Dialectics and Noir (2)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 248-9:

[....] The key to the 'drama of false appearances' is therefore that, in it, less overlaps with more. On the one hand, the standard procedure of censorship is not to show the (prohibited) event (murder, sex act) directly, but in the way it is reflected in the witnesses; on the other hand, this deprivation opens up a space to be filled in by phantasmatic projections--that is to say, it is possible that the gaze which does not see what is actually going on clearly sees more, not less.

Similarly, the notion of noir (or of 'poststructuralist deconstructionism', for that matter), although it results from a limited foreign perspective, perceives in its object a potential which is invisible to those who are directly engaged in it. That is the ultimate dialectical paradox of truth and falsity: sometimes, the aberrant view which misreads a situation from its limited perspective can, by virtue of this very limitation, perceive the 'repressed' potential of the observed constellation. It is true that, if we submit productions usually designated as noir to a close historical analysis, the very concept of film noir loses its consistency, and disintegrates; paradoxically, however, we should none the less insist that Truth is on the level of the spectral (false) appearance of noir, not in detailed historical knowledge. The effectiveness of this concept of noir is that which today enables us immediately to identify as noir the short scene from Lady in the Lake, the simple line of a dialogue in which the detective answers the question 'But why did he kill her? Didn't he love her? with a straight 'That is reason enough to kill'.

Furthermore, sometimes the external misperception exerts a productive influence on the misperceived 'original' itself, forcing it to become aware of its own 'repressed' truth (arguably, the French notion of noir, although it is the result of misperception, exerted a strong influence on American film-making). Is not the supreme example of this productivity of the external misperception the American reception of Derrida? Did it not--although it clearly was a misperception--exert a retroactive productive influence on Derrida himself, forcing him to confront ethico-political issues more directly? Was not the American reception of Derrida in this sense a kind of pharmakon, a supplement to the 'original' Derrida himself--a poisonous stain-fake, distorting the original and at the same time keeping it alive? In short, would Derrida still be so much 'alive' if we were to subtract from his work its American misperception?Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 244-5: