Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment 9780226668550

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SOVEREIGNTY, INC.

ALSO PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies AmAndA Ande r son, r i tA F e l s k i, And t or il moi Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory We ndy B ro Wn, Pe te r e. Gor d on, And mAx P e ns k y

Each TRIOS book addresses an important theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies through three extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars.

Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State PAu l Chr ist oP he r J oh n s on, PAme lA e. k lAsse n, And WinniFr e d FAlle r s s u lli vAn Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism mArCu s B o o n, e r i C C Azdy n, An d timo th y morton

SOVEREIGNTY, INC. THREE INQUIRIES IN P O L I T I C S A N D E N J OY M E N T

WILLIAM

Mazzarella ERIC L.

Santner AARON

Schuster The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2020 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20

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isBn-13: 978-0-226-66838-3 (cloth) isBn-13: 978-0-226-66841-3 (paper) isBn-13: 978-0-226-66855-0 (e-book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226668550.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mazzarella, William, 1969– Brand(ish)ing the name, or, Why is Trump so enjoyable? | Santner, Eric L., 1955– Rebranding of sovereignty in the age of Trump. | Schuster, Aaron, 1974– Beyond satire. Title: Sovereignty, Inc. : Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment / William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, Aaron Schuster. Other titles: Trios (Chicago, Ill.) Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, [2020] | Series: Trios | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lCCn 2019031018 | isBn 9780226668383 (cloth) | isBn 9780226668413 (paperback) | isBn 9780226668550 (ebook) Subjects: lCsh: Trump, Donald, 1946– | Genet, Jean, 1910–1986. Balcon. | Political culture— United States. | Branding (Marketing)— Political aspects— United States. | Authority. | United States— Politics and government— 2017– Classification: lCC e913.3 .s69 2020 | ddC 973.933— dc23 lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031018 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of Ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS Introduction: In the Beginning Was the Brand Name William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster

1

THE REBRANDING OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

Toward a Critique

of Manatheism

Eric L. Santner } 19 BRAND(ISH)ING THE NAME

or, Why Is

Trump So Enjoyable?

William Mazzarella } 113 B E YO N D S AT I R E

The Political Comedy of the

Present and the Paradoxes of Authority

Aaron Schuster } 161

INTRODUCTION In the BegInnIng Wa s the Br and name

William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster 1

Because it was in some ways too good a match for the essays collected here, we decided not to make use of an image that would have emblematized the claims on which they all in one way or another converge, claims themselves encapsulated by the title of this book: Sovereignty, Inc. The idea was to make a slight adjustment to the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, to place on the breast of the figure of the sovereign towering over his lands the brand name Trump, much as it appears on the current American president’s various hotels and condominiums. As noted, the image simply hit the nail on the head with a bit too much force. Much of what we wanted to say was in some sense all there: the return of a monarchical style of authority but now under the sign of a brand; the composition of the sovereign figure from a multitude of bodies held together by exuberant participation in the sovereign’s own self-aggrandizement, his own compulsively repetitive autodoxologies; the relay of gazes constituting the figure (the eyes of the subjects are raised toward the head of the sovereign while his gaze is turned toward the spectator— or perhaps better: the television camera); the strange combination of corpulence and artificiality. And indeed,

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the motto from the book of Job inscribed at the top of the image seemed to capture the American president’s obsession with rankings (Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei— There is no power on earth to be compared to him). And finally, the Trumped-up image would also have served to mark the mutation of the canonical treatise on the social contract theory of sovereign authority into something akin to the art of the deal, a treatise on sovereignty into a handbook of business and management. For some decades now, the global present has easily— perhaps too easily— been diagnosed as “neoliberal.” Too often, we feel, this diagnosis has smuggled in a kind of excarnation of the social, a forgetting of the flesh. To be sure, there has hardly been silence around “the body”— the body as the signifying surface of disciplinary power, the body as the evidentiary support for hegemonic agendas whose purpose and telos always lie elsewhere, and of course the body as irreducible site of resistance. Against the prevailing tendency to theorize the neoliberal moment as a time of administrative capture, as an era of increasingly watertight logic of governmentality, we consider bodies as sites of exceedingly laborious enjoyment, as localizations of the business— and busyness— of corporate jouissance. We apprehend the political present as an anxiously vital, and vitally corporeal, space of fantasy. The claim of these essays is that we have all, in one way or another, been drafted into the liturgical labor that animates this space and thereby sustains the effects of sovereignty in its new forms and configurations. Our title is also an affectionate nod to Jean and John Comaroff ’s Ethnicity, Inc. If the Comaroffs are concerned with the commodification of identity, then perhaps one could say that we are concerned with the commodification of sovereignty— if by that phrase one understands a perpetually tense and generatively unresolvable relation. Ours is the age of crowdsourcing and “prosumption”— the supposedly democratized reconciliation of production and consumption, of sovereignty and citizen-

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ship, that the distributed interactivity of the internet enables. No longer, we are told, must we accept the faceless authority of distant corporations and bureaucracies. Today, politicians as well as brands present themselves as always already “ours”— intimately solicitous, customizable, concerned only with the immaculate realization of our desires. In a time of immediation— the intensely mediated production of immediacy-effects— we appear finally to have overcome the besetting problem of liberal democracy: how to make the brand-sovereign fully present, fully responsive, and fully isomorphic with the agitated flesh of the multitude. Here the medium is not so much the message as a site of the burning jouissance of the brand. The fact that, in this scenario, fully alienated labor becomes hard to tell apart from fully integrated labor should be an early warning sign. Or at the very least, it ought to be a signal that we might need some new ways of making sense of the frantic motion in which we, today more than ever, find ourselves. We may decry the data-mining agenda that hovers behind every new life-enhancing app. We may quite legitimately continue to be concerned about the ever-tightening networks of surveillance and control that form the sober side of the cooing consumer come-ons which greet us at every step. But where in this scenario do we place the manifestly excessive gestures, the glorious gratuitousness, of our current crop of neopopulist leaders? And where in this neoliberal dream of seamless governmentality, of a perfectly harmonized society, do we place our own increasingly compulsive inability to rest? At one level, the three essays in this book are inquiries into the economization of fantasy: how libidinal investments can/ not be harnessed to projects of power and value. At another level, as the opening figure of the branded Leviathan suggests, these are also meditations on how, today, we are recruited, drafted into the production of glory. Bringing together Santner’s engagement with the carnal traces of magnificence in the headless body of the multitude, Schuster’s investigations into

4 introduCtion

the politics and productive perversities of enjoyment, and Mazzarella’s explorations of the vital energetics that connect ritual to branding, this TRIOS volume amounts to a sustained consideration of the in/vestments of a political present in which monarchical pomp returns as consumer product and participation in politics as the consumption of branded commodities (including “ethically responsible” brands). Responding, as each of these essays do, to an exceptionally Trumped-up moment, they all nevertheless suggest that the reign of The Donald is in no sense an aberration or an anomaly but rather a point of convergence of multiple historical tendencies. As the fleshy incarnation of a form of life in which social recognition has become brand recognition— to paraphrase Jacques Lacan, the brand represents the subject for other brands— Trump assumes the status of a kind of master-brand whose primary business is the compulsive activity of self-branding (where, as Santner suggests, the repetition compulsion becomes something like the compulsion to retweet). Whether one belongs to his “base” or not, one has the sense that everybody— and that also means the jouissance at the “base” of every body— has been enlisted in the collective dream-work that sustains this new sort of authoritarian charisma or mana, that we have all become willing participants in the mana-facturing process that keeps us riveted to this new and excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty. The essays in the pages that follow thereby intersect in many ways with recent investigations of what has been characterized as a global shift from material to immaterial labor. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have put it, “Images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships . . . are coming to outweigh material commodities or the material aspects of commodities in the valorization process.”1 As they emphasize, this in no way means that material labor has disappeared or is even in the process of disappearing, but rather that the production of immaterial values has come to color all other forms of production much as industrial labor had with respect to agriculture and small-scale manufacture in the nineteenth cen-

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tury, even though it represented only a small portion of what people actually did to earn a living. “Our claim,” they write, “is that immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself. . . . Just as in that phase [of the rise of industrial labor] all forms of labor and society itself had to industrialize, today labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective.”2 They further propose that immaterial labor is best characterized as biopolitical, “that is, labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself. The term biopolitical,” they continue, “thus indicates that the traditional distinctions between the economic, the political, the social, and the cultural become increasingly blurred.”3 The three essays collected here attempt to analyze this biopolitical blur less as immaterial labor than as liturgical labor. “Biopolitics,” we argue, needs to be grasped in its relation to the fundamental fantasies that help make multitudes governable. In his study of medieval and early modern political theology, The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz suggested that “the vision of the king as a persona geminata is ontological and, as an effluence of a sacramental and liturgical action performed at the altar, it is liturgical as well.”4 Our argument is that much of what has come under the heading of the biopolitical needs to be grasped in relation to the new locations and production processes of the sovereign’s sublime body, one made of, as Slavoj Žižek has put it, “a special, immaterial stuff.”5 It is the labor devoted to the production of that immaterial stuff that is of interest here. The title of this book, Sovereignty, Inc., suggests that the sublime substance of the sovereign has been reinvested and reincorporated under conditions of capitalist modernity. This means that capitalism is ultimately less concerned with efficient markets than with officiant ones, markets devoted to the production and circulation of the captivating substance of enjoyment, of enjoyment as a political factor. A particularly striking and prescient description of the as-

6 introduCtion

cendancy of the brand name, or the fateful crossing of brand and sovereignty, can be found in Philip K. Dick’s remarks on the German translation of his science fiction novel Ubik: If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying: I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence “I am the word.” That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity that made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself: I am the brand name. Had he translated the Gospel according to St. John, I suppose it would have come out as: When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.6

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In the beginning was— not the word but— the brand name? Could this be taken as the formula of the political-economic theology of our times? Does the brand become flesh not capture the incarnate dimension of capitalism as religion, the mystical body of the market? Might we trace a philosophical trajectory leading from (Greek) logos to (Trumpian) logo? If brands could speak, would they repeat the divine mystery and say “I am that I am”? In fact, in one of his most extensive discussions of the origin of the signifier and the function of proper names, Lacan refers to the primitive signifier as a “brand” (marque in French can mean both “mark” and “brand name or logo”).7 The new divine comedy of the ubiquitous (“Ubik”) consumer logo is revealed by the German translator’s error, in what Dick wonderfully calls “one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding”— like Lacan said, the truth emerges from a mistake. Incidentally, this notion of a lapse of truth fits the era of George W. Bush much better than that of Trump; recall the odd Bushisms where the bumbling president articulated the truth in spite of himself, such as “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” Trump’s approach to language, while equally maladroit, is quite different. If Bush occasionally lapsed into truth, Trump’s speech is not merely duplicitous— and it is surely that— but novel in how it positions itself beyond truth and falsehood; one might say, enjoyment trumps truth. When Trump boasted on the campaign trail that “I know words, I have the best words,” it was not till the mangled tweet of May 31, 2017, that we learned what one of these best words is: covfefe. The original tweet, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” was active on Trump’s account without comment or clarification until it was replaced the next morning with another: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’??? Enjoy!” Trump’s reaction to his Twitter typo presents a reverse Freudianism: instead of a slip one disavows since it points to a disturbing truth, it is a slip one proudly avows in order to affirm one’s mastery over sense and nonsense. There

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is no true meaning of covfefe except “Enjoy!” It is nothing other than a master signifier of sovereign babble, a fragment of what Lacan called lalangue, a (not so) wonderful lapse of enjoyment. But what is meant by enjoyment (jouissance)? Despite its usage and explication by psychoanalytically minded scholars and cultural critics, the concept itself nonetheless remains a difficult and slippery one— for Lacan as well, one might add, since he revised his understanding of enjoyment throughout his career as he elevated its importance in his conceptual machinery. One of the features of enjoyment is precisely its indirectness, the way that it is “along the paths that appear to be contrary to enjoyment that enjoyment is obtained,”8 thereby confounding supposedly rational expectations and interests. Yet another difficult aspect of enjoyment is that it is not simply reducible to feeling or affect, and especially not to what “feels good,” even as it designates a kind of vital spark, elation, or “effervescence” (Mazzarella’s Durkheimian term). Instead, it must be situated at a particular crossing point or threshold: it names the precarious meeting of the symbolic and the somatic, logos and eros, language and the body, which remain out of joint even as they are inseparably joined together (we should add to this the jointure of the individual and the collective, the subject and the Other, and the sexual “nonrelation”). It is highly significant, as Schuster demonstrates, that Lacan’s first rigorous conceptual determination of enjoyment takes place in his reading of Jean Genet’s The Balcony, one of the great political comedies of the twentieth century— and a piece whose “political whorehouse” and failed revolution appear more relevant today than ever. How the subject (unconsciously) finds a way to inhabit a symbolic order in which it is necessarily alienated, how it lives and unlives this alienation in and through its fantasmatic investments and bodily drives— this is what is at stake in enjoyment. As with Lacan’s interpretation of The Balcony, enjoyment must be understood from its symptomatic formations and concrete expressions, its surprising disturbances and wayward

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lapses. The essays in this volume explore the terrain of politics and enjoyment through different means: an analysis of the libidinal appeal of Trumpian politics starting from a curious detail, namely how Trump’s name itself became a slur, an insult, a racially and sexually charged provocation— something like a real-life version of what happens in David Lynch’s Dune, when the name of the messiah becomes a “killing word,” whose very enunciation does physical damage (Mazzarella); an inquiry into how the economy became our modern Thing (das Ding, la Chose), the site of everyday psychotheology and ritual observance, dealing in particular with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of glory and his attempt to think another noneconomic use of bodies (Santner); and a turn to the theater in order to better understand our highly theatricalized (and social-mediatized) times, where the standard Marxian formula “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” finds itself reversed: what first appears as a ridiculous and inconsequential farce ends up as a deadly serious tragedy with devastating consequences. How can comedy address the derisory comedy that is contemporary reality, the obscene self-satire of sovereignty (Schuster)? We are convinced that only such a multifaceted approach can capture the troublesome complexity of enjoyment and its explosive ramifications. Hence the breadth of our references, moving from philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, anthropology, literature, and aesthetics to historical and political actuality. And after all, is this not what the TRIOS brand represents? 2

Eric Santner’s essay develops further his recent efforts to track the emergence of modern political economy from the “royal remains” of political theology, now extending that genealogy to neoliberal forms of governance and their culmination in the “rebranding of sovereignty” in the age of Trump. The essay makes use of two key terms that the European human sciences

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appropriated from the cultures of its colonial empires, fetish and mana. Santner argues that the current neoliberal configuration of political authority can best be understood by taking both concepts into consideration. Teaching a seminar with Schuster on neoliberal formations of subjectivity and one with Mazzarella on the theory of crowds and what he calls the “mana of mass society” were crucial to the development of the argument. Thinking back to our (imagined) modified frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the essay concerns itself with the nature of the work all those bodies are doing qua “economic base” of the new sovereign’s authority, the nature of the business model— or busyness model— of Sovereignty, Inc. As Santner notes in his essay, Marx’s first encounter with the concept of the fetish most likely goes back to his readings in the early 1840s in the history of religion. First coined in the context of Portuguese colonial exploits in Africa, the word had by then already become familiar in Europe and referred to cult objects fabricated by so-called primitive peoples to be containers of divine or magical forces. With his own famous coinage, “commodity fetishism,” Marx wanted to point to the ways in which capitalism functioned as a quasi-religious cult, indeed as a modern form of idol worship, in which objects manufactured for the market— commodities— were effectively invested with magical forces that came to dominate those who made them. Marx’s version of the labor theory of value was meant to clarify how people were effectively turned into lay priests or “officiants” of a cult devoted to one thing only, the self-valorization of Value, die Selbstverwertung des Werts (with this locution, Marx was underlining the driven, quasi-autonomous nature of the valorization process, the fact that there must always be more of it; and, as we know, this cult is now effectively practiced 24/7). Before Max Weber linked the spirit of capitalism, that is, the spirit of a certain kind of materialism, to the Protestant Ethic, Marx had already seen that capitalism was a “doxological practice,” one in which the Christian’s devotion to the amplification

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of God’s glory— God’s doxa— in the world had been transformed into the service of the infinite (in principle) self-appreciation of Value. At the core of Marx’s argument is the claim that the commodity form, the form that allows all things to be directly exchangeable for the general equivalent of Value, money, effectively homogenizes human labor, renders it into so many forms of service to the cult of Value, to the production of the sublime substance— Marx called it gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit, spectral materiality— that in turn comes to dominate those devoted to its making. Over the course of the nineteenth century, another crucial concept imported from the colonies was introduced into the European social sciences, that of mana (not to be confused with the biblical manna from heaven). As Robert Codrington, the missionary and ethnologist credited with introducing this Melanesian word into European discourse, put it, “The Melanesian mind is entirely possessed by the belief in a supernatural power or influence, called almost universally mana. This is what works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature; it is present in the atmosphere of life, attaches itself to persons or things, and is manifested by results which can only be ascribed to its operation.”9 Bringing these two terms together, Santner argues that Marx’s fundamental insight was that capitalism was, in effect, a manatheistic cult, one in which the manufacture of objects of use— in Marx’s terms, the production of use-values— was always redoubled by the activity of mana-facture, the production of the gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit of Value proper, the magical stuff that ultimately dominates the lives of its officiant producers. Marx’s claim was, then, that political economy— and this includes contemporary neoliberal economic theory— is never really the study of efficient markets but rather that of officiant markets. So when Marx, alluding to the words of Christ on the cross, suggests that “they know not what they do,” the claim is, paradoxically, that people are far more religious than they

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know or believe, that they are officiants in a manatheistic cult performing a perverse sort of liturgical labor. Santner further argues that this manatheistic aspect of our lives comes most clearly to the fore in the current preoccupation with brands. Branding is, he argues, a postmodern sort of alchemy, the attempt to isolate and produce the spectral stuff of Value in its absolute purity (one might think of Walter White, the crack chemist of Breaking Bad). We should thus, Santner suggests, not be so surprised that the present incumbent of the office of President of the United States is himself the most radical— the most officiant, most mana-ical— member of a quasi-religious form of life dedicated to the praise of a brand name (his own), or perhaps better: the incarnation of the self-valorization of Value as living, breathing brand name. William Mazzarella’s essay starts from the enigmatic status of Trump-as-name: at once a weapon to be brandished and a brand to be weaponized. What does it mean that Trump is the first president who was already a consumer brand at the time of his election? What is the relation between Trump as political brand— the insignia of sovereignty— and Trump as consumer brand? Mazzarella argues that it is precisely in the face of these questions that we must avoid falling back on well-worn laments about the corruption of politics by marketing. Could it be, he asks, that it is in fact the all-too-easy figuring of branding and marketing as totalizing processes that allows us to hold on to an equally questionable ideal of the political as a sublime space of possibility? How would we need to navigate our received understandings of politics and commerce to avoid the complementary clichés that often inform critical theory: on the one hand, the despairing diagnosis of a fully administered society and, on the other hand, the romantic determination to find spaces of resistance that remain untainted by the ambitions of commercial and political planners? Mazzarella finds an opening in the terrain that would at first appear to be an obstacle: the obscene enjoyments that seem to

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have corrupted our politics, polluted our public spheres, and upended all sense of moral proportion and personal accountability. By digging into the apparently unprecedented immunity that a figure like Trump seems to enjoy from catastrophes that would long since have destroyed any other public figure, Mazzarella suggests— like Santner and Schuster— that the current political moment is not so much exceptional as it is exceptionally revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy that has always been a sine qua non of our fascinated addressability by the social orders in which we participate. Taking seriously this constitutive tension, this irreducible yet infinitely compelling gap between enjoyment and economy means accepting that authority is always founded on a fundamental indeterminacy, an indeterminacy that drives the frantic busyness, the hectic hole-filling of what Santner in his essay calls liturgical labor. Our reliably fruitless commitments to “filling the gap,” our work to sustain our Wirklichkeit, is at once what keeps the system going and what makes it unstable. This tension becomes explicit in the figure of Trump as the Branded President— or, as Schuster has it, “the sovereignty experience.” The work of branding— both the labor of marketing and the collective effort of what Santner calls “officiancy”— discloses, in an unusually direct way, the impossible yet indispensable economization of enjoyment that infuses all auratic projects of social authority, whether commercial or political. The current “crisis of neoliberalism”— a crisis that, paradoxically, appears as both the end and the very apotheosis of the neoliberal— is no different. What we are seeing today, Mazzarella suggests, is the spectacular explosion of the historically particular fantasy that sustained the neoliberal attempt to economize enjoyment: namely, the enjoyment of economy. Can there still be political comedy when politics has itself become an unsurpassable comedy, a self-satire to beat all satires? In a 1990 Playboy interview, a brash real estate developer announced, “The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold- out perfor-

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mances everywhere. I’ve had fun doing it and will continue to have fun, and I think most people enjoy it.”10 In his essay, Aaron Schuster takes up the question of the theatricality of politics— the mixture of spectacle and statecraft that has always been a feature of political life, now given a new spin by the Trumpian merger of brand name, reality show, and sovereignty— by turning to the work of one of the most challenging twentiethcentury playwrights, an artist whose audacity, outrageousness, and poetic genius are up to the level of the present vaudeville: Jean Genet. The Balcony takes place almost entirely inside a fancy brothel, whose clients come to impersonate figures of authority, all while a revolution is raging outside. At the center of the play’s burlesque metatheater of power is the Chief of Police, who yearns to become not so much the leader as the living logo of the state, the self-proclaimed Phallus-inChief. After an attempt to castrate him (or rather, his image), the Chief of Police defiantly declares that “I am still intact”— coincidentally, exactly what the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson replied when asked about his “castration”-by-tweet by President Trump. The leftist revolution fails, and in the end the state is subsumed by the brothel itself; in other words, all the world’s a whorehouse. Beyond the uncanny parallels between Genet’s play, written in the mid-1950s, and the vicissitudes of contemporary politics, The Balcony traces a momentous shift in the logic of modern power and the subject’s relationship to authority. Genet’s theater provides a means of addressing the politics of enjoyment and the enjoyment of politics, and Schuster shows how Lacan’s interpretation of The Balcony in seminar 5 is in fact central to his conceptualization of jouissance. For Lacan, the symbolic order not only designates the signifying structure governing human relations— thereby displacing the usual reference to self-consciousness and self-experience, to how things seem and feel to the ego— but must equally be understood as a masturbation machine. The symbolic order is a machine that

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generates a fantasmatic surplus enjoyment that both supports this order while also spinning off in its own unmanageable and unpredictable direction. The Balcony can be read as articulating an original phenomenology of enjoyment, or more precisely, a phenomenology of sovereign enjoyment, the jouissance that clings to and gravitates around symbolic offices and roles. Genet’s brothel is, quite literally, a “sovereignty corporation,” in the business of generating and commodifying mana, the aura or élan of power. Taking up Lucien Goldmann’s sociological reading of the play as an allegory of the historical transformations that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century concerning the relationship between political and economic power and the shifting centers of power and prestige, Schuster uses The Balcony as a jumping-off point to more broadly interrogate the intersection between sovereignty and economy, linking Genet’s play to other significant political comedies and films addressing the paradoxes of authority. Together with The Balcony, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be and J. G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” pose the problem of satire and its traps, helping frame what is at stake in the “political comedy of the present.” Another story of high-class prostitutes, the Soviet blockbuster Interdevochka, introduces a discussion of the brand name as the capitalist emblem par excellence and a new shape of the master signifier. Complicating the doxa regarding the modern crisis of authority, the films Office Space (dir. Mike Judge), The Boss of It All (dir. Lars Von Trier), and Nightcrawler (dir. Dan Gilroy) show how authority thrives in its decline and breakdown, profiting from its “crisis” to invent new ways of ensnaring the subject. Finally, not only does The Balcony provide an arresting depiction of impostor sovereigns and playacting masters, it also has something to say about the willing slave. A consideration of the portrayal of labor in the play leads to an extended existentialontological elaboration of the boss’s slogan (and reality show catchphrase) “You’re fired!” as the negative interpellation of our

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times, where the assumption of precarity goes together with the state of being always already fired. 3

Only in small measure is this a book on Trump, Trumpism, or Trumpishness. Trump is merely the most recent occasion to return, once again, to the constitutively untimely (in the Nietzschean sense) and uncanny problem of sovereignty. Leading up to 9/11 and in its aftermath, the investigation of sovereignty focused largely on the relationship between the politics of war and the logic of the exception. More recently, however, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, philosophical discussions of sovereignty have focused on the complex relationship between sovereign power and capitalism (this shift is manifest perhaps most forcefully in the work of Giorgio Agamben, who was largely responsible for the recent preoccupation in political theory with the concept of the state of exception in the wake of 9/11). By taking as its impetus the election of a president with a brand in place of a name, this TRIOS volume situates itself squarely within and offers a decisive inflection to debates concerning this reorganization of political and economic power and authority. Put somewhat differently, our book is not so much an analysis of the Trump phenomenon as it is a series of reflections aimed to foster a better understanding of the history of the present, of the broader social, political, cultural, and economic developments that helped create the conditions of possibility for this phenomenon. We understand these conditions as a new configuration of political and social authority, sites and modes of labor, and individual and collective fantasy. In other words, we are interested in the kinds of work— including various ways of getting “worked up”— sustaining the fantasy frame that allows the Trump brand to enjoy and exercise its clearly compelling power and authority. Such an exercise includes the open brandishing of often extravagant falsehoods, rumors, and conspiracy theories.

William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster

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We push back on the commonplace assumption that a branded politics is a fully economized, completely instrumentalized politics. On the contrary, the brand’s mobilization of enjoyment pushes it beyond economic reckoning, even as the brandform has become increasingly definitive of our contemporary political economy, and even as markets attempt, quixotically, to put a number on “brand equity”— a reified distillate of collective liturgical labor. At the same time, our political moment suggests an opening to a different kind of ethics. If we are now being forced to confront that which lies beyond economy in our public and collective life, then this is also an opportunity to question the impatient impulse to retrieve political agency— an impulse that, on the left as well as on the right, remains mired in a debilitating attachment to moralized utility. We are not suggesting that the neoliberal commandment to assume active responsibility for managing and maximizing our human capital has, in any straightforward sense, colonized our liberal political interpellation as citizens. But we are suggesting that when it comes to current configurations of sovereignty, the relation between political economy and the economy of politics needs to be reconsidered under the extra-economic sign of enjoyment. Whether to warn against or to celebrate it, commentators on the left and the right are united in the view that the “normal” framework of politics is shifting. At such a moment, it is essential not only to grasp the novelty of these changes but, even more important, to consider the presuppositions of this so-called normality. The problem today, we are arguing, lies not so much in normalizing Trump but in normalizing normality. It is in the spirit of resisting this normalization that we dedicate the analyses of this book.

notes

1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 132.

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2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 109; emphasis in the original. 3. Hardt and Negri, 109. 4. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 59. 5. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 255. 6. Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Vintage, 1995), 277–78. 7. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar IX: L’identification, session of December 20, 1961 (unpublished), 37–42 in the Staferla edition: http:// staferla.free.fr/S9/S9%20L’IDENTIFICATION.pdf. 8. Lacan, Seminar IX: L’identification, session of March 14, 1962 (unpublished), translated from p. 91 in the Staferla edition. 9. Cited in Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 221. 10. Glenn Plaskin, “Interview with Donald Trump,” Playboy, March 1990, 57.

THE REBRANDING OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE AGE OF TRUMP toWard a CrItIque of manatheIsm

Eric L. Santner 1

I’d like to begin these reflections by way of an observation regarding a recent series of debates at my home institution, the University of Chicago. The occasions of the debates were varied. One concerned budgetary priorities in the wake of drastic budget cuts imposed by the board of trustees; another concerned the university’s public stance on different dimensions of controversies surrounding free speech at academic institutions; yet another concerned the prospect of establishing an undergraduate major in business economics. What I found especially striking in these and other debates concerned with what might be called the university’s official values was how often their ultimate stakes and subject matter came to be characterized as pertaining to the nature of the Chicago “brand.” With respect to the proposed business economics major, the debate became uncannily self-referential: what would be the future of the Chicago brand were the university to add classes on branding to the undergraduate curriculum of what is still largely understood as a liberal arts institution? At least for me, it came to seem more

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than fortuitous that the provost, who was often at the center of these debates, had established his own considerable reputation as a scholar with a study of reputation management.1 I bring up this observation not to open a broad discussion about the current transformation of the university under the pressures of “neoliberal reason”— one might venture to say that all American colleges and universities are becoming institutions of neoliberal arts education— but rather to underline one aspect of the pressure exerted by this new Umwertung der Werte, this revaluation of values, namely the pressure to think in terms of branding. Why had this language become a kind of second nature? 2

As suggested, the pressure to think of institutions, corporate bodies, even individuals in terms of “brands” is part of that broader series of transformations of economic rationality that have been taking place over the last several decades and that we have come to group together under the heading of neoliberalism. In her book on what she sees as the triumph of a new sort of homo oeconomicus over a homo politicus still attentive to the politically liberal values of sovereignty and moral autonomy and questions of rights and justice, Wendy Brown follows Michel Foucault in, as she puts it, “conceiving neoliberalism as an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life.”2 “Neoliberal rationality,” she continues, “disseminates the model of the market to all domains of activities— even where money is not the issue— and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.”3 Although differing in some ways from the picture of this new regime presented some years ago by Michel Feher, she more or less follows the tracks of his essay on “the aspirations of human capital,” nicely summarized in the abstract to its English translation:

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Human capital is to neoliberalism what Marx’s free worker was to liberal capitalism, that is, the subjective formation at once presupposed and targeted by neoliberal technologies of government. According to this thesis, the neoliberal condition involves investors in their own human capital who, as such, seek to appreciate the value of the portfolio of conducts that constitutes them and whose relationship to themselves is speculative rather than possessive— as was the case of their liberal predecessors.4

Commenting specifically on Feher, Brown unpacks the meaning of the main title of his essay, “Self- Appreciation,” in terms that lead us back to my opening remarks: “Whether through social media ‘followers,’ ‘likes,’ and ‘retweets,’ through rankings and ratings for every activity and domain, or more directly monetized practices, the pursuit of education, training, leisure, reproduction, consumption, and more are increasingly configured as strategic decisions and practices related to enhancing the self ’s future value.”5 Brand is the concept that names the ultimate locus of such value, what appreciates or depreciates— what is appreciated or unappreciated— in the market of competing self-investing human capitals. To return to the title of Daniel Diermeier’s book, brand is what reputation becomes once it has been transformed into an enterprise’s most valuable asset, once it becomes the true locus of the “sublime object” that, beyond the practical use-values involved, captures the desire and secures the faith of the consumer or client. This transformation demands, however, that we consider the nature of the labor devoted to the production of that most valuable asset which would include of course the role played by the “mad men” of advertising. I will be arguing that it is a certain sort of devotional activity, a certain sort of liturgical labor. Some of the developments we have been tracking here were presciently adumbrated by Georg Simmel in his deservedly famous essay from 1903, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” There Simmel characterizes modernity as the staggered emergence of new forms of both homo politicus and homo oeconomicus:

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The eighteenth century found the individual in the grip of powerful bonds which had become meaningless— bonds of a political, agrarian, guild and religious nature— delimitations which imposed upon the human being at the same time an unnatural form and for a long time an unjust inequality. In this situation arose the cry for freedom and equality— the belief in the full freedom of movement of the individual in all his social and intellectual relationships which would then permit the same noble essence to emerge equally from all individuals as Nature had placed it in them and as it had been distorted by social life and historical developments. Alongside this liberalistic ideal there grew up in the nineteenth century from Goethe and the Romantics, on the one hand, and from the economic division of labor on the other, the further tendency, namely, that individuals who had been liberated from their historical bonds sought now to distinguish themselves from one another. No longer was it the “general human quality” in every individual but rather his qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability that now became the criteria of his value.6

As the main title of her book indicates— Undoing the Demos— Brown argues that under the pressures of neoliberalism, the old liberal ideal of homo politicus doesn’t have much of a chance. No doubt one of the central questions of our day is whether these are the only games in town, especially now that various populisms, the most successful of which have come from the Right rather than from the Left (if those directions still provide any orientation), at least claim to offer new alternatives, alternatives that have typically depended on what I want to call a rebranding of national sovereignty. It was as if an older form of nationalism and the most advanced mode of capitalism had combined to form a new sort of hybrid entity. Here one might recall that Theresa May, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, at one point attempted to brand the Brexit as the emergence of a new “Global Britain.” The irony here is that it was as if May were say-

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ing that should Britain compromise on its national sovereignty, it would do so after its own fashion via more direct subjection to the exigencies of the global market by assuming the form of a brand (this irony seems to follow the logic of the death drive as elaborated by Freud: every organism is driven to die in its own way). If the United Kingdom could no longer be an empire, it could recast itself as a leading global brand commanding if not political then at least brand loyalty. The concerns raised by Brown suggest that brand loyalties of one form or another have come to constitute the primary social and political bonds of homo oeconomicus. This particular irony— among others— has been explored in considerable detail by John and Jean Comaroff in their book Ethnicity, Inc., a study of the mutations of national, cultural, and ethnic identity under conditions of neoliberalism, of the emergence of what they call “ethno-preneurship” and “ethno-prise.”7 They begin their study with a series of vignettes displaying the basic pattern whereby a kind of self-sovereignty is asserted in the form of a national or ethnic brand capable of competing in a new kind of global economy. One of the documents they cite is taken from a web page of an association promoting the self-determination of the French region of Catalogne-Nord; it includes the following text: “The ‘identity’ economy signifies a return to the formerly popular products which were abandoned in the 20th Century. . . . The rediscovery of the natural potentials of the land, the advantage of ancestral experience and the added value of ‘identity’ as a synonym of quality represents a welcome possibility in a region missing a productive economy. . . . The ‘identity’ economy . . . induces an obvious closeness [among Catalonians]” (2). This reification of identity produced within the framework of a new, neoliberal “identity economy” in which individual self-investing human capitals— the basic economic unit in neoliberalism— are, as it were, collectivized would appear to produce, in its turn, “a new sensibility, an explicitly new awareness of [identity’s] essence, its affective

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material, and expressive potential.” In this particular case, the Comaroffs continue, “North Catalonian ethnicity is both commodified, made into the basis of value-added corporate collectivity, and claimed as the basis of shared emotion, shared lifestyle, shared imaginings for the future” (2; emphasis in the original). We might say that under the regime of Ethnicity, Inc., one is not so much fatefully branded with an identity (by way of various processes of cultural inscription) as identified with a brand as the locus of a distinctive and distinguishing surplus value endowed with, and indeed fatefully compelled to actualize, a capacity for further valorization. 3

These formulations take us, at least in my reading of it, into the heart of Marx’s labor theory of value. Marx grasps the commodity as an amalgam of distinctive dimensions or modes of being: one concrete, one virtual, one laboriously manufactured out of raw materials ultimately taken from nature, one economically distilled— we might say “manufractured”— by separating out from the product of useful labor a distinct and subtle subject-matter, a sort of abstract materiality.8 The production or “manufracturing” process that yields this rarefied substance is, as Marx argues, performed by the social form that the products of useful labor are compelled to assume in capitalism. The true object of his critique of political economy is the misleading notion of wealth as measured by quantities of useful commodities. “The use-values of commodities,” he writes, “provide the material for a special branch of knowledge, namely the commercial knowledge of commodities [Warenkunde]. Use-values are only realized [verwirklicht] in use or in consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society considered here they are also material bearers of— exchange-value.”9 More precisely, they are bearers of a virtually real substance— Value— the necessary form

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of appearance of which is exchange-value (it exists, in other words, only insofar as it appears in this form). Marx considers his great discovery to concern the nature of the “value-forming substance” (wertbildende Substanz) and its modes of extraction and production— what I have referred to as its distillation or “manufracturing” process. In one of the most striking passages of the first volume of Capital, he turns to the peculiar material remains of products of labor once we cease to concern ourselves with, once we have— or rather, once the commodity form has— abstracted from, their various concrete use-values, that is, the mere wealth they constitute: Let us now look at the residue of the products of labor. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same spectral materiality [gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit]; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labor [Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit], i.e. of human labor-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us that human labor-power has been expended to produce them, human labor is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values, commodity values [Warenwerte]. (128)

When Marx turns from the analysis of the commodity form and of money as the general equivalent of Value to the general formula of capital, he emphasizes that the process whereby Value appreciates— the production of surplus value— transforms human beings into instruments or, perhaps better, into officiants, of a kind of autodoxological machine, a machine, that is, of self-appreciation, self-glorification, self-valorization. (A doxology is, one will recall, a liturgical formula in praise to God. One thinks, for example, of the Gloria in excelsis Deo, also called the Greater Doxology, a hymn that begins with the words the angels sang when the birth of Christ was announced to shepherds in Luke 2:14.) It’s worth citing this famous passage at length:

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The independent form, i.e. the monetary form, which the value of commodities assumes in simple circulation, does nothing but mediate the exchange of commodities, and it vanishes in the final result of the movement. [At this point, that is, Value does not yet function as a medium of social relations, does not incarnate a social substance— ELS.] On the other hand, in the circulation M-C-M both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value [der sich verwertende Wert] in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value [sich als Mehrwert von sich selbst als usprünglichem Wert abstößt], and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore selfvalorization [seine Verwertung also Selbstverwertung]. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs. (168– 69; my emphasis)

We should note in passing that the verb Marx uses here, abstossen, also belongs to the semantic field of disgust. Self-appreciation would thus seem to live near self-disgust, a proximity registered in the long history of linking money to the base materiality of excrement. Surplus value is grundsätzlich bodensätzlich, composed at its base or ground of grounds, of what is in excess of and removed from the sphere of human use and “alchemically” transformed into splendor, that is, not so much into gold as into what makes gold gold.10

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If the recent analyses of neoliberalism I’ve cited are correct, then one might say that their fundamental thesis comes down to positing an extensive reorganization of the work we are called on to perform in the service of Value’s self-appreciation. I’ve followed Marx’s lead in emphasizing the theological dimension of this process, the deep historical background of which has been explored in painstaking detail by Giorgio Agamben in his recent contributions to the semantic history of the notion of oikonomia (above all in patristic literature).11 And indeed, Marx himself summarizes the general formula of capital in the terms of a divine economy of self-glorification (of the Father through the Son): “It [Value] differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person; for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and as soon as this has happened, as soon as the son has been created and, through the son, the father, their difference vanishes again and both become one, £110.”12 In a word, value-producing labor— this is what Marx characterizes as abstract, homogeneous human labor— figures as the living, instrumental cause— as the officiant cause— of Value’s own self-valorization (self-appreciation), just as the liturgical labor of the faithful— above all, the cultic performance of praise, of doxologies— serves the process of God’s own selfglorification.13 Here we might recall the Jesuitical formula that became so important to Max Weber’s understanding of the doxological spirit of capitalism. In the context of the Protestant Ethic analyzed by Weber, labor in a calling is always performed ad majorem Dei gloriam; one’s true Arbeitsberufung ultimately concerns the amplification and dissemination of God’s own Ruf, or reputation, the glorification— we might say the everappreciating appraisal— of God’s name. I would suggest, then, that our ongoing transformation from free laborers to selfinvesting, self-appreciating human capitals might be thought of as a new sectarian split, perhaps a new reformation correlated

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with a new spirit of capitalism, one that intensifies the individual’s responsibility for responding to the call for what might be characterized as liturgical work on the self, work that ultimately transforms the self into a brand. And indeed, failure to perform such work raises the specter not only of ill-repute but of a sort of excommunication, of total abandonment by the community of the faithful (my weakness for puns tempts me to abbreviate the sequence as one of abrandonment). I’d like at this point to note a peculiar resonance between Weber’s characterization of the spirit of capitalism and Freud’s understanding of the drives. For Weber, Protestantism transforms work into a liturgical vocation, a labor performed for the greater glory of God; that’s the doxological sense of the Arbeitsberufung, the labor in a calling, at issue. Freud’s first major work on the drives, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, appeared in 1905, the same year as the publication of Weber’s treatise. In an emendation added some ten years after its initial publication, Freud explicitly characterizes the drives as a demand for a work, as an Arbeitsanforderung understood, in its turn, as the “psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation.”14 The drives are, we might say, the body’s way of “re-minding” itself to get busy in response to pressures emanating from within, to discharge or work off a surplus, a certain too-muchness creating both small and large states of emergency for the otherwise homeostatic state of the organism. Freud’s formulation of the task to be discharged resonates not only with Weber’s thought but also with Marx’s notion of abstract, homogeneous human labor. For Marx, as we have seen, this labor is charged with discharging a continuously flowing source of stimulation emanating from capital, from Value’s own immanent drive to self-valorization. As Freud puts it, “Trieb is thus one of those concepts marking off the frontier between the mental and the physical [Trieb ist so einer der Begriffe der Abgrenzung des Seelischen vom Körperlichen]. The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of the drives would seem to be that in them-

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selves they are without quality . . . and are only to be regarded as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work [daß sie an sich keine Qualität besitzen, sondern nur als Maße von Arbeitsanforderung für das Seelenleben in Betracht kommen].”15 My argument here is part of a larger effort to demonstrate the belonging together of these three conceptualizations of the nature of work in capitalist modernity. 4

Against this background, rather than negating the significance of Marx’s labor theory of value, the emergence of brands over the last decades as what many consider to be, to use Daniel Dier meier’s phrase, a company’s most valuable asset instead represents its full confirmation.16 The brand just is the most concentrated site of the congealed doxological labor that Marx identified as the spectral materiality of Value, of the surplus or “more” we come to possess— or, perhaps better, participate in— when we choose a brand-name product. The task is to develop a better feel for the modes and sites of its production, how it functions in contemporary societies, how the citizen-subjects of contemporary societies increasingly come to enjoy social recognition by responding in the relevant ways to the calls, the interpellations issued by brands. Naomi Klein has gone a long way in helping us orient ourselves in this new dispensation of capitalism. In her pathbreaking book, No Logo, first published in 2000, she presents in great and pungent detail the history of the trend in the corporate world to see the brand as the real locus of the value of the commodity.17 In the book, she cites a number of corporate executives who proudly and, I would suggest, devoutly announce what seems to be a new revelation of the name, the glad tidings that the brand name functions no longer as the guarantee of the quality or reliability of the product but as the site of its splendor. In the shift from merely advertising a product

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to producing a brand, the latter, as Klein puts it, “acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. Advertising is about hawking a product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence” (21). Nike CEO Phil Knight— a key figure in Klein’s study and one of the great apostles of branding— characterizes this revelation as a true conversion experience: “For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing-tool” (cited in Klein, 22). To shift the register of religious discourse for a moment, we might say that brand comes more and more to function as a sort of totemic name that authorizes, or better, sponsors, the lives and kinship relations of a particular clan of consumers. In a word, life is lived increasingly as sponsored life, one organized around a series of signifiers— brand names— saturated with enjoyment. This carnal dimension is of course already contained in the word brand understood as a mark burned into the flesh. Following Klein’s lead, Noam Yuran, in a recent book that tries to supplement some of the canonical sociological work on money (Weber, Simmel, Veblen) with a fleshed-out theory of desire, argues that insofar as brand names have themselves become the crucial bearers of surplus value— that “more” that we are willing to pay when we purchase a brand-name commodity— we must rethink the analysis of value production first proposed by Marx.18 More specifically, the ascendancy of the brand to the status of an enterprise’s most valuable asset leads to a blurring of the boundaries between production and consumption. “The surplus value associated with brand names can be traced by asking exactly how and where they are produced” (158). Because the names are symbolic entities, their production does not take place in the factories where the com-

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modities bearing the names are produced, factories now typically located in low-wage countries like China, Bangladesh, and El Salvador. Such products serve— this was Phil Knight’s great revelation— merely as material supports for the name. We need, rather, to grasp consumption itself as a crucial part of the production process of the surplus value borne by the brand. Brands are invested with meaning by their consumers insofar as consumers are in turn “vested,” in turn sponsored by the brands they choose. “In this sense, brand names represent a sort of pure surplus value, folded into the thing itself [as we shall see, one might better say mana-folded— ELS]. In industrial capitalism, surplus value is spread through the system of production. It is theoretically detected in the difference between what a laborer produces and what he is paid. . . . In the case of brands, surplus value is what constitutes the economic object itself. The object becomes what it is through the unpaid consumption work invested in it” (158–59; my emphasis). Yuran rethinks advertising along the same lines. Following the lead of Guy Debord and Sut Jhally, among others, he argues that watching advertisements, say, commercials on television— a fundamental aspect of the “society of the spectacle”— is a form of value-producing labor. “Advertising, in this view, should not be thought of in terms of persuasion . . . but as a form of production. It is where images related to brands become public and where the brand is actually produced” (160; my emphasis). And borrowing from Thorstein Veblen’s writings on the economy of religious expenditure, Yuran argues that “just like the members and workers of the aristocratic household consume not for their own comfort but to display the wealth and power of the head of the household, worshipers consume for the grandeur of their divinity. This is precisely our situation vis-à-vis television consumer discourse. It presents more luxurious pleasures than our own. Our consumption, in this context, is devout vicarious consumption” (165; my emphasis). Taking the example of Apple, Yuran notes that “because its products succeeded in becoming

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very personal matters for its users, objects that reflect their user’s identities,” it was able to “extract . . . a form of devotion” from them (167; my emphasis). As I have suggested, such insights ultimately confirm and, indeed, endow with new urgency what I take to be the crucial insight of Marx’s labor theory of value, namely that the substance of Value, its gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit, is ultimately congealed doxological labor, labor performed in the service of the self-valorization of Value.19 These reflections on brand names furthermore suggest that this truth about the nature of Value hides in plain sight, precisely insofar as its substance becomes ever more refined, becomes the subtle matter that fills the air of everyday life and converts even the most humdrum activities into a kind of liturgical labor that can no longer be characterized as “worldly asceticism.” To use Émile Durkheim’s evocative term, they become the site of a collective effervescence, the excitations of which— now ingathered by various brand names— produce a sort of hyperexcitation, a manic busyness that now goes on 24/7. In this context, I must admit that it’s hard to hear the words “collective effervescence” and not think that it is part of an ad campaign for some new, locally sourced carbonated beverage.20 5

In his monumental study The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim himself suggested that in modern secular society, the boundaries between the sacred and the profane— ultimately different forms and functions of collective effervescence— had largely blurred. Comparing the life of the Australian societies central to his study with those of modern Europeans, he writes that “the pious life of the Australian moves between successive phases— one of utter colorlessness, one of hyperexcitement— and social life oscillates to the same rhythm. This brings out the link between the two phases. Among the peoples called civilized,

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on the other hand, the relative continuity between them partially masks their interrelations.”21 This is also, I think, what Walter Benjamin had in mind when, in his early fragment, “Capitalism as Religion,” he tried to radicalize Max Weber’s account of the spirit of capitalism. There he characterizes capitalism as a sort of remorseless cultic activity, one in which “there are no ‘weekdays.’ There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshiper.”22 The cult goes on 24/7. I will return to Benjamin’s argument, along with its Kafkaesque “background noise,” the constant hum of the busy bodies that populate Franz Kafka’s fiction, later in the discussion. As the reference to Durkheim (and to totemism, one of his primary objects of study) reminds us, in the years before Benjamin’s profane revelation as to the religious nature of advanced capitalism, a number of European social scientists were themselves getting busy gathering and codifying knowledge of so-called primitive societies, societies still organized around rituals and practices deemed both religious and magical. The term that came to function as the general concept for the fundamental forces at work in these practices, for what was efficacious in them, was the Melanesian word mana, introduced into European ethnographic discourse by the missionary and ethnologist Robert Codrington. Indeed, in his recent book, The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella characterizes the years 1870 to 1920 as the “mana moment” in the social sciences in Western Europe.23 As Codrington explains the term in his 1891 study of Melanesian folklore and culture, “The Melanesian mind is entirely possessed by the belief in a supernatural power or influence, called almost universally mana. This is what works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature; it is present in the atmosphere of life, attaches itself to persons or things, and is manifested by results which can only be ascribed to its operation.”24 In his General Theory of Magic, Durkheim’s nephew, Marcel

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Mauss, uses the term to identify the “active ingredient” of both religious and magical practices. Much like for Codrington, mana functions here as a sort of enigmatic signifier that names the force or power that endows persons, things, and practices with their particular value and prestige (prestige, we should note, derives from the Latin word for conjuring tricks). “This extraneous substance,” Mauss writes, “is invisible, marvelous, spiritual— in fact, it is the spirit which contains all efficacy and all life. . . . It is only supernatural ‘in a way,’ that is to say, that mana is both supernatural and natural, since it is spread throughout the tangible world where it is both heterogeneous and ever immanent.”25 Mana is something like a surplus of immanence generated by social life, the binding and symbolization of which— the production of socially binding, “transcendent” representations— serves to give structure and form to that surplus, allows it to be authoritatively managed and administered, to be further “invested” in people and things, thereby endowing them with a recognizable dignitas. The capacity to enjoy recognition— not contingently by this person or that person but “officially,” by the “big Other” of society and tradition— is, we might say, itself sustained by a sort of mana-ical enjoyment. Durkheim’s own reflections on mana (along with what he takes to be comparable forces in other cultures, such as waken for the Sioux and orenda for the Iroquois) follow the same general lines. He characterizes it as an anonymous, diffuse, and impersonal force that comes to be figured by way of totemic images and insignia, which thereby acquire (and further endow or relay) power and authority. For Durkheim there exists, in some sense, no force without such representations, much as for Freud there is really no such thing as drives without their ideational representatives, their Triebrepräsentanzen.26 Mana-ical enjoyment is accessible only in and through its “official” totemic representations, those proper to each clan. Although he tries to frame his work by way of the opposition of the sacred and the profane, it would be more accurate to say that Durkheim tracks

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the vicissitudes of mana as it moves between the poles of a somatic and quasi-sexual jouissance— he discusses at great length the corroboree, a highly charged sequence of celebratory rites among various Australian tribes that can include transgressions of the rules that normally govern sexual relations— on the one hand, and the moral authority of those people and things that are seen to enjoy, to be highly charged, with mana, on the other. What would seem to exceed the confines of a normative order is here grasped as being of the same nature as what sustains it, indeed as the very source of the normative pressure exerted by the order on its members. Durkheim thus refers approvingly to the German ethnologist Konrad Preuss, who for his part characterizes mana as the quasi-material, quasi-carnal aspect of impersonal powers and forces which only later come to be understood as spirit or soul (we might think of it as the career of the flesh). As Durkheim paraphrases Preuss’s observations, these mana-ical forces are initially conceived “in the form of vague discharges spontaneously emitted from the things in which mana resides, and sometimes tending to escape using all available routes: mouth, nose, and every other body opening, breath, gaze, speech, and so on.”27 These “partial objects” that mark the unstable boundaries of the body are at the same time understood to be the very source of the moral authority of social norms and their “official” representatives, who are in turn charged with attending to what is normatively binding. The realm of ethics, law, and politics where it makes sense to say such things as one is charged with a task or with authority (that one then discharges), one is guilty as charged, one has been placed in charge— this realm overlaps with the semantic field of partial objects, leakage, secretions, discharges. The stuff that binds is the stuff that unbinds; the social glue is also a social solvent.28 Durkheim, for his part, is above all interested in the moral dimension of mana, of mana as a source of the authority enjoyed by norms and their representatives (this is the source

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of Durkheim’s reputation as a fundamentally conservative thinker). As he puts it at the beginning of the chapter in which he introduces the concept of mana, the forces at issue— and that at times issue forth from the body— have, “in addition to their physical nature . . . a moral nature.” When he addresses this aspect of mana, it is very clear that he is no longer speaking of so-called primitive societies but rather what he takes to be the fundamental laws of any social formation— the real subject matter (and subject-matter) of his study: Precisely because society has its own specific nature that is different from our nature as individuals, it pursues ends that are also specifically its own; but because it can achieve those ends only by working through us, it categorically demands our cooperation. Society requires us to make ourselves its servants, forgetful of our own interests. And it subjects us to all sorts of restraints, privations, and sacrifices without which social life would be impossible. . . . If society could exact those concessions and sacrifices only by physical constraint, it could arouse in us only the sense of a physical force to which we have no choice but to yield, and not that of a moral power such as religions venerate. In reality, however, the hold society has over consciousness owes far less to the prerogative its physical superiority gives it than to the moral authority with which it is invested.29

The French word for “consciousness” and for “conscience” is, as Durkheim himself emphasizes, one and the same: conscience. This suggests that our most basic sense of wakefulness, of awareness, is an awareness of world, a space, that is, in which we are always already answerable to the Other. To use a contemporary formulation, to be truly awake means to be “woke.”30 Here Durkheim is clearly trying to establish links between his own theory of social normativity— really a social ontology— and the set of concepts Immanuel Kant employs in his account of practical reason: law, the categorical imperative, duty, respect,

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indifference to parochial (“pathological”) purposes and interests, and so on. He is, however, more of a Hegelian insofar as he is ultimately interested in the Triebfeder, the driving force, of practical reason understood in turn as always embedded in a form of life, in a historical mode of Sittlichkeit: An individual or collective subject is said to inspire respect when the representation that expresses it in consciousness has such power that it calls forth or inhibits conduct automatically, irrespective of any utilitarian calculation of helpful or harmful results. When we obey someone out of respect for the moral authority that we have accorded to him, we do not follow his instructions because they seem wise but because a certain psychic energy intrinsic to the idea we have of that person bends our will and turns it in the direction indicated. When that inward and wholly mental pressure moves within us, respect is the emotion we feel.31

Durkheim goes on to address what would appear to be a specifically modern modality of normative pressure, public opinion. What he is after is an understanding of the production— ultimately the mass mediation— of mental states, the intensity of which “we call moral influence” (209). We might say that he is interested in grasping what it means to act under the influence, to comport oneself in ways that “are marked [we might say branded— ELS] with a distinguishing sign that calls forth respect. Because these ways of acting have been worked out in common, the intensity with which they are thought in each individual mind finds resonances in all the others, and vice versa. The representations that translate them within each of us thereby gain an intensity that mere private states of consciousness can in no way match” (209–10). For Durkheim, these resonances constitute a sort of vibrant vocal matter that, as it were, mana-ically moves in and through each member of the collective as the compellingly percussive object-cause of affects, thoughts, and actions (the French verb he uses, retentir, means not only “to

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resound or resonate, to be heard with force” but also “to produce actions and effects, to have repercussions”): It is society that speaks through the mouths of those who affirm them [ways of acting] in our presence; it is society that we hear when we hear them; and the voice of all itself has a tone that an individual voice cannot have. . . . In short, when something is the object of a state of opinion, the representation of the thing that each individual has draws such power from its origins . . . that it is felt even by those who do not yield to it. The mental representation of a thing that is the object of a state of opinion has a tendency to repress and hold at bay those representations that contradict it; it commands instead those actions that fulfill it. It accomplishes this not by the reality or threat of physical coercion but by the radiation of the mental energy it contains. (210)

It is worth recalling here that the Greek word for “opinion,” doxa, is also the word for “glory.” This is the background of Giorgio Agamben’s remarks concerning public opinion as the locus par excellence in modernity of the doxologies, the liturgical labor, devoted to the production of glory formerly limited to the church and the court, the spaces of religious and political theological ritual. Bringing together Guy Debord’s analysis of the society of the spectacle and Carl Schmitt’s view that what we now refer to as public opinion assumes the function of acclamations, of purely political doxologies, in modern democratic societies, Agamben writes: What is in question is nothing less than a new and unheard of concentration, multiplication, and dissemination of the function of glory as the center of the political system. What was once confined to the spheres of liturgy and ceremonials has become concentrated in the media and, at the same time, through them it spreads and penetrates at each moment into every area of society, both public and private. Contemporary democracy is a democ-

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racy that is entirely founded upon glory, that is, on the efficacy of acclamation, multiplied and disseminated by the media beyond all imagination.32

One thinks here perhaps of such “news” organizations as Fox News, in which the production of doxa qua opinion is understood as the production of a certain mode of ostensibly patriotic doxa qua glory. There it also becomes clear that the delivery of news and information has become fully part of the society of the spectacle, in which life is, as it were, maintained by being constantly entertained. The ancient Greek word for “common opinion or belief ” that first takes on properly religious meaning when used in the Septuagint to translate kavod, the Hebrew word for “glory,” retains its sacral aura in occult though in some sense intensified form at the very point at which it seems to return to its purely “secular,” everyday social meaning. In the terms I’ve been using here, participation in public opinion, whether yielding or unyielding, would have to be considered an eminently mana-ical mode of enjoyment. 6

In his book The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella tries to deepen and expand on Émile Durkheim’s understanding of the transmission of mana through the voice of authoritative norms as well as through (often ritualized) transgressions of norms. Mazzarella emphasizes the figure of resonance and resounding, the vibrations of the vocal matter mediating such transmissions, such transferences of mana. He is especially interested in linking Durkheim’s understanding of such mediations with the notion of the mimetic faculty developed in the work of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. He characterizes this faculty as “a sensuous, transformative ability to resonate with the world,”33 and goes so far as to rethink the notion of culture as a mimetic archive, as the virtual site or medium in

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and through which the resonances and re-percussions of prior forms of life— of history— may be picked up and reactualized.34 The resonances that for Durkheim serve to constitute the social bonds in a community, making it one of shared mana-ical enjoyment, also serve, in this view, to establish links diachronically, with events, traumas, gestures, unlived potential of past lives and forms of life. They are conceived as traces or residues of elements, “embedded not only in the explicitly articulated forms commonly recognized as cultural discourses but also in built environments and material forms, in the concrete history of the senses, and in the habits of our shared embodiment.”35 Mazzarella keeps the notion of the mimetic archive sufficiently open so as to “resonate” for its part with similar conceptualizations of cultural transmission (he mentions Gilles Deleuze, Benjamin, Marcel Jousse, and Peter Sloterdijk, among others). 36 What he also refers to as “constitutive resonance” is, however, Janus faced, insofar as this vibrant subject-matter “has increasingly been harnessed by sovereign pretenders, whether political or commercial.” And further: “Sometimes the pursuit of constitutive resonance is self-consciously ‘sacred,’ such as in several recent ethnographic accounts of learning to hear and to receive the call of piety. Sometimes . . . constitutive resonance is experienced as a more ‘secular’ seduction: how to negotiate the siren songs of political and commercial publicity.”37 Against this background, one might characterize the work of branding as the deployment of a sort of MRI: mimetic resonance imaging. Much like a totem, a brand “works,” is efficacious, when its image serves to absorb, focus, and organize the otherwise diffuse resonances— the collective effervescence— of a society, when it not only promises to offer a locus and point of reference of especially intense mana-ical enjoyment but also offers to invest its bearer with the status of one who belongs to a “clan” endowed with especially high concentrations of mana. Branding is, in this sense, the contemporary form of mana-gement par excellence.38 Without using the term, in my reading of Rainer Maria

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Rilke’s 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, I argued that the novel as a whole was organized as a kind of mimetic archive.39 To motivate this reading, I cited Rilke’s own characterization in the novel of the relation between different historical periods and figures of significance to the novel’s narrator (or, perhaps better, note-taker). Rilke tried to explain his “historical methodology” in a letter to the Notebooks’ Polish translator, Witold Hulewicz. In his response to Hulewicz’s series of queries concerning the novel’s various historical references and allusions, Rilke underlined the value such references had for Malte in the context of the protagonist’s existential crisis and sense of psychic endangerment (Rilke speaks of his protagonist’s Notzeit, time of distress, even emergency). In the novel, he writes, “there can be no question of specifying and detaching [zu präzisieren und zu verselbstständigen] the manifold evocations. The reader should not be in communication with their historical or imaginary reality, but through them with Malte’s experience: who is himself involved with them only as, on the street, one might let a passer-by, might let a neighbor, say, impress one. The connection lies in the circumstance that the particular characters conjured up register the same vibration-rate of vital intensity [Schwingungszahl der Lebensintensität] that vibrates in Malte’s own nature.”40 In my reading of the novel, I argued that these vibrations ultimately concerned the shifting locus of sovereignty in modernity, that the vital intensity at issue in them was not that of biological life but rather of socially and politically qualified life, “authorized” life, life, in a word, bound to particular ways of binding the mana-ical enjoyment that ultimately sustains the symbolic order in which one finds (or fails to find) one’s legitimate place. And it is to the story of those shifts that I now return. 7

I hope that it is already sufficiently clear that for Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim, and other researchers working in the “mana

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moment,” mana functions much in the way that Value (along with its general equivalent, money) does for Marx in his analysis of the commodity form.41 One will recall that Marx characterized Value as a social substance and, indeed, as an occult and spectral one, a gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit extracted/ abstracted from the bodies of workers and transferred to objects as a surplus value in excess of any use-value. His political economic point was of course that in modern capitalist societies, lives are governed by, subject to the demands and commands of, this marvelous surplus and its autodoxological drive to selfappreciation. Arguably, Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism prepared the way for these later anthropological investigations of mana. Or rather, one could say that the “scientific” preoccupation with mana (along with fetishism, totemism, etc.) is itself a displaced way of engaging with the facts of a life ever more governed by the spectral materiality of Value. If capitalism is, as Benjamin suggested, to be grasped as a religion, we should characterize it as a manatheistic one. Accordingly, Marx’s labor theory of value should be grasped not as a theory of work, let alone of the industrial mode of production, but rather of the processes of mana-facturing that officiantly produce the subtle matter that is ultimately refined into a kind of pure state in the brand name.42 I am arguing, then, that Durkheim and Mauss, along with other researchers working in the mana moment, were already up to their ears in the stuff without ever leaving Western Europe (neither Durkheim nor Mauss conducted any ethnographic fieldwork of their own). Marx’s first encounter with the concept of the fetish most likely goes back to his readings in the early 1840s in the history of religion. Among the works he consulted or at least knew of secondhand were those of Charles de Brosses, who in 1760 introduced the concept of the fetish into European debates on the elementary forms of religious life, as well as Benjamin Constant’s popular book, De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements, published some seventy years later.43 It is, I think, of some significance that the concept that would become

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so central to the labor theory of value began to take hold in the European imagination at the end of the ancien régime, at the very moment, that is, when royal sovereignty along with the political theological doctrines and rituals sustaining it was beginning to yield to popular sovereignty, a shift demanding new ways of establishing and sustaining social bonds. What Marx saw was that such bonds, such social relations, were coming to be determined by the relations of commodity production, that the political theology of sovereignty was being displaced not only or even primarily by a political theory and practice of democracy but rather by the political economy of Value, by the task of administering and managing a somehow sacred, somehow spectral materiality (again, we should read management as mana-gement). Ideology thus did not need to enter bourgeois economic relations in a secondary, superstructural way; it was always already there at the economy’s base, in the “base materiality” at issue in the mana-facturing process. Here again we find European theorists extracting concepts from various “primitive” and colonized “Others” in order to grasp the transformation of social bonds brought about by historical processes of modernization. What allowed the theorists of the mana moment to recognize what the “mana workers” (to borrow Mazzarella’s term) were elaborating in the “primitive” cultures they were investigating was the fact that their own lives had at some level become “mana-ical,” absorbed by and busy with the everyday doxologies of Value, doxologies once dedicated not only to God but also to God’s secular, political theological vicars on earth. As Marx had argued, the political theology of sovereignty had, by the time the mana moment arrived, already become the political economy of the wealth of nations— which for that very reason meant, as we have seen, that wealth was itself a misleading concept. 8

Michel Foucault also came to see that wealth was a misleading concept in accounting for the emergence of political economy,

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both as a subject matter and as the science dedicated to understanding its laws. As he put it in his 1977–78 lectures at the Collège de France, When it became possible not only to introduce population into the field of economic theory, but also into economic practice, when it became possible to introduce into the analysis of wealth this new subject, this new subject-object, with its demographic aspects, but also with the aspect of the specific role of producers and consumers, owners and non-owners, those who create profit and those who take it, when the entry of this subject-object, of population, became possible within the analysis of wealth, with all its disruptive effects in the field of economic reflection and practice, then I think the result was that one ceased analyzing wealth and a new domain of knowledge, political economy, was opened up.44

For Mazzarella, this peculiar “subject-object” also points toward the emergence of the mana moment in the social sciences, one coincident with the emergence of a new sociology dedicated to understanding the laws of mass society, of what, in a word, appeared to be an efflorescence of mana-ical enjoyment in the form of urban crowds. This suggests, however, that the concept of population also misses the mark of what is at issue in this subject-object, or what I have characterized as the subject-matter of political economy. To cite Claude Lévi-Strauss’s remark apropos of the notion of mana, it lacks the “oomph” that surcharges this subject-matter, that adds to wealth a virtually real surplus that can no longer be grasped by the analysis of wealth and wealth accumulation or by any empirical science addressed to the formation and composition of “populations.”45 To put it differently, none of the “sciences of immanence” could really get a purchase on the surplus of immanence that had, as Foucault’s own genealogical work suggests, entered the life of the people with the shift from royal to popular sovereignty. Foucault formulated this transformation in a number of

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different ways, most notably as the displacement of sovereign forms of power by a series of institutions and practices that did not so much reign over or rule juridical subjects as manage and administer the lives of individuals and populations. At least for a time, he grouped these practices under two headings: the “anatomo-politics of the human body” and the “biopolitics of the population.”46 Regarding the former, he speaks of a disciplinary physics of power that supplants what had once been thought of as the magical effects of the king’s touch, a touch endowed, we might say, with a high concentration of mana: “The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power . . . : a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations.”47 (Using William Mazzarella’s term once more, the representatives of this new physics of power might be thought of as “mana workers.”) With respect to the biopolitical administration of populations, the body of the king figures equally as Foucault’s key point of departure. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1975–76, for example, he opens his account of the postrevolutionary “embourgeoisement” of the nation-state (and so the emergence of the defining sphere of modern political economy, civil or bourgeois society) with remarks that could have been taken from Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies. What makes a nation, he notes, is the fact that its members “all have a certain individual relationship— both juridical and physical— with the real, living, and bodily person of the king. It is the body of the king, in his physical-juridical relationship with each of his subjects, that creates the body of the nation.”48 It is precisely the dispersal and reorganization of this “physical-juridical relationship”— of this paradigmatic yet still exceptional jointure of the somatic and the normative— that is of interest to Foucault. What is crucial to keep in mind here— and I think that this is

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what Foucault often fails to do— is that this hyphenation of the physical and the juridical “secretes” a new element or dimension, which I have in previous work referred to as the flesh, a word that I think captures what is at issue in what I have here been calling mana-ical enjoyment.49 Recalling Saint Paul’s canonical distinction between body and flesh, between soma and sarx— the political theology of sovereignty in the West is of course deeply indebted to this Pauline legacy— I am proposing that Foucault was fundamentally a sarxist materialist. He is touching here on what I have characterized as a metamorphosis of the King’s Two Bodies into the People’s Two Bodies, a mutation that calls forth new forms of power adapted to the management of the latter, of what is more than the body in the bodies of its citizensubjects. Foucault’s investigations lead us to conclude that the threshold of modernity is marked by the “massification” of the physical-juridical flesh of the king, its dispersion into populations that for that very reason must be placed in the care of biopolitical administration. What this means is that whenever Foucault speaks about the object of biopolitics— man-as-species, populations— he is also, although never explicitly and perhaps never even intentionally, addressing the fate in modernity of the royal remains of political theology, the dimension of the flesh in its new, modern form: masses of officiantly busy bodies. Biopolitics is always mass politics— and here I think that Mazzarella and I are largely in agreement— in the sense of dealing with the massive presence of a sublime object— the virtual reality of a fleshy mass— now circulating in and mana-ically agitating the life of the People. This means, in turn, that political economy, the domain that Foucault came to see as a central site of biopolitical administration, acquires a certain sacramental dimension, the aspect of a mass in the religious sense. It is no surprise, then, that Marx would discover “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” amid our life with commodities.50 What Foucault was aiming at in his remarks concerning the new subject-object of political economy was that it ultimately shares its subject-

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matter with biopolitics, for it is itself a modality of biopolitics. This no doubt surprising link becomes, for its part, the subject matter of Foucault’s lectures delivered at the Collège de France in 1978–79 and published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. Just how surprising the link is can be gauged by readers’ response to the lectures. As we have seen, Wendy Brown largely adopts the broad perspective that Foucault presents in the lectures about neoliberalism as a form of governmental rationality, one that places homo oeconomicus at the center of what he typically referred to as the “art of the government of men.” She remarks, however, that the lectures “are notoriously difficult to place in Foucault’s thought.” Most striking for Brown is that “the lectures, which travel under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, seem to have little to do with that subject. . . . Perhaps Foucault was wandering a bit that year, trying out various ways of opening historico-theoretical problems preoccupying him and also seeking to make sense of what he was reading in his daily newspapers.”51 Certainly, the reasons Foucault himself gives in the lectures for taking up the topic of political economy— and of liberalism and neoliberalism, more particularly— are not fully satisfying with respect to these topics’ ostensible links to the “birth of biopolitics.”52 In the lectures, political economy would seem to represent, along with the disciplines and biopower, above all a shift from the primacy of questions of legitimacy and legality— the domain of “jurisdiction”— to that of questions of theoretical and practical knowledge— the domain of “veridiction”— in the art of the government of men: The market now means that to be good government, government has to function according to truth. . . . Political economy . . . pointed out to government where it had to go to find the principle of truth in its own governmental practice. In simple and barbaric terms, let’s say that from being a site of jurisdiction, which it remained up to the start of the eighteenth century, the market . . .

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is becoming what I will call a site of veridiction. The market must tell the truth; it must tell the truth in relation to governmental practice. (33)

To clarify the stakes of such shifts, Foucault gives, among others, an example familiar from previous work, that of the transformation of punishment and penal institutions at the threshold of modernity: Studying penal institutions meant studying them first of all as sites and forms where jurisdictional practice was predominant and we can say autocratic. [It meant studying] how a certain practice of veridiction was formed and developed in these penal institutions that were fundamentally linked to a jurisdictional practice, and how this veridictional practice— supported, of course, by criminology, psychology, and so on . . .— began to install the veridictional question at the very heart of modern penal practice, even to the extent of creating problems for its jurisdiction, which was the question of truth addressed to the criminal: Who are you? When penal practice replaced the question: “What have you done?” with the question: “Who are you?” you see the jurisdictional function of the penal system being transformed, or doubled, or possibly undermined, by the question of veridiction. (34–35; my emphasis)

What I think Foucault ultimately misses is that what is at issue in this doubling is the emergence, as an ostensible object of knowledge and public policy, of a sort of mana-ical Doppelgänger. Or again, that the management of the object of veridictional practices was always also a kind of mana-gement. As I’ve been suggesting, this double is constituted out of the “royal remains,” the transformed residues of the king’s second, virtually real body. What is crucial for Foucault is that political economy as a veridictional practice, that is, as an emerging body of expert knowledge about the laws of the market, comes, over the course

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of the eighteenth century, to replace various conceptions of external limits to state power (“those that come from God, or those which were laid down once and for all at the origin, or those which were formulated in the distant past of history”). He argues that from the mid-eighteenth century onward, “we are forced to note an important transformation that in a general way will be a characteristic feature of what could be called modern governmental reason.” This transformation, he continues, “consists in establishing a principle of limitation that will no longer be extrinsic to the art of government, as was law in the seventeenth century, [but] intrinsic to it: an internal regulation of governmental rationality” (10). It was political economy qua veridictional practice that would, in Foucault’s view, come to articulate and enforce that principle. Paraphrasing a formulation of Benjamin Franklin’s, Foucault characterizes it as the principle of “frugal government” (28). The establishment of this principle marks the emergence of political-economic liberalism: The question of frugality has, if not replaced, at least overtaken and to an extent forced back and somewhat marginalized a different question which preoccupied political reflection in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even up to the start of the eighteenth century, which was the problem of the constitution. Certainly, all the questions concerning monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy do not disappear. But just as they were fundamental questions, I was going to say the royal questions, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so starting from the end of the eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth century, and obviously more than ever today, the fundamental problem is not the constitution of states, but without a doubt the question of the frugality of government. [The] question of the frugality of government is indeed the question of liberalism. (29; my emphasis)

This is of course the historical trajectory that culminates, as Brown has argued apropos of neoliberal governmentality, in a

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near absolute displacement of homo politicus by homo oeconomicus in which not the polis but the market serves as the primary point of reference or site of veridiction, the site “that . . . must be left to function with the least possible intervention precisely so that it can both formulate its truth and propose it to governmental practice as rule and norm.”53 In this context, I would like to recall Jacques Lacan’s take on the issue at hand: the difficulty of conceptualizing and historicizing the relation between doctrines and practices of sovereignty on the basis of the political theology of the monarch or “master”— the domain of what Foucault calls the royal questions— and new kinds of power and authority wielded largely by medical and social-scientific “experts” authorized according to the secular protocols of knowledge production— practitioners, in a word, of veridiction. Foucault’s claim, in the 1978–79 lectures, is simply that political economy needs to be included centrally among these practices of veridiction. Lacan’s perspective on this question can be discerned in his theory of discourses as formal matrices of sociality.54 He posited the emergence, in the long nineteenth century, of a new kind of social bond and discourse— the “discourse of the university”— which, he suggested, supplanted the dominance of the “discourse of the master.” His understanding of the new discourse corresponds closely to what Foucault was aiming at with the notions of the disciplines as the “anatomo-politics of the human body” and regulatory controls as the “biopolitics of the population.”55 Lacan’s formula, or “matheme,” of the university discourse suggests that the new paradigm whereby knowledge aims at directly grasping and controlling some real of the human body (and, perhaps, of nature more generally)— in his notation: S2 → a— represents the flip side of what I have elsewhere referred to as a generalized investiture crisis in society at large, the subject’s ($) difficulty in locating itself with respect to a master signifier (S1). By that I mean a crisis whereby the symbolic authority regulating status and social roles— one’s dignitas— has become radically attenu-

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ated, where the distribution of symbolic authority is no longer grounded in the person and charisma, the mana, of a master. The new “master” is one who commands a “new physics of power,” to use Foucault’s phrase. If there is a distribution of dignitas here, it is, so to speak, a biocratic one. As difficult as his theory of discourses is, what Lacan does make clear is that the “object” of the university discourse, and thus what is at issue in the disciplines and biopolitics, cannot be captured by an accumulation and deployment of knowledge concerning bodily life. With the notion of the objet a, he attempts to hold the place of the dimension that accounts for the “strange material and physical presence” that Michel Foucault— following Ernst Kantorowicz— had located in the body of the king. This is precisely the dimension I have tried to develop with the notion of the flesh, and have here tried to link to the notion of mana as elaborated by Marcel Mauss and Émile Durkheim and that has acquired new urgency in William Mazzarella’s work; it is, we might say, that “thing” in the king that can’t be contained in his natural life and body, only in a second one. We need, in other words, to introduce a slight but crucial adjustment into Foucault’s terms and insist that the real object of the new physics of power is not simply the body or life but rather the flesh that has become separated from the body of the king— the substance of his sublime, second body— and entered, like a strange alien presence— an immanent heterogeneity— into that of the people. We might say that the “mana workers” formerly employed to manage the King’s Two Bodies according to the liturgical practices of the political theology of sovereignty left the confines of the court and entered into the larger society to administer the mana-ical enjoyment of the royal remains that were now redistributed to every body. This slight adjustment thereby allows us to see Foucault’s researches as a major contribution to what I have referred to as sarxist materialism. To return to the question of the relation of political economy and the birth of biopolitics, we might say that the mana work-

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ers who left the confines of the court to attend to the life of the now sovereign people intermingled with those monks who, as Max Weber abbreviated the emergence of the spirit of capitalism, left their monastic confines to disseminate into the secular world the new doxa: the doxology of the everyday life of capitalist modernity. What Foucault seems to be arguing is that biopolitics proper is born when these two tendencies converge, when these two sets of “experts” in the ways of all flesh (of what is in the body that is more than the body) join hands in counting and accounting for, in attempting to measure, the weight of all flesh in response to the dynamic of its immanent drive of self-appreciation under the sign of Value, the true subjectmatter of political economy. Political economy as analyzed by Marx becomes, as it were, the lingua franca shared by these two sets of experts, one that allows them jointly to administer the mana-facturing process of bourgeois society, the process in and through which “frugal government” is practiced. This— call it the basic insight of Marx’s own sarxist materialism— is, I submit, the ultimate truth of the practices of veridiction analyzed by Foucault.56 9

To recapitulate the genealogical argument I’ve been pursuing here, I am claiming that the liturgical labor once expended to sustain the sublime body of the sovereign— one inherited, in its turn, from the double nature of Christ— has come to be ever more displaced and absorbed by the work of self-appreciation we engage in as officiants of the self-appreciation of Value. As Kantorowicz put it in his magisterial study of the mode of production of the “substance” of majesty— of the King’s Two Bodies— “the vision of the king as a persona geminata is ontological and, as an effluence of a sacramental and liturgical action performed at the altar, it is liturgical as well.”57 Perhaps, then, the modern “economization” of this liturgical labor should no

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longer be understood as a straightforward process of secularization (or it indicates, rather, that we need to rethink the very concept of secularization). Indeed, Marx’s argument, or at least my reading of it, is that the shift from the church to the court to the market— let’s say from Christological theology to political theology to bourgeois political economy and on to neoliberal forms of governance— represents, rather, so many ways in which our liturgical labors— Mazzarella might say our labors as mana workers— have been reorganized, recoded, and to a large extent naturalized or, perhaps better, humanized, with the notion of human capital figuring as a sort of culmination. There all labor is devoted to the work of appreciation of the precious substance that every body now incarnates. We live, then, at a strange point of convergence where the notion of human capital and that of the sacredness of life enter a zone of indistinction. My project is thus in many ways an effort to flesh out and give new urgency to Jacques Derrida’s claim, in his Specters of Marx, that European history is at some level constituted as a series of displacements of the spectral materiality, the ghostly res publica, that Marx “experimentally” isolated as the substance of value of the commodity, a substance that— and I take this to be the crucial insight of Marx’s sarxist theory of value— continues to be produced as the “effluence of a sacramental and liturgical action,” one officiantly performed before a throne of one kind or another, even if hidden amid a proliferation of expert knowledge. Under the pressures of neoliberalization, this sacramental and liturgical labor is performed increasingly on and by each individual self. The autodoxological machine of capital— the selfvalorization of Value— would now seem to function ever more by way of the autodoxological operations each one of us is called on to perform, is, we might say, excited, even overexcited, to perform (ex-citare: to summon or call out). It’s no wonder, then, that sleep itself is coming to be economically occupied, to be branded by way of a variety of pharmaceuticals and consumer products. If we must sleep at all in the 24/7 economy in which everything

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we do is seen to have opportunity costs, we are invited to make use of, as a recent ad campaign for Beautyrest mattresses puts it, the proper “equipment for high-performance sleep.” I’d like to note another way of trying to make sense of the link between biopolitics and liberalism/neoliberalism that has perplexed so many readers of Foucault’s 1978–79 lectures gathered in The Birth of Biopolitics. In a brilliant master’s thesis written at the University of Chicago, Nicolae Biea has argued that biopolitics emerges quite logically, indeed inevitably, from the fundamental recasting of labor as human capital undertaken in the era of neoliberal governance.58 On a first approach, Biea notes that for Gary Becker and other proponents of human capital theory, human reproduction along with attendant matters of marriage, fertility, and child rearing comes to represent a central problem for the discipline of economics. Once the boundaries of economic calculation have been eliminated, “all human behavior,” as Becker writes, “can be viewed as involving participants who maximize their utility from a stable set of preferences” (cited in Biea, 7).59 In a word, “maximizing behavior is not restricted to market exchange but permeates all aspects of human life” (7). Because Becker holds to the premise of neoclassical economics that techniques of optimization ultimately appeal to the notion of scarcity, to the need to satisfy infinite (in principle) ends with scarce means that have alternative uses, “[his] equating of all human behavior with optimization . . . has as its presupposition a life fully permeated with scarcity” (8). This means, as Becker fully affirms, that the time spent working is only a small part of what is at issue in thinking about the maximization of human capital. As he already says in a groundbreaking paper from 1965, “the allocation and efficiency of non-working time may now be more important to economic welfare than that of working time; yet the attention paid by economists to the latter dwarfs any paid to the former” (cited in Biea, 11).60 But this means, as Biea concisely concludes, that what is at stake for Becker— what represents the true stakes of economics— “is not

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simply the time during which an individual is conscious but rather the full twenty-four hours of the day. . . . What has to be allocated . . . is not the subjective time of human experience but the objective time of the bodily life processes. The ultimate source of scarcity in Becker’s theory . . . is the tautology that a day has only twenty-four hours” (12; my emphasis). When coupled with “the long-run tendency of technological progress and productivity growth,” he concludes, “the locus of economization will tend to shift from material objects to the very selves of individual actors.” The result is what Biea characterizes as the perverse dialectics of scarcity: “This technological reproducibility of goods makes them relatively abundant . . . and . . . must simultaneously render that which cannot be technologically reproduced relatively scarce. Human beings— or human time— cannot be reproduced at will through technological means. Advanced capitalist economies, therefore, Becker suggests, so adept at the technological production of goods, find themselves, through the perverse dialectics of scarcity, revolving more and more around the economization of human life itself ” (15). In a word, “the more our power to produce and reproduce goods will increase, the more economization will come to coincide with life itself. . . . [This] is the birth of biopolitics to which his work serves as the announcement” (16).61 Another recent take on what we might call bioeconomic scarcity in the age of neoliberalism approaches the matter from the perspective of symbolic status and claims that the contemporary currency of symbolic capital is neither luxury goods nor leisure but rather, as I’ve already argued from a different perspective, busyness, the ostentatious display of one’s own scarcity as a resource for others.62 On this view, one based on considerable empirical research, scarcity is largely second-order scarcity, scarcity in the eyes of the beholder: “We uncover an alternative kind of conspicuous consumption that operates by shifting the focus from the preciousness and scarcity of goods to the preciousness and scarcity of individuals. Our investigation reveals

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that positive status inferences in response to long hours of work and lack of leisure time are mediated by the perceptions that busy individuals possess desired human capital characteristics (competence, ambition), leading them to be viewed as scarce and in demand” (119). Though the authors of the study surmise that the shift in the value of busyness may be linked to the development of knowledge-intensive economies, their argument is more far-reaching and is ultimately grounded in human capital theory: Although working hard in economic systems that were mostly based on less-skilled agriculture and manufacturing may have been perceived as virtuous, it may not have implied an individual was in high demand. In contrast, we propose that in advanced economies, long hours of work and busyness may operate as a signal that one possesses desirable human capital capabilities and is therefore in high demand and scarce in the job market, leading to elevated status attribution. We surmise that the overall status benefits that busy people enjoy over non-busy people may stem from the perception that they possess desirable human capital characteristics that make them scarce and in demand on the job market. A busy individual is scarce like a rare gemstone and thus perceived to have high status. (121)

At this point we should ask, For whose sake is one really being busy? From what locus does this demand for busywork, for maintaining oneself as a “busy body,” ultimately emanate? And what, exactly, does busyness, performed surely not simply for this or that particular gaze but rather for the gaze of the Other of society writ large, produce? This essay as a whole has of course been an attempt to answer these very questions; and, as I’ve suggested, they invite us to bring together the different understandings of work found in the writings of Marx, Weber, and Freud. Borrowing from the language of the “mana moment” of anthropology, I’ve argued that these three approaches con-

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verge on the insight that work performed under conditions of capitalist modernity always doubles the processes of manufacturing by those of mana-facturing. In the context of the genealogical story I’ve been developing, this work is performed under the pressure of a shift in the locus of sovereignty, one that injects the royal remains of the King’s Two Bodies into the life of the People, thereby transforming the sovereign’s mana into every body’s business. Under conditions of capitalist modernity, we have all become “mana workers,” and the mana-facturing busyness goes on 24/7. What Foucault characterized as “frugal government” is, in a word, underwritten by a massive displacement and dispersion— a dispersion into the masses— of the demand for a kind of liturgical labor “charged” with sustaining the social bond, producing the social glue— we might say “crazy glue”— in liberal and neoliberal societies. Our participation in these forms of mana-ical enjoyment has at some level become normative. The displacement at issue here is a sort of transfer of charges affecting a spectrum of domains: symbolic, energetic, somatic, economical. In his famous Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Judge Daniel Paul Schreber gives a psychotic account of this transfer of charges. He registers the transfer and the concomitant becoming normative of mana-ical enjoyment as a radical transformation of his own body, nervous system, and libidinal economy— of his flesh— as correlative with what he refers to as circumstances contrary to the Order of the World.63 In the context of his own elaborate theological system, what he means by this order is above all the maintenance of proper distance between God and God’s creation. In Schreber’s view, God is a master of general providence; he establishes the order of things, creates the laws that allow things to run, each after its own kind. He engages in special providence, the fateful and intrusive intervention into creation, only in exceptional circumstances which thereby assume the appearance of miracles. For Schreber, nearly everything he experiences has a miraculous aspect in this sense; in circumstances contrary

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to the Order of the World, the state of exception has become the norm.64 He experiences this state of exception am eigenen Leib, in his own flesh; he registers it as a feminine enjoyment, a Wollust or jouissance that ultimately becomes a duty and bears its own messianic charge: Few people have been brought up according to such strict moral principles as I, and have throughout life practiced such moderation especially in matters of sex, as I venture to claim for myself. Mere low sensuousness can therefore not be considered a motive in my case. . . . But as soon as I am alone with God, if I may so express myself, I must continually or at least at certain times, strive to give divine rays the impression of a woman in the height of sexual delight; to achieve this I have to employ all possible means, and have to strain all my intellectual powers and foremost my imagination. . . . Voluptuous enjoyment or Blessedness is granted to souls in perpetuity and as an end in itself, but to human beings and other living creatures solely as a means for the preservation of the species. Herein lie the moral limitations of voluptuousness for human beings. An excess of voluptuousness would render man unfit to fulfil his other obligations; it would prevent him from ever rising to higher mental and moral perfection; indeed experience teaches that not only single individuals but also whole nations have perished through voluptuous excess. For me such moral limits to voluptuousness no longer exist, indeed in a certain sense the reverse applies.65

And further, attempting to explain his exceptional status as a man compelled by moral duty— a sort of perverse office— to “imagine myself as man and woman in one person having intercourse with myself,” Schreber writes: This behavior has been forced on me through God having placed Himself into a relationship with me which is contrary to the Order of the World; although it may sound paradoxical, it is jus-

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tifiable to apply the saying of the Crusaders in the First Crusade to myself: Dieu le veut (God wishes it). God is inseparably tied to my person through my nerves’ power of attraction which for some time past has become inescapable; there is no possibility of God freeing Himself from my nerves for the rest of my life— although His policy is aimed at this— except perhaps in case my unmanning were to become a fact. On the other hand, God demands constant enjoyment, as the normal mode of existence for souls within the Order of the World. It is my duty to provide Him with it in the form of highly developed soul-voluptuousness, as far as this is possible in the circumstances contrary to the Order of the World.66

Schreber’s mana-ical busyness was, as he repeatedly claims, a response to the emergency that the big Other wasn’t working, circumstances that made normative, that transformed into an office or duty, an otherwise exceptional state of jouissance. This deficiency of the Other— in Schreber’s terms, the divine Order of the World— is experienced much in the way that Freud describes the drives, that is, as a demand for work— a demand to get busy— emanating from a continuously flowing source of stimulation, from a sort of chronic emergency in the homeostatic regulation of bodily life. Freud seems to be saying that the body must repeatedly re-mind itself to fill a lack, repair a deficit, reduce what is registered as an excess of pressure, discharge or work off a certain too-muchness that seems to emanate from within, from a kind of civil unrest or stasis in the otherwise homeostatically ordered state of the body. But, as we have also seen, this account of the drives bears uncanny resonances with Marx’s understanding of the nature of labor in capitalism, labor charged with discharging a continuously flowing source of stimulation emanating from capital, from Value’s own immanent drive to self-valorization. What Marx and Freud seem to be getting at is the notion of what we might refer to as a surplus scarcity generating a demand for work that can never be fully

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discharged no matter how busy one gets. The mana-facturing process that doubles and haunts the manufacturing process in capitalist modernity is, I want to suggest, ultimately addressed to this surplus scarcity that assumes different guises in different forms of life. It is surplus scarcity that demands constant, manaical enjoyment.67 What Marx, Max Weber, and Freud all observed in their engagements with life under conditions of capitalist modernity was a historical reorganization of the social processes for addressing a surplus of scarcity that every society in one way or another is called to manage. It is, we might say, always the case that in one sense or another the Other isn’t working, and we— that is, whoever wishes to belong to the social formation in question— are called on in various ways to fill in.68 To use Freud’s terms, the wishes that set our own dream-work in motion are always at some level ambivalent repetitions of a single wish that isn’t exactly ours: to fill in, to cover for the Other, to assume the charge of a surplus scarcity “at work” in the Other. This is the gist of what Slavoj Žižek, following Jacques Lacan, has characterized as the “labor theory of the unconscious.”69 And, as Žižek emphasizes, the dream-work fills in/covers for the Other not by adding this or that content to the dream but by elaborating the form of the dream, the work of translating latent dream thoughts— these are thoughts triggered by the day’s events, by the remains of the day— into the manifest content of the dream. What is ultimately being translated here— along with and, as it were, piggybacking on, the dream thoughts— is the surplus scarcity “at work” in the Other and the pressure it generates, pressure that introduces a critical stasis into the otherwise homeostatic operations of somatic self-regulation. Thus, when Freud speaks of ideational representatives of the drive, of Triebrepräsentanzen that relay the drive qua demand for work, it is crucial to see that these representatives are in some sense delegates of the Other. One might recall here the beginning of act 1, scene 2 of Wagner’s Parsifal, where Titurel, with a voice coming as if from the grave, asks from a space in the deep background behind his wounded

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son’s bed, “Mein Sohn Amfortas, bist Du am Amt?” The office in question is one of pure officiancy, that of officiating over the grail ceremony, the miraculous effects of which sustain the uncanny vitality of the liturgical community as a form of life. (Amfortas, we might say, prefers not to.) 10

There are, I think, multiple ways to conceptualize this surplus scarcity, this deficit of the symbolic order, this continuously flowing source of stimulation— of a demand for (dream) work— flowing from the Other. As Alenka Zupančič has compellingly argued in her book, What Is Sex?, the wager of psychoanalysis— one we’ve seen to be prefigured by Daniel Paul Schreber’s florid psychotheological system— is that sexuality stands at the origin of this scarcity, or, perhaps better, is coextensive with it; Zupančič refers to it as an ontological deficit.70 As she programmatically observes, One of the founding gestures of psychoanalysis was to cut short the discussion of sexuality as a moral question by relating it to an epistemological difficulty, with immanent ontological relevance. Moral issues around sexuality have their origin in sexuality as an ontological problem. Sexuality is the paradigm of research and exploration, not in the sense of the reduction to the last instance but on the contrary, because it brutally introduces us to the lack of the last instance. It is precisely this lack of the last instance that becomes the place of thought, including the most speculative (metaphysical) thinking.71

I take Zupančič’s unidiomatic use of “last instance” to be a sort of translation of the German letzte Instanz, a phrase with a certain Kafkaesque aura and which means something like the final agency or court of appeal for adjudicating a controversy, the place where one gets the last word on an outstanding conflict or disagreement (precisely what Franz Kafka’s figures never find).

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From Zupančič’s Lacanian perspective, sexuality is the locus of a fundamental impossibility, one that Lacan famously formulated as the nonexistence of the sexual relation. There is something in sexuality that leaves our minds and bodies with an irreducible remainder of disorganization and disorientation which lacks a “last instance” that could resolve or fully pacify it. One will recall in this context Freud’s remark, first made in his 1912 article, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” and repeated in Civilization and Its Discontents: “Sometimes it is not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the [sexual] function itself which denies us [etwas am Wesen der Funktion selbst versage uns] full satisfaction and urges us along other paths.”72 In a footnote added to this passage, Freud links this kernel of dissatisfaction— or, perhaps better, unsatisfaction— to a constitutive perplexity as to the meanings of “masculine” and “feminine” in sexual life, to the limits of formulating the biological fact of sex in psychological terms. Zupančič puts the matter in more orthodox Lacanian language, language that frames a philosophical orientation one might call logical sexistentialism. Beginning with Lacan’s insistence that all discourse begins with a gap, she writes: This implication of discursivity and gap is a crucial point. . . . Lacan’s writing of it . . . is this: S (A), referring to a constitutive lack in the Other. What I would like to emphasize is the dimension of something like virtual subtraction or “minus” involved in this notion. This emphasis allows us to say not only that the signifying order is inconsistent and incomplete, but in a stronger and more paradoxical phrasing, that the signifying order emerges as already lacking one signifier, that it appears with the lack of a signifier “built into it,” so to speak (a signifier which, if it existed, would be the “binary signifier”).73

What Zupančič means with the nonexistent “binary signifier” is, if I understand this Lacanian notion correctly, an at-

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tempt to formalize what Freud was getting at in his admission of a limit with respect to the possibility of grasping the sexual function— along with the meanings of the “binary” masculine and feminine— in any sort of consistent fashion. What Freud refers to as a constitutive dissatisfaction proper to the nature of the sexual function, at least in human life, is itself a function of this gap in the signifying order, this limit to our capacity to translate what would appear to be a biological fact into consistent logical and psychological terms. Sexuality is, at its origin, born of a kind of signifying stress, and it is this stress— what I have been referring to as mana-ical busyness— that our bodies and minds take on in our assumption of our place in a symbolic order. Put somewhat differently, sexuality is born when we become unconscious of a surplus scarcity, a constitutive lack in the Other (thus my inclination to speak of unsatisfaction rather than dissatisfaction). As Zupančič puts it, “The signifying order could be said to begin not with One (nor with multiplicity), but with a ‘minus one.’ . . . It is in the place of this gap or negativity that appears the surplus-enjoyment which stains the signifying structure: the heterogeneous element pertaining to the signifying structure, yet irreducible to it” (42; emphasis in the original). And in another formulation, one that emphasizes the disorientation that Freud noted apropos of the lack of any primary sexual orientation guided by a clear set of relational terms: “The messiness of our sexuality is not a consequence of there being no sexual relation, it is not that our sexuality is messy because it is without clear signifying rules; it emerges only from, and at the place of, this lack, and attempts to deal with it [we might say manage it— ELS]. Sexuality is not ravaged by, or disturbed, because of a gap cutting deep into its ‘tissue,’ it is, rather, the messy sewing up of this gap” (43; emphasis in the original). Sexuality is, as it were, where we first get busy in response to, or better, as our life with and in the midst of, a tear in the fabric of being.74 Put differently again, what I have been calling, in a quasi-Pauline idiom, the flesh is, from the start,

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a flesh wound; what I have referred to as sarxist materialism is born of this tear.75 It is of course well known that Lacan got much of his inspiration for his conceptualization of the symbolic order from the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. What seems to have played an especially important role in Lacan’s thought was Lévi-Strauss’s famous critique of the notion of mana as presented in the writings of Marcel Mauss.76 There Lévi-Strauss effectively introduces the concept of the self-reflexive master signifier— he calls it the floating signifier— that would become so central to all of Lacan’s thought about unconscious mental processes: “I believe that notions of the mana type, however diverse they may be, and viewed in terms of their most general function (which . . . has not vanished from our mentality and our form of society) represent nothing more or less than that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought” (63; emphasis in the original). Lévi-Strauss characterizes this disability as one that “arises out of the human condition: namely, that man has from the start at his disposition a signifier-totality which he is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signified, given as such, but no less unknown for being given. There is always a non-equivalence or ‘inadequation’ between the two, a non-fit or overspill which divine understanding alone can soak up” (62; the human sciences are, in this view, all various forms of “disability studies”). The vaguely economic language used here should help us recognize the contours of Marx’s analysis of the commodity form, with its culmination in the money form as the general equivalent— the floating signifier— of Value.77 But Marx was of course insistent that the overspill noted by Lévi-Strauss no longer needed divine understanding to soak it up; it simply got reinvested as surplus value, which would thereby keep the process of the selfvalorization of Value mana-ically humming. It’s worth noting that for Lévi-Strauss too, the mana-facturing process endemic to the human condition gets going as a constitutively belated response to a kind of primary (and thus name-

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less) tear in the fabric of being— a kind of anthropogenic lucky break— one coextensive with the emergence of language.78 “It is,” he writes, in the relational aspect of symbolic thinking that we can look for the answer to our problem [the functioning of concepts of the mana type— ELS]. Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the ascent of animal life, language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually. In the wake of a transformation which is not a subject of study for the social sciences, but for biology and psychology, a shift occurred from a stage when nothing had meaning to another stage when everything had meaning. Actually, that apparently banal remark is important, because that radical change has no counterpart in the field of knowledge.79

It would seem to follow that anthropology— and indeed all the human sciences— are always thrown off balance, are always reeling, from the missing “real”— from missing out on the “real”— of our anthropogenesis. Psychoanalysis is, we might say, the peculiar science of this “reeling,” of the ways we never cease becoming unconscious of what has no part in the field of knowledge.80 11

I’d like to return to my point of departure for these reflections, the phenomenon of branding that has come to occupy such a dominant place in life governed by neoliberal reason. Here I think it might help to note, once more, what has been missed by many readers of Michel Foucault— and perhaps, to some extent, by Foucault himself— namely, that in his genealogy of modern governmentality (one often schematized as a shift from sovereign power, to disciplinary power, to biopower), what biopolitical administration is, at bottom, charged with administering— with “liberally” and “neoliberally” economizing— is, as Marx

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already saw, not so much the wealth of nations but rather a spectral materiality that is sustained by way of the explicit and implicit doxological practices of everyday life. Biopolitics and neoliberal political economy are two aspects of a life essentially devoted to various forms of mana-facturing. The mystery of administration, as Giorgio Agamben has demonstrated in his efforts to extend and deepen Foucault’s genealogical project, is that it pertains to a mysterion, a quasisacramental subject-matter (think again of the Grail Society in Parsifal). If one misses this dimension, then one gets hopelessly caught up in debates as to Foucault’s uncertain stance with respect to neoliberalism or his ostensible blindness with respect to the legacies of political liberalism. Wendy Brown, for example, argues that Foucault, at the very least, was largely indifferent to the possibilities of forms of sovereignty uncoupled from state power. As she puts it, “It is strange that sovereignty for Foucault remains so closely allied to the state and never circulates through the people— it’s almost as if he forgot to cut off the king’s head in political theory.”81 For others, however, who see in Foucault a closet neoliberal thinker, it is precisely only liberal and neoliberal economic theories that manage to achieve this act of revolutionary violence (by, in some sense, willfully ignoring it). The principle of liberal governance as Foucault understood it was, as we have noted, frugality, the systematic suspicion that the state always governs too much. This principle, as Michael Behrent has pointed out in Foucault and Neoliberalism, a volume he coedited, “was consonant with Foucault’s philosophical ambition to emancipate the conceptualization of power from juridical categories— or, as he liked to put it, cut off the king’s head (by abandoning the idea that power must derive from a sovereign, legitimate source).”82 Foucault’s antistatism was, from this perspective, consistent with his thoroughgoing philosophical antifoundationalism: “Because utilitarian and economic liberalism attach no special importance to the question of power’s origin (unlike the revolutionary and natural-rights tradition),

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they effectively dispense with the need for juridical foundations. Consequently, from Foucault’s perspective, they manage to chop off the king’s head very ably— more so, paradoxically, than the revolutionaries themselves. Contemporary economic liberalism thus epitomized power as Foucault had come to understand it.”83 What is missed in this account is, as I have been suggesting, not so much the ostensibly utilitarian efficiency of the governmental frugality associated with liberalisms old and new but the ways in which this mode of governmentality invests subjects with new forms of liturgical officiancy. What is missed by both Brown and Behrent in their efforts to identify the true locus of the decapitation of royal sovereignty is the postrevolutionary fate of not so much the king’s rule but his glory, not so much the redistribution of his Herrschaft as his Herrlichkeit. To put it simply, political theory needs to consider not only the problem of the relation of legitimacy and legality but also that of legitimacy and regality. Both Brown and Behrent forget that the king had two bodies, and that something of the royal remains in the passage beyond royal sovereignty. Marx’s fundamental insight, as I have argued, was that these remains have largely been transformed into the spectral substance of Value, the elaboration of which is now performed, now officiated by, each member of the liberal and now neoliberal polity. My sense is that we are now in the midst of a further and quite radical metamorphosis of the subject- matter at issue here. That, at least, is how I understand the fact that the new American president has managed to fully amalgamate political office, person, and brand. I am even tempted to say that Trump is not fully mistaken when he repeatedly claims that there is no real conflict of interest between his duties as president and those of running his business.84 He may in fact simply be naming a new mutation in modern political economy, call it brand-name sovereignty. What this means is that the conceptual— and lived— distinction between homo politicus and homo oeconomicus has lost

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its salience. Trump, we might say, is the proper name, or rather the brand name, of this zone of indistinction. His own autodoxological drive of self-appreciation— his constant need to be praised and to praise himself in front of others, to amplify the value of his personal brand— would then no longer be a contingent quirk, the personality disorder of the present incumbent of the office of President of the United States, but rather something transpiring within the office itself. The royal remains have, it would seem, returned to the locus of the sovereign but now in the form of a brand name, indeed as a sort of “master brand” in which the truth of the neoliberal paradigm is laid bare.85 To put it another way, one could say that the current administration has fully grasped that what is at issue in neoliberal governmentality is not so much frugal government and rational efficiency as a kind of radical, even total officiancy (based not so much on efficient as on officiant markets). Again, that is precisely what Walter Benjamin was pointing to in his efforts to identify the fundamental features of “capitalism as religion,” a religion he characterizes as “a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have meaning only in their relationship to the cult.” 86 As already noted, when officiancy colors all of life, the distinction between workday and holiday, workday and Sabbath— and in the case of Trump, between family member, corporate officer, and government official— is rendered meaningless, even if it retains a certain nominal— a certain “official”— validity: “Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans trêve et sans merci [without truce/ interruption and without mercy; one might thus translate: a relentless and merciless cult— ELS]. There are no ‘weekdays.’ There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshiper.”87 One might in this context return to the foremost theorist of the “human capital” paradigm. As already noted, in the opening paragraph of his 1965 article, “A Theory of the Allocation of

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Time,” Gary Becker points to a crucial gap in economic theory. “Economic development has led to a large secular decline in the work week. . . . Consequently, the allocation and efficiency of non-working time may now be more important to economic welfare than that of working time; yet the attention paid by economists to the latter dwarfs any paid to the former.”88 I can’t claim to understand the mathematical calculations Becker performs in the article, but it’s clear that the understanding of time at work here practices an utter indifference to the distinction between workday and holiday, already signaled by the use of scare quotes in the following passage: The incentive to economize on time as its relative cost increases goes a long way towards explaining certain broad aspects of behavior that have puzzled and often disturbed observers of contemporary life. Since hours worked have declined secularly in most advanced countries, and so-called “leisure” has presumably increased, a natural expectation has been that “free” time would become more abundant, and be used more “leisurely” and “luxuriously.” Yet, if anything, time is used more carefully today than a century ago. If there was a secular increase in the productivity of working time relative to consumption time . . . there would be an increasing incentive to economize on the latter because of its greater expense (our theory emphatically cautions against calling such time “free”). Not surprisingly, therefore, it is now kept track of and used more carefully than in the past.89

As Nicolae Biea has summarized Becker’s main point, one that openly derides any notion of a utopia of leisure, “the separation between ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ then, is viewed as merely conventional and can in no way be taken to reflect a distinction between economic and non-economic realms (which, of course, Becker denies in the first place). Similarly, to speak of ‘free time’ is, for him, a contradiction, given that all time spent has as its opportunity cost the potential output of the most productive activity one

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could have otherwise engaged in.”90 Once human life is conceived as human capital, all life is a form of busyness. What I’ve been suggesting, however, is that ever more of this busyness is consumed by the cultivation of brand, which, in the context of human capital theory, should be grasped as a kind of liturgical work on the self. Put somewhat differently, everyone— every body— is an entrepreneur of his or her own private mana-facturing process. One might say, then, that the two main meanings of secular are at work in the citation from Becker: a development that takes place over an extended period of time; no longer subject to religious rules or standards. The secular increase in productivity has, I am arguing, been matched by a decline in the “secularity” of our lives, or rather of our human capital that comes to be ever more religiously administered. The neoliberal order is one in which we are always in some fashion engaged in officiant business, always caught up in the activity of officiant markets. We have all become, at some level, observant manatheists. One might recall in this context the remarkable observation made early in Franz Kafka’s The Castle by the novel’s protagonist: “Nowhere else had K. ever seen one’s official position and one’s life so intertwined as they were here, so intertwined that it sometimes seemed as though office and life had switched places.”91 This, I believe, is what Benjamin had in mind in his debate with Gershom Scholem about the political theological stakes of Kafka’s work. This is what he meant when he insisted, not only against his friend’s opposition but against what would seem to be Kafka’s own self-understanding, that the juridical sphere, whether it be sacred or profane, misses what is essential in Kafka’s writings: “I consider Kafka’s constant insistence on the Law to be the point where his work comes to a standstill [Kafkas stetes Drängen auf das Gesetz halte ich für den toten Punkt seines Werkes], which only means to say that it seems to me that the work cannot be moved in any interpretive direction whatsoever from there.”92 Benjamin’s ambition here would seem to be fully consonant with that of Michel Foucault, who, to cite Michael Behrent once more, wanted to “emancipate the concep-

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tualization of power from juridical categories— or, as he liked to put it, cut off the king’s head (by abandoning the idea that power must derive from a sovereign, legitimate source).” However, as a close reader of Shakespearean and German baroque tragedy, Benjamin knew that the king had two bodies; and as an ethnographer of commodity fetishism, he knew that the political theology of sovereignty had an afterlife in the doxology of everyday life in capitalist modernity, in its devotion to devotional labor, to mana-facturing. This is, as I have been arguing, a form of life in which one is governed not so much by efficient, rational administration but rather by an infinitely dispersed and disseminated cultic officiancy. It is, as Benjamin put it apropos of Kafka’s last novel, “life as it is lived in the village at the foot of the hill on which the castle is built.”93 In one of the short aphoristic texts that Kafka wrote during his brief stay— September 1917 to April 1918— with his sister in the countryside outside Prague, we find an allegory of the mutation of officiant life in the passage beyond royal sovereignty: They were given the choice to become kings or messengers. Just like children they all chose to be messengers. For this reason, there are only messengers; they race through the world and, because there are no kings, they cry out to one another announcements that have become meaningless. They would happily put an end to their miserable life but because of their oath of office they don’t dare. Es wurde ihnen die Wahl gestellt Könige oder der Könige Kuriere zu werden. Nach der Art der Kinder wollten alle Kuriere sein. Deshalb gibt es lauter Kuriere, sie jagen durch die Welt und rufen, da es keine Könige gibt, einander selbst die sinnlos gewordenen Meldungen zu. Gerne würden sie ihrem elenden Leben ein Ende machen, aber sie wagen es nicht wegen des Diensteides.94

In the age of Trump, these announcements have of course come to circulate ever more by way of or, perhaps better, as

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social media. One might even propose a revision of Kafka’s text and replace the word announcements (Meldungen) with tweets. (This would demand a correlative revision of Freud’s notion of the repetition compulsion in the direction of the compulsion to retweet.) The challenge raised by both Kafka and Benjamin, a challenge that has taken on new urgency in the age of Trump, whether he remains president or not, is to identify the places and practices where we take the oaths of office that bind us to the corpus mysticum of the neoliberal polity in which our officiancy is now, perhaps more than ever, branded into our individual and “corporate” flesh.95 But it might also be the case that the phenomenon of brandname sovereignty so perfectly incarnated by Donald Trump marks the very historical moment when the neoliberal paradigm has actually begun to exhaust and surpass itself, to succumb to a dialectical movement that opens onto a new form of life, one for the moment taking shape as an inconsistent and volatile mixture of populism, ethno-nationalism, mafia capitalism, and refeudalization (one could easily imagine a gated community reinstating the use of moats). To put it another way, we have perhaps entered a new interregnum in which the res publica and its forms of organization are quite literally up for grabs. It would seem that if the presidential election of 2016 has anything to teach the Left, it is that if it is to engage in this struggle effectively it will, at some level, have to go mana a mana, will have to find new anchorage points to gather in and orient the collective effervescence that is so clearly out there now— we are, in some sense, in a new age of what William Mazzarella calls the mana of the masses—toward new destinations. This is, for example, how I understand Alain Badiou’s remarks concerning the subjective dimension of “truth procedures” in the realm of politics. As he puts it in The Communist Hypothesis, The non-factual element in a truth is a function of its orientation, and this will be termed subjective. We will also say that the mate-

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rial “body” of a truth, in so far as it is subjectively oriented, is an exceptional body. Making unabashed use of a religious metaphor, I will say that the body-of-truth, as concerns what cannot be reduced to facts within it, can be called a glorious body. With respect to this body, which is that of a new collective Subject in politics, of an organization composed of individual multiples, we will say that it shares in the creation of a political truth.96

But if we have learned anything from the histories of capitalism as well as really-existing-socialism, it is that any new dispensation of glory, any new doxological practice, any new organization of our liturgical labor, needs to be coupled with the critical resources that will allow us to recognize it if we become, once more, officiants of yet another form of manatheism, one in which the “nonfactual” becomes all-consuming. In a word, we must also learn to cultivate the paradoxological capacity for inofficiancy. ePiloGue

What might such a capacity look like? What does it mean to work “inofficiantly,” to practice “inofficiancy,” to suspend one’s “officiant causality”?97 What is paradoxical about paradoxologies? What does para- mean here? How does one engage in doxological labor, perform doxologies, “from the side,” as it were? How is this different from what political economists have traditionally referred to as “unproductive labor”? While arguing that the stance of “constant ‘creativity, mobility and flexibility’ in which work and enjoyment coincide”— what I have referred to as mana-ical enjoyment— is one “shared by late-capitalist subjectivity as well as by the Deleuzian and other grassroots direct democratic movements,” Slavoj Žižek notes in passing— and with considerable sympathy— how a new form of art of the readymade has attempted to display inofficiant forms of life or, perhaps better, ordinary life as its own sort of liturgical practice:

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YouTube is full of sites in which ordinary people present a recording (usually an hour long) of themselves accomplishing some ordinary chore like baking a cake, cleaning a bathroom, or painting their car— nothing extraordinary, just a regular activity whose predictable rhythm engenders a soothing effect of peace on the viewer. It is easy to understand the attraction of such recordings: they enable us to escape the vicious cycle of the oscillation between nervous hyperactivity and bouts of depression. Their extraordinary nature resides in their very ordinariness: such totally predictable everyday chores are becoming rarer and rarer in our frantic daily rhythm.98

As an epilogue of sorts to my essay, I would like to broach this broader area of inquiry by way of commentary on the work of Giorgio Agamben, a thinker who has himself been struggling with these questions and whose writings on and genealogical approach to various forms of religious and political liturgies have been crucial for my own thinking on these matters. Agamben has devoted much of his philosophical career to exploring the possibility of what he often characterizes as new ways of using bodies and things. Although he hardly takes notice of it, this task places his work alongside Marx and the question of the possible overcoming of the logic of Value and what I have characterized as its officiant self-valorization, a dynamic grounded, in turn, in the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. For Agamben, this possibility involves the uncoupling of the use of bodies and things from all juridical categories, the placing of use beyond all jurisdictions (the ultimately Pauline dimension of this gesture suggests that overall, Agamben’s work might best be characterized as a kind of messianic pragmatism). Thus, for example, his great interest (and ultimate disappointment) in the Franciscans, who, he maintains, tried, on the basis of the notion of the “highest poverty,” to elaborate a form of life— or, as he prefers to write it, form-of-life— that would be practiced at the limits of ecclesiastical jurisdiction with re-

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spect to property and the proprieties of the priestly office. Franciscanism, Agamben argues, “represents the moment when the tension between forma vitae and officium is released, not because life is absorbed into liturgy, but on the contrary, because life and Divine Office reach their maximum disjunction.”99 More radically still, this was a form of life organized as a mode of “continuous opposition to the liturgical paradigm” (xiii), as a mode of resistance to the great temptation of the monks “to construct their life as a total and unceasing liturgy or Divine Office” (xii). In the terms I have been proposing, Agamben sees in the life of the Franciscans, in their efforts to remove their rules of conduct and modes of use from the sway of the juridical sphere and to construct a new sort of communal (not to say communist) life, an emergent practice of inofficiant use. Although the Franciscans ultimately failed, in Agamben’s view, to develop a robust theory of use— or what I would call inofficiancy— it was nonetheless “due to the foresight of Francis, who in distinguishing forma vitae and officium, ‘living according to the form of the holy Gospel’ and ‘living according to the form of the holy Roman Church,’ had succeeded in making of the Minors’ life not an unceasing liturgy, but an element whose novitas seemed completely extraneous to both civil and canon law” (121–22). Altissima paupertas, or “highest poverty,” was the term used to identify “this extraneousness to the law” (122; one might also think of this as a refusal to brand things with marks of ownership). Agamben thus characterizes the “most precious legacy of Franciscanism” as the articulation of the West’s “undeferrable task: how to think a form-of-life, a human life entirely removed from the grasp of the law and a use of bodies and of the world that would never be substantiated into an appropriation. That is to say . . . to think life as that which is never given as property but only as a common use.” Such a task “will demand the elaboration of a theory of use— of which Western philosophy lacks even the most elementary principles— and, moving for-

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ward from that, a critique of the operative and governmental ontology that continues, under various guises, to determine the destiny of the human species” (xiii). In other work, Agamben characterizes this task as the cultivation of practices of profanation, practices aimed at rendering inoperative the everyday liturgical labor, the everyday doxologies, that serves to capture life within the folds— we might say mana-folds— of the sacred, which, as Marx so compellingly argued, lives on as the gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit of Value. Here Agamben seems to suggest that what is at issue is not so much the operation of the juridical sphere as such but rather the ways in which its operations are in turn underwritten by relations of mana-facturing, the ways in which they are, at some level, officiantly practiced. One might recall here Daniel Paul Schreber’s notion of circumstances contrary to the Order of the World. Under such circumstances, Schreber constantly finds himself not only biopolitically man(a)handled but also subject to the divine command to produce ever more mana-ical enjoyment, to render his own body into an instrument of officiant causality. This is, I’ve suggested, one of the risks of the modern mutation of the political theology of sovereignty, one that emerges, that is, once the principle of sovereignty has entered the life of the People, has become every body’s busyness. Opening things to new and inofficiant use by way of profanation thus means, at some level, going out of busyness, which is by no means an easy and straightforward process. Commenting on the Roman jurists, Agamben writes, “Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men. . . . And if ‘to consecrate’ (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, ‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men.” He notes the paradoxical state of “purity” achieved thereby, namely to be purified of or absolved from the religious concept of purity, to be “freed from sacred names.”100 The paradoxological as-

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pect of this achievement is underlined by the title of the essay from which these words are taken: “In Praise of Profanation.” In this context, Agamben insists on the derivation of the term religio from relegere (rather than the more familiar etymology linking it to religare, signifying that which binds and unites the human and the divine). Relegere “indicates the stance of scrupulousness and attention that must be adopted in relations with the gods . . . that must be observed in order to respect the separation between the sacred and the profane” (74–75). Against this background, Agamben is able to bring his discussion into contact with one of the major (and profoundly ambiguous) topics in the cultural theory of urban modernity, that of distraction: “Religio is not what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain distinct. It is not disbelief and indifference toward the divine, therefore, that stand in opposition to religion, but ‘negligence,’ that is, a behavior that is free and ‘distracted’ (that is to say, released from the religio of norms) before things and their use, before forms of separation and their meaning. To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use” (75). For Agamben, the activity of play serves as the paradigmatic form of such negligence. Following the lead of Emil Benveniste, who shows the complex and at some level antagonistic relations between play and the sacred in the history of Indo-European languages and cultures, he concludes that “play frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it. The use to which the sacred is returned is a special one that does not coincide with utilitarian consumption” (76; my emphasis). To put it somewhat differently, what stands opposed to officiancy is not efficiency but rather inofficiancy. Agamben goes on to extend the realm of what can become an object of “child’s play” to “the spheres of economics, war, law, and other activities that we are used to thinking of as sacred. All of a sudden, a car, a firearm, or a legal contract becomes a toy” (76). What is

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ultimately— I would say paradoxologically— at issue here is “the passage from a religio that is now felt to be false or oppressive to negligence as vera religio. This, however, does not mean neglect (no kind of attention can compare to that of a child at play) but a new dimension of use, which children and philosophers give to humanity” (76; my emphasis). It is at this point that Agamben turns to Walter Benjamin’s 1934 essay on Kafka, a text he has cited on a number of occasions and always as a sort of placeholder-testimony for the new dimension of use he is invoking here. The passage that Agamben repeatedly cites is taken from Benjamin’s brief commentary on Kafka’s short prose text “Der neue Advokat” (The New Advocate), a parable about Bucephalus, Alexander the Great’s horse, who has apparently metamorphosed into Dr. Bucephalus, the new lawyer of the parable’s title. Kafka situates this metamorphosis in a time and place not unlike that of the messengers in the parable cited earlier, who because there are no kings seem only to be able to run around proclaiming messages that have become meaningless: “Nowadays— it cannot be denied— there is no Alexander the Great.” And although even in Alexander’s time, “the gates of India were beyond reach, yet the King’s sword pointed the way to them. Today the gates have receded to remoter and loftier places; no one points the way; many carry swords, but only to brandish them, and the eye that tries to follow them is confused.” (The verb Kafka uses here is fuchteln; today, as I have been arguing and as the title of Mazzarella’s essay suggests, what we brandish are our brands.) The parable concludes with an image of the “new advocate” at study: “So perhaps it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done and absorb oneself in law books. In the quiet lamplight, his flanks unhampered by the thighs of a rider, free and far from the clamor of battle, he reads and turns the pages of our ancient tomes.”101 Citing Werner Kraft’s characterization of the parable as the single most powerful and penetrating critique of myth in world literature, a critique launched in the name of justice, Benja-

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min, for his part, insists on taking a further step, one that recalls the remarks cited earlier apropos of the limits of any “juridical” reading of Kafka: “Is it really the law which could thus be invoked against myth in the name of justice? No, as a legal scholar Bucephalus remains true to his origins, except that he does not seem to be practicing law— and this is probably something new, in Kafka’s sense, for both Bucephalus and the bar. The law which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice.”102 Agamben locates here, in a law no longer applied but rather studied— it is hard not to think of the Talmudic study of laws pertaining to Temple-era Judaism— the kind of attentive negligence, the mode of focused inofficiancy, at issue in the practice of profanation. “Just as the religio that is played with but no longer observed opens the gate to use, so the powers of economics, law, and politics, deactivated in play, can become the gateways to a new happiness” (Profanations, 76). This new happiness would thus seem to be correlated with the emergence of new powers of (inofficiant) observation.103 Benjamin’s work is crucial to Agamben’s efforts to clarify the difference between profanation and secularization. Indeed, secularization is the process that serves, as Carl Schmitt famously observed, to establish and sustain what I’ve been tracking throughout this essay, namely the political theology of sovereignty. Secularization, to Agamben, “leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus, the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact” (Profanations, 77). Again, my argument has been that both biopolitics and the political economy of the wealth of nations (as I’ve indicated, “wealth” should be in scare quotes) are two further developments in this process (developments which, I’ve suggested, also opened the space for anthropology’s “mana moment”). Invoking a crucial Benjaminian category, that of aura— a word neighboring, of

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course, on mana— Agamben posits profanation as a practice aimed precisely at intervening into this series of displacements, at interrupting the mana-facturing processes that constitute what might be called the dream-work of secularization: “Profanation . . . neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized” (77). Agamben at times presents his genealogy of what I have been calling officiancy as an alternative or, at the very least, complement, to Martin Heidegger’s efforts to situate modernity— and for Heidegger, modernity is for the most part correlated with modern science and technology— within a history of metaphysics going back to Plato and decisively consolidated in the biblical theology of creation. For both Heidegger and Agamben, what is at issue is the transformation of the semantic field around the Greek concepts of energeia and ergon into the semantic field around the Latin concepts of operari, opus, actualitas, and facere. As Heidegger puts it in the second volume of his Nietzsche study, “The ergon is no longer what is freed in the openness of presencing [das ins Offene des Anwesens Freigelassene], but what is effected in working [das im Wirken Gewirkte]. . . . Having progressed from the beginning essence of energeia, Being has become actualitas.”104 This transformative Latinization of Greek philosophical language was, as Heidegger argues, further advanced under the influence of the Roman church and the biblical concept of creation: “Being which has changed to actualitas gives to beings as a whole that fundamental characteristic which the representational thinking of the biblical-Christian faith in creation can take over in order to secure metaphysical justification for itself.”105 As we have seen, Agamben’s focus is precisely not on productive labor and efficient causality but rather on liturgical labor and what I have characterized as officiant causality. As

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Agamben argues— and his critique also applies to much of the Frankfurt school critique of instrumental reason— Heidegger was thus unable to grasp that “one cannot understand the metaphysics of technology if one understands it only in the form of production. It is,” he continues, “just as much and above all governance and oikonomia, which in the last analysis can even put causal production between parentheses in the name of a more refined and diffuse form of management of human beings and things. And it is this peculiar praxis whose characteristics we have sought to define through our analysis of liturgy.”106 In the terms I’ve been proposing here, the crucial dimension at issue in the history of the European West up to and including the recent history of global capitalism is not so much manufacturing but rather mana-facturing.107 In a Nietzschean spirit, Agamben at times presents this alternative history of metaphysics as a kind of hostile takeover of the Greek understanding of being by a Roman and, ultimately, Christian one that burdens the innocence of being with a new kind of ethical weight and normative pressure, indeed transforms all being into a having-to-be, turns all of life into a kind of duty, into an officium. (One will recall in this context the remarkable passage from Franz Kafka’s Castle cited earlier: “Nowhere else had K. ever seen one’s official position and one’s life so intertwined as they were here, so intertwined that it sometimes seemed as though office and life had switched places.”)108 And indeed, Agamben introduces this alternative ontology as one that fills a crucial lacuna in Friedrich Nietzsche’s own genealogy of morals, where the concept of duty is never properly thematized.109 Much like Heidegger, Agamben constructs his genealogy of this normatively hyper- or sur-charged ontology largely as a series of translations of Greek philosophical concepts, one that finds its first canonical articulation in Cicero’s De officiis. 110 Agamben understands Cicero’s project as a kind of philosophical anthropology pertaining to the formative in-

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stitution of a common life. Commenting on Cicero, he writes, “If human beings do not simply live their lives like the animals, but ‘conduct’ and ‘govern’ life, officium is what renders life governable, that by means of which the life of humans is ‘instituted’ and ‘formed.’”111 For Agamben, the stakes are huge— one hears echoes of Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking history of sexuality— for “in this way, the politician and the jurist’s attention is shifted from the carrying out of individual acts to the ‘use of life’ as a whole; that is, it is identified with the ‘institution of life’ as such, with the conditions and the status that define the very existence of human beings in society” (75). We are, it would seem, within the orbit of officium— finding ourselves invested with one office or another— once human life has become, has been “instituted” as, a space of normativity. There are many further turning points in Agamben’s story, one that keeps circling back to Greek and Roman philosophy even as it pushes forward in fits and starts. The general trajectory, however, takes us from Ambrose’s attempt to rewrite Cicero’s work with an eye to the proprieties of the priestly office and the efficacy of the performance of sacraments— the officiant causality of liturgical labor— to Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of religio, to Immanuel Kant’s understanding of duty in response to the claims of practical reason, to Francisco Suárez’s elaboration of religious duty as infinite debt, to Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, and even to Adolf Eichmann’s reference to the duties of his office in defense of his actions in the extermination of the Jews. (I would argue that regarding the so-called Final Solution, the task was not so much the efficient elimination of the Jews for the sake of the health and well-being of the population but rather the officiant production of the glory of the German Volk; the Final Solution was in that sense a perversely and pervasively toxic doxological operation.) Living one’s life under the sign of duty or officium is, as Agamben argues, to live in an atmosphere suffused with imperatives, to exist in a state of constant ex-citation under the impact

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of commands, to never cease to hear the voices that not so much demand Achtung, or respect— the feeling that reveals, for Kant, the commanding presence of the categorical imperative and for Durkheim the presence of mana— but rather constantly call to attention, command, yell out: Achtung! As Agamben puts it, Here one can see the proximity between the ontology of command and the ontology of office. . . . Both the one who executes an order and the one who carries out a liturgical act neither simply are nor simply act, but are determined in their being by their acting and vice versa. The official— like the officiant— is what he has to do and has to do what he is: he is a being of command. The transformation of being into having-to-be which defines the ethics as much as the ontology and politics of modernity, has its paradigm here. (84)

As Agamben further notes, this paradigm essentially converts the incumbent of an office into a pure functionary of the Other. Citing Pietro Gasparri, he writes, “‘To function is to act as if one were another, in the capacity of someone’s alter ego, either an individual person or a community.’ . . . The term function names the constitutive vicariousness of office” (86). To return to my earlier remarks on the “labor theory of the unconscious,” one is a functionary of the Other because it is always the case that at some level, the Other isn’t working; this dysfunction is registered as the quasi-somatic pressure of a call or summons— the ex-citation— to “fill in,” “to cover for,” the Other. This “alteration” of the ego is what Freud was after with the notion of the Überich, or superego, which we can now grasp as the surplus-ego charged with managing a surplus scarcity, as a sort of officiancy expert monitoring our liturgical labors, our outputs in the doxology of everyday life. As I’ve suggested, human capital theory and neoliberalism more generally have effectively posited these analyses as their own glorious doxa. In a word, neoliberalism is essentially a theory of officiant markets. This means that our Diensteid,

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our oath of office, pertains ultimately to our participation not in any straightforwardly productive process but rather in what I have been calling the mana-facturing process.112 To return to Agamben, it is worth noting that Claude LéviStrauss’s critique of the concept of mana plays a significant role in the former’s efforts to write an “archaeology of the oath,” to give shape and context to his claims concerning what he refers to as the “sacrament of language” performed in every oath.113 Both writers take pains to argue against what they see as the inflation of aspects of human language, its structure and modes of operation, into “scientific mythologemes.” Agamben in particular takes aim at a whole array of concepts developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and the study of comparative religions. As we have seen, these concepts— among them mana, taboo, sacer— were often used to locate the origins not only of religion but also of modern juridical and political concepts, practices, and institutions in ostensibly more “primitive” layers of magic and ritual, in what Émile Durkheim characterized as the elementary forms of religious life and Marcel Mauss elaborated in the context of a general theory of magic. As Agamben already puts it in Homo Sacer, “Lévi-Strauss has shown how the term mana functions as an excessive signifier with no meaning other than that of marking an excess of the signifying function over all signifieds. Somewhat analogous remarks could be made with reference to the use and function of the concepts of the sacred and the taboo in the discourse of the social sciences between 1890 and 1940.”114 In this later entry to the Homo Sacer project that focuses on the phenomenon of the oath, Agamben emphasizes the “event” of anthropogenesis that, as we have seen, is at work in LéviStrauss’s critique of Mauss. For Lévi-Strauss, the excessive signifier that comes to be hypostasized as a sort of magical substance or energy is correlated with the rupture in the fabric of being that marks the emergence of human language. The synchronic structural element that Lévi-Strauss calls the floating

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signifier is something like the index of the missing link in the diachronic emergence of language, of the belatedness of any effort to capture the emergence of language in language. To cite Lévi-Strauss again, “Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the ascent of animal life, language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually. In the wake of a transformation which is not a subject of study for the social sciences, but for biology and psychology, a shift occurred from a stage when nothing had meaning to another stage when everything had meaning. Actually, that apparently banal remark is important, because that radical change has no counterpart in the field of knowledge.”115 For Agamben, the oath is the cultural practice that serves as “the historical testimony” of this “experience of language in which man was constituted as a speaking being” (The Sacrament of Language, 66). More precisely, the oath functions for him as the site where this anthropogenic “moment” persists, reaches into our life with language. To use Nietzsche’s famous formulation from On the Genealogy of Morals, the work of breeding an animal capable of making promises is never finished once and for all but rather is, at some level, posited anew each time we give our word. Where Agamben moves beyond Lévi-Strauss is in his sustained reflection not on the gap in knowledge that is filled with concepts of the mana type but rather on the ethical and political dimensions at issue in this “filling in.” What concerns Agamben is the emergence of language not so much as a communicative capacity or tool and medium of knowledge but rather as an ethico-political space in which we are seen to be answerable for what we say each time we, by speaking, put ourselves “out there.” The “out there” is ultimately, as Robert Brandom might put it, a space of normativity (a word studiously avoided by Agamben). “When,” Agamben writes in his more speculative “continental” idiom, language appeared in man, the problem created cannot have been solely, as according to the hypothesis of Lévi-Strauss, the

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cognitive aspect of the inadequation of signifier and signified that constitutes the limits of human knowledge. For the living human being who found himself speaking, what must have been just as— perhaps more— decisive is the problem of the efficacy and truthfulness of his word, that is, of what can guarantee the original connection between names and things, and between the subject who has become a speaker— and, thus capable of asserting and promising— and his actions. (68)

In his account of the oath, Agamben more or less adapts Martin Heidegger’s well-known characterization of Dasein as the being that in its being puts itself out there, as (this is Heidegger), “the entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, Dasein’s Being is an issue for it” (Das Dasein ist ein Seiendes, das nicht unter anderem Seiendem vorkommt. Es ist vielmehr dadurch ontisch ausgezeichnet, daß diesem Seienden in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht).116 In Agamben’s terms— terms that already take into account Heidegger’s own “linguistic turn”— “uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language . . . [and] so also is . . . the living being whose language places his life in question” (The Sacrament of Language, 68–69; emphasis in the original). The oath serves for Agamben “as the anthropogenic operator by means of which the living being, who has discovered itself speaking, has decided to be responsible for his words and, devoting himself to the logos, to constitute himself as the ‘living being who has language.’” The oath becomes thereby the “historical testimony” of not just man’s emergence as a speaking being but also— or rather, therewith— of his entry into history as such; it serves, that is, as the historical testimony of man’s essential historicity: “And just as mana expresses, according to Lévi-Strauss, the fundamental inadequation between signifier and signified, which constitutes

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‘the disability of every finite thought,’ so does the oath express the demand, decisive in every sense for the speaking animal, to put its nature at stake in language and to bind together in an ethical and political connection words, things, and actions. Only by this means was it possible for something like a history, distinct from nature and, nevertheless, inseparably intertwined with it, to be produced” (69). It’s not always easy to discern precisely the critical aspect of Agamben’s work, but in the present context it would seem to be aimed at those institutions and practices— above all, religion and law— that attempt to master the anthropogenic core of the oath, to get hold of and administer its components and so “technicalize” its performance. Because, as Agamben puts it, the double possibility of blessing and curse is inscribed in every avowal— “a blessing, if the word is full, if there is a correspondence between the signifier and the signified, between words and things . . . a curse if there remains, between the semiotic and the semantic, a void and a gap,” because every oath is shadowed by perjury, every “bene-diction” by a “male-diction,” religion and law attempt to “technicalize this anthropogenic experience of the word in the oath and the curse as historical institutions, separating and opposing point by point truth and lie, true name and false name, efficacious formula and incorrect formula. That which was ‘badly said’ became in this way a curse in the technical sense, and fidelity to the word became an obsessive and scrupulous concern with appropriate formulas and ceremonies, that is, religio and ius” (70). What this means for Agamben— and here he returns to the basic trajectory of the Homo Sacer project— is that “the performative experience of the word is constituted and isolated in a ‘sacrament of language’ and this latter in a ‘sacrament of power.’” To put it in Heideggerian terms, Agamben is essentially arguing that various institutions of power are symptoms of the forgetting of Being, of forgetting the ontological difference between Being and beings, between a primordial experience of language

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and historical attempts to exploit it or, to use a German formulation that returns us to the topic of political economy, Kapital daraus zu schlagen: “The ‘force of law’ that supports human societies, the idea of linguistic enunciations that stably obligate living beings, that can be observed and transgressed, derive from this attempt to nail down the originary performative force of the anthropogenic experience, and are, in this sense, an epiphenomenon of the oath and of the malediction that accompanied it” (70; my emphasis). It perhaps comes as no surprise, then, that Agamben sees in at least a certain mode of doing philosophy the resources for countering such efforts to separate out and institutionalize the components of the oath, for raising what might be called the question of technology with respect to language, a question that proves to be most urgent in relation to Christianity as the key relay in the West for sacraments of language and power, for the technical officiancy of the governance of people and things: “Christianity is, in the proper sense of the term, a religion and divinization of the logos. The attempt to reconcile faith as the performative experience of veridiction with belief in a series of dogmas of an assertive type is the task and, at the same time, the central contradiction of the Church, which obliges it, against the clear evangelical command, to technicalize oath and curses in specific juridical institutions” (66). Against this background, philosophy becomes the paradoxical religion— we might say paradoxological religion— that devotes itself to a sort of unscrupulousness, that cultivates a peculiar discipline of— to return to Agamben’s “praise of profanation”— distractedness and negligence, of inofficiancy, with respect to the observance of all offices: “For this reason philosophy, which does not seek to fix veridiction into a codified system of truth but, in every event of language, puts into words and exposes the veridiction that founds it, must necessarily put itself forward as the vera religio [true religion]” (66). To put it differently, given the characterization of religion

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and law essentially as institutional forms of obsessional neurosis, as practices in which “fidelity to the word became an obsessive and scrupulous concern with appropriate formulas and ceremonies,” philosophy puts itself forth as a mode of rendering inoperative the compulsive aspect of repetition compulsion— we might write it as repetition compulsion — and opening the way for experimental and perhaps more playful modes of repetition of the anthropogenic experience. It is this “experience”— one only ever registered unconsciously— that installs in life a sort of surplus scarcity that, as we have seen, largely serves as the driving force of our various forms of mana-facturing. Agamben’s lifelong project of opening, by way of the vera religio of philosophical thought, a space of possibilities of new uses of bodies and things is, as we can now see, essentially one devoted to the task of interrupting our devoted service to those mana-ical modes of production. As I’ve already indicated, against the background of his profound indebtedness to the Pauline figure of the deactivation of the law, we might characterize his project as a kind of messianic pragmatism. The Pauline concept at the center of Agamben’s work, or better, the master signifier that holds the Homo Sacer project together, is a verb whose significance Agamben claims to have discovered himself: “The discovery concerns the verb katargeo, a true key word in the Pauline messianic vocabulary. . . . Katargeo is a compound of argeo, which in turn derives from the adjective argos, meaning ‘inoperative, not-at-work (a-ergos), inactive.’ The compound therefore comes to mean ‘I make inoperative, I deactivate, I suspend the efficacy.’”117 As Agamben suggests, Paul likely integrated into his own messianic lexicon the use, in the Septuagint, of the Greek argeo to translate the Hebrew word signifying Sabbath rest. “It is certainly not by chance,” Agamben writes, “that the term used by the apostle to express the effect of the messianic on works of the law echoes a verb that signifies the sabbatical suspension of works.”118 However, Paul’s own writings suggest a very specific under-

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standing of the work at issue in this sabbatical suspension, one that points in the direction I have been pursuing throughout this essay. It is presented as a kind of individualizing (and therewith universalizing) repetition of the foundational event of the Jewish people, the exodus from the “fleshpots” of Egypt. But what is at stake for Paul is an excess of flesh, an inflammation generated in and through the exodus itself, which of course reaches its climax in the giving of the law at Sinai, sealing the foundational oath, the covenantal pact with the Israelites. Paul characterizes this inflammation of the flesh as the work of a supplementary law that shadows God’s commandments, comes to life in and through them as their obscene double. The two crucial passages from Romans 7 are worth quoting at length:119 What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said “You shall not covet.” But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, wrought in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died; the very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and by it killed me. . . . Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. (Rom. 7:7–13)

This awakening of sin through the giving of the law is, as noted, then presented as another sort of law: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells

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within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but the sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. (Rom. 7:15–23)

As I’ve suggested, the law “in my members” refers to the automaticity, the drive dimension, of desire that intensifies and amplifies the body, sexualizes its parts (making of them “partial objects”), excites its members, adds to life an uncanny surplus of vitality, of inflamed flesh, that goes its own way even against the will and interests of the individual and the integrity of its body. Paul’s messianism is aimed precisely at this supplementary law of the drive; or, to return to a neologism introduced earlier, it is a sarxist messianism, one pertaining to (at least a certain mode of) the jouissance condensed here in the notion of the flesh. It is in this context that Agamben’s rendering of Paul’s key word is most salient: “For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sin were enacted [energeito] through the law in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are de-activated [katergethemen, “made inoperative”] from the law.”120 We might put it this way: our inscription into a normative order generates a surplus pressure that can never be discharged by any positive “works” in response to the established norms of that order; indeed, it is this excess pressure that seems to drive those works, render them compulsive. Nothing we do seems to do the trick, nothing provides true relief from this surplus pressure, returns us to some sort of homeostatic set point. In the terms I’ve been using here, I understand Agamben to be proposing a conception of the messianic agency as one that introduces something like a general strike, an in principle universal sabbatical on all attempts to fill in for the Other in accordance

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with one’s various oaths of office. To repeat an earlier formulation (about repetition), the task is to render inoperative the compulsive aspect of repetition compulsion and thereby open the way for experimental and perhaps more playful modes of repetition of the anthropogenic experience, to in some sense repeat the sabbatical “work” done on the seventh day of creation. Creativity proper emerges only on the condition of “going out of busyness,” of lifting the compulsive force of our actions, setting free our various ways of being mana-ically productive in the officiant service of some Other. What I am arguing in this no doubt revisionary reading of his work is that Agamben’s lifelong project of reconstructing the genealogy of modern forms of power and authority essentially takes up this Pauline figure of the flesh and recasts it not so much as “bare life”— a term I often find to be misleading— but rather as the mana-ical enjoyment that keeps us busy— that keeps us in the busyness of— filling in for the Other and thereby saying yes to power (one might even say: yes, oh yes!).121 What I have referred to as Agamben’s “messianic pragmatism” thus concerns above all the dimension of enjoyment at issue in our relation to people, nature, and things, in our “use” of them. If we broaden our thinking of the German concept of Eidgenossenschaft, a form of oath community historically (and mythically) associated with the confederation of Swiss cantons, as pointing to fundamental dimensions of every social bond, then we might grasp this project as one largely aimed at separating out, freeing up, the dimension of enjoyment, of Geniessen, at work in and to some extent exploited by every Eidgenossenschaft, whether explicitly identified as one or not, as the “crazy glue” that ultimately holds every social formation, every form of life, together (and thus, too, our identities, our sense of who we are). And, as I have been arguing, neoliberalism is a form of life in which our “oath of office,” our Diensteid, is not merely affectively sustained by this dimension but rather pertains first and foremost to our complete devotion to mana-ical enjoyment, to our full participation in the

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operations of officiant markets. Those messengers from Franz Kafka’s short parable who run around pronouncing meaningless messages are thus at some level actually doing their job. Against this background, I would insist that Agamben’s otherwise acute diagnosis of the crisis of all Eidgenossenschaften, one that has reached its apparent culmination in the age of Trump, needs correction, and indeed one that goes in the direction of my reading of Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics. Those lectures, as we have seen, address not so much the reduction of life to “bare life”— what one might expect from the use of the concept of biopolitics— as the radical “economization” of life in the form of neoliberal human capital theory. In his prescient reading of our contemporary situation, Agamben, taking up Paolo Prodi’s work on “the sacrament of power,” suggests that “we are today the first generations to live our collective life without the bond of the oath.”122 The consequences of this dissolution of the bond “that, by means of the oath, united the living being to its language” are radical and have arguably reached an extreme since Donald Trump took the oath of office as president of the United States. In his diagnosis of the situation, Agamben divides these consequences into two separate domains or rather, claims to track a division manifest in the situation itself: “On the one hand, there is the living being, more and more reduced to a purely biological reality and to bare life. On the other hand, there is the speaking being, artificially divided from the former, through a multiplicity of technico-mediatic apparatuses, in an experience of the word that grows ever more vain, for which it is impossible to be responsible and in which anything like a political experience becomes more and more precarious” (70). Who could not recognize in, as Agamben puts it, the “spectacular and unprecedented proliferation of vain words” (71) unleashed by the ostensible decline of the oath the current state of affairs— if not exactly inaugurated with the inauguration of Donald Trump, then certainly one that has become with his oath of office, to use a Hegelian formulation, in and for itself. But, as

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I have been arguing, it is misleading to separate the living being from the speaking being or, in the terms I have been developing here, to separate “bare life” from the officiancies we are called on to achieve, the mana-facturing we are driven to engage in on the basis of, with the material of, our own living human capital. I would suggest that branding is the form in which the two seemingly separate domains are most tightly conjoined, in which the living being is inscribed in the operations of officiant markets and human life itself becomes an unceasing enterprise of selfappreciation or brand mana-gement. One might say that our flesh is inflamed not by the lures of transgressing the law but rather by way of the searing process of being branded, the seal not of a decline but rather of a new form, a new and extreme kind of oath of office. With regard to Trump, this neoliberal turn returns to the figure of the sovereign, but this time as a kind of superbrand sustained by the doxological labor of his political-economic base (in the age of branding, of brand-producing labor, we might say that the ideological superstructure has largely been absorbed by its base). The acclamations Trump invokes at his rallies are boosts of mana-ical enjoyment that keep reanimating the (second) body of this figurehead of Sovereignty, Inc. I have concluded my essay with a discussion of Agamben’s work in the hopes that it might provide the resources for thinking about what it would mean to interrupt the mana-facturing processes that, in an age of neoliberalism, have achieved something of the order of a second nature or, indeed, a full-fledged form of life; what it would mean to produce “paradoxological” alternatives to our relentless participation in officiant markets, to go out of the busyness of producing the mana-ical enjoyment that serves as the “crazy glue” of our ever-shifting forms of identity and modes of belonging. I hope that over the course of this discussion such possibilities for, as Agamben likes to put it, new uses of our bodies and things have come into view if only in a very provisional way. Agamben, as we have seen, himself suggests that the activity of philosophy— philosophy as a form of a life— might itself just be the best candidate.123 Be that as it may, I’d like to conclude

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with a short text by Kafka, the writer whom Agamben so often tries to enlist in his project of messianic pragmatism. It is a diary entry from February 15, 1920, and offers a kind of reverie— or rather the memory of a reverie— concerning the “slight adjustment” at issue in the attempt to live inofficiantly.124 As should be clear from this marvelously suggestive passage, it is not simply a matter of simplifying life, making things for one’s own use and consumption, shifting from mana-facturing to small-scale, small-batch manufacturing (a shift that has itself entered the repertoire of branding). If it is a matter of practicing ordinary life as a sort of counter-liturgy, a liturgy of profanation, it is one with a considerable Kafkaesque twist. I give Kafka the last enigmatic word for now: One day, many years ago, I sat on the slope of the Laurenziberg, feeling sad. I was considering the wishes I had for my life. The most important or the most appealing wish was to attain a view of life (and— this was inescapably bound up with it— to convince others of it in writing) in which life retained its natural full complement of rising and falling, but at the same time would be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, as a dream, as a hovering. A beautiful wish perhaps, if I had truly wished it [wenn ich ihn richtig gewünscht hätte]. Somewhat like wishing to hammer together a table with painstakingly methodical craftsmanship, and at the same time to do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people could say: “This hammering is a nothingness to him,” but rather: “This hammering is really a hammering to him yet at the same time it is also a nothingness,” whereby the hammering would have become still bolder, still more resolute, still more real, and, if you will, still more senseless [irrsinniger].125

notes

1. Daniel Diermeier, Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011).

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2. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30. 3. Brown, 31; emphasis in the original. 4. Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital,” trans. Ivan Ascher, Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21–43. 5. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 34. 6. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” trans. Edward Shils, in Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 338–39; my emphasis. 7. John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Subsequent references will be made in the text. 8. These are further elaborations of an argument I already develop in The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 9. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:126. The German has been taken from Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, erster Band (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2008). Subsequent references will be made in the text. 10. Sandor Ferenczi’s essay, “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” offers the most concise psychoanalytic account of the link between excrement and money. Ferenczi argues that what makes gold gold is the yield of a sort of dehydration/deodorization process that leads from shit to mud to sand to pebbles to marbles and buttons and eventually to gold. See Ferenczi, First Contributions to Psychoanalysis, trans. Ernest Jones (London: Karnac Books, 1994), 319–31. 11. See above all Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 12. Marx, Capital, 256. 13. As Agamben summarizes the paradoxical economy of glory,

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the peculiar circularity of its officiant causality, “Glory is the exclusive property of God for eternity, and will remain eternally identical in him, such that nothing and no one can increase or diminish it; and yet, glory is glorification, which is to say, something that all creatures always incessantly owe to God and that he demands of them. From this paradox follows another one, which theology pretends to present as the resolution of the former: glory, the hymn of praise that creatures owe to God, in reality derives from the very glory of God; it is nothing but the necessary response, almost the echo that the glory of God awakens in them. That is (and this is the third formulation of the paradox): everything that God accomplishes, the works of creation and the economy of redemption, he accomplishes only for his glory. However, for this, creatures owe him gratitude and glory.” Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 216. 14. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 34 (this and subsequent translations slightly modified). 15. Freud, 34. 16. Although my approach is in many ways compatible with that of Slavoj Žižek’s recent efforts to establish “the belated actuality of Marx’s critique of political economy,” my focus on the liturgical dimension of value-producing labor offers a rather different point of entry into and conceptualization of this actuality. See Žižek’s Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 149. 17. Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2010). Subsequent references will be made in the text. 18. Noam Yuran, What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Subsequent references will be made in the text. 19. On September 26, 2017, I briefly tuned in to the business channel CNBC, where I saw one of the regular business correspondents interview two men, one the head of a company specializing in branding, the other a private investor in that company. When the correspondent asked the investor why he got involved, he replied

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that he liked the company because it gave him the sense of dealing with something tangible. 20. See my discussion of Jonathan Crary’s wonderful essay, 24/7, in my Weight of All Flesh. In this context, it’s worth citing the Comaroffs’ remarks concerning the congelation of the labor of “ethno-prise” (one might also say ethno-praise): “It is only by understanding how and why identity congeals into property— into a species of capital vested in the entrepreneurial subject, singular and collective— that we may fully grasp emerging patterns of selfhood and sociality at the dawn of the twentieth century. . . . All the more so . . . under historical conditions that unmoor the struggle for survival from received forms of wage labor and material being-in-the-world, and redirect it toward the alienation of the immaterial— epitomized in the branding and marketing of just the sorts of value that accrue to the identity economy and to those best positioned within it.” Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc., 144. 21. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 221. 22. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 288. 23. William Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 41. 24. Robert Codrington, The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folklore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 118–19. 25. Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge, 2001), 137. This notion of immanent heterogeneity would seem to be getting at the dimension referred to by Jacques Lacan as extimacy, itself an effort to provide a new term for Freud’s understanding of the uncanny, of das Unheimliche. 26. The English translation of Freud’s major study of the drives, Triebe und Triebschicksale, The Drives and Their Vicissitudes, thus actually captures an aspect of Freud’s drive theory missed in the original title, namely the always vicarious aspect at work in the functioning of the drives. To borrow from the vocabulary of sovereignty, in the realm of the drives there are no kings, only viceroys.

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27. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 204. 28. In this context, it’s worth recalling a compelling aesthetic representation of the subject matter at issue here that I’ve periodically cited, Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s filmic adaptation of Wagner’s Parsifal. The opera stages the investiture crisis of the Fisher King, Amfortas, who is unable to assume the duties of his office as sovereign of the Grail Society. The crisis is embodied in the wounded flesh of the king. Syberberg’s dramaturgical innovation is to present the object-cause of the crisis as a kind of organ without a body, a bit of living flesh ritually displayed and carried about on a pillow by the officers of the society. In the terms we’ve been using here, this ritual “celebration” of the suspension of ritual— the normal rituals of the Grail Society— displays a separating out of what I have called mana-ical enjoyment from the enjoyment of mana that normally sustains the authority of those in charge. No longer able to discharge his duties, Amfortas discharges the substance of his enjoyment. 29. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 209; my emphasis. 30. In Martin Heidegger’s terms, we are always already called to thinking, entrusted with the understanding of Being. Indeed, in his lectures from 1951 to 1952 published under the title Was Heisst Denken?, he proposes that one ultimately needs to hear that question not primarily as the English translation reads it (What Is Called Thinking?) but rather as What Calls Out for Thinking? Thinking is always already responsive, a mode of responsibility. 31. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 209; emphasis in the original. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 32. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 256. 33. Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, 4–5. 34. Friedrich Nietzsche famously gave his book Twilight of the Idols the subtitle Or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. At the end of the book’s foreword, it’s clear that the hammer at issue is one designed to pick up the deepest level of resonances from the mimetic archive of Western civilization: “This little book is a grand declara-

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tion of war; and as regards the sounding-out of idols, this time they are not idols of the age but eternal idols which are here touched with the hammer as with a tuning fork.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols” and “The Anti-Christ,” trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 32; emphasis in the original. In his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], 172), Judge Daniel Paul Schreber claims, more or less, to have been transformed into a kind of vessel of mimetic resonances. Describing one of the major symptoms of his psychotic episodes, “compulsive thinking,” Schreber writes, “My nerves are influenced by the rays to vibrate corresponding to certain human words; their choice therefore is not subject to my own will, but is due to an influence exerted on me from without.” Cited in Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 76. The most significant programmatic attempt to link mimesis/imitation to vibratory resonance (as well as hypnotic suggestion or “magnetization”) remains Gabriel Tarde’s 1890 study, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parson (London: Read Books, 2013). 35. Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, 8. 36. I have written extensively on Freud’s understanding of “mimetic archives” as the medium for the transmission of traumas. The exemplary case study of this dynamic is Freud’s last completed book, Moses and Monotheism, where he attempts to demonstrate that the bond sustaining the dispersed unity of the Jewish people in space and time is ultimately forged by way of the unconscious transmission of memory traces of an inaugural violence in the formation of the Jews as a people. For Freud, this violence ultimately pertains to what we might characterize as the break between monotheism and “manatheism.” This originary violence figures for Freud as the persistence of mana-ical enjoyment in the cultural space opened by its ostensible overcoming. See my “Freud’s Moses and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 3–41. Reprinted in Renata Salecl, ed., Sexuation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000): 57–105.

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37. Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, 5. 38. In this context, it’s worth noting the emergence of a new kind of marketing that appeals, as it were, directly to the brain. Citing the work of Roger Dooley (Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince the Consumers with Neuromarketing [Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2001]), Mazzarella writes ironically, “Critical theorists used to speak of the consciousness industry. But why worry about consciousness if we can now simply look inside people’s heads to find out whether the mana is working: ‘brain scans show that when you put Apple “true believers” in an fMRI machine, their brains light up in the same areas normally triggered by religion.’” The Mana of Mass Society, 108. 39. See my The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chapter 6. 40. Letter of November 10, 1925, in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1910–1925, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 371; my emphasis. Against this background, the novel as a whole might be characterized as a series of well-wrought manafolds. 41. A great deal of the ambiguity associated with the term mana concerns this doubling or splitting. As Marx argues, the social substance of Value splits into itself and its own master signifier or general equivalent, money. It is as if gold split into the units of money— say, gold coins— and into what makes gold gold, that is, the bearer of Value in what appears as its pure form. My sense is that in his famous critique of the use of the concept of mana by anthropologists of the “mana moment”— above all by Marcel Mauss— Claude Lévi-Strauss fails to grasp the logic of this doubling. See his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 2002). I will return to Lévi-Strauss later in the discussion. 42. What both Naomi Klein and Noam Yuran underline in their discussions of brand names is that the difference between manufacturing and mana-facturing is now put into practice by way of a new geographical division of labor, a new global articulation of

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commodity production (political economy is thus always geopolitical economy). Actual, physical products are increasingly manufactured “offshore” by workers hired by subcontractors rather than directly by the parent company, while the mana-facturing process— the production and maintenance of the brand— is performed in first-world corporate parks and offices (some of that work is in its turn now further outsourced to independent cognitive entrepreneur-laborers working in the “gig economy,” itself a strange return to “cottage industries”). 43. See Hartmut Böhme’s excellent study of the semantic history of fetishism in modern European culture, Fetischismus und Kultur: Eine andere Theorie der Moderne (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006). 44. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 76–77; my emphasis. 45. See again Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 55. 46. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 139. 47. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 208; my emphasis. 48. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 217; my emphasis. 49. I refer to Slavoj Žižek’s concise formulation of this dimension: “What is at stake is . . . not simply the split between the empirical person of the king and his symbolic function. The point is rather that this symbolic function redoubles his very body, introducing a split between the visible, material, transient body and another, sublime body, a body made of a special, immaterial stuff.” Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 255; emphasis in the original. 50. Marx, Capital, 163. 51. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 53.

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52. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Subsequent references will be made in the text. 53. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 30. 54. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). 55. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:139; emphasis in the original. 56. In one of his late seminars, speaking of the shift from the discourse of the master to that of the university, Lacan puts it this way: “Something changed in the master’s discourse at a certain point in history. We are not going to break our backs finding out if it was because of Luther, or Calvin, or some unknown traffic of ships around Genoa, or in the Mediterranean Sea, or anywhere else, for the important point is that on a certain day surplus jouissance became calculable, could be counted, totalized. This is where what is called the accumulation of capital begins.” Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 17, p. 177. 57. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 59; my emphasis. 58. Nicolae Biea, “The Eternal Return of the Economic: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, Transhumanism,” master’s thesis submitted July 2017 in the Social Sciences Division, University of Chicago. As faculty advisor of the thesis, I had many opportunities to learn from Nicolae. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 59. See Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 14. 60. See Gary Becker, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,” Economic Journal 75, no. 299 (1965): 493. 61. Biea’s ultimate claim is that this perverse dialectic of scarcity is what provides the impetus to transhumanism, the efforts to overcome the limits of biological life through the creation of artificial life via some combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, and

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biotechnology. As Biea puts it, the dream of transhumanism “is the coalescence of life, world, and optimization into a single process which, by definition, cannot have any end outside itself ” (“The Eternal Return of the Economic,” 40). 62. Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Pharia, and Anat Keinan, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” Journal of Consumer Research 44 (2017): 118–38. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 63. My first real encounter with this dimension, that is, where it hit me that this was indeed a dimension of embodied subjectivity that exceeded both the space of meaning and that of any empirical understanding of the body, was in my reading of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, above all in his becoming Luder, a mass of creaturely flesh, under the impact of a divine voice. See my book My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), especially 41–43. 64. One will recall, in this context, Carl Schmitt’s well-known correlation of miracles in the realm of theology with the state of exception in the realm of the political theology of sovereignty. See his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36. 65. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 208. 66. Schreber, 208–9; my emphasis. 67. Žižek reads the film The Matrix along these lines, that is, as a sort of science fiction elaboration of a Schreberian universe, the ultimate enigma of which is the question as to why the Matrix needs our energy: “The purely energy-related solution, is, of course, meaningless: the Matrix could easily have found another, more reliable source of energy which would not have demanded the extremely complex arrangement of the virtual reality coordinated for millions of human units. The only consistent answer is: the Matrix feeds on the humans’ jouissance— so here we are back at the funda-

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mental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs a constant influx of jouissance.” Žižek, Incontinence of the Void, 205. 68. This is, I think, the key to Melville’s Bartleby: Bartleby prefers not to fill in, to somehow render inoperative not so much his otherwise admirable efficiency as an office worker but rather his officiancy. The disorder “at work” in the Other that Schreber found himself subject to is also “at work” in the paradoxical circularity noted earlier that afflicts the doxological exchange between God and the faithful that was so central to Weber’s understanding of the spirit of capitalism. We glorify God because God is glorious; the glory that God’s creatures owe to God and produce through cultic praise is already an essential attribute of God; the earth is full of the glory that the faithful must return to God by way of doxologies. This work would thus appear to be a mode of God’s own self-glorification, a peculiar sort of divine autoaffection that makes use of creaturely life as its instrument or tool, as its officiant cause. To cite Giorgio Agamben once more, this time summarizing Karl Barth’s efforts to capture the paradoxical logic of what I have been calling officiant causality, “The circularity of glory here attains its ontological formulation: becoming free for the glorification of God means to understand oneself as constituted, in one’s very being, by the glory with which we celebrate the glory that allows us to celebrate it.” Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 215. 69. Žižek, Incontinence of the Void, 184. 70. Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). One will recall that Freud experienced a sort of influence anxiety with respect to Schreber, that he was concerned about Schreber’s prescience and priority with regard to the libido theory he was in the process of developing and applying in his interpretation of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. I discuss Freud’s anxiety of influence in chapter 1 of My Own Private Germany. 71. Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 35; my emphasis. 72. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 61.

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73. Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 41–42; my emphasis. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 74. Here I recommend Jonathan Lear’s Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), especially his discussion of the famous fort/da game apropos of which Freud elaborated his notion of a beyond of the pleasure principle. There Lear correlates what he calls the “remainder of life” with what I am characterizing as a virtually real flesh wound. 75. One might recall that Freud, in his reading of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, argues that what appears as the disease, as the messy proliferation of delusional thoughts, images, and experiences, is in fact the mind’s efforts to heal itself, to stitch up a tear in the fabric of being that Freud describes as Schreber’s psychologically catastrophic withdrawal of all libidinal cathexis from the world. 76. I’ll be referring again to Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 77. Slavoj Žižek nicely exhibits the homologies between Marx’s account of the commodity form, culminating in the positing of money as the general equivalent of Value, on the one hand, and Lacan’s account of the signifier, culminating in the formula that the (master) signifier represents the subject for all other signifiers, on the other. See his For They Know Not What They Do, 21–27. The classic study of such homologies with respect to the notion of the general equivalent remains Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 78. I borrow this term from Lear, who correlates “lucky breaks” in the course of life, breaks that open a space of genuinely new possibilities, with the insistence of what he calls a “remainder of life,” an excess of vital pressure the “enjoyment” of which holds the place of a nameless loss or absence (and so not really a loss at all). See his Death, Happiness, and the Remainder of Life. 79. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 59–60; my emphasis.

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80. This is, I think, one way of understanding what Franz Rosenzweig refers to, in The Star of Redemption, as die immerwährende Vorwelt, translated by William Halo as the “Ever-Enduring Protocosmos” and by Barbara Galli as the “Everlasting Primordial World.” What Rosenzweig is after with this formulation is the persistence/insistence of a dimension of emergence, of the comingto-be of beings— a sort of ontological natality— around a black hole of any possible knowledge. 81. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 86. 82. Michael Behrent and Daniel Zamora, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (London: Polity, 2015), 47. 83. Behrent and Zamora, 47. 84. Against this background, I would suggest that what is at issue in Trump’s repeated claims aimed at his political base that he will bring manufacturing jobs back to America is the manafacturing he solicits from this base that further amplifies and consolidates his brand. Trump’s political base functions, in effect, as the economic base in the production process of his most valuable asset. 85. In the preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of No Logo (2010), Naomi Klein argues that the branding of the presidency was already in operation under Barack Obama: “So, it seemed that the United States government could solve its reputation problem [in the wake of the Bush years] with branding— it’s just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today’s tough market” (xxiii). She goes on to note that just weeks before the election, Obama’s public relations team won the top annual award from the Association of National Advertisers, “Marketer of the Year.” My sense is that with Trump we have moved to a new level, that from “Yes We Can” to “Making America Great Again” brand-name sovereignty has become, to use Hegel’s formulation, an und für sich, in itself and for itself. My understanding of this potentiation of the brand has been largely confirmed by Klein in her latest book, No Is Not Enough, in which she characterizes Trump as a “super brand.” See Naomi

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Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). Klein nicely captures the dynamic of what I am calling the rebranding of sovereignty with this pithy formulation: “The presidency is in fact the crowning extension of the Trump brand” (5; my emphasis). 86. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 288. 87. Benjamin, 288. The great temptation that, as Giorgio Agamben has written, the Franciscans were constantly struggling with is one to which, in other words, moderns have largely succumbed without ever fully realizing it, namely “to construct their life as a total and unceasing liturgy or Divine Office.” Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), xii. 88. Becker, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,” 493. 89. Becker, 513. 90. Biea, “The Eternal Return of the Economic,” 14. 91. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harmon (New York: Schocken, 1998), 58. 92. Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, August 11, 1934, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940, trans. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 453. 93. Benjamin, 453. 94. Franz Kafka, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1992), 235–36. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. 95. At a rally held in North Dakota on September 6, 2017, Donald Trump staged with his audience a kind of consultation regarding the branding of American products once his economic policies lead to a new efflorescence of industry in the United States. He asked the audience what the label of the new line of products should say: Made in America or Made in U.S.A. He seemed to think that the audience preferred the latter logo. 96. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2015), 244–45; my emphasis.

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97. In my Weight of All Flesh, I introduced this problem under the heading of “idle worship” (237–82). 98. Žižek, Incontinence of the Void, 206. 99. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 119. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 100. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2007), 73. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 101. Franz Kafka, “The New Advocate,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1983), 415. 102. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, vol. 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 815. 103. I am tempted to link these new powers of inofficiant observation to Freud’s characterization of the mode of attention proper to analytic practice as gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit, evenly suspended attention. Freud introduced the term in his 1912 paper, “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis.” 104. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2 (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1961), 412, cited in Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 59. 105. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 414, cited in Agamben, Opus Dei, 59–60. 106. Agamben, 61. 107. It’s worth noting that the dimension of concern here fits neatly into none of the three primary domains of the vita activa in Hannah Arendt’s account of the human condition: labor, fabrication, action. Indeed, her remarks, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, on the Kafkaesque aspect of bureaucratic power in the AustroHungarian and Russian Empires in the nineteenth century stand in much closer proximity to the subject-matters in question here than those proposed in Arendt’s The Human Condition.

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108. Kafka, The Castle, 58. 109. Agamben cites a brief fragment of Nietzsche’s dated around the time of the drafting of his Zur Genealogie der Moral to indicate that Nietzsche himself felt this lacuna. In the fragment, Nietzsche already seems to grasp the notion of the drive that Freud will introduce in the new century, namely as a demand for work, an Arbeitsanforderung: “The problem: You must! An inclination that fails to give itself a foundation, similar in this to the sexual instinct, would not fall under the censure of the instincts, but on the contrary would be their criterion of value and their judge” (cited from an Italian edition in Agamben, Opus Dei, 89). 110. “In an archaeology of the term officium, the inaugural moment is when Cicero, in the course of his repeated attempts to elaborate a Latin philosophical vocabulary, decides to translate the Stoic concept of kathekon [a term indicating the propriety of an action— ELS] with the term officium and to inscribe under the rubric De officiis a book that, rightly or wrongly, was to exercise an enduring influence over Western ethics” (Agamben, Opus Dei, 67). 111. Agamben, Opus Dei, 74–75. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 112. It’s worth repeating that the English translation of Freud’s most detailed presentation of his theory of the drives, Triebe und Triebschicksale, as Drives and Their Vicissitudes captures a crucial dimension of the drive and its demand for work that’s missing from the German title (as long as one fails to hear the connection between Schicksal, fate or destiny, and schicken, to send, as to send a letter or message)— namely, the dimension of vicariousness that Freud otherwise underlines by way of the notion of Triebrepräntanz, or drive representative. Recalling Kafka’s parable about kings and messengers, one might perhaps venture a few alternative translations: drive viceroy, drive deputy, drive messenger, or even driven messenger. The element of “vicarity” is even stronger for Freud, insofar as the drive is— and here the sexual drive is exemplary— open to numberless substitutions with respect to possible objects of satisfaction; almost anything can end up becoming “deputized” as an object of the drive. More radically still, Freud suggests that any

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possible object of the drive is essentially a substitution for an impossible satisfaction, one that retroactively comes to be prohibited, translated into a norm (in Kantian terms, we never get to the Ding an sich of drive satisfaction). 113. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). This small book “officially” represents part 2, volume 3 of the Homo Sacer project. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 114. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 80. For a more nuanced account of the life of these concepts in the history of anthropology, see again Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society. 115. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 59– 60; my emphasis. 116. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), 12; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 32. 117. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letters to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 95. 118. Agamben, 96. 119. The passages are cited from Wayne A. Meeks, ed., The Writings of St. Paul (New York: Norton, 1972). 120. This last passage reads in the Revised Standard Version used in the Meeks edition as follows: “While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are discharged from the law.” The paradoxical nature of Paul’s vision comes to the fore in the continuation of the passage, which presents the deactivation of the lethal law in our members as a becoming “dead to that which held us captive.” A certain way of “being towards death”— or better: a certain Triebschicksal, a certain destiny of the (death) drive— must itself die to give way to “the new life of the Spirit.” See Meeks, The Writings of St. Paul, 79.

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121. Against this background, one might ultimately characterize every neurosis as a form of “master-baiting,” as various ways of baiting the master: providing the Other with jouissance; luring the Other’s gaze with one’s naughtiness and thereby inciting punishment. One of the crucial experiences recounted by Schreber in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is being the object of an insult/ curse emanating from one of God’s aspects/voices that, through the performative force of its utterance, effectively transforms Schreber into a Luder, a word that signifies, among other things, whore or slut; a wretched being; meat used as bait in hunting. See my book My Own Private Germany for further remarks on Schreber’s Ludertum. 122. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 70. Subsequent references will be made in the text. 123. Agamben would thereby be participating in a long tradition elaborated in the work of Pierre Hadot, above all in his Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 124. Here I am alluding to a formulation used by Walter Benjamin toward the end of his essay on Kafka to characterize the messianic act. Speaking of the figure of the hunchback who for Benjamin serves as the prototype of distorted life in Kafka’s work, he writes (in Harry Zohn’s translation), “This little man is at home in distorted life; he will disappear with the coming of the Messiah who (a great rabbi once said) will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it.” Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” 2:811. In Walter Benjamin’s correspondence with his friend Gershom Scholem, Scholem indicates that this formulation, which Benjamin apparently picked up from Ernst Bloch, ultimately comes from him. 125. Franz Kafka, Tagebücher. Band 3: 1914-1923, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1990), 179–80. Translation cited in Rainer Stach, Kafka: The Early Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 204.

BRAND(ISH )ING THE NAME or, Why Is trum p so enjoyaBle?

William Mazzarella That’s just the thing, gentlemen, that there may well exist something that is dearer for almost every man than his very best profit, or (so as not to violate logic) that there is this one most profitable profit (precisely the omitted one, the one we were just talking about), which is chiefer and more profitable than all other profits, and for which a man is ready, if need be, to go against all laws, that is, against reason, honor, peace, prosperity— in short, against all these beautiful and useful things— only so as to attain this primary, most profitable profit which is dearer to him than anything else. Fyodor dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864)

WhAt’s in A nAme?

Around the time of the 2016 US presidential election, a friend told me about a curious new form of harassment. Something like this was happening: pretty much anyone who wasn’t a white male might be approached on the street by someone who was. What ensued wasn’t any conventional kind of violence. In fact, “all” that happened was that the perpetrator uttered one word at his victim: Trump. And then walked away. No physical violence, no slur, not even any clear or specific threat. Just this one word—

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Trump— delivered with a palpable quantum of relish. Later, I found that the practice had been integral to Donald Trump’s election rallies as well. Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi reported from a February 2016 Trump rally in New Hampshire: “Before the speech, the PA announcer had told us not to ‘touch or harm’ any protesters, but instead just surround them and chant, ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’ until security can arrive (and presumably do the touching and/or harming).”1 After Trump’s victory at the polls, the practice of brandishing his name, often as a chant aimed by white Americans at fellow citizens of color, often at sports events, seems to have become generalized.2 Now, we shouldn’t neglect the real and dramatic explosion in hate crimes that Trump’s path to the White House encouraged and enabled. But there’s something about this enjoyableoffensive brandishing of the name, this weaponizing of the word, which deserves a closer look. The presidential historian Michael Beschloss notes the novelty of such a name-activation: “The message here is Trump is going to come and get you— and we support that.” Khalil Gibran Muhammad, scholar of race, history, and public policy, remarks, “To use the name as a rallying cry for a kind of embodied white supremacy, white nationalism or sense of triumphalism, for taking back the country, as best as I can tell has never been crystallized in the name of a US president.”3 At the same time, Trump isn’t just the name of a (non)politician. It’s also a brand name, now extended across commercial and political domains. Celebrity politicians are of course nothing new. Ronald Reagan was a movie actor, as was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jesse Ventura was a wrestler, Al Franken a comedian. And that’s just in the United States. Nor is there anything novel about the branding of politicians as politicians, or marketing as a mode of politics. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi pioneered a form of “shameless” entertainment-based sovereignty that in some respects prefigures the rise of Trump. But Trump is the first major elected official whose name had already been set in commercial motion, as it were, across a wide

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range of consumer products. If there is enjoyment in brandishing the word Trump, then it is an ambiguously doubled enjoyment that emerges between Trump as the personal name of the commander in chief and Trump as the signifier of shared substance across a vast range of products and services, including real estate, brokerages, casinos, hotels, golf courses, restaurants, an airline, furniture, menswear, chocolates, tea, books, bottled water, beauty pageants, modeling, production companies, ice skating rinks— to which more or less plausible initiatives we may add a string of notorious failures: Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump Magazine, and Trump University. Let us not forget, either, Trump fragrances, available— so the merchandising section of the Trump Organization website promises— in such piquantly named variations as Success and Empire.4 At first sight, it seems obvious that a president who is also the head of a large consumer products and services empire— and who refuses to dissociate his political from his commercial life— embodies a flagrant conflict of interest. The short circuit between the Trump administration’s foreign policy and the Trump Corporation’s business interests (not to mention the public cost of protecting and housing his family members as they traverse the globe, striking private deals) is plain enough, even if many of its details remain obscure. But what, actually, is the reciprocal impact of this experiment in brand synergy on the respective fortunes of the Trump Corporation and the office of the President of the United States? The preliminary signs are more ambiguous than one might suppose. For one thing, it’s not entirely clear that the brand equity of the Trump organization— as opposed to its sheer visibility, which is of course staggering— is particularly impressive. “Seeing Trump in a presidential setting has solidified his support among those already predisposed to like him, especially men, Republicans and those over 70,” observes Jim Zarroli. “To be sure, Trump’s value remains very low outside his base. The Reputation Institute [which measures the worth of business

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brands] considers any rating below 40 as ‘poor,’ which means Trump’s pulse score [which is in the 30s] is in the lowest category [as compared to brands like Rolex— around 80— or Lego and Disney, Canon and Google— all in the 70s].”5 Certainly, the conjoining of the consumer and the presidential projects can sometimes work in Trump’s favor. In August 2017, for example, it emerged that the United States Secret Service had spent some sixty thousand dollars since the beginning of the year on golf cart rentals at Trump’s private members’ club Mar-a-Lago, the better to protect (and, conveniently, also profit) the commander in chief. And even though residents in some Trump-branded buildings in the United States and Canada greeted the news of his election with demands to have his name removed from their facades, Trump’s ascension also clearly set off a rush to secure the Trump brand for construction projects worldwide. But the contagion between the political and the consumer brands goes the other way too. In the wake of Trump’s unequivocal refusal to condemn the white supremacist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia (this, too, in August 2017), some sixteen charities canceled reservations for major events at Mar-a-Lago.6 Nor is it at all clear whether the positions adopted by the Trump brand qua political signifier are compatible with either the Trump consumer brand or, perhaps especially, the image that the larger Trump family is trying to cultivate vis-à-vis its property development empire. A Republican operative tells a journalist, “The [Trump family’s] fundamental assessment is that if they want to win the White House in 2020, they’re not going to do it the way they did in 2016, because the family brand would not sustain the collateral damage. . . . It would be so protectionist, nationalist and backward-looking that they’d only be able to build in Oklahoma or the Ozarks.”7 Aaron Schuster writes, “Trump has become the new monstrous face of global capitalism— not the end of neoliberalism, but a neoliberalism that will be run on his terms. Trump

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stands for the merger of capital and state sovereignty, so that the state should ultimately become part of the Trump brand and a worldwide platform for his ongoing reality show.”8 But how are we to make sense of this merger? My project here is twofold. First, I want to suggest that Trump’s public profile is all about enjoyment— in the Lacanian sense of jouissance, about which more shortly. Second, because this enjoyment is inseparable from Trump qua brand, I want to understand how it may help us rethink some of our commonly held assumptions about the relation between commerce and politics. Spoiler alert: I will not be rehashing the well-worn claim that “all politics is just marketing nowadays.” Rather, I will be suggesting that we need to think beyond the totalizing images of marketing and “the consumer society” that such formulations imply. This is important not just because such totalizing motifs are simply empirically wrong. It’s important, too, because they help sustain an idealized fantasy— persisting at the heart of even the most cynical diagnoses of politics today— of a split between a space of the market which is all about abject instrumentality and a space of politics in which a kernel of sublime freedom is still imaginable. Where is the PolitiCAl?

The twin shocks of Brexit and Trump in 2016 had many diagnosing “the end of neoliberalism.” Clearly, it was the end of something— perhaps first and foremost the assumption (certainly characteristic of Clinton-Obama–style neoliberalism) that technocratic elites, in bed with big capital, would automatically enjoy broad-based public legitimacy. Emmett Rensin satirizes the postpolitical horizon of the Clinton-Obama machine: “At the dawn of the 21st century, we stood on the doorstep of a permanent managerial world order. The wonks just needed to finish explaining it to the rest of us.”9 Government by white paper and alumnus handshake seems now to have given way to government by tweet and executive

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order. Living in the age of Trump means constantly asking ourselves, Where is politics? What is politics today? How should we understand, to adapt a phrase from Martin Amis, the moronic inferno of fake news, alternative facts, Tourette’s-style tweeting, and social media spats? What’s signal and what’s noise? What’s surface and what’s depth? What’s virtue and what’s vice? Do such terms even have any analytic traction today? One way to approach our situation is to insist on looking behind the weapons of mass distraction to where the supposedly real business of government resides. To note that behind all the sound and fury, signifying nothing, real and potentially irrevocable changes are taking place— for example, the shockingly rapid and comprehensive dismantling of environmental protections under the Trump administration.10 Or the ongoing attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, sabotage the Affordable Care Act, criminalize abortion, and gut whatever little is left of public education. In the same realist spirit, one might point to the material factors that help explain Trump’s appeal to many. There is the bald fact of economic stagnation for a majority of Americans. From the Great Depression through to 1980, the lower 90 percent of the US population took home about 70 percent of the growth in the country’s income. After 1997, this same 90 percent took home exactly none of that growth.11 Such hard economic facts also come in handy as a kind of key to the culture wars. Urban liberals may complain about white privilege, but, as one journalist puts it, “when you are the son or daughter of a carpenter or mechanic and a housewife or secretary who lives paycheck to paycheck, who can’t afford to send kids to college, as many rural residents are, white privilege is meaningless and abstract.”12 Nor is Trump’s appeal to significant segments of the wealthy any surprise.13 At the same time, as the enjoyment buzzing around the brandishing of the Trump name suggests, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of energies that are irreducible to material interest. The mistake here would be to presume a hard distinc-

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tion between “real” political or economic factors and “empty” affective noise— although the vapidity of so much of what passes for public communication in the age of Trump makes it tempting. From the first Republican candidate debates, Trump excelled at cultivating an enjoyment of pure presence, an ability to dominate the collective field of attention irrespective of the content of what was being communicated at any given moment. And yet it would equally be a mistake to think that this enjoyment, these energies, float free of the histories and the political economies that give them collectively palpable urgency. Take Trump’s mobilization of white supremacist racial panic, clearly a decisive factor in his 2016 victory, especially considering that the general economic situation was just as bad, if not worse, in 2008 and 2012.14 He and some of his allies have engaged in the kind of up-front and undisguised race-baiting that many thought had disappeared for good from mainstream US public life.15 The historian Adam Green observes that the period stretching from 1945 to 1980— in other words, the period during which the United States underwent a civil rights revolution— was also an era of unusually low economic inequality. By the same token, Green argues, periods of sharpened inequality, such as the decades that preceded and followed this “golden age,” tend to bring intensified public racism. Racial tension appears in this picture, then, as both an expression and a kind of defusing of economic tension.16 And yet at the same time, one would have to acknowledge the force of racism as extra-economic excess, as a form of enjoyment that, from the standpoint of political strategy, is as volatile as it is reliable. Consider, for example, Trump’s widely lambasted response to the August 2017 neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia— his instantly infamous insistence that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the clash, and that elements on both sides were to blame for the violence.17 He could have stayed on safe populist ground, lamenting the humiliation of the white working class and so on. But he couldn’t

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resist taking it just that little bit further, adding that little bit extra, that wild supplement— even at the cost of (at least temporarily) alienating some important allies. When it comes to the politics of enjoyment, it becomes hard to tell levelheaded strategy apart from hotheaded compulsion. So it was that Steve Bannon, Trump’s (right-) wingman during the first few months of his administration, could at once be characterized by a White House colleague as “the rain man of nationalism”18— suggesting idiot savant–like powers of ideological intuition19— and quite deliberately go on record calling the fascists marching in Charlottesville “a collection of clowns.”20 One might think that Trump’s endlessly repeated promise to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico reaped an ill wind of anti-immigrant sentiment. And one would be right. But one would also have to acknowledge that the wall embodies a spectacular and grandiose promise of enjoyment, far beyond whatever function it might have as a physical barrier. In September 2017, after it seemed for a moment that Trump might be willing to pull back on the nonnegotiable importance he had earlier given to the wall, a caller to the right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham’s show declared, “The No. 1 reason I voted for him was for the immigration. . . . I want the wall. I want it to be seen in space, like the Chinese wall.”21 The clearest evidence that the appeal of Trumpism is at best only partly explicable in terms of material interests is Trump’s extraordinary immunity to scandal. Even during the presidential campaign, gaffe after faux pas failed to put any lasting dent in his popularity. Every time Trump gave a speech, the fact-checkers would pounce, triumphantly convinced that they had finally caught him in a decisive blunder. His January 2018 State of the Union address actually achieved the great contemporary aspiration: it broke the internet, managing to crash PolitiFact.com for five minutes.22 But like Ronald Reagan before him, known in his time as the “Teflon president,” Trump just shrugged it off and barreled on down the road. If, as Joan Copjec has noted, the fact-checkers missed America’s love for Reagan,

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its deep indifference to merely factual challenges,23 then Trump was the beneficiary of a more turbulent but no less ardent libidinal investment. Trump took it all to the next level. There was of course the infamous pussy-grabbing tape— his immunity here was quite spectacular, especially in the proximate context of the explosion of sexual harassment accusations, starting with the case of Harvey Weinstein, that erupted within a year of Trump’s election. Then there was the time that Trump boasted that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, shoot someone, and still get elected. And then there was his curious immunity to comedy. Satire simply didn’t seem to bite him. Nor did the way that Trump himself was often inadvertently comical do him any harm. The writer Dale Beran observes, “We know, by this point, that Trump is funny. Even to us leftists, horrified by his every move, he is hilarious. Someone who is all brash confidence and then outrageously incompetent at everything he does is— from an objective standpoint— comedy gold.”24 Beran’s point was that what liberals didn’t understand— or were only slowly beginning to realize— was that, if anything, the joke was on them: “Strangely, as the left realized after the election, pointing out Trump was a joke was not helpful. In fact, Trump’s farcical nature didn’t seem to be a liability, rather, to his supporters, it was an asset.”25 And yet: even as the jokes seemed to slide off Trump, he himself remained breathtakingly thin-skinned, firing off late-night tweets of indignation every time someone had the temerity to criticize him. As Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury, notes, “The great value of being president, in [Trump’s] view, was that you’re the most famous man in the world, and fame is always venerated and adored by the media, isn’t it? But, confusingly, Trump was president in large part because of his particular talent, conscious or reflexive, to alienate the media, which then turned him into a figure reviled by the media. This was not a dialectical space that was comfortable for an insecure man.”26 It may not have been comfortable for Trump, but it worked

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for him. It worked partly by means of a politics of indignation, where Trump, in populist mode, tried to use Twitter to reach his base directly, constantly stoking a solidarity-through-outrage. But surely his own indignation here also exemplified how totalitarian authority tends to misunderstand itself. Like those who resist them in the name of freedom, rulers with totalitarian tendencies tend to imagine that their power is in fact dependent on there being no laughter, no chinks in the armor. This is of course, as Slavoj Žižek and others have tirelessly pointed out, one of the great liberal myths about totalitarianism: that it can’t take a joke. One need only reflect on the fact that for totalitarianism to be worthy of its name, it must also already include its own satire— the dynamic that Herbert Marcuse used to call “repressive tolerance.” And of course there was a great deal of enjoyment in Trump’s jumpy indignation— for himself, for his followers, as well as for his critics. There was energy in the fury. Nor did Trump’s popularity with his supporters— as opposed to the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party— seem to have much to do with whether he was able to fulfill his campaign promises. Indeed, in important respects Trumpish enjoyment may well be predicated on not getting things done. During the first few months of the Trump administration, political pundits constantly insisted that the bubble was about to burst, that as soon as Trump’s followers realized they’d been taken for a ride, as soon as they realized Trump wasn’t going to be able to bring back those jobs or make America white again, the honeymoon would be over and they would start abandoning him in droves. But it kept not happening. Even though, again and again, the Trump administration failed or was thwarted in its marquee initiatives: the (clearly anti-Muslim) travel ban, health care reform, and so on. If anything, Trump supporters were doubling down. The George W. Bush administration imagined itself as thoroughly and performatively world-changing. In a tragicomic appropriation of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Baby

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Bush’s ideologists set out to change the world while the rest of us scrambled to interpret their singular, godlike agency.27 But Trump, in stark contrast, seemed to thrive on a paradoxically potent inefficacy; as one journalist noted, “the lack of legislative accomplishment seems only to make supporters take more satisfaction in Trump’s behavior.”28 Trump was all about not getting much of anything done, yet all the time being in hectic, profoundly enjoyable motion— a classic image of the drive momentum that sustains surplus enjoyment. Competence, clearly, was no match for jouissance. In the 2016 presidential face-off, Hillary Clinton was the candidate who indubitably knew how the job got done. Donald Trump, by contrast, made hay by ostentatiously not knowing. Exit polls suggest that nearly 25 percent of Trump voters thought that Clinton was better qualified for the presidency.29 Clearly, then, the Trump phenomenon cannot be explained solely through a conventional interest-based analysis. This point is just as frequently lost on the Right as it is on the Left. Both sides tend to presume that voters’ enjoyments move in lockstep with their interests. Matt Taibbi provides a good illustration of this dynamic. Against the establishment Republican expectation that years of carefully cultivating resentment against liberal elites in the American heartland would somehow automatically produce voter commitment to neoliberal economics, Taibbi notes, “the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.”30 But the lesson is not for all that that political economy trumps the culture wars, since when Taibbi points out to a Trump supporter that Trump’s promise to impose import tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the United States is virtually identical to a policy promoted by Democratic hopeful Dick Gephardt in 1988, his interlocutor says she didn’t like that idea back then. When Taibbi asks her why, she replies,

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“I didn’t like him.”31 Here it would be easy to conclude, as many including Taibbi himself tend to do, that such a response is simply symptomatic of willful ignorance or stupid intransigence, evidence of a vertiginously regressing public sphere in which the electorate insists on feeling rather than thinking. But again, that would be to miss the disjunctive yet mutually constitutive relation between interest and enjoyment that Trumpism so palpably discloses. So, let’s look a bit more closely at this question of enjoyment— the jouissance of politics in the age of Trump. WhAt’s so enJoyABle, then?

The French word jouissance is typically translated into English as “enjoyment.” Pointing out the inadequacy of this translation is by now an obligatory gesture. For one thing, jouissance doesn’t so much describe pleasure as that place beyond an economy of pleasure and pain, that orgasmic zone (jouir: “to come”), where pleasure and agony become indistinguishable. Enjoyment in the sense of jouissance blurs the boundary between vitality and stuckness; it flowers where we become attached to what thwarts us, to the very obstacle that seemingly blocks us. As Jacques Lacan put it, “It is along the paths that appear to be contrary to enjoyment that enjoyment is obtained.”32 Something very intimate— or, to invoke the Lacanian neologism, extimate— lives here: an external obstacle that is at the same time a rebus of our most intimate being. Enjoyment is, Schuster writes, the substance of “our secret coherence— whether this saves us or drives us to our doom.”33 It’s what is most deeply in us, the last thing we surrender, a foreign body, an obscene supplement, anxiously obtruding from our most intimately reliable terrain of the self. Enjoyment is noneconomic and nonmoral; it achieves satisfaction in dissatisfaction. With Friedrich Nietzsche we might say that it’s beyond good and evil; with Freud, that it’s beyond the pleasure principle. André Patsalides and Kareen Ror Malone expand on the anti-economics of enjoyment: “Rather than being

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goal-oriented functional organisms, human subjects sometimes insist in repetitions that work against their self interest. One finds a suspicious pleasure in one’s complaints, one is drawn to ‘dissatisfying’ sexual objects, one’s sense of duty becomes deliciously rapacious.”34 Noneconomic and nonmoral and yet at the very center of human and social being, enjoyment is at odds with all the ways in which we tend to moralize utility. Nestor Braunstein writes, “Its essence is the suspension of the reflex act, of the pursuit of satisfaction, of service to the community, of the ‘good reasons’ governing rational behaviour. It carries within it its own reason.”35 As an ethical concept, enjoyment touches on some of the same corporeal terrain as aesthetics. But it adds a kind of wild intimacy to the impersonality that the modernist aesthetic judgment enjoins. If, like aesthetic experience, enjoyment refuses instrumental reason, unlike aesthetics it also implies a quite unshakable kind of attachment, but one that has little to do with self-interest. Pleasure may be about desire, but enjoyment is about drive. Desire may be deferred, but drive— enjoyment— won’t wait. If desire arises from lack, then drive is the intense enjoyment of lack as such; again, that deep satisfaction to be found in dissatisfaction.36 From the very beginning, the campaign to put Trump in the White House signaled its allegiance to drive over desire. Consider, for example, how at its rallies the Trump team persisted, against the objections of the song’s composers, in playing the Rolling Stones classic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Which, famously, goes on to observe: “but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.”37 As Joan Williams notes, to reduce Trump’s appeal to an economic promise to bring back jobs is to miss the powerful current of existential redemption activated by a candidate who appears to push back against those liberal elites who routinely refer to white working-class Americans as “trailer trash” living in “flyover states,” the “basket of deplorables” (Hillary Clinton) who “cling to guns and religion” (Barack Obama).38 Tom McCarthy’s

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series of Guardian dispatches from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, captures this mood. In the wake of the 2016 election, McCarthy speaks with one Lee Snover, who describes herself as “a born again Christian, a mother of one, and a boss.” Snover backed John McCain for president in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, but “wasn’t in love with either candidate. . . . Then Donald Trump came along, and Snover’s investment in politics changed.” She tells McCarthy, “Whatever it takes, that’s what was running through my mind. If I have to lose it all, I need for him to win.” McCarthy goes on to observe, “While Trump’s promise has economic contours, it goes beyond dollars and cents. As Trump’s supporters tell it, the promise has to do with a regained spirit of possibility and a renewed sense of identity, too. Trump’s promise is both personalized— it means something different for everyone— and universal. People who voted for him describe a shock of recognition when he stepped on to the national stage. They’d been waiting for a candidate like him. They just never dreamed they’d get him.”39 This sense of an appeal beyond economy crops up again and again in dispatches from the front line of Trumpism: “In Grand Junction [Colorado],” Peter Hessler reports in the New Yorker, “people wanted Trump to accomplish certain things with the pragmatism of a businessman, but they also wanted him to make them feel a certain way.”40 You know you’re around enjoyment when people seem quite willing to see the whole house go up in flames rather than give up their attachments— which is also part of what gives enjoyment its ambiguous double aspect of morbid self-destruction and heroic sacrifice. As the journalist Dale Beran remarks, “Thus these Trump supporters hold a different sort of ideology, not one of ‘when will my horse come in,’ but a trolling, self-effacing ‘I know my horse will never come in.’ . . . In this sense, Trump’s incompetent, variable, and ridiculous behavior is the central pillar upon which his younger support rests.” And then: “[Trump] is both despair and cruel arrogant dismissal, the fantasy of winning and the pain of losing mingled into one potion. . . . For

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this reason, the left should stop expecting Trump’s supporters to be upset when he doesn’t fulfill his promises.”41 None of this is about ideals or policies. What matters is the “Internet motherfuckery,”42 which is to say the lulz— the raw, jaded fun of knowingly cultivated outrage, the more cynical the better.43 Mark Andrejevic speculates that Trump is tapping into a hunger for spectacular self-immolation that has roots in fascism but has been updated for the age of reality television. “It is tempting to cast Trump as a contemporary version of the Italian futurists in an update to the finale of Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay: the US population’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as entertainment programming of the highest order,” Andrejevic observes.44 We might recall here, too, that Lacan once described enjoyment as that which “begins with a tickle and ends in a blaze of petrol.”45 Whether the enjoyment feels like rebirth or simply a bit of rowdy fun, the key point is that it rests on something that is not only irreducible to economy and self-interest but also impervious to critique (at least within the genre of critique that we’ve hitherto associated with the presidency). As Lacanian social theorists have helped us understand, this irreducible kernel of jouissance is what makes sexism, racism, classism, nationalism, and so on stick. It’s what gives prejudicial ideologies their idiotic, obdurate persistence, quite apart from any belief or disbelief in their propositional content or their truth claims. Enjoyment is the “pre-ideological” core retroactively produced, as it were, from within the play of ideology itself. It’s the extimate element in ideology, “what is in ideology more than itself.”46 But one doesn’t have to be a Lacanian to notice it in the world. Sharing none of these conceptual assumptions, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes exactly this in her ethnography of Tea Party and, latterly, Trump supporters in Louisiana. As Hochschild notes, it’s all about what an informant will do to defend her politics— the lengths to which she will go to “protect her elation.”47

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Now of course enjoyment is not an exclusive property of the political Right. It is, rather, an indispensable element of any vitally thriving, compelling politics. Enjoyment both secures and destabilizes all attempts to regiment and ritualize politics. Enjoyment is, then, a kind of pharmakon, at once tonic and poison, of the social as such. As I’ve had occasion to reflect elsewhere, any ideological formation has to be affective in order to be effective.48 The question then becomes how to think about the relation between the discursive or propositional dimension of the social and its affective dimension— or, as Ernesto Laclau puts it with admirable economy, the relation between the form and the force of ideology.49 Thus, enjoyment is just as constitutive of the possibility of politics on the left as it is on the right. And yet the Right seems often to have been rather better at mobilizing political enjoyment than the Left. Lauren Berlant suggests that “shamelessness is an affect of freedom on the right, and an affect of failure on the left.”50 The sense that the Left all too easily cedes political enjoyment to the Right is by no means new. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno both lamented, each in their own way, the right-wing hijacking of social elation.51 The syndrome might well have something to do with the uneasy relationship between the demonic intensity of enjoyment and the liberal attachment to Enlightenment rationality. The symptom of this liberal attachment is one generally shared by academics, and it is the first thing that the right wing seizes on for satire: an earnestly utilitarian rush to explanation supported by a firm belief in the reparative social value of expertise.52 Of course the contrast between enjoyment and enlightenment shouldn’t be overdrawn; liberal enlightenment involves its own jouissance— all the way from the sadistically pious violence with which it is often imposed (“truth hurts,” “this is for your own good,” “you’ll thank me later,” etc.) to the perverse way in which it thrives on being thwarted. In fact, this (not so) secret nurturing of an intense attachment to an obstacle to one’s own

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flourishing is a distinctive hallmark of enjoyment. That way, the fascination with what has been lost/what remains to be fully regained can be sustained. And if the obstacle is imagined as a group of people— as it so often is in political enjoyment— then we typically animate the members of that group in fantasy as the thieves, the illegitimate possessors, of the sublime, full enjoyment that might otherwise have been ours. As the political theorist Jodi Dean notes. “Thus, fantasy provides us with an explanation for why our enjoyment is missing, how we would have, could have, really enjoyed if only . . .”53 Of course there’s a wrinkle here: the actual enjoyment resides— and resides intensely— in the febrile cultivation of the fantasy of why this virtual, full enjoyment is impossible. So, for example, in Trump’s America (as in so many other parts of the world), immigrants, by their sheer presence, have stolen and stand in the way of the enjoyment of a pure nation. Or the so-called alt-right, by its publicity practices, has stolen and stands in the way of a reasonable and civil public sphere. Clearly, the pure nation and the reasonable public sphere never actually existed, and will never actually exist in their ideal typical perfection. The point is that one derives energy and enjoyment from fixating on whatever it is that supposedly stands in the way of their realization. Now, the corollary point is that a beloved/detested obstacle becomes a source of enjoyment even as there is a “real” underlying problem. Or one could say that the enjoyment of the obstacle often becomes a way of channeling real and potentially revolutionary energies away from a political truth that would, within the existing order, be much more difficult to confront. So, for example, Trumpian populism thrives on— but also deflects attention from— the structural disenfranchisement and marginalization of millions of people by organizing its enjoyment around figures of Mexican rapists, Islamist terrorists, and welfare queens. Hochschild captures the sentiment at Trump rallies in Louisiana: “His supporters have been in mourning for a lost way of life. Many have become discouraged, others depressed.

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They yearn to feel pride but instead have felt shame. Their land no longer feels their own. Joined together with others like themselves, they now feel hopeful, joyous”— and yes, there’s that word again— “elated.”54 Her informants embody the force of stolen enjoyment. They “felt like victims of a frightening loss— or was it theft?— of their cultural home, their place in the world, and their honor.”55 Likewise, liberal indignation correctly registers a serious corruption of the political process, but then organizes its enjoyment around the supposed stupidity and illiteracy of Trump voters, making condescending jokes about misspelled signs and redneck ways. As Dean writes during the George W. administration, liberals enjoy nothing so much as being outraged at the sheer boorishness of political style of the New Right: “Bush’s speech enables me to be self-righteously horrified, to write letters to the editor, talk with friends and colleagues, and send money to MoveOn, all while denying the way that I am nonetheless trapped, unable actually to change a thing.”56 Naturally, liberal condescension only boosts Trump’s appeal to his base. As a Trump voter told Peter Hessler in Colorado, “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life. . . . The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.”57 On both sides, enjoyment becomes a kind of drive addiction in the vicinity of outrage. It allows us to feel like we’re thriving by scratching an itch, probing a wound— all the while remaining stuck, circling the same point. At the same time, it’s crucial to note here that enjoyment is, when it comes to societies as much as to individuals, at once “surplus to requirements” and indispensable to life. As Slavoj Žižek reminds us, “The fascinating image of the Other [the obstacle, the one who has stolen our sublime enjoyment] 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.”58 The point, once again, being that it is only the

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presence of the fascinating obstacle to enjoyment, insofar as it gives external shape to a necessary internal impasse, which sustains the fantasy that “full identity with ourselves” could ever be achieved. So, regarding the political examples I offered just now, the lesson takes the form of a both/and rather than an either/ or. It’s not that we must (or indeed can) choose between either a false fantasy structure that permits enjoyment or a political reality that, once confronted, would do away with the fantasy. The political challenge, rather, is how to acknowledge both the structural indispensability of an enjoyable reliance on fantasy and the possibility of detaching that fantasy from social practices that sustain exploitation and abjection. One of the great difficulties here is that it’s precisely this exploitation and abjection that feeds the appeal of Trump-style narratives of thwarted glory. On the campaign trail, Trump put it perfectly when he leveled accusations of “dreamicide” at all those liberals who had put needless regulations and red tape in the way of making America great again.59 Since assuming the presidency, Trump’s go-to Twitter term whenever he is attacked or challenged is witch hunt, stoking the fantasy that America could be great again— that enjoyment could be restored in all its lost plenitude— if only it weren’t for the “failing” news media, the “incompetent” judges, the “bad and conflicted people” investigating ties between Trump and Russia.60 It’s no coincidence that Trumpism thrives on projects that are in some fundamental sense impossible, projects like the border wall with Mexico, projects that are guaranteed to stoke that sense of dreamicide precisely because they’re always going to fall short of the sublime object. We should now be in a position to understand why more empathy is not the answer. Nowadays, we constantly hear that politics in the United States, and in many other parts of the world, have never been so polarized, that we have never been so far from understanding each other. The remedy is never far behind: more empathy, more putting ourselves in the other’s shoes. So,

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for example, Arlie Hochschild’s prescription is that we should all be doing more to scale “the empathy wall” that has, she says, gone up between red and blue states. But the problem here isn’t just that neither side understands the other enough— although certainly the distance between red- and blue-state worldviews is often staggering. The problem is the one that I elaborated above: that we sustain our enjoyment by requiring our political opponents to be the supposed obstacles to its flourishing. And since this happens on all sides, the result is a kind of codependent mutuality of incommensurable enjoyments.61 As Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai point out, enjoyment may sit deeper than empathy: “People seem to get more upset when their capacities for enjoyment are questioned . . . than when their capacities for empathy are tested.”62 Liberals may certainly enjoy their own outrage, but no one enjoys liberal outrage quite as intensely as the New Right. One might even say that the Right runs on provoking liberal outrage— on, in the phrase of one Trump voter, “poking at the jellyfish.”63 Again, the energetic yield is much more important than whether anyone actually believes in any of the “alternative facts” or “fake news.” As the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has suggested, it’s not that most right-wing readers necessarily believe that Hillary Clinton was ever implicated in running a child sex ring out of a Washington, DC, pizzeria; rather, it’s that they thoroughly enjoy the outrage and indignation that those kinds of stories generate among the liberal intelligentsia.64 While the New Right harvests the outrage that liberals so obligingly keep producing, its real political target isn’t the Democratic but rather the Republican establishment: the moderate Republicans, satirized by the New Right as beta cucks, wimps who bow down to liberal indignation rather than calling it, feeding it, channeling it. The PR genius of the New Right is that it’s able to wring publicity mileage out of the mainstream media by insulting it. So, for example, Steve Bannon tells journalists that “the media should keep its mouth shut,” knowing full well that the media will open its mouth wide to relay precisely that statement.65

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eConomizinG enJoyment, enJoyinG eConomy

I noted just now that enjoyment is at once surplus to requirements and yet indispensable to life. Jacques Lacan developed his notion of “surplus enjoyment” as a direct extension of Marx’s theory of surplus value.66 The surplus value that, according to Marx, is “thrown off ” from the circulation of commodities is, as Eric Santner notes in the present volume, registered in the original German abstossen, a word that “also belongs to the semantic field of disgust. Self-appreciation would thus seem to live near self-disgust, a proximity registered in the long history of linking money to the base materiality of excrement.”67 A similar kind of “throwing off ” happens, I would suggest, in the play of mass publicity, in the place where collective enjoyment accumulates, the public punctum68 where the highest becomes indistinguishable from the lowest, the transcendent from the obscene. Whether we are talking about the ceremonies of state or those of advertising, ritual is one name for the attempted routinization of symptomatic eruptions. If the two-step game of inciting and containing the social energies that Émile Durkheim called, variously, “collective effervescence” and mana is necessary for any social order that aspires to be both intelligible and enjoyable, then we could say that the possibility of society itself rests on an impossibility: the paradox of economizing enjoyment. Marketing and its medium, branding, are among the chief means by which the economization of enjoyment is pursued. In that regard, the risible rise of Trump— a brand first and foremost— looks like the very zenith of neoliberalism. And yet insofar as neoliberalism is based on the enjoyment of economy— a fierce attachment to the idea that everything can be marketized— the rise of Trump equally appears as a symptom of the neoliberal dream in crisis. Every ideological formation— and here neoliberalism is no exception— relies for its force, for its capacity to hold us, on a kernel of enjoyment that is itself not reducible to economy. A kernel that, as Žižek following Lacan shows, is extimate to the field of meaning that it supports— at

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once beyond it and internal to it.69 As an extimate relationship, it is both deep and volatile, stabilized by powerful, often intensely moralized, affective investments in signifiers like hope and change (to take only the most obvious examples from recent US political discourse). These signifiers are themselves riveted onto a more corporeal set of fascinations: the dignitas of a certain way of being presidential, the gravitas of public life, and other such loaded atmospheres. When these hegemonic braidings of ways of meaning and ways of being slide out of alignment, as they did in 2016, then the nonidentity of enjoyment and economy, always active but generally effaced, becomes palpable. This, in turn, enables the rise of figures like Trump who seem, initially and excitingly, to be unintelligible according to previously prevailing norms and forms of public life. Neoliberal enjoyment (the enjoyment of economy) depended, like all ideologized enjoyments, on a series of obstacles that seemed to stand in the way of its sublime realization. For that reason, it should also not be surprising that Trump— as the symptom of neoliberal crisis— should appear both as the apotheosis of the businessman (“let’s make a deal!” “you’re fired!”) and, at the same time, as an absolutely untrammeled embodiment of noninstrumental enjoyment (“I could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and still get elected!”). The mistake here would be to suppose that Trump is in this respect exceptional. No doubt he manifests the tensely extimate relation between economy and enjoyment in a particularly stark way, and no doubt he can do so only because of the moment he occupies. But this disjunctive yet constitutive relationship is common to how both markets and politics function. This has not been sufficiently acknowledged. The point is precisely not that politics has simply become another wing of marketing— although it’s certainly the case that marketing and branding strategies have for many decades played a central role in politics, both on the campaign trail and in the day-to-day of public relations management. The point is, rather, that we continue

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to imagine marketing as a space of totalizing instrumentality so as to preserve a sublime kernel in our dreams of the political. In the old days, critical takes on the consumer society used to invoke a totalizing marketing machine whose efficacy depended— much like Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society— on colonizing and instrumentalizing every last little corner of social life. One thinks of Theodor Adorno’s “administered society,” where, as he and Max Horkheimer mordantly observed, “something is provided for all so that none may escape.”70 Or of Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” in which “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”71 In each case, critical pathos was generated from the struggle to sustain a space outside the marketing machine— a space of aesthetic freedom, a space of agency, a space of independence. Against such totalizing diagnoses, cultural studies responded, in the 1970s and 1980s, with the heroically agentive consumer/viewer/citizen, whose modes of engagement with even the most ideologically oppressive culture-industrial products might still yield evidence of “resistance.”72 But the stout celebration of consumer agency missed the point. The real question was never whether marketing was as totalizing as old-school critical theory made it out to be. The real question, rather, was whether the critics of the culture industries had not in fact inadvertently reproduced the ideological discourse of culture industry professionals. Because it is in this discourse, first and foremost, that branding is supposed to be able to turn every last nook and cranny of everyday life, whether conscious or unconscious, to account. But what if the fascination— which is to say the efficacy— of resonant brands, politicians, or products has always rested not on their airtight messaging but rather on their often unintentional ability to serve as containers for a volatile interlacing of signification and enjoyment? Such volatile compacts cannot, whatever the marketing experts claim, be planned, although they can, perhaps, be sensed qua structures of feeling, on the cusp of their emergence.

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In this way too, charismatic demagogues can “read” the emergent potentials of the crowd they are addressing— surprising even themselves with the phrases that occur to them “in the heat of the moment.” As I have discussed elsewhere, the work of politics just as much as the work of marketing consists in no small part in constructing retrospective narratives about supposed inevitability of largely unforeseen successes/resonances.73 I want to emphasize two points here. The first is that for all our advances in theorizing ideology and subjectivity, for all that we’ve moved well beyond naïve invocations of agency, we still remain oddly attached to totalizing images of marketing— as if marketing really could achieve what we otherwise rightly insist is impossible: the thorough economizing of enjoyment (or, to invoke Richard Burt’s felicitous phrase, the administration of aesthetics).74 Consider, for example, how Slavoj Žižek, who otherwise insists on the irreducible kernel of enjoyment in all ideological discourse, describes the consumer society: “Consumerist post-democracy . . . tries to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration: individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration.”75 Now clearly, tries is the crucial word here, reminding us that the reduction of consumerist drive to docile, administered desire is at best an asymptotic aim. But, curiously, the next step remains untaken: to insist, then, that the phrase “consumerist post-democracy” does not describe a situation in which politics has in fact been domesticated by marketing— because marketing itself (despite what its practitioners may claim) relies on the persistence of a drive dimension, of a nonsymbolizable core of enjoyment, a core that can be eliminated only at the cost of the collapse of what is known (in a phrase that should only be understood ironically) as the “consumer economy.” Yannis Stavrakakis appears, early in his book The Lacanian Left, to put pressure on this point by asking precisely the right question: “Can late capitalism’s reliance on consumption be ex-

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plained at a purely economic level, without taking into account desire and enjoyment?”76 But by the end of the book, his position on this point has become more or less indistinguishable from Žižek’s. Once again, the genius of “consumerist postdemocracy” is that it always promises and always defers full enjoyment. But isn’t this true of enjoyment as such? Or rather, isn’t the only “really” full enjoyment, in politics as in marketing, the enjoyment of the deferral? The expectation that a once-lost enjoyment will or can be restored in all its plenitude, along with the perpetual deferral of that restoration, is the dialectic that drives drive, so to speak. Stavrakakis argues that the consumerization of politics prevents dissatisfaction from emerging as a properly political question, because the culture industries keep telling us that enjoyment is already ours for the buying while they keep displacing the full realization of that enjoyment onto a future purchase, another commodity. For Stavrakakis too, then, the end result is the paradoxical subsumption of enjoyment under economy: “Hence politics loses all antagonistic connotations and becomes synonymous with administration.”77 But who are these sinister administrators? And what are the laws by which their work becomes so magically effective? Haven’t we long ago let go of these kinds of top-down conspiratorial understandings of public culture (which, by the way, is not at all to say that we do not remain rightly concerned with persistent patterns of ideological identification)? This brings me to the second point: Is it in fact the case that we sustain an ideal of the political as an open-ended space of possible antagonism by contrasting it with a (false) image of a totally administered economy? Is the sublimity of the political sustained at the cost of the banalization of the market? To be sure, insisting on the irreducibly antagonistic potential of politics is a necessary corrective to the kind of cynical and lazy diagnosis one often encounters, according to which what we used to know as politics has been entirely absorbed by marketing. But if we want to reject that diagnosis, then it’s not enough to

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“save” politics from total commodification. We also must entertain the possibility that the efficacy of marketing is no less reliant than political mobilization precisely on the nontotalizable relation between enjoyment and economy. Shouldn’t we be reconsidering this apparently desperate desire to maintain a cordon sanitaire between how we theorize the market and how we theorize politics— not, again, because “politics is nothing but marketing nowadays” but rather because marketing may be more like politics than we have been prepared to admit? My point is not the boring Romantic one: that something will always reassuringly escape rationalization, that Spirit will always exceed System because quality can’t be reduced to quantity, et cetera, et cetera. My point, rather, is the opposite: that we should by no means feel reassured, because it’s precisely the mutual irreducibility of enjoyment and economy that fascinates us, that draws us in, whether we’re talking about a resonant brand or a charismatic politician. And what better place to explore this thesis than in the form of our very first prebranded Leader of the Free World? BrAnd(ish)inG the nAme

I opened this essay with a scene in which the name Trump was being brandished with a kind of elated aggression. Now, the invocation of this name as a signifier of a political community was always already also an invocation of a brand. A brand that stood emblazoned on towers all over the world. A brand stamped on commodities of, as we have seen, the most various hues. And a brand name can be owned. It is a kind of property. It is, perhaps, in that sense the quintessence of the proper name. And in fact, the other standard meaning of jouissance in French is the enjoyment of property rights. For what property is more properly my own than my proper, personal name? The properness of my name is, however, in another sense not mine. Rather, it is dependent on its inscription in an Other, a symbolic order. As Jacques Lacan

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remarks, “The subject . . . while he may appear to be the slave of language, is still more the slave of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at his birth, if only in the form of his proper name.”78 In contexts where autonomous individuality is the normative telos, a proper name, personal or brand, promises the idiotically tautological enjoyment of pure self-reference, of “identity” in the most literal sense. But its “actual” enjoyment, if one may say so, lies, again, in the dynamic and unbridgeable distance between (full) enjoyment and (symbolic) economy. Under ordinary conditions, we experience this delicately enjoyable distance between enjoyment and economy vis-à-vis our sense of ourselves as well as in relation to curiously compelling brands. In both cases, there’s that sense that the name embodies “a certain je ne sais quoi,” an “X factor,” a “fifth element,” something that is never reducible to a simple enumeration of its constituent parts, something that— like obscenity— you can’t define but you know when you see. As I have discussed at length elsewhere,79 brand names transpose this enjoyable im/properness into the space of mass publicity. And in that movement from person to brand, other problems emerge. For an individual, the irreducible properness of the personal name is always haunted both by its symbolic inscription and by its more or less arbitrary origin. Whatever its genealogical resonances, it is a given name; and much as social conventions in some parts of the world try to prevent duplication, other people, known and unknown, are likely to share my name80 (consider the narcissism-punishes/rewards-itself experience of Googling one’s name and finding a namesake’s obituary . . .). A brand name is of course also a given name. But a brand plays a different game with the dialectic of enjoyment and economy, of participation and representation, of substance and symbol. Like all proper names, a brand name ideally refers only to itself. It strives to be the kind of impossibly self-sufficient signifier that Saul Kripke called a “rigid designator.”81 But a brand name also must be capacious: it must be extendable so as to

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include in its substance, as it were, often quite diverse products and services. As we have seen, the Trump consumer brand, extended ad nauseam if not ad absurdum, is no exception. A consumer brand is, for that reason, not only condemned to navigate the enjoyment/economy tightrope to which all names are subject; rather, it must also constantly balance centripetal (brand coherence) and centrifugal (brand extension) pressures. If the Trump consumer brand seems to house a rather motley range of products and services united only by a vague reference to luxury, then we should also note that consistent messaging has never been important to his/its success. Trump’s truly decisive brand property is not to signify so much as to keep us in motion: adoring, getting outraged, feeling sick— in other words, enjoying. As a brand, Trump provokes us to rethink the elementary forms of marketing ideology, forms which, as I was suggesting above, self-styled critiques of marketing tend, uncritically, to reproduce. Perhaps the most elementary of these forms is the idea that branding works via the discipline of carefully managed, competitively deployed signifiers known as “positioning.” This is the Uncola principle: if their candidate/product signifies X, then our candidate/product must signify not-X (and/or be very careful not to get pushed into signifying Y). In today’s crowded marketplace, we are told, a brand that wants to stand out and be noticed needs to stay on message. But if there’s a consistent message to Trump’s political brand, then it is the power of straying off message. If gilding base metals is Trump’s superpower, then the teleprompter is his kryptonite.82 This makes it hard to attack the Trump brand with the adbuster’s usual toolkit. Naomi Klein, for example, makes an argument that at first sight seems plausible: namely, that if Trump lives by branding, then branding should also be his Achilles’ heel. Perhaps Trump, as Farhad Manjoo suggests, heralds a new type of PR-based democracy, where presidents no less than corporations will live in terror of adverse social media reviews and mass app deletions: “Posting a hashtag— #deleteUber, for

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instance, or #grabyourwallet— and threatening to back it up by withholding dollars can bring about a much quicker, more visible change in the world than, say, calling your representative.”83 But Klein herself notes that Trump’s core brand value is actually impunity: “His brand is being the ultimate boss, the guy who is so rich he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and to whomever he wants (including grabbing whichever woman he wants, by whichever body part he wants).”84 Even as Klein continues to advocate culture-jamming strategies, she also acknowledges that this is “also why no labor scandal is ever going to stick to him. In the world he has created, he’s just acting like a ‘winner’; if someone gets stepped on, they are obviously a loser. . . . According to those rules, you don’t need to be objectively good or decent; you only need to be true and consistent to the brand you’ve created. . . . In Trump’s world, impunity, even more than lots of gold, is the ultimate signifier of success.”85 It’s hard, then, not to ask the seemingly obvious question: how do you impugn a brand that’s all about impunity? Trump epitomizes the tautological principle of celebrity as such: being famous for being famous. During the first few months of his presidency, he was discussed on Twitter ten times as frequently as the entire Kardashian family combined. The effect exceeds the United States: Trump dis/graced the cover of Der Spiegel five times in the first half of 2017 alone. 86 Qua attention-sink, he pulls eyes and ears away from those previously highly visible organizations and social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, that mobilize against Trumpworld. By the same token, all over the world, war criminals and other highlevel miscreants are breathing a sigh of relief and thanking The Donald for diverting the spotlight. The valorization of attention for its own sake may be gauged from Trump’s statement after the July 2017 resignation of his much-lampooned walking malapropism of a press secretary, Sean Spicer, in which the president expressed his confidence in Spicer’s future success by exclaiming, “Just look at his great television ratings.”87

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As the focus of all attention, Trump can, in his own way, appear as a kind of charismatic master. Here again, the mastery has less to do with any actual political achievements (indeed, as we have seen, the more Trump is thwarted, the more enjoyable he becomes) than with the powerful seduction of a leader who appears to be entirely unconstrained by ordinary rules of civility. Arlie Hochschild reports from a Trump rally in Louisiana: “So it was with joyous relief that many heard a Donald Trump who seemed to be wildly, omnipotently, magically free of all PC constraint.”88 As Wendy Brown notes, “Trump’s own entitlement to disinhibition anointed the wound of castrated white masculinity in the twenty-first century.”89 This is a heady fantasy of restored freedom, to be sure: a freedom of action, of affect, of being. It may certainly seem to be an infantile fantasy at times90 — one thinks of those moments when Trump comes closest to looking and sounding like “Rocket Man,” his opposite number in North Korea (recognized by the rest of the world as Kim Jong-un). Consider here Trump’s childish need to have every aspect of the world conform to his grandiose fantasy of perfect control. So, for example, it wasn’t enough to claim, against all the evidence, that his presidential inauguration attracted larger crowds than any other; Trump also had to insist that it didn’t rain. Or, as Lauren Berlant put it, it didn’t “rain on his pomade.”91 How this tautological celebrity, this fixation on enjoyable visibility as such, manifests vis-à-vis the brand is in a parallel preoccupation with the apparently pure self-referentiality of the name. One of Trump’s signature moves on the campaign trail was to try to make sure that his was the only truly proper name, the only name that could stand by and for itself, without modifiers of any kind. To this end, like the wrestlers from whom he’s learned so much, he compulsively assigned belittlingly familiar adjectives to the names of his critics and opponents: Goofy Elizabeth (Warren), Crazy Bernie (Sanders), Little Marco (Rubio), Low-Energy Jeb (Bush), Crooked Hillary (Clinton), Crying Chuck (Schumer), Sloppy Steve (Bannon), and so on.

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Again, the key point here was not so much a meaningful game of positioning through which Trump associated his challengers with undesirable qualities, although that was not unimportant. Rather, doling out these adjectives was a way of relativizing all competitors vis-à-vis the sublime and transcendent singularity of the Trump brand name. This aspiration to tautologous and thus intensely enjoyable self-referentiality has, as a correspondent in Advertising Age notes, long characterized the Trump consumer brand as well. “The Trump brand, as personified by Donald Trump, has always been about self-absorption. The core brand message: Hey, look at me! . . . In other words, his brand was a meta-brand. A brand about branding. Which is why it made perfect sense that last October [2016], the Trump campaign started soliciting $35 donations in exchange for a ‘limited edition Trump Black Card,’ a card that conferred exactly no benefits. The Trump Black Card was about . . . having a Trump Black Card.”92 As a metabrand, Trump is exemplary but not exceptional. The Trump brand set itself apart by adopting as an explicit characteristic— as, in a sense, its “content”— a dynamic that is at work in all resonant marketing, all vital politics: the paradoxical pursuit of economized enjoyment. The brand that works, in marketing as in politics, is the one in which the irreducible tension between symbolic economy and visceral enjoyment is palpably activated. Within and across the manifest message of a brand, beyond its “positioning,” hovers the unassimilable aura of enjoyment, at once inseparable from the “meaning” of the brand and irreducible to it. And yet, brand equity can be and often is given a dollar value. Enjoyment can (appear to) be economized. The phenomenal form of this compulsory impossibility is, one might say, entertainment. One speculative definition of entertainment might be the belief that we are actively and enjoyably consuming what is in fact consuming us. Elsewhere, I have theorized branding as an exercise in “keeping-while-giving.”93 A consumer goods

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corporation or a political operation “keeps” the brand (as a proprietary vessel of value) while “giving” the branded commodity (which can enter circulation and be purchased). As brand-consuming subjects, we are in fact laboring subjects— performing the work of attention, of attachment, of enjoyment, of imagination. We are the ones actually producing the value that, by the displacing logic of commodity fetishism, appears to reside in the brand. We are what Eric Santner calls the “officiants” of the brand. Our “liturgical labor” is being voraciously consumed by the brand— although we are rewarded in the measureless coin of enjoyment— even as we experience ourselves as freely consuming the brand. The surplus enjoyment arising from our work for and in the brand appears to us subjectively as enjoyment available for purchase. Lorenzo Chiesa usefully notes that Jacques Lacan invoked the German term Wirklichkeit— with its connotations of both “work” and “reality”— to designate that “little bit of the Real,” the nonsymbolic element in the symbolic order that works. The drive dimension, the dimension of enjoyment, that keeps us working even as it works in us.94 unGAinFul liFe: An ethiCs oF PAtienCy

Now, it’s certainly the case that, especially in authoritarian populist regimes, the very name of the leader often becomes a kind of sublime object, inextricable from the project and prospect of the national community as such— “Fidel,” “Indira is India,” and so on. But the ascension of Trump radicalizes this effect by detaching the enjoyment of the name from any necessary reference to a social or political vision, however perfunctory. In that sense, the enjoyment generated by brandishing the name Trump might seem similar to the enjoyment that, as Slavoj Žižek notes, a patriot derives from saying “America!” Žižek argues that this enjoyment requires no detour through referential meaning, as it is rather a direct enjoyment of the signifier as such.95 And yet, what is being enjoyed in the enjoyment of the signi-

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fier “as such”? At this point the easy mistake, it seems, would be to fall into the trap of positivizing lack, of reintroducing the lure of something when the lure of jouissance is precisely its capacity to circle nothing— or, perhaps more precisely, circle the object or image that stands in for the unrepresentable, the hard kernel that resists interpretation. Methodologically, the imperative to hold firm against the temptation to interpret is invaluable. This holding firm is all the more important since enjoyment already appears as an incitement to discourse. Frédéric Declercq illustrates this from an analytical standpoint: “Little children don’t know what on earth to do with the jouissance that arises from their bodies. Maybe the well-known situation of children attracting their parents’ attention to their genitals has to do with this. They try to provoke a discourse.”96 Do we not see an analogous phenomenon in public life, only with the enjoyment arising now from the social body, from the virtual flesh of the collective that appears, alternately, as multitude or mob, as people or public? If, as Nestor Braunstein suggests, the psychoanalytic paradigm of jouissance “is found in those tensional states which allow the body to experience itself as such,”97 then shouldn’t we also be paying attention to those “tensional states” in the life of politics when the social body experiences itself as such? These might be states of clearly collective assembly and becoming— crowds massing in city squares— or they might be spectacles of mass affect and mass discipline.98 As entertainer-politician, Trump attempts to channel our enjoyment onto genre pathways that are perhaps less epic although hardly less operatic: witness his enthusiastic tendency to rely on the gestural and affective idiom of wrestling.99 Sharon Mazer observes, “Wrestling is about heat, not truth. . . . Since the fight is fixed, winning and losing are, in effect, beside the point. Success is marked by the degree of heat generated. . . . The ebb and flow of despair and elation are all.”100 But couldn’t we also say that Trump’s compulsive drive toward pure self-referentiality is perfectly symptomatic of a

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political juncture that is at once a moment of crisis and a moment of opportunity? It’s a moment of crisis in all the directly “political” ways: the desperate threat to the environment, the reassertion of white supremacist patriarchy, and so on. But it’s also a moment of crisis in a mode that may yet turn out to be an opportunity. Trump’s “empty” self-referentiality is at one level obviously vacuous. At another level, perhaps we could read the brandishing of the Trump name precisely as the activation of a particular “tensional state” of the contemporary US body politic: namely, one through which Trump’s white nationalist support seeks to have, as Berlant puts it, “its whiteness enfleshed.”101 An elated moment, then, of activating and participating in the relay between an anxious social body and the shameless sovereignty of the Trumpian name/brand/body. Again, at one level the amorality of Trumpism tempts us to respond with a reassertion of decency. Sometimes this might take the form of a demonization of political enjoyment as such as an inherently “irrational” or destructive energy. Sometimes it might appear as a search for “good” or “progressive” jouissance in place of the forces of darkness. This is the sentiment that underpinned Michelle Obama’s much-repeated but ill-advised counter-Trumpian slogan, “When they go low, we go high.” But what if our first move was, instead, to refuse the investment in moralized utility and “hygienic politics”102 that subtends such responses? Consider how mainstream political discourse on both the left and the right tends to fall into a kind of ethical panic when confronted with any refusal of usefulness, when asked to take seriously the prospect of an ungainful life as anything other than a failed life. There are of course various registers in which the ungainful can be legitimized and contained. Doing something “for its own sake” can be romanticized in the name of art and/or sublimated in the name of the sacred. But when it comes to everyday life, when it comes to how someone makes sure they’re not “wasting their day,” then the anxious attachment to utility is a

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central and apparently implacable strand of ordinary American ethics. We might note here too that the ethical panic at the prospect of uselessness introduces its own idiom of enjoyment: if we can’t be sure that we’re actually doing something useful, then at least we can insist on the purely formal achievement of working hard. In the presumptively Protestant space of mainstream US public culture, saying “I worked my ass off,” without any further specification as to content, is already an uncontestable claim to ethical excellence. Here stands an army ready for an aim. Peter Sloterdijk’s sly observation comes to mind: “It is always a good investment to make use of a naïve will to work, never mind for what.”103 Here too we’re in the realm of tightly interlocking enjoyments. Take, for example, the obsessive way in which commentators on the left as much as on the right fixate on the clichéd image of the white working-class Trump voter, especially the version of that voter that is jobless or casually employed, who scams welfare while complaining about entitlement, who might spend days getting high and watching TV. What emerges from the possibility that such a person might not only be either a victim or a loser, that such a person might be both suffering and enjoying their inability or unwillingness to live up to a middleclass ideal of hard work, self-care, and Protestant discipline? What emerges is, on the one hand, the terrifying enjoyment of an ungainful life; on the other hand, the enjoyment of condemning that life in moralizing tones. On the right, one laments “lost values”; on the left one bemoans “lost hope.” Perhaps the clearest symptom of both sides’ attachment to moralized utility is their compulsive return— in registers of either revulsion or compassion— to this one stereotype of the quintessential Trump voter, against all evidence of the diversity of the people who bought into the brand.104 Holding steady against moralized utility thinking may, for one thing, mean opening a space in which to encounter the “tensional states” of the social body, the apparently senseless play of

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collective enjoyment, differently and more creatively. Especially in the face of the issues— poverty, suffering, addiction, abuse— that seem inherently to demand utilitarian, practical solutions. Obviously, practical solutions to suffering are indispensable— but it’s also precisely in response to the urgency of suffering that a kind of tone-deaf, edifying instrumentality often takes over. If the psychoanalytic lesson of enjoyment is to recognize the limits of interpretation, then perhaps we might extend this lesson in the direction of a political approach to crisis as well— especially insofar as that crisis is, as I was suggesting earlier, a breakdown in previously reliable braidings of economy and enjoyment. What emerges here is the need for a different kind of attentiveness: an ethics of patiency rather than an ethics of agency. Less “what is to be done?”; more yielding to the symptom— to the play of enjoyment— so as to become better attuned to the shape of a problem that has not yet found its language. Recall my earlier proposition that a certain sublime dimension to the political is sustained by portraying the market as a space of pure instrumentality. Even in quick-and-dirty journalistic accounts, it’s as if we’re being fed two propositions at the same time. First, there’s the easy, cynical diagnosis of a contemporary politics that has been completely subsumed by marketing. And then at the same time, we’re also told that there nevertheless is a sublime dimension to politics, a “something more,” that needs to be saved from the all-dissolving logic of truck and barter. So, for example, the following lines (taken from an article titled “Branding Eats Policy for Lunch”) are not only intended as a diagnosis; they’re also supposed to be a warning. They’re supposed to evoke an ethical chill: “The brand that’s about branding [i.e., the Trump brand] will just keep throwing stuff to the wall to see if it sticks. Except the ‘stuff ’ now is politics. And policy. And national destiny.”105 The pompous ethical seriousness of a term like national destiny, here endangered by the reckless whims of a none-too-serious brand steward, is supposed to remind us of a gravitas, of a serious enjoyment, that we are apparently in danger of squandering.

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At issue here is how we think, across markets and politics, about the relation between enjoyment and agency. Of course, nowadays it’s entirely conventional to have political choice presented to us as consumer choice: picking a president off the shelf much as we might select an appealing outfit. And just as giving in to a kind of self-indulgent enjoyment is, in the end, entirely expected, even approved, in the realm of consumption (“I just had to have it!” “Because you’re worth it!”), this same kind of surrender remains normatively unacceptable in the space of politics. Because in politics we are supposed to be creatures of agency, not patiency. Admitting to having yielded to the charm of an irresistible commodity can itself come across as charming, not least on the part of individuals whose public image is premised on self-control (this is a big part of what the coy game of “confessing” to so-called guilty pleasures is about). But yielding in this same way to the appeal of political candidates, surrendering to their seduction, signifies regression and ethical failure. The Latin etymology of the patient, as opposed to the agent, leads us back to suffering and of course to passion. Immanuel Kant, in his Anthropology, took great pains to explain that passion is a particularly deceptive and treacherous state, because it simulates the self-determination and drive of autonomous, agentive reason while all the while subjecting that drive to an external compulsion. Passion for Kant is a kind of surreptitiously (and deliciously) hijacked autonomy.106 The Latin passio also translates the Greek pathos, which similarly evokes this kind of extimate takeover of autonomous agency. Stavrakakis brings us full circle by linking patiency and jouissance, noting that pathos is linked to the Greek verb pascho, which “has connotations of satisfaction, feeling or enjoyment during intercourse.”107 It’s as if our defensive political discourse, triggered by the trauma of Trump, keeps us suspended between, on the one side, a trivialized notion of passive enjoyment and, on the other side, the glimmer of an already moralized political promise, a promise that we can sustain only by rigorously separating the seduction of consumer marketing from the sublime object of

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democracy. Both poles are instrumentalized, at one end by clinging to the idea of marketing as perfectly economized enjoyment, at the other end by insisting on all the pathos of a moralized conception of the “nobility” that yet survives as the potential promise of the political. Each side of the opposition keeps the other in place, yet avoids a more searching, possibly traumatic encounter with the nonmoral, noneconomical movement of enjoyment, with the tensional states of the collective flesh. And it is this, in the end, that the Trumpian moment forces us to confront. The apparent senselessness of Trumpish enjoyment points not so much to any epochal political crisis of liberalism as such, but rather to the need to acknowledge the enjoyments that have sustained (and exceeded) liberal-democratic public culture all along.

notes

For illuminations and provocations, I would like to thank Karin Ahlberg, Damien Bright, Molly Cunningham, Maura Finkelstein, Dianna Frid, Dilip Gaonkar, Rohit Goel, Keith Hart, Ravinder Kaur, Eleftheria Lekakis, Joe Masco, Dan McNaughton, W. J. T. Mitchell, Andy Rotman, Asmus Rungby, Eric Santner, Aaron Schuster, Frank Summers, Jeremy Walton, and Lisa Wedeen. 1. Matt Taibbi, Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2017), 133. 2. Dan Barry and John Eligon, “‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ How a President’s Name Became a Racial Jeer,” New York Times, December 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/trump-racial -jeers.html. 3. Michael Beschloss and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, quoted in Barry and Eligon, “‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’” 4. http://www.trump.com/merchandise/. 5. Jim Zarroli, “Trump’s Role as President May Be Boosting His Brand’s Reputation,” WBUR News, Boston, February 8, 2017, http://

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www.wbur.org/npr/513973748/trumps-role-as-president-may-be -boosting-his-brands-reputation. 6. Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna, “The List of Charities Canceling Events at Mar-a-Lago Keeps Growing,” Vox, August 23, 2017, https:// www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/23/16185216/charities -canceling-events-mar-a-lago-charlottesville. 7. Quoted in Joseph Grosso, “Presidential Branding: Trump and the Cult of Celebrity,” Counterpunch, April 20, 2017, https://www .counterpunch.org/2017/04/20/presidential-branding-trump-and -the-cult-of-celebrity/. 8. Aaron Schuster, “Primal Scream; or, Why Do Babies Cry? A Theory of Trump,” e-flux, no. 83 (June 2017), http://www.e-flux .com/journal/83/140999/primal-scream-or-why-do-babies-cry-a -theory-of-trump/. 9. Emmett Rensin, “The Blathering Superego at the End of History,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 18, 2017, https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-blathering-superego-at-the-end -of-history/. 10. “Since February, [the Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency] . . . has filed a proposal of intent to undo or weaken Mr. Obama’s climate change regulations, known as the Clean Power Plan. In late June, he filed a legal plan to repeal an Obama-era rule curbing pollution in the nation’s waterways. He delayed a rule that would require fossil fuel companies to rein in leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells. He delayed the date by which companies must comply with a rule to prevent explosions and spills at chemical plants. And he reversed a ban on the use of a pesticide that the E.P.A.’s own scientists have said is linked to damage of children’s nervous systems.” Coral Davenport, “Counseled by Industry, Not Staff, EPA Chief Is Off to a Blazing Start,” New York Times, July 1, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017 /07/01/us/politics/trump-epa-chief-pruitt-regulations-climate -change.html. Indeed, the sheer intensity of Scott Pruitt’s pursuit of deregulation smacks of an enjoyment beyond economy— as witnessed by the gathering alarm of even those energy corporations the deregulation was supposed to favor. See Ben Lefebvre,

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“Oil and Gas Allies to Trump: Slow Down,” Politico, August 25, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/25/oil-and-gas-allies-want -trump-to-slow-down-242008?cid=apn. 11. Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal; or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Henry Holt, 2016). 12. Robert Leonard, “Why Rural America Voted for Trump,” New York Times, January 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01 /05/opinion/why-rural-america-voted-for-trump.html?_r=0. 13. At the same time, it’s clear enough that Trump was helped into office by segments of the urban professional elites who saw in him not only material advantages but a genuine opportunity to move beyond the doddering neoliberal platitudes emanating from the Clinton campaign— especially after Bernie Sanders had been edged out of the race. See, e.g., Julius Krein, “I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It,” New York Times, August 17, 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/sunday/i-voted-for-trump -and-i-sorely-regret-it.html?mcubz=1. 14. See, for example, Eric Oliver and Wendy Rahn, “Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 667, no. 1 (2016): 1–18; and Danny Westneat, “UW Professor Got It Right on Trump. So Why Is He Being Ignored?,” Seattle Times, June 14, 2017, http://www .seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-got-it-right -on-trump-so-why-is-he-being-ignored/. 15. See John Jackson Jr., Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (New York: Civitas, 2010). 16. Adam Green, “Racecraft, Inequality, and Political Reaction: An American Primer” (lecture, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, May 30, 2017). 17. Rosie Gray, “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides,’” Atlantic, August 15, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump -defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on -both-sides/537012. 18. Eliana Johnson and Eli Stokols, “What Steve Bannon Wants

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You to Read,” Politico, February 7, 2017, http://www.politico.com /magazine/story/2017/02/steve-bannon-books-reading-list -214745. 19. As Damien Bright points out in a personal communication, the phrase also reworks an ableist cliché about autism, which has the effect of absolving Bannon of responsibility for his magnetizing actions/discourse. 20. Sophie Tatum, “Report: Bannon Calls White Supremacists ‘A Collection of Clowns,’” CNN.com, August 18, 2017, http://www .cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/steve-bannon-interview-white -supremacy/index.html. 21. Jeremy Peters, “Conservatives Recoil at Trump’s Accommodation with Democrats over DACA,” New York Times, September 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/us/politics /conservatives-trump-democrats-daca.html. Trump’s habit of reassuring supporters that “the wall will come later” is of course the perfect formula by which to keep a sublime object alive. 22. Avery Anapol, “Fact-Checking Site Crashes during Trump State of the Union,” The Hill, January 31, 2018, http://thehill.com /homenews/media/371557-fact-checking-site-crashes-during -trump-state-of-the-union. 23. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (1994; reprint, London: Verso, 2015), chap. 6. 24. Dale Beran, “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump,” Medium.com, February 14, 2017, https://medium.com/@DaleBeran /4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb. 25. Beran. 26. Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt, 2018), 198. 27. Yannis Stavrakakis quotes the journalist Ron Suskind reporting on a 2004 interaction with a senior member of the Bush administration after an Esquire article Suskind had written on Bush’s former communications director Karen Hughes. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as a people who ‘believe that solutions emerge

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from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors. . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’” Quoted in Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 124. 28. Peter Hessler, “Follow the Leader,” New Yorker, July 24, 2017, 26. Michael Wolff makes a similar point: “In six months as president, failing to master almost any aspect of the bureaucratic process, [Trump] had, beyond placing his nominee on the Supreme Court, accomplished, practically speaking, nothing. And yet, OMG!!! There almost was no other story in America— and in much of the world. That was the radical and transformational nature of the Trump presidency: it held everybody’s attention.” Wolff, Fire and Fury, 251. 29. Wendy Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism,” Eurozine, August 30, 2017, http://www.eurozine.com/apocalyptic-populism. 30. Taibbi, Insane Clown President, 146. 31. Taibbi, 147. 32. Jacques Lacan, Seminar IX: L’identification, session of March 14, 1962 (unpublished), quoted in translation in Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 86. 33. Schuster, 180. 34. André Patsalides and Kareen Ror Malone, “Jouissance in the Cure,” in The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists, ed. Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen Friedlander (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 124. 35. Nestor Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 108.

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36. Slavoj Žižek, “The Liberal Utopia: Against the Politics of Jouissance,” n.d., http://www.lacan.com/zizliberal.htm. 37. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, originally released on Let It Bleed (Decca, 1969). 38. Joan Williams, “The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension,” editorial, New York Times, May 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes .com/2017/05/27/opinion/sunday/the-dumb-politics-of-elite -condescension.html. 39. Tom McCarthy, “Trump Loyalists Stand by Their Man— but the Resistance Is Taking Root,” Guardian (US edition), February 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/17/donald -trump-supporters-pennsylvania-loyalists-resistance. 40. Hessler, “Follow the Leader,” 23. 41. Beran, “4chan.” 42. Member of the organization Anonymous, quoted in Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (New York: Verso, 2014), 4. 43. Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Breitbart News Network, March 29, 2016, http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an -establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/. See Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, for an extended unpacking of the lulz. 44. Mark Andrejevic, “The Jouissance of Trump,” Television and News Media 17, no. 7 (2016): 651. 45. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 72. 46. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). 47. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right— a Journey to the Heart of Our Political Divide (New York: New Press, 2016), 228; my emphasis. 48. William Mazzarella, “Affect: What Is It Good For?,” in En-

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chantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, ed. Saurabh Dube (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009), 291–309. 49. Ernesto Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” in Laclau: A Critical Reader, ed. Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart (London: Routledge, 2004), 326. See also Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left. 50. Lauren Berlant, “Trump, Comedy, Inequality” (lecture, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, April 11, 2017). 51. See William Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 141–42. 52. Peter Sloterdijk reflects on pedagogy and publicity in Weimar Germany in ways that resonate with our present: “The Enlightenment had never been able to form an effective alliance with the mass media, and political maturity (Mündigkeit) was never an ideal of the industrial monopolies and their associations.” Peter Sloterdijk, “Cynicism— the Twilight of False Consciousness,” New German Critique 33 (Autumn 1984): 197. 53. Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 12. 54. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 225. 55. Hochschild, 48. 56. Dean, Žižek’s Politics, 29. 57. Quoted in Hessler, “Follow the Leader,” 26. 58. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 206. 59. Phyllis Schlafly et al., The Conservative Case for Trump (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2016), 103. 60. Brennan Center for Justice, “In His Own Words: The President’s Attacks on the Courts,” June 5, 2017, https://www .brennancenter.org/analysis/his-own-words-presidents-attacks -courts; Brandon Carter, “New York Times Fact-Checks Trump’s Claim That It’s ‘Failing,’” The Hill, August 7, 2017, http://thehill .com/homenews/media/345669-new-york-times-fact-checks -trumps-claim-that-its-failing; Peter Nicholas, “Trump Attacks ‘Bad and Conflicted People’ Leading ‘Witch Hunt’ Obstruction Investigation,” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2017, https://www.wsj.com /articles/trump-attacks-bad-and-conflicted-people-leading-witch -hunt-obstruction-investigation-1497534251.

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61. Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in the New York Times: “Two terrible tendencies now feed off each other, growing stronger every day: the more [liberal] smugness, the more satisfying to poke holes in it; the more toxic the [conservative] trolling, the greater the sense of moral superiority.” Katherine Mangu-Ward, “When Smug Liberals Meet Conservative Trolls,” New York Times, March 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/opinion/sunday/smug -liberals-conservative-trolls.html. 62. Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (2017): 242. 63. Hessler, “Follow the Leader,” 23. 64. Geoffrey Kabaservice, “The Great Performance of Our Failing President,” New York Times, June 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes .com/2017/06/09/opinion/great-performance-of-donald-trump -our-failing-president.html?_r=0. 65. Nikita Vladimirov, “Bannon: Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut,’” The Hill, January 26, 2017, http://thehill.com/blogs/blog -briefing-room/news/316360-bannon-media-should-keep-its -mouth-shut. 66. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; Alenka Zupančič, “When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value,” in Jacques Lacan and “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis”: Reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 155–78. 67. Constantine Nakassis’s argument about the “surfeits” that brands generate in the course of their circulation could perhaps be interestingly reconsidered in the light of this dialectic of selfappreciation and self-disgust. Constantine Nakassis, “Brands and Their Surfeits,” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 1 (2013): 111–26. 68. See William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), for a more extensive development of this concept. 69. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 103. See also Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left. 70. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1st English ed., New York: Continuum, 1972), 123.

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71. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967; reprint, Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), thesis 1. 72. I discuss and critique this false dialectic at length in Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 345–67; and The Mana of Mass Society. 73. See especially Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke. 74. Richard Burt, ed., The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 75. Žižek, “The Liberal Utopia.” 76. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 21. 77. Stavrakakis, 263. 78. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 414. 79. William Mazzarella, “On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 12 (2015), https:// samaj.revues.org/3986. 80. Sean Dowdy, “Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam),” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 12 (2015), https://samaj.revues.org/4027. 81. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 82. Contrast, for example, Trump’s alarmingly lifeless Afghanistan policy address of August 21, 2017, with the much more characteristic freewheeling, madcap jouissance of his rally in Phoenix, Arizona, the following day. 83. Farhad Manjoo, “How Battling Brands Online Has Gained Urgency, and Impact,” New York Times, June 21, 2017, https://www .nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/how-battling-brands-online -has-gained-urgency-and-impact.html?_r=0. 84. Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 33. 85. Klein, 33, 34.

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86. Ryan Mac, “‘We Just Don’t Really Matter’— How to Break Through in the Trump Era,” Buzzfeed, July 24, 2017, https://www .buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/donald-trump-has-your-full-attention -can-anyone-else-be?utm_term=.dymb3Nxbp#.lt19N2X95. 87. Glenn Thrush, “Sean Spicer Resigns as White House Press Secretary,” New York Times, July 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com /2017/07/21/us/politics/sean-spicer-resigns-as-white-house-press -secretary.html. 88. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 227. 89. Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism.” 90. See Schuster, “Primal Scream,” for a theory of Trump as a baby. 91. Lauren Berlant, Facebook post, January 2017. 92. Simon Dumenco, “How to Understand the Trump Brand in 2017,” Advertising Age, January 9, 2017, http://adage.com/article /media/how-to-understand-the-trump-brand-in-2017/307423/. 93. I develop this point, an extension of an argument originally developed in a different context by Annette Weiner, at length in Shoveling Smoke, chap. 6. 94. Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 127. 95. Žižek, “The Liberal Utopia.” 96. Frédéric Declercq, “Lacan’s Concept of the Real of Jouissance: Clinical Illustrations and Implications,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 9 (2004): 238. 97. Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance,” 107. 98. Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (London: Verso, 2016); William Mazzarella, “The Myth of the Multitude; or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Summer 2010): 697–727, and “Totalitarian Tears, or, Does the Crowd Really Mean It?,” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2015): 91–112. 99. Klein, No Is Not Enough; Sharon Mazer, “Donald Trump Shoots the Match,” TDR: The Drama Review (2017), https:// www.mitpressjournals.org/pb-assets/pdfs/TDR_Mazer_Trump

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%20Shoots%20the%20Match.pdf; Taibbi, Insane Clown President. One thinks here too of Norman Mailer’s old line about how wars should be fought between world leaders mano a mano rather than by remote control via subaltern bodies. Mailer clearly hadn’t fully considered the kind of politician who would be excited at the prospect of inhabiting such a role— the kind who, like Trump, would gleefully retweet video footage appearing to show the commander in chief ringside, pummeling a prone figure with the CNN logo for a head: Michael Grynbaum, “Trump Tweets a Video of Him Wrestling ‘CNN’ to the Ground,” New York Times, July 2, 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/07/02/business/media/trump-wrestling -video-cnn-twitter.html. 100. Mazer, “Donald Trump Shoots the Match,” 1, 4, 12. 101. Lauren Berlant, “Big Man,” Social Text Online, January 19, 2017, https://socialtextjournal.org/big-man/. 102. Berlant. 103. Sloterdijk, “Cynicism,” 206. 104. Peter Hessler: “In Grand Junction, I learned to suspend any customary assumptions regarding political identity. I encountered countless strong working women, some of whom believed in abortion rights, who had voted for Trump. Cultural cues could be misleading: I interviewed one gentle, hippieish Trump voter who wore his gray hair in a ponytail. An experience like leaving a small town for an Ivy League college, which might lead some people to embrace more liberal ideas, could inspire in others a deeper conservatism.” Peter Hessler, ‘How Trump is Transforming Rural America,’ New Yorker, July 24, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine /2017/07/24/how-trump-is-transforming-rural-america. 105. Dumenco, “How to Understand the Trump Brand.” 106. “Passions are cancerous stores for pure practical reason, and most of them are incurable because the sick person does not want to be cured and avoids the dominion of the principle by which alone a cure could be effected.” Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 173. 107. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 182–83.

BEYOND SATIRE the polItICal Comedy of the present and the par adoxes of authorIty

Aaron Schuster the sovereiGnty exPerienCe

Although first published in 1956, against the backdrop of the Algerian War for Independence and, more distantly, the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Jean Genet’s The Balcony is an extraordinarily contemporary play, dealing with such pressing issues as the failure of the revolution, the obscenity of police power, and the fateful chiasmus between images of power and the power of images. Reading it today, one could be forgiven for thinking it was composed with the political struggles and developments of the early twenty-first century in mind. Alain Badiou’s three-year seminar, Images of the Present Time (2001–4), which has as its explicit ambition “the writing of the philosophical comedy of the present,”1 opens with an interpretation of The Balcony, deriving from it a conceptual matrix for thinking the relations between power, images, and the real of revolutionary change. Carl Lavery recalls the original historical context of the play, claiming that “The Balcony addresses what was, arguably, the most pressing political problem facing gauchiste militants and progressive artists in the 1950s and 1960s. What could be done, politically and aesthetically, to provoke a revolutionary consciousness in an age of modernization and spectacle?”2 Kate Millett celebrates Genet’s play as a “scathing

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critique of sexual politics” that skewers the “pathology of virility” as a “paradigm of power,” and demonstrates “the futility of all forms of revolution which preserve intact the basic unit of exploitation and oppression, that between the sexes.”3 Benjamin Bratton, in his proposal “For a Staging of Jean Genet’s The Balcony in 2007,” reimagines the play in light of the war on terror, with a narrator in a rubber Donald Rumsfeld mask talking about the “new security environment” in the wake of 9/11 until he is finally muffled, S/M-style, with a ball gag.4 When I first taught The Balcony at a workshop organized by the American University of Beirut, the resonances with the disappointments and reversals of the Arab Spring were palpable; later, lecturing in the United States, it seemed to almost directly address the rise of Trump. Viewed in the light of the last presidential election, The Balcony is essentially the story of a grotesque reality show whose buffoonish actors, exploiting the right moment, commandeer the actual state. The play’s capacity to resonate with and uncannily capture diverse political struggles and events testifies to its artistic brilliance, and signals that we are dealing with something that must be situated on a structural level: The Balcony is, I would argue, the theater of the theatricality of power or the inherent comedy of power.5 The play takes place almost entirely inside a fancy brothel called the Grand Balcony, otherwise known as a house of illusions (maison d’illusions is a name for a brothel in French). Its patrons come to indulge their perverse fantasies in elaborately staged scenarios, mainly involving authority figures. In the opening scenes, we see clients impersonating a bishop, a judge, and a general (there is also a masochistic scenario involving a beggar— more on him later). All this is played for maximum artificiality, with ridiculously oversize costumes and florid speeches: the bishop berates a prostitute-sinner over whether she really committed the sins she confessed to, then coyly feigns shock at her outrageous behavior; a bare-breasted thief makes the judge lick her boots before admitting to her crime;

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the general rides his stallion-whore through corpse-strewn fields, ordering her to describe the sights of battle. Breaking up this burlesque metatheater of power is the occasional rattle of machine-gun fire, which alerts us to a political crisis: while the johns are playacting masters in the bordello, a revolution is going on outside. This is a cause of consternation for the customers and the brothel’s hostess, Madame Irma, who is counting on her ex-lover George, the Chief of Police, to come and save the day by putting down the rebels. The Chief of Police, meanwhile, seems concerned with only one thing: whether anyone has come to the brothel to play him. He is informed by Irma that sadly, no: despite the great variety of fantasies catered to in the Balcony, no one wants to be the Chief of Police; he doesn’t figure in the “pink handbook” of the brothel’s greatest hits (or, as he puts it, the “nomenclature”). The revolution advances, the state appears on the verge of collapse. Roger the plumber is a leader of one of the cadres, and his lover Chantal, one of Irma’s former prostitutes, is celebrated as an inspiring symbol (or really, sex symbol) of the revolution. The Queen’s Envoy arrives at the brothel, and soon afterward the royal palace is detonated in a thunderous explosion, to which he coolly remarks, “A royal palace is forever blowing up. In fact, that’s exactly what it is: a continuous explosion.”6 We can translate this to mean that order isn’t simply the opposite of chaos but a kind of managed chaos; once one understands this, the disorder created by the revolution appears to be not so much a threat to the status quo as an opportunity for this explosive order to reinvent itself and extend its domination. And that’s precisely what happens. In its moment of dire crisis, the Envoy conceives a cunning plan to save the state: the brothel patrons will present themselves as real figureheads to the public, actually becoming the authorities they were merely pretending to be for their private libidinal kicks. The “Bishop,” the “Judge,” and the “General,” along with Irma in the role of the Queen and the Chief of Police as Hero, parade themselves before the public on

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the balcony of the Balcony. This works: the appearance of order is saved, and the tide of fighting turns in their favor. At this moment, Chantal is shot and killed. Once this public display is over, the brothel then turns into a media headquarters, where a photo session is quickly organized to produce propaganda for the new rulers. Soon afterward, in the most comical episode of the play, the Chief of Police— still upset that no one has come to play him— proposes an emblem for himself: a rubber phallus of exactly his stature, decked out in the national colors. At last, a defeated Roger shows up at the brothel, asking to impersonate the Chief of Police, who is thrilled to finally become immortalized in an Image. But the end of the performance takes a surprising turn: Roger takes out a knife and castrates himself. The Chief of Police feels for his balls, then triumphantly announces that he is still “intact.” Afterward, he departs into his tomb— the scene takes place in a newly constructed “mausoleum studio”— from where he will reign for a reported “two thousand years.” After complaining about the cost of all these extravagances, Irma breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, telling them that the festivities will start again tomorrow, but for now they should all go home, where life is even falser than in her studios. What the brothel is selling might be called “the sovereignty experience,” after Steven Soderbergh’s film The Girlfriend Experience (2009), which remains one of the best films about the global financial crisis of 2008. The anthropologist Nancy Ries wrote a book titled Russian Talk, identifying complaining, or the litany, as the most common form of discourse in Russia during the turbulent perestroika years; likewise, Soderbergh’s film could be regarded as “American Talk,” dissecting how networking and self-promotion serve as the prevalent modes of communication in crisis USA. The movie provides a quasi-ethnographic portrait of neoliberal subjects under duress, fretting about the economy and trying to cut deals in bad times. Among its various characters— a personal trainer boyfriend, a journalist, businessmen, graphic designers— it is Chelsea, the upscale prosti-

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tute, who is the model of a precarious entrepreneur, working to grow her market, improve her logo and website, optimize search engine results, and go more upscale (“upscale beyond,” as one sleazy operator puts it). In Genet’s brothel, one can purchase the experience of “being a master” without being a master, just as with today’s luxury escorts one can enjoy “having a girlfriend” without having a girlfriend. In both cases, sex is not the only or even the main goal but part of a whole fantasmatic scenario: the real object of (sexual) enjoyment is the image or “experience.” Even further, Genet’s house of illusions both anticipates and becomes legible in a new way with the contemporary entrepreneurialism of personal branding (detachable images) and self-appreciation (privatized glory), especially in the socialmediatized domain of politics. What the Chief of Police aspires to become is not so much the leader as the living logo of state, whose brand name is Phallus, an image that will penetrate every corner of the social body— “in the games of children,” “in the wrinkles of old people,” “on the teeth of soldiers,” “in the curves of roads” (92) (Genet didn’t yet know about Twitter).7 In an age marked by turbulence and anxiety, he will be the reflecting pool in which an uncertain people can behold their lost greatness, and, like the mythological Narcissus, drown there— the reign of Chief Dickhead combines narcissistic self-valorization with nihilistic violence. Genet’s outlandish depiction of modern power is even more clear-sighted and disturbing today than when it was first censored by the French state.8 the BishoP: You’re in the best possible position. There’s consternation everywhere, in all families, in all institutions. People have trembled so violently that your image is beginning to make them doubt themselves. the ChieF oF PoliCe: Am I their only hope? the BishoP: Their only hope lies in utter collapse. the ChieF oF PoliCe: In short, I’m like a pool in which they behold themselves? the GenerAl (delighted, with a burst of laughter): And if they lean

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over too far, they fall in and drown. Before long, you’ll be full of drowned bodies! (No one seems to share his merriment.) Oh well . . . they’re not yet at the brink! (Embarrassed) Let’s wait. (A silence.) the ChieF oF PoliCe: So you really think the people had a wild hope? And that in losing all hope they lose everything? And that in losing everything they’ll come and lose themselves in me? (Genet, The Balcony, 85–86)

In these exceedingly theatrical times, what better place to look for critical guidance than the theater? And what better theater than that of Jean Genet, whose theater is “a theater of political theatricality”?9 As a brash real estate dealer once gushed, “The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere. I’ve had fun doing it and will continue to have fun, and I think most people enjoy it.”10 “It seems to me,” remarks Genet in one of his interviews, “that power can never do without theatricality. Never. Sometimes the theatricality is simplified, sometimes it’s modified, but there is always theatricality. Power covers and protects itself by means of theatricality.”11 But how exactly does this work? If the theater protects and masks the workings of power, it can also do so by unmasking it: this is one of The Balcony’s major themes, epitomized by the failure of Roger’s (self-)castration to wound the image of the master, to put an end to the “fun.” Marx, too, was an acute observer of the inherent theatricality of politics, and a striking aspect of The Balcony is how it reverses Marx’s famous formula from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Instead of history as the farcical repetition of what previously possessed tragic dignity, for Genet it is the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy: what begins as a seemingly inconsequential sex charade inside a brothel ends as a deadly serious political tragedy when the troupe of impostors effectively seizes power. The Balcony is a diagnosis of the times (Genet’s own, but perhaps even more so ours) as a farce more tragic than tragedy.

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In what follows, I propose a kind of “view from the bordello.” My aim is to provide an oblique perspective on the present through an extended, and digressive, rereading of The Balcony, putting it into dialogue with different theoretical currents (especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, for which it holds an important place) as well as other pertinent political comedies (mainly films, and one particularly scandalous “report”). How does The Balcony speak to us today, and how can it sharpen our perception of the workings of power? As I’ve already suggested with my brief comments updating the play to reflect such phenomena as the entrepreneurial self, universalized branding, and the experience economy, this return to Genet will serve as an occasion for examining the intersection between politics and economics, the meeting of the authority of the market and the marketing of authority. This meeting can be summed up in the phrase “Sovereignty, Inc.,” and its paradigm is provided by the bordello, a versatile and protean organization that is at once a fantasy factory, a media empire, a political rally, a sexual orgy, a modern church, a glorified tomb, a profitable business, and a theater. To state my central claim more boldly, I believe that Genet’s brothel should be elevated to the same rank as such figures as Bentham’s Panopticon, Kafka’s Trial, or the Network of critics of control society as a provocative model for theorizing power and authority. Charting the shift from its traditional forms to its modern instantiation, Genet’s brothel exposes how the “mysterious brilliance” of sovereignty (in the Bishop’s words) is produced, circulated, and consumed. If contemporary politics seems to have all too literally realized Genet’s vision of the whorehouse-state, there’s one aspect of his theater that is seriously out of step with the present. Contrary to the liberal warning not to normalize Trump— which, in treating him as an ill-tempered child and authoritarian aberration, thereby leaves intact a whole set of assumptions about the proper functioning of capitalist democracy, run by “adults”— the political injunction of Genet’s theater could be stated as not

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to normalize normality. So, how not to normalize normality in these abnormally normal or normally abnormal times? the Four elements oF sovereiGn enJoyment

Let us begin by scrutinizing the brothel’s business. The Balcony sells a particular product: the sovereignty experience. The prostitutes labor to produce this experience through the fabrication of scenarios that are referred to, significantly enough, as the brothel’s “liturgies” (Genet, The Balcony, 47). We are thus dealing with a modern, secularized version of the sacred. These liturgies distill the pure essence of authority; their object, as the Bishop puts it, is “absolute dignity” (79). The absolute (for the brothel) should be understood not in terms of some particularly elevated content— the liturgies are obviously far from being “dignified,” they are full of debasement, depravity, abuse, inanity, ridicule, and so on— but rather according to its form. In addition to the sacred character of its erotic services, there is also a philosophical or speculative dimension to the brothel: it effects a kind of phenomenological reduction of power, reducing it to the realm of pure appearances. Absolute dignity refers to an autonomous, free-floating image, an image of power sovereignly detached from the mundane realities of power, the labor of its worldly exercise. A taste of this absolute is what the middleclass clients come to the brothel to enjoy, ideally in peace and quiet, behind the closed doors of Madame Irma’s studios, and protected by the police. One of the unusual qualities of Genet’s writing is its theoretical rigor (Sartre once remarked that “he has the style of Descartes”); consequently, The Balcony could almost be read as a philosophical treatise on the notion of authority. If we interpret the play in this “theoretical” way, its guiding idea would be that authority (symbolic power) thrives off its virtuality, the fact that it must be enacted, fictionalized, performed. The theater is thus not only a means for interrogating how authority works;

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authority is theatrical through and through, the theater is its natural home. The brothel is like a Freudian “other scene,” eine andere Schauplatz (literally, “theater”), with respect to bourgeois society, in which the fantasmatic relation to power is staged and played out: it represents the sociopolitical id. It is also a veritable laboratory of enjoyment, where the structure of fantasy is laid bare and decomposed into its component parts. Alenka Zupančič has underlined the originality of Genet’s approach, which is not moralistic but analytical: “This question, or rather the perspective it introduces, is not obvious; it is Genet’s invention, idea. It is not about denouncing or exposing the fact that the figures of symbolic power enjoy its performance, Genet pursues a much more specific question: what exactly does it mean to enjoy the state of being this or that figure of power?”12 Following its different articulations throughout the play, the essential elements of this enjoyment, or the sovereignty experience, may be described as follows. First, it is detachable. The Chief of Police: “I’ll make my image detach itself from me. I’ll make it penetrate into your studios, force its way in, reflect and multiply itself. Irma, my function weighs me down. Here, it will appear to me in the blazing light of pleasure and death” (Genet, The Balcony, 48). The Bishop: “The majesty, the dignity, that light up my person, do not emanate from the attributions of my function.— No more, good heavens! than from my personal merits.— The majesty, the dignity that light me up come from a more mysterious brilliance: the fact that the bishop precedes me” (12). The object of enjoyment is the detachability of the office (or, more precisely, the image of the office), in a double sense: first from the function that it serves, and second from the flesh-and-blood person who happens to occupy it. The majesty of the Bishop, for example, has nothing to do with the empirical qualities of the person who holds the position, nor is it grounded in the actions and duties that define the bishop’s function. It belongs to the office as such. The office ontologically precedes the person who occupies it, and is logi-

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cally detachable from his or her real existence. In a word, what the brothel clients delight in, and what their baroque charades bear witness to, is the autonomy of the symbolic order. They are interested not in power per se (i.e., in really wielding it over others) but in all the fetishistic details and signifiers that surround power and mark out its social presence: special articles of clothing, official props, decorations, ritual forms of behavior and speech, insignias, medals, and so on. Thus, the Bishop fawns over “my beautiful gilded hat . . . you, my handsome ornaments, copes, laces” (7). Carmen, one of the prostitutes and Irma’s main assistant, sums up this ecstasy of detachability with a funny image: “Without the thighs it contained, a pair of pants on a chair is beautiful” (49). This reversal is key: it’s not that the costume magnifies or enhances a person’s image; rather, it’s the person who serves as the support for the glorious costume. Here, however, we should note a crucial difference: whereas the Bishop, the Judge, and the General step into already given roles (“the bishop precedes me”), the Chief of Police is an upstart, an innovator. He does not embody an already established image (symbolic office), but strives to make his image “detach itself ” from his person: his rise will entail a mutation in the symbolic order.13 Second, it is immobile. The Envoy speaks of “a quest of immobility” (Genet, The Balcony, 61), and the Bishop declares, “A solemn stiffness! Final immobility” (13). Immobility is opposed to action; to use Sartre’s terminology, it is on the side of being rather than doing.14 The brothel-goers’ erections are made for show; their enjoyment is essentially contemplative. This is demonstrated a contrario when, compelled to actually assume the roles they were merely playing in the brothel, the Bishop complains that their pleasure is not magnified but spoiled: “Our ornamental purity, our luxurious and barren— and sublime— appearance has been eaten away. . . . You hurt us by dragging us into the light. . . . We— magistrate, soldier, prelate— we’re going to act in such a way as to impoverish our ornaments

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unceasingly! We’re going to render them useful!” (Genet, The Balcony, 80). Usefulness is precisely what the brothel patrons don’t want: serving a purpose means entering the profane world of toil, the instrumental universe of ends and means. It is the Chief of Police who is “in motion” and “loaded with actions” (84): his being is defined by his doing, that is, killing. Therefore, he can’t enjoy, at least not until he’s transformed into an image by which he can contemplate himself. In fact, the Bishop distinguishes between two pleasures: the “bitter delight of responsibility” (80), the mixed pleasure that comes from really exercising power, and the pure pleasure of sterile appearances, whose object is “absolute dignity” (79). Even though the Bishop admits that they are starting to like their newfound executive positions, it’s a different kind of pleasure, not as sweet, sullied by effort, strain, difficulty, pain. In the end, it’s the Chief of Police who will gain access to the immobile pleasure whose loss the Bishop laments. Throughout the course of the play, the Bishop, the Judge, and the General are on an opposite trajectory to that of the Chief of Police: while the former are simulations that end up becoming real agents of power, the latter starts off as an uninspiring practitioner of state violence and is finally elevated to the level of a glamorous “dead” image. (To refer again to Trump: the same anxiety expressed by the Bishop was noted on the face of Donald Trump during his inauguration, as if assuming the duties of the presidency spoiled his purely immobile enjoyment of playacting the role. And the question at the time was whether the weight of the office would neuroticize Trump, making him worry about his being up to his symbolic mandate and take seriously the responsibilities of power— such was Obama’s hope: “This office has a way of waking you up”15— or whether he would turn the office into a vehicle of perverse enjoyment.) Third, the sovereignty experience is solitary. The Bishop: “I wish to be bishop in solitude, for appearance alone” (Genet, The Balcony, 12). The General: “I want to be a general in solitude. Not even for myself, but for my image, and my image for its image,

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and so on” (27). The brothel is a hall of infinite mirrors, where the self encounters only its own glorified reflection. And yet, is it not the case that the clients’ enjoyment is mediated by and dependent on the participation of others, that it entails a whole intersubjective scenario? What would the Bishop be without the sinner to pardon, the Judge without the criminal to condemn, and the General without his horse to ride and whip? Not to mention the panoptic surveillance system by which Irma keeps tabs on the proceedings, as if it were all put on before a third person, the gaze of the big Other (in this sense, Genet’s brothel is not only The Girlfriend Experience but also Sex, Lies, and Videotape). One is never “alone” in fantasy; narcissism involves a complex choreography of social relations and identifications. Identity is always performed for the Other, before whom this identity gains its value and consistency. Genet delights in portraying the perversity of the logic of recognition whereby the master turns out to be the slave of the slave; for example, the Judge who, crawling on all fours, begs the thief to steal, for without her crime he would promptly vanish in a puff of dialectical smoke. “My being a judge is an emanation of your being a thief. You need only refuse— but you’d better not!— need only to refuse to be who you are— what you are, therefore who you are— for me to cease to be . . . to vanish, evaporated. . . . But you won’t refuse, will you? You won’t refuse to be a thief? That would be wicked. It would be criminal” (19). From the invention of the “who you are” of the soul to the complicity of law and transgression, somehow all of Discipline and Punish is contained here. What is striking about the three perverse scenarios that open The Balcony is the way that they tell the truth. They openly display (within the confines of the brothel, that is) the dirty secret of power: the murky complicity of order and disorder, the glorified center and the repressed and despised margins, the “cast” (of characters that make up the brothel’s hallowed nomenclature) and the “outcast” (represented by the beggar who is performed in scene 4). The Bishop needs the sinner, the Judge needs

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the thief, the General needs the bloody chaos of battle. The point of these authorities is not to fight against or prevail over sin, crime, and war but to incite and manage them. What is enjoyed in the brothel’s liturgies is precisely the staging of this truth, to the point of a self-deconstructing reversal: the law admits that it is in the service of transgression, and seeks recognition of this truth from the very outlaw it disciplines and punishes. To this must be added a further twist. Genet’s characters only ever play at the struggle for recognition; his metatheatrics are a simulation of a recognitive space, Hegel on the holodeck. The crucial word is not mediation but solitude. But what solitude is at stake here? If the brothel-goers insist on their solitude, it’s to highlight that their narcissistic gratification is not so much about them (funny as this sounds) as something that’s greater than themselves and that transcends their persons: the Image. Their attitude is one of worship and adoration. The “enjoyment of the image” should be understood in both the subjective and the objective senses of the genitive. It’s not only that images of power serve as the means for the client’s enjoyment, but, in a more profound way, the image itself is the locus of enjoyment. To put this more strongly: it is not I who enjoys, but it— the image— which enjoys in and through me. “I want to be a general in solitude. Not even for myself, but for my image, and my image for its image, and so on.” Through its liturgies, the brothel’s bourgeois clientele ecstatically participate in something greater than themselves: they serve as the support for the detached reign of images which they mimetically conjure. The Balcony thus effects a peculiar synthesis: the consumerist culture of narcissism (where hedonism is the only value and everything is for sale) meets a religious reverence for the Image that precedes and transcends the ego— is this not a precious insight that exceeds the usual critiques of postmodern media society? It’s perhaps only psychoanalysis that allows us to appreciate the libidinal realism of Genet’s strangely depersonalizing prose. To take the clients’ words seriously means that it is not their own

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pleasure that is at stake but rather the enjoyment of the Other. It’s the Bishop, the Judge, and the General who enjoy in and through the clients’ performances, and it’s this impersonal enjoyment that they faithfully serve. One of the funny aspects of the play is that this sovereign enjoyment is constantly being interrupted, thus losing sovereignty over itself. Whether it is by the whores going off script, or the madame demanding payment, or the approaching rebel gunfire, reality keeps breaking in. On the other hand, one can never be sure whether this seeming reality is but another fantasy. Irma offers some interesting reflections about the structure of fantasy and the relationship between fantasy and reality. Every fantasy, she says, is composed of an authentic detail and a false detail; the first ratifies the veracity of the simulation, while the second marks it out as fiction (she gives the example of a nun fantasy: the ring symbolizing the nun’s marriage to Christ is the true detail, while the sexy lingerie beneath her habit is the false one). “They all want everything to be as true as possible. . . . Minus something indefinable, so that it won’t be true” (36). The false detail is the crucial one: it’s what makes appearance appear qua appearance. It functions like the “magic circle,” to use Johan Huizinga’s term, the line which separates the space of play from reality, the virtual from the actual, the sacred from the profane. Now, this applies not only within the brothel but also to the division between the brothel and the world beyond it, that is, the revolution. Does the revolution belong to reality (or, as Badiou puts it, to the “real” of political antagonism), or is it caught in its own fantasy? Does it pose a serious threat to the brothel’s image factory, or is it another of its studios? Is the revolution a game that threatens to spin out of control (this is what Irma fears: “But supposing they let themselves be carried beyond the game. . . . Yes, yes, I know, there’s always the false detail” [50]), or is it nothing but a game, and a poorly played one at that (as the Chief of Police claims)? In Genet’s words: “Do the rebels exist inside the brothel or outside it? The equivocation must be main-

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tained until the end.”16 The Balcony is not a balanced depiction of two opposing forces but a portrayal of the self-enclosure, the solitude, of power. And fourth, the sovereignty experience is fatal. As Carmen succinctly puts it, “The scenarios are all reducible to a major theme . . . Death” (Genet, The Balcony, 87–88). Death is invoked repeatedly throughout the play (indeed, it is practically all its characters ever talk about), from the Bishop’s “vigorous course towards death” (7) and the General’s “descent to the grave” (26) to Carmen’s daughter outside the brothel (“Whether dead or alive, your daughter is dead” [40]) and the Chief of Police’s “blazing light of pleasure and death” (48). Above all, death is marked by the construction of the mausoleum studio, which is presented as a kind of master studio, the studio of studios, the one that contains and sums up the rest. Death as the absolute master— why? Death is arguably the most important theme in all Genet’s work; starting in the mid-1950s, he worked on a magnum opus titled simply “La Mort,” which he never finished but whose fragments were spun off in other writings. Concerning the brothel, it’s not that its patrons are suicidal or have an obscure death wish but just the opposite. Death is the name for immortality, which can be achieved only by becoming a detached, immobile, solitary Image. “CArmen: You want to merge your life with one long funeral, sir. / the ChieF oF PoliCe (aggressively): Is life anything else?” (49). To merge life with a funeral means to memorialize and monumentalize oneself while living, such that this glorious “entombment” is worth more than life itself. Just as Hegel said that “the word is the murder of the thing,” so glory is the murder of the person. If something has changed since Genet’s times, it’s that this monumentalization is no longer the sole provenance of official bodies and state institutions but has become democratized: the technological means exist so that everyone can make of themselves an object of glory, a “blazing light of pleasure and death,” with social media sites serving as individualized mausoleum studios (not to mention new surveillance tools). Instead of

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cutting off the head of the old sovereign, what we witness today is more a generalization, or better, privatization of its form: to each his or her micro-glory. What for the Chief of Police was a personal aspiration now sounds like a social imperative— to make my image detach itself from me— in which life is merged with the labor of its self-promotion, its own funerary glorification.17 enJoy your AlienAtion

Jacques Lacan was one of the first serious readers of The Balcony, and he immediately saw its profundity. Commenting on it in the March 5, 1958, session of his fifth seminar, The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan deems the play to be a great comedy in the Aristophanic tradition, with important lessons about fantasy, enjoyment, and the unveiling of the phallus (he will later come back to Genet’s perspicacious description of the role of the false detail in fantasy— this is the place of the subject, Lacan argues: the subject is signified by a “false” element out of place in the scene).18 Unlike Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis, there is no question here of a psychoanalytic exposé of Genet’s life and career. Instead of applying psychoanalysis to art or interpreting it in a more Freudian vein, it is art that poses a challenge to psychoanalysis, forcing it to revise its schemas and to think anew. Lacan typically turns to artworks when it comes to articulating a theoretical innovation or turning point in his work.19 In the case of The Balcony, what is at stake is the notion of jouissance (enjoyment). This concept, which will increasingly take up Lacan’s attention to the point where he will claim that “jouissance is the substance of everything we speak about in psychoanalysis,”20 is introduced for the first time in a rigorous manner in this session of seminar 5. Though one can find scattered references to it earlier in Lacan’s work— and almost all of these, interestingly enough, in connection with the Hegelian master-slave dialectic— it’s only here that we get a more precise

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definition of the term, a preliminary elaboration of jouissance as a concept, or, as he puts it in the concluding line of the session, a “first taste” (le premier gramme, literally, “the first gram”) of the “essential questions of desire and jouissance.”21 Lacan opens the session by recalling his core thesis regarding the symbolic structure of desire: “What manifests itself in the phenomenon of human desire is its fundamental subduction, not to say subversion, by signifiers.” He then continues, “I am going to show you what . . . is signified by a notion that is always more or less implicated in your handling of the notion of desire, which deserves to be distinguished from it. . . . It’s called jouissance.”22 Jouissance is the “other pole” to desire. How does Lacan characterize this other pole? Although he doesn’t exactly put it this way, we can see in the notion of enjoyment derived from The Balcony the formulation of a Lacanian theory of autoeroticism. This theory is similar to Freud’s, yet has a different starting point: it begins not with the body but with the signifier. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud argues that sexuality first emerges as an accidental byproduct of the body’s functional activities. In the course of the satisfaction of vital needs, there is produced a bonus or surplus pleasure that subsequently breaks free and leads its own life in the body, independent of the circumstances which gave rise to it. Sexuality parasitizes and perverts the body that it leans on, warping its functioning and inducing a new pressure or drivenness. The famous example Freud gives of this is thumb-sucking: in the sating of hunger at the breast, the baby discovers a new pleasure in the stimulation of its lips and tongue, what Freud calls “sensual sucking” (Ludeln or Wonnesaugen), which later manifests itself as an autonomous force in the activity of thumbsucking detached from any need (and then drifts off in a series of other activities). If Freud thinks autoeroticism starting from the body of vital needs, Lacan instead begins with the symbolic order and the symbolic identifications that constitute the subject. The exercise of these functions, necessary for the preserva-

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tion of society and the fulfillment of its “needs,” also gives rise to a libidinal by-product, a surplus enjoyment that clings to the symbolic office, independent of the actual discharge of one’s tasks and duties. And this enjoyment also quickly becomes an autonomous affair, the very stuff of fantasy. In Irma’s studios, “we begin to imagine what it is like to enjoy these functions.”23 It is the pure signifiers of power that excite the brothel’s clientele: they revel in the glory, the glamour, the splendor attached to symbolic roles, which they wish to enjoy independently of the work and responsibilities that come with actual power. Glamour or glory is the Lacanian equivalent to Freud’s sensual sucking: there is a polymorphous perversity not only of the body but also of society, which, whatever its explicit purposes and ideals, is revealed to be a giant masturbation machine— such is “the brothel in which we live.”24 It is worthwhile underlining this point: Lacan theorizes jouissance starting from the fantasmatic enjoyment parasitic on social investments and identifications. The symbolic order is not only the set of codes and laws governing a given social space, or the arrangement of various elements in a differential structure, but a masturbation machine, and this masturbatory dimension of the social order is precisely what is revealed by The Balcony. All the world’s a whorehouse would be Genet’s variation on Shakespeare. Generally speaking, enjoyment is Lacan’s way of theorizing the driving forces of psychic life beyond the standard moral psychology in which human beings seek pleasure and avoid pain. Just as the notion of the unconscious decenters the ego as the seat of subjectivity, so does enjoyment dethrone the rule of the pleasure principle, warping the hedonic regulation of the drives from within. But enjoyment doesn’t simply consist in the disruption of an equilibrium; it is, rather, the positive expression of the lack of such an equilibrium. The psyche has no stable ratio or golden mean to which it tends but is constitutively off balance or out of joint. This is key: rather than being a deviation from a normal or a balanced state, enjoyment consists in the

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positivization of a lack. It is a plus that gives body— thereby constituting the “matter” of bodily existence, in the double sense of “corporeal stuff ” and “what matters”— to a minus. Here we must add something to our Lacanian account of autoeroticism. Enjoyment not only springs from the eroticization of symbolic roles and functions, spinning off in its own direction, but is related to the fundamental instability of the symbolic order, the disorder at the heart of this order. This is what the Envoy divulges with his cool, cynical wisdom: “A royal palace is forever blowing up.” Enjoyment is bound to the “continuous explosion” that is the symbolic order, its intrinsic negativity, its lack of the signifier that would substantially ground it (the usual way of expressing this, in Lacanian terms, is that there is no big Other, or the big Other does not exist). What the Envoy’s avowal tells us is that there’s nothing inherently subversive about this disorder: every order involves a dynamic combination of lack and surplus, deficiency and excess— this double imbalance is what is at stake in the two poles of desire and enjoyment, which refer, respectively, to a hole in the structure that can never be filled and a drifting object without a proper place. Indeed, from the perspective of enjoyment, the idea of a balanced, self-regulating system of needs and interests (of the individual, of society) is itself a fiction, a secondary construction. Instead of enjoyment spinning off from a more basic stratum of needs, it is so-called needs and interests that serve as a means for trying to contain the excess of enjoyment. Let us look more closely at how Lacan defines enjoyment, at this relatively early point in his career. When introducing the notion, he says, “We will briefly return to what forms, as such, desire’s deviation or alienation in signifiers, and we will ask what it means, from this perspective, that the human subject is able to take possession of the very conditions imposed upon him in his world, as if these conditions were made for him, and that he manages to be satisfied with them.”25 As it is elaborated throughout Lacan’s work, enjoyment takes on a number of es-

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sential characteristics: it is connected with excess (in Freudian terms, a too much of tension or an underwhelming too little); with death and the death drive (enjoyment is indifferent to life and death, it presses forward without concern for what is good or satisfying for the ego); it is partial (it can’t be integrated into an encompassing framework or Gestalt, it is an antisynthetic instance, a leftover or remainder); it has the aesthetic character of a stain (an anamorphotic blot that can’t be put into proper perspective without the rest of the picture blurring); it is associated with ambivalence (the psyche is driven to disrupt the limits that it elsewhere strives to maintain); it is a surplus (a bonus or an extra, a by-product of other processes); it is parasitic (it slips back in through the very defense mechanisms meant to contain it); it is repetitive (it manifests itself through the insistent return of thoughts, dreams, and behaviors, despite oneself and the suffering they cause); it is impersonal (it enjoys: its agency is not the ego but the id, an anonymous other in the self); it is both impossible and unavoidable (enjoyment is a fulfillment that can never be attained, a gratification forever beyond one’s grasp, yet it also flares up in the most unexpected and unwanted situations, often through wayward or banal details); it has no specific affective valence, although its purest expression is anxiety (unlike pleasure, enjoyment is not a matter of good feelings, but it can combine with different feelings and affective states; anxiety is enjoyment that has come too close and is suffocating); it can be commanded (the superego); it is bound up with the law and transgression, and with the notion of exception (there is no enjoyment that is not mediated by or submitted to the law, but the law also gives rise to the fantasy of a wild enjoyment outside the law, which excites the partial drives); it is a hypothesis or supposition, a matter of fantasy (the Other deprives me of it or smothers me with it or enjoys in my place or at my expense); and it is articulated with sexuality and sexual difference in a complex manner (where the sexes are understood not according to a complementary division but as different logical formulations

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of a fundamental impasse). Yet underlying all these different determinations, I would argue, is this first definition of the meaning of jouissance with Genet, as the other pole to desire— this starting point is never left behind. More specifically, Lacan describes how enjoyment springs from the subject’s alienation in the symbolic order, “desire’s deviation or alienation in signifiers.” After alienation in the symbolic order where “man’s desire is the Other’s desire,” enjoyment entails a kind of return-to-self, an appropriation of the alienated conditions of desire as if they were one’s own (“the human subject is able to take possession of the very conditions imposed upon him” and “manages to be satisfied with them”). Through enjoyment I possess my dispossession, or at least I get off on it. My desire may not be mine, but nevertheless I can find some satisfaction there, in the chain of signifiers that reigns over my divided existence— this jolt of excitement from loss and estrangement is what the concept of jouissance designates. In other words, enjoyment is always the enjoyment of the subject’s alienation, it’s how the subject lives this alienation and makes it its “own”— with the proviso that this “mineness” is not a matter of the ego, it is not about conscious recognition and ownership, but rather the unconscious fantasies and partial drives that inscribe this alienation in the body. Mineness is never really mine, and this inner tension is precisely what makes it so enjoyable. The paradox of identity in psychoanalysis might best be expressed by the formula “my own alienation.” The definition of enjoyment that Lacan advances here involves the spark of satisfaction by which the subject gets hooked into a certain socio-symbolic order, thereby giving to psychic life a precarious yet persistent form.26 CAPitAlism And Authority, PArt 1

The foregoing structural analysis of power and enjoyment can’t be understood outside the historical context in which it is articulated, and in this respect Lucien Goldmann’s intervention

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is crucial. I believe that Goldmann’s 1960 review remains to this day one of the most illuminating interpretations of The Balcony. Goldmann’s provocation is to read the play as a “realist” drama— he makes of Genet a Marxist playwright in the Brechtian mold. According to this sociological interpretation, contained in his review and later reiterated in an essay on Genet’s theater, the play faithfully renders the major historical changes that took place in the West in the first half of the twentieth century, concerning the relationship between political and economic power and the shifting centers of power and prestige (or we could say power and authority, or real power and symbolic power). The Balcony stages the shift from a traditional society ruled by old masters to the new universe of capitalist modernity; or rather, it concerns a transformation in the popular consciousness of power and its social representation. Genet shows what happens to the aura, the glory, the “mysterious brilliance” associated with traditional centers of power with the advent of a world ruled by capital, and how this transformation is consecrated against the backdrop of the revolution’s defeat. This allegory unfolds in three essential moments. The first, taking place in the brothel (scenes 1–3), shows the clients impersonating traditional figures of authority, where they imagine that power still resides: the Bishop, the Judge, and the General (or church, law, and army). Although these are no longer the sole or even the main forms of power in industrial society, they continue to occupy an important place in the social imaginary of power: they have glamour, distinction, prestige. In the second moment, we are shown the people who hold real power despite their not possessing the prestige associated with power: Irma, the brothel’s owner and manager, and George, the Chief of Police (scene 5). Irma and George are incarnations of “technocracy”; they represent the “organization of an enterprise and the power of the State.”27 If the opening scenes portray glory without power, what is shown afterward is power without glory; or, more precisely, while the power of the traditional authori-

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ties is on the wane, the power of the “technicians” is on the rise, though it has not yet penetrated popular consciousness. The third and final moment depicts the restoration of order following the defeat of the revolution (scenes 7–9). This restoration, however, does not simply entail a return to the status quo ante but marks a decisive shift in the social imaginary of power, which is linked to the collapse of revolutionary hopes. What the failed revolution makes apparent is the alliance between police power, in the service of protecting private property, and the bourgeoisie. Expanding on Goldmann’s reading, we could add that the traditional authorities are appropriated by the new regime as knowing impostors, fetishized appearances deprived of their substance; the church, the law, and the army still have their roles to play, but their power is circumscribed by the capitalist-technocratic order. It’s the images of Irma and George that now dominate. As for George: “Even up until 1920, who would have put a Minister of the Interior or a Chief of Police on a par with a Prime Minister, an Archbishop, a top-ranking Magistrate, or General? Conversely, who in the twentieth century is unaware of the absolutely predominant importance of Himmler or Beria in the totalitarian regimes . . . and who is unaware that their importance is tending toward predominance even in non-totalitarian countries?”28 As for Irma: “Almost all contemporary sociologists agree that in modern western society the separation between political and economic power is tending to disappear progressively; without yet being identical, they are tending towards it. And Genet is simply recording this phenomenon when in the newly established order he depicts Irma as having become both Queen and owner of the house of illusions at the same time.”29 A representative of police power and a major business owner, an organizer of state violence and a captain of the illusion industry: these are new glorious faces of power. (Subsequent history, from the postwar economic boom to the 1970s neoliberal consensus to present-day left-wing and right-wing reactions against neoliberalism, has only confirmed

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the alliance between economic and state power, their effective convergence). Genet thus stages the transformation by which the old authorities are displaced by the rise of the bourgeoisie, which then asserts its supremacy under the threat of revolution. Goldmann summarizes: “The theme of The Balcony is how awareness of the importance of the executive function develops in a society which has long been dominated by property-owners but in which people still imagine power to be in the hand of long outdated fixtures: the bishop, the judge, and the general. And Genet is telling us that this awareness is created by the threat of revolution and its subsequent defeat: a fairly accurate reflection of Western European history between 1917 and 1923.”30 Badiou offers a different take on the play’s historical significance, seeing an anachronism rather than the allegory of a shift: “the historical element is somewhat weak.”31 There’s something antiquated about The Balcony’s selection of authority figures and its obsession with costumes and insignia, the outward paraphernalia of power. “Can you get off on the human rights activist’s white shirt or the banker’s attaché case? Democratic rule is the disappearance of costumes. Our world is fiercely inegalitarian, but inequality is no longer in costume. This seems like a trivial point, but it’s in fact very important: costumes are the sign of a regime of collective acceptance of inegalitarian difference. The latter is costumed, represented, emblematized, and is part of accepted social interaction. Having costumed inequalities is not the same as having inequalities without costumes, inequalities that are, so to speak, secularized.”32 In liberal-democratic societies, inequalities are no longer draped in collectively recognized costumes and prescribed insignia; instead, there are inequalities without the ritual trappings of power (politicians dress like businessmen, billionaires wear sneakers). Social disparities aren’t marked in the same old feudalistic way. This doesn’t mean we live in a transparent, nonideological society, freed from mystical ornaments and premodern garb; rather, the very ordinariness and “naturalness” of today’s costumes act as a lure to block the

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politicization of inequalities.33 The Emperor has no clothes— or rather, the Emperor’s clothes are pretty much the same as everyone else’s— but instead of breaking the spell, the relative drabness of power makes it all the more difficult to challenge. Badiou will twist this idea around, arguing that while there are no more costumes today, democracy itself is a kind of costume, or, as he puts it, the speculative phallus of our time. Power masks itself through reference to democratic processes and values. A recent example of this was provided by Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign in Brazil, where he used the slogan “authority without authoritarianism.” This is the slogan of contemporary authoritarianism: a decaffeinated fat-free postfascism, the reassuring hand of authority without the boot stomping in your face, a master who is bold enough to restore order and identitarian greatness yet (supposedly) free of the noxious elements of old-style repressive authoritarianism. In other words, a guiltfree Führer made specially for democratic consumption. There is, however, one candidate for a new kind of costume that appears in the capitalist-democratic era, which I would propose as a “poetical” addition to Goldmann’s realist interpretation and to Badiou’s world of secularized inequalities, and which shows the continuing pertinence of Genet’s baroque aesthetics. Here we can turn to another story of high-class prostitutes, the Soviet blockbuster Interdevochka (Intergirl [1989]; dir. Pyotr Todorovsky), based on the eponymous novel by Vladimir Kunin and released shortly before the collapse of the USSR and the ensuing capitalist revolution. It was the first film about prostitution in the Soviet Union. Under communism, prostitution was not illegal because, officially, it did not exist. Possessing foreign money, however, was a crime, and the film deals with the fortunes of “hard currency hookers,” prostitutes who catered to foreign clients and were paid in “valuta,” foreign cash. Consequently, the truly pornographic dimension of the film is not sex (there is only one sex scene in the movie, quite brutal and depressing) but economics. The intergirls are the dolled-up shock troops of the

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coming Russian capitalism, effectively replacing the heroic factory workers of old: they are experts in Western luxury goods, traffickers of Western currency, and, crucially from the perspective of the state, they grease the wheels for much-needed foreign business deals (this is why they largely escape prosecution). Though a moralistic tale in which the heroine-prostitute escapes to the West by marrying one of her clients— the film’s Prince Charming is a midlevel Swedish exec— and is ultimately punished for her betrayal of the motherland, the film is really a kind of capitalist pedagogy, with lessons about shopping, different kinds of slang for money and foreign currency, and, most important, brand names. “Vogue, Burda Moda, Nickerman, Quille, Cardin, Nina Ricci. . . . Every suit was a thousand or two. The boots cost six or seven hundred. The cosmetics— Max Factor, Chanel, Christian Dior. . . . This was our trade union. Intergirls. Valuta prostitutes. Hard currency hookers.”34 Capitalism is introduced as a language, an Adamic language of brand names, and these brands become the insignia and emblems of the new political-economic order. Beyond the proliferation of logos for companies and commodities, over the last decades the brand name has developed into a quasi-universal form of naming, from the micro-level of entrepreneurial selves, whose personal names are their brands— it’s no accident that the luxury prostitute in The Girlfriend Experience, played by a porn actress, is the model of a selfpromoting precarious worker— to the macro-level of heads of state and countries themselves. Trump is not exceptional in this regard, but he is emblematic of the general trend; in his earlier formulation of the MAGA slogan the emphasis is tellingly put on the brand: “We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again.”35 If there is a “truth” to Trump (which there is not), it is the coming into selfconsciousness of branding on the stage of world politics: with his mixture of scam, show business, compulsive self-praising, and now superpower status, he is something like the brand in its

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pure and empty form. Seen through the prism of The Balcony, Trump is George and Irma rolled into one, uniting the violence of the state with the illusion industry/entertainment complex/ perverse role-play of the brothel. Here, though, I’d like to raise a more general question, bearing on the brand. If the personal name inserted the subject into a history, a community, and a succession of generations, with all the conflicts and impasses this entails, what kind of symbolic work does the brand name involve? Brand names and personal names are more similar than one might think.36 A key difference, though, would seem to be the worlds in which they operate: while the personal name interpellates the subject into a familial and social order, the brand name inserts its commodified bearer (person, product, company, country) into the universe of surplus value; it both renders the subject intelligible in terms of the marketplace and acts as a vector for the accumulation of value. But in another sense, the realms of society and economy aren’t really separable. Branding might best be viewed as a new articulation of an old problem: that of how the subject gets inserted into the symbolic order, when this order is determined primarily by the production of surplus value; or, to put it slightly differently, when the surplus enjoyment that is an excessive element of and necessary supplement to any order comes to be coded by and identified with capitalist surplus value.37 In this configuration, a double movement takes place: the excess is economized, but the process of economization turns into a new site of excess. Surplus enjoyment is quantified and rationalized, while the market itself becomes the object of sacralization and glorification, taking on the “mysterious brilliance” associated with older forms of theological and political sovereignty.38 (A Lacanian approach to capitalism could start with the idea that in capitalism the economy, which in earlier cultural formations served to create and maintain a livable relation to “the Thing,” itself occupies the place of the Thing: with its unpredictable crises and fateful shifts, the market acts in a manner not unlike the indifferent and capricious God of old—

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but that would be another story.) This double movement is what is captured in the activity of branding. Brand names are effectively the new vestments of sovereignty. They not only function as marketing tools or provide a kind of cognitive mapping of the capitalist flux— they also reenchant the world of universal equivalence, introducing there an incantatory and sacred dimension of enjoyment. If Genet had written of the brand name as a glorious emblem of postmodernity, a detachable, solitary, and fatal corporate symbol, he might have come up with something like this: She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica. A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child’s restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child’s brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.39

The brand name as a new figure of sovereignty can also be compared with how Lacan conceives the master signifier. He writes, “Getting people to work is even more tiring, if one really has to do it, than working oneself. The master never does it. He gives a sign, the master signifier, and everybody jumps.”40

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What’s interesting here is the kind of causality that Lacan attributes to the master signifier. It’s not efficient causality— that belongs to the exhausting work of the manager, not the master. Does, then, the master signifier act as the final cause (that for the sake of which everyone “jumps”— like Aristotle’s God, who moves without moving) or the formal cause (the master’s word informs whatever one does)? It could also be linked with the occasional cause; instead of directly producing effects, it figures as the occasion for various responses and reactions. The master signifier is evocative, not directive. This returns today with discussions about how the president sets a tone, a framework, an atmosphere, which gives rise to certain actions and effects, even though he isn’t technically responsible for them. The truth of the master signifier is revealed precisely in these indirect effects; ironically, a true master is never fully in charge, the master signifier doesn’t totalize the field it reigns over but proves its efficacy in the interpretations it unleashes and the resonances it creates, the way it energizes a certain space; for example, of misogyny and white nationalism. Now, the brand name works in a similar way: not “give a sign and everybody jumps” but “give a sign and the value jumps.” Today, there is a clear split between work, job, and career: one can work without having a job or career, one can have a job without working or having a career, and— the ultimate goal of self-branding capitalism— one can have a career without having a job or working. We could call this the Warholian theory of the brand name: a detachable signifier that has its own career, to which the person is a mere appendage, generating surplus value wherever and whenever it appears. Beyond sAtire

“To remain in authority requires respect for the person or the office. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”41 Are we so sure about this? When we think of authority, a certain image often

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comes to mind: dignified, reserved, self-confident, serious, somewhat aloof, impervious to argumentation but vulnerable to embarrassment and ridicule, laughter breaking the spell. If this dignified image seems to embody the essence of authority, the characters we are more likely to meet nowadays express some sort of ambivalence or excess with respect to their roles: the liberal boss or parent who wants to be loved and so tries to avoid assuming an authoritative position, disavowing the symbolic framework that structures the relationship (“it’s just you and me”); the technocrat manager who hides his or her power behind a claim to objective knowledge, making decisions in the name of the way things are (“there is no alternative,” “the market speaks through me”); the overpresent, vulgar leader who willfully collapses person and office and whose obscenities are part of his aura, laughter very much included (new democratized versions of L’état c’est moi, “I am the Nation”). These are not distortions of some pure instance of authority— belonging, no doubt, to a more respectable past— but different faces of the thing itself: to think through the problem of authority means to grapple with the meaning of these imbalanced or excessive instances, whether they involve some way of dodging the office or else too closely identifying with it, underassuming or overassuming the mantle of the big Other (we have identified three modes: to pretend as if there were no Other; to make oneself the mouthpiece of the Other; to identify the Other with one’s charismatic persona). How do symbolic fictions continue to work, to structure social and political reality, in an era that prides itself with being disabused of fictions, of knowingly seeing through them or else proclaiming mastery over them? This is especially tricky with regard to laughter, that supposedly antiauthoritarian weapon par excellence which seems to have traitorously switched sides, bolstering “respect” for clownish figures rather than undermining it. If branding is the mode by which authority “markets” or “promotes” itself today, another key factor involves the relation to laughter, the comedy internal to power’s allure.

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The political unconscious is structured like a bordello: let us begin by looking more closely at how Genet analyzes the construction of fantasy in The Balcony, particularly the logic of political fantasy. The crucial scene is the climactic one, where the disgraced revolutionary Roger comes to the brothel to impersonate the Chief of Police, and at the height of his performance castrates himself. This is also the most convoluted scene of the play, full of complexities and ambiguities. The first question is, Who is being struck at, Roger himself, in an act of masochistic penance for the revolution’s defeat, or Roger-as-Chief-of-Police, in a last defiant revolt against the master’s phallic authority? And who is doing the striking— is it Roger-as-Chief attacking Roger, or Roger attacking himself, or Roger-as-Chief attacking himself, or Roger attacking Roger-as-Chief? Or perhaps the whole “whirligig” (Sartre’s word) of combinations: this uncertainty is essential for the play-within-a-play, for the “mousetrap” which Roger sets for his adversary but in which he himself gets ensnared. In this scene, Genet sends up the masochism of the Left, its self-flagellation for historical losses and melancholic attachment to failure; at the same time, he stages the new master’s rise to power, which depends on his entrance into the brothel’s perverse fantasy space. So again, we must ask whose fantasy is being performed: is it Roger’s or the Chief of Police’s? It’s as if there were a mutual interlocking of fantasies, a “merging of destinies.” The Chief of Police wants to join the brothel’s liturgy but is excluded, since no customers desire to play him; the revolutionary leader Roger, on the other hand, wants to absent himself from the logic of the brothel, to fight against and destroy its glamorous imagery, but he ends up exactly there, center stage in the Mausoleum Studio. It is at the point where these two opposing trajectories intersect (left-wing failure and right-wing buffoonery) that fantasy is situated. If we consider the scene from the angle of the Chief of Police, this is his moment of triumph. “Gentlemen, I belong to the Nomenclature!” he proudly announces when Roger enters the

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brothel asking to impersonate him (Genet, The Balcony, 86). This becoming-simulacrum constitutes a veritable transubstantiation: it marks his passage from an undistinguished agent of state violence, operating in the shadows (the “last resort of power,”42 as Lacan calls him, the muscle behind the law’s majesty), to a publicly acclaimed “hero,” someone with symbolic authority, whose “name will act in my place,” as he himself puts it— in other words, a master signifier, an incarnation of the big Other (Genet, The Balcony, 53). He moves from being the “last resort” to the “first instance” of power. The irony is that it’s only when the Chief of Police becomes a caricature of himself that he ascends to the level of symbolic authority. In a funny reversal of Platonism, one could say that the fact of his being copied makes him into a Form, the phallic Form of his dreams. In order to grasp what is at stake here, we should refer to an earlier comedy of power, one of the greatest of all Hollywood comedies, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be. Released in the thick of war in 1942, Lubitsch’s film concerns a troupe of (hammy and egotistical yet endearing) actors in occupied Poland who are forced to play Nazis in order to thwart the treachery of a certain Prof. Siletsky, save one of their own, and eventually make their escape to London. Lubitsch’s film, like Genet’s play, is a masterpiece of metatheater. One of its lessons is that Nazis, in all their cruelty and evil, are not just directly or immediately Nazis but also play at being themselves; to speak like Judith Butler, fascist identity has a performative character. This is exemplified by the relationship between the self-proclaimed “great Polish actor” Joseph Tura (played by Jack Benny) and the Gestapo officer Colonel Ehrhardt, known by his moniker “Concentration Camp” Ehrhardt. To foil a plot against the Polish resistance, the actors set up a counterfeit Nazi headquarters in their theater and Tura impersonates Ehrhardt. Having never met the colonel, Tura improvises. Hamming up the role, and running out of things to say, his Ehrhardt repeats the phrase “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?” Later in the film, when we encounter

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the real Ehrhardt, we discover that the man corresponds exactly to his imitation, down to the pompous catchphrase “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?” (Tura, now impersonating Prof. Siletsky, slyly tells the colonel that he thought he would say that.) This is one of the great jokes of the film: Tura’s imitation effectively undermines the authenticity of the original, making Colonel Ehrhardt appear, uncannily, as a copy of himself. And this brings us back to The Balcony: it is Genet who draws the full consequences of this comic mechanism; however odd it may sound, he is the true successor to Lubitsch. His Chief of Police follows, as it were, in the goose steps of Concentration Camp Ehrhardt, but with a self-reflexive twist that makes him an even more comical, and sinister, character. Lubitsch’s punch line is Genet’s starting point. It is as if the Chief of Police already knew that he is a copy of a copy, that his charismatic appeal and subjective status depended on his not being but playing himself— and so he is desperately in need of a Jack Benny character who would perform him and thus denature his being, insinuating a gap that can be dressed up and paraded in a symbolical (phallic) way. If, as Mladen Dolar puts it, the basic formula of Lubitsch’s comedy in To Be or Not to Be is “Double comes first,” then the Chief of Police’s reply would be “Yes, double comes first— so where’s my double?!”43 Whereas when we meet Ehrhardt he has already been impersonated, giving rise to the metaphysical joke of the copy preceding the original, the Chief of Police is still anxiously awaiting the arrival of his double, who would thereby allow the fictionalization of his being. (Irma notes that apart from a policeman, no one wants to play a colonial administrator either: the cop and the colonist, these are the lowest of the low.) The Chief ’s repeated inquiries as to whether anyone has played him are among the funniest moments of the play: the world is falling apart, and all he cares about is charades in a whorehouse! He’s desperately looking for and repeatedly not seeing his reflection in the mirror, the mirror of the brothel (this will be reversed when the Chief of Police becomes the reflecting pool in which

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the people behold themselves). Amid the revolutionary mayhem of machine-gun fire, explosions, and executions, there’s only one thing that matters to him: his own glory. No matter how much power he wields— more than the Bishop, the Judge, the General, the Queen, Chantal Victorious, and even God, as he boasts— he is still slave to the brothel (that is, to the theater), which is the real arbiter of symbolic power. the ChieF oF PoliCe (with rising fury): Are you pulling my leg, Carmen? I’m asking you whether I’m in it? CArmen: Whether you’re in it? irmA (ironically, though we do not know with whom she is ironic): You’re not in it. the ChieF oF PoliCe: Not yet? (To Carmen.) Well, yes or no, is there a simulation . . . CArmen (bewildered): Simulation? the ChieF oF PoliCe: You idiot! Yes! An impersonation of the Chief of Police? (Very heavy silence.) irmA: The time’s not ripe. My dear, your function isn’t noble enough to offer dreamers an image that would console them. Perhaps because it lacks illustrious ancestors? No, my dear fellow. . . . You have to resign yourself to the fact that your image does not yet conform to the liturgies of the brothel. (Genet, The Balcony, 47)

Again, in Genet’s inverted Platonism the Form is dependent on the copy, which alone establishes its transcendence. The dark aspect of this is that while in Lubitsch comedy is what allows fascism to be resisted, in Genet it marks its triumph: it is the fascists who excel at performativity, winning at the comic game of doubles and impersonations; the restoration of the state at the end of the play effectively makes it into an extension of the brothel. This reactionary potential of comedy is already intimated in To Be or Not to Be, which shockingly gives to the Nazis some of the funniest lines, notably Colonel Ehrhardt’s deadpan

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comparison of Tura’s acting skills with the obscenity of the German occupation: “What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland.” This fascist humor, and not the wily charades of the resistance, is what, sadly, rings most true today. The Balcony’s portrait of the Chief of Police shouldn’t be read simply as a satire of a dictator. More disturbingly, it portrays the rise of a leader whose very aura is bound up with his being a fake, a buffoon, an impostor, a satire of himself. The problem of satire is central to the play. The Balcony can be considered a post-satirical comedy or even anti-satirical comedy. Genet is adamant on this point. The comedy of The Balcony begins with the recognition that parody and blasphemy are no longer viable strategies for attacking power, since they have become part of its very fabric and allure. What to do when reality has become its own unsurpassable satire? There have been many variations of this lament in recent times, all of which point to an impasse of political comedy. Terry Gilliam, who might be considered an authority on the matter, states that “not even the Pythons in their 1960s pomp could match the surreal madcap nature of the presidency. . . . The reality is funnier than anything one can do.”44 Echoing the same sentiment is this commentary on a Saturday Night Live parody of Fox News: “But the virulent hatred Fox serves up is difficult to make a joke about: it’s so over-the-top and vile that any comedic exaggeration ends up accidentally being an improvement.”45 Or: “Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel— that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”46 Or again: “Trump is more hilarious, grotesque, dangerous— in a word, more satirical— than his earnest impersonators ever could be. If one wanted to sound grand (mea culpa), one could say that Trump himself is the greatest satirical spectacle we have ever known— he is the Swiftian consummation of modern America.”47 This exasperation is certainly not

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new, or unique to American political culture (probably Italy would win the prize: who can forget the pioneering avant-garde buffoonery of Berlusconi?). Referring to a completely different context, Giorgio Agamben writes of the “master of venomous ridicule,” Karl Kraus: “The punch line with which Kraus, in the posthumous Third Walpurgis Night, justified his silence in the face of the rise of Nazism is well known: ‘On Hitler, nothing comes to my mind.’ This ferocious Witz, where Kraus confesses without indulgence his own limitation, marks also the impotence of satire when faced by the becoming-reality of the indescribable.”48 In contrast to Kraus’s comic silence, Chaplin and Lubitsch did make films about Hitler, and although they are very different they share the same underlying artistic strategy: instead of satirizing Nazism directly, they make use of the figure of the double, they thematize the theatricality and performativity of Hitler himself. The Balcony belongs in the company of To Be or Not to Be and The Great Dictator. Genet starts from this failure of comedy and attempts to do something productive with it: The Balcony is a comedy that aims at subverting the obscene internal comedy of power, and the way it does so is by taking this comedy absolutely seriously. In “How to Perform The Balcony,” Genet writes that “the play should not be performed as if it was a satire on this or that. It is— and must therefore be performed as— the glorification of the Image and the Reflection. Only then will its meaning— whether satirical or not— become apparent.”49 This is key: it is all too easy to interpret The Balcony as a satire of different authority figures, but this misses its more disturbing and subversive dimension. Genet excoriates an early English production for precisely this reason: “In London the director’s sole aim was to abuse the English royal family, the Queen in particular, and to turn the scene between the General and his horse into a satire on war, with a décor of barbed wire. Barbed wire in de luxe brothel!”50 On the contrary, the Balcony has the same solemnity and grandeur as a church. (In Genet’s Querelle, the bordello La Feria is described as a holy

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place: “Every evening he went long stretches out of his way to pass by the vicinity of La Feria— which to him truly seemed like a chapel.” The Balcony and La Feria were loosely modeled on the infamous Madame Petite’s in Barcelona, which Genet visited in the 1930s.)51 To vary the title of his first novel, Genet’s whorehouse could be renamed Our Lady of Ideology, whose bawdy “liturgies” bring together the sexual, the political, the theatrical, the monetary, and the sacred. The play’s comedy consists in a jarring combination of farcicality and solemnity, over-the-top ridiculousness and deadly sincerity, wild burlesque and pious devotion— if done right, the comic effect does not let the spectators off the hook, but uneasily and even unbearably implicates them inside the spectacle. There’s a double problem posed by political comedy. On the one hand, it’s not obvious that satire and mockery really degrade or diminish their target, and they can even strengthen it; they are relatively weak weapons not up to the level of the enemy. Often, even the most skillful impersonation cannot help but fall short of, and inadvertently soften, the outrageousness of the original (which already appears as its own best imitation). On the other hand, the trouble with satire is its tendency to flatter the audience, confirming them in their complacent superiority. This trap was identified long ago by the arch satirist Jonathan Swift: “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”52 This sense of false comfort is why, in the face of great opposition, even from his closest friends, Lubitsch was so insistent on the scandalous joke in the mouth of the Gestapo colonel. A true comedy must cut in all directions, sparing nothing and no one; Lubitsch’s message, in the words of Dolar, is that “Nazis, with all their egomania and stupidity, can actually be just as witty as us, and disturbingly close.”53 Today, the endlessly repeated characterization of Trump as a baby works in this complacent way, signaling that the political elite are the real adults, who patronizingly reassure the public that they are minding the situation— when the

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real question ought to be, Who is an adult today, and how can political maturity be reinvented?54 There’s a deeply conservative bent to this feel-good ridicule, which, in the guise of fearless truth-telling functions to foreclose the necessity of inventing a new politics. Genet’s own solution to the problem of satire consists of three elements: first, he specifies that the production should not be tailored to the local context but remain somewhat abstract; The Balcony is not about any person or institution in particular, hence one can’t pin down the characters or specify the play’s content. It’s about a structure, not a content. And for this reason, the play has an uncanny timeliness: it seems to directly address multiple places and presents, inviting creative updates and reinterpretations, like Badiou’s and Bratton’s recastings of the play in light of the Bush administration’s war on terror, or my own attempt to read the brothel’s sovereignty experience in terms of the brand-name presidency of Donald Trump (one could come up with many more parallels). Yet it’s also untimely, in the sense that it refuses to be absorbed by any particular context, but aims to blow up the context from within. Second, Genet insists on the devout character of the proceedings, so that the laughter of satire doesn’t do away with the more disturbing comic object: “the glorification of the Image and the Reflection.” Perhaps the best way of thinking about the brothel would be to view it as a rightwing drag bar: full of passion and self-deconstructive at the same time. Genet is one of the sharpest observers of the potential of irony, playfulness, parody, and performativity for right-wing politics, and he insists that the circus be taken seriously. It would take an inspired production to get the atmosphere right— one would need to bring together the pathos of transcendence with hedonistic vulgarity, ecstatic adoration and pious devotion with cynical self-awareness and crass manipulation. In order to have its subversive effect, the comedy must be played straight. And third, at the end of the play Irma addresses the audience directly and implicates them in the universe of the brothel. When leaving the theater, she says, they will return not to “reality” but

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to a fictionalized reality supported by their own secret fantasies; whereas the theater, just like the psychoanalytic setting, is a privileged space where the real of these structuring fictions can come to light. The comedy addresses the spectator’s capture within the illusion, from which he or she can no longer enjoy a safe distance. One of the running jokes in the play is that joking is prohibited in the brothel. Irma: “I don’t allow any joking. A giggle, or even a smile, spoils everything. A smile means doubt. The clients want sober ceremonies” (Genet, The Balcony, 30). Or, as Carmen rebukes Arthur: “Mr. Arthur, you’re wearing an outfit that doesn’t allow you to joke. The pimp has a grin, never a smile” (43). For all its clownishness, the brothel is a solemn space, a holy place, a temple of jouissance— and this gravity makes it all the more comical. If jokes aren’t allowed in the brothel, it’s because the whole thing is a joke, and it’s this “whole thing” that is obscured by pinning it to one or another incompetent, corrupt, and/or depraved official (needless to say, such figures are never lacking). But since a comedy can’t be made from abstractions, this all-encompassing framework must be embodied by a particular element inside the play: this is the starring role of the phallus, or rather the Chief of Police’s fantasized man-size national prick costume. The phallus is the “whole thing” summed up and presented as a single element within the action, and the comic spark comes from this sudden collapse of the frame into the picture.55 The real aim of Genet’s comedy is not to satirize a person or an institution or some all-too-human vice but to indict the structure of power in which we (the spectators) are implicated— this is the “explosive” dimension of the play, to which I shall return in the conclusion. FAke theory

Baudelaire once said that “God is the only being who, in order to rule, doesn’t even need to exist” (Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner, n’ait même pas besoin d’exister).56 Doesn’t this

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outdo Nietzsche’s “God is dead” for its sheer paradoxical flair, anticipating Lacan’s “God is unconscious”? Baudelaire’s witticism about the reign of a nonexistent God, or the God who is so mighty he can sovereignly dispense with his own existence, should be generalized. God is not the only being to whom this funny logic applies, but it expresses a basic thesis about the nature of symbolic power. The symbolic order is an order of pretense and fictions that regulates social life without any underlying anchor or ontological ground; indeed, this lack of ground is not a defect but essential to its operation, it is what frees the symbolic order (also simply referred to as the Other) to be a properly autonomous realm with its own consequences. Benjamin Noys formulates this succinctly: “It is not despite its nonexistence, but because of its nonexistence that the Other has material effects.”57 What happens, however, when knowledge of this lack of ground— the news of God’s death— begins to penetrate the symbolic structure itself, when God, as it were, becomes aware of his own nonexistence? It’s not simply that God rules despite (or rather because of) his death, but that everybody knows this, including God. This, in a nutshell, is the story of The Balcony. The state faces an existential crisis, which it surmounts by creating a sham version of itself that proves to be politically effective: the impostors carry the day. These new masters discover that like Baudelaire’s God, they don’t even need to exist in order to rule. Now in a sense, the power of the state was always a sham, a theater, a fiction; the difference is that this fakery is now incorporated into the appearances themselves. This is the key insight of Zupančič’s reading of The Balcony, which I am following here: the power restored at the end of the play is not the same as that which ruled at the beginning but a “castrated” power, a power that has integrated the Other’s nonexistence into its public display, turning the lack itself into a captivating fetish, a new unmasked mask.58 To relate this to Goldmann: it’s not enough to argue that The Balcony allegorizes a shift in the centers of power and prestige; the play also exposes a qualitative

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change in how ideology operates, its shift to a knowing, cynical mode. It was Adorno who, early on, highlighted performativity as a key component of fascist ideology. In a well-known passage from the essay “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” he writes, “Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in the leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance.”59 He goes on to argue that this reflexive awareness, far from weakening the illusion, makes people cling to it all the more: “It is probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own ‘group psychology’ which makes fascist crowds so merciless and unapproachable. If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.”60 The Balcony could be considered an extended artistic elaboration of this fundamental insight that the masses do not directly identify with the leader but participate in the show; they playact their identification or identify with the leader’s performance of himself. It’s not that the brothel clients cease being impostors once they become their fantasies and assume actual positions of power, but that symbolic power is infused with playacting and imposture: acting is now a part of the role, with the split between the actor and the mask internal to the mask itself. Consequently, the public’s consumption of the spectacle is dependent on their being not naïve dupes but in on the act. The Trumpian version of this was neatly articulated by Salena Zito: the press takes Trump literally but not seriously (calling him out on his factual errors and lies while disdaining his popular appeal, the enjoyment he elicits), while his supporters take him seriously but not literally (one could imagine an ironical Adornian rebuke to liberal critics: “with Trump nothing is true except the exaggerations”).61 The difference with respect to Adorno is that today the performative aspect of fascist ideology should be reflexively ap-

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plied to the notion of fascism itself: for the extreme right, fascism often appears as a kind of ironical joke, something that one plays at, or that one approaches through a kind of knowing performance (involving some variant of “authority without authoritarianism”).62 The significance of this redoubled theatricality for contemporary politics has also been signaled by pop culture, in the move from the old Star Wars universe to the Disney one. Kylo Ren is a wannabe dictator, a cartoonish imitation of the original Darth Vader, who doesn’t simply inhabit his role but plays at being it. The logic of this aspirational master is expressed above all in the relation to the mask: Darth Vader needed his mask for life support, but mainly it served as a prop for his charismatic aura; when the mask is torn off the master is destroyed, both physically and symbolically. In this way, he belongs to the same classical theater of power as the Bishop, the Judge, and the General, the so-called nomenclature. For his millennial successor Kylo Ren, on the other hand, the mask has become a self-consciously styled ornament; his mask can be taken on and off, ridiculed, ironized, and smashed without the least effect on his person. The message would seem to be clear: the symbolic fiction is no longer taken seriously, everybody is in on the charade, its gravitas belongs to another era. However, this doesn’t mark so much a decline in symbolic efficiency as a new self-reflexive mode of its functioning, which, if anything, is even more resilient. Ren is a consummate fanboy, and so, in an inverted way, is the Chief of Police, who anxiously seeks fans in the brothel, the fans he needs in order to become the celebrity idol of his own political reality show. Ren’s fan behavior is metanostalgic; it’s where the Disney series knowingly reflects its own Star Wars nostalgia. But it’s also where it puts its finger on something happening to the structure of authority, tellingly indicated by the title of William Connolly’s recent book Aspirational Fascism.63 Isn’t today’s political theater full of Kylo Rens of various stripes, all chasing their own Darth Vaders? That it should be a cop, the Chief of Police, who embodies

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this shift is deeply ironic, since for Genet the cop is the least theatrical figure imaginable. As he writes in The Thief’s Journal, It is commonly said of a judge that he is lofty. In the symbolism of the Byzantine Empire, which copies the heavenly order, Eunuchs are said to represent Angels. Judges owe to their robes an ambiguity which is the sign of orthodox angelism. I have spoken elsewhere of the uneasiness which the idea of those celestial beings causes me. In like manner, judges. Their garments are droll, their behavior comical. . . . You can twit them, but not cops, who have arms to grab criminals and thighs to bestride and dominate powerful motorcycles. I respected the police. They can kill. Not at a distance and by proxy, but with their hands. Their murders, though ordered, derive none the less from a particular, individual will implying, along with its decision, the responsibility of the murderer. The policeman is taught to kill. I like those sinister though smiling machines which are intended for the most difficult act of all: murder.64

Genet’s view of the police is more Benjaminian than Foucauldian: it’s not that the police embody the “visible splendor” of the state, as Foucault argues;65 they are, rather, its “ghostly” underside, operating in the shadows where the distinction between making the law and enforcing the law blurs and breaks down.66 For Genet, the policeman is defined by the immediacy of his physical presence: he wields actual force, he can kill with his own hands. This is why he’s so erotically charged.67 The police are agents of violence, not authority (or in Benjamin’s words, their authority is “ignominious,” tainted, compromised, shameful). When Lacan calls the Chief of Police the “last resort” of power, he makes the same point: he stands for the violence of the law rather than its majesty. And for this reason, one cannot “twit” the police, they aren’t funny in the same way as a judge (or bishop or general). Doesn’t this fly in the face of comedic common sense? Aren’t cops a comic object par excellence, as

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countless films and TV shows would attest (Keystone Kops, buddy cops, police academy, etc.), the cop comedy being “one of the longest running genres in cinema across the 20th century”?68 Nevertheless, Genet has a point. Judges are structurally funny due to the split between the (lowly) person and the (lofty) role, a gap which is dressed up in robes and ritual gestures, and which is eminently mockable. More precisely, it’s not just the distance between the weak and faulty person and the hallowed office that is comical, but the gap itself, the insinuation of a split within being. But the cop is gapless. While the judge is part of a whole chain of legal authority which he sets into motion with his words, the police stand at the end of this chain, where words give way to physical force. If no one wants to impersonate the Chief of Police— a mystery never really explained in the play— we can surmise it is because the brothel customers only impersonate figures who are already theatricalized, already impersonating themselves, and whose power is purely symbolic.69 To put it bluntly, one couldn’t play a cop without at some point ceasing to play and really beating or killing someone. The policeman is not fake enough, which is why he has no place in the house of illusions. Irma mentions the same dilemma with respect to a client who used to come to impersonate a mechanic but then stopped: “What with tightening screws, he’d have ended by constructing a machine. And it might have worked. Back to the factory!” (Genet, The Balcony, 48). Likewise, the policeman is too functional, his work is too real, he is too much “in motion.” The mechanic and the policeman represent productive labor (tightening screws, cracking heads), not, to use Eric Santner’s highly apt term, liturgical labor (which is the specialty of the brothel).70 Inside the house of illusions everything is artifice, one is plunged into a vertiginous universe of plays within plays— except for the Chief of Police, who is a real cop aspiring to be a make-believe one. This is Genet’s poetical-comic reversal: in his universe, make-believe is not a substitute for reality; rather, it is reality

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that dreams of becoming a dream. The Chief of Police’s overbearing demeanor and anxious entreaties to Irma (“I’m asking you whether I’m in it”) present what is effectively a metatheatrical comment on Genet’s metatheater. He desperately wants to join the “whirligig,” the ranks of the rest of Genet’s alienated characters who play at being their roles— as Sartre observed, “In Genet’s plays every character must play the role of a character who plays a role”71 — but he is stuck on the outside looking in. Or is he? This is the height of Genet’s metatheater, his masterstroke: the Chief of Police as a wannabe player is the most theatrical, the most artificial, the most histrionic player of them all. “i CheCked, i’m Fully intACt”

How, then, should we read Roger’s violent gesture, the climactic scene where he castrates himself in the guise of the Chief of Police? Is it a final act of revolt or an admission of total defeat? First, we can observe that the scenario conforms to Irma’s rule of construction: there is the authentic detail in the toupee that Roger wears— the Chief of Police is surprised that Roger knows about his hairpiece (apparently then as now, reactionaries prefer fake hairdos)— and then there is the false detail, which in this case is more than a detail, the knife with which Roger cuts the phallus that is the Chief of Police’s designated emblem. Here is the scene. roGer (disengaging himself): If the brothel exists and if I’ve a right to go there, then I’ve a right to lead the character I’ve chosen to the very limit of his destiny . . . no, of mine . . . of merging his destiny with mine . . . CArmen: Stop shouting, sir. All the studios are occupied. Come along . . . (CARMEN tries to make him leave. She opens a door, then another, then a third, unable to find the right one. ROGER takes out a knife and, with his back to the audience, makes the gesture of castrating himself.) the Queen: On my rugs! On the new carpet! He’s a lunatic!

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CArmen (crying out): Doing that here! (She yells) Madame! Mme Irma! (CARMEN finally manages to drag Roger out.) (THE QUEEN rushes from the room. All the characters— the CHIEF OF POLICE, THE ENVOY, THE JUDGE, THE GENERAL, THE BISHOP— turn and leave the port-holes. THE CHIEF OF POLICE moves forward to the middle of the stage.) the ChieF oF PoliCe: Well played. He thought he had me. (He places his hand on his fly, very visibly feels his balls and, reassured, heaves a sigh.) Mine are here. So which of us is washed up? He or I? Though my image be castrated in every brothel in the world, I remain intact. Intact, gentlemen. (A pause.) That plumber didn’t know how to handle his role, that was all. (Genet, The Balcony, 93–94)

Roger’s dilemma is the same as Hamlet’s: he must strike at something that isn’t there.72 Just as Hamlet needs to slay not Claudius’s physical person but the King in his kingliness— the sublime “second body” of the king, in Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous formulation (more on him later)— so Roger wants to destroy the phallus as the symbol of the Chief of Police’s authority, to dispel that “thing of nothing” that makes the Chief the Chief. Yet he fails. The Chief of Police declares that he is still “intact,” adding, in theater critic mode, that Roger played the scene badly, “that plumber didn’t know how to handle his role.” Roger didn’t manage to plumb the depths, as it were, to “move the infernal regions,” to break out of fantasy. Rather than disturbing the order of things, his act of violence is a pseudoviolence that fully belongs to the house of illusions. What Genet portrays in this scene is the revolution’s complicity with power, its ambivalent attachment to the figure of the master, which was also the subject of his previous play The Maids. Indeed, the climax of The Balcony effectively repeats the final scene of The Maids: this time, instead of the chambermaid Claire drinking from the poisoned teacup while impersonating Madame, it’s

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Roger who castrates himself while playing the Chief of Police. Their fates, however, are quite different. Though The Maids’ ending is ambiguous, Claire’s suicidal deed effectively destroys the image of “Madameness” inside her, it breaks her servile identification, even if only on the point of death (incidentally, also like Hamlet, who strikes Claudius only after he is fatally poisoned). Roger’s act, on the contrary, confirms his defeat, marking his reintegration into the very order he rebelled against (this is how Lacan reads the scene, which jibes with Genet’s comment that “the revolutionary who castrates himself was all those Republicans when they had admitted their defeat”).73 Even more than Roger, it is his lover, Chantal, who illustrates the old joke that revolution means “turning in circles.” In a classically tragic manner, Chantal meets the very destiny that she flees: escaping from the brothel to join the rebels, she is prostituted by her comrades as a (sex) symbol of revolution; and then, after she’s killed, her image is reappropriated by the state to become its new standard. In death, Chantal is returned to the spectacular machinery of Irma’s bordello, and in this way she personifies the fate of many cultural heroes: canonization by the very institutions they fought against and despised. In The Maids, the suicidal act should be understood as a ritual act of expiation, a way of breaking out of the game, of disidentifying with one’s prescribed role (of the slave, the victim, the subordinated, the oppressed); it is a symbolic death that brings about the subject’s rebirth outside the coordinates of the identity mandated by the Other (Claire’s tragedy is that her symbolic death corresponds to her physical demise).74 But something else happens in The Balcony. Roger’s self-castration could be seen as an (aborted) attempt to exorcise the attachment to the master, to strike at the symbol of his authority; but it really ends up being a kind of coronation, though a strangely corrupted one where the master’s symbolic status is confirmed by blasphemy and desecration, indeed, by castration. This confronts us with a Freudian version of the Baude-

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lairean nonexistent ruling God. What does it mean that the Chief of Police is impervious to castration? Or how is it that even if his image is castrated everywhere (in “every brothel in the world”), his power remains unaffected, “intact”? For the Chief of Police, castration— being victimized, wounded, blasphemed, unmasked— is but another mask, and this is what makes him invulnerable. It is not simply that Roger, by castrating himself, admits his defeat and is reintegrated into the old order. Rather, as Zupančič argues, the Chief of Police’s defiant retort bears witness to a change in the logic of this order. If the traditional master was wounded when his image was wounded, the maxim of the new castrated master might be stated as “Let the image be castrated in all possible ways, and meanwhile I can do pretty much whatever I like.”75 In a case of life imitating art, the Chief of Police’s line was uttered by the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson on national television when asked whether Trump had “castrated” him by firing him via Twitter: “I checked, I’m fully intact.” This bad joke, a vulgar protestation of physical potency, tells us something about the structure of the political field: that humiliation, blasphemy, and degradation pervade everything, yet without compromising (indeed, even enhancing) the big Other’s power. The Chief of Police’s boast is not that of a master who is so elevated that he cannot be touched, nothing wounds him, he rises above it all. Rather, it is that of the master who is already castrated and therefore uncastratable— one could say, he rises below all attacks. In addition to Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, there is another historically significant political comedy that The Balcony should be compared to: J. G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” (Mazzarella’s essay in this volume, analyzing enjoyment as a political factor in the rise of Trump, might be similarly retitled.) Like Genet, Ballard exposes the link between sexuality and power, and he, too, searches for a way out of the traps of satire, although with very different literary means. Ballard’s prose is dry, clinical, precise; the text is written in the style of

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a scientific report, mixing faux-experimental data with Freudian jargon to surrealistic effect. “Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic character surrounded the image of the Presidential contender”; “Slow-motion cine-films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children”; “Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was superimposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with ‘Reagan’ proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2 percent of subjects. Axillary, buccal, navel, aural, and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal.”76 Written in 1967, early into Reagan’s governorship of California, Ballard’s piece was extremely prescient in foreseeing his presidency. Pranksters perpetrated a hoax at the 1980 Republican convention, printing Ballard’s text as a pamphlet and distributing it to the delegates. “I’m told,” Ballard writes, “that it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think tank.”77 Genet and Ballard represent two modes of comic sobriety: religious (solemnity) and scientific (objectivity). If the brothel’s perverse fantasies are, for Genet, a matter of liturgical labor, a “glorification of the Image and the Reflection,” for Ballard they are the object of technocratic examination, submitted to polling data, control groups, and experimental psychological technologies in the service of mass manipulation— in a word, political marketing. More than Reagan’s subliminal sex appeal, it is this expert discourse that Ballard’s sexo-political report drily lampoons. And the point is that these should be brought together: marketing, scientific expertise, and economic rationality are put in the service of the bordello’s liturgies as they themselves become new objects of glory.78 Like The Balcony, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” is an intervention into the theatricality of politics and the comedy of

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power. If one speaks of theatricality in the context of American politics, it’s Reagan who immediately leaps to mind: the B cowboy actor who put his stamp on the office of President of the United States by turning it into a Hollywood role— the same redoubling of the symbolic fiction foreseen by Genet. Despite the explicit attacks on him during his campaign and afterward, thereby breaking with conservative orthodoxy’s idealization of “the Gipper,” Trump can be understood as a repetition of Reagan in new historical conditions and in a new media environment, under the rehashed slogan “Make America Great Again”: from movie actor to reality television star, from purveyor of supplyside economics and the dismantling of the welfare state to living brand-name and corporate-logo chief executive, with a similarly sadistic agenda of division, demonization, and racialization as well as a Teflon-like invulnerability to scandal and outrage, nothing sticks to them. A key difference between the two, however, has to do with the place and logic of enjoyment. Ballard could present an eroticized anal Reagan as the obscene underside of his Hollywoodized presidential performance: sex as “subliminal message.” There is a split between the obscene underside and the ideal image, the object of enjoyment and the symbolic fiction, however vacuous and duplicitous that fiction may be— Ballard pointed out how Reagan’s easy manner and TV-salesman presentation masked the cruel content of his political message.79 With Trump, this split collapses. The ob-scene (literally, offstage, unseen) is part of the scene; the brothel exists in the full light of day. Enjoyment occupies center stage; in a way, it is the fiction. Even the most outrageous elements of Ballard’s text now sound weirdly plausible. For example: “The genitalia of the Presidential contender exercised a continuing fascination. A series of imaginary genitalia were constructed using (a) the mouth-parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, (b) a Cadillac rear-exhaust vent, (c) the assembly kit prepuce of President Johnson, (d) a child-victim of sexual assault.”80 Today, such fascination and bizarre sexual imagery belong to the mainstream press (the phallus as a video

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game character?).81 In Badiou’s updating of Genet, George W. Bush becomes the Chief of Police of the US brothel, with the “new world order” as his phallus.82 Yet it’s the Trump era that comes closer to Genet’s original vision: the penis is the phallus. This brings us back to Millet’s feminist reading of The Balcony as a critique of pathological virility.83 The enjoyment of power is no longer a dirty secret but at the very core of politics, but here we should be precise about the logic of phallic enjoyment and its relation to castration. It’s not that the phallus represents potency, virility, masculine domination, and so on, which is then subject to the threat of its possible loss; rather, it’s that this power can be articulated only from the standpoint of its loss: fear and impotence pervade the phallic spectacle. Castration is the inner truth of this power and not, as it imagines, an external menace weighing on the future. This is what the Chief of Police divulges: it’s not despite Roger’s castration that he’s still “intact,” but rather because of it, he rules as already (virtually) castrated. This coincidence of castration and phallic power is why the phallus in Lacanian theory is the ultimate fake, a “phallacy,” to cite Millet. Or, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, “It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity.”84 CAPitAlism And Authority, PArt 2

Could we also read The Balcony as an office comedy? There are three essential elements to the play: erotic farce, political intrigue, and internal troubles relating to the brothel’s management. At this point, I would like to shift gears and look more broadly at the intersection of sovereignty and economy in the current moment, and how authority thrives in its decline and breakdown, profiting from its “crisis.” To make this more concrete, I will examine how different paradoxes of authority have been depicted in recent cinema. The office comedy is a particularly rich vein for analyzing contemporary ideology; indeed, in

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popular culture there are two great sources for thinking about authority (apart from explicitly political shows, which tend to be less interesting): office comedies and medieval fantasy dramas. The truth is that they are the same: the modern office is the site of neofeudalist power struggles and strangely baroque rituals of legitimation.

O F F I C E S P A C E ; O R , I N F I N I T E LY D E M A N D I N G

If one wishes to take the idea of capitalism as religion seriously, one should not hesitate to look for this theological background in the tackiest of places. In a scene from Office Space (1999; dir. Mike Judge), Joanna (played by Jennifer Aniston), a waitress at the chain restaurant Chotchkie’s, is confronted by her manager, Stan, for not wearing enough “flair” on her uniform (buttons and pins that employees use to spruce up their appearance). She is, in fact, wearing the mandated minimum fifteen pieces, but that’s precisely the problem. To do the minimum is almost worse than doing nothing at all. stAn: I need to talk about your flair. JoAnnA: Really? I have 15 buttons on. I, uh, (shows him). stAn: Well, okay, 15 is the minimum, okay? JoAnnA: Okay. stAn: Now, it’s up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum. Well, like Brian, for example, has 37 pieces of flair. And a terrific smile. JoAnnA: Okay. Okay, you want me to wear more? stAn: Look. Joanna. JoAnnA: Yeah? stAn: People can get a cheeseburger anywhere, okay? They come to Chotchkie’s for the atmosphere and the attitude. That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun. JoAnnA: Okay. So, more then? stAn: Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? If you think the

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bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don’t you? JoAnnA: Yeah. Yeah. stAn: Great. Great. That’s all I ask. JoAnnA: Okay.

This awkward, comical exchange can be understood as a clash between two fundamentally incompatible notions of authority; there is a philosophical, or theological, dispute here. Joanna wants to know what to do, how many pieces of flair she should wear; she asks her boss for a clear directive. But this is what the boss refuses to give; even the vague suggestion to “wear more” misses the point. Instead, he appeals to her creativity and free initiative: he wants her to set her own rule, in the name of her “self-expressiveness.” Beyond burgers and fries, this is what the restaurant “sells.” She’s literally required to brand herself, with self-chosen cultural tidbits, so as to become a personalized extension of the restaurant’s brand. And if the boss doesn’t impose a rule on her it’s because, paradoxically, he wants to command her freedom. The boss’s demand is not particular, not an order to do this or that, but it is “infinitely demanding.” And it’s through the generosity of this infinite demand that the subject is captured: Joanna is invited not to mechanically conform to an external order but to engage herself beyond the fulfillment of rules, to “love beyond the limits of the law.” This is the religious backdrop to this banal workplace encounter, which I am overexaggerating in order to clarify the stakes (the point being that this exaggeration is experienced in the phenomenon itself). The lesson is that there is nothing liberating in the boss’s generous stance— the waitress implicitly understands this, which is why she pushes back, trying to get him to articulate a limited demand which she can obey (or not). Ironically, the worker is making a plea for a traditional disciplinary authority that would set clear rules and limits against a postmodern permissive au-

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thority which aims to capture her creativity and spontaneity, or, in antiquated terms, her soul. The boss’s strategy is to instill an internal (superego) pressure, to make her feel guilty for not giving herself, her whole being— “You do want to express yourself, don’t you?” is his seductive entreaty, with the unspoken threat of termination in the background (there is always a “Brian” ready to take one’s place). In these conditions, good oldfashioned alienation would be a relief, since in treating her labor power as a separable commodity it at least leaves her soul intact. On the boss’s side, he benefits by being able to think of himself as a nonauthoritarian, democratic boss: after all, he’s not ordering her to do anything but simply inviting her to actualize her inner potentials, to express her unique personality. Here we have another variant of “authority without authoritarianism,” a seemingly generous and neutered authority that in fact exerts an even greater pressure. The character of Bartleby, from Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” has become a central figure for discussing resistance in contemporary philosophy, with important readings by Deleuze, Agamben, Derrida, Blanchot, Hardt and Negri, Žižek, and others. Office Space presents a comic variation of Bartleby, not as a figure of resistance or refusal but as a corporate success story. The film’s protagonist, Peter, is an unhappy software engineer who spends his workdays dreaming of doing nothing. Prodded into a hypnotherapy session by his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, he is put into a trance state, but before he can be awakened the hypnotist has a heart attack and dies. Left under the hypnotic spell, Peter’s anxieties disappear, and he finally has the courage to do what he truly wants: nothing. This mainly means fishing and drinking beer, and asking the Chotchkie’s waitress out on a date. He still shows up for work, but he arrives late, doesn’t answer phone calls, refuses to do paperwork (dreaded TPS reports), and plays video games in his cubicle. The irony is that Peter’s disengagement is richly rewarded. He functions all the better at the com-

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pany, and even receives a promotion; consultants consider him management material, and comment that if there is a problem with Peter, it’s that he hasn’t been sufficiently motivated. The enigmatic and tragic figure of Bartleby has thus turned into farce, revealing the absurdity of contemporary office life. The postmodern work ethic is a hyperbusyness that is at the same time a managed idleness, full of meaningless meetings, strategic relationships, time-consuming reports and evaluations, and other activities mostly meant to create the appearance of activity. The joke is that if Bartleby appeared today, he’d probably be promoted up the corporate ladder.

T H E B O S S O F I T A L L ; O R , E VA D I N G A U T H O R I T Y

“‘I too am a slave’— these are the new words spoken by the master.”85 Lars Von Trier’s The Boss of It All (Direktøren for det hele, 2007) seems tailor made to illustrate Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis about the transformation of authority in capitalism. In it, the boss of a small Danish IT company, Ravn, fakes being an employee in order to enjoy the camaraderie of his workers and avoid having to exercise power over them. Meanwhile, he manipulates the team behind the scenes through the fiction of a “boss of it all,” an absentee director named Svend who lives in the United States and is responsible for all the difficult, unpopular decisions. The problem of authority is thereby “outsourced,” and this idea of “outsourcing authority,” as Noys nicely put it, can be understood as the capitalist solution to the political theological problem of the “mystical basis of authority.”86 The trouble begins when Ravn decides to sell the company to an Icelandic buyer, who insists on dealing with the boss personally; in order to maintain his subterfuge, Ravn hires an actor to play the part of Svend, and gives him power of attorney to conduct the sale. Things go haywire from there, in a classically comical way: the game Ravn sets into motion gets out of hand and ends up playing a game with him. The actor, Kristoffer, a disciple of

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the avant-garde playwright Gambini (noted author of the chimney sweep’s monologue from A Town without Chimneys), is increasingly reluctant to go along with Ravn’s plot as he discovers what a scoundrel he is: he borrowed money from his employees to start the company, which he never returned; he secretly cheated them out of the rights to the Brooker 5, the firm’s premium product they developed; they will all lose their jobs when the business is sold, with the exception of Ravn himself; he is a cheapskate, refusing to pay for any perks or company outings; and, with his emails under the guise of the boss of it all, he manipulated one of the female employees to sleep with him, and lured another to stay with the company through the promise of a marriage proposal. Ravn is the very image of exploitation, but he can’t identify with this image: “If I wasn’t such a wuss . . . companies need presidents, I didn’t have it in me, I couldn’t see myself as one.” He ruthlessly exploits everyone to his advantage, but clings to the fiction of being a warm human being. In short, Ravn is a sentimental capitalist, an emo boss, happiest when his employees sing him a ridiculous ditty: “Who never lets us down? Ravn. In whose arms do we drown? Ravn’s. Who deserves the crown? Ravn, Ravn, Ravn.” The fiction gets redoubled when the actor playing the boss of it all declares to the group that he’s a mere employee like Ravn and invents the fiction of “the boss of the boss of it all” (who of course lives in the United States). Surprisingly, this gambit works: all go along with the new metafiction, and are relieved to discover that Svend is a good guy after all. Kristoffer thereby gets his revenge on Ravn, even taking the employees out on their much-desired company vacation on orders from “the boss of the boss of it all” (Ravn is furious about the waste of money, and bitterly jealous when the employees sing a similarly ridiculous ode to Svend). The ultimate revenge, however, comes at the end of the film: Kristoffer maneuvers to break Ravn and get him to admit to the whole farce by appealing to his clichéd, sentimental side— which is, ironically, the phoniest fiction in the whole web of fictions.

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When everyone is assembled for the company’s sale, Kristoffer makes an extremely corny elegy to Ravn’s love and generosity, to the employees’ applause. Ravn finally cracks: he tearfully confesses to his deception and promises not to sell the company. But Kristoffer, annoyed at being upstaged, and holding legal authority for the sale, makes a dramatic show of deciding whether to sign the contract. Just as he is about to lay down the pen, a stray remark leads him to discover that the Icelandic businessman is a fellow Gambini fan. In a final twist, the actor ends up signing the contract, and afterward performs Gambini’s chimney sweep’s monologue for the new Icelandic boss. The end of the movie presents a hilarious (and depressing) parody of the invisible hand of the market. The fiction of a hidden master invented by Ravn takes on a life of its own, runs its course, and in the end fulfills the aims of exploitation and enrichment with which it was launched. Except for one thing: Ravn gets what he wants only when he no longer wants it; he’s been psychologically broken and as a result isn’t looking for money anymore, just sentimental redemption from his exploited workers. Everybody at the company ends up getting screwed. So, who finally enjoys these crazy machinations? There’s no Other, there’s even no Other of the Other, only the surrealist artistic master Gambini, whose miraculous last-minute intervention has something of the old gods of fate, a deus ex machina. But here divine fate neatly aligns with the profane interests of business. There does seem to be an Other after all: the invisible hand of the market, which in this case is more of an invisible hand job of the market, “enjoying” at the expense of the various players, who are revealed to be its dupes. Or are they? Remarkably enough, when Ravn finally confesses to being the “boss of it all,” an employee claims to have seen through the ruse all along: “I always knew you were the boss, you’d have to be stupid not to see that.” Here is where Zupančič has made a very interesting connection with The Balcony: both are comedies of autonomously running fictions, in which the reflexive awareness of the fiction’s

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fictionality not only doesn’t impede its efficiency but is an integral part of the charade.87 To vary Baudelaire’s phrase, God is not the only being who, in order to rule, doesn’t even need to exist. The problem Von Trier’s film raises is that of the evasion of authority as a contemporary form of its exercise and even intensification: the boss who pretends not to be the boss, inventing a fictional superior for cover which ends up getting the better of him and yet eventually delivers exactly the desired result— business as (un)usual. I’d now like to consider this phenomenon of evading or dodging authority from a different angle. We find a provocative example of it in the work of Hannah Arendt— not in her canonical essay “What Is Authority?” but rather in “The Crisis of Education”: Modern man could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his refusal to assume, in respect to his children, responsibility for all this. It is as though parents daily said: “In this world even we are not very securely at home; how to move about in it, what to know, what skills to master, are mysteries to us too. You must try to make out as best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you.”88

How should we understand this remarkable prosopopoeia of modern parenting? The first thing that strikes us is the honesty of this little speech: aren’t the parents simply telling the truth? Ultimately, no one is “securely at home” in the world, there is no answer to the mystery of how one ought to live, the perplexities of children are also enigmas for adults. In the end, everyone is alone, with nothing to fall back on except, as Genet would say, his or her “wound”— isn’t this a much better starting point for a philosophical ethics than all the expert nonsense spouted in the name of ethics, and especially applied ethics, today? Authority is the veil thrown over this ontological insecurity, the pretense of intellectual and moral mastery. The world works through a kind

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of collective pretense by which order perpetuates itself; when, from time to time, things break down and this order is exposed as an illusion, we act as if these disruptions were mere accidents and contingent defects, and so the charade is soon restored and everyone gets back to work. Unlike Von Trier’s boss, Arendt’s parents don’t invent a fiction, they tell the truth, they admit that there is no “boss of it all.” So, where is the lie in the parents’ statement? In what does the falsity of their stance consist? The problem resides not on the level of content but in the position of enunciation. The statement “the big Other does not exist” is not a matter of theoretical knowledge, it is not a factual proposition but a statement that concerns one’s subjective engagement; its truth-value depends on how it is integrated and lived. For Arendt, it’s not that the parents are revealing to their children a dangerous truth; rather, they want to wash their hands of the world, to dodge the authority implied in their parental role, where, in spite of themselves, they are thrust into the position of being representatives of the wider world, with its history and traditions, its conflicts and deadlocks, its problems and enigmas. Inventing a fake boss and claiming that there is no boss are equally lies, insofar as they are both strategies to insulate one against the perils of authority, to exempt one from having to take a position in the symbolic order. The parents’ evasion of authority, far from being a lesson in critical pedagogy, leaves the world intact, as it is, and, if anything, makes it even harder to question. The ethical lesson is that the parents should pretend (to know what to do and how the world works), for there is no way out of the problem of authority other than to assume it, in its very fictionality, with all the difficulties and discontents this entails. (Or is there another alternative, beyond either assuming one’s role or else trying to dodge it?) This is also the moral of The Boss of It All: in trying to avoid the position of the boss, and thus save the sentimental lie of his lovable identity, Ravn embroils his workers in an even more stubborn and pernicious fiction. In both cases, the appear-

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ance of weakness and vulnerability— in psychoanalytic terms, the castrated master— is a ruse which, paradoxically, strengthens the existing order.

N I G H T C R AW L E R ; O R , T H E S W E E T P S YC H O S I S O F S U C C E S S

The film Nightcrawler (2014; dir. Dan Gilroy) might be easily mistaken for an exercise in mass-media critique. Its antihero, Lou Bloom, becomes a “stringer,” a freelance reporter filming videos of accidents and crime scenes to sell to local news channels, the gorier the better. Through Bloom’s exploits, we see how TV news is a cutthroat business that has little to do with creating an informed citizenry and everything to do with the ratings game. But a crucial detail suggests that something else is at stake. At the beginning of the film, Bloom steals scrap metal to sell to a construction site, and then pleads with the foreman for a job. After being rejected, he falls into photojournalism by chance, when he happens upon a car crash and talks to a stringer at the scene. It’s clear that Bloom has no particular interest in TV news, and as the film progresses we get the uncanny sense that he has no desire whatsoever. Or rather, he has a single overwhelming desire, which is to excel: he is ferociously self-improving, studying self-help manuals, management literature, anything that can help him get ahead. Corporations and universities often make use of inspirational mottoes like Performance, Excellence, Innovation, which is something of a neoliberal mantra. Bloom is the living embodiment of such an empty slogan: he is abstraction incarnate. He wants to be a “success,” full stop; every concrete encounter or engagement— in work, studies, or human relationships— is instrumentalized in pursuit of this nebulous excellence. Lou Bloom is a combination of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver and Diana Christensen from Network: God’s lonely man as a relentless corporate striver. Instead of being neurotically split between sentimentality and exploitation, Bloom is (psychotically) whole, unified, fully immersed in the big Other of the mar-

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ket: capitalism without the human face. The neurotic capitalist subject is based on the division of being both inside and outside the system, a division which is itself exploited by the system; for Bloom, on the other hand, there is no outside. The movie shows how his psychopathology— he could be diagnosed as a pathological narcissist, a borderline character type, an as-if personality, or a normal psychotic— makes him perfectly adapted to a deranged reality, an ideal specimen of self-maximizing human capital. He lies, he steals, he threatens, he kills, all while ventriloquizing the lingo of deal-making and best practices. Although not a comedy like the previous films, Nightcrawler is a strange sort of tragedy with a comical happy ending, or the caricature of such an ending. Despite adversity, including rival stringers, the police getting wise to his crimes, and an employee who becomes a little too greedy, everything works out for our antihero: Bloom produces the blockbuster of all stringer videos, and the final scene shows him expanding his media business, complete with a fresh logo, and giving a motivational speech to new employees. The key to his subjectivity is best encapsulated by the rhetorical question he poses to his protégé: “What if my problem wasn’t that I don’t understand people but that I don’t like them?” Bloom has a wholly strategic approach to human relationships, deprived of empathy or emotional depth; he “understands” people very well, but at the center there is a void, a lack of real connection, something dead inside. Except that this is not entirely true. The crucial scene in this regard takes place about midway through the film. Bloom has coaxed Nina, the news director of the station he is selling to, to go on a dinner date, with the not-so-subtle threat to peddle his videos elsewhere if she doesn’t agree to the rendezvous— the station’s ratings, and with them Nina’s job, have become dependent on Bloom’s sensational footage, and so she reluctantly consents. At the dinner, he speaks with the same wide-eyed intensity and cold analytic precision of both his career goals and his romantic desire for Nina.

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Bloom: The true price of any item is what someone’s willing to pay. You want something and I want you. ninA: To fuck you. Bloom: And as a friend. ninA: Jesus Christ. Friends don’t pressure friends to fucking sleep with them. Bloom: Actually that’s not true, Nina. Because as I’m sure you know, a friend is a gift you give yourself.

Bloom negotiates the love affair as if it were a business transaction. With merciless lucidity, he dissects their respective positions, then presents their coupling as a maximization of mutual interests. What is interesting is that he not only wishes to have sex with Nina, he wants her companionship too: he is looking not only for physical satisfaction but also for intimacy, closeness, a friend. What Bloom, in his warped mentality, cannot grasp is that the manner by which he pursues an emotional connection destroys its very possibility. He treats a noninstrumental good as if it could be the object of an instrumental exchange without thereby compromising the nature of that good— hence his twisting of a Hallmark-style sentiment into a sinister profession of narcissism: “a friend is a gift you give yourself.” Can intimacy and emotional warmth be commanded or manipulated without extinguishing them in the process? Here we have a variation on the theme of capitalism and sentimentality (The Boss of It All) along with the problem of capturing the “soul,” commanding freedom and spontaneity (Office Space). Now, one could argue that this desire for authentic human contact, even if expressed in a mutilated form, testifies to a glimmer of subjectivity that has not yet been obliterated by instrumental rationality and the drive for excellence; however incoherently, something in Bloom is looking for redemption. I think we should draw a different and more uncanny conclusion. There is talk of tenderness in The Balcony as well— remarkably enough, not only between Roger and Chantal but

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between George and Irma. Indeed, it is the power couple, more than the revolutionary lovers, who express a spark of true affection. Irma explains to George, “It’s a question of tenderness. Neither the wildest concoctions of my clients nor my own fancies nor my constant endeavor to enrich my studios with new themes nor the passing of time nor the gilding and crystals nor bitter cold can dispel the moments when you cuddled in my arms or keep me from remembering them” (Genet, The Balcony, 52). Irma’s words should be taken sincerely— if love does exist outside the brothel, the one sign of it is her nostalgia for the tenderness she once shared with George. But, as George says, “We couldn’t cuddle each other eternally” (52). He sacrificed this tenderness in order to pursue his dream of becoming a power player, a fatal image, which, unlike the fleeting cuddle, never stops dying (meanwhile, he’s supplied Irma with a replacement phallus in the guise of Arthur). Nightcrawler goes a step further: it imagines that tenderness can itself become the object of a transaction, that is, another of the brothel’s simulations. The end of the film intimates that Bloom’s seduction strategy might even have worked: Nina seems genuinely swept away by his pure will to excel. The problem of a future erotics is not simply that of inventing new technical means for sexual satisfaction, as it is sometimes envisioned, but fulfilling the need for warmth and human intimacy in a controlled and efficient manner. Andrei Platonov, already in the 1920s, imagined a utopian (or dystopian) “AntiSexus” masturbation machine that would solve the universal problem of sex by providing reliable ready-to-hand enjoyment; what about an “Anti-Affectus” emotional device that would solve the universal problem of tenderness, marketed with the slogan “a friend you give yourself ”?89 If the coincidence of extreme instrumentality and noninstrumental intimacy and companionship is something like a new erotic horizon, to make the other “cuddle for eternity” would be its weirdly Sadeian fantasy fulfillment.

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From “Guilty!” to “you’re Fired!”

This brings us to one last aspect of The Balcony. We have seen how Genet depicts the restored power as a troupe of impostors (church, law, army), with the Chief of Police as phallus-of-state and Irma as the Queen taking care of the (whore)household, that is, economic, management— not forgetting the Envoy as think tank, the intellectual architect of the new order. But how does Genet portray labor in the play? Though the question has hardly been raised among commentators, The Balcony does provide a striking portrayal of work. It concludes with the Chief of Police triumphantly descending into his tomb for two thousand years, “larger than large, stronger than strong, deader than dead” (Genet, The Balcony, 94). Apart from the prostitutes, the other instance of labor we are presented with— and it is a massive one— is the construction of this mausoleum. “roGer: How many slaves are working on it? / CArmen: The entire people, sir. Half the population during the day and the other half at night. As you have requested, the whole mountain will be burrowed and tunneled” (94). A focal point of the drama is the building of this colossal tomb; and just like the revolution, it plays on the confusion between inside and outside, fantasy and reality: is it another one of Irma’s studios, or a vast construction project mobilizing the whole population?90 The brothel and the mausoleum, the house of illusions and the house of the dead— these are the two great institutions of the state which are in fact one. In the universe of The Balcony, one is either a sex worker or a death worker, which amount to the same fantasy labor (or, to again use Santner’s term, liturgical labor). After the opening scenes with the Bishop, the Judge, and the General, which stage the enjoyment of power and the transgressive fantasies that go along with it, there follows a short, nearly wordless scene with a beggar (scene 4). One of the clients is dressed up as a tramp, his image reflected in three mirrors— a tramp in solitude, as it were, not for himself but for his image

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and his image’s image, and so on. Accompanied by a prostitute clad in leather and fur, he asks her to make sure the lice are in his wig. This is the ultimate luxury transgressive experience: someone comes to perform a character from the lowest social stratum, enjoying a masochistic identification with the leftover, the trash, the outcast— after the “sovereignty experience,” the “tramp experience.” The same character reappears twice toward the end of play: first in scene 8, where he shouts, “Long live the Queen!” when the new authorities appear before the public on the balcony of the Balcony; and then again in scene 9, during Roger’s impersonation of the Chief of Police, where he features in the role of the Slave. This marginal recurring figure has something essential to contribute: what The Balcony stages is a transformation not only in the discourse of the master but also in the logic of voluntary servitude. roGer (playing his role): For you can talk? And what else can you do? the slAve (lying on his belly): First, bow; then, shrink into myself a little more. (He takes Roger’s foot and places it on his own back.) Like this! . . . and even . . . roGer (impatiently): Yes . . . and even? the slAve: Sink into the earth, if it’s possible. ... the slAve: We do all we possibly can to be more and more unworthy of you. roGer: What, for example? the slAve: We try hard just to stand and rot. And, believe me, it’s not always easy. Life tries to prevail. . . . But we stand our ground. We keep shrinking more and more every . . . (Genet, The Balcony, 90–91)

“Day?” Roger asks. Then comes the deflating punch line: “Week,” the Slave replies. However fast the degradation goes, the Slave’s position is portrayed as one of extreme masochism. Genet presents this in mock-heroic fashion— “Life tries to prevail. . . . But

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we stand our ground”— as if the greatness and even the “glory” of the Slave consisted in his struggle to overcome the facticity of nature, the dumb thrust of biological life. Contrary to Hegel’s well-known analysis, it’s not the slave’s cowardly clinging to life that makes him a slave, as opposed to the master’s daring and willingness to risk it all, but his “valiant” antivitalism. Beyond the useful body that toils and produces is another counternatural body of waste and rot, shrinking and sinking into the void. We could call this the slave’s two bodies, in reference to Ernst Kantorowicz’s analysis of “the king’s two bodies,” the title of his famous study of political theology. To the king’s second body of glory corresponds the slave’s second body of infamy, which also has a transcendent character (one of the most arresting portraits of this negative transcendence in modern literature is the conclusion of Kafka’s The Trial, the eternal shame that outlives K.’s murder, which is something like the “mysterious brilliance” of the sovereign in reverse). Kantorowicz’s book was published in 1957, just one year after the first edition of The Balcony, and indeed, these two works belong together, they form the perfect odd couple. The perverse political theology that Genet dramatizes in The Balcony appears as a kind of anticipatory response to The King’s Two Bodies, transposing its reconstruction of medieval legal doctrine into the modern era, where the sexualized power fantasies of the brothel figure as the sacred rites of a new church and a new sovereign glory. Kantorowicz writes of the medieval “germinate” king as the predecessor of the Tudor two-bodies doctrine: “The Christian ruler became the christomimētēs— literally the ‘actor’ or ‘impersonator’ of Christ— who on the terrestrial stage presented the living image of the two-natured God, even with regard to the two unconfused natures.”91 The king’s “imitation of Christ” is the medieval source of the notion of sovereign as actor, taken over by Genet— and accordingly, even though there is no Chief of Police in the Grand Balcony’s pink handbook, “there is a missionary dying on the cross, and Christ in person” (Genet, The

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Balcony, 47). This gives us a better sense of the play’s historical and theological background.92 What, then, makes The Balcony a specifically modern work, despite its fetishistic attachment to “outdated” costumes and insignia? To put it simply, the selfreflexivity of the structure: one no longer acts a role, but acts at acting, for the split between actor and role has become part of the performance itself— a game that the public is also in on, and willingly or enthusiastically plays along with. From this follows the materialist reversal by which the copy precedes the original: it is the imitation in the brothel that constitutes one’s authoritative status, as impersonation is the source of symbolic power— imagine Christ anxiously awaiting the christomimētēs so that he can finally join his Father in heaven. Here, however, I want to focus on not the master but the slave— the other side of sovereign glory, what stands behind the “glorification of the Image and the Reflection.” The Slave’s talk of sinking into the void— what I am calling the slave’s second body— might be taken as a poetic expression of his humility and baseness; however, read today, it’s a strikingly lucid (or, as Goldmann would say, “realistic”) comment on the conditions of labor. To better understand the relationship between the Chief of Police and the Slave, we can borrow Jean Wahl’s terminology for the two sides of transcendence.93 On the one hand is the trans-ascendance of the Chief of Police, made possible by Roger’s imitation of him and beyond that the fantasy labor or liturgical labor of the entire population, mobilized in building the mausoleum: this colossal excess of work is the work of glorification, which transforms the Chief of Police into a master signifier (“my name will act in my place”). On the other hand is the trans-descendance of the Slave, who becomes lower than low and smaller than small and, in his own way, “deader than dead”; he is a kind of waste product to the whole laboring operation. Being waste is comically presented as hard work: “We try hard just to stand and rot.” This is, in the vocabulary of the brothel, the Slave’s function, his structural place, or better, nonplace.

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The bitter joke is that the Slave is ultimately interpellated, not in terms of his productive capacities or exploitable labor power, but in his nothingness, his disposability, as something that is always already eliminated, thrown out of Being. Let us pursue this idea a little further. If Freud and Heidegger theorized a primordial, ontological guilt before having done anything wrong, today one should rather speak of an ontological “You’re fired!” preceding ever being considered useful or employable or ontically having-a-job. If we could but attune to this condition of always already being-fired, which anxiously calls to us throughout the daily hubbub of office life or any kind of salaried, freelance, or uncompensated work, we could arrive at a fundamental interpretation of such phenomena as needing-ajob and the meaning of being-laid-off, in terms of an ontological joblessness and unemployability, a being-toward-termination. Although this is obviously a parody of Heidegger’s philosophical language, a kind of Heidegger avec Trump, there is a serious intention behind it. The point is not to make fun of Heidegger but to expose how reality already is such a Heideggerian caricature. Post-Fordist capitalism effectively does function as a parody of Heideggerian philosophy; it speaks the same radical language, or at least a mangled version it. Here I draw on the work of Paolo Virno and Bertrand Ogilvie, who have shown how contemporary capitalism, emphasizing flexibility, responsibilization (the “resolute” assumption of anxiety and risk), permanent precariousness, the gig economy, continuing education, reinvention, self-branding, entrepreneurialism, and the need to adapt to unpredictable situations, is not so much an alienation of human nature as fashioned in its very image. Or rather, fashioned in its lack of image. Capitalism exploits what “negative philosophical anthropology” has defined as the human being’s fundamental indetermination and historicity, its absence of stable origin or fixed destination, as a new pathway for reification.94 How can we better understand this transformation of the existentialist “Guilty!” into the capitalist “You’re fired!”? For

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Heidegger, ontological guilt is not a matter of moral fault, nor is the call of conscience a cruel superego taunting and punishing Dasein for its failures. Just the opposite: the “nullity” that this guilt designates means that nothing and no one can take over or vouch for Dasein’s being. The burden of one’s existence cannot be “outsourced” to some Other (the “They,” das Man); in Lacanian terms, ontological guilt is the equivalent of the big Other’s nonexistence, the lack in the symbolic order (which is not the lack of something that could be present but a constitutive or nonprivative lack, a lack that belongs to being as such). In the resolute assumption of this primordial guilt lies the possibility of emancipation, of becoming the singular, unexchangeable existence that one is. On the other hand, the capitalist “You’re fired!” puts one entirely at the mercy of the Other: it reveals Dasein as beholden to an Other that has always already rejected it. Yet it does so by aping the ontological terms of Dasein’s emancipation. It is as if das Man were to speak the language of Being and Time, preaching the gospel of “being the basis of a nullity” as a new, perversely “authentic” mode of inauthenticity: Dasein must face the anxiety of its nothingness, of having no substantial worldly support, nothing to hold on to or no social safety net to protect it, and resolutely assume responsibility for its own precarious existence— precisely as the vector for its capture by the biggest big Other of them all, capital. If no one can die in my place, when I’m fired I’m in everybody’s nonplace. Following Zupančič, we can say that the Other appropriates its nonexistence as an integral part of its functioning, making this lack into the ultimate lure which, ironically, dissembles lack itself. Capital aims to capture a responsibilized Dasein in its freedom, creativity, spontaneity, and singularity, while at the same time positioning it as something that is not thrown but thrown out, trashed, entirely exchangeable and eliminable. Genet’s joke about the hard work of being waste— “We try hard just to stand and rot”— takes on a new meaning in this light. This provides a different way of approaching the problem of

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ideology critique. Against a more straightforward understanding of how ideology works, capital tries to convince people not of its value, but rather of their valuelessness— this is the secret of its self-valorization. In an essay titled “Good for Nothing,” Mark Fisher writes about a “deliberately cultivated depression” as the psychic consequence of the politics of responsibilization. “This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state.”95 Beyond how capitalism positively brands itself (the American dream) and the objects with which it dazzles consumers (commodity fetishism, the ever-renewed broken promise of desire’s fulfillment), it is by positioning subjects as waste and then making them feel gratitude for being (provisionally) granted a place that the system maintains its psychic grip.96 “You’re fired!” is the negative interpellation of our times, not so much because it expresses the ultimate power of the boss, but because it sums up the underlying existential message of the system: one is included (or rather, one actively includes oneself) inside the system as something that is thrown out of it. Being eliminated, trashed, or thrown out— the inculcation of nothingness as a means of capture— is the other side of those descriptions of capital that emphasize its frenetic productivity, creative dynamism, proliferating flows, communicative networks, and so on. The formula for Freudo-Marxism today should be: Marx analyzes how work is exploitation, psychoanalysis how one is made to feel grateful for the opportunity of being exploited. our lAdy oF ideoloGy

Like Goldmann, I believe that if The Balcony is worth reading today, it’s precisely because of its realism; but contrary to him, I would argue that it’s realistic not in spite of its poetic imagery and artistic extravagances but because of them. Goldmann al-

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most goes so far as to suggest that we “forget Genet” when we read The Balcony: “In spite of the presence in this play of numerous traditional themes of Genet— the double, the mirror, sexuality, and especially the superiority of the ‘pure and sterile’ dream and, ultimately, death, over a reality that is efficacious but ‘impure and sullied by compromise’— the play as a whole has a ‘realist’ and ‘didactic’ . . . structure that relegates these themes to a secondary, non-essential level.”97 This is a bold move but ultimately a wrongheaded one. Rather than secondary dressing or idiosyncratic obsessions, the themes of the image, solitude, sexuality, and death add something essential to the Marxist sociological story: namely, they explicate the inherent theatricality of politics and, in a Freudian vein, the fantasmatic dimension of power. This is the play’s libidinal realism. And indeed, is not The Balcony most literally true when it is most flamboyantly over the top? The theater is not only an efficient vehicle for teaching a lesson about the changing nature of power and authority under capitalism— namely, the triumph of technocracy against traditional prestigious authorities— but is bound up with the very form of power’s symbolic efficiency. We can approach this question of the relationship between the new technocratic order and old-style theatrical glamour from another angle. In fact, Genet ascribes the inspiring force behind technocracy’s rise not so much to the state as to the revolution. This is spelled out in a passage from scene 7 of the play’s 1960 edition, removed two years later in the final edition. envoy: A revolutionary committee has been created. You do not know much about it, but we, who have eyes everywhere, we can tell you that it is becoming more and more dangerous for you. It is composed of severe technicians. Dressed in black. irmA: Like in Salon 28. e n v o y (interrupting): Not at all. That’s the difference. These gentlemen— and this appears to be completely new— do not play, or rather, they do not know that they are playing: they calculate.

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Their faces are pale and sad. Their words, always exact. They do not cheat or fool around. They have immense power over the people. They want to save them . . .98

This exchange provides a window onto how Genet conceives the revolutionary movement. On the one hand, the rebels turn out to be caught up in the same spectacular, and transactional, logic as the “house of illusions,” with Chantal treated more or less the same by her pimpstress Madame Irma and by her leftist comrades. George reassures Irma that the revolution is a game, and therefore the brothel, representing the law of theater, will prevail. On the other hand, the revolution does present something truly new and “revolutionary”: a power that disdains fantasy, carnival, and theater, that does not play but calculates. Unlike the elaborately costumed figures of the ancien régime, the revolution’s men in black are without costume, like Badiou says; they don’t play, they don’t exult in their emblems, they aren’t part of the brothel’s baroque erotic theater (as Irma at first supposes, placing them in Salon 28). Despite their defeat by the reactionary forces, it is these calculating gentlemen who will eventually triumph. They augur a transformation in modern authority, based on the rule of objective knowledge and bureaucratic administration; Genet here anticipates what Lacan will later articulate as the shift from the discourse of the master to that of the university, in the wake of the failure of May 1968.99 The crucial question is, How does this new expert authority relate to the brothel, understood as the sociopolitical id, the collective repository of fantasies circling around power and transgression, the locus of enjoyment “beyond the pleasure principle”? Far from purifying politics of the old fantasy apparatus, which they take to be their mission, the men in black provide it with a new élan and unprecedented sophistication. The Envoy glimpses this, specifying that it is not that the technicians do not play, but that they “do not know that they are playing”— play, that is, enjoyment, is their blind spot, even though, or rather precisely because, they claim to represent knowledge.

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If the quasi-religious glorification of the Image, represented by the liturgical labor of the brothel-church, is the target of Genet’s comedy, these severe technicians will be the object of Ballard’s. Writing approximately a decade after Genet, with California rather than Spain and Algeria as the backdrop, Ballard’s parody “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” is about not only the seamy side of a politician’s popular appeal but, more profoundly, the making of enjoyment ( jouissance) into an object of scientific examination and technical manipulation, and, we should add, a matter of branding and marketing. These are the sources of “mysterious brilliance” in capitalist society, whose formula could be summed up as the meeting of the authority of the market and the marketing of authority. The Balcony stages the shift in the locus of sovereignty from the traditional centers of the church, law, and army to the ascendancy of the market, supported by the police power of the state— this new configuration is represented by the couple of Irma and George, who reign over a self-consciously hollow impostor state. But there’s another point to be made here. Viewed in the light of contemporary politics, what Genet describes as the division between actor clowns (of the restored state) and severe technicians (of the defeated revolution) is prophetic, for it is the germ of what will develop into the clash between two of the main forms of political authority operative today: the reduction of politics to administration, the rule by economic experts who want to “save the people” (above all from themselves), and the populist revival of political theater in its most burlesque and cynical forms. To refer again to Lacan, I think it’s a mistake to argue that the university discourse has definitively replaced the master discourse as the hegemonic form of social link in modernity; rather, the two exist in a necessarily perilous tension with each other. If the university discourse consists in the ruse of a symbolic order that would no longer be a symbolic order but a sheerly factual one, grounded in objective knowledge and thus vacated of political antagonism, the master discourse can be viewed as the return of the repressed division within this (supposedly)

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neutral administrative space. The leader of competence and calculation, disappearing behind and speaking in the name of the big Other, finds its uncanny counterpart in the overpresent leader whose authority is based on his own will and who openly disdains knowledge— it is this rebellious, antisystemic theater that serves as the point of identification for the people. Now in Freudian theory, the prototype of such a leader is, of course, the primal father; but today it is worth recalling that there is not one but two paradigmatic figures of sovereignty in Freud’s work: the primal father of the horde, the raging beast who dominates his tribe and monopolizes sexual enjoyment, and “his majesty the Baby,” the tyrannical tot possessing an invincible narcissism lost to adults— the primal baby, as it were. These apparently opposite characters belong together: there is something more terrifying about the infant and more ridiculous about the father than we normally think. If the baby is such a fitting incarnation of the master, it is not only in the sense that its (cognitive) incompetence and (emotional) immaturity contradict the cool image of the expert, but also above all in its terrible willfulness, as Kant understood. Genet signals this as well: in the original 1956 edition of The Balcony, one of the key figures in the brothel’s nomenclature is Le Bébé. Carmen even says that the special “theme of the week” is “the baby slapped, spanked, and diapered, who cries and gets rocked.”100 The calculating technicians in black suits and the puffed-up bordello masters, moving in fantasy between the primal father and the primal baby— these disparate characters all belong to same political-symbolic space. Does The Balcony, then, simply leave us at an impasse? How does Genet envision the play’s emancipatory dimension? In the “Avertissement” appended to the play, he defines the artist’s function as follows: It is not the function of the artist or the poet to find a practical solution to the problems of evil. They must resign themselves to being accursed. They may thereby lose their soul, if they have one;

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that doesn’t matter. But the work must be an active explosion, an act to which the public reacts— as it wishes, as it can. If the “good” is to appear in a work of art it does so through the divine aid of the powers of song, whose strength alone is enough to magnify the evil that has been exposed.101

This description of the artist strongly resonates with the position of the psychoanalyst, from having no practical solution (equivocal interpretation) and magnifying evil (treating the painful symptom as the index of subjective truth) to having to resign oneself to being lost or accursed (not being able to fall back on anything— expert knowledge, institutional qualifications, or even a well-adjusted ego— except one’s own “wound”).102 The aim of the theater, according to Genet, is not to instruct but to wound the audience, to provoke a new subjectivation without dictating its terms. The artwork works as an “active explosion,” but, as we noted at the outset of this essay, this is not so much the detonation of a rigid and ossified edifice as an explosion of an explosion, since “a royal palace is forever blowing up.” In a sense, the whole difficulty lies there. What The Balcony offers is an original analytic of power, the paradigm of which is the brothel— understood as a “sovereignty corporation” whose liturgical rites combine the sexual, the political, the theatrical, the monetary, and the sacred. But if the play lends itself to this kind of critical diagnostic, one is eventually led to ask, What lies beyond the whorehouse-state? It might be tempting to define the ultimate political horizon of The Balcony as the state without the brothel, a rational social organization purified of its obscene underside, a new regime minus the perverse fantasmatic investment in authority; in psychoanalytic terms, law without the superego. In fact, this is the gambit of the revolutionary committee; yet its calculating technicians only end up feeding the brothel afresh, providing it with the new articulation. Genet’s wager, on the contrary, could be stated as whether one can have the brothel without the state—

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the dirty bathwater without “his majesty the Baby,” as it were; or, in other words, enjoyment disarticulated from the law, the hierarchies, divisions, and identities enforced by power. This puts us at the edge of the play, the limits of The Balcony. By way of conclusion, I can suggest two points for further exploration. First, turning to Genet’s writings on art, which are contemporaneous with his theater, we find an elaboration of the four elements of sovereign enjoyment along very different lines.103 If there is a positive politics in Genet, it lies not in simply valorizing the opposite qualities of attachment, active engagement, sociability, and life against the brothel’s perverse jouissance of power. Instead, he asks whether there is a kind of detachability, immobility, solitude, and death that is not bound up with hierarchy and authority, another form of “emancipated” sovereignty. This is what he found in Giacometti’s atelier. This involves another kind of enjoyment, leading to a certain thought of egalitarianism and a different form of solitude, now linked with solidarity, all of which would require a study of its own. This brings us to the second point. The overriding political question of The Balcony, as well as the subsequent plays (and already The Maids), is how to break the circle of power. This is Roger’s anxiety and point of (self-castrating) failure, which he states most directly in the play’s first edition: “Instead of changing the world we will only succeed in being the reflection of that which we want to destroy.”104 Without laying out a program or “practical solution,” the provocation of The Balcony is to insist that the condition for any real action is that the revolutionary subject refuse the role foisted on him or her by the brothel’s theater of power, with all the traps and difficulties this entails. The ultimate object of Genet’s theater is this rupture or cut, disidentification as the abyssal counterpart to the whirligig of plays within plays. This is a metapolitical question, in line with the metatheatrical character of Genet’s theater. How to puncture the illusion and shift the framework for thought and action in a world defined by its tremendous theatrical sophistication,

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its self-reflexive illusoriness? How to refuse not only the identity assigned by the Other but the (unconscious) attachment to this identity, the enjoyment of alienation? How can the Other’s nonexistence be mobilized not as a fetish that strengthens the Other’s authority— from capitalism’s derisory “philosophy of nothingness” to the current wave of antisystemic movements in service of the system— but as a critical force that exorcises this authority, opening a space for the appearance of something new? The most radical depiction of this refusal in Genet’s oeuvre is found in the character of Saïd, the accursed protagonist of The Screens, his final play, which can be read as a kind of sequel to The Balcony— this time the revolution succeeds, yet not without producing another discontent, the seeming inevitability of the postcolonial order reproducing the same structure of domination as the colonial regime. There are two vectors at work in Genet’s theater, and each is taken to its extreme: one insists on the closure of the world and the ineluctable circle of power, the other on the explosion that prevents this closure from ever being closed. This unbearable tension is what makes The Balcony such a powerful piece for today. As a political comedy of the present, the solemn lunacy of The Balcony’s metatheater of power is pitched at the right level to match the boldness of contemporary nihilism.

notes

1. Alain Badiou, Images du temps présent 2001–2004 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 32. Badiou later revisited his reading of The Balcony, presenting it as a lecture at the Sorbonne, Paris, in 2013, published as Pornographie du temps présent (Paris: Fayard, 2013). 2. Carl Lavery, The Politics of Jean Genet’s Late Theatre: Spaces of Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 105. 3. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 19, 22, 20.

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4. Benjamin Bratton, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution (Berlin: Sternberg, 2015), 112–13. 5. One of the texts which Genet worked on the most, The Balcony was first published in 1956 by Editions L’Arbalète; two revised versions came out, with the same editor, in 1960 and 1962. There are two structurally different versions of the piece, one with fifteen scenes divided into two acts, the other with nine scenes in one act. On the level of content, the major difference between them involves the depiction of the revolutionaries: Genet adds a number of additional characters (Armand, Henri, Georgette, Luc, Louis, Marc) to fill out the revolutionary ranks, and sets a long scene in their camp. In the final edition Genet has scaled this back, with only Roger and Chantal representing the revolution. Except where otherwise noted, I am using the last official version, translated into English by Bernard Frechtman in 1966. 6. Jean Genet, The Balcony, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1966), 65. Subsequent citations are given in the text. 7. “[The British politician and journalist] Boris Johnson has described Donald Trump as ‘one of the great huge global brands’ and said he was penetrating corners of the world’s consciousness that few other presidents have managed to reach.” Patrick Wintour, “Boris Johnson Hails Donald Trump as ‘Great Huge Global Brand,’” Guardian (US edition), November 9, 2017, https://www.theguardian .com/politics/2017/nov/09/boris-johnson-hails-donald-trump-as -great-huge-global-brand. 8. “Genet sought to have the play produced in France, with Peter Brook directing at the Theatre Antoine. Simone Berriau, the manager of the Theatre Antoine, was informed by the Prefecture de Police in early November 1957 that the authorities would close down the theater if Le Balcon were performed there. Apparently, the thought of a bishop and general frequenting a brothel was too much to bear. Mme. Berriau chose not to risk confrontation with the police and, as a compromise, offered Brook the chance to direct Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Brook not only refused the ‘invitation,’ but also swore that he would never produce another

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play in Paris until the authorities lifted the ban on Le Balcon.” Gene A. Plunka, The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), 192. Eventually, The Balcony received its first staging in Paris in 1960, directed by Brook. 9. Jérôme Neutres, Genet sur les routes du Sud (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 270. 10. Glenn Plaskin, “Interview with Donald Trump,” Playboy, March 1990, 57. 11. Jean Genet, “Interview with Hubert Fichte,” in The Declared Enemy, ed. Albert Dichy and trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 131. 12. Alenka Zupančič, “Power in the Closet (and Its Coming Out),” in Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy, ed. Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 224. My reading of The Balcony owes much to Zupančič’s, and is in close dialogue with it. 13. It is important to note that this does not mean that the Chief of Police becomes master over the symbolic order. The symbolic order retains its absolute priority, meaning that the Chief of Police’s creative addition has the structure of a temporal paradox. He becomes the embodiment of his own image, which will have “preceded” him. Or, to put it differently, once the image has detached itself it immediately assumes an ontological priority, so that the Chief comes to occupy the role that originally sprang from himself. This is the weird alienation effect that stems from the self-made detachable image. 14. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. George Braziller (New York: Signet, 1963), 61–62. 15. Stephen Collinson, “Obama Urges Americans to Give Trump a Chance,” CNN, November 15, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016 /11/14/politics/obama-news-conference-donald-trump-transition /index.html. 16. Jean Genet, “Avertissement,” in The Balcony, trans. Barbara Wright and Terry Hands (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), xii.

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17. Is not the truth of Facebook revealed by the uncanny phenomenon that occurs when a person dies, yet his or her page remains active, even sending out notifications and “memories”? From a Genetian perspective, Facebook involves the funereal memorialization of oneself while living. 18. “I defy you to find this I of desire anywhere else than where Jean Genet points it out in The Balcony. I already spoke to you about Jean Genet— dear Genet— one day when I discussed him at length here. You can easily find the passage where he admirably indicates what call-girls know full well, namely that, whatever the fanciful ideas of men may be who are thirsting to have their fantasies fulfilled, one feature is common to them all: in the enactment, there must be one feature that seems untrue, because otherwise, perhaps, were it to become altogether true, they would no longer know which way is up. The subject would perhaps no longer have any chance of survival. This is the place of the barred signifier, which is necessary in order for us to know that it is merely a signifier. This indication of something inauthentic is the place of the subject qua first person in fantasy.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book VIII, Transference, 1960–1961, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 392. 19. For example: “The Purloined Letter” and the autonomy of symbolic structure; Hamlet and the objet a; Antigone and the ethics of desire; Paul Claudel’s Coûfontaine trilogy and the historicity of the Oedipus complex; The Ambassadors and the gaze as the anamorphotic object of the scopic drive; Las Meninas and the structure of fantasy; Lol V. Stein and the object of love; Finnegans Wake and the new conception of the symptom as “sinthome,” knotting together the orders of the imaginary, symbolic, and real. 20. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–69, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 45. 21. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book V, Formations of the Unconscious, 1957–58, trans. Russell Grigg and ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 252. 22. Lacan, 235–36.

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23. Lacan, 247. 24. Lacan, 248. 25. Lacan, 236. 26. According to the formula articulated just a couple years after seminar 5, “desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance.” Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 699. But shouldn’t we add that jouissance is also a defense against desire? Enjoyment, understood as partial satisfaction, is what renders the subject’s alienation in the symbolic order livable— one’s very own alienation— even though this is not pleasing or fulfilling in any straightforward manner. Enjoyment is an excess that gives bodily form to a symbolic lack. 27. Lucien Goldmann, “Genet’s The Balcony: A Realist Play,” trans. Robert Sayre, Praxis: A Journal of Radical Perspectives on the Arts, no. 4 (1978): 127; originally published as “Une pièce réaliste: Le Balcon de Genet,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 171 (June 1960). 28. Goldmann, 127. 29. Goldmann, 128. 30. Lucien Goldmann, “The Theatre of Genet: A Sociological Study,” TDR 12, no. 2 (Winter 1968): 57. 31. Alain Badiou, Images du temps présent, 22; I am quoting from the unpublished translation by Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer. 32. Badiou, 22. 33. Zupančič, “Power in the Closet (and Its Coming Out),” 229. 34. Vladimir Kunin, Intergirl: A Hard Currency Prostitute, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Bergh, 1991), 8. 35. Alexander Burns, “Donald Trump, Pushing Someone Rich, Offers Himself,” New York Times, June 16, 2015, https://www .nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/politics/donald-trump-runs-for -president-this-time-for-real-he-says.html. 36. My comparison of brand names and proper names has been shaped by William Mazzarella’s essay “On the Im/Propriety of

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Brand Names,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 12 (2015), https://samaj.revues.org/3986. 37. I am suspicious of the notion, advanced by Lacan, of a “homology” between surplus enjoyment and surplus value, which, in my view, risks naturalizing capitalism. I would, rather, speak of a coding or reconfiguration of surplus enjoyment as surplus value, though more research would be necessary here. For this idea of homology see Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI, 45. 38. Eric Santner’s work has long been concerned with this transfer of sovereignty from its royal form to its capitalist incarnation. See in particular The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 39. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985), 148–49. 40. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 174. 41. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 45. 42. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book V, 236. 43. Mladen Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be? No Thanks,” in Lubitsch Can’t Wait: A Theoretical Examination, ed. Ivana Novak, Jela Krečič, and Mladen Dolar (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Slovenian Cinematheque, 2012), 127. 44. Agence France-Presse, “Donald Trump Is Funnier Than Monty Python, Says Terry Gilliam,” Guardian (US edition), March 17, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/17 /donald-trump-is-funnier-than-monty-python-says-terry-gilliam. 45. Matthew Dessem, “Saturday Night Live Takes on Fox News’ Racist Fearmongering with a Cold Open That Is Too Kind by Far,” Slate, November 4, 2018, https://slate.com/culture/2018/11 /saturday-night-live-caravan-cold-open-laura-ingraham-jeanine -pirro-david-clarke.html?via=homepage_taps_top. 46. Stephen Marche, “The Left Has a Post-Truth Problem Too. It’s Called Comedy,” Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2017, http://www

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.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-marche-left-fake-news-problem -comedy-20170106-story.html. Cited in Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2017), 273, where he also discusses the impasse of political comedy with respect to Trump. 47. Michael Roderick, “Is Satire Still Possible in Trumpworld?,” Tank Magazine/Live, October 20, 2018, https://tankmagazine.com /tank/2018/10/vic-berger/. 48. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 77. I thank Adam Kotsko for this reference. 49. Genet, “How to Perform The Balcony,” in The Balcony, trans. Wright and Hands, xiii. 50. Genet, xi. 51. Genet, Querelle, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Grove, 1974), 230. On Madame Petite’s, see Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1993), 103. 52. Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908), lxv. 53. Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be? No Thanks,” 121. 54. I attempted a tongue-in-cheek treatment of the widespread characterization of Trump as a baby, examining the satirical slur in a philosophically rigorous manner with reference to the Kantian theory of the baby, in “Primal Scream; or, Why Do Babies Cry? A Theory of Trump,” e-flux, no. 83 (June 2017), https://www.e-flux .com/journal/83/140999/primal-scream-or-why-do-babies-cry-a -theory-of-trump/. 55. Zupančič writes, “To put it simply: the phallic signifier is a tautological signifier that signifies nothing but that it signifies; it functions as a hidden presupposition (and reference) of the signifying order, guaranteeing its meaning. Comedy plays with this hidden presupposition in different ways, exploring the fundamental function of this presupposition: the linking together of the field of signification and of the field of desire. By making it appear on the stage— ‘in person’ or in some other way— comedy makes this pre-

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supposition a direct protagonist in the very configuration of which it is a presupposition, hence the comic effect.” Zupančič, “Power in the Closet (and Its Coming Out),” 220. 56. Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes. Fusées: Mon coeur mis à nu (Paris: Les Éditions G. Cres et Cie, 1920), 3. 57. Benjamin Noys, “Seriously Funny: Comedy and Authority in The Boss of It All,” forthcoming in The Object of Comedy, ed. Gregor Moder, Jamila Mascat, and Luisa Lorenza Corna (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Zupančič also cites his line in “Power in the Closet (and Its Coming Out),” 232. 58. See Zupančič, “Power in the Closet (and Its Coming Out),” 226–28. 59. Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 136–37. 60. Adorno, 137. 61. Salena Zito, “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally,” Atlantic, September 23, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics /archive/2016/09/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh/501335/. 62. For example: a recent campaign advertisement for Ayelet Shaked, Israeli Minister of Justice under Netanyahu, runs like a parody of a perfume ad, for a fragrance named Fascism. After listing her accomplishments— “judicial activism restrictions,” “governance,” “Supreme Court restraints”— Shaked sprays the perfume and says, “Fascism, smells like democracy to me.” Now on one level, this is a lucid statement of leftist critique: fascism does indeed smell like democracy, since democracy serves as the fig leaf for authoritarian politics. But the ad is intended quite differently: Shaked’s punch line satirizes leftist attacks on herself and her allies as fascist, thus turning fascism into a joke with which she ironically identifies— a message-in-drag to right-wing voters about her ideological bona fides. We have here a sexier, more playful version of “authority without authoritarianism.” 63. See William E. Connolly, Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle

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for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 64. Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1964), 196. 65. “What is splendor? It is both the visible beauty of the order and the brilliant, radiating manifestation of a force. Police therefore is in actual fact the art of the state’s splendor as visible order and manifest force.” Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 314; quoted in Eric Santner, The Weight of All Flesh: On the SubjectMatter of Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 91. 66. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 286–87. 67. Elsewhere, Genet says, “If you’ve read my books, you know my low opinion of the police. . . . The police have never been human, and the day they become human, they’ll no longer be police.” Mohamed Choukri, Jean Genet in Tangier, trans. Paul Bowles (New York: Ecco Press, 1974), 25. But this contempt is also mixed with erotic fascination and praise; for example, reporting on the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Genet wrote that “America has a magnificent, divine, athletic police force . . . high on LSD, rage, and patriotism.” “Appendix I: The Members of the Assembly,” in The Declared Enemy, ed. Albert Dichy and trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 269. 68. See Evan Calder Williams, “Objects of Derision,” New Inquiry, August 13, 2012, https://thenewinquiry.com/objects-of -derision/. 69. The list of scenarios catered by the brothel is quite long and humorous, and underlines the Chief of Police’s exclusion: “There are two kings of France with coronation ceremonies and different rituals, an admiral at the stern of his sinking destroyer, a dey of Algiers surrendering, a fireman putting out a fire, a goat attached to

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a stake, a housewife returning from market, a pickpocket, a robbed man who’s bound and beaten up, a Saint Sebastian, a farmer in his barn . . . but no chief of police . . . nor colonial administrator, though there is a missionary dying on the cross, and Christ in person” (Genet, The Balcony, 47). 70. The notion of liturgical labor becomes even more pertinent when read in the light of The Balcony, where the “liturgies” refer to perverse politico-erotic rites of the brothel-church. Apart from his contribution in this volume, Santner elaborates the concept of liturgical labor in The Weight of All Flesh, 83, 86–87, 115, and passim. 71. Jean-Paul Sartre, introduction to Jean Genet, The Maids and Deathwatch, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1982), 16. 72. “What stays Hamlet’s arm? It’s not fear— he has nothing but contempt for the guy— it’s because he knows that he must strike something other than what’s there.” Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. James Hulbert, Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977): 51. 73. Lacan argues that “the conclusion is completely clear”: the one who is fighting against the brothel in the name of an “authentic,” “fully human” life is “reintegrated” into it “on the condition of being castrated.” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book V, 252. Regarding the historical background of The Balcony, Genet remarks, “My point of departure was situated in Spain, Franco’s Spain, and the revolutionary who castrates himself was all those Republicans when they had admitted their defeat. And then my play continued to grow in its own direction and Spain in another.” Jean Genet, interview with Michel Breitman, “J’ai été victime d’une tentative d’assassinat,” Arts, no. 617 (May 1957). Translated and quoted in White, Genet: A Biography, 414. 74. To grasp what is at stake in The Maids, we can contrast two great readings of the play, those of Jean-Paul Sartre and Leo Bersani. For Sartre, the significance of the play is ontological and ethical. Genet’s metatheater of maids playacting Madame and each another volatilizes the distinction between being and appearance, issuing in a vertiginous universe of masks without persons, appearances

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deprived of reality: “Being has been revealed as non-being and thereupon non-being becomes being.” In ethical terms, “Good is only an illusion; Evil is a Nothingness that arises upon the ruins of the Good.” Sartre, introduction to Genet, The Maids and Deathwatch, 30, 31. For Bersani, on the other hand, the significance of the play is political, but in a very specific sense. It’s not simply about the struggle between oppressed and oppressor, but about how the oppressed can disidentify with her assigned role. In the final murdersuicide, perpetrated by Solange (playing Claire) on Claire (playing Madame), Claire’s identification with the role of the servant is finally broken, though her symbolic death and rebirth are coincident with her real death. “Between oppression now and freedom later there may have to be a radical break with the social itself. . . . The maids’ revolt (and the revolt of all the oppressed?) will be effective only if their subjectivity can no longer be related to as an oppressed subjectivity. Madame may attend Solange’s trial, but she has nonetheless been killed as that difference from the maids that constituted them as maids.” Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 176–77. This would require further study; I can note that another important resource for thinking about this problem of detachment from authority is Richard Sennett’s largely forgotten early book Authority (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). 75. Zupančič, “Power in the Closet (and Its Coming Out),” 231. See also Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of this theme, in Disparities (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 260–61. 76. J. G. Ballard, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” in The Atrocity Exhibition (1967; reprint, San Francisco: RE/Search, 1990), 105–6. 77. Ballard, 106. 78. Mark Fisher distinguishes Ballard’s strategy of simulating simulation from satire in his essay “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 2004–2016, ed. Mark Fisher and Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater Books, 2018), 47–52.

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79. “In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompterperfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan’s manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth.” Ballard, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” 105. 80. Ballard, 106. 81. Ben Mathis-Lilley, “How Will the President Respond to His Penis Being Described as ‘the Mushroom Character From Mario Kart’?,” Slate, September 18, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and -politics/2018/09/trump-toad-penis-stormy-daniels-response -likely-forthcoming.html. 82. Badiou, Images du temps présent, 40. 83. See Millett, Sexual Politics, 19–22, 351–54. 84. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 226. 85. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 292. 86. I draw here from Noys’s very insightful “Seriously Funny.” 87. “The Other who does not exist nevertheless has dramatic consequences for our lives, and if it has such consequences, it is not because we don’t know about its nonexistence or inconsistency, but precisely because we know all about it.” Zupančič, “Power in the Closet (and Its Coming Out),” 233. 88. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Education,” in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 191. 89. See Andrei Platonov, “The Anti-Sexus,” trans. Anne O. Fisher, and my introduction “Sex and Anti-Sex: The Monstrous

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Modern Couple,” Cabinet, no. 51 (Fall 2013): 41–47, 48–53. A new critique of sexuality might be inspired by the theme of the “revolutionary aspects of radical tenderness,” one of the chapter titles in Nikolay Oleynikov’s (with Kirill Medvedev, Keti Chukrov, Oxana Timofeeva, and Grey Violet) Sex of the Oppressed, trans. Jonathan Brooks Platt (Guelph, ON: PS Guelph, 2016). 90. The tomb’s historical model is the fascist Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) in Spain, Franco’s burial site, built in part by enslaved Republican prisoners of war. It remains a fraught and controversial monument. At the time of writing, the Spanish congress has approved the exhumation of Franco’s remains. The dictator’s family wants to rebury him in the family vault in Madrid’s Almudena Cathedral, which the socialist government opposes for fear of its becoming a pilgrimage site for the Far Right; meanwhile, the government is consulting with the Vatican in hopes of finding a solution. In contrast, Genet’s corpse escaped such monumentalization: not wanting to be buried in France, and reappropriated by the French culture he despised, friends arranged his interment in the Spanish cemetery outside the town of Larache, on the Moroccan coast. 91. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, with a new preface by William Chester Jordan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 47. 92. Other key historical antecedents would include Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Pascal’s “Three Discourses on the Condition of the Great,” and Shakespeare’s Richard II. Before the medieval “Christ imitator,” the most illustrious model for an actor-sovereign in the pagan world was the Roman emperor Nero, described by Pliny as an “actor-emperor” (scaenici imperatoris). See Edward Champlin, Nero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), especially chapter 3, “Portrait of the Artist,” 53–84. I thank Damián Fernández for this reference. 93. See Jean Wahl, “Subjectivity and Transcendence,” in Human Existence and Transcendence, trans. William C. Hackett (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016). 94. See Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and

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Human Nature, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext[e], 2015), 204–9; Bertrand Ogilvie, La seconde nature du politique: Essai d’anthropologie négative (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), 161–64. 95. Mark Fisher, “Good for Nothing,” in K-Punk, 749. 96. I draw inspiration here from Dominiek Hoens’s essay “Capital Owes You Nothing: On Pascal’s Wager and the Problem of Pure Love” (unpublished, 2013), where at the end he suggests a new take on capitalism as religion in terms of the heretical Christian doctrine of pure love. “You may be temporarily useful as an employee, salesman, or artist, but that does not change what you are: a superfluous, useless, shrieking body sick with vanity. Between the despair provoked by an Other that is always ready to get rid of you, and the unconditional love one is invited to feel for this Other, there you are, nothing.” 97. Goldmann, “Genet’s The Balcony,” 125. 98. Jean Genet, The Balcony, in Théâtre complet (Paris: Gallimard Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2002), 1169–70. 99. The scandalous 1966 production of Genet’s The Screens, which provoked attacks on the Odéon-Théâtre de France by extreme right-wing elements and counterprotests by the Left, was one of the precursors to May 1968. For the fascinating story of this “battle of The Screens,” see Lavery, The Politics of Jean Genet’s Late Theatre, 168–94. 100. In Genet, Théâtre complet, 385. 101. Genet, “Avertissement,” xiv. 102. Lorenzo Chiesa already pointed out the link between Genet’s artist and the Lacanian analyst in “The First Gram of Jouissance: Lacan on Genet’s The Balcony,” Comparatist 39 (October 2015): 19. 103. I am referring to “The Studio of Alberto Giacometti,” his two essays on Rembrandt, and “The Tightrope Walker.” See Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 104. In Genet, Théâtre complet, 426.