Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

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СКАЧАТЬ So she put off her trousers and became a body without a soul. Then he entered the hall of the treasures, where he saw gold lying in heaps . . .

      Fethi Benslama points out how this passage indicates that Islam knows what our Western universe denies: the fact that incest is not forbidden, but is inherently impossible (when one finally gets to the naked mother, she disintegrates as a bad specter).¹² Benslama refers here to Jean-Joseph Goux’s Œdipe philosophe,¹³ where he demonstrates how the Oedipus myth, far from being universal, the underlying arche-myth, is an exception with regard to other myths, a Western myth, its basic feature being precisely that “behind the prohibition, the impossible withdraws itself”:¹⁴ the very prohibition is read as an indication that incest is possible. From the standard position of commonsensical wisdom, Oedipus is a Western aberration, a confusion of the ontic object with the ontological void; it is a blinding short circuit, the elevation of an ontic object into the ontological Absolute, where the goal should be to distance them, to see the vanity of all objects. Here, however, one should remain faithful to the Western “Oedipal” tradition: of course every object of desire is an illusory lure; of course the full jouissance of incest is not only prohibited, but is in itself impossible; however, it is here that one should fully assert Lacan’s claim that les non-dupes errent. Even if the object of desire is an illusory lure, there is a real in this illusion: the object of desire in its positive nature is vain, but not the place it occupies, the place of the Real, which is why there is more truth in unconditional fidelity to one’s desire than in a resigned insight into the vanity of one’s striving.

      There is a parallax shift at work here: from illusion as mere illusion to the real in illusion, from the object which is a metonym/mask of the Void to the object which stands in for the void. This parallax shift is, in Lacanese, the shift from desire to drive. The key distinction to be maintained here can be exemplified with reference to the (apparent) opposite of religion: intense sexual experience. Eroticization relies on the inversion-into-itself of movement directed at an external goal: the movement itself becomes its own goal. (When, instead of simply gently shaking the hand offered to me by the beloved person, I hold onto it and squeeze repeatedly, my activity will be automatically experienced as—welcome or, perhaps, intrusively unwelcome—eroticization: what I do is change the goal-oriented activity into an end-in-itself.) Therein resides the difference between the goal and the aim of a drive: say, with regard to the oral drive, its goal may be to eliminate hunger, but its aim is the satisfaction provided by the activity of eating itself (sucking, swallowing). One can imagine the two satisfactions entirely separated: when, in hospital, I am fed intravenously, my hunger is satisfied, but not my oral drive; when, on the contrary, a small child sucks rhythmically on the comforter, the only satisfaction he gets is that of the drive. This gap that separates the aim from the goal “eternalizes” the drive, transforming the simple instinctual movement which finds peace and calm when it reaches its goal (a full stomach, say) into a process which gets caught in its own loop and insists on endlessly repeating itself.

      The crucial feature to take note of here is that this inversion cannot be formulated in terms of a primordial lack and a series of metonymic objects trying (and ultimately failing) to fill the void. When the eroticized body of my partner starts to function as the object around which the drive circulates, this does not mean that his or her ordinary (“pathological,” in the Kantian sense of the term) flesh-and-blood body is “transubstantiated” into a contingent embodiment of the sublime impossible Thing, holding (filling out) its empty place. Let us take a direct and “vulgar” example: when a (heterosexual male) lover is fascinated by his partner’s vagina, “can never get enough of it,” is obsessed not only with penetrating it, but with exploring and caressing it in all possible ways, the point is not that, in a kind of deceptive short-circuit, he mistakes this bit of skin, hair and muscle for the Thing itself—his lover’s vagina is, in all its bodily materiality, “the thing itself,” not the spectral appearance of another dimension. What makes it an “infinitely” desirable object whose “mystery” cannot ever be fully penetrated is its non-identity with itself, that is, the way it is never directly “itself.” The gap which “eternalizes” the drive, turning it into the endlessly repetitive circular movement around the object, is not the gap that separates the void of the Thing from its contingent embodiments, but the gap that separates the very “pathological” object from itself, in the same way that Christ is not the contingent material (“pathological”) embodiment of the suprasensible God: his “divine” dimension is reduced to the aura of a pure Schein. It is this self-separation of the object that makes it sublime: wisdom cannot grasp sublimation proper.

      Lacan’s les non-dupes errent should thus be read at two levels: against the cynic who dismisses symbolic fiction on account of the real of jouissance being the only thing that counts; and against the sage who dismisses the real of jouissance as itself transient and illusory. How, then, does psychoanalysis stand with regard to enjoyment? Its great task is to break the hold over us of the superego injunction to enjoy, that is, to help us include in the freedom to enjoy also the freedom not to enjoy, the freedom from enjoyment.

      The opposition between the Pelagians and Augustine with regard to (sexual) lust is instructive here. For the Pelagians, lust was in itself a good thing which might be put to bad use, while, for Augustine, lust was a bad thing which might, in marriage, be put to good use.¹⁵ Did the Communist movement not face exactly the same dilemma in how to deal with “sexual liberation,” oscillating between the two extremes: on the one side, the Wilhelm-Reichian “Pelagians” who emphasized the liberating potential of free sexuality; on the other, the ascetic “Augustinians” who castigated “free sexuality” as the exemplary phenomenon of bourgeois decadence, destined to confound people and divert their energy away from revolutionary objectives? Although the Pelagian view may appear more sympathetic, “progressive” and “life-affirming,” there is more truth in the Augustinian position: lust (jouissance) is formally “evil,” an “unnamable” excess threatening the stable order; the correct solution is that jouissance is in itself neutral, and the ethical problem is how to put it to use. What makes Augustine more true is his linking of excessive sexuality (and sexuality is by definition excessive) to the Fall of man: sexuality is not natural, it is the result of the denaturalization of human beings through the “original sin.” This is why, in his On Free Will, Augustine writes:

      To approve falsehood instead of truth so as to err in spite of himself, and not to be able to refrain from the works of lust because of the pain involved in breaking away from fleshly bonds: these do not belong to the nature of man as he was created before the fall. They are the penalty of man as now condemned by original sin.¹⁶

      Augustine here comes close to Paul’s insight into the intimate link between lust (sin) and law: lust does not come “naturally,” it is an obscene perverted “duty,” a painful drive of which we cannot rid ourselves. The entanglement of lust (sin) and law resides not only in the fact that the prohibition of sexuality makes lust desirable; one should also add that the pain and guilt we feel when, against our will, we are dragged into sexual lust, are themselves sexualized. Not only do we feel pain and guilt at sexual enjoyment, we enjoy this very pain and guilt.

      It is at this precise point that perversion enters. The fateful step towards masochistic perversion is accomplished when the claim that a clean body and clean clothes may nonetheless contain a dirty mind (and vice versa) is radicalized into the claim that a clean body and clean clothes as such are the proof of a dirty mind—or, as Paula, the ascetic Roman aristocrat, put it: “A clean body and clean clothes betoken an unclean mind.”¹⁷ A similar fateful step from heroism to perverse jouissance occurred on April 25, 1915, before the battle with the British-Australian forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk told his troops: “I don’t order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time it takes us to die, other troops and commanders can come and take our places.” This “passion to die” is the last great example of the Thermopylae-Alamo logic of consciously sacrificing oneself so that one’s forces are able СКАЧАТЬ