From Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eeerdmans Publishing Co.), pp. 145-149:
The Counterbook of Christianity
What can I add to the book that provides a precise critical reading of my continuous struggle to come to terms, as an atheist, with our Christian legacy? The only honest thing to do is to "dot the i," as it were, with a concise version of what I perceive as the Communist core of the Christian ethical revolution.
Let me begin with a simple mental experiment with two of Hitchcock's late masterpieces. What if Vertigo were to end after Madeleine's suicide, with the devastated Scottie listening to Mozart in the sanatorium? What if Psycho were to end seconds prior to the shower murder, with Marion staring into the falling water, purifying herself? In both cases we would get a consistent short film. Vertigo would be a drama of the destruction caused by the violently obsessive male desire: it is the very excessive-possessive nature of male desire that makes it destructive of its object--(male) love is murder, as Otto Weininger knew long ago. Psycho would be a moral tale about the catastrophe prevented in the last minute: Marion commits a minor crime, escaping with the stolen money to rejoin her lover; on the way she meets Norman, who is like a figure of moral warning, rendering visible to Marion what awaits her at the end of the line if she follows the path taken; this terrifying vision sobers her up, so she withdraws to her room, plans her return, and then takes a shower, as if to cleanse her of her moral dirt. In both cases, it is thus as if what we are first lured into taking as the full story is all of a sudden displaced, reframed, relocated into, or supplemented by another story, something along the lines of the idea envisaged by Borges in the opening story of his Fictions, which culminates in the claim: "Un libro que no encierra su contra-libro es considerado incomplete" [A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete]. In his 2005-2006 seminar, Jacques-Alain Miller elaborated on this idea, referring to Ricardo Piglia. Piglia quoted as an example of Borges's claim one of Mikhail Chekhov's tales whose nucleus is: "A man goes to the casino at Monte Carlo, wins a million, returns to his place and commits suicide."
If this is the nucleus of a story, one must, in order to tell it, divide the twisted story in two: on the one hand, the story of the game; on the other, that of the suicide. Thus Piglia's first thesis: that a story always has a double characteristic and always tells two stories at the same time, which provides the opportunity to distinguish the story that is on the first plane from the number 2 story that is encoded in the interstices of story number 1. We should note that story number 2 appears only when the story is concluded, and it has the effect of surprise. What joins these two stories is that the elements, the events, are inscribed in two narrative registers that are at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories. The inversions that seem superfluous in the development of story number 1 become, on the contrary, essential in the plot of story number 2.
There is a modern form of the story that transforms this structure by omitting the surprise finale without closing the structure of the story, which leaves the trace of a narrative, and the tension of the two stories is never resolved. This is what one considers as being properly modern: the subtraction of the final anchoring point that allows the two stories to continue in an unresolved tension.
This is the case, says Piglia, with Hemingway, who pushed the ellipse to its highest point in such a way that the secret story remains hermetic. One perceives simply that there is another story that needs to be told but remains absent. There is a hole. If one modified Chekhov's note in Hemingway's style, it would not narrate the suicide, but rather the text would be assembled in such a way that one might think that the reader already knew it. Kafka constitutes another of these variants. He narrates very simply, in his novels, the most secret story, a secret story that appears on the first plane, told as if coming from itself, and he encodes the story that should be visible but becomes, on the contrary, enigmatic and hidden.
Back to Hitchcock's Vertigo and Psycho. Is this not precisely the structure of the narrative twist/cut in both films? In both cases story number 2 (the shift to Judy and to Norman) appears only when the story seems concluded, and it certainly has the effect of surprise; in both cases the two narrative registers are at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories. The inversions that seem superfluous in the development of story number 1 (like the totally contingent intrusion of the murdering monster in Psycho) become essential in the plot of story number 2.
One can thus well imagine, along these lines, Psycho remade by Hemingway or Kafka. Exemplary of Hemingway's procedure is "The Killers," his best-known short story that, on a mere ten pages, reports in a terse style the arrival of two killers to a small provincial city; they occupy there a diner, awaiting a mysterious "Swede" whom they have to kill. Swede's young friend escapes from the diner and informs him that two killers are on the way to murder him, yet Swede is so desperate and resigned that he sends the boy off and calmly awaits them. The "second story," the explanation of this enigma (what happened to Swede that he is ready to calmly await his death), is never told. (The classic film noir based on this story tries to fill in this void: in the series of flashbacks, the "second story," the betrayal of a femme fatale, is told in detail.) In Hemingway's version, Norman's story will remain hermetic: the spectator will simply perceive that there is another (Norman's) story that needs to be told but remains absent--there is a hole. In Kafka's version Norman's story would appear in the first plane, told as if coming from itself: Norman's weird universe would have been narrated directly, in the first person, as something most normal, while Marion's story would have been encoded/enframed by Norman's horizon, told as enigmatic and hidden. Just imagine the conversation between Marion and Norman in his private room, prior to the shower murder: the way we have it now, our point of identification is Marion, and Norman appears as a weird and threatening presence. What if this scene were reshot with Norman as our point of identification, so that Marion's "ordinary" questions would appear as what they often effectively are, a cruel and insensitive intrusion into Norman's world?
This is how, from a proper Hegelo-Lacanian perspective, one should subvert the standard self-enclosed linear narrative: not by means of a postmodern dispersal into a multitude of local narratives, but by means of its redoubling in a hidden counternarrative. (This is why the classic detective whodunit is so similar to the psychoanalytic process: in it, also, the two narrative registers--the visible story of the discovery of crime and its investigation by the detective, and the hidden story of what really happened--are "at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories.") And is one of the ways to conceptualize class struggle not also such a split between the two narratives that are "at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories"? If one starts to tell the story from the standpoint of the ruling class, one sooner or later reaches a gap, a point at which something arises that doesn't make sense within the horizon of the story, something experienced as a meaningless brutality, something akin to the unexpected intrusion of the murdering figure in the shower scene from Psycho. In 1922 the Soviet government organized the forced expulsion of leading anti-Communist intellectuals, from philosophers and theologians to economists and historians. They left Russia for Germany on a boat known as the "Philosophy Steamer." Prior to his expulsion, Nikolai Lossky, one of those forced into exile, enjoyed with his family the comfortable life of the haute bourgeoisie, supported by servants and nannies. He "simply couldn't understand who would want to destroy his way of life. What had the Losskys and their kind done? His boys and their friends, as they inherited the best of what Russia had to offer, helped fill the world with talk of literature and music and art, and they led gentle lives. What was wrong with that?"
To account for such a foreign element, one has to pass to "story number 2," the story from the standpoint of the exploited. For Marxism, class struggle is not the all-encompassing narrative of our history, it is an irreducible clash of narratives--and does not the same go for today's Israel? Many peace-loving Israelis confess to their perplexity: they just want peace and a shared life with the Palestinians: they are ready to make concessions, but why do Palestinians hate them so much, why the brutal suicide bombings that kill innocent wives and children? The thing to do here is of course to supplement this story with its counterstory, the story of what it means to be a Palestinian in the occupied territories, subjected to hundreds of regulations of the bureaucratic microphysics of power--say, a Palestinian farmer is allowed to dig a hole in the earth no deeper than three feet to find a source of water, while a Jewish farmer is allowed to dig as deep as he wants.
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