Showing posts with label psychoanalysis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychoanalysis. Show all posts
The Essential Zizek: The Complete Set (The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, The Fragile Absolute, The Plague of Fantasies: 4 books)
The essential texts for understanding Žižek’s thought.
Slavoj Žižek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory,’ and today’s most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes—all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy.
His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Žižek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator. Now Verso are making these four classic titles, that stand as the core of his ever-expanding life’s work, available as new editions. Each is beautifully repackaged, including new introductions from Žižek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Žižek’s thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy.
The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?by Slavoj Žižek
Argues that the subversive core of the Christian legacy forms the foundation of a politics of universal emancipation.
One of the signal features of our era is the re-emergence of the 'sacred' in all its different guises, from New Age paganism to the emerging religious sensitivity within cultural and political theory.
The wager of Zizek's The Fragile Absolute – published here with a new preface by the author – is that Christianity and Marxism can fight together against the contemporary onslought of vapid spiritualism. The revolutionary core of the Christian legacy is too precious to be left to the fundamentalists.
by Slavoj Žižek
The relations between fantasy and ideology, and the deluge of digital phantasms surrounding us.
Modern audiovisual media have spawned a 'plague of fantasies', electronically inspired phantasms that cloud the ability to reason and prevent a true understanding of a world increasingly dominated by abstractions—whether those of digital technology or the speculative market.
Into this arena, enters Žižek: equipped with an agile wit and the skills of a prodigious scholar, he confidently ranges among a dazzling array of cultural references—explicating Robert Schumann as deftly as he does John Carpenter—to demonstrate how the modern condition blinds us to the ideological basis of our lives.
by Slavoj Žižek
Exploring the ideologies fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.
The Sublime Object of Ideology: Slavoj Zizek's first book is a provocative and original work looking at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.
by Slavoj Žižek
A specter is haunting Western thought, the specter of the Cartesian subject.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology: A specter is haunting Western thought, the specter of the Cartesian subject. In this book Slavoj Zizek unearths a subversive core to this elusive specter, and finds within it the indispensable philosophical point of reference for any genuinely emancipatory project.
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.
FULL EBOOK - Kristeva (Key Contemporary Thinkers)
Kristeva - Key Contemporary Thinkers
Julia Kristeva is one of the most creative and prolific writers to address the personal, social, and political trials of our times. Linguist, psychoanalyst, social and cultural theorist, and novelist, Kristeva's broad interdisciplinary appeal has impacted areas across the humanities and social sciences.
S. K. Keltner's book provides the first comprehensive introduction to the breadth of Kristeva's work. In an original and insightful analysis, Keltner presents Kristeva's thought as the coherent development and elaboration of a complex, multidimensional threshold constitutive of meaning and subjectivity. The ‘threshold' indicates Kristeva's primary sphere of concern, the relationship between the speaking being and its particular social and historical conditions; and Kristeva's interdisciplinary approach. Kristeva's vision, Keltner argues, opens a unique perspective within contemporary discourses attentive to issues of meaning, subjectivity, and social and political life. By emphasizing Kristeva's attention to the permeable borders of psychic and social life, Keltner offers innovative readings of the concepts most widely discussed in Kristeva scholarship: the semiotic and symbolic, abjection, love, and loss. She also provides new interpretations of some of the most controversial issues surrounding Kristeva's work, including Kristeva's conceptions of intimacy, social and cultural difference, and Oedipal subjectivity, by contextualizing them within her methodological approach and oeuvre as a whole.
Julia Kristeva: Thresholds is an engaging and accessible introduction to Kristeva's theoretical and fictional works that will be of interest to both students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.
"Keltner's book is highly original, insightful, and promises to change the way scholars have traditionally read Kristeva's work."
Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University
"The book represents an engaging and original interpretation of the entire spectrum of Kristeva's work, including her often overlooked fiction. There are real gems in this manuscript, in particular a terrific and highly original interpretation of Kristeva's theory of intimacy, Oedipus, temporality, as well as of the phenomenological and ontological dimensions of her work, often disregarded by her interpreters. In short, Kristeva is a remarkable intellectual achievement."
Ewa Ziarek, University at Buffalo
"Keltner deftly demonstrates how Kristeva extends phenomenological insights in radically new directions. Her fresh, probing analysis decisively tackles the social and historical significance of Kristeva's Freudian and aesthetic standpoint. A tour de force of Kristeva's highly faceted portrait of Oedipus supports Keltner's excellent and timely elucidation of 'intimate revolt.'"
Sara Beardsworth, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity
Julia Kristeva is one of the most creative and prolific writers to address the personal, social, and political trials of our times. Linguist, psychoanalyst, social and cultural theorist, and novelist, Kristeva's broad interdisciplinary appeal has impacted areas across the humanities and social sciences.
S. K. Keltner's book provides the first comprehensive introduction to the breadth of Kristeva's work. In an original and insightful analysis, Keltner presents Kristeva's thought as the coherent development and elaboration of a complex, multidimensional threshold constitutive of meaning and subjectivity. The ‘threshold' indicates Kristeva's primary sphere of concern, the relationship between the speaking being and its particular social and historical conditions; and Kristeva's interdisciplinary approach. Kristeva's vision, Keltner argues, opens a unique perspective within contemporary discourses attentive to issues of meaning, subjectivity, and social and political life. By emphasizing Kristeva's attention to the permeable borders of psychic and social life, Keltner offers innovative readings of the concepts most widely discussed in Kristeva scholarship: the semiotic and symbolic, abjection, love, and loss. She also provides new interpretations of some of the most controversial issues surrounding Kristeva's work, including Kristeva's conceptions of intimacy, social and cultural difference, and Oedipal subjectivity, by contextualizing them within her methodological approach and oeuvre as a whole.Julia Kristeva: Thresholds is an engaging and accessible introduction to Kristeva's theoretical and fictional works that will be of interest to both students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.
"Keltner's book is highly original, insightful, and promises to change the way scholars have traditionally read Kristeva's work."
Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University
"The book represents an engaging and original interpretation of the entire spectrum of Kristeva's work, including her often overlooked fiction. There are real gems in this manuscript, in particular a terrific and highly original interpretation of Kristeva's theory of intimacy, Oedipus, temporality, as well as of the phenomenological and ontological dimensions of her work, often disregarded by her interpreters. In short, Kristeva is a remarkable intellectual achievement."
Ewa Ziarek, University at Buffalo
"Keltner deftly demonstrates how Kristeva extends phenomenological insights in radically new directions. Her fresh, probing analysis decisively tackles the social and historical significance of Kristeva's Freudian and aesthetic standpoint. A tour de force of Kristeva's highly faceted portrait of Oedipus supports Keltner's excellent and timely elucidation of 'intimate revolt.'"
Sara Beardsworth, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity
Body/text in Julia Kristeva: religion, women, and psychoanalysis
Julia Kristeva works at a crucial intersection of contemporary disciplines: psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, literary criticism, feminism, postmodern philosophy, and religious studies. This volume examines this rich body of work and the ways in which its interdisciplinary style gives insight into problems in understanding religion. Special attention is given to two related themes: the understanding of woman in relation to religion and the role of mother (especially of mother's body) in the formation of self and of a religious discourse. Issues recurrent in the essays include the problem of ethics; the relation between discourse and the life of the body; the formation and sublimation of narcissism; the pre-Oedipal function of the father; the functions of fantasy, imagination, and art; the relation of religion to the negation of woman; and the possibility of positive and playful religion.
The themes of the relation between the symbolic structures of language and a pre-symbolic semiotics of the infant body, of the split and decentered subject, and of the opposition between desire and Jouissance (ecstatic enjoyment).participate in organizing the discussion. Abjection and sacrifice in religion, the dynamics of Christian love and faith, the relation between the doctrine of the Virgin Mary and the experience of motherhood, and the question of feminism and its sometimes quasi-religious forms are also thematic.
"What I like most about this book is that it provides a useful corrective to the overwhelming tendency to dismiss French feminism as essentialist. None of the contributors to this volume assume Kristeva is an essentialist. Some assume that she is not, while others for the most part argue for a more sympathetic and less biologically reductionist view of her work. Given the centrality of the essentialism/anti-essentialism controversy to recent feminist debates, the book presents a valuable addition to and extension of that debate, clarifying what the issues are but not assuming a common consensus." -- Tina Chanter, Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change, University of Virginia
David Crownfield is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Northern Iowa. He is co-editor of Lacan and Theological Discourse, also published by SUNY Press.
Julia Kristeva (Routledge Critical Thinkers) by Noëlle McAfee
One of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, Julia Kristeva has been driving forward the fields of literary and cultural studies since the 1960s. This volume is an accessible, introductory guide to the main themes of Kristeva's work, including her ideas on:
*semiotics and symbolism
*abjection
*melancholia
*feminism
*revolt.
McAfee provides clear explanations of the more difficult aspects of Kristeva's theories, helpfully placing her ideas in the relevant theoretical context, be it literary theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, gender studies or philosophy, and demonstrates the impact of her critical interventions in these areas.Julia Kristeva is the essential guide for readers who are approaching the work of this challenging thinker for the first time, and provides the ideal opportunity for those with more knowledge to re-familiarise themselves with Kristeva's key terms.
Noëlle Claire McAfee is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is also Associate Editor of the Kettering Review, a journal of political thought published by the Kettering Foundation. McAfee specializes in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, twentieth century continental philosophy, and ethics. She combines philosophic research in deliberative democratic theory with investigations in the public sphere, including new experiments being conducted around the globe. She is the author of Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Cornell University Press, 2000) and the co-editor, with James Veninga, of Standing with the Public: the Humanities and Democratic Practice (Kettering Foundation Press, 1997).
Julia Kristeva - Summary of Major Themes
"Kristeva and Feminism"
by Kelly Oliver
Theories of the body are particularly important for feminists because historically (in the humanities) the body has been associated with the feminine, the female, or woman, and denigrated as weak, immoral, unclean, or decaying. Throughout her writing over the last three decades, Kristeva theorized the connection between mind and body, culture and nature, psyche and soma, matter and representation, by insisting both that bodily drives are discharged in representation, and that the logic of signification is already operating in the material body. In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva describes the drives as "as pivot between 'soma' and psyche', between biology and representation" (30; see also Time and Sense).
She is now famous for the distinction between what she calls the "semiotic" and the "symbolic," which she develops in her early work including Revolution in Poetic Language , "From One Identity to the Other" in Desire in Language, and Powers of Horror. Kristeva maintains that all signification is composed of these two elements. The semiotic element is the bodily drive as it is discharged in signification. The semiotic is associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices. As the discharge of drives, it is also associated with the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being since we all have resided in that body.
The symbolic element of signification is associated with the grammar and structure of signification.
The symbolic element is what makes reference possible. For example, words have referential meaning because of the symbolic structure of language. On the other hand, we could say that words give life meaning (nonreferential meaning) because of their semiotic content. Without the symbolic, all signification would be babble or delirium. But, without the semiotic, all signification would be empty and have no importance for our lives. Ultimately, signification requires both the semiotic and symbolic; there is no signification without some combination of both.
Just as bodily drives are discharged into signification, the logic of signification is already operating within the materiality of the body. Kristeva suggests that the operations of identification and differentiation necessary for signification are prefigured in the body's incorporations and expulsions of food in particular (see Revolution in Poetic Language and Powers of Horror). These bodily "identifications" and "differentiations" are regulated by the maternal body before birth and the mother during infancy. Kristeva proposes that there is a maternal regulation or law which prefigures the paternal law which Freudian psychoanalysts have maintained is necessary for signification (see Powers of Horror and Tales of Love). The regulation or grammar and laws of language, then, are already operating on the level of matter.
The Maternal Body
Following Melanie Klein and in contrast to Freud and Lacan, Kristeva emphasizes the maternal function and its importance in the development of subjectivity and access to culture and language.
While Freud and Lacan maintain that the child enters the social by virtue of the paternal function, specifically paternal threats of castration, Kristeva asks why, if our only motivation for entering the social is fear, more of us aren't psychotic? In Tales of Love, she questions the Freudian-Lacanian notion that paternal threats cause the child to leave the safe haven of the maternal body. Why leave this safe haven if all you have to look forward to is fear and threats? Kristeva is interested in the earliest development of subjectivity, prior to Freud's oedipal situation or Lacan mirror stage.
Kristeva argues that maternal regulation is the law before the Law, before Paternal Law (see Tales of Love). She calls for a new discourse of maternity that acknowledges the importance of the maternal function in the development of subjectivity and in culture. In "Stabat Mater" in Tales of Love and "Motherhood According to Bellini" in Desire in Language, Kristeva argues that we don't have adequate discourses of maternity. Religion, specifically Catholicism (which makes the mother sacred), and science (which reduces the mother to nature) are the only discourses of maternity available to Western culture.
In "Motherhood According to Bellini" and elsewhere, she suggests that the maternal function cannot be reduced to mother, feminine, or woman. By identifying the mother's relation to the infant as a function, Kristeva separates the function of meeting the child's needs from both love and desire. As a woman and as a mother, a woman both loves and desires and as such she is primarily a social and speaking being. As a woman and a mother, she is always sexed. But, insofar as she fulfills the maternal function, she is not sexed. Kristeva's analysis suggests that to some extent anyone can fulfill the maternal function, men or women.
By insisting that the maternal body operates between nature and culture, Kristeva tries to counter-act stereotypes that reduce maternity to nature. Even if the mother is not the subject or agent of her pregnancy and birth, she never ceases to be primarily a speaking subject. In fact, Kristeva uses the maternal body with its two-in-one, or other within, as a model for all subjective relations. Like the maternal body, each one of us is what she calls a subject-in-process. As subjects-in-process we are always negotiating the other within, that is to say, the return of the repressed. Like the maternal body, we are never completely the subjects of our own experience. Some feminists have found Kristeva's notion of a subject-in-process a useful alternative to traditional notions of an autonomous unified (masculine) subject.
Abjection and Sexism
In Powers of Horror, working with Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger, New York: Routledge, 1969.), Kristeva develops a notion of abjection that has been very useful in diagnosing the dynamics of oppression. She describes abjection as an operation of the psyche through which subjective and group identity are constituted by excluding anything that threats one's own (or one's group's) borders. The main threat to the fledgling subject is his or her dependence upon the maternal body. Therefore, abjection is fundamentally related to the maternal function. As Kristeva claims in Black Sun, matricide is our vital necessity because in order to become subjects (within a patriarchal culture) we must abject the maternal body. But, because women cannot abject the maternal body with which they also identify as women, they develop what Kristeva calls a depressive sexuality (see Black Sun). Kristeva's analysis in Black Sun suggests that we need not only a new discourse of maternity but also a discourse of the relation between mothers and daughters, a discourse that does not prohibit the lesbian love between women through which female subjectivity is born.
In Tales of Love, Kristeva suggests that misplaced abjection is one cause of women's oppression (see p. 374). In patriarchal cultures, women have been reduced to the maternal function; that is to say, they have been reduced to reproduction. So, if it is necessary to abject the maternal function to become a subject, and women, maternity, and femininity all have been reduced to the maternal function, then within patriarchy, women, maternity, and femininity are all abjected along with the maternal function. This misplaced abjection is one way to account for women's oppression and degradation within patriarchal cultures.
Feminism
Although many feminist theorists and literary critics have found Kristeva's ideas useful and provocative, Kristeva's relation to feminism has been ambivalent. Her views of feminism are best represented in her essay "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul. In this essay originally published in 1979, Kristeva argues that there are three phases of feminism. She rejects the first phase because it seeks universal equality and overlooks sexual differences. She implicitly criticizes Simone de Beauvoir and the rejection of motherhood; rather than reject motherhood Kristeva insists that we need a new discourse of maternity. In fact, in "A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," Kristeva suggests that "real female innovation (in whatever field) will only come about when maternity, female creation and the link between them are better understood" (298).
Kristeva also rejects what she sees as the second phase of feminism because it seeks a uniquely feminine language, which she thinks is impossible. Kristeva does not agree with feminists who maintain that language and culture are essentially patriarchal and must somehow be abandoned. On the contrary, Kristeva insists that culture and language are the domain of speaking beings and women are primarily speaking beings. Kristeva endorses what she identifies as the third phase of feminism which seeks to reconceive of identity and difference and their relationship. This current phase of feminism refuses to choose identity over difference or visa versa; rather, it explores multiple identities, including multiple sexual identities. In an interview with Rosalind Coward, Kristeva proposes that there are as many sexualities as their are individuals.
Notes
1. For a more detailed account of Kristeva's ambigious relation to feminism, see my "Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions" Hypatia a journal of feminist philosophy, 8:3, summer 1993, p. 94-114.
2. She introduces her notion of subject-in-process/on trial in her early texts including Revolution in Poetic Language, "Le Sujet en Proces" in Polylogue and Desire in Language, and develops this notion in her later writings.
3. Her recent analysis in New Maladies of the Soul also carries this suggestion.
by Kathleen O'Grady
Julia Kristeva: You are posing some very searching questions and not treating me gently here. I will answer the question in two parts: one is the interest in origins, and the other the place of Christian tradition. Origins are one of the fundamental questions of metaphysics that cannot be entirely avoided in linguistics or psychoanalysis. Let me take the psychoanalytical point of view. In anamnesis we have the possibility of entering as far as possible into the investigation of infantile memory to discover the most distant memories of our childhood. These are so often traumatic memories. In this journey, a strange transmutation occurs in our language. In speaking, in traversing the universe of signs, we arrive at emotions, at sensations, at drives, at affects, and even at what Freud named the 'umbilicus of the dream'. This is something unnamable, which becomes, none the less, the source of our investigation. The heteronomy of our psyche has always preoccupied my investigations. I am interested in language [langage], and in the other side of language which is filtered inevitably by language and yet is not language. I have named this heterogeneity variously. I have sought it out in the experience of love, of abjection, of horror. I have called it the semiotic in relation to the symbolic. But it is the doubling of language [la langue] that seems, at the moment, to be of more interest to women than to men.
What the other side of language as metaphysics thinks of as origins, is not an origin. Rather it is heterogeneity vis-à-vis language. I suggest that this is a fundamental point of psychoanalytical theory. Freud frequently reclaimed what he called his dualism: the death drive versus the life instincts. For Freud the psychic apparatus is composed of two distinct economies or logics of Ruth the Moabite. The book of Ruth is a magisterial reflection on the alterity and strangeness of woman which one finds nowhere else. Ruth is a foreigner and yet she is the ancestor of the royal house of David. Thus, at the hear of sovereignty there is an inscription of a foreign femininity. Institutionalized Judaism does not recognize this, yet it is part of a tradition of generosity towards the other that is at the heart of Jewish monotheism. In the Song of Songs the amours relation is figured as a relation between a man and a woman who are strangers, travelers, destined to lose each other. Separation is thus placed at the heart of the relation of one to the other in the Bible. With regards to my interest in narcissism, you will recall the Biblical and Gospel verse on which Thomas Aquinas comments:
Love your neighbor as yourself. It can be interpreted narrowly as the legitimation of egotism and individualism. But in my book, Tales of Love, I interpreted it as the necessity of structuring narcissism. To become capable of loving our neighbor as ourself, we have first of all to heal a wounded narcissism. We must reconstitute narcissistic identity to be able to extend a hand to the other. Thus what is needed is a reassurance or reconstruction of both narcissism, personality and, of course, the subject for there to be a relation to the other. To put this into its practical social context, let me recall the enthusiasm with which many of us of the generation of '68 launched ourselves into social activism, and put our selves and our comforts at risk. We struggled to find some meaning in the destruction. We occupied factories; I myself took part in this to find meaning in life. But while reading as usual, and in particular at that moment, these texts, the Bible, the Gospels and Thomas Aquinas, I began to argue that it was important to act on this social plane by moving into the factories, but perhaps it was necessary to be installed within ourselves first of all. This seems to be the primary message of Thomas Aquinas: love the other as oneself, but by being settled within oneself, by delight in oneself. Thus: heal your inner wounds which, as a result will render you then capable of effective social action, or intervention in the social plane with the other. Therefore, I would argue that we must heal our shattered narcissism before formulating higher objectives.
Le feminin et le sacre. Co-authored with Catherine Clément. Paris: Stock, 1998.
Le temps sensible: Proust et l'expérience littéraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Les Nouvelles maladies de l'ame, Paris: Libraire Artheme Fayard, 1993.
Soleil noir: Depression et mélancolie, Paris: Gallimard, 1987.
Histoires d'amour, Edtions Denoël: Paris, 1983.
Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Paris: Seuil, 1980.
Polylogue, Paris: Seuil, 1977.
La Révolution du langage poétique, Paris: Seuil, 1974.
BOOKS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, Trans. by Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
New Maladies of the Soul Trans. by Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Black Sun Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Tales of Love Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Revolution in Poetic Language, Trans. by Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Powers of Horror, Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Desire in Language, Edited by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
ARTICLES
"A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," in The Kristeva Reader, Edited by Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; originally published in 1977.
"Julia Kristeva in conversation with Rosiland Coward," Desire, ICA Documents, 1984, p. 22-27.
Huntington, Patricia. Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray.
Julia Kristeva 1966-96: Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics. (special issue of the journal Parallax out of the University of Leeds, UK) 1998.
Lechte, John and Mary Zournazi, ed. After the Revolution: On Kristeva. 1998. ISBN 1-876017-37-6.
O'Grady, Kathleen, ed. Julia Kristeva: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources in French and English: 1966-1996. 1997.
Oliver, Kelly, ed. Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writings. 1993.
Oliver, Kelly. "Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions," Hypatia a journal of feminist philosophy, 8:3, summer 1993, p. 94-114.
Oliver, Kelly, ed. The Portable Kristeva. 1997.
Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. 1993.
Reineke, Martha J. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence. 1997.
Smith, Anna. Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement. 1997.
Smith, Anne-Marie. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable. Pluto Press, 1998.
by Kelly Oliver
- [Copyright 1998 Kelly Oliver]
- 1. Her attempt to bring the body back into discourses in the human sciences;
2. Her focus on the significance of the maternal and preoedipal in the constitution of subjectivity; and
3. Her notion of abjection as an explanation for oppression and discrimination.
Theories of the body are particularly important for feminists because historically (in the humanities) the body has been associated with the feminine, the female, or woman, and denigrated as weak, immoral, unclean, or decaying. Throughout her writing over the last three decades, Kristeva theorized the connection between mind and body, culture and nature, psyche and soma, matter and representation, by insisting both that bodily drives are discharged in representation, and that the logic of signification is already operating in the material body. In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva describes the drives as "as pivot between 'soma' and psyche', between biology and representation" (30; see also Time and Sense).
She is now famous for the distinction between what she calls the "semiotic" and the "symbolic," which she develops in her early work including Revolution in Poetic Language , "From One Identity to the Other" in Desire in Language, and Powers of Horror. Kristeva maintains that all signification is composed of these two elements. The semiotic element is the bodily drive as it is discharged in signification. The semiotic is associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices. As the discharge of drives, it is also associated with the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being since we all have resided in that body.
The symbolic element of signification is associated with the grammar and structure of signification.
The symbolic element is what makes reference possible. For example, words have referential meaning because of the symbolic structure of language. On the other hand, we could say that words give life meaning (nonreferential meaning) because of their semiotic content. Without the symbolic, all signification would be babble or delirium. But, without the semiotic, all signification would be empty and have no importance for our lives. Ultimately, signification requires both the semiotic and symbolic; there is no signification without some combination of both.
Just as bodily drives are discharged into signification, the logic of signification is already operating within the materiality of the body. Kristeva suggests that the operations of identification and differentiation necessary for signification are prefigured in the body's incorporations and expulsions of food in particular (see Revolution in Poetic Language and Powers of Horror). These bodily "identifications" and "differentiations" are regulated by the maternal body before birth and the mother during infancy. Kristeva proposes that there is a maternal regulation or law which prefigures the paternal law which Freudian psychoanalysts have maintained is necessary for signification (see Powers of Horror and Tales of Love). The regulation or grammar and laws of language, then, are already operating on the level of matter.
The Maternal Body
Following Melanie Klein and in contrast to Freud and Lacan, Kristeva emphasizes the maternal function and its importance in the development of subjectivity and access to culture and language.
While Freud and Lacan maintain that the child enters the social by virtue of the paternal function, specifically paternal threats of castration, Kristeva asks why, if our only motivation for entering the social is fear, more of us aren't psychotic? In Tales of Love, she questions the Freudian-Lacanian notion that paternal threats cause the child to leave the safe haven of the maternal body. Why leave this safe haven if all you have to look forward to is fear and threats? Kristeva is interested in the earliest development of subjectivity, prior to Freud's oedipal situation or Lacan mirror stage.
Kristeva argues that maternal regulation is the law before the Law, before Paternal Law (see Tales of Love). She calls for a new discourse of maternity that acknowledges the importance of the maternal function in the development of subjectivity and in culture. In "Stabat Mater" in Tales of Love and "Motherhood According to Bellini" in Desire in Language, Kristeva argues that we don't have adequate discourses of maternity. Religion, specifically Catholicism (which makes the mother sacred), and science (which reduces the mother to nature) are the only discourses of maternity available to Western culture.
In "Motherhood According to Bellini" and elsewhere, she suggests that the maternal function cannot be reduced to mother, feminine, or woman. By identifying the mother's relation to the infant as a function, Kristeva separates the function of meeting the child's needs from both love and desire. As a woman and as a mother, a woman both loves and desires and as such she is primarily a social and speaking being. As a woman and a mother, she is always sexed. But, insofar as she fulfills the maternal function, she is not sexed. Kristeva's analysis suggests that to some extent anyone can fulfill the maternal function, men or women.
By insisting that the maternal body operates between nature and culture, Kristeva tries to counter-act stereotypes that reduce maternity to nature. Even if the mother is not the subject or agent of her pregnancy and birth, she never ceases to be primarily a speaking subject. In fact, Kristeva uses the maternal body with its two-in-one, or other within, as a model for all subjective relations. Like the maternal body, each one of us is what she calls a subject-in-process. As subjects-in-process we are always negotiating the other within, that is to say, the return of the repressed. Like the maternal body, we are never completely the subjects of our own experience. Some feminists have found Kristeva's notion of a subject-in-process a useful alternative to traditional notions of an autonomous unified (masculine) subject.
Abjection and Sexism
In Powers of Horror, working with Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger, New York: Routledge, 1969.), Kristeva develops a notion of abjection that has been very useful in diagnosing the dynamics of oppression. She describes abjection as an operation of the psyche through which subjective and group identity are constituted by excluding anything that threats one's own (or one's group's) borders. The main threat to the fledgling subject is his or her dependence upon the maternal body. Therefore, abjection is fundamentally related to the maternal function. As Kristeva claims in Black Sun, matricide is our vital necessity because in order to become subjects (within a patriarchal culture) we must abject the maternal body. But, because women cannot abject the maternal body with which they also identify as women, they develop what Kristeva calls a depressive sexuality (see Black Sun). Kristeva's analysis in Black Sun suggests that we need not only a new discourse of maternity but also a discourse of the relation between mothers and daughters, a discourse that does not prohibit the lesbian love between women through which female subjectivity is born.
In Tales of Love, Kristeva suggests that misplaced abjection is one cause of women's oppression (see p. 374). In patriarchal cultures, women have been reduced to the maternal function; that is to say, they have been reduced to reproduction. So, if it is necessary to abject the maternal function to become a subject, and women, maternity, and femininity all have been reduced to the maternal function, then within patriarchy, women, maternity, and femininity are all abjected along with the maternal function. This misplaced abjection is one way to account for women's oppression and degradation within patriarchal cultures.
Feminism
Although many feminist theorists and literary critics have found Kristeva's ideas useful and provocative, Kristeva's relation to feminism has been ambivalent. Her views of feminism are best represented in her essay "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul. In this essay originally published in 1979, Kristeva argues that there are three phases of feminism. She rejects the first phase because it seeks universal equality and overlooks sexual differences. She implicitly criticizes Simone de Beauvoir and the rejection of motherhood; rather than reject motherhood Kristeva insists that we need a new discourse of maternity. In fact, in "A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," Kristeva suggests that "real female innovation (in whatever field) will only come about when maternity, female creation and the link between them are better understood" (298).
Kristeva also rejects what she sees as the second phase of feminism because it seeks a uniquely feminine language, which she thinks is impossible. Kristeva does not agree with feminists who maintain that language and culture are essentially patriarchal and must somehow be abandoned. On the contrary, Kristeva insists that culture and language are the domain of speaking beings and women are primarily speaking beings. Kristeva endorses what she identifies as the third phase of feminism which seeks to reconceive of identity and difference and their relationship. This current phase of feminism refuses to choose identity over difference or visa versa; rather, it explores multiple identities, including multiple sexual identities. In an interview with Rosalind Coward, Kristeva proposes that there are as many sexualities as their are individuals.
Notes
1. For a more detailed account of Kristeva's ambigious relation to feminism, see my "Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions" Hypatia a journal of feminist philosophy, 8:3, summer 1993, p. 94-114.
2. She introduces her notion of subject-in-process/on trial in her early texts including Revolution in Poetic Language, "Le Sujet en Proces" in Polylogue and Desire in Language, and develops this notion in her later writings.
3. Her recent analysis in New Maladies of the Soul also carries this suggestion.
Interview
"An Interview with Julia Kristeva"by Kathleen O'Grady
- [Copyright 1998 Kathleen O'Grady]
. This is a small section (pp. 8-11) of a larger audience dialogue with Julia Kristeva, printed in Parallax: Julia Kristeva 1966-96. Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics. Issue 8 July-September 1998, pp. 5-16. Guest Editor, Griselda Pollock. This interview appears here with the permission of Kathleen O'Grady.
Julia Kristeva: You are posing some very searching questions and not treating me gently here. I will answer the question in two parts: one is the interest in origins, and the other the place of Christian tradition. Origins are one of the fundamental questions of metaphysics that cannot be entirely avoided in linguistics or psychoanalysis. Let me take the psychoanalytical point of view. In anamnesis we have the possibility of entering as far as possible into the investigation of infantile memory to discover the most distant memories of our childhood. These are so often traumatic memories. In this journey, a strange transmutation occurs in our language. In speaking, in traversing the universe of signs, we arrive at emotions, at sensations, at drives, at affects, and even at what Freud named the 'umbilicus of the dream'. This is something unnamable, which becomes, none the less, the source of our investigation. The heteronomy of our psyche has always preoccupied my investigations. I am interested in language [langage], and in the other side of language which is filtered inevitably by language and yet is not language. I have named this heterogeneity variously. I have sought it out in the experience of love, of abjection, of horror. I have called it the semiotic in relation to the symbolic. But it is the doubling of language [la langue] that seems, at the moment, to be of more interest to women than to men.
What the other side of language as metaphysics thinks of as origins, is not an origin. Rather it is heterogeneity vis-à-vis language. I suggest that this is a fundamental point of psychoanalytical theory. Freud frequently reclaimed what he called his dualism: the death drive versus the life instincts. For Freud the psychic apparatus is composed of two distinct economies or logics of Ruth the Moabite. The book of Ruth is a magisterial reflection on the alterity and strangeness of woman which one finds nowhere else. Ruth is a foreigner and yet she is the ancestor of the royal house of David. Thus, at the hear of sovereignty there is an inscription of a foreign femininity. Institutionalized Judaism does not recognize this, yet it is part of a tradition of generosity towards the other that is at the heart of Jewish monotheism. In the Song of Songs the amours relation is figured as a relation between a man and a woman who are strangers, travelers, destined to lose each other. Separation is thus placed at the heart of the relation of one to the other in the Bible. With regards to my interest in narcissism, you will recall the Biblical and Gospel verse on which Thomas Aquinas comments:
Love your neighbor as yourself. It can be interpreted narrowly as the legitimation of egotism and individualism. But in my book, Tales of Love, I interpreted it as the necessity of structuring narcissism. To become capable of loving our neighbor as ourself, we have first of all to heal a wounded narcissism. We must reconstitute narcissistic identity to be able to extend a hand to the other. Thus what is needed is a reassurance or reconstruction of both narcissism, personality and, of course, the subject for there to be a relation to the other. To put this into its practical social context, let me recall the enthusiasm with which many of us of the generation of '68 launched ourselves into social activism, and put our selves and our comforts at risk. We struggled to find some meaning in the destruction. We occupied factories; I myself took part in this to find meaning in life. But while reading as usual, and in particular at that moment, these texts, the Bible, the Gospels and Thomas Aquinas, I began to argue that it was important to act on this social plane by moving into the factories, but perhaps it was necessary to be installed within ourselves first of all. This seems to be the primary message of Thomas Aquinas: love the other as oneself, but by being settled within oneself, by delight in oneself. Thus: heal your inner wounds which, as a result will render you then capable of effective social action, or intervention in the social plane with the other. Therefore, I would argue that we must heal our shattered narcissism before formulating higher objectives.
Bibliography
- [This information was contributed by Kelly Oliver.]
Le feminin et le sacre. Co-authored with Catherine Clément. Paris: Stock, 1998.
Le temps sensible: Proust et l'expérience littéraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Les Nouvelles maladies de l'ame, Paris: Libraire Artheme Fayard, 1993.
Soleil noir: Depression et mélancolie, Paris: Gallimard, 1987.
Histoires d'amour, Edtions Denoël: Paris, 1983.
Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Paris: Seuil, 1980.
Polylogue, Paris: Seuil, 1977.
La Révolution du langage poétique, Paris: Seuil, 1974.
BOOKS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONTime and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, Trans. by Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
New Maladies of the Soul Trans. by Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Black Sun Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Tales of Love Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Revolution in Poetic Language, Trans. by Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Powers of Horror, Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Desire in Language, Edited by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
ARTICLES"A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," in The Kristeva Reader, Edited by Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; originally published in 1977.
"Julia Kristeva in conversation with Rosiland Coward," Desire, ICA Documents, 1984, p. 22-27.
Secondary Sources
de Nooy, Juliana. Derrida, Kristeva, and the Dividing Line: An Articulation of Two Theories of Difference. Garland, 1998.Huntington, Patricia. Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray.
Julia Kristeva 1966-96: Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics. (special issue of the journal Parallax out of the University of Leeds, UK) 1998.
Lechte, John and Mary Zournazi, ed. After the Revolution: On Kristeva. 1998. ISBN 1-876017-37-6.
O'Grady, Kathleen, ed. Julia Kristeva: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources in French and English: 1966-1996. 1997.
Oliver, Kelly, ed. Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writings. 1993.
Oliver, Kelly. "Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions," Hypatia a journal of feminist philosophy, 8:3, summer 1993, p. 94-114.
Oliver, Kelly, ed. The Portable Kristeva. 1997.
Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. 1993.
Reineke, Martha J. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence. 1997.
Smith, Anna. Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement. 1997.
Smith, Anne-Marie. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable. Pluto Press, 1998.
Julia Kristeva - The Need to Believe and the Desire to Know
Julia Kristeva's Lecture at the 2009 conference "The Force of Monotheism - Psychoanalysis and religions", organised by the Sigmund Freud Foundation - October 29-31.2009 in Vienna
Introduction to Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom - Open Yale Courses (20 free video online lectures + transcripts)
About the Course
What do your dreams mean? Do men and women differ in the nature and intensity of their sexual desires? Can apes learn sign language? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, love, lust, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.
About Professor Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at Yale University. He was born in Montreal, Canada, was an undergraduate at McGill University, and did his doctoral work at MIT. He has published in scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and in popular outlets such as The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the author of two books: How Children Learn the Meanings of Words and Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. His research explores children's understanding of art, religion, and morality.
Watch free online lectures - Introduction to Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom:
Click session titles below to access audio, video, and course materials.
1. Introduction
2. Foundations: This Is Your Brain
3. Foundations: Freud
4. Foundations: Skinner
5. What Is It Like to Be a Baby: The Development of Thought
6. How Do We Communicate?: Language in the Brain, Mouth and the Hands
7. Conscious of the Present; Conscious of the Past: Language (cont.); Vision and Memory
8. Conscious of the Present; Conscious of the Past: Vision and Memory (cont.)
9. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Love (Guest Lecture by Professor Peter Salovey)
10. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Evolution and Rationality
11. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part I
12. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part II
13. Why Are People Different?: Differences
14. What Motivates Us: Sex
15. A Person in the World of People: Morality
16. A Person in the World of People: Self and Other, Part I
17. A Person in the World of People: Self and Other, Part II; Some Mysteries: Sleep, Dreams, and Laughter
18. What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Mental Illness, Part I (Guest Lecture by Professor Susan Nolen-Hoeksema)
19. What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Mental Illness, Part II
20. The Good Life: Happiness
What do your dreams mean? Do men and women differ in the nature and intensity of their sexual desires? Can apes learn sign language? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, love, lust, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.
About Professor Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at Yale University. He was born in Montreal, Canada, was an undergraduate at McGill University, and did his doctoral work at MIT. He has published in scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and in popular outlets such as The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the author of two books: How Children Learn the Meanings of Words and Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. His research explores children's understanding of art, religion, and morality.
Watch free online lectures - Introduction to Psychology with Professor Paul Bloom:
Click session titles below to access audio, video, and course materials.
1. Introduction
2. Foundations: This Is Your Brain
3. Foundations: Freud
4. Foundations: Skinner
5. What Is It Like to Be a Baby: The Development of Thought
6. How Do We Communicate?: Language in the Brain, Mouth and the Hands
7. Conscious of the Present; Conscious of the Past: Language (cont.); Vision and Memory
8. Conscious of the Present; Conscious of the Past: Vision and Memory (cont.)
9. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Love (Guest Lecture by Professor Peter Salovey)
10. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Evolution and Rationality
11. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part I
12. Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Emotions, Part II
13. Why Are People Different?: Differences
14. What Motivates Us: Sex
15. A Person in the World of People: Morality
16. A Person in the World of People: Self and Other, Part I
17. A Person in the World of People: Self and Other, Part II; Some Mysteries: Sleep, Dreams, and Laughter
18. What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Mental Illness, Part I (Guest Lecture by Professor Susan Nolen-Hoeksema)
19. What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Mental Illness, Part II
20. The Good Life: Happiness
Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity (Suny Series in Gender Theory)
A comprehensive examination of Kristeva's work from the seventies to the nineties.
This is the first systematic overview of Julia Kristeva's vision and work in relation to philosophical modernity. It provides a clear, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary analysis of her thought on psychoanalysis, art, ethics, politics, and feminism in the secular aftermath of religion. Sara Beardsworth shows that Kristeva's multiple perspectives explore the powers and limits of different discourses as responses to the historical failures of Western cultures, failures that are undergone and disclosed in psychoanalysis.“…one of the best books on a French figure to be published in recent years. Beardsworth brilliantly and provocatively deepens our understanding of the foundations of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic position and situates her thought in the broader fields of modern and continental philosophy. It is a book that challenges not only our most basic assumptions about Kristeva, but also those concerning psychoanalysis itself.” — Continental Philosophy Review
"I am pleased to say that this is one of the best books on Kristeva I've read. It develops an original reinterpretation of Kristeva's work and offers a new undertaking of the vexed relations between subjectivity and the social. This is a timely and important book that changes our understanding of Kristeva's work, its relation to feminism, psychoanalysis, and the broad culture of modernity." — Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, author of An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy and editor of Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality
"This is the best available study of Kristeva's thought. Beardsworth clearly and cleanly exposes the inner workings of the system of critical thought of this towering intellectual figure. This will become the primary text for understanding—one might even say for constructing—Kristeva's relationship to most of the diverse streams of contemporary feminism." — Gregg M. Horowitz, author of Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life
"This is an original and utterly compelling philosophical reading of Kristeva. In the course of crystallizing the fundamental gestures of Kristeva's thought, Beardsworth has provided a riveting psychoanalytic redescription of the meaning of modernity." — J. M. Bernstein, author of Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics
"Beardsworth's thesis—that Kristeva diagnoses a loss of loss as well as a need for a recovery of loss—is stunning and original. Her analysis of Kristeva's relationship to Lacan is lucid and insightful and her recuperation of Kristeva's notions of melancholy and abjection for feminist theory is exciting and productive." — Kelly Oliver, author of Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind
Sara Beardsworth is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University.
HOMO SACER AS THE OBJECT OF THE DISCOURSE OF THE UNIVERSITY by Slavoj Zizek
L'envers de la psychanalyse, Seminar XVII (1969-1970) on the four discourses, is Lacan's response to the events of 1968 - its premise is best captured as his reversal of the well-known anti-structuralist graffiti from the Paris walls of 1968 "Structures do not walk on the streets!" - if anything, this Seminar endeavors to demonstrate how structures DO walk on the streets, i.e. how structural shifts CAN account for the social outbursts like that of the 1968. Instead of the one symbolic Order with its set of a priori rules which guarantee social cohesion, we get the matrix of the passages from one to another discourse: Lacan's interest is focused on the passage from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of University as the hegemonic discourse in contemporary society. No wonder that the revolt was located at the universities: as such, it merely signaled the shift to the new forms of domination in which the scientific discourse serves legitimizes the relations of domination. Lacan's underlying premise is sceptic-conservative - Lacan's diagnosis is best captured by his famous retort to the student revolutionaries: "As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!" This passage can also be conceived in more general terms, as the passage from the prerevolutionary ancien regime to the postrevolutionary new Master who does not want to admit that he is one, but proposes himself as a mere "servant" of the People — in Nietzsche's terms, it is simply the passage from Master's ethics to slave morality, and this fact, perhaps, enables us a new approach to Nietzsche: when Nietzsche scornfully dismisses "slave morality," he is not attacking lower classes as such, but, rather, the new masters who are no longer ready to assume the title of the Master - "slave" is Nietzsche's term for a fake master. — How, then, more closely, are we to read the university discourse?
The university discourse is enunciated from the position of "neutral" Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real (say, in the case of pedagogical knowledge, the "raw, uncultivated child"), turning it into the subject ($). The "truth" of the university discourse, hidden beneath the bar, of course, is power, i.e. the Master-Signifier: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things. What one should avoid here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. "Production" (the fourth term in the matrix of discourses) does not stand simply for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its "indivisible remainder," for the excess which resists being included in the discursive network, i.e. for what the discourse itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart. Perhaps the exemplary case of the Master's position which underlies the university discourse is the way in which medical discourse functions in our everyday lives: at the surface level, we are dealing with pure objective knowledge which desubjectivizes the subject-patient, reducing him to an object of research, of diagnosis and treatment; however, beneath it, one can easily discern a worried hystericized subject, obsessed with anxiety, addressing the doctor as his Master and asking for reassurance from him. At a more common level, suffice it to recall the market expert who advocates strong budgetary measures (cutting welfare expenses, etc.) as a necessity imposed by his neutral expertise devoid of any ideological biases: what he conceals is the series of power-relations (from the active role of state apparatuses to ideological beliefs) which sustain the "neutral" functioning of the market mechanism.
In the University discourse, is not the upper level ($ — a) that of biopolitics (in the sense deployed from Foucault to Agamben)? Of the expert knowledge dealing with its object which is a - not subjects, but individuals reduced to bare life? And does the lower not designate what Eric Santner called the "crisis of investiture," i.e., the impossibility of the subject to relate to S1, to identify with a Master-Signifier, to assume the imposed symbolic mandate?1 The key point is here that the expert rule of "biopolitics" is grounded in and conditioned by the crisis of investiture; this crisis generated the "post-metaphysical" survivalist stance of the Last Men, which ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow. It is within this horizon that one should appreciate today's growing rejection of death penalty: what one should be able to discern is the hidden "biopolitics" which sustains this rejection. Those who assert the "sacredness of life," defending it against the threat of transcendent powers which parasitize on it, end up in a world in which, on behalf of its very official goal — long pleasurable life — all effective pleasures are prohibited or strictly controlled (smoking, drugs, food…). Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is the latest example of this survivalist attitude towards dying, with its "demystifying" presentation of war as a meaningless slaughter which nothing can really justify - as such, it provides the best possible justification for the Colin Powell's "no-casualties-on-our-side" military doctrine.
On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight…)? Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real - in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one.
Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also Last Man's revolution — "revolution without revolution.") Is this not one of the two versions of Lacan's anti-Dostoyevski motto "If God doesn't exist, everything is prohibited"? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance; (2) If God is dead, superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy directly the Thing Itself: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your blood! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitations by external reality? Take drugs which directly affect your brain! - And if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any "merely human" constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness).
Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint — it is no longer the old notion of the "right measure" between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction "Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!", i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner's famous "Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it" from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's "biopolitics." Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is "safe sex" — a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying "Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?". The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent "opium without opium": no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it — it already IS a kind of "opium without opium."
The structure of the "chocolate laxative," of a product containing the agent of its own containment, can be discerned throughout today's ideological landscape. There are two topics which determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness, openness towards it, AND the obsessive fear of harassment — in short, the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other… A similar structure is clearly present in how we relate to capitalist profiteering: it is OK IF it is counteracted with charitable activities — first you amass billions, then you return (part of) them to the needy… And the same goes for war, for the emergent logic of humanitarian or pacifist militarism: war is OK insofar as it really serves to bring about peace, democracy, or to create conditions for distributing humanitarian help. And does the same not hold more and more even for democracy: it is OK if it is "rethought" to include torture and a permanent emergency state, if it is cleansed of its populist "excesses," and if the people are "mature" enough to live by it…
However, what we were describing what cannot but appear as two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to bare life, to homo sacer as the dispensable object of the expert caretaking knowledge; and that of the respect for the vulnerable Other brought to extreme, of the attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences itself as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential "harassments." Is there a stronger contrast than the one between the respect for the Other's vulnerability and the reduction of the Other to "mere life" regulated by the administrative knowledge?
But what if these two stances nonetheless rely on the same root, what if they are the two aspects of one and the same underlying attitude, what if they coincide in what one is tempted to designate as the contemporary case of the Hegelian "infinite judgement" which asserts the identity of opposites? What the two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. Nowhere is the complicity of these two levels clearer as in the case of the opposition to death penalty — no wonder, since (violently putting another human being to) death is, quite logically, the ultimate traumatic point of biopolitics, the politics of the administration of life. To put it in Foucauldian terms, is the abolition of death penalty not part of a certain "biopolitics" which considers crime as the result of social, psychological, ideological, etc., circumstances: the notion of the morally/legally responsible subject is an ideological fiction whose function is to cover up the network of power relations, individuals are not responsible for the crimes they commit, so they should not be punished? Is, however, the obverse of this thesis not that those who control the circumstances control the people? No wonder the two strongest industrial complexes are today the military and the medical, that of destroying and that of prolonging life.
Superego is thus not directly S2; it is rather the S1 of the S2 itself, the dimension of an unconditional injunction that is inherent to knowledge itself. Recall the informations about health we are bombarded with all the time: "Smoking is dangerous! To much fat may cause a heart attack! Regular exercise leads to a longer life!" etc.etc. — it is impossible not to hear beneath it the unconditional injunction "You should enjoy a long and healthy life!"… What this means is that the discourse of the University is thoroughly mystifying, concealing its true foundation, obfuscating the unfreedom on which it relies.
1. See Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996.
In the University discourse, is not the upper level ($ — a) that of biopolitics (in the sense deployed from Foucault to Agamben)? Of the expert knowledge dealing with its object which is a - not subjects, but individuals reduced to bare life? And does the lower not designate what Eric Santner called the "crisis of investiture," i.e., the impossibility of the subject to relate to S1, to identify with a Master-Signifier, to assume the imposed symbolic mandate?1 The key point is here that the expert rule of "biopolitics" is grounded in and conditioned by the crisis of investiture; this crisis generated the "post-metaphysical" survivalist stance of the Last Men, which ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow. It is within this horizon that one should appreciate today's growing rejection of death penalty: what one should be able to discern is the hidden "biopolitics" which sustains this rejection. Those who assert the "sacredness of life," defending it against the threat of transcendent powers which parasitize on it, end up in a world in which, on behalf of its very official goal — long pleasurable life — all effective pleasures are prohibited or strictly controlled (smoking, drugs, food…). Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is the latest example of this survivalist attitude towards dying, with its "demystifying" presentation of war as a meaningless slaughter which nothing can really justify - as such, it provides the best possible justification for the Colin Powell's "no-casualties-on-our-side" military doctrine.
On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight…)? Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real - in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one.
Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also Last Man's revolution — "revolution without revolution.") Is this not one of the two versions of Lacan's anti-Dostoyevski motto "If God doesn't exist, everything is prohibited"? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance; (2) If God is dead, superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy directly the Thing Itself: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your blood! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitations by external reality? Take drugs which directly affect your brain! - And if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any "merely human" constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness).
Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint — it is no longer the old notion of the "right measure" between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction "Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!", i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner's famous "Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it" from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's "biopolitics." Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is "safe sex" — a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying "Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?". The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent "opium without opium": no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it — it already IS a kind of "opium without opium."
The structure of the "chocolate laxative," of a product containing the agent of its own containment, can be discerned throughout today's ideological landscape. There are two topics which determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness, openness towards it, AND the obsessive fear of harassment — in short, the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other… A similar structure is clearly present in how we relate to capitalist profiteering: it is OK IF it is counteracted with charitable activities — first you amass billions, then you return (part of) them to the needy… And the same goes for war, for the emergent logic of humanitarian or pacifist militarism: war is OK insofar as it really serves to bring about peace, democracy, or to create conditions for distributing humanitarian help. And does the same not hold more and more even for democracy: it is OK if it is "rethought" to include torture and a permanent emergency state, if it is cleansed of its populist "excesses," and if the people are "mature" enough to live by it…
However, what we were describing what cannot but appear as two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to bare life, to homo sacer as the dispensable object of the expert caretaking knowledge; and that of the respect for the vulnerable Other brought to extreme, of the attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences itself as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential "harassments." Is there a stronger contrast than the one between the respect for the Other's vulnerability and the reduction of the Other to "mere life" regulated by the administrative knowledge?
But what if these two stances nonetheless rely on the same root, what if they are the two aspects of one and the same underlying attitude, what if they coincide in what one is tempted to designate as the contemporary case of the Hegelian "infinite judgement" which asserts the identity of opposites? What the two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. Nowhere is the complicity of these two levels clearer as in the case of the opposition to death penalty — no wonder, since (violently putting another human being to) death is, quite logically, the ultimate traumatic point of biopolitics, the politics of the administration of life. To put it in Foucauldian terms, is the abolition of death penalty not part of a certain "biopolitics" which considers crime as the result of social, psychological, ideological, etc., circumstances: the notion of the morally/legally responsible subject is an ideological fiction whose function is to cover up the network of power relations, individuals are not responsible for the crimes they commit, so they should not be punished? Is, however, the obverse of this thesis not that those who control the circumstances control the people? No wonder the two strongest industrial complexes are today the military and the medical, that of destroying and that of prolonging life.
Superego is thus not directly S2; it is rather the S1 of the S2 itself, the dimension of an unconditional injunction that is inherent to knowledge itself. Recall the informations about health we are bombarded with all the time: "Smoking is dangerous! To much fat may cause a heart attack! Regular exercise leads to a longer life!" etc.etc. — it is impossible not to hear beneath it the unconditional injunction "You should enjoy a long and healthy life!"… What this means is that the discourse of the University is thoroughly mystifying, concealing its true foundation, obfuscating the unfreedom on which it relies.
1. See Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996.
Homo Sacer As the Object of the Discourse of the University - lacan.com (Sep. 25)
Psychoanalysis in post-marxism: The case of Alain Badiou by Slavoj Zizek.
In the history of Marxism, the reference to psychoanalysis played a precise strategic role: psychoanalysis was expected to "close the gap" by explaining why, despite the presence of "objective" conditions for the revolutionary transformation, individuals willingly persisted in their enslavement to the ruling ideology (i.e., why they desired their subordination and even found a perverse satisfaction in it). Why did the masses prefer the Fascist temptation to the Communist revolution in the 1930s? Why did they let themselves be lured into dull satisfaction by the Sirens of the late-capitalist "society of consumption" in the 1960s? In short, psychoanalysis functioned as an ambiguous (necessary but dangerous) pharmakon invoked in order to supplement the inherent insufficiency of the Marxist theoretic edifice.
Today, however, with the apparent demise of Marxism, the entire situation has changed: the emerging post-Marxist "radical" political philosophy as a rule insists that psychoanalysis cannot provide access to the specific dimension of the political; useful as it is in clarifying the libidinal foundation of a multitude of "regressive" phenomena (from ethnic violence to the "apolitical" passivity of the postmodern subject), psychoanalysis cannot account for the miraculous emergence of an egalitarian democratic enthusiasm-of an unconditional demand for what Etienne Balibar called egaliberte. For that reason, the political use of psychoanalysis has always wound up in a justification of failure, in an explanation of why things had to go wrong.
The author who has provided the ultimate formulation of this critique of psychoanalysis is Alain Badiou. He deserves special attention insofar as his "post-Marxism" has nothing whatsoever to do with the fashionable deconstructionist dismissal of the alleged Marxist "essentialism"; on the contrary, he is unique in radically rejecting the deconstructionist doxa as a new form of pseudo-thought, as a contemporary version of sophism. Since Badiou is not yet well-known in Anglo-American academia, the basic outlines of his philosophy will be rehearsed here prior to offering a Lacanian response to his depiction of the limits of psychoanalysis.
The axis of Badiou's theoretic 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 that which presents itself in our experience, categorized by genus and species in terms of its properties. At bottom, as it were, lies the pure multiple, the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is given; this multitude is not a multitude of Ones, since the counting has not yet taken place. What Badiou calls a "situation" is any particular consistent multitude (e.g., French society, modern art): a situation is structured, and it is its structure which allows us to "count" it "as One." Here, however, the first cracks in the ontological edifice of Being appear: in order for us to "count" it "as One," the reduplicatio proper to 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 involve a metastructure which designates it as One. (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." (Badiou plays here on the ambiguity of the term state-"state of things" versus "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. "Void" has been the central category of ontology from Democritean atomism onward: "atoms" are nothing but the configurations of 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, though clearly belonging to the situation, is not "counted" by it, properly included in it (e.g., the "nonintegrated" rabble in a societal situation): this element is presented, but not re-presented. On the other hand, there is an excess of re-presentation over presentation: the agency which brings about the passage from situation to its state (State in society) is always in excess relative to what it structures. In contrast to the impossible liberal dream of a State reduced to a service of civil society, State power is necessarily "excessive," that is, it never simply and transparently re-presents society, but acts as a violent intervention in what it re-presents.
This, then, is the structure of Being. From time to time, however, in a wholly contingent, unpredictable way, out of reach for the Knowledge of Being, an Event takes place which belongs to a wholly different dimension-that, precisely, of non-Being. Take, for example, French society in the late eighteenth century: what is accessible to Knowledge is the state of society-its strata, economic, political, and ideological fights, and so on; no Knowledge, however, enables us to predict or account for the properly unaccountable Event which consists in the so-called French Revolution. In this precise sense, an Event emerges ex nihilo. But the fact that it cannot be accounted for in the terms of the situation 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 which renders visible/readable what the "official" state of the situation had to "repress," but it is also always localized, that is, the Truth is always the Truth of a specific situation. The French Revolution is the Event that renders visible/readable the excesses and inconsistencies, the "lie," of the ancien regime; and it is the truth of the ancien regime situation-what is localized, or attaches to it. An Event thus involves its own series of determinations: the Event itself; its denomination ("French Revolution" not being an objective-categorizing designation but part of the Event itself, the way its participants or adherents perceived and symbolized their activity); its ultimate Goal (the society of fully realized emancipation, of freedom-equality-fraternity); its "operator" (the political movements struggling for the Revolution); and, last but not least, its subject (the agent who, on behalf of the Truth-Event, intervenes in the historical multiple of the situation and discerns/identifies in it the signs-effects of the Event). What defines the subject is his fidelity to the Event: coming after the Event, the subject persists in discerning its traces within the situation. "Subject," for Badiou, is thus a finite contingent emergence: not only is Truth not "subjective" in the sense of being subordinated to the subject's whims, but the subject himself is "serving the Truth" which transcends him; since he is never fully adequate to the infinite order of Truth, the subject always has to operate within a finite multiple of a situation in which he discerns the signs of Truth. Take, for example, Christianity (perhaps the example of the Truth-Event): the Event is Christ's advent and death; its ultimate Goal is the Last Judgment (the Redemption); its "operator" in the multiple of the historical situation is the Church; and its "subject" is the corps of believers who intervene in their situation on behalf of the Truth-Event, searching for the signs of God in it.
When Badiou speaks of "cette torsion symptomale de l'etre qu'est une verite dans le tissu toujours total des savoirs" (this symptomal torsion of being which is a truth in the always total texture of knowledges),2 every term bears weight here. The texture of Knowledge is always by definition total, that is, for the Knowledge of Being, there is no excess (a situation's excess or lack being visible only from the standpoint of the Event). From within the standpoint of the knowing servants of the State, of course, "problems" can be seen, but they are automatically reduced to local "difficulties" or contingent "errors": what Truth does is to render visible that (what Knowledge misperceives as) marginal malfunctionings and points of failure are a structural necessity. With regard to the ancien regime, for example, what the Truth-Event of the Revolution renders visible is that injustices are not marginal malfunctionings but effects of the very structure of the system, which is essentially "corrupt." Such an effect, when misperceived by the system as a local "abnormality," condenses the global "abnormality" of the system as such, in its entirety (what, in the Freudo-Marxian tradition, is called symptom). In psychoanalytic terms, lapses, dreams, compulsive formations and acts, and so forth, are "symptomal torsions" that render the Truth of the given individual inaccessible to Knowledge, which sees them as mere malfinctionings; in Marxist terms, an economic crisis is such a "symptomal torsion."
Today, when even the most radical intellectual readily succumbs to the compulsion to distance himself from communism, it seems appropriate to reassert the October Revolution as a Truth-Event defined against the opportunistic leftist "fools" and conservative "knaves." That revolution also allows us to clearly identify three ways to betray the event of Truth: (I) a simple disavowal, with a corresponding attempt to follow old patterns as if nothing had happened, as if it were just a minor disturbance (the reaction of the "utilitarian" liberal democracy); (2) the false imitation of the event of Truth (the Fascist staging of the conservative revolution as a pseudo-event); and (3) a direct ontologization of the event of Truth, with its reduction to a new positive order of Being (Stalinism) .3 One can clearly grasp here the gap that separates Badiou's "Truth" from the deconstructionist notion of the "multitude of truths" (or, rather, "truth-effects"); for Badiou, truth is contingent, hinging as it does on a concrete historical situation-of which it is the truth. Nevertheless, in every concrete and contingent historical situation, there is one and only one Truth, which, once articulated, functions as the index of itself and of the falsity of the field subverted by it.
One of Badiou's main theses is that the pure multiple lacks the dignity of the proper object of thought: from Stalin to Derrida, the philosophical common sense has always insisted on infinite complexity (everything is interconnected, reality is so complex that it is accessible to us only in approximations, etc.); deconstruction is the latest version of this commonsense motif of "infinite complexity."
Advocates of "anti-essentialist" identity politics, for example, tend to stress that there is no "woman in general," only White middle-class women, Black single mothers, lesbians, and so on and so forth, but such "insights" should be rejected as banalities unworthy of being considered objects of thought. The problem for philosophical thought resides precisely in how the universality of "woman" emerges from this "infinite" multitude, a problem that also enables one to rehabilitate the Hegelian distinction between bad ("spurious") and true infinity: the first refers to the commonsense infinite complexity, while the second concerns the infinity of an Event which transcends, precisely, the "infinite complexity" of its context. A homologous distinction can be drawn between historicism and historicity proper: historicism refers to the set of circumstances (economic, political, cultural, etc.) whose complex interactions allow us to account for a given event, while historicity proper involves the specific temporality of the Event and its aftermath, the span between the Event and its ultimate End (between Christ's death and the Last Judgment, between the October Revolution and communism, between falling in love and the accomplished bliss of living together).
Badiou is clearly and radically opposed to the postmodern anti-Platonic thrust whose basic dogma is that the era when it was still possible to ground a political movement in a direct reference to some eternal metaphysical or transcendental truth is definitely over, and, the experience of our century having proved that such a reference to some metaphysical a priori leads to catastrophic "totalitarian" social consequences, the only solution is to accept that we live in a new era deprived of metaphysical certainties, an era of contingency and conjectures, and in a "society of risks" that renders politics a matter of phronesis, of strategic judgments and dialogue, not of applying fundamental cognitive insights. What Badiou is aiming for, against this postmodern doxa, is precisely the resuscitation of the politics of (universal) Truth in today's conditions of global contingency. He would thus rehabilitate, in the current conditions of multiplicity and contingency, not only philosophy but the properly meta-physical dimension: the infinite Truth is "eternal" and meta relative to the temporal process of Being; it is a flash of Another Dimension which transcends the positivity of Being.
However, an Event does not entail any ontological guarantee: its status is radically undecidable; it cannot be reduced to (nor deduced or generated from) a (previous) situation, since it emerges "out of Nothing" (the Nothing that was the ontological truth of this previous situation). On that account, there is no neutral gaze of Knowledge which could discern the Event in its effects. A Decision for the Event is always already here (i.e., one can discern the signs of an Event in the situation only from a previous Decision for Truth), just as in Jansenist theology divine miracles are readable as such only to those who have already opted for Faith. A neutral historicist gaze will never see in the French Revolution a series of traces of the Event called "French Revolution," but merely a multitude of occurrences caught in the network of social determinations (and to an external gaze, Love is only a succession of psychical and physiological states).4 The engaged observer perceives positive historical occurrences as parts of the Event of the French Revolution only insofar as he observes them from the uniquely engaged standpoint of the Revolution. In Badiou's terms, 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, that content turns into a multitude of positive occurrences available to Knowledge. It is in this precise sense that an Event involves subjectivity: the engaged "subjective perspective" on the Event is part of the Event itself.
The Marxist thesis that the entire hitherto history is the history of class struggle already presupposes such an engaged subjectivity, for it is only from its partial point of view that the entire hitherto history appears as such-only from this "interested" perspective can traces of the class struggle be discerned in the entire social edifice, up to the highest cultural products. The answer to the obvious counterargument (that this very fact proves we are dealing with a distorted view, not with the true state of things) is that the allegedly "objective," "impartial" gaze is not neutral, but rather is the partial gaze of the winners, of the ruling classes. (No wonder the rhetoric of right-wing historical revisionists includes so many constructions like "let's approach the topic of the Holocaust in a cool objective way," "let's put it in context," and "let's look at the facts.") A theorist of the Communist revolution is not the one who, after establishing on the basis of objective study that the future belongs to the working class, decides to take its side and place his bets on the winner; the engaged view permeates his theory from the very outset. Within the Marxist tradition, this notion that partiality is not a positive condition of Truth was most clearly articulated by Georg Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness, as well as in a more messianic or proto-religious mode by Walter Benjamin in "Theses on the Philosophy of History." The "truth," for them, emerges when a victim, from his catastrophic position in the present, gains a sudden insight into the entire past as a series of catastrophes leading up to the victim's current predicament. So, when we read a text of Truth, we should be careful not to confuse the level of Knowledge with the level of Truth. In Marx himself, although he mainly used "proletariat" as a synonym for "the working class," one can nevertheless discern a clear tendency to conceive "the working class" as a descriptive term belonging to the domain of Knowledge (e.g., that class as the object of "neutral" sociological study, as a social stratum subdivided into components, etc.), whereas "proletariat" designates the operator of Truth, namely, the engaged agent of the revolutionary struggle.
An Event is thus circular in the sense that its identification is possible only from the standpoint of what Badiou calls "an interpreting intervention," meaning the perspective of those who accept the "wager" that such an Event exists. An intervention is any "procedure by means of which a multiple is recognized as Event." Moreover, "it would remain forever doubtful if there had been any Event at all, except for the intervening one [l'intervenant], who determined his belonging to the situation." 5 Fidelity to the Event consists of continually attempting to traverse the field of Knowledge from the standpoint of Event, of intervening in it and searching for the signs of Truth. Thus the difference between Event and its denomination: Event is the traumatic encounter with the Real (Christ's death, the historic shock of a revolution, etc.), while its denomination is its inscription into language (Christian doctrine, revolutionary consciousness, etc.). In Lacanese, Event is objet a, while denomination is the new signifier that establishes what Rimbaud called the New Order-for Badiou, the new readability of the situation on the basis of Decision.
Badiou calls the language in which the Truth-Event is purportedly denominated the "subject-language [langue-sujet]." This language is meaningless from the standpoint of Knowledge, which judges propositions according to their referents within the domain of positive Being (or according to the proper functioning of speech within the established symbolic order). When confronted with the subject-language of Christian redemption, revolutionary emancipation, or love, for example, Knowledge dismisses it all as empty phrases lacking any proper reference (i.e., as "political-messianic jargon," "poetic hermeticism," etc.). Imagine a man in love describing the features of his beloved to a friend who, not being himself in love with that particular person, will simply find this enthusiastic description meaningless-he will not get "the point" of it. In short, subject-language involves the logic of shibboleth, of a difference which is visible only from within. This, however, in no way means that a given subject-language involves another, "deeper" reference to a hidden, true referent; it is rather that subject-language "derails" or "unsettles" the standard use of language on the basis of its established meanings and leaves the reference "empty," but with a "wager" that this Void will be filled when the Goal is reached, that is, when Truth actualizes itself as a new situation (the reign of God on Earth, the emancipated society, etc.). The denomination of the Truth-Event is thus "empty" precisely insofar as it refers to the "fullness" yet to come.
From this brief description, one can already get a presentiment of what one may be tempted to term, in all naivete, the intuitive power of Badiou's notion of the subject, which effectively describes the experience each of us has when fully engaged, subjectively, in some Cause that is "our own." Isn't that when, in those precious moments, I fully am a subject? And doesn't this very feature make it ideological? That is to say, the first thing that strikes anyone versed in the history of French Marxism is how uncannily close Badiou's notion of Truth-Event comes to Althusser's notion of (ideological) interpellation. Is the process Badiou describes as Truth-Event not that of an individual interpellated into a subject by a Cause? Is the circular relationship between Event and subject (i.e., the subject serving the Event, which is itself only visible as such to an already engaged subject) not the very circle of ideology? Prior to constraining the notion of subject to ideology, that is, identifying the subject as such as ideological, Althusser briefly entertained the idea of subjectivity as comprising four modalities: the subject of ideology, the subject of art, the subject of the unconscious, and the subject of science. Badiou's four "generics of truth" (love, art, science, and politics) would seem to clearly parallel these four modalities of subjectivity (with love corresponding to the subject of the unconscious-the focus of psychoanalysis-and politics, of course, to the subject of ideology).
Is this identity between Truth-Event and ideology not further confirmed by futur anterieur as the specific temporality of generic procedures? Starting with the denomination of the Event (Christ's death, the Revolution), the generic procedure is to search for signs of the Event in the multiple with a view to the ultimate Goal, which will bring about full plenitude (Last Judgment, communism, or, for Mallarme, le Livre). Generic procedures thus involve a temporal loop: fidelity to the Event enables the historic multiple to be judged from the standpoint of the plenitude to come, but the arrival of this plenitude already involves the subjective act of Decision, or the Pascalian "wager." Take, for example, the democratic-egalitarian political Event: its reference to the Democratic Revolution enables history to be read as a continuous democratic struggle aimed at total emancipation, so the present situation is experienced as fundamentally "dislocated" or "out of joint" (the corruption of the ancien regime, the class society, the fallen terrestrial life) relative to the promise of a redeemed future. "Now," in subject-language, is always a time of antagonism, split between the corrupted "state of things" and the promise of Truth.
Badiou defines as "generic" the multiple within a situation that has no particular properties, the referent of which would enable us to classify it as its subspecies; the generic multiple belongs to the situation but is not properly included in it as its subspecies (the "rabble" in Hegel's philosophy of right, for example). Of course, Badiou simultaneously mobilizes the association of "generic" with "generating": this generic element is what enables us to generate the propositions of the subject-language in which Truth resonates. Generic is thus a multiple element/part of the situation that doesn't fit into it, that sticks out precisely insofar as it gives body (as it were) to the Being of the situation as such, subverting the situation by directly embodying its universality. With regard to this point, isn't it significant that Badiou's ultimate example of the Event is religion (Christianity from Paul to Pascal), as the arch-model of ideology, and that this Event, precisely, does not fit any of his four generiques of truth (love, art, science, and politics 6)? If we take Badiou's thought itself as a "situation" of Being, subdivided into four generics, however, doesn't religious ideology occupy precisely this generic place? Isn't religion itself his "symptomal torsion," the element which belongs to the domain of Truth without being one of its acknowledged parts or subspecies? This would seem to confirm that the Truth-Event consists in the elementary ideological gesture of interpellating individuals (parts of a "situation" of Being) into subjects (bearers/followers of Truth). It is tempting to go one step further, given that Badiou's paradigmatic example of Truth-Event is not religion in general but Christianity in particular, the religion centered on the Event of Christ's advent and death. (As was pointed out by Kierkegaard, Christianity inverts the standard metaphysical relationship between eternity and time, with eternity in a sense hinging on a temporal event, Christ.) Perhaps, then, Badiou can also be read as the last great author in the French tradition of Catholic dogmaticists that began with Pascal and Malebranche (suffice it to recall that two of his key references are Pascal and Claudel). The parallel between revolutionary Marxism and messianic Christianity was a commonplace among liberal critics like Bertrand Russell, who dismissed Marxism as a secular messianic ideology; Badiou, by contrast (following a line from the later Engels to Fredric Jameson), fully endorses this homology.
Badiou passionately defends Paul for having articulated the Christian Truth-Event-Christ's Resurrection-as the "universal singular" (a singular event which interpellates individuals into subjects universally, irrespective of their race, sex, social class, etc.), along with the conditions of fidelity to it.' Of course, Badiou is well aware that today, in our era of modern science, we are no longer inclined to accept as the form of the Truth-Event the fable of the miraculous Resurrection, although the Truth-Event invariably designates the occurrence of something which, from within the horizon of the predominant order of Knowledge, appears to be impossible (as witness the laughter with which Athenian philosophers greeted Paul's announcement of the Resurrection upon his arrival there). Today, any positing of the Truth-Event at the level of the supernatural or the miraculous necessarily entails a regression to obscurantism, since the Event of Science is irrefutable and cannot be undone. Today, we can accept as Truth-Events (i.e., intrusions of the traumatic Real, which shatters the predominant symbolic texture) only those occurrences that take place in a universe compatible with scientific knowledge, even if they happen at its borders and place its presuppositions in question. The "sites" of the Event are now scientific discovery itself, as well as political act, artistic invention, and psychoanalytic confrontation with Love. Apropos of Paul, Badiou tackles the problem of locating his position relative to the four generics that generate effective truths. His solution is to propose Paul as the antiphilosophical theoretician of the formal conditions of the truth-procedure, since he provided the first detailed articulation of how fidelity to a Truth-Event operates in its universal dimension: the excessive (surnumeraire) Real of a Truth-Event ("Resurrection"), emerging by means of grace (i.e., it cannot be accounted for in terms of the constituents of the given situation), sets in motion-in those subjects who recognize themselves in its call-the militant "work of Love," or the struggle to propagate, with persistent fidelity, this Truth in its universal scope (i.e., as concerning everyone).
So, although Paul's particular message may no longer be operative for us, the terms in which he formulated the operative mode of Christianity apply to every Truth-Event. Each Truth-Event leads to a kind of "Resurrection," that is, by means of fidelity to it and a labor of love on its behalf, one enters another dimension irreducible to a mere service des biens (the smooth running of affairs in the domain of Being)-the dimension of Immortality, of Life not encumbered by death. Nevertheless, the problem remains of how it was possible for the first and still most pertinent description of the operation of fidelity to a Truth-Event to occur apropos of a Truth-Event that was a mere semblance, not an effective Truth. From the Hegelian standpoint, there is a deep necessity to this, confirmed by the fact that the twentieth-century philosopher who provided the definitive description of an authentic political act (Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit) got seduced by a fake political act, that is, one which was not an effective Truth-Event (Nazism). So it is as if rendering the formal structure of fidelity to the Truth-Event means doing so apropos of an Event which is merely its own semblance. Perhaps the lesson in this is more radical than it may appear: What if what Badiou calls Truth-Event is, at its most radical, a purely formal act of decision, not only not grounded in an effective Truth but ultimately indifferent to the precise status (effective or fabulous) of the Truth-Event to which it refers? What if we are dealing here with a key component of the Truth-Event, notably, that true fidelity to the Event is "dogmatic" in precisely the sense of unconditional Faith, of an attitude which, not needing any grounds, cannot be refuted by any argument?
Paradoxically, this topic of Pauline Christianity is crucial to Badiou's confrontation with psychoanalysis. In adamantly opposing the Truth-Event to the death drive, to what he repeatedly calls the "morbid obsession with death," he is at his weakest, succumbing to the temptation of the nonthought. It is indeed symptomatic that Badiou is compelled to identify the liberaldemocratic service des biens, the smooth running of things in the positivity of Being where "nothing effectively happens," with the "morbid obsession with death." One can easily see the element of truth in this equation: the mere service des biens, deprived of the dimension of Truth and far from able to function as the "healthy" everyday life that is not bothered by "eternal" questions, necessarily regresses to nihilistic morbidity. In Christian terms, there is true Life only in Christ, so life outside the Event of Christ sooner or later turns into its opposite, a morbid decadence; when one's life is dedicated to an excess of pleasures, these very pleasures are sooner or later spoiled. At the same time, it is important to emphasize here what Lacan calls the space or distance between the two deaths: in order to be able to open oneself up to the true life of Eternity, one's attachment to "this" life must be suspended for entry into the domain of ate, the domain between the two deaths, the domain of the "undead."
This point is worthy of a more detailed examination, since it condenses the gap that separates Badiou from Lacan and psychoanalysis in general. Badiou, of course, is well aware of the two Deaths (and two Lives) entailed by the Pauline opposition of Life and Death (or Spirit/Life vs. Flesh/Death), one that has nothing to do with the biological distinction between life and death as stages of the generation-corruption cycle, or with the standard Platonic opposition of Soul and Body. For Paul, "Life" and "Death," Spirit and Flesh, designate two subjective stances, two ways of living one's life. This leads Badiou to interpret Christianity as radically dissociating Death and Resurrection: not only are they not the same, they are not even dialectically interconnected in the sense that the price of Eternal Life is the suffering which redeems our sins. For Badiou, Christ's death on the crossGod's having had to become man and die (to suffer the fate of all flesh) in order to be resurrected-simply signals that Eternal Life is accessible to humanity, to all men qua finite mortal beings, that each of us can be touched by the grace of the Truth-Event and enter the domain of Eternal Life. Badiou is openly anti-Hegelian here: there is no dialectic of Life and Death, no emergence of the Truth-Event of Resurrection as the magic that turns negativity into positivity once we are fully ready to "tarry with the negative," to assume our mortality and suffering in its most radical form. This Truth-Event is simply a radical New Beginning, accompanied by the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of Another Dimension that is not "mediated" by the domain of terrestrial finitude and corruption.
One must accordingly avoid the pitfalls of the morbid masochist morality which perceives suffering as inherently redeeming; this morality, remaining within the confines of the Law (which demands that a price be paid for admission to Eternal Life), has thus not attained the level of properly Christian Love. As Badiou sees it, the Truth-Event is not Christ's death in itself, which just prepares the site for the Event (Resurrection) by asserting the identity of God and Man, that is, if the infinite dimension of Immortal Truth is also accessible to a finite/mortal human being, then what ultimately matters is only the Resurrection of the dead (mortal/human) Christ because it signals that every human being can be redeemed and can participate in the Truth-Event. Therein resides the message of Christianity: the positivity of Being, the Order of Cosmos regulated by its Laws, which is the domain of finitude and mortality, is not "all there is." (From the standpoint of Cosmos, of the totality of positive Being, we are just particular beings determined by our specific place in the global order, with the Law ultimately another name for the Order of Cosmic Justice which allocates to each of us our proper place.) Rather, there is Another Dimension, that of True Life in Love, accessible to all of us through divine grace. Christian Revelation is thus an example (the example) of how we, human beings, are not limited to the positivity of Being, since from time to time, in a contingent and unpredictable way, a Truth-Event can occur which opens up the possibility of our participation in Another Life by means of a persistent fidelity to that Event. The interesting thing to note here is how Badiou inverts the standard opposition of universal Law and accidental Grace (or charisma), that is, the idea that we are all subject to divine law, whereas only some of us can be touched by grace and thus redeemed. In Badiou's reading of Paul, it is rather law (however "universal" it may appear to be) that is ultimately "particularist" (a legal order always imposing specific duties and rights on us, as well as always defining a specific community at the expense of excluding members of other communities), while divine grace is truly universal (i.e., nonexclusionary), available to all human beings regardless of race, sex, or social status.
Corresponding to the two lives (the finite biological life and the Eternal Life of participation in the Truth-Event of Resurrection) are two deaths: (biological) death and Death, in the sense of going the "way of the flesh." How does Paul determine this opposition of Life and Death as two opposing subjective, existential attitudes? Here we get to the crux of Badiou's argument, which also pertains to psychoanalysis, for the opposition of Death and Life overlaps with the opposition of Law and Love. For Paul, succumbing to the temptations of the flesh does not simply mean indulging in unbridled worldly pursuits (of pleasure, power, wealth, etc.), heedless of the Law (or moral prohibitions). On the contrary, his central tenet, elaborated in what is probably the (deservedly) most famous passage in his Epistles (Romans 7:7-I8), is that there was no Sin prior to or independent of the Law, that what preceded the Law was the simple, innocent prelapsarian life once and forever lost to us mortal human beings. The universe in which we live, our "way of the flesh," is one in which Sin and Law, desire and its prohibition, are inextricably twined, and it is the very act of Prohibition that gives rise to the desire for its transgression, or fixes our desire on the prohibited object:
What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me…. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
The direct result of the intervention of the Law is thus to divide the subject, introducing a morbid confusion between life and death, between the (conscious) obedience of the Law and the (unconscious) desire for its transgression that is generated by the legal prohibition. It is not me, the subject, who transgresses the Law but (nonsubjectivized) "Sin" itself, the sinful impulses in which I do not recognize myself and that I even hate. Because of this split, my (conscious) Self is ultimately experienced as "dead," as deprived of living impetus, while "life," the ecstatic affirmation of living energy, can only appear in the guise of "Sin," of a transgression which gives rise to a morbid sense of guilt. My actual life-impulse, my desire, appears to me as an autonomous foreign automatism which insists on and follows its own path regardless of my conscious Will and intentions.
Paul's problem is thus not the standard morbid moralistic one (how to crush my transgressive impulses, how finally to purify myself of sinful impulses) but its exact opposite: How can I break out of this vicious cycle of Law and desire, of the Prohibition and its transgression, within which I can assert my passion for life only as its opposite, a morbid death drive? How would it be possible for me to experience my "life drive" not as a foreign automatism, a blind "compulsion to repeat" which compels me to transgress the Law (with the unacknowledged complicity of the Law itself), but as a fully subjectivized, positive yes! Here, Paul (like Badiou) seems to fully endorse Hegel's point that there is Evil only in the gaze that perceives it, while it is the Law that not only opens up and sustains the domain of Sin, of sinful impulses to transgress its prohibitions, but also finds a perverse and morbid satisfaction in making us feel guilty for such transgressions. The ultimate results of the Rule of Law are thus all the well-known twists and paradoxes of the superego; since I can enjoy only what I feel guilty about, I can find enjoyment only, in (a self-reflective) turn, in feeling guilty, in punishing myself for sinful thoughts, and so on and so forth. When Badiou speaks of the "morbid fascination of the death drive," therefore, he is not resorting to platitudes, but articulating a specific Pauline reading of psychoanalytic notions to do with the complex entanglement of Law and desire, this morbid intertwinement of life and death in which the "dead" letter of the Law perverts my very life-enjoyment, turning it into a fascination with death. In this perverted universe the ascetic who whips himself on behalf of the Law enjoys himself more intensely than anyone who takes an innocent pleasure in worldly delights, for it is not only the illicit sinful desires (i.e., those that are against the Law) which Paul considers "the way of the flesh" (as opposed to "the way of the Spirit"). "Flesh" includes both what is against the Law and the excessive self-torturing, self-mortifying, morbid fascination with the flesh that is begotten by the Law. As Badiou emphasizes, Paul comes unexpectedly close here to his great detractor Nietzsche, whose problem was also that of how we can break out of the vicious cycle of a morbid, self-mortifying denial of Life: the Christian "way of the Spirit" is for Nietzsche precisely the magic rupture, the New Beginning which delivers us from this morbidly debilitating deadlock and enables us to open ourselves to the Eternal Life of Love without Sin (i.e., without the Law and the guilt induced by the Law).
Here we have two divisions of the subject, which are not to be confused. On the one hand, the subject of the Law is divided between his conscious ego, which adheres to the letter of the Law, and his decentered desire, whichoperating against the subject's conscious will, "automatically"-compels him to "do what he hates," to transgress the Law and indulge in illicit jouissance. On the other hand, we have the more radical division between this entire domain of the Law/desire, of the prohibition that generates its own transgression, and a properly Christian Love, the New Beginning of which means breaking out of the deadlock of Law and its transgression.
Where does the Lacanian "divided subject" stand in relation to each of these divisions? At first glance, the answer to this question may appear to be simple and straightforward: psychoanalysis is the theory that conceptualizes-brings to light-the paradoxical structure of the first division. Isn't Badiou's description of the intertwinement of Law and desire full of implicit (and even some explicit) references to or paraphrases of Lacan? Isn't the ultimate domain of psychoanalysis the intersection of the (symbolic) Law and desire? Isn't the multitude of perverse satisfactions the form in which that very intersection is realized? Isn't the Lacanian division of the subject one that concerns precisely the subject's relationship to the symbolic Law? Furthermore, isn't that ultimately confirmed by Lacan's Kant avec Sade, in which the Sadean universe of morbid perversion is posited as the "truth" of the most radical assertion of the moral weight of symbolic Law in human history (Kantian ethics)?8 However, the crucial question with regard to psychoanalysis here is whether it remains within the confines of this morbid/masochistic obsession with death, this perverse intermingling of Life and Death that characterizes the dialectics of a prohibitory Law generating a transgressive desire. Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to start with Lacan's own recourse to that same passage from Paul's Epistle to the Romans in elaborating the link between Law and desire, where he refers to the availability of "the Thing" (the impossible object of jouissance) via only the prohibitory Law, as its transgression:
Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn't said: "Thou shalt not covet it." But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. But even without the Law, I was once alive. But when the commandment appeared, the Thing flared up, returned once again, I met my death. And for me, the commandment that was supposed to lead to life turned out to lead to death, for the Thing found a way and thanks to the commandment seduced me; through it I came to desire death. I believe that for a little while now some of you at least have begun to suspect that it is no longer I who have been speaking. In fact, with one small change, namely, "Thing" for "sin," this is the speech of Saint Paul on the subject of the relations between the law and sin in the Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 7, paragraph 7.
The relationship between the Thing and the Law could not be better defined than in these terms…. The dialectical relationship between desire and the Law causes our desire to flare up only in relation to the Law, through which it becomes the desire for death. It is only because of the Law that sin . . . takes on an excessive, hyperbolic character. Freud's discovery-the ethics of psychoanalysis-does it leave us clinging to that dialectic?9
Crucial here is the concluding question, which clearly points toward there being, for Lacan, "a way of rediscovering the relationship to das Ding somewhere beyond the Law." The whole point of "the ethics of psychoanalysis" is to formulate the possibility of such a relationship, which would avoid the pitfalls of superegoic culpability and "morbid" enjoyment in sin, while also avoiding what Kant called Schwarmerei, the obscurantist claim to give word to (and thus legitimize one's position by reference to) spiritual illumination, or direct insight into the impossible Real Thing. The desire to which Lacan refers in his maxim of psychoanalytic ethics, "ne pas ceder sur son desir" (not to compromise, or give way on, one's desire), is no longer transgressive or, consequently, involved in a "morbid" dialectic with the prohibitory Law; it is rather one's own desire, to which one owes fidelity-desire elevated to the level of ethical Duty. Thus "ne pas ceder sur son desir" is ultimately another way of saying "do your duty!" 11
It would thus be tempting to risk a Badiouan/Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis-which is to say, a New Beginning or symbolic "rebirth"-with the analysand's subjectivity radically restructured such that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. (Doesn't Lacan himself drop many hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the same Pauline terms as Badiou? 12) Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not "psychosynthesis"; it does not posit a "new harmony," a new Truth-Event, but merely wipes the slate clean for it. This "merely," however, should be put in quotation marks because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of "wiping the slate clean," something (a Void) is confronted which is already "sutured" with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity-a negative gesture of withdrawal-precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identification with a Cause, functioning as its condition of (im)possibility, that is, laying the ground or opening up the space for it, but simultaneously being obfuscated by it and undermining it. For that reason, Lacan implicitly shifts the balance between Death and Resurrection toward Death, which at its most radical stands for not merely the passing of earthly life but the "night of the world," the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity in which its very links with "reality" are severed-this is "wiping the slate clean," which opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning and enables the emergence of the "new harmony" sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier.
Here, Lacan parts company with Paul and Badiou: God not only is dead, but was always already dead. After Freud, one could not place one's faith in a Truth-Event, since every such Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a prior Void whose Freudian name is death drive. So where Lacan differs from Badiou is in the determination of the exact status of this domain beyond the Rule of Law. Like Badiou, Lacan delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the "morbid" superegoic intersection of Law and its transgressive desire. However, for Lacan, the Freudian concept of death drive cannot be accounted for in terms of this intersection; the death drive is not the outcome of a morbid confusion of Life and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic Law. The uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is what Lacan calls the domain "between the two deaths," the preontological domain of monstrous spectral apparitions, which is "immortal" yet not in Badiou's sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but rather in the sense of what Lacan calls lamella-the monstrous "undead" object-libido. This domain, in which Oedipus (or King Lear, to take another exemplary case) finds himself after the fall, when his symbolic destiny has been fulfilled, is for Lacan "beyond the Law." In his reading of the Oedipus myth, the early Lacan was already focusing on what the standard version of the Oedipus complex leaves out of sight: the first figure of what is "beyond Oedipus," which is Oedipus himself after he has fulfilled his destiny to the bitter end: the horrifying figure of Oedipus at Colonus, that embittered old man with his thoroughly uncompromising attitude, cursing everyone around him. Doesn't this figure confront us with the inherent deadlock, the impossibility of jouissance, concealed by its Prohibition? Wasn't Oedipus the one who transgressed the Prohibition and paid the price for it in having to assume this impossibility? Lacan exemplifies the status of Oedipus at Colonus by comparison with that of the unfortunate Mr. Valdemar, the famous Poe character who, via hypnosis, is put to death and then, reawakening, implores the observers of this horrible experiment: "For God's sake!-quick!-quick!-put me to sleep-or, quick!-waken me! quick!-I sAY TO YOU THAT I AM DEAD!" Upon being awakened, Mr. Valdemar, says Lacan,
is no more than a disgusting liquefaction, something for which no language has a name, the naked apparition, pure, simple, brutal, of this figure which it is impossible to gaze at face on, which hovers in the background of all the imaginings of human destiny, which is beyond all qualification, and for which the word carrion is completely inadequate, the complete collapse of this species of swelling that is lifethe bubble bursts and dissolves down into inanimate putrid liquid.
That is what happens in the case of Oedipus. As everything right from the start of the tragedy goes to show, Oedipus is nothing more than the scum of the earth, the refuse, the residue, a thing empty of any plausible appearance.l3
The ultimate object of horror is this sudden emergence of the "life beyond death," of the undead-indestructible object, of Life deprived of any support in the symbolic order. This is perhaps not unrelated to today's phenomenon of cyberspace: the more our (experience of) reality is "virtualized"-changed into a "screen phenomenon" or interface encounterthe more the "indivisible remainder," that which resists integration into the interface, appears as the horrifying remainder of the undead Life. No wonder images of such a formless "undead" substance of Life abound in today's science fiction/horror narratives, from Alien on. Let us recall the scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil in which a waiter in a high-class restaurant recommends the daily specials to his customers ("Today, our tournedos is really special!"), yet what they get is a dazzling color photo of the meal they've ordered on a stand above the plate, and on the plate itself a loathsome excremental, pastelike lump. This split between the food's image and the real of its formless excremental remainder perfectly exemplifies the disintegration of reality into an interface image, ghostlike and insubstantial, and the raw stuff of the remainder of the Real-our obsession with which is the price we have to pay for the suspension of the paternal Prohibition/Law that sustains and guarantees our access to reality. And, of course, Lacan's point is that, if one exploits to the limit the potentials opened up by our existence as parletres ("beings of language"), one sooner or later finds oneself in this horrifying in-between state, the threatening possibility of which looms over each of us.
This "indivisible remainder," this formless stain of the "little piece of the real" that "is" Oedipus after the fulfillment of his symbolic Destiny, is the direct embodiment of what Lacan calls plus-de-jouir, the "surplusenjoyment" or excess that cannot be accommodated by any symbolic idealization. In Lacan's use of the term, of course, there is a play upon the French ambiguity of "excess of enjoyment" versus "no longer any enjoyment"; on this model, it is tempting to speak here, apropos of this formless "indivisible remainder" that is Oedipus, of a case of plus d'homme: "excessively human," he has lived, to the bitter end, the "human condition," realizing its most fundamental possibility, and, on that very account, he is in a way "no longer human," having turned into an "inhuman monster" bound by no human laws and considerations. As Lacan emphasizes, there are two main ways to cope with this "remainder": on the one hand, traditional humanism disavows it, avoids confronting it, covers it up by means of idealizations (i.e., concealing it with noble images of Humanity); on the other hand, the ruthless and boundless capitalist economy, as it were, puts this excess/remainder to use, manipulating it in order to keep its productive machinery in perpetual motion (as they usually put it-there being no desire, no depravity, too low to exploit for capitalist profiteering). At this point, when Oedipus has been reduced to the "scum of humanity," we again encounter the ambiguous relationship (or, in Hegelese, the speculative identity) between the lowest and the highest, between the excremental scum and the sacred, for now, all of a sudden, messengers from different cities appear and vie for Oedipus's favor, asking him to bless their hometowns with his presence, to which the embittered Oedipus responds with the famous lines:
Am I to be counted as something according to some readings: as a man only now, when I am reduced to nothing when I am no longer human? Don't these lines expose the elementary matrix of subjectivity: you become "something" (you are accounted a subject) only after going through the zero-point, after being deprived of all those "pathological" (in the Kantian sense of empirical, contingent) features that support your identity, thus being reduced to "nothing"-"a Nothingness counted as Something," which is the most concise formula for subject.14
We are now in a position to precisely determine how much of a gap separates Badiou from Lacan. For Badiou, what psychoanalysis provides is insight into the morbid intertwining of Life and Death, of Law and desire, insight into the obscenity of the Law itself as the "truth" of the thought and the moral stance which limit themselves to the Order of Being and its discriminatory Laws; as such, psychoanalysis cannot properly render thematic the domain beyond the Law, that is, the mode of operation of fidelity to the Truth-Event. The psychoanalytic subject is the divided subject of the (symbolic) Law, not the subject divided between Law (which regulates the Order of Being) and Love (as fidelity to the Truth-Event). (The logical consequence for Badiou is that psychoanalysis remains constrained by the field of Knowledge, unable to approach the properly positive dimension of Truth processes: in the case of love, psychoanalysis reduces it to a sublimated expression of sexuality; in the cases of both science and art, psychoanalysis can only speak to the subjective libidinal conditions of a scientific invention or a work of art-such as that an artist or a scientist was driven by his unresolved Oedipus complex or latent homosexuality, and so on-conditions which are ultimately irrelevant to the work's truth dimension; in the case of politics, psychoanalysis can only conceive of collectivity against the background of a Totem and Taboo or Moses and Monotheism problematic of primordial crime and guilt, so is unable to think a militant "revolutionary" collective that is not bound by parental guilt, but rather freed by the positive force of Love.) For Lacan, on the other hand, the Truth-Event operates only against a background of traumatic encounter with the undead/monstrous Thing, and what are Badiou's four generiques if not four ways of reinscribing the encounter with the Real Thing into the symbolic texture? In art, beauty is "the last veil of the Monstrous," while science, far from being just another symbolic narrative, endeavors to formulate the structure of the Real beneath the symbolic fiction; love, no longer merely the narcissistic screen obfuscating the truth of desire in the later Lacan, is the way to "gentrify" and come to terms with the traumatic drive, while militant politics is a means of putting the terrific force of Negativity to use in restructuring our social affairs. So Lacan is not a postmodern cultural relativist with respect to the authenticity of the Truth-Event: there really is a difference between an authentic Truth-Event and its semblance, and it can be traced to the fact that in a Truth-Event the Void of the death drive, of a radical negativity that momentarily suspends the Order of Being, continues to resonate.
This difference between Badiou and Lacan turns precisely on the status of the subject: Badiou's main point is that the subject should not be identified with the constitutive Void of the structure, since such an identification already ontologizes the subject, though in a purely negative way, turning the subject into an entity that is consubstantial with the structure and thus belongs to the order of the necessary and a priori ("no structure without a subject"). To this Lacanian ontologization of the subject, Badiou opposes its "rarity"-the local-contingent-fragile-transient emergence of subjectivity. When a Truth-Event (contingently, unpredictably) occurs, a subject emerges and exercises fidelity to it by discerning its traces in a Situation the Truth of which is this Event.ls Lacan, however, introduces a distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization (or what Badiou describes as the process of subjectivization, in which the subject's engagement with and fidelity to the Event occurs, versus subject as the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the possibility of subjectivization). The subject prior to subjectivization is the pure negativity of death drive prior to its reversal into identification with some new Master-Signifier.
In Lacan, act is a purely negative category, which (in Badiou's terms) stands for the gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being, for the reference to the Void at its core, prior to the filling in of this Void. In this precise sense, act involves the dimension of death drive which grounds the decision (to exercise fidelity to a Truth), but it cannot be reduced to it. The Lacanian death drive is thus a kind of "vanishing mediator" between Being and Event, a "negative" gesture constitutive of subject that is then obfuscated in "Being" (the established ontological order) and in fidelity to the Event.16 One should insist here on the irreducibly vicious cycle of subjectivity: "the wound is healed only by the spear which smote it," that is, the subject "is" the very gap filled in by the gesture of subjectivization. In short, the Lacanian answer to the question asked (and answered in the negative) by such different philosophers as Althusser, Derrida, and Badiou- Can the gap/opening/Void which precedes the gesture of subjectivization still be called "subject"?-is an emphatic yes! The subject is at once the ontological gap (the "night of the world" or madness of radical self-withdrawal) and the gesture of subjectivization that closes, or heals up the wound of, that gap (in Lacanese: the gesture of the Master which establishes a new harmony). Subjectivity is a name for this irreducible circularity, for a power that does not fight an external, resisting force (say, the inertia of the given substantial order) but an obstacle that is absolutely inherent, which ultimately "is" the subject itself." In other words, the subject's very endeavor to fill in the Gap is precisely what both generates and sustains it. "Death drive" is thus the constitutive obverse of every emphatic assertion of Truth irreducible to the positive order of Being, that is, the negative gesture which clears the way for creative sublimation; the fact that sublimation presupposes death drive means that a sublime object by which we are enthusiastically transfixed is effectively a "mask of death," a veil that covers over the primordial ontological Void. (To will this sublime object effectively amounts to willing a Nothingness, as Nietzsche would have put it.) If there is an ethicopolitical lesson to be learned from psychoanalysis, it consists of the insight that the great calamities of our century (from the Holocaust to the Stalinist desastre) resulted not from our succumbing to the morbid attraction of this Void but, on the contrary, from our endeavoring to avoid confronting it and to impose the direct rule of Truth and/or Goodness.
The political consequences of reasserting psychoanalysis in the face of Badiou's critique are the very opposite of the standard psychoanalytic skepticism about the final outcome of the revolutionary process (i.e., the revolutionary process has to go wrong and end up in self-destructive fury because it is unaware of its own libidinal foundations, of the murderous aggressivity which sustains its idealism, etc.). It is tempting to claim instead that Badiou's resistance to psychoanalysis is part of his hidden Kantianism, on account of which he also ultimately opposes the full revolutionary passage a l'acte. That is to say, although Badiou is adamantly anti-Kantian and, in his political stances, radically leftist (rejecting not only parliamentary democracy outright, but also multiculturalism or "identity politics"), at a deeper level his distinction between the order of the positive Knowledge of Being and the wholly different Truth-Event remains Kantian. When he emphasizes how, from the standpoint of Knowledge, there simply is no Event (i.e., that its traces can be discerned as signs only by those who are already engaged with the Event), doesn't he thereby echo Kant's notion of signs as announcing the noumenal fact of freedom without positively proving it (e.g., the enthusiasm for the French Revolution)?
What a true Leninist and an authentic political conservative have in common is the fact that they both reject what could be called liberalleftist "irresponsibility" (advocating grand projects of solidarity, freedom, etc., yet ducking out when their price proves to be concrete and often cruel political measures); an authentic conservative, like a true Leninist, is not, however, afraid to pass to the act and bear all the consequences, unpleasant as these may be, of realizing a political project. Kipling, for example (whom Brecht admired very much), despised British Liberals who advocated freedom and justice while silently counting on the Conservatives to do the necessary dirty work for them; the same can be said of the attitude of liberal leftists (or "democratic Socialists") toward Leninist Communists: "democratic Socialists" reject the social-democratic "compromise," wanting a true revolution yet shirking the price to be paid for it; they thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and keep their hands clean. In contrast to this false liberal-leftist position (pro-democracy for the people so long as there are no secret police to fight and no threat to their academic privileges), a Leninist is, like a conservative, authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his politics, of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power and exert it. Therein lies the fatal weakness of those who, like Badiou, rely on a proto-Kantian opposition between the positive order of Being (or of the service des biens) and the radical, unconditional demand for egaliberte that signals the presence of the Truth-Event-an opposition, that is, between the global social order and the dimension of universality proper, which cuts a line of separation into this global order-their unconditional demand for the Truth remains at the level of a hysterical provocation directed at the Master, testing his limits ("Can he reject-or meet-our demands and still maintain the appearance of omnipotence?"). The test of the true revolutionary stance, as opposed to this game of hysterical provocation, is the heroic readiness to endure the subversive undermining of the existing System as it undergoes conversion into the principle of a new positive Order that can give body to this negativity-or, in Badiou's terms, the conversion of Truth into Being.
Notes
1 Alain Badiou, L'etre et l'evenement (Paris, I988).
2 Ibid., 24-25.
3 Another Badiou example of Truth-Event, the atonal revolution in music accomplished by the Second Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), also exemplifies three ways to betray the event of Truth: (I) the traditionalists' dismissal of atonal music as an empty formal experiment, which allowed them to continue to compose in the old ways, as if nothing had happened; (2) the pseudo-modernist fake imitation of atonality; and (3) the tendency to change atonal music into a new positive tradition.
4 Perhaps therein resides the negative achievement which brought such fame to Francois Furet: the de-event-ualization of the French Revolution, that is, adopting an external perspective toward it and thereby turning it into a succession of complex historical facts.
5 Badiou, L'etre et l'evenement, 224, 229.
6 As Badiou perspicuously notes, these four domains of Truth-Event are increasingly displaced in the public discourse of today by their non-evenemential fake doubles. We speak of "culture" instead of "art," of "sex" instead of "love," of "know-how" or "wisdom" instead of "science," of "management" (gestion) instead of "politics," and thereby reduce art to an expression/articulation of historically specific culture, and love to an ideologically dated form of sexuality, while science is dismissed as a falsely Westernuniversalized form of practical knowledge equal to many forms of prescientific wisdom, and politics (with all the passion of struggle that this notion involves) as an immature ideological version or forerunner of the art of social management.
7 See Badiou's unpublished 1995/96 seminar, "Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme."
8 An irony worth noting here is Foucault's conception of psychoanalysis as the last link in the chain beginning with the Christian confessional mode of sexuality, which thereby links it to Law and guilt. However, Paul, the founding figure of Christianity, does exactly the opposite (at least on Badiou's reading) by endeavoring to break the morbid chain that links Law and desire.
9 Jacques Lacan, "On the Moral Law" (1959), in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, Bk. 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London, 1992 [1986]), 7I-84; quotation from 83-84.
10 Ibid., 84.
11 The status of the reference to Kant here is another matter. Insofar as Kant is conceived as the philosopher of the Law in Badiou's Pauline sense, Lacan's concept of Kant avec Sade retains its full validity, that is, the Kantian moral Law retains its status as a superego formation, so its "truth" remains the Sadean universe of morbid perversion. However, there is another way to conceptualize the Kantian moral injunction which delivers it from the superego's constraints; for a Lacanian approach to this "other Kant," see Alenka Zupancic, Die Ethik des Realen (Vienna, 1995).
12 For example, the very last sentence of Lacan's Seminaire XI speaks of the "signification of a limitless love [which] is outside the limits of the law"; Jacques Lacan, "In You More than You" (1964), in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London, 1978 [1973] ), 263-76; quotation from 276.
13 Jacques Lacan, "Desire, Life and Death" (I955), in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, Bk. 2 of Miller, ed., Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York and London, 199I [1978]), 221-34; quotations from 23I-32.
14 The other famous quip of the embittered Oedipus is uttered in response to the claim by the Chorus that the greatest boon to mortal man is not to have been born at all; the well-known comic rejoinder, quoted by Freud and referred to by Lacan ("Unfortunately, that happens to scarcely one in a hundred thousand"), has acquired new meaning today amidst the heated debate over abortion: Aren't aborted children in a sense those who do succeed in not being born?
15 See Badiou, L'etre et l'Evenement, 472-74.
16 This difference between Lacan and Badiou also has certain implications for the appreciation of political events. The disintegration of East European socialism was not, for Badiou, a Truth-Event; apart from giving rise to a brief popular enthusiasm, the dissident fomentation never managed to transform itself into a stable movement of followers consistently engaged in militant fidelity to the Event, but soon disintegrated such that what we have today is either the resurgence of vulgar liberal-parliamentarian capitalism or the rise of racist/ethnic fundamentalism. However, if we accept the Lacanian distinction between the negative gesture of the act (saying no!) and its positive aftermath (i.e., locating the key dimension in the primordial negative gesture), then the process of socialism's disintegration can be said to have produced a true act nonetheless, in the guise of an enthusiastic mass movement of saying no! to the Communist regime for the sake of authentic solidarity-a negative gesture that counted more than its later, failed positivization did.
17 The first and still unsurpassed description of this paradox was perhaps Fichte's notion of Anstoss, the "obstacle/impetus" which sets in motion the subject's productive effort to "posit" objective reality; no longer the Kantian Thing-in-itself-an external stimulus affecting the subject from outside-the Anstoss is a kernel of contingency which is extimate: a foreign body in the very heart of the subject. Subjectivity is thus defined not by a struggle against the inertia of the opposing substantial order but by an absolutely inherent tension.
From: The South Atlantic Quarterly; Durham; Spring 1998, Volume: 97, Issue: 2, Start Page: 235-261, ISSN: 00382876, Copyright Duke University Press Spring 1998.
Today, however, with the apparent demise of Marxism, the entire situation has changed: the emerging post-Marxist "radical" political philosophy as a rule insists that psychoanalysis cannot provide access to the specific dimension of the political; useful as it is in clarifying the libidinal foundation of a multitude of "regressive" phenomena (from ethnic violence to the "apolitical" passivity of the postmodern subject), psychoanalysis cannot account for the miraculous emergence of an egalitarian democratic enthusiasm-of an unconditional demand for what Etienne Balibar called egaliberte. For that reason, the political use of psychoanalysis has always wound up in a justification of failure, in an explanation of why things had to go wrong.
The author who has provided the ultimate formulation of this critique of psychoanalysis is Alain Badiou. He deserves special attention insofar as his "post-Marxism" has nothing whatsoever to do with the fashionable deconstructionist dismissal of the alleged Marxist "essentialism"; on the contrary, he is unique in radically rejecting the deconstructionist doxa as a new form of pseudo-thought, as a contemporary version of sophism. Since Badiou is not yet well-known in Anglo-American academia, the basic outlines of his philosophy will be rehearsed here prior to offering a Lacanian response to his depiction of the limits of psychoanalysis.
The axis of Badiou's theoretic 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 that which presents itself in our experience, categorized by genus and species in terms of its properties. At bottom, as it were, lies the pure multiple, the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is given; this multitude is not a multitude of Ones, since the counting has not yet taken place. What Badiou calls a "situation" is any particular consistent multitude (e.g., French society, modern art): a situation is structured, and it is its structure which allows us to "count" it "as One." Here, however, the first cracks in the ontological edifice of Being appear: in order for us to "count" it "as One," the reduplicatio proper to 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 involve a metastructure which designates it as One. (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." (Badiou plays here on the ambiguity of the term state-"state of things" versus "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. "Void" has been the central category of ontology from Democritean atomism onward: "atoms" are nothing but the configurations of 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, though clearly belonging to the situation, is not "counted" by it, properly included in it (e.g., the "nonintegrated" rabble in a societal situation): this element is presented, but not re-presented. On the other hand, there is an excess of re-presentation over presentation: the agency which brings about the passage from situation to its state (State in society) is always in excess relative to what it structures. In contrast to the impossible liberal dream of a State reduced to a service of civil society, State power is necessarily "excessive," that is, it never simply and transparently re-presents society, but acts as a violent intervention in what it re-presents.
This, then, is the structure of Being. From time to time, however, in a wholly contingent, unpredictable way, out of reach for the Knowledge of Being, an Event takes place which belongs to a wholly different dimension-that, precisely, of non-Being. Take, for example, French society in the late eighteenth century: what is accessible to Knowledge is the state of society-its strata, economic, political, and ideological fights, and so on; no Knowledge, however, enables us to predict or account for the properly unaccountable Event which consists in the so-called French Revolution. In this precise sense, an Event emerges ex nihilo. But the fact that it cannot be accounted for in the terms of the situation 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 which renders visible/readable what the "official" state of the situation had to "repress," but it is also always localized, that is, the Truth is always the Truth of a specific situation. The French Revolution is the Event that renders visible/readable the excesses and inconsistencies, the "lie," of the ancien regime; and it is the truth of the ancien regime situation-what is localized, or attaches to it. An Event thus involves its own series of determinations: the Event itself; its denomination ("French Revolution" not being an objective-categorizing designation but part of the Event itself, the way its participants or adherents perceived and symbolized their activity); its ultimate Goal (the society of fully realized emancipation, of freedom-equality-fraternity); its "operator" (the political movements struggling for the Revolution); and, last but not least, its subject (the agent who, on behalf of the Truth-Event, intervenes in the historical multiple of the situation and discerns/identifies in it the signs-effects of the Event). What defines the subject is his fidelity to the Event: coming after the Event, the subject persists in discerning its traces within the situation. "Subject," for Badiou, is thus a finite contingent emergence: not only is Truth not "subjective" in the sense of being subordinated to the subject's whims, but the subject himself is "serving the Truth" which transcends him; since he is never fully adequate to the infinite order of Truth, the subject always has to operate within a finite multiple of a situation in which he discerns the signs of Truth. Take, for example, Christianity (perhaps the example of the Truth-Event): the Event is Christ's advent and death; its ultimate Goal is the Last Judgment (the Redemption); its "operator" in the multiple of the historical situation is the Church; and its "subject" is the corps of believers who intervene in their situation on behalf of the Truth-Event, searching for the signs of God in it.
When Badiou speaks of "cette torsion symptomale de l'etre qu'est une verite dans le tissu toujours total des savoirs" (this symptomal torsion of being which is a truth in the always total texture of knowledges),2 every term bears weight here. The texture of Knowledge is always by definition total, that is, for the Knowledge of Being, there is no excess (a situation's excess or lack being visible only from the standpoint of the Event). From within the standpoint of the knowing servants of the State, of course, "problems" can be seen, but they are automatically reduced to local "difficulties" or contingent "errors": what Truth does is to render visible that (what Knowledge misperceives as) marginal malfunctionings and points of failure are a structural necessity. With regard to the ancien regime, for example, what the Truth-Event of the Revolution renders visible is that injustices are not marginal malfunctionings but effects of the very structure of the system, which is essentially "corrupt." Such an effect, when misperceived by the system as a local "abnormality," condenses the global "abnormality" of the system as such, in its entirety (what, in the Freudo-Marxian tradition, is called symptom). In psychoanalytic terms, lapses, dreams, compulsive formations and acts, and so forth, are "symptomal torsions" that render the Truth of the given individual inaccessible to Knowledge, which sees them as mere malfinctionings; in Marxist terms, an economic crisis is such a "symptomal torsion."
Today, when even the most radical intellectual readily succumbs to the compulsion to distance himself from communism, it seems appropriate to reassert the October Revolution as a Truth-Event defined against the opportunistic leftist "fools" and conservative "knaves." That revolution also allows us to clearly identify three ways to betray the event of Truth: (I) a simple disavowal, with a corresponding attempt to follow old patterns as if nothing had happened, as if it were just a minor disturbance (the reaction of the "utilitarian" liberal democracy); (2) the false imitation of the event of Truth (the Fascist staging of the conservative revolution as a pseudo-event); and (3) a direct ontologization of the event of Truth, with its reduction to a new positive order of Being (Stalinism) .3 One can clearly grasp here the gap that separates Badiou's "Truth" from the deconstructionist notion of the "multitude of truths" (or, rather, "truth-effects"); for Badiou, truth is contingent, hinging as it does on a concrete historical situation-of which it is the truth. Nevertheless, in every concrete and contingent historical situation, there is one and only one Truth, which, once articulated, functions as the index of itself and of the falsity of the field subverted by it.
One of Badiou's main theses is that the pure multiple lacks the dignity of the proper object of thought: from Stalin to Derrida, the philosophical common sense has always insisted on infinite complexity (everything is interconnected, reality is so complex that it is accessible to us only in approximations, etc.); deconstruction is the latest version of this commonsense motif of "infinite complexity."
Advocates of "anti-essentialist" identity politics, for example, tend to stress that there is no "woman in general," only White middle-class women, Black single mothers, lesbians, and so on and so forth, but such "insights" should be rejected as banalities unworthy of being considered objects of thought. The problem for philosophical thought resides precisely in how the universality of "woman" emerges from this "infinite" multitude, a problem that also enables one to rehabilitate the Hegelian distinction between bad ("spurious") and true infinity: the first refers to the commonsense infinite complexity, while the second concerns the infinity of an Event which transcends, precisely, the "infinite complexity" of its context. A homologous distinction can be drawn between historicism and historicity proper: historicism refers to the set of circumstances (economic, political, cultural, etc.) whose complex interactions allow us to account for a given event, while historicity proper involves the specific temporality of the Event and its aftermath, the span between the Event and its ultimate End (between Christ's death and the Last Judgment, between the October Revolution and communism, between falling in love and the accomplished bliss of living together).
Badiou is clearly and radically opposed to the postmodern anti-Platonic thrust whose basic dogma is that the era when it was still possible to ground a political movement in a direct reference to some eternal metaphysical or transcendental truth is definitely over, and, the experience of our century having proved that such a reference to some metaphysical a priori leads to catastrophic "totalitarian" social consequences, the only solution is to accept that we live in a new era deprived of metaphysical certainties, an era of contingency and conjectures, and in a "society of risks" that renders politics a matter of phronesis, of strategic judgments and dialogue, not of applying fundamental cognitive insights. What Badiou is aiming for, against this postmodern doxa, is precisely the resuscitation of the politics of (universal) Truth in today's conditions of global contingency. He would thus rehabilitate, in the current conditions of multiplicity and contingency, not only philosophy but the properly meta-physical dimension: the infinite Truth is "eternal" and meta relative to the temporal process of Being; it is a flash of Another Dimension which transcends the positivity of Being.
However, an Event does not entail any ontological guarantee: its status is radically undecidable; it cannot be reduced to (nor deduced or generated from) a (previous) situation, since it emerges "out of Nothing" (the Nothing that was the ontological truth of this previous situation). On that account, there is no neutral gaze of Knowledge which could discern the Event in its effects. A Decision for the Event is always already here (i.e., one can discern the signs of an Event in the situation only from a previous Decision for Truth), just as in Jansenist theology divine miracles are readable as such only to those who have already opted for Faith. A neutral historicist gaze will never see in the French Revolution a series of traces of the Event called "French Revolution," but merely a multitude of occurrences caught in the network of social determinations (and to an external gaze, Love is only a succession of psychical and physiological states).4 The engaged observer perceives positive historical occurrences as parts of the Event of the French Revolution only insofar as he observes them from the uniquely engaged standpoint of the Revolution. In Badiou's terms, 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, that content turns into a multitude of positive occurrences available to Knowledge. It is in this precise sense that an Event involves subjectivity: the engaged "subjective perspective" on the Event is part of the Event itself.
The Marxist thesis that the entire hitherto history is the history of class struggle already presupposes such an engaged subjectivity, for it is only from its partial point of view that the entire hitherto history appears as such-only from this "interested" perspective can traces of the class struggle be discerned in the entire social edifice, up to the highest cultural products. The answer to the obvious counterargument (that this very fact proves we are dealing with a distorted view, not with the true state of things) is that the allegedly "objective," "impartial" gaze is not neutral, but rather is the partial gaze of the winners, of the ruling classes. (No wonder the rhetoric of right-wing historical revisionists includes so many constructions like "let's approach the topic of the Holocaust in a cool objective way," "let's put it in context," and "let's look at the facts.") A theorist of the Communist revolution is not the one who, after establishing on the basis of objective study that the future belongs to the working class, decides to take its side and place his bets on the winner; the engaged view permeates his theory from the very outset. Within the Marxist tradition, this notion that partiality is not a positive condition of Truth was most clearly articulated by Georg Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness, as well as in a more messianic or proto-religious mode by Walter Benjamin in "Theses on the Philosophy of History." The "truth," for them, emerges when a victim, from his catastrophic position in the present, gains a sudden insight into the entire past as a series of catastrophes leading up to the victim's current predicament. So, when we read a text of Truth, we should be careful not to confuse the level of Knowledge with the level of Truth. In Marx himself, although he mainly used "proletariat" as a synonym for "the working class," one can nevertheless discern a clear tendency to conceive "the working class" as a descriptive term belonging to the domain of Knowledge (e.g., that class as the object of "neutral" sociological study, as a social stratum subdivided into components, etc.), whereas "proletariat" designates the operator of Truth, namely, the engaged agent of the revolutionary struggle.
An Event is thus circular in the sense that its identification is possible only from the standpoint of what Badiou calls "an interpreting intervention," meaning the perspective of those who accept the "wager" that such an Event exists. An intervention is any "procedure by means of which a multiple is recognized as Event." Moreover, "it would remain forever doubtful if there had been any Event at all, except for the intervening one [l'intervenant], who determined his belonging to the situation." 5 Fidelity to the Event consists of continually attempting to traverse the field of Knowledge from the standpoint of Event, of intervening in it and searching for the signs of Truth. Thus the difference between Event and its denomination: Event is the traumatic encounter with the Real (Christ's death, the historic shock of a revolution, etc.), while its denomination is its inscription into language (Christian doctrine, revolutionary consciousness, etc.). In Lacanese, Event is objet a, while denomination is the new signifier that establishes what Rimbaud called the New Order-for Badiou, the new readability of the situation on the basis of Decision.
Badiou calls the language in which the Truth-Event is purportedly denominated the "subject-language [langue-sujet]." This language is meaningless from the standpoint of Knowledge, which judges propositions according to their referents within the domain of positive Being (or according to the proper functioning of speech within the established symbolic order). When confronted with the subject-language of Christian redemption, revolutionary emancipation, or love, for example, Knowledge dismisses it all as empty phrases lacking any proper reference (i.e., as "political-messianic jargon," "poetic hermeticism," etc.). Imagine a man in love describing the features of his beloved to a friend who, not being himself in love with that particular person, will simply find this enthusiastic description meaningless-he will not get "the point" of it. In short, subject-language involves the logic of shibboleth, of a difference which is visible only from within. This, however, in no way means that a given subject-language involves another, "deeper" reference to a hidden, true referent; it is rather that subject-language "derails" or "unsettles" the standard use of language on the basis of its established meanings and leaves the reference "empty," but with a "wager" that this Void will be filled when the Goal is reached, that is, when Truth actualizes itself as a new situation (the reign of God on Earth, the emancipated society, etc.). The denomination of the Truth-Event is thus "empty" precisely insofar as it refers to the "fullness" yet to come.
From this brief description, one can already get a presentiment of what one may be tempted to term, in all naivete, the intuitive power of Badiou's notion of the subject, which effectively describes the experience each of us has when fully engaged, subjectively, in some Cause that is "our own." Isn't that when, in those precious moments, I fully am a subject? And doesn't this very feature make it ideological? That is to say, the first thing that strikes anyone versed in the history of French Marxism is how uncannily close Badiou's notion of Truth-Event comes to Althusser's notion of (ideological) interpellation. Is the process Badiou describes as Truth-Event not that of an individual interpellated into a subject by a Cause? Is the circular relationship between Event and subject (i.e., the subject serving the Event, which is itself only visible as such to an already engaged subject) not the very circle of ideology? Prior to constraining the notion of subject to ideology, that is, identifying the subject as such as ideological, Althusser briefly entertained the idea of subjectivity as comprising four modalities: the subject of ideology, the subject of art, the subject of the unconscious, and the subject of science. Badiou's four "generics of truth" (love, art, science, and politics) would seem to clearly parallel these four modalities of subjectivity (with love corresponding to the subject of the unconscious-the focus of psychoanalysis-and politics, of course, to the subject of ideology).
Is this identity between Truth-Event and ideology not further confirmed by futur anterieur as the specific temporality of generic procedures? Starting with the denomination of the Event (Christ's death, the Revolution), the generic procedure is to search for signs of the Event in the multiple with a view to the ultimate Goal, which will bring about full plenitude (Last Judgment, communism, or, for Mallarme, le Livre). Generic procedures thus involve a temporal loop: fidelity to the Event enables the historic multiple to be judged from the standpoint of the plenitude to come, but the arrival of this plenitude already involves the subjective act of Decision, or the Pascalian "wager." Take, for example, the democratic-egalitarian political Event: its reference to the Democratic Revolution enables history to be read as a continuous democratic struggle aimed at total emancipation, so the present situation is experienced as fundamentally "dislocated" or "out of joint" (the corruption of the ancien regime, the class society, the fallen terrestrial life) relative to the promise of a redeemed future. "Now," in subject-language, is always a time of antagonism, split between the corrupted "state of things" and the promise of Truth.
Badiou defines as "generic" the multiple within a situation that has no particular properties, the referent of which would enable us to classify it as its subspecies; the generic multiple belongs to the situation but is not properly included in it as its subspecies (the "rabble" in Hegel's philosophy of right, for example). Of course, Badiou simultaneously mobilizes the association of "generic" with "generating": this generic element is what enables us to generate the propositions of the subject-language in which Truth resonates. Generic is thus a multiple element/part of the situation that doesn't fit into it, that sticks out precisely insofar as it gives body (as it were) to the Being of the situation as such, subverting the situation by directly embodying its universality. With regard to this point, isn't it significant that Badiou's ultimate example of the Event is religion (Christianity from Paul to Pascal), as the arch-model of ideology, and that this Event, precisely, does not fit any of his four generiques of truth (love, art, science, and politics 6)? If we take Badiou's thought itself as a "situation" of Being, subdivided into four generics, however, doesn't religious ideology occupy precisely this generic place? Isn't religion itself his "symptomal torsion," the element which belongs to the domain of Truth without being one of its acknowledged parts or subspecies? This would seem to confirm that the Truth-Event consists in the elementary ideological gesture of interpellating individuals (parts of a "situation" of Being) into subjects (bearers/followers of Truth). It is tempting to go one step further, given that Badiou's paradigmatic example of Truth-Event is not religion in general but Christianity in particular, the religion centered on the Event of Christ's advent and death. (As was pointed out by Kierkegaard, Christianity inverts the standard metaphysical relationship between eternity and time, with eternity in a sense hinging on a temporal event, Christ.) Perhaps, then, Badiou can also be read as the last great author in the French tradition of Catholic dogmaticists that began with Pascal and Malebranche (suffice it to recall that two of his key references are Pascal and Claudel). The parallel between revolutionary Marxism and messianic Christianity was a commonplace among liberal critics like Bertrand Russell, who dismissed Marxism as a secular messianic ideology; Badiou, by contrast (following a line from the later Engels to Fredric Jameson), fully endorses this homology.
Badiou passionately defends Paul for having articulated the Christian Truth-Event-Christ's Resurrection-as the "universal singular" (a singular event which interpellates individuals into subjects universally, irrespective of their race, sex, social class, etc.), along with the conditions of fidelity to it.' Of course, Badiou is well aware that today, in our era of modern science, we are no longer inclined to accept as the form of the Truth-Event the fable of the miraculous Resurrection, although the Truth-Event invariably designates the occurrence of something which, from within the horizon of the predominant order of Knowledge, appears to be impossible (as witness the laughter with which Athenian philosophers greeted Paul's announcement of the Resurrection upon his arrival there). Today, any positing of the Truth-Event at the level of the supernatural or the miraculous necessarily entails a regression to obscurantism, since the Event of Science is irrefutable and cannot be undone. Today, we can accept as Truth-Events (i.e., intrusions of the traumatic Real, which shatters the predominant symbolic texture) only those occurrences that take place in a universe compatible with scientific knowledge, even if they happen at its borders and place its presuppositions in question. The "sites" of the Event are now scientific discovery itself, as well as political act, artistic invention, and psychoanalytic confrontation with Love. Apropos of Paul, Badiou tackles the problem of locating his position relative to the four generics that generate effective truths. His solution is to propose Paul as the antiphilosophical theoretician of the formal conditions of the truth-procedure, since he provided the first detailed articulation of how fidelity to a Truth-Event operates in its universal dimension: the excessive (surnumeraire) Real of a Truth-Event ("Resurrection"), emerging by means of grace (i.e., it cannot be accounted for in terms of the constituents of the given situation), sets in motion-in those subjects who recognize themselves in its call-the militant "work of Love," or the struggle to propagate, with persistent fidelity, this Truth in its universal scope (i.e., as concerning everyone).
So, although Paul's particular message may no longer be operative for us, the terms in which he formulated the operative mode of Christianity apply to every Truth-Event. Each Truth-Event leads to a kind of "Resurrection," that is, by means of fidelity to it and a labor of love on its behalf, one enters another dimension irreducible to a mere service des biens (the smooth running of affairs in the domain of Being)-the dimension of Immortality, of Life not encumbered by death. Nevertheless, the problem remains of how it was possible for the first and still most pertinent description of the operation of fidelity to a Truth-Event to occur apropos of a Truth-Event that was a mere semblance, not an effective Truth. From the Hegelian standpoint, there is a deep necessity to this, confirmed by the fact that the twentieth-century philosopher who provided the definitive description of an authentic political act (Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit) got seduced by a fake political act, that is, one which was not an effective Truth-Event (Nazism). So it is as if rendering the formal structure of fidelity to the Truth-Event means doing so apropos of an Event which is merely its own semblance. Perhaps the lesson in this is more radical than it may appear: What if what Badiou calls Truth-Event is, at its most radical, a purely formal act of decision, not only not grounded in an effective Truth but ultimately indifferent to the precise status (effective or fabulous) of the Truth-Event to which it refers? What if we are dealing here with a key component of the Truth-Event, notably, that true fidelity to the Event is "dogmatic" in precisely the sense of unconditional Faith, of an attitude which, not needing any grounds, cannot be refuted by any argument?
Paradoxically, this topic of Pauline Christianity is crucial to Badiou's confrontation with psychoanalysis. In adamantly opposing the Truth-Event to the death drive, to what he repeatedly calls the "morbid obsession with death," he is at his weakest, succumbing to the temptation of the nonthought. It is indeed symptomatic that Badiou is compelled to identify the liberaldemocratic service des biens, the smooth running of things in the positivity of Being where "nothing effectively happens," with the "morbid obsession with death." One can easily see the element of truth in this equation: the mere service des biens, deprived of the dimension of Truth and far from able to function as the "healthy" everyday life that is not bothered by "eternal" questions, necessarily regresses to nihilistic morbidity. In Christian terms, there is true Life only in Christ, so life outside the Event of Christ sooner or later turns into its opposite, a morbid decadence; when one's life is dedicated to an excess of pleasures, these very pleasures are sooner or later spoiled. At the same time, it is important to emphasize here what Lacan calls the space or distance between the two deaths: in order to be able to open oneself up to the true life of Eternity, one's attachment to "this" life must be suspended for entry into the domain of ate, the domain between the two deaths, the domain of the "undead."
This point is worthy of a more detailed examination, since it condenses the gap that separates Badiou from Lacan and psychoanalysis in general. Badiou, of course, is well aware of the two Deaths (and two Lives) entailed by the Pauline opposition of Life and Death (or Spirit/Life vs. Flesh/Death), one that has nothing to do with the biological distinction between life and death as stages of the generation-corruption cycle, or with the standard Platonic opposition of Soul and Body. For Paul, "Life" and "Death," Spirit and Flesh, designate two subjective stances, two ways of living one's life. This leads Badiou to interpret Christianity as radically dissociating Death and Resurrection: not only are they not the same, they are not even dialectically interconnected in the sense that the price of Eternal Life is the suffering which redeems our sins. For Badiou, Christ's death on the crossGod's having had to become man and die (to suffer the fate of all flesh) in order to be resurrected-simply signals that Eternal Life is accessible to humanity, to all men qua finite mortal beings, that each of us can be touched by the grace of the Truth-Event and enter the domain of Eternal Life. Badiou is openly anti-Hegelian here: there is no dialectic of Life and Death, no emergence of the Truth-Event of Resurrection as the magic that turns negativity into positivity once we are fully ready to "tarry with the negative," to assume our mortality and suffering in its most radical form. This Truth-Event is simply a radical New Beginning, accompanied by the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of Another Dimension that is not "mediated" by the domain of terrestrial finitude and corruption.
One must accordingly avoid the pitfalls of the morbid masochist morality which perceives suffering as inherently redeeming; this morality, remaining within the confines of the Law (which demands that a price be paid for admission to Eternal Life), has thus not attained the level of properly Christian Love. As Badiou sees it, the Truth-Event is not Christ's death in itself, which just prepares the site for the Event (Resurrection) by asserting the identity of God and Man, that is, if the infinite dimension of Immortal Truth is also accessible to a finite/mortal human being, then what ultimately matters is only the Resurrection of the dead (mortal/human) Christ because it signals that every human being can be redeemed and can participate in the Truth-Event. Therein resides the message of Christianity: the positivity of Being, the Order of Cosmos regulated by its Laws, which is the domain of finitude and mortality, is not "all there is." (From the standpoint of Cosmos, of the totality of positive Being, we are just particular beings determined by our specific place in the global order, with the Law ultimately another name for the Order of Cosmic Justice which allocates to each of us our proper place.) Rather, there is Another Dimension, that of True Life in Love, accessible to all of us through divine grace. Christian Revelation is thus an example (the example) of how we, human beings, are not limited to the positivity of Being, since from time to time, in a contingent and unpredictable way, a Truth-Event can occur which opens up the possibility of our participation in Another Life by means of a persistent fidelity to that Event. The interesting thing to note here is how Badiou inverts the standard opposition of universal Law and accidental Grace (or charisma), that is, the idea that we are all subject to divine law, whereas only some of us can be touched by grace and thus redeemed. In Badiou's reading of Paul, it is rather law (however "universal" it may appear to be) that is ultimately "particularist" (a legal order always imposing specific duties and rights on us, as well as always defining a specific community at the expense of excluding members of other communities), while divine grace is truly universal (i.e., nonexclusionary), available to all human beings regardless of race, sex, or social status.
Corresponding to the two lives (the finite biological life and the Eternal Life of participation in the Truth-Event of Resurrection) are two deaths: (biological) death and Death, in the sense of going the "way of the flesh." How does Paul determine this opposition of Life and Death as two opposing subjective, existential attitudes? Here we get to the crux of Badiou's argument, which also pertains to psychoanalysis, for the opposition of Death and Life overlaps with the opposition of Law and Love. For Paul, succumbing to the temptations of the flesh does not simply mean indulging in unbridled worldly pursuits (of pleasure, power, wealth, etc.), heedless of the Law (or moral prohibitions). On the contrary, his central tenet, elaborated in what is probably the (deservedly) most famous passage in his Epistles (Romans 7:7-I8), is that there was no Sin prior to or independent of the Law, that what preceded the Law was the simple, innocent prelapsarian life once and forever lost to us mortal human beings. The universe in which we live, our "way of the flesh," is one in which Sin and Law, desire and its prohibition, are inextricably twined, and it is the very act of Prohibition that gives rise to the desire for its transgression, or fixes our desire on the prohibited object:
What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me…. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
The direct result of the intervention of the Law is thus to divide the subject, introducing a morbid confusion between life and death, between the (conscious) obedience of the Law and the (unconscious) desire for its transgression that is generated by the legal prohibition. It is not me, the subject, who transgresses the Law but (nonsubjectivized) "Sin" itself, the sinful impulses in which I do not recognize myself and that I even hate. Because of this split, my (conscious) Self is ultimately experienced as "dead," as deprived of living impetus, while "life," the ecstatic affirmation of living energy, can only appear in the guise of "Sin," of a transgression which gives rise to a morbid sense of guilt. My actual life-impulse, my desire, appears to me as an autonomous foreign automatism which insists on and follows its own path regardless of my conscious Will and intentions.
Paul's problem is thus not the standard morbid moralistic one (how to crush my transgressive impulses, how finally to purify myself of sinful impulses) but its exact opposite: How can I break out of this vicious cycle of Law and desire, of the Prohibition and its transgression, within which I can assert my passion for life only as its opposite, a morbid death drive? How would it be possible for me to experience my "life drive" not as a foreign automatism, a blind "compulsion to repeat" which compels me to transgress the Law (with the unacknowledged complicity of the Law itself), but as a fully subjectivized, positive yes! Here, Paul (like Badiou) seems to fully endorse Hegel's point that there is Evil only in the gaze that perceives it, while it is the Law that not only opens up and sustains the domain of Sin, of sinful impulses to transgress its prohibitions, but also finds a perverse and morbid satisfaction in making us feel guilty for such transgressions. The ultimate results of the Rule of Law are thus all the well-known twists and paradoxes of the superego; since I can enjoy only what I feel guilty about, I can find enjoyment only, in (a self-reflective) turn, in feeling guilty, in punishing myself for sinful thoughts, and so on and so forth. When Badiou speaks of the "morbid fascination of the death drive," therefore, he is not resorting to platitudes, but articulating a specific Pauline reading of psychoanalytic notions to do with the complex entanglement of Law and desire, this morbid intertwinement of life and death in which the "dead" letter of the Law perverts my very life-enjoyment, turning it into a fascination with death. In this perverted universe the ascetic who whips himself on behalf of the Law enjoys himself more intensely than anyone who takes an innocent pleasure in worldly delights, for it is not only the illicit sinful desires (i.e., those that are against the Law) which Paul considers "the way of the flesh" (as opposed to "the way of the Spirit"). "Flesh" includes both what is against the Law and the excessive self-torturing, self-mortifying, morbid fascination with the flesh that is begotten by the Law. As Badiou emphasizes, Paul comes unexpectedly close here to his great detractor Nietzsche, whose problem was also that of how we can break out of the vicious cycle of a morbid, self-mortifying denial of Life: the Christian "way of the Spirit" is for Nietzsche precisely the magic rupture, the New Beginning which delivers us from this morbidly debilitating deadlock and enables us to open ourselves to the Eternal Life of Love without Sin (i.e., without the Law and the guilt induced by the Law).
Here we have two divisions of the subject, which are not to be confused. On the one hand, the subject of the Law is divided between his conscious ego, which adheres to the letter of the Law, and his decentered desire, whichoperating against the subject's conscious will, "automatically"-compels him to "do what he hates," to transgress the Law and indulge in illicit jouissance. On the other hand, we have the more radical division between this entire domain of the Law/desire, of the prohibition that generates its own transgression, and a properly Christian Love, the New Beginning of which means breaking out of the deadlock of Law and its transgression.
Where does the Lacanian "divided subject" stand in relation to each of these divisions? At first glance, the answer to this question may appear to be simple and straightforward: psychoanalysis is the theory that conceptualizes-brings to light-the paradoxical structure of the first division. Isn't Badiou's description of the intertwinement of Law and desire full of implicit (and even some explicit) references to or paraphrases of Lacan? Isn't the ultimate domain of psychoanalysis the intersection of the (symbolic) Law and desire? Isn't the multitude of perverse satisfactions the form in which that very intersection is realized? Isn't the Lacanian division of the subject one that concerns precisely the subject's relationship to the symbolic Law? Furthermore, isn't that ultimately confirmed by Lacan's Kant avec Sade, in which the Sadean universe of morbid perversion is posited as the "truth" of the most radical assertion of the moral weight of symbolic Law in human history (Kantian ethics)?8 However, the crucial question with regard to psychoanalysis here is whether it remains within the confines of this morbid/masochistic obsession with death, this perverse intermingling of Life and Death that characterizes the dialectics of a prohibitory Law generating a transgressive desire. Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to start with Lacan's own recourse to that same passage from Paul's Epistle to the Romans in elaborating the link between Law and desire, where he refers to the availability of "the Thing" (the impossible object of jouissance) via only the prohibitory Law, as its transgression:
Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn't said: "Thou shalt not covet it." But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. But even without the Law, I was once alive. But when the commandment appeared, the Thing flared up, returned once again, I met my death. And for me, the commandment that was supposed to lead to life turned out to lead to death, for the Thing found a way and thanks to the commandment seduced me; through it I came to desire death. I believe that for a little while now some of you at least have begun to suspect that it is no longer I who have been speaking. In fact, with one small change, namely, "Thing" for "sin," this is the speech of Saint Paul on the subject of the relations between the law and sin in the Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 7, paragraph 7.
The relationship between the Thing and the Law could not be better defined than in these terms…. The dialectical relationship between desire and the Law causes our desire to flare up only in relation to the Law, through which it becomes the desire for death. It is only because of the Law that sin . . . takes on an excessive, hyperbolic character. Freud's discovery-the ethics of psychoanalysis-does it leave us clinging to that dialectic?9
Crucial here is the concluding question, which clearly points toward there being, for Lacan, "a way of rediscovering the relationship to das Ding somewhere beyond the Law." The whole point of "the ethics of psychoanalysis" is to formulate the possibility of such a relationship, which would avoid the pitfalls of superegoic culpability and "morbid" enjoyment in sin, while also avoiding what Kant called Schwarmerei, the obscurantist claim to give word to (and thus legitimize one's position by reference to) spiritual illumination, or direct insight into the impossible Real Thing. The desire to which Lacan refers in his maxim of psychoanalytic ethics, "ne pas ceder sur son desir" (not to compromise, or give way on, one's desire), is no longer transgressive or, consequently, involved in a "morbid" dialectic with the prohibitory Law; it is rather one's own desire, to which one owes fidelity-desire elevated to the level of ethical Duty. Thus "ne pas ceder sur son desir" is ultimately another way of saying "do your duty!" 11
It would thus be tempting to risk a Badiouan/Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis-which is to say, a New Beginning or symbolic "rebirth"-with the analysand's subjectivity radically restructured such that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. (Doesn't Lacan himself drop many hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the same Pauline terms as Badiou? 12) Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not "psychosynthesis"; it does not posit a "new harmony," a new Truth-Event, but merely wipes the slate clean for it. This "merely," however, should be put in quotation marks because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of "wiping the slate clean," something (a Void) is confronted which is already "sutured" with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity-a negative gesture of withdrawal-precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identification with a Cause, functioning as its condition of (im)possibility, that is, laying the ground or opening up the space for it, but simultaneously being obfuscated by it and undermining it. For that reason, Lacan implicitly shifts the balance between Death and Resurrection toward Death, which at its most radical stands for not merely the passing of earthly life but the "night of the world," the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity in which its very links with "reality" are severed-this is "wiping the slate clean," which opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning and enables the emergence of the "new harmony" sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier.
Here, Lacan parts company with Paul and Badiou: God not only is dead, but was always already dead. After Freud, one could not place one's faith in a Truth-Event, since every such Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a prior Void whose Freudian name is death drive. So where Lacan differs from Badiou is in the determination of the exact status of this domain beyond the Rule of Law. Like Badiou, Lacan delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the "morbid" superegoic intersection of Law and its transgressive desire. However, for Lacan, the Freudian concept of death drive cannot be accounted for in terms of this intersection; the death drive is not the outcome of a morbid confusion of Life and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic Law. The uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is what Lacan calls the domain "between the two deaths," the preontological domain of monstrous spectral apparitions, which is "immortal" yet not in Badiou's sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but rather in the sense of what Lacan calls lamella-the monstrous "undead" object-libido. This domain, in which Oedipus (or King Lear, to take another exemplary case) finds himself after the fall, when his symbolic destiny has been fulfilled, is for Lacan "beyond the Law." In his reading of the Oedipus myth, the early Lacan was already focusing on what the standard version of the Oedipus complex leaves out of sight: the first figure of what is "beyond Oedipus," which is Oedipus himself after he has fulfilled his destiny to the bitter end: the horrifying figure of Oedipus at Colonus, that embittered old man with his thoroughly uncompromising attitude, cursing everyone around him. Doesn't this figure confront us with the inherent deadlock, the impossibility of jouissance, concealed by its Prohibition? Wasn't Oedipus the one who transgressed the Prohibition and paid the price for it in having to assume this impossibility? Lacan exemplifies the status of Oedipus at Colonus by comparison with that of the unfortunate Mr. Valdemar, the famous Poe character who, via hypnosis, is put to death and then, reawakening, implores the observers of this horrible experiment: "For God's sake!-quick!-quick!-put me to sleep-or, quick!-waken me! quick!-I sAY TO YOU THAT I AM DEAD!" Upon being awakened, Mr. Valdemar, says Lacan,
is no more than a disgusting liquefaction, something for which no language has a name, the naked apparition, pure, simple, brutal, of this figure which it is impossible to gaze at face on, which hovers in the background of all the imaginings of human destiny, which is beyond all qualification, and for which the word carrion is completely inadequate, the complete collapse of this species of swelling that is lifethe bubble bursts and dissolves down into inanimate putrid liquid.
That is what happens in the case of Oedipus. As everything right from the start of the tragedy goes to show, Oedipus is nothing more than the scum of the earth, the refuse, the residue, a thing empty of any plausible appearance.l3
The ultimate object of horror is this sudden emergence of the "life beyond death," of the undead-indestructible object, of Life deprived of any support in the symbolic order. This is perhaps not unrelated to today's phenomenon of cyberspace: the more our (experience of) reality is "virtualized"-changed into a "screen phenomenon" or interface encounterthe more the "indivisible remainder," that which resists integration into the interface, appears as the horrifying remainder of the undead Life. No wonder images of such a formless "undead" substance of Life abound in today's science fiction/horror narratives, from Alien on. Let us recall the scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil in which a waiter in a high-class restaurant recommends the daily specials to his customers ("Today, our tournedos is really special!"), yet what they get is a dazzling color photo of the meal they've ordered on a stand above the plate, and on the plate itself a loathsome excremental, pastelike lump. This split between the food's image and the real of its formless excremental remainder perfectly exemplifies the disintegration of reality into an interface image, ghostlike and insubstantial, and the raw stuff of the remainder of the Real-our obsession with which is the price we have to pay for the suspension of the paternal Prohibition/Law that sustains and guarantees our access to reality. And, of course, Lacan's point is that, if one exploits to the limit the potentials opened up by our existence as parletres ("beings of language"), one sooner or later finds oneself in this horrifying in-between state, the threatening possibility of which looms over each of us.
This "indivisible remainder," this formless stain of the "little piece of the real" that "is" Oedipus after the fulfillment of his symbolic Destiny, is the direct embodiment of what Lacan calls plus-de-jouir, the "surplusenjoyment" or excess that cannot be accommodated by any symbolic idealization. In Lacan's use of the term, of course, there is a play upon the French ambiguity of "excess of enjoyment" versus "no longer any enjoyment"; on this model, it is tempting to speak here, apropos of this formless "indivisible remainder" that is Oedipus, of a case of plus d'homme: "excessively human," he has lived, to the bitter end, the "human condition," realizing its most fundamental possibility, and, on that very account, he is in a way "no longer human," having turned into an "inhuman monster" bound by no human laws and considerations. As Lacan emphasizes, there are two main ways to cope with this "remainder": on the one hand, traditional humanism disavows it, avoids confronting it, covers it up by means of idealizations (i.e., concealing it with noble images of Humanity); on the other hand, the ruthless and boundless capitalist economy, as it were, puts this excess/remainder to use, manipulating it in order to keep its productive machinery in perpetual motion (as they usually put it-there being no desire, no depravity, too low to exploit for capitalist profiteering). At this point, when Oedipus has been reduced to the "scum of humanity," we again encounter the ambiguous relationship (or, in Hegelese, the speculative identity) between the lowest and the highest, between the excremental scum and the sacred, for now, all of a sudden, messengers from different cities appear and vie for Oedipus's favor, asking him to bless their hometowns with his presence, to which the embittered Oedipus responds with the famous lines:
Am I to be counted as something according to some readings: as a man only now, when I am reduced to nothing when I am no longer human? Don't these lines expose the elementary matrix of subjectivity: you become "something" (you are accounted a subject) only after going through the zero-point, after being deprived of all those "pathological" (in the Kantian sense of empirical, contingent) features that support your identity, thus being reduced to "nothing"-"a Nothingness counted as Something," which is the most concise formula for subject.14
We are now in a position to precisely determine how much of a gap separates Badiou from Lacan. For Badiou, what psychoanalysis provides is insight into the morbid intertwining of Life and Death, of Law and desire, insight into the obscenity of the Law itself as the "truth" of the thought and the moral stance which limit themselves to the Order of Being and its discriminatory Laws; as such, psychoanalysis cannot properly render thematic the domain beyond the Law, that is, the mode of operation of fidelity to the Truth-Event. The psychoanalytic subject is the divided subject of the (symbolic) Law, not the subject divided between Law (which regulates the Order of Being) and Love (as fidelity to the Truth-Event). (The logical consequence for Badiou is that psychoanalysis remains constrained by the field of Knowledge, unable to approach the properly positive dimension of Truth processes: in the case of love, psychoanalysis reduces it to a sublimated expression of sexuality; in the cases of both science and art, psychoanalysis can only speak to the subjective libidinal conditions of a scientific invention or a work of art-such as that an artist or a scientist was driven by his unresolved Oedipus complex or latent homosexuality, and so on-conditions which are ultimately irrelevant to the work's truth dimension; in the case of politics, psychoanalysis can only conceive of collectivity against the background of a Totem and Taboo or Moses and Monotheism problematic of primordial crime and guilt, so is unable to think a militant "revolutionary" collective that is not bound by parental guilt, but rather freed by the positive force of Love.) For Lacan, on the other hand, the Truth-Event operates only against a background of traumatic encounter with the undead/monstrous Thing, and what are Badiou's four generiques if not four ways of reinscribing the encounter with the Real Thing into the symbolic texture? In art, beauty is "the last veil of the Monstrous," while science, far from being just another symbolic narrative, endeavors to formulate the structure of the Real beneath the symbolic fiction; love, no longer merely the narcissistic screen obfuscating the truth of desire in the later Lacan, is the way to "gentrify" and come to terms with the traumatic drive, while militant politics is a means of putting the terrific force of Negativity to use in restructuring our social affairs. So Lacan is not a postmodern cultural relativist with respect to the authenticity of the Truth-Event: there really is a difference between an authentic Truth-Event and its semblance, and it can be traced to the fact that in a Truth-Event the Void of the death drive, of a radical negativity that momentarily suspends the Order of Being, continues to resonate.
This difference between Badiou and Lacan turns precisely on the status of the subject: Badiou's main point is that the subject should not be identified with the constitutive Void of the structure, since such an identification already ontologizes the subject, though in a purely negative way, turning the subject into an entity that is consubstantial with the structure and thus belongs to the order of the necessary and a priori ("no structure without a subject"). To this Lacanian ontologization of the subject, Badiou opposes its "rarity"-the local-contingent-fragile-transient emergence of subjectivity. When a Truth-Event (contingently, unpredictably) occurs, a subject emerges and exercises fidelity to it by discerning its traces in a Situation the Truth of which is this Event.ls Lacan, however, introduces a distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization (or what Badiou describes as the process of subjectivization, in which the subject's engagement with and fidelity to the Event occurs, versus subject as the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the possibility of subjectivization). The subject prior to subjectivization is the pure negativity of death drive prior to its reversal into identification with some new Master-Signifier.
In Lacan, act is a purely negative category, which (in Badiou's terms) stands for the gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being, for the reference to the Void at its core, prior to the filling in of this Void. In this precise sense, act involves the dimension of death drive which grounds the decision (to exercise fidelity to a Truth), but it cannot be reduced to it. The Lacanian death drive is thus a kind of "vanishing mediator" between Being and Event, a "negative" gesture constitutive of subject that is then obfuscated in "Being" (the established ontological order) and in fidelity to the Event.16 One should insist here on the irreducibly vicious cycle of subjectivity: "the wound is healed only by the spear which smote it," that is, the subject "is" the very gap filled in by the gesture of subjectivization. In short, the Lacanian answer to the question asked (and answered in the negative) by such different philosophers as Althusser, Derrida, and Badiou- Can the gap/opening/Void which precedes the gesture of subjectivization still be called "subject"?-is an emphatic yes! The subject is at once the ontological gap (the "night of the world" or madness of radical self-withdrawal) and the gesture of subjectivization that closes, or heals up the wound of, that gap (in Lacanese: the gesture of the Master which establishes a new harmony). Subjectivity is a name for this irreducible circularity, for a power that does not fight an external, resisting force (say, the inertia of the given substantial order) but an obstacle that is absolutely inherent, which ultimately "is" the subject itself." In other words, the subject's very endeavor to fill in the Gap is precisely what both generates and sustains it. "Death drive" is thus the constitutive obverse of every emphatic assertion of Truth irreducible to the positive order of Being, that is, the negative gesture which clears the way for creative sublimation; the fact that sublimation presupposes death drive means that a sublime object by which we are enthusiastically transfixed is effectively a "mask of death," a veil that covers over the primordial ontological Void. (To will this sublime object effectively amounts to willing a Nothingness, as Nietzsche would have put it.) If there is an ethicopolitical lesson to be learned from psychoanalysis, it consists of the insight that the great calamities of our century (from the Holocaust to the Stalinist desastre) resulted not from our succumbing to the morbid attraction of this Void but, on the contrary, from our endeavoring to avoid confronting it and to impose the direct rule of Truth and/or Goodness.
The political consequences of reasserting psychoanalysis in the face of Badiou's critique are the very opposite of the standard psychoanalytic skepticism about the final outcome of the revolutionary process (i.e., the revolutionary process has to go wrong and end up in self-destructive fury because it is unaware of its own libidinal foundations, of the murderous aggressivity which sustains its idealism, etc.). It is tempting to claim instead that Badiou's resistance to psychoanalysis is part of his hidden Kantianism, on account of which he also ultimately opposes the full revolutionary passage a l'acte. That is to say, although Badiou is adamantly anti-Kantian and, in his political stances, radically leftist (rejecting not only parliamentary democracy outright, but also multiculturalism or "identity politics"), at a deeper level his distinction between the order of the positive Knowledge of Being and the wholly different Truth-Event remains Kantian. When he emphasizes how, from the standpoint of Knowledge, there simply is no Event (i.e., that its traces can be discerned as signs only by those who are already engaged with the Event), doesn't he thereby echo Kant's notion of signs as announcing the noumenal fact of freedom without positively proving it (e.g., the enthusiasm for the French Revolution)?
What a true Leninist and an authentic political conservative have in common is the fact that they both reject what could be called liberalleftist "irresponsibility" (advocating grand projects of solidarity, freedom, etc., yet ducking out when their price proves to be concrete and often cruel political measures); an authentic conservative, like a true Leninist, is not, however, afraid to pass to the act and bear all the consequences, unpleasant as these may be, of realizing a political project. Kipling, for example (whom Brecht admired very much), despised British Liberals who advocated freedom and justice while silently counting on the Conservatives to do the necessary dirty work for them; the same can be said of the attitude of liberal leftists (or "democratic Socialists") toward Leninist Communists: "democratic Socialists" reject the social-democratic "compromise," wanting a true revolution yet shirking the price to be paid for it; they thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and keep their hands clean. In contrast to this false liberal-leftist position (pro-democracy for the people so long as there are no secret police to fight and no threat to their academic privileges), a Leninist is, like a conservative, authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his politics, of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power and exert it. Therein lies the fatal weakness of those who, like Badiou, rely on a proto-Kantian opposition between the positive order of Being (or of the service des biens) and the radical, unconditional demand for egaliberte that signals the presence of the Truth-Event-an opposition, that is, between the global social order and the dimension of universality proper, which cuts a line of separation into this global order-their unconditional demand for the Truth remains at the level of a hysterical provocation directed at the Master, testing his limits ("Can he reject-or meet-our demands and still maintain the appearance of omnipotence?"). The test of the true revolutionary stance, as opposed to this game of hysterical provocation, is the heroic readiness to endure the subversive undermining of the existing System as it undergoes conversion into the principle of a new positive Order that can give body to this negativity-or, in Badiou's terms, the conversion of Truth into Being.
Notes
1 Alain Badiou, L'etre et l'evenement (Paris, I988).
2 Ibid., 24-25.
3 Another Badiou example of Truth-Event, the atonal revolution in music accomplished by the Second Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), also exemplifies three ways to betray the event of Truth: (I) the traditionalists' dismissal of atonal music as an empty formal experiment, which allowed them to continue to compose in the old ways, as if nothing had happened; (2) the pseudo-modernist fake imitation of atonality; and (3) the tendency to change atonal music into a new positive tradition.
4 Perhaps therein resides the negative achievement which brought such fame to Francois Furet: the de-event-ualization of the French Revolution, that is, adopting an external perspective toward it and thereby turning it into a succession of complex historical facts.
5 Badiou, L'etre et l'evenement, 224, 229.
6 As Badiou perspicuously notes, these four domains of Truth-Event are increasingly displaced in the public discourse of today by their non-evenemential fake doubles. We speak of "culture" instead of "art," of "sex" instead of "love," of "know-how" or "wisdom" instead of "science," of "management" (gestion) instead of "politics," and thereby reduce art to an expression/articulation of historically specific culture, and love to an ideologically dated form of sexuality, while science is dismissed as a falsely Westernuniversalized form of practical knowledge equal to many forms of prescientific wisdom, and politics (with all the passion of struggle that this notion involves) as an immature ideological version or forerunner of the art of social management.
7 See Badiou's unpublished 1995/96 seminar, "Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme."
8 An irony worth noting here is Foucault's conception of psychoanalysis as the last link in the chain beginning with the Christian confessional mode of sexuality, which thereby links it to Law and guilt. However, Paul, the founding figure of Christianity, does exactly the opposite (at least on Badiou's reading) by endeavoring to break the morbid chain that links Law and desire.
9 Jacques Lacan, "On the Moral Law" (1959), in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, Bk. 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London, 1992 [1986]), 7I-84; quotation from 83-84.
10 Ibid., 84.
11 The status of the reference to Kant here is another matter. Insofar as Kant is conceived as the philosopher of the Law in Badiou's Pauline sense, Lacan's concept of Kant avec Sade retains its full validity, that is, the Kantian moral Law retains its status as a superego formation, so its "truth" remains the Sadean universe of morbid perversion. However, there is another way to conceptualize the Kantian moral injunction which delivers it from the superego's constraints; for a Lacanian approach to this "other Kant," see Alenka Zupancic, Die Ethik des Realen (Vienna, 1995).
12 For example, the very last sentence of Lacan's Seminaire XI speaks of the "signification of a limitless love [which] is outside the limits of the law"; Jacques Lacan, "In You More than You" (1964), in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London, 1978 [1973] ), 263-76; quotation from 276.
13 Jacques Lacan, "Desire, Life and Death" (I955), in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, Bk. 2 of Miller, ed., Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York and London, 199I [1978]), 221-34; quotations from 23I-32.
14 The other famous quip of the embittered Oedipus is uttered in response to the claim by the Chorus that the greatest boon to mortal man is not to have been born at all; the well-known comic rejoinder, quoted by Freud and referred to by Lacan ("Unfortunately, that happens to scarcely one in a hundred thousand"), has acquired new meaning today amidst the heated debate over abortion: Aren't aborted children in a sense those who do succeed in not being born?
15 See Badiou, L'etre et l'Evenement, 472-74.
16 This difference between Lacan and Badiou also has certain implications for the appreciation of political events. The disintegration of East European socialism was not, for Badiou, a Truth-Event; apart from giving rise to a brief popular enthusiasm, the dissident fomentation never managed to transform itself into a stable movement of followers consistently engaged in militant fidelity to the Event, but soon disintegrated such that what we have today is either the resurgence of vulgar liberal-parliamentarian capitalism or the rise of racist/ethnic fundamentalism. However, if we accept the Lacanian distinction between the negative gesture of the act (saying no!) and its positive aftermath (i.e., locating the key dimension in the primordial negative gesture), then the process of socialism's disintegration can be said to have produced a true act nonetheless, in the guise of an enthusiastic mass movement of saying no! to the Communist regime for the sake of authentic solidarity-a negative gesture that counted more than its later, failed positivization did.
17 The first and still unsurpassed description of this paradox was perhaps Fichte's notion of Anstoss, the "obstacle/impetus" which sets in motion the subject's productive effort to "posit" objective reality; no longer the Kantian Thing-in-itself-an external stimulus affecting the subject from outside-the Anstoss is a kernel of contingency which is extimate: a foreign body in the very heart of the subject. Subjectivity is thus defined not by a struggle against the inertia of the opposing substantial order but by an absolutely inherent tension.
From: The South Atlantic Quarterly; Durham; Spring 1998, Volume: 97, Issue: 2, Start Page: 235-261, ISSN: 00382876, Copyright Duke University Press Spring 1998.
Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou - The South Atlantic Quarterly (EGS) (Spring)
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