US Soldier Charged for Disclosing War Crimes

Charged for revealing the truth

http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/09/revealing-the-truth

ANALYSIS: ALAN MAASS

Alan Maass reports on the persecution of an Army private who has been accused of leaking video of a U.S. massacre of civilians in Iraq and other "classified information."

July 9, 2010

THE U.S. military is pressing criminal charges against a whistleblower for allegedly leaking information to the watchdog Web site WikiLeaks.org, including the video of an Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad [1] that killed at least 12 civilians and caused a scandal for the Pentagon.

Pfc. Bradley Manning faces eight charges, including espionage, and could go to jail for more than half a century if found guilty.

All for the "crime" of exposing the unacknowledged crimes of the American military.

Manning has also been accused of turning over at least 150,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department to WikiLeaks--as well as encrypted video of another air strike, this one in Granai, Afghanistan, which killed 140 civilians. WikiLeaks has so far published only one such embarrassing cable, and it has not released the Granai video.

The 22-year-old Manning, who was stationed at a U.S. base east of Baghdad, was arrested by military authorities in May and has been in detention in Kuwait since. He was fingered to the military by a computer hacker named Adrian Lamo. Lamo claims that Manning started communicating with him online, and admitted to being the source of the WikiLeaks exposé.

But there's reason to doubt Lamo's story--not least because he was convicted of hacking into news and corporate Web sites and served a sentence of house arrest and probation that could leave him vulnerable to pressure by authorities.

The attempts to convict Manning in the press are bound up with the military's ongoing campaign against WikiLinks, a Web site founded three years ago to expose government and corporate wrongdoing by publishing information from whistleblowers. In addition to the explosive video of the Baghdad massacre, the site has published documents about toxic waste dumping in Africa and the military's practices at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a Democracy Now! interview [2], the U.S. Army's counterintelligence division prepared a report in 2008 identifying WikiLinks as a "threat to national security" and detailing possible ways to silence the Web site.

The main thrust was that if WikiLeaks' sources were exposed--and the perception created that it was dangerous to associate with the site--whistleblowers could be intimidated from turning over information. As Greenwald said:

That's exactly what has happened here. Suddenly, a 22-year-old private, who supposedly has access to vast amounts of classified information, contacts someone who's a complete stranger and over the Internet...[and] confesses to crimes that could send him to prison for the rest of his life...It's exactly what the U.S. military described it wanted to do in order to destroy WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange drew similar conclusions about the Pentagon campaign in an April interview on Democracy Now! [3]. Assange pointed out that the 2008 report specifically uses the term "whistleblowers"--that is, people who leak classified information to expose an injustice--in identifying targets to investigate and prosecute. The aim, according to Assange, is to "destabilize us and destroy what [the Pentagon report] calls our 'center of gravity'--the trust that the public and sources have in us."

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AMID the speculation about Manning since his arrest and indictment--not to mention what he did and didn't say to hacker Adrian Lamo via Internet chat--the video of the massacre itself [4] has tended to fade into the background of mainstream news reports.

It shouldn't. The footage is a chilling--and undeniable--indictment of the brutality of the U.S. military machine and its occupation of Iraq. As Eric Ruder described it in a report for SocialistWorker.org [5]:

The video shows U.S. troops circling in a helicopter and focusing on a group of about 10 men, certain that the cameras slung over the reporters' shoulders are AK-47s and a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher. "Fucking prick," one soldier says of the men with the camera.

After obtaining permission from commanding officers, one of the soldiers exclaims, "Light 'em all up," and the men are cut to pieces with a burst from the helicopter's 30mm machine gun. On the video, they disappear in a cloud of dust and smoke. "Look at those dead bastards," one pilot says. "Nice," responds another.

The helicopter continues to circle, watching as a van arrives, and a man jumps out to help the injured...to safety. One soldier remarks that the man from the van looks to be "picking up the wounded." But a few moments later, the troops again request--and receive--permission to open fire.

This is clearly a war crime--a violation of international law that forbids firing on people aiding the wounded.

After obliterating the van, ground troops are called in and quickly discover the camera belonging to the journalist, as well as two wounded children in the van. Their father, the van's driver, had just been killed by the soldiers in the Apache.

When they hear the report of children in the van, one of the soldiers renders a quick verdict: "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle." Another replies, "That's right."

The July 12, 2007, attack wasn't the massacre committed by U.S. forces in Iraq. But it stayed in the spotlight at least in part because two Reuters reporters were killed in the attack, and the news agency spent several years trying to obtain the footage from the helicopter gunship. The military claimed it had "lost" its copy--and then "Collateral Murder" appeared via WikiLeaks.

Pentagon officials continue to claim that the video misrepresents what happened--and that U.S. forces were justified in responding to hostile forces. But the leaked video shows no combat at all.

In fact, when WikiLeaks published the video, two members of the company that was involved in the assault--one of them the man who rescued two wounded children from the vehicle that the gunship was attack--came forward and said that massacres like these were a regular occurrence of the Iraq occupation.

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GEORGE W. BUSH and his administration were notorious for their efforts to stop leaks of embarrassing information and silence whistleblowers--for example, the smear campaign, personally directed by Vice President Dick Cheney, against CIA agent Valerie Plame.

But the Obama administration has proven to be at least as aggressive against whistleblowers, if not more so.

In May, Shamai Leibowitz, a former linguist for the FBI, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for giving classified documents to an unidentified blogger--the longest sentence for any convicted leaker in U.S. history, according to the Politico Web site. One month earlier, Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistleblower, was charged by the Obama Justice Department with disclosing classified information that exposed details of a domestic spy program carried out by the Bush administration.

As Democracy Now! pointed out, the Obama White House has also targeted journalists who get classified information--for example, subpoenaing New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal the sources for parts of his book State of War.

Millions of people voted for Barack Obama because they hoped a Democrat in the White House would restore respect for civil liberties and curb the runaway powers of the federal government's executive branch. Those hopes have been disappointed. As Glenn Greenwald summarized the double standards for Salon.com:

-- If you torture people or eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, you receive "look-forward imperial immunity."

-- If you shoot and kill unarmed rescuers of the wounded while occupying their country and severely wound their unarmed children sitting in a van--or if you authorize that conduct--your actions are commended.

-- If you help wreck the world economy with fraud and cause hundreds of millions of people untold suffering, you collect tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.

-- If you disclose to the world evidence of war crimes, government lawbreaking or serious corruption, or otherwise embarrass the U.S., you will be swiftly prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and face decades in prison.

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Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [6] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

[1] http://socialistworker.org/2010/04/09/massacre-caught-on-video
[2] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/17/wikileaks_whistleblowers
[3] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/6/massacre_caught_on_tape_us_military
[4] http://www.collateralmurder.com/
[5] http://socialistworker.org/2010/04/09/massacre-caught-on-video
[6] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Marxism 2010

Alex Callinicos

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 July 2010 14.36 BST

The death of Ken Coates last weekend silenced yet another strong and distinguished voice on the radical left. The past year or so has taken from us some of the most outstanding Marxist intellectuals of the 1968 generation – Giovanni Arrighi, Jerry Cohen, Peter Gowan, and, particularly painful for me, Chris Harman and Daniel Bensaïd. In the supposedly ideology-free world of the Con-Lib coalition, it would be tempting to conclude that these individual disappearances are representative of a much broader decline of Marxism as an intellectual and political tradition.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the constitutionally myopic financial markets are beginning to wake up to the fact that capitalism is very badly broken. The Keynesian economist Paul Krugman wrote a few days ago: "We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression," following those of the late 19th century and of the 1930s. Marx described his own intellectual project as the critique of political economy: Marxism therefore lives or dies by its ability to make sense of the dynamics of capitalism and to offer a way out of it.

And Marxist political economists have indeed been, in the forefront, analysing the causes and tracing the trajectory of the global crisis. Just over the past year Chris Harman's Zombie Capitalism, David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital, and my own Bonfire of Illusions have presented overviews. Costas Lapavitsas and the Research on Money and Finance group of young scholars based at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London have led the way in explaining the eurozone crisis and offering radical alternative policies for countries such as Greece.

This research activity has been accompanied by a renewal of interest in Marxism among the young that is now very visible in the English-speaking academy. When David Harvey visited London in April to launch his new book, he spoke to half a dozen meetings packed with audiences in their hundreds. One of them was at my own university, King's College London, hardly a traditional centre of revolution. The meeting was co-sponsored by the thriving King's group reading Marx's Capital, which also helped to organise last November a debate on the future of capitalism between Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and myself.

The journal Historical Materialism, set up by a group of young scholars in the mid-1990s, has been one of the main drivers of the academic revival of Marxism. Its annual conference in London every November now attracts more than 500 participants and has spun off North American counterparts in Toronto and New York.

But Marxism has, of course, always been about the effort not simply to develop better theories but to relate them to emancipatory political practice, as the lives of engaged intellectuals such as Coates, Harman, and Bensaïd bear witness. London, as it happens, provides an important venue for this effort. The five-day Marxism 2010 festival takes place in central London, starting today.

Organised by the Socialist Workers party, this forum for socialist ideas has been held every year since 1977 and expects to have more than 4,000 participants this year. There should be plenty of intellectual fireworks – Tariq Ali on Islamophobia, Slavoj Žižek, John Holloway and me on the idea of communism, Hester Eisenstein, Judith Orr, and Nina Power on the new sexism, along with a gallery of leftwing talent – Tony Benn, Eamonn McCann, Gareth Peirce, Steven Rose, Michael Rosen, Sheila Rowbotham, and the Guardian's Gary Younge.

But running through the sessions will be a more practical intent as well. As austerity sweeps through Europe, the Con-Lib coalition now seems intent on reinventing the sado-monetarism of the 1980s on a scale undreamt of even by Margaret Thatcher. The Marxist left is thriving intellectually. The real test it faces is political: can it help to develop effective resistance to the coalition's plans to devastate the public sector and the poor? Events in Greece show how neoliberal shock therapy can provoke social rebellion. The real future of Marxism depends on the scale on which these revolts develop and on the political direction they take.

The Plague of Fantasies (31)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

p. 163: Today's racism is strictly (post)modern, it is a reaction to the 'disenchantment' inflicted by the new phase of global capitalism. One of the commonplaces of the contemporary 'post-ideological' attitude is that today, we have more or less outgrown divisive political fictions (of class struggle, etc.) and reached political maturity, which enables us to focus on real problems (ecology, economic growth...) relieved of their ideological ballast--however, it is as if today, when the dominant attitude defines the terrain of the struggle as that of the Real ('real problems' versus 'ideological chimeras'), the very foreclosed political, as it were, returns in the Real--in the guise of racism, which grounds political differences in the (biological or social) Real of the race. One could thus claim that what the 'post-ideological' attitude of the sober pragmatic approach to reality excludes as 'old ideological fictions' of class antagonism, as the domain of 'political passions' which no longer have any place in today's rational social administration, is the historical Real itself.

[....] Or, to put it in ontological terms: the moment the function of the dark spot which keeps open the space for something for which there is no place in our reality is suspended, we lose our very 'sense of reality'.

p. 175: [....] the three fundamental dimensions which, according to Lacan, structure the human universe: the Real (the 'hard', traumatic reality which resists symbolization), the Symbolic (the field of language, of symbolic structure and communication), and the Imaginary (the domain of images with which we identify, and which capture our attention).

p. 179: [....] jouissance is torn between the Symbolic and the Real. On the one hand, jouissance is 'private', the kernel which resists public disclosure (look how embarrassing it is to us when our intimate modes of enjoyment, private tics, etc., are publicly disclosed); on the other hand, however, jouissance 'counts' only as registered by the big Other; it tends in itself toward this inscription [....]

p. 213-214: [....] an ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolization, the Real which is experienced in the encounter with the abyss of the Other's desire (the famous 'Che vuoi?', What do you want [from me]'?). There is ethics--that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology--in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack.

The crucial point on which the consistency of Lacan's position hinges is thus the difference between reality and the Real.

p. 215: Lacan (dialectical materialism) accepts idealism's basic ontological premiss (the transcendental subjective constitution of 'objective reality'), and supplements it with the premiss that this very act of ontological positing of 'objective reality' is always-already 'stained', 'tainted' by a particular object which confers upon the subject's 'universal' view of reality a particular 'pathological' twist. This particular object, objet petit a is thus the paradox of a 'pathological a priori', of a particular object which, precisely as radically 'subjective' (objet petit a is, in a way, subject itself in its 'impossible' objectality, the objectal correlate of the subject), sustains constitutive transcendental universality itself; in other words, obet petit a is not only the 'objective factor of subjectivization' but also the very opposite, the 'subjective factor of objectivization'. [....]

The traumatic Real is thus that which, precisely, prevents us from assuming a neutral-objective view of reality, a stain which blurs our clear perception of it. And this example also brings home the ethical dimension of fidelity to the Real qua impossible: the point is not simply to 'tell the entire truth about it,' but, above all, to confront the way we ourselves, by means of our subjective position of enunciation, are always-already involved, engaged in it....

p. 216: Or--with respect to truth: the Real qua trauma is not the ultimate 'unspeakable' truth which the subject can approach only asymptotically, but that which makes every articulated symbolic truth forever 'not-all', failed, a bone stuck in the throat of the speaking being which makes it impossible to 'tell everything'. This is also how the Real of antagonism ('class struggle') functions within the social field: antagonism, again, is not the ultimate referent which anchors and limits the unending drift of the signifiers ('the ultimate meaning of all social phenomena is determined by their position in class struggle'), but the very force of their constant displacement--that on account of which socio-ideological phenomena never mean what they seem/purport to mean--for example, 'class struggle' is that on account of which every direct reference to universality (of 'humanity', of 'our nation', etc.) is, always in a specific way, 'biased', dislocated with regard to its literal meaning. 'Class struggle' is the Marxist name for this basic 'operator of dislocation'; as such, 'class struggle' means that there is no neutral metalanguage allowing us to grasp society as a given 'objective' totality, since we always-already 'take sides'. The fact that there is no 'neutral', 'objective' concept of class struggle is thus the crucial constituent of this notion.

[And the Real is] that which 'skews' the discursive universe, preventing us from grounding its formulations in 'hard reality'--that on account of which every symbolization of sexual difference is forever unstable and displaced with regard to itself.

p. 217: In this precise sense, real (antagonism) is inherent to the symbolic (system of differences), not the transcendent Beyond which the signifying process tries to grasp in vain [....]. And the Real cannot be signified not because it is outside, external to the symbolic order, but precisely because it is inherent to it, its inherent limit: the Real is the internal stumbling block on account of which the symbolic system can never 'become itself', achieve its self-identity. Because of its absolute immanence to the symbolic, the Real cannot be positively signified; it can only be shown, in a negative gesture, as the inherent failure of symbolization [....].

p. 218: Later, with the shift of emphasis on to the Real, fantasy is no longer reduced to an imaginary formation (over)determined by the absent symbolic network, but conceived as the formation which fills in the gap of the Real--as Lacan put it, 'one does not interpret fantasy [....].' Phenomenology is now reasserted as the description of the ways in which the Real shows itself in phantasmic formations, without being signified in them: it is the description, not interpretation, of the spectral domain of mirages, of 'negative magnitudes' which positivize the lack in the symbolic order.

p. 223: The true horror of the act resides in this self-referential abyss--or, to put it another way, it is crucial to bear in mind the gap between the act and Will: the act occurs as a 'crazy', unaccountable event which, precisely, is not 'willed'. The subject's will is, by definition, split with regard to an act: since attraction to an repulsion against the act are inextricably mixed in it, the subject can never fully 'assume' the act.

p. 239: Lacan's ne pas céder sur son désir (the ethical injunction not to compromise on one's desire) in no way condones the suicidal persistence in following one's Thing; on the contrary, it enjoins us to remain faithful to our desire as sustained by the Law of maintaining a minimal distance towards the Thing--one is faithful to one's desire by maintaining the gap which sustains desire, the gap on account of which the incestuous Thing forever eludes the subject's grasp.

p. 241: note 30: Along the same lines, the Lacanian desire grounded in symbolic Law is also a defence against the lethal jouissance.

The Plague of Fantasies (30)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

p. 154: The suspension of the function of the (symbolic) Master is the crucial feature of the Real whose contours loom on the horizon of the cyberspace universe: the moment of implosion when humanity will attain the limit that is impossible to transgress; the moment at which the co-ordinates of our societal life-world will be dissolved. At that moment, distances will be suspended (I will be able to communicate instantly through teleconferences with any place on the globe); all information, from texts to music to video, will be instantly available on my interface. However, the obverse of this suspension of the distance which separates me from a faraway foreigner is that, due to a gradual disappearance of contact with 'real' bodily others, a neighbour will no longer be a neighbour, since he or she will be progressively replaced by a screen spectre; general availability will induce unbearable claustrophobia; excess of choice will be experienced as the impossibility to choose; universal direct participatory community will exclude all the more forcefully those who are prevented from participating in it.

[....] The proximity of the Other which makes a neighbour a neighbour is that of jouissance: when the presence of the Other becomes unbearable, suffocating, it means that we experience his or her mode of jouissance as too intrusive. And what is contemporary 'postmodern' racism if not a violent reaction to this virtualization of the Other, a return of the experience of the neighbour in his or her (or their) intolerable, traumatic presence? The feature which disturbs the racist in his Other (the way they laugh, the smell of their food...) is thus precisely the little piece of the Real which bears witness to their presence beyond the symbolic order.

p. 155: We must focus on what gets lost when these voids in the text are filled in--what gets lost is the real presence of the Other. Therein lies the paradox: the oppressive and simultaneously elusive presence of the Other subsists in the very absences (holes) of the symbolic texture.

[....] We are thus a long way from bemoaning the loss of contact with a 'real', flesh-and-blood other in cyberspace, in which all we encounter are digital phantoms: our point, rather, is that cyberspace is not spectral enough. That is to say: the status of what we have called the 'real presence of the Other' is inherently spectral: the little piece of the Real by means of which the racist identifies the Other-jouissance is a kind of minimal guarantee of the spectre of the Other who threatens to swallow us or to destroy 'our way of life'.

[....] the Other loses his spectral quality, he turns into an ordinary worldly being towards whom we can maintain a normal distance. In short, we pass from the spectral Real to reality, from the obscene ethereal presence of the Other to the Other who is simply an object of representation.

p. 156: [....] I, as it were, return to a symbiotic relationship with an Other in which the deluge of semblances seems to abolish the dimension of the Real.

In a recent interview, Bill Gates celebrated cyberspace as opening up the prospect of what he called 'friction-free capitalism'--this expression encapsulates perfectly the social fantasy which underlies the ideology of cyberspace capitalism: the fantasy of a wholly transparent, ethereal medium of exchange in which the last trace of material inertia vanishes. The crucial point not to be missed here is that the 'friction' we get rid of in the fantasy of 'friction-free capitalism' does not refer only to the reality of material obstacles which sustain any exchange process, but, above all, to the Real of the traumatic social antagonisms, power relations, and so on, which brand the space of social exchange with a pathological twist. In his Grundrisse manuscript, Marx pointed out how the very material mechanism of a nineteenth-century industrial production site directly materializes the capitalist relationship of domination (the worker as a mere appendix subordinated to the machinery which is owned by the capitalist); mutatis mutandis, the same goes for cyberspace: in the social conditions of late capitalism, the very materiality of cyberspace automatically generates the illusory abstract space of 'friction-free' exchange in which the particularity of the participants' social position is obliterated.

p. 157: [....] what is obfuscated in such direct 'naturalization' of the World Wide Web or market is the set of power relations--political decisions, institutional conditions--within which [....] internet (or market or capitalism...) can only thrive.

This brings us back to the problem of the Master-Signifier: a Master-Signifier is always virtual in the sense of involving some structural ambiguity.

p. 158: [....] What the emptiness of the Master-Signifier conceals is thus the inconsistency of its content (its signified) [....] And again, this virtual status of the Master-Signifier is what gets lost in cyberspace, with its tendency to 'fill in the gaps'.

The suspension of the Master, which reveals impotence, in no way gives rise to liberating effects: the knowledge that 'the Other doesn't exist' (that the Master is impotent, that Power is an imposture) imposes on the subject an even more radical servitude than the traditional subordination to the full authority of the Master.

pp. 159-160: [....] for Lacan, modern science is not just another local narrative grounded in its specific conditions, since it does relate to the (mathematical) Real beneath the symbolic universe.

The Plague of Fantasies (29)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

pp. 150-151: The supreme example of symbolic virtuality, of course, is that of (the psychoanalytic notion of) castration: the feature which distinguishes symbolic castration from the 'real' kind is precisely its virtual character. That is to say: Freud's notion of castration anxiety has any meaning at all only if we suppose that the threat of castration (the prospect of castration, the 'virtual' castration) already produces real 'castrating' effects. This actuality of the virtual, which defines symbolic castration as opposed to the 'real' kind, has to be connected to the basic paradox of power, which is that symbolic power is by definition virtual, power-in-reserve, the threat of its full use which never actually occurs (when a father loses his temper and explodes, this is by definition a sign of his impotence, painful as it may be). The consequence of this conflation of actual with virtual is a kind of transubstantiation: every actual activity appears as a 'form of appearance' of another 'invisible' power whose status is purely virtual--the 'real' penis turns into the form of appearance of (the virtual) phallus, and so on. That is the paradox of castration: whatever I do in reality, with my 'real' penis, is just redoubling, following as a shadow, another virtual penis whose existence is purely symbolic--that is, phallus as a signifier. Let us recall the example of a judge who, in 'real life', is a weak and corrupt person, but the moment he puts on the insignia of his symbolic mandate, it is the big Other of the symbolic institution which is speaking through him: without the prosthesis of his symbolic title, his 'real power' would instantly disintegrate. And Lacan's point apropos of the phallus as signifier is that the same 'institutional' logic is at work already in the more intimate domain of male sexuality: just as a judge needs his symbolic crutches, his insignia, in order to exert his authority, a man needs a reference to the absent-virtual Phallus if his penis is to exert its potency.

p. 153: The decline of this function of the Master in contemporary Western societies exposes the subject to radical ambiguity in the face of his desire. The media constantly bombard him with requests to choose, addressing him as the subject supposed to know what he really wants (which book, clothes, TV programme, holiday destination...) [....] At a more fundamental level, however, the new media deprive the subject radically of the knowledge of what he wants: they address a thoroughly malleable subject who has constantly to be told what he wants--that is, the very evocation of a choice to be made performatively creates the need for the object of choice. One should bear in mind here that the main function of the Master is to tell the subject what he wants--the need for the Master arises in answer to the subject's confusion, in so far as he does not know what he wants. What happens, then, in the situation of the decline of the Master, when the subject himself is constantly bombarded with the request to give a sign of what he wants? The exact opposite of what one would expect: it is when there is no one to tell you what you really want, when all the burden of the choice is on you, that the big Other dominates you completely, and the choice effectively disappears--is replaced by its mere semblance. One is again tempted to paraphrase here Lacan's well-known reversal of Dostoevsky ('If there is no God, nothing at all is Permitted'): if no forced choice confines the field of free choice, the very freedom of choice disappears.

The Plague of Fantasies (28)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

p. 138: This is one way to read Lacan's dictum 'Truth has the structure of a fiction': I can articulate the hidden truth about my drives precisely in so far as I am aware that I am simply playing a game on the screen. In cyberspace sex, there is no 'face-to-face', just the external impersonal space in which everything, including my most intimate internal fantasies, can be articulated with no inhibitions....What one encounters here, in this pure 'flux of desire', is, of course, the unpleasant surprise of what the Frankfurt School called 'repressive desublimation': the universe, freed of everyday inhibitions, turns out to be a universe of unbridled sadomasochistic violence and will to domination....The usual complaint against cybersex is that instead of the truly arousing and intensive encounter with another body, we get a distanced, technologically mediated procedure. However, is not precisely this gap, this distance towards immediate Erlebnis, which can also add sexual arousal to a sexual encounter? People use pornography (or other technical sex devices) not only when they lack 'flesh-and-blood' partners but also in order to 'spice up' their 'real' sex life. The status of sexual supplement is thus again radically ambiguous and 'undecidable': it can spoil the game, yet it can also intensify enjoyment.

p. 139: However, this ambiguity, although irreducible, is not symmetrical. What one should introduce here is the elementary Lacanian distinction between imaginary projection-identification and symbolic identification. The most concise definition of symbolic identification is that it consists in assuming a mask which is more real and binding than the true face beneath it [....]

p. 140: [....] what is this middle-mediating level, this third domain interposing itself between 'real life' and 'mere imagination', this domain in which we are not directly dealing with reality, but not with 'mere words' either (since our words do have real effects), if not the symbolic order itself?

p. 141: The subject who suffers from [multiple personality disorder] is rather too firmly anchored in 'true reality': what he lacks is, in a sense, lack itself: the void which accounts for the constitutive dimension of subjectivity. That is to say: the 'multiple Selves' [....] are 'what I want to be', the way I would like to see myself, the representations of my ideal ego; as such, they are like the layers of an onion: there is nothing in the middle, and the subject is this 'nothing' itself. It is therefore crucial to introduce here the distinction between 'Self' ('person') and subject: the Lacanian 'decentred subject' is not simply a multiplicity of good old 'Selves', partial centres; the 'divided' subject does not mean there are simply more Egos/Selves in the same individual [....]. The 'decentrment' is the decentrement of the $ (the void of the subject) with regard to its content ('Self', the bundle of imaginary and/or symbolic identifications); the 'splitting' is the splitting between $ and the phantasmic 'persona' as the 'stuff of the I'. The subject is split even if it possesses only one 'unified' Self, since this split is the very split between $ and Self....In more topological terms: the subject's division is not the division between one Self and another, between two contents, but the division between something and nothing, between the feature of identification and the void.

'Decentrement' thus first designates the ambiguity, the oscillation between symbolic and imaginary identification--the undecidability as to where my true point is, in my 'real' self or in my external mask, with the possible implication that my symbolic mask can be 'more true' than what it conceals, the 'true face' behind it. At a more radical level, it points towards the fact that the very sliding from one identification to another, or among 'multiple selves', presupposes the gap between identification as such and the void of $ (the 'barred subject') which identifies itself--serves as the empty medium of identification. In other words, the very process of shifting among multiple identifications presupposes a kind of empty band which makes the leap from one identity to another possible, and this empty band is the subject itself.

p. 142: [....] Lacan's point is that ego itself is always-already 'alter' with regard to the subject whose ego it is. For that reason, the subject entertains towards it the relationship of acceptance-through-disavowal [....]

p. 143: One can thus say that the phallus is the [....] point at which the very gap that separates the series of mental causes from the series of bodily causes is inscribed into our body....

p. 144: [....] there is no reality without its phantasmic support: social reality [....] can occur only if it is supported by (at least) two fantasies, two phantasmic scenarios.

p. 148: [....] you can have it all only if you pass through the 'zero point,' and agree to lose it all [....] a suicidal moment has to occur in which the hero casts off the fake position and assumes an authentic position. [....] the subject occupies, fills in, the empty place in some pre-existing symbolic network [....] gradually identifies with this symbolic place and fully assumes it, up to the point where he is prepared to stake his life on it.

This line of development is properly materialist: it accounts for the process in the course of which what was at the outset a manipulated movement with a faked Leader can outgrow its initial conditions and turn into an authentic movement. That is to say: much more interesting than the idealist narrative of gradually corrupted innocence is the opposite story: since we all live within ideology, the true enigma is how we can outgrow our 'corrupted' initial condition--how something which was planned as ideological manipulation can all of a sudden miraculously start to lead an authentic life of its own.