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HOMO SACER AS THE OBJECT OF THE DISCOURSE OF THE UNIVERSITY by Slavoj Zizek

L'envers de la psychanalyse, Seminar XVII (1969-1970) on the four discourses, is Lacan's response to the events of 1968 - its premise is best captured as his reversal of the well-known anti-structuralist graffiti from the Paris walls of 1968 "Structures do not walk on the streets!" - if anything, this Seminar endeavors to demonstrate how structures DO walk on the streets, i.e. how structural shifts CAN account for the social outbursts like that of the 1968. Instead of the one symbolic Order with its set of a priori rules which guarantee social cohesion, we get the matrix of the passages from one to another discourse: Lacan's interest is focused on the passage from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of University as the hegemonic discourse in contemporary society. No wonder that the revolt was located at the universities: as such, it merely signaled the shift to the new forms of domination in which the scientific discourse serves legitimizes the relations of domination. Lacan's underlying premise is sceptic-conservative - Lacan's diagnosis is best captured by his famous retort to the student revolutionaries: "As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!" This passage can also be conceived in more general terms, as the passage from the prerevolutionary ancien regime to the postrevolutionary new Master who does not want to admit that he is one, but proposes himself as a mere "servant" of the People — in Nietzsche's terms, it is simply the passage from Master's ethics to slave morality, and this fact, perhaps, enables us a new approach to Nietzsche: when Nietzsche scornfully dismisses "slave morality," he is not attacking lower classes as such, but, rather, the new masters who are no longer ready to assume the title of the Master - "slave" is Nietzsche's term for a fake master. — How, then, more closely, are we to read the university discourse?




The university discourse is enunciated from the position of "neutral" Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real (say, in the case of pedagogical knowledge, the "raw, uncultivated child"), turning it into the subject ($). The "truth" of the university discourse, hidden beneath the bar, of course, is power, i.e. the Master-Signifier: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things. What one should avoid here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. "Production" (the fourth term in the matrix of discourses) does not stand simply for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its "indivisible remainder," for the excess which resists being included in the discursive network, i.e. for what the discourse itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart. Perhaps the exemplary case of the Master's position which underlies the university discourse is the way in which medical discourse functions in our everyday lives: at the surface level, we are dealing with pure objective knowledge which desubjectivizes the subject-patient, reducing him to an object of research, of diagnosis and treatment; however, beneath it, one can easily discern a worried hystericized subject, obsessed with anxiety, addressing the doctor as his Master and asking for reassurance from him. At a more common level, suffice it to recall the market expert who advocates strong budgetary measures (cutting welfare expenses, etc.) as a necessity imposed by his neutral expertise devoid of any ideological biases: what he conceals is the series of power-relations (from the active role of state apparatuses to ideological beliefs) which sustain the "neutral" functioning of the market mechanism.

In the University discourse, is not the upper level ($ — a) that of biopolitics (in the sense deployed from Foucault to Agamben)? Of the expert knowledge dealing with its object which is a - not subjects, but individuals reduced to bare life? And does the lower not designate what Eric Santner called the "crisis of investiture," i.e., the impossibility of the subject to relate to S₁, to identify with a Master-Signifier, to assume the imposed symbolic mandate?¹ The key point is here that the expert rule of "biopolitics" is grounded in and conditioned by the crisis of investiture; this crisis generated the "post-metaphysical" survivalist stance of the Last Men, which ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow. It is within this horizon that one should appreciate today's growing rejection of death penalty: what one should be able to discern is the hidden "biopolitics" which sustains this rejection. Those who assert the "sacredness of life," defending it against the threat of transcendent powers which parasitize on it, end up in a world in which, on behalf of its very official goal — long pleasurable life — all effective pleasures are prohibited or strictly controlled (smoking, drugs, food…). Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is the latest example of this survivalist attitude towards dying, with its "demystifying" presentation of war as a meaningless slaughter which nothing can really justify - as such, it provides the best possible justification for the Colin Powell's "no-casualties-on-our-side" military doctrine.

On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight…)? Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real - in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one.

Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also Last Man's revolution — "revolution without revolution.") Is this not one of the two versions of Lacan's anti-Dostoyevski motto "If God doesn't exist, everything is prohibited"? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance; (2) If God is dead, superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy directly the Thing Itself: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your blood! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitations by external reality? Take drugs which directly affect your brain! - And if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any "merely human" constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness).

Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint — it is no longer the old notion of the "right measure" between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction "Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!", i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner's famous "Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it" from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's "biopolitics." Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is "safe sex" — a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying "Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?". The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent "opium without opium": no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it — it already IS a kind of "opium without opium."

The structure of the "chocolate laxative," of a product containing the agent of its own containment, can be discerned throughout today's ideological landscape. There are two topics which determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness, openness towards it, AND the obsessive fear of harassment — in short, the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other… A similar structure is clearly present in how we relate to capitalist profiteering: it is OK IF it is counteracted with charitable activities — first you amass billions, then you return (part of) them to the needy… And the same goes for war, for the emergent logic of humanitarian or pacifist militarism: war is OK insofar as it really serves to bring about peace, democracy, or to create conditions for distributing humanitarian help. And does the same not hold more and more even for democracy: it is OK if it is "rethought" to include torture and a permanent emergency state, if it is cleansed of its populist "excesses," and if the people are "mature" enough to live by it…

However, what we were describing what cannot but appear as two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to bare life, to homo sacer as the dispensable object of the expert caretaking knowledge; and that of the respect for the vulnerable Other brought to extreme, of the attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences itself as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential "harassments." Is there a stronger contrast than the one between the respect for the Other's vulnerability and the reduction of the Other to "mere life" regulated by the administrative knowledge?

But what if these two stances nonetheless rely on the same root, what if they are the two aspects of one and the same underlying attitude, what if they coincide in what one is tempted to designate as the contemporary case of the Hegelian "infinite judgement" which asserts the identity of opposites? What the two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. Nowhere is the complicity of these two levels clearer as in the case of the opposition to death penalty — no wonder, since (violently putting another human being to) death is, quite logically, the ultimate traumatic point of biopolitics, the politics of the administration of life. To put it in Foucauldian terms, is the abolition of death penalty not part of a certain "biopolitics" which considers crime as the result of social, psychological, ideological, etc., circumstances: the notion of the morally/legally responsible subject is an ideological fiction whose function is to cover up the network of power relations, individuals are not responsible for the crimes they commit, so they should not be punished? Is, however, the obverse of this thesis not that those who control the circumstances control the people? No wonder the two strongest industrial complexes are today the military and the medical, that of destroying and that of prolonging life.

Superego is thus not directly S₂; it is rather the S₁ of the S₂ itself, the dimension of an unconditional injunction that is inherent to knowledge itself. Recall the informations about health we are bombarded with all the time: "Smoking is dangerous! To much fat may cause a heart attack! Regular exercise leads to a longer life!" etc.etc. — it is impossible not to hear beneath it the unconditional injunction "You should enjoy a long and healthy life!"… What this means is that the discourse of the University is thoroughly mystifying, concealing its true foundation, obfuscating the unfreedom on which it relies.

1. See Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996.

Homo Sacer As the Object of the Discourse of the University - lacan.com (Sep. 25)

"The Big Other doesn't exist" by Slavoj Zizek

Why did Freud supplement the Oedipal myth with the mythical narrative of the "primordial father" in Totem and Taboo (T&T)? The lesson of this second myth is the exact obverse of the Oedipus: far from having to deal with the father who, intervening as the Third, prevents direct contact with the incestuous object (thus sustaining the illusion that his annihilation would give us free access to this object), it is the killing of the father, i.e., the very realization of the Oedipal wish, which gives rise to symbolic prohibition (the dead father returns as his Name). And today's much-decried "decline of Oedipus" (of the paternal symbolic authority) is precisely the return of figures which function according to the logic of the "primordial father" from "totalitarian" political leaders to the paternal sexual harasser. But why? When the "pacifying" symbolic authority is suspended, the only way to avoid the debilitating deadlock of desire, its inherent impossibility, is to locate the cause of its inaccessibility into a despotic figure which stands for the primordial jouisseur: we cannot enjoy because HE amasses all enjoyment ...

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In the "Oedipus complex," parricide (and incest with the mother) is the unconscious desire of all ordinary (male) subjects, since the paternal figure prevents access to the maternal object, disturbs our symbiosis with it, while Oedipus himself is the exceptional figure, the One who effectively did it. In T&T, on the contrary, parricide is not the goal of our unconscious wish, but, as Freud emphasizes again and again, a prehistoric fact which "really had to occur", to allow the passage from animal state to Culture. In short, the traumatic event is not something we dream about, but which never really happens and thus, via its postponement, sustains the state of culture (since the consummation of the incestuous link with the mother would abolish the symbolic distance/prohibition which defines the universe of Culture); rather, the traumatic event is that which always already had to happen the moment we are within the order of Culture. If we effectively killed the father, why is the outcome not the longed-for incestuous union? In this paradox lies the central thesis of T&T: the bearer of prohibition preventing our access to the incestuous object is not the living but the DEAD father, who, after his death, returns as his Name, i.e., the embodiment of the symbolic law/prohibition. What the matrix of T&T accounts for is thus the structural necessity of the parricide: the passage from direct brutal force to the rule of symbolic authority, of the prohibitory law, is always grounded in a (disavowed) act of primordial crime. Therein resides the dialectic of "You can only prove that you love me by betraying me": the father is elevated into the venerated symbol of Law only after his betrayal and murder. This problematique also opens up the vaguaries of ignorance not the subject's, but the big Other's: "the father is dead, although unaware of it," i.e., he doesn't know that his loving followers have (always-already) betrayed him. On the other hand, this means that the father "really thinks that he is a father," that his authority directly emanates from his person, not merely from the empty symbolic place that he occupies and/or fills in. What the faithful follower should conceal from the paternal figure of the leader is precisely this gap between the leader in the immediacy of his personality and the symbolic place he occupies, a gap on account of which the father qua effective person is utterly impotent and ridiculous (King Lear, confronted violently with this betrayal and the ensuing unmasking of his impotence, and deprived of his symbolic title, is reduced to an old, raging, impotent fool). The heretical legend according to which Christ himself ordered Judas to betray him (or at least let him know his wish between the lines...) is thus well-founded: in this necessity of the Betrayal of the Great Man, which can only assure his Fame, resides the ultimate mystery of Power.
However, there is still something missing in the T&T matrix. It is not enough to have the murdered father return as the agency of symbolic prohibition: this prohibition, to be effective, must be sustained by a positive act of Will. For that reason, Freud, in his Moses and Monotheism (M&M), added a further, last variation to the Oedipal dispositif. Here, the two paternal figures, however, are not the same as that in T&T: the two figures are here not the presymbolic obscene/non-castrated Father-Jouissance and the (dead) father qua bearer of the symbolic authority, i.e. the Name-of-the-Father, but the old Egyptian Moses (who, dispensing with earlier polytheistic superstitions, introduces monotheism, the notion of a universe as determined and ruled by a unique rational Order) and the Semitic Moses (Jehovah [Yahve], the jealous God who displays vengeful rage when He feels betrayed by his people). M&M turns around yet again the dispositif of T&T: the father "betrayed" and killed by his followers/sons is NOT the obscene primordial Father-Jouissance, but the "rational" father embodying the symbolic authority, the figure which personifies the unified rational structure of the universe (logos). Rather than the obscene pre-symbolic father returning in the guise of his Name, of symbolic authority, we have now the symbolic authority (logos) betrayed, killed by his followers/sons, and returning in the guise of the jealous, vengeful and unforgiving superego figure of a God full of murderous rage (1). Only after this second reversal of the Oedipal matrix do we reach the well-known Pascalean distinction between the God of Philosophers (God qua the universal structure of logos, identified with rational structure of the universe) and the God of Theologists (the God of love and hatred, the inscrutable "dark God" of capricious "irrational" predestination).

The crucial point is that, in contrast to the primordial father endowed by a knowledge about jouissance, this uncompromising God is that He says "No!" to jouissance as Lacan puts it, this God is possessed by a ferocious ignorance ("la féroce ignorance de Yahvé") (2), by an attitude of "I refuse to know, I do not want to hear, anything about your dirty and secret ways of jouissance"; a God who banishes the universe of traditional sexualized wisdom, a universe with still a semblance of an ultimate harmony between the big Other (the symbolic order) and jouissance, and the notion of a macrocosm regulated by some underlying sexual tension of male and female "principles" (yin and yang, Light and Darkness, Earth and Heaven...). This God is the proto-existentialist God whose existence to apply anachronistically Sartre's definition of man does not simply coincide with his essence (as with the Medieval God of St. Aquinas), but precedes it. Thus, He speaks in tautologies not only concerning his own quidditas ("I am what I am"), but also and above all in what concerns logos, the reasons for what He is doing, or, more precisely, for his injunctions (what He asks or prohibits us to do); His inexorable orders are ultimately grounded in "It is like this BECAUSE I SAY IT IS LIKE THIS!". In short, this is the God of pure Will, of its capricious abyss which lies beyond any global rational order of logos, a God who does not have to account for anything he does (3)

This is the God who speaks to his followers/sons, to his "people" the intervention of voice here is crucial. As Lacan put it in his unpublished Seminar on Anxiety (from 1960-61), the voice (the actual "speech act") brings about the passage à l'acte of the signifying network, its "symbolic efficiency." This voice is inherently meaningless, nonsensical even, a negative gesture giving expression to God's malicious and vengeful anger (all meaning is already there in the symbolic order which structures our universe); but it is precisely as such that it actualizes the purely structural meaning, transforming it into an experience of Sense (4). This, of course, is another way of saying that, through this uttering of the Voice which manifests his Will, God subjectivizes Himself. The old Egyptian Moses, betrayed and killed by his people, was the all-inclusive One of logos, the rational substantial structure of the universe, the "writing" accessible to those who know how to read the "great book of Nature," not yet the all-exclusive One of subjectivity who imposes his unconditional Will on His creation.
This God of groundless Willing and ferocious "irrational" rage is the God who, by means of his Prohibition, destroys the old sexualized Wisdom, thus opening up the space for the de-sexualized, "abstract" knowledge of modern science. The paradox is that there is "objective" scientific knowledge (in the modern, post-Cartesian sense of the term) only if the universe of scientific knowledge itself is supplemented and sustained by this excessive "irrational" figure of the prohibitive father; Descartes' "voluntarism" (his infamous statement that 2+2 would be 5 if such were God's Will, there are no eternal truths directly co-substantial with the Divine Nature) is the necessary obverse of modern scientific knowledge. Pre-modern Aristotelian and Medieval knowledge was not yet "objective," rational, scientific precisely because it lacked this excessive element of God qua the subjectivity of pure "irrational" Willing: the Aristotelian God, directly equal to its own eternal rational Nature, "is" nothing but the logical Order of Things. A further paradox is that this "irrational" God, as the prohibitory paternal figure, also opens up the space for the entire development of modernity, up to the deconstructionist notion that our sexual identity is a contingent socio-symbolic formation: the moment this prohibitory figure recedes, we are back into Jungian neoobscurantist notions of masculine and feminine archetypes which thrive today. This point is crucial if we are not to misunderstand completely the gap which separates the "proper" authority of the symbolic law/prohibition from the mere "regulation by rules": paradoxically, the domain of symbolic rules, to count as such, must be grounded in some tautological authority BEYOND RULES, which says, "It is so because said it so!".
One can see, now, why, at the level of individual libidinal economy, Lacan calls this prohibiting God the "real father" as the "agent of castration": symbolic castration is another name for the gap between the big Other and jouissance, for the fact that the two can never be "synchronized." One can also see in what precise sense perversion enacts the disavowal of castration: the pervert's fundamental illusion is that he possesses a (symbolic) knowledge which enables him to regulate his access to jouissance, i.e., put in more contemporary terms, the pervert's dream is to transform sexual activity into an instrumental, purpose-oriented activity which can be projected and executed according to a well-defined plan. So when one speaks today of the decline of paternal authority, it is THIS father, the father of the uncompromising "No!", who seems effectively to be in retreat; in his absence, in the absence of his prohibitory "No!", new forms of the fantasmatic harmony between the symbolic order and jouissance can thrive again. This is what the so-called New Age "holistic" attitude ultimately is about, this renewal of the harmony between Reason and Life substance (Earth or macrocosm itself as a living entity) at the expense of the prohibitory "real father" (5).

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These deadlocks indicate that today, in a sense, "the big Other no longer exists" however, in WHAT sense? The big Other is somewhat the same as God according to Lacan (God is not dead today He was dead from the very beginning, except He didn't know it...): it never existed in the first place, i.e., the "big Other's" inexistence is ultimately equivalent to Its being the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality. (In this sense, the only subject for whom the big Other does exist is the psychotic, the one who attributes to words direct material efficiency.) In short, the "inexistence of the big Other" is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of symbolic trust, of credence, of taking what other's say "at their word's value."

What is symbolic efficiency? We all know the old, worn-out joke about a madman who thought he was a grain of corn; after being finally cured and sent home, he immediately returned to the mental institution, explaining to the doctor his panic: "On the road, I encountered a hen, and I was afraid it would eat me!" To the doctor's surprised exclamation, "But what's the problem now? You know you're not a grain but a man who cannot be swallowed by a hen!", the madman answered "Yes, I know I am no longer a grain, but does the hen know it?"... This story, nonsensical at the level of factual reality where you either are a grain or not, is fully sensible if one replaces "grain" with some feature which determines my symbolic identity. Look at what occurs in our daily dealings with the bureaucratic hierarchy? For instance, a high-level office complies with my demand and gives me a higher title; however, it takes some time for the decree to be properly executed and reach the lower-level administration which effectively takes care of the benefits from this title (higher salary, etc.). We all know the frustration caused by a lower bureaucrat who, casting a glance at the decree, indifferently retorts:

"Sorry, I have not yet been properly informed about this new measure, so I can't help you...". Isn't this somewhat like telling you: "Sorry, for us you're still a grain of corn, not yet a human being?" In short, there is a certain mysterious moment at which a measure or a decree becomes effectively operative, registered by the "big Other" of the symbolic institution. This mysterious moment can be exemplified by a funny thing which happened during the last election campaign in Slovenia. A friend of mine was approached for help by an elderly lady from his local constituency. She was convinced that the street number of her house (not the standard 13, but 23) was bringing her bad luck the moment her house was assigned this new number due to some administrative reorganization, misfortunes had started to afflict her (burglers broke in, a storm tore through the roof, neighbors began to annoy her...). She kindly asked my friend, a local candidate there, to arrange with the municipal authorities for the number to be changed. My friend made a simple suggestion to the lady: why didn't she do it herself? Why didn't she simply repaint or replace the plate with a different number (say, 23A or 231 instead of 23)? The old lady answered: "Oh, I tried that a couple of weeks ago, I added an A to 23, but it doesn't work, the misfortunes continue you cannot cheat it, it has to be done properly, by the responsible state institution...". The "it" which cannot be duped is, of course, the "big Other" of the symbolic institution. Symbolic efficiency is thus about this minimum of "reification":to become operative, it is not enough for all concerned individuals to know some fact; "it," the symbolic institution, must also know/"register" this fact. This "it," of course, can ultimately be embodied in the gaze of the absolute "big Other," God Himself. Do we not encounter exactly the same problem as that of unfortunate old lady with those Catholics who, in order to avoid unwanted pregnancy, have intercourse only on days with no ovulation? Whom are they cheating, as if God could not know their desire for pleasurable sex without procreation? The Church was always extremely sensitive to this gap between mere existence and its proper inscription/registration: for example, unbaptized children who died were not allowed a proper burial on holy ground, since they were not yet properly inscribed into the community of believers ...
In one of the Marx brothers' films, Groucho Marx, when caught in a lie, answers angrily: "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?" This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the symbolic order, in which the symbolic mask-mandate matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears this mask and/or assumes this mandate. This functioning involves the structure of fetishist disavowal: "I know very well that things are the way I see them /that this person is a corrupted weakling/, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him". So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e., I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen. The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. Lacan aims at this paradox with his "les non-dupes errent": those who do not allow themselves to be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction, who continue to believe their eyes, are the ones who err most. A cynic who "believes only his eyes" misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality. The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbors: we behave AS IF we do not know that they also smell bad, secrete excrements, etc. a minimum of idealization, of fetishizing disavowal, is the basis of our co-existence.

Today, new digitalized technologies enable perfectly faked documentary images, not to mention Virtual Reality, so that the motto "believe my words (argumentation), not the fascination of your eyes!" is more actual than ever. It is crucial to keep in sight how the logic of "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?" (i.e., "I know well, but nonetheless ... /I believe/") can function in two different ways that of the symbolic fiction and that of the imaginary simulacrum. In the case of the efficient symbolic fiction of the judge wearing his insignia, "I know very well that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him as if /I believe that/ the symbolic big Other speaks through him": I disavow what my eyes tell me and choose to believe the symbolic fiction. On the contrary, in the case of the simulacrum of virtual reality, "I know very well that what I see is an illusion generated by digital machinery, but I nonetheless accept to immerse myself in it, to behave as if I believe it." Here, I disavow what my (symbolic) knowledge tells me and choose to believe my eyes only ...

However, the supreme example of the power of the symbolic fiction as the medium of universality is perhaps Christianity proper, i.e., the belief in Christ's Resurrection: the death of the "real" Christ is "sublated" in the Holy Ghost, in the spiritual community of believers. This authentic kernel of Christianity, first articulated by St. Paul, is today under attack in the guise of the New Age gnostic/dualist (mis)reading, which reduces the Resurrection to the metaphor of the "inner" spiritual growth of the individual soul. What is lost is the central tenet of Christianity: the break with the Old Testament logic of Sin and Punishment, i.e. the miracle of Grace, which retroactively "undoes", erases our past sins. The "good meesage" of the New Testament is that the miracle of creatio ex nihilo a New Beginning, starting a new life "from nothing" is possible. (Creatio ex nihilo, the establishment of a new symbolic fiction which erases the past one, of course is feasible only within a symbolic universe). The crucial point is that this New Beginning is possible only through Divine Grace its impetus must come from outside, and not as the result of man's inner effort to overcome his limitations and elevate his soul above egotistic material interests. In this precise sense, the properly Christian New Beginning is absolutely incompatible with the pagan gnostic problematic of the "purification of the soul."
One of the obsessions of the contemporary New Age approach to Plato is to unearth beneath his public teaching at our disposal in his written dialogues his true, esoteric doctrine, Plato's so called "secret teaching". This "secret teaching" exemplifies case of the theoretical obscene Other which accompanies, as a kind of shadowy double, the One of pure theory. But, on a closer look, the positive content of this "secret teaching" reveals itself to be pop-wisdom commonplaces a la Joseph Campbell sold at airport bookstores: the New Age platitudes about the duality of cosmic principles, about how the One, the positive principle of Light, must be accompanied by the primordial Otherness, the mysterious dark principle of feminine matter. Therein resides the basic paradox of Plato's mysterious "secret teaching": the secret we are supposed to discern through the arduous work of textual archeology is none other than the most notorious New Age pop-wisdom a nice example of Lacanian topology in which the innermost kernel coincides with the radical externality. This is simply another chapter in the eternal fight waged by obscurantist Illumination against Enlightenment: insofar as Plato was the first great Enlightener, the obsession with his secret teaching bears witness to the effort to prove that Plato himself was already an obscurantist preaching a special initiatic doctrine.

The goal of recent New Age pop-gnostic endeavors to reassert a kind of Christ's "secret teaching" beneath the official Paulinian dogma is the same: to undo, to erase, the radical novelty of the "Event-Christ," reducing it to a continuation of the preceding gnostic lineage. Another important aspect of this gnostic (mis)reading of Christianity is the growing obsession of the popular pseudo-science with the mystery of the Christ's alleged tomb and/or progeny from his alleged marriage with Mary Magdalene. Bestsellers like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail or The Tomb of God, focusing on the region around Rennes-le-Château in the south of France, weave a large coherent narrative out of the Grail myth, Cathars, Templars, Freemasons, etc., and endeavour to supplant the diminishing power of the symbolic fiction of the Holy Ghost (the community of believers) with the bodily Real of Christ and/or his descendants. The fact that Christ left behind his body or bodily descendants undermines the Christian-Paulinian narrative of Resurrection: Christ's body was not effectively resurrected, "the true message of Jesus was lost with the Resurrection" (6). This "true message" allegedly resides in promoting "the path of self-determination, as distinct from obedience to the written word" (7):

redemption results from the soul's inner journey, not from an act of Pardon coming from Outside. "Resurrection" is to be understood as the inner renewal/rebirth of the soul on its journey of self-purification. For the advocates of this "return of/in the real," their discovery is the unearthing of the heretic and subversive secret long repressed by the Church as Institution; however, what if this very unearthing of the "Secret" serves the "undoing," the riddance of the truly traumatic, subversive core of Christian teaching, the skandalon of Resurrection and retroactive pardon of sins, i.e., the unique character of the Event of Resurrection?
- 3 -

These vicissitudes signal that, today, "the big Other doesn't exist" is more radical than the usual one, synonymous with symbolic order: this symbolic trust, which persists against all sceptical data, is more and more undermined. The first paradox of this retreat of the big Other is discernible in the so-called "culture of complaint" with its underlying logic of ressentiment: far from cheerfully assuming the inexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other for its failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn't exist, i.e. as if impotence is no excuse. The more the subject's structure is "narcissistic," the more he blames the big Other, and thus asserts his dependence on it. The "culture of complaint" thus calls on the big Other to intervene, and to set things straight (to recompense the damaged sexual or ethnic minority, etc., although how exactly this is to be done is a matter of different ethico-legal "committees"). The specific feature of the "culture of complaint" lies in its legalistic twist, in the endeavor to translate the complaint into the legal obligation of the Other (usually the State) to indemnify one for what? For the very unfathomable surplus-enjoyment of which I am deprived, whose lack makes me feel deprivileged. Thus, is not the "culture of complaint" today's version of the hysterical impossible demand, addressed to the Other, which effectively wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds its existence in its complaint:"I am insofar as I make the Other responsible and/or guilty for my misery"? The gap here is insurmountable between this logic of complaint and the true "radical" ("revolutionary") act which, instead of complaining to the Other and expecting it to act (i.e. displacing the need to act onto it), suspends the existing legal frame and itself accomplishes the act. What is wrong with the complaint of the truly deprivileged is that, instead of undermining the position of the Other, they still address It: they, translating their demand into legalistic complaint, confirm the Other in its position by their very attack.

Furthermore, a wide scope of phenomena the resurgent ethico/religious "fundamentalisms" which advocate a return to the Christian or Islamic patriarchal division of sexual roles; the New Age massive re-sexualization of the universe, i.e., the return to pre-modern, pagan, sexualized cosmo-ontology; the growth of "conspiracy theories" as a form of popular "cognitive mapping" seem to counter the retreat of the big Other. These phenomena cannot be simply dismissed as "regressive," as new modes of "escape from freedom," as unfortunate "remainders of the past" which will disappear if only we continue more resolutely on the deconstructionist path of historicisation of every fixed identity, of unmasking the contingency of every naturalized self-image. Rather, these disturbing phenomena compel us to elaborate the contours of the big Other's retreat: The paradoxical result of this mutation in the "inexistence of the Other" (of the growing collapse of the symbolic efficiency) is precisely the re-emergence of the different facets of a big Other which exists effectively, in the Real, and not merely as symbolic fiction.

The belief in the big Other which exists in the Real is the most succint definition of paranoia, so that, two features which characterize today's ideological stance cynical distance and full reliance on paranoiac fantasy are strictly codependent: today's typical subject, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other. Distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject's refusal to "take it seriously," relies on the belief that there is an "Other of the Other," a secret, invisible, all-powerful agent who effectively "pulls the strings" behind the visible, public Power. This other, obscene, invisible power structure acts the part of the "Other of the Other" in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life).

Here we should look for the roots of the recent impasse of narrativization, i.e., of the "end of large narratives". In our era, when global, all-encompassing narratives ("the struggle of liberal democracy with totalitarianism", etc.) no longer seem possible in politics and ideology as well as in literature and cinema the paranoiac narrative of a "conspiracy theory" appears the only way to arrive at a kind of global "cognitive mapping." We see this paranoiac narrative not only in right-wing populism and fundamentalism, but also in the liberal center (the "mystery" of Kennedy's assassination) and left-wing orientations (the American Left's old obsession that some mysterious government agency is experimenting with nerve gases to regulate the behavior of the population). It is all too simplistic to dismiss conspiracy-narratives as the paranoiac proto-Fascist reaction of the infamous "middle classes" which feel threatened by the process of modernization: it would be much more productive to conceive "conspiracy theory" as a kind of floating signifier which could be appropriated by different political options to obtain a minimal cognitive mapping.

This, then, is one version of the big Other which persists in the wake of its alleged disappearance. Another version operates in the guise of the New Age, Jungian re-sexualization of the universe ("men are from Mars, women are from Venus"), according to which there is an underlying, deeply anchored archetypal identity which provides a safe haven in the flurry of contemporary confusion of roles and identities. From this perspective, the ultimate origin of today's crisis is not the difficulty to overcome the tradition of fixed sexual roles, but modern man's unbalanced emphasis on the male/rational/conscious aspect at the expense of the feminine/compassionate one. While sharing with feminism the anti-Cartesian and anti-patriarchal bias, this tendency rewrites the feminist agenda into a re-assertion of archetypal feminine roots repressed in our competitive, male, mechanistic universe. Another version of the real Other is the figure of the father as sexual harasser of his young daughters, which stands at the core of the so-called "false-memory-syndrome": here, also, the suspended father as the agent of symbolic authority i.e., the embodiment of a symbolic fiction "returns in the real" (the controversy is caused by the contention of those advocating rememoration of childhood sexual abuses, that sexual harassment by the father is not merely fantasy or, at least, an indissoluble mixture of fact and fantasy, but a plain fact, something that in the majority of families "really happened" an obstinacy comparable to Freud's no less obstinate insistence on the murder of the "primordial father" as a real event in humanity's prehistory.) There is, however, yet another, much more interesting and uncanny assertion of the big Other, clearly discernible in the allegedly "liberating" notion that, today, individuals are compelled to (re)invent the rules of their co-existence without any guarantee of some meta-norm Kant's ethical philosophy was already its exemplary case. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze provides an unsurpassable formulation of Kant's radically new conception of the moral Law:

... the law is no longer regarded as dependent on the Good, but on the contrary, the Good itself is made to depend on the law. This means that the law no longer has its foundation in some higher principle from which it would derive its authority, but that it is self-grounded and valid solely by virtue of its own form. [...] Kant, by establishing THE LAW as an ultimate ground or principle, added an essential dimension to modern thought: the object of the law is by definition unknowable and elusive. ... Clearly THE LAW, as defined by its pure form, without substance or object of any determination whatsoever, is such that no one knows nor can know what it is. It operates without making itself known. It defines a realm of transgression where one is already guilty, and where one oversteps the bounds without knowing what they are, as in the case of Oedipus. Even guilt and punishment do not tell us what the law is, but leave it in a state of indeterminacy equaled only by the extreme specificity of the punishment." (8)

The Kantian Law is thus not merely an empty form applied to random empirical content in order to ascertain if this content meets the criteria of ethical adequacy. Rather, the empty form of the Law functions as the promise of an absent content (never) to come. The form is not a kind of neutral-universal mould of the plurality of different empirical contents; the autonomy of the Form rather bears witness to the uncertainty which persists with regard to the content of our acts we never know if the determinate content which accounts for the specificity of our acts is the right one, i.e., if we have effectively acted in accordance with the Law rather than being guided by some hidden pathological motifs. Kant thus announces the notion of Law which culminates in Kafka and the experience of modern political "totalitarianism": since, in the case of the Law, its Dass-Sein (the fact of the Law) precedes its Was-Sein (what this Law is), the subject finds himself in a situation in which, although he knows there is a Law, he never knows (and a priori cannot know) what this Law is a gap forever separates the Law from its positive incarnations. The subject is thus, a priori, in his very existence, guilty: guilty without knowing what he is guilty of (and for that very reason guilty), infracting the law without knowing its exact regulations. For the first time in the history of philosophy, the assertion of the Law is unconscious: Form experienced without content is always the index of a repressed content the more intensely the subject sticks to the empty form, the more traumatic the repressed content becomes.

The gap that separates this Kantian version of the subject reinventing the rules of his ethical conduct from the postmodern Foucauldian version is easily discernible. Both assert that ethical judgments ultimately display the structure of aesthetic judgement (in which, instead of simply applying a universal rule to a particular situation, one must (re)invent the universal rule in each unique concrete situation); however, in Foucault, this simply means that the subject is thrown into a situation in which he has to shape his ethical project with no support in any transcendent(al) Law, while for Kant, this very absence of Law in the specific sense of a determinate set of positive universal norms renders all the more sensible the unbearable pressure of the moral Law qua the pure empty injunction to do one's Duty. From the Lacanian perspective, it is here that we encounter the crucial distinction between rules to be invented and their underlying Law/Prohibition: it is only when the Law qua set of positive universal symbolic norms fails to appear, that we encounter the Law at its most radical, the Law in its aspect of the Real of an unconditional injunction. The paradox to be emphasized here resides in the precise nature of the Prohibition involved by the moral Law: at its most fundamental, this Prohibition is not the prohibition to accomplish some positive act which would violate the Law, but the self-referential prohibition to confuse the "impossible" Law with any positive symbolic prescription and/or prohibition, i.e., to claim for any positive set of norms the status of the law. Ultimately, the Prohibition means that the place of the Law itself must remain empty.

Put in classic Freudian terms: in Foucault we get a set of rules regulating the "care of the Self" in his "use of pleasures" (in short, a reasonable application of the "pleasure-principle"), while in Kant the (re)invention of rules follows an injunction which comes from the "beyond the pleasure-principle." Of course, the Foucauldian/Deleuzian answer would be that Kant is ultimately the victim of a kind of perspective illusion which leads him to (mis)perceive the radical immanence of ethical norms the fact that the subject has to invent the norms regulating his conduct autonomously, at his own expense and responsibility, with no big Other to take the blame for it as its exact opposite, as radical transcendence, presupposing the existence of an inscrutable, transcendent "big Other" who terrorizes us with its unconditional injunction, and simultaneously prohibits us access to it; we are under compulsion to do our Duty, but forever prevented from clearly knowing what this Duty is. The Freudian answer is that such a solution (the translation of the big Other's inscrutable Call of Duty into immanence) relies on the disavowal of the Unconscious: what usually passes unnoticed is that Foucault's rejection of the psychoanalytic account of sexuality also involves a thorough rejection of the Freudian Unconscious. If we read Kant in psychoanalytic terms, the gap between self-invented rules and their underlying Law is none other than the gap between (consciously-preconscious) rules we follow and the Law qua unconscious: the basic lesson of psychoanalysis is that what is unconscious is, at its most radical, not the wealth of illicit "repressed" desires but the fundamental Law itself.

So, even in the case of a narcissistic subject dedicated to the "care of the Self," his "use of pleasures" is sustained by the unconscious, unconditional superego-injunction to enjoy. Is not the ultimate proof of this feeling of guilt which haunts him when he fails in his pursuit of pleasures? According to sociological investigations, people find less and less attraction in sexual activity; this uncanny, growing indifference towards intense sexual pleasure contrasts starkly with the official ideology of our postmodern society as bent on instant gratification and pleasure-seeking. So, we have a subject who dedicates his life to pleasure and becomes so deeply involved in the preparatory activities (jogging, massages, tanning, applying cremes and lotions...) that the attraction of the official Goal of his efforts fades away; a brief stroll today along New York's Christopher Street or Chelsea reveals hundreds of gays putting extraordinary energy into body-building, obsessed with getting old, dedicated to pleasure, yet obviously living in permanent anxiety and under the shadow of ultimate failure... the superego has again successfully accomplished its work: the direct injunction "Enjoy!" is a much more effective way to hinder the subject's access to enjoyment than the explicit Prohibition which sustains the space for its transgression. The lesson of it is that the narcissistic "care of the Self," and not the "repressive" network of social prohibitions, is the ultimate enemy of intense sexual experiences. The utopia of a post-psychoanalytic subjectivity engaged in the pursuit of new, idiosyncratic bodily pleasures beyond sexuality has reverted into disinterested boredom; and the direct intervention of pain (sado-masochistic sexual practices) seems the only remaining path to the intense experience of pleasure.

Thus, the fact that "the big Other doesn't exist" (as the efficient symbolic fiction) has two interconnected, although opposed, consequences: on the one hand, the failure of symbolic fiction induces the subject to cling more and more to imaginary simulacra, to sensual spectacles which bombard us today from all sides; while on the other, it triggers the need for violence in the Real of the body itself (cutting and piercing the flesh, or inserting prosthetic objects into the body).

(1) For a concise description of these shifts, see Michel Lapeyre, Au-delà du complexe d'Oedipe (Paris: Anthropos-Economica 1997).
(2) The title of Chapter IX of Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1991).
(3) In the history of philosophy, this crack in the global rational edifice of macrocosm in which the Divine Will appears was first opened up by Duns Scotus; but we owe to F.W.J. Schelling the most piercing descriptions of this horrifying abyss of Will. Schelling opposed the Will to the "principle of sufficient reason": pure Willing is always self-identical, it relies only onto its own act - "I want it because I want it!". In his descriptions of horrifying poetic beauty, Schelling emphasized how ordinary people are horrified when they encounter a person whose behaviors displays such an unconditional Will: there is something fascinating, properly hypnotic about it, one is as if bewitched by its sight... Schelling's emphasis on the abyss of pure Willing, of course, targets Hegel's alleged "panlogicism": Schelling wants to prove that the Hegelian universal logical system is in itself stricto sensu impotent it is a system of pure potentialities, and as such in need of the supplementary "irrational" act of pure Will in order to actualize itself.
(4) For a more detailed account of this distinction, see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso 1996).
(5) A sign of how even the Church is not resistant to this shift in the fundamental attitude are the recent grass-root pressures on the Pope to elevate Mary to the status of co-redemptrix: one expects the Pope to render the Catholic Church viable for the post-paternal third millenium by proclaiming a dogma which asserts that the only way for us, sinful mortals, to gain divine mercy, is via our plea to Mary, who serves as mediator, i.e., if we convince her, she will speak in our favor to Christ, her son.
(6) Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, The Tomb of God (London: Warner Books 1997), p. 433.
(7) Op.cit., p. 428.
(8) Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books 1991), p. 82-83.

"The Big Other Doesn't Exist" - Psychomedia (Spring/Fall)

Slavoj Zizek - From Joyce-the-Symptom...

What does Lacan's thesis on "Joyce-the-symptom" aim at? Joyce's famous statement that he wrote Finnegans Wake in order to keep literary historians busy for the next 400 years has to be read against the background of Lacan's assertion that, within a psychoanalytic cure, a symptom is always addressed at the analyst and as such points forward towards its interpretation. The "modernism" of Joyce resides in the fact that his works, at least Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, are not simply external to their interpretation but, as it were, in advance take into account their possible interpretations and enter into dialogue with them. Insofar as an interpretation or theoretical explanation of a work of art endeavors to frame its object, one can say that this modernist dialectics provides another example of how the frame is always included in, is a part of, the framed content: in modernism, theory about the work is comprised in the work, the work is a kind of preemptive strike at possible theories about itself. On that account, it is inappropriate to reproach Joyce for no longer writing for a naive reader capable of an immediate consumption of his works, but for a "reflected" reader who is only able to read with an eye on possible theoretical interpretations of what he is reading-in short, for a literary scientist. Such an approach in no way diminishes our enjoyment in the work: quite the contrary, it supplements our reading with a surplus-enjoyment which is one of the trademarks of true modernism.

What interests us here, however, is the general background of the all-pervasive reflectivity of everyday life within which this Joycean attitude is inscribed. In one of his letters, Freud refers to the well-known joke about the newly married man who, when asked by his friend how his wife looks, how beautiful she is, answers: "I personally don't like her, but that's a matter of taste." The paradox of this answer does not point towards an attitude of selfish calculation ("True, I don't like her, but I married her for other reasons-her wealth, the social influence of her parents..."). Its crucial feature is that by providing this answer, the subject pretends to assume the standpoint of universality from which "to be likeable" appears as an idiosyncrasy, as a contingent pathological feature which, as such, is not to be taken into consideration. The joke therefore relies on the impossible/untenable position of enunciation of the newly married: from this position, marriage appears as an act which belongs to the domain of universal symbolic determinations and should as such be independent of personal idiosyncrasies-as if the very notion of marriage does not involve precisely the pathological fact of liking a particular person for no particular rational reason.

One encounters the same impossible position of enunciation in contemporary postmodern racism. We all remember one of the highlights of Bernstein's West Side Story, "Officer Krupke," the song in which the delinquents provide the amazed policeman with the socio-psychological explanation of their attitude: they are victims of disadvantageous social circumstances and unfavorable family relations. When asked about the reasons for their violence against foreigners, neo-Nazi skinheads in Germany tend to give the same answers: they suddenly start to talk like social workers, sociologists and social psychologists, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, etc. The same goes even for Zhirinovsky: in interviews to the "enlightened" Western press, he also speaks the language of pop-sociologists and psychologists. That is to say, there are two main pop-scientific cliches about the rise of populist demagogues: they feed on the frustrations of ordinary people at the economic crisis, and social insecurity; the populist totalitarian leader is a distorted personality who, by means of his aggressivity, abreacts the traumatic personal past, the lack of genuine parental love and support in his childhood — the very two reasons quoted by Zhirinovsky when he is asked to explain his success: "If there were a healthy economy and security for the people, I would lose all the votes I have."; "It seems to have been my fate that I never experienced real love or friendship." This is what Lacan had in mind when he claimed that "there is no metalanguage": what Zhirinovsky or skinheads assert is a lie even if, or rather precisely insofar as, it is factually true — their assertions are belied by their very position of enunciation, i.e. by the neutral, disengaged position from which the victim is able to tell the objective truth about itself. And it is easy to imagine a more theoretically updated version of such a false attitude — a racist, for example, who claims he is not the true author of his violent verbal outbursts against the African-Americans or Jews or Arabs: the charges against him presuppose traditional metaphysical notions which have to be deconstructed; in his performative utterance, which by itself perpetrated an act of violence, he was merely referring to, quoting, drawing from the historically available stock of insults, so that the entire historical tradition, not himself, must be put to trial; the very notion that there exists a self-identical responsible subject who can be held accountable for racist outbursts is an illusion already denounced by Nietzsche who proved that the deed or rather the doing is original, and that the "doer" behind the doing is a symbolic fiction, a metaphysical hypostasis, etc.

This impossible position of enunciation characterizes the contemporary cynical attitude: in it, ideology can lay its cards on the table, reveal the secret of its functioning, and still continue to function. Exemplary is here Robert Zemeckis' Forest Gump, a film which offers as the point of identification, as the ideal ego, a simpleton, and thus directly asserts stupidity as a key category of ideology. The principal ideological axis of Forest Gump is the opposition of the hero and his life-long love. Gump is a blessedly-innocent simpleton with a "heart of gold" who executes the orders of his superiors undisturbed by any ideological qualms or fanatical devotions. Renouncing even a minimum of "cognitive mapping"(Jameson), he is caught in a tautological symbolic machine towards which he lacks any ironic distance — a passive witness and/or participant of great historico-political battles whose significance he doesn't even try to understand (he never asks himself why he has to fight in Vietnam, why he is suddenly sent to China to play ping-pong, etc.). His love is a girl fully engaged in the ideological struggles of the last decades (anti-Vietnam demonstrations, etc.) — in a word, she participates in history and endeavours to understand what is effectively going on. The first thing to note about the film is that Gump is ideology at its purest: the opposition of Gump and his girlfriend does not stand for the opposition between the extra-ideological zero-degree of social life and ideological struggles which divide the social body; it rather exemplifies the tension between Ideology in its zero-degree (the meaningless ideological machine) and the antagonisms Ideology endeavours to master and/or render invisible. Gump, this slow-witted, automatic executor of orders, who doesn't even try to understand anything, gives body to the impossible pure subject of Ideology, to the ideal of a subject in whom Ideology would function flawlessly. The ideological mystification of the film resides in the fact that it presents Ideology at its purest as non-ideology, as extra-ideological good-natured participation in social life. That is to say, the ultimate lesson of the film is: do not try to understand, obey, and you shall succeed! (Gump ends up as a famous millionaire.) His girl, who endeavours to acquire a kind of "cognitive mapping" of the social situation, is symbolically punished for her thirst of knowledge: at the end of the film, she dies of AIDS. Forest Gump reveals the secret of ideology (the fact that its successful functioning involves the stupidity of its subjects) in such an open way that, in different historical circumstances, it would undoubtedly have subversive effects; today, however, in the era of cynicism, ideology can afford to reveal the secret of its functioning (its constitutive idiocy, which the traditional, pre-cynical ideology had to keep secret) without in the least affecting its efficiency.

This cynical attitude also provides a key for today's resurgent ethnic and religious "fundamentalisms". Lacan already emphasized how a cynic doesn't believe in words (in the "symbolic efficiency"), but only in the real of jouissance — and is the Nation—Thing not today's supreme embodiment of political jouissance? This accounts for the paradox that, today, the cynically "enlightened" intellectuals who are no longer able to believe in any social Cause are the first to fall prey to "fanatical" ethnic fundamentalism. The link between cynicism and (ethnic or religious) fundamentalism does not concern primarily the fact that, in today's "society of spectacle", fundamentalism itself is just another mediatic show and, as such, feigned, a cynical mask of power interests, but rather its opposite: the cynical distance itself relies on the unacknowledged attachment to an ethnic (or religious) Thing — the more this attachment is disavowed, the more violent its sudden eruption... We should always bear in mind that, within our ideological space, the reference to one's Nation is the supreme form of ideology in the guise of anti— or non-ideology (in short, of ideology tout court): "let's leave aside our petty political and ideological struggles, it's the fate of our nation which is at stake now".

We encounter a homologous falsity in the attitude of those traditional psychoanalysts who prefer their patients to be "naive" and ignorant of psychoanalytic theory — this ignorance allegedly enables them to produce "purer" symptoms, i.e. symptoms in which their unconscious is not too much distorted by their rational knowledge. For example, the incestuous dream of a patient who already knows all about the Oedipus complex will be far more distorted, resorting to more complex strategies to conceal its desire, than the dream of a "naive" patient. We all have a longing for the good old heroic times of psychoanalysis, in which a patient told his analyst "Last night, I had a dream about killing a dragon and then advancing through a thick forest to a castle...", whereupon the analyst triumphantly answered "Elementary, my dear patient! Dragon is your father and the dream expresses your desire to kill him in order to return to the safe haven of the maternal castle...". Lacan's wager is here exactly the opposite: the subject of psychoanalysis is the modern subject of science, which means — among other things — that his symptoms are by definition never "innocent", they are always addressed to the analyst qua subject supposed to know (their meaning) and thus as it were imply, point towards, their own interpretation. For that reason, one is quite justified in saying that we have symptoms which are Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, etc., i.e. whose reality involves implicit reference to some psychoanalytic theory. Today, the "free associations" of a typical educated analysand consist for the most part of attempts to provide a psychoanalytic explanation of their disturbances...

So, at the political level, the problem today is how to counteract this "reflected" racism: is there a specific kind of knowledge which renders impossible the act, a knowledge which can no longer be co-opted by cynical distance ("I know what I am doing, but I am nevertheless doing it")? Or must we leave behind the domain of knowledge and have recourse to a direct, extra-symbolic, bodily intervention, or to an intuitive "Enlightenment", a change of subjective attitude, beyond knowledge? The fundamental wager of psychoanalysis is that there exists such a knowledge which produces effects in the Real, that we can "undo things (symptoms) with words" — the whole point of psychoanalytic cure is that it operates exclusively at the level of "knowledge" (words), yet has effects in the Real of bodily symptoms.

How, then, are we to specify this "knowledge" which, even in our era of cynicism, brings about effects in the Real? Perhaps the best approach to it is via the opposition between violent coercion and "genuine" subordination. This opposition, of course, is never to be accepted at its face value: subordination (of women to men in a patriarchal society, of a "lower" to a "higher" race, of a colonized to the colonizer, etc.), precisely when it is experienced as "genuine" and "sincere" by the subordinated subjects themselves, presents a case of ideological delusion beneath which critical analysis should be able to discern the traces of (internalized, "naturalized") external brute coercion. However, what about the far more sinister inverse operation which makes us (mis)perceive as mere coercion to which we submit ourselves in a wholly external way, something that effectively has a hold on us "from within"? In a first approach, i.e. at an immediate-abstract level, our yielding to the raw coercion is, of course, to be contrasted to a relationship towards some "genuine" authority in which I experience my subordination to it as the fulfillment of my personality, not as something that thwarts my self-realization — by way of subordinating myself to a genuine authority, I realize my own essence (in a traditional patriarchal society, for example, a woman is supposed to fulfill her inner vocation by subordinating herself to her husband). The "spirit" of such an immediate opposition between external coercion and genuine subordination is, however, profoundly anti-Hegelian: Hegel's wager is precisely to demonstrate how the two opposites pass over into each other (see his exemplary analyses of "noble" and "low" consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit).

On the one hand, a close dialectical analysis renders visible how our external subordination to brutal coercion is never simply external, i.e. how this very experience of the force to which we yield as simply external is an illusion of abstract consciousness. Suffice it to recall the traditional liberal attitude towards State as a "mechanical" instrument of external coercion which limits my freedom: what this liberal individualist attitude fails to notice is how this limitation of my freedom involved in the notion of a citizen is not external but the self-limitation which actually increases my true freedom, i.e. elevates me to the level of a free rational being — that part of me which resists the State order, which experiences this order as a threat, is the unfree aspect of my personality. In it, I am effectively enslaved to the contingent "pathological" features of my non-rational nature, to the insignificant whims of my particular nature — as such, this part has to be sacrificed if I am to become a truly free individual. Perhaps an even better example is provided by an adolescent who resists his father's authority and experiences it as external "repression", misrecognizing thereby the extent to which this authority holds him in sway "from within" and guarantees the integrity of his self-experience — witness the disorientation, the sense of loss, which takes place when the paternal authority effectively disintegrates ... As a true Hegelian, Lacan was fully justified in inverting the commonplace about the liberating potential of the unconscious impulses which resist the "repression" of the Authority to which we submit consciously: the Master is unconscious, he exerts his hold upon us in the unconscious. On the other hand, insofar as "human being" implies the infinite freedom of subjectivity, an element of falsehood sticks to every allegedly "genuine" subordination: beneath it, there always lurks a hypocritical calculation or a fear of raw violence. The dialectic of liberation resides precisely in breaking the spell of "genuine" authority, in denouncing it as a mask of brutal coercion; exemplary is here (again) the case of the feminist critique that discerns the traces of brutal coercion in what, within the patriarchal space, appears as woman's "natural" vocation. At a more general level, one can assert that "progress" does not consist only in reducing the amount of violent coercion but also in recognizing violent coercion in what was previously perceived as the "natural" state of things. The logic of this recognition involves the properly Hegelian dialectical tension between the In-itself and the For-itself: it is wrong simply to claim that the patriarchal subordination of women always was founded on violent coercion and that liberating reflection just brings to light an already existing state of things; yet it is no less wrong to claim that, prior to feminist critical reflection, things just took their course without any antagonistic tension and that violence becomes violence only when it is experienced as such. The paradox of reflection is that it retroactively makes the past state of things what it always-already "truly was": by means of the feminist retroactive gaze, the past is retroactively posited in its "truth".
On that account, one should be very careful not to reify the psychic impact of a certain sexual practice into its immediate property. For some feminists, for example, fellatio stands for the worst humiliation and debasement of the woman — what if, on the contrary, we imagine an intersubjective relationship in which fellatio bears witness to men's humiliation, to his abasement to a passive bearer of his phallus, a plaything in woman's hands? Our point here is not merely that the relationship of domination in a sexual contact is always tainted with ambiguity, but that it is the very ambiguity, "undecidability", of a Master/Servant relationship that "sexualizes" it. In the minimal dispositif of sexual intercourse, the one stares blindly, intoxicated with enjoyment, while the other "works" — who is here the Master and who the Servant? Who effectively serves whom as the means of his or her enjoyment? Is not the apparent Master the Slave of his Slave, is not the true Master he who demands of his Slave that he play the role of Master? In the standard (hetero)sexual act, man "takes", "makes use of", a woman — but with a small shift in perspective, it is possible to assert that he effectively reduces himself to an instrument of her enjoyment, subordinating himself to the insatiable superego-injunction "Encore!" (the title of Lacan's Seminar XX).

What we must avoid here, apropos of such dialectical passages of an opposite into its other, is the lure of symmetry: Hegel's point is not that the two reversals (of "genuine" authority into external coercion and vice versa) are somehow exchangeable, that they follow the same logic. Their asymmetry is best epitomized by means of reference to the couple of cynicism and irony. The fundamental gesture of cynicism is to denounce "genuine authority" as a pose, whose sole effective content is raw coercion or submission for the sake of some material gain, while an ironist doubts if a cold calculating utilitarian is really what he pretends to be, i.e,. he suspects that this appearance of calculating distance can conceal a much deeper commitment. The cynicist is quick to denounce the ridiculous pretense of solemn authority; the ironist is able to discern true attachment in dismissive disdain or in feigned indifference. In matters of love, for example, the cynicist excels in denigrating exalted declarations of deep spiritual affinity as a stratagem to exploit sexually or otherwise the partner, whereas the ironist is prone to ascertain, in a melancholic mood, how the brutal making sport of our partner, even humiliation, often just expresses our unreadiness to admit to ourselves the full depth of our attachment... Perhaps, the artist of irony par excellence was none other than Mozart — suffice it to recall his masterpiece Cosi fan tutte. The trio Soave il vento, of course, can be read in a cynical way, as the faked imitation of a sad farewell which barely conceals a glee at the coming erotic intrigue; the ironic point of it is that the subjects who sing it, inclusive of don Alfonzo, the manipulator who staged the event, are nonetheless authentically taken with the sadness of the situation — this unexpected authenticity is what eludes the grasp of the cynicist.

In a first approach, cynicism may appear to involve a much more radical distance than irony: is irony not a benevolent ridicule "from above", from within the confines of the symbolic order, i.e. the distance of a subject who views the world from the elevated position of the big Other towards those who are enticed by vulgar earthly pleasures, an awareness of their ultimate vanity, while cynicism relies on the "earthly" point-of-view which undermines "from below" our belief in the binding power of the Word, of the symbolic pact, and advances the substance of enjoyment as the only thing that really matters — Socrates versus Diogenes the Cynicist? The true relationship is, however, the reverse: from the right premise that "the big Other doesn't exist", i.e. that the symbolic order is a fiction, the cynicist draws the wrong conclusion that the big Other doesn't "function", that its role can simply be discounted — due to his failure to notice how the symbolic fiction nonetheless regulates his relationship to the real of enjoyment, he remains all the more enslaved to the symbolic context that defines his access to the Thing-Enjoyment, caught in the symbolic ritual he publicly mocks. This, preciely, is what Lacan has in mind with his les non-dupes errent: those who are not duped by the symbolic fiction are most deeply in error. The ironist's apparently "softer" approach, on the other hand, far more effectively unbinds the nodal points that hold together the symbolic universe, i.e. it is the ironist who effectively assumes the non-existence of the Other.

A common notion of psychoanalysis, of course, makes it almost an epitome of cynicism as an interpretative attitude: does psychoanalytic interpretation not involve in its very essence the act of discerning "lower" motivations (sexual lust, unacknowledged aggressivity) behind the apparently "noble" gestures of spiritual elevation of the beloved, of heroic self-sacrifice, etc.? Perhaps, however, this notion is somewhat too slick; perhaps the original enigma that psychoanalysis endeavours to explain is exactly the opposite: how can the effective behaviour of a person who professes his/her freedom from "prejudices" and "moralistic constraints" bear witness to inumerable inner impediments, unavowed prohibitions, etc.? Why does a person free to "enjoy life" engage in systematic "pursuit of unhappiness", methodically organizing his/her failures? What's in it for him/her, what perverse libidinal profit?

Another way to define the trap into which cynicism gets caught is via the difference between the public Law and its obscene underside, the unwritten superego rules: cynicism mocks the public Law from the position of its obscene underside which, consequently, it leaves intact. A personal experience revealed to me this inherent obscenity of Power in a most distastefully-enjoyable way. In the '70s, I did my (obligatory) army service in the old Yugoslav People's Army, in small barracks with no proper medical facilities. In a room which also served as sleeping quarters for a private trained as a medical assistant, once a week a doctor from the nearby military hospital held his consulting hours. On the frame of the large mirror above the wash-basin in this room, the soldier had stuck a couple of postcards of half-naked girls — a standard resource for masturbation in those pre-pornography times, to be sure. When the doctor was paying us his weekly visit, all of us who had reported for medical examination were seated on a long bench alongside the wall opposite the wash-basin and were then examined in turn. So, one day while I was also waiting to be examined, it was the turn of a young, half-illiterate soldier who complained of pains in his penis (which, of course, was in itself sufficient to trigger obscene giggles from all of us, the doctor included): the skin on its head was too tight, so he was unable to draw it back normally. The doctor ordered him to pull down his trousers and demonstrate his trouble; the soldier did so and the skin slid down the head smoothly, though the soldier was quick to add that his trouble occurred only during erection. The doctor then said: "OK, then masturbate, get an erection, so that we can check it!" Deeply embarrassed and red in the face, the soldier began to masturbate in front of all of us but, of course, failed to produce an erection; the doctor then took one of the postcards of half-naked girls from the mirror, held it close to the soldier's head and started to shout at him: "Look! What breasts, what a cunt! Masturbate! How is it that you don't get the erection? What kind of a man are you! Go on, masturbate!" All of us in the room, including the doctor himself, accompanied the spectacle with obscene laughter; the unfortunate soldier himself soon joined us with an embarrassed giggle, exchanging looks of solidarity with us while continuing to masturbate... This scene brought about in me an experience of quasi-epiphany: in nuce, there was everything in it, the entire dispositive of Power — the uncanny mixture of imposed enjoyment and humiliating exercise of Power, the agency of Power which shouts severe orders, but simultaneously shares with us, his subordinates, obscene laughter bearing witness to a deep solidarity...

One could also say that this scene renders the symptom of Power: the grotesque excess by means of which, in a unique short-circuit, attitudes which are officially opposed and mutually exclusive reveal their uncanny complicity, where the solemn agent of Power suddenly starts to wink at us across the table in a gesture of obscene solidarity, letting us know that the thing (i.e. his orders) is not to be taken too seriously and thereby consolidating his power. The aim of the "critique of ideology", of the analysis of an ideological edifice, is to extract this symptomal kernel which the official, public ideological text simultaneously disavows and needs for its undisturbed functioning.

Raymond Pettibon, The Statue of Liberty, ink on paper, 1995.
Raymond Pettibon, No title, ink on paper, 1990.

From Joyce-the-Symptom... - Lacanian Ink 11 (April)

Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or How Not to Misread Lacan's Formulas of Sexuation by Slavoj Zizek

lacanian ink 10 - 1995

The usual way of misreading Lacan's formulas of sexuation 1 is to reduce the difference of the masculine and the feminine side to the two formulas that define the masculine position, as if masculine is the universal phallic function and feminine the exception, the excess, the surplus that eludes the grasp of the phallic function. Such a reading completely misses Lacan's point, which is that this very position of the Woman as exception-say, in the guise of the Lady in courtly love-is a masculine fantasy par excellence. As the exemplary case of the exception constitutive of the phallic function, one usually mentions the fantasmatic, obscene figure of the primordial father-jouisseur who was not encumbered by any prohibition and was as such able fully to enjoy all women. Does, however, the figure of the Lady in courtly love not fully fit these determinations of the primordial father? Is she not also a capricious Master who wants it all, i.e., who, herself not bound by any Law, charges her knight-servant with arbitrary and outrageous ordeals?

In this precise sense, Woman is one of the names-of-the-father. The crucial details not to be missed here are the use of plural and the lack of capital letters: not Name-of-the-Father, but one of the names-of-the-father-one of the nominations of the excess called primordial father. 2 In the case of Woman-the mythical She, the Queen from Rider Haggard's novel of the same name for example-as well as in the case of the primordial father, we are dealing with an agency of power which is pre-symbolic, unbridled by the Law of castration; in both cases, the role of this fantasmatic agency is to fill out the vicious cycle of the symbolic order, the void of its origins: what the notion of Woman (or of the primordial father) provides is the mythical starting point of unbridled fullness whose "primordial repression" constitutes the symbolic order.

A second misreading consists in rendering obtuse the sting of the formulas of sexuation by way of introducing a semantic distinction between the two meanings of the quantifier "all": according to this misreading, in the case of the universal function, "all" (or "not-all") refers to a singular subject (x), and signals whether "all of it" is caught in the phallic function; whereas the particular exception "there is one..." refers to the set of subjects and signals, whether within this set "there is one" who is (or is not) entirely exempted from the phallic function. The feminine side of the formulas of sexuation thus allegedly bears witness to a cut that splits each woman from within: no woman is entirely exempted from the phallic function, and for that very reason, no woman is entirely submitted to it, i.e., there is something in each woman that resists the phallic function. In a symmetric way, on the masculine side, the asserted universality refers to a singular subject (each male subject is entirely submitted to the phallic function) and the exemption to the set of male subjects ('there is one' who is entirely exempted from the phallic function). In short, since one man is entirely exempted from the phallic function, all others are wholly submitted to it, and since no woman is entirely exempted from the phallic function, none of them is also wholly submitted to it. In the one case, the splitting is externalized: it stands for the line of separation that, within the set of "all men", distinguishes those who are caught in the phallic function from the 'one' who is exempted from it; in the other case, it is internalized: every singular woman is split from within, part of her is submitted to the phallic function and part of her exempted from it.

However, if we are to assume fully the true paradox of Lacan's formulas of sexuation, one has to read them far more literally: woman undermines the universality of the phallic function by the very fact that there is no exception in her, nothing that resists it. In other words, the paradox of the phallic function resides in a kind of short-circuit between the function and its meta-function: the phallic function coincides with its own self-limitation, with the setting up of a non-phallic exception. Such a reading is prefigured by the somewhat enigmatic mathemes that Lacan wrote under the formulas of sexuation and where woman (designated by the crossed-out la) is split between the capitalized Φ (of the phallus) and S(A), the signifier of the crossed-out Other that stands for the nonexistence/inconsistency of the Other, of the symbolic order. What one should not fail to notice here is the deep affinity between the Φ and S(A), the signifier of the lack in the Other, i.e., the crucial fact that the Phi, the signifier of the phallic power, phallus in its fascinating presence, merely gives body to the impotence/inconsistency of the Other.

Suffice to recall a political leader-what is the ultimate support of his charisma? The domain of politics is by definition incalculable, unpredictable; a person stirs up passionate reactions without knowing why; the logic of transference cannot be mastered, so one usually refers to the magic touch, to an unfathomable je ne sais quoi which cannot be reduced to any of the leader's actual features-it seems as if the charismatic leader dominates this (x), as if he pulls the strings where the Other of the symbolic order is incapacitated. The situation is here homologous to the common notion of God as a person criticized by Spinoza: in their endeavour to understand the world around them by way of formulating the network of causal connections between events and objects, people sooner or later arrive at the point at which their understanding fails, encounter a limit, and God (conceived as an old bearded wiseman, etc.) merely gives body to this limit-we project into the personalized notion of God the hidden, unfathomable cause of all that cannot be understood and explained via a clear causal connection.

The first operation of the critique of ideology is therefore to recognize in the fascinating presence of God the filler of the gaps in the structure of our knowledge, i.e., the element in the guise of which the lack in our positive knowledge acquires positive presence. And our point is that it is somewhat homologous with the feminine "not-all": this not-all does not mean that woman is not entirely submitted to the Phallus; it rather signals that she sees through the fascinating presence of the Phallus, that she is able to discern in it the filler of the inconsistency of the Other. Yet another way to put it would be to say that the passage from S(A) to the Φ is the passage from impossibility to prohibition: S(A) stands for the impossibility of the signifier of the Other, for the fact that there is no "Other of Other", that the field of the Other is inherently inconsistent, and the Φ reifies this impossibility into the exception, into a sacred, prohibited/unattainable agent who avoids castration and is thus able really to enjoy (the primordial Father, the Lady in courtly love). 3

One can see now, how the logic of the formulas of sexuation ultimately coincides with that of public power and its inherent transgression: 4 in both cases, the crucial feature is that the subject is effectively 'in' (caught in the phallic function, in the web of power) only and precisely insofar as he does not fully identify with it but maintains a kind of distance towards it (posits an exception to the universal phallic function; indulges in the inherent transgression of the public Law), and, on the other side, the system (of public Law, of phallic economy) is effectively undermined by the very unreserved identification with it. 5 Stephen King's Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption tackles with all stringency this problem apropos of the paradoxes of prison life. The commonplace about prison life is that I am effectively integrated into it, ruined by it, when my accommodation to it is so overwhelming that I can no longer stand or even imagine freedom, life outside prison; so that my release brings about a total psychic breakdown, or at least gives rise to a longing for the lost safety of prison life. The actual dialectic of prison life, however, is somewhat more refined. Prison effectively destroys me, attains a total hold over me, precisely when I do not fully consent to the fact that I am in prison but maintain a kind of inner distance towards it, stick to the illusion that real life is elsewhere, and all the time indulge in daydreaming about life outside, about nice things that are waiting for me after my release or escape. I thereby get caught in the vicious cycle of fantasy, so that when eventually I am released, the grotesque discord between fantasy and reality breaks me down. The only true solution is therefore fully to accept the rules of prison life and then, within the universe governed by these rules, to work on a way to beat them. In short, inner distance and daydreaming about life elsewhere effectively enchains me to prison, whereas full acceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by the prison rules, opens up a space for true hope. 6

The paradox of the phallic function (which symmetrically inverts the paradox of the feminine not-all) is therefore that the phallic function acts as its own self-limitation, that it posits its own exception. 7 And insofar as the phallic function, i.e., the phallic signifier, is the quasi-transcendental signifier, the signifier of the symbolic order as such, one can say that it merely reveals the fundamental feature of the symbolic order at its purest, a certain short-circuit of different levels that pertains to the domain of modal logic. In order to illustrate this a priori possibility of the short-circuit between different levels that pertains to the symbolic order qua order of symbolic mandates-titles, let us recall the opposition of father/uncle: father qua severe authority versus uncle qua good fellow who spoils us. The seemingly meaningless, contradictory title of father-uncle can be nonetheless justified as the designation of a father who is not fully ready to exert his paternal authority, but instead spoils his offspring. (To avoid misunderstanding: far from being a kind of eccentric exception, father-uncle is simply the normal everyday father who maintains a distance towards his symbolic mandate, i.e., who, while fully taking advantage of his authority, at the same time affects camaraderie and gives an occasional wink to his son, letting him know that, after all, he is also merely human ...) We are dealing here with the same short-circuit as that found in The History of VKP(B), the holy text of Stalinism, where-among other numerous flashes of the logic of the signifier-one can read that, at a Party congress, "... the resolution was unanimously adopted by a large majority". If the resolution was adopted unanimously, where is the(however tiny) minority opposed to the large majority?

The way to solve the riddle of this 'something that counts as nothing' is, perhaps, to read the quoted statement as the condensation of two levels: the delegates resolved by a large majority that their resolution is to count as unanimous... The link with the Lacanian logic of the signifier is here unmistakable-the minority which mysteriously disappears in this enigmatic/absurd overlapping between majority and unanimity is none other than the exception which constitutes the universal order of unanimity. 8 The feminine position, on the contrary, is defined by the rejection of this short-circuit-how? Let us take as our starting point the properly Hegelian paradox of coincidentia oppositorum that characterizes the standard notion of women: woman is simultaneously a representation, a spectacle par excellence, an image intended to fascinate, to attract the gaze, while still an enigma, the unrepresentable, that which a priori eludes the gaze. She is all surface, lacking any depth, and the unfathomable abyss.

In order to elucidate this paradox, suffice it to reflect on the implications of a discontent that pertains to a certain kind of feminist critique which persistently denounces every description of femininity as male cliché, as something violently imposed onto women. The question that instantly pops up is: what is, then, the feminine "in itself", obfuscated by male clichés? The problem is that all answers (from the traditional eternally feminine, to Kristeva and Irigaray) can again be discredited as male clichés. Carol Gilligan, for example, 9 opposes to the male values of autonomy, competitiveness, etc., the feminine values of intimacy, attachment, interdependence, care and concern, responsibility and self-sacrifice, etc. Are these authentic feminine features or male clichés about women, features imposed on women in the patriarchal society? The matter is undecidable, so that the only possible answer is, both at the same time. 10 The issue thus has to be reformulated in purely topological terms: with regard to the positive content, the male representation of woman is the same as woman in herself; the difference concerns only the place, the purely formal modality of the comprehension of the same content (in the first case this content is conceived as it is 'for the other', in the second case, as it is "in itself"). This purely formal shift in modality, however, is crucial. In other words, the fact that every positive determination of what woman is "in herself" brings us back to what she is "for the other" (for man), in no way compels us to the male-chauvinist conclusion that woman is what she is only for the other, for man: what remains is the topological cut, the purely formal difference between the "for the other" and "for herself".

Here, one should recall the passage from consciousness to self-consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: what one encounters in the suprasensible Beyond is, as to its positive content, the same as our terrestrial everyday world; this same content is merely transposed to a different modality. Hegel's point, however, is that it would be false to conclude from this identity of content that there is no difference between the terrestrial reality and its Beyond: in its original dimension, Beyond is not some positive content but an empty place, a kind of screen onto which one can project any positive content whatsoever-and this empty p ace is the subject. Once we become aware of it, we pass from Substance to Subject, i.e., from consciousness to self-consciousness. 11 In this precise sense, woman is the subject par excellence. The same point could be made also in Schelling's terms, i.e., in terms of the difference between the subject qua original void, deprived of any further positive qualifications (in Lacan's mathemes:, $), and the features that this subject assumes, puts on, and which are ultimately always artificial, contingent. 12 It is precisely insofar as woman is characterized by an original masquerade, insofar as all her features are artificially put on, that she is more subject than man-since according to Schelling, what ultimately characterizes the subject is this very radical contingency and artificiality of her ever positive feature, i.e., the fact that she in herself is a pure void that cannot be identified with any of these features.

We are us dealing with a kind of convoluted, curved space, as in the story about Achilles and the tortoise: the male representations (which articulate what woman is "for the other") endlessly approach the woman-tortoise, yet the moment the man leaps over, overtakes the woman-tortoise, he finds himself again where he already was, within the male representations about what woman is "in herself"-woman's "in itself" is always already "for the other". Woman an never be caught, one can never come up with her, one can either endlessly approach her or overtake her, for the very reason that "woman in herself" designates no substantial content but just a purely formal cut, a limit that is always missed-this purely formal cut is the subject qua $. One is thus tempted to paraphrase Hegel again: everything hinges on our conceiving woman not merely as Substance but also as Subject, i.e., on accomplishing a shift from the notion of woman as a substantial content beyond male representations to the notion of woman qua pure topological cut that forever separates the "for the other" from the "in itself".

The asymmetry of the sexual difference resides in the fact that in the case of man we are not dealing with the same cut, we do not distinguish in the same way between what he is "in himself" and what he is 'for the other' qua masquerade. True, the so-called modern man is also caught in the split between what (it seems to him that) the other (woman or social environment in general) expects from him (to be a strong macho type, etc.), and between what he effectively is in himself (weak, uncertain of himself, etc.). This split, however, is of a fundamentally different nature: the macho-image is not experienced as a delusive masquerade but as the ideal-ego one is striving to become. Behind the macho-image of a man there is no secret, just a weak ordinary person that can never live up to his ideal; whereas the trick of the feminine masquerade is to present itself as a mask that conceals the feminine secret. In other words, in opposition to man, who simply tries to live up to his image, i.e., to give the impression that he really is what he pretends to be, woman deceives by means of deception itself; she offers the mask as mask, as false pretence, in order to give rise to the search for the secret behind the mask. 13

This problematic of femininity qua masquerade also enables us to approach in a new way Lacan's earlier attempt (from the late '50s in "The signification of the phallus") to conceptualize sexual difference as internal to the phallic economy, as the difference between "having" and "being" (man has the phallus, woman is the phallus). A reproach that immediately arises here concerns the reliance of this difference on Freud's naïve anthropologist evolutionism whose premise is that the primitive savage doesn't have an unconscious since he is (our, civilized man's) unconscious. Does the attempt to conceptualize sexual difference by means of the opposition of being and having not imply woman's subordination to man, i.e., the notion of woman as a lower, less reflected, more immediate stage, somewhat in the sense of Schelling's notion of progression as the passage from being to having? That is to say, in Schelling's philosophy, (what previously was) a Being becomes a predicate of a higher Being; (what previously was) a Subject becomes an object of a higher Subject: an animal, for example, is immediately its own Subject, it is its living body, whereas man cannot be said to be his body, he merely has a body which is thus degraded to his predicate...

As a close reading of Lacan's text instantly attests however, the opposition we are dealing with is not that of being versus having, but rather the opposition of to have/to appear: woman is not the phallus, she merely appears to be to be phallus, and this appearing (which of course is identical with femininity qua masquerade) points towards a logic of lure and deception. Phallus can perform its function only as veiled-the moment it is unveiled, it is no longer phallus; what the mask of femininity conceals is therefore not directly the phallus but rather the fact that there is nothing behind the mask. In a word, phallus is a pure semblance, a mystery which resides in the mask as such. On that account, Lacan can claim that a woman wants to be loved for what she is not, not for what she truly is: she offers herself to man not as herself, but in the guise of a mask. 14 Or, to put it in Hegelian terms: phallus does not stand for an immediate Being but for a Being which is only insofar as it is "for the other", i.e., for a pure appearing. On that account, the Freudian primitive is not immediately the unconscious, he is merely unconscious for us, for our external gaze: the spectacle of his unconscious (primitive passions, exotic rituals) is his masquerade by means of which like the woman with her masquerade, he fascinates the other's (our) desire.

Man wants to be loved for what he truly is; which is why the archetypal male scenario of the trial of woman's love is that of the prince from a fairy tale who first approaches his beloved under the guise of a poor servant, in order to insure that the woman will fall in love with him for himself, not for his princely title. This, however, is precisely what a woman doesn't want-and is this not yet another confirmation of the fact that woman is more subject than man? A man stupidly believes that, beyond his symbolic title, there is deep in himself some substantial content, some hidden treasure which makes him worthy of love, whereas a woman knows that there is nothing beneath the mask-her strategy is precisely to preserve this 'nothing' of her freedom, out of reach of man's possessive love...

A recent English publicity spot for a beer renders perfectly what Lacan aims at with his notion that "... there is no sexual relation". Its first part stages the well-known fairy tale anecdote: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn't over yet: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her towards himself, kisses her, and she turns into a bottle of beer the man triumphantly holds in his hand... For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signalled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence (in Lacan's mathemes, Phi); for the man, it is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (in Lacan's mathemes, the objet petit a). On account of this asymmetry the relationship is impossible: we have either a woman with the frog or a man with the bottle of beer; what we can never obtain is the natural couple of the beautiful woman and man... To conclude, two clichés are to be avoided apropos of the hysterical nature of feminine subjectivity:

-on the one hand, the dismissive treatment of the (feminine) hysterical subject as a confused babbler unable to confront reality, and therefore taking refuge in impotent theatrical gestures (an example from the domain of political discourse: from Lenin onwards, Bolsheviks regularly stigmatized their liberal political opponents as hysterics who "do not know what they effectively want");

-on the other hand, the false elevation of hysteria to a protest, through woman's body language, against male domination: by means of hysterical symptoms, the (feminine) subject signals her refusal to act as the empty screen or medium for the male monologue.

Hysteria has to be comprehended in the complexity of its strategy as a radically ambiguous protest against Master's interpolation which simultaneously bears witness to the fact that the hysterical subject needs a Master, that she cannot do without a Master, so that there is no simple and direct way out. For that reason, one should also avoid the historicist pitfall of rejecting the notion of hysteria as belonging to a bygone era, i.e., the notion that today borderline disturbances, not hysteria, are the predominant form of "discontent" in our civilization: borderline is the contemporary form of hysteria, i.e., of the subject's refusal to accept the predominant mode of interpolation whose agent is no longer the traditional Master but the expert-knowledge of the discourse of Science. In short, the shift from the classic form of hysteria to borderline disturbances is strictly correlative with the shift from the traditional Master to the form of Power legitimized by Knowledge.

A more than sufficient reason for maintaining the notion of hysteria is that the status of the subject as such is ultimately hysterical. That is to say, when Lacan asserts that the most succinct definition of the subject is 'that which is not an object', the apparent banality of this claim should not deceive us: the subject-in the precise psychoanalytic sense of the subject of desire-only exists insofar as the question remains open of how much of an object she is for the Other, i.e., I am a subject insofar as the radical perplexity persists as to the Other's desire, as to what the Other sees (and finds worthy of desire) in me. In other words, when Lacan claims that there is no desire without an object-cause, this does not amount to the banality according to which every desire is attached to its objective correlative: the 'lost object' which sets in motion my desire is ultimately the subject herself, and the lack in question concerns her uncertainty as to her status for the Other's desire. In this precise sense, desire is always desire of the Other: the subject's desire is the desire to ascertain her status as the object of the Other's desire.

Notes

1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-73 (Encore), New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.

2 In the domain of politics, populist rhetoric offers a case of the exception which grounds universality: whenever the opinion prevails that politics as such is corrupted etc., one can be sure that there is always one politician to promulgate this universal distrust and thereby offer himself as the one to be trusted, the neutral/apolitical representative of the people's true interests...

3 The transsexual subject, by way of installing Woman at the place of the Name-of-the-Father, disavows castration. If one adopts the usual feminist-deconstructionist commonplace, according to which the notion of castration implies that woman, not man, is castrated, one would expect that when Woman occupies the place of symbolic authority this place will be branded by castration; if however, we take into account that both Woman and the primordial father are uncastratable, the mystery immediately disappears.

4 Slavoj Zizek, Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, New York: Verso, 1994.

5 Since, in patriarchal societies, male predominance is inscribed into the symbolic order itself, does the assertion that women are integrated into it without exception-in a sense more fully than men-not run counter to their subordinate position within this order? Is it not more logical to ascribe the subordinate position to those who are not fully integrated into the symbolic order? What one must challenge here is the underlying premise according to which Power belongs to those who are more fully within the symbolic order. The exercise of Power, on the contrary, always involves a residue of the non-symbolized real (in the guise of the unfathomable je ne sais quoi which is supposed to account for the Master's charisma, for example). It is not accidental that both our examples of the constitutive exception, of the element non-integrated into the symbolic order (primordial father, Lady in courtly love), involve the figure of an extremely cruel Master not bound by any Law.

6 This paradox points towards the delusion which is the proper object of psychoanalysis-the delusion more refined than a simple mistaking of a false appearance for the thing itself. When, for example, I daydream about sexual prowess and conquests, I am, of course, all the time aware of the illusory character of my fantasizing-I know very well that, in reality, I'll never effectively do it, that I am 'not really like that'. The delusion resides elsewhere: this daydreaming is a screen which provides a misleading image of myself, not only of my capacities but also of my true desires-if, in reality, I were to find myself in a position to realize my daydreaming, I would surely retreat from it in panic. At an even more complex level (in the case of indulging in sadistic fantasies, for example), the very soothing awareness of how I merely daydream, of how "I am not really like that", can well conceal the extent to which my desire is determined by these fantasies...

7 Insofar as the symbolic constitutes itself by way of positing some element as the traumatic non-symbolizable Thing, as its constitutive exception, then the symbolic gesture par excellence is the drawing of a line of separation between symbolic and real; the real on the contrary, is not external to the symbolic as some kind of substance resisting symbolization-the real is the symbolic itself qua "not-all", i.e., insofar as it lacks the constitutive exception.

8 It would be productive to elaborate the link between the totalitarian leader and the art of the comic absurd, in which figures of the capricious Master, à la Jarry's roi Ubu, abound: i.e., to read Lewis Carroll with Samuel Goldwyn, Marx Brothers with Stalin, etc.

9 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Such a feminine substantialism (this word is probably more appropriate than the usual essentialism) often serves as the hidden presupposition of feminist argumentation. Suffice it to recall the standard claim that a woman who actively participates in patriarchal repression (by way of following the male ideals of feminine beauty, focusing her life on raising the children, etc.) is eo ipso a victim of male manipulation and plays a role imposed on her. This logic is homologous to the old orthodox Marxist claim: the working class is, as to its objective social position, progressive. So that when workers engage in the anti-Semitic, right-wing populism, they are being manipulated by the ruling class and its ideology: in both cases, one has to assert that there is no substantial guarantee of the progressive nature of women or of the working class-the situation is irreducibly antagonistic and open, the terrain of an undecidable ideological and political struggle.

10 This ambiguity pertains already to the commonplace notion of femininity, which, in line with Gilligan, associates women with intimacy, identification, spontaneity, as opposed to male distance, reflectivity, calculation; but at the same time, also with masquerade, affected feigning, as opposed to male authentic inwardness-woman is simultaneously more spontaneous and more artificial than man.

11 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: OUP, 1977.

12 F.W.J. von Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, Cambridge: CUP, 1994.

13 We can see now how the notion of femininity qua masquerade is strictly co-dependent with the position of woman as "not-all": supposed to conceal something beneath itself, the mask is not all; so, since there is nothing-no hidden truth beneath the mask-there is also no positive, substantial element exempted from the masquerade, which is not a mask. The name for this void which is in itself nothing, but nonetheless makes the domain of masks not-all, of course, is the subject qua void (_).

14 "It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved". Jacques Lacan, ...crits: A Selection, New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.