Desire & the Symbolic (4)

From Slavoj Žižek's How to Read Lacan (First published in the UK by Granta Publications; page numbers here refer to the edition published in New York by W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), pp. 34-36:

Because of this gap, the subject cannot ever fully and immediately identify with his symbolic mask or title; the subject's questioning of his symbolic title is what hysteria is all about: 'Why am I what you are saying what I am? Or, to quote Shakespeare's Juliet: 'Why am I that name?' There is a truth in the wordplay between 'hysteria' and 'historia': the subject's symbolic identity is always historically determined, dependent upon a specific ideological context. We are dealing here with what Louis Althusser called 'ideological interpellation': the symbolic identity conferred on us is the result of the way the ruling ideology 'interpellates' us--as citizens, democrats, Christians. Hysteria emerges when a subject starts to question or to feel discomfort in his or her symbolic identity: 'You say I am your beloved--what is there in me that makes me that? What do you see in me that causes you to desire me in that way? Richard II is Shakespeare's ultimate play about hystericization (in contrast to Hamlet, the ultimate play about obsession). Its topic is the progressive questioning by the king of his own kingship--What is it that makes me a king? What remains of me if the symbolic title 'king' is taken away?

I have no name, no title

No, not that name was given me at the font,

But 'tis usurp'd: alack the heavy day,

That I have worn so many winters out,

And know not now what name to call myself!

O that I were a mockery king of snow,

Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,

To melt myself away in water-drops!

In the Slovene translation, the second line is translated as: 'Why am I what I am?' Although this clearly involves too much poetic license, it does convey the gist of the predicament: deprived of its symbolic titles, Richard's identity melts like a snowman's in the sun.

The problem for the hysteric is how to distinguish what he or she is (his true desire) from what others see and desire in him or her. This brings us to another of Lacan's formulas, that 'Man's desire is the other's desire.' For Lacan, the fundamental impasse of human desire is that it is the other's desire in both subjective and objective genitive: desire for the other, desire to be desired by the other, and, especially, desire for what the other desires.

Desire & the Symbolic (3)

From Slavoj Žižek's How to Read Lacan (First published in the UK by Granta Publications; page numbers here refer to the edition published in New York by W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), p. 34:

This gap between my direct psychological identity and my symbolic identity (the symbolic mask or title I wear, defining what I am for and in the big Other) is what Lacan (for complex reasons that we can here ignore) calls 'symbolic castration', with the phallus as its signifier. Why is phallus for Lacan a signifier and not simply the organ of insemination? In the traditional rituals of investiture, the objects that symbolize power also put the subject who acquires them into the position of exercising power--if a king holds the sceptre in his hands, and wears the crown, his words will be taken as royal. Such insignia are external, not part of my nature: I don them; I wear them to exercise power. As such, they 'castrate' me, by introducing a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (I am never complete at the level of my function). This is what the infamous 'symbolic castration' means: the castration that occurs by the very fact of me being caught in the symbolic order, assuming a mask or title. Castration is the gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic title that confers on me a certain status and authority. In this precise sense, far from being the opposite of power, it is synonymous with power; it is what gives power to me. So one has to think of the phallus not as the organ that immediately expresses the vital force of my being, but as a kind of insignia, a mask that I put on in the same way that a king or judge puts on his insignia--phallus is a kind of organ without a body which I put on, which gets attached to my body, but never becomes an organic part, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive prosthesis.

Desire & the Symbolic (2)

From Dylan Evans' An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 128-129:

The second 'time' of the Oedipus complex is characterised by the intervention of the imaginary father. The father imposes the law on the mother's desire by denying her access to the phallic object and forbidding the subject access to the mother. Lacan often refers to this intervention as the 'castration' of the mother, even though he states that, properly speaking, the operation is not one of castration but of privation. This intervention is mediated by the discourse of the mother; in other words, what is important is not that the real father step in and impose the law, but that this law be respected by the mother herself in both her words and her actions. The subject now sees the father as a rival for the mother's desire.

The third 'time' of the Oedipus complex is marked by the intervention of the real father. By showing that he has the phallus, and neither exchanges it nor gives it (S3, 319), the real father castrates the child, in the sense of making it impossible for the child to persist in trying to be the phallus for the mother; it is no use competing with the real father, because he always wins (S4, 208-9, 227). The subject is freed from the impossibility and anxiety-provoking task of having to be the phallus by realizing that the father has it. This allows the subject to identify with the father. In this secondary (symbolic) identification the subject transcends the aggressivity inherent in primary (imaginary) identification. Lacan follows Freud in arguing that the superego is formed out of this Oedipal identification with the father (S4, 415).

Since the symbolic is the realm of the LAW, and since the Oedipus complex is the conquest of the symbolic order, it has a normative and normalising function: 'the Oedipus complex is essential for the human being to be able to accede to a humanized structure of the real' (S3, 198). This normative function is to be understood in reference to both clinical structures and the question of sexuality.

Desire & the Symbolic (1)

From Dylan Evans' An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 127-128:

The Oedipus complex was defined by Freud as an unconscious set of loving and hostile desires which the subject experiences in relation to its parents; the subject desires one parent, and thus enters into rivalry with the other parent. In the 'positive' form of the Oedipus complex, the desired parent is the parent of the opposite sex to the subject, and the parent of the same sex is the rival. The Oedipus complex emerges in the third year of life and then declines in the fifth year, when the child renounces sexual desire for its parents and identifies with the rival. Freud argued that all psychopathological structures could be traced to a malfunction in the Oedipus complex, which was thus dubbed 'the nuclear complex of the neuroses'. Although the term does not appear in Freud's writings until 1910, traces of its origins can be found much earlier in his work, and by 1910 it was already showing signs of the central importance that it was to acquire in all psychoanalytic theory thereafter.

Lacan first addresses the Oedipus complex in his 1938 article on the family, where he argues that it is the last and most important of the three 'family complexes'. At this point his account of the Oedipus complex does not differ from Freud's, his only originality being to emphasize its historical and cultural relativity, taking his cue from the anthropological studies by Malinowski and others (Lacan, 1938: 66).

It is in the 1950's that Lacan begins to develop his own distinctive conception of the Oedipus complex. Though he always follows Freud in regarding the Oedipus complex as the central complex in the unconscious, he now begins to differ from Freud on a number of important points. The most important of these is that in Lacan's view, the subject always desires the mother, and the father is always the rival, irrespective of whether the subject is male or female. Consequently, in Lacan's account the male subject experiences the Oedipus complex in a radically asymmetrical way to the female subject.

The Oedipus complex is, for Lacan, the paradigmatic triangular structure, which contrasts with all dual relations (though see the final paragraph below). The key function in the Oedipus complex is thus that of the FATHER, the third term which transforms the dual relation between mother and child into a triadic structure. The Oedipus complex is thus nothing less than the passage from the imaginary order to the symbolic order, 'the conquest of the symbolic relation as such' (S3, 199). The fact that the passage to the symbolic passes via a complex sexual dialectic means that the subject cannot have access to the symbolic order without confronting the problem of sexual difference.

In The Seminar, Book V, Lacan analyses this passage from the imaginary to the symbolic by identifying three 'times' of the Oedipus complex, the sequence being one of logical rather than chronological priority (Lacan, 1957-8: seminar of 22 January 1958).

The first time of the Oedipus complex is characterised by the imaginary triangle of mother, child and phallus. In the previous seminar of 1956-7, Lacan calls this the preoedipal triangle. However, whether this triangle is regarded as preoedipal or as a moment in the Oedipus complex itself, the main point is the same: namely, that prior to the invention [sic] of the father there is never a purely dual relation between the mother and the child but always a third term, the phallus, an imaginary object which the mother desires beyond the child himself (S4, 240-1). Lacan hints that the presence of the imaginary phallus as a third term in the imaginary triangle indicates that the symbolic father is already functioning at this time (Lacan, 1957-8: seminar of 22 January 1958).

In the first time of the Oedipus complex, then, the child realises that both he and the mother are marked by a lack. The mother is marked by lack, since she is seen to be incomplete; otherwise, she would not desire. The subject is also marked by a lack, since he does not completely satisfy the mother's desire. The lacking element in both cases is the imaginary PHALLUS. The mother desires the phallus she lacks, and (in conformity with Hegel's theory of DESIRE) the subject seeks to become the object of her desire; he seeks to be the phallus for the mother and fill out her lack. At this point, the mother is omnipotent and her desire is the law. Although this omnipotence may be seen as threatening from the very beginning, the sense of threat is intensified when the child's own sexual drives begin to manifest themselves (for example, in infantile masturbation). This emergence of the real of the drive introduces a discordant note anxiety into the previously seductive imaginary triangle (S4, 225-6). The child is now confronted with the realisation that he cannot simply fool the mother's desire with the imaginary semblance of a phallus--he must present something in the real. Yet the child's real organ (whether boy or girl) is hopelessly inadequate. This sense of inadequacy and impotence in the face of an omnipotent maternal desire that cannot be placated gives rise to anxiety. Only the intervention of the father in the subsequent times of the Oedipus complex can provide a real solution to this anxiety.

Žižek's Afterward to Marcus Pound (3)

The Counterbook of Christianity (continued)

Slavoj Žižek

From Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eeerdmans Publishing Co.), pp. 153-156:

These lines cannot but evoke the famous passages from The Communist Manifesto that answer the bourgeois reproach that Communists want to abolish freedom, property, and family: it is the capitalist freedom itself that is effectively the freedom to buy and sell on the market and thus the very form of unfreedom for those who have nothing but their labor force to sell; it is the capitalist property itself that means the "abolition" of property for those who own no means of production; it is the bourgeois marriage itself that is the universalized prostitution. In all these cases the external opposition is internalized, so that one opposite becomes the form of appearance of the other (bourgeois freedom is the form of appearance of the unfreedom of the majority, etc.). However, for Marx, at least in the case of freedom, this means that Communism will not abolish freedom but, by way of abolishing the capitalist servitude, bring about actual freedom, the freedom that will no longer be the form of appearance of its opposite. It is thus not freedom itself that is the form of appearance of its opposite, but only the false freedom, the freedom distorted by relations of domination. Is it not, then, that, underlying the dialectic of the "negation of negation," a Habermasian "normative" approach imposes here immediately: How can we talk about crime if we do not have a preceding notion of legal order violated by the criminal transgression? In other words, is the notion of law as universalized/self-negated crime not auto-destructive? This, precisely, is what a properly dialectical approach rejects: what is before transgression is just a neutral state of things, neither good nor bad (neither property nor theft, neither law nor crime); the balance of this state of things is then violated, and the positive norm (law, property) arises as a secondary move, an attempt to counteract and contain the transgression. With regard to the dialectic of freedom, this means that it is the very "alienated, bourgeois" freedom that creates the conditions and opens up the space for "actual" freedom.

This Hegelian logic is at work in Wagner's universe up to Parsifal, whose final message is a profoundly Hegelian one: the wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it ("Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der Sie schlug"). Hegel says the same thing, although with the accent shifted in the opposite direction: the Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, i.e., the wound is self-inflicted. That is to say, what is "Spirit" at its most elementary? The "wound" of nature: subject is the immense--absolute--power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of "abstracting," of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity. This is why the notion of the "self-alienation" of Spirit (of Spirit losing itself in its otherness, in its objectivization, in its result) is more paradoxical than it may appear: it should be read together with Hegel's assertion of the thoroughly nonsubstantial character of Spirit: there is no res cogitans, no thing that (as its property) also thinks, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming natural immediacy, of the cultivation of this immediacy, of withdrawing-into-itself or "taking off" from it, of--why not?--alienating itself from it. The paradox is thus that there is no Self that precedes the Spirit's "self-alienation": the very process of alienation creates/generates the "Self" from which Spirit is alienated and to which it then returns. (Hegel here turns around the standard notion that a failed version of x presupposes this x as their norm (measure): x is created, its space is outlined, only through repetitive failures to reach it.) Spirit self-alienation is the same as, fully coincides with, its alienation from its Other (nature), because it constitutes itself through its "return-to-itself" from its immersion into natural Otherness. In other words, Spirit's return-to-itself creates the very dimension to which it returns. (This holds for all "return to origins": when, from the nineteenth century onward, new nation-states were constituting themselves in central and eastern Europe, their discovery and return to "old ethnic roots" generated these roots.)

What this means is that the "negation of negation," the "return-to-oneself" from alienation, does not occur where it seems to: in the "negation of negation," Spirit's negativity is not relativized, subsumed under an encompassing positivity; it is, on the contrary, the "simple negation" that remains attached to the presupposed positivity it negated, the presupposed Otherness from which it alienates itself, and the "negation of negation" is nothing but the negation of the substantial character of this Otherness itself, the full acceptance of the abyss of Spirit's self-relating that retroactively posits all its presuppositions. In other words, once we are in negativity, we never quit it and regain the lost innocence of Origins; it is, on the contrary, only in "negation of negation" that the Origins are truly lost, that their very loss is lost, that they are deprived of the substantial status of that which was lost. The Spirit heals its wound not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane body into which the wound was cut. It is a little bit like in the (rather tasteless version of the) "first the bad news then the good news" medical joke: "The bad news is that we've discovered you have severe Alzheimer's disease. The good news is the same: you have Alzheimer's, so you will already forget the bad news when you will be back home."

In Christian theology, Christ's supplement (the repeated "But I tell you...") is often designated as the "antithesis" to the thesis of the law--the irony here is that, in the proper Hegelian approach, this antithesis is synthesis itself at its purest. In other words, is what Christ does in his "fulfillment" of the law not like the law's Aufhebung in the strict Hegelian sense of the term? In its supplement, the commandment is both negated and maintained by way of being elevated/transposed into another (higher) level. This is why one should reject the commonplace reproach that cannot but arise here: Is, from the Hegelian standpoint, the "second story," this supplement that displace the "first story," not merely a negation, a split into two, which needs to be negated in its own turn in order to bring about the "synthesis" of the opposites? What happens in the passage from "antithesis" to "synthesis" is not that another story is added, bringing together the first two (or that we return to the first story, which is now rendered more "rich," provided with its background): all that happens is a purely formal shift by which we realize that the "antithesis" ALREADY IS "synthesis." Back to the example of class struggle: there is no need to provide some encompassing global narrative that would provide the frame for both opposing narratives: the second narrative (the story from the standpoint of the oppressed) ALREADY IS the story from the standpoint of social totality--why? The two stories are not symmetrical: only the second story renders the antagonism, the gap that separates the two stories, and this antagonism is the "truth" of the entire field.

Žižek's Afterward to Marcus Pound (2)

The Counterbook of Christianity (continued)

Slavoj Žižek

From Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eeerdmans Publishing Co.), pp. 149-153:

A similar clash of narratives is at the very core of Christianity. One of the few remaining truly progressive U.S. publications, the Weekly World News, reported on a recent breathtaking discovery: archaeologists discovered an additional ten commandments, as well as seven "warnings" from Jehovah to his people; they are suppressed by the Jewish and Christian establishment because they clearly give a boost to today's progressive struggle, demonstrating beyond doubt that God took a side in our political struggles. Commandment 11 is: "Thou shalt tolerate the faith of others as you would have them do unto you." (Originally, this commandment was directed at the Jews who objected to the Egyptian slaves joining them in their exodus to continue to practice their religion.) Commandment 14 ("Thou shalt not inhale burning leaves in a house of manna where it may affect the breathing of others") clearly supports the prohibition of smoking in public places; commandment 18 ("Thou shalt not erect a temple of gaming in the desert, where all will become wanton") warns of Las Vegas, although it originally referred to individuals who organized gambling in the desert close to the camp of wandering Jews; commandment 19 ("Thy body is sacred and thou shalt not permanently alter thy face or bosom. If thy nose offends thee, leave it alone") points toward the vanity of plastic surgery, while the target of commandment 16 ("Thou shalt not elect a fool to lead thee. If twice elected, thy punishment shall be death by stoning") is clearly the reelection of President Bush. Even more telling are some of the warnings: the second warning ("Seek ye not war in My Holy Lands, for they shall multiply and afflict all of civilization") presciently warns of the global dangers of the Middle East conflict, and the third warning ("Avoid dependence upon the thick black oils of the soil, for they come from the realm of Satan") is a plea for new sources of clean energy. Are we ready to hear and obey God's word?

There is a basic question to be raised here, above the ironic satisfaction provided by such jokes: Is the search for supplementary commandments not another search for the counterbook without which the principal book remains incomplete? And insofar as this book-to-be-supplemented is ultimately the Old Testament itself, is the counterbook not simply the New Testament itself? This would be the way to account for the strange coexistence of two sacred books in Christianity: the Old Testament, the book shared by all three "religions of the book," and the New Testament, the counterbook that defines Christianity and (within its perspective, of course) completes the book, so that we can effectively say that "the construction itself of the Bible is supported by the junction between the two Testaments." This ambiguous supplementation-completion is best encapsulated in the lines on the fulfillment of the law from Jesus' Sermon on the Mountain, in which he radicalizes the commandments:

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, "Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment." But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.... You have heard that it was said, "Do not commit adultery." But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.... You have heard that it was said, "Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth." But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matt. 5:21-22, 27-28, 38-42 NIV)

The official Catholic way to interpret this series of supplements is the so-called double-standard view, which divides the teachings of the Sermon into general precepts and specific counsels: obedience to the general precepts is essential for salvation, but obedience to the counsels is necessary only for perfection, or, as Saint Thomas Aquinas put it (paraphrasing Didache 6.2): "For if you are able to bear the entire yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but if you are not able to do this, do what you are able." In short, law is for everyone, while its supplement is for the perfect only. Martin Luther rejected this Catholic approach and proposed a different two-level system, the so-called two-realms view, which divides the world into the religious and secular realms, claiming that the Sermon applies only to the spiritual: in the temporal world, obligations to family, employers, and country force believers to compromise; thus a judge should follow his secular obligations to sentence a criminal, but inwardly he should mourn for the fate of the criminal.

Clearly, both these versions resolve the tension by introducing a split between the two domains and constraining the more severe injunctions to the second domain. As expected, in Catholicism this split is externalized into two kinds of people, the ordinary ones and the perfect (saints, monks, etc.), while Protestantism internalizes the split between how I interact with others in the secular sphere and how I inwardly relate to others. Are these, however, the only way to read this operation? A (perhaps surprising) reference to Richard Wagner might be of some help here: to his draft of the play Jesus of Nazareth, written between late 1848 and early 1849. What Wagner attributes here to Jesus is a series of alternate supplementations of the commandments:

The commandment saith: Thou shalt not commit adultery! But I say unto you: Ye shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into, and who so hath wooed without love, already hath broken the wedding. If ye follow my commandment, how can ye ever break it, since it bids you to do what your own heart and soul desire?--But where ye marry without love, ye bind yourselves at variance with God's love, and in your wedding ye sin against God; and this sin avengeth itself by your striving next aginst the law of man, in that ye break the marriage-vow.

The shift from Jesus' actual words is crucial here: Jesus "internalizes" the prohibition, rendering it much more severe (the law says no actual adultery, while I say that if you only covet the other's wife in your mind, it is the same as if you had already committed adultery; etc.); Wagner also internalizes it, but in a different way--the inner dimension he evokes is not that of intention to do it, but that of love that should accompany the law (marriage). The true adultery is not to copulate outside of marriage, but to copulate in marriage without love: the simple adultery just violates the law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So, to paraphrase Brecht yet again: what is a simple adultery compared to (the adultery that is a loveless) marriage! It is not by chance that Wagner's underlying formula "marriage is adultery" recalls Proudhon's "property is theft"--in the stormy 1848 events, Wagner was not only a Feuerbachian celebrating sexual love, but also a Proudhonian revolutionary demanding the abolition of private property; so no wonder that, later on the same page, Wagner attributes to Jesus a Proudhonian supplement to "Thou shalt not steal!": "This also is a good law: Thou shalt not steal, nor covet another man's goods. Who goeth against it, sinneth: but I preserve you from that sin, inasmuch as I teach you: Love thy neighbor as thyself; which also meanest: Lay not up for thyself treasures, whereby thou stealest from thy neighbor and makest him to starve: for when thou hast thy goods safeguarded by the law of man, thou provokest thy neighbor to sin against the law." This is how the Christian "supplement" to the Book should be conceived: as a properly Hegelian "negation of negation," which resides in the decisive shift from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion, i.e., to this notion as a distortion-in-itself. Recall again Proudhon's old dialectical motto "property is theft": the "negation of negation" is here the shift from theft as a distortion ("negation," violation) of property to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property (nobody has the right to fully own means of production; their nature is inherently collective, so every claim "this is mine" is illegitimate). The same goes for crime and law, for the passage from crime as the distortion ("negation") of the law to crime as sustaining law itself; i.e., to the idea of the law itself as universalized crime. One should note that, in this notion of the "negation of negation," the encompassing unity of the two opposed terms is the "lowest," "transgressive," one: it is not crime that is a moment of law's self-mediation (or theft that is a moment of property's self-mediation); the opposition of crime and law is inherent to crime, law is a subspecies crime, crime's self-relating negation (in the same way that property is theft's self-relating negation). And does ultimately the same not go for nature itself? Here, "negation of negation" is the shift from the idea that we are violating some natural balanced order to the idea that imposing on the Real such a notion of balanced order is in itself the greatest violation...which is why the premise, the first axiom even, of every radical ecology is "there is no Nature."

Žižek's Afterward to Marcus Pound (1)

From Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eeerdmans Publishing Co.), pp. 145-149:

The Counterbook of Christianity

Slavoj Žižek

What can I add to the book that provides a precise critical reading of my continuous struggle to come to terms, as an atheist, with our Christian legacy? The only honest thing to do is to "dot the i," as it were, with a concise version of what I perceive as the Communist core of the Christian ethical revolution.

Let me begin with a simple mental experiment with two of Hitchcock's late masterpieces. What if Vertigo were to end after Madeleine's suicide, with the devastated Scottie listening to Mozart in the sanatorium? What if Psycho were to end seconds prior to the shower murder, with Marion staring into the falling water, purifying herself? In both cases we would get a consistent short film. Vertigo would be a drama of the destruction caused by the violently obsessive male desire: it is the very excessive-possessive nature of male desire that makes it destructive of its object--(male) love is murder, as Otto Weininger knew long ago. Psycho would be a moral tale about the catastrophe prevented in the last minute: Marion commits a minor crime, escaping with the stolen money to rejoin her lover; on the way she meets Norman, who is like a figure of moral warning, rendering visible to Marion what awaits her at the end of the line if she follows the path taken; this terrifying vision sobers her up, so she withdraws to her room, plans her return, and then takes a shower, as if to cleanse her of her moral dirt. In both cases, it is thus as if what we are first lured into taking as the full story is all of a sudden displaced, reframed, relocated into, or supplemented by another story, something along the lines of the idea envisaged by Borges in the opening story of his Fictions, which culminates in the claim: "Un libro que no encierra su contra-libro es considerado incomplete" [A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete]. In his 2005-2006 seminar, Jacques-Alain Miller elaborated on this idea, referring to Ricardo Piglia. Piglia quoted as an example of Borges's claim one of Mikhail Chekhov's tales whose nucleus is: "A man goes to the casino at Monte Carlo, wins a million, returns to his place and commits suicide."

If this is the nucleus of a story, one must, in order to tell it, divide the twisted story in two: on the one hand, the story of the game; on the other, that of the suicide. Thus Piglia's first thesis: that a story always has a double characteristic and always tells two stories at the same time, which provides the opportunity to distinguish the story that is on the first plane from the number 2 story that is encoded in the interstices of story number 1. We should note that story number 2 appears only when the story is concluded, and it has the effect of surprise. What joins these two stories is that the elements, the events, are inscribed in two narrative registers that are at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories. The inversions that seem superfluous in the development of story number 1 become, on the contrary, essential in the plot of story number 2.

There is a modern form of the story that transforms this structure by omitting the surprise finale without closing the structure of the story, which leaves the trace of a narrative, and the tension of the two stories is never resolved. This is what one considers as being properly modern: the subtraction of the final anchoring point that allows the two stories to continue in an unresolved tension.

This is the case, says Piglia, with Hemingway, who pushed the ellipse to its highest point in such a way that the secret story remains hermetic. One perceives simply that there is another story that needs to be told but remains absent. There is a hole. If one modified Chekhov's note in Hemingway's style, it would not narrate the suicide, but rather the text would be assembled in such a way that one might think that the reader already knew it. Kafka constitutes another of these variants. He narrates very simply, in his novels, the most secret story, a secret story that appears on the first plane, told as if coming from itself, and he encodes the story that should be visible but becomes, on the contrary, enigmatic and hidden.

Back to Hitchcock's Vertigo and Psycho. Is this not precisely the structure of the narrative twist/cut in both films? In both cases story number 2 (the shift to Judy and to Norman) appears only when the story seems concluded, and it certainly has the effect of surprise; in both cases the two narrative registers are at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories. The inversions that seem superfluous in the development of story number 1 (like the totally contingent intrusion of the murdering monster in Psycho) become essential in the plot of story number 2.

One can thus well imagine, along these lines, Psycho remade by Hemingway or Kafka. Exemplary of Hemingway's procedure is "The Killers," his best-known short story that, on a mere ten pages, reports in a terse style the arrival of two killers to a small provincial city; they occupy there a diner, awaiting a mysterious "Swede" whom they have to kill. Swede's young friend escapes from the diner and informs him that two killers are on the way to murder him, yet Swede is so desperate and resigned that he sends the boy off and calmly awaits them. The "second story," the explanation of this enigma (what happened to Swede that he is ready to calmly await his death), is never told. (The classic film noir based on this story tries to fill in this void: in the series of flashbacks, the "second story," the betrayal of a femme fatale, is told in detail.) In Hemingway's version, Norman's story will remain hermetic: the spectator will simply perceive that there is another (Norman's) story that needs to be told but remains absent--there is a hole. In Kafka's version Norman's story would appear in the first plane, told as if coming from itself: Norman's weird universe would have been narrated directly, in the first person, as something most normal, while Marion's story would have been encoded/enframed by Norman's horizon, told as enigmatic and hidden. Just imagine the conversation between Marion and Norman in his private room, prior to the shower murder: the way we have it now, our point of identification is Marion, and Norman appears as a weird and threatening presence. What if this scene were reshot with Norman as our point of identification, so that Marion's "ordinary" questions would appear as what they often effectively are, a cruel and insensitive intrusion into Norman's world?

This is how, from a proper Hegelo-Lacanian perspective, one should subvert the standard self-enclosed linear narrative: not by means of a postmodern dispersal into a multitude of local narratives, but by means of its redoubling in a hidden counternarrative. (This is why the classic detective whodunit is so similar to the psychoanalytic process: in it, also, the two narrative registers--the visible story of the discovery of crime and its investigation by the detective, and the hidden story of what really happened--are "at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories.") And is one of the ways to conceptualize class struggle not also such a split between the two narratives that are "at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories"? If one starts to tell the story from the standpoint of the ruling class, one sooner or later reaches a gap, a point at which something arises that doesn't make sense within the horizon of the story, something experienced as a meaningless brutality, something akin to the unexpected intrusion of the murdering figure in the shower scene from Psycho. In 1922 the Soviet government organized the forced expulsion of leading anti-Communist intellectuals, from philosophers and theologians to economists and historians. They left Russia for Germany on a boat known as the "Philosophy Steamer." Prior to his expulsion, Nikolai Lossky, one of those forced into exile, enjoyed with his family the comfortable life of the haute bourgeoisie, supported by servants and nannies. He "simply couldn't understand who would want to destroy his way of life. What had the Losskys and their kind done? His boys and their friends, as they inherited the best of what Russia had to offer, helped fill the world with talk of literature and music and art, and they led gentle lives. What was wrong with that?"

To account for such a foreign element, one has to pass to "story number 2," the story from the standpoint of the exploited. For Marxism, class struggle is not the all-encompassing narrative of our history, it is an irreducible clash of narratives--and does not the same go for today's Israel? Many peace-loving Israelis confess to their perplexity: they just want peace and a shared life with the Palestinians: they are ready to make concessions, but why do Palestinians hate them so much, why the brutal suicide bombings that kill innocent wives and children? The thing to do here is of course to supplement this story with its counterstory, the story of what it means to be a Palestinian in the occupied territories, subjected to hundreds of regulations of the bureaucratic microphysics of power--say, a Palestinian farmer is allowed to dig a hole in the earth no deeper than three feet to find a source of water, while a Jewish farmer is allowed to dig as deep as he wants.