Imagination What better description could one offer of the power of imagination in its negative, disruptive, decomposing aspect, as the power that disperses continuous reality into a confused multitude of ‘partial objects’, spectral apparitions of what in reality is effective only as part of a larger organism? Ultimately, imagination stands for the capacity of our mind to dismember what immediate perception puts together, to ‘abstract’ not a common notion but a certain feature from other features. To ‘imagine’ means to imagine a partial object without its body, a colour without shape, a shape without a body: ‘here a bloody head – there another white ghastly apparition ’. This ‘night of the world’ is thus transcendental imagination at its most elementary and violent – the unrestrained reign of the violence of imagination, of its ‘empty freedom’ which dissolves every objective link, every connection grounded in the thing itself: ‘ For itself is here the arbitrary freedom – to tear up the images and to reconnect them without any constraint. Imagination VS. Understanding/Real impossible as pure imagination How, then, does the opposition between imagination and understanding relate to that between synthesis and analysis (in the sense of disrupting, decomposing, the primordial immediate unity of intuition)? This relation can be conceived as working both ways: one can determine imagination as the spontaneous synthesis of the sensuous manifold into a perception of unified objects and processes, which are then torn apart, decomposed, analysed by discursive understanding; or one can determine imagination as the primordial power of decomposition, of tearing-apart, while the role of understanding is then to bring together these membra disjecta into a new rational Whole. In both cases, the continuity between imagination and understanding is disrupted: there is an inherent antagonism between the two – it is either Understanding that heals the wound inflicted by imagination, synthesizing its membra disjecta, or Understanding mortifies, tears the spontaneous synthetic unity of imagination into bits and pieces. At this point, a naive question is quite appropriate: which of the two axes, of the two relations, is more fundamental? The underlying structure here, of course, is that of a vicious cycle or mutual implication: ‘the wound can be healed only by the spear that inflicted it’ – that is to say, the multitude that the synthesis of imagination endeavours to bring together is already the result of imagination itself, of its disruptive power. This mutual implication none the less gives precedence to the ‘negative’, disruptive aspect of imagination – not only for the obvious commonsense reason that elements must first be dismembered in order to open up the space for the endeavour to bring them together again, but for a more radical reason: because of the subject’s irreducible finitude, the very endeavour of ‘ synthesis’ is always minimally ‘violent’ and disruptive. That is to say, the unity the subject endeavours to impose on the sensuous multitude via its synthetic activity is always erratic, eccentric, unbalanced, ‘unsound’, something that is externally and violently imposed on to the multitude, never a simple impassive act of discerning the inherent subterranean connections between the membra disjecta. In this precise sense, every synthetic unity is based on an act of ‘repression’, and therefore generates some indivisible remainder: it imposes as unifying feature some ‘unilateral’ moment that ‘ breaches the symmetry’. This is what, in the domain of cinematic art, Eisenstein’s concept of ‘intellectual montage’ seems to aim at: intellectual activity brings together bits and pieces torn by the power of imagination from their proper context, violently recomposing them into a new unity that gives birth to an unexpected new meaning. Kant’s break with the previous rationalist/empiricist problematic can thus be located precisely: in contrast to this problematic, he no longer accepts some pre-synthetic zero-ground elements worked upon by our mind – there is no neutral elementary stuff (like elementary sensory ‘ideas’ in Locke) which is then composed by our mind – that is, the synthetic activity of our mind is always-already at work, even in our most elementary contact with ‘ reality’. The pre-synthetic Real, its pure, not-yet-fashioned ‘multitude’ not yet synthesized by a minimum of transcendental imagination, is, stricto sensu, impossible: a level that must be retroactively presupposed, but can never actually be encountered. Our (Hegelian) point, however, is that this mythical/impossible starting point, the presupposition of imagination, is already the product, the result, of the imagination’s disruptive activity. In short, the mythic, inaccessible zero-level of pure multitude not yet affected/fashioned by imagination is nothing but pure imagination itself, imagination at its most violent, as the activity of disrupting the continuity of the inertia of the pre-symbolic ‘natural’ Real. This pre-synthetic ‘ multitude’ is what Hegel describes as the ‘night of the world’, as the ‘ unruliness’ of the subject’s abyssal freedom which violently explodes reality into a dispersed floating of membra disjecta. It is thus crucial to ‘ close the circle’: we never exit the circle of imagination, since the very zero-level mythic presupposition of synthetic imagination, the ‘stuff ’ on which it works, is imagination itself at its purest and most violent, imagination in its negative, disruptive aspect. Preponderance of the Objective as the subject’s failed desire What if what eludes our grasp, what is ‘in the object more than the object itself ’, are the traces of what, in past history, this ‘object’ (say, a historical situation the subject endeavours to analyse) might have become, but failed to do so? To grasp a historical situation ‘in its becoming’ (as Kierkegaard would have put it) is not to perceive it as a positive set of features (‘the way things actually are’), but to discern in it the traces of failed ‘emancipatory’ attempts at liberation. (Here I am, of course, alluding to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the revolutionary gaze which perceives the actual revolutionary act as the redemptive repetition of past failed emancipatory attempts.) In this case, however, the ‘preponderance of the objective’, that which eludes our grasp in the Thing, is no longer the excess of its positive content over our cognitive capacities but, on the contrary, its lack, that is, the traces of failures, the absences inscribed in its positive existence: to grasp the October Revolution ‘in its becoming ’ means to discern the tremendous emancipatory potential that was simultaneously aroused and crushed by its historical actuality. Consequently, this excess/lack is not the part of the ‘objective’ that is in excess of the subject’s cognitive capacities: rather it consists of the traces of the subject himself (his crushed hopes and desires) in the object, so that what is properly ‘unfathomable’ in the object is the objective counterpart/correlative of the innermost kernel of the subject’s own desire. Universal as the power of negativity In order not to misread the properly Hegelian flavour of the opposition between abstract and concrete universality, one should ‘crossbreed’ it with another opposition, that between positive Universality as a mere impassive/neutral medium of the coexistence of its particular content (the ‘ mute universality’ of a species defined by what all members of the species have in common), and Universality in its actual existence, which is individuality, the assertion of the subject as unique and irreducible to the particular concrete totality into which he is inserted. In Kierkegaardese, this difference is the one between the positive Being of the Universal and universality-in-becoming: the obverse of the Universal as the pacifying neutral medium/container of its particular content is the Universal as the power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular constellation, and this power comes into existence in the guise of the individual’s absolute egotist self-contraction, his negation of all determinate content. The dimension of Universality becomes actual (or, in Hegelese, ‘for itself ’) only by ‘entering into existence’ as universal, that is, by opposing itself to all its particular content, by entering into a ‘negative relationship’ with its particular content. Stubborn Attachment The notion that best illustrates the necessity of a ‘false’ (‘unilateral ’, ‘abstract’) choice in the course of a dialectical process is that of ‘ stubborn attachment’; this thoroughly ambiguous notion is operative throughout Hegel’s Phenomenology. On the one hand, it stands for the pathological attachment to some particular content (interest, object, pleasure … ) scorned by the moralistic judging conscience. Hegel is far from simply condemning such an attachment: he emphasizes again and again that such an attachment is the ontological a priori of an act – the hero’s (active subject’s) act by means of which he disturbs the balance of the socioethical totality of mores is always and necessarily experienced by his community as a crime. On the other hand, a far more perilous ‘stubborn attachment’ is that of the inactive judging subject who remains pathologically attached to his abstract moral standards and, on behalf of them, condemns every act as criminal: such a stubborn clinging to abstract moral standards, which could legitimize us to pass judgement on every active subjectivity, is the ultimate form of Evil. As for the tension between ethnic particularity and universalism, ‘stubborn attachment’ describes simultaneously the subject’s clinging to his particular ethnic identity, which he is not ready to abandon under any circumstances, and a direct reference to abstract universality as that which remains the same, the unchangeable stable framework in the universal change of all particular content.The properly dialectical paradox, of course, is that if the subject is to extract himself from the substantial content of his particular ethnic totality, he can do so only by clinging to some radically contingent idiosyncratic content. For that reason, ‘stubborn attachment’ is simultaneously the resistance to change–mediation–universalization and the very operator of this change: when, irrespective of circumstances, I stubbornly attach myself to some accidental particular feature to which I am bound by no inner necessity, this ‘pathological’ attachment enables me to disengage myself from immersion in my particular life-context. That is what Hegel calls the ‘infinite right of subjectivity’: to risk everything, my entire substantial content, for the sake of some trifling, idiosyncratic feature that matters more to me than anything else. The paradox, therefore, lies in the fact that I can arrive at the Universal-for-itself only through a stubborn attachment to some contingent particular content, which functions as a ‘negative magnitude’, as something wholly indifferent in itself whose meaning resides entirely in the fact that it gives body to the subject’s arbitrary will (‘I want this because I want it!’, and the more trifling this content, the more my will is asserted … ). This idiosyncratic feature, of course, is in itself contingent and unimportant: a metonymy of void, of nothingness – willing this X is a way of ‘willing Nothingness’. Death Drive, Sublimation So we are back at the problematic of ‘stubborn attachment’, since it is absolutely crucial to bear in mind the co-dependence between detachability from any determinate content and excessive attachment: to a particular object that makes us indifferent to all other objects – such an object is what Lacan, following Kant, calls ‘negative magnitude’, that is, an object which, in its very positive presence, acts as a stand-in for the void of Nothingness (or for the abyss of the impossible Thing), so that wanting this particular object, maintaining one’s ‘stubborn attachment’ to it come what may, is the very concrete form of ‘wanting Nothingness’. Excess and lack of attachment thus stricto sensu coincide, since excessive attachment to a particular contingent object is the very operator of lethal dis-attachment: to take a rather pathetic example, Tristan’s unconditional, excessive attachment to Isolde (and vice versa) was the very form of his dis-attachment, of the severing of all his links with the world and his immersion into Nothingness. (A beautiful woman as the image of death is a standard feature of male phantasmic space.) One can see how this paradox perfectly fits Lacan’s notion of sublimation as the elevation of some particular positive object to ‘the dignity of the Thing ’: the subject becomes excessively attached to an object insofar as this object starts to function as a stand-in for Nothingness. Here, Nietzsche on the one hand, and Freud and Lacan on the other, part company: what Nietzsche denounces as the ‘nihilistic’ gesture to counteract life-asserting instincts, Freud and Lacan conceive as the very basic structure of human drive as opposed to natural instincts. In other words, what Nietzsche cannot accept is the radical dimension of the death drive – the fact that the excess of the Will over a mere self-contended satisfaction is always mediated by the ‘nihilistic’ stubborn attachment to Nothingness. The death drive is not merely a direct nihilistic opposition to any life-asserting attachment; rather, it is the very formal structure of the reference to Nothingness that enables us to overcome the stupid self-contended life-rhythm, in order to become ‘passionately attached’ to some Cause – be it love, art, knowledge or politics – for which we are ready to risk everything. In this precise sense, it is meaningless to talk about the sublimation of drives, since drive as such involves the structure of sublimation: we pass from instinct to drive when, instead of aiming directly at the goal that would satisfy us, satisfaction is brought about by circulating around the void, by repeatedly missing the object which is the stand-in for the central void. So, when a subject desires a series of positive objects, the thing to do is to distinguish between objects which are actually desired as particular objects, and the object which is desired as the stand-in for Nothingness: which functions as a ‘negative magnitude’ in the Kantian sense of the term. Subject as empty signifier Again, we can easily see the homology with Nietzsche: a Will can be a ‘Will to Will’, a willing which wants willing itself, only insofar as it is a Will which actively wills Nothingness. (Another well-known form of this reversal is the characterization of Romantic lovers as actually being in love not with the beloved person, but with Love itself.) Crucial here is the self-reflexive turn by means of which the (symbolic) form itself is counted among its elements: to Will the Will itself is to Will nothing, just as to steal the wheelbarrow itself (the very form-container of stolen goods) is to steal Nothingness itself (the void which potentially contains stolen goods). This ‘nothing’ ultimately stands for the subject itself – that is, it is the empty signifier without signified, which represents the subject. Thus the subject is not directly included in the symbolic order: it is included as the very point at which signification breaks down. Sam Goldwyn’s famous retort when he was confronted with an unacceptable business proposition, ‘Include me out!’, perfectly expresses this intermediate status of the subject’s relationship to the symbolic order, between direct inclusion and direct exclusion: the signifier which ‘ represents the subject for other signifiers’ is the empty signifier, the ‘ signifier without signified’, the signifier by means of (in the guise of) which ‘nothing (the subject) is counted as something’ – in this signifier, the subject is not simply included into the signifier’s network; rather, his very exclusion from it (signalled by the fact that there is no signified to this signifier) is ‘included’ in it, marked, registered by it. Religion as Modern This double nature of the foundational act is clearly discernible in religion: Christ calls on his followers to obey and respect their superiors in accordance with established customs and to hate and disobey them, that is, to cut all human links with them: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14: 26). Do we not encounter here Christ’s own ‘religious suspension of the ethical’? The universe of established ethical norms (mores, the substance of social life) is reasserted, but only insofar as it is ‘mediated’ by Christ’s authority: first, we have to accomplish the gesture of radical negativity and reject everything that is most precious to us; later, we get it back, but as an expression of Christ’s will, mediated by it (the way a Sovereign relates to positive laws involves the same paradox: a Sovereign compels us to respect laws precisely insofar as he is the point of the suspension of laws). When Christ claims that he did not come to undermine the Old Law, but merely to fulfil it, one has to read into this ‘fulfilment’ the full ambiguity of the Derridean supplement: the very act of fulfilling the Law undermines its direct authority. In this precise sense, ‘Love Is the Fulfilment of the Law ’ (Romans 13: 10): love accomplishes what the Law (Commandments) aims at, but this very accomplishment simultaneously involves the suspension of the Law. The notion of belief which fits this paradox of authority was elaborated by Kierkegaard; this is why, for him, religion is eminently modern: the traditional universe is ethical, while the Religious involves a radical disruption of the Old Ways – true religion is a crazy wager on the Impossible we have to make once we lose support in tradition. What is properly modern in Schmitt’s notion of exception is thus the violent gesture of asserting the independence of the abyssal act of free decision from its positive content. What is ‘Modern’ is the gap between the act of decision and its content – the perception that what really matters is the act as such, independent of its content (or ‘ordering’, independent of the positive determinate order). The paradox (which grounds so-called ‘ conservative modernism’) is thus that the innermost possibility of modernism is asserted in the guise of its apparent opposite, of the return to an unconditional authority that cannot be grounded in positive reasons. Consequently, the properly modern God is the God of predestination, a kind of Schmittian politician who draws the line of separation between Us and Them, Friends and Enemies, the Delivered and the Damned, by means of a purely formal, abyssal act of decision, without any grounds in the actual properties and acts of concerned humans (since they were not yet even born). In traditional Catholicism, salvation depends on earthly good deeds; in the logic of Protestant predestination, earthly deeds and fortunes (wealth) are at best an ambiguous sign of the fact that the subject is already redeemed through the inscrutable divine act – that is, he is not saved because he is rich or did good deeds, he accomplishes good deeds or is rich because he is saved … Crucial here is the shift from act to sign: from the perspective of predestination, a deed becomes a sign of the predestined divine decision. Badiou’s Truth Event The axis of Badiou’s theoretical edifice is – as the title of his main work indicates – the gap between Being and Event. ‘Being’ stands for the positive ontological order accessible to Knowledge, for the infinite multitude of what ‘presents itself ’ in our experience, categorized in genuses and species in accordance with its properties. According to Badiou, the only proper science of Being-as-Being is mathematics – his first paradoxical conclusion is thus to insist on the gap that separates philosophy from ontology: ontology is mathematical science, not philosophy, which involves a different dimension. Badiou provides an elaborated analysis of Being. At the bottom, as it were, is the presentation of the pure multiple, the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is given; this multitude is not a multitude of ‘Ones’, since counting has not yet taken place. Badiou calls any particular consistent multitude (French society; modern art … ) a ‘situation’; a situation is structured, and it is its structure that allows us to ‘count [the situation] as One’. Here, however, the first cracks in the ontological edifice of Being already appear: for us to ‘count [the situation] as One’, the ‘reduplication’ proper to the symbolization (symbolic inscription) of a situation must be at work: that is, in order for a situation to be ‘counted as One’, its structure must always-already be a meta-structure that designates it as one (i.e. the signified structure of the situation must be redoubled in the symbolic network of signifiers). When a situation is thus ‘counted as One’, identified by its symbolic structure, we have the ‘state of the situation’. Here Badiou is playing on the ambiguity of the term state: ‘state of things ’ as well as State (in the political sense) – there is no ‘state of society ’ without a ‘state’ in which the structure of society is re-presented/redoubled. This symbolic reduplicatio already involves the minimal dialectic of Void and Excess. The pure multiple of Being is not yet a multitude of Ones, since, as we have just seen, to have One, the pure multiple must be ‘counted as One’; from the standpoint of the state of a situation, the preceding multiple can only appear as nothing, so nothing is the ‘proper name of Being as Being’ prior to its symbolization. The Void is the central category of ontology from Democritus’ atomism onwards: ‘atoms’ are nothing but configurations of the Void. The excess correlative to this Void takes two forms. On the one hand, each state of things involves at least one excessive element which, although it clearly belongs to the situation, is not ‘counted’ by it, properly included in it (the ‘non-integrated’ rabble in a social situation, etc.): this element is presented, but not re-presented. On the other hand, there is the excess of re-presentation over presentation: the agency that brings about the passage from situation to its state (State in society) is always in excess with regard to what it structures: State power is necessarily ‘ excessive’, it never simply and transparently represents society (the impossible liberal dream of a state reduced to the service of civil society), but acts as a violent intervention in what it represents. This, then, is the structure of Being. From time to time, however, in a wholly contingent, unpredictable way, out of reach for Knowledge of Being, an Event takes place that belongs to a wholly different dimension – that, precisely, of non-Being. Let us take French society in the late eighteenth century: the state of society, its strata, economic, political, ideological conflicts, and so on, are accessible to knowledge. However, no amount of Knowledge will enable us to predict or account for the properly unaccountable Event called the ‘French Revolution’. In this precise sense, the Event emerges ex nihilo: if it cannot be accounted for in terms of the situation, this does not mean that it is simply an intervention from Outside or Beyond – it attaches itself precisely to the Void of every situation, to its inherent inconsistency and/or its excess. The Event is the Truth of the situation that makes visible/legible what the ‘official’ situation had to ‘ repress’, but it is also always localized – that is to say, the Truth is always the Truth of a specific situation. (As Badiou perspicaciously notes, these four domains of the Truth-Event are today, in public discourse, more and more replaced by their fake doubles: we speak of ‘culture’ instead of art, of ‘administration’ instead of politics, of ‘sex’ instead of love, of ‘know-how’ or ‘wisdom’ instead of science: art is reduced to an expression/articulation of historically specific culture, love to an ideological dated form of sexuality; science is dismissed as a Western, falsely universalized form of practical knowledge on an equal footing with forms of pre-scientific wisdom; politics (with all the passion or struggle that this notion involves) is reduced to an immature ideological version or forerunner of the art of social gestion …) Subject-language Badiou calls the language that endeavours to name the Truth-Event the ‘ subject-language’. This language is meaningless from the standpoint of Knowledge, which judges propositions with regard to their referent within the domain of positive being (or with regard to the proper functioning of speech within the established symbolic order): when the subject-language speaks of Christian redemption, revolutionary emancipation, love, and so on, Knowledge dismisses all this as empty phrases lacking any proper referent (‘ political-messianic jargon’, ‘poetic hermeticism’, etc.). Let us imagine a person in love describing the features of his beloved to his friend: the friend, who is not in love with the same person, will simply find this enthusiastic description meaningless; he will not get ‘the point’ of it … In short, subject-language involves the logic of the shibboleth, of a difference which is visible only from within, not from without. This, however, in no way means that the subject-language involves another, ‘deeper ’ reference to a hidden true content: it is, rather, that the subject-language, ‘derails’ or ‘unsettles’ the standard use of language with its established meanings, and leaves the reference ‘empty’ – with the ‘wager’ that this void will be filled when the Goal is reached, when Truth actualizes itself as a new situation (God’s kingdom on earth; the emancipated society … ). The naming of the Truth-Event is ‘empty’ precisely insofar as it refers to the fullness yet to come. The undecidability of the Event thus means that an Event does not possess any ontological guarantee: it cannot be reduced to (or deduced, generated from) a (previous) Situation: it emerges ‘out of nothing’ (the Nothing which was the ontological truth of this previous situation). Thus there is no neutral gaze of knowledge that could discern the Event in its effects: a Decision is always-already here – that is, one can discern the signs of an Event in the Situation only from a previous Decision for Truth, just as in Jansenist theology, in which divine miracles are legible as such only to those who have already decided for Faith. A neutral historicist gaze will never see in the French Revolution a series of traces of the Event called the ‘French Revolution’, merely a multitude of occurrences caught in the network of social determinations; to an external gaze, Love is merely a succession of psychic and physiological states … (Perhaps this was the negative achievement that brought such fame to François Furet: did not his main impact derive from his de-eventualization of the French Revolution, in adopting an external perspective towards it and turning it into a succession of complex specific historical facts?) The engaged observer perceives positive historical occurrences as parts of the Event of the French Revolution only to the extent that he observes them from the unique engaged standpoint of Revolution – as Badiou puts it, an Event is self-referential in that it includes its own designation: the symbolic designation ‘French Revolution’ is part of the designated content itself, since, if we subtract this designation, the described content turns into a multitude of positive occurrences available to knowledge. In this precise sense, an Event involves subjectivity: the engaged ‘subjective perspective’ on the Event is part of the Event itself. Event and its Naming Badiou none the less provides a precise criterion for this distinction in the way an Event relates to its conditions, to the ‘situation’ out of which it arose: a true Event emerges out of the ‘void’ of the situation; it is attached to its élément surnuméraire: to the symptomatic element that has no proper place in the situation, although it belongs to it, while the simulacrum of an Event disavows the symptom. For this reason, the Leninist October Revolution remains an Event, since it relates to the ‘class struggle ’ as the symptomatic torsion of its situation, while the Nazi movement is a simulacrum, a disavowal of the trauma of class struggle … The difference lies not in the inherent qualities of the Event itself, but in its place – in the way it relates to the situation out of which it emerged. As for the external gaze that bears witness to the Truth of the Event, this gaze is able to discern that Truth only insofar as it is the gaze of the individuals who are already engaged on its behalf: there is no neutral enlightened public opinion to be impressed by the Event, since Truth is discernible only for the potential members of the new Community of ‘believers’, for their engaged gaze. In this way, we can paradoxically retain both distance and engagement: in the case of Christianity, the Event (Crucifixion) becomes a Truth-Event ‘after the fact’, that is, when it leads to the constitution of the group of believers, of the engaged Community held together by fidelity to the Event. There is thus a difference between an Event and its naming: an Event is the traumatic encounter with the Real (Christ’s death; the historic shock of revolution; etc.), while its naming is the inscription of the Event into the language (Christian doctrine, revolutionary consciousness). In Lacanese, an Event is objet petit a, while naming is the new signifier that establishes what Rimbaud calls the New Order, the new readability of the situation based on Decision (in the Marxist revolutionary perspective, the entire prior history becomes a history of class struggle, of defeated emancipatory striving). Subjective Stances toward Truth-Event When, in his unpublished course of 1997/98, Badiou elaborated the four possible subjective stances towards the Truth-Event, he added as the fourth term to the triad of Master/Hysteric/University the position of the Mystic. The Master pretends to name, and thus directly translate into symbolic fidelity, the dimension of the act – that is, the defining feature of the Master’s gesture is to change the act into a new Master-Signifier, to guarantee the continuity and consequences of the Event. In contrast to the Master, the Hysteric maintains the ambiguous attitude of division towards the act, insisting on the simultaneous necessity and impossibility (ultimate failure) of its symbolization: there was an Event, but each symbolization of the Event already betrays its true traumatic impact – that is to say, the Hysteric reacts to each symbolization of the Event with a ‘ ce n’est pas ça ’, that’s not it. In contrast to both of them, the perverse agent of University discourse disavows that there was the event of an act in the first place – with his chain of knowledge, he wants to reduce the consequences of the act to just another thing that can be explained away as part of the normal run of things; in other words, in contrast to the Master, who wants to ensure the continuity between the Event and its consequences, and the Hysteric, who insists on the gap that forever separates an Event from its (symbolic) consequences, University discourse aims at ‘suturing’ the field of consequences by explaining them away without any reference to the Event (‘ Love? It’s nothing but the result of a series of occurrences in your neuronal network!’, etc.). The fourth attitude Badiou adds is that of the Mystic, which is the exact obverse of perverse University discourse: if the latter wants to isolate the symbolic chain of consequences from their founding Event, the Mystic wants to isolate the Event from the network of its symbolic consequences: he insists on the ineffability of the Event, and disregards its symbolic consequences. For the Mystic, what matters is the bliss of one’s immersion in the Event, which obliterates the entire symbolic reality. Lacan, however, in contrast to Badiou, adds as the fourth term to the triad of Master, Hysteric and University pervert the discourse of the analyst: for him, mysticism is the isolated position of the psychotic immersed in his/her jouissance and, as such, not a discourse (a social link) at all. So the consistency of Lacan’s entire edifice hinges on the fact that a fourth discursive position is possible, which is not that of a Master, that of the Hysteric, or that of the University. This position, while maintaining the gap between the Event and its symbolization, avoids the hysterical trap and, instead of being caught in the vicious cycle of permanent failure, affirms this gap as positive and productive: it asserts the Real of the Event as the ‘generator’, the generating core to be encircled repeatedly by the subject’s symbolic productivity. Politics and Signifier In other words, politics exists because ‘society doesn’t exist’: politics is the struggle for the content of the empty signifier which represents the impossibility of Society. The worn-out phrase ‘the politics of the signifier’ is thus fully justified: the order of signifier as such is political and, vice versa, there is no politics outside the order of the signifier. The space of politics is the gap between the series of ‘ordinary ’ signifiers (S2) and the empty Master-Signifier (S1). Knowledge, Truth, Death Drive In a way, everything seems to hinge on the relationship between Knowledge and Truth. Badiou limits Knowledge to a positive encyclopaedic grasp of Being which is, as such, blind to the dimension of Truth as Event: Knowledge knows only veracity (adequation), not Truth, which is ‘subjective’ (not in the standard sense of subjectivism, but linked to a ‘wager’, to a decision/choice which in a way transcends the subject, since the subject himself/herself is nothing but the activity of pursuing the consequences of the Decision). Is it not a fact, however, that every concrete, socially operative field of Knowledge presupposes a Truth-Event, since it is ultimately a kind of ‘sedimentation’ of an Event, its ‘ontologization’, so that the task of analysis is precisely to unearth the Event (the ethico-political decision) whose scandalous dimension always lurks behind ‘ domesticated’ knowledge?13 We can also see now the gap which separates Badiou from Laclau: for Badiou, an Event is a contingent rare occurrence within the global order of Being; while for Laclau (to put it in Badiou’s terms), any Order of Being is itself always a ‘sedimentation’ of some past Event, a ‘normalization’ of a founding Event (for example, the Church as the Institution of Order is sedimented from the Event of Christ, say) – every positive ontological order already relies on a disavowed ethico-political decision. Laclau and Badiou nevertheless share a hidden reference to Kant. That is to say, the ultimate philosophical question that lurks behind all this is that of Kantian formalism. The horizon of Laclau’s central notion of hegemony is the constitutive gap between the Particular and the Universal: the Universal is never full; it is a priori empty, devoid of positive content; different particular contents strive to fill this gap, but every particular that succeeds in exerting the hegemonic function remains a temporary and contingent stand-in that is forever split between its particular content and the universality it represents … Do we not encounter here the paradoxical logic of desire as constitutively impossible, sustained by a constitutive lack (the absent fullness of the empty signifier) that can never be supplied by any positive object, that is, by a constitutive ‘out of joint’ of the Particular with respect to the Universal …? What, however, if this impossible desire to make up for the lack, to overcome the ‘out of joint’, is not the ultimate fact? What if, beyond (or, rather, beneath) it, one should presuppose not the fullness of a Foundation, but the opposite striving: an uncanny active will to disrupt? (It was Hegel who, apropos of Understanding, emphasized how, instead of complaining about the abstract, negative quality of Understanding, how Understanding replaces the immediate fullness of life with dry abstract categories, one should praise the infinite power of Understanding that is capable of tearing asunder what belongs together in nature, positing as separate what remains in reality joined together.) And is not the Freudian name for this active will to disrupt the death drive? In contrast to desire, which strives to regain the impossible balance between the Universal and the Particular – that is, for a particular content that would fill the gap between itself and the Universal – drive thus actively wills and sustains the gap between the Universal and the Particular. Disavowals of Politics ‧arche-politics: ‘communitarian’ attempts to define a traditional close, organically structured homogeneous social space that allows for no void in which the political moment-event can emerge; ‧para-politics: the attempt to depoliticize politics (to translate it into police logic): one accepts political conflict, but reformulates it into a competition, within the representational space, between acknowledged parties/agents, for the (temporary) occupation of the place of executive power; ‧Marxist (or utopian Socialist) meta-politics: political conflict is fully asserted, but as a shadow-theatre in which events whose proper place is on Another Scene (of economic processes) are played out; the ultimate goal of ‘ true’ politics is thus its self-cancellation, the transformation of the ‘ administration of people’ into the ‘administration of things’ within a fully self-transparent rational order of collective Will; ‧the fourth form, the most cunning and radical version of the disavowal (not mentioned by Rancière), is what I am tempted to call ultra-politics: the attempt to depoliticize the conflict by bringing it to an extreme via the direct militarization of politics – by reformulating it as the war between ‘ Us’ and ‘Them’, our Enemy, where there is no common ground for symbolic conflict – it is deeply symptomatic that, rather than class struggle, the radical Right speaks of class (or sexual) warfare. (The metaphoric frame we use in order to account for the political process is thus never innocent and neutral: it ‘schematizes’ the concrete meaning of politics. Ultra-politics has recourse to the model of warfare: politics is conceived as a form of social warfare, as the relationship to ‘Them’, to an Enemy. Arche-politics prefers to refer to the medical model: society is a corporate body, an organism; social divisions are like illnesses of this organism – that is, what we should fight, our enemy, is a cancerous intruder, a pest, a foreign parasite to be exterminated if the health of the social body is to be re-established. Para-politics uses the model of agonistic competition which follows some commonly accepted rules, like a sporting event. Meta-politics relies on the model of scientific-technological instrumental procedure, while post-politics involves the model of business negotiation and strategic compromise.) Four Levels of Appearance ‧appearance in the simple sense of ‘illusion’, the false/distorted representation/image of reality (‘things are not what they seem’ platitudes) – although, of course, a further distinction needs to be introduced here between appearance qua mere subjective illusion (distorting the transcendentally constituted order of reality) and appearance qua the transcendentally constituted order of phenomenal reality itself, which is opposed to the Thing-in-itself; ‧appearance in the sense of symbolic fiction, that is, in Hegelese, appearance as essential: say, the order of symbolic customs and titles (‘the honourable judge’, etc.) which is ‘merely an appearance’ – if we disturb it, however, social reality itself disintegrates; ‧appearance in the sense of signs indicating that there is something beyond (directly accessible phenomenal reality), that is, the appearance of the Suprasensible: the Suprasensible exists only insofar as it appears as such (as the indeterminate presentiment that ‘there is something beneath phenomenal reality’); ‧finally (and it is only here that we encounter what psychoanalysis calls the ‘fundamental fantasy’, as well as the most radical phenomenological notion of ‘phenomena’), the appearance which fills the void in the midst of reality, that is, the appearance which conceals the fact that, beneath the phenomena, there is nothing to conceal. (Simulacrum vs Appearance: This crucial distinction between simulacrum (overlapping with the Real) and appearance is easily discernible in the domain of sexuality, as the distinction between pornography and seduction: pornography ‘shows it all’, ‘real sex’, and for that very reason produces the mere simulacrum of sexuality; while the process of seduction consists entirely in the play of appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing.) Subject(ification) of Desire, Drive To those versed in Hegelian philosophy, these two features of drive – its temporal loop; the pitiless and inexorable identification of the subject with the inaccessible Thing whose lack or withdrawal sustains the space of desire – cannot but evoke two fundamental features of the Hegelian dialectical process: does not Hegel reiterate again and again how the dialectical process displays the circular structure of a loop (the subject of the process, the absolute Idea, is not given in advance, but is generated by the process itself – so, in a paradoxical temporal short circuit, the final Result retroactively causes itself, generates its own causes); and, furthermore, how the basic matrix of the dialectical process is that of the subject’s self-recognition in the In-itself of its absolute Otherness (recall the standard figure of Hegel according to which I have to recognize my own substance in the very force that seems to resist and thwart my endeavour). Does this mean that ‘drive’ is inherently metaphysical, that it provides the elementary matrix of the closed circle of teleology and of self-recognition in Otherness? Yes, but with a twist: it is as if, in drive, this closed loop of teleology is minimally displaced on account of the failure that sets it in motion. It may appear that drive is the paradigmatic case of the closed circle of auto-affection, of the subject’s body affecting itself within the domain of Sameness – as we have seen, does not Lacan himself suggest, as the supreme metaphor of drive, lips kissing themselves? One should bear in mind, however, that this reflexive reversal-into-self constitutive of drive relies on a fundamental, constitutive failure. The most succinct definition of the reversal constitutive of drive is the moment when, in our engagement in a purposeful activity (activity directed towards some goal), the way towards this goal, the gestures we make to achieve it, start to function as a goal in itself, as its own aim, as something that brings its own satisfaction. This closed loop of circular satisfaction, of the repetitive movement that finds satisfaction in its own circular loop, thus none the less relies on the failure to achieve the goal we were aiming at: drive’s self-affection is never fully self-enclosed, it relies on some radically inaccessible X that forever eludes its grasp – the drive’s repetition is the repetition of a failure. And – back to German Idealism – is not the same failure clearly discernible in the very fundamental structure of Selbst-bewusstsein, of self-consciousness? Is it not clear already in Kant that there is transcendental self-consciousness, that I am aware of ‘myself ’ only insofar as I am ultimately inaccessible to myself in my noumenal (transcendent) dimension, as the ‘I or He or It (the Thing) that thinks’ (Kant)? So the basic lesson of the transcendental self-consciousness is that it is the very opposite of full self-transparence and self-presence: I am aware of myself, I am compelled to turn reflexively on to myself, only insofar as I can never ‘encounter myself ’ in my noumenal dimension, as the Thing I actually am. We can now pinpoint the opposition between the subject of desire and the subject of drive: while the subject of desire is grounded in the constitutive lack (it ex-sists insofar as it is in search of the missing Object-Cause), the subject of drive is grounded in a constitutive surplus – that is to say, in the excessive presence of some Thing that is inherently ‘impossible’ and should not be here, in our present reality – the Thing which, of course, is ultimately the subject itself. The standard heterosexual ‘fatal attraction’ scene is that of male desire captivated and fascinated by a deadly jouissance féminine: a woman is desubjectivized, caught in the self-enclosed cycle of acephalous drive, ignorant of the fascination she exerts on man, and it is precisely this self-sufficient ignorance which makes her irresistible; the paradigmatic mythical example of this scene, of course, is that of Ulysses captivated by the Sirens’ song, this pure jouis-sense. What happens, however, when the Woman-Thing herself becomes subjectivized? This, perhaps, is the most mysterious libidinal inversion of all: the moment at which the ‘ impossible’ Thing subjectivizes itself. In his short essay on the ‘Silence of the Sirens’, Franz Kafka accomplished such a reversal: his point is that Ulysses was in fact so absorbed in himself, in his own longing, that he did not notice that the Sirens did not sing, but just stared at him, transfixed by his image. And again, the crucial point here is that this reversal is not symmetrical: the subjectivity of the subjectivized Sirens is not the same as the subjectivity of the male desire transfixed by the irresistible look of the Woman-Thing. When desire subjectivizes itself, when it is subjectively assumed, the flow of words is set in motion, since the subject is finally able to acknowledge it, to integrate it into its symbolic universe; when drive subjectivizes itself, when the subject sees itself as the dreadful Thing, this other subjectivization is, on the contrary, signalled by the sudden onset of silence – the idiotic babble of jouissance is interrupted, the subject disengages itself from its flow. The subjectivization of drive is this very withdrawal, this pulling away from the Thing that I myself am, this realization that the Monster out there is myself. The Empty Law Yet another, much more uncanny assertion of the big Other is discernible, however, in the allegedly ‘liberating’ notion of the subjects compelled to (re)invent the rules of their coexistence without any guarantee in some meta-norm; Kant’s ethical philosophy can already serve as its paradigmatic case. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze provides an unsurpassable formulation of Kant’s radically new conception of the moral Law: the law is no longer regarded as dependent on the Good, but on the contrary, the Good itself is made to depend on the law. This means that the law no longer has its foundation in some higher principle from which it would derive its authority, but that it is self-grounded and valid solely by virtue of its own form … Kant, by establishing THE LAW as an ultimate ground or principle, added an essential dimension to modern thought: the object of the law is by definition unknowable and elusive … Clearly THE LAW, as defined by its pure form, without substance or object of any determination whatsoever, is such that no one knows nor can know what it is. It operates without making itself known. It defines a realm of transgression where one is already guilty, and where one oversteps the bounds without knowing what they are, as in the case of Oedipus. Even guilt and punishment do not tell us what the law is, but leave it in a state of indeterminacy equalled only by the extreme specificity of the punishment. The Kantian Law is thus not merely an empty form applied to a random empirical content in order to ascertain if this content meets the criteria of ethical adequacy – the empty form of the Law, rather, functions as the promise of an absent content (never) to come. This form is not the neutral-universal mould of the plurality of different empirical contents; it bears witness to the persisting uncertainty about the content of our acts – we never know if the determinate content that accounts for the specificity of our acts is the right one, that is, if we have actually acted in accordance with the Law and have not been guided by some hidden pathological motives. Kant thus announces the notion of Law which culminates in Kafka and the experience of modern political ‘totalitarianism’: since, in the case of the Law, its Dass-Sein (the fact of the Law) precedes its Was-Sein (what this Law is), the subject finds himself in a situation in which, although he knows there is a Law, he never knows (and a priori cannot know) what this Law is – a gap forever separates the Law from its positive incarnations. The subject is thus a priori, in his very existence, guilty: guilty without knowing what he is guilty of (and guilty for that very reason), infringing the law without knowing its exact regulations …What we have here, for the first time in the history of philosophy, is the assertion of the Law as unconscious: the experience of Form without content is always the index of a repressed content – the more intensely the subject sticks to the empty form, the more traumatic the repressed content becomes. The gap that separates this Kantian version of the subject reinventing the rules of his ethical conduct from the postmodern Foucauldian version is easily discernible: although they both assert that ethical judgement ultimately displays the structure of aesthetic judgement (in which, instead of simply applying a universal rule to a particular situation, one has to (re)invent the universal rule in each unique concrete situation), for Foucault this simply means that the subject is thrown into a situation in which he has to shape his ethical project with no support in any transcendent(al) Law; while for Kant this very absence of Law – in the specific sense of a determinate set of positive universal norms – renders all the more sensible the unbearable pressure of the moral Law qua the pure empty injunction to do one’s Duty. So, from the Lacanian perspective, it is here that we encounter the crucial distinction between rules to be invented and their underlying Law/Prohibition: only when the Law qua set of positive universal symbolic norms fails to appear – do we encounter the Law at its most radical, the Law in its aspect of the Real of an unconditional injunction. The paradox to be emphasized here lies in the precise nature of the Prohibition entailed by the moral Law: at its most fundamental, this Prohibition is not the prohibition to accomplish some positive act that would violate the Law, but the self-referential prohibition to confuse the ‘ impossible’ Law with any positive symbolic prescription and/or prohibition, that is, to claim for any positive set of norms the status of the law – ultimately, the Prohibition means that the place of the Law itself must remain empty. To put it in classic Freudian terms: in Foucault, we get a set of rules regulating the ‘care of the Self ’ in his ‘use of pleasures’ (in short, a reasonable application of the ‘pleasure principle’); while in Kant, the (re)invention of rules follows an injunction which comes from the ‘beyond of the pleasure principle’. Of course, the Foucauldian/Deleuzian answer to this would be that Kant is ultimately the victim of a perspective illusion which leads him to (mis) perceive the radical immanence of ethical norms (the fact that the subject has to invent the norms regulating his conduct autonomously, at his own expense and on his own responsibility, with no big Other to take the blame for it) as its exact opposite: as a radical transcendence, presupposing the existence of an inscrutable transcendent Other which terrorizes us with its unconditional injunction, simultaneously prohibiting us access to it – we are under a compulsion to do our Duty, but forever prevented from clearly knowing what this Duty is … The Freudian answer is that such a solution (the translation of the big Other’s inscrutable Call of Duty into immanence) relies on the disavowal of the Unconscious: the fact which usually goes unnoticed is that Foucault’s rejection of the psychoanalytic account of sexuality also involves a thorough rejection of the Freudian Unconscious. If we read Kant in psychoanalytic terms, the gap between self-invented rules and their underlying Law is none other than the gap between (consciously preconscious) rules we follow and the Law qua unconscious: the basic lesson of psychoanalysis is that the Unconscious is, at its most radical, not the wealth of illicit ‘repressed’ desires but the fundamental Law itself. (According to the standard narrative of modernity, what distinguishes it from even the most universal versions of premodern Law (Christianity, Judaism, etc.) is that the individual is supposed to entertain a reflected relationship towards ethical norms. Norms are not there simply to be accepted; the subject has to measure not only his acts against them, but also the adequacy of these norms themselves, that is, how they fit the higher meta-rule that legitimizes their use: are the norms themselves truly universal? Do they treat all men – and women – equally and with dignity? Do they allow free expression of their innermost aspirations?, and so forth. This standard narrative gives us a subject who is able to entertain a free reflexive relationship towards every norm he decides to follow – every norm has to pass the judgement of his autonomous reason. What Habermas passes over in silence, however, is the obverse of this reflexive distance towards ethical norms expressed by the above quote from Deleuze: since, apropos of any norm I follow, I can never be sure that it is actually the right norm to follow, the subject is caught in a difficult situation of knowing that there are norms to follow, without any external guarantee as to what these norms are … There is no modern reflexive freedom from the immediate submission to universal norms without this situation of a priori guilt.) The Act the act in its traumatic tuche is that which divides the subject who can never subjectivize it, assume it as ‘his own’, posit himself as its author-agent – the authentic act that I accomplish is always by definition a foreign body, an intruder which simultaneously attracts/fascinates and repels me, so that if and when I come too close to it, this leads to my aphanisis, self-erasure. If there is a subject to the act, it is not the subject of subjectivization, of integrating the act into the universe of symbolic integration and recognition, of assuming the act as ‘my own’, but, rather, an uncanny ‘acephalous’ subject through which the act takes place as that which is ‘in him more than himself ’. The act thus designates the level at which the fundamental divisions and displacements usually associated with the ‘Lacanian subject’ (the split between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated/statement; the subject’s ‘decentrement’ with regard to the symbolic big Other; etc.) are momentarily suspended – in the act, the subject, as Lacan puts it, posits himself as his own cause, and is no longer determined by the decentred object-cause. For that reason, Kant’s description of how a direct insight into the Thing in itself (the noumenal God) would deprive us of our freedom and turn us into lifeless puppets if we subtract from it the scenic imagery (fascination with the Divine Majesty) and reduce it to the essential (an entity performing what it does ‘automatically’, without any inner turmoil and struggle), paradoxically fits the description of the (ethical) act perfectly – this act is precisely something which unexpectedly ‘just occurs’, it is an occurrence which also (and even most) surprises its agent itself (after an authentic act, my reaction is always ‘Even I don’t know how I was able to do that, it just happened!’). The paradox is thus that, in an authentic act, the highest freedom coincides with the utmost passivity, with a reduction to a lifeless automaton who blindly performs its gestures. The problematic of the act thus compels us to accept the radical shift of perspective involved in the modern notion of finitude: what is so difficult to accept is not the fact that the true act in which noumenal and phenomenal dimensions coincide is forever out of our reach; the true trauma lies in the opposite awareness that there are acts, that they do occur, and that we have to come to terms with them. In the criticism of Kant implicit in this notion of the act, Lacan is thus close to Hegel, who also claimed that the unity of the noumenal and the phenomenal adjourned ad infinitum in Kant is precisely what takes place every time an authentic act is accomplished. Kant’s mistake was to presuppose that there is an act only insofar as it is adequately ‘subjectivized’, that is, accomplished with a pure Will (a Will free of any ‘pathological’ motivations); and, since one can never be sure that what I did was in fact prompted by the moral Law as its sole motive (i.e. since there is always a lurking suspicion that I accomplished a moral act in order to find pleasure in the esteem of my peers, etc.), the moral act turns into something which in fact never happens (there are no saints on this earth), but can only be posited as the final point of an infinite asymptotic approach of the purification of the soul – for that reason, that is, in order none the less to guarantee the ultimate possibility of the act, Kant had to propose his postulate of the immortality of the soul (which, as can be shown, effectively amounts to its very opposite, to the Sadeian fantasy of the immortality of the body) – only in such a way can one hope that after endless approximation, one will reach the point of being able to accomplish a true moral act. The point of Lacan’s criticism is thus that an authentic act does not – as Kant assumes on misleading self-evidence – presuppose its agent ‘on the level of the act’ (with his will purified of all pathological motivations, etc.) – it is not only possible, even inevitable, that the agent is not ‘on the level of its act’, that he himself is unpleasantly surprised by the ‘ crazy thing he has just done’, and unable fully to come to terms with it. This, incidentally, is the usual structure of heroic acts: somebody who, for a long time, has led an opportunistic life of manoeuvring and compromises, all of a sudden, inexplicably even to himself, resolves to stand firm, cost what it may – this, precisely, was how Giordano Bruno, after a long history of rather cowardly attacks and retreats, unexpectedly decided to stick to his views. The paradox of the act thus lies in the fact that although it is not ‘ intentional’ in the usual sense of the term of consciously willing it, it is nevertheless accepted as something for which its agent is fully responsible – ‘I cannot do otherwise, yet I am none the less fully free in doing it.’ Consequently, this Lacanian notion of act also enables us to break with the deconstructionist ethics of the irreducible finitude, of how our situation is always that of a displaced being caught in a constitutive lack, so that all we can do is heroically assume this lack, the fact that our situation is that of being thrown into an impenetrable finite context; the corollary of this ethics, of course, is that the ultimate source of totalitarian and other catastrophes is man’s presumption that he can overcome this condition of finitude, lack and displacement, and ‘act like God’, in a total transparency, overcoming his constitutive division. Lacan’s answer to this is that absolute/unconditional acts do occur, but not in the (idealist) guise of a self-transparent gesture performed by a subject with a pure Will who fully intends them – they occur, on the contrary, as a totally unpredictable tuche, a miraculous event which shatters our lives. To put it in somewhat pathetic terms, this is how the ‘divine’ dimension is present in our lives, and the different modalities of ethical betrayal relate precisely to the different ways of betraying the act-event: the true source of Evil is not a finite mortal man who acts like God, but a man who denies that divine miracles occur and reduces himself to just another finite mortal being. Two Death Drives Crucial here is the inherent stupidity of this compulsion: it stands for the way each of us is caught in the inexplicable spell of idiotic jouissance, as when we are unable to resist whistling some vulgar popular song whose melody is haunting us. This compulsion is properly ex-timate: imposed from the outside, yet doing nothing but realizing our innermost whims – as the hero himself puts it in a desperate moment: ‘When I put the mask on, I lose control – I can do anything I want.’ ‘Having control over oneself ’ thus in no way simply relies on the absence of obstacles to the realization of our intentions: I am able to exert control over myself only insofar as some fundamental obstacle makes it impossible for me to ‘do anything I want’ – the moment this obstacle falls away, I am caught in a demoniac compulsion, at the whim of ‘something in me more than myself ’. When the mask – the dead object – comes alive by taking possession of us, its hold on us is effectively that of a ‘living dead’, of a monstrous automaton imposing itself on us – is not the lesson to be drawn from this that our fundamental fantasy, the kernel of our being, is itself such a monstrous Thing, a machine of jouissance? On the other hand, against this stupid superego injunction to enjoy which increasingly dominates and regulates the perverse universe of our late capitalist experience, the death drive designates the very opposite gesture, the desperate endeavour to escape the clutches of the ‘undead’ eternal life, the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of jouissance. The death drive does not relate to the finitude of our contingent temporal existence, but designates the endeavour to escape the dimension that traditional metaphysics described as that of immortality, the indestructible life that persists beyond death. It is often a thin, almost imperceptible line which separates these two modalities of the death drive: which separates our yielding to the blind compulsion to repeat more and more intense pleasures, as exemplified by the adolescent transfixed by the video game on the screen, from the thoroughly different experience of traversing the fantasy. So we not only dwell between the two deaths, as Lacan put it, but our ultimate choice is directly the one between the two death drives: the only way to get rid of the stupid superego death drive of enjoyment is to embrace the death drive in its disruptive dimension of traversing the fantasy. One can beat the death drive only by the death drive itself – so, again, the ultimate choice is between bad and worse. And the same goes for the properly Freudian ethical stance. The superego injunction ‘Enjoy!’ is ultimately supported by some figure of the ‘totalitarian’ Master. ‘ Du darfst! /You may!’, the logo on a brand of fat-free meat products in Germany, provides the most succinct formula of how the ‘totalitarian’ Master operates. That is to say: one should reject the standard explanation of today’s new fundamentalisms as a reaction against the anxiety of excessive freedom in our late capitalist ‘permissive’ liberal society, offering us a firm anchor by providing strong prohibitions – this cliché about individuals ‘escaping from freedom’ into the totalitarian haven of closed order is profoundly misleading. One should also reject the standard Freudo–Marxist thesis according to which the libidinal foundation of the totalitarian (Fascist) subject is the so-called ‘authoritarian personality’ structure: the individual who finds satisfaction in compulsively obeying authority, repressing spontaneous sexual urges, fearing insecurity and irresponsibility, and so on. The shift from the traditional authoritarian to the totalitarian Master is crucial here: although, on the surface, the totalitarian Master also imposes severe orders, compelling us to renounce our pleasures and to sacrifice ourselves for some higher Duty, his actual injunction, discernible between the lines of his explicit words, is exactly the opposite – the call to unconstrained and unrestrained transgression. Far from imposing on us a firm set of standards to be obeyed unconditionally, the totalitarian Master is the agency that suspends (moral) punishment – that is to say, his secret injunction is: You may !: the prohibitions that seem to regulate social life and guarantee a minimum of decency are ultimately worthless, just a device to keep the common people at bay, while you are allowed to kill, rape and plunder the Enemy, let yourself go and excessively enjoy, violate ordinary moral prohibitions … insofar as you follow Me. Obedience to the Master is thus the operator that allows you to reject or transgress everyday moral rules: all the obscene dirty things you were dreaming of, all that you had to renounce when you subordinated yourself to the traditional patriarchal symbolic Law – you are now allowed to indulge in them without punishment, exactly like the fat-free German meat which you may eat without any risk to your health … It is here, however, that we encounter the last, fatal trap to be avoided. What psychoanalytic ethics opposes to this totalitarian You may! is not some basic You mustn’t!, some fundamental prohibition or limitation to be unconditionally respected (Respect the autonomy and dignity of your neighbour! Do not encroach violently upon his/her intimate fantasy space!). --

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