Herein lies the scandal of psychoanalysis, unbearable for philosophy: what is at stake in the Lacanian critique of selfconsciousness is not the commonplace according to which the subject is never fully transparent to itself, or can never arrive at full awareness of what is going on in its psyche; Lacan's point is not that full self-consciousness is impossible since something always eludes the grasp of my conscious ego. Instead, it is the far more paradoxical thesis that this decentered hard kernel which eludes my grasp is ultimately self-consciousness itself; as to its status, selfconsciousness is an external object out of my reach. More precisely, selfconsciousness is the object qua objet petit a, qua the gaze able to perceive the true meaning of the stain which gives body to the unbearable truth about myself. "I Doubt, Therefore I Am" Lacan's achievement with regard to cogito and doubt could be summed up in the elementary, but nonetheless far-reaching operation of perceiving (and then drawing theoretical consequences from) the affinity between the Cartesian doubt and the doubt that dwells at the very heart of compulsive (obsessive) neurosis. This step in no way amounts to a "psychiatrization of philosophy"— the reduction of philosophical attitudes to an expression of pathological states of mind—but rather to its exact contrary, the "philosophization" of clinical categories: with Lacan, compulsive neurosis, perversion, hysteria, etc., cease to function as simple clinical designations and become names for existential-ontological positions…. In short, Lacan as it were supplements Descartes' I doubt, therefore I am—the absolute certainty provided by the fact that my most radical doubt implies my existence qua thinking subject— with another turn of the screw, reversing its logic: I am only insofar as I doubt. This way, we obtain the elementary formula of the compulsive neurotic's attitude: the neurotic clings to his doubt, to his indeterminate status, as the only firm support of his being, and is extremely apprehensive of the prospect of being compelled to make a decision which would cut short his oscillation, his neither-nor status. Far from undermining the subject's composure or even threatening to disintegrate his self-identity, this uncertainty provides his minimal ontological consistency…. It is this inherent dialectical inversion that characterizes the subject of doubt and suspicion: "officially," he strives desperately for certainty, for an unambiguous answer that would provide the remedy against the worm of doubt that is consuming him; actually, the true catastrophe he is trying to evade at any price is this very solution, the emergence of a final, unambiguous answer, which is why he endlessly sticks to his uncertain, indeterminate, oscillating status. There is a kind of reflective reversal at work here: the subject persists in his indecision and puts off the choice not because he is afraid that, by choosing one pole of the alternative, he would lose the other pole…. What he truly fears to lose is doubt as such, the uncertainty, the open state where everything is still possible, where none of the options are precluded. It is for that reason that Lacan confers on the act the status of object: far from designating the very dimension of subjectivity ("subjects act, objects are acted upon"), the act cuts short the indeterminacy which provides the distance that separates the subject from the world of objects. These considerations enable us to approach from a new perspective the motif of "Kant avec Sade." Today, it is a commonplace to qualify Kant as a compulsive neurotic: the uncertain status of the subject is inscribed into the very heart of the Kantian ethics, i.e., the Kantian subject is by definition never "at the height of his task"; he is forever tortured by the possibility that his ethical act, although in accordance with duty, was not accomplished for the sake of duty itself, but was motivated by some hidden "pathological" considerations (that, by accomplishing my duty, I will arouse respect and veneration in others, for example). What remains hidden to Kant, what he renders invisible by way of his logic of the Ought (Sollen), i.e., of the infinite, asymptotic process of realizing the moral Ideal, is that it is this very stain of uncertainty which sustains the dimension of ethical universality: the Kantian subject desperately clings to his doubt, to his uncertainty, in order to retain his ethical status. What we have in mind here is not the commonplace according to which, once the Ideal is realized, all life-tension is lost and there is nothing but lethargic boredom in store for us. Something far more precise is at stake: once the "pathological" stain is missing, the universal collapses into the particular. This, precisely, is what occurs in Sadeian perversion, which, for that very reason, reverses the Kantian compulsive uncertainty into absolute certainty: a pervert knows perfectly what he is doing, what the Other wants from him, since he conceives of himself as an instrument-object of the Other's Will-to-Enjoy. In this precise sense Sade stages the truth of Kant: you want an ethical act free of any compulsive doubt? Here you have the Sadeian perversion! Of what, more exactly, does this ontological uncertainty of the subject consist? The key to it is provided by the link between anxiety and the desire of the Other: anxiety is aroused by the desire of the Other in the sense that "I do not know what object a I am for the desire of the Other." What does the Other want from me, what is there "in me more than myself" on account of which I am an object of the Other's desire—or, in philosophical terms, which is my place in the substance, in the "great chain of being"? The core of anxiety is this absolute uncertainty as to what I am: "I do not know what I am (for the Other, since I am what I am only for the Other)." This uncertainty defines the subject: the subject "is" only as a "crack in the substance," only insofar as his status in the Other oscillates. And the position of the masochist pervert is ultimately an attempt to elude this uncertainty, which is why it involves the loss of the status of the subject, i.e., a radical self-objectivization: the pervert knows what he is for the Other, since he posits himself as the object-instrument of the Other's juissance…. For that reason, it is quite legitimate to associate perversion, in its fundamental dimension, with the "masochism" of the anal phase. In his Seminar on transference, Lacan made it clear how the passage from the oral into the anal phase has nothing whatsoever to do with the process of biological maturation, but is entirely founded in a certain dialectical shift in the intersubjective symbolic economy. The anal phase is defined by the adaptation of the subject's desire to the demand of the Other, i.e., the object-cause of the subject's desire (a) coincides with the Other's demand, which is why Lacan's mathem for the "anal" compulsive neurosis is that of drive, S O D. True, the oral phase does imply an attitude of wanting to "devour it all" and thereby satisfy all needs; however, due to the child's dependency, caused by the premature birth of the human animal, satisfying its needs, from the very beginning, is "mediated" by, hinges upon, the demand addressed to the Other (primarily mother) to provide the objects which meet the child's needs. What then occurs in the anal phase is a dialectical reversal in this relationship between need and demand: the satisfaction of a need is subordinated to the demand of the Other, i.e., the subject (child) can only satisfy his need on condition that he thereby complies with the Other's demand. Let us recall the notorious case of defecation: the child enters the "anal phase" when he strives to satisfy his need to defecate in a way that complies with the mother's demand to do it regularly, into the chamber-pot and not into his pants, etc. The same holds for food: the child eats in order to demonstrate how well-behaved he is, ready to fulfill his mother's demand to finish the plate and to do it properly, without dirtying his hands and the table. In short, we satisfy our needs in order to earn our place in the social order. Therein lies the fundamental impediment of the anal phase: pleasure is "barred," prohibited, in its immediacy, i.e., insofar as it involves taking a direct satisfaction in the object; pleasure is permitted only in the function of complying with the Other's demand. In this precise sense, the anal phase provides the basic matrix for the obsessional, compulsive attitude. It would be easy to quote here further examples from adult life; suffice it to recall what is perhaps its clearest case in "postmodern" theory, namely the obsession with Hitchcock, the endless flow of books and conferences which endeavor to discern theoretical finesses even in his minor films (the "save-the-failures" movement). Can't we account, at least partially, for this obsession by way of a compulsive "bad conscience" on the part of intellectuals who, prevented from simply yielding to the pleasures of Hitchcock's films, feel obliged to prove that they actually watch Hitchcock in order to demonstrate some theoretical point (the mechanism of the spectator's identification, the vicissitudes of male voyeurism, etc.)? I am allowed to enjoy something only insofar as it serves Theory qua my big Other. The Hegelian character of this reversal of oral into anal economy cannot but strike the eye: the satisfaction of our need by means of the Other who answers our demand "attains its truth" when complying with the Other's demand is directly posited as the sine qua non, the "transcendental frame," the condition of possibility, of satisfying our needs. And the function of the third, "phallic," phase, of course, is precisely to disengage the subject from this enslavement to the demand of the Other. The Precipitous Identification …what is at stake in a symptom is not only the hysteric's attempt to deliver a message (the meaning of the symptom that waits to be deciphered), but, at a more fundamental level, his desperate endeavor to affirm himself, to be accepted as a partner in communication. What he ultimately wants to tell us is that his symptom is not a meaningless physiological disturbance, i.e., that we have to lend him an ear since he has something to tell us. In short, the ultimate meaning of the symptom is that the Other should take notice of the fact that it has a meaning. Perhaps it is with regard to this feature that a computer message differs from human intersubjectivity: what the computer lacks is precisely this self-referentiality (in Hegelese: reflectivity) of meaning. And, again, it is not difficult to discern in this self-referentiality the contours of a logical temporality: by means of the signifier of this reflective meaning, i.e., of the signifier which "means" only the presence of meaning, we are able as it were to "overtake" ourselves and, in an anticipatory move, establish our identity not in some positive content but in a pure self-referential signifying form alluding to a meaning-to-come.41 Such is, in the last resort, the logic of every ideological Master-Signifier in the name of which we fight our battles: fatherland, America, socialism, etc.—do they not all designate an identification not with a clearly defined positive content but with the very gesture of identification? When we say "I believe in x (America, socialism ...)," the ultimate meaning of it is pure intersubjectivity: it means that I believe that I am not alone, that I believe that there are also others who believe in x. The ideological Cause is stricto sensu an effect of the belief poured into it from the side of its subjects. Keynes concedes that the moment of some final "settling of accounts" would be a catastrophe, that the entire system would collapse. Yet the art of economic politics is precisely to prolong the virtual game and thus to postpone ad infinitum the moment of final settlement. In this precise sense capitalism is a "virtual" system: it is sustained by a purely virtual keeping of accounts. Realism Against this background, one is tempted to propose one of the possible definitions of "realism": a naive belief that, behind the curtain of representations, some full, substantial reality actually exists (in the case of Madame Bovary, the reality of sexual superfluity). "Postrealism" begins with a doubt as to the existence of this reality "behind the curtain," i.e., with the foreboding that the very gesture of concealment creates what it pretends to conceal. What does it mean, precisely, that Nothing is to be conceived as the "truth" of Being? Being is first posited as the subject (in the grammatical sense), and one endeavors to accord it some predicate, to determine it in any way possible. Yet every attempt fails: one cannot say anything determinate about Being; one cannot attribute to it any predicate, and thus Nothing qua the truth of Being functions as a positivization, a "substantialization," of this impasse. Such a positivization of an impossibility is at work in every Hegelian passage from one category to another which functions as the first category's "truth": the Hegelian development is never simply a descent toward a more profound and concrete essence; the logic of the notional passage is by definition that of a reflective positivization of a failure, i.e., of the impossibility of the passage itself. Let us take a moment X: all attempts to grasp its concealed essence, to determine it more concretely, end in failure, and the subsequent moment only positivizes this failure; in it, failure as such assumes positive existence. As a rule, one overlooks how closely the elementary Lacanian triad needdemand-desire follows the inner logic of the Hegelian "negation of negation." First, we have a mythical, quasi-natural starting point of an immediate need—the point which is always-already presupposed, never given, "posited," experienced "as such." The subject needs "natural," "real" objects to satisfy his needs: if we are thirsty, we need water, etc. However, as soon as the need is articulated in the symbolic medium (and it always already is articulated in it), it starts to function as a demand: a call to the Other, originally to the Mother qua primordial figure of the Other. That is to say, the Other is originally experienced as he or she who can satisfy our need, who can give us the object of satisfaction, deprive us of it, or hinder our access to it. This intermediary role of the Other subverts the entire economy of our relationship toward the object: on the literal level, the demand aims at the object supposed to satisfy our need; the demand's true aim, however, is the love of the Other, who has the power to procure the object. If the Other complies with our demand and provides the object, this object does not simply satisfy our need, but at the same time testifies to the Other's love for us. (When, for example, a baby cries for milk, the true aim of his demand is that his mother should display her love for him by providing milk. If the mother does comply with the demand, but in a cold, indifferent way, the baby will remain unsatisfied; if, however, she bypasses the literal level of the demand and simply hugs the baby, the most likely result is the child's complacency.) It is in no way accidental that, to denote this inversion, Lacan resorts to the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung (sublation): "The demand sublates (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love." By means of the transformation of a need into a demand, i.e., into a signifier addressed to the Other, the particular, material object of the need is "sublated": it is annulled in its immediacy and posited as something "mediated," as a medium through which a dimension transcendent to its immediate reality (that of love) finds its expression. This reversal is strictly homologous to that described by Marx apropos of the commodity-form: as soon as a product of human labor assumes the form of a commodity, its immediate particularity (its "use-value," the effective, actual properties by means of which it satisfies certain human needs) starts to function as the form of appearance of its "exchange-value," i.e., of a nonmaterial intersubjective relationship—the same as with the passage from need to demand, whereby the particular object of need starts to function as the form of appearance of the Other's love. This reversal is then the first moment, the moment of "negation," which necessarily culminates in a deadlock, in the unsolvable antagonistic relationship between need and demand: every time the subject gets the object he demanded, he undergoes the experience of "This is not that!" Although the subject "got what he asked for," the demand is not fully satisfied, since its true aim was the Other's love, not the object as such, in its immediate particularity. This vicious circle of need and demand finds its ultimate expression in the nursling's anorexia ("pathological" refusal of food): its "message" is precisely that the true aim of his demand for food was not food itself but Mother's love. The only way open to him to point out this difference is by refusing food, i.e., the object of demand in its particular materiality. This impasse where a demand for the Other's love can only be articulated through the demand for an object of need which, however, is never "that" is resolved by means of the introduction of a third element which adds itself to need and demand: desire. According to Lacan's precise definition, "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Desire is what in demand is irreducible to need: if we subtract need from demand, we get desire. In a formulation typical of the anti-Hegelian attitude of his late teaching, Lacan speaks here of "a reversal that is not simply a negation of the negation"—in other words, one that is still a kind of "negation of the negation," although not a "simple" one (as if, with Hegel himself, the "negation of the negation" is ever "simple"!). This "reversal" is a "negation of the negation" insofar as it entails a return to the object annulled by the passage from need to demand: it produces a new object which replaces the lost-sublated object of need—objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. This paradoxical object "gives body" to the dimension because of which demand cannot be reduced to need: it is as if the surplus of the demand over its (literal) object—over what the demand immediately-literally demands —again embodies itself in an object. Objet a is a kind of "positivization," filling out, of the void we encounter every time we are struck by the experience of "This is not that!" In it, the very inadequacy, deficiency, of every positive object assumes positive existence, i.e., becomes an object. This cultural overdetermination of the dividing line between gender and sex should not however push us into accepting the Foucauldian notion of sex as the effect of "sexuality" (the heterogeneous texture of discursive practices); what gets lost thereby is precisely the deadlock of the Real. Here we see the thin, but crucial, line that separates Lacan from "deconstruction": simply because the opposition between nature and culture is always-already culturally overdetermined, i.e., that no particular element can be isolated as "pure nature," does not mean that "everything is culture." "Nature" qua Real remains the unfathomable X which resists cultural "gentrification." Or, to put it another way: the Lacanian Real is the gap which separates the Particular from the Universal, the gap which prevents us from completing the gesture of universalization, blocking our jump from the premise that every particular element is P to the conclusion that all elements are P. When a proletarian becomes aware of his "historical role," none of his actual predicates changes; what changes is just the way he relates to them, and this change in the relationship to predicates radically affects his existence. Hegel affirms the basic thesis of speculative idealism: the process of knowledge, i.e., our comprehending the object, is not something external to the object but inherently determines its status (as Kant puts it, the conditions of possibility of our experience are also the conditions of possibility of the objects of experience). In other words, contingency does express the incompleteness of our knowledge, but this incompleteness also ontologically defines the object of knowledge itself— it bears witness to the fact that the object itself is not yet ontologically "realized," fully actual. The merely epistemological status of contingency is thus invalidated, without us falling back into ontological naivete: behind the appearance of contingency there is no hidden, not-yet-known necessity, but only the necessity of the very appearance that, behind superficial contingency, there is an underlying substantial necessity—as in the case of anti-Semitism, where the ultimate appearance is the very appearance of the underlying necessity, i.e., the appearance that, behind the series of actual features (unemployment, moral disintegration ...), there is the hidden necessity of the "Jewish plot." Therein consists the Hegelian inversion of "external" into "absolute" reflection: in external reflection, appearance is the elusive surface concealing its hidden necessity, whereas in absolute reflection, appearance is the appearance of this very (unknown) Necessity behind contingency. Or, to make use of an even more "Hegelian" speculative formulation, if contingency is an appearance concealing some hidden necessity, then this necessity is stricto sensu an appearance of itself. The Master's potential threat is far worse than his actual display of power. This is what Bentham counts on in his fantasy-matrix of Panopticon: the fact that the Other—the gaze in the central observing tower—can watch me; my radical uncertainty as to whether I am being observed or not at any precise moment gives rise to an anxiety far greater than that aroused by the awareness that I am actually observed. This surplus of what is "in the possibility more than a mere possibility" and which gets lost in its actualization is the real qua impossible. It is precisely on account of this potential character of his power that a Master is always, by definition, an impostor, i.e., somebody who illegitimately occupies the place of the lack in the Other (the symbolic Order). In other words, the emergence of the figure of the Master is of a strictly metonymical nature: a Master never fully "measures up to its notion," to Death qua "absolute Master" (Hegel). He remains forever the "metonymy of Death"; his whole consistency hinges upon the deferral, the keeping-inreserve, of a force that he falsely claims to possess. It would be wrong, however, to conclude—from the fact that anyone who occupies the place of the Master is an impostor and a clown—that the perceived imperfections of the Master subvert his authority. The whole artifice of "playing a Master" consists in knowing how to use this very gap (between the "notion" of the Master and its empirical bearer) to our advantage: the way for a Master to strengthen his authority is precisely to present himself as "human like the rest of us," full of little weaknesses, a person with whom it is quite possible to "talk normally" when he is not compelled to give voice to Authority. Orpheus who looked back and thus intentionally sacrificed Euridice in order to regain her as the sublime object of poetic inspiration. This, then, is the logic of perversion: it is quite normal to say to the beloved woman, "I would love you even if you were wrinkled and mutilated!"; a perverse person is the one who intentionally mutilates the woman, distorts her beautiful face, so that he can then continue to love her, thereby proving the sublime nature of his love. An exemplary case of this short-circuit is Patricia Highsmith's early masterpiece, the short story "Heroine," about a young governess extremely eager to prove her devotion to the family whose child she is taking care of; since her everyday acts pass unnoticed, she ends by setting the house on fire, so that she has the opportunity to save the child from the flames. This closed loop is what defines perversion. And is not the same closed loop at work in the Stalinist sacrificial production of enemies: since the Party fortifies itself by fighting rightist and leftist deviations, one is forced to produce them in order to fortify Party unity. Kant himself gets caught in this circle of perversion in his Critique of Practical Reason: at the end of Part One, he asks himself why God created the world in such a way that things in themselves are unknowable to man, that the Supreme Good is unattainable to him because of the propensity to radical Evil that pertains to human nature. Kant's answer is that this impenetrability is the positive condition of our moral activity: if man were to know things in themselves, moral activity would become impossible and superfluous at the same time, since we would follow moral commands not out of duty but out of simple insight into the nature of things. So, since the ultimate goal of the creation of the universe is morality, God had to act precisely like the heroine from the Highsmith story and create man as a truncated, split being, deprived of insight into the true nature of things, exposed to the temptation of Evil. Perversion is simply the fulfillment of this sacrificial act which establishes the conditions of Goodness. the "authoritarian personality" ultimately designates that form of subjectivity which "irrationally" insists on its specific way of life and, in the name of its self-enjoyment, resists liberal proofs of its supposed "true interests." The theory of the "authoritarian personality" is nothing but an expression of the ressentiment of the left-liberal intelligentsia apropos of the fact that the "non-enlightened" working classes were not prepared to accept its guidance: an expression of the intelligentsia's inability to offer a positive theory of this resistance. the ultimate proof of the constitutive character of the dependence on the Other is precisely so-called "totalitarianism": in its philosophical foundation, "totalitarianism" designates an attempt on the part of the subject to surmount this dependence by taking upon himself the performative act of grace. Yet the price to be paid for it is the subject's perverse self-objectivization, i.e., his transmutation into the object-instrument of the Other's inscrutable Will. --

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