Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek: SIC 10 9780822373384

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek

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sic stands for psychoanalytic interpretation at its most elementary: no discovery of deep, hidden meaning, just the act of drawing attention to the litterality [sic!] of what precedes it. A sic reminds us that what was said, inclusive of its blunders, was effectively said and ­cannot be undone. The series sic thus explores different ­connections to the Freudian field. Each volume proSIC

vides a bundle of Lacanian interventions into a spe-

A

cific domain of ongoing ­theoretical, cultural, and

series

ideological-­political battles. It is neither “pluralist”

edited

nor “socially sensitive”: Unabashedly avowing its

by

exclusive Lacanian orientation, it disregards any form

Slavoj

of correctness but the inherent correctness of

Žižek

theory itself.

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek

Russell Sbriglia, Editor

sic 10

Duke University Press Durham and London 2017

© 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Typeset in Sabon by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Sbriglia, Russell, [date] editor. Title: Everything you always wanted to know about literature but were afraid to ask Žižek / Russell Sbriglia, editor. Other titles: sic (Durham, N.C.) ; 10. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Series: sic : 10 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016040909 (print) lccn 2016041334 (ebook) isbn 9780822363033 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822363187 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822373384 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Žižek, Slavoj—Criticism and interpretation. | Žižek, Slavoj—Influence. | Criticism. | Popular culture and literature. Classification: lcc b4870.z594 e94 2017 (print) | lcc b4870.z594 (ebook) | ddc 199/.4973—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040909 Cover art: Photo by Borut Peterlin.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Russell Sbriglia, Introduction: Did Somebody Say Žižek and Literature? 1 Part I. Theory 1

Anna Kornbluh, Reading the Real: Žižek’s Literary Materialism 35

2

Shawn Alfrey, Looking Awry: Žižek’s Ridiculous Sublime 62

3

Todd McGowan, The Bankruptcy of Historicism: Introducing Disruption into Literary Studies 89

4

Russell Sbriglia, The Symptoms of Ideology Critique; or, How We Learned to Enjoy the Symptom and Ignore the Fetish 107

5

Jamil Khader, Concrete Universality and the End of Revolutionary Politics: A Žižekian Approach to Postcolonial Women’s Writings 137

6

Andrew Hageman, A Robot Runs through It: Žižek and Ecocriticism 169

Part II. Interpretation 7

Geoff Boucher, Shakespeare after Žižek: Social Antagonism and Ideological Exclusion in The Merchant of Venice 195

8

Louis-­Paul Willis, Beyond Symbolic Authority: La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes and the Aesthetics of the Real 222

9

Daniel Beaumont, Wake-­Up Call: Žižek, Burroughs, and Fantasy in the Sleeper Awakened Plot 245

10 Paul Megna, Courtly Love Hate Is Undead: Sadomasochistic Privilege in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde 267 11 Slavoj Žižek, The Minimal Event: Subjective Destitution in Shakespeare and Beckett 290 Contributors 317 Index 321

Acknowledgments

The idea for this collection came to me during the first International Žižek Studies Conference, held at SUNY Brockport in May 2012 and organized by Antonio Garcia. It was there that I first met Todd McGowan, whose enthusiastic response to the idea and subsequent encouragement of the project were crucial to my taking it up in earnest. I thank him for this, for his input on an early draft of my introduction, and for his contribution to the volume. Though she was the last to come aboard the project, Anna Kornbluh was indispensable to its completion, as she not only gave a crucial reading of a late draft of my introduction—one that prompted me to better frame it—but also stepped in at the last minute to contribute the volume’s all-­important lead-­off essay. I would like to thank all of the other contributors to the volume as well, both for their hard work on their respective essays and for their patience as I worked toward honing the volume into its current form. I hope they find the end result to have been worth the wait. Molly Rothenberg (an early champion of the project who offered sage advice to this first-­time editor) and Donald Pease both gave the entire manuscript very generous, very careful readings—readings that resulted in the strengthening not only of its individual essays but of the collection as a whole. I am grateful to them both. At Duke University Press, I would like to thank Courtney Berger for her confidence in the project, Sandra Korn for her guidance as I worked

x Acknowledgments toward finalizing the manuscript, and Lisa Bintrim for her work on the manuscript itself. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank Slavoj Žižek for his support of and collaboration on this project. If this book succeeds in bringing greater attention to the relevance of his work for literary studies, I will feel that I have in some way begun to repay him for his generosity.

Introduction: Did Somebody Say Russell Sbriglia

Žižek and Literature ?

Slavoj Žižek between Theory and Post-­Theory Were one to ask a random literary critic or theorist what Slavoj Žižek knows about literature, the answer would more than likely be some variation on “not much.” Indeed, if posed such a question himself, Žižek might very well answer, “Nothing!” Take, for instance, his recent “confession” that, when it comes to literature, “it is here that one encounters the very bottom of my bad taste.” As evidence of such bad taste, he volunteers his opinion that “Daphne du Maurier is a much better writer than Virginia Woolf,” an opinion likely to strike even the most strident of anticanonists as definitive proof that Žižek knows nothing about literature.1 One might even imagine such critics responding in the form of the following line from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, one of Žižek’s favorite classic Hollywood films: “This man may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot!” Upon a closer look, however, perhaps there is more to this supposed idiocy than meets the eye, a resounding “something” to this seeming nothing after all. Conceding that du Maurier “tells stories without truly being a writer,” for her works are marked by a “melodramatic excess,” a “pathetic directness,” and an overall “lack of style,” Žižek nonetheless insists that this lack of literariness is less a fault of du Maurier’s prose than a “formal effect of the fact that [her] narratives directly, all too directly, stage the fantasies that sustain our lives.”2 Žižek, of course, is here speak-

2 Russell Sbriglia ing of fantasy in a psychoanalytic sense. As he explains, “far from being opposed to reality,” fantasy is for psychoanalysis “that which provides the basic coordinates of what we experience as ‘reality.’”3 In the words of Jacques Lacan, the thinker to whom Žižek frequently swears dogmatic fidelity, “everything we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy.”4 And yet, as Žižek points out, in order to perform this function, our fantasies “ha[ve] to remain hidden, to exert [their] efficiency in the background.”5 Hence Freud’s insistence that “if what [subjects] long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less flee from it.”6 What Žižek finds “so compelling” about du Maurier’s novels, then, “especially when compared to the aseptic politically correct feminism,” is their “properly shameless, often embarrassing, direct staging of fantasies.” Therein lies “the secret of the[ir] undisputed tremendous power of fascination.”7 Among the most common accusations leveled at Žižek by his detractors—one that I will address more thoroughly below—is that his use of artworks (especially films) is “purely hermeneutic,” that the works he invokes serve as merely “incidental illustrations of an already installed machine.”8 At first glance, such would seem to be the case here: importing the works of du Maurier into his “reading machine,” the “terrible matrix” that he “appl[ies] . . . to everything,” Žižek predictably discovers that the “secret” of their power lies in their illustration of the psychoanalytic axiom that our everyday lives are structured by fantasy.9 And yet, when one looks more closely, it becomes clear that Žižek’s reading of du Maurier is far more complex than this. In the first place, implicit in the connection that he draws between the melodramatic excesses of her works and their embarrassingly direct staging of fantasies is an argument regarding the relationship between fantasy and form—an argument that suggests that melodrama is the form both by and through which literature most directly stages (and accesses) our fantasies.10 What’s more, such a laudation of du Maurier’s works despite—or, more precisely, because of—their melodramatic “unliterariness” participates in the project of steering literary critics away from the simple “But is it any good?” question—a question that long led works of melodrama to be dismissed as utterly devoid of aesthetic merit and thus utterly unworthy of serious consideration.11 In the second place, what Žižek ultimately finds “so compelling”—not to mention enjoyable—about du Maurier’s fic-

Introduction 3 tion is what, in de Manian fashion, we might characterize as its “resistance to theory,” in particular its immunity to the pull of psychoanalysis, its refusal to fit neatly into its own era’s psychoanalytic weltanschauung.12 Noting that the advent of so-­called applied psychoanalysis fundamentally “transformed artistic literary practice,” Žižek points out that whereas the works of an author like Eugene O’Neill “already presuppose psychoanalysis,” those of du Maurier do not.13 The “oblivion” to which du Maurier’s works have been consigned, then, is for Žižek above all a result of their anachronicity, their “radical[ ] untimel[iness].”14 Hence his claim that, “after reading a book by [du Maurier], it is difficult to avoid the vague sentiment of ‘it is no longer possible to write like that today.’”15 Thus, rather than belonging to the modernist era during which they were written, du Maurier’s works more properly belong to the Victorian era, “the era limited, on the one side, by Romanticism and its notion of radical Evil (‘pleasure in pain’) and, on the other side, by Freud, by the direct impact of psychoanalysis on the arts.”16 As such, they occupy the “space of the heroic innocence of the Unconscious in which irresistible passions freely roam around.”17 Far from confirming claims that Žižek’s interest in works of literature lay solely in their exemplarity, in their ability to function as “allegories of theoretical doctrines,” this reading of du Maurier—one that touches on issues of taste, style, form, periodization, and even reader response— demonstrates not only Žižek’s interest in but also his respect for literature’s singularity.18 Yet such readings, of which there are many throughout his oeuvre, have gone largely unremarked by literary critics. Such an oversight may to some degree be a result of the fact that while Žižek is unabashedly theoretical, we are currently living in what a number of critics have agreed is a “post-­theory” era.19 Whereas the 1970s saw the Yale school of deconstruction grow out of the work of Jacques Derrida, and the 1980s saw the New Historicism grow out of the work of Michel Foucault, from the 1990s onward theory, at least in the United States, has, in the words of Nicholas Birns, remained “a formation frozen in place.” More than that, theory has all but “broken up.”20 This is not to say that there has been a shortage of theorists. On the contrary, Birns points to contemporary figures like Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, and Žižek. Such figures, however, are ultimately “theorists without ‘theory,’” “something like giant, mountainous islands,

4 Russell Sbriglia monumental yet at a standstill, looming over a sea of untheoretical historicists and anti-­theoretical literary journalists.”21 Of all these figures, Žižek presents the most interesting—and perplexing—case with respect to literary studies. As Birns points out, “though everyone in the humanities kn[ows] Žižek’s work, it [has] not produce[d] readings the way the work of his predecessor theory stars had.”22 Indeed, to place a bit of pressure on Birns’s pronouncement of theory’s death, even if there is no longer an active network or clearly discernible school of theory in the Anglo-­American academy, the influence of many other of the aforementioned theorists on literary studies has been considerable. Agamben’s work on language, “potentiality,” biopolitics, and exceptionalism, for instance, has spawned a number of studies, spanning virtually all periods of literary history, while Butler’s influence on literary criticism and theory, an influence difficult to overstate, is reflected not only, or even primarily, by books and articles that engage her work directly, but also, more notably, by the very fact that her work has had arguably the single greatest influence on the trajectory of cultural studies over the past two decades, transforming disciplines such as women and gender studies (including third-­wave feminism), queer studies, and disability studies, as well as reinvigorating more ostensibly literary avenues of inquiry such as speech act theory and performance studies.23 When it comes to Žižek, however, though he is indeed universally known, his work, as I will address below, has had a much greater impact on film and media studies than literary studies. This is not to say that literary critics have ignored Žižek altogether. Terry Eagleton and Geoffrey Harpham, two of today’s leading literary critics and theorists, have written on Žižek at length.24 Furthermore, there have been a handful of explicitly Žižekian approaches to literature, the most extensive of these being Shelly Brivic’s Joyce through Lacan and Žižek.25 Yet when looked at more closely, these direct engagements with Žižek’s work prove just as exemplary of the two main problems one encounters when attempting to address its relevance to the study of literature as does the relative dearth of such work itself. The first of these problems is the impression that Žižek, whose penchant for using pop cultural artifacts to illustrate some of the most recondite principles of philosophy and psychoanalysis has led him to be crowned “the Elvis of cultural theory,” is interested only, or at least primarily, in film. The sec-

Introduction 5 ond is the impression that Žižek, in his self-­professed dogmatic fidelity to Lacanian psychoanalysis, is merely an ambassador of Lacan, a figure whose heyday in literary studies has long since come and gone. Thus, Eagleton and Harpham are far more interested in (and far more beguiled by) Žižek’s analyses of film (and of popular culture more generally) than of literature, while the very title of Brivic’s book (to say nothing of its cover, which features a sketch of Lacan and Joyce face-­to-­face, absent Žižek) is indicative of the degree to which he deploys Žižek not as a thinker or theorist in his own right but as a mere interpreter of Lacan.26 I will address the former problem—let’s call it “the film problem”—at length below. For now, the latter problem—let’s call it “the Lacan problem”—is more pressing. Lacan avec Žižek; or, A Miserable Little Piece of the Real Given the titles of many of Žižek’s books—titles featuring phrases such as “everything you always wanted to know about Lacan,” “an introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture,” “Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out,” and “how to read Lacan”—it is little wonder that Žižek is often thought of as, above all, an ambassador of Lacan. Lacan, of course, is no stranger to literary critics. His “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (1955), “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957), and “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958), to name but a few of his more iconic écrits, have long been recognized as key works of structuralism, even poststructuralism. Indeed, in the American academy, Lacan is most often classified alongside contemporaries like Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva as a fellow (post)structuralist. Kristeva is perhaps the most notable in this regard, as the title of her first book in English, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980), is indicative of the semiolinguistic bent that Lacanian psychoanalysis was given by its early exponents.27 In a sense, Kristeva and company had good reason for taking Lacan in this direction. Claims such as “the unconscious is structured like a language,” “the subject is divided by language,” “a letter always arrives at its destination,” and “there is no metalanguage” beg linguistic, if not exactly literary, analysis. From this perspective, critics who know little about Žižek other than his dogmatic fidelity to Lacan-

6 Russell Sbriglia ian psychoanalysis might well be tempted to view his work as little more than repetition with a minimal difference. What’s more, in our current theoretical malaise, one characterized by an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion with the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricouer), the “semiotic challenge” (Barthes), and the “death” not just of the author (Barthes) but of the subject more generally (Derrida, Foucault, Butler), a return to Lacan is likely to strike most critics as the worst case of theoretical recidivism, a “defense of a lost cause,” as Žižek himself would put it.28 However, as a number of the essays in this collection demonstrate, Žižek’s Lacan is quite different from the poststructural Lacan with which literary critics have long been most familiar. In fact, Žižek often calls the very concept of poststructuralism into question, pointing out that, in itself, poststructuralism has never existed in France but is instead an invention of the Anglo-­American “academic gaze,” a gaze that brings together figures who are “simply not perceived as part of the same épistème in France.”29 Thus, in contrast to the poststructural Lacan of the sliding of the signifier, Žižek’s Lacan is the Lacan of the Real—the Real being the third and most notoriously elusive of Lacan’s “three orders” of psychic experience (the other two being the Imaginary and the Symbolic). As Žižek argues, when read according to the teaching of the later Lacan, the Lacan of the Real, the so-­called logic of the signifier lies beyond both semiotics (what Žižek often refers to as “the ‘structuralist’ problematic”) and hermeneutics.30 Indeed, from the vantage point of the Real, the signifier is not to be read linguistically or semiotically but objectively, as a “traumatic kernel” or “stain” that resists symbolization (for it is impossible to enunciate the Real; hence Lacan’s insistence that “there is no metalanguage”) yet for that very reason sets the process of symbolization in motion. This recalcitrant, traumatic kernel of the Real is what Lacan termed the objet petit a, the object-­cause of desire. As the unsymbolizable, unassimilable traumatic kernel at the very heart of the subject—the “object in subject” that is “in the subject more than the subject”—the Lacanian objet petit a holds the potential to steer literary criticism away from the hermeneutical dead ends in which it has all too often found itself of late and toward the difficult work of interpretation.31 As Žižek notes of the incommensurability between hermeneutics and interpretation, whereas the hermeneut believes that everything can be translated into meaning, even distortions, the psychoanalyst

Introduction 7 holds that “meaning as such results from a certain distortion,” namely, the distortion caused by the subject’s disavowal of the objet petit a.32 In this Žižek follows Lacan, according to whom the goal of interpretation is “to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-­sense.”33 For Žižek, then, psychoanalytic interpretation differs from hermeneutics insofar as its goal is not to glean meaning by tracing the differential/diacritical relationship between signifiers, but rather, as Lacan puts it, to discover “to what signifier—to what irreducible, traumatic, non-­meaning—[the subject] is, as a subject, subjected.”34 Žižek’s focus on the objet petit a, the non-­sensical object-­in-­subject that not only subjectivizes the subject but also brings about a rupture in the symbolic order, can likewise help return literary criticism to an engagement with what, to invoke an old formalist term, we might characterize as the “defamiliarization” occasioned by the literary work. In fact, defamiliarization is a precise aesthetic analogue of the psychoanalytic process of sublimation, that process whereby, as Lacan defined it, a common, everyday object is “elevated to the dignity of the Thing” (das Ding), reified into a sublime object.35 Given the centrality of the sublime to Žižek’s work—a centrality no better exemplified than by the fact that Žižek, through his focus on the objet petit a, associates sublimation with subjectivity as such—it is surprising just how little literary critics and theorists, among whom the sublime has long been one of the most privileged aesthetic categories, have had to say about it. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that, in keeping with the Lacanian logic of sublimation, Žižek’s sublime objects are more apt to be “miserable ‘little piece[s] of the Real’” than the “boundless, terrifying[,] imposing phenomena” typically cited by theorists of the sublime (e.g., stormy oceans, volcanoes, lofty waterfalls, majestic mountains—all of which Kant cites as examples of sublime objects in his Critique of Judgment).36 In short, to apply Žižek’s characterization of the films of David Lynch to his own work, the Žižekian sublime is a “ridiculous sublime.”37 Žižek frequently sees works of literature as animated by and grappling with miserable/ridiculous sublime objects. In Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, he identifies as sublime objects both the infamous purloined letter and the puddle of detestable putridity into which the undead title character of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” deliquesces upon impossibly (and metalinguistically) pronouncing his own death.38 He

8 Russell Sbriglia finds an even more systematic pursuit of sublime objects in the works of Henry James, examples of which include the eponymous Aspern Papers, the secret meaning of author Hugh Vereker’s novels in “The Figure in the Carpet,” and the anxiously anticipated event that paralyzes the protagonist of “The Beast in the Jungle.”39 Other literary sublime objects identified by Žižek include the king’s second body in Shakespeare’s Richard II; the voice of the Monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; the eponymous count of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; the grandmother’s voice in Proust’s The Guermantes Way; the beam that almost kills Flitcraft, the protagonist of Sam Spade’s parable in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon; the “black house” in Patricia Highsmith’s story of the same name; Godot in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; the forbidden place “beyond the barrier” in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary; the eponymous perfume of Patrick Süskind’s novel; Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men; and many more. Such a catalogue of Lacanian objets petit a brings us to the very heart of Žižek’s “Lacan problem,” a problem that Rex Butler confronts head-­ on when he asks, “Is it not possible that Žižek’s own books are merely, as he himself puts it, an ‘introduction to Lacan through popular culture’ or ‘everything you always wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock)’? That is to say, is there any point in actually reading Žižek?”40 For the contributors to this volume, the respective answers to these questions are an emphatic “No!” and “Yes!” This is the case for two reasons. In the first place, as noted, Žižek’s Lacan is a thoroughly original Lacan. Even if Žižek contributed nothing else to the study of literature, his disarticulation of Lacan from poststructuralism by way of his focus on the Real would in and of itself merit attention to his work from literary critics. For as a number of the essays here collected demonstrate, not only can literature help us to think the Real—as it clearly helps Žižek to do—but, more importantly for the field of literary studies, so too can the Real help us to think through (and with) works of literature and the literary in general. In the second place, as Žižek makes clear at the very outset of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), the ultimate purpose of his Lacanianism is “to accomplish a kind of ‘return to Hegel’—to reactualize Hegelian dialectics by giving it a new reading on the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis.” For the only way to “save Hegel,” Žižek insists, is to read him “through Lacan.”41 Thus, in

Introduction 9 order to properly understand Žižek’s philosophical project, literary critics must take into account not only his Lacanianism but his Hegelianism as well—a Lacano-­Hegelianism whose “transcendental materialist” core can aid us in both theorizing and practicing new modes of literary critical ethics, politics, humanism, and materialism.42 Hegel avec Žižek; or, A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity Adrian Johnston opens a recent book on Žižek by noting that “one of Žižek’s most startling claims is his assertion that the Cartesian conception of subjectivity à la the cogito (especially as radicalized by Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) is, contrary to the prevailing intellectual consensus, anything but obsolete and outdated.”43 The consensus to which Johnston here alludes is the poststructural “death of the subject.” An extrapolation of the structuralism of Claude Lévi-­Strauss and Louis Althusser, according to which the subject is merely a by-­product of sociosymbolic matrices and ideological state apparatuses, poststructuralism sees the subject as an epiphenomenon of differential discursive networks.44 Indeed, though the influence of the semiolinguistic vein of poststructuralist thought has waned in recent years, a number of “posthumanist” movements, among them various strains of affect theory, ecocriticism, animal studies, and object-­oriented ontology, have carried on the poststructuralist project of placing the subject under erasure. Thus, another reason for Žižek’s lack of adherents in literary studies may very well be his humanism. Yet just as Žižek’s Lacan is not the typical (post)structuralist Lacan, neither is Žižek’s humanism of the typical variety. Grounded on the idealist radicalization of the Cartesian subject, according to which the subject is precisely the irreducible gap between the Kantian “I” of transcendental apperception and the Cartesian “thing that thinks” (res cogitans)—a gap that Hegel simply characterizes as “the negative”—Žižek’s theory of the subject is not a metaphysics of presence but rather a metaphysics of absence or voidance. Following the German Idealists, the subject is for Žižek not self-­present and self-­transparent (as it was for Descartes, who believed that self-­consciousness [the cogito] renders self-­present and self-­ transparent the “thing” in me that thinks [res cogitans]); on the contrary, the subject is radically “out of joint” with both itself and the world. Yet

10 Russell Sbriglia whereas for poststructuralists this out-­of-­jointness undermines (or, to adopt the common poststructuralist parlance, deconstructs) the subject, for Žižek, as for Hegel, this very out-­of-­jointness is the subject. As Hegel memorably asserts in his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is by “looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it” that the subject is subjectivized.45 This is why Hegel identifies the subject—“the interior of [human] nature,” “pure Self ”—as “the night of the world,” an “empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity.”46 For Hegel, the subject emerges when self-­consciousness itself becomes conscious of the fact that what at first appears to it as an abstract, external threat (that which he calls “substance”) is actually immanent. Hence Žižek’s insistence that the subject is “the infinite power of absolute negativity.”47 Contrary, then, to the poststructuralist claim that all subjectivity, plagued by such a void (or, to again adopt the common poststructuralist parlance, an aporia) ultimately unravels as it descends down an abyme, for Žižek, following Hegel, this abyme is the subject at its purest. It should now be apparent just how far Žižek’s humanism is from the typical liberal variety. For Žižek, the subject is human only insofar as it is monstrous, marked by an “indivisible remainder,” “a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity,’ is inherent to being-­human.”48 The idealist cogito exposes this monstrosity at the heart of the human by rendering manifest that which remains latent in Descartes: namely, the association of thinking with madness (and diabolism). As Žižek explains: In the pre-­Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while only with Kant and German Idealism is the excess to be fought absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself. . . . [T]his is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness all around. . . . So when, in the pre-­Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity—that is, animal passions or divine madness have taken over—while with Kant, madness implies the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.49

This equation of humanity with madness and monstrosity bears considerable affinity with Romanticism, a movement in many respects the

Introduction 11 aesthetic correlative of philosophical idealism. It should thus come as no surprise that Žižek finds in Shelley’s Frankenstein one of the best representations of the idealist subject—a subject represented not by the novel’s eponymous mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein, but by his monstrous creation. In a novel filled with sublime moments, surely the most sublime of all is that in which Frankenstein’s monster begins speaking in the first person, telling the pitiful tale of his lonely existence thus far. As Žižek explains, in subjectivizing the monster, giving him a voice, Shelley doesn’t simply “‘humanize’ the Thing, demonstrating that what we thought was a Monster is in fact an ordinary, vulnerable person”; on the contrary, not only does the monster/Thing “retain . . . its unbearable Otherness,” but, more importantly, “it is as such that it subjectivizes itself.”50 This, claims Žižek, is what is so sublime—uncanny, even—about the monster/Thing, that it is “even more ‘ourselves,’ our own inaccessible kernel, than the Unconscious,” “an Otherness which directly ‘is’ ourselves, staging the phantasmatic core of our being.”51 As Žižek otherwise puts it, troping on a common theme from science fiction, the monster/Thing is a materialization of something from “inner space.”52 This is why it must be disavowed, for to encounter it brings us too close to the Real, too close to that from which, though it lies within us, we must remain at a distance if we wish to participate in the symbolic order—that is, “reality,” “everyday life.” Novels like Frankenstein are thus important for Žižek because they not only give expression to the disavowed Thing from inner space, thereby representing the Real, but also dramatize its disavowal, thereby confronting us with the fantasmatic nature of our reality, with the fantasies we construct in order to shield ourselves from the traumatic core of the Real. The greatest relevance of the above to literary criticism and theory most obviously concerns the category of the sublime, a category in Žižek’s work whose aesthetic dimensions and consequences, as noted above, have yet to be fully apprehended, let alone addressed, by literary critics. And yet, as is the case with his (re)interpretation of Lacan according to the logic of the Real, the implications of Žižek’s return to the Hegelian subject extend beyond aesthetics and into the realms of ethics and politics as well. Consider, for instance, the recent “ethical turn” in literary criticism, a turn for which the most important thinker has been Emmanuel Levinas. The goal of Levinas’s philosophical project

12 Russell Sbriglia is to establish ethics, rather than ontology, as “first philosophy.” As Levinas argues, “ethics precedes ontology,” for the subject comes into being only when brought face-­to-­face with an Other whose radical alterity opens within the subject an “idea of the Infinite” that stems from the subject’s responsibility for the Other.53 This face-­to-­face encounter with the Other, claims Levinas—an encounter that not only “recalls my responsibility” to the Other but also “calls me into question”—renders the Other “my neighbour.”54 As Žižek sees it, what is missing from Levinas’s ethics of the neighbor is the inhuman dimension of humanity itself, a dimension not captured by the face-­to-­face relationship.55 To illustrate this point, Žižek cites the figure of the Muselmann, the “faceless” “living dead” of the Nazi concentration camps.56 As he points out, the Muselmann figures as a kind of “zero-­level neighbor,” for when confronted with the Muselmann, “one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility,” but only “a kind of blind wall, a lack of depth.” What the Muselmann thus reveals, Žižek claims, is that the Levinasian association of Otherness with the face is an act of “domesticat[ion]” and “gentrifi[cation],” one that signals “yet another defense against the monstrous definition of subjectivity.”57 Once again, Žižek turns to a literary text to further illustrate his point: Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man.” “The Cares of a Family Man” is a brief sketch concerning a figure known simply as “Odradek,” an oddly shaped, spool-­like “creature,” which, because it is “extraordinarily nimble,” cannot be subjected to “closer scrutiny.” Yet this creature bears human characteristics as well. For instance, the narrator claims that one can have a dialogue with it/ him: “‘Well, what’s your name?’ you may ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs.”58 For Žižek, what is emblematic about Odradek is the fact that it/he “becomes human only when he no longer resembles a human being (by metamorphosing himself into an insect, or a spool, or whatever). He is, effectively, a ‘universal singular,’ a stand-­in for humanity by way of embodying its inhuman excess, by not resembling anything ‘human.’”59 Contra Levinas, what Odradek demonstrates, Žižek claims, is the properly universalist dimension of the ethical relation, the fact that “the first relationship to an Other is that to a faceless Third”:

Introduction 13 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. . . . [T]he 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. . . . Thus, truly blind justice cannot be grounded in the relationship to the Other’s face, . . . in the relationship to the neighbor. Justice is emphatically not justice for—with regard to—the neighbor.60

In identifying the faceless third as the primordial ethical relation, Žižek champions a transcendentalist ethics, one that, following Kant, is universal only insofar as it is expressly not based on any empirical (what Kant would term “pathological”) conditions or motivations (any “contingent umbilical links” to particular situations, as Žižek puts it)—conditions or motivations that the encounter with the Other’s face clearly brings into play. As Žižek sees it, Levinas’s grounding of ethics in the face-­to-­face encounter with the Other is merely one instance (albeit a paradigmatic one) of the general tendency throughout the humanities to attempt to “think the essence of humanity outside the domain of subjectivity,” for the very notion of subjectivity (i.e., self-­consciousness, self-­positing autonomy), so we are told, “stands for a dangerous hubris, a will to power, which obfuscates and distorts the authentic essence of humanity.”61 What Žižek’s work demonstrates is that characterizations of the idealist subject as self-­ conscious and self-­positing/autonomous in any common sense of these terms betray a rather poor understanding of Kant and Hegel. Indeed, one need only point to Hegel’s thesis regarding the “cunning of reason” to demonstrate that the type of subjectivity posited by German Idealism is far from autonomous or absolutist in any facile sense.62 Contrary, then, to the putatively ethical quest to decouple subjectivity from humanity, Žižek’s quest is instead the idealist–psychoanalytic quest to find the “point at which we enter the dimension of the ‘inhuman,’ the point at which ‘humanity’ disintegrates, so that all that remains is a pure sub-

14 Russell Sbriglia ject.”63 Such a quest, one that adheres to an altogether different ethical imperative than that put forth by Levinas and company—namely, that one not give ground relative to one’s desire—is precisely what Lacan undertakes in his magisterial interpretations of literary figures like Sophocles’s Antigone, the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette, and Paul Claudel’s Sygne, all of whom Žižek, following Lacan, upholds as examples of “the ‘inhuman’ subject.”64 For just as Frankenstein’s monster both represents and dramatizes the disavowed Real, so too do these figures represent and dramatize not only the plight of the pure subject, but also the radically emancipatory potential such a subject possesses.65 Žižek’s invocation of Lacan with respect to the “pure subject” brings us to the synthesis of Lacan and Hegel so characteristic of and integral to his work. In reading the two alongside one another—or, more precisely, in reading Hegel through Lacan—the transcendental-­idealist subject becomes the Lacanian “barred subject,” a subject represented by Lacan via the matheme Ꞩ. As Žižek explains, the move from the Cartesian to the Hegelian subject is “simply the move from S to Ꞩ.” Whereas the Cartesian subject is “a full, substantial identity, identical to a particular content which is threatened by [an] external pressure”—a pressure that in Descartes is represented via the figure of the “evil genius” (le malin génie)— the Hegelian subject is an abyss, a “void of absolute negativity to whom every ‘pathological,’ particular positive content appears as ‘posited,’ as something externally assumed and thus ultimately contingent.” The move from S to Ꞩ thus entails an understanding of the immanent genesis of subjectivity, an understanding achieved via the process of tarrying with the negative, the act of “identify[ing] myself to that very void which a moment ago threatened to swallow the most precious kernel of my being”; for it is by tarrying with the negative, the act of negative self-­ relating, that the subject discovers its immanent genesis, discovers that the “evil genius” lies not without, but within.66 This shared emphasis on the immanent genesis of an abyssal subject is for Žižek the ultimate coincidence of Hegel and Lacan.67 To return, then, to an issue raised above, Žižek’s originality lies less in his dazzling applications of Lacan (and, to a lesser extent, Hegel) to popular culture and the attendant leveling of the distinction between lowbrow and highbrow, theory and example, that such applications affect (though this is indeed one of the more remarkable aspects of his work)

Introduction 15 than in his anachronistic positing of a Lacanian Hegel in order to develop what Johnston perspicuously characterizes as “a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity.”68 As many of the contributors to this volume aim to demonstrate, such a transcendental materialism has much to impart to the field of literary studies, a field long dominated by a discursive/cultural materialism that more often than not views metaphysical and materialist concerns as mutually exclusive.69 Before providing a brief overview of the ways in which the essays here collected place Žižek’s work in dialogue with the concerns of contemporary literary criticism and theory, however, it would be helpful to first consider a few examples of Žižek’s own interpretations of literature—­interpretations that, in contrast to his interpretations of film, have thus far received scant attention. The Pervert’s Guide to Literature Despite the above examples of Žižek’s engagement with works of literature, as noted at the outset of this introduction, the second major problem concerning Žižek’s relation to literary studies is the widespread belief among literary critics that Žižek is interested only, or at least primarily, in film. Given Žižek’s frequent references to and unmistakable enthusiasm for film—an enthusiasm evidenced not only by his own films, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), but also by books such as The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” (2000), The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-­Theory (2001), and the collection of essays from which the title of this volume is derived, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (1992)—such a view is to some degree warranted. Indeed, the fact that the majority of scholarly work done on Žižek has been in film and media studies would seem to bear this out.70 Yet in addition to film, Žižek, as I have already begun to demonstrate, also frequently turns to works of literature, both lowbrow and highbrow, canonical and noncanonical, to illustrate his claims. What’s more, contrary to what is arguably the most common accusation leveled at him by his critics, Žižek doesn’t simply “use” works of literature (and film) as “allegories of theoretical doctrines,” “incidental illustrations” of an “already installed” Lacano-­Hegelian “machine.”71 Rather, as Colin Davis correctly points

16 Russell Sbriglia out, Žižek more often than not “finds in the text a knowledge which is the same as—rigorously of equal value to—that of psychoanalysis, even if that knowledge is formulated differently.” Indeed, we could say that this is Žižek’s greatest gambit, that “popular culture might know what high theory has not yet understood,” the result being that he reads the two through one another “without one being treated as ‘theory’ and the other as ‘example.’”72 A mere cursory glance through Žižek’s many books will reveal that, contrary to prevailing impressions, interpretations of literature feature nearly as often as interpretations of film. A handful of examples will serve to illustrate this point. For starters, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek reads Hamlet as “a drama of failed interpellation,” for what prevents Hamlet from acting on the command of his father’s ghost to avenge his murder (without, as the ghost also stipulates, in any way harming his mother) is not, Žižek claims, any uncertainty regarding his own desire, but rather an uncertainty regarding his mother’s desire, an uncertainty that Lacan would characterize as the problem of the “Che vuoi?” As Žižek explains, The key scene of the whole drama is the long dialogue between Hamlet and his mother, in which he is seized by doubt as to his mother’s desire— What does she really want? What if she really enjoys her filthy, promiscuous relationship with his uncle? Hamlet is therefore hindered not by indecision as to his own desire; it is not that “he doesn’t know what he really wants”—he knows that very clearly: he wants to [a]venge his father— what hinders him is doubt concerning the desire of the other, the confrontation of a certain “Che vuoi?” which announces the abyss of some terrifying, filthy enjoyment. If the Name-­of-­the-­Father functions as the agency of interpellation, of symbolic identification, the mother’s desire, with its fathomless “Che vuoi?,” marks a certain limit at which every interpella-

tion necessarily fails.73

That Hamlet’s inaction is due not to a lack of knowledge but, rather, to doubt concerning his mother’s desire is an argument upon which Žižek builds in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Focusing on the way in which “act and knowledge” form a “tragic constellation” throughout the play, Žižek reads Hamlet alongside Oedipus, noting that whereas the latter accomplishes the act (that is, killing his father) because he doesn’t

Introduction 17 know what he is doing, the former, by contrast, knows all too well who killed his father, yet it is precisely this knowledge that renders him unable to go through with the act (that is, killing his uncle and avenging his father). Indeed, in a point that harbors considerable implications for the study of genre, Žižek implies that the “excessive knowledge” borne not only by Hamlet but also his father—for, contrary to the father in the famous Freudian dream, Hamlet’s father “mysteriously knows that he is dead and even how he died”—renders the play closer to melodrama than tragedy, the latter of which is premised not on “some unexpected and excessive knowledge” but rather “some misrecognition or ignorance.”74 A second example: in Looking Awry, Žižek argues that, upon closer examination, it would be more accurate to characterize Kafka’s The Trial as a postmodernist novel than a modernist one. Žižek begins his analysis of the novel by rehearsing the typical modernist account of it, one that takes the enigmatic, inaccessible nature of the Court as the sign of an “‘absent God.’” While Žižek concedes that the proponents of such a reading are correct to consider the novel’s universe one of “anxiety,” this anxiety, he claims, is triggered not by God’s absence, but by His presence. As he explains, “the formula of the ‘absent God’ in Kafka does not work at all: for Kafka’s problem is, on the contrary, that in this universe God is too present, in the guise of various obscene, nauseous phenomena.”75 To illustrate this point, Žižek turns to the pivotal court scene in which Josef K.’s defense is interrupted by an act of public sex—an obscene act that, ironically enough, proves identical to the law of the Court itself. For though K. believes that the Court will be anxious to have order restored and the sex offenders ejected, what he finds instead is that the members of the gallery are “delighted” by the act—so much so that they prevent him, in all his “seriousness,” from breaking it up.76 What this surprising approval of the obscene act reveals, Žižek claims, is that, far from operating according to the rational logic of argumentation (as K. assumes), the Court operates according to the irrational, superegoic logic of jouissance, a traumatic enjoyment that lies beyond the pleasure principle. Indeed, Kafka “flood[s] the juridical domain” with jouissance, and this deluge of enjoyment is for Žižek proof that the “theological lesson” of The Trial is not that of modernism, which posits the world as “a crazy bureaucratic machine turning blindly around the central void of an absent God,” but that of postmodernism, which posits “a world in which

18 Russell Sbriglia God—who up to now had held himself at an assured distance—has gotten too close to us.”77 That The Trial is more postmodernist than modernist is a claim that is apt to give most literary critics (especially those of a historicist bent) pause, for the fact that it was written between 1914 and 1915 and published in 1925 would seem to render it without question a modernist text. Yet by reading the novel for its illustration of the obscene law of the superego—the law of jouissance—Žižek’s point is precisely to call into question the “reduc[tion]” of “the opposition between modernism and postmodernism” to “a simple diachrony.” For if the lesson of postmodernism is God’s nauseating proximity, his “inert, obscene, revolting presence,” then, regardless of its composition and publication dates, the fact that The Trial captures this abject presence by way of “a blind machinery to which nothing is lacking insofar as it is the very surfeit of enjoyment” renders it, perforce, “already postmodernist.”78 A third example: in both The Parallax View and Less Than Nothing, Žižek reads the iconic phrase from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—the eponymous scrivener’s “I would prefer not to”—as the “gesture of subtraction” par excellence.79 Less a “refusal of a determinate content” than a “formal gesture of refusal as such,” for Bartleby does not say that he “doesn’t want to do it” but rather that “he prefers (wants) not to do it,” Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is for Žižek a “holophrastic” act of Versagung, a “signifier-­turned-­object, a signifier reduced to an inert stain that stands for the collapse of the symbolic order.”80 As such, it constitutes a “refusal of the Master’s order”—a refusal that instructs us “how [to] pass from the politics of ‘resistance,’ parasitical upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation.”81 Such a “politics of subtraction”—a “Bartlebian politics,” as he commonly dubs it—harbors for Žižek the same “divinely violent” potential as the civil disobedience of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Melville’s contemporary, Henry David Thoreau.82 Indeed, Bartleby does for a radically emancipatory politics what Antigone, Juliette, and Sygne do for a radically emancipatory ethics.83 A fourth and final example: in The Parallax View, Žižek provides a magisterial close reading of what is arguably Henry James’s greatest novel, The Wings of the Dove. Carefully parsing the different ethical di-

Introduction 19 lemmas facing each main character—Milly Theale, Merton Densher, and Kate Croy—Žižek illustrates that while James, in accordance with the impetus of modernity, refuses to “retreat to old mores” by espousing belief in a “transcendent ethical Substance” that (pre)determines our ethical judgments in advance, he likewise refuses to embrace the “ethical relativism and historicism” characteristic of most modernist art.84 For, as Žižek convincingly demonstrates, the novel’s “true ethical hero” is the one most often “dismissed as either a cold manipulator or a mere victim of social stances”: Kate Croy.85 Beginning with Milly, Žižek argues that although her decision to bequeath her fortune to Densher might appear altruistic, the ultimate proof of her supposed sainthood, this gesture is in fact far more manipulative than Kate’s plot to have Densher feign love for Milly so that Milly will bequeath her fortune to him (thus leaving him wealthy enough to marry Kate). As Žižek explains, Milly’s so-­called ethical sacrifice is a fake insofar as she intends it to ruin the link between Kate and Densher. Though she bequeaths her fortune to them, she “at the same time mak[es] it ethically impossible for them to accept her gift”: if, on the one hand, they accept her bequest, then they will be “marked by an indelible stain of guilt and moral corruption”; if, on the other hand, they take what would seem to be the moral high road and reject it, then “[their] very rejection will function as a retroactive admission of [their] guilt.” Thus, whatever Kate and Densher decide, “the very choice Milly’s bequest confronts them with makes them guilty.”86 Moving on to Densher, Žižek asserts that although we might be tempted to view his rejection of Milly’s bequest as “moral growth,” in actuality he is “Milly’s perfect counterpoint,” for, like Milly’s supposed ethical sacrifice, Densher’s sacrifice is also a fake, a testament to the fact (discerned by Kate) that although he didn’t really love Milly while she was alive, he loves her in death, “a false love if ever there was one.”87 What’s more, Densher is further indicted by his self-­professed “test” of Kate’s delicacy (i.e., seeing whether she will open the envelope containing Milly’s bequest), a test ultimately less reflective of Kate’s moral compass (or supposed lack thereof) than his own “hypocritical attempt to sell avoidance, escape, as an ethical gesture, to sell the refusal to choose as a choice” (a point reinforced by Densher’s admission to Kate that his primary “desire” is “to escape everything”).88

20 Russell Sbriglia This brings Žižek to Kate, the only one of the three, he insists, to perform a truly ethical act: namely, deciding to leave Densher. As he explains, Kate rightly dismisses Densher’s supposed ethical rejection of Milly’s money as phony, for he does so “not because he doesn’t love her” and is therefore “unworthy of her gift,” but, on the contrary, “because he does love her.” The paradox here, one of which Kate is all too aware, is that “it is precisely by refusing Milly’s money that Densher attests his fidelity to Milly’s fantasy.”89 Complicating matters even further is the choice with which Densher, because he loves Milly, confronts Kate: either she marry him without the money or refuse him and keep the money herself. Rejecting both of these options, Kate, Žižek points out, imposes her own, “more radical” choice: she will take Densher with the money or nothing at all, for “she wants neither ‘Densher without money’” (a choice that, again, would entail acceptance of the terms of Milly’s fantasy) “nor money without Densher.” It is for this reason, Žižek claims, that Kate is the novel’s “true ethical hero,” “the only ethical figure in the novel,” for she willingly gives up both Densher and the money.90 In all four of the above instances, the literary texts that Žižek engages do not serve as mere “illustrations” or “allegories” of the principles of German Idealism or Lacanian psychoanalysis. On the contrary, such engagements not only address (as well as complicate our understanding of) fundamental literary concerns—concerns including (but not limited to) questions of genre, periodicity, and characterization—but also demonstrate how specific works of literature and the literary in general can help us to envision and think about more emancipatory forms of ethics, politics, and aesthetics. As any serious encounter with Žižek’s work will reveal, complex literary engagements such as these are not the exception but the rule. The purpose of this volume, however, is not to rehearse Žižek’s readings of particular works of literature, a maneuver that would only serve to further specious claims that Žižek’s work contains “no invitation to further work by others,” that he writes “not to open up a field of investigation but to establish for the reader the truth he has already achieved.”91 On the contrary, the aim of this collection is to examine what in Žižek’s work invites—or, as its contributors maintain, demands—engagement from literary critics and theorists, be those engagements ones of acceptance or rejection, affirmation or negation, addition or subtraction. The

Introduction 21 essays collected here are therefore committed to considering what Žižek’s work has to offer literary criticism and theory both in general, by way of theoretical engagements with the field of literary studies itself, and in particular, by way of Žižekian interpretations of specific literary texts. The book is thus divided into two parts: Theory and Interpretation. The former considers Žižek’s contributions to a number of branches of literary inquiry, including semiotics (by way of his critique of poststructuralism and his attendant positing of a “Real Lacan”), aesthetics (by way of his theory of the “ridiculous sublime”), historicism (by way of his championing of “historicity” over and against historicism), ideology critique (by way of his call to shift our mode of understanding ideology from the “symptomal” to the “fetishistic”), postcolonialism (by way of his critique of identitarianism and his attendant championing of “concrete universality”), and ecocriticism (by way of his critique of contemporary ecological consciousness and his attendant call to become “even more artificial,” even “more alienated” from Nature). The latter part, which includes an essay by Žižek himself, uses his methods and insights to interpret literary texts from a range of different historical periods, nations, and genres, including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Richard II, William Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy, Samuel Beckett’s Not I, and Gaétan Soucy’s La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes (The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches). This is not to say that a hard-­and-­fast distinction between “doing theory” and “practicing criticism” exists throughout these essays.92 On the contrary, Jamil Khader’s essay in part I on Žižek’s critique of postcolonialism looks at the memoirs of Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú and Crossing Borders, as well as Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven, while Louis-­Paul Willis’s essay in part II on Soucy’s La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes looks at Žižek’s theorization of the Real as itself triadic in nature, comprised of an “imaginary Real,” a “symbolic Real,” and a “real Real.” Likewise, Andrew Hageman’s essay in part I on Žižek’s critique of contemporary ecological consciousness looks closely at Karel Čapek’s r.u.r. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the text that coined the term robot to signal artificial human beings/laborers, while Paul Megna’s essay in part II on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde looks closely at Žižek’s theorization of the “undead,” sadomasochistic nature of courtly love. The distinction between the essays that constitute

22 Russell Sbriglia these two parts, then, lies not in any gap between theory and interpretation but rather in the degree to which theory or interpretation is the primary focus. It is the sincere hope of the contributors to this volume that, like Žižek’s own work, it will invite further work from other literary scholars. You’ve had your anti-­Žižek fun, and you are pardoned for it. Do not be afraid; join us! Notes 1 Slavoj Žižek, “Žižek,” in The Žižek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2014), 275. 2 Žižek, “Žižek,” 275–76. 3 Žižek, “Žižek,” 276. 4 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 95. 5 Žižek, “Žižek,” 276. 6 Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth, 1953), 110. 7 Žižek, “Žižek,” 276. 8 David Bordwell, “Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, April 2005, http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/zizek.php; and Richard Stamp, “‘Another Exemplary Case’: Žižek’s Logic of Examples,” in The Truth of Žižek, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (New York: Continuum, 2007), 173. 9 See Benjamin Noys, “Žižek’s Reading Machine,” in Repeating Žižek, ed. Agon Hamza (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 72–83. The claim regarding Žižek’s “terrible matrix” comes, ironically enough, not from a Žižek detractor but from Žižek’s close friend and fellow communist philosopher Alain Badiou. Conceding the transformative effect that Žižek’s “brilliant interpretations of everything” have had on the field of psychoanalysis, Badiou nonetheless voices concern over what he deems the “hermeneutical attitude” of Žižek’s brand of psychoanalysis. As he puts it, “it becomes a sort of matrix. I say to him often, because he is really a friend, ‘you have a matrix, a terrible matrix, and you apply your matrix to everything.’” “Human Rights Are the Rights of the Infinite: An Interview with Alain Badiou,” by Max Blechman, Anita Chari, and Rafeeq Hassan, Historical Materialism 20, no. 4 (2012): 184. Contra Badiou (as well as Bordwell, Stamp, and others), I argue later in this introduction that, like Lacan’s, Žižek’s brand of psychoanalysis is ultimately antihermeneutical. 10 Such an argument is proximate to that of Lauren Berlant, who examines the role that American melodramas from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Now, Voyager to The Life and Loves

Introduction 23

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of a She-­Devil have played in “cultivat[ing] fantasies of vague belonging as an alleviation of what is hard to manage in the lived real—social antagonisms, exploitation, compromised intimacies, the attrition of life.” Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. And yet, as this quote suggests, there nonetheless remains a difference in orientation between Berlant and Žižek: whereas Berlant is interested in how melodrama stages fantasies that shield us from “the lived real”—what Žižek, following Lacan, would call the “symbolic order”—Žižek is interested in how melodrama stages fantasies that allow us to participate in the “lived real” in the first place by shielding us from the traumatic order of experience that Lacan termed “the Real.” See Jane Tompkins, “‘But Is It Any Good?’ The Institutionalization of Literary Value,” in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 186–201. See Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Žižek, “Žižek,” 276–77. Žižek, “Žižek,” 275. Žižek, “Žižek,” 275–76. Žižek, “Žižek,” 276. Žižek, “Žižek,” 277. The phrase “allegories of theoretical doctrines” is from Bordwell, “Slavoj Žižek.” See, for instance, Valentine Cunningham, Reading after Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Nicholas Birns, Theory after Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early Twenty-­First Century (Buffalo, NY: Broadview, 2010); and Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge, eds., Theory after “Theory” (New York: Routledge, 2011). Birns, Theory after Theory, 291. Birns, Theory after Theory, 291, 293. Birns, Theory after Theory, 293. For work on Agamben and literature, see, for instance, William Watkins, The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis (New York: Continuum, 2010); William V. Spanos, The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Spanos, Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013); Anke Snoek, Agamben’s Joyful Kafka: Finding Freedom beyond Subordination (New York: Continuum, 2012); Aaron Hillyer, The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Agamben, and the Writers of the No (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); and a number of the essays collected in Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray, eds., The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Essays that explicitly apply Butler to literature are numerous. See, for instance, Sophie Croisy, “Re-­imagining Healing after Trauma: Leslie Marmon Silko and Judith

24 Russell Sbriglia Butler Writing against the War of Cultures,” Nebula 3, nos. 2–3 (2006): 86–113; Amaleena Damlé, “Gender Performance in the Work of Judith Butler and Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos,” Dissidences 2, no. 4 (2008): 1–16; Ernesto Javier Martínez, “On Butler on Morrison on Language,” Signs 35, no. 4 (2010): 821–42; Hina Nazar, “Facing Ethics: Narrative Recognition from George Eliot to Judith Butler,” Nineteenth-­Century Contexts 33, no. 5 (2011): 437–50; Inge Arteel, “Judith Butler and the Catachretic Human,” in Towards a New Literary Humanism, ed. Andy Mousley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 77–90; and Denis Flannery, “Judith Butler’s Henry James,” Henry James Review 32, no. 1 (2011): 12–19. Examples of implicitly Butlerian approaches to literary and cultural studies are likewise numerous, but some of the more notable works include Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jeffrey T. Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Nadine Ehlers, Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). 24 See Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivac, Žižek and Others (New York: Verso, 2003), 196–206; and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Criticism as Symptom: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge,” in The Character of Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 81–108. See also Denise Gigante, “Toward a Notion of Critical Self-­Creation: Slavoj Žižek and the ‘Vortex of Madness,’” New Literary History 29, no. 1 (1998): 153–68; Tim Dean, “Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism,” diacritics 32, no. 3 (2002): 21–41; and Colin Davis, “Žižek’s Idiotic Enjoyment,” in Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 108–34. 25 Shelly Brivic, Joyce through Lacan and Žižek: Explorations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See also Ken Jackson, “‘All the World to Nothing’: Badiou, Žižek and Pauline Subjectivity in Richard III,” Shakespeare 1, nos. 1–2 (2005): 29–52; Robert Rushing, “What We Desire, We Shall Never Have: Calvino, Žižek, Ovid,” Comparative Literature 58, no. 1 (2006): 44–58; Thomas F. Haddox, “On Belief, Conflict, and Universality: Flannery O’Connor, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj Žižek,” in Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace, ed. Avis Hewit and Robert Donahoo (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 231–40; Tereza Stejskalová, “Žižek’s Act and the Literary Example,” Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 2, no. 2 (2011): 55–74; and Étienne Poulard, “‘After the Takeover’: Shakespeare, Lacan, Žižek and the Interpassive Subject,” English Studies 94, no. 3 (2013): 291–312. 26 Though Eagleton, in discussing Žižek’s “almost comic versatility of interests,” notes the nods to Kafka, detective fiction, and vampire novels throughout Žižek’s work, he clearly considers it more characteristic of Žižek “to leap in a paragraph from Hegel to Jurassic Park,” from Kant to The Flintstones, or from Lacan to the films of David Lynch

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than to leap from any of these key thinkers to literary works or figures. Harpham likewise makes passing references to Žižek’s use of literary texts to illustrate key philosophical and psychoanalytic principles—among them, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and, most notably, Sophocles’s Antigone—yet he is far more interested in exposing what he takes to be the antidemocratic/totalitarian “character” of Žižek’s work than in examining any possible contributions it might make to the study of literature. What’s more, although he notes Žižek’s “heav[y] invest[ment] in a number of discourses, all of which seem to be immediately available to him,” it is his work in film studies that Harpham chooses to single out, noting that such work “alone would qualify him as a leading film scholar and theorist.” Eagleton, Figures of Dissent, 197, 202; and Harpham, “Criticism as Symptom,” 87. As Kristeva explains in her preface to Desire in Language, the aim of what she calls “semanalysis” is to “draw out [the] consequences” that “the breakthrough accomplished by Lacan in French psychoanalysis” holds for “different practices of discourse (in literature and particularly in the novel).” Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), viii. For Žižek’s most extensive critique of the semiolinguistic version of Lacanian psychoanalysis, see “The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis,” in Interrogating the Real, by Slavoj Žižek, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York: Continuum, 2005), 113–40. See Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2009). The two “lost causes” Žižek here seeks to defend are Marxism and psychoanalysis, the “only two theories” in our postmodern, seemingly “post-­ideological” era, he maintains, that “imply and practice . . . an engaged notion of truth” (3). Žižek, “Da Capo senza Fine,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 243. For further commentary from Žižek on the “nonexistence” of poststructuralism, see Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Malden, MA: Polity, 2004), 45–48. For further commentary from Žižek on the misidentification of Lacan as a poststructuralist, see “The Quilting Point of Ideology: Or, Why Lacan Is Not a ‘Poststructuralist,’” in The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-­Railton (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014), 195–208; and “The Eclipse of Meaning: On Lacan and Deconstruction,” in Interrogating the Real, 190–212. Important to note here is that Žižek doesn’t deny that a structuralist strain runs throughout Lacan. As he points out, the “second stage” of Lacan’s teaching is indeed structuralist in orientation. His point, however, is that the third and final stage of Lacan’s teaching, that of the Real, marks a complete break with the second stage, one that retroactively destructuralizes, so to speak, Lacan’s earlier work. See Žižek, “Das Ungeschehenmachen: How Is Lacan a Hegelian?,” in The Most Sublime Hysteric, 70–82. The paradigmatic instance of Žižek’s use of the Real to retroactively destructuralize Lacan is his (re)interpretation of the latter’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Let-

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35 36 37 38

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ter’” in “Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?,” in Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–32. The quotation is from Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 113. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 27. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 250. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 250–51. Dean effectively glosses this point as follows: “For interpretation to point not toward meaning or signification but ‘beyond . . . signification’ pushes interpretation—paradoxically enough— beyond the framework of hermeneutics. Rather than making sense of trauma, psychoanalytic interpretation draws attention to its resistance to sense.” Dean, “Art as Symptom,” 34. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 1960, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 112. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 207. See Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). For Žižek on the purloined letter as objet petit a, see “Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?” Like Lacan, Žižek cites Poe’s Valdemar as a prime example not only of the objet petit a but also of what Lacan termed the lamella, an indestructible partial object that goes on living despite being deprived of its support in the symbolic order—an undead object, which Žižek, in his inversion of the Deleuzean figure of the “body without organs,” would term an “organ without a body.” See, for instance, Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2008), 180–81. See Žižek, “Kate’s Choice; or, the Materialism of Henry James,” in The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), 125–44. Rex Butler, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2005), 13. For more by Butler on this question, see his introduction to The Žižek Dictionary, “Less Than Nothing to Say: An Introduction to Slavoj Žižek,” ix–­xx. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 7. That Lacan is for Žižek ultimately (in the words of Ian Parker) “a machine for reading Hegel” is a point more recently reiterated by Žižek himself. Asked whether he uses Hegel to reactualize Lacan or the other way around, Žižek answers, “I would say the other way around. What really interests me is philosophy, and for me, psychoanalysis is ultimately a tool to reactualize, to render actual for today’s time, the legacy of German Idealism. . . . [U]ltimately if I am to choose just one thinker, it’s Hegel. He’s the one for me.” Hence Parker’s claim that “even when Žižek is writing about Lacan, it is actually Hegel who is in command.” Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2004), 112, 108; and Žižek, “Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek,” by Eric Dean

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Rasmussen, Electronic Book Review, July 1, 2004, http://www.electronicbookreview .com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation. The use of the term transcendental materialist to characterize Žižek’s brand of Lacano-­ Hegelianism comes from Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008). Marx, of course, is also important to Žižek’s work, especially his critique of ideology. See, for instance, the opening chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?,” in which Žižek interprets Marx’s theories of commodity fetishism and surplus-­value as having laid the groundwork for key psychoanalytic concepts like fetishistic disavowal (Freud) and surplus-­enjoyment (Lacan). What’s more, in recent years, Žižek has become more unabashedly Marxist in his political orientation, leading the charge for a “return to communism.” And yet, for Žižek, Marx is always subordinate to Hegel. That is to say, contrary to typical Marxist praxis, according to which Marx’s materialism is read as a corrective to Hegel’s idealism, for Žižek, as he boldly asserts in Tarrying with the Negative, “the time has come to raise the inverse possibility of a Hegelian critique of Marx.” Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 26. For an example of such a critique, see the introduction to The Parallax View, “Dialectical Materialism at the Gates,” in which Žižek distinguishes between dialectical materialism and “the much more acceptable, and much less embarrassing, ‘materialist dialectic’” informing virtually all twentieth-­century Marxist thought (4–5). For an extended examination of Žižek’s Hegelian critique of Marx, see Todd McGowan, “Hegel as Marxist: Žižek’s Revision of German Idealism,” in Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies, ed. Jamil Khader and Molly Anne Rothenberg (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 31–53. Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, xxiii. As Žižek asserts at the outset of The Ticklish Subject, “a spectre is haunting Western academia . . . the spectre of the Cartesian subject” (xxiii). For Žižek, although the poststructuralist is certainly the most vocal advocate of the death of the Cartesian subject, virtually all other contemporary thinkers—even those who position themselves as antithetical to poststructuralism—are guilty of the same rejection, including (to use Žižek’s own classifications) “the New Age obscurantist,” “the Habermasian theorist of communication,” “the Heideggerian proponent of the thought of Being,” “the cognitive scientist,” “the Deep Ecologist,” “the critical (post-­) Marxist,” and “the feminist.” Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, xxiii. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6), trans. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 87. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 23. Žižek, The Parallax View, 22. Žižek adopts the term indivisible remainder from Hegel’s contemporary and fellow idealist F. W. J. Schelling. See Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996), 75.

28 Russell Sbriglia 49 Žižek, The Parallax View, 22. 50 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 365. See also Žižek’s claim that “the Gothic novel is a kind of critique avant la lettre of the Kantian insistence on the unsurmountable gap between phenomena and the transcendent Thing-­in-­itself,” for in these novels “apparitions . . . are precisely . . . Things that think.” Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2002), 220. 51 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 368. 52 See Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space,” in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 216–59. Worth noting here is Žižek’s reliance on the famous “stolen boat” episode from Wordsworth’s The Prelude in order to illustrate the emergence of the thing from inner space. As Žižek claims, this episode demonstrates that, “far from being a simple descendant of the Kantian Thing-­in-­itself, the Freudian ‘Thing from Inner Space’ is its inherent opposite: what appears to be the excess of some transcendent force over ‘normal’ external reality is the very place of the direct inscription of my subjectivity into this reality. In other words, what I get back in the guise of the horrifying-­irrepresentable Thing is the objectivization, the objectal correlate, of my own gaze—as Wordsworth puts it, the Thing is the ‘sober colouring’ reality gets from the eye observing it.” Žižek, The Parallax View, 151–52. 53 Levinas often uses the slogan “ethics precedes ontology” to characterize his philosophical project. According to Levinas, the face of the Other opens within the subject an “idea of the infinite” insofar as it “exceed[s] the idea of the other in me,” “at each moment destroy[ing] and overflow[ing] the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea.” Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 50–51. 54 Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 83. 55 Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, by Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 158. 56 Žižek here relies on Primo Levi’s characterization of the Muselmann as “faceless” throughout his autobiographical account of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man (a.k.a. Survival in Auschwitz). See Levi, If This Is a Man, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein, vol. 1 (New York: Liveright, 2015), 1–205. 57 Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 161–62. 58 Franz Kafka, “The Cares of a Family Man,” trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1971), 428. 59 Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 166. Žižek’s allusion to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis here is no accident. As he notes in The Parallax View, in the original German text, the term that Gregor Samsa’s sister, Grete, uses to refer to her brother-­turned-­ insect is ein Untier, a term often translated as “a monster” but whose literal translation is “an inanimal.” As Žižek concludes, “what we get here is the opposite of inhuman: an animal which, while remaining animal, is not really animal—the excess over the

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animal in animal, the traumatic core of animality, which can emerge ‘as such’ only in a human who has become an animal” (22). Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 183–84. As Žižek puts it in The Parallax View, “just as in Kant’s philosophy, the sublime Noumenal, when we come too close to it, appears as pure horror, man ‘as such,’ deprived of all phenomenal qualities, appears as an inhuman monster, something like Kafka’s Odradek. The problem with human rights humanism is that it covers up this monstrosity of the ‘human as such,’ presenting it as a sublime human essence” (342). Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 15. Posthumanism takes this project even further insofar as its goal is not to rethink or reclaim “the authentic essence of humanity” but to rethink—or, more precisely, call into question—humanity’s central position in the “Great Chain of Being.” The “cunning of reason” is a theory of Hegel’s that holds that great men, in following their own individual passions, intending only their own interest, unwittingly act as agents of the universal Idea/Reason, carrying out the will of the “World-­Spirit,” which ruthlessly dispenses with them once they have fulfilled their role in advancing world history. See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1956), 30–33. Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 15. Žižek, The Parallax View, 42. That one not give ground relative to one’s desire is for Lacan the ultimate “ethics of psychoanalysis.” As he asserts, “from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.” Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 319. Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan’s reading of Antigone is crucial here. As he explains in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), Lacan’s interest in Antigone resides in her demonstration of “the paradoxical reversal by means of which desire itself (i.e., acting upon one’s desire, not compromising it) can no longer be grounded in any ‘pathological’ interest or motivation, and thus meets the criteria of the Kantian ethical act, so that ‘following one’s desire’ overlaps with ‘doing one’s duty’” (195). Antigone is thus an indispensable figure for Žižek insofar as she reveals that “what is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom is possible, and we desperately search for some ‘pathological’ determinations in order to avoid this fact” (196). Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 27–28. As Johnston puts it, by likening the Lacanian barred subject to the Hegelian subject qua negativity, Žižek’s entire project could be characterized as “an effort to raise Lacan to the dignity of the philosophical tradition.” Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 13. See Johnston’s preface to Žižek’s Ontology. In Americanist literary criticism, the work of John Carlos Rowe best exemplifies the cultural materialist insistence on the mutual exclusivity of metaphysical and materialist concerns. This is especially true of Rowe’s At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of

30 Russell Sbriglia Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Consider, for instance, Rowe’s following critique of the dominant approach to Poe throughout the twentieth century, the psychoanalytic approach: “The translation of his literary works into the language game of psychoanalysis has accomplished precisely what Edgar Allan Poe had hoped: the substitution of an immaterial world for the threatening world of material history” (48). What Žižek’s redeployment of psychoanalysis via the logic of the Lacanian Real does to such a point is invert it, for when read according to the Real, not only is psychoanalysis not a mere language game (i.e., an avatar of structuralism), but, what’s more, it is the immaterial fantasy world that proves the most threatening. Indeed, as Žižek argues, it is the very process of “traversing the fantasy” that returns us to the material world. See, for instance, Žižek’s commentary on Lacan’s reading of Freud’s dream, “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” As Žižek explains, “the dreamer is awakened when the Real of the horror encountered in the dream (the dead son’s reproach) is more horrible than the awakened reality itself, so that the dreamer escapes into reality in order to escape the Real encountered in the dream.” Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 17. 70 The most comprehensive account—and application—of the relevance of Žižek’s work for film studies is Matthew Flisfeder’s The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 71 Bordwell, “Slavoj Žižek”; and Stamp, “‘Another Exemplary Case,’” 173. Dean, in “Art as Symptom,” likewise takes Žižek to task for his (alleged) reduction of works of art to mere “illustrat[ions] of psychoanalytic concepts” (39). Noting not only the putative lack of “conceptual space for any consideration of aesthetic effects or their significance” (23) throughout his work, but also his unwillingness to “concede even relative autonomy to the aesthetic domain, either in principle or in practice” (30), Dean claims that Žižek’s reduction of the aesthetic constitutes an “ethical problem” insofar as it “eradicates dimensions of alterity particular to art, making any encounter with the difficulty and strangeness of aesthetic experience seem beside the point” (23). For a less polemical—and more precise—version of all of these critiques, Bordwell’s included, see Walter A. Davis, “Slavoj Žižek, or the Jouissance of an Abstract Hegelian,” in Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9/11 (London: Pluto, 2006), 75–117. 72 Davis, Critical Excess, 109–10. Hence Davis’s claim that although Žižek is “deeply immersed in Lacanian thought and vocabulary,” Lacan “does not figure as the knowledge which popular culture illustrates.” Rather, Žižek’s work effects a “crossover” between Lacanian psychoanalysis and popular culture in which “each elucidates the other” (111). As Žižek himself explains at the outset of Looking Awry, “what is at stake in the endeavor to ‘look awry’ at theoretical motifs is not just a kind of contrived attempt to ‘illustrate’ high theory, to make it ‘easily accessible,’ and thus to spare us the effort of effective thinking. The point is rather that such an exemplification, such a mise-­ en-­scène of theoretical motifs renders visible aspects that would otherwise remain unnoticed.” Such a procedure, Žižek correctly points out, “has a respectable line of philosophical predecessors, from late Wittgenstein to Hegel.” Žižek, Looking Awry:

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83 84 85 86 87 88 89

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An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1991), 3. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 120–21. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2011), 12. Žižek also provides a fascinating antihistoricist reading of Hamlet as a play whose narrative precedes the Oedipus myth. Žižek, Looking Awry, 146. Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa Muir, Edwin Muir, and E. M. Butler (New York: Schocken, 1992), 46. In a related point, Žižek likewise notes that, rather than being “simply absent,” the Court is in fact “present under the figures of obscene judges who, during night interrogations, glance through pornographic books.” Žižek, Looking Awry, 146. Žižek, Looking Awry, 150, 146, 151, 146. Žižek, Looking Awry, 145, 146, 151, 146. For Žižek, the foil to Kafka’s The Trial is Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. As he explains, although Finnegan’s Wake is in many respects an “unreadable” book, for it cannot be read in the same manner as a normal, “realist” novel, its “illegibility” nonetheless “functions precisely as an invitation to an unending process of reading, of interpretation.” Hence Joyce’s famous claim that he wrote the novel “to keep the critics busy for three hundred years.” The Trial, by contrast, is “quite ‘readable’”: “the main outlines of the story are clear enough,” and “Kafka’s style is concise and of proverbial purity.” And yet “it is this very ‘legibility’ that, because of its overexposed character, produces a radical opacity and blocks every essay of interpretation.” Žižek, Looking Awry, 151; and Joyce, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 703. Žižek, The Parallax View, 382; and Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 1007. Žižek, The Parallax View, 384, 381, 385. Žižek, The Parallax View, 381–82; and Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 1007. For Žižek’s uses of the phrase “Bartlebian politics” (or “Bartleby politics”), see The Parallax View, 342–43; Violence, 214; In Defense of Lost Causes, 409; and Less Than Nothing, 1007. For Žižek on the resonances between the “divine violence” of Gandhi and Bartleby, see The Parallax View, 342–43; and In Defense of Lost Causes, 474–75. As Žižek asserts, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is “strictly analogous to Sygne’s No!” The Parallax View, 384–85. Žižek, The Parallax View, 126, 130, 127, 126. Žižek, The Parallax View, 132. Žižek, The Parallax View, 130–31. Žižek, The Parallax View, 131–32. Žižek, The Parallax View, 137; and Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, ed. J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2003), 404, 406. Žižek, The Parallax View, 138, 132. As Žižek explains, in “a properly Kierkegaardian moment,” the ethical itself (that is, the rejection of Milly’s money) is the temptation to be resisted (132). Žižek, The Parallax View, 139.

32 Russell Sbriglia 91 Harpham, “Criticism as Symptom,” 84. 92 As Žižek often notes, Marxism and psychoanalysis are both simultaneously theories and practices. As he puts matters at the outset of In Defense of Lost Causes, for instance, “in both of them [Marxism and psychoanalysis], the relationship between theory and practice is properly dialectical, in other words, that of an irreducible tension: theory is not just the conceptual grounding of practice, it simultaneously accounts for why practice is ultimately doomed to failure. . . . At its most radical, theory is the theory of a failed practice” (3).

1 Reading the Real: Anna Kornbluh

Žižek’s Literary Materialism

How does Žižek read Lacan, and where does this reading practice meet contemporary literary criticism? This essay suggests that Žižek’s work, in all its theoretical virtuosity and interpretative velocity, comprises an absolute but variable practice of reading the Real. In the vein of Lacan’s return to Freud, which countermanded the assimilation of Freud’s radical insights to ego psychology in favor of reading the enigmas of symbolization that inspired Freud, Žižek returns to Lacan to read his staging of enigmas, paradoxes, topological puzzles, and impasses of formalization, countermanding the assimilation of Lacan to the diverse theoretical traditions that, in the Anglo-­American world, are commonly united under the banner of “poststructuralism.”1 Žižek has observed that “Lacan did not understand this return as a return to what Freud said, but to the core of the Freudian revolution of which Freud himself was not fully aware,” and it seems that a parallel holds for Žižek, who turns to Lacan not as a master but as an adherent, loyal to the Freudian event and to the advent of psychoanalysis as a radically novel discursive formation.2 The repetitious yet unsystematizable process of reading that comes into relief via Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s reading of Freud is one whose promise for literary criticism continues to be open. It is the speculative wager of this essay that reading the Real with Žižek can inspire something like a contemporary materialist literary criticism, a criticism whose essential posture, not unlike that of the analyst, entails curiosity about the Real,

36 Anna Kornbluh perspicuity about form, renunciation of mastery, and enthusiasm for the ironies of metadiscourse.3 To begin to appreciate Žižek’s technique of reading the Real, we should first make a provisional indication of what “the Real” performatively signifies in his thought. The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary are the three interdependent registers of psychic experience that Lacan uses to organize his work. Žižek’s own work emphasizes the paradoxical priority of the Real within this interdependence. As pictured by Lacan’s favored image of the Borromean knot, the Real is inextricably intertwined with the Symbolic and the Imaginary, yet its status as the least elaborated of the three registers, irruptive of Lacan’s discourse rather than systematically presented within it, reveals a certain exceptionality or singularity, a certain demand for continued returns. Žižek has long endeavored to think this singularity, this opacity that preserves a place of nonmastery. While other readers of Lacan often make recourse to a theory of phases in order to track his thought (the infantile Lacan of the Imaginary, the adolescent Lacan of the Symbolic, the senescent Lacan of the Real), Žižek almost always attends to the persistent figurations of the Real legible throughout Lacan’s oeuvre. Although there are moments at which Žižek succumbs to the temptation to historicize Lacan in this way, on the whole Žižek’s Lacan is the Real Lacan, the Lacan of the Real, the Lacan with whom it is possible to advance that earlier tarrying with the Real that Žižek finds in Schelling and Hegel.4 This fleeting priority of the Real perhaps derives from its multifacetedness; its three prevalent dynamics are materiality, a limit to symbolization, and antagonism. The materiality of the Real is that which is irreducible, indivisible, unshakeable. To quote Lacan, “the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always and in every case in its place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing that can exile it from it”; “the real is absolutely without fissure.”5 Such obdurate matter also encompasses the objectal dimension of the subject, the disturbingly animated matter of the body at the sites of the drives (ocular, oral, aural, anal, and navel orifices). Furthermore, the materiality of the Real materializes in language—its own kind of “something material”— in the form of the “letter,” “the material medium [support] that concrete discourse borrows from language.”6 Like the letter, other figures at times avail themselves as marks of the Real throughout Lacan’s oeuvre: objet

Reading the Real 37 petit a, Master Signifier, lamella, and sinthome. This very figurative proliferation is a sign of the Real’s generativity vis-­à-­vis the Symbolic and of the motion of energetic positing that it inertly embodies. The Real is ever present as a limit of the Symbolic, not external but extimate to the Symbolic. As Žižek frames it in The Sublime Object of Ideology, extimacy here indicates the Real as “posed” (i.e., immanently produced, as an internally generated chimera, in and by the Symbolic), which is strictly opposed to the Real as “presupposed” (wholly and completely external, as an anterior ground).7 The Real as posed rather than presupposed suggests both that the Symbolic is internally riven and that whatever might be external to it is also inconsistent or ungrounded. This inconsistency/ negativity/self-­division of the material, including the materiality of language, culminates in the specter of “antagonism.” Antagonism is central to Lacanian political discourse; while its Marxian complement might prefer “class struggle,” one of Žižek’s unique fusions of the two projects is to affirm precisely that the Real is class struggle.8 In this vein, Žižek powerfully defines the Real as a convergence of “contradictory determinations,” and he elaborates a series of antinomies of the Real: pre-­ Symbolic/residue of the Symbolic; fullness/gap; positivity without properties/negativity with only properties.9 To perceive the antinomies of the Real, it is necessary to countenance contradictory determinations neither as complementary (Imaginary) nor as differential (Symbolic), but as vertiginous (Real): “the Real is defined as a point of immediate coincidence of the opposite poles: each pole passes immediately into its opposite; each is already in itself its own opposite.”10 The Real as real contradictory determination in the end signals itself as “nothing but the impossibility of its inscription: the Real is not a transcendent positive entity, persisting somewhere beyond the symbolic order like a hard kernel inaccessible to it, some kind of Kantian ‘Thing-­in-­itself’—in itself it is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness in a symbolic structure marking some central impossibility.”11 It is crucial, therefore, that the Real, as this limit of symbolization, is at once impossible and material—the materialization of impossibility, or an impossibly dematerialized matter—and that “void,” “chasm,” and “gap” are the frequent figures of this antagonistic materiality. Having sketched certain traits of the Real, we can now begin to more systematically think about how it occasions reading practices. We have

38 Anna Kornbluh already remarked in passing that Žižek consistently, from his earliest doctoral work to his most recent treatises on Hegel, reads Lacan as a Lacan of the Real, eschewing the prevailing phase theories. This willingness to treat a corpus as whole, if not self-­mastering, reflects something like a methodological corollary to Lacan’s maxim that the Real is always in its place.12 It is the nature of the Real, if we can be permitted such a formulation, to be amenable to reading even though it is resistant to writing. Indeed, it is a little piece of the Real—the objet petit a—that sets the very wheels of reading and interpretation in motion. We should recognize as a vector of this method that Žižek’s approach to reading Lacan is not systematic but kinetic; it rarely involves tracing out the logic of a given writing or seminar, and far more often honors Lacan’s own disfavor of writing by focusing on the recurrence of problematics across texts and time, on the provisional and contingent formulations of the Real that take shape throughout Lacan’s oeuvre. The Real is the ultimate instance of such rhythmic flow; Žižek’s reading strategy thus could itself be said to perform and, indeed, performatively constitute that which it reads for. As a punctual reader, Žižek recurs to Lacan’s fundamental concepts and intriguing formulations far more often than he recapitulates Lacan’s arguments; he is more likely in the space of a paragraph to constellate snippets of Lacan’s discourse from decades apart in his thought than he is to systematically reconstruct any given Lacanian text. For Žižek, what matters in Lacan is the punctual evanescence of intricate notions, not the philosophical exposition of determinate concepts. More than any other reader of Lacan, that is, Žižek attends to the ways in which the Real’s resistance to conceptualization (“that which resists symbolization absolutely”) means less that Lacan turned to it at a late phase of his thought, as a topic to be apprehended, than that the Real itself turns and twists throughout his oeuvre, materializing in different problematics and with different intensities.13 Following these twists and turns, Žižek retroactively generates a Real Lacan, attending to that in Lacan’s discourse which contours Lacan’s discourse.14 Just as, for Lacan, “the poetics of Freud’s work” opens “the first entryway into its meaning,” for Žižek the repetitions and performativity in Lacan’s discourse signal its preoccupation with the Real.15 Less a topic than a topos, Lacan’s Real becomes real to us only through practices of reading and attending to the pressures it places on metadiscourse.

Reading the Real 39 Žižek has been a formidable reader in this regard, showing deftly how the Real attains palpability in the very texture, contour, and play of Lacan’s language—language that, as Lacan characteristically quipped, was written “not to be read” (c’est pour ne pas le lire).16 At an important moment of methodological reflection on his reading practices, Žižek insists on the necessity of this textural attention, arguing that it emerges from the way Lacan’s corpus deliberately activates a tension between writing and speech. This tension is essential to what Lacan produces, and reading for this tension requires an idea of reading as a recursive, confounding, and aleatory process. Likening the seminars to the associative speech of the analysand and the écrits to the punctuating and instigating discourse of the analyst, Žižek instructs that the only way to read Lacan is to read both the seminars and the écrits side by side, and to read them repetitively and circularly: “If you go directly to the écrits, you won’t get anything, so you should start—but not stop—with the seminars since, if you read nothing but the seminars, you also won’t get it. . . . We are dealing here with a temporality of Nachträglichkeit (crudely translated as ‘action deferred’) which is proper to the analytic treatment itself.”17 Reading Lacan cannot be a project of chronologically tracking concepts, nor of absorbing a body of ideas; it can only be an experience of suspended sense and of “bearing backward”/Nachtragen—of belated and retroactive integration. It is precisely this sensation of retroactivity that is at issue in Lacan’s “return” to Freud, for Lacan wants to circle back to and through the Freudian discourse to punctuate the intensities that remain after the institutionalization of psychoanalysis. To take just one example, at the beginning of Lacan’s seminars he returns to the beginning of Freud’s theory, finding there less a bold new assertion of the procedure of dream interpretation than a strangely vivid underactualization of the discovery of the unconscious. As Lacan points out, Freud’s presentation of the dream of Irma’s injection is resolved within his own text as a dream whose wish is hardly unconscious. Rather than showing dreams as a symbolization of the unconscious, Freud chooses as the opening dream in his work an instance that shows a dream as an expression of something conscious: “its content is the fulfillment of a wish and its motive was a wish.”18 Lacan commences from a question about why this example is chosen as so exemplary, given its failure to actually exemplify the workings of the un-

40 Anna Kornbluh conscious: “How is it that Freud, who later on will develop the function of unconscious desire, is here content, for the first step in his demonstration, to present a dream which is entirely explained by the satisfaction of a desire which one cannot but call preconscious, and even entirely conscious?”19 Honoring in his question the formal placement of the dream in Freud’s text above and beyond Freud’s overt discourse about the dream (“the balance-­sheet he draws up of the significance of the dream is far surpassed by the de facto historical value he grants it by placing it in this position in his Traumdeutung. That is essential to the understanding of this dream”), Lacan reinterprets the dream’s prevalence of triadic motifs: the three male characters in the dream, the three female characters in the dream, and the dream’s surreal representation of the formula for trimethylamine.20 Alongside this clear prevalence of threes, he also notes the nonappearance of Freud himself; his ego does not seem present in the dream. Even though Freud interprets the dream as issuing from the ego, for Lacan “what is at stake in the function of the dream is beyond the ego, what in the subject is of the subject and not of the subject, that is the unconscious.”21 This subject of the unconscious, which becomes palpable via triads, is what Freud wishes, unconsciously, to bring into symbolization; “what gives this dream its veritable unconscious value, whatever its primordial and infantile echoes, is the quest for the word, the direct confrontation with the secret reality of the dream, the quest for signification as such.”22 Lacan’s reading strategy is to stress certain formal elements (the repetition of the three, the priority of the placement of the interpretation, the intensity of the image of the mouth) in order to sense in speech (or, here, the writing of what would be speech in the clinic) what disturbs the sense commanded by the speaker. To read for the evental tenor of Freud’s discoveries, to read for the radical products of the Freudian revolution, to read for the unconscious as “structured like a language,” but of a strange matter nonidentical to language—to read, in short, for the Real—is also to read for what remains percolative rather than codified, to read for what demands a return reading. Žižek’s Real Lacan Lacan’s return to Freud inspires Žižek’s return to the Real Lacan. But how might we read Žižek reading Lacan reading Freud so as to read

Reading the Real 41 literature differently? Engaging the Real emerges in Žižek’s work as a reading project, a project of reading the Real in/of Lacan and of reading the Real on the make. What if we were to read literature the way that Žižek, Lacan, and Freud read the Real? This volume of sic, addressing the literary vicissitudes of Žižek’s reading strategies, sets for itself the task of experimenting with what relations can exist between literature, the ultimate mediation, and the Real, that which is “lacking any possible mediation.”23 The Real is impossible, “is the impossible.”24 Its being or essence eludes possible formulations, schematizations, conceptualizations, nominalizations, and yet it materializes itself effectively, unpredictably. As Alenka Zupančič puts it, “the impossibility of the Real does not prevent it from having an effect in the realm of the possible.”25 Literature, in its fictionality and antireferentiality, in its excessive status vis-­à-­vis what already exists, is at root something like a meditation on the possible. Literature and the Real thus converge inversely: the Real is the impossible, the limit to the possible, while literature is the asymptotic approach to this limit, the multiplication of the possible. Though straddling this possibility/impossibility parallax, the literary and the Real may nonetheless touch elsewhere. Grazing this point of contact, however, requires putting a finer point on literariness as Lacan might conceive it. Although many literary critical employments of Lacan posit the Real as metonymic displacement, it is perhaps more useful to regard the Real as dialectical figuration and defiguration.26 Returning to our provisional indication of the Real’s three dimensions—materiality, a limit to symbolization, and antagonism—we might suggest that a Lacanian literariness inheres in the synchronicity of these three dimensions: the highest formalization of the Real is nothing other than its incessantly elusive yet irrefutably insistent character; the Real is not the motion of deferral or the place of aporia but the contradiction of simultaneous insistence and inexistence, the negativity of deadlock, nonconceptualization, irresolvability, antagonism. This distinction between an idealization of the Real as lack and a materialism of the Real as antagonistic negation (including the negation of oppositions such as negative/positive, form/substance, transcendence/immanence, void/wholeness [“there is no absence in the real”]) has too often been lost on Lacanian literary critics, who have tended to exaggerate Lacan’s affinity with semiotics and with certain versions of deconstruction.27 Any ontology of literature predicated

42 Anna Kornbluh on its deferral of meaning forecloses in advance literature’s excessive, self-­asserting, self-­subtracting meaning, wherein lies literature’s special purchase on—and, indeed, performance of—the Real. We might note that, for a quasi-­deconstructive ontology, the horizon is what literature attempts but ultimately fails to achieve, whereas a Lacanian literary ontology would instead prioritize what literature does, in fact, achieve. To grasp literature’s resonance with the Real requires affirming that literary language fundamentally operates a disjunction between reference and allegory, that the being of the literary inheres not in always already allegorical momentum, but in this disjunctive, nonsensical, material power. Disjunctive, resistant to univocity or conceptuality, literature can also be thought of as a distinct vehicle of antinomies, of aestheticizing antinomic thought without recourse to the mandates of a logical decision. Literature is not propositional; it is, rather, the aesthetic confluence and syncretism of partial, overlapping, and competing positions. This affinity between literature and the Real has not been a proper object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, largely because of Anglo-­ American habits of lumping together incommensurate French traditions under the rubric of poststructuralism. Prominent outlines of twentieth-­ century theory routinely beatify the poststructuralist “trinity” of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, naming Lacan “properly post-­structuralist.”28 Indeed, numerous anthologies of literary criticism and theory not only take this trinity as an organizing principle, but also labor to assimilate the Real to this “poststructuralist” weltanschauung.29 From Lacan’s introduction to the English-­speaking world via the literary critics Jacqueline Rose and Colin MacCabe, to the formidable development of theory by Jane Gallop, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler, the semiotic aspects of Lacan’s thought have been vociferously accentuated.30 Fredric Jameson’s widely cited essay “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” was one of the first to offer some systematic articulations of Lacan’s proximity to poststructuralism and served as a road map for literary critics interested in pursuing the Lacanian way.31 Through the influence of such work, and through the circulation of inscrutable quips like “the unconscious is structured like a language,” we have come to see Lacan as applying Saussurean and Jakobsonian linguistics to psychoanalysis, presenting both language and desire as metonymic glissades with no ultimate terms. Furthermore, Lacan’s commitment to the problematic of the subject as activated by an

Reading the Real 43 encounter with the Other has underwritten countless Foucauldian and identitarian appropriations, in which literature is seen as the vehicle of othering or as the means of propagating and/or fulfilling the lacking subject. The general tendency to assimilate Lacan to a rubric of poststructuralism propounds a version of the subject-­of-­the-­signifier that reduces the subject to ideation and ego, omitting Lacan’s crucial concerns for the contingency and materiality of the subject and thus fundamentally losing sight of the Real.32 Žižek’s reading the Real is a project of distinguishing a Real Lacan from diluted versions that he often polemically labels “poststructuralist.” Although he frequently acknowledges that “poststructuralism does not exist,” he nonetheless regularly hypostatizes it as a thing against which one can more clearly define the specificity of Lacan’s thought.33 We might think of these kinds of pointed, even incautious, gestures as indices of the intensity with which Žižek promotes encounters with the Real. Indeed, it seems paramount for him that the very work of elaborating the Real not only be contrasted with an obsessional deferral of the Real but that the Real itself likewise be contrasted with deferral. This explains why he so starkly insists that an “abyss forever separates the Real of an antagonism from Derrida’s différance”: “différance points toward the constant and constitutive deferral of impossible self-­identity, whereas in Lacan, what the movement of symbolic deferral-­substitution forever fails to attain is not Identity but the Real of antagonism. (In social life, for example, what the multitude of [ideological] symbolizations-­narrativizations fails to render is not society’s self-­identity but its antagonism, the constitutive splitting of the ‘body politic.’)”34 For our purposes, what is most important about the distinction Žižek here draws between the Real and différance is the way in which it clarifies that a Lacan positioned otherwise than poststructuralist, a Lacan of the Real, is the most literary Lacan. Žižek’s Lacan mobilizes a wild materialism for a project of contending with the Real—a project we may come to see as crucially aligned with literary critical reading. Žižek’s mapping of Lacan’s singularity commences in earnest in his (recently published) doctoral dissertation. In a chapter subtitled “Why Lacan Is Not a ‘Poststructuralist,’” Žižek identifies three points of contention between psychoanalysis and so-­called poststructuralism: totalization of the symbolic order, the relation of the subject to the symbolic

44 Anna Kornbluh order, and the status of metalanguage.35 In each case, Žižek delineates a crucial difference between the psychoanalytic and the poststructural conception of the limits of the Symbolic, the end result being a new and different way of encountering or affirming the Real.36 In describing the functioning of the Symbolic, the way that signifiers seem to generate and convey meaning, Lacan introduces a “spatializing device” he calls the point de capiton (quilting point): “This is the point at which the signified and the signifier are knotted together, between the still floating mass of meanings that are actually circulating. . . . Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier, similar to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of a material. It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively.”37 While the chain of metonymic connections among signifiers is unlimited, and the differentiation by way of such connections becomes the prime location of meaning, this self-­perpetuating, self-­differential system depends upon a conditioning element, a signifier that retroactively confers meaning upon the system as a whole. Crucially, such a signifier is itself meaningless; it does not refer so much as perform or “represent . . . the agency of the signifier within the field of the signified.”38 This strange, material “agency” is utterly crucial: whereas a poststructuralist Real might simply be a void, a Lacanian Real is active, effective. This divergence about agency underlies a more explicit debate between Lacan and Derrida regarding the role of supplementarity in the signifying process. At issue here is the difference between the point de capiton—what, in Lacan’s earlier teaching, goes by the name “Master Signifier”—and Derrida’s notion of the “supplement.” As Žižek explains, whereas for Derrida the supplement is that which evades the Master Signifier, existing at its margins, for Lacan such a point of evasion is already internal to the Master Signifier. Lacan, that is to say, posits “the ultimate identity of supplement and Master-­Signifier,” locating the undecidability generated by the supplement “in the very heart of the Master-­Signifier: with reference to the series of ‘ordinary’ elements, the Centre is by definition an excessive, supplementary element whose place is structurally ambiguous, neither within nor without. Lacan’s name for the supplement is le plus-­un, the excessive element, the stand-­in for the lack, which performs the operation of suture; the Master-­Signifier proper emerges

Reading the Real 45 through the ‘neutralization’ of the supplement, through the obliteration of its constitutive undecidability.”39 In short, Lacan “unites in one and the same concept what Derrida keeps apart”: “the Centre Derrida endeavours to ‘deconstruct’” is for Lacan “ultimately the very supplement which threatens to disrupt its totalizing power.”40 At stake in these competing versions of the supplemental relation is thus a core difference about symbolic consistency. So-­called poststructuralism typically takes as ontological “an open, dispersed, plural process (writing, text, difference, the flux of desire, etc.) which is then ‘totalized’ through a ‘nodal point’” and apprehends this procedure of “totalization of the open, plural process through the One” as a “‘suturing’ [that] is always destined for failure.”41 As opposed to this project of finding the failure, Lacan, Žižek stresses, asks how a provisional success was even possible or attractive in the first place: “How is it that there is even the possibility of a ‘quilting point’ in a diffuse text? . . . If totalization and the ‘quilting point’ fail, it is because they can only bring about their own existence through an element that incarnates this very impossibility itself. The quilting point, far from immediately establishing the totality, embodies its very impossibility, the totality as an impossibility.”42 What the notion of the quilting point makes thinkable is not totalization as a product of Lacanian reification, but totalization as a dilemma, a question of structuration, a trajectory for thought. Similarly, Lacan does not practice psychoanalysis as a tool for the individual’s accommodation to reality, but as an interrogation into the constitution of reality: How does something like reality obtain? How does a subject’s truth emerge amid reality? How can subjects confront the radical dimensions of human existence?43 Lacan’s bold statement that “there is no metalanguage” would seem a point of agreement between psychoanalysis and deconstruction (along with postmodernist epistemologies and aesthetics more generally), affirming, as Žižek writes, that “there is no text that is completely metaphysical, nor is there any text that is completely non-­metaphysical.”44 Yet the very form of his statement belies such agreement. In its uncharacteristic brevity and simplicity, its declarative concision, this utterance embeds a performed paradox. Lacan’s form should therefore clue us in that his position is less a pronouncement on logos than an exaltation of performativity and materiality. As Žižek clarifies, Lacan highlights meta-

46 Anna Kornbluh language and its nonexistence as an insurrection of the Real, not just an exclusion or prohibition of the Symbolic: “Metalanguage is not just an imaginary entity. It is Real in the strict Lacanian sense—that is, it is impossible to occupy its position. But, Lacan adds, it is even more difficult simply to avoid it. One cannot attain it, but one also cannot escape it.”45 We can further add that Lacan’s addition takes place precisely by way of the form of his enunciation, its inevitable mobilization of metalanguage exactly in denying the existence of metalanguage. This stain of metalanguage—which is directly refused in quasi-­deconstructive conceptualizations of impossibility—is palpable in the self-­ironizing excess of any given would-­be metalinguistic enunciation; such gestures “produce an utterance of pure metalanguage which, by its patent absurdity, materializes its own impossibility: that is, a paradoxical element which, in its very identity, embodies absolute otherness, the irreparable gap that makes it impossible to occupy a metalanguage position.”46 Impossible statements constitute the very texture of Lacan’s discourse. Claims such as “there is no metalanguage” and paradoxes of the sort “I always tell the truth,” “every truth has the structure of fiction,” and even “there is no sexual relationship” appeal to Lacan because they “keep the fundamental gap of the signifying process open and in this way prevent us from reverting back into a metalanguage position.”47 In Žižek’s reading, Lacan’s consistent attraction to absurdist literature, such as Bertolt Brecht’s didactic pieces and James Joyce’s heteroglossia, stems from the literary performance of the impossibility of metalanguage in gestures more subversive than what he polemically deems the “forced poeticism” of deconstruction—a poeticism that “forbids every simple and direct statement, that always tells us to add yet another meta-­ commentary, take yet more distance[,] . . . not take what we are reading directly, literally, as identical to itself.”48 Literature appears not as indirection, nonstatement, but as an almost unbearable duality of absurdist directness and ironic undertow. This duality has to be rigorously distinguished from garden-­variety irony or standard metafictional gestures. Self-­reflexive reminders of “mere fictionality” in literature may appear to be radical, but “instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of Brechtian dignity, perceiving them as versions of alienation, one should rather denounce them for what they are: the exact opposite of what they claim to be—escapes from the Real, desperate attempts to avoid the real of the

Reading the Real 47 illusion itself.”49 We are therefore left with the question of the shape of non-­Brechtian Brechtianisms. What are the aesthetics of impossibility? Like the analyst, whose strategy of punctuation hosts new symbolizations, a Žižekian literary critic would hail such possible aesthetics of impossibility without foreknowledge of their form. A Literary Real Apropos the distinction of psychoanalysis that he engineers by way of opposition to poststructuralism, it follows that, for Žižek, psychoanalysis commends different reading strategies, different ways of relating to the Symbolic, than those that commonly prevail in literary critical practice. The obsessively deferring form of reading characteristic of certain strains of poststructuralism privileges the coincidence of a text and its truth, the result being that “literary theory becomes the same thing as its ‘subject,’ it becomes part of the literary body, such that we end up with an endless text that presents the perpetually unfinished attempt at its own interpretation.”50 In maintaining a certain gap between literature and theory, a psychoanalytic form of reading, by contrast, privileges the ethical mandate of “the impossible task of symbolizing the Real, inclusive of its necessary failure,” and thus celebrates diverse aesthetic modalities of absurdity, literalism, negation, and impossibility, necessitating a destination for criticism other than educing literature’s autointerpretation.51 Criticism is in this respect a practice and posture that might learn from the example of the clinic: there is no autointerpretation; dyadic projective encounters are the condition of a new discourse irreducible to the analysand’s discourse, a discourse whose novelty is not its metastatus but its disruption of the logical constellations and symbolic architecture of the normative discourse.52 Such a criticism is unsurpassably local, responsive to the situation of the text and its critic (and to debates about what constitutes a situation); it is also ultimately—and constitutively—oriented toward the impossibilities, but necessities, of symbolizing the Real. As alternatives to the type of diluted, perpetually deferring criticism to which Lacan is commonly assimilated, strands of more robustly Lacanian literary practice have surfaced at regular intervals, paving the way toward reading the Real. Notably, these critical works address a

48 Anna Kornbluh range of literary styles and movements, from Shakespeare and Henry James to Rainer Maria Rilke and Toni Morrison. In her introduction to the collection Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Shoshana Felman famously dismantles an earlier twentieth-­ century paradigm for psychoanalytic literary criticism. Setting aside the assumption that literature is an object that psychoanalysis can masterfully exposit, Felman promotes an alternative reading of the copula and for “literature and psychoanalysis”: “The notion of application would be replaced by the radically different notion of implication. . . . [T]he interpreter’s role would here be, not to apply to the text an acquired science, a preconceived knowledge, but to act as a go-­between, to generate implications between literature and psychoanalysis—to explore, bring to light and articulate the various (indirect) ways in which the two domains do indeed implicate each other, each one finding itself enlightened, informed, but also affected, displaced, by the other.”53 Building on but also departing from Felman—and taking inspiration from Žižek to do so—Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Reinhard Lupton mark out the marvelous kinship between the two modes of thought, underscoring the ways in which the relationship of implication must be complemented by a relation of extimité: “the intimate exteriority of the material letter, the mute signifier intransigently lodged through primal repression, incorporation, or foreclosure in the significations that it sets into motion.” Reinhard and Lupton thus offer a reading model that aims “not merely to reveal the symbolic beneath the imaginary or the real beneath the symbolic, but rather, following Lacan, to express the inextricable entwining, at once normative and extraordinary, of the three orders.”54 More recently, Todd McGowan, Eric Santner, and Tracy McNulty have each instantiated possible methods of reading the Real. Presciently, before what, in the past five years, has come to be celebrated as “the critique of critique,” or “postcriticism,” McGowan had in 2004 already audited the shortcomings of this postcritical turn, diagnosing a pervasive phenomologism in theory and culture, a fascination with “experience” and “description” and an eschewing of interpretation and critique.55 Linking this methodological and ethical position to what Žižek calls “the demise of symbolic efficiency,” McGowan argues that literary and cultural texts widely appear to forswear critical interpretation, but that certain kinds of aesthetic production actually make this tendency criti-

Reading the Real 49 cally thinkable.56 In the work of Toni Morrison, for instance, McGowan reads carefully for repetitions, plot construction, parallelisms, and other formal features that work to offer context for the irruptive events whose resistance to interpretation for the characters has seemed to mandate a resistance to interpretation by readers.57 These formal features of the literary text function as a “symbolic frame” within which the Real of the event is not reduced to meaning but also not reduced to nonmeaning. McGowan cites Lacan’s claim that “interpretation is not directed so much at the meaning as towards reducing the non-­meaning of the signifiers.”58 Through his method of reading literature formally and narratologically, in addition to thematically or phenomenologically, McGowan models reading the Real in ways that exceed the mere identification of traumatic events or unsymbolizable dynamics and that instead achieve a greater fidelity to the intricate topology of the Real within a symbolic field. Working from a formalist rather than a historicist sense of literary and aesthetic movements, Santner has argued for an “idiosyncratic genealogy of modernism” as a historically diffuse “significant relay point” for the pressures on symbolization in the era of popular sovereignty.59 The specifically literary enactment of these pressures is best exemplified for Santner in Rilke’s quest for a practice of poetic texture that attains a material heft comparable to that of the plastic arts he deeply admired. This quest takes the form of thick description, a thematization of objecthood, and an activation of manifold sensory impressions, all in the interest of giving aesthetic shape to “the hole in finitude” produced by the jointure of the material body and the materiality of language.60 Rilke is, in other words, a novelistic poet of the Real as the “surplus immanence” of the Symbolic, a poet of “the fundamental impasse affecting the concept and procedures of representation.”61 Santner’s reading strategy engages with the Real as material, as a limit to symbolization, and as political antagonism; his approach to literature continuously juggles the unique literary faculties for these permutations of the Real. To give one final example, McNulty has advocated for a dynamized conception of the symbolic order, encompassing symbolic practices ranging from social formalization and law to creative experimentation and poetry, in the interest of renovating the way we understand and practice the Symbolic’s relation to the Real. Her readings of Oulipo poet-

50 Anna Kornbluh ics, for example, celebrate how that collective’s commitment to formal constraints like haiku, lipogram, or algorithm achieves poetic invention and galvanizes poetic subjectivity. Through their “regeneration of the ­symbolic,” these poets dramatize the fact that, as in psychoanalysis, poetics may engender a “specific modality of language that involves an encounter with an obstacle, limit, or empty space that interrupts another relation to language.” This limit is the Real; it is the material “creative support for the subject of desire.”62 In formalizing this limit directly, Oulipo poetry is a “practice of the letter, an engagement with language in its literality that is also a form of work.”63 While Oulipo is obviously a special case, we might extrapolate from McNulty’s analysis to convoke a criticism that attends to how different literary modes understand limits. What, for instance, are the limits that literary realism understands itself to uphold, and what kind of Real marks their sites?64 What are the aesthetic variations of “regeneration of the symbolic”? Does an author of pure style, like Ernest Hemingway, give contour to the Real or foreclose it? In the vein of these formalisms and asymptotic approaches to impasses, we might base a renewed Lacanian literary criticism on attending critically to the confluence of different levels of the Symbolic within a literary work and to the dynamics that seem to overdetermine or disrupt symbolizations. Žižek often clarifies that Lacanian ethics involves creative deployment of the Symbolic; how might this found a paradigm for critical reading? As he puts it at one juncture, “Lacan is as far as it is possible to be from tabooing the Real, elevating it to some untouchable entity exempted from historical analysis—his point, rather, is that the only truly ethical stance is to assume fully the impossible task of symbolizing the Real, inclusive of its necessary failure.”65 When Lacan defines the Real as that which can be inscribed through a necessary “impasse of formalization,” he invites us to read for literary impasses as sites of literary thinking.66 What happens when a text confronts itself, breaks down, shifts narrative or aesthetic modes precipitously, mobilizes inconsistencies, solicits questions? Failures, enigmas, formal impasses, or aesthetic traversals within texts might well be fruitful points of departure for a renewed psychoanalytic literary criticism. (And perhaps here would be avenues of reading deconstruction in light of the Real, or avenues for broaching new points of contact between deconstruction and psycho-

Reading the Real 51 analysis.67) Reading literary ethics, reading impossible symbolizations, reading the Real: these critical practices would all take for their horizon not a given set of meanings, nor even a given aesthetic, but simply an ontology of literature that privileges its capacity for grappling with the Real. Toward a New Foundation of Literary Materialism What I have been calling “reading the Real” may ultimately be more recognizable under the banner of “materialism,” albeit a wild, antihermeneutical materialism. Such materialism, as the procedure of Lacan’s thought (like Freud’s and Marx’s before him), definitively distances him from philosophy. Lacan himself maintained a rigorous opposition to any form of idealism and insisted that the language of psychoanalysis was other to philosophy.68 Such insistence properly recalls Freud’s own attachment to the clinic and his interest in the prospect of psychoanalysis as a weird science, and has been echoed in Laplanche’s exposition of “psychoanalysis as anti-­hermeneutic” and Badiou’s repeated celebration of Lacan as “anti-­philosopher.”69 Žižek gives us a Lacan oblique to philosophy in general and to poststructuralism in particular. For Žižek, reading Lacan “properly” necessitates that we “change the whole philosophical map,” for, as he insists, between Lacan and “the three main operations identified with European philosophy” during the twentieth century—“hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, and deconstruction”— stands an “abyss.”70 This image of the chasmic gap is an indispensable one for Žižek, for it indicates not only Lacan’s difference from the dominant strands of philosophy but also the very matter of that difference, the voided, material, negative, and antagonistic dimensions of the Real, the thought of which always drives Lacan. In the works he considers his magna opera, The Ticklish Subject and The Parallax View, Žižek offers a succession of figures of gaps with which to illustrate the Real and the materialism it animates. The subtitle of The Ticklish Subject—“the absent centre of political ontology”—already indicates the extent to which a void organizes the line of inquiry there; the text offers dozens of meditations on the gap in being itself as refracted in gaps in formulations of freedom, agency, universality, and the imagination. Ultimately, the material, antagonistic Real emerges in this text as

52 Anna Kornbluh gap: the gap between appearance and essence, logic and being, reality and the Real—this gap is itself the Real.71 The gap theorized at length in The Ticklish Subject reappears under a different figure in The Parallax View, in which Žižek takes the concept of “parallax gap” from the sciences and from literary critic-­theorist Kojin Karatani to name “irreducible antinomy”: Confronted with an antinomic stance in the precise Kantian sense of the term, we should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other (or, even more so, to enact a kind of “dialectical synthesis” of opposites); on the contrary, we should assert antimony as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the irreducible gap between the positions itself, the purely structural interstice between them. . . . [I]s this not Karatani’s way of asserting the Lacanian Real as a pure antagonism, as an impossible difference which precedes its terms?72

To further theorize the parallax, Žižek relies on Kant, Hegel, and Lévi-­ Strauss, but within the first few pages of the book he also discusses Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (as well as proceeding to numerous other literary readings, including a brilliant sustained interlude on Henry James). These diverse literary examples recur as markers of the irreducibility of the gap, aestheticizations of a “minimal difference,” the “pure difference which cannot be grounded in positive substantial properties,” not the difference between two terms, but the difference that generates this difference, the noncoincidence of “the One” with itself.73 The gap of literary minimal difference is not an accidental figure: gap is something like the name of the generation of language. In answer to the question of whether the Real as that which resists symbolization implies a “dispersal of the pure Multiple not yet totalized/ homogenized through some form of the symbolic One” or, rather, implies “an absolute . . . unique event that cannot be put into words”—the question, that is, of whether the opposition between the Real and the Symbolic entails a multiplicity or a singularity—Žižek opts for a third way, in which the Real itself is the mediator of such an opposition. This mediator is “vanishing” and takes the form of the production of a self-­ differing void, “the violent opening up of a gap in the Real which is not yet symbolic.”74 This minimal difference within the Real, this advent of

Reading the Real 53 the Symbolic, is not a spontaneous overflow of plenitude but a material diversification. In working to effectively perform or present this minimal difference, literature appears less as a representation than as the creative formalization of something properly unrepresentable. The minimal difference is not binary, not a split between the two (between the One and its other), but proper to the One, “the split between the One and its empty place of inscription (this is how we should read Kafka’s famous statement that the Messiah will come one day after his arrival).”75 As this passage attests, for Žižek, defining this difference necessitates parallel parenthetical statements from literature. Literature irrepressibly arises in this discussion because of its dynamic operating of this split: literary language not only emerges from splits and divagations at the place of inscription but also theorizes such gaps. If Žižek’s materialism is an irreducibly literary materialism—one called into being in a sense by literature or a literary movement against philosophy—then we must celebrate the attempts of our comrades to refine the philosophical coordinates of this materialism while also holding open the gap that separates psychoanalysis from philosophy. Drawing on Žižek’s insistence on this gap, as well as on German idealism and French rationalism, Adrian Johnston and Tom Eyers have made significant efforts to robustly map the Lacanian terrain of the abyss, bringing Lacanian materialism into sharper relief. For Eyers, Lacan’s work can be seen as “concerned with articulating aspects of language and subjectivity that resist incorporation into networks of idealized meaning or sense. . . . [I]t is this emphasis on the materiality of language, routed through the concept of the Real, that makes up the particular ‘materialism’ of Lacanian theory.”76 This materialism, in Eyers’s view, is ultimately “non- if not anti-­dialectical.”77 Instead, as a theory of the subject’s absurd, self-­referential, insistent consistency, it is “the terrain of a materialism expanded beyond the limits of a theory of signification and gesturing towards a renewed psychoanalytic ontology.”78 Johnston has done more than anyone else to elucidate this ontology. By his lights, the materialism in Žižek’s Lacanianism activates adherence to a disturbance in materiality itself; subjectivity is nothing other than “the most profound symptom” of human corporeality, whose distinctive feature is its self-­division: “the infamous division between res cogitans and res extensa is symptomatic of a prior split, an underlying

54 Anna Kornbluh antagonistic discordance, within the material substratum of (libidinal) being itself.”79 As Johnston concludes, “more-­than-­material subjectivity immanently arises out of the dysfunctionality of a libidinal-­material ground.”80 Žižek’s Lacanian materialism constitutes an adherence to the Real, the antagonism of substance, what Lacan calls the “nature [that] distinguishes itself by not being one” (la nature se spécifie de n’être pas une).81 As Žižek defines that materialism, it is the critical reading of this nonidentity: “Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather, it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me. . . . [M]aterialism means that the reality I see is never ‘whole’—not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it.”82 Materialism is the project of adequation to distortion, a project that is constitutively, necessarily, anticonceptual. Both Johnston and Eyers meticulously systematize what in Žižek remains more sporadic, irruptive, diffuse, and in so doing they may risk missing what makes his irrepressible, exuberant style so key to the thought of the Real: namely, that the Real is not a concept but an immanent material backdrop, itself legible only in sporadic, irruptive, diffuse moments and gestures. Like Lacan before him, Žižek performs the Real. A literary Žižek is a Žižek of the Real. His writings are notoriously indirect, but however much this exasperates academic critics, this style is its own substance: the jolting juxtapositions, vertiginous reversals, alarming repetitions, perversions of meaning, and unexpected flights of his prose materialize the parallax gaps and real antagonisms to which his thought addresses itself. He is, as the highly systematic philosopher Alain Badiou appraises him, not a philosopher, “but in the field of a new topology, a new topology for the interpretation of concrete facts in a situation, political events and so on.”83 The manner in which Žižek does not operate linearly, in the university discourse, but rather twitches “topologically,” in some hybrid of the hysteric’s and the analyst’s discourse, powerfully repeats the manner in which Lacan is not a philosopher, and both such manners may precisely be akin to the manner in which literature is not philosophy: the performative disrupts the conceptual.

Reading the Real 55 Eyers and Johnston are not unconscientious about this irony; the point, though, is that representing the Real(’s) resistance to representation remains a tension—a galvanizing tension to which psychoanalysis addresses itself. Psychoanalysis is a theory and practice of discursive formations and discursive links; the ultimate discourse of the analyst is an unpredictable, unsystematizable play of signification without guarantee, a movement vers un signifiant nouveau that generates new discursive links, new logics of social relations.84 The analyst’s discursive play propagates citations of the analysand’s discourse, highlighting equivocalities, homophones, puns—practicing interpretation not as a technology of decoding, or of hermeneutical meaning making, but as an art of reading without predestination, of resignifying and recontextualizing the signifier so as to highlight its material, contingent force.85 One of Lacan’s final seminars, Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome, focuses precisely on the promise of the literary relation to language, a new dimension of or space for the subject of the Symbolic, whose impetus is a different constellation of symbolizations of the Real. Alighting upon James Joyce’s extraordinarily singular glossolalia as a site or practice of this new relation, Lacan celebrates a materiality of the signifier in which jouissance—or, more precisely, “joui-­sense”—“resonates.” To résonner is to substantiate through repetition (and thus differentiation) a “tone,” a “ring,” a “sound,” a sensuous super- or non-­sensical nugget of language. Resonance is the manifestation of the signifier’s materiality as a force of contingent subjectivation; it is also the name of literary language’s excess. The fundamental resistance of literature to literary criticism (especially today’s hegemonic historicist criticism) is its enigmatic resonance, the sounding and resounding of literary works beyond and in excess of their conditions of production, determination, and possibility. The literary Real and the renewed practice of reading at which this sic volume aims may therefore afford a strike against today’s regnant symbolic constellation—ideology, accumulation, historicism, the university discourse—precisely by accentuating that which in the signifier remains uncountable, what resonates beyond quantification. This strike has been so wonderfully conceived by Juliet Flower MacCannell in her commentary on Seminar XXIII that it is worth quoting at length: Lacan describes our current relation to signifiers, in which we tend to regard signifying chains from the point of view of their already massive

56 Anna Kornbluh accumulation, as a “treasury” of meanings: a rich storehouse of already acquired “total” knowledge (or what he terms a Hegelian savoir-­totalité). . . . [S]omething has to strike the signifiers it has amassed (like so much capital). . . . The existence of the treasury of signifiers as a vast quantity of “ones” is a fantasy because it elides the fact that there is or can be no “one” without “zero.” Only the insertion of a zero, a gap, a rupture could hope to free up or loosen the “meaning” repressed in or under them. . . . [W]hat else is there to “strike” this mass, to deliver the creative blow? It could only be an evocation of what an S1 actually starts out as: an utterance, a partial speech, an intonation that is not yet a “meaning,” not yet tied to a long chain of signifiers.86

Pivoting upon its elusive encounters with the strange, material Real, Lacanian materialism looks rather different from the materialism criticized by the brand of poststructuralism that has dominated literary studies. Not a materialism of determination but a materialism of negation and antagonism, Žižek’s Real Lacan and the literary criticism pursuant thereto read with and for manifold literary aestheticizations of antagonism. Reading the Real, reinventing literary critical materialism: let’s strike! Notes 1 Lacan emphasizes that the return to Freud most fundamentally means reading Freud’s texts. See Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 334–63. 2 Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: Norton, 2007), 2. 3 Criticism galvanized by the Real might be illuminated by contrasting reference to what Alain Badiou calls the “passion of the Real.” In describing the twentieth century as one of ideological fervor for the “immediately practicable here and now” and for the putative immediacy of “bodies and languages” as exhausting ontology, Badiou paints a damning picture of the collusions between the worst horrors of twentieth-­ century politics and the epistemological trends of academic historicism. Yet, in the interest of what he calls “materialist dialectics,” as an opposing itinerary for thought, Badiou also holds open the possibility of a “subtractive path” whose aim is not “to purify reality” but to “subtract it from its apparent unity so as to detect within it the miniscule difference, the vanishing term which constitutes it . . . this immanent exception.” Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), 65. Materialist dialectics might be one name for reading the Real, reading for miniscule differences and immanent exceptions: materialist because committed to the material

Reading the Real 57 events and material inscriptions of dialectical differentiation; dialectics because committed to the essence of difference as the force of a third term marking the gap between the two terms of a merely apparent difference. Another relevant point of contrast is today’s hegemonic New Historicism, in which, as Fredric Jameson sagely describes it, “extreme theoretical energy is captured and deployed, but repressed by a valorization of immanence and nominalism that can look like a return to the thing itself.” Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 190. 4 Such gestures might be evident in Žižek’s frequent distinctions between a Lacan of desire and a Lacan of the drive, in his emphasis on a break in Lacan’s thought after Seminar XI, and in his distinction between a structuralist Lacan and a Real Lacan. 5 Lacan, Écrits, 17; and Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 98. 6 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 82; and Lacan, Écrits, 413. 7 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 169. For more on Žižek’s distinction between the “posed” and “presupposed” Real, see Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 18. 8 On the role of antagonism in Lacan, see especially Todd McGowan and Paul Eisenstein, Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012). With regard to class struggle, Žižek explains, “Class struggle is ‘real’ in the strict Lacanian sense. . . . Class struggle is none other than the name for the unfathomable limit that cannot be objectivized, located within the social totality, since it is itself that limit which prevents us from conceiving society as a closed totality.” Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 1994), 22. For similar iterations of this point, see Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 164; Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 199; and, most recently, his review of McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red, “Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red,” Verso Blog, May 26, 2015 (available at http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2007-­ecology -­against-­mother-­nature-­slavoj-­zizek-­on-­molecular-­red), in which he asserts that “class antagonism is the Real which is obfuscated by the multiplicity of social conflicts.” For a thorough discussion of class struggle as the Real, see Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 47–94. 9 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 169–71. 10 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 172. 11 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 173. 12 Another maxim of Lacan’s is resonant here: “a letter always arrives at its destination.” As Žižek interprets this maxim, in explicit riposte to Derrida, “When the letter arrives at its destination, the stain spoiling the picture is not abolished, effaced: what we are forced to grasp is, on the contrary, the fact that the real ‘message,’ the real letter awaiting us is the stain itself. We should perhaps reread Lacan’s ‘Seminar on “The Purloined

58 Anna Kornbluh Letter”’ from this aspect: is not the letter itself ultimately such a stain—not a signifier but rather an object resisting symbolization, a surplus, a material leftover circulating among the subject and staining its momentary possessor?” Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 10. 13 The quotation is from Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 66. 14 The opening chapter of Enjoy Your Symptom!—“Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?”—is perhaps the quintessential instance of Žižek’s project of retroactively generating a Real Lacan. In it, Žižek interprets Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”—a text that itself “stays within the confines of the ‘structuralist’ problematic of a senseless, ‘mechanical’ symbolic order regulating the subject’s innermost self-­experience”—by reading it from the perspective of the Real instead of the Symbolic. As he explains: From the perspective of the last years of Lacan’s teaching, the letter which circulates among the subjects in Poe’s story, determining their position in the intersubjective network, is no longer the materialized agency of the signifier but rather an object in the strict sense of materialized enjoyment—the stain, the uncanny excess that the subjects snatch away from each other, forgetful of how its very possession will mark them with a passive, “feminine” stance that bears witness to the confrontation with the object-­cause of desire. What ultimately interrupts the continuous flow of words, what hinders the smooth running of the symbolic circuit, is the traumatic presence of the Real. (26–27) 15 Lacan, Écrits, 267, 102. In his own close reading of Lacan, Bruce Fink is a vigilant reminder of this insistence. See his Lacan to the Letter: Reading “Écrits” Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 67. 16 Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 251. 17 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 129. 18 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1953), 118–19. 19 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 151. 20 For the quote, see Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 162. 21 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 159. 22 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 159–60. 23 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 164. 24 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 123. 25 Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000), 235. As Žižek puts it in explaining why the “ethics of the Real” does not involve merely “accepting the Real of a structural impossibility,” “the ‘Real as impossible’ means . . . that

Reading the Real 59

26 27 28

29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40

the impossible does happen, that ‘miracles’ like Love (or political revolution . . .) do occur. From ‘impossible to happen’ we thus pass to ‘the impossible happens’— this, and not the structural obstacle forever deferring the final resolution, is the most difficult thing to accept.” Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 84. Tom Eyers has worked to develop this duality in Lacan and the Concept of the “Real” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The quotation is from Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 313. Dino Franco Felluga, “Modules on Lacan: On Psychosexual Development,” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, January 31, 2011, https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english /theory/psychoanalysis/lacandevelop.html. Felluga likewise classifies Lacan as a poststructuralist throughout his Critical Theory: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2015). See also Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 116, 146; Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 139; and Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 94. See Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Judith Butler, “Arguing with the Real,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 187–222. Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 338–95. On this point, see Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the “Real,” 163. Žižek, “Da Capo senza Fine,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 243. Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996), 100–101. See Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-­Railton (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014). Furthermore, in each case this different relationship to limits brings a different set of political commitments, insights, and tactics into relief. What is at stake in the articulation of these differences is not only the very practices of reading that would flow from specific approaches to the Symbolic but also the interrelation between reading practices and social acts. These differences are starkly laid out in the debate between Butler, Laclau, and Žižek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-­ Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 267–68. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 99. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 196. Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 99.

60 Anna Kornbluh 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66

Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric, 202. Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric, 203. On these questions, see Žižek’s introduction to How to Read Lacan, 1–6. Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric, 205. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 156. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 156–57. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 156. Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric, 207. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 59. Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric, 205. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 200. On disruption as a crucial motif in psychoanalytic political theory, see McGowan and Eisenstein, Rupture. Shoshana Felman, “To Open the Question,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 8–9. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 4–5. See Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 101. The phrase “the demise of symbolic efficiency” is from Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 322. McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction?, 95–120. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 212. Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 102–3. Santner, The Royal Remains, 211. Santner, The Royal Remains, 92. Tracy McNulty, Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 258–59. McNulty, Wrestling with the Angel, 266. Jameson’s recent The Antinomies of Realism (New York: Verso, 2013), for example, theorizes realism as riven by contradictory impulses that might be thought of as antagonistic: between past and present narration, affect and nomination, providence and freedom. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 100. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 93.

Reading the Real 61 67 For the strongest such avenue I know of, see Steven Miller, War after Death: On Violence and Its Limits (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 68 See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 221. 69 See Jean Laplanche, “Psychoanalysis as Anti-­hermeneutics,” Radical Philosophy 79 (1996): 7–12; and Badiou, “Lacan and the Pre-­Socratics,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2006), 7–16. 70 Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Malden, MA: Polity, 2004), 46, 48. 71 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 54–57. 72 Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), 19. For Karatani on parallax, see his Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2003). 73 Žižek, The Parallax View, 18, 11. 74 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 239. 75 Žižek, The Parallax View, 38. 76 Eyers, “Lacanian Materialism and the Question of the Real,” Cosmos and History 7, no. 1 (2011): 155. 77 Eyers, “Lacanian Materialism,” 156. 78 Eyers, “Lacanian Materialism,” 164. 79 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 44. 80 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 273. 81 Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, 1975–1976, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 12. 82 Žižek, The Parallax View, 17. 83 “An Interview with Alain Badiou: ‘Universal Truths and the Question of Religion,’” by Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 3, no. 1 (2005): 41. 84 See Lacan, “Vers un signifiant nouveau,” Ornicar? 17–18 (1979): 7–23. For an elaboration of the prospects of this notion, see Žižek, The Parallax View, 304–8. For a more sustained theorization of this concept as it relates to materialism, see Tom Eyers, Post-­ rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-­war France (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 65–67. 85 One pragmatic discussion of the analyst’s discourse is Bruce Fink’s Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners (New York: Norton, 2007). 86 Juliet Flower MacCannell, “The Real Imaginary: Lacan’s Joyce,” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 1 (2008): 50–51.

2 Looking Awry: Shawn Alfrey

Žižek’s Ridiculous Sublime

For the last decade or so, Slovenian political philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has occupied the position of both public intellectual and academic bad boy, by turns alienating and galvanizing his audience. Žižek is so provocative in part because he refuses to offer a theory of subjectivity that can meet progressives’ needs. Instead of embracing some kind of Habermasian “intersubjectivity,” Levinasian “alterity,” or “object-­relations” solution to the problem of the subject, he consistently joins Hegelian dialectics to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to make clear that at no time can the subject be rescued from its circuit of identifications, desires, and drives. While a great deal of attention has been given to the political implications of this commitment to Lacan and Hegel, Žižek’s own attention is just as often devoted to the realm of literary and aesthetic concerns—to film studies, science fiction and popular culture, literature, opera, and even architecture. In fact, Žižek’s political and aesthetic theories are intimately connected. As critic Philip Shaw puts it, “ideology is for Žižek an aesthetic matter.”1 The aesthetic tradition to which Žižek’s writing is most indebted is that of the sublime. In his most widely read book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek uses the logic of sublimity to explain various aspects of society, culture, and politics, and this emphasis on the sublime is inscribed throughout his work.2 Indeed, as I argue below, it is by means of the sublime that Žižek most powerfully joins Hegelian

Looking Awry 63 dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—a combination that ultimately enables him to reinvigorate the aesthetic itself. The sublime as an aesthetic tradition reflects the subject’s ambivalent place in a world of things and others. For most of its history, it has repeated the goals of what we now call “subject formation”: the development of a stable, recognizable, unitary identity—the ability somehow to gain authority and achieve power and voice.3 As Thomas Weiskel points out vis-­à-­vis the romantic sublime, the sublime’s “structure of transcendence” encodes a magisterial version of subjectivity.4 It thus repeats the violence that Emmanuel Levinas ascribes to ontology generally, wherein “the other . . . dissolve[s] into the same: every representation . . . a transcendental constitution” that results in an “imperialism of the same.”5 Contrary to the romantic sublime, Žižek’s sublime, as I explore below, is situated along the generative chain of signification, not the traditionally vertical domain of transcendence. It is spatial, architectural, horizontal. It takes its cue from what Žižek considers related gestures in Hegel and Lacan: the “gap in immanence” inscribed in Hegel’s dialectic that keeps thesis and antithesis in relation and forestalls any final Aufhebung, and the act of anamorphosis that underlies Lacan’s conception of the objet petit a, the “sublime object” that keeps interpretation circulating. For Žižek, the sublime reveals itself not in political consensus but through what he will come to call “parallax,” a phenomenon in which, instead of a unilateral perspective, we are confronted with numerous provisional, partial viewpoints. Žižek’s sublime thus describes an ambivalent subject: a combination of Hegel, whose dialectic highlights the codependence of master and slave, and Lacan, whose model of the subject inscribes within it both subjectivity and subjection. The Not-­So-­Romantic Sublime The sublime traces its roots to rhetoric, especially the classical rhetoric whose goal was to facilitate the transmission of power and influence from speaker to hearer, writer to reader. From the classical period on, much of the theory on the sublime has concerned itself with just how to understand this apparent exchange of power and authority. In response to a felt threat or excess—the vastness of the sea, the non-­negotiable

64 Shawn Alfrey weight of history, the intransigence of the categorical imperative—the subject experiences transport and awe and is somehow ultimately able to identify with the power that so disturbed him or her. Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher argue that Žižek’s political philosophy vacillates between values they describe as “enlightenment” and “romantic.”6 Similarly, discourse on the sublime—and on the subject it constructs—is often poised on the border between these two camps. In their discussions of the sublime, both Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant navigate this divide. For both philosophers, the sublime experience runs its course from a romantic sense of awe and excess to the reassuring stability of reason. The subject experiences first subjection and then mastery. For Burke, the aesthetic of the sublime, “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” offers a possible curative to human excess by revealing a supposedly universalized field of strong emotion.7 It yokes the subject to a transcendent judgment that is at once subjective and universal.8 Similarly, for Kant, the sublime begins in excess and confusion, only to become the very sign of reason’s supremacy. In fact, it allows reason to be recognized as an a priori category, “the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense.”9 While the sublime for Burke and Kant might work to separate an enlightenment from a romantic subjectivity, it is worth remembering that even these categories are less divided than perhaps codependent.10 In his aforementioned study of the sublime’s structure of transcendence, Weiskel reminds us that “what happens to you standing at the edge of the infinite spaces can be made, theoretically, to ‘mean’ just about anything. Such agreement as in fact occurs . . . is a precise function of a correlative ideological unanimity.”11 From Kant on, the “ideological unanimity” regarding the sublime has ensured that, one way or another, confusion gives way to reason, whichever version of reason is currently ascendant.12 Weiskel’s study focuses on the relations hidden by such seemingly natural, a priori divisions. Instead of emphasizing the sublime’s apparently inevitable closure into transcendent “concept thoughts” like “self, imagination, or God,” he is interested in the disruptive, dynamic nature of the sublime experience itself.13 Neither purely an enlightenment nor a romantic subject, the subject central to Weiskel’s study is more ambivalent—and more modern. Following Harold Bloom’s influential theory

Looking Awry 65 of “the anxiety of influence,” Weiskel submits the sublime to a psychoanalytic critique.14 Focusing on the “larger narrative form” embedded in the sublime’s structure, he looks to Longinus’s famous description of the sublime experience: “The ‘proud flight’ of the soul, ‘filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard,’ appears at once to acknowledge authority and to fulfill identity. How is this possible? . . . [T]hrough an amazing and subtle metaphor whose larger narrative form has been marked indelibly by Freud as the Oedipus complex.”15 Weiskel’s psychological account describes the sublime as an “economy” wherein the imagination’s relation to the external, sublime object is internalized.16 He identifies three phases in its representational economy, from harmony between the signifier and signified, to an excessive dissonance in their relation, and back to harmony again—but with a new, “meta” character to their relation.17 By breaking down the experience of the sublime into phases, Weiskel calls our attention to the complex nature of sublime power and the circuit it travels. He also hints that its “structure of transcendence” might be a bit of a ruse, a story we tell ourselves—a sublime object of ideology, as Žižek might put it. Indeed, although he is working with Freudian language, the economy Weiskel here describes seems to anticipate Žižek’s Lacanian investment in the objet petit a, that which memorializes the gap within the symbolic order where the Real peeks through: “I see now—this will be the working definition of the sublime—it is that moment when the relation between the signifier and signified breaks down and is replaced by an indeterminate relation.”18 Informed as it is by psychoanalytic and poststructuralist thinking, Weiskel’s work signaled a new approach to the sublime. Subsequent theorists have similarly reconceived its modes and meanings, offering such possibilities as “American,” “postmodern,” “women’s,” and “technological” sublimes.19 Jean-­François Lyotard, for instance, describes a postmodern sublime that, instead of demanding a nostalgic and thus reactionary form of closure and identification with power, might in fact help us “activate differences” and function as a curative to technocratic hegemony.20 From a different direction, Žižek himself has added two more possibilities: the “Wagnerian” and—appropriately denying the logic of categories—the “ridiculous,” both of which I will examine in detail below.21

66 Shawn Alfrey The economy whose relations Weiskel calls our attention to is understood by Žižek according to Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order. Despite his influence on theories of the sublime, Freud himself was famously insusceptible to the “oceanic feeling” associated with it and did not seem to consider it of much interest to psychoanalytic theory.22 In contrast, Lacan did recognize the importance of the sublime to psychoanalysis. His theory of “sublimation”—intimately related to the sublime—would generate the most important concept of his later work, the objet petit a, the sublime object.23 Still, as Shaw notes, Lacan’s published work fails to address the sublime in any sustained way, and it would remain to Žižek to take up “the detailed analysis of the sublime, promised by Lacan but never quite realised.”24 Indeed, the majority of Žižek’s work can be described as an attempt to explain Lacan’s theory of the subject and the objet petit a according to the aesthetic of the sublime. Much of his work explains how the numinous nature of the sublime object is the effect not of reason but of desire. As Žižek explains in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Lacan recognized Kantian ethics, specifically the famously sublime formulation of “pleasure in pain,” as foundational to psychoanalytic theory.25 Here, Kantian and Lacanian theories align: “the object is received as sublime with a pleasure that is only possible through the mediation of displeasure. . . . In short, the Sublime is ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’ it is a paradoxical pleasure procured by displeasure itself (the exact definition—one of the Lacanian definitions—of enjoyment [jouissance]).”26 Žižek likewise explores the relation between Kant’s moral and empirical law and the Lacanian theory of the symbolic order, asking us to look at the psychic economy embedded in each: “It is a commonplace of Lacanian theory to emphasize how this Kantian moral imperative conceals an obscene superego injunction: ‘Enjoy!’—the voice of the Other impelling us to follow our duty for the sake of duty is a traumatic irruption of an appeal to impossible jouissance, disrupting the homeostasis of the pleasure principle and its prolongation, the reality principle. . . . This surplus produced through renunciation is the Lacanian objet petit a, the embodiment of surplus-­enjoyment.”27 As Žižek explains, jouissance, the paradoxical pleasure in pain experienced as the sublime, is the result of the subject’s relation to the symbolic order. For Lacan, the subject emerges as an effect of the symbolic order. The ego depends on the “reason” the sym-

Looking Awry 67 bolic order provides, but the symbolic order cannot contain or describe the Real, that which lies “beyond” symbolic representation. Like Kant’s sublime, the Real is intrinsically elusive, excessive, and awesome. Unlike Kant’s formulation, however, for Lacan the Real-­as-­ sublime is not a transcendent category, and our encounters with it do not elevate us to the godlike plane of reason. Instead, the pleasure in pain of jouissance is the expression of the incompatibility of drive and desire, which together describe the inaccessible horizon that can only mean the end of the world. Thus, while the sublime’s impossibility reveals for Kant, the moralist, a sign of reason’s (and our own) reassuring end point, for Lacan, the therapist, it is merely the vacuum into which we throw everything we’ve got. Between the Real, which we can never attain, and the symbolic order, through which we attempt to capture it, lies what Lacan termed the objet petit a, the supplemental lack, “the leftover of the Real” that “set[s] in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation.”28 Key to our aesthetics and our ideology, the objet petit a, the sublime object, is Žižek’s focus. He embraces “the Freudian insight according to which identification is, at its most radical, identification with the lost (or rejected) libidinal object. We become (identify with) the object of which we were deprived, so that our subjective identity is a repository of the traces of our lost objects.”29 As the embodiment of the disruption caused by the Real, the sublime object litters our psychic and social geography. Read through Lacan, it figures a sort of relational dynamo—the circuit between the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. A Miserable Piece of the Real Throughout The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek provides examples of sublime objects. As he often does, he looks to Alfred Hitchcock, whose filmic landscape is littered with sublime objects—resonant, ominous, and unexplained. He cites the “MacGuffin,” the famous plot device in Hitchcock films that is ultimately nothing more than a prop, an otherwise superfluous object intended to put in motion an exchange between characters, as the “purest case” of the objet petit a. Both outside the meaning of the events and central to their occurrence, the MacGuffin is “a pure void which functions as the object-­cause of desire.”30 The

68 Shawn Alfrey Titanic, on the other hand, is a real thing whose history and conception would seem natural material for the sublime. According to Žižek, however, the Titanic achieves its sublime status only once it is lost, its import retroactively assigned. Žižek describes the Titanic as “the material leftover, the ­materialization of the terrifying, impossible jouissance. By looking at the wreck we gain an insight into . . . a space that should be left unseen.”31 The sublime object can be found not only in things but in subjects as well. Indeed, it is that which is “in the subject more than subject, . . . the object in subject which is constitutive for the subject.”32 Žižek often cites, for instance, the Sadean victim, who poses endless aesthetic and philosophical possibilities and problems for the writer. Her torture and use cannot satisfy the drive or reach the source of the desire. Instead, she becomes the embodiment of the Real—the impossible jouissance: “In his work [Sade’s] victim is, in a certain sense, indestructible: she can be endlessly tortured and can survive it; she can endure any torment and still retain her beauty. It is as though, above and beyond her natural body . . . , she possessed another body, . . . a sublime body.”33 This sublime body is the objet petit a, that miserable little piece of the Real resistant to the symbolic order, reflecting “an obscene injunction: ‘Enjoy!’”34 As sublime object, the Sadean victim exists beyond the homeostasis of both the reality principle and the pleasure principle. For both Žižek and Lacan, Sophocles’s Antigone is an exemplary sublime object. Lacan describes how Antigone’s refusal of Creon’s decree results in her transformation from volitional subject to object of fascination. Although his discussion concerns the ethics of psychoanalysis, the fascination Antigone holds for him lies not in the ethical power of her choice but in its quality, as Lacan puts it, of “pure desire.” Having made her choice, she commits herself to a space “between the two deaths.”35 Here in the sepulcher, between the life she has already relinquished and the death she is about to embrace, she becomes a sublime object. What both Lacan and Žižek emphasize is how the incommensurability of Antigone’s situation is embodied in the resistance posed by her abject physical being. Lacan describes the effect of her physical presence on the judging Chorus, for whom she possesses “unbearable splendor. She has a quality that both attracts us and startles us.” She “causes the Chorus to lose its head,” thereby “caus[ing] all critical judgment to

Looking Awry 69 vacillate, stop[ping] analysis, and plung[ing] the different forms involved into a certain confusion.”36 Antigone relinquishes her agency and status as subject by following her desire. Rejecting the law, she paradoxically becomes the object that reveals its demands, disrupting judgment and decorum in the process. Standing in place of the deadly real thing, representing the unrepresentable, she becomes sublime.37 According to Žižek, Antigone is in fact a saint. A priest, claims Žižek, as the functionary of a religious system, is not sublime. A saint, by contrast, “occupies the place of objet petit a, of pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution. [She] enacts no ritual, [she] conjures nothing, [she] just persists in h[er] inert presence. . . . [W]e must [therefore] oppose all attempts to domesticate her, to tame her by concealing the frightening strangeness, ‘inhumanity,’ a-­pathetic character of her figure.”38 Whether thing, victim, or saint, the sublime object contains within itself an insoluble relation between signifier and signified. As Žižek points out, for both Kant and Lacan, the nature of representation itself is a central question housed in the sublime. In Kant’s understanding, the failure of representation is the inability of one realm to adequately contain the other, and this very failure points to a sphere beyond the chain of signification. As Žižek puts it, “with Kant the Sublime designates the relation of an inner-­worldly, empirical, sensuous object to Ding an sich, to the transcendent, trans-­phenomenal, unattainable Thing-­in-­Itself.” Through the sublime object we surmount the gap between noumena and phenomena, and “by means of the very failure of representation, we can have a presentiment of the true dimension of the Thing.”39 In Lacan, by contrast, there is no outside to the circuit of signification. The signifier does not hide or hint at a transcendental signified—there is nothing behind the veil other than the symbolic order that installed the veil itself. As a leftover of the Real, the surplus produced by the signifying operation, the sublime object/objet petit a represents the “‘pure’ signifier,” the impossible-­real kernel that is “in an object more than the object”—in Lacanian terms, “an object raised to the level of the (impossible-­real) Thing.”40 Instead of a vertical structure of transcendent, a priori categories, in fact, Lacan posits a very different schema, that of the point de capiton, the “Master Signifier” that stitches meaning together, retroactively, along

70 Shawn Alfrey the very horizontal chain of signification. The promise of a transcendental signified thus yields to the effects of a “‘rigid designator’ [which] aims . . . at that impossible-­real kernel,” a “signifier without a signified.”41 The goal is not to describe a space beyond the chain of signification but to give expression to the circuit of signifiers established by the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. When it comes to the sublime’s representational logic, then, Lacan and Kant necessarily part company. For Žižek, Lacan teaches us that, far from escaping the field of representation, the sublime is valuable because it is embedded there. And that problematic space is best understood not according to Kant’s transcendental categories but according to Hegel’s dialectics. Like Kant, Hegel understands the sublime as a relation between the noumenal (the Idea) and the phenomenal. Unlike Kant, however, Hegel understands the sublime object as part of a dialectical process. According to Žižek, Hegel’s departure from Kant lies not in any devaluation of the division between noumena and phenomena but in taking this relation more “literally”: “[Hegel’s] position is that there is nothing beyond phenomenality, beyond the field of representation. . . . [T]he experience of the radical fissure between [the Idea and phenomena] . . . is already Idea itself, as ‘pure,’ radical negativity.”42 Thus, Hegel’s dialectic is inscribed in the relation between noumena and phenomena and, as dialectic, is mobile and relational in a way that Kant’s sublime could never be. This is why, as Žižek emphasizes, Hegel’s sublime object does not refer to a transcendent thing but “occupies the place of the Thing as the void, . . . an object which . . . ‘gives body’ to the absolute negativity of the Idea.”43 This absolute negativity of noumena/Idea leads to what Hegel calls “infinite judgment,” a judgment in which “subject and predicate are radically incompatible, incomparable.”44 Hegel’s examples of infinite judgments—for example, “the Spirit is a bone,” “wealth is the self,” “the State is Monarch,” “God is Christ”—constitute what we might consider a grammar of the Real. As Žižek explains, in such judgments we are dealing with a miserable “little piece of the Real”—the Spirit is the inert, dead skull; the subject’s Self is this small piece of metal that I am holding in my hand; the State as the rational organization of social life is the idiotic body of the Monarch; God who created the world is Jesus. . . . Herein lies the “last secret” of dialectical speculation: not in the dialecti-

Looking Awry 71 cal mediation-­sublimation of all contingent, empirical reality . . . but in the fact that this very negativity, to attain its “being-­for-­itself,” must embody itself again in some miserable, radically contingent corporeal leftover.45

By rejecting transcendence in favor of a radical dialectic, Hegel’s sublime shares the aesthetic and ethical stance of Lacan. The goal is not to escape representation but to engage it, not to hide in fantasy but to traverse it—to find those radically contingent relations where the symbolic order shows its work, as it were, in the scattered miserable pieces of the Real. Žižek thus values Hegel’s sublime because, in its syntax of radically incomparable subject and predicate, it puts noumena and phenomena side by side, on the horizontal, generative chain of signification, thereby protecting the distance between the Symbolic and the Real.46 Indeed, as Fredric Jameson argues, both Lacan and Hegel rely on a radical dialectic in order to preserve what he terms “incommensurability.” In this practice, instead of a transcendent Aufhebung, even Hegelian synthesis resists closure: “If synthesis there be in Hegel, then it seems crucial to insist that there is only one, that of the . . . so-­called Absolute Spirit— a stopping point so enigmatic that all kinds of different interpretations have been proposed that satisfy no one. . . . [T]he dialectic is . . . a tormented kind of language which seeks to register incommensurabilities without implying any solution to them by some facile naming of them, or the flattening-­out of this or that unified philosophical code.”47 From here, Jameson emphasizes that Lacan’s many graphic elements work similarly to “register incommensurabilities”: “I think we cannot neglect the spatial passion involved in the pursuit of these concentrated hieroglyphs or ‘characters,’ nor can we avoid seeing in them a specific kind of desire, the desire called formalization, which would seem to me to be something quite distinct from scientificity and the claims made for that.”48 In a way that scientific discourse cannot, Lacan’s graphic depictions inscribe ongoing negotiations between diachronic and synchronic, paradigmatic and syntagmatic, metonymic and metaphoric. They reveal a relationality and dynamism that, Jameson claims, will ultimately submit the object-­cause of desire (objet petit a) to a new aesthetic: the objet petit a will “be given its value by its position within the larger narrative microcosm which is the fantasm,” and this, in turn, will result in a

72 Shawn Alfrey “whole new rhetorical development” in which “the fateful notion of a dimension ‘beyond’ will colonize a whole species of visual jenseits, in the form of veils or tempting coverings of all kinds, which seduce not so much because they have an object behind them as, rather, because they dramatize the absence of an object and are signs and substitutes for just such an absent object.” Thus, “a whole aesthetic opens up—architecture as the setting in place of the void, as shaped absence; and a whole wealth of cultural and literary examples becomes available.”49 Enter the Ridiculous Sublime The new aesthetic Jameson alerts us to describes the trajectory in Lacan that Žižek has taken up with a vengeance. Like Lacan, Žižek focuses on aesthetic, architectural, and structural objects; he embeds Lacan’s own arrows and diagrams in his texts and organizes his work in seminar-­style asides and seemingly random digressions that open up spaces within his text. Even his cover art reveals his “spatial passion.” The cover of the first edition of The Sublime Object of Ideology, for instance, includes a box with part (or all?) of one of surrealist Max Ernst’s prints. The image, which depicts a woman supine on a bed, mostly covered but with her breasts exposed—a quintessential object, both of desire and of the sublime (and, indeed, if one looks closely enough, one can see that the woman is being leered at by a partially hidden man standing outside her bedroom/cage)—is taken from Ernst’s collage novel Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), a book itself pieced together from an array of Victorian magazines and illustrations. As Elizabeth Cowling explains, surrealists like Ernst “loved collage because it enabled them to bring together found materials, placing them in a context which was unexpected and irrational.” When “reading” Ernst’s collage novels, “you look from one image to the other and you try to create a kind of connecting thread. And the same sorts of characters appear, but there’s no kind of rational explanation—it’s a kind of anti-­novel, in the normal sense.”50 In placing images of beauty and violence, narrative and nonsense, side by side, Ernst’s collages consistently rebuff viewers’ attempts to read them for meaning, thereby foreclosing the possibility of any seamless interpretation. The shifting perspective necessitated by collage is, in fact, key to

Looking Awry 73 Figure 2.1 The cover of the first edition of The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Žižek’s sublime, and he celebrates such visual jenseits in two seemingly unrelated champions of the sublime: David Lynch and Richard Wagner. Jameson’s use of the term jenseits alerts us to a paradox, the possibility of a visualization of something beyond or outside its field. For Žižek, this is accomplished through the sublime object, which both embodies and facilitates a process understood variously as Lacanian “anamorphosis,” Shakespearean “looking awry,” and Žižek’s own “parallax view.” Lacan borrowed the term anamorphosis from visual art, where it describes an image whose perspective has been purposely distorted and which, to be seen correctly, requires viewing from a particular intended angle.51 In Lacan’s hands, this angle becomes the “interested” view necessitated—and made unavoidable—by desire. Borrowing the language of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Žižek describes anamorphosis as the practice of “looking awry”: “If we look at a thing straight on, i.e., matter-­of-­ factly, disinterestedly, objectively, we see nothing but a formless spot; the object assumes clear and distinctive features only if we look at it

74 Shawn Alfrey ‘at an angle,’ i.e., with an ‘interested’ view, supported, permeated, and ‘distorted’ by desire. This describes perfectly the objet petit a, the object-­ cause of desire: an object that is, in a way, posited by desire itself. . . . [T]he object a is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze ‘distorted’ by desire, an object that does not exist for an ‘objective’ gaze.”52 Looking awry is looking sideways, recognizing a choice regarding which image to see, positioning oneself along one particular perspective. In his essay The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, Žižek pays homage to a similar perspectival collage—a composite, side-­by-­side view he finds in the work of filmmaker David Lynch, in particular the film Lost Highway. Žižek focuses on the illogical, horizontal quality of the film, what he calls its “decomposition”—that is, its presentation of two competing story lines side by side, each with the same claim to primacy. In the first, a man named Fred (Bill Pullman) finds himself in prison after apparently murdering his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), whom he believed to be cheating on him. In the second, the man in prison disappears, having apparently morphed into a completely different man, Pete (Balthazar Getty), and is set free. Once free, he cheats on his girlfriend with a woman who is not Renee (her name is Alice) but who is played by the same actor (Arquette). These competing, seemingly incompatible story lines are intimately linked through the transformation of one set of characters (Fred becomes Pete), the shared identity of two different characters (Renee and Alice), and the wending in and out of two others, Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and an unknown “Mystery Man” (Robert Blake). What’s more, each character’s role seems to slant between the two story lines: the victim in plot 1 is the victimizer in plot 2; the failed lover in plot 1 is the sexual adept in plot 2; the same actress plays both the murdered adulteress and the murderous object of desire; and so on. Connecting both plots is one bit of discourse that begins and ends the film: “Dick Laurent is dead.” This statement, which Fred does not understand and which seems to have no context or agency, is by the end of the film understood by Fred as his own utterance, describing the murder he will commit, not of Renee, but of Mr. Eddy (a.k.a. Dick Laurent). Žižek begins his interpretation of the film by noting that, in Lynch’s technique, “reality and fantasy no longer relate vertically (fantasy beneath reality, sustaining it), but horizontally (side by side)”: “Lynch puts aseptic, quotidian social reality alongside its fantasmatic supplement, the

Looking Awry 75 dark universe of forbidden masochistic pleasures. He transposes the vertical into the horizontal and puts the two dimensions—reality and its fantasmatic supplement, surface and its ‘repressed’—on the same surface. . . . This displacement of the vertical into the horizontal brings about a further unexpected result: it explodes the very consistency of the film’s fantasmatic background.”53 In this form, any sense of Kantian transcendence is jettisoned, and, as in the Hegelian sublime, the transcendent and the phenomenal lie on the same plane. Operating side by side, the Symbolic and the Real comment on each other such that the viewer is forced to experience (if not recognize) the work that our Imaginary does to suture the two together. The plot is thus robbed of any reliable interpretation, and the characters lose all psychological “depth.” Instead of a typical psychological drama, which would retain a clear distinction between interior and exterior motivation, Lynch’s film, Žižek claims, presents us with an allegory, as it were, of the desires and displacements of psychoanalytic theory itself, above all the process of traversing the fantasy housed in the objet petit a. Indeed, it is this process—the psychic work of traversing the fantasy—that causes Lost Highway to mirror both the temporal structure and the results of the psychoanalytic “cure”: “Do we not have here a situation like that in psychoanalysis, in which, at the beginning, the patient is troubled by some obscure, indecipherable, but insistent message (the symptom) which, as it were, bombards him from outside, and then, at the conclusion of the treatment, the patient is able to assume this message as his own, to pronounce it in the first person singular. The temporal loop that structures Lost Highway is thus the very loop of the psychoanalytic treatment in which, after a long detour, we return to our starting point from another perspective.”54 The “insistent message,” the symptom traversed by the film’s end, is the declaration early on that “Dick Laurent is dead.” As noted above, this statement is made again at the end of the film. This time, however, the subject of the discourse is known, as is the significance of the statement. Lynch’s ridiculous sublime is thus invested in the sort of Hegelian dialectic described above. What happens when the viewer—like the analysand—­ returns to the object from “another perspective,” a psychic “parallax view,” is the opening up of the object, a recognition of its limits and edges. Thus, Žižek claims that Lynch represents through his visual bricolage “the fundamental fantasy staging the primordial scene of jouis-

76 Shawn Alfrey sance, and the whole problem [becomes] how to ‘traverse’ it, to acquire a distance from it.”55 By setting alternate meanings side by side, Lynch, Žižek claims, invites us to navigate the chain of signification and find ourselves in it. Ideology and the libidinal, the Symbolic and the Real, oscillate in this horizontal space, and we realize that “the difference between ‘subjective’ pathologies and the libidinal economy of the ‘objective’ ideological system [is] ultimately something inherent to the subject(s): there is an ‘objective’ socio-­symbolic system only insofar as subjects treat it as such.”56 A series of unimportant, “ridiculous” objects and events take on the quality of the sublime as a result, we realize, of the subject’s investment in them: “what we are not aware of is not some deeply repressed secret content but the essential character of the appearance itself.” Here we return to the radical nature of Hegel’s “infinite judgment”: Spirit is a bone; “appearances do matter: you can have your multiple dirty fantasies, but it matters which of them will be integrated into the public domain of the symbolic Law, of the big Other.”57 Of course, the goal of the psychoanalytic cure is not to erase desire. It is merely to help the analysand realize that the drive will not eradicate it either. Traversing the fantasy will, however, help the subject come to a new understanding—gain some distance and “a new perspective,” as it were—in relation to it. As Mark Wieczorek points out in his introduction to Žižek’s essay, traversing the fantasy in fact amounts to an ethical choice: “the drive ‘is . . . the ethical compulsion which compels us to mark repeatedly the memory of a lost cause.’ . . . The marking of all lost causes signals the impossibility of all totalizing ethics and morals.”58 If Lynch’s films offer a ridiculous sublime, Wagner’s operas inscribe what might seem another version of the Kantian sublime. Yet whereas the Kantian sublime, as Frances Ferguson notes, involves the “heroic possibility of encounter with one’s own death”—an encounter that ultimately results in a “consciousness of the importance of self-­preservation”—the Wagnerian sublime, according to Žižek, “enacts the concentrated overpowering force of the one demand, the unconditional demand of love,” with love morphing predictably into “the ecstatic self-­obliteration of death.”59 Following such a logic, love is sublime insofar as it is “the primordial act of violence, the ruthless privileging of one object at the expense of all others,” including oneself.60

Looking Awry 77 Žižek here makes what might seem a surprising choice for an exposition on the ethics and aesthetics of the sublime. Yet he is determined to stake out, as the title of his essay states, “The Politics of Redemption, or, Why Richard Wagner Is Worth Saving.” Wagner is worth saving for Žižek because his work permits something like a fortunate fall: “What Wagner perceives as the Fall is in effect . . . the explosive opening, the emergence of human freedom proper.”61 In order to recognize this explosive opening, Žižek suggests, we must first find a new way to read Wagner—a “horizontal” way of reading. Characteristically for Žižek, Wagner’s political redemption requires a new understanding of the logic of representation. He points to Wagner’s theory regarding the redemptive role of art. Somewhat ironically, when religion becomes artificial, its true spirit can be saved only by “abandoning the dogma and expressing only the authentic religious emotion, that is, by transforming religion into the ultimate aesthetic experience.”62 By way of the sublime object, the leftover of every process of symbolization that gives expression to the Real, the metaphysical experience of revelation is transformed into an aesthetic representation. Working backward, as it were, Wagner’s representational strategies do not posit the transcendent realm of the Kantian sublime. Instead, they reflect the Hegelian dialectic—a dialectic in which, as Žižek explains, there can be no “‘reconciliation’-­mediation between Idea and phenomena.”63 As is the case with Lynch’s ridiculous sublime, the Wagnerian sublime functions to keep reality (the Symbolic) and the Real in a sort of oscillating relation, the very representational nature of these “forcefully externalized” figures maintaining the separation between them. Thus, the “problem” in Parsifal, for instance, “is not the unmediated dualism of its universe (Klingsor’s kingdom of fake pleasures versus the sacred domain of the Grail) but, rather, the lack of distance, the ultimate identity, of its opposites.”64 Likewise, the true topic of Tannhäuser is that of “a disturbance in the order of sublimation: sublimation starts to oscillate between th[e] two poles” of “the Ideal-­Symbolic and the Real; Law and Superego”: “The key . . . is not, as is usually claimed, the conflict between the spiritual and the physical, the Sublime and the ordinary pleasures of the flesh, but a conflict inherent to the Sublime itself, splitting it up.”65 In order to recognize and preserve this split, Žižek proposes what he calls a “horizontal” reading. Like the side-­by-­side strategy of Lynch,

78 Shawn Alfrey the reading of Wagner that Žižek proposes is a reading along the chain of signification, a metonymic reading: “The way to read Wagner is . . . with a ‘horizontal’ interpretation, not a ‘vertical’ one: we should look for structural variations on a gesture or an object, not directly for its meaning. . . . The first step in a proper understanding of Wagner’s work is to establish the multiple series of features which serve as lateral links between different operas by Wagner himself, as well as between Wagner’s operas and other composers’ operas.”66 Reading for these lateral links is akin to viewing Lynch’s film with, as it were, an eye in both camps. The “new perspective” Žižek applauds is in fact a result of reading for the lateral links, of watching one actor split into two characters, or, as he would describe it, “looking awry.” Such a horizontal reading can also help us read “Wagner’s progress” as more complex, as itself part of a dialectical process. Instead of accepting Wagner’s late metaphysical turn as an abandonment of belief in revolutionary change in favor of a pessimistic withdrawal into the unifying oblivion of the “Night of the World” (as is typically considered to be the case with the lovers Tristan and Isolde), Žižek asks, “What if the shift to a ‘pessimist’ metaphysics compels us to raise the question of social change again, from a new perspective?”67 As Žižek recounts, Wagner’s early “revolutionary” stance is indebted to a Kantian sublime that “naive[ly]” seeks to restore the notion of “primordial harmony” in a necessarily fascistic gesture: namely, an attempt to “liquidat[e] the excessive element which introduced imbalance and antagonism (the Jew).”68 Žižek suggests, however, that we can read the figure of the Jew in the early Wagner as a more Hegelian than Kantian sublime object, one that embodies, once again, a miserable little piece of the Real. In one of the many instances in which he cites anti-­Semitism as the “zero-­level” of ideology, Žižek, in discussing the Ring cycle, argues that, “for Wagner, the external intruder (Alberich [the Jew]) is merely a secondary repetition, externalization, of an absolutely immanent inconsistency/antagonism (Wotan’s)”: the Jew represents not an external evil but, rather, a “primordial imbalance . . . at [the] very centre” of the Grail community itself.69 Similarly, the embrace of the “ecstatic realm of the night”—juxtaposed with the reason-­and-­reality-­dependent light of day—can be read not as capitulation to the void but, rather, as another formulation of the shaped absence of the incommensurable, the repre-

Looking Awry 79 sentation of what is unrepresentable, and the opening of a space where the two can exist side by side. Throughout the essay Žižek makes numerous suggestions as to how to properly stage Wagner’s plays, and in its final pages we know why: the Real will take up residence in that most artificial of places, an opera house, Wagner’s Bayreuth, the site for a hundred years of the annual Wagner Festival. Here, in the darkened space, the audience will experience a kind of immersion into the ecstasies of the night. Here, too, Wagner might be appropriated for other politics.70 Enacting and putting into motion all kinds of desire, the Bayreuth that Žižek envisions amounts to the sublime object writ large. Along its boards, the arrangement of the actors that Žižek suggests would require a horizontal reading from each member of the audience, each of whom would, by necessity, view the stage from a “different perspective.” In this sublime space, claims Žižek, we might choose to “look awry” and thus “make it clear to ourselves where we stand, in the most radical existential sense.”71 Room for a (Parallax) View In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek embraces the aesthetic of the sublime for revealing the distance between our (symbolic) representations and the Real. In his readings of both the Lynchian “ridiculous sublime” and the “Wagnerian sublime,” he invokes the sublime in order to provide similar openings for “new perspectives” on our social and psychic realities. Joining Lacan and Hegel, these horizontal readings refuse transcendence, enforce our recognition of parallax and incommensurability, and provide examples of the spatial desire that might allow us to traverse the fantasy that is ideology. In his essay on Wagner, Žižek asks us, as readers, to do the same sort of sideways, horizontal reading that Lynch’s Lost Highway requires of us as viewers. Such a reading or viewing provides the new perspective that Žižek has been positing ever since he hinted at the perspectival variance in the sublime object itself: “The sublime object is an object which cannot be approached too closely: if we get too near it, it loses its sublime features and becomes an ordinary vulgar object—it can persist only in an interspace, in an intermediate state, viewed from a certain perspective, half-­seen.”72 In closing, I want to briefly discuss how, in his more recent work,

80 Shawn Alfrey Žižek takes on some truly sublime problems of scale and scope. In The Parallax View (2006), for instance, he takes the sublime object into a space whose best analogy is (the very small) quantum physics, while in Living in the End Times (2010) he tackles the problem of totality through a treatment of (very large) global capitalism. To begin with the former, early on in The Parallax View, Žižek explains that his choice of the term parallax is a strategic way to address “the basic ‘law’ of dialectical materialism, the struggle of opposites”: “The first critical move is to replace this topic of the polarity of opposites with the concept of the inherent ‘tension,’ gap, noncoincidence, of the One itself. This book is based on a strategic politico-­philosophical decision to designate this gap which separates the One from itself with the term parallax.”73 This move has at least two important strategic effects: first, unlike the sublime, with its historical connections to aesthetics and Enlightenment thought, it relies on terminology that resonates for a number of domains of modern theory: quantum physics, neurobiology, ontological difference, the Real, the unconscious, and philosophy as such. The language and value of the fundamental gap and tension inscribed in the sublime, however, remain. Second, the perspectival view—looking awry—is recognized at the very heart of epistemology. Indeed, the “parallax view” serves as a quantum iteration of the sublime, a “new science of appearances”: “In quantum physics, the ‘appearance’ (perception) of a particle determines its reality. The very emergence of ‘hard reality’ out of the quantum fluctuation through the collapse of the wave function is the outcome of observation, that is, of the intervention of consciousness. Thus consciousness is not the domain of potentiality, multiple options, and so on, opposed to hard singular reality—reality previous to its perception is fluid-­multiple-­open, and conscious perception reduces this spectral, preontological multiplicity to one ontologically fully constituted reality.”74 Žižek’s move from the language of sublimity to that of parallax constitutes more than a simple rebranding, however. Just as quantum physics opens up the relation between observer and observed, Žižek’s focus on the parallax view provides a foundation, as it were, for social and political movements that might otherwise be missed. Akin to the spatial desire inscribed in Lacan’s graphic aesthetics, Žižek’s emphasis on architectural spaces leads to an almost quantum reinvestigation of the public sphere that might even accommodate the “paradox of universal

Looking Awry 81 singularity.”75 From the quantum to the quorum, the parallax view reveals a space—a shaped absence—where illogical constructions interact and protect the variety possible within the relation between subject and object and the fantasmatic reality constructed by that relation. In fact, it shares the structural logic of Lacan’s famous grapheme, the lozenge (◊), where “less than,” “greater than,” “and,” and “or” all seem to be operative in the relation between the “barred subject” (Ꞩ) and the objet petit a. Here is articulated the possibility of social contestation, democratic politics, and discourse itself. Thus, Žižek points to the great structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-­Strauss, who discovered just such a parallax view long ago among the two subgroups of a Winnebago village: “A member of the first subgroup (let us call it ‘conservative-­corporatist’) perceives the ground-­plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second (‘revolutionary-­antagonistic’) subgroup perceives his or her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier. . . . The point Lévi-­Strauss wants to make is that . . . the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group-­belonging.”76 Not only is there no correct or singular perspective here, but both are in fact incompatible fantasms: “The very splitting into the two . . . perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant[,] . . . a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize. . . . [T]he ‘Real’ here is not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village. . . . [T]he Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective.”77 Both of these views exist simultaneously. A parallax view is the representational paradox through which each can be seen. In philosophical terms, focusing on this shift is akin to shifting from Kant’s transcendence to Hegel’s immanence and recognizing that the “place of freedom” is not the “noumenal beyond” but “the very gap . . . in immanence itself.”78 This “gap in immanence itself” is the gap Žižek has been exploring all along: the separation in Lacan’s ethics, the clash/superimposition of alternate narratives in Lynch, the horizontal reading that joins and divides readings of Wagner, the possible social space that is the composite view between the two versions of the village. Each text of Žižek’s that I’ve discussed asks us to linger on and embrace the paradoxes, energies, and quantum spaces figured by the sub-

82 Shawn Alfrey lime object. In Living in the End Times, however, Žižek counsels us on how to decathect, as it were—how to let go of the sublime object that provided so much of his initial inspiration: Marxist theory itself. The text is structured according to Elisabeth Kübler-­Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.79 The grief Žižek asks us to navigate is that caused by the apparent failure of Marxism as a response to the dominance of global capitalism. The problem, he tells us, lies in Marxism’s approach to this massive, truly sublime whole. Marxism has understood this complex totality through a system of Kantian antinomies, “oscillat[ing] between the ontology of ‘dialectical materialism’ which reduces human subjectivity to a particular ontological sphere . . . and the philosophy of praxis which, from the young Lukács onwards, takes collective subjectivity which posits/mediates every objectivity as its starting point and horizon, and is thus unable to think its genesis from the substantial order, the ontological explosion, the ‘Big Bang,’ which gives rise to it.”80 In contrast to this antinomial thinking, Žižek maintains that we must accept the more dynamic, Hegelian relation between noumena and phenomena, theory and praxis, subject and substance: “‘Reconciliation’ between subject and substance means acceptance of this radical lack of any firm foundational point: the subject is not its own origin, it is secondary, dependent upon its substantial presuppositions; but these presuppositions do not have a substantial consistency of their own and are always retroactively posited. The only ‘absolute’ is thus the process itself.”81 In Hegel’s terms, as Žižek reminds us, “the truth is the whole”; however, that whole is not a static monism or the “natural immediacy” ideology might present to us. Instead, it is a particularly complex and relational mode of thought: “The totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion—to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include in a system all its ‘symptoms,’ its antagonisms and inconsistencies, as its integral parts.”82 It is the aesthetic of the sublime that describes the “traumatic kernel” wherein these symptoms circulate and that stands as a testament to the process. Ultimately, for Žižek, “the ‘whole’ is unthinkable without reference to the disturbing power of the sublime.”83

Looking Awry 83 Notes 1 Philip Shaw, The Sublime (New York: Routledge, 2006), 137. 2 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). 3 Not surprisingly, the sublime has been prominent during periods dedicated to the rise of the citizen, the political agent, the individual actor: the classical Greece of Longinus, Kant’s Enlightenment, Whitman’s America, etc. 4 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 5 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 38–39. 6 Matthew Sharpe and Geoffrey Boucher, Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 25. Sharpe and Boucher identify two competing Žižeks: the “Radical-­Democratic” Žižek (“Žižek1”), influenced by Enlightenment thinking and guided by an ironic theory of ideology, and the “Revolutionary-­ Vanguardist” Žižek (“Žižek2”), influenced by “anti-­Enlightenment Romanticism” and guided by a cynical theory of ideology (24–26). Žižek2, they argue, has won the day, with the result being a totalizing subject-­object incapable of meaningful political action (28). 7 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 33–34. 8 As Weiskel notes, the same holds for Kant, but to an even greater degree: “Kant’s insistence on th[e] principle of a subjective but universal, a priori aesthetic divides his theory at a stroke from its empiricist predecessors in the eighteenth century. The aesthetic judgment is ‘final’ or ‘purposive’ (Zweckmässig) only with reference to the subject but is necessarily determined for that subject and is therefore universally valid and separate from any other teleology or motive.” Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 38. 9 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 98. 10 Although he is concerned with periodization, Clifford Sisken’s comments resonate in this context: When Immanuel Kant answered the question “What is Enlightenment?” in 1784, he defined it not only as a philosophical concept but as a particular moment in history. Looking back from the 1780s—over decades of debate regarding reason and religion, scepticism and idealism—he had no trouble naming his period: “we do live in an age of enlightenment.” Looking back to the 1780s, however, is another matter. The irony, for us, of Kant’s confident assertion is that he made it at precisely the moment that has since come to mark the start of another age: the period we call Romantic. Kant’s certainty about his own age is now a central uncertainty of our own: the problem of periodization. Was there a period shift in the late eighteenth century? Do the terms “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism” describe it? The progressive agenda of Enlighten-

84 Shawn Alfrey ment complicates the confusion. If, for example, history followed the developmental logic of Kant’s vision—he argued that his present “age of enlightenment” would lead to “an enlightened age”—Romanticism as the next period would realize rather than reject what came before. But what we call Romanticism came with its own baggage—claims of difference, of a turn from the past. In that scenario, Romanticism has been either celebrated as a remedy—a cleansing new “Spirit of the Age”—or blamed as a reaction—an emotionally charged retreat from the rational means and ends of Enlightenment. Clifford Sisken, “The Problem of Periodization: Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Fate of System,” in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 101. 11 Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 28. 12 In his own update of the idiom of the sublime, Shaw marks its moments as follows: “The sublime has stood, variously, for the effect of grandeur in speech and poetry; for a sense of the divine; for the contrast between the limitations of human perception and the overwhelming majesty of nature; as proof of the triumph of reason over nature and imagination; and, most recently, as a signifier for that which exceeds the grasp of reason.” Shaw, The Sublime, 4. 13 Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 28. 14 Bloom had asked us to reflect on the mechanism at play in poetic askesis: “Freud, in The Ego and the Id, speculated that sublimation was closely related to identification, an identification itself reliant upon distortion of aim or object, which may go so far as transformation into the opposite. . . . The final product . . . [would be] the formation of an imaginative equivalent of the superego, a fully developed poetic will, harsher than conscience.” Harold Bloom, “Freud and the Poetic Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity,” in Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Perry Meisel (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981), 119. While he recognizes this type of identification in many descriptions of the rhetorical sublime, Weiskel is not interested in elaborating on the poetic will that is the “final product” for the subject of the sublime. Instead, he focuses on the relations and representations that give rise to it. 15 Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 10. 16 Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 23. 17 Weiskel (The Romantic Sublime, 23–24) charts the sublime’s progress as follows: In the first phase, the mind is in a determinate relation to the object . . . [where] [n]o discrepancy or dissonance interrupts representation, the smooth correspondence of inner and outer. . . . [But] in the second phase, the habitual relation of mind and object suddenly breaks down. . . . [T]here is an immediate intuition of a disconcerting disproportion between inner and outer. Either mind or object is suddenly in excess—and then both are, since their relation has become radically indeterminate. . . . In the third, or reactive, phase of the sublime moment, the mind recovers the balance of outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object such that the very indeterminacy which erupted in phase two

Looking Awry 85 is taken as symbolizing the mind’s relation to a transcendent order. This new relation has a “meta” character, which distinguishes it from the homologous relation of habitual perception. 18 Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, ix. 19 See, for instance, Patricia Yaeger, “Toward a Female Sublime,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues in Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 191–212; Lee Edelman, “At Risk in the Sublime: The Politics of Gender and Theory,” in Kauffman, Gender and Theory, 213–24; Jean-­François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Frances Bartkowski, “A Fearful Fancy: Some Reconsiderations of the Sublime,” boundary 2 15, no. 1 (1988): 23–32; and Mary Arensberg, introduction to The American Sublime, ed. Mary Arensberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 1–20. 20 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 82. 21 Because of their sustained attention to a radical aesthetics, Žižek’s texts in fact hold a place of honor in at least two recent books on the sublime: Shaw’s aforementioned The Sublime and my The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Gertrude Stein (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000). 22 See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 11. 23 Lacan defined sublimation as the process whereby a common, everyday object is “elevated to the dignity of the Thing.” See Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 112. 24 Shaw, The Sublime, 137. As Shaw points out, “Twice in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis . . . Lacan notes the centrality of the sublime in connection with his thought. In the first case, however, he leaves the task of explaining the concept to another speaker, whose discourse is not printed in the proceedings of the seminar . . . , and in the second his promise to ‘take up the question’ of ‘the Kantian definition of the sublime’ is left suspended” (132). Shaw goes on to explain how the structure of desire and Lacan’s reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle reflect the structure of the sublime. 25 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 81–82, 202–3. 26 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 202. 27 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 81–82. 28 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 185. 29 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption, or, Why Richard Wagner Is Worth Saving,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2006), 253. 30 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 163. 31 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 71. As Žižek explains, only as a wreck does the Titanic become a piece of the Real: “[Its] fascinating power cannot be explained by the symbolic overdetermination, by the metaphorical meaning of the Titanic: its last resort is not that of representation but that of a certain inert presence. . . . The wreck

86 Shawn Alfrey

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

51

of the Titanic therefore functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing” (71). Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 180. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 134. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 81. For Lacan’s extended reading of Antigone, see “The Ethics of Tragedy: A Commentary on Sophocles’s Antigone,” in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 243–90. As Žižek notes, “this place ‘between the two deaths,’ a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-­traumatic kernel in the midst of symbolic order.” Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 135. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 247, 281. See Shaw, The Sublime, 137. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 116–17. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 203. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 97, 202–3. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 97. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 205. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 206. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 207. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 207. Žižek discusses the ethics of this division as follows: “We may denote the ethics implied by Lacanian psychoanalysis as that of separation. The famous Lacanian motto not to give way on one’s desire [ne pas céder sur son desir]—is aimed at the fact that we must not obliterate the distance separating the Real from its symbolization: it is this surplus of the Real over every symbolization that functions as the object-­cause of desire [objet petit a]. To come to terms with this surplus (or, more precisely, leftover) means to acknowledge a fundamental deadlock (‘antagonism’), a kernel resisting symbolic integration-­dissolution.” Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 3. Fredric Jameson, “Lacan and the Dialectic: A Fragment,” in Žižek, Lacan: The Silent Partners, 375. Jameson, “Lacan and the Dialectic,” 374. Jameson, “Lacan and the Dialectic,” 372–73. Elizabeth Cowling, “‘Une Semaine de Bonté [A Week of Kindness]’ by Max Ernst,” YouTube video, 4:33, posted by “The National Galleries of Scotland,” July 10, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5wLxO_YMqg. For Lacan, the quintessential example of anamorphosis in art history is Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. See Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 79–90. As Lacan explains, if one looks at Holbein’s painting straightforwardly, a strange, unidentifiable object appears in the bottom center of the canvas. It is only when one looks at the painting askew, or “awry” (as Žižek would put it), from the right-­hand side of the canvas, that the object comes into relief and is revealed to be a human skull.

Looking Awry 87 52 Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1991), 11–12. 53 Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 21, 35. 54 Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 18. 55 Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 20. 56 Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 26. 57 Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 6. 58 Mark Wieczorek, introduction to Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, xii. 59 Frances Ferguson, “The Nuclear Sublime,” diacritics 14, no. 2 (1984): 7; and Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 233, 259. As Žižek points out, this is precisely the case in Tristan and Isolde, in which “love is an act of radical transgression which suspends all socio-­symbolic links and, as such, has to culminate in the ecstatic self-­obliteration of death” (259). 60 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 247. 61 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 247. 62 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 233. 63 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 204. 64 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 237. 65 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 235, 234. 66 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 235–36. 67 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 246. 68 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 246. 69 Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 244–45. As Žižek points out, that the threat posed to the Grail community is ultimately immanent rather than external is suggested by both Rheingold and Parsifal. In the case of the former, the “source of all evil” lies not in Alberich’s fatal choice but, rather, in Wotan’s earlier choice to destroy the World-­Tree—an “ethically worse [choice] than Alberich’s.” Similarly, in the case of the latter, the true threat is not the outsider, the Jewess Kundry, but two insiders: Klingsor, “the evil magician and Kundry’s master,” and Titurel, whose “excessive fixation on enjoying the Grail . . . is at the origin of the misfortune” (244–45). For other of Žižek’s examinations of anti-­Semitism as the zero-­level of ideology, see chapters 4 and 6 of Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); and “Reverberations of the Crisis in a Multi-­centric World,” in Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010). 70 As Žižek (“The Politics of Redemption,” 264–65) elaborates: Why not leave behind this search for the “proto-­Fascist” elements in Wagner and, rather, in a violent gesture of appropriation, reinscribe Parsifal in the tradition of radical revolutionary parties? . . . When one approaches the Festspielhaus during intermissions, the first impression, of course, is that of a scene from a Fellini film: aseptic old men in dark suits silently roaming around, accompanied by ladies with too much makeup, a true dance of the vampires, a reunion of living dead playing

88 Shawn Alfrey high society. . . . Is this, however, the whole truth? Or was Boulez right when, back in the 1960s, in one of his memorable anarchic-­avant-­garde outbursts, he said that all opera houses should be bombed—except Bayreuth? 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption,” 265. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 170. Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), 7. Žižek, The Parallax View, 170, 172. Žižek, The Parallax View, 10. Žižek, The Parallax View, 25. Žižek, The Parallax View, 25–26. Žižek, The Parallax View, 25. See Elisabeth Kübler-­Ross, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families (New York: Macmillan, 1969). Žižek, Living in the End Times, 228. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 229. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 231, 154. Shaw, The Sublime, 138.

3 The Bankruptcy of Historicism: Introducing Disruption Todd McGowan

into Literary Studies

The Silent Majority Historicism dominates stealthily. Unlike theoretical positions such as feminism and Marxism, critics do not have to explicitly avow their allegiance to historicism in order to practice it. One can engage in a historicist reading of a text without seeming to engage in a historicist reading. For the practitioners of historicism, this obscurity is a virtue rather than a deficit. It provides the historicist with a certain maneuverability that the avowed theorist lacks. This is precisely the claim made by H. Aram Veeser in his introduction to The New Historicism (1989), the first anthology of New Historicist scholarship. “Suspicious of any criticism predetermined by a Marxist or liberal grid, New Historicists,” Veeser asserts, “eschew overarching hypothetical constructs in favor of surprising coincidences.”1 The implication of Veeser’s claim is that abandoning theory for historicism brings a sense of liberation, as if the critic begins to operate outside the bounds that constrain those who take up a particular theoretical position. The problem with such a claim is that this sense of liberation almost always coincides with the onset of an invisible constraint. That is to say, the historicist’s sense of freedom from a predetermined theoretical grid is not the same as interpreting without a predetermined theoretical grid. Historicism predicates itself on the absence of any transhistorical universals. It eschews, say, psychoanalytic theory because, though its

90 Todd McGowan practitioners claim for it a universal validity, it is simply the product of a particular historical situation (with a certain sexual morality that made Freud’s analyses pertinent at the time). The historicist can grant a situational importance to psychoanalytic theory, but he or she cannot accept that this theory transcends the historical context that gave rise to it. This presupposition that historical context is determinative and obviates the possibility of universals is precisely the universal of historicism. Despite the rejection of the universal, historicism cannot avoid its structural necessity. No matter how hard one tries to be historicist, one can never be historicist enough. And yet this dilemma has not at all diminished the appeal of the historicist approach. Since the 1980s an unrelenting tide of historicism has ruled literary studies. Led by Stephen Greenblatt’s encounter with Michel Foucault— an encounter that produced New Historicism as its offspring—historical analysis thoroughly supplanted the dominance of theoretical exploration in literary studies. From the 1970s to the early 1980s, a theoretical wave fundamentally reshaped literary study. Though actual deconstructionists were relatively rare, Jacques Derrida functioned as the emblem for this movement, along with other theorists like Roland Barthes, Jean-­François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard. As the 1980s advanced, however, this explosion of theory began to wane. Although Derrida remained a significant figure on the intellectual scene, he ceded his position as a leading indicator of thought to Foucault, one of his teachers.2 Foucault is the unqualified parent of the historicism that continues to dominate literary studies. Though no longer the explicit reference point for most historicists, Foucault’s historicist conquest of theory remains the background against which today’s historicists operate.3 Foucault and the historicism that he helped spawn treat literary works as constructions of the cultural milieus in which they were written. According to this paradigm, there is a direct through line from the culture to the literary product. A glance at any contemporary historicist book or essay makes this completely evident. J. Gerald Kennedy, for instance, opens a recent essay on Edgar Allan Poe by proclaiming that “authors are made, not born, fashioned by a subtle process embedded in the systems of production and distribution that constitute print culture.”4 What stands out about Kennedy’s statement is the extent to which it doesn’t stand out. Such statements, which echo Foucault’s, sound commonsensi-

The Bankruptcy of Historicism 91 cal to contemporary ears.5 Explaining an author by situating that author in the cultural milieu that produced him or her remains the common way of addressing a literary figure. The true index of a system’s dominance, however, is never merely the number of open adherents it counts but rather the way in which that system’s lexicon and logic come to determine what constitutes a field’s common sense, its accepted wisdom, even among its opponents. When I have opponents speaking my language, the game is over before it even begins. This is the case with historicism today. Even many of today’s avowed theorists resort to the language of historicism when discussing their theoretical projects. This is evident in the widespread use of the term archive to describe the group of texts that one has chosen to discuss.6 The transformation of this term from signifying a collection of historical records, or a site where records are stored, to signifying a group of texts discussed by a critic reveals that theorists today are thinking according to the presuppositions of historicism. Take, for instance, queer theorist J. Jack (né Judith) Halberstam. Halberstam criticizes fellow queer theorists Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman not for their philosophical missteps but rather for the restrictiveness of their archive. He writes, “The real problem, to my mind, with the antisocial turn in queer theory as exemplified by the work of Bersani, Edelman, and others has less to do with the meaning of negativity—which, I am arguing, can be found in an array of political projects, from anticolonialism to punk—and more to do with the excessively small archive that represents queer negativity.”7 Halberstam presents himself unabashedly as a queer theorist, and yet historicism provides him with both the terminology and the logic for countering other queer theorists with whom he disagrees. This is true of most contemporary theorists, who operate within the hegemony of historicism rather than carving out a territory outside of this hegemony.8 I focus on the historicist transformation of the term archive here because it is indicative of the main effect of historicism on literary studies today—namely, the abandonment by literary critics of the straightforward interpretation of literary texts in favor of a more properly scholarly pursuit: the perusal of archives in search of the social contexts that would render the act of interpretation moot or even unnecessary. From the historicist’s perspective, the point of literary study becomes the elucidation of a cultural context in the hopes of understanding how that

92 Todd McGowan context determined every text produced within (or during) it. Under this paradigm, context suffices to explain the text, or, more properly speaking, the definition of the literary text expands so broadly as to include within it the entire sociohistorical context in which the text appeared. Another prominent effect of historicism’s hegemony in literary studies has been the dramatic expansion of what counts as literature. Scholars and students now study not just canonical literary works but also popular works of the past, including pamphlets, magazines, diaries, advertisements, and so on. This expansion of what constitutes a literary text occurs with the best of intentions—namely, the desire to expose both scholars and students to a broader group of texts, texts that reflect a greater cultural diversity—but the effect is the virtual elimination of the distinction between text and context. Because historicism’s aim consists in understanding contexts, context subsumes text. In this situation, the interpreter’s task becomes one of accumulating historical data rather than confronting the disruption occasioned by the literary work. The work of Slavoj Žižek explodes the grounds of this prevailing historicism. Žižek’s work brings not a return to the theory of the 1970s, but a new type of theoretical approach, one that focuses on the text’s ability to act as a traumatic disruption to its context. Whereas historicism, in subordinating literary texts to their sociohistorical contexts, treats them as mere symptoms of their cultures, Žižek’s amalgam of Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist politics demonstrates that literary texts are primarily valuable not for (nor simply reducible to) what they reveal about their cultural contexts, but rather for how they break from their contexts in order to articulate what a culture cannot directly articulate about itself.9 The result of historicism is a continuist conception of history. Even though Foucault emphasizes the importance of discontinuity in each of his works, genuine discontinuity does not fit theoretically into his thought or that of his historicist followers. On the contrary, historicism operates under a continuist hypothesis in which the story between the breaks transpires without interruption. Foucault makes this clear in his preface to The Order of Things, in which he claims, “The fundamental codes of a culture—those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchies of its practices—establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders

The Bankruptcy of Historicism 93 with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.”10 Cultural codes determine the texts produced within a given culture. They don’t just stand as external barriers to what can be said but provide the foundation for the very act of saying. As a result, when discontinuity arrives, it always arrives from without, not from within, the cultural codes themselves. Foucault is Žižek’s primary antagonist because Foucauldian historicism, with its understanding of history as a series of success stories, represents the greatest intellectual danger today. Žižek counters Foucault’s historicism by insisting that discontinuity exists within cultural reproduction. In fact, discontinuity is the sine qua non of cultural reproduction. The problem with historicism is that it views history as a series of successes, of occasions in which the historical context completely constructs—and therefore determines—the events that occur within it. But this historicist view of history fails to grasp history’s failure. History is a series of failures rather than successes. Culture results not from success but from the failure to integrate trauma into the narrative that it constructs about the universe. If we view culture as inherently successful in reproducing itself, we will be unable to conceive of the possibility of genuine historical change. The irony of historicism is thus that, for all its pretensions to progressivism, it leads to the elimination of history as the site of novelty. Žižek’s antidote to this conclusion is to pose historicity against historicism. For Žižek, historicism is “historicity minus the unhistorical kernel of the Real,” the “traumatic kernel which returns as the Same through all historical epochs.” The “only way to save historicity from th[is] fall into historicism, into the notion of the linear succession of ‘historical epochs,’” Žižek concludes, “is to conceive these epochs as a series of ultimately failed attempts to deal with the same ‘unhistorical’ traumatic kernel.”11 By focusing on this traumatic kernel, historicity rewrites the historicist vision of linear succession as a broken series of halting failures. Only through such an understanding of history as failure can one preserve the possibility for the emergence of the new, for the novelty that preserves history as such. In order to conceive of the theoretical space for historical novelty, one must insist on a traumatic kernel that resists historical change. In contrast to other disciplines, literary studies has paid scant atten-

94 Todd McGowan tion to Žižek’s challenge to its historicist bent. This failure of literary studies to come to terms with Žižek’s intervention mirrors historicism’s failure to confront the disruption occasioned by the literary text. The almost unchallenged dominance of historicism within literary studies is what has so far inoculated it against Žižek’s type of intervention. In order to take stock of Žižek’s theoretical contribution, literary critics would have to revolutionize their conception of the text, understanding its primary importance to reside neither in what it reveals about its sociohistorical context (historicism) nor in itself (deconstruction) but in its rupture from history. Newly Interpellated The key to Žižek’s critique of historicism lies in his appraisal of a philosopher to whom he is theoretically close: Louis Althusser. Even though Foucault is much more the father of contemporary historicism than Althusser, Žižek’s reformulation of Althusser’s classic conception of ideology provides the philosophical basis for his break from the prevailing historicism. Though the term ideology appears even in Marx’s own writing (and in the title of one of his books, The German Ideology), Marx did not develop a theory of ideology as such. Althusser was the first Marxist philosopher to theorize the process by which ideology brings new individuals into its fold.12 In his most influential essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser theorizes ideological interpellation (rather than simple class domination) as the process whereby a ruling order (like capitalism) perpetuates itself.13 The production of a ruling order depends on its reproduction through ideological interpellation, and this process enables reproduction to occur without a hitch. Through ideological interpellation, concrete individuals misrecognize themselves as subjects. According to Althusser, this misrecognition happens without fail, and the subject that it produces is mired in self-­deception. The subject believes that it has agency and mastery in the world, thus failing to see the role that history plays in constituting and circumscribing its apparent choices. Ideological interpellation succeeds, and the individual’s belief in his or her own subjectivity is the signpost for its success. There is no interruption or blank space within the process of ideological interpellation from

The Bankruptcy of Historicism 95 which resistance might form because the process succeeds even when it fails: the individual who recognizes him- or herself as a subject in the ideological hail actually misrecognizes the hail as personally directed toward him or her. To demonstrate this point, Althusser uses the example of a police officer who calls out to someone, “Hey, you there!” Though the individual who turns around isn’t the person to whom the officer was calling, he or she nonetheless misrecognizes him- or herself in this ideological hail, thereby proving interpellation’s success even in failure. Misrecognition, then, functions as recognition in Althusser’s theory, and, as a result, he cannot conceive of a politically significant failure in the realm of ideological interpellation.14 The key to Althusser’s thought—and the link between his thought and historicism—is that he doesn’t believe in failure. The story of ideological interpellation is for Althusser a success story, and its failures are nothing but versions of this success. Historicists don’t model themselves on Althusser, but this is a paradigmatic characteristic that they share with him. Positing the ubiquity of success is exactly how historicism operates and why it conceives of historical epochs as continuous. The subject who refuses ideological interpellation testifies to the success of the interpellation even in this refusal. Refusal for Althusser and historicists alike is always just refusal in quotation marks. Simply being a subject who rejects interpellation indicates that ideology has triumphed by creating a subject. Like Althusser, Žižek places ideological interpellation at the center of his social theory. Yet Žižek reformulates Althusser’s view of ideological interpellation by turning it on its head. For Žižek, ideology doesn’t interpellate concrete individuals into subjects; rather, ideology interpellates subjects into symbolic identities. Here, the subject ceases to be an ideological construction and becomes a traumatic hole within the symbolic structure that ideology attempts to obscure. As Žižek points out, “far from emerging as the outcome of interpellation, the subject emerges only when and in so far as interpellation liminally fails. Not only does the subject never fully recognize itself in the interpellative call: its resistance to interpellation (to the symbolic identity provided by interpellation) is the subject.”15 For Žižek, then, the subject is not an ideological construction. Subjectivity is the problem that ideology attempts to conquer by offering the lure of symbolic identity. The subject is not a figure of mastery but a

96 Todd McGowan disturbance of it, and it is the process of ideological interpellation itself that indicates that the subject functions in this way. Ideological interpellation keeps the ruling order operating, but its very existence testifies to a fundamental weakness in that order. The moment that an order must effectuate a process to reproduce itself, it necessarily proclaims its vulnerability. A perpetual-­motion machine—that is, a perfect machine—never needs to act to reproduce itself. For Žižek, then, ideological interpellation doesn’t succeed even when it fails; it fails even when it succeeds. A successful interpellation replaces the trauma of subjectivity with the stability of symbolic identity, but the fact that capitalism requires this process reveals its vulnerability. Every act of ideological interpellation is thus both a victory for capitalism and an admission of the potential for its defeat. Ideology most often works, though its very existence indicates that capitalism does not simply continue on its own. We can interrupt capitalism as a system because it constantly interrupts itself through the act of reproducing itself. Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation is a profoundly historicist theory. Even though it posits a concrete individual who submits to the hail of ideology, ideological interpellation performs its operation on this concrete individual without a hitch. Žižek breaks from Althusser—and thus from historicism as well—by seeing a hitch present in the very existence of the process. In the act of reproducing itself, capitalism evinces its susceptibility to revolutionary transformation. The manner in which a ruling order perpetuates itself exposes the discontinuity within the ruling order, and it is from this discontinuity that the literary work emerges.16 The Trauma of the Text Every society, even the most authoritarian, offers its subjects choices. But as historicist analysis correctly shows, these choices are always false. The difference between them bespeaks an underlying identity. The choices that the social order offers us—between, say, Democrat and Republican, pro-­choice and pro-­life, McDonald’s and Burger King—do not reflect authentic alternatives. Whichever way we lean, we remain within the constraints that our society establishes. For historicism, the same dilemma holds for the literary text. Even the greatest work of literature must choose between the alternatives its

The Bankruptcy of Historicism 97 society offers. Foucault, for instance, reveals that the prison reformers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century betrayed just as much (if not more) of an investment in disciplinary power as their hard-­line opponents. Foucault’s historicist disciples extend this line of thought to the literary text. Thus, Catherine Gallagher is able to see the apparently opposed theories of Romanticism and political economy as indicative of a similar false opposition. As she writes in The Body Economic, “Romanticism and political economy should be thought of as competing forms of ‘organicism,’ both of which flourished in British radical thought at the turn of the century, and both of which fostered skepticism toward what they presented as their immediate predecessors’ unrealistic faith in an idealized human rationality.”17 As it turns out, the Romantic poet and Thomas Robert Malthus aren’t so different after all: the choice between “Ode to a Nightingale” and An Essay on the Principle of Population is a false one because both Romanticism and political economy partake in the organicism that prevailed in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­ century Britain. This, of course, is not how Romantic poets saw themselves or how critics have traditionally conceived of them. The project of Romanticism is usually thought of as having aimed at introducing vitality into the mechanical categories characteristic of political economy and other Enlightenment-­inspired approaches to the world. A historicist like Gallagher, however, can diagnose the falsity of this conception because she examines the social and cultural presuppositions that inform Romanticism in ways that defy its self-­conception. She sees continuity where the Romantic poet envisions discontinuity. Historicism assumes an unbroken continuity between the text itself and the historical context that establishes the choices from among which a text emerges. This assumption provides the justification for research into the historical conditions that surround the literary text. Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction is an early example of the historicist turn in literary studies. Because she was writing at the outset of this New Historicist epoch, Tompkins gives voice to its controlling assumptions in a rather straightforward manner. She emphasizes that the significance of the literary work lies not in its ability to transcend its cultural milieu and thereby articulate universal truths (the criteria that the so-­called myth critics of the generation preceding hers used to gauge the significance of literary works), but rather in its

98 Todd McGowan capacity to exemplify that milieu. As she writes at the very outset of the book, “novels and stories should be studied not because they manage to escape the limitations of their particular time and place, but because they offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment.”18 In this statement, Tompkins targets critics who praise literary masterpieces for their ability to transcend their cultural milieu and articulate universal truths. The problem with this move is that it overtly accepts the constraints that the social order imposes on subjects without seeing the possibility of refusing the given alternatives. While it may very well be the case that subjects most often choose between given alternatives and thus remain within the ideological structure of their epochs, the very existence of the subject bespeaks the capacity for a refusal to choose. This refusal—what Žižek alternately calls “symbolic suicide” or “unplugging”—is the condition for authentic freedom, and this authentic freedom is a constant possibility for the subject. As Žižek notes in On Belief, “the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options within a pre-­given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself.”19 By refusing the choices that a society offers, one changes the societal givens, but this revolutionary act requires the subject to sacrifice its symbolic identity and confront the trauma of losing the ground beneath its feet. This is precisely why the character of Bartleby has come to play such a central role in Žižek’s thought (and that of many other contemporary theorists): by opting for an impossible choice—or, more precisely, by preferring not to opt for any of the possible choices presented him—Bartleby sacrifices his symbolic identity and thereby attains an authentic freedom.20 This type of impossible choice is always possible, though the social order insists on its impossibility in order to perpetuate itself. Like Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” great literary works always involve an impossible choice. Great works evince a refusal to accept the socially determined alternatives and instead confront the traumatic groundlessness that these alternatives work to obscure. Historicism vigorously challenges the concept of a literary masterpiece, and historicism’s rise coincides with the questioning of the canon containing such masterpieces.21 For historicists, acceptance of a canon implies

The Bankruptcy of Historicism 99 acceptance of the idea of transcendence, of belief in the great work that leaps out of history and attains immortality. Historicism rejects the possibility of this leap, and its attempt to show that the canon was formed through power relations rather than pure aesthetic merit remains convincing. It is difficult to continue to believe in a canon of immortal literary works today. But this does not imply that we must altogether jettison the concept of a literary masterpiece or historicize its emergence. Even when historicism accepts the existence of a masterpiece, its concern is never with the masterpiece itself but rather with the conditions of possibility that led to its production qua masterpiece. Greenblatt makes this clear in his Shakespearean Negotiations, in which he examines how Shakespeare’s masterpieces acquired their power of enchantment. As he asserts in its opening chapter, the goal of the book is to gain “insight into the half-­hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered.”22 Greenblatt analyzes how we came to see Shakespeare’s works as masterpieces in order to grasp the source of their power. But this represents an impoverished—even conservative—view of the masterpiece, one that we should vigorously combat. The masterpiece is not a work that transcends its time but one that changes the symbolic coordinates of its time. It refuses the options provided by the ruling order and points toward the impossible. As a result, the masterpiece neither provides affirmation for readers nor supplies them with what Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural capital.”23 Instead, the authentic masterpiece traumatizes readers by subtracting the security of their symbolic coordinates from them. This is precisely why the character of Bartleby traumatizes not just the narrator of the tale but the reader as well. As one reads a masterpiece, the ground crumbles beneath one’s feet and one confronts the trauma of a fundamental groundlessness. The literary masterpiece thrusts the reader into a position of freedom, but this freedom is incompatible with the freedom to choose among given alternatives. That is to say, freedom is never freedom of choice. Rather, one must make the Leninist distinction between formal freedom and actual freedom that Žižek himself insists on.24 Formal freedom provides subjects with options that exist within the ruling ideological structure, whereas actual freedom functions without the guarantees associated with this structure. The subject of actual freedom doesn’t magically escape ideology but no longer accepts the ideologically given possibilities.

100 Todd McGowan Actual freedom is always traumatic because it denies the subject the support of a ground for acting, and it is just this type of freedom that the literary masterpiece activates. The power of the masterpiece is evident in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a text that Žižek himself highlights for its revolutionary status.25 Beloved doesn’t just recount the horrors of slavery but demonstrates how slavery interrupts narrative itself and requires an unhuman act to counter it. The fragmented structure of the novel centers around a slave owner coming to Ohio to recapture his escaped slave Sethe and her children. When the master, Schoolteacher, arrives where Sethe is staying, she refuses to allow her children to return to slavery and instead kills her own daughter. This act so shocks Schoolteacher and his confederates that they go back to the South without taking Sethe or her other daughter with them. At the same time, Morrison creates a narrative designed to deliver a traumatic shock to the reader, and this trauma resides in the eruption of the impossible as possible. When confronted with returning to the horror of slavery, Sethe makes an impossible choice: killing her daughter. Morrison’s novel shows the appropriateness of this act, and its positive depiction in the novel forces the reader to confront the possibility of the impossible act in the contemporary world. Sometimes a literary masterpiece can make the impossible choice by exposing how the symbolic structure controls subjects. This is the case with Franz Kafka. The greatness of The Trial consists in Kafka’s ability to reveal that Josef K. falls victim to the ultimate deception of the law. He believes that the law is an independently existing entity that one can understand and confront. But Kafka shows how Josef K.’s investment in the law is the very key to its power over him. The law emerges out of the commitment that subjects have to it, which is why a direct challenge of the kind that Josef K. attempts to pose only solidifies the law’s control. The Trial refuses the alternatives that Josef K. accepts by revealing that the law is nothing but the acceptance of it.26 Every authentic literary masterpiece works in the way that “Bartleby,” Beloved, and The Trial do, even if it doesn’t depict an act as disruptive as Bartleby’s symbolic (and literal) suicide or Sethe’s killing of her own daughter in order to save her, or a situation as hopeless as that of Josef K. The great literary work enables readers to see possibility where they once saw only impossibility—or constraint where they once saw possibility.

The Bankruptcy of Historicism 101 We must retain the category of the masterpiece despite the ideological uses that critics have made of it because it provides a name for the power of the literary work to change our symbolic coordinates. If we weren’t to acknowledge this power, there would be no point in reading at all. One reads for the possibility of an impossible occurrence. This is a revolutionary power that historicism refuses to grant the literary work. Literary Universality Though the rise of contemporary historicism marked the end of the theory explosion of the 1970s and 1980s, it nonetheless shares the suspicion of the universal prominent in the theory of this era. This suspicion is most evident in deconstruction, which exposes how universals emanate from a particular point of enunciation that they subsequently deny. According to deconstruction, there is no neutral universal, though every universal appears in the guise of neutrality—the implication being that if the universal is not neutral, then it isn’t really universal at all but, rather, the expression of a particular individual or cultural perspective. Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics is an exposition of the hidden particularity present in its pretensions to universality. Not surprisingly, the philosopher who preoccupies Derrida the most is the one most committed to articulating the universal: Hegel. In Glas, his massive volume devoted to reading Hegel alongside Jean Genet, Derrida deconstructs Hegel’s claim that German and Christianity each have an inherent universality. He writes, “Just as German, the naturally speculative tongue in certain of its traits, lifts itself by itself in order to become the universal tongue, so a historically determinate religion becomes absolute religion, and an absolute religion lifts its character of representation (Vorstellung) in order to become absolute truth.”27 Derrida here calls into question both German’s status as the “universal tongue” and Christianity’s status as the “absolute religion.” He does so by pointing to the operation by which the universal becomes universal—an operation in which particularity plays a central, though repressed, role. Though historicism doesn’t value the text for its own sake in the way that deconstruction does, it takes up fully, and in the same manner, deconstruction’s dismantling of claims to universality. For the historicist, the literary work always remains stuck within the particularity of its time

102 Todd McGowan and space. It is a prisoner of its historical epoch, and the truths that it speaks are the truths of this particular epoch only. Historicism operates according to the nominalist conviction that only particulars exist. Pretensions to universality are merely pretensions that the historicist can trace back to a cultural particularity. One can reveal this even when dealing with the most accomplished literary works. As a result, in some respects it isn’t at all surprising that the critic who played the most decisive role in the historicist turn of the 1980s, the aforementioned Stephen Greenblatt, was a Shakespeare scholar. Of all the literary figures who have written in English, Shakespeare enjoys an unchallenged position as the greatest. His status is so definitive that no one, either in the culture at large or in the domain of literary studies, would even think of questioning it. His name bespeaks universality and the transcendence of historical conditions. In short, his work, as is often said of it, is “timeless.” In this sense, Shakespeare would seem to represent the most daunting challenge for the historicist: the grandeur of his achievement, especially given his relatively low-­key origins, would appear to give the lie to any reduction of the literary text to the historical context that produced it. Such being the case, if the historicist can show that even Shakespeare’s plays are continuous with their milieu, then the game becomes much easier with every other writer.28 For Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s works hold an immense attraction—an attraction that he often emphasizes. Yet his explorations of these works are first and foremost explorations of the context that produced them. As Greenblatt puts it in the preface to one of his more recent books on Shakespeare, Hamlet in Purgatory, “I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.”29 In order to understand Hamlet, Greenblatt immerses himself in the discourses that made the writing of the play possible. The allure of Hamlet is a product of its particular historical situation, not its universal significance. Following Greenblatt’s logic, one cannot even think of raising the question of universality in Hamlet. Žižek’s embrace of the universal is not a return to the universality that deconstruction undermines or that historicism attacks. Žižek champions a universality inextricable from its particular point of enunciation, a universality made possible by particularity—what, following Hegel, he calls

The Bankruptcy of Historicism 103 “concrete universality.” If we apply this theory of concrete universality to literature, the literary work no longer proclaims universal truths by virtue of transcending history but, rather, by virtue of its specific location in history. It is in this sense that Žižek offers a new version of universality, one that takes a step forward, rather than a step backward, relative to the prevailing historicism. Žižek counters historicism’s insistence that the universal doesn’t exist by claiming that it is the particular that doesn’t exist—or, more precisely, that particularity suffers from a self-­division. No particular culture is identical with itself. If the particular could attain self-­identity, it would be incapable of interacting with other particulars. The conflict between particulars attests to the conflict within particulars, and the universal emerges through this internal conflict of the particular. As Žižek explains in Less Than Nothing, “‘concrete universality’ means precisely that my particular identity is corroded from within, that the tension between particularity and universality is inherent to my particular identity.” Universality thus arises “only through or at the site of a thwarted particularity.”30 We can articulate universals from the point of the particular’s self-­division, the point at which the particular fails to be wholly particular. Historicism maintains its appeal today because it saves the critic from making a decision. Unlike other theories, it doesn’t demand an open profession of faith. However, as historicism continues to retain its status as the critical common sense of literary studies, the imperative to challenge it grows stronger. Žižek’s critique of historicism provides an opportunity to take stock of how historicism has diluted our perception of not only the disruptiveness occasioned by the literary text, but also its capacity for articulating universals. Critics can unabashedly take up the idea of a literary masterpiece that articulates universal truths if they foreground the role that failure plays in cultural reproduction. The masterpiece is a testament to a moment when a given culture fails, not when it succeeds. Historicism undervalues the literary text because it judges it as a cultural success. But one can properly engage the literary text only by measuring it in terms of failure. In this way, one can reject historicism without returning to naïveté.

104 Todd McGowan Notes 1 H. Aram Veeser, introduction to The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), xi–­xii. 2 In the early 1950s, Derrida was a student in a course that Foucault offered at the École Normale Superieure, but he was never Foucault’s disciple. Nonetheless, his essay “Cogito and the History of Madness,” which is a fierce deconstruction of Foucault’s History of Madness, resembles an effort to assert one’s independence from a parent figure. See Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 31–63; and Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006). 3 The publication of Foucault’s seminars at the Collège de France, which began in the late 1990s and continued into the 2010s, helped to reassert Foucault as a tangible presence in contemporary historicism. Just as historicist scholars exhausted Discipline and Punish, these seminars began appearing, thus giving new life to Foucault-­ inspired readings. The joy that the reader experiences when reading Foucault’s historicist works stems from the sense of emancipation from the constraints that govern thought. One reads about how a series of epistemes dominated Western thought from a perspective outside of this domination. In short, Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies are not subject to the same constraints that govern other forms of knowledge. 4 J. Gerald Kennedy, “Inventing the Literati: Poe’s Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture,” in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 13. Worth noting here is that Kennedy’s essay appears in a collection on Poe coedited with Jerome McGann, one of the leading practitioners of New Historicism. 5 One can find statements similar to Kennedy’s throughout Foucault’s works. One of the most often cited occurs in The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault claims, “The frontiers of a book are never clear-­cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1972), 23. 6 Perhaps Derrida wrote Archive Fever, which is in some sense a plea for what remains irreducible to the archive, in response to the burgeoning use of this term. But the ironic effect of this book is that, rather than leading to a questioning of the term archive, as Derrida no doubt intended, it served to only increase its use. See Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 7 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 109. 8 Even Giorgio Agamben, one of the leading contemporary theoretical figures, often buries his theorizing within his explorations of history. It is as if one can see a struggle

The Bankruptcy of Historicism 105

9

10 11 12 13

14

15

16

taking place within Agamben’s work between the theorist Walter Benjamin and the historicist Foucault, two of the forerunners to his own work. One can see the victory of Foucault in The Kingdom and the Glory and that of Benjamin in his (far superior) subsequent book, The Highest Poverty. See Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); and The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-­of-­Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). Žižek was not a lone voice in the assault on historicism. Joan Copjec actually provided a more direct critique in her magisterial Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1994). Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1994), xx. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 81. Ideology plays a more central role in Althusser’s Marxism than it does in more economically oriented versions of Marxism, such as that of Ernest Mandel. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 85–126. This is evident in Robert Pfaller’s heroic attempt to defend Althusser’s conception of ideology against a psychoanalytic critique. According to Pfaller, it is impossible to speak of any failure in ideological interpellation because that failure is always part of how the interpellation succeeds. Even the void of subjectivity is part of the ideological structure. As he puts it, “in ideology we do not only have to do with some phantasmatic or imaginary content (which fills the void of ‘true subjectivity’); ideology is as well the appearance of a void that seems to be something totally different from any ideological content.” Pfaller, “Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 240–41. The problem with this formulation is that the elimination of any point of resistance to ideology—including the void of the subject that undergoes interpellation—leaves Pfaller unable to explain his own ability to see how ideology functions. When one is inside a perfectly functioning system, one cannot gain any purchase on that system in order to theorize how it works. The fact that Pfaller analyzes ideology refutes what he says in his analysis, despite its conceptual appeal. Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 115. Here, Žižek is proximate to Judith Butler, whose politics of the performative stems from her understanding that interpellative power is fundamentally iterative. See, for instance, Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New

106 Todd McGowan

17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

York: Routledge, 1997). Žižek and Butler both locate the weak spot of ideology in the same place; however, they respond to this weak spot in radically different ways. For Butler, parodying the performance of ideology provides a way of undermining it, whereas for Žižek parody doesn’t go far enough and remains cynically attached to the very ideological structure it appears to undermine. One must not simply mock the ideological choices provided; one must go all the way and reject them entirely by shifting the very terrain on which our choices are made. Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 7–8. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi. Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 121. See, for example, Žižek’s meditations on what he calls a “Bartleby politics” in The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006) and Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012). Paul Lauter provides the canonical critique of the canon. In Canons and Contexts, he contends that the literary canon is simply a direct expression of the interests of the ruling class. According to Lauter, “the literary canon is, in short, a means by which culture validates social power.” Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 23. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 4. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). See, for example, chapter 3 of On Belief, “Father, Why Did You Forsake Me?” See, for example, Žižek’s conclusion to The Fragile Absolute; or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2000). From this perspective, the parable of the doorkeeper that appears in the novel’s penultimate chapter represents the key to the entire novel, which is why it is entirely appropriate that Orson Welles foregrounds it in his film version of The Trial (1962), placing it both at the beginning of the film and near its end. This parable reveals that the law doesn’t exist independently of the subject who engages with it, that it harbors no secret substantial identity that the subject might uncover. Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 32 (translation modified). Foucault’s focus on Descartes in his History of Madness has a similar function. If Foucault can show that Descartes, the philosopher who founded modernity by breaking from Scholasticism, is the product of the constraints of his historical epoch, then the task becomes much simpler with every other philosopher. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 362.

4 The Symptoms of Ideology Critique; or, How We Learned to Enjoy the Symptom Russell Sbriglia

and Ignore the Fetish

If recent debates in literary and cultural studies are any indication, the tried-­and-­true methods of ideology critique have brought us to an impasse. As critics from Eve Sedgwick and Anne Cheng to Toril Moi and Rita Felski have pointed out, the hermeneutics of suspicion—a hermeneutics that, for the past quarter of a century at least, has taken its cues less from the classic triumvirate of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche than from the postmodernist paradigms of Althusserian interpellation, Foucauldian disciplinarity, and Jamesonian political unconsciousness—has brought us not so much to a dead end as to a cul-­de-­sac where we rehearse ad infinitum, if not ad nauseam, the text’s unwitting complicity with forms of disciplinary power and imperialist aggression.1 Such a critical abyme has, of late, given rise to increasing calls for a return to the “text itself.” Phenomenological interpretive paradigms such as “surface reading” and “ordinary language criticism,” for instance, are premised on giving up probing for a text’s political unconscious and instead attending to what has been right in front of us all along.2 Casting practitioners of hermeneutical suspicion as the Prefect from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” advocates of these paradigms prompt us to adopt C. Auguste Dupin’s method of “superficial” and “empirical” reading and relinquish the Prefect’s “deep” and “theoretical” approach, for “what lies in plain sight is worthy of attention but often eludes observation— especially by deeply suspicious detectives who look past the surface in order to root out what is underneath it.”3

108 Russell Sbriglia While I believe there is indeed a good deal to be learned from such calls to return to the text’s surface, I am nonetheless skeptical of what is frequently their all-­too-­quick dismissal of ideologically informed reading practices in the interest of achieving a putative “neutrality” and “objectivity”—(dis)positions that, in the words of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, promise a “true openness to all the potentials made available by texts.”4 Attempting to combine attention to the text’s surface with a continued investment in the critique of ideology, in this essay I take up Slavoj Žižek’s call to shift our understanding of ideology, and, in turn, our practice of ideology critique, from the symptomatic to the fetishistic—a shift, I maintain, that harbors the potential to revamp the outmoded practices of politically engaged literary and cultural criticism. Indeed, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the type of “fetishistic reading” I outline and attempt to model in the following offers us a means of attending to the text’s surface while nonetheless maintaining our commitments to ideology critique and psychoanalysis, the “only two theories” in our relativistic, postmodern era, Žižek points out, that still “imply and practice . . . an engaged notion of truth”—“engaged” not in the sense of “running after ‘objective’ truth,” but in the sense of “holding onto the truth about the position from which one speaks.”5 For unlike the symptom, the latent, repressed “crack . . . in the fabric of the ideological lie” that ultimately returns to “disturb . . . the surface of false appearance,” the fetish, the object to which one consciously clings as a means of disavowing trauma, of “(pretend[ing] to) accept reality ‘the way it is,’ ” is manifest, located on the surface.6 Furthermore, if, as Žižek repeatedly insists, ideology today operates at the fetishistic as opposed to the symptomatic level, then it only makes sense that we shift our attention away from what texts (and their authors) unwittingly say and toward what, in the language of fetishistic disavowal, they know very well they’re saying but say all the same. Symptomatic Surplus-­Enjoyment and the Knowledge of Fetishism In the spirit of Žižek’s abiding interest in and formidable contributions to the study of German Idealism, let me use as my literary example throughout this chapter the closest thing the American literary canon has to offer in that vein: the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, an author who, as I

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 109 discuss below, developed new idioms for engaging the questions posed by German Idealists regarding the conditions of possibility for knowledge.7 The best example of a symptomatic reading of Emerson is provided by John Carlos Rowe, whose goal in his book At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (1997) is to unmask the “reactionary unconscious” of Emersonian transcendentalism and the liberal tradition of “aesthetic dissent” to which it helped give birth.8 As Rowe argues, although on the surface Emerson appears to be a democratic liberal who, however begrudgingly, lent his voice to progressive causes such as the abolition of slavery, the idealist, transcendental grounds of his putative progressivism render him perforce conservative insofar as idealism, so the familiar critique goes, eschews practical reality by resolving conflicts in thought only, thereby upholding the status quo. Indeed, because Rowe believes that “transcendentalist values” are “inherently incompatible” with political activism, “rationaliz[ing] present wrongs rather than bring[ing] about actual social change,” he is able to insist on Emerson’s conservatism while at the same time noting his “profound commitment to and . . . activism regarding the abolition of slavery in the United States in the years following Daniel Webster’s ‘great betrayal’ in giving his support to the Compromise of 1850, which included passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill.”9 In short, Emerson can’t have it both ways: he “either must abandon the fundamentals of transcendentalism or the principles of political activism.”10 Such an either/or logic is precisely what allows Rowe to read the returns of Emerson’s repressed predilection for thought over action throughout his antislavery addresses—returns that, again, occur despite the fact that “Emerson tries valiantly to avoid the sort of idealist rhetoric that characterizes his early and most often cited works,” among them Nature (1836), “The American Scholar” (1839), the “Divinity School Address” (1838), and “Self-­Reliance” (1841)—as symptomatic of the fundamentally reactionary core of Emersonian liberalism.11 For, having failed to entirely purge his antislavery addresses of all traces of transcendental idealism, Emerson’s reform efforts are always already “depoliticized,” compromised before the fact.12 Rowe’s prime example of the specter of idealism returning to haunt Emerson’s antislavery addresses is the latter’s “Address to the Citizens of Concord” on the Fugitive Slave Law, delivered on May 3, 1851. As Rowe notes, whereas Emerson had previously, in his August 1844 “Address on

110 Russell Sbriglia the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” grounded the case for abolition on “the practical advantages likely to accrue to [Southern] commercial interests,” asserting, for instance, that “the oldest planters of Jamaica are convinced, that it is cheaper to pay wages, than to own the slave,” in the later “Concord” address he reverts to the transcendental/idealist mode, critiquing slavery on primarily spiritual as opposed to material grounds by appealing to the “Higher Law,” that law “which is, independent of appearances,” and by which “men of all conditions” are “uplifted . . . into a peace and into a power which the material world cannot give.”13 As Rowe concludes, because “the grounds for . . . collective action” proffered in passages such as this latter one are so “profoundly transcendental,” they are “by no means compatible” with the more practical (that is, material) “economic and political solutions” suggested in the earlier “Emancipation” address.14 Taken as a whole, then, Emerson’s antislavery addresses are plagued by an “intellectual schizophrenia” that renders his forays into the political arena a “failure.”15 Rowe’s reading of Emerson’s antislavery addresses is paradigmatic of the symptomatic mode of ideology critique insofar as it quite clearly subscribes to what Žižek considers “the most elementary definition of ideology,” that provided by Marx in volume 1 of Capital when, in explaining workers’ unawareness that “by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour,” he says, “They do not know it, but they are doing it.”16 As Žižek explains, this definition of ideology “implies a kind of basic, constitutive naiveté” on the part of the subject, “a distance, a divergence between so-­called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it.” Proceeding from the presumption of constitutive false consciousness, the goal of ideology critique has long been “to lead the naïve ideological consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its own effective conditions, the social reality that it is distorting, and through this very act dissolve itself.”17 Such a mode of ideology critique is symptomatic, Žižek explains, because, according to it, “the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua ‘returns of the repressed,’ cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie.”18 Much of the case that the aforementioned Best and Marcus make for what they call surface reading consists of demonstrating the obsoles-

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 111 cence of the type of symptomatic reading outlined by Žižek. Tracing the origin of contemporary symptomatic reading back to Fredric Jameson’s monumental The Political Unconscious (1981), Best and Marcus argue that whereas at the beginning of the 1980s Jameson could legitimately claim that “no society has ever been quite so mystified in quite so many ways as our own,” at the end of the first decade of the twenty-­first century, by contrast, “so much seems to be on the surface” that Jameson’s “demystifying protocols” have become “superfluous.”19 As evidence of this superfluity, they note that “images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the internet,” that “the real-­time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that required little explication the state’s abandonment of its African American citizens,” and that “many people instantly recognized as lies political statements such as ‘mission accomplished.’” Such instances of putative transparency lead Best and Marcus to conclude that the project of ideology critique, long dependent on “the assumption that domination can only do its work when veiled,” has today come to seem “nostalgic, even utopian.”20 They thus call for a criticism that attends to what in literary texts “insists at being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through.”21 Anticipating Best and Marcus’s position, Žižek concedes that, in today’s seemingly postideological world, it would indeed appear that “there is no longer a need for the refined procedure of Ideologiekritik, for a ‘symptomal reading’ that detects the faults in an ideological edifice,” “confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency,” for insofar as “the thoroughly cynical power-­discourse concedes [the obvious truth] in advance” (i.e., its “search for profits,” its “brutal imposition of economic interests,” and so on), “such a procedure knocks at an open door.”22 And yet Žižek is careful to add that not only is the postmodern power discourse thoroughly cynical, but so too is the postmodern subject. Indeed, rather than being a dupe of false consciousness, one who “misrecogni[zes] . . . the social reality which is part of this reality itself,” the cynical, postmodern subject “is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but . . . none the less still insists upon the mask.”23 And this is where Žižek diverges not only from Best and Marcus, for whom ideology critique has passed its sell-­by date, but from Jameson as well, who (in 1981 at least) claimed that “if everything were transparent, then

112 Russell Sbriglia no ideology would be possible, and no domination either.”24 For Žižek, by contrast, the fact that we can no longer count on the subject’s constitutive naïveté—or, for that matter, the acts of mystification typically associated with the maintenance of political power—doesn’t mean that we have reached “the end of ideology.” On the contrary, under the reign of “cynical reason,” as Peter Sloterdijk has characterized our current era—a cynical reason that, in turn, produces a cynical subject guided by an “enlightened false consciousness”—ideology operates according to the logic of what Žižek, following Freud, terms “fetishistic disavowal,” the classic formulation of which, as identified by Octave Mannoni, is “I know well, but all the same . . .”25 For Žižek, then, it is to “the contours of fetishism” that ideology critique must attend if it is to continue to remain relevant.26 Freud’s most sustained treatment of fetishistic disavowal comes, naturally enough, in his essay “Fetishism” (1927), in which he defines the fetish as “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us [i.e., castration anxiety]—does not want to give up.” Disavowal (Verleugnung) enters into the equation because the boy, by clinging to the fetish object, the substitute for the mother’s “lost” penis, “refuse[s] to take cognizance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis.”27 Fetishistic disavowal is thus a response to traumatic knowledge; as Mannoni stresses, “the sole reason for the existence of the fetish is that the fetishist knows that women have no phallus.”28 To put matters more formulaically: the boy knows very well that the mother does not have a penis (for, as Freud emphasizes, “the perception has persisted”), but all the same (through “the force of his counter-­wish” and the subsequent “compromise” he achieves via the fetish object) he continues to believe that she does. Hence Freud’s claim that the boy “has retained [his] belief, but he has also given it up,” the result being that “both the disavowal and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the construction of the fetish itself.”29 As Žižek explains it, the fetish is “effectively a kind of envers of the symptom.” Whereas the symptom is the manifestation of something repressed, “the exception which disturbs the surface of false appearances,” the fetish is instead “the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth.” Rather than operating by repressing traumatic scenes or tragic knowledge—scenes or knowledge that ulti-

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 113 mately return as symptoms—fetishists “‘rationally’ fully accept” such traumas and tragedies while at the same time “cling[ing] to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for [them] the[ir] disavowal.” This is not to altogether dismiss any relation between the symptom and the fetish. Like repression, disavowal can be an effective means of coping with a traumatic reality; however, the latter’s efficacy as a coping mechanism depends on an altogether different logic. As Žižek explains, “fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds”; on the contrary, “they are thoroughly ‘realist,’ able to accept the way things effectively are—since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality.”30 It is precisely at this fetishistic level, Žižek argues, that ideology operates today. The cynical postmodern subject “knows the falsehood very well, . . . is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still . . . does not renounce it.” Hence Žižek’s substitution of Marx’s symptomatic definition of ideology with the following fetishistic one: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.”31 So where does this leave today’s symptomatic reader? Whereas Best and Marcus question the continued relevance of symptomatic reading on predominantly historicist grounds, I want to instead challenge symptomatic reading by way of Žižekian psychoanalysis.32 My thesis here is as follows: though a hermeneutical mode ostensibly bereft of enjoyment, symptomatic reading nonetheless depends for its continued purchase on what Lacan termed “surplus-­enjoyment” (plus-­de-­jouir). As Robyn Wiegman has recently pointed out with regard to the type of New Americanist criticism of which Rowe’s work is a prime example, “affective attachments . . . are disallowed by the commitment to critique,” as the critic’s relation to the work of art, especially a canonical one, is one of compulsory “disidentification.”33 Resisting identification with and renouncing any and all pleasure one might derive from the artwork itself, the symptomatic reader is akin to the Kantian ethical subject, a subject who must “exclude all empirical, ‘pathological’ contents . . . as the locus of [his] moral activity.”34 For symptomatic readers, the hermeneutical correlative of this Kantian moral law would be Jameson’s injunction to “Always historicize!”—an injunction that Jameson proffers as “the moral of The Political Unconscious” and that subsequent critics have taken to all but necessitate both disidentification with and disaffection

114 Russell Sbriglia from the object of historicization.35 And yet, as Žižek explains apropos the Kantian ethical subject, “this renunciation itself produces a certain surplus-­enjoyment,” for the Kantian moral imperative—in our example, the Jamesonian historicist-­hermeneutical imperative—“conceals an obscene superego injunction: ‘Enjoy!’ . . . a traumatic irruption of an appeal to impossible jouissance.”36 And just as one can never fulfill the impossible demands of the superego, so too the historicist can never be historicist enough, for, as Žižek points out, one thing will forever elude the historicist: the objet petit a, the “unhistorical kernel of the Real . . . which returns as the Same through all historical epochs.”37 Indeed, for Žižek, the objet petit a, the “little piece of the Real” that remains recalcitrant not only to “the notion of the linear succession of ‘historical epochs’” but also to the process of symbolization (hence its position beyond the symbolic order), is the precise embodiment of surplus-­enjoyment.38 It is here, then, that we should locate the symptomatic reader’s disavowed (surplus-­)enjoyment: as the purveyor of knowledge (the Lacanian “subject supposed to know”)—the agent who is able to detect the text’s blind spots, deconstruct its aporias, and diagnose its unwitting complicities with hegemonic power—the symptomatic reader is granted a position outside of the symbolic order, a position that Lacan would characterize as “metalinguistic.” As a number of critics have pointed out (albeit in less psychoanalytic terms), occupying such a metalinguistic position results in an aggrandizement of the critic vis-­à-­vis the author, the text, and, of course, the “common” or “naive” reader.39 As Žižek often notes, one of Lacan’s most fundamental maxims is that “there is no metalanguage,” a maxim likewise shared by poststructuralists and historicists, both of whom are notoriously symptomatic readers.40 And yet, as Žižek is at pains to stress, “there is no metalanguage” means something far different for Lacan than it does for poststructuralists and historicists. For poststructuralists, “there is no metalanguage” means that it is impossible to dissociate the enunciated content from the speaker’s position of enunciation, for “the process of enunciation always subverts the utterance.”41 For historicists, similarly, “there is no metalanguage” means that it is impossible to dissociate a text from its historical milieu, for texts (and cultural artifacts more generally) are by-­products—epiphenomena, as it were—of their particular milieus. In contrast to both of these positions, what Lacan means when

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 115 he says “there is no metalanguage” is that “it is impossible to occupy [the] position” of metalanguage, for metalanguage is “Real,” and the Real, as Lacan asserts throughout Seminar XVII, “is the impossible.”42 From Žižek’s Lacanian perspective, the great irony of poststructuralism and historicism alike is that, despite their practitioners’ insistence that there is no metalanguage, a metalinguistic position is nonetheless precisely what both presume to inhabit. As Žižek points out with regard to the former, the position from which the poststructuralist proclaims that “no utterance can say precisely what it intended to say,” for “the process of enunciation always subverts the utterance,” is “the position of metalanguage in its purest, most radical form.”43 Indeed, for Žižek, “the passionate zeal with which the post-­structuralist insists that every text, his own included, is caught in a fundamental ambiguity and flooded with the ‘dissemination’ of [an] inter-­textual process” that “always subverts what we ‘intended to say’” is the mark of “an obstinate denial,” a “barely hidden acknowledgement of the fact that one is speaking from a safe position, a position not menaced by the decentred textual process.” Such being the case, “the whole effort to evade the purely theoretical form of exposing our ideas and to adopt rhetorical devices usually reserved [for] literature,” above all “ironic self-­commentary” and “self-­distance”— what Žižek refers to as poststructuralism’s “affected poeticism”—“masks the annoying fact that at the root of what post-­structuralists are saying there is a clearly defined theoretical position which can be articulated without difficulty in a pure and simple metalanguage.” The poststructuralist position is thus ultimately “too ‘theoretical,’” for it “does not affect the place from which we speak.”44 The same goes for historicism, a mode of analysis that, in positing cultural artifacts as symptoms of their respective milieus, bears even greater responsibility for ushering in the reign of symptomatic reading than poststructuralism. Like the poststructuralist’s “poeticism,” the historicist’s project of “endless recontextualisation,” his “dissolution of every event into its socio-­historical context,” is, as Geoff Boucher effectively encapsulates Žižek’s stance, yet another attempt to occupy “the ‘view from nowhere,’ the gods-­eye position of pure, neutral metalanguage situated ‘above’ the historical texture.” From this perspective, the “apparently modest perspectival relativism of the historicist . . . masks an extraordinarily immodest claim to perfect neutrality.”45 In short, the historicist, as Žižek himself puts it, affects to pos-

116 Russell Sbriglia sess “the Master’s gaze,” that gaze which, “viewing history from a safe metalanguage distance, constructs the linear narrative of ‘historical evolution.’”46 Such a distance renders historicism itself “the very form of ahistorical ideological closure.”47 In contrast to the type of metalinguistic distance/detachment and neutrality characteristic of the symptomatic reading practices that permeate both poststructuralism and historicism, fetishistic reading would take it that the project of critique is always already intimate/proximate. As John Michael reminds us, “critical distance does not equal exteriority”; rather, “criticism . . . is an immanent art,” one that “works most interestingly when we struggle to understand what touches us deeply.”48 Rejecting the notion that intimacy and critique are mutually exclusive, fetishistic reading would seek to steer us away from what Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost characterize as the “facile” goal of “sophisticated disengagement through the construction of a theoretical overview from which we may observe [texts] at a comfortable remove from them,” and toward “reengagement” and “reinvestment” in the texts we read, teach, and critique, toward “a seeing from the inside, where theory, no longer meta-­ explanation, elaborates what we are invested in . . . in all the richness and complexity of that investment.”49 As Stanley Cavell might put it, fetishistic reading would entail an “acknowledgment” of the ineluctable “neighboring” of text and critic.50 One upshot of this acknowledgment of the neighboring of text and critic would be an understanding that the text has a knowledge to impart that is at least commensurate with that of the critic. To appropriate Cavell’s argument for what he calls “redemptive reading”—a mode of reading that, in order to make good on its “therapeutic” promise, Cavell believes “will have to be psychoanalytic in character”—we might say that fetishistic reading would be “interested in the possibility of art as a possibility of knowing, or of acknowledging,” of “turning the picture of interpreting a text into one of being interpreted by it.”51 Cavell’s notion of being interpreted by the text—a notion that acknowledges what he characterizes as the “autonomy” of the text, but what I would instead characterize as its agency—resonates with Lacan’s theory of “the gaze,” a concept long misinterpreted as the look that the subject casts upon the object but instead concerns the look that the object casts back at the subject, undermining its seeming omnipotence, its sense of mastery

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 117 over a given visual or textual field.52 Cavell himself draws this connection between redemptive reading and the gaze when he notes that, contrary to hermeneutical psychoanalysis, which “seem[s] typically to tell us something that we more or less already knew, to leave us pretty much where we were before we read,” redemptive reading would instead follow the example of clinical psychoanalysis, in which “it is not first of all the text that is subject to interpretation but we in the gaze or hearing of the text.”53 That the reader is subject to interpretation in the gaze—or, for that ­matter, the voice—of the text is precisely the point made by Todd Mc­ Gowan when he defines the gaze as the “blank point” inscribed within the very “aesthetic structure” of the text that “obliquely include[s]” the reader in the text itself.54 As he puts matters apropos the anamorphic skull that lies at the bottom of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (Lacan’s primary illustration of the gaze as objet petit a), “you think that you are looking at the painting from a safe distance, but the painting sees you—takes into account your presence as a spectator.” What this means is that readers/viewers “never look on from a safe distance; they are in the picture in the form of this stain, implicated in the text itself,” “wholly embodied in the object.”55 Acknowledging the agency of the text, its ability to look and talk back, fetishistic reading would concern itself less with what a text fails to or refuses to say than with how what it does in fact say is disruptive, troubling, or non-­sensical enough. Thus, while I continue to share Roland Barthes’s “resent[ment at] seeing Nature and History confused at every turn,” my call for fetishistic reading is nonetheless intended to signal that the primary work of ideology critique—what Barthes would call “demythologization”—can no longer be to simply “go behind the paper” in order to “track down, in the decorative display of what-­goes-­without-­ saying, the ideological abuse which . . . is hidden there.”56 This is not to claim that texts cannot or do not evince politically unconscious symptoms that belie their surfaces. A great deal of ideological abuse often does lie behind the paper. It is to claim that ideology critique must become equally attuned to textual (and authorial) disavowals and disownings of knowledge.57 A more fetishistic way of putting this would be to say that ideology critique must begin giving texts (and their authors) their due while nonetheless holding them accountable—perhaps more so than

118 Russell Sbriglia ever—for the ideological masks that (they know very well) they have chosen to don (all the same). Where’s Waldo? The Fetishization of “Experience” In the interest of attempting to model what fetishistic reading might look like, I would like to return to the literary figure with whom I began: Emerson. One work of Emerson’s that has lent itself to numerous symptomatic readings is “Experience,” an essay that Sharon Cameron has correctly classified as an “elegy” and that critics have long identified as a turning point in Emerson’s career, one that signals a shift from an unshakeable faith in the freedom of the individual to a tragic acceptance of the “negative power” of fate.58 The occasion for this elegy was the death of Emerson’s son Waldo, who, two years before the essay’s publication, died of scarlet fever at the age of five. The following iconic passage is the only one in which Waldo’s death is explicitly addressed by Emerson: What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces. . . . People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-­painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So it is with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me,

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 119 falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-­rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us. I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-­ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.59

Though this passage begs a number of responses, the one I want to pursue here is that Emerson, by way of his disparagement of grief’s “shallow,” superficial nature—its surfaceness, as it were—all but courts a “deep,” symptomatic reading. Indeed, to invoke Melville’s Captain Ahab, a character often read as an allegory of Emersonianism run amok, we might say that Emerson here grieves that even grief proves unable to penetrate the “scene-­painting and counterfeit” that is quotidian experience and thereby expose us to the “sharp peaks and edges” of reality’s “truth”—that even grief fails to “strike through” the “pasteboard masks” that Ahab proclaims “all visible objects” to be and thereby grant us access to the “little lower layer” of the Real.60 Hence readings of “Experience” as either a work of transcendence or, what amounts to much the same thing, a work of mourning. In the case of the former, to take up Jay Grossman’s reading of the essay, “Experience” is paradigmatic of the repeated “denigration and attempted expulsion of the physical” throughout Emerson’s oeuvre.61 Reading Waldo’s death as “the site of a . . . confrontation [between] the competing demands of the material and the spiritual,” Grossman, homing in on the word caducous—a term that “vividly represents a quintessentially Emersonian relation to embodiment, since something that was ‘caducous’ was once physically, palpably joined, but has since faded away, leaving no trace of its previous state”—claims that the spiritual wins out, as Waldo

120 Russell Sbriglia is “successfully transmigrated from physicality and visibility to spirituality and invisibility.”62 As Grossman asserts, “Waldo’s death . . . represent[s] the desired culmination toward which the striving in Emerson’s essays repeatedly directs its readers”: namely, “the necessity of breaking the bounds of material encumbrance in favor of the possibilities of purely spiritual release.”63 The moral of this reading is thus that Emerson “only half craves the ‘friction’ with which the essay opens,” and it is precisely this “ambivalence”—insincerity, even—of Emerson’s that accounts for the typical reading of his grief as “insufficient.” For, by the essay’s end, Emerson’s alleged desire for friction is overruled by his irrepressible penchant for “affirming . . . the possibilities of decorporealized ‘Man ­Thinking.’”64 In the case of the latter, “Experience,” to take up Cameron’s aforementioned magisterial reading, is “an essay whose primary task is its work of mourning,” that work being the “displacement” of Waldo throughout.65 According to Cameron, though Waldo is mentioned only at the outset of the essay (and even then not by name), “Experience” is nonetheless a work of mourning insofar as “the loss and grief initially attached to a single experience”—the death of Waldo—“ultimately pervades the perception of all experience so that there is no boundary to grief, nothing that is not susceptible to it.”66 Waldo’s death is thus not “only one of several causes equal in their provocation of listlessness and despair” throughout the essay; rather, as the essay’s “first cause,” “the grief occasioned by the death of the child . . . begets the [essay’s] other subjects, the consideration of which—Emerson’s and ours—depends on our understanding their relation to Waldo’s death.”67 And yet, for Cameron, Emerson never fully decathects from Waldo. On the contrary, likening Waldo to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s “introjected object”—­ introjection being (in Cameron’s redaction) “that phenomenon which absorbs into the ego a lost object or corpse that it then preserves in a fantasmatic crypt or hermetically concealed place”—Cameron argues that Emerson has “internalized” and “encrypted” Waldo, thereby rendering “Experience” a “cryptic text.”68 For Cameron, then, Waldo’s death is not, in fact, caducous for Emerson, for Waldo does not fall off from but rather is taken in by Emerson. Whatever the ostensible differences between these readings—perhaps the most crucial of which is that whereas Grossman’s Waldo is decor-

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 121 porealized, Cameron’s is incorporated—both are nonetheless guided by much the same suspicious logic. Like Grossman, whose Emerson only “half craves” the “friction” he claims to court, Cameron posits an Emerson who cannot really mean what he says about Waldo. Or, more precisely, we should say that, for Cameron, what Emerson explicitly says cannot be all he has to say about Waldo in the essay. Hence her reading of the catalog of losses recounted throughout “Experience” as symptoms/sublimations of the repressed death and subsequent incorporation of Waldo. For by “positing [an] equivalence” between losses as incommensurable as the death of a son and the forfeiture of a “beautiful estate,” Emerson “keep[s] hidden or unconscious (that is, dissociated) his sorrow for the child, as if hidden the feeling . . . escapes acknowledgment of its actuality, and, perhaps, therefore too its fact.”69 Contrary to both Grossman and Cameron, what I want to claim is that neither the logic of transcendence nor that of mourning is adequate for understanding what happens to Waldo in “Experience.” This is the case, above all, because Emerson does not, as Freud says is characteristic of both mourning and melancholia, experience a “cessation of interest in the outside world”—a point I take to be equally an answer to Grossman’s transcendental reading of the essay.70 In fact, it is not even the case that Emerson, as Cameron claims, is “[u]nab[le] to experience grief.” On the contrary, when Emerson claims, “I cannot get it nearer to me,” the “it” to which he cannot get nearer is not grief itself—for to grieve that grief has nothing to teach (or, to invoke the famous words from his letter to Caroline Sturgis mere days after Waldo’s death, to “grieve that [he] cannot grieve”) is still to experience grief—but rather the “reality” for which grief promises to be a conduit.71 That is to say, what Emerson grieves over—or, better yet, yearns for—in “Experience” is what Cavell would characterize as an “intimacy” with the world, a “contact,” as Emerson puts it, which grief promises and for which one “would pay the costly price of sons and lovers,” but which grief ultimately fails to deliver.72 The problem of contact—which, as Cavell astutely defines it, is the problem of skepticism—is that the harder one clutches at it, the more evanescent and lubricious the object of desire becomes; hence Emerson’s pun on the term unhandsome.73 This leads me to the second reason why both transcendence and mourning are inadequate logics for understanding “Experience”—a rea-

122 Russell Sbriglia son a bit more complex than the first. Emerson’s answer to the problem of skepticism—and, for that matter, the analogous problem of idealism (“Grief too will make us idealists”)—is, as Cavell puts it, to “overcom[e] thinking as clutching,” clutching being characteristic of “Western conceptualizing as a kind of sublimized violence.”74 Such an overcoming, Cavell explains, “will require the achievement of a form of knowledge . . . Emerson . . . call[s] reception,” a form of knowledge that challenges “the Kantian idea that knowledge is active, and sensuous intuition alone passive or receptive.”75 To return to the pun on unhandsome, what is unhandsome for Emerson, according to Cavell, is “not that objects for us, to which we seek attachment, are, as it were, in themselves evanescent and lubricious; the unhandsome is rather what happens when we seek to deny the standoffishness of objects by clutching at them, which is to say, when we conceive thinking, say the application of concepts in judgments, as grasping something, say synthesizing.”76 And yet Cavell nonetheless insists that the “very subject” of “Experience” is “precisely the necessity of ‘synthesis,’ of putting experiences together into a unity in knowing a world of objects.”77 For Cavell, however, Emersonian synthesis is far different from Kantian synthesis.78 In fact, Cavell’s Emersonian synthesis bears an uncanny resemblance to Žižek’s Hegelian synthesis. Countering the standard critique of the Hegelian Idea as “a voracious eater ‘swallowing’ every object it stumbles upon”—what Žižek, citing Adorno’s quip that idealism is “the belly turned mind,” dubs the “thoroughly constipated” Idea—Žižek queries, “But what about the inevitable counter-­movement: Hegelian defecation?”79 Žižek’s answer is that “the subject of what Hegel calls ‘Absolute Knowing’ [is] also a thoroughly emptied subject, a subject reduced to the role of pure observer (or, rather, registrar) of the self-­movement of the content itself.”80 The “final subjective position of the Hegelian System,” the dialectical movement of Aufhebung (synthesis/sublation), “compel[s] us to turn around the digestive metaphor”: “the Idea, in its resolution or decision, ‘freely releases itself’ into Nature—lets it go, discards it, pushes it away from itself, and thus liberates it. Which is why, for Hegel, the philosophy of nature is not a violent re-­appropriation of its externality; it rather involves the passive attitude of an observer: as he puts it in the Philosophy of Mind, ‘philosophy has, as it were, simply to watch how nature itself sublates its externality.’”81 True cognition, then—Absolute Knowledge—is “not only the

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 123 notional ‘appropriation’ of its object: the process of appropriation goes on only as long as cognition remains incomplete. The sign of its completion is that it liberates its object, lets it be, drops it.”82 And this, Žižek concludes in remarks that resonate with Cavell’s reading of Emerson’s challenge to Kantian epistemology, is why Hegelian cognition is simultaneously both active and passive, but in a sense which radically displaces the Kantian notion of cognition as the unity of activity and passivity. In Kant, the subject actively synthesizes (confers unity on) the content (the sensuous multiplicity) by which it is passively affected. For Hegel, on the contrary, at the level of Absolute Knowing, the cognizing subject is thoroughly passivized: it no longer intervenes in the object, but merely registers the immanent movement of the object’s self-­differentiation/determination (or, to use a more contemporary term, the object’s autopoietic self-­organization). The subject is thus, at its most radical, not the agent of the process: the agent is the System (of knowledge) itself which “automatically” deploys itself, without the need for any external impetus. . . . The supreme moment of the subject’s freedom is when it sets free its object, leaving it alone to freely deploy itself.83

To return to Emerson, then, the reason why neither transcendence nor mourning is an adequate logic for understanding what happens to Waldo in “Experience” concerns that term which Grossman correctly identifies (albeit for the wrong reasons) as the most crucial: caducous. That Emerson characterizes the death of Waldo as caducous is crucial insofar as this botanical term—which comes from the Latin cadūcus, meaning “to fall,” and which, to quote a late eighteenth-­century botanical dictionary, is a term “applied to stipules and bractes [sic]; to leaves that fall before the end of summer”; and “to calyxes and petals falling before the corolla is well unfolded”—registers precisely what Žižek characterizes as the object’s “self-­deployment,” an autopoiesis that cancels the “need for any subjective agent to push it forward or to direct it.”84 That Waldo’s death was caducous for Emerson renders “Experience” a work neither of transcendence nor of mourning, for Emerson, as it turns out, has no work to do; his role is one of sheer passivity. Thus, what is often read as Emerson’s stoicism and antisentimentalism—his callousness, even—is instead a testament to what Cavell, anticipating Žižek’s Hegel, dubs “the

124 Russell Sbriglia power of passiveness.” As Cavell asserts in addressing Emerson’s iconic conclusion to “Experience,” in which, rejecting both the “despair” of “a paltry empiricism” and “the deceptions of the element of time,” Emerson preaches, “Patience and patience, we shall win at the last,” for “there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power”: “Emerson’s emphatic call to patience should threaten a familiar idea of Emersonian power, for Emerson makes power look awfully like . . . passiveness.”85 What is crucial to note here is that the power of passiveness Cavell commends Emerson for modeling is inextricable from something else modeled—or, at the very least, advocated—by Emerson throughout “Experience”: surface reading. Though Emerson begins the essay as a deep, suspicious reader, a skeptic who grieves over the shallowness of grief, its failure to penetrate the “slippery sliding surfaces” of things and “introduce” him to “the reality,” to “real nature,” he concludes it as a surface reader who rejects the attempt to know and experience reality by way of “direct strokes” and “blows,” unhandsome clutching. Indeed, this is the lesson of the entire second half of the essay. Rejecting knowing as clutching, Emerson asserts that “Nature hates peeping,” that “we live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them”; he notes that John Dalton’s “new molecular philosophy,” in its discovery of “astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom,” proves that “the world is all outside: it has no inside”; and he points out the “rapaciousness” of the “colored and distorting lenses” through which we experience the world, lenses whose power “threatens to absorb all things.”86 Passages such as these lay the groundwork for the passiveness and receptivity with which Emerson so memorably concludes the essay. And yet, to return to the question of ideology, while the power of passivity generated by Emerson’s surface reading may indeed enable him to escape the ideology of a Western metaphysics whose mode of thinking and knowing perpetrates a kind of sublimized violence, it does not enable him to escape ideology altogether. For, as it turns out, surface reading is not the only thing that enables Emerson to so passively abide this process of autopoiesis—that is, Waldo’s death and caducity. What also enables Emerson’s epistemology of passivity is the logic of fetishism, and the fetish is precisely what a strict surface reading would overlook.

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 125 In the case of “Experience,” the fetish that grants Emerson the power of passiveness with respect to Waldo’s death—and, in turn, his knowledge of the world—is to be found not in the essay itself but in the following passage from a journal entry dated January 17, 1862, almost twenty years to the day after Waldo’s death: Long ago I wrote of “Gifts” & neglected a capital example. . . . There’s a gift for you which cost the giver no money, but nothing he could have bought would be so good. . . . John Thoreau, Junior, knew how much I should value a head of little Waldo, then five years old. He came to me, & offered to carry him to a daguerrotypist [sic] who was then in town, & he, Thoreau, would see it well done. He did it, & brought me the Daguerre which I thankfully paid for. In a few months after, my boy died, and I have ever since had deeply to thank John Thoreau for that wise & gentle piece of friendship.87

More than anything else, this journal entry confirms that “Experience” cannot be a work of mourning, for the work of mourning has already been transferred from Emerson to the fetish object of the daguerreotype.88 Emerson need not do the unhandsome work of either clutching at Waldo or mourning him, for the daguerreotype of Waldo has already done both for him. Thus, if “Experience” has anything more to tell us about Emerson’s response to the death of Waldo, it is to be found in the following passage: “All I know is reception. . . . When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-­called, I reckon part of the receiving.”89 If reception is another term for passivity, and if, for Cavell, both passivity and reception are other terms for acknowledgment, then it is Emerson’s receptivity to the gift of the autopoietic fetish object that, as Žižek would put it, enables him to (pretend to) rationally and fully accept Waldo’s death without macerating himself—maceration being the obverse of caducity. “Experience,” then, provides a perfect illustration of Žižek’s claim that “‘absolute knowledge’ itself is nothing but a name for the acknowledgement of a certain radical loss.”90 To speak of acknowledgment with regard to the fetish might seem somewhat counterintuitive, since, as we have seen, fetishism is dependent on disavowal, disowning knowledge. Here it is crucial to note

126 Russell Sbriglia that the fetish not only bears resemblance to but also partially overlaps with the objet petit a, the object-­cause of desire. As Elizabeth Cowie explains, the objet petit a is “comparable to the fetish . . . insofar as it figures as a separable object, one of a series of substitutable elements . . . which enable desire.”91 In Emerson’s case, we might say that, following his death, Waldo becomes Emerson’s objet petit a, a first-­order substitution for the lack at the heart of both subject and substance that sets in motion his desire to reclaim a lost intimacy or contact with the world, while the daguerreotype that stands in for Waldo functions as a second-­ order substitution, a substitute of a substitute, as it were.92 Even more instructive than the logic of first- and second-­order substitution, however, is that of avowal and disavowal. To again cite Cowie, whereas the objet petit a, insofar as it “signifies lackingness,” “represents an avowal, a recognition of the knowledge of separation,” the fetish, conversely, signifies a “disavow[al of] lackingness.”93 Hence Cowie’s conclusion that, “though fetish-­like, the objet petit a is not a fetish,” for “the fetish is supplementary, not a residue”—“a residue” being one of Žižek’s primary characterizations of the objet petit a.94 And yet, insofar as the avowal of lackingness achieved via the objet petit a “opens the subject to fantasy, to the imagining of the object which will disavow separation”—hence Lacan’s formula for fantasy: Ꞩ◊a—the fetish is not just, as Žižek notes, an envers of the symptom but of the objet petit a as well.95 This is why Žižek, using Lacan’s mathemes, formalizes the relationship between the −ϕ fetish and the objet petit a as “a under minus small phi,” or a .96 Thus, if the daguerreotype is the fetish object that enables Emerson to “(pretend to) accept reality ‘the way it is,’ ” we must also add that this act of disavowal is, paradoxically, made possible only by way of an originary act of avowal, of acknowledgment.97 If such a reading of “Experience” is ultimately more a type of reading for the fetish than a fetishistic reading per se, it nonetheless anticipates the ways in which fetishistic reading, while resonating with surface reading, would at the same time go beyond it by retaining the investment in ideology critique (and psychoanalysis) that surface reading, in embracing the “end-­of-­ideology” argument, does not. Indeed, a fetishistic reader would be interested not only in Emerson’s epistemology of passivity but also in how that epistemology of passivity, in its inextricability from the act of transferring the work of mourning onto the daguerreotype—a

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 127 precursor to the infinitely reproducible commodity fetish of the photograph, one of the great nineteenth-­century inventions that helped bring about the age of mechanical reproduction—participates in the ideology of commodity fetishism. As Karen Sánchez-­Eppler, for instance, points out, the daguerreotype is a perfect example of how “desire and the market create each other,” how “the modes of commercial and mechanical reproduction and the emotions and desires of an individual life” operate “collaborat[ively].”98 For while it may very well be the case that “commodification exploits feelings to yield profit”—a point frequently made by critics who operate under the assumption that “mortality and grief are incompatible with commerce” and who thus interpret the nineteenth-­ century commercialization of death and mourning as having “strip[ped] bereavement of its emotional authenticity”—“it is equally possible for emotions to use the commercial as a means of expression and a form of circulation.”99 This latter possibility—the emotions’ use of the commercial rather than vice versa—is precisely what “Experience” demonstrates. Indeed, with regard to the question of emotion, as Sánchez-­ Eppler stresses, Emerson’s relationship to the daguerreotype reveals that even his supposed antisentimentality regarding Waldo’s death is itself bound up in the antebellum ideology of sentimentality.100 Thus, both for better and for worse, Emerson’s power of passivity ends up carrying quite a bit of ideological weight—weight that a mere surface reading would be ill equipped to register.101 To draw attention to what, following Lori Merish, we might characterize as the ideology of “sentimental materialism” buttressing Emerson’s fetishistic epistemology of passivity is to effectively prove the either/or logic informing Rowe’s and Grossman’s symptomatic readings of Emerson—not to mention their understanding of the relationship between materialism and idealism—to be premised on a false opposition.102 Such a false opposition between a politically conscious materialism and a politically unconscious (what Rowe would term “depoliticized”) idealism is analogous to the false opposition that symptomatic reading posits between the conscious (if not exactly omniscient) critic and the all-­too-­ unconscious text, a perfect example of which is Jameson’s insistence that “interpretation proper” requires a “‘strong’ rewriting” that “restor[es] to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of [its] fundamental history,” thereby “allow[ing]” the “cultural past . . . once more to

128 Russell Sbriglia speak.”103 Jameson’s imagery of the speaking text recalls the conclusion to the section of volume 1 of Capital that remains the most intriguing for literary and cultural critics, “The Fetishism of Commodities and Its Secret,” in which Marx imagines what they would say “if commodities could speak.”104 While fetishistic reading would follow Jameson in eschewing Marx’s conditional, it would nonetheless reject his insistence that a text has to be “rewritten”—or, in the stronger language of hermeneutical suspicion, interrogated—in order to speak. Texts already speak; we just need to be willing, and receptive enough, to listen to them. Notes 1 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37; Anne Anlin Cheng, “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” differences 20, no. 1 (2009): 87–101; Toril Moi, “Afterword,” in Sexual/Textual Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 173–85; Moi, “The Adventure of Reading: Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir,” in Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie (New York: Continuum, 2011), 17–29; Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008); Felski, “After Suspicion,” Profession (2009): 28–35; and Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Paul Ricoeur coined the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” to characterize the type of reading ushered in by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche; see his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 2 I use the term phenomenological here in the sense of “descriptive/experiential.” The primary advocates of surface reading are Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus; see their “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. The leading proponents of ordinary language criticism, a paradigm born of the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, are Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; see Dauber, “Ordinary Language Criticism: A Manifesto,” Arizona Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1997): 123–39; Jost, Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); and Dauber and Jost, “Introduction: The Varieties of Ordinary Language Criticism,” in Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, ed. Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), xi–­xxii. For other contemporary forms of phenomenological reading, many of which (contrary to Dauber and Jost’s ordinary language criticism) are avowedly “postcritical” in orientation, see Felski, The Limits of Critique; Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 129 History 41, no. 2 (2010): 371–91; Timothy Bewes, “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism,” differences 21, no. 3 (2010): 1–33; and a number of the essays collected in Jeffrey R. Di Leo, ed., Criticism after Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 3 The differentiation of “superficial” and “empirical” reading from “deep” and “theoretical” reading comes from Dauber and Jost, who associate the former with ordinary language criticism and the latter with “grammatology.” Dauber and Jost, “The Varieties of Ordinary Language Criticism,” xvi. The claim that “what lies in plain sight is worthy of attention but often eludes observation” comes from Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 18. 4 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 18, 17, 16. 5 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 3. As Žižek explains with regard to “the wager of Truth” informing both ideology critique (in the form of Marxism) and psychoanalysis, “at the level of positive knowledge, it is, of course, never possible to (be sure that we have) attain(ed) the truth—one can only endlessly approach it, because language is always self-­referential, there is no way to draw a definitive line of separation between sophism, sophistic exercises, and Truth itself (this is Plato’s problem). Lacan’s wager is here the Pascalian one: the wager of Truth” (3). As noted above, for Lacan (and, in turn, Žižek), such a wager involves not pursuing “objective” truth but, rather, acknowledging and “holding on to” the truth of one’s position of enunciation. As I discuss in the following section of this essay, the failure to hold on to, let alone acknowledge, the truth of one’s position of enunciation—a failure that Lacan and Žižek associate with the attempt to inhabit a(n impossible) metalinguistic position—is a major characteristic of various types of hermeneutically suspicious reading. 6 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 296, 299. 7 In addition to Stanley Cavell’s monumental work on Emerson’s responses to philosophical epistemologies of knowledge, especially those of Kant and Hegel, see John Michael, Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). I address Cavell’s work on Emerson and the problem of knowledge at length below. 8 John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 250, 1. 9 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, 22, 21, 40, 17–18. 10 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, 21. 11 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, 24. 12 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, 25. Rowe extends his critique of Emerson’s progressive turn to the addresses he delivered on women’s rights as well, above all “Woman,” which he gave at the Boston Women’s Rights Convention in September 1855. 13 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, 28; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 8, 59, 58. 14 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, 30.

130 Russell Sbriglia 15 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, 21, 250. 16 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 28; and Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 1:166. Marx’s original German reads “Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es,” a line that Fowkes, differing slightly from Žižek, translates as “They do this without being aware of it” (166–67). 17 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 28. 18 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 296. 19 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 60; and Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 2. 20 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 2. 21 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 9. 22 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 296; and Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 30. 23 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 29. 24 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 61. 25 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5; and Octave Mannoni, “‘I Know Well, but All the Same . . . ,’” trans. G. M. Goshgarian, in Perversion and the Social Relation, ed. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 68–92. 26 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 296. For Žižek, it is not just ideology critique that must attend to the contours of fetishism if it is to remain relevant, but psychoanalysis as well, for contrary to yesterday’s naive analysand, today’s cynical analysand “calmly accepts the analyst’s suggestions about his innermost obscene desires, no longer shocked by anything” (296). 27 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1961), 152–53. 28 Mannoni, “‘I Know Well, but All the Same . . . ,’” 71. 29 Freud, “Fetishism,” 154, 156. 30 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 296. 31 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 29. Marx, of course, offered his own theory of fetishism, that of the commodity fetish. I turn to Marx on commodity fetishism at the conclusion of this essay. Also interesting to note here is that Žižek relies on a literary example—Patricia Highsmith’s short story “Button”—to illustrate the logic of fetishistic disavowal. See Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 296–97. 32 Best and Marcus’s approach is historicist insofar as it understands neither ideological mystification nor the practice of ideology critique as “timeless” phenomena but rather as ones that are (or, more precisely, were) of a specific historical epoch. 33 Robyn Wiegman, “The Ends of New Americanism,” New Literary History 42, no. 3 (2011): 391, 390. With regard to the issue of canonicity, Wiegman explains that the field of American studies “does not refuse identification altogether, but carries with

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 131 it an impetus toward loving other objects,” especially those “whose historical relation to ‘America’ is marked by subordination, exploitation, abjection, and disdain—­ objects whose seeming exteriority to the exceptionalist dramas of both U.S. nationalism and its imperialist imaginary provide a different ‘map’ of the terrain of the field and engage the kind of affective attachments that are disallowed by the commitment to critique” (390–91). For a devastating critique of this brand of identitarianism as a form of “anarcho-­liberalism” that casts subalternity not as “an inequality to be expunged” but as an “occult freedom” and “a form of ontological resistance that must be preserved—but only in that form: in a perpetually splintered, ineffective, heroic, invisible, desperate plenitude,” see Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 12, 16–17. 34 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 81. 35 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9. Sedgwick similarly notes that, in becoming a “mandatory injunction,” Jameson’s “Always historicize!” has acquired “the sacred status . . . of the Law.” Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 125. 36 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 81. 37 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 94. As Žižek explicitly asserts, the objet petit a is “the blind spot of historicism” (94). 38 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 94; and Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 82. 39 Best and Marcus, for instance, point out that in “present[ing] professional literary criticism as a strenuous and heroic endeavor, one more akin to activism and labor than to leisure,” symptomatic reading casts the critic as “a hero who performs interpretive feats of demystification.” Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 5–6, 13. Along similar lines, Mary Thomas Crane notes that although Jameson attributes critical agency to the “hermeneutic system” rather than the symptomatic reader, the practical effect of symptomatic reading has, on the contrary, been to not only “empower” the reader but also ascribe a “heroic agency” to him or her—an agency that, again, places the reader above the text and its author(s). Crane, “Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 78, 83. To give one final example, in comments that speak to other disavowed forms of enjoyment experienced by the symptomatic reader, Wiegman notes that “the ascription of political agency to critical inquiry” is “not only alluring, but also reassuring, allowing practitioners to believe that the value of critical practice is its political value, and that the political agency it thereby lays claim to is finally the critic’s own.” Wiegman, “The Ends of New Americanism,” 393–94. 40 See Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 688. 41 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 155. 42 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 156; and Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 123, 172.

132 Russell Sbriglia 43 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 154–55. 44 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 155. 45 Geoff Boucher, The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 223. As Boucher points out, for Žižek it is not just the case that poststructuralism and historicism make similar claims to inhabit a metalinguistic position; more radically, poststructuralism (deconstruction in particular) is “the ‘highest expression’ of contemporary historicism” (223). 46 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 93. 47 Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 112. 48 John Michael, “Transnational American Studies,” New Literary History 42, no. 3 (2011): 417. As Michael elaborates, “while . . . distance accords well with a certain vision of academic impartiality, . . . it [is] a poor model for cultural studies” (412), for “we are no more able, as critics, to stand outside the aesthetic when we analyze its effects than we are . . . to end [American] exceptionalism by construing our own political virtue as our immunity to its pull” (416–17). 49 Dauber and Jost, “The Varieties of Ordinary Language Criticism,” xii. Dauber and Jost’s insistence that ordinary language criticism refuses to conceive of theory as “meta-­explanation” resonates with Žižek’s critique of the metalinguistic posture of poststructuralism and historicism. It likewise resonates with Cheng’s suggestion that we “counter a hermeneutics of suspicion with . . . an ethics of immersion.” Cheng, “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” 99. 50 For Cavell on “acknowledgment” as a means of comprehending our “neighboring” of the world, see The Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 51 Cavell, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 51, 52, 47, 52. The resonances between Cavell’s “redemptive” reading and Žižek’s fetishistic reading are best suggested by Colin Davis, who explains that for Žižek the text is “a form of knowledge on equal footing with, or even sometimes superior to, analytic or philosophical discourse,” for “the art knows something that the analyst does not (yet) know.” Davis, Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 111, 114. For an altogether different take on Žižek’s reading practices—one that incorrectly paints him as a symptomatic reader par excellence—see Tim Dean, “Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism,” diacritics 32, no. 3 (2002): 21–41. 52 Cavell, Themes Out of School, 52. 53 Cavell, Themes Out of School, 52. This is why Lacan insisted on distinguishing between hermeneutics and interpretation, aligning psychoanalysis with the latter. For Lacan, interpretation differs from hermeneutics insofar as its goal is not to “make sense of” a text, to ascribe meaning to it, but instead to isolate and elucidate the instances of non-­sense (or resistance to sense) and non-­meaning that permeate it, so as to attempt to reduce such instances. See especially Seminar XI, The Four Fundamen-

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 133 tal Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 250, 212. For more on psychoanalysis as “antihermeneutical,” see Jean Laplanche, “Psychoanalysis as Anti-­hermeneutics,” Radical Philosophy 79 (1996): 7–12. 54 Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 8. We might say that the literary text falls somewhere between “gaze” and “voice” (the aural incarnation of the gaze), both of which Lacan adds to the list of Freudian “partial objects” (breasts, feces, and phallus). As Mladen Dolar explains, like the gaze, the voice is for Lacan “an object . . . which does not go up in smoke in the conveyance of meaning” but which, insofar as it “functions as a blind spot in the call and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation,” is “what exceeds language and meaning.” It is thus “one of the paramount ‘embodiments’ of what Lacan called objet petit a.” Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), 4, 11. 55 McGowan, The Real Gaze, 7. 56 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 11; and s/z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 161. 57 Though I don’t have the space to address this connection in this essay, I would nonetheless note the affinity between fetishistic disavowal and what Cavell, in addressing the problem of skepticism, terms “disowning knowledge.” Cavell reframes skepticism not as the impossibility of knowing whether or not the external world or other minds actually exist, but rather as a mode of disowning knowledge, of “denying” or “avoiding” that which “we cannot just not know.” Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 69, 75, 191. Compare this definition of skepticism with Žižek’s claim that “what the fetish gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge, my refusal to subjectively assume what I know.” Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 300. 58 Sharon Cameron, “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience,’” Representations 15 (1986): 25. For the classic formulation of this shift in Emerson’s thinking, see Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953). 59 Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 472–73. 60 Herman Melville, Moby-­Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), 144. 61 Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 200. 62 Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance, 198–99. 63 Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance, 199, 202. 64 Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance, 202, 203. 65 Cameron, “Representing Grief,” 25, 28. 66 Cameron, “Representing Grief,” 26.

134 Russell Sbriglia 67 Cameron, “Representing Grief,” 25, 26. 68 Cameron, “Representing Grief,” 40, 35. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1:125–38. 69 Cameron, “Representing Grief,” 22. 70 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957), 244. As I see it, the main problem with Grossman’s reading is that Emerson does not begin squarely in the material world and end up in the ideal. Rather, as Emerson explains in response to the essay’s memorable opening line— “Where do we find ourselves?”—he is situated in a liminal space somewhere between the material and the ideal, “on a stair . . . which we seem to have ascended,” yet with “many a one” still “above us . . . which go upward and out of sight.” The material world, then, is precisely what Emerson is unable to access at the essay’s outset. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 471. 71 Cameron, “Representing Grief,” 16; and The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 3:9. 72 Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 23. In Cavell’s parlance, intimacy is another word for “neighboring.” 73 Cavell calls attention to this pun when he notes “the connection between the hand in ‘unhandsome’ and the impotently clutching fingers.” Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 117. 74 Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 133, 147. 75 Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 147. For Cavell, this receptivity leads not to knowledge, exactly, but to acknowledgment, a concept that he proposes “not . . . as an alternative to knowing but rather as an interpretation of it, as . . . the word ‘acknowledge,’ containing ‘knowledge,’ itself . . . suggest[s].” Hence, he insists that “the correct answer to skepticism . . . does not consist in denying the conclusion of skepticism but in reconceiving its truth. It is true that we do not know the existence of the world with certainty; our relation to existence is deeper—one in which it is accepted, that is to say, received. My favorite way of putting this is to say that existence is to be acknowledged.” Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 8; and Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 16. 76 I take Cavell’s point regarding the “standoffishness” of objects as another form of acknowledging the agency/autonomy of the objectal gaze. 77 Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 117. 78 As Cavell succinctly puts matters: “Overcoming Kant’s idea of thinking as conceptualizing—say analyzing and synthesizing concepts—is coded into Emerson’s idea that our most unhandsome part belongs to our condition.” Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 147.

The Symptoms of Ideology Critique 135 79 Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 398–99. 80 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 399. 81 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 400. 82 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 401. 83 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 401–2. 84 Thomas Martyn, The Language of Botany (London: B. and J. White, 1793); and Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 406. 85 Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 492; and Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 137. I should here note that my reading of “Experience” is closest to that of Mark Edmundson, who interprets the essay as a work not of mourning but of melancholia. See Edmundson, “Emerson and the Work of Melancholia,” Raritan 6, no. 4 (1987): 120–36. As Edmundson argues, “the crucial passage from ‘Experience’ on Waldo’s death may not signal a refusal of grief, but rather that the spiritual labors of mourning have been in some way completed” (128), for “to have achieved [a] vocabulary in which grief is so severely objectivized”—that is, to compare the loss of Waldo to the loss of a “beautiful estate”—“stands, for Emerson, as a symbolic representation that the loss has been surpassed, and that, in Freud’s terms, ‘the ego has become free and uninhibited again’” (128–29). 86 Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 478, 481, 487. 87 Emerson, Selected Journals, 1841–1877, ed. Lawrence Rosenwald (New York: Library of America, 2010), 775–76. It is worth noting that the essay “Gifts” was published in the same collection as “Experience,” Emerson’s Essays: Second Series (1844). 88 As Žižek explains, the logic of fetishism, like the logic of the symptom, involves a “gesture of transference.” Such a gesture, however, “functions as an exact inversion of the standard formula of transference,” for whereas the symptom “embodies a repressed knowledge, the truth about the subject that the subject is not ready to assume,” what the fetish embodies is “precisely my disavowal of knowledge, my refusal to subjectively assume what I know.” Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 300. 89 Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 491. 90 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 7. 91 Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 218. 92 In this regard, the “first cause” of the essay is not exactly, as Cameron claims, Waldo’s death (and Emerson’s subsequent inability to get that death nearer to him). Rather, the essay’s first cause is the originary lack in both subject and substance, the “barred” nature of them both—a lack that, as we might more accurately put it, Waldo’s death stands as the essay’s “first avowal” of. Waldo is thus not so much the object of desire as the object-­cause of desire. 93 Cowie, Representing the Woman, 220, 218. 94 Cowie, Representing the Woman, 220. As Žižek defines it in The Sublime Object of Ideology, for instance, the objet petit a is “a residue, a remnant, a leftover of every signifying operation,” of every process of symbolization (180).

136 Russell Sbriglia 95 Cowie, Representing the Woman, 218. 96 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 196. See also Žižek’s Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (New York: Verso, 2001), 80. In keeping with Freud’s theory of the fetish object as the substitute for the mother’s missing penis, Lacan’s matheme for the fetish, −ϕ, is simultaneously the matheme for the “imaginary phallus.” See Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre IV: La relation d’objet, 1956–1957, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994). 97 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 299. 98 Karen Sánchez-­Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-­Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 131, 129. 99 Sánchez-­Eppler, Dependent States, 135. 100 As Sánchez-­Eppler explains, “even as we may read ‘Experience’ as a critique of sentimentalism and its vain clutching at what is gone, Emerson’s theory of bereavement expresses more explicitly than sentimentalism itself how the structures of excess, replication, and circulation that characterize sentimentality reflect not only the repetitive characteristics of mourning, but also the commercial and replicating mechanisms that place those feelings in circulation.” Sánchez-­Eppler, Dependent States, 131. 101 For another antebellum work that reveals the ideological weight carried by the daguerreotype—a weight that, in this instance, concerns the daguerreotype’s democratizing function, its role in conferring on both its subjects and its possessors a type of middle-­class status—see Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. 102 See Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-­ Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 103 Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb, 25, 247; and Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 60, 20, 19. 104 Marx, Capital, 176. To relate what I have characterized as the daguerreotype’s “autopoietic mourning” to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, early commentators on the daguerreotype often considered it, as Marx says of the commodity fetish in general, to “abound . . . in metaphysical subtleties.” Typical here is magazine editor Nathaniel Parker Willis’s characterization of the daguerreotype as “the real black art of true magic,” one according to which “all nature, animate and inanimate, shall be henceforth its own painter, engraver, printer, and publisher.” Insofar as Willis’s daguerreotype, to invoke Marx, has “absolutely no connection with . . . the material [dinglich] relations arising out of [it]” (i.e., the labor of the daguerreotypist, the technology of the camera, etc.), it is a perfect instance of commodity fetishism. Marx, Capital, 163, 165; and Willis, “The Pencil of Nature, a New Discovery,” The Corsair 1 (April 1839): 71.

5 Concrete Universality and the End of Revolutionary Politics: A Žižekian Approach to Postcolonial Women’s Jamil Khader

Writings

In “Dialectical Materialism and the ‘Feminine Sublime,’” Matthew Flisfeder explores the revolutionary potential of the feminine subjective position as the ethical subject of psychoanalysis. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s work on the sublime object of ideology, Flisfeder proposes a configuration of the “feminine sublime”—one grounded in both the Lacanian notion of feminine enjoyment (jouissance) and the Hegelian idea of radical negativity—that inscribes the feminine subject’s symbolic destitution, or her violence against herself, as the precondition for a genuine revolutionary act. As he asserts, “it is the feminine subjective position that offers for us the dimensions of a ‘proletarian’ position that connects the critique of ideology in dialectical materialism with the psychoanalytic gesture of ‘striking at oneself’—of destroying the very kernel of subjectivity: the sublime object.”1 Flisfeder grounds this assertion on the premise that the feminine and proletarian subject positions coincide with the Real of antagonism as articulated in psychoanalysis and Marxism: sexual difference and class struggle, respectively. As such, he boldly claims that the feminine subject functions as the primary site for the production of the revolutionary subjective position, that it is the feminine subject that has the greatest potential to occupy or subjectivize the working-­class position of the proletarian subject of dialectical materialism.2 Flisfeder is, of course, correct in claiming that Žižek posits woman, or the feminine logic of “non-­all,” as the “true subject, as [the] subject

138 Jamil Khader at its most fundamental,” but Žižek never actually refers to this “true subject” as radical or revolutionary.3 It is only by overreading the connection that Žižek makes between the Real of sexual difference and the ethical position of the subject that Flisfeder can turn around and parenthetically re-­present this subject as “radical.”4 For, however true feminine subjectivity is for Žižek, he never automatically engenders radical subjectivity as feminine within the framework of revolutionary politics, nor does he axiomatically elevate such a subjective position to the status of a universal revolutionary subject.5 On the contrary, Žižek does not presume that there is a subject that can ever occupy an a priori ontological position as the ultimate locus of revolutionary subjectivity. In fact, he never acknowledges that there ever was a “‘predestined’ revolutionary subject,” not even the working class itself.6 Cognizant of the radical transformations that the proletariat has undergone under the neocolonial global capitalist mode of production, Žižek does not fetishize the working class. What’s more, repeating a similar gap in Žižek’s theorization of the Act, Flisfeder fails to identify the specific conditions under which the feminine subject can assume the proletarian position or, as Žižek writes about Lenin’s October Revolution, become capable of looking “the abyss of the act” in the eye and rearticulating acts of resistance in a different register beyond itself altogether.7 Indeed, as Žižek himself makes clear, Lacan’s configuration of the feminine “non-­all” poses serious challenges to the possibility of “feminine resistance to symbolic identification”: whereas the masculine subject can fully assume his “symbolic mandate,” the feminine subject remains “somehow excluded from fully participating in the Symbolic order, unable to wholly integrate [herself] into it, condemned to leading a parasitical existence[,] . . . condemned to hysterical splitting, to wearing masks, to not wanting what she pretends to want.”8 It is precisely because of these potentialities and deadlocks that Žižek identifies in the feminine subject position, especially in relation to the proletarian subject, that his work makes, or promises to make, a significant contribution to contemporary women’s and gender studies in general and minority/postcolonial feminist studies in particular, especially at this particular historical juncture, when the normative forms of transnational feminism are increasingly coming under attack for serving as an

Concrete Universality 139 alibi for the expanding U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the world.9 Indeed, contemporary forms of transnational feminism seem to replicate the liberal postideological gesture underpinning second-­wave feminism’s universalist discourse of “global sisterhood,” a discourse that disavows the radical tradition of transnationalism: namely, proletarian internationalism and its correlative socialist feminist tradition. Grounded in neocolonial global capitalist realities and the expanding “actually existing” colonial geographies around the world, multicultural/postcolonial feminisms manage to recuperate alternative modes of subjectivization and forms of transformative emancipatory politics embedded in histories of anticolonial internationalism. As Gayatri Spivak notes, these alternative forms of internationalist praxis and politics are “not only possible but necessary” for postcolonial subjects, women especially, because the increasing hegemony of global capital and World Bank economics makes “social redistribution in [global Southern] states . . . uncertain at best.”10 These new modes of political subjectivity—modes that fall within the larger history of the anticolonial internationalist struggle for liberation and emancipation—include national liberation struggles, decolonization projects, socialist internationalism, hemispheric indigenous solidarity, grassroots activism, and communitarian forms of alliance and resistance, what Edward Said calls narratives of “adversarial internationalism.”11 Such modes of political subjectivization fall outside the language of possibility of the prevailing forms of transnational feminism and thus call for alternative theoretical projects that frame such discourses within a critique of neoliberal global capitalism and neocolonial hegemony. In this essay, then, I argue that Žižek’s dialectical materialist interventions can help illuminate both the radical possibilities of and the contradictions inherent to the new modalities of political subjectivization found throughout multicultural/postcolonial women’s writings. On the one hand, Žižek’s ideas reveal the ways in which postcolonial feminism engages in revolutionary politics; on the other, Žižek’s interventions also make it possible to appreciate the impossibility of articulating the full potential of the revolutionary act in multicultural/postcolonial feminisms. In what follows, I will first examine Žižek’s interventions into the fields of feminism and postcoloniality in the context of what he refers to as the “culturalization of politics,” or the institutionalization of postpolitical multicultural ideology as “the cultural logic of multinational

140 Jamil Khader capitalism.”12 Second, I will outline Žižek’s dialectical materialist theory of the subject, a theory that attributes the originary division, or multitude, to the subject’s inconsistency with itself, to the constitutive gap between the subject’s ontic properties and the “empty place” of the subject. Here, I claim that Žižek’s theory of the acephalous subject, what Lacan refers to as “extimacy” (extimité), offers a productive approach for rethinking the alternative forms of political subjectivization that postcolonial feminist writers negotiate and mediate in their texts. Third, I will interrogate the inscription of multicultural/postcolonial feminist struggle within the histories of revolutionary internationalism by way of Žižek’s idea of “concrete universality,” according to which revolutionary politics is reinstituted through an exception that discloses and destabilizes the hegemonic universal framework. I here look at the testimonio and the subsequent political memoir of Guatemalan indigenous rights activist and Nobel Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú—I, Rigoberta Menchú (1984) and Crossing Borders (1998)—both of which trace the particular struggles of a colonized indigenous woman within and against the universal framework of the neoliberal cosmopolitan discourse of international law and the human rights regime by disclosing this regime’s exception: namely, the cartographies of anticolonial internationalist struggle. As I demonstrate, for Menchú, the only way to challenge the hegemony of cosmopolitan law and the human rights regime is to fully assume its repressed point of exclusion, an assumption that allows for the articulation of an egalitarian and emancipatory politics of solidarity with what Jacques Rancière terms “the part of no part” around the world, since their radical gesture of universality stands in opposition to the empty principles of constitutional equality.13 Fourth, and finally, I will explore the implications of Žižek’s theory of subjective destitution—the violent act of setting off the ontic properties that lie at the heart of subjectivity—for the revolutionary act in multicultural/postcolonial women’s writings. I will show that in her novel No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff constructs a viable form of revolutionary politics grounded in the Bartlebian politics of subtraction and withdrawal that Žižek views as the basis for a genuine revolutionary act. At the same time, however, Cliff’s novel also functions as a cautionary tale that illuminates the challenges—even failures—of resignifying a radical,

Concrete Universality 141 revolutionary subjectivity that shifts from a politics of subtraction to a politics of resistance, foreclosing the potential of the revolutionary event itself. My point here is not that we should exclusively advocate for these forms of anticolonial internationalism and revolutionary acts, but that we should subject the universal framework itself to a “ruthless critique,” to use Marx’s words, in order to begin rethinking the universal framework beyond itself. Multiculturalism as the “Form of Appearance of Its Opposite”: Žižek, Postcolonialism, Feminism As minority/postcolonial feminism is articulated through the overlaps and contradictions between feminism and postcoloniality, it is worth looking first at Žižek’s interventions into these fields, since he usually couples them in the same context of his critique of liberal multicultural ideology. For him, multiculturalism is the ideal form of global capitalist ideology, and as such it constitutes “the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal world system.”14 As he makes clear in the parallels he draws between multiculturalism and colonialism, multiculturalism replicates the same racist and Eurocentric colonial structures; he asserts that “multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-­referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-­enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position.” Unsurprisingly, Žižek maintains that the multiculturalist inhabits the privileged position of the “empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and deprecate) other particular cultures properly—the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.”15 Hence, the terrain of struggle in multicultural politics is constructed around the cultural-­ethical mandate of tolerance, which, as he states, “involves the ‘repression’ of a different discourse to which it continues to refer,” namely, the socioeconomic struggle.16 For Žižek, then, insofar as feminism and postcolonialism constitute dominant forms of multicultural identity politics, they repress or displace the extent of the class struggle by offering excessive representations of the

142 Jamil Khader “horrors of sexism, racism, and so on,” an excess that can be attributed to “the fact that these other ‘-­isms’ have to bear the surplus-­investment from the class struggle whose extent is not acknowledged.”17 In his specific engagement with feminism and postcolonialism, Žižek calls for more reflexivity in interrogating the constructivist content of feminist theories of performativity and the radical postcolonial critique of liberalism and Eurocentric universality. For him, the content of both these theories is “insufficient”: on the one hand, feminism merely describes the dominant attitude concerning the possibility of repositioning and restructuring identity; on the other hand, postcolonial discourse not only repeats the standard Marxist critique of “false universality” but also levels this critique through the very same liberal vocabulary it purports to criticize, thus failing to transcend the constitutive contradictions of the dominant neocolonial liberal ideology.18 More importantly, Žižek’s engagement with feminism and postcolonial politics must be understood in the context of what he refers to as the “culturalization of politics,” or the institutionalization of postpolitical multicultural ideology as “the cultural logic of multinational capitalism.” This post­political multicultural ideology makes possible the proliferation of social movements that inscribe their presumably oppositional subjects primarily within the sphere of cultural production.19 For Žižek, multicultural postpolitics, embedded as it is in proliferating narratives of victimization and the primacy of ontic properties or secondary contradictions, reduces the struggle for emancipation and economic justice to a struggle over identity politics and the politics of recognition, be it gender, racial, sexual, national, ecological, and so on.20 He deems it symptomatic of these movements’ complicity with capitalism that multiculturalism enumerates these ontic properties or secondary contradictions within the constellation of identity politics, bearing “witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world” by the “(dead universal)” global capitalist machine, which colonizes the “heart of each (particular living) ghost.”21 For Žižek, feminism and postcolonialism, like all other social movements structured around the identitarian logic of multiculturalist postpolitics, are embedded within the mainstream logic of domination and are hence susceptible to “inherent commodification,” since “the very space for this proliferation of multiplicity is sustained by the recent stage in the development of capitalism.”22 In short, for Žižek, femi-

Concrete Universality 143 nism and postcoloniality fail to address and interrogate the real issue that remains seemingly impossible to symbolize, seeking instead to be integrated within the same dominant symbolic order (capitalist ideology) that mystifies the fundamental antagonism: class struggle, the constitutive split that forms society in the capitalist mode of production. Excess and the Fundamental Antagonism: The Extimate Subject of Minority/Postcolonial Feminisms In their negotiations and mediations of the contradictions between gender, patriarchy, and the nation-­state, on the one hand, and between the nation-­state and the neocolonial global capitalist system, on the other, minority/postcolonial women writers construct complex political subjectivities—subjectivities that Audre Lorde and Trinh T. Minh-­ ha, among others, refer to as “sister/outsider” and “outside in inside out,” respectively.23 These excessive subjectivities are formed through the dialectical relation between the intimate and the external, the inside and the outside, the private and the public. Minh-­ha, for example, locates the production of these subjectivities at that moment when the insider “steps out from the inside,” because her position as a pure insider becomes no longer tenable, affording her the unique vantage point of “looking in from the outside while also looking out from the inside.”24 Much has been written about these subjectivities in postcolonial feminist texts, but, more recently, critics have framed their discussions of these subjectivities within theories of intersectionality, cosmopolitics, and transnationalism, theories that foreground the multiple allegiances and the shifting, intersectional identities that minority/postcolonial women allegedly inhabit in their nomadic existence within a postnational, borderless world.25 At the ontological level, theories of multiple allegiances and shifting, cross-­cutting identities seem to attribute the inconsistency of the subject to some ontological difference or division from the Other. According to such theories, these multiplicities or multitudes are inscribed and reinscribed in order to, in Žižek’s words, “fill in the gap of the missing binary signifier.”26 Consequently, such theories endlessly add on new dimensions of identity or otherness within the same unity or totality, conducting their analyses only at the level of the subject’s ontic properties, ad infinitum.

144 Jamil Khader At the political level, moreover, such theories of intersectionality, cosmopolitics, and transnationalism fail to account for the exponential proliferation of discourses of multiple belongings and shifting, intersectional identities in minority/postcolonial women’s writings, specifically in the context of the current neocolonial global capitalist mode of production. To paraphrase Žižek, neocolonial global capitalism engenders and favors the drive for the reproduction of these kinds of identities and allegiances in the first place, so there is nothing inherently oppositional or revolutionary about them.27 The truth of the matter is that the global capitalist economy has incorporated postcolonial women into its fold and recodified their bodies as cheap labor in export processing zones and other special economic zones in the global South. Migrant workers (legal and illegal), refugees (internally or externally displaced persons), sexually trafficked women, sex workers, nannies, maids—these are just a few of the women who have been rendered even more invisible and disposable in a world of increasing wealth polarization. Lorde, for instance, encodes her “sister/outsider” subjective position in the context of her interrogation of the ways in which the global capitalist system produces its outsiders and exploits them as, in her words, “surplus people” in the global economy of profit. She states, “In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the space of the dehumanized inferior.”28 By thus depoliticizing the exploitation of minority/postcolonial women in the neocolonial global capitalist economy, theories of intersectionality, cosmopolitics, and transnationalism end up not only reproducing the conditions for structural exploitation, but also displacing and mystifying the intractable Real of the class struggle. Whereas theories of multiple allegiances and intersectional, shifting identities locate the subject’s multitude in her contingent, ontic properties, Žižek’s theory of the subject as a “signifier-­turned-­object” within the “self-­referential loop” of the Möbius strip attributes this multitude to the subject’s originary inconsistency and indeterminacy.29 Žižek grounds his theory of the political “acephalous” subject in both Lacan’s idea of extimacy (extimité) and his account of the drive. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan coined the neologism extimacy to refer to a paradoxical mode of subjectivity in which binary oppositions such as inside and out-

Concrete Universality 145 side, intimate and external or foreign, are spliced and conjoined to engender a radical zone of indistinction that can be referred to as interior-­ exteriority.30 For Lacan, the extimate designates that which is neither fully inside nor fully outside the system, but which exists both inside and outside the system concurrently. As Jacques-­Alain Miller notes in his extended commentary on the term, extimacy reveals that “the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite” (in other words, objet a), adding that in extimate structures “the most interior has a quality of exteriority,” and vice versa. Miller thus points out that “the subject contains as the most intimate (intime) of its intimacy the extimacy of the Other.”31 To represent this radical zone of extimate indistinction, Lacan and Miller use various figures and shapes, such as the Möbius strip, the “internal eight” (huit intérieur), and the torus. In his elaboration of the acephalous subject, moreover, Žižek connects Lacan’s reference to the objet petit a in his theory of extimacy back to the Lacanian account of the drive. According to this theory of the drive, subjectivization results from the subject’s continual circumnavigation of an allegedly missing object, an impossible object in the order of the Real that does not exist in the first place.32 Moreover, the impossible and unsymbolizable objet petit a comes to stand for this missing object, “for that which the subject had to lose in order to subjectivize itself.”33 It is in this sense that Žižek argues that the objet petit a constitutes “the subject’s stand-­in within the order of objectivity.”34 By identifying with the objet petit a, in other words, this acephalous subject (the subject of the drive) “assumes the position of the object,” opening up a space for its depersonalization and desubjectification, whereby “the subject emerges out of the person as the product of the violent reduction of the person’s body to a partial object.”35 In this sense, the extimate subject as Žižek’s political acephalous subject can be considered multitudinous by virtue of the constitutive gap between the subject’s ontic or symbolic properties and the “empty place” of its inscription. Making use of set theory in explaining Žižek’s theory of the subject following subjectification, Molly Anne Rothenberg points out that the subject equals both a set that places in brackets its ontic properties in the symbolic order and an “empty set” representing a little piece of the Real, the objet petit a. The excess in the subject is the effect of the coincidence of the external brackets with “the internal element of the

146 Jamil Khader empty set” in this equation.36 As such, any account of the subject must also take into consideration the “hollow place” in which the subject is inscribed into the symbolic order, thereby “actually becom[ing] a subject.”37 As Rothenberg explains, for Žižek, the subject is reduced to these formal elements by way of subtracting “the ontic properties from the presentation of the subject.”38 The subject thus puts in quotation marks or sets off “[its] real life substantive properties, fostering [its] minimal self-­difference,” bringing forth its excessive location as both signifier and object, as that which either completes communal social life or blocks it.39 Despite the seemingly universal formal conditions of subjectivization here, Rothenberg correctly argues that each subject will set off these ontic properties in a singular way that will make “the extimate cause of [one’s] subjectification, [one’s] Versagung, . . . look different from everyone else’s.”40 At stake in this account of extimate subjectivity is the excess that typifies the social field itself in terms of what Alain Badiou calls the “relation of nonrelation.”41 As Rothenberg explains, the social dimension of subjectivity is “irremediably excessive”; she adds that the production of the social subject’s extimacy “leaves a remainder or indeterminacy, so that every subject bears some unspecifiable excess within the social field.” Paradoxically, this excess is not only that which renders our symbolic efficiency and “meaning as social beings” uncertain to us and incomprehensible to others, but also that which is at the same time “the necessary ingredient of the social field within which we obtain the only meaning that we will ever have, however uncertain.”42 The constitutive excess that marks the production of these extimate subjectivities thus requires constant negotiation and mediation, as they are constructed without a chance of closure or resolution. Gloria Hull’s explication of Lorde’s notion of “sister outsider” is instructive here. Hull explains, “When Audre Lorde calls herself ‘sister outsider,’ she is claiming the extremes of a difficult identity. I think we tend to read the two terms with a diacritical slash between them—in an attempt to make some separate, though conjoining, space. But Lorde has placed herself on that line between the either/or and both/and of ‘sister outsider’—then erased her chance for rest or mediation.”43 As they operate through paradoxical zones of indistinction, zones where the logics of neither/nor and both/and bleed into each other and operate seamlessly,

Concrete Universality 147 minority/postcolonial feminists indelibly inscribe their extimate subjectivities in the enviable position of constant interrogation, questioning, reframing, and recodification. For Rothenberg, living with the uncertainty that results from this ineradicable excess “means that the subject can never live in absolute peace and harmony: some form of discord is inevitable.”44 The Question of Solidarity: Concrete Universality, the Exception, and Revolutionary Internationalism In their production of extimate subjectivities, minority/postcolonial women writers reconfigure their ontic or symbolic properties as subjects, setting them off and nullifying them in order to foreground the distance of the subject from itself. These practices of desubjectification and depersonalization serve as a precondition for reimagining a genuinely egalitarian dimension of solidarity politics in which all subjects encounter each other in their nonsymbolic dimension as objects. Extimate subjects are for Žižek identified with the objet petit a as their “little piece of the Real,” affording them access to this “order of objectivity.”45 Needless to say, Žižek considers this access to the register of the Real an act of withdrawal from ontic or symbolic properties, since the Real in itself “stands for the collapse of the symbolic.”46 It is in this sense that Žižek states that “the subject who acts is no longer a person but, precisely, an object.”47 For Žižek, then, the subject’s symbolic divestiture, her nullification of her symbolic properties, installs the subject in “objective-­ ethical” relations with other subjects-­turned-­objects.48 As Rothenberg explains, “The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur. Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relation but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects.”49 However, Žižek himself admits the contingent nature of this political project, since the process of objectification keeps open the temporality of solidary, thus making it impossible to predetermine the precise manner in which these objects will encounter each other and interact. Yet despite

148 Jamil Khader the “intentional fallacy” that he locates at the heart of solidarity politics, Žižek is intent on quilting it around some emancipatory Master Signifier. For example, he asserts that “the only real universality is the political one: the universal link binding together all those who experience a fundamental solidarity, all those who [become] aware that their struggles are part of the very struggle which cuts across the entire social edifice.”50 But this “universal link” can be articulated in any number of ways: there are no immanent guarantees that will ensure a singular script of the politics of solidarity. Rothenberg is thus correct to note the inconclusive nature of Žižek’s theory here, arguing that he fails to address the potential of the “objective-­ethical” order to slide into fascism.51 In other words, desubjectification makes it possible to produce a level playing field in which all subjects are equally re-­posited as objects, but it does not necessarily serve as the grounds for articulating emancipatory forms of solidarity politics structured around the disclosure of the Real of the fundamental antagonism. One way to reconfigure this aporia in Žižek’s political theory is to interpret it through his appropriation of the Hegelian idea of “concrete universality.” According to Žižek, in Hegel the universal coincides with the particular contents or concrete situations through which it can be “hegemonized,” while at the same time maintaining its universal frame in and through these concrete situations. Žižek thus maintains that for Hegel not only is the particular content a “subspecies of the universality of the total process, [but] it also hegemonizes this very universality,” transmuting universality itself into a “part of (or, rather, drawn into) the particular content.”52 As such, the universal does not stand in opposition to some concrete content or particular feature of the totality; rather, both universal and particular occupy the same paradoxical zone of extimate indistinction. In order to sustain itself, therefore, Hegelian universality requires a point of inherent exclusion, “an exception at which it is suspended.”53 For Hegel, universality is inherently exclusive, not only in the simple sense of excluding the “underprivileged Other,” but, more importantly, in the sense of excluding “its own permanent founding gesture—a set of unwritten, unacknowledged rules and practices which, while publicly disavowed, are none the less the ultimate support of the existing power edifice.”54 To this extent, concrete universality refers to the exception that is “reconciled in the universal”—that is, concrete uni-

Concrete Universality 149 versality is formed through “the unity of the abstract universal with its constitutive exception.”55 Unsurprisingly, Žižek considers such points of exception to be constitutive of the “very site of political universality.”56 In a different context, Žižek links this notion of concrete universality to the modern feminist movement, suggesting that feminism can live up to its radical potential only when it actualizes the language of possibility of this concrete universality. According to this model, feminists would not simply engage in inscribing a particular form of difference (i.e., gender or sexual difference) within the matrix of the dominant symbolic order; rather, they would interrogate and destabilize the universal framework within which a troubling excess is foreclosed: “This is what you must be conscious of, that when you fight for your position, you at the same time fight for the universal frame of how your position will be perceived within this universal frame. This is for me, as every good feminist will tell you, the greatness of modern feminism. It’s not just we women want more. It’s we women want to redefine the very universality of what it means to be human. This is for me this modern notion of political struggle.”57 The concern with particular sexual or gender difference in feminist discourses would embody the exception, as long as feminists seek not to single out this particular difference and elevate it to the level of the universal. The point is to instead appropriate the form of feminist particularity in order to interrogate and destabilize the very universal framework (i.e., multiculturalism and identity politics) within which this particular form of difference is posited. The concern here, in Fabio Vighi’s words, is that the struggle for a particular form of difference becomes “nothing but a content that is necessarily distorted by its own attempt to fulfill the demand of its abstract universal” (in Žižek’s example above, sexual difference and human emancipation, respectively).58 What is crucial to keep in mind here is that the emphasis on the struggle against particular forms of oppression structured around secondary (visible) contradictions mystifies and displaces—even effaces—the fundamental antagonism, or the constitutive split, in the neocolonial global capitalist mode of production insofar as it constitutes the totality of social relations today. To this extent, the assertion of the concrete universality of specific forms of struggle must be made in a double inscription: it is an articulation of particular forms of struggle against exploitation based on the specific experiences of the exploited and oppressed, but it is also a rearticulation

150 Jamil Khader of this struggle through the language and grammar of the fundamental antagonism of the class struggle. This is not to say that Žižek dismisses the important struggles that surround and accompany these secondary contradictions, but rather that he insists, above all, on the need to fully assume the repressed point of exclusion as “the gap between the particular . . . and the universal which destabilizes it from within” in order to reconfigure the very coordinates and terms of universality.59 The work of the Guatemalan Quiché Nobel Prize laureate and indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchú maps out a politics of solidarity in her particular struggles as a colonized indigenous woman in a way that destabilizes the universal framework of both the neoliberal cosmopolitan discourse of international law and the human rights regime through its exception: namely, the history and practices of anticolonial internationalist struggle. In her political memoir, Rigoberta Menchú: La nieta de los mayas (translated into English as Crossing Borders), Menchú unravels the gaps and contradictions between these cosmopolitan institutions and her struggles for ethnic particularity that sustain the universal framework itself.60 Obversely, Menchú’s ethnic particularity hegemonizes this universality. That is to say, it is precisely through her commitment to ethnic particularity that internationalist universalism becomes possible. In specifying the national and international conditions under which her imposed exile and nonvoluntary travels throughout Mexico and Europe became embedded within institutionalized forms of cosmopolitanism such as the United Nations, the human rights regime, the Nobel Prize, and the transnational movements of solidarity with other exploited peoples, Menchú demonstrates that rethinking universalism requires a thorough interrogation of the universal framework itself. In Menchú’s work the postcolonial female subject is constructed through her extimacy, as she desubjectifies herself by divesting herself of and nullifying her symbolic properties. In her descriptions of her travels as a Nobel laureate, Menchú underscores the gap between her extimate subjectivity, as she is reduced to an excremental position on her travels, and her reception in official cosmopolitan ceremonies and protocols: “I always travel like any other citizen of the world, squat and dark-­skinned as I have always been. I will always have the face of a poor woman, my Mayan face, my indigenous face. At official ceremonies, when I am received by a king or a head of state, I am the winner of the Nobel Peace prize. Yet

Concrete Universality 151 when I cross borders, it’s another story. Customs and immigration officials act impatiently. They take my things out one by one, even my underclothes. They are often very offensive and racist.”61 In contrast to the image of the subject of liberal individualism—the unfettered, unbound, rootless, privileged citizen of the world that sustains the normative-­ philosophical claims of cosmopolitical discourses—Menchú inscribes her extimate subjectivity within the structural, material conditions that mark the excremental positionality of the racialized body of the female indigenous subject as an object of the proliferating technologies of surveillance, criminalization, and control under the neocolonial capitalist state. This emphasis on extimacy and excremental positionality is important for the distinction Menchú draws between, on the one hand, the official reception she enjoys at international ceremonies and global institutions whose structures of fame and recognition reinscribe her body within its multiple allegiances and intersectional identities, and, on the other hand, the harassment and persecution she is subjected to within structures of state surveillance regimes and border/immigration authorities that reduce her to the objectified position of an excremental subject. Ironically, she realizes that her passport to international fame and world citizenship—that is, her Nobel Peace Prize—does not offer her the protection she expected from the “racism and bullying” of state officials, and this makes her ponder the condition of the thousands of illegal Guatemalan immigrants living in the United States under constant threat of deportation. Thus, following a press conference in which she protested the racist practices of immigration and border officials, she concludes, “I felt proud to be an ordinary citizen. Yet for people who have no help at the borders, things are very tough. It’s as if, at the end of the twentieth century, it’s a crime to be poor, and an international crime at that, for wherever you go in the world you always come up against obstacles and laws.”62 Menchú’s interrogation and destabilization of the hegemonized universality of cosmopolitan law and the human rights regime within which the struggle for ethnic particularity is inscribed disclose its exception or troubling excess as a point of inherent exclusion that unravels the violent founding gestures of the universality of the neocolonial capitalist system.63 In her reaffirmation of “the need for resistance,” Menchú not only links her struggle to the struggles of oppressed indigenous communities

152 Jamil Khader both in the western hemisphere and around the globe—those excluded communities whose members comprise “the part of no part”—but also situates these struggles within histories of anticolonial internationalist struggle for emancipation.64 In his discussion of concrete universality in the context of Hegel’s elaboration of the “rabble” as a trope for the part of no part, Žižek notes that “it is precisely those who are without their proper place within the social Whole (like the rabble) that stand for the universal dimension of the society which generates them. This is why the rabble cannot be abolished without radically transforming the entire social edifice.”65 The part of no part, therefore, introduces a “totally different universal, that of an antagonistic struggle which, rather than taking place between particular communities, splits each community from within, so that the ‘trans-­ cultural’ link between communities is one of a shared struggle.”66 As such, these excluded communities turn the conflict under global capitalism from one between two particular groups to one between the global order and this radical universality, since such communities are more than willing to “introduce a division of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them.’”67 In their lack of a determinate place within the private order of the social hierarchy, these excluded communities of struggle recenter the egalitarian emancipatory dimension needed for living in a just world. The universality of the part of no part becomes, then, the universality of “the public use of reason,” which can redefine “the very universality of what it means to be human.” From this vantage point, it becomes possible to subvert the totality of the system, since the domain of politics proper is not simply about “the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire space.”68 Indeed, as Jodi Dean notes, such a political act constitutes a reinscription “in another register, a register beyond itself,” that can “unsettle or challenge the existing order.”69 For Menchú, the only way to challenge a given sociosymbolic order is to fully assume its repressed point of exclusion, the struggle of the part of no part, since their radical gesture of universality stands in opposition to the empty principles of constitutional equality. As elaborated in her testimonio, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (translated into English as I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala), Menchú was from an early age involved in a number of radical

Concrete Universality 153 movements—among them the Committee for Peasant Unity (in 1979), the 31st of January Popular Front (in 1981), the United Representation of the Guatemalan Opposition (in 1982), and the National Coordinating Committee of the Committee for Peasant Unity—that sought to educate indigenous peasants in resistance to the military dictatorship in Guatemala, a struggle that, following her exile from Mexico, she later expanded into a hemispheric struggle for the land rights and national sovereignty of Native Americans and indigenous peoples throughout the western hemisphere.70 In fact, Menchú concludes her testimonio with a statement that grounds her revolutionary internationalism within the specific context of her ethnic, indigenous particularity: “My commitment to our struggle knows no boundaries nor limits. This is why I’ve traveled to many places where I’ve had the opportunity to talk about my people.”71 Hence her work with the American Indian Movement and the International Council of Indian Treaties in 1982, which led to the formation of the first continental Quincentenary Conference in Colombia in 1989, where the “Five Hundred Years of Resistance” campaign began to support landless peasants in Brazil with the participation of indigenous movements from Ecuador, Colombia, and Guatemala. Indeed, by 1991 this movement had turned into a hemispheric campaign that included, in addition to indigenous and Native American organizations, Caribbean and other South American popular movements; it was appropriately called “Five Hundred Years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance.”72 These experiences in the western hemisphere only confirmed Menchú’s belief that the struggle of indigenous peoples was only a part of the struggle of the oppressed all around the world, grounding her radical politics in revolutionary internationalism.73 Menchú’s internationalist politics are clearly grounded not only in the moral vision that underwrites normative discourses of cosmopolitanism but, more importantly, in a materialist understanding of poverty and fundamental inequality within the power structures that inform global capitalist and neocolonial hegemony. For instance, she correctly criticizes the proliferation of developmental agencies and many “phony” nongovernmental organizations that, under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, bear “direct responsibility for the extreme poverty that plagues the majority of the world’s population.”74 She also condemns the paternalistic and discriminatory practices of these global

154 Jamil Khader financial institutions and cosmopolitan civil society for undermining “the [indigenous] people’s own organizations and leaders, [and for] imposing on them groups or organisms that just serve to channel funds.” As she points out, these global institutions and organizations trivialize the pragmatic knowledge of indigenous peoples, thereby precluding the contribution of local “knowledge, techniques, wisdom, and labor” in development.75 What is most interesting to note about the response to Menchú’s scathing critique of global financial institutions, cosmopolitan civil society, and developmentalist discourses is that once it is transvalued into the language of internationalism, it immediately becomes repackaged and dismissed as communist.76 Nonetheless, it seems that only within such a discourse can the egalitarian dimension of solidarity politics be coupled with its hidden emancipatory potential to reactualize Žižek’s “universal link” through her commitment, as she says, to “my humble home, to my own poor people, women with calloused hands and shy uncertain smiles.”77 It is important to note the extent to which anticolonial internationalism functions as the exception in the universal neoliberal ideology of international law and the human rights regime. For example, although theorists of cosmopolitics maintain that cosmopolitanism and internationalism are neither identical nor incompatible, they continue to omit, even excise, narratives of radical internationalism from their accounts of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, cosmopoliticians question and elide narratives of internationalism and the history and theory of decolonization, replacing them instead with emergent forms of global civil society that are not yet available to the subjects of internationalism—subjects who, as Timothy Brennan states, “have an interest in transnational forms of solidarity, but whose capacities for doing so have not yet arrived.”78 This tendency to erase internationalism, even when references to it are made or fondness for it is feigned, is common among cosmopoliticians. In the end, these theorists reject the term internationalism for its valorization of national sovereignty, overshadow the realities of global capitalist exploitation and class struggle with the abstract language of rights and ethics, and substitute the exclusive concerns of global civil society and transnational solidarity movements for internationalism’s comprehensively transformative program.79

Concrete Universality 155 The Ends of Revolutionary Politics: The Politics of Subtraction, Liberated Zones, and Resignifying the Revolutionary Act Although Menchú’s work frames her struggle in solidarity with the part of no part in the context of the universal exception or the concrete universality of anticolonial internationalism, it fails to articulate the full potential of the revolutionary act. In this case Menchú’s work is symptomatic of minority/postcolonial women’s writings in general, in which there is an illumination of the cartographies of alternative forms of antiprogrammatic subjectivization and politics, but in which there also remains a glaring gap with regard to the possibility of re-­creating and reimagining a fully fledged revolutionary project. Most of these writers invest in relinking these forms of struggle with a vaguely described larger project of “resistance” and emancipation, not with a revolutionary event or act per se. As such, the full elaboration of the actualization of the genuinely revolutionary act remains lacking in these texts. The challenge here cannot be underestimated, of course: the main problem with the dominant neocolonial global capitalist system is the way in which it uses ideological fantasy to appropriate, co-­opt, and integrate every aspect of the subject’s thoughts and experiences within the system itself, to the extent that even theories of revolution and radical politics begin to replicate the logic, rhetoric, and values of the dominant economic and political order itself.80 For Žižek, therefore, the revolutionary act must take a form that cannot be described as resistance in the traditional sense. As we have seen, Žižek argues that desubjectification through the nullification of ontic or symbolic properties opens up a space for the extimate subject to access the register of the Real and identify with the object, thereby making it possible for the subject to assume a genuinely revolutionary positionality. In this act of desubjectification, the subject aestheticizes itself through self-­distancing practices that allow it to strike against itself in pure acts of violence (Versagung). The subject’s violence against itself thus constitutes for Žižek the precondition for a genuine revolutionary act, since in its symbolic divestiture the subject becomes “a signifier reduced to an inert stain that stands for the collapse of the symbolic order.”81 Žižek views such a gesture, one embodied in the subject’s violent relationship to itself, as a revolutionary gesture par excellence because “revolution does not come about through a replacement of what

156 Jamil Khader is with something else, not even through a focus on the elimination of suffering, but rather in the stubborn stance of refusal of the entire social universe.”82 Hence, in its refusal and withdrawal, the subject appears as an “obstacle to the Symbolic, [a] little piece of the Real that resists symbolization” and thus clears a space for reimagining the possibility of a different relationship to the symbolic order, perhaps even its collapse.83 As such, Žižek argues that a proper political act refuses to seek legitimation from the big Other, opting instead to “authorize itself only in itself” and thus create “its own (new) rationality.”84 This is precisely where Žižek locates the meaning of the revolutionary act of Melville’s Bartleby, beginning with his affirmation of a “non-­ predicate” by way of his literal insistence that he “would prefer not to.” As Žižek explains, Bartleby’s act of Versagung instructs us “how [to] pass from the politics of ‘resistance’ or ‘protestation,’ which parasitizes upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation.” This, Žižek asserts, is “the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference.”85 Žižek therefore describes Bartleby’s act of refusal as not so much “the refusal of a determinate content as, rather, the formal gesture of refusal as such.”86 In this way the subject can reveal to others the possibility of resignifying revolutionary acts of symbolic divestiture, thus unraveling the limits of the social field and its mechanisms of normalization, and fostering “the conditions under which people will have a choice to make at the level of practices— individual, familial, institutional.”87 Although Žižek maintains that the subject cannot control the way its acts are resignified and repeated by others, he insists that there is no other option but to “accept the risk that a blind violent outburst will be followed by its proper politicization.”88 Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven (1987) bears witness to Žižek’s speculations on the revolutionary act, but it also raises important questions about the conditions under which the revolutionary subject becomes genuinely revolutionary and the politics of subtraction can no longer be sustained as the need arises for resignifying the revolutionary act in a register beyond itself, something for which Žižek offers no clear answers. In her novel Cliff constructs a viable form of revolutionary politics grounded in the Bartlebian gesture of subtraction and withdrawal—a politics embodied in the emergence of a revolutionary

Concrete Universality 157 band living in a commune. However, when the guerrilla members of the commune insist on shifting the locus of their act from subtraction to resistance, the end result is their premature death. Cliff’s novel thus avows the symbolic divestiture constitutive of the sudden eruption of violence necessary to any authentic radical revolutionary act, while at the same time warning against the resignification of political acts before the process of self-­aestheticization has been completed. Cliff’s diasporic protagonist, Clare Savage, attempts to set off and nullify her ontic properties—especially the symbolic properties inscribed within the history of the colonial imaginary in the Caribbean— but she ultimately fails in her self-­aestheticization project owing to her insistence on overidentifying with her (African) self and reclaiming her grandmother’s land. Clare grows up as a privileged creole child, enjoying the prerogatives of light skin and straight hair in a postcolonial society that still values and operates by the residues of an old colonial culture. Throughout her formative years, Clare identifies with the desire for whiteness of her father, Boy Savage—what her mother, Kitty Savage, refers to as “favor[ing] backra.”89 In fact, Kitty, in an attempt to expose and ridicule her husband’s colonial mimicry, calls him “busha” and “massa.” Cliff writes, “With each fiction his new self became more complete.”90 To accomplish his racial fantasy, Boy begins to practice camouflage and invisibility, or assimilation, losing all connections to his home culture. In Paris, Clare explains to her expatriate African American boyfriend, Bobby, the psychological effects of such fantasies on her self-­ image: “I was raised by my father to be that way. To be the soft-­spoken little sambo, creole, invisible neger, what have you, blending into the majority with ease.”91 Given the structures of colonial mimicry that shape her thought, it is not surprising to see Clare drawn to metropolitan space and its colonial culture. Foregrounding the irony in Clare’s choice to travel to London, for instance, Cliff writes, “Choosing London with the logic of a creole. This was the mother-­country. The country by whose grace her people existed in the first place. Her place could be here.”92 Although she momentarily manages to disidentify with Jane Eyre, she is still incapable of nullifying her symbolic identity, as she continues to misrecognize herself as Bertha, whom she sees as “Captive. Ragut. Mixture. Confused. Jamaican. Caliban. Carib. Cannibal. Cimarron. All Bertha. All Clare.”93 Such misrecognition on the part of Clare emphasizes Žižek’s

158 Jamil Khader point that suffering and victimization are still premised on the elevation of one ontic property over others.94 This valorization of one ontic property over others is also obvious in Clare’s overidentification with blackness, her misrecognition of herself as a coherent and unified black subject. Clare realizes that in order to shake off colonial authority, or the (colonial) Name-­of-­the-­Father, she needs to make a choice between whiteness and blackness. As she explains to Bobby, people like her, “who look one way and think another, feel another[,] . . . can be very dangerous, to ourselves, to others,” a view that leads her to conclude that she has to “be one and not both.”95 Clare’s renunciation of the subject’s inconsistency with itself in favor of a unified subjectivity makes her susceptible to the gaze of Harry/Harriet, the novel’s hermaphroditic and ardent nationalist, who leads her to reclaim her commitment to the nation and to overidentify with blackness over other identity narratives. As a victim of rape by a colonial white officer as a boy, Harry/Harriet wholeheartedly believes in reclaiming national consciousness and resistance politics, because “Jamaica’s children have to work to make her change.” Harry/Harriet thus urges Clare to return home and “help bring us into the present.”96 Ironically, at one point in the novel Clare seems ready to think her subjectivity through her extimate position as “neither the one thing, nor the other,” but Harry/ Harriet suggests that such a gesture is a sign of luxury and privilege and that they, as well as all Jamaicans, regardless of ethnicity and sexual orientation, will “have to make [a] choice.”97 No longer able to live “in borrowed countries, on borrowed time,” Clare returns to Jamaica, reclaims her grandmother’s land, contributes it to the cause, and withdraws into a commune with a local guerrilla band in an effort to fight oppression and transform the deplorable conditions of Jamaica by modeling their struggle after the local history of slave fugitism and resistance, or marronage.98 In its Bartlebian gesture, Clare’s withdrawal into the commune is a step in the right direction, for this is precisely the type of space that Žižek claims exists outside the hegemonic position and its negation. Despite her renunciation of the prospects of revolutionary politics and violence, Cliff’s representation of the experiences of the guerrilla band in the commune points to the radical potential of such sites of agency. Indeed, for Žižek, such communal spaces, like the favelas and slums of the Third World, constitute alter-

Concrete Universality 159 native forms of community, or “supernumerary” collectives, that exist “outside the structured social field” in extrajuridical spaces beyond state control, spaces where the system itself is suspended.99 In fact, according to Žižek, the state has withdrawn its power to control the slums and their dwellers, leaving them to “vegetate in the twilight zone,” even though they are still subject to integration within the global capitalist economy as its “systematically generated ‘living dead.’”100 Grounded in the possibility of “self-­transparent organization,” these marginalized and dispossessed dwelling spaces have led to the construction of an emergent form of agency and social awareness.101 Hence, Žižek dubs these spaces “liberated territories” where the “horizon[ ] of the politics to come” is being actualized.102 Like the members of the guerrilla commune depicted by Cliff, the postcolonial subject in the favelas and slums subjectivizes the position of Marx’s proletariat. Although the slum dwellers, in contrast to the working class, are defined in sociopolitical rather than economic terms, Žižek argues that they embody—even exceed—the definition of the “free” proletarian revolutionary subject. He writes that they are “‘freed’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, beyond the police regulations of the state . . . ; they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, ‘thrown’ into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-­ together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-­forms.”103 Furthermore, for Žižek, such utopian spaces are embedded in what, appropriating Walter Benjamin’s phrase, he calls “divine violence,” those negative and inhuman forms of vitality and energy that are necessary for shaking up the system. Like the biblical locusts, the slum dwellers, Žižek surmises, strike “blindly” out of nowhere, “demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance,” an act or a decision not “covered by the big Other,” and, as such, one without any external guarantees, invoking the passion of risking a contingent decision—a decision requiring what Žižek calls “the political suspension of the ethical.”104 As such, there is, as Žižek might put it, “more in the favelas than the favelas themselves,” indicating the capacity of these Other utopian spaces to affect a subversion of the whole edifice of the system. Indeed, for Žižek, it is precisely through the “improvised modes of social life” that proliferate in the slums—criminal gangs, the black economy, diverse forms of socialist solidarity and social

160 Jamil Khader programs, and so on—that such utopian sites become capable of facilitating the “political mobilization of new forms of politics.”105 Insofar as it remains implicated in the politics of subtraction, Cliff’s guerrilla commune, like the favelas and slums, is a truly authentic “evental site.” Though they overidentify with blackness and elevate it over other symbolic properties, Clare and her guerrilla band attempt to resignify the revolutionary act by turning to the politics of resistance as an answer to Jamaica’s problems: “no telephone to heaven. No miracles. None of them knew miracles. They must turn the damn thing upside down. Fight fire with fire. Burn. Yes, burn it down. Bu’n it dung, bredda. Catch a fire. Catch afire. Send flame through the hills like you light the cane. Watch de snake run ’way. No hab no choice in de matter. . . .”106 The band thus attacks a Hollywood movie production site. However, in a clear setup, they end up dead following a shootout with the local police. Concurring with Žižek, then, Cliff’s novel offers Clare’s narrative as a cautionary tale, re-­positing this failed military attack as suicidal. The example of Clare and her guerrilla band clearly demonstrates Žižek’s contention that the shift from a politics of subtraction to a politics of resistance cannot succeed until the subject has completely nullified her symbolic properties and managed to actualize the project of self-­aestheticization. Moreover, Žižek is careful to posit the Bartlebian politics of subtraction as “merely the first, preparatory, stage for the second, more ‘constructive,’ work of forming a new alternative order.” That is to say, the politics of subtraction is not the new alternative order itself but, rather, “the very source and background of this order, its permanent foundation.”107 However, Cliff’s novel still raises important questions about the extent to which the politics of subtraction can be sustained under the socioeconomic and political conditions that typify postcolonial spaces in the global South. Žižek fails to specify the conditions under which a revolution might occur as the need for resignifying the revolutionary act in a register beyond itself becomes inevitable. However, there might not be easy answers to these questions at present. Nonetheless, reading Žižek’s operative semantics and theories of the subject, solidarity, and revolutionary politics with and against minority/postcolonial women’s writings promises to clear a space for interrogating the current global crisis in general and the postcolonial impasse in particular from the perspective of some ideas that fall outside the hegemonic neoliberal ideology.

Concrete Universality 161 Notes 1 Matthew Flisfeder, “Dialectical Materialism and the ‘Feminine Sublime,’” Subjectivity 5 (2012): 385. 2 Flisfeder, “Dialectical Materialism and the ‘Feminine Sublime,’” 391. Flisfeder doesn’t simply suggest that there is a homology or “chain of equivalence” between the feminine and the proletarian subject positions, that the referent “Woman” merely constitutes “the psychoanalytic name for the Marxian subject of History: the proletarian,” or, in his paraphrase of Jacques Lacan, that “‘Woman’ is one of the names of the proletarian” (378). Rather, he actually attributes to the feminine subjective position an inherently revolutionary potentiality. 3 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), 91. 4 Flisfeder, “Dialectical Materialism and the ‘Feminine Sublime,’” 390. In an interview in which he intervenes in the debate over feminism at some depth, Žižek speaks of the “truly horrifying dimension of subjectivity,” namely, the “radical negativity” of the feminine subject position. Alluding to both the eponymous Medea from Euripides’s play and Sethe from Toni Morrison’s Beloved and contrasting these instances of feminine radical negativity with the masculine logic of sacrifice, Žižek describes the former as the position of “letting the object go precisely when you could have gotten it,” of “abandon[ing] everything for nothing.” For Žižek, such a radical feminine subjectivity can be established only through positively violent acts. To this extent, he goes on to claim, “subjectivity as such . . . is feminine.” Nonetheless, he never generalizes this feminine subject position as the “true subject” into the revolutionary subject as such. Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek: Philosopher, Cultural Critic, and Cyber-­ Communist,” interview by Gary Olson and Lyn Worsham, jac: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics 21, no. 2 (2001): 263, 262. 5 Todd McGowan assigns an “inherently political” structure to the feminine subject position, but he does not call it revolutionary or radical either. For McGowan, this politicization of female subjectivity can be attributed to its lack of a “signifier of exception [the phallus], which means that the set of women is a set without a limit, an infinite set that must remain incomplete,” as opposed to the masculine logic of exception, which “must create the illusion of a whole—a whole society and whole identities—in order to provide a sense of social stability.” McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 119. Molly Anne Rothenberg also examines particular cases of radical feminine subjectivity, including the Jewish ballerina, as exemplary of Žižek’s theory of the act, but, again, she does not suggest that these cases operate as a universal theory of the revolutionary subject. See Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 172. 6 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 289. 7 Žižek, “Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions,” in Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2002), 8. For more on Žižek’s exhortation to repeat Lenin today, see my essay “Žižek’s Infi-

162 Jamil Khader delity: Lenin, the National Question, and the Postcolonial Legacy of Revolutionary Internationalism,” in Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies, ed. Jamil Khader and Molly Anne Rothenberg (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 159–74, as well as the contributions in Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For critiques of Žižek’s theory of the Act, see Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009); Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject; and Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 8 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 57. Fabio Vighi suggests that Žižek’s defense of Lacan’s feminine logic of the non-­all against feminist critiques insists on linking the true subjectivity of the feminine position to the “inconsistency of feminine sexuality” as the assertion of “women’s ontological primacy over man.” For Vighi, however, this “ontological primacy” does not seem to automatically translate into a revolutionary or politically radical subjectivity. Vighi, Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 151–52. 9 Some critics, like Sarah Kay, consider Žižek to be “an ally of feminism,” while others, like Ian Parker, argue that Žižek’s position constitutes merely a repetition of the French existentialist themes common in the 1950s but “stripped of [their] feminist rhetoric.” Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: Polity, 2003), 14; and Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2004), 68. Parker suspects that Žižek may find himself in trouble with feminists because he does not hesitate to offer plausible explanations, or specifications, as he calls them, about “what women want and what they will not be willing to give up because of it” in response to Lacan’s insistence on the Real of sexual difference. Part of the problem, Parker maintains, is that Žižek’s theory of sexual difference appeals “not so much to an analysis of and distance from the historical constitution of man, and of woman as other, and with some mysterious access to the Other, but to a tragic repetition of the failure of both men and women to measure up to the figure of man in their own distinctive ways” (67). For a concise defense of Žižek’s views on feminism, one that draws parallels between his views and those of other feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray, see Marcus Pound, Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 112–26. 10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (New York: Routledge, 1995), 260. For an examination of the links between transnational feminism and the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, and global human rights institutions and discourses, see Inderpal Grewal and Karen Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Sally Engle Merry, Human

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

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Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See also Andrea Smith, “Native American Feminism, Sovereignty, and Social Change,” Feminist Studies 31, no. 1 (2005): 116–32, for an indigenous feminist critique of transnational feminism. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 244. See Žižek, “Multiculturalism; or, The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (September–­October 1997): 28–51. See Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1995). Žižek, “Multiculturalism,” 46. Žižek, “Multiculturalism,” 44. Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010), 137. Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 97. Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 148. Žižek’s critique of feminist contingent identities, constructivism, and performativity follows the lead of Joan Copjec’s seminal work on the exclusion of the Real of sexual difference from theories of gender performativity. See Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1994), 201–36. Žižek tirelessly admonishes Judith Butler for merely describing and mystifying the state of things under the hegemony of the global capitalist mode of production, arguing that “there is nothing inherently anticapitalist” in her program of subversive/parodic performativity. See, for instance, his interview with Diana Dilworth, “Slavoj Žižek: Cultural Critic,” Believer Magazine 2, no. 7 (2004), in which he explains that Butler’s theory of performativity operates “totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.” Žižek has at times been accused of racism in his discussion of postcolonial spaces and cultures. See, for instance, Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Žižek’s representation of the postcolonial subject is certainly ambivalent, as he oscillates between representing this subject as either a fetish or a symptom of global capitalism, an ideological supplement or an excremental remainder. On the one hand, his work features a culturalist representation of the postcolonial (mostly Tibetan Buddhism) as a fetish, a fantasmatic object upon which the Western melancholic subject projects his or her own anxieties, embodying the lie that allows this subject to endure the unbearable truth. See, for instance, Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 12–15. On the other hand, his work features a political representation that considers the postcolonial (mostly the favelas in Latin America and the slums in Southeast Asia) as a symptom of the logic of global capitalism, modernization, and

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21 22

23

24 25

26 27 28

developmentalism that functions as the point of the return of the repressed truth of class antagonism within the “field of global capitalist lies.” See, for instance, Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 420–27. In both cases Žižek fails to reimagine the subject of postcolonial difference as a genuine locus of the revolutionary act, as a subject-­ for-­itself. However, this is no reason to frivolously call him a racist. For more on this topic, see my “Žižek’s Infidelity,” 162–65. See, for instance, Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 396–97; and Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Malden, MA: Polity, 2004), 143–44. Žižek correctly notes that authority and voice in neoliberal multiculturalist politics can be legitimized only through appeals to victimization, which he of course rejects, the reason being, as Rothenberg explains, that although “the suffering victim may appear to be subjectively destitute, . . . the designation as suffering victim, as one reduced to bare life, simply elevates one ontic property above all others.” Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 183–84. What’s more, the position of victimization aligns the subject squarely with desire rather than with drive. Žižek, “Multiculturalism,” 45–46. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 395. In the case of contemporary feminism and its uncritical relationship to the capitalist mode of production, for example, Žižek argues that feminism is “strictly correlative to the fact that, in recent decades, family and sexual life itself has become ‘colonized’ by market logic, and is thus experienced as something that belongs to the sphere of free choices” (395–96). See Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984); and Trinh T. Minh-­ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991). Minh-­ha, When the Moon Waxes Red, 190. These theories are premised on the assumption of the feminine subject’s multiple identity narratives and her shifting locations between systems of oppression and privilege. Cosmopolitics and transnationalism project these issues onto wider global horizons, but, all the same, these theories tend to pluralize the subject’s politics of location only to obfuscate the fundamental antagonism in late capitalism. On intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1993): 1241–99; on cosmopolitics, see Bruce Robins and Pheng Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics: Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). For both a review and a critique of these theories, see my Cartographies of Transnationalism in Postcolonial Feminisms: Geography, Culture Identity, Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 1–4, 15–18. Žižek, “An Answer to Two Questions,” in Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, 195. See Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 225. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 114.

Concrete Universality 165 29 See Žižek, The Parallax View, 385; and Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 195. Rothenberg (The Excessive Subject) offers the most lucid and elaborate analysis of Žižek’s theory of subjectivity. My discussion is deeply indebted to hers. 30 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 71. 31 Jacques-­Alain Miller, “Extimité,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Marc Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Corthell, and Françoise Massardier-­Kenney (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 75. 32 See Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 174–75; and Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). One way to explain Žižek’s account of the acephalous subject as multitudinous is through Hegel’s idea of the absolute. On this point, see Todd McGowan, “Hegel as Marxist: Žižek’s Revision of German Idealism,” in Khader and Rothenberg, Žižek Now, 31–53. As McGowan explains, Hegel defines the absolute as the inescapability and irreducibility of structural antagonism, the divided structure of being, the scission and self-­division that creates a barrier to self-­identity. Rather than representing an obstacle to be overcome, that is, antagonism emerges as the form of one’s being, its condition of possibility (31–37). Consequently, the recognition of the inevitability of structural antagonism in Hegel eliminates the need for escape, reconciliation, or transcendence in some form of pure outside or undivided Other (33). 33 Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 174. 34 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 175. 35 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 174, 175. As Rothenberg explains, according to Žižek, “the identification with the object de-­personalizes the subject, instituting a gap between its subjectivated individuation (all the little preferences and properties that make up our social identities) and its subject-­ness, the pure subject that emerges as a function of the drive.” Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 176. 36 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 176. 37 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 185. 38 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 176. 39 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 184, 187. 40 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 188. 41 See Alain Badiou, “The Scene of Two,” trans. Barbara Fulks, Lacanian Ink 21 (2003): 42–55. 42 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 10. 43 Gloria Hull, “Living on the Line: Audre Lorde and Our Dead behind Us,” in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 153; emphasis added. 44 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 45.

166 Jamil Khader 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 175. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 385. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 176. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 182. Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 177. Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” in Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, 177. Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 177. Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-­theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 23. 53 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 98. 54 Žižek, “Da Capo senza Fine,” in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 217. 55 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 97. 56 Žižek, “Da Capo senza Fine,” 213. 57 Žižek, quoted in Pound, Žižek, 113; emphasis added. 58 Vighi, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Films: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious (Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2006), 108. 59 Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 361. 60 The title of the English translation, Crossing Borders, represents a clear commodification of Menchú’s memoir within the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and postnationalism. 61 Rigoberta Menchú, Crossing Borders, ed. and trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso, 1998), 21. 62 Menchú, Crossing Borders, 195. 63 On this point, see Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 201. 64 Menchú, Crossing Borders, 117. Menchú’s narrative debunks the common liberal feminist belief that most women, when confronted with the choice between liberal human rights and the right of sovereign nations to exist, “prefer the cosmopolitan view of citizenship which perceives human beings (men and women alike) as citizens of the global community, over and against the internationalist view according to which individuals primarily belong to, and demand rights and benefits from, a particular political community or nation-­state.” Baukje Prins, “Mothers and Muslims, Sisters and Sojourners: The Contested Boundaries of Feminist Citizenship,” in Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, ed. Kathy Davis, Mary Evans, and Judith Lorber (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 247. 65 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 432. 66 Žižek, Living in the End Times, 53. 67 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 201. 68 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 208. 69 Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 123.

Concrete Universality 167 70 The English subtitle of Menchú’s testimonio, An Indian Woman in Guatemala, clearly substitutes the political act of conscientization and subjectivization for an ethnoculturalist representation of Guatemalan womanhood. 71 Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. and trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso, 1984), 247. 72 Menchú, Crossing Borders, 168. 73 In 1993, moreover, Menchú traveled on speaking tours to twenty-­eight countries, from Thailand to Ecuador, making her struggle for social justice and equal distribution of wealth even more international. 74 Menchú, Crossing Borders, 175. 75 Menchú, Crossing Borders, 177. 76 Menchú, Crossing Borders, 179. 77 Menchú, Crossing Borders, 1. 78 Timothy Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” in Debating Cosmopolitics, ed. Daniele Archibugi (New York: Verso, 2003), 42. 79 For more on this critique of the cosmopolitical erasure of internationalism, see my essay “Cosmopolitanism and the Infidelity to Internationalism: Repeating Postcoloniality and the World Revolution,” in Critique of Cosmopolitan Reason: Timing and Spacing the Concept of World Citizenship, ed. Rebecka Lettevall and Kristian Petrov (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 267–91. 80 On this point, see Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). 81 Žižek, The Parallax View, 385. 82 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 187. 83 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 185. 84 Žižek, “Lenin’s Choice,” 243. 85 Žižek, The Parallax View, 381–82. 86 Žižek, The Parallax View, 384. 87 Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 208. 88 Žižek, “Lenin’s Choice,” 225. 89 Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Plume, 1987), 105. 90 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 62. 91 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 151. 92 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 109; emphasis added. 93 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 116. 94 On this point, see Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject, 183–84. 95 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 152–53. 96 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 127. 97 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 131. 98 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 193. 99 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 417, 162. 100 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 425. 101 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 376.

168 Jamil Khader 102 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 426. 103 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 425. 104 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 162. On “the political suspension of the ethical,” see the conclusion to Less Than Nothing. 105 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 427. 106 Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 50; emphasis added. 107 Žižek, The Parallax View, 382.

6 A Robot Runs through It: Andrew Hageman

Žižek and Ecocriticism

Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. —Karl Marx, Capital

Cultivating the Seeds of Žižek’s Ecological Thought From his early books, such as The Sublime Object of Ideology and Looking Awry, to his most recent ones, Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil, Slavoj Žižek has consistently included ecology in his work on ideology critique. Over the course of Žižek’s thinking and writing, ecology and ecological ideology have intensified in their significance, advancing from illustrative examples to central components of his political programs. While Looking Awry contains the seminal claim that “Nature does not exist” and The Sublime Object of Ideology deploys ecology to illustrate the Lacanian quilting point, Žižek devotes the entirety of the crucial last chapter of In Defense of Lost Causes to ecological crisis, and in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce he includes “the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe” as one of four antagonisms potentially capable of disrupting the otherwise seemingly inevitable reproduction of capitalism.1 Put simply, Žižek’s oeuvre offers a sustained and increasingly engaged approach to critiquing contemporary ecological ideology, although this particular stream of his thought has developed without literary illustra-

170 Andrew Hageman tions or criticism. I raise this last point not as if it indicates a lack in Žižek’s thinking. Rather, I regard the absence of literature in his work on ecological ideology as an index of potential ecocritical work that Žižek has made possible in new and significant ways. In that spirit, this chapter aims to integrate Žižek’s work more deeply into ecological literary criticism—or, as it is more commonly called, ecocriticism—and at the same time to advance his work along the trajectory on which it is already in motion. As Tereza Stejskalová has convincingly argued, Žižek frequently invokes works of literature such as Sophocles’s Antigone and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” at crucial moments in his writing.2 Therefore, to put his ecological critique into conversation with literature is very much in line with Žižek’s own maneuvers. Žižek’s work has already exerted some very significant influence in the field, in particular through Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), which instigated a radical reframing of ecocriticism.3 Still, much remains to be done. To that end, this chapter makes a clear case for ecocritics to produce more Žižek-­inflected ecocriticism. Furthermore, it invites Žižek scholars not yet working in literary ecocriticism to explore and contribute to the field. This second group of readers might find ways to engage with and expand on ecocriticism by writing on extant work in much the same way that Marx intervened in literary criticism with his formidable writing on Szeliga-­Vishnu’s critique of The Mysteries of Paris.4 I believe that literary ecocriticism needs more work committed to analyzing ecology in the social imaginary through the approaches and apparatuses that Žižek brings from Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Lacan, as well as the innovations he himself has created. This can be accomplished by recruiting already existing ecocritics to ideology critique, psychoanalysis, and political economy, as well as by recruiting people already versed in Žižek to lend their shoulders to the advancement of ecocriticism. This chapter proceeds in three movements. First, I outline three ideas that are fundamental to the work of ecocriticism. Each of these ideas has a complex history within ecocriticism, and while approaches to them have become increasingly sophisticated and productive, they remain key sites of struggle in literature and literary analysis. Second, I identify elements of Žižek’s thought that seem ready-­made for performing ecocritical ideology critique on these three fundamental ideas. These elements

A Robot Runs through It 171 range from analyzing the concept of Nature to fantasies of human naturalness/unnaturalness and ideas about how to catalyze ecological awareness, care, and change. Third, I perform a brief, Žižek-­driven ecocritical analysis of Karel Čapek’s play r.u.r. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a play that, in coining the term robot to signify artificial human beings/laborers, offers a fecund literary intersection of technology, ecology, and ideology for this ecocritical demonstration. Theoretical Ecocriticism Begins to Blossom beyond the Bud This first movement opens with a quote. In his guest column in pmla, “Queer Ecology” (2010), Timothy Morton wrote, “A commentator on my Amazon.com blog specified what Slavoj Žižek needed for daring to endorse ecology without Nature: ‘Every academic wanting to pontificate on the absence of nature or their convenient version of “ecology” should be dropped in the Bob Marshall wilderness with a knife and forced to find his or her way out’ (Robisch). (I [Morton] fantasize that Žižek would emerge from this muttering, ‘I found my way out, but although there were a lot of animals and plants, I didn’t find Nature’).”5 Morton is the most influential ecocritic to bring Žižek’s work into the field, particularly in his books Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought, and this engagement with Žižek persists in Morton’s more recent work on object-­oriented ontology, such as Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.6 The passage I quote from Morton alludes to the three ideas traditionally at the core of ecocriticism that I have selected for critical focus in this chapter. First is the claim that Nature not only exists but is a pure, pristine, organic thing. Second is the claim that human beings—often at both the individual and the species level—have become unnatural, alienated from Nature. While ecocritical thinkers have circulated numerous causal explanations for this so-­called unnaturalness, technology and machinery are among the most usual suspects. What’s more, significant ecocritical thinkers like Bill McKibben have attached claims about the dignity of work to this mechanophobic trend without treating the dignity of work as itself an ideological construct, much less an ideological construct subject to exploitation by the capitalistic status quo. Third is the idea that ecological awareness, care, and change are blocked simply by false con-

172 Andrew Hageman sciousness and that once people wake up to the dire ecological truths, this knowledge will compel them to care and act. This idea persists as ecocritics, myself included, try to discern how and why demonstrably increased awareness of ecological crisis does not catalyze demonstrable collective change. Each of these three ideas has been at the center of ecocritical thinking since the nascent work in this field from the 1980s and 1990s. In its early years, ecocriticism appears to have concentrated on literature readily classifiable as “Nature writing,” as well as to have largely eschewed critical theory. A survey of the essays published in isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the primary journal of ecocriticism then and now, attests to that original framing of the field. That said, the field has changed immensely over the past fifteen years, with many of its active and up-­and-­coming scholars taking critical theoretical approaches that bring ecocriticism into conversation with current thinking on sex and gender, social justice, and materialisms, to name just a few of the new ecocritical directions. Lawrence Buell, one of the major founders of ecocriticism, recorded early glimmers of this critical shift in his field assessment The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), and Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism (published in 2011 as part of Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series) reflects some directions in which the field did shift.7 Building on this historical context of the field, I have chosen the three ideas of Nature, unnaturalness, and ecological awareness, care, and action as productive locations for advancing a critical theory trend already well under way. To be clear, then, this chapter is explicitly not casting ecocriticism as currently lacking in theoretical energy and rigor. Rather, to take a Žižekian view of things, the theory-­resistant earlier work of ecocriticism was the revolutionary first step of negation necessary to make this field of study possible. Now we must step further into the ideological space that the initial step opened up, and this chapter aims to advance precisely this subsequent negation of the negation. Specifically, within this increasingly theory-­informed ecocriticism, there remains much to be done in terms of articulating and deploying specific methods and apparatuses. Žižek is of stellar assistance, as he provides a concise and compelling channel for importing the methods and apparatuses of psychoanalysis and political economy—above all, dialectical thought, ideology critique, and analysis of desire and the

A Robot Runs through It 173 unconscious—into ecocritical studies. In the next section of this chapter I provide a parallax view of Žižek’s thought as it oscillates between political-­psychoanalytic and ecological thought—or, to put it in strictly figurative terms, a parallax view of Žižek’s thought as it oscillates between the Lacanian triangle of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real and the Möbius strip triangle of the universal recycling symbol. The Specific Fruits of Žižek’s Work for Ecocriticism Appear The idea of Nature has transformed and expanded in significance as Žižek has continued to write about it. In Looking Awry, Žižek writes, “Homologous to the Lacanian proposition ‘Woman does not exist,’ we should perhaps assert that Nature does not exist. . . . The image of nature as a balanced circuit is nothing but a retroactive projection of man.”8 The principal objective of Looking Awry is to introduce core ideas of Lacan to those unfamiliar with his work via multiple illustrations. In this case, Žižek reveals the complex structure that supports and requires the conventional idea of Nature in order to illustrate the Lacanian concept of the “big Other,” though he emphasizes the latter rather than the former. Later in the same book, Žižek presents a very brief, albeit very provocative, remark on the ecological dimension of Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds (1963).9 Among multiple possible readings of the film, he includes what he distinctly labels an “‘ecological’ reading.”10 As such, Žižek is explicitly doing cinema ecocriticism, yet because this is not the focus of the book, or of his work from this period more broadly, the actual content of the critique remains merely a provocative prompt for readers to perform their own ecocritical analyses of The Birds. In subsequent writings, Žižek has fleshed out his engagement with the idea of Nature by way of more thorough arguments about its contemporary political significance. A crucial example is the final chapter of In Defense of Lost Causes, “Unbehagen in der Natur,” where he writes, “What . . . if this relationship of faith in Nature, in the primordial harmony between mind and reality, is the most elementary form of idealism, of reliance on the big Other? Indeed, what we need is an ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on.”11 The phrase “ecology without nature” alerts us that this chapter, as Verena Andermatt Conley has noted, is a response

174 Andrew Hageman to Morton’s Ecology without Nature.12 In responding to Morton’s argument, Žižek transcends his previous use of ecology as an illustration of Lacan by claiming that ecology is one of the most crucial sites of ideology in contemporary capitalism. After all, ecology has been drawing massive amounts of ideological investment, as if we have grasped something of its force while remaining blind to the fantasies of Nature that determine the shapes our massive investments can take. To put it somewhat differently, ecology, as I will discuss at greater length below, is for Žižek an intense site of fetishistic disavowal; it is a thing to which we increasingly cling in order to blunt the full force of reality while maintaining the appearance of being entirely realistic about global warming and other ecological catastrophes. A similar claim, but with an emphasis on myth, appears in both the film and print versions of Žižek’s contribution to Astra Taylor’s Examined Life: “The true ecologist must also accept that nature is the ultimate human myth. The first duty is to drop this heavily ideologically mythological, invested notion of nature.”13 What’s important here is Žižek’s claim that the idea of Nature is not merely a myth, but a myth—perhaps even the myth—that paved the ideological way for industrial capitalism, late capitalism, and whatever form of capitalism we are currently experiencing. As Fredric Jameson has frequently reminded us, the myth, and perhaps the narrative more generally speaking, “is to be grasped as the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.”14 Thus, instead of vehemently protecting this non-­thing, Nature, we need to recognize its constitutive role in maintaining the ideology of capitalism and from there begin to work through it, without it. And because we perpetuate this fantasy of Nature through myth, it is to the aesthetic dimension, including literature, that we must turn to perform ideology critique as well as to imagine alternatives to Nature, or at least to imagine the need for alternatives, no matter how ultimately asymptotic the endeavor to imagine them may in itself be. In other recent books like First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek builds on the importance of the idea of Nature when he claims that there are four antagonisms visible in the world today that would appear to provide space for disrupting the seemingly impermeable naturalization of capitalism: “the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-­called ‘intel-

A Robot Runs through It 175 lectual property’; the socio-­ethical implications of new techno-­scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums.”15 Not only does the idea of Nature prevent us from grasping our actual conditions of existence in relation to ecological crises and catastrophes, but it also plays a constitutive role in the naturalization of capitalism and is therefore ripe for ideology critique aimed at undermining that very naturalization. After all, each of the four antagonisms has ecological implications, not just the specifically ecological catastrophes. I consider this development in Žižek’s work as analogous to Marx’s work in volume 1 of Capital, in which he revisits cooperation in an attempt to discover how and why this form of labor that held the utopian prospect of transcending the limits of the human individual manifested instead in the machines of industrial capitalist production.16 Like Marx, who, to return to the epigraph of this chapter, took a cue from Darwin and paralleled the fossil record with the technocultural record, Žižek revisits a form, that of the idea of Nature, to try and discern how and why its utopian prospect of identifying human beings as parts of a universal collective with all human and nonhuman others manifested instead in the water and air pollution, desertification, deforestation, and planet-­scale global warming of industrial capitalist production. Through this mereological analysis of people as parts of massive ecological and ideological structures, Žižek renovates Althusserian interpellation to show how the concept of Nature functions as a patch with which to cover over the internal fractures of the capitalist structures that both drive and thrive on ecological devastation. On the second idea—that human beings are or have become unnatural—Žižek argues in Examined Life that “what we should do to confront properly the threat of ecological catastrophe is not all this New Age stuff of breaking through from this technological manipulative mold and to find our roots in nature, but, on the contrary, to cut off even more our roots in nature.”17 This quote is Taylor’s transcription, though the film version emphasizes the idea of being unnatural even more, with Žižek closing this thought with the following pronouncement: “We need more alienation from our lifeworld, as it were, spontaneous nature. We should become more artificial.”18 Such a claim echoes Žižek’s argument that ideology critique functions by performing particular acts to bring about

176 Andrew Hageman ideological restructuring, though not in a direct fashion. In other words, one does not just give up the idea of Nature by giving it up; ideology adheres to us too insistently for that. Since giving up the idea of Nature is extremely challenging and painful—it is, after all, giving up a fantasy— we can contribute to this hard work by reshaping ourselves and our lives to assist the intellectual reshaping required. I suspect Žižek’s provocative call for more alienation and artificiality to be not an end state but an act of initial negation intended to open up a space for subsequent negation of this negation. If we can avoid misreading him as promoting an endgame of total detachment from the environment, we obtain a position from which our ecocritical work begins to reframe ecological interconnectedness and universal collectivity. This is not to say that a utopian form of ecocriticism is imminent. Rather, through Žižek, ecocriticism begins a parallax oscillation akin to Richard Brautigan’s techno-­eco lyrical poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”—a familiar “Nature writing” form taken into the cybernetic dialectics of technology and ecology that Brautigan witnessed in his year as a poet in residence at the California Institute of Technology in 1967.19 Žižek makes similar claims elsewhere about the intersection of biological technoscience and the human dignity of work. In Defense of Lost Causes targets the book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben, a central figure in ecocriticism. First of all, Žižek argues that the limits to technoscientific development McKibben proposes actually promote a kind of environmental Taylorization for the maximum efficiency of everything on Earth.20 Furthermore, the things McKibben fears will be lost, including the human dignity of work, are defined exclusively within the existing horizon of capitalist ideology. As such, McKibben’s anti-­posthumanist veneration of work is a misrecognized yet desperate desire to reproduce exactly the ideology through which we have produced the very ecological crises that McKibben believes he is writing against. While this implication may upset ecocritics who admire McKibben for the awareness he has raised and the action he has encouraged, it is ultimately unsurprising given McKibben’s political alignment in Enough. Consider, for instance, the following line from the book: “Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist, has thought more carefully than anyone else about the implications of these new divisions.

A Robot Runs through It 177 His measured, unhysterical book Our Posthuman Future conjures up a truly frightening vision of a world where the successful young people owe their prospects not ‘to the accidents of birth and upbringing’ but instead to the ‘good choices and planning of their parents.’”21 Note McKibben’s use of unhysterical to describe Fukuyama’s and therefore his own aligned position. From a Žižekian point of view, both thinkers subscribe to a hysterical form of reaction to technoscientific development that replicates and even fosters what it seeks to eliminate. That hysteria is a position that presumes the alienation of human beings from Nature to be true and tries to remedy this situation through frenetic activity that amounts to a composite of non-­action, or, even worse, action on behalf of the advancement of capitalism. There is a difference between reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as a call to individuals to live alone in the wild and reading Walden while also working together with classmates to build homeless shelters.22 The latter reading is itself problematic and imperfect, but it avoids the capitalistic celebration of the individual in favor of the social, all while paying careful attention to those parts of Walden in which Thoreau describes the housing market as a disaster getting worse by the day. With regard to the third idea—ecological awareness, care, and action—Žižek has argued in The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Indivisible Remainder that ecologism is itself a form of ideology, a fact evinced by the many varieties of ecologism, some entirely incommensurate with each other: feminist, neoliberal capitalist, communist, anarchist, and so on.23 He extends this point toward ideology and class antagonism when he writes in Living in the End Times that “the commonsense reasoning which tells us that, independently of our class position or political orientation, we will all have to tackle the ecological crisis if we are to survive, is deeply misleading: the key to the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such.”24 For Žižek, ecological awareness, care, and change are dependent not on getting people to wake up to the realities of climate change but on critiquing the ideology of capital that precludes radical change via fetishistic disavowal. Put another way, the debate about global warming is not a debate about the science of ecology; it is a debate about the future of the structures of capitalism. Žižek works out the relationship between fetishistic disavowal and

178 Andrew Hageman ecological awareness and action in Examined Life, where he complicates the typical understanding of ideology as false consciousness: We all know what danger we are in: global warming, the threat of other ecological catastrophes, so on and so on. Why don’t we do anything about it? It is a nice example of what in psychoanalysis we call disavowal. The logic is that of “I know very well, but, nonetheless, I do not believe it. I act as if I don’t know.” . . . [P]recisely in the case of ecology, I know very well there will be global warming, that everything will explode, will be destroyed. But after reading treatises on this, what do I do? I step out and I see . . . nice sights, birds singing. Even if I know rationally that it is all in danger, I do not believe that it can be destroyed.25

Hence his conclusion that, paradoxically, “it is our roots in our natural environment that prevent us from taking seriously things that we already know: that all this normal life we see around us can disappear. We can imagine it, but we do not really believe it—I mean we don’t effectively act upon it.”26 Throughout his oeuvre, Žižek has consistently returned to fetishistic disavowal as a central tool for ideology critique—for locating and analyzing contradictions that ground structures of capital but that also present opportune spaces for intervening in the automatic reproduction of these structures and their devastating outputs, including ecological crises. More recently, in Absolute Recoil, Žižek has advanced his work on ecological fetishistic disavowal by locating part of the matter in the mystifying notion that total perception and therefore absolute resolution are available to us. From a Žižekian perspective, total perception and resolution are impossible because there will always be exceptions that exceed the knowable, the controllable. In fact, these exceptions are constitutive kernels that we must not consider nuisances so much as the very conditions of possibility of the world as we know it. To this end, Žižek has developed a slightly modified, more tautological understanding of how the logic of fetishistic disavowal operates with regard to the issue of climate change. Examining the relation between knowledge and belief, Žižek draws on Althusser’s depiction of ideology when he queries, “Why does knowledge have to be supplemented by belief? Is it that a belief emerges in order to compensate for the failure of knowledge?” The “solution,” he claims, is that “‘even if I know it, I don’t really know it.’” In the case of ecological fetishistic disavowal,

A Robot Runs through It 179 knowledge [is] not—cannot be—really subjectively assumed, it [does] not occupy the place of truth. . . . Belief thus supplements a gap, an imminent split, within knowledge itself, hence we are not dealing here just with a gap between knowledge and belief. . . . [I]t is not a simple “I know all about the ecological threat, but I don’t really believe in it.” It is rather “I know all about . . . and I nonetheless believe in it,” because I do not really assume my knowledge. It is this immanent gap that eludes Althusser’s theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses.27

By way of transitioning from Žižek’s critical thought on ecological ideology to literature, I mention the synthesis of these two things in Nell Zink’s novel The Wallcreeper (2014). The narrative arc describes an American couple living in Bern, Switzerland, as they transform from bird-­watching enthusiasts to ecoterrorists. Early in the novel, Tiffany, the female protagonist, begins an ongoing affair with Elvis, whom she describes in the following way: “He had tight pants and a degree in superannuated theory from Ljubljana,” adding later, “He’s a disciple of Slavoj Žižek.”28 Zink’s shout-­out to Žižek, which alludes to the “Elvis of cultural theory” moniker given him by Scott McLemee before explicitly naming him, draws attention to the specific thinker and thinking that Zink may have in mind as she narrates Tiffany and her husband’s ethical justifications for their acts of ecoterrorism, thus inserting Žižek directly into the fabric of a novel about ecology, capitalism, and forms of political agency.29 Still more suggestive is the passage near the middle of the novel that invokes the slimy things in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a passage that appears to anyone who has read Morton’s The Ecological Thought as an unacknowledged allusion to his work—precisely the thinker who has engaged Žižek in the field of ecocriticism.30 Finally, in the penultimate paragraph of the novel, Zink explicitly incorporates Lenin’s injunction “Learn, learn, and once again learn!”—thereby repeating a frequent favorite of Žižek’s.31 In a fascinating way, then, The Wallcreeper aesthetically attests to the forceful critical link I am asserting here between Žižek on ecological ideology and literature. With that in mind, I turn now to the literary ecocritique section of this chapter.

180 Andrew Hageman A Žižek-­Driven Ecocriticism of the First Literary Robots To follow Žižek’s own frequent move of illustrating his argument by turning to a literary example, I turn now to an ecocritical analysis of Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play r.u.r. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1921). I choose r.u.r. because robots are objects of intense ideological investment in which ideas of Nature, humanity, technoscience, and political economy intersect and where the internal contradictions of these ideas are made visible. Throughout the play, the existence of the robots and their relationship with human beings is consistently framed in terms of the natural/unnatural status of both the robots themselves and the human beings who created them, of the agricultural structures that feed the global human population, and of the human connection to the environment via manual labor. Furthermore, as Ivan Klíma claims in his introduction to the English translation of the play (a claim that the Oxford English Dictionary reinforces), the use of the word robot in Eng­ lish originates with this play.32 Before Čapek gave the word the science-­ fictional denotation of “artificial human beings” that still persists today, robot was a Slavic term for “serf” or “slave laborer,” one dating back to at least the 1830s. The play’s success in London and New York was instrumental in launching and then popularizing the word in English. Indeed, the play was such a hit that when it premiered in London in 1923, just two years after its successful premiere in Prague, G. K. Chesterton (one of Žižek’s favorite literary thinkers) and George Bernard Shaw attended and held a public debate about the play afterward (more on this later). All told, then, r.u.r. is a vital origin point of robots in the social imaginary and therefore a prime text for analysis, and, to that end, I will give a brief synopsis and then move into my Žižek-­driven ecocritique of the play. Set in the not-­too-­distant future, the play opens with Helena Glory, daughter of the president (though of what we are never told), arriving on the island where the Rossum Corporation is located, where robots are produced in a factory by the millions and sold around the world as slave laborers. Helena has come as a top representative of the League of Humanity to liberate the robots—in particular, to incite them to rise up and claim their human rights. Domin, the central director of the Rossum Corporation, informs her that this won’t work because the robots don’t have emotions or desires; without these, there’s no way to incite them.

A Robot Runs through It 181 In an abrupt and absurd narrative, Helena gives up her mission, marries Domin, and stays on the island. Ten years later, robots around the world have formed a universal union and revolt. Ultimately, the robots kill all but one human being, Alquist, the one high-­level Rossum executive who loves the dignity of manual labor, so he can help them rediscover how to reproduce more robots—a technique that got lost in the revolution. Just before he dies, Alquist realizes that two robots have become human, and he concludes the play with a seemingly rhapsodic monologue on the future of these robots as a new sort of Humanity 2.0. To open the analysis, I would first point out that the eponymous robots are organic biological beings. Early in the play, Domin explains to Helena that old Rossum found through a series of biochemical experiments a second way to organize living matter that was faster, simpler, and more malleable than the so-­called natural organization of living matter without human design. The crucial point here is that this method already existed and simply needed a scientist to look in the right place. As such, old Rossum, like Charles Darwin before him, irrevocably altered the current idea of Nature, doing so not by creating something new but by revealing something already inherent to matter. The comparison to Darwin is made explicit in the play when Domin invites Helena to project back to the time of old Rossum: “Imagine him sitting over a test tube and thinking how the whole tree of life would grow out of it, starting with some species of worm and ending—ending with man himself.”33 The tree-­of-­life metaphor comes directly from the last sentence of the “Natural Selection” section of On the Origin of Species.34 Darwin doubtless invoked the Tree of Life at that moment to place the theory of natural selection in dialogue with the Judeo-­Christian tradition, and, by alluding to this, Čapek likewise frames the robots’ scientific rewriting of the idea of Nature in terms of the Judeo-­Christian tradition (as well as Darwin’s paradigm-­shifting work). Crucially, Čapek does not oppose science and religion; rather, he subtly but surely depicts the robots as a crystallization of ideology—an intersection of Judeo-­Christian, capitalist, and communist ideologies, and therefore a site of ideology critique. Domin goes on to frame this anecdote of the radical scientific alteration to the idea of Nature, including the Judeo-­Christian metaphor, within a narrative of political economy. Following the initial discovery by old Rossum, who represents the lone scientist interested chiefly in

182 Andrew Hageman science and in challenging God (in other words, a figure from the pre-­ industrial social imaginary), his son, young Rossum, creates a family-­ run monopolistic robot industry: “Those two quarreled brutally. The old atheist didn’t have a crumb of understanding for industry, and finally young Rossum shut him up in some laboratory where he could fiddle with his monumental abortions, and he himself undertook production from the standpoint of an engineer. . . . The age of production following the age of discovery.”35 The transition from old Rossum to young Rossum represents a shift in technoscience, but, more importantly, it also signals a shift in mode of production. However, the political economic transitions do not end here, as Domin, not a member of the Rossum family, succeeds young Rossum to control the corporation as its chief executive officer, answerable to corporate shareholders. As such, Čapek presents the shifting fate of the idea of Nature as inextricably bound to the fates of modes of production and capitalism and their convergence with religious ideology. This particular ideological convergence runs throughout much of Čapek’s work, achieving especial impact in his novel The Absolute at Large (1922), in which an engineer designs a new form of energy generation that is super-­efficient, but instead of emitting carbon dioxide, these new engines emit God into the earthly world.36 While an ecocritical approach aligned with McKibben’s and Fukuyama’s anti-­posthumanism would not equip us to critique, let alone perceive, the symbiosis of religious and political economic ideologies in r.u.r., a Žižek-­driven ecocritical approach to the play enables us to do both. Even more pointedly, the Communist-­Christian convergence in the play’s allusion to Darwin puts this literary text into productive conversation with Žižek. In The Year of Dreaming Dangerously and elsewhere, Žižek formulates the seemingly radical claim that the idea of the Christian community of believers offers an alternative way to imagine universal communist collectivity: “When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, we should remember what Christianity essentially is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters [of the Occupy Wall Street movement] who represent the Holy Spirit, while pagan Wall Street continues to worship false idols (embodied in the statue of the bull).”37 To bring this idea to an ecocritique of Čapek’s play is to resist a knee-­jerk reading of it as a religious jeremiad against technoscience as an affront to God.

A Robot Runs through It 183 There is one more crucial point about the fact that these robots are flesh, blood, bone, and nerves, without metal gears or silicon circuits. Since the very first reviews of the play, spectators, critics, and readers have tended to interpret it as a cautionary tale against producing technologies, specifically machines, because they will rise up and annihilate us. This repeated misreading of the robots as machines (whether explicitly or implicitly inorganic) evinces the strength of a powerful mechanophobic ideology that hinges on an idea of Nature as something organic that is threatened by the machinic—an ideology perpetuated by ecocriticism like Carolyn Merchant’s conceptualization of organic-­machinic antagonism in The Death of Nature.38 Čapek himself addressed this trend in a newspaper column in 1935 entitled “The Author of the Robots Defends Himself”: The author was silent a goodly time and kept his own counsel, while the notion that robots have limbs of metal and innards of wire and cogwheels (or the like) has become current. . . . For his robots were not mechanisms. They were not made of sheet-­metal and cogwheels. They were not a celebration of mechanical engineering. If the author was thinking of any of the marvels of the human spirit during their creation, it was not of technology, but of science. With outright horror, he refuses any responsibility for the thought that machines could take the place of people, or that anything like life, love, or rebellion could ever awaken in their cogwheels. He would regard this somber vision as an unforgivable overvaluation of mechanics or as a severe insult to life.39

For Čapek, the matter is not preservation of Nature as such, but the exploration of differences between science and technology as modes of analyzing and knowing. While it is true that Čapek maintains a division between the mechanical and the living in this defense, neither his play nor this defense maintains the idea of a pristine, harmonious Nature. If anything, Čapek’s defense is an act of ideology critique against the very thinking that automatically makes machines of these living robots and, in the process, obfuscates the radical core of the play as a literary exploration of materialism and ideology. To bolster my reading, consider Čapek’s declaration in another short text that “if we see in front of us some perfect, shining machine, we see in it man’s triumph; well, let’s put next to it the first tat-

184 Andrew Hageman tered beggar to make us realize man’s defeat.”40 Taken together, these two statements make it very clear that Čapek as a thinker and r.u.r. as a work of literature disrupt the organic-­machinic binary and the idea of Nature that underwrites it by triangulating this binary with political economy. Because technoscientific development is situated within the structures of industrial capitalist production, Čapek reminds us to be rigorous in seeing what he has put on the page and stage and not simply presume to see an ideological projection overwriting his text. In reminding us that his robots are not machines, Čapek provokes us to see questions of Nature and political economy as mutually constitutive and fundamentally built on contradictions that are too readily elided when we read the play or watch it performed onstage and see machines where they are not. This reading resonates with some of Žižek’s repeated analysis of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982) and its fleshy, organic bots known as replicants.41 To shift gears from the idea of Nature to the idea of unnatural humanity, Domin, the director, and Alquist, who is chief of construction at Rossum and strongly prefers manual labor, debate about work early in the play. When Alquist questions Domin’s dream of the robots freeing people from often dangerous and debilitating manual labor, Domin replies, “But within the next ten years Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, cloth, everything that things will no longer have any value. There will be no more poverty. They [human beings] will live only to perfect themselves.”42 Čapek puts together two different arguments here: Domin meets Alquist’s concern about the dignity of work as integral to being human with his own program for rendering the structure of exchange value obsolete. This juxtaposition points out how readily a matter of labor and alienation under capitalist production (Domin’s point of view) can slip or get flipped into the ideology of labor and alienation from Nature (Alquist’s point of view)—the idea of humanity become or becoming unnatural. Domin’s utopian dream of eliminating the most arduous and dangerous forms of manual labor, and class division in the process, does not work out in the play, and r.u.r. is far from promoting a communist social agenda, which is not surprising seeing that Čapek published a well-­ known essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Communist.”43 That said, Čapek does not simply present Alquist as a straightforward anti-­technoscience

A Robot Runs through It 185 foil to Domin, and the play is absolutely not a jeremiad against our technology-­fueled separation from Nature. If anything, Domin possesses the loftier social imagination; Alquist’s ideals remain sharply confined within the limits of the individual, a fantasy of people living in isolated self-­sufficiency. Not only is Domin’s vision loftier, but it also embraces the complex challenges entailed in realizing it, a point reinforced when, in response to Helena’s asking him whether this laborless utopia can really be so, he answers: “It will. It can’t be otherwise. But before that some awful things may happen, Miss Glory.”44 Thus, whereas Alquist dreams of a revolution that would effectively be a reactionary retreat to a mode of nonsocial living—what Žižek, inspired by Robespierre, would call the desire for “revolution without revolution”—Domin dreams of a revolution that will bring about radical change and will therefore entail “awful things” in the transition, because, as Žižek also frequently argues, radical change is by definition not a comfortable extension of the same but a leap into the unpredictable, the unimaginable.45 While neither vision succeeds in the play, this literary laboratory stages the ideological antagonism of reactionary and revolutionary dreams in the ecologically poignant intersection of agriculture, work, population, and modes of production and consumption. r.u.r. thus provides a science fiction drama in which we can see our own eco-­ideological antagonisms reflected back to us sufficiently distorted so as to render internal contradictions newly visible, inexorable. To dig deeper into the labor-­and-­Nature dynamics of this exchange between Domin and Alquist, consider Alquist’s following quip: “Because human labor has become unnecessary, because suffering has become unnecessary, because man needs nothing, nothing, nothing but to enjoy—Oh, cursèd paradise, this.”46 This lamentation regarding the cursed compulsion to enjoy feels at first as if it could have been written by Žižek himself, but the catch is that Alquist posits this as the condition to come of postcapitalism, whereas Žižek posits this injunction to enjoy as the condition of postmodern late capitalism itself.47 What Alquist and Domin posit within the play, then, is a distinct dichotomy between visions of a society that rejects the aspiration to enjoy and of a society that vehemently aspires to enjoy. This is where the debate between G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw over the play can be especially illuminating. In his ac-

186 Andrew Hageman count of the debate, Chesterton says that Shaw applauded the “Leisure State” aspects of the play while he, himself, applauded the “Liberty State” elements—a dichotomy very similar to that between Domin and Alquist. Here is one of Chesterton’s portraits of Shaw’s side: “The argument is this: that instead of abolishing mechanism, we should make it yet more mechanical, and even the men who work it, for certain stated hours, more mechanical.”48 At a glance, Shaw’s position seems to resemble that taken by Žižek in the passage from Examined Life quoted above, but there’s a crucial difference. Žižek’s prescription is aimed at making a core contradiction of ecological ideology intolerably visible, whereas Shaw’s prescription is not cast as ideology critique. Chesterton then displays the complexity of his reflection on both the debate and the play itself when he tempers the idea that Shaw’s Leisure State would force people’s very lives to depend on machinery they could neither access nor comprehend by claiming, “Many million people are doubtless in this miserable condition under industrial capitalism; but his scheme, like mine, is propounded as something freer than industrial capitalism.”49 For Chesterton, robot-­enabled human leisure would in itself be meaningless because it would replicate the real living and working conditions of industrial capitalist production.50 Like Domin and most utopian thinkers and writers of political economic/ecological futures, Chesterton tries to project forward to the revolutionary change but gets mired in the transition stage, finding it nearly impossible to cast off the adherence to capitalist ideology as natural. As an act of speculative science fiction, what r.u.r. itself contributes beyond this limit at which Domin, Alquist, Chesterton, and Shaw arrive is a dialectical imagining of a new form of being—and being social—that might follow the ultimate struggle with ideas of Nature, unnatural humanity, and the naturalization of capitalism. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) presents a similar aesthetic dialectical imagining of a human–­robot future in which certain ideological notions of Nature and the un/naturalness of human beings have been transcended. Recall the close of Asimov’s book: “But you are telling me, Susan, that the ‘Society for Humanity’ is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.” “It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and

A Robot Runs through It 187 sociological forces it did not understand—at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society,—having, as they do, the greatest of weapons at their disposal, the absolute control of our economy.” “How horrible!” “Perhaps how wonderful! Think, that for all time, all conflicts are

finally evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!”51

The brilliance of this passage is its piercing through of the ideological notion that human beings ever had real control regarding their future. This is a breakthrough claim, as is the attendant horror that accompanies accepting it. That said, from a Žižekian perspective, the trouble with this passage is the presumption that there could ever be a state of all conflicts becoming evitable. For Žižek, there will by definition always be that which exceeds anticipation, account, imagination itself. This part of the machine-­control fantasy at the end of I, Robot, then, should be read not as a call for humanity to return to Nature and its own naturalness, but as the point of ideological retreat—the frontier of imagination beyond which the narrative will not, perhaps cannot, go. Finally, to engage with ecological awareness, care, and change, I turn to the final monologue of Čapek’s play. Of the human species, only Alquist remains, and he is nearly dead from old age and exhaustion, but he has observed in a female bot named Helena and a male bot named Primus—the likely nominal progenitor of the Transformers Primus and Optimus Prime—the signs of their having become human. He deduces this from an overheard conversation between them that reveals that she has begun menstruating and he has begun to dream during sleep.52 In other words, what makes us human in the eyes of Alquist, the key figure striving to reinsert humanity into Nature, is old-­fashioned reproduction and the existence of the unconscious—a striking pairing of identifiable biological certainty and psychological uncertainty, or the confluence of dna and desire in sex. After giving his blessing to Helena and Primus, Alquist retreats to a room alone and reads aloud the passage from Genesis where God sends Adam and Eve forth to be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it.53 Then Alquist sets down the Bible and delivers by far the longest

188 Andrew Hageman monologue of the play: “O nature, nature, life will not perish! Only we have perished. Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like autumn leaves. Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds. Now let Thy servant depart in peace, O Lord, for my eyes have beheld Thy deliverance through love, and life shall not perish! It shall not perish! Not perish!”54 Alquist describes an apocalypse true to its definition: an ending that ushers in the new, not merely an end. Recall Lacan’s short apocalyptic thought experiment in Seminar II, in which he describes the end of humanity and a camera recording weather phenomena reflected on the surface of a lake. To make the thought experiment work, Lacan reintroduces humanity in order to see what was recorded, what changed. Alquist also fantasizes about the apocalypse he believes to be imminent, yet he imagines this end of humanity as the beginning of humanity—a transition that does not eradicate us but remakes us so radically that we in many senses no longer exist (just as the reintroduced people in Lacan’s narrative now see ego, only in a new sense).55 This ending appears to lend itself to two opposed interpretations: either happy or horrific. To make a Žižekian move, I would call this a false choice, one that reveals contradictions at the core of the text that are crucial to ecocritical analysis. The happy-­ending reading, the one that Čapek repeatedly espoused as his intention, is representative of the posthumanist desire that the essence of humanity or human nature will survive an otherwise revolutionary leap—again, what Žižek calls the desire for revolution without revolution.56 The horrific reading of the play’s ending exhibits melancholic anxiety that technoscientific developments can and will extinguish humanity. Both readings are two sides of the same ideological coin. Or, recast through cyborg cinema, these readings are Roy Baty’s “I want more life, fucker” to Sarah Connor’s “You’re terminated, fucker.” In the guise of a choice between the happy and horrific readings, we end up clinging to the same idea of Nature, human and nonhuman, that has been built to serve capitalism. As a result, neither of these readings leads to a breakthrough in ecological awareness, much less resultant care and/or action. Recall here Žižek’s repeated paraphrase of Jameson’s line from The Seeds of Time: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of na-

A Robot Runs through It 189 ture than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”57 As Žižek so often does, I propose a third reading. The very success of old Rossum’s scientific demonstration that human life is possible through multiple channels renders humanity, and the so-­called Nature of which it is a part, neither singular nor sacred. This third reading suggests that confronting crises—specifically crises that are simultaneously ecological and political-economic—requires not merely a simple removal of false consciousness but, on the contrary, a radical openness to both revolution and, especially, the unknown that may follow revolution—to a future that we cannot imagine in itself but the necessity of which we can and must imagine. Such unknowable aspects of the future include the revolutionary step of thinking and embracing ecology without Nature. r.u.r. takes readers to this dialectical point, but the text itself does not include a crossing of the ideological frontier it has made visible. In its final scene, the drama reaches back, almost in panic it may seem, to recover, via its utopian prediction of a glorious new Nature, the fetishistic disavowal of what it has so provocatively revealed about human and nonhuman beings and the systems of ecology and political economy. This failure is fundamentally useful for ecocritical and other literary studies. In studying Žižek, ecocritics can learn to enjoy such ideological failure rather than try to expunge failure and seek out pure postideological texts and forms of critique. Whether the full-­on search for literature that enacts perfect ecological awareness, care, and action, or the relentless critique of literature that falls short of such perfection, an ecocriticism that chooses this path is doomed to impasse at best and green fascism at worst. As an alternative, a Žižek-­inflected ecocriticism offers a form of critique aimed at discerning the quilting points around which capitalist ideology structures, narrates, and perpetuates the totality that has led to our current ecological crises and catastrophes. I invite us to imagine a Žižekian ecocriticism that embraces the failures in literature to achieve ecological awareness, care, and action as one of the greatest topographical means for mapping the limits of our imagination as we shape and reshape, narrate and renarrate, ecological collectivities of the future.

190 Andrew Hageman Notes 1 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1991), 38; Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 87–88; Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 420–61; and Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), 91. 2 Tereza Stejskalová, “Žižek’s Act and the Literary Example,” Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 2, no. 2 (2011): 57. 3 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 4 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism, in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Y. Dakhina and T. Chikileva, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1975). Therein, Marx excoriates Szeliga-­Vishnu’s analysis of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, a landmark in the history of the novel. 5 Morton, “Queer Ecology,” pmla 125, no. 2 (2010): 274. 6 Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 7 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); and Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2011). 8 Žižek, Looking Awry, 38. 9 Žižek, Looking Awry, 97–99. 10 Žižek, Looking Awry, 97. 11 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 444. 12 Verena Andermatt Conley, “Slavoj Žižek’s Eco-­Chic,” in Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies, ed. Jamil Khader and Molly Anne Rothenberg (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 126. 13 Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek: Ecology,” in Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Astra Taylor (New York: New Press, 2009), 166. 14 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 77. 15 Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 91. 16 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 447. 17 Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek: Ecology,” 161. 18 Žižek, Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2010), dvd. 19 Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” in Richard Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing in America,” “The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster,” and “In Watermelon Sugar” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1989). 20 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 448.

A Robot Runs through It 191 21 Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 29. 22 See Hugh Crawford’s work on Thoreau and student-­built homeless shelters at Georgia Tech. “Crawford Challenges Students to Take Risks,” Georgia Tech News Center, June 11, 2012, http://www.news.gatech.edu/2012/06/13/crawford-­challenges -­students-­take-­risks. 23 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 87–88; and The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996), 131. 24 Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010), 334. 25 Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek: Ecology,” 161. 26 Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek: Ecology,” 161. 27 Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2014), 52. 28 Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper (St. Louis: Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 2014), 22, 31. 29 For McLemee’s first use of this now (in)famous moniker, see his article “Žižek Watch,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 22 (February 6, 2004). 30 See Zink, The Wallcreeper, 105–9; and Morton, The Ecological Thought, 45–48. 31 Zink, The Wallcreeper, 192. 32 Ivan Klíma, introduction to r.u.r. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), by Karel Čapek (New York: Penguin, 2004), xvi. 33 Čapek, r.u.r., 6. 34 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 100. 35 Čapek, r.u.r., 8. 36 Čapek, The Absolute at Large (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). For more on this novel and on ecocritical analysis of Čapek more broadly, see my essay “Karel Čapek Energies: The Absolute at Large as Proto-­Cli-­Fi Literature,” Deletion: The Open Access Online Forum in Science Fiction Studies, episode 7: “Retrospective Futures,” October 6, 2014, http://www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/czech-­book/. 37 Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (New York: Verso, 2012), 82. 38 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). 39 Čapek, “The Author of the Robots Defends Himself,” trans. Cyril Simsa, Science Fiction Studies 23, no. 1 (1996): 143–44. 40 Quoted in Bohuslava Bradbrook, Karel Čapek: In Pursuit of Truth, Tolerance, and Trust (Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), 52. 41 Čapek, r.u.r., 38. This is an especially apt connection, as r.u.r. is an obvious progenitor of Blade Runner. Even more explicitly, the corporate scientists in r.u.r. measure pupil dilation and sensitivity in the robots when some of them start acting strangely—an element of the play strikingly akin to the Voight-­Kampff test in Blade Runner. 42 Čapek, r.u.r., 21. 43 Čapek, “Why I Am Not a Communist,” Fortnightly Review 127 (1927), 390–99.

192 Andrew Hageman 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52 53

54 55

56 57

Čapek, r.u.r., 21. On “revolution without revolution,” see Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 157–64. Čapek, r.u.r., 35. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 58. G. K. Chesterton, “The Leisure State and the Liberty State,” in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 33, The Illustrated London News, 1923–1925 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), 134. Chesterton, “The Leisure State and the Liberty State,” 136. Chesterton cites the Bolsheviks in Russia as evidence that the Leisure State that Shaw would have has in practice shown itself to offer “only as much leisure as our masters chose,” and he offers the peasants’ resistance to economic centralization and to the mechanization of their agricultural labor as the site of his own ideal. Chesterton, “The Leisure State and the Liberty State,” 138. Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 224. Čapek, r.u.r., 80. In the wonderful, zany novel The Literary Conference, César Aira leverages the idea that one version of the creation stories in the Book of Genesis is a tale of human cloning. Aira, The Literary Conference, trans. Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions, 2010). Čapek, r.u.r., 84. See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 46–49. Bradbrook, Karel Čapek, 45. Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii.

7 Shakespeare after Žižek: Social Antagonism and Ideological Exclusion in Geoff Boucher

The Merchant of Venice

The historicization of the context for The Merchant of Venice that opens Michael Radford’s recent cinematic version of the play indicates the anxiety surrounding its ambivalent representation of Shylock.1 Although it sticks fairly closely to the folio text, the film bookends the action with apologetic introductory slides about the historical situation of the Jews in Venice in the 1590s. Perhaps the situation of Jewish converts in London after the execution in 1594 of Queen Elizabeth’s physician, Dr. Lopez, on specious charges of conspiracy to poison the regent might have been more germane.2 But it would also have missed the point. For in the contemporary, post-­Holocaust reception of the play—concerned, as it is, with the political ambiguities surrounding Shylock—­Shakespeare is on trial for concealing an anti-­Semitic spirit within the letter of the text. Roger Ebert’s review of Radford’s film, with his comment that erudite lectures on the Venice ghetto cannot bridge the gulf within the play itself between romantic comedy and bleak tragedy, indicates why this is a work that may always remain problematic.3 Given that the Holocaust provides the contemporary definition of radical evil, Shakespeare’s potential contribution to the ideological prehistory of this event is fiercely contested. The play is therefore simultaneously impossible, an aberration on the part of everybody’s favorite humanist, and prohibited, never exhibited in public without prophylactic warnings about the history of domination. No psychoanalysis from Slovenia is needed to notice that the play’s kernel of the Real, the heart that is to be cut out from the dramatic

196 Geoff Boucher action, is the trial scene that occupies the entirety of act 4—a scene that itself ends up on trial in the play’s contemporary reception. What Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics can tell us, however, is how the disturbing affect generated by The Merchant of Venice is produced by the interaction of ideology and aesthetics.4 Specifically, a Žižekian approach can coordinate the aesthetic interference between the play’s romantic comedy and incipient tragedy with the libidinal dynamics of social exclusion and ideological fantasy at the beginning of the modern epoch. In light of the present limitations on space, rather than offering a dialectical totalization of existing criticism, this reading is intended to briefly sketch a Žižek-­inspired approach to the play, as well as to outline how this approach might lead to new research on Shakespeare. The central claim that I will make here is that such an approach avoids the Cultural Materialist and New Historicist danger of treating drama as a transparent representation of a historical world. For an artwork does not consist of ideological discourses that can be completely abstracted from their aesthetic presentation and treated as methodologically equivalent to “political pamphlets, religious tracts, medical records, gardens, fashion, jewellery, maps and privies.”5 Yet the Žižekian approach argued for here acknowledges the dimensions of artistic form and content without lapsing into the opposite, traditionalist temptation of isolating the aesthetics of the play from its social context. Broadly speaking, interpretations of the play focus on the trial scene and fall into two basic camps: the traditionalist interpretation of the play, which reads it as a unified statement about reconciliation, and the radical interpretation of the play, which contextualizes the drama within the history of anti-­Semitism. It is worth remarking on this for a moment because the difference between Shakespeare’s work and his sources is so striking that we might expect there to be interpretive disputes about details rather than complete critical divergence. The Merchant of Venice was probably written in 1595–96 as a response to the successful revival of Christopher Marlowe’s racist blockbuster, The Jew of Malta, restaged in the aftermath of the Lopez trial of 1594.6 But whereas Marlowe’s Barabas is a grotesque figure of metaphysical evil drawn from medieval anti-­Semitism, Shakespeare equips Shylock with the famous speech on common humanity and lets him have the wrenching last words: “I am not well.”7 This is not surprising, in light of the fact that Shakespeare departs

Shakespeare after Žižek 197 from his source, Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, in several interesting ways: the test of the knight with the Lady of Belmonte becomes the casket test, kinship ties are removed from the relation between the young man and his older creditor, and Shakespeare’s Jew has a psychologically intelligible set of motivations for revenge. In place of evil intentions that proceed from an alien nature, The Merchant of Venice sketches a history of grievances and supplements these with what appears to be Antonio’s collusion in Jessica’s elopement on the night of Bassanio’s feast (3.1.21– 27). Yet in the comic domestic sequences leading up to the elopement and the speeches from the trial, Shakespeare borrows extensively from Anthony Munday’s Zelauto and Orator, retaining the faithless daughter, the unruly servant, the women disguised as attorneys, and so forth, while transposing the potentially tragic character of Shylock into a comic role designed for a specifically Christian usurer.8 The problem here, then, is that Shakespeare seems ambivalent on a topic that today permits no hesitation. Probably the most influential article on this topic, that by Derek Cohen, exemplifies this logic: The most troubling aspect of . . . The Merchant of Venice is this: if Shakespeare knew the Jews were human beings like other people—and the conclusion of the play suggests that he did—and if he knew that they were not merely carriers of evil but human creatures . . . then the play as a whole is a betrayal of the truth. . . . It is as though The Merchant of Venice is an anti-­Semitic play written by an author who is not an anti-­Semite, but an author who has been willing to use the cruel stereotypes of that ideology for . . . artistic purposes.9

To be perfectly clear: the politics of Shakespeare’s left-­wing critics are completely correct; in a conjuncture of the resurgence of the far Right, the Left must make no concessions to anti-­Semitism. The problem is that if artworks are to be vehicles for unambiguous statements on the politics of hate, then the Left must always condemn art, for it is the nature of aesthetic treatments of social problems to equivocate. Not surprisingly, then, the major critical camps seek to reduce the equivocal character of the play. For traditionalists, the confrontation between Portia and Shylock allegorizes the supersession of Jewish legalism by Christian mercy. Developing the numerous Christian references in the text to the Geneva

198 Geoff Boucher Bible, especially to Romans 13:8–13, the basic traditionalist position is that The Merchant of Venice transcends the letter of the law in the spirit of love. Accordingly, Shakespeare is to be defended from the charge of anti-­Semitism by theological pleading, to the effect that, far from being hostile to Jews, the play embodies a reconciliatory injunction to Christians to forgive, include, and embrace the other.10 To effect this defense, the traditionalist position must interpret the two strata of the play as unified through the thematic link, embodied in the human bond, between companionate marriage and the commercial contract. The forgiveness germane to romantic love is to the marriage contract as the generosity proper to the spirit of civilized wealth is to the commercial bond.11 This interpretive strategy harbors some amazing implications, which, to be fair to critics such as Lawrence Danson, the traditionalists seem extraordinarily uncomfortable about. Linking Portia’s signature speech with Matthew 5:17–22, Danson proposes that the revelation of a law that satisfies justice and mercy informs the final symmetry of the play, in which “a merciful justice is extended to Shylock as well as to Antonio, and Shylock too is accommodated within the final harmony.”12 Acknowledging that this interpretation might clash with the affective disturbance unleashed by the vengeful realities of the trial scene, Danson’s argument consists of a series of qualifications to the traditionalist position outlined by Cesar Lombardi Barber and Barbara Lewalski. Although Shylock is malicious, he is not diabolical; although Antonio is Christ-­like, he is not exactly a Christ figure; Bassanio is a fallible but well-­meaning “everyman”; it goes too far to say that Portia is mercy personified; and so forth.13 The traditionalist case therefore relies on several questionable interpretive positions, the key to which is that the comic plot and tragic subplot must under no circumstances be regarded as interacting ironically.14 For the moment that irony is acknowledged, the traditionalist case collapses: Shylock is environmentally conditioned by injustice; Antonio is a vicious racist; Bassanio is a worthless adventurer; Portia is a master of stratagems whose retributive literalism makes Shylock seem positively naive. For radicals, the religious doctrine defended by traditionalists is exactly the historical root of modern, racially based anti-­Semitism. In other words, the radical critique does not contest the traditional interpretation but merely inverts its terms. Accordingly, Shakespeare’s represen-

Shakespeare after Žižek 199 tation of Shylock cannot be retrieved from contemporary ideological discourses that demonized the Jews and linked them to moneylending at the beginning of the capitalist epoch. In line with this New Historicist and Cultural Materialist interpretive strategy, Walter Cohen, James Shapiro, and Derek Cohen all advert to the historical context of anti-­Semitic representations in the English crisis of post-­Reformation communal identity.15 The shift from the feudal state legitimated by the anti-­Semitism of late medieval Christian ideology to the modern state legitimated by nationalist ideology was accomplished under the conditions of the Reformation schism in Christianity by means of a prolongation of anti-­ Semitism. For Stephen Greenblatt and Marc Shell, the economic antagonism of finance versus mercantilism, rather than the politics of the absolute state, supplies the historical context for grasping Shakespeare’s representation of the Jews in Venice.16 These positions locate the play in the context of the well-­known link between the special position of Jewish finance in late medieval commerce and the development of modern anti-­Semitism. This determines the anti-­Semitic implications of the play in terms of Shylock as the principle of excluded difference, the exemplar of the harshness of contract. That is, the two approaches at work here— linking anti-­Semitism to mercantile capitalism or to incipient nationalism—trace modern anti-­Semitism to a mutation in medieval prejudice, as inflected by political or economic determinants. Contrary to both the traditionalist and radical methodologies, a Žižekian approach to the play involves “looking awry” at its central dramatic tensions and conflict dynamics, beginning with the recognition that the drama is itself “off center,” designed around the tension between the plot dominance of the ring test and the emotional and conceptual centrality of the trial scene. From the perspective of Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics, the contradiction between tragedy and comedy that determines divergent audience responses to The Merchant of Venice happens because artworks are aesthetic force fields. Indeed, following Adorno, whose influence on Žižek is omnipresent, artworks represent an inherent equivocation between aesthetic form and social fact.17 They are divided between, on the one hand, a dialectic of form and content that exhibits consistency rather than coherence, and, on the other, the antagonism between the monadic autonomy bestowed on them by their lack of functionality and their generation by practice in the social division of labor.18

200 Geoff Boucher Aesthetic technique represents the transformation of social material and unconscious impulses into the substance of the work, something that preserves contradictions rather than resolves them. The opposition between form and content that results—the lack of organic coherence of authentic artworks—is thus raised up rather than eliminated by the contradiction between the aesthetic import and the social impact of the work.19 From the Lacanian perspective, the reason that this relation eludes reconciliatory closure is because it is ultimately governed by the connection between the symbolization of the desire of the Other (the “Che vuoi?”) and the object-­cause of desire that resists symbolization, disturbing the work as a meaningless stain (the objet petit a). Against this theoretical background, a Žižekian analysis of the play must demonstrate the claim that the drama consists of contradictory perspectives that disclose the mechanism of exclusion. On this interpretation, The Merchant of Venice is a structurally ambivalent play that dramatizes a series of equivocations—around religious difference and sexual conduct— through the tension between its two perspectives. Although The Merchant of Venice is an early tragicomic “problem play,” it exhibits particularly clearly the underlying construction of the developed tragicomedies because it separates its conflicting perspectives into plot and subplot, Belmont and Venice. It is this dissonance, of course, that leads most audiences to imagine that the titular merchant is Shylock and that the play is a tragedy. Accordingly, my claim will be that The Merchant of Venice both critiques and enacts historical exclusion through a characteristic early modern form: tragicomedy. Most critical discussions of tragicomedy trace its evolution from Italian models to John Fletcher’s classic definition of it in terms of a tragic plot lacking deaths, but recent work has begun to consider alternative models involving dual plots. This clarifies the constantly shifting critical status of The Merchant of Venice—a problematic drama that does not seem to belong structurally to the group containing All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida.20 On this theory, The Merchant of Venice is not—as is often thought—aesthetically defective and ideologically regrettable, but is rather an exploration of emergent formal possibilities for the expression of the ambivalent complex surrounding religious difference and the politics of exclusion.

Shakespeare after Žižek 201 The Absent God and the Abyss of Desire: Crisis of the Imaginary From a Žižekian perspective, the social context for critiquing the ideological exclusion of the Jews is not solely situated in the long history of European anti-­Semitism but is decisively conditioned by the cultural dislocation produced by the Reformation. To approach this, we need to begin from its symptomatology. The early modern period witnessed an “epidemic of paradoxes” that included fascination with logical impossibilities, captivation by melancholia, and a fashion for tragicomedy. According to Rosalie Colie’s classic and definitive work on the culture of paradoxes, the contemporary cultivation of the rhetoric of undecidability set out to challenge conventional authority and monological truths. This destabilization of the reigning doxa was “always somehow involved in dialectic: challenging some orthodoxy, the paradox is an oblique criticism of absolute judgement and absolute convention.”21 To describe the deliberate cultivation of paradox as “baroque,” as Ralph Berry does, is valid when this refers to the shift away from Renaissance naturalism and toward an aesthetic of superficial movement intended to generate specific feelings rather than to represent historical worlds.22 Tragicomedy in this context, then, involves consciousness of irresolvable contradiction. This is captured within a baroque aesthetic whose sensationalist design is intended to transpose the emotional and intellectual correlates of impossibility onto the audience. A dissonant work such as The Merchant of Venice typically undermines (both affectively and intellectually) the fragile aesthetic closure that its formal structures affirm as conventionally valid. The seventeenth-­century “epidemic of paradoxes” that generated the fashion for tragicomedy should be linked to the central ideological antagonism of the period, that between Protestantism and Catholicism.23 Of course, this antagonism must be grasped as overdetermined by the contradictions of the absolute state, which can be characterized both economically and politically.24 Economically, the rise of the mercantile bourgeoisie in the urban centers and the decline of the landed gentry brought a massive displacement of the agricultural population. Politically, the centralization of the state facilitated the development of the mechanisms of “Machiavellian” princely power, but in a context where religious legitimation was disrupted by doctrinal dispute and princely manipulation.

202 Geoff Boucher As Shakespeare’s history plays show, the notion of popular consent, lu­ bricated by national identification, was at that time insufficiently distinct from dynastic propaganda. The legitimation crisis of absolute sovereignty among the unemployed, the “cankers of a calm world and a long peace” of the Henriad, was ultimately insoluble without civil war. Both of these determinants find their representation in The Merchant of Venice, but, crucially, they do so within a religious framework dominated by the Reformation’s introduction of uncertainty into spiritual life. For starters, schism in the Church relativized frameworks of belief, particularly when the official doctrine became the plaything of princes throughout the sixteenth century in England. More importantly, though, both the Reformation and Counter-­Reformation called on believers to act on their consciences in the absence of miraculous guarantees for the rightness of their decisions. By interpreting the doctrines of original sin and divine omnipotence in terms of the universality of human depravity, the inscrutability of salvation, the absolute character of grace, and the cessation of miracles, Lutheranism and Calvinism transformed God into the absent cause of a fallen world, cheerfully admitting that this produced a God of faith beyond reason who was either “absurd” (Luther) or “monstrous” (Calvin).25 The response of the Counter-­Reformation, which on influential recent accounts may have held significant attractions for Shakespeare, was not to restore the medieval conception of religion but to substitute saintly miracles for those proximate indicators of election—wealth and family—that even the reformers found necessary to alleviate anxiety about reprobation. In other words, the two reformations were fideistic in their basic approach. In Lacanian terms, this involves an evacuation of the locus of the imaginary representation of the big Other, the ego ideal, and its replacement by a fungible series of symbolic substitutes—prince, cardinal or bishop, father—and imaginary objects—money, children, congregation—that cannot really resolve the resulting crisis of anxiety. The implication is that The Merchant of Venice is a play that is covertly about religious difference in a context where contradiction and equivocation register not only division but also the absence of an imaginary resolution to social antagonism. There are two aspects to this. First, according to Žižek’s social theory, the disjunction between these two ideological perspectives discloses the existence of social an-

Shakespeare after Žižek 203 tagonism, a category that provides a multidimensional alternative to the Marxist concept of an economically defined “fundamental contradiction.” The achievement of social cohesion in a political community, despite the existence of antagonism, depends on the unconscious ideological mechanism of the exclusion of enjoyment, centered on the articulation of a reconciliatory social fantasy.26 The category of enjoyment describes the sort of filthy and terrifying repetition compulsion “beyond the pleasure principle” that is supposed to drive the witch and the heretic (in medieval ideologies) or the fundamentalist terrorist and the national enemy (in modern ideologies). The prohibition of such enjoyment functions to unify otherwise irreconcilable perspectives around “Latin Christendom,” “Western civilization,” or some other such master signifier, grounded in the social fantasy of harmonious reconciliation between erstwhile ideological opponents—following the expulsion (or annihilation) of those “demonic others” who have refused to sacrifice their enjoyment. It is not for nothing that Žižek’s main example of the demonized other who is expelled in order to reconcile reformer with counter-­ reformer, or national liberal with conservative nationalist, is the Jew.27 For, as Žižek frequently points out, “anti-­Semitism is not just one among ideologies; it is ideology as such, kat’exohen. It embodies the zero-­level (or the pure form) of ideology, providing its elementary coordinates: social antagonism . . . is mystified/displaced, so that its cause is projected onto the external intruder.”28 Now, Marlowe’s Barabas is the Elizabethan locus classicus of the anti-­ Semitic myth of the horrendous enjoyment that the Jews refuse to renounce: As for myself, I walk abroad a-­nights And kill sick people groaning under walls. Sometimes I go about and poison wells; And always kept the Sexton’s arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells. Then after that was I an usurer, And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, And tricks belonging unto brokery, I fill’d the jails with bankrupts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals,

204 Geoff Boucher And every moon made some or other mad, And now and then one hang himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a long great Scroll How I with interest tormented him. But mark how I am blest for plaguing them, I have as much coin as will buy the town.29

As Žižek points out, against this theoretical background, the meaningfulness of the law (its combination of justice and mercy, its support in divine law and sovereign will) is a retroactively generated illusion, provided that there exists a fantasy scenario of the demonization of the other. “We always impute to the ‘other,’” he notes, “an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/ or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.”30 The Merchant of Venice provides a textbook illustration of these mechanisms in action. Second, then, the transition from traditional to modern accomplishes a momentous shift from identification with the imaginary divinity to identification with the symbolization of national-­popular unity. Although this is sometimes explained in terms of the significance of the French Revolution’s emptying of the place of power, I propose that, in actuality, the Reformation acts as a “vanishing mediator” in this process by evacuating the imaginary representation of the locus of the divine. As Žižek explains, the decline of the medieval world and the disintegration of the patriarchal extended family mean that the modern father figure must combine the symbolic ideal that lays down the law with the superegoic agency that is permeated by an obscene enjoyment.31 In the transitional period of the Reformation, this paternal representation was occupied not by the figure of the prince or the nation but by the figure of God as a symbolic mechanism of providential predestination. Calvinism in particular advocated an “absent God” whose divine providence worked imperceptibly as the structural cause of the phenomenal world. With the termination of the age of miracles at the time of the Apostles, individuals might gain no insight into their salvation or reprobation. This was in practice softened by doctrines around the rewards of enterprise springing from the professional calling as a proximal indicator of the nonwithdrawal of divine grace. But it is well known that English Calvinists experienced tremendous anxiety about the hiddenness of their election or damnation. In effect, then, the Reformation proposes an absurd

Shakespeare after Žižek 205 universe, exposing subjects to the full force of the anxiety aroused by the enigma of the desire of the Other. Keeping this anxiety in mind, it is not for nothing that Althusser makes the “calling,” or moment of “interpellation,” the centerpiece of his theory of ideology, and Žižek’s commentary on this is worth citing: The subject is always fastened, pinned, to a signifier which represents him for the other, and through this pinning he is loaded with a symbolic mandate, he is given a place in the intersubjective network of symbolic relations. The point is that this mandate is ultimately always arbitrary: since its nature is performative, it cannot be accounted for by reference to the real properties and capacities of the subject. So, loaded with this mandate, the subject is automatically confronted with a certain Che Vuoi?, with a question of the Other. . . . [F]antasy functions as a construction, as an imaginary scenario filling out the void, the opening of the desire of the Other: by giving a definite answer to the question “What does the Other want?” it enables us to evade the unbearable deadlock in which the Other wants something from us, but we are at the same time incapable of translating this desire of the Other into a positive interpellation, into a mandate with which to identify.32

Luther’s and Calvin’s agonies as they wrestled with this “unbearable deadlock” illustrate Žižek’s theoretical claims with uncanny precision. Fundamentally, the problem is that God is split, divided in his essence: the God of the “eternal predestination” of human affairs is also, at the same time, the terrible judge of human fallibility. The inconsistent God of the Reformation so arranges events in his “secret providence” that human depravity executes the divine plan and yet humans are nonetheless reprobated for having sinned.33 This absent God is a deeply anxiety-­generating figure, about whom Luther and Calvin actively wondered what He wants. They also tremulously speculated that, in fact, Creation surged forth from a vortex of hatred for humanity that preceded the moment of the Garden of Eden.34 Calvin admitted that such a God seems a monster but added that, doubtless, God reveals himself “paradoxically or in self-­ contradiction” only for finite human reason. The appropriate response, he proposed, is not angry incomprehension but awestruck submission. The God of the Reformation, then, is definitely not the Imaginary divinity of medieval iconography but is instead located in the Symbolic

206 Geoff Boucher (through mechanisms of providence and predestination) and the Real (as a figure of dreadful wrath). Such a God is, in other words, located in the abyss of the desire of the Other, Lacan’s celebrated “Che vuoi?”—a space where the traumatic kernel of a nonintegrated commandment to obedience is the foundation for the ethical life and positive laws of a political community. Žižek’s basic point, however, is that ideological interpellation happens only on the condition that a social fantasy screens the inconsistency of the Other. In theoretical terms, the social fantasy transforms the impossibility of the satisfaction of desire into a prohibition on the transgression of commandments. This happens by means of an ideological transposition of the deadlock of the desire of the Other onto the figure of an excluded remainder who has “stolen” the enjoyment of the political community.35 In short, a scapegoat is chosen. Emblematically, we might say that Luther followed up “Concerning the Spirit and the Letter” (1521), an uncompromising text rejecting external conformity to biblical strictures in favor of right intention in line with angular doctrines of grace, with “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543), the social fantasy about excluded enjoyment that resolves the deadlock of uncertainty about salvation. Social Antagonism and Religious Difference: The Inconsistency of the Law Not only did the absent God of the Reformation disturb those theologians whose impact on Shakespeare’s cultural context can scarcely be overstated; it also sparked the religious difference between Protestantism and Catholicism that politically overdetermined the major social antagonisms of the period. In the absence of an imaginary framework for the reconciliation of religious differences, this torsion in the social formation threatened civil strife, even after the failure of the Armada. Centrally, the lack of an imaginary image of social harmony exposed the fundamental inconsistency in the positive law, its split between rational social contract and arbitrarily imposed result of political violence. Since the English legal framework of the early modern period was supposedly grounded in natural law, this split in the positive law entailed a division in the nature of God—in psychoanalytic terms, an inconsistency in the Other. More simply, one person’s religious terrorist, conspirato-

Shakespeare after Žižek 207 rially aiming to detonate Parliament, is another person’s political saint, executing a warrant for resistance to injustice issued by the pope himself. In the interplay between plot and theme in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare critiques the way that any imaginary resolution to this social antagonism, because of the inconsistency of the law, must depend for its success on a dark moment of ideological exclusion grounded in the social fantasy. From the structural perspective of plot dynamics, the main driver of the action of The Merchant of Venice concerns how a young man, seeking to simultaneously repay a debt to his friend and win the heart of a beautiful heiress, must demonstrate the authenticity of his friendship and the sincerity of his romantic inclinations by passing a series of tests. Despite the ordinariness and fallibility of the protagonist, trickery and fortune prevail in the context of two final gestures of reconciliation—one from the friend, the other from the beloved—and the play ends in wedding celebrations. The assertion that the role of Shylock is to “complicate the movement through release to clarification” by providing a background of anxiety misses entirely that the dramatic tension in the comic plot springs not from the moneylender but from the fact that Portia’s suspicions, which motivate the ring test, are right: she has a very serious rival in Antonio.36 In actuality, the romantic plot drives the potentially tragic subplot, not the other way around. The bond with Shylock is initiated to fund Bassanio’s Belmontese adventure. Repayment of Antonio’s debt is possible because Portia has used the trick of instructing Bassanio through song lyrics on how to win her. Thus, Bassanio can demonstrate his love for both friend and fiancée while conveniently evading repayment of the debt to Antonio through a legal device; but not before one final bond is agreed upon and a guarantor provided. The tragic potential of the subplot springs from the strict symmetry between Antonio and Shylock. Both love deeply, prompting reckless action, and both hate unreflexively, motivating a history of grievances and a disposition to maliciousness. That the titular merchant and his commercial acquaintances are religious hypocrites, unable to enact the neighbor love they profess, is part of the play’s muted critique of the social problem of religious difference. But what is most important here is that the affective and conceptual gravity of the basic problem—the

208 Geoff Boucher simplicity of the reversal of reciprocity into retribution, especially under conditions of generalized equivalence—thoroughly throws the triviality of the plot into relief. Eliminating all doubt on this matter, the playwright then introduces the elopement sub-­subplot, which not only provides Shylock with a humanly intelligible motivation for revenge and an opportunity to contrast his fidelity regarding Leah’s ring with Bassanio’s “Christian husbandry” of Portia’s ring (4.1.303), but also parodically duplicates the vacuousness of the romantic-­comic plotline as desktop calendar poesy and infantile prodigality. Following several recent works on the topic, then, a Lacanian dialectics locates Shakespeare on the fringes of the Catholic underground, as an equivocal critic of the Protestant settlement.37 For Greenblatt, who traces out the connections that lead from Shakespeare’s paternal background in the recusant milieu of Stratford-­upon-­Avon (and John Shakespeare’s recently discovered Catholic will), Shakespeare’s divided allegiance led to a sharp eye for hypocrisy on both sides. In The Merchant of Venice (and beyond), Greenblatt notes a strong division between external conformity and internal dissent that enables the poetics of subjective introspection for which Shakespeare is known.38 For Richard Wilson, who locates Shakespeare in the broader milieu or “sustaining connections” of recusant communities that in various ways may well have assisted his success, the record around Shakespeare involves contemporary suspicions and coded language. In the final analysis, Shakespeare turned away from “the suicidal violence of the fanatics with a project of freedom of conscience and mutual toleration.”39 Moderate in faith, distrustful of extremism: Greenblatt and Wilson agree that the incommensurable perspectives of Catholic and Protestant, combined with analytic introspection, led Shakespeare to skeptical positions and an ultimate allegiance to theatricality as a social engine. They might have added that this mutual destruction of absolute claims is a characteristic movement of skepticism, typical of Montaigne (and Shakespeare).40 According to Wilson, the world of Belmont is surreptitiously aligned with manorial Catholicism as a domestic region dominated by the value of erotic love. There we learn that the supreme institution of companionate marriage signified by the marital bond needs to be leavened by the spirit of reconciliation.41 As Wilson points out, female-­led households were characteristic of the landed gentry in the recusant commu-

Shakespeare after Žižek 209 nity, such as the moderate, pro-­Catholic Montagues—a consequence of the regime of detentions inflicted by the Elizabethan state. Perhaps indeed the romantic love that governs under the reign of the absent father in Belmont is intended to be consistent with the allegorical designs of the pre-­Reformation presentation of Catholicism as the “religion of love.”42 Certainly, Belmont is a region of sumptuous extravagance, replete with music, poetry, and feasts, where gracious wealth seems transmuted into elegant generosity. It is the fitting location for Lorenzo’s seemingly definitive pronouncement that “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; / The motions of his spirit are dull as night / And his affections dark as Erebus” (5.1.90–94). It is also private and domestic. If the casket test introduces the opposition between appearance and reality, quantity and quality, and the notion of hazarding all, then the ring test links risking everything to complete fidelity—that is, to right intention rather than mixed motivation. When Bassanio demands, “Let me choose / For as I am, I live upon the rack,” Portia replies, “Upon the rack, Bassanio! then confess / What treason there is mingled with your love” (3.2.25–28). Bassanio must—as the casket duly instructs—learn to “give and hazard all” in love, renouncing the self-­interested pursuit of Portia’s financial wealth and the promise of sexual delight that she represents for an unselfish reciprocity along the lines of the gift rather than the exchange. But there is a comic gap between these lofty ideals and the prosaic reality of the main figure (not to mention the minor characters, such as Gratiano), which means that the need for forgiveness is a permanent one. Meanwhile, the world of Venice is coded in terms of mercantile Protestantism as a public arena regulated by the financial laws governing reciprocal exchange. The world of commerce controlled by “general equivalence” involves the well-­known problem of reification—that is, the conversion of qualities into quantities. Salerio and Solano’s “consolations” to Antonio frame, right at the beginning of the drama, this reduction of everything that Belmont represents to a calculable nullity: “Should I go to church / And see the holy edifice of stone, / And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks, / Which touching but my gentle vessel’s side, / Would scatter all her spices on the stream, / Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks, / And, in a word, but even now worth

210 Geoff Boucher this, / And now worth nothing?” (1.1.30–37). Social relations in Venice are therefore dominated by the instrumental calculations of a formal rationality that includes both exchange and legality in the structure of the “bond.” It is because of the abstract formality of general equivalence that the generosity of Antonio’s friendly loans and the maliciousness of Shylock’s contractual entrapment belong to the same structure. While the Duke refers to Shylock when he informs Antonio that “thou art come to answer / A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch / Uncapable of pity, void and empty / From any dram of mercy” (4.1.3–6), the action of the scene makes it clear that it is the law itself that is the “stony adversary” opposed to the substance of mercy—or to value judgments about the quality of an intention. Shakespeare rehearses here the problem of the history plays—the arbitrary character of the foundation of the law in a historically contingent “criminal act” of political violence linked to dynastic ambitions, versus its rational character as the instrument of the social pact that brings civil peace—as a problem about the split between legal form and ethical content. As Žižek points out, the law is believed to exist “because it is accepted as a constitutive part of a community’s historical tradition,” originating in spiritual truth—that is, beginning from natural law.43 But without a metaphysical guarantee for ethical conduct, this presupposition of faith cannot actually determine the intentionality of actors within legal frameworks. Just as the imperative of the moral law—“Do your duty!”—is an empty formality that fills the subject with the anxiety that their selection of a maxim governing their conduct might turn out to be “pathological,” immoral, so too the Christian injunction to “do unto others” slides uneasily between enjoining reciprocation and mandating retribution. In the final analysis, positive law resolves this deadlock through a framework that provides the illusion that evil is possible but illegal, which means that all the subject needs to do to resolve the deadlock of the desire of the Other is to obey the law. As Žižek proposes, the law intervenes as “a way for the subject to avoid the impasse constitutive of desire by transforming the inherent impossibility of its satisfaction into prohibition.”44 The agent who “does not give way on their desire” is “evil,” not because they are a malicious agent according to some ethical framework that subtends the law, but because they reveal that the formalism of the law is completely indifferent to the ethical substance of the political community.

Shakespeare after Žižek 211 The “malice” of Shylock, then, and the “inconsistence” of his character, is simply the malicious inconsistency of the law itself. In fact, Shylock, with his blindly formal insistence on the letter of the law, on strict exchange irrespective of whether it is for reciprocation or retribution, distills the essence of Venetian society. Indeed, the play constructs an elegant symmetry between Shylock’s and Antonio’s motivations and their biases within a critique of hypocritical Christianity. Shylock’s confession of hatred, tuned to Lorenzo’s comment on those who, like Shylock, abhor “the vile squealing of the wry-­necked fife” (2.5.30), is framed as raw prejudice: “So can I give no reason, nor I will not, / More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing / I bear Antonio” (4.1.60–62). But this merely echoes Antonio’s hostility toward Shylock: Shylock: “You call me misbeliever, cut-­throat dog, / And spit upon my Jewish gabardine.” (1.3.109–10) Antonio: “I am as like to call thee so again, / To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.” (1.3.127–28)

The formality of the law makes possible the concealment of substantial malice alongside the reconciliatory mercy that Portia advocates; the law of Venice, which includes slavery alongside interest, regulates retribution and reciprocity within the same structure. In terms of homiletics, it turns out that mercy, or forgiveness, is what makes possible the spiritual depth of the human bond as the substance contained within the literal text of the commercial law. In commercial law as in the marital bond, one “gives and hazards all”—hence the urgency of an ethos of kindliness to control the human implications of these contracts, as well as a reconciliatory settlement between their competing values to heal the wound of fragmentation. It would be difficult for the political allegory to be any clearer. Just as the division between public and private is to be healed by means of an ethos of kindness, the schismatic tendencies and social forces dividing religious loyalties (and city from country) are to be reconciled within an ethical settlement based in forgiveness. This vision—more Hooker than Hobbes—is built into the reconciliatory dynamic implicit in the superficial web of thematic correspondences that the play insists on; implied sympathy for the fallible Bassanio lubricates the challenging task of having Antonio extend forgiveness to the excluded other in a form

212 Geoff Boucher that averts tragedy. Surely, this is why Shakespeare’s “Jewish play,” probably sparked, as we have seen, by a successful revival of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, is entirely different in structure and conception. Shakespeare equips Shylock with psychological motivations and an articulation of shared humanity. His perverse literalism is explicitly in line with the nature of the legal code rather than an aberration: Shylock confronts the Christians with the kernel of the Real at the heart of their mercantile arrangements. The free fall in value of the marketplace, lacking the moderation of the lifestyle of the landed gentry, is an inhuman region of instrumental conduct—but, according to the reigning ideology, social harmony and full self-­identity can be achieved within a new settlement. Political Community Founded on Ideological Exclusion What The Merchant of Venice shows is that this new settlement—which, in historical terms, will turn out to be the Glorious Revolution and then the Restoration in England (that is, ultimately, nationalism)—is possible only on the condition of an exclusionary social fantasy. The play does this by showing how the absence of an imaginary unification to society means that difference inevitably becomes antagonism. In conceptual terms, the imaginary distinction between fixed religious and social camps, such as Belmont and Venice, is disclosed as in actuality a symbolic opposition between differently defined, mutually antagonistic blocs. The only way to stop the resulting sliding of cultural and political signifiers is to make an arbitrary exception, one supported by the demonization of the agent of the “theft of enjoyment” constructed by the social fantasy. As Žižek points out, the inner antagonism inherent to the political community cannot be reconciled within a new harmony without the expulsion of that figure who embodies the deadlock at its heart. In general, therefore, in anti-­Semitic ideology, the “perception of ‘real’ Jews is always mediated by a symbolic-­ideological structure which tries to cope with social antagonism: the real ‘secret’ of the Jews is our own antagonism.”45 Žižek continues: Is the anti-­Semitic capitalist’s hatred of the Jew not the hatred of the excess that pertains to capitalism itself, i.e., of the excess produced by its inherent antagonistic nature? Is capitalism’s hatred of the Jew not the hatred of its own innermost, essential feature? For this reason, it is not sufficient

Shakespeare after Žižek 213 to point out how the racist’s Other presents a threat to our identity. We should rather inverse this proposition: the fascinating image of the Other gives a body to our own innermost split, to what is “in us more than ourselves” and thus prevents us from achieving full identity with ourselves.46

Hence Žižek’s claim that, for the anti-­Semite, the Jew is “effectively the objet petit a,” “not another subject who I encounter in front of me but a foreign intruder within me.” The anti-­Semite thus “need[s] the . . . figure of the ‘Jew’ in order to maintain [his] own identity.”47 Against this conceptual background, it is significant that the ethos of kindness adverted to at the thematic level of The Merchant of Venice is entirely absent from the texture of the action. In its absence, there is a constant reversal of properties between plot and subplot. Qualities are defined through their antithesis—quantities—and vice versa, so that the reconciliatory thrust of the plot can best be described as advocating the “wealth of spirit,” while Portia, emissary of love, is “undervalued” even as a “golden fleece” (1.1.165). As Norman Rabkin comments, “Portia’s true gold may be spiritual, but Bassanio gets himself out of trouble with his creditors by her material wealth.”48 This concerns both the interplay of quantification (money) and qualification (spirit) and the perspective from which we evaluate the action in the distinct regions. The problem concerns the inescapability of quantitative metaphors for describing intrinsic qualities (the wealth of spirit, the love of money) and the way that qualitative value lacks meaning without quantification (triple the repayment, double the guarantee, half the inheritance). Perhaps the most significant instance of this is the figure of Jessica and the entire elopement sub-­subplot, which acts as a comic mediation between plot and subplot. The disturbing scene in which Jessica, following the abusive sexual banter of Lorenzo’s accomplices, must “gild [herself] with some more ducats” (2.7.51–52) to guarantee her attractiveness to Lorenzo, emblematizes the conflation of love and money active within the entire play. It reveals the Christians systematically confusing generosity with profligacy and romantic expression with sexual adventures—that is, conflating love with money and daughters with ducats. Barren money does indeed breed (accumulates as wealth, civilizes as generosity); mercy is in fact strained (sets the division of a fortune, sits in judgment on romantic transgression). Several characters display this value confusion, while the play thema-

214 Geoff Boucher tizes the impossibility of achieving the separation of perspectives linguistically through the notion of the bond (of contract, of marriage). Portia and the test of the caskets, for instance, exhibits particularly clearly the motif of quality and its contamination by quantity. The test of the caskets (gold for desire, silver for deserts) implies that love is a quality that cannot be intersubjectively measured. That lead—involving “giving and hazarding all”—stands for romantic love implies that reservations of interest and considerations of exchange are antithetical to companionate marriage. Beyond reciprocity understood as exchange begins generosity, a theme that accords well with Portia’s speech on the quality of mercy and her role in the forgiveness that brings reconciliation between herself and Bassanio. The song that precedes Bassanio’s choice, the warnings in the caskets themselves—these all equate superficial appearances with quantitative valuation and with deceptive formalism. Yet by no means does Bassanio rise to this ethical level. He is an adventurer in quest of the “golden fleece,” one who, by deserts, “questionless should be fortunate” (1.1.174–79)—in other words, he chooses gold and silver, with Morocco and Aragon. Instructed by the song to reject superficial appearances, he fortunately selects lead, only to reveal that his calculated duplicity of Portia is twofold: the treason of his financial interest and the betrayal of her heart. Portia does indeed have “vantage to exclaim upon” Bassanio, and he by no means passes the ring test, despite the opportunity that this presents for witty innuendos about Balthasar sleeping with Portia in his absence. Portia is a casket of ducats, a golden ring. Bassanio’s romantic engagement is contaminated by the reservations of interest that make him a comic equivalent to Shylock’s contractual ambivalence. The resulting ambivalence can be brought out economically by considering Shylock’s well-­known speech on how “the villainy that you teach me I will execute” (3.1.45–60). This speech begins from a statement of grievances that proceeds to the assertion of common humanity—that is, a claim for normative redress based in an articulate statement of the shared potential to experience emotional distress and have damaged self-­ identity. But it rapidly swings from reciprocity to retribution by way of an argument that recruits intelligible (because shared) psychological motivations, such as the desire for vengeance and the idea that villainous conduct rightly begets a vicious response. Now, critics have interpreted this passage as either an expression of frustration driven by a history of

Shakespeare after Žižek 215 suffering or the sudden gleam of a malicious will exposed in an extremity of passion, but it is surely both.49 It is not just the ambivalent potential of the slide from reciprocity to retribution in light of hostile intentions that disturbs the thematic unity of the play around Shylock. Rather, it is the fact that Shylock (with the possible exception of Portia) is the model of fidelity. For the impossibility that completely decenters the play’s anodyne thematic statement–­cum–­ political allegory is that Shylock acts principally from love, not hate. Sure, according to the merchants of Venice, he confuses “his stones, his daughter and his ducats” (2.8.24) because he loves money. But this is obviously not true, because he says himself that his ultimate motivation is a “lodged hatred” toward Antonio. And yet this is not the full truth either, for it is Shylock—not Bassanio—who passes the test of that ring that he “would not have given . . . for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.1.104). Shylock turns from a potentially malicious disposition to actively seeking revenge because of his daughter’s elopement, including her theft of Leah’s ring. It is Shylock, virtually alone among the cast, who truly loves and who keeps faith with that love. But this is only to say that Shylock emblematizes love “beyond the pleasure principle,” love turned to hate, life veering toward death: “I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! / Would she were hearsed at my foot, / And the ducats in her coffin!” (3.1.74–76). Shylock does not want the ducats, the daughter, and the stones back. He wants them all dead. He actively wants nothing—that is, he desires death; his is a pure desire; he wants only what the law wants. The obdurate literalism that Shylock exhibits in the trial scene, where he keeps faith with vengeance through the compulsive repetition of staccato exclamations upon the “learned judge” who is a “new Daniel,” prolongs this desire and extends it to the one empirical object within his grasp—Antonio: “If every ducat in six thousand ducats were in six parts, / And every part a ducat, I would not draw them. / I would have my bond. . . . / My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond” (4.1.86–88, 210–11). It is time to summarize the psychoanalytic interpretation of all of this. The “pound of flesh” nominated in the bond is of course a displacement upward of the circumcision ritual, itself a symbolization of what psychoanalysis describes as castration.50 From the Lacanian perspective that Žižek adopts, castration can be theorized in terms of the inevitable divi-

216 Geoff Boucher sion between the “nothingness” of the differential order of the signifier and the “ineffable stupid existence” of the substantial being. To exist as a subject of language, as a speaking being, the human being as a corporeal entity must “lose everything,” must renounce the direct satisfaction of instincts and thereby surrender its substance to the differential movement of the articulation of demand in language. What remains is merely the drives, insatiable impulses linked to arbitrary things that are constituted through the shifting networks of the signifier as focused around an object that forever eludes signification. The subject must “give and hazard all” to that “stony adversary,” the law, which states that the differential order of the signifier is fixed to the realm of the signified only by means of the intervention of the Master Signifier, itself a “signifier without signified.”51 Although what the subject then gets back in language is access to desire through the inherent potential for ambivalence built into signification, there is an important consequence for the subject’s efforts to represent the (sexual) drives. The consequence, equivalent to repression, is that the signified is only transiently connected to the signifier—that is, like a set of caskets, signifiers have signifieds “placed within them,” or attached to them, by convention, not by nature. But the fantasmatic final signified, the one that, as the object-­cause of desire, or object of the drives, in fantasy belongs to the Master Signifier, necessarily belongs in a lead box whose content is ultimately death.52 This is because the Master Signifier, as the “‘reflective’ signifier [that] ‘totalizes’ the battery of ‘all the others,’” represents the subject for the field of signification as what it is: “the failure of representation[,] . . . not a positive, substantial entity . . . but the void opened by the failure of its representations.”53 In the final analysis, what is deposited in the last casket is the nothingness of the signifier itself, signified to the subject as a question about the desire of the Other. As Žižek explains apropos the problem of interpellation discussed earlier, the question of the desire of the Other represents an intolerable anxiety for the subject. “The key,” Žižek notes, is that “anxiety is aroused by the desire of the Other in the sense that ‘I do not know what object a I am for the desire of the Other.’”54 The “pound of flesh” that the subject must sacrifice to the Other for access to language is always too much to pay, so that the place of death—the pure nothingness of the order of the signifier—is always concealed behind the screen of fantasy. A beautiful object is always in the casket, miraculously placed there for

Shakespeare after Žižek 217 the subject by fortune, making it possible for the subject to desire, provided that this is within the frame of the fantasy scenario. All of this is manifestly there in the romantic comedy of the plotline of The Merchant of Venice. But there is more. In fantasy, as Žižek explains apropos the topic of “enjoyment as a political factor,” there is always a stranger, outcast, or outsider who has supposedly refused the sacrifice. This demonic other refuses the “renunciation of instinctual satisfactions,” the loss of substance demanded by entry into the cultural fabric, remaining part of an alien civilization whose monstrous, disgusting enjoyment disturbs the political community. This hostile enjoyment involves appropriating the sacrifice of the subjects, engaging in the “theft of enjoyment” through, in this case, demanding the pound of flesh. But despite the florid imaginary representation of the demonic other in popular culture, ranging from Elizabethan anti-­Semitism through to today’s Islamophobic caricatures, the theft of enjoyment always happens because, ultimately, the demonic other is a representation of the otherness of the order of the signifier itself. The otherness of the order of the signifier is the same thing as the desire of the Other, most commonly represented mythically to the subject as the question of what God wants. In the context of the Reformation’s evacuation of the imaginary representation of God, this question becomes a topic of intense concern and anxious speculation. It is not accidental that the Reformation invents the notion of the Abrahamic faiths as part of its anxiety about the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament. The Reformers worried about the possibility of making a mistake in this transition, a possibility signified for Luther and Calvin by the false prophet Muhammad as well as by the Antichrist in Rome. Nor is it accidental that, at the same moment that Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies, Caravaggio painted several variants of the Sacrifice of Isaac, for this happened at a historical moment of maximal anxiety about what God wants, here explicitly connected to the continuities between Judaic and Christian faith. This is where Shylock steps in, as a representation of the nothingness of the law, of the alien order of signification, which wants— what?—the death of the subject qua substantial, corporeal entity composed of natural instincts. The Merchant of Venice certainly exhibits this mechanism in action, culminating in the trial scene where the otherness of Shylock is finally domesticated within the fantasy of universal rec-

218 Geoff Boucher onciliation, but not before we have glimpsed the terrible menace of the desire of the Other. The imagined community can be regained only through social fantasy, dramatized through the punishment of Shylock as the deeply problematic moment in which unity is restored through the social exclusion of “political enjoyment.” Not only does Shakespeare enact this mechanism; the play at the same time critiques its enactment. This complexity depends on the ironic relation between its two perspectives. As we have seen, the tragic potential of the subplot exposes the superficiality of the romantic comedy, disclosing as a fantasy scenario the notion that the victory of love can prevent the slide from reconciliatory reciprocity into savage retaliation. The Belmontese couples are disclosed as shallow, and the reconciliation that happens after the ring test, following directly from the trial scene, is emotionally and conceptually forced. It is shallow because the destructive passions unleashed in the subplot—in particular, the reversal of love into hate—are not contained in the saccharine reconciliation, which promises sexual delight rather than romantic reciprocity. The adolescent infatuation of Portia with Bassanio, and Bassanio’s somewhat calculating response, therefore provides no assurance that a mature judgment of the lack of a sexual relation will prevail. The reconciliation is therefore forced. Echoes of Shylock’s “unwell” attend upon the callow wordplays and the coarse reminders that Portia is ultimately a human ring for Bassanio’s pound of flesh. The “music” and “poetry” of Belmont clash in dissonance with the seriousness of the trial aftermath, so that the hollow conventionality of the second-­rate love poetry seems parodic. It is a reconciliation gained through “jugglery.” But, at the same time, the subplot provides an ambivalent representation of Shylock, at once the demonic other of anti-­Semitic fantasy and a projection of Christian hypocrisy. A set of symmetries—between Shylock and Antonio, and between Shylock and Bassanio—insists on the “introreflection” of Shylock as absolute outsider into the heart of the political community, as its excluded remainder. It is true that Shylock’s comic interludes in the elopement sub-­subplot significantly interfere with this design, driving it in the direction of the Elizabethan comic villain. Nonetheless, when Shylock is not playing the senex iratus, he marks out a place of dialectical reversals—love into hate, faithlessness into fidelity, humanity into

Shakespeare after Žižek 219 atrocity—the essence of which is inconsistency itself, that is, the Real of pure desire qua the conceptual impossibility of forbidden enjoyment. As Žižek states, “fantasy conceals the fact that the Other, the symbolic order, is structured around some traumatic impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolised—i.e., the real of jouissance: through fantasy, jouissance is domesticated, ‘gentrified.’”55 More prosaically, but no less accurately, Cohen’s argument that the destiny of medieval anti-­ Semitism is to be incorporated within post-­Westphalian nationalism is borne out here in a moment of pre-­Westphalian reconciliation of the Christian community as exclusive of the Jewish intruder.56 Shakespeare’s critique depends on whether we too “feel unwell” afterward. Notes 1 William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2004). 2 On this point, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 71–73. 3 Roger Ebert, review of The Merchant of Venice, RogerEbert.com, January 20, 2005, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-­merchant-­of-­venice-­2005. 4 On this point, see my essay “Enjoyment as an Aesthetic Factor: The Specificity of the Aesthetic in Late Marxism,” Parallax 16, no. 4 (2010): 29–44. 5 Scott Wilson, Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 11. 6 See Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews. 7 William Shakespeare, The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or, Otherwise Called, The Jew of Venice, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 2008), 1111–76. Further references are to act, scene, and line and will be given parenthetically in the text. 8 See Donna Hamilton, “Anthony Munday and The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 89–99. 9 Derek Cohen, “Shylock and the Idea of the Jew,” in Jewish Presences in English Literature, ed. Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1990), 39. 10 Exemplary here is Barbara Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1962): 327–43. 11 See Cesar Lombardi Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 185–206.

220 Geoff Boucher 12 Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 63–64, 164. 13 Danson, The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice,” 108, 31, 25, 70. 14 Danson, The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice,” 20–21. 15 Walter Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” elh 49, no. 4 (1982): 765–89; Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews; and D. Cohen, “Shylock and the Idea of the Jew.” 16 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004); and Marc Shell, “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Kenyon Review 1, no. 4 (1979): 65–92. 17 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 34–35. 18 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 222–26. 19 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 227–35. 20 Fletcher’s definition of tragicomedy as a tragic plot lacking deaths can be found in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (1610). For criticism grounded on this classic definition, see, for instance, Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Nancy Klein Maguire, Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York: ams Press, 1987). On dual plots in tragicomedy, see Nathaniel Leonard, “Embracing the ‘Mongrel’: John Marston’s The Malcontent, Antonio and Mellida, and the Development of English Early Modern Tragicomedy,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2012): 60–87. 21 Rosalie Littell Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 10. 22 Ralph Berry, Shakespearean Structures (London: Macmillan, 1981). 23 See Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1–21. 24 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974). 25 See John Schwindt, “Luther’s Paradoxes and Shakespeare’s God: The Emergence of the Absurd in Sixteenth-­Century Literature,” Modern Language Studies 15, no. 4 (1985): 4–12. 26 See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 87–129. 27 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 126. 28 Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010), 136. 29 Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, in Christopher Marlow: The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (London: Penguin, 1969), 378–79 (2.3.179–205). 30 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 203. 31 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 322. 32 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 113–115. 33 See Jean Calvin, Calvin’s Calvinism: A Treatise on the Eternal Predestination of God;

Shakespeare after Žižek 221

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56

and, A Defence of the Secret Providence of God, trans. Henry Cole (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 125. See Herman Westerink, The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Early Reformation Thought (New York: Routledge, 2012), 37–38, 54–59. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 206–67. See Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 190. See Greenblatt, Will in the World; Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (London: Ashgate, 2004); Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: Public Affairs, 2005); and Peter Milward, Shakespeare the Papist (Ann Arbor, MI: Sapientia, 2005). Greenblatt, Will in the World, 270–87. R. Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, ix. See Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from “Richard II” to “Hamlet” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). R. Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, 255–56. See John Coolidge, “Law and Love in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1976): 243–63. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 51. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2002), 266. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 205. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 206. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 125. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 16. See Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, 1–33. See Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 121–30. See Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 95. See Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth, 1958), 291–300. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 25. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 71. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 123. D. Cohen, “Shylock and the Idea of the Jew.”

8 Beyond Symbolic Authority:

La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes and the Louis-­Paul Willis

Aesthetics of the Real

Žižek, from Film Studies to Literary Studies For well over two decades, Slavoj Žižek’s work has played a major role in reintroducing Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as Marxian ideology critique and Hegelian philosophy, into the fields of cultural studies, media studies, and film studies. When it comes to the latter, Žižek has often done so directly against contemporary film formalism. Indeed, his rereading of Lacan coincides with what some have called the waning of psychoanalytic film theory.1 For this reason, film studies is indebted to Žižek, as he stands at the forefront of what might be called contemporary Lacanian film psychoanalysis.2 Perhaps Žižek’s greatest contribution to film studies has been his outlining of cinema’s role in illustrating the ways in which the Lacanian Real—the realm/register of human experience that lies beyond imaginary representation and symbolic signification—constructs subjectivities. This long-­overdue attention to the Real has contributed greatly to the emergence of contemporary Lacanian cultural, media, and film psychoanalysis. Central to Žižek’s recuperation of Lacan’s thought, and to its application to cultural and media artifacts, is his insistence that, “for Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice which confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence.”3 For Žižek, then, film is important insofar as it carries the fundamental possibility of confronting its viewers with some form of traumatic Real.

Beyond Symbolic Authority 223 Given the importance of this theoretical insight for film studies, one can only wonder how Žižek’s recuperation of the Real might be applied to the study of literature and how such a study would view the aesthetic dimension of representing the Real within a medium whose relation to the Imaginary rests on a very particular relation to the Symbolic. Given the general perception of Lacan within literary studies as a purely semiotic philosopher, Žižek’s insistence on the centrality of the Real to Lacan’s thinking harbors the potential to steer psychoanalytic literary studies toward a more complete comprehension of Lacan’s contribution to cultural analyses.4 Of course, in order to ponder the Real and its aesthetic manifestations within literature, an appropriate object must be chosen—one that plunges its reader into an uncomfortable relation with subjectivity, language, and various social and cultural constructs. Gaétan Soucy’s La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes (translated as The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches) provides an exemplary case of just such a literary work, one that begs for a Lacano-­Žižekian analysis focused on the Real.5 In fact, performing such a reading can help make a strong case for the theoretical usefulness of psychoanalytic and ideological literary criticism. With its highly figurative depiction of what Žižek calls “the decline of symbolic authority,” Soucy’s novel submerges its reader into a world where characters maintain a highly problematic relation to gender and symbolic roles. In so doing, it provides the aesthetic coordinates for a literary representation of a world beyond the Symbolic. This world, as I will demonstrate here, is so intimately tied to a myriad of traumas that it inherently problematizes the reader’s own relation to the traumatic dimension beyond symbolic existence. This subjective problematic inherent to the novel is foregrounded by its narrator’s troubled relation to language. In fact, the language in Soucy’s novel is unusual to the point that it has motivated quite a few analyses focused on semiotics, form, and narratology—all of which are not only warranted but also quite accurate. The novel’s father figure and the incestuous family dynamics at the center of the narrator’s existence have also spawned literary analyses—analyses grounded in notions of filiation, identity, femininity, and religion. However, there has yet to be any in-­depth analysis of the novel guided by a properly Žižekian (let alone Lacanian) focus on its attempt to represent the traumatic, Real dimensions of subjective existence. Not only is such an analysis highly warranted, but its development

224 Louis-Paul Willis can help make a strong case for the establishment of a Lacano-­Žižekian paradigm within literary studies. With these introductory issues in mind, this essay’s aim is twofold. In the first place, it seeks to provide a long-­overdue analysis of the Real and its traumatic manifestations and representations throughout Soucy’s novel. Drawing on Žižek’s detailed analysis of the Real as triadic, this theoretical reading will begin to articulate the contours of what I will here call “the aesthetics of the Real”—that is, the literary representation of what lies beyond language, beyond gender, and, most importantly in Soucy’s highly metaphorical tale of hindered identity and subjectivity, beyond the decline of symbolic and paternal authority. This idea of an aesthetics of the Real will be grounded in various discussions of the novel’s portrayal of the demise of the father figure and, by extension, his symbolic authority. These discussions will concern the shortcomings of language, of symbolic identity, and of gendered identification. In the second place, by developing an analytic reading grounded in Žižek’s discussion of the various modalities of the Real, this essay aims to bring the Lacano-­Žižekian model of discourse and cultural analysis into the field of contemporary literary studies. Because of literature’s form, its expression of the imaginary realm of human existence is quite different from that of film. This difference will lead to a discussion about how the tension among the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic can operate through the written word, and how this expression of the imaginary realm can call for a renewed psychoanalytic criticism of literature. An Initiatory Tale We had to take the universe in hand, my brother and I, for one morning just before dawn papa gave up the ghost without a by-­your-­leave. His mortal remains strained from an anguish of which only the bark remained, his decrees so suddenly turned to dust—­everything was lying in state in the bedroom upstairs from which just the day before papa had controlled everything. We needed orders, my brother and I, so as not to crumble into little pieces, they were our mortar. Without papa we didn’t know how to do anything. On our own we could scarcely hesitate, exist, fear, suffer. —Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes reveals its affinity with a Lacanian-­influenced analytic paradigm as early as its first lines, in which the narrator’s brother finds their father hanged in his upstairs bedroom.6

Beyond Symbolic Authority 225 The father’s untimely death immediately entails a drastic change in the two children’s symbolic universe—a universe that, as it turns out, is marked by various traumas that distinguish it from a more traditionally functioning symbolic order. Their reality—on what turns out to be a physically and symbolically dilapidated estate, isolated by a dense pine grove that blocks the horizon—is gradually revealed to the reader as the children struggle to decide what to do about the discovery of their father’s body. The narrator describes the siblings’ existence as devoid of a fully functioning symbolic frame: because they have been kept from the rest of the world and know only their immediate family members, they lack what Claude Lévi-­Strauss would refer to as “structures of kinship.”7 For instance, they address each other as “brother” rather than by their names (the same goes for their violent, whack-­distributing father, and even the family horse, which is simply referred to as “horse”), and any and all knowledge of the outside world has been provided by the highly religious homeschooling they have obviously been subjected to, including the “dictionaries” that seem to abound in the estate’s decrepit and mildew-­infested library. Like the brother’s watch, whose missing hands indicate a problematic relation to the most basic elements of symbolic existence, the narrator’s world is marked by a traumatic absence of signification that requires attention. What is most notable about the siblings’ life on the family estate, however, is that it is marked, above all, by the existence of what they refer to as the “Fair Punishment,” an initially indeterminate entity that lives in the equally decrepit woodshed, stored in a box. As the narrator puts it, in what can only be described as a gross understatement, “It’s quite something, the Fair Punishment, it will surprise the world someday.”8 As will be discussed shortly, this “Fair Punishment” is the centerpiece around which the novel revolves, most specifically in its relation to a traumatic Real and its aestheticization. After the children have brought the father’s corpse downstairs and into the kitchen, it is decided that the narrator will walk to the neighboring village to purchase a casket so that the siblings may proceed to bury the patriarchal figure who gave them what little sense and meaning they possess.9 While seemingly trivial, the decision to leave the estate— and hence to disobey a paternal command—is not taken lightly. Through various encounters in the village, the narrator is eventually confronted with conflicting truths, not the least of which is that, in an extreme in-

226 Louis-Paul Willis stance of gender confusion, “he” is actually a she. (This information is very gradually hinted at, making it all the more confusing for the first-­ time reader.) Having been brought up thinking she was a boy, the narrator eventually relates the following: “Once upon a long time ago a true calamity happened to me, I think I lost my balls. I bled for days and then it healed over and then it started up again, it depends on the moon, ah la la, it’s all because of the moon, and I started to get inflations on my torso as well.”10 This is recounted to the local mine inspector, a figure who takes a special interest in the narrator once she makes her remarkable entry into the village, and whom she perceives as the knight in shining armor who will save her. As it turns out, the deceased father was the owner of the local mine and one of the most powerful men in the region. When the mine inspector adds that things will undoubtedly change for the narrator and her brother, and that they might be forced to live outside of the estate that constitutes the only place they have ever known, she flees back home to inform her brother of these incredible developments, only to find that her brother has been “touched by grace,” a state that is worsened once she informs him that “entire hordes of neighbours” will be coming to “take everything away from them.”11 At this point in the novel, the story revealed is closer to its underlying fabula, as the information that has been slowly divulged begins to make more sense to the reader. We come to understand that, in a distant past, this powerful and rich family was complete and living in happiness. At some point, when the narrator (whose name is later revealed to be Alice) was approximately four years old, a dramatic fire ravaged the family estate, killing the mother and seriously burning what is revealed to be the narrator’s twin sister, Ariane, who started the fire by playing with matches (hence the novel’s title). Seemingly devastated beyond the capacity for reason, the father secluded what remained of the family, placing the severely burned and permanently mummified Ariane in chains in the woodshed, facing the calcified remains of her mother, who is put on display in a glass box along with a matchbox so as to remind Ariane of her actions and their consequences. When the young Alice discovers that her father spends the majority of his evenings in the woodshed, crying over the glass box and weepily caring for Ariane, she makes it a habit to spy on him for a while. When she finally reveals herself to him, her father calmly states, while pointing in Ariane’s direction,

Beyond Symbolic Authority 227 “It’s a fair punishment”—an expression that will be used by Alice and her brother to designate that “thing” living in the woodshed.12 For what appears to be many years, Alice and her father tend to Ariane; eventually, it is only Alice who tends to what she doesn’t fully acknowledge is her twin sister. By the time her father hangs himself, Alice is approximately seventeen years old and has been impregnated by her brother. All of this information is revealed to the reader through the diary and testament that is the novel itself, written by Alice as she witnesses her brother’s spiraling insanity in the wake of strangers making their way to the estate. By the novel’s end, Alice is in labor in the once-­magnificent estate’s ballroom, unsure of what lies ahead, while her brother has been arrested for killing the mine inspector and the family estate is in flames for the second—and possibly ultimate—time. Most importantly, the reader is confronted with the ramifications of what lies beyond the signification of what has just been read. In what follows, I will discuss the complexity of this tale in Lacano-­Žižekian terms, eventually arriving at an apprehension of its unique and intriguing aestheticization of the Real as a realm beyond signification and sense. As I will demonstrate, this notion of an “aesthetics of the Real” is a crucial component of a Lacano-­ Žižekian approach to literature, for it takes us beyond the merely semiotic/(post)structuralist approach that critics have tended to take when applying Lacan to literature. Signification and Its Discontents Words are the last ramparts in the face of catastrophe. They reveal its presence, all the while dissimulating its extent. —Bertrand Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts”

One of the most strikingly unusual aspects of Soucy’s novel is Alice’s problematic relation to language—a problematic that, because what we are reading is also her diary, likewise extends to the novel itself.13 As is revealed early on, the novel is Alice’s recollection of the events that led her to seek refuge in the woodshed, next to the Fair Punishment, in order to “flee the disaster and to write [her] last will and testament.”14 However, as the end of the novel approaches and her recollection of the events following her father’s death nears completion, she makes this stunning declaration: “And if any sly devil should stumble upon this book of spells

228 Louis-Paul Willis he wouldn’t understand a thing, because I write with just one letter, a cursive l it’s called, I string them together page after page, caravel after caravel, nonstop.”15 And so it is revealed that what we have been reading is actually an indecipherable rendition addressed to an impossible narratee; there is no possible receptive end to this act of enunciation, at least none that can be understood. As Bertrand Gervais notes, our reading of the novel “in no way dissipates the confusion”; on the contrary, “it generates another, unbeknownst to us, of course.”16 This literary state of affairs plunges the reader into a most problematic relation with the act of signification—a problematic that concerns not only Alice’s recounting of the narrated events but also the very possibility of this recounting in the first place. In a detailed analysis of the novel’s use of comparative tropes, Jessica Whelan notes how “a plethora of clues in the novel suggest the presence of an intended listener or reader: dozens of times, the narrator asks him if he has understood, reminds him of a previous event or prepares him for an upcoming one. These are signs of the ‘narratee,’ the textually inscribed audience to whom every narrator addresses him- or herself.”17 Yet the obvious question here is, how can there be a narratee, a textual instance of narrative understanding, when there is no possibility of understanding Alice’s text to begin with? One could argue that, in this instance at least, narrator and narratee are the same person, but that seems improbable, seeing that Alice regularly addresses the recipient of her enunciation. Moreover, these addresses are frequently problematic. For instance, when describing her visit to the village and the sign above the general store, she adds, “Sorry, excuse me, but the secretarious knows how to write,” an altogether superfluous declaration given that we are already reading what is supposedly her “last will and testament.”18 Hence, at both the narratological and psychoanalytic levels—that is, in terms of both its reception and its traumatic inscription in the core of subjective existence—Soucy’s novel is a symbolic impossibility.19 In an account of the novel based on its ties with what he refers to as “l’imaginaire de la fin,” best translated as “the Imaginary of the end,” Gervais tackles the topic of desemiotization, a highly important issue from both a structuralist and a psychoanalytic point of view.20 Based on the idea of a postcatastrophic premise at the heart of La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes, Gervais asks how one can justify Alice’s mis-

Beyond Symbolic Authority 229 apprehensions of the reality surrounding her, not least of which is her misapprehension of her own gender. What is the founding act of this speech that is so far off course? The proposed avenue of response lies in a “process of desemiotization, that is, a language that disintegrates to the point of no longer signifying, and where the erratic and opaque speech that ensues takes a central part in an Imaginary of the End, in the representation of a time and a world of the End.”21 This process of desemiotization, while fully present in the narrated events of the novel, also rings true with respect to the novel’s impossible form, which breaks literary signification’s traditional reliance on the presence of both a narrator and a narratee. While the fact that Alice has been transmitting her story to us, its impossible narratees, through a likewise impossible act of signification may seem secondary and trivial, I believe that this detail lies at the core of Soucy’s impressive discourse on what Žižek would call the decline of paternal and symbolic authority, an issue I will tackle shortly. Coupled with a focus on Alice’s complex relation to levels of signification that appear more central to the novel—levels that include, above all, her gender, her identity, and her relation to the symbolic order—an examination of the desemiotization that transpires as a result of the end of patriarchal authority in La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes can allow us to generate a clearer understanding of its aestheticization of the Real. While the novel opens with the death of the father, a death that generates the collapse of the children’s known world, this death is in fact not the initial death for the siblings. As Gervais explains, “the death of the father in fact represents a second ending, the foreclosure of a world that already was a world of the end, opened by a first death acting as a founding event.”22 This “first death” refers, of course, to the death of the mother—a death caused by Ariane’s innocent recklessness (a four-­year-­ old playing with matches can be seen as nothing else; no intent can be tied to such a tragic accident). But what reality is this tragedy the foundation of? The existence known to Alice and her brother is described as sordid and repressive; beyond the obvious austerity of their daily subsistence, Alice’s narration makes several mentions of an absence of sunlight, as well as endless winters and countless rainy days. For instance, on the very morning of the father’s death, Alice states, “This one looked as if it would be rainy, that was our daily bread.”23 But the most important as-

230 Louis-Paul Willis pect of these descriptions is their frequent comparisons to an idyllic “before”; indeed, Alice makes several mentions of “rememories . . . of a time when nothing on our blasted estate was as it is nowadays. First of all, the sun: it was everywhere.”24 These descriptions are of a time that preceded the initial tragedy that “amputate[d] the family from its feminine component.”25 As such, the fairy-­tale connotations of the titular “little girl who was too fond of matches” resonate through this distant past where everything was beautifully exquisite; the novel’s present takes place in an “after” that, as Maïté Snauwaert remarks, is the result of an excess whose cause the reader is slowly worked up to. As such, the narration takes place in a time that can be best described as “postcatastrophic.”26 It is through this postcataclysmic setting that Soucy’s novel can be linked to an Imaginary of the end.27 Yet while this Imaginary of the end is amply discussed in semiotic terms by Gervais, my aim here is to tie this idea to the psychoanalytic notion of the decline of symbolic authority. For, as I conceive of them, there is an important link between Gervais’s notion of the Imaginary of the end and what I am calling the aesthetics of the Real: these notions are complementary insofar as the Real represents, stands for, this very end, the impossibility that marks every symbolic structure. Through the process of desemiotization discussed above, and through its purely postapocalyptic resonance, Alice’s reality can indeed be seen as one wherein symbolic authority fails. Just as her use of words betrays an obvious confusion regarding the function of the signifier, so too is her existence on the family estate marked by a highly problematic relation to symbolic and paternal authority.28 As noted earlier, Alice and her brother are secluded by their bereft and guilt-­ridden father and are thus forced to live outside of any possible symbolic interaction. And yet my thesis here is that this existence can be best described not as presymbolic, as though the children are forever stuck in the imaginary order, but as postsymbolic, indicating a previous, properly functioning relation to the symbolic order.29 In characterizing Alice’s existence as postsymbolic, I do not mean to imply that she lives a postideological existence, one that lies completely beyond symbolic efficiency.30 The catastrophe that precedes the children’s current existence does not in any way place them beyond ideology; rather, it plunges them into a strictly autarkic ideology founded on their father’s withdrawal into religious frenzy. Indeed, it is precisely this

Beyond Symbolic Authority 231 religious frenzy that has led previous critics to see Soucy’s novel as waging an ideological critique of religion. As Gervais, for instance, notes, the father’s insanity, seemingly contagious and transmitted to his children, maintains the novel’s narrative universe in an insupportable entre-­deux in the very setting of the death of the Other, a death reflected on the self. It is as if, through the father’s gaze and all that it implies, the siblings are maintained in an insupportable relation to a beyond—as is most evident in their relation to Ariane in her role as the Fair Punishment.31 This postcatastrophic, postsymbolic world—a world depicted by Alice in her impossible memoir—obviously requires psychoanalytic attention. From a Lacano-­Žižekian standpoint, it suggests that the siblings’ existence is stuck “between the two deaths,” between the first, symbolic death of the family, brought on by the initial tragedy (the death of the mother), and the second, Real death of symbolic authority/the law, brought on by the final tragedy (the death of the father). To say that the father figure in La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes is extremely problematic would be a gross understatement. This father’s recourse to violence and to corporal punishment places him squarely in the realm of the obscene. As Žižek puts it, the “decline of paternal symbolic authority” rests on “the return of figures which function according to the logic of the ‘primordial father,’ from ‘totalitarian’ political Leaders to the paternal sexual harasser.”32 Soucy’s depiction of obscene paternity, however, functions somewhat differently from Freud’s prototypical primordial father, for the enjoyment to which Alice’s father has access is not limited to that which is prohibited but also extends to a highly traumatic jouissance that is beyond the children’s capacity to fathom. Indeed, Alice’s father is a perfect example of what Žižek, apropos the character of Mr. Eddy from David Lynch’s Lost Highway, terms “père jouissance,” father of enjoyment.33 Hence, not only do the children know that there is some form of prohibited knowledge to which their father has access, but, what’s more, they know that they know nothing of it. For instance, their father frequently locks himself in his room to perform “exercises” that remain a mystery to both the children and the reader; he plays music on a sound system that, in the eyes of the children, is a mystical, fairylike machine; he subjects them to traumatic rituals, the significations of which they know nothing; and, most importantly, he has access to powerful knowledge beyond their imagination, above all their very iden-

232 Louis-Paul Willis tity and family history, both of which he keeps from them and takes away with him in death. Thus, the father as primordial father in La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes has access to the ultimate prohibited object: knowledge. And yet there are limits to the father’s knowledge—limits suggested by the ritualistic torture he demands his children subject him to; for such ritualistic torture bears intimate ties to the Lacanian “Che vuoi?,” the traumatic question posed by the subject in response to the enigmatic desire of the Other. Ordering Alice and her brother to chain him up “with arms outstretched and legs wide apart” in a hallway decorated with ancestral family portraits that Alice refers to as the “portrait gallery,” the father requires his children to flog him while he overarches his back, placing them under strict orders not to detach him until nightfall, despite his pleas to the contrary. As Alice details, while hanging from his chains, he “shout[s] insults at the arrogant individuals who st[and] there framed in their portraits in the gallery.”34 Through these sessions— sessions that Alice describes as the ultimate torture inflicted on her— the father seems to address his ancestors in an ultimate incantation of Lacan’s “Che vuoi?,” raging at the tragic fate dealt him and the contingency at the heart of his subjective existence, as well as seeking answers from an inaccessible Other that remains deaf to his demands. By subjecting his children to the trauma of his own subjective existence, to his own “Che vuoi?,” he bars the road to proper access to the coordinates of their subjectivity through desire. As Gervais aptly remarks of this ritual wherein the father is hanged so as to resemble an x, this x is symbolic of the fact that the father is both alive and dead: alive insofar as he drags his children down into the depths of his own infamy; dead insofar as he is lost in an endless resentment, a painful nostalgia that brings him to reject life.35 Furthermore, the father’s actual death brings an end to a world that, despite its nonsensical aspect in the eyes of the reader, constitutes the “mortar” that kept the children composed. As Alice puts it, “outside the living body of papa those rites made no sense whatsoever, and all the fragile meanings I’d up till now hung here and there on the great remnants of the world . . . , I watched them shatter one by one in little puffs, in the manner of foam soap, from the mere fact of my father’s awe-­inspiring death. Which filled a gap on the ‘horizon-­of-­our-­life.’”36 As this passage clearly illustrates, the postsymbolic realm in which Alice

Beyond Symbolic Authority 233 exists is grounded on remnants, recalling the process of desemiotization that marks the novel’s depiction of a “beyond” of symbolic and paternal authority. In what follows, I will examine the literary manifestations of this “beyond” as they relate to the novel’s aestheticization of a Lacano-­ Žižekian Real. Aestheticizing the Real The body is an abyss, everything inside it is pitch-­black. —Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches The Real cannot be inscribed, but we can inscribe this impossibility itself, we can locate its place: a traumatic place which causes a series of failures. —Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

One of Žižek’s main contributions to film studies remains his in-­depth exploration of the Real and the parallel explorations of psychoanalytic notions intimately tied to the Real as structural impossibility.37 As suggested by the barrage of notions Lacan used to attempt to define it— notions including objet petit a, desire, fantasy, sexual difference, lamella, extimacy, the gaze, and so on—the Real, as Matthew Flisfeder correctly notes, is “perhaps the most elusive concept in the Lacanian oeuvre.” And while Žižek’s elaboration of the Real is indeed, as Flisfeder deems it, his “most significant contribution to Lacanian theory,” it is also the case that, “even within Žižek’s own writings on the Lacanian Real, the concept still seems to slip into various modalities.”38 While complex, these different modalities of the Real in Žižek’s thought are nonetheless adequately summed up in the following passage from his foreword to the second edition of For They Know Not What They Do: “There are three modalities of the Real: the ‘real Real’ (the horrifying Thing, the primordial object, from Irma’s throat to the Alien); the ‘symbolic Real’ (the Real as consistency: the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like quantum physics formulas which can no longer be translated back into—or related to—the everyday experience of our life-­world); and the ‘imaginary Real’ (the mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable ‘something’ on account of which the sublime shines through an ordinary object).”39 By tracing these modalities along the lines of Lacan’s three registers of human experience (the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary), Žižek

234 Louis-Paul Willis tackles a fundamental deadlock related to the mere act of speaking or thinking the Real: if Lacan’s Real represents the impossible, that which “resists being put into words” and thus, ultimately, resists symbolization, how can it be discussed, let alone written about?40 While the Real cannot be signified, since it is what fails in the act of signification itself, it must nevertheless be discussed, for, to recall the quote from Žižek cited at the outset of this chapter, it lies at the core of the “most radical dimension of human existence.” In this context, Žižek’s deciphering of the various modalities of the Real that punctuate Lacan’s thought is of paramount importance, for it helps us to interpret the core of the aesthetics of the Real represented in La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes. In the aptly titled Interrogating the Real, Žižek argues that the three dimensions of the Real are present in contemporary art—a statement, I would argue, that can be extended to artistic mediums beyond the visual arts. Indeed, he posits that “the Real is first there as the anamorphic stain, the anamorphic distortion of the direct image of reality—as a distorted image, a pure semblance that ‘subjectivizes’ objective reality. Then the Real is there as the empty place, as a structure, a construction that is never actual or experienced as such but can only be retroactively constructed and has to be presupposed as such—the Real as symbolic construction. Finally, the Real is the obscene, excremental Object out of place, the Real ‘itself.’”41 Because the Real is potentially present in artistic expression across various mediums, the model that Žižek proposes can be applied to discourses that rely not only on the visual but also on the written word. This is perhaps the most important aspect of a Žižekian reading of Soucy’s novel: through its desemiotized language, its wordplays that are in fact plays on the signifier and its vicissitudes, and its characters who evolve in a postsymbolic relation to language and identity, La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes plunges its reader squarely into the midst of a traumatic encounter with the otherness of the Real.42 The most obvious dimension of the aesthetics of the Real in Soucy’s novel is its declension of the three Reals that permeate Žižek’s thought. Because the children evolve in a postsymbolic relation to paternal and symbolic authority, these instances of the Real revolve around the various versions of otherness they encounter. It should be noted here that, as he does with the Real, Žižek also articulates the figure of the Other by way

Beyond Symbolic Authority 235 of the Lacanian triad: there is the imaginary Other, consisting of “people ‘like me,’ my fellow human beings with whom I am engaged in mirror-­ like relationships of competition, mutual recognition, and so on”; there is the “symbolic ‘big Other’—the substance of our social existence, the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our existence”; and, finally, there is the “Other qua Real, the impossible Thing, the ‘inhuman partner,’ the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible.”43 In La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes, Alice relates to each of these Others, and it is through these relations that we can discern the functioning—and, ultimately, the novel’s aestheticization—of the Real. First of all, there are imaginary Others, those whom Alice designates as “neighbours.”44 Though secluded by their father on the family estate, Alice and her brother nonetheless encounter a few of these “neighbours,” people, as she most interestingly—and imaginarily—describes them, “endowed with bodies like us.”45 Given that their existence is centered exclusively on the family nucleus, the otherness that these neighbors represent for Alice and her brother is highly radical; the descriptions that Alice provides of them are never fully operational but are instead “anamorphic distortion[s] of the direct image of reality.”46 Second, the symbolic big Other, while highly problematized, is present in the form of the paternal entity as law—a presence felt to such an extreme degree that, even after the father’s death and the events that transpire throughout the novel’s narrative, Alice fears that she and her brother have “done nothing but continue to obey him, without knowing it, unable to do otherwise.”47 This, of course, represents a perfect example of the “symbolic Real,” the empty structure that seems to prevail despite no longer having a physical embodiment. Third, and finally, there is the Other as Real, an Other incarnated by the Fair Punishment and all the horror and trauma it inflicts on the children (to say nothing of the reader). The Fair Punishment marks the novel’s relation not only to the Other as Real but also to the “real Real,” to das Ding, the “sublime object,” that which lies beyond signification and thus exists beyond symbolic mediation. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the Fair Punishment, the otherness that generates the novel’s most primary and radical expression of the Real, is in fact the central character designated by the novel’s title.48 The centrality of the Fair Punishment in Soucy’s narrative concerns

236 Louis-Paul Willis not only the obvious trauma that it/she evokes but also that which permeates that trauma. This is first revealed when Alice’s brother threatens to bury everything their father possessed along with him, including the Fair Punishment, to which Alice responds, “‘The Fair Punishment?’ He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t do that. ‘But we’ll lose the power of speech!’”49 While Alice’s repetition of the same sentence (“He couldn’t do that”) obviously translates her incredulity in the wake of this threat, it is important in yet another, more crucial sense, for Alice has previously stated that she “needs words too much to waste them by saying them twice.”50 Coupled with the fact that she is now writing this sentence twice, the reader is faced with Alice’s firm yet puzzling belief that language originates from the existence of the Fair Punishment—a notion evoked on several occasions throughout the novel but most evidently in the following passage, addressed to the mine inspector: “The Fair Punishment, that’s what it’s called. Without it, I wonder if we’d even be able to use words. That came to me once when I was thinking about it. Perhaps all the silence that fills the life of the Fair allows my brother and me to be on first-­name terms with speech, especially me. I mean, it’s as if the Fair had taken all the silence on herself to free us from it and enable us to speak, and what would I be without words, I ask you.”51 From a Lacano-­ Žižekian perspective, to situate the origin of language and signification in such a kernel of pain and trauma is crucial. Not only does the novel’s title suggest that the Fair Punishment lies at the core of its aestheticization of the Real, but so too does the epigraph with which it opens—a quote on language and pain from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The experience of feeling pain is not that a person ‘I’ has something. I distinguish an intensity, a location, etc. in the pain, but not an owner. What sort of a thing would a pain be that no one has? Pain belonging to no one at all? Pain is represented as something we can perceive in the sense in which we perceive a matchbox.”52 Taken from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks, this passage ponders the shortcomings of language in its attempt to appropriate the impossible; it suggests that because pain has no subject, it lies beyond subjectivity and the Symbolic. It is also directly inscribed in the following passage from the novel, in which Alice explains the Fair Punishment’s existence to the mine inspector: “You could say this is suffering in the purest state, all wrapped up in a single package. She’s like

Beyond Symbolic Authority 237 pain that doesn’t belong to anyone.”53 The Fair Punishment represents that which fails symbolically: like the estate’s ruinous library, whose innumerable decaying books are filled with signifiers returning to the Real, the Fair Punishment stands as both a reminder and a remainder of a previous symbolic experience, one whose signification lies in ruins in Alice’s postsymbolic realm. Alice’s belief that her capacity to use language is inextricably tied to the existence of the Fair Punishment also relates to Lacan’s well-­known statement on the impossibility of metalanguage. While literary critics have typically viewed this stance through a poststructuralist, even Derridean lens, Žižek insists that such a lens is “completely incompatible” with Lacan’s own position.54 As Flisfeder explains, the poststructuralist/deconstructionist position on metalanguage—a position that literary critics have erroneously conflated with Lacan’s own position—is that there is no metalanguage “simply because the speaker is incapable of separating him or herself from his or her own position of enunciation. That is, the enunciated content is always framed by the speaker’s own position of enunciation.” Yet, from a purely Lacanian perspective, “there is no metalanguage” not only because “it is impossible to dissociate the enunciated content from the speaker’s position of enunciation,” but also, more importantly, because “metalanguage is Real in the sense that ‘it is impossible to occupy its position.’”55 Indeed, it is for this very reason, Flisfeder points out, that Lacan identifies two stand-­ins for the Real as it relates to the impossibility of metalanguage: the Master Signifier and the objet petit a, both of which occupy a linguistically impossible position. Bringing Žižek’s reinterpretation—or, more precisely, reclamation— of Lacan’s insistence that “there is no metalanguage” to bear on Soucy’s novel ultimately leads to a better understanding of Alice’s belief that without Ariane/the Fair Punishment she would lose her ability to use language. Living as she does in a postsymbolic realm, one with intricate ties to the Real, language would be utterly impossible for her without the mediating/placeholding role played by das Ding, the impossible object as incarnated by the Fair Punishment. What’s more, Ariane as the Fair Punishment can likewise be said to occupy the impossible position of the Master Signifier in Alice’s postsymbolic realm: it is her existence that gives meaning to the siblings’ own existence. As the (unwitting) agent of

238 Louis-Paul Willis the original tragedy that placed the family in its postsymbolic predicament, her position as the Fair Punishment acts as the point de capiton, the “quilting point” that provides whatever sense there is to Alice’s (and her brother’s) postsymbolic reality. The Fair Punishment is therefore the bedrock on which Alice’s existence rests. At this point, it seems crucial to mention that in the original French text the Fair Punishment is designated as “le Juste Châtiment”—a designation that, given its acronym (jc), has obvious religious overtones. What remains of Ariane’s existence, just like Christ on the cross, lies at the heart of the world depicted in La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes. This is implied when Alice writes that “the first sun of any religion . . . is always a corpse that moves.”56 What remains of Ariane in the guise of her suffering and unthinkable existence within the realm of the impossible provides Alice with the use of language. Trapped in a realm outside of language and subjectivity, the cruelty of religion echoes through this gap in the authoritative structure. For, as Gervais correctly stresses, the punishment is “not fair” but, on the contrary, “bears the severity of a cruel and angered god, with no compassion for his own offspring. This punishment is a founding gesture, turning Ariane into the scapegoat through which communal ties, however twisted, are reconstituted.”57 This state of affairs makes Ariane into the Real beyond language, the unattainable Thing (das Ding) that language fails to grasp but that nevertheless permits it to signify. As the origin of the postcatastrophic, postsymbolic existence to which the family is subjected, Ariane stands at the center of the process of desemiotization within the novel; by extension, she confronts the reader with the inexplicable and unbearable horror of desubjectivized pain and suffering. It is thus her existence beyond signification that confers an abandoned, decrepit, and archaic aspect to the realm in which Alice and her brother live. She is the novel’s incarnation of a Real beyond language, the traumatic kernel that sets the wheels of the novel’s aestheticization of the Real into motion. ***

When father existed on this side of things, at least the life of the world had a meaning, twisted and bumpy though it may have been, that’s the point I’m trying to make. The inexorable course of the stars and the path of the galaxies, the vegetables that obstinately grow beneath the hairy earth, even the little creatures that scurry so softly through the thick-

Beyond Symbolic Authority 239 ets and the odours they send up from the dense grasses, all of it had a direction, though it didn’t show, a direction that papa’s orders had stamped on them. —Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes reveals a reading experience shaped by the trauma that underlies a particular postsymbolic rendering of the Name-­of-­the-­Father.58 As such, it is an exemplary instance of a literary work that confronts the reader with the subjectivization of what lies beyond meaning, beyond language, and, most importantly, beyond symbolic authority. Such a literary aestheticization of the Real as that which resists symbolization and exists beyond signification perfectly exemplifies literature’s potential for a radical reading experience.59 While the complex relations between enunciation and reception put forth by Alice’s (and the novel’s) most unusual recourse to language motivate a semiotic as well as a formalist approach to Soucy’s writing, to stop at these approaches would be to condemn literary analysis to oversee the very subjective experience that is the reading and appropriating of a literary work. Given the role his work has played in other disciplines throughout the arts and humanities, arguing for a Žižekian approach to literature seems not only pertinent but highly important. Just as Soucy’s novel, in aiming to provide a literary/aesthetic representation of the Real, thrusts its characters into a decaying, postsymbolic universe whose unspeakable past/prehistory is grounded in a highly repressed founding Event, so too does it thrust us, its readers, into a confrontation with our own unspeakable pasts—pasts that precede our accession to language. Notes 1 While there was a very popular psychoanalytic trend within film studies during the 1970s and 1980s, it met with growing criticism during the latter decade. Yet this earlier wave of psychoanalytic film theory and criticism was grounded on an incomplete reading of Lacan. For more on this issue, see Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1994); and Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). The most outspoken proponents of a more formalist, anti-­psychoanalytic film theory and criticism are David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. See, for instance, their coedited collection, Post-­Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). For Žižek’s response, see Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears:

240 Louis-Paul Willis Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-­Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001). 2 As McGowan explains in The Real Gaze, the major difference between the contemporary Lacanian film studies initiated by Žižek and Copjec and the classic Lacanian film studies of the 1970s and 1980s concerns the former’s reinterpretation of the crucial Lacanian concept of “the gaze”—a concept that, as both Žižek and Copjec demonstrate, earlier Lacanian film scholars misinterpreted. 3 Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: Norton, 2007), 3. 4 In this sense, Žižek’s focus on the more radical aspects of Lacan’s later thought can potentially do for Lacanian literary studies what his (and Copjec’s) reinterpretation of the gaze and its Real dimension has done for film studies. 5 Gaétan Soucy, La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes (Montreal: Boréal, 1998). For practical reasons, the quotes used throughout this essay will be taken from the English translation of the novel: The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, trans. Sheila Fischman (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2000). 6 Epigraph: Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 3. 7 This is, of course, of paramount importance when one considers that Lacan’s notion of the symbolic order is grounded in a Lévi-­Straussian approach to social structures based on kinship and communication. 8 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 8. 9 The siblings’ existence is so grounded in that of the patriarch/father that once the words “Then he’s dead” have been spoken, thereby symbolically validating the “real” fact, the narrator reflects, “What was strange was that when I uttered those words, nothing happened. The state of the universe was no worse than usual.” Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 6. 10 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 55. 11 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 71. 12 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 92. From a Lacano-­Žižekian perspective, the use of the word thing is far from trivial here. As I will demonstrate below, the Fair Punishment bears all the traits of das Ding, the sublime object. 13 Epigraph: Bertrand Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts: L’imaginaire de la fin de La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes,” Voix et images 26, no. 2 (2001): 385. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of French articles are my own. 14 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 8. 15 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 134. 16 Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts,” 393. 17 Jessica Whelan, “Interpreting Comparisons in La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes by Gaétan Soucy,” in Language and Its Contexts: Transposition and Transformation of Meaning, ed. Pierre-­Alexis Mével and Helen Tattam (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 178. 18 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 32. 19 It should be noted that I use the term impossible here and throughout the essay in a

Beyond Symbolic Authority 241

20

21 22 23

24

25 26

27

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Lacanian sense, in much the same way that Todd McGowan refers to David Lynch’s cinema as “impossible.” As McGowan states, “for Lacan, a link exists between impossibility and what he calls the real.” We are able to read Soucy’s novel (or view a Lynch film), of course, but Alice’s position of enunciation, as well as her relation to the Symbolic, generates what McGowan (in speaking of Lynch’s films) characterizes as “a fundamental challenge to the ruling symbolic structure, forcing us to see possibilities where we are used to seeing impossibilities.” McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 25. Soucy’s novel thus places us in the thick of a highly problematic relation to the Symbolic, revealing its failure through manifestations of the Real, of das Ding. As will become apparent later in this essay, the impossibility of the Real lies behind Lacan’s famous insistence that “there is no metalanguage.” Because of the importance of his semiotic reading of the novel, and because this reading—and its grounding in the notion of an Imaginary of the End—seems to naturally point toward a Lacanian-­influenced analysis of the notion of desemiotization as it operates in Soucy’s novel, I will be making several references to Gervais’s article in order to sustain my own analysis. Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts,” 386. Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts,” 389. Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 6. This is, of course, but one example. Another striking passage describes how in their “part of the world freezing rain accumulates from year to year, spanning all the summers” (106). Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 93. Rememories is just one of the many words that Alice uses throughout the novel that don’t exist—words that, in their very nonexistence, are indicative of the very desemiotization discussed by Gervais. Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts,” 389. Maïté Snauwaert, “Fils du conte et de la fiction de soi: Le roman de filiation québécois contemporain,” @nalyses 2, no. 3 (2007): 113. As Snauwaert notes, this fairy-­tale connotation derives from the novel’s reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl. The reference is more direct in French, as the title of Andersen’s tale—La petite fille aux allumettes—is closer to Soucy’s original title, La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes. In addition, several details within the novel itself contribute to its faux fairy-­tale quality: the mine inspector whom Alice perceives as a knight in shining armor; the untimely death of a loving parent, whose absence is felt through the violence of the remaining parent; even the language Alice uses, as in the aforementioned passage in which she recounts how “once upon a long time ago” she “lost her balls”— these are all instances of the novel’s flirtation with classic fairy-­tale tropes. As Gervais explains, “the end as conclusion and closure implies an antecedent: a world, an order, a law, all destroyed by forces too great.” Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts,” 388. In another article dedicated to desemiotization and its ties with an Imaginary of the End, Gervais explains how this process rests on words that appear uncanny, irre-

242 Louis-Paul Willis

29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36

ducibly marked by otherness; such words become containers emptied of their contents, desemiotized. See Gervais, “Manger le livre: Désémiotisation et imaginaire de la fin.” Protée 27, no. 3 (1999): 7–18. It could possibly be argued that Alice and her brother are, on the contrary, forced to regress to a presymbolic/imaginary state of family fusion, one in which the mother is replaced by an all-­powerful father. However, I believe that the importance of language in its desemiotized state instead connotes an “after,” a postsymbolic state in which the fundamental fantasy that structures Alice’s existence is the fantasy of a “before,” of a properly functioning identity within given symbolic coordinates. The novel itself contains clues that point to the siblings’ existence being post- rather than presymbolic. For instance, Alice’s surname—that which confers (or, more precisely, conferred) on her a symbolic identity—is known to her, albeit intrinsically repressed: when recounting how the word soissons (her surname) used to “whistle past [her] ear” while she was reading her “dictionaries,” she notes, “I had the impression that the word had something to do with me, that it belonged to the most intimate part of me more than any other word.” (The absence of uppercase letters when mentioning her surname—­ something that holds for all the names mentioned by Alice in her diary—is yet another instance of the waning of symbolic authority throughout the novel.) Instances such as this one prove that Alice did have a symbolic existence at one point; her current existence is thus not one without signification but one in which signification lies in ruins. Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 47. Žižek describes just such a postideological existence in the final chapter of The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Ontology, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2008), 375– 483. Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts,” 387. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 378. Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 20. As Žižek notes, obscene paternal figures like Lost Highway’s Mr. Eddy can be found throughout a number of Lynch’s films; these include Baron Harkonnen in Dune, Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, and Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart. Like Alice’s father, these characters are all “figures of an excessive, exuberant assertion and enjoyment of life; they are somehow evil ‘beyond good and evil.’ Yet . . . [they] are at the same time enforcers of the fundamental respect for the socio-­symbolic Law. Therein resides their paradox: they are not obeyed as an authentic paternal authority; they are physically hyperactive, hectic, exaggerated and as such already inherently ridiculous—in Lynch’s films, the law is enforced through the ridiculous, hyperactive, life-­enjoying agent” (19). For more commentary by Žižek on this point, see The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes (San Francisco: Microcinema International, 2006), dvd, especially the section entitled “Lynchian Obscene Fathers.” Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 77. Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts,” 387. Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 95.

Beyond Symbolic Authority 243 37 Epigraphs: Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 76; and Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 173. 38 Matthew Flisfeder, The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 43. 39 Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2002), xii. 40 Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading “Écrits” Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 172. Serge Leclaire opens his in-­depth discussion of the Real, Démasquer le réel, by asserting that the Real is that which resists, insists, irreducibly exists, and offers itself fleetingly through jouissance, anxiety, death, or castration. Leclaire, Démasquer le réel (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 11. 41 Žižek, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York: Continuum, 2005), 313. 42 Beyond her highly problematic relation to the Name-­of-­the-­Father and its symbolic authority, Alice seems somewhat aware of the limits of language and, most importantly, of a “beyond” language. In one of her many allusions to the existence of a realm beyond that of signification, she openly states that she relies on “the part of [herself] that uses words” to “keep going” in the impossible task of consigning the events to her memoir, thus hinting at a part of her that does not use words—a part that lies beyond words. Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 102. 43 Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 320. 44 While in the English translation Alice uses the term neighbor to designate other people—a most interesting choice from a Žižekian perspective—it should be noted that in the original French version the term is semblable, which has obvious connotations on the imaginary level. 45 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 21. 46 The most obvious instances of such anamorphic distortion are Alice’s highly enigmatic accounts of the “beggar,” a figure with “one leg . . . stuck in the very middle like a fool’s bauble,” who “hop[s] like a magpie,” “express[es] himself through throat sounds, like dogs do,” and is as “woolly as a sheep.” Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 23. 47 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 126. 48 As Snauwaert puts it, in likewise noting that the novel’s title designates Alice’s twin sister, Ariane is Alice’s “literary other.” Snauwaert, “Fils du conte et de la fiction de soi,” 110. 49 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 71. 50 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 53. 51 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 116. 52 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 94. Its presence at the beginning of the novel makes a Lacano-­Žižekian analysis all the more pertinent and relevant. 53 Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 116.

244 Louis-Paul Willis 54 55 56 57 58 59

Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 153. Flisfeder, The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film, 46. Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 126. Gervais, “L’art de se brûler les doigts,” 390. Epigraph: Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 89. With its complex relation to many of the same psychoanalytic issues discussed here, one could make the case that Soucy’s novel is the literary equivalent of David Lynch’s films. Both, for example, provide an experience that places readers and viewers in a radical relation to their own subjective positions.

9 Wake-­Up Call: Žižek, Burroughs, and Fantasy in the Sleeper Daniel Beaumont

Awakened Plot

Chapter 23 of Marco Polo’s Travels, “Concerning the Old Man of the Mountain,” describes a sort of medieval Osama bin Laden, a man who hides out in a mountain redoubt in a region Polo calls “Mulehet,” from whence the Old Man sends his fanatical followers down to bring death and terror to his enemies. The story is loosely based on the real career of one Hassan i Sabbah, who was the leader of a Shiite sect properly called the Nizari Isma‘ilis but better known as the Assassins, an epithet applied to them by their Sunni foes. It is usually thought that Polo’s name for the region, Mulehet, was derived from the Arabic word malahida, a plural of mulhid, which means “an apostate” (obviously another name bestowed on them by their Sunni foes). Hassan i Sabbah was the sect’s—or, more properly, the order’s—first leader when they split away from the rest of the Isma‘ilis over a succession issue in the Fatimid dynasty, a dispute in the last decade of the eleventh century over which son should succeed as imam. The Nizari Isma‘ilis favored the son named Nizar. Polo passed through Persia about seventeen years after the fall of the Nizari state, and his account is compounded solely of Sunni propaganda. We learn how the Old Man recruited and prepared his followers for their missions. He built an elaborate garden with fruit trees, flowers, pavilions, running streams, and, of course, “beautiful damsels”—a garden constructed to resemble medieval Islamic descriptions of paradise, the damsels being earthly versions of the heavenly houris. Polo tells us that when the Old Man was in need of agents for one of his desperate

246 Daniel Beaumont schemes, he would drug some young recruits and have them transported into the secret garden. When they awakened, they would eat and drink, and “the ladies and damsels dallied with them to their heart’s [sic] content, so that they had what young men would have.”1 The recruits would then be drugged again and returned to the Old Man’s palace. There, the Old Man would tell them that they had just been in paradise and that if they died carrying out his plot they would find themselves there again instantly. As it happens, this marvelous tale is cobbled together from some rather humble materials, the principal ingredient being a surefire plot that I will here refer to as the “Sleeper Awakened” plot, after one of the most elaborate versions of it, a story in Antoine Galland’s translation of The 1001 Nights, the “Histoire du dormeur éveillé.”2 In that story, the Caliph Harun al-­Rashid drugs a young man of humble circumstances, Abu al-­Hasan, and has him placed in his palace, where he has instructed his servants and court to treat him as the caliph when he awakens. Upon waking, al-­Hasan looks around at the servants and the palace and asks himself, “Am I dreaming, or am I awake?” After watching his confusion with great amusement, al-­Rashid has al-­Hasan drugged again and placed back in his own house. Ultimately, al-­Rashid reveals himself to al-­Hasan and rewards him. Many other works also make use of this plot. In fact, it is found in places as varied as the twelfth-­century Persian poet Farid ud-­Din Attar’s narrative poem Mantiq al-­Tayr (The Conference of the Birds), the quasi-­prologue of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s seventeenth-­century play La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream). In recent years, the Sleeper Awakened plot has resurfaced in a number of novels and films, foremost among them the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999).3 I single this film out because it has attracted the attention of Slavoj Žižek. Yet there is another important postmodern work—or, more precisely, series of works—that makes use of this plot: the Nova Trilogy of William S. Burroughs, three novels published in quick succession between 1961 and 1964: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. By examining Burroughs’s use of this plot throughout his Nova Trilogy and comparing it with Žižek’s comments on The Matrix, I hope to show how Burroughs anticipated several key ideas of Žižek’s regarding fantasy, reality, subjectivity, and the nonexistence of what Lacan

Wake-Up Call 247 termed the big Other. To do so, however, we must first examine the role of the Sleeper Awakened plot in legends about the medieval Shiite sect known as the Assassins, since, as his allusions to the Assassins throughout the Nova Trilogy (and beyond) make clear, it was in those legends that Burroughs came across the plot. The Assassins and/of Fantasy The Assassins and their first leader, Hassan i Sabbah, first came to the attention of Europeans during the Crusades, when the Assassins carried out some spectacular assassinations of leaders of their Sunni foes, the Seljuk Turks, and occasionally of Crusaders (though they were also sometimes allied with the Crusader states against their Sunni enemies). The Assassins put together a sort of state anchored by a series of castles in the mountains of Syria and Persia. Too militarily weak to challenge the Seljuks in pitched battles, the Assassins instead used assassination to strike back at their foes. Ultimately, the Mongols took their castles in the thirteenth century and the Assassins were destroyed as a political force. But the sect lived on, especially in India, and indeed still lives on today, now headed by the Agha Khan. For our purposes, however, the historical realities of the Nizari Isma‘ilis are of almost no importance. Instead, it is the defamatory tales that their Sunni enemies made up to discredit them that are our main concern here. Indeed, the very name “Assassins” is one of those slanders, since it comes from the Arabic word hashishiyyin, meaning “hashish eaters” (though by the time it was applied to the Nizaris it had probably come to mean something simply like “riffraff”). Ultimately, these lies and slanders were picked up and embellished by Crusader historians and medieval European travelers to the Middle East, including the term hashishiyyin, which would take on an entirely different meaning in European languages than it had in Arabic: “professional killers.” Some excerpts from medieval European chroniclers will give a sense of the evolution of the tales in Europe and show how they coalesced into a very specific form—a form that fits Žižek’s Lacanian definition of fantasy. In virtually every case, this fantasy involved three essential features: the fanatical obedience of the recruits to their Master, the use of a drug to both dope and dupe the recruits, and a garden that serves as a

248 Daniel Beaumont simulacrum of paradise. The earliest chronicler of the Assassins seems to be Arnold of Lübeck (d. circa 1211–14). His work shows us that two— or, more precisely, two and a half—of the three essential features of the legend in Europe must have been present in the twelfth century. In the first place, Arnold claims that Hassan i Sabbah demonstrated the fanatical devotion of the order’s fida’is to visitors by ordering a few of them to jump from the ramparts of the castle to their deaths. In the second place, he notes Hassan i Sabbah’s use of a drug to dazzle recruits with a foretaste of paradise. This element is our “two and a half” insofar as it anticipates the third element: the garden that, in future versions of the fantasy, the recruits will mistake for paradise. To quote Arnold: Many of them even, when standing on a high wall, will jump off at his nod or command, and, shattering their skulls, die a miserable death. The most blessed, so he affirms, are those who shed the blood of men and in revenge for such deeds themselves suffer death. When therefore any of them have chosen to die in this way, murdering someone by craft and then themselves dying so blessedly in revenge for him, he himself hands them knives which are, so to speak, consecrated to this affair, and then intoxicates them with such a potion that they are plunged in ecstasy and oblivion, displays to them by his magic certain fantastic dreams, full of pleasures and delights, or rather of trumpery, and promises them eternal possession of these things in reward for such deeds.4

Interestingly, the Assassins are also mentioned by at least five troubadour poets either just prior to or contemporaneous with Arnold’s work. Aimeric de Peguilhan, for instance, says to his Lady, “You have me more fully in your power than the Old Man his Assassins, who go to kill his mortal enemies, even if they were beyond France.”5 Frank Chambers notes four more instances in which the Assassins’ blind devotion to their Master is used by the troubadours as a metaphor for the predicament of the poet.6 Two of these mention murder. In one striking example, the poet is slain by his “Assassin heart,” which obeys the commands of his Lady, who is implicitly compared to the Old Man. Though they vary as to how they position the Assassins in relation to the Lady, the references to the Assassins throughout these poems are nonetheless consistent with Lacan’s claim in Seminar VII that “the object involved [in courtly love], the feminine object, is introduced oddly enough through the door of pri-

Wake-Up Call 249 vation or of inaccessibility.”7 Indeed, in every instance cited by Chambers the Assassins are used as a symbol of the Lady’s “inaccessibility.” Lacan, of course, connects the Lady of troubadour poetry with Freud’s das Ding, the traumatic, inassimilable Thing (renamed by Lacan objet petit a), and since several troubadour poets compare the Lady to the Master of the Assassins, we can go one step further and compare the Assassins and their Master to the inassimilable Thing. Žižek’s commentary on Lacan’s understanding of the logic of courtly love is helpful here, for in it he stresses that the trap to be avoided is “the erroneous notion of the Lady as the sublime object” in the typical sense of a “spiritual guide into the higher sphere of religious ecstasy” (as is the case with Dante’s Beatrice, for instance). For Lacan, on the contrary, the Lady is sublime insofar as she is a terrifying, “inhuman partner” who subjects the poet to “senseless, outrageous, impossible, arbitrary, capricious ordeals.”8 Recall Arnold of Lübeck’s description of the Master ordering his Assassins to jump to their death simply as a demonstration of their blind obedience. The Master here stands for precisely the same “radical Otherness” as the Lady, an otherness “wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires.”9 Between Arnold of Lübeck and the troubadour poets, the Assassins of Sunni propaganda had become a fantasy in the European literary imagination. Indeed, when the Assassins of courtly love poetry are placed next to the perfidious Assassins of the chronicles, the two qualities that characterize a fantasy are evident: the fear and the fascination that its central figure (or figures) simultaneously exerts. Hence Žižek’s claim that fantasy has a “Janus-­like structure,” for “a fantasy is simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the abyss of the Other’s desire) and shattering, disturbing, inassimilable into our reality.”10 This split between the two faces of a fantasy is why the Assassins, as we see with Arnold and the troubadour poets, can occupy different positions in the fantasy/narrative. This duality is also evident in the one troubadour’s comparison of his Lady to the frightening Master and himself to the recruit, or fida’i, who sacrifices himself with blind obedience (as a loyal subject, that is), and in the other troubadour’s simile of his heart as the recruit/fida’i who, in obedience to the Master/Lady, assassinates him as the hostile object. Likewise important to note is how, in addition to the theme of blind obedience that makes

250 Daniel Beaumont them a fitting metaphor for the troubadours, the theme of inaccessibility, crucial to the Lady in courtly love poetry, is also part of the fantasy of the Assassins, for they are lodged in a mountain fortress from which their enemies find it well-­nigh impossible to dislodge them. As we have seen, all of the essential pieces of these wild tales would end up in The Travels of Marco Polo, thereafter beginning a long residence in the Western literary imagination, one that continues into our own time (with especial purchase in the post-­9/11 West). Through their fantastic depiction in Crusader chronicles, troubadour poetry, and Marco Polo, the Assassins of legend would become part of what we might call the “literary unconscious.” For, as we will see, though not mentioned for centuries, they would return.11 At the same time that the concocted tales of the Assassins were being passed down in European literature, in the Middle East the tales of Sunni propaganda were also evolving independently. With the collapse of the political power of the Nizari Isma‘ilis, those tales, having lost their value as propaganda, seem to have passed over into popular literature, ending up lodged in a pseudonymous work that was completed in 1430 and falsely attributed to the respectable thirteenth-­century scholar Ibn Khallikan (d. 1282). The title of this work was Sirat amir al-­mu’minin al-­Hakim bi-­Amr Allah (The life of the commander of the faithful, al-­Hakim bi-­ Amr Allah). It purports to be a biography of the sixth Fatimid caliph, who ruled the Fatimid Empire from Cairo from 996 to 1021 (as noted above, the Nizaris’ origins lie in a Fatimid succession dispute). One of the instruments of Fatimid policy was the funding of secret agents, propagandist-­recruiters known as da‘is who fanned out through the Sunni Muslim realms seeking recruits among the discontents and trying to foment rebellion to overturn the Sunni regimes. In the pseudo–­ Ibn Khallikan biography, it is claimed that one of these agents, a certain Ismail, received an endowment from al-­Hakim’s son that he used to build a mountain fortress—not in Persia, however, but in the Syrian town of Masyaf—and to construct a garden along the lines of the celestial one. Again, there was a historical core to the story. Masyaf had a huge citadel and was for a period held by the Nizari Isma‘ilis. The account is virtually the same as that of the Old Man of the Mountain in Marco Polo. Its description of the garden emphasizes its symmetry: it has four parts—two devoted to fruit trees, one to vegetables, and one

Wake-Up Call 251 to flowers and herbs. Its account of how the recruits are drugged, taken into the garden, and then awakened is more elaborate, however: “When the [recruit] would awaken he would see the male and female slaves, the epitomes of beauty, wearing finery and jewelry. And he would see the place and smell the musk and incense, and see the animals and birds in the garden, and the running streams and trees. And he would see the beauty of the pavilion and the vessels of gold and silver. And the young men and women would talk to him, and the man would be astonished, and would say to himself, ‘Who can tell if I am dreaming or awake!’”12 At length, this recruit would be fed “in dishes of gold and silver, on which were roasted and baked birds and other things. The man would eat while the slaves sprinkled the foods and dishes with rosewater. When the man asked for something to drink, he would be given a gold cup and pour him a beverage with henbane in it. When the man fell asleep again, he would be carried out of the garden by means of the subterranean passages and placed on the sofa in the anterior chamber.” Finally, the chief Ismail would awaken the man and tell him: Sir, the dream which you just had—it was no dream! It was one of the miracles of the Imam [Ali]. He has written your name among his friends. If you keep your secret, you are certain of success. But if you give away your secret, you will anger your Imam. If you [keep it] and die, you will be a martyr. So beware of informing anyone else of this experience. You have entered into this house and become one of his [Ali’s] friends. But if you betray his secret, you will become one of his enemies, and he will expel you from his house.13

Here we find the Sleeper Awakened plot much as it is in Marco Polo. Stripped to its bare essentials, the plot involves a powerful person who drugs some hapless inferior, transports him to some lavish setting, tricks him into believing that he is in heaven or that he is a prince, drugs him again, and, finally, transports him back to his humble circumstances. Sometimes the Master secretly observes his victim’s mixture of confusion, delight, and disappointment for the sheer sadistic pleasure of it. In the Arabian Nights version of the story alluded to above, the Caliph Harun al-­Rashid in disguise meets a man named Abu al-­Hasan. As noted, al-­Rashid has al-­Hasan drugged and placed in his palace, where all his staff have been ordered to treat al-­Hasan as the caliph. After observing

252 Daniel Beaumont his confusion from a hidden spot, al-­Rashid then has al-­Hasan drugged again and placed back at his mother’s house, and when he wakes up again his mother thinks he has gone mad. The very phrase “Am I dreaming or awake?” is found in this version as well.14 Of course, in the Assassins version of the Sleeper Awakened plot, the aim of manipulating the gullible recruit is not so “innocent,” for it is done to get him to perform some dangerous task. Given the similarities between Polo’s account and that found in the pseudo–­Ibn Khallikan biography, an earlier version of the latter may very well have been the source for Polo. Or the two may have had a common source. In any case, by the time the Assassins appeared in Polo they had become a ready-­made reference for fanaticism, duplicity, and skullduggery of all sorts. As we have seen, three elements in particular gripped the imagination of Western writers. First of all, with respect to the simulacrum, these writers were fascinated not only with the idea of passing off a grandiose illusion as the real thing but also, undoubtedly, with certain of the simulacrum’s contents, especially the earthly young ladies passed off as the houris of paradise. Indeed, it is easy to see how that element in particular anticipated European fascination with the harem. Second, the role of some sort of drug—usually hashish but sometimes opium—is also notable here. The Assassins of European fantasy possess some sort of magical substance that Europeans do not—one that enables them to do things that Europeans might not be able to, such as tricking people into believing they are in paradise or assassinating very powerful and well-­protected enemies. Third, and finally, the substance seems also linked with the “death leap” that displays the unquestioning loyalty of the Old Man’s followers—clearly something any medieval or modern European ruler wished he could inspire. While it seems likely that an ancestor of the pseudo–­Ibn Khallikan biography was the source for early European versions of the Assassins, the pseudo–­Ibn Khallikan biography would itself come to supplement the long-­existing Western legends. In the early nineteenth century, a manuscript of Sirat al-­Hakim was discovered in a Viennese museum by a reactionary Austrian Orientalist, Joseph von Hammer-­Purgstall. And what happened with the original Sunni propaganda happened again with the biography: Hammer-­Purgstall treated it as factual and trans-

Wake-Up Call 253 lated into French that portion of it which dealt with the Assassins and their amazing garden, publishing it in the journal of which he was the editor, Fundgruben des Orients, in 1813. Hammer-­Purgstall’s work is the culmination of one particular side of the European fantasy of the Assassins: the Assassins of perfidy. The Assassins, he would write in his History of the Assassins (1818), were a “union of imposters and dupes, which under the mask of a more austere creed and severer morals, undermined all religion and morality.”15 Indeed, he employed the Assassins as objective historical evidence of the dangers of all revolutionaries, comparing them to all sorts of iniquitous, fanatical, and secret European societies, such as the Templars, the Jesuits, and the Freemasons, thereby illustrating Žižek’s point about the inherent link between fantasy and paranoia— a point that, interestingly enough, Žižek makes by way of reference to another contemporary work involving the Sleeper Awakened plot: The Truman Show (1998).16 Revaluation; or, A Parallax View Hammer-­Purgstall’s works stand as the culmination of portrayals of the Assassins as drug-­crazed terrorists, for an event had already transpired that would soon give rise to an opposing fantasy of the Assassins: the French Revolution. The French Revolution reframed many issues in its wake, and it reframed the Assassins fantasy in a way that resulted in a complete revaluation of it. This revaluation began in 1814, the year after Hammer-­Purgstall published his work, which concludes with the parting shot that “the members of the [National] Convention who sat with Robespierre . . . would have been satellites worthy of the Old Man of the Mountain.”17 The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley led the way in this revaluation, dictating to his wife the beginnings of a prose romance called The Assassins, in which the perfidious, drug-­crazed killers of the past six centuries suddenly become heroic resistance fighters. Shelley never finished the narrative, completing only the first chapter, which gave the Assassins a whimsical Christian lineage, but, for the leftist Romantic poet and supporter of the French Revolution, the Assassins became a positive symbol of the quest for freedom.18 And here the notion of parallax that Žižek borrows from the Japanese thinker Kojin Karatani may

254 Daniel Beaumont help us to understand what happened—how the fantasy of the Assassins persisted but became, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, “revalued.”19 Indeed, as we will soon see, Nietzsche himself was part of this revaluation. As Žižek writes in The Parallax View, parallax, according to its common definition, is “the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in the observational position that provides a new line of sight.” Nowadays, the term is most commonly used in photography, but, interestingly enough, Kant used it to mean the difference between two different subjective points of view, in which parallax indicates the incompleteness of each. Hence, it is, as Žižek points out, a mediating notion in the Hegelian sense: parallax is that phenomenon by which “an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.”20 Although unpublished, Shelley’s text was followed by others that likewise demonstrate the parallax gap surrounding the Assassins’ reception. In 1873–75, Rimbaud mentioned them in a prose poem in The Illuminations entitled “Matinee d’ivresse” (“Morning of Drunkenness”). The final line reads, “This is the time of the Assassins.” Not surprisingly, Nietzsche, as mentioned, took an interest in them as well, citing them in a positive way in On the Genealogy of Morals. The phrase attributed to Hassan i Sabbah on his deathbed to discredit him—“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted”—captured Nietzsche’s imagination in ­particular: When the Christian Crusaders in the Orient encountered the invincible order of Assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose lowest ranks followed a rule of obedience the like of which no order of monks ever attained, they obtained in some way or other a hint concerning that symbol and watchword reserved for the highest ranks alone as their secretum, “Nothing is true, everything is allowed.”—Very well, that was freedom of spirit; in that way the faith in truth itself was abrogated. Has any European, any Christian free spirit ever strayed into this proposition and into its labyrinthine consequences? has one of them ever known the Minotaur of this cave from experience?—I doubt it; more, I know better.21

Actually, in this instance, Nietzsche did not know better, at least not entirely, because much of what he admired about the Assassins was ap-

Wake-Up Call 255 parently first thought by Europeans—that is, if “thinking it up” is also “thinking it.” These new Assassins of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche would put in a few more appearances before Burroughs would take them up. In 1917, for instance, the Russian historian Vladimir Ivanow began publishing materials on the real Nizari Isma‘ilis in places like the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Nevertheless, the perfidious Assassins from earlier versions of the fantasy were too well established. In 1934, the British traveler Freya Stark would publish In the Valleys of the Assassins, giving an account of her journey in the mountains of Persia and especially her visit to Alamut. Then, in 1936, Betty Bouthoul published what would become the key text for Burroughs, Le grand maître des Assassins. Two years later, in 1938, Vladimir Bartol published his Slovenian masterpiece, the novel Alamut, which brought together all the legendary material, including, once again, the saying “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” Finally, in 1957, Hollywood got in on the act with the release of a costume drama entitled Omar Khayyam (a.k.a. The Loves of Omar Khayyam). The film stars Cornel Wilde as Omar Khayyam, Michael Rennie as Hasani Sabbah, and, in a masterstroke of casting, Sebastian Cabot as Nizam al-­Mulk. In one scene, a group of Assassins walks around in a circle at Alamut with their cowls over their heads, muttering in unison, “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” At this point we might pause for a moment to observe that the saying “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted” bears somewhat on the status of the European fantasy of the Assassins in that there is no “true” version of the Assassins, since what we are discussing was always already a fantasy. One can likewise see a relation between this saying and the Sleeper Awakened plot involving the Assassins’ simulacrum garden. Indeed, it is not a very long step from wondering, as the Sleeper does, “Am I dreaming, or am I awake?” to concluding that everything is an illusion. What is crucial here is that a real event in every sense of the word— the French Revolution, that is—brought about a parallax, a shift in the subjective viewpoint that produced a different object. Also important to note is that, in the case of fantasy, the possibility of parallax seems an especial result of its “Janus-­like” structure. Žižek touches on this connection between fantasy and parallax when, in discussing Kant’s antino-

256 Daniel Beaumont mies in terms of parallax, he says, “Kant’s solution is neither to choose one of these terms nor to enact a kind of higher ‘synthesis’ which would ‘sublate’ the two as unilateral, as partial moments of a global truth.”22 But neither does Kant withdraw into skepticism. On the contrary, “far from designating a ‘synthesis’ of the two dimensions, the Kantian ‘transcendental’ stands, rather, for their irreducible gap ‘as such.’”23 If we apply this notion to the Assassins fantasy, then the parallax truth of the fantasy is precisely the irreducible contradiction between the perfidious, drug-­crazed killers and the heroic freedom fighters. If we ask whether Purgstall-­Hammer’s Assassins or Nietzsche’s Assassins are the true ones, the answer is that neither are true. And it is precisely the “neither” that is true, pointing as it does to the fantasmatic core behind both. Burroughs avec Žižek; or, The Desert of the Real The casual reader of Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy—The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express—might think that Burroughs’s “cut-­up” masterpiece eschews almost all traditional narrative devices, but that reader would be mistaken. As Timothy S. Murphy points out, the trilogy is “a hybrid of two hoary popular genres, the science fiction novel and the detective story.”24 As I have written elsewhere, “the offspring of this marriage is hardboiled Buck Rogers.”25 However, there is something else in the narrative mix as well—a plot that is even hoarier than the detective story and science fiction, since it precedes them both by about a thousand years, but that, for all that, is particularly well suited to the central theme of Burroughs’s trilogy: the aforementioned Sleeper Awakened plot. Although I have given this plot a name based on the tale in Galland’s 1001 Nights, Burroughs did not come upon it there. The only reference to the Nights to be found anywhere in the vicinity of Burroughs’s life and writings concerns not the literary work but a restaurant/nightclub by that name opened by the artist and writer Brion Gysin in Tangier in 1954. This was the year that Burroughs and Gysin met, although it would be four more years until their friendship really developed and Gysin would introduce Burroughs to the Assassins material in which the Sleeper Awakened plot figured prominently. Gysin had come upon that material in the Bouthoul book mentioned

Wake-Up Call 257 above, Le grand maître des Assassins, and he shared that book with Burroughs. As we have seen, Bouthoul’s book had nothing to do with the Nizari Isma‘ilis of history and everything to do with the fictional Assassins of European literature.26 It was the Sleeper Awakened plot that Burroughs found in Bouthoul’s Assassins that he used to structure the plot of the final two volumes of the Nova Trilogy. The Nova Trilogy is a satire that describes what Burroughs himself called his “Nova myth,” in which a criminal organization called the Nova Mob aims at establishing “total control” over humanity. The main tactic of the Nova Mob in pursuit of this goal is creating antagonisms as well as aggravating existing ones. Nova is the term Burroughs uses to mean the destruction of the planet and humanity, were “total control” ever to be achieved. The reigning metaphor for the Nova Mob’s means of total control is “junk”—heroin and all other opiates—but the metaphor of junk is used to express a variety of other human needs through which the subject is manipulated and dominated by various social, political, and economic agents, all of which are represented in the trilogy by the Nova Mob. As Burroughs writes of junk in the preface to Naked Lunch, it is “the mold of monopoly and possession,” “the ideal product[,] . . . the ultimate merchandise.”27 Indeed, we might say that junk is like capital in that it “knows absolutely no limit or control.”28 The first novel in the trilogy, The Soft Machine, describes the ways in which the sexual desires of the human body are exploited by the Mob as a means of dominating and controlling humans. The “Soft Machine” is the human body.29 In Burroughs’s view, The Soft Machine is a companion piece to Naked Lunch insofar as it describes the ways in which human needs and desires are exploited by contemporary society in order to control people; the second and third novels in the trilogy, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, lay out strategies for escaping that control. The Ticket That Exploded is the installment of the trilogy that most interests us here, for it is in this novel that Burroughs introduces another important metaphor for total control and domination: “the Reality Film.” Clearly another version of the Sleeper Awakened plot, the Reality Film is what the Nova Mob projects to their human subjects, duping them into thinking that the film is in fact reality. The title of the novel is an allusion to one of the strategies for shutting down the Reality Film: the ticket explodes when the subject wakes up to the fact that what he

258 Daniel Beaumont or she is viewing is only a film and subsequently rejects the domination and manipulation that are the film’s real “content.” In other words, the ticket explodes when the subject learns the lesson that Burroughs imparts in the final novel of the trilogy, Nova Express: “There is no true or real ‘reality’—‘Reality’ is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern—The scanning pattern we accept as ‘reality’ has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented towards total control.”30 It is at this point that we can begin to examine the ways in which Burroughs’s trilogy resonates with—and even anticipates—many of Žižek’s ideas. As mentioned at the outset, The Matrix features what is arguably the most iconic use of the Sleeper Awakened plot in recent memory, and it is precisely the film’s use of this plot (although Žižek doesn’t refer to it as such) that captures Žižek’s attention. Not only is the second half of the final chapter of Enjoy Your Symptom! (“The Matrix, or the Two Sides of Perversion”) about The Matrix, but the title of Welcome to the Desert of the Real! is derived from the line that Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), the leader of the human resistance, delivers to Neo (Keanu Reeves), the chosen “One,” upon the latter’s awakening out of the Matrix and into postapocalyptic reality. For Žižek, the Matrix is a metaphor for the Lacanian big Other, “the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us.”31 And the same can be said of the Reality Film that Burroughs’s Nova Mob attempts to palm off on its viewers as reality. Indeed, like the Matrix, the Reality Film literalizes Žižek’s point about the inherently “virtual character of the symbolic order”/big Other.32 More than this, the fact that the Reality Film, unlike the Matrix, is literally screened to viewers renders it an even more precise illustration of Žižek’s point that the symbolic order “functions as the ‘screen’ that separates us from the real.”33 But how does the subject wake up to the fact that the Reality Film is an elaborate simulacrum? Or, as Burroughs frequently puts it, how does the mark wise up to the con? Here again, the Nova Trilogy anticipates The Matrix. Just as Morpheus explains to Neo how the Matrix functions, there are characters throughout Burroughs’s trilogy who already know the nature of the Reality Film and who help the marks by exposing its “unreality.” Some of these characters are “defectors” from the Nova Mob, like Uranium Willy or the Subliminal Kid. The two most important

Wake-Up Call 259 protagonists combating the Nova Mob, however, are William Lee and Hassan i Sabbah. Lee, an inspector for the Nova Police first introduced in Naked Lunch, is helped by the defectors, but it is Hassan i Sabbah, of course, who most interests us here. Burroughs imports both Hassan i Sabbah and the paradisiacal garden from the Bouthoul book, but he uses them in altogether different ways. While Hassan i Sabbah himself is a positive figure throughout the trilogy (and after), for Burroughs the “Garden of Delights” is decidedly negative. Indeed, he sometimes refers to it by the acronym g.o.d. (or god), since he viewed religion as yet another form of total control. In other words, the Garden is like the Reality Film in that it is mistaken for something else; it is yet another instance of a fundamental deception imposed on the unsuspecting masses. And if we remember the “Janus-­like structure” of fantasy, Burroughs’s use of the Assassins splits, as it were, in a way consonant with that structure. The Garden of Delights is first described in the second chapter of The Ticket That Exploded in a cluster of references that ultimately introduces the figure of Hassan i Sabbah: “The Garden of Delights is a vast tingling numbness surrounded by ovens of white-­hot metal lattice with sloped funnels like a fish trap—Outside the oven funnels is a ruined area of sex booths, Turkish baths and transient hotels—orgasm addicts stacked in rubbish heaps like muttering burlap—phantom sex guides flashing dirty movies—sound of fear—dark street life of a place forgotten.”34 The Garden of Delights is also mentioned in the second section of Nova Express (“Prisoners, Come Out”) in a way that makes it quite clear that Hassan i Sabbah is opposed to the Garden, a place that Inspector Lee characterizes as “a terminal sewer”: “‘Don’t listen to Hassan i Sabbah,’ they will tell you, ‘He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immorality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?’”35 Burroughs’s use of Hassan i Sabbah is here similar to Nietzsche’s free reuse of Zarathustra.36 Nietzsche seized upon Zarathustra because he took Zarathustra to be the source of the great error that translates a human struggle between “good” and “bad” into a Manichean, metaphysical battle between “good” and “evil.” He thus brings Zarathustra back to abolish

260 Daniel Beaumont that error and liberate humanity from metaphysics and religion. In Burroughs’s trilogy, the legendary Garden of Delights typically associated with Hassan i Sabbah becomes another form of junk used to manipulate humanity, and, as Nietzsche does with Zarathustra, Burroughs brings Hassan i Sabbah back to undo the error.37 Indeed, undoing that error is for Burroughs the meaning behind Hassan i Sabbah’s mantra: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” If the sci-­fi–­cum–­cops-­and-­robbers plot of the Nova Trilogy is an allegory of liberation—“Nova Police combat Nova Mob,” “break through in Grey Room,” “disconnect the control machine,” and so on—how does the apocalypse of Hassan i Sabbah in Nova Express stand in relation to that allegory? It both recapitulates the primary significance of one part of the allegory and at the same time makes the reader cognizant of its limits. In other words, shutting down the Reality Film is not removing a fraudulent version of reality (although it is fraudulent) so as to reveal the “real” one. Burroughs is not a Gnostic. He does not fall into the trap that Žižek criticizes The Matrix for falling into—namely, the trap of not being “‘crazy’ enough,” for though the film calls attention to the virtual nature of the symbolic order/big Other so as to critique it, it nonetheless “supposes another ‘real’ reality behind our everyday reality sustained by the matrix.”38 The problem with such a supposition, Žižek explains, is that it overlooks the “crucial complication” that “if what we experience as ‘reality’ is structured by fantasy, and if fantasy serves as the screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw Real, then reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the Real.” For “in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality.”39 In thus maintaining that “there is no true or real ‘reality,’” that “‘Reality’ is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern,” Burroughs anticipates Žižek, for whom the choice between the red and the blue pills that Morpheus offers Neo (the red pill representing reality, the blue pill representing the Matrix) is a false choice.40 In so doing, Burroughs confronts his readers with an even starker “desert of the real” than the Wachowskis do their viewers. The final appearance of Hassan i Sabbah in the trilogy occurs near the end of Nova Express, with the rebellious “marks” breaking into the “control room” and the Nova Police arresting Nova mobsters. It is at this point that Burroughs interjects Hassan i Sabbah’s “last words”: “‘Noth-

Wake-Up Call 261 ing Is True—Everything Is Permitted.’”41 While there is nothing like the Lacanian traversing of the fantasy in the Nova Trilogy, Hassan i Sabbah’s mantra nonetheless demonstrates that Burroughs and Žižek are of one mind about the need for a wake-­up call to bring the subject to the realization that there is no transcendental reality to which he or she must conform—to realize that, as Lacan famously proclaimed, “the big Other does not exist.”42 Indeed, this is precisely the meaning that Burroughs gives to the mantra “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” As he writes in his introduction to a Keith Haring exhibition catalogue: “Consider an apocalyptic statement: ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’—Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain. Not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of unrestrained and destructive behavior; that would be a minor episode, which would run its course. Everything is permitted because nothing is true. It is all make-­believe, illusion, dream, art.”43 This connection between Lacan’s maxim that “the big Other does not exist” and Burroughs’s mantra “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted” is even further solidified in a later novel of Burroughs’s, The Wild Boys. In a vignette entitled “The Penny Arcade Peep Show,” an eleventh-­ century general for the city of Rasht in northern Persia pores over maps as he plans an expedition against Alamut, the mountain redoubt of Hassan i Sabbah and his Assassins. As the narrator explains, “The Old Man of the Mountain represented for the General pure demonic evil. . . . The whole Ishmaelian sect was a perfect curse, hidden, lurking, ready to strike, defying all authority . . . ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.’ . . . ‘Blasphemy’ the General screamed starting to his feet. ‘Man is made to submit and obey.’”44 In his role as authority figure, the general clearly functions as a stand-­in for the big Other/symbolic order. What’s more, in proclaiming Hassan i Sabbah’s motto blasphemous because “man is made to submit and obey,” he demonstrates perfectly what the big Other requires from the subject: complete and total obedience and submission. This is why Žižek, following Lacan, associates the subject’s internalization of the commands of the big Other with the superego. The big Other so hysterically insists that “man is made to submit and obey” because the moment people refuse to do so, they will realize that the big Other is impotent, that the Master is an impostor. Hence Žižek’s claim that “in spite of all its grounding power, the big Other is fragile, insubstantial, prop-

262 Daniel Beaumont erly virtual, in the sense that its status is that of a subjective presupposition. It exists only in so far as subjects act as if it exists.”45 Thus, although Burroughs seems to have taken Bouthoul’s version of the Assassins fantasy at face value, he nonetheless extricated from Hassan i Sabbah’s “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted” a very different moral than Bouthoul and company. This moral—“There is no true or real ‘reality’”—is in perfect accordance with Žižek’s claims that fantasy is on the side of reality and that, in order to liberate itself, the subject must “recognize the imposture in the very notion of the Master.”46 Indeed, to go one step further, Burroughs’s project of awakening his reader to the fact that he or she is really free accords precisely with Žižek’s following remarks on the Marxian notion of “formal freedom” as opposed to “actual freedom”: “So what about the standard critique of ‘formal freedom’—that it is, in a way, even worse than direct servitude, since, in the case of the latter, at least I am not deluded into thinking that I am free. One reply on this point is Herbert Marcuse’s . . . motto ‘freedom is the condition of liberation’: in order to demand ‘actual freedom,’ I already have to experience myself as basically and essentially free—only as such can I experience my servitude as unworthy of my human condition.”47 Is not Burroughs saying the same thing to the audience of the Reality Film? Postscript Not long after Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy, the Assassins and their motto of liberation would be mentioned in a British film entitled Performance (1970).48 The film stars James Fox as a London gangster who, after running afoul of the mob, hides out in a mansion with a reclusive rock star and his two girlfriends. Mick Jagger plays the rock star and Anita Pallenberg (then Keith Richards’s girlfriend) plays one of the girlfriends. Jagger and his two girlfriends start tinkering around with the gangster’s mind, getting him on a diet that includes magic mushrooms and hashish. The film is a bit like Bergman’s Persona as revised by Keith Richards. Meanwhile, the gangster, while growing ever more disoriented, is trying to figure out how to leave Britain and where to go. At one point he says to Jagger, “I need to sort out what’s true and what’s not true,” in response to which Jagger not only replies, “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” but also picks up a copy of The Travels of Marco Polo and pro-

Wake-Up Call 263 ceeds to read aloud the passage about the Old Man’s marvelous garden. Jagger had come by the stories in the same way as Burroughs: in 1967 the Rolling Stones had visited Gysin in Tangier. Notes 1 The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. and trans. Henry Yule, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1871), 134. 2 The Sleeper Awakened tale is one of the so-­called orphan stories. No Arabian Nights manuscript has ever been found that contains it, although the earliest translation of the Nights, Galland’s French translation, which began to appear in 1704, contains the story. Nevertheless, other medieval Arabic versions of the tale exist. For more on the tale’s publication history, see Ulrich Marzolph, Richard van Leeuwen, and Hassan Wassouf, eds., The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: abc-­ clio, 2004), 392–93. 3 The Matrix, directed by The Wachowskis (Los Angeles: Village Roadshow Pictures, 1999). 4 Quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 4–5. 5 Quoted in Frank M. Chambers, “The Troubadours and the Assassins,” Modern Language Notes 64, no. 4 (1949): 245. 6 See Chambers, “The Troubadours and the Assassins,” 245–51. 7 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 149. 8 Slavoj Žižek, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 89–90. 9 Žižek, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” 90. 10 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 18. 11 Following Marco Polo, a series of modern European writers continued to treat the Sunni libels and character assassinations as simple facts. In 1603 the French writer Denis Lebey de Batilly wrote the first “scholarly investigation” that attempted to trace the history of the sect, especially the origin of the word assassin. (He failed in the latter task; it would be two more centuries before the Arabist Silvestre de Sacy would finally solve that conundrum.) In 1788 Edward Gibbon mentioned the Assassins in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). In chapter 64, Gibbon writes of them in relation to the Mongol (or “Mogul,” as he had it) conquests under Hulagu Khan: “I shall not enumerate the crowd of sultans, emirs, and atabeks, whom he trampled into dust: but the extirpation of the Assassins, or Ismaelians of Persia, may be considered as a service to mankind. Among the hills to the south of the Caspian, these odious sectaries had reigned with impunity above an hundred and sixty

264 Daniel Beaumont

12

13 14

15 16

17 18

19 20

years.” Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (New York: Penguin, 1995), 3:800. [Pseudo–­Ibn Khallikan], “Sur le paradis du Vieux de la montagne,” trans. Joseph von Hammer-­Purgstall, Fundgruben des Orients 3 (1813): 205–6. The English translation is mine. [Pseudo–­Ibn Khallikan], “Sur le paradis,” 206. I discuss this story in my book on the Arabian Nights, Slave of Desire: Sex, Love, and Death in “The 1001 Nights” (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 93–104. Two other medieval texts made use of this plot, neither of which makes any connections to the Assassins. As noted above, it is found in the twelfth-­century Persian narrative poem by ‘Attar, The Conference of the Birds (probably completed in 1177), where the story is told of a princess who falls in love with a slave and has him drugged and brought to her bed. He falls in love with her, is drugged again, and then put back in his humble surroundings. ‘Attar’s work is a mystical allegory, and the Sleeper Awakened tale fits into a Sufi framework in which the night of love with the princess is posited as the true reality (even though it seems like a dream) as opposed to the mundane world of the slave, which he must learn to reject in order to return to the higher reality of love. Joseph von Hammer-­Purgstall, The History of the Assassins: Derived from Oriental Sources, trans. Oswald Charles Wood (London: Smith and Elder, Cornhill, 1835), 1–2. As Žižek notes, the film The Truman Show, in which Jim Carrey plays a small-­town clerk who gradually comes to discover that he is the protagonist of an around-­the-­ clock reality tv show, is a paradigmatic instance of the “ultimate American paranoiac fantasy,” namely, “that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he is living in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he is living in a real world, while all the people around him are in fact actors and extras in a gigantic show.” Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 12–13. Hammer-­Purgstall, The History of the Assassins, 218. In 1859 Edward FitzGerald, in the preface to his translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, told the old story that Nizam-­al-­Mulk, the great Seljuk vizier whom the Nizaris assassinated, was a schoolboy friend of Omar Khayyám and Hassan i Sabbah, and that Hassan had him assassinated because he broke a childhood promise to help him in his career. FitzGerald counterpunched, as it were. He wrote of the Assassins that “they maddened themselves to the sullen pitch of oriental desperation.” But FitzGerald was out of touch with the trend of history, for it was Shelley’s transformation of the Assassins of fantasy from “terrorists” into “freedom fighters” that would henceforth become the dominant version. FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. Daniel Karlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. For Karatani on parallax, see his Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2003). Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), 17. Fittingly enough for our purposes here, Žižek’s title is an allusion to the film of the same title released

Wake-Up Call 265

21

22 23 24

25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39

in 1974, which stars Warren Beatty as a journalist whose investigation of the assassination of a presidential candidate leads to his discovery of a corporation, the Parallax Corporation, whose business is political assassination. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), 150. Žižek, The Parallax View, 20. Žižek, The Parallax View, 21. Timothy S. Murphy, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 107. Acknowledging the “discontinuous” and “fractured” nature of the trilogy’s narrative, Murphy claims that it is nonetheless “possible to discern the broad outlines of an organization arising spontaneously from the material, without the conscious predetermination a modern artist would impose” (107). Beaumont, “The Lone Nut Theory: Paranoia and Recognition in Contemporary American Fiction,” in Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative: Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis, ed. Philip F. Kennedy and Marilyn Lawrence (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 200. Only one reference to the Assassins made its way into Naked Lunch, but they would loom much larger in the Nova Trilogy that followed. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (New York: Grove, 2013), 200–201. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 201. Murphy likewise establishes this connection, pointing out that “the junky consumes without producing, in a symmetrical parody of the capitalist managerial class.” Murphy, Wising Up the Marks, 55. My sketch of the Nova Trilogy draws on Murphy, Wising Up the Marks; and Jennie Skerl, William S. Burroughs (Boston: Twayne, 1985). Burroughs, Nova Express, ed. Oliver Harris (New York: Grove, 2014), 53. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 246. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 243. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 252. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, ed. Oliver Harris (New York: Grove, 2014), 8. Burroughs, Nova Express, 5. The Nietzsche parallel is my own, but otherwise I am more or less following Murphy’s reading of the trilogy: “humanity is subjugated not by ‘Alien Enemies’ but by its ‘own’ language in every possible way.” Murphy, Wising Up the Marks, 117. Yet other pieces of the Assassins legend remain positive: Alamut, for example, yields the apocalyptic revelation that there is no transcendent reality: “Great wind voices of Alamout it’s you?” Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 119. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 247. Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: Norton, 2007), 57. Žižek’s claim that “fantasy and reality are on the same side” echoes Lacan’s claim from Seminar XX that “every-

266 Daniel Beaumont

40

41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48

thing we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy.” Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 95. As Žižek explains in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, “The choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, [the] Matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.” Rejecting this false choice, Žižek demands a “third pill,” a pill that would not be “some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake, fast-­food, religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.” The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes (San Francisco: Microcinema International, 2006), dvd. Burroughs, Nova Express, 149. Žižek frequently repeats this phrase. For variations on this proclamation by Lacan, see “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 695, 700; and Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 66. Quoted in Murphy, Wising Up the Marks, 6. Burroughs, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (New York: Grove, 1992), 169–70. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 10. Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010), 243. With regard to the Master’s imposture, Žižek further explains that “a Master is always, by definition, . . . somebody who illegitimately occupies the place of the lack in the Other (the symbolic Order).” Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 160. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 290. Performance, directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (London: Goodtimes Enterprises, 1970).

10 Courtly Love Hate Is Undead: Sadomasochistic Privilege in Chaucer’s Paul Megna

Troilus and Criseyde

The Sadomasochistic Historicity of Courtly Love As Todd McGowan’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy has long challenged New Historicism’s still-­ hegemonic method of reading literary texts in reference to a web of contemporaneous discourses, both literary and nonliterary, in order to reconstruct the sociohistorical context out of which they emerged and in which they interacted.1 For Žižek, New Historicism’s blind spot is its failure to historicize itself: “In the simple distinction between our own and past societies we avoid calling into question our own position, the place from which we ourselves speak.”2 Against such context-­obsessed historicism, Žižek pits historicity, which focuses on the “unhistorical traumatic kernel of the Real which returns as the Same through all historical epochs.”3 Unlike historicism, historicity reveals not the literary text’s alterity as a product of a foreign epoch but rather the uncanny sameness with which it responds to the very traumatic questions we continue to struggle with today. Somewhat paradoxically, by foregrounding the continuity with which all historical epochs respond to the traumatic demands of the Real, Žižek forges a historiographical method attentive to history’s discontinuities—the ruptures through which the past always already impinges on the present.4 Among the finest examples of Žižek’s attention to textual historicity is his oft-­anthologized essay on courtly love, originally published in The Metastases of Enjoyment. Therein, Žižek builds on Jacques Lacan’s dic-

268 Paul Megna tum that courtly love’s undead influence marches on into the present day: “On the subject all the historians agree: courtly love was, in brief, a poetic exercise, a way of playing with a number of conventional, idealizing themes, which couldn’t have any real concrete equivalent. Nevertheless, . . . [t]he influence of these ideals is a highly concrete one in the organization of contemporary man’s sentimental attachments, and it continues its forward march.”5 Although he does not employ a terminological distinction between historicism and historicity, Lacan nevertheless complicates the historicist view that courtly love was merely a game people played in the past by drawing attention to the historicity through which the medieval ethos of courtly love influences “contemporary man’s sentimental attachments.” Following Lacan, Žižek also foregrounds courtly love’s undead presence in contemporary culture, contending that “we are far from inventing a new ‘formula’ capable of replacing the matrix of courtly love.”6 In support of this thesis, Žižek performs a series of incisive readings of cinematic subjects who are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by love objects elevated to the dignity of the Thing (i.e., the objet petit a, the traumatic kernel of the Real at the center of subjectivity that both resists signification and renders it possible). Žižek’s Lacanian courtly lover simultaneously pursues and evades the Lady, since either consummation with or separation from the Thing would be utterly unbearable: “the paradox of the Lady in courtly love ultimately amounts to . . . the paradox of detour: our ‘official’ desire is that we want to sleep with the Lady; whereas in truth, there is nothing we fear more than a Lady who might generously bend her will to ours.”7 This paradoxical push-­pull of conscious attraction and unconscious repulsion causes the courtly lover to continuously circle the Lady—a sentient being turned “inhuman partner” in the courtly lover’s mind—at the “safe” distance of courtship.8 Medieval or modern, however, courtly love is far from safe. Žižek’s courtly lover is a masochist hundreds of years before the term masochism was coined. As he asserts, “It is only with the emergence of masochism, or the masochistic couple, toward the end of the [nineteenth] century that we can . . . grasp the libidinal economy of courtly love.”9 Building on Gilles Deleuze’s famous analysis of masochism, Žižek sees in the medieval courtly lover a forebear of the bourgeois masochist who guiltlessly enjoys patriarchal privilege at every moment except during a

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 269 carefully preregulated period of masochistic play in which he enjoys suffering at the hands of his victims.10 The courtly lover’s passive subordination to the Lady constitutes a response to privilege, an unconscious impulse to both acknowledge and disown his day-­to-­day impingements on the agency of others. Courtly love, in other words, functions as a sort of patriarchal safety valve through which the privileged male vents his unconscious guilt without surrendering much actual power.11 On the one hand, Žižek’s diagnosis of the medieval courtly lover as masochistic brilliantly explains why powerful men in a violently patriarchal era would have enjoyed adopting a servile demeanor toward women. On the other, it somewhat obfuscates (as does much medieval courtly literature) the sadistic violence perpetrated by medieval and modern courtly lovers alike. This is not to say that Žižek altogether fails to address the relationship between sadism and courtly love. Following Deleuze, he argues that sadism is not an inversion of masochism: “Sadism follows the logic of institution, of institutional power tormenting its victim and taking pleasure in its victim’s helpless resistance.”12 For Deleuze and Žižek, sadism and masochism are both forms of enjoyment bound up with privilege. In sadism, the subject enjoys lording it over the less privileged by causing them suffering; in masochism, the subject enjoys temporarily surrendering power to the less privileged and suffering in a prescripted manner at their hands. Thus, despite his relative inattention to the courtly lover’s sadism, we can nonetheless apply Žižek’s Deleuzean conceptualization of sadomasochism as two distinct but related modes of privileged enjoyment to courtly lovers, medieval and modern. It is now commonplace for historicist critics of medieval literature to point out that the works of literature usually held to express the “original” ethos of courtly love often differ from the Lacano-­Žižekian model.13 Of course, we should neither reduce every male courtly lover to the knight of Lacan’s famous troubadour poem, whose Lady orders him to lick her ass, nor reduce every courtly Lady to an inhuman automaton generating random, often obscene injunctions. If medieval courtly lovers enjoyed deferring sexual consummation, they also enjoyed consummation. As Jill Mann demonstrates, seminal works such as Guillame de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose and Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love celebrate long-­delayed sexual consummation with bla-

270 Paul Megna tant triumphalism.14 If medieval courtly lovers really were terrified that their Lady would “generously bend her will” to theirs, this certainly did not stop them from partaking in sex, often without the consent of their partner.15 Capellanus, to give a famous example, advises aristocratic men to show the utmost deference to aristocratic ladies and rape unwilling peasant women.16 All too often, medieval courtly lovers were not actually nice, passive guys (at least not nice enough to refrain from raping peasants), though they assumed a passive, servile disposition toward aristocratic women in an effort to sleep with them. In other words, they were not merely masochists but sadomasochists. In this essay, I’ll try to demonstrate that the courtly lover’s masochism always carries with it an implicit threat of mutating into violent sadism. Masochism cannot help but evoke the specter of sadism because the masochist always already possesses the privilege to turn into a sadist on a whim. If sadism, according to Žižek, “is at work in the obscene superego underside that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the ‘public’ Law,” then the masochist becomes a sadist when he stops enjoying his temporary subjugation to less privileged subjects and starts enjoying inflicting suffering on them from the vantage point of the law.17 As Capellanus’s dual advice to rape peasants and defer passively to aristocratic ladies demonstrates, medieval courtly lovers used class distinctions to enjoy both sadism and masochism simultaneously. As we will see, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus morphs from a masochistic courtly lover to a sadistic courtly hater on a whim. From a historicist perspective, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde can help us understand medieval “emotional communities” centered on an ethos of courtly love.18 Yet insofar as it constitutes a certain response to the approach of the Thing, courtly love is intimately bound up with the ahistorical kernel of the Real that differentiates historicity from historicism. It would therefore be a critical error to too rigidly differentiate modern subjectivity from that of the medieval courtly lover. Displaced Agency and Compulsory Consent in Books 1–3 of Troilus and Criseyde Though Chaucer was deeply immersed in a culture of courtly love, his attitude toward that culture was profoundly ambivalent. He is simulta-

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 271 neously courtly love’s most eloquent proponent and its most dour critic. Indeed, as L. O. Aranye Fradenburg points out, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers both one of the most sublime medieval accounts of the vicissitudes of courtly love and one of the most stunning medieval desublimations thereof.19 The poem’s ambivalent attitude toward courtly love reflects its courtly lovers’ ambivalent attitude toward their (de)sublimated love objects: just as Troilus and Criseyde are compelled to constantly sublimate and desublimate each other, so too does Chaucer’s poem (de)sublimate the signifier “Love” by elevating it to the dignity of the Thing to which it is attracted and by which it is simultaneously repulsed. Paradoxically, it is Chaucer’s very ambivalence regarding courtly love that renders him a Žižekian courtly lover par excellence. Every time he wants out, they pull him back in—indeed, quite literally in The Parliament of Fowls (though, technically, he is pushed in on that occasion). Chaucer’s ambivalence about courtly love is felt early on in Troilus and Criseyde, when his narrator muses: For I, that God of Loves servantez serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unlikilynesse, Pryen for speed, al sholde I therefore sterve, So fer am I from his help in derknesse. But natheles, if this may don gladnesse Unto any lovere, and his cause availle,

Have he my thonk, and myn be this travaille.20

The narrator characterizes himself not as a courtly lover but as a servant of courtly lovers. As such, he does not dare pray to the God of Love for success, even though neglecting to do so might kill him. Instead, he obsequiously thanks any lover who might find delight or advancement through his narrative labor. Although his nonprayer is presented to us in the form of a humility topos, we can nonetheless detect a certain sadistic aggression undergirding the narrator’s ostensibly humble refusal to pray to the master signifier Love. In adopting the role of servant of the servants of Love, Chaucer’s narrator quietly eschews the role of Love’s servant. Yet, as many critics have noted, the narrator’s servile self-­description— “I, that God of Loves servantez serve”—subtly alludes to the pope’s title: “servant of the servants of God.”21 On the one hand, Chaucer’s narrator

272 Paul Megna is a bumbling outsider in the religion of courtly love. On the other, he is its high priest. Ambivalence is all. Chaucer’s narrator is analogous to Žižek’s courtly lovers in that he is simultaneously infatuated with and repulsed by a love object elevated to the dignity of the Thing; yet it is the master signifier Love that he elevates rather than a sentient Lady. Consequently, he enjoys the God of Love’s scorn as much as his affection. Yet the narrator’s diminutive self-­portrait masks a servile aggression somewhat akin to Nietzschean ressentiment. Just as the initially white crow of Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale” eagerly awaits his chance to bring down his master’s house by speaking truth to power, the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde vents his servile aggression toward the God of Love by shoring up exactly how the passive male courtly lover displaces responsibility for his erratic, lovesick actions onto the Lady who “caused” them by spurning him.22 As Fradenburg points out, however, “the unthreatening cuteness or desexualized gallantry of the Chaucerian narrator does not fool the God of Love. He knows that the narrator is after something that belongs to him, and we should believe him.”23 Chaucer’s treatment of Troilus can be read as a case study in sadomasochistic masculinity. Troilus’s masochism, at least, is well documented. As Holly Crocker and Tison Pugh note, “unlike the traditional masculine subject, whose ability to act in relation to others situates his identity, Troilus is defined more extremely by his immuring passivity.”24 Yet Chaucer’s Troilus initially appears anything but passive. The narrator introduces Troilus strutting at the head of a homosocial military assemblage and heaping scorn on lovers who cede their sovereignty to another (other than the Trojan state, of course). A Deleuzean sadist, this initial Troilus identifies as a metonymy for the state (as his name suggests) and revels in his role as a purveyor of law-­enforcing violence. Despite his condemnation of lovers’ surrender of sovereignty, Troilus is always already subordinated to the Law of the Father: even a king’s son is a son. Troilus’s pride, however, angers the God of Love, who promptly impales the knight with a phallic arrow, subjugating Troilus to Criseyde and himself: “That Love is he that alle may bynde, / For may no man fordon the lawe of kynde.”25 From this point on, Troilus must balance two juridical orders: the law of the state and the inescapable law of love. The God of Love’s imposition of this perilous balancing act sets the stage for Troi-

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 273 lus’s later internal conflict between loyalty to the Trojan state and desire for Criseyde. In a very real sense, then, the God of Love is the archvillain of Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s Criseyde is the daughter of a traitor and a widow who may or may not have children. When Troilus falls in love with her, she is shrouded in mourning attire. Whether or not this deathly garb plays some part in Troilus’s initial attraction to Criseyde is an open question, but once Troilus is in the throes of love, her “weedwes habit” becomes an obstacle to his happiness.26 He quickly enlists Criseyde’s creepy uncle Pandarus to help him alleviate his lovesickness. Like the narrator, Pandarus is eager to serve Love’s servants, though he himself is a spurned lover. He begins his task as a go-­between by seducing Criseyde on Troilus’s behalf, trying to put her “in the mood”: “Do wey your barbe, and shew youre face bare; / Do wey your book, rys up, and lat us daunce, / And lat us don to May som observaunce.”27 In a series of succinct imperatives, Pandarus orders Criseyde to cast off her widow’s habit (“barbe”), throw down her book (a romance on the siege of Thebes—timely subject matter for a besieged Trojan), and dance in the name of religious deference to May. Pandarus’s insistence that Criseyde desublimate her lost love object and sublimate the world seems well intentioned enough. Grieving subjects are, however, often unable or unwilling to desublimate lost objects in order to sublimate new ones. Chaucer was well aware of this. Think, for example, of the Black Knight of The Book of the Duchess. By rendering Criseyde’s mourning and subsequent return to happiness compulsory, Pandarus exerts patriarchal privilege over her emotional disposition. Pandarus is an ambivalent figure. He is potentially, as Jessica Rosenfeld argues, “the poem’s problematic spokesperson for an earthly happiness that might evade the Law of the Father, trick Fortune at her own game, and might disturb our convictions that earthly happiness, because necessarily fleeting, is a foolish or even impossible pursuit.”28 On the other hand, Pandarus’s actions often smack of more unsavory (incestuous and sadistic) forms of desire and enjoyment. Indeed, Criseyde’s Theban romance, among other details surrounding the poem’s treatment of Pandarus and Criseyde’s relationship, hints at incestuous rape.29 Critics less generous than Rosenfeld have therefore read Pandarus as a walking knot of incestuous and voyeuristic desire shrouded in patriarchal privilege.30 While the poem does not clearly state that Pandarus molests

274 Paul Megna Criseyde or that he watches Troilus and Criseyde have sex, it strongly leads us to ask these uncomfortable questions. Whether or not Chaucer’s medieval audience respected the privacy of Pandarus’s interactions with his niece, modern readers find it difficult to do so. If Pandarus endorses the evasion of the unenjoyable aspects of the Law of the Father (the ahistorical truth that love hurts), he also represents the obscene enjoyment animating that Law. As Fradenburg puts it, Pandarus reminds us that “the big Other does not even care about its own rules when its jouissance is at stake.”31 Pandarus, then, is not unlike Žižek’s postmodern superego that endlessly enjoins us to enjoy. Although he loves the seduction game, he is a proponent not of endless deferral but of compulsory enjoyment. Indeed, he taunts those around him into enjoying immediately, before it’s too late. Anticipating a great many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, he warns Criseyde that old age devours beauty by the hour: “Thenk ek how elde wasteth every houre / In ech of yow a partie of beautee.”32 An aesthetic, rather than reproductive, biological clock is ticking, and Criseyde cannot afford an endless deferral of romantic enjoyment. She must love now, while someone—a king’s son no less—will love her back. After unsuccessfully appealing to her anxieties about aging, Pandarus appeals to Criseyde’s compassion, claiming that Troilus will die of lovesickness and that he himself will die of pity if she refuses to return the pining knight’s affections. When Criseyde attempts to refuse this unfair ethical burden, Pandarus disavows his unamorous niece: “I se wel that ye sette lite of us, / Or of oure deth!”33 Pandarus’s death threats impinge directly on Criseyde’s agency. They are acts of terrorism. Perhaps here more than anywhere else in Troilus and Criseyde, the uneven gender dynamic of courtly love is most legible. Troilus is afforded the leisure of eschewing responsibility for maintaining his life when he is subjugated to love, but that agency must be relocated, and Pandarus’s rhetoric delivers it directly to Criseyde, who thereafter internalizes it: “And if this man sle here hymself—allas!— / In my presence, it wol be no solas.”34 It is Criseyde’s compassion, her capacity to be not just Love’s servant (as Troilus is) but also the servant of Love’s servants, that causes her to assume responsibility for Troilus’s happiness. Following Žižek, who argues that “every one of us is identified with, pinned down to, a certain fantasy place in the other’s symbolic structure,” Kate Koppelman suggests that the crucial ethical difference between Troilus and Criseyde

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 275 is that the latter is hyperaware of her role as an object for other people, while the former is blissfully ignorant of the effect his actions have on others: “Chaucer’s poem is not only about courtly love, but also about ethical relationality—of what a full awareness of and compassion for the other might actually look like. The subject position that chooses this fullness of subjectivity—the reality of being pinned down—is the female one while the primary male position in the poem (and the representative of the male symbolic structure that pins down those within it) chooses a path of significantly less ethical awareness.”35 Criseyde constantly worries about ethical relationality, about the ways her actions might affect others; Troilus almost never does. Unlike Troilus, to whom the poem grants the privileged position of involuntary victim of love, Criseyde is forced to carefully ponder whether she ought to love or not, weighing the evidence of her senses, emotions, and social experience. She possesses the empathic awareness necessary to engender a sense of ethical responsibility and therefore recognizes that all decisions must be made with both self and other in mind. Like Koppelman, J. Allan Mitchell argues that Criseyde’s ethical heroism lies in her act of knowingly subordinating herself to the ever-­ unpredictable dictates of another (Troilus). For Mitchell, Troilus and Criseyde endorses a proto-­Levinasian ethics according to which “ethical choices can be as much a matter of passive discovery and acceptance as of positive self-­determination.”36 Mitchell lionizes Criseyde’s “radical passivity,” her stoic acceptance that her fate is shaped by others. Crocker and Pugh, on the other hand, critique Troilus’s “immuring passivity” insofar as it constitutes an implicit refusal to take responsibility for his actions—a refusal that both affords and is afforded by the prince’s privileged social status.37 Although these readings are not mutually exclusive, they are interestingly at odds. Mitchell takes Criseyde’s character arc to exemplify an ethical passivity; Crocker and Pugh take Troilus’s character arc to exemplify an unethical passivity. Following Koppelman, I would argue that Troilus and Criseyde differentiates between an ethical passivity in which the subject accommodates the other’s fantasy and an unethical passivity in which the subject insists that the other accommodate their fantasy. Rather than simply drawing this distinction, Troilus and Criseyde portrays the social process through which the practitioner of the latter passivity (i.e., Troilus) exerts privilege to exploit the practitioner of the

276 Paul Megna former (i.e., Criseyde). By shoring up the unethical economy of courtly love, Chaucer implicitly vents his servile aggression toward the God of Love, even while explicitly paying him homage. In rendering Criseyde’s acquiescence to Troilus ethically heroic, Mitchell pays rather short shrift to the more troubling aspects of her consent. Indeed, as Fradenburg stresses, “Troilus and Criseyde makes a powerful contribution to the literature of rape not by clarifying consent but by showing its difficulty.”38 The process through which Criseyde falls in love with Troilus emblematizes the profound ambivalence not only of her own consent but also of the notion of consent in general. Whereas Troilus is instantly subjugated to love, Criseyde falls in love gradually, based on visions of Troilus returning from battle, a dream in which an eagle violently exchanges her heart for Troilus’s, and the fearful compassion solicited by Pandarus’s and Troilus’s aforementioned death threats. Although Criseyde ostensibly consents to Troilus’s sexual advances, we are never fully certain whether love compels her to do so or if she compels herself to do so out of a sense of ethical responsibility for Troilus’s and Pandarus’s well-­being (as if the self-­serving and altruistic motives behind any given decision could ever be neatly extricated, especially since our motives are so conditioned by intersubjective experience). If Criseyde consents based on concern for the joint well-­being of Troilus and Pandarus, how much does that count as consent? At what point does coerced consent cease to be consent and become compulsion? The narrator curiously elides the task of signifying Criseyde’s consent. Before consummation, Criseyde, the narrator tells us, “opned hire herte and tolde hym hire entente” to the singing of a nightingale.39 While there is plenty of reason to follow Mitchell in celebrating Criseyde’s radical passivity, we should not neglect the manner in which Troilus’s passivity—his promise to die if unloved by Criseyde—impinges on Criseyde’s decision to consent to his love, thereby rendering her consent tacitly compulsory and therefore not truly consensual. Whether or not Troilus rapes Criseyde, Troilus and Criseyde evokes the specter of rape. Indeed, the nightingale in the background reminds some readers of Ovid’s Philomela, who is transformed into a nightingale after using art to avenge her rape.40 Even though Criseyde has already chosen to love Troilus, he continues to imply that she has no choice but to consent: “Now yeldeth yow, for other bote is non!”41 These are not the words of

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 277 a subject who respects his love object’s infinite alterity. Whether Troilus and/or Pandarus rapes Criseyde, the process through which the two men wear down her initial resistance is disturbing. Indeed, Criseyde’s situation is not unlike that described by Žižek in the following passage from his essay on courtly love: “One of the most painful and troubling scenes from David Lynch’s Wild at Heart [1990] is also comprehensible only against the matrix of the logic of suspension that characterizes courtly love. In a lonely motel room, Willem Dafoe [Bobby Peru] exerts a rude pressure on Laura Dern [Lula Fortune]: he touches and squeezes her, invading the space of her intimacy and repeating in a threatening way ‘Say fuck me!,’ that is, extorting from her a word that would signal her consent to the sexual act.” Unlike Dafoe’s character, Troilus does not abruptly step away and politely refuse the offer immediately after managing to coerce a “barely audible” statement of consent. If Troilus resembles Bobby Peru in that he “wants to extort the inscription, the ‘registration,’ of her consent in the field of the big Other,” he also wants to and does enjoy having sex with Criseyde.42 It is telling that, for all its interest in narrating the rude pressure that Troilus and Pandarus apply to Criseyde, Troilus and Criseyde refuses to register her consent in the field of the big Other. Though the poem ostensibly celebrates the consummation of Troilus and Criseyde’s love, it leaves conspicuously open the possibility that Criseyde has sex with Troilus less out of love for him than out of fear that not doing so would endanger him and her uncle. Melancholic Masochism and Sadistic Violence in Books 4 and 5 of Troilus and Criseyde In the wake of her transfer to the Greek camp, Criseyde makes the fateful decision to succumb to Diomede’s active advances and forsake Troilus, though she is prophetically aware that doing so will earn her a lasting literary reputation for unfaithfulness: “Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, / Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge / No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende.”43 When we weigh Criseyde’s case, it is impossible to overstate the ethical significance of the parallel between the widow’s initial “decision” to mourn her lost husband and love Troilus, and her later decision to mourn Troilus and love Diomede. Criseyde never wanted to mourn her husband in the first place. She never wanted

278 Paul Megna to reinvent herself, but learning to recathect her love ultimately enables her to secure future happiness in the Greek camp by loving Diomede (despite suffering some prophetic shame at her lasting reputation for infidelity). Troilus and Pandarus deliberately force her out of a melancholic state by holding her accountable for their lives.44 After the Trojan senate trades Criseyde for Antenor, and Troilus stares on, “ful of angwissh and grisly drede,” but does nothing to prevent the trade, she repeats the process exactly as Pandarus taught her to, mourning a lost love object and taking a new one before she is too old to love or be loved again.45 How can such analogous shifts in object-­love lead to such dramatically different social reactions? After hearing that Criseyde has traded Troilus for Diomede, Pandarus vows, “I hate, ywys Cryseyde; / And, God woot, I wol hate her evermore!”46 How can he hate his niece for doing the very thing he just pressured her into doing, the very thing for which he fashions himself the spokesperson? Because the big Other breaks its own rules in pursuit of jouissance—or perhaps because the Law of the Father is the father of enjoyment, “père jouissance,” as Žižek puts it.47 Pandarus’s sovereignty affords him the ability to love or hate Criseyde according to his enjoyment’s whim. Of course, unlike Criseyde’s husband, Troilus remains alive and in love with Criseyde, but in order to love Troilus, Criseyde would be forced to endure love at a distance: the Žižekian courtly lover’s modus operandi. Criseyde opts to love an accessible object that can love her back, but she also regrets doing so. She is ethically heroic, not just because of her radical passivity, but also because she accepts the responsibility to act and its inherent danger of acting regrettably. In other words, she is ethically heroic because she refuses to be either the Žižekian courtly lover or his Lady. Symbolizing her exchange of lovers, Criseyde gives Diomede a brooch that Troilus had given her: an object that Žižek might very well call a Hitchcockian MacGuffin.48 When he sees Diomede wearing the brooch, Troilus finally abandons hope of regaining Criseyde, taking Diomede’s possession of the brooch as evidence of Criseyde’s infidelity. But the brooch is also evidence of Criseyde’s willingness to draw an overt analogy between her love for Diomede and her prior love for Troilus. What if Criseyde gives Diomede the brooch because she knew Troilus would see it? What if she gives Diomede the brooch in an effort to teach Troilus, as he taught her, to cure his melancholia through mourning a lost love object

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 279 and taking a new one? Of course, Chaucer’s poem does not permit us to answer these questions. We can, however, read Diomede’s brooch as a sort of encoded letter to Troilus, one meant to draw his attention to his own indirect role in facilitating Criseyde and Diomede’s love by insisting that she mourn her lost husband in the first place. Although Žižek has yet to write on Chaucer’s poem, he writes about a similar scene of communicative betrayal in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.49 Therein, Ulysses brings Troilus to the Greek camp and allows him to look in on Cressida flirting with Diomedes. After Diomedes leaves, Troilus overhears Criseyde address him, though she is ostensibly unaware of his presence: Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee, But with my heart the other eye doth see. Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find: The error of our eye directs our mind. What error leads must err. O then conclude: Minds swayed by eyes full of turpitude.50

For Žižek, “the key question to be raised here is: what if Cressida had been all the time aware of being observed by Troilus and just pretended to be thinking aloud alone? . . . The general lesson of this is that, in order to interpret a scene or an utterance, sometimes, the key thing to do is to locate its true addressee.”51 In Žižek’s example, the fictional and the actual addressee are one and the same person; the ambivalence lies in whether Cressida pretends to be unaware that she is actually addressing Troilus or actually is unaware of his presence and simply believes herself to be apostrophizing him. We find this same ambivalence in the brooch that Chaucer’s Criseyde gives to Diomede. Is it a signifier of Criseyde’s lack of care for Troilus’s feelings, or is it a hidden message meant to explain to Troilus that she has moved on and that he ought to as well? Is its true addressee Diomede or Troilus (or both, or neither)? While neither Chaucer’s poem nor Shakespeare’s play permits us far enough into Criseyde/Cressida’s interior to determine her actual addressee, both make it difficult for us to judge her decisions, just as it is difficult for her to decide what to do in any given situation. Both authors recognize that which escapes both Pandarus and Troilus: namely, that one cannot love Criseyde ethically through passive deferrals of will alone; one must also

280 Paul Megna actively assess her thoughts, emotions, and desires without ever claiming to know them absolutely. If Criseyde does intend the brooch as a call for Troilus to mourn, he certainly does not accept it as such. Despite his earlier desire to make Criseyde mourn her dead husband, Troilus is unwilling to mourn his lost love object and elevate a new Lady to the dignity of the Thing. He quite simply will not practice what he preached. Whereas Criseyde learns over the course of Troilus and Criseyde to abandon a melancholic attachment to a lost love object, mourn that object, and subsequently love a new object, Troilus, like Dido of The Legend of Good Women and the Black Knight of The Book of the Duchess, is paralyzed in anguish over a permanently unavailable love object. Unlike the Black Knight, however, Troilus does not abandon the prospect of enjoyment in despair but elevates the Trojan state to the dignity of the Thing and, consequently, channels the monumental energy he devoted to loving Criseyde into sadistic hatred of the Greek invaders.52 Indeed, as Fradenburg writes, “Troilus’ submission to the Trojan state represents not a conflict between enjoyment and duty but the enjoyment of duty itself.”53 Thus, Troilus goes immediately from blaming an absent Criseyde for all of his pain to relishing the prospect of inflicting pain on Diomede: “. . . I se that clene out of youre mynde Ye han me cast—and I ne kan nor may, For al this world, withinne myn herte fynde To unloven yow a quarter of a day! I cursed tyme I born was, weilaway, That yow, that doon me al this wo endure, Yet love I best of any creature!” “Now God,” quod he, “me sende yet the grace That I may meten with this Diomede! And trewely, if I myght and space, Yet shal I make, I hope, his sydes blede. O God,” quod he, “that oughtest taken heede To fortheren trouthe and wronges to punyce,

Whi nyltow don a vengeaunce of this vice?”54

Despite the woe that she has caused him by desublimating him and sublimating another, Troilus obstinately refuses to desublimate Criseyde.

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 281 Like Žižek’s courtly lover, Troilus is a masochist; he is therefore able to enjoy suffering at the hands of an indifferent lover. Although Troilus has sex with Criseyde, his passive inaction in the face of the Trojan senate’s decision to trade her to the Greeks can be read as a choice of masochistic enjoyment over a more ethical, intersubjective love. Nevertheless, Troilus blames Criseyde for cleaning him from her mind, and he pronounces himself unable to do the same. Immediately after doubling down on masochistic courtly love, Troilus becomes a sadistic courtly hater. In the liminal space between stanzas cited above, Troilus jumps from a masochistic-­melancholic enjoyment of pining for a lost love object to a sadistic-­aggressive lust for vengeance. Like Othello’s handkerchief, Troilus’s brooch appears in the possession of another man, thereby traumatizing the jealous male (Othello-­Troilus) and causing him to transform from a masochistic courtly lover to a sadistic purveyor of vengeful violence. Troilus does not simply translate his frustration at losing Criseyde into a blanket hatred of all invading Greeks—he wants Diomede, wants to make his (in)sides bleed, to turn him inside out. Troilus’s sadistic fantasy of mangling Diomede is bound up closely with his sense of transcendent justice. He reminds God (it is unclear which one) of his duty to ­advance truth and punish wrongs, and he even goes so far as to reprimand Him for not yet exacting vengeance for “this vice.” But of what vice does Troilus speak? What has Diomede done that he himself has not? Troilus possesses the big Other’s privilege and therefore does not have to tolerate even his own rules when they conflict with his sadistic jouissance. There is no logic behind Troilus’s belief in the divinity backing his righteous anger. The big Other is on his side, and if the big Other is not on his side, then the big Other is wrong. Troilus assumes the big Other’s role of righting all wrongs—the role, that is, of the Žižekian sadist. As such, he is something like Leonard (Vincent D’Onofrio) from the opening act of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), in which a walking superego of a drill sergeant (R. Lee Ermey) drives the initially inept Leonard to kill himself and his tormenter with mock-­military precision.55 “I don’t think Leonard can hack it anymore,” Private Joker (Matthew Modine) muses shortly before Leonard’s paroxysm. “I think Leonard’s a Section 8” (“Section 8” being military parlance for a subject unfit to serve owing to mental instability). According to Žižek, Leonard lacks the

282 Paul Megna “proper ironic distance” from military ideology necessary for an “efficient soldier.” He identifies too closely with the “obscene military rituals” meant to suture the soldier’s sexual enjoyment to the enjoyment attained by submitting to a superegoic state. “If you get too close to it,” Žižek explains in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, “if you over-­identify with it, if you immediately become the voice of this super-­ego, it’s self-­ destructive. You kill people around you. You end up killing yourself.”56 The obscene drill sergeant of Full Metal Jacket is not unlike the God of Love in Troilus and Criseyde: both conflate subordination to a homosocial order with heterosexual enjoyment. Just as Leonard rejects the masochistic enjoyment other soldiers receive from subordinating themselves to the state, adopting instead the drill sergeant’s superegoic subject position, Troilus resumes the sovereignty stripped from him by the God of Love and becomes, in his own mind, a godlike purveyor of punishment. Unlike Leonard, Troilus does not turn on the military organization that made him. Nevertheless, he resolves to die for the Trojan cause— “Myn owen deth in armes wol I seche”—and kills thousands of Greeks (but not Diomede) before being killed (somewhat ingloriously) by Achilles.57 Troilus deliberately “goes out” in a spree of semi-­militaristic, semi-­vengeful, semi-­suicidal violence. True, he does not go “Section 8,” but are Troilus’s killings morally laudable because they are accomplished within the symbolic parameters of proper military service? Do Greek lives matter to us as readers of Troilus and Criseyde? In Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibee”—one of the two Canterbury tales that he assigns to his narrative surrogate—the heroic parrhesiastes Prudence argues doggedly against violence, even toward those who have invaded her home and violated her and her child. If Chaucer explicitly identifies with a moral philosophy centered on nonviolence in The Canterbury Tales, how are we to take the fact that his narrator lionizes Troilus’s vengeful slaughter of thousands of Greeks in Troilus and Criseyde? Toward the poem’s conclusion, the disembodied, sublimated Troilus triumphantly floats up through the spheres of heaven, desublimating Criseyde and the entire world in a fit of antiromantic laughter. Troilus is ultimately happy. Never mind the thousands of people he just killed. They do not fall under the narrator’s jurisdiction, which consists of Troilus’s love, not his hate. But is Troilus’s masochistic love not bound up inextricably with his sadistic

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 283 hate? If Žižek is right that we should take seriously the undead nature of masochistic courtly love, should we not also take seriously that of sadistic courtly hate? Cory James Rushton claims that in Troilus and Criseyde “Chaucer plays most explicitly with the gap between courtly love and male aggression.”58 Deviating slightly from this view, I would argue that the ease with which Troilus’s masochistic love gives way to sadistic hate shores up the intimate interrelation of courtly love and male aggression. Just as Capellanus’s courtly lover can defer obsequiously to an aristocratic woman’s whim at one moment and rape a peasant the next, so too can Troilus reap masochistic enjoyment from loving Criseyde without reciprocation at one moment and channel his sadistic hatred of Diomede the next. Since he occupies a privileged social position, Troilus is free to enjoy both a masochistic love of the woman he himself failed to protect and a sadistic hatred of Diomede, the “thief of enjoyment” responsible for his woe.59 Indeed, the boundary between his masochism and his sadism is as thin and hollow as that separating two stanzas of a poem. Troilus, therefore, gives us a fuller picture of patriarchal privilege than Žižek’s courtly lover. Whereas the latter is content to enjoy an endless deferral of consummation, the former supplements this deferral with a complementary sadistic enjoyment of self-­identifying as a godlike punisher of vice. Courtly Love Hate Is Undead: Elliot Rodger’s Sadomasochistic Privilege As we have seen, Žižek’s analysis of historicity, with its focus on the traumatic kernel of the Real present in all historical epochs, is interestingly analogous to his diagnosis of the courtly lover as a masochistic slave to a love object elevated to the dignity of the Thing. In fact, the courtly lover can be seen as an allegory for historicity—an undead body incessantly marching out of the past and into our contemporary moment and adopting countless incarnations along the way. Just as the masochistic courtly lover continues his zombie-­like march, so too does the courtly hater, purveyor of sadistic violence. Sadomasochistic historicity links the medieval courtly lover hater to his modern descendant. Unlike Chaucer’s Troilus, however, most courtly sadomasochists do not have a war raging at the gates of their city in which they can readily sacrifice themselves on

284 Paul Megna the altar of military glory after becoming disillusioned with courtly love. Consequently, they invent wars to vent their sadistic hatred. Medieval or modern, Troilus sans siege is a frightening entity indeed. Take, for example, Elliot Rodger, who perpetrated the spree of violence that killed six in Isla Vista, California, in March 2014. Rodger was a modern-­day Troilus, a masochistic courtly lover turned sadistic courtly hater. In addition to several deeply disturbed YouTube videos, Rodger left behind a detailed, 140-­page manifesto entitled My Twisted World, in which he recounts his life and the motivation behind his terrorist killing spree.60 Above all, Rodger was angry with women who did not freely offer themselves to him as sexual objects and envious of the other young men whom he believed to be hoarding all the world’s jouissance, leaving him only pain and suffering. In Rodger’s tormented psyche, these “thieves of enjoyment,” as Žižek would call them, play a crucial role. Without them, Rodger might have been forced to reevaluate his privileged presupposition that he was entitled to sex. By scapegoating sexually active “brutes,” especially people of color, Rodger elides the traumatic fact that he is not entitled to sexual gratification and maintains the masochistic fantasy that he is being denied the effortless sex that he inherently deserves. This logic engendered in Rodger the sadistic fantasy of “punishing” those who enjoyed in his stead. Like Troilus, Rodger is a masochistic courtly lover turned sadistic courtly hater. Unlike Troilus, Rodger did not live in a city under siege. His sadism therefore manifested itself in a terrorist bloodbath explicitly designed to punish those withholders and thieves of enjoyment who supposedly robbed him of the sexual privilege of which he believed himself deserving.61 Among the many shocking aspects of My Twisted World is how little Rodger says about his actual attempts at courting women. Although he was obsessed with his virginity, he was, like Troilus, completely unable to express his love to the women for whose company he so yearned. Unlike Troilus, however, Rodger had no Pandarus, no pimp to procure him a woman without him having to broker the deal himself—though he did have a series of counselors paid to spur his social life.62 As he recounts in his manifesto, Rodger sought male advice for courting women in the form of a community of so-­called pickup artists, self-­described outcasts who trade coercive and altogether disturbing techniques for tricking women into sex. Just as Rodger is uncannily linked to the medi-

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 285 eval courtly lover hater by bonds of sadomasochistic masculinity, so too are these modern pickup artists. Indeed, the “great works” of courtly love—Capellanus’s De amore and de Lorris and de Meun’s Romance of the Rose—are medieval equivalents of pickup artist books through which modern men teach each other tricks for manipulating women into sex.63 Though Rodger presumably sought to belong to the pickup artist community, there is no record of him doing so. What we do have an extensive record of, though, is his vitriol toward that community, which he expressed on an anti–­pickup artist forum (PUAhate.com) inhabited by radical misogynists who were left disenchanted, angry, and jealous after the pickup artist community’s advice failed to trick women into sex as advertised.64 In other words, there is no record of a merely masochistic Rodger, content to bewail (and secretly enjoy) sexual humiliation at the hands of women. Rodger is anything but content to revel in masochistic enjoyment. Instead, we are left with a record of a young man intensely angry about his sexual frustration and intent on punishing those he deems responsible for it. Both Rodger and Troilus grew up shrouded in privilege—that necessary prerequisite for toxic, sadomasochistic masculinity. Although Rodger was hardly a prince, he grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. His parents divorced and vied for his affection, as divorced parents do. He drove a black bmw 328i coupé, of which he was extremely proud, and relished buying and wearing designer clothing.65 Despite their privilege (or perhaps, as Deleuze and Žižek would have it, because of it), both Rodger and Troilus obsess over their own suffering at the hands of unwilling women. At a certain point, both lovers slip from masochism to sadism. They stop trusting the big Other to right all their wrongs and, Leonard-­like, take matters into their own hands. Consequently, both knowingly ride to their death with no desire to live beyond a desire for violent vengeance against the men (and, in Rodger’s case, women) who supposedly prevented their happiness. Given the clear family resemblance between Troilus and Rodger, we must not content ourselves with a shallow historicism that reads the courtly lover hater as the denizen of a long-­past era. A symbol of historicity, the sadomasochistic courtly lover hater remains undead, but we must kill him if we wish to live in a world in which courtly love objects are free to love without fear.

286 Paul Megna Notes 1 For an early example of Žižek’s critique of historicism, see Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 80–82. For an overview of Žižek’s various critiques of historicism, see Kirk Boyle, “Historicism/ Historicity,” in The Žižek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2014), 118–22. Although McGowan argues for New Historicism’s continued hegemony in literary criticism, many critics have noted the waning of its dominance in recent years. See, for example, Paul Strohm, “Historicity without Historicism?,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 80–91. In this review essay, Strohm, a prominent New Historicist and Chaucerian, offers a compelling critique of historicism in response to that launched in Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, eds., The Post-­Historical Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Both Strohm’s essay and Scala and Federico’s collection critique historicism in a manner quite similar to Žižek, though neither offers an extensive discussion of his pioneering work on the historicity/historicism relationship. See also the responses to Strohm’s essay published at postmedieval forum, “Historicity without Historicism? Responses to Paul Strohm,” October 2011, http://postmedieval-­forum.com/forums/forum-­i-­responses -­to-­paul-­strohm/. 2 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2002), 102. As Žižek explains, in failing to interrogate the position of his or her own enunciation, the historicist presumes to inhabit “the Master’s gaze,” a gaze that “view[s] history from a safe metalanguage distance.” As was the case for Lukács, then, for Žižek “the problem of historicism is that it is not ‘historicist’ enough: it still presupposes an empty external observer’s point for which and from which all that happens is historically relativized.” Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 80; and Žižek, “Georg Lukács as the Philosopher of Leninism,” in The Universal Exception, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York: Continuum, 2006), 115. 3 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 81. 4 Discontinuous historiography has been quite popular in medieval studies. See, for example, Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); and Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 5 Jacques Lacan, “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 148. 6 Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 109. 7 Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 96. 8 Lacan originally dubs the Lady an “inhuman partner” in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 150. 9 Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 89. 10 Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 91–94.

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 287 11 Žižek’s reading of the medieval roots of Deleuzean masochism differs from that of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who brilliantly renames masochism (named after the nineteenth-­century Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-­Masoch) Lancelot-­ism. Cohen argues that Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight of the Cart can be read as belonging to “an enduring but historically specific masochistic assemblage, an intersubjective sexuality that almost always involves a transposition of institutionalized dominance and submission into unexpected arenas of performance; a subsequent estranging or queering of that structure through magnification, exaggeration, and sexualization, rendering visible normally unseen operations of power.” Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 79. Cohen is no doubt correct to recognize the subversive nature of a masochistic counterculture that queered Western patriarchal ideas about gender relations hundreds of years before Sacher-­Masoch wrote Venus in Furs. In this essay, I hope to complement Cohen’s somewhat utopian vision of a transmodern masochistic assemblage with a more dystopian account of the manner in which masochism bolsters the patriarchal social structure that it ostensibly inverts. Although I do not disagree with Cohen’s ideas about the potential value of masochistic subversion, I do disagree, as will be clear, with his decision “to exclude from the start the nebulous and not very useful concept of sadomasochism” (89). I see no reason why Deleuze’s declaration that sadism and masochism do not neatly complement one another should foreclose a careful analysis of the commingling of sadism and masochism so frequently evinced by privileged subjects. 12 Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 91. 13 See, for instance, Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 75–83; and Jill Mann, “Falling in Love in the Middle Ages,” in Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer, ed. Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 92–94. For a more favorable analysis of Lacan’s engagement with medieval troubadours, see Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 129–36. 14 Mann, “Falling in Love in the Middle Ages,” 104–10. Mann not only places pressure on Žižek’s characterization of the courtly Lady as a monstrous, inhuman partner, but also stresses the differences between his characterization of the courtly Lady and Lacan’s (93n21). 15 For an account of rape culture in medieval England, see Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction and Adultery, 1100–1500 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 52–81. 16 Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 149–50. 17 Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 91. 18 For “emotional communities,” see Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 19 L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer

288 Paul Megna

20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). As Fradenburg explains, because “Troilus and Criseyde’s enjoyment is caught up . . . in the objet a as (sentient) object of exchange,” the poem is characterized by “a constant oscillation between sublimation and desublimation” (203). Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York: Norton, 2006), 1.15–21. References are to book and line number. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 7n3. On the “Manciple’s Tale,” see Fradenburg, “The Manciple’s Servant Tongue: Politics and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales,” elh 52, no. 1 (1985): 85–115. Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 233. Holly A. Crocker and Tison Pugh, “Masochism, Masculinity, and the Pleasures of Troilus,” in Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” ed. Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 84. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 1.237–38. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 1.170. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 2.110–12. Jessica Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Ethics after Aristotle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 152. See Cory James Rushton, “The Awful Passion of Pandarus,” in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory Rushton (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 147–60. Rushton, “The Awful Passion of Pandarus,” 148–52. Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 212. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 2.393–94. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 2.432–33. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 2.459–60. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 6; and Kate Koppelman, “‘The Dreams in Which I’m Dying’: Sublimation and Unstable Masculinities in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Pugh and Marzec, Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” 97. J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 42. Crocker and Pugh, “Masochism, Masculinity, and the Pleasures of Troilus,” 84. Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 208. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1233–39. As Fradenburg, for instance, suggests, “it is possible to hear behind Criseyde’s inaudible (to us) voicing of her ‘entente,’ the mutilated mouth of Philomela. . . . The possibility of Criseyde’s rape is spoken in Troilus and Criseyde through intertextual haunting.” Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 226. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1208. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 101. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1058–60. For the classic account of mourning as a healthy psychic reaction to loss and of melancholia as a pathological reaction to loss, see Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melan-

Courtly Love Hate Is Undead 289

45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61

62 63 64 65

cholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957), 237–58. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 4.155. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1732–33. See, for instance, Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 20. See Žižek, “Alfred Hitchcock, or, The Form and Its Historical Mediation,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 1992), 6–8. See Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 26–29, 81–82. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997), 5.2.107–12. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 82. For Žižek on the elevation of the nation-­state to the status of the Thing—an act of sublimation dependent on an excessive enjoyment/jouissance bordering on the sadistic—see the final chapter of Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!” Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 205. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1695–708. Full Metal Jacket, directed by Stanley Kubrick (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 1987). Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2014), dvd. For the quotation, see Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1718. Rushton, “The Awful Passion of Pandarus,” 153. As suggested by the title of the aforementioned chapter of Tarrying with the Negative in which his discussion of the “theft of enjoyment” is found (“Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!”), Žižek ties the logic of stolen enjoyment to the logic of nationalism—a point that helps to frame Troilus’s sadistic hatred of Diomede and the Greeks more generally. Rodger’s My Twisted World is available online at http://abclocal.go.com/three/kabc /kabc/My-­Twisted-­World.pdf. For Žižek on the relationship between the “theft of enjoyment” and the type of racial and ethnic othering found in Rodger’s manifesto, see Tarrying with the Negative, 201–5. Rodger, My Twisted World, 119–28. The archetypal pickup artist text is Neil Straus’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). In the wake of Rodger’s killings, PUAhate.com is now defunct. Rodger, My Twisted World, 94–110, 128–32.

11 The Minimal Event: Subjective Destitution in Slavoj Žižek

Shakespeare and Beckett

Shakespeare: Music as “a Sign of Love” In his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes the French historian André Monglond: “The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly.”1 These lines should not be read as an assertion of direct teleology: it is not that the past events are secretly directed by a hidden force steering them toward a predetermined future. The point is rather that the future is open, undecided—but so is the past. The past retroactively becomes what it was. This certainly holds for Shakespeare, whose ability to prefigure insights that properly belong to later epochs often borders on the uncanny. Well before Satan’s famous “Evil, be thou my Good” from Milton’s Paradise Lost, was not the formula of diabolical evil already provided by Shakespeare, in whose Titus Andronicus the unrepentant Aaron’s final words are “If one good deed in all my life I did / I do repent it from my very soul”?2 Was not Richard Wagner’s short circuit between seeing and hearing in the last act of Tristan, which is often perceived as the defining moment of modernism proper (the dying Tristan sees Isolde’s voice), already clearly formulated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Bottom (as Pyramus) says, “I see a voice. Now will I to the chink / To spy an I can hear my Thisbe’s face”? (5.1.190–91). (The same thought occurs in King Lear when Lear says to the blind Gloucester, “A man may see how this

The Minimal Event 291 world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears” [4.6.146–47].) And what about the extraordinarily modern definition of poetry given by Theseus in the very same scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination That if it would but apprehend some joy It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (5.1.7–22)

Indeed, as Mallarmé put it centuries later, poetry talks about “ce seul objet dont le Néant s’honore.”3 More precisely, Shakespeare articulates here a triad: the madman sees devils everywhere (misperceives a bush as a bear); the lover sees sublime beauty in an ordinary face; the poet “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” In all three cases, we have the gap between ordinary reality and a transcendent ethereal dimension, but this gap is gradually reduced: the madman simply misperceives a real object as something else, not seeing it as what it really is (a bush is perceived as a threatening bear); the lover maintains the reality of the beloved object, which is not canceled but merely “transubstantiated” into the appearance of a sublime dimension (the beloved’s ordinary face is perceived as it is, but it is as such elevated—I see beauty in it, as it is); the poet reduces transcendence to zero—that is, empirical reality is “transubstantiated,” not into an expression/materialization of some higher reality, but into a materialization of nothing. The madman directly sees God—he mistakes a person for God (or the devil); the lover sees God (divine beauty) in a person; the poet sees a person only against the

292 Slavoj Žižek background of nothingness. (The second part of the argument is no less interesting, with its proto-­Nietzschean “ontological” argument—not so much the last two lines, with their standard wisdom [fear makes you see what is not there, makes you misperceive a simple bush in the night as a bear], as the more precise previous lines: imagination substantializes a property [feature, emotion], imagining its bearer, its cause.) One should not shirk from asking the vulgar historicist question: why was Shakespeare able to see all this? Part of the answer resides in his historical moment (the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries), the moment at which the rise of melancholia overlaps with the prohibition and gradual disappearance of different forms of carnival, of manifestations of “collective joy,” from public life.4 Hamlet, the ultimate Shakespearean hero, is clearly a melancholic subject.5 So how is melancholia related to prohibition? The obvious answer would be that the prohibition came first: it deprived individuals of a key source of libidinal satisfaction, and this loss caused melancholia. Melancholia bore witness to the fact that modern subjects live in a gray, disenchanted, secularized world from which ecstatic collective experience disappeared. What if, however, the causality is the opposite one? What if melancholia precedes prohibition? What if prohibition is a way to resolve the deadlock of melancholia? One has to be very precise here about the structure of melancholia. In contrast to mourning, melancholia is not only the failure of the work of mourning, the persistence of the attachment to the Real of the object, but also its very opposite: “melancholia offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.”6 Therein resides the melancholic’s stratagem: the only way to possess an object that we never had, that was from the very outset lost, is to treat an object that we still fully possess as if this object is already lost. The melancholic’s refusal to accomplish the work of mourning thus takes the form of its very opposite: a faked spectacle of excessive, superfluous mourning for an object even before this object is lost. This is what provides the unique flavor to a melancholic love relationship (like the one between Newland Archer and Countess Olenska in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence): although the partners are still together, immensely in love, enjoying each other’s presence, the shadow of their future separation already colors their relationship, so that they perceive their current plea-

The Minimal Event 293 sures under the aegis of the catastrophe (separation) to come (in an exact reversal of the standard notion of enduring the present hardships with a view to the happiness to emerge out of them). In short, the mourner mourns the lost object and “kills it the second time” through symbolizing its loss, while the melancholic is not simply one who is unable to renounce the object but one who kills it the second time (treats it as lost) before the object is actually lost. How are we to unravel this paradox of mourning an object that is not yet lost, that is still here? The key to this enigma resides in Freud’s precise formulation, according to which the melancholic is not aware of what he has lost in the lost object.7 One has to introduce here the Lacanian distinction between the object and the (object-­)cause of desire: while the object of desire is simply the desired object, the cause of desire is the feature on account of which we desire the desired object (some detail or tic of which we are usually unaware and sometimes even misperceive as the obstacle, as that in spite of which we desire the object). From this perspective, the melancholic is not primarily the subject fixated on the lost object, unable to perform the work of mourning on it, but rather the subject who possesses the object but who has lost his or her desire for it, because the cause that made him or her desire this object has withdrawn, lost its efficiency. Far from accentuating to the extreme the situation of frustrated desire, desire deprived of its object, melancholia rather stands for the presence of the object itself deprived of the desire for itself: melancholia occurs when we finally get the desired object but are disappointed with it. In this precise sense, melancholia (disappointment at all positive, empirical objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) is, effectively, the beginning of philosophy. Take, for example, a person who, having lived all his life in the same city, is finally compelled to move elsewhere. Naturally, this person is saddened by the prospect of being thrown into a new environment. However, what is it that effectively makes him sad? It is not so much the prospect of leaving the place that was for long years his home as it is the subtler fear of losing his very attachment to this place. What makes him sad is his awareness that, sooner or later—sooner than he is ready to admit—he will integrate himself into a new community, forgetting the place that now means so much to him. In short, what makes him sad is the awareness that he will lose his desire for (what is now) his home.

294 Slavoj Žižek The conclusion is thus that melancholia precedes prohibition: what makes melancholia so deadening is that objects are here, available—the subject just no longer desires them. As such, melancholia is inscribed into the very structure of the modern subject (the “inner self”): the function of prohibition is to shatter the subject out of melancholic lethargy and to set alive its desire. If, in melancholia, the object is here, available, while the cause of the subject’s desire for it is missing, the wager of prohibition is that, by depriving the subject of the object, it will resuscitate the cause of desire. The lesson of melancholia is thus that there is no “pure” subject, that such a subject is a fantasmatic position, since there is no subject simply dwelling in an external point with regard to universal reality: the subject is always already “objectivized,” reliant on its impossible-­real objectal counterpart.8 The void filled in by fantasmatic content (by the “stuff of the I,” as Lacan called fantasy) is opened up by the ultimate failure of the subject’s symbolic representation: it is not that every symbolic representation simply fails, is inadequate to the subject it represents (“words always betray me . . .”); much more radically, the subject is the retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation. It is because of this failure that the subject is divided, not into something and something else, but into something (its symbolic representation) and nothing, and fantasy fills in the void of this nothingness. The catch is that this symbolic representation of the subject is primordially not its own: before speaking, I am spoken, identified as a name by the parental discourse, and my speech is from the very outset a kind of hysterical reaction to being-­spoken-­to (“Am I really that name, that thing which you’re saying I am?”). Every speaker—every name giver—has to be named, has to be included in its own chain of nominations; or, to refer to the joke often quoted by Lacan: “I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and myself.” (No wonder that, in many religions, God’s name is secret, that one is prohibited to pronounce it.) The speaking subject persists in this in-­between: prior to nomination, there is no subject, but once it is named it already disappears in its signifier—the subject never is; it always will have been. It is from this standpoint that one should read the passages in Rich­ ard II that center around the objet petit a, the object-­cause of desire. Pierre Corneille provides a nice description of this Lacanian concept in his Médée: “Souvent je ne sais quoi qu’on ne peut exprimer / Nous sur-

The Minimal Event 295 prend, nous emporte, et nous force d’aimer” (Often an I-­don’t-­know-­ what which one cannot express / surprises us, takes us with it and compels us to love).9 Is this not the objet petit a at its purest—on the condition that one supplements it with the alternate version: “. . . and compels us to hate”? To this, one should add that the place of this “I-­don’t-­know-­ what” is the desiring subject itself. “The secret of the Other is the secret for the Other itself”—but crucial in this redoubling is the self-­inclusion: what is enigmatic for the Other is myself; that is, I am the enigma for the Other, so that I find myself in the strange position (like in detective novels) of someone who all of a sudden finds himself persecuted, treated as if he knows (or owns) something, bears a secret, but is totally unaware as to what this secret is. The formula of the enigma is thus: “What am I for the Other? What as an object for the Other’s desire am I?” Because of this gap, the subject cannot ever fully and immediately identify with his or her symbolic mask or title. Indeed, the subject’s questioning of his or her symbolic title is precisely what hysteria is about: “Why am I what you’re saying that I am?”10 Or, to quote Shakespeare’s Juliet: “Why am I that name?” There is a truth in the wordplay between hysteria and historia: the subject’s symbolic identity is always historically determined, dependent on a specific ideological constellation. We are dealing here with what Althusser called “ideological interpellation”: the symbolic identity conferred on us is the result of the way the ruling ideology “interpellates” us—as citizens, democrats, Christians, and so on.11 Hysteria emerges when a subject starts to question or to feel discomfort in his or her symbolic identity: “You say I am your beloved—what is there in me that makes me that? What do you see in me that causes you to desire me in that way?” Richard II is Shakespeare’s ultimate play about hystericization (in contrast to Hamlet, the ultimate play about obsessionalization). Its topic is the progressive questioning by the king of his own “kingness”: What is it that makes me a king? What remains of me if the symbolic title “king” is taken away from me? As Richard laments: I have no name, no title, No, not that name was given me at the font, But ’tis usurped. Alack the heavy day, That I have worn so many winters out

296 Slavoj Žižek And know not now what name to call myself! O, that I were a mockery king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke To melt myself away in water-­drops!12

In the Slovene translation, the second line is rendered as “Why am I what I am?” Although this clearly involves too much poetic license, it does render adequately the gist of it: deprived of its symbolic titles, Richard’s identity melts like that of a snow king under the sun’s rays. The hysterical subject is thus the subject whose very existence involves radical doubt and questioning; his entire being is sustained by the uncertainty as to what he is for the Other. Insofar as the subject exists only as an answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire, the hysterical subject is the subject par excellence. In contrast to it, the analyst stands for the paradox of the desubjectivized subject, of the subject who fully assumes what Lacan calls “subjective destitution”—the subject who breaks out of the vicious cycle of the intersubjective dialectics of desire and turns into an acephalous being of pure drive. And this is precisely what Richard II stages: the transition from hystericization to subjective destitution. Not only does Shakespeare’s play enact the gradual hystericization of the unfortunate king; at the lowest point of his despair, before his death, Richard enacts a further shift of his subjective status that equals subjective destitution: I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out. My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-­breeding thoughts; And these same thoughts people this little world In humours like the people of this world. For no thought is contented. The better sort, As thoughts of things divine, are intermixed With scruples, and do set the faith itself Against the faith, as thus: “Come, little ones,” And then again,

The Minimal Event 297 “It is as hard to come as for a camel To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye.” Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot Unlikely wonders: how these vain weak nails May tear a passage through the flinty ribs Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls; And for they cannot, die in their own pride. Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves That they are not the first of fortune’s slaves, Nor shall not be the last—like seely beggars, Who, sitting in the stocks, refuge their shame That many have, and others must, set there; And in this thought they find a kind of ease, Bearing their own misfortunes on the back Of such as have before endured the like. Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented. Sometimes am I king; Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar, And so I am. Then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king. Then am I kinged again, and by and by Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased With being nothing. The music plays Music do I hear. Ha, ha; keep time! How sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept. So is it in the music of men’s lives. And here have I the daintiness of ear To check time broke in a disordered string; But for the concord of my state and time Had not an ear to hear my true time broke. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock.

298 Slavoj Žižek My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point, Is pointing still in cleansing them from tears. Now, sir, the sounds that tell what hour it is Are clamorous groans that strike upon my heart, Which is the bell. So sighs, and tears, and groans Show minutes, hours, and times. But my time Runs posting on in Bolingbroke’s proud joy, While I stand fooling here, his jack of the clock. This music mads me. Let it sound no more, For though it have holp madmen to their wits, In me it seems it will make wise men mad. [The music ceases] Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me, For ’tis a sign of love, and love to Richard

Is a strange brooch in this all-­hating world.13

It is crucial to properly grasp the shift in modality that occurs with the entrance of music in the middle of this monologue. The first part is a solipsistic rendering of a gradual reduction to nothingness, to the pure void of the subject (Ꞩ): Richard starts by comparing his cell with the world, but in his cell he is alone, while the world is peopled. In order to solve this antinomy, he posits his thoughts themselves as his company in the cell—Richard dwells in the fantasms generated by a mother (his brain) and father (his soul).14 The problem with this solution is that if he, with his thoughts, is a multitude of people, then, caught in this shadowy, unsubstantial world, the substantial consistency of his self explodes and he is forced to play “in one person many people,” which is why he effectively oscillates between being a king and a beggar, ultimately concluding that the truth of the matter and the only peace to be found is in accepting to be nothing. In the second part, music as an object enters, a true “answer of the Real.” This second part itself contains two breaks. First, in his usual rhetorical vein, Richard uses this intrusion to yet again form a metaphor: the playing of the music out of tune reminds him of how he himself was “disordered” (out of tune) as a king, unable to strike the right notes in running the country and thus bringing disharmony: while he has great

The Minimal Event 299 sensitivity for musical harmony, as king he lacked this sensitivity for social harmony. (This “out-­of-­jointness,” as it were, is linked to time—the implication being not merely that “time is out of joint” [Hamlet] but that time as such signals an out-­of-­jointness; that is, there is time because things are somehow out of joint.) Then, no longer able to sustain this safe metaphorical difference, Richard enacts a properly psychotic identification with the symptom, with the musical rhythm as the cipher of his destiny: like an alien intruder, music parasitizes, colonizes, him, its rhythm forcing on him an identification with time, a literal identification (a psychotic one) whereby he no longer needs a clock but, in a terrifying vision, directly becomes the clock (in the mode of what Deleuze celebrated as “becoming-­machine”). It is as if Richard is driven to such an extreme of painful madness with this music that the only way for him to get rid of its unbearable pressure is to directly identify with it. Finally, there occurs an additional shift in the last three lines of the monologue: upon stopping, the music (that which Richard at first experiences as a violent intrusion that drives him to madness) becomes a soothing “sign of love.” Why this shift? What if music loses its intrusive character and becomes a “sign of love” when it is separated from the metaphorical dimension—that is, when it no longer echoes the disharmony of Richard’s lost kingdom? The paradox here is that, in order for music to appear as a sign of love, one has to hear in it less than before, has to obliterate its social echoes and reduce it to the Real of a pure articulation. This designation of music as “a sign of love” has to be understood in its strict Lacanian sense, as an answer of the Real by means of which the circular-­repetitive movement of drive is reconciled with—integrated into—the symbolic order. Such a moment of subjective destitution provides an exemplary case of what an event is: not a big spectacular explosion, but a barely perceptible shift in the subjective position. Beckett: A Scene from a Happy Life One can understand James Joyce, with all the obscenities that permeate his writings, as the ultimate Catholic author, “the greatest visionary of the dark underground of Catholicism, an underground embodying a pure transgression, but one which is nevertheless a profoundly Catholic transgression.”15 Catholicism is legalistic, and as Paul knew so well, the

300 Slavoj Žižek Law generates its own transgression; consequently, the staging of the obscene underground of the Law, the travesty of the Black Mass (or, in Joyce’s case, the elevation of Here Comes Everybody into Christ, who has to die in order to be reborn as the eternal Life-­Goddess, from Molly Bloom to Anna Livia Plurabelle), is the supreme Catholic act. This achievement of Joyce simultaneously signals his limit, the limit that pushed Samuel Beckett to break with him. If ever there was a kenotic writer, a writer of the utter self-­emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it was Beckett. The gap that separates Beckett from Joyce is the gap between the two Reals. The Lacanian Real, in its opposition to the Symbolic, has ultimately nothing whatsoever to do with the standard empiricist (or phenomenological, or historicist, or Lebensphilosophie) topic of the wealth of reality that resists formal structures, that cannot be reduced to its conceptual determinations (language is gray, reality is green . . .). The Lacanian Real is, on the contrary, even more reductionist than any symbolic gesture: we touch it when we subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences, reducing it to a minimum of antagonism. Lacan sometimes gets seduced by the rhizomatic wealth of language beyond (or, rather, beneath) the formal structure that sustains it. It is in this sense that, in the last decade of his teaching, he deployed the notion of lalangue (sometimes simply translated as “llanguage”), which stands for language as the space of illicit pleasures that defy any normativity—the chaotic multitude of homonymies, wordplays, “irregular” metaphorical links and resonances, and so on. Productive as this notion is, one should be aware of its limitations. Many commentators have noted that Lacan’s last great literary reading, that of Joyce, to whom his late seminar (XXIII: The Sinthome) is dedicated, is not at the level of his previous great readings of literary works such as Hamlet, Antigone, and Claudel’s Coûfontaine Trilogy.16 There is effectively something fake in Lacan’s fascination with the later Joyce, with Finnegan’s Wake as the latest version of the literary Gesamtkunstwerk, with its endless wealth of lalangue, in which not only the gap between singular languages but the very gap between linguistic meaning and jouissance seems overcome and the rhizomatic jouis-­sense (enjoyment-­in-­meaning: enjoy-­meant) proliferates in all directions. The true counterpart to Joyce is, of course, Beckett. Beckett is effec-

The Minimal Event 301 tively the literary counterpart of Anton Webern: both are authors of extreme modernist minimalism, of subtracting a “minimal difference” from the wealth of material. After his early period, in which he more or less wrote some variations on Joyce, the “true” Beckett constituted himself through a true ethical act, a cut, a rejection of the Joycean wealth of enjoy-­meant, and an ascetic turn toward a minimal difference, toward a minimalization, a “subtraction,” of the narrative content and of language itself—a line most clearly discernible in his masterpiece, the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.17 Supplementing this trilogy is the later Texts for Nothing, which Beckett himself referred to as “the grisly afterbirth of L’innomable,” an “attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration [of the trilogy] but it failed.”18 The obvious link between the two is that the first line of Texts (“Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more”) echoes the famous last line of The Unnamable (“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”), a true Kantian imperative, a paraphrase of Kant’s “Du kannst, denn du sollst!” (“You can, because you must!”).19 The voice of conscience tells me “You must go on,” and I reply, referring to my weakness, “I can’t go on,” but as a Kantian I know that this excuse doesn’t count, so I nonetheless decide that “I’ll go on,” doing the impossible. Is not Beckett’s The Unnamable, then, to be opposed to Badiou’s version of it?20 For Beckett, the unnamable is not the excessive multitude that cannot be thoroughly forced but the ethical fidelity itself, its persistence embodied in the “undead” partial object. Since, for Beckett, what “must go on” is ultimately writing itself, the Lacanian version of the last line of The Unnamable is something that ne cesse pas a s’ecrire, that doesn’t cease writing itself—a necessity, the first term in the logical square that also comprises impossibility (that which ne cesse pas a ne pas s’ecrire, doesn’t cease not writing itself), possibility (that which cesse a s’ecrire, ceases to write itself), and contingency (that which cesse a ne pas s’ecrire, ceases not writing itself). It is crucial to note here the clear distinction between possibility and contingency: while possibility is the opposite of necessity, contingency is the opposite of impossibility. To put it in Badiou’s terms of the proper attitude toward a Truth-­Event: necessity stands for the fidelity to Truth, impossibility for a situation with no truth, possibility for the possibility of a truth-­procedure to exhaust its potentials and to stop, and contingency for the beginning of a new truth-­ procedure.

302 Slavoj Žižek So what, then, do these “texts for nothing” register: a possibility or a contingency? A possibility, definitely—a possibility to “cease writing,” to betray fidelity, to cease going on. The failure of these texts is thus good news: they are failed betrayals, failed attempts to get rid of the ethical injunction. And it is in this sense that they are a comical supplement to Beckett’s great trilogy—an opportunist’s attempt to dodge the call of duty, somewhat like Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death,” where a mortal human being attempts to escape immortality, its unbearable ethical burden/injunction. Texts for Nothing is thus an optimistic work—its message is that one cannot but “go on” as an immortal bodiless drive, as a subject without subjectivity: “No, no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death, you’ve got to go on without any of that junk.”21 Jonathan Boulter’s reading of Texts for Nothing thus gets it right—on the condition that we distinguish strictly between subject and subjectivity.22 The whole of the Molloy–­Malone Dies–­The Unnamable trilogy can be read as a gradual getting rid of subjectivity, a gradual reduction of subjectivity to the minimum of a subject without subjectivity—a subject that is no longer a person, whose objective correlative is no longer a body (organism) but only a partial object (organ), a subject of drive, which is Freud’s name for immortal persistence, “going on.” Such a subject is a “living dead” or “undead”—still alive, going on, persisting, but dead (deprived of body). Texts, on the other hand, is a comical attempt to resubjectivize this subject—to provide him with a body, to travel back the road from the Cheshire Cat’s smile to its full body. Boulter is thus right to correct Alfred Alvarez, who claims that Texts is written in the same “breathless, bodiless style” as The Unnamable.23 To quote Boulter: One of the things the reader notices about Texts from its outset is that the body (of the narrator/narrated) has made an uncanny return from its near obliteration in The Unnamable: the narrator of The Unnamable is disembodied (it may be that “he” is merely a brain in an urn). At the very least, the issue of subjectivity is a complex one in the trilogy because the relation between voice (of narrator) and body (of narrator) is continually called into question. We may in fact argue that the trilogy in toto is about the dismantling of the physical body: in Molloy, the body is ambulatory but weakening; in Malone Dies the body is on its last legs, immobile and dying; in The Unnamable the physical body may in fact have ceased to be

The Minimal Event 303 an issue as the narrator floats between personalities and subject positions. All of which is to indicate that in Texts, the body has made . . . an unexpected comeback.24

The subject without subjectivity, this “living dead,” is also timeless: when we reach this point, “time has turned into space and there will be no more time, till I get out of here.”25 The subject we thus reach, a subject without subjectivity, is a subject who “cannot maintain with any certainty that the experiences he describes are in fact his own; . . . cannot discern if his voice is his own; . . . cannot tell if he has a body; and most crucially, . . . has no sense of personal history, no memory. We have, in short, a subject whose ontology denies the viability of mourning and trauma, yet who seems to display the symptomatology of mourning and trauma.”26 Is not this subject deprived of all substantial content the subject as such, at its most radical, the Cartesian cogito? Boulter’s idea is that, for Freud, trauma presupposes a subject to whom it happens and who then tries to narrativize it, to come to terms with it, in the process of mourning. In the case of the Beckettian narrator, on the contrary, “there is no hope of establishing a link between his own present condition and the trauma that is its precondition. Instead of having a story seemingly given to him unawares—as in the case of the victim of trauma who cannot recognize his past as his own—the Beckettian narrator can only hope (without hope . . .) for a story that will reconnect his present atemporal . . . condition to his past.”27 This is the division of the subject at its most radical, the subject reduced to Ꞩ, the barred subject, with even its innermost self-­experience taken from it. This is how one should understand Lacan’s claim that the subject is always “decentered”: his point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are decentered with regard to my self-­experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but rather something much more unsettling: I am deprived of even my most intimate subjective experience, of the way things “really seem to me”— deprived of the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the core of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it. One should thus counter Boulter’s question, “To what extent do trauma and mourning require a subject?” with a more radical one: to what extent does (the very emergence of) a subject require trauma and

304 Slavoj Žižek mourning?28 The primordial trauma, the trauma constitutive of the subject, is the very gap that bars the subject from its own “inner life.” This inner and constitutive link between trauma and subject is the topic of what is undoubtedly Beckett’s late masterpiece, Not I (1972)—a twenty-­minute dramatic monologue and exercise in theatric minimalism. There are no “persons” in Not I; rather, the play reduces intersubjectivity to its most elementary skeleton, that of a faceless mouth speaking (a partial object, an “organ without a body,” as it were) and an auditor who witnesses the monologue but who says nothing (all the Auditor does throughout the play is repeat, four times, in “a gesture of helpless compassion,” a “simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back”).29 Beckett himself pointed to the similarities between Not I and The Unnamable, with its clamoring voice longing for silence, its circular narrative, and its concern about avoiding the first person pronoun: “I shall not say I again, ever again.”30 Along these lines, one could agree with Vivian Mercier’s suggestion that, gender aside, Not I is a kind of dramatization of The Unnamable—one should only add that in Not I the talking partial object is coupled with/supplemented by a minimal figure of the big Other.31 Beckettology, of course, did its job in discovering the empirical sources of the play’s imagery. Beckett himself provided the clue for the “old hag,” but he also emphasized the ultimate irrelevance of this reference. On the one hand, he claimed that he “knew that woman in Ireland. I knew who she was—not ‘she’ specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, besides the hedgerows. Ireland is full of them. And I heard ‘her’ saying what I wrote in Not I. I actually heard it.”32 On the other hand, he claimed to “no more know where she is or why thus than she does. All I know is in the text. ‘She’ is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage text. The rest is Ibsen.”33 As for the figures of the Mouth and the Auditor, Beckett claimed that the reduction of the body of the speaker to a partial organ was “suggested by Caravaggio’s Decollation of St John in Valetta Cathedral,” while the figure of the Auditor was inspired by a djellaba-­clad “intense listen[er]” whom he had seen in a café in El Jadida, Morocco, in early 1972—a figure that, as James Knowlson conjectures, “probably . . . coalesced with his sharp memories of the Caravaggio painting,” in which an old woman “observes the de-

The Minimal Event 305 capitation [of John the Baptist] with horror, covering her ears rather than her eyes” (a gesture that Beckett added in the 1978 Paris production).34 Much more interesting, however, are Beckett’s own uncertainties and oscillations with regard to the Auditor (who is generally played by a male, though the sex is not specified in the text). When Beckett came to be involved in staging the play, he found that he was unable to place the Auditor in a stage position that pleased him, and he consequently allowed the character to be omitted from those productions. However, he chose not to cut the Auditor from the published script and left the decision as to whether or not to use the character in subsequent productions to the discretion of individual producers. As he wrote to American directors David Hunsberger and Linda Kendall in 1986: “He is very difficult to stage (light—position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively.”35 Beckett reinstated the character in the 1978 Paris production, but from then on abandoned it, concluding that it was perhaps “an error of the creative imagination.”36 From the Lacanian perspective, it is easy to locate the source of this trouble: the Auditor gives body to the big Other, the Third, the ideal Addressee-­Witness, the place of Truth which receives and thereby authenticates the speaker’s message. The problem is how to visualize/materialize this structural place as a figure on the Imaginary of the stage: every play (or even speech) needs it, but every concrete figuration is by definition inadequate; thus, it can never “function effectively” onstage. The basic constellation of the play is thus the dialogue between the subject and the big Other, where the couple is reduced to its barest minimum: the Other is a silent, impotent witness that fails in its effort to serve as the medium of the Truth of what is said, while the speaking subject is deprived of its dignified status of “person” and reduced to a partial object. Consequently, since meaning is generated only by means of the detour of the speaker’s word through a consistent big Other, the speech itself ultimately functions at a presemantic level, as a series of explosions of libidinal intensities. This explains why Beckett advised Jessica Tandy, the actress who played the Mouth at the play’s premiere at Lincoln Center, to consider the Mouth “an organ of emission, without intellect,” one intended to “work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect.”37 So where does this bring us with regard to the standard postmodern

306 Slavoj Žižek critique of dialogue, which emphasizes its origin in Plato, where there is always one who knows (even if only that he knows nothing), questioning the other (who pretends to know) to admit that he knows nothing? There is always a basic asymmetry in a dialogue, and this asymmetry breaks out openly in Plato’s later dialogues, where we are no longer dealing with Socratic irony, but with one person talking all the time, with his partner merely interrupting him from time to time with phrases like, “So it is, by Zeus!” and “How cannot it be so?” It is easy for a postmodern deconstructionist to show the violent streak even in Habermas’s theory of communicative action, which stresses the symmetry of the partners in a dialogue. This symmetry is grounded in the respect of all parties for the rules of rational argumentation, but are these rules really as neutral as they claim to be? Once we accept this basic asymmetry and bring it to its radical conclusion—the rejection of the very notion of “objective truth” as oppressive, as an instrument of domination—the postmodern path to what Lyotard called le différend is open: in an authentic dialogue, there is no pressure to reach a final reconciliation or accord, but merely to reconcile ourselves with the irreducible difference of perspectives that cannot be subordinated to any encompassing universality. Or, as Richard Rorty put it: the fundamental right of each of us is the right to tell our own story of our life experience, especially of pain, humiliation, and suffering. But, again, it is clear not only that people speak from different perspectives but that these differences are grounded in different positions of power and domination. What does the right to free dialogue mean if, when I approach certain topics, I risk everything, up to my life? Or, even worse, when my complaints are not even rejected, but dismissed with a cynical smile? The Left-­liberal position is here that one should especially emphasize the voices that are usually not heard, that are ignored, oppressed, or even prohibited within the predominant field (sexual and religious minorities, etc.). But is this not all too abstract-­formal? The true problem is: how are we to create the conditions for a truly egalitarian dialogue? Is this really possible to do in a respectful, “dialogic” way, or is some kind of counterviolence needed? Furthermore, is the very notion of (not naively “objective,” but) universal truth really by definition a tool of oppression and domination? Say, for instance, that in the Germany of 1940, the Jewish story of their suffering was not simply an oppressed minority view to be heard but a complaint whose truth was in a way uni-

The Minimal Event 307 versal—that is, one that rendered visible what was wrong in the entire social situation. Is there a way out of this conundrum? What about the dialogic scene of the psychoanalytic session, which weirdly inverts the coordinates of the late-­Platonic dialogue? As in the latter case, here also one (the analysand) talks almost all the time, while the other (the analyst) only occasionally interrupts him or her with an intervention that is of a more diacritical than dialogical order, asserting the proper scansion of what was told. As we know from the Freudian theory, the analyst is here not the one who already knows the truth and just wisely leads the analysand to discover it himself or herself: the analyst precisely doesn’t know it; his knowledge is the illusion of transference that had to fall at the end of the treatment. Is it not the case, then, that with regard to this dynamic of the psychoanalytic process, Beckett’s play can be said to start where the analytic process ends: the big Other is no longer “supposed to know” anything, there is no transference, and, consequently, “subjective destitution” has already taken place? If so, does this not also mean that, since we are already at the end, there is no inner dynamic, no radical shift, possible anymore (which would nicely account for the appearance of the circular movement in this and others of Beckett’s plays)? A closer look at the content of the play’s narrative, of what is told in this twenty-­minute-­long monologue, seems to confirm this diagnostic: the Mouth utters at a ferocious pace a logorrhea of fragmented, jumbled sentences that obliquely tell the story of a woman of about seventy who, having been abandoned by her parents after a premature birth, has lived a loveless, mechanical existence and who appears to have suffered an unspecified traumatic experience. The woman has been virtually mute since childhood, apart from occasional winter outbursts, a fragment of one of which constitutes the text we hear, in which she relates four incidents from her life: lying facedown in the grass in a field in April; standing in a supermarket; sitting on a mound in Croker’s Acre (a real place in Ireland, near Leopardstown racecourse); and “that time in court.”38 Each of the last three incidents somehow relates to the repressed first “scene,” which is often likened to an epiphany: whatever happened to her in that field in April was the trigger for her to start talking. Her initial reaction to this paralyzing event is to assume that she is being punished by God; strangely, however, this punishment involves no suffering—she feels no

308 Slavoj Žižek pain, as in life she felt no pleasure. She cannot think why she might be being punished but accepts that God needs “no particular reason” for what he does.39 She thinks she has something to tell, though she doesn’t know what, but she believes that if she goes over the events of her life for long enough, she will stumble upon that thing for which she needs to seek forgiveness. However, a kind of abstract, nonlinguistic, continual buzzing in her skull always intervenes whenever she gets too close to the core of her traumatic experience. The first axiom for interpreting this piece is not to reduce it to its superficial cyclical nature (endless repetitions and variations of the same fragments, unable to focus on the heart of the matter), thereby imitating the confused mumbling of the “old hag” who is too senile to get to the point. On the contrary, a close reading makes it clear that, just before the play’s end, there is a crucial break, a decision, a shift in the mode of subjectivity. This shift is signaled by a crucial detail: in the last (fifth) moment of pause, the Auditor doesn’t intervene with his mute gesture— his “helpless compassion” loses its ground. Here are all five moments of pause:

1. “all that early April morning light . . . and she found herself in the—



2. “the buzzing? . . yes . . . all dead still but for the buzzing . . . when

. . . what? . . who? . . no! . . she! . . [Pause and movement 1.]” suddenly she realized . . . words were—. . . what? . . who? . . . no! . . she! . . [Pause and movement 2.]”

3. “something she—. . . something she had to—. . . what? . . who? . . no! . . she! . . [Pause and movement 3.]”



4. “all right . . . nothing she could tell . . . nothing she could think . . . nothing she—. . . what? . . who? . . no! . . she! . . [Pause and movement 4.]”



5. “keep on . . . not knowing what . . . what she was—. . . what? . . who? . . no! . . she! . . she! . . [Pause.] . . . what she was trying . . .

what to try . . . no matter . . . keep on . . . [Curtain starts down.]”40

Note the three crucial changes here: (1) the standard, always identical series of words that precedes the pause with the Auditor’s movement of helpless compassion (“. . . what? . . who? . . no! . . she! . .”) is here supplemented by a repeated, capitalized “she”; (2) the pause is without the Auditor’s movement; (3) it is not followed by the same kind of confused

The Minimal Event 309 rumbling as in the previous four cases but by a variation on the paradigmatic Beckettian ethical motto of perseverance (“no matter . . . keep on”). Consequently, the key to the entire piece is provided by the way we read this shift: does it signal a simple (or not-­so-­simple) gesture by means of which the speaker (Mouth) finally fully assumes her subjectivity, asserts herself as she (or, rather, as I), overcoming the blockage indicated by the buzzing in her head? In other words, insofar as the play’s title comes from the Mouth’s repeated insistence that the events she describes or alludes to did not happen to her (and that she cannot, therefore, assume them in the first person singular), does the fifth pause indicate the negation of the play’s title, the transformation of “not I” into “I”? Is there a convincing alternative to this traditional-­humanist reading, one that so obviously runs counter to the entire spirit of Beckett’s universe? Yes— on the condition that we also radically abandon the predominant cliché about Beckett as the author of the “theatre of the absurd,” preaching abandonment of every metaphysical sense (e.g., Godot will never arrive) and resignation to an endless, circular self-­reproduction of meaningless rituals (e.g., the nonsensical rhymes in Waiting for Godot). This, of course, in no way implies that we should counter the theatre-­ of-­the-­absurd reading of Beckett with its no less simplified, upbeat mirror image. Perhaps a parallel with “Der Laienmann,” the song that concludes Schubert’s Winterreise, may be of some help here. “Der Laienmann” displays a tension between form and message. Its message appears to be the utter despair of the abandoned lover who finally loses all hope, even the very ability to mourn and despair, and identifies with the man on the street automatically playing his music machine. However, as many perspicuous commentators have noticed, this last song can also be read as the sign of a forthcoming redemption: while all other songs present the hero’s inward brooding, here, for the first time, the hero turns outward and establishes a minimal contact, an empathic identification, with another human being—albeit an identification with another desperate loser who has likewise lost the ability to mourn and is thus reduced to performing blind mechanical gestures. Does not something similar take place with the final shift of Not I? At the level of content, this shift can be read as the ultimate failure both of the speaker (Mouth) and of the big Other (Auditor): when the Mouth loses even the minimal thread of the content and is reduced to the minimalist injunction that the

310 Slavoj Žižek meaningless babble must go on (“keep on . . . not knowing what”), the Auditor despairs and renounces even the empty gesture of helpless compassion. There is, however, an opposite reading, one that imposes itself at the level of form: the Mouth emerges as a pure (form of) subject, deprived of all substantial content (depth of “personality”), and, pending this reduction, the Other is also depsychologized, reduced to an empty receiver, deprived of all affective content (“compassion,” etc.). To play with Malevich’s terms, we reach here the zero-­level of communication. Indeed, the subtitle of the play’s finale could very well have been “white noise on the black background of immobile silence.” In what, then, does this shift consist? We should approach it via its counterpart, the traumatic X around which the Mouth’s logorrhea circulates. What happened to “her” in that field in April? Was the traumatic experience she underwent there a brutal rape? When asked by Tandy if this was the case, Beckett unambiguously rejected such a reading, exclaiming, “How could you think of such a thing! No, no, not at all—it wasn’t that at all.”41 We should not take this statement as a tongue-­in-­ cheek admission, but literally: that fateful April, while “wandering in a field . . . looking aimlessly for cowslips,” the woman suffered some kind of collapse, possibly even her death.42 It was definitely not a real-­ life event but an unbearably intense “inner experience” close to what C. S. Lewis describes in his Surprised by Joy as the moment of his religious choice: The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to

The Minimal Event 311 open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, “I chose,” yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “I am what I do.” Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back—drip-­drip and presently trickle-­trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.43

In a way, everything is here: the decision is purely formal, ultimately a decision to decide, without a clear awareness of what the subject decides about. It is a nonpsychological act, one without motive, emotion, desire, or fear. It is incalculable, not the outcome of strategic argumentation—a totally free act, although one couldn’t do it otherwise. It is only afterward that this pure act is “subjectivized,” translated into a (rather unpleasant) psychological experience. From the Lacanian standpoint, there is only one aspect that is potentially problematic in Lewis’s formulation: the traumatic Event (encounter of the Real, exposure to the “minimal difference”) has nothing to do with the mystical suspension of the ties that bind us to ordinary reality, with the attainment of the bliss of radical indifference in which life or death and other worldly distinctions no longer matter, in which subject and object, thought and act, fully coincide. To put it in mystical terms, the Lacanian act is rather the exact opposite of this “return to innocence”: it is the Original Sin itself, the abyssal disturbance of the primeval Peace, the primordial “pathological” Choice of the unconditional attachment to some singular object (like falling in love with a singular person who, thereafter, matters to us more than everything else). Does not something like this take place on the grass in Not I? The sinful character of the trauma is indicated by the fact that the speaker feels punished by God. What happens in the final shift of the play, then, is that the speaker accepts the trauma in its meaninglessness, ceases to search for its meaning, restores its extrasymbolic dignity, as it were, thereby getting rid of the entire topic of sin and punishment. This is why the Auditor no longer reacts with the gesture of impotent compassion: there is no longer despair in the Mouth’s voice; the standard Beckettian formula of the

312 Slavoj Žižek drive’s persistence is asserted (“no matter . . . keep on”) and God is only now truly love—not the loved or loving one, but Love itself, that which keeps things going. Even after all content is lost, at this point of absolute reduction, the Galilean conclusion imposes itself: eppur si muove. This, however, in no way means that the trauma is finally subjectivized, that the speaker is now no longer “not I” but “she,” a full subject finally able to assume her Word. Something much more uncanny happens here: the Mouth is only now fully destituted as subject—at the moment of the fifth pause, the subject who speaks fully assumes its identity with the Mouth as a partial object. What happens here is structurally similar to that which takes place in an episode of the British horror omnibus Dead of the Night (1945), in which Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who becomes jealous of his dummy, gnawed at by the suspicion that it wants to leave him for a competitor. At the episode’s end, after destroying the dummy by thrashing its head, he is hospitalized. After reawakening from a psychic coma, he identifies with his symptom (the dummy) and starts to talk and contort his face like it. Here we get psychotic identification as the false way out: what started out as a partial object (the dummy is a doll stuck on his right hand—it is literally his hand acquiring an autonomous life, like the hand of Edward Norton in Fight Club) develops into a full double, engaged in a mortal competition with the subject. And since the subject’s consistency relies on this symptom-­double, since it is structurally impossible for him to get rid of the symptom, the only way out of it, the only way to resolve the tension, is to directly identify with the symptom, to become one’s own symptom.44 A similar dynamic is likewise at work in one of the most disturbing episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “The Glass Eye” (the opening episode of the third season), in which Jessica Tandy (the very actress who was the original Mouth!) plays a lone woman who falls for a handsome ventriloquist, Max Collodi (a reference to the author of Pinocchio). When she gathers the courage to approach him alone in his quarters, she declares her love for him and steps forward to embrace him, only to find that she is holding in her hands a wooden dummy’s head. After she withdraws in horror, the “dummy” stands up and pulls off its mask, and we see the face of a sad old dwarf, who starts to jump desperately on the table, asking the woman to go away. The ventriloquist is in fact the dummy, while the hideous dwarf is the actual ventriloquist. Is this not a perfect rendering of an “organ with-

The Minimal Event 313 out a body”? It is the detachable “dead” organ, the partial object, which is effectively alive, and whose dead puppet the “real” person is: the “real” person is merely alive, a survival machine, a “human animal,” while the apparently “dead” supplement is the focus of excessive Life. Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 482. 2 William Shakespeare, The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997), 5.3.188–89. However, when, in Coriolanus, Shakespeare speaks of “A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that / Which would increase his evil” (1.1.167–68), the ambiguity is radical: this characterization holds for self-­destructive evil as well as for the dedication to the good that neglects one’s own well-­being. Subsequent citations of Shakespeare’s plays will be given in the text. 3 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Plusieurs Sonnets,” in Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poems, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 84. MacIntyre’s translation of this line reads “the sole object by which the Nothing is honored” (85). 4 See Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (London: Granta, 2007). 5 Perhaps the best way to account for the relationship between mourning and melancholia would be to apply to it Lacan’s formula of psychosis, “What is foreclosed from the Symbolic returns in the Real”: the loss whose symbolic process of mourning is foreclosed returns to haunts us in the Real, as a superegoic guilt. See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 86. 6 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 20. 7 See Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” in Psychologie des Unbewussten, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975), 199. 8 This is why the melancholic subject who displays his misfortune is a nice case of the dialectics of picture and stain: his aim is to inscribe himself into the picture of the (social) world that he inhabits as a worthless stain, or the stain of suffering—that is, to make himself into a stain of the picture and thereby catch the Other’s gaze. 9 Pierre Corneille, Médée, in Théâtre complet, vol. 1, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Garnier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1971), 2.5.635–36. 10 Lacan identifies hysteria with neurosis: the other main form of neurosis, obsessional neurosis, is for him a “dialect of hysteria.”

314 Slavoj Žižek 11 See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 85–126. 12 Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, in Greenblatt et al., The Norton Shakespeare, 4.1.245–52. 13 Shakespeare, Richard II, 5.5.1–66. 14 The pandemonium he thus dwells in, in which the highest and the lowest coexist side by side, is exemplified by a wonderful Eisensteinian montage of two biblical fragments: “Come, little ones” (a reference to Luke 18:​16, Matthew 19:​14, and Mark 10:​14) counterposed to “It is as hard to come as for a camel to thread the postern of a small needle’s eye” (a reference to Luke 18:​26, Matthew 19:​24, and Mark 10:​25). If we read these two fragments together, we get a cynical superegoic God who first benevolently calls us to come to him and then sneeringly adds, as a kind of second thought, “Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that . . .”—that it is almost impossible to come to him. 15 Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Contemporary Jesus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 101. 16 See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016). 17 One is here tempted to propose the thesis that the minimal difference—the purely parallax gap—that sustains Beckett’s mature production is the very difference between French and English. As is known, Beckett wrote most of his mature works in French (not his mother tongue) and then, desperate at the low quality of translations, translated them into English himself. These translations are not mere close translations but effectively different texts. 18 Quoted in Jonathan Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject? Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing,” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 2 (2004): 333. 19 Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove, 1994), 75; and Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 2009), 407. 20 See Alain Badiou, “The Writing of the Generic: Samuel Beckett,” in Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2008), 251–84. 21 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 125. 22 See Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject?” 23 Alfred Alvarez, Samuel Beckett (New York: Viking, 1973), 66. 24 Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject?,” 333–34. 25 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 112. Note how Beckett here repeats Wagner’s precise formula of the sacred space of the Grail’s castle from Parsifal, “time becomes here space,” which Claude Lévi-­Strauss quotes as the most succinct definition of myth. See Lévi-­ Strauss, “From Chrétien de Troyes to Richard Wagner,” in The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic, 1985). 26 Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject?,” 337. 27 Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject?,” 341.

The Minimal Event 315 28 Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject?,” 337. Judith Butler develops this point in detail, especially in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 29 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 215. When asked if the Auditor is Death or a guardian angel, Beckett simply shrugged his shoulders, lifted his arms, and let them fall to his sides, leaving the ambiguity intact—repeating the very gesture of the Auditor. For a discussion of the “organ without a body,” a reversal of the Deleuzean figure of the “body without organs,” see my Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004). 30 Beckett, Three Novels, 348. 31 See Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett: The Truth of Contradictories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 32 Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Touchstone, 1990), 622. 33 Quoted in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought, ed. C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 2004), 411. 34 Beckett, quoted in James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1979), 196; and James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1996), 521–22. 35 Quoted in S. E. Gontarski, “Revising Himself: Performances as Text in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre,” Journal of Modern Literature 22, no. 1 (1998): 144. 36 Quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 617. 37 Quoted in Bair, Samuel Beckett; and quoted in Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, 195. 38 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, 221. 39 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, 217. 40 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, 216–23. 41 Quoted in Bair, Samuel Beckett, 624. 42 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, 216. 43 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Fontana, 1977), 174–75. 44 This is in exact homology to Hitchcock’s Psycho, at the end of which the only way for Norman to get rid of his mother is to identify with her directly, to let her take over his personality and, using his body as a ventriloquist uses his dummy, speak through him.

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Contributors

Shawn Alfrey is the associate director of the University Honors Program at the University of Denver, where she teaches courses on contemporary theory, modern and contemporary literature, and American studies. She is the author of The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Gertrude Stein (Bucknell University Press, 2001), and her articles have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Sagetrieb, and the Emily Dickinson Journal. She is currently working on a book on the idea and practice of collage in modern and contemporary discourse. Daniel Beaumont is an associate professor of Arabic language and literature in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Slave of Desire: Sex, Love, and Death in “The 1001 Nights” (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002) and Preachin’ the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House (Oxford University Press, 2011). He also produced and directed the video documentary about bluesman Joe Beard, So Much Truth: The Life and Music of Joe Beard (2004). Geoff Boucher is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. He is the author of numerous books, including Understanding Marxism (Routledge, 2014), Adorno Reframed (I. B. Tauris, 2013), Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2010, with Matthew Sharpe), and The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek (re.press, 2008). With Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, he is also the coeditor of Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek (Acumen, 2005), and, with Matthew Sharpe, he is the general editor of the Thinking Politics series at Edinburgh University Press. Andrew Hageman is an assistant professor of English at Luther College, where he teaches courses on American literature, literature and ecology, and ecomedia. A former Associated Colleges of the Midwest (acm)-­Mellon postdoctoral fellow, his scholarship has appeared in the edited collection Ecocinema Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2012), as well as in journals such as Excursion, Ecozon@, Science Fiction Studies, Scope, and the “Ecology and Ideology” special issue of Polygraph, featuring essays by Slavoj Žižek and Michael Hardt.

318 Contributors Jamil Khader is a professor of English and dean of research at Bethlehem University, Palestine. He is the author of Cartographies of Transnationalism in Postcolonial Feminisms: Geography, Culture, Identity, Politics (Lexington Books, 2012) and the coeditor, with Molly Anne Rothenberg, of Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies (Polity, 2013). His articles on postcolonial women writers, fantastic literature, and cosmopolitanism have appeared in numerous national and international journals and edited collections. He is currently completing a book on fantastic literature, including science fiction, rewritten fairy tales, and vampire fiction. Anna Kornbluh is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where her research and teaching focus on the Victorian novel and literary and critical theory, especially Marxism and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham University Press, 2014) and is currently at work on a book entitled The Order of Forms. Her essays have appeared in Theory & Event, elh, Novel, Mediations, the Henry James Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she coordinates two scholarly working groups: InterCcECT (the Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory) and the v21 Collective (Victorian Studies for the 21st Century). Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. His books include Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016), Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (Northwestern University Press, 2012, with Paul Eisenstein), The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (State University of New York Press, 2007), and The Impossible David Lynch (Columbia University Press, 2007). With Adrian Johnston and Slavoj Žižek, he is coeditor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press; he is also editor of the Film Theory in Practice series at Bloomsbury. He is currently at work on a book on Hegel and contradiction. Paul Megna is a postdoctoral fellow in the Australian Research Council (arc) Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Western Australia, where his research focuses on medieval literature, affect theory, and histories of emotion. His articles have appeared in pmla, Glossator, Exemplaria, and the Yearbook of Langland Studies. He is currently working on a book entitled Feeling Bad, Doing Well: Existential Emotion in Middle English Literature. Russell Sbriglia is an assistant professor of English at Seton Hall University, where he teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century American literature and culture and literary and critical theory. He is the author of The Night of the World: American Romanticism and the Materiality of Transcendence (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming), and coeditor, with Slavoj Žižek, of Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). His essays have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Poe Studies, and Postmodern Culture. Louis-­Paul Willis is a professor of film and media studies and head of the New Media Creation Department at the University of Québec at Abitibi-­Témiscamingue. His research interests include feminism, contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysis, and questions pertaining to desire, fantasy, and the gaze within cinema. In addition to articles in the International Journal of Žižek Studies and the French-­Canadian film journals Kinéphanos

Contributors 319 and Écranosphère, he is the coeditor, with Matthew Flisfeder, of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and guest editor of “Revoir Lacan,” a special issue of CiNéMAS on Lacan and film studies. Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Communist social analyst. He is a professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; a professor at the European Graduate School; and researcher at the Institute of Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. Among his many books are Disparities (Bloomsbury, 2016), Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2014), Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2012), The Parallax View (mit Press, 2006), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Verso, 1999), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Duke University Press, 1993), For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Verso, 1991), and The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 1989).

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Index

1001 Nights, 246, 251, 256, 263n2, 264n14 Abraham, Nicolas, 120 absent God, 17, 201, 204–6 absolute, 82, 165n32. See also Hegel, G. W. F. Absolute Knowledge, 122–23. See also Hegel, G. W. F. absurdism, 46, 47, 181, 202, 205, 309 acephalous subject, 140, 144, 145, 165n32, 296 act, the, 16–17, 138, 161n5, 162n7, 301, 311 Adorno, Theodor, 122, 199 addressee, 279, 305. See also narratee aesthetics, 2, 7, 10–11, 20, 21, 30n71, 42, 45, 47, 48–50, 51, 52, 56, 62–63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71–72, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83n8, 85n21, 99, 109, 117, 132n48, 133n54, 155, 157, 160, 174, 179, 186, 196, 197, 199–200, 201, 223, 274 aesthetics of the Real, 222–44 affect theory, 9 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 4, 23n23, 104–5n8 Aimeric de Peguilhan, 248 Aira, César: Literary Conference, The, 192n53 al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, 250, 252 allegory, 3, 15, 20, 42, 75, 119, 197, 209, 211, 215, 260, 264n14, 283 Althusser, Louis, 5, 9, 94–96, 105n12, 178– 79; interpellation, 16, 94–96, 105n14, 107, 175, 205–6, 216, 295

Alvarez, Alfred, 302 analysand, 39, 75, 76, 130n26, 307; discourse of, 47, 55 analyst, 35, 39, 47, 54, 55, 130n26, 132n51, 296, 307; discourse of, 39, 54, 55, 61n85 anamorphosis, 63, 73, 86n51. See also Lacan, Jacques Andersen, Hans Christian: Little Match Girl, The, 241n26 animal studies, 9 antagonism, 36, 37, 41, 43, 56, 57n8, 78, 82, 86n46, 149, 164n25, 169, 174–75, 183, 185, 257, 300; as absolute, 165n32; as class struggle, 37, 57n8, 143, 150, 163–64n19, 177; political, 49; as Real, 37, 43, 52, 54, 81, 137, 148; social, 23, 81, 195–221 antihermeneutics, 22n9, 51, 133n53. See also hermeneutics anti-Semitism, 78, 87n69, 195–221; ideology and, 78, 87n69, 203, 212–13 Antigone, 14, 18, 29n65, 68–69. See also Sophocles antinomy, 37, 42, 52, 82, 298. See also Kant, Immanuel anxiety, 17, 65, 112, 163n19, 188, 195, 202, 204–5, 207, 210, 216, 217, 243n40, 274 Arabian Nights. See 1001 Nights architecture, 62, 63, 72, 80–1 archive, 91, 104n6 Arnold of Lübeck, 248, 249

322 Index Asimov, Isaac: I, Robot, 186–87 Assassins, the, 245–66 Attar, Farid ud-Din, 246, 264n14 Aufhebung, 63, 71, 122. See also Hegel, G. W. F. Badiou, Alain, 3, 22n9, 51, 54, 56n3, 146, 301; relation of nonrelation, 146 Barber, Cesar Lombardi, 198, 219n11, 221n36 barred subject, 14, 29n67, 81, 135n92, 303. See also Lacan, Jacques Bartleby, 18, 31n83, 98, 99, 156, 158, 160. See also Bartleby politics; Melville, Herman Bartleby politics, 18, 31nn82–83, 106n20, 140, 156, 158, 160. See also divine violence; politics, of subtraction Bartol, Vladimir: Alamut, 255 Baudrillard, Jean, 90 Barthes, Roland, 5, 6, 90, 117 Beckett, Samuel, 299–313; Malone Dies, 301, 302; Molloy, 301, 302; Not I, 21, 304–12; Texts for Nothing, 301–3; Unnamable, The, 301, 302, 304; Waiting for Godot, 8, 309 belief, 94, 112, 178–79, 202 Benjamin, Walter, 105n8, 159, 290. See also divine violence Berlant, Lauren, 22–23n10 Berry, Ralph, 201 Bersani, Leo, 91 Best, Stephen, 108, 110–11, 113, 130n32, 131n39 between the two deaths, 68, 86n35, 231. See also Lacan, Jacques Bible, 187, 198. See also New Testament; Old Testament big Other. See Lacan, Jacques biopolitics, 4 Birns, Nicholas, 3–4 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), 184, 191n41 Bloom, Harold, 64–65, 84n14 Borromean knot, 36. See also Lacan, Jacques Boucher, Geoff, 64, 83n6, 115, 132n45 Boulter, Jonathan, 302–4 Bourdieu, Pierre, 99 Bouthoul, Betty, 255, 256–57, 259, 262 Brautigan, Richard, 176 Brecht, Berthold, 46–47 Brennan, Timothy, 131n33, 154

Brivic, Shelly, 4, 5 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 157 Buell, Lawrence, 172 Burke, Edmund, 64 Burroughs, William S., 21, 246–47, 255, 256–63; Naked Lunch, 257, 259, 265n26; Nova Express, 246, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260; Nova Trilogy, 21, 246, 256–63; Soft Machine, The, 246, 256, 257; Ticket That Exploded, The, 246, 256, 257–58, 259, 265n37; Wild Boys, The, 261 Butler, Judith, 3, 4, 6, 23–24n23, 42, 105– 6n16, 163n18, 315n28 Butler, Rex, 8, 26n40 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro: La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), 246 Calvin, Jean, 202, 205, 217 Calvinism, 202, 204–5 Cameron, Sharon, 118, 120–21, 135n92 canonicity, 1, 15, 92, 98–99, 106n21, 108, 113, 130–31n33 Čapek, Karel, 180–89; Absolute at Large, The, 182; “Author of the Robots Defends Himself, The,” 183; R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), 21, 171, 180–89; “Why I Am Not a Communist,” 184 Capellanus, Andreas, 269–70, 283, 285; Art of Courtly Love, The, 269–70 capitalism, 94, 96, 141, 142, 143, 163n18, 164n22, 169, 171, 174–75, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 199, 212–13, 257, 265n28; global, 80, 82, 138, 139–40, 141, 142, 143, 144, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 159, 163–64n19; industrial, 174, 175, 184, 186; late, 164n25, 174, 185, 189; mercantile, 199; post-, 185 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 217, 304–5; Decollation of St John, 304–5, Sacrifice of Isaac, 217 carnival, 292 castration, 112, 215–16, 243n40 castration anxiety, 112. See also fetishism categorical imperative, 64. See also Kant, ­Immanuel cathexis, 82, 120, 278 Catholicism, 201, 206, 208, 209, 299–300 Cavell, Stanley, 116–17, 121–24, 125, 129n7, 132nn50–1, 133n57, 134nn72–73, 134nn75–

Index 323 76, 134n78; acknowledgment, 116, 125, 126, 132n50, 134n75; disowning knowledge, 133n57; neighboring, 116, 132n50; ­redemptive reading, 116–17, 132n51 Chambers, Frank, 248–49 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 21, 270–83; Book of the Duchess, The, 273, 280; Canterbury Tales, The, 282; Legend of Good Women, The, 280; “Manciple’s Tale, The,” 272, 288n22; Parliament of Fowls, The, 271; “Tale of Melibee, The,” 282; Troilus and Criseyde, 21, 270–89 “Che Vuoi?,” 16, 200, 206, 232. See also Lacan, Jacques Cheng, Anne Anlin, 107, 132n49 Chesterton, G. K., 180, 185–86, 192n50 Chrétien de Troyes: Knight of the Cart, The, 287n11 civil disobedience, 18. See also divine violence Cixous, Hélène, 5 class struggle, 37, 57n8, 137, 141–42, 143, 144, 150, 154. See also antagonism; Lacan, Jacques; Marxism; Žižek, Slavoj classical rhetoric, 63 Claudel, Paul, 14, 18, 300; Coûfontaine Trilogy, 300 Cliff, Michelle: No Telephone to Heaven, 21, 140–41, 156–60 climate change, 177, 178. See also global warming clinic, the, 40, 47, 51 cogito, 9, 10, 303. See also Descartes, René Cohen, Derek, 197, 199, 219 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 287n11 Cohen, Walter, 199 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The, 179 Colie, Rosalie Littell, 201 collage, 72, 74 commodity fetishism, 27n42, 128, 130n31, 136n104. See also Marx, Karl communism, 22n9, 27n42, 154, 177, 181, 182, 184 concrete universality, 21, 103, 140, 147–55. See also Hegel, G. W. F. Conley, Verena Andermatt, 173–74 constructivism, 90, 95, 142, 163n18 contingency, 13, 14, 38, 43, 55, 70–1, 144, 147, 159, 163n18, 210, 232, 301–2

Copjec, Joan, 105n9, 163n18, 239n1, 240n2, 240n4 Corneille, Pierre: Médée, 294–95 cosmopolitanism, 140, 150, 151, 153–54, 166n60, 166n64 cosmopolitics, 143, 144, 151, 154, 164n25, 167n79 Counter-Reformation, 202 courtly love, 22, 248–50, 267–89 Cowie, Elizabeth, 126 Cowling, Elizabeth, 72 Crane, Mary Thomas, 131n39 Crocker, Holly A., 272, 275 Crusades, the, 247 cultural materialism, 15, 29–30n69, 196, 199. See also New Historicism cultural studies, 4, 24n23, 107, 132n48, 222 cunning of reason, 13, 29n62. See also Hegel, G. W. F. cynicism, 83n6, 106n16, 111–13, 130n26, 314n14 daguerreotype, 125–27, 136n101, 136n104 Danson, Lawrence, 198 Dante Alighieri, 249 Darwin, Charles, 175, 181 das Ding, 28n52, 249. See also Freud, Sigmund Dauber, Kenneth, 116, 128n2, 129n3, 132n49 Davis, Colin, 15–16, 30n72, 132n51 Dead of the Night, 312 Dean, Jodi, 57n8, 152 Dean, Tim, 26n34, 30n71, 132n51 deconstruction, 3, 10, 41–46, 50–1, 90, 94, 101–3, 104n2, 114, 132n45, 237, 306. See also Derrida, Jacques; poststructuralism defamiliarization, 7 Deleuze, Gilles, 26n38, 268–69, 272, 285, 287n11, 299, 315n29. See also sado­ masochism de Man, Paul, 12 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 5, 6, 42–45, 57n12, 90, 101, 104n2, 104n6; différance, 43–44; supplement, 44–45. See also deconstruction; poststructuralism Descartes, René, 9, 10, 14, 106n28; cogito, 9, 10, 303; evil genius (malin génie), 14; res cogitans, 9, 53 desemiotization, 228–29, 230, 233, 234, 238, 241n20, 241n24, 241–42n28, 242n29

324 Index desire. See Lacan, Jacques desubjectification, 145, 147, 148, 150, 155, 238, 296 desublimation, 271, 273, 280, 282, 287– 88n19 detour, 268. See also Lacan, Jacques dialectical materialism, 27n42. See also Marx, Karl; materialism dialectics, 8, 32n92, 41, 52, 56–57n3, 78, 143, 172, 176, 186, 189, 196, 199, 201, 218, 296, 313n8, 313n10; of desire, 296; Hegelian, 8, 62, 63, 70–1, 75, 77, 92, 122; Lacanian, 41, 71, 196, 199, 208; materialist, 27n42, 56–57n3 dialogue, 235, 305–7 Dickens, Charles, 52 différance, 43–44. See also Derrida, Jacques différend, 306. See also Lyotard, Jean-François disability studies, 4 disavowal, 7, 11, 14, 27n42, 108, 112–14, 117, 125–26, 130n31, 131n39, 133n57, 135n88, 139, 141, 148, 174, 177–78, 189, 274. See also fetishism disidentification, 113, 157 disruption/rupture, 7, 47, 50, 54, 56, 60n52, 64, 66, 67, 69, 92, 94, 100, 103, 117, 169, 174, 184, 267 divine violence, 18, 31n82, 159 Dolar, Mladen, 133n54 drive. See Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques Duck Soup (Marx Brothers), 1 du Maurier, Daphne, 1–3 Eagleton, Terry, 4, 5, 24–25n26 Ebert, Roger, 195 ecocriticism, 9, 21, 169–92 ecology, 169–79, 189; without nature, 171, 173–74, 189 Edelman, Lee, 85n19, 91 Edmundson, Mark, 135n85 ego, 40, 43, 66–67, 120, 135n85, 188 ego ideal, 202 ego psychology, 35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 108–10, 118–27; “Address to the Citizens of Concord,” 109–10; “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” 109–10; “American Scholar, The,” 109; “Divinity School Address, The,” 109; “Ex-

perience,” 118–27; “Gifts,” 125, 135n87; Nature, 109; “Self-Reliance,” 109; transcendentalism and, 109–10 Emerson, Waldo, 118–28, 135n85, 135n92 emotional communities, 270, 287n18 end of ideology, 112, 126. See also post­ ideology enjoyment, 16, 17–18, 58n14, 66, 68, 87n69, 113, 114, 131n39, 137, 185, 189, 203, 204, 217, 242n33, 268–69, 270, 272, 273, 274, 277, 278, 280–85, 287–88n19, 289n52, 289n59, 300–1; father of (père jouissance), 231, 278; forbidden, 203, 219, 231; political, 217, 218; stolen/theft of, 204, 206, 212, 217, 284, 289n59, 289n61. See also jouissance Enlightenment, 10, 80, 83n3, 83n6, 83–84n10, 97; subjectivity and, 64 epidemic of paradoxes, 201 Ernst, Max: Une Semaine de bonte, 72–73 ethical turn, 11–14 ethics, 9, 11–14, 18–20, 28n52, 29n65, 30n71, 31n89, 47, 48, 50, 51, 76, 77, 87n69, 141, 147, 148, 154, 159, 175, 179, 206, 210, 211, 214, 274–78, 279, 281, 301, 302; Beckett­ ian, 309; Kantian, 13, 29n65, 66, 113–14; Lacanian, 50, 71, 81, 86n46; Levinasian, 11–14, 28n53, 275; literary, 9, 20, 51, 132n49; political suspension of, 159, 168n104; of psychoanalysis, 29nn64–65, 50, 58–59n25, 66, 68, 81, 85n24, 86n46; of the Real, 58n25 Euripides, 161n4 event, 35, 40, 49, 52, 141, 155, 160, 239, 255, 299, 301, 311 evil genius (malin génie), 14. See also Descartes, René Examined Life (Taylor), 174, 175, 178, 186 exception/exclusion, 56–57n3, 112, 140, 147– 52, 154, 155, 161n5, 178, 196, 200, 201, 203, 207, 212, 218 exceptionalism, 4, 130–31n33, 132n48 excessive subject, 143, 146 extimacy/extimaté. See Lacan, Jaques Eyers, Tom, 53, 54, 55, 59n26, n32, 61n84 fairy tales, 230, 241n26 false consciousness, 110, 111, 178, 189; enlightened, 112

Index 325 fantasy, 2, 20, 30n69, 56, 71, 74–76, 79, 126, 155, 157, 174, 176, 185, 187, 196, 203–4, 206–7, 212, 216–19, 233, 242n29, 246–62, 264n16, 264n18, 265–66n39, 274, 275, 281, 284, 294, 303; formula for, 126; ideological, 155, 196; social, 203, 206, 207, 212, 218; traversing the, 30n69, 71, 75–76, 79, 261 Felman, Shoshana, 48 Felski, Rita, 107, 128n2 feminism, 2, 4, 89, 137–68; postcolonial, 138–39, 140, 141, 143, 147; transnational, 138–39, 162–63n10 Ferguson, Frances, 76 fetishism, 21, 108, 112–13, 125, 130n26, 135n88; as mode of ideology, 21, 108, 113, 130n26 fetishistic disavowal, 27n42, 108, 112–13, 133n57, 174, 177–79, 189 fetishistic reading, 108, 116–28, 132n51 Fight Club, 312 film studies, 25n26, 30n70, 62, 222–23, 233, 239–40n1, 240n2, 240n4 Fink, Bruce, 58n15, 61n85, 234 Fiorentino, Giovanni: Il Pecorone, 197 FitzGerald, Edward, 264n18 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 52 Fletcher, John, 200, 220n20; Faithful Shepherdess, The, 220n20 Flisfeder, Matthew, 30n70, 137–38, 161n2, 233, 237 form/formalism, 1–2, 3, 7, 36, 40, 41, 45–46, 47, 49–50, 55, 65, 196, 199–200, 201, 222, 223, 224, 229, 239, 239n1, 247, 309, 310 formalization, 35, 41, 49, 50, 53, 71 Foucault, Michel, 3, 5, 6, 97, 104n2, 105n8, 106n28; historicism and, 3, 90, 92–93, 94; poststructuralism and, 5, 42, 97 Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye, 271, 272, 274, 276, 280, 287–88n19, 288n40 Frankfurt School, 51 freedom, 29n65, 51, 60n64, 77, 81, 98–100, 118, 123, 130–31n33, 253, 254, 256, 262, 311; formal, 99, 262 French rationalism, 53 French Revolution, 204, 253–54, 255 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 3, 7, 17, 27n42, 35, 38, 39–40, 41, 51, 56n1, 65, 66, 67, 84n14, 85n24, 90, 107, 121, 133n54, 135n85, 170,

231, 303, 307; das Ding, 28n52, 249; drive and, 302; fetishism and, 112, 136n96; fetishistic disavowal and, 27n42, 112; hermeneutical suspicion and, 107; Irma’s injection, 39–40; mourning and melancholia and, 121, 288–89n44, 293; Oedipus complex, 65; sublimation and, 84n14; sublime and, 66; Traumdeutung (dream interpretation), 17, 30, 39–40 Fukuyama, Francis, 176–77, 182 Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick), 281–82 Gallagher, Catherine, 97 Galland, Antoine, 246, 256, 263n2 Gallop, Jane, 42 Gandhi, Mahatma, 18, 31n82 Garrard, Greg, 172 gaze. See Lacan, Jacques Genet, Jean, 101 Gervais, Bertrand, 227–32, 238, 241n27, 241–42n28 Gibbon, Edward, 263–64n11 global South, 139, 144, 160 global warming, 174, 175, 177–78 Glorious Revolution, 212 Gothic novel, 28n50 Greenblatt, Stephen, 90, 99, 102, 199, 208 Grossman, Jay, 119–21, 123, 127, 134n70 Guillame de Lorris: Romance of the Rose, The, 269, 285 Gysin, Brion, 256–57, 263 Habermas, Jürgen, 27n44, 62, 306 Halberstam, Jack, 91 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von, 252–53 Hammett, Dashiell: Maltese Falcon, The, 8 Haring, Keith, 261 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 4, 5, 25n26 Hassan i Sabbah, 245, 247, 248, 254, 255, 259–62, 264n18 Hegel, G. W. F., 8–10, 11, 13–15, 24n26, 26n41, 27n42, 29n62, 29n67, 36, 38, 52, 56, 62–63, 70–1, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 92, 101, 102, 122–23, 129n7, 137, 148, 152, 165n32, 170, 222, 254; absolute, 82, 165n32; Absolute Knowledge, 122–23; antagonism and, 165n32; Aufhebung, 63, 71, 122; concrete universality, 21, 103, 140, 147–55; cunning of reason, 13, 29n62;

326 Index Hegel, G. W. F. (continued) dialectics and, 8, 62, 63, 70–1, 75, 77, 92, 122–23; Idea, 29n62, 70, 77, 122; immanence and, 10, 14, 63, 81, 123; infinite judgment, 70–71, 76; master/slave, 63; negativity and, 9–10, 14, 29n67, 70–1, 137; night of the world, 10, 78; rabble, 152; subjectivity and, 9–15, 29n67, 62, 70–1, 122–23, 137, 165n32, 254; sublime and, 62–63, 70–1, 75; substance, 10, 54, 82, 126, 135n92; synthesis/sublation and, 71, 122, 256 Heidegger, Martin, 27n44 Hemingway, Ernest, 50 hermeneutics, 2, 6–7, 22n9, 26n34, 51, 55, 113, 114, 117, 131n39; antihermeneutics, 22n9, 51, 133n53; of suspicion, 6, 107, 128, 128n1, 129n5, 132n49, 132–33n53 Highsmith, Patricia: “Black House,” 8; “Button,” 130n31 Holbein, Hans: Ambassadors, The, 86n51, 117 historicism, 4, 18, 19, 21, 31n74, 36, 49, 55, 56n3, 89–106, 113–16, 130n31, 131n35, 131n37, 132n45, 132n49, 195–96, 199, 267–70, 283, 285, 286nn1–2, 292, 300. See also cultural materialism; New Historicism historicity, 21, 93, 267–70, 283, 285, 286n1 Hitchcock, Alfred, 8; Alfred Hitchcock Pre­ sents, 312; Birds, The, 173; MacGuffin, 67, 278; Psycho, 315n44 Hobbes, Thomas, 211 Hooker, Thomas, 211 Hulagu Khan, 263–64n11 Hull, Gloria, 146 humanism, 9–14, 29n60, 195, 309. See also posthumanism human rights, 29n60, 140, 150, 151, 154, 162n10, 166n64, 180 humility topos, 271 Hunsberger, David, 305 hysteria/hystericization, 54, 138, 261, 294– 96, 313n10 hysteric’s discourse, 54 Ibn Khallikan, 250, 252 Ibsen, Henrik, 304 Idea, 29n62, 70, 77, 122. See also Hegel, G. W. F. idealism, 9–15, 51, 83n10, 109, 118, 122,

127; German, 9–15, 20, 26n41, 27n42, 53, 108–9, 122–23 identity politics/identitarianism, 21, 43, 130– 31n33, 141–43, 146, 149, 158, 164n25 ideology, 21, 27n42, 55, 62, 65, 67, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83n6, 87n69, 94–96, 99, 105n12, 105n14, 105–6n16, 107–18, 124, 126–27, 169–92, 196, 203, 205, 230, 295 ideology critique, 21, 27n42, 107–36, 137, 169–92, 222 Imaginary, the. See Lacan, Jacques Imaginary of the end, 228–30, 241n20, 241– 42n28. See also Gervais, Bertrand imaginary phallus, 136n96. See also Lacan, Jacques imf. See International Monetary Fund indivisible remainder, 10, 27n48. See also Schelling, F. W. J. infinite judgment, 70–71, 76. See also Hegel, G. W. F. intentional fallacy, 148 internationalism, 139, 140, 141, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 166n64, 167n79 International Monetary Fund (imf), 153 interpellation. See Althusser, Louis interpretation, 6–7, 14, 15, 16, 21–22, 26n34, 31n78, 35, 38, 39–40, 47, 48–49, 55, 63, 67, 72, 75, 78, 89, 91–92, 116–17, 127, 132n53, 134n75, 198, 279 intersectionality, 143, 144, 151, 164n25 intersubjectivity, 58n14, 62, 147, 205, 214, 276, 281, 287n11, 296, 304 introjected object, 120 Irma, 39–40, 233. See also Freud, Sigmund Islam, 217, 245 Islamophobia, 217 Ivanow, Vladimir, 255 Jagger, Mick, 262 Jakobson, Roman, 42 James, Henry, 48, 52; Aspern Papers, The, 8; “Beast in the Jungle, The,” 8, “Figure in the Carpet, The,” 8, Wings of the Dove, The, 18–20 Jameson, Fredric, 42, 57n3, 60n64, 71–72, 73, 107, 111, 113, 114, 127–28, 131n35, 131n39, 174, 188; political unconscious, 107; Political Unconscious, The, 111, 113 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), 157

Index 327 Jean de Meun: Romance of the Rose, The, 269, 285 jenseits, 72–73 Johnston, Adrian, 9, 15, 27n42, 29n67, 53–54, 55, 57n7 Jost, Walter, 116, 128n2, 129n3, 132n49 jouissance. See Lacan, Jacques Joyce, James, 5, 31n78, 46, 55, 299–301; Finnegan’s Wake, 31n78, 300 Juliette, 14, 18. See also Sade, Marquis de Kafka, Franz, 12, 17–18, 24n26, 52, 53; “Cares of a Family Man, The,” 12, 29n60; Metamorphosis, The, 28–29n59; Trial, The, 17–18, 31n76, 31n78, 100 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 9, 10, 13, 24n26, 29n60, 29n65, 52, 66, 75, 81, 82, 83n3, 83n10, 113– 14, 122–23, 129n7, 134n78, 254, 255, 301; antinomy, 52, 82; categorical imperative, 64; morality/moral law, 66, 67, 113–14, 210; sublime and, 7, 64, 67, 69–70, 76, 77, 78, 83n8, 85n24; Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), 28n50, 28n52, 37, 69; transcendental apperception, 9 Karatani, Kojin, 52, 61n72, 253, 264n19 Kay, Sarah, 162n9 Kendall, Linda, 305 Kennedy, J. Gerald, 90, 104nn4–5 Kierkegaard, Søren, 31n89, 302 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 18 King, Stephen: Pet Sematary, 8 Klíma, Ivan, 180 knowledge, 16–17, 30n72, 48, 56, 104n3, 108–18, 122, 123, 125, 126, 129n5, 129n7, 132n51, 133n57, 134n75, 135n88, 172, 178– 79, 231–32, 307 Knowlson, James, 304–5 Koppelman, Kate, 274–75 Kristeva, Julia, 5, 25n27, 42, 90 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 82 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 4, 5–9, 11, 14–15, 16, 21, 22n9, 22–23n10, 24–25n26, 25n27, 25nn29–30, 26n38, 26n41, 27n42, 29nn64–65, 29n67, 29–30n69, 30n72, 35–36, 37, 38–48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53–56, 57n4, 57n8, 57–58n12, 58nn14–15, 59n28, 62, 63, 65, 66–71, 72, 73, 79, 80–1, 85nn23–24, 86n35, 86n46, 86n51,

92, 113–15, 116, 117, 126, 129n5, 132n53, 133n54, 136n96, 137–38, 140, 144–45, 161n2, 162nn8–9, 169, 170, 173, 174, 188, 196, 199, 200, 202, 206, 208, 215, 222–24, 227, 231, 232, 233–34, 235, 236, 237, 239n1, 240n2, 240n4, 240n7, 240n12, 240– 41n19, 241n20, 243n52, 246, 247, 248–49, 258, 261, 265–66n39, 266n42, 267–68, 269, 286n8, 287nn13–14, 293, 294, 296, 299, 300, 301, 303, 305, 311, 313n5, 313n10; anamorphosis, 63, 73, 86n51; barred subject, 14, 29n67, 81, 135n92, 303; between the two deaths, 68, 86n35, 231; big Other, 76, 156, 159, 173, 202, 235, 247, 258, 260, 261, 274, 277, 278, 281, 285, 304, 305, 307, 309; Borromean knot, 36; “Che Vuoi?,” 16, 200, 206, 232; desire, 14, 16, 29n65, 40, 42, 45, 50, 57n4, 62, 66, 67, 68–69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 85n24, 126, 130n26, 135n92, 164n20, 172, 187, 200, 201–6, 210, 216–18, 219, 232, 233, 249, 293–96; detour, 268; drive, 36, 51, 57n4, 62, 67, 68, 76, 144–45, 147, 164n20, 165n35, 216, 296, 299, 302, 311–12; ethics of psychoanalysis, 29nn64–65, 50, 58–59n25, 66, 68, 81, 85n24, 86n46; extimacy/extimaté, 37, 140, 143–47, 148, 150, 151, 155, 158, 233; gaze, 6, 28n52, 74, 116–17, 133n54, 134n76, 158, 231, 233, 240n2, 204n4, 286n2, 313n8; Imaginary, the, 6, 21, 36, 37, 42, 46, 48, 67, 70, 75, 104n14, 157, 170, 173, 174, 180, 182, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 212, 217, 222, 223, 224, 228, 230, 233, 235, 242n29, 243n44, 249, 305; imaginary phallus, 136n96; jouissance, 17–18, 55, 66, 67, 68, 114, 137, 219, 231, 243n40, 274, 278, 281, 284, 289n52, 300; lalangue, 300; lamella, 26n38, 37, 233; letter, the, 5, 36, 48, 50, 57–58n12, 58n14; lozenge, 81; Master Signifier, 37, 44–45, 69–70, 148, 203, 216, 237–38, 271, 272; matheme, 14, 71, 80, 81, 126, 136n96; metalanguage, 5, 6, 44, 45–46, 114–16, 237, 241n19; Möbius strip, 144–45, 173; Name-of-the-Father, 16, 158, 239, 243n42, 286n2; non-all, 137–38, 162n8; objet petit a, 6–7, 26n38, 38, 63, 65, 66, 67–69, 71–72, 74, 75, 81, 86n46, 114, 117, 126, 131n37, 133n54, 135n94, 145, 147, 200, 213, 233, 237, 249, 268, 294–95; point

328 Index Lacan, Jacques (continued) de capiton (quilting point), 44–45, 69, 148, 169, 189, 237–38; Real, the, 5–9, 11, 14, 21, 23n10, 25n30, 30n69, 35–61, 65, 67–72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85n31, 86n35, 86n46, 93, 114, 115, 119, 137, 138, 144, 145, 147, 148, 155, 156, 162n9, 163n18, 173, 174, 195, 206, 212, 219, 222–44, 256–62, 267, 268, 270, 283, 292, 294, 298, 299, 300, 311, 313n5; sexual difference, 137–38, 149, 162n9, 163n18, 233; sinthome, 37, 55, 300; subjective destitution, 69, 140, 296, 299, 307; subject supposed to know, 114, 307; sublimation, 7, 66, 77, 85n23, 288n19, 289n52; surplus-enjoyment, 27n42, 66, 113–14; suture, 44; Symbolic, the, 6, 7, 11, 16, 18, 23n10, 26n38, 36, 37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 58n14, 59n36, 60n56, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 79, 85n31, 86n35, 86n46, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 114, 137, 138, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 155, 156, 157, 160, 173, 202, 204, 205, 206, 212, 219, 222–44, 258, 260, 261, 266n40, 274, 275, 282, 294, 295, 296, 299, 300, 311, 313n5 lalangue, 300. See also Lacan, Jacques lamella, 26n38, 37, 233. See also Lacan, Jacques Laplanche, Jean, 51, 133n53 Lauter, Paul, 106n21 law, 17, 18, 49, 66, 69, 76, 77, 100, 106n26, 113, 131n35, 140, 150, 151, 154, 198, 204, 206–12, 215–16, 217, 231, 235, 241n27, 242n33, 270, 272, 274, 299–300 Law of the Father, 272, 273, 274, 278 Lebey de Batilly, Denis, 263n11 Leclaire, Serge, 243n40 Lenin, V. I., 99, 138, 161–62n7, 179 letter, the, 5, 36, 48, 50, 57–58n12, 58n14. See also Lacan, Jacques Levi, Primo, 28n56 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 9, 52, 81, 225, 240n7, 314n25; structures of kinship, 225, 240n7 Levinas, Emmanuel, 11–14, 28n53, 62, 63, 275 Lewalski, Barbara, 198 Lewis, C. S., 310–11 little piece of the Real. See Lacan, Jacques, objet petit a Longinus, 65, 83n2

looking awry, 30n72, 73–74, 78, 80, 199. See also anamorphosis Lorde, Audre, 143, 144, 146 love, 19–20, 58–59n25, 76, 87n59, 182, 198, 207, 208, 209, 213, 214, 215, 218, 259, 264n14, 271, 272–85, 290–99, 311, 312. See also courtly love; love object love object, 268, 271, 272, 273, 277, 278, 280, 281, 283, 285 Lukács, Georg, 82, 286n2 Lupton, Julia, 48 Luther, Martin, 202, 205, 206, 217 Lutheranism, 202 Lynch, David, 7, 24n26, 73, 74–76, 77, 79, 81, 231, 240–41n19, 242n33, 244n59, 277; Blue Velvet, 242n33; Dune, 242n33; Lost Highway, 74–76, 78, 79, 231, 242n33; Wild at Heart, 242n33, 277 Lyotard, Jean-François, 65, 90, 306; différend, 306 MacCabe, Colin, 42 MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 55–56 MacGuffin, 67, 278. See also Hitchcock, Alfred Machiavelli, Niccolò, 201 madness, 10, 291, 298–99 Malevich, Kazimir, 310 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 291 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 97 Mann, Jill, 269–70, 287n14 Mannoni, Octave, 112 Marcus, Sharon, 108, 110–11, 113, 130n32, 131n39 Marcuse, Herbert, 262 Marlowe, Christopher, 196, 203, 212; Jew of Malta, The, 196, 212 Marshall, Bob, 171 Marx, Karl, 42, 51, 94, 107, 110, 130n16, 141, 159, 169, 170, 175, 190n4, 222, 262; commodity fetishism, 27n42, 128, 130n31, 136n104; dialectical materialism and, 27n42; ideology and, 94, 105n12, 110, 113; surplus-value, 27n42 Marxism, 25n28, 32n92, 37, 82, 89, 92, 129n5, 137, 142, 161n2, 203 masculinity, 138, 161nn4–5, 272, 285 masochism, 75, 268–70, 272, 277–85, 287n11. See also sadism; sadomasochism

Index 329 masterpiece, 98–101, 103 Master Signifier. See Lacan, Jacques materialism, 9, 27n42, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58n14, 61n84, 68, 127, 153, 172, 183, 291, 303, 305; cultural, 15, 29–30n69, 196, 199; dialectical, 27n42, 80, 82, 137, 139–40; Lacanian, 53–54, 56; literary, 51–56; sentimental, 127; transcendental, 9–15, 27n42 matheme, 14, 71, 80, 81, 126, 136n96. See also Lacan, Jacques Matrix, The (Wachowskis), 246, 258, 260, 266n40 McCarthy, Cormac: No Country for Old Men, 8 McGowan, Todd, 27n42, 48–49, 117, 161n5, 165n32, 240n2, 240–41n19, 267, 286n1 McKibben, Bill, 171, 176–77, 182 McLemee, Scott, 179, 191n29 McNulty, Tracy, 48, 49–50 mechanophobia, 171, 183 Medea (Euripides), 161n4 media studies, 4, 15, 222 melancholia, 121, 135n85, 188, 201, 277–83, 288–89n44, 292–94, 313n5, 313n8 melodrama, 1–2, 17, 22–23n10 Melville, Herman, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 18, 98, 99, 100, 170; Moby-Dick (Captain Ahab), 119 Menchú, Rigoberta, 21, 140, 150–55, 167n73; Crossing Borders, 21, 140, 150–51, 166n60, 166n64; I, Rigoberta Menchú, 21, 140, 152–53, 166n70 Merchant, Carolyn, 183 Mercier, Vivian, 304 Merish, Lori, 127 metalanguage. See Lacan, Jacques Michael, John, 116, 129n7, 132n48 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 145 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 290 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 143 minimalism, 301, 304, 309–10 Mitchell, J. Allan, 275–76 Möbius strip, 144–45, 173. See also Lacan, Jacques modernism, 3, 17–18, 19, 49, 290, 301 Moi, Toril, 107 Monglond, André, 290 Montaigne, Michel de, 208

Morrison, Toni, 48, 49; Beloved, 25n26, 100, 161n4 Morton, Timothy, 170, 171, 174, 179 mourning, 119–21, 123, 125, 126, 127, 135n85, 136n100, 136n104, 273, 278, 288–89n44, 292–93, 303–4, 313n5 multiculturalism, 139–43, 149, 164n20; Žižek and, 141–43. See also cosmopolitanism; identity politics/identitarianism Munday, Anthony, 197 Murphy, Timothy S., 256, 265n24, 265nn28– 29, 265n36 Muselmann, 12. See also Levi, Emmanuel music, 209, 218, 231, 297–99 myth, 117, 174, 217, 314n25 myth criticism, 97–98 Name-of-the-Father, 16, 158, 239, 243n42, 286n2. See also Lacan, Jacques narratee, 228–29. See also addressee narratology, 49, 174, 223, 228, 256, 303 nationalism, 130–31n33, 158, 199, 203, 212, 219, 289n59 Nature, 21, 117, 119, 122, 124, 136n104, 169–92, 216. See also ecology negativity, 9–10, 14, 29n67, 70–1, 137. See also Hegel, G. W. F. neighbor, the, 12–13, 243n44 neocolonialism, 138–39, 142, 143, 144, 149, 151, 153, 155, 162n10 neoliberalism, 139, 140, 150, 154, 160, 164n20, 177 New Age/New Ageism, 27n44, 175 New Testament, 217 Nietzsche, Freidrich, 107, 254–55, 256, 259– 60, 272, 292; ressentiment, 272 night of the world, 10, 78. See also Hegel, G. W. F. Nizari Isma‘ilis, 245, 247, 250, 255, 257, 264n18 New Historicism, 3, 57n3, 89–90, 267, 286n1. See also cultural materialism; historicism Nobel Peace Prize, 140, 150, 151 non-all, 137–38, 162n8. See also Lacan, Jacques object-oriented ontology, 9, 171 objet petit a. See Lacan, Jacques

330 Index October Revolution, 138. See also Lenin, V. I. “Ode to a Nightingale” (John Keats), 97 Oedipus complex, 31n74, 65. See also Freud, Sigmund Old Testament, 217 Omar Khayyam, 255 O’Neill, Eugene, 3 ontic properties, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 147, 155, 157, 158, 164n20 ontology, 9, 12, 28n53, 45, 51, 53, 56n3, 63, 80, 82, 131n33, 138, 143, 162n8, 171, 254, 292, 303; of literature, 41–42, 51; objectoriented, 9, 171 opera, 62, 76–79, 87–88n70. See also Wagner, Richard ordinary language criticism, 107, 128n2, 129n3, 132n49 organ without a body, 26n38, 304, 315n29 organicism, 97, 171, 183 Othello, 281 Other, the, 12–13, 16, 28n53, 43, 63, 66, 141, 143, 145, 162n9, 198, 200, 204, 205, 206, 210, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219, 231, 232, 234–35, 249, 266n46, 274–75, 295–96, 305, 310, 313n8 Oulipo poetry, 49–50 Ovid, 276 parallax, 41, 52, 54, 63, 73, 75, 173, 176, 253– 56, 314n17; Kant and, 52, 81, 254, 255–56; Karatani and, 52, 253, 264n19; Žižek and, 41, 52, 54, 63, 73, 80–82, 253–56, 264n19, 264–65n20 Parker, Ian, 26n41, 162n9 partial object, 26n38, 133n54, 145, 301, 302, 304, 305, 312, 313 part of no part, 140, 152, 155 Pascal, Blaise, 129n5 passiveness, 122–27, 269, 270, 272, 275, 276, 278, 279, 281 Performance (1970), 262–63 performance studies, 4 performativity, 36, 38, 45, 54, 105–6n16, 142, 163n18, 205 periodization, 3, 20, 83–84n10 Persona (Ingmar Bergman), 262 Pfaller, Robert, 105n14 pickup artists, 284–85, 289n63 Plato, 129n5, 306–7

pleasure principle, 17, 66, 68, 203, 215 Poe, Edgar Allan, 7, 30n69, 90, 104n4; “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The,” 7, 26n38; “Purloined Letter, The,” 58n14, 107 poetics/poeticism, 38, 46, 49–50, 84n14, 115, 208 point de capiton (quilting point). See Lacan, Jacques political economy, 97, 170, 172, 180, 181, 182, 184, 186, 189 political unconscious, 107. See also Jameson, Fredric politics, 9, 11, 18, 20, 37, 56n3, 59n36, 60n52, 62, 63, 64, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83n3, 83n6, 91, 92, 95, 105–6n16, 108, 109–10, 111, 112, 127, 131n39, 132n48, 169, 173, 177, 179, 195, 197, 199, 201, 203, 206, 210, 211, 212, 215, 217, 218, 247, 250, 257; culturalization of, 139—40, 142; of recognition, 142, 151; of resistance, 18, 95, 105n14, 138, 139, 141, 151, 153, 155, 156–57, 158, 160; revolutionary, 138–68; of subtraction, 18, 140– 41, 155–57, 160 Polo, Marco, 245–46, 252, 263n11; Travels, 245–46, 250–52, 262–63 popular culture. See Žižek, Slavoj possibility, 41, 55, 100–101, 109, 139, 149, 165n32, 178, 301–2 postcatastrophic, 228, 230, 231, 238 postcolonialism, 21, 137–68; Žižek and, 141–43 postcriticism, 48, 128n2 posthumanism, 9, 29n61, 176–77, 182, 188 postideology, 111–12, 139, 189, 230, 242n30 postmodernism, 17–18, 25n28, 45, 65, 107, 108, 111, 113, 185, 246, 274, 305–6 postnationalism, 143, 166n60 postpolitics, 139–40, 142 poststructuralism, 5–6, 8, 9–10, 21, 25n29, 27n44, 35, 42–47, 51, 56, 59n28, 65, 114–16, 132n45, 132n49, 237. See also deconstruction postsymbolic, 230–31, 232, 234, 237–38, 239, 242n29. See also aesthetics of the Real posttheory, 1–5 primordial father, 231–32 prohibition, 46, 203, 206, 210, 231–32, 292, 294, 306

Index 331 proletarian subject, 137–39, 159, 161n2 Protestantism, 201, 206, 208, 209 Proust, Marcel: Guermantes Way, The, 8 psychoanalysis, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 16, 22n9, 24–25n26, 25n28, 26n41, 27n42, 29–30n69, 30n71, 32n92, 35, 39, 42, 43–44, 45, 47, 48, 50–51, 53, 55, 60n52, 65, 66, 75, 89–90, 105n14, 108, 114, 117, 126, 129n5, 130n26, 137, 161n2, 170, 172, 173, 178, 195, 206, 215, 222, 228, 230, 231, 233, 244n59, 307; applied, 3; clinical, 117; cure, 75, 76; ethics of, 14, 29n64, 68, 86n46, 137–38; film criticism and, 222, 239n1; hermeneutics and, 6–7, 22n9, 26n34, 51, 55, 117, 132–33n53; interpretation and, 6–7, 26n34, 132–33n53; Lacanian, 5–6, 8, 20, 25n27, 30n72, 62, 63, 86n46, 92, 222; literary criticism and, 29–30n69, 42, 47, 48, 50, 116, 223, 224; Žižekian, 22n9, 113 Pugh, Tison, 272, 275 quantum physics, 80–1, 233 queer studies, 4 rabble, 152. See Hegel, G. W. F. Rabkin, Norman, 213 Radford, Michael: William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, 195 Rancière, Jacques, 3, 140; part of no part, 140, 152, 155 reader response theory, 3 Real, the. See Lacan, Jacques; Žižek, Slavoj Reformation, the, 199, 201, 202, 204–6, 209, 217 Reinhard, Kenneth, 48 relation of nonrelation, 146. See also Badiou, Alain Renaissance/early modern, 200, 201, 206 repetition compulsion, 203 representation, 49, 53, 55, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 77, 79, 81, 84n17, 85–86n31, 216, 217, 222, 223, 224, 239, 294 repression, 48, 56, 57n3, 75, 76, 101, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112–13, 121, 127, 135n88, 140, 141, 150, 152, 163–64n19, 216, 239, 242n29, 307 res cogitans, 9, 53. See also Descartes, René ressentiment, 272. See also Nietzsche, ­Freidrich

Restoration, the, 212 retroactivity, 19, 25–26n30, 38, 39, 44, 58n14, 68, 69, 82, 173, 204, 234, 290, 294 revolution without revolution, 185, 188, 192n45 rhizome, 300 Richard, Keith, 262 Ricouer, Paul, 6, 128n1 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 48, 49 Rimbaud, Arthur, 254, 255; Illuminations, The, 254 Robespierre, Maximilien, 185, 253 Rodger, Elliot, 283–85 Rolling Stones, the, 263 Romanticism, 3, 10–11, 83n6, 83–84n10, 97 Rorty, Richard, 306 Rose, Jacqueline, 42 Rosenfeld, Jessica, 273 Rothenberg, Molly Anne, 145–48 Rowe, John Carlos, 29–30n69, 109–10, 113, 127, 129n12 Rushton, Cory James, 283 Sade, Marquis de, 14, 68, 161n5, 164n20, 165n35 sadism, 269–70, 271, 272, 277–83, 284, 285, 287n11, 289n52. See also masochism; sadomasochism sadomasochism, 21, 22–23, 267–89. See also masochism; sadism Said, Edward, 139; adversarial internationalism, 139 Saint Paul, 299 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 127, 136n100 Santner, Eric, 48, 49 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 42 Schelling, F. W. J., 9, 27n48, 36 science fiction, 11, 62, 180–89, 256–62 Schubert, Franz: “Der Laienmann,” 309 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 107, 131n35 self-division, 37, 53–54, 103, 165n32 semiolinguistics, 5, 9, 25n27 semiotics, 5, 6, 9, 21, 25n27, 41–42, 223, 227–33, 234, 238, 239, 241n20, 241n24, 241–42n28, 242n29 senex iratus, 218 sentimentality, 123, 127, 136n100, 268 set theory, 145–46, 161n5 sexual difference. See Lacan, Jacques, non-all

332 Index Shakespeare, William, 48, 73, 99, 102, 195–221, 274, 290–99; All’s Well That Ends Well, 200; Coriolanus, 313n2; Hamlet, 16–17, 31n74, 102, 292, 295, 299, 300; King Lear, 290–91; Measure for Measure, 200; Merchant of Venice, The, 21, 195–221; Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 290–91; Othello, 281; Richard II, 8, 21, 295–99; Romeo and Juliet, 295; Taming of the Shrew, The, 246; Titus Andronicus, 290; Troilus and Cressida, 200, 279 Shapiro, James, 199, 219n2, 219n6, 221n50 Sharpe, Matthew, 64, 83n6 Shaw, George Bernard, 180, 185–86, 192n50 Shaw, Philip, 62, 66, 84n12, 85n21, 24 Shell, Marc, 199 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein, 8, 11 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 253, 254, 255, 264n18; Assassins, The, 253 signifier, 6, 7, 18, 43, 44, 48, 49, 55–56, 57–58n12, 58n14, 65, 69–70, 84n12, 143, 144, 146, 155, 161n5, 205, 212, 216, 217, 230, 233, 234, 237, 271, 279, 294 Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine Isaac, 263n11 singularity, 3, 36, 43, 52; universal, 80–1 sinthome, 37, 55, 300. See also Lacan, Jacques Sisken, Clifford, 83–84n10 skepticism, 121–22, 133n57, 134n75, 208, 256 Sleeper Awakened plot, 245–66 Sloterdijk, Peter, 112 Snauwaert, Maïté, 230, 241n26, 243n48 Sophocles: Antigone, 14, 25n26, 29n65, 68–69, 86n35, 170, 300; Oedipus, 16–17 Soucy, Gaétan: Petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes, La, 21, 222–44 speech act theory, 4 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 139 Stark, Freya: In the Valley of the Assassins, 255 Stejskalová, Tereza, 24n25, 170 Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 8 Strohm, Paul, 286n1 structuralism, 5, 6, 9, 25n30, 30n69, 57n4, 58n14, 81, 227, 228 structures of kinship, 225, 240n7. See also Lévi-Strauss, Claude Sturgis, Caroline, 121 subject, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9–15, 28n53, 29n65, 29n67,

36, 40, 42–43, 45, 50, 53, 55, 57–58n12, 58n14, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 70, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83n6, 83n8, 84n14, 94–96, 98, 99, 100, 105n14, 106n26, 110, 111–12, 113–14, 116, 122–23, 126, 135n88, 135n92, 137–48, 150–51, 154, 155–56, 158, 159, 160, 161n2, 161nn4–5, 163nn18–19, 164n20, 164n25, 165n32, 165n35, 205, 210, 213, 216, 217, 232, 236, 254, 257–58, 261, 262, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273, 275, 277, 282, 287n11, 292, 293–96, 298, 302–4, 305, 310, 311, 312, 313n8; barred, 14, 29n67, 81, 135n92, 303; Cartesian, 9, 14, 27nn43–44; feminine, 137–38, 161nn4–5, 162n8; Hegelian, 9–14, 29n67; Kantian, 10, 13, 113–14; Lacanian, 29n67, 66–67 subject supposed to know, 114, 307. See also Lacan, Jacques subjective destitution, 69, 140, 296, 299, 307. See also Lacan, Jacques subjectivity, 7, 9–15, 28n52, 50, 53–54, 55, 62, 63, 64, 67, 76, 82, 94, 95–96, 105n14, 122, 123, 133n57, 137–41, 143–47, 150, 151, 155, 158, 159, 161n2, 161nn4–5, 162n8, 164–65n29, 165n35, 166–67n70, 179, 208, 222, 223, 224, 228, 232, 234, 236, 238, 239, 244n59, 246, 254, 255, 268, 270, 275, 296, 299, 300, 302–3, 308–9, 311, 312; Cartesian, 9, 14, 43n27; feminine, 137–38, 161nn4–5, 162n8; Hegelian, 9–14, 29n67; Kantian, 10, 13; Lacanian, 63, 66–67 sublimation. See Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques sublime, the, 7–8, 11, 21, 29n60, 62–88, 233, 249, 271, 291; feminine, 137–38; postmodern, 65; ridiculous, 7–8, 21, 65, 72–76, 77, 79, 242n33; romantic, 63–67; Wagnerian, 65, 76–79 sublime object, 7–8, 63, 65, 66, 67–72, 73, 77, 78, 79–80, 82, 86n31, 137, 235, 240n12, 249. See also Lacan, Jacques, ­objet petit a substance, 10, 54, 82, 126, 135n92. See also Hegel, G. W. F. Sue, Eugène: Mysteries of Paris, The, 170, 190n4 superego, 17, 18, 66, 77, 84n14, 114, 204, 261, 270, 274, 281–82, 313n5, 314n14 supplement, 44–45. See also Derrida, Jacques

Index 333 surface reading, 107, 110–11, 124, 126, 127, 128n2, 129n3, 131n39 surplus-enjoyment, 27n42, 66, 113–14. See also Lacan, Jacques surplus-value, 27n42. See also Marx, Karl surrealism, 72–73 Süskind, Patrick: Perfume, 8 suture, 44. See also Lacan, Jacques Sygne, 14, 18, 31n83. See also Claudel, Paul Symbolic, the. See Lacan, Jacques symbolic/paternal authority, 223, 224, 229, 230, 231, 234, 239, 243n42; decline of, 223, 229, 230, 231, 242n29 symbolic suicide, 98, 100 symptom, 53, 75, 82, 92, 108, 110, 112–13, 115, 117, 121, 126, 135n88, 163n19, 299, 312 symptomatic reading, 21, 108–36 Szeliga-Vishnu, 170, 190n4 Tandy, Jessica, 305, 310, 312 taste, 1–3 Taylor, Astra, 174, 175. See also Examined Life theatre of the absurd, 309 theory, 1–5, 11, 14, 15, 16, 21–22, 30n72, 32n92, 42, 47, 48, 63, 80, 82, 89, 90, 92, 101, 116, 132n49, 172, 179; film, 222, 239; Lacanian, 53, 62, 63, 66, 233; literary, 4, 11, 15, 21, 42, 47; Marxist, 82; psychoanalytic, 55, 60n52, 62, 63, 66, 75, 89–90, 222, 239; queer, 91 Thing from inner space, 11 Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), 28n50, 28n52, 37, 69. See also Kant, Immanuel Thoreau, Henry David, 18, 177, 191n22; Walden, 177 Thoreau, John, Jr., 125 three Others, 234–35. See also Žižek, Slavoj three Reals, 21, 233–34. See also Žižek, Slavoj Titanic, the, 67–68, 85–86n31 tolerance, 141 Tompkins, Jane, 23n11, 97–98 Torok, Maria, 120 tragedy, 17, 195, 199, 212 tragicomedy, 200, 201, 220n20 transcendental apperception, 9. See also Kant, Immanuel transcendental materialism, 9–15, 27n42

transcendentalism, 109–10 transference, 125, 126, 135n88, 307 transnationalism, 138, 139, 143, 144, 150, 154, 162–63n10, 164n25 traumatic kernel. See Lacan, Jacques, objet petit a Traumdeutung (dream interpretation), 17, 30, 39–40. See also Freud, Sigmund Trial, The (Orson Welles), 106n26 Truman Show, The, 253, 264n16 truth, 20, 25n28, 45, 46, 47, 82, 97, 101, 102, 103, 108, 111, 112, 118, 119, 129n5, 134n75, 135n88, 163–64n19, 172, 179, 201, 210, 254, 256, 272, 274, 281, 301, 305, 306–7 unconscious, the, 3, 5, 11, 39–40, 42, 80, 121, 172–73, 187 universality, 12–13, 51, 64, 80–81, 83n8, 89–90, 113, 137–68, 306; literature and, 97–98, 101–3. See also concrete universality vanishing mediator, 52, 56n3, 204 Veeser, H. Aram, 89 Versagung, 18, 146, 155, 156. See also Bartleby politics Vighi, Fabio, 149, 162n8 voice, 8, 66, 117, 133n54, 164n20, 282, 290, 304, 311–12 Wachowskis, the, 246, 260. See also Matrix, The Wagner, Richard, 65, 73, 76, 77–79, 81, 87–88n70, 290, 314n25; Bayreuth, 79, 87–88n70; Parsifal, 77, 87nn69–70, 314n25; Rheingold, 87n69; Ring cycle, 78–79; Tristan and Isolde, 78, 87n59, 290 Webern, Anton, 301 Webster, Daniel, 109 Weiskel, Thomas, 63, 64–66, 83n8, 84n14, 84–85n17 Wharton, Edith: Age of Innocence, The, 25n26, 292–93 Whelan, Jessica, 228 Whitman, Walt, 83n3 Wieczorek, Mark, 76 Wiegman, Robyn, 113, 130–31n33, 131n39 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 136n104 Wilson, Richard, 208–9

334 Index Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 30n72, 128n2, 236 women and gender studies, 4, 138 Woolf, Virginia, 1 Wordsworth, William: Prelude, The, 28n52 World Bank, 139, 153 Yale School (of deconstruction), 3 Zarathustra, 259–60 Zink, Nell: Wallcreeper, The, 179 Žižek, Slavoj, Absolute Recoil, 169, 178–79; Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, The, 15, 30n69, 74–76, 242n33; Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 59n36; Conversations with Žižek, 25n29, 164n20; Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 16–17, 31n74, 136n96; Enjoy Your Symptom!, 25–26n30, 57–58n12, 58n14, 258, 286nn1–2; Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), 15; Examined Life, 174, 175–76, 178, 186; First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 169, 174– 75; For They Know Not What They Do, 28n50, 233; Fragile Absolute, The, 106n25; Fright of Real Tears, The, 15, 239–40n1; How to Read Lacan, 60n43; In Defense of Lost Causes, 25n28, 31n82, 32n92, 129n5, 130n26, 130n31, 133n57, 135n88, 164n19, 169, 173, 176, 192n45; Indivisible Remainder, The, 27n48, 177; Interrogating the Real, 25n27, 25n29, 234; Less than Noth-

ing, 18, 31n82, 103, 106n20, 168n104, 169; Living in the End Times, 80, 82, 87n69, 177; Looking Awry, 17–18, 30n72, 31n76, 31n78, 73–74, 169, 173; Metastases of Enjoyment, The, 57n8, 267–68; Most Sublime Hysteric, The, 25n29, 25n30; On Belief, 58–59n25, 98, 106n24, 163n19; Organs without Bodies, 315n29; Parallax View, The, 18–20, 27n42, 28n52, 28–29n59, 29n60, 31nn82–83, 31n89, 51, 52, 61n84, 80–81, 106n20, 164n29, 254, 264–65n20; Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, The, 15, 242n33, 266n40; Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, The, 15, 282; “Politics of Redemption, The,” 77, 87n59, 87n69, 87–88n70; popular culture and, 4, 5, 8, 14, 16, 30n72, 62; “Spectre of Ideology, The,” 57n8; Sublime Object of Ideology, The, 8–9, 16, 27n42, 37, 57n8, 62, 66–68, 72–73, 79, 86–87n31, 86n35, 86n46, 135n94, 167n80, 169, 177, 220n26, 221n51, 233; Tarrying with the Negative, 27n42, 87n69, 266n46, 289n52, 289n59, 289n61; three Others, 234–35; three Reals, 21, 233–34; Ticklish Subject, The, 26n38, 27nn43–44, 51–52, 60n56, 164n20, 164n22, 164n29, 166n63, 242n30; Violence, 29n65, 31n82; Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 258, 264n16; Year of Dreaming Dangerously, The, 182 Zupančič, Alenka, 41