However, the 'big Other' is not simply the decentred symbolic 'substance'; the further crucial feature is that this 'substance' is, in turn, again subjectivized, experienced as the 'subject supposed to know', the Other of the (forever split, hysterical) subject, the guarantor of the consistency of the field of knowledge. As such, the 'subject supposed to know' is often embodied in a concrete individual, not only God himself (the paradoxical function of God as qua big Other from Descartes through Hobbes and Newton, and so on, up to Einstein is precisely to guarantee the materialist mechanism of Nature--God is the ultimate guarantee that 'nature does not play at dice', but obeys its own laws, but even some quasi-empirical figure; let us recall this well-known passage from Heidegger:
[blockquote from Heidegger] "Recently I got a second invitation to teach at the University of Berlin. On that occasion I left Freiburg and withdrew to the cabin. I listened to what the mountains and the forest and the farmlands were saying, and I went to see an old friend of mine, a 75-year-old farmer. He had read about the call to Berlin in the newspaper. What would he say? Slowly he fixed the sure gaze of his clear eyes on mine, and keeping his mouth tightly shut, he thoughtfully put his faithful hand on my shoulder. Ever so slightly he shook his head. That meant: absolutely no."
Here we have it all: the uncorrupted/experienced old farmer as the subject supposed to know who, with his barely perceptible gesture, a prolongation of the whisper of 'the mountains and the forest', provides the definitive answer....On a different level, did not a reference to the judgement of an authentic member of the working class play the same role in some versions of Marxism-Leninism? And is it not true that even today, multiculturalist 'politically correct' discourse attributes the same authentic stance of the one 'supposed to know' to some privileged (African-American, gay...) figure of the Other?
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