by Slavoj Žižek
There are pipes
and pipes.
Flaubert’s description of the
first encounter of Madame Bovary and her lover 1
condense the entire problematic which, according to Foucault, determines the
post-Kantian episteme of the 19th century: the new configuration of the axis
power–knowledge caused by the incommensurability between the field of
representation and the Thing, as well as the elevation of sexuality to the
dignity of the unrepresentable Thing. After the two lovers enter the coach and
tell the driver just to circulate around the city, we hear nothing about what
goes on behind the coach’s safely closed curtains: with an attention to detail
reminiscent of the later nouveau roman, Flaubert limits himself to lengthy
descriptions of the city environment through which the coach aimlessly wanders,
the stone-paved streets, the church arches, etc. — only in one short sentence
does he mention that, for a brief moment, a naked hand pierced through the
curtain… this scene is made as if to illustrate Foucault’s thesis, from the
first volume of his History of Sexuality, that the very speech whose “official”
function is to conceal sexuality actually engenders the appearance of its
secret, i.e. that, to make use of the very terms of psychoanalysis against
which Foucault’s thesis is aimed, the “repressed” content is an effect of
repression: the more the writer’s gaze is restricted to irrelevant and boring
architectural details, the more we, the readers, are tormented, greedy to learn
what goes on in the space behind the closed curtains of the coach. The public
prosecutor walked into this trap in the trial against Madame Bovary when he
quoted precisely this passage as one instance of the obscene character of the
book: it was easy for Flaubert’s defense lawyer to point out that there is
nothing obscene in the neutral descriptions of paved streets and old houses.
Any obscenity is entirely constrained to the reader’s (in this case: the
prosecutor’s) imagination obsessed by the “real thing” behind the curtain .… It
is perhaps no mere accident that today, this procedure of Flaubert strikes us
as eminently cinematic: it is as if it plays upon what cinema theory designates
as hors-champ, the externality of the field of vision that, in its very
absence, organizes the economy of what can be seen: if (as was long ago proven
by the classical analyses of Eisenstein) Dickens introduced into the literary
discourse the correlatives of what later became the elementary cinematic
procedures — the triad of establishing shots, “American” pans and close-ups;
the parallel montage, etc. —, Flaubert took a step further towards an
externality that eludes the standard exchange of field and counter-field, i.e.
an externality that has to remain excluded if the field of what can be
represented is to retain its consistency. 2
The crucial point, however, is
not to mistake this incommensurability between the field of representation and
sexuality for the censorship of the description of sexuality already at work in
the preceding epochs. If Madame Bovary were to have been written a century
earlier, the details of sexual activity would also have remained unmentioned,
for sure, yet what we would have read after the two lover’s entry into the secluded
space of the coach would have been a simple short statement like: “Finally
alone and hidden behind the curtains of the coach, the lovers yielded to
passion.” There, the lengthy descriptions of streets and buildings would have
been totally out of place, they would have been perceived as lacking any
function, since, in this pre-Kantian universe of representations, no radical
tension could arise between the represented content and the traumatic Thing
behind the curtain. Against this background, one is tempted to propose one of
the possible definitions of “realism:” a naive belief that, behind the curtain
of representations, some full, substantial reality actually exists (in the case
of Madame Bovary, the reality of sexual superfluity). “Postrealism” begins with
a doubt as to the existence of this reality “behind the curtain,” i.e. with the
foreboding that the very gesture of concealment creates what it pretends to
conceal.
An exemplary case of such
“postrealist” playfulness, of course, are the paintings of Rene Magritte.
Today, when one says “Magritte,” the first association, of course, is
the notorious drawing of a pipe with an inscription below it: Ceci n’est pas
une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). Taking as a starting point the paradoxes
implied by this painting, Michel Foucault wrote a perspicacious little book of
the same title. 3
Yet, perhaps, another of Magritte’s paintings can serve even more appropriately
to establish the elementary matrix that generates the uncanny effects
pertaining to his work: La
lunette d’approche from 1963, the painting of a half-open window where,
through the windowpane, we see the external reality (blue sky with some
dispersed white clouds), yet what we see in the narrow opening which gives
direct access to the reality beyond the pane is nothing, just a nondescript
black mass.… In Lacanese, the painting would translate thus: The frame of the windowpane
is the fantasy-frame that constitutes reality, whereas through the crack we get
an insight into the “impossible” Real, the Thing-in-itself. 4
This painting renders the
elementary matrix of the Magrittean paradoxes by way of staging the “Kantian”
split between (symbolized, categorized, transcendentally constituted) reality
and the void of the Thing-in-itself, of the Real, which gapes open in the midst
of reality and confers upon it a fantasmatic character. The first variation
that can be generated from this matrix is the presence of some strange,
inconsistent element which is “extraneous” to the depicted reality, i.e., that,
uncannily, has its place in it, although it does not “fit” in it: the gigantic
rock that floats in the air close to a cloud has its heavy counterpart, its double,
in La
Bataille de l’Argonne (1959); the unnaturally large bloom which fills out
the entire room in Tombeau
des lutteurs (1960). This strange element “out of joint” is precisely the
fantasy-object filling-out the blackness of the real that we perceived in the
crack of the half-open window in La
lunette d’approche. The effect of uncanniness is even stronger when the
“same” object is redoubled, as in Les deux
mystères, a later variation (from 1966) on the famous Ceci n’est pas une
pipe: the pipe and the inscription underneath it “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” are
both depicted as drawings on a blackboard; yet on the left of the blackboard,
the apparition of another gigantic and massive pipe floats freely in a
nonspecified space. The title of this painting could also have been “A pipe is
a pipe,” for what is it if not a perfect illustration of the Hegelian thesis on
tautology as the ultimate contradiction: the coincidence between the pipe
located in a clearly defined symbolic reality, and its phantomatic, uncanny
double, strangely afloat nearby. The inscription under the pipe on the
blackboard bears witness to the split between the two pipes: the pipe which forms
part of reality and the pipe as real, i.e. as a fantasy–apparition, are
distinguished by the intervention of the symbolic order: it is the emergence of
the symbolic order which splits reality into itself and the enigmatic surplus
of the real, each one “derealizing” its counterpart.
The Lacanian point to be made
here, of course, is that such a split can occur only in an economy of desire:
it designates the gap between the inaccessible object-cause of desire, the
“metonymy of nothingness” — the pipe floating freely in the air — and the
“enmpirical” pipe which, although we can smoke it, is never “that”… (The Marx
brothers’version of this painting would be something like “This looks like a
pipe and works like a pipe, but this should not deceive you — this is a pipe!” 5)
The massive presence of the free-floating pipe, of course, turns the depicted
pipe into a “mere painting,” yet, simultaneously, the free-floating pipe is
opposed to the “domesticated” symbolic reality of the pipe on the blackboard
and as such acquires a phantom-like, “surreal” presence … like the emergence of
the “real” Laura in Otto
Preminger’s Laura. The police-detective (Dana Andrews) falls asleep staring
at the portrait of the allegedly dead Laura; upon awakening, he finds at the
side of the portrait the “real” Laura, alive and well. This presence of the
“real” Laura accentuates the fact that the portrait is a mere “imitation;” on
the other hand, the very “real” Laura emerges as a nonsymbolized fantasmatic
surplus, a ghost-like apparition — beneath the portrait, one can easily imagine
the inscription “This is not Laura.” A somewhat homologous effect of the real
occurs at the beginning of Sergio
Leone’s Once upon a Time in America: a phone goes on ringing endlessly;
when, finally, a hand picks up the receiver, the phone continues to ring — the
first sound belongs to “reality,” whereas the ringing that goes on even after
the receiver is picked up comes out of the nonspecified void of the real. 6
The non-intersubjective other
The impenetrable blackness that
can be glimpsed through the crack of the half-opened window thus opens up the
space for the uncanny apparitions of an Other who precedes the Other of
“normal” intersubjectivity. Let us recall here a detail from Hitchcock’s Frenzy which bears
witness to his genius: in a scene that leads to the second murder, Babs, the
soon-to-be victim, a young girl who works in a Covent Garden pub, after a
quarrel with the owner leaves her working place and steps out onto the busy
market street; the street noise that for a brief moment hits us is quickly
suspended (in a totally “nonrealistic” way) when the camera approaches Babs for
a close-up, and the mysterious silence is then broken by an uncanny voice
coming from an indefinite point of absolute proximity, as if from behind her
and at the same time from within her, a man’s voice softly saying “Need a place
to stay?”; Babs moves off and looks back — standing behind her is an old
acquaintance who, unbeknownst to her, is the “necktie-murderer;” after a couple
of seconds, the magic evaporates and we hear again the sound tapestry of
“reality,” of the market street bustling with life.… This voice that emerges in
the suspension of reality is none other than the objet petit a, and the figure
which appears behind Babs is experienced by the spectator as supplementary with
regard to this voice: it gives body to it, and, simultaneously, it is strangely
intertwined with Babs’ body, as her body’s shadowy protuberance (not unlike the
strange double body of Leonardo’s Madonna, analyzed by Freud; or, in Total Recall, the body of the
leader of the underground resistance movement on Mars, a kind of parasitic
protuberance on another person’s belly…). It is easy to offer a long list of
similar effects; thus, in one of the key scenes of Silence of the Lambs, Clarice
and Lecter occupy the same positions when engaged in a conversation in Lecter’s
prison: in the foreground, the close-up of Clarice staring into the camera, and
on the glass partition-wall behind her, the reflection of Lecter’s head
germinating behind — out of her — as her shadowy double, simultaneously less
and more real than her. The supreme case of this effect, however, is found in
one of the most mysterious shots of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, when
Scottie peers at Madeleine through the crack in the half-opened back-door of
the florist’s shop. For a brief moment, Madeleine watches herself in a mirror
close to this door, so that the screen is vertically split: the left half is
occupied by the mirror where we see Madeleine’s reflection, while the right
half is sliced by a series of vertical lines (the doors); in the vertical dark
band (the crack of the half-opened door), we see a fragment of Scottie, his
gaze transfixed on the “original” whose mirror-reflection we see in the left
half. A truly “Magrittean” quality clings to this unique shot: although, as to
the disposition of the diegetic space, Scottie is here “in reality,” whereas
what we see of Madeleine is only her mirror-image, the effect of the shot is
exactly the reverse: Madeleine is perceived as part of reality and Scottie as a
phantomlike protuberance who (like the legendary dwarf in Grimm’s Snow White)
lurks behind the mirror. This shot is Magrittean in a very precise sense: the
dwarf-like mirage of Scottie peeps out of the very impenetrable darkness which
gapes in the crack of the half-open window in La
lunette d’approche (the mirror in Vertigo, of course, corresponds
to the windowpane in Magritte’s painting) — in both cases, the framed space of
the mirrored reality is traversed by a vertical black rift. As Kant puts it,
there is no positive knowledge of the Thing-in-itself, one can only designate
its place, “make room” for it. This is what Magritte accomplishes on a quite
literal level: the crack of the half-open door, its impenetrable blackness,
makes room for the Thing. And by locating in this crack a gaze, Hitchcock
supplements Magritte in a Hegelian–Lacanian way: “If beyond appearance there is
no Thing-in-itself, there is the gaze.” 7
In his Bayreuth production of Tristan
und Isolde, Jean-Pierre Ponelle changed Wagner’s original plot, interpreting
all that follows Tristan’s death — the arrival of Isolde and King Marke,
Isolde’s death — as Tristan’s mortal delirium: the final appearance of Isolde
is staged so that the dazzlingly illuminated Isolde grows luxuriantly behind
him, while Tristan stares at us, the spectators, who are able to perceive his
sublime double, the protuberance of his lethal enjoyment. This is also how
Bergman, in his version of The Magic Flute, often shot Pamina and Monostatos: a
close-up of Pamina who stares intensely into the camera, with Monostatos
appearing behind her as her shadowy double, as if belonging to a different
level of reality (illuminated with pointedly “unnatural” dark-violet colors),
with his gaze also directed into the camera. This disposition, in which the
subject and his or her shadowy, ex-timate double stare into a common third
point (materialized in us, the spectators), epitomizes the relationship of the
subject to an Otherness which is prior to intersubjectivity. The field of
intersubjectivity where subjects, within their shared reality, “look into each
other’s eyes,” is sustained by the paternal metaphor, whereas the reference to
the absent third point which attracts the two gazes changes the status of one
of the two partners — the one in the background — into the sublime embodiment
of the real of enjoyment.
What all these scenes have in
common on the level of purely cinematic procedure is a kind of formal correlative
of the reversal of face-to-face intersubjectivity into the relationship of the
subject to his shadowy double which emerges behind him or her as a kind of
sublime protuberance: the condensation of the field and counterfield within the
same shot. What we have here is a paradoxical kind of communication: not a
“direct” communication of the subject with his fellow-creature in front of him,
but a communication with the excrescence behind him, mediated by a third gaze,
as if the counterfield were to be mirrored back into the field itself. It is
this third gaze which confers upon the scene its hypnotic dimension: the
subject is enthralled by the gaze which sees “What is in himself more than
himself”.… And the analytical situation itself — the relationship between
analyst and analysant — does it not ultimately also designate a kind of return
to this pre-intersubjective relationship of the subject(–analysand) to his
shadowy other, to the externalized object in himself? Is not this the whole
point of the spatial disposition of analysis: after the so-called preliminary
interviews, the analysis proper begins when the analyst and the analysand no
longer confront each other face to face, but the analyst sits behind the
analysand who, stretched on the divan, stares into the void in front of him?
Does not this very disposition locate the analyst as the analysant’s object
small a, not his dialogical partner, not another subject? 8
The object of the indefinite
judgment
At this point, we should go
back to Immanuel Kant: in his philosophy, this crack, this space where such
monstrous apparitions can emerge, is opened up by the distinction between
negative and indefinite judgement. The very example used by Kant to illustrate
this distinction is tell-tale: the positive judgment by means of which a
predicate is ascribed to the (logical) subject — “The soul is mortal;” the
negative judgement by means of which a predicate is denied to the subject —
“The soul is not mortal;” the indefinite judgement by means of which, instead
of negating a predicate (i.e. the copula which ascribes it to the subject), we
affirm a certain nonpredicate — “The soul is not-mortal.” (In German also, the
difference is solely a matter of punctuation: Die Seele ist nicht sterbliche —
Die Seele ist nichtsterbliche; Kant enigmatically does not use the standard
unsterbliche. See CPR, A 72–73.)
Along this line of thought,
Kant introduces in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason the
distinction between positive and negative meanings of “noumenon:” in the
positive meaning of the term, noumenon is “an object of a nonsensible
intuition,” whereas in the negative meaning, it is “a thing insofar as it is
not an object of our sensible intuition” (CPR, B 307). The grammatical form
should not mislead us here: the positive meaning is expressed by the negative
judgment and the negative meaning by the indefinite judgment. In other words,
when one determines the Thing as “an object of a nonsensible intuition,” one
immediately negates the positive judgement which determines the Thing as “an
object of a sensible intuition”: one accepts intuition as the unquestioned base
or genus; against this background, one opposes its two species, sensible and
nonsensible intuition. Negative judgement is thus not only limiting, it also
delineates a domain beyond phenomena where it locates the Thing — the domain of
the nonsensible intuition — whereas in the case of the negative determination,
the Thing is excluded from the domain of our sensible intuition, without being
posited in an implicit way as the object of a nonsensible intuition; by leaving
in suspense the positive status of the Thing, negative determination saps the
very genus common to affirmation and negation of the predicate.
Herein lies also the
difference between “is not mortal” and “is not-mortal”: what we have in the
first case is a simple negation, whereas in the second case, a nonpredicate is
affirmed. The only “legitimate” definition of the noumenon is that it is “not
an object of our sensible intuition,” i.e. a wholly negative definition which
excludes it from the phenomenal domain; this judgment is “infinite” since it
does not imply any conclusions as to where, in the infinite space of what
remains outside the phenomenal domain, the noumenon is located. What Kant calls
“transcendental illusion” ultimately consists in the very (mis)reading of
infinite judgment as negative judgment: when we conceive the noumenon as an
“object of a nonsensible intuition,” the subject of the judgment remains the
same (the “object of an intuition”), what changes is only the character
(nonsensible instead of sensible) of this intuition, so that a minimal
“commensurability” between the subject and the predicate (i.e., in this case,
between the noumenon and its phenomenal determinations) is still maintained.
This subtle difference between
negative and indefinite judgment figures in a certain type of witticism where
the second part does not immediately invert the first part by negating its
predicate but repeats it with the negation displaced onto the subject. Let us
recall Marx’s ironic critique of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy:
“Instead of the ordinary individual with his ordinary manner of speaking and
thinking, we have nothing but this ordinary manner purely and simply — without
the individual.” 9
This is what the chimera of “nonsensible intuition” is about: instead of
ordinary objects of sensible intuition, we get the same ordinary objects of
intuition, without their sensible character. Or, to take another example: the
judgment “He is an individual full of idiotic features” can be negated in a
standard mirror way, i.e. replaced by its contrary “He is an individual with no
idiotic features”; yet its negation can also be given the form of “He is full of
idiotic features without being an individual.” This displacement of the
negation from the predicate onto the subject provides the logical matrix of
what is often the unforeseen result of our educational efforts to liberate the
pupil from the constraint of prejudices and cliches: the result is not a person
capable of expressing himself or herself in a relaxed, unconstrained way, but
an automatized bundle of (new) cliches behind which we no longer sense the
presence of a “real person.” Let us just recall the usual outcome of
psychological training intended to deliver the individual from the constraints
of his or her everyday frame of mind and to set free his or her “true self,”
with all its authentic creative potentials (transcendental meditation, etc.): once
the individual gets rid of the old cliches that were still able to sustain the
dialectical tension between themselves and the “personality” behind them, what
take their place are new cliches which abrogate the very “depth” of personality
behind them… in short, the individual becomes a true monster, a kind of “living
dead.” Samuel Goldwyn, the old Hollywood mogul, was right: “What we need are
indeed some new, original cliches.…”
Invoking the “living dead” is
no accident here: in our ordinary language, we resort to indefinite judgments
precisely when we endeavor to comprehend those borderline phenomena that
undermine established differences, such as those between living and being dead:
in the texts of popular culture, the uncanny creatures which are neither alive
nor dead, the “living dead” (vampires, etc.), are referred to as “the undead” —
although they are not dead, they are clearly not alive like us, ordinary
mortals. The judgment “he is undead” is therefore an indefinite-limiting
judgment in the precise sense of a purely negative gesture of excluding
vampires from the domain of the dead, without for that reason locating them in
the domain of the living (as in the case of the simple negation “he is not
dead”). The fact that vampires and other “living dead” are usually referred to
as “things” has to be rendered with its full Kantian meaning: a vampire is a
Thing which looks and acts like us, yet it is not one of us.… In short, the
difference between the vampire and the living person is the difference between
indefinite and negative judgment: a dead person loses the predicates of a
living being, yet he or she remains the same person; an undead, on the
contrary, retains all the predicates of a living being without being one — as
in the above-quoted Marxian joke, what we get with the vampire is “the ordinary
manner of speaking and thinking purely and simply — without the individual.”
“I am going to talk to you
about the lamella…”
What one should do here, in
the space of a more detailed theoretical elaboration, is to approach in a new
way the Lacan–Heidegger relationship. In the 1950s, Lacan endeavored to read
the “death-drive” against the background of Heidegger’s “being-towards-death
(Sein-zum-Tode)”, conceiving of death as the inherent and ultimate limit of symbolization,
which accounts for its irreducible temporal character. With Lacan’s shift
towards the Real from the ‘60s onwards, it is the indestructible life sprouting
in the domain of the “undead” that emerges as the ultimate object of horror.
Lacan delineates its contours towards the end of Chapter XV of his Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis where he proposes his own myth,
constructed upon the model of Aristophanes’ fable from Plato’s Symposium, the
myth of l’hommelette (little female-man—omelette 10):
“Whenever the membranes of the
egg in which the fetus emerges on its way to becoming a newborn are broken,
imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an
egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella.
The lamella is something
extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated.
But it goes everywhere. And as it is something … that is related to what the
sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed
beings, immortal — because it survives any division, any scissiparous
intervention. And it can run around.
Well! This is not very
reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly
asleep.…
I can’t see how we would not
join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a
very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not
to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ … is the libido.
It is the libido, qua pure
life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that
has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is
subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to
the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the
objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. The
objets a are merely its representatives, its figures. The breast — as
equivocal, as an element characteristic of the mammiferous organization, the
placenta for example — certainly represents that part of himself that the
individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound
lost object.” 11
What we have here is an
Otherness prior to intersubjectivity: the subject’s “impossible” relationship
to this amoebalike creature 12
is what Lacan is ultimately aiming at by way of his formula $ <> a. The
best way to clarify this point is perhaps to allow ourselves the string of
popular-culture associations that Lacan’s description must evoke. Is not the
alien from Ridley Scott’s film
of the same title “lamella” in its purest? Are not all the key elements of
Lacan’s myth contained in the first truly horrifying scene of the film when, in
the womblike cave of the unknown planet, the “alien” leaps from the egg-like
globe when its lid splits off and sticks to John Hurt’s face? This amoebalike, flattened
creature, which envelops the subject’s face, stands for the irrepressible life
beyond all the finite forms that are merely its representatives, its figures
(later in the film, the “alien” is able to assume a multitude of different
shapes), immortal and indestructible (it suffices to recall the unpleasant
thrill of the moment when a scientist cuts with a scalpel into a leg of the
creature which envelops Hurt’s face: the liquid that drips from it falls onto
the metal floor and corrodes it immediately, nothing can resist it). 13
The second association which
brings us back to Wagner is a detail from Syberberg’s film-version of
Parsifal: Syberberg depicts Fisher King Amfortas’ wound as externalized,
carried by the servants on a pillow in front of him, in the form of a
vaginalike partial object out of which blood drips in a continuous flow (as,
vulgari eloquentia, a vagina in an unending period…). This palpitating opening
— an organ that is at the same time the entire organism (let us just recall a
homologous motif in a series of science-fiction stories, like the gigantic eye
living a life of its own) — this opening epitomizes life in its
indestructibility: Amfortas’ pain consists in the very fact that he is unable
to die, that he is condemned to an eternal life of suffering; when, at the end,
Parsifal heals his wound with “the spear that smote it,” Amfortas is finally able
to rest and die.… This wound of Amfortas, which persists outside himself as an
undead thing, is the “object of psychoanalysis.” 14
Notes:
See Alain Abelhauser’s
analysis “D’un manque a saisir” in Razpol 3, Ljubljana
1987.
One can imagine how the
cinematic version of this scene would be able to rely on the contrapuntal use
of sound: the camera would show the coach running along the empty streets, the
fronts of old palaces and churches, whereas the soundtrack would be allowed to
retain the absolute proximity to the Thing and to render the real of what goes
on in the coach: the gasping and moaning that attests to the intensity of the
sexual encounter…
See Michel Foucault, This is
not a pipe, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1982.
One encounters the same
paradox in Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel The Unpleasant Profession of
Jonathan Hoag: when a window is opened, the reality previously seen through it
dissolves and all we see is a dense, nontransparent slime of the Real. For a
more detailed Lacanian reading of this novel, see Chapter 1 of Slavoj Žižek, Looking
Awry, Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press 1991.
In Marx Brothers’ films, we
encounter three variations on this paradox of identity, i.e. of the uncanny
relationship between existence and property:
•Groucho Marx, upon being
introduced to a stranger: “Say, you remind me of Emmanuel Ravelli.” — “But I am
Emmanuel Ravelli.”— “Then, no wonder you look like him!”
•Groucho, defending a client
before the court: “This man looks like an idiot and acts like an idiot, yet all
this should not deceive you — he is an idiot!”
•Groucho, courting a lady:
“Everything on you reminds me of you, your nose, your eyes, your lips, your
hands — everything except you!”
What lies at the heart of
these paradoxes, of course, is the thesis, defended already by Russian
formalists (Jakobson, for example), according to which every predicate has the
status of a metaphor: describing a thing by means of a predicate ultimately
equals saying what that thing resembles to.
What we have in this scene, of
course, is a kind of reflective redoubling of the external stimulus (sound,
organic need, etc.) that triggers the activity of dreaming: one invents a dream
integrating this element in order to prolong the sleep, yet the content
encountered in the dream is so traumatic that, finally, one escapes into
reality and awakens.… The ringing of the phone while we are asleep is such a
stimulus par excellence; its duration even after the source in reality ceased
to emit it exemplifies what Lacan calls the insistence of the real.
Jacques Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, New York: Norton l977, p. 103.
This phantomlike double, our
shadow and yet “more real than ourselves,” is also rendered by the famous
verses from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner which Mary Shelley used to characterize
Dr. Frankenstein’s relationship to his terrifying creature: “Like one, that on
a lonesome road / Doth walk in fear and dread, / And having once turned round
walks on, / And turns no more his head; / Because he knows, a frightful fiend /
Doth close behind him tread.”
Karl Marx, “The Poverty of
Philosophy,” in Karl Marx / Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 6, New
York: International Publishers 1976, p. 163.
Lacan, of course, alludes here
to the proverbial “You cannot make an hommelette without breaking the egg.”
Jacques Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, New York: Norton 1979, p. 197–198.
Here, apropos of lamella, one
should avoid the trap of identifying it precipitously with the maternal body.
As Freud himself pointed out in one of his letters, the model of the double
(and of lamella) is not mother but rather placenta — that part of the child’s
body that, at the moment of birth, is lost by the newborn as well as by the
mother.
It is precisely this physical,
tangible impact of “lamella” which gets lost in the sequel Aliens, which is why
this sequel is infinitely inferior to the original Alien. — Alien3 is far more
interesting because of two key features: first, the doubling of the
“alien”-motif (Ripley, herself an alien in the male penal colony, carries within
her the “alien”); secondly, the suicidal gesture which concludes the film (upon
learning that she already is pregnant with the “alien” which, sooner or later,
is bound to jump out of her chest the way it did in the first Alien out of John
Hurt, Ripley throws herself into the hot melted iron — the only way to destroy
what is “in herself more than herself,” the a, the surplus-object in herself…).
The more general interest of
Syberberg’s Parsifal lies in the specific mode of subverting ideology which
might be called interpellation without identification (the same paradox is also
at work in Franz Kafka’s novels; see Chapter V of Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime
Object of Ideology, London: Verso 1990): the subject finds itself interpellated
without knowing what s/he is interpellated into, without any point of
identification, of self-recognition, being offered. And it is precisely this
“empty” interpellation, this nonspecific notion that we are addressed,
summoned, lacking any clear indication of what the Other actually wants from
us, that gives rise to an intense culpability. The “Che vuoi?” emanating from
the Other thus remains unfulfilled. Or, to put it a different way, Syberberg’s Parsifal
overwhelms us with a baroque profusion of symbols in which we, the spectators,
look in vain for a consistent message; this overabundance paradoxically hinders
the effect of meaning and brings about what Lacan baptized jouis-sense,
enjoy-meant, enjoyment-in-meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment