........ The Stellar Parallax: The Traps of Ontological Difference
........ The Subject, this "inwardly circumcized Jew" -
the von Paulus version - part I
Slavoj Zizek
The Tickling Object
Many times I am asked the
obvious yet pertinent question about the title of my longest book: "so who
or what is tickling the ticklish subject?" The answer, of course, is: the
object - however, which object? This, in a nutshell (or, rather, as a nut
within the shell), is the topic of the present book. The difference between
subject and object can also be rendered as the difference between the two
corresponding verbs, to subject (submit) oneself and to object (protest,
oppose, make an obstacle). The subject's elementary, founding, gesture is to
subject itself - voluntarily, of course: as both Wagner and Nietzsche, the two
great opponents, were well aware of, the highest act of freedom is the display
of amor fati, the act of freely assuming what is otherwise necessary. If,
then, the subject's activity is, at its most fundamental, the activity of
submitting oneself to the inevitable, the fundamental mode of object's
passivity, of its passive presence, is that which moves, annoys, disturbs,
traumatizes us (subjects): the object is at its most radical that which
objects, that which disturbs the smooth run of things. 1 The paradox is thus
that the roles are reversed (with regard to the standard notion of the active
subject working on the passive object): the subject is defined by a fundamental
passivity, and it is the object from which movement comes, i.e., which does the
tickling. But, again, WHICH is this object? The answer is: the parallax object.
The common definition of
parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position
against a background), caused by a change in observational position that
provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course,
is that the observed difference is not simply "subjective," due to
the fact that the same object which exists "out there" is seen from
two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would
have put it, subject and object are inherently "mediated," so that an
"epistemological" shift in the subject's point of view always
reflects an "ontological" shift in the object itself. Or, to put it
in Lacanese, the subject's gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived
object itself, in the guise of its "blind spot," that which is
"in the object more than object itself," the point from which the
object itself returns the gaze. "Sure, the picture is in my eye, but me, I
am also in the picture": 2 the first part of
this Lacan's statement designates subjectivization, the dependence of reality
on its subjective constitution, while its second part provides a materialist
supplement, reinscribing the subject into its own image in the guise of a stain
(the objectivized splinter in its eye). Materialism is not the direct assertion
of my inclusion into the objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that
my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the
whole of reality); it rather resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I
myself am included into the picture constituted by me - it is this reflexive
short-circuit, this necessary REDOUBLING of myself as standing outside AND
inside my picture, that bears witness to my "material existence."
Materialism means that the reality I see is never "whole" - not
because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind
spot, which signals my inclusion in it.
Nowhere is this structure
clearer than in the case of Lacan's objet petit a, the object-cause of
desire. The same object can all of a sudden be "transubstantiated"
into the object of my desire: what is to you just an ordinary object, is for me
the focus of my libidinal investment, and this shift is caused by some
unfathomable x, a je ne sais quoi in the object which cannot ever be
pinned down to any of its particular properties. Objet a is therefore
close to the Kantian transcendental object, since it stands for the unknown x,
the noumenal core of the object beyond appearances, for what is "in you
more than yourself." L'objet petit a can thus be defined as a
pure parallax object: it is not only that its contours change with the shift of
the subject; it only exists - its presence can only be discerned - when the
landscape is viewed from a certain perspective. More precisely, the object a is
the very CAUSE of the parallax gap, that unfathomable X which forever eludes
the symbolic grasp and thus causes the multiplicity of symbolic perspectives.
The paradox is here a very precise one: it is at the very point at which a pure
difference emerges - a difference which is no longer a difference between two
positively existing objects, but a minimal difference which divides one and the
same object from itself - that this difference "as such" immediately
coincides with an unfathomable object: in contrast to a mere difference between
objects, the pure difference is itself an object. Another name for the parallax
gap is therefore minimal difference, a "pure" difference which cannot
be grounded in positive substantial properties. In Henry James's "The Real
Thing," the painter-narrator agrees to hire the impoverished
"true" aristocrats Major and Mrs. Monarch as models for his
illustrations of a de luxe book. However, although they are the "real
thing," their drawings appear a fake, so the painter has to rely more and
more on a vulgar couple of the cheap Cockney model Miss Churm and the lithe
Italian Oronte, whose imitation of the high-class poses works much better... is
this not the unfathomable "minimal difference" at its purest?
A more complex literary case
of this minimal difference is provided by the editorial fate of Tender Is
the Night, Francis Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, the sad story of the
disintegrating marriage between Nicole Warren, the rich American heiress, a
schizophrenic victim of incest, and Richard Diver, a young brilliant
psychiatrist who treated her in Switzerland. In the first edition, the novel
begins years later at the Divers' villa on the French Riviera where the couple
lives a glamorous life; the story is told from the perspective of Rosemary, a
young American movie actress who falls in love with Dick, fascinated by the
Divers' glitzy life style. Gradually, Rosemary gets hints of a dark underside
of traumas and psychic breakdowns beneath the surface of the glamorous social
life. At this point, the story moves back into how Dick encountered Nicole, how
they got married in spite of her family's doubts, etc.; after this interlude,
the story returns to the present, continuing the description of the gradual
falling apart of Nicole's and Dick's marriage (Dick's desperate affair with
Rosemary, etc., up to one of the most depressive and hopeless endings in modern
literature). However, for the novel's second edition (the first printing was a
failure), Fitzgerald tried to improve it by rearranging the material in
chronological order: now, the novel begins in 1919 Zurich, with Dick as a young
doctor called by a friend psychiatrist to take over the difficult case of
Nicole. 3
Why is none of the two
versions satisfying? Obviously, the first one is the more adequate one, not
only for purely dramatic-narrative reasons (it first creates the enigma - what
is the secret behind the glitzy surface of the Divers' marriage? - and then,
after arousing the reader's interest, it proceeds to give the answer).
Rosemary's external point of view, fascinated by the ideal(ized) couple of Dick
and Nicole, is not simply external. Rather, it embodies the gaze of the social
"big Other," the Ego-Ideal, for which Dick enacts the life of a happy
husband who tries to charm everybody around him, i.e., this external gaze is
internal to Dick, part of his immanent subjective identity - he leads his life
in order to satisfy this gaze. What this implies, furthermore, is that Dick's
fate cannot be accounted for in the terms of the immanent deployment of a
flawed character: to present Dick's sad fate in this way (i.e., in the mode of
a linear narrative) is a lie, an ideological mystification that transposes the
external network of social relations into inherent psychological features. One
is even tempted to say that the flashback chapter on the prehistory of Dick's
and Nicole's marriage, far from providing a truthful account of the reality
beneath the false glitzy appearance, is a retroactive fantasy, a kind of a
narrative version of what, in the history of capitalism, functions as the myth
of "primordial accumulation." 4 In other words, there
is no direct immanent line of development from the prehistory to the glitzy
story proper: the jump is irreducible here, a different dimensions intervenes.
The enigma is thus: why was
Fitzgerald not satisfied with the first version? Why did he replace it with the
clearly less satisfying linear narrative? Upon a closer look, it is easy to
discern also the limitations of the first version: the flashback after the
first part sticks out: while the jump from the present (French Riviera in 1929)
to the past (Zurich in 1919) is convincing, the return to the present
"doesn't work," is not artistically fully justified. The only
consistent answer is therefore: because the only way to remain faithful to the
artistic truth is to "bite the bullet" and admit defeat, i.e., to
circumscribe the gap itself by way of presenting both versions. 5 In other words, the
two versions are not consecutive, they should be red structurally
(synchronously), like the two maps of the same village in the example from
Levi-Strauss (developed in detail later). In short, what we encounter here is
the function of parallax at its purest: the gap between the two versions is
irreducible, it is the "truth" of both of them, the traumatic core
around which they circulate, there is no way to resolve the tension, to find a
"proper" solution. What first appears as a merely formal narrative
deadlock (how, in what order, to tell the story), thus signals a more radical
deadlock that pertains to the social content itself. Fitzgerald's narrative
failure and oscillation between the two versions tells us something about the
social reality itself, about a certain gap that is stricto sensu a
fundamental social fact. The "tickling object" is here the absent
Cause, the unfathomable X that undermines every narrative solution.
Since l'objet petit a is
the object of psychoanalysis, no wonder that we encounter a parallax gap in the
very core of psychoanalytic experience. When Jean Laplanche elaborates the
impasses of the Freudian topic of seduction, he effectively reproduces the
precise structure of a Kantian antinomy. On the one hand, there is the brutal
empirical realism of the parental seduction: the ultimate cause of later
traumas and pathologies is that children effectively were seduced and molested
by adults; on the other hand, there is the (in)famous reduction of the
seduction scene to the patient's fantasy. As Laplanche points out, the ultimate
irony is that the dismissal of seduction as fantasy passes today for the
"realistic" stance, while those who insist on the reality of
seduction end up advocating all kind of molestations, up to satanic rites and
extra-terrestrial harassments... Laplanche's solution is precisely the
transcendental one: while "seduction" cannot be reduced just to
subject's fantasy, while it does refer to a traumatic encounter of the other's
"enigmatic message," bearing witness to the other's unconscious, it
also cannot be reduced to an event in the reality of the actual interaction
between child and his/her adults. Seduction is rather a kind of transcendental
structure, the minimal a priori formal constellation of the child confronted
with the impenetrable acts of the Other which bear witness to the Other's
unconscious - and we are never dealing here with simple "facts," but
always with facts located into the space of indeterminacy between "too
soon" and "too late": the child is originally helpless, thrown
into the world when unable to take care of itself, i.e., his/her surviving
skills develop too late; at the same time, the encounter of the sexualized
Other always, by a structural necessity, comes "too soon," as an
unexpected shock which cannot ever be properly symbolized, translated into the
universe of meaning. 6 The fact of seduction
is thus that of the Kantian transcendental X, a structurally-necessary
transcendental illusion.
The Kantian Parallax
In his formidable Transcritique, 7 Kojin
Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of such a "parallax
view": when confronted with an antinomic stance in the precise Kantian
sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the
other (or, even more, to enact a kind of "dialectical synthesis" of
the opposites); one should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible,
and conceive the point of radical critique not a certain determinate position
as opposed to another position, but the irreducible gap between the positions itself,
the purely structural interstice between them. Kant's stance is thus "to
see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others,
but to face the reality that is exposed through difference
(parallax)." 8 (Is this not
Karatani's way to assert the Lacanian Real as a pure antagonism, as an
impossible difference which precedes its terms?) This is how Karatani reads the
Kantian notion of the Ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, beyond
phenomena): this Thing is not simply a transcendental entity beyond our grasp,
but something discernible only via the irreducibly antinomic character of our
experience of reality. 9
Let us take Kant's
confrontation with the epistemological antinomy which characterized his epoch:
empiricism versus rationalism. Kant's solution is neither to chose one of the
terms, nor to enact a kind of higher "synthesis" which would
"sublate" the two as unilateral, as partial moments of a global truth
(and, of course, nor does he withdraw to pure scepticism); the stake of his
"transcendental turn" is precisely to avoid the need to formulate
one's own "positive" solution. What Kant does is to change the very
terms of the debate; his solution - the transcendental turn - is unique in that
it, first, rejects the ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental
and irreducible limitation ("finitude") of the human condition, which
is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be
fully mediated-reconciled - the "synthesis" of the two dimensions
(i.e., the fact that our Reason seems to fit the structure of external reality
that affects us)always relies on a certain salto mortale or
"leap of faith." Far from designating a "synthesis" of the
two dimensions, the Kantian "transcendental" rather stands for their
irreducible gap "as such": the "transcendental" points at
something in this gap, a new dimension which cannot be reduced to any of the
two positive terms between which the gap is gaping. And Kant does the same with
regard to the antinomy between the Cartesian cogito as res
cogitans, the "thinking substance," a self-identical positive entity,
and Hume's dissolution of the subject in the multitude of fleeting impressions:
against both positions, he asserts the subject of transcendental apperception
which, while displaying a self-reflective unity irreducible to the empirical
multitude, nonetheless lacks any substantial positive being, i.e., it is in no
way a res cogitans. Here, however, one should be more precise than
Karatani who directly identifies the transcendental subject with transcendental
illusion:
yes, an ego is just an
illusion, but functioning there is the transcendental apperception X. But what
one knows as metaphysics is that which considers the X as something
substantial.
Nevertheless, one cannot
really escape from the drive /Trieb/ to take it as an empirical substance in
various contexts. If so, it is possible to say that an ego is just an illusion,
but a transcendental illusion. 10
However, the precise status of
the transcendental subject is not that of what Kant calls a transcendental
illusion or what Marx calls the objectively-necessary form of thought. First,
the transcendental I, its pure apperception, is a purely formal function which
is neither noumenal nor phenomenal - it is empty, no phenomenal intuition
corresponds to it, since, if it were to appear to itself, its self-appearance
would be the "thing itself," i.e., the direct self-transparency of a
noumenon. 11 The
parallel between the void of the transcendental subject ($) and the void of the
transcendental object, the inaccessible X that causes our perceptions, is
misleading here: the transcendental object is the void beyond phenomenal
appearances, while the transcendental subject already appears as a void. 12
Perhaps, the best way to
describe the Kantian break towards this new dimension is with regard to the
changed status of the notion of the "inhuman." Kant introduced a key
distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment
"the soul is mortal" can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is
denied to the subject ("the soul is not mortal"), and when a
non-predicate is affirmed ("the soul is non-mortal") - the difference
is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between
"he is not dead" and “he is un-dead." The indefinite judgment
opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction: the
“undead" are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous
“living dead." 13 And the same goes
for "inhuman": "he is not human" is not the same as
"he is inhuman" - "he is not human" means simply that he is
external to humanity, animal or divine, while “he is inhuman" means
something thoroughly difference, namely the fact that he is neither human nor
inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we
understand as "humanity," is inherent to being-human. And, perhaps,
one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian
revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of
reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while only
with Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent,
the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the
metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, "Night of the World,"
in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the
darkness around). 14 So when, in the
pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity,
i.e., the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness
signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. (In
Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa's sister Grete designates her
brother-turned-insect a monster - the German word used is ein Untier, an
inanimal, in a strict symmetry to inhuman. What we get here is the opposite of
inhuman: an animal which, while remaining animal, is not really animal - the
excess over the animal in animal, the traumatic core of animality, that can
only emerge "as such" in a human which became animal.) 15
Which, then, is this new
dimension that emerges in the gap itself? It is that of the transcendental I
itself, of its "spontaneity:" the ultimate parallax, the third space
between phenomena and noumenon itself, is the subject's freedom/spontaneity,
which - although, of course, it is not the property of a phenomenal entity, so
that it cannot be dismissed as a false appearance which conceals the noumenal
fact that we are totally caught in an inaccessible necessity - is also not
simply noumenal. In a mysterious subchapter of his Critique of Practical
Reasonentitled "Of the Wise Adaptation of Man's Cognitive Faculties to His
Practical Vocation," Kant endeavors to answer the question of what would
happen to us if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an
sich:
... instead of the conflict
which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which,
after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity
in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. /.../ Thus most
actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from
hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of
the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would
not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is
now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show,
everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the
figures. 1
In short, the direct access to
the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very "spontaneity" which
forms the kernel of transcendental freedom: it would turn us into lifeless
automata, or, to put it in today's terms, into "thinking machines."
The implication of this passage is much more radical and paradoxical than it
may appear. If we discard its inconsistency (how could fear and lifeless
gesticulation coexist?), the conclusion it imposes is that, at the level of
phenomena as well as at the noumenal level, we - humans - are a “mere
mechanism" with no autonomy and freedom: as phenomena, we are not free, we
are a part of nature, a “mere mechanism," totally submitted to causal
links, a part of the nexus of causes and effects, and as noumena, we are again
not free, but reduced to a "mere mechanism." (Is what Kant describes
as a person which directly knows the noumenal domain not strictly homologous to
the utilitarian subject whose acts are fully determined by the calculus of
pleasures and pains?) Our freedom persists only in a space IN BETWEEN the
phenomenal and the noumenal. It is therefore not that Kant simply limited
causality to the phenomenal domain in order to be able to assert that, at the
noumenal level, we are free autonomous agents: we are only free insofar as our
horizon is that of the phenomenal, insofar as the noumenal domain remains
inaccessible to us.
Is the way out of this
predicament to assert that we are free insofar as we ARE noumenally autonomous,
BUT our cognitive perspective remains constrained to the phenomenal level? In
this case, we ARE “really free" at the noumenal level, but our freedom
would be meaningless in we were also to have the cognitive insight into the
noumenal domain, since that insight would always determine our choices - who
WOULD choose evil, when confronted with the fact that the price of doing evil
will be the divine punishment? However, does this imagined case not provide us
with the only consequent answer to the question “what would a truly free act
be," a free act for a noumenal entity, an act of true noumenal freedom? It
would be to KNOW all the inexorable horrible consequences of choosing the evil,
and nonetheless to choose it. This would have been a truly
“non-pathological" act, an act of acting with no regard for one's
pathological interests... Kant's own formulations are here misleading, since he
often identifies the transcendental subject with the noumenal I whose phenomenal
appearance is the empirical "person," thus shirking from his radical
insight into how the transcendental subject is a pure formal-structural
function beyond the opposition of the noumenal and the phenomenal.
The philosophical consequences
of this Kantian parallax are fully explored in the notion of ontological
difference, the focus of Heidegger's entire thought, which can only be properly
grasped against the background of the motif of finitude. There is a
double doxa on Heidegger's ontological difference: it is a difference
between the What, the essence of beings, and the mere That-ness of their being
- it liberates beings from being subordinated to any ground/arché/goal;
furthermore, it is a difference not merely between (different levels of) beings,
of reality, but between the All of reality and something else which, with
regard to reality, cannot but appear as "Nothing"... This doxa is
deeply misleading.
With regard to the notion of
ontological difference as the difference between WHAT things are and the fact
THAT they are, the doxa says that the mistake of metaphysics is to subordinate
being to some presupposed essence (sense, goal, arché...) embodied in the
highest entity, while ontological difference "de-essentializes"
beings, setting them free from their enslavement to Essence, letting-them-be in
their an-archic freedom - prior to any "what-for? why?" etc., things simply
ARE, they just OCCUR... However, if this were Heidegger's thesis, then Sartre,
in his Nausea, would also outline ontological difference at its most radical -
does he not describe there the experience of the stupid and meaningless inertia
of being at its most disgusting, indifferent to all our (human) meanings and
projects? For Heidegger, in contrast to Sartre, "ontological
difference" is, rather, the difference between the entities' stupid
being-there, their senseless reality, and their horizon of meaning.
There is a link between
ontological and sexual difference (conceived in a purely formal-transcendental
way, along the lines of Lacan's "formulas of sexuation," of
course). 17 The
male side - universality and exception - is literally "meta-physical"
(the entire universe, all of reality, is grounded in its constitutive
exception, the highest entity which is epekeina tes ousias), while the
ontological difference proper is feminine: reality is non-all, but there is
nothing beyond-outside it, and this Nothing is Being itself. Ontological
difference is not between the Whole of beings and their Outside, as if there is
a Super-Ground of the All. In this precise sense, ontological difference is
linked to finitude (Heidegger's original insight and link to Kant), which means
that Being is the horizon of finitude which prevents us from conceiving beings
in their All. Being cuts from within beings: ontological difference is not the
"mega-difference" between All of beings and something more
fundamental, it is always also that which makes the domain of beings itself
"non-all." - Apropos "telling all the truth," one should
again apply the Lacanian paradoxes of the non-All; that is to say, one should
strictly oppose two cases. Because truth is in itself non-all, inconsistent,
"antagonistic," every telling of "all the Truth" has to
rely on an exception, on a secret that is withheld; the opposite case, the
telling of non-all truth, does not imply that we keep some part of truth secret
- its obverse is that there is nothing we did not tell. 18
What this also means is that
ontological difference is not "maximal," between all beings, the
highest genus, and something else/more/beyond, but, rather,
"minimal," the bare minimum of a difference not between beings but
between the minimum of an entity and the void, nothing. Insofar as it is
grounded in the finitude of humans, ontological difference is that which makes
a totalization of "All of beings" impossible - ontological difference
means that the field of reality is finite. Ontological difference is in this
precise sense "real/impossible": to use Ernesto Laclau's
determination of antagonism, in it, external difference overlaps with internal
difference. The difference between beings and their Being is simultaneously a
difference within beings themselves; that is to say, the difference between
beings/entities and their Opening, their horizon of Meaning, always also cuts
into the field of beings themselves, making it incomplete/finite. Therein
resides the paradox: the difference between beings in their totality and their
Being precisely "misses the difference" and reduces Being to another
"higher" Entity. The parallel between Kant's antinomies and
Heidegger's ontological difference resides in the fact that, in both cases, the
gap (phenomenal/noumenal; ontic/ontological) is to be referred to the non-All
of the phenomenal-ontic domain itself. However, the limitation of Kant was that
he was not able to fully assume this paradox of finitude as constitutive of the
ontological horizon: ultimately, he reduced transcendental horizon to a way
reality appears to a finite being (man), with all of it located into a wider
encompassing realm of noumenal reality.
Crucial is thus the shift of
the place of freedom from the noumenal beyond to the very gap between
phenomenal and noumenal - is this shift not the very shift from Kant to Hegel,
from the tension between immanence and transcendence to the minimal
difference/gap in the immanence itself? Hegel is thus not external to Kant: the
problem with Kant was that he produced the shift but was not able, for
structural reasons, to formulate it explicitly - he "knew" that the
place of freedom is effectively not noumenal, but the gap between phenomenal
and noumenal; AND he could not put it so explicitly, since, if he were to do
it, his transcendental edifice would have collapsed. However, WITHOUT this
implicit "knowledge," there would also have been no transcendental
dimension, so that one is forced to conclude that, far from being a stable
consistent position, the dimension of the Kantian "transcendental"
can only sustain itself in a fragile balance between the said and the unsaid,
through producing something the full consequences of which we refuse to
articulate, to "posit as such." 19 What this means is
that Karatani is wrong in the way he opposes Kant and Hegel: far from
overcoming the parallax logic, Hegel brings it from the Kantian "in
itself" to "for itself." It is only Hegel who can think the
parallax in its radicality, as the priority of the inherent antagonism over the
multiple/failed reflection of the transcendent/impossible Thing.
Recall Claude Levi-Strauss's
exemplary analysis, from his Structural Anthropology, of the spatial
disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes, might
be of some help here. The tribe is divided into two sub-groups
("moieties"), "those who are from above" and "those
who are from below"; when we ask an individual to draw on a piece of
paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his/her village (the spatial disposition
of cottages), we obtain two quite different answers, depending on his/her
belonging to one or the other sub-group. Both perceive the village as a circle;
but for one sub-group, there is within this circle another circle of central
houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group,
the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member
of the first sub-group (let us call it "conservative-corporatist")
perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less
symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the
second ("revolutionary-antagonistic") sub-group perceives his/her
village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible
frontier... 20 The point
Levi-Strauss wants to make is that this example should in no way entice us into
cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends
on the observer's group-belonging: the very splitting into the two
"relative" perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant - not
the objective, "actual" disposition of buildings but a traumatic
kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to
symbolize, to account for, to "internalize", to come to terms with,
an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing
itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground-plan are
simply two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with this traumatic antagonism,
to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. It is
here that one can see it what precise sense the Real intervenes through
anamorphosis. We have first the "actual," "objective,"
arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both
distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the
"real" is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of
some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members' view of the actual
arrangement of the houses in their village.
The Real is thus the disavowed
X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is
SIMULTANEOUSLY the Thing to which direct access is not possible AND the
obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp
AND the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the
Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second
standpoint. Recall the old well-known Adorno's analysis of the antagonistic
character of the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the
two notions of society (Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic and
Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists
individuals) seems irreducible, we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy
which cannot be resolved via a higher "dialectical synthesis," and
which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself; however, in a
second approach, one should merely take not of how this radical antinomy which
seems to preclude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF - the
fundamental feature of today's society IS the irreconcilable antagonism between
Totality and the individual. What this means is that, ultimately, the status of
the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: is has no
substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of
perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The
parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as
that which "always returns at its place," i.e., as that which remains
the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that
which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying
Real - it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of
contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances. In
a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront
directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions,
virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual,
actually non-existing, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from
the multitude of symbolic formations which are "all that there actually
is." 21
In philosophical terms, the
topic of parallax confronts us with the key question of the passage from Kant
to Hegel. There are two main versions of this passage (which is still one of
the great dividing lines among philosophers: those - mostly of the analytic
orientation - who think that Kant is the last one who "makes sense,"
and that the post-Kantian turn of German Idealism is one of the greatest
catastrophes, regressions into meaningless speculation, in the history of
philosophy, and those for whom the post-Kantian speculative-historical approach
is the highest achievement of philosophy):
1. Kant asserts the gap of
finitude, transcendental schematism, the negative access to the Noumenal (via
Sublime) as the only possible one, etc., while Hegel's absolute idealism closes
the Kantian gap and returns to pre-critical metaphysics;
2. it is Kant who goes only
half the way in his destruction of metaphysics, still maintaining the reference
to the Thing-in-itself as external inaccessible entity, and Hegel is merely a
radicalized Kant, who makes the step from negative access to the Absolute to
Absolute itself as negativity. Or, to put it in the terms of the Hegelian shift
from epistemological obstacle to positive ontological condition (our incomplete
knowledge of the thing turns into a positive feature of the thing which is in
itself incomplete, inconsistent): it is not that Hegel "ontologizes"
Kant; on the contrary, it is Kant who, insofar as he conceives the gap as
merely epistemological, continues to presuppose a fully constituted noumenal
realm existing out there, and it is Hegel who "deontologizes" Kant,
introducing a gap into the very texture of reality.
In other words, Hegel's move
is not to "overcome" the Kantian division, but, rather, to assert it
"as such," to drop the need for its "overcoming," for the
additional "reconciliation" of the opposites, i.e., to gain the
insight - through a purely formal parallax shift - into how positing the
distinction "as such" already IS the looked-for
"reconciliation." The limitation of Kant is not in his remaining
within the confines of finite oppositions, in his inability to reach the
Infinite, but, on the contrary, in his very search for a transcendent domain
beyond the realm of finite oppositions: Kant is not unable to reach the
Infinite - what he is unable of is to see how he ALREADY HAS what he is looking
for. This reversal provides the key for the infamous "Hegelian
triad."
When talking about the
"Hegelian triad," the first thing to do is to forget the story about
alienation, loss of the original organic unity, and the return to a
"higher" mediated unity. To get a more appropriate idea of it, it is
worth recalling the sublime reversal found, among others, in Charles
Dickens' The Great Expectations? When, at his birth, Pip is designated as
a "man of great expectations," everybody perceives this as the
forecast of his worldly success; however, at the novel's end, when he abandons
London's false glamour and returns to his modest childhood community, we become
aware that he did live up to the forecast that marked his life - it is only by
way of finding strength to leave behind the vain thrill of London's high
society that he authenticates the notion of being a "man of great
expectations". We are dealing here with a kind of Hegelian reflexivity:
what changes in the course of the hero's ordeal is not only his character, but
also the very ethical standard by which we measure his character. And did not
something of the same order happen at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympic
games in Atlanta, when Muhammad Ali lighted the Olympic fire with the torch
held by his hand shaking heavily on account of his severe illness - when the
journalists claimed that, in doing this, he truly was "The Greatest"
(a reference to Ali's boasting self-designation decades ago, the title of the
film about himself in which he starred and of his autobiography), they, of
course, wanted to emphasize that Muhammad Ali achieved true greatness now,
through his dignified endurance of his debilitating illness, not when he was
enjoying the full swing of popularity and smashing his opponents in the ring...
This is what "negation of negation" is: the shift of perspective
which turns failure into true success.
The predominant way to assert
the actuality of Hegel, i.e., to save him from the reproach that his system is
a totally outdated metaphysical madness, is to read his thought as an attempt
to establish the normative conditions or presuppositions of our cognitive and
ethical claims: Hegel's logic is not a system of universal ontology, but just a
systematic deployment of all ways available to us to make claims about what
there is, and of the inherent inconsistencies of these ways. In this reading,
Hegel's starting point is the fact that the fundamental structure of the human
mind is self-reflective: a human being does not simply act, it (can) act(s)
upon rational freely assumed norms and motivations, which means that, in order
to account for our statements and attitudes, one cannot ever simply refer to
some positive data (natural laws and processes, divine Reason, God's Will...) -
each of these reference has to be JUSTIFIED, its normative binding power has to
be somehow ACCOUNTED FOR. - The problem with this elegant solution is that, in
contrast to the robust direct metaphysical reading of Hegel as rendering the
structure of the Absolute, it is too modest: it silently reduces Hegel's logic
to a system of global epistemology, of all possible epistemological stances,
and what gets lost to it is the intersection between the epistemological and
ontological aspects, the way "reality" itself is caught in the
movement of our knowing it (or, vice versa, how our knowing of reality is
embedded in reality itself, like journalist embedded with the US Army units in
Iraq).
1 Furthermore, the very
term "subject" has three main meanings: subject as an autonomous
agent; subject as this same agent submitted ("subjected") to some
power; topic, "subject matter." It is not difficult to recognize in
these three meanings the triad of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary:
pure subject as the "answer of the real"; a subject of the signifier,
submitted to - caught into - the symbolic order; the imaginary stuff that
provides the matter, the "content," of the subject.
2 Jacques Lacan, The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, New York: Norton 1979, p. 63.
3 For a condensed
overview of the problem of the two versions of Tender Is the Night, see
Malcolm Cowley's "Introduction" to the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth
1948).
4 Even the
"complete" narrative of the second edition is structured around a
black hole: it jumps directly from the events that led to marriage to the
couple living at the Riviera, with their marriage already starting to disintegrate:
the first few "happy years" are left out.
5 For this reason, one
is tempted to propose that the only feasible solution would have been to do
something similar to what Luis Bunuel did in his Mexican adaptation of Wuthering
Heights from the early 50s (there, the story begins with Heathcliff's
return - the past events are only evoked something mysterious that happened
years ago between Heathcliff and Cathy, never directly shown or even narrated):
to leave out completely the past, and to merely evoke it as a dark spot, as
something indescribable, the "absent Cause" of the story.
6 See Jean
Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
1989.
7 See Kojin
Karatani, Transcritique. On Kant and Marx, Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press 2003.
8 Karatani, op.cit.,
p. 3.
9 And, as René Girard
pointed out, is the first full assertion of the ethical parallax not the Book
of Job, in which the two perspective are confronted (the divine order of the world
and Job's complaint), and neither is the "truthful" one - the truth
resides in their very gap, in the shift of perspective. See René Girard, Job:
The Victim and His People, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1987.
10 Karatani, op.cit.,
p. 6.
11 See Chapter 1 of
Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative, Durham: Duke University Press
1993.
12 Along these lines, the
paradox of Kant's Ding an sich is that it is at the same time the
excess of receptivity over intellect (the unknowable external source of our
passive sensible perceptions) AND the purely intelligible content-less
construct of an X without any support in our senses.
13 So why does Kant
call judgements like »The soul is non-mortal« infinite? Because, in contrast to
»The soul isn't mortal,« it covers an infinite set, not only the limited set of
»immortal souls« as one of the species of the genus »souls,« the other species
being the »mortal souls,« but the open-ended, illimited, set of souls which
belong to the third domain, neither mortal nor immortal. For a closer
elaboration of this distinction, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying
With the Negative.
14 Perhaps, the
satisfaction obtained by the cutters ("self-harmers") does not
pertain so much to the way the feeling of intense bodily pain returns us back
to reality, but, rather, to the fact that cutting oneself is a form of making a
mark: when I make a cut into my arm, the »zero« of the subject's existential
confusion, of her blurred virtual existence, is transformed into the »one« of a
signifying inscription.
15 When Lacan defines
himself as anti-philosopher, as insurging himself against philosophy, this is
again to be conceived as a Kantian indefinite judgment: not "I am not a
philosopher," but "I am a not-philosopher," i.e., I stand for
the excessive core of philosophy itself, for what is in philosophy more than
philosophy (which is why his main references are philosophical - in the index
of ...crits, Hegel outnumbers Freud!).
16 Immanuel Kant, Critique
of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan 1956, p. 152-153.
17 See On Feminine
Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
XX, Encore, New York: Norton 1999.
18 Can "multitude"
in its opposition to crowd also not be conceived along the lines of the
Lacanian non-All? Is multitude non-all, while there is nothing outside it,
nothing that is not its part, and is crowd multitude under the sign of One, the
"common denominator" of identification?
19 The same goes, say,
for the fact that, in the Kantian dialectic of the Sublime, there is no
positive Beyond whose phenomenal representation fails: there is nothing
"beyond," the "Beyond" is only the void of the
impossibility/failure of its own representation - or, as Hegel put it at the
end of the chapter on consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit, beyond the
veil of the phenomena, the consciousness only finds what it itself has put
there. Again, Kant "knew it" without being able to consistently
formulate it.
20 Claude Levi-Strauss,
"Do Dual Organizations Exist?", in Structural Anthropology (New
York: Basic Books 1963), p. 131-163; the drawings are on pages 133-134. For a
more detailed analysis of this example, see Chapter III of Slavoj Zizek, The
Puppet and the Dwarf, Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press 2003.
21 Lacan's thought
moves from the "internal externality" - the famous
"ex-timacy" - of the Real qua Thing to the Symbolic (the Real as the
inaccessible traumatic core around which symbolic formations circulate like
flies around the light which burns them if they approach it too much), to the
absolute inherence of Real to Symbolic (the Real has no subsistence, no
ontological consistency of its own, it is NOTHING BUT the inherent
inconsistency, gap, of the Symbolic). This, however, does not solve the key
materialist question: if Real has no subsistence of its own, if it is inherent
to Symbolic, how, then, are we to thing the emergence-explosion of the Symbolic
out of the pre-symbolic X? Is the only solution to naïve realism really a kind
of "methodological idealism" according to which, "the limits of
our language are the limits of our world," so that what is beyond the
Symbolic is strictly unthinkable?
