existential loneliness in the phenomenological sense. The alterity of death he is referring to is not meant to communicate the subject’s anxiety about its status as a Heideggerian “being-towards-death,” but rather to capture the tight association between singularity and undeadness, between what is irreplaceable about us and what is absolutely nonrelational (incapable of sociality and intersubjectivity). Ironically, our opening to singularity is also what most distances us from any comfort-

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able notion of a fully intelligible existence. Who we are, on the level of the real of our being, is, precisely, a “dense core of existential loneliness” that resists all forms of social assimilation, linking us, instead, to the nonrelational throb of jouissance.9

The Stain of Infinity Our constitutive “undeadness” thus prevents the seamlessness of social assimilation, making it impossible for us to ever entirely “fit in.” Yet this undeadness is also what, as Santner puts it, makes each of us “something more than just a piece of the world” (2005, 95).To the extent that it resists social integration, it infuses our being with a paradoxical kind of “infinity” that keeps us from ever fully coinciding with the world. Zupancˇicˇ, discussing Lacanian ethics, expresses the matter as follows: The answer to the religious promise of immortality is not the pathos of the finite; the basis of ethics cannot be an imperative which commands us to endorse our finitude and renounce all “higher,” “impossible” aspirations. . . . The end of the promise of a life after death (i.e. of an infinite outside this world) does not imply that we are henceforth “enclosed,” confined within a finite world. It implies, on the contrary, that the infinite ceaselessly “parasitizes” the finite. The absence of the beyond, the lack of any exception to the finite, “infinitizes” the finite. . . . The problem of the infinite is not how to attain it but, rather, how to get rid of its stain, a stain that ceaselessly pursues us. The Lacanian name for this parasitism is enjoyment [jouissance]. (2000, 249)

If we are used to thinking about the infinite as an otherworldly “beyond” that is impossible to attain—as an iridescent ideal that forever retreats under the pressure of our attempts to reach it—jouissance connects us to an infinity that we cannot either escape or exorcize.This “stain” of jouissance parasitizes us from within, infinitizing the finite, so that instead of us pursuing the infinite, the infinite pursues us, introducing a lamellalike undeadness to our being. This is why Zupancˇicˇ believes that our efforts to respond to the religious promise of immortality by a “pathos of the finite”—by a simple renunciation of all “higher” or “transcendent” aspirations—are disingenuous:They refute the fact that we are by definition creatures riven by infinitude. Likewise, our efforts to ground ethics on the finite overlook the “parasitism” of jouissance that we can never fully overcome.

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But how exactly does the “stain” of jouissance translate to the infinite? Surely this is not merely a matter of a persistent undeadness that does not let us rest. If we stay on this level, the idea of infinitude remains metaphoric at best, indicating merely that within our finite being there are energies that gesture towards the infinite. It may, then, help to reiterate the matter as follows: It is only insofar as jouissance precludes selfclosure that we long for the infinite; the fact that jouissance parasitizes our symbolic constitution, that it generates a rift (or a series of rifts) within our social intelligibility, arouses “immortal” yearnings. In other words, it is our gnawing sense of being somehow less than fully selfrealized, of lacking “resolution,” as it were, that makes us reach for the transcendent. Indeed, one could say that it is when the lack caused by the signifier meets the (earlier, more originary) lack of the real that the spark of infinity gets ignited.10 Or, to spin the issue in yet another way: It is the (fantasized) loss of the Thing that initiates our quest for something “other” than our daily lives. It is because we feel that we have lost something infinite (and infinitely valuable) that we know how to long for its resurrection or reincarnation—that we possess the capacity, however tentatively, to covet what surpasses our customary life-world. Note that there is a distinction, here, between what is “outside” the world and what is “other” than it. Zupancˇicˇ stresses that the fact that we cannot reach “outside” the world in the religious sense does not mean that we are fully “within” it—that we have no access to something “other” than the normative structures of the world. That is, Zupancˇicˇ is not striving to revive a theological conception of infinitude, but merely to explain why being “stuck” in the world does not (and should not) prevent us from having “higher” (or even “impossible”) aspirations. Such aspirations arise the moment we acknowledge that the reality principle (and the pleasure principle that sustains it) does not account for the entirety of human experience—that we are capable of exceeding the parameters of our ordinary “reality.” In the same way that the symbolic and the imaginary are always haunted by the real, there is a “beyond” of the reality/pleasure principle; there is a “beyond” of the habitual composition of our lives. In chapter 7, I spell out the implications of this in relation to sublimation and human innovative capacity.11 Here it suffices once again to refer to sublimation’s close cousin: the sublime. After all, although the “beyond” of the reality/pleasure principle—as Freud already established—is the province of the death drive, it is also the province

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of the sublime (the luster of the Thing). Conversely, the sublime, in the Kantian sense at least, is a notion that, by definition, aligns the transcendent with the specter of death, for the mathematical and dynamical sublime are marked by a potentially death-dealing immensity and power.12

Intimations of Immortality In our “postmodern” times, it can be difficult to talk about the sublime. But it can be equally hard to completely smother our yearning for it, even if we have no qualms, as I do not, about embracing a secular, post-theological outlook. My discussion this far explains why: As beings whose symbolic and imaginary “completeness” is always undercut by the disruptive energies of the real, we are constitutionally compelled to search for it. What is more, if many of us are so reluctant to renounce it, it is because we have attained it before—because, despite our deep skepticism about all things “transcendent,” we know full well that the sublime, while certainly difficult to come by, is by no means unachievable; we know that it is possible occasionally (if always fleetingly) to reach jouissance. Religion, and particularly mysticism, has historically offered a powerful way to talk about what it means to hit (or at least brush against) jouissance, which is one reason Lacan repeatedly returns to it. Santner—as we will see more clearly below in the context of his discussion of the “miracle”—draws on this tradition in exceptionally compelling ways. But it is important to recognize that religion by no means exhausts the terrain of the transcendent.Within the framework of this book, I use the concept quite expansively, to indicate the possibility of the kinds of experiences that transport us beyond our everyday mode of being—experiences that, in broadly existential terms, manage to communicate intimations of infinity, eternity, and even immortality. By “immortality,” I obviously do not mean that we will not die. Rather, as Zupancˇicˇ does with the notion of infinitude, I am referring to the sense that there is something “within” human experience that connects us to what is “other” than this experience—that allows us to pierce the sociosymbolic frame that modulates our passions and to (always momentarily) gain a glimpse of something more “timeless.” That the real and its “undeadness” have, in recent post-Lacanian theory, become associated with immortality has to do with the idea that the real, like the unconscious, does not register time, with the result that “eter-

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nity” or “infinity” are almost automatically embedded within its topography. From this perspective, transcendent moments are those when the real erupts within the symbolic, exposing the fantasmatic underpinnings of the latter’s claim to consistency, and revealing (in an epiphanic manner) that there is something “beyond” social normativity. In a way, such moments stage a clash of two temporalities: the timeliness of ordinary experience and the timelessness (or untimeliness) of the extraordinary. Inasmuch as we allow the ordinary to defeat the extraordinary, we reinforce our mortality. But when the reverse is the case, we activate the immortal (the transcendent). The fact that we can only do so transiently in no way diminishes the value of transcendent episodes, for they are what, arguably, ensures that we are not completely overtaken by the hegemonic structures of the social establishment; they open a sorely needed space for the singularity of being within an otherwise homogenizing symbolic landscape. According to this account, the tear in the fabric of the symbolic caused by the real is the hole through which the sublime enters the domain of everyday life in ways that engender intimations of immortality. Leaving aside the baffling testimonials of mystics, sexual ecstasy and heightened states of creativity are the most obvious examples of such experiences. They strip away the symbolic and imaginary layers that usually keep our rebellious singularity in check. By suspending, blurring, or dissolving the coordinates of our socially intelligible identity, they allow us to feel in temporary possession of a depth, intensity, fullness, and luminosity of being that otherwise eludes us. This is why we often experience them as moments of self-surrender or selflessness that make us feel that we have been seized, taken over, or transported “beyond” ourselves by a force that we cannot master. Absorbing moments of creativity, for instance, are characterized by a hyperfocused or elated state that temporarily makes us lose touch with the historical quality of human experience. No longer creatures situated on a personal continuum that extends from a past recognized as “ours” towards a hypothesized future—no longer creatures of either memory or hope—we fall into and embrace the immediacy of the present. Entirely immersed in the task at hand, we feel that we have been ushered to a place beyond time and self-reflexivity. The present takes up all of our experience, yet we do not feel in any way deprived or delimited, but are rather filled by an exhilarated sense of liberation and self-expansion; we feel vibrantly alive, connected to the deepest recesses of our being.

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Transcendence as a Worldly Phenomenon Posthumanist theory routinely insists that the human subject can never be fully present to itself—that self-alienation or self-noncoincidence is an inherent component of subjectivity. However, a Lacanian understanding of what it means to reach the real offers us a posthumanist way of conceiving how it might be possible for us to experience an immediacy of being and to achieve an (always transitory) taste of self-presence. This is not a matter of attaining some sort of an essential core of being. Quite the contrary, the transcendent encounters I have been depicting extend the posthumanist critique of the essential self by revealing that the subject can only approach its singularity when it finds itself on the brink of utter disintegration. In other words, they put the consistency of the self in question even more radically than do deconstructive theories of signification, for they transport us to nonlinguistic realms that liquefy the coherence of subjectivity even more effectively than the polyvalence and slipperiness of language. In fact, it is exactly because they neutralize our usual processes of symbolization that they feel so viscerally “real” to us: Our powers of representation falter in the face of such episodes, so that we, quite simply, do not have the words to describe them.The best works of art, literature, and other cultural production may manage to convey something of their enchantment. Yet, ultimately, transcendent encounters repel or defeat the power of language as a social glue. They cannot ever be entirely incorporated into our symbolic universe. But this does not mean that they do not happen. Or that they lack reality.They may in fact be the most “real” thing we ever experience. If language is what holds the subject together, then transcendent episodes that manage to puncture the canvas of our sociolinguistic reality by definition undermine any lingering faith that we might have in the capacity of the symbolic to master the real.13 One might even say that it is precisely because the real defies the intelligibility of the symbolic that it empowers us to feel immediately intelligible to ourselves. Such immediacy of self-experience demands that we allow ourselves to be overtaken by what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls “the flesh of the world” to such an extent that the usual distinction between self and world becomes permeable.The integrity of both self and world is destabilized, yet this destabilization is also what enables us to experience the acuteness of both. This is why transcendence is no longer a matter of escaping the world, but rather of finding a way to enter more completely into its

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folds. Instead of chasing an illusory promise of redemption or salvation, we become open to moments of sublimity that punctuate our daily existence; we, in short, step more fully into the cadence of our lives. On this view, the more we remain enthralled by the fantasy of an otherworldly sanctuary, the less capable we are of transcendence; our very dreams of transcendence keep us from accessing it. Or, in more strictly philosophical terms, our quest for the noumenal at the expense of the phenomenal leaves the world, as Kaja Silverman aptly states, “barren and poor” (2000, 9).14 Conceptualized in this manner, transcendence becomes a worldly, rather than an otherworldly, occurrence, allowing us to feel inspired while at the same time anchoring us in the tangible materiality of our lives. Another way to explain the matter is to say that sublime experiences enable us to draw close to the world without being mundane or utilitarian. The deep irony of mundane and utilitarian practices is that even though they take place in the world, they simultaneously distance us from the very world that they seemingly sustain. As Heidegger already suggested, they distract us from the worldness of the world because they are designed to help us to “survive” the world rather than to be passionately immersed in it. From this point of view, being in touch with the rhythm of the world may sometimes be the exact opposite of dutifully navigating its humdrum concerns; it is only when we manage to disregard our preoccupation with the minor annoyances of life that we become capable of a more evocative connection to the world—that we become capable of sublime encounters within the texture of everyday experience. During such encounters, we do not exit the world, but rather cut through the sociosymbolic strata of meaning that normally arbitrate our relationship to it. We touch the living tissue of the world rather than merely perceiving its socially mediated significations. This is why the world, at such moments, appears so intensely, almost painfully, present.

When Miracles Happen Understood in this way, transcendent experiences may be a means of ensuring the liveliness of our spirit.They signify a revolt of sorts, a determination to maintain enclaves of singularity that are not fully co-opted by the social order. Because they bring the real into the symbolic in an emphatic manner, they guarantee that our normative “abduction” is

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never entirely accomplished. This should not be taken to mean that all social investitures are harmful or that we cannot attain agency within the symbolic, for I believe that there is a great deal that is enabling about our various symbolic investments.15 Yet there are undeniably aspects of these investments that drain us of inner vitality, over time suppressing our capacity for “creative living” (to use Winnicott’s phrase) and reconciling us to the conventionality of the cultural “order of things” (to use Foucault’s). And there are also situations where our investments wound us. This is most blatant in the context of inequalitarian settings that are oppressive or otherwise debilitating. But it can also manifest itself in more “benign” ways, via the innumerable edicts that (explicitly or implicitly) tell us who we are supposed to be, how we are meant to behave, which goals it is legitimate to pursue, and what is expected of us. Such edicts constrict our psychosocial field by foregrounding some existential options at the cost of others. Or, alternatively, they make so many (usually commercially generated) “options” available to us that we are paralyzed by the sheer volume of our “choices.” Against this backdrop, transcendent experiences that make us feel “real”—that summon us to what is “immortal” within our being—uphold a valuable resource for rebelliousness. Post-Lacanian theory has devised (at least) three different ways of ˇ izˇek’s exploration of the thinking about this rebelliousness. The first is Z act of subjective destitution as a leap into the deadly jouissance of the real regardless of consequences.16 This does not mean that the act canˇ izˇek admits, its consequences can be not have consequences—for, as Z considerable—but merely that it should be committed without any consideration for its potential outcome. The second approach is Alain Badiou’s more life-affirming conceptualization of the truth-event as an innovative rupture in the façade of the social establishment.17 I come back ˇ izˇek and Badiou in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. Here I want to to Z briefly consider the third option, namely Santner’s assertion that subjective singularity surfaces at those “miraculous” moments when the subject manages to push aside the edifice of its sociosymbolic investments so as to release the drive energies that have become congealed in such investments. This discharge of trapped energies grants the subject access to new sources of life—what Santner poetically calls the “blessings” of “more life” (2001, 142). If symbolic investitures channel the subject’s energies into confining configurations, causing a debilitating stiffness of being, the release of these energies makes it possible to intervene in that

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stiffness, “to convert a rigidity at the very core of one’s being . . . into a resource of transformation” (65).That is, the subject’s symptomatic rigidity can, through a miracle, be transmuted into more free-flowing energy. Besides drawing on Franz Rosenzweig’s theology, Santner takes his ˇ izˇek’s bold declaration that “the true source of Evil is not a cue from Z finite mortal man who acts like God, but a man who denies that divine miracles occur and reduces himself to just another finite mortal being” (2000, 376). Interestingly, Lacan’s own statement about miracles is much less sanguine, for he makes it in the context of complaining about the fact that analysands are invariably looking for “a place where miracles happen, a promise, a mirage of original genius or an opening up of freedom” (1960, 303). This, Lacan asserts, is not something that analysis can offer. Santner, in contrast, wishes to hold onto the possibility of such an “opening up of freedom.” In more specific terms, he depicts the miracle as an interpellation (a calling) that operates beyond the subject’s “normal” sociosymbolic interpellations and that consequently possesses the power to suspend the latter. In other words, he contrasts ideological interpellation in the Alhusserian sense with the experience of being summoned by a “miracle,” and asserts that the miracle empowers the subject to abandon social investments that seduce it into complacent subject positions (2005, 131).18 This is because the interpellation enacted by a miracle is much more convincing and resounding, much more gripping and mesmerizing, than the force of the subject’s habitual social interpellations. As a result, it breaks the hypnotic hold of hegemonic sociality, rescuing the subject from its servitude to debilitating, wounding, or abjecting symbolic configurations, and inviting it to reimagine the possibilities of its life.19 Because of his theological orientation, Santner singles out divine revelation as such an alternative interpellation—a mysterious calling that cannot be resisted. But I think that we can envision the matter more broadly, as having to do with the kinds of transcendent (vitalizing and transformative) encounters I have depicted. As a matter of fact, what I find most resonant about Santner’s analysis is his description of Rosenzweig’s decision to abandon a promising academic career because he felt possessed by a “dark drive” that made him question the more soulstifling, spirit-numbing, and institutionally fossilized aspects of intellectual pursuit.There is no doubt that Rosenzweig’s crisis (what he portrays as a collapse followed by a recovery) was connected to his rediscovery of

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Judaism, but it also had strongly existential connotations, as is evident in the following statement: Not every question seems to me worth asking. Scientific curiosity and omnivorous aesthetic appetite mean equally little to me today, though I was once under the spell of both, particularly the latter. Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men [Menchen] rather than by scholars. There is a man in each scholar, a man who inquires and stands in need of answers. I am anxious to answer the scholar qua man but not the representative of a certain discipline, that insatiable, ever inquisitive phantom which like a vampire drains him whom it possesses of his humanity. I hate that phantom as I do all phantoms. Its questions are meaningless to me. (quoted in Santner 2001, 17–18)

Rosenzweig is here looking for the “man” beneath the “scholar” in the same way that I have been looking for the “singular” beneath the normative composition of subjectivity. He is tired—a tiredness with which I identify on a profound level—with the ways in which the demands of disciplinary rigidity can drain the scholar of his or her humanity so that scholarship becomes a matter of asking meaningless questions, and of offering meaningless answers, within a world populated by bloodthirsty phantoms who are engaged in the same meaningless endeavor. By this I obviously do not mean that all scholars are soulless vampires, but merely that disciplinary requirements can sometimes divest us of intellectual capaciousness, open-mindedness, and generosity to the extent that we find it difficult to appreciate anything that falls outside of our own tightly defended way of doing things. We are, in short, prey to a professional inertia that can, to greater or lesser degrees, overtake the best of us at various moments. This inertia is what the summons of a miracle, the interpellation beyond ideological interpellation, that Santner portrays liberates us from. And it is also what “transcendence,” in the nontheological sense that I understand it, (temporarily) nullifies, which is why the transcendent, via the Lacanian real, is where I have gone looking for the singular.

The Call of Character Rosenzweig’s account of the scholar as a vampire calls attention to a noteworthy paradox (one that Santner also comments on): The scholar

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as vampire is animated by his or her own brand of disturbing undeadness. If I have presented the undeadness of the real as a rebellious force that connects us to an “immortality” beyond hegemonic sociality, the scholar as vampire could be said to uphold precisely such sociality: He or she personifies the kind of inflexibility of being that results from an excessive allegiance to symbolic investitures that seek (sometimes quite brutally) to bind our energies. In other words, Rosenzweig’s vampire implies that our undeadness can, under some circumstances, lose its counterhegemonic quality and, instead, become tied to certain forms of normativity (such as the rules of scholarly pursuit). There is thus a fine line between the kind of undeadness that fuels our singularity and the kind that impedes its unfolding—that is, between liberating and symptomatic forms of surplus energy. Rosenzweig’s predicament highlights this dilemma because he, as Santner points out, finds himself wedged between both of these faces of the drive: the repetitive and insatiable (symptomatic) drive of his scholarly ambitions and the (liberating) “dark drive” that breaks the spell of these ambitions. Both of these aspects of the drive express a potentially pathological single-mindedness for, as we have seen, they represent two different forms of interpellation, two different forms of being compelled by something “bigger” than the self (e.g., a cause or a goal). Yet one produces a “vampire” (by definition a figure of “deadly” undeadness or inability to die) while the other—the “miraculous” kind— produces a man intensely connected to his (singular) humanity. Fortunately for Rosenzweig, the man in the end defeats the vampire. Interestingly, Rosenzweig depicts this triumph of man over his lethal adversary as a life-altering and completely nonnegotiable moment of being infiltrated by yet another mythical giant, namely the daimon: “Once man is possessed by his daimon, he has received ‘direction’ for his whole life. His will is now destined to run in this direction which directs him once and for all” (quoted in Santner 2005, 122). Rosenzweig hence suggests that the best way to conquer a vampire is to be surprised by a daimon that will give one’s will an unwavering “direction” (in exactly the same the way that Rosenzweig himself was surprised by the continued vitality of Judaism, deciding, after his crisis, to devote his life to promoting Jewish adult education in Frankfurt). I say “surprised” because Rosenzweig stresses that the daimon is not something we can cajole into our existence in a premeditated manner. Rather, like Santner’s “miracle” (or interpellation beyond ideological interpellation), it overtakes us without warning, leaving no room for deliberation, and propelling us onto ex-

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istential paths that we could not have prophesied.20 When this happens, we are nudged into an uncompromising faithfulness to our singularity. We are asked to own up to our wholly idiosyncratic particularity—what Santner depict as our “demonic self-sameness” (2005, 124). This gives us a way to envision what it might mean to become a character in a specifically psychoanalytic rather than an Aristotelian sense— what it, in other words, might mean to remain faithful to the insistent pulse of jouissance. If this pulse can get caught up in the meshes of hegemonic sociality, thereby producing something akin to Rosenzweig’s vampire, it can also, like the “miracle,” fissure the surface of this sociality so as to create something bravely resistant. Along related lines, if we return to the idea that the repetition compulsion is where trauma and singularity meet, then Rosenzweig’s daimon rescues singularity from trauma’s grip by offering jouissance an alternative site of cathexis. Indeed, the clinical practice of analysis could be said to be a space for the cultivation of character in precisely this sense. After all, insofar as analysis observes not only the social persona but also—to borrow from Zupancˇicˇ—those components of being that manifest themselves “in the distortions, in the torsions, of a body which is not made in the measure of the infinite (of the jouissance) that inhabits it” (2000, 258), it extends a summons to what is eccentric, out of place, and even embarrassing. And insofar as it pays attention not only to what is said, but also to what is left unsaid and, furthermore, notes the always distinctive tenor of the signifier (how things sound rather than merely what they “mean”), it strives to release the singularity of the subject’s being from its hiding place. Or, to translate the matter into Winnicottian vocabulary, it seeks to liberate the True Self from the impenetrable carapace of the False Self. Granted, this is not its only mission, but there are situations—cases where the vampire has overtaken the man (or woman) so successfully that little of “life” remains—in which it is a highly valuable one.

Carving a Space for Utopian Aspirations The Lacanian scaffold I introduced in the beginning of this book makes it possible to sum up the matter as follows: If the “subject” remains subjected to symbolic law, and if “personality” expresses the vanities of the imaginary, the “character” responds to a defiant directive—one that carries the force of an obligation—arising from the real.21 By this I do not wish to fetishize the real to the point of marginalizing the symbolic

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and the imaginary, for I recognize that this can lead to a problematic reification of the “beyond” at the expense of what is precious, even “miraculous,” about the social world. And it can also lead to an entirely mechanical valorization of counterhegemonic “subversion”—a valorization that does not in any way help us to enact real change in our lives or in the world at large. Indeed, our fantasies of “miraculous” transcendence may at times even divert our attention from the concrete problems of the world so that we come to passively accept its various privations and injustices; the more we place our hope in the idea that we have the ability to escape the normative symbolic by hitting the real, the less interested we might be at working to alter what is most limiting about this symbolic. Under certain conditions, we may even reconcile ourselves to drastically wounding circumstances, provided that we, in return, get to cherish the idea that what is truly meaningful resides beyond the confines of our everyday experience.22 It is to preempt this kind of thinking that I have attempted to dissociate transcendence from fantasies of otherworldly redemption. But, admittedly, positing that transcendence taps into something that is “other” than the world rather than “outside” it does not entirely remedy the problem. This is also why I am somewhat hesitant to endorse efforts by ˇ izˇek to advocate a drastic break with all symbolic investments. I am not Z at all sure that such a break is a goal worth pursuing, for how could a life devoid of shared symbolic ideals, values, and systems of representation possibly aid us?23 This is why I have sought to highlight the importance of the kinds of transcendent experiences that allow us to weave strands of singularity into our otherwise socially mediated existence. I have attempted to show that our loyalty to such strands can be a means of resisting psychic capture, of reminding ourselves that we are not eternally beholden to a predetermined existential trajectory. It can be a means of reminding ourselves that we have the right (and sometimes even an obligation) to entertain the kinds of aspirations that surpass what is at offer within our taken-for-granted world—a world that tends to be organized around the exigencies of production and consumption. Such aspirations are essential because they are the breeding ground of new ideals, values, and systems of representation; they are what keeps the symbolic order from solidifying into a stagnant entity with no room for innovation. The need to defend the continued possibility of such aspirations is why I would rather risk being accused of being a bit utopian than risk being accused of nihilism.

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In a certain way, we are constantly compelled to negotiate the inevitable tension between being a subject (in the sense of being subjected to social norms) and being a singular creature (in the sense of having a distinctive character and destiny). Most times, we are both at once, but arguably it is only as singular creatures that we are fully awake. I have tried to illustrate that the art of living a singular life demands our capacity to interact with the more disconcerting aspects of our being. Singularity, in other words, asks us to create space in our lives for what is irregular, erratic, unnerving, and sometimes even uncomfortable; it asks us to allow ourselves to be swayed by aspirations that may lead to thoroughly awkward displays of surplus ardor, passion, and (post-theological) devotion. This is one reason that the search for existential harmony that often motivates our worldly pursuits can be so fundamentally misguided. If what is most singular about us is linked to what is most unpredictable about our being, then the attempt to achieve composure can only rob us of distinctiveness. I am by no means saying that we should actively court instability, or that composure has no place or value in our lives. Much of the time, we could not survive without a measure of poise and selfpossession.Yet if we are to take the Lacanian account of singularity seriously, we must admit that what really counts in life is not our ability to evade chaos, but rather our capacity to meet it in such a manner as to not be irrevocably broken or demolished. We need to be able to transform the “immortal” energies of the real into a livable (and perhaps at times even a “sublime”) actuality—one that honors the singularity of our being without at the same time making it untenable for us to participate in collective systems of sociality and intersubjectivity.

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2.

The Rewriting of Destiny

I have stressed that the repetition compulsion organizes our desire in ways that shape the basic orientation of our existence. Another way to express the matter is to say that unconscious fantasy formations can become so fate-defining that we come to feel that the course of our lives is dictated by a (usually malignant or at the very least mischievous) force outside of ourselves.1 Our fantasies, as it were, generate a custom-made “vocation” that we feel compelled to honor even when it causes us to reenact painful personal or interpersonal scenarios. As we have seen, this “vocation” lends structure to our lives by holding us at a safe distance from jouissance. But it also curtails the scope of our existence by preventing us from approaching our everyday realities in a mindful, situation-specific fashion. This is why dissolving unconscious fantasies amounts to nothing less than the rewriting of our psychic destiny. It represents a rare existential nudge—an awakening to life that ruptures the coordinates of what we have hitherto understood to be life. If fantasies determine the ways in which we relate to the world, and therefore influence the ways in which the world responds to us, the disbanding of fantasies, a lot like the overthrow of the vampire by the daimon I talked about in the last chapter, allows us to begin to imagine alternative ways of going about our lives. Before we consider Lacan’s specific take on fantasies, though, it is important to acknowledge that other psychoanalytic thinkers have raised the possibility that fantasies enliven our existence by allowing us to cultivate a more imaginative attitude towards the world. After all, fantasies may at times be a necessary foundation for our ability to entertain the kinds of utopian aspirations I have aligned with our aptitude for bringing new ideals, values, and systems of representation into the world. Hans Loewald, for instance, postulates that the more we lose touch with fantasy 36

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and become dedicated to the mundane demands of “objective” reality, the less meaningful (let alone magnificent) our lives appear. According to Loewald, we can only thrive as creative individuals to the extent that we manage to preserve a fluid interplay “between the world of fantasy and the world of objectivity, between imagination and rationality” (2000, 363). From this viewpoint, fantasies enrich our lives by rendering us receptive to the more emblematic and enigmatic (as opposed to merely literal or rational) aspects of existence. However, even Loewald recognizes the difference between active (imaginative, life-giving) and passive (unconscious, automatic) fantasies, proposing, as Freud already did, that one of the main tasks of psychoanalysis is to enable us to replace our passive (unconscious) fantasies by an active capacity to reconfigure our fate (see Ruti 2009).What interests me in this chapter is how Lacan undertakes this task, for Lacan’s efforts to unveil the fantasmatic foundations of our lives were directed precisely at understanding how passive (unprocessed, mechanical) fantasies motivate our actions without our conscious consent or awareness. Although Lacan may have neglected the manner in which fantasies can add passion and imagination to our lives, his delineation of the ways in which they imprison us in draining configurations of psychic life reveals how they can easily deprive us of both.That is, Lacan sought to release us from the grip of fantasies because he realized, as Freud also did, that they drive us to confront the world in reductive ways, thereby damaging our ability to cope with the various challenges of our lives.

Fantasies as Fate Defining Fantasies are fate defining in the sense that they determine the “content” (or “substance”) of the repetition compulsion, giving our desire its inexorable direction, and making us single-mindedly preoccupied by, and doggedly faithful to, certain existential designs and preferences even when these undercut our well-being. To the degree that they endow us with a misleading sense of the role we occupy in the world, they delimit what we consider psychically and existentially possible, predetermining the range of our actions and holding us ensnared in perfunctory ways of living and relating. At their most narcissistic, they delude us into thinking that we are more agentic, coherent, invincible, and self-identical than we actually are.They, in short, promise the end of alienation by suturing our lack or self-division. For example, the fantasy of an “essential,” inviolable

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inner core obscures our ontological void, offering us the comforting illusion of a flawlessly integrated psychic life. This makes everyday life more manageable, not to mention more gratifying, but it also perpetuates the deceptive dynamic of misrecognition and mistaken identity that epitomizes the mirror stage; as an existential “strategy,” it can drastically, and often quite devastatingly, misguide us by causing us to pursue the kind of self-certainty and solidity of being that Lacan deems inherently impossible. Lacan could be criticized for not having adequately considered the possibility that a degree of narcissistic self-deception may well facilitate our ability to survive the world’s demands by offering us a stabilizing image of ourselves. However, Lacan is surely correct in suggesting that fantasies often freeze our lives into unyielding patterns that keep us from exploring what we could become beyond the predictable outlines of our fantasy lives. Among other things, they inhibit the emergence of our singularity, making it difficult for us to access the less regimented echelons of our being. If we are willing to pay this price, it is undoubtedly in part because we do not know the full extent of our loss. But it is also because we tend to value the security provided by fantasies over the rewards of claiming our singularity. This, incidentally, is also why, as ˇ izˇek has argued, we routinely resort to social fantasies that blind us to Z the possibility that the big Other might be plagued by exactly the same ˇ izˇek conkinds of internal fractures as we ourselves belabor under. As Z jectures, if fantasies veil the rifts of our subjectivity, they also fill the gaps of the Other, making invisible the antagonisms of the social world and offering us an overly reassuring vision of a knowable reality. In more specific terms, fantasies allow us to experience the world as consistent and meaningful because they conceal “the fact that the Other, the symbolic order, is structured around some traumatic impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolized—i.e. the real of jouissance: through ˇ izˇek 1989, 123). fantasy, jouissance is domesticated, ‘gentrified’” (Z To the degree that fantasies mask the terrifying abyss of the real— that they protect us from a jouissance that threatens to perforate the social framework of our existence—they serve as a key support of our symbolic reality. On this account, fantasies are designed not to allow us to flee an unsatisfactory world, but rather to render the world satisfactory by reassuring us that the Other—the social environment within which we struggle to find our bearings—possesses the correct, calming, or consoling answers to our most pressing questions. As such, fantasies

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constitute the most elementary gesture of ideology, positing the symbolic order as a reliable structure that ensures the stability of cultural life. In this way, our ideological interpellation into fantasmatic structures of sociality obscures the fact that the Other itself is beset by the kinds of divisions and animosities that make it internally unable to guarantee the very practices of power that it uses to authorize its existence.2

The Enigma of the Other’s Desire Our fantasmatic reliance on symbolic sites of authority thus serves as a distraction from the inherent volatility (the “traumatic impossibility”) at the heart of human life.Yet traces of this volatility inevitably persist, adding a layer of mystifying opacity to the demands of the Other. As Lacan explains: A lack is encountered by the subject in the Other, in the very intimation that the Other makes to him by his discourse. In the intervals of the discourse of the Other, there emerges in the experience of the child something that is radically mappable, namely, He is saying this to me, but what does he want? . . . It is there that what we call desire crawls, slips, escapes, like a ferret. The desire of the Other is apprehended by the subject in that which does not work, in the lacks of the discourse of the Other, and all of the child’s whys reveal not so much an avidity for the reason of things, as a testing of the adult, a Why are you telling me this? ever-resuscitated from its base, which is the enigma of the adult’s desire. (1964, 214)

The discourse of the Other impacts the subject—and particularly the child—on two different levels at once. On the overt level, the subject is being interpellated into symbolic law by being told what is expected of it. But on another, more surreptitious level, underneath the explicit meaning of the Other’s discourse, the subject is being addressed by the Other’s enigmatic desire.3 This desire scurries around in the intervals and failings of the Other’s discourse like a ferret, and the subject struggles in vain to interpret it. In this sense, the lack of the Other—the place where the energies of the real fissure the Other’s symbolic edifice and reveal a glimpse of its jouissance—constitutes a constant source of (over)excitation for the subject who seeks answers to its existential predicament.The Other’s inconsistency, in short, forces the subject into the frustrating and largely defensive posture of Why are you telling me this? What do you want from me?

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This account implies that we are “thrown” into the world not only in the Heideggerian sense of lacking secure existential foundations, but also in the sense of being surrounded by inscrutable messages that we are unable to decipher but to which we feel compelled to respond. Arguably, it is exactly our ambivalence in relation to signifiers that we feel vaguely accountable for, yet cannot accurately decode, that generates the bodily overagitation—the disturbing “undeadness” or “too muchness” of the drives—that I have depicted. On this view, our formative encounter with the confusing signifiers of the Other—or, more properly, with an array of social others—shapes the parameters of our personality on an almost frighteningly fundamental level. As Santner observes, “Our entire being is in some sense permeated by . . . unconscious efforts at making the enigmas by which we feel ourselves addressed . . . make sense (this is what it means to discharge an excitation). The very core of what we think of as our individuality, our characteristic way of assuming our place amid the socio-symbolic relations of exchange that constitute our shared world, can be understood as the pulse of these fantasmatic efforts” (2001, 97–98). In this manner, the Other’s enigmatic desire establishes the outlines of our individuality, giving rise to a life-orientation that determines how we experience ourselves, put down roots in the world, relate to others, and find (or fail to find) fulfillment. An alternative way to explain the issue is to say that the surplus vitality of our drives tends to seek relief by cathecting to sociofantasmatic zones of legitimacy that stabilize its otherwise unmanageable force. As I have noted, this process is never entirely successful: Because the real cannot ever be fully tamed or reined in, it generates a remainder that cannot be assimilated into our symbolic reality. At the same time, to the degree that the process does succeed, our jouissance, although being the part of our constitution that is generally thought to escape social hegemonies, can become strongly devoted to these very hegemonies; as much as jouissance resists our (always fantasmatic) cultural investitures, it can in turn become channeled into unconscious fantasies that increase our investment in normative forms of authority. This is exactly how the scholar becomes a vampire. In such scenarios, our repetition compulsion starts to transmit the insidious messages of hegemonic power. It becomes a mechanism through which this power infiltrates us not only on the level of psychic meaning, but also on the level of the drives—on the level of bodily jouissance. Needless to say, whenever dominant social fantasies get this deeply embedded, we lose yet another foothold of autonomy.

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Fantasies, then, can deepen our ideological captivation by binding our surplus vitality to normative structures of sociality. Santner hypothesizes that when this happens, we become enmeshed in a “drive destiny” that frames our always-peculiar manner of making our way through the world. That is, fantasies fasten our excess energies “into a schema, a distinctive ‘torsion’ or spin that colors/distorts the shape of our universe, how the world is disclosed to us,” and it is this torsion that “sustains our sense of the consistency of the world and our place in it” (2001, 39–40). It is, moreover, hardly a coincidence that the mixture of uncanny surplus animation and (symptomatic) constriction that characterizes this “destiny” is also an accurate description of the death drive: We feel compelled to pursue certain paths even when these prove to be intensely self-destructive. Our jouissance becomes caught up in the dead automatism of the repetition compulsion, our energies get trapped in painful symptoms, and our humanness is undermined by “inhumanness”—by an involuntary yet insistent reiteration of empty gestures that serves death rather than life. Perhaps the purest expression of this inhuman element is the meaningless facial tic, spasm, or cringe that Lacan hauntingly calls the “grimace of the real” (1990, 10). But, more commonly, this inhuman element expresses itself through the psychic fixity we experience when we are helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts.

Validity in Excess of Meaning I ended the last chapter by drawing a contrast between subjectivity and character, specifying that while the subject is subjected to the social world, the character expresses something about the individual’s singularity beyond (or beneath) the dictates of sociality. Yet I also stressed that the drives as a locus of singularity (and thus of character) are always proto-social—that singularity both does and does not escape the imprint of the Other. It should now be clear why this is the case, why it is that the social occupies our drives—and the repetition compulsion that, through the fixations of desire, communicates the insistence of these drives—even when they seem to elude its grip. The Other’s enigmatic desire incites us to strive to make sense of the various ways we are addressed, and the more ambiguous this desire, the more thoroughly it penetrates our bodily constitution, organizing our drives into destinydetermining configurations of enjoyment (or lack thereof). This is what ensures that our investments in normative networks of sociality are never

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merely juridical, but operate on deeply visceral levels that touch the most elementary layers of our being. Santner explains that one reason the mysterious signifiers of the Other’s desire function so effectively is that they express a “validity in excess of any meaning” (2001, 97): We know that the Other’s signifiers hold meaning, but to the extent that we cannot accurately locate this meaning, they start to exert power independently (“in excess”) of meaning. This is why our (always necessarily transferential) relationship to institutions of symbolic authority can be so very frustrating: We keep trying to convert the irrationalities and inconsistencies of such institutions into explicit demands with which we can reason and negotiate, only to be caught up in the fact that they tend to secrete pure “validity in excess of any meaning.” Santner compares our predicament to that of Kafka’s protagonists who are “forever trying to get clear about a message in which an enigmatic and unnerving surplus of validity beyond meaning persists as a chronic signifying stress ‘curving’ the space in which they move.” The inability of these protagonists to “translate the enigma, to stabilize its meaning in a legible call with which to identify, in a demand one can comply with or refuse, is what ultimately serves to draw them all the more powerfully into the ban of the Law, Castle, and so forth” (2005, 99). Sadly, there are circumstances where this ever-failing quest for unambiguous meaning can become synonymous with everyday life. Santner’s analysis suggests that our relationship to institutions of authority contains a largely unconscious component so that one of the principal ways such institutions exact obedience from us is by eliciting our automatic “citation”—our mindless and mind-numbing reiteration—of their regulations. As a matter of fact, insofar as such institutions are erected upon “magical” (unsubstantiated) foundations, they can only secure our submission by inducing us to engage in a rote citation of their authority. In a way, the flimsier their foundations are, the more ardently they seek to obtain our subordination through a purely habitual allegiance to their (imaginary and always-already-failing) power. And since this (ex)citation, as Santner puts it, is always inevitably “a citation of lack” (2001, 50)—something that cannot ever fill the emptiness it camouflages—we can never escape the vicious cycle of “validity in excess of any meaning” within which we are caught.4 In addition, it is not a coincidence that Santner’s phrase evokes Lear’s description of the breakdown of psychic functioning as a “breaking-through of quantity without quality” (see Chapter 1), for the excess “validity” of the Other’s

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enigmatic desire can overstimulate our constitution to such an extent that we experience a breakdown of normal functioning. Our helplessness in the face of the Other’s desire can cause the kind of anxiety that makes it impossible for us to proceed with life “as usual.”

The Office of the Controller I was recently reminded of this when an officer at an American university where I was scheduled to give a talk claimed that she could not process my modest honorarium without my first filling out a six-page document that asked me to list the dates of every United States visa I had held since 1985, as well as to disclose the reasons of all my visits to the country since 2004. I knew that the request most likely had to do with the confusion (one that also tends to stump immigration officers at the United States border) of me holding citizenship in an obscure European country, permanent residency in Canada, and absolutely no immigration status in the United Status—where I nevertheless lived for more than twenty years. As much as I tried to tell myself that there was no reason for alarm, the incident brought up the anxiety of nearly thirty years of efforts to “account” for myself in the North American context. The barely suppressed psychological terror I have long felt about my persistent lack of a “legitimate” foothold on the continent—the endless string of visas, monetary troubles, deportation nightmares, anxiety attacks at border crossings, and paralyzing fears of suddenly losing everything and everyone I have ever loved—came flooding back. But still, what was most anxiety inducing about the request was its absolute lack of logic, for I knew that my taxation status (which the form in question was supposed to clarify) could not have been more clear cut, given that I held a tenured position in a Canadian university and had been paying taxes in that country for years. Predictably, the more I struggled—the more I demanded “sensible” treatment—the more vehemently the officer asserted her authority so that, in the end, I could not even receive a refund for my travel expenses (I gave up the honorarium after a few sleepless nights) without filling out a form that asked for everything from my birthday to my passport number, social security number, and the number of my I-94 (the latter being a visa waiver form that Homeland Security no longer uses, so that the demand for this number was, quite literally, “magical” in the sense of lacking any reasonable foundation). The Kafkaesque connotations of the

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situation were heightened by the fact that the request came from a place called the Office of the Controller, and that this office could not give me any reasonable explanation for is demands. The incident had additional power because it recalled an earlier, much more serious one, involving a Canadian immigration officer who inexplicably violated every precedent in the book by deciding that I alone among the hundreds of foreign professors at the University of Toronto (not to mention other Canadian universities) did not deserve permanent residency. As chance would have it, at the time I had two foreign graduate students with no immediate employment prospects who received their papers without a hassle while mine were mysteriously held up. The disorienting impact of the Other’s enigmatic desire has never been as palpable for me as during the months I struggled to figure out what in my application could possibly have induced the officer in question to go rogue (his ruling was ultimately overturned by the immigration headquarters in Ottawa). Was it that I was a single woman who would not contribute to Canada’s population growth by having children? Was it that my curriculum vitae indicated expertise in feminist and queer theory? Was it that the officer wanted to protect his country from Ivyeducated professionals who took jobs away from Canadians? Or was he perhaps in the claws of negative transference towards someone with a higher income level than his? Or was he simply just plain incompetent? As far as psychological grievances go, mine were hardly severe, paling in comparison to war, rape, ethnic cleansing, domestic abuse, hunger, poverty, sexism, racism, homophobia, political dictatorship, and religious persecution (among other things). In other words, my aim is not to claim the status of a trauma survivor, but merely to illustrate that a prolonged exposure to the illegible desire of authority figures—to the “validity in excess of any meaning” secreted by institutionalized forms of power— can over time cause anxiety to accumulate to such a degree that even something relatively minor, such as the aggravation caused by the Office of the Controller, can drive us over the edge. My reaction to the latter was in fact a perfect example of what Santner means by a “signifying stress” that “curves” the subject’s everyday space. And it was also a good example of what Lacan describes as a kind of loss of subjectivity: “The subject outlines himself as a-subject; he is an a-subject because he . . . senses himself as profoundly subjected [assujetti] to the caprice of the one he depends on” (1958, 188–89).5 This sense of being subjected to the arbitrary desire of the Other/other upon which/whom the sub-

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ject’s future depends is precisely what drives it to utter its desperate Chè vuoi? (“What do you want?!”) According to this account, our disquiet about the parameters of our lives owes as much to the fact that we are surrounded by intangible currents of institutional desire—that we are constantly attempting to make inherently inconsistent messages make consistent sense—as it does to more tangible stress factors. We can, as it were, become saturated, filled to the brim, by demands that we do not fully comprehend and that can consequently never be satisfactorily processed. What is more, the fact that we cannot grasp the meaning of the Other’s desire does not even necessarily result from some cognitive failing on either side of the divide, but rather from the inherent ambivalence of that desire itself. What my encounters with the Office of the Controller and Canadian immigration demonstrated is that the Other is frequently not only unwilling to account for its desire but also, more fundamentally, largely incapable of doing so; simply put, the Other often cannot offer any reason for wanting what it wants. But this in no way diminishes its power, for the riddles of the Other fortify its domain (of impenetrable injunctions) even as they force us to an awkward loyalty to draining circuits of authority that time and again exasperate us. An ironic example of such loyalty is that I am now waiting for a citizenship decision from the same country that once told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was not worthy of residing on its soil (a message that was made all the more humiliating by Canada’s enormous pride in its “open” immigration policy). That I these days occupy a fairly privileged subject position (something that has not always been the case) only accentuates my point about the potentially wounding impact of the Other’s opaque desire: If someone with my advantages can be rattled to the point of sleeplessness by something as petty as the bureaucratic antics of a tax accountant, then what kind of havoc are we talking about in situations where the stakes are higher and where the fault lines of power are more clearly articulated?

The (Uneven) Tragedy of Human Life That we are frequently humiliated by the very structures of power that sustain our existence is, in many ways, the foundational tragedy of life. No wonder, then, that Lacan often draws on Greek tragedy for paradigms of human experience. What better way than classical tragedy to convey the idea that our fate is determined by outside forces that we

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cannot control but that we feel obligated to obey? As Zupancˇicˇ remarks in relation to Oedipus: “Even if Oedipus is not truly guilty of his crime (since it had been foretold well before his birth), he heroically shoulders responsibility for his act, assumes his destiny and lives with it until the end.” In this sense, Zupancˇicˇ continues, Oedipus serves as the prototype of our “existential condition,” namely that we are “born into a pre-existing symbolic constellation in which we must recognize the significance of our being” (2000, 175–76).6 This constellation allows us to situate ourselves in the world, transforming our social environment into a familiar dwelling place. But it also exacts a tremendous price by asking us to accept our “destiny” as inherently “necessary” even when it is difficult to bear. It is in this manner that we come to carry responsibility for our lot in life even when we are not its architects—even when we are not personally “guilty” for its failings. As a result, we may feel that we have no choice but to “assume” our (good, bad, or ambivalent) fortune by searching in it for the ultimate “significance of our being.” Our relationship to the symbolic Other is therefore exceedingly complex. On the one hand, we are indebted to the Other in that, without the Other’s presence, we would have no subjectivity: We would not have a sense of identity, or the capacity to make meaning, or the aptitude for intersubjectivity; we would not have a specifically human destiny.7 On the other hand, the “destiny” that we “owe” to the Other is profoundly alienating in all the ways I have outlined. Perhaps most importantly, this “destiny” (which, as we have seen, has a strong unconscious component) cannot be divorced from our particular social positioning. After all, the way in which we enter the “game of odds and evens” (Lacan 1964, 145)—the game that determines our “existential condition”—is far from uniform. Though we are all traumatized by the signifiers of the Other’s enigmatic desire, some of us are obviously much more traumatized than others, for signifiers do not function in a cultural vacuum, but rather communicate and perpetuate deeply entrenched forms of socioeconomic, national, racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and gendered power. Lacan observes that the signifier, in ushering us onto the “track” of the repetition compulsion, invariably guides us towards “the obligatory card,” adding that “if there is only one card in the pack, [we] can’t draw another” (67). Like Oedipus, we are asked to live out a destiny that has been “fixed” for us before we enter the scene. What often gets forgotten, in this context, is the unequal manner in which the cards are

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dealt in the first place: the fact that some “destinies” are much more demoralizing than others. Even if it is the case that all of us, without fail, gain an identity through the various ways in which the signifiers (and enigmas) of the social world cut into our bodily realities, the specific parameters of that identity are molded by the unique arrangement of the signifiers we encounter.There are signifiers (configurations of social meaning) that are enabling and life sustaining. But there are others that are denigrating and wounding. The psychic implications of this are enormous, for while it is certainly possible that individuals with pain-filled “destinies” possess a more realistic sense of how the world functions, they may also find it harder to shed the sinking feeling that there is no respite from its intrusiveness. Individuals who experience themselves as being under attack by the external world may find it next to impossible to relax their wakeful vigilance in relation to their surroundings. And they may find this difficult even when there is no immediate danger—even when there is no discernible cause for anxiety. It would be grossly inaccurate to equate this kind of anxiety with the inherent anxieties of life. At stake here is the distinction between foundational and contingent forms of alienation—that is, between forms of psychic injury that are constitutive of subjectivity as such (existential) and others that are circumstantial (historical or cultural). In other words, there is an important difference between universal forms of lack and the kind of “lack” that ensues from oppressive social conditions that erode the subject’s psychic resources for the simple reason that they oblige it to focus on survival.8 For instance, when it comes to the Other’s enigmatic signifiers, it is not difficult to see how some of us might be more vulnerable to their menace than others.When the mystery of the Other’s desire is intertwined with the Other’s (overt or covert) hostility, this desire becomes even more anxiety inducing. And when this desire rouses us to overvigilance not only because of its inherent opacity, but also because there are structural or power-related barriers to our ability to interpret it, we can be agitated to the point of exasperation (or even self-injury). Finally, when we feel that our very existence depends on our capacity to read the Other’s desire—that the price of failure is nothing short of social extinction—we can become overwhelmed by a “too muchness of too muchness,” so to speak, by an excess of agitation over and above what is “normal” in human life. Whether we are walking in

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a given neighborhood after dark, trying to make a living, catching a cab across town, entering a government building, or crossing the border from Mexico to the United States, how we are situated in relation to social networks of power matters. If the “validity in excess of any meaning” of social institutions can be maddening for all of us, there are instances when it is nothing short of terrorizing.

The “Truth” of Desire Whether we are confronted by forms of interpersonal or familial injury or by forces of sociocultural oppression, we cannot escape the fact that our identities are frequently fashioned in relation to trauma. This is why we need to look for signs of subjection not only on the level of understanding why and how certain individuals lack social agency, but also on the level of the repetition compulsion and other painful contortions of the psyche. This does not mean that those who have been traumatized beyond the usual trials of subject formation are somehow irrevocably damaged. But it is useful to recognize that much of what seems like “chance,” “accident,” or “providence” in our lives actually has a certain structural logic to it. Lacanian theory is a much more powerful tool of social critique than is often acknowledged not only because it understands this structural logic (a part of which I have attempted to capture through my analysis of our precarious relationship to the Other’s desire), but also because it insists that there are ways to fight it. As much as Lacan has been read in reductive ways that imply that he has a stake in upholding the hegemonic symbolic (or even worse, the Law of the Father), I think that there is nothing he stresses more than the idea that we do not need to reconcile ourselves to our particular “destiny”—that we are not, after all, quite like Oedipus. More specifically, there are two closely related avenues of resistance opened up by Lacanian theory: the “truth” of the subject’s desire and the so-called “ethical act.” I would never want to suggest that these exhaust the field of human rebellion, and even less that they are universally (or equally) available to all subjects. But I do think that they raise some interesting questions about the goals of analysis as well as about effective political and ethical action. I return to the ethical act, along with political and ethical considerations, in Chapter 3. Here I want to look at how analysis profits from the idea that the “truth” of the subject’s desire may, under certain circumstances, enable it to reinvent its destiny.

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The emphasis on the “truth” of desire characterizes Lacan’s thinking from early on. He of course notoriously admits that our desire is “the desire of the Other” not only in the sense that we want to be desired by the Other, but also in the sense that we learn to desire what (we think that) the Other desires (or wants us to desire). This is why, as I have sought to illustrate, we are often not the authors of our desires but serve as conduits for culturally hegemonic forms of desire; it explains why our desires tend to be so conventional, so caught up in normative patterns of satisfaction, that we cannot usually trust them to usher us beyond social banalities.Yet Lacan also repeatedly asserts that the aim of analysis is not social adaptation (reconciliation to the desire of the Other) but, quite the contrary, the truth of the subject’s desire. “Truth,” in this context, does not refer to some sort of absolute, Platonic (or metaphysical) Truth, but rather to what is most idiosyncratic about the subject. As Lacan postulates, “If the truth that we are seeking is a truth that frees, it is a truth that we will look for in a hiding place in our subject. It is a particular truth . . . Nothing can be compared to it that allows it to be judged from the outside” (1959, 24). That is, although the truth of desire is universal in the sense that each of us possesses it, its character is always distinctive, having to do with the particular ways in which we relate to the losses of our history. The task of analysis, Lacan implies, is to unearth this distinctive character from underneath the conformist yearnings that masquerade as our desire; its task is to release the singularity of our being from underneath the Other’s oppressive signifiers. Or, to articulate the matter in terms of fantasy, the objective of Lacanian analysis is to cut through sediments of fantasy that hold us captive in incapacitating existential scenarios, thereby making us mere passive spectators of our life stories.9

Not Ceding on One’s Desire Lacan’s clinical goal, therefore, is to allow the subject to develop a dynamic and discerning, rather than a reactive and unconscious, relationship to its destiny. This is why he asserts that one of the aims of analytic interpretation is to empower the subject to see “to what signifier . . . he is, as a subject, subjected” (1964, 251). In other words, understanding something about the distinctive truth of our desire requires that we learn to actively confront the nexus of signification, alienation, and injury that gives rise to the particularity of our “destiny” (our unconscious and bodily life-orientation). It requires that we puncture the fan-

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tasy formations that are designed to hide the terrors of our past so that we can attain a better sense of the always context-specific ways in which the signifier has wounded us and, in so doing, arrive at a more accurate reading of the densities of our desire regardless of how disquieting that desire may be. Embedded within this vision one can detect the influence of the phenomenological notion that existential authenticity is linked to the subject’s ability to confront the uncertainties and perplexities of its being without recourse to reassuring modes of social conformity. For the early Lacan, such “authenticity”—to use a term that Lacan himself rarely employs—is a function of the truth of the subject’s desire. Lacan believes that when we are estranged from the truth of our desire, satisfaction—beyond the tortured satisfaction granted by symptoms—remains elusive, for a symptom indicates, among other things, that we have not succeeded in dissociating our desire from the desire of the Other; we have not managed to persevere in our desire but have compromised this desire to demands originating from the Other. This is why Lacan famously tells us not to “cede on” our desire, specifying that “the only thing of which one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire” (1960, 319). Admittedly, it is a bit problematic to talk about our desire as if we somehow “owned” it, given that this desire—as I stressed above—is always in large part the desire of the Other. Yet there are still degrees of freedom and unfreedom, of hegemonic capture and noncapture. If this were not the case, it would not be possible to distinguish between humans and automatons. Though the gap between the two may be rapidly closing, all is not yet lost. Even if it is not feasible for any of us to entirely extricate ourselves from the dominant structures of desire that surround us, there are nevertheless desires that remain more loyal to our idiosyncratic “character” than others. On this view, our main responsibility to ourselves is to act “in conformity” with our desire rather than to compromise its integrity for the sake of social compliance (314). Our responsibility, in a way, is to singularize our desire—to stop paying attention to what the Other wants and to focus instead on what we ourselves want—so as to avoid being completely subsumed by the desire of the Other. This, according to Lacan, is how we not only align our desire with the possibility of satisfaction, but also liberate ourselves from the tendency to turn to the Other for reassurance. Ideally, what emerges from this is a far-reaching transformation in how we relate to the Other—a profound shift in subject position that makes us less submissive, less acquiescent.10

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This explains, in part, why Lacan is adamant about the fact that the goal of analysis cannot be to work towards the subject’s happiness—that there is a basic discrepancy between what analysis can accomplish and the analysand’s misguided quest for “a place where miracles happen” (1960, 303). I will return below to why I think that this statement—which we already encountered in Chapter 1—is less incompatible with Santner’s assertion that “miracles happen” than it might at first appear. For now, what is important is that Lacan makes this statement in the context of insisting that for the analyst to make himself “the guarantor of the possibility that a subject will in some way be able to find happiness . . . is a form of fraud” (303).To some degree, what is being expressed here is Lacan’s notorious animosity towards what he saw as specifically American methods of analytic normalization and social adaptation. However, the deeper philosophical point he conveys is that the proper aim of analysis—and the phenomenological echoes are once again clearly audible here—is to enable the subject to confront “the reality of the human condition”: “the state in which man is in that relationship to himself which is his own death . . . and can expect help from no one” (303–4). Lacan links this “human condition” to anguish, distress, and psychic disarray, suggesting that the purpose of analysis is to reconcile the subject to the realization that there is no ultimate cure, remedy, or salvation, no “Sovereign Good” (300) that can secure its happiness, but merely the always more or less eccentric trajectory of its desire.11

The Agency of the Signifier ˇ izˇek has criticized those Lacanians who equate psychoanalysis with Z a “heroic assumption of a necessary, constitutive sacrifice” (2001, 58) whereby the subject accepts its foundational lack—its symbolic castration—as the price of its subjectivity. Yet there is no doubt that such a reading is easily available in Lacan’s work, for Lacan repeatedly posits that the goal of analysis is to enable the subject to come to terms with the void of its being (the lack of a “Sovereign Good” that would grant it ultimate happiness or wholeness). I would propose, however, that Lacan advances this line of argumentation not because he wishes (heroically or otherwise) to celebrate lack per se, but because he believes that the subject’s confrontation with its lack in the long run gives it access to more agile and open-ended psychic scenarios than what fantasies (which, as we have learned, cover over lack) can offer. More specifically, because

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this confrontation empowers the subject to claim for itself some of the agency of the signifier that usually belongs to the Other, it allows it to better hold its own in the face of the Other’s hegemonic desire. If we stay, for a moment, on the constitutive (existential) level, it is obvious that one of the “rewards” of our interpellation into the symbolic order is our ability to enter into potentially empowering, and sometimes even creative, processes of signification. That is, even if being mortified by the signifiers of the social world is a necessary precondition of subjectivity, we still possess the capacity to utilize the signifier in ways that enable us to reach beyond our mortification. In fact, it is precisely because we experience ourselves as somehow mortified (lacking)—because we are beings of desire—that we feel compelled to generate new signifiers, that we feel motivated to devise personally resonant forms of meaning that allows us, to some extent at least, to compensate for our mortification. After all, if we were entirely content and self-contained—if nothing were missing from our lives—we would feel no urgency to enter into the cycle of invention and reinvention that characterizes human existence. From this perspective, following the (true) thread of our desire is a means to activate the agency of the signifier for our own purposes; it is a means to ensure that we do not hand over to the Other all the instruments of meaning production, but retain for ourselves the right to bring new ideals, values, and systems of representation to the world.12 On the level of circumstantial deprivation, our relationship to the signifier is similarly paradoxical: One of the best ways to counter the brutality of context-specific social meanings is to devise an alternative, more affirmative set of meanings. If, as Lacan suggests, it is trauma’s “resistance to signification” that results in “the transfer of powers from the subject to the Other” (1964, 129), then weaving a robust network of signifiers around the traumatic experience is a way to assert agency. This explains in part why a sense of narrative control is frequently a vital component of the working through of trauma—why those who have been traumatized often seek to give an account of their suffering. It is as if they were striving to counter trauma’s resistance to signification by a heightened determination to wield the signifier; they are, as it were, fighting trauma’s ability to divest them of signifiers so as to prevent “the transfer of powers” that Lacan describes. Granted, the more a given subject’s constitutive lack has been compounded by more specific forms of wounding, the more difficult it may be for it to claim its share of the world-making potential of the signifier—a point I return to in the next chapter. But,

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in principle, being a creature of signification benefits the subject even in situations of extreme traumatization.13 Even if the subject’s signifiers do not reach the core of the trauma—even if they by necessity leave components of that trauma “unclaimed,” to use Cathy Caruth’s (1996) influential term—the act of casting a web of signifiers around this core returns a modicum of strength to the survivor. This is why Lacan places the signifier at the center of clinical work. As he states, “In analytic practice, mapping the subject in relation to reality . . . and not in relation to the signifier, amounts to falling already into the degradation of the psychological constitution of the subject” (1964, 142). In other words, what distinguishes psychoanalysis from “mere” psychology is exactly the fact that it recognizes that it is through the signifier that our tenacious “destiny” can be modified. The signifier may not grant us the existential harmony we tend to covet, but it gives us something equally valuable, namely the ability to resist the Other’s commands whenever these become too hurtful or unreasonable. Or, to state the matter in terms of desire, because the signifier allows us to begin to read the truth of our desire, it helps us to cast off our excessive faithfulness to the desire of the Other. We may not be able to change the practices of the “controllers” of the world, but we can learn to be skeptical, and at times even overtly defiant, of their demands. Sometimes this defiance can be as simple as learning to short-circuit power by going directly to the top (what we do when we go “over someone’s head”). From personal experience, I know that this can be very difficult for those who are not used to being in control of their destinies, but it is something that analysis can explicitly teach one to do. And it is a “skill” that is enabling even when one chooses not to exercise it: The sheer knowledge that one could, if one wanted to, contest the injunctions of “the controller” in this manner can rescue one from the swamp of “a-subjectivity” (helplessness) so that a greater sense of agency becomes possible. Other times, the defiance in question can take the form of transmuting the Other’s debilitating signifiers to something more inspired. This is what some people accomplish through creativity, some through intellectual exertion, some through political action, some through love and relationality, and yet others through analysis.

The Analyst as Daimon If fantasies bind us to the Other’s enigmatic desire, causing us to forge wounding attachments to symbolic institutions of authority and pre-

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venting us from fully entering the stream of our lives, the signifier’s intervention can activate hidden sources of psychic vitality. This is akin to what Santner is getting at when he asserts that the “miracle” grants us the “blessings” of more life. We have seen that Lacan insists that miracles do not take place in analysis. But if we understand the notion of a miracle in Santner’s sense—namely as an interpellation beyond ideological interpellation—rather than in Lacan’s more conventional sense (as something that promises definitive salvation), then analysis may well be one of the few places where miracles do actually happen. If we envision analysis as a practice that endeavors to break the analysand’s habitual (fantasmatic) interpellations by offering alternative sites of interpellation, alternative sites of cathexis, then it is certainly capable of a “miraculous” reinvention of destiny. In much the same way that Rosenzweig’s daimon defeats the vampire, analysis can, under auspicious conditions, overthrow the subject’s most deadening fantasies so that a more livable, more satisfying (or rebellious) life becomes possible. But this, of course, requires that the analyst turn him- or herself into an emissary of the daimon. Not coincidently, this is exactly how Bruce Fink describes the Lacanian analytic process: The analyst attempts to get the analysand’s desire into motion, to shake up the fixation . . . and to dissipate the stasis that sets in when the analysand’s desire has seemingly ebbed to the point of no return. The analyst attempts to arouse the analysand’s curiosity about the manifestations of the unconscious, to bring the analysand to wonder about the why and wherefore of his or her life decisions, choices, relationships, career . . . and by getting the analysand to throw things into question, the analyst makes the analysand want to know something, find out something, figure out what the unconscious is saying, what the analyst sees in his or her slips, dreams, and fantasies, what the analyst means when he or she punctuates, scands, and interprets, and so on. The analyst, by attributing meaning to all these things, becomes the cause of the analysand’s wonderings, ponderings, ruminations, dreams, and speculations—in short, that cause of the analysand’s desire. (1997, 52–53)

The analyst as an agent of the daimon attempts to rouse the analysand’s curiosity about his inner life. She endeavors to insert herself into the analysand’s structure of desire so that she becomes the new “cause” of this desire, replacing a fantasmatic fixation with an attitude of inquisitiveness. As Fink elaborates, “A new fixation is thereby established, but it is one

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that, Freud tells us, is ‘at every point accessible to our intervention’” (53). The analyst as the cause of the analysand’s new fixation becomes a locus of transference, which means that a path has been cleared for the possibility of altering the analysand’s organization of desire: Instead of staying forever stuck in repetitive fantasies, the analysand’s desire becomes amenable to working through and reconfiguration. In this sense, analysis gradually converts the congealed “too muchness” of the subject’s drive energies—its habitual allegiance to symbolic sites of authority—into forms of meaning that no longer communicate submission, but rather express something about its singularity of being. To be sure, analysis can never offer a definitive cure, but it does grant the subject a way to go on from a new place, in a new way. What is this if not exactly the kind of interpellation beyond ideological interpellation, the kind of miracle, that Santner advocates? Ironically, the metamorphosis Fink describes relies on the very force of enigmatic signifiers that I have been complaining about. Analysis takes advantage of the fact that the initial “why” of the child (which is aimed at the frustrating desire of the parents) becomes, later in life, generalized into a “why” (a Chè vuoi?) addressed to institutional forms of authority. It places the analyst in the position of the enigmatic Other who has the power to cathect the subject’s drive energies. However, rather than seeking to reconcile the subject to hegemonic social formations, the analyst encourages it to pursue life directions that might have been previously foreclosed or unimaginable. Instead of paralyzing the subject, the analyst’s enigmatic desire galvanizes layers of inner potentiality that the subject might not even have realized it had. The subject-as-analysand—always unconsciously and transferentially—responds to the analyst’s unreadable desire. Whenever there is movement in its psychic life—whenever its deep-seated fantasies, fixations, and symptoms are being worked through and dissolved—it is in part because it finds itself reacting to subtle messages radiating from the analyst.This is why the best analytic work sometimes happens when the analyst says very little. The less transparent the analyst’s messages, the more they create room for the revitalization of the analysand’s psychic life.14 On this view, transference works, in part at least, by leading the subject to unanticipated discoveries about its desire. By inducing the subject to discard some of its most ingrained fantasies, it provokes a massive reorganization of its existential orientation, opening what Lear, in a different context, has described as the “possibility for new possibilities” (2000a, 112).

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The Possibility for New Possibilities Lear is not a Lacanian, but his statement transmits the ethos of what I am trying to express, namely that analysis, as Lacan envisions it, can transform the fantasy-generated fixity that characterizes symptomatic lives into a more fluid configuration of subjective possibilities. This opening up of the possibility for new possibilities, Lear specifies, is not merely a matter of adding a fresh possibility—one that is analogous to already existing ones—to the subject’s psychic repertoire, but rather of revising its entire world of possibilities. It enables the subject to reinterpret the fundamental premises of its existence so that more inspired ways of meeting the world become conceivable. For instance, a subject whose life is permeated by a persistent sense of failure and disappointment might come to understand its own role in the repetitive reproduction of this failure and disappointment; it might come to see that the world it lives in is, to some degree at least, of its own making—that the world it has “taken to be objective is in fact subjective.” As Lear explains, “The analyst facilitates a process . . . by which the analysand slowly comes to recognize that what he had taken to be the world as it really is, is in fact the imposition of a distorting point of view. The analysand has been living with a skewed view of himself and others, and all along he has assumed that he has been the passive recipient of the world as it really is” (2004, 47). The danger of this approach is that it can be misinterpreted to suggest that we are all fully responsible for our destinies regardless of how deprivileged these destinies are. To return to my earlier reference to Oedipus, this approach can lead us to believe that we are personally “guilty” for the failings of a social order that predates our birth; it can cause us to overlook the ways in which the deeply inequalitarian world in which we live can repeatedly generate the failure and disappointment of some people while facilitating the success and satisfaction of others— that many of the injustices of the world are not “subjective” but, rather, absolutely “objective” (in the sense of being structural). We cannot, then, forget that sometimes our perception of the world as unfair and unkind captures, quite accurately, what the world actually “really is.” But this is not what Lear is talking about. Rather, he is getting at the idea that a subject driven by unconscious fantasies tends to continuously recreate the same imaginary relationship—of being punished, suffocated, persecuted, embarrassed, or slighted, for instance—to what it presumes the Other’s desire to be. This is the illusion of “objectivity” that analysis can

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dismantle by allowing the subject to see how it has unwittingly become the obedient string-puppet of a desire that does not in any way serve its interests. As Fink’s delineation of the aims of analysis reveals, transference works when the subject begins to develop a questioning relationship to its desire, no longer meekly accepting the desire of the Other as its own. This empowers it to rework the basic sketch of its psychic life, for the less it is willing to “cede on” its true desire, and aspires instead to actively speak the language of this desire, the less beholden it remains to the Other. Lear puts the matter as follows: “Surely, what is at stake here is the development of a capacity: a certain kind of capacity for creative living. Being able to take responsibility for one’s unconscious motives is not an ability one is born with; it is something that, under favorable circumstances, may develop. . . . The analysand emerges with new relations to life’s possibilities, and that increases the capacity for joy—as well as for genuine sorrow” (2000b, xxxvii). The compensation for the subject’s ability to take responsibility for its own desire, in other words, is a more flexible sense of life’s possibilities. This is not a matter of making the subject happy but of increasing its overall emotional range—of augmenting its capacity to work through feelings of all kind. These may well include the sorts of bad feelings that arise in response to abjecting or inequalitarian social structures, so that even if analysis cannot rectify the world’s injustices, it may be able to help the subject to better cope with the psychic impact of such injustices. This is what I meant above when I said that even when we cannot control the “controllers” of the world, we can develop a greater degree of agency in relation to them so that they cannot overpower us quite so easily. We are now finally in a position to fully grasp what Santner means when he argues that the miracle does not aim at an otherworldly sanctuary, but rather releases the blessings of more life within the present moment. If fantasies that seek to artificially contain the surplus of the drives make us defensive—if they function as misleading interpretative gestures that hinder life and cause pain—their disbanding represents a revitalizing upsurge of fresh energy that summons us to our character by conjuring up the possibility for new possibilities. This, however, should be not confused with the idea that our lives will become easier for, as I have been arguing, the awakening of character can be acutely disorienting.15 This may be why Lacan asserts that, at the end of a training analysis, the analysand “should know the domain and the level of the experience

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of absolute disarray” (1960, 304). I have noted that there are instances when existential disarray reaches too high a pitch—when the subject is overwhelmed by a “too muchness of too muchness”—and this is an argument I take up in greater detail in the next chapter. At this stage, it is enough to observe Lacan’s position, namely that the subject who has completed analysis, or at the very least the subject who plans to become an analyst, should be able to tolerate a relatively high degree of anxiety. Such tolerance, rather than “happiness” in the usual sense of the word, could be said to be the goal of Lacanian analysis. In this way, Lacan, like Lear, invites us to accept unexpected breakdowns as an essential component of our psychic destinies.16 Lacanian analysis is meant to show that we are rarely the entirely helpless victims of our fate, even when this “fate” has been encoded within our unconscious and bodily constitution. If this were the case, there would be little point to therapeutic practice, the purpose of which is, exactly, to intercede in the unconscious and bodily composition that propels our destiny. When we are alienated from the “truth” of our desire—when we are overrun by the hegemonic desire of the Other— our existence can feel lackluster and devoid of meaning. When we are caught up in soul-defeating fantasies, we go though the motions of daily existence in an apathetic and insipid manner, living at a distance from ourselves; we lack singularity, passion, and intersubjective grace. This is why analysis targets the nexus of desire, repetition, symptomatic rigidity, and the return of the repressed that characterizes psychic lives that are too dedicated, too faithful, to unyielding fantasy formations. When analytic intervention (however imperfectly) attains its aim, we can begin to loosen psychic patterns that cause us suffering. From this point of view, analysis strives to convert the symptomatic sticking points of our being into a more versatile sense of how our lives might turn out; it liquefies unconscious and bodily deposits of fixity—deposits that are frequently experienced as an arresting sense of existential impossibility—into a living and breathing sense of possibility.

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The Ethics of the Act

I have argued that analysis mobilizes the play of signification in order to release psychic and bodily energies that have become ensnared in lifeconstricting fantasy formations. This is why the “talking cure”—which essentially consists of the signifier-galvanizing methods of free association, interpretation, and transference—resides at the heart of clinical practice. However, there is a form of fantasy, the so-called “fundamental fantasy,” that does not respond well to this approach. This fantasy functions as the most deep-seated depository of the subject’s jouissance. As such, it resides beyond the talking cure: It cannot usually be reoriented by any mediation on the part of the signifier. Quite the contrary, any attempt to draw too near to it results in the collapse of the subject’s ˇ izˇek posits, “it is never possible for me to fully assymbolic identity. As Z sume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being. When I approach it too closely, what occurs is the aphanisis of the subject: the subject loses his or her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates” (2005, 147–48). This is why the fundamental fantasy operates so forcefully:The core of the subject’s fantasy life is protected by the fact that the only way to intervene in it is to allow the subject to fall into pieces. Here it is, once again, helpful to think about the relationship between desire and the drive, for if the fundamental fantasy resists analysis so effectively, it is because it operates on the level of the drive. This is not to say that it is always possible to distinguish between desire and the drive for, as we have seen, not only do they both pursue the same Thing (das Ding), but there is a point of overlap between them in the sense that the lack inflicted by the signifier (which causes desire) is the opening through which jouissance (the “undeadness” of the drives) bubbles into the realm of social subjectivity. On this view, the subject finds it difficult to confront its constitutive lack not only because this lack reminds it of 59

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its alienated status, but also because it serves as a portal to what most encroaches upon its desire-driven sense of cohesion; if the subject’s lack bars its access to the real, it also forces it to face this very real as something that is too insistently present, too insistently “undead.” Yet there is still a difference between the subject of desire and the subject of the drive.The subject of desire is the one who stuffs one object (objet a) after another into the lack within its being, only to discover that no object can fully make up for the loss of the Thing. The subject of the drive, in contrast, is a subject of uncontrollable jouissance, which is why its emergence results in the undoing of the culturally viable individual. As Lacan explains, if the subject of desire is “a subject-with-holes,” the subject of the drive is situated at the level of “a headless subjectification, a subjectification without subject” (1964, 184). Another way to convey the matter is to say that if the subject of desire thrives on the postponement of satisfaction, the drive has no patience with deferral: It aims directly at the sublime Thing. As a result, even though neither the subject of desire nor the subject of the drive attains complete satisfaction, the subject of the drive—the “headless” subject of jouissance—comes closer to it: It grazes the nub of unmitigated bliss that the subject of desire can only circle from a distance.Yet because the drive is always, ultimately, the death drive, the closer the subject comes to full satisfaction, the closer it also comes to utter destruction. This nexus ˇ izˇek and Lee of satisfaction and self-annihilation has led critics such as Z Edelman to valorize the act of subjective destitution—the subject’s suicidal plunge into the unmediated jouissance of the real—as a liberatory act that, finally, grants the subject some “real” satisfaction.The purpose of this chapter is to trace the outlines of this reasoning, starting with Lacan’s analysis of the “sinthome” as the kind of symptom that cannot be alleviated through the talking cure, and ending with the idea that the act of subjective destitution is the ethical act par excellence. Although this is not my preferred reading of Lacan, I want to show that there is an internal logic to it—one that does raise some intriguing questions about effective political and ethical action.

The Sinthome as a Site of Singularity In his 1975–76 seminar on James Joyce, entitled The Sinthome, Lacan contrasts the sinthome—the tight knot of jouissance that encloses the subject’s fundamental fantasy—with the conventional Freudian render-

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ing of the symptom. Freud asserts that the symptom arises when symbolization, in one way or another, misses its target: The symptom communicates what the subject is unable to articulate through any other means. This suggests that symptoms can be dissolved through successful interpretation, which is exactly why analysis seeks to promote the subject’s capacity to verbalize the “truth” of its desire—to catch the potentially traumatic tangle of unspoken desire in the network of the signifier. Lacan, however, argues that there is a steadfast breed of symptoms—or sinthomes—that cannot be unraveled through the signifier’s intervention. Such sinthomes do not express the subject’s repressed desire, but rather organize its jouissance on such a basic level that they reside beyond processes of symbolization and working through. This is why they cannot easily be amended by analytic treatment. While the symptom is a coded message addressed to the Other in the sense that it is motivated by the subject’s (misguided) conviction that someone in the external world can decipher the meaning of its suffering, the sinthome operates independently of the conventions of intersubjective exchange. Beyond the erroneous belief that the big Other is a dependable field that contains the cure to the subject’s affliction, the sinthome connects the subject to the real of its being outside of any recognizable sequence of discourse. As Edelman maintains, the sinthome “binds the subject to its constitutive libidinal career, and assures that no subject, try as it may, can ever ‘get over’ itself—‘get over,’ that is, the fixation of the drive that determines its jouissance” (2004, 35–36). Edelman goes on to explain that because the sinthome cannot be substituted for any other signifier, because it “accedes to no equivalent, to no translation, and thus to no meaning,” it functions as a locus of idiosyncrasy that captures the individual’s singularity “as definitively, and as meaninglessly, as a fingerprint” (36).1 On this account, singularity emerges at the very place where meaning is refused—where social identity and intelligibility disintegrate. There are obvious similarities between Edelman’s claim that the sinthome functions as the underpinning of the subject’s singularity of being—as a kernel of jouissance that resists the logic of comparison and that cannot therefore be translated into a socially feasible “identity”— and the idea, advanced by Levinas and Santner, that singularity is what ensures that the subject is never merely a part of a whole (or a piece of the world), but contains elements that defy all social categories and classifications. Edelman specifies that, as a site of mindless enjoyment—as

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a “node of senseless compulsion on which the subject’s singularity depends” (2004, 38)—the sinthome is so essential for the subject’s lifeorientation (what Santner calls “drive destiny”) that it feels that in compromising its sinthome, it compromises itself. That is, insofar as the sinthome constitutes the most elementary tier of subjectivity, operating as a nucleus of jouissance that holds the subject together on the level of the drives, it feels so absolutely irreplaceable that the subject, quite simply, cannot live without it. Or, to articulate the issue slightly differently, because the sinthome is what in the subject is “more than” the social parameters of its existence, the subject will rather destroy itself than give up its sinthome. This is why Lacan, in the final phase of his thinking, came to believe that analysis achieves its end only when the subject comes to identify with its sinthome, recognizing in it the “real” of its identity. If analysis typically aims to disperse symptoms through processes of signification that promise to provide the subject with the “missing” signifier—the signifier that conveys the “truth” of its desire—the only thing to be done with the sinthome is to accept it as the core of one’s unique approach to jouissance. Against this backdrop, the goal of analysis becomes to enable the subject to own up to its sinthome, to “assume” the disruptive kernel of the real that lends its character a degree of distinctiveness beyond its symbolic calling. Instead of striving to unravel its fixations, the subject opts to identify with these fixations—with its always highly specific way of circling the Thing—because it realizes that they impart a paradoxical kind of “self-sameness” to its being.2 One could say that to the degree that Lacan, in his later work, shifts his emphasis from the symptom to the sinthome, he redirects his attention from the subject of lack (the subject of desire who is subjected to the symbolic order) to the question of singularity beyond both lack and subjection. If the sinthome represents a surge of singularity beyond the social, then the final Lacan is more interested in the subject’s capacity to access this singularity than in its ability to navigate its existential predicament of constitutive lack. Indeed, if one of the principal lessons of Lacan’s early thought was that it is only when the subject acquaints itself with the current of its desire that it gains some agency over its life, the lesson of his later thought was more radical in that he came to connect singularity to jouissance and to advocate identification with the sinthome as a means of sidestepping the dominant economy of the symbolic order. Lacan, in other words, transitioned from theorizing the conditions under which the subject can recognize the “truth” of its de-

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sire to trying to understand the conditions under which it can forgo desire (which, even at its most counterhegemonic, is always indebted to the Other) for the sake of the drive (which represents a site of singularity that is deeply antithetical to the Other).That is, while Lacan’s early work focused on the ways in which the subject can begin to dissociate itself from the desire of the Other (so as to open up the possibility for new existential possibilities that I discussed in the previous chapter), his later work interrogates the real as what has the potential to transport the subject beyond the reach of the Other by causing a categorical break with its injunctions. Or, to put the matter in yet another way, Lacan moves from desire as a function of lack to the possibilities for jouissance opened up by the suspension of symbolic identity.3

The Act of Subjective Destitution The subject of desire retains a relationship to the desire of the Other even when it manages to attain the “truth” of its own desire. The subject of the drive, in contrast, identifies with its sinthome as a manifestation of singularity that has absolutely no interest in the Other. This is why there is a conceptual parallel between the act of identifying with one’s sinthome and the act of subjective destitution—of completely forsaking one’s allegiance to the symbolic order. Edelman is perhaps the thinker who has most profited from this parallel, pushing it to its limits in the context of theorizing queer sexuality and politics. If Santner takes the insight that singularity makes the subject something “more than” its social identity (more than a piece of the world) towards the transcendent, Edelman chooses to pursue the destructive by positing that queerness attains its “ethical value” only to the extent that it accepts “its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social” (2004, 3). Starting from the premise that the symbolic is structured around the relentlessly futureoriented optimism of reproductive heteronormativity—an optimism that finds its emblem of hope in the image of the innocent child— Edelman asserts that it is inherently hostile to queer sexuality (what he ingeniously dubs sinthomosexuality). As a consequence, queer subjects are mistaken when they seek social assimilation, acceptance, and equality through strategies such as gay marriage or economic prosperity. Rather, queers should take it upon themselves to embody the threat to the social fabric that they, whether they so wish or not, always already signify. Since queer subjects are by definition aligned with negativity—with

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what menaces the integrity of the establishment—their best strategy is to ride the full force of this negativity in order to rupture the symbolic at its very foundations. Criticizing those who naively place their faith in the symbolic order’s “limitless elasticity” (2004, 14) and “ever-widening horizon of inclusiveness” (104), Edelman asks queer subjects to renounce their devotion to the ideal of an improved future and to adopt, instead, a “stubborn denial of teleology” (27). That is, rather than seeking to dismantle the homophobic representation of queers as death-driven and socially destructive, queers should welcome the antisocial pulsation of the death drive that they are, culturally speaking, forced to epitomize.4 They should embrace the anti-identitarian and meaningless force of jouissance so as to forsake “all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms.” Against the hollow promises of political activism, they should, in short, perform the act: “the act of repudiating the social.” It is in this sense that the sinthomosexual “stands for the wholly impossible ethical act.” By personifying “intelligibility’s internal limit,” this subject boldly situates its “ethical register outside the recognizably human” (101). Edelman’s reading is both compelling and frustrating—compelling because one can certainly sympathize with his skepticism about the normative order’s willingness to accommodate non-normative forms of sexuality, but frustrating because his stance leaves no room for transformative political action or, for that matter, for socially sustainable identity.5 While it is clear that Edelman does not expect queer subjects to commit mass suicide, that the sinthomosexual, for him, functions as a “figure,” a metaphor of sorts, for an internal limit to sociality (in much the same way that the real functions as an internal limit to the symbolic’s consistency), there is still, arguably, something defeating about the alignment of queer subjectivity with a position that is, practically speaking, untenable. Moreover, although I agree with Edelman that the dream of futurity can keep us from living in the present—can hold “the place of life empty,” as he puts it (2004, 48)—I do not see a reason to equate the future, as he does, with a utopian dream of seamless self-realization. For Edelman, there is an intrinsic connection between our hopeless quest to recover an imaginary state of plenitude (to attain the Thing) and our quest to find fulfillment in the future. Our pursuit of a better future, in his opinion, is merely an attempt to heal the constitutive wound inflicted by the signifier; it is an attempt to recreate a fantasized past

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where all desires were satisfied.6 To be exact, our mistake is to imagine the future as a place that redeems our suffering by granting us the “final signifier”—the signifier that ensures that “being and meaning” are, at long last, “joined as One” (2004, 10). Admittedly, Edelman is right in the sense that this vision underpins both the Christian notion of salvation and the idea that our children will somehow complete our life’s mission.Yet, from a more psychoanalytic angle, the future does not so much rescue us from the pain of the past as it allows us to engage in an (always incomplete) rewriting of this past. Because the future is, by definition, open-ended, it is not merely an illusory return to an imaginary state of wholeness where “being” meets “meaning,” but rather what guarantees that the two can never coincide. It does not suture our identity by closing the lack within us, but rather ensures that we keep translating this lack into ever-renewed forms of meaning; instead of offering us the “final signifier,” it draws us into previously unencountered webs of signification that facilitate our continuous process of becoming. On this view, the future is not where we rediscover a perfect past, but rather where we take responsibility for the imperfections of this past—where we do our best to make sure that what is hurtful about the past is not repeated.7 This is not a matter of denying death, but merely of holding onto the possibility that between the present moment and the moment of death, we are capable of meeting the world in ways that are worthy of our passion.

Beyond the Good ˇ izˇek—to whom Edelman’s analysis is indebted—offers This is where Z ˇ izˇek’s commentary on subjective a valuable counterpoint. To be sure, Z destitution shares a great deal with Edelman’s theory of sinthomosexuality for, like Edelman, he defines the “ethical act” as one where the subject risks total social obliteration (and sometimes even actual death) in order to sidestep the dictates of the big Other. In other words, he agrees with Edelman that the act represents an unfaltering refusal of the symbolic complex of meaning that legitimates the subject as a member of a given cultural fabric; simply put, the act asks the subject to relinquish all of its normative supports by hurling itself into the abyss of the real. ˇ izˇek is a Hegelian in the sense that he believes in However, because Z the potentially constructive consequences of destructive acts, he tends to underscore the transformative, even heroic, implications of the act more

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than Edelman does. By this I do not mean to argue that radical negativˇ izˇek, redeems itself in some sort of a positive outcome, such as ity, for Z a stable social order or identity position. Quite the contrary, he repeatedly stresses that the act cannot be understood within the framework of any kind of a dialectical “resolution.” And he points out that the act of saying “no” to the symbolic establishment is much more important than ˇ izˇek’s position is not any potential benefit of the act could ever be.8 Yet Z nearly as consistently on the side of abjection as that of Edelman. Our first clue to this is the fact that while Edelman foregrounds the ˇ izˇek (who is by no means negligent of mindless thrust of jouissance, Z this thrust) adds a political dimension to his analysis by maintaining that the subject who is willing to destroy its social viability in the act is often (not always, but often) defending a “principle” of some sort—one that it experiences as absolutely compelling. “This, incidentally, is the usual ˇ izˇek writes: “somebody who, for a long time, structure of heroic acts,” Z has led an opportunistic life of maneuvering and compromises, all of a sudden, inexplicably even to himself, resolves to stand firm, cost what it may. . . .The paradox of the act thus lies in the fact that although it is not ‘intentional’ in the usual sense of the term of consciously willing it, it is nevertheless accepted as something for which its agent is fully responsible” (2000, 376). The subject thus accepts responsibility for its act even when this act is not consciously willed or premeditated.9 Although the subject is frequently, afterwards, disturbed by the act as well as incapable of coming to terms with it (376), there is something noble about its readiness to surrender the customary coordinates of its identity for the sake of this act; there is a heroism of sorts to committing an uncompromising act that cuts through the layers of maneuvering and compromising that characterize human life as an opportunistic pursuit of social validation. ˇ izˇek’s examples of the act are often intentionally controversial in the Z sense that they challenge our habitual understanding of ethics, thereby making a statement about the inherently countercultural impact of the act. A case in point is his discussion of Mary Kay Letourneau, the schoolteacher who was imprisoned for sleeping with her fourteen-year-old ˇ izˇek describes the affair as student. With characteristic wry humor, Z “one of the great recent love stories in which sex is still linked to authentic social transgression: this affair was condemned by Moral Majority fundamentalists (as an obscene illegitimate affair) as well as by politically correct liberals (as a case of child sexual molestation)” (2000, 381). Stating that the “ethical act proper by definition involves a move ‘beyond

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the Good’—not ‘beyond Good and Evil’, but simply beyond the Good,” ˇ izˇek maintains that the incident demonstrates that “acts are still possible Z today” (382). After all, the destabilization of what the social collectivity considers moral, rational, or plausible is one of the necessary constituents ˇ izˇek continues, “Crucial here was Mary of the authentic act, so that, as Z Kay’s unconditional compulsion to accomplish something she knew very well was against her own Good: her passion was simply too strong; she was fully aware that, beyond all social obligations, the very core of her being was at stake” (386). That is, Mary Kay knew full well the possibly catastrophic consequences of her act, but she did it anyway. That is ˇ izˇek, is all about. what the pure act, according to Z ˇ Zizˇek goes on to ridicule the attempts of Mary Kay’s legal defense to categorize her act as a medical problem (bipolar disorder) that should be dealt with prescription drugs that would stabilize her behavior: “This, then, is the sad reality of our late capitalist tolerant liberal society: the very capacity to act is brutally medicalized, treated as a manic outburst within the pattern of ‘bipolar disorder,’ and as such to be submitted to biochemical treatment—do we not encounter here our own, Western, liberal-democratic counterpart to the old Soviet attempts to diagnose dissidence as a mental disorder” (2000, 387)? Mary Kay’s case was therefore one where the social establishment sought to neutralize the subversive implications of the act by reinterpreting it as a mental ailment, as something that could be “treated” (and consequently safely tucked away at the margins of the cultural order) by the “scientific” tools of the ˇ izˇek posits, was establishment. This pathologization of Mary Kay’s act, Z a pathetic attempt to conjure away its disruptive passion. This is why he believes that Mary Kay betrayed herself when she, at her trial, renounced her passion (ceded on her desire, as it were) by admitting that she knew that she had done something legally and morally wrong. In contrast, ˇ izˇek adds, “When she later reasserted her unconditional fidelity to her Z love (stating with dignity that she had learned to remain true and faithful to herself), we have a clear case of someone who, after almost succumbing to the pressure of her surroundings, overcomes her guilt and regains her ethical composure by deciding not to compromise her desire” (388).

The Will to Begin Again ˇ izˇek asserts that inasmuch as the act arises from the subject’s nonneZ gotiable fidelity to an internal obligation, it entails its own idiosyncratic

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“reasonableness”: Its “value” or “correctness” cannot be determined by reference to an external standard. Even though the act violates cultural norms in the sense that it is unfathomable, even “impossible,” from the ˇ izˇek notes, “involves its own inherent perspective of the social order, it, Z normativity which ‘makes it right’” (2000, 388). In addition, to the extent that the act annuls the subject as a social entity, as a moral agent with a binding connection to a world of shared ideals and codes of conduct, it does not serve the goals of subjectivization or psychic integration.Yet, ˇ izˇek observes, the subject who endures the act emerges from the as Z experience a different being: someone who is “literally ‘not the same ˇ izˇek as before.’” “The act differs from an active intervention (action),” Z concludes, “in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). . . . in it, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not)” (2001, 44). This statement about rebirth is important, for it raises the possibility ˇ izˇek here appears to recognize of future repercussions. Unlike Edelman, Z that the act transforms the subject, potentially paving the way for a new kind of relationship to the social world. That is, even if the act itself is radically antisocial, it may, over time, translate into effects that can be carried back into the social. This should not be confused with the idea that the act consciously aims at change, let alone social change.Yet what often gets ˇ izˇek’s lost in post-Lacanian accounts of the act, and sometimes even in Z 10 own work, is the fact that although Lacan certainly describes the act as a suicidal, destructive encounter with the death drive whereby the subject explicitly goes against its own well-being—whereby the subject sacrifices not only its social position but also the promises of its future—he also links the death drive to a will “to make a fresh start,” “a will to create from zero, a will to begin again” (1960, 212). Indeed, insofar as the death drive “challenges everything that exists” (212), it can make visible what is invisible from the point of view of the social organization, thereby inviting a drastic reconfiguration of the normative order. As a result, although Lacan certainly does not suggest that the act invariably results in indiˇ izˇek’s “or not” in the above quotavidual or social rebirth (this is why Z tion is perceptive), the potential is nevertheless present in his account. There is hence an intriguing tension in Lacan’s rendering of the act. On the one hand, the act is a deed without any promise of future redemption or reward. As a matter of fact, the very point of undergoing the act as a locus of sociocultural “impossibility” is to shed any lingering hope of such redemption or reward. On the other hand, Lacan implies that there is something transformative about this experience—that the

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dissolution of social subjectivity that the act brings about is potentially a gateway to some new (presumably more worthwhile) way of interacting with the world; the act of self-negation that erases the subject is simultaneously a basis of a fresh form of subjectivity, not in the sense of serving as a prelude to some sort of a reassuring recentering of identity, but in the sense of instigating a sweeping realignment of priorities. Because the act fractures the subject’s usual life-world and taken-for-granted mode of being, it can induce it to question the underpinnings of its existence in ways that provoke a sudden shift in perspective; it can offer the subject a more piercing sense of what really matters in its life. And it can, under ˇ izˇek puts it, some conditions, even bring about social change, so that, as Z after the act, “nothing remains the same” (2001, 45). A real-life example of such an ethical act might be the refusal of Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus or the resolution of Mohamed Bouazizi to set himself on fire for the sake of his cause. Both of these ˇ izˇek, a deed “of pure risk, of refusal, of acts represented, to borrow from Z ‘persisting on one’s own’” (2001, 45). Neither Parks nor Bouazizi could possibly have predicted the outcome of their actions—neither could have known ahead of time that their acts would have tremendous collective ramifications—yet this uncertainty did not keep them from acting.11 Their acts might have seemed “crazy” from the viewpoint of the surrounding social order, yet these acts also possessed an internal “logic” that made them “necessary” for the actors themselves. Moreover, both sparked social rebellions of immense fervor. At the time of writing, the full impact of Bouazizi’s act is still unclear. But Parks’s act reveals that no ˇ izˇek matter how seemingly transgressive the act is, it can ultimately, as Z concedes, become “the very foundation of a new social link” (45). If the case of Mary Kay Letourneau is an example of an act that did not, in the final analysis, make much of a dent in the façade of the symbolic establishment, particularly as she ended up marrying her lover after having served her sentence, thereby (with a poignant irony) entering into a covenant with the very social order that had earlier condemned her actions, Parks’s “no” to a racist state arguably changed the course of world history.

Antigone’s Act of Defiance The contrast between these two cases raises a question about the act’s “content.” While few would doubt the ethical force of Rosa Parks’s act,

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even those vehemently critical of social hegemonies might have reservations about Mary Kay Letourneau’s actions. The best way to consider the issue may be to ask a related question: What distinguishes “genuine” singularity—the kind of singularity that makes the subject more than just a part of a whole—from, say, the actions of the Canadian immigration officer who decided that I did not qualify for permanent residency? Did not the actions of the latter also constitute a kind of assertion of singularity, a defiant refusal to follow protocol? These considerations reveal that a lot depends on how the actor is positioned in relation to social power. Both Letourneau and the immigration officer held institutional authority in their respective situations: Letourneau because of her status as a (much older) teacher and the immigration officer because of his right to decide the fate of the applicant whose file he was reviewing. The matter is of course complicated by the fact that power is far from straightforward, that youth (which Letourneau’s student had) can exert a lot of influence, as can the cultural capital of a university professor (which I had). But this does not change my sense that a big part of what makes an act “ethical”—rather than merely dictatorial, tyrannical, sadistic, or self-serving—is its point of origin among those who are disempowered. To use an extreme example, the decision of a concentration camp inmate to disobey a guard would qualify as an ethical act, but the decision of the guard to shoot the inmate would not. Both might say that they could not help themselves—that they felt compelled to commit a destructive act—but this does not alter the fact that the guard’s “act” hardly qualifies as “ethical.” It seems to me that daring or destructive acts that fit the template of Lacanian ethics are usually staged by individuals (or social groups) who inhabit deprivileged subject positions. In other words, I cannot concur ˇ izˇek that the serial killer who keeps murdering people, or the with Z man who kills his entire family with a machine-gun, qualify as ethical ˇ izˇek actors in the Lacanian sense, no matter how “lonely or desperate” (Z 2001, 57) they may be. These individuals still, at the moment of committing their acts, wield power over others in ways that make it difficult to interpret their actions as acts of “freedom” (33). Rather—to use a term that foreshadows my discussion of Badiou in the next chapter—their actions might be best understood as simulacra, as actions that may share some of the outward qualities of the ethical act but that lack its dignity. After all, what leads Lacan to read Antigone’s defiant “no” to Creon’s edict (which prohibits the proper burial of her brother, Polyneces) as

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ethical is not just its self-destructiveness, but also its sublime nobility. I ˇ izˇek when the am in fact not at all sure that Lacan would agree with Z latter asks: “Is not, in the eyes of Lacan, the ultimate ethical achievement the suicidal ecstasy, the full acceptance of our ‘being toward death’” (45)? I think that Lacan recognizes that there are situations where the impasses of the symbolic are so intransigent that only a resounding rejection of its parameters—such as Antigone’s fervent “no”—will do. But this seems quite different from “suicidal ecstasy.” The “no” of the ethical act may be more exasperated than ecstatic in the sense that it demands change at any cost. As Lacan maintains in relation to Antigone, “She literally cannot stand it anymore. Her life is not worth living. . . . She lives in the house of Creon; she is subject to his law; and that is something she cannot bear” (1960, 263). Lacan thus stresses that Antigone has reached her limit in that Creon’s edict is one that she cannot tolerate. But, ultimately, what makes Antigone’s transgression ethical is the fact that she is rooting for the underdog. Antigone places her love for Polyneces ahead of her life as well as of the interests of Creon’s state, choosing, as Lacan remarks, “to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of the criminal as such” (283). Her position is unyielding, admitting of no compromise.12 Her desire is obviously not the desire of the Other, and she insists on following this desire to its bitter end. Yet the flipside of her self-destructiveness is a paradoxical kind of freedom—a singularity of being that does not let anyone else dictate the course of her desire. As Lacan states, Antigone “affirms the advent of the absolute individual with the phrase, ‘That’s how it is because that’s how it is’” (278). We have, once again, reached the core of Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, of “not ceding on one’s desire.” Antigone is a heroine because she does not give ground relative to her desire, but rather pursues this desire beyond social limits, to “a place where she feels herself to be unassailable” (1960, 278). Lacan observes that tragic heroes are often isolated in this fashion, in one way or another separated from the structure that surrounds them. While most human beings situate themselves within a network of conventional signifiers, within what Lacan calls the “morality of the master” (315), the hero as a singular creature attaches herself to “the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man” (279).This “break” (the hole in the symbolic through which jouissance gushes into the realm of sociality) is, of course, where the Thing appears as lost so that what distinguishes the hero from her less noble

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compatriots is her willingness to directly confront the lack (or “nothingness”) at the heart of her “being.” In addition, while the ordinary subject tends to capitulate its desire in the face of external pressure, the hero pursues the track of this desire (the track that, as we have learned, situates her in a particular “destiny”) to its conclusion regardless of the price. The hero knows as well as the rest of us that insisting on her desire is “not a bed of roses,” yet she is willing to meet her fear head-on in order to accomplish this task. In Lacan’s words, “the voice of the hero trembles before nothing” (323).

Getting Satisfaction But how is it that we have, once again, transitioned from the drive energies of the real to desire? Why is it that every time we try to talk about the subject of the drive, we end up back at the subject of desire? The answer is actually relatively uncomplicated, for if it is true—as I have pointed out—that what sets the drive apart from desire is its closer proximity to the Thing, then the subject who pursues its desire to its outmost limit by necessity catches up with the drive (ultimately, the death drive). This is why the act of subjective destitution is the logical outcome of not ceding on one’s desire. However, I would say that it is merely the most radical expression of Lacanian ethics, for Lacan is by no means saying that the only way to become an ethical agent is to destroy oneself or the social establishment (“these are not the comments of an anarchist” [1960, 315], he reassures us). Though the injunction to not cede on one’s desire may, in extreme cases, result in a terroristic or suicidal act, it can also, in less extreme ones, merely be a matter of doing what one, deep down, wants to do rather than what social wisdom deems prudent or productive. The ethical act can be as “sublime” as Antigone’s “no” to Creon, but it can also be as “ordinary” as loving a person everyone else thinks is of the “wrong” race, religion, gender, or class status. What matters is that one honors one’s own inner directive even when this leads to a degree of social discomfort or inconvenience—even when this directive results in personal choices that the collectivity judges as “perverse.” The reason Lacan connects ethics to desire is that if following the thread of one’s desire can complicate one’s life, failing to do so is even worse. As Lacan explains, “What I call ‘giving ground relative to one’s desire’ is always accompanied in the destiny of the subject by some betrayal—you will observe it in every case and should note its impor-

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tance. Either the subject betrays his own way, betrays himself, and the result is significant for him, or, more simply, he tolerates the fact that someone with whom he has more or less vowed to do something betrays his hope and doesn’t do for him what their pact entailed” (1960, 321). In such instances, one “gives ground to the point of giving up one’s own claims and says to oneself, ‘Well, if that’s how things are, we should abandon our position; neither of us is worth that much, and especially me, so we should just return to the common path’” (321). The problem with this is that even though backing away from one’s desire may help to preserve a modicum of intersubjective harmony, it also generates a deep contempt for both self and other. In other words, because desire is “the metonymy of our being” (321), when we betray our desire, we betray ourselves, with the consequence that we lose respect for ourselves. And we also lose respect for those who are too cowardly to do what they have promised to do. We have discovered that, under normal circumstances, desire serves as a defense against unmanageable jouissance: The incessant circling of desire around the lost Thing shields the subject from the Thing’s more devouring aspects. Against this backdrop, the subject who undertakes an act of subjective destitution—as Antigone does—allows its desire to meet the arc of its jouissance; it allows its desire to aim directly at the fundamental fantasy. Such desire, like the mechanical pulsation of the drive that it expresses, causes the subject to “persevere” in its goal regardless of external demands to relinquish it. Or, to state the matter in another way, the subject who carries out an act does so because it is fed up with the secondary satisfactions of the pleasure principle. It reaches “beyond” the pleasure principle because it is frustrated by the fact that this principle tends to translate pleasure into displeasure by postponing satisfaction indefinitely. As Lacan points out, individuals who adhere to the pleasure principle sometimes “give themselves too much trouble” (1964, 166). Because they approach satisfaction through the roundabout trajectory of the pleasure principle (through the mediation of objets a), they can exhaust themselves in the quest, particularly when this quest becomes synonymous with the repetition compulsion. In this sense, the subject who, however briefly, seeks to touch the Thing is so tired of giving itself “too much trouble” that it is willing to sacrifice its social standing for the sake of finally attaining some satisfaction. Such a subject moves towards “real” satisfaction because it has had enough of the utter dissatisfaction of always falling short of satisfaction. This is why, as Lacan

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states, Antigone explores “the way in which moral action presents itself as an experience of satisfaction” (1959, 56).

The Service of Goods At first glance, it may be difficult to appreciate the ethical potential of the Lacanian act. It may be hard to see the ethical relevance of an act that radically uproots the subject from the domain of sociality and intersubjectivity, for ethics in its usual sense negotiates conduct between subjects in this very domain. We are used to thinking about ethics as what arbitrates relationships between people, as well as what allows us to distinguish between right and wrong, just and unjust, actions. The idea that ethics might be a matter of following one’s desire to the point of self-annihilation and/or social destruction may appear individualistic and socially irresponsible. Since when has ethics been a matter of doing what one wants to do, regardless of consequences? And what happens when the desire of one person conflicts with that of another? Or even hurts others? How are we supposed to adjudicate such tensions? What I have said about the act defending the underdog is one way to foreground its ethical potential. Another closely related way emerges from the fact that the act shatters the subject’s paralyzing devotion to what Lacan calls the “service of goods”: the tendency of the Other to privilege practical concerns of productivity and mass consumption over the integrity of the subject’s desire. To put the matter plainly, Lacan renounces the idea that ethics mediates symbolic relationships for the same reason that he repudiates the assumption that analysis aims at social adaptation, namely that the subject’s desire and the demands of disciplinary power (the “morality of the master”) are frequently inherently antithetical to each other: Part of the world has resolutely turned in the direction of the service of goods, thereby rejecting everything that has to do with the relationship of man to desire—it is what is known as the postrevolutionary perspective. The only thing to be said is that people don’t seem to have realized that, by formulating things in this way, one is simply perpetuating the eternal tradition of power, namely, “Let’s keep on working, and as far as desire is concerned, come back later.” (1960, 318)

Lacan asserts that one of the primary characteristics of our postrevolutionary (late capitalist) society is to make desire wait even as it simul-

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taneously offers a multitude of shimmering lures that are designed to incite this very desire.The subject is drawn into the fold of commercially generated desires at the same time as it is expected to suppress the kinds of desires that do not directly serve the interests of consumer culture and ideology. “The service of goods” that the Other expects, Lacan maintains, reliably commands the following: “‘Carry on working. Work must go on.’ Which, of course, means: ‘Let it be clear to everyone that this is on no account the moment to express the least surge of desire’” (315).13 It is because of his contempt for this mentality that Lacan deems the subject who gives ground on its desire guilty of self-betrayal. If the “service of goods” valorizes utilitarian aspirations over the specificity of the subject’s desire, Lacanian ethics asks, “Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you” (Lacan 1960, 314).14 Zupancˇicˇ spins this statement as follows: “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” (2000, 253)? We will see in the next chapter that this is also Badiou’s main question—one that determines the subject’s “fidelity” to the truth-event. This “fidelity” to the event (to whatever, in a moment of passion, threw the subject out of joint and forced it to rethink the fundamentals of its life) is, in turn, what brings the subject into being as a “real” subject. As Zupancˇicˇ explains, “it is only after this choice that the subject is a subject” (235). “It is at this level,” she specifies, “that we must situate the ethical subject: at the level of something which becomes what ‘it is’ only in the act” (103). Badiou and Zupancˇicˇ here employ the term “subject” (the version of the “subject” that comes into being as a result of its fidelity to the event) in much the same way as I have been using the term “character,” namely as a site of an uncompromising singularity of being. Ethical betrayal, in this context, equals social compliance. Lacan in fact ridicules both the Aristotelian path of moderation and the Kantian notion that ethics must be “disinterested,” divorced from any idiosyncratic passions. Regarding the latter, he posits that the categorical imperative (“Act in such a way that the maxim of your action may be accepted as a universal maxim”), in today’s docile society, implies that you should never act “except in such a way that your action may be programmed” (1960, 76–77). That is, the categorical imperative dictates that you should only do what the mainstream morality of the Other has conditioned you to do. Kant himself might have been as disturbed by this formulation as Lacan is. But the contrast to Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis holds in the sense that, as

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I have shown, the latter asks that you, quite simply, cease to care about what the Other wants—that you reject the legitimacy of the Other’s desire. Ethics, from this perspective, is less a matter of negotiating relationships between subjects than of the subject’s altered relationships to its own desire. As Joan Copjec elaborates,“The ethics of psychoanalysis is concerned not with the other, as is the case with so much of the contemporary work on ethics, but rather with the subject, who metamorphoses herself at the moment of encounter with the real of an unexpected event.” Ethics, Copjec concludes, is “a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself ” (2004, 44).

Towards Revolutionary Politics For Lacan, there is nothing as ethically complacent as perpetuating the morality of the master, which always, in the end, bolsters the “service of goods.” If we return to the statement about the service of goods fueling the “postrevolutionary perspective” of late capitalism that I quoted above, then the ethical act in some ways restores the potential for revolutionary politics. While I do not agree with those who interpret Lacan as saying that the symbolic order is always and in every way hegemonic (more on this in the second half of this book), it seems clear that he regards the act as a means to counter a morality that is “created for the virtues of the master and linked to the order of powers” (1960, 315). And it seems equally clear that he sees the act as something that gestures towards the possibility of radical change beyond mere reform or incremental improvement, for he professes that the ethical attitude of the hero “suspends everything that has to do with transformation, with the cycle of generation and decay or with history itself ” (285). While there are obviously situations where historical transformation is invaluable, where new possibilities arise gradually from old conditions, there are others that call for a more definitive break with the establishment. The ethical act represents exactly such a break, for it does not serve the patient processes of regeneration that characterize the unfurling of history. This is why “Antigone with relation to Creon finds herself in the place of synchrony in opposition to diachrony” (285). Antigone’s act does not contribute to the (horizontal) continuation of historical progress, but situates her in a (vertical) rift that fissures that progress. Rather than attempting to oil the squeaky wheel of history, she inserts a spoke through it, momentarily halting its motion.

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One reason the ethical act has become such an influential concept in post-Lacanian theory is that its political implications are enormous, eliciting the key question of whether it is more effective to try to subvert the symbolic from within (as is the case, for instance, with Foucauldian, Butlerian, and other poststructuralist theories of reiteration, performativity, and deconstruction) or to stage an adamant rebellion against the system (as is suggested by the Lacanian and post-Marxist approaches ˇ izˇek and Badiou). Lacanian ethics, in short, offers a much-needed of Z language for comprehending social upheavals that reach beyond a politics of modification. It, as it were, rescues the subject from the logic of repetition.While an approach such as Butler’s theory of reiteration could be said to still partake of this logic in the sense that it advocates “repetition with a difference,” the act short-circuits the incessant march of the (personal or cultural) repetition compulsion that the subject experiences as unbearable.The subject’s fierce “no” to this repetition is precisely what allows it to move towards “real” satisfaction in the manner that I described above. According to this view, if repetition (and perhaps even Butlerian reiteration) has to do with the relentless return of signs, with their automatic pressure, the encounter (the touché) with the real jolts the subject beyond this relentlessness, this automatism. In Lacan’s words, it ushers the subject “beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs” (1964, 53). At such moments, jouissance defeats the signifier, thereby making it impossible for the “service of goods” to proceed with business as usual.15 To better understand this defeat of the signifier by jouissance, it may help to revisit my earlier account of the subject’s paradoxical relationship to the signifier: As much as the subject is subjected to the symbolic, it also needs the tools offered by this symbolic—particularly the all-important tool of signification—to cope with this subjection. Even though the subject can never claim full agency over the signifier, it can have a more or less empowered relationship to it. Under auspicious conditions, it may be able to borrow some of its creative spark to devise ideals, values, and nuggets of meaning that offer it an (always inadequate) antidote against traumatization. Such ideals, values, and nuggets of meaning give the subject a sense of self-governance that keeps it from transferring all of its powers to the Other. Even though these ideals, values, and nuggets of meaning can never fully conquer the Other’s authority, they may enable the subject to envision alternatives to the circumstances it faces, thus making it possible for it to oppose what seeks to oppress it. In short,

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the fact that the subject is rarely completely overrun by the dominant signifiers of the collective world, but possesses the power to invent new signifiers (new ideals, values, and nuggets of meaning), allows it to put up a degree of resistance. This idea, in one way or another, resides at the heart of most poststructuralist theories of subversion, which, explicitly or implicitly, rely on the notion that the signifier always, in the final analysis, overflows the normative strictures that are designed to contain it. The problem with this is that those who have been particularly badly traumatized can find it extremely difficult to access the agency of the signifier. When the subject is surrounded by signifiers that carry the hegemonic messages of the tyrant, and that do not consequently grant it any opportunity for affirmative self-constitution, the signifier itself can become an enemy of insurmountable proportions. In such situations, the act of subjective destitution may offer the kind of respite that the signifier is no longer able to proffer. In this sense, the defeat of the signifier by jouissance takes place when the subject’s frustration spills over the dam, when there is, to return to the phrase I introduced in the previous chapter, a “too muchness of too muchness.” These are situations where the subject of desire yields to the subject of the drive because the repetition of the same old pattern is no longer a feasible option, because the aggravation of always wanting what one cannot have (say, social justice) becomes so overwhelming that the only “reasonable” response is to rupture the endless cycle of desire and disappointment by reaching for direct (rather than socially mediated) satisfaction; these are situations where one more spin on the wheel of desire is so intolerable that the subject would rather destroy itself or its social environment than endure it. The act, then, emerges during moments of breakdown when the subject is past the point of polite negotiation, when there is no choice but to stake everything on a stubborn stance of defiance that attacks the Other’s hegemony—that represents a categorical rejection of the (enigmatic or obvious) signifiers of the Other’s desire.

The Fraying of Social Ideals The matter gains some urgency when we place it in the context of the long-term effects of social trauma and oppression. Speaking from a clinical viewpoint, Lewis Kirshner proposes that trauma destroys the points de capiton—the “quilting points”—that suture the subject to the symbolic order, thereby eroding its capacity for “self-maintenance” (2004, 76).The

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quilting point, as Lacan himself explains, is the knot that fastens a given signifier to its corresponding signified, so that “everything radiates from and is organized around this signifier, similar to the little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of materials” (1956, 268). That is, the quilting point arrests the incessant sliding of the signifier by attaching the subject to a specific signified, a specific site of cultural meaning. We all need a number of such points, or “hooks,” in order to develop a workable sense of how we fit into the world—what Kirshner appropriately characterizes as a sense of “having a life.” As Kirshner stipulates, such hooks allow us to consolidate an identity based on symbolic ideals that support our “lived sense of subjective cohesion or, in more Lacanian terms . . . the metonymic chain of discourse enabling participation in the intersubjective exchanges of ordinary life” (2004, 120). One of the injurious effects of trauma is that it severs the link between signifiers and signifieds, triggering a dramatic unraveling of the points de capiton, the symbolic supports, that protect the subject against excessive jouissance. Kirshner maintains that traumatic events such as funerals, accidents, and scenes of catastrophe, for instance, bring the subject so close to the bodily real that it becomes vulnerable to a cauldron of symptomatic enactments—to what he, following Lacan, calls “signifiers of the flesh.” As Kirshner puts it, what is foreclosed in the symbolic “returns in the real” (2004, 73). In other words, trauma that cannot be mediated by symbolization—and I would add social trauma and oppression to Kirshner’s list—threatens to thrust the subject into pure “thingness” by causing a fraying of the cultural reference points that normally anchor it in a universe of collective ideals.The best way to repair this kind of damage, Kirshner proposes, is to restore the subject’s faltering connection to this universe: “In my interpretation, the social context provides the points de capiton (in the form of shared narratives, for example) where signifiers of desire can be quilted down to consensual ‘reality’” (119). Explaining that the capacity to idealize social values offers a degree of much-needed stability to the traumatized subject, he sums up the matter as follows: “I have situated the analytic work . . . within the framework of reconstitution of the functions of an ego ideal or of reestablishment of links to the ‘pole of values’ within the symbolic order, which allow for variegated affective narratives” (100–1).16 In principle, this is a compelling solution—one that is close to what I myself advocated in the last chapter. But it also highlights the fundamental problem about social inequality that I am in the process of delineat-

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ing, namely that symbolic ideals can hardly help a subject who is being traumatized by these very ideals (say, a racist idealization of whiteness, a homophobic idealization of heterosexuality, or a sexist idealization of masculinity). Sustained patterns of social oppression rob the subject exactly of what Kirshner describes as “the capacity to express affect in a form that can be communicated within a framework of shared meanings and social conventions” (2004, 19). While none of us can construe a coherent or conclusive account of ourselves, oppression violently attacks the subject’s capacity for self-narration by coercing it to internalize the very signifiers that are calculated to disparage it. Such signifiers immobilize the subject into debilitating nodes of meaning, marking it with—and making it the unwilling bearer of—the oppressor’s aggression. They turn the deprivileged subject into an object of use for the oppressor (so that the subject becomes an instrument of the oppressor’s sadistic jouissance). Such signifiers infiltrate the subject’s psychic life and bodily constitution in the manner that I portrayed in the context of talking about the enigmatic desire of the Other, and the less the subject is able to counter them by signifiers of its own, the more devastatingly they operate. By depriving the subject of an agentic relationship to social meaning, they annihilate its capacity to actively mold its future. In this fashion, oppression reinforces the traumatic logic of the repetition compulsion whereby the very signifiers that carry harm are also the ones that are most insistently present in the subject’s inner life, deepening its sense of despondency.

The Point of No Return This is one way in which the subject arrives at the Lacanian ethical act. I have proposed that one of the most effective means to oppose the oppressive ideals of the Other is to devise ideals of one’s own. This is something that happens not only in analysis, but also in subcultural or countercultural settings that are organized around a different consensual reality from that of the normative symbolic. Such an alternative reality can offer its participants symbols that neutralize the impact of those disseminated by the Other. The ability to translate victimization into an empowered vocabulary of collective action, for instance, may allow deprivileged subjects to develop a dynamic (and perhaps even a creative) relationship to the signifier. But this process is often only partially successful, not to mention difficult to sustain over time, which is why I also

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comprehend the urge to suddenly break with the establishment in a gesture closer to the Lacanian act. In this latter scenario—and this has been the main point of this chapter—the subject deems the dominant system to be so thoroughly corrupt that the only option left is to declare one’s independence from it. The act’s result is frequently tragic, as was the case with Antigone, and as continues to be the case with those contemporary subjects, such as Bouazizi, who commit destructive (terroristic) or selfdestructive (suicidal) acts because the social order leaves them no room to demand their fair share of the agency of the signifier. But it can also be transformative (like Parks’s act was) in the sense of paving the way for personal, political, or ethical possibilities that have either been completely absent from, or buried by, the dominant order. It can release the actor—or, in those cases where the actor does not survive, those who choose to take up the actor’s cause—from traumatizing attachments to authority so that their energies become available for counterhegemonic usage. I have demonstrated that the act shatters the cycle of repetition—of business as usual—when the subject (or a social movement) has had enough, when things have reached a point of no return. By this, I obviously do not wish to advocate either terrorism or suicide as an antidote to victimization. But it may be useful to understand how things can get this far. And we may as well admit that there is often a tinge of terrorism or suicidal tendency in effective political action. It may in fact be that the choice between constructive dialogue and unwavering acts of insubordination is not as unconditional as it may at first seem—that successful political action may sometimes entail a combination of these two approaches. If I am correct in thinking that the Lacanian act mobilizes not only the death drive, but also this drive’s “will to create from zero,” it might be possible to see it as a stepping stone to a state of affairs where the social establishment is finally forced to participate in constructive dialogue. Indeed, it is arguable that we are all the beneficiaries of mutinous acts akin to that of Parks—acts that, at various moments in history, have broken a stalemate where those in power refused to negotiate for the simple reason that they did not have to. The French revolution, the civil rights movement, early forms of feminism, many postcolonial struggles, etc. involved a passionate renunciation of the status quo—an attitude of “enough is enough” or “we don’t give a damn about what you want (us to want).” As much as these “acts” may have over time become imbricated in dialogue with the Other, at their core resides a posture of

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dogged defiance—a defiance for the sake of which many people were willing to face imprisonment, ridicule, torture, hunger, or even death. A more contemporary example might be a soldier who refuses to carry out a mission ordered by a superior, a political prisoner who stands his or her ground in the face of violence, or an activist who would rather confront a racist mob than surrender his or her principles. If, as I concluded in the previous chapter, Lacanian analysis reveals that we are rarely the entirely helpless victims of our “destiny”—that the “truth” of our desire functions as an entryway to resistance—the act merely takes the attitude of not ceding on our desire to its absolute limit. If analysis relies on the signifier to reconfigure our destiny, the act (usually temporarily) ushers us beyond signification—to a place that demolishes the quilting points that customarily hold together our symbolic universe. The hope, here, is that out of the ashes of this destructiveness rises a new private or collective set of possibilities. Clearly, neither of these approaches is perfect. But both have the potential to ensure that what seems “impossible” from the point of view of the normative symbolic, however fleetingly, becomes possible. Both undermine our faithfulness to the hegemonic desire of the Other, allowing us to access deposits of passion that are more representative of our singularity than what we have inherited from our environment. As I stated in the end of Chapter 1, there is no way around the fact that we are constantly compelled to negotiate the tension between our cultural inheritance and our singularity, between social subjection and the capacity to claim a distinctive destiny. But, as I have underlined, it is only as singular creatures that we can attain “real” satisfaction—that we can develop an identity that is not entirely subsumed to the rules of social conventionality. This is why I have tried to illustrate that if we are to engage in embarrassing displays of surplus ardor, it is better that this ardor be directed at the “truth” of our desire than at social sites of authority that seek to secure our loyalty by convincing us that, really, what we should desire is what the Other desires us to desire.

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4.

The Possibility of the Impossible

Alain Badiou’s theory of the truth-event, and particularly his approach to ethics, shares a number of important intersections with Lacanian psychoanalysis—intersections that not only allow me to wrap up some of the themes I have been developing this far, but also provide a bridge to the concerns of the second half of this book. Badiou conceives of human existence as consisting of two (at times overlapping) realms. The first is the ordinary, everyday domain of (seemingly) coherent identities. This domain (or “situation”) is organized around the pursuit of personal interests, such as wealth, success, acclaim, happiness, or rewarding relationships, and it is held together by a pool of taken-for-granted knowledge about the state of the world and the meaning of human life. The second is the exceptional domain of truth-events—moments when the subject is seized by an epiphanic vision so powerful that it is momentarily dislodged from its ordinary life. During such sudden surges of insight, the subject is able to view the world from an angle that is foreclosed by its customary mode of being. In the same way that the Lacanian real explodes the coordinates of the symbolic, the truth-event pierces the membrane of the subject’s interest-driven preoccupations. Perhaps most importantly, Badiou suggests that if the domain of interests is dominated by the conventional concerns of those in power, the domain of the truth-event is by definition one of innovation—an unexpected occasion for something previously unimaginable to shatter the established order of things. Like Lacan’s act, Santner’s miracle, and Rosenzweig’s daimon, the truth-event opens the possibility for new possibilities or, to use Badiou’s own wording, the “possibility of the impossible” (2002, 39). In this manner, Badiou lends yet another perspective to the line of inquiry I have been pursuing about the conditions under 83

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which something new might enter the world: He invites us to think about the premises of transformation. Moreover, he raises the question of how it might be possible to stay faithful to the force of this transformation in the face of the world’s inevitable opposition or indifference. How might it be possible to convert what, from the viewpoint of the status quo, appears impossible into a sustainable sense of possibility? We will discover that this question is, for Badiou, by necessity one of ethics. His “ethic of truths”—which draws its inspiration from Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis—is centered on the problematic of the subject’s fidelity to the rupture represented by the truth-event. In this chapter, I would like, first, to outline the major principles of Badiou’s ethic of truths and, second, to highlight the differences between the Lacanian real and Badiou’s modification of the concept. I will show that Badiou’s rewriting of Lacanian ethics reconceptualizes the subject’s “private” experience of resistance and/or disorientation as an opening for artistic, intellectual, interpersonal, or political change in the collective realm. We have seen that this possibility is already implicit in Lacan’s analysis of the act. But if the social ramifications of the act are, for Lacan, an afterthought of sorts, for Badiou they are absolutely central. One might in fact say that if transformation within the social arena is, for Lacan, a potential byproduct of the act, for Badiou the act only becomes a genuine act to the extent that it brings about such transformation. Even the truth-event of love—seemingly the most solipsistic of Badiou’s examples—entails the forging of a new intersubjective entity so that the lovers “enter into the composition of one loving subject, who exceeds them both” (2002, 43). This does not mean that Badiou’s subject “wills” the event into being in order to produce a social or intersubjective outcome any more than the Lacanian subject wills the act, for Badiou stresses that the event cannot be planned for in advance, forced into appearing, or in any way mastered.Yet it seems that, for Badiou, the event only means something if it generates social (or at the very least intersubjective) ripples.

The Subject of Truth Badiou’s phrase about the possibility of the impossible recalls Lacan’s assertion that “the impossible is not necessarily the contrary of the possible.” Lacan makes this statement in the context of arguing that it is the real, specifically, that is “impossible,” adding, however, that its economy all the same “admits something new” (1964, 167). That is, even though the

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real as such remains impossible (e.g., unmediated jouissance, the Thing), it can nevertheless bring something unprecedented into existence; it can, precisely, produce the possibility for new possibilities. Or, in a somewhat different vein, the encounter with the real is the impossible event that nonetheless takes place. Zupancˇicˇ conveys this beautifully when she writes, “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.” This is why “the impossibility of the Real does not prevent it from having effects in the realm of the possible” (2000, 235). This is one way to understand why the encounter with the real—say, the ethical act—has the power to transform not only our self-perception, but also the structure of the world. Likewise, Badiou’s truth-event represents a break in routine that manages to provoke something utterly surprising or unforeseeable. Badiou’s distinction between the ordinary human “situation” and the event bears an unmistakable residue of the phenomenological divide between inauthentic and authentic, culturally complacent and creative, existential modalities. But where the phenomenological subject must take responsibility for actively orchestrating its process of becoming, Badiou’s subject only comes into being as a subject as a result of being captivated by the event. For Badiou, there is no abstract subject who exists prior to the event, but only an always particular creature, particular body, particular “some-one,” who is summoned by an extraordinary event to become a subject, to become a quasi-transcendent being driven by the fire of its commitment to the truth it has discovered. Badiou regards the four domains of art, science, love, and politics as potential sites of such a summons, giving the following examples: “Some-one” can . . . be this spectator whose thinking has been set in motion, who has been seized and bewildered by a burst of theatrical fire, and who thus enters into the complex configuration of a moment of art. Or this assiduous student of a mathematical problem, after the thankless and exhausting confusion of working in the dark, at the precise moment enlightened by its solution. Or that lover whose vision of reality is befuddled and displaced since, supported by the other, he remembers the instant of the declaration of their love. Or this militant who manages, at the end of a complicated meeting, to find simple words to express the hitherto elusive statement which, everyone agrees, declares what must be pursued in the situation. (2002, 45)

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The event—being spellbound by a play, solving a mathematical problem, becoming absorbed in an amorous encounter, attaining a moment of political insight—transforms the ordinary “some-one” that we all are into a subject of truth: a subject who is willing to proceed with its life in accordance to a deep faithfulness to the event. From this moment on, the subject reads its life-situation through the demands of the event rather than through the lens of its self-serving interests. Once again speaking of love, Badiou postulates, “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ my situation” (42). Like the Lacanian subject of the act, Badiou’s subject of truth exhibits a radical “decenteredness” in relation to the normative expectations of its social setting. To utilize the central terms of my discussion this far, one might say that the event interpellates the subject beyond its usual ideological interpellations, beyond its usual symbolic investments, so as to make room for its singularity. It converts a replaceable individual—an individual who, in Levinas’s terms, is a (classifiable) part of a whole—into an irreplaceable subject of truth.1 To be precise, it enables the “some-one” to attain the complex status of a “universal singular,” of a subject who is at once “singular” (in the sense of being unique and inimitable) and “universal” (in the sense of being traversed by a truth that is applicable to everyone without exception).2 The subject, in this sense, is a specific instance of a universal truth. Furthermore, although subjecthood is not something that everyone attains, the position of the subject is one that could in principle be inhabited by anyone; insofar as the event articulates a thoroughly generic truth, it engenders a subject whose irreplaceability consists of the fact that it is endlessly replaceable.3

The Void of the Situation Badiou specifies that the truth-event invariably arises from the void (lack, absence, or silence) at the core of a given “situation.” Such a void is the suppressed point of negation that secretly supports the (seemingly) stable “plenitude” of the situation that surrounds it.4 The event leaps out of this void like a frog leaps out of a puddle, calling attention to an element that the situation consistently erases even as it also relies on it for its survival. For instance—to use one of Badiou’s favorite examples—Marx represents an event for political thought because he manages to designate the void around which bourgeois society is built: the proletariat as the

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dispossessed masses that are absent (as agents) from the political stage.5 In this sense, though the event is inherently “situated” in that it always intervenes in a particular set of circumstances, it is utterly unrelated to the governing rules of the situation; it cannot be reduced to, or even recognized by, the terms of the situation. Badiou goes as far as to state that ontology itself rejects the event as “that-which-is-not-being-qua-being” (2005, 184). Or, as he elaborates in a less abstract tone, “We might say that since a situation is composed by the knowledges circulating within it, the event names the void inasmuch as it names the not-known of the situation”; “the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event” (2002, 69).6 I will return to the question of naming below. But first it should be noted that Badiou explicitly aligns the void with the Lacanian real, with the point of impasse or foundational antagonism of every symbolic situation. However, while Lacan understands the real as a structural (universal and ever-present) dimension of human life, Badiou regards it as something that is always specific to the situation at hand. The real of the situation is what the situation’s normal configuration of possibilities is designed to hide (render “impossible”).7 This is why the situation is blind to its own void, why the void (the real) of a situation is never knowable from within that situation, but only becomes discernible from the perspective of the event. The void (or real) of the situation that the event discloses is therefore context specific yet never marginal. Quite the opposite, it functions as ˇ izˇek has pointed out that the organizing principle of the situation. Z social animosities frequently structure the very reality that they appear to fissure. Along the same lines, the void (limitation or obstruction) that impedes the comfortable closure of a particular situation (or sociosymbolic hegemony) is what ensures the “proper” functioning of that situation. What is so revolutionary about the event, then, is that it shows that what might seem like a (mere) contingent obstacle to the system’s smooth operation is in reality what guarantees its viability; it reveals that the obstacle in question is a systemic necessity without which the situation’s “logic” would collapse. So, for instance, it becomes clear that the poor, the homeless, the prostitutes, the “illegal” immigrants, the socially abjected, the intercity youth, the gang members, and so forth who constitute the “void” (the invisible underside) of American society in fact facilitate the confident running of this society (its “business as usual”); they

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ˇ izˇekian sense) represent the underprivileged “stain” (in the Lacanian/Z that perpetuates social “privilege” as one of the defining characteristics of the dominant ideology of what it means to be American.

The Immortal Within The truth-event strikes a blow at the normative order because it makes visible this invisible underside. Even in less politically charged contexts, it challenges the situation’s appearance of normalcy by exposing its blind spots. It is disquieting because it alters the subject’s entire worldorientation, revealing facets of its life-situation that were previously undetectable.This is one reason that it is impossible to meet the event with anything less than a complete commitment: A halfhearted or lackadaisical approach would represent an immediate betrayal of the event. This is why, as Badiou asserts, the subject who is seized by the event is summoned to become an “immortal”—a transcendent entity that it did not know it was (or could be). As is the case with Santner’s miracle, the event introduces a sublime spark of eternity and infinity into an ordinary “situation” of linear temporality and finitude.8 Indeed, Badiou’s contention that it is through the event that the subject becomes “something other than a mortal being” (2002, 12) serves as a predecessor to Santner’s statement that jouissance makes the subject more than “just a piece of the world.” In this sense, to be convoked to become a singular subject is not only to allow the passion of truth to penetrate one’s being, but also to be (always temporarily) carried to a place where one is at once “oneself ” and “other than” (“more than”) oneself. The subject of truth—a subject who responds to a call arising from a dimension of being that is not easily reconcilable to its mundane reality—is suspended between the ordinary and the extraordinary. It belongs both to its own (artistic, scientific, amorous, or political) “situation” and the universal (yet context-specific) truth that is in the process of materializing; it is, so to speak, pierced by the truth that “passes” through it. Or, in slightly different terms, the event causes the subject’s habitual self-interest to pour out of it so as to create room for a transcendent truth.9 This emptying out of the individual is exactly what transforms an ordinary mortal into an immortal. Once again, this does not mean that the subject will never die. But it is now inhabited by a truth that is “immortal” in the sense of being eternally valid. Even though there may in due course be other events that supplant the knowledge gained from

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the event in question, the latter does not therefore become false: Because the event expresses the singular truth of a particular situation, the fact that later situations might give rise to other events does not in any way diminish its impact.10 Because the event releases the immortal part of the individual by connecting him or her to something larger than the self (e.g., a scientific community, a revolutionary struggle), it, as Badiou posits, brings about a local subject of “collective humanity” (2005, 345). It replaces the distracted person of everyday concerns by the fully engaged subject of truth. This is why Badiou aligns the immortal with existential freedom, with a radical stance of autonomy and self-determination. Peter Hallward explains the matter as follows: As far as its subjects are concerned, access to truth is . . . identical to the practice of freedom pure and simple. Ordinary individuals are constrained and justified by relations of hierarchy, obligation, and deference; their existence is literally bound to their social places. True subjects, by contrast, are first and foremost free of relations as such, and are justified by nothing other than the integrity of their own affirmations. Pure subjective freedom is founded quite literally on the absence of relation, which is to say that it is founded on nothing at all. (2003, xxxi–xxxii)

There is here a somewhat problematic sliding from the notion of hierarchical social obligations to relationality as such, as if freedom and relationality were inherently antithetical to each other. There are those who would point out that the idea that there could ever be a wholly autonomous “integrity” to a given person’s “affirmations” is a myth pure and simple. And there are also those who would argue that freedom is attained through relationality—that human beings reach the transcendent through their interactions with others. Indeed, the fact that Badiou himself links “immortality” to the process of being interpellated to a larger “cause” supports this reading. But if we understand the matter through the link I have drawn between undeadness and singularity, between what is “immortal” within us and what bypasses normative sociality, we once again encounter that “dense core of existential loneliness” (Santner) that connects the subject to the nonrelational pulse of jouissance; we once again meet up with the antisocial compulsion of Antigone. In Badiou’s terms, Antigone’s decision to disobey Creon is what turns her from a mortal creature to an immortal one. Her defiance is an act of freedom in that it liberates her from all bonds to the sociopolitical establishment.

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Freedom, in this sense, is not an ontological attribute, but something that comes into existence through the truth-event. As such, it cannot be taken for granted. Immortality, in other words, is not an automatic reward for a virtuous life. Rather, it must be sustained over time through what Badiou calls “fidelity.”

Fidelity to the Event The question facing the subject summoned by an event is whether, and how, it can remain faithful to that event—whether, and how, it can sustain its passion beyond what Badiou calls the “enthusiastic clarity of the seizing” (2002, 60). How can it, in short, remain loyal to the inspiration the event represents? After all, the event itself evaporates as soon as it appears. The subject’s fidelity to the event consequently entails its ability to retroactively elaborate a “process” of truth, to safeguard the effects of the event after its flash has been extinguished. “Truth,” while revealed by the event, is also what the subject gathers together gradually, bit by bit, by its fidelity to the event. In a way, the subject must ask: How can I continue to exceed my own (situation-specific) being, how can I continue to link what is familiar about my world with the singular event of being engulfed by the unfamiliar? How can I defend, in the context of my mortal life, the immortal that the event brings into being? The matter is complicated by the fact that the “some-one” who is punctured by a truth does not (cannot) know ahead of time if she is capable of fidelity to this truth. In Badiou’s terms, this “some-one” sustains her fidelity to the event only by way of “the unknown.” This is why the subject’s ethical fortitude—its capacity to maintain the truth-process in the long run (its “fidelity to fidelity,” as it were)—demands the willingness to “submit the perseverance of what is known to a duration [durée] peculiar to the not-known” (47). This is not easy. The event is difficult to sustain over time because it causes a major upheaval that complicates the subject’s existence. As Badiou maintains, “If I ‘fall in love’ (the word ‘fall’ indicates disorganization in the walk of life), or if I am seized by the sleepless fury of a thought [pensée], or if some radical political engagement proves incompatible with every immediate principle of interest—then I find myself compelled to measure life, my life as a socialized human animal, against something other than itself ” (2002, 60). The event is disorienting because it forces the subject to evaluate its life in terms of criteria that

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are different from its usual preoccupations. Fidelity, in turn, is a matter of working through this disorientation in order to impose a degree of organization on the utter disorganization generated by the event. This “secondary” organization is what Badiou calls “ethical consistency”:The subject’s ability to faithfully tend to the long-term effects of the event that has derailed it (60). One could of course say that life—even in its normal course—is inherently disorganized, that the disorganization of life is, quite simply, life itself.11 Yet there are unquestionably life-events that disrupt the subject’s usual rhythm, demanding a drastic rethinking of its overall existential landscape. To return to an earlier line of reasoning, one could say that the event releases drive energies that have been stored in (individually or socially) symptomatic ways of living; it disperses the congealed surplus agitation or overanimation that haunts the subject as a result of its normative seduction by the enigmatic signifiers of the Other. If this seduction determines the contours of the subject’s drive destiny, the event uncouples the drive from its destiny, allowing a new kind of destiny to slide into view. In Santner’s rendering, the event empowers the subject to “unplug” from the automatism of its drive destiny (2005, 121).This is exactly how the event, like the defeat of the vampire by the daimon, breaks the subject’s inertia, creating an opening for genuinely new possibilities.

The Temptation to Give Up The discharge of congealed energies in the subject’s fidelity to the event facilitates fresh forms of life.Yet to the extent that the event deprives the subject of its accustomed social supports, it, like the Lacanian act, threatens the very parameters of its symbolic existence, potentially generating a high level of anxiety. As a consequence, if the event sounds a compelling call to an alternative life-direction, the challenge of fidelity is to learn to heed this call without being destroyed by the torrent of newly released energies; the challenge is to learn how to survive the (partial) loss of one’s “known” life, one’s customary cadence and concerns. The temptation to give up—to betray the event—is always strong because it is difficult to hold onto the force of the revelation in the context of lives that are organized around the fulfillment of personal interests. In effect, our collective world more or less by definition undermines the subject’s fidelity because it actively coaxes it towards utilitarian goals (the “service of goods”). Furthermore, inasmuch as the symbolic rewards a “healthy,”

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sensible, and utterly levelheaded approach to existence, it tends to disparage the subject’s attempts to stay faithful to an event the minute this event seems somehow “pathological.” If we step back, for a moment, from the most esteemed values of our society, it is easy to see that there is something profoundly ideological about the assumption that we should live lives that are geared towards balance and longevity regardless of how bland these lives might prove to be. Why not, instead, valorize lives that get imbalanced and a little unhinged because they are guided by strong convictions? The truth-event is by definition an incident that—if only implicitly—raises this question. And because the event’s importance is accessible only to those who are caught up in it—because it may seem unintelligible or inconceivable to those who are looking at it from the outside—the pressure to betray it can be considerable. Badiou explains that even though the truth process itself cannot be touched by a crisis, cannot be marked by uncertainty or hesitation, the “some-one” who has chosen to undertake this process can: “Everyone is familiar with the moments of crisis faced by a lover, a researcher’s discouragement, a militant’s lassitude, an artist’s sterility” (2002, 78). For instance, the subject’s fidelity to the life-altering experience of falling in love can sometimes appear self-destructive (and even self-abusive) to the surrounding world so that friends, relatives, colleagues, and sometimes even therapists do their best to convince it that its passion is misguided. Likewise, the subject’s political fervor may strike others as deluded, unrealistic, or disproportionate. And an artist’s or scientist’s withdrawal from the concerns of the social world may be condemned as selfish or unwholesome (social isolation supposedly being an instant marker of pathology). Fidelity is demanding in part because it asks the subject to defend the value of something that is rationally indefensible.

The Event vs. the Simulacrum Perhaps even more arduous than the challenge of living up to the potential of the immortal within one’s being is the fact that it can be virtually impossible to distinguish between a genuine truth-event and an insidious simulacrum of such an event. A crisis of fidelity frequently crystallizes because the subject is doubtful about the truthfulness of its truthprocess. As Badiou states, “Opinion tells me (and therefore I tell myself, for I am never outside opinions) that my fidelity may well be a terror

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exerted against myself, and that the fidelity to which I am faithful looks very much like—too much like—this or that certified Evil. It is always a possibility, since the formal characteristics of this Evil (as simulacrum) are exactly those of a truth” (2002, 79). This proximity of the truth-event to the possibility of evil, and the difficulty of telling the two apart, is one of the major weaknesses of Badiou’s theory. One might say that if the event is where the daimon defeats the vampire, the simulacrum is where the vampire defeats the daimon. As I have illustrated, both the daimon and the vampire are characterized by a disconcerting kind of single-mindedness, so that the difference between the two has to do with how this single-mindedness is deployed. Likewise with the event and its simulacrum. If, as Badiou concedes, Nazism and other forms of dictatorial terror display some of the main characteristics of the event—such as the subject’s sense of being initiated to a cause that is more important than the self and that consequently induces it to antinormative actions—then the question becomes whether it might be more prudent to resist the impulse to be swept under the ethos of truth-events altogether. If there is the slightest chance that the event turns out to be a simulacrum, would it not be a sign of social responsibility to preserve a skeptical distance? Are the gains of staying faithful to a genuine event ever enough to compensate for the very real dangers of falling into the illusion of a false one? Such considerations—which are serious indeed—introduce an inherent ambiguity to the subject’s relationship to the event in the sense that it can never know, ahead of time, whether the event will turn out to be genuine or not; every act of fidelity carries within it the risk of being drastically wrong. The subject may even be aware that the very fervor it feels towards the event might be a manifestation of the various ways in which it is allowing itself to be duped. Add to this the opinions of others who might be trying to convince the subject that its fidelity is injudicious, and it is clear why the temptation to betray the event can (and perhaps should) sometimes be overwhelmingly strong. Yet Badiou postulates that if being deceived by a simulacrum releases evil to the world, betraying a genuine event does the same because it prevents the emergence of something of great value (the possibility of the impossible). It returns the subject to the “service of goods,” thereby ensuring the continuity of the cultural status quo. What is more, in the same way that the Lacanian subject betrays itself when it betrays the “truth” of its desire, the subject who betrays the event betrays itself by convincing itself

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that the immortal part of its being—the part that urged it to stay faithful to the event—never existed in the first place. This is how, Badiou specifies, we arrive at scenarios where, for example, a former revolutionary detracts his prior commitment, a spurned lover claims to have never loved his partner, and a tired scientist replaces his inventiveness by the bureaucratic minutia of his profession.12 In this fashion, the subject thwarts its own “becoming-subject” (2002, 79), and sometimes even ends up an enemy of the very truth it has helped to bring into being.

The Injunction to Keep Going Staying faithful to the event—and living up to the call of singularity that the event represents—hence takes courage and dedication. Badiou links the subject’s ethical consistency, its fidelity to truth, to the Lacanian injunction to not cede on one’s desire that we have already encountered several times. Simply put, Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, of not giving ground on one’s desire, provides Badiou with a general blueprint for his ethic of truths. Badiou expands on Lacanian ethics by proposing that to the degree that desire is constitutive of the subject of the unconscious, it by definition connects the subject to the “not-known” of its life—to the “immortal” aspects of its being.This, Badiou asserts, implies that “‘do not give up on your desire’ rightly means: ‘do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know.’” Or, more succinctly, “do not give up on your own seizure by a truth-process.” Lacan’s maxim therefore becomes, in Badiou’s interpretation, equivalent to the subject’s unqualified dedication to the event so that, in the final analysis, the ethic of truths commands: “‘Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you’” (2002, 47). If the crisis of fidelity emerges from the tension between the subject’s “situation” as a mortal and the event as a site of immortality, the maxim of ethical consistency states: “‘Keep going!’ Keep going even when you have lost the thread, when you no longer feel ‘caught up’ in the process, when the event itself has become obscure, when its name is lost, or when it seems that it may have named a mistake, if not a simulacrum” (Badiou 2002, 79). Ethical consistency, then, is a matter of persisting, of persevering beyond one’s normal perseverance, even when one is no longer sure of one’s direction, when one no longer feels excited about the investment

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one has made, when the outlines of the event are no longer obvious, and when one can no longer be sure that the truth the event names is not, in actuality, a simulacrum. The injunction to keep going demands the subject’s self-sacrificing devotion to its goal even when the cost of this devotion is its own well-being, and even when it feels besieged by forces of corruption, exhaustion, and distraction. The moment the subject betrays its fidelity, it is no longer a subject, but reverts to being a mortal “someone” who rates her “situation” to be more important than truth. Ethical consistency is thus, on some level, a matter of blind faith. The subject decides to act even when there is no assurance that its action will work as intended. It does not wait for all the relevant circumstances to click into place or become favorable but, rather, acts upon incomplete information because it understands that, in a fundamental sense, one is either “for” or “against” the event.13 Badiou’s ethic of truths, in short, shares with Lacanian ethics the ideal of acting without knowing how things will turn out in the end. However, much more than Lacan, Badiou accentuates the life-affirming implications of the event. As Hallward remarks, the imperative of the event is as much one “of power and joy as it is of austerity and faith” (2003, 266). Even if Badiou’s notion of the situated void quite loyally reproduces Lacan’s insights about the ways in which the real renders the symbolic inconsistent, and even if Badiou’s event, like the Lacanian act, transfigures the basic coordinates of the subject’s existence, Badiou resists connecting ethics to the death drive, viewing it, instead, as a matter of the subject’s positive identification with a ˇ izˇek to criticize Badiou for truth that is worth fighting for.This has led Z not recognizing the radical negativity of the Lacanian act. What remains ˇ izˇek asserts, “is this domain ‘beyond the Good’, beyond Badiou’s reach, Z in which a human being encounters the death drive as the utmost limit of human experience, and pays the price by undergoing a radical ‘subjective destitution’” (2000, 161).14 ˇ izˇek here censures Badiou for rejecting the terrifying elements of Z the real, as well as for ignoring the fact that the drive is always, in the final analysis, the death drive.Yet how one views that matter depends on one’s reading of Lacan. I have illustrated that one can understand Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis as an attempt to forge a personal and/or collective space for the kinds of passions that are not legitimate from the standpoint of the big Other. This is why I have placed so much emphasis on the idea that, according to Lacan, both the “truth” of the subject’s desire

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and the ethical act provide an entryway to the possibility for new possibilities. It seems to me that, inasmuch as Badiou is primarily interested in the process of converting the countercultural passion of the event into enduring effects, his theory is a powerful way of interpreting this aspect of Lacan. One might in fact suggest that Badiou clarifies what Lacan means when he asserts that the death drive does not merely represent an impulse towards self-annihilation, but also the “will to begin again.” We ˇ izˇek himself argues along similar lines on those occahave seen that Z sions when he presents the Lacanian act as a precursor to social change. Indeed, even his critique of Badiou is accompanied by an acknowledgment that the act as the “negative gesture of ‘wiping the slate clean’” at times creates an opportunity for new symbolic beginnings (2000, 153). ˇ izˇek’s disagreement with Badiou? What, then, is the cause of Z

Naming the Event ˇ izˇek and Badiou accept that the act/event can have social (politiBoth Z ˇ izˇek highlights the traumatizcal or ethical) consequences. But while Z ing impact of the act—the idea that the subject always pays for the act’s transformative power (if not with its life, then with its social viability)— Badiou, as we saw above, adopts a more triumphant tone by declaring that the event “names” the void for which it is an event, thereby carving a passage to a new type of social viability. More specifically, if ˇ izˇek tolerates the idea of a new symbolic beginning as long as the act Z is not deliberately calculated to bring it about, Badiou implies that such a beginning can only result from a rigorous effort to name the event. That is, while the event itself cannot be planned for, its elaboration over time—the subject’s exercise of fidelity—demands a measure of mindful exertion. “This matter of nomination is essential,” Badiou writes, for if the event is merely “a kind of flashing supplement” to the situation it attacks, what is retained of it after its disappearance “must be something like a trace, or a name, that refers back to the vanished event” (2002, 72). This suggests that the only way to “persevere” in the symbolic interruption that the event signifies is to devise a new symbolic paradigm—a new “situation,” if you will—that preserves the event’s imprint beyond its fleeting eruption. This is, Badiou proposes, how the event—the artistic invention, the scientific discovery, the loving encounter, the political inspiration—solidifies into an alternative social arrangement.

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ˇ izˇek to claim that Badiou’s event is in the end not very This leads Z different from the sinister workings of ideological interpellation in the sense that the more faithful the subject remains to the event, the more securely the event’s residue gets woven into a new symbolic edifice that serves hegemonic sociality (2000, 145). That is, even if Badiou’s event initially functions as an interpellation beyond ideological interpellation, the act of naming it inevitably brings it back into the creases of ideology. More concretely, if the event itself—the death of Christ, the historiˇ izˇek’s examples)—represents a traumatizing cal shock of revolution (Z encounter with the real, the transcription of the event into discourse (Christian doctrine, revolutionary rhetoric) redeems its trauma. “In Laˇ izˇek alleges, “naming is the new signifier that establishes . . . the canese,” Z New Order, the new readability of the situation” (141). In this manner, the event, however antithetical to the symbolic situation from which it arises, is, through the process of naming, given retroactive symbolic consistency; it undergoes an “ontologization” (183) that ushers it back into the domain of conventional knowledge. ˇ izˇek, is hence an act of betrayal that translates the Naming, for Z event’s disruptiveness into a new status quo (or “situation”).15 It softens the event’s radical edge, over time repairing the gaping hole in the canvas of the establishment. Or, in more directly Lacanian vocabulary, if the event brings the tumultuous energies of the real into the symbolic, its subsequent naming represents a victory of the symbolic over the real.Yet, from a less paranoid perspective, the process of naming is, exactly, what introduces the “possibility of the impossible” into our world—what allows what has been absolutely inadmissible within the regime of a given situation to become admissible. The “ontologization” of the event by naming is, in short, how we move from one constellation of knowledge to the next. Truth may punch a hole in the situation’s standard compilation of knowledges, but it is simultaneously, as Badiou remarks, “the sole known source of new knowledges”: It is precisely because truth violates established wisdom, because it reworks the “portable encyclopaedia” from which collective opinions draw their strength, that it manages to engender a new economy of knowledge (2002, 70).This does not necessarily mean that naming results in social or intellectual progress. But it does imply that formerly undisputed attitudes become less “self-evident” at the same time as new ones enter into the mix.

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The Lures of Power ˇ izˇek does—such a process of symIt might be tempting to dismiss—as Z bolic recuperation as something that dilutes the revolutionary potential of the event, yet this process is, arguably, an extremely powerful device for refashioning the world. If the event reveals the “impossible” void of a situation, naming gradually renders this impossibility into an alternative situational possibility.When it comes to political action in the real world, it would be difficult to overestimate the value of this, as Hallward spells out when he postulates: “What Badiou calls a ‘passion for the real’—the driving force, as he sees it, of the revolutionary projects of the twentieth century—is a passion for ‘what can be done, here and now,’ in the mateˇ izˇek with his idealizarial urgency of the present” (2003, 14). Unlike Z tion of the pure act that “risks everything cost what it may,” or Edelman with his idealization of the sinthomosexual as a figure of absolute social abjection, Badiou seems interested in what can be accomplished on the concrete level by flesh-and-blood actors who may be ready to sacrifice a whole lot for their cause, but who may nevertheless stop short of being willing to destroy themselves in the process. This does not mean that Badiou’s approach is flawless—a point I will return to in the conclusion to this book where I take him to task on his one-dimensional attack on multiculturalism. But I do think that there is real value in his attempt to ensure that emancipatory politics consists of making conceivable what, from within the situation, appears inconceivable. Because Badiou envisions the real as a tangible entity that can be named (the proletariat, inner-city youth, illegal immigrants, etc.), he believes that political action can reach its elusive core in ways that make a ˇ izˇek’s critique of the ontologization of the real difference.16 Moreover, Z event loses some of its power when we recall that naming the real is, for Badiou, always an incomplete act in the sense that the truth disclosed by the event cannot ever be (and should never be) totalizable. As a matter of fact, the two lures of power Badiou warns us against are (1) the temptation to reify the real after it has been named, thereby turning it into a site of plenitude, and (2) the temptation to absolutize the new truth, thereby turning it into a site of terror. Regarding the first of these lures, Hallward explains that it is one of the faces of evil to try to “monumentalize the void,” to worship it as a sacred source of identity or “perpetual ecstasy.” Consequently, it is essential that the subject of truth fight the inclination to turn the name

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(or the void that the name identifies) into something “inhabitable,” such as “the Third Reich, the Bastion of Socialism, the Land of Freedom and Democracy” (2003, 263). Indeed, one of the surest ways to tell the difference between a genuine event and a simulacrum is that while the event is “universally addressed” (applicable to everyone), the simulacrum attempts to translate the name into an identitarian “substance” of some sort (Badiou 2002, 73). For instance, the rise of National Socialism was unmistakably a simulacrum because its cohesion was erected around an ideology of race, blood, and soil. The Nazis promised to carry a particular community, the German people, to its destiny. However, because they conjured up the “plenitude” (the “national substance”) of a people rather than the void of the situation, they remained utterly incapable of truth (73). We see the same dynamic in the historical endeavor to transform the amorphous void of the “proletariat” into a socialist state with well-defined and well-defended borders and a clearly identifiable membership. Such an effort to convert the void into a nameable community inevitably ends in totalitarianism. Because the void is, as Badiou puts it, “the place of an absence, or a naked place, the mere taking place of a place” (quoted in Hallward 2003, 263), any attempt to “fill” it by definitive content—to transform the singular burst of the event into something “repeatable”—cannot but lead to a dangerous totalization. Along closely related lines—and this is the second lure—Badiou insists that it would be disastrous for any new truth to become all encompassing. Even if the event can name something of the real, it should never strive to name the whole of the real, for this would lead to dogmatic and tyrannical knowledges. Badiou thus recognizes that if there is bravery in ethical consistency, there is always also the potential for bigotry and narrow-mindedness; as I have noted, there is always the potential to become a vampire. Because the event implies unfailing faithfulness to a particular truth at the expense of all others, it cannot admit other viewpoints, other ways of looking at the “situation,” into its vocabulary: Inasmuch as the subject of truth is entirely caught up in the event, it is by definition unable to entertain conflicting perspectives. Or, to state the matter in a way that Badiou himself would not necessarily endorse: The very fact that the event’s truth is supposed to be universally applicable violently excludes those who do not find it applicable to themselves; to the extent that the event automatically delegitimizes all manifestations of “otherness,” it, for the time being at least, precludes alternative events— events that other individuals might find more convincing. Again, I will

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return to this problem in the end of this book when I interrogate the limitations of Badiou’s “universalism” (which are directly related to the limitations of his account of multiculturalism). Here it suffices to remind ourselves of what I already alluded to above, namely that there might be subsequent events that will contest the situational status quo established by the current one. And it is also important to remember that the elaboration of truth is never a discrete occurrence, but rather an open-ended process.

Truth as a Process Somewhat paradoxically, the fact that truth has no choice but to seek expression through a mortal “some-one” who cannot ever wholly transcend its mundane “interests”—who cannot ever fully become the immortal it aspires to be—is what prevents the absolutization of truth: Because it is impossible for the subject to entirely overcome its rootedness in the world of everyday opinions, its attempts to name the truth will by necessity remain partial. Moreover, Badiou clarifies that, in any given situation, there is at least one element that is inherently unnameable.This element is “not susceptible to being made eternal,” which means that it represents the “pure real” of the situation (2002, 86), expressing, as it were, the life of the real beyond truth. In the same way that every situation is punctured by a void, every truth—even as it struggles to name this void—is, in turn, punctured by a kernel of impossibility that stays unreachable; every truth contains an undecipherable component that cannot be drawn into the network of symbolization. This internal limit to truth, far from being a debilitating obstacle, ensures that the articulation of truth is an infinite process rather than a totalizing terror. In this sense, fidelity—insofar as it is genuine fidelity—resists fixing truth into a stable ideology. One might even say that the moment the subject arrests the creative movement of truth, it betrays the event. The idea that the elaboration of truth is an ongoing process could ˇ izˇek’s contention that naming the event is a form be used to counter Z ˇ izˇek, Badiou overlooks Laof ideological interpellation. According to Z can’s insistence that there is an unbridgeable gap between the act and its symbolization, between the encounter with the real and the signifier. Yet to the degree that Badiou insists that the event invariably contains an unnameable element that cannot be “forced”—that cannot be incorporated into the new situation—without sliding into terror, he appears

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to agree with Lacan. To be sure, the simulacrum results in totalization. But, as I stressed above, the genuine event asks the subject to refrain from trying to turn the void of a particular situation into a “substantive” form of meaning (such as Nazi ideology). From this perspective, the maxim of not ceding on one’s desire could be interpreted to mean that one should resist the temptation to completely close the space between the void and the “name” that aims to encapsulate this void; it could be said to imply that desire should remain partially unfulfilled, that some share of desire should always persist as desire rather than become completely overtaken by the jouissance of the act. ˇ izˇek may be contradicting himself when he, in his Furthermore, Z critique of Badiou, insists that the real is utterly unattainable. Is not the ˇ izˇek’s own view, a means of (momentarily) hitting the ethical act, in Z real? I have shown that Lacan suggests that the encounter (touché) with the real can enable us to break our repetitive pattern of never attaining “real” satisfaction. This to me is not very different from Badiou’s argument that the real can, under the exceptional circumstances of the event, be (always partially) “named” in ways that shatter the collective repetition compulsions that govern our social universe. In other words, it ˇ izˇek seems to me that Badiou merely puts a spotlight on an insight that Z himself to some extent endorses, namely that the energies of the real can, on occasion, be brought into contact with the symbolic world in ways that reconfigure this world. But I think we can do even better. If I have devoted the second half of this book to an examination of Lacan’s “ethics of sublimation,” it is because I believe that this ethics offers a sophisticated theory of both personal and social transformation. However, before we turn the page to a new set of questions, let me pose—however rhetorically—some that arise from our investigation of Badiou: If the event is a searing explosion of acumen that cannot be planned for,17 can we nevertheless somehow invite it into our lives? Can we increase its likelihood? Is there, for example, a connection between our ability to withstand the contingencies of existence and our capacity to welcome, and perhaps even court, events?18 Can we learn to tarry with life’s ambiguities in a manner that makes us more receptive to truth in Badiou’s sense? Can we approach what is “mortal” about our being with the kind of attitude of curiosity that entices the “immortal” to make an appearance? I would hypothesize that the more we manage to respond in the affirmative, the easier it is for us to cultivate the singularity of our being.

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5.

The Jouissance of the Signifier

ˇ izˇek and Badiou I introduced in the end of the The contrast between Z last chapter gets to the heart of how we envision subjective singularity, namely the relationship between the symbolic and the real. As I have noted, the early Lacan tended to view the jouissance of the real as someˇ izˇek has, for thing that was intrinsically inassimilable to the symbolic. Z the most part, followed this line of reasoning. By this I do not mean that ˇ izˇek regards the real as some sort of a positive, extrasymbolic excess Z that attacks the symbolic from the outside, for he repeatedly stresses that the real is internal to the symbolic: the “bone in the throat” or “immanent crack” that prevents the closure of the symbolic.1 Nevertheless, he remains devoted to the trope of a rebellious real that cannot be reconciled with symbolic reality. In contrast, Badiou, as I have shown, has developed the idea that the real (or the void that generates the truth-event) can be named and (to a limited extent) rewoven into the fabric of the symbolic. In this chapter, I would like to explain why I believe Badiou’s interpretation to be quite faithful to the spirit of the later Lacan. This is ˇ izˇek neglects the reconceptualization of the real that not to argue that Z Lacan performs in the final phase of his theorizing. But I do think that ˇ izˇek does not always admit the full weight of this reconceptualization, Z with the result that he stays resistant to interpretative avenues that have enormous implications for our understanding of subjectivity, politics, and ethics alike. Take the notion of what constitutes legitimate (or effective) political and/or ethical action. We have seen that those who regard the real as inassimilable to the symbolic tend to valorize the radical purity of both politics and ethics. On this view, the only “real” politics is a politics of the real whereby the subject severs its ties to the symbolic. The only “real” 105

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political actor is one who is willing to forgo all social supports and to defy all social directives in favor of an uncompromising act that shatters the symbolic status quo. Such politics is revolutionary by definition, shunning all reformative approaches. Likewise, the only “real” ethics is an ethics of the real whereby the subject refuses to cede on its desire even when this means destroying either itself or its social environment. Ethics that takes up the question of normative distinctions between right and wrong, that seeks to offer retribution for past injustices, or that focuses on the details of the self-other relationship does not count as “real” ethics. The “authentic” ethical subject is not one who (for instance) strives to create a more egalitarian world through processes of lobbying and negotiation, but rather Antigone in her solitary cave—a subject cut off from all networks of intersubjectivity.2 I have already pointed out that if one starts from the idea that the symbolic establishment is inherently hegemonic—the premise of much of post-68 theory—there are two ways to proceed: One can either reject the establishment altogether or one can try to gradually change it from within. Thinkers, such as Butler, who wish to subvert and reconstitute the establishment have tended to rely on the legacies of Foucault, whereas ˇ izˇek, who are more interested in revolutionary politics, those, such as Z have tended to rely on the legacies of Lacan.3 I have spent the first half of this book outlining the reasons for which Lacanian theory lends itself to the revolutionary perspective. And I have conceded that there are times when the ethical act may be the only viable option. Yet the limitations of this approach are also fairly obvious in that the more one distances oneself from the symbolic, the more difficult it becomes for one to have a transformative impact on it. Arguably, there are situations where a more incremental approach works better, which is why I do not see the need to exclude one approach at the expense of the other. Both have worth, depending on circumstances. And both can help us to think through the parameters of subjective singularity—of the kind of singularity that, within the framework of my argument, founds both political and ethical action. This is why one of the aims of this chapter, as well as of the rest of this book, is to illustrate that the alignment of Lacan primarily with revolutionary politics may be an oversimplification in the sense that his conceptualization of the relationship between the symbolic and the real also opens up the possibility of social transformation.

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Transformative vs. Revolutionary Politics ˇ izˇek has in recent years come under attack precisely because of his apZ parent disdain for transformative politics. In The Defense of Lost Causes (2009), he stages a spirited vindication of his thinking against those, such as Yannis Stavrakakis and Simon Critchley, who have accused him of fetishizing the suicidal act as the paradigmatic ethical event, of ridiculing those committed to concrete political action, and of advocating a nihilistic stance of not raising a finger to rectify the world’s injustices. Accordˇ izˇek dreams of a purifying act of “divine” violence, ing to his critics, Z cruelty, and force to the extent that his politics becomes, for all practical purposes, utterly apolitical (powerless to effect change in the real world). ˇ izˇek’s exasperation with this assessment. To some extent, I understand Z For example, I agree that Stavrakakis is (somewhat) mistaken in mainˇ izˇek views the act as something that is completely devoid taining that Z ˇ izˇek does frequently of social consequences. As we saw in Chapter 3, Z specify that the act can rearticulate the symbolic field—that, as he puts it, although the act is suicidal, its “stakes are symbolic” (2009, 305). Likewise, ˇ izˇek as a “Slovenian Hamlet” paralyzed to the Critchley’s caricature of Z point of political inertia by his fantasies of “an absolute, cataclysmic revolutionary act of violence” may be a bit overdrawn.4 ˇ izˇek’s critics are not entirely wrong, for if it is true At the same time, Z ˇ that Zizˇek has written “pages and pages”—as he keeps stating during his self-defense—that should prevent the kinds of readings that Stavrakakis and Critchley undertake, it is also true that he has written pages and ˇ izˇek is pages that leave themselves open to precisely such readings. Z not a self-consistent writer, which in itself may be fine, particularly in light of the argument I have been advancing in this book, namely that self-consistency is, on some level, always a fantasmatic defense against the surge of singularity. But this means that the conclusions a given ˇ izˇek he or she chooses to forereader draws depend on which pages of Z ˇ ground. Consider Zizˇek’s critique of Butler’s (2005) contention that we can never give a full account of ourselves because our discourse always already belongs to the symbolic—because we are “dispossessed” by the ˇ izˇek counvery language that we are forced to utilize to tell our story. Z ters Butler’s argument as follows: Lacan’s position is . . . that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical au-

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tonomy. Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do, in an act of negativity, is “cleanse the plate,” draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a “suicidal” gesture of a radical act—what Freud called “death drive” and what German idealism called “radical negativity.” (2005, 140)

ˇ izˇek’s rebuff of Butler’s exaggerated insistence As much as I agree with Z on the subject’s irremediable disempowerment (a topic I will return to in Chapter 7), and as much as I appreciate his insistence that being born into an established system of social meanings is not incompatible with autonomy, I cannot but wonder what his all-purpose valorization of the suicidal act, in this particular instance, accomplishes. What, exactly, are the act’s “symbolic stakes”? Does it have a transformative impact on the social order? Does it “cleanse the plate” so as to create a new order of things? Does something dynamic arise from the rupture? Or are we talking about destruction for the sake of destruction? ˇ izˇek’s reading of Lacan, on this occasion at least, does not Ironically, Z leave any more room for nonhegemonic varieties of meaning than the Butlerian “victim-mentality” he attacks.There is, in his account, no possibility of revising the symbolic through resignification, political intervention, avant-garde artistic practice, or any kind of Nietzschean revaluation of values.The symbolic is rotten to the core, meaning in all of its forms is corrupt, and every form of socially viable identity serves the interests of ˇ izˇek arrives at the power structure.This type of thinking is exactly how Z the idea that sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing—the very idea that Critchley derides.5 And it is also how he justifies the claim that the only way to undermine the symbolic is to self-destructively (or destructively) embrace the jouissance of the real—a claim I cannot fully endorse.Though I agree that the emphasis on the real can be an effective means to question the ideologically complacent edifice of the symbolic, I would insist that taking up permanent residency in the real is hardly a feasible option. Peering into the abyss, remaining aware of lack, tarrying with the negative, and even temporary destructiveness as a springboard to something constructive all make sense to me. But the idea of the real as an alternative to symbolic subjectivity simply does not. What would the plunge into the real achieve in tangible terms? What would it mean to “step out of the symbolic” altogether? Why the impulse to delimit resistance to one experiential register—the real—instead of interrogat-

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ing the vibrant interplay between the symbolic and the real (as well as the imaginary, for that matter)? If the goal is to escape the rigidity of the dominant symbolic, why build an equally categorical exit strategy?

From “Divine”Violence . . . ˇ izˇek’s When it comes to the purifying act of “divine” violence that Z critics indict him of valorizing, it is easy to find examples that point ˇ izˇek concludes exactly towards such a valorization. As a matter of fact, Z The Defense of Lost Causes—the very book where he declares that his critics are dead wrong—by a portraiture of divine violence that only ˇ izˇek’s logic holds as long as he confirms what these critics are saying. Z sticks to illustrations that support his reading of divine violence as “the counterviolence to the excess of violence that pertains to state power” (2009, 483). It makes sense to argue that divine violence is the “irrational” response to the invisible (and therefore all the more poisonous) violence of the state—that we cannot blame those who have been systematically deprived of their dignity for rising against their oppressors.6 It makes some sense to propose that those who have been excluded by the social order owe this order absolutely nothing and that their acts of violence are, consequently, located “‘beyond good and evil,’ in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical” (478). But when the discourse suddenly shifts to a celebration of Norman’s murder of Marion in Hitchcock’s Psycho, or to an admiring account of Che Guevara’s decision to point his loaded gun at the temple of a comrade-turned-traitor and pull the trigger, one has to ask what is so “divine” about these acts. ˇ izˇek asserts that divine violence is the kind of violence that funcZ tions as its own justification—that is not a means to an end (such as a more just social order), but rather a direct “manifestation of the divine” (2009, 485). Simply put, divine violence is divine precisely because it does not serve a purpose. Leaving aside the mystifications that necessarily accompany such an evocation of the “divine,” there is some merit to the argument. But does this mean that any random act of violence qualifies? And is it really true that the sociosymbolic order is, in every instance, so thoroughly tyrannical that only a divine “intervention” can rectify the situation? In slightly different terms, is there no political traction whatsoever to processes of symbolization—to the kinds of processes that Badiou is getting at through his notion of “naming”? Is the ethical (divine) act really the only effective political tool available to us?

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We are here up against a larger dilemma of contemporary ethics that Dominick LaCapra has, with his characteristic subtlety, identified as a tension between needing to forge a relationship to normative limits while simultaneously staying mindful of situations where it is necessary to transgress these limits. As he explains, there are some normative limits “you might want to place in question, some you may want to reform, and others you may want to test critically and perhaps validate” (2001, 154). In other words, it is simply not the case that all normative limits are diabolical: There may be some that are actually worth affirming (after they have been critically assessed). This does not change the fact that there are situations where the only way to arrive at a palatable set of normative limits is to exceed the previous ones (this is what Badiou’s process of truth is, arguably, meant to accomplish). But the point is that how we choose to move forward should be context specific, that there may be situations where it is much more productive to uphold normative limits than to blow them to pieces. Regardless of how defective our statesanctioned systems of justice are, there are times when they are the best (or even the only) way to check the abuses of power. LaCapra observes that poststructuralist theory is often so focused on wanting to transgress any and all limits that it fails to pay “sufficient attention to the problem of the actual and desirable relationship between excess and limits” (154). ˇ izˇek, despite his vehement dislike of all things postI would say that Z structuralist, frequently falls into the same trap. Indeed, he could at times be said to be guilty of what Zupancˇicˇ, in her Ethics of the Real, describes as an attempt to “force the encounter with the Real” (2000, 236).

. . .To Forcing the Act Zupancˇicˇ speculates that the inevitable result of any attempt to force the real to appear through an act (or an event) is a state of terror. While the encounter with the real that the act (or event) stages is always terrorinducing in that it throws us out of kilter with our social milieu and identity, Zupancˇicˇ cautions us against confusing this terror with the terror that ensues from taking the encounter with the real as our direct objective: “it is necessarily to distinguish between the terror inherent in the event, in the Real, and terror as a strategy that aims at forcing the impossible, the Real, to appear” (2000, 235–236). In exactly the same way as Badiou postulates that striving to name all the components of “the

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void” of a given situation leads to terror, thereby undercutting the ethical power of the truth-event, Zupancˇicˇ believes that trying to compel the act or the event to take place expresses an “obscure desire for catastrophe” that no longer has anything to do with ethics. The real, after all, is not an ethical category. When we forget this, when we envision the real as a goal “that must be realized at any price” (236), we are in danger of embracing terror. Bringing Kant into conversation with Sade, Zupancˇicˇ points out that there is an enormous difference between our (unpremeditated) encounter with the real on the one hand, and the tendency to try to turn this encounter into a “user’s guide” on how we should conduct ourselves as ethical subjects on the other. If the former can revamp not only our subjectivity but also, to some extent at least, the social world, the latter, while perhaps overtly “designed” to subvert the dominant order, easily veers into “methodical masochism” that reifies pain, suffering, and self-injury as an ethical stance in itself. More particularly, translating the Kantian notion that ethics has nothing to do with our well-being into an injunction to act against our well-being (or that of others) collapses Kant and Sade, so that destruction (or destitution) become “the (immediate) object of our will” (2000, 236). It turns the Kantian categorical imperative into a simulacrum of ethics (in Badiou’s sense), namely terror.7 Considering the real as an immediate goal therefore does not give us ethics, but merely celebrates destruction (or destitution). Zupancˇicˇ specifies that when we aim directly at the real, death or some other calamity becomes our “ultimate horizon” so that, ironically, the purpose ˇ izˇek at times of life gets “reduced to the opportunity to die.” Arguably, Z (not always, but at times) lapses into this mentality, as does Edelman with his alignment of the sinthomosexual with the destructiveness of the death drive without any attention to the drive’s more vitalizing potential. One of the main problems with this stance is that it sees life as utterly pointless and devoid of value and, consequently, as Zupancˇicˇ remarks, privileges the moment of death as the only time we are “truly awake” (2000, 237). It ignores the possibility that the social world can also afford moments of awakeness—that not all forms of symbolic existence deaden us but can, instead, be experienced as deeply enlivening (and sometimes even enriching). This is why it is important to construct socially viable alternatives to the ethical (or divine) act—alternatives that admit the value of transformative politics.

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The Inconsistency of the Signifier ˇ izˇek is for the most part unable (or unwilling) to do One reason that Z so is that he does not sufficiently distinguish between the symbolic order as a hegemonic structure and the signifier as a tool of resistance. To be exact, his characterization of the relationship between the symbolic and the real reveals that he tends to conflate the signifier with the most ˇ izˇek’s repressive aspects of the symbolic. Though there are moments in Z work when he recognizes the ways in which the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real work in tandem to constitute human existence,8 the early core of his theory—one that is articulated in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and that is never entirely supplanted—views symbolic structures of signification as a colonizing attempt to neutralize the terˇ izˇek in fact postulates that the symbolization rifying impact of the real. Z of the real is precisely what brings the big Other into being as a fantasmatic site of coherence and authority: What is the “empty gesture” by means of which the brute, senseless reality is assumed, accepted as our own work, if not the most elementary ideological operation, the symbolization of the Real, its transformation into a meaningful totality, its inscription into the big Other? We can literally say that this “empty gesture” posits the big Other, makes it exist: the purely formal conversion which constitutes this gesture is simply the conversion of the pre-symbolic Real into the symbolized reality—into the Real caught in the web of the signifier’s network. In other words, through this “empty gesture” the subject presupposes the existence of the big Other. (1989, 230)

ˇ izˇek here describes the real as a “pre-symbolic” entity explicitly That Z contradicts his later critique of Stavrakakis for being an unmitigated fool ˇ izˇek 2009, 316–19). This confirms my point for doing the same (see Z about the “pages and pages” that can guide the reader to conclusions ˇ izˇek no longer endorses, but it is easy enough to explain by the that Z fact that the early Lacan does sometimes portray the real in these terms (more on this below). And the main argument about the symbolization of the real being the elementary ideological gesture by which our social world gains intelligibility is right on target. But what intrigues me is the implicit portrayal of the signifier as an aggressive device that violates the real by catching it in its network. According to this account, although

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the real mulishly eludes the castrating impact of the signifier, it is at the same time always in danger of being preyed upon by this very signifier. I agree that the aesthetics of the signifier can serve as a shield against the traumatizing impact of the real, hiding the fact that the consistency of subjectivity is a mirage designed to make our lives more manageable. But the image of the signifier as a death-dealing force that violates the ˇ izˇek’s (much more recent) disreal merits further consideration. Take Z cussion of the lamella as an “undead” organ without a body (as a partial object): For a human being to be “dead while alive” is to be colonized by the “dead” symbolic order; to be “alive while dead” is to give body to the remainder of Life-Substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization (lamella). What we are dealing with here is thus the split between Other and Jouissance, between the “dead” symbolic order which mortifies the body and the nonsymbolic Life-Substance of jouissance. These two notions . . . designate a properly monstrous dimension—Life is the horrible palpitation of the lamella, of the nonsubjective (acephal) “undead” drive which persists beyond ordinary death; death is the symbolic order itself, the structure which, as a parasite, colonizes the living entity. What defines death drive in Lacan is this double gap: not the simple opposition of life and death, but the split of life itself into “normal” life and horrifying “undead” life, and the split of the dead into “ordinary” dead and the “undead” machine. The basic opposition between Life and Death is thus supplemented by the parasitical symbolic machine (language as a dead entity which “behaves as if it possesses a life of its own”) and its counterpoint, the “living dead” (the monstrous life-substance which persists in the Real outside the Symbolic). This split which runs within the domains of Life and Death constitutes the space of the death drive. (2005, 172)

ˇ izˇek makes a compelling argument about the manner in which death Z is internal to life and life is internal to death: The living human being is “dead while alive” because it is colonized by a “dead” symbolic, but “alive while dead” (or “undead”) because a part of the real always escapes the murderous signifier. We have learned that this “undeadness” is what, in a certain sense, underlies the persistence of singularity, ensuring that the subject is always something more than just a piece of the world. ˇ izˇek once However, what is noteworthy in the present context is that Z

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again—against his own better judgment, as it were, and certainly against his scathing condemnation of Stavrakakis—posits a binary split between the symbolic and the real, the Other and jouissance, maintaining that the symbolic mortifies the body and its nonsymbolic jouissance, and depicting language as a “dead entity which ‘behaves as if it possesses a life of its own.’” Language, in other words, is a parasitical machine that gorges on the life-substance of the real. While thinkers from Derrida to Butler regard language as something inherently mobile—as a nimble entity that is able to bring forth a multitude of unexpected, startling, and rebelˇ izˇek connects it to the most stagnant and complacent lious meanings—Z components of the symbolic order. ˇ izˇek does not entirely appreciate the full impliOne might say that Z cations of his own contention that the most radical aspect of Lacanian theory is the recognition that the real renders the symbolic unreliable. As he explains with regard to the signifier, “As soon as the field of the signifier is penetrated by enjoyment it becomes inconsistent, porous, perforated—the enjoyment is what cannot be symbolized, its presence in the field of the signifier can be detected only through the holes and inconsistencies of this field” (1989, 122). Fair enough. But why not take the next logical step of conceding that the structural impossibility of symbolic closure is precisely what makes the play of (re)signification possible? Why not admit that the porosity of the Other is precisely what allows it to undergo constant transformation, that the inconsistency of the signifier is merely the flipside of its creativity, of its continuous capacity to generate new significations? From this perspective, the fact that the signifier is always disrupted by the energies of the real makes it open to the polyvalence of meaning. In (early) Derridean terms, one could say that the reason the big Other contains the possibility of counterhegemonic articulations of meaning is that it does not possess enough stability to ever entirely contain the “overabundant” play of signification (Derrida 1980, 290).9 ˇ izˇek acknowledges the possibility of “experiencing the Even though Z word in its violent and contingent ‘becoming,’ before it acquires the features of logos, the universe of symbolic necessity” (2001, 54), language for him functions for the most part as an implement of totalization— one that seeks to overpower the real. The signifier, he asserts, “‘dissects’ the body and subordinates it to the constraint of the signifying network.” The word is the “murder of a thing,” he continues, so that the “power of understanding consists in this capacity to reduce the organic

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whole of experience to an appendix to the ‘dead’ symbolic classification” (51).10 Lacan undoubtedly contributes to this vision by connecting subject formation to the idea that the emerging subject is by definition subjected to disciplinary structures of signification, and by suggesting that the body, as he expresses it, “suffers from the signifier” (1960, 118). But this is hardly Lacan’s only view on language.While it is certainly the case that the symbolic contains signifiers that are “dead” in the sense that ˇ izˇek describes them, it also contains others that are vividly alive. As a Z consequence, one does not always need to exit the symbolic in a grand gesture of subjective destitution (or divine violence) in order to activate the subversive potentialities of the real. One merely needs to mobilize the “overabundance” of the signifier.

Lacan’s Reading of Joyce Lacan’s late seminar on the sinthome—which I discussed in passing in Chapter 3—confirms this. In this seminar, Lacan carries out a close reading of James Joyce, postulating that the sinthome is a peculiar kind of signifier that “does not cease to write itself ’ (1975, 13; trans. mine).While the signifier under normal conditions keeps the real at bay, concealing and containing its disquieting pulse, in the sinthome the real manages to overtake the signifier so that the latter no longer conveys coherent meaning but becomes, instead, a site of jouis-sens—of meaning permeated by enjoyment; the sinthome, in short, is where jouissance engulfs meaning. Admittedly, it would be easy to take this to imply that jouissance destroys meaning altogether, thereby ushering the subject to the heart of psychosis (or the ethical/divine act). Yet Lacan maintains that the sinthome does not merely obliterate symbolic structures, but also animates them. More specifically, the signifier’s encounter with the real revives the signifier so that it is precisely those forms of signification that capture something of the energies of the real that remain innovative; it is only through the lively interaction between the symbolic and the real that the signifier manages to replenish itself. Without this interaction, Lacan suggests, the signifier would rapidly become worn out and barren. On this account, the signifier’s ability to activate, incorporate, and transport morsels of the real is a precondition of creativity. Speaking of Joyce’s inspired writing process, Lacan argues that Joyce is able to invent rebellious forms of language—forms of language that alter the normal rules of signification—not only because he manages

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to galvanize the real, but also because he identifies with his sinthome. We have learned that the sinthome organizes the subject’s jouissance on such a fundamental level that the subject feels that in compromising its sinthome, it compromises itself—that, insofar as the sinthome represents what in the subject is “more than” its social identity, it will rather destroy itself than relinquish its sinthome. And we also have learned that Lacan came to think that the aim of analysis was to allow the subject to identify with its sinthome, for doing so made it possible for it to disconnect itself from the desire of the Other. Most importantly, we have learned that the sinthome resides beyond the reach of the signifier, which is why it does not respond to analytic treatment, but can only be “assumed” as the symptomatic kernel of one’s being. Against this backdrop, it is telling that Lacan concludes that writing, for Joyce, is equivalent to the sinthome, that it is precisely because Joyce is infected by the “virus” of the sinthome that he is a true artist. As Lacan explains: “it is clear that Joyce’s art is something so particular that the term sinthome is what suits it best” (1976, 94; trans. mine). On Joyce’s jouissance, Lacan in turn states, “Read the pages of Finnegans Wake, without trying to understand. It reads. If it reads . . . it is because one feels present the jouissance of the one who wrote it” (165; trans. mine). Lacan’s interpretation of Joyce’s writing suggests that, for Joyce, compromising his writing would have been akin to compromising his sinthome—that, for Joyce, what was “more than” his social identity was, exactly, his writing. In this scenario, the signifier (writing) is not neatly ˇ izˇek, but aligned with the hegemonic symbolic, as it frequently is for Z rather stands for what challenges the latter’s seamlessness. This implies ˇ izˇek stresses—Lacan connects the sinthome to that even though—as Z the death drive, he does not invariably regard identification with the sinthome as a matter of subjective destitution (or divine violence). In the case of Joyce, such an identification is a means of linking the symbolic and the real so as to generate fresh forms of signification.11 Indeed, Lacan interprets Finnegans Wake as Joyce’s “solution” to the fact that the death drive is inherently unthinkable. As Lacan declares, “The death drive, it is the real insofar as it cannot be thought except as impossible. That is to say, every time that it shows the tip of its nose, it is unthinkable. . . . What is unbelievable is that Joyce . . . could not find another solution but to ˇ izˇek advocates the write Finnegans Wake” (1975, 25; trans. mine). While Z pure “no” of subjective destitution (or divine violence) as a response to what is “impossible” about the death drive, Lacan here intimates that

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Joyce weaves this impossibility into the folds of his art, thereby fending off death (at least for the time being).

Epiphanies That Transmit the Real Without question, the insurrection of the real within the symbolic in Joyce’s writing conveys the destructive force of the death drive. Joyce dissolves meaning. He undoes—destroys, dismembers, and massacres— language. However, Joyce and his art are clearly driven by an élan or improvised ardor rather than (merely) by an inclination towards destitution or violence. Regardless of how subversive his writing gets, Joyce endeavors to awaken rather than to choke the signifier. By bringing the real in contact with the signifier, he imparts to language an unparalleled dexterity and resourcefulness. One might in fact say that Joyce’s signifiers are unique precisely to the degree that they breathe to the rhythm of the real. Though there is no doubt that language is a trespasser, an intruder, in the domain of the real, Joyce reveals that it is exactly because the real makes language struggle—forces it to fight for its territory, as it were— that the encounter with the real can make language fiercely inventive. He demonstrates that even though the real as such cannot be written, one can write in such a way as to brush against it; one’s signifiers can transmit energizing scraps of the real. Roberto Harari points out that Joyce’s artistic practice is pioneering precisely because it “reaches the edge of the real” (2002, 222), because it, in fact, allows Joyce “to bite into bits of the real” (141). In other words, Joyce’s “calling”12—and we can understand this calling in Santner’s sense of being summoned beyond ideological interpellation—is to take language to its limits in order to rebuild it. This is why his writing is characterized by a dazzling epiphanic force. More specifically, if an epiphany “is a sudden glimmer revealing something essential” (66), the vigor of Joyce’s epiphanies arises from the fact that they “leave language unknotted” (73) so as to create a portal for the real and, ultimately, for the reconfiguration of language. In a sense, unknotting is required for reknotting to become possible: Language is disfigured so that the tissue of signification can be reshaped in previously unimaginable ways.13 And although epiphanic creativity by definition courts subjective disintegration, the fact that it always, in the final analysis, holds onto the signifier means that it never plummets entirely into the real. This is why Joyce’s writing can approach psychosis without never fully falling into it.

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What is distinctive about Joyce—and one reason that Joyce manages to stay so close to his sinthome—is that he is not particularly interested in making meaning in the rational sense, but often remains on the level of the epiphany. As a result, Harari asserts, “it must be said that what Joyce does is in no way metaphorical. One could speak, rather, of metonymic residues, the remnants of an ecstatic experience, dislocated fragments that are displaced into writing and that, as broken pieces, make us feel penetrated by a nothingness” (2002, 74). This explains why Joyce’s texts tend to be close to incomprehensible. They sidestep metaphors in order to convey us directly to “the hiding place of being” in a gesture that is comparable to the Heideggerian image of the unveiling of truth: “Heidegger, in his concept of truth (which was adapted, with certain reservations, by the early Lacan), insists that Being is unveiled, its truth exposed by the lifting of a veil. This was what the Greeks called alethea: truth as unveiling and not, in its academic definition, adequation. Joyce sets out, by means of his epiphanies, to lift the veil, an act that, as a literary undertaking, can only expose a ‘split,’ if it fails to give rise to a metaphor” (74). That is, it is because Joyce’s writing does not always communicate meaning that it manages to communicate something else—something more immediately visceral. Like the Heideggerian disclosure of truth (“the lifting of the veil”), it aims at the essence of being rather than at its distant echo. And it invites the reader to experience jouissance through an intimate engagement with the text. It in fact enacts a certain eroticization of language—an eroticization that makes the act of reading Joyce a different experience from the act of reading most other writers.

Enjoyment-in-Meaning Lacan’s appraisal of Joyce’s subversive writing practice is hardly original in the context of twentieth-century literary criticism. As a matter of fact, Julia Kristeva’s 1974 Revolution in Poetic Language (note the closeness of the publication date to Lacan’s seminar on Joyce) already articulates many of the same themes. My point, then, is not that Lacan presents a groundbreaking interpretation of Joyce, but rather that those interpreters of Lacan who ignore this component of his theory end up producing overly dispirited theories of subjectivity as well as of (the impossibility of ) social change. They valorize the real as a site of subjective destitution (or divine violence) in part because they fail to recognize the signifier as a vehicle of innovative energy and regard it, instead, primarily as a pas-

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sive pawn of normative sociality. Yet if we allow for the possibility that the signifier does not invariably obey the dictates of the big Other, and that the unruly energies of the real can regenerate, rather than merely weaken, the symbolic, it becomes apparent that the signifier is not always an instrument of ideological interpellation. While it is obvious that we are often confronted by dead signifiers—signifiers that contain no trace of the real—language is by definition as much a locus of creative potential as it is of hegemonic power. Another way to express the matter is to say that in the final stage of his thinking, Lacan no longer regards language and jouissance as mutually exclusive, but suggests that the signifier remains creative to the extent that it transmits jouissance. In Lacan’s early work, not only did the subject’s entrance to the symbolic order mutilate the body as a site of immediate enjoyment, but bodily jouissance was inherently unrepresentable through language; jouissance was the basic stumbling block of signification, the riddle in the face of which the signifier faltered.14 ˇ izˇek I quoted above are not incorrect This is why the statements by Z even if they contradict his claim (in response to Stavrakakis) that he has never envisioned the real as external to the symbolic. However, by the time Lacan gave his seminar on Joyce, he had begun to pay attention to the manner in which jouissance inhabits the signifier itself. He came to admit the possibility that jouissance might manifest itself as the insistent throb of the drives within language. And he developed the notion of jouis-sens to convey this connection between language and jouissance: the fact that jouissance is inherent to meaning rather than something that resides completely outside or beyond it. The sinthome captures, precisely, the nexus of meaning and jouissance that results in jouis-sens. Dominiek Hoens and Ed Pluth explain that this does not imply that the sinthome communicates a particular, identifiable meaning, or even that it contains meaning that could be communicated. Rather, the enjoyment that the sinthome grants is the enjoyment intrinsic in the production of meaning, having to do specifically with the poetic qualities of language, with the fact that imaginative language transmits significatory ambivalence and—to once again use Derrida’s expression—overabundance.The sinthome, in short, makes polyvalent meaning possible. Even though it itself is not in the least bit concerned with the various meanings generated, it functions as a locus of enjoyment-in-meaning, enjoyment in the proliferation of meaning. Indeed, insofar as it remains enigmatic, beyond easy comprehension, it

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calls forth a countless number of interpretative efforts. Like a poem, it is “a pure, evocatory thing” that “reads you” at the same time as you try (and repeatedly fail) to read it (2002, 11).15 This is why Hoens and Pluth conclude that the sinthome is “the meaning of meaning, a kind of tautological point presupposed for the development of a chain of differentiated, open-ended significations.” According to this analysis, “One can only be open to meanings because one is always-already enjoying the structure within which meaning occurs. Your ultimate identity, the ultimate support of your being, is the particular way in which you enjoy meaning: your sinthome” (12).

Joyce as a Singular Individual The implications of interpreting jouissance as what both animates language and results from the creative usage of language are far reaching in that jouissance is no longer merely the seditious underside of the signifier but, rather, foundational to its innovative thrust. Likewise, the signifier no longer merely domesticates the real, but also functions as a means through which jouissance become integrated into symbolic existence. That is, even as the symbolic makes inroads into the real, the insurgence of the real within the symbolic simultaneously forces the latter to undergo a radical alteration. We are hence not talking about a one-sided activity whereby the real is wounded by the signifier, but rather about a more reciprocal process whereby the signifier is remolded to the extent that the real is incorporated into its trajectory. The signifier and the real are both forced to adapt, and this is at least as much a matter of transformation as it is of violation, given that adaptation is usually a necessary precondition of renewal of any kind. This new understanding of the relationship between the signifier and the real is in part what allows Lacan, in his seminar on the sinthome, to present the subject as an active inventor of meaning rather than as a passive recipient of hegemonic forms of meaning.16 More specifically, Lacan conjectures that language challenges normative symbolic structures as much as it reinforces them, and that to some degree we create the language that we use. As he asserts, “This assumes or implies that one chooses to speak the language that one effectively speaks. . . . One creates a language insofar as one at every instant gives it a sense, one gives a little nudge, without which language would not be alive. It is alive to the extent that one creates it at every moment. It is in this sense . . . that

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everyone, at every instant, gives a little nudge to the language that he speaks” (1976, 133; trans. mine). This statement—which implies that we are capable of giving language a little “nudge” that makes it uniquely “ours”—is dramatically different from the earlier (and more familiar) Lacanian idea that we are always already subjected to oppressive configurations of collective meaning. Lacan thus proposes that each of us has some leeway in organizing the signifiers of the big Other. That is, we can assert our singularity not only by exchanging the symbolic for the real, but also by bringing the real into the symbolic.This is exactly what Joyce does, and it is his ability to do so that leads Lacan to characterize him as a wholly singular individual. As Lacan muses, “Portrait of the Artist. The artist, one must write it by placing all the emphasis on the the. . . . One can have faith in Joyce. If he says the, it’s because he thinks that, the artist, it’s himself alone, there, he is singular” (1975, 17; trans. mine). Lacan goes on to support his interpretation by stressing that Joyce becomes a unique “individual” precisely because he is able to connect the symbolic with the sinthome (as the depository of jouissance).17 In other words, it is because Joyce is hopelessly stuck on his sinthome, because his jouissance stubbornly circles around a specific nexus of satisfaction—one that compels him to write in his inimitable manner—that he is a singular subject. And what is so remarkable about this is that Joyce manages to attain such a singular way of being without forgoing the symbolic. His singularity is quasi-social, intrinsically tied to the meandering path of the signifier.

Singularity as a Social Phenomenon It may not be possible (or even desirable) for everyone to be singular in Joyce’s sense. What distinguishes Joyce from most of us is that he seemed to be able to “bite into the real” on a fairly regular basis; he was able to flirt with psychosis in a manner that many of us are not. In addition, he may have hurt those around himself, particularly his wife, in ways that most of us would like to avoid. Yet I would still argue that, to a certain extent, we all have the capacity to navigate the relationship between the symbolic and the real in ways that produce jouissance. We, potentially at least, have the power to link the sinthome as a site of compulsion—as what is inexorable in our existence in the sense that it “does not cease to write itself ”—with the signifier as what allows us to write ourselves onto the map of the symbolic. While the symbolic is hegemonic in that

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it carries the weight of tradition, of all the cultural fictions that have over time solidified into seemingly binding conventions, it cannot ever draw us into its circuit in an entirely dependable fashion.This is why conceiving the relationship between the symbolic and the real as a unilateral process that translates the energies of the real into oppressive symbolic formations is too reductive. Likewise, the idea that symbolic subjectivity represses the asocial energies of the real cannot be remedied by a theory that completely annihilates the social in favor of the real, for this merely reverses the poles of the binary, replacing one form of brutality ˇ izˇek’s noby another. (This, incidentally, is one of the problems with Z tion of divine violence as a “response” to the systemic violence of the establishment.) I have demonstrated that moments when the real penetrates the symbolic are not necessarily indicative of the failure of signification, but rather of its irrepressible agility. Such moments may well be productive irregularities that serve to disband congealed structures of meaning, ˇ izˇek himself thereby ensuring that the symbolic is never static but, as Z affirms in his critique of Butler, historical. What we witness here is the unraveling of the largely artificial opposition between the Foucauldians ˇ izˇek and Derrideans on the one hand and the Lacanians on the other. If Z tells us that the real always undermines the symbolic, and if poststructuralism tells us that the signifier always overflows the normative strictures designed to contain it, I have illustrated that these processes are merely two sides of the same coin: It is because the real is rebellious that the signifier can be rebellious.This is easy to overlook as long as we think of the relationship between the signifier and the real as one where the signifier “colonizes” the real, which is why I have chosen to emphasize that the signifier in fact offers one of the main outlets for the rebellious energies of the real; it functions as a means of binding our surplus agitation. This, in some ways, is the classical definition of sublimation but, as we will see in the next chapter, Lacan develops the issue to the point that sublimation is no longer a matter of artistic, scientific, or intellectual exertion but, quite simply, synonymous with human life as such. Understanding the relationship between the symbolic and the real in this way also allows us to envision subjective singularity as a social, rather than a completely asocial, phenomenon. It allows us to see that we can evade ideological interpellation not only by “assuming” the nonexistence of the big Other through a mutinous act of subjective destitution (or divine violence), but also, quite simply, by playing with the inconsistency

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of the Other. And it adds a valuable spin to Badiou’s concept of “naming,” enabling us to think more concretely about what it means to transform the embers of the truth-event into an enduring social reality. This is important because aligning singularity exclusively with the real leads exactly to the kinds of evils that Stavrakakis and Critchley—perhaps a ˇ izˇek of perpetuatlittle too strongly, but not entirely falsely—accuse Z ing. Within the real, there is no difference, no otherness, no opposition, and therefore no possibility of either politics or ethics in the usual sense of these terms. As a consequence, the valorization of the real as a site of political and ethical “purity” all too easily turns into a post-political and post-ethical pipedream that, paradoxically enough, transforms singularity into something that no longer signifies as such. After all, even if the singular is what is not a part of any whole, it needs this whole—this collectivity—to register as singularity: It needs difference, otherness, and opposition to set itself apart from the whole. The human being cannot be pure substance (the real of the body) or pure subject (symbolic identity), for it is composed of both body and meaning-making capacity. This is why I have argued that if signification is a process by which the energies of the real are (always incompletely) brought into the symbolic, then the signifier is, potentially at least, an effective means to cultivate our singularity. One might even propose that it is through the creative work of the signifier that what is “immortal” about us (the real) becomes a part of our “mortal” (symbolic) identity. Or, to use a more precise formulation, Lacan’s reading of Joyce implies that the “immortality” (the agitation or “undeadness”) of the real can be transformed into symbolically viable modalities of vitality; the excess (“too muchness”) of the drives can become the basis for the excess (“overabundance”) of meaning. In this sense, pioneering forms of meaning production are a way to infuse the “dead” signifier with the “undead” energies of the drive so as to keep the symbolic moving forward. This gives us yet another rendering of how what is “impossible” (jouissance) becomes the foundation of the possible (innovation). According to this interpretation, it is not only how we die (literally or figuratively)—or even how we face the prospect of our mortality (as phenomenology asserts)—that singularizes us. Rather, it is how we choose to inhabit language that gives our identities a distinctive resonance. Although being compelled to participate in a common symbolic system on one level deprives us of autonomy, on another level it offers us the opportunity of carving out a singular place within that system, of

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claiming language for our own purposes. Harari reminds us that “when the symbol and the sinthome are separated, this is an effect of the discourse of the master” (2002, 88). In other words, when our discourse fails to transmit the real (when it is separated from the sinthome), it obeys the master’s dominant law (thereby remaining unoriginal). Discourse that communicates the real, in contrast, crafts what I have been calling a “character.” Singularity, in this sense, is a matter of creative living, of the always-idiosyncratic ways in which we manage to activate the energies of the real within the symbolic. One could even say that through creative activity, what in the subject is “more than” itself (the energies of the real, the sinthome) comes to permeate the subject’s social identity in ways that cause it to stand out from the pool of standardized (and sanitized) humanity.

The Language of Resistance All of this raises the question of what kind of language “qualifies” as a sign of singularity. If we accept Joyce as a paradigmatic singular subject, we might be left with the impression that only the obscure, ambiguous, fragmented, and to some extent indecipherable discourse of modernist (and postmodernist) literature fits the mode of singularity—that the singular, even when it is no longer fully allied with the asociality of the real, carries the mark of this asociality in the form of solipsism and nonreferentiality. That is, we might be forced to acknowledge that the asociality of the real returns as the asociality of language so that the singular self is only capable of producing discourse that is not immediately accessible to others (because the conventional social link is—intentionally or unintentionally—severed).There is undeniably a seedling of truth in this. Insofar as the real transmits the traumatic impact of the death drive, its entrance into language can, as Kristeva puts it, “be spotted precisely in the dissociation of form itself.” In this sense, the disfiguration of language is the prerequisite of our ability to reach “ultimate thresholds of inscribable dislocation and jouissance” (1989, 27). From this perspective, even if the singular can be conceptualized as a social phenomenon, there is still always something vehemently asocial about it. Is singular language, then, by definition traumatized language? There is a lot to support this reading, for one could argue that the kind of language that exhibits the signs of formal dissociation (in Kristeva’s sense) expresses a certain incapacity to work through trauma. LaCapra in fact

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proposes that the significatory aporias, anxieties, excesses, hyperboles, and undecidabilities of modernist and postmodernist discourses, whether literary or theoretical, can be interpreted as a species of post-traumatic writing. More specifically, the intense resistance to narrative closure, totalization, and harmonization that frequently characterizes such discourses could be hypothesized to arise from a compulsive repetition of the very traumas that they are trying to overcome. Such discourses are, as it were, haunted by the personal or collective traumas of the past and, consequently, performatively caught up in an endless cycle of narrative irresolution that is, at bottom, a symptomatic form of acting out. On this view, the “singularity” of Joycean or equivalent discourses might simply be the underside (or “upside”) of the kind of trauma that has not been adequately processed. Yet LaCapra also stresses that modernist and postmodernist discourses might offer a “relatively safe haven” for responding to trauma (2001, 180). If redemptive narratives deny the persistence of trauma, “nonredemptive narratives are narratives that are trying to come to terms with trauma in a post-traumatic context, in ways that involve both acting out and working through” (178). Experimental narratives, in other words, provide a capacious, provocative, and affectively resonant space that, instead of positing acting out and working through as two mutually exclusive modalities, allows for their complex intertwining so that acting out may come to serve as a means of working through (or trying to get to working through) and working through may contain elements of acting out. Referring to Virginia Woolf in particular, LaCapra concludes that what she writes “is in no sense a conventional narrative but one that both traces the effects of trauma and somehow, at least linguistically, tries to come to terms with those effects, so that they will be inscribed and recalled but perhaps reconfigured in ways that make them not entirely disabling” (180). LaCapra thus raises the possibility that even if modernist and postmodernist discourses often reenact trauma, they also at times transmute it in ways that make it less debilitating. Similarly, I would propose that even if singularity is—as I remarked in Chapter 1—always in some ways connected to the idiosyncratic ways in which we have been traumatized (the ways in which the repetition compulsion has bound not only desire, but also the drive, in tortured configurations that do not let us rest), it might also be a sign that there is a defiant part of us that has not been entirely broken. What I have sought to illustrate in this chapter is that

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when singularity erupts within the social, it inevitably contains a spark of this defiance. Experimental writing such as Joyce’s—the kind of writing that is animated by the energies of the real—is a linguistic marker of this spark. But Joyce’s writing is merely one way for language to communicate the flash of singularity. I would say that any language that makes us question our assumptions, allows us to think in original ways, disrupts the monotony of the status quo, moves us emotionally, makes us sit up and pay attention, or exhibits the kind of creative suppleness that allows us to reinvent a slice of the world, is singularizing. Such language, by definition, avoids resolution. Inasmuch as it allows the “immortal” vitality of the real to infect its structure, it incessantly pushes aside fossilized forms of meaning in order to elude being subsumed by the dominant symbolic; it, as it were, harnesses the destructiveness of the death drive for the purposes of new life. As a result, even if we are inevitably the involuntary heirs of cultural signifiers, language that manages to foster the spark of singularity grants us a measure of agency over this inheritance so that we come to possess the (always incomplete) capacity to intervene in our (personal or collective) destinies.

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6.

The Dignity of the Thing

When it comes to the aliveness of language, we are never far from the Lacanian Thing—or, more particularly, the absence of this Thing. I have already established that lack and creativity are related in the sense that it is precisely because we feel lacking that we are compelled to create, and it is through our creative activity that we find ways to compensate for our lack. Kristeva expresses this vividly when she states that “there is meaning only in despair” (1989, 5–6). In other words, it is because we are haunted by the sadness of having lost the Thing that we are driven to try to reincarnate it through our various efforts to make meaning. As I noted in Chapter 2, without loss there would be no motivation for signification; there would be nothing to push us to take an interest in the world, let alone interact with it in innovative ways. The reverse of loss—and of the constitutive melancholia that this loss generates—is, therefore, sublimation: our capacity to use the signifier (in the broadest possible sense) not only to invent new objects and representations, but also to endow old objects and representations with fresh, lustrous significance. As Lacan famously puts it, sublimation raises the object “to the dignity of the Thing” (1960, 112). It, in short, infuses mundane objects or representations with the nobility, brilliance, and incomparable worth of the lost Thing. Our ability to make the lost Thing manifest itself through the countless objects and representations that we bring into the world (that we create, invent, or discover) is the source of our inner richness. Lacan makes this tangible when he, in outlining the dialectic between the lost Thing and its sublimatory resurrection, resorts to the Heideggerian image of a potter who creates a vase around emptiness, “creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole” (1960, 121).1 Likewise, it is because there is a lack (of the Thing) within our being that we un127

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The Echo of the Thing

dertake ever-renewed efforts to signify it. Lacan stipulates that the vase, in his simile, is “in its signifying essence a signifier of nothing other than of signifying as such, or in other words, of no particular signified.” That is, the vase signifies the process of signification itself; it is a metasignifier for signification rather than merely a specific instance of signification. It reveals that emptiness and “the possibility of filling it” are introduced into the world simultaneously: The vase can only be filled because it is “in its essence” empty (120). In this context, Lacan introduces two other examples that capture the relationship between lack and signification, namely an empty mustard pot and a hollow piece of macaroni (“a hole with something around it”). His point about these mundane “objects” is that they render concrete a fundamental fact about human life, namely that “the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real is identical” (1960, 121). This is a precise way of expressing what I have emphasized all along, namely that the lack in the real that results from the subject’s encounter with the symbolic world is also what makes it a subject of signification. This is why, as I have argued, the signifier is not merely what deprives the subject of the Thing but also, paradoxically, what allows it to cope with this constitutive loss. Or, to articulate the matter in yet another way, it is because the Thing resists symbolization—because it cannot ever be fully captured within the folds of the signifier—that the subject spends its lifetime circling around it; it is because the subject cannot fill its inner void, undo its alienation, in any definitive manner that it persist as a creature of continued creative capacity. This is why, as Lacan maintains, “a mustard pot possesses as essence in our practical life the fact that it presents itself as an empty mustard pot” (120).

The Grief of Being Apart Our ability to fill the void of the lost Thing with an almost endless array of (either tangible or purely mental) surrogates is therefore what founds human subjectivity.2 Lacan of course specifies that the Thing— the primordial (non)object that, fantasmatically, promises us unadulterated jouissance—was never “actually” lost. The Thing is not something that we once, in some material sense, possessed. Yet its imagined loss generates the kinds of psychic effects that shape the contours of our existence in fundamental ways. It is exactly because the Thing-in-itself can only be represented by emptiness—because we can only ever relate to

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it obliquely, “as something missed” (1959, 52)—that we are forced to approximate it through our variegated attempts to recapture it. In Lacan’s words, “If the Thing were not fundamentally veiled, we wouldn’t be in the kind of relationship to it that obliges us, as the whole of psychic life is obliged, to encircle it or bypass it in order to conceive it” (1960, 118). In a nutshell, it is because the Thing can “only be represented by something else” (130) that sublimation is, by definition, “characterized by a change of objects” (94). Kristeva pushes this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion when she states that “there is no imagination that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy” (1989, 6). If loss is the basis of creativity, then melancholia is by necessity the somber lining of human imaginative capacity. In point of fact, symbolic subjectivity—the kind of subjectivity that is capable of imaginative production—is, in a deep sense, a defense against an underlying melancholia that threatens to pull the subject back into the silent crypt of the Thing. Sublimation, Kristeva specifies, protects the subject from being overwhelmed by sadness by weaving “a hypersign around and with the depressive void”: “This is allegory, as lavishness of that which no longer is, but which regains for myself a higher meaning because I am able to remake nothingness” (99). Sublimation, in other words, rescues the subject from the utter devastation of loss by allowing it to replace emptiness by the polyvalence of signs. For Kristeva, as is well known, it is poetic language specifically—the kind of language that is able to capture the energies of the real in the sense that I characterized in the previous chapter—that offers one of the most effective means of binding the melancholy impulse. As she argues, “The so-called poetic form, which decomposes and recomposes signs, is the sole ‘container’ seemingly able to secure an uncertain but adequate hold over the Thing” (14). Kristeva asserts that it is to the extent that we are able to transcend melancholia by taking an interest in signification that we discover “the royal way through which humanity transcends the grief of being apart” (1989, 99–100). As a form of “signified sadness,” sublimation keeps us from being consumed by the Thing. But this is a constant struggle, for life has a way of resuscitating our foundational melancholia: The various losses, setbacks, betrayals, misfortunes, disappointments, and disillusionments of human existence can cause us to plummet into depressive states that overpower us in part precisely because they stir up our suppressed sorrow. If sublimation represents a negation of loss3—an ongoing attempt to keep loss at a distance—depressed persons affirm loss by disavowing

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this negation; they nostalgically revert back onto the Thing, the “real object . . . to which they remain painfully riveted” (43–44).Those racked by depression, then, cannot bear the loss of the Thing, remaining, instead, enthralled by it.They do not, so to speak, know how to lose but insist on the jouissance of endless mourning.They are so wholeheartedly devoted to the Thing that they bear witness to the signifier’s “flimsiness,” to its occasional failure to compensate for loss (20). This kind of depression, Kristeva proposes, can result “in asymbolia, in loss of meaning” (42) so that, suffocated by the overproximity of the Thing, the subject becomes incapable of translating lack into signification; it loses its sublimatory capacity to endure privation.

The Erscheinung of the Matchbox For Kristeva, art in its various forms (literary, poetic, visual) is a privileged means of fending off depressive states: “Art seems to point to a few devices that bypass complacency and, without simply turning mourning into mania, secure for the artist and the connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing” (1989, 97). Lacan, in many ways, agrees, for he postulates that all “art is characterized by a certain mode of organization around . . . emptiness” (1960, 130). He even punctuates his review of sublimation by recounting an art-driven case history of a patient called Ruth Kjar (the details of which he gleans from an article by Melanie Klein4). Apparently, Kjar was a depressive woman who kept complaining about “an empty space inside her, a space she could never fill.” As chance would have it, the walls of her house were covered by the paintings of her talented brother-in-law. At some point, this brother-in-law decided to sell one of his paintings, with the result that there was suddenly an empty spot on the wall as well. This spot precipitated Kjar’s descent into severe depression. Lacan portrays her miraculous recovery as follows: “One fine day she decides to ‘daub a little’ on the wall, so as to fill up that damned empty space that has come to have for her such a crystallizing power. . . . So as to fill up that empty space in imitation of her brother-inlaw, she tries to paint a painting that is as similar to the others as possible. She goes to an artists’ supply shop to look for colors that are the same as those of her brother-in-law’s palette. . . . And out of this there emerges a work of art” (116–17).5 Although Lacan admits that Klein presents the anecdote “with a lack of critical distance” that cannot but raise reservations about its accuracy,

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he thinks that it is still a useful illustration of the power of sublimation (1960, 117). Perhaps more importantly, Lacan quickly transitions from a consideration of artistic practice in particular to an analysis of sublimation as a general condition of human life. This is how, he observes, we “come to the question of what man does when he makes a signifier” (119). What follows in the text is the story of the potter and the vase to which I already alluded. But an even more resonant example of man’s capacity to manipulate the signifier may be Lacan’s charming account of his friend’s collection of matchboxes. Lacan tells us that his friend has hung a colorful, decorative ribbon made of used matchboxes around his mantelpiece: It was the kind of collection that it was easy to afford at that time; it was perhaps the only kind of collection possible. Only the match boxes appeared as follows: they were all the same and were laid out in an extremely agreeable way that involved each one being so close to the one next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced. As a result, they were all threaded together so as to form a continuous ribbon that ran along the mantelpiece, climbed the wall, extended to the molding, and climbed down again next to the door. I don’t say that it went on to infinity, but it was extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of view. . . . In other words, this arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn’t simply something that has a certain utility, that it isn’t even a type in the Platonic sense, an abstract match box, that the match box all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the match box than the Thing that subsists in a match box. (1960, 114)

Lacan thus asserts that his friend’s string of matchboxes reveals the “thingness”—rather than the utility or even the Platonic “type”—of the matchbox: It shows “that a box of matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of an Erscheinung, as it appeared in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing” (114). That is, rather than being merely an assemblage of ordinary matchboxes, the collection illuminates the trace of the Thing that “subsists” in the matchbox: It makes the sublime appear in the most commonplace of objects. In this sense, sublimation is not merely a matter of artistic innovation but also, on a much more basic level, of inducing the Thing to materialize within the mundane weave of everyday life.

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The matchbox here is a way to explain how ordinary objects become invested with a special meaning.The example demonstrates “the transformation of an object into a thing, the sudden elevation of the match box to a dignity that it did not possess before.” However, Lacan continues, “it is a thing that is not, of course, the Thing” (1960, 117–18).The object—in this case, the matchbox—elevated to the nobility of the Thing is still a substitute in the sense that it can never give us the Thing-in-itself.Yet it comes closer to the Thing than other objects; it grants us a tiny portion of jouissance that connects us to the luster of the Thing. As I pointed out in chapter 1, it is because we feel that we have lost something infinite (and infinitely precious) that we hunt for its “pleasurable associations” (52); we hunt for crumbs of sublimity that can give us a little taste of the jouissance that is forbidden to us. Such crumbs are always mere muffled echoes of the original sublime object, yet they still manage to satisfy us because they transmit a muted imprint of this object.

Cézanne’s Apples There is another key moment in Lacan’s account of sublimation that illustrates this dynamic. Musing about the overall purpose of art, Lacan criticizes Plato for having deemed art to be a mere “shadow of a shadow, imitation of an imitation” (1960, 141). This, Lacan claims, is a misconception, for even if art imitates objects, it also simultaneously contains something inscrutable beyond these objects, such as a tone, timbre, or resonance that is highly distinctive yet eludes our grasp. Imitation, then, is not the ultimate aim of art, for art’s endgame is much more interesting, namely to allow something of the Thing’s dignity to float to the surface. Art, like the string of matchboxes, renders the Thing accessible by making its echo reverberate within a tangible object. This is why works of art, however “realistic,” are never identical to the objects they represent, but rather create something slightly different from these objects.6 Referring to Cézanne specifically, Lacan writes: At the moment when painting turns once again upon itself, at the moment when Cézanne paints his apples, it is clear that in painting those apples, he is doing something very different from imitating apples—even though his final manner of imitating them, which is the most striking, is primarily oriented toward a technique of presenting the object. But the more the object is presented in the imitation, the more it opens

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up the dimension in which illusion is destroyed and aims at something else. Everyone knows that there is a mystery in the way Cézanne paints apples, for the relationship to the real as it is renewed in art at that moment makes the object appear purified; it involves a renewal of its dignity by means of which these imaginary insertions are, one might say, repetitively restated. (1960, 141)

When Cézanne paints an apple, he “renews” its dignity. Inasmuch as his art forges a relationship to the real—to the dwelling place of the Thing—he taps into a mystery that resides beyond his skill at imitating his object. Cézanne’s apple is never just a simple imitation of an apple, for the deeper objective of his art is a dimension that exceeds mere imitation—that points at “something else.” This is why his apple is at once an imitation of an apple and something “more than” this imitation. His genius resides in the fact that his art “makes the object appear purified,” that he manages to capture something about the enigma (and even the sublimity) of the Thing in his representation of an utterly banal object. The same principle applies to many of the prosaic things that we, on a routine basis, insert into the void of the missing Thing. Although few of us attain Cézanne’s skill, the objects (and representations) that we either discover or invent as stand-ins for the Thing can resonate on its frequency; they can house a more or less intense residue of the lost Thing. In the same way that Joyce’s signifiers enclose morsels of the real, sublimation can saturate an ordinary object with the radiance of the Thing. This is why the fictions we fashion, the substitute satisfactions we endow with special significance, hold such value for us. They may fall short of the sublime object yet, insofar as they evoke it, they lend meaning to our lives. And if there are certain objects that move us more than others—if we feel strongly about some objects while others leave us cold—it is because these objects communicate more of the Thing’s aura than others.7 As “illusory” as the sparkle of such objects may be, we experience it as “real.” As a result, the reverence we feel for our most cherished objects cannot be relegated to some posthumanist dustbin of discarded affects, for it is an inevitable psychic manifestation of the power of the Thing to electrify us. I have remarked, at various points in my discussion, that we are able to tolerate jouissance only in small doses so that we, for instance, cannot usually sustain transcendent states for very long. Lacan’s analysis of sublimation gives us an additional way to approach the question of manage-

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able jouissance, for it implies that the very fact that we are barred from the Thing makes it possible for us to gain little bits of jouissance within the confines of symbolic existence. From the vase to the mustard pot to the string of matchboxes to Cézanne’s apples, the things we place in the cavity of the Thing give us (always necessarily partial and diluted) enjoyment.This is why Lacan specifies that even though his friend’s matchbox collection did not go on to “infinity” (did not meet the sublime, if you will), it was still able to grant satisfaction. As Danny Nobus succinctly conveys, “Any artificial stuffing of the hole in the Symbolic coincides with the production of jouissance” (2002, 31).8

Sublimation and the Pleasure Principle Let me formulate the relationship between the Thing and sublimation in yet another way (one that is already somewhat familiar to us from chapter 1): Sublimation transforms the drive for jouissance into a desire that is mediated by the pleasure principle. I have indicated that although the drive (ultimately always the death drive) aims at the Thing, coming too close to it would be terrifying because it would spell the demise of social subjectivity (because it would mean that the death drive had actually reached its target). This is why Lacan declares that when the limit of bearable jouissance is breached, the “psychic impulse is not . . . capable of advancing any further toward what is supposed to be its goal” (1959, 59). Rather, the impulse becomes scattered throughout the organism, resulting in the state of “too muchness” or surplus agitation I have depicted. The task of sublimation is to curtail this scattering. Because the subject cannot endure the direct impact of jouissance, but can only handle its “reflection,” sublimation transforms the drive for the Thing into a desire directed at various objets a. It forces the drive into the mold of the pleasure principle so that the boundary of manageable excitation is not exceeded and satisfaction becomes a concrete possibility; it inserts the signifier between the subject and the Thing so that what the subject experiences is an endless series of secondary satisfactions rather than the primary satisfaction it covets yet cannot allow itself to have. As Lacan asserts, the pleasure principle is “nothing else than the dominance of the signifier” (1960, 134).9 To be exact, while the Thing spurs the subject’s quest for satisfaction, it is the pleasure principle that controls the movement of this quest, imposing the detours of desire—the winding voyage of psychic attachments from object to object (or representa-

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tion to representation)—that keep the subject at a safe distance from the Thing.10 As we have seen, this mechanism is by no means infallible. It can never entirely contain the excess jouissance of the drives, which is why so many of us end up with the kind of “too muchness” of energy that periodically overwhelms the pleasure principle and causes anxiety. Yet without the modulating impact of the pleasure principle—and of sublimation as one of the major instruments of the pleasure principle— our lives would be largely unbearable. It may also be worth thinking about the matter in terms of the theme of “destiny” I have been elaborating from time to time, for to stipulate, as Lacan does, that the Thing as the object at which the drive (as well as, from a greater distance, desire) aims is what determines the trajectory of our quest for satisfaction is to proclaim, quite simply, that the Thing shapes our overall psychic orientation (or disorientation), which is to say, our “destiny.” This is why Lacan announces that the Thing constitutes “the heart of man’s destiny” in that it is “the cause of the most fundamental human passion” (1960, 97). Because the Thing stands at the origin of the kind of desire that can never be satisfied, it gives us our “destiny” by dictating, through the always highly idiosyncratic cadence of our pleasure principle, how we go about the task of shifting from one substitute to the next; it fixes our fate by providing a difficult-to-alter map that separates desires that seem viable to us from those that do not. According to this account, one of the distinctive characteristics of human life is that we are obliged to travel from object to object (or from representation to representation) in a manner that is both faithful to our fate and makes this fate livable.

Repetition as Creativity This may help to clarify why the repetition compulsion is an important manifestation of the regulatory force of the pleasure principle, for repetition is obviously an immensely reliable means of controlling the movement of desire, of obliging desire to stick to a predetermined path. Even though it would be easy to assume that the repetition compulsion violates the pleasure principle, Lacan implies that it is merely a particularly virulent expression of the latter’s power to command the subject’s destiny. If the Thing is the knot (the not des Lebens) around which the drive (and, again, desire from a greater distance) circulates, repetition manages this incessant circulation. This is why I specified in chapter 1 that the

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stubbornness with which the repetition compulsion lands the subject in the same spot over and again is an essential facet of its attempt to contain the otherwise overwhelming pressure of jouissance. But my discussion in this chapter suggests something even more counterintuitive, namely that repetition may, under certain conditions, be a conduit of creativity. As we have learned, repetition offers the drive the peculiar pleasure of never attaining its object (the Thing), which is why, as Lacan posits, its satisfaction occurs “elsewhere than where its aim is” (1960, 111).11 If we add to this Copjec’s contention that this inhibition of the drive is “the very definition of sublimation” (2004, 30), we arrive at a very intriguing idea, namely that sublimation—and the bourgeoning of creativity that sublimation implies—only becomes possible to the extent that the drive persists, to the extent that the subject’s “drive destiny” is, precisely, not overcome. This is in many ways what Lacan’s equation of Joyce’s writing with the sinthome suggests. But Lacan articulates this even more directly when he states, “Repetition demands the new. It is turned towards the ludic. . . . The adult, and even the more advanced child, demands something new in his activities, in his games. But this ‘sliding-away’ (glissement) conceals what is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition in itself ” (1964, 61). Repetition veers towards the ludic, the creative, because it demands the new. The insistence of the drive (the “undeadness” of the death drive, as it were) demands variation, and this variation allows the subject to sidestep the drive’s real aim by “giving it certain outlets that go some way to satisfying the pleasure principle” (62). It is in this sense that “the true secret” of the ludic is repetition—repetition as a vehicle of sublimation (or, as Lacan here puts it, of “radical diversity”). Lacan goes on to propose that this is exactly the dynamic we witness in the repetitive fort-da game of the child who has been momentarily abandoned by his mother, for this game is the child’s “answer to what the mother’s absence has created on the frontier of his domain—the edge of his cradle—namely, a ditch, around which one can only play at jumping” (1964, 62). The fort-da game is designed to fill the ditch (the lack, void, or abyss) that is opened up around the child’s cradle by the mother’s absence.The game is, if you will, the child’s first attempt at sublimation—one that will later be supplanted by a whole host of creative activities. As such, it already exhibits sublimation’s most basic mechanism: repetition. The variation (or “diversity”) of repetition that sublimation calls for could be said to arise from the fact that the child’s spool

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never falls in precisely the same way. Nor is any instance of recovery entirely identical to previous (or future) recoveries. In the adult, this variation obviously takes more sophisticated forms, but the principle holds, so that even when we repeat, we never repeat in precisely the same way; no matter how symptomatic our repetitions, we never live out our pain in exactly the same manner, but continuously invent new ways to sting ourselves. This is because repetition, like the sublimatory impulse it serves, is extraordinarily plastic: It finds infinite ways to approach its object so that when one route is obstructed, others take its place. In this manner, it guarantees that there is always “the possibility of satisfaction, even if it is substitutive” (Lacan 1960, 94).

“Deviant” Satisfactions This conceptual affinity between sublimation and repetition explains in part why the line between creativity and symptom formation can at times get blurry. On the one hand, the fact that we are stuck on the Thing—that we are forever condemned to circulate a knot of jouissance that we can neither reach nor disband—facilitates the discovery of evernew ways to reincarnate the lost object. But, on the other, it can give rise to agonizing symptoms. After all, the symptom, like sublimation, is at bottom a means of binding excess jouissance. It consumes and to some extent disciplines the drives that circle the Thing, shielding us from its more devouring aspects as effectively—and sometimes even more effectively—as sublimatory activity does. One could in fact propose that the symptom is, in the final analysis, merely a pathological form of sublimation. What distinguishes it from less pathological (more creative) varieties of sublimation is that the latter mobilize the signifier whereas the symptom, as I have observed, arises from the subject’s failure to do so. While there may be cases—and Joyce might be a good example of this— where the signifier itself becomes symptomatic, usually the emergence of the symptom is a sign that the signifier has not managed to adequately contain the drives. This “flimsiness” of the signifier (to recycle Kristeva’s phrase) is precisely why we are all prey to the “too muchness” of energy I have analyzed. The symptom as a nexus of tortured and roundabout satisfaction is what absorbs this “too muchness,” thereby doing its very best to prevent a total breakdown of psychic functioning. The symptom is thus a stopgap measure intended to ensure our survival. Sublimation, in contrast, reaches beyond survival to something

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more life affirming. If symptomatic strains of the repetition compulsion already introduce a degree of “diversity” in that, as I indicated above, we never repeat pain in quite the same way, the repetitive thrust of sublimation demands variety so ardently that even when it reiterates the old, it produces something new. Or, to put the matter slightly differently, even when sublimation replicates the past, it animates the future as a site of imaginative possibility. This is why it constitutes the cornerstone of my attempt to theorize singularity as a social phenomenon, why it offers a viable alternative to the ethical (or divine) act. More specifically, if sublimation, as Lacan claims, populates “the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes” (1960, 99), and if the contours of this imaginary expansion are always distinctive, reflective of our highly personal relationship to loss, then sublimation functions as a crucial resource for the augmentation of our character. Its summons, its interpellation beyond ideological interpellation, may not be as palpable as that of the act (or event), but its long-term effects can be equally valuable in that it gradually adds layer upon layer of depth and meaning to our psychic lives, inserting precious deposits of singularity into the texture of our social existence. There is no doubt that this singularity can be compromised by the fact that many of our sublimatory satisfactions are dictated by what the normative social order recognizes as a useful or lawful pleasure. This is why our satisfactions tend to be historically and culturally specific, dedicated to collective fantasies of legitimacy. However, as I illustrated in the previous chapter, the complex mechanisms of sublimation can also work semi-independently of, and sometimes even in direct opposition to, what the establishment finds acceptable. In the same way that learning to read the “truth” of our desire allows us to distance ourselves from the enigmatic desire of the Other, our sublimatory efforts can, over time, revise our repertoire of satisfactions. This is how we sometimes end up with “deviant” satisfactions—ones that digress from what our environment judges as valid or even recognizes as possible. As is the case with Badiou’s truth-event, the “logic” of our satisfactions may be invisible from the outside, which is why we sometimes end up defending their “reasonableness.” Such noncompliance can obviously complicate our lives. But it is also how we end up with avant-garde art and other pioneering types of cultural innovation, along with intellectual, ethical, political, and scientific, not to mention sexual, inventiveness. The sublimations of Galileo and Mary Wollstonecraft (to choose two obvious examples) were not accepted as legitimate by their social settings. But, in the larger

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scheme of history, they turned out to be exceptionally important. This is the luminous face of sublimation—the face that confirms that our failure to attain the Thing can stimulate tremendous feats of originality.

The Allure of False Objects In this context, it is helpful to acknowledge how easy it is to get sucked into the whirlwind of superficial satisfactions promised by our overly saturated consumer culture. By this I do not mean to set up a facile distinction between “high” and “low” culture, “authentic” and “inauthentic” satisfactions, for I believe that the gratification we get from watching HBO can be just as valid, just as “genuinely” fulfilling, as seeing a Shakeˇ izˇek’s appraisal that speare play. Nevertheless, I cannot but agree with Z there is something pathetically hollow about our current cultural “injunction to enjoy”—the almost fanatical command that we seek sexual, spiritual, personal, and professional satisfaction as voraciously as we can, and that we use the cookie-cutter solutions offered by our late capitalist market economy to do so.12 From Viagra to Deepak Chopra, we are told that there are ways to improve the quality of our lives, yet the improvement in question often remains elusive, so that we end up expending our energies in a futile attempt to catch up with satisfactions that forever flee us.We fall into this trap to the degree that our desire to feel meaningfully “present” in our lives causes us to pursue one activity after another, one interest after another, so relentlessly that we lose our capacity to accurately assess which pleasures actually meet the “real” of our desire. This is how our very quest for enjoyment can, ironically enough, rob us of it. What is more, because we understand that the profusion of the various “enjoyments” on offer in our culture can harm us, we can become a bit paranoid about our satisfactions. Zupancˇicˇ has characterized this as the double-bind of contemporary nihilism: “on the one hand, the imperative ‘Enjoy!,’ and, on the other, the reminder that we are also constantly bombarded with: ‘Enjoyment can kill you!,’ ‘Enjoy!—but be aware that enjoyment can kill you’” (2003, 68).13 It is easy to be deceived by false objects that proffer the kind of satisfaction that they cannot ultimately deliver. As Lacan explains, “In forms that are historically and socially specific, the a elements, the imaginary elements of the fantasm come to overlie the subject, to delude it, at the very point of das Ding” (1960, 99). In other words, the imaginary components of the objet a can function as shimmering lures that eclipse the

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aura of the Thing, seducing us to look for satisfaction in entirely illusory directions—directions that little by little detach us from the truth of our desire. This is exactly how we come to be overrun by the desire of the Other to the point that we no longer recognize the voice of our own. In addition, when the imaginary components manage to overtake the object, it is no longer capable of transmitting the Thing’s echo. It no longer contains a little piece of the sublime object, but merely participates in an empty play of aesthetic effects that cannot bring us any “real” satisfaction. Unfortunately, to the degree that the Other seeks to hide its lack by offering us a dizzying cornucopia of unnecessary objects, our life-worlds are filled with such decoys, with distractions calculated to steer our attention away from social problems to the problem of deciding which shade of lipstick, scent of aftershave, size of television screen, or box of breakfast cereal will most satisfy us. The archetypal North American breakfast cereal aisle—the enormity of which never ceases to shock me even after nearly thirty years of close encounters—is in many ways a perfect example of the double-bind of nihilism Zupancˇicˇ outlines: On the one hand, you want a cereal you can enjoy but, on the other, you want to make sure it is good for you (will not in any way contribute to your untimely death). Many cereals are explicitly calculated to mollify the apprehension caused by this bind, so that when you reach for a particular box, you get instant gratification from knowing that you have managed to outwit the problem. Alternatively, the cereal aisle allows you to rectify your lapses of hedonism at the very moment of their occurrence, so that if your cart already contains a box of Coco Puffs, adding a virtuous box of organic Swiss muesli will immediately balance things out, appeasing any pangs of bad conscience you might have felt creeping in. Furthermore, the cereal aisle is the perfect microcosm for determining how your enjoyment compares with that of others so that your sidelong glances at other shoppers’ carts enable you to figure out if you are being either overly indulgent or overly prudish. As compensation for the impossibility of visiting other people’s bedrooms while they are having sex, the cereal aisle offers a convenient way to gauge how your enjoyment measures up to theirs. And it even empowers you to make snap judgments about the moral fiber and sanity of others so that, unless the buyer is a skeleton-skinny teenage boy, you deem anyone who fills his or her cart with Sugar Smacks as somehow lacking in basic human integrity.

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All of this is to say that the uniquely human capacity to sublimate generates not only meaning, but also heaps and heaps of “stuff ” in which we can lose ourselves (or at least hours of our day). The Western world is guilty of this to such an extreme that anyone arriving at an average American or European department store from a less privileged place is justified in feeling disgusted, particularly as it is clear that the West’s affluence is usually purchased at the expense of the rest of the world. And our sublimatory urge also spawns a lot of ugliness. From waste dumps to weapons of mass destruction, our world is filled with harmful objects that, in an increasingly symptomatic manner, represent the residue of human endeavors to compensate for the lost Thing—to fill the lack that founds human “being.” As a race, we are on the brink of devastating our environment because we are overloading it by our desperate attempts to fend off the specter of nothingness. We do this on the social level, so that nuclear arsenals erect a phallic barrier against the abyss at the center of the symbolic Other. But we also do it on the individual level by accumulating piles of useless possessions that are meant to make us feel full rather than empty (but that ultimately end up cluttering the world). In this sense, if sublimation allows us to access the world’s resources as raw materials for our creative undertakings, it can also prompt us to act destructively towards this very world.This is why we have a pressing ethical obligation to pay attention to the difference between objects that contain an echo of the Thing and the various lures that drown out this echo. Arguably, many of our most burning environmental problems are due to the fact that we sometimes confuse the two, with the consequence that our relationship to the world is driven by sheer gluttony rather than the quest for new forms of resourcefulness. Whenever this happens, we violate the “thingness” of things; we deprive them of the sublime kernel that alone can offer us “real” satisfaction.

Symbolic Ideals and Values I want to be careful here to resist the temptation to demonize our symbolic universe in its entirety, for I do not think that the lures of consumer society even begin to exhaust its domain. Concluding that there is nothing worth venerating in our culture would only lead us back to the idea that the only way to assert our singularity is to relinquish all of our symbolic supports in an act of subjective destitution (or divine violence). We

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have seen that there are situations where such an act is the right (or only) course of action. But I hope to have illustrated that this is not invariably the case, that there are times when engaging with the social world achieves a lot more. Indeed, if we go back to the notion of quilting points I introduced in Chapter 3, it seems obvious that most of us have cultural reference points that connect us to something more constructive than the distractions of consumerism—that provide the kinds of meaningful ideals and values that anchor us in the collective world even as we endeavor to define our singular place within that world.14 In my earlier discussion of quilting points, I emphasized that they become toxic when they are laced by prejudice. This is why it is essential to choose our ideals and values carefully, and to maintain a critical attitude towards them at all times so that, if need be, we remain capable of dissociating our desire from the desire of the Other. At the same time, it would be futile to pretend that we could step outside of our usual network of quilting points without losing the foundations of our lives. Regardless of where we find them (in our general cultural setting, in a subcultural space, between several cultures), they stabilize our lives by offering us places to cathect our desire. Social quilting points work best when they lend consistency to our existence without arresting the movement of our desire. In such cases, they do not impede our sublimatory impulse, but merely allow us to better manage it by offering us a number of steady summits of cultural meaning that ensure that the endless sliding of desire from one object to the next does not spin completely out of control; they provide some “known” signifieds for our signifiers so that we do not need to begin the process of orienting ourselves in the world from scratch every morning.15 Or, to restate the issue in the terms of my analysis of sublimation, the fact that we borrow energy from relatively stable coordinates of meaning does not deprive us of the ability to personalize these coordinates. The fact that we are connected to specific signifieds does not mean that there is no room left for the playfulness of the signifier; it does not mean that the link between signifieds and signifiers cannot be severed and reconfigured. This severing may not always be easy, but it is entirely possible, as is proven not only by Joyce, but also by artists, intellectuals, politicians, and social activists (among others) who manage to revamp our cultural ideals and values from year to year, from decade to decade, so that someone from the nineteenth century would have a hard time fitting into our current cultural configuration.

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Quilting points guarantee that no matter how ludic the sliding of the signifier gets, it does not slide quite to the point of psychosis (or complete nonmeaning). Likewise, inasmuch as they offer collective containers for our desire, they connect us to the social world in ways that facilitate our capacity to gain satisfaction in and through that world. In a more technical vein, one might say that they rescue us from the narcissistic economy of the imaginary, allowing us to exchange the ideal ego of the mirror stage for the (ego) ideals of the symbolic. Kirshner’s distinction between the ideal ego as a grandiose fantasy of a cohesive self on the one hand and the ego ideal as what arises from our internalization of social values on the other is useful here. While I would once again caution against assuming that all of the social values that surround us are benevolent, Kirshner is right to argue that they serve as an effective antidote to the kinds of mirroring identifications that collapse the space between self and other, making it difficult for us to admit that external objects possess an integrity of their own. Kirshner specifies that while both the ideal ego and the ego ideal defend against the threat of fragmentation, the former is problematic because it denies all personal limitation. The ego ideal, in contrast, allows us to transition from the deceptive universe of the mirror stage to collective structures of meaning production (2004, 46–49; 100–1). Or, to return to the framework I have developed in this chapter, one could propose that the ego ideal succeeds where the ideal ego fails because it chooses sublimation over narcissism.

Professor D’s Shoes Sublimation, as Lacan theorizes it, explains how we come to fill our world not only with worthless junk, but also with worthwhile ideals and values (quilting points). In Chapter 1, I examined transcendence as a worldly, rather than an otherworldly, phenomenon, proposing that moments that allow us to (however briefly or incompletely) hit the real introduce a sliver of sublimity into our everyday realities. Along related lines, Lacan’s analysis of sublimation reveals that to the extent that we discover little specks of the Thing in mundane objects and representations (matchboxes, Cézanne’s apples, etc.), we make the sublime present within the fabric of ordinary life. This is why I have stressed that it is important to be able to differentiate between objects and representations that contain the Thing’s echo and others that do not. Consumer goods

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that have been divested of the last vestiges of the Thing fall into the latter category, which is why they betray the Thing’s dignity. But it is necessary to be cautious even here: I do not think that all the items that fill our stores and television screens are devoid of the Thing’s aura. Where a given person finds this aura is absolutely idiosyncratic, so that an item I find completely banal might elicit a strong reaction from someone else. I suspect that many of us are familiar with the tingling sensation that comes over us when we chance upon the perfect article in a crowded store. We might have spent hours looking for something worth purchasing when this article suddenly calls on us from some inconspicuous corner or from underneath a pile of kitschy trinkets. Personally, I have turned shopping into an effortless activity by having unconditional faith in this process, so that I can determine within a couple of minutes whether a particular store holds any promise or not. I scan the articles in a fairly absent-minded manner, and if nothing leaps at me immediately, I move on. In a given year, I might spend less than two hours shopping for clothes, yet I always seem to have ones that “feel right.” This may appear light-years from the Lacanian Thing, but who is to say that if Lacan finds the Erscheinung of the Thing in a matchbox, I cannot find it in a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes? Indeed, I may be explicitly invited to do so by Lacan’s story of how his wife discovered that Professor D—his former mentor from the Ecole des Langues Orientales—was lodged in the same quaint London guesthouse as Lacan himself was. Lacan tells us that his wife returned to their room one morning and declared that Professor D was in the guesthouse. When Lacan asked her how she knew this, she responded, “I’ve seen his shoes.” Lacan reports that he remained skeptical, not willing to take a pair of clodhoppers sitting outside a door as “sufficiently convincing evidence.” But, lo and behold, it turned out that Professor D in fact was staying at the guesthouse—something that Lacan discovered when he caught the esteemed professor slipping out of his room “in his dressing gown, exposing as he went a pair of long and highly academic drawers” (1960, 296). Lacan segues from here to van Gogh’s peasant shoes (famously analyzed by Heidegger), concluding that “any object may be the signifier by means of which that reflection, mirage, or more or less unbearable brilliance we call the beautiful starts to vibrate” (297).16 However, what most interests me about Lacan’s anecdote is the idea that a pair of clodhoppers may, “in spite of its dumbness” (297), speak—and speak quite eloquently—about the singularity of its owner. Professor D’s shoes, in short, were a site where

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“the universality belonging to the shoes of an academic was intimately joined to whatever it was that was absolutely specific to Professor D” (296–97). Do we not here witness precisely the escape of the singular from underneath the generic, the man from underneath the scholar, that Rosenzweig was looking for? Moreover, Professor D’s drawers may have been “academic,” but the sight of him wearing them in the corridor of a London guesthouse (an establishment “marked by the delicious smell of toast and the menace of . . . inedible gelatine desserts” [296]) certainly was not. As a matter of fact, the irony of the word academic here is meant to call our attention to how very nonacademic (expressive of the man rather than of the scholar) the situation really was.

The Sublime as Accessible My point here is that if ordinary objects can “vibrate” on the unique frequency of a given individual (in this case, Professor D), the reverse may also be the case: We can feel summoned by objects (or representations) that match the distinctive outlines of our desire. Even though we often fall for the seductions of hollow objects and representations that can only give us a shallow (and usually short-lived) satisfaction, we do usually know when we have stumbled upon the “real” thing, be it in the form of a pair of shoes or a beloved person; we know when we have discovered something that is not easily replaceable. In other words, we may err by attributing the luster of the Thing to too many objects—we may on occasion let ourselves be fooled by shiny lures—but we rarely hesitate in the face of the genuine article. There are objects that resurrect the Thing in highly suggestive ways, which is why they carry a strong affective valence, at times tapping into deposits of melancholia that bring us to the verge of despair, other times rendering us uncommonly alive by galvanizing existential frequencies we rarely visit (or even recognize we have). We may not know why certain objects touch us—why certain people, for example, energize us while others deplete us—and we may also not know why some objects manage to have this impact over long stretches of time while others only offer a transitory satisfaction. All we know is that objects that do have the power to move us on this level are more adored than those that do not. And we also know that some circuits of desire are more “truthful” than others precisely because they are directed at objects that, however ineffably, possess this power. One might even hypothesize that those of

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us who are able to find objects that convey something about the Thing’s aura activate the “immortal” within ourselves better than those who live entirely on the level of empty (counterfeit) objects. This is why we need to hold onto the “content” of our satisfactions by recognizing that objects matter—that the makeup and emotional resonance of the article or person we welcome into our lives makes a difference.17 Lacan acknowledges this much when he states, in the context of his discussion of the matchbox, that we do not find the Thing “in a random way in any object whatsoever” (1960, 114). ˇ izˇek’s critique of the This is yet another reason I cannot endorse Z false “heroism” involved in the acceptance of symbolic castration (see ˇ izˇek implies that those who fall into such heroism meekly Chapter 2). Z reconcile themselves to the notion that “real” satisfaction is impossible; they idiotically submit themselves to the metonymic sliding of desire so that worldly objects (objets a) will always block their access to unmediated jouissance. I have tried to show that the matter is much more complicated than this. I do not think that Lacan’s assertion that symbolic castration is the price we pay for our social viability is meant to suggest that all “real” satisfaction is forbidden. Although Lacan certainly criticizes the corrupt nature of much of what our society sells as “enjoyment,” he does not ask us to shun material things in favor of some sublime ideal that will never crystallize (or even in favor of a radical act that will detach us from the world). Quite the opposite, he intimates that the various things (objects and representations) of the world are how “real” satisfaction makes its way into our lives. Lacan’s theory of sublimation reveals how far he is from valorizing a transcendent (or death-driven) “real” beyond worldly semblances. It shows that it is through such semblances—the various objects we cathect to—that we attain jouissance, with the result that when we shun mundane objects, we gain neither these objects nor the real. This is to say that aiming directly at the real Thing without going through objects of desire does not, in most circumstances, get us anywhere. With typical acumen, Zupancˇicˇ asserts that when we insist on an unbridgeable chasm between the Thing and all worldly things, we remain perpetually dissatisfied. We become caught up in a hopeless fidelity “to a lost enjoyment” in the sense that we spurn everyday objects because we imagine that only the missing Thing can grant us “authentic” fulfillment: “in the name of the lack of the True object, we reject all other objects and satisfy ourselves with none” (2000, 240). Because we convince ourselves that

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beyond all ordinary objects there is “‘someThing’ which alone would make our life worth living” (240), we fail to appreciate the partial satisfactions offered by worldly things, thereby gradually evacuating our existence of all possibility of jouissance. This is why Zupancˇicˇ maintains that the attempt to distinguish between the Thing and things (the real and semblances), and to valorize the former over the latter, amounts to “a machine for producing the Nothing, a kind of ‘factory of nihilism’” (2003, 129).18 Zupancˇicˇ thus suggests that if we are to avoid the kind of nihilism that renders the world meaningless, we must recognize that the Thing can only be approached through things. She calls this phenomenon “desublimation” because it makes the sublime accessible within the semblances of the world (2003, 180–81). But there may not actually be any need for a new term, given that, as I have demonstrated, Lacan’s theory of sublimation is designed to communicate this very idea, namely that the sublime enters the world through ordinary objects and representations. Ideally, this results in an enhanced capacity to find value in the minutiae of everyday life. And it illustrates how drastically Lacan’s existential ethos—if I may call it that—differs from philosophies that place satisfaction beyond the world, in some ultimate moral or divine Good, for instance. In the Lacanian vision, instead of looking for satisfaction in Platonic ideals, the Christian afterlife, or any other transcendent domain, we aspire to discover it in the here and now of our existence. From a slightly different standpoint, one might say that if metaphysical notions of satisfaction seek the end of desire, Lacan advocates its infinite perpetuation. Though one can certainly interpret the ethical/divine act as one that extinguishes desire by dropping the subject into the turbulent ocean of jouissance, Lacan’s account of sublimation unmistakably valorizes the continuation of desire.19 On this view, not ceding on one’s desire is not only a matter of holding onto the truth of one’s desire, but also of making sure that this desire does not dissipate under the utilitarian pressures of life.

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The Ethics of Sublimation

Given how much emphasis post-Lacanian theory has, in recent years, placed on the ethics of the act, it is important to note that Lacan also views sublimation—our capacity to raise mundane objects to the dignity of the Thing—as a matter of ethics: “We must now, therefore, consider the notion of creation with all it implies . . . because it is central, not only for our theme of the motive of sublimation, but also that of ethics in its broadest sense” (1960, 119). Lacan here links “creation” to ethics, making it difficult to interpret his “ethics of psychoanalysis,” of not ceding on one’s desire, solely as a function of diving into the deadly jouissance of the real. While Lacan’s reading of Antigone certainly points to that direction, his analysis of sublimation—as I started to suggest in the end of the previous chapter—offers an alternative reading of what it means to persist in one’s desire. According to the latter, ethics is not a matter of seeing one’s desire to its destructive climax, but rather of keeping desire alive by refusing to close the gap between the Thing and things. By now we know that there are (at least) two ways to “access” the real: While the act aims directly at it, sublimation takes the more subtle approach of looking for the echo of the Thing in ordinary objects and representations. Both have to do with the quest for satisfaction, but while the jouissance of the act neutralizes the symbolic, sublimation aspires to reconfigure it by bringing bits of jouissance into the realm of signification. I have argued for the viability of both of these approaches to counter the tendency to celebrate the act as the zenith of Lacanian ethics, in part because I am not convinced that such celebration faithfully captures the spirit of Lacanian ethics. If nothing else, Lacan’s contempt for Sade should make us think twice. After all, there are few who have gone further than Sade in their efforts to forgo all symbolic mediation (to raise the middle finger at all established norms, as it were) in order to reach 148

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the heart of jouissance.Yet Lacan thought that Sade lacked imagination: “Although in the eyes of some the work of Marquis de Sade seems to promise a variety of entertainments, it is not strictly speaking much fun. Moreover, the parts that seem to give the most pleasure can also be regarded as the most boring” (1959, 78). All of this implies that when Lacan tells us to act in conformity with our desire, he is not necessarily advocating that we abdicate our status as creatures of symbolic capacity. I have granted that there are cases where the cost of staying faithful to the truth of our desire results in such a radical outcome.Yet we have seen that persevering in our desire may also be a matter of struggling to find ways to incorporate the echo of the Thing (as the cause of our idiosyncratic desire) into the rhythm of our social lives even when doing so proves demanding—even when our environment erects obstacles to our ability to accomplish this task. In both cases, Lacanian ethics asks us to revere the utter singularity of our relationship to the Thing even when it would be easier to capitulate to the desire of the Other. It may in fact be that the act and sublimation are merely two different points of resistance on a continuum that runs from antisocial rebellion to meek social conformity, so that honoring the echo of the Thing through sublimatory efforts to reinvent social ideals and values is merely a less drastic (or desperate) manifestation of ethical action than the act is. Perhaps we are simply dealing with two faces of the attempt to ensure that what the cultural order considers “impossible” somehow becomes possible.

The Debt of Desire The ethics of sublimation shares a basic similarity with the ethics of the act, namely that, like the latter, it pursues the thread of desire—follows the echo of the Thing—even when doing so means going against the “service of goods” (the morality of the master) that Lacan so despises. A comparison with Heidegger may once again be useful, for Lacan’s critique of the master’s morality is in many ways akin to Heidegger’s critique of das Man. The difference from Heidegger is that Lacan tackles the issue through the authenticity of desire rather than through the authenticity of Being. He wants to remind us of the debt of desire that grounds our subjectivity: “If analysis has a meaning, desire is nothing other than that which supports an unconscious theme, the very articulation of that which roots us in a particular destiny, and that destiny

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demands insistently that the debt be paid, and desire keeps coming back, keeps returning, and situates us once again in a given track, the track of something that is specifically our business” (1960, 319). In other words, insofar as the signifier brings us into being as symbolic subjects, granting us a (more or less developed) sense of social belonging, we are irrevocably indebted to it for our very existence. This debt can never be paid in full, but our endeavors to redeem it situate us in a singular sublimatory track, singular constellation of desire, through which we strive to reincarnate the lost Thing. This, as Lacan suggests—and as I been underlining throughout this book—is what our “destiny” is made of. There may be nothing that impacts our destiny more than the fact that our “desire keeps coming back, keeps returning” to the same track, demanding that we place one object, one objet a, after another into its groove. Incontestably, some of these objets a cater to the narcissistic side of desire—the side that expects the things of the world to seal the gaping wound left by the absent Thing. When this happens, the repetition compulsion trumps the ethical dimension of sublimation—the dimension that empowers us to renew the world on a regular basis—so that the things in question remain “stuck in the gullet of the signifier” (Lacan 1964, 270). To be exact, the tortured trail of the repetition compulsion is a sign that the sublimatory impulse, which, in principle, possesses the power to resurrect the Thing in endlessly novel ways, has congealed into symptomatic patterns. But, as I have shown, this does not mean that desire’s repetitive force is by definition tyrannical. When it is coupled with sublimation’s open-ended energy—when it acknowledges that the Thing cannot be reduced to (totalized by) any one incarnation—it allows us to observe the various ways in which the Thing echoes within different objects, or within the same object at different times. This last insight is important because I do not mean to suggest that we are mistaken when we get cathected to a specific object—that it is somehow more rewarding to move from object to object than to devote ourselves to one object that manages to revive the Thing with unusual intensity. Obviously, the object of our deepest appreciation can be a valid means of venerating the Thing’s echo. But the point about the sublimatory mobility of desire applies here as well—and may even apply more urgently—in the sense that an excessive rigidity of desire can cause a lot of problems, particularly when our “object” is another person. Simply put, the more inflexible and narrow-minded (narcissistic) our desire, the less generous it is: It suffocates the object, fixing it into a static ideal that

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is not allowed to evolve. Such desire does not respect the shifting reality of the object, but instead expects it to reincarnate the Thing with absolute accuracy and consistency so that any deviation from the ideal comes to be read as a betrayal. Needless to say, this places an unreasonable burden on the object, for not only is it impossible for any one object to flawlessly coincide with the Thing, but the requirement that there be no change in the object violates the basic principles of relationality. It renders the object a prisoner of its past by asking it to endlessly replicate its original embodiment. Against this backdrop, what makes the ethics of sublimation ethical is that it is driven by the longing to find ever-new ways to approach the Thing, which means that it by definition accepts the variable nature of the object. It in fact welcomes this variability because the less predictable the object, the better it facilitates the endless perpetuation of the sublimatory impulse.

Beyond the Reality Principle Another way to consider the issue is to stress, once again, that there is an enormous difference between the symbolic Other as a site of hegemonic power and the signifier as a site of sublimatory capacity. If the Other worships the master’s morality, the signifier as a tool of sublimation has the power to challenge this morality precisely because it pursues the unknown and as-of-yet-unrepresented. Zupancˇicˇ sums up the issue by arguing that sublimation is a matter of ethics “insofar as it is not entirely subordinated to the reality principle, but liberates or creates a space from which it is possible to attribute certain values to something other than the recognized and established ‘common good’” (2003, 77). That is, our faithfulness to the echo of the Thing establishes a code of ethics that is drastically different from that of the reality principle (the principle of the Other). It, like the Erscheinung of the matchbox or Cézanne’s apples, ensures that there is something “more than” reality within reality. It creates a space for the luster of the real within reality (thereby making the symbolic “not-all”).1 Sublimation thus undermines the seamlessness of social reality. Because the objects we endow with the Thing’s nobility contain a trace of the real, they automatically challenge the notion that the Other’s reality principle is all we have got. In this sense, it is exactly the fact that reality does not fully correspond to itself—that it is always punctured by the energies of the real—that forges an opening for the reinvention of

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(personal or social) ideals, values, and systems of representation. Or, to approach the matter from the opposite direction, it is only when something of the real is admitted to the space of the symbolic that it becomes possible to reach beyond the reality principle.2 On this view, sublimation is not what tempers prohibited passions by directing their unlawful energies into something more lawful, as Freud saw it. And it is also not what turns passion into beauty in the conventional sense. Rather, it strives to clear a stage on which ideals, values, and systems of representation that are considered illegitimate and devoid of worth become legitimate and worthwhile.3 In a deep sense, it institutes a set of ethical criteria that give the subject pause whenever it is asked to betray the Thing’s echo. As Lacan himself clarifies, “There is another register of morality that takes its direction from that which is to be found on the level of das Ding; it is the register that makes the subject hesitate when he is on the point of bearing false witness against das Ding, that is to say, the place of desire” (1960, 109–10). This is an ethics that is not dictated by the instrumentalist imperatives of utility, but rather assesses the value of things—as well as of the ethical actions related to those things—on the basis of their proximity (or loyalty) to the Thing. The object that comes the closest (or remains the most loyal) to the Thing is, ethically speaking, more important than one that is merely useful. Once again, this does not mean that we have the right to expect the objects of our desire to capture the Thing’s aura with complete precision. But it does suggest that objects that most powerfully emit this aura are also the ones that most readily engage our passion.This is why, as Lacan remarks, the ethics of sublimation has “nothing at all to do with something that may be satisfied by moderation—that moderation which soberly regulates a human being’s relationship with his fellow man at the different hierarchical levels of society in a harmonious order, from the couple to the State with a capital S” (1960, 110). This lack of moderation is of course exactly what attracts Badiou to Lacanian ethics, for Badiou’s truth-event also has absolutely nothing to do with moderation. Inasmuch as the event activates the “immortal” within the mortal, turning an ordinary “some-one” into an extraordinary “subject,” it inevitably brings the subject’s “immoderate” passion for the Thing into its conventionally moderate “situation.” In the same way as the everyday object (say, a matchbox) that contains a faint echo of the Thing ushers some of the “immortal” energies of the real into the symbolic, the event reanimates the subject, infusing it with the kind of

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passion that may not be rationally explicable but that renders it acutely awake. As a result, the event guarantees, precisely, that “reality does not fully coincide with itself.” By causing the subject to question the complacent self-coincidence of its “known” surroundings, the event urges it to challenge the reality principle. According to this account, Badiou’s fidelity to the event is nothing other than fidelity to the echo of the Thing; it is nothing other than an attempt to ensure that reality is never just reality—that there is room in human life for the “undead” (or transcendent) energies of the real. Badiou’s notion of naming the event, in turn, is one way to understand how the echo of the Thing finds its way into symbolic formations.

The Banalization of the World All of this suggests that whenever we insist that there is nothing beyond the reality principle—that nothing besides our customary reality has any value—we engage in an active banalization of the world. I have accentuated the dangers of assuming that the transcendent is something we can only attain in some otherworldly paradise. But it may be equally important to avoid the seemingly opposite trap of thinking that there is nothing worth revering outside the mundane parameters of the reality principle. As a matter of fact, a deeper look reveals that these two attitudes ultimately amount to the same thing, namely the inability to view the world as anything but utterly prosaic. If the former causes us to shun the world, the latter causes us to shun those aspects of the world that aspire beyond the reality principle. As a consequence, both betray the ethics of sublimation. Both seek to separate the sublime from the signifier, for to equate the sublime with what escapes signification is merely the flipside of insisting on the inherent impossibility of inspired forms of meaning production—of the kinds of creative processes that, like Joyce’s writing, grab hold of fragments of the real. In the same way that the subject who is caught up in the repetition compulsion comes to regard its private reality as the only conceivable reality (see chapter 2), the person who refuses to admit the desirability of anything beyond our current reality ensures what Zupancˇicˇ describes as “the inexorable dictatorship of the reality principle as something that ‘self-evidently’ functions as the ultimate limit of the possible” (2003, 81). Zupancˇicˇ isolates two ways of thinking that both result in this dictatorship. The first is the idea I raised in passing in the end of the last

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chapter, namely that nothing on the level of everyday reality matters, that the world is composed of mere semblances, and that we should consequently aim directly at the real. This attitude strives to separate all symbolic formations from the real and to assert that the real is the only thing that matters. Those who uphold this view rail against the notion that there could be anything in the world that is capable of giving us a little slice of the Thing (that has the power to grant us any “real” satisfaction). Zupancˇicˇ characterizes this approach as a zealous “passion for the Real” that demands an end to all ideological configurations—all semblances—as a distraction from the real Thing.The second attitude, in contrast, claims that there is no transcendent reality beyond ideological configurations, specifying that the belief that there is a real different from symbolic formations is nothing but “the last grand narrative, the last great illusion.” According to this account, Zupancˇicˇ posits, “There is no Real, everything is convention, language games, a labyrinth of different possibilities that, at least in principle, are all of equal value” (80). The first of these approaches could be said to span from religious funˇ izˇek’s valodamentalism (as a pursuit of an otherworldly paradise) to Z rization of the ethical/divine act (which also, in a very different sense, represents a pursuit of an otherworldly place, albeit perhaps one closer ˇ izˇek’s contention to hell than paradise). It could be claimed to underlie Z that the big Other is nothing but a set of ideological deceptions designed to cover over and pacify the monstrous real. It fails to acknowledge that it is only through symbolic formations (semblances and even ideologies) that the real materializes as something tangible. I have conceded that many of these materializations remain “empty.” And undeniably there are others that are deeply hegemonic. But, as I have stressed, there are also those that carry the “immortal” passion of the real into the domain of symbolization in highly transformative ways. That is, even if symbolic formations are “mere” semblances and ideologies, some of them convey “real” commitment; they communicate the kind of absolute dedication that Badiou’s event also calls for, thereby feeding our sublimatory efforts to turn the world into a less insipid place. The second approach, in turn, leads to the nihilistic attitude of “why bother” that typifies some strands of poststructuralist theory, as well as much of contemporary Western society. Zupancˇicˇ proposes that this attitude arises from the belief in the impossibility of any definitive truth or satisfaction. Because our world seems inauthentic, filled with simulacra rather than genuine truth-events, we come to assume that “real” passion

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is untenable—that a strong investment in a goal, cause, person, or purpose is, in the final analysis, utterly useless. Nihilism of this kind reflects our awareness that although there are countless seductions and sites of interest that surround us, few of these can arouse our commitment in any meaningful fashion.4 The realization that there is no definitive “point” to our lives—no final redemption, salvation, or transcendent insight—can induce us to see the world’s offerings as both futile and insincere, so that, as Zupancˇicˇ concludes: “We give up on things because we know that they ‘make no sense,’ because there is no ultimate Meaning attached to them” (2003, 153).5

The Crisis of Sublimation This is how we end up with a world devoid of higher aspirations—how we end up reconciling ourselves to the notion that the way things are is how they always will (or should) be. Zupancˇicˇ describes this as a “crisis of sublimation”: our increasing inability to invest our surroundings with sublime meaning. This crisis causes us to denounce all hopes for a better future as too utopian. It persuades us to adopt a wholly pragmatic approach to our lives so that we come to affirm the validity of the cultural status quo by barring the possibility of new possibilities, by forbidding any new ideals, values, and systems of representation from entering the world. This pragmatism is, precisely, what ensures that the reality principle coincides with our actual reality, that our present reality represents the only version of reality that is imaginable to us. In Zupancˇicˇ’s terms, the crisis in question concerns “the weakening of the sublimatory force, the force that could produce or create some distance toward the reality principle and its claims. It entails the closure of the very space of creativity” (2003, 80).6 If the beauty of sublimation consists of its power to conjure up new ideals by raising objects (and representations) to the dignity of the Thing, the decline of our ability to sublimate implies that we become more and more tightly enslaved to already existing ideals; we lose the ability to envision viable alternatives to the ideologies that govern our world—that, as it were, constitute the “reality” of our reality principle. In this context, it is helpful to recall that the reality principle is not “natural,” that it is not the way things, in some organic sense, “are.” Rather, it is a particularly convincing version of social ideology. In Nietzschean terms, the reality principle is a fiction that has been so suc-

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cessful at covering its tracks that we no longer recognize it as such but, instead, take it to be reality “in itself.”This, notoriously, is how victorious social ideologies function: They are not perceived as ideologies, as specific ways of looking at the world, but rather come to correspond with the world. Sublimation is a genuine ethical stance because it causes us to question our gullibility in the face of this apparent correspondence. Like Badiou’s event, sublimation invites us to see the world from a different point of view—one that admits the sublime echo of the Thing. This is why Zupancˇicˇ insists that Lacanian ethics “is not an ethics of the finite, of finitude” (2000, 249), and why Badiou calls for a philosophical “securization of infinity” (2002, 20). What both thinkers are getting at is that ethics should be a matter of making sure that we do not shun all forms of infinitude, all transcendent aspirations, merely because the reality principle considers them unrealistic. If they insist on the continued relevance of the infinite (the “immortal”), it is because they want to counter our ethical indolence, particularly the notion that nothing can be done to change things for the better.

Symbolic “Dispossession” We live in a cultural moment where it is easy to fall into the crisis of sublimation—where it is easy to become resigned to the idea that what we choose to believe in, or to do, ultimately makes no difference whatsoever.The symbolic may appear so thoroughly hollow that the only way to counter it is to opt out of it altogether, whether through the ethical/ divine act or (perhaps more commonly) through a gradual withdrawal of all affective attachments. Alternative, it is easy to become convinced that however much we resist the hegemonic pull of the symbolic, we are irredeemably subjected to its laws, divested of all agency, and constitutionally dispossessed in relation to the collective discourse that we are obliged to employ. Contemporary theory is often acutely complicit with this line of reasoning. Listen to Judith Butler in (the otherwise astute) Giving an Account of Oneself: My words are taken away as I give them, interrupted by the time of a discourse that is not the same as the time of my life. This “interruption” contests the sense of the account’s being grounded in myself alone, since the indifferent structures that enable my living belong to a sociality that exceeds me. . . . I am compelled to give the account away, to send it

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off , to be dispossessed of it at the very moment that I establish it as my account. No account takes place outside the structure of address, even if the addressee remains implicit and unnamed, anonymous and unspecified. The address establishes the account as an account, and so the account is completed only on the occasion when it is effectively exported and expropriated from the domain of what is my own. It is only in dispossession that I can and do give any account of myself. (2005, 36–37)

What is notable here is the conspicuous nostalgia for a narrative account of myself that would be “grounded in myself alone” and somehow entirely “my own.” Indeed, the fact that my account is “interrupted” by a discursive temporality (by a sociosymbolic order) that is not the same as the time of my life—that I am “dispossessed” of my account by the “indifferent” structure of address that facilitates it—is presented as a deprivation of almost tragic proportions. My problem is that my account is “taken away” from me at the very moment I attempt to give it.7 In Lacanian terms, because I am forced to speak the language of the Other, I can never account for myself independently of the hegemonic terms supplied by this Other. The temporality of the social discourse that I am compelled to use disorients my “own” temporality, destabilizing any account of myself I might try to offer. Yet if human subjectivity is inherently social and intersubjective—as Butler, correctly, believes—why would I be bothered by the idea of not being able to give an account of myself that would be “mine” alone? And does not the notion that we are “dispossessed” by the collective spirit of language imply the underlying assumption that self-possession is (or somehow should be) possible? Does not the complaint that we are deprived of something suggest that we are also somehow entitled—that we have been cheated out of something that is rightfully “ours”? In addition, why is the fact that we are inserted into (and “interrupted” by) a preexisting structure of language such a colossal hardship? Is it not what makes human life possible? I find it hard to imagine what it would be like not to have that structure—what it would be like to be forced to create the world ex nihilo each and every time. Although Butler specifies that being “dispossessed” by the Other (or by an array of others) does not necessarily mean that we are treated badly, but merely that we are “acted upon” by forces we cannot control, it is difficult to shake the impression that she advances an unnecessarily disempowered theory of what it means to come into being and persist as a human subject.

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To be sure, there are people who have been terribly dispossessed— and even profoundly traumatized—by collective structures of meaning. I have myself emphasized that the enigmatic signifiers of the Other’s desire can be intolerably wounding. And it may also be that most of us have experienced one form or another of “dispossession” at some point in our lives. But I would want to distinguish this from the assertion that the scene of subject formation is inherently humiliating simply by virtue of the fact that it is unwilled and unchosen. In the context of explaining Levinasian ethics, Butler maintains that because I am acted upon “unilaterally from the outside”—overwhelmed, rendered passive, and “imposed upon” by networks of sociality beyond my private “being”—I am automatically “not only persecuted but besieged, occupied”: “That which persecutes me brings me into being,” “animates me into ontology at the moment of persecution” (2005, 89). Admittedly, it is somewhat difficult to distinguish Butler’s own views from those of Levinas at this point in her discussion, but I still think that “persecution” is a strong word to use to describe the inaugurative condition of subjectivity.Though Butler admits that there are context-specific (historical and cultural) forms of persecution whose insidiousness is on a completely different scale from our constitutive dispossession,8 her theory assumes that the constellations of sociality into which we are born are invariably hostile or at the very least indifferent. It assumes that there are no empowering configurations of sociosymbolic meaning, no ideals, values, or systems of representation (quilting points) that offer us a sense of purpose and belonging. And it assumes that the signifier is primarily a vehicle of hegemonic power so that there are no signifiers that are capable of granting us agency. Yet there is very little that justifies this equation of language with social tyrannies. As my analysis of sublimation suggests, as much as language may come to serve such tyrannies, it can also oppose them by ushering us “beyond” the reality principle.

The Other vs. the Signifier ˇ izˇek have, over the years, disagreed, they arguAs fiercely as Butler and Z ably suffer from the same blind spot, namely the inability to appreciate the various ways in which we are the beneficiaries of the Other’s disˇ izˇek’s case—as I have stressed—this blind spot leads to an course. In Z overvalorization of the ethical/divine act. In Butler’s, it tends to generate a masochistic discourse of irremediable deprivation. It seems to me that

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if there is no subjectivity without the Other (or others), it is a little disingenuous to lament that “my” account of myself is somehow brutally “exported and expropriated” from me by the very entity that makes it possible for me to give it in the first place; it is odd to complain that the Other/other has deprived me of what I only have because of this Other/ other to begin with. Unless I am willing to entertain the dubious idea that there is (or should be) an autonomously viable presymbolic identity that is entirely my “own,” the idea that my subjectivity has been somehow defiled by my insertion into collective discourse cannot hold as a universal pronouncement. What, besides the real of the body, has the Other/other “disrupted,” “violated,” “offended,” or “wounded”? Is there some sort of a pure “I” that has been corrupted by its encounter with collective discourse? While it is true that a specific subject can be defiled in specific ways by its relationship to the Other/others, the belief that this relationship is intrinsically defiling overlooks the fact that it is this very Other/other that gives us access to the meaning making capacities of language—that, more broadly, gives us the gift of sublimation. I have sought to explain that Lacan’s theory of sublimation reveals that the signifier is by no means equivalent to the Other’s hegemonic law—that there are ways to break our servitude to the Other. To be fair to Butler, this is what her theories of performativity and subversive reiteration also imply. However, her recurring emphasis on “dispossession” makes it easy to forget that, without this “dispossession,” we would be incapable of meaning production, intersubjectivity, and even love; we would in fact have no psychic life to speak of.Whatever the political and ethical failings of the Other—and there is no denying that these can be considerable—we cannot refute that, without our participation in symbolic structures of signification, we would be deprived of many of the things that most matter to us in the world.Though the signifier deprives us of “wholeness,” it is simply not the case that our problems would be solved if we were somehow able to sidestep its alienating imprint. As much as Lacan criticized our propensity to buy into the complacency of the Other, he also stressed that it is through the Other that we come to constitute ourselves as creatures of sublimation, that is, creatures who possess the capacity to resculpt the world. Lacan’s theory of sublimation demonstrates that even though we are never free of social norms, we are not entirely determined by them either. This is because there are two distinctive “levels” of the Other. On the one hand, there are the demands of various authority figures, such

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as parents, teachers, spouses, and other significant others, as well as of sites of institutional power such as the state, law, work, and religion. On the other, there is the symbolic order as a structure of meaning production that raises us to the status of (at least potentially inventive) makers of meanings. I have attempted to show that while our meanings may accord with the demands of authority figures and sites of institutional power, they can also challenge these demands. This is a matter of pitting the Other against itself, as it were, of fighting the tyrannical aspects of the symbolic order with the significatory resources that this very order makes available. Furthermore, because of the Derridean “overabundance” of the signifier, our acts of meaning production can be renewed indefinitely so that there are, in principle, no limits to the human capacity to fashion new meanings. Precisely because we never reach the end of meaning (the “truth” of Being)—because sublimation always fails to attain its aim (or only attains it because it fails to attain its goal, the Thing-in-itself)—the process of singularizing our discourse is inherently open ended. This is why our inability to bring our sublimatory impulse to a satisfactory conclusion is not a cause for grief but what lends human life much of its dynamism.

Balancing the Symbolic and the Real That sublimation always falls short of its mark, that language inevitably disappoints our efforts to redeem the lack within our being, is what ˇ izˇek asserts that our compulsive symbolic activity is keeps us nimble. Z nothing but “a desperate attempt” to repair the traumatizing rupture of the real (2001, 46). Yet this desperation is exactly what provides the necessary momentum for our various activities:The persistent remainder of alienation that we cannot banish—an alienation that, on the visceral level, tends to announce itself as the “undead” throb of the real pulling us towards the Thing with the same hypnotic force as the ring possesses in The Lord of the Rings—ensures that we keep inventing new ways to alleviate our basic existential malaise. This, of course, does not mean that we get off easy, for maintaining a balance between the symbolic and the real, between the signifier and the bodily “excess” that resists significaˇ izˇek himself acknowledges, whenever the tion, can be demanding. As Z symbolic gains too much power at the expense of the real, our existence loses its passion and forward-moving cadence. But when the symbolic fails to adequately mediate the disorderly energies of the real—when

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the quilting points that connect us to social sites of meaning are too fragile—we feel terrorized by the overproximity of jouissance; we fail to gain a steady foothold in cultural narratives and other collective landmarks that would be able to anchor us in the symbolic world.9 If the process of fashioning a singular place within the world results in a distinctive subjective “style,” this style always expresses something about the manner in which the symbolic and real, however tenuously, come together and amalgamate. If too little of the real leads to existential blandness, too much of it interferes with our ability to access a workable social identity. As Kirshner posits, “To summarize the Lacanian position, self-maintenance (a sense of embodied existence) entails preservation of a certain equilibrium with the real. The subject must preserve contact with the traces of the ‘thing’ (the unsymbolized part of the real), without being overwhelmed by it.” At the same time, an excessive weakness of social links, Kirshner continues, “exposes the subject to destabilization by a real that cannot be contained” (2004, 76).This implies, among other things, that there are ways to live that maintain the Thing at a proper distance and others that are less successful at doing so. One reason I have focused on sublimation so strongly is that it is easier for us to grasp the dangers of coming too close to the Thing than it is to appreciate those of stifling its echo by holding it too far. If the former traumatizes us to the point of paralysis, the latter compromises the truth of our desire, thereby making it impossible for us to attain a singular identity. This is why it is important to pursue desires that remain faithful to the Thing, for such desires promote our singularity by maintaining a robust relationship to jouissance (which by definition captures something of the Thing’s echo). Along related lines, one might speculate that intensely creative states— the kinds of states that overtake our symbolic persona and transport us into an alternative existential plane—are ones of heightened singularity because they allow jouissance to temporarily overshadow the more socially mediated texture of desire. Such states are moments when the echo of the Thing reverberates within the symbolic with unusual passion. Some individuals (the Joyces and the Cézannes of the world) seem capable of conjuring them into existence in a fairly reliable manner. But as a rule they dissipate after a certain interval for the simple reason that they run into resistance from the requirements of sociality. This is why the reconciliation between the symbolic and the real within strongly sublimatory states must always in the end yield to some tension and

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discord.Yet even after such states fade, their residue may remain present in our psychic lives, fueling our being with an affective recollection of what has taken place; the effects of sublimation, in other words, may linger long after the process itself has expired. Indeed, if this were not the case, the reinvention of social ideals, values, and systems of representation I have been talking about would not be possible, for such reinvention demands that the “results” of our sublimatory efforts “stick”—that they become the new “reality” for the time being. They will of course over time be supplanted by additional sublimatory efforts, additional attempts to remold the world. But their impact on the world is still “real” in the sense that it leaves an indelible imprint. Like Freud’s magic writing pad, the world holds an invisible record of such imprints. The fact that new imprints over time attain ascendance rarely means that old ones are completely extinguished—that they entirely vanish from our collective consciousness (let alone our collective unconscious).

The Upside of Anxiety The challenges of balancing the symbolic and the real allow us to better grasp what has been implicit in much of my argument, namely that the distinction between being summoned to a singularity beyond ideological interpellation on the one hand and being overstimulated (rendered “undead”) on the other can be difficult to uphold. The surplus vitality or “too muchness” of energy that characterizes human life is at once a source of enormous originality and enormous discomfort: The intense feeling of aliveness generated by sublimation can be matched by an equally intense overagitation (or “overaliveness,” if you will). In effect, the more we manage to feel in touch with the “real” of our being, the more vulnerable we may be to the onslaught of the kind of hyperactivity that mortifies us by its excessiveness. This may explain why those capable of unusual creativity often also seem prone to pathology (and vice versa). From this point of view, the fact that we seldom achieve perfect existential poise may be a prerequisite of our capacity for innovation. Or, to return to a formulation from chapter 1, our lapses of composure are merely the obverse of our singularity. Our culture does its best to conjure away the discomfort of overagitation—what it likes to denote by the diffuse label of anxiety. Even though the rushed pace of contemporary life makes serenity more and

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more impossible to come by, we are constantly warned against the pitfalls of anxiety, including the psychosomatic symptoms that it tends to spawn. These warnings are in fact so pervasive that it is hard not to feel anxious about feeling anxious; it is difficult to shed the suspicion that anxiety is a telltale sign of existential failure. Yet assuming that we can rid ourselves of anxiety might be largely unrealistic. And to the degree that it propels our sublimatory achievements, suppressing it might rob us of some of our most vigorously inventive energy. I do not mean to imply that creative processes themselves are necessarily wrought by anxiety (although they certainly can be). But if I am right in positing a link between singularity and the surplus energies of the real, there might not be an easy way around the fact that creativity cannot thrive without a degree of anxiety (or excess agitation). I have noted how distressing things can get when the “too muchness” of energy overflows the limits of our tolerance—when we are overtaken by a “too muchness of too muchness”—and I by no means wish to minimize the very real agony generated by this kind of anxiety (particularly when it results from inequalitarian social arrangements). But I think that it is equally valuable to recognize that breakdowns in “normal” psychic functioning can serve as portals to innovation, opening up, on the private level, the possibility of the “impossible” that Badiou’s truth-event is meant to release on the collective level. It is hardly a coincidence that I have referred to Heidegger at various points in my analysis, for if Heidegger saw the ability to handle anxiety about one’s existential predicament as a precondition of authenticity, Lacan similarly implied that anxiety is often inextricable from singularity. However, perhaps because of his interest in linguistics, Lacan was able to develop a more detailed model for coping with anxiety than Heidegger. This model was, precisely, sublimation. Lacan concurred with Heidegger that confronting the nothingness (lack) at the heart of human life was anxiety producing, but he went on to theorize sublimation as something that both resulted from anxiety and offered an effective means of binding it. While Heidegger’s late theory of poetic dwelling could be argued to gesture towards something related, it lacks the rigor of Lacan’s notion of sublimation as a mode of welcoming jouissance without letting it engulf us. No doubt there are times when this mechanism fails, when the anxiety generated by jouissance gets the better of us. But it may also succeed more often than we realize. After all, it succeeds every time we

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manage to deal with multiple tensions, multiple stimuli, in a manner that grants us a sense of aliveness. And during our most creative moments, we may even be able to draw productive connections between the various stimuli that threaten to overpower us, thereby turning their pressure into a resource for originality.

Lacan with Dr. Phil My analysis of Lacanian singularity has moved from the ethical act to the ethics of sublimation, but there is one factor that has remained constant: the drive energies of the real. I call attention to this because I am aware that connecting singularity to the real inevitably runs the risk of insinuating that existential authenticity is inherently antithetical to sociality. I hope to have clarified why this is not the case. At the same time, it is necessary to acknowledge that even if we propose, as I have done, that the drives are always proto-social, and that they can find their way into our symbolic, and even our interpersonal, lives, it is arguable that the alignment of singularity with jouissance is not nearly as different from traditional notions of self-actualization as the evocation of Lacan’s name typically implies. On some level, it replicates the idea that what arises from “within” us is authentic and rebellious, whereas what is introduced from “without” is inauthentic and complacent; it suggests that those aspects of our being that escape relationality are somehow more “real” than those that have been tainted by socialization. Take the injunction to not cede on one’s desire. Does it not, in some sense, merely reproduces the age-old warning against ignoring one’s inner directives, being a social sellout, and compromising one’s principles? In addition, what do we make of the irony of Dr. Phil asserting that the authentic self “is the part of you that is not defined by your job, or your function, or your role”: “It is all your strengths and values that are uniquely yours and need expression, versus what you have been programmed to believe that you are ‘supposed to be and do’” (see Guignon 2004, 2)? How different is this, really, from the contention that the singular self is what is not a part of any whole, what escapes all social categories and classifications? Is Lacan merely a more sophisticated version of Dr. Phil, conveying in unnecessarily obscure language what every self-help guru knows, namely that authenticity is a matter of reaching into the depths of the self to recover hidden gems that allow us to figure out the meaning of our lives?

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Intellectual honesty requires us to admit that these questions are not as far fetched as we might like to think. Though Lacan certainly does not postulate that there is an essential kernel of personality within us that is striving for recognition and self-realization—though he does not refer to a mysterious wellspring of innate characteristics, potentialities, dispositions, or aptitudes that makes us who we are—he does appear to imply that there a distinction between subjective “truth” and the kind of loss of vitality and purpose that results from becoming a mere cog in the social machine. But this is where the similarities end, not least because, as I have underlined, Lacan does not regard singularity (or authenticity) as a matter of self-possession or self-ownership. Whether Lacanian singularity expresses itself through a miraculous interpellation beyond ideological interpellation, an ethical/divine act of absolute defiance, an uncompromising faithfulness to a truth-event, or the destabilizing jouissance of the signifier, its defining attribute is existential bewilderment rather than reassurance: There is always something about it that wars against the self-help quest for unruffled lives.

Singularity and Intersubjective Ethics This, incidentally, only adds to the complexity of assessing the ethical implications of Lacanian singularity, for existential bewilderment is often accompanied by the difficulty of relating to others (from this perspective, it is true that aligning singularity with the real introduces a degree of antisociality).Whether we are talking about the ethical/divine act or about transcendent forms of sublimation, the singular self ’s loss of stable social footing makes it—for the time being at least—largely incapable of intersubjectivity so that we are forced to ask,What happens when the “truth” of our desire wounds others? What if our desire is not only “pathological” in the sense that it hurts us, but also “criminal” in the sense that it injures others? What if our desire drives us to treat others badly, or even to harm them physically? What if I am a straight man who, upon encountering a gay man, falls into a “homosexual panic,” beats up the gay man, and then claims that my unconscious “made me do it”? What if I am a man who batters his wife on a regular basis because something about my desire tells me that I need to assert my superiority over women? What if I am a woman who subjects my lovers to psychological manipulation because that is what my desire to stay in control tells me to do? And, to switch to a slightly different register, what happens if my efforts to re-

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main loyal to the echo of the Thing make it impossible for others to do the same? What, in short, is the relationship between Lacanian ethics and more normative considerations about justice? I will return to the question of justice in my concluding remarks. For now, suffice it to point out that such considerations raise the broader question of how we can take responsibility for what we cannot entirely understand, let alone control, about ourselves. Butler offers a thoughtful response when she observes, “If the subject is opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself, it is not thereby licensed to do what it wants or ignore its obligations to others. The contrary surely is true” (2005, 19–20). That is, the fact that we are partially incomprehensible to ourselves—that, among other things, the often quite enigmatic “destiny” generated by our desire is something we can never completely decipher—does not absolve us of ethical accountability, but rather invites us to rethink the very meaning of this accountability. Butler in fact suggests that it is precisely to the extent that we acknowledge the limits of our self-possession and self-ownership that we can begin to forge genuinely ethical relationships to others. This is an ethics based on unqualified intersubjective generosity in the sense that our recognition of our own lack of self-consistency allows us to feel empathy for, and remain patient with, the lack of self-consistency of others, thereby allowing us to enter into a kind of solidarity of vulnerability with them. As a result, it counters the kind of ethical violence “which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same” (42). Butler perhaps pushes this line of reasoning a bit too far when she continues as follows: “I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others, who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves” (2005, 42). I would have to disagree. I believe that it would be a mistake to see subjective opacity as automatic grounds for forgiveness. Doing so makes it far too easy for us to dodge responsibility at those moments when our unconscious passions cause us to harm others. And as much as I appreciate the idea of staying benevolent with the inscrutable inner lives of others, I think that there is a threshold where such benevolence turns into masochism—where the line between generosity and self-injury becomes dangerously thin. Crossing this line does nothing for our status as beings of ethical capacity. While it is possible to be merciful and critical at once—to forgive without condoning the other’s actions—

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an ethics that considers forgiveness as an existential given rather than a conscious choice made by those who have been injured, places the latter in an impossible bind: Either forgive or show yourself to be less than human by defaulting on your ethical responsibility to forgive the other. Either way, the perpetrator gets off the hook while the weight of doing the right thing is squarely placed on the shoulders of the injured party. It seems to me that a big part of learning to accurately read the “truth” of our desire is being able to intervene in this desire whenever it threatens to wound others. Furthermore, the reverse of being able to distance ourselves from the desire of the Other is our willingness to claim full responsibility for our own desire. Ethics, on this view, is a matter of owning up to our actions even when they are motivated by unconscious forces that remain partially impenetrable. And it is a matter of expecting similar accountability from others. It should be obvious by now that Lacan’s point about the repetition compulsion—a point Freud would have agreed with—is not that we are free to wring our hands in helpless resignation (“I don’t know why I do the things I do,” “I don’t understand why I keep repeating the same pattern,” “I can’t figure out why I keep wounding others”). Rather, his point is that the repetition compulsion invites us to pay closer attention to how our unconscious passions dictate our behavior. Stubborn repetitions, in other words, are our wake-up call to the necessity of becoming accountable for how our unconscious habits structure our world, including our relational world. If we consistently slip in the same way—if we repeatedly harm others—it is not forgiveness we need, but rather a greater degree of self-reflexivity. After all, the fact that we are never fully rational and agentic creatures does not mean that we have no rational capacity or agency whatsoever; the fact that we are riven by unconscious motivations does not mean that we have no consciousness (or conscience, for that matter).10 It merely means that sometimes we need to work quite hard to make sure that our unconscious does not determine the contours of our entire destiny without our conscious consent, let alone without any input from our conscience.

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8.

The Sublimity of Love

I have demonstrated that because our desire circles around a riddle (of the Thing) that can never be definitively solved by, or dissolved into, significations, we are motivated to devise ever-new ways of symbolizing it. And I have argued that the difficulty of this task in many ways only fuels our commitment and perseverance. The purpose of this concluding chapter is to illustrate that this dynamic is nowhere as obvious as in the realm of romantic love.1 I will show that the Thing is never as powerful—as likely to enliven and exhilarate us—as when we fall in love. After all, there is nothing in the world that carries the echo of the missing Thing as convincingly as the person we love. If the dissection of the real by the signifier causes morsels of the real—displaced scraps of the Thing—to scatter around, desire (animated by the drives) chases these morsels with a relentless (“undead”) intensity. This is why an object that seems to contain one of these morsels is no ordinary object, but rather a sublime one that appears to capture something about the very essence of the Thing. Such an object compels us in ways that more commonplace objects rarely can. This is because it comes closer than any other object to giving us the impression that we can actually touch the Thing in tangible ways that make unmediated jouissance available to us. We have seen that the loss of the Thing gives rise to an idiosyncratic trajectory of desire that causes us to search for fitting substitutes among the objects of the world. And we have also seen that this trajectory is far from random, but consists of a specific configuration of passion (the “track” of desire I have referred to) so that the shape of our desire coincides with the shape of the loss we imagine having endured. As Kaja Silverman explains, this configuration of passion amounts to a “unique language of desire” (2000, 23)—a “grammar according to which we care about new objects and things” (24). In other words, our primordial loss 168

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serves as a “precondition for care” (38) in the sense that it is precisely because we cannot access the Thing that other people come to matter to us, that there is space for others within our psyches to begin with; it is because we feel lacking that we have the ability to lovingly illuminate others—to, in Silverman’s words, “bring others from the darkness of invisibility into the radiance of appearance” (43). This is yet another way to understand Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, for it links our capacity to perceive the value of certain objects with our readiness to keep our desire alive; it aligns our ability to light up specific objects with our willingness to hold the void of our being open even when we might feel tempted to close it artificially. Insofar as every new object of desire resurrects the Thing, we have no choice but to relate to this object through our specific language of desire. However, we can be more or less charitable with respect to our expectations. We can either demand that the object reflect our desire in precise and predetermined ways, according to the automatism of our repetition compulsion. Or we can invite the object to meet our desire freely, in ways that guide us into previously unexplored pathways of desiring. In other words, even though our language of desire is a site through which our past persistently resurfaces in the present, we can allow this past to assume fresh incarnations. As Silverman proposes, the subject who is concerned about “the being of others” does not seek “to bury, forget, or transcend the past”: “Rather, this subject holds himself open to new possibilities for the deployment of that signifying constellation which most profoundly individualizes him. He is receptive to the resurfacing in the present and future of what has been—not as an exercise in narcissistic solipsism, but rather as the extension in ever new directions of his capacity to care” (2000, 62). Silverman thus distinguishes between narcissistic desire and the kind of desire that is content to revive the Thing in less self-centered ways.The aim of this chapter is to elucidate these two ways of envisioning desire, and to argue that while our language of desire can imprison us in narcissistic modalities of relationality, it can also serve as an opening to genuine love and interpersonal generosity.

The Love Object as Refound I have shown that we have the sublimatory capacity to raise more or less any object to the dignity of the Thing. But Lacan’s quintessential paradigm of sublimation is courtly love. And his discussion of this type of love

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is meant to highlight, in part at least, the problems that can arise when the object that is elevated to the status of the Thing is a living creature rather than an inanimate item of interest. To state the matter succinctly, the more seamlessly the love object is conflated with the Thing, the less of its singularity of being is allowed to shine through. In extreme cases, the object comes to correspond to the Thing—or, more precisely, to the promise of “wholeness” represented by the Thing—so perfectly that it becomes more or less “interchangeable with the love that the subject has for its own image” (Lacan 1960, 98). This is exactly the narcissistic ethos of courtly love for, as Lacan notes, the lover of courtly poetry does not venerate a flesh-and-blood woman, but rather an imaginary object that fulfills his fantasy (of recovered jouissance) from a distance. Distance is in fact essential for the “success” of such love because it ensures that the lover is able to uphold the purity of his fantasy against any and all corruptions that might be introduced by the actual woman in question.This is why, as Lacan puts it, courtly poems “all seemed to have been praising the same person” (126). They were filled with “conventional, idealizing themes, which couldn’t have any real concrete equivalent” (148). Lacan remarks that even though courtly love was a deliberate invention of the Middle Ages, it has left an indelible imprint on Western history, engendering a romantic culture that is sustained not only by a strong literary tradition, but also by an unconscious fantasy structure that organizes “contemporary man’s sentimental attachments,” particularly his obdurate adherence to “the idealizing cult of the feminine object” (1960, 148; 153).This cult is what transforms an ordinary woman into a coveted objet a. It is frequently activated by a detail that the woman herself might not even be cognizant of having but that, mysteriously, conjures up the Thing for the desiring subject. This detail is the “remainder of the real” (Kirshner 2004, 114)—the amalga, treasure, or “certain something” that renders the object uniquely attractive; it is a veiled, obscure, unlocatable, and unfathomable component that does not necessarily match any of the object’s definable characteristics, but that nevertheless possesses the power to incite the lover’s passion. The lover, in short, becomes infatuated when he (unconsciously) senses that he has discovered a little fragment of the Thing, even if he cannot explicitly designate it. This is why the love object is invariably a “refound” object—a (never entirely successful) surrogate for the sublime (non)object.2 As an unusually compelling representative of the Thing, the objet a seems to offer the end of alienation, and perhaps even the possibility of

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redemption, which is why the subject’s desire solidifies around it with extraordinary intensity.3 Yet because the subject cannot identify the detail that draws it, let alone explain its significance, it is often perplexed by the strength of its desire. Roland Barthes expresses this perfectly when he writes, “The more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance” (1977, 20). The specificity of the subject’s desire is hence confounding, making it impossible for it to understand why it falls in love with a particular person rather than some other, or why, once in love, it finds it difficult to transfer its affections elsewhere. The very fact that the object signifies “in excess” of itself— that it transmits a trace of the enigmatic Thing—makes it all the more inscrutable. Conversely, it may well be that the subject is intrigued by objects it experiences as somehow opaque or impenetrable because such objects provide a perfect screen for its narcissistic projections; they, in a sense, explicitly “invite” the subject to idealize (or even idolize) them by raising them to the dignity of the Thing.

The Problems of Narcissistic Desire I have discussed the problems of narcissistic desire at length elsewhere.4 Here it is enough to mention three in passing. First, this type of desire is predicated on the chronic unavailability of the object. It is defined by its need for a barrier of some kind, for it is only capable of revering the beloved to the extent that she remains beyond reach.5 The moment she “gives in” to the lover’s advances, the illusion shatters and she reverts to the status of a prosaic object. Because she is largely an imaginary creation of the desiring subject, the subject’s structure of desire cannot withstand any interference from her; this desire is threatened as soon as she reveals dimensions of her being that have nothing to do with the subject’s fantasy life. There is, then, an inherent impossibility to narcissistic desire in the sense that the more the lover gets to know his object, the less the object manages to satisfy. This explains, to some degree at least, why many individuals like to erect obstacles—endless detours, hindrances, and impediments—to their love, why it is the tragic “missed encounter” of love, the passion that was not meant to be, could not be, or should not have been, that comes the closest to fulfilling their fantasies. An authentic interpersonal connection is the last thing that the subject of narcissistic

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desire wants, for such a connection makes it difficult for him or her to maintain the image of the beloved as an accurate replica of the Thing. Second—and along closely related lines—this type of desire demands the idealization of the love object to such an extreme that this object is more or less entirely emptied of substance and independent integrity. The object is, as it were, drained of its distinctiveness. As is the case with the requirement of unavailability, idealization cannot tolerate the other as genuinely “other”—as a person with her own ideals, values, interests, concerns, or preoccupations.6 What is more, the lover’s fixation on his ideal renders him incapable of finding alternative objects even when the chosen one is utterly unattainable; he remains attached to an unreachable object because all other objects seem empty in comparison. In this sense, excessive forms of idealization cause the subject to eschew many of the world’s attractions because these fail to measure up to the imagined splendor of the ideal. In such a scenario, only a particular woman will do, and this woman is only acceptable as long as she does not divert from the ideal. This gives rise to a strange kind of asceticism whereby the lover flees from obtainable satisfactions for the simple reason that they do not live up to his fantasy. In addition, because no object can in the end completely reincarnate the Thing, the lover is condemned to repeat his quest indefinitely in the sense that once he attains his object, his disappointment prompts him to abandon it after a short interval. Because every object will eventually dissatisfy and disillusion, the lover has no choice but to constantly defer satisfaction by moving from one object to the next. Third, the elevation of the love object to the dignity of the Thing can result in intense aggression towards the object. As Lacan tersely observes, “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you— the objet petit a—I mutilate you” (1964, 268). Inasmuch as it is the objet a (as an emissary of the Thing), rather than the person herself, that the lover desires, he will rather mutilate the object than revise his desire. Not only does the lover unleash his hostility towards the object whenever she deviates from his ideal, but in his feverish search for the hidden kernel of the Thing within her being (for what in the object is “more than” who she is), he is prone to tear her apart, metaphorically speaking, so as to gain a glimpse of what he thinks will satisfy him. I have noted that the objet a as a site of fixation “remains stuck in the gullet of the signifier” in the sense that it “cannot be swallowed” (270). But this does not mean that it cannot be chewed up or gnawed upon. When the tragic automatism of

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compulsive desire is set in motion, little matters to the lover besides the expectation that the object fulfill its pre-assigned, fantasmatic destiny as the object that is supposed to give him complete satisfaction.

The Paralysis of Desire I have argued that circling the Thing serves as a valuable platform for our sublimatory capacity to accentuate new facets of the world, as well as to invent new objects and representations; it enables us to direct our curiosity towards a range of artifacts and activities that we might otherwise overlook. From this perspective, the fact that we are capable of various forms of fantasy—that we pursue objects and representations that convey something about the dignity of the Thing—works in our favor by making our private universe more scintillating.Whether we use a string of matchboxes to decorate our mantelpiece, a palette of colors to paint some apples, or a sequence of words to compose a poem, our creativity augments our lives. The main problem with narcissistic love is that, even though it aims at the Thing in much the same way as sublimation does, it arrests the sublimatory impulse. It overpowers sublimation’s ethical (innovative) force—the force that rides the open-ended thrust of desire—by turning the object into a static emblem whose sole purpose is to buttress our quest for self-completion. In an affective configuration such as this, our desire no longer admits any alternative elaborations; its goal is to preserve the sanctity of our own image rather than to facilitate the mobile resurrection of the Thing. Consequently, it effectively divests the object of the right to evolve. When our pursuit of the Thing gets tangled up with our narcissistic tendencies, the outcome tends to be an interpersonal mess. Our inability to respect the lived reality of those we are supposed to love can cause us to suffocate what is most alive in them. Even though we, cognitively, know that others possess psychic lives that are different from our own, we can end up incorporating them into our fantasy world so meticulously that we no longer recognize the distinction between who they are and the products of our own imagination. In a way, this is not surprising; it is not entirely unexpected that we try to do with people what we do with other objects, namely invest them with meaning that emanates from our own interiority. As I indicated above, we are in some ways predestined to relate to every new object of interest through the specific language of our desire. However, because this language can easily become caught up

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in the repetition compulsion—in fact, in a certain sense the repetition compulsion is nothing but a rigid version of our language of desire—it can induce us to see in others only what our fantasies dictate rather than what these others actually bring to the encounter. This should make us extremely careful about how we raise the objects of our love to the dignity of the Thing. There is a precarious line between our capacity to illuminate others in Silverman’s sense and the ever-present temptation to use them to plug the void of our being; there is a fine line between treating our primordial void as a stage for the appearance of others on the one hand and expecting them to fantasmatically close that void on the other. Because narcissism guarantees that our relationship to our desire remains largely passive, motivated by the repetitive urge to reawaken the Thing in extremely specific (fantasydriven) ways, it causes us to do the latter. In slightly different terms, insofar as we are afraid to actually attain our goal, we resort to the objet a as an inert object that evokes the Thing in a predictable manner, thereby rendering it safe. In the same way that the pleasure principle protects us from the overwhelming impact of jouissance by ensuring that we circle it without ever (or rarely) hitting it directly, the beloved as domesticated objet a shields us from the potentially horrifying impact of the Thing. In this sense, the objet a as the (imaginary) “cause” of our desire safeguards us against the very jouissance it promises, conveniently occluding the fact that the love object cannot ever be entirely dissociated from the terrorizing “real” that threatens to destroy us.

The Overproximity of the Object In the context of his discussion of courtly love, Lacan specifies that, ironically, the love object that corresponds too flawlessly with the Thing can easily revert from an idealized entity to a menacing “inhuman partner” that encroaches upon the subject’s territory (1960, 150). As every commitment phobe knows, the beloved who manages to capture the echo of the sublime object also manages to capture something about the repulsive “real” Thing that threatens to engulf, devour, subsume, or subjugate. This manifestation of the object is no longer the glittering objet a that sutures the subject’s narcissistic fantasy, but rather the petrifying “stain” of the real that alarms by its sheer overproximity. As a consequence, whenever the subject draws too close to the object, it is filled by an unmanageable degree of anxiety that keeps it from “crossing a certain

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frontier at the limit of the Thing” (186). This is why the object that most engages is frequently also the one that most repels. Fink points out that it is often easier for the subject to feel uncertain about the object’s love than to confront the immensity of this love: “The subject much prefers to deal with the Other’s demand that he or she do things, become this or that, than to deal with the Other’s desirousness, pure and simple” (1997, 60). This is in part because eros, at this level of ardor, hearkens back to those early stages of life when the boundaries between self and world, subject and other, were not yet fully delineated. One of the goals of social interpellation is to establish these boundaries. But since social interpellation is never entirely accomplished, since something of the real always remains, the rudimentary traces of infantile experiences of merging persist in the subject’s psyche. Love resuscitates these traces, so that the subject ends up reenacting the confusion or vanishing of boundaries that characterized its prehistory. This can be terrifying because, as we have learned, the closer to the real the subject gets, the more it loses the symbolic (social) and imaginary (fantasmatic) coordinates of its being. Against this backdrop, it is easy to see that fantasy functions defensively, enabling the subject to neutralize the potential monstrousness of the object. I have stressed that, on the collective level, the aim of fantasy is to conceal the antagonisms of the social world so as to generate a dependable cultural fabric. Likewise, one of the main tasks of fantasy in the context of interpersonal relationships is to render the other safely intelligible. More specifically, Lacan claims that our attempts to relate to the other as a “you” represent an effort to tame the distressing dimension of the other—a dimension that “threatens to surprise us and to cast us down from the height of its appearance.” “‘You’ contains a form of defense,” Lacan continues, “and I would say that at the moment when it is spoken, it is entirely in this ‘You,’ and nowhere else, that one finds what I have evoked today concerning das Ding” (1959, 56). “You,” Lacan thus suggests, allows the subject to contain the threat of the other (as Thing) by turning it into someone “like” itself—someone with whom it can develop an intersubjective rapport based on the assumption of a degree of shared “humanity.” “You,” in sum, functions as a (fantasmatic, imaginary) protection against the alarming realization that the other as Thing is potentially lethal. The purpose of fantasmatic/imaginary supports, then, is to keep the coveted Thing at a reasonable distance so that the subject can relate to

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the other as someone comparable to itself—as someone it can feel affinity for because it seems familiar.That is, the aim of fantasy is to obfuscate the fact that the enigmas of the other cannot ever be fully resolved, that each attempt to decode an intersubjective mystery can only spawn a multitude of new mysteries. On the one hand, the other’s resistance to the subject’s need for clarity rouses the subject’s passion for the simple reason that human beings tend to be magnetized by what eludes their control. On the other, to the extent that this resistance is a source of disconcerting uncertainty, it can drive the subject to impose an artificial veneer of continuity, permanence, and dependability on a relational dynamic that is by definition fragile and volatile. And it can also cause the subject to fall into overbearing patterns of knowing that impinge upon the other’s sovereignty; as I noted above, it can cause the subject to deflect the challenge posed by the other’s mystifying presence by trying to force the other to correspond to the demands of its fantasy world. In this manner, the subject runs the risk of smothering the very singularity that makes the other interesting in the first place.

Narcissism as an Ethical Failure Sadly, this kind of a pursuit of a “reliable” relational dynamic not only ravages the other’s multidimensionality but also, in the long run, destroys the living substance of the relationship. By annihilating the ethos of exploration that sustains the momentum of desire, it extinguishes the spark that animates the intersubjective space between self and other. In a sense, the more the subject allows its quest for security to shape its relationship, the more it refuses the invitation to life arising from the other. Among other things, the subject’s attempts to translate the otherness of the other into transparent meaning blind it to the possibility that the other may not be entirely comprehensible even to itself. As Santner posits, “What makes the Other other is not his or her spatial exteriority with respect to my being but the fact that he or she is strange, is a stranger, and not only to me but also to him- or herself, is the bearer of an internal alterity, an enigmatic density of desire calling for response beyond any rule-governed reciprocity” (2001, 9).7 In other words, if I am haunted by a surplus animation that agitates me while simultaneously lending a thrilling singularity to my being, the other is also fissured by intensities of desire (and drive) that it cannot fully discipline; it is caught up in the same tight nexus of turbulence and singularity with which I

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also struggle. Likewise, in exactly the same way that I cannot access every recess of my interiority, the other cannot access every facet of its being. As a result, my demand that the other disclose its secrets is as unrealistic as it is violating. One could, then, say that to the degree that narcissistic desire denies the unknowability of the other by repressing its more disquieting aspects, it represents a fairly drastic ethical failure, for ethics almost by definition asks us to accept this unknowability. As Butler proclaims, “Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness . . . when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession” (2005, 136). On this view, ethics requires us to allow ourselves to be touched by the unknowable otherness of the other in ways that transform the basic parameters of our being; our encounter with the enigmatic other obliges us to shed our false self-sufficiency, our conviction of being securely in control of ourselves. In the end of the last chapter, I pointed out that it is possible to stretch this account of intersubjectivity too far, as Butler does when she promotes unconditional forgiveness. But she is absolutely right that the act of letting ourselves be “undone” by the other, while certainly a challenge, is also an opportunity to become human in a different way, starting from a different place. After all, in the same way that there is no subject without the other, there is no subjective transformation without the ongoing presence of the other. Our continued openness to the other, in short, ensures the vitality of our own process of becoming; our courageous brush against the other’s alterity guarantees our own ongoing evolution. In more Lacanian terms, one might add that meeting the other’s unknowability asks us to tolerate not only the symbolic (social) and imaginary (fantasmatic) facets of the other, but also what is “real” about it. This is to say that Lacanian ethics demands us to confront what is most alarmingly “inhuman” (“undead”) about the other; it asks us to accept the other not only as our own likeness, but also as the grotesque Thing that cannot be assimilated into our symbolic or imaginary networks of meaning. As I will be positing in greater detail in the conclusion, Lacanian ethics moves from the other as a reassuring “face” (or “neighbor”)

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to the much more difficult matter of the other as uncompromisingly “other”—as someone whose jouissance is potentially too close, too alien, too strong, and therefore too traumatic.The problem with narcissism, as I have argued in this chapter, is that it prompts us to flee from any and all signs of this traumatizing otherness—an act that is made relatively simple by the fact that the world offers a whole host of convenient distractions. As Santner states, everyday life is filled with various ways of withdrawing, of “not really being there, of dying to the Other’s presence” (2001, 9).Tragically, even though our answerability to the other’s uncanny presence may reside at the very heart of our receptivity to the world—of our ability to renew ourselves through contact with what is wholly unlike us—we frequently turn away from this answerability out of narcissistic defensiveness. If, as Silverman proposes, interpersonal ethics entails our willingness to let those we love disclose themselves in their own way,8 narcissism as an ethical failure makes such disclosure impossible. This is how we become incapable of discovering in the other anything besides our own image.

The Call and Response of Love The fact that the love object has the power to evoke the Thing for us can therefore have some fairly troubling consequences. At the same time, it would be useless to pretend that love could (or should) be separated from the echo of the Thing. As we have seen, the Thing galvanizes our desire, which is why our deepest affection, our most enduring passion, is reserved for those who, however fantasmatically, usher us to its vicinity. As a matter of fact, although we may desire numerous people during our lives, there are usually relatively few who manage to embody the Thing for us in this profoundly meaningful fashion. These are the ones we love with a perseverance that defies rational comprehension, so that even when they hurt or frustrate us, we cannot easily discard them. Our desire is fixated on them because they seem to grant us a breathing piece of the lost Thing. They personify the (always receding) possibility of jouissance, and the more closely they approximate our fantasy of what we have lost, the more precious they appear to us. This is why the person we love is the sublime object par excellence—the object that most forcefully resonates on the frequency of the Thing. Although it is an ethical failure to confuse the love object with the Thing, pretending that the two have nothing to do with each other

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would deprive love of its power to electrify us; it would rob love of everything that is most magical about it. Indeed, to the extent that love is a particularly gripping form of sublimation, its capacity to make the sublime “appear” in the realm of concrete, everyday reality is even more robust than that of the other special objects I have described. In this sense, love is not only what deludes us into thinking that we can access a slice of sublimity but also what, in a very “real” (tangible) way, does actually make this sublimity available to us. It can obviously only do so partially, but this does not alter the fact that when it enters our lives, it brings with it a tiny sliver of shining sublimity. In the same way that a string of matchboxes can transmit the Erscheinung of the Thing, or a painted apple can allegorize a shadowy ideal, the love object can reflect the radiance of the missing Thing. This is why Badiou is correct in arguing that the truth-event of love alters our lives irrevocably. Once we have been roused by love, we cannot pretend that nothing has changed without betraying the event (or the Thing). Regardless of how our love turns out in the end, we have been propelled onto a new way of living and relating. Insofar as the truth-event of love brings the subject into existence as a subject (in Badiou’s sense), it awakens the immortal within the mortal “some-one.” Santner communicates this marvelously when he postulates that the subject of love emerges in relation to a summons originating from the other, and that this summons has the power to insert an intimation of timelessness (eternity) into the ordinary flow of time. More specifically, Santner declares that the capacity “to say ‘I’ only becomes manifest, only truly becomes a part of life, in and through the response to the passionate call of one’s proper name” (2001, 87). This is because the call of love—a call that eagerly awaits our response—stirs the singularity of our being by suspending our usual sociosymbolic investments; it bypasses what is generic about us by targeting the most distinctive (or “real”) corners of our character. In addition, because its “miracle,” its heady interpellation beyond ideological interpellation, momentarily stills the passage of time in much the same way as other transcendent experiences do, it enables us to detach ourselves from our usual utilitarian concerns. In this sense, as Santner stipulates, love is a locus of freedom: a temporary liberation from the relations of production and exchange that govern so much of the terrain of human life.9 Best of all, the liberating impact of the spellbinding call and response of love is reciprocal in that if it releases my uniqueness, it also releases the

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uniqueness of the other; it discharges the singularity of the other from its holding cell. As a result, to borrow from Butler, “we are bound to one another by what differentiates us, namely, our singularity” (2005, 34). If narcissism connects through the ruse of resemblance, “real love”—if I may use such a sentimental expression—does so through the recognition of difference; it allows bits of the real, bits of jouissance, to glide into the intersubjective space so that the hyperbolic “cleanliness” of narcissism is replaced by the messiness of relating. What is more, to the degree that I manage to sustain my investment over time, I weave the beloved into an ever-expanding network of ardent memories; I incorporate the other into a field of meanings that is deeply meaningful to me. Those who do not have access to this field may not understand why the object in question is so important to me. Indeed, I myself may not be able to accurately articulate my reasons. But I do know when an object holds this type of special significance. I return to such an object again and again because it has become the container of my jouissance. Admittedly, this is the cause of the worst of love’s obsessions. And it is also why love can devastate us so thoroughly—why the person who most faithfully reincarnates our Thing is frequently also the one who hurts us more than anyone else. But it is simultaneously the seat of love’s majesty, the reason love has the power to transport us beyond our customary sociosymbolic interpellations.

The Other as Irreplaceable According to this account, it would be injudicious to assume that love that ignites our longing for the Thing is invariably a mistake—that it is merely an illusion that we should strive to overcome as quickly as possible. If our desire crystallizes around a particular object, it may well be because this object does in fact contain something inestimably valuable. If we keep raising such an object to the dignity of the Thing— and if we find it difficult to forgo this object even when we, rationally, know that we “should”—it may be because the object has triggered a “real” yearning within us. While this yearning can get us in trouble, it is not something we can conjure away by willpower alone. And it is not, strictly speaking, false, for it connects us to something that not only feels irreplaceable, but in many ways actually is irreplaceable.When we lose an object that elicits our affection on this profound level, we lose something absolutely inimitable, with the result that we may never entirely “get

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over” such a loss. There is, as it were, a certain immortality to such an object in that even though the object can die or disappear, the singular place it holds in our affective universe does not dissipate. The imprint (enduring trace or indentation) it leaves behind outlives its actual presence in our lives, sometimes reverberating all the more intensely the more time or distance accumulates. Even a new passion, a new love, cannot always entirely erase this imprint, for the object that is irreplaceable (or immortal) does not have an equivalent; if we lose it, we cannot easily substitute someone else for it. The other who feels irreplaceable is loved not for what he does, or accomplishes in the world, but for who he, in the intricate complexity of his being, “is.” It should be clear by now that I do not mean this in an essentialist sense, for it is never possible to definitively determine who or what a given individual is in the depths of his or her being. This, however, does not annul the captivating, visceral force of the other’s singularity. As Barthes explains, “I love the other, not according to his (accountable) qualities, but according to his existence. . . . I love, not what he is, but that he is” (1977, 222). Along similar lines, Lacan remarks with respect to Antigone’s love for her brother Polyneces that her position “represents the radical limit that affirms the unique value of his being without reference to any content, to whatever good or evil Polyneces may have done, or to whatever he may be subjected to” (1960, 279). Interestingly, Lacan concludes that the unique value Polyneces holds for Antigone is linked to language: Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man. (1960, 279)

The matter is hence nuanced in that we are asked to distinguish between, on the one hand, the “historical drama” of symbolic law, a law that, in this particular instance, condemns Polyneces as a criminal and, on the other, the rift that language “inaugurates in the life of man.” Though both have to do with language, the former refers to the historically specific structuring of the symbolic order whereas the latter indicates the

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formative encounter with the signifier that makes Polyneces Polyneces— that lends Polyneces’s character its inimitable valence. This encounter fixes Polyneces—like every subject is fixed—into a specific drive destiny, which is why it gives rise to something more entrenched, more fundamental, than Polyneces’s symbolic identity. It is to this elemental dimension of her brother—to this “what is, is”—that Antigone is attached and that she juxtaposes with Creon’s edict: “As far as I am concerned, the order that you [Creon] dare refer me to doesn’t mean anything, for from my point of view, my brother is my brother” (278). In other words, Antigone does not care about how Polyneces has acted, how he has violated Creon’s law, but fixates on the fact that Polyneces is Polyneces (“my brother is my brother”). What matters to her is that her “brother is what he is,” and that “only he can be what he is” (278–79). Antigone’s love for Polyneces is not romantic in the sense that I have been discussing, but Lacan’s commentary highlights the idea that even though love is never completely indifferent to the particular qualities of the beloved, at its most riveting, it contains a layer of passion that does not depend on any one of these qualities. As Copjec sums up the matter, “love is that which renders what the other is lovable” (2004, 42). That is, love demands that the other be cherished “as he is, the way he comes” (42).With reference to Antigone’s insistence that she could never have another brother, Copjec states, “This is the sentiment we express when we say of someone, ‘They broke the mold after they made him.’ Antigone lets us know that her brother is unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him. . . . She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no deity, none of the laws of the polis to sanction the deed she undertakes on his behalf ” (41). This—the fact that Antigone refuses to justify her love—is what makes her, as Lacan (following the Chorus) puts it, “autonomous” (1960, 279). When it comes to Polyneces, the big Other (the law of Creon) is, for Antigone, entirely irrelevant.

Making the Sublime “Appear” The notion of loving the other as he comes should not be confused with the idea that we should approach him with a levelheaded pragmatism that insists that “real love” is a matter of stripping him of all of his sublime qualities; it should not be confused with the idea that we should heroically resist the faintest echo of the Thing so as to fight the

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temptation to see in the other something “more than” him. Quite the opposite, loving the other as he comes implies that we accept that he is at once “himself ” and “more than” himself. As Copjec postulates, although the Lacanian phrase “I love in you something more than you” is usually taken to signify that I love what is ineffable in you (what “I cannot reach in you”), it can also be interpreted to mean that, through love, I in fact do access “something more” in you. Copjec elaborates on this as follows: 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. A gift given by a beloved friend ceases to coincide with itself, it becomes itself plus the fact that it was given by the friend. The same is true of everything I get from the beloved, all the qualities, everything he or she is. That is, the “is” of the beloved is split, fractured. The beloved is always slightly different from or more than, herself. It is this more, this extra, that makes the beloved more than just an ordinary object of my attention. (2004, 43)

This is another way to express what I stated above, namely that love, like other forms of sublimation, makes the sublime “appear” within the framework of everyday life. The beloved is always both himself and slightly different from (“more than”) himself. The “surplus satisfaction” we get from a lover or a dear friend (as opposed to a mere acquaintance) arises precisely from this split between what “is” and what is “more than.” This is why it would be an enormous mistake to presume that “real love” is a matter of tolerating the beloved in all of his banality without any attention to the kernel of sublimity that attracted us to him in the first place. Quite the contrary, “real love” is what elevates a regular person into a sublime one—into a worthy ambassador of the Thing—without at the same time erasing everything that is “human” about him. As Zupancˇicˇ asserts, “The miracle of love consists . . . in perceiving the two objects (the banal object and the sublime object) on the same level; additionally, this means that neither one of them is occulted or substituted by the other.” The “true miracle of love,” she posits, “consists in preserving the transcendence in the very accessibility of the other” (2003, 175). “Real love,” like the decorative string of matchboxes or Cézanne’s apples, thus makes the sublime accessible to us, even if it can only ever do so to a limited degree. This does not mean that the sublime aspect of the object is somehow more “authentic” than the banal aspect (or

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vice versa), for neither fully captures the “truth” of its being; both are “semblances” that cannot be expected to completely account for the complexity of the beloved’s ontology or self-experience. But this does not change the fact that both are equally important to love. As Zupancˇicˇ concludes, “Finally, the miracle of love consists in ‘falling’ (and in continuing to stumble) because of the Real which emerges from the gap introduced by this ‘parallel montage’ of two semblances or appearances, that is to say, because of the real that emerges from the non-coincidence of the same. The other whom we love is neither of the two semblances (the banal and the sublime object); but neither can she be separated from them, since she is nothing other than what results from a successful (or ‘lucky’) montage of the two” (2003, 175). “True love,” in other words, situates itself in the “lucky” montage between the banal and the sublime dimension of the object, and it is precisely because there is a disorienting gap between the two that we fall (and keep stumbling).

The Value of Idealization If it is an error of judgment to equate the beloved with the Thing in an attempt to attain narcissistic satisfaction, it is also an error to deprive him of all vestiges of Thingness. “True love,” according to the account I have been developing, creates space for the extraordinary within the ordinary without thereby downplaying the ordinary. In a way, if we wish to avoid the trap of closing the gap between the banal and sublime object (and therefore of extinguishing our love), we must be able to view the beloved as at once prosaic and awe inspiring. If we only see his banality, we can hardly claim to experience him as worthy of the special attention we bestow upon him. Yet if we only regard him as sublime, our “love” has little to do with his mundane reality as a person.The trick, then, is to perceive both aspects of the beloved simultaneously, while also admitting that neither is who he “actually” is. When it comes to appraising others, we might do well to heed Lacan’s general advice: “Begin by thinking you don’t understand. Start from the idea of a fundamental misunderstanding” (1955, 20). It may help to recast the matter as follows: Although we are conditioned to think that our assessment of the other as ordinary is more reliable than our sense that he is extraordinary, this may in fact not be the case. There is absolutely no guarantee that our appraisal of the other as

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banal is any more correct than our evaluation of him as sublime. From this stance, insisting on the other’s ordinariness can be as violating—and as drastically off the mark—as over-idealizing, which is all the more reason to ensure that, in our efforts to build a loving connection, we do not overlook everything that is luminous about the other. Even though over-idealizing can devastate the other’s integrity, the opposite “strategy” of demoting him to a wholly commonplace object denies the fact that love needs some evidence of transcendence (of immortality, eternity, or infinity) to thrive. In this context, the uplifting sweep of sublimation could be argued to be merely an indulgent way to interpret the intangible reality of the person we love; it could be said to be a generous means of bringing into the foreground, and perhaps even awakening, sediments of his being that might usually be concealed or subdued. On this account, raising the beloved to the dignity of the Thing does not necessarily overshadow his “actual” reality, but rather allows us to discern this reality from a previously unexplored viewpoint. In the same way that a string of matchboxes reveals something about a matchbox that normally remains dormant, and in the same way that Cézanne’s apples disclose something about an apple that is not readily apparent in a pile of apples we might find in our local supermarket, the sublimatory gesture of love divulges something about the beloved that might otherwise never see the light of day. This implies that the “content” of the idealizing gesture matters, that there is a significant difference between idealizations that lovingly illuminate neglected aspects of the other’s being and others that arise solely from the crevices of our fantasy life. There is, in other words, a distinction between idealizations that cater to our narcissistic needs and those that strive to release the beloved’s hibernating potentialities from their hiding place. If fantasy formations entangle us in the former, the “truth” of our desire aims at the latter in the sense that it responds to the sublime glow of the Thing within the beloved; because it—like the ethics of sublimation—honors the Thing’s echo, it cuts through the lures of narcissism in order to attain “real” satisfaction. Consequently, as long as we do not confuse the beloved with the Thing, as long as we manage to keep his banal and sublime aspects in productive tension, it may be safe to assume that the attributes within him that seem to speak the language of our desire with such enviable fluency in fact are as lovely, as worthy of our idealizations, as they appear. I have admitted that we are usually not

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able to accurately name these attributes. But this does not mean that we cannot make progress, that we cannot become more cognizant of what it is in the beloved that calls to us so hauntingly. And the more we are able to do so—the more we learn to interpret the code of our desire— the better we are able to engage in the kinds of idealizations that expand rather than diminish the beloved’s being.

Love’s Innovative Energy Many of love’s most common problems arise from the difficulty of balancing its banal and sublime aspects. On the one hand, when we lose sight of the banal, we tend to become unforgiving of human imperfection, imposing on the person we love the sorts of unrealistic expectations that he or she cannot possibly live up to.We risk turning the radiance we bestow upon the beloved into something he feels compelled to emulate, with the result that our idealizing gesture becomes suffocating rather than augmenting. In such cases, we slide from love to a (narcissistic) worship of the sublime object so that little of the beloved’s independent reality remains visible to us. On the other hand, when we lose sight of the sublime, we strip our beloved of what makes him different from our friends, colleagues, and neighbors; we turn our relationship into yet another ingredient of our everyday routine. This may in many ways be inevitable in long-term relationships, but it also represents a fairly regrettable degradation of love’s mission, which, I would say, has at least as much to do with inspiration as it does with the securities of emotional compatibility, contractual cohabitation, and reproductive stability. If the institutionalization of love tends to serve the exigencies of social orthodoxy—lending solidity to our cultural order through structures such as marriage—love as raw passion could be said to represent the kind of innovative energy that I have, in the course of this book, aligned with the possibility for new possibilities. This energy is what is squandered whenever love loses its miraculous, transcendent dimensions, and becomes merely a part of the daily grind. A concrete way to think about this innovate energy is to recognize that every meaningful relationship—every relationship that remains alive to the echo of the Thing—adds new layers to the constellation of our desire, thereby diversifying our character. If, as I have maintained, the renewal of the self calls for a transformative encounter with the other,

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then there are few things in life that make a bigger contribution to our ongoing process of becoming than love, for our relationship with the beloved tends to be much more intimate and affectively charged, and hence more far reaching, than most of our other interpersonal relationships. At its most commanding, it grants us entry into inner domains we seldom visit, shaking things up and perhaps even initiating the kinds of psychic modifications that are otherwise unattainable to us. Because love in some ways transports us “beyond” ourselves, it can unearth buildups of passion that remain suppressed by the status quo of our lives. In this sense, we need the mediation of a loving relationship to realize key dimensions of our being. And we may even need the enchantment of being on the receiving end of the idealizing gesture, for in exactly the same way as our own efforts to raise our beloved to the dignity of the Thing can revive frozen or buried aspects of his being, we might ourselves need the caressing presence of generous ideals to fully come to our “own.” Indeed, our attempts to negotiate and renegotiate a singular identity may demand the continuous arbitration of those we love, for if we are never the only makers of our identity, we are also never the sole agents of its capacity for regeneration. When we are particularly fortunate, love rouses what is most noble within us; it makes us bold enough to reach for what we might normally suppress out of self-doubt, fear of failure, or sheer laziness. Conventional wisdom tells us that we frequently do for love what we are not willing to do for anything else. Sometimes this is bad, as when the addictions of passion cause us to stalk others. But other times this is good because it prompts us to the kinds of daring or high-minded actions that lend dignity not only to our love, but also to the rest of our lives. This, in turn, implies that the fact that our desire tends to chase a dense kernel of sublimity without ever fully attaining its object is far from the affective misfortune it may appear to be but, quite the contrary, an existential asset of unfathomable proportions. Simply put, it is the foundation of our capacity to invent fresh devotional practices, to either invest our desire in new objects or, equally importantly, to invest our desire in an old object in new ways. The question this raises is how we might best remain loyal to our amorous quest as one that can never be completed. How might we be able to remain faithful to the truth-event of love after the event itself has passed? Or, to return to my earlier formulation, if the call and response of love is where eternity enters time—where passion arrests

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time’s incessant motion into a rare moment of timelessness—how do we live this eternity, this timelessness, while simultaneously attending to the various claims on our time that constitute the texture of our practical life-worlds? How do we intertwine the demands of the ordinary with the summons of the extraordinary?

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Conclusion: The Other as Face

Throughout this book, I have offered different ways to read Lacanian ethics, gradually working my way from the ethical act to the ethics of sublimation. I would like to close my analysis by highlighting an ethical concern that has been central not only in Lacanian theory, but in contemporary critical thought in general: the ethics of the self–other relationship. Indeed, one could say that this is one of the main issues that distinguishes Lacanian theory from other contemporary critical approaches. More specifically, if much of recent ethical theory has taken its inspiration from Levinas—and especially from Levinas’s analysis of the other’s face as an inviolable site of ethical accountability—Lacanians have raised doubts about the idea that the face offers a straightforward foundation for ethics. This skepticism can be traced back to the fact that when Lacan revisited Freud’s famous critique of the Judeo-Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor,” he stressed that the neighbor, the Nebenmensch, is “by its very nature alien, Fremde” (1959, 52). As a consequence, if post-Levinasian ethics tends to emphasize the ethical call of the face, post-Lacanian ethics tends to stress the terror-inducing strangeness of the face: the ways in which the face can alarm us to the point of deep ethical ambivalence. This is why it is the tormented and/or inexpressive features of Agamben’s Muselmann (the “living dead” of the concentration camps)—rather than, say, the gentle countenance of Levinas’s “feminine Other”—that have, in recent Lacanian theory, become the standard metaphor for the other’s face. In the aftermath of Levinas, the other’s face has to some extent eclipsed the Kantian categorical imperative as a focal point of ethics. Central components of Levinas’s philosophy—the primacy of ethics over ontology, the privileging of relationality over self-sovereignty, deep reverence for the irreducible otherness of the other, as well as our un189

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conditional responsibility for the other—have consolidated around the viscerally evocative image of the other’s face. However, as I started to suggest in the course of my discussion of love, Lacan complicates the issue by indicating that the other as face is always divided into two parts. On the one hand, there are those culturally intelligible qualities that “can be formulated as an attribute” (Lacan 1959, 52)—that make the other more or less “like” us, thereby facilitating our capacity to relate to it as an entity whose existential struggles resemble our own. On the other, there is the specter of the other as Thing, as an anxiety-producing and menacing stranger. This latter is not das Ding as the good object, as the “refound” (m)other who holds the promise of unmediated satisfaction, but rather the other who comes too close, who is disconcerting because of its consuming overproximity. This is one reason that the Lacanian face is more akin to a distorted grimace than to the beseeching face of Levinasian ethics: It expresses the “too muchness” of jouissance, the involuntary spasm, cringe, or wince that betrays the other’s discomfort and disorientation. In post-Lacanian theory, Lacan’s reflections on the other as Thing, as the disturbing “stain” that ruptures the (always fantasmatic) coherence of our social world, have been recast as a political query about how we can ethically relate to what is most terrifying or off-putting (even repellent) about the other. In other words, the ethical concern is no longer how we might manage to recognize others as our equals even when they hold different values—how we might build a viable “human” community out of radically divergent opinions and outlooks—but rather how we are (or are not) able to meet the “inhuman” aspects of the other. The political implications of this reformulation are momentous, for it shifts our attention from the nitty-gritty of pluralistic tolerance to the question of how we can relate to those who are not in the least bit similar to us and who may, consequently, make us profoundly uncomfortable. Furthermore, this reformulation has led to a resurgence of universalist ethics that goes against the grain of today’s multicultural sensibilities. The issue is in fact so contentious that some Lacanians appear to be on a warpath against those (such as Derrida and Butler) who advocate a Levinasian perspective. What I would like to do in these concluding pages is to sketch the stakes of this anti-Levinasian gesture. How, precisely, do we get from the “inhuman” other to universalist ethics? What is such an ethics meant to accomplish? And what are its main blind spots?

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The Other as “Evil” ˇ izˇek et al. are It is necessary to begin with a qualification. I think that Z at least partially mistaken when they imply that the Levinasian face solicits the kind of effortless empathy and identification that causes us to ˇ izˇek, for overlook the utter uncanniness of the individual in front of us. Z instance, postulates that what “Levinas fails to include into the scope of ‘human’ is . . . the inhuman itself: a dimension which eludes the face-toface relationship” (2005, 158). This suggests that the Levinasian face is an imaginary lure that “particularizes” a person by making him or her appear fully (and falsely) “human.” Yet this is not how Levinas describes the face, for he states that the other as face is “a being beyond all attributes, which would have the effect of qualifying him, that is, of reducing him to what he has in common with other beings, of making a concept of him. It is this presence for me of a being identical to itself that I call the presence of the face. The face is the very identity of a being; it manifests itself in it in terms of itself, without a concept” (1991, 33).1 The face, as Levinas envisions it, is therefore not an easily readable map that would allow us to approach the other through attributes that the other shares with us, but rather a locus of the kind of absolute singularity that escapes comparison and immediate understanding. To return to the vocabulary I established in the introduction, the face houses some of the subject’s “perseverance of being”—of what in the subject escapes conceptual capture because it eludes all social categories and classifications. This is exactly why it renders the subject “a being identical to itself.” The Levinasian face is, then, not entirely antithetical to the Lacanian notion of the other as troubling Thing. But I grant that even if Levinas does highlight the singularity of the face, he does not characterizes it as potentially “monstrous” in the way that Lacan and post-Lacanian critics do. Levinas does on occasion raise the possibility that the other is not kind or benevolent, as when he, for instance, implies that even the tyrant (say, the guard at a Nazi concentration camp) has a face. But the other’s malevolence is, for Levinas, an aberration (even if its unknowability is not). For Lacan, in contrast, the other is always, potentially at least, evil: “Every time that Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to love one’s neighbor, we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor” (1960, 186).2 This “evil” is what obliged us to relate to the other through symbolic

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and imaginary supports, the task of which, as I have specified, is to enable us to embrace the other as a “fellow human being” for whom we can feel affinity. If the symbolic stabilizes social exchanges by imposing a set of normative expectations that regulate relationships between subjects, the imaginary allows us to view the other as equivalent to ourselves and, as such, as a possible object of our affection. However, even our symbolic and imaginary fortifications can never completely erase the other as Thing, as the “inhuman partner” of excess jouissance that threatens to overpower the intelligible coordinates of our existence.3 Whenever the other as Thing pierces our customary symbolic and imaginary supports, we lose our social balance as well as our fantasmatic sense of security. Against this backdrop, what is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance. This is why Lacanian ethics is less interested in the “morality” of our actions than it is in our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the other’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity. As Lacan puts the matter, “One would have to know how to confront the fact that my neighbor’s jouissance, his harmful, malignant jouissance, is that which poses a problem for my love” (1960, 187). Lacan here suggests that our ethical relationship to the other requires us to come to terms with its characteristic approach to jouissance, which is to say, its singular drive destiny. If the enigma of the other—the enigma that both arouses and baffles us—expresses the other’s wholly idiosyncratic way of living out (the real of) its drives, then to ethically relate to this other means to tolerate what is least social about it: the distinctive ˇ izˇek asserts, the other’s jouissance is by tenor of its jouissance. If, as Z definition traumatic, and even a bit obscene,4 a genuine ethical connection demands that we meet it without flinching or recoiling. In Santner’s terms, “Being-in-the-midst-of-life means being with another subject in the singularity of his or her jouissance”: “It means exposure not simply to the thoughts, values, hopes, and memories of the Other, but also to the Other’s touch of madness, to the way in which the Other is disoriented in the world, destitute, divested of an identity that firmly locates him or

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her in a delimited whole of some sort” (2001, 81–82). Ethics, then, cannot avoid confronting the other’s unique madness and existential confusion, “the always contingent . . . and, in some sense, demonic way in which he contracts a foothold in Being” (78).

The “Faceless” Face From a Lacanian perspective, if I am truly to obey the Levinasian command to honor the other as a site of alterity, it is my ethical obligation to bear the proximity of the other’s jouissance regardless of how “demonic” this jouissance proves to be. What is more, as we learned in the previous chapter, the impenetrable otherness of the other demands that I recognize that the other is not necessarily any more transparent to itself than it is to me. The other who claims my attention may be as bewildered, as perplexed and drastically at a loss, with respect to itself as I am with respect to myself. Somewhat paradoxically, then, meeting the irreducible alterity of the other entails bringing my nonrelational (asocial) surplus into a bizarre kind of “relation” with the other’s equally nonrelational surplus; it necessitates that I try to relate to what, in principle, eludes relationality. From this point of view, the trouble with our usual ethical attitude is that we treat the other’s face as a fetish that allows us to disavow its nonrelational aspects.5 Our customary ethical attitude excludes the nonsymbolizable element that complicates our ability to forge a comfortable face-to-face relationship with the other. Moreover, it cannot account for the ambiguous dialectic of fascination and repulsion that we tend to feel whenever we are confronted by the spectacle of utter dehumanization. An exˇ izˇek treme example of this is the Muselmann as a kind of “faceless” face (Z 2005, 161): a face that has been emptied of all signs of human vitality or “personality.” This expressionless face is no longer a socially intelligible face, but rather brings us in contact with what is “most objectlike, most thinglike about the other” (Santner 2005, 125) so that we are forced to ˇ izˇek witness the pure materiality, or inertness, of the other’s being. As Z elaborates, “When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinitive call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind wall, a lack of depth. Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible” (2005, 161–62). That is, the Muselmann stands for

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a limit case of “humanity” in the sense that he persists as a “presence” in the absence of all the conventional signifiers of relational capacity. In Santner’s terms, the Muselmann is “reduced to the substance of a ‘cringe.’” He is “there, yet no longer ‘in the world’” (2005, 100). This raises poignant questions for ethics. How do we relate to someone who has been traumatized to the extent that he or she no longer seems fully “human”? What are the limits of our capacity for empathetically witnessing the suffering of others? These are concerns that motiˇ izˇek, Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, in the introduction to their vate Z book The Neighbor, to articulate the stakes of post-Lacanian ethics as follows: “After the slaughters of WWII, the Shoah, the gulag, multiple ethic and religious slaughters, the explosive rise of slums in the last decades, and so on, the notion of neighbor has lost its innocence. To take the extreme case: in what precise sense is the Muselmann . . . still our neighbor” ˇ izˇek sums up the matter by asking, (2005, 3)? In his part of the book, Z “What if, facing a Muselmann, one hits upon one’s responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic” (162)? According to this account, the problem with much of contemporary (post-Levinasian) ethics is that it does not reach the core of intersubjective responsibility: It resorts to “the dazzling epiphany” (162) of the face as a falsely harmonious totality that distracts us from what is genuinely difficult about our ethical accountability to others; it sidesteps elements of otherness that reside beyond our capacity for compassion, understanding, interpersonal identification, and ˇ izˇek correctly maintains, “It would symmetrical dialogue. After all, as Z be obscene to proclaim pathetically, ‘We are all Muselmänner’” (161).

The Critique of Multiculturalism It is the realization that we do not relate to others merely on the symbolic and imaginary levels, but also on the level of the real, that has led postLacanian thinkers to reorient ethics from the politics of multicultural tolerance to ideals of universal justice. From their standpoint, multiculturalism repeats the weaknesses of Levinas by failing to acknowledge the malevolent (not to mention hatred-inducing) dimensions of the other. It serves as yet another convenient means of keeping the neighbor at a tolerable distance, of defending against the other’s jouissance by placing the other within the relatively superficial network of “compassionate” relationality. To be precise, multiculturalism celebrates the rhetoric of “difference” while at the same time protecting us against the “real” dif-

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ference of others; it keeps us from having to deal with the distressing difference of those who are radically different from us. In this context, it is worth quoting Badiou at length: Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethics and of the “the right to difference” are clearly horrified of any vigorously sustained difference. For them, African customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so on. As a matter of fact, the celebrated “other” is acceptable only if he is a good other—which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? . . . That is to say: I respect differences, but only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects, just as I do, the said differences. Just as there can be “no freedom for the enemies of freedom”, so there can be no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences. To prove the point, just consider the obsessive resentment expressed by the partisans of ethics regarding anything that resembles an Islamic “fundamentalism”. . . . Even immigrants in this country (France), are seen by the partisans of ethics, are acceptably different only when they are “integrated”, only if they seek integration (which seems to mean, if you think about it: only if they want to suppress their difference). It might well be that ethical ideology, detached from the religious teachings which at least conferred upon it the fullness of a “revealed” identity, is simply the final imperative of a conquering civilization: “Become like me and I will respect your difference.” (2002, 24–25)

Badiou maintains that the multiculturalist respect for “difference” applies only to those differences that are more or less compatible with the hegemonic West’s conception of liberal democracy and human rights. Any difference that deviates too drastically from the West’s “humanistic” vision—any difference that is too different—is automatically deemed “barbaric,” “totalitarian,” or “terroristic.” Multiculturalism, in short, falls apart the moment we fail to identify with the other as face. The critique of multiculturalism undertaken by post-Lacanians tends to be scathing, linking it to the advance of global capitalism and Western military dominance, so that multiculturalist ethics becomes merely the latest incarnation of colonialism. Multiculturalism, on this view, serves the interests of consumer capitalism by drawing more and more “diverse” communities into its fold. It transforms the ugly realities of capitalist exploitation to the deceptively benign notion of respect for differences. In his book on Saint Paul (whom he elevates to the status of a

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“universal subject”—a point I will return to below), Badiou explains the matter as follows: Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist logic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of communities and minorities form an articulated whole. (2003, 10–11)

Santner, in turn, glosses Badiou’s analysis in this way: Badiou positions his reflections on Paul as a challenge to the multiculturalist consensus of contemporary thought and culture. . . . Badiou sees the tendency toward ever more subtle modes of identifying groups and individuals—a tendency often linked with grievances and claims to victim status (black, lesbian, single-parent, etc.)—in much the same way that Michel Foucault understood the proliferation of sexualities: as an expansion of the field by which power is able to invest human life with certain kinds of meaning, knowledge, and value. The “deterritorialization” of populations into diverse minority identities is seen here as the means by which capital spreads its logic of general equivalence throughout the globe, configuring the world precisely as world-market. (2005, 116)

The more identity categories there are, the more effectively global capital is able to expand its tentacles, offering goods and services to an everincreasing segment of the world’s population. “Difference” becomes profitable: a convenient means for capital to invade new markets. In addition to the advance of multinational corporations across the globe, culturally “sensitive” sections for hair care, skin care, clothing, decorations, ethnic foods, and so forth in Western department stores mean that “appropriate” products are available to previously underrepresented groups.This ensures that these groups are caught all the more securely in the vise of capitalism. Multiculturalism as an arm of capital assures that every subject enters the (ultimately homogenizing) sphere of consumer economics, becoming, as it were, exchangeable through the very process that professes to promote its “uniqueness.” “Singularity,” instead of summoning the subject beyond its sociosymbolic investments, traps it in an

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identity category (woman, black, Asian, Arab, gay, etc.) that makes it all the more exploitable. Looked at in this way, multiculturalism merely confirms the versatility and adaptability of capital—the fact that capital has an apparently infinite capacity to cater to our various desires as well as to generate new ones. Moreover, because multiculturalism reifies distinctions between different identity categories, it makes it all the more impossible to front a genuinely revolutionary (unified and effective) assault against the establishment. The post-Lacanian alternative to this, spearheaded by Badiou, is to advocate sameness—a kind of studied indifference to differences—as a basis for universalist ethics. As Badiou boldly claims, “The whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned. For the real question—and it is an extraordinarily difficult one—is much more that of recognizing the Same” (2002, 25). Since difference, infinite alterity, “is quite simply what there is” (25), politics and ethics alike need to be centered around what we share, around what is universally valid for all of us: “Philosophically, if the other doesn’t matter it is indeed because the difficulty lies on the side of the Same. The Same, in effect is not what is . . . but what comes to be.” This coming-to-be-of-the-Same is precisely what the process of truth accomplishes, for “a truth is the same for all,” is something that, in principle, any subject could undertake (27).6

Towards Universalist Ethics The truth-event, as well as the process of elaboration that represents fidelity to this event, thus renders “difference” insignificant by introducing a truth that is universally applicable to everyone concerned. However, this does not imply an erasure of singularity for, as we have seen, the subject of truth is always, by definition, an immortal—someone who cannot be subsumed into the (unthinking) mass of the collectivity. One might in fact say that only a person who recognizes herself as singular (in the sense of not being a part of a social category) can recognize the singularity—and therefore the equality—of others. From this perspective, singularity is not merely what founds ethics, but also what comes into being by a faithful adherence to a universal (yet always specific) ethic of truths. Such an ethic is “ethical” precisely insofar as it raises sinˇ izˇek’s maintains, the singular gularity to the realm of the universal. As Z

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subject of ethics “bypasses the meditation of the particular by directly participating in the Universal.” “This identification with the Universal,” he continues, “is not the identification with an encompassing global Substance (‘humanity’), but an identification with a universal ethicopolitical principle—a universal religious collective, a scientific collective, a global revolutionary organization, all of which are in principle accessible to everyone” (2006, 14). ˇ izˇek is thus not The neo-Kantian “universal singular” promoted by Z merely a matter of asserting that singularity is the one thing that is universally applicable to each of us—that what we all share is that we are singular creatures—but also of stressing that the singular partakes in the ˇ izˇek’s statement universal by bypassing every particular identification. Z also reveals his indebtedness to Marxism in the sense that he advances a revolutionary politics that seeks to transcend differences between people by rallying them around a common cause rather than an identitarian “substance” of some sort. The goal of such a politics is to challenge the status quo rather than to expand it to include individuals belonging to previously excluded identity categories—categories that, always fantasmatically, unite those of a certain gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth.7 Santner expresses the same idea when he advocates the creation of a (paradoxical kind of anticommunitarian) “community” that does not depend on “any positive features”: “Beingneighbor in this sense does not imply resemblance, familiarity, or likeness, but rather a kind of shared resoluteness sustained, in large measure, by certain kinds of linguistic and social practices (rather than merely individual intentions or states of mind)” (2005, 109). As we discovered in chapter 4, Badiou conveys the same sentiment when he claims that National Socialism was a simulacrum rather than a genuine event because it was organized around the interests of a particular identity category, the Germans. It was an instance of totalizing evil rather than of liberating truth because it advanced “the national substance of a people” rather than a universally applicable truth. Its violence resulted, in part at least, from the fact that fidelity to a simulacrum, unlike fidelity to an event, breaks with the status quo (or “situation”) “not by the universality of the void, but by the closed particularity of an abstract set” (in this instance, “the Germans”). Even more problematically, National Socialism was only able to amass its “substance” by voiding what surrounded it, that is, “the Jews”: “There were certainly others as well: the Gypsies, the mentally ill, homosexuals, communists. . . . But

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the name ‘Jew’ was the name of names, serving to designate those people whose disappearance created, around the presumed German substance . . . a void that would suffice to identify the substance” (2002, 74–75). It was, then, the brutal voiding (extermination) of Jews that was supposed to guarantee the “substantiality” of German identity. This is one reason that Badiou shuns every invocation of custom, commonality, or collective identity as a basis of the event, pointing out that this results in “catastrophic statements, on the model: only a homosexual can ‘understand’ what a homosexual is, only an Arab an Arab, etc.” (quoted in Hallward 2003, 26).

The Third of Justice The privileging of the universal (or universal singular) over the particular had led post-Lacanian thinkers to align ethics with justice—with the impersonal “Third” that mediates relationships between individuals— rather than with the subject’s face-to-face encounter with specific others. ˇ izˇek, in particular, has advocated the following “radical anti-Levinasian Z conclusion”: “the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the third” (2005, 183). This statement is a bit misleading for, as ˇ izˇek is not entirely correct in implying that the face, I clarified above, Z for Levinas, functions as a fantasmatic lure that gentrifies all the disquieting (“thinglike”) elements of the other. As I noted, the Levinasian face does not individualize a person in ways that would make it possible for us to identify with her as a “fellow human being” but, quite the contrary, singularizes her to such an extent as to make any easy identificaˇ izˇek here implies, that tion impossible. And it is also not the case, as Z Levinas altogether ignores the Third as a site of justice. Levinas explicitly distinguishes between “ethics” and “justice,” admitting that while “ethics” starts from the other’s face, “justice” reaches beyond the face to the impersonal space of the Third (a space from which it becomes possible to arbitrate between difference faces). ˇ izˇek’s critique in that it is very Yet there is also some validity to Z difficult for post-Levinasian theory to account for instances when our attention to the specificity of the face diverts us from impartial justice. From a post-Lacanian perspective, the main failure of our legal system is that it cannot get beyond the face: It keeps discriminating against some faces at the expense of others. Nor can we deny that Levinasian phe-

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nomenology is primarily oriented around the face rather than the Third. We cannot refute that, in the Levinasian universe, the primordial call of the face is constitutive of our ethical subjectivity, so that we are always already beholden to, and responsible for, the other as face. According to Levinas, “the fellow human being’s existential adventure matters to the I more than its own, positing from the start the I as responsible for the being of the other” (1991, xii–xiii). This responsibility is unconditional, asymmetrical, and nonreciprocal in the sense that we are infinitely accountable to the other without being able to demand the same in return. Levinasian ethics is thus founded on a kind of sacrificial logic that makes us answerable to the other regardless of what this other does or how disrespectfully it treats us. Because we cannot disavow our ontological debt to the other, we cannot, under any circumstances, turn away from the other. Taken to an extreme, this logic leads to the (strangely masochistic) conclusion that the victimized remain responsible for their victimizers— that the persecuted remain ethically accountable to their persecutors. This is not the same thing as saying that the persecuted are responsible for their own persecution. But it does imply, as Butler states, that “precisely the Other who persecutes me has a face” (2005, 90), and that my ethical responsibility to others extends to this face that injures me. Butler goes on to propose that it is precisely this susceptibility to injury—the fact that I can be wounded by others—that founds me as an ethical entity. It represents an essential “ethical resource” (91) because it alerts me to the general precariousness of human life: My awareness of my vulnerability makes me more attuned to the vulnerabilities of others. In principle, this is a convincing argument. But I also think that this aspect of Levinasian ethics can place on the persecuted the arguably unreasonable burden of needing to humanize the face of their persecutor.8 The persecuted are, as it were, asked not only to bear the brunt of their persecution, but also to adopt a wholly unrealistic stance of compassion for their persecutors. Levinas famously quotes Dostoyevsky: “We are all guilty for everything and everyone, and I more than all the others” (1991, 105). Yet this is simply not always the case.There are, for instance, circumstances of racial, ethnic, economic, gendered, sexual, and religious imbalance where some people are much more guilty than others. As a result, if the Ku Klux Klan burns a cross on my yard, a multinational corporation poisons my water supply, or my husband beats me up, my stance of unconditional generosity would only feed power structures that have historically made

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some lives unbearable while simultaneously justifying various social atrocities. From this viewpoint, Levinas’s emphasis on the face can, ironically enough, make it difficult to account for institutional structures of inequality that make some faces much more prone to injury than others. Levinasian ethics also skirts the fact that it is impossible, practically speaking, for any of us to respond equally—with the same degree of solicitousness and attentiveness—to the claim of every face, every other, we encounter in the world. This failing is what Lacanian ethics attempts to rectify by resurrecting the Third as a seat of disinterested justice. Ethics, from this angle, is not a question of loving the other, empathizing with the other’s suffering, or forgiving the other for its violence or indiscretion. Instead, ethics as justice is entirely indifferent to the particulariˇ izˇek explains the distinction ties of the other’s (face-bound) situation. Z between love and justice as follows: We should . . . assume the risk of countering Levinas’s position with a more radical one: others are primordially an (ethically) indifferent multitude, and love is a violent gesture of cutting into this multitude and privileging a One as the neighbor, thus introducing a radical imbalance into the whole. In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the One. Justice and love are thus structurally incompatible: justice, not love, has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I “really understand.” What this means is that the Third is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship, the one in shadow, like the absent child of a love-couple. (2005, 182)

When I profess to love the other as face, I ignore those with whom I have no face-to-face relationship. Justice begins when I recall this distant and faceless multitude that eludes my relational grasp. When justice prevails, everyone is equally my neighbor so that my “actual” neighbor is no more important to me than my “universal” neighbor. While love implies that I elevate a certain someone over all others, justice demands the opposite; it demands that I set aside my inclination to raise those I love and understand to a special status. This is why “love thy neighbor” can function as a properly ethical injunction only when it becomes a universal command rather than something directed at particular neighbors.9 The Third thus regulates my relationship with the other’s face. The fact that every face relates to the Third as a locus of impartial justice

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ensures that there is a means of mediating the violence of one face towards another. While the attempt to negotiate the parameters of right and wrong on the basis of one-on-one relationships can lead to situations where those who hold social power have an upper hand, cold impersonality guarantees that every face is equally subjected to the same ˇ izˇek: ethical code. According to Z This coldness is justice at its most elementary. Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it “embedded” in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper. When Levinas endeavors to ground ethics in the Other’s face, is he not still clinging to the ultimate root of the ethical commitment, afraid to accept the abyss of the rootless Law as the only foundation of ethics? (2005, 183–84)

Justice is a matter of transcending the lure of the face so as to uphold the “dead” (impartial) letter of the law (185). Through justice, I do not relate to the other as an individual, but rather as an abstraction stripped of all of the signifiers of inner depth and richness that are capable of seducing me to sentiments of love, pity, empathy, or compassion. To the extent that justice is not swayed by the pathos of the face, it pays no attention whatsoever to its color, features, bone structure, beauty, ugliness, expression, or other form of specificity. Rather, it upholds the coldness of the universal against the allure of the particular.

But Still . . . This is where we stumble upon an obvious problem, namely that it is difficult to divorce the notion of universality from the realities of hegemonic power. One of the main strengths of multiculturalist ethics is, precisely, its ability to reveal that what is considered “universal” may very well be merely what happens to be convenient or attractive to those who hold institutional forms of authority (so that, to use the most common example, “universal” is a thinly veiled cipher for “white heterosexual

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male”).10 To put the matter simply, the idea that “universality” protects the marginalized from the subjective whims of those in power has not been born out by the historical record. Badiou tries to get around this by positing that universality is invariably “situated” in the sense that the ethic of truths arises in response to the always context-specific void of a particular set of circumstances.This means that there can be no ethical principle, no abstract rule of justice, that predates the situation at hand; there can be no a priori ethics à la Kant, but merely ethical “processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation” (2002, 16). This, in turn, implies that there can be no general human rights, no general rule of thumb about the correct course of action. Fidelity to the event, or ethical consistency, cannot be decided on in advance, on a theoretical level, but must come into being in the aftermath of the event in question. Consequently, “The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural—or, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world. . . . Ethics does not exist.There is only the ethic-of ” (28). Equally importantly, a viable ethics cannot be based on self-interest, but must address everyone evenly. Indeed, because it names what, from the perspective of the privileged, is “impossible” (exactly, the “void” of the situation), it is by definition counterhegemonic, aimed at those who are most vulnerable or thoroughly unacknowledged in a given situation. This is admittedly a valiant effort to resolve the long-standing problems surrounding universality. But, in the final analysis, the question remains: Who gets to name the void of the situation? Is it, to resort to a “true-to-life” example, the valiant male “warriors” of the socialist revolution? Or the women who serve them coffee? Who decides that the “authentic” void of the situation is class inequality rather than gender inequality? If class inequality cuts across gender lines, does not gender inequality also cut across class lines? How, then, do we determine the primacy of one struggle over the other? It seems to me that there is no way around the fact that any given situation lends itself to different interpretations—that what constitutes the void of a situation is ambiguous at best—and that mediating between the various voices that aspire to name this void invariably raises concerns about power disparities. Given the notorious post-Lacanian scorn for the “flat” and “aseptic” universe of ˇ izˇek 2005, 144), we must assume Habermasian communicative action (Z that divergences of opinion are not to be resolved through meticulous

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negotiation and compromise. What, in that case, guarantees that those who hold historically grounded and institutionalized forms of power are not the ones who get to decide what the void consists of? It would be naïve to assume that abuses of power only plague the establishment. There is no need to look any further than the “revoluˇ izˇek themselves to ascertain that tionary” discourses of Badiou and Z being “counter-establishment” by no means ensures that one automatically avoids perpetuating deeply entrenched power differentials. More specifically, no matter how genuinely “universalist” the intensions of ˇ izˇek may be, their neo-Marxist theories repeat the masBadiou and Z culinist and white-hegemonic weaknesses of classical Marxism so that while class (or one’s status as a member of the “proletariat”) qualifies as a “universal” basis for progressive struggle, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality do not. As a matter of fact, these thinkers are not content to merely exclude movements that target racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and homophobia, but actively disparage them, so that Badiou, for instance, espouses the “universal” legitimacy of the class struggle while at the same time grouping feminism with “parliamentary-democratic, pro free-market economics” (2002, 24).11 Badiou’s reasoning here is that feminism, like ethnic and gay rights activism, amounts to the same kind of “substance-driven” identity politics as National Socialism was guilty of. There is a grain of truth to this in the sense that identity politics has historically been one facet of the movements in question. But it is hardly the only configuration these movements have taken. Anyone with even the most rudimentary familiarity with debates in contemporary feminist and queer politics, as well as ethnic and postcolonial studies, knows that the vehement critique of identity politics is not something external to these fields, but rather an integral part of them. That is, scholars and leaders within feminist, queer, antiracist, and postcolonial struggles often advocate exactly the same kind of coalitional, anti-identitarian politics as Badiou himself does.12 Furthermore, even if we stay within the domain of identity politics, surely there is a difference between progressive political movements such as feminism or the civil rights movement on the one hand and National Socialism on the other. Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe may have defended the “substance” of women, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X may have defended the “substance” of blacks, but surely this is not the same thing as Hitler defending the “substance” of the German people. These kinds of facile conflations of complicated

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historical realities undercut Badiou’s otherwise sophisticated theoretical ˇ izˇek at those moapparatus. Similarly, it is difficult to stay patient with Z ments when he resorts to sensationalist statements such as “Gandhi was ˇ izˇek’s reasoning holds on more violent than Hitler” (2009, 475). Even if Z the abstract level (Gandhi’s resistance was more “violent” than Hitler’s in the sense that he created a social space outside the colonial state, thereby interrupting the basic functioning of British imperialism, whereas Hitler merely ensured that the capitalist order could survive13), there is simultaneously an obvious concrete absurdity—and even an obscenity—to it. ˇ izˇek frequently writes as if the theoretical (usually dialectical) soundZ ness of his analysis automatically cancelled out the practical preposterousness (or political offensiveness) of his proclamations. But this is simply not always the case.

Whose Multiculturalism? ˇ izˇek Ironically, what we often witness in the writings of Badiou and Z is a flagrant instance of exactly the problem that universalist ethics cannot seem to resolve, namely the stubborn persistence of institutionalized structures of marginalization. What, exactly, justifies Badiou’s equation of feminism with identity politics? Certainly not his erudite grasp of the current topography of feminism. To put it bluntly, Badiou’s notion of feminism, like his conception of racial/ethnic struggles and gay/lesbian/ queer politics, appears to stem from an almost embarrassingly anachronistic understanding of what these things mean—an understanding that could be dated circa 1970. For instance, he states in an interview with Peter Hallward: “When I hear people say ‘We are oppressed as black, as women’, I have only one problem: what exactly is meant by ‘black’ or ‘woman’? If this or that particular identity is put into play in the struggle against oppression, against the state, my only problem is with the exact political meaning of the identity being promoted” (2002, 107). Anyone who has read a few key texts in African American studies and feminist theory knows that this has been one of the main questions of these fields for at least the last thirty years.14 Likewise, the fact that Badiou turns to Jean Genet, Césaire, and Senghor (107–8) for insights about the complicated “meaning” of blackness without any reference whatsoever to more recent analyses of the issue accentuates the enormous gap that separates him from the versatile debates of contemporary critical theory.

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If it is not Badiou’s careful research that allows him to (falsely) classify feminism as an “identity politics,” then we must entertain the possibility that he claims this right because he feels that he has the power to do so. While no theoretical discussion can cover all of its bases, and while there is a lot to be said for granting oneself permission to speculate without undue faithfulness to prior debates in a given discipline, there is a huge difference between free-roaming theorizing on the one hand and the willful suppression of entire fields of inquiry on the other. Arguably, there is nothing that accounts for this difference better than the continued operation of the power/knowledge system that Foucault analyzed. It would be one thing if Badiou simply just ignored questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. But he doesn’t. He explicitly evokes these questions, usually in order to launch a passionate critique against anyone who takes them seriously as a political concern, and it is this that makes the omission of scholarship in the relevant disciplines so noteworthy. The same observation pertains to Badiou’s appraisal of multiculturalˇ izˇek —in ism—as well as to the similarly simplistic appraisal staged by Z that both thinkers fabricate a “definition” of multiculturalism out of the concept’s most corrupted versions without any regard for the fact that most “multiculturalist” critics are acutely aware of these very corruptions. A recent case in point is Butler’s attack on tolerant multiculturalism in The Frames of War (2009)—an attack that shares some of the basic ˇ izˇek without replicating their inattention to insights of Badiou and Z the nuances of the matter. Or, to state the issue even more forcefully, when I taught “multiculturalist” theory to Harvard undergraduates in the mid-1990s, the analysis of the numerous weaknesses of multiculturalism was already so endemic within the field that my students routinely wrote incisive papers about how the tenets of multiculturalism were being dexterously co-opted by global capital, why multiculturalist politics should not be based on group identifications, how essentialist identity categories keep us from developing effective political alliances, and so on. Now, fifteen years later, I occasionally encounter graduate students ˇ izˇek for single-handedly in my advanced theory seminars who credit Z inventing these critiques.The implications of the matter run deeper than petty squabbles about intellectual territory, striking at the very core of what makes “indifference to differences” such an intensely problematic notion. Who, exactly, can afford such indifference? And whom does it ultimately serve? Indeed, is it not the case that sophisticated forms of multiculturalism—forms that seek to build political coalitions across

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various differences rather than to advance a single-issue identitarian agenda—are the closest we might ever get to a genuine universalism?

The Victim vs. the Immortal ˇ izˇek is thereMy resistance to the universalist rhetoric of Badiou and Z fore not that it criticizes identity politics, for I largely agree with this criticism, but that it is not universalist enough—that it falls pathetically short of the very ideal it promotes. When Saint Paul is elevated to the epitome of the “universal subject” at the same time as “woman,” “black,” “gay,” and “Arab” are relegated to the wasteland of “substance-based” (and thus politically useless) identity categories, something is rotten in Denmark. I understand the connection between Saint Paul and God’s “universal” command to love one’s neighbor, but this hardly justifies the valorization of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the linchpin of universalist ethics. Moreover, it is simply not true that, as Badiou would have it, there “are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself ” (2002, 26). I hate to belabor the obvious, but Badiou’s self-difference (his difference from “himself ”) is not in the least bit akin to the difference between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional. All the talk about the subject’s noncoincidence with itself, the “inhuman” within the “human,” or even the hideous grimace of the real, cannot alter the fact that some differences matter more than others, and that there are even situations where “differences” having to do with race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality (among other things) quite literally decide between life and death.15 One of the most striking aspects of the theorizing of Badiou and ˇ izˇek is their disdain for any and all attempts to make sense of those “difZ ferences” that arise from the realities of social victimization. On the one hand, both thinkers stress the structural importance of the “underclasses” (the unemployed, the homeless, the gang members, the drug addicts, the inner-city youth, the sans-papier, etc.) who constitute the void of liberal capitalism. But, on the other, their “indifference to differences” leads them to oppose any alignment of ethics with discourses of victimization. Badiou rationalizes this by declaring that an ethics that defines man as a victim of this or that “evil” inflicted upon him stifles the “immortal” within him.16 “Because the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, equates man with his animal substructure,” Badiou

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states, “it reduces him to the level of a living organism pure and simple” (2002, 11). This must be resisted at all costs, for ethics is not a question of the “rights of survival against misery,” but rather of “the rights of the Immortal,” “of the Infinite” (12). Because only the “immortal” is capable of fidelity to the event, because only the “immortal” can resist the force of the hegemonic “situation” imposed upon him, an ethics cannot stay properly ethical unless it sustains this immortal dimension: “If we do not set out from this point . . . if we equate Man with the simple reality of his living being, we are inevitably pushed to a conclusion quite opposite to the one that the principle of life seems to imply. For this ‘living being’ is in reality contemptible, and he will indeed be held in contempt” (12). I do not deny that there is something inspiring about Badiou’s vision of the subject as an “immortal” who is able to overcome the limitations of its situation.17 I appreciate the effort to define the human as something other than a passive and fragile entity. Nevertheless, leaving aside the strange (yet all-too-familiar) denigration of animality (“the simple reality” of the subject’s “living being”) as “contemptible,” what is awkward about Badiou’s formulation is its implication that victimization is something that can be avoided or rejected at will. It may well be that Badiou does not mean to vilify the victimized themselves, but merely ethical discourses centered on the notion of victimization. However, this distinction is not always easy to uphold. Consider this passage: The stories told by survivors of torture forcefully underline this point: if the torturers and bureaucrats of the dungeons and the camps are able to treat their victims like animals destined for the slaughterhouse, with whom they themselves, the well-nourished criminals, have nothing in common, it is because the victims have indeed become such animals. What had to be done for this to happen has indeed been done. That some nevertheless remain human beings, and testify to that effect, is a confirmed fact. But this is always achieved precisely through enormous effort . . . as an almost incomprehensible resistance on the part of that which, in them, does not coincide with the identity of victim. (2002, 12)

No doubt there are individuals who are able to defy even the most excruciating torture, and who manage to retain their dignity (remain “immortal” in Badiou’s sense) under unbearable conditions. And no doubt such displays of resistance deserve our respect and admiration. But does this mean that those who cannot accomplish such feats of endurance

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are somehow less human than those who can? From the perspective of whom are they, as Badiou asserts, “held in contempt”? Surely the fact that torturers may find those of their victims who break down all the more contemptible for their “animal weakness” does not mean that these victims actually are contemptible in some ontological sense. In fact, why should we care overly much about what torturers think? Since when have the assessments of torturers been a legitimate mode of determining the distinction between those who “remain human beings” and those who do not (whatever that means)? The idea that we can somehow choose to assert our “immortality” against forces of victimization oversimplifies not only the realities of power, but also the radical permeability of our bodies and psyches alike. Torture is an extreme example. But the broader implications of Badiou’s argument are equally disturbing because he seems to imply that some people “allow” themselves to be victimized, whereas others (those we admire rather than hold in contempt) are strong enough to resist it.18 ˇ izˇek, a virulent aversion for the There is in his discourse, like that of Z victimized that routinely shifts the emphasis from what the victimizers do to how the victimized handle their lot.This is comparable to the current tendency in popular psychology and spirituality to try to convince us that we can only be hurt by the actions or statements of others insofar as we “let” ourselves be hurt—that, no matter what others do or say to us, we are ultimately responsible for our own welfare. Although the goal of such pronouncements is to empower us so that we do not hand over our agency to others, they can also easily be (mis)used to evade responsibility for intensely insensitive or abusive behavior. After all, if you are fully responsible for your own welfare, I can do or say whatever the hell I please in relation to you. If you get upset by my actions or statements, that is your problem, a sign of your weakness, rather than something I need worry about. This is hegemonic power at its most insidious: First you victimize the other, and then you blame (and ridicule) the other for feeling victimized.

In Defense of Empathy ˇ izˇek add a layer of conviction to their analyses by Both Badiou and Z suggesting that the reduction of man to a victim is part and parcel of the Western colonialist project. As Badiou writes:

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Who can fail to see that in our humanitarian expeditions, interventions, embarkations of charitable légionnaires, the Subject presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? (2002, 12–13)

It is difficult to argue with this logic, for it is undoubtedly true that Western “benevolence” and “compassion for the victimized” have historically often served as screens for self-satisfaction and colonial exploitation. However, there is a big (and in my view largely unjustifiable) leap from this to the vilification of all interpersonal empathy and attempts to “witness” the anguish or victimization of others. In the same way that the abuses of multiculturalist politics cannot be equated with the complex theories of multiculturalism produced by cultural critics, the abuses of Western “pity” for the suffering postcolonial “masses” cannot be equated with the ethos of contemporary ethical discourses that ask us to empathize with the plight of others. I am not even altogether convinced that ethically responding to the dehumanization of the Muselmann is as ˇ izˇek et al. paint it to be.Though it would be preposterous impossible as Z to assert that those of us who have not been incarcerated can fully understand the experiences of a concentration camp survivor, let alone that our compassion alone could ever redeem what happened, it is equally preposterous to claim that we are completely incapable of approaching this survivor from a place of genuine concern. There is an important difference between, on the one hand, acknowledging the limits of our capacity for compassion and, on the other, callously abandoning all efforts to connect with the suffering of others. The fact that we cannot ever entirely comprehend the other does not mean that we cannot comprehend something about the other, that we remain completely exiled from the experience or private meaning of the other. Likewise, the fact that our powers of empathy may falter when confronted by the raw realities of the other’s pain in no way implies that we cannot kindly touch some portion of that pain. And, to return to post-Lacanian terminology, the fact that the other as “inhuman” Thing inevitably derails our attempts to relate to it on a “human” level does not mean that no human bond is possible; the fact that we are asked to meet

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the disorienting jouissance of the other does not mean that we cannot also experience the other as a socially intelligible “fellow human being” with whom we can enter into an interpersonal rapport of some kind. One of the dangers of the post-Lacanian insistence on the “monstrous” aspects of the other is that it can eclipse the realization that, ultimately, we have a great deal in common with each other, that we can to some extent understand and even sympathize with the other.The other who is unknowable is always also in many ways knowable. In short, the fact that contemporary multiculturalist ethics has trouble coming to terms with the other as Thing does not justify reversing matters so that we relate to the Thing exclusively, as if “the other as Thing” was the only thing the other was. It seems fairly obvious that most of us are capable of projecting from the self to the experiences of the other so that a degree of empathetic understanding becomes possible. As much as we might (rightly) worry about the ethical pitfalls of using the self as a point of comparison, it is also the case that we are capable of meaningful relationality in part precisely because we have the ability to detect the similarities between self and other, because we can often (not always, but often) assume a measure of psychological and emotional symmetry. Why, then, is this vision of “sameness” not a part of the universalist vocabulary of Badiou ˇ izˇek? What keeps them from arriving at the same conclusion as and Z Butler does, namely that it is the universality of human precariousness that founds ethics in the sense that my recognition that the other is as woundable as I am offers a starting point for my ethical indignation, outrage, and horror in the face of any and all violence done the other? I have noted a couple of times that it is possible to push the Levinasian respect for the other too far so that interpersonal ethics collapses into masochism. And it may also be that Butler’s assumption that there is a primordial commonality to the experience of precariousness is overly sanguine. But her basic premise seems correct: I oppose injustice done to the other (in part at least) because, on some level, I can place myself in the other’s position—because I perceive that, under different conditions, the oppression aimed at the other, or at least something analogous to this oppression, could be aimed at me. One might consequently wonder ˇ izˇek when they argue that empaabout the motivations of Badiou and Z thy in all of its forms is either impossible or invariably tainted. In outlining the advantages of Badiou’s universalist ethics over the multiculturalist “concern for the other,” Hallward states: “Gone is the

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whole abject register of ‘bearing witness’, of a guilt-driven empathy or compassion ultimately indistinguishable from a distanced condescension” (2002, xxxv). Though it is true that empathy can be motivated by guilt or condescension, there is something odd about the idea that this is all it is, that we are inherently incapable of authentic compassion. Might it, then, be that the ridiculing of empathy that tends to characterize postLacanian ethics conceals an unwillingness to make an effort, a kind of intellectual lethargy that gives up in the face of obstacles (the opacity of the other)? Recall the arguments of white English professors made during the “canon wars” of the 1980s: “I don’t want to teach black, Asian, or Native American literature (or literature by women) because I’m not qualified to speak about experiences I do not completely understand.” Such statements were more frequently motivated by intellectual lassitude than by any real concern for appropriating or misrepresenting the experiences of others (after all, if such fears had been the real concern, these same professors would also have abstained from teaching Plato, Milton, and Shakespeare and stuck, instead, to the “relatable” works of contemporary authors).

The Ressentiment of the Powerful ˇ izˇek express for the I suspect that the contempt that both Badiou and Z realities of victimization is not merely a matter of revealing the hypocrisies of the West in relation to the “rest” of the world, but also speaks to a certain discomfort with the heavy historical burdens of white masculinity. After all, if we can discredit an ethics centered around the idea of reparation for victimization, and if we can define the “human” as the very antithesis of the victim, then we are justified in not worrying too much about the increasingly audible claims originating from those who feel victimized in one way or another. In this sense, the anti-victim discourse ˇ izˇek represents the theoretical arm of a of critics such as Badiou and Z mounting backlash against the recent successes of multiculturalism and its respect for “differences”—successes that have put some (by no means all, but some) white men on the defensive so that what we are seeing is, precisely, an attempt to deny the history and continued relevance of inequality, a kind of “we are all equally oppressed” voiced by those who are losing their cultural centrality. By this I obviously do not mean to imply that white men do not suffer or that they do not have the right to express their suffering. I am merely calling attention to the very real

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possibility that the universalist leveling of social distinctions that Badiou ˇ izˇek advocate can be used to hide the fact that we are not, after all, and Z “all equally oppressed.” On the one hand, we are witnessing a rapid and wonderfully promising redefinition of masculinity along non-patriarchal lines. On the other, we are in the midst of a panic about the waning of white heterosexual ˇ izˇek in particular, it is hard patriarchy.19 When it comes to Badiou and Z to miss the barely suppressed undercurrent of ressentiment that seeps into their texts whenever they tackle issues concerning marginalized subject positions. While the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment usually refers to the unquenchable resentment of the weak for the more powerful, what we see here is a reversal of this dynamic so that what is being resented is the ability of the “victimized” to agitate for their rights on the basis of a ˇ izˇek: history of oppression. Let us listen carefully to Z People far from the Western world are allowed to fully assert their particular ethnic identity without being proclaimed essentialist racist identitarians (native Americans, blacks, etc.). The closer one gets to the notorious white heterosexual males, the more problematic this assertion is: Asians are still OK; Italians and Irish maybe; with Germans and Scandinavians, it is already problematic. However, such a prohibition of asserting the particular identity of White Men (as the model of oppression of others), although it presents itself as the admission of their guilt, nonetheless confers on them a central position: this very prohibition to assert their particular identity makes them into the universal-neutral medium, the place from which the truth about the others’ oppression is accessible. (2005, 156)

Leaving aside the utter ridiculousness of professing that Native Ameriˇ izˇek may be right cans and blacks reside “far from the Western world,” Z that the prohibition imposed on the identity of white men only reinforces the fantasy of their “universal-neutral” centrality. This fantasy is exactly what is responsible for the historical failings of universalism, so ˇ izˇek is trying to formulate a more truly universalthat, inasmuch as Z ist version of universalism, he is on the right track. However, what one also hears in this passage is something we see increasingly in our culture, namely a sort of desperate “Hey, what about me? Do you not see my suffering?” emanating from folks who, perhaps for the first time in their lives, are feeling the sting of marginalization. What is being mourned here is the difficulty of asserting a wounded identity—the lack of a lack.

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Once again, I do not mean to suggest that there are no white men who suffer, for unquestionably plenty do. But I do think that there is something disturbing about a discourse that, after centuries of dehumanization that has “othered” large segments of the world’s population, now maligns the “othered” for claiming their status as “other.” This ressentiment for the suffering of others may make more sense when we recall that, beyond the contempt for the humiliating realities of suffering, the ideal of withstanding adversity is a deeply ingrained aspect of the mythology of white masculinity (and I mean “mythology” in Barthes’s sense). Within this mythology, the ability to endure hardship immediately suggests a strength of character and lends distinction to one’s existence.20 What has happened in recent decades of “multiculturalism” is that the Emersonian hero narrative of rugged fortitude has been appropriated by a multitude of “others.” Even though it is true that we are inundated by images of wretched “Third World others,” it is also the case that we are seeing a proliferation of stories about “the othered” triumphing against all odds (immigrants becoming economically successful, single mothers raising “well-adapted” kids, battered women rising against their abusers, black youth pursuing their dreams against tremendous resistance, etc.). Such stories, paradoxically enough, can make the “other who suffers” an object of envy rather than a purely abject entity. On a less superficial level, one could say, activating Lacanian terminology, that what is being envied is the jouissance of suffering. Lacan himself makes the connection between envy and jouissance when he explains that the (fantasized) jouissance of the other tends to generate a high degree of Lebensneid: “Lebensneid is not an ordinary jealously, it is the jealousy born in a subject in his relation to an other, insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality, that the subject perceives as something that he cannot apprehend” (1960, 237). On this view, I begrudge the other’s jouissance or “superabundant vitality” for the simple reason that I am myself barred from it; what is important to me is not the specific form that the other’s jouissance takes, but the fact that I do not have it. As Lacan explains, my covetousness “is not addressed to anything that I might desire but to a thing that is my neighbor’s Thing” (83).21 This is how even a marginalized subject can become an object of jealousy. This subject is resented to the degree that it is fantasized to be in possession of the kind of jouissance of suffering that the dominant subject lacks. Along slightly different lines, a marginalized subject (or group) can come to be viewed as an explicit hindrance to the

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dominant group’s access to jouissance—as what, for example, keeps the dominant group from attaining a sense of cultural cohesion (along the lines of “if those people did not exist, everything would be well in our society”). In this scenario, the marginalized group is seen as robbing the dominant group of enjoyment that is “rightfully” theirs. ˇ izˇek understands this better than most.22 Yet he, like Badiou, tends Z to slide into a similar position of resentment whenever the matter of the suffering “other” surfaces as an ethical concern. When this other belongs to the proletariat, things are still fine because the proletariat ˇ izˇek and Badiou. But fulfills the specifications of universality set up by Z the minute the other who suffers is a racial, ethnic, or sexual minority, a woman, or some sort of a postcolonial subject, the limits of universality have been breached. I comprehend the reasoning behind this stance insofar as the proletariat is a diffuse entity without any clear identitarian “substance.” But, as I have sought to demonstrate, the same could be said ˇ izˇek and Badiou so about some of the other groupings shunned by Z that, for instance, a queer is anyone who does not buy into heteronormative patriarchy, and a postcolonial subject is anyone who resists the West’s hegemonic attempts at empire-building. That is, the distinction between the proletariat and other alliance-based movements, including the much-maligned feminism, is arbitrary at best, based on an insufficient appreciation of the multiple ways in which such movements have been deconstructed to the point that their claim to universality is just as strong as that of the proletariat (and I say this as someone for whom poverty and social class are not only theoretically, but personally, important). It is just as difficult to isolate the “substance” of the queer, feminist, antiracist, or postcolonial subject as it is to isolate the “substance” of the ˇ izˇek and Badiou, in other words, is not that proletariat. My issue with Z they advocate a universalist ethics, for my own analysis of subjective singularity takes me in the same direction.23 The issue, instead, is that their universalism does not even begin to meet the requirements of a genuinely universalist universalism.

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Notes

Introduction ˇ izˇek (1989), Fink (1997), and Harari (2002) all provide a useful delin1. Z eation of the different stages of Lacan’s thinking. 2. Strictly speaking, Santner (2001) makes this statement in the context of talking about Roland Barthes’s distinction between the studium and the punctum in Camera Lucida (1982). To be exact, Santner posits that it is the punctum that represents “a rising to consciousness of a non-symbolizable surplus.” I am linking Santner’s statement to the singular self because the purpose of his discussion of Barthes is to draw a parallel between the punctum and what is most distinctive about the subject. 3. In this context, it is worth noting that the stakes of letting one’s singularity loose vary from subject position to subject position, as well as from social setting to social setting, so that the repercussions of rocking the boat are far from uniform across different individuals. 1.The Singularity of Being 1. Lacan writes: “If analysis has a meaning, desire is nothing other than that which supports an unconscious theme, the very articulation of that which roots us in a particular destiny, and that destiny demands insistently that the debt be paid, and desire keeps coming back, keeps returning, and situates us once again in a given track, the track of something that is specifically our business” (1960, 319). I will return to this statement in chapter 7. 2. The “primordial” nature of this deprivation has to do with the fact that it is the signifier’s formative intrusion into the bodily real—the very intrusion that gives birth to the subject as a creature of symbolization and intersubjectivity—that causes the Thing to appear as a lost object. 3. As Lacan posits, “If the Thing were not fundamentally veiled, we wouldn’t be in the kind of relationship to it that obliges us, as the whole of psychic life is obliged, to encircle it or bypass it in order to conceive it.” The 217

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Thing is, in other words, by its very nature always “represented by something else” (1960, 118). I will return to these statements in greater detail in chapter 6, where I explain why this is not as big an existential tragedy as it may at first appear. 4. As Lacan asserts, “In the beginning was the Word, which is to say, the signifier. Without the signifier at the beginning, it is impossible for the drive to be articulated as historical” (1960, 213). 5. This implies that the ultimate aim of the repetition compulsion is invariably das Ding. The particularity of the compulsion arises from the fact that each subject experiences the loss of das Ding differently. 6. Lacan also explains, “But it is not the Law itself that bars the subject’s access to jouissance—it simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier. For it is pleasure that sets limits to jouissance, pleasure as what binds incoherent life together” (1966, 696). ˇ izˇek writes: “The trouble with jouissance is not that it is unattainable, 7. Z that it always eludes our grasp, but, rather, that one can never get rid of it, that its stain drags along for ever—therein resides the point of Lacan’s concept of surplus-enjoyment: the very renunciation of jouissance brings about a remainder/surplus of jouissance” (1996, 93). Zupancˇicˇ, in turn, maintains that the trouble with jouissance is less that we cannot reach it than that “it is found everywhere” (2000, 242). 8. It should be noted that Lacan questions the validity of the Freudian death drive as a “destruction drive,” implying that it is a quasi-mythological construction rather than a scientifically justifiable discovery.Yet he finds it conceptually helpful: “I simply want to say that the articulation of the death drive in Freud is neither true nor false. It is suspect; that’s all I affirm. But it suffices for Freud that it was necessary” (1960, 213). 9. Lacan supports this reading when he remarks that the real is that dimension of the other with which we cannot “enter into a human relationship” (1960, 279). 10. Lacan elucidates the distinction between the lack caused by the signifier and the lack of the real as follows: “Two lacks overlap. The first emerges from the central defect around which the dialectic of the advent of the subject to his own being in the relation to the Other turns—by the fact that the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other. This lack takes up the other lack, which is the real, earlier lack, to be situated at the advent of the living being, that is to say, at sexed reproduction” (1964, 204–5). 11. As we will see in chapter 7, one of Zupancˇicˇ’s most noteworthy contributions to contemporary theory is her analysis of sublimation as a matter of creating space for values that are not recognized by the reality principle, a

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Notes to pages 24–30 219 principle which, far from being “natural,” is deeply ideological, reflecting the dominant values of its social setting. 12. Ever the rationalist, Kant tried to get around this by proposing that, ultimately, what is sublime is the capacity of man’s reason to master nature’s destructiveness and to comprehend even what the imagination cannot fathom. This is why he (unlike Edmund Burke) maintained that the sublime is lodged in the human mind rather than in the perceived object (e.g., the stormy ocean). 13. In chapter 5, I will explain that there are forms of creativity that partake of this dynamic not by ushering us beyond language, but by infusing language itself with the energies of the real. In such instances, the signifier does not seek to master the real, but rather to profit from its unruly vitality. 14. Santner (2001) makes a comparable argument, as does Lear (1999). 15. I develop this point in Reinventing the Soul (2006) and A World of Fragile Things (2009). See also Fink (1997) and Kirshner (2004) for an analysis of the ways in which symbolic ideals and reference points (what Lacan calls “quilting points”) offer us much-needed social support. 16. The paradigmatic example of subjective destitution is Antigone’s defiant “no” to Creon. Antigone was willing to sacrifice everything, including her life, for the sake of her principle (her desire to bury her brother Polyneces). Lacan offers an extensive reading of Antigone in Seminar 7 (1959–60). 17. Badiou’s theory is deeply indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan’s account of the real. Badiou argues that the truth-event emerges from the “void” of a given “situation” (the normative order of things), rendering visible what is inherently invisible from within that situation. As a result, the event radically reconfigures the situation, making it impossible for the subject (or an entire society) to go on living as if nothing had happened. For instance, a new scientific discovery, an artistic innovation, or a genuine revolution shatters the status quo (of science, art, or the social order) in ways that cannot be ignored. I discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 4. ˇ izˇek’s description of an “‘interpella18. Santner explicitly draws on Z tion’ beyond ideological interpellation, an interpellation which suspends the performative force of the ‘normal’ ideological interpellation that compels us to accept our determinate place within the sociosymbolic edifice” (2003, 112). 19. Santner’s conceptualization is close to Badiou’s analysis of the almost prophetic power of the truth-event to jolt the subject out of its customary “situation.” Earlier in his discussion, Santner in fact aligns himself with Badiou, adding that “Badiou’s thought is related to the Heideggerian notion of ‘authenticity,’ according to which, our immersion in the practices and opinions of the social world we inhabit—in what Heidegger calls ‘das Man’—is

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structurally susceptible to a disruption that ‘compels us to decide a new way of being’” (2005, 111). 20. There may be existential attitudes that are more conducive than others to the emergence of such a daimon, which is why some emphasis should be placed on the notion of “allowing” oneself to be surprised. Although being summoned by a miracle is not something that can be planned for or orchestrated, there may be ways to facilitate its occurrence. 21. Some of the thinkers I have cited, most notably Badiou and Zupancˇicˇ, at times use the term “subject” in much the same way that I deploy the term “character.” I consequently want to specify that I am here referring to the “subject” in its most rudimentary poststructuralist sense, namely as an entity that has been subjected to sociosymbolic law. 22. Graham Wolfe (2009) discusses these dangers brilliantly, pointing out that the solidity of the symbolic order is, in some ways, indebted to such fantasies of transcendence—fantasies that have no substantial foundation, but that serve to reconcile us to less than satisfactory social conditions. Indeed, our fetishization of the sublime can come to support the most hegemonic aspects of the symbolic by offering us an emotional escape from the more dispiriting facets of our lives: The more we can fantasize about the possibility of attaining the sublime, the better we are able to tolerate the banalities, hardships, inequalities, and injustices of our existence. In this manner, the sublime functions as a fantasmatic underlining of our passive reconciliation to the oppressive restrictions of the normative order. To the degree that we place the “truth” of our singularity in awe-inspiring experiences that sidestep everyday triteness, we accept without complaint what is unfair or tyrannical about this triteness. As a matter of fact, the dominant socioeconomic order counts on our propensity to use the promises of the sublime as a means of turning away from the disparities of contemporary society. 23. This is a matter I take up at greater length in the second half of this book. 2.The Rewriting of Destiny 1. Here it may be helpful to recall Freud’s description of the repetition compulsion: “Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one;

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Notes to pages 36–44 221 or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a women passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion” (1920, 23). Freud goes on to remark that individuals in this predicament give the uncanny impression “of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power” (23). Note that Freud’s conception of the “daimon” here diverges from that of Rosenzweig, coming, in fact, quite close to the latter’s “vampire.” ˇ izˇek, the most radical aspect of Lacan’s work is precisely this inco2. For Z herence of the Other, the fact “that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack” (1989, 122). If the function of fantasy as well as of social ideology is to conceal the various divisions of the social field—to convince us that the big Other is an all-powerful structure—in reality the Other is always undermined by the energies of the real. Indeed, the real, rather than merely attacking the Other from the outside, represents an internal limit to the consistency of our social order. This is why Lacan maintains that there is no Other of the Other, no ultimate guarantee of the Other’s reliability (1966, 688). 3. This idea has been developed famously by Jean Laplanche (1989) and more recently by both Santner (2001, 2005) and Judith Butler (2005). 4. Santner expresses the matter in this way: “What I mean . . . is that the libidinal component of one’s attachment to the predicates securing one’s symbolic identity must also be thought of as being ‘ibidinal’: a symbolic investiture not only endows the subject with new predicates; it also calls forth a largely unconscious ‘citation’ of the authority guaranteeing, legitimating one’s rightful enjoyment of those predicates (that is at least in part what it means to ‘internalize’ a new symbolic identity). But because that authority is itself in some sense ‘magical,’ that is, unsubstantiated . . . this ‘ibidity’ is, in the final analysis, a citation of lack, and so never settled once and for all” (2001, 50). 5. Lacan links this sense of subjection to the desire of the mother as follows: “The law of the mother is, of course, the fact that the mother is a speaking being and this suffices to legitimate my saying the law of the mother. Nevertheless, this law is, if I may say so, an uncontrolled law. . . . this law is entirely in the subject who supports it, namely in the good or bad will of the mother, the good or bad mother” (1958, 188–89). The law of the mother is here a kind of pre-law—a law that predates the Law of the Father and operates on an even more foundational level so that the subject (here the child) comes to experiences itself as an “a-subject,” as someone completely subjected to the mother’s capricious whims. Lacan argues that the child needs the Law of the Father to rescue it from this degree of frustration and anxiety—that it is only by fully entering the symbolic order that the child can claim its position as a subject (rather than an a-subject). However, it is evident that the frustration and anxiety that the subject experiences in rela-

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tion to the mother’s law continue to animate its existence on the level of the drives and unconscious fantasy well after the introduction of the Father’s Law. And it is equally evident that the latter can come to function on a comparable level of arbitrariness—that the Law of the Father is rarely the clear-cut letter of rational Law. 6. In the context of her discussion of Oedipus, Zupancˇicˇ notes that Lacan distinguishes between classical and modern tragedy as follows: “We are no longer guilty just in virtue of a symbolic debt. . . . It is the debt itself in which we have our place that can be taken from us, and it is here that we can feel completely alienated from ourselves. The ancient Ate doubtless made us guilty of this debt, but to renounce it as we can now means that we are left with an even greater misfortune: destiny no longer applies” (quoted in Zupancˇicˇ 2000, 172). In classical tragedy, the tragedy consists of a “fate” that cannot be either altered or evaded. As Zupancˇicˇ elaborates, “The force of the great tragic characters of antiquity consists in the fact that they have no choice: they are what they will and accomplish from their birth on, and they are this with all of their being” (172–73). Modern tragedy, in contrast, deprives us of even this last vestige of stability: “even this last refuge of our being—the guilt and debt where we could previously take shelter—can be taken from us” (173). The result is a “radical ‘destitution’ of the subject” (173)—an absolute loss of existential foundations. 7. As I have demonstrated, this destiny includes “inhuman” elements in the sense that it is fueled by drive energies that have not been fully “humanized.” Yet, as we have seen, these energies are no longer purely nonhuman either. Because they have inevitably been touched (“oriented”) by the humanizing coordinates of the Other, they are not equivalent to the “animal” instincts that dictate the destines of other species. 8. One of the best analyses of this distinction can be found in LaCapra (2001). 9. In the next chapter, we will discover that the most tenacious of such fantasies, the so-called “fundamental fantasy,” does not respond to analytic treatment. 10. See chapter 5 of Fink (1997) for an extended discussion of this aspect of Lacanian theory. It should be noted that it can be difficult, and sometimes even too costly, to oppose the Other’s desire if one occupies a deprivileged subject position to begin with. Along related lines, in saying that we should not expect reparation from the Other, I do not mean that we should not hold the Other responsible for its abuses of power. I am merely referring to the idea that it is useless to expect the Other to conjure away our “burden” of being creatures of desire (which is one of the defining burdens of human existence).

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Notes to pages 51–58 223 11. Speaking against the idea that analysis ends “with the position of comfort,” Lacan asserts: “As I believe I have shown here in the sphere I have outlined for you this year, the function of desire must remain in a fundamental relation to death. The question I ask is this: shouldn’t the true termination of an analysis—and by that I mean the kind that prepares you to become an analyst—in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality of the human condition. It is precisely this, that in connection with anguish, Freud designated as the level at which its signal is produced, namely, Hilflosigkeit or distress, the state in which man is in that relationship to himself which is his own death . . . and can expect help from no one” (1960, 303–4). In relation to the lack of a “Sovereign Good,” he states: “That’s something to remember whenever the analyst finds himself in the position of responding to anyone who asks him for happiness. The question of the Sovereign Good is one that man has asked himself since time immemorial, but the analyst knows that it is a question that is closed. Not only doesn’t he have that Sovereign Good that is asked of him, but he also knows that there isn’t any” (299–300). 12. I make this argument at length in Reinventing the Soul (2006) and A World of Fragile Things (2009). 13. One of my supervisees, Jay Rajiva, argues in his dissertation that the idea that trauma needs to be narrativized may be a specifically Western notion, that in some postcolonial contexts such narrativization is neither possible nor desirable. For an interesting take of this, see Das (2006). 14. Fink articulates the matter as follows: “Here I would simply like to reiterate the idea that the analysand’s interpretation or construction of the Other’s desire can be thrown into question only insofar as the analyst does not react as the analysand expects and does not show his or her cards—does not allow the analysand to read his or her desire. Instead, the analyst must maintain a position of enigmatic desire. . . . The analyst’s interest, curiosity, and desire must be hard for the analysand to read, hard to pin down, and thus the analyst must not be where the analysand is expecting him or her to be. Otherwise, the fundamental fantasy can never be thrown into question, shaken up, and reconfigured” (1997, 59). 15. As Santner specifies, “If life includes a dimension of ‘too much,’ then being in the midst of life will of necessity involve a mode of tarrying with this unassumable excess rather than repetitively and compulsively defending against it. To use a Freudian formulation, it will involve a certain readiness to feel anxiety” (2001, 22). 16. This is a point on which Lear agrees with Lacan, for he proposes that analysis places the analysand “in a position to take advantage of certain kinds of chance occurrences,” enabling him or her to turn breakdowns into “lucky breaks” and, consequently, to understand happiness “as the experience of

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chance things’ working out well rather than badly.” In other words, because the consistency of our lives is over and again undermined by a “too muchness” of energy, because our psyches have the tendency to disrupt themselves in the most random and sporadic ways conceivable, analysis cannot be conceptualized as “a teleological occurrence” but must, rather, be viewed as “a taking-advantage of the disruption of previous attempts to construct a teleology” (2000a, 129). 3.The Ethics of the Act 1. Roberto Harari also argues that the sinthome is “an uncoupled One, outside of any sequence; it answers to no integration, no context, no history, no full or anticipated meaning” (2002, 125). Lacan himself in turn asserts that the sinthome is “what is singular about every individual” (1976, 168; trans. mine). 2. In Edelman’s words, “Lacan, toward the end of his career, maintained that by moving beyond, by traversing ‘the fundamental fantasy,’ we confront the meaningless spur or nub of our access to jouissance, the Thing that holds the drive, indecipherably, in a fixed rotation around it. And faced with this sinthome, itself the limit of every analysis and beyond interpretation, the subject, he proposed, must come at last to identify with it. The subject, that is, must accept its sinthome, its particular pathway to jouissance, as its ‘Real identity, connecting it to the Real of its being’” (2004, 47). 3. See Fink (1997, 207–8) for a helpful delineation of this transition. In this context, it should be noted that Lacan’s increasing interest in the drive does not mean that desire loses its importance. Because the sinthome represents “the beyond of analysis” (Lacan 1964, 273), analysis, in a sense, has no choice but to deal with the symptomology of desire; analysis has to reflect the fact that there is no way to approach the drive except through desire. 4. Edelman writes: “With no sympathy for the subject’s desires and no trace of compassion for the ego’s integrity, with no love insofar as love names the subject’s defense against dissolution, sinthomosexuals, like the death drive they are made to represent . . . endanger the fantasy of survival by endangering the survival of love’s fantasy, insisting instead on the machine-like working of the partial, dehumanizing drives and offering a constant access to their surplus of jouissance” (74). 5. For an incisive critique of Edelman’s approach, see Muñoz (2009). 6. Edelman characterizes the “fantasy” of the future as “an effort to fill what Lacan calls the lack in the Other—the place of the absent from every signifying chain and hence of the very division around which the subject itself takes shape—through a stop-gap identification with the empty place of the gaze in a gesture of hopeless optimism for which we’re always compelled

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Notes to pages 64–75 225 to opt” (2004, 34–35). In this sense, the future functions as a lure that promises the end of alienation while simultaneously reconciling us to the notion that we are not yet “quite there.” After all, as Edelman states, the future is “always / A Day / Away”: “Like the lovers of Keats’s Grecian urn, forever ‘near the goal’ of a union they’ll never in fact achieve, we’re held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day when today and tomorrow are one” (30). The sinthomosexual, in contrast, refuses to invest in the hollow promise of a brighter tomorrow, recognizing that the future is “just as lethal as the past,” and insisting “that the future stop here” (31). The sinthomosexual, in sum, denies the appeal of fantasy by rejecting the idea that the future is what “mends each tear, however mean, in reality’s dress with threads of meaning” (35). He scorns any belief in a “final signifier” that would “make meaning whole at last” (37). 7. To be sure, the future is always in some ways a response to the past, a response to the ways in which we are being addressed by the ghosts of our personal (or collective) history. One might even say that there are parts of our past that only become legible to us in the future.Yet because the future, unlike the past, is something we can negotiate with, we can to some extent use it to counter the symptomatic, life-arresting force of persistent ghosts (the repetition compulsion). ˇ izˇek specifies, the act is, by definition, one “of annihilation, of 8. As Z wiping out”: “we not only don’t know what will come out of it, its final outcome is ultimately even insignificant, strictly secondary in relation to the NO! of the pure act” (2001, 44). 9. Indeed, the act is not something that the subject can ever actively choose to undertake. As Zupancˇicˇ stresses, it “happens to the subject that he performs an act, whether he wants to or not” (2000, 100). 10. I will return to this in chapter 5. 11. I am aware that Parks’s action was actually quite premeditated in the sense that it was orchestrated to induce organized bus boycotts. But what matters here is the symbolic impact of her act—that onlookers understood it to be a spontaneous act of resistance. In addition, even if Parks knew that her action was to precipitate a political movement, she could not have anticipated the extent of its success. She took a personal and political risk without having a clear sense of where it might lead. 12. As Lacan explains, “Antigone invokes no other right than that one, a right that emerges in the language of the ineffaceable character of what is. . . . What is, is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed. She rejects everything else” (1960, 279). 13. In the context of arguing that the goal of analysis is not happiness, Lacan stipulates, “There’s absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream. A little more rigor and firmness

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are required in our confrontation with the human condition. That is why I reminded you last time that the service of goods or the shift of the demand for happiness onto the political stage has its consequences. The movement that the world we live in is caught up in, of wanting to establish the universal spread of the service of goods as far as conceivably possible, implies an amputation, sacrifices, indeed a kind of puritanism in the relationship to desire that has occurred historically. The establishment of the service of goods at a universal level does not in itself resolve the problem of the present relationship of each individual man to his desire in the short period of time between his birth and his death. The happiness of future generations is not at issue here” (1960, 303). 14. To be precise, Lacan states, “It is because we know better than those who went before how to recognize the nature of desire, which is at the heart of this experience, that a reconsideration of ethics is possible, that a form of ethical judgment is possible, of a kind that gives this question the force of a Last Judgment: Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you” (1960, 314). 15. This, of course, is exactly what Edelman is getting at when he pits the jouissance of the sinthomosexual against the future-oriented hopefulness of heteronormative sociality. 16. Harari expresses something similar when he argues that analytic interpretation “restores a missing link in the chain of the analysand’s thoughts and feelings, and it could be said to hit the real in the sense that it verbalizes (symbolizes) something that has never before been put into words” (2002, 48). The real, Harari continues, “can also be thought of as what Freud calls trauma—traumatic events that have never been talked through. . . . This real has to be symbolized through analysis: it has to be spoken, put into signifiers.” Analysis, in this sense, involves “the progressive draining away of the real into the symbolic” (49). 4.The Possibility of the Impossible 1. Peter Hallward posits that the event ensures that “an ordinary (replaceable) individual becomes irreplaceable, becomes a (singular) subject” (2002, xxvi). In this context, it is worth stressing, once again, that if the term “subject” in contemporary theory usually connotes the state of being “subjected” to cultural hegemonies, Badiou employs it to signify a state of being that is able, momentarily at least, to resist such subjection. Indeed, like Lacanian singularity, Badiou’s singularity involves the idea of being radically out of joint with respect to one’s social environment. In the same way that Lacan associates singularity with the “truth” of the subject’s desire (as it intertwines with the drive)—with what undercuts the subject’s faith in the seamless legitimacy of

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Notes to pages 86–89 227 the big Other—what makes Badiou’s subject a subject of truth is its ability to access an existential realm beyond the compelling mirages of its life-situation. Both thinkers, therefore, distinguish between the submissive individual and the singular subject of truth, which, for Lacan, emerges through analysis or the ethical act and, for Badiou, arises in response to the event. And because such a subject represents a fissure in the surface of the symbolic order, it is by definition deprived of any comforting “substance” or “fullness of being.” 2. As Badiou asserts, truth-events “are irreducible singularities, the ‘beyond-the-law’ of situations. Each faithful truth-process is an entirely invented immanent break with the situation. Subjects, which are the local occurrences of the truth-process (‘points’ of truth), are particular and incomparable inductions” (2002, 44). 3. As Hallward articulates the matter, there can “be no irreplaceable subject without engagement in a process in which, in principle, any subject might take part” (2002, xxxvi). 4. Badiou writes: “You might then ask what it is that makes the connection between the event and that ‘for which’ it is an event. This connection is the void [vide] of the earlier situation. What does this mean? It means that at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organized the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question” (2002, 68). 5. Another one of Badiou’s examples is this: To the extent that Haydn successfully names the void at the center of baroque music, his musical architectonics constitute an event that introduces a revolutionary way of composing music—one that was not accessible from within baroque style even at the height of its virtuosity (see Badiou 2002, 68–69). 6. Badiou also argues that every “radical transformational action originates in a point, which, inside a situation, is an evental site” (2005, 176). This evental site is the “condition of being for the event” (179). 7. In Hallward’s words, the real of the situation is “that which the situation’s normal supervision of possibilities is . . . designed to obscure or foreclose” (2003, 13). 8. Badiou remarks that the event inscribes the subject “in an instant of eternity” (2002, 45). 9. As Badiou expresses the matter, “All my capacity for interest . . . has poured out into the future consequences of the solution to this scientific problem, into the examination of the world in the light of love’s being-two, into what I will make of my encounter, one night, with the eternal Hamlet, or into the next stage of a political process, once the gathering in front of the factory has dispersed” (2002, 50). 10. As Badiou explains with respect to the “event” of Mozart, “There is no ‘progress’ here, for classical academicism, or the cult of Mozart, are in no

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sense superior to what went on before. But it marks a forcing of knowledges, an often extensive modification of the codes of communication (or the opinions on ‘music’ that human animals swap). Of course, these modified opinions are ephemeral, whereas the truths themselves, which are the great creations of the classical style, shall endure eternally” (2002, 70). 11. This is Santner’s point when he states, “The socialized human animal that we are is, so to speak, always already bent over, locked into some sort of cringe. What Badiou refers to as the ‘vital disorganization’ generated by a truth-event thus signifies a disruption of this symptomatic cringe already constraining/intensifying our life. If we think of a symptom as being a locus of some sort of disorganization, then the ‘vital disorganization’ at issue in a truth-event must be understood in this reflexive sense as a disorganization of a disorganization already at the heart of our animal—or rather, our ‘creaturely life’” (2005, 114). 12. Badiou writes: “This explains why former revolutionaries are obliged to declare that they used to be lost in error and madness, why a former lover no longer understand why he loved that woman, why a tired scientist comes to misunderstand, and to frustrate through bureaucratic routine, the very development of his own science. Since the process of truth is an immanent break, you can ‘leave’ it (which is to say, according to Lacan’s powerful phrase, return to the ‘service of goods’ [service des biens]) only by breaking with this break which has seized you. And this breaking of a break has continuity as its motif [motif]. Continuity of the situation and continuity of opinions: all that came before, under the names of ‘politics’ or ‘love’, was an illusion at best, a simulacrum at worst” (2002, 79–80). 13. As Hallward observes, only “rigorous converts can maintain a truth,” which means that the event “leaves little room for modulation or discussion, let alone for skeptical or distanced admiration”: “The truth is an all-ornothing deal” (2003, 127). ˇ izˇek also specifies, “For Lacan, negativity, a negative gesture or 14. Z withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identification with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification” (2000, 154). ˇ izˇek’s most forceful statements about this is the following: 15. One of Z “The true task lies not in momentary democratic explosions which undermine the established ‘police’ order, but in the dimension designed by Badiou as that of ‘fidelity’ to the Event: translating/inscribing the democratic explosion into the positive ‘police’ order, imposing on social reality a new lasting order. This is the properly ‘terroristic’ dimension of every authentic democratic explosion: the brutal imposition of a new order” (2009, 419). 16. According to Hallward, “Action pursued at the ‘level of the real’ is action in its most inventive and most dangerous sense, a kind of rigorous

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Notes to pages 98–105 229 improvisation pursued in the suspension of every moral norm and every academic certainty. Only such action can access the real in its structural sense” (2003, 14). 17. The paradox of the event is that as soon as we turn it into a goal, into something we explicitly aim at, we lose our capacity to experience it. As Santner advances, we cannot, by will-power alone, give ourselves the possibility for new possibilities: “Something must happen, something beyond one’s own control, calculation, and labor, something that comes from the locus of the Other” (2005, 123). This could be taken to imply that our relationship to the event is inherently passive, that—like a desperate artist praying for inspiration—all we can do is to wait for the event to catch up with us. However, as Zupancˇicˇ points out, according to the logic of the event, “the very opposition active/passive (our waiting for the event/our exertions designed to make it occur) is misplaced. This is because the Real (the Event) does not have a subject (in the sense of a will that wants it), but is essentially a by-product of the action (or inaction) of the subject—something the latter produces, but not as ‘hers,’ as a thing in which she would be able to ‘recognize’ herself. In other words, ‘there is no hero of the event’” (2003, 238). 18. Zupancˇicˇ conveys something similar when she writes, “What is at stake is the theoretical presupposition that the possibility of an event as contingent falls under certain (subjective) conditions. In other words, contingency can be ‘activated’ without losing the character of contingency. The presupposition here is that the contingency is always-already discursive, and that there are discourses excluding contingency (implying that, in these discourses, we will wait for it in vain). This thesis, according to which contingency (the event, the real) can be activated, could be understood in the same sense as when we talk about ‘detonating a bomb.’ Although we do not produce the actual bomb ourselves (the event, the real), we are capable of activating it by ‘setting it off ’” (2003, 24–25). 5.The Jouissance of the Signifier ˇ izˇek’s defense of Lacan 1. A good example of this can be found in Z against Butler’s assessment of the big Other as ahistorical: “When Lacan emphatically asserts that ‘there is no big Other,’ his point is precisely that there is no a priori formal structural scheme exempted from historical contingencies: there are only contingent, fragile, inconsistent configurations. . . . The Lacanian Real is that traumatic ‘bone in the throat’ that contaminates every ideality of the symbolic, rendering it contingent and inconsistent. . . . for Lacan, as well as for Butler, there is nothing outside of contingent, partial, inconsistent symbolic practices, no ‘big Other’ that guarantees their ultimate consistency” ˇ izˇek’s often-repeated contention (2006, 322–23). What we witness here is Z

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230 Notes to pages 105–11 that because the real is internal to the symbolic, the Other inevitably fails to live up to the ideal of coherence that it (fantasmatically) posits as its legitimating foundation. This is why Lacan maintains that there is no Other of the Other—no ultimate guarantee of the Other’s meaning. In the same way that the subject’s lack causes a constitutive alienation (an impossibility of coherent self-identity), there is a lack in the Other that keeps it from ever becoming a closed totality. 2. This does not mean that Lacanian critics have completely neglected questions of social justice and intersubjective ethics—a matter I will return to in the conclusion to this book. 3. In her latest work, such as The Frames of War (2009), Butler has arguably been moving towards a more revolutionary perspective (or at least a perspective that appreciates the necessity of revolutionary politics). ˇ izˇek is, I think, a Slovenian Hamlet, utterly para4. Critchley writes: “Z lyzed but dreaming of an avenging violent act for which, finally, he lacks the ˇ izˇek’s work courage. In short, behind its shimmering dialectical inversions, Z leaves us in a fearful and fateful deadlock, both a transcendental-philosophical deadlock and a practical-political deadlock: the only thing to do is to do nothing. We should just sit and wait. Don’t act, never commit, and continue to dream of an absolute, cataclysmic revolutionary act of violence. Thus speaks the great obsessional. . . . As Hamlet says, ‘readiness is all.’ But the truth ˇ izˇek is never ready. His work lingers in endless postponement and is that Z over-production. He ridicules others’ attempts at thinking about commitment, resistance, and action—people like me and many others—while doing nothing himself ” (2008, 3). ˇ izˇek asserts in a different context, “Better to do nothing than to 5. As Z engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, etc.). The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate,’ to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘doing something’; academics participate in meaningless ‘debates,’ etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all” (2009, 476). ˇ izˇek writes: “Although we are dealing with what, to an ordinary 6. Z moral consciousness, cannot but appear as ‘immoral’ acts of killing, one has no right to condemn them, since they are the reply to years, centuries even, of systematic state violence and economic exploitation” (2009, 478). “If a class of people is systematically deprived of their rights,” he continues, “they are eo ipso also released from their duties towards the social order, since this order is no longer their ethical substance” (479). 7. In Zupancˇicˇ’s words, “This, of course, is what is at stake in one of the major controversies about Kantian ethics: whether Kantian ethics is the

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Notes to pages 111–12 231 theory of an ethical configuration or a ‘user’s guide’ to ethical practice. If we choose the latter, we are necessarily led towards Sade’s position: since suffering and pain then become the mark of ethics, the rarity of ‘good’ becomes the omnipresence of ‘evil’; the incompatibility of ethics and pleasure leads to a methodical masochism. . . . If, therefore, we understand the elements through which Kant specifies ethics as the elements we must take for the (immediate) object of our will, in believing that in doing this we will realize the ethical, the comparison between Kant and Sade seems a moderate one. If Kant says that, in an ethical act, well-being is not relevant, and if we understand this as an injunction to act against our own well-being or against the well-being of others (in order to make the ethical at all possible), we find ourselves caught by the throat in the snares of the ‘simulacrum’ of ethics, terror” (2000, 236). 8. Here is one example: We need the recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and only insofar as the other whom we encounter is not only the imaginary semblant, but also the elusive absolute Other of the Real Thing with whom no reciprocal exchange is possible. In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a “normal human fellow” cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves—there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order. So no axis between the two terms can subsist without the third one: if the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone); if there is no neighbor to whom I can relate as a human partner, the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing which directly parasitizes upon me (like Daniel Paul Schreber’s God who directly controls me, penetrating me with the rays of jouissance). If there is no Thing to underpin our everyday symbolically regulated exchange with others, we find ourselves in a Habermasian “flat,” aseptic universe in which subjects are deprived of their hubris of excessive passion, reduced to lifeless pawns in the regulated game of communication. (2005, 143–44)

That is, we need the symbolic Third to regulate our exchanges with the other because the other is never merely our imaginary double, but also an unknowable and potentially grotesque Thing with which we cannot have a reciprocal relationship. The symbolic as the Third—as an entity to which both self and other are subjected—mediates our interactions with the other; simply put, there is no possibility of intersubjectivity without the symbolic order. At the same time, without the imaginary—without the fantasmatic constructs that allow us to relate to the other as someone with whom we can identify—the symbolic Third would turn into an omnipotent and vengeful God parasitiz-

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232 Notes to pages 112–20 ing upon us; there would be no respite from our absolute subservience to the Other. Finally, without the real, our lives would lose their dynamism, for we would be deprived of our idiosyncratic passions and reduced to robotic cogs in the symbolic machine. 9. Interestingly enough, this is something Butler does recognize, even if her reading of the Lacanian symbolic is frequently too reductive. Because Butler tends to read social formations through a Foucaultian lens—a lens that emphasizes that such formations are always vulnerable to internal resistance and gradual reconfiguration—her theory, even at its most socially deterministic, retains the idea that social structures can shift in unforeseeable ways. ˇ izˇek is to the very portraiture of the real 10. Note once again how close Z he accuses Stavrakakis of perpetuating. In the course of his critique of the ˇ izˇek states, “This empiricist misreading of the Lacanian Real accounts latter, Z for Stavrakakis’s strange use of ‘negativity’: the Real as the excess of experience over its symbolization is ‘negative’ only in the superficial sense that it undermines symbolization, since it functions as the Otherness which resists it; in itself, however, this Real is a positivity of the exuberant wealth of experiˇ izˇek ence. For Lacan, things are exactly opposite” (2009, 319). If so, why does Z himself align the real with “the organic whole of experience” (2001, 51)? 11. Referring to Joyce’s epiphanies, Lacan maintains, “When one lists them, all of his epiphanies are always characterized by the same thing, which is very precisely the consequence that results from the error in the knot, namely the fact that the unconscious is connected to the real. . . . It is altogether readable in Joyce that the epiphany is what establishes that, because of a fault, the unconscious and the real become connected” (1976, 154; trans. mine). It should be noted that, insofar as Lacan believes that the unconscious is structured like a language, his references to the unconscious here are meant to evoke the symbolic (as opposed to the imaginary or the real). 12. In Lacan’s terms, Joyce “felt himself overwhelmingly called” (1976, 89; trans. mine). 13. From a slightly different perspective, one could propose that by unknotting language, Joyce shatters the phallic confidence of the signifier. In the same way that the mystic’s pursuit of jouissance is “encumbered” by his or her attachment to phallic subjectivity (see Lacan 1973, 76), the writer’s allegiance to phallic (hegemonic) forms of signification can impede the materialization of creativity. 14. Zupancˇicˇ states the matter as follows: “We might thus say that, for the early Lacan, jouissance does not exist. More precisely, it exists only in its own loss (it exists only in so far as it is already lost), as something lacking. Here the category of the lack is an ontological category; the lack is something ‘tangible’, irreducible to a simple absence or privation” (2000, 240). 15. Hoens and Pluth elaborate as follows:

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Notes to pages 120–29 233 The sinthome is not itself a meaning—it has no “truth”—but it does produce meanings. In what sense? In the sense of an enigma. An enigma confronts you with one or more signifiers that evoke many meanings. It is poetic. For example, after a certain number of readings of a poem you do not necessarily grasp the poem’s ultimate meaning; rather, it is as if the poem had read you: it remains opaque and produces whole chains of signifiers within you. The sinthome could also be considered as a poem, or as an object that is very familiar to you but at the same time absolutely unknown in that you do not quite know what to make of it. The whole idea here is that the sinthome produces meaning out of nothing, again and again. It should be noted that meaning here does not imply any end point in some ultimate signification. What is at stake, rather, are inventions of meaning where there is nothing but the sinthome as a pure, evocatory thing. (2002, 11)

16. As Harari sums up the matter, “Having maintained for almost all of his teaching (along broadly Heideggerian lines) that we are inhabited by language, that we are spoken by it rather than speaking it, that language constrains us into absolute dependence on it—having supported such a position for more than twenty years, Lacan’s work now takes a turn that radically undermines it” (2002, 300). 17. It is noteworthy that Lacan pointedly uses the humanistic term l’individual to refer to Joyce. As he announces, “It is insofar as the unconscious becomes connected to the sinthome, which is what is singular about every individual, that one can say that Joyce, as it is written somewhere, identifies himself as an individual” (1976, 168; trans. mine). Again, the “unconscious” here implies the symbolic.

6.The Dignity of the Thing 1. To be precise, Lacan writes: “Now if you consider the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness . . . presents itself as nihil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hands around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole” (1960, 121). 2. Lacan states, for instance, “The prohibition of incest is nothing other than the condition sine qua non of speech” (1950, 69). In other words, the separation from das Ding—from the maternal Thing—is the foundation of human subjectivity insofar as this subjectivity presupposes the capacity to use language. 3. Kristeva explains “negation” as follows: “‘I have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother,’ is what the speaking

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234 Notes to pages 129–35 being seems to be saying. ‘But no, I have found her again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose her I have not lost her (that is the negation), I can recover her in language’” (1989, 43). This ability to recover the lost object in language is what the depressed person has lost. 4. Klein in turn refers to a text by an analyst named Karin Mikailis. 5. Lacan goes on to tell us with evident amusement that when Kjar shows her painting to her brother-in-law, the latter is enraged and accuses her of lying about having painted it. Claiming that the painting is the work of an experienced, mature artist, he swears “that if his sister-in-law painted that, then he can conduct a Beethoven symphony at the Royal Chapel, even though he doesn’t know a note of music” (1960, 117). 6. Lacan specifies, “Of course, works of art imitate the objects they represent, but their end is certainly not to represent them. In offering the imitation of an object, they make something different out of that object. Thus they only pretend to imitate. The object is established in a certain relationship to the Thing and is intended to encircle and to render both present and absent” (1960, 141). 7. Which objects resonate with us and which do not is determined by the distinctive manner in which we experience the Thing’s absence. 8. Along similar lines, Joan Copjec remarks that even though there is no Sovereign Good, Lacan “informs us that representation, or thought, can ‘apprehend,’ can by itself grasp hold of some good. Not some of das Ding— this possibility is foreclosed as the subject finds itself perched over the void of das Ding, the void of its absence—but some good, something in place of das Ding. Vorstellungrepräsentanz [ideational representative], in other words, is not any ordinary representation . . . but a peculiar kind of representation the permits us to grasp hold of some nonbeing, some jouissance, or satisfaction” (2004, 36). 9. “The function of the pleasure principle,” Lacan maintains, is “to lead the subject from signifier to signifier, by generating as many signifiers as are required to maintain at as low a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the psychic apparatus” (1960, 118–19). 10. As Lacan explains, “The pleasure principle governs the search for the object and imposes the detours which maintain the distance in relation to its end. Even in French the etymology of the word—which replaces the archaic ‘quérir (‘to search’)’—refers to circa, detour. The transference of the quantity from Vorstellung to Vorstellung always maintains the search at a certain distance from that which it gravitates around. The object to be found confers on the search its invisible law; but it is not that, on the other hand, which controls its movements. The element that fixes these movements, that models the return—and this return itself is maintained at a distance—is the pleasure principle” (1959, 58).

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Notes to pages 136–44 235 11. Lacan also posits that if the drive may attain its satisfaction without attaining its “end,” it is because “its aim is simply this return into circuit” (1964, 179). ˇ izˇek’s many statements about the matter: 12. Let me quote just one of Z “Today . . . when we are bombarded from all sides by the different versions of the superego injunction ‘Enjoy!’—from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening— one should move to a more radical level: psychoanalysis is today the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy (as opposed to ‘not allowed to enjoy’). (And, from this vantage point, it becomes retroactively clear how the traditional prohibition to enjoy was sustained by the implicit opposite injunction)” (2005, 152). 13. Zupancˇicˇ’s observations are worth quoting a length: “Nobody is asking us to cut down on our ways of finding excitement, to cut down on champagne—God forbid! We are simply asked to take our champagne with some Xanax or, ever better, to buy products that already fulfill the two conditions. What are these products? Coffee without caffeine, sweets without sugar, cigarettes without nicotine (i.e., ‘substances deprived of their substance’). Perhaps these products should not be conceived of so much in terms of substances that lack the very thing that defines them, but, rather, as being composed of two substances, one neutralizing the exciting effect of the other (like champagne and Xanax mixed together). For why else should we need to call this brownish water with no caffeine in it ‘coffee’? Why, if not because the very name ‘coffee’ evocatively awakens the excitement that is then successfully deactivated by the lack of caffeine? Products of this kind are the perfect response to the double-bind that defines the core and frame of nihilism” (2003, 68). 14. In relation to the number of necessary quilting points, Lacan states, “I don’t know how many there are, but it isn’t impossible that one should imagine to determine the minimal number of fundamental points of insertion between the signifier and the signified necessary for a human being to be called normal, and which, when they are not established, or when they give way, make a psychotic” (1956, 268–69). 15. Kirshner expresses the complexity of the matter adroitly when he proclaims that what is at stake in the concept of quilting points is the grounding of the subject “in the polysemous chain of discourse that is, on one hand, open-ended . . . and, on the other hand, limited or directed by the important signifiers received by the subject from the Other” (2004, 70–71). 16. Lacan explains at length that the beautiful, along with “the good,” is what separates us from the Thing: “The true barrier that holds the subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction . . . is properly speaking the aesthetic phenomenon

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236 Notes to pages 144–47 where it is identified with the experience of beauty—beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty that has been called the splendor of truth. It is obviously because truth is not pretty to look at that beauty is, if not its splendor, then at least its envelope.” If “the good constitutes the first stopping place” on the scale that separates us from the central field of desire, “the beautiful forms the second and gets closer. It stops us, but it also points in the direction of the field of destruction” (1960, 216–17). Beauty, in other words, ushers us close to the Thing (closer, in fact, than “the good”) while still keeping us at a manageable distance from it. It, as it were, envelopes the Thing so that we can have a relationship to the latter without destroying ourselves. This is one way to understand the idea that the Thing only appears to us “veiled” (shrouded in beauty). 17. To be sure, there are moments in Lacan’s writings where he seems to suggest that the object is completely indifferent—that any object will do. For instance, he states, “As far as the object in the drive is concerned, let it be clear that it is, strictly speaking, of no importance. It is a matter of total indifference” (1964, 168). Lacan makes this argument to emphasize that the ultimate aim of the drive is its continued failure to attain its goal: As I have explained, what gives the drive satisfaction is the repetition of unsatisfaction (the incessant circling around the object). From this point of view, one object will satisfy as well as any other. However, insofar as certain objects evoke the Thing better than others, thereby offering a greater degree of jouissance, they cannot be a matter of indifference. 18. This is a mistake, Zupancˇicˇ argues, for the real “cannot be reached or attained by its differentiation from the Imaginary and the Symbolic. We will not find the Real by searching for it behind the veils of the Imaginary and the distortions of the Symbolic. This tendency that ultimately identifies the Real with some unspeakable authenticity or Truth is the nihilistic tendency par excellence” (2003, 129–30). 19. Moreover, as should be clear by now, it may even be that these two ways of approaching the real are not mutually exclusive—that sublimation may under some circumstances be a means of carrying the effects of the ethical act into the symbolic. This is how I understand Badiou’s insistence that the event be “named” after it has passed, for if the event (or act) is going to be transformative rather than merely destructive, it needs to be made sense of—it needs to be translated into symbolic terms. The event may convey the subject to a place where change becomes obligatory, but for this change to become socially relevant, it needs to be signified. In a certain sense, the sublimatory process of naming captures what has never been articulated before. Indeed, if the real is what has not yet been put into words—if, as Harari argues, “it can be thought of as the connection or link between two thoughts

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Notes to pages 147–55 237 that has succumbed to repression and must be restored” (2002, 49)—then sublimation is a way to restore the missing link, to access a trauma that has never been verbalized. 7.The Ethics of Sublimation 1. As Zupancˇicˇ explains, sublimation “aims at the Real precisely at the point where the Real cannot be reduced to reality.” It “opposes itself to reality . . . in the name of the Real. To raise an object to the dignity of the Thing is not to idealize it, but, rather, to ‘realize’ it, that is, to make it function as a stand-in for the Real” (2003, 77). This is another way to state the main argument of the previous chapter, namely that sublimation is what makes the real “appear” within reality: It “realizes” (renders tangible) a little piece of the Thing. 2. As Zupancˇicˇ observes, raising an object to the dignity of the Thing enables us “to accept as possible something the possibility of which is excluded from the realm of the reality principle” (2003, 76). 3. In Zupancˇicˇ’s terms, “The creative act of sublimation is not only a creation of some new good, but also (and principally) the creation and maintenance of a certain space for objects that have no place in the given, extant reality, objects that are considered ‘impossible.’ Sublimation gives value to what the reality principle does not value.” As a consequence, “to ‘sublimate a passion’ does not mean to turn away from it, and concentrate on something else, or something that is more acceptable. On the contrary, it implies that we make of this passion itself something acceptable (or at least conceivable)” (2003, 77–78). 4. As Zupancˇicˇ elaborates, the problem is not “that ‘there is nothing everywhere,’ that there is nothing all around us: the problem is, rather, that, all around us, there are ‘somethings,’ yet none of these particular ‘somethings’ has the power to engage our will or desire in any serious way” (2003, 66). 5. Copjec communicates the same idea by asserting that “there is a world of difference between that dissatisfaction which expresses itself in a feeling that the world does not measure up to some ideal, however vaguely this ideal may be conceived, and that dissatisfaction which expresses itself in a feeling that the world lacks any legitimate ground.” “In the first case,” Copjec continues, “the world appears as a pale and degraded form of what it ought to be, in the second it appears as inauthentic”: “Everywhere one looks one finds . . . façades without any real support.” This sense of inauthenticity is “based not on the assumption that just beyond our reach there hovers an ideal we have failed to attain, but on the conviction that the world is not based on any ideal support” (2004, 116–17).

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238 Notes to pages 155–67 6. In a different context, Zupancˇicˇ declares that the sublimatory crisis is grounded in an implicit recognition that “a change in the symbolic constellation has in fact taken place”: “This change can be summed up in the fact that the point of view of the Last Judgment no longer exists (for us). What is at stake is not simply that ‘God is dead’—as Lacan pointed out, God was dead from the very beginning, and it was precisely His death that invested us with a symbolic debt. What has changed today is that this very debt where we had our place can be taken from us; that it is losing its symbolic grip, its unconditional value, its once-effective power to engage us. . . . The fact is that no only do we know that ‘God is dead’ (that the Other does not exist), He knows it too” (2000, 255). In other words, not only do we know that the Other (our symbolic universe) is devoid of any ultimate guarantee (such as God), but the Other knows this too. If in earlier times, the death of God placed upon us a symbolic debt that we felt compelled to pay through our ideals, values, and systems of representation, the fact that the Other now openly admits that God was always already dead, and that there is therefore no Other of the Other, means that we are deprived even of this debt, along with its power to motivate us. 7. In Butler’s words, “If I try to give an account of myself, if I try to make myself recognizable and understandable, then I might begin with a narrative account of my life. But this narrative will be disoriented by what is not mine, or not mine alone. And I will, to some degree, have to make myself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable. The narrative authority of the ‘I’ must give way to the perspective and temporality of a set of norms that contest the singularity of my story” (2005, 37). “The one story that the ‘I’ cannot tell,” Butler continues, “is the story of its own emergence as an ‘I’ who not only speaks but comes to give an account of itself. In this sense, a story is being told, but the ‘I’ who tells the story, who may well appear within the story as the first-person narrator, constitutes a point of opacity and interrupts the sequence, induces a break or eruption of the non-narrativizable in the midst of the story. So the story of myself that I tell, foregrounding the ‘I’ who I am and inserting it into the relevant sequences of something called my life, fails to give an account of myself at the moment that I am introduced. Indeed, I am introduced as one for whom no account can or will be given. I am giving an account of myself, but there is no account to be given when it comes to the formation of this speaking ‘I’ who would narrate its life. The more I narrate, the less accountable I prove to be. The ‘I’ ruins its own story, contrary to its best intentions” (66–67). 8. This is perhaps more clear in Precarious Life (2004) and The Frames of War (2009), where Butler explicitly analyzes marginalized subject positions. ˇ izˇek states the matter. 9. See note 8 of Chapter 5 for an example of how Z 10. I make this argument more fully in The Summons of Love (2011).

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Notes to pages 168–72 239 8.The Sublimity of Love 1. In the end of Chapter 2, I pointed out that the clinical practice of psychoanalysis can take advantage of the enigmatic desire of the analyst to induce a reorganization of the analysand’s psychic life. In this instance, the enigma of the Other’s desire has an enlivening rather than an enervating impact. The same reasoning applies to love in the sense that the enigma of the beloved’s desire, while obviously capable of frustrating us, also tends to intrigue and stimulate us. Though intimate relationships are inevitably characterized by power struggles—and though we can certainly feel depleted by the intimate other no less than by the big Other—we do not usually experience the intimate other, the other with whom we enjoy, primarily as a bearer of hegemonic intent. Consequently, we are, initially at least, likely to experience the enigmas of the intimate other as revitalizing. 2. Lacan asserts, “Das Ding has, in effect, to be identified with the Wieder zu finden, the impulse to find again that for Freud establishes the orientation of the human subject to the object. . . . we might just as well characterize this object as a lost object. But although it is essentially a question of finding it again, the object indeed has never been lost” (1959, 58). Lacan here states with unusual clarity what I have already emphasized, namely that even though the Thing was never lost “in reality,” the fantasy of its loss determines the parameters of the subject’s subsequent desire by propelling it to seek objects that seemingly compensate for the very specific ways in which it has been wounded by the loss it imagines having endured. 3. Lacan maintains, “Psychoanalysis makes the whole achievement of happiness turn on the genital act. It is, therefore, necessary to draw the proper consequences from this. 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” (1960, 300). Sexual love, in other words, allows the subject to (always fleetingly) approach “the place” of the Thing. 4. See my Reinventing the Soul (2006), A World of Fragile Things (2009), and The Summons of Love (2011). 5. As Lacan states, the love object “is introduced oddly enough through the door of privation or of inaccessibility”: “It is impossible to serenade one’s Lady in her poetic role in the absence of the given that she is surrounded and isolated by a barrier” (1960, 149). 6. As Lacan observes, “The Lady is never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues, for her wisdom, her prudence, or even her competence” (1960, 150). Courtly love, in this sense, has nothing to do with the woman herself, but merely with her status as a “signifier”: “The inhuman character of the object of courtly love is plainly visible. This love that led some people

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to acts close to madness was addressed at living beings, people with names, but who were not present in their fleshly and historical reality. . . . They were there in any case in their being as reason, as signifier” (214–15). ˇ izˇek in turn posits that the enigma of the Other’s desire is “an enigma 7. Z not only for us, but also for the Other itself ”: “For this reason, the Lacanian ‘Che vuoi?’ is not simply an inquiry into ‘What do you want?’ but more an inquiry into ‘What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master” (2005, 141)? 8. Silverman’s analysis is indebted to the Heideggerian ideal of letting the things of the world to disclose themselves according to their own logic. 9. As Santner specifies, “Without this call and response, freedom remains in some sense impacted. . . . With the call and response and its distinctive mode of temporalization, however, this complex accommodation to the matrix of socio-symbolic relations and identifications in and through which we otherwise find our place in the world, is, for the eternity of a moment, suspended (this call and response is, in a word, where and how eternity enters time). To respond to love’s interpellation—to its passionate utterances—is . . . to momentarily suspend the force of the interpellations—the performative utterances—that otherwise invest us with socially intelligible identities, locate us within an established set of social relations of production and exchange” (2001, 87). Conclusion:The Other as Face 1. I am grateful to Aaron Goldsman for having steered me to this aspect of Levinas. 2. Lacan specifies that the “evil” that dwells within the other also dwells within me: “My neighbor possesses all the evil Freud speaks about, but it is no different from the evil I retreat from in myself. To love him, to love him as myself, is necessarily to move toward some cruelty. His or mine?, you will object. But haven’t I just explained to you that nothing indicates they are distinct? It seems rather that they are the same, on condition that those limits which oblige me to posit myself opposite the other as my fellow man are crossed” (1960, 198). ˇ izˇek states, “The neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the Thing means that, 3. As Z beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be ‘gentrified’” (2005, 143). ˇ izˇek elaborates as follows: “When do I effectively encounter the 4. Z Other ‘beyond the wall of language,’ in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams,

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Notes to pages 192–203 241 and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail—a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic—that signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter of the real is always traumatic, there is something at least minimally obscene about it, I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gap separating me from it” (quoted in Santner 2001, 81). ˇ izˇek writes: “This disavowal does not primarily concern the raw real5. Z ity of flesh (‘I know very well that beneath the face there is just the Real of the raw flesh, bones, and blood, but I nonetheless act as if the face is a window into the mysterious interiority of the soul’), but rather, at a more radical level, the abyss/void of the Other: the human face ‘gentrifies’ the terrifying Thing that is the ultimate reality of our neighbor” (2005, 146). 6. I find it interesting that post-Lacanian “universalism” has found its way to theoretical approaches that have previously advanced respect for differences. For instance, prominent queer theorists such as Leo Bersani (2008) and Tim Dean (2009) have recently advocated a “return” to the category of “the Same” as a foundation for ethics. This is not an attempt to revive a humanistic notion of universalism, but rather to rethink ethics from the perspective of what unites human beings across various differences. ˇ izˇek explains that “one participates in the universal dimension of the 7. Z ‘public’ sphere precisely as singular individual extracted from and even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification—one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities” (2006, 14–15). ˇ izˇek goes as far as to postulate that Levinas displaces his own guilt 8. Z to the persecuted so that “although Levinas is often perceived as the thinker who endeavored to articulate the experience of the Shoah, one thing is selfevident apropos his questioning of one’s own right to be and his emphasis on one’s unconditional asymmetrical responsibility: this is not how a survivor of the Shoah, one who effectively experienced the ethical abyss of Shoah, thinks and writes. This is how those think who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance” (2005, 160). ˇ izˇek, Santner, and Reinhard have turned 9. This is why critics such as Z to the Judeo-Christian conception of loving one’s neighbor. Because this is God’s command, it is supposed to apply to everyone equally, with the result that it can become the basis of universal justice. Personally, I find the alignment of universality with Judeo-Christianity problematic (see below). But, admittedly, there is a strange kind of internal consistency to the argument. 10. Likewise, one of the main appeals of poststructuralist theory—which ˇ izˇek —is its capacity to deconis strongly maligned by both Badiou and Z struct the concept of the universal by revealing the violence inherent in the imposition of seemingly “objective” values that, in reality, are nothing but

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the wholly subjective preferences of the powerful. While it may be true that poststructuralism does not easily lend itself to unified political action, there is a lot to be said for its recognition that the universal is frequently merely a convenient screen for the interests of those who wield social influence. Universality, in this sense, is ideology at its purest. In addition, it often has an unconscious component that is completely invisible to its advocates. ˇ izˇek mocks “politically correct multicultural 11. Along related lines, Z liberalism” for its “inquisitorial pursuit of racism and sexism in the details of personal behavior” (2009, 333). 12. Although it may be that political activists in feminist, racial/ethnic, and gay/lesbian/queer struggles at times still resort to the rhetoric of essentialist identity categories, this is often mostly strategic because it is easier to attain concrete political victories around identity-based agendas than to build effective coalitions across identity groups. And this rhetoric is rarely the basis of contemporary academic and theoretical discussions in the relevant fields, which, quite the contrary, have focused on the deconstruction of identity categories. It is, for instance, much less common for feminist theory to rely on a notion of “woman” as a stable identity than it is to question the very meaning and construction of this notion. Likewise, while it is certainly possible to find thinkers who advocate gay and lesbian rights from an essentialist perspective, most queer theorists do exactly the opposite, opening the category of “queer” to multiple deployments (so that, for example, straight people can claim the label queer for political purposes). And the meaning of postcolonial has been theorized so expansively that it may well constitute as inclusive (and thus potentially “universal”) a category as any notion of social class could ever be. ˇ izˇek makes this point in the context of arguing that sometimes 13. Z “doing nothing,” refusing to participate, deals a bigger blow to the power structure than overt resistance because it prevents the normal functioning of this structure. Insofar as our activity sustains a given structure, or helps it to reproduce itself, our decision to not take any action is “a case of ‘non-violent violence,’ of doing nothing as the greatest act of violence.” This “opens up the space for a passive revolution which, rather than directly confronting power, gradually undermines it in the manner of the subterranean digging of a mole, through abstaining from participation in the everyday rituals and practices that sustain it” (2009, 474). 14. To Badiou’s credit, he admits that any identity category has the potential to become political: “I never know in advance what quality, what particularity, is capable of becoming political or not; I have no preconceptions on that score. What I do know is that there must be a progressive meaning to these particularities, a meaning that is intelligible to all. . . . I would call ‘political’ something that—in the categories, the slogans, the state-

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Notes to pages 205–14 243 ments it puts forward—is less the demand of a social fraction or community to be integrated into the existing order than something which touches on a transformation of that order as a whole” (2002, 109). “I want to underline,” he continues, “that no category is in itself blocked from its possible politicization. Even ‘Arab’, even ‘Islam’, even ‘Jew’, even ‘French’, can, at a give moment, have a progressive political signification” (112). 15. I understand that Badiou’s rhetoric of “self-difference” is meant to show that the fact that we are all internally divided is what unites all of us—that self-difference is a universal predicament. I agree with this. But, as I argued in chapter 2, I think that it is necessary to distinguish between this type of “self-alienation” and the alienation caused by circumstantial forms of sociocultural oppression. 16. Badiou posits that conceptualizing man as a victim “prohibits every broad, positive vision of possibilities.” To forbid man “to imagine the Good, to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards the realization of unknown possibilities, to think what might be in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid his humanity as such” (2002, 14). 17. In some ways, this is simply a recasting of the classical phenomenological distinction between the immanent and the transcendent. ˇ izˇek makes an equally questionable point when he states, “We do 18. Z not obey and fear power because it is in itself so powerful; on the contrary, the power appears powerful because we treat it as such” (2009, 474). I would say that there are plenty of situations where power causes serious damage not because we treat it as powerful, but because it actually is powerful. 19. I recently had a vivid reminder of this when I wrote a humorous blog entry about the so-called cougar phenomenon: older women dating, and sometimes even marrying, younger men. I pointed out that if women are now able to turn the tables on the age-old custom of men dating younger women, it is because some of them finally have enough power and independence to pull it off. The hate-soaked responses I received from some male readers were an astonishing display of seemingly disproportionate rage. It was as if I had attacked the very core of their being—which, I suppose, in some sense I had. ˇ izˇek’s frequently repeated convic20. This issue may also be at play in Z tion that the trouble with contemporary culture is that it is “too permissive”: “Nonalienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all directly serve the system, which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics. Especially in the domain of poetic art, this means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying one’s innermost emotional turmoil, desires, and dreams. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with disgusting emotional exhibitionism—insofar as the standard notion of ‘poetic spirit’ is the ability to display one’s intimate turmoil,

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what Vladimir Mayakovski said about himself with regard to his turn from personal poetry to political propaganda in verses (‘I had to step on the throat of my Muse’) is the constitutive gesture of a true poet. If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene of a close friend opening up his heart, spilling out all the dirt of his inner life” (2005, 135). What is this if not an (ironically heartfelt) expression of melancholia for a white masculinist mythology of rugged unemotionality? 21. In a slightly difference context, Lacan explains that the child who envies his younger brother at the mother’s breast does not want the breast itself (for he no longer needs it), but rather the (imagined) jouissance of the brother: “What the small child, or whoever, envies is not at all necessarily what he might want. . . . Everyone knows that envy is usually aroused by the possession of goods which would be of no use to the person who is envious of them, and about the true nature of which he does not have the least idea” (1964, 116). ˇ izˇek states, “At its most radical level, violence is pre22. For instance, Z cisely an endeavour to strike a blow at this unbearable surplus-enjoyment contained in the Other” (2006, 268). 23. The tension between multiculturalist and universalist ethics remains, for me, somewhat unresolved. This is a topic for another book—one that I am tentatively calling Self, Other, Ethics: Towards a New Universalism.

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Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London:Verso. ———. 2003. Saint Paul:The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum. Barthes, Roland. 1977. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York: Hill & Wang. ———. 1992. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill & Wang. Bersani, Leo, and Adam Phillips. 2008. Intimacies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. ———. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2009. The Frames of War. New York:Verso. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience:Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Copjec, Joan. 2004. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ˇ izˇek.” Naked Punch 11 Critchley, Simon. 2008. “Violent Thoughts about Slavoj Z (Autumn). Das,Veena. 2006. Life and Words:Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dean, Tim. 2009. Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Fink, Bruce. 1997. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis:Theory and Technique. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Ed. James E. Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961. Guignon, Charles. 2004. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge. Hallward, Peter. 2002. Introduction to Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, by Alain Badiou. London:Verso.

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———. 2003. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harari, Roberto. 2002. How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan. Trans. Luke Thurston. New York: Other Press. Hoens, Dominiek, and Ed Pluth. 2002. “The Sinthome: A New Way of Writing an Old Problem?” In Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, ed. Luke Thurston. New York: Other Press. Kirshner, Lewis. 2004. Having a Life: Self-Pathology after Lacan. Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1955–1956. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III:The Psychoses. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 1993. ———. 1957–58. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre V: Les Formations de L’Inconscient. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. ———. 1959–60. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII:The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992. ———. 1964. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI:The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981. ———. 1966. Écrits:The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2007. ———. 1972–73. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1999. ———. 1975–76. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le Sinthome. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. ———. 1990. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Norton. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History,Writing Trauma. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laplanche, Jean. 1989. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Trans. David Macey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lear, Jonathan. 1999. Open-Minded:Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000a. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000b. Introduction to The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs, by Hans Loewald. Hagerstown, Md.: University Publishing Group. ———. 2004. Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony. New York: Other Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Loewald, Hans. 2000. The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs. Hagerstown, Md.: University Publishing Group. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia:The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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Works Cited 247 Nobus, Danny. 2002. “Illiterature.” In Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, ed. Luke Thurston. New York: Other Press. Ruti, Mari. 2006. Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life. New York: Other Press. ———. 2009. A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2011. The Summons of Love. New York: Columbia University Press. Santner, Eric L. 2001. On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor.” In The Neighbor:Three Inquiries in Political Theology, by ˇ izˇek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. Chicago: University of Slavoj Z Chicago Press. Silverman, Kaja. 2000. World Spectators. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Stavrakakis,Yannis. 2007. The Lacanian Left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ˇ izˇekian Approach to the Wolfe, Graham. 2009. “Encounters with the Real: A Z Sublime and the Fantastic in Contemporary Drama.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, Canada. ˇ izˇek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London:Verso. Z ———. 1996. The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London:Verso. ———. 2000. The Ticklish Subject:The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. ———. 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. New York: Routledge. ———. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ———. 2005. “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” In ˇ izˇek, Eric L. SantThe Neighbor:Three Inquiries in Political Theology, by Slavoj Z ner, and Kenneth Reinhard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. Interrogating the Real. Ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London: Continuum. ———. 2009. In Defense of Lost Causes. New York:Verso. Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London:Verso. ———. 2003. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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Index

accessibility of the sublime, 145–47 account of oneself, 156–57 agency of analyst, daimon and, 54–55 aggression toward love object, 172–73 alienation, 6, 47–48 analysis acceptance of lack, 51–52 destiny, reinvention, 54 end of, position of comfort and, 223 fixity and, 58 happiness and, 51 Lacanian process, Fink on, 54 objectivity, illusion, 56–57 versus psychology, 53 signifiers, at center, 53 sinthome, 62, 116 truth and, 49 victims of fate, 58 analyst as agent of daimon, 54–55 transference and, 55–57 Antigone ethical act and, 70–72 Polyneces love for, 181 anxiety, 162–164 Aristotle, science of character versus psychoanalysis, 13 art, 130–33 assimilation, undeadness and, 23 a-subject, 44–45 authentic self, 164–65 authority, institutions, validity in excess of any meaning, 42

author’s dealings with institutions of authority, 43–45 autonomy, social fantasies and, 40 Badiou, Alain, 4 ceding on desire, 94 domain of interests, 83 domain of truth-events, 83 ethic of truths, 84 multiculturalism, 195–96 the real, situation specific, 87 securization of infinity, 156 subject, 75 transformation, 84 truth-event, 29 versus human situation, 85 moderation, 152–53 rising from the void, 86–87 balanced lives, 160–62 truth-event and, 92 banalization of the world, 153–55 Barthes, Roland, 217 bodily jouissance, 119 Bouazizi, Mohamed, ethical act and, 69 breakfast cereal aisle and nihilism, 140 Butler, Judith establishment, subversion, 106 ethical relationships, 166 Giving an Account of Oneself, 156–57, 238 telling one’s own story, 107–8 call and response of love, 178–80 castration, symbolic, 146

249

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250

Index

cause of desire and object of desire, 17–18 ceding on desire, 49–51, 164 Badiou interpretation, 94 Fink, Bruce, 57 Cézanne’s apples, 132–33 chaos, singularity and, 35 character the real and, 33 relationships and, 186–87 child’s fort-da game, 136 citation, institutions of authority and, 42–43 classical tragedy versus modern, 222 completeness, the real and, 25 condition of being for event, 227 conduits for desire, 49 consciousness, drive and, 20 consistency, ethical, 94–96 consumer culture and superficial satisfactions, 139–40, 235 contemporary nihilism, 139 continuity motif, truth and, 228 controllers, defiance of, 53 cougar phenomenon, 243 courtly love, 239–40 call and response, 178–80 narcissistic desire and, 171–73 ethical failure, 176–78 object, distancing, 175–76 paralysis of desire, 173–74 sublimation and, 169–70 Western history and, 170 creativity ethics and, 148 fantasy and, 37 immortal and mortal, 123 lack and, 127 pathology and, 162 repetition compulsion and, 135–37 signifier transmitting jouissance, 119 sublime and, 26 crisis of consciousness, 20–21 crisis of sublimation, 155–56, 238 Critchley, Simon, on Žižek, 107 cultural meanings, sublimation and, 8

F5760.indb 250

daimon, analyst as agent, 54–55 das Ding, 17, 139–40 morality and, 152 dead souls, 3 death drive, 21–22 ethical act and, 68, 95 jouissance and, 22 Lacan on, 218 queer sexuality and, 64 debt of desire, 149–51 defense, desire as, 19 The Defense of Lost Causes (Žižek), 107 deferral, 60 defiance of controllers, 53 depression, art and, 130–31 desire ceding on, 49–51, 164 Badiou interpretation, 94 Fink, 57 debt of, 149–151 as defense, 19 defense against unmanageable jouissance, 73–74 deferral and, 60 drive and, 16–19 proximity to the Thing, 72 social prohibition, 19 ethical act and, 48–49 ethics and, 72–75 fantasy and, 19 humans as conduits, 49 lack-in-being of subject, 20 language of, 168–69 repetition compulsion and, 174 narcissistic, 171–73 object is cause, 17–18 objects, new resurrecting the Thing, 169 objets a, 150 the Other, 39–42 breakdown of normal functioning, 42–43 hostility and, 47–48 individuality, 40 our desire and, 49 passion and, 168–69 persistence, 19

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Index repetition compulsion and, 14–17 singularizing, 50 subject of, versus subject of drive, 60 the Thing and, 18, 19 truth of, 48–49 alienation, 58 effects, 165–67 estrangement, 50 value of objects and, 169 despair, meaning in, 127 destiny accepting as necessary, 46 controlling one’s own, defiance and, 53 drive destiny, 41 fantasies and, 36 fixed, 46–47 the Other and, 46 reconciliation, necessity, 48–49 reinvention through analysis, 54 relationship development, 49–51 repetition as, 14–16 responsibility for, 56 social positioning and, 46 destruction, the real as a goal and, 111 desublimation, 147 deviant satisfactions, 137–39 discourse, impersonal, social totality and, 3 disenfranchisement, universalism, 6 disorientation, Santner, 4 dispossession, symbolic, 156–58 dissociation, formal, 124–25 divine violence, 109–10 Dr. Phil, 164–65 drive crisis of consciousness, 20–21 death drive, 21–22 ethical act and, 68, 95 jouissance and, 22 Lacan on, 218 deferral and, 60 desire and, 16–19 proximity to the Thing, 72 social prohibition, 19 destiny, 41 sinthome, 62 fundamental fantasy and, 59–60

F5760.indb 251

251

instinct and, 18 jouissance, excess, 20–21 the Other and, 18 the real and, 3 repetition compulsion, 41 singularity and, 2 social and, 41 sociohistorical context, 19 subject of, versus subject of desire, 60 sublimation and, 136 the Thing and, 18 Edelman, Lee ethical act, 65–67 on the future, 64–65 queer sexuality, 63–64 sinthomes, 61 subjective destitution, 60 ego, 1 empathy, 209–12 emptiness Kjar, Ruth, 130 vase around emptiness, 127–28 energy discharge of trapped and new sources of life, 29–30 fantasies, 41 jouissance, surplus, 20–21 love, 186–188 epiphanies, Joyce, 117–18 Erscheinung, 131 establishment, subversion, 106 ethic of truths, 84 ethical act annihilation, 225 Antigone, 70–72 Bouazizi, Mohamed, 69 content, 69–72 death drive and, 68, 95 deprivileged subjects, 70–71 desire and, 48–49 Edelman, 65–67 Žižek, 65–67 internal obligation, 67–68 legitimate, 105–6 Letourneau case, 66–67 medicalization of capacity to act, 67

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252

Index

ethical act (continued ) negativity, 95 Parks, Rosa, 69 political implications, 77–78 repetition cycle and, 81–82 simulacra, 70 suicide, 107–108 transformation of agent, 68–69 truth-event and, 95–96 valorization, 154 ethical betrayal, 75 ethical complacency, 76 ethical consistency, 94–96 ethical relationships, 166 ethics creativity and, 148 desire and, 72–73, 74–75 disinterested, 75 intersubjective, 165–67 Kantian, 230–31 narcissism and, 176–78 proximity to the Thing and, 152 self-other relationship, 189–90 empathy and, 209–12 faceless face, 193–94 multiculturalism, 194–97, 205–7 other as evil, 191–93 ressentiment of powerful, 212–15 Third of justice, 199–202 universal ethics, 197–99 victimization, 207–9 sublimation and, 148 ethics of the act, 149–50 Zupanc´ic´, 151 universal, 197–99, 202–4 unknowability of the other and, 177 event. See truth-event evil other, 191–93 existance, immediacy, 3 existential disarray, 57–58 existential freedom, the immortal and, 89 experience, timeliness and, 26 face empathy, 209–12 ethical accountability, 189 faceless, 193–94

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as fetish, 193 Lacanian versus Levinasian, 190–92 multiculturalism, 194–97 Muselmann, 193–94 other, evil, 191–93 parts, 190 Third of justice, 199–202 facial tic (grimace of the real), 41 false objects, 139–41 fantasy active versus passive, 37 creativity and, 37 desire and, 19 destiny and, 36 energies, 41 as existential strategy, 38 fundamental fantasy, 59–60 future, 224–25 ideology and, 39 inhibiting singularity, 38 Loewald, Hans, 36–37 mirror stage, 38 necessity, 36 the object and, 175 the Other and, 38 relationship to the Other, 56–57 repetition compulsion and, 37–38 self-deception and, 38 social, autonomy and, 40 support of symbolic reality, 38–39 vocation, 36 fate’s victims, 58 Father, law of, 221–22 fidelity to the truth-event, 90–94 finite mortal man, 30 Fink, Bruce desire, ceding on, 57 on Lacanian analytic process, 54 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 116–17 fixity, analysis and, 58 flesh of the world, 27–28 forcing the real, 110–11 forgiveness, 166–67 unknowable other and, 177 formal dissociation, 124–25 fort-da game of children, 136 freedom, relationality and, 89–90

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Index Freud, Sigmund as Cartesian, 13 certainty of the unconscious, 13–14 repetition compulsion, 220–21 symptoms, symbolization and, 61 unconscious and, 20 fundamental fantasy, 59–60 futurity, present moment and, 64 generalization, Emmanuel Levinas, 3 Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler), 156–57, 238 goal, the real as, 111 grimace of the real, 41 habits of trauma, 13 Hallward, Peter subject, 226 true subjects, 89 happiness, analysis and, 51 Harari, Roberto on Joyce, 117–18 separation of symbol and sinthome, 124 hegemonic interpretation of social order, 7 homosexuality, see queer sexuality human destiny, the Other and, 46 human experience, immortality and, 25–26 humiliation by power structures, 45–46 id, 1 idealization of love object, 172 value of, 184–86 ideals opposing, 80–81 symbolic, 141–43 identity fundamental fantasy and, 59 language and, 123–24 signifiers and, 47 sinthome and, 61–62 trauma and, 48 ideology, fantasy and, 39 Butler, Judith, on telling one’s own story, 107–8

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253

Critchley, Simon, on, 107 The Defense of Lost Causes, 107 ethical act, 65–67 fantasy fundamental fantasy, 59 the Other and, 38 finite mortal man, 30 humans dead while alive/alive while dead, 113–14 interpellation, 219 jouissance, excess, 20 lamella as undead organ, 113 language, 114–15 Letourneau case, 66–67 negativity of Lacanian act, 95 the real, symbolization of, 112 Stavrakakis,Yannis, on, 107 subjective destitution, 29 symbolic castration, 146 universal singular, 198 the imaginary description, 1 objet a and, 139–40 personality and imagination, melancholia and, 129–30 imitation, art and, 132–33 immediacy of existence, singularity and, 3 the immortal, victimization and, 207–9 immortality existential freedom and, 89 human experience and, 25–26 jouissance and, 22 sublime in everyday life and, 26 truth-event and, 88–89 undeadness and, 25–26 impersonal discourse, social totality and, 3 impossible contrary to possible, 84–85 the real as, 84–85 individuality, desire of the Other, 40 infinity, Alenka Zupanc´ic´, 23 inhuman partner of love object, 174–76 insistence over existence, 2 instinct, drive and, 18

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254

Index

institutions of authority, 42 author’s dealings with, 43–45 citation, 42–43 transference and, 55–57 intersubjective ethics, 165–67 irregularity, singularity and, 35 irreplaceability of the Other, 180–82 jouissance animation of being, 22 bodily, 119 creativity of signifier, 119 death drive and, 22 early Lacan, 232 excess, 20–21 fantasy and, 19 freedom from excess, 20 immortality and, 22 inhabiting signifier, 119 inherence to meaning, 119 mysticism and, 25 parasitism, 23 religion and, 25 repetition compulsion and, 16 sacrifice to signifier, 20 sinthome and, 116 stain of, 23–24 tolerance level, 133–34 unattainability, 19 jouis-sens, 115 sinthome and, 119 Joyce, James epiphanies, 117–18 Finnegans Wake, 116–17 Harari, Roberto, on, 117–18 Lacan’s reading, 115–17 language and, 115–16 signifiers, 117 singularity of, 120–21 The Sinthome (Lacan), 60–61 subversiveness, 117–18 Kantian ethics, 230–31 Kirshner, Lewis, 78–79 Kristeva, Julia formal dissociation, 124–25 meaning in despair, 127 negation, 233–34

F5760.indb 254

Revolution in Poetic Language, 118–19 the Thing, sublimation and subject, 129–30 Lacan, Jacques on Aristotle, 13 on Cézanne, 132–33 early, jouissance, 232 friend’s matchbox ribbon, 131–32 Joyce, 8, 115–17 singularity of, 120–21 on Marquis de Sade, 148–49 Plato on art, 132 Professor D’s shoes, 144–45 revolutionary politics and, 106 The Sinthome, 60–61 tragedy, classical versus modern, 222 transitions in thought, 62–63 LaCapra, Dominick normative limits, 110 structural trauma/historical trauma distinction, 6 trauma, 125–26 lack acceptance in analysis, 51–52 creativity and, 127 distinctions, 218 the Other, 229–30 signifiers, generating, 52 survival and, 47–48 the Thing, imagined, 128–29 vase around emptiness, 127–28 lack-in-being of subject, 20 language of desire, 168–69 repetition compulsion and, 174 identity and, 123–24 Joyce, James, and, 115–16 the real and, Žižek, 114–15 of resistance, 124–26 as sign of singularity, 124–26 sinthome and, 119–20 transcendence and, 27 Law of the Father, 221–22 Lear, Jonathan fantasies, relationship to the Other, 56–57 possibilities, 55–58 quantity without quality, 20–21

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Index Letourneau, Mary Kay, ethical act, and, 66–67 Levinas, Emmanuel generalization, 3 social life compared to singularity of being, 2–3 limits, normative, Dominick LaCapra, 110 linguistic innovation, singularity and, 8 Loewald, Hans, fantasy, 36–37 loneliness, Eric Santner, 22–23 loss as precondition for care, 168–69 the Thing and, 17 love call and response, 178–80 courtly love, 239–40 sublimation and, 169–70 Western history and, 170 energy of, 186–88 idealization, value of, 184–86 narcissistic desire and, 171–73 Polyneces and Antigone, 181 romantic, the Thing and, 168–69 sexual, 239 something more than you, 183 sublime, appearance, 182–84 truth-event, 84 love objects, 172–79 lures of power, 98–100 Marxist political thought, truth-event and, 86–87 master’s morality, the Other and, challenges, 151 meaning in despair, 127 melancholia, 129–31 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 27 miracles, 30 Santner, Eric, 54 present moment, 57–58 moderation, truth-event and, 152–53 modern tragedy versus classical, 222 morality, das Ding and, 152 mother, law of, 221–22 Mozart,Wolfgang Amadeus, 227–28 multiculturalism, 194–97, 205–7, 242–43 mundane, sublime and, 28

F5760.indb 255

255

Muselmann, 193–94 mysticism, jouissance and, 25 naming event, 96–97, 110–11 narcissism, ethical failure of, 176–78 narcissistic desire, 171–73 necessity of destiny, 46 nihilism breakfast cereal aisle and, 140 contemporary, 139 desublimation, 147 object into thing transformation, 132 object of desire cause of desire, 17–18 new resurrecting the Thing, 169 object of drive, 17–18 objectivity, illusion, 56–57 objects false, 139–41 love, 172–76 narcissistic desire and, 171 value, desire and, 169 objet a desire and, 150 imaginary components, 139–40 woman as, 170 Oedipus, Zupanc´ic´ on, 46 Office of the Controller, 43–45 opinion, fidelity to truth-event and, 92–93 the Other desire of, 39–41, 41–42 breakdown of normal functiong, 42–43 hostility and, 47–48 individuality and, 40 our desire and, 49 reading, and one’s existence, 47–48 validity in excess of any meaning, 42–43 desirousness of, 175 discourse of, 39–41 dispossession, 156–58 drive and, 18 human destiny and, 46 as irreplaceable, 180–82 lack, 229–30

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256 Index the Other (continued ) master’s morality, challenges, 151 versus the signifier, 158–60 subjectivity and, 159 the other evil, 191–93 face metaphors, 189 multiculturalism, 194–97 parts, 190 versus outside, 24 unknowability, 177 outside the world versus other, 24 parasitism of jouissance, 23 Parks, Rosa, ethical act and, 39 passion, desire and, 168–69 personality, 1 imaginary and, 33 versus singularity, 21 Plato on art, 132 pleasure principle deviant satisfactions, 137–39 function of, 234 signifier dominance, 134–35 sublimation and, 134–35 political action, legitimate, 105–6 political implications of ethical act, 77–78 position of comfort of analysis, 223 possibilities impossible and, 84–85 Lear, Jonathan, 55–58 truth-events, 83 power, resentment, 212–15 power lures, 98–100 power structures, humiliation by, 45–46 process of truth, 100–101 Professor D’s shoes, 144–45 prosaid world, 153 psychoanalysis, see analysis psychology versus analysis, 53 punctum, 217 queer sexuality, death drive and, 64 Edelman, Lee, 63–64 repudiating the social, 64

F5760.indb 256

quilting points, 235 sublimation and, 142–43 trauma, 78–79 Rajiva, Jay, 223 the real access, 148–49 character and, 33 completeness and, 25 description, 1 drive energies, 3 encounters as users guides, 111 forcing, 110–11 as goal, 111 grimace of the real, 41 as impossible, 84–85 Lacan versus Badiou, 87 lures of power, 98–100 rebellious, 105 rebelliousness, 122 signifiers, relationship, 120–21 singularity and, 21 social animosities, 87–88 symbolic and, 26 alternative to, 108–9 balance, 160–62 Žižek, 112 intelligibility, 27 taming, 40 as tangible entity, 98 truth-events and, 86–87 reality beyond, 24 fantasy’s support, 38–39 sublimation and, 151–52 symbolic, rebellious real and, 105 rebellious real, 105, 122 rebellious signifiers, 122 reconciliation with destiny, necessity, 48–49 redemption, transcendence and, 34 redemptive narratives, trauma and, 125 relationality, freedom and, 89–90 relationship to destiny, developing, 49–51 relationship to event, fidelity and, 93–94 relationships character and, 186–87 self-other, ethics, 189–215

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Index religion jouissance and, 25 religious fundamentalism, 154 transcendence and, 25 repetition compulsion creativity and, 135–37 desire and, 16–17 drives, 41 ethical act and, 81–82 fantasies and, 37–38 Freud on, 220–21 hegemonic power, 40 jouissance and, 16 language of desire and, 174 loving symptoms, 15–16 obliteration consequences, 15–16 orderliness, 22 sublimation, 138 sublimation and, 150 train analogy, 14–15 unconscious desire and, 14–15, 167 resentment of powerful, 212–15 resistance, language of, 124–26 resurrecting the Thing, 145–47 Revolution in Poetic Language (Kristeva), 118–19 revolutionary politics, 76–78 Lacan, Jacques and, 106 versus transformative politics, 107–9 rigidity, transformation, 29–30 romantic love, the Thing and, 168–69 Rosenzweig, Franz Santner, Eric, and, 30–31 scholar as vampire, 31–33 Sade, Marquis de, 148–49 Santner, Eric disorientation, 4 divine revelation, 30–31 drive destiny, 41 sinthome, 62 insistence over existence, 2 irreplaceability of human life, 22 loneliness, 22–23 miracles, 54 present moment, 57–58 the Other, validity in excess of any meaning, 42

F5760.indb 257

257

Rosenzweig and, 30–31 singular self, 2 singularity sociosymbolic investments, 29 and undeadness, 22 satisfaction, consumer culture and, 139–40 scholar as vampire, 31–33 securization of infinity, 156 self-deception, fantasy and, 38 self-noncoincidence, subjectivity and, 27 self-other relationship ethics, 189–90 empathy and, 209–12 faceless face, 193–94 multiculturalism, 205–7 other as evil, 191–93 Third of justice, 199–202 universal, 197–99 victimization, 207–9 multiculturalism, 194–97 ressentiment of power, 212–15 service of goods, 74–76 sexual love, 239 shoes of Professor D, 144–45 signification, talking cure and, 59 signifiers analysis and, 53 generating new, 52 Joyce, James, 117 versus the Other, 158–60 pleasure principle and, 134–35 the real, relationship, 120–21 rebelliousness, 122 trauma and, 52–53 Silverman, Kaja, language of desire, 168–69 simulacra ethical act, 70 National Socialism, 99 simulacrum, truth-event and, 92–94 singularity, 1 chaos and, 35 drives and, 2 fantasy inhibiting, 38 immediacy of existance and, 3 the inhuman and, 21 as intensity of being, 9

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258 Index singularity (continued ) irregularity and, 35 jouissance, excess, 21 language as sign, 124–26 linguistic innovation and, 8 monstrousness, 21 versus personality, 21 the real and, 4, 21 the reasonable, 21 Santner, Eric, 2 undeadness and, 22 social establishment and, 8 as social phenomenon, 121–24 social subjectivity and, 3 subjective destitution and, 6–7 singularity of being, trauma and, 14 singularizing desire, 50 sinthome, 233 acceptance, 62 analysis and, subject’s identification with, 116 drive destiny, 62 Edelman, Lee, 61 identifying with, versus subjective destitution, 63 identity and, 61–62 jouissance and, 116 jouis-sens, 119 Joyce, James, and, 116 language and, 119–20 separation of symbol, 124 as site of compulsion, symbolic and, 121–22 symbolization and, 61 animation of symbolic structures, 115 symptom and, 60–61 The Sinthome (Lacan), 60–61 sinthomosexuality, 63–64 social assimilation, undeadness and, 23 social fantasies, autonomy and, 40 social norms, sublimation and, 159–60 social order hegemonic interpretation, 7 pleasure and, 138 sublimation and, 138 social phenomenon of singularity, 121–24 social positioning, destiny and, 46

F5760.indb 258

social prohibition and drive, 19 social reality, sublimation and, 151–52 social subjectivity, singularity and, 3 social totality and impersonal discourse, 3 sociohistorical context of drive, 19 sovereign power, pervasiveness, 5–7 stain of jouissance, 23–24 state power, divine violence and, 109 Stavrakakis,Yannis, on Žižek, 107 studium, 217 subject a-subject, 44–45 Badiou, Alain, 75 of desire versus subject of drive, 60 summons by event, 85–86 symbolic law, 33 of truth, 88–89 Zupanc´ic´, Alenka, 75 subjective destitution, 5–7 Edelman, Lee, 60 Žižik and, 60 sinthome, indentifying with, 63 subjectivity the Other and, 159 self-alienation, 27 self-noncoincidence, 27 symbolic law and, 1 sublimation, 7 courtly love, 169–70 crisis of, 155–56, 238 cultural meanings and, 8 drive and, 136 ethics and, 148 ethics of the act, 149–50 Zupanc´ic´, 151 Kjar, Ruth, 130–31 nihilism and the breakfast cereal aisle, 140 desublimation, 147 pleasure principle and, 134–35 quilting points and, 142–43 repetition compulsion and, 138, 150 social norms and, 159–60 social order and, 138 social reality and, 151–52 symptoms and, 137–39 the Thing and, 127 Kristeva, 129–30

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Index sublime, 24–25 accessibility, 145–47 appearance, 182–84 creativity and, 26 everyday life and, 26 mundane and, 28 ordinary life and, 143–44 suicide as ethical event, 107–8 summoning by event, 85–86 superego, 1 superficial satisfactions and consumer culture, 139–41 survival, lack and, 47–48 symbolic authority, validity in excess of any meaning, 42 castration, 146 corruptness of, 108–9 dispossession, 156–58 ideals, 141–43 investments, 28–29 law, subject and, 33 the real and, 26 balance, 160–62 intelligibility, 27 the real as alternative, 108–9 reality, rebellious real and, 105 separation of sinthome, 124 sinthome as site of compulsion and, 121–22 values, 141–43 the symbolic, definition, 1 symbolization sinthomes and, 61 animation of symbolic structures, 115 symptoms and, 61 the Thing, 128 symptoms sublimation and, 137–39 symbolization and, Freud, 61 talking cure, signification and, 59 the Thing, 17 desire and, 18 new objects resurrecting, 169 drives and, 18 drive versus desire, 72

F5760.indb 259

259

ethics, and proximity to, 152 imagined loss, 128–29 living creature, 170 love and, 168–69 confusion with love objects, 178–79 sexual love, 239 as object of loss, 17 resurrecting, 145–47 sublimation and, 127 Kristeva, 129–30 symbolization, 128 Third, 199–202, 231–32 time experience and, 26 immortality and, 25–26 tragedy classical versus modern, 222 of life, power structures and, 45–46 transcendence entering the world and, 27–28 language and, 27 limits of sustaining state, 133–34 liveliness of spirit and, 28–29 mundane practices and, 28 versus otherworldly redemption, 34 real within the symbolic, 26 religion and, 25 truth-event and, 88 as worldly phenomenon, 27–28 transference analyst and, 55 institutional forms of authority and, 55 transformation of agent of ethical act, 68–69 Badiou, 84 object into thing, 132 rigidity, 29–30 signifier and real, 120 transformative politics, versus revolutionary politics, 107–9 trauma habits of, 13 identity formation and, 48 Kirshner, Lewis, 78–79 LaCapra, Dominick, 125–26 narrativizing, 223 redemptive/nonredemptive narratives, 125

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260

Index

truth signifiers and, 52–53 singularity of being and, 14 unclaimed components, 53 unconscious and, 14 analysis and, 49 of desire, 48–49 alienation, 58 effects, 165–67 estrangement, 50 as process, 100–101 truth-event, 29, 83 balanced lives and, 92 condition of being, 227 as contingent, 229 continuity motif, 228 ethical act and, 95–96 ethical consistency, 94–96 fidelity to, 90–94 versus human situation, 85 immortality and, 88–89 love, 84 Marxist political thought, 86–87 moderation, 152–53 Mozart, 227–28 naming, 96–97, 110–11 possibilities and, 83 rising from the void, 86–87 simulacrum and, 92–94 subject, 88–89 decenteredness, 86 summoning by, 85–86 transcendence and, 88 unconscious Freud and, 20 trauma repetition and, 14

F5760.indb 260

undeadness immortality and, 25–26 jouissance and, 22 scholar as vampire, 31–33 social assimilation and, 23 universal ethics, 197–99, 202–4 universality, 202–204 unknowable otherness, 177 validity in excess of any meaning, 42–43 values, symbolic, 141–43 vampire scholar, 31–33 van Gogh’s peasant shoes, 144 vase, emptiness, 127–28 victimization, 207–9 victims of fate, 58 violence, divine violence, 109–10 vitality, undeadness of jouissance and, 22 vocation, fantasy and, 36 the void. See the real Wolfe, Graham, 220 women, as objet a, 170 world as prosaic, 153 Žižek, Slavoj, 4 Zupanc´ic´, Alenka infinity, 23 jouissance early Lacan, 232 excess, 20 Kantian ethics, 230–31 on Oedipus, 46 subject, 75 sublimation, 237 ethics and, 151

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