by Jela Krečič and Slavoj
Žižek
Ugly
The notion of the ugly as an
aesthetic category was first systematically deployed by Karl Rosenkranz—editor
and scholar of G. W. F. Hegel, author of his first “official” biography,
although himself a reluctant Hegelian—in his Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Aesthetics
of the Ugly, 1853). 1
Rosenkranz’s starting point is the historical process of the gradual
abandonment of the unity of true, good, and beautiful; not only can something
ugly be true and good but ugliness can also be an immanent aesthetic notion; in
other words, an object can be ugly and an aesthetic object, an object of art.
Rosenkranz remains within the long tradition from Homer onwards that associates
physical ugliness with moral monstrosity; for him, ugly is das Negativschöne (the
negatively beautiful): “The pure image of the beautiful arises all the more
shining against the dark background/foil of the ugly.” 2
Rosenkranz distinguishes here between a healthy and a pathological mode of
enjoying the ugly in a work of art; in order to be aesthetically
enjoyable and, as such, edifying and permissible, ugliness has to remain
as a foil of the beautiful. Ugliness for the sake of itself is a pathological
enjoyment of art.
Ugliness is, as such, immanent
to beauty, a moment of the latter’s self-development. Like every concept,
beauty contains its opposite within itself, and Rosenkranz provides a systematic
Hegelian deployment of all the modalities of the ugly, from formless chaos to
the perverted distortions of the beautiful. The basic matrix of his
conceptualization of the ugly is the triad of the beautiful, the ugly, and the
comical, where the ugly serves as the middle, the intermediate moment, between
the beautiful and the comical: “A caricature pushes something particular over
its proper measure and creates thereby a disproportion which, insofar as it
recalls its ideal counterpart, becomes comical.” 3
A whole series of issues
arises here. First, can this third term not also be conceived of as the
sublime, insofar as the ugly in its chaotic and overwhelming monstrosity that
threatens to destroy the subject recalls its opposite, the indestructible fact
of reason and of moral law? Which, then, is the triad: the beautiful, the ugly,
and the comical (ridiculous)? Or the beautiful, the ugly, and the sublime? It
may appear that it depends on what kind of ugliness we are dealing with, the
excessive monstrous one or the ridiculous one. However, excess can also be
comical, and du sublime au ridicule, il n’y a qu’un pas. The sublime can appear
(turn into) the ridiculous, and the ridiculous can appear (turn into) the
sublime, as we learned from Charlie Chaplin’s late films.
Second, the notion of the ugly
as the foil for the appearance of the beautiful is in its very core profoundly
ambiguous. It can be read (as it is by Rosenkranz) in the traditional Hegelian
way: the ugly is the subordinated moment in the game the beautiful is playing
with itself, its immanent self-negation that lays the (back)ground for its full
appearance; or it can be read in a much stronger literal sense, as the very
(back)ground of the beautiful that precedes the beautiful and out of which the
beautiful arises—the reading proposed by Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory: “If
there is any causal connection at all between the beautiful and the ugly, it is
from the ugly as cause to the beautiful as effect, and not the other way
around. If one originated in the other, it is beauty that originated in the
ugly and not the reverse.” 4 (In a
homologous way, one should turn around the standard Thomist notion of evil as a
privative mode of the good: what if it is the good itself that is a privative
mode of evil? What if, in order to arrive at the good, we just have to take
away excess from the evil?) Adorno’s point is here double. First, in general
terms, concerning the very notion of art, the ugly is the archaic or primitive
chaotic (Dionysian) life substance that a work of art gentrifies, elevates into
the aesthetic form, but the price for this is the mortification of the life substance;
the ugly is the force of life against the death imposed by the aesthetic form.
Second, with a specific reference to the modern era in which the ugly became an
aesthetic category, Adorno claims that art has to deal with the ugly “in order
to denounce, in the Ugly, the world which created it and reproduces it in its
image.” 5 The underlying premise is that art is a medium of
truth, not just an escapist play of beautiful appearances; in a historical
situation in which the beautiful is irreparably discredited as kitsch, it is
only by presenting the ugly in its ugliness that art can keep open the utopian
horizon of beauty.
Third, what if the reversal of
the ugly into the comical (or the sublime) does not occur? Herman Parret
describes such an option with regard to the Kantian sublime. If the
overwhelming pressure of the ugly gets too strong, it becomes monstrous and can
no longer be sublated/negated into the sublime. It’s thus a question of an
acceptable limit:
there is for Kant a
progression from the colossal to the monstrous, i.e. towards the total
annihilation of our faculty of presentation [vernichtet]. If the colossal can
already be considered a sublime correlate, then it remains certainly inside an
acceptable limit; with the monstrous, on the other hand, one has passed beyond
the acceptable limit, in full terror and total unpleasure. With the monstrous
we are in the margin of the acceptable where the imagination is fully blocked
to function. It looks as if the monstrous is the Thing, inexpressible and
abyssal. The monstrous does violence to subjectivity without submitting it to any
legality. 6
The sublime pleasure is a
pleasure in unpleasure, while the monstrous generates only unpleasure, but, as
such, it provides enjoyment. In short, what Kant already elaborated in the
distinction between pleasure (Lust, regulated by the pleasure principle, which
makes us avoid all painful excess, even the excess of pleasure itself) and
enjoyment (Genuss, jouissance). Therein resides the link between enjoyment and
disgust:
The “disgust for the object”
arises from a certain “enjoyment” [Genuss] in the “matter of sensation” which
distances the subject from its purposiveness. Pleasure [Lust] is opposed to
“enjoyment” insofar as “pleasure is culture” [wo die Lust zugleich Kultur ist]
.… “enjoyment” in matter, in contrast, provokes disgust. In addition, this
enjoyment of losing oneself in the matter of “charms and emotions” has a direct
impact on the health of our body: it generates disgust which manifests itself
in corporeal reactions like nausea, vomiting and convulsions.
Pleasure-unpleasure [Lust/Unlust] in the feeling of the sublime has nothing to
do with that “enjoyment” [Genuss] destructive of culture and generative of
disgust. [“U”]
What, precisely, is the
ontological status of this weird Genuss that threatens to drag us into its
self-destructive, vicious cycle? It is clearly not culture, but it is also not
nature, as it is an “unnatural” excess that totally derails nature. So, should
we not posit a link, an identity even, between this Genuss and what Immanuel
Kant isolated as the
“unnatural” savagery (Wildheit)
or passion for freedom specific to human nature: “Savagery [or unruliness, Wildheit]
is independence from laws. Through discipline the human being is submitted to
the laws of humanity and is first made to feel their constraint.… Thus, for
example, children are sent to school initially not already with the intention
that they should learn something there, but rather that they may grow
accustomed to sitting still and observing punctually what they are told, so
that in the future they may not put into practice actually and instantly each
notion that strikes them.… Now by nature the human being has such a powerful
propensity towards freedom that when he has grown accustomed to it for a while,
he will sacrifice everything for it.” The predominant form of appearance of
this weird “savagery” is passion, an attachment to a particular choice so
strong that it suspends rational comparison with other possible choices. When
in the thrall of a passion, we stick to a certain choice whatever it may cost:
“Inclination that prevents reason from comparing it with the sum of all
inclinations in respect to a certain choice is passion (passio animi).”
As such, passion is morally
reprehensible: “far worse than all those transitory emotions that at least stir
up the resolution to be better; instead, passion is an enchantment that also
refuses recuperation.… Passions are cancerous sores for pure practical reason,
and for the most part they are incurable because the sick person does not want
to be cured and flees from the dominion of principles, by which alone a cure
could occur.… And, as the subdivision “On the inclination to freedom as a
passion” tells us, “For the natural human being this is the most violent [heftigste]
inclination of all.” Passion is as such purely human; animals have no passions,
just instincts. The Kantian savagery is “unnatural” in the precise sense that
it seems to break or suspend the causal chain that determines all natural
phenomena—it is as if in its terrifying manifestations, noumenal freedom
transpires for a moment in our phenomenal universe. 7
Do we not get here even an
echo of what Julia Kristeva calls the abject? The object of enjoyment is by
definition disgusting, and what makes it disgusting is a weird superego
injunction that appears to emanate from it, a call to enjoy it even if (and
precisely because) we find it ugly and desperately try to resist being dragged
into it:
Kant insists on the
non-representability of ugliness in art: “[in] disgust … that strange
sensation, which rests on nothing but imagination, the object is presented as
if it insisted, as it were, on our enjoying it even though that is just what we
are forcefully resisting.” This is a typically Kantian approach: in a single
phrase, there is a gleichsam (as it were) and an als ob (as if). The ugly
object has no reasonable effect on the Gemüth. Instead, an excited and
dangerously disconcerted imagination petrifies the subject in its corporeity.
This is the very essence of disgusting ugliness: it threatens the stability of
our corporeity, our body ‘forcefully resists’ the incitement to enjoy that
ugliness deceitfully imposes on us. [“U”]
This, finally, brings us to
the very heart of disgust: the object of disgust “threatens the stability of
our corporeity”; it destabilizes the line that separates the inside of our body
from its outside. Disgust arises when the border that separates the inside of
our body from its outside is violated, when the inside penetrates out, as in
the case of blood or shit. “It’s similar with the saliva: as we all know,
although we can without problem swallow our own saliva, we find it
extremely repulsive to swallow again a saliva [which was spit into a glass] out
of our body—again a case of violating the inside/ outside frontier.” 8
What
distinguishes man from animals
is that, with humans, the disposal of shit becomes a problem: not because it
has a bad smell, but because it issued from our innards. We are ashamed of shit
because, in it, we expose/externalize our innermost intimacy. Animals do not
have a problem with it because they do not have an “interior,” as humans do.
Hence I should refer to Otto Weininger, who called volcanic lava “the shit of
the earth.” It comes from inside the body, and this inside is evil, criminal:
“The Inner of the body is very criminal.” 9
One should return here to
Sigmund Freud who, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, describes how the living
substance:
floats about in an outer world
which is charged with the most potent energies, and it would be destroyed by
the operation of the stimuli proceeding from this world if it were not
furnished with a protection against stimulation (Reizschutz). It acquires this
through its outermost layer—which gives the structure that belongs to living
matter—becoming in a measure inorganic, and this now operates as a special
integument or membrane that keeps off the stimuli, i.e. makes it impossible for
the energies of the outer world to act with more than a fragment of their
intensity on the layers immediately below which have preserved their vitality.
These are now able under cover of the protecting layer to devote themselves to
the reception of those stimulus masses that have been let through. But the
outer layer has by its own death secured all the deeper layers from a like
fate—at least so long as no stimuli present themselves of such strength as to
break through the protective barrier. For the living organism protection
against stimuli is almost a more important task than reception of stimuli; the
protective barrier is equipped with its own store of energy and must
above all endeavor to protect the special forms of energy-transformations going
on within itself from the equalizing and therefore destructive influence of the
enormous energies at work in the outer world. 10
Or, as Ray Brassier put it
concisely, “the separation between organic interiority and inorganic
exteriority is won at the cost of part of the primitive organism itself, and it
is this death that gives rise to the protective shield.… Thus, individuated
organic life is won at the cost of this aboriginal death whereby the organism
first becomes capable of separating itself from the inorganic outside.” 11
Disgust arises when the dead
barrier is broken and the organic interiority penetrates the surface. One
should be clear here and draw all the consequences; the ultimate object of
disgust is bare life itself, life deprived of the protective barrier. Life is a
disgusting thing, a sleazy object moving out of itself, secreting humid warmth,
crawling, stinking, growing. The birth itself of a human being is an Alien–like
event: a monstrous event of something erupting out from the inside
of a body, a big, stupid, hairy body crawling around. Spirit is above life; it
is death in life, an attempt to escape life while alive, like the Freudian
death drive that is not life but pure repetitive movement.
Creepy
How, then, does ugly relate to
subjectivity? Is a subject—which is excessive in its very notion—simply ugly,
an outgrowth disturbing the harmony of the world, opening up a gap in its very
heart? One has to draw a clear distinction here: ugly is ultimately the inside
of a living object (like the depth of Irma’s throat from Freud’s dream about
Irma’s injection), while the inside of a subject is creepy. As Adam Kotsko has
shown in Creepiness, creepy is today’s name for the Freudian uncanny, for the
uncanny core of a neighbor; every neighbor is ultimately creepy, which is why
the title of the book’s last subchapter is quite appropriately “The Creepiness
of All Flesh.” 12
What makes a neighbor creepy is not his weird acts but the impenetrability of
the desire that sustains these acts. For example, it is not primarily the
content of Marquis de Sade’s writings that is creepy (their content is rather
dull and repetitive); it is the question, why is he doing it? Everything in Sade
is a sadist perversion, everything except his writing, the act of doing it,
which cannot be accounted for as a perversion. So the question is: what does a
creepy neighbor want? What does he get out of it? An experience, an encounter,
gets creepy when we all of a sudden suspect that he is not doing it for the
obvious reason one does what he is doing:
In the case of a sleazy guy
who insists on propositioning every woman he meets, the element of enigma may
seem to be missing insofar as he clearly wants sex. And yet it seems strange
that simply wanting sex would be creepy, because a man who politely asks a
woman on a date and then accepts the answer is, all things being equal, not
being creepy. What makes the sleazy guy creepy, then, is not that he is simply
asking too many women out, but that his constant failure seems to indicate that
he doesn’t care that his methods are ineffective. It’s as though he’s directly
“getting off ” on the very act of approaching women, with no regard for the
ostensible goal of sleeping with them. When we recognize this, we can’t help
but ask, “What is he getting out of this?” even the most seemingly obvious
creepy desire turns out to be enigmatic on closer examination. [C, pp. 11–12]
Here enters the Lacanian
distinction between the object of desire and the object cause of desire, that
which sustains our desire for the object. The creepy effect arises when we
perceive that the subject in front of us is do ing what he is doing directly
for the object cause of desire, remaining in different towards the object of
his desire—in short, when there occurs a kind of short circuit between the
object and object cause so that the object becomes directly the object cause.
For example, what sustains my desire for a woman are the locks of her hair. So,
what if I simply directly focus on that, forgetting about full sex and finding
satisfaction in just caressing her hair? This short circuit defines perversion.
In the “revolutionary” 1960s,
it was fashionable to assert perversion against the compromise of hysteria. A
pervert directly violates social norms; he does openly what a hysteric only
dreams about or articulates ambiguously in his or her symptoms. In other words,
the pervert effectively moves beyond the master and his law, while the hysteric
merely provokes her master in an ambiguous way, which can also be read as the
demand for a more authentic real master. Against this view, Freud and Jacques
Lacan consistently emphasized that perversion, far from being subversive, is
the hidden obverse of power; every power needs perversion as its inherent and
sustaining transgression.“In the hysterical link,” on the contrary,
the $ over a stands for the
subject who is divided, traumatized, by what for an object she is for the
Other, what role she plays in the Other’s desire: ‘Why am I what you’re saying
that I am?,’ or, to quote Shakespeare’s Juliet, ‘Why am I that name?’ … What
she expects from the Other-master is knowledge about what she is as object.…
What produces the unbearable castrating effect is not the fact of
being deprived of ‘it,’ but, on the contrary, the fact of clearly
‘possessing it’; the hysteric is horrified at being ‘reduced to an object,’
that is to say, at being invested with the agalma that makes him or her the
object of other’s desire.… In contrast to hysteria, the pervert knows perfectly
what he is for the Other: a knowledge supports his position as the object of
Other’s (divided subject’s) jouissance. 13
So far from being a
compromiser, the hysterical subject is deeply justified in resisting the
temptation of fully throwing herself into pervert transgression; what the
hysteric perceives (or, rather, suspects) is precisely the falsity of the
pervert’s transgression, the way the pervert’s activity sustains legal power.
Kotsko therefore characterizes hysteria as:
a way of creeping out the
social order itself. And just as in the case of the individual psyche, the
social order is only susceptible to be ing creeped out due to the creepiness it
carries within itself. Under normal circumstances, the social order appears to
be obsessive in structure, opting for certain acceptable desires while
repressing or excluding others. Yet from the hysteric’s perspective, the most
salient fact about the social order is the way it is continually setting us up
to fail, so that it can even seem that the social order needs transgression and
the illicit, creepy enjoyment that it provides. The social order’s wink and nod
of unofficial permission toward our creepy indulgences simultaneously makes
social constraints more bearable and binds us more closely to the social order
insofar as it makes those creepy indulgences possible. In short, the hysteric
is uniquely positioned to see that the pervert has a point. [C, pp. 109–10]
Hysteria, is as such, always a
historical formation; it reacts to the predom inant mode of ideological
interpellation (identification). This historical approach also allows us to
refute the standard argument according to which, in today’s permissive era, we
no longer get hysterical patients whose symptoms are caused by oppressed
sexuality. What is usually referred to as borderline is precisely hysteria in
our time of permissiveness and when the traditional figure of the master is
more often replaced by the neutral expert legitimized by his (scientific)
knowledge:
Thankfully, the social order
no longer explicitly backs women so completely into a corner as in the age of
the housewife. Yet women still face conflicting pressures, such as those
that Carrie feverishly attempts to navigate in her quest to avoid being “that
girl” in Sex and the City. Indeed, some of the contradictions have even been
intensified and complicated as, for example, women are expected to excel in
professional life while still meeting traditional requirements of motherhood.
If anything, women suffer from having too many mutually contradictory outlets
for their desire. Hence the contemporary manifestation of hysteria is not
the psychosomatic intrusion of the body into the social order—in the face of
the impossible demand to “have it all,” the hysteric effectively goes on
strike, refusing desire altogether. [C, p. 108]
The borderline subject is thus
a hysteric without a master, a hysteric who is not oppressed by the master but
solicited by some expert-advisor figure to realize all his or her potentials
and have it all, leading a full life. Such a solicitation, of course,
immediately acquires the superego dimension of an inexorable pressure to which
the subject can only respond by withdrawing from desire. Is this desire on
strike not a perfect formula for the borderline as the contemporary form of
hysteria?
Abject
For the borderline to be a
mode of hysteria, the line that separates inside from outside is still
maintained, but what happens when this line itself vacillates? Recall our
unease when we stumble upon a decaying human corpse or, in a more ordinary
case, upon an open wound, shit, vomit, brutally tornout nails or eyes, or the
skin that forms on the surface of warm milk. What we experience in such
situations is not just a disgusting object but something much more radical: the
disintegration of the very ontological coordinates that enable me to locate an
object into external reality out there. The phenomenological description of
such experiences is Kristeva’s starting point in her elaboration of the notion
of abject: the reaction of horror, disgust, withdrawal, and ambiguous
fascination triggered by objects or occurrences that undermine the clear
distinction between subject and object, between myself and reality out there. 14 The
abject is definitely external to the subject, but it is also more radically
external to the very space within which the subject can distinguish itself from
reality out there. Maybe we can apply here Lacan’s neologism “extimate”: 15
the abject is so thoroughly internal to the subject that this very overintimacy
makes it external, uncanny, inadmissible. For this reason, the status of
the abject with regard to the pleasure principle is profoundly ambiguous.
It is repulsive, provoking horror and disgust, but at the same time it exerts
an irresistible fascination and attracts our gaze to its very horror: “One thus
understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims— if
not its submissive and willing ones” (P, p. 9). Such a mixture of horror and
pleasure points towards a domain beyond the pleasure principle, the domain of jouissance:
“One does not know it, one does not desire it, one enjoys in it [on en jouit]. Violently
and painfully. A passion” (P, p. 9).
Is then the abject close to
what Lacan calls objet petit a, the indivisible remainder of the process of
symbolic representation that functions as the always already lost object cause
of desire? Objet petit a as the object cause of desire is, in its very
excessive nature, an immanent part of the symbolic process, the
spectral/eluding embodiment of lack that motivates desire sustained by the
(symbolic) law. In contrast to objet a, which functions within the order of meaning
as its constitutive blind spot or stain, the ab ject “is radically excluded
[from the space of symbolic community] and draws me toward the place where
meaning collapses” (P, p. 2): “Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism
of preobjectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body
becomes separated from another body in order to be” (P, p. 10). The experience
of abjection thus comes before the big distinctions between culture and nature,
inside and out side, consciousness and the unconscious, repression and the
repressed, and others; abjection does not stand for the immersion into nature,
the primordial mother, but for the very violent process of differentiation. It
is the vanishing mediator between nature and culture, a culture in becoming,
which disappears from view once the subject dwells within culture. The abject
is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders,
positions, rules,” but not in the sense of the flow of nature under mining all
cultural distinctions (P, p. 4); it renders palpable the “fragility of the
law,” including of the laws of nature, which is why when a culture endeavors to
stabilize itself it does so by way of referring to the laws (regular rhythms)
of nature (day and night, regular movement of stars and sun, and others) (P, p.
4). The encounter of the abject arouses fear, not so much fear of a particular
actual object (snakes, spiders, height), but a much more basic fear of the
breakdown of what separates us from external reality; what we fear in an open
wound or a dead body is not its ugliness but the blurring of the line between
inside and outside.
The underlying conceptual
matrix of the notion of the abject is that of a dangerous ground. The abject
points towards a domain that is the source of our life-intensity; we draw our
energy out of it, but we have to keep it at the right distance. If we exclude
it, we lose our vitality, but if we get too close to it, we are swallowed
by the self-destructive vortex of madness; this is why abjection does not step
out of the symbolic but plays with it from within: “The abject is perverse
because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but
turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the
better to deny them” (P, p. 15).
This abjectal excess can also
appear in the guise of an indivisible re mainder of the Real which resists the
process of idealization/symboliza tion; in this sense, Kristeva mentions the
pagan opponents of Western monotheism who praise the notion of remainder as
that which prevents the teleological closure of creation, keeping the movement
forever open: “the poet of the Atharva Veda extols the defiling and
regenerating remainder (uchista) as precondition for all form.‘Upon remainder
the name and the form are founded, upon remainder the world is founded … Being
and nonbeing, both are in the remainder, death, vigor’ ”(P, p. 77). 16
The remainder here is the support of the cyclic notion of the universe; it
enables the rebirth of the universe. (We find the last traces of this logic
even in Kabbalah where the evil in our universe is accounted for as the
remainder of the previous universes created and then annihilated by God because
he was dissatisfied with the result of his creation; remainder thus grounds
repeated creation.) Hegel and Christian monotheism are here easy targets; they
allegedly tend to abolish the remainder in a complete sublation of the evil in
the good, in a fulfilled teleology that redeems all previous lower stages. 17
Disavowal
In our daily lives, we deal
with what Julia Kristeva calls ‘abject’ in a variety of ways: ignoring it,
turning away from it with disgust, fearing it, constructing rituals made to
keep it at a distance or constraining it to a secluded place (toilets for
defecation, etc.). Disgust, horror, phobia … but there is yet another way to
deal with abjection which is to enact a split between abjectal objects or acts
and the symbolic ritualisation meant to cleanse us from defilement, i.e., to
keep the two apart, as if there is no shared space where they may
encounter each other since the abject (filth) in its actuality is simply foreclosed
from the symbolic. Kristeva evokes the case of castes in India where the strong
ritualisation of defilement (numerous rituals, prescribed in painful details,
that regulate how one should purify oneself) [“]appears to be accompanied by
one’s being totally blind to filth itself, even though it is the object of
those rites. It is as if one had maintained, so to speak, only the sacred,
prohibited facet of defilement, allowing the anal object that such a
sacralization had in view to become lost within the dazzling light of
unconsciousness if not of the unconscious. V. S. Naipaul points out that Hindus
defecate everywhere without anyone ever mentioning, either in speech or in
books, those squatting figures, because, quite simply, no one sees them. It is
not a form of censorship due to modesty that would demand the omission in
discourse of a function that has, in other respects, been ritualized. It is
blunt foreclosure that voids those acts and objects from conscious
representation. A split seems to have set in between, on the one hand, the
body’s territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion
between mother and nature, and on the other hand, a totally different universe
of socially signifying performances where embarrassment, shame, guilt, desire,
etc. come into play—the order of the phallus. Such a split, which in
another cultural universe would produce psychosis, thus finds in this context a
perfect socialization. That may be because setting up the rite of defilement
takes on the function of the hyphen, the virgule, allowing the two universes of
filth and of prohibition to brush lightly against each other without
necessarily being identified as such, as object and as law. On account of the
flexibility at work in rites of defilement, the subjective economy of the
speaking being who is involved abuts on both edges of the unnamable (the
nonobject, the offlimits) and the absolute (the relentless coherence of
Prohibition, sole donor of Meaning [” (P, p. 74)]. Do we not find similar cases
also in Christianity as well as in Islam? When, a decade ago, the (then)
Iranian president Ahmadinejad visited New York to attend a UN general assembly
session, he was invited to attend a live debate at Columbia University. When
asked about homosexual ity in Iran, his reply was rudely mistranslated into
english as if he claimed that in Iran they have no problem with homosexuals
since there are none there. An Iranian friend (very critical of Ahmadinejad)
who was there told me that Ahmadinejad’s reply was in reality much more
nuanced: what he hinted at was that in Iran they don’t talk about
homosexuality in public, they condemn it officially and mostly ignore its
actual occurrences, thereby ‘allowing the two universes of filth and of prohibition
to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being identified as
such, as object and as law’. And does the same not hold for paedophilia in the
Catholic church? Paedophilia is publicly condemned while (till recently, at
least) tolerated by being ignored in practice, as if public Law and material
practice of sinful filth belong to different domains. This logic at work in
Hinduism, Islam and Catholicism should not be confused with repression: nothing
is ‘repressed’ or ‘unconscious’ about filth or homosexuality or paedophilia,
the filthy act in question is practiced more or less openly and without any
qualms, its practitioners are (mostly) not trauma tised by their perverse
desires or haunted by any deep guilt feelings, they just simply keep the two
dimensions apart. Our problem today is that, within the predominant logic of
Political Correctness, such a procedure of keeping the two domains apart no
longer functions: the PC stance by definition collapses the two dimensions
since it aims precisely at directly controlling and regulating ‘the body’s
territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion between
mother and nature’. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 74). In other words, there is no domain
left unseen, ignored by the PC law—its law tolerates no unwritten rules, there
is no space here for a transgressive behaviour that violates explicit rules and
is precisely as such not only tolerated but even solicited by the law.… Is the
mechanism described here not a case of socalled fetishist disavowal? Kristeva
locates the most radical fetishism, fetishist disavowal, into language itself:
“But is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable fetish? And language,
precisely, is based on fetishist denial (‘I know that, but just the same’, ‘the
sign is not the thing, but just the same,’ etc.) and defines us in our essence
as speaking beings. Because of its founding status, the fetishism of ‘language’
is perhaps the only one that is unanalyzable.” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 37).
Kristeva locates the fetishist dimension of language into the implicit
overcoming of the gap that separates words (signs) from things: ‘I know that
words are only signs with no immanent relation to things they designate, but I
nonetheless … (believe in their magic influence on things)’. But where,
exactly, is here fetishism? In his classic text, Octave Mannoni (Mannoni, 2003
[1968]) distinguishes three modes of je sais bien, mais quand meme … , and
reserves the name ‘fetishism’ only for the third one. The first mode is the
standard functioning of the symbolic order, namely the relation between the
symbolic title of a subject and his/her miserable reality as a person: ‘I know
very well that this guy in front of me is a miserable stupid coward, but he
wears the insignia of power, which means that it is the Law which speaks
through him …’ Is it, however, accurate to charac terise this basic
‘alienation’ in a symbolic title that changes our perception of an individual
as a case of fetishism? Not yet, for Man noni. Then there is the mode of
falling into one’s own trap, like a guy who, in order to calm his small child
when a storm is ravaging around their house, draws a circle on the floor with a
chalk and assures him that one is safe if one stands inside the circle; when,
soon thereafter, a lightning directly strikes the house, he in a moment of
panic quickly steps into the circle, as if being there will protect him,
ignoring the fact that he himself concocted the story about the magic property
of the circle to calm down the child. For Mannoni, this is also not yet fetishism
proper which only occurs when we have no need for any belief at all: we know
how things really stand, plus we have the object fetish with no magic belief
attached to it. A foot fetishist has no illusions about feet, plus he simply
has a strong libidinal investment in feet, playing with them generates immense
enjoyment. So which among these three versions pertains to language as such?
Maybe, all three are activated at different levels. First, there is the
disavowal that characterises the symbolic mandate (‘I know very well that you
are a miserable individual, but you are a judge and the authority of the law
speaks through you’). Then, there is the selfdeception of a manipula tor who,
as it were, falls into his own trap. In his Anthropology, Kant (Kant, 2006
[1798]) explores how the love of the illusion of the good can lead to the love
of the good itself: if one loves the illusion of the good and enacts this
illusion in social intercourse, one might come to appreciate its worth and
to love the good itself for its own sake. Correlatively from the point of view
of the spectator, loving the illusion of the good in others may make us be
polite in order to become lovable, which, in turn, exercises our selfmastery,
leads us to control our passions and, eventually, to love the good for its own
sake. In this sense, paradoxically, by deceiving others through politeness and
social pretence, we in fact deceive ourselves and transform our pragmatic,
polite behaviour into virtuous behaviour.… The differ ence between this and the
first mode of disavowal is obvious: in the first mode, we are dealing with the
straight confusion between an object/ person and the properties that belong to
it only on behalf of its inscription into a symbolic network (to paraphrase
Marx, a king is a king only because his subjects treat him as a king, but it
appears to them that they treat him as a king because he is in himself a
king), while in the second case, the illusion is generated purposefully
and consciously (the subject produces an appearance in order to dupe another,
and then he ends up falling into his own trap and believing in it himself). One
should note how, although the cynical manipula tor consciously cheats and is in
this sense less naïve than the subject of the first mode of disavowal, he ends
up believing in a much more direct and naïve illusion: he fully falls into his
own trap, in contrast to the first mode in which the subject retains to the end
the distance towards his belief (‘I know very well it’s not true …’). 18
Purification
Until now, we were dealing
with the main modes of avoiding the abject. There are, however, two privileged
ways of traversing abjection, of going through it and purifying ourselves of
it: religion and art (poetic catharsis): “The various means of purifying the
abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with
that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of
religion” (P, p. 17). The whole of modern literature and art—from Antonin
Artaud to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, from Wassily Kandinsky to Mark
Rothko—confronts and tries to sublimate the abject; following Rainer
Maria Rilke’s famous formula “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,”
it weaves a screen that renders the abject not only tolerable but even
pleasurable: 19
On close inspection, all
literature is probably a version of the apoc alypse that seems to me rooted, no
matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border
(borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only
barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.
[P, p. 207]
In a detailed analysis,
Kristeva presents the work of Céline as a long and tortuous confrontation with
the abjectal dimension; this is what Journey to the End of the Night alludes
to; the night is the night of the abject that suspends not only reason but the
universe of meaning as such, not only at the level of content (describing the
extreme states of dissolution) but also at the level of form (fragmented
syntax) and others, as if some prelinguistic rhythm—“the ‘entirely other’ of
signifiance”—is invading and undermining language:
It is as if Céline’s scription
could only be justified to the extent that it confronted the “entirely other”
of signifiance; as if it could only be by having this “entirely other” exist as
such, in order to draw back from it but also in order to go to it as to a
fountainhead; as if it could be born only through such a confrontation
recalling the religions of defile ment, abomination, and sin. [P, p. 149]
Céline carefully walks on the
edge of this vortex of ecstatic negativity like the hero of edgar Allan Poe’s
“A Descent into the Maelström” (1841), flirting with it but avoiding complete
immersion into it, which would mean a descent into madness. Here, of course,
Kristeva confronts the big problem. One would have expected that such a
confrontation with the ab ject and its libidinal vortex, allowing it to
penetrate our universe of meaning, would have a liberating effect, allowing us
to break out of the constraints of symbolic rules and to recharge ourselves
with a more primordial libid inal energy; however, as is wellknown, Céline
turned into a fully pledged fascist, supporting Nazis to their very defeat. So
what went wrong? At a general level, Kristeva’s reply is to avoid both
extremes; not only is the to tal exclusion of the abject mortifying, cutting us
off from the source of our vitality (when the abject is excluded, “the
borderline patient, even though he may be a fortified castle, is nevertheless
an empty castle” [P, p. 49]), but the opposite also holds. every attempt to
escape the patriarchal/rational symbolic order and enact a return to the
prepatriarchal feminine rhythm of drives necessarily ends up in anti-Semitic
fascism: “Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping
from the JudeoChristian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to
what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same
Célinian anti-Semitic fantasy?” (P, p. 180).
The reason is, of course, that
Judaism enacts in an exemplary way the monotheistic rejection of the maternal
natural rhythms. However, Kriste va’s account of Céline’s move to fascism is
more complex; the fascist anti Semitism is not just a regression to the domain
of the abject but also a regression controlled/totalized by reason. “The return
to what [reason] has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.)” is in
itself liberating; it brings about an inconsistent bubble of fresh
insights. Problems arise when this anarchic schizodisorder, its mad dance, is
totalized through a paranoiac stance that
totalizes/unifies the entire field, generating
a spectral object like “the Jew” that allegedly explains all antagonisms
and dissatisfactions:
One has to admit that out of
such logical oscillations there emerge a few striking words of truth. Such
words present us with harsh X-rays of given areas of social and political
experience; they turn into fantasies or deliriums only from the moment when
reason attempts to globalize, unify, or totalize. Then the crushing anarchy or
nihilism of discourse topples over and, as if it were the reverse of that
negativism, an object appears—an object of hatred and desire, of threat and
aggressivity, of envy and abomination. That object, the Jew, gives thought a
focus where all contradictions are explained and satisfied. [P, pp. 177–78]
The limitation of Kristeva’s
theory of the abject resides in the fact that she conceives the symbolic order
and abjection as the two extremes be tween which one has to negotiate a middle
way. What she neglects to do is to inquire into what the symbolic order itself
is in terms of the abject. The symbolic order is not just always already
embedded in the feminine hora (or what Kristeva in her earlier work referred to
as the semiotic), penetrated by the materiality of its immanent libidinal
rhythms that distort the purity of the symbolic articulations. If it is here,
it had to emerge out of hora through a violent act of self-differentiation or
splitting. Consequently, insofar as we accept Kristeva’s term abjection for
this self-differentiation, then we should distinguish between hora and
abjection; abjection points towards the very movement of withdrawal from hora, which
is constitutive of subjectivity. This is why we had to further specify
Kristeva’s diagnosis: every “unilateral call to return to what [the
Judeo-Christian compound] has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.)”
generates fascism (as in Céline’s work) not because it regresses from the symbolic
but because it obfuscates abjection itself, the primordial repression that
gives rise to the symbolic. The dream of such attempts is not to suspend the
symbolic but to have the (symbolic) cake and eat it—in other words, to dwell in
the symbolic without the price we have to pay for it (primordial repression,
the subject’s ontological derailment, antagonism, outof-joint, the violent gap
of differentiation from natural substance), the ancient dream of a masculine
universe of meaning, which remains harmonically rooted in the maternal
substance of hora. In short, what fascism obfuscates (forecloses even) is not
the symbolic as such but the gap that separates the symbolic from the real.
This is why a figure like that of the Jew is needed; if the gap between the
symbolic and the real is not constitutive of the symbolic, if a symbolic
at home in the real is possible, then their antagonism has to be caused by a
contingent external intruder—and what better candidate for this role than
Judaism, with its violent monotheist assertion of the symbolic law and
rejection of the earthbound paganism?
The Jew as the enemy allows
the anti-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital:
by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the
vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate. This is
also why Julia Kristeva is right in linking the phobic object (the Jew whose
plots antiSemites fear) to the avoidance of a choice: ‘The phobic object is
precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the
subject far from a decision.’ Does this proposition not hold especially for
political phobia? Does the phobic object/abject, on the fear of which the
rightist-populist ideology mobilizes its partisans (the Jew, the immigrant,
today in europe the refugee), not embody a re fusal to choose? Choose what? A
position in class struggle. 20
This is how anti-Semitism
relies on a paranoiac totalization of playing with abjection; the anti-Semitic
fetish figure of the Jew is the last thing a subject sees just before he
confronts social antagonism as constitutive of the social body.
From here follows another
crucial consequence with regard to Kristeva’s theoretical edifice: hora (the
semiotic) is not more primordial than the symbolic but strictly a secondary
phenomenon, the return of the presymbolic mimicry (echoes, resemblances,
imitations) within the field of symbolic differentiality. Roman Jakobson drew
attention to the fact that we can discern in our language traces of direct
resemblance between signifier and signified (some words signifying vocal
phenomena seem to sound like what they signify, sometimes even the external
form of a word resembles the form of the signified object, like the word locomotive,
which resembles the old-fashioned steam locomotive with the elevated cabin and
chimney). This, however, in no way undermines the priority and ontological
primacy of the differential character of linguistic signifiers (the identity
and meaning of a signifier depends on its difference from other signifiers, not
on its resemblance to its signified). What we are dealing with in the case of
phenomena like these are the secondary mimetic echoes within a field that is
already, in its basic constitution, radically different (contingent, composed
of differential relations). And the same holds for hora, for the immanent
rhythm of pre-symbolic materiality that pervades the symbolic: what happens
first is the violent cut of abjection that gives birth to the symbolic, and
what Kristeva describes as hora is a strictly secondary phenomenon of
pre-symbolic mimetic echoes within the symbolic field.
Moor Eeffoc
A similar limitation
characterizes Catherine Malabou’s “ontology of the accident,” which brings
negativity to its extreme in the guise of an external organic or physical
catastrophe that totally destroys the symbolic texture of the subject’s psychic
life, allowing for no interpretation, no symbolic appropriation. 21
Malabou’s “ontology of the accident” is thus
an ontology finally taking
into account, as previous orientations have not yet done, explosive events of
indigestible, meaningless traumas in which destructive plasticity goes so far
as to destroy plasticity itself, in which plasticity is exposed, thanks to
itself, to its own disruption.… The massive cerebrolesions of catastrophic
neurotraumas produce the bodies of human organisms living on but not, as it
were, living for, that is, not Inclining toward future plans, projects.…
Plasticity (including neuroplasticity) stands permanently under the shadow of
the virtual danger of its liquidation. 22
A materialist notion of
humanity should effectively take into account the shadow of a permanent threat
to our survival at a multitude of levels, from external threats (an asteroid
hitting the earth, volcanic eruptions, and others) through individual
catastrophes like Alzheimer’s up to the possibility that humanity will destroy
itself as a nonintended consequence of its scientific and technological
progress. Is there, however, a catastrophe that always already occurred and
that is missing from the list of external threats: the catastrophe that is the
emergence of subjectivity, of the human mind, out of nature? The exclusion of
the real of this catastrophe (what Freud called primordial repression) is what
introduces the gap that separates the real from reality—it is on account of
this gap that what we experience as external reality always has to rely on a
fantasy and that when the raw real is forced upon us it causes the experience
of the loss of reality. G. K. Chesterton was on the right track here in his
wonderful description of Charles Dickens’s realism:
[Dickens] was a dreamy child,
thinking mostly of his own dreary prospects. Yet he saw and remembered much of
the streets and squares he passed. Indeed, as a matter of fact, he went the
right way to work unconsciously to do so. He did not go in for ‘observation,’ a
priggish habit; he did not look at Charing Cross to improve his mind or count
the lampposts in Holborn to practice his arithmetic. But unconsciously he made
all these places the scenes of the monstrous drama in his miserable little
soul. He walked in darkness under the lamps of Holborn, and was crucified at
Charing Cross. So for him ever afterwards these places had the beauty that only
belongs to battlefields. For our memory never fixes the facts which we have
merely observed. The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the
place for an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to
forget the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see if we shut our
eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the direction of
guidebooks; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not look at
all—the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something
else—about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow. We can see the
background now because we did not see it then. So Dickens did not stamp these
places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places. For him ever
afterwards these streets were mortally romantic; they were dipped in the purple
dyes of youth and its tragedy, and rich with irrevocable sunsets.
Herein is the whole secret of
that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull
corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions—a window, or a
railing, or the keyhole of a door—which he endows with demoniac life. Things
seem more actual than they really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not
exist in reality; it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of
realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained
by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how
these nightmare minutiæ grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions
among the coffeeshops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St.
Martin’s Lane, ‘of which I only recollect it stood near the church, and that in
the door there was an oval glass plate with “COFFee ROOM” painted on it,
addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of
coffeeroom now, but where there is an inscription on glass, and read it
backwards on the wrong side, MOOR eeFFOC (as I often used to do then in a
dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.’ That wild word, ‘Moor eeffoc’,
is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good
realistic principle—the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often
the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere.
His world was alive with inanimate objects. 23
Strange realism whose
exemplary case—“the motto of all effective realism” —is a signifier MOOR
eeFFOC, whose lack of meaning (signified) is more than supplemented by a rich
condensation of unconscious obscene libidinal echoes (fears, horrors, obscene
imaginations) so that it effectively functions as a direct signifier (or,
rather, cypher) of jouissance, signaling a point at which meaning breaks down!
So if we are looking for the traces of das Ding in all this, they are not to be
found in external reality the way it operates independently of our investments
into it—say, the way oval glass plates on the doors of coffee rooms really
are—but at those myste rious points within the universe of meaning where
meaning breaks down and is overshadowed by a nameless abyss of jouissance. This
is why when he stumbles upon the meaningless signifier MOOR eeFFOC, “a shock
goes through [his] blood.” It may appear that Chesterton is here simply
asserting the key role of inner psychic traumas, desires, obsessions, and
fears: “Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on
these places.” That is, certain places impressed him deeply not because of
their inherent qualities but because of the intense inner experi ences
(concerning sin and love) they served as a pretext for and gave birth to. One
can easily imagine here a critic of psychoanalysis like Malabou sarcastically
asking if a devastating catastrophe in external reality like a gigantic tsunami
or being exposed to brutal torture also acquires weight only if a previous
psychic trauma resonates in it. But are things as simple as that? What makes
inanimate objects alive is the way they are enveloped by dreams; this is not
the same as the famous Freudian dream where the burning cloth on the son’s
coffin triggers in the sleeping father the terrifying dream image of his dread
son approaching him with “Father, can’t you see I’m burning!” In Freud’s case,
the dreamer (father) escapes from reality into a dream where he encounters an
even more terrifying real. In Dickens, there is no escape from ordinary
reality; a detail of reality itself gets spectralized, is experienced as a
moment from a nightmarish dream. Something similar takes place continuously in
Franz Kafka’s work; Kafka is also a master of “effective realism.” But let us
rather take an unexpected example from cinema.
In James Cameron’s Titanic (1997)
there is a short shot from above of an unidentified old couple lying embraced
in their bed while the ship is already sinking, so their cabin is half-flooded
and a stream of water is running all around the bed. This shot, although meant
as a realistic shot, creates the impression of a dream scene—a bed with the
tightly embraced couple in the midst of strong flow of water, touchingly
rendering the stability of love in the midst of a disaster. This detail in an
otherwise average commercial movie bears witness to an authentic cinematic touch,
that of making reality appear as a dream scene. A variation of the same motif
are those magic moments in some films when it seems as if an entity that
belongs to fantasy space intervenes in ordinary reality so that the frontier
that separates the fantasy space from ordinary reality is momentarily
suspended.
Suffice it to recall a scene
from Possessed, Clarence Brown’s melodrama from 1931 with Joan Crawford.
Crawford, playing a poor small-town girl, stares amazed at the luxurious
private train that slowly passes in front of her at the local railway station;
through the windows of the carriages she sees the rich life going on in the
illuminated inside—dancing couples, cooks preparing dinner, and so on. The
crucial feature of the scene is that we, the spectators, together with
Crawford, perceive the train as a magic, immaterial apparition from another
world. When the last carriage passes by, the train comes to a halt and we
see on the observation desk a goodnatured drunkard with a glass of champagne in
his hand, which stretches over the railing towards Crawford—as if, for a brief
moment, the fantasyspace intervened in reality. 24
It is along these lines that
we should understand also what Chesterton says about Dickens’s “eerie realism”
in which “the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact”: “a shock
goes through my blood” when I stumble upon a small material detail that stirs
up something in my “inner life”—not some “deeper meaning” but something
traumatic, nonsymbolizable, extimate (external in the very heart of my being).
One should emphasize the hyperrealism of such moments; the spectralization of
material reality overlaps with full focus on material objects. How is this
paradox possible? There is only one solution: external reality itself is not
simply out there, it is already transcendentally constituted so that it is
experienced as such—as “normal” reality out there—only if it fits these
transcendental coordinates.
Let’s take a traumatic event
like the 9/11 World Trade Center (WTC) destruction. One “should therefore
invert the standard reading according to which the WTC explosions were the
intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere; quite the reverse—it
was before the WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, perceiving Third World
horrors as something which was not actually part of our social reality, as
something which ex isted (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV)
screen—and what happened on September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen
apparition entered our reality.” 25
“In short, one should discern which part of reality is ‘trans functionalized’
through fantasy, so that, although it is part of reality, it is perceived in a
fictional mode”—exactly as our examples from Titanic and Possessed show in
which part of reality is spectralized, acquires dreamlike quality. “Much more
difficult than to denounce/unmask (what appears as) reality as fiction is to
recognize in ‘real’ reality the part of fiction.” 26
This, then, is what the
Malabou-like critique misses when it accuses psychoanalysis of ignoring the
bodily weight of traumatic events, thereby reducing their impact to their
stirring up some previous dormant psychic trauma. Let us imagine witnessing or
being submitted to extremely brutal torture. Precisely because the impact of
the scene is so shattering—as it would undermine the basic coordinates of what
we perceive as “solid external reality”—the scene would not be experienced as
part of ordinary reality but as an unreal, nightmarish fiction. The sense of
ordinary external reality and extreme trauma are mutually exclusive. This is
the ultimate reason why, as Chesterton saw it clearly, dream and “effective
realism” go together.
Notes:
Häßliche: ugly and, literally,
worthy of hatred, that which provokes hatred, “hatable.” For more on Karl
Rosenkranz, see Viktoras Bachmetjevas, “The Ugly in Art,” Man and the Word 9,
no. 4 (2007): 29–34. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own.
Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des
Häßlichen (Stuttgart, 2007), 36.
Ibid., p. 145. Rosenkranz
strangely ignores Hegel in his book on the ugly, although Hegel points the way
towards Ästhetik des Häßlichen when he conceives romantic art as the art that
liberates subjectivity in its contingency (ugliness) and culminates in humor as
a way to subsume the ugly.
Quoted in Bachmetjevas, “The
Ugly in Art,” p. 33.
Ibid., p. 34.
Herman Parret, “The Ugly as
the beyond of the Sublime,” http://www.hermanparret.be/media/articles-in-print/21_The-Ugly-as-the-Beyond.pdf;
hereafter abbreviated “U.”
Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil:
Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (Brooklyn, N.Y.,
2014), pp. 65–66.
Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom:
Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York, 2008), 265 n. 16.
Žižek, The Puppet and the
Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, 2003), p. 150.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, C. J. M. Hubback, ed. ernest Jones, www.bartleby.com/276/4.html
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound:
Enlightenment and Extinction (London, 2007), p. 237
Adam Kostko, Creepiness (London,
2015), 119; hereafter abbreviated C.
Žižek, “Lacan’s Four Discourses:
A Political Reading,” in Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural
Criticism, Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller (Albany, N.Y., 2008). pp. 88–89.
See Julia Kristeva, Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982);
hereafter abbreviated P.
See also JacquesAlain Miller,
“extimity,” The Symptom, www.lacan.com/symptom/
The quotation within the
quotation is from Charles Malamoud, “Observations sur la notion de ‘reste’ dans
le brahmanisme,” Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde Siidasiens 16 (1972): 5–26.
Against such a reading, it
suffices to recall that for Hegel the concluding moment of the dialectical
process is not the complete sublation of all contingent particularity in
the universality of a notion but its exact opposite: the insight into how
a nonsublatable remainder is needed to close the process; the state as a
rational totality is fully actualized in the (biologically, or contingently,
determined) person of the monarch. In other words, the spurious infinity of
the idealization of empirical contingency is brought to its end not when it
finally succeeds but when that which seems its fatal obstacle is experienced as
its point de capiton (quilting point).
Žižek, “Abjection, Disavowal,
and the Masquerade of Power,” Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and
Research 26 (July 2015): jcfar.org.uk/jcfar-bookshop/articles/jcfar-26-slavoj-zizek/
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino
Elegies, in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria
Rilke, trans. and ed. Stephen Mitchell (New York, 1995), p. 331.
Žižek, “The Need to Traverse
the Fantasy,” In These Times, inthesetimes.com/article/18722/Slavoj-Zizek-on-Syria-refugees-Eurocentrism-Western-Values-Lacan-Islam
See Catherine Malabou, The
Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans.
Carolyn Shread (New York, 2012).
Adrian Johnston, Adventures in
Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (edinburgh,
2014), p. 281.
G. K. Chesterton, Charles
Dickens, in The Everyman Chesterton (New York, 2011), pp. 70–71.
Žižek, The Metastases of
Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (Brooklyn, Y., 2005), p. 111
n. 21.
Žižek, Welcome to the Desert
of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York,
2002), p. 16.
Žižek, Organs without Bodies:
Deleuze and Consequences (New York, 2004), p. 170.
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