hirt-s2-2009 s j o u r n a l o f t h e j a n v a n e y c k c i r c l e f o r l a c a n i a n i d e o l o g y c r i t i q u e 2 ( 2 0 0 9 ) islam and psychoanalysis, edited by sigi jöttkandt and joan copjec editorial 2 cogito and the subject of arab culture julien maucade 6 to believe or to interpret jean-michel hirt 10 the veil of islam fethi benslama 14 jannah nadia tazi 28 four discourses on authority in islam christian jambet 44 the glow fethi benslama 62 dialogues translations of monotheisms fethi benslama and jean-luc nancy 74 the qur’an and the name-of-the-father keith al-hasani 90 reviews reading backwards: constructing god the impossible in psychoanalysis and the challenge of islam benjamin bishop 96 the powers of the negative: the mathematics of novelty benjamin noys 102 s is on the web at www.lineofbeauty.org j e a n m i c h e l h i r t translated by kristina valendinova t o b e l i e v e o r t o i n t e r p r e t n the arabo-muslim culture, the visionary dream, ru’yâ, is a religious event, ―the forty-eighth part of the prophesy, it is confirmed by one of the often quoted hadîth, muhammad’s speeches―, one that is bound to happen at any moment to great numbers of people. a remarkable book by an expert on sufism, pierre lory, le rêve et ses interprétations en islam1 enables us to grasp the scope of this “permanent revelation” through the scale of the material it presents. if one was to retain only a single trait in support of the book’s author, and thus of the dream’s eschatological importance, it would be the calling to prayer, adhân, which was established in islam thanks to the similar dreams of the two companions of prophet muhammad, ’abd allah ibn zayd of medina and the future caliph ’umar. “hence the meaning,” writes pierre lory, “of the companions assembling around the prophet every morning in order to share dreams: they came to bring the unveilings of the order of the divine real, haqq.” whence the critique of muhammad’s detractors, who in the sura of “the prophets” reproach him for making up “medleys of dream” (qur’an, 21: 5).2 i for islam, the last monotheist religion, the dream is an ordinary miracle, destined for everyone, and in the muslim society, throughout the ages, dream activity, this dimension of psychic and physiological life, of the prophet, of the sufis and of the simple believers, has never been overlooked. yet the particular nature of the visionary dream is to give information about the hidden dimension of the dreamer’s existence and especially to help consider the future. the literature of dream criticism that grew out of these dreams, century after century, is considerable and it testifies to the importance of the relationship between the flesh and the spirit as it concerned the islamist thinkers―without even mentioning the colossal dream sound box, the indispensable corollary of the qur’an, one thousand and one nights. just like this collection of stories, le grand livre de l’interprétation des rêves3 is anonymous, although it is attributed to ibn sîrîn, the 1 pierre lory, le rêve et ses interprétations en islam [dream and its interpretations in islam] (paris: albin michel, 2003). 2 the holy qur’an, trans. yusif ali. 3le grand livre de l’interprétation des rêves [the great book of dream interpretation] (la tour d’aigues: editions de l’aube, 2005). s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 2 (2009): 10-13 h i r t : to believe or to interpret s2 (2009): 11 transmitter of both the dreams and the statements of the prophet at the dawn of islam. in this text, recently translated by youssef seddik, we learn in particular the meaning of dreams about “coupling and all that is connected to it, the sexual act and repudiation, jealousy and corpulence, acquisition of a slave and fornication, sodomy, group debauchery, wantonness, female or male travesty and observation of the female sex,” but also the signification of dreams “of prophets and god’s and muhammad’s messengers.” this text, similar in its excess to the one thousand and one nights, shows a continuity between the human and the divine, as well as an interpenetration of the sacred and the profane, leading to some surprising juxtapositions. for example: “he who sees himself in a dream copulating with his dead mother, in her grave, will die, because the very-high had said: ‘from the (earth) did we create you, and into it shall we return you’” (qur’an, 20: 55). the eruption of the dream into a prophecy is the recognition of the necessary subversion of the spiritual by the carnal. released from the rules of morality, as apt to blasphemy as it is to sacrilege, playing with reason, the dream scene combines the inadmissible and the impossible. in this respect, it resembles what of the divine revelation had reached the prophet, the strange supernatural dictate that he himself dared not approach critically. the qur’an will be established a decade after muhammad’s death (632) by the third caliph, ’othman, who will shape a ne varietur collection of revelations, to which the living prophet had often proposed variant versions and which he had refused to fixate―in a verse, god himself declares: “it is for us to collect it and to promulgate it” (qur’an, 75 :17). with a literary construction dating back to the 7th century, but in its modernity yielding nothing to the most innovative western works, the qur’an is a “mise-enabîme” of biblical, canonical or apocryphal stories, giving us a sensational rereading of them thanks to “dream-work,” the condensations, displacements and figurations it effects. are we perhaps more able to read the qur’an today, after having been able to confront ourselves with a work of the english language impregnated by all other human languages: joyce’s finnegan’s wake or the relation of his night journey to that of the prophet? the qur’an identifies itself as a “reminder” of the monotheist scriptures, all of whose prophets it refers to, yet it stages them differently, exposing both the aspects known from their biblical story and those that are unknown. like a broken mirror, the qur’an reflects the fragments of their lives that do not appear in the mirror plane of the bible. how, then, can we not ask whether the qur’an is not the dream of monotheist religion, requiring each of its readers to decipher its content in order to access its dream-thoughts? for all the islamist mystic philosophers―who made no distinction between speculative, dream and visionary activity, all of which lead from the natural to the supernatural―interpretation is decisive, personal and infinite. in their own way, they took up for themselves muhammad's prophetic gesture for themselves, aiming to preserve the extreme mobility of the revelations for which he was the receptacle. interpreting, ta’bîr, is the master-word [maître-mot] created by qur’anic textuality and it consists of passing from the manifest, zâhir, to the latent, bâtin, which then h i r t : to believe or to interpret s2 (2009): 12 itself becomes the manifest of another latent content and so on, the oscillation of zâhir and bâtin deploying itself indefinitely. each person engages in interpretation according to his or her own speculative capacity and each qur’anic verse is likely to be given several meanings, according to the level of the dreamer’s spiritual progress and according to his or her clairvoyance, al-baçin. one easily sees that for the political and religious powers, such unlimited liberty of interpretation is inadmissibly audacious, which many islamic spiritual thinkers have paid for with their lives. thus they carry out the recommendation of a 12th-century persian thinker, sohravardî, to his disciples: “read the qur’an as if it had been revealed only for you.” but if the qur’an constitutes a dream addressed to everyone, leading each reader to interpret it in his own way in order to come to a revelation of the divine dimension concerning oneself―one's own god and no longer the god common to all―we understand the conflict arising at the heart of this monotheist religion, a conflict between believing in the dream and interpreting it. in the qur’an, this dilemma is reflected in the primal scene of the sacrifice of abraham’s son, which depends here on the missing interpretation of the dream sent to the patriarch―the father’s refusal to sacrifice the child, at the very basis of monotheism’s religious difference, thus depends, only in the qu’ran, on his ability or inability to interpret his dream. the episode is presented as follows: then, when (the son) reached (the age of) (serious) work with him, he said: “o my son! i see in vision that i offer thee in sacrifice: now see what is thy view!” (the son) said: “o my father! do as thou art commanded: thou will find me, if allah so wills one practicing patience and constancy!” so when they had both submitted their wills (to allah), and he had laid him prostrate on his forehead (for sacrifice), we called out to him “o abraham! “thou hast already fulfilled the vision!”―thus indeed do we reward those who do right. for this was obviously a trial and we ransomed him with a momentous sacrifice. (qur’an, 37: 102-8) confronted with the dream, abraham is subject to the test everyone must face: whether to believe or to interpret one’s dream. he chooses to believe and to kill his son, putting both of them, in the final instance, before the judgment of god. in an exemplary fashion, abraham bears within himself all the subsequent religious conflicts between the faithful, who believe what they read in their referential scriptures or what the priests tell them about it, and the unfaithful (infidels), who endlessly interpret what they read. the religious world view is constructed with the former and undone by the latter. “the letter kills but the spirit gives life,” claims paul h i r t : to believe or to interpret s2 (2009): 13 of tarsus in his second epistle to the corinthians; in each monotheistic religion, the antagonism between the defendants of the letter and the defendants of the spirit is all the more perennial in that it derives from psychic life, from the opposition between everyone’s religiosity and spirituality. in the 12th century, the greatest andalusian sufi master shaykh al-akbar, ibn ’arabî, believed that every terrestrial act existed simultaneously in several dimensions. the dream is the lived proof of the multiplicity of human states, hence the importance of interpretation, which allows us to pass from one shore of desire to another, from one level of existence to another, from the human to the divine. in the book of the bezels of wisdoms, which he claims he had received in his sleep from the hands of the prophet, ibn ’arabî writes: “to interpret means to transpose the perceived form onto another reality.” in this work, what he sees as abraham’s main error is that he adhered to the dream’s vision as if to an objective view, one that lies outside of himself. the error is to give in to the manifest meaning of the dream, to reduce it to an action, instead of hearing its latent signification, which would lead one to think the action seen in the dream instead of realizing it. this passage from the dream’s visuality to its spirituality simultaneously represents an instinctual renunciation and a “progress in the life of the spirit.” abraham, explains ibn ’arabî, should have understood that the figure of his son in the dream was only a representation of himself, confronted with the enigma and the scandal of individual death striking a life demanded [voulue] by god. commenting on the divine intervention, ibn ’arabî sees in it the shadow of a reproach: “god said to abraham, while he was speaking to him: ‘in truth, o abraham, you believed in a vision,’ which is not to say that abraham, believing he had to sacrifice his son, was faithful to the divine inspiration; because he had taken the vision literally, while every dream demands a transposition or interpretation.” here we have someone who immediately tosses into the dustbin of history all the refusals to interpret that have been boasted of by so many past and present murderers, usurping the name of god to perpetrate in reality crimes they might have dreamed of in their feverish nights. opposed to this is the man who, desirous of submitting himself to god alone, escapes from his illusory representation of reality thanks to the dream, thanks to the uncertainty that the dream instills in everyone’s language, thanks to interpretation which is bound to the psychic continent and the spiritual ocean, that the dream awaits from him. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 5 (2012): 1-5 b e n j a m i n j o s e p h b i s h o p t o p o l o g y a n d t h e i n s c r i p t i o n o f t h e c l i n i c p erhaps the most pressing challenge for anyone who attempts to construct an analytic practice with the material and means of mathematics is to justify the relation the two fields share with one another. put otherwise, what exactly does topology have to do with psychoanalysis? this special issue of s responds to this question with essays by individuals who have, since lacan’s late seminars, established analytic practices and advanced a theory of topology in one of the few places left where suffering is still addressed, the clinic of psychoanalysis. this introduction attempts to isolate the clinical significance of these essays by responding to this question with a non-sardonic, though curtly punctuated, “nothing whatsoever.” topology and analysis bear a non-relation whose disjunction refuses any mimesis between clinical problems and topological objects, exposing the clinic to a real that reorients the approach to the symptom from a therapy of treatment to work of inscription. but still, why topology? how, for example, may lacan identify psychosis in something so seemingly un-psychoanalytic as the trefoil knot? the practice of reading and writing that topology requires uncovers an impossibility of identifying this clinical structure with the smallest non-trivial knot through the perception of a similarity of properties. that is to say, if one attempts to identify psychosis through an intuition, then he may find himself looking at the object for a very long time. for the trefoil and psychosis quite literally and actually look nothing alike. indeed, the work of topology cuts through such a stare by requiring a material intervention on the part of the participant in order read and recognize the structure of the knot before presuming to locate that structure in something so complicated as psychosis. whether or not such an identification between psychosis and the trefoil is possible, it is important to note that a perseveration of structure between the two cannot be mapped out by an intuition of likeness and similarity. topology, if anything, demands a more precise work of analysis than one carried out by imitation. already then the analytic effects of working with things like knots, links and locks would seem to occur outside of an aesthetics secured by mimesis. topology bishop: topology and the inscription of the clinic s5 (2012): 2 is supported by a materiality whose plasticity functions according to the matheme, and whose legibility neither reduces to a concept of the beautiful, as determined by a sensus communis, nor becomes upended in the incalculability of the sublime. though many of these figures are aesthetically pleasing and perhaps captivating, it is important to recognize that topology is not, in its final instance, a matter of aesthetic appreciation. whereas aesthetics secures its principles and objects of inquiry, at least in the kantian program, through an agreement within a community, topology is a mathematical field whose practice is secured by discourses such as algebra, graph theory, group theory, category theory and topology. and here is one of topology’s chief analytical purchases: its transmissibility is confirmable or deniable. whereas one may agree on the aesthetic value of an object through a doxa, topology demands for the classical and platonic shift to episteme. this special issue of s addresses these issues with texts authored by three individuals who have worked with lacan and one another in small groups, cartels and seminars throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. both jeanmichel vappereau and robert groome continue analytical practices: vappereau helped found topologie en extension in paris and buenos aires; robert groome has established p.l.a.c.e., an analytic association in los angeles. michel thomé, who co-edited soury’s three-volume work from which the included articles are excerpted, continues to present his topological achievements at analytic associations in paris. by way of introduction, then, i limit my focus in a somewhat arbitrary manner on three places in these authors’ works where i believe a simple clinical problem may be provisionally articulated. this issue begins with an essay by vappereau titled “a method of reading a knot.” excerpted from his book noeud, vappereau aligns his project with the work of interpretation carried out by freud in his book on dreams. while this eventually allows for a writing within the clinic, vappereau is careful to emphasize the importance of reading at the beginning of an analytic practice. “a method of reading a knot” proceeds much like, as i would suggest, the work of primarily narcissism, by taking an object as the first step in beginning to work with structure. vappereau places the object within a planar surface where it presents one of its most basic and legible features, the crossing. if a crossing may be naively defined as a place where an object’s curve crosses over another curve, be it the very same thread, as in knots and tangles, or another component, as in links and locks, then an immediate problem of reading presents itself: how can such a crossing be marked as distinct from other crossings in such a manner as to confirm that there is some alternation, and that the object being read is one of topological significance and not merely a mean looking tangle? without a minimal alternation of crossings, three for a knot (trefoil) and two for a link (hopf), the object would not hold together and would eventually come undone in to one or more unknots. the problem raised by vappereau as to how alternating crossings may be read is anything but easy. in fact, if one were to begin at a crossing of a closed curved object like the trefoil knot and mark it, per convention, “plus” and next precede to the bishop: topology and the inscription of the clinic s5 (2012): 3 remaining crossings in the object, designating them “minus” and “plus” alternately and respectively, then upon returning to the initial crossing one would be forced, according to this naïve algorithm, to mark it “minus” and continue to reverse the previous labeling. at any given place in this knot, the same crossing would be marked doubly as “plus” and “minus”—a contradiction, if the object’s crossings alternate. this naïve approach would, in short, render the knot unreadable, unsecure its identity and fail to recognize the structure of the object that makes it it. one would be forced to understand this object as a “trefoil” only through a visual inspection, the force of a name or (perhaps worse) hypnosis. if analytical practice is concerned with transmitting its material through different means, then already in this simple example of marking crossings does a clinical problem arise: how can a method of reading and writing be developed in order that the structural legibility and identity of something as seemingly simple as a trefoil knot may be rendered transmissible beyond subjective intuition and manipulative speech? it is important to note that a clinical problem already presents itself here in the problem’s description, which remains at a purely rhetorical register, unanchored by any graphic demonstration and mathematical calculation. merely reading—and indeed writing—about labeling a trefoil’s crossings inadequately exhibits its structural significance. the reader is therefore encouraged to sketch out a trefoil knot, label it, and confirm (or not) the claims made in the above paragraph, rather than rely on the imagination’s capacity to adequately present the failure of this naïve approach to labeling. while this problem is not especially complicated, it does require a material support to secure its transmission, a support i leave out in order to show this clinical issue of transmission by way of a negative example. as each of the essays presented in this volume show—quite literally given their many diagrams and constructions—when it comes to topology and a work of analysis, one does not expressly “see” what is meant. against such an “intuitive” approach, vappereau proceeds to a coding of crossings that he calls “freudian,” and then on to perhaps the most topologically significant work of his text, where he develops a subtle reading of the spanning surface of an object named the “knot of 23 july 1993.” care must be taken with this object, as it is not immediately clear—again, at least by a mere glance—whether it is a one component knot or a tangle, or whether it is a composition of multiple components. vappereau is careful to set up an algorithmic process of knot-reading that will only fully be developed in the course of his book. in this first part, however, he develops an elegant reading of a topological object’s spanning surface that is capable of distinguishing a knot from an unknot. of especial interest to readers who remain unconvinced by topology’s purchase for analytical work—and again, given the non-relation between the two fields, one has very good reason to proceed with suspicion—is vappereau’s reading of the permutations of the dream of the butcher’s wife as recounted by freud and further interpreted by lacan. the significance of vappereau’s intervention is not his unique contribution to the interpretation of the dream, but rather the method he takes bishop: topology and the inscription of the clinic s5 (2012): 4 in reading the dream’s many layers in conjunction—or perhaps disjunction—with the algorithm he develops in reading the spanning surface of the “knot of 23 july 1993.” it remains up to the judgment of the reader, after having worked through vappereau’s text, to determine what analytical effects there may be in the decoding of a knot. if vappereau’s text stresses the importance of reading in the analysis of a knot, robert groome’s “elements of analytic knot theory” extends the function of the signifier further into a practice of inscription. groome’s text recognizes the material implications of reading and writing and argues for the non-triviality of the diagram when constructing a topological theory that, as marked in the title of his essay, is worthy of the qualifier “analytic.” the clinical significance of the diagram for knot theory or psychoanalysis is neither intuitive nor trivial. indeed, given a long theoretical and philosophical tradition that eschews the image for the thing, a tradition that groome locates in plato’s republic, it would seem that the diagram of a topological object would function within a secondary or even tertiary register, subsumed under the formal requirements that regulate both the object and its representation. groome undertakes a heresy of the best kind and places the dream of the cave not within the unenlightened souls of the slaves, but in the project that wants to awaken those bounded prisoners and force them to understand the image as a formal derivation. “elements of analytic knot theory” presents something of a reverse platonism by insisting on the constitutive function of the topological diagram. importantly, this insistence does not deny such a formal approach, but rather incorporates the material practice of diagrammatic construction and refuses to relegate it to a representational order in service of a theory, whose principles and object precede any writing and reading. groome’s essay subtlety anticipates vappereau’s in that where the latter begins with a diagram, groome’s recognizes a problem already in the mapping between a topological object in space and its graphic equivalent on the planar surface. this recognition of the surface underscores the significance of the mapping between these two dimensions. in order to understand how building a theory of the knot in such a way is “analytic,” i return to the simple problem of the crossing addressed above. even before one can approach any crossing as a proper crossing, where one thread’s intersection with another strand may read as “over” or “under,” the principles by which a three-dimensional object’s projection onto a two-dimensional surface must be articulated. groome’s work denaturalizes the conditions where such a mapping occurs. for if one were to read, materially and literally, the intersection of any two threads inscribed onto the planar surface, then one would be forced, strictly speaking, to account for the gap in the lower thread’s passing underneath the upper as a literal blank rather than an example of three-dimensional depth. of course this blank on either side of the upper thread is obvious enough: it is a well-established, conventional use of traits meant only to represent the over/under passing that actually occurs one dimension up. but the insistence of groome’s essay demands that such conventions never be assumed and much of his essay is bishop: topology and the inscription of the clinic s5 (2012): 5 dedicated to the meticulous work of writing the categorical theoretic conditions by which the mapping between object and diagram take place. and here groome’s work punctures convention and makes a place where the conjunction of analysis and topology invite a meaningful work. for is it not the work of analysis to articulate how the conditions in which a convention—be it mathematical, social or other—is established and rendered functional? this issue closes with two short pieces authored by pierre soury from his threevolume work chaines et noeuds and selected especially for this issue by his longtime collaborator, michel thomé. soury’s essays are unique in that they attempt to articulate an analytical practice out of a work of topology. chaines et noeuds documents soury’s mathematical results of knots, links and locks along with a number of algebraic results on the topological objects that are painstakingly constructed and drawn out. especially important is soury’s work on the generalized borromean and the fundamental group of the lock, whose property of holding—what lacan calls its consistency—poses a problem for many conventional ways of reading links and knots. it is important, therefore, to keep in mind that soury’s “a year in the company of knots” and “topological objects and the current state of mathematics” are written in the wake of a rigorous mathematical work of topology and are not mere speculative essays on the analytical purchase of topological work. “topological objects and the current state of mathematics” nicely summarizes soury’s theory of topology and the attention that theory gives to defining its object. soury takes issue with what he calls the “general” trend in topology that reduces its objects to a finite set of points whose specific and finite combinations become meaningful only within an infinite set—call it “space.” such a theory, soury claims, establishes a distinction between finite objects and the massively infinite spaces that support them, reducing this complex relation to a mere question of “interiority” and “exteriority.” what’s especially concerning about this approach, according to soury, is its failure to distinguish the object from its complement, which in turn overlooks the structurally significant feature that makes the object different—that its, its hole. attending this critique of the conventional approach to the knot is soury’s lamenting the lack of drawing—“good” drawing, he says—within the field of topology. the so-called general approach to the topological object confines the object to a series of points and leaves out the plastic dimension of the work. interestingly enough, each page of soury’s chaines et noeuds is printed on only half of the available space, so that on every page of his work the reader is presented with soury’s results and an empty leaf on which these results may be confirmed through an act of writing on the part of the reader. and if this introduction began with a critique of the aesthetic approach to topology it ends, prompted by soury’s work, with an invitation to advance its theory through the practice of its materiality, to open up a blank in each of these texts and expose and inscribe the places where a transmission does and, equally important, does not occur. bishop-s2-2009 s j o u r n a l o f t h e j a n v a n e y c k c i r c l e f o r l a c a n i a n i d e o l o g y c r i t i q u e 2 ( 2 0 0 9 ) islam and psychoanalysis, edited by sigi jöttkandt and joan copjec editorial 2 cogito and the subject of arab culture julien maucade 6 to believe or to interpret jean-michel hirt 10 the veil of islam fethi benslama 14 jannah nadia tazi 28 four discourses on authority in islam christian jambet 44 the glow fethi benslama 62 dialogues translations of monotheisms fethi benslama and jean-luc nancy 74 the qur’an and the name-of-the-father keith al-hasani 90 reviews reading backwards: constructing god the impossible in psychoanalysis and the challenge of islam benjamin bishop 96 the powers of the negative: the mathematics of novelty benjamin noys 102 s is on the web at www.lineofbeauty.org b o o k r e v i e w r e a d i n g b a c k w a r d s constructing god the impossible in psychoanalysis and the challenge of islam b e n j a m i n b i s h o p fethi benslama, psychoanalysis and the challenge of islam. trans. robert bononno. minneapolis: university of minneapolis press, 2009. isbn 978-0-8166-4888-7 (cloth), isbn 978-0-8166-4889-4 (paper). 272pp. $25.00 paper, $75.00 cloth. n his 1937 essay, “constructions in analysis,” freud reorients the analyst’s work, claiming that instead of offering a series of associative interpretations, the analyst’s task is “to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it.”1 the shift from interpretation to construction signals an important moment in psychoanalysis in which it becomes irrevocably distinguished from the diachronic narrativization of an individual psychic development. construction inaugurates a new kind of clinical work that doesn’t simply locate psychic events as causes for one’s symptoms but provides the appropriate place where one’s symptoms can begin to present themselves in their various permutations, thus opening them up to a work of an analysis, rather than a dramatization of one’s history. to be sure, one’s past provides the material for a construction in analysis, and freud likens the work to archeological excavation. but unlike interpretation, which attaches this material to a prefixed drama―oedipal or other―this excavation uncovers material not to merely discover and identify it but rather to work with it in conjunction with one’s present symptoms. freud’s late essay thus gives psychoanalysis an experimental edge where it both risks the effects of and assumes responsibility for its own work: “we do not pretend that an individual construction is anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or rejection.”2 freudian construction calls for a confirmation founded upon analytic effects as opposed to verification of past events. i 1 sigmund freud, the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, standard edition 23, trans. james strachey (london: hogarth, 1978) 259. 2 freud, 265. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 2 (2009): 96-101 b o o k r e v i e w : reading backwards s2 (2009): 97 it is within this experimental tradition of psychoanalytic construction, then, that fethi benslama’s book psychoanalysis and the challenge of islam, recently translated into english, makes a welcome introduction into a field that has only begun to take off. taking up this freudian task, benslama delves into the vast archive of islam, reading many of its literary, ontological, ethical and theological works in order to uncover nothing less than an impossibility at its origin. benslama undertakes his investigation of psyche and civilization in order to read and “examine” certain problems of islam “through the eyes of our universal psychoanalytic knowledge” (psychoanalysis and the challenge of islam, 7). although at first benslama seems to propose a psychoanalytic “approach” to islam, he rather undertakes a number of close readings, including acute attention to arabic etymology, and nicely avoids a flat-footed application of a theory to the material. if one of psychoanalysis’s goals―that is, for itself and the material it assumes―is to achieve a clinical effect, then benslama’s book provides a deft and fascinating survey of the challenges islam poses for the clinic. benslama acknowledges the clinical stakes of his work as seen, for instance, in the chapter entitled “the clinic of the nights,” and his advice to analysts working with muslim analysands is: “be receptive to anger, to identify despair, to analyze its figures” (92). though psychoanalysis has historically articulated the problems of psyche and civilization through the judeochristian monotheistic tradition, islam provides its own unique material and, indeed, challenges. to his credit, benslama approaches these challenges not via a transcendental application of some a priori worked-out theory, but through an immanent working through of material already present in islam. benslama’s work is clinical, then, to the extent that it attempts to read islam’s traits and construct its impossible beginning rather than merely interpret them through some unacknowledged hermeneutic. and in its most ambitious moments, psychoanalysis redevelops the theory itself within the islamic literary, philosophical and theological traditions and thereby ends up posing a challenge back to psychoanalysis: how does this “universal psychoanalytic knowledge” treat and reinscribe itself in an encounter with islam’s singularities? no doubt the most profound move in psychoanalysis is the argument that, unlike the judeo-christian god, the god of islam is not a father. that is to say, at its inception, islam has “excluded god from the logic of paternity” (104). this provocative gesture doubles benslama’s project: one, if the god of islam is not a father, then what exactly is he and what part does he play? two, as benslama puts its, “how can we conceptualize the question of the father in a religion in which god is not the father?” (105). to address the latter question, benslama rereads the figure of abraham and his first born son, ishmael. while nowadays one accepts ishmael as an ancestor of the arabs, this was not always the case. as benslama points out, it was not until the birth of islam that ishmael becomes an arab. to be more precise, it was not until muhammad, long after ishmael’s life, uttered the putatively constative phrase, “ishmael was an arab,” that this genealogy gets constructed and the father put into place. muhammad doesn’t merely discover some lost truth about the essence of the arabs’ origin―nor does he interpret it―he rather reads backwards into their lost b o o k r e v i e w : reading backwards s2 (2009): 98 origin and makes ishmael a father. in this manner, then, the father comes about through a work of construction―a speech act. at the place where no father exists, muhammad’s performative utterance supplements this lack of essence with a work of fiction. in so doing, or better, so saying, muhammad appropriates for the arabs what is not quite proper. this retrospective construction already signals an impossible father at the origin of islam. but in order to present his work’s most provocative thesis concerning the father, benslama interestingly turns his attention to the mothers of the monotheistic traditions, sarah and hagar. as benslama claims, the question of the woman in islam repeatedly articulates itself through his book, and an entire chapter is devoted to islam’s “other woman,” in addition to a fascinating reading of scheherazade’s use of fiction in her desire to preserve life. turning to genesis, benslama argues that because isaac’s conception occurs through divine intervention―god intervenes in order to impregnate the barren sarah―the god of the judeo-christian tradition functions as an exception, unbound by natural law. the conception of ishmael, however, occurs very naturally between abraham and hagar. whereas abraham is the “symbolic father” in judaism and christianity, he is simply the “real father” of islam. so if abraham naturally fathers ishmael, then allah functions in a very different way than the god of the other monotheistic traditions. the “god of islam is not an originary father,” notes benslama, “he is the impossible: trans-paternal [hors père]” (125). just how, then, is the god of islam impossible? as benslama puts it, the fact remains that the god of islam is connected neither with a sexual relation, nor with its absence of spiritualization through symbolic filiation. rather, this god should be seen as being in the background of relation and non-relation; he is the incommensurable withdrawal of the no-place, through which the place of the father finds its opening. god is the originary withdrawal of the father. (126) benslama locates the structure of this impossible originary withdrawal in a “mechanism” that suspends the father, the son and the origin through an impossible withholding that he nevertheless writes out: “there is, there is not” [il y a, il n’y a pas]. and because this impossible articulates the “real of the origin,” benslama uncovers an invariant which he nicely extends: “there is that there is not,” “there is a there is not,” “there is there is not.” these various permutations each repeat the same thing and reach the “limit of writing the origin,” a limit that “constitutes the radical alterity of every origin” or, in other words, the other (132). turning to benslama’s own work, it’s interesting to note how psychoanalysis handles the impossible through a freudian construction. in the last chapter of his work, entitled “within himself,” benslama retrieves a concept of the transfer (naqala) in the ethical treatise of the eleventh-century philosopher ibn miskawayh in order to bring out a constitutive difference built into identity and identification. locating a transfer in the filiation between father and son, miskawayh claims that the father “sees” himself in the son―or more true to the arabic, the father sees “another himself” (huwa huwa). the father’s identity is transferred, claims miskawayh, to the b o o k r e v i e w : reading backwards s2 (2009): 99 son, whose body provides an exterior place for the extension of the father’s identity. importantly, the arabic word for transfer, naqala, can also mean translation and transmission.3 benslama provides a fine anthropomorphic reading of the transfer of another self (huwa huwa) in which he examines how identity is achieved through filiation. the immediate stakes of this transfer is nothing short of man’s (in)capacity to identify with god’s essence, that is, god’s identity within himself. benslama focuses on the name that miskawayh gives to this transfer, huwa huwa, one of the many names of allah. in arabic, huwa is both the third person singular and a proper name for god and the qur’an consistently refers to god as he. it is also helpful to note as well that the arabic word for essence and identity (huwiya) is derived directly from this name of god, the third person singular huwa. yet each of these cases of identity is brought about by recourse to something else. god’s huwa huwa is doubled in the other self of man who engenders a son, making him a doubled “he”―man and father. this identity is made possible only through its reduplication: “the principle of human identity is to be separated in two,” says benslama. but, at the same time, this doubling also inscribes an impossibility: “through the son, the father is confronted with something like the possibility of identifying with the impossible” (275). importantly, miskawayh does not specify precisely how this transfer comes about. for instance, where exactly in the son does the father see and recognize himself? the eyes? the hands? the voice? underneath the transmission of an entire self lie particular traits, material characteristics that both support, yet can also undermine, the recognition of one’s self. this identification is made possible and impossible through the manifestation of the traits shared between father and child. and while these markers allow for an identification to occur, they can also disrupt the process: the relation god/man becomes a double game of doubling thanks to the child, because god’s huwa huwa is doubled by the huwa huwa of the man-father once he engenders a child-son, while this child becomes the mediating factor―the unitary characteristic [trait unaire] (einziger zug) to use the freudian concept―that makes the two sides of the equation similar. (275) man qua father becomes “another himself” through child qua son. benslama sets up the anthropological transmission of a trait in terms of analogy: “the man-father becomes huwa huwa through his child-son, as god is huwa huwa in himself.” in this way, man-father assures his identification with god’s essence through an indirect recognition of self in the child-son, who can only function as a “model of god’s identify” rather than his essence (275). benslama’s appropriation and writing out of the arabic expression for “another self” (huwa huwa) ends up grounding the transfer’s imaginary procedures within a surface, a crucial move towards the analytic kind of work that freud calls construction. rather than leave the transfer at the level of the father’s “seeing” himself outside the self, benslama’s text uncovers a doubling of the very name huwa 3 all references to arabic are taken from the hans wehr dictionary of modern written arabic, 3rd ed., ed. j. milton cowan (ithaca: spoken language services, 1976). b o o k r e v i e w : reading backwards s2 (2009): 100 huwa at the heart of this process. literally translated as “he is he” or simply “he he,” this repetition of huwa identity produces at least two selves―huwa (1), huwa (2). because benslama locates freud’s einziger zug in the child, he appears to leave transmission at the anthropological level of filiation. yet it is through an unusual, though brief, turn to arabic calligraphy that benslama extends his anthropomorphic reading of identification to the use of traits in a literal writing and reading. despite his effort to locate this transmission in a human genealogy “constituted as a chain of unary traits,” this section of benslama’s own text bears its own traits that ground this discussion of an anthropological linking within a literality (276). thus another kind of transfer enters a writing that “mirrors” the huwa to itself, with impossible effects. “what is it about the identical that is so important?” asks benslama, before proceeding to an identical writing, “in islam it is one of the principal names of god. god is, in fact, called: huwa huwa, which literally means he he, or he is himself. often, in arabic calligraphy, we find the word ‘identical’ represented by the mirror form of the word huwa” (273). benslama inserts the following figure to illustrate this mirror form: to make things trickier, recall that arabic is written and read in the opposite direction as english. the figure on the right side is the correct way to write huwa. the figure on the left, of course, is the mirror image, whose shape does not spell anything in arabic and is, strictly speaking, nonsense. these reversed traits might lack signification but they also lay bare a literality beyond the letter that opens up god the impossible to the possibility of a construction. god’s identity, that is, his “absolute sovereignty,” says benslama, becomes “represented” by huwa’s doubling in its mirror image. but “once the doubled letter huwa is interlaced, the mirror is canceled [annulé]” (274). annulé may also be translated as “voided” or “written off.” it indicates not a total suppression of the mirror, but rather its emptying out, which subsequently introduces another surface. the space in which huwa is written at first correctly, and then in reverse, grounds these letters and traits on the two-dimensional surface of the page, which is most certainly not a mirror. and if the mirror exists, it does so in an imaginary register as an object whose properties of reversal are assumed in order to make a writing in reverse possible. although it neatly creates a mirror effect, the asymmetric figure on the left irrevocably challenges this “absolute sovereignty” by rendering its very name illegible. b o o k r e v i e w : reading backwards s2 (2009): 101 to be clear, this illegibility does not grind benslama’s work to a halt―far from it. like the “mechanism” that suspends the father, the writing of huwa huwa makes the impossible manifest through a backwards reading. unlike the letters h and w, those that make up huwa―ه (ha) and و (wa)―are asymmetric and orientable, that is, they require a specific handedness in order to be read and become immediately illegible once their orientation is reversed. hold up the letters alla in the mirror and you’ll have no trouble reading what’s written. not so for huwa; its doubling as a mirror image does not neatly replicate the arabic word for he or god. rather, one asymmetric figure is placed next to another, producing the impossible through an enantiomorphism between the two―each side is identical yet incongruent.4 while each figure shares the same intrinsic properties, their difference becomes obvious once one side is superimposed upon the other. because there is no actual mirror here, these figures remain asymmetrical mismatches of one another inscribed onto the surface of benslama’s text. they are identical yet not the same―an impossibility brought out through a literal construction. by dint of benslama’s own text, the impossible “absolute sovereignty” of god is no longer left at the level of representation. rather, its very writing in the figure above presents the impossibility. it is here, where an imaginary mirror’s reversal uncovers a trait beyond the word and the letter, that i indicate a construction in analysis in benslama’s book. in this reading backwards, an impossibility which is at first merely interpreted becomes literally constructed. 4 this kind of incongruent but identical spatiality is exactly what prevents the pre-critical kant from telling apart one hand from the other. kant’s incapacity to think through the difference between his right and left hands requires him to move from a leibnizian analysis situs to newtonian absolute space, paving the way for the transcendental aesthetic of the first critique. this transfer from an intrinsic to an extrinsic view of space allows kant to read the difference between right and left. see kant’s essay “concerning the ultimate ground of the differentiation of directions in space” in theoretical philosophy, 1755-1770, ed. david walford (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003) 361-372. milner-prose.indd s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 3 (2010): 106-113 j e a n c l a u d e m i l n e r translated by john cleary p r o s e r e d e e m e d t here always comes a time when one is tempted to say: nothing took place. this moment is mallarméan. it is not to be confused with the moment of the philosopher who says: what you believe, it did not take place, but actually something else did. think of plato. the dialogues,after all, describe an athenian world where the peloponnesian war, the plague and the reign of the thirty tyrants did not take place. therefore, what plato had seen with his very eyes, and which thucydides considered to be more important than the war in troy or the mediterranean wars, is never spoken of. of course this depends on a decision. counter to thucydides, whom in all likelihood he read, and xenophon, thucydides’ successor, with whom he was no doubt familiar, plato only recognizes the life and death of socrates as having taken place. the plague never happened, but socrates did, and this is the pattern of a large number of philosophical propositions-whatever names are substituted for those of the plague or socrates, since the names often change. whether platonists or not in general, philosophers always tend to be so in this respect, and nothing is so pleasing to them as the shifting of emphasis, granting or removing the mark of having taken place depending on their temperament. but mallarmé is an entirely different matter.1 he says that nothing took place. the thesis is explicit in a throw of the dice…and i would argue that it is articulated in a way that is as distinct as it is obscure in the sonnet the virginal….the 19th century did not take place, declares mallarmé; none of its unforgettable crises (crises of verse or social crises) happened. on this basis, poetry alone may take place: as a book, if the book was able to exist, and if it does not exist (which is the thesis of a throw of the dice…), then as a verse. for there is only ever one verse: the verse that is said, in the moment that it is said. this is why, in the absence of being able 1. translator’s note: all translations of mallarmé are taken from stéphane mallarmé, collected poems and other verse, trans. e.h and a.m blackmore (oxford: oxford university press, 2006) and divagations, trans. barbara johnson (cambridge: harvard university press, 2007) except where i have translated them directly as indicated by a reference to the french text. milner: prose redeemed s3 (2010): 107 to establish the book as an institution of reading and ceaseless diction, those who wish to declare to the universe that poetry is nevertheless possible cannot avoid indefinitely delaying, by way of numerous parenthesis, without a further thought for the alexandrine twelve, the concluding stance of his last syntagm—“throw of the dice”—replying to the distant first ”—“never.” much like the dice, whose being is decided in the very moment that it is thrown, however long it tumbles. such a position rests on a doctrine of poetry. that is to say, on a doctrine of prose. mallarmé’s doctrine, a phenomenology of verse, is well known: its first figure, hugo, thought that prose spoke with eloquence about history and philosophy: “all prose, philosophy, eloquence, history”2; in short, prose eloquently says what takes place (history) in light of all possible knowledge (philosophy); therefore if poetry is to say something, it must thus say what takes place, otherwise it says nothing. yet, for hugo, poetry does say something. consequently he believed that it was the duty of poetry to commandeer the entire domain of prose. the axiom is clear; prose speaks of what takes place. mallarmé does not accept this: insofar as it speaks of what takes place, prose is in the end identical to the newspaper. for what takes place adheres to the form of a day (virginal, vibrant and beautiful); it was hugo’s belief that this day was that of the uprising (the one depicted in les misérables), but for the true modernists (following baudelaire, the second figure, the grieving figure, but also despite baudelaire, because of the futility of grief) there is no such day and no uprising (except “in view of every result that is non human”3). if there is no uprising, not even its defeat, then the day (virginal, vibrant and beautiful) is nothing; in being nothing, it is indistinguishable from fashion. every actual newspaper, insofar it claims to pertain to the day, and therefore all prose, the newspaper being its catchment, is the latest fashion, the real grimace of the beautiful day. all that takes place falls under this prescription; since it speaks of what takes place and even when it thinks it is discussing history and philosophy, the most eloquent prose speaks of nothing but fineries, maraschinos and dutiful negresses from bengal. prose alone speaks of what takes place, yet it does so as the newspaper, but the newspaper does not speak and nothing in it takes place. consequently, if there is no day (and there is not) then prose never says anything. we can see why, in the wake of rue de rome,4 gide would place his own prose and the novel (where the novel of voyages represents all possible novels) under the spell of urien, who shares his initial letter with ulysses (every novel is an odyssey) while his last presents the void as the secret nothingness of prose. to say nothing of paludes, ‘pas-lu-de-romans’[the novels un-read]. or journal, whose title is indebted more to mallarmé than to amiel. 2. stéphane mallarmé, œuvres complètes, tome 2 (paris: gallimard, 2003) 205. 3. mallarmé, stéphane mallarmé, collected poems and other verse, trans. e.h and a.m blackmore (oxford: oxford university press, 2006) 179. 4. tn: the rue de rome was mallarmé’s residence in paris on the rue de rome and was a literary salon that gide and valéry, amongst others, attended. milner: prose redeemed s3 (2010): 108 we can see how, in the wake of rue de rome, valéry could become the faithful servant of illusions, and of the most meagre one of all: the third republic, precisely because he shared exactly the same belief about it as maurras. by granting that any given thing takes place, poetry will inevitably collapse into the newspaper, and the latter into fashion; the latest fashion, as the truth of the legend of the centuries. only a decision that is absolute allows poetry to distance itself, a distance that is infinite: “on high perhaps as far away as a place merges with the beyond…a constellation, etc.”5 if the newspaper speaks of what takes place, then it must be said that, on the basis of poetry, nothing takes place. 1830 did not take place, or 1848, or 1870, or 1871, or anything at all. “there is no present, no—a present does not exist.”6 hence the days meld into one another; and none may be said to be virginal, vibrant and beautiful; today is nonexistent. this is what mallarmé calls boredom. the place of poetry is described as “cold with neglect and disuse.”7 as far as poetry is concerned, prose speaks of the everyday and is no different from the newspaper. but the newspaper never says anything that goes beyond the latest fashion and the everyday is nothingness (“headlines whose task it is to propagate faith in the nothingness that is the everyday”8). therefore, poetry must say something different. it is not enough that it does so in a different manner, what it speaks of must be different. it must speak in a different way of something different. but this something different is by definition what does not take place. it is all the more so because it does not take place. taken from plato, by way of hegel, this is named the idea (and not the ideal). passers-by are therefore treated with contempt, because they mirror the present. hence the disdain for rimbaud: “considerable passer-by.”9 one reads in littré: “the real meaning of this word is: what should considered, what merits consideration. it should almost never be employed beyond this meaning…” furthermore, it is emphasized that one should never commit the error of making “considerable” 5. mallarmé, stéphane mallarmé, collected poems and other verse, trans. e.h and a.m blackmore (oxford: oxford university press, 2006) 180-181. 6. it is true that mallarmé admits a proviso: he implies, except if the crowd appears. but only to add straight away that the crowd in fact does not appear: “a present does not exist… for lack of the crowd appearing, for lack of—everything.” tn: the quote that the preceding footnote by milner references, the quote in the footnote itself and the translation of both are from stéphane mallarmé, divagations, 218. 7. mallarmé, stéphane mallarmé collected poems and other verse, 181. 8. mallarmé, divagations, p 218. tn: i have modified here the translation by barbara johnson who renders it as, “…those all-paris occasions whose job it is to propagate faith in the quotidian nothingness… ” the original french reads, “ …des premier-paris charges de divulger une foi en le quotidien néant.” i have translated premier-paris as ‘headlines’ because premier-paris was a parisian newspaper in the 19th century and the term referred more generally to the leading front cover article of a newspaper. this rendering also fits better in the context of milner’s discussion of mallarmé. 9. mallarmé, œuvres complètes, tome 2 (paris: gallimard, 2003) 121. milner: prose redeemed s3 (2010): 109 a synonym of “great.” it often seems as though mallarmé only employed the first adjective to make it clear that he was withholding the second from rimbaud. let us add to this a hidden comparison. by means of the allusion to the sidereal that harbours mallarmé’s consideration of him, rimbaud appears as a celestial body. this is what the word influence refers to (“at least…he exerts an influence on recent poetic events…”10). but this body is a comet and not a star. as opposed to the immobile stars, it passes and moves on to other heavens, just like halley’s comet. the allusion in the first paragraph to “vagueness” should be read as the latin vagus, which refers to roaming. the apparent sparkling from the comet is explosion, intermittency, migration and ultimately extinguishment: “he burst out like a meteor, ignited by no motive other than its own presence, arising and extinguishing alone,”11 —“alone,” just as no comet forms a constellation; “by no motive”: meaning that its presence traces no delineable motif, unlike the great bear. hence the presence of the crowd, as enthusiastic about rimbaud as they are about comets, which figure, unlike the stars, within the realm of current affairs. rimbaud took place, but in the sense that belongs to the newspaper and fashion, and therefore in the sense that nothing takes place. like all that pertains to the newspaper, he belongs to the world of the commodity and money. his fate as a merchant only reveals a necessity masked by several beautiful verses; hence the conclusion about the author’s royalties. it would perhaps be going too far, but i doubt it, to decipher in the word considerable—which is linked to the sidereal—the lexical inversion of the word constellation. constellations are made up of stars, not any old sidereal body—a planet or comet. that rimbaud is “considerable” means only that, to this “cold constellation,” which alone is an exception to the idea that nothing took place, he is entirely irrelevant. mallarmé also clarifies it in an inverse manner: “everything would have existed just as it did without this considerable passer-by.”12 but as something may exist only as an exception to nothing taking place, and, as the place of this exception is a constellation, rimbaud does not enter into this constellation. he is undoubtedly a sidereal body, but not stellar; considerable but not constellated. beyond those like rimbaud who chose money and apostasy in favour of verse, poets and those who think they are right would never refute mallarmé’s axioms and definitions. because, from the standpoint of poetry, prose qua speech says nothing since, to the extent that it does speak, it is poetry. therefore what prose says, if it is not poetry, must be nothing. but in voicing this nothing that poetry does not say, it is itself nothing. even when it speaks of poetry, even when it presents to the universe this nothingness that, as prose, it itself is, it is indistinguishable from the newspaper, no matter what it utters. 10. mallarmé, mallarmé, divagations, 4. 11.mallarmé, mallarmé, divagations, 65 [trans modified]. 12. mallarmé, mallarmé,œuvres complètes, tome 2 (paris: gallimard, 2003) 121. milner: prose redeemed s3 (2010): 110 those who write prose and argue that it must be something also believe that it does not converge with the language of the newspaper. in short, they reject mallarmé’s axioms. he would assert: nothing from the newspaper takes place. the prose writer affirms: something from the newspaper takes place, but if they are to withstand the mallarméan assault, they must add that the newspaper itself is incapable of expressing this taking place. for something to be nothingness, it is not a sufficient condition that it takes the form of the everyday, today, the newspaper or herodotean and thucydidean history. but there is one condition that is necessary to grasp, that which, within this something, surpasses nothingness: prose must surpass the language of today, the language of the newspaper, history and the everyday. since nothing in the newspaper took place, mallarmé concluded that prose is nothing, because, in the end, all prose amounts to the language of the newspaper. he also came to another conclusion. he argued that because the nineteenth century became the century of the newspaper, nothing in the nineteenth century took place. therefore the question has any century taken place? and especially the question did our century take place? merge with the question does prose exist? here the russians are important. in their language, revolution and poetry summoned and, as it were, defied one another to proof themselves worthy of the task. but this challenge itself veiled another. just like blok, and following pushkin, all the poets were convinced that poetry alone had the power to speak of revolution— for or against it—because it alone was able to say what takes place at the very height of its taking place. was it not pushkin who showed that verse alone was able to become the language of the decembrist rebellion, just as it alone was able to create the language of a true love? there was no need to renounce mallarmé. it sufficed to interpret him within a negative theology; “nothing took place,” he said, meaning: nothing took place so long as there is no revolution or new love. certainly there were a number of heretics: not poetry, they said, especially not that, since it is never anything but the dreamings of a russia asleep and orating, asleep, about itself—but prose. but prose in the style of the french, unceasingly alert, and which does not dream. they were misunderstood. the adventures of this double challenge form a tale of pain and beauty, of bloody deaths and pitiful survival, a tale that constitutes the novel of chivalry, the holy grail or don quixote, for the 20 th century. not even the figure of the terrifying enchanter, who was perhaps merely a vicious charlatan, is absent: joseph stalin. and because of him it all came to a standstill; if there is revolution, and because there is revolution, nothing will affect language. it will not change. it seems that the time for an epilogue has come. who will recite it and on what terms? the question is open. some claim to be able to settle the matter completely with statistics: the number of victims, the identities of executioners and black books of every variety. it is unlikely that this suffices since it remains within the milner: prose redeemed s3 (2010): 111 register of the newspaper in its most impoverished form: the language of numbers and names. whether it would be sufficient or not, an intervention that is inscribed in the russian language itself is nonetheless necessary. it appears that brodsky had planned to be the one to recite the epilogue. nevertheless, in the hands of brodsky the epilogue erases each of the preceding episodes. in flight from byzantium, he declares that everything, meaning everything important, was there already before 1914. it was all part of that universe which he calls civilization and which, above all, produced the great russians: blok, akhmatova, mandelstram, tsvetaeva, pasternak, mayakovsky too—each in their own way, which distinguished them from one another and sometimes tore them apart. the will to render civilization worthless compared to what comes after 1914, and which bears no resemblance to what had come before, whether it is called the revolution, history, the world, in short: what takes place— this is the idol of the 20th century. to revere it is a mistake; one that a number of writers committed and through them the mistake became a crime. having succumbed to the idol, they themselves became one: aragon, neruda, brecht, etc., the names of criminals. to the extent that the 20th century took place, it admits here but a single definition: it is the century that halted civilization, which systematically destroyed it, tirelessly demolishing any monument that could testify to it. this is another way of saying that the 20th century only accomplished a single work that was peculiar to it, the ussr, which is simply the abolished place of civilization. the imperative is therefore clear; act, write and think all the while reminding those unable to fathom it that nothing took place and especially not the ussr. the magic of writing is precisely what allows this unexpected juxtaposition: the absolute contemporaneousness of brodsky (born in 1940) and akhmatova. this is what confirms, what demonstrates that the 20th century did not take place (but simply, childhood, love, reading, unhappiness, etc.: everything that this century shares with all the others). for if it had taken place then so did all the brutal events, wars, revolutions, massacres and camps, that distinguished it from every other century, and if this is what takes place then poetry does not. but simply prose, meaning: shalamov. he is the stumbling block. his axiom is, the 20th century took place and the ussr was something because the camps existed. but to render it in the russian language he argues that poetry is not enough; that it was never enough. what is needed is prose or, in other words, to write just like the russians do not know how to, but instead like flaubert. kolyma is to be treated as flaubert had treated carthage (the tales of kolyma are a modern salammbo), not because the camps are distant, but because they are the essence of proximity, the milestone without which no distance can be measured, neither in time or space. but if shalamov is right, then mallarmé had always been wrong, and brodsky after him. hence the importance for brodsky of being silent. to not ever utter the offending name. this clarifies the origin of the syllogism: prose must not exist, particularly milner: prose redeemed s3 (2010): 112 not shalamov, because if prose exists then the 20th century took place and if shalamov exists then the ussr took place. but the 20th century cannot have taken place, or the ussr. hence brodsky argued persistently that there is no russian prose after dostoevsky. posed in this way, nothing in the 20th century will have surpassed the possibilities of the mallarméan newspaper. shalamov will have been nothing more or less than the replacement for the latest fashion. to ignore him is a duty. the theorem on existence the 19th century took place was formulated by the author of l’écrivain pensif13 following a study of prose. that stands to reason, for example, with respect to the french language which mallarmé had hoped to stamp with his seal. all the more so as something finally happened to this language that had stubbornly and recklessly weathered so many fractures. moulded and remoulded by jurists for their own ends, it was long associated with the processes of the state and thus thought of as the consort to the nation-state, just as the greek language was believed to be the consort of the polis. so much so that under the rule of the mallarméan scission, apart from poetry, it hardly proffered anything in the form of prose, other than the canon of a cultured bureaucracy (the reserved rhetoric of the new french review). however, the nation-state surrendered, debased or pitiful, or both at once. just as after alexander the polis turned into a pantomime. consequently, the french language found itself increasingly and completely internalized. especially since the commodity evidently chose other idioms. in the french language today, the univocal nature of the questions of the century and prose takes on a pure form. whoever examines whether the 20th century took place in this language will discover that they are interrogating the possibility de facto and the legitimacy de jure of prose. those who ask if there exists a french prose, one that is modern but not in the sense of being the last fashion, are investigating the 20th century. this could be conceived in the negative, as proved by the strict mallarméans. to reply in the affirmative is a rarer decision. at the horizon of the affirmation, the subject no longer speaks of the century other than to speak of prose; it no longer speaks of prose other than to grasp the century. but this is in order to grasp the newspaper in a language that would in no way depend on the newspaper. to never begin by conceding to the nothingness of what would be able to be inscribed in the form of today, and not even if empirical newspapers treat it so. to never begin by affirming that prose is unable to surpass itself. therefore, one question poses itself. which levers will be proven powerful enough to liberate today from the battered carcass of the newspaper? to liberate what takes place from the news? to liberate the vibrancy of everyday life from nothingness? for people in times gone by, the thesis that there could be a kind of everyday life that was not a nothingness fell within the domain of history and politics. only recently was it still believed that, at the horizon of modernity, the newspaper and history could by right be superimposed onto one another—be it at that infinitely distant point that only a great novel could attain or in its absence, a great man, or worse, a 13. tn: the author referred to here is natacha michel. milner: prose redeemed s3 (2010): 113 great party. malraux and sartre attest to this. but today people have doubts about history and the party (these may be the same doubt). they must therefore look to other terrains. i know of those for whom something from the newspaper takes place that can be said in a language freed from the newspaper and for whom this is named “thought,” others for whom it is called “novel,” others for whom it is called “voyage” and others still for whom it is called “truth” or “metaphor,” which are not very different. it is from the standpoint of thought, novel, voyage, truth, metaphor or anything else that inhabits this role that today can once again matter. it is from this standpoint that considerable passers by exist. that is to say, that each day is distinct, that boredom did not perpetually shine, that prose is possible. in other words, the 20th century did take place, as each one of us did, do and will take place. drigo.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 9 (2016): 133-145 l a r i s s a d r i g o f o l d i n g a n d u n f o l d i n g t h e i n f i n i t e space-time relations in mallarmé’s un coup de dés introduction f rom the point of view of its form, un coup de dés has been analyzed from many different perspectives. kristeva1 analyzes its syntactic procedures; scherer2 presents a grammatical description of mallarmé’s language; meschonnic3 focuses on orality; murat4 on verse; the study undertaken by greer cohn5 deals with the poem as a unity, its rhythm and its place in mallarmé’s œuvre, while, at the same time performing an analysis of the syntax, the vocabulary, the form, and the themes, including the meaning of each letter. the most recent analysis comes from quentin meillassoux,6 who finds in the poem a code that would explain the manner by which mallarmé inserted chance into his creation.7 but there remains a point still unexplored by commentators: how does mallarmé think or formalize, inside his poem, the relationship between chance and the infinite? in the drafts of igitur we discover that chance always performs its own idea, indicating that the throw of dice is defined precisely as that which allows the infinite to be: “this was to take place in the combinations of the infinite face to face with the absolute”.8 in this work, we will analyze and describe how the infinite was formalized in un coup de dés. we will begin with the formal innovations that the poet himself highlighted in the preface of his work, such as the double page and the division of motifs. the evolution of the formal and spatial resources employed by mallarmé — the blanks inserted on the page are concrete spaces that provide the narrative with its space but which also move, process or present the spacing of un coup de dés as mobile — illustrate a path whereby the unique space of poetry, the space of the page, is used more and more to become a fundamental element of its formal constitution. if poetry takes place, it is because it is capable of making space a condition of its evental possibility; that is, space is not a simple given, but an element that prolarissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 134 duces stories, a condition that allows poetry to take place, that produces qualitative transformations, that make it possible for something to happen. in short, it makes history as it makes a story. the same can be asserted about time. un coup de dés takes place in “eternal circumstances” since if a specific time had been appointed, the poem would lose its general, universal, and cosmological ambition. to be the poetic explication of the earth the poem must be capable of seizing “the relation, between times, rare or multiple” and thus “expanding, simplifying the world”.9 in eternal circumstances, time is always multiple and composed of divergent series. it is thus capable of providing the conditions of all possible experience or making the possibilities of experience infinite. it is also rare since each story, each small event in each person’s life, takes place in a singular combination of multiple times. the rare time, however, is not the time of particular experience: what is rare is that time presents itself not as one, but as multiple — as infinite. rare is the time of an event that contains inexhaustible possibilities in a unique instant. for a poem to take place inside “the combinations of the infinite face to face with the absolute” it must be able to identify the eternal and minimal conditions of all possible experience, of any possible event; and thus from these minimal conditions discover the “unholy” formula that makes the production of the infinite in the book possible. in other words, the infinite can be disclosed in a form because this form is constructed through an elaboration of multiple spatio-temporal relations intended to contain (potentially) endless experiential possibilities. where does time start? where does space end? before unearthing this letter, i had wondered how a book could be infinite. the only way i could surmise was that it be a cyclical, or a circular volume. a volume whose last page would be identical to the first, so that one might go on indefinitely.10 this eminently mallarméan question guides the adventure of borges’ story  ‘the garden of forking paths’. but upon discovering the manuscript of ts’ui pen, the narrator sees himself confronted with another way of making an infinite book. in the manuscript of the novel the narrator reads: “i leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths”. faced with this affirmation we could think of mallarmé’s assertion in the preface of un coup de dés: “today or at least without presuming upon the future that will emerge from this — nothing or perhaps what merely verges on art”.11 the narrator continues these speculations by telling us that the phrase “several futures (not all)” suggests an image of a forking in time, rather than in space. a complete rereading of the story confirms this theory. in all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the virtually-impossible-to-disentangle work of ts’ui pen, the charlarissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 135 acter chooses — simultaneously — all of them. he thereby creates several futures, several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.12 it is thus as if all the possible futures of his art were somehow prefigured or present in the work at the time of its completion. the garden of forking paths is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids ts’ui pen the merest mention of its name. to always omit one word, to employ awkward metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word. it is at any rate, the tortuous path chosen by the devious ts’ui pen at each and every one of the turnings of his inexhaustible novel. i have compared hundreds of manuscripts, i have corrected the errors introduced through the negligence of copyists, i have reached a hypothesis for the plan of that chaos, i have reestablished, or believe i’ve reestablished, its fundamental order — i have translated the entire work; and i know that not once does the word ‘time’ appear. the explanation is obvious: the garden of forking paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by ts’ui pen. unlike newton and schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. that fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. in most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but i do not; in others, i do and you do not; in others still, we both do. in this one, which the favoring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, i say these same words, but i am an error, a ghost.13 it is first with irony that the narrator seeks to explain what might yet be difficult, strange and distant to the reader. he quotes schopenhauer and newton as if the reader were familiar with these authors and could recognize the obvious nature of the explanation. but after explaining that time is composed of multiple sets that intersect or remain unaware of each other, borges, in bringing science and philosophy to life in their concrete dimension, mentions familiar examples which any reader could identify with; placing the player in a time series, he challenges them by introducing a relation of complicity: “you came to my house”. these divergent time series can cross or lose each over; when a character meets another, these encounters or misfortunes are what make stories take place. actually, the multiple temporal series — convergent or divergent, parallel or intersecting at a point in space — are responsible for all the possibilities of events, meetings and misfortunes. chance places us in the same space-time, while another is where the narrator dies, and yet another rattles space and time themselves, and turns the narrator into a ghost. thus, every story requires a minimal condition to start, a chance that causes a spatio-temporal meeting. larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 136 if a time composed of convergent or divergent infinite series is a condition that makes literature infinite and inexhaustible, what can we say about space? where does it start? can it be also infinite? if a book can cause multiple time series to meet, it must be able to contract space — and thus contain all points of the universe. this is what borges described in another story ‘the aleph’: under the step, toward the right, i saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. at first, i thought it was spinning; then i realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. the aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because i could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.14 the aleph is a small circumference of two to three centimeters from where the character observes all the points of cosmic space. and as in ‘the garden of forking paths’, borges’ examples are both imaginary and real, or very familiar: i saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was london), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on calle soler the same tiles i’d seen twenty years before in the entry way of a house in fray bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand.15 the aleph is viewed from all points and from the aleph one sees the entire earth, and from the earth the aleph, and in the aleph again the earth. the character of the text, before starting its description, announces that what he has seen was produced simultaneously, but its description will be successive because language itself is successive. what if the form of a poem could contract space and time such that an infinity of possibilities could, as in the aleph, fit in a restricted and limited space? if ‘the garden of forking paths’ provides us with a description of a temporal infinity, here borges manipulates a spatial infinity. an infinite space is not a boundless space (for this reason the first text is not about space but time) but a space restricted and yet capable of containing all points in the universe, capable of expanding itself, successively, just like language. the first conception of the infinite, which is aristotle’s, or that of common sense, is that what is infinite takes an infinite time to be travelled. but there are other ways of designing the infinite inside a book. and this manner is not exclusively the cyclic book that never ends. here borges describes two: two infinites constituted out of space and time. borges shows us that if space and time are the minimal conditions of all possible experience, a multiple and infinite space-time assures us larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 137 the certainty of the infinity of experience; that is, of an infinite number of possible stories to be told. literature, just like any possible experience, has its source in a temporal series and in a particular space; that is, it is sufficient that two people occupy determined spaces or determined temporal series for a story to take place. the question is how poetry can present its own infinitude through a mise en forme of space and time. so, the question of elaborating a presentation of the infinite concerns what configuration of space-time is capable of presenting its own infinitude. what would the configuration of a poem be, such that it could demonstrate the infinite nature of spacetime and the endless possibilities of literature? from borges, we can conclude that to demonstrate the inexhaustible infinity of literature, the poem must provide the following: the presentation of a potentially infinite series of convergent, divergent, or parallel times that intersect or are unaware of one another; and the presentation, in a restricted space, of a multiplicity of infinite spaces, as if we could observe the infinite space of the cosmos from all points of the universe. a form in the image of a starlit sky in the preface to his poem, mallarmé lists its innovations: the spatialization of reading, the “prismatic subdivisions of the idea”, the double page, and the designs created by its typography. these are the elements that will radically transform the format of the book: “without presuming upon the future that will emerge from this — nothing or perhaps what merely verges on art — let us openly acknowledge the attempt participates, in a way that could not be foreseen, in a number of pursuits that are dear to our time: free verse and the prose poem”.16 the phrase “in a way that could not be foreseen” sufficiently indicates that the poem is as innovative as the prose poem and free verse but that it cannot be confused with either of them.17 it begins with a transformation of the space of the page, causing the breakup of verse. this highly visual design of the poem is referred to as the “prismatic subdivisions of the idea”; it replaces verse with the configuration of this new form. the paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, excepting the succession of others; and, as it is not a question, as it usually is, of regular sound patterns or verses but rather of prismatic subdivisions of the idea.18 the “prismatic subdivisions of the idea” are organized into several motifs according to the print; the images slide into and out of the scene (the sheet of paper); they emerge from the main sentence and revolve around it as a constellation. the motifs are divided into: primary motif: “a throw of dice/will never/abolish/chance”; larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 138 first secondary motif : even when launched in eternal/circumstances/from the depths of a shipwreck (p. 3) / “though it be” (p. 4)/ “the master” (p. 5)/ “were it to exist/were it to begin and were it to cease/were it to be numbered/were to illumine” (p. 10)/ “nothing/will have taken place/but the place” (p. 11) “except/perhaps/a constellation” (p. 12). second secondary motif  : “as if ” (p. 7) “it was the number/it would (p. 10) adjacent motif (p. 7) : “as if/as if ”, which has several ramifications. the two secondary motifs have in turn their own adjacent motifs. the fourth and fifth double page develop a hypothesis introduced by the term “soit” [though it be], “that/the abyss […]”. the 6th, 7th and 8th pages develop a prismatic subdivision of the first secondary motif, describing the hesitancy of the master. the 11th page develops another prismatic subdivision of the first motif, nothing/will have taken place/but the place: “of the memorable crisis […]”. the 12th page develops a final prismatic subdivision of the first secondary motif “a constellation”: “on high/perhaps […]”. the second secondary motif has its adjacent motif, or its development, on the 10th page: “born of the stars […] / worse / no / more nor less / but as much indifferently”. the secondary motifs bend the main motif. then they divide and unfold in turn. adjacent motifs develop and bend the secondary motifs. thus mallarmé creates several temporal and spatial layers. the typography of the letters perfectly illustrates this division; the poem develops from larger letters towards smaller ones. the smaller letters occupy the middle of the poem, and thus are the deepest layer of the text, the fold or centre around which the poem-constellation revolves. each letter, with its special typography, is the distinct twinkle of words-stars. each letter marks a distinct spatio-temporal series. the poem is then crossed by several layers, textures and intensities. each typeface marks both a temporal and a spatial series (mallarmé distinguishes between different phrases that occupy spaces determined within the development of the poem); one texture, as it folds and unfolds or divides the motifs; an intensity (a tone, marked by the size of the letters); and a “brightness” (a “flicker” marked by normal letters in bold or italic characters), indicating the distinct importance of motifs. these divisions provide a depth, both temporal and spatial. they realize a temporal and spatial distension and contraction. first, the division of the motifs distend time, as the double page enlarges the space of the page. then, in one single page, several times that were spread across the pages are then mixed, juxtaposed, and cross themselves. the main motif forms a sentence, its reading has a time, but this sentence is cut and crossed by many other motifs throughout the poem. and this operation is repeated with regards to the secondary and adjacent motifs. it is as if each motif corresponds to a spatio-temporal series, like a verse, placed on a straight larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 139 line. but from the moment the motifs spatialize and mix, the “prismatic subdivisions of the idea” contract to fit into a smaller space, presenting them in a swoop on a single page. thus each page (with the exception of the episode of the “solitary distraught feather” where letters are smaller, indicating the “depth” or deepest layer of the poem) is crossed by multiple time series. there is therefore a first movement of development of motifs through division. motifs are unfolded and elongated in several phases. there are multiple temporal series that nevertheless do not converge but diverge since secondary and adjacent motifs contradict the assertion of the title phrase, which affirms that a throw of dice will never abolish chance, while the motifs speculate on this possibility. thus at the very moment these multiple sets, these temporal series, mix on the same page they converge producing distinct effects; this convergence contracts spacetime, presenting it as divided and multiplied on the same page in a confined space. by dividing the poem into motifs, mallarmé created multiple configurations of space-time. time and space are divided before being prolonged or distended along the pages. on the one hand, the divisions of the motifs develop or distend time, like a camera whose frame-rate has been slowed. on the other hand, these motifs are mixed, as if the time which had been dilated had contracted again. each turned page reproduces and resumes the same movement, as if each were the performance of the whole poem, of a poem that had turned itself around itself like a whirlpool. through the divisions of the motifs juxtaposed on the same page, on several occasions, mallarmé makes the poem the act of extending and simplifying the world through these multiple or rare space-time configurations. in ‘the book as spiritual instrument’, mallarmé suggests that the role of the poet is precisely to transform literature in its objective form, the book: “the folds will perpetuate a mark, intact, inviting one to open or close the page, according to the master”.19 knowing that the poem tells the story of the sinking master who wants to vanquish chance, the question would be whether on the formal or visual level, the motifs are also ordered so as to vanquish chance. if in narrative terms chance arises from its own negation, or from the impossibility of its being denied, the poem visually performs the condition that makes possible the appearance of chance, from the unique number, which in fact is not a number because it is infinite. on the narrative level, this condition is fulfilled when the siren, this fictional being, dissolves the bounds of the infinite and opens the space of the poem to the appearance of the number. in formal visual terms, chance arises when literature develops and creates a space without frontiers. these operations are accomplished through the spacing of the page and the double page. in the passage from one side to another of the double page, the “siren episode” illustrates this movement of expansion of poetic space and the multiplication of time:  in its siren twist long enough to slap with impatient terminal scales forked larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 140 chance is conquered by the master who orders the folding and unfolding of the motifs for each page, but chance is present here too insofar as it establishes the relationship between the series and allows the combination and the meeting of the motifs. to the extent that the presentation of the poem is that of its infinite power, chance does nothing but multiply this power, since any act — any event in literature — takes place thanks to a basic condition: the qualitative power of space-time. in this passage, time forks, just as it does in borges’ text, in a movement that can be compared to the twist of a siren or a page being turned. and time bifurcates through the double page. it is for this reason that in literature “nothing / will have taken place / but the place”. literature is the place where no chance is vain and all chance is chance defeated because it necessarily leaves open a space for the other possibilities of literature — and thereby expands the real. all chance is a hypothesis that, similarly to those in the poem, makes a story. in these circumstances, chance is no longer the other of reason, nor is it what prevents and blocks the poetic faculty. chance is therefore the engine of another logic — a poetic, creative logic — that transforms the poem into a constellation, an image of the universe. the division of the motifs will create the conditions for chance to be the engine of a concept that is “in formation” and presented in its limitless power. the count or the thought moves in such a manner that it is “keeping vigil / doubting / rolling / shining and meditating”. its form is that of the poem, oscillating, rotating or even doubting, and achieving a “count”, a constellation that is the infinite series of its own possibilities, its multiple subsequent envelopings: the folding and unfolding of chance. the ballet of words-stars: to fold and to unfold in mallarmé’s reflections on the book in divagations, as well as in the manuscript for the book, we find several clues that will guide us in the analysis of the fold. the fold allows the book to establish relations and it is from these relations that the book can compose an idea, which completely escapes the universal story. folding — which is more than a contribution to the creation of the poem’s rhythm and more than what distinguishes the book from the newspaper (where each column presents a distinct fact), but instead a “religious index” — contains a secret: “folding is, in relation to the large printed sheet, a sign, quasi-religious: that does not strike so much as its compression, in thickness, offering the miniscule tomb, surely, of the soul”.20 we can then identify “religious index” or the sacred with what makes the book unique, namely the ability to lock up, unfold and develop an idea. the fold joins a recurrent metaphor in the poetry of mallarmé, that of the “hymen”, the betrothal mentioned in un coup de dés, the union between the words and the present concept in épouser la notion. in the book, the fold is the “religious” index of a union between larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 141 the world and the book; a union that sees the very possibility of the transposition of the world to the book. the fold works like a veil, each turned page breaks with inviolability, with the virginity of the book, as black ink breaks with the whiteness of the page. each turned page is an unveiling, a revelation, a discovery, an event. it is by reflecting on the fold that mallarmé describes how literature could renew itself by transforming the format of the book: “can there be any end to this; and in a moment i am going to satisfy the curiosity in every detail, for the work, preferably on its own, should provide an example. why — a burst of grandeur, of thought or of emotion, eminent, a sentence pursued in large letters, one line per page, in a graduated arrangement — wouldn’t this keep the reader in suspense throughout the whole book, appealing to this power of enthusiasm — all around, minor clusters, of secondary importance, explicatory or derivative — an array of flourishes”.21 this description, so close to how the motifs of un coup de dés function, indicates that mallarmé thought the poem to be like a book. this therefore justifies our hypothesis that the reflections on the book, as well as the manuscripts of the book, can also be reflections on the mise en page and format of the poem. the manuscripts of the book suggest that the assembly and disassembly of the pages, the planning or the constitution of a book, correspond to an operation that can be identified as a dramatization of the poem: the passage from the idea into its realization and practical presentation, a theatre; or, as in igitur, the passage from the idea to the act — existence. writing is therefore turning an idea into a book, operating concretely on the format of the book or from the format of the book itself — transforming it and thus changing literature. mallarmé speculates on the formal opportunities offered to literature by the height, thickness, and width of the book, but also on its “position” — standing or lying down — on a table or other support: the ratio is in the thickness the height indicates the number of lines 18 width — their fragmented length 12 the thickness of the jet of their addition — be from 1 to 2/3 or if the height is reduced to 12, everything happens between the width and the thickness and the deduction of the number of lines indicates the number of volumes in which one is resolved top edge gilt where 5 (or 6?) superposed lying volumes = the height of one standing — and the ensemble of all volumes standing = the block produced by the same number of vol. lying. the block.22 mallarmé multiplies possibilities or assumptions of motifs and unfolds them in their development. this development is not historical but rather intellectual or hypothetical; therefore it relates to possibilities as such. that is, the format of the book larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 142 allows the expansion of formal possibilities, of future possibilities, possibilities of transformation and the renewal of literature. thus the title phrase or the predominant motif and the secondary motif develop; in turn, the leading motif and adjacent motifs develop the secondary motifs. a spiral is created, folding and unfolding itself throughout the reading. the size of the letters and typography contribute to determining the operative movement of expanding space-time. each motif is superimposed on another, thereby creating various temporal series and diverse spaces that generate several temporal and spatial layers. it multiplies the space-time because the motifs are folded and unfolded according to the format of the book. multiple layers are developed and unfolded throughout the reading; the movement that turns the pages is therefore the act of unfolding the motifs, which extends and distends time and space. from another place a turned page folds or refolds motifs one on each other, creating a block, the book, which is the folding of these motifs, or a temporal and spatial contraction. the book would thus contain multiple temporal and spatial series. its own format is the “quasi religious” index of this possibility: the ability of multiplying, encrypting and making space-time series infinite at once, and at the same time contains them all, folded or virtual, in a limited space, in the space of a single book. the book, like a fan, folds and unfolds. thus two space-time axes are created simply by the format of the book, in its width and depth, its verticality and horizontality. the motifs are therefore the reflection of a book’s format and its disposition. if a book by itself already offers two different configurations of space-time, then the motif’s division multiplies these possibilities. it allows the division of the motifs to expand space-time as its contracts: the presentation on the page of a variety of motifs belong to distinct time series. the double page is, then, the distention of space-time: and the book is to this reader pure block — transparent — he reads in, guesses it — knows in advance — showing where it is — what should be — or end connection — relations.23 and again, the back of one — that becomes front — the front of the other — that becomes back.24 in the same way that the poem is like a spiral that unfolds, mallarmé conceived that the pages should “turn” in a manner that results in recto becoming verso and verso, recto. the vision of the whole poem would permit the vision of multiple temporal and spatial layers, replicating once again the operation of the motifs, which in turn reproduce the folding operation. reading, by activating this mechanism, breaks with the inviolability of the book, which for mallarmé means taking possession of this sacred object in order to transform literature. but this transformation is larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 143 still based on that of the book. literature is therefore literally based on the concrete elements that constitute a book, its object, product or support. and the book, since it condenses all the power of combinations of space-time, englobes the world. thus if any book were to enclose multitudes of “combinations of the infinite with respect to the absolute”, there would no limits capable of determining precisely what literature is capable of. conclusion un coup de dés is a constellation, “a total count in formation”. it is created from multiple temporal series that the poem crosses with other series in a space unfolded to allow precisely the most possible encounters between times. expanding the space of encounters between multiple temporal series, the poem increases the possibilities of literature itself (this does not mean, however, that it multiplies the possibilities of reading or meanings because everything happens at a formal level). chance will no longer be what prevents poetry from being; rather, it will be the single source of its renewal. transforming chance into a new logic — a creation of opportunities and a source of novelty — is possible only because literature creates the conditions under which chance can make a story. these eternal conditions concern space and time, the minimal conditions of all experience, sensible givens that make all stories possible — in a book as well as in reality. space and time are no longer units of measure. they no longer quantify movement (which is no longer a simple spatial displacement). they are the source and condition of any event. the poem may, as an aleph, contract and present in a limited space an infinite number of possible worlds because it plays on the conditions of these worlds. in these circumstances, each meeting is an event, an event triggered by chance. it is always chance that makes a temporal series cross another temporal series. it is always chance that performs its own idea and that turns this idea into a story by allowing it to unfold. by altering the mise en page of the poem, with various temporal series, expanded and contracted across a double page, mallarmé touched on a fundamental point that concerns the conditions of all possible experience: namely, space and time. all story and all narrative, each event or different fact, requires a determined spacetime configuration as its minimal condition. if a specific time and a precise space provide the conditions for any fact, a potentially infinite space-time provides the conditions for the eternal return of movement or of change. it contains, in a limited space, that is, the pages of the poem, all the possibilities of stories, all possible forms of life, all the points of universe. the poem is the reflection of the starlit sky: the “orphic explanation of earth”. space-time is presented in its pure state, in its state of pure power. any book is, in this way, a block of space-time, a summary of the endless possibilities of literature. everything exists to produce a book, because the book, while limited, can contain multiple worlds. under these circumstances, where space-time relations are multiple, chance is an infinite source of novelty — and thus of stories. the mallarméan siren neither deceives, nor seduces, nor causes larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 144 perdition. for some its act is absurd, pure madness, and yet, despite the sobriety and the seriousness of the realists, the siren, this fictional being is capable of making evaporate into mist any rock “which imposed / a limit on infinity”. notes 1. julia kristeva, la révolution du langage poétique. l’avant-garde à la fin du xixème siècle. mallarmé et lautréamont (paris: editions du seuil, 1974). 2. jacques scherer, grammaire de mallarmé (paris: broché, 1977). 3. henri meschonnic, ecrits sur le livre, ‘mallarmé au-dela du ‘silence’, introduction à mallarmé (paris: editions de l’éclat, 1986). 4. michel murat, le coup de dés de mallarmé. un recommencement de la poésie (paris: belin, 2005). 5. robert greer cohn, l’œuvre de mallarmé. un coup de dés (paris: les lettres, 1951). 6. quentin meillassoux, the number and the siren. a decipherment of mallarmé’s un coup de dés (falmouth: urbanomic, 2014). 7. for an exposition of the critical fortunes of the poem see, thierry roger, l’archive du coup de dés (paris: garnier, 2010). 8. stéphane mallarmé, igitur in selected prose and poetry, mary-ann craws (ed.) (new york: new directions, 1982), p. 92. 9. stéphane mallarmé, ‘music and letters’ in divagations, translated by barbara johnston (cambridge/massachusetts/london: the belknap press of harvard university press, 2007), p. 187 (modified trans.). 10. jorge luis borges, collected fictions, translated by andrew hurley (london: penguin, 1998), p. 67. 11. stéphane mallarmé, collected poems, translated by henry weinfield (berkeley/los angeles/london: university of california press, 1994), p. 122. 12. jorge luis borges, collected fictions, op. cit., pp. 285-286. 13. ibid., p. 68. 14. ibid., p. 145. 15. ibid. 16. stéphane mallarmé, collected poems, op. cit., pp. 122-123. 17. this hypothesis of reading can be reinforced by the affirmation to be found in the unpublished draft of the preface. in this excerpt the poet affirms that the poem is “a poem conceived and then executed according to habits in fact completely different from others which defy our tradition” [conçu puis exécuté selon des habitudes en vérité tout à fait différentes d’autres qui défraient notre tradition]. 18. ibid., p. 121. 19. stéphane mallarmé, divagations, op. cit., p. 227. larissa drigo: folding and unfolding the infinite s9 (2016): 145 20. stéphane mallarmé, divagations, op. cit., p. 224. 21. ibid., p. 227. 22. stéphane mallarmé, œuvres complètes, i, bertrand marchal (ed.) (paris: gallimard 1998), p. 559. 23. ibid., p. 561. 24. ibid., p. 576. bown.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 10 & 11 (2017-18): 63-74 a l f i e b o w n h e g e l t h e c o m e d i a n or the wink of st vitus w riting in flüchtlingsgespräche, berthold brecht says that hegel had what it takes to be one of the greatest comedians.1 this suggestion works in opposition to a whole history of philosophy that has asserted hegel’s status as the philosopher of complete and secure totality, and of seriousness. typically, hegel would be one of the last philosophers to be associated with anxiety, disorder or comedy and yet brecht sees his philosophy as embodying each of these things, writing: he was always winking in the same way that others had an insuppressible st. vitus’ dance. his sense of humor was such that he could not think, for example, of order without disorder. it was clear to him that in the immediate proximity of the greatest order, there was to be found the greatest disorder, and he even went so far as saying: in one and the same place!2 brecht refers here to the st. vitus dance, a cultural name given to bouts of mania involving infectious erratic dancing and laughter, occurrences of which were recorded from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. the phenomenon is sometimes called choreomania, from the greek choros, meaning dance, and mania, meaning madness. this dancing madness involves being taken over by (usually) temporary hysterical laughter, sometimes in large groups. pieter breughel the elder is among those to have famously depicted the phenomenon. when it comes to comedy, it is tempting to relate the st vitus dance to bakhtinian carnival, another kind of infectious and “insuppressible” group eruption into comic disorder, or to what has sometimes been called “relief theory” or liberation theory in laughter studies. on the contrary, i argue here for a hegelian reading of laughter which counters bakhtinian carnival and ideas of laughter as liberating, assumptions which have dominated discussions of comic theory in the fields of both literary studies and philosophy. this function of laughter is embodied by hegel’s wink: a wink carrying the insuppressible threat of st vitus. alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 64 the paper explores laughter as a process involving a kind of paradoxical relationship between order and disorder. as brecht’s comment suggests, in laughter order and disorder are not only “in closest proximity” but are “in one and the same place.” looking at hegel’s comments on comedy in the last 50 pages of aesthetics, as well as earlier comments in the logic, this paper argues for a hegelian conception of laughter as a kind of “beginning,” or what would later be termed an “event” in the work of alain badiou; a moment at which a new “order” emerges and is asserted, retroactively changing the past so that it appears as if the new order was always-already destined to be.3 laughter establishes precisely such new realities, i will show here, but it also comes with the wink of st vitus, indicating the precarity of the new orders that it brings into being. further, the article explores how lacan understood this function of humour via his reading of hegel and put it to work in his lectures to produce new realities in order to force his philosophy into being within the room of his seminars. in this paper, then, lacan is used less as a commentator on comedy than as an example of a humorist who embodied a particularly and peculiarly hegelian approach to comedy. hegel discusses comedy at length, though this part of his oeuvre is often critically neglected.4 there is discussion of comedy in several important sections of the phenomenology, and there is a much more sustained discussion at the end of his last work, the posthumously published aesthetics. here, hegel dedicates fifty pages to the topic of comedy, yet, due to their critical neglect, these final pages of his life’s work seem to recall stories surrounding aristotle’s lost book on comedy, the second part of the poetics. umberto eco speculates about these lost pages in his 1980 novel the name of the rose, somewhat comically suggesting that discovery of the text would undo the western traditions of thought that have been set on their course by aristotelian philosophy. hegel, likewise considered by many to be an embodiment of established european rationality, finished his final lecture series with a disruptive and subversive discussion of comedy that has been “lost.” hegelian comedy—if it is recovered—would be equally disruptive of a number of assumptions about hegel’s status as the philosopher of secure rationality. it would also counter assumptions about laughter’s apolitical and supplementary status, showing laughter to be of vital political power and a key feature of philosophical discourse. writing in aesthetics, hegel discusses the “comic as such,” which can be thought of as something like the pure spirit of laughter, often separate from the general things which make us laugh. hegel writes that such laughter: implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all: this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustration of his aims and achievements.5 this idea of comedy can be read as being on the side of the subject, and on the side of a traditional reading of the hegelian dialectic and of hegel’s work as asserting totality and completeness. in such a way it could be read as asserting that laughter alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 65 helps the subject overcome its contradiction and progress in some way: there is first the subject, then the subject threatened by “its own inner contradiction,” and finally the subject “raised above” this problem via comedy. yet this reading is insufficient, and the flicker of st vitus is visible in hegel’s eye, since he is clear that the process has to do not only with the development of a pre-existing contradiction into a total and secure conclusion (as in the clichéd thesis-antithesis-synthesis reading of hegel) but with the absolute destruction of what has gone before in the emergence of something new, even if the new also, paradoxically, emerges out of the old in its very destruction or undoing. hegel returns to the definition of the comic as such and stresses the radically destructive function of the laughter it involves. for hegel, such comedy occurs: when what has no substance in itself has destroyed its show of existence by its own agency, [and] the individual makes himself master of this dissolution and remains undisturbed in himself and at ease.6 for hegel, a moment of pure comedy destroys something which “has no substance in itself” and only ever had “a show of existence.” in its place, something new emerges. this new thing may be thought of as “truth,” as if comedy abolishes appearance and reveals “true reality” underneath apparent fictions (something laughter studies and general discussion of laughter have often claimed).7 something is destroyed and “dissolved” which is shown never to have had any substance but to have been in the order of appearance only. this is an old tradition and one can think of any comedian revealing the fallacy of an eminent performer and showing the harsh and inadequate material reality underneath the show of appearance: plautus’s miles gloriosus, shakespeare’s falstaff, mel brooks’s hitler. this is a precursor to what freud would call “unmasking,” a comic moment when “such and such a person, who is admired as a demigod, is after all only human like you and me.”8 kant could also be thought of as philosophizing laughter in a comparable way when he comments that “laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”9 such ideas, also a kind of “relief theory” see laughter as the transformation of an (apparent) something into nothing. the confusing difference is that in hegel’s conception of the comic this is carried out by the individual’s own agency and the individual is able to emerge in a new form as the master of the situation, making laughter at least as creative as it is destructive, at least as much the production of something as the dissolution of something. as such, the key to the complexity of hegel’s argument is found in another implication: that which is produced appears to have always-already existed; rather than appearing new, it seems to “remain” and to be “undisturbed,” even though it has been produced anew in the moment of comedy. in other words, this laughter doesn’t so much reveal the truth as produce it as preexistent. we might say that this type of laughter finishes something and starts something new, but that which it starts appears to have pre-existed, it “remains undisturbed” and “persists selfassured.” hegel implies that true comedy is not about dismantling appearance and alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 66 revealing underlying truths but that comedy functions in the service of producing truth itself. perhaps we can hypothesize that comedy turns existing truths into mere appearance and creates new truths which appear grounded in more than appearance, as indeed truth always appears to be. i will try to bear out this hypothesis in what follows. rather than the aesthetics, where hegel discussed comedy directly, brecht singles out the science of logic as the most comical of hegel’s works. in that text hegel explores the idea of a “beginning,” questioning how order comes into being. for brecht: his book “the greater logic” … is one of the great comic works of world literature. it is about the mode of a life of concepts, those slippery, unstable, unaccountable existences; how they insult each other and fight with knives, and then sit down to dinner together as if nothing had happened. they appear, so to speak, in pairs, each is married to its opposite … what order declares is immediately denied, in one and the same breath if possible, by disorder, its inseparable partner.10 but, how is it exactly that, in the hegelian schema, order and disorder can be married and sit down to dinner? to approach an answer to this we need an understanding of hegel’s conception of beginning, which is also developed in the science of logic. viewing laughter through the idea of beginning can lead to an understanding of his conception of pure comedy in which order and disorder are simultaneously and dialectically present. for hegel, when something begins it is established and presented as inevitable and secure, yet also threatened by a kind of infinite anxiety. as in brecht’s comment, hegel explores how order is produced through a paradoxical relationship with itself. he writes: there is nothing in heaven or nature or spirit or anywhere else that does not contain just as much immediacy as mediation, so that both these determinations prove to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them nothing real.11 everything which appears immediate contains just as much mediation, and vice versa, anticipating a freudian concept of the unconscious. hegel considers these two things, mediation on the one hand and immediacy on the other, which have characterized all prior theorizations of the beginning, to be inseparable, although equally importantly, something falsely or apparently separates them. this process which divides the two is close to what we can think of as the beginning in hegel’s work. for hegel we can say that the beginning does not exist at the beginning, but rather, the beginning is, in hegel’s own words, “to be made” by this division.12 at the beginning there is a divider, something which precedes immediacy and mediation, cause and effect, which separates the two, producing them in relation to each other. the moment of laughter can be seen as such a divider, a rupture that produces both cause and effect, which determines both the object of laughter and alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 67 the subject laughing. it is this unsecuring sense of how truth and identity come into being which brecht found so humorous in hegel and called “those slippery, unstable, unaccountable existences [that] insult each other and fight with knives, and then sit down to dinner together as if nothing had happened.” a whole history of laughter studies has focused on the causes of laughter, seeing it as purely the effect of something else, while more recent work such as that of anca parvulescu has begun to discuss its effects and what can be caused by laughter.13 in this conception of laughter via hegel, laughter is conceived of as neither cause nor as effect but as a rupture which constitutes both. in his book event, slavoj žižek defines the event as “the effect that seems to exceed its causes.”14 an event is that which exceeds its causes, so that whilst it has political stimuli, it also establishes new causes for itself, its effects retroactively re-structuring the past into a new structure and bringing us within this re-ordered world, whether we like it or not. laughter, conceived as hegelian beginning, is exactly such an event. it brings the subjects involved (those telling the jokes, those laughing, and those targeted) into new ideological structures which are produced, entrenched, naturalized and enforced by the process of laughter, with the laugh itself (considered only as effect) appearing to serve as evidence of the existence of what caused it. instead, laughter is both cause and effect, as well as a force that falsely divides the two. it is a true hegelian beginning, which has three constituent parts that cannot exist save in relation to each other. the political effects of seeing laughter in this way are significant. rather than an effect of or response to existing political discourses, laughter must be seen as a more active participant in the establishment of and resistance to political realities. since such comic processes produce political reality, establishing order, they also leave that political reality precarious and open to being reproduced again. in other words, such laughter is order and disorder “in one and the same place.” whilst for brecht it is hegel’s logic which holds within it the greatest humour, for lacan it is the phenomenology that is “hysterically funny.” as if frustrated with his students’ failure to pick upon his suggestive comments about the humour of hegel, in seminar xvii lacan notes that “it has no kind of effect […] if i say to you that the phenomenology of spirit is hysterically funny. and yet, this is what it is.”15 pointing to a lack of attention to hegel’s humour, lacan hides his insight in a throwaway comment, himself making a joke by offering his audience the chance to ignore him and misread hegel. “hysterically funny” means not just very funny but that hegel’s comedy must be thought of in terms of the “discourse of the hysteric,” something he suggested some weeks earlier in the seminar. for lacan, hegel’s discourse goes against the history of philosophy, which has been nothing but “a fascinating enterprise for the master’s benefit.” on the contrary, with hegel’s “outrageous absolute knowledge,” we confront the fact that “what leads to knowledge […] is the hysteric’s discourse” (s17, 23). the hysteric’s discourse is a constantly questioning and never fixed sense of knowledge. as the servant to many masters, the hysteric suggests knowledge on the precipice, always capable of collapsing and being replaced by another. the st vitus dance is also “hysterical,” both in terms of humour, alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 68 and in terms of the hysteric’s discourse in a strictly psychoanalytic sense. for lacan, hegel counters the idea that knowledge is fixed (and the fixity, or ossification, of this very idea) with the fact that knowledge is always new. truths are produced, rather than being perceptions of what is “already there.” while we talk of “discovering” the truth, particularly in scientific discourse, lacan re-formulates the idea of discovery in seminar xi to argue that “the discovery is of a strange temporality.”16 recalling freudian nachträglichkeit, lacan shows that the discovery of something also brings it into being in a new form. this production of truths found in hegel is, for lacan, “hysterically funny,” with the pun fully intended. it is funny because it shows how humour itself functions like a beginning or discovery, appearing to be a blast of clarifying “unmasking” which renders what previously appeared true to be mere illusion and establishes a new truth in its place, just like the hysteric in its relationship to its masters. any classic example of unmasking laughter will serve the argument well: laughter issued at the pompous king is often thought to shatter the illusion (his performance of superiority) and reveal the truth (the common humanity of us all). on the contrary, it abolishes one truth (traditional hierarchy) only to replace it with another (equality in the eyes of god). via laughter, a new master is established, making laughter a truly hysterical affect. freud did not consider himself much indebted to hegel and it is lacan who brings hegel into psychoanalytic discourse. in seminar xvii, lacan criticizes traditional philosophy and makes hegel the absolute antithesis of this, calling him the “antiphilosopher” (23). influenced by kojève’s lectures on hegel that he attended in the 1930s,17 lacan criticizes ideas of the ego-as-origin which characterize the psychoanalysis of anna freud and other freudian schools. distancing himself from these schools, lacan writes that “one should not imagine that [psychoanalysis] is something that would be the discovery of being or of the soul.”18 lacan, like hegel, asks not what the origin of the subject is but rather how we are formed as subjects who see ourselves as originary. ian parker and david pavon-cuellar explain that “lacanian discourse analysis” is an attempt to move away from models which “attempt to go back to some reality that was expressed, represented or reflected in discourse” and instead place the emphasis on “the reality of discourse itself,” not just linguistics but the way in which real subjects are produced and constructed within those languages.19 lacan’s comment about hegel’s humour is no throw-away remark but a central point of seminar xvii to which he repeatedly returns. all the way through—take as an example what hegel is able to say about culture—the most pertinent remarks concerning the play of events and exercises of wit abound. i repeat, there is nothing more amusing. (171) lacan stresses that reason, the very thing affirmed by traditional readings of hegel, operates in his work as a cunning trick: “the cunning of reason is, he tells us, what directed the entire game.” “however,” writes lacan, “the high point of this cunning is not where one thinks it is. it is the cunning of reason, no doubt, but one has to recognize the cunning of the reasoned and take one’s hat off to him.” lacan then realfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 69 fers to the “extraordinarily dirty trick of the phenomenology of spirit” arguing that hegel’s question “which is truth?” and “what brings him into play?” are humorous ones (171). such humour—like lacanian psychoanalysis itself—would operate against the discovery of the soul, working not to unmask what is already there but to reveal the cunning trick by which we emerge as subjects who see themselves as originary or who believe in the existence of a soul-like quality to our subjectivity. lacan’s insistence that this element of hegel’s project should be seen as hysterically funny indicates that the process described by hegel is close to the heart of humour itself. we can put the hypothesis in the terms discussed above: laughter, while appearing to unmask the truth behind illusion and show what the subject really is, is in fact a process which involves bringing the subject into being while tricking it into thinking it existed to be unmasked. lacan’s own use of light humour in his seminars is an interesting case study of the function of such humour. lacan’s humour has rarely been mentioned (except perhaps by those such as noam chomsky, who mindlessly labelled lacan an arrogant charlatan). like most jokes, they are usually seen as a light aside to the serious development of his arguments. on the contrary, his use of jokes supplies illustration of how lacan understood the function of humour itself. from a certain perspective the jokes may seem arrogance, since he uses them to prove himself right, but in doing so he shows how ideologically powerful jokes can be. in short, lacan’s own use of light humour shows how the joke can establish an argument as a truth. one example is a humorous gambit aimed at his contemporary writer marie-claire boons: marie-claire boons would even give us to understand that […] in some way psychoanalysis frees us from the law. fat chance. i am well aware that this is the register in which a libertarian hook attaches itself to psychoanalysis. […] the father’s death […] does not seem to me to be of a kind to liberate us from it, far from it. (s17, 119) lacan stresses that psychoanalysis, from freud’s own work to his own, should not be thought of as on the side of liberation. rather, its interest is in the always structured movement from one “discourse” to another, with the production of new subjects and discourses out of and in place of old ones. the joke in the above quotation turns on the phrase “fat chance,” takes as its target the idea that “psychoanalysis frees us from the law.” as such, by mocking the idea of liberation, it also targets the idea that humour operates as a “liberating release,” which is often considered to characterize freud’s own theory of humour in jokes and their relation to the unconscious. his conception of humour via hegel reflects this primary interest of his work, stressing a laughter that is not so much on the side of liberation—as freudian relief theory and bakhtinian carnival have often been considered—but involved in the process of moving from one structure to another. lacan uses this small joke to make a certain event-like movement happen in the very text of his seminar. the laughter (albeit brief) that we might assume accompanied this phrase “fat chance” in the lecture theatre full of lacan fanatics, is itself an evental change; it turns alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 70 a reading of psychoanalysis (that of marie-claire boons, who thought that psychoanalysis may liberate us from the law) into a past that is now laughed at and shown to have only ever had “a show of existence,” to borrow hegel’s language from above. in relation to this past, a new present is established in which it is made clear that psychoanalysis is “far from” liberating. the process therefore establishes a new present in relation to this equally new past, both of which emerge as the joke is made. the joke has the three-part structure of a hegelian beginning. another way of putting this might be to say that lacanian psychoanalysis (like laughter) is not about truths but about myths or the truth of myth; it does not reveal the “truth” but shows us the truth of discourse itself. lacan makes more jokes to hammer home this point: bullshitting, as i have always said, is truth. they are identical. […] why is this privilege given to myth in psychoanalysis? […] claude levi-strauss states the complete myth of oedipus [but] one can see that it concerns something quite different from whether or not one is going to fuck one’s mummy. (s17, 111) this observation is not simply grounded in the argument made by many postfreudians that the oedipus myth is not to be taken literally but metaphorically. rather than being a myth which shows us something true, as metaphor can function, it is the mythic status of oedipus which makes it important. here, the joke about fucking one’s mummy actually enacts what lacan describes. the joke shows that we are wrong to see psychoanalysis as something which reaches back into childhood to find “truths,” indicating instead that it is the myths we tell ourselves (about childhood for example) which are important. these myths, in being shown for the myths that they are (or shown to be a kind of true “bullshit” which governs subjectivity) are revealed to have never had anything but a “show of existence,” to borrow hegel’s phrase once more, and a new truth is erected in its place, which then seems to have always been the truth waiting to be revealed (“unmasked”) by the abolishment of myth. which truth is demoted to the status of myth here? it is the myth that fucking our mothers is at the root of psychoanalysis, a former psychoanalytic truth. yet the joke doesn’t reveal essential truth (what psychoanalysis is really about), but it produces new truth in place of the old myth. this new equally mythic truth appears true by virtue of its comparison with the old and now abolished myth. thus lacan is able to defend freud, to get him off the hook, and re-establish his theory as a new truth: from this joke on, psychoanalysis was never just about “fucking one’s mummy,” and freud always meant something quite different. it is the same “dirty trick” played by hegel’s phenomenology and which lacan found so humorous. now playing this dirty trick on his seminar audience, lacan shows that laughter functions to turn established truths into appearance and establish new truths its place. psychoanalysis itself can be said to function comparably. alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 71 as a final example, we can consider one of lacan’s best comic moment from seminar xi, in which he uses a humorous story about an encounter with a sardine can in order to explain the function of the gaze. joan copjec noted that the humour deployed by lacan in this famous instance should be thought of in relation to hegel. lacan tells his tale of the relation of the subject to its world in the form of a humorously recondite story about a sardine can. the story is told as a kind of mock hegelian epic, a send up of the broadly expansive hegelian epic form by a deliberately “little story” that takes place in a “small boat” in a “small port” and includes a single named character, “petit jean.”20 this little story is about the gaze—not my topic here—but it is also about humour. in the tale, the young man, petit-jean, points to a sardine can floating in the ocean and comments to lacan (himself a character in the story) “you see that can? do you see it? well, it doesn’t see you!” for lacan the theorist, the non-reciprocity between the subject and the sardine can illustrates a lacanian theory of the gaze, but for lacan the character in the story, what is most disconcerting is that while petit-jean finds his own comment “highly amusing,” he had not. “why did i find it less amusing than he?” asks lacan, “it’s an interesting question.” the answer he gives is that the moment of exclusion from the humour makes it visible that the middle class lacan had no place in the picture of working life in which he finds himself, but the further implication is that the laughter establishes a new reality to the scene in which the little story is set. after the laugh, the scene is rendered in a different light, with even its history constructed anew. again, laughter is conceived as an eventual force that moves the subjects involved into a new structural reality. recognizing this power of laughter is a prerequisite to being able to use it to create such a shift in the examples discussed above. one of the most interesting comments lacan made about laughter is the suggestion in television that laughter may oppose capitalism. here lacan says, “the more saints, the more laughter; that’s my principle, to wit, the way out of capitalist discourse—which will not constitute progress, if it happens only for some.”21 the possibility of lacanian laughter working against capitalism has been brilliantly explored by samo tomšič: the association of laughter with the exit from capitalism is another surrealist moment in the citation from lacan’s television. laughter as a weapon against capitalism seems to suggest that capitalism might be structured like a joke, and the envisioned universalisation of laughter—“the more saints the more laughter”—would mean the downfall of capitalism. should psychoanalysis teach us how finally to laugh at capitalism?22 for tomšič, laughter, as something which reveals the structure of capitalism, might cause its very downfall. such an argument is comparable with the one i’ve made here, that laughter has the power to change the structure of a discourse and inaugurate new realities. yet, tomšič’s insight provides another important dimension. alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 72 laughter is not just any event, but a particular kind of event or movement which makes something structural visible to us. we can have many masters, and many beginnings, while still within the capitalist discourse and framework, but what makes laughter different is that it makes such structures visible to us, undermining their claim to inevitability. speaking of hegel and of derrida on hegel, jean-luc nancy—perhaps an unusual writer to evoke here—puts it nicely when he writes of laughter that “what makes sense about meaning is that it senses itself making sense.”23 if we can say that laughter is a beginning, or an event, that exceeds its causes and produces something which it appears to reflect, then what is specific about laughter is that it senses its role in the production of a cause which seems to have pre-existed, rather than believing in itself as an effect of already-existing objects, identities and subject-positions. laughter, with all its anxieties, knows that what it brings into being is completely unsecured and always potentially subject to complete change. it could function not only like the hysteric’s discourse, but to change the structure of the discourse itself. in such a way, this hegelian laughter could be the opponent of capitalism. like hegel’s philosophy, capitalism often presents itself as inevitable and secure totality, but if it is structured like a joke, and if jokes produce rather than reveals truths, then capitalism is shown to be based on the kind of dirty cunning trickery found in the phenomenology. describing hegel as the most anxious of men, his student heinrich heine makes the following comment which chimes with that of brecht many years later: i often saw how he anxiously looked around, fearing that people would understand him. he liked me a lot since he was certain i wouldn’t betray him; i even thought at the time that he was servile. when i was once uneasy about the saying ‘all that is, is rational,’ he smiled in a peculiar way and remarked: ‘this could also read “all that is rational must be.”’ he quickly looked around, but soon calmed down.24 as mladen dolar has written, the passage depicts hegel as “someone who must constantly attempt to hide his subversive underside.”25 this subversive underside, this article has proposed, is to do with laughter. in heine’s account, hegel’s manner is uneasy and anxious because he fears being understood, seemingly on this particular tricky point. speaking privately to heine, hegel allegedly suggests an alternate reading of the famous proposition “all that is, is rational”; whilst the first phrase implies that being is inherently rational, the alternative suggests that this is because rationality itself demands to be. hegel sees, in the very act of making rationality inevitable, the strange and powerful way in which rationality demands to be inevitable, and makes itself so, thus performatively undoing the very chain of causality and inevitability traditionally thought to bind the rational itself. this paradoxical move is the true st vitus’ dance in hegel’s viewpoint, and makes its destabilizing presence felt in what brecht called his wink, and in what heine called his “peculiar smile”—embodied, even unconscious gestures which constantly threaten to undo themselves in the very act of doing. alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 73 whilst it was georges bataille who wrote “my philosophy is a philosophy of laughter” and hegel would never have described his own work in this way, it is in fact hegel—the philosopher of rationality—whose work threatens the very logic of the order it also establishes.26 whilst bataille saw laughter as “non-knowledge” or antiknowledge, humour in hegel’s philosophy—and here he might be heard to have the last laugh—is both knowledge and non-knowledge, both philosophy and antiphilosophy at once, “in one and the same place!” the peculiar role of comedy in his work is not found in its association with any liberation from the law, but rather in making visible a process by which a new structural reality comes into being. the wink of st vitus, barely concealed in hegel’s work, is the indicator that such a reality could collapse just as easily as it emerged. notes 1. special thanks are due to mladen dolar for inspiration for the article. 2. berthold brecht, gessamelte werke 14, (frankfurt: suhrkamp, 1967) 1460-1. english translation by mladen dolar. 3. this is not something that badiou would be likely to directly agree with, since laughter is far from one of the four categories of the event. the theory is explored in full in my forthcoming book in the event of laughter: psychoanalysis, hegelianism and comedy. 4. agnes heller makes an interesting connection between hegel and the comic novel. see immortal comedy: the comic phenomenon in art, literature and life (oxford: lexington books, 2005) 93. alenka zupančič dedicates a chapter to hegelian comedy in the odd one in (london: mit press, 2008) 11-60. zupančič’s text has been crucial in reversing the trend of dissociating hegel from the comic. 5. g. w. f. hegel, aesthetics, vol ii, trans t.m. knox (oxford: clarendon press, 1975) 1200. 6. hegel, 1202. 7. see for example elder olson, the theory of comedy (bloomington, indiana, 1968) 35-6. 8. sigmund freud, “jokes and their relation to the unconscious” in the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, vol. viii, ed. & trans. james strachey (london: vintage, 2001) 3-238; 202. 9. immanuel kant, critique of judgement, trans. james creed meredith (oxford: oxford university press, 2007) 161. 10. brecht, gessamelte werke, vol. 14, 1401-2. 11. g. w. f. hegel, the science of logic, trans. george di giovanni (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010) 46. 12. brecht, 1401-2. 13. anca parvulescu, laughter: notes on a passion (cambridge, mass.: mit press, 2010). 14. slavoj žižek, event: philosophy in transit (london: penguin books, 2014) 3. alfie bown: hegel the comedian s10 & 11 (2017-18): 74 15. jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis, ed. jacques-alain miller and russell grigg, the seminar of jacques lacan, xvii (new york: norton, 2007) 169–70. all subsequent references to seminar xvii are to this edition, denoted by s17 (where necessary) and page number. 16. jacques lacan, the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, ed. jacques alain-miller, trans. alan sheridan (london: norton, 1998) 25. 17. alexandre kojève, introduction to the reading of hegel, ed. allan bloom, trans. james h nichols, jr (new york: basic books, 1969). 18. jacques lacan, “the tokyo discourse,” journal for lacanian studies, 3.1 (2005): 129-144; 3. 19. david pavon-cuellar and ian parker, lacan, discourse, event: new psychoanalytic approaches to textual indeterminacy (london: routledge, 2013) 2. 20. joan copjec, read my desire: lacan against the historicists (london: mit press, 1994) 30. 21. jacques lacan, television: a challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment, ed. joan copjec, trans. denis hollier et al. (new york: norton, 1990) 16. 22. samo tomšič, “laughter and capitalism” in s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 22-38; 29. 23. nancy, jean-luc, “elliptical sense,” research in phenomenology, 18 (1988): 175-191; 177. 24. heinrich heine, “briefe über deutschland” in sämtliche schriften, 6 vols, vol. 5 (munich: hanser, 1976) 197. i have used the translation of this passage given by mladen dolar in ‘the owl of minerva from dusk till dawn, or, two shades of gray,’ in filozofija i društvo, vol. 26, broj 4 (2015): 875-890; 882-3. 25. dolar, “the owl of minerva from dusk till dawn, or, two shades of gray,” in filozofija i društvo, vol. 26, broj 4 (2015): 883. 26. georges bataille, “nonknowledge, laughter, and tears” in the unfinished system of nonknowledge, ed. stuart kendall, trans. michelle kendall and stuart kendall (minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota, 2001) 138. kim-reuter-s1-2008 s j o u r n a l o f t h e j a n v a n e y c k c i r c l e f o r l a c a n i a n i d e o l o g y c r i t i q u e 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) table of contents editorial 2 the gaze of pygmalion bernard baas 4 missing the point: reading the lacanian subject through perspective thomas brockelman 16 montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights”: the image of the corps morcelé in the essays jonathan kim-reuter 36 the real imaginary: lacan’s joyce juliet flower maccannell 46 dialogues intimate extorted, intimate exposed gérard wajcman 58 response: the politics of “atopia of the intimate” in contemporary art: the view from lacanian psychoanalysis lieven jonckheere 78 reviews hitchcock’s cryptonomies, by tom cohen sigi jöttkandt 100 s is on the web at www.lineofbeauty.org j o n a t h a n k i m r e u t e r m o n t a i g n e i n t h e “ g a r d e n o f e a r t h l y d e l i g h t s ” the image of the corps morcelé in the essays iven the imagistic sources for the corps morcelé (the “body in bits and pieces” or the “fragmented body”), it is understandable that lacan turned to painting, and to the artist hieronymous bosch, for a graphic depiction of the disintegrating ego. the tortured and disfigured bodies in the “garden of earthly delights” vividly complement the reports of dream content by patients in analysis. the pre-linguistic locus of this archaic experience and its specifically figurative nature, not to mention the developmental push toward forms of psychic wholeness, makes the encounter with the corps morcelé an especially fugitive and elusive affair, for which examples are not only lacking but constitutionally inadequate. in the two important papers on the imaginary conditions wherein ego formation takes its cues from the overcoming of the infantile body, namely “the mirror stage as formative of the i function” and “aggressiveness in psychoanalysis,” lacan turns to bosch to aid him in illustrating this difficult theoretical notion.1 that we lack words adequate to this experience is precisely lacan’s point, and it justifies his stepping outside the psychoanalytic domain for the artistic, where words and language give place to affect and image. yet, between the painted body and the visible body there is a continuity, not an identity, an approximation that can never trespass the former’s asymptotic limits. this raises the question, then, of whether the evocative significance of bosch and painting has no cousin among the authors of literature. to paint a similar portrait of the image of the corps morcelé with words is difficult but surely not beyond the creative literary imagination. one would need to oppose the generalizing character of language, to draw down the word to the level of subjective experience; there would need to be a pervasive mood of anxiousness suitable to a subject undergoing the collapse of its ego formation; there should be an exclusive attention to the body and to the body’s sensory, affective life: one would need to write essays, and one would have to be montaigne. in the essays, montaigne portrays his own “garden of earthly delights,” a vision of a fragmented body as useful as those in bosch for exploring lacan’s realm of the imaginary.2 g 1 jacques lacan, écrits, trans. bruce fink (new york: w. w. norton & company, 2006). hereafter écrits. 2 michel de montaigne, the complete essays of montaigne, trans. donald frame (stanford: s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 1 (2008): 36-45 k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 37 montaigne is not an unfounded choice to illustrate the forces and effects of subjectivity that find a home in the imaginary. in the paper on the structure of the imaginary, “presentation on psychical causality,” lacan ranks montaigne just below freud in revealing the profound and irresolvable gaps and contradictions that make the imaginary identity of the ego unequal to the being of the subject which it represents (écrits, 146). for montaigne, as for freud, the divisions within the ego or the moi illustrate the crucial phenomenon of miscognition (méconnaisance), insofar as they point up the real function of the ego, which is its illusory function. “this also happens to me: that i do not find myself in the place where i look; and i find myself more by chance encounter than by searching my judgment” (essays, 27). montaigne, it would seem, stands within the scene of his own primordial alienation, watching closely as the totalizing dream of the ego crumbles everywhere around him. this consideration puts montaigne in a fairly elite constellation of psychoanalytic figures, even granting the obvious cultural, historical and theoretical differences. his position is further consolidated when, in seminar xi, lacan looks to montaigne for the paradigmatic illustration the phenomenon of aphanisis (“fading”).3 lacan writes, “i would show you that montaigne is truly the one who has centered himself, not around skepticism but around the living moment of the aphanisis of the subject” (seminar xi, 223). to situate the author of the essays in this psychoanalytic register of experience is to position montaigne at the very disappearance of the subject into the signifier or the “field of the other.” the essays can be read as a primer on the aphanisis of the human subject because montaigne wields his doubt and uncertainty as moments for ego constitution and ego disintegration. in him is illustrated the core lacanian critique of the subject as an autonomous and unified entity. there are many levels on which aphanisis is displayed, but perhaps the most primal generator of this phenomenon, at least developmentally, is manifested in the move to overcome the division between the dissonant experience of the lived body and the “‘orthopedic’ form of its totality” (écrits, 78). carried out at the level of the visual image, the movement “from insufficiency to anticipation” (écrits, 78) is the key idea in mapping out the field of the imaginary. all of its forces are centered on the lure offered by the visual image to the subject. if the specular capture of the i by the image fails, or is pressured to do so by the analyst, the individual is thrown back on the body’s anarchic subterranean existence, its “turbulent movements” (écrits, 76) or what lacan refers to more generally as humankind’s specific “prematurity of birth” (écrits, 78). understandably, in the analytical situation the patient will muster every ego defense available to avoid such an attack on the formative unity of ego identity. aggressiveness, for lacan, is a key behavioral sign that the formal structure of the ego―the vital marriage of subject and image―is starting to lose its hold over stanford university press, 1958). hereafter essays. 3 the seminar of jacques lacan, book xi: the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. alan sheridan (new york: w. w. norton & company, 1978). hereafter seminar xi. k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 38 subjectivity (écrits, 84-5). if the collapse is complete, the spell of the “visual gestalt of his own body” (écrits, 92) is broken and the ego shatters. the patient becomes one of the tortured souls in bosch’s “garden of earthly delights,” and the subject experiences at the level of the body the fracturing of identity. images of the corps morcelé populate the distressed life of the patient, as he becomes the playfield for terrible visions of corporeal dislocation.4 “most often,” lacan writes concerning the appearance of these body-images in the patient’s dreams and fantasies, “the resemblance is to a jig-saw puzzle, with the separate parts of the body of a man or an animal in disorderly array.”5 it hardly seems conceivable that montaigne occupies a place in this traumatic universe. montaigne is the paradigm renaissance humanist. in the essays, the sovereign individualism of the classical past flowers anew. the many stoic counsels against the corrupting passions of the body originate from a philosophical retreat from lived experience, a sheltering of the mind or the soul against all affective states that would dislodge the self-mastery pursued by the sage. against the accidents of life, “the wise man, after having well weighed and considered their qualities and measured and judged them for what they are, springs above them by a power of a vigorous courage. he disdains them and tramples them underfoot, having a strong and solid soul, against which the arrows of fortune, when they come to strike, must necessarily bounce off and be blunted, meeting a body on which they can make no impression” (essays, 226). in borrowing the title of one of the essays from cicero―“that to philosophize is to learn to die”―montaigne is giving himself over to a thinking that seeks to remove from itself all mediating influences. self-mastery weights the subject down with a meditation on death so as to deaden the existential cues offered by the world to the subject. nevertheless, no reading of the essays can any longer abide by the simplistic arrangement of the three books of the essays into supposed stoic, pyrrhonian and epicurean phases, as if each book was an unadulterated position or school rather than the unfolding record of a life.6 the stoicism adopted by montaigne, inasmuch as it 4 as lacan writes, “among the latter images are some that represent the elective vectors of aggressive intentions, which they provide with an efficacy that might be called magical. these are the images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, and bursting open of the body―in short, the imagos that i personally have grouped together under the heading ‘imagos of the fragmented body,’ a heading that certainly seems to be structural” (écrits, 85). 5 lacan, “some reflections on the ego,” international journal of psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 11-17 (13). hereafter “some reflections.” 6 there has been a long-standing debate over whether montaigne evolved or developed through different stages (stoic, skeptic, epicurean) corresponding to the different books of the essays. pierre villey, whose edition of the essays―complete with identified sources for quotations―is the modern version used by nearly all readers, advanced the “evolution” theory. its basic thesis is that montaigne identified with an early stoic phase (first book), followed by a period during which he underwent a skeptical crisis (second book), which was then followed k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 39 flowed into his thought as part of the renaissance zeitgeist, was also very much tied to a relation to the body that is singular in its history but general in its implications. the essays, after all, as montaigne writes in the opening letter to all future readers, is a book composed as a “private convenience” for friends and relatives, containing as it does “some features of my habits and temperament,” in which the author is presented “entire and wholly naked” (essays, 2). in other words, the essays, and this is perhaps what so fixed the inestimable psychoanalytic value of montaigne for lacan, is a portrait whose compositional material is the author’s relation to his own body. this combination of elements is the “psychic relationship par excellence”: “the relation of the subject to his own body in terms of his identification with an imago” (“some reflections,” 12). from the very outset, and thus adulterating considerably the portrait of stoicism, the intimate bond between the body, its image, and the ego were on display for all to see. normally stitched together in the distant past in the life of the individual, they have forced themselves on montaigne with an insistence that can only be the outcome of a traumatic experience. is there in the essays an unraveling of the ego that leaves in its troubled wake the exposed chaos of the body? the answer to this question lies in the essay “of idleness.” contained within its few short paragraphs is a logic of the imaginary that structures the entirety of montaigne’s effort at self-portraiture in the essays. the close connection between montaigne and the essays means that any judgment regarding an individual essay’s interpretive significance should be laced with caution. why privilege any one essay when they all bear the impress of a life? the essays is, after all, a most unusual book: “a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life” (essays, 504). “i am myself the matter of my book,” continues montaigne in the same passage, an admission that would be an act of defenseless vanity if what follows was less candid, less inconsistent, and less steeped in the minutiae of subjectivity. his vanity is of a species that does not flatter but expose. he is not looking to draw the reader in so much as draw his inner life out.7 on this count, all the essays succeed, but among them “of idleness” possesses a uniquely revelatory power. its title refers to the expectation of what retirement promised montaigne after he left public life behind for the simple pleasures of managing the affairs of his family estate. the implied temporary cessation of by the mollifying attitude toward life expressed in epicureanism (third book). although still persuasive, the “evolutionary” theory has been questioned. for two of the more influential responses, see donald frame, montaigne’s discovery of man: the humanization of a humanist (new york: columbia university press, 1955) and floyd gray, “the unity of montaigne in the essais,” modern language quarterly 22 (1961): 79-86. 7 in his “preface,” william hazlett makes this point eloquently, and with more than a touch of psychoanalytic relevance: “of all egotists, montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most truthful. what he did and what he had professed to do, was to dissect his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what relation it bore to external objects.” see the works of michel de montaigne, ed. william c. hazlett, trans. charles cotton, vol. 1 (new york: edwin c. hill, 1910) 55. k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 40 movement (“idling”) was going to give way to a full stop. the cares of the world were no longer his. “lately when i retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life i have left in rest and seclusion, it seemed to me i could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself” (essays, 21). montaigne is here giving voice to at least two stoic precepts, the one having to do with the wise sage’s counsel of solitude, and the other fixing attention on the mind and the stoic quest to achieve psychic tranquility or calmness (apatheia). an intimation of past difficulty with the latter leads montaigne to believe that in the former he might more easily attain stoic impassibility. from the essay, “our feelings reach out beyond us,” there is a glimpse of this former struggle, and of the lesson learned: “he who knows himself no longer takes extraneous business for his own; he loves and cultivates himself before anything else; he refuses superfluous occupations and useless thoughts and projects” (essays, 9). the “extraneous business” of public service is an obstacle to full selfpossession. all worldly affairs are foreign intrusions; although he is quite admired for his political skills, montaigne comes to realize his being lies elsewhere. the decision to return to the family estate is motivated by an insight that turns against all exteriority. supporting this insight is a belief in the fundamental unity and integrity of the mind, the domicile of true identity, and that by cleaving away the external shell of “superfluous occupations and useless thoughts and projects,” the native and authentic self will re-surface intact. returning to the context of thought in “of idleness,” montaigne affirms the ego’s seeming substantiality, coming into its own self-visibility in idleness―“which i hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time” (essays, 21). montaigne’s experience of idleness, however, is anything but psychic quietude. the narrative that began with the mind in seclusion terminates abruptly in a portrait of self-identity in complete and total dissolution. the anticipation leading montaigne on in his attempted recovery of the unified self, the self that was lying below the surface of appearances, intact, ready to spring to life once the world faded from view, is proven misleading. for reasons that will become clear only later, when montaigne deigns to set aside the mirror held up by the external, public world, he is left without any stabilizing reflection. psychic unity and self-mastery are shown to be illusions. from idleness comes a scene where the subject-image-ego structure has collapsed. instead of a mind in calm self-repose, montaigne encounters a primal chaos: “on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, i have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself” (essays, 21). in a sort of meta-commentary that precedes but accompanies this self-description in the essay, montaigne observes that a mind lacking a determinate shape or form is especially prey to this psychic affliction. uncoupled from the form-giving, “orthopedic” properties of the imago, the self or ego becomes a plaything of the affective dynamism of the imaginary: “so it is k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 41 with minds. unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. [. . .]. and there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in this agitation” (essays, 21). without simplifying the descriptive richness in these passages, in essence montaigne is relating his own descent into the phenomenon of anxiety lying at the origins of ego development. the lure of the image that was supposed to captivate the subject and provide a secure point of identification, wherein the ego would emerge out of the psychic dissonance between identity and lived experience, has lost its totalizing promise. the normally unbidden and developmentally masked alienation of the ego in the illusory unity of the imago has become traumatically visible. what is one to make of this profusion of disordered images against which montaigne is helpless? to begin with, there is no mistaking the uncanny resemblance between the images and visions described here and those encountered by lacan and others in clinical practice. the effort at controlling the mind by giving it a “definite subject” to fixate on could be taken to mean a busying of the mind that amounts to nothing more than a technique of distraction. this, however, does not square with “disorder” and the “ineptitude and strangeness” into which the mind is thrown if lacking an object on which the subject can be fixed. more than a mere diversionary tactic, montaigne is touching upon precisely the psychoanalytic point that lacan made in the “mirror stage” article. the subject is turned over to the formative control offered by the objectifying effect produced through an identification with and assumption of an external form (gestalt). “it suffices to understand the mirror stage,” lacan writes, “in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image―an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity’s term, ‘imago’” (écrits, 76). the mind is lacking in itself the structuring principle needed in order to support the subject as it traverses the chasm created by the “specific prematurity” of the human individual. what it needs is something to fix it in place, to give it a determinate shape or contour. lacking this formative structure or “formal fixation” (écrits, 90), the psyche is subjected to the turbulent, “unbridled” domain of lived experience. the individual may go through many such ideal unities or imagos, but to undergo the fracturing of the ego’s ideal unity is to fall into the distress of finding oneself without the primordial constitution that maps out for the subject an umwelt. there is a failure “to the structures of systematic misrecognition and objectification that characterize ego formation” (écrits, 94). the “vital dehiscence constitutive of man” (écrits, 94) opens up beneath montaigne’s feet. the description he provides in the essay “of idleness” obeys the same logic of the imaginary as portrayed by lacan. this is an important point: both the essay, “of idleness,” and the dreams and fantasies of patients suffering ego disintegration manifest the fundamental notion of the corps morcelé. the images of “chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose,” are these not drawn from the same pool of terrifying creatures as that of the flying fish k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 42 whose inflated, transparent body stalked the dreams of one of lacan’s analysands? (écrits 86) to admit that they are situates the opening moments of the essays in a psychoanalytically suggestive light. more is needed, however, in order to see the essay “of idleness” as the very dimension of the imaginary from which montaigne never leaves. let us look more closely at how montaigne responds to his sudden immersion in the lived experience of his own subjectivity. “i have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself” (essays, 21). against the carnival of disordered images, montaigne puts quill to paper so as to give them some semblance of reality. they are like nothing he has ever encountered before; in them he does not recognize himself. in their “ineptitude and strangeness,” the images are truly monstrous, that is, they offer neither formative integrity nor formative recognition. they are very much like “jig-saw puzzles,” to borrow the expression from lacan. to describe them as “chimeras” is to join bosch in his “garden of earthly delights,” where half-human, half-animal creatures populate the foreign terrain. the functional unity of the human body is lost in these precipitates of ego deformation. they are the products of an unraveling of the structural effects of identification, which is for montaigne a glimpse into the truth, lost afterwards to much of the western philosophical tradition, that the being of the subject is not reducible to the being of consciousness. it is a truth, however, that is shocking and alien, and that offends the dignity of the individual and the authority of reason. such an unruly and disobedient awareness must be domesticated, or at the very least brought into an order of familiarity. “i have begun to put them in writing,” remarks montaigne, an act that begins with “of idleness” and which constitutes the very project of the essays. thinking he could tame and bridle the roaming affectivity so disturbing to the driving and regulating forces of identification, montaigne himself becomes a literary version of bosch: his essays are themselves “fancies,” the imaginary’s flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shores of language. the image of the corps morcelé is the central motif in the portrait of the self offered by montaigne. that the images are fragmentary, lacking determinate shape or form, is clearly indicated by the preceding analysis. the fact that the images are modeled upon and take existence from a disturbance to montaigne’s body-image, that it is in fact his own embattled body-image which serves as the very material for writing, this is the psychoanalytic tour de force represented by the essays. “of idleness” is neither an isolated statement of intention, nor is it a solitary depiction of the body’s formative insecurity. everywhere one turns, montaigne is fixing his inquisitive eye on the field of the imaginary. one of the best examples comes from the essay “of friendship.” anthony wilden, the english translator of lacan’s discours de rome, in a rare and still brilliant instance of a lacanian reading of the essays in terms of the relation between montaigne and la boétie, finds in their friendship a crucial analytic insight.8 for wilden, the essays represent an individual’s search for the illusionary 8 anthony wilden, “par divers moyens on arrive a pareille fin: a reading of montaigne,” modern language notes 83.4 (1968): 577-97. k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 43 point of overcoming the dehiscence that marks all human relations. “[t]he essays,” writes wilden, “are a particularly interesting example of an interpersonal relationship dependent upon the constitution of a lost id” (wilden, 581). there is a void at the heart of the essays, an “absent image” of the friend la boétie (wilden, 591). captured in the ideal image offered by la boétie, his untimely death preceding the essays sets in motion the experience of radical alienation and the resultant quest for lost unity that drives montaigne without cease. wilden’s thesis is significant in that it captures the intersubjective horizons outside of which the essays cannot be read. moreover, he is one of the only commentators to pick up on the properly imaginary context for understanding the movements of self that make the essays such a unique document of lived subjectivity.9 what he does not develop, however, is the profound bodily meditation that takes place for montaigne as a result of the fracturing of his ideal image, his “proto-self” (wilden, 588). the imaginary is not just the place where the corps morcelé lodges its unsettling force, it is, in its essence, a dimension of the body itself. lacan’s masterstroke was to de-center the subject and thus doom the traditional philosophy of consciousness; montaigne perhaps exceeds even lacan in bringing out the nature of the operative forces pushing the subject out of focus. the various essays are so many captured fragments from a glimpse into what, on an existential level, it would mean to try to inhabit the imaginary realm, to expose the self to the winds of the passions. picking up again the thread of the essay “of friendship,” witness, for example, the profound implication of the following passage. drawing on an analogy with painting to orient his efforts, the deformed body-image, void of all structural unity, is on full display: “as i was considering the way a painter i employ went about his work, i had a mind to imitate him. he chooses the best spot, the middle of each wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skill, and the empty space all around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness. and what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, no sequence, or proportion other than accidental” (essays, 135, my italics). here again is the description given in “of idleness,” where the essays, being montaigne’s attempt to study the images of corporeal dislocation, would themselves be formless and disordered. the painting metaphor solidifies the intent and the meaning: to move within the imaginary realm one needs to remain at the sensory level, close to the lived experience of the body; the contents of the portrait, lacking solidity and determinacy, will be pieces of the body-image that have been snatched from the fleeting life they lead. without any support from an imago that would give montaigne’s ego a sense of being totalized in a stable unity, any and every essai of the self reveals a truth, partial and uncertain as it may be. 9 “it is the contradictions of the essays between assertions of personal solidity and stability (plenitude) and montaigne’s discovery of his own vacillations (flux) which reveal the existential status of imagination and absence in the constitution of human desire” (wilden 595). k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 44 with the self of consciousness displaced by the subject of the imaginary, the body weighs heavily on the images that make it into writing. from the essay “of practice,” montaigne describes this captivation of the subject by the lived body: “i expose myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its place. one part of what i am was produced by a cough, another by a pallor or a palpitation of the heart―in any case dubiously. it is not my deeds that i write down; it is myself, it is my essence” (essays, 274). lacking the formative permanence and integrity of a specular image, each reflection “at a glance” carries with it a trace of that which has been refused the structuring effects of a visual form. there is no body-image synthesis because the ego has lost its ideal locus of objectification. where there is no identifying form, there is no “alienating destination,” no “mental permanence” (écrits, 76), and the “i” encounters not a rigid world of statues but a world given over to heraclitean flux and unrest. “the world,” montaigne observes, “is but a perennial movement. all things in it are in constant motion―the earth, the rocks of the caucasus, the pyramids of egypt―both with the common motion and with their own. stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion” (essays, 610). such a paradoxical overturning of the structure of human life and knowledge is possible only on the basis of the bodying forth of the subject. writing essays is for montaigne to raise a watchtower in the imaginary order itself.10 he becomes a recording machine for the monstrous images whose animating force is the body. in a sense, for montaigne waking life is a dream only a body could have. “in order to train my fancy even to dream with some order and purpose, and in order to keep it from losing its way and roving with the wind, there is nothing like embodying and registering all the little thoughts that come to it. i listen to my reveries because i have to record them” (essays, 504, my italics). not even the slightest “imaginings” are corrected (essays, 574), as they are all testimony to the existential mutability of the embodied subject. to maintain the subject within the interior orbit of the corps morcelé is to move at the level of the image. without any structuring form to capture the subject and draw it away from the body’s turbulence, the individual lives in intimate proximity to the 10 in focusing montaigne’s psychoanalytic value on his proximity to the imaginary order, i realize that however similar the essays might seem to bosch’s “garden of earthly delights,” there is still this fundamental and irreducible difference: to capture his corporeal visions, he turned to the word, to language. this raises the very significant question of the status of the unconscious with montaigne. for lacan, the freudian unconscious presupposes the cartesian subject, divided and split as it is between thought and being. from the perspective of descartes, montaigne makes a fatal alliance with being. whereas descartes enforces the division of the subject into cogito and sum, pinning the being of the subject in the act of thinking, montaigne observes no comparable split. indeed, montaigne aggravates the very assumption of such a cogito unfettered from the substance of embodied subjectivity. thus, the necessary precondition of the subject of the unconscious, namely the alienation of the subject as it is forced to choose between being and meaning or thought, is absent in the essays. what complicates this otherwise sound picture? not only does montaigne not stop speaking, displaying a striking and subversive awareness of the divergence, in lacanian terms, between k i m r e u t e r : montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights” s1 (2008): 45 affective register, wherein all paths to the visible world are labyrinthine struggles that take place “against a background of organic disturbances and discord” (“some reflections,” 15). for montaigne, the play of “reveries” across the field of the subject constitutes a radical involvement with the lived body. at this level, that is, at the level of the imaginary, the body mirrors little back to the subject that looks anything like the human form. if there is a madness in the essays, it belongs to the same species of madness “by which a man thinks he is a man,” a psychoanalytic truth which is also the most profound illusion (écrits, 153). like one of the tortured residents of the “garden of earthly delights,” montaigne sees everywhere around him a world populated by images of the body as if seen through a prism. if by fortune and by practice he is to remain in the realm of the imaginary, a gaze doubled-back on itself and returned to its primal sources in the corporeal fact, as the subject caught up in the image of the corps morcelé, is it any surprise that in describing the style of his writings he chooses to call them, this literary cousin of bosch, “essays in flesh and bone” (essays, 640)? the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation, but like freud, he never for once makes the mistake of believing that conscious intention is adequate to the full expression of signification. see further, lorenzo chiesa, subjectivity and otherness: a philosophical reading of lacan (cambridge, mass.: the mit press, 2007) 38. between montaigne and descartes there emerges the possibility of psychoanalysis sketched in the outlines of the unconscious. this strange period in the history of thought yet remains to be written, obscured as it is and has been by the reading of the essays that situates its skepticism, retroactively, within the project of cartesian certainty and the self-founding of the subject in consciousness. yet, if skepticism shares with psychoanalysis a certain taste for the negative, it remains simultaneously and paradoxically true that both montaigne and descartes make freud’s epochal discovery possible. i want to thank a reviewer’s comments for signaling the need to address this problematic. pluth.indd s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 3 (2010): 178-190 e d p l u t h a n a d v e n t u r e i n t h e o r d e r o f t h i n g s : jean-claude milner on lalangue and lacan’s incomplete materialism milner on the silent seminars i n l’œuvre claire, jean-claude milner claims that lacan arrives at a theoretical impasse during his last years of teaching, one that makes his entire project comparable “to the great materialist works,” such as those by lucretius and marx—projects that, like lacan’s, milner thinks are incomplete or failed.1 the problem is found in lacan’s notorious silent seminars, during which the study and manipulation of borromean knots seemed to be tasked with the work of transmitting psychoanalytic theory. milner takes the use of these knots to mean that lacan had concluded that showing theory was better than transmitting it through speech, and was also superior to the transmission of it via the mathemes lacan had been using for years. milner argues: what is shown in silence [psychoanalytic theory, via the borromean knots] is that without which the transmission of psychoanalysis would not be able to be accomplished integrally. how can we avoid a bit of inductive reasoning here? if the matheme is abolished then one can no longer say, one can only show: well, after seminar xx, lacan progressively arrives at doing nothing other than showing; it is therefore the case that the matheme had been abolished. (l’œuvre claire 167) milner’s argument in this paragraph sounds to me more like an example of deductive reasoning. and if it is, it turns out to be a formally invalid argument, committing the fallacy of “affirming the consequent” (taking the form, “if p then q; q; therefore p”). perhaps milner only means to say that from the fact that lacan “shows” psychoanalytic theory via the borromean knots, it can be inferred that he came to negative conclusions about the matheme, and language itself, as ways 1. jean-claude milner, l’œuvre claire: lacan, la science, la philosophie (paris: seuil, 1995) 171. further references in the text as l’œuvre claire. pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 179 of transmitting theory. this certainly seems to be what milner is arguing, and put this way, the problem with the argument is also easier to see. what is questionable, however, is that lacan ever thought one could or should only show theory. this, the basis of milner’s reasoning, is what i will be calling into question in this paper. in milner’s discussion of lacan, there are echoes of the famous concluding thesis from wittgenstein’s tractatus—“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”2 this is not accidental; reflections on the relation between lacan and wittgenstein make up an important part of milner’s considerations. wittgenstein’s thesis obviously upholds a strong antinomy between speaking and showing. as milner frames it: “there is what is said and there is what is not said; between the two, the frontier is real and impassable. what is not said shows itself and it is necessary to be silent about it” (l’œuvre claire 168). for most of his career, milner points out, lacan considered the problem posed by this thesis to be “a real one and, simultaneously, one that could be handled; and that it did not lead to the duty to be silent” (168). this is in large part because silence was held by lacan to be “at the level of the real, impossible” anyway (169). what milner is pointing to here is an assertion upon which lacan’s work was for a long time based—that there is an unconscious, and that the actions of the unconscious require us to posit something like a thinking or a speaking other than that posited by the classical philosophical subject. for much of lacan’s career, an account of the unconscious—its structures, its genesis—was very important for the teaching of psychoanalysis. milner’s claim, that lacan’s materialist project is ultimately incomplete, is driven by what he takes to be a modification in the status of the unconscious: in the period of the silent seminars, the unconscious is no longer considered to be a thinking at all, really. and if this is the case, its structure can at best be shown, not spoken, and not even mathematized. one of the great merits of milner’s reading of lacan is not only the fact that he places lacan within the materialist tradition in philosophy, but that, by bringing lacan into relation to wittgenstein, he gets us to pay attention to a topic that any materialist project now should attempt to clarify: the relation between thinking and being. it is perhaps obvious why materialisms avoid this topic, since it seems to be the very stuff of idealism. a common point shared by most contemporary materialisms is their degradation of the status of thinking, which is usually considered to be epiphenomenal and non-real, reducible to and constituted by brain activity. why bother accounting for its status? therefore, many contemporary philosophical materialisms do not at all require that thinking, or anything like it, be considered a part of the real. the real, for these materialisms, can well be considered silent, and its silence is an unproblematic one—all the more reason why the “showing” of the real would be better than any possible “speaking” about it, which will always be off the mark. the real’s silence does not cause any difficulties for the sciences that 2. ludwig wittgenstein, tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. c. g. ogden <http://www. uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus-jsnav.html> [accessed 17 july, 2010]. pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 180 study it, since these sciences circumvent ordinary human language and linguistic meaning in the first place, precisely by relying on a mathematization of nature. it is not ordinary human language that hits the real at all, but a more formalized “language” that does so. none of this stops natural scientists from trying to convey in ordinary language something about their discoveries sometimes but we know that, when they do this, their writing approximates the status of poetry, as merleau-ponty pointed out, and that such written texts are not really the conveyors of scientific knowledge anyway. such knowledge is in the formulas, the math (if it can be said to “be” anywhere), and not in the ordinary language descriptions of those formulas, which are always metaphorical. whatever is going on at the atomic or sub-atomic constitutive level of nature defies our ability to think, imagine, or intuit. furthermore, our ability to manipulate the constitutive level of nature does not require that we think anything particularly clearly about it either. it simply requires a technical know-how, based on proper formalizations; not on the creation of correct linguistic expressions about it, and not on having proper intuitions about it either. the sciences show us a way, then, in which knowledge is transmitted through mathemes, and what is said about them is basically superfluous. according to milner’s reading, lacan embraces the borromean knots because they are “saying” even less about the real than the mathemes do, and are therefore respecting even more ably what is supposed to be an inviolable barrier between the shown and the spoken. for that reason, lacan’s is a failed or unachieved materialism: in fact, less a materialism than a mysticism. quentin meillassoux’s materialist return to parmenides a discussion of quentin meillassoux’s project is relevant here, because it addresses the tendency of contemporary materialist projects to, if not embrace, then at least enable, mysticism—precisely by trying to remedy materialism’s shortcomings when it comes to the status of thinking.3 meillassoux’s development of a position that returns to the “parmenidean” idea of a real union of thinking and being (and not parmenides’ monism) is worth considering as a possible instance of what a successful, achieved materialism would be. interestingly, he uses the mathematization of the real as a main point in his refutation of what he calls “correlationism”—about which more in a moment. yet, as i suggest above, it would seem that the mathematization of nature goes very well with a continuation of the position meillassoux wants to avoid. the question i will raise after considering meillassoux’s alternative (he calls it “speculative” materialism) is: whatever happened to dialectical materialism? not a dialectical materialism that posits dialectical relationships in nature, nor one that posits the importance of interactions among material beings for material beings, whatever they are, however they are conceived, but one that posits a dialectical relationship between thinking and being themselves. it is ultimately not 3. quentin meillassoux, after finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency, trans. ray brassier (london: continuum, 2008). pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 181 clear that meillassoux’s position has the merit of destroying the absolute barrier between what can only be shown and what can be said, which would constitute a vigorous refutation of the ineffable. this will lead us to reconsider lacan’s position, as well as milner’s description of it. quentin meillassoux defines his main philosophical antagonist, correlationism, as “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (meillassoux 5)—that is, we never have access to being as it really is, except through the medium of thought, which, precisely as a medium, distorts what it targets. one way to oppose correlationism would be with a naïve realism, which supposes that access to what is other than thought is possible and even relatively unproblematic—that the relation of being to thought can be immediate. meillassoux, by contrast, wants to hang on to the idea that there is something problematic about this relation. naïve realism, according to him, does not sufficiently appreciate the weirdness presented by our ability to make meaningful claims about, for example, what preceded the emergence of any conscious being whatsoever, as we do when we make meaningful statements about the nature of the universe before the existence of humanity. meillassoux claims that it is being’s ability to be “mathematized” that gives us a way out of correlationism, and this also requires us to reconsider the kantian turn in philosophy, whose essence can be described as follows: “being and thinking must be thought as capable of being wholly other”—as good a definition of what meillassoux understands as correlationism as there is (meillassoux 44). yet a strong correlationism goes further than this, positing a strong separation of thinking from being, making thought into something radically other than being—not superior to it, not a cause of it, but typically more of a sub-being, a mere epiphenomenon, appearance, fiction, or illusion, as it would be for a nietzschean as well as for an eliminative or reductionist materialist. in this case, thinking would have access only to what it produces, while being would continue on, independent of and indifferent to what is (rightly or wrongly—it hardly matters) thought about it. this condition meillassoux identifies as one of the most significant and pernicious errors committed by correlationism, for it is what, inadvertently, creates an opening for the mystical and the obscurantist. one of the most valuable insights of meillassoux’s work is that a common type of materialism in fact enables mysticism even when it may believe itself to be promoting the hard sciences. the point is that if it is held that thinking is cut off entirely from being, the existence of the divine in the real is as viable a hypothesis as any other. this sort of too—cautious materialism makes agnosticism the safest among philosophical options. what i want to show next is how meillassoux’s project, precisely in its most compelling gesture—its reconsideration of a kind of mathematical realism, its evocation of the galilean mathematization of nature as a continued inspiration for thought—overlooks an opportunity to make a more vigorous materialist claim about the union of thinking and being. pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 182 consider more closely the relationship between thinking and being that is asserted in meillassoux’s work. being is said to be mathematizable, and so correlationism is wrong, because mathematics shows us how the “parmenidean postulate” can be returned to: it shows us where “being and thinking are the same” (meillassoux 44). yet this does not mean that mathematics is, or is even part of, the really real. mathematics is a thinking. it is through mathematics that being and thinking are supposed to be joined together. yet this still amounts to an imbalanced union, because meillassoux’s way out of correlationism does not allow for anything like a “knowledge in the real”—an idea i will discuss via the notion of lalangue in the next section. it is doubtful that meillassoux wants to say that being itself knows anything about mathematics. it would be erroneous to say that the real knows the laws of physics and chemistry. and there is also no need to posit a subject in the real who knows these laws. the formal languages we use for such laws are not at all etched into the heart of things either. must it then be said that such formal expressions of laws “correlate” to the real? yet this cannot be what meillassoux wants to say!4 this leads me to conclude that the way in which meillassoux articulates the relation of mathematics to thinking poses a problem for his speculative materialism. while he says of his work that it refutes correlationism by bringing thinking and being back into a union with each other (via mathematics), this relation turns out to be one-directional and therefore not as far from correlationism as it is possible to go. let’s agree that being is mathematizable. this still leaves being ultimately unaffected by its mathematization—and therefore, mathematics does not show us where there is an interaction and interrelation—not to mention union—of thinking and being. (if there is not even a strong interaction between thinking and being, it is hard to see how there could be a meaningful union . . . unless meillassoux really meant to go all-out parmenidean on us, by claiming that thinking is being, and vice versa: the monist direction, in other words. but i see no evidence for this in what i’ve read of him.) the hard sciences, and mathematics, can only take us from one kind of correlationism to another, it seems. what is needed, for a different sort of materialism, one of human practice, is a reconsideration of the status of the socalled “human” sciences. a table from alain badiou’s theory of the subject is very helpful for gaining clarity on the nature of this debate and where i wish to take it—toward a position that i would describe as some variant of dialectical materialism.5 badiou has always understood his own work to be articulating such a position, and the figure he uses to illustrate it is that of a spiral: an arrow starts in the realm of being, crosses over into thinking, turns back to being, and continues to move on in this way. there is no circularity here, in the sense that there is no projected completion, no overarching purpose or goal that thinking and being are trying to attain—such as a point of ultimate coincidence, when the relation between thinking and being would be fully 4. ray brassier makes a similar point about meillassoux’s position in nihil unbound: enlightenment and extinction (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2007) 87-88. 5. alain badiou, theory of the subject, trans. bruno bosteels (london: continuum, 2009) 117. pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 183 adequate, complete, attained, in a sort of ideal correlation. nor is it the point of a dialectical materialism to claim that being and thinking are really one (à la parmenides). rather, what is desired is a theory in which the actual reciprocity and strong mutual influence between thinking and being, theory and practice, at least in some domains of human life, is accounted for; a theory in which there is no absolute barrier between thinking and being (and also not between saying and showing) that would require us to adopt silence as the most appropriate philosophical attitude (and therefore devaluing thought itself). as georg lukàcs put it in history and class consciousness, when contrasting dialectics to what he called metaphysics, “in all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality.”6 obviously, the merely contemplative status that thinking must have in mathematics is one of the things that concerns me about meillassoux’s attempt to refute correlationism. much better, it seems to me, is to reconsider what a dialectical materialism can do. in response to my points here, meillassoux may be able to assert that mathematics does have effects on being too. the natural sciences have assisted, after all, in the creation of new material beings, as well as new types of beings, and have certainly given us an effective “know how” with the real. while this is certainly practical, and suggests that mathematics is something other than merely contemplative, it does not allow us to assert that any change in the nature of being itself has come from mathematics (or from any of the hard sciences). in fact, it is difficult to see how the hard sciences could offer us any examples of the kind asserted by a dialectical theory in which being and thinking would be mutually influencing each other (unless one adopts an undesirable “quantum mysticism”). and therefore it is difficult to see how the hard sciences can offer a model for how thinking and being are actually unified, along the lines of the parmenidean thesis meillassoux himself wishes to rehabilitate. it would seem that meillassoux’s position is, by lukàcs’ standard, metaphysical rather than dialectical, even though it does qualify as a philosophical materialism. my study of milner’s interpretation of the notion of lalangue in lacanian theory in the next section will give us an example of what is desired: something like a dialectical materialism on the question of the relation between thinking and being. yet lalangue also plays a key role in what milner considers to be the impasse in lacan’s materialism, because milner ultimately concludes that what is going on in lalangue cannot be called a thinking at all. thus, it functions as a “silent” real, 6. georg lukacs, history and class consciousness, trans. rodney livingstone (cambridge, mass: mit press, 1971) 3. pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 184 and the barrier between thinking and being is reinstated. this is the point i will question in my conclusion. lalangue and saussure’s anagrams as an “adventure in the order of things” lacan introduced the term lalangue in the 1970s to address what there is of the real in language—something like the very sound of a language, such as phonemes considered apart from the creation of sense. the phrase lalangue is itself written in a way that is supposed to get us to pay attention to the sound of language under or alongside its meaning, which is the very thing the term is about. bruce fink uses “llanguage” as an english translation for this, in which the graphically repeated, and in speech a bit elongated “l” gets us to hear the word differently, having basically the same effect—calling our attention to the thing the concept is supposed to designate.7 lalangue, milner argues, is not unstructured and without reason. it is structured and, according to milner in l’amour de la langue,8 its structure marks the presence of a kind of “knowledge in the real.” this is what “dooms” language “to equivocity” (l’amour 22). the structure or “reason” intrinsic to lalangue can even be considered extra-linguistic since it involves things like resemblances among sounds, or, in writing, the physical arrangement of letters. it is “extra-linguistic,” therefore, on the condition that language is thought of along the lines of saussurean linguistic structure. milner writes that “homophonies, homosemies, palindromes, anagrams, tropes, and all the imaginable figures of association” are the effects of lalangue, and are due to nothing other than the materiality or physicality of languages, and not to that in languages which is involved in the creation of meanings—such as relations and differences among signs (l’amour 104). on milner’s reading, lalangue is, therefore, also a term for what it is of language that escapes and exceeds formalization, and it therefore presents a challenge to the science of linguistics. saussure’s analyses of saturnian verse—a type of latin poetry whose nature still seems to puzzle scholars—provide milner with an intriguing case study for this view of lalangue as a challenge to the science of linguistics. when first published in 1971, saussure’s notes inspired many to wonder whether the father of structuralist linguistics had opened up a new discipline that questioned some of the basics of what was set up in his earlier and influential cours.9 saussure argued that these latin verses contained anagrams of things like the names of gods or the individuals to whom the poems were devoted—anagrams of names that do not themselves 7. see jacques lacan, on feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge: the seminar of jacques lacan, book 20: encore, 1972-1973, edited by jacques-alain miller, trans. with notes bruce fink (new york: w. w. norton, 1998). 8. jean-claude milner, l’amour de la langue (paris: seuil, 1978). further references in the text as l’amour. 9. ferdinand de saussure, course in general linguistics, ed. charles bally and albert sechehaye, with albert riedlinger, trans. roy harris (la salle, il: open court press, 1986). pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 185 necessarily appear in the verse as such. although often referred to as anagrams, this turns out not to be the best name for what saussure was discussing. saussure himself suggested some alternative names, like homograms, since the “anagrams” in question do not involve a rearrangement of letters strictly speaking (as anagrams do) but of phonemes. finding the original or key name (the mot-thème, saussure sometimes called it) for a given poem required a puzzling out of which phonemes were repeated from verse to verse, and which were left over—a sort of tangential code had to be developed for reading the poem. david shepheard described it well in a paper from 1982: firstly, each phonetic term in the verse might be repeated in pairs, in such a way that no unmatched sound was left over in a given line or passage (monophones). secondly, the phonetic structures could involve more looselyarranged sets of syllables or phonic groups which then ‘echo’ one another across the line or passage (diphones, triphones, polyphones). and thirdly, there was an independent, though related, phenomenon in which the groups of sounds seem to reproduce the syllables or sounds of a key-word (motthème) or of a name important in the context of the passage as a whole (anagramme).10 according to roman jakobson, in these notebooks saussure was developing what could be called a “diachronic” linguistics, alongside the well-known “synchronic” linguistics proposed by the cours (shepheard 523). the anagrams reveal an historical constant in language use that is distinct from the rules governing language as a synchronic structure: one now sees that the particular features of any language’s materiality provide the basis for some aspects of the style of that language’s use. this use would not depend on the structure of the language and the relations among signs in it, but rather on the nature of the physical phonemes—their sounds—themselves. this is why milner himself calls the anagram theory “maximally distinct” from the theory proposed by the structuralist saussure of the cours (l’amour 91). one particular phoneme rather than another appears where it does in a saturnian verse due to its homophony with the phonemes of the “mot-thème,” or with other phonemes of the poem. the placement of sounds is not entirely arbitrary, but conditioned (although not entirely conditioned either). it is for this reason that milner claims the anagram theory shows us where a theory of language can touch on the real, in opposition to what linguistics usually studies. and, making a point i will expand on in my conclusion (for it affects the status of lacan’s allegedly incomplete materialism), it also shows us the conditions for the actions of the unconscious: simply, linguistics [as a structural science] has nothing to do with this real of homophony, a condition of the slip of the tongue and the pun. linguistics sets it aside, consigning it to contingency. [a conclusion] to which the saussurean sign easily leads: if it is contingent that such and such a phonic 10. david shepheard, “saussure’s vedic anagrams,” the modern language review 77. 3 (july 1982): 513-523. 514. pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 186 signifier is knotted to such and such a signified this will be a fortiori the case if two phonic signifiers knotted to different signifieds find themselves in resemblance. this would be an adventure in the order of things, which the order of signs would not be able to attain. (l’amour 91-2) saussure’s views on the arbitrariness of the signifier are well known: that a particular sound comes to be linked to a particular signified is not supposed to be motivated by any trait in the thing referred to, the signified, or the sound itself. so if the sound of two signifiers is identical, this would also be a merely contingent and accidental feature of the phonemes involved, with no bearing on the constitution of meanings or values in a language. as milner puts it, this is an adventure on the order of things, not signs. but what is interesting about the anagram theory is that, in it, this adventure in the order of things, the materiality of language itself, does become the condition for certain aspects of a language’s style and use. the anagram theory should not be understood as a mystical pursuit of hidden meanings, therefore, as it has sometimes been taken (shepheard’s essay makes this point well). in fact, the “mot-thème” revealed by the analysis of saturnian verses does not really tell one anything new about the verse—the result is usually rather obvious, or else trivial, whether the mot-thème or keyword appears in the poem directly or not. what is happening is that these poems (like everything else, potentially) show us another register of language at work, a register other to language as a meaninggenerating system—one that exploits a language’s materiality, sonority, textuality or ‘litterality,’ and one that is not entirely without its own rules. and this is why milner says, with respect to such linguistic creations, that in them “it is no longer the linguist who knows, but lalangue who knows by him, because that is the truth of his competence: not mastery, but subjugation (assujettissement) and the discovery that lalangue knows” (l’amour 128). and later on: “no one is master of lalangue, a real insists there, and lalangue, ultimately, knows” (133). but why does milner consider calling what is going on in lalangue a “knowledge” at all since, clearly, there is not really anything like knowledge going on in it? rather, there is simply an ordering, a patterning in the order of things, an order proper to the thingliness of language. the ordered interactions of material beings in physics do not lead most people to speak of a knowledge present at that level. milner’s claims in l’œuvre claire suggest that he reconsiders this point. it is no longer really anything like a knowledge that occurs or is contained in lalangue; stripped of anything like thought and reason, it becomes a mere automaticity. the idea is that the insistence of sounds, the repetition of phonemes—even articulated to the advanced degree that they are in saturnian verses—happens thoughtlessly. it is for this reason milner comes to the conclusion that he does about lacan’s materialism: that for lacan the real is silent, and therefore is best shown, not spoken about—with all of the problems for theory that this poses (namely, silence, and an anti-philosophy). in conclusion, i want to point out how the play in lalangue is, however, always a possible source for the generation of meaning; this is what milner overlooks, and it is pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 187 what calls into question his conclusion about the alleged failure of lacan’s materialism. it also models for us a dialectical materialism operating in lacanian theory. the way back to dialectical materialism? can a materialism that would not be eliminative or reductionist, but instead dialectical (because it posits a real transformation of being by something like thinking), and, in turn, a real influence on thought from being (if not in the domain of the hard sciences then in that of the old “human” sciences)…can such a project do anything with the idea of a “knowledge in the real,” as odd as this sounds, and as outré as such a thing would be for most types of materialism? if hegelian idealism is to be avoided—if there is to be no super-subject who knows, no spirit or mind who is driving things—and yet thinking and being are to be aligned in a way that is more vigorous than what occurs in the natural sciences or in mathematics itself, should this relation be put in such a way that there can be said to be a “knowledge in the real”? the “knowledge in the real” allegedly contained in lalangue, according to milner’s reading in l’amour de la langue, involved an ordered appearance of phonemes; an appearance that is not guided according to the dictates of sense and classical saussurean differential relations among signs, and thus also not in accordance with a language-user’s intent, or with what a language-user wants to say. this order is guided simply by resemblances among sounds, by homophonies, or by other physical factors. structuralist linguistics did much to teach us that a speaker says more (or less) than what she wants to say: a linguistic system generates a surplus of meaning. there is, in language use, a production of meaning that occurs in indifference to anything like the conscious intent of a speaker. this perspective affects how the relation between thinking and language should be conceived, and it helps to refute the idea that there is a clearly articulated thought that precedes its expression in language. rather, it is the case that being put into a form of expression gives a thought or an intention a clarity it did not previously have. this is why we continue to work with and alter the form of expression, and is why we feel that our thoughts have sometimes not been adequately expressed: not because the form of expression (language) fails to portray them accurately, but because what is expressed is itself, if not inexhaustible, then at least vague enough and indeterminate enough to allow for repeated and multiple expressions. here, linguistic form not only forms content (meaning) but indeed makes (much of) it. it is no wonder then that structuralist approaches to language were of interest to psychoanalysis. lalangue shows us instead a kind of stupidity proper to language, something that concerns not the relation between thinking and language, and not the generation of unintended meanings, but rather a level of no meaning at all. a zombie-like level of language, the level of language’s materiality itself, the phoneme or grapheme; a level responsible for homophonic insistences (one sound influencing the sounds that appear elsewhere), resemblances, etc., which insist within or alongside what pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 188 is meant, running parallel to what is said. as we have seen, milner at one point wanted to call the structure that guides such articulations in lalangue a “knowledge in the real” (as opposed to the knowledge in/of the symbolic that classical linguistic structure would be). in l’œuvre claire he reconsiders this, because what goes on in the real no longer deserves the name of thinking. i will go over his case for this in a moment. what milner overlooks, however, is the fact that the dimension of lalangue can, of course, serve as a basis for the development of potential linguistic content, and for thinking. but here it is not a matter of there being, first, a relatively undetermined, vague thought that is the seed for continuing formation, precision, in words, as is the case for the relation between language and thinking. in lalangue we see how the matter of language itself can inspire further adventures in thought. if saussure is right about saturnian poetry, we would have an entire genre based on this dimension. but, as i will explain in a moment, something as simple as punning shows us the same thing. and beyond punning, everyday language use contains aspects of the same thing. what i am getting at, then, is the idea that lalangue is a positive factor in, and a genuine contributor to, the creation of thought. lalangue shows us how an adventure at the level of things can feed an adventure at the level of thought—exactly the sort of relation between thinking and being that a dialectical materialism is about. this is why i do not think milner’s conclusions about lacan’s materialism are right. let’s get back to the alleged impasse in lacan’s materialist project, and to the reasons for milner’s change of heart about a possible “knowledge in the real.” milner’s contention in l’œuvre claire was that the borromean knot period of lacan’s teaching amounted to a triumph of showing over saying, a renunciation of the possibility of articulating psychoanalytic doctrine, of transmitting it well in either natural language or via mathemes. in his twentieth seminar, lacan claimed there was no thinking but “aristotelian” thinking (that is, philosophical, or individual, or classical thinking, or something like that)…and that if the “signifier” is “bête,” one cannot say the unconscious thinks. lacan claimed that “man thinks with his soul, that is, man thinks with the thought of aristotle” (quoted in l’œuvre claire 144). milner glosses this as follows: “in other words, there is no thought but an imaginarized and qualified one […] with which the unconscious has nothing to do” (l’œuvre claire 144). but the idea that the unconscious was some kind of thinking had been important to lacanian theory previously: “in order for the unconscious to be a ‘ça pense,’ it is necessary, one knows, that a thinking without qualities exists; psychoanalysis entirely succeeded in establishing the existence of this […] and yet at the very moment of its success, it turns out that one must no longer speak of ‘thinking’ here” (145). so milner opposes one of lacan’s early theses about the unconscious, which embraces the idea that “ça pense”—it thinks, or there is thinking, there where i am not —to the later thesis, which goes as follows: “there where it thinks, it enjoys, and it knows nothing” (145). this should be taken to mean that an impersonal “it enjoys” replaces an impersonal “it thinks.” and the dimension of lalangue, according to pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 189 milner, illustrates just this: it is language pleasuring itself in a “headless” manner, as it were, through, as well as despite, our uses of it. an enjoyment in and of the real is posited, rather than a thinking therein. the more lacan thought the unconscious through the category of the real, milner suggests, the more it, too, veered over into the domain of silence and non-thinking (being, let’s say). accordingly, a “science of the unconscious” itself had to forgo not only natural language but even a matheme-based approach to transmitting a knowhow with the unconscious, which the training of psychoanalysts, and psychoanalytic theory itself, requires. psychoanalytic theory becomes a (non-)discourse of showing, not saying. hence the silent seminars. and yet there is a practice of saying, a persistence in saying, in a particular mode, that continues in this period of lacan’s teaching, as milner himself notes. this is why i find milner’s conclusion unconvincing. and that’s why the inference milner tries to draw doesn’t work. remember that milner tried to engage in what he called some inductive reasoning: from the fact that the knots were used to display theory, the matheme was refuted. yet the knots were never used entirely on their own. or, they were never really supposed to do all the work milner tries to make them do. for accompanying the use of the knots was, always, an “elucubration” of the real. milner points this out himself, when he calls attention to an interesting comment lacan made in his seminar in 1977: “should a psychoanalyst be inspired by something on the order of poetry? this is where i’m trying to take you. […]. although i slide into it occasionally, an articulated logic is not the thrust of my speech” (lacan, quoted in milner, l’œuvre claire 172n4).11 but for milner, the explosion of puns and witticisms in the seminar only confirms his interpretation. yes, lacan’s “poetization” of theory continues in the silent period (not silent enough, after all . . .). but according to milner, the many plays on words, the jokes that transmit knowledge, only confirm that lacan thought the knots are the way to go. why? “each of these games devours the other, to the point where each devours itself. the poem, polymerized to the unlimited infinity of lalangue, explodes fixedly on the abyss. on the one hand, the taciturn knots, on the other […] the poem, attested to and abolished by its own proliferation” (l’œuvre claire 165). milner is distinguishing between something like the bad infinity of a “poetizing” approach to theory—one that opens up an abyss of interpretation by exploiting the level of lalangue—and the silent but precise alternative abyss of the matheme, embodied by the borromean knots (which, strictly speaking, milner thinks count as an abolition of the “matheme” as well). beyond “poeme” (sic) and matheme, into silence; this seems to be milner’s thesis on lacan’s project. 11. lacan’s french is typically challenging, so i include it here: “�tre �ventuellement �tre �ventuellement inspir� par quelque chose de l’ordre de la po�sie pour intervenir en tant que psychanalyste? c’est bien ce vers quoi il faut vous tourner […]. ce n’est pas du côté de la logique articulée-quoi que j’y glisse à l’occasion-qu’il faut sentir la portée de notre dire…” pluth: an adventure in the order of things s3 (2010): 190 it is true that during this last period lacan pays less and less attention to the structuralist view of language that had guided his thinking for so long. yet the more one considers the status of lalangue, the more questionable milner’s conclusions about the incompleteness of lacan’s materialist project and his embrace of silence become. what is going on in lalangue can be described as a zombie-like non-thinking. but punning is something else, and the punning during the silent seminars is like a folding in of lalangue into sense, an exploitation of it for sense, for thinking . . . or a forcing of sense from lalangue, such that any purity in the domain of the real is not respected at all. (and isn’t this one of the lessons of the knots anyway—the interweaving of all three orders, the abolition of the distinctness of any one of them from the others?) we are back to what was always lacan’s violation of wittgenstein’s prohibition. the purity of the ineffable is rejected. milner might take this assertion to be, in fact, a negative conclusion about theory and language—because it would seem to sanction saying whatever, presumably. yet milner’s interpretation of lalangue in lacanian theory points to just what a philosophical materialism needs. lalangue shows us a de-individualized “knowledge in the real,” and a link between thinking and being that is more vigorous than what quentin meillassoux’s interesting and important project gives us. one needs to look outside the hard sciences to find this, to what used to be called the “human sciences.” not only linguistics, but economics and, of course, psychoanalysis need to be considered by such a project as well, as cases in which an interaction between thinking and being indeed takes place. so, the pun-fueled observations and theses lacan promotes during this period also “show” us the solution to the apparent impasse in lacan’s materialism. they show it in practice, and are a showing that is irreverent to the sanctity of the real—an un-wittgensteinian showing. lacan continues to violate wittgenstein’s prohibition: whereof one cannot speak, it is legitimate to go ahead and speak anyway, and one can even mock the reverential mere showing of theory. perhaps it is the showing of the borromean knots that needs to be considered the parodic commentary, and not the punning? this discussion also bears on the question of whether lacan was an anti-philosopher or not. he probably was, or meant to be. whether his theory succeeds in being an anti-philosophy is another matter. if milner’s interpretation of lacan is correct, not only was lacan personally an anti-philosopher, but his theory results in anti-philosophy as well. i am trying to propose another reading of lacanian theory here, nowhere near as detailed, well-documented, and rigorously argued as milner’s study in l’œuvre claire, it is true (to which i have not been able to do justice here). but i hope to have presented the outlines of a counter-interpretation to the challenge milner’s work poses, a counter-interpretation that considers lacan’s work to contain the basic elements of a dialectical materialism, theorizing like little else the interaction of thinking and being. (wasn’t philosophy for althusser the theory of theoretical practice? lacanian theory teaches us quite a bit about that.) maccannell-s1-2008 s j o u r n a l o f t h e j a n v a n e y c k c i r c l e f o r l a c a n i a n i d e o l o g y c r i t i q u e 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) table of contents editorial 2 the gaze of pygmalion bernard baas 4 missing the point: reading the lacanian subject through perspective thomas brockelman 16 montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights”: the image of the corps morcelé in the essays jonathan kim-reuter 36 the real imaginary: lacan’s joyce juliet flower maccannell 46 dialogues intimate extorted, intimate exposed gérard wajcman 58 response: the politics of “atopia of the intimate” in contemporary art: the view from lacanian psychoanalysis lieven jonckheere 78 reviews hitchcock’s cryptonomies, by tom cohen sigi jöttkandt 100 s is on the web at www.lineofbeauty.org j u l i e t f l o w e r m a c c a n n e l l t h e r e a l i m a g i n a r y lacan’s joyce n his twenty-third seminar, jacques lacan framed the sinthome as a radical unknotting of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. he offered le sinthome not as a mere technical addition to the battery of psychoanalytic tools, but as a concept of paramount importance, for its unique adequation to what he found to be a significant change in the conventional relation of subject to culture and of ego to other.1 the sinthome denoted for lacan a new way that the subject could confront the challenge posed by the rancid politics of our time―the politics produced by (or at least not precluded by) the traditional borromean entwining of the three registers (symbolic, imaginary, real, or sir). the corollary to lacan’s staking out this new ground is a surprising promotion of the imaginary to a principal role in the subject’s relation to the real―of bearing more of this burden than he had previously thought. by the time of his twenty-third seminar, that is, lacan realizes that the crucial task of mediating between the real and the imaginary for the subject could no longer be shouldered exclusively by a symbolic whose failings were increasingly (and alarmingly) apparent. the rupture that the sinthome indexes appears most importantly for lacan in the art of writing―and in particular, the writing of james joyce. i in the nineteen-sixties, lacan began closely studying the work of joyce, an interest enhanced when hélène cixous (who was writing a book on joyce that drew on her affinity for jacques derrida’s theses on “écriture”) became lacan’s assistant.2 from joyce’s proper name (“joy-ce”/jouissance) to his family psychiatric history (joyce’s daughter lucia was diagnosed as schizophrenic3), the irish author clearly suited lacan’s abiding concerns. as the father of a troubled daughter and himself the son of a weak, alcoholic father, joyce was, according to lacan, marked by the failures of the paternal metaphor. in seminar xxiii, lacan posited that joyce’s artistic enterprise 1 seminar xxiii, 1976 in ornicar? (1976): 6-11, ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. luke thurston. unless otherwise noted, page numbers refer to luke thurston’s unpublished english translation. i also refer to the often confusingly titled “joyce the symptom i” (as mentioned in note 1 of thurston’s translation; in manuscript), the address he delivered at the invitation of jacques aubert at the opening of the fifth international joyce symposium, 26 june 1975, s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 1 (2008): 46-57 m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 47 was his way of “making a name for himself,” of provisioning a necessary supplement, and joyce’s art appears to be compensating for this paternal lack. lacan says, joyce did this close-up: born in dublin with a boozing, practically good-fornothing father, [. . .] a fanatic with two families [. . .]. the phallus is the conjunction of this parasite, the little prick in question, and the function of language [parole]. and it is thus that joyce’s art is the true guarantee of his phallus. (seminar xxiii, lesson of 18 november, 1975, 3) however, lacan proposes a slightly new version of what he means by “father,” designating a “borromean father” who is not the name, but the one who names. this father who names functions where the unconscious “is knotted to a sinthome” that is completely unique to and in each and every individual (jsi, 9). thus in “joyce the symptom i,” when lacan says joyce wants to be the symptom (“he displays the apparatus, the essence and the abstraction of the symptom,” jsi, 6), he does not intend the traditional or familiar psychoanalytic symptom (indeed, to his psychoanalytic students lacan will remark, “the symptom in joyce is a symptom that doesn’t concern you at all,” jsi, 6). for joyce’s writing urged upon lacan a radically new definition of the symptom, one that emerges from joyce’s singular (though not uncommon) situation with regard to language―or rather, to languages (or “l’élangues”). joyce is situated, lacan says, not only by his relation to the english that he speaks and writes, but also to the irish tongue that the british empire has so forcefully cut out of his native ireland. imperial english is a language that is not joyce’s own; it is instead a language that lacan says he “plays upon [. . .] for his own was wiped off the map, that is, gaelic [. . .] not his own, therefore, but that of the invaders, the oppressors” (jsi, 7). in a recent essay i described joyce’s peculiar linguistico-politico problematic in this way: joyce’s personal malaise in his own (irish) civilization was that of a double encirclement by the hell of an english language that had been forcibly imposed over his culture and that had remained fixed at the moment of its imposition. it had no freedom to change or evolve. as the language of a conqueror forced upon his new subjects, it brooked none of the playful, metaphoric outlets for the jouissance that language represses―outlets open to any “native” speaking-being. english stagnated in its irish iteration. (see a portrait of the artist as a young man, in the passage where young stephen published in seminar xxiii as “joyce le symptôme,” le séminaire, livre xxiii: le sinthome, texte établi par jacques-alain miller (paris: éditions du seuil, 2005) 161-69. hereafter jsi. 2 from 1963 to 1965. in 1963, cixous traveled to the united states to research joyce at suny buffalo, yale university, and robinson jeffers in california. she was introduced to jacques lacan, who was interested in joyce, by jean-jacques mayoux. lacan worked with cixous for the next two years. 3 a diagnosis joyce rejected, calling lucia simply “telepathic” (seminar xxiii, 43). m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 48 discovers he only knows what the english priest laughs at as the oldfashioned word for candle-snuffer [tundish], because it is no longer current in english usage.) the upshot was that joyce was oppressed not simply by language. his oppression was aggravated specifically by its being the language, deeply foreign to his culture, of his imperial oppressor.4 what ends up intriguing lacan in joyce’s writing is the manner in which joyce responds to this double linguistic/political imposition-privation: the body of joyce’s work culminates in nothing less than the destruction (or deconstruction) of the english language.5 lacan says: sinthome is an old way of spelling what has more recently been spelt symptom. this orthographic modification clearly marks the date at which greek was injected into french, into my language. likewise, in the first chapter of ulysses, joyce expresses the wish that we should hellenise, that we should inject the hellenic language into something―one is not sure into what, since it is not gaelic; even though ireland is the subject, joyce had to write in english. joyce wrote in english in such a way that as [. . .] philippe sollers has remarked in tel quel the english language no longer exists. (seminar xxiii, lesson of 18 november, 1975, 1) lacan will go even further: “it is hard not to see that a certain relation to language [la parole] is increasingly imposed on [joyce], to the point where he ends up breaking or dissolving language itself, by decomposing it, going beyond phonetic identity” (seminar xxiii, lesson of 17 february, 1976, 43). now, in seminar xxiii, lacan repeatedly remarks on his own feeble english, on his own inability to understand joyce, his own uncertain reading, and his vain efforts to keep abreast of all the academic writing on joyce, culminating in this confession: it is obvious that i don’t know everything, and in particular, i don’t know, when i read joyce―for that’s what’s frightful i am reduced to having to read him!―what he believed about himself. it is absolutely sure that i haven’t analysed him―and i regret it. but anyway, he was clearly not very disposed to it. (seminar xxiii, 10 february, 1976, 37) 4 juliet flower maccannell, “nowhere, else: on utopia,” umbr(a), forthcoming, 2008. 5 the french manuscript reads a bit differently. speaking of joyce’s ulysses, lacan says, “il ne s’agissait pas du gaélic, encore qu’il s’agit de l’irelande, mais que joyce devait écrire en anglais, il a été écrit en anglais d’une façon telle que, comme l’a dit quelqu’un dont j’espère qu’il est dans cette assemblée, philippe solers [sic], dans “tel quel”, il l’a écrit d’une façon telle que lalangue [sic, though the context surely requires la langue] anglaise n’existe plus. elle avait déjà, je dirais, peu de consistance, ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’il soit facile d’écrire en anglais. mais joyce, par la succession d’oeuvres qu’il a écrites en anglais, y a ajouté ce quelque chose qui fait dire au même auteur il faudrait écrire l’élangues, les langues, les langues par où je suppose qu’il entend désigner quelque chose comme l’élation dont on nous dit, enfin, que c’est au principe de je ne sais quel sinthome que nous appelons en psychiatrie la manie .” ornicar? (séminare du 18 novembre, 1975): 6. m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 49 despite these disclaimers, lacan progressively unfolds something extraordinary, something radically different that he finds in joyce’s writing. it constitutes a new dimension to the subject’s relation to language, speech, and finally to university discourse, which for lacan correlates with the ethics of capitalism and is the dominant discourse of our time.6 long before this seminar, lacan had begun exploring a crucial change in the postkantian subject (see his seventh seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis7). now he realizes that if one is to have any hope of taking the full measure of the surprises to be encountered in joyce (such as lacan’s own astonishment that joyce is “not hooked up to the unconscious” [jsi, 5]), one must start down an unknown pathway. for while freud discovered that the subject is a function of an endemic discontent with or malaise in civilization, he largely saw that malaise affecting the subject on the psychical plane. and although freud clearly knew that it also acts on (and is obliquely expressed in) the political plane, it is lacan who developed the analytic linkage. in his encounter with joyce’s writing, lacan feels under pressure to frame a fresh concept that can recognize, name and define new factors in the relation of the subject to language, including the political factor. this he names the sinthome. it is by means of the sinthome that lacan will courageously undertake a highly original reading of joyce which will have, as crucial byproduct of recognizing these “new factors,” an amazing reassessment of his own psychoanalytic theses regarding language and jouissance, the ego and the imaginary. the crucial new “factor” in the subject’s relation to language appears in lacan’s revitalized appreciation for what we call “tone” in the work of the signifier. the linguist ferdinand de saussure had already discovered that the “body” of language requires the addition of a new signifier in order to remain an open, generative system. it offers or promises the subject meaning and a certain place in the symbolic order (which it, of course, cannot really deliver) by its structuring of “meaning” on the basis of adding yet one more signifier. in seminar xxiii, lacan, however, remarks that psychoanalytic meaning is produced by a certain splicing of the imaginary and the symbolic in order to obtain “unconscious knowledge”―or as he puts it, “what the analysand reveals over time about his symptom.”8 here, he now suggests that given that the three registers are in reality separate (“imaginary, symbolic and real do not 6 for lacan, university discourse is the dominant discourse of our post-hegelian era. in the introductory section of “joyce the symptom i” entitled “university and analysis,” lacan writes that joyce may mean the closing or turning away from this dominant discourse: “in accordance with what joyce himself knew would happen to him posthumously, the university in charge. it’s almost exclusively academics who busy themselves with joyce. [. . .]. and he hoped for nothing less than to keep them busy until the extinction of the university. we’re headed in that direction” (jsi, 3). 7 the seminar of jacques lacan, book vii: the ethics of psychoanalysis, ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. dennis porter (new york: norton, 1997). 8 seminar xxiii, lesson of 13 january, 1976, 22. m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 50 intermingle”9), any meaning, conscious or unconscious, that is produced in language is the byproduct of the knot. what “meaning” would there then be if this knot were undone―and undone by something so slight as an intonation, an overtone, a resonance? in seminar xvii, the other side of psychoanalysis (1969), lacan introduced a new “tonal” factor when he says that the next signifier must “strike” the whole symboliclinguistic order like a gong striking a bell.10 only its resonating provides an opening out for (and of) the order. lacan then wonders how (and if) this new opening out can still take place once the “symbolic system” and its “order” follows an inevitable tendency to close in on itself: to regard itself as a finite, albeit vast, treasury of accumulated “signifiers” rather than as the bearer of infinite promise, including the never concluded promise of meaning.11 why do we need this opening? why is a “next” or “new” signifier crucial to the symbolic order and (or as) its language? why is the production of “the new” so important? to understand these “whys,” one needs a basic knowledge of the semiotic production of “meaning” and significance, as identified by de saussure. according to his semiotic theory of language, meaning emanates strictly from the procession and retroactivity of signifiers. there can be no “meaning” until a second or “next” signifier is added to a first utterance, s1, that only retroactively becomes a signifier (pointing to something else) when a second signifier is added to it. this second signifier endows the first with a significance it cannot have on its own. moreover, this meaning, for psychoanalysis, is not only symbolic, but unconscious. it is that part of the first utterance that is lost when it becomes a signifier or a link in the chaining of meanings―the part lost we call jouissance. lacan says, “if there is knowledge that is not known, as i have already said, it is instituted at the level of s2, which is the one i call the other signifier” (seminar xvii, 33). in seminar xvii, lacan describes our current relation to signifiers, in which we tend to regard signifying chains from the point of view of their already massive accumulation, as a “treasury” of meanings: a rich storehouse of already acquired “total” knowledge (or what he terms a hegelian savoir-totalité). lacan warns against any such dream of finalizing, quantifying and adding up all “meaning”: it is a variant of the death drive that necessarily results in the end of meaning-making: this other signifier is not alone. the stomach of the other, the big other, is full of them. this stomach is like some monstrous trojan horse that provides 9 seminar xxiii, lesson of 13 january, 1976, 22. 10 the seminar of jacques lacan, book xvii: the other side of psychoanalysis, ed. jacquesalain miller, trans. russell grigg (new york: w. w. norton, 2007) 33. hereafter seminar xvii. 11 an infinity that ironically (and we might even say tragically) always ends by forming itself into a circle, closing in on itself. on lacan, the circle and infinity, see my recent work, “the city, year zero: memory and the spatial unconscious,” journal of romance studies 7.2 (2007): 1-18. m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 51 the foundations for the fantasy of a totality-knowledge [savoir-totalité]. it is, however, clear that its function entails that something comes and strikes it from without, otherwise nothing will ever emerge from it. and troy will never be taken. (seminar xvii, 33) it is true that, under the rubric of postmodernism, the value of the new has recently come strongly into question. lacan, however, remains true to the thesis that only the fact of a new signifier (that permits the next to emerge from the order) grants knowledge (s2), and the linguistic formations that support it, true symbolic standing. if this order becomes (as it so often does) sclerotic, it is no longer enough simply to add on another signifier: it will offer neither promise nor hope. rather, lacan asserts here, something has to strike the signifiers it has amassed (like so much capital), and strike them in such a way as to realize the dimension in which they actually exist―that of fantasy. the existence of the treasury of signifiers as a vast quantity of “ones” is a fantasy because it elides the fact that there is or can be no “one” without “zero.” only the insertion of a zero, a gap, a rupture could hope to free up or loosen the “meaning” repressed in or under them. only the revelation or articulation that the idea of accumulation (of knowledge, of power, of capital) is indeed a fantasy of full enjoyment without loss or lack might liberate us psychically from its domination. to put it another way: the treasury of signifiers, like the wealth of nations, constitutes a new kind of unconscious, “the stomach of the other” lacan calls it, the belly of a “monstrous trojan horse that provides the foundation for the fantasy of a totality-knowledge.” because signifiers, when they become a simple unit of this mass, are effectively neutered, deprived of their creative force, what else is there to “strike” this mass, to deliver the creative blow? it could only be an evocation of what an s1 actually starts out as: an utterance, a partial speech, an intonation that is not yet a “meaning,” not yet tied to a long chain of signifiers. one must rupture this chain to recall the full reserve power of that first signifier―the vocalization that has broken with nature, the animal, jouissance while retaining their echo―that permits it to break into the vault that holds (fantasmatically) the wealth of knowledge, power, and capital. “it is [. . .] clear that its function entails that something comes and strikes it from without, otherwise nothing will ever emerge from it” (seminar xvii, 33), that is, only a signifier deprived of its fellows, reduced to nothing other than a rupturing sound, has the power to break into―or out of―this monstrous enclosure. i have recently argued that the sclerosis that characterizes “the discourse of the university” and its twin, the ethos of capitalism, are both founded on making “accumulation” (in the case of university discourse, the amassing of “total knowledge”) the discursive agent of contemporary discourse.12 (in the university 12 juliet flower maccannell, “more thoughts for the times on war and death: lacan’s critique of capitalism in seminar xvii” in clemens and grigg, ed., jacques lacan and the other side of psychoanalysis: reflections on seminar xvii (durham and london: duke university press 2006) 194-215. (previously published in slovenian, trans. alenka zupančič, m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 52 discourse, the s2 is positioned in the upper left hand.) but it has a peculiar “mot d’ordre,” one that (in contrast to the discourse of the master) demands not work, but simply accounting. in such a discourse, where can renewal emerge? lacan makes clear that it no longer resides in the linguistic signifier (s1) that originally functioned to purge us of a certain unbearable jouissance and to substitute unsatisfiable desire in its place. lacan defines the task of the signifier as that of carving a body out of animal substance, a process of carving away a jouissance that “returns” only as ghostly “letters” on the body that index what the organic, animal body has lost to the imperium of language. but by the middle of the seventies (and with the political history of the previous three decades in mind―the second world war, the nuclear threat, nazism, collaborationism, the wars in indochina and in algeria), it had become painfully evident to lacan that the linguistic-symbolic order was very much in need of renewal. and this was not only because the “discourse of the university” had become a closed, encyclopedic, comprehensive and self-satisfied compilation of the “known.” lacan makes clear from his remarks in seminar xvii regarding the rigidifying socioeconomic order that there are political consequences to making “language” the instrument for neutralizing or voiding jouissance. language is a double-edged sword, indeed, for it also brings us what he calls in that seminar “jouissance en toc”: the pseudo jouissance of a world filled with little gadgets (lathouses), a phony jouissance that substitutes for (and militates against) the creative forces that resist the death drive. in fact, after seminar xvii it seems perhaps possible to place lacan closer to the sentiments about language expressed by roland barthes in his leçon inaugurale (on taking the chair of semiology at the collège de france): “la langue est tout simplement fasciste.”13 la langue without lalangue, “language” without the “extra” dimensions that tone, babble, overlapping resonances bring to it, cannot empower its signifiers, cannot mobilize them against the entropy of the death drive. these other elements of lalangue alone permit language to engage its signifiers against drive energy (jouissance), but now do so without repressing it, while not yet being destroyed by it. if language has failed to remain a shelter against the real and has even become the instrument or bearer of threat and a danger itself, it is because it has to a large degree become tone-deaf. thus it is that lacan comes to a new conclusion about language: razpol 13 [2003]: 157-191). 13 “la langue, comme performance de tout langage, n'est ni réactionnaire ni progressiste; elle est tout simplement fasciste; car le fascisme, ce n'est pas d'empêcher de dire, c'est d'obliger à dire.” “but language―the performance of a language system―is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.” roland barthes, “inaugural lecture, collège de france,” in a barthes reader, ed. susan sontag (new york: hill and wang, 1983) 457-78 (461). m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 53 there must be something in the signifier which resonates. it is surprising that this has been in no way apparent to the english philosophers. i call them philosophers because they are not psychoanalysts―they have a rock-solid belief that language has no effect. they imagine that there are drives and so on, [. . .], for they don’t know what a drive is: the echo in the body of the fact that there is speech [dire]; but for this speech to resonate, [. . .], the body must be sensitive to it. (seminar xxiii, lesson of 18 november, 1975, 4) lacan was ready for someone like joyce, an author unhampered by concerns for meaning and whose lalangue formed a creative mode of writing that could convey (rather than cut away) the specific jouissance of its author. lacan advises, read some pages from finnegans wake without trying to understand anything. it reads, but as someone of my circle remarked to me, that’s because we can feel present in it the jouissance of the one who wrote it. (jsi, 5) noting that joyce’s name “echoes freud’s―joyce is related to joy, to jouissance, as it is written in the english language,” lacan says, this joy, this jouissance is the only thing that we’re able to get a hold of in his text. [. . .]. joyce gives it all the power of language without, for all that, any of it being analyzable, which is what strikes the reader and leaves one literally dumbfounded―in the sense that one is struck dumb. (jsi, 8) lacan needed a term for this singularly new entity, yes, but where is it located? (recall that the jouissance lacan encountered in joyce is not “hooked to the unconscious.”) certainly not there where jouissance unconsciously persists (in the symptom) and not where this persistence is expressed only by denying it (in the signifier). he had to create a new term, le sinthome, for this signifier-symptom that could bear and not reject jouissance―but without being damaged by it. as lacan describes the variations on borromean “knottings” that correspond to the sinthome in seminar xxiii, he suggests that the sinthome is a “mis-tied” knot, a mistake that nonetheless transforms the traditional symptom and the symbol alike into a new hybrid form: a linguistic, or linguistically modeled, formation that somehow permits jouissance to flow through it rather than be repressed and hidden by it. the difference lies in where it is located. lacan makes the point that the original conception of the symbolic is a choosing between two signifiers that privileges the “hole” between them: as saussure taught us, it is the differences or the void between signifiers that is of paramount importance. however, lacan says, this has led to the fixing of that hole by a “frame” which has taken on far too much importance: the triplicity which the knot allows to be illustrated results from a consistence which is only feigned by the imaginary, a foundational hole which emerges in the symbolic, and an ex-sistence which belongs to the real, as its fundamental characteristic. this method offers no hope of breaking the constitutive knot of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. [. . . ]. [. . .] we observe desire. from m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 54 this observation we infer its cause is objectal [objectivée]. the desire for knowledge encounters obstacles. as an embodiment of this obstacle i have invented the knot. the knot must come undone. the knot is the only support conceivable for a relation between something and something else.14 (seminar xxiii, lesson of 9 december, 1975, 9-10; my emphasis) “the knot must come undone.”15 joyce’s writing has, it seems, confronted lacan with a new means to the truth, which depends on a renewed sense of urgency, the urgency of art, the urgency of making psychoanalysis a part of this urgency, and reconnecting both to a freshly revalued imaginary. this new imaginary is (and must be) realized as providing something both completely new and yet very ancient: a confrontation with the real that the self-enclosed, self-satisfied “symbolic” no longer seems capable of confronting. the real, says lacan, is always framed as seen through the hole―that hole gaping between two signifiers.16 in a fabulatory manner, i propose that the real, as i think it in my pan-se17 is comprised really―the real effectively lying―of the hole which subsists in that its consistence is nothing more than the totality of the knot which ties it together with the symbolic and the imaginary. the knot which may be termed borromean cannot be cut without dissolving the myth it offers of the subject, as non-supposé, in other words the subject as real, no more varied than each body which can be given the sign speaking-being [parlêtre]. only due to this knot can the body be given a status that is respectable, in the everyday sense of the word. (seminar xxiii, lesson of 9 december, 1975, 10) but now lacan proposes an alternative, an art that has to do with a call/appeal to the real, not as linked to the body, but as different. at a distance from the body there is the possibility of something i termed last time resonance or consonance. in relation to its poles, the body and language, the real is what harmonizes [fait accord].” (seminar xxiii, lesson of 9 december, 1975, 11) this proposition, which places art and the imaginary at the heart of a new subjective relation, commands a corresponding alteration in the psychoanalytic structuring of 14 he cites the borromean knot (as given on seminar xxiii, 35, french edition). 15 lacan says, “th[e] analytic grasp of knot is the negative of religion” (seminar xxiii, lesson of 9 december, 1975, 10). this reflects on joyce’s antipathy to the jesuit education he received, and also on freud’s anger that religion demands that certain fundamental things can never be questioned or made subject to proof. 16 lacan says, “to produce a true hole, it must be framed by something resembling a bubble, a torus, so that each one of these holes is outlined by something which holds them together, for us to have something which could be termed a true hole. (seminar xxiii, lesson of 18 november, 1975, 7). 17 lacan plays on panser, to bandage, and its homonym, penser, to think. m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 55 the ego. toward the end of his twenty-third seminar, lacan makes the critical, even revolutionary discovery of an ego that is no longer bounded by the form of the circle, no longer defined as and by the two-dimensional imaginary barrier it erects (unsustainably) between itself and the twinned hostilities of the real (the id and/or the social order). but a form of ego that no longer defends itself with the armor of the symbolic or that escapes into the comforting fantasy of the circle (of imaginary enclosure) is an ego that has opened itself to the real through the imaginary: a new form of “ego” which lacan pictures no longer as a vacant circle but as a set of open “brackets” (figure 1 ). lacan has encountered a fundamental alteration in the structure of the ego and for him it appears first in joyce. this is an ego that is no longer determined by an imaginary, 2-d or flat relation to the body, to the “sack and cord” image that sustains the circular, closed ego. this is the very definition for joyce of a hellish circle, mirrored by the sermons on hell that fill so much of the middle of a portrait of the artist as a young man. it is precisely this circle and this hell that joyce breaks into, and breaks apart. the scene where lacan finds this new ego most clearly is the one where young stephen is beaten mercilessly by his peers. lacan says that stephen’s response is unheralded: after the beating, rather than nourishing the wounds to his figure 1 m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 56 ego, his pride, and his body, joyce describes stephen as literally “emptied out,” as having no relation to his body at all. what this indicates, for lacan, is that joyce goes beyond an imaginary tied to the ideal of “consistency” that defines our “body”: joyce wonders why [. . .] he [stephen] has nothing against [the boy]. [. . .] he metaphorizes nothing less than his relation to his body. he observes that the whole affair has emptied out; he expresses this by saying that it’s like a fruit being peeled.” (seminar xxiii, lesson of 11 may, 1976, 59) lacan concludes that the fact that the body-image is not engaged in joyce is a sign that the ego has a quite particular function―that of opening up, rupturing and freeing the imaginary from supporting the consistency of the body. the rupture of the ego “sets the imaginary relation free” (lesson of 11 may, 1976, 63). lacan continues, it is easy to imagine that the imaginary will bugger off―if the unconscious allows it to, and it incontestably does. [. . .]. one thinks against a signifier [. . .] one leans against a signifier in order to think.” (seminar xxiii, lesson of 11 may, 1976, 63) the way joyce’s stephen leaned against that fence . . . what lacan has done, it seems to me, is free the imaginary from its sterile relation to the “ego-as-circle” to which the traditional sir borromean knot seemed to consign it, putting it in touch with that other kind of ego that long haunted the work of a rousseau, a baudelaire―the one capable, as baudelaire says, of taking a bath of multitude because it is open to other egos and not walled off from them. an ego that therefore becomes capable of opening the “order” that only simulates a symbolic order in the old sense, had purchased its mastery at the expense of this different egoother relation, that had used oppression, imperialism, coercion, and the demand for unquestioning faith. in joyce, lacan discovered another kind of imaginary and another kind of ego, an open one: he diagrams the “open ego” as a set of brackets, rather than as a circular link (see again fig. 1) through which experience flows―without being referred back to its effect on the fortress with which it has surrounded itself. this is an ego no longer ensnared in (and buried under) a mass of verbiage that tries to obscure the enormous power of the drives. that power remains key: for the drives constitute a demand to find ever-new ways of dealing with them. for this ego and this imaginary, the future might just be open, too. i would say that for lacan, joyce clears the way for a second imagination not limited to an imaginary homogeneity with the real―a real that has been flattened and enclosed―the “real” in a sack. this first form of the imaginary is stuck in a mirror, hemmed in by the limits that the symbolic demands be placed on it. but an imaginary that is freed, through a mis-tie, from its eternal imbrication in the triple knot, can address the elementary structuring of meaning that the knot affords. it is therefore something else, something not restricted by the ego’s m a c c a n n e l l : the real imaginary s1 (2008): 57 compass and not limited to an egosphere that, no matter how far it is stretched, remains a stifling container. with it, the new becomes once more possible. lacan places the imaginary in a direct relation with the real (in contrast to his original definition of the imaginary, where it flees the real). the reason why this is of extreme importance to us today is (as it should by now be clear) the unstated matter of my paper. as the globe is increasingly encircled by the plenitude of “known knowledge,” by an “aléthosphère” brimming over with the avatars of pseudo jouissance (lathouses), the negative effect on the individual of “the discourse of the university” (and its twin, capitalist discourse) needs to be much more fully assessed than one has thought. the globalized imperative to “enjoy” what is already accumulated, already at hand, is precisely what blocks desire: we want want, we lack lack, we can no longer desire. as such, we cannot therefore have any possible relation―desiring, analytic, knowledgeable, and yes, even unconscious―to our own jouissance. joyce, for lacan, leads the way to untying the rigidifying knot, the hypertrophied borromean knot, by breaking it apart, taking down the mechanisms by which it unsustainably sustains itself and its closed-up ego. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 6-7 (2014): 24-37 i z a r l u n a č e k a c o m e d y o f h o r r o r s on humor, escapism, despair, the uncanny and comedy’s happily horrible hierophany o ne of hollywood’s recent releases titled this is the end stars a group of young american comedians as exaggerated versions of themselves facing an apocalypse of biblical proportions complete with heavenly ascensions and abysses opening straight into the depths of hell. if this is the first ever entry into the genre of disaster movie spoofs what should surprise us about it most is that it had not come about earlier. throughout history humor has always thrived on disastrous circumstances. think about it: have you ever seen a comedy about a stable relationship, a quiet family life or a thriving career? while comedies often tend to start and end in blissful circumstances, what actually makes us laugh in between is the hilarious way it all unravels in the blink of an eye. but why do comedies make us laugh at catastrophes while the same set of events could bring us to terror or tears if it happened in real life or was presented to us in a more somber tone? is the equation really as simple as carol burnett’s famous “comedy is tragedy plus time” quote or mel brook’s equally notorious comparison between the tragedy of cutting one’s own finger and the comedy of someone else walking into an open sewer and dying? is that really all there is to it or does this dissent between comedic and tragic or horrific attitudes toward catastrophe run deeper than mere dosage of empathic distance? why, finally, would we find the predicaments of other people funny at all, even if we don’t actively empathize with them? do we secretly enjoy other people’s suffering or is it merely a case of relief at being spared ourselves? or is there something entirely different going on when we actually do laugh at someone walking into an open sewer and dying? it was henri bergson’s essay on laughter published in 1900 that laid the most thorough conceptual ground for a philosophical account of comedy understood as a lack of empathy so an engagement with this famous text promises to provide as with a solid starting point for tackling our dilemma. to put it very concisely, the basic point of bergson’s theory is that a comic character is one that has become absent minded, not full aware of himself and has consequently allowed mechanical processes to take over where plastic, flexible and lively responses would have been called for.1 from its external vantage point, the audience spots his blunders 1. henri bergson, laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic (london, new york: macmillan publishing company, 1911) 9-12. lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 25 and punishes them with a humiliating laughter that in real life supposedly has the aim of reminding the involuntary comedian to regain full consciousness of himself and return to flexibly adapting to the world around him.2 thus, if we were to rely on bergson for the answer to our question regarding comedy and disaster, his explanation would probably go along the lines of our laughing at disaster in order to avoid it. the point of our laughter would be to jerk a comic blunderer from the quagmire of his disastrous decisions and back into a sober, external view of the predicament so he may rationally analyze and escape it. concerning the dilemma of the two radically divergent—terrified vs. hilarious— reactions to catastrophe, bergson states his case plainly by insisting on the negative role of empathy as “laughter’s greatest foe.”3 once we understand a character’s predicament from inside his own head and heart, we are presumably, according to bergson, prevented from laughing at him. furthermore, were we to follow bergson all the way, we would have to admit that our laughter at another person’s tragedy is not even really as cruel as it sounds. it is merely there to inform the sufferer of the preference for an external, distanced and rational viewpoint on the problem since it would give its victim a better chance of resolving it. it should thus come as no surprise that bergson’s book also includes explicit comparisons between the spectator of comedy and the cool, objective attitude of a natural scientist.4 while bergson’s argument is rather convincing in its elegant simplicity it tends to provoke at least two obvious questions. namely: number one, why are physicists and chemists not perpetually rolling on the floors of their labs in laughter at the hilarity of their scientific insights? and, number two, why does a comedy’s audience not walk out on the show after ten minutes, when it should already have become clear to it that the cast have no intention on paying any heed to its laughing admonitions? as for the first question, freud promptly provided an answer to it in his 1905 book on jokes and their relation to the unconscious by defining laughter as an immediate dispensing of energy saved by a psychologically economical insight.5 from this and other remarks made by freud on the relationship between science and comedy as well as between the expression of a joke’s enjoyment in its maker and its audience, we might risk the proposal that serious contemplation binds the energy conserved by its insights by investing it in further investigation. to put it differently, we could understand psychoanalysis as claiming that in comedy, the surplus enjoyment ever implicit in all objective observation is suddenly revealed, expressed and thus truly “enjoyed” for the first time in the proper sense of the word. the energy that is bound and transmitted along the line of scientific progress is, in comedy, spent along the way implying a refreshingly careless attitude of laughter toward asceticism in the name of long-term goals. 2. bergson, 18-20. 3. bergson, 4-5. 4. bergson, 128 5. sigmund freud, jokes and their relation to the unconscious (london, new york: w. w. norton and company, 1960) 180. lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 26 what this addition of enjoyment to bergson’s equation changes in his account of laughter is, however, that the spectator of comedy has now ceased to be a mere rational promoter of self-conscious reflection but, when compared to the wisely investing scientist, appears to behave as a foolhardy spendthrift spraying valuably conserved psychic energy all over the place. presumably, it is precisely the enjoyable nature of this energetic spending spree that not only keeps him from leaving the theater after five minutes but even makes him keep coming back for more from time to time. furthermore, the inclusion of enjoyment into bergson’s conception also radically changes the nature he proposes for the relationship between comedy’s actor and spectator. abandoning all thought of rational energy handling, the laughing audience has now become very similar to their own comic butt: forgetful of the values of self-reflection and possessed by physiological spasms and jerks. the audience of comedy can now be seen as left willy-nilly at the mercy of comical mechanics whose buttons are being manipulated by agents beyond the viewer’s control: the comedy’s playwright and his accomplices playing dumb on the stage. finally, this overhaul of bergson’s theory gives us a very changed picture of comedy’s stance on disaster. namely, rather than being an instructive demonstration of how things can go wrong if improperly reflected—a demonstration aimed at preventing such disasters in our own lives -, comedy has now begun to take on the image of an underhanded promotion of disaster as something to be enjoyed. and it comes complete with tiny disasters planted in its audience’s minds: bursts of laughter momentarily forcing open cracks in their psychic edifices. while comedy really does abhor empathy between the spectator and his comic butt, this strategy apparently lets it achieve something much more radical: the very structural identity of the two. before we continue this line of thought, however, let us approach the topic of comedy and disaster from yet another angle. regrouping our conceptual troops on the comfortable plane of apparently self-evident truths, we would like to continue our investigation by tackling the widely-recorded phenomenon of humorous attitudes flourishing in stably critical situations. continuously downtrodden and marginalized ethic groups like the irish in the uk and jews all over europe and the us have historically been known for a superior sense of humor and old yugoslavia, the country of my birth, was no exception there. the inhabitants of bosnia, the federation’s habitually poorest republic, proved successful not merely as the traditional butts of the best yugo jokes but also as their most prolific authors. when the balkan wars started in the early 1990’s with bosnia bearing the brunt of the horrors, the republic’s locally produced jokes not only failed to dwindle but multiplied, gaining an even sharper edge by tackling the unlikely comic subjects of murder, famine and life on the front. now, it would be tempting to explain this phenomenon via the simple version of comic theory outlined at the beginning of this article: by stating that a humorous attitude towards a terrible situation enables its victims to survive it by transcending the horrible circumstances and isolating the laughing subjects in a lofty realm lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 27 beyond their overbearingly real surroundings. the latter is, in a nutshell, the point of freud’s theory of humor proposed in an article written more than twenty years after his monograph on jokes, where the father of psychoanalysis claimed the essence of the humorous attitude to be narcissistic. the argument goes that humor’s function is to enable its author to preserve her ego untouched by transposing it into the safe position of a disembodied observer laughing at the predicaments of its infantile remainder still stuck in the material world. according to freud, in short, humor lets our ego attain the intangible status of an idealized parent privileged to smile benignly at what seem like unsurpassable horrors to the short-sighted half of its own subjectivity still embedded in the struggles of mortal life.6 if you think this formulation rings very close to bergson’s comparison between the comedic spectator and the natural scientist above, you are right on the mark, but one has to admit that it the concept is perhaps really better fitted to humor (in freud’s particular sense of the word) than to theatric comedy where it had been applied by bergson. humor as freud understands it is no laughing matter. it is an attitude bent on producing not chuckles or guffaws but a calmly smiling acceptance of one’s material life as an unimportant and fleeting comedy that, too, will eventually pass. the smile of humor is the self-contained, unperturbed smile of angels and can rightly be deemed a metaphysical view – on virtue of which, incidentally, simon critchley’s book on humor praised it far above what he saw as its tactless and sadistic counterpart of loud laughter.7 it is probably obsolete to point out that our own sympathies still lie with the latter and not merely because laughter is not necessarily cruel to its butt but may unwittingly be in cahoots with it, as we have partly tried to already demonstrate above. to get back to our current subject of laughter in the face of adversity, however, what needs to be accounted for first is that the irish, jewish and bosnian jokes mentioned above tend to produce not the blissful smiles that had earned critchley’s nod but precisely the loud guffaws of his abhorrence – and this holds true even though the author and the butt of these jokes are by rule entrenched in the same predicament. what my suggestion in explaining this would be is that jokes flourish in catastrophic circumstances for the simple reason that their authors have nothing left to lose. their world has been stripped down to its very essentials, with the bare bones of paradoxical mechanics exposed that are allowed to remain hidden behind propriety in more stable times. now, laughing at humanity reduced to this minimal state is definitely more beneficial to its victims’ mental health than being petrified by it. but i believe the psychic relief they gain through these jokes does not stem from their being able to flee from reality into a realm beyond the material but, rather, from a shift in their perspective still planted within the material. and this shift, i would further argue – the shift that makes their circumstances suddenly seem comically absurd rather than hor6. freud, “humour,” in: international journal of psychoanalysis, 9 (1928): 1-6. 7. simon critchley, on humour (london and new york: routledge, 2002) 102-5. lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 28 ribly oppressing—is attained by performing the very opposite of an escape into the beyond: a radical eradication of any transcendent realm whatsoever. to be more concrete, the conception of our circumstances as threateningly horrible still implies beliefs in entities that transcend these circumstances—on one side, our own human dignity, or justice, or a world that makes sense, that are being violated, and, on the other, a demonic, all-powerful villain orchestrating this violation. once we abandon these transcendent concepts, however, and get a glimpse of ourselves as something other than dignified carriers of elevated humanity and of our torturers as similar fools caught in an impersonal web of mechanical phenomena, well, such a radically absurdist and nihilist view of the world suddenly begins to burst with comic potential. it was slovenian philosopher alenka zupančič who perhaps put it most succinctly when, in a lacanian re-examination of hegel’s accounts of comedy from lectures on aesthetics and the phenomenology of spirit, she claimed that comic characters are immune to castration not because they are so compact as to be invulnerable but because they have always already come to terms with their own inevitable castration. when they encounter disaster they only lose what they had never possessed in the first place.8 and by laughing at them, to pour my own bergson overhaul into the mix, we also concede to our own castration being enjoyably cut into us by side-splitting laughter. this conclusion might seem at first sight like a sad one since it appears to imply the dark joker’s loss of what is precious in humanity through complete cynical disillusion, but i would argue things are not necessarily as bad as that. cynicism is always a lurking possibility in extremely dire circumstances, but it is not an attitude that produces particularly funny jokes. rather, what happens in extremely dark humor is that the trap of cynicism is precisely avoided by showing that, so to speak, nothing does not really amount to nothing; that nothing is, let’s say, more and less than nothing at the same time. in dark jokes a literal creatio ex nihilo is taking place. all that is transcendental is annihilated, all that is left is pure mechanical interactions between fragments of senseless materiality, but it is as if, out of the seemingly empty gaps between these devastated material fragments unexpected new things start emerging and producing the surplus enjoyment embodied by our laughter. and, what’s best of all, our emptied humanity, stripped of its dignity, seems to find a place for itself precisely at this surplus’ origin, in these very vacant places between the shattered fragments of the world. in a way, what we could say is happening in dark, catastrophic humor is that, instead of our subjectivity making a break for it to an imagined beyond where it will no longer have to suffer the indignity of being subjected to a lacking and imperfect world, subjectivity suddenly finds itself becoming passively identified with the very lacks and imperfections in the world— 8. alenka zupančič, poetika – druga knjiga, ljubljana: društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, 2004) 208-11. i canot, unfortunately, quote the english version of the book here (the odd one in, london, cambridge: mit press, 2008), because the particular reference to hegel's lectures on aesthetics has been left out in the translation. lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 29 and it is these lacks and imperfections, these pieces of non-sense, that, in a very deleuzian way,9 turn out to be the unconscious, masterless source of all surplus sense and enjoyment in our world. in dark humor, thus, the subject ceases to be the victim of a cruel world, but also fails to turn into its master. rather, it becomes identical to the creative vacancy that ultimately orders our worlds in a poeticallymechanical, subjectively uncontrollable way. if all this sounds a bit too abstract, let us consider two darkly humorous examples: one from a catastrophe of socio-political and one of merely personal proportions. we will start with a popular joke from wartime bosnia that begins with mujo and haso (the two eternal bosnian comic characters starring in these jokes since times immemorial) fighting in the trenches. all of a sudden, mujo gives out a loud yell. haso asks him: “what’s the matter, mujo, why are you yelling?” mujo answers: “a sniper! he hit me in the leg!” and haso: “in the leg? and that’s what you’re complaining about? you know, suljo got hit right in the forehead yesterday and he didn’t let out a peep!” on the face of it this is a terribly politically incorrect joke that should probably only be allowed to be laughed at by people who have ever found themselves in such a horrifying situation. and that was exactly what happened – the situation and the laughter—all over bosnia, for several years. it is a joke that taunts death and laughs off a nation’s fear of it by demystifying it through casual mention. but what it also does is to conflate the ideological image of the ideal soldier—a war hero not giving out a peep even in the direst of circumstances—with a dead man, a vacant place in the chain of living that behaves like a hero for purely mechanical reasons of needing an intact brain to do the complaining. the ideal of human dignity imperturbable by any physical lack, and death as the embodiment of the absolute lack have been short circuited into a single figure and the results, at least for people living their daily lives strung out between the two, proved to be hilarious. my second example is far more banal but also easier to relate to, both for myself and for the readers of this article who probably lead relatively comfortable lives with other worries on their mind rather than getting shot by a sniper. the joke comes from the career of louis ck, currently the hottest stand up comedian in the us who, however, spent years in virtual anonymity due to his fear of radical experimentation. according to his account, louie was already pushing thirty and still reciting his repetitive one hour routine to bored vegas gamblers. bitterly unsatisfied with his professional achievements he was, to top it off, laden with substantial personal problems since the arrival of a new baby had put additional strain on his marriage. in an interview, louie recounts sitting alone in his car after a particularly crappy performance listening to a radio interview with his idol, george carlin, and being dumbfounded at the report that the big man would come up with a whole hour of new material every single year. louie, in contrast, was desperately 9. see, particularly, deleuze’s entire logic of sense (new york: columbia university press, 1990). lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 30 clinging to an equal running time of half-baked jokes painstakingly accumulated during more than a decade. he made a decision then and there to set himself the carlin challenge: after all, he figured, he had nothing to lose, this was a make or break situation, and if he could not make any progress, he would sack the standup career altogether. louie describes having exhausted all the obvious material fairly quickly and needing to dig deeper and deeper into his own tortured self for additional cannon-fodder. when he finally let go of the reins, his shows slowly but surely began to shock and delight viewers with desperate, disillusioned rants featuring, among others, statements such as the one about his baby being a f****g asshole because it won’t let him f**k its mom anymore. louie’s routines are hard to capture in text because their magic lies more in the attitude than the wording but they are beautifully funny and have resounded with people across the globe in the decade that has passed since louie momentous decision in that solitary car session. the point is, ck became truly, groundbreakingly funny only when he gave up trying to live up to the image of a stable, surefire family provider and risked it all by being brutally, no-holds-barred honest with both himself and his audience. he succeeded, financially and artistically, by throwing away all veils of decency, dignity and propriety and becoming what he ultimately was and what we all are: a nobody, a stain, “a professional asshole,” as he himself puts it (a filthy lack, that is, if we take the term at face value), and the resulting vacancy beneath the façade proved an infinitely rich source of surpluses in terms of enjoyment, creativity and finance. and that is, as they say, quod erat demonstrandum. that is, of course, not to say that reducing oneself to a filthy lack is a surefire recipe for success, either artistic or financial. the point is that there are no recipes for success, there is only a recipe for a risk of either spectacular success or failure, and there is surely something logical behind the fact that so many comedians tend to be “sad clowns,” often suffering from chronic depression and occasionally even ending their lives at their own hands. because of its radically disillusioned outlook on life great comedy always balances the slippery slope between dark despair and comfortable, crowd-pacifying jokes that refrain from challenging basic human beliefs. but when comedy does manage to tread that narrow path well, it quite possibly gets closer than any other art form to the core truth of that fascinating plexus of lack and wealth making up human existence. since we are already on the topic and to cover all our bases, this might be a good time to say a word or two about the difference between the comic and the uncanny as well. comedy and horror really do share many common themes and it was alenka zupančič who first noted the similarity between bergson’s list of comedic phenomena and freud’s enumeration of uncanny motifs in his own short text on das lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 31 unheimliche: the themes of mechanical life, strange coincidences and doppelgangers are shared by both genres but generate very divergent emotional responses.10 what is additionally interesting here is that freud’s explanation of both sensations engaged the same concept of infantile pleasure: in his book on jokes comedy is reduced to a revival of infantile pleasure (pleasure in nonsensical word and concept play as well as in egotism, unbridled sexuality, aggression etc) that effectively bypasses our adult censor via smoke screens of sophisticated poetics or similes of logical operations,11 while his text on the uncanny explains our feelings of horror at witnessing dolls come alive or our selves redoubled in hellish doubles as anxiety at having our own infantile desires suddenly fulfilled in the real with our internal censor still on guard.12 the difference between the two, then, would lie in comedy succeeding where the uncanny fails: in managing to build infantile pleasure into adult life without the censor punishing us with anxiety. comedy would thus be a reconciliation of infancy as the source of all pleasure with the adult mechanisms of castration and asceticism that are able to upgrade it into full-scale comic enjoyment, while the uncanny merely taunts our unchallenged adulthood with ghostly visions of infantile pleasure ominously haunting us from beyond the grave. while comedy sees infantile pleasure practically, as innocent mechanics useful for enhancing the experience of adult enjoyment, the uncanny injects the suppressed domain of infantile pleasure with a sinister, grown-up subjectivity; a tempter modeled on the image of the rational ruler of the adult psyche; the devil as god’s dark doppelganger. thus, another way to approach the problem would be via the difference between funny and oppressive views of war we have already described above. the same motif can switch its atmosphere from funny to frightening as soon as the suspicion arises that there is a sinister puppet-master hidden behind the curtain. a comic coincidence is scary if it is conceived as more than a mere coincidence but not yet an orchestrated ruse by an identifiable trickster (jerry palmer here gives a very nice example of how a certain central african tribe would fail to find comic coincidences in charlie chaplin movies amusing since they invariably conceive all coincidence as evidence of witchcraft13); a comic double becomes an eerie doppelganger when he is understood as a devilish copy sent to replace the original from some sinister domain; living dolls scare the feces out of us if they are hinted to be possessed by spirits of dead murderers while people acting mechanically stop making us laugh when they give the impression of being controlled by some dark force of unknown origin. all these examples, however, also demonstrate how necessary it is for the uncanny sensation to arise for the sinister force to remain as mysterious 10. alenka zupančič, “reversals of nothing: the case of the sneezing corpse,” filozofski vestnik 26.2( 2005): 175. 11. see freud 1960, e.g. 151-60. 12. freud, the uncanny (london: penguin books, 2003) 147-51. 13. jerry palmer, the logic of the absurd (london: bfi publishing, 1987) 47. lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 32 as possible and not be, for example, simply reduced to a banal old man from kansas pulling the strings from behind a wizard’s mask. when mikhail bakhtin analyzed the difference between essentially funny motifs from medieval carnival and their uncanny resurrection during the romantic era, he simultaneously stressed two very divergent point about the split: on one hand, the uncanny version is more foreign to the viewer than the homelier comic one (“our world suddenly becomes a strange world”) but it is also more endowed with psychology (the strange coincidences conceal the plan of a dark, hidden subjectivity).14 a good way to turn a scary scene into a funny one is thus to engage the sinister force in conversation where it proves to be just as banal and preoccupied with daily problems as ourselves. this strategy is employed, for instance, in the recent animated feature paranorman, starring a kid who can talk to ghosts who, however, turn out to be not very scary, just slightly more transparent and greenish versions of the living, and they happily chat to norman on his way to school. similarly, when norman inadvertently awakes four zombies in the same film these stop being threatening the moment he talks to them and they explain the whole business of having to get up from the grave to be a great nuisance to them as well. the same logic could be used to analyze the confrontation between sosie and mercury masked as his double in moliere’s amphitrion: the scene is saved from being uncanny by sosie’s failure to, as a typically unreflective comic character, recognize his double as such, resulting in sosie, rather than running away from his ominously approaching spitting image, engaging the doppelganger in conversation and thus demystifying his dark quest into a mere horny escapade ordered by the latter’s boss, jupiter.15 in short, the paradox we are dealing with in the difference between the comic and the uncanny is that comedy simultaneously injects its key motifs with more and less personality than a horror film: a coincidence is just a coincidence with no dark subject behind it, but a zombie is a full-fleshed person and not simply a vacantly marching living corpse. i would thus venture the conclusion that the difference between the two lies in the fact that the uncanny still believes in the spirit as an immaterial entity capable of exerting full control over excessively physical matter (horror genres forever swing between glimpses of barely visible but powerful ghastly apparitions and gory details of their victims’ blood and guts) while for comedy matter is just matter, relieved even of its ideological blut-und-boden status (blood holds no fascination for comedy and its characters habitually appear to be made of rubber) while the subjectivity that inevitably animates it usually has to hand over the wheel to the masterless mechanics of headless interaction between material fragments that produces surplus, authorless sense. incidentally, this theory is also compatible with alenka zupančič’s comparison between the two concepts from a few years ago where she assigned comedy to the register of drive 14. mikhail bakhtin, rabelais and his world (bloomington: indiana university press, 1984) 37-42. 15. scene quoted but analysed differently in zupančič, the odd one in, 73-7. lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 33 and the uncanny to the register of desire.16 the object of desire is always precisely a ghastly, unattainable and idealized apparition in the name of which every concrete object offered as its fulfillment is rejected as disgustingly insufficient; while drive always achieves its aim by happily orbiting a lack inhabited by a practically and contingently chosen goal. thus, comedy and drive are both simultaneously indifferent to specific objects which they neither idealize nor demonize but use pragmatically in order to milk enjoyment from their unchanging, circulating distance to the lack-occupying incidental object; while horror movies and desire forever strive to reach a substantial ideal whose all too lacking, all too material approach in the real never fails to give them the heebie-jeebies. i want to conclude this investigation of comedy and catastrophe by one last referral to a commonly observed phenomenon that has already been listed near the beginning of this essay. namely, the fact that while most comedies start and end with a stable state of things, their plots are universally made up of that very state’s nearcatastrophic unraveling. although the theme can take any form from the downfall of a personal economy through professional failures to troubles among friends it is a format that has been perhaps applied most often to the theme of love. throughout history comedies have often ended with one or multiple weddings, but the central bulk of their plots has perpetually focused on the frantically mounting troubles the couple or couples have had in finally getting together. prevented from seeing each other, the lovers hear or mishear information leading to doubts in their partner’s fidelity, and even when they do manage to arrange a rendezvous to clear things up, they are usually met there by the wrong person, sometimes of the wrong sex and sometimes in drag. things are of course by rule cleared up in the end (let us not forget one of the most traditional definitions of comedy is “a story with a happy ending,” hence the forever confusing title of dante’s classic epic), but the couple’s (re)union is never left untouched by the consequences of the preceding mix-ups. this holds true for examples from shakespeare’s classic pieces all the way to 2000s sitcoms like the excellent bbc production couplings. if we take an example from the former first, one of the two main subplots of the great bard’s much ado about nothing revolves around a guy and a girl who initially can’t stand each other but are driven to love via a cunning trick of transference by their friends: they tell each that the other has a secret crush on them and is merely trying to hide it behind the dismissive facade. at the end of the play the pair uncovers the ruse but it is already too late: they have fallen in love and no amount of conscious knowledge can undo the results of the preceding psycho-mechanics. here, again, we are faced with a classic example of how an utterly cynical plot based on disillusioned insights is able to produce purely transcendent effects; how a new and genuine affection can emerge from nothingness obscured by an illusion-producing notting (which is to say innuendo in old shakespearean: the title of the play is a play on the nottingnothing homophony). 16. zupančič 2005, 183-6. lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 34 if we examine an example from the latter show next, let us take an episode from the final season of coupling entirely focused on a four-way phone conversation between two girlfriends and their eavesdropping boyfriends. the episode starts with susan phoning up sally to complain about steve not finding her attractive anymore since she’s been pregnant. sally tries to console susan by assuring her that a future mom is still more than desirable but things take an awkward turn when she inadvertently reveals her own unspoken wish for a baby to her boyfriend patrick listening in on the other line, while he, in turn, shocks her by too eagerly assuring susan of the sexiness of girls in the blessed state by boasting on having had spent a wild night with “a full blown preggie” during his single years. as the conversation and episode draw to an end, the future parents’ relationship is patched up by the sight of the other couple’s bickering while the latter’s relationship ends the show in much more dire straits. the plot of this episode succeeds in showing us how the idyllic stability of the latter’s relationship was necessarily based on a strategic concealment of certain aspects of their personality. sally had kept silent about her nesting tendencies while patrick refrained from flaunting the full extent of his unabashed sexuality, enabling them to meet in the artificially constructed middle ground of compatibly sizzling young lovers. as the shaken up couple returns to bed after the traumatic conference call, all thoughts of continuing the snogging interrupted by it having been abandoned, sally sighs loudly in desperation: “god, a guy with a pregnancy fetish and a woman who wants to have a baby! how will we ever make it?” slowly absorbing the full meaning of sally’s exclamation, both lovers simply stare in shock at the bedroom’s ceiling as the credits are cued in. again, what we had just witnessed was an effective demonstration of how, yes, the fragile stability of a couple is always sustained by certain concealed bits of truth, but how, at the same time, the radical disclosure of the hidden agenda inadvertently makes them perfectly, perhaps even too perfectly, obscenely perfectly compatible on the level of pure, cold logics – and the conclusion leaves them laying there shattered but still not broken up. we could go on endlessly with analysis’ of similar examples but let these two suffice as paradigms of comedy’s ultimate stance on chaos and mix-ups when it comes to love—and the latter effectively reads as follows. all stability, including the stability of an erotic relationship, is based on fragile illusion that can be inadvertently shattered in the blink of an eye if the right elements are let loose into the equation. there is no such a thing as an utterly compatible, harmonious sexual relationship lacking any jagged edges sticking out here and there at the seams of the partner’s connection. but, and this is a big “but,” it is precisely these jagged edges and cracks at the core of every erotic union that, if mercilessly uncovered, are liable to break up a couple, that are also the sources of novelty, of reality with a big r, of surplus enjoyment and of surplus sense, and are thus also in sole possession of the ability to revitalize and spice up that same amorous union. lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 35 in short, it is not as if love is only possible if crucial bits of reality are concealed to enable us the illusion of perfect compatibility: that would, in the long run, more likely t result in a stale marriage focused on maintaining a pretty façade while suppressed desires and unexpressed doubts bubble dangerously beneath it. erotic attraction as such is fueled by incompatibility that challenges us to both attack and adore the strangeness in the other, while constantly also struggling to somehow include it into the dynamically stable structure of our coupling. or, to put it another way: a popular view on love holds that its main two stages consist of 1) an initial enamoration characterized by the illusion of perfect compatibility with an idealized partner and 2) an inevitable facing up to the reality of our partner’s failings and our mutual incompatibilities. we believe, however, that a more accurate description would probably follow this scheme: 1) an initial attraction to someone complete with all his or her strangely alluring incompatibilities with us, all presented in the beautiful yet brutally honest (artistic, in other words) display he or she puts on for us during our initial meetings, and 2) the facing up to both of us inevitably failing to maintain this stage-play indefinitely and being pulled down by the gravity of the banal, routine, empty façade of meaning that takes so much less effort to maintain; a facing up that leads to either a breakup or a sort of comfortable truce of routine compatibility in terms of knowing what to respond to certain problematic phrases of the other to keep the boat from rocking. rather then seeing love as progression from illusion to reality, then, i think is much more appropriate to present it as a regression from an art motored by the real to an illusionary view of everything as “banal, finite, dying reality” covered by a blanket of shorthand phrase compatibility; a situation that needs to be continually spiked back into the state of art by kicks from the real lurking precisely in our incompatibilities. initially, we are attracted to each other precisely by our defiantly staged differences and they have the sole power to shake up the ensuing banal façade into a more passionate display of affection, even if threatening to crumble the former altogether. as robert pfaller puts it in his lovely book das schműtzige heilige und die reine vernunft (the dirty holy and pure reason), we both fall in love and break up over the same odd, undomesticable characteristics of our beloved; peculiar, unplaceable traits that, much like the tabooed holies of old, acts as the source of both transcendent meaning and peril (particularly for stable social establishments) at the same time. to sum up, the basic points of this article on comedy and catastrophe would be the following. firstly, comedy thrives on catastrophe not so much because it would offer it a way to transcend or abolish disaster, but rather because the latter provides it with a medium of generating surplus enjoyment and sense which, in the case of viewed comedy, are transmitted via a back-handed loop from comic character to comic spectator. secondly, even though comedy usually begins and ends its storyline by steering clear of full scale disasters, this is not a sign of its half-hearted commitment to the chaotic but rather a consequence of its tendency to work with disaster as a productive and not merely destructive force—as a gap yawning in lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 36 any given structure that also holds the latter together as an adhesive, intermittently infusing it with surplus sense and meaning. thirdly, because comedy sees catastrophe as a permanent and necessary rather than occasional and contingent state of the world—one that can only hope to be temporarily covered up with just enough fleeting illusion for a brief period of fragile stability -, it is sufficiently disillusioned to forfeit hopes of permanently stable states projected into an unattainable future, but still idealistic enough to work with catastrophe as a dynamic engine of transformation. fourthly, the comedic view on catastrophe does not differ from its tragic counterpart merely in a more advanced state of detachment from reality but, rather, in a more complete acceptance of reality’s status of fragmented materiality crisscrossed by productively-shattering gaps, while rejecting any loftier realm to escape to beyond it. fifthly, comedy also differs from the uncanny’s take on disaster in its conception of both structural cracks in any given situation and the contingent emergence of surplus objects emerging from them not as ominous omens from a spectral beyond but as purely superficial, non-mystical generation of miraculously banal sources of transcendence from pure and simple lacks. while the uncanny sees the material world as a gory victim of forces from a world of otherworldly enjoyment, comedy knows that the material plane is the only one there is and that all its surplus sense and enjoyment stem from its own internal, empty, essentially bloodless lacks. the difference is similar to that between the romantic and the structuralist view of the unconscious: while romanticism saw the latter as a deep, unfathomable dark ground bubbling below the thin surface of cultured life, structuralism, and comedy with it, understand the unconscious as a source of sense and enjoyment that is always already there, in the gaps and double meanings between the signifiers making up the cultured world. in the atmosphere of amorous relationships, to link up that final theme to our theory as well, this is expressed in the difference between the romantic idealization of love as a seamless union forever tragically plagued by worldly obstacles that can thus only be fully consummated beyond death, while comedy pragmatically finds love to be interesting precisely inasmuch as it is plagued by cracks, fissures, friction and misunderstandings that prove to be the sole providers of amorous transcendence in a relationship’s here and now. in short, if serious genres see catastrophe as an evil intrusion into harmony that makes our world so sadly insufficient, comedy sees it as the prime platform for the only possible enjoyment there is, at once perilous and wonderfully exciting. finally, since this issue of s has obviously chosen its thematic thread due to its timeliness in an epoch of economic, ethical and cultural crisis, and a renewed consumer and theorist interest in comedy, i believe it is not the least bit inappropriate to close our text with a pointed referral to the spirit of our times. we live in an era when hitherto reigning empires are beginning to crumble; when the geographical centers of power are gradually shifting their locations; and when old ways that had until recently held the status of history’s final word have proven to be in rapid need lunaček: a comedy of horrors s6-7 (2014): 37 of exchange for a new model. simultaneously, however, our era is also marked by a prevailing spiritual attitude that is much too disillusioned, fatigued and cynically entrenched in post-modern ennui to seriously believe in, much less come up with a serious contender for a convincing vision of a new world order. now, if we are to learn anything from quality comedy in times such as these, it is that cynicism is not the only way to react to disillusionment, as well as that if something new is going to emerge from anywhere, it is the nothingness that surrounds us that is our best bet. comedy would, i believe, currently advise us to, but of course, “conceive crisis as an opportunity,” as the currently popular business maxim goes, but not as an opportunity for selling instant cures for or weapons against the crisis nor for buying up cheap stock to sell with a profit after the storm has passed. rather, we should conceive of crisis as an opportunity to stop waiting for the old order to reestablish itself and to instead change something radical in the world’s clockwork that has temporarily been laid bare. a crisis never fails to disclose the normally concealed paradoxes at work in the grounding of our worlds and this provides us with a unique chance to influence and inject something new into the latter. the more potent, intelligent, creative and revealing the ensuing comic chaos will turn out to be, the better chances we stand for a happy marriage that will sooner or later put an end to our lively period of comedic existence. and the better the closing wedlock, the more we can expect from the children born and raised into it who will inherit and rule the temporarily stable state before our next opportunity for a hilarious revelation of life, the universe and everything as implicitly catastrophic. faye.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 10 & 11 (2017-18): 180-194 e s t h e r f a y e i l n ’ y a p a s d e r a p p o r t s e x u e l … ou pire: the discourse of capitalism o u pire, … or worse? what is it that could possibly be worse … and worse than what? and why not write the worst? … ou pire is the title of jacques lacan’s nineteenth seminar of 1971-1972. anticipating these same questions from his audience, lacan begins with a comment on his choice of the adverbial form of ‘pire’ for his title. as an adverb, lacan explains, “worse” calls for a verb, a verb from which it has been separated, its absence represented by the three dots of the ellipsis that precede the words “or worse.” these three dots, lacan explains, is something you see used in printed texts to mark or create an empty place—something, a word, and in this instance a verb, that should be there has been deliberately omitted. and so lacan goes on to say: “my title underlines the importance of this empty place.” why? because it is the only way of catching something with language that is not of language; in other words, something of the real. in this middle period of lacan’s teaching—the late 60’s to early 70’s—when he began to elaborate a theory of discourse as a logical writing of the structure of relations between speaking beings—that is, as a social bond that takes the real of jouissance into account—for this is what is really at stake in discourse, he concluded that the only way language can say something about the real is by allowing this empty place to be preserved … with the use of language. this empty place is what a saying [“un dire”] preserves as act: “ that one might say remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard” [“qu’on dise reste oublié derrière ce qui se dit dans ce qui s’entend ” (“l’étourdit” 5). lacan arrives at the term “un dire”—the saying that he will bring into play in … ou pire—by tipping over the first letter of the word “pire” and then, to make it function as argument in logic, converting “dire”—to say—into “un dire”—a saying. with a particular saying—il n’ y a pas de rapport sexuel, there is no sexual relation—one of a related series of sayings lacan was formulating around this time, the real that is proper to psychoanalysis and which the ellipsis indexes, the real as the impossible to say, the real as unsayable, is thus marked with language. lacan warns that in trying to dodge this saying you can only say worse (… ou pire 11-12). using propositional and modal logic lacan undertook in … ou pire to elaboesther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 181 rate this saying—there is no sexual relation—and that of another, one that would be a response to it, that would moreover not try to get out of it and thus say worse. this saying is “y a d’ l’ un” or rather yad’lun (turning it into a one saying)—there is something of one, the one all alone not the one of union. there is something of one that can function as a placeholder for the hole of the real. a singular one, a master signifier that as letter names the singularity of the subject’s jouissance identity. but the worse has already been forgotten in what has been said in what is heard. i am referring to the saying of the capitalist discourse, the matheme of which lacan wrote only once in a lecture he gave in italy in 1972 (“du discours psychanalytique”). and this saying worse is precisely the effect of the capitalist discourse’s foreclosure of the impossible real of the sexual non-rapport, that is, the foreclosure of the saying that sustains the emptiness brought into real ex-sistence through the operation of language on the living being—castration. my argument here is that the reality this foreclosure generates is far worse—ou pire—than the impossible real of the lack of the sexual relation. castration is not fantasy, it is real (lacan, the sinthome 107) we know that there is a general and deeply held belief in the existence of the sexual relation. it is a universal dream, we could say, the dream of eros, the principle of union, of two making one that lacan calls in …ou pire a gross mythology he was determined to exorcise. an archaic version of such a belief can be seen in the comic fable recounted by the poet aristophanes, one that has taken on mythological status, when he takes his turn at the table in plato’s symposium to speak on the topic of love. in it, he derives the ancient and powerful desire of one human being to join up with another in what he calls human nature—a powerful drive to reunite what was once original nature, expressing itself as a “seeking to make one out of two, to heal the state of man.” to heal, in other words, the cut perpetrated by zeus as punishment for mankind’s hubris in attacking the gods that divided the original unity or oneness of human beings. the significance of this little story that makes a myth of subjective division, is that each half of the severed being is destined to always look for their original other half. in other words, the desire of two to become one again is the very expression of an ancient need which aristophanes called desire and the pursuit of the one love. myth, as russell grigg explains, “is a kind of logical instrument for resolving contradictions.” there is a logical contradiction at the heart of the myth that insists as “a point of impossibility.” in other words, at the heart of any myth we find an unsayable real—the impossible real for which lacan gave the modal formulation “that which never ceases not being written in the unconscious.” as such this real cannot be reduced or resolved but, as lacan says, it can be marked as such—it can be circumscribed. which is precisely what a myth does—it is a circumscription. or as grigg puts it: “the myth is a fictional story woven around a point of impossibility, or the real,” and its function is to provide “a fictional papering over for esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 182 the impossible, real kernel around which the myth is constructed and for which it was originally formulated” (grigg 55). now we might take aristophanes’ mythical story of a primal unity and the desire it leaves behind, of seeking to make one out of two as comedic fiction, as a comical treatment of a point of real that cannot be resolved, the point of real in this case being the impossibility of making one from two, in other words, of establishing the sexual relation. when people say, i say what i mean, or i always speak the truth, we should not forget the saying that underpins such statements—it is that there is a sexual relation, that is, that it exists. there is however a non-comedic outcome of such a saying, one that stems precisely from the foreclosure by the capitalist discourse of the impossible real of the sexual non-rapport, a saying that takes us to something worse. i will return to this. castration is however not a fable, it is not a fiction, it is not a myth—it is real. it is the real effect of language on the living being, an effect that precludes any possibility of there being a sexual relation. what does this mean? as lacan says in “…ou pire, compte rendu du séminaire 1971-1972,” there is no measurable relation [rapport], that is, there is no calculable ratio of sexual jouissance that can be universalized between speaking beings (lacan 549). the non-rapport of the sexes is integral to the very fact that a human being is a speaking being, an être parlant. “i have also defined the sexual relation as that which ‘doesn’t stop not being written.’ there is an impossibility therein. it is also that nothing can speak it—there is no existence of the sexual relation in the act of speaking” (lacan, encore 144-45). and it is sexual jouissance itself, that is, the jouissance that is our lot because of castration, which is simply the cut of the signifier, which bars access to the sexual relation (lacan, … ou pire 31). the subject, as supposed to the signifier which represents it for another signifier, the support of itself as parlêtre, can appear qua subject only on the basis of loss, the loss of an absolute form of jouissance that does not exist (there is no other of the other). and yet, although irrecoverable, the subject will seek to recover what does not exist through the very means, that is through the symbolic and imaginary semblances of language that effected this primordial loss in the first place. exiled from the sexual relation, that is, from the possibility of establishing a sexual relation with the other, of making one from two, the subject will attempt to seek compensation via the surplus jouissance objects around which their drive will turn endlessly in fantasy. imagining the possibility of overcoming castration, yet memorializing its very impossibility in this attempt to make up for it—in fantasy—the subject does not know they are already enjoying, in their symptom and in their affects, “everything that marks in each of us the trace of his exile.” as speaking beings we are exiled from the one of the sexual relation, condemned to the semblance of a sexual relation in and through discourse, to the contingency of an encounter “that momentarily gives the illusion that the sexual relation stops not being written […]—an illusion that something is not only articulated but inscribed […] by which, for a while—a time during which things are suspended—what would constitute the sexual relation finds its trace and its mirage-like path in the being who speaks” (lacan, encore 145). esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 183 to grasp this notion of exile, and of the sought for illusion that the sexual relation can be written in the unconscious, it is necessary to say something more about the lacanian concept of the unconscious. what follows here is i believe pertinent to my later discussion of the capitalist discourse. the german word that has been translated as the unconscious gives a clearer idea of its true sense in freud: das unbewusste. although the adjectival form from which this noun has been formed, ‘bewusste,’ can be translated as conscious, and unbewusste therefore as unconscious, its first listed meaning derives from the verb “wissen,” ‘to know,’ to have knowledge of, and correlatively unbewusste ‘to not know.’ i am making something of this etymology because i want to emphasize the fundamental characteristic of the unconscious—of a knowledge that is unknown, that is, unknown to the subject. unknown, not only in the sense that, as freud explained, one can only assume the existence, or rather ex-sistence, of the unconscious—it is a postulate, a necessary one however; it can only be supposed on the basis of the traces left behind from the first encounters with the other, traces that appear in a camouflaged way in the formations of the unconscious—dreams, bungled acts, slips, that is, lapses of the tongue and pen, forgetting and, of course, symptoms and affects as i referenced earlier— but unknown also in a much more fundamental way. as lacan was able to show, freud’s conceptualization of the primary repressed, das urverdrängung, constitutes the unconscious as a hole, a kernel of emptiness. this kernel is not merely repressed knowledge; it is knowledge as radically irrecoverable. it took someone like lacan to draw out the radical nature of this primary repressed as the primordial object foreclosed to the human subject, topologically both outside and inside the subject at the same time—as ex-timate. this truly radical concept of the unconscious as a knowledge in the real is fundamental to (but as beyond) the very constitution of the unconscious as the discourse of the other, the unconscious structured like a language, the more usual understanding of the lacanian unconscious. the unconscious as a place of unconscious knowledge without the subject is what lacan’s concept of lalangue references, a kind of un-known knowledge in which signifiers as unchained symbolic elements carry something real, namely the real of jouissance. an early sense of this real dimension of the unconscious can be seen in lacan’s eleventh seminar the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. there he speaks of the unconscious as an opening and closing: as a split, a gap, an interval in time, an unborn, a non-realized, and yet through this a-temporal gap some-thing speaks— ça parle. it speaks, not i speak (the four fundamental concepts 22-23).1 although not formulated expressly by lacan at this time, in 1964, the notion of the unconscious speaking without a subject will eventuate in the recognition that it is jouissance that is spoken, and most saliently in the symptom as an event of the body: “what speaks, whatever it is, is that which enjoys itself as body, that which enjoys a body that is lived” (… ou pire 151). and yet what is also born in the gap of this unknown knowledge is the very possibility of desire: from that which presents itself as a lack in being comes a want to be—(manque à être)—to be that which was foreclosed to the subject qua subject on entry into the game of language. lacan uses pascal’s esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 184 wager about the existence or non-existence of god to make the point that we have no choice but to enter the game of language, of heads or tails, money or your life, death or life, a game in which we have always-already lost (d’un autre à l’autre). and it is this loss that has the status as the real of a jouissance presumed lost to the subject, that is the cause of both the subject’s unconscious desire and their compulsion to repeat—to repeat what lacan in seminar xvii refers to as the ruinous search for the lost jouissance of themselves as living beings, even to the point of going against life itself! what is to be noted here is that the unconscious comes at this time to be theorized by lacan as an apparatus fitted out by language for the repetition of jouissance. for what necessitates repetition, the engine of desire, the search for a sexual jouissance that would be restored to the subject, is precisely a point of impossibility in the very structure of discourse, the very thing that the capitalist discourse forecloses. although lacan never discarded the concept of the subject as a being spoken by language, but also essentially as a being who speaks, an être parlant—“the human being, called thus undoubtedly because he is only the humus of language” (the other side of psychoanalysis 51)—in his later teachings he invented a new term for this being in whom speech and jouissance are inseparable—parlêtre. written as one word parlêtre glues together two words—‘parler’ to speak, and ‘être,’ being. but together these also evoke the phrase, par lettre, by the letter, alluding thus to the real element carried in the signifier by the speaking being. this real element is the foundation of the saying that lacan elaborates in his seminar … ou pire—yad’lun, there is a one-all-alone. there is something of one, a master signifier that represents the subject at the level of its singular mode of jouissance. with parlêtre ,lacan introduced a subtle but significant shift in the concept of the unconscious and simultaneously in the concept of the subject of the unconscious. for the parlêtre now becomes the very name of this subject of the unconscious in its real dimension. an unconscious no longer to be understood simply as the unconscious structured as a language, as the discourse of the other, but the unconscious as real.2 the parlêtreunconscious is the real subject with a body that enjoys itself, for the most real of the subject is as enjoying substance; this is an unconscious that enjoys [jouit], and in enjoying [jouissant] speaks: “i speak with my body and i do so unbeknownst to myself” (encore 119). apparolé to the capitalist discourse “the subject, who is called human, no doubt because he is only the humus of language, has only to apparoler himself to this apparatus,” to the structure immanent in speech (lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis 51, modified trans.).3 discourse, if we are to follow lacan, is a logical writing of little letters that inscribe a particular social bond that represents the relations of speech and jouissance between subjects as speaking beings. and it does so—each discourse doing so differently—as a way of making up for the fact that there is no possibility of a sexual relation, for there is no natural social/sexual relation between subjects, and none such especially beesther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 185 tween what is fundamentally at stake for all subjects, the jouissance specific to the discourse in which they are apparolés. lacan’s neologism apparolé is fundamentally equivocal. the french word parole refers to the function of speech and language in the constitution of the subject and evokes the sense of the subject as fitted out in and by language, thus putting the emphasis on the status of language as semblance. but the prefix ‘a,’ this little letter that alludes to lacan’s objet petit a, announces something beyond semblance—the real that as remainder of the operation of language functions nachträglich as cause, the cause of the speaking being, the parlêtre. to be apparolé is thus the condition of being fitted out in the terms of the specific discourse(s) one inhabits but also essentially characterises the position of the subject in discourse in relation to their real. as the ‘a’ indicates, to be apparolé is not merely the condition of being apparelled, as with an item of clothing that one can adorn oneself in and take off at will; language has effects that go beyond the semblances that construct our reality: “the subject is not only represented by language … he is in addition produced as an effect, a real effect of language which transforms the organism” (soler, vers l’identité 32). language, in other words, touches the real. turning now to the capitalist discourse (if it is a discourse) to which subjects are apparolés, i now ask: what exactly are the effects of this discourse on subjects and what might qualify it as producing a worse saying? the capitalist discourse has recently received increasing attention from a number of lacanian psychoanalysts and my discussion of it here is indebted to their insights. lacan had commented on capitalism sporadically from early in his teaching but it was only in 1968, understandable given what was happening in the world at the time, that he began to examine it more concertedly.4 a few years later, in a lecture he gave at the university of milan, “du discours psychanalytique,” he mathematized capitalism as a discourse for the first time and in so doing indicated in what ways it challenged not only the very status of discourse but in particular the psychoanalytic discourse, or as he had formulated it a little earlier, the discourse of the psychoanalyst. in this lecture lacan laid out what he considered to be the foundation stone of psychoanalytic discourse—that it is founded on the play of signifiers, namely that the signifier slips in relation to meaning—le jeu des signifiants, ça glisse au sens. with the verb “slip” we hear the possibility of making a blunder, a lapsus which, as lacan states in “preface to the english-language edition” of seminar xi, indicates the presence of the unconscious, the unconscious as real (lacan, “preface” vii). the practice and effectiveness of psychoanalytic discourse depends on this very possibility, on the possibility of the parlêtre analysand slipping up in speaking, a slipping made possible by the fact that there is no signifier whose meaning is assured. hence the possibility of the analysand saying something more or less than intended, and saying something that unbeknownst to them touches a real. a psychoanalytic session relies on this possibility in speech, of a slip falling from the lips of the analysand and thereby revealing an unintended sense—in meaning and direction. speech takes the analysand towards something real, the real of their jouissance. esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 186 it is this very principle of language’s equivocity that is not only the fundamental condition of psychoanalytic discourse, it is also, said lacan, what characterizes what we, that is psychoanalysts, refer to as man. but it is a fact that psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic practice has shown us the radical character of the effect of the signifier in this constitution of the world. i do not say for the being who speaks, because what i called this skidding [ce dérapage, slip-up] a moment ago, this sliding which is done with the signifying apparatus … this is what determines being in the one who speaks. the word being has no other meaning outside of language [emphasis and ellipsis in original]. but the radical effects of language go even further than constituting the world and the being that speaks. the play of signifying slippage disrupts any possible natural or harmonious relation between man and his objects and this is evident in the fact that not only is the signified not primary, before it is produced in the wake of the signifier—and lacan quickly added that we would be rushing too quickly if we think that the purpose of language is to produce the signified and signification— “there is something more primary than the effects of signification.” what could be more primary? we are assured, said lacan, of the presence of a subject in the real if we have before us a subject who is capable of using the signifier as such, which means, to make use of the play of the signifier not to signify something but precisely to deceive us as to what there is to be signified. so in lacan’s view, the primary purpose of the signifier is not to produce sense or signification, and it is not even to re-present the subject that is supposed to the signifier, that is as a barred subject represented by a signifier for another signifier and as therefore lacking-in-being, but to produce a real subject, a subject in which there is a jouissance proper to it—in other words, a parlêtre. to produce in other words, the parlêtre-unconscious. that is, i hasten to add, if the particular discourse to which the subject is apparolé will allow it. i say this because of what lacan then goes on to say in relation to the capitalist discourse. we are in the time of crisis because something no longer goes around, something has stopped turning. this is not the crisis of the discourse of the master, as many are still banging on about, that is, a crisis in the failure of the position of the father in current social arrangements, for the discourse of the old pater-master has already given way to that of the university. the crisis we face is due to the fact that the capitalist discourse turns only on itself; there is no movement possible from it to any of the other discourses and, moreover, the movement internal to the capitalist discourse is fundamentally different from that in the other discourses. what the four discourses lacan named have in common—the discourse of the master, the hysteric, the university and the analyst—is that they each turn on a common point of impossibility, the impossibility of the sexual relation. i stress this condition of impossibility for it is this that allows these discourses to rotate and thus turn from one to the other, and it is precisely this condition that is foreclosed in the capitalist discourse. in each of the four discourses something remains impossible; something is barred from being brought into the field of semblance. esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 187 this is the effect of castration as real. in this sense alone the capitalist discourse cannot be considered a true discourse that constitutes a social bond. each discourse consists of the same four little letters—s1, s2, a, and $—that rotate via a quarter turn to the left and, starting from the bottom left, occupy in turn the four fixed places in the structure—those of truth; agent/semblance/desire/symptom; the worker/other/jouissance; and product/surplus jouissance—whichever letter that occupies the place of agent (in the top left position), giving the discourse its name. the barrier of jouissance determines that the product or surplus jouissance of the discourse, (surplus jouissance, mehrlust in german, which lacan exposed as being what is really at stake in marx’s concept of surplus value, mehrwert) can never meet up with the place of truth underlying the place of agent/semblance/desire (d’un autre à l’autre 172-173). the circle cannot be closed; there is an unbridgeable barrier. and precisely because of this, castration is brought into play each time a discourse shifts from one discourse to the next, the turning revealing the unconscious truth that underlay the agent of the previous discourse and that now through the turning occupies the place of agent.5 esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 188 to repeat: it is precisely this barrier of impossibility that the capitalist discourse disables. in the discourse of the capitalist, the truth incarnated in the master signifier is now not only directly accessible to the subject—note the downward vector from the divided subject in the place of agent to the master signifier in the place of truth—but also that this master must be passed through in order to reach the scientific/technological knowledge—note the vector from truth to knowledge—through which surplus jouissance embedded in the products of capitalism flow to the subject—note the vector from product to agent. in none of the other discourses does the product of surplus jouissance, in whatever letter it is embedded, be that s1, s2, $ or object a, come directly to the subject. that happens only in the capitalist discourse and this is precisely the effect of the foreclosure of castration. in the capitalist discourse, it is the masked master, the brand names of the capitalist market, as stiijn vanheule nominates this master to be, that occupies the place of truth—an inversion of the discourse of the master, the very discourse that is also equated with the structure of the unconscious. this has far-reaching consequences—to the status of the subject as well as to the endurance of social bonds. within the logic of the other four discourses we can see that loss is incurred from the very outset because the one in the position of agent has to go via the other, the place where their desire hopes to meet up with some knowledge about the jouissance of their lost being, for this is the question being raises for the subject. but the product resulting from this operation is never all the jouissance that was aimed for, only a more and/or less of jouissance—surplus jouissance. even more disturbing to the subject is the fact that desire can never make this not-all jouissance product reach the place of the agent’s unconscious truth; there is, as i have already noted, a barrier constituted by the only jouissance permitted to subjects as speaking beings. so in the social bonds constituted within the terms of this logic, the subject remains necessarily divided from the truth of their singular mode of jouissance, divided from, in other words, the proper name of the singular jouissance of their symptom; the singular way in which they have, in these four discourses, made up for the fact that there is no sexual relation. however, within the logic of the capitalist discourse the subject does not have to go via the other in the hope of meeting up with a knowledge of their jouissance and of thereby creating some form of social bond. seeking an answer to the question of their subjective division and to the dissatisfaction it may generate, the subject in the capitalist discourse is directed to seek it directly via the master signifiers of capitalism. any possibility of a bond with the other is necessarily via this master. but what is arrested through the rupturing of the social bond between agent and other is the very possibility of the equivocity, that is, the play of signifiers, lacan regarded as so fundamental to the definition of man as a speaking being. the capitalist discourse goes around and around continuously like a roulette table, apparently unstoppable, and the effect of this is that the necessary impasse of the non-rapport is no longer an obstacle. at the same time then that capitalism necessarily cultivates ersatz forms of dissatisfaction and discontent, it offers a fantasy of esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 189 completeness. the capitalist discourse is in fact predicated on making the sexual relation exist. its fundamental yet deceptive promise is that we can have all we desire, that satisfaction via the objects of surplus jouissance is attainable. the subject, as irène foyentin has remarked, is thus reduced to what she/he desires—the objects of surplus jouissance that pull the subject into consumption—not that he/she desires (foyentin 59). desire does not have to pass via the signifiers of the other to be there confronted with the enigma of the other’s desire and the question in turn of the subject’s desire. instead the promise of the realization of the sexual relation now comes to the subject as homogenised and collectivised objects of consumption, these ready-made gadgets of capitalist production that we as subjects reduced to our status as consumers are commanded to enjoy. desire is in effect reduced to demand. as colette soler has argued, capitalism has no interest in the truth of the subject’s desire and the singular jouissance that desire aims at. rather its sole interest is in managing the jouissance of the capitalist subject by feeding the pseudo-desire it creates with “lathouse” objects that render the subject anonymous to itself. in line with the psychoanalytic understanding of perversion, the only universal right capitalism is interested in is the right to enjoy—jouis—encore, encore! and the encore is guaranteed through the cunning of the capitalist discourse. the jouissance of consumption can never be satisfied, frustration is built into the very principle of its logic: the more i consume, the more i need to/have to consume. as apparolé to the capitalist discourse, the subject is thus reduced to the status of proletarian (soler, “sujets apparolés”). it was marx, as lacan pointed out, who must be credited with having revealed the truth of capitalist discourse as the proletariat: “the proletariat means what? it means that work is radicalized at the level purely and simply of merchandise, which means that it reduces the worker himself to the same rate” (d’un autre à l’autre 172-173). a proletarian is thus a subject reduced to the same unit value of the merchandise they produce, for the effect of the absolutization of the market is to reduce all life “to an element of value.” as renata salecl has noted: the prediction is that in the future almost everything will be a paid-for experience in which traditional reciprocal obligations and expectations— mediated by feelings of faith, empathy and solidarity—will be replaced by contractual relations in the form of paid memberships, subscriptions, admission charges, retainers and fees. (salecl 29) in other words, as proletarian, the subject becomes a mere body whose primary purpose is to consume the gadgets—whether these are objects or so-called life experiences—produced by the capitalist machine, and to be consumed by them. reduced thus to the equivalence and value of objects, the modern subject as proletarian is left with very little with which to form a social bond, for the body on its own is not enough with which to create a social bond (soler 2011, 35, citing lacan 1975 [1974], 177-203).6 so it is not surprising that the bonds of love as well as ties to place have become precarious, for as lacan said: esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 190 what distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is that the verwerfung, the rejection—the rejection outside of any symbolic exchange, with what i already said it has as consequences. the rejection of what? of castration. all order, all discourse that akin to capitalism leaves aside what we simply call the things of love, my good friends.” (the knowledge of the psychoanalyst 103) conclusion colette soler has written about the precarity of what she calls the generalized proletariat, those who having lost their relations of solidarity with each other are thereby more exposed to insecurity and loneliness. this is surely a worse. but what is perhaps even worse is what this precarity (and not just dissatisfaction and frustration) can lead to—to the appeal of a one of union—“by which i designate the identification of the other with the one” (lacan, television 23)—a fundamentalist one that has shown itself to be murderous towards others. lacan may have questioned whether the discourse of psychoanalysis would survive,7 but he had the certainty of presentiment that something worse would be born from the capitalist discourse—to which he gave the name pst. spelled out, these letters form the word “peste,” the french word for plague or pestilence, an ironic reference to what freud believed he had brought to the united states with psychoanalysis.8 the pst would truly be a pestilential discourse, a scourge in the service of the capitalist discourse. it would be the worse of a jouissance taken to the extreme already manifest in rising levels of hatred, religious intolerance and racism. with capitalism’s foreclosure of castration and its co-optation of scientific universalism, the singularity of subjects as embodied in their fundamental symptom is at stake. the homogenization of subjects as equally free to consume, the only freedom capitalism is interested in, and the extreme individualism to which we are pushed, can only result in more and more segregation. the building of walls is the logical attempt to make up for the social bond that is in default in today’s world, described by colette soler as the logic of segregation.9 slavoj žižek has also noted this: … age-old fixations, and particular, substantial ethnic, religious and cultural identities, have returned with a vengeance. our predicament today is defined by this tension: the global free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing separations in the social sphere. since the fall of the berlin wall and the rise of the global market, new walls have begun emerging everywhere, separating peoples and their cultures. (žižek 7) the fascination with populist nationalisms gaining momentum in the world today is premised on this logic. a single quote from a speech by donald trump alerts us to the resurfacing of an old danger: that of the murderous exclusionism of extreme nationalism and its potential to end in fascism through its elevation of the volk, constituted as such in identification with a mad master—“the only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything” (cited in müller).10 this would truly be the return of the real as peste. i wrote at esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 191 another time of the drama of nazism as the fascination of sacrifice on behalf of a fuehrer and of the ego ideal the leader incarnated.11 although trump is not hitler, perhaps we can see something of the latter’s discourse resurfacing in the trumpism of make america great again. this is the danger of a discourse about which lacan had already in 1964 thought necessary to warn us. at that time, he spoke of the “drama of nazism” as a re-enactment of “the most monstrous and supposedly superseded forms of the holocaust,” the resurgence of which the predominant forms of historical critique (hegelian-marxist) could not account for. i believe we are witnessing such a resurgence again—think of the privileged world’s responses to the forced mass movements of peoples; the terror and terrifying conditions in which those who cannot flee live; and the formation of one nation politics around the world: brexit; donald trump; pauline hanson; australia’s detention camps; etc. in my view, what lacan said at the very end of the last session of seminar xi to account for the resurgence of “the holocaust” still holds good today: … the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell. ignorance, indifference, an averting of the eyes may explain beneath what veil this mystery still remains hidden. but for whoever is capable of turning a courageous gaze towards this phenomenon—and, once again, there are certainly few who do not succumb to the fascination of the sacrifice in itself—the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this other that i call here the dark god. (the four fundamental concepts, 275, emphasis in original) as we know, the ideal of purity and non-division at that time required the enslavement and extermination of all those others who were seen to threaten the unity of the one people, das volk. those who threaten this fantasy of the imaginary unity of “the other and the one,” the mystical one crudely brought to life by aristophanes as “the beast-with-two-backs” (lacan, television 23), have to be expelled, for their very existence disrupts the fantasy of the one body. dissent, not merely dissatisfaction, we could say, is built into the very structure of discourse, but only if the barrier of impossibility created by the castrating effect of language is sustained. the capitalist discourse removes this barrier; foreclosing castration, foreclosing the impossibility of the sexual relation—as happens in psychosis—it is difficult to see how, despite the clear evidence of protests around the world in response to the excesses of capitalism, the discourse of capitalism itself could be made to shift to another that would expose its truth. the only chance for the proletariat cast adrift without ballast and driven to distraction by their quest for lathouse objects is, i argue, via the wager of the unconscious—the unconscious that psychoanalysts take responsibility for making ex-sist12—and of its symptom that incarnates the singular real of the subject’s response to the non-rapport of the sexual relation. we have this chance because, as colette soler has argued, the parlêtre is not all apparolé to discourse. as living beings effected and affected by language, not all of esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 192 the subject’s being is ensnared by language. and this not all is essential if a subject is to emerge in the real, not just one apparolé to the discourse they inhabit. this not all ex-sists in the real of the symptom, in the opaque jouissance conveyed by the letter of the symptom. the symptom is not the real, for the real is impossible and the symptom is necessary, but it is the closest thing there is in the parlêtre, who is pas tout apparolé to the capitalist discourse, that preserves something of the empty space that is foreclosed in the capitalist discourse. only such a subject with a symptom that stands against the dominant discourse has a chance of resisting the push to join up with the empty plus de jouir objects of capitalism. for joining up is tantamount to the suicide of the subject—a subject who in search of the social bonds which capitalism cannot provide is thus easy prey to the increasingly loud calls of populist nationalisms to sacrifice him or herself to the dark god of the one leader, the one nation. in contrast to the push to the one of the one-volk, the psychoanalytic premise of the not all—another way of saying that there is no sexual relation—and of the singular one as condition for the symptom—yad’lun— is, i believe, the ethical and political antidote to the … or worse ushered in by the capitalist discourse. works cited braunstein, n. a. “le discours capitaliste: ‘cinquième discours’? anticipation du ‘discours peste,’ ou peste,̀ ” savoirs et clinique 2:14 (2011): 94-100. faye, esther. “a solid hatred addressed to being,” analysis 15 (2009): 3-19. foyentin, i. “tous prolétaires?” mensuel 15 (2006): 59. grigg, r. “beyond the oedipus complex.” in reflections on seminar xvii, jacques lacan and the other side of psychoanalysis. eds. j. clemens and r. grigg. durham & london: duke university press, 2006, lacan, jacques. du discours psychanalytique, conférence à l’université de milan le 12 mai 1972, lacan en italie 1953-1978. édition la salamandra, 1972. –––. “l’étourdit.” scilicet 4. paris, éditions du seuil, 1973. –––. the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the seminar of jacques lacan book xi. trans. a. sheridan. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 1981. –––. preface to the english-language edition of seminar xi [1976], the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the seminar of jacques lacan book xi, trans. a. sheridan. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 1981. –––. television [1974]. trans. d. hollier, r. krauss, a. michelson. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 1990. esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 193 –––. the seminar of jacques lacan, on feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge, book xx encore 1972-1973. trans. b. fink. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 1998. –––. … ou pire [1975]. compte rendu du séminaire 1971-1972. in autres écrits. paris, éditions du seuil, 2001. –––. le séminaire de jacques lacan livre xvi d’un autre à l’autre 1968-1969. paris, éditions du seuil, 2006a. –––. le séminaire de jacques lacan livre xviii, d’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant 1971. paris, éditions du seuil, 2006b. –––. the seminar of jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis, book xvii (19691970). trans. r. grigg. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 2007. –––. le séminaire livre xix … ou pire 1971-1972. ed. j-a. miller. paris, éditions du seuil, 2011. –––. the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, seminar 1971-1972. trans. m. plastow. éditions de l’association freudienne internationale, publication hors commerce, 2013. –––. the sinthome, the seminar of jacques lacan book xxiii 1975-1976. trans. a. r. price. cambridge, uk; malden, ma, usa, polity press, 2016. –––. “la troisième—intervention au congrès de rome” (31.10.1974/3.11.1974), lettres de l’école freudienne 16 (1975): 177-203. müller, j-w. “capitalism in one family: the populist moment.” lrb 23 (dec. 1) 2016. salecl, renate. on anxiety. london & new york, routledge, 2004. 59; citing jeremy rifkin, the age of access 2001. 29. soler, colette. les affects lacaniens. paris, puf, 2011. –––. lacan—the unconscious re-invented. trans. e. faye & s. schwartz. london, karnac books, 2014. –––. “sujets apparolés au capitalisme.” mensuel 94 (2015a): 8-14. –––. vers l’identité, cours 2014-2015, collège clinique de paris, éditions du champ lacanien (2015b). vanheule, s. “capitalist discourse, subjectivity and lacanian psychoanalysis.” frontiers in psychology 7 (dec. 2016): 1-14. žižek, s. “who can control the post-super-power capitalist world order?” the guardian (may 2014). notes 1. this could also be translated as “that there is a saying ….” esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 194 2. for an excellent introduction to this shift in the conceptualization of the unconscious, see soler, lacan—the unconscious re-invented. 3. as bruce fink, the translator of seminar xvii notes, the punning of lacan here is untranslatable. i have decided however not to use fink’s translation of “s’apparoler” as “speechify,” preferring to keep the french because of the way it condenses both “speech” and “apparel,” nor his translation of “appareil” as “fittings,” seeing more value in using a word that is closer to the french “cet appareil-là” at the same time as its sound is closer to “s’apparoler.” 4. the year 1968 is famous for being a time of generalized revolt and social disturbance in many parts of the world and especially in france. the possibility of a real revolution marked a crisis for capitalism and the socio-political regimes that sustained it and were sustained by it. lacan engaged seriously with the question of capitalism as a discourse from his sixteenth seminar, d’un autre à l’autre until his nineteenth … ou pire, as well as in the series of talks at st anne that coincided with this latter seminar, known as le savoir du psychanalyste [the knowledge of the psychoanalyst], some of which have been included in the published edition of … ou pire. 5. the truth from which the agent is barred from knowing is represented by each one of the letters that in turn occupy the place of truth and that thereby function as the particular cause of the agent’s unconscious desire. 6. in 1974, lacan would say that even though we are so captured/captivated by gadgets these could still function as symptoms, for example, the car as like a false woman—“une fausse femme”—that is, it has phallic value. 7. this was discussed by lacan in la troisième in 1974, but was also raised in his talk in milan in 1972, as well as in other texts. 8. lacan may have also intended with pst to evoke the four horsemen of the apocalypse, harbingers of the last judgment, the name for one of these being pestilence. see braunstein’s remarks on pst as the pestilential discourse in the service of capitalism. 9. see soler, vers l’identité, see esp. session 6 may 1975, as well as in other of her writings. 10. on the power of fascination in the relationship between subjects identified with each other via identification with a leader, see s. freud, group psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921c), se xviii, ch. 8 being in love and hypnosis. 11. the paper to which i refer is “a solid hatred addressed to being.” 12. on the responsibility of the discourse of the analyst in making the unconscious ex-sist, see esp. lacan, television, 14. kukuljevic.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 10 & 11 (2017-18): 138-151 a l e x i k u k u l j e v i c w h y a h i t c h c o c k d r i n k s i t s c o f f e e b l a c k i n an interview with bon appétit magazine, mel brooks recalls an evening dining with alfred hitchcock before the release of high anxiety (1977) at one of the latter’s favorite restaurants, chasen’s on beverly boulevard:1 he ordered a shrimp cocktail to begin, with cocktail sauce. and a sirloin steak, which was at least two inches thick. and a baked potato crammed full of chives and sour cream. and then he ordered a separate plate of asparagus with hollandaise sauce. and some sliced tomato on lettuce and there was some kind of blue cheese dressing on that … and for dessert he had, i don’t know two bowls of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, with strawberry or something on top. what a meal. and this is all true. you won’t believe this … so he finished and he took out a kind of ostrich-covered wallet, and in it there were three cigars or four cigars, and i’m sure it was a cuban cigar. he took it out and he took out a little guillotine from his pocket, which he always kept, and he clipped the tip of the cigar. and he put it in his mouth and he paused. he paused. i figured he’d take out a lighter. he paused, he paused, he paused. he took the cigar out of his mouth, put it back in the case, and put it back in his pocket. “oh george.” headwaiter ran over, and he said, “george, i’m really peckish tonight. do it again. … he had a big belly, and he ate it all. and he didn’t have the dessert. he just finished the main course. he got the tomato and the roquefort cheese dressing and everything, and then he lit the cigar. and i said, “don’t you want some cream on the side, or some milk on the side?” and he said, “no, no, no, i gotta watch the calories.”…[r]eally a great joke. [laughing] you know, he had black coffee. watch the calories; watch him tower up like a goyishe, like nobody else in the world.2 mel brooks’s narration—its richness of detail, attentiveness to hitchcock’s timing and fine use of that signifier of suspense, the cigar—lends to their encounter a cinematic quality, as if the scene had been directed with a refined sense for the impression the ‘goodness’ of his appetite would make, not only on his companion, but posterity as such. the gorging, the flabbergast, and the punchline. the joke here turns on understating the all too visible excess, situating “hitchcock” within alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 139 the hole marked by the performative negation, “no, no, no…” and embodied in the blackness of his coffee. “wit is only wit,” lacan mentions in passing, “because it is close enough to our existence to cancel it with laughter.”3 and laughter here cancels any semblance of congruity to the creature before our eyes. the signifier’s incision renders any consistent sense that image might have null. “logic is dull,” hitchcock frequently reiterated, taking aim at his critics that he dismissed as the “plausabilists.” it proceeds too consistently, intolerant of the incongruities hitchcock worked so hard to plan.4 no stranger to making a spectacle of himself, hitchcock carefully managed his public persona, the production more than authentication of his signature, treating his projected image as an extension of his cinematic art, always mucking about with the idea of his corpus and the relation its swelling mass would bear to his person. there was more than a bit of a dandy in hitchcock, to allude to thomas elsaesser’s fine essay, and his films are littered with dandyesque rogues and elegant villains. one of the chief aims of the dandy is to render the humanity in the human unrecognizable. to this purpose, hitchcock put his corpulence to good work.5 “[l]ike the exorbitant ingestion of meanings by the image,” tom cohen suggests, it is “always a signifier to be exploited—whether rendering the figure unthreatening and neutered, perhaps infantile, or signalling formality in excess.”6 in this case, it is a void to be stuffed. hitchcock once told robert boyle, a close friend and set designer of such films as shadow of a doubt and the birds: “i have all the feelings of everyone encased in an armour of fat.”7 as armour, his suit of flesh deflects blows, but as fat it absorbs them. feelings for hitchcock are the effect of perturbations of a surface that does not just reflect, but is stained by its contact, as a mirror by the oil that leaks from the human pore. feelings are as dirty as they are artificial: the result of a certain amplification of a stain. just as melodrama, for hitchcock, is in service of understatement, feeling is in service of registering the “cut” that is the vehicle of the cinematic idea. the image that does not react to the cut, that understates it, is most faithful to the null presence of the idea. the cut operates less perhaps like a blade than a tooth, akin to a biting remark that the image like the flesh must ingest. ††† the principle of hitchcock’s eating follows closely the cinematic principle that he lays out in the essay, “why i make melodramas.”8 “i use melodrama,” hitchcock writes, “because i have a tremendous desire for understatement in film-making.”9 defining the “melodramatic film” as “one based on a series of sensational incidents,” he claims that it is “the backbone and lifeblood of cinema.”10 however, the melodramatic is not any less real for being sensational, just as the understated is not more real for being less theatrical. as hitchcock puts it: “a woman may receive the news of her husband’s death by throwing up her arms and screaming, or she may sit quite still and say nothing. the first is melodramatic. but it may well hapalexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 140 pen in real life.”11 striving for what he terms an “ultra-realism,” his cinema assumes the contradictory form of the sensationalization of the understated, arriving at a form of melodrama that is less fictional than reality. rather than assuming the opposition between reality and fiction, he displaces the distinction itself. since audience’s perception of reality has been shaped irreparably by a “habit of drama,” as he puts it, “[r]ealism, faithfully represented,” does not appear as such, seems “unreal,” because “[t]his habit causes the audience to prefer on the screen things that are outside their own, real-life experience.”12 by sensationalizing “the strange anomalies of real life”—often dismissed as “wildly improbable” and “grotesquely unreal” though filched directly from the newspaper—he maintains at once “the entertainment demands of the screen” for “colorful action” without simply feeding their “habit of drama.” he entertains contrawise: not by making time pass, but, let us say, by filling the void. ultra-realism is thus more real than reality’s lack of reality, since it includes the void that reality excludes. this is hitchcock’s formula for his break with a representational conception of cognition and thus cinema. understatement internalizes the thing it excludes: sensation. it does so by sensationalizing lack, making the void scintillatingly present. to fill a void is not simply to add something, like cream to coffee, but to mark out its emptiness, making a place for absence, and this is what allows hitchcock to liken the construction of the cinematic phantasm, as he does in psycho, to the taxidermist’s macabre art. the taxidermist fills the void for the sole purpose of displaying a kill, mounting its vacancy, maintaining its look while vacating its gaze. such a practitioner must first gut the beast before treating its hide and filling it with cheap materials. as norman says, “it’s cheap, really. you know, needles, thread, sawdust. [today it would be styrofoam.] the chemicals are the only thing that cost anything.”13 taxidermy like cinema, hitchcock suggests, preserves the look of the void. the vacancy of the eye is what hitchcock captures through the metonymic slide from shower head, to the eye, to the drain that follows the murder of marion (janet leigh) in the infamous shower sequence in psycho. any crass attempt to reinstate metaphor—life going down the drain, etc.—results in mere cliché, which cannot sustain the formal relentlessness of the metonymic chain that associates these things by their voided shape. reduced to their capacity to stand in the null place of a vacant subject—vacated by a virtuoso series of “cuts”—they do not become metaphors for marion’s loss of life, but emblems of insignificance, separated from their own meanings through their circumstantial association. he does not make something from nothing, but some thing of not. absence makes an impression, like the imprint left by mrs. bates on her bed, the poison illuminating the glass of milk carried by johnnie aysgarth (cary grant) in suspicion, the smoke ring blown by uncle charlie (joseph cotton) in a shadow of a doubt, the stain on the glass that brandon wants to keep for the museum in rope, the crop duster that is dusting a cropless field in north by northwest, or hitchcock’s black coffee. absence takes place, hollowing out the signification of that which appears like the empty vessel of the “o” that stands for nothing of roger o. thornalexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 141 hill’s name and whose matchbook bares the initials rot: the “o” being mighty coffin like. treating an absent presence as an all too present absence is perhaps hitchcock’s most central operation: one which mel brooks parodies in high anxiety by making it shatteringly literal. shooting a dinner scene at “the psycho-neurotic institute for the very, very nervous” from outside a large window, the camera slowly zooms in crashing, rather than passing, through the window, drawing the shocked attention of the dining analysts, brooks included. the process of filmic enunciation here crudely intrudes on the enunciated like a fumbling voyeur. far from positioning the director as a figure who holds all the spades, or a master manipulator who plays the audience “like a giant organ,” brooks allegorizes his own relation to the viewer as a goofball always ready to lay the banana peel. if the joke hits the mark, it is because hitchcock, of course, would never resort to such clumsy measures. his approach being decidedly understated. if he understates his relation to the viewer, this is not, however, because he takes himself and the cinema so much more seriously. although he would take the joke in stride, hitchcock’s problem is neither concerned with calling the fictional, diegetic space of the film into question, by including in the space of the picture that which is purportedly excluded: the beyond of the frame or the physical “reality” of the camera, the set, etc.. nor does hitchcock, despite opinion, simply personify the camera’s presence.14 it may indeed be a certain decoy of authorial presence, like the cameo, but the question remains: what kind of presence? hitchcock’s notorious (and doubtless overstated) claim that “actors are cattle” provides a clue. rather than humanizing the camera, by assigning an authorial role or making it a character, it is a question of dehumanizing the actor with its mobile presence, stripping him or her of “character,” some reputed interiority that they could appeal to. when ingrid bergman had trouble ‘motivating’ a scene, he would simply tell her to “fake it,” doing the trick.15 if the camera’s passivity acts in their place, it is because their roles are only animated by a series of “cuts.” all images await the cutting that hollows them out: making them at once self-contained and yet insufficient unto themselves.16 the inhuman, artificial cinematic gaze snatches away the interiority of ‘character’ by way of its irreducible exteriority and it is the cut implied by its animation that positions the subject in the very place of its absence: always between the image like a gap tooth. inside by being irreducibly outside: on its masticated plane. ††† hitchcock conceives of cinema as vast network of the relations that determine the course of ingestion. as he tells truffaut: i’d like to try to do an anthology on food, showing its arrival in the city, its distribution, the selling, buying by the people, the cooking, the various ways in which its consumed. what happens to it in various hotels; how it’s fixed alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 142 up and absorbed. and, gradually, the end of the film would show the sewers, and the garbage being dumped out into the ocean. so there’s a cycle, beginning with the gleaming fresh vegetables and ending with the mess that’s poured into the sewers. thematically, the cycle would show what people do to good things. your theme might almost be the rottenness of humanity.17 it is neither the beginning nor the end, nor the vast system of exchange that focusses hitchcock’s attention, but the chewing, the incessant chewing, that moment that already implies corruption, but is not yet wholly identified with the mess that flows into the sewer. this is the moment in which the teeth bite down on the image, positioning it in relation to those that are absent, broken down and tasted, prepared for ingestion. the average public, hitchcock stresses, have little clue as to this process of “cutting,” as little clue as awareness of the piping that carries the human mess through the walls and under the streets. a film must ingest the cuts that position its many seams, creating that phantom of interiority—a meaning or a message—that hitchcock treats corrosively, insisting rather on the absolute exteriority of that which unfolds upon the screen.18 hitchcock liked to quote sam goldwyn: “messages are for western union.”19 the message that hitchcock sends cannot be telegraphed, since it would be composed of the stops between words: like uncle charlie’s (played by joseph cotton) strange message from a shadow of a doubt in which he articulates the “stops” between the message: “lonesome for you all. stop. i’m coming out to stay with you a while. stop. will arrive thursday and try and stop me. will wire exact time later. love to all and a kiss to little charlie from her uncle charlie.” it is this “between” that hitchcock aims to show: the arrested image, so to speak, with all its bite marks. the cinematic moving picture is cut up, or better chewed, masticated, only then swallowed in a gulp. herbert coleman recalled that hitchcock “always said he hated the idea of swallowing food or drink, and in fact everything seemed to be taken in one huge gulp.”20 but he certainly chewed it, so to be more precise, the image is chewed in order to be tasted, absorbed by the tongue and palette and only subsequently swallowed, sent on its unmerry way. only cohen, to my knowledge, grasps the full extent to which in hitchcock the eye is “metonymically transcoded as site of mastication, ingestion, the lips as eyelids, teeth as shredders, where the white skeleton protrudes.”21 ††† did i mention that hitchcock loved his food? he once said that he would be happy to die eating. a gourmand, he even had meals on occasion flown in from paris and his wine cellar was worth a small fortune. however, he was not fond of the toilet, even lifting his legs if he sensed a presence while in a public stall. not surprising for one for whom eating was more conceptual than nutritional. hitchcock liked to astonish, even shock, but only rarely disgust. his efforts were never aimed at simply tearing the fronts off houses to reveal the sty within. his feats of eating alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 143 were not the performance of a pig at the trough. their ambition was to destroy the organic, or at least transform it into that empty vessel we call art, converting fat into chainmail. in the episode that mel brooks recounts, hitchcock’s hunger per se is not at issue, but the manner in which it is put on display, cued by the repetition—“oh george … do it again”—as if it was not a meal but a scene to be replayed. the repetition of the meal situates him in relation to his appetite and it is this relation that becomes the kernel of this joke. rather than simply sharing a meal with the master, mel brooks is treated to the spectacle of watching him eat. the meal’s wanton excess, which serves no purpose, certainly no caloric function, other than hitchcock’s drive to transform the “health” of his appetite into something as fiendishly funny as it is ugly—to allude to the voice of norman bates’s mother.22 this transformation is indubitably the source of the hilarity of hitchcock’s understatement: “no, no, no, i gotta watch the calories,” as if health was a concern. an excess of calories is certainly at stake, contributing as they no doubt do to the girth of his physical presence, but their consumption here serves to lay stress to a certain formality in excess. like the birds that norman bates stuffs—his hobby that is “more than a hobby,” since “a hobby is supposed to pass the time,” as he puts it, “not fill it”—hitchcock’s stuffing of his belly establishes the true enormity of his peckishness. he certainly does not eat like marion crane, which is to say, like a bird, unless we are to admit norman’s correction: “the expression ‘eats like a bird,’” he stutters, “is really a fal-fal-falsity. because birds really eat a tremendous lot.” the mise en scène of hitchcock’s joke, his own stuffing, serves the function, like the chemicals of the taxidermist trade, of the fixation of his form. this form, always stuffed into the same blue suit, is fixed by means of the understatement that announces a sudden concern with how all those calories will make him appear. but appearance was the concern all along: not a concern with the size of his belly, but with making the stomach appear as a bottomless pit, a hollow to be stuffed. by not just eating a hell of a lot, but repeating the meal, hitchcock causes the quality of his appetite to change sign (from health to ugliness). a transformation that happens through his exhaustive capacity to put it away: “he had a big belly, and he ate it all.” gorging himself he assumes the artifice of his hunger through its hyperbole. the natural becomes unnatural, the real surreal, the stomach a void, not through an assumed opposition between the artificial and the natural, fiction and reality, but through a process of exhaustive ingestion, oversaturation, or exaggeration. the moment of restraint, the punctuations of wit, assigns the limit to the indulgence, making a recognizable form unrecognizable, marking the transformation, not by highlighting the excess but by positioning it in the place of its absence. what was a stomach becomes a void to be stuffed. not one meal or two meals, but a meal repeated, making the person who must absorb all those calories into a hitchcock. no small achievement, it is a matter of applying the right stress, a matter of timing. hitchcock goes to great lengths here, interestingly, to not place the accent alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 144 on excess. when brooks attempts to get in on the joke, he does the opposite, emphasizing hitchcock’s overindulgence: “you’ve been so excessive, why stop there, why not add some milk or cream to your coffee.” hitchcock’s joking rejoinder is a corrective that returns to the logic of understatement (no, no, no…), insisting on the necessity of restraint (i gotta watch the calories). does the image that hitchcock here forms depend on exceeding expectation or laconically disappointing it? it does both: it exceeds in order to disappoint. but the moment of disappoint is first, since the excess is staged for the display of this lack. hitchcock has his cake, so to speak, and eats it to, but the stress clearly falls to the thing less given. dessert, the second time round, is left out. it is as if hitchcock is subtly saying, do not be distracted by the quantity, the matter of addition, not the amount that is put away; it is not the stretching of the belly, but the hollowing out of the gut. repetition is repetition only if it adds nothing, the stress falling to the less given. and this is the power of understatement; it adds nothing and thereby positions the singularity of its act incongruously. it is repetition that here shifts the frame from one more to the less that is more. unsurprisingly, perhaps, hitchcock had repeated this performance, this half-gag, before. but as his biographer, donald spoto, remarks, he did not make a habit of it, preferring not to make a public display of his affections. donald spoto recounts: america was famous for steak and ice cream, hitchcock told smith, and so he had enjoyed plenty of both since his arrival. he admitted ordering vanilla ice cream for breakfast with a dash of brandy poured over it, and he said his luncheon and dinner so far had not varied: a double-thick steak at each meal. smith thought hitchcock was exaggerating, but when everyone ordered coffee at the end of the meal, hitchcock showed the newsman by ordering a second steak to follow his dessert of an ice-cream parfait. the second steak he followed with still another serving of ice cream, and when hitchcock summoned the waiter, the diners thought at last he would be leaving. but moments later the 21 club hummed with the gossip: alfred hitchcock had ordered a third steak, and with it, so as not delay his companions, his third helping of ice cream. at last he seemed to finish, with a gulp of strong tea. “lord!” hitchcock said with a great sigh as he fingered the teacup. smith thought he was commenting on the gargantuan meal. instead, hitchcock reflected aloud on the china cup, his mind perhaps bending back to his perverse habit of throwing teacups over his shoulder in the london studios. “how i’d love to shatter this cup. fling it on the floor. smash it in a million pieces. i can’t explain it, but breaking things makes me feel fine.” but the director restrained himself, and smith turned the conversation to hitchcock’s appetite. with a final swallow of brandy, hitchcock remarked with uncharacteristic honesty: “i find contentment from food. it’s a mental process rather than a physical. there is as much anticipation in confronting alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 145 good food as there is in going on a holiday, or seeing a good show. there are two kinds of eating—eating to sustain and eating for pleasure. i eat for pleasure.”23 gilles deleuze credits hitchcock with introducing the “mental image” into cinema.24 yet, one should also credit him with introducing it into the act of eating. this is not simply to suggest that hitchcock here eats with an eye to the newsman and the discourse he will produce. whether his aims are to astonish or frustrate, making his dining companions into prisoners of his appetite, they are repeated with an eye to the tooth of inscription. it is not simply his image, but its signification that is at stake. if the jaw drops when these episodes are repeated, it is to transform this linguistic instrument into a sagging hole. such an impression cannot be made without the repetition of the act, of taking one bite after another. it is not what is eaten, or its metabolizing, but the act of eating, that sanctioned destruction, that turns the body into a screen of chainmail. when hitchcock utters “lord!,” setting up an expected reference, and then fingers his teacup, shattering the expectation that he would comment on the meal, this shattering stands in the place of the desire to destroy the object in his hands, figuring the teacups devastation: the evidence hanging, as if suspended, before the anxious gaze of lydia brenner in the birds. and he does in fact destroy something; he destroys the form that one had of a hitchcock. he hollows out the gaze as if pecking out the form that the eye could seize upon. ††† hitchcock jokes wittily that the style of his films results from a form of “self-plagiarism,” each film cannibalizing the last. his style emerges from this process of incorporation. this becomes most evident perhaps in rope: the film that put the form of a hitchcock film most in question by eliminating montage in the strict sense altogether. but in doing so, he also pushes the relation between the eye and the mouth to its furthest extreme: identifying the camera, not with the eye, but the mouth, a mobile jaw that eats whatever is put before it. “[u]ntil rope came along,” he writes, “i had been unable to give full rein to my notion that a camera could photograph one complete reel at a time, gobbling up 11 pages of dialogue on each shot, devouring action like a giant steam shovel.”25 perhaps his most experimental film, it also wears its allegorical dimension on its sleeve, but it makes of the sleeve a mere hollow where arms are kept. an elaborate pun on real and reel, the film consists of nine cuts, each determined by the length of a single canister of film. the end of each reel, rather than being left to dangle, dare i say, is ingeniously concealed by a “featureless frame,” to borrow peter wollen’s apt description, that allows for the camera’s reloading.26 a truly colossal feat of technique and planning, involving, “a kind of intricate ballet for moving camera, furniture and performers,” the film’s artifice lies in the seamlessness of the camera’s and the story’s movement enabling for the time of the film’s alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 146 “real” projection to coincide with the time that elapses within the fictional space of the film. “i wanted to do a picture with no time lapses—a picture in which the camera never stops.”27 as the camera eats up dialogue and ploughs through space, it causes an incessant upheaval which only the most rigorous imposition of order can disguise. the floor was covered with “tiny numbers” indicating spots that the camera man had to hit at a given point of dialogue, a choreography that required that everything be “wild” as hitchcock termed it, movable in principle. this literal displacement concealed from view makes possible the mapping in turn of the figurative displacement prompted by the absent place of david kentley whose dead body is the film’s macguffin. the film “centers” around david, a schoolmate of brandon and phillip, who strangle him at the start of the second reel. hitchcock cues his murder with his scream, which is heard but concealed from view by the curtains of the apartment window. abruptly “cut out,” the scream’s absence is timed to coincide with the only visible cut in the film in which the camera jumps from the exterior to the interior of brandon’s manhattan apartment, focusing on the rope’s silencing of kentley’s scream. separating the seen and the heard, we are left to linger on the gasping mouth of david that no longer emits a sound. without a voice, the mouth becomes a mere hole that is promptly stuffed into a chest. appearing only to be promptly dispatched, david is a kind of any corpse whatever, “as good or as bad as any other,” as brandon says: “the david’s of this world merely occupy space which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder.” and this is precisely what david will do for the remainder of the film: occupy space. hidden in what brandon will refer to as a “cassone,” his absent presence will be the motor for the dark and macabre humor that drives the film. a kind of practical joke taken to an absolute limit, david’s murder is a purely gratuitous act staged for the pleasure of observing how their company, david’s father in particular, will react to his absence. an experiment to test their capacity for detachment, their ability to register the queries of their guests as to david’s absence without flinching, or showing any emotion at all. it is a test in understatement, of not reacting even though one’s suit of fat is being bombarded with sensations. brandon especially does everything within his power to intensify the pressure of the situation by actively presenting david’s absence. as good a film as any about the withdrawal of being,28 the film is less concerned with the concealment of a crime, than playing with the manner of its revelation. the film’s drama is created not through the crime’s revelation, nor by any need to confess, but by the strange manner in which david’s absent place (the cassone) is incessantly presented. david’s absent place is constantly put on display: not literally, of course, but figuratively, allowing him even, for instance, to become identified with the chicken served up and subsequently swallowed by all the guests. all the guests except phillip, that is, who refuses to eat chicken, because, as he blurts out, he is not a “chicken strangler.” it is his truly bizarre insistence that he does not strangle chickens, even though it was well known that he had rung the necks of more than a few, that leads to the alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 147 association of david, strangled by phillip, with the chicken being eaten. and all the while this playful dialogue is being “gobbled” up by the camera. the film abounds in such figurative play on david’s literal absence, just as the film itself is a literal play on the figurative absence of the cut. form and content seamlessly stitched, the film’s efforts to hide brandon’s and phillip’s efforts to commit a perfect crime, figures the cinematic means of staging it. hitchcock’s “desire,” as william rothman suggests, to have his own technical mastery recognized, mirrors the character’s paradoxical aim of having their own criminal audacity acknowledged: “the crux of rope’s secret is that it allows the film to be a perfect counterpart to the murder at the heart of its narrative.”29 absence figured and absence made literal is the real subject of the film. and true to form, hitchcock uses his cameo to complicate this relation between the figurative and the literal. he does not appear in person so to speak, but only as a sign of himself. yet, this reflexivity which tempts one to align brandon’s facile nietzscheanism with hitchcock is in fact undermined with his cameo. positioning ‘himself,’ as a sign to be read in the background, we glimpse his trademarked profile as a neon outline blinking in the manhattan skyline, just as the party is breaking up. its appearance coincides with the statement off screen, “i’m sure the old boy will turn up somehow,” referring of course to david, but signalling hitchcock and the spectator’s long overdue search for a “sign” of his presence. he meets this search head on and all too literally: by making the sign of his presence the presence of a sign. if signs are only signs insofar as they refer, this sign refers not only to his absent presence, but the absence of his person. referring then to his present absence, a sign of a sign, the status of his cameo aligns him with that other signifying absence, david kentley. and the first literal clue, that is not a suspicion figured, is david’s hat that rupert tries to put on as he leaves only to find that it does not fit. looking at the hollow of its form he sees the printed initials dk. far from a signifier of mastery—hitchcock is no brandonian—he aligns himself with the hollow that dk occupies, that signifier of absence, that is presented to us as if the camera had “cut” to a close-up of its presence. as hitchcock tells truffaut, he overcomes the deficit of a lack of montage through the camera’s ability to move in to a scene: a requirement that demanded the invention of a new lens that would allow for such range.30 hitchcock’s sign that blinks on and off, literalizing its figurative play with presence and absence, does not refer us to his person, but the chubby profile of an “adrenal type.” ††† “a new york doctor once told me that i’m an adrenal type. that apparently means that i am all body and only vestigial legs. but since i’m neither a mile runner nor a dancer and my present interest in my body is almost altogether from the waist up, that didn’t bother me much.”31 alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 148 ††† the things that made hitchcock the happiest, according to his own ledger, were eating, drinking, and sleeping: i sleep like a newborn babe. i drink like a fish, have you seen what a red face i have? and i eat like a pig. even if it does make me look more and more like a porker myself. some days ago, walking along in new york, i saw myself reflected in the window, and before i recognized myself, i let out a yell of fright. then i called to my wife, “who’s that porker on two legs?” i didn’t want to believe it when she replied, “it’s you dear.”32 after likening himself to an infant and a fish, he misrecognizes himself as a pig with two trotters, leaving the punctuation of dry wit to alma. if hitchcock appears to himself at times to be a porker, it is wit that assures him otherwise, positioning him as a queer old bird, an odd duck, more chicken than cock, but certainly no ham, as he insists responding to a critic who described his cameo performance as such in stage fright where he can be spied as a passerby ogling the behind of his lead, eve gill, played by jane wyman. in stage fright i have been told that my performance is quite juicy. i have been told this with a certain air of tolerance, implying that i have now achieved the maximum limits of directorial ham in the movie sandwich. it just isn’t true. there may have been a “macguffin” in my film appearance, but not a ham. my motives have always been more devious, or, if you prefer a more devious word, sinister. i have wormed my way into my own pictures as a spy. a director should see how the other half lives. i manage that by shifting to the front side of the camera and letting my company shoot me, so i can see what it is like to be shot by my own company.33 if the macguffin is that infamous apparatus for trapping that which is not, that which does not exist, like the mythical scottish lion of the highlands; its presence marks an absence filled by the narrative, but this “filling” is a filling out of its void that serves to displace the film’s raison d’être into those atomized particles that comprise the dissipated substance of cinema as such.34 by referring his cameos to this utterly ridiculous creature, a macguffin, hitchcock defines himself as: hitchcock \̀ hich,käk\: a rotund bird which only appears human. occasionally it lets itself be spotted obsessively preening the irreparable falsity of this image by pecking on the pounds. such a definition reminds us that hitchcock may stuff himself to his heart’s content, but his coffee must remain black. all the better to understate the void’s presence, filling it with the deformity of his presence. the cock of his double-chin that refers us to the letters of his name reminds us that he is less pig than bird. and as lydia brenner worries in the birds, it is a problem when the chickens won’t eat. alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 149 the bird has pride of place in hitchcock’s bestiary: from the shot in young and innocent from a seagull’s point of view, sabotage’s use of the bird store as a front for the bomb-maker, the artificial wing flaps whose disturbing resonance is fabricated by the trautonium in the birds, to the crow perched on the branch of hitchcock’s lit cigar. the bird in hitchcock is a friend of the void and just as he imagined a film entitled “bartholomew the strangler,” he likely could have conceived of a “francis the hangman.” a signifier of suspense, the bird is a creature of the void. it is not the void that scares a hitchcock, but its absence. hitchcock had a singular horror of eggs: i’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened; they revolt me. that white round thing without any holes, and when you break it, inside there’s that yellow thing, round, without any holes… brr! have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? blood is jolly, red. but egg yolk is yellow, revolting. i’ve never tasted it.35 yolk is too runny, too shapeless, for a hitchcock, and unable to register the beak of an incisor. and it is the bite of wit, to return to lacan’s remark, that situates the subject that enunciates it in the place of its absence. notes 1. hitchcock was one of a handful of figures who had their own booth at the restaurant. hitchcock dined there, religiously, on thursdays. chasen’s played a key role in hitchcock’s “ritual of manners” as thomas elsaesser puts it: “affecting a superstitious nature, a fear of crossing the street or driving a car was part of the same public gesture [of always staying at the same hotel or always dining at chasen’s]: to make out of the contingencies of existence an absolute and demanding ritual, and thereby to exercise perfect and total control, almost as if to make life his own creation.” elsaesser, “the dandy in hitchcock,” alfred hitchcock: centenary essays, ed. richard allen and s. ishii-gonzalès (london: bfi publishing, 1999) 3-14, 5. 2. “mel brooks on omelettes, coffee, and the inimitable appetite of alfred hitchcock,” interview with mel brooks, bon appetite magazine on-line, may 17th 2013. https://www. bonappetit.com/people/celebrities/article/mel-brooks-on-omelettes-coffee-and-the-inimitable-appetite-of-alfred-hitchcock 3. jacques lacan, the seminar of jacques lacan, book ii: the ego in freud’s theory and the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. sylvana tomaselli (new york: norton, 1988) 234. 4. françois truffaut speaks of the “planned incongruity” of the famous scene with the crop duster in north by northwest, in truffaut, hitchcock (new york: simon & schuster, 1985), 256. 5. recall his clever cameo in lifeboat. placing himself into the boat as model for a newspaper advertisement for “reduco,” “the sensational new obesity slayer,” hitchcock sinisterly establishes with tongue in cheek the relation between his own struggle with weight loss and the all too serious diegetic reality facing his boat of castaways. lifeboat—a film alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 150 about weight loss?—yes, indeed, for one who approaches life as such a joke. “40,000 dollars is a joke to me, the whole world is a joke to me,” uncle charlie hurls at the priggishness of the bank manager in a shadow of a doubt. and 40,000 dollars is the sum that marion crane steals from her employer, in psycho, ending up ultimately in the trunk of her car at the bottom of the bog. as a side note, thomas leitch, commenting on the role of hitchcock as ‘celebrity auteur,’ mentions how hitchcock did not merely lend his name, but his “unmistakable image to the projects of others in order to fatten their market.” leitch, “the outer circle: hitchcock on television” in alfred hitchcock: centenary essays, 59. 6. tom cohen, hitchcock’s cryptonymies: vol. ii war machines (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2005) 18. 7. as quoted by peter ackroyd, alfred hitchcock: a brief life (new york: doubleday, 2016). 8. in the dark side of genius, donald spoto describes the episode in the chapter addressing the years 1937-39. hitchcock’s essay appears in 1939. 9. alfred hitchcock, “why i make melodramas” in hitchcock on hitchcock, vol. 2, ed. sidney gottlieb (oakland: university of california press, 2015) 77. 10. “why i make melodramas” in hitchcock on hitchcock, vol. 2, 77. 11. “why i make melodramas” in hitchcock on hitchcock, vol. 2, 76. 12. “why i make melodramas” in hitchcock on hitchcock, vol. 2, 77. 13. as william rothman notes, “this is a joking comment about the link between norman’s stuffing things and hitchcock’s acts of filming” hitchcock—the murderous gaze (cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1982) 280. 14. william rothman writes, for example, “in hitchcock’s films, the figure of the author is an important—perhaps the most important—character. one cannot even accurately relate the story of a hitchcock film without taking into account the author, or his instrument, the camera.” “some thoughts on hitchcock’s authorship,” in alfred hitchcock: centenary essays, 30. 15. donald spoto, the dark side of genius: the life of alfred hitchcock (new york: ca capo press, 1983) 275-276. 16. gilles deleuze formulates this well when he writes, “each image in its frame, by its frame, must exhibit a mental relation” cinema i: the movement image, trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam (minneapolis: university of minnesota press) 201. 17. truffaut, hitchcock, 320. 18. george toles formulates this nicely: “hitchcock’s style is predicated on the belief that the surface of a screened image is absolute. it never yields to anything ‘within.’ the only interior it has is supplied by the mind of the spectator.” “‘if thine eye offend thee…’: psycho and the art of infection” in alfred hitchcock: centenary essays, 164. 19. “surviving: an interview with john russell taylor” in hitchcock on hitchcock: selected writings and interviews, vol. i, ed. sidney gottlieb (berkeley: university of california press, 1995) 60. 20. as quoted by donald spoto, the dark side of genius: the life of alfred hitchcock (new york: ca capo press, 1983) 382. alexi kukuljevic: why a hitchcock drinks its coffee black s10 & 11 (2017-18): 151 21. tom cohen, hitchcock’s cryptonomies, volume i. secret agents (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2005) 62. 22. i am alluding to norman’s first ‘conversation’ with his mother, in psycho, in which she says, “go on, go tell her that she’ll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with my food or my son. or do i have to tell her because you don’t have the guts.” 23. as quoted by spoto, the dark side of genius, 170-171. 24. see gilles deleuze, cinema i: the movement image, 200-205. deleuze’s analysis of hitchcock is correct to link the problem of relation to a “process of weaving,” but errs in attributing hitchcock’s destitution of the “whole” to a tragic orientation. as this essay hopes to establish, it is rather a ruthlessly comic dimension that motivates him. in response to a question of why he only made thrillers, hitchcock once remarked to the contrary that all of his films were in fact comedies. the truth of this claim cannot be assessed without grasping the relation it bears to the operation of putting one’s tongue in one’s cheek. 25. alfred hitchcock, “my most exciting picture” in hitchcock on hitchcock, vol. i, 275. 26. peter wollen, “rope: three hypotheses” in hitchcock: centenary essays, 78. 27. alfred hitchcock, “my most exciting picture,” in hitchcock on hitchcock, vol. i, 275. 28. for the relevance of hitchcock to the question of being, see mladen dolar, “being and macguffin,” crisis & critique 4.1 (2017): 83-101. 29. hitchcock—the murderous gaze, 247. 30. “when i look back, i realize that it was quite nonsensical because i was breaking with my own theories on the importance of cutting and montage for the visual narration of the story. on the other hand, this film was, in a sense, precut. the mobility of the camera and the movement of the players closely followed my usual cutting practice. in other words, i maintained the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to its emotional weight within a given episode” (truffaut, hitchcock, 180). 31. donald spoto, the dark side of genius, 385. 32. oriana fallaci, “hitchcock: mr. chastity” in the egotists: sixteen surprising interviews, trans. pamela swinglehurst (chicago: henry regnery, 1963) 239-56. 33. alfred hitchcock, “master of suspense: being a self-analysis by alfred hitchcock” in hitchcock on hitchcock, vol. 1, 122. 34. in hitchcock’s first film, the lodger: a story about the london fog, the colon itself hints at the operation his cinema will repeatedly negotiate. nominally a melodrama concerning the enigmatic identity of the lodger, the film in fact tells the story of the london fog. the figure is displaced by that which places it: the fog that marks the “avenger’s” present absence. the fog presents the void’s presence that avenges itself on all attempts to assign it a determinate place and meaning within the narrative, which would make it the mere functionary of an attempt to pass the time. but the fog does not pass, it remains, it fills the void by marking the place of a vacant figure. 35. fallaci, “hitchcock: mr. chastity.” badiou.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 9 (2016): 16-30 a l a i n b a d i o u i s i t e x a c t t h a t a l l t h o u g h t e m i t s a t h r o w o f d i c e ? translated by robert boncardo & christian r. gelder w e have, in this place, in this theatre, supported several times the textual representation of music.1 this was the case not long ago — and i remember it fondly — with my own text, l’echarpe rouge. what i am going to say here will be a matter of abstraction without music. there will be nothing more than a person speaking: to this day this has been the law of the conférences du perroquet. in order to summon up the courage required to propose only a few ornaments, i will seek refuge behind the following thesis of mallarmé, which is that someone who speaks can on their own become the equivalent of all that music provokes. mallarmé said this in the following terms: “at the exact moment when music appears better suited than any rite to what is present in the masses, though latent and incomprehensible, it has been shown that there is nothing, in the inarticulation or anonymity of those cries, that jubilation, that pride, and those transports, that can not with equal magnificence — and, what is more, with that clarity that is our conscious knowledge — be rendered by that old and holy elocution; or the word, when someone proffers it”.2 after all, mallarmé said this, precisely, in a conference. in doing so he justified once and for all for us that his be du perroquet. we will also declare it retroactively to be so, thereby submitting ourselves to a very high standard. on the 11th of february 1890, in brussels, mallarmé pronounced in effect a conference on villiers de l’isle-adam. villiers had died in august 1889. between he and mallarmé there had been a profound friendship, forged in the years 1865–1870. it was thus that in 1870, villiers had come to see his friend in avignon, where mallarmé was exercising the noble profession of teaching english in a secondary college, as he did for his whole life. among the travelling companions of villiers de l’isle-adam was judith gauthier, the fanatical admirer of wagner. alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 17 villiers de l’isle-adam is one of the very few writers not to have fled paris during the commune. from him we have an accurate and calmly composed account of the commune, which compensates for the sinister declarations of the petulant and spiteful property owners that flaubert, the goncourts, george sand and leconte de lisle revealed themselves to be in the circumstances. only hugo, rimbaud, perhaps verlaine, and villiers, rose above the moral debacle and the profound villainy shown at this moment of truth by writers who, masquerading as aesthetes, had taken part in the commercial depravity of the second empire. villiers noted in particular the beauty of communard paris, the visible happiness of the passers-by, the feeling that the real inhabitants of the city finally walked its streets. i would add that jean aubry’s book, which is appropriately titled une amitié exemplaire: villiers de l’isle-adam et stéphane mallarmé, was published in 1941. let us allow these dates and names to resonate with each other: 1870, the commune, wagner, villiers, mallarmé, 1941. this interweaving of the worst of history, of intellectual genius, of friendship — i believe that it quite clearly constitutes what we can call the temporal site of mallarmé. he himself referred to it as follows: we are witnessing, in this fin-de-siécle, not — as it was during the last one — upheavals, but, far from the public square: a disturbance of the veil in the temple, with significant folds, and, a little, its rending.3 mallarmé, who died in 1898 at the age of 56, could not yet imagine that what the rending of the veil would reveal was the foundational couple of the butchery of 14–18 and the october revolution; and that thus, as far as the “public square” was concerned, we would not be left wanting. his statement seems perfectly appropriate to our own site, but perhaps the veil, torn once again, will allow us to see, once again, what is completely unknown to us. mallarmé began his homage to villiers as follows: a man habituated to dream, comes here to speak of another, who is dead.4 habituated to dream… it is a paradoxical definition, because, in the poem entitled ‘funeral toast’, which mallarmé wrote in 1873 to celebrate théophile gauthier, he states as a poetic imperative the prohibition of dream. thus: it is the whole domain of our true grove that the pure poet’s humble, generous gesture prohibits dreams, his function’s enemy.5 let it be said in passing that this poem sketches a different constellation. the collection in which it appears, namely le tombeau de théophile gauthier, includes a sort of passage of which the dead man, this théophile gauthier, who knew how to make himself loved by all, is the absent cause: the passage hugo-mallarmé. the collection in fact opens with a superb poem by hugo, the one in which we find the following famous lines that malraux would later use as a title: alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 18 what a wild noise these oaks cut down for herakles’ pyre are making in the dusk.6 only the poem by mallarmé reaches the heights of such an opening. mallarmé had a powerful and conclusive image of hugo: hugo, in his mysterious task, brought all prose, philosophy, eloquence, history down to verse, and, since he was verse personified, he confiscated, from whoever tried to think, or discourse, or narrate, almost the right to speak. a monument in the desert, surrounded by silence; in a crypt, the divinity of a majestic unconscious idea – that is, that the form we call verse is simply itself literature; that there is verse as soon as diction calls attention to itself, rhyme as soon as there is style. verse, i think, respectfully, waited until the giant who had identified it with his tenacious and firm blacksmith’s hand came to be missing, in order to, itself, break.7 the passe from hugo to mallarmé is that of the crisis of verse, which immediately opens onto the mystery in letters. what is the french language as a literary language, if verse fails? mallarmé is the watchman of this question; a question that is still being posed today and in terms of which he, mallarmé, remains an enigmatic anticipation. the prohibition of dream is certainly a post-hugolian directive. but how can he who designates in the dream “his function’s enemy” present himself as a “man habituated to dream”? we can shed some light on this question if we ask what real is at stake here, which it would be imperative to subtract from dream. it is essential to understand that, at the antipodes of the connection between dream and nature, in which the romantic vision had its origins, and which baudelaire had only half disentangled, since he remained nostalgic for it, mallarmé holds that, in the epoch of the reign of technology, and of the accomplishment of cartesianism in its effective possession, nature has ceased to be of value as a referent for poetic metaphor: “nature has taken place; it can’t be added to, except for cities or railroads or other inventions forming our material”.8 i will therefore hold that the real of which the mallarméan text proposes the anticipation is never the unfolded figure of a spectacle. mallarmé’s doctrine devotes poetry to the event, which is to say to the pure there is of occurrence. we have misunderstood the function of the negative in mallarmé, since we believed we discerned in it a nihilist despair. certainly — and i devoted a long development in my theory of the subject to this — we find in him a complete dialectic of procedures of absence. the intelligibility of the most minor of his poems supposes that we carefully distinguish three regimes of negation: vanishing, which has causal value, annulment, which has conceptual value, foreclosure, which has null value. but this dialectic has only an operative value. it organises an experience in which, all factuality being subtracted, the pure essence of that-which-takes-place is capalain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 19 tured. the mallarméan question is not: what is being? his question is: what is it “to take place” [avoir lieu], what is it for something “to happen” [se produire]? is there a being of that-which-takes-place insofar as it takes place? of course, this question is very close to another, which has often been taken to be central and which is: what is it to disappear? but disappearance [disparaître] is here only the obliquity of appearance [paraître], when what is in play is appearance [l’apparaître]. mallarmé summons us to think that the touchstone of meaning and of truth lies not in what gives or shows itself, but in that which is, in his words, “sprung from the croup and the flight”.9 can there be, and under what conditions, a thought of what “springs forth” [surgir], a rational nomination of that which can only be counted once, having neither insistence nor consistence? it is precisely to the point of the real that, for mallarmé, literature is devoted. in this sense it suits him to unburden literature of dream [délester du rêve] and nonetheless to be habituated to it, for this pure point can be grasped only insofar as one undertakes within oneself to prohibit dream. it is here that the prohibition, whose material is the dream, commands the impossible, whose equivocation is the real. in lacan’s terminology, we will say that a prohibition bearing upon imaginary totalization authorizes a symbolic subtraction, from which is fixed a point of the real. this is why any poem by mallarmé describes the place of an aleatory event, which we are required to interpret on the basis of its traces. contrary to what is most often said, poetry is no longer submitted to action. this poetic universe is precisely the hugolian passe, in the sense that it is the reverse of the contemplations. the meaning, to my mind always univocal, of mallarmé’s text does not result from some symbolic substrate, or from a thematic obsession. in mallarmé, there is no profound depth. meaning results from the detection of that which has taken place [ce qui s’y est produit], in the text — from the evental putting-into-play of that which, at the beginning, we have only the décor. you know of the famous “hermeticism” of mallarmé, which has led many literary exegetes to gloss, and to the all-too convenient doctrine of polysemy, by virtue of which a certain entitlement is given to arbitrary interpretations. this “hermeticism” should instead be thought in terms of the category of the enigma, in the sense of a detective novel. this empty salon, this vase of flowers, this eventail, this tombstone, this sombre and deserted sea, of what crime, of what catastrophe, of what major lack are they indicative? the greatest interpreter of mallarmé, the australian gardner davies, entitled one of his books mallarmé et le drame solaire. it is the word “drama” [drame] taken from this title that holds the general value. the sunset is in effect an example of one of those defunct events, of that appearancein-disappearance, of which it is necessary to reconstruct, in the heart of the night, the “will-have-taken-place.” but all the poems have a dramatic structure. if, at the beginning of the poem, you have an extremely condensed set of figures — a few objects — then it is according to the same law that determines that, in a detective novel, there can be no more than a few characters, indeed no more than ten, since alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 20 it is amongst the members of this finite group that suspicion has to circulate, and that beyond a certain number it becomes diffuse and insignificant. mallarméan objects are essentially suspects who are suspected of having supported or hindered a radical action, an event that must be saved on the edge of forgetting. there must be a strictly circumscribed scene such that from the interpretant — from the reader — nothing is hidden. the descriptive protocol of the poem does not go beyond a system of clues such that a single hypothesis concerning what has taken place suffices to give it consistency. a sole deduction on the basis of this hypothesis must allow one to say how, having been abolished, the event will nevertheless fix itself in the décor, becoming thus the eternity of a “pure notion”. and there is no other pure notion than the pure “there is”. this can also be said as follows: every law is a law for suspects. poetry suspects being of not releasing the event it has put behind bars. if poetry is an essential use of language, this is not because it is devoted to presence, to the proximity of being; on the contrary, it is because it submits language to the maintenance of that which, being radically singular, pure action, would without it have fallen back into the nullity of the place. poetry is the assumption of an undecidable: that of action itself, the action of the act, which we can only know has taken place by wagering on its truth. being is that to which knowledge is devoted, the event that from which a truth is woven. an event does not take place just anywhere. there are what i will call evental sites, whose ontological structure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the essentially paradoxical multiple of the event to occur there. this structure always involves the site lying on the edge of the void, in the sense that the terms that compose the site qua multiple-presentation are not themselves presented. an evental site is, in a global situation, a multiple which is counted-as-one on the condition that that which belongs to it is not. we can thus demonstrate that the factory is an evental site of modern politics, in the sense that, under the name of enterprise, it is presented, but without its workers being presented nor, truth be told, able to be presented. except that, precisely, the interpretative intervention undertakes, on the basis of the event, to put into circulation a name for this un-presentable. the evental site thus conjoins the solidity of the one-multiple with the errancy of the void, which is fixed only in the dialectic of the event and the intervention. in substance: an intervention is that which makes a name from an unpresented element of the site in order to qualify the event of which this site is the site. a poem by mallarmé is a fictive intervention. what did not elude mallarmé was that the status of the workers has to do with the dialectic of the site, the event and the intervention. in the text titled ‘conflict’ — and for which, at the point at which we find ourselves, is worth the entirety of germinal by zola — mallarmé writes the following, making of the sleep of the railalain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 21 road workers beneath his windows the emblem of a non-presentation, the sublation of which his thought must henceforth devote itself to: constellations begin to shine: i wish that, in the darkness that covers the blind herd, there could also be points of light, eternalizing a thought, despite the sealed eyes that never understood it — for the fact, for exactitude, for it to be said.10 mallarmé, you see, shows that what is at stake is, precisely, that the invisibility of the workers, to which the thought of the intervention is exposed, can be said. and he concludes magnificently: keeping watch over these artisans of elementary tasks, i have occasion, beside a limpid, continuous river, to meditate on these symbols of the people — some robust intelligence bends their spines every day in order to extract, without the intermediary of wheat, the miracle of life which grounds presence: others in the past built aqueducts or cleared fields for some implement, wielded by the same louis-pierre, martin, poitou, or the norman. when they are not asleep, they thus invoke one another according to their mothers or their provinces. but in fact their births fall into anonymity, and their mothers into the deep sleep that prostrates them, while the weight of centuries presses down on them, eternity reduced to social proportions.11 you see that the poet is the watchman of the invisibility of the workers. you also see that it is the word “people” that is drawn from the void of the worker’s sleep, and which, by the intervention of the text, circulates henceforth under the injunction of an eternal value. more generally, it is necessary to conceive of the poem as an intervention at the outskirts of an evental site, whose fiction it institutes. this intervention aims to detect the event whose name will break with and separate from the void. for this separation between the void and the one, between the site and the unpresentable, the established order, that of reality, is perpetuated. yet this separation is an injustice done to being. poetry is truth since it proposes a reparative fiction for the injustice done to being. this injustice is that the event is prohibited from being. with regard to this definition, un coup de dés… occupies a general position, insofar as what is at stake in it is the doctrine of the event as such and not its investment in such and such a figure. i will first read you this text, conscious of thus inviting you to read it for yourself, written as it is for the eye rather than for the ear. mallarmé expressly anticipated that his absolute book be read in public. he saw in these readings an operation at once political and spiritual, which would give the public the representation of that which this public — like the railroad workers from before — held within itself of the invisible. he imagined that this public would be alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 22 immense. his calculations predicted that, performance after performance, there would a minimum of 480000 participants, listeners or readers. he conceived of this operation as a relation to the crowd, an essential term for mallarmé. he said: “in this proof by the crowd through narrations or reciprocity, me, i am a simple reader carrying my copy.” the book, having disappeared in the reading, became its central void. mallarmé notes: “the book, same and null, as central, angel.” to make, by reading mallarmé’s text, an angel pass by a detachment of the crowd, which this evening you constitute, is to be faithful to his wish. i note that, on the 27th of january and the 24th of february, antoine vitez and myself will, in this very place, set ourselves this same task, without any commemorative reference but by the sole and simple effect of our common admiration for this poetry and this prose, whose status in our language is properly unique. if i now read un coup de dés, then it is as a text of thought, as the greatest theoretical text that exists on the conditions for thinking the event. a throw of dice will never even when launched in eternal circumstances, from the depths of a shipwreck, though it be/that the abyss, blanched, spread, furious, beneath an incline desperately plane on a wing (its own) fallen back in advance from being unable to dress its flight, and covering the spurtings, cutting of the surges, most inwardly sums up the shadow buried in the deeps by this alternate sail, to the point of adapting to the wingspan its gaping maw like a shell of a ship, listing to starboard or larboard. the master, beyond ancient reckonings, the maneuver forgotten with the age, arisen/ — formerly he would grasp the helm —, inferring, from this conflagration at his feet from the unanimous horizon, that there is readied, tossed about, and mixed, in the hand that would clasp it as one shakes one’s fist at a destiny and the winds, the unique number which cannot be another (spirit to cast it into the storm, to fold back the division and pass on, proudly), hesitates (corpse by the arm separated from the secret it withholds), rather than play, as a hoary maniac, the game in the name of the waves (one invades the head, flows in the submissive beard — shipwreck, this, pertaining, to man, without vessel, no matter/where vain)/ from ancient time not to open up the hand clenched beyond the useless head: legacy, amid disappearance, to someone ambiguous, the ulterior immemorial demon having, from nullified regions, induced the old man toward this supreme conjunction with probability. this one (his puerile shade caressed and polished and rendered and washed, made supple by the waves and removed from the hard bones lost among the timbers), born of a frolic, the sea through the ancestor, or the ancestor against the sea, tempting an idle chance. alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 23 (nuptials from which the veil of illusion sprung up, their haunting, like the ghost of a gesture, will falter, will fall, madness). abolish as if, an insinuation simple, in the silence, enrolled with irony, or the mystery hurled, howled, in some nearby whirlpool of hilarity and horror, flutters, about the abyss, without strewing it, or fleeing, and out of its cradles the virgin sign. as if, solitary distraught feather, — unless a midnight toque encounters, or grazes it, and immobilizes on the crumpled velvet by a somber guffaw this rigid whiteness; ridiculous; in opposition to the sky, too much so not to mark in the slightest detail whoever, bitter prince of the reef, wears it (as an heroic headdress irresistible but contained by his small virile reason) in a lightning flash. anxious, expiatory and pubescent, (mute laughter, that if) the lucid and lordly crest of vertigo invisible on the brow scintillates, then shadows a delicate dark form standing upright, in its siren twist, long enough to slap, with impatient terminal scales forked, a rock, false manor immediately evaporated into mist, which imposed a limit on infinity. it was the number — born of the stars — ? were it to exist (other than as scattered dying hallucination) were it to begin and were it to cease (springing up as denied, and closed off when made manifest) at last through some thinly diffused emanation were it to be numbered evidence of a totality however meagre were it to illumine it would be, worse? no, more nor less, but as much indifferently, chance. (falls the feather, rhythmic suspension of disaster, to be buried in the original spray, whence formerly its delirium sprung up to a peak withered by the identical neutrality of the abyss). nothing, of the memorable crisis or might the event have been accomplished in view of all results null human, will have taken place (an ordinary elevation pours out absence), but the place — some splashing below of water as if to disperse the empty act, abruptly which, otherwise, by its falsehood would have founded perdition, in these latitudes, of indeterminate waves in which all reality dissolves; except, on high, perhaps, as far as place can fuse with the beyond (aside from the interest marked out to it in general by a certain obliquity through a certain declivity of fires), toward what must be the septentrion as well as north, a alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 24 constellation, cold from forgetfulness and desuetude not so much, that it doesn’t number, on some vacant and superior surface, the successive shock in the way of stars of a total account in the making; keeping vigil, doubting, rolling, shining and meditating, before coming to a halt at some terminus that sanctifies it. all thought emits a throw of dice. (note: the text here reproduced is that from the reading, punctuated by my pauses)12 in un coup de dés, the metaphor for the fact that any evental site is on the edge of the void is constructed from a deserted horizon hanging over a stormy sea. these are stripped back to the pure immanence of the nothing — of unpresentation — which mallarmé names the “eternal circumstances” of action. the term by which mallarmé always designates a multiple presented within the confines of un-presentation is the abyss, which, in un coup de dés… is “spread,” “blanched”, and refuses in advance any flight from itself, “the wing” of its own foam being “fallen back in advance from being unable to dress its flight.” the paradox of an evental site is that it is identifiable only on the basis of what it does not present in the situation in which it itself is presented. it is only insofar as it makes-one the inexistent multiples in a situation that a multiple is on the edge of the void. mallarmé ingeniously presents this paradox by composing, on the basis of the site — the deserted ocean — a phantom multiple that metaphorizes the inexistence of which the site is the presentation. in the scenic frame you have only the abyss, indistinguishable sea and sky. but out of the “desperately plane incline” of the sky and the “gaping maw” of the waves, there is composed an image of a ship, of its sail and prow, revoked as soon as it is invoked, such that the desert of the site “most inwardly sums up … a ship [batîment]” that does not exist, being only the figurative interiority of what the empty site indicates, with nothing more than its own resources, the probable absence. thus the event will not only occur in the site, but will do so by summoning that which the site contains of the unpresentable: the ship “buried in the deep,” whose abolished plenitude — since only the ocean is presented — authorizes us to announce that action takes place “from the depth of a shipwreck.” for any event, in addition to being localized by its site, produces the ruin of the site with respect to the situation, since it retroactively names its interior void. the “shipwreck” singlehandedly gives us these allusive debris of which is composed, in the one of the site, the undecidable multiple of the event. a fundamental characteristic of the event is that it is ultra-one, in the sense that it is itself the determining element of the multiple that it is. a revolution, a strike, a war, a significant artistic representation — each of these contain their own proper name. when saint-just declared, in 1794, that “the revolution is frozen,” he is certainly referring to a multiplicity of factors, fatigue, terroristic impotence, the alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 25 weight of the war and military personnel. but he refers to, as being immanent to these terms, and as the ultra-one of their multiple, the revolution itself, which also, insofar as it can be identified within the situation that it itself names, is in a position of self-belonging. in mallarmé’s text, the name of the event, internal as it is to its being, will arrange itself on the basis of a debris from the phantom ship, this being a symbol of the fact that the site does not present its own terms. the debris is the captain of the shipwrecked ship, the “master,” whose arm held high above the waves grips between its fingers the two dice that are to be cast upon the surface of the sea. in “the hand that would hold it” there “is readied tossed about and mixed […] the unique number which cannot be another.” that the gesture of throwing the dice is to be performed by the captain, which literally draws from the bare place the shipwreck of an inexistent ship — therefore from the disappearance of a nonbeing — indicates that the name of the event, its circulation on the surface of reality, can in effect only be drawn from the void that borders the evental site. such is the function of all intervention: to decide that the event belongs to the situation, by drawing from the void which it borders, which is to say from unpresented terms, the name under which the event will henceforth circulate and propagate its faithful consequences. why is the event, insofar as it occurs in the one of the site and on the basis of the “shipwrecked” multiples, which this one presents only in their result-one, a throw of the dice? what does this name signify? this gesture symbolizes the event in general, namely that which, as a pure contingency that cannot be inferred from the situation, is no less a fixed multiple, a number, which nothing can modify as soon as it has unfolded — “folded back the division” — the sides of its visible faces. a throw of dice conjoins the emblem of chance to that of necessity, to the erratic multiple of the event to the retroactive readability of the count. the event in question in un coup de dés… is therefore the production of an absolute symbol of the event. what is at stake in throwing the dice “from the depths of a shipwreck” is to make an event of the thought of the event. the difficulty is as follows: an event is not itself a term of the situation for which it is an event. this multiple is an ‘ultra-one’, as i have said. its essence determines that, by a special procedure that i will call the intervention, deciding the belonging of the event to the situation be decided. considered as a simple multiple, with the recognizably paradoxical property of being self-belonging, the event is undecidable. it belongs to the place, or it does not: this undecidability being a matter of principle. what results from this is that an event whose content is the eventality of the event (and such is the dice thrown “in eternal circumstances”), can only take the form of indecision. since the master must produce the absolute event (the event that, mallarmé says, will abolish chance, being the active and fully realized concept of the “there-is”), he must suspend the production from a hesitation that is itself absolute, thereby indicating that the event is a multiple that one can neither know nor see alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 26 if it belongs to the situation of its site. we shall never see the master throw the dice, for on the scene of action all we have access to is a hesitation as eternal as its circumstances: “the master […] hesitates […] rather than play as a hoary maniac the game in the name of the waves […] not to open up the hand clenched beyond the useless head.” “to play the game,” or “to not open the hand”? in the first case, we miss the essence of the event, since we decide in anticipation that it will occur. likewise for the second case, since “nothing will have taken place but the place.” between the event annulled by the reality of its visible belonging to the situation and the event annulled by its total invisibility, the sole representable figure of the concept of the event is the mise-en-scene of its undecidability. moreover, the entirety of un coup de dés… organises a stupefying series of metaphorical transformations around the theme of the undecidable. from this raised arm, which — perhaps — holds the “secret” of the number, there unfolds, according to the technique that had already summoned the unpresentability from the oceanic site by superimposing an image of a phantom vessel, a fan of analogies unfolds by which, little by little, the equivalence between the throwing and not throwing of dice is achieved — such is the metaphoric treatment of the concept of undecidability. the “supreme conjunction with probability” that the old man, hesitating to throw the dice on the surface of the sea, represents, is firstly — and as an echo of the initial foam from which the sail of the drowned ship was woven — transformed into nuptial robes (the nuptials of the event and the situation), a frail fabric on the edge of vanishing, which “will falter, will fall”, blown apart by the nothingness of presentation in which unpresentables of the site are dispersed. then this veil, at the moment of disappearing, becomes a “solitary feather,” which “flutters about the abyss.” what more beautiful image of the event, at once impalpable and crucial, than this white feather on the sea, of which we cannot reasonably decide if it will be “scattered” across the situation or whether it will “flee” it? the feather, at the possible end of its errancy, adjusts itself to this marine pedestal as if to a velvet hat. then, underneath this headgear where a fixed hesitation (“this rigid whiteness”) adjoins “the sombre guffaw” of the massivity of the place, who do we see arise but — miracle of the text — hamlet himself, the “bitter prince of the reef”: that is, exemplarily, this subject of theatre who can find no admissible reason for deciding if he should, or should not, and when, kill the murderer of his father. the “lordly crest” of the romantic headgear with which the dane adorns himself throws off the last fires of evental undecidability — it “scintillates then shadows” — and in this shadow where once again everything risks being lost, a siren and a rock arise — poetic temptation of the gesture and massivity of the place — both of which will this time vanish. for the “impatient terminal scales” of the temptress serve only to make the rock, this “false manor,” “evaporate into mist,” which had claimed to impose “a limit on infinity.” understand this: the undecidable equivalence of the gesture and the place has at this point been refined, on the scene of analogies, by such successive transformations, that a single supplementary image annihilates alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 27 the correlative image: the impatient gesture of the tail of a siren, which invites a throw of dice, cannot but make the limit to the infinity of indecision — that is to say the local visibility of the event — disappear and thus bring back the original site, which dismisses the two terms of the dilemma, for lack of having failed to establish a tenable asymmetry between them, on the basis of which a rational choice could have been stated. on no discernible rock of the situation is the mythological chance of an appeal disposed. this return to a prior stage is admirably stylized by the reappearance of an anterior image, that of the feather, which this time will be “buried in the original spray”, its “delirium” (the wager of being able to decide an absolute event), having risen up as high as it could, up to a “peak” from where, figuring the undecidable essence of the event, it falls back, “withered by identical neutrality of the abyss.” it will neither have been able to join the abyss (to throw the dice) nor flee it (to avoid the gesture), it will have exemplified the impossibility of a rational choice — of abolishing chance — and in this identical neutrality will have simply abolished itself. into this figurative development, mallarmé inserts his abstract lesson, which is announced on the 8th sheet, between hamlet and the siren, by a mysterious “if.” the 9th sheet breaks the suspense: “if […] it was the number, it would be chance.” if the event were to deliver up the fixed finitude of the one-multiple that it is, it would not follow that we could have rationally decided its link to the situation. the fixity of the event as a result, its count-for-one, is carefully detailed by mallarmé: it would come into existence (“it would exist other than as a hallucination”); it would be held within its limits (“it would begin and it would cease”), having surged up in its very disappearance (“sprung up and denied”) and closed itself off in its appearance (“closed off when made manifest”), it would be multiple (“it would be numbered”); but it would have also been counted for one (“evidence of a totality however meagre”). in short, the event would be in the situation, it would have been presented. but this presentation would either swallow it up in the neutral regime of anonymous (“the identical neutrality of the abyss”), allowing its essence qua event to escape; or, having no perceptible link with this regime, the event would be “worse/no/more nor less/but as much indifferently/chance,” and consequently nothing there would not have been represented, via the event of the event, of the absolute notion of the “there is”. should we thus conclude, in nihilist fashion, that the “there is” is forever groundless [in-fondé], and that thought, devoting itself to structures and to essences, leaves outside of its scope the interruptive vitality of the event? or even that the power of the place is such that, at the undecidable point of the outplace, reason vacillates and cedes ground to the irrational? this is what the 10th sheet, where it is stated that “nothing will have taken place but the place,” might have us believe. the “memorable crisis,” which the absolute event symbolized in the roll of the dice would have represented and which would have had the privilege of escaping from the logic of the result, would have accomplished itself “in view of all null human results”. this means: the ultra-one of the number would have transcended the human, all-too alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 28 human, law of the count-for-one, which demands that the multiple — because the one is not — can not exist, except as the result of structure. by the absoluteness of a gesture, a self-founding interruption would have fused together the aleatory and the count, chance would have affirmed and abolished itself in the ultra-one, “the stellar result,” of an event that encrypts the essence of the event. but no. “some splashing below” on the sea’s surface, the pure site now devoid of any interiority, even phantasmatic, comes to “disperse the empty act.” except, mallarmé tells us, if by chance the absolute event had been able to occur, the “falsehood” of this act (a falsehood that is the fiction of a truth), would have provoked the ruin of the indifference of the place, “the perdition […] of these indeterminate waves.” since the event was not able to engender itself, it is necessary, it seems, to acknowledge that the “indeterminate waves” triumph over it, that the place is sovereign, that “nothing” is the true name of that which takes place, and that poetry, as language that seeks to eternally fix that which takes place, is indistinguishable from commercial uses of language in which names have for their vile office to make circulate imaginary links that support a prosperous and vain reality. but this is not the last word. on the 11th sheet, which opens with the promise of an “except perhaps,” there is suddenly inscribed, at once outside of all possible calculation — and thus in a structure which is itself that of the event —, and as a synthesis of all that has preceded, the stellar double of the suspended throw of the dice: the great bear (the constellation “toward … the septentrion”), enumerating its seven stars and effecting “the successive shock in the way of stars of a total count in the making”. to the “nothing” of the preceding sheet there responds, in the outplace (“as far as place can fuse with the beyond”) the essential figure of number and thus the concept of the event. this event is precisely at once self-engendering [advenue de lui-même] (“keeping vigil / doubting / rolling / shining and meditating”) and a result, a stopping-point (“before coming to a halt / at some terminus that sanctifies it”). how is this possible? to understand it what must be remembered is that at the end of the metamorphoses in which indecision was inscribed (the arm of the master, veil, feather, hamlet, siren), we did not arrive at a non-gesture, but rather at the equivalence of gesture (throwing the dice) and non-gesture (not throwing). the feather that returns to the “original spray” was thus the purified symbol of the undecidable, not the renouncement of action. that “nothing” had taken place meant only that nothing decidable in the situation could figure the event as such. by giving precedence to the place over the idea that an event can be calculated to occur there, the poem accomplishes the essence of the event, which is precisely, from the point of view of the place, incalculable. the pure “there is” is simultaneously chance and number, multiple and ultra-one, such that the scenic presentation of its being delivers nothing but non-being because all existents demand the structured necessity of the one. as an unfounded, self-belonging multiple — indivisible signature of itself — the event can indicate itself only as being beyond the situation, even if it is necessary to wager that it has manifested itself there. alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 29 also, with the courage that it takes to hold the gesture in its equivalence to the nongesture, and the risk of abolition in the site, the reward is the supernumerary emergence of the constellation, which fixes in the sky of ideas the ultra-one of the event. certainly, the great bear — this arbitrary number [chiffrage], which is the sum of four and three, and therefore has nothing to do with the parousia of a supreme count that would be symbolized, for example, by the double six — is “cold from forgetfulness and desuetude,” for the eventality of the event is anything but a warm [chaleureuse] presence. nevertheless, the constellation, “on some vacant and superior surface,” is subtractively equivalent to all the being of which the event is capable, and fixes as our task its interpretation, since it is impossible for us to will it. furthermore, the conclusion to this prodigious text, the most incisive that exists on the limpid seriousness of a conceptual drama, is a maxim i once gave a different version of in my theory of the subject. there, i said that ethics comes down to the imperative: “decide from the point of the undecidable.” mallarmé writes this as follows: “all thought emits a throw of dice.” even if “a throw of the dice will never abolish chance,” we should not conclude with nihilism, with the uselessness of action, and even less with the managerial cult of reality and the fictive links it proliferates. for if the event is erratic, and if from the point of view of the situation it cannot be decided whether it exists or not, then we are entitled to wager, which is to say to legislate without law as to its existence. since undecidability is a rational attribute of the event, the salvific guarantee of its non-being, no other form of vigilance is possible than confronting the event with the anxiety of hesitation and the courage of the outplace. one who wanders on the edge of evental sites, faithful to the vocation of intervening there in order to draw from the void a supernumerary name — some of you here will recognize yourselves in this figure. mallarmé says to them that they are at once the feather, which “flutters about the abyss,” and the star, “on high, perhaps.” notes 1. originally published in les conférences du perroquet, no. 5 (janvier, 1986) 3–20 and republished in this english version in hyperion: on the future of aesthetics. vol. ix, no. 3 (winter, 2015). we would like to sincerely thank a.j. bartlett, justin clemens and sigi jöttkandt for their invaluable and generous suggestions on earlier versions of this translation. we are also grateful to oliver feltham, whose pioneering translation of being and event we closely consulted [tn]. 2. stéphane mallarmé, “villiers de l’isle-adam”, œuvres complètes (paris: gallimard, 1945), 507. translation from rosemary lloyd, mallarmé: the poet and his circle (ithaca: cornel university press, 1999), p. 225. translation modified. 3. stéphane mallarmé, “crisis of verse”, divagations, translated by barbara johnston (massachusetts: the belknap press of harvard university press, 2007), p. 201. translation modified. 4. stéphane mallarmé, “villiers de l’isle-adam”, œuvres complètes, p. 481. alain badiou: is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice? s9 (2016): 30 5. stéphane mallarmé, the poems in verse, translated by peter manson (oxford, ohio: miami university press, 2011), p. 107. 6. victor hugo, “for théophile gautier”, selected poems of victor hugo: a bilingual edition, translated by blackmore, e.h., blackmore, a. h. (chicago: university of chicago press, 2004), p. 549. 7. stéphane mallarmé, “crisis of verse”, divagations, op. cit., p. 201. 8. stéphane mallarmé., “music and letters”, divagations, op. cit., p. 187. translation modified. 9. stéphane mallarmé, collected poems, tr. by henry weinfield (berkley: university of california press, 1994). p. 79. 10. stéphane mallarmé, ‘conflict’, divagations, op. cit., p. 46. 11. ibid. 12. stéphane mallarmé, a throw of the dice, collected poems, op. cit., pp. 124–145. we have retained the form of badiou’s presentation of the poem [tn]. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 5 (2012): 98-113 s a m o t o m š i č h o m o l o g y : m a r x a n d l a c a n 1. from saussure to marx i n my paper i would like to focus on the shift in lacan’s teaching after 1968, when he introduces his reference to marx. i will limit myself only to this shift, in order to show why marx should be understood as more than mere “occasional” reference in lacan’s teaching. i could, of course, trace this reference back to the very beginnings of this teaching, but i will confine myself to seminar xvi (1968-69), since it is here that lacan elaborates the connection between marx’s critique of political economy and freud’s discovery of the unconscious for the first time in a more systematic way, and in close reference to what then appears as the deadlocks of classical structuralism. lacan introduces his reference to marx as follows: “i will proceed with a homological outlook based on marx in order to introduce today the place where we need to situate the essential function of object a.”1 i would like to specifically focus on this notion of homology for two main reasons: first, because this is how lacan subsequently describes the relation between surplus value, and surplus jouissance; and second, because the term homology, the emphasis on the shared logic in the freudian and the marxian field, exemplifies the specificity of lacan’s approach in difference to other attempts to link, in one way or another, psychoanalysis with marxism. regarding the first point i can immediately mention that the notion of surplus jouissance is not something lacan would simply pull out of his hat. the term is of course coined according to mehrwert, surplus value, and lacan even proposes a german version, mehrlust. but this connection of jouissance and surplus exists already in freud. in his book on jokes, freud articulated his analysis of the mechanism of satisfaction around the notion of lustgewinn, gain in pleasure, or simply pleasureprofit.2 this connection of pleasure with surplus already indicates the direction that will push freud’s theoretical development towards what he will later call “beyond the pleasure principle.” to keep it brief we can say that as soon as pleasure is marked by a certain surplus, it is no longer what we would spontaneously understand under pleasure, i.e. the bodily feeling accompanying the decrease of tension, tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 99 as in the case of satisfaction of hunger or thirst. on the contrary, pleasure beyond the pleasure principle, or pleasure-profit, is no longer something that simply accompanies the decrease of tension, but something that is produced in its increase. a by-product, then, that freud articulates with two objects of his early analysis, unconscious desire (in interpretation of dreams) and drive (in three essays on the theory of sexuality and in jokes and their relation to the unconscious). and what is striking in freud is that he links the reaching of satisfaction of unconscious desire, and later of drive, with labour: traumarbeit, dream-work, witzarbeit, joke-work etc. in this process of unconscious labour he discovers that the satisfaction deviates from the content of unconscious formations and clings onto its form. postulating lust, pleasure—a term that lacan will for good reasons translate as jouissance—as profit therefore already sets the terrain for lacan’s reading of freud through marx. if jouissance is produced, and produced as surplus, as a possible source of profit, then the unconscious seems to bear the same structure as the capitalist mode of production; but also the other way around, the capitalist structure is inscribed in the unconscious, so that we can discern a thesis here: “capitalism is unconscious.” this thesis, too, can already be found formulated in freud’s interpretation of dreams, in a crucial passage where he compares the unconscious desire with the role of the capitalist in the social organisation of production processes.3 when lacan later starts speaking of capitalist discourse he strengthens the homological link between freud and marx, since saying “the capitalist discourse” means as much as saying “the capitalist mode of production.” given the freudian focus on the productive aspect of the unconscious, and given the lacanian re-elaboration of this productive dimension, i would say that psychoanalysis started with the discovery not of just any unconscious, but precisely of the capitalist unconscious, or more generally with the discovery of the “ex-sistance of unconscious to discourse,” as lacan will repeatedly claim in his later teaching. this is, for instance, where freud’s discovery has nothing in common with the jungian subconsciousness, or with philosophical ideas of the unconscious.4 we can find the confirmation of this “ex-sistance” all over freud’s work: the connection between capitalism and the emergence of traumatic neurosis; the central role of capitalist instability in the determination of cultural discontent (discontent in culture precisely is discontent in capitalism) and, as already mentioned, the explicit comparison of unconscious desire with the capitalist. lacan’s introduction of marx implies that freud’s comparison should be taken literally, that is, logically, and not analogically. regarding the second point we can note that the specificity of lacan’s approach in comparison to freudo-marxism consists in the fact that he is not interested in translating psychoanalytic contents into marxist contents, or the other way around. he is not interested in shaping marx’s contents, so that they would be “integrated” into psychoanalysis. his emphasis is on logic, and in lacan’s teaching logical links are never innocent. logic (and notably mathematical logic) is understood as the “science of the real,” aiming at the paradoxes of the symbolic order, or on what lacan in seminar xvi calls “discursive consequences.” by claiming that the relation tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 100 between marx and freud is logical, he therefore redirects the debate towards the structural deadlocks within the social bond, and on the logical connection between these deadlocks and production. the relation between marxism and psychoanalysis changes as well. to illustrate this change let me recall the famous passage from lacan’s responses to the epistemological circle of école normale superieure: only my theory of language as structure of the unconscious can be described as something that is implied by marxism, if only you are not more demanding than material implication […] my theory of language is true, no matter what the sufficiency of marxism turns out to be, and it is necessary for marxism, no matter what defaults it produces to it. so much for the theory of language that marxism implies logically. (ae, 208.) naturally, to say marxism does not mean the same as to say marx. and it is clear that lacan aims here at stalin’s intervention into soviet linguistic debates. nevertheless the movement of lacan’s teaching will take a direction that can be summed up in an implication as simple as this: “if marx then lacan.” we can recall that a material implication is false (0) only when truth implies something false. in other words, we have only the options that marx is true, which implies lacan’s theory of language as something true; or marx is false, which nevertheless implies lacan’s theory of language as true; there is, naturally, the third option in which both marx and lacan would be false, but let their opponents engage with this position. lacan then turns towards the theory of language that marxism implied historically, pointing out the debate regarding marrism, which considered language as “superstructure,” a debate that was interrupted by stalin’s “order” that “language is not a superstructure.”5 the logical relation is here already pointed out in its discrepancy with the historical relation—which is based on a series of misunderstandings on both sides (for instance freud’s critique of marxism as a “worldview,” marxist critique of psychoanalysis as a bourgeois practice etc.). then lacan concludes as follows: the minimum that you can admit to me regarding my theory of language, if that interests you, that it is materialist. the signifier is matter that transcends itself into language. (ae, 209.) i will not make an exegesis of this complex statement here, but i can briefly indicate that the definition of the signifier proposed in this passage is not unrelated with marx’s notion of “commodity language” and with his demonstration of impossibility to delimit commodity language from language of political economists (cf. the famous prosopopoeia of commodities that concludes the discussion of commodity fetishism in the first volume of capital). the lesson of marx’s critique of fetishism is that there is no metalanguage, and that language therefore is commodity language. but lacan’s answer also points out that he considered his contribution both to marxist debates and to the debates surrounding the articulation of marx with freud in the connection between logic and materialism, a connection that he will recapitulate in his notion of discourse. and one could even claim that this connectomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 101 tion of formalization and materialism, the matheme doctrine, can be considered as the persistence of dialectics in lacan’s teaching. it is apparent at this point that there is a significant shift in lacan’s teaching in the mid-1960’s: his theory of language is no longer referred exclusively to structural linguistics but also to the critique of political economy. the reason for this shift lies in the fact that lacan finds in marx something that saussurean structuralism failed to offer, precisely the theory of production, or better a theory of production that departs from discursive asymmetry or social non-relation. considering this connection between production and social non-relation lacan will claim that marx invented the function of the symptom, which is again a logical function: the proletariat as the social symptom embodies the truth of the social bond, which consists in the fact that there is no social relation, that theories of “contract,” be it social or economic—liberty, equality, freedom and bentham, as marx famously puts it,—are constructions, the function of which is to mask a discursive deadlock. but in order to understand the shift that leads lacan to homology, let me make here a longer detour via saussure. in his course in general linguistics, saussure draws a strong analogy between linguistics and political economy. he justifies this analogy with the fact that they are both sciences of values. but as such sciences they are both internally doubled. this doubling is caused by the temporal dimension of their object. in order to illustrate his point, saussure first gives examples of sciences, where time does not cause particular complications in the structure of the scientific field and object. such a case is astronomy, which investigates changes in the composition of stars, the temporality of which does not call for an inner differentiation of astronomy as such; the same holds for geology, which, on the one hand, explores different geological epochs, and can, on the other hand, provide descriptions of unchangeable states. in short, the temporal shift does not change the object of research. all these conditions of scientificity change in linguistics and political economy, where the object transforms depending on whether we think it within or without temporality (which also means: within or without the relation to a body—the speaking body, the working body). political economy and economic history form two separated disciplines within one science, and the same goes for static linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. as i have already mentioned, the reason for this immanent split within the two sciences lies in the concept of value: “both sciences are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders—labour and wage in one and a signified and signifier in the other.”6 of course, the notion of value has a different meaning in economy and in linguistics. but the common trait of both understandings of value consists in the structure of exchange. from the perspective of value, the relation of labour to wage is logically identical with the relation between the signified and the signifier. commodity exchange is structured as a language.7 but the system of equivalence can have two directions. equivalence can concern things here and now (commodity exchange), as well as things in temporal succession (production). here the split produced by the notion of value finally entomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 102 ters the picture. saussure illustrates it with the intersection of two axes, the axis of simultaneities that designates the relations between co-existing things, and from which the dimension of time is excluded; and the axis of successions, “on which only one thing can be considered at a time but upon which are located all the things on the first axis together with their changes.”8 in linguistics, this distinction is absolute, imperative, for “language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms.”9 this distinction is therefore necessary in a field that has no external determination or from which it is, so to speak, impossible to step out: language and market, two fields that know no exteriority. because of this absoluteness, their scientific discussion is possible only by splitting it to its temporal and atemporal aspects. language and the market can be scientific objects only insofar as their positive existence is stained with the same break that, according to lacan, reveals the other as inexistent. because they have no exteriority they do not exist. because they have no exteriority they are internally barred. the passage from saussure’s course concludes with the introduction of synchronicity and diachronicity, describing the split within linguistics (static linguistics and evolutionary linguistics) and the split within the object itself. language is both state and movement, and if linguistics focuses only on the static, atemporal aspect of language, it becomes the “ponding of knowledge,” as lacan will say in encore. for this reason he will later also claim that he strives to construct a linguistics that would take language “more seriously,” considering more the temporality of language, or as he also puts it, its “life.”10 lacan’s linguisterie will consequently become a critique of linguistics, and antiphilosophy a critique, not of philosophy, as one might think, but of university discourse (including capitalism). all these efforts of lacan’s later teaching affirm the marxian notion of critique. saussure compares the inscription of language into the intersection of synchronicity and diachronicity with a chess-game, not only because it brings together the static and the dynamic dimension of language but also because it acknowledges that the value of particular elements depends on their position on the chessboard. signifiers have value only insofar as they relate to other signifiers. value is not something that would be immanent to signifiers as such, but emerges from difference. the logic of the signifier is here very unambiguously related to the logic of exchange. this point can be described as critical because with it saussure reveals and rejects what we could call linguistic fetishism or fetishisation of language. in the history of philosophy we can detect two versions of such fetishism. first in cratylus, where plato strives to demonstrate the relation between words and things, and thus to think linguistic value as an immanent feature of the signifier: language is presented in mimetic relation to physis, so that on the very level of its basic elements, its phonemes, we encounter an imitation of natural sounds. plato tries to demonstrate that the relation between the signifier and the signified is as such rooted in nature, tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 103 and that signifiers always-already mean something in themselves: meaning and value overlap, the signifiers are supposed to have “natural” meanings. another case of linguistic fetishism can be situated in the pragmatic tradition that leads back to aristotle’s organon. although this pragmatism does not want to demonstrate any natural link between logos and physis, it nevertheless continues to presuppose that the nature of language consists in referentiality and communication. language is understood as an organon, a tool, an organ, and even if it appears that this reduces language to its communicational “use-value,” we find the same hypothesis as in plato: the signifier, in itself, supports a relation between words and things, between the symbolic and the real. there is more at stake here than the mere problematic of language. what plato and aristotle do is the following: on the case of language they repeat the very same operation as in relation to usury. just like usury detaches money from its social function, turning it into an obscene self-reproducing entity (geld heckendes geld, as marx will put it), the sophists, these usurers in language, detach language from its supposed communicative and relational function, turning it into an apparatus of jouissance.11 the signifier becomes denaturalized; it starts causing “pleasure in speaking,” as aristotle will explicitly claim in metaphysics. and this is tantamount to the evacuation of value from the field of meaning. a further pertinence of saussure’s comparison of language with chess resides in the fact that the system is only temporary and depends on the rules of the game, which remain unaltered. the passage from one synchronicity to another takes place with each move, establishing a new distribution of figures and new relations, thereby modifying the values between particular figures. but saussure expresses the following reserve: at only one point is the comparison weak: the chess player intends to bring about a shift and thereby to exert an action on the system, whereas language premeditates nothing. the pieces of language are shifted—or rather modified—spontaneously and fortuitously. […]. in order to make the game of chess seem at every point like the functioning of language, we would have to imagine an unconscious or unintelligent player.12 here the freudian discovery gets its full weight. did not freud in the interpretation of dreams do precisely this, namely draw a strict equivalence, in all points, between chess and language? he did this precisely by presupposing an unconscious player. but with this presupposition freud complicated the matter, because what the interpretation of dreams actually discovers as the unconscious is internally doubled on unconscious desire and dream work. the unconscious player is split into two, and in order to illustrate this two, and the specific relation they stand in, he will refer to nothing other than political economy: unconscious desire plays the part of the capitalist, dream work the role of the labourer. what is important to note here is that freud separates intention from the subject. the unconscious desire is intention without a subject, whereas the dream work, once it stands in relation to the unconscious desire, implies a subject without intention: the subject of the signifier (freud will say that the dream work does not think, nor calculate, nor judge).13 by linking tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 104 language and labour with the unconscious freud modifies the figure of the speaker and the labourer: ça parle, as lacan will say, but we could also add, ça travaille. this is already the first point where the path of psychoanalysis reaches beyond the saussurean project, and points towards marx’s analysis of labour. the common ground that brings together marx, saussure and freud is the key role of the form in the constitution of their scientific object. marx discovers that the commodity form captures the subject into the fetishist relation to value; saussure shows that the linguistic form displays a discrepancy between value and meaning; and finally the freudian analysis leads to the conclusion that the unconscious formations do not only carry meaning but also codify jouissance: they bear the “value of jouissance.”14 the analysis of form aligns two heterogeneous kinds of production: the production of meaning and the production of value. use-value in marx describes a commodity that has only the meaning of satisfying needs, whereas (exchange) value points towards an “other satisfaction,” as lacan will say in encore, one that parasites on the satisfaction of needs, but aims at production of surplus value. to this production no need corresponds, and this is also why lacan will later claim that jouissance is something that serves to nothing (it does not presuppose any use-value). 2. homology and materialism when lacan elaborates the idea of homology between the marxian and the freudian discovery, he expresses his regret that he did not introduce marx earlier into “the field in which he is after all fully at home.”15 let us define this field by recalling what the homology is supposed to explain: it concerns “the place where we need to situate the essential function of object a.”16 we first notice that the homology is also a homotopy. it concerns both the (logical) function of object a, and the (structural) place of this function in the discourse that constitutes the network of social bonds. there is an immediate connection between logic and topology. this overlapping of homology and homotopy has its conceptual development in lacan, namely the progressive identification of topology and structure, explicitly formulated in l’étourdit,17 but already indicated in the very title of seminar xvi (1968-69), d’un autre à l’autre: from an other to the other. the focus is no longer on the other as such, but on the logico-spatial connection between the big other (language) and the small other, object a, the function and the place of production, appearing in its two fundamental roles, surplus value and surplus jouissance. a year later, in radiophonie, lacan will even go on saying that “mehrwert is marxlust, marx’s surplus jouissance,”18 leaving no doubt that the social contextualization of surplus jouissance is surplus value. we see again that speaking about an analogy would mean to see in surplus value a metaphor of surplus jouissance, and the other way around; and we would be dealing with a parallel: what is surplus value in capitalist social bond is surplus jouissance in psychic life. lacan does not say this. he says surplus value is surplus jouissance, redirecting the debate on the logical tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 105 articulation of the subjective and the social, and thereby also de-substantializing the notion of jouissance. we can also remind ourselves that psychoanalysis rejects the division of the subjective and the social. all freud’s efforts consisted in placing psychoanalysis on the very border between the two spheres, pointing out a (topo) logical continuity between the subjective sphere and the social bond. the lacanian notion of discourse formalizes this freudian movement. it describes both the structure that articulates itself in the individual speech, and the structuration of the social sphere. the discourse thus becomes the “management of jouissance,” whereby jouissance itself is detached from the subjective reference. the lacanian lesson here would be that there is no subject of jouissance, just like for marx there is no subject of surplus value. marx is said to have been familiar with the function of object a, because his theory of the capitalist mode of production turns around the relation between representation (of labour) and production (of value). this is how lacan introduces his reading: marx departs from the function of the market. his novelty is the place where he situates labour. it is not that labour is something new, but that it is bought, that there is a market of labour. this is what allows marx to demonstrate what is inaugural in his discourse and what is called surplus value.19 the point of departure is the connection between market and labour, with which marx determines the coordinates that will enable him to trace the historic transformation of labour under capitalism, and alongside the transformation of the subject into labour-power.20 hence we can say that marx departs from the relation between the subject and the other. the market appears as a battery of values that designate relations between commodities (“the immense collection of commodities” that constitutes the wealth of nations is precisely this battery); the field in which commodity exchange takes place appears as homogeneous and structured on stable and predictable relations, just like in the saussurean analogy, where there are only values that designate commodities. the introduction of labour, marx’s permanent and apparently insignificant insisting that it is not enough to say “labour” but “socially productive labour,” shifts the discussion from the mere relation between values to a more complex feature of the capitalist discourse that includes four levels: production, distribution, exchange and consumption. marx shows that the same problem, the same discrepancy traverses all these levels, which continuously turns around the way labour is represented in terms of value. when labour is freed from its feudal boundaries, when it becomes something that is sold, a commodity, this shift from the commodity market to the market of labour—a process that lacan calls “the absolutisation of the market”—reveals an anomaly within the logic of representation as such, and simultaneously demonstrates how this anomaly gives rise to an entirely new historic mode of production. the anomaly discovered by marx in the transformation of the commodity market, already present in previous historic regimes, into the labour market is linked with two things: firstly, with the introduction of a new commodity, the labour power, tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 106 that is, an exceptional commodity, the only commodity-producing commodity; and secondly, to the fact that as soon as we think of labour as something that is being sold, just like any other commodity, we are dealing with an internal break, a minimal shift, a discrepancy in representation: representation of commodity-producing commodity in terms of value becomes problematic, because both value and production are internally differentiated. this will be the point of departure of lacan’s homology. in his classical saussurean phase, lacan defined the signifier as what represents the subject for another signifier. in seminar xvi, he relates this definition to marx, claiming that it is “copied from the fact that, in what marx deciphered, namely economic reality, the subject of exchange value is represented next to the use-value.”21 we can again recall the saussurean comparison of the relation between the signifier and the signified with the relation between wage and labour. but while with saussure the comparison remained in the frames of political economy (where all commodities are considered as equal), lacan actually focuses on a gap between commodities (products of labour) and commodity (labour power). let us consider carefully what lacan says in his redefinition of the signifier in terms of value-representation. he actually sums up the very same discrepancy that marx extensively analyzes in the first 200 pages of capital, that is, the discrepancy that reveals the capitalist mode of production as a non-relation between two different circulations. as we know, the circulation c—m—c formalizes the exchange (selling and buying), and aims at the equivalence saussure was already talking about in his analogy; the circulation m—c—m (that marx also writes m—c—m’, whereby m’ = m + δm), on the other hand, no longer produces equivalence but non-equivalence or difference within apparent equivalence. lacan speaks of a gap in representation, and it is within this gap that the surplus value is produced. marx considered the proletarian as a social symptom precisely because (s)he is a sign of the gap between the two circulations, a sign that there is no social relation. there are two modes of circulation then: the first one, selling and buying, concerns the labourer, and the second, apparently symmetrical one, buying and selling, the capitalist. but what the labourer is selling is not the same thing as what the capitalist is buying, or to be more precise, the value for which the labour is sold is not the same as the value for which it is bought: we pay labour with money, because we are on the market. we pay it according to its true price, as it is defined on the market by the function of exchange value. but there is unpaid value in what appears as the fruit of labour, because the true price of this fruit is in its use-value. this unpaid labour, which is nevertheless paid in the just way in relation to the consistency of the market in the functioning of capitalist discourse, is surplus value.22 tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 107 the apparently banal remark that we pay labour with money demonstrates its point if we remember the fundamental marxian lesson regarding money. since we are dealing with two different circulations, money appears once as money, in other words, as the general equivalent, that “sameness” that is expressed by all commodities that are exchanged, and once as capital. the labourer only deals with money as money, that is, the labour power is only represented in terms of exchange value, and in this regard the labourer gets paid according to the “just” price. the capitalist, on the other hand, deals with money as capital, and from this perspective the use of the labourer does not consist so much in producing commodities but in producing the surplus. the labourer gets paid “fairly,” according to the representation in terms of exchange value. but since the production is internally doubled the just payment is simultaneously unjust. translated into the vocabulary of the logic of the signifier: the subject is represented only as far as it is misrepresented. the subject of exchange value is represented next to the use-value hence means that labour power implies a fundamental non-identity because value is internally differentiated on use-value and value, and because exchange value cannot stand alone. this is where lacan passes over to the question of jouissance: “henceforth non-identical to itself the subject no longer enjoys. something called surplus jouissance is lost.”23 there is a loss (of jouissance) implied in its very production, and the basic point that lacan makes here is that the subject is not the one to enjoy. again, there is no subject of jouissance. marx described this as alienation, whereby we also need to take into account that the concept of alienation becomes radicalized in capital, since it is no longer referred to some presupposed “human essence.” the key figure here is of course abstract labour or labour power, which showed that marx’s effort was to depsychologise and deindividualize the labourer—but not in order to present it as collective labourer. better put, the subject produced by capitalism, the proletarian, is irreducible both to individual labourer and to collective labourer. the labourer as subject is an effect produced by the transformation of the commodity market into the labour market. consequently, lacan also seems to claim that we are not only dealing with a homology between the two surpluses, but also with the same subject: the subject of capitalism is the same as the subject of the signifier. what i want to point out here is the very expression arbeitskraft, where the expression kraft (power but also force) seems to bear the same meaning as in physics. for lacan, and i think he is merely following marx here, there is a connection between the transformation of the market and the discursive consequences of modern science, which place formalization in relation to the real. there are two ways thatlacan frames this position in seminar xvi: “reduction of materiality” (réduction du materiel) and “renunciation to jouissance,” two fundamental discursive effects, around which lacan develops his materialist reading of the discourse. let us first take a brief look at the renunciation to jouissance. lacan starts by reminding his audience that this renunciation needs to be related to labour, which is tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 108 in itself nothing new. what is new is the way how marx and freud, starting from this renunciation, “correct” hegel: from the very start, contrary to what claims or seems to claim hegel, it is precisely this renunciation that constitutes the master, who knows very well how to make it the principle of his power. what is new here is that there is a discourse that articulates this renunciation and makes it appear within something that i will call the function of surplus jouissance.24 the novelty of marx’s analysis is that he links surplus value with the discrepancy in the representation of labour, making this discrepancy the fundament of the capitalist social bond. accordingly, the novelty of marx’s approach resides in the fact that he defines society as grounded on non-relation. if we think the marxian and the freudian project together, their shared novelty consists not so much in the focus on the relation between labour and renunciation but in the discovery that this “renunciation to jouissance is an effect of discourse,”25 and more importantly, that the capitalist mastery is grounded on the connection between this renunciation and production. insofar as commodity in capitalism is defined as a product of human labour, it presents itself as something that contains surplus value. every object carries a stamp of surplus, but this stamp is simultaneously a stamp of lack. this relation between the surplus and the lack, against the background of the relation between renunciation and jouissance, is the driving force of the capitalist discourse, or as lacan himself puts it elsewhere: “surplus value is the cause of desire of which a certain economy has made its principle: that of the extensive and therefore unsatisfiable production of a lack-of-jouissance.”26 the function of object a reveals the double character of the object that assumes the place of production. surplus value and surplus jouissance are caught in a parallax structure that makes them appear once as surplus and once as lack. discourse produces both surplus jouissance and lack of jouissance, but it is the same production, and the same jouissance. and the structural reason for this doubling lies again in the deadlock of representation. surplus jouissance is lost for the subject, thus the subject is not the one to enjoy. the commodity, as such, becomes the sign of the evacuation of jouissance: commodity is jouissance without jouissance, which means that it is stamped with surplus jouissance. we could then think that the one to enjoy is the capitalist, since he appropriates surplus value. but actually this is not the case, and marx makes it very clear when he states that capitalists are merely administrators (or personifications) of capital. capitalism is socialized hoarding, which is why the capitalist economy needs the fantasy of a social relation, the “contract” between the labourer and the capitalist, the “just” price, which is in constitutive discrepancy with the “true” price. justice is the founding lie of capitalism. and if we return to the question of “who enjoys?” we could say that, in capitalism, jouissance reveals itself as what it essentially is, a presupposition that supports the intertwining of surplus and lack in an objectal function. everyone is “supposed to enjoy,” when in fact no one actutomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 109 ally does: no one is in possession of jouissance because the production of surplus jouissance is the same as the production of lack-of-jouissance. it is this supposition of jouissance that is pointing towards this new figure of the master that lacan indicates when he speaks of the capitalist discourse as the discourse that is based on the articulation of renunciation to jouissance. this renunciation is the source of capitalist power, and the new figure of the master, produced together with capitalism, is no other than what freud described the unconscious desire, the headless master.27 before concluding i would like to quickly address the second point: the reduction of materiality. with this, lacan approaches the relation between scientific and capitalist discourse. if, for koyré, the revolution in modernity consisted in the passage from the “closed world” to the “infinite universe,” or from the “world of approximation” to the “universe of precision,” then lacan addresses this passage within the development of language. this is how he condenses this point in seminar xvi: it is more than possible that the emergence of surplus value in the discourse was conditioned by the absolutization of the market. the latter is hard to separate from the development of certain effects of language, and this is why we have introduced surplus jouissance. in order for surplus value to be defined as a follow-up there needed to be the absolutization of the market, up to the point to swallow labour itself.28 here we see the kernel of lacan’s argument: the absolutization of the market responds to another absolutization that concerns the functioning of the scientific discourse, the ideal of formalization. once formalization becomes the privileged access to the real, a specific development takes place in the functioning of language. lacan calls this development reduction of materiality and links it back to the historical emergence of logic, with the difference that the scientific modernity establishes a connection between formalization and the infinite. both operations, as marx has already shown, leave their mark on the historical development of capitalism. what is the metamorphosis of labour, the absolutization of the market, if not a reduction of materiality that, as marx explicitly puts it in capital, instead of freeing the labourer from labour, frees labour from its content? i would like to mention another point that lacan makes with the reduction of materiality (formalization). in seminar xvi he constantly repeats, “discourse has consequences,” whereby he is taking discursive production as the point where the connection between logic and materialism should be sought. i would again claim that the role of formalization in lacan is logically equivalent to the role of dialectics in marx (we can play with the thought that lacan makes with mathematical formalization what marx claims to have made with hegelian dialectics—making it walk on its feet again, thus forcing its materialist character). it is dialectical precisely in the sense that it does not formalize something existent (the “great outdoors” that exists independently from life and thinking, as quentin meillassoux would put it); what is formalized is, rather, something that inexists independently within life tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 110 and thinking, an irreducible inexistence, the “there is no” of sexual relation and of social relation. in short, what is formalized, in both marx and lacan, is inexistence with consequences, an effective inexistence. precisely in this sense mathematical logics, as science of the real, is materialist, because it thinks the convergence of the symbolic towards the impossible: it thinks positive, that is, material effects of an independent and irreducible inexistence: class struggle (history) does not exist but nevertheless has social consequences, the other (language) does not exist but nevertheless has bodily consequences. lacan starts his materialist reading of the discursive production by drawing the equivalence between the structure and the real: “structure should be taken in the sense in which it is something upmost real, the real itself,” or further, “structure is therefore the real. this is in general determined by its convergence towards the impossible. precisely in this the structure is real.”29 within saussure this understanding of structure has no place. there the structure is simply equivalent to the symbolic order (the system of differences, the system of equivalence). the overlapping of structure and the real will get another expression in the following statement: “let us say that in general it is not worth speaking of anything else than of the real in which discourse has consequences.”30 in this shift from the supposed real as absolute exteriority to the discursive real lies the entire lacanian concept of the real. in this formalization, the central problem concerns the discursive operation that brings together the logic and the real: if you operate this reduction of materiality you do this why? in order to evaluate a functioning, in which consequences can be grasped. when you grasp these consequences you articulate them in something you can consider as metalanguage—only that this “meta” merely causes confusion. for this reason i will only claim that if in discourse we can distinguish something that should be called with its proper name, logic, this distinction is always conditioned by a reduction of materiality and by nothing else.31 here lacan naturally speaks of his own use of formalization, which consists in grasping the consequences, that is, the real kernel of discursive production. one such kernel for lacan is connected with the problem of jouissance, which is why the entire follow-up to seminar xvi will elaborate a formalized theory of social bonds. but his (mis)use of formalization is not the only thing that is addressed here. lacan also aims at the transformation of labour under capitalism. discursive consequences in question need to be related to the constitution of subjectivity: “mathematical logic is highly essential for your existence in the real, whether you know it or not.”32 there is an intimate relation between the reduction of the materiality, the place of the subject in the discourse, and the production of surplus. the homology of surplus value and surplus jouissance then logically passes over to the constitution of subjectivity. the place of the proletarian and the place of the subject of the unconscious is the same. and further development of lacan’s teaching will take precisely this direction. two quotes to illustrate this point: “let tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 111 us say that the unconscious is the ideal labourer, the one marx made the flower of capitalist economy in the hope to see him take over the relay from the master’s discourse”;33 and “there is only one social symptom—every individual is really a proletarian, having no discourse to form a social bond, differently put, a semblant. this is where marx got stuck in an incredible fashion.”34 the proletarian as the subject of the unconscious? this claim, of course, has its implications that are codified in lacan’s statements, “the unconscious is politics” and “the unconscious is history,” which means that in psychoanalysis a certain displacement, but also a radicalization of marx’s analysis of capitalism can be discerned. this radicalization does not necessarily pretend to offer a solution, but it does, at least, expose a problem: the capitalist mode of jouissance that makes us all reproduce capitalism in the unconscious. it is for this reason that psychoanalysis, as far as it consists in modifying the subjective relation to jouissance, should be considered in logical continuity with marx’s project of a critique of political economy. unfortunately this is something that psychoanalysts themselves, today more than ever, tend to forget, and instead celebrate the fact that the capitalist state occasionally admits that they are “serving the public good.”35 notes 1. jacques lacan, le séminaire, livre xvi, d’un autre à l’autre (paris: éditions du seuil, 2006), 16. 2. see also jacques lacan, le séminaire, livre xxi, les non-dupes errent, 20 november 1973, unpublished, where lacan already translates the freudian lustgewinn with plus-dejouir. 3. the appropriate quote goes as follows: “the motive force, which the dream required had to be provided by a wish; it was the business of the worry to get hold of a wish to act as the motive force of the dream. the position may be explained by an analogy. a daytime thought may very well play the part of entrepreneur for a dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without the capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from the unconscious.” sigmund freud, the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, trans. james strachey, et. al. (london: the hogarth press, 1953-1974), vol 4, 560561. freud’s emphasis. i will discuss this passage more extensively in samo tomšič, the capitalist unconscious: marx and lacan, forthcoming in 2013. 4. freud does claim that the unconscious knows no time, but as slavoj žižek has shown on several occasions, this atemporal aspect of the unconscious is the same as the atemporality of ideology that marx already thematized in his early writings (see notably german ideology and misery of philosophy). the connection between both atemporalities, ideological and unconscious, was first pointed out by althusser. it is therefore easy to understand, why the unconscious appears as something that transcends ‘concrete cultural circumstances,’ while simultaneously being determined by the logic of capitalist discourse. tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 112 5. for a detailed contextualization of the stalinist “axiom” in lacan’s teaching see jeanclaude milner, l’oeuvre claire (paris: éditions du seuil, 1995). 6. ferdinand de saussure, course in general linguistics (new york: the philosophical library, 1959) 79. 7. here i can already underline the problematic aspect of saussure’s comparison. namely, he does not pick any relation between commodity and value, but the most problematic relation that puts the entire political economy under question, the relation between “commodity producing commodity” and its representation in terms of value. he thus picks an example that would have to orientate him towards the critique of political economy, which will be precisely lacan’s case. but let us for now follow saussure’s line of reasoning. 8. saussure, 80. 9. saussure, 80. 10. see jacques lacan, “peut-être à vincennes…,” in autres écrits, 313-314. what lacan in seminar xx and in television calls linguisterie relates to linguistics in the same way as critique of political economy to political economy. 11. for a systematic discussion of the problem of value in plato and aristotle see marcel hénaff, le prix de la vérité (paris: éditions du seuil, 2002). 12. saussure, 80. saussure actually says that the unconscious player would need to be presupposed, and not imagined. 13. the subject without an intention is caught between the signifier of unconscious desire (s1) and all other signifiers (s2). for freud the unconscious labourer comprises heterogeneous operations that interpretation of dreams nevertheless classifies into four categories, the two main ones being condensation and displacement, or translated into linguistic vocabulary metaphor and metonymy. 14. an expression that will serve lacan to translate the notion of exchange value. 15. lacan, le séminaire, livre xvi, d’un autre à l’autre, 16. 16. le séminaire xvi, 16. 17. just to recall some crucial passages: “is topology not this notspace (n’espace), where the mathematical discourse leads us and which necessitates a revision of the kantian aesthetics? no other stuff should be given to it than this language of pure matheme…” jacques lacan “l’étourdit,” in autres écrits, 472. further: “structure is the real, which shows itself in language. of course it has no relation whatsoever with a ‘correct form,’” autres écrits, 476. and finally: “topology is not ‘made to guide us’ in the structure. topology is this structure—as a retroaction of the chain order of which consists language.” autres écrits, 483. 18. jacques lacan, “radiophonie,” autres écrits, 434. 19. lacan, le séminaire xvi, 17. 20. for a lacanian reading of marx’s theory of the subject see jean-claude milner, clartés de tout, paris: verdier, 2011. 21. le séminaire xvi, 21. 22. le séminaire xvi, 37. 23. le séminaire xvi, 21. 24. le séminaire xvi, 21. tomšič: homology: marx and lacan s5 (2012): 113 25. le séminaire xvi, 21. 26. lacan, “radiophonie,” 435. 27. i can add here that the question of repression (of unconscious desire) and the question of accumulation (of capital) point toward the same temporal-logical problem or paradox: they presuppose a primitive accumulation and a primal repression. here the homology and homotopy between marx and freud continues since they both discover a double structure in repression and accumulation (they both have to take twice in order to take place at all). we can formulate a provisory thesis that repression is the logical pedant of the capitalist accumulation in the unconscious. 28. lacan, le séminaire xvi,37. 29. le séminaire xvi, 30. 30. le séminaire xvi, 31. 31. le séminaire xvi, 34. 32. le séminaire xvi, 35. 33. jacques lacan, “télévision,” in, autres écrits, 518. 34. jacques lacan, “la troisième,” in: la cause freudienne, 79, paris: navarin, 2011, 18. in seminar xx lacan proposed what he called ‘his’ hypothesis, which goes as follows: the individual that is affected by the unconscious is the same as the subject of the signifier. we can say that lacan’s subject-hypothesis, too, is copied from marx. marx’s subject-hypothesis is namely: the individual that is exploited by capitalism is the same as labour power (or the subject of value). this, of course, does not mean that the subject is reduced back to the individual. on the contrary, lacan’s subject-hypothesis is a specific translation of freud’s wo es war soll ich werden, and it is no coincidence that the main theoretical struggle of lacan’s teaching evolves around the understanding of freud’s sentence. from its understanding depends the entire political range of psychoanalysis. 35. another political moment of lacan’s return to freud lies in his matheme doctrine. while today several analysts remain stuck in what one could easily call the mysticism of clinical experience and of poetic interpretation, lacan insisted on the transmissible character of psychoanalysis. as soon as psychoanalysis is entirely reduced to the clinical hermetism psychoanalysts themselves risk to become experts, that is, they start believing in their own status of “subjects supposed to know,” psychoanalysts as the experts, united in the supposed impenetrability of clinical experience, risk turning psychoanalysis into a reactionary discipline, or simply into a church of experts, that will be only capable assuming cynical positions towards contemporary political struggles. 0 introduction.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 9 (2016): 1-15 r o b e r t b o n c a r d o & c h r i s t i a n r . g e l d e r i n t r o d u c t i o n advice to young psychoanalysts: read mallarmé a s jean-michel rabaté recalls in ‘lacan’s return to freud’,1 in 1969 the french linguist georges mounin published an essay in la nouvelle revue française entitled ‘quelques traits du style de jacques lacan’.2 amidst scathing remarks about lacan’s self-described “gongorism”, his disastrous incomprehension of saussure, and his idiosyncratic use of constructions like de ce que or pour ce que in place of the far more familiar parce que, mounin suggested that lacan’s linguistic peculiarities, like those of mallarmé before him, arose from an infantile bilingualism. while mounin was wrong about the linguistic ambiance of both the psychoanalyst’s and the poet’s childhoods, for many french thinkers of the last half-century the proximity between their respective styles has been too striking to ignore. reflecting on his ambivalence towards the psychoanalyst’s literary imagination and scientific pretensions, lacan’s own analyst rudolph loewenstein remarked that “when i read his works i can’t help thinking, ‘words, words, words’. and yet i love and admire mallarmé”.3 in a perhaps more positive vein, jean bollack described lacan’s translations of heidegger as having drawn the german thinker’s work away from an etymologizing nationalism and towards “science, art, and language”, and thus as having “add[ed] a touch of mallarmé”.4 in his own attempt to account for their stylistic proximity, vincent kaufmann offers an impressive — yet far from complete — list of those who have compared mallarmé and lacan: in her histoire de la psychanalyse en france, elisabeth roudinesco recalls that in a dossier published by l’humanité on the day after lacan’s death, jeanpierre léonardini — one of the contributors to this dossier — compared the style of lacan to that of mallarmé. he was certainly not the first to do so. in 1974 shoshana felman had brought the two œuvres together in a very feminine special edition of l’arc devoted to lacan. rené girard spoke in la violence du sacré of a ‘mallarméan version of psychoanalysis’, and others had perhaps made similar remarks even earlier. more recently, the same robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 2 comparison has also been made by alain badiou, who sees in mallarmé and lacan the greatest formal dialecticians in french thought.5 lacan himself referred infrequently to mallarmé. his two most significant references are no doubt to be found in the ecrits, where lacan twice uses the poet’s image of ordinary discourse as a coin “put into someone else’s hand in silence”6 to convey the difference between empty and full speech.7 however, as jean-claude milner remarks, lacan not only composed unpublished sonnets in the style of mallarmé,8 he also took inspiration from the poet’s designs for a literary ceremony  — mallarmé’s infamous “book” — when conceiving of la cause freudienne’s institutional structure.9 more significantly still, milner argues that lacan “associate[d] freud and mallarmé under the heading of the signifier”. milner writes: the modern reflection on language begins, it seems to me, with the following affirmation that we read in meillet, who was a direct student of saussure: the name bird does not designate the bird that is there, but the one who has taken flight. the signified consists in the absence of the signified thing. how can we not link these aphorisms to mallarmé’s flower, which is “absent from every bouquet”? is this the same absence? if yes, then the condition of possibility of language as an object of a galilean science, and the condition of possibility of language as a poetic material, are one and the same. i claim that the lacanian notion of the signifier sums up this unicity.10 in tracking the history of lacan’s —  or of lacanians’ — relation to mallarmé, it is indeed the signifier that occupies pride of place. the most noteworthy attempt to bring mallarmé and lacan together, and indeed to do so, as milner suggests, through an alliance between the science of structural linguistics and poetry, is to be found in work of the telquellians, mostly through julia kristeva. announcing tel quel’s program in les lettres françaises in 1968, philippe sollers wrote that the journal would attempt to “go back before those effects that can be situated in the 1920’s (surrealism, formalism, the extension of structural linguistics) in order to properly pinpoint a more radical reserve inscribed at the end of last century (lautréamont, mallarmé, marx, freud)”.11 as kristeva argued exhaustively in sèméiôtiké (1969) and la révolution du langage poétique (1974), mallarmé was part of an avant-garde whose radical linguistic negativity presaged the freudian discovery of the unconscious, understood in terms of lacan’s dictum that the unconscious was structured like a language.12 this genealogy involved the passage from poetic insight to scientific foundation. commenting in his 1965 essay ‘littérature et totalité’ on mallarmé’s reply to proust, ‘the mystery in letters’, sollers put this points as follows: mallarmé writes: ‘there must be something occult deep inside everyone, decidedly i believe in something opaque, a signification sealed and hidden, that inhabits the common man: for as soon as the masses throw themselves toward some trace that has its reality, for example, on a piece of paper, it’s in the writing — not in oneself — that there is something obscure: they stir robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 3 crazily like a hurricane, jealous to attribute darkness to anything else, profusely, flagrantly’. mallarmé adds: ‘i prefer, faced with aggression, to retort that contemporaries don’t know how to read’. for us, these remarks can be illuminated in a new light if we consider the findings of psychoanalysis, particularly the following, recent one: that the unconscious is structured like a language. the existence of this signifier sealed and hidden, which mallarmé suspects in each person, has since, if i may say so, been scientifically proven.13 in the spirit of avant-garde one-upmanship, in 1974 kristeva sought to show how mallarmé offered resources not only for legitimating, but indeed for going beyond lacan and the primacy he accorded the law. in a long reading of ‘prose (pour des esseintes)’, for instance, she shows how the poem’s phonic patterns disrupt its lawgoverned signifying unities. a sense of kristeva’s reading strategy can gleaned from her commentary on the first stanza: hyperbole ! de ma mémoire triomphalement ne sais-tu te lever, aujourd’hui grimoire dans un livre de fer vêtu kristeva firstly explores the semantic and articulatory overdetermination of the word “hyperbole”, which she claims is central to understanding the poem as a whole. for her, the semantic value of the word is “the negation of an authority”,14 a value she deduces, firstly, from the fact that one of its a-signifying parts, the “signifying differential”15 [per], is a homophone of père, which is also linked phonically to the term “fer”, an image of intransigent solidity, as well as to the term “ère” found in the syntagm “l’ère d’autorité” from the fourth stanza. secondly, she claims that the signifying differential [bol] stands for “the seme for symbolic negation”16 since it constitutes part of a term mallarmé frequently uses to refer to negation, namely, abolir and its cognates. finally, that the word “hyperbole” involves a “glottal stop”17 means that it expresses an “aggressivity”, 18 which constitutes the articulatory accompaniment to the seme of negation. “hyperbole” thus names the first movement of what kristeva takes to be the poem’s program: that “an irruption of the drives, a negativity, destroys the stases and the finitudes represented by the symbolic code of language”.19 mallarmé’s poetry instantiates and disrupts the symbolic law, relativizing lacan’s central concept by recourse to the feminine force of la sémiotique. while tel quel’s references to mallarmé and lacan oscillated between using the psychoanalyst to clarify the poet, then using the poet to surpass the psychoanalyst, jean-claude milner’s 1978 book for the love of language employs lacan’s own concept of lalangue to conceive the difference between what structuralist and generativist linguistics can capture of language, on the one hand, and those languageeffects that escape both of them, such as poetry, on the other.20 given language’s proclivity for producing equivocity, all signifying activity is either in excess of what the subject means to say, or misses what the subject was aiming for. for milrobert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 4 ner, this irreducible discrepancy gives rise to the dream of an absolute language, of which mallarmé offers a classic image: “languages imperfect insofar as they are many; the absolute one is lacking”.21 yet as milner recognizes, for mallarmé verse is precisely that which “makes up for language’s deficiencies, as a superior supplement”22 by overcoming the chance encounter between sound and sense in the transmutational space of a verse. milner stages another encounter between mallarmé and lacan in his 1983 book les noms indistincts. here, he claims un coup de dés comes as close as any text can to simultaneously staging the registers of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary (r, s, and i): …in the dry crackle of the two dice, thrown one against the other, one bearing the figure of meaning and the other of sound; in the course of this instant — an instant without duration, but one that, for having taken place once, is such that nothing can make it so that it did not take place: hence the character of an eternal circumstance that, through the alliance of words, we can confer upon it — we will thus hear the encounter: of s, for it is a matter of numbers (figures of the dices’ faces, arithmetic of verse, network of syntax and lexicon), of i, for it is a matter of formed matter (cubes of dice, sonorities and significations of words), of r, finally, the idea of which is given by the cluster of stars, without properties, without any form other an illusion, yet nevertheless countable as the septuor and nameable as the septentrion.23 milner has since prolonged his engagement with mallarmé and lacan in later works such as l’œuvre claire, where the poet’s doctrine of contingency is shown to presage post-popperian science in its insistence on the centrality of falsification.24 his 2003 piece, ‘the tell-tale constellations’, reprinted in this collection, extends this argument through an analysis of mallarmé’s image of the constellation. published a year before milner’s les noms indistincts, alain badiou’s theory of the subject presents lacan and mallarmé, as kaufmann pointed out above, as the “two great modern french dialecticians”.25 we will leave a discussion of this work for our presentation of badiou’s essay published here, ‘is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice?’ suffice to say that while badiou has never engaged with mallarmé and lacan within the framework of a language-centred philosophy or science, the poet and psychoanalyst have long accompanied his thinking: they appear in close proximity, at once textual and conceptual, in pieces such as ‘philosophy and psychoanalysis’ from conditions,26 as well as in badiou’s 1994-1995 seminar lacan: l’antiphilosophie 3.27 in more recent years, critics have maintained the suggestive linkage between mallarmé and lacan. in mallarmé le livre: etude psychanalytique (2007),28 joseph attié has offered the most committed and extensive lacanian analysis of the poet’s œuvre to date, while in contre l’éternité: ogawa, mallarmé, lacan (2009),29 jean allouch has examined the interlinked questions of hermeticism, language games and, most centrally, of ones second death or disappearance, through a close engagement robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 5 with leo bersani’s classic work the death of stéphane mallarmé. perhaps the most promising angle of attack is to be found in patrick thériault’s le (dé)montage de la fiction: la révélation moderne de mallarmé (2010).30 thériault’s point of departure is mallarmé’s admission in ‘music and letters’ that he is reluctant “to take apart impiously, in public, the fiction, and consequently the literary mechanism itself, in order to lay out the principle part or nothing”.31 for this radically modern poet, literature has no transcendental guarantee. however, not only does playing the literary game require an at least feigned investment in the illusio of its ontological grounding; it also brings with it a singular jouissance, which seems irresistibly to correlate with the existence of an ideal. how can mallarmé adapt himself to the pragmatic contradiction between belief and critical lucidity, which characterizes his position of enunciation? for thériault, mallarmé precedes lacan in recognizing that the subject’s desiring economy is structured by a lack: literature’s “principal part or nothing”, its “superior attraction” that is in fact a “void”.32 for both poet and psychoanalyst, understanding desire’s “motor”33 not as an excess but as a lack — one which, moreover, can never be filled — allows a first step towards an equal parts tragic and ludic acceptance of the ineradicable inexistence of the ideal. but thériault goes further, showing how their shared conception of desire and the law can help explain mallarmé and lacan’s infamously hermetic, indeed initiatory, mode of address. while both promise to lead the reader towards knowledge, whether it be of literature or the law, both of these knowledges are progressively revealed to be nothing — or almost-nothings. other contemporary approaches to mallarmé and lacan exist, and the points of comparison, real-historical entanglements, and distance-takings have hardly been exhaustively addressed by existing studies.34 a work on lacan’s mallarmé remains to be written. ◆ ◆ ◆ this edition of s: journal for the circle of lacanian ideology critique, however, seeks to advance and problematize the relation between mallarmé and lacan by translating a series of the best and most exciting scholars working on the poet today. some of the names in the journal will no doubt be familiar to readers, while others have never before appeared in translation. in what follows, we will briefly outline each of the essays with an eye to situating them within the author’s larger work. one philosophical contemporary of tel quel who also maintained a close relationship with mallarmé and lacan is alain badiou, whose 1986 lecture ‘is it exact that all thought emits a throw of dice?’ is the first article in this edition.35 to place the essay in its proper context, we first need to refer to badiou’s 1982 book theory of the subject. two years after the publication of kristeva’s la révolution du langage poétique, and developed over five seminar sessions held between december 15, 1975, and february 8, 1976, badiou provided his first and to date most extensive engagement with mallarmé. in these seminars, later published as the second robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 6 chapter of theory of the subject, badiou reads mallarmé and lacan as two equally brilliant exponents of the “structural dialectic”.36 both poet and psychoanalyst are supposed to have taken a step beyond structuralism by showing how the web of “weak differences” constituting any given structure is caused by an absent event, a vanishing upsurge of “strong difference” that henceforth insists in the structure, splitting each of its individual elements.37 however, mallarmé and lacan still remain incorrigible conservatives who have to be surpassed if a truly revolutionary thought is to be constructed. in poems such as ‘a la nue accablante tu’ and the ‘sonnet en –yx’, badiou reads mallarmé as having staged events that are made to disappear as soon as they appear, thus allowing “weak difference” to assert its primacy over “strong difference”.38 by stark contrast, in ‘is it exact…?’ we witness badiou taking an irreversible step towards treating mallarmé as his “master”,39 as he puts it in logics of worlds; a master from whom he has learned to think, rather than repress, the event. in fact, badiou’s 1986 piece includes a long reading of un coup de dés that will make up much of ‘meditation nineteen’ from his magnum opus being and event (1988), where mallarmé is treated as the unsurpassable poetthinker of the event. in anticipation of this reading, badiou opens ‘is it exact…?’ by asking: how mallarmé can present himself as a “man habituated to dream”, as he does in his 1889 homage to villiers de l’isle-adam, yet also write in ‘funeral toast’ that “the pure poet’s humble, generous gesture / prohibits dreams, his function’s enemy”?40 for badiou, everything turns on the poet being habituated — in the sense of attuned to — “dream” in the form of the event, and not in the form of romantic reverie or mystical communion. badiou writes: “i will therefore hold that the real of which the mallarméan text proposes the anticipation is never the unfolded figure of a spectacle. mallarmé’s doctrine devotes poetry to the event, which is to say to the pure there is of occurrence” (18). using a lacanian terminology, he writes that mallarmé’s “prohibition bearing upon imaginary totalization” — the nature of the romantics — “authorizes a symbolic subtraction, from which is fixed a point of the real” (19). in his extensive reading of un coup de dés, badiou thus shows how mallarmé first circumscribes the “evental site” where an event will — perhaps —have taken place, before producing “an absolute symbol of the event” (25) in the form of the dice-throw, which the master hesitates to perform before sinking beneath the waves. ‘is it exact…?’ thus constitutes a stunning reversal of theory of the subject, inaugurating badiou’s mature thinking of the event, whose concept mallarmé will have heroically provided for all philosophy to come. while less well-known to anglophone readers than badiou, jean-claude milner’s engagement with mallarmé nevertheless extends from his first book to his most recent writings. ‘the tell-tale constellations’, a 2003 piece first published in the journal elucidation, finds its place within the second stage of his dialogue with the poet. in one of his early works, for the love of language (1978), milner asks how it is possible that language can be the object of a science — linguistics — as well as of love, in the form of poetry. here, he differentiates between the motivations of the linguist, who seeks to identify the universal rules governing the grammatical and robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 7 the ungrammatical, and the purists, who are fascinated by the power of language to break down these very rules. milner’s first examination of mallarmé treats the poet as an exemplary purist. as he notes in a recent 2016 essay ‘mallarmé perchance’, which continues the thread of for the love of language, rather than strictly adhering to the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified legislated by saussure, mallarmé thinks that verse can alone create a total word whose signifier would in fact correspond to its signified — whose sound would be uniquely joined with its sense. this is mallarmé’s “promise”:41 that verse can create a word whose phonic qualities match with its signified content, thus making up for the internal deficiencies of language. yet this is a promise unable to be kept, and defines mallarmé as an exemplary purist. taking up the relations between linguistic science and poetry in the second stage of his engagement with the poet, ‘the tell-tale constellations’ pits mallarmé the purist against a thematic that has occupied milner since for the love of language: the conditions that define post-galilean science. following the work of alexandre koyré — and, above all, koyré’s influence on lacan — milner locates a radical historical cut that took place with galileo’s unveiling of the infinite universe, as opposed to the finite cosmos of the ancients. one of the defining features of this universe is the role galileo accorded mathematics. in the post-galilean universe, mathematics underwrites the sensible regime thanks to what milner calls the “mathematization of the empirical”.42 for the post-galilean scientific subject, empirical reality is not defined by a sensible relation to the world or even by a situated agent operating in a spatio-temporal field. instead, empirical reality is mapped and formalised by mathematical language. this, for milner, results in the non-existence of the constellations in the post-galilean universe. as he opens ‘the tell-tale constellations’: “constellations do not exist; there only exist the stars that compose them. this is a lemma of modern science. it is also one of the differential traits that separates the phusis of the ancients from post-galilean nature” (31). in other words, the universe mapped by galilean science takes stars that cannot be immediately perceived by the gaze as more real than the ideological, cosmological and contingent groupings of stars named the constellations: “visible or not, the stars are real; precisely because they are visible, constellations are imaginary” (31). in this article, milner asks how mallarmé responded to this “sacrifice demanded by science” (33). rather than constructing an alternative, intrinsically poetic, universe to the one presented by post-galilean science, mallarmé believes that “[v]erse and, more generally, letters must constitute a limit to science” (34). in other words, mallarmé uses the calculations of verse and his doctrine of chance to render visible that which post-galilean science deems invisible. his poetry, though, not only “bear[s] witness to this disappearance”, it also draws upon the brilliance of the constellations to posit a “subtraction and exception” (34) to modern science — that is, an internal limit. this limit, crystallized by the image of the constellation that perhaps appears at the close of un coup de dés, signals mallarmé’s verdict on postgalilean science: he “says no” to it, calling upon the numbers that comprise the calrobert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 8 culations of verse to critique the “hyper-scientific” modernity instituted by galileo. mallarmé’s singular use of language not only stands in distinction to the linguistic sciences, but, in ‘the tell-tale constellations’, also to scientific modernity as such. in his article on ‘play, jouissance and illusio in mallarmé and bourdieu’, patrick thériault continues the work begun in his 2010 book le (dé)montage de la fiction. there he had demonstrated a homology between lacan’s apparently oracular discourse and the notoriously hermetic structure of mallarmé’s own address. in his 2011 article, thériault extends his engagement to bourdieu’s reading of a key passage from mallarmé’s ‘music and letters’. arguing that bourdieu mistakes mallarmé’s relation to the “literary game” for an elitist cynic, thériault shows how the poet was not only exemplarily conscious of the sociological determinants of his practice, as bourdieu recognized, but also that he understood the libidinal dynamics of literature — something the sociologist failed to elaborate. in a striking anticipation of lacan, mallarmé describes how the practice of reading and enjoying literature is performed “[i]n light of a superior attraction like a void”; in light, that is, of an ideal or transcendent object of belief, which is ultimately revealed to be a “nothingness”. as mallarmé clarifies, the vacuity of this ideal does not prevent the reader from being “lured on” (divagations, 187) by it. like lacan after him, mallarmé recognizes “the perennial or invincible nature of the ideal, beyond all of the twists and turns of the history of thought” (47). more importantly still, both frenchmen understand how the desiring economy of the subject can be structured by an absent object, whose inexistence in no way prevents it from acting as a libidinal “motor” (mallarmé’s own term, divagations, 187). for thériault, against bourdieu, this mode of jouissance cannot be identified purely and simply with cynicism. this is not only because it operates pre-reflexively. rather, as thériault shows through a reading of an early letter written to mallarmé by his friend eugène lefébure, mallarmé’s subjective position is best described as that of a “pervert”. at once duplicitous and mystifying, read through the structural position of the pervert, mallarmé can be seen to orient himself towards the restricted domain of literary production in late19th century france in a way that allowed him to be aware of, detached from, yet capable of manipulating its singularly complex codes. with thierry roger and jean-françois hamel’s articles, we turn from libidinal to political economy. in ‘art and anarchy in the time of symbolism’, roger provides perhaps the most extensive and informed treatment to date of mallarmé’s relation to anarchism.43 as roger recalls, this question preoccupied prominent modern critics like julia kristeva, whose book la révolution du langage poétique includes a long section on the objective solidarity between the poet’s artistic negativity and anarchist political praxis.44 yet by drawing on newspaper and journal articles, books of literary criticism as well as novels from fin-de-siècle france, roger proves that the question of anarchism already exercised the minds of mallarmé’s literary contemporaries — perhaps even more so than it did his 20th century avant-garde readers. but roger does more than rectify the scholarly record.45 his article also clarifies the complex process of metaphorical transfer, as well as mutual misunrobert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 9 derstanding, that linked literature to anarchism in late-19th century france. firstly, roger maps the most obvious sites of conflict between anarchism and symbolism. despite what he describes as the “sincere, profound and durable engagement” (62) of writers like mirbeau, quillard, lazare or fénéon with the anarchist movement, from the start there existed an irreducible tension between symbolism’s tendency towards the autonomization or absolutization of literature, not to mention its historical pessimism, and anarchism’s progressivism and obvious concern for le fait social. even their shared distaste for commodity society could not durably synthesize the egalitarianism of one with the aristocratism of the other. a more promising terrain of agreement, however, could be found in the “cardinal notion of the individual” (66). yet as roger explains, while one form of individualism “attack[ed] institutions and authority, the other attack[ed] the people, universal suffrage and equality understood as egalitarianism” (67). but where is mallarmé to be situated on this constantly shifting terrain? roger proceeds first by assessing the poet’s own pronouncements on anarchism, before turning to the formal properties of his work. while mallarmé showed a deep distrust of what were for him the factitious forms of justice found in the institutions of the third republic, he showed a consistent scepticism towards modes of anarchist praxis such as bombings. instead, he praised both the intellectual virtues and enduring political efficacy of writing. most significant, however, was his desire to go beyond — or rather before — all existing political ideologies to again institute, through poetry, an “articulation between the human and the cosmic” (73). following bertrand marchal’s la religion de mallarmé, roger thus concludes that however radical his poetic innovations, mallarmé’s was ultimately a quite traditional “grand politics” that sought a social form and cosmological harmony; a politics, in other words, that “would no doubt horrify an anarchist nominalist like stirner” (74), not to mention many of mallarmé’s own anarchist admirers. jean-françois hamel’s article picks up where roger’s historical inquiry leaves off, turning this time to the political reception of mallarmé in the 20th century. drawing on his account of the initial stages of this reception, which he presents in exhaustive detail in his 2014 book camarade mallarmé: une politique de la lecture,46 hamel offers a genealogy of the figure of ‘le camarade mallarmé’, a paradoxical incarnation of the poet as a privileged point of reference for progressive and revolutionary thinkers, from sartre to the telquellians, badiou to rancière. hamel’s research sheds light on contemporary readings of mallarmé, in particular those of badiou and rancière, and allows us to see, as he puts it, the “two chains of memory” (99) that have structured mallarmé’s recent reception. on the one hand, hamel discerns a tendency to treat mallarmé’s work “as a philosophical hieroglyph that demands to be deciphered” in order to discover within it “the ethical and political foundations of a community to come” (99). on the other hand, hamel reveals how mallarmé’s nationalization — or sacralization — in the context of the occupation and the liberation determined that his exigent poetics and posture of aristocratic isolation became associated with a principled opposition to “the collaborationist robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 10 gregariousness of universal reportage” (99), as hamel memorably puts it. in the most extensive section of his article, hamel demonstrates that it was the decisive influence of valéry’s reading of mallarmé — indeed of his reading of late-19th symbolism more generally — that laid the foundations for this figure of ‘le camarade mallarmé’. for valéry, mallarmé was at once an aesthetic and an ethical guide. for later writers such as henri mondor and maurice blanchot, valéry’s reading thus permitted the poet’s very position within the “ivory tower” to become the condition of possibility for his political and ethical potency. moreover, it made him a metonymy of all that was best in french culture. as hamel remarks, there was nothing obvious about this, since “[i]n his lifetime, his poetry was described as latin, hebrew, chinese” (96): that is, as anything but french. hamel’s work thus suggests that mallarmé’s uncompromising linguistic radicality — his formal inventiveness —  has ultimately become indissociable from the ethical and political guidance that, in the guise of ‘le camarade mallarmé’, he has provided to many french thinkers since. vincent kaufmann is one such critic intimately familiar with the various incarnations of ‘le camarade mallarmé’.47 in his 2011 book la faute à mallarmé: l’aventure de la théorie littéraire,48 kaufmann uses the poet — or, rather, those readings of the poet published in journals such as tel quel and change — as a point of condensation for the aesthetic and political concerns of post-sartrean french literary theory. kaufmann defends the utopian energy and theoretical inventiveness of this period’s signature texts, all the while admitting that today it is “no doubt closed as a chapter in the history of literary criticism”.49 in ‘believe that it was to be very beautiful’, by contrast, kaufmann turns away from theory to a more traditional form of literary history, even if he qualifies his article as an “anti-philological tale”. he takes up the crucial question of mallarmé’s relation to his two most important predecessors, victor hugo and charles baudelaire. focusing on baudelaire as the poet who first — and perhaps forever — “defigured” french poetry, to adapt a term from barbara johnson to whom kaufmann’s essay is dedicated, he describes the paradoxical intergenerational dialectic linking mallarmé to his forebears. is it possible, he asks, to be the heir of a poet notorious for his own inability to fully assume his history, who squandered his inheritance and neglected the property he was bequeathed; a poet, moreover, who denied the very existence of a transcendent other from whom symbolic authority could flow? as kaufman shows, mallarmé’s first treatment of baudelaire in literary symphony is a model of self-deception. instead of registering that his predecessor had broken — indeed “denounced” (kaufmann’s term, 112) — the poetic contract between religion, community and lyrical subjectivity, in his 1865 text mallarmé treats him as nothing less than the preeminent exponent of a “religion of letters” (107). comparing literary symphony with its heavily-modified reprise in divagations, titled long ago, in the margins of a copy of baudelaire (1888), kaufmann notes how in the intervening period mallarmé erased from his text all of the marks of subjectivity. for kaufmann, mallarmé’s infamous death as an author is above all a mark of his relation to baudelaire. in regards to the poet’s well-known robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 11 letter to henri cazalis, kaufmann argues that it is no coincidence it was written at almost the exact same time as baudelaire’s death. “whatever the real state of mallarmé’s health”, he writes, “whatever role hypochondria played (but all of this is even more significant if it is a case of hypochondria), it is necessary to point out that at the moment of baudelaire’s death mallarmé begins to be sick, to die — as if he were contaminated by baudelaire’s death” (110). this “contamination” consists in the fact that far from promulgating “a religion of letters”, mallarmé came to recognize that baudelaire had in fact “denounce[d] a specific poetic contract signed by god, the (charitable) poet and meaning (the good), a contract which had had its glory days and its romantic predecessors, hugo in particular” (111). but if symbolic transmission was now impossible, for the simple reason that after baudelaire the symbolic itself had been revealed to be radically inconsistent, how did mallarmé take up the intergenerational thread of french poetry? how, kaufmann asks, can one “come after a poetry infected by a pathology?” (112), a pathology of transmission? for kaufmann, mallarmé’s œuvre cannot be understood unless his apparent reprise of the hugolian gesture of creating a poetic ceremony to unite a sundered community is seen as a knowingly post-baudelairean project. after les fleurs du mal, there are no more subjects or communities; no more god or “people”. however, there is language, and thus poetry, even if its existence is as precarious as the communities it can fleetingly form. after swallowing baudelaire’s “tutelary poison”, mallarmé thus undertook the impossible task of creating a community for whom the big other is knowingly barred. claude pérez’s piece ‘mallarmé, polecat-ferret’, is similarly concerned with questions of transmission and poetic history. this time, however, it is not mallarmé who occupies the unenviable position of the troubled heir, but rather the contemporary french poet dominique fourcade, who is introduced to english readers for perhaps the first time in his otherwise long and celebrated career. as pérez points out, fourcade’s relationship to mallarmé is unique in the contemporary intellectual context. for not only is he a working poet and theoretician of poetry in his own right, he is also a critic — at times furious, forgiving, but always energetic — of the “obscure sphinx of tournon”.50 central to fourcade’s approach is the gap he perceives between mallarmé’s “programmes” and the actual “poems” that result from them. while an extensive and star-studded list of philosophers have mined mallarmé’s prose works for insights, fourcade’s judgement of them is devastating: “there is an abyss between the great programmatic moments — unverifiable experiences, capital experiences, as stimulating as possible — and the very constrained mechanics of a number of poems” (127). however, as pérez also makes clear, fourcade’s severity with respect to mallarmé is interwoven with a deep ambivalence about the influence the poet has had on french letters. recounting an at turns hilarious and horrifying dream, fourcade imagines himself “being handcuffed to mallarmé” (123). but is mallarmé the policeman who has captured fourcade as punishment for his heresy, or is fourcade the one detaining mallarmé, thus protecting contemporary french poets and artists from his deleterious influence? for pérez, the answer is robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 12 both. moreover, he demonstrates that mallarmé and fourcade share more than the latter is perhaps willing to admit. not only does the postmodern bric-à-brac cluttering fourcade’s poems recall mallarmé’s staging of the salon décor of his time, but in its formal dispersal fourcade’s poetry shows the author of est-ce que j’peux placer un mot? owes an unpayable — and thus disavowed — debt to mallarmé. channelling fourcade, pérez remarks that philosophers do little of what fourcade exemplarily does, namely to ask whether mallarmé’s poems are successful as poems. for larissa drigo, by contrast, there is no bathetic gap between the poet’s soaring pretensions and his actual achievements. correlatively, there is no reason to give up on the project of treating mallarmé’s work “as a reservoir or generator of concepts” (128). in ‘folding and unfolding the infinite’, drigo sets herself the difficult task of explaining how with un coup de dés mallarmé produced a work whose singular “configuration of space-time [was] capable of presenting its own infinitude” (137). for drigo the infinity operative in un coup de dés is without doubt a potential infinity. drawing on two of borges’ short stories, ‘the garden of forking paths’ and ‘the aleph’, stories which present in a contracted, finite form both temporal and spatial infinities — infinities capable of being unfolded in the successive manner proper to reading — drigo explains how mallarmé seeks to do something similar in the space-time of his final poem. “from borges”, drigo writes, “we can conclude that to demonstrate the inexhaustible infinity of literature, the poem must provide the following: the presentation of a potentially infinite series of convergent, divergent, or parallel times that intersect or are unaware of one another; and the presentation, in a restricted space, of a multiplicity of infinite spaces” (137). in demonstrating how mallarmé achieves this, drigo’s analysis focuses on the formal features of un coup de dés. the different motifs of the poem, for instance, constitute so many convergent and divergent narrative trajectories for the reader to follow, while the singular use of the double page and its central fold is supposed to stage the fan-like structure of the poem: its contraction and potentially infinite dilation of space and time. if in his ‘observation relative to the poem’, mallarmé claimed to have replaced “regular sound patterns or verses” with “prismatic subdivisions of the idea”, then according to drigo mallarmé’s “idea” is infinitely divisible. for her, the figure of the siren, whose impatient scales make disintegrate the “rock / false manor / which imposed / a limit on infinity”, is the ideal incarnation of un coup de dés itself. drigo thus implicitly provides a novel interpretation of valéry’s intuition upon seeing the proofs of un coup de dés for the first time, when he asked: “was i not present at an event of a universal order?”51 closing our collection is guillaume artous-bouvet’s piece ‘of a latent prose’. combining close attention to the syntactical intricacies of the texts with a philosophical sensibility, artous-bouvet leads us back to a typically lacanian problem also addressed by thériault: the relation between desire and knowledge. beginning with a comparison of badiou and rancière’s readings of the sonnet ‘a la nue accablante tu’, artous-bouvet demonstrates that by translating the sonnet into a prose discourse, both philosophers fail to distinguish between three very different forms of robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 13 prose that mallarmé mobilizes. first, there is “the literal and linear prose” (151) that relates the successive hypothetical events of the sonnet. next, there is the sonnet’s immanent meta-discursive voice, through which it speaks of what it (ideally) does or is doing. as artous-bouvet suggestively puts it, this is “the reflexive consciousness of the poem”, as opposed to its mere “meaning” (151). finally, there are mallarmé’s “external” (146) prose pieces, which include his infamous “critical poems”. on the basis of this triple distinction, artous-bouvet proceeds to a close reading of ‘prose (pour des esseintes)’, a poem whose perplexing title foregrounds the very problematic of the piece. for artous-bouvet, ‘prose’ is indeed a work of prose insofar as it takes the form of a linear narrative, at least at some of its key junctures. yet it is also a work of prose insofar as it “expresses its own operation”: that is, it both performs and proclaims it is performing poetry’s “new duty” (153) to “transpos[e] a fact of nature into its vibratory near-disappearance” (divagations, 210), as mallarmé famously put it in ‘crisis of verse’. however, in order to double its effective operation with a discourse on its very operation, artous-bouvet shows that the poem must stage within itself some irreducible moment of enunciation. identifying three such moments in ‘prose’, artous-bouvet notes that the second person pronoun “tu” present in the opening verses — “hyperbole ! de ma mémoire / triomphalement ne sais-tu / te lever…” — mysteriously disappears and is replaced by the first person plural pronoun “nous”, most notably in the ninth and tenth verses: “nous promenions notre visage / (nous fûmes deux, je le maintiens)”. for artous-bouvet, the parenthesis that surrounds this tenth verse, along with the verse’s strikingly assertoric tone — not to mention the strangely singular form given to the noun “visage” in the verse that precedes it — all suggest that the unity-in-duality of the poet and his companion — of the poem and its contemplative meta-discourse — is actually of the order of desire, not of actuality. through this reading, artous-bouvet thus seems to conclude that if mallarmé wrote extensive “external” prose pieces, then it was precisely to suture the irreducible gap between desire and knowledge, which the poem exemplarily articulates. notes 1. jean-michel rabaté, ‘lacan’s return to freud’, in jean-michel rabaté (ed.) cambridge companion to lacan (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 2003), pp. 1-24. 2. georges mounin, ‘quelques traits du style de jacques lacan’, la nouvelle revue française, january 1 (1969), pp. 84-92. 3. cited in elisabeth roudinesco, jacques lacan: an outline of a life and a history of a system of thought, trans. barbara bray (cambridge, uk: polity, 1997), p. 87. 4. cited in ibid., p. 228. 5. vincent kaufmann, ‘les styles du livre: mallarmé et lacan’, dalhousie french studies, vol. 25, ‘mallarmé, theorist of our times’ (fall-winter, 1993), p. 57. 6. stéphane mallarmé, divagations. translated by barbara johnson, (cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press, 2007), p. 210. robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 14 7. see jacques lacan, ecrits (new york: norton, 2006), p. 251, p. 801. page numbers refer to the original french pagination, reproduced in the english translation. 8. jean-claude milner, ‘i believed i owed mallarmé the truth’, in robert boncardo, christian r. gelder, mallarmé: rancière, milner, badiou (rowman & littlefield international, 2017) [forthcoming]. 9. jean-claude milner, l’œuvre claire: lacan, la science, la philosophie (paris: seuil, 1995), p. 160. 10. ‘i believed i owed mallarmé the truth’, op. cit. 11. philippe sollers, lettres françaises, 30 october-5 november, 1968. 12. kristeva, j., sèméiôtiké : recherches pour une sémanalyse (editions du seuil, 1969), kristeva, j., la révolution du langage poétique : l’avant-garde à la fin du xixème siècle : mallarmé et lautréamont (paris: editions du seuil, 1974). 13. philippe sollers, ‘littérature et totalité’, logiques (paris: editions du seuil, 1968), p. 109. 14. la révolution du langage poétique, op. cit., p. 243. 15. ibid., p. 211 16. ibid., p. 243. 17. ibid., p. 246. 18. ibid., p. 247. 19. ibid., p. 245. 20. jean-claude milner, for the love of language, trans. ann banfield (london: the macmillan press, 1990). 21. divagations, p. 205. 22. ibid., p. 206. 23. jean-claude milner, les noms indistincts (paris: verdier, 2007), p. 41. 24. l’œuvre claire, p. 62. 25. alain badiou, theory of the subject (london: continuum, 2009), p. xl. 26. alain badiou, ‘philosophy and psychoanalysis’, in conditions (london: continuum, 2006), pp. 201-202. 27. alain badiou, lacan: l’antiphilosophie 3, 1994-1995 (paris: fayard, 2013), pp. 21-22, p. 38. 28. joseph attié, mallarmé le livre: etude psychanalytique (toulon: editions du losange, 2007). 29. jean allouch, contre l’éternité: ogawa, mallarmé, lacan (paris: epel, 2009). 30. patrick thériault, le (dé)montage de la fiction: la révélation moderne de mallarmé (paris: honoré champion, 2010). 31. divagations, p. 187. 32. ibid. robert boncardo & christian r. gelder: introduction s9 (2016): 15 33. ibid. 34. see for example aleksić branko, ‘l’acte poétique absolu de mallarmé et de lacan’, topique 4, no. 109, (2009), pp. 87-128. 35. this piece has previously appeared. along with the original, in hyperion: on the future of aesthetics, ‘on mallarmé’, vol. ix, no. 3 (winter 2015), pp. 44-63, pp. 64-786. 36. theory of the subject, pp. 54-55. 37. ibid., p. 72. 38. ibid., p. 88. 39. alain badiou, logics of worlds. being and event 2 (london: continuum, 2008), p. 4 (translation modified). 40. stéphane mallarmé, ‘funeral toast’, in the poems in verse, trans. peter manson (oxford, oh: miami university press, 2011), p. 107. 41. jean-claude milner, ‘mallarmé perchance’, trans. liesl yamagutchi, in hyperion: on the future of aesthetics, vol. ix, no. 3 (winter, 2015), p. 87. 42. jean-claude milner, introduction à une science du langage (paris: editions du seuil, 1989), p. 21. 43. readers interested in this topic will no doubt also find patrick mcguinness’ even more recent work stimulating. see patrick mcguinness, poetry and radical politics in fin de siècle france: from anarchism to l’action française (oxford: oxford university press, 2015). 44. see in particular la révolution du langage poétique, p. 427. 45. roger’s extraordinary and unsurpassable work on the coup de dés, numbering over 900 pages in length, is similarly at once a work of historical reconstruction and critical limitmarking. see thierry roger, l’archive du coup de dés: etude critique de la récéption d’un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard de stéphane mallarmé (1897-2007) (paris: garnier, 2010). 46. jean-françois hamel, camarade mallarmé: une politique de la lecture (paris: minuit, 2014). 47. see kaufmann’s poétique des groupes littéraires, avant-gardes 1920-1970 (paris: puf, 1997). 48. vincent kaufmann, la faute à mallarmé: l’aventure de la théorie littéraire (paris: editions du seuil, 2011). 49. ibid., p. 15. 50. jean-paul sartre, mallarmé: la lucidité et sa face d’ombre (paris: gallimard, 1986), p. 92. 51. paul valéry, ‘le coup de dés. lettre au directeur des marges’, œuvres, i, éd. j. hytier (paris, gallimard, coll. ‘pléiade’, 1957), p. 624. jottkandt.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 12 (2019): 119-134 s i g i j ö t t k a n d t h i s t o r y ’ s h a r d s i g n vladimir nabokov’s ‘the visit to the museum’ the characteristic of the real is the fact that it sticks to the soles of one’s shoes. jacques lacan1 a ll of the constructs of museology – identification, possession, inheritance, display – breed the perfect conditions in vladimir nabokov’s short story “the visit to the museum” for the dissolution of the idea of history as the record of past experience.2 originally composed in russian, this “disconcertingly resistant text,” as will norman aptly describes it, reveals the archive as an aporetic structure.3 the nabokovian museum fails to record anything, it no longer seems to preserve memory or offer instruction as would befit its definition as a place of learning but instead ushers in a sort of a cinematic parallax view of the real. parallax, as slavoj žižek reminds us in the parallax view, is defined as the seeming change in an object’s location, brought about by a shift in observational perspective.4 this change, moreover, effects not only the subjective view of the object but, as he puts it, “always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.”5 to expose the object of history to a parallax view, as nabokov does in this tale, is to re-set the perceptual and cognitive programmes giving rise to a certain understanding of being. what nabokov uncovers is a startlingly lacanian point, which is that our sense of ourselves as wholes is itself the effect of a parallax. rather than being the ‘natural’ viewpoint, it is a parallax that coheres the infant’s disparate parts into the appearance of a one, giving us the illusion of being a totality. parallax would seal, as it were, the representational contract that permits the flowers, in henri bouasse’s famous optical trick that lacan refers to several times, to be perceived as sitting upright in the reflected vase, which is in fact upside down.6 the lesson lacan draws from this is that our apprehension of our body is in a strong sense virtual, our sensorial unity no more ‘real’ than the sun that appears to emerge, crowning the streetlamp in the reflected pond in image 1. jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 120 in “the visit to the museum” – to visit, from videre, “to see, notice, observe” – ordinary perception becomes progressively distorted until the entire premise of experience, as what happens to a body occupying a particular location in space and possessing a continuity over time, is rescinded. the story, whose twist turns on a missing russian alphabetical sign, mysteriously transports the narrator from a museum in an unspecified, sun-dappled moment in the south of france to the stark present-day of soviet russia. but the tale’s apparent premise, namely, of history’s separation from the linguistic material that composes it, becomes increasingly questionable following the cinematic distortion of vision that nabokov’s museum inflicts. we take our start from the story’s narrator who, we learn, has been asked to help in the recovery of his friend’s inheritance. this takes the form of a portrait of his friend’s grandfather painted by the famous painter leroy which ended up in the museum of leroy’s birth place, the french town of montisert. from the outset of the tale, then, “the visit to the museum” puts into play the idea of representation and of its proxies, even as it questions the status of possession and inheritance, identification and knowledge. for, having located the painting – to his great surprise, given his friend’s frequent failure “to remain this side of fantasy,” – when the narrator tries to buy it from the museum’s director, m. godard, he finds himself strangely rebuffed. the director tells him that the only leroy painting they have in the collection is not a portrait but, rather, a cattle-dotted landscape titled “the return of the herd.” to an increasingly mystified narrator, m. godard insists, i have been curator of our museum for almost twenty years now and know this catalogue as well as i know the lord’s prayer. it says here return of the herd and that means the herd is returning, and, unless perhaps your friend’s grandfather is depicted as a shepherd, i cannot conceive of his portrait’s existence in our museum.7 countering its promise of completion and accuracy, the montisert museum’s catalogue is an unstable record in which the past is encountered as a textual impasse that goes on to saturate the rest of the tale: letters go unanswered – “when i asked why he did not get in touch with the museum, he replied that he had written several times, but had never received an answer,”8 – paper and pen supplies are scarce: image 1: by brocken inaglory https://commons.wikimedia. org/w/index jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 121 “while wandering about montisert’s empty streets in search of a stationery store….”9 with fatal errors in its record leading to spotty gaps in the precincts of history and memory, the montisert museum seems riddled with the literary analogue of silver lice (well-known “bathroom pest on the riviera”10). nabokov’s archive disarticulates history’s linear assumptions, which become overwritten by the silvery traces of other technologies for constructing time. tunnelling orthogonally through the leaves of the archive, these other technologies take different forms but their association with cinematics is a constant as one soon discovers as we shadow the narrator with our own “felted steps” to survey the montisert museum’s collection. first up, and presided over by two stuffed owls – stealth predators whose acute nocturnal vision implicitly cites a certain noir aesthetic continually shadowing minerva’s flight, – is a case of old coins, the vestiges of ancient economies harbouring different orders or models of representational exchange. swimming next into view is a display of “venerable minerals.”11 formed through the process of “twinning,” the diffracted, mirror image pattern of crystal growth registers a potential rupturing of euclidean space, posing the cinematic challenge to organic models elaborated by gilles deleuze in the suggestive terms of a virtual regime.12 as they lie like dormant cinematic projectiles awaiting their moment of firing in “open graves of dusty papier mache” (the favoured material not only for masks and theatrical backdrops but also for sabots, the small disks or rings in a firearm that guide a bullet through the driving band of a gun), the crystal hints at the museum’s stealth assassination of linear models of time that the idea of history seems to institute. as it roves further over the museum’s attractions, the narrator’s eye pauses at a display of “black lumps of various sizes,” which he likens to “frass,” the fine powdery material that cellulose-digesting insects extrude as their waste. the custodian explains that this black stoff was the discovery of a certain “louis pradier, municipal councillor and knight of the legion of honour,” whose surname recalls that of a certain 19th-century swiss copyist, giving us a first clue (indeed, it is always advisable to pay attention to names in nabokov).13 in anticipation of our encounter with the leroy portrait, mimetic representation is already put into question here at multiple levels. for a quick search reveals that charles-simon, the ‘real’ pradier of the “knight of the legion of honor,” received his citation for his engraving of “virgil reading the aeneid to augustus,” which was first painted in 1812 by the history painter ingres. charles-simon’s “virgil reading” would thus be an etched copy of a painting that preceded it. but there’s a nabokovian twist – readily visible if one is on the lookout for it given the painting’s implicit references to both a double and a ghost,14 not to mention the drama of the scene itself, which depicts a blocked scene of reading. pradier’s imitation, it seems, served as the ‘original’ for ingres’ 1864 recreation of his painting. ingres evidently reworked his original by tracing over pradier’s engraving, whose lines are partially left visible in the finished canvas. in these inversions of the expected order of succession, virgil’s hypostasized scene of instruction ricochets the viewer into a mysterious site where the mimetic premise of original and copy, of the real and its representation are suspended – as if lit jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 122 erally blocked by augustus’s upraised hand that interrupts virgil’s recitation of his text (see image 2). out of the swoon that replaces or perhaps now becomes the act of “reading,” an alternate, ‘cinematic’ history of representation unfolds, which is set forth in the museum’s ensuing exhibits a “chinese vase,” like the omphalous of some other reproductive process, “probably brought back by a naval offi cer,”15 highlights ideographic and phonosemantic rather than alphabetic writing systems, shrugging off what saussure calls the “linear nature of the signifi er” in favour of a more visual simultaneity.16 in the “group of porous fossils” that follow it, we encounter moulded images cast directly through the earth’s own, material, printing techniques – inscriptions by a representational ‘agent’ that is utterly removed from human hands and human time. “a pale worm in clouded alcohol” is similarly suggestive, not only of aborted branches of other evolutionary lifeforms but also of other, perhaps only temporarily suspended poetic traditions for, as nabokov in a later text reminds us, the french vers (verse) is aurally identical to ver (worm).17 conjuring up the idea of secret messages inscribed in invisible ink as in edgar allan poe’s short story, “th e gold bug,”18 the seventeenth-century map of montisert printed in “red-and-green ink” might provide directions to these other, pre-enlightenment traditions. indeed, the “trio of rusted tools” immediately following this seems to support this poe connection as does the museum’s name itself: montisert echoes poe’s montresor in “th e cast of amontillado,” imposing the idea of some kind of literary “fortunato” being unsuccessfully contained.19 th us the tools – rusty with disuse – could be for digging into textual riddles. each of these visual and aural cryptonymic fi gures point back to the counter-anachronization of the pradier image that appeared to spawn them: purporting merely to imitate, a copyist etches inscriptions which the offi cial historical record paints over but the off -cuts and shavings remain discernible as the detritus of a diff erent representational agency that eats through the books of history, leaving its waste in “black lumps of various sizes” – lett ers. image 2: by charles-simon pradier public domain, htt ps:// commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31178176 jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 123 it is in the dim glow of this other, counterhistorical light, in a room dominated by a “large sarcophagus” (perhaps one of the same saturnine tombs from whose hypogrammatic inscriptions saussure fled in terror20), the narrator chances upon “the very object whose existence had hitherto seemed to me but the figment of an unstable mind.” the leroy painting hanging between “two abominable landscapes (with cattle and ‘atmosphere’)” is described thus: the man, depicted in wretched oils, wore a frock coat, whiskers, and a large pincenez on a cord; he bore a likeness to offenbach, but, in spite of the work’s vile conventionality, i had the feeling one could make out in his features the horizon of a resemblance, as it were, to my friend. in one corner, meticulously traced in carmine against a black background, was the signature leroy in a hand as commonplace as the work itself.21 as it emerges from the status of fantasy into the apparent field of reference, the grandfather’s portrait takes shape as a cinematic figure par excellence. the “likeness,” which the narrator casually observes it possesses with the parisian composer of comic operettas, initially seems to connect it with the famous 1860’s photograph of jacques offenbach by nadar (gaspard-félix tournachon).22 in this studio portrait (image 3), one of numerous photographs of well-known artists made by the nadar brothers, offenbach peers through oval lenses at something out of frame to his right, his enormous fur collar seeming to blend with his dappled “whiskers” like an extension of his body. the fur’s viscous textures initially seem to recall the brushstrokes of oil paints, but another complication of the technological history of representation enters into play once one recalls that painting’s “wretched oils” have also long harbored the chemicals also used in film processing such as silver halide’s iodine. if the leroy painting, like the previous museum objects, is already allied with the cinematic challenge to the mimetic order, what is also striking is the way cinema itself seems split between an allegiance to photography’s ‘punctum’ and to something that appears to lead back to older representational instruments such as the hand, albeit only after its initial dispossession by the non-human agency of the camera. the narrator’s mention of a “horizon of a resemblance” calls forth the imimage 3: by nadar| (a.k.a. gaspard-félix tournachon, 1820–1910): photographeradam cuerden restoration gallica digital library digital id btv1b530922314, public domain jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 124 age of a line and, with this reference, a different “likeness” to offenbach emerges, leading this time back to the hand-drawn sketch of him, also made by nadar in collaboration with edouard riou (image 4). in this caricature, a cartoon version of the photograph, offenbach again peers out through his circular glasses, bewhiskered, and with a suddenly accentuated nose. however his collar has been replaced with his cello, which wraps his neck and upper body almost as effectively as the furred ruff in the photograph. the photograph’s textured riches alluding to oil paint’s depth and interiority have been replaced with a musical instrument’s two-dimensional strings. photography’s “likeness,” a mimetic concept tied to the idea of a pre-existing real, finds itself over-written with quivering, proto-animated lines drawn perhaps by the “ghost” hand secreted in the custodian’s pocket as some sort of manual dexterity that seems to have become separated from its seat in any body. this hand, another prototypical cinematic figure, introduces the idea of the cut as what severs the museological notion of inheritance as a process of continuity and succession. hence to speak of “resemblance” in this context would mean beginning from a different model than the reflection implied by photography. called up by figures of plucking, scratching, stippling, the facsimile – from facere, to make – suggests the furrowing of the representational manifold with sharpened tools such as the “spade, a mattock, and a pick” that the narrator absent-mindedly passed over in his tour of the museum’s first room.23 the upshot is that while the narrator and the museum director tussle over the epistemological status of the object of perception, as authorized either by imaginary apprehension or the symbolic’s written record, both are equally inattentive to the appearance of an order that has already turned against both registers. if a ghost of the comic french composer presides over this story of a failed commission, then, it is the offenbach of les deux aveugles (two blind men) rather than the composer of orphée aux enfers.24 what is this other order? at this point writing re-enters as a doubled topos: it is simultaneously the instrument of law, authority and memory, that is, of what would be transmitted by the blue end of the pencil godard offers the narrator to seal their agreement in writing: “‘all right,’ he said. ‘here, take this red-and-blue pencil and using the red – the red, please – put it in writing for me,’”25 image 4: by nadar after édouard riou bibliothèque nationale de france, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11543458 jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 125 – and a carnivalesque, “festive” overturning of all such constructs, which becomes incarnated in the colour red. red has already made an advance appearance in the “carmine” lettering of leroy’s signature (perhaps also indirectly citing the flamboyant nadar’s own signature flashing letters lighting up the outside of his studio in illuminated red gas lamps). it now begins a flooding of the museum’s visual topos. a red bus “packed with singing youths” nearly runs the narrator over before disgorging its boisterous load at the museum. wearing “some kind of festive emblems in their lapels” and “very purple-faced, and full of pep,” the youths cause a commotion with their “rowdy cries.”26 like throwbacks to some counter-athenian tradition (recall the spartans’ own famous red cloaks), these members of “some rural athletic organization” fire shots at minerva – “another was taking aim at an owl with his fist and forefinger” – in a comic spectral war. these would be avatars of a counter-historical tradition, a benjaminian “materialist historiography,” that vests the museum’s trademark silence with homeric mirth: a “lewd laughter” mocks the museum’s iconography of death – “some at the worm in alcohol, others at the skull.”27 like the glow of a darkroom light, red redounds here with the realization that, never “natural,” the real has always been a hothouse for experiment, a “deserted laboratory with dusty alembics on its tables,” sans maker or designer. and in the wake of this discovery, a full-scale cinematic derealization of the world begins, as if started by the phantom flame that a youth pretends to ignite with a borrowed light from the portrait’s “glowing cigar.” causal logic collapses: above the “din,” and with increasingly carrollian reasoning, the museum director shouts, “i must first discuss the matter with the mayor, who has just died and has not yet been elected.”28 teleological histories slide into reverse “‘who’s the old ape?’ asked an individual” gesturing to the leroy painting. nothing can be decided because “[d]ecisiveness is a good thing only when supported by law” and the law of the archive as authorized by the signature “fell like snowflakes into a massive spittoon,” having been torn into pieces by “fingers, moving as it were on their own.”29 the immediate consequence is the refragmentation of the body. the body is sliced back up, limbs amputated, the head disassociated from the trunk. we enter into cinematic zones of magnification: i lost my way for a moment among some enormous marble legs, and twice ran around a giant knee before i again caught sight of m. godard, who was looking for me behind the white ankle of a neighboring giantess.30 “ancient sculpture” elicits another experience of the body, prior to its integration by mirror logics. alan cholodenko observes of cinema that “it violently opened a wound – a wound in a sense never closed, a posthumous wound – in ‘reality,’ as well as in the ‘self,’ the ‘subject,’ a wound no amount of suturing (and its system) could close.”31 nabokov, too, renders the cinematic encounter as an uncontrollable opening. for once the body has been cut up by the camera, the imaginary frame is jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 126 no longer containing. as the body’s form expands, the museum amplifies in tandem. the angle of vision then takes another fantastic turn. we pass through a succession of entr’actes, each presiding over a diminishing human perspective. a whale skeleton, implicitly citing herman melville’s description of leviathan as the “unspeakable foundations, ribs and very pelvis of the world,”32 obtrudes as a figure of sheer exteriority, a series of curved bars encasing the void. moving into “still other halls, with the oblique sheen of large paintings, full of storm clouds, among which floated the delicate idols of religious art in blue and pink vestments,”33 an aterrestrial viewpoint unfolds. when our gaze returns earthwards, it is to a deserted oikos. an “abrupt turbulence of misty draperies,” ushered in from a fallen ‘house’ vacated of the human viewpoint, transports us to a scene where the lines of rectilinear perspective bulge into hemispheric globes of fish-eye lenses: “chandeliers came aglitter and fish with translucent frills meandered through illuminated aquariums.”34 prismatic, iridescent with reflections, this is the “perspective of the inside” to recall jean epstein’s suggestive phrase, “a multiple perspective, shimmering, sinuous, variable and contractile” perspective through which the world “becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world” in deleuze’s phrasing.35 these ocular displacements then introduce another order of dimensionality: “racing up a staircase, we saw, from the gallery above, a crowd of gray-haired people with umbrellas examining a gigantic mock-up of the universe.”36 an entire system of the world, which the museum synecdochically fronted for, has always been a “mock-up,” suggests nabokov, as another model, now self-consciously cinematic, overruns it. when the narrator is found lingering among “models of railroad stations,”37 one is reminded that such ‘mere’ toys are nevertheless what engineer the catastrophic derailings of models of knowledge that the cinema exults in. yet if film is revealed to be fakery at its core, its circular loopings on comically shaky miniature trestles end up being unexpectedly operational. in a quarter turn, the doors of the arriving train swing open to become the cascading drawers of filing systems: “in front of me stretched an infinitely long passage, containing numerous office cabinets and elusive, scurrying people.”38 a strange loop, whose content upends into becoming its own formal principle, the self-citational, cinematic ‘train’ auto-archives itself. it is at this juncture that the logos of the museum transposes aurally back to its “ancient” source in music. like hands criss-crossing one another on piano keys, music takes us to a scene of reflective models in a mise-en-abyme of self-cancellation: taking a sharp turn, i found myself amid a thousand musical instruments; the walls, all mirror, reflected an enfilade of grand pianos, while in the center there was a pool with a bronze orpheus atop a green rock.39 resonating from a khoratic pool, music should be understood not just as the apollonian allusion, orpheus’ worship of the sun-god, but as the greek name for something that auto-theorizes itself. for as penelope murray and peter wilson observe, jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 127 mousikē in fact names the totality of instrumental sound, poetic word and movement embraced by the muses. the first of the “tekhnai” nouns formed in the form –ική, mousikē is thus intimately connected with theory, representing, as they surmise “the first area of greek cultural practice that produced more or less systematic descriptive and explanatory accounts of itself.”40 what chiefly interests is the way such self-theorization entails a different – performative – relation to the past than that represented by memory. as murray and wilson describe it, mousikē “betokens a total and privileged access to the past.” as such, mousikē would entail the originary fashioning of the structures of spatial and temporal difference itself. and with this recomposing, a whole other program of knowledge and understanding – exposition: “the act of expounding, setting forth, or explaining” – seems in the process of being constructed, metropolis-like, in the catacombs honeycombing the museum’s foundations as the narrator threads precariously down staircases of stone steps resounding with “whistles, the rattle of dishes, the clatter of typewriters, the ring of hammers, and many other sounds,” coming from “exposition halls of some kind or other, already closing or not yet completed.”41 here, consciousness, perhaps even ‘being’ itself, harks back to its primordial structuring by technics: “whistles,” “rattles,” “clatter” “hammers.” what these sounds call up are the alternations of rhythmic beats and patterned serial repetitions. they sequence what bernard stiegler has theorized as the body’s originary grammatization, namely, the processes, john tinnell explains, “by which a material, sensory, or symbolic flux becomes a gramme, which – broadly conceived – can include all manners of technical gestures that maintain their iterability and citationality apart from an origin or any one particular context.”42 suddenly sightless from cinema’s winding back of existing perceptual and cognitive paradigms, the narrator gropes about the “unknown furniture” of a different epistemological regime. but it is just at this point that the vector of the narrative changes and the tale embarks on its final fantastic turn. a qualitative shift, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, seems to take place and the narrator finds himself “with a joyous and unmistakable sensation,” metamorphically egressing from the museum’s cinematic vortex and back out into “reality.”43 he marvels at the new solidity of the ground, “the stone beneath my feet was real sidewalk, powdered with wonderfully fragrant, newly fallen snow, in which the infrequent pedestrians had already left fresh black tracks.” contrasting with his previous chaotic “feverish wanderings” comes a “pleasant feeling” of peace. the quiet of a snowy streetscape “replaced all the unreal trash amid which i had just been dashing to and fro.”44 as he “trustfully” starts to “conjecture” what has occurred – “why the snow, and what were those lights exaggeratedly but indistinctly beaming here and there in the brown darkness”45 – the narrator is suddenly struck by a missing letter, the absent russian “hard sign” on an advertisement. unspoken, manifesting only in written form to mark a separation between certain consonants and vowels (non-palatized and iotated), the russian “hard sign” – “ъ” – was abolished in the orthographic reform following the 1917 bolshevik revolution, as nabokov informs us in a footnote.46 jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 128 it is this hard sign’s omission from the cobbler’s placard “‘… inka sapog’ (‘… oe repair’)” that clues the narrator in to what has happened. a wormhole in spacetime, the montisert museum has somehow tossed its visitor out into “the factual russia of today, forbidden to me, hopelessly slavish, and hopelessly my own native land.”47 and with this realization, we, too, seem to have exited from this confusing, whirling, cinematic vortex into a more readily comprehended narrative space. as if materializing from the frescoes of the museum’s pediment, the golden figure of allegory swoops down to proffer the solution to the tale’s riddle, prompting the established, “orphic,” interpretation of the story: as a satire of the ussr, “the visit to the museum” would be nabokov’s testament to the sovereign power of the imagination to retrieve and resurrect the past. it is only memory, and specifically literary memory, that can protect our narrators’s “fragile, illegal life” from the unspeakable ordeals of history embodied by the russian red guards.48 and yet. it seems that whatever is elicited by the “real” here has already been undercut by the hypostasized scenes of shredded writing and arrested reading that preceded it. if the ‘nightmare’ of history would be the sole dream from which one cannot awake – if history is “what hurts,” as fredric jameson famously puts it49 – what is curious is how a strange symmetry, a certain visual echo, suffuses this putative ‘real’: oh, how many times in my sleep i had experienced a similar sensation! now, though, it was reality. everything was real – the air that seemed to mingle with scattered snowflakes, the still unfrozen canal, the floating fish house, and that peculiar squareness of the darkened and the yellow windows.50 the scattered snowflakes, re-materializations of the “snowflakes” of m. godard’s torn-up contract, suggest metonymic fragments of the reader’s and author’s contractual “agreement” to adhere to a certain representational order of origin and copy, the firm boundaries separating text from interpretation dissolving in the “unfrozen canal.” as one pauses at the “peculiar squareness of the darkened and the yellow windows,” why should the panels of a comic strip suddenly come to mind? looking back, the description of the museum’s mottled facade of “many colored stones” suddenly becomes recognisable as the marbled sides of a leather-bound book whose ornate columns and “gilt inscription” recall the gold-leaf ornamentation of early book covers. its “bronze door” doubles as a clasp, blocking our exit. is allegory’s “real” merely one more cover, a final flailing gesture of history’s order of the book as it goes under in a cinematic parallax of all of its tropes and figures? if so, with them too must go the humanist armature and model of reading through which a certain figure of nabokov, redeemer of the past, has been traditionally cast. for training one’s eye back over the text in a more “leisurely” way this time, something else also leaps out: continuing my leisurely examination, i looked up at the house beside which i was standing and was immediately struck by the sight of iron steps and railings that descended into the snow on their way to the cellar. there was a jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 129 twinge in my heart, and it was with a new, alarmed curiosity that i glanced at the pavement, at its white cover along which stretched black lines, at the brown sky across which there kept sweeping a mysterious light, and at the massive parapet some distance away.51 iron steps, railings, a chiaroscuro sketch of light and dark bands. an expanding series of lines leads away from every promise of a return to substantial reality. it is into a cartoon world that we have been summarily disgorged. the “factual” world, it transpires, is no less insubstantial that the museum’s cinematic one. both tend towards a “drop,” a black pit into which language as sense or meaning descends. i sensed that there was a drop beyond it; something was creaking and gurgling down there. further on, beyond the murky cavity, stretched a chain of fuzzy lights. scuffling along the snow in my soaked shoes, i walked a few paces.52 what creaks, gurgles, fuzzes and scuffles is the return of the heard: language unleashed by its internal phonics. ••• first published in russian in 1939, “the visit to the museum” was written just before the outbreak of the second world war yet it reads strangely presciently as we emerge from our covid-19 cocoons into a world whose anchor in a certain “real” has shifted. one may think of trump’s cartoon-like suspension of the symbolic law in favour of a gravity-defying market for jouissance as the symptom of one’s exit from the world formerly known as history. dumped out into this new, “factual” reality – the ‘hard sign’ of a world becoming uninhabitable for human life – we find that it is facts themselves that have become elusive as a catastrophic illogic reigns and the historical record is either wiped clean or written over. thus if climate change inaugurates a decisive rupture with humanity’s past, it is emerging just as much as a rift in older models of the social relation. where, in a previous era, the neurotic’s access to enjoyment was mediated by the name-of-thefather, whose instituting cut placed a prohibition on jouissance thereby opening the subject onto the exigencies of desire, in the contemporary “post-truth” world, the paternal prohibition seems largely absent, giving rise to increased anxiety, depression and the new epistemic category that jacques-alain miller and others identify as “ordinary psychosis.”53 it is as if, taking advantage of the opening in time cinema inaugurated, what lacan called the “ghost” of the subject released in the founding cartesian gesture that gave birth to the world of reason, has in the meantime taken control of the knobs and levers of perception and, with it, the instruments of identity and memory that previously framed it. unknotting itself houdini-like from its hold in the three psychic registers – the “old cases” and “displays” of the enlightenment fantasy that, by parenthesizing it, maintained the jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 130 object of desire at the correct (“safe”) distance from the subject, – jouissance has swarmed into every gap. if the 21st century is increasingly being defined by the retreat of desire, i suspect few would argue for a return to the paternal signifier – even if this were possible: the strutting symbolic father is precisely the comic figure most keenly performed by today’s new masters of jouissance. these fake or make-believe names-of-thefather would be the symptoms of a “hole” in a symbolic system gone psychotically awry. lacan, speaking of psychosis, comments, “at the point at which the nameof-the-father is summoned a pure and simple hole may thus answer in the other; due to the lack of metaphoric effect, this hole will give rise to a corresponding hole in the place of phallic signification.”54 how, then, to repair the symbolic’s hole in the ravaged days of the late anthropocene? here nabokov re-enters – ironically, of course, given his legendary antipathy towards psychoanalysis – as a writer uniquely equipped for this moment (out) of time. recall how in the story the narrator is only able to orientate himself in space and time because he notices the absence of the russian hard sign on the shoe shop’s insignia. and by the light of a streetlamp whose shape had long been shouting to me its impossible message, i made out the ending of a sign – “… inka sapog” (“… oe repair”) but no, it was not the snow that had obliterated the “hard sign” at the end. “no, no, in a minute i shall wake up,” i said aloud, and, trembling, my heart pounding, i turned, walked on, stopped again. from somewhere came the receding sound of hooves, the snow sat like a skullcap on a slightly leaning spur stone and indistinctly showed white on the woodpile on the other side of the fence, and already i knew, irrevocably, where i was.55 abolished by the bolsheviks, the hard sign was officially erased from the russian alphabet. yet as one can see in image 5, the hard sign merely went underground or, rather, overground. a reversed-out letter ъ, the shape of the st petersburg streetlamp (on the angliyskaya [english] embankment no less) “has long been shouting its impossible message” to all in plain sight, in stark defiance of the representational regime that sought to eliminate it.56 and if one does a little more sleuthing, one discovers that what has been truncated in the signboard is the phoneme поч [poch]. the corrected sign should read починка сапог. “pochinka sapog” (shoe repair). poche, french for pocket. with a breath-taking insouciance for enlightenment models of phenomenality, an oil lamp pockets the missing hard sign from the real’s inky bog. poch, poche, poach, pocket, – as if seanced by this bubbling stream of open phonemes, offenbach returns. he comes into focus not as the orphic avatar of the lyrical tradition – always a sweltering costume for the composer of opéra bouffon (whose own orphée, incidentally, is only too delighted to lose eurydice57) – but as one of the cinematic o-shapes that have been cycling, like the woman “in besplattered stockings […] jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 131 spinning along on a silver-shining bicycle,” scarcely noticed until now throughout the tale: the october night, the owls, the oriental vase, orpheus of course, the obvodny canal, the narrator’s exclamation “oh!” and, finally, the truncated sign: “oe repair.” if the soles of language’s metrical ‘feet,’ the connecting legs of the symbolic’s transport system, can be patched, nabokov suggests, it will be by way of another operation of seeing and hearing secreted within history’s rectilinear perceptual order. nabokov’s cinematic parallax forces it into the open. notes 1. jacques lacan, séminaire 4: la relation d’objet, texte établi par jacques-alain miller (paris, seuil, 1998). english translation, cormac gallagher (unpublished). 2. vladimir nabokov, the stories of vladimir nabokov (new york: vintage, 1997), 277-285. 3. will norman, “nabokov and benjamin: a late modernist response to history,” ulbandus review 10, my nabokov (2007): 79-100, 19. 4. slavoj žižek, the parallax view (cambridge, ma: mit, 2009), 17. 5. žižek, parallax, 17. 6. henri bouasse, optique géométrique élémentaire: focométrie, optométrie (paris: delagrave, 1917). available at http://www.archive.org/details/optiquegomtriqu00bouagoog. see image 5: by ykatrina, английская набережная [english embankment], st petersburg, 12 june 2009 https://commons.wikimedia.org jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 132 also jacques lacan, écrits: the first complete edition in english, trans. bruce fink in collaboration with heloise fink and russell grigg (new york: norton, 2006), 565. 7. nabokov, 280. 8. nabokov, 277. 9. nabokov, 277. 10. vladimir nabokov, look at the harlequins. in vladimir nabokov, novels 1969-1974 (new york: the library of america, 1996), 563-747, 591. 11. nabokov, 278. 12. gilles deleuze, cinema 2: the time-image, trans. hugh tomlinson and robert galeta (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1997), 70. 13. nabokov, 278. 14. the painting depicts octavia fainting at the hearing the name of her dead son marcellus whom aeneas meets as a ghost in book 6 of the aeneid. there were, moreover, two historical figures named marcus claudius marcellus. 15. nabokov, 279. 16. ferdinand de saussure, course in general linguistics, ed. charles bally with albert sechehaye and albert riedlinger, trans. and notes wade baskin (new york: mcgraw hill, 1915), 70. 17. “i let my index finger stray at random over a map of northern france; the point of its nail stopped at the town of petiver or petit ver, a small worm or verse, which sounded idyllic.” nabokov, harlequins, 620. 18. in poe’s “the gold bug,” a hieroglyphic signature appears “rudely traced, in a red tint.” edgar allan poe, “the gold bug.” in the works of edgar allan poe, vol. 1, project gutenberg, 2008. retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2147/2147-h/2147-h.htm http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/2147/2147-h/2147-h.htm 19. for a brilliant reading of poe’s “the cask of amontillado,” see tom cohen, “poe’s foot d’or: ruinous rhyme and nietzschean recurrence (sound).” in anti-mimesis from plato to hitchcock (cambridge: university of cambridge press, 1994), 105-126. my debt to cohen’s reading practice is comically obvious but it also proves what he discovered in hitchcock is indeed real. 20. paul de man, “hypogram and inscription: michael riffaterre’s poetics of reading,” diacritics 11.4 (1981): 17-35, 24. 21. nabokov, 279. 22. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jacques_offenbach. 23. nabokov, 279. 24. performed in a former magician’s theatre, salle lacaze, “a little theatre of magic,” in 1865, two blind men was offenbach’s first foray into comic opera. it was made into a film in 1900 by george méliès. 25. nabokov, 281. jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 133 26. nabokov, 281. 27. see walter benjamin’s description of messianic universal history as a “festively enacted history.” walter benjamin: selected writings, 4: 1938-1940, howard eiland and michael w. jennings (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2006), 404. 28. nabokov, 282. 29. nabokov, 281. 30. nabokov, 282. 31. alan cholodenko, “the crypt, the haunted house, of cinema,” cultural studies review 10.2 (2004): 99-103 (108). 32. herman melville, moby-dick, or the whale, project gutenberg 2008. retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm 33. nabokov, 283. 34. nabokov, 283. 35. gilles deleuze, cinema 1: the movement-image, trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1997), 23, 57. 36. nabokov, 283. 37. nabokov, 283. 38. nabokov, 283. 39. nabokov, 283. 40. penelope murray and peter wilson, music and the muses: the culture of mousikē in the classical athenian city (oxford: oxford university press, 2010), 2. 41. nabokov, 283. 42. see john tinnell, “grammatization: bernard stiegler’s theory of writing and technology,” computers and composition 37 (2015): 132–146. 43. nabokov, 284. 44. nabokov, 284. 45. nabokov, 284. 46. nabokov, 673. 47. nabokov, 285. 48. see irene masing-delic, “replication of recreation? the eurydice motif in nabokov’s russian oeuvre,” russian literature lxx (2011): 391-414 (395). see also norman, 95. 49. fredric jameson, the political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act (ithaca: cornell university press, 1981), 102. 50. nabokov, 285. 51. nabokov, 284. jöttkandt: history’s hard sign s12 (2019): 134 52. nabokov, 284. 53. jacques-alain miller, “ordinary psychosis revisited,” psychoanalytical notebooks 26 (2008): 139-167. 54. jacques lacan, “on a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis.” in écrits, 465-6. 55. nabokov, 284. 56. my profound thanks to david ottina who drew this to my attention. 57. this operetta is also famous for its “duo de la mouche” where jupiter’s part in the love song consists of a fly’s buzzing sound. hjorth-intro.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 10 & 11 (2017-18): 1-15 b e n h j o r t h i n t r o d u c t i o n cause:rie :: repetition:s lear: … speak. cordelia: nothing, my lord. lear: nothing! cordelia: nothing. lear: nothing will come of nothing: speak again. […] cordelia: …no cause, no cause. […] leer1: never, never, never, never, never. shakespeare, king lear all this is at the beginning only an empty word [nur leeres wort] and only being [nur sein]; this simple [dies einfache], which has no further meaning besides, this void [dies leere], is as such, therefore, the beginning of philosophy. hegel, the science of logic2 cause toujours. (devise de la pensée « causaliste ».) lacan, écrits3 l acan’s pun, in the rome discourse of 1953, on the word “cause” sums up much of what is at stake in the debates over knowledge, meaning and agency raised by his own theory of the subject as a fundamentally “linguistic” phenomenon. the parodic “motto of ‘causalist’ thought” is one of the epigraphs to the first section—“empty speech and full speech in the psychoanalytic realization of the subject”—of this foundational paper, whose “proper” name outlines these stakes, as well as the arena of their playing-out: “the function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis.” they were stakes which were perhaps highest when the chips seemed the furthest down, in the wake of lacan’s resignation (under duress) earlier that year from the international psychoanalytic association (ipa). the quip’s critical (that is, negative) assessment of the naïve ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 2 “causalist” metaphysics of scientism—as a theoretical cause that should have been acknowledged as lost since at least hume—appears directed at lacan’s former ipa colleagues who, it was increasingly and alarmingly clear, not only held but clung to one version or other of such a “causalism.” but, alongside and beyond this critique, there is a profound speculative (that is, positive) force animating this witticism. it is one which partakes of that mysterious, (side-)splitting quality of the joke or witz to which shakespeare, freud and hegel attended so closely, convinced that there are manifold, doppelsinnig, even contradictory truths to be found in jest. while lacan’s own flamboyant performances of wordplay are themselves often dismissed—most vehemently, of course, by those same colleagues, so-called “orthodox” freudians— as the conscious obscurantism of a sophist, or simply the attention-seeking tomfoolery of a narcissistic poser, in retrospect it seems that this jester may well prove a prophet, at least when it comes to the strange, even paradoxical temporality of this weird object of metaphysical inquiry to which we still give the name “cause.” when read by lacan, the “promethean” discovery of freud’s “copernican” revolution returns us (again and again) to this foundational metaphysical category, which seems to lie in flaming ruins in the wake of psychoanalytic insight. the unconscious, and the compulsive repetitions of langue and lalangue by which its slippery, chameleonic traces are registered in consciousness, no more recognizes the independence, nor the unidirectional relation, of causes and effects than it obeys the “law” of non-contradiction, the laws of morality or of the land, or the grammatical rules which alone seem to allow for meaning within that very language, and to impart stability, substance and reference to language as such. the ego’s realization of the phantasmatic nature of its own self-mastery means giving up, also, the imaginary belief in its agential capacity for fully free action. to be no longer master in one’s own house means to cease to (act as if one could) be the undetermined, “efficient” cause of consequent effects in that realm, including—perhaps most devastatingly—effects upon that self itself. what the much-fabled “death of the subject” in fact names may, in the end, be no more than the end, or better the loss, of the subject-as-cause.4 the real problem is that, in the vacuum of this subject as “lost cause,” you can still hear yourself scream. it is, of course, proper to the definition of a scream that it has no definable semantic or locutionary meaning, no stable constative referent, but also that it is nonetheless manifestly brimming with experiential or performative content, wielding significant (perlocutionary) force, and often to very real, material and/or affective (illocutionary) effect. hence the scandal, simultaneously aural and moral, of electra’s repetitive, incessant cries of mourning and outrage: by cleaving to meaning at the edge of meaninglessness, they tear holes in the fabric of common sense, of the commonness and commonality of sense-making. to communicate by scream or lamentation is to throw language-as-communication into turmoil, if not entirely out the window. anne carson, in a recent poem introducing her new translation of sophokles,5 addresses herself to antigone (another infamous screamer): ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 3 perhaps you know that ingeborg bachmann poem from the last years of her life that begins ‘i lose my screams’ dear antigone, i take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams. how to understand the meaning of these screams? how to pose—let alone answer— the abyssal question of whether they even have a “meaning”? how to keep listening to them in the face of this undecidability, bordering on the utter negation of the possibility of asking the question itself? how not to lose, along with “meaning,” the undeniable “truth” of these screams? these questions, which elude any simple or final answer, animated the lacanian project from beginning to end. not to play by the rules of “proper” communicative action does not mean to forgo the chance to play with them. this double-issue of s: journal seeks to take lacan’s cause-gag quite seriously. the muffled tale, told in and between dictionaries, of its wordplay is suggestive both of the promise, and of a vague sense of threat—the threat of loss—embodied in the unstable causative power of speech: the queer, repetitive performativity of the language by which we, as subjects, come to be subjects; the language that (we) subjects are. function and field of “cause” in/as language translators alan sheridan and bruce fink each keep lacan’s devise in french. the fundamental untranslatability of the pun hinges on an intriguing dual function of the french verb causer. in a footnote to lacan’s epigraph, sheridan simply gives the alternative translations—“‘always a cause’ or ‘keep talking’”6—two meanings which for the anglophone may result in a surd of understanding: how are speech and causation to be grasped as related, even punningly? fink proves that sheridan was on the right (two) path(s), but adds useful context—simultaneously culturallinguistic, historical and metaphysical—which allows us to grasp more fully the complexity of lacan’s parodic-conceptual move: cause toujours usually implies that the person who says it couldn’t care less about or doesn’t believe what the other person is saying, and might in fact prefer that the latter shut up. causer means to talk or chat, and cause toujours could be literally rendered as “keep talking,” “talk anyway,” or “go on,” even though the context indicates that the speaker means the opposite of what he or she is saying (as when we say “go on” ironically or in exasperation). agramatically it might be construed to mean “always a cause.” causalisme [lacan’s pensée « causaliste »] is the doctrine that science seeks causes and not merely regular antecedents.7 in contemporary french, causer retains these meanings, which seem at first confoundingly incongruous: both to cause, to be the cause of; and to speak, or otherben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 4 wise use language or diction. wiktionary lists both a transitive usage, as in speaking a specific language or dialect (the verlan idiom “tu causes le céfran, mec?”—a true untranslatable—ridiculously rendered as “you speak frog, dude?”), and an intransitive, as in the overproduction of empty, irrelevant and/or annoying chatter (“de quoi il cause?” / “what’s he banging on about?”).8 causer is in turn derived from the latin causārī, to dispute or plead, i.e. one’s cause or case—with the attendant question mark over the reality or authenticity of such a cause: “to give as a reason (a real, and more frequently a feigned one) for something, to make a pretext of, to pretend, to plead.”9 the oed does give this sense of “speak familiarly, converse, talk, chat” as an extremely rare secondary meaning of the english verb “cause,”10 though it is in fact probably the singular contribution of the 19th-century british poet p.j. bailey. the citation from his festus (“i have caused face to face with elements”) is reminiscent of nothing so much as lear’s argument with the storm on the heath, the terrain not only of his divided kingdom, but of his own psychic collapse. and indeed there is something maddening about the hall of mirrors opened up by the confusion of causation and speech. wiktionary’s entry for the written term “causer” here gives an immediate sense of the almost schizoid, translingual polysemy of “cause” more globally: from the english noun (“someone or something that causes or produces an effect”), to the french infinitive verb (with its dual meaning of speaking and causing, a kind of meta-performative demonstrating the content of performativity itself in the slippery form of the verb’s own utterance) to the first-person present active subjunctive conjugation of the latin verb (as in “were i to plead…”). simultaneously subjective and objective, both that which causes and that which is caused, the pure or “infinite” metaphysical activity of the prime mover devolves into subjective, subjunctive, indeed self-interested pleading, casuistry or outright pretense in the contingent forms of language. while bailey’s “spasmodic” coinage, borrowing from the french, never made it into semantic currency in english, the noun causerie, which derives from this sense of causer, did manage to cross the channel sometime in the early 19th century. according to le trésor de la langue française, causerie refers archaically to the act of speech in general, and more specifically to long-winded and familiar banter between conversationalists or debaters, whether amiable or malicious, around a literal or metaphorical campfire: flaubert, writing to a friend in 1849, wondered: “quand reprendrons-nous nos interminables causeries au coin de feu? ”11 it was after this sense that sainte-beuve’s weekly column on literary topics in le constitutionnel, beginning in 1849 in the wake of the workers’ rebellions, was named causeries du lundi (“monday chats”). the contemporary usage of the term has continued down this path, referring nowadays to the discursive commodities forged from such chatter: “informal” or “personal” discussion, whether in the form of newspaper columnfiller or daytime tv talk shows, which arguably “guide [the] tastes of the populace” no less than sainte-beuve’s causeries shaped the views of polite society in the second empire.12 it was this sense of causerie that entered both the english language, ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 5 and english-language literary-commercial production, around the same time. the oed defines “causerie” as “informal talk or discussion, esp. on literary topics; also, a chatty article or paragraph.” the first example listed, from an 1827 edition of the edinburgh review, pinpoints this “lost” (french) connection between chatter and causation, referring presumably to a previous edition of the review as “the volume which has been the innocent cause of all this causerie.”13 in the north american context “the lost cause” traditionally refers to the (“impossible,” but precisely thereby “noble”) position of the confederate south in the civil war. this position, frequently referred to as a “religion,” is a near-perfect example of what lacan refers to elsewhere as the “supreme narcissism of the lost cause [la cause perdu],”14 whose pathway in the “revolutions of culture” winds from the oracular fatalism of greek tragedy to a “christianity of despair” in the work of paul claudel. the “fate” or “destiny” represented in the tragic dramas of both ancient greece and modern christendom is, as lacan saw, another name for this “lost cause,” reified in the form of one or another origin myth, whether told in detail or eternally deferred (and thereby upheld) as inarticulable or ineffable, as “transcending” language’s capacity to capture this traumatic experience. what would it mean, then, for intellectual work to escape such a fate: that of being yet one more causerie, one more little, petty object heaped on the exponentially growing pile marked “lost”? can we really “do things with words,” as the transitive usage of causer suggests—that to speak is in some sense to cause something, even language itself, to come into being? or are we rather doomed to the sense suggested by the intransitive usage: an intransigent irrelevance, crapping on endlessly into the ivory toilet bowl perched perilously atop the academic tower? the same essential dilemma confronts every analytic dyad, when after a relatively short time the experience of repetition in the analysand’s utterances and preoccupations becomes often painfully acute, raising the specter of (bad) infinite, unchanging repetition of the eversame symptom. and, as in tragedy, escape cannot be the goal. rather, the challenge is to assume our fate—the meaningless repetitions of causation to which we seem predestined—as if it had been and continued to be (“as if it were,” to use one of the only remaining subjunctive constructions in english, here more necessary than ever) our own choice. this choice or decision in relation to our fate—this refusal to accept la cause as perdu—is, for lacan, the proper psychoanalytic “act.” the alternative to acting out is an inwardly-directed action, an acting and working upon the self, but only as one of nachträglich interpretation and the assumption of previously unconscious responsibilities and potentials. such an act would amount to the only kind of “freedom” or “cure” to which the work of psychoanalysis could lay claim; could, that is, if it were not always doomed to arrive too late to truly “save” us. of course, the chatter and babble both registered in, and in turn generated by, causerie is far from innocent; as rebecca comay puts it, “[t]he aptly named chain of signifiers is anything but uncoerced.”15 on the contrary, even the most seemingly harmless speech nonetheless has its effects, and the proliferative polysemy and ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 6 instability of causes and effects here proves deeply troubling to received wisdoms metaphysical, psychological and “ethical.” for lacan, beginning with the mother’s ronron or lalangue,16 and echoed in the parapraxes and stubborn repetitions of the analysand’s endless babble, language is the field in which the truth of the subject is “caused,” as an effect of speech: brought into being by and as language, the subject incessantly continues to speak itself into being, without knowing how or even that it is doing so, and most markedly when it imagines that it is speaking about an other, an object. the threat this “linguistic” approach posed to the contemporary doxa was registered in the rejection of lacan’s theoretical and clinical innovations by the ipa. this was, of course, the beginning of the infamous “split” which occasioned the rome discourse’s project of returning to and “revamp[ing] the foundations our discipline derives from language,” despite (or rather because of) the fear on the part of many analysts that, as lacan characterizes it, “if we were to challenge the principles in which each of us believes his experience is grounded, our walls would very quickly dissolve into the confusion of babel” (199). this threat, and the resistances to it, would continue to rip lacan—or he, the threat, ripped himself17—from one institution and line of filiation to another, first in the form of his eventual “excommunication” from the ipa, and then his abandonment of the societé française de la psychanalyse (sfp), at which point he returned to the cause that must by then have seemed closer than ever to being irrevocably lost—the name of the new and final école, before it was itself disbanded: la cause freudienne. already in 1953, “function and field” signals lacan’s signature uptake of the extremely difficult, even paradoxical “task of speaking about speech,” in the midst of the seeming negation simultaneously performed by his punning, opaque discourse—a certain cancellation, or ruling-out, of the possibility of a satisfactory completion of such a self-recursive task. in order to carry out this herculean (if not, precisely, hegelian) aufhebung—in speech, of speech—he adopts “an ironic style suitable to a radical questioning of the foundations of our discipline” (198). beyond the “threat” posed by the biblical specter of the confusion of tongues, lacan sought to demonstrate the constitutive or foundational nature of such a cacophony, working—stylistically—in and through it to show that there is no escaping this causerie as simultaneous cause and effect of the subject. instead of getting around it, the analyst, whether as clinician or theorist, must listen (that is, work) through it, closely and with an attention suspended from logical presupposition, temporal prejudgement and moral prejudice. what the analyst listens for is of course what “causes” patients to speak in the way they do, but—and this is crucial—only via what results from the one rule of the cure: that the subject “go on,” working against self-censorship to continue speaking, no matter the seeming inanity or perversity of repetition heaped upon repetition; that the analysand cause toujours.18 with othello we can say, “it is the cause, it is the cause, my soul… it is the cause”— but only in order to perform, in this rehearsal of othello’s own insistent repetition, the contradiction inherent to cause, in the very act of speaking it: not knowing exactly what the cause is, what the term or concept “cause” even finally means, we ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 7 are not only unwilling but unable, finally, to “name it.” as othello acts, and presents himself to us as driven to his fateful act by a certain force or necessity,19 “the cause,” or cause as such, appears as unnamable, the language for it “lost” not only in the face of the “chaste stars” or other form of superegoic power above us, but to our own selves, as the loss of that causative power or agency we imagine is lodged within us. and we can still share with kant a sense of wonder at this predicament of simultaneously celestial and internal lostness—the objective lack in our grasp of the outer reaches of the universe as the correlative of the gap or abyss constituting our most “inward” subjectivity—even as we inevitably go on causing language to come into being; as we go on chattering, littering the earth with our little, lost syllables, down to the last of recorded and repeated time. whether wonder-struck or fear-stricken, we can not know (the) “cause” any more than we can fully know our own “soul” or psyche: each demanding the scare-quotes of postmodern epistemological suspicion, they seem, for us today, already and irrevocably lost from the start, even before the emergence of any particular “lost cause” of political or cultural history. they seem shrouded in the mists of time and the impenetrable thickets of semantic proliferation, their nominations and theorizations heaping up like the soil from the dogged work—however blind—of a mole digging the tunnel that will become its own grave. somehow both “first” and “final”—and yet conspicuously failing to explain either origin or telos—the term “cause” seems to mean everything and nothing, all at once. and yet what does the very title (or titles) of this edition of s: journal suggest, except that we seem equally unwilling—or perhaps, again, unable—to simply dispense with cause? to let cause be lost? we keep on talking, causing, causing words (like “cause”) to come into existence, in our mouths and on our pages: repeating the (lost) cause, in repetitions whose force attests, above all and deep down, to some original lostness, an absence that is not only “there” from the beginning, but in some sense is the beginning. this is disappearance functioning as efficient cause; an originary lack of a thing whose (prior) loss was, paradoxically and thus traumatically, the moment of its own birth: always missed, and so never fully arriving, it is the cause, it is the cause… whatever “it” might be, we seem to cling stubbornly to the notion that—as othello intones a third time, perhaps for luck—“it is the cause.” the wikipedia entry for the english term causerie defines it as “a literary style of short informal essays mostly unknown in the english-speaking world… contain[ing] more verbal acrobatics and humor than a regular opinion or column.” the description that follows sounds a lot like the dismissals of the “ironic style” and droll, lapidary brevity20 with which lacan addressed his audience in the rome discourse, and continued to work with his analysands and followers despite the protestations of the psychoanalytic establishment: the causerie style is characterized by a personal approach to the reader; the writer “babbles” to the reader, from which the term derives. language jokes, hyperbole, intentional disregard of linguistic and stylistic norms, and other absurd or humorous elements are permitted… [r]oom is left for the ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 8 reader to read between the lines… the content… may be satire, parody, opinion, factual or straight fiction. causerie is not defined by content or format, but style.21 “the style is,” lacan repeats in the first words of his écrits, “the man [sic] himself”— by which he (lacan) also seemed to mean despite himself. indeed this médecin malgré lui immediately qualifies his clownish opening move, as a citation of “buffon’s discourse to the academy” and, perhaps more significantly, a citation of repetition as such—“« le style est l’homme même », répète-t-on…”—a repetition which, as he does not fail to note, leaves us on increasingly shaky ground: “man is no longer so sure a reference point [l’homme ne soit plus référence si certaine].”22 and yet, despite the “fading” certainty of its bearer, style itself continues to occupy a fundamental role in lacan’s thought, as a crucial hermeneutic and clinical tool. in 1957, in an address to the société française de philosophie, he attempted once again to explain and defend his own version of “psychoanalysis and its teaching”: a return to freud, which provides the material for a teaching worthy of the name [un enseignement digne de ce nom], can only be produced by the pathway by which the most hidden truth manifests itself [la voie, par où la vérité le plus caché se manifeste] in the revolutions of culture. this pathway is the only training [la seule formation] that i can claim to transmit to those who follow me. it is called: a style [elle s’appelle: un style].23 certainly, style—along with the distinctly uncertain “référence” (including the gender) of “man,” and their respective repetitions—remained central to lacan’s formulation of the principle governing the function of language in the field of the psyche; a psychic function in/as the field of language: shall we adopt the formulation—the style is the man—if we simply add to it: the man one addresses? this would be simply to comply with the principle i have proposed: that in language our message comes to us from the other, and—to state the rest of the principle—in an inverted form.24 the causeries assembled here, each in its own way, attempt to heed the double truth—the speculative as well as the critical—in lacan’s little causerie on cause. they seek to understand, and play with, the structures at work in such a devise, the stylistic operation of a verbal mechanism which points simultaneously to the “mere” spokenness—the contingent linguistic nature—of “cause,” and to the mysterious fact that, despite this apparent emptiness of the category, the nothing/s we speak or sweetly whisper do/es nonetheless have effects, thus seeming to constitute (a) cause. and here we stop. we stutter over, and so stumble on a point of confusion between singular and plural, subjective and objective, individual and collective. we arrive—again, and as always—at a problem, at a point whose obscurity demands ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 9 analysis and which amounts to one of principle. this principle is one of distinct uncertainty or indecision, an unentschiedenheit resulting not from merely passive indifference, but from the “pure”—or simply raw—indeterminacy [unbestimmtheit] and the strangely active indifferentiation, the “lack of all distinction within” [ununterschiedenheit in ihm selbst] by which hegel characterizes the real (if not yet quite “concrete”) existence of “nothing,” and therefore of being itself.25 and it is at this point of indistinctness (nichtunterscheidung), approaching even a final—and, ironically, determinative or constitutive—“cause” of indistinguishability (ununterschiedbarkeit) or undecidability (unentsheidbarkeit), that a single little letter (re) emerges, in parentheses, as a singular theorization of the “original,” and therefore lost, cause; the cause of loss and loss as (a) cause: the small other, lacan’s “object a (to be read: little a).” what lacan’s style, and theorizations of style (of “man,” of “repetition”…), reflect most strikingly are the paradoxical inversions and chiasmatic interpenetrations of the primal words of the hegelian logic—those of the “petrified” metaphysics into which he tried to breathe new, and still for many seemingly insane, life. the logic, too, is littered with “strange formulations” [befremden reden], the cunning of puns and wordplays, making this infamously dense and difficult text counterintuitively funny, as brecht’s ziffel in the flüchtlingsgespräche notes over beer and billiards.26 already in the phenomenology of spirit hegel had proposed that consciousness has its meaning or opinion [meinung] corrected when it “learns through experience [erfährt] that it means something other than it meant to mean [daß es anders gemeint ist, als sie meinte].”27 this punning proposition, this sentence or leap—all meanings of satz, an ambiguity upon which hegel plays throughout a text which seeks to prove the immanent movement of the properly “speculative” proposition—this proposition-as-leap-of-thought not only demonstrates hegel’s own considerable powers of literary witz, but in so doing throws the very meaning of meaning into question. this occurs via the unique performativity of such a pun, in which the sentence demonstrates or performs, in its form, what its content “constatively” proposes—here, as so often, the difficulty and (self-)contradiction inherent to “meaning” as such, and the “learning experience” [erfahrung] of repeated failure via which one’s own intention [meinung] is revealed and reflected upon retrospectively, even retroactively, only after one has first taken the risk of speaking, of attempting to express truth despite the inevitability of a certain failure; of attempting to go on causing in the face of so much seemingly empty causerie. such repetition and failure can be the cause either for laughter or despair, like any reversal [verkehrung] at the hands of cruel fate: the subject, having put out its own eyes, proceeds to slip on the banana peel laid by its own meaning or intention, an article, object or other left indefinite; “(a),” a little letter stealing itself away in italics and parentheses, volée, stolen or flown gleefully away through the dark. this “object-cause of desire,” lacan notes in the overture to the écrits, is the object that (cor)responds [l’objet qui répond] to the question about style that i am raising right at the outset. in the place [“]man[”] marked for bufben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 10 fon, i call for the falling-away of this object [la chute de cet objet], which is revealing due to the fact that the fall isolates this object, both as the cause of desire in which the subject disappears [la cause du désir où le sujet s’éclipse] and as sustaining the subject between truth and knowledge.28 the (a) is the one of which we always speak, without ever knowing exactly what either the subject or the object of our language is; we speak (of) nothing, and nothing else. but, in hegel’s words, this nothing of speech, this mere “empty word,” this “void,” is “neither more nor less than nothing.” or, to follow barbara cassin’s wished-for ventriloquization of lacan, it is the “less than nothing,” the moins que rien29 which is not merely or simply nothing, but which rather serves as the constant corollary and inconstant sign of our very being: the meaningless sign that “we” are, though not thereby any less affected, or pained, by the loss or lack that we mean when we speak, when we cause language, when language courses through us and causes us, as effects, to “be.” in so doing, this (less-than-)nothing also serves as “the beginning”—the word, the first, simplest (stupidest) and most oft-repeated word—“of [a] philosophy,” as a science striving in every direction after causes, effects and the proper form of their relation, but always haunted by the ironic and uncertain echoes of its constitutive causeries. acknowledgements: loss the pieces in these two volumes of s originated, with a few exceptions, in the conference “repetition/s: performance and philosophy in ljubljana,” hosted by ljubljana’s aufhebung: international hegelian association at the city museum and the university of ljubljana, 22-24 september 2016.30 a description of some of the more madcap theatrics of this unique 3-day event can be read in justin clemens’s ‘re/ viewing repetition/s,’ in this volume, while more of the conference proceedings are forthcoming in book format. the focus on hegel in the first section, and the concern with repetition throughout the volume, are reflections of the essential contribution to contemporary thought of the “ljubljana school” theorists, mladen dolar and alenka zupančič (whose timely reflections on blanchot’s “the apocalypse is disappointing” we publish here), both keynote speakers at the event but, much more importantly, intellectual leaders and fierce teachers for several generations of scholars, artists and analysts in slovenia and beyond. in addition to its dark, astringent humour—twin to the stringency of its critique—and their generosity of spirit, their work evinces an abiding interest in, and commitment to, hegelian dialectical thought as a thinking of repetition, and as therefore essential to the psychoanalytic project in its clinical, aesthetic-cultural and historico-political dimensions. one of those who joined us in those three magical days in the heartland of the ljubljana school was jan sieber, a brilliant young phd student and lecturer at the berlin udk, whom i had met as a welcoming interlocutor at a symposium on benjamin’s aktualität in frankfurt in 2015, and with whom i’d consolidated an intellectual comradeship over as many nights with the kafe kotti stift as i (that is, my liver) ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 11 could manage. after having worked with him to develop and edit his startlingly original paper for this volume, “beyond the mimetic principle: kant with lacan,” we received the devastating news earlier this year that jan had lost his battle with cancer, and that he had left us on may 22nd,, 2018. at one point some months ago sigi jöttkandt—the co-editor (with dominiek hoens) of s journal, whose idea it had been to collect papers from the “repetition/s” event, and who was in some justified despair that her suggested title for what was initially to be the 2017 volume (“lost cause”) might prove an uncomfortably self-fulfilling performative, and that these volumes might never come to print—suggested forging ahead without an introduction. in the wake of an unthinkably shocking loss, it suddenly seemed impossible to finish thinking and writing, any sense of a just cause for yet more academic causerie having dried up or dissipated along with that loss. the causers assembled here—and this mumbling, bumbling editor most of all—want to thank and acknowledge sigi for her own editorial and intellectual guidance, her masterful typesetting, and her singular, nurturing patience, all of which were indispensable in allowing us to bring these essays to fruition in the face of what amounted, for many of us, to devastation.31 it is probably true that this introduction could be rendered superfluous by the succinct, and playfully profound, utterance with which sigi suggested marking the traditional place of introduction: a true echo of lacan’s 1953 witz, which brings us back to the beginning and to the question of beginning: “that which repeats has no true beginning, for the one is the original ‘lost cause.’” but one statement more, at least, had to be made here, at the end. it will take some time—perhaps too much—to measure the extent and nature of the loss we have suffered in losing jan sieber. certainly, we can say already, we have lost an intricate mind and a courageous spirit, the twinkle in whose eye could simultaneously flash forth a lightning wit, and bestow a kind, quiet but glimmering attention. his essay here attests to the enormous promise of his genuinely unique work in aesthetic, political and psychoanalytic theory. it is not just suffering, but also this promise, that he bequeaths to us in the midst of our loss. he leaves a spirit—that of this promise and, thereby, his own—that continues to live and breathe in the intellectual and social communities to which he contributed so much, and that continues to make its gentle but insistent demand on us: to think more critically, to work harder, to listen and to love with the depth and strength of which his bodily life was a consistent exemplar. with the approval of his family and friends, with whom our deepest sympathies remain, and with particular thanks to samo tomšič, sami khatib and jenny nachtigall for guidance and editorial assistance, we are humbled to publish jan’s work here, and to dedicate these volumes to his memory, and to this promise, which continue to speak beyond the incalculable loss of his person: il cause toujours. ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 12 in memoriam, jan sieber: 1982-2018 notes 1. “leer (v.), 1520s, ‘to look obliquely’ (since 18c. usually implying a lustful, wolfish, malicious intent), probably from… proto-germanic *hleuza- ‘near the ear,’… from pie root *kleu‘to hear.’” www.etymonline.com/word/leer “the ordinary meaning [man meint] is that being is the absolutely other of nothing [das nichts], and that there is nothing clearer [es ist nichts klarer] than this absolute distinction; indeed, nothing seems easier than being able to state it. but it is just as easy to convince oneself… that the distinction is unsayable [unsagbar]… if being and nothing had any determinateness differentiating them [then] they would be determinate being and determinate nothing, not the pure being and the pure nothing which they still are at this point. their distinction is therefore fully empty [völlig leer], each is as indeterminate as the other; the distinction depends, therefore, not on them but on a third element, on intention [meinen].” georg wilhelm friedrich hegel, the science of logic, trans. george di giovanni (cambridge; new york: cambridge university press, 2010), 68, hegel’s emphases, translation modified. 2. hegel, the science of logic, 55, translation modified. 3. jacques lacan, “fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse,” écrits (paris: editions du seuil, 1966) 247. “function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,” in lacan, écrits: the first complete edition in english, trans. bruce fink (new york: w.w. norton & co, 2006) 206. future references to fink’s translation of the rome discourse (“function and field”) will be given as page numbers in the text. 4. and it is indeed a loss, a kind of death to be mourned, for the late-liberal subject of an ideology cleaving desperately to the ragged edge of the fantasy of individual freedom. on this, see frank ruda, abolishing freedom: a plea for a contemporary use of fatalism (lincoln: university of nebraska press, 2016). 5. anne carson, “the task of the translator of antigone” in sophokles, antigonick, trans. anne carson (new york: new directions, 2015) 6. i follow carson’s own transliteration of the playwright’s name, which happens to be closer to the german in being more “faithful” to the greek… 6. jacques lacan, écrits: a selection, trans. alan sheridan (london: routledge, 2001 [1977]) 30; note at 79n5. ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 13 7. bruce fink, notes to “function and field,” in lacan, écrits: the first complete edition in english, 785–6 n247,4. fink describes his methodology of translation in terms germane to the efforts in this volume: “given the degree to which lacan’s texts have been—and will continue to be, i suspect—subjected to close readings, i have been careful to respect his terminology as much as possible. i have translated here with the notion that the repetition of terms from one sentence to the next, from one paragraph to the next, and from one text to the next, may be springboards for future interpretations and have attempted to either repeat them identically in the translation or at least provide the french in brackets or endnotes so that the repetition is not lost” (xi, my emphasis). 8. “causer” (french), wiktionary, en.wiktionary.org/wiki/causer#french. 9. lewis & short, a latin dictionary: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=perseu s:text:1999.04.0059:entry=causor, my emphasis. 10. oxford categorizes this second sense as “rare–1.” the superscriptual negation here indicates that the citation of bailey’s festus (2nd ed., 1845) is the sole instance the editors could find of this usage. given the linguistic breadth and idiosyncracy (indeed, the “spasmodic” nature) of bailey’s literary production, it seems likely that this is a neologistic borrowing from the french sense. see “cause, v.2.” oed online (oxford: oxford university press, july 2018): www.oed.com/view/entry/29149. 11. “causerie,” in le trésor de la langue françcaise informatisé, www.cnrtl.fr/definition/causerie. 12. the english-language wikipedia entry for le constitutionnel notes that “sainte-beuve’s reputation as one of the most important french literary critics of the day rested on these columns, in which he guided the literary tastes of the populace.” see www.wikiwand.com/ en/le_constitutionnel 13. “causerie, n.” oed online (oxford university press, july 2018), www.oed.com/view/ entry/29164. all bar one of the examples listed keep the term in italics, including the most recent (a 1957 edition of the times), attesting to the ongoing recognition of it as a borrowing from the french. 14. “the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, 700; “subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien” in écrits, 826–7. 15. rebecca comay, “resistance and repetition: freud and hegel,” research in phenomenology 45.2 (2015): 237-266; 248. 16. these are lacan’s terms for the pre-linguistic cooing and gurgling that allows the infant to register for the first time the vibrations of the speaking being, the parlêtre, and which indeed induces and inducts them into that being, that subjectivity. 17. here we can register the lack, in english, of a reflexive verbal form, one of whose crucial conceptual functions in discourse is to allow for an ambiguity of subject and object. there are of course those who maintain that it was lacan, as subject, who freely chose to tear himself out of the fabric of various institutions, including those he founded. wanting to dodge the imperative to adjudicate, to “come down” on one side or the other of these often vicious debates, i choose simply to repeat my formulation in an apparently inverted form in order to note the possibility that some “cause” other than lacan was operative in ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 14 the foundation—and the dissolution—of l’école de la cause [note the rare capital letter—this the école shared with la cause perdu of “subversion du sujet…”] freudienne. 18. rebecca comay has theorized the unfreedom—the resistance—of repetition as central to the supposedly “liberatory” quality of the cure, in terms that highlight both the hegelian inheritance in this psychoanalytic insight, and the sense of causerie as anxious, even compulsive, repetition of speech-as-resistance: “above all resistance is the breakdown in language when the chain of associations comes to a halt, or never gets off the ground, when nothing comes to mind, when speech fails to spark, when despite or because of your best efforts the whole thing sputters and stalls and goes off the rails; or when, fleeing silence, you fill the air by telling stories or by concocting theories about language’s own inevitable failure… like a passenger on a train… you’re to report the changing mental scenery as it passes by, merely looking on, like hegel’s phenomenological observer… suspending judgment and leaving understanding and explanation to another (day, or person). ‘free’ association is not a matter of self-expression or catharsis; the point is not to alleviate tension, to discharge pressure, or to tap into an archaic stew of primary process ideation. in fact, the apparent spontaneity of so-called stream-of-consciousness can be yet another stalling tactic—a way of plugging the void with noise. the point of the “free” association method is not to achieve freedom in any immediate or obvious way, and certainly not in the sense of autonomy, freewill, or self-expression. it’s about suspending the official rules of language but only so as to allow the real constraints to reveal themselves in their unembellished tyranny. “resistance and repetition: freud and hegel,” 247–8, my emphases. 19. the necessity, perhaps, which derrida followed freud in naming “the drive.” see jacques derrida, “necessity is the drive,” umbr(a): a journal of the unconscious, #1 “on the drive” (1997), 165. 20. the contentious “short session,” after all, keeps open the potential for scansion and punctuation like rocks thrown mischievously, nachträglich, backward through the windows of time and memory… 21. “causerie,” wikipedia, www.wikiwand.com/en/causerie 22. “overture to this collection” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, 6; “ouverture de ce recueil” in écrits, 9. in articulating this principle, lacan also notes the performative proof in the causal pudding, reminding us that “this principle applied to its own enunciation”: while it derives from him (“the man [lacan] himself”), as the one who proposed it, via a return to freud, its “finest formulation” nonetheless arrived to him from (or, again, via) another, an other, “interlocuteur eminent.” 23. “psychoanalysis and its teaching” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, 383. 24. “overture to this collection,” 3–4. 25. hegel, the science of logic, 59. 26. “ziffel: i once read hegel’s book the great logic, when i was laid up with rheumatism and couldn’t move. it didn‘t do the pain much good, because i kept laughing. the book deals with the lives of ideas, those irresponsible things. it’s about how they fight each other with knives then sit down to dinner together as if nothing’s happened. they go in pairs, ideas: each one is married to its opposite. they sign contracts as a couple, take things to court as a couple, plan muggings and burglaries as a couple, but their marriage is hell! they argue about everything! we’ve talked of ‘order’ and ‘dis-order’—well, in hegel they ben hjorth: introduction s10 & 11 (2017-18): 15 are married. whatever order says, it’s contradicted by disorder. they can’t live without each other and they can’t live with each other.” bertolt brecht, “conversations in exile,” adapted by howard brenton, trans. david dollenmayer, theater 17. 2 (20 march 1986): 13. 27. hegel, phenomenology of spirit, trans. a. v. miller (oxford: oxford university press, 1977), §63. here i opt for a slightly modified version of miller’s translation, which preserves the triplicate repetition of the cognates meinung / meinen within hegel’s wendung. 28. lacan, “overture to this collection,” 4-5. 29. cassin in alain badiou and barbara cassin, il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel (paris: fayard, 2010) 82, cited in slavoj žižek, less than nothing: hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism (london & new york: verso, 2012) 59n48. 30. the conference program of “repetition/s: performance and philosophy in ljubljana” can be viewed here: www.issuu.com/znanstvenazalozbaff/docs/repetitions. 31. for various forms of intellectual, emotional and editorial fortitude over the almost two years of this edition’s gestation, i also need to thank helen goodman, geoff hjorth and the whole much-missed elefteriou-hjorth gang; dr. renae fomiatti (as ever), shifrah blustein, emma fajgenbaum, aaron orzech, fregmonto stokes, justin clemens, amanda holmes, salvatore martino, sarah freke, and tom clerehan; “i fantastici [tre] di toronto” of isabell dahms, marion bilodeau and natasha hay; the equally inimitable fan wu, daniel leblanc and alex kern; the best conference co-organizers nobody could have hoped for in bara kolenc, gregor moder and anna street; and the various faculty, staff and comrades-at-arms in the graduate communities in the department of philosophy at monash university, and at the centre for comparative literature at the university of toronto, who know who they are. most recently but also most profoundly, these volumes may never have seen the light of day had it not been for the presence, as well as some of the absences—all of them patient and hilarious and piercing and kind—of the singular francesco gagliardi, phdiva. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 4 (2011): 56-70 n a d i a s e l s m y t h , m i n d a n d m e t a p h o r on the relation of mythology and psychoanalysis 1. mythology and psychoanalysis: uncanny doubles i t may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. but does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?”1 these words, addressed to albert einstein,2 were written by sigmund freud in 1932, seven years before his death. in his new introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, published in the same year, the comparison with mythology pops up once more: “the theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. instincts are mythical entities magnificent in their indefiniteness”.3 these statements, made by freud near the end of his life, seem to be his final word on a problem that had occupied him at several instances of his career: the relationship of psychoanalysis and mythology. both fields have always shared a special connection and not only because the myths of oedipus and narcissus proved so useful to freudian theory.4 like literature and art, mythology was one of the first cultural fields to be explored by applied psychoanalysis. but what sets mythology apart from other fields is the fact that it in many ways re1. sigmund freud, collected papers, vol 5, ed. and trans. james strachey (london: hogarth press, 1950) 283. 2. it is no coincidence that the addressee here is einstein. as jean-paul valabrega points out in les mythes, conteurs de l’inconscient (paris: payot & rivages, 2001) 13 and 37, freud and einstein were kindred spirits in as far as both of their theories dealt with the relativity of (systems of) knowledge. 3. sigmund freud, the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, vol. 22, ed. and trans. james strachey (london: hogarth press, 1964) 95. 4. freud’s use of mythical stock characters has eagerly been copied by his followers. ewald rumpf, for example, managed to come up with a medea, phaeton, tantalos and niobe complex. see ewald rumpf, eltem kind-beziehungen in der griechischen mythologie (frankfurt am main: peter lang, 1985). sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 57 sembles psychoanalysis itself: both disciplines deal with the irrational, both work with stories, and both have to do with interpreting metaphorical language. when lionel trilling claimed that psychoanalysis was “a science of tropes, of metaphor and its variants,”5 he was comparing psychoanalysis to the science of giambattista vico, the founding father of the modern study of myth. it is because of these resemblances that psychoanalysis’s dialogue with mythology has often resulted in a kind of self-exploration, in psychoanalysis rethinking its own project. with this paper i aim to retrace their shared trajectory and to point out why and how psychoanalysis can still be of great use to the study of mythology. this, however, also implies a reflection on psychoanalysis’s status as a system of knowledge. two models will present themselves: a) psychoanalytic theory as an allegorical interpretation of myth, functioning as a master discourse, and b) psychoanalysis as a discourse analogical to mythology, operating on the same level. in a time where freud’s statement is so often echoed as a reproach, it may be worth reconsidering psychoanalysis’s relatedness to myth as something to embrace. 2. just “another metaphorical language”? freud and jung on myth first, the short history of freud’s own dealings with mythology.6 in a letter to wilhelm fliess, dated december 1897, freud tries out a personal theory on the matter for the first time : “can you imagine what “endopsychic myths” are? the latest product of my mental labor. the dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond.”7 myths, in other words, are the psyche’s symbolic renderings of its own working and can be translated as such by the analyst. when in 1900 freud gives his famous analysis of the oedipus-myth in the interpretation of dreams, he specifies why this projection takes place: myth gives vent to the repressed longings and fears of humankind. we revel in oedipus’s crimes, because they represent our own unconscious desires, and we feel relief when he is punished, because this alleviates our own feelings of guilt. in creative writers and day-dreaming (1907) he once more describes myths as “the distorted 5. lionel trilling, “freud and literature”, in lionel trilling ed., the liberal imagination (london, heinemann, 1964) 34-57 (52-53). 6. for a more elaborate survey, see dan merkur, psychoanalytic approaches to myth. freud and the freudians (new york & london: routledge, 2005); graziella nicolaïdis and nicolas nicolaïdis, mythologie grecque et psychanalyse (paris: delachaux & niestlé, 1994); christine downing, “sigmund freud and the greek mythological tradition,” journal of the american academy of religion, 43 (1975): 3-14. a select bibliography on the jungian approach would include robert segal ed., jung on mythology (princeton: princeton university press, 1998) and michael vannoy adams, the mythological unconscious (new york & london: other press/karnac, 2001). 7. sigmund freud, the complete letters of sigmund freud to wilhelm fliess 1887-1904, ed. and trans. jeffrey mousaieff masson (cambridge, ma, and london: belknap press of harvard university press, 1985) 286. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 58 vestiges of the wish fantasies of whole nations — the age-long dreams of young humanity.”8 it has to be said, of course, that it was not freud’s main intention to develop a psychoanalytic theory of mythology. on the few occasions he really gives an elaborate interpretation of myth,9 he is chiefly concerned with illustrating his theories.10 for many of his followers (abraham, rank, róheim,…), however, the interpretation of myths did become an end in itself. and they had been given a very clear example of how it had to be done: the mythic imagery, that was assumed to metaphorically represent psychological processes, had to be converted into the familiar language of freudian theory. some of these analyses — rank’s der mythos von der geburt des helden (1922), for example — are still very much worth reading. but the freudian analyses of myth that are mostly remembered nowadays are unfortunately the caricatures, in which flying is always a metaphor for sex, aggression is always oedipal, and trees or spears are bound to represent phalluses. the problem with these readings, though, is not the focus on sex: greek myths often explicitly deal with “freudian” themes such as castration, incest and parricide, and even many interpretations that may seem far-fetched at first can actually be underpinned with textual and archaeological evidence — freud’s link between medusa’s head and female genitalia, for instance. the real problem is the one-sidedness of these interpretations. many of freud’s epigones have followed his example in using myth merely as an excuse to once more illustrate the freudian tenets. basically, this meant that nothing new could be learned from mythology. this approach on the contrary consisted in transposing the exotic imagery of myth into the safe register of an already familiar truth. the first person to notice this missed opportunity was freud’s would-be heir carl gustav jung, who soon developed a special interest in mythology. “it has become quite clear to me,” he writes to freud in 1909, “that we shall not solve the secrets of neurosis and psychosis without mythology and the history of civilisation.”11 as kris pint argues in this same issue, jung’s divergent attitude towards mythology would finally drive both men apart. at first, freud was happy to encourage jung to dabble in mythology, as long as the final aim would be to “plant the flag of libido 8. sigmund freud, collected papers, vol 4, ed. and trans. james strachey (london: hogarth press, 1925) 182. 9. besides from his analysis of the oedipus myth, the only elaborate cases from greek mythology are the myth of perseus and medusa, and the myth of prometheus. for a discussion, see eric csapo, theories of mythology (malden, ma: blackwell, 2007) 91-131. 10. freud of course also used greek mythology to prop up the status of psychoanalysis. he was well aware of the fact that references to antiquity would reflect prestige on his new discipline. see richard armstrong, a compulsion for antiquity. freud and the ancient world (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2005). 11. sigmund freud and carl gustav jung, the freud/jung letters. the correspondence between sigmund freud and c.g. jung, ed. william mcguire, trans. ralph manheim and richard francis carrington hull (princeton: princeton university press, 1974) 279. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 59 and repression in that field and return as a victorious conqueror to our medical motherland.” (the freud/jung letters, 213) jung, however, would become more and more inclined to reverse the manifest hierarchy that is implied by freud’s exhortation. instead of seeing psychoanalysis as the one and ultimate key to the question of mythology, jung came to see psychoanalysis as the youngest branch of the old mythological tree, as just one more way of telling stories about the images that had occupied humanity. with his theory of the archetypes, he adopted freud’s idea that mythical imagery should be approached as a kind of rebus: “an archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.” 12 but he explicitly distanced himself from the idea that psychoanalysis could provide a metalanguage for mythology, that the archetypal metaphors could be reduced to one true referent: [t]here is no longer any question whether a myth refers to the sun or the moon, the father or the mother, sexuality or fire or water. all it does is to circumscribe and give an approximate description of an unconscious core of meaning. […] not for a moment dare we to succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language (indeed, language itself is only an image). the most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and to give it a modern dress. (jung 90 and 94, italics in original) freud could not forgive this defection, which he saw as a betrayal of his theories of psychosexuality; he interpreted jung’s attitude as yielding to repression.13 for jung, however, it was freudian theory itself that was repressive in its unilateral approach. after they went their separate ways, the history of their controversy on myth would have an ironic ending. freud, as we have seen, would in his later years become more and more sympathetic to the idea that psychoanalysis itself was on a par with mythology. this is not only made clear by the statements mentioned above, but also by the overtly mythic character of some of his (later) writings, such as totem and taboo (1913) and moses and monotheism (1937). apparently, freud gradually came to accept that at certain liminal points, the quest for knowledge could not but mitigate its demands, and that a self-conscious fiction, a myth, was sometimes as close as one could get to the truth. with the same resignation, freud in 1937 accepted the concept of “construction”: the idea that when a psychoanalyst was not able to break down infantile amnesia, he was allowed to create a fiction, a mere hypothesis about the patient’s past that would hopefully be accepted as the truth.14 12. carl gustav jung, “the psychology of the child archetype,” in carl gustav jung and károly kerényi, jung and kerenyi. the science of mythology, trans. richard francis carrington hull (london and new york: routledge, 2002) 83-118 (90). 13. on freud’s sensitiveness at this point, see merkur 92. 14. on freud’s acceptance of the uses of myth, see hans blumenberg, work on myth, trans. robert wallace (cambridge, mass.: mit press, 1990) 57 and 94. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 60 the jungian school, on the other hand, has tended to evolve towards the kind of restrictive dogmatism for which jung had originally reproached freud. as robert segal has pointed out, jung’s warnings about interpreting the archetypes were not only directed against the freudian approach, but in the first place against would-be definitive jungian interpretations of myth.15 and indeed, jungian psychoanalysis — jung himself included— has not always escaped the seduction of the master discourse. joseph campbell’s jungian inspired writings are a case in point. following jung’s example, he praises myth as a boundless matrix of signification: “it would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”16 but what he actually does with his concept of the “monomyth”, quite literally contradicts this idea of myth as an inexhaustible source of new meanings: all myths can actually be reduced to one and the same story of individuation, a story told by campbell himself. his exuberant praise of myth is thus conveniently reflected back to him. 3. an entangled history: the allegorical approach to further understand what was at stake in these first psychoanalytic approaches to myth, it is necessary to situate them in the history of myth study itself; it then becomes apparent how much freud’s theory on myth was a child of its time. although “mythology” is often mistakenly treated as a universal and timeless category, the concept as we use it today is actually, like psychoanalysis, a creation of the nineteenth century. in l’invention de la mythologie (1981), marcel detienne describes the ideological context that gave birth to this field of research.17 for ages, the stories of the greek gods and heroes had simply been called fabulae, “fables”, and did not arouse any special intellectual curiosity. the old term mythos only came to denote a special category when these same stories started to pose a problem.18 in the beginning of the nineteenth century, europe had for the first time come to systematically compare the roots of its own culture — more particularly, the legacy of antiquity 15. robert segal, theorizing about myth (amherst: university of massachusetts press, 1999) 71. 16. joseph campbell, the hero with a thousand faces (princeton: princeton university press, 1968 [1949]) 3. 17. marcel detienne, l’invention de la mythologie (paris: gallimard, 1981). 18. detienne of course acknowledges that mythos and logos were already used as oppositional terms in ancient greece, albeit unsystematically. but he stresses that “myth” for the greeks never denoted a special category or genre. the opposition was primarily used by the philosophers and historiographers of the fifth and fourth century, who started to use “myth” as a pejorative term for the very heterogeneous discourses of the oral tradition against which they wished to oppose their newly rising discourses. in this context, the word mythos was simply used as a “mot-geste, toujours mobilisable, disponible pour chaque procédure d’exclusion.” (detienne, 104) see also bruce lincoln, theorizing myth. narrative, ideology, and scholarship (chicago: university of chicago press, 1999) 43. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 61 — to the so-called “savage” cultures. due to the successes of comparative linguistics, it had suddenly become painfully apparent that the stories of the greeks in many ways resembled the “barbaric”, “irrational” and “immoral” imagination of the “inferior” races. with the words of max müller, the greek “would relate of their gods what would make the most savage of the red indians creep and shudder.”19 mythos became the opposite of logos, of the moral and intellectual standard the west identified itself with. between 1850 and 1890, new academic chairs of mythology were established throughout europe and the explicit purpose of this new field of research was to explain away this stain of irrationality (detienne, 16). andrew lang, for example, defines mythology as “the quest for an historical condition of the human intellect to which the element in myths, regarded by us as irrational, shall seem rational enough.” 20 so the study of mythology— not unlike psychoanalysis— was called into being by the emergence of the other in the self. and just as with psychoanalysis, its original project was to force back this unwelcome intrusion: from id to ego, from mythos to logos. both disciplines are also alike in the fact that they have at some point left this path and, ironically, have led to theorisation of why the irrational can never fully be overcome. nineteenth-century mythologists, however, still had high hopes that myth could be explained away as an aberration of the primitive mind. various schools all claimed to have the one key by which all myths could be interpreted: for max müller, all myths were distorted forms of solar and lunar theories; for edward tylor mythology was primitive science, talking of natural phenomena in anthropomorphic terms; for james frazer, all of myth’s metaphors referred to the cycle of nature and agriculture. what all these explanations have in common is that they basically come down to an allegoric interpretation. myth’s enigmatic language supposedly hides a deeper meaning that can be uncovered if only its symbols are correctly interpreted. freudian “theory of myth” of course perfectly fits this model. and its problems and limitations are also those of the other nineteenthcentury theories of myth. not exactly wrong, the least one can say is that they were reductive and unilateral. the very multiplicity of theories illustrates how myth’s polysemy easily escapes every single attempt to once and for all explain its meaning. the fact that so many scholars nevertheless stubbornly kept looking for the one true key, the one true meaning behind the mythical metaphor, has everything to do with the struggle between self and other, the battle for control that is always part of the mechanism of allegory. the allegorical tradition reaches back to antiquity itself, and even then allegory was a weapon in a discursive battle. when in the sixth century the old religious tradition with its amoral and anthropomorphic divinities became unacceptable to the rising discourse of the “ionic enlightenment”, allegory (in greek huponoia, “to 19. f. max müller, lectures on the science of language (london: longmans, green and co, 1868) 385. 20. andrew lang, myth, ritual and religion, vol. 1 (guernsey: the guernsey press, 1995 [1913]) 8. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 62 understand what is underneath”) arose as a way of neutralising the scandalous elements of the stories by explaining them symbolically as cosmological, psychological or philosophical messages.21 in the same way, christianity would later on recuperate the pagan myths by interpreting them as symbolic prefigurations of the christian doctrine; odysseus tied to the mast, sailing away from the sirens, could only refer to christ on the cross and his victory over all worldly seductions. in all these cases, allegory follows the same logic: a discourse that is threatening by its heterogeneity is incorporated back into the discourse of the interpreter and by this a hierarchy is established. the allegory propagates its own master discourse as the one truth that is always hidden under a multiformity of semblance. with the words of laurence coupe: “the narrative is not allowed to exceed the argument, the medium is not allowed to exceed the message. allegory is domesticated myth.”22 4. metaphors groping for meaning: cassirer and blumenberg both the study of mythology and psychoanalysis have at a certain point outgrown the allegorical model, simply because the medium proved too recalcitrant. just like freud’s hysterics, myth seems to ply itself to the master discourse of theory up to a certain point where it breaks free from whatever allegorical interpretation theory had to offer. the “personifications” in greek mythology are a fine example. zeus and hera, for instance, are obviously weather gods, which to a certain point confirms the ancient and early modern meteorological allegories of the olympic pantheon. but their marriage was also a paradigm for the battle of the sexes as well as a symbol of kingly authority. aphrodite, on the one hand, is obviously a personification of love and desire — her name was commonly used by the greek to metaphorically refer to the pleasures of love and sex. but on the other hand she is also an anthropomorphic character that talks, loves, cries, bleeds… so when mythology tells us that it was aphrodite who helped paris to abduct helen, it is implied that helen simply fell in love with him and followed her own desires. on the other hand, the mythical imagery of the story at the same time problematizes her personal choice. if aphrodite is helen’s own desire, this desire is still depicted as an external force with godlike power, a power that cannot possibly be resisted. what it comes down to is that the mythical metaphor always only goes halfway in suggesting a certain meaning and that this vagueness and ambiguity is as much part of myth’s functioning as the various meanings that present themselves. it is pointless to ask whether the greeks really “believed” that zeus was the ruler of the skies, or to what extent they read their own myths symbolically: the exact boundary between the literal and the symbolic, the one meaning and the other, was always conditional, always under negotiation. to elaborate upon the example 21. on the allegoric tradition in antiquity, see luc brisson, how philosophers saved myths. allegorical interpretation and classical mythology, trans. catherine tihanyi (chicago: university of chicago press, 2004). 22. laurence coupe, myth (london: routledge, 1997) 105. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 63 of helen: the ambivalent and provisional character of the mythic imagery allows for an expression of an ambivalence that is part of reality itself, namely the fact that we are always free and externally determined at the same time. myth allows for an exploration of this ambivalence, and this is exactly what is lost in allegorical interpretation. the question posed by myth is reduced to a positive truth. by saying it all, allegory says too little. allegory sees myth as a kind of secondary language, always subservient to the true message hidden underneath. the alternative is to read myth as a language in its own right and this is exactly what many twentieth-century theorists on myth have attempted. in the context of myth’s relation to psychoanalysis, ernst cassirer is an example worth mentioning. cassirer has been one of the first theorists to grant myth its own legitimacy. up until then, myth had mostly been seen as an aberration of the mind, as the absolute opposite of logos. cassirer, however, claimed that the stage of logos could only have been achieved through the preliminary work of mythos. in his the philosophy of symbolic forms (1923-1929), he describes how myth provided man with his first means of structuring the world. as a neo-kantian, cassirer believed that reality could never be experienced as such; to be processed by the human mind, it always had to be mediated by what he called “symbolic forms”. mythos was the most primeval of symbolic forms; it not only structured the world, but it structured the self as well: [a] glance at the development of the various symbolic forms shows us that their essential achievement is not that they copy the outward world in the inward world or that they simply project a finished inner world outward, but rather that the two factors of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ of ‘i’ and ‘reality’ are determined and delimited from one another only in these symbolic forms and through their mediation. if each of these forms embraces a spiritual coming-to-grips of the i with reality, it does not imply that the two, the i and reality, are to be taken as given quantities, as finished, self-enclosed halves of being, which are only subsequently composed into a whole. on the contrary, the crucial achievement of every symbolic form lies precisely in the fact that it does not have the limit between i and reality as pre-existent and established for all time but i must itself create this limit—and that each fundamental form creates it in a different way.23 with numerous mythological examples, cassirer illustrates how the line between inside and outside is drawn differently in different mythologies, and how the self is thus differently constructed— created, even. this means that mythical imagery can have no further allegorical explanation: mythology does not refer to any external reality, because it itself constructs reality. cassirer would thus agree with jung that psychoanalysis, when it interprets certain mythical images in its own 23. ernst cassirer, the philosophy of symbolic forms. volume ii: mythical thought, trans. ralph manheim (new haven and london: yale university press, 1977 [1955]) 155-174 (156). sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 64 terms, can only give “more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language”. jung’s statement that “language itself is only an image” is actually cassirer’s theory in a nutshell. cassirer, however, is more cautious in talking of something like an impenetrable “unconscious core of meaning,” an expression by which jung leaves the door open for an esoteric essentialism. the metaphor of myth cannot have a real referent, not even an unutterable one. cassirer did, however, believe in a kind of rise from mythos to logos. because myth constantly provokes new “translations”, its language is optimized up until the point that it can almost perfectly deal with the world; this is what we call rational thinking. hans blumenberg, a contemporary philosopher and myth theorist, has taken cassirer’s theory one step further. for him, mythos can never fully dissolve into logos, because man’s symbolic mediation of the universe always implies a certain imperfection. language can never fully mirror reality— in fact, it serves to keep the overwhelming complexity of reality at bay. this is why even the most scientific language will always to a certain extent keep a mythic, metaphorical character: just as a metaphor always partially resembles its referent but at the same time adds a deforming element, language always both reflects and deforms. every worldview ultimately rests on metaphor, but the inherent imperfection of each metaphor will soon or later force us to reconsider and adapt our imagery. the history of thought, for blumenberg, is therefore the history of the grafting of one metaphor upon another. blumenberg borrows an image from neurath, who compares language to a holed ship at full sea: “we are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the high seas, without ever being able to take it apart in a dock and reconstruct it out of the best parts.”24 every new organisation of our symbolic material inevitably brings with it its own problems, but the constant shifting keeps the ship afloat despite of its incurable flaws. this is why myth, for blumenberg, is never a stable product but always an ongoing process, a constant, tentative groping for significance. there is no “myth” as such, there is only “work on myth”. (blumenberg, 1990) within this context, allegory receives a new function. although it can no longer take the place of a master discourse, it can play its part in the ongoing “work on myth” by providing new analogies, new translations that may in some ways be more effective than the old ones. 5. new forms of impossibility: lacan and lévi-strauss the theories of cassirer and blumenberg are a very suitable prelude to the last psychoanalytic approach to myth i would like to discuss here, that of jacques lacan. the obvious parallels between his work and that of cassirer and blumenberg once again illustrate the affinity between the project of psychoanalysis and the study of mythology. like cassirer, lacan has built his theory around the idea that language (the symbolic) constructs both reality and the self by separating the two. and like blumenberg, he stresses the inescapable and agonizing imperfection of language, 24. hans blumenberg, shipwreck with spectator. paradigm of a metaphor for existence, trans. robert wallace (cambridge, mass. & london: mit press, 1997 [1979]) 76-77. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 65 and the impossibility of it ever coinciding with the real. for lacan, however, the emphasis lies on the fact that this lack in the symbolic also entails a structural rupture in the subject. for him, the damaged ship that can never be fully repaired is both language and the subject itself. 25 while freud and jung figure in almost any general introduction to the theory of myth, lacan is hardly ever mentioned. nevertheless, he showed an equally great interest in the subject: he constantly refers to greek mythology to illustrate his theories and concepts.26 but what is more important: lacan’s psychoanalytic theories were fundamentally inspired and shaped by the structuralist myth theory of claude lévi-strauss—a fact that is thoroughly documented by marcos zafiropoulos.27 lévi-strauss himself compares in his article “l’efficacité symbolique”28 (1949), often quoted by lacan, the mythical healing method of the shaman to the workings of psychoanalysis. the curious effectiveness of the shaman’s mythical narratives has led lévi-straus to the conclusion that the illness was of the same symbolic nature as the cure: if symbols and stories could suffice to heal a patient, this meant that the illness had been a matter of symbols and stories in the first place.29 he suggested that the unconscious should therefore be seen as an organ that simply imposed structural laws upon the pulsions, and also compared it to a kind of individual lexicon. lacan’s pivotal idea of the unconscious as the “discourse of the other” and as “structured like a language” was thus handed to him by lévi-strauss. (zafiropoulos, 60-61) but there were other ways in which lévi-strauss “mythanalyse” functioned as an example. the very core of lévi-strauss’s approach was his refusal to “interpret” myth in the traditional, sc. allegorical way: while the allegorical approach departed from the idea that an underlying meaning had shaped the form of myth, the 25. for a comparison of blumenberg’s and lacan’s views on metaphoric language, see anselm haverkamp, metapher. die ästhetik in der rhetorik: bilanz eines exemplarischen begriffs (münchen: wilhelm fink, 2007). 26. to give a few examples of myths he discusses: actaeon (s4, s13), amphitryo (s2, s8), the dynastic battle between uranus, cronus and jupiter (s4, s22), pan and syrinx (s4), philomela and procne (although he confuses them with philemon and baucis) (s4), eros and psyche (s4), daphne (s6, s8), tiresias (s10, s13, s15, s19), niobe (s10), orpheus (s11), narcissus (s12), the cyclops (s12), the sirens (s24), and of course the omnipresent oedipus. the story of antigone serves as leitmotiv in l’éthique de la psychanalyse (1986), and the figure of eros as it is discussed in plato’s symposium plays a leading role in le transfert (1991a). 27. marcos zafiropoulos, lacan et lévi-strauss ou le retour à freud (1951-1957) (paris: presses universitaires de france, 2003). 28. claude lévi-strauss, “l’efficacité symbolique,’’ revue d’histoire des religions, 135.1 (1949): 5-27. 29. the works of tobie nathan (e.g. du commerce avec les diables (paris: le seuil/les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2004); psychanalyse païenne (paris: dunod, 1988)) and michael taussig (e.g. shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: a study in terror and healing (chicago: university of chicago press, 1987)) exemplify the ongoing cross-fertilization of psychoanalysis and anthropology. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 66 structuralist approach asserted that it was the form, the structure that determined myth’s signifying function. as zafiropoulos reminds us, it was lévi-strauss, and not lacan, who converted the saussurian algorithm s/s into s/s (zafiropoulos 189). “the symbols are more real than what they symbolize, the signifier precedes and determines the signified,” lévi-strauss proclaims.30 lacan follows him: “it is the world of words that creates the world of things.”31 the way lévi-strauss approaches myth provides lacan with a model to approach the stories of his analysands: for lévi-strauss, myth is a structured system of signifiers that functioned to mediated irresolvable cultural oppositions. it all but proclaims a positive truth; on the contrary, it signals a permanent conflict within the cultural texture, mostly dealing with problems like birth, death and sexuality. myth cannot resolve this conflict, but it can provide a certain symbolic grip on the problem by comparing one irresolvable opposition to another one: “the impossibility of putting in connection groups of relations is surmounted […] by the affirmation that two contradictory relations between them are identical to the extent where each one is, as the other, contradictory with itself.”32 darian leader puts it in a formula: “myth takes an initial contradiction between a and b and shows that a further contradiction between c and d is contradictory in a similar way”33 lacan sees the resemblance with the histories of individual neurotics: in the same way as myth, their stories revolve around an initial contradiction that cannot be solved. a simultaneous desire for and fear of the mother, for example, that repeats itself in every new relationship with a woman. in itself, this problem would not seem insurmountable, were it not that it ultimately reflects a more fundamental predicament: the split nature of the subject. though the neurotic may suffer deeply from the problem he claims he wants to get rid of, he will at the same time cling to it, and stage it time and again because this phantasmatic scenario anchors his very subjectivity. this is why lacan can no longer, like the early freud, believe that it suffices to simply unearth some kind of hidden truth in the patient’s discourse. the problem cannot be solved, because it is the subject itself. but just as with lévistrauss myth, a certain ‘mediation’ of the problem can be achieved by telling the story over and over again, by reshuffling and reorganising its elements. lacan integrates lévi-strauss’s model of mythanalysis into his own writings on psychoanalysis for the first time in his paper “le mythe individuel du névrosé ou poésie et vérité dans la névrose.” (1953, “the individual myth of the neurotic or poetry and truth in neurosis”)34 with two examples, freud’s clinical case of the rat man and a biographical anecdote on goethe, he illustrates how a phantasmatic 30 lévi-strauss, quoted in zafiropoulos, 189. my trans. 31. jacques lacan, écrits (paris: seuil, 1966) 276. my trans. 32. claude lévi-strauss, anthropologie structurale (paris: plon, 1958) 239. my trans. 33. darian leader, “lacan’s myths,” in jean-michel rabaté ed., the cambridge companion to lacan (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006) 35-49 (p. 39). 34 jacques lacan, “le mythe individuel du névrosé ou ‘poésie et vérité’,’’ ornicar? 17-18 (1979): 289-307. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 67 scenario—the ‘individual myth’—can be repeated in different forms to cope with an original, mythical problem. the rat man, for example, feels neurotically compelled to put up a complex and absurd scenario in which he has to pay off a certain debt through all kinds of unnecessary intermediaries. freud had already connected this strange behaviour to two stories from the rat man’s personal prehistory: his father had married his mother because of her wealth, and this same father had once been saved by a friend from a gambling debt, but had not been able to repay his benefactor. lacan points out, using lévi-strauss’s model, how the rat man’s scenario serves to bring into relation these two unthinkable debts. in 1956 lacan once again uses this kind of analysis on the case study of little hans and shows how hans in the same way symbolically structures his world by developing complex forms of mythic activity: dreams, fantasies, phobia… in each of these symbolic creations, the original elements of his family situation are reshuffled and reconfigured, and this ultimately brings about a certain grip on the problem. lacan explains the functioning of this mythical activity as follows: [t]his foundational character of the mythical development […] ultimately consists of facing an impossible situation through the successive articulation of all the forms of the impossibility of the solution. in this sense, mythic creation responds to a question. it runs through the complete circle of what presents itself at the same time as a possible opening and as an opening that is impossible to take. the circuit thus accomplished, something is realized, which means that the subject has put itself on the level of the question. 35 lacan’s approach obviously differs widely from the hermeneutic method freud started out with. lacan, it is true, has not fully abandoned the project of (allegorical) interpretation. for him just as for freud, the neurotic problems of hans and the rat man are to be traced back to issues concerning the father and the mother, and the problem of sexuality. but the difference lies in the fact that lacan does not expect any healing from the power of this truth. on the contrary, what allows hans and the rat man to surmount their problems is the successive translation of the original problem into ever new metaphors, all equally problematic and imperfect, that repeat the original conflict in a slightly different configuration. up to a certain extent, we could even say that lacan treats his own psychoanalytic reading as one of the many possible metaphors. of course, there is the firm belief that the neurotic “myths” of hans and the rat man genealogically originated in a certain familial situation. but what lacan is saying is that we can only grasp the meaning of this familial situation retroactively by looking at the metaphors in which the original problem finds its expression. the actual significance of words like “father”, “mother” and “sexuality” is only actualised in these mythic articulations. and as there was no symbolisation before these primary articulations, every other wording of what came before will be equally “mythical” and deforming. 35. jacques lacan, le séminaire, livre iv: la relation d’objet (1956-1957), ed. jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 1994) 330. my trans. sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 68 it is therefore no coincidence that lacan started his paper on the neurotic’s individual myth by a reflection on the inevitably “mythical” status of psychoanalysis itself. psychoanalysis, proclaims lacan, … always implies at the heart of itself the emergence of a truth that cannot be spoken, because what constitutes it is the spoken word (parole) itself, and one ought in a way to speak the spoken word itself, which is to put it properly that which cannot be said as spoken word as such. […] [t]his is why there is at the heart of the analytic experience something which is properly speaking a myth. […] the spoken word cannot seize itself, nor seize the movement of access to the truth, as an objective truth. it cannot but express it and this in a mythic way.36 what lacan is saying comes down to what neurath expresses with his metaphor of the ship: we cannot step out of language. both psychoanalysis and mythology explore the point where language, where thinking is founded (together with the subject). but in describing these foundations, they cannot but make use of the very instrument they are trying to describe. at this point, they cannot but be aware of the fact that the models they use are no more than tentative metaphors, “mythical” images. if psychoanalysis can be called a mythology, this does not have to mean that it is more mythical than any other discipline. what it does mean is that it operates at the point where every language is confronted with its own inevitably metaphorical character. 6. applied psychoanalysis, applied mythology lacan is a fine example of how psychoanalysis can be inspired by the study of mythology: because of their kindred projects they can learn from each other. but what about the possibilities of applying psychoanalysis to the study of myth? it is clear that the old allegorical model, in which myth was reduced to merely an illustration of the psychoanalytic truth, is no longer an option. but the ‘analogical’ model, in which both discourses are treated as overlapping metaphorical fields, can definitely still offer wonderful perspectives. to conclude, an example: c. fred alford’s the psychoanalytic theory of greek tragedy (1994)37 starts out from a rhetorical question: “what if the insights into the human psyche contained in greek tragedy were somehow more profound than the psychoanalytic theories often used to explain them? the answer, of course, is that we should never know this, as our theories would reduce these insights to the terms of psychoanalytic theory.” (alford ix) he acknowledges that every kind of interpretation involves a certain translation into another register, and that translation is always in some way a violation of the 36. le mythe individuel, 291-292 (my trans. and italics). 37. c. fred alford, the psychoanalytic theory of greek tragedy (new haven: yale university press, 1994). sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 69 original meaning. but, as he claims, some translations are more violent and blunt than other. he reproaches psychoanalysis its lack of sophistication: [t]heir studies are overly reductive not because they impose categories, for they must, but because they impose the wrong categories—categories insufficiently rich and profound to capture the great themes of the tragic poets. their readings […] reduce something important to something less important. to correct this it is neither necessary nor possible to go to the “texts themselves.” rather, we must find better psychoanalytic categories. (alford 5) “finding better categories” also implies being prepared to acknowledge the differences. alford makes it clear that tragedy itself had a “fairly consistent perspective on issues which we today call psychoanalytic”, though it sometimes does not concur with any modern psychoanalytic theory. but it is exactly at these points that psychoanalysis can enrich itself. alford for example points out how the mythic imagery of the tragic poets expresses some insights that we now think of as very progressive. the lacanian “otherness of desire”, for instance: many tragedies give their very own expression of this problem by using an explicitly contradictory mythical imagery. clytaemnestra, for example, self-consciously claims full responsibility for the murder of her husband and at the same time depicts herself as the instrument of an alastor, a divine spirit of vengeance. phaedra is overcome by desire by the power of aphrodite but at the same time she is held personally accountable for her disastrous choices. and oedipus’s fate is at the same time determined by his character and by his daemon. the only real difference with the postmodern view on the subject, as alford states, was the fact that the greeks were not faced with the “sovereignty of the subject” in the first place. “the tragic poets did not need to take the subject apart, as they never assumed that any sane person might believe man to be an autonomous.” (alford 23) ironically, psychological readings would traditionally have called instances like the daemon or alastor “external projections”, while we could now say that exactly their ambiguous positioning on the cusp of inside and outside is what makes them phenomenologically accurate. the very ambivalence and fragmentation of the mythic imagery, that was traditionally seen as a trait of a primitive and undeveloped spirit, now seems particularly apt for the problem it wants to express. ultimately the dialogue alford sets up between greek tragedy and different psychoanalytic currents develops into a rich and personal reflection on the problem of autonomy. surprisingly enough, studies like alford’s are still scarce. at this point, psychoanalysis seems reluctant to once more engage in the study of mythology, maybe because it is too scared to repeat the mistakes of the past. vice versa, scholars of myth often look at psychoanalysis as a historically important approach that nowadays however is a spent force.38 nevertheless, works like these show how 38. this tendency is more or less common to classical studies as a whole. although psychoanalysis certainly is still applied for the reading of classical texts (e.g. paul allen sels: myth, mind and metaphor s4 (2011): 70 the concept of the lacanian/lévi-straussian “mythanalysis” could also provide a paradigm for the relation of both disciplines: as different, analogous metaphors circling around the same impossibility. as lacan stresses, the ultimate expression of the problem can never be given, nevertheless there is a freedom to be found in the continuous creative reformulation of the problem. this is what both mythology and psychoanalysis still have to offer to each other. miller, subjecting verses: latin love elegy and the emergence of the real (princeton: princeton university press, 2004), michaela janan, the politics of desire: propertius iv (berkeley: university of california press, 2001), james porter and marc buchan eds., before subjectivity? lacan and the classics. helios, 31.1-2 (2004)), it remains a peripheral phenomenon that is regarded with suspicion. ellen oliensis gives a good description of this uneasy alliance between psychoanalysis and contemporary classical studies in the introduction to freud’s rome. psychoanalysis and latin poetry (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2009), in which she provokingly and wittily defends the old-fashioned freudian reading. much more generally accepted than these active applications of psychoanalytic theory are studies that chiefly turn to psychoanalysis to historically map its relation with antiquity, such as armstrong’s a compulsion for antiquity, rachel bowlby’s freudian mythologies. greek tragedy and modern identities (oxford: oxford university press, 2007), or cathy gere’s chapter on freud in knossos and the prophets of modernism (chicago: university of chicago press, 2009) 141-176. the historicizing tendency of such works is telling for status of psychoanalysis in classical studies as something that mostly belongs to the past. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 22-38 s a m o t o m š i č l a u g h t e r a n d c a p i t a l i s m i n this time of crisis, interest in marx’s economic thought has once again found its way to the core of international political-economic debates. only a good decade ago, many voices claimed this figure’s attempts to think the capitalist mode of production no longer sufficed to explain our financialised technocapitalist societies, but he has now made a triumphal comeback from the annals of political philosophy. in the same move, another old alliance that had vanished from the political agendas, freudo-marxism, has now re-emerged, reformulated through its lacanian developments. marx and freud, the critique of political economy and psychoanalysis (one could also write, the critique of libidinal economy) are no longer treated as ways of thinking that belong to some tamed “cultural heritage” (which is to claim that they do not need to be taken seriously). instead, they are resuming their roles as critical and radical voices, addressing the question, in all its necessity and complexity, of how to break out of capitalist structures. the official transcription of lacan’s seminar d’un autre à l’autre, which contains his most direct contribution to the critique of political economy, was published in 2006, only a little more than a year before the outbreak of yet another fundamental crisis of capitalism. the seminar in question, too, was a crisis seminar, held in the turbulent moment of 1968-69, directly after the student and workers’ protests, which had reached their well-known climax in may 68. yet lacan’s seminar contains more than a confrontation with the political events of its time. it also performs a widereaching reorientation of the critical project known under the slogan of the “return to freud.” in this reorientation, which, it is true, stretches back to lacan’s “excommunication” from the international psychoanalytic association, marx slowly replaced the authority of ferdinand de saussure, and consequently, the political implications of the theory of the signifier prevailed over the epistemological value of structural linguistics. put differently, the science of value supplemented the science of signs, and the intricacies of discursive production1 became the main preoccupation of lacan’s thought. 1. in its double aspect, which comprises production of subjectivity and production of enjoyment. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 23 despite being openly reserved toward the revolutionary slogans or the proclaimed goals of the worker-student alliance, lacan sided with the movements by determining the sources of the structural opposition to the social rebellion. the theory of discourses, developed in the aftermath of may 68, could therefore be read both as lacan’s theory of crisis as well as his theory of revolution. its pivotal point is the link between structure and instability. lacan strives to think the real consequences of discursive logic by examining the contradictions, dynamics and impossibilities inherent in every structural order. it is within this perspective that his notorious response to the revolutionary students and critiques of structuralism should be read: “… if the may events demonstrate anything, then they demonstrate precisely the descent of structures into the street.”2 “structure i[n] the street” intertwines the space of discursive relations with the site of political action, which, according to the agents of may 68, escapes the determinism of structural laws. lacan’s formulation, on the other hand, argues that events, be they social or subjective, political or traumatic, are realisations of structure; they are above all logical events, an assertion that does not simply suggest that they are overdetermined by a set of rigid relations. lacan persistently argued against the dichotomy of structure and event, because this opposition depends on an oversimplified conception of both terms, a double misunderstanding. just as structure is no stable and invariable compendium of necessary relations, event is no pure and mystic “outdoors,” which would intervene out of the blue in order to bring about a sudden transformation. for psychoanalysis, there is some kind of event-character pertaining to structures as such, and one can thematise the emergence of events only by conceptually linking structure and instability. lacan’s theory of discourses thus pushes structuralism toward the logic of instability, whether this instability is called crisis, revolution or event. what matters is that all these cases necessitate a more sophisticated and critical notion of structure. consequently, this reorientation brings about a fundamental reinvention of structuralism, which now begins to designate a science of the real,3 a science whose privileged epistemic object is precisely instability. in this framework lacan introduced and deployed his controversial thesis that there was a wide-reaching homology between marx’s deduction of surplus-value and freud’s attempts to theorise the production of enjoyment. the production of value in the social apparatus and the production of enjoyment in the mental apparatus follow the same logic and eventually depend on the same discursive structure. this move confronted lacan’s “return to freud” in the midst of a capitalist 2. lacan’s intervention following michel foucault’s lecture “qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? [what is an author],” in dits et écrits (paris: gallimard, 2001) 848. 3. in the concrete case of lacan’s teaching, a science of the structural real. see, for instance, the following remarks: “structure is thus real. in general, this is determined by means of convergence toward impossibility. this is why it is real.” and further: “let us say that, in principle, it is not worth speaking of anything other than of the real, in which discourse itself has consequences. call it structuralism, or not. last time i called it the condition of seriousness.” jacques lacan, d’un autre à l’autre (seminar xvi, 2006) 30-31. henceforth cited in the text as seminar xvi. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 24 crisis with a more general deadlock that freud had already stumbled upon in his theoretical and clinical work: the production of jouissance against the background of a psychic conflict, a tension between opposing demands or heterogeneous instances in the mental apparatus. one of freud’s greatest merits consisted in the fact that he no longer conceived of enjoyment as a more or less insignificant sideeffect of satisfaction, which would signal the decrease of bodily tension once the satisfaction of a need, desire or drive had taken place. instead, he recognised in enjoyment a product emerging directly from the increase of tension. one merely needs to consult freud’s writings in metapsychology (for instance, repression, instincts and their vicissitudes or beyond the pleasure principle) in order to become aware that freud associates the production of enjoyment with the intensification of tension. the more the unconscious tendency demands satisfaction, the more the mental apparatus works on creating the conditions for satisfaction. however, this satisfaction does not take place at the end of this process—it is inscribed in the process itself. the unconscious tendency constantly demands more enjoyment, and consequently, more psychic labour. already from freud’s earlier works, such as the interpretation of dreams or jokes and their relation to the unconscious, it becomes apparent that unconscious labour performs an endless task of satisfying an insatiable demand. it is no surprise, then, that lacan at a certain point described the unconscious with the expression “ideal worker,” a worker that does not “think, judge or calculate”4. yet complications emerge even in this seemingly automatic factory that is the unconscious. for psychoanalysis, libidinal economy never follows the machine-like model. instead, it is always articulated around a fundamental deadlock (e.g. repression), and the actual source of enjoyment should be sought precisely there. already in freud, this deadlock was contextualised both epistemologically and politically: it triggered the “scientific project” of psychoanalysis by becoming its privileged object, but it also provided specific insight into the mechanisms that support the social mode of production. it is not exaggerated to claim that das unbehagen im kapitalismus, discontent in capitalism, would be the more appropriate title of das unbehagen in der kultur, discontent in culture, since one can hardly ignore that freud never speaks of some abstract culture, but precisely of industrial societies marked by insatiable consumerism, intensified exploitation and recurring breakdowns, economic depressions and wars. the nexus of the epistemological and the political problematic that accompanied the freudian theory of the unconscious suggests that capitalism belongs among the crucial problems for psychoanalysis and that clinical practice constantly confronts the pathologies of what one could call the capitalist mode of enjoyment. lacan brought out this point in the following emphatic remark: “the more saints, the more laughter; that’s my principle, to wit, the 4. jacques lacan, television: a challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment, ed. by joan copjec, trans. by denis hollier et al. (new york: norton, 1990) 16. henceforth cited in the text as television. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 25 way out of capitalist discourse—which will not constitute progress, if it happens only for some” (television 16). the relation between psychoanalysis and capitalism could hardly be situated in a more openly antagonistic way. psychoanalysis is the envers of the capitalist discourse, its conflictual flipside and inversion—which means its internal border and the point where the capitalist discourse can be destabilised, sabotaged and inverted. this clearly does not mean that psychoanalysis already stands outside capitalism, or that it possesses positive knowledge of how to break out of its forms of domination. but it does suggest that the imperative of psychoanalysis, as it was invented by freud and reinvented by lacan, consists in not shying away from direct confrontation with capitalism and in pursuing the line initiated precisely by marx’s critique of political economy: to destabilise the appearances that sustain the capitalist mode of production and to mark the point, from which the capitalist social link can be envisaged in its irreducible contradiction. in lacan’s words, “without any doubt, the worker is the sacred place of this conflictual element, which is the truth of the system” (seminar xvi 39). to mobilise this conflictual element—namely the subject that both marx and freud encountered in productive social labour and in unconscious labour—against the capitalist strategies of exploitation is the shared effort of psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy, which is why no psychoanalyst can be indifferent to the question: how can the exit from the capitalist discourse be brought about for all? this for all is indeed crucial, since it demands that psychoanalysis force the juncture of the singular with the universal, rather than remaining in the apparent autonomy and self-sufficiency of clinical experience. the impossibility of the psychoanalytic profession, which freud had already spoken about seems to redouble and intensify when confronted with this challenging political task.5 on the other hand, lacan’s remark contains a sobering moment for everyone else: there is no such thing as an easy way out, an exit from capitalism for one, some or many. claiming the opposite would mean to fall back into an extremely problematic dichotomy between inside and outside, and consequently, to identify the exit with a metaposition. this would then amount to an even more problematic fetishisation, according to which psychoanalysis, for instance, would be considered the “great outdoors” of the logic of capital, a small oasis of authenticity within the vast capitalist desert. lacan’s critical stance is clear: psychoanalysts must restrain themselves from becoming self-sufficient, self-absorbed or self-centred, for these are precisely the key features that will abolish the radical and critical character of their discipline and 5. “here let us pause for a moment to assure the analyst that he has our sincere sympathy in the very exacting demands he has to fulfil in carrying out his activities. it almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. the other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.” the standard edition of complete psychological works of sigmund freud, vol. xxiii, trans. james strachey (london: vintage, 2001) 248. henceforth cited in the text as standard edition, followed by the volume number. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 26 integrate it into the logical frameworks of the dominant social discourse. a case of such assimilation is well known, the international psychoanalytic association, which can mockingly be called the “professional insurance plan against analytic discourse” (television 15). the institution, created by freud in order to be the official guardian of his epistemic invention, soon became an institutionalisation of the resistance against the most revolutionary insights of psychoanalysis. by searching for a way out of the capitalist discourse, the task of psychoanalysis becomes embedded, from the very outset, in a significantly broader context than the supposed intimacy of the analyst’s office. in the apparent clinical withdrawal from the social structures, the latter are most effectively at work. they re-emerge in the patient’s speech, as well as in the structure of his or her libidinal economy. capitalism is inscribed in the mental apparatus—this was already freud’s insight, when he found the best metaphor for unconscious desire in none other than the capitalist, meaning that psychoanalysis began with a fundamental critical and political insight rooted in the rejection of the opposition “unconscious—conscious” or “private—social.” the unconscious is no archive or reservoir of unclear representations and forgotten memories; it is a site of discursive production. consequently, what matters most in the unconscious is not the “explicit content” of memories and signifiers, but what happens to them, the procedures that manipulate the material, and which can be approached in a logical way. freud famously broke this logic down to two central symbolic operations—condensation and displacement—for which lacan provided a linguistic translation: metaphor and metonymy. but for freud the unconscious processes were all about a specific form of labour. operations like condensation and displacement are no simple automata; they demand a labouring subject, which, in the given regime knows only one form, labour-power. hence, to talk about unconscious labour is far from innocent. freud refers to the same economic reality and to the same conceptual apparatus as marx. the important freudian insight would thus be that the unconscious is no neutral or transcendent space of thinking: its mechanisms and the corresponding mode of enjoyment depend on the same structure as the social mode of production. lacan named this predominating structure the master’s discourse, a discourse that he first identified with the logic of the signifier, which comes down to his famous definition “the signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier.” to these three discursive elements lacan later added the surplus-object, a. however, for the master’s discourse the same conclusion needs to be drawn as for the unconscious. it may be the oldest discourse, yet it does not function in the same way in different historical contexts (slaveholder societies, feudalism and capitalism). why is this the case?—because its four elements (master-signifier, s 1; knowledge, s 2; subject, ; and surplus-object, a) know different “personifications” (as marx would put it) in different modes of production. this point can be read along with the remark, from the communist manifesto, that the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”—and not of class struggle.6 marx and engels were cautious 6. see karl marx, selected writings (oxford: oxford university press, 2000) 246. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 27 enough not to make of class struggle a trans-historical invariable, which would simply assume different concretisations in different historical epochs. they even write that capitalism resolves previous class struggles and replaces them with the capitalist struggle between two social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. capitalism “simplifies” class struggle by making the non-relation that supports society fully visible in the split into two opposing camps, while past societies were still engaged into multiple class conflicts. again, this does not imply that capitalism revealed the true essence of past struggles but that it fabricated something entirely different from the existing social inequalities and introduced new modes and strategies of exploitation, which introduced new social structures, etc. to repeat, both class struggle and the master’s discourse turn out to be empty concepts, if we detach them from their social concretisations. they do not designate some ahistorical essence of history or positive entity; they stand for the inconsistency, contradiction or instability that traverses each concrete historical mode of production but which is also transformed together with the mode of production.7 the feudal lord cannot be compared with the modern capitalist, even if he can be associated with the same discursive articulation or with the same insatiable tendency of exploitation etc. class struggle designates for marx and engels both the structure of the social link and the distortion of this structure. in other words, class struggle is an empty concept precisely because it designates structural instability and even instability as structure, thereby rejecting the essentialist readings, where structures are said to form an enclosed and stable order. homologically, lacan’s notion of the master’s discourse, too, envisions the instability in the relations of domination and not some eternal master, which would remain identical throughout history. one could therefore reformulate marx and engels by saying that all history is the history of the master’s discourses. in lacan’s translation of the classical marxian problematic, the master’s discourse should be taken as a formula of nonexistence rather than existence—namely of the nonexistence of the social relation, on the background of which other social links become possible (such as the hysteric’s discourse, which lacan associates with various political revolutions, the university discourse, which is linked with modern science, or finally the analytic discourse, which concerns psychoanalysis but should not be limited only to that framework).8 going back to the quotation from television, we can ask ourselves who or what is the enigmatic saint that lacan associates with the exit from the capitalist discourse. let us consider the lines that precede the quoted excerpt: a saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not caritas. rather, he acts as trash: his business being trashitas. so as to realise what the structure imposes, namely 7. in the last instance, marx’s term “mode of production” is homologous with lacan’s notion of “discourse.” but the “mode of production” without specification (“slaveholder,” “feudal,” “capitalist” etc.) clearly does not say anything. 8. for the deduction and elaboration of the four discourses, see jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis (seminar xvii), trans. russell grigg (new york: norton, 2007). tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 28 allowing the subject, the subject of the unconscious, to take him as the cause of the subject’s own desire. in fact it is through the abjection of this cause that the subject in question has a chance to be aware of his position, at least within the structure. for the saint, this is not amusing (television 15-16, translation modified). the task of the analyst consists in “realising what the structure imposes.” but the realisation of structure also means its destabilisation, by detecting and circumscribing its internal impossibility, contradiction and disclosure. in doing so, the analyst enables the subject to become aware of its position within the given regime of production, namely that the subject is constituted as pure split, in the case of capitalism, as commodity labour-power.9 marx already showed that labour-power is marked by inconsistency, because it is both one commodity among others and the only commodity that can produce other commodities. in this respect, he assumed the same position in relation to the proletariat that freud did toward his neurotic patients: he was their analyst, in the sense that he dissolved (the actual meaning of analysis) the layers of appearances and fetishisations in order to reach the point where structure is realised in nothing other than the subject’s inconsistency. in labour-power the contradictions of the commodity universe are knotted together—this is the actual critical point of marx’s labour theory of value, to which we shall return further below. the realisation of structural imperatives requires transference, in which the analyst assumes the position of the cause of the analysand’s desire and thereby establishes the libidinal relation that sustains the analytical economy. here, a certain displacement is at work, since the analytical situation achieves something that otherwise remains unknown to the subject: it creates the conditions in which the subject can openly confront its own status in the broader social reality: “to be aware of his position, at least within the structure.” this is why psychoanalysis does not aim at doing charity (caritas), i.e., creating the conditions, in which the subject would be reintegrated into the given social frameworks. charity is a form of love, which does not seriously problematise the regime that created the conditions requiring charity. what lacan calls trashitas contains a more subversive tendency, which aims to subvert the regime of domination by repeating its contradictions within the analytic situation. yet should the task of analysis consist in more than mere repetition of existing deadlocks, it needs to prevent the development of transference into yet another “love-relation” (caritas) and instead orientate the subject toward the point where its act will transform the established mode of enjoyment. targeting this transformation means working on a possible resistance against capitalism. lacan provided different names for this analytic goal—the pass, traversing the fantasy, identification with the symptom—which all envision the same structural shift: transformation of the subject (“the pass”), defetishisation (“traversing the fantasy”) and organisation of structural contradiction (“identification with the symptom”). 9. see jean-claude milner, clartés de tout (paris: verdier, 2011) 90. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 29 in all these cases the realisation of what (the capitalist) structure imposes will widen the gap that allows the commodified subject to be transformed into a “sainttrash,” the counterpart to commodity. one subversive aspect of trashitas, transference, thus consists in its rejection of the only love that capitalism cultivates for its impoverished subjects (caritas). of course, by practising trashitas, psychoanalysis risks strengthening the dependency of the analysand on the analyst, which is why lacan incessantly repeated that the analyst should never identify with the object of transference. the risk of transference lies in the analysand’s fetishisation of the analyst as a “subject supposed to know,” to recall lacan’s formulation; by identifying with this figure, the analyst would indeed end up in self-fetishisation, turning psychoanalysis into yet another form of capitalist domination. the analyst is merely a provisional love object, and the end of analysis inevitably coincides with the dissolution of transference. psychoanalysis should thus envision the subject’s confrontation with capitalism and strive to bring him or her to the point where an apparently private symptom can be recognised as a concrete manifestation of the general economic framework. there is no private suffering, and to cure concretely means to cure from capitalism. this would be the basic difference between psychoanalysis and other psyprofessions. psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy all engage in the practice of caritas and thereby mystify the actual position of the subject within structure. the association of laughter with the exit from capitalism is another surrealist moment in the citation from lacan’s television. laughter as a weapon against capitalism seems to suggest that capitalism might be structured like a joke, and the envisioned universalisation of laughter –“the more saints the more laughter”—would mean the downfall of capitalism. should psychoanalysis teach us how finally to laugh at capitalism? much of the effectiveness of capitalism surely concerns the fact that it is more successful in causing anxiety than laughter. while nietzsche wrote that all the gods died of laughter when one of them claimed he was the only one, will the same fate strike capital, once everyone starts laughing at its advocates, who never get tired of repeating that we live in the best possible world or that we need to tighten our belts because we have been living beyond our means? “the more saints the more laughter” evidently means “the more ‘abjects’ the more politics,” a politics carried out with a somewhat different humour than the one proposed by the capitalist class. for the saint’s laughter is not the only laughter lacan talked about. it is the inversion of the capitalist’s laughter, which lacan stumbled upon in marx’s capital: marx introduces this surplus value almost guilelessly (…) after taking some time, when he lets the person involved, namely the capitalist, speak. (…) marx allows him to take his time to develop this apologia, which appears to be nothing if not honest, and there marx points out that this spectral figure he confronts, the capitalist, laughs. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 30 this feature, seems superfluous, nevertheless struck me when i first read it. it seemed to me then that this laughter is properly something that refers to what, at that very moment marx is unveiling, namely what concerns the essence of surplus-value. (…) what i am unveiling in the passage has, of course, not been noted until now (…) i mean the conjuncture of laughter with the radically eluded function of surplus-value (…) in short, there and elsewhere, i mean in the radical function hidden in the relation of production to labour, as well as elsewhere, in another, deeper relation, where i am trying to lead you with the help of surplus-enjoyment, there is something like a fundamental gag, which is located strictly speaking in this joint, where we have to drive our wedge when the relations that are in play in the experience of the unconscious, understood in terms of its most general functioning. (seminar xvi 64-65) the capitalist hijacks laughter by imposing his own idea of humour. the matching passage in marx is to be found in the section on the production of absolute surplusvalue, the chapter on labour and its valorisation, where marx lays out most openly his correction of the political-economic labour theory of value, a correction that displaces the accent from the all-too-simple claim that “labour is the source of value” to the more sophisticated association of the source of value with the contradictions of the commodity form: in fact, the seller of labour-power, like the seller of any other commodity, realizes [realisiert] its exchange-value, and externalises [veräussert] its usevalue. he cannot take the one without giving the other. the use-value of labour-power, in other words labour, belongs just as little to its seller as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who sold it. the owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day’s labour belongs to him. on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller. our capitalist foresaw this situation, and that was the cause of his laughter. the worker therefore finds, in the workshop, the means of production necessary for working not just 6 but 12 hours. (…) the trick has at last worked: money has been transformed into capital. every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws governing the exchange of commodities have not tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 31 been violated in any way. equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. for the capitalist as buyer paid the full value for each commodity, for the cotton, for the spindle and for the labour-power. he then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities: he consumed their use-value.10 what the capitalist exploits is not simply labour but a specific structural feature, the minimal gap between use-value and exchange value. he mobilises the alienating dimension of the commodity form and turns this alienation into a privileged source of value. in doing so, he successfully implements labour-power as the commodified version of the subject. however, the commodity form is clearly not the only form of alienation. a much more fundamental level of alienation is labour as such. more precisely, what the english translation of marx calls “alienation” is in german called entäußerung, externalisation. by choosing this notion, marx literally repeated something that hegel already wrote in phenomenology of spirit, when he ranked labour and speech among processes of constitutive alienation, processes that do not simply cause alienation, but which simply are alienation in action. however, capitalism is the first mode of production in history that rigorously organises the creation of value around this alienating character of labour and speech, in other words, of discourse.11 the critical importance of the labour theory of value that marx adopted from his predecessors in political economy (adam smith and david ricardo) consists in a highlighting of what the classics had failed to understand. for them, the labour theory of value was meant to situate labour as the source of value, next to selfinterest (or what freud called “human narcissism”). however, marx recognised the insufficiencies and mystifications of this simple approach. for him the source of value is not labour but exploitation (among others of labour), and more fundamentally, the exploitation of alienation that inevitably marks all forms of human activity. and one should not forget that in this productive process, the mystification of exploitation (what marx calls fetishism) plays a role that is just as important as exploitation. there is no exploitation without its ideological mystification, which strives to make exploitation socially invisible. several readers of marx have thus mistakenly concluded that he is merely rewriting adam smith by adding more drama, which is false. instead, marx provided the epistemic conditions that enable one to envision, behind the social exploitation of concrete men, women and children, a more fundamental exploitation of structural contradictions. with this move marx also succeeded in isolating an entirely different form of subjectivity. unlike the non-alienated and abstract subject of private interest in classical political economy, 10. karl marx, capital, vol. 1, trans. ben fowkes (london: penguin books, 1990) 300-301, translation modified. henceforth cited in the text as capital i. 11. or as alenka zupančič has recently claimed, capitalism is the first mode of production, to have transformed the nonexistence of a social relation—a social non-relation— into the privileged source of profit. see alenka zupančič, “sexual is political?” in samo tomšič and andreja zevnik eds., jacques lacan between psychoanalysis and politics (london: routledge, 2015). tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 32 the subject of alienation and exploitation is no psychological or pathological (narcissistic) subject, no subject supposed to possess positive knowledge of its private interests and of market laws. political economy remains centred on consciousness and cognition. on the other hand, the subject discovered by the critique of political economy, is non-psychological, non-individual and an ‘abject’ of knowledge; it is a subject of truth, which marx targeted by introducing notions and procedures such as alienation, exploitation, contradiction and class struggle into the efforts of economic thought to elaborate a scientific theory of value. let us remain with the quoted excerpt from capital a bit further. marx continues to address the problematic of alienation in the following way: by turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorisation process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’. (capital i 302) marx openly exposes two levels of alienation, the constitutive and the constituted, when claiming that what capitalism does is incorporate living labour into a lifeless thing. we should keep in mind that this incorporation, which is also mortification, does not simply target the production of commodities, but also and above all the transformation of living labour into labour-power, a measurable and calculable commodity, which, despite all asserted equality in exchange, assumes an exceptional status within the capitalist universe. while living labour has often been interpreted in a vitalist way, one should nevertheless consider that marx’s expression does not envision some non-alienated positive substance, but precisely the aspect of labour that, according to hegel, makes of it a process of constitutive alienation. instead of “living labour” one might as well write “living alienation,” alienation that has not yet assumed the formal envelope of the commodity form. the predicate “living” is misleading because it suggests a vital horizon beyond alienation, a state in which labour would be liberated of alienation. but alienation is above all decentralisation and externalisation. it does not have the exclusively negative and tragic connotation of a “subjective drama,” that the vitalistic readings persistently denounce. as marx, freud and lacan have more or less implicitly argued, alienation should be transformed from tragedy to comedy. only through this transformation can something like a political mobilisation of subjectivised negativity—subjectivity without predicates and/or imaginary features such as “race,” “gender,” “nationality” etc. (all cases of constituted alienation)—be achieved and the class struggle effectively actualised in the confrontation of two classes. (we can observe, today more than ever, that class struggle is most often a “one way street,” “class struggle from above,” as it has also been called.) tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 33 when talking about the capitalist’s laughter, lacan hints that no one ever seriously considered that the structure of jokes might reveal something about the scope and the effectiveness of capitalism. this is not entirely the case, since such a consideration can be found in none than freud’s book on jokes, which is filled with economic comparisons and where the central object of discussion is nothing other than lustgewinn, surplus-enjoyment, the psychoanalytical homologue to surplus-value. here is an exemplary comparison of the unconscious with capitalism, where the economic tendency toward saving re-emerges in the psychogenesis of jokes: i may perhaps venture on a comparison between psychical economy and a business enterprise. so long as the turnover in the business is very small, the important thing is that outlay in general shall be kept low and administrative costs restricted to the minimum. economisation (sparsamkeit) is concerned with the absolute height of expenditure. later, when the business has expanded, the importance of the administrative cost diminishes; the height reached by the amount of expenditure is no longer of significance provided that the turnover and profits can be sufficiently increased. it would be niggling, and indeed positively detrimental, to be conservative over expenditure on the administration of the business. nevertheless it would be wrong to assume that when expenditure was absolutely great there would be no room left for the tendency to save (spartendenz). the mind of the manager, if it is inclined to saving (ersparung), will now turn to economisation (sparsamkeit) over details. he will feel satisfaction if a piece of work can be carried out at smaller cost than previously, however small the saving may seem to be in comparison with the size of the total expenditure. in a quite analogous fashion, in our complex psychical business too, economisation in detail (detaillierte ersparung) remains a source of pleasure, as may be seen from everyday happenings. (standard edition viii 156-157, translation modified) the unconscious engages in budget cuts and there is one insight that brings freud particularly close to social economy: once business runs smoothly and expands with success, the tendency to economise turns toward the reduction of labourcosts. the system invests in the “division of labour” in the sense that it strives to prevent its political organisation. the entire liberal economic model with its fantasies of homo oeconomicus and private interests is destined to implement a system of values that would counteract the political tendencies of labour movements. when it comes to disorganising labour, no expenditure is too high, for as soon as the conflict between capital and labour would externalise in production, it would push class struggle into the midst of social reality and increase the costs and losses. so what freud calls the “economisation over details” in fact concerns a multitude of strategies, which will support the interiorisation of the capital-labour conflict, the most successful interiorisation being precisely the creditor-debtor relation, as marx’s reinterpretation of primitive accumulation has shown. here, the indebtedness of the system is “outsourced” to the multitude of political subjects and socially tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 34 implemented as the new “holy spirit,” the social link, in which the subject can participate only under the condition that he or she assumes the commodity form. in another passage, freud describes the tendency toward saving in the following way: “‘saving (ersparung) in expenditure on inhibition or suppression’ appears to be the secret of the pleasurable effect of tendentious jokes” (standard edition viii 119, translation modified). the success of jokes, but also of capitalism, lies in the minimisation of investment for inhibiting and repressing counter-tendencies. once resistance is neutralised, the mechanism appears to run smoothly and the economic apparatus can exploit the sources of enjoyment without restrictions. we should be attentive to what freud says here. he does not claim that social repression is abolished and the unconscious tendencies can find their uninhibited way into the realisation of their “creative potentials.” he remarks something much more sophisticated, namely that the unconscious conflict undergoes a transformation—the libidinal economy meets no internal resistance. this neutralisation of resistance is embodied in lacan’s already-mentioned notion of the ideal worker, which now stands for labour without the moment of resistance; labour merges entirely with production and willingly executes the imperatives of capital. neoliberalism in fact created the conditions for such an ideal worker to emerge in the social context: the entrepreneur, the economic figure that freud places alongside the capitalist in interpretation of dreams.12 in a scenario in which the labourer has become a small entrepreneur, the capitalist does not need to invest in suppressing conflictual social movements or the organisation of labour. this is no longer necessary because this expenditure has successfully been delegated onto the labouring subjects: their main task is to work on themselves, impose self-discipline, stand in mutual competition, and in doing so they provide the best service to the system. the capitalist worldview, which adds private property and the egoistic pursuit of private interests to apparently universal political categories such as freedom and equality (thereby excluding fraternité, a non-narcissistic love as the foundation of a non-capitalist social link)—strives to create the conditions in which inhibition and suppression would be entirely delegated onto the subjects, and exploitation turned into self-exploitation. now, if both capitalism and the exit from it are structured like a joke, what types of jokes are at stake in both cases? or differently put, what tension in jokes do these situations of laughter address? there are two notable freudian examples, which thematise capitalist reality directly and contextualise the peculiar character of the capitalist’s humour. one is the well-known joke about salmon mayonnaise. a poor guy borrows a certain amount of money from his wealthy friend, after explain12. see standard edition v 223. i engage more extensively with the quotation in question in the capitalist unconscious. marx and lacan (london: verso, 2015). see also mai wegener, “why should dreaming be a form of work?” in samo tomšič and andreja zevnik, jacques lacan between psychoanalysis and politics (london: routledge, 2015). tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 35 ing his situation. the friend lends the requested amount only to find the poor guy shortly after in a fancy restaurant eating salmon mayonnaise: “what? you borrow money from me and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? is that what you’ve used my money for?” “i don’t understand you,” replied the object of attack; “if i haven’t any money i can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if i have some money i mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. well, then, when am i to eat salmon mayonnaise?” (standard edition viii 50) the joke is labelled cynical because the accused person displaces the accent from the reproach that “in his circumstances he has no right to think of such delicacies at all” (ibid.). behind the apparent mocking of the creditor’s moralism, the debtor is in fact revealed as the one who is trapped in the creditor’s fantasy: means of subsistence, yes, luxury, no. the reproach is, thus, that the debtor has violated the unwritten rule, according to which he is not allowed to live beyond his means, and if he borrows money, it must be in order to repay his creditors, and not to spend it on personal enjoyment. the cynicism of the debtor can be translated into direct speech: “i can’t deny myself what tastes good to me, and it’s a matter of indifference to me where i get the money from to pay for it. there you have the explanation of why i’m eating salmon mayonnaise on the very day you’ve lent me the money” (ibid. 52). freud rightly remarks that the translation abolishes the conditions of a joke—in the given case the minimal displacement in the debtor’s reaction to his creditor’s reproach: “i will not finance your enjoyment”—and turns it into a piece of cynicism. we can observe why such direct confrontation would not be funny, while also revealing complete impotence in face of the reproach: “in your position you have no right to enjoy.” it would in fact legitimise the capitalist fantasy that the poor personify the subject of enjoyment. we can recall that marx comes upon this fantasy when he criticises the “politicaleconomic tale” (myth, fiction) of primitive accumulation, which provides the genesis of the capitalist and the labourer. in some distant past, to recall the story, there have presumably been two sorts of people, the elite, who renounced enjoyment and accumulated the first wealth, and the “lazy rascals,” who spent “their substance, and more, in riotous living” (capital i 873), i.e., who have, as today’s advocates of austerity incessantly repeat, lived beyond their means and ended up possessing merely their labour-power, the capacity of their bodies to produce other bodies (commodities). so, what was, according to the political-economic tale, originally a subject of enjoyment has progressively been transformed into an indebted economic subject, who is forced to enter the market and assume the commodity form as the sole support of social relations. according to classical political economy, enjoyment produces debt, which is not false in itself, for marx’s correction of the political-economic tale of primitive accumulation remains within this claim, but with a crucial correction. marx first rejects the fantasy of the subject of enjoyment—there is no such “thing” as a subject of enjoyment, this subject is indeed an ideological fiction, which provides a basis for the problematic capitalist “morality,” the abstinence theory, which argues for the birth of wealth out of renunciation tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 36 of enjoyment. marx’s second correction consists in situating enjoyment correctly. the latter is no quality or action, pertaining to some presupposed and in the last instance fictitious subject, but a feature of the system. it is capital, which enjoys, and it enjoys under the condition of pushing its subjects deeper into indebtedness. to return to freud’s joke, the debtor would disarm himself if he responded with open cynicism, for then he would walk straight into the ideological trap that the creditor’s reproach had ready for him. he would admit that all he wants is “enjoyment without boundaries.” vivre sans temps mort, jouir sans entraves was also the demand of the revolutionary students in 1968: life without boredom, i.e., without abstract capitalist time, which forces everyone into an automatized process of production; and enjoyment without restrictions, i.e., without capitalist morality, according to which surplus-enjoyment follows from self-imposed abstinence. but the goal of capitalism is to raise everyone into a regime, in which they will enjoy (in) exploitation and thus become something like ideal masochists. this makes of capitalism a far more obscene form of domination than any previous historical form of the master’s discourse. in this respect capitalism comes close to what freud analyses under the category of obscene jokes, or more precisely, smut. financial capitalism or neoliberalism openly displays its systemic obscenity, and it is also no surprise that in this era the critical voices of political economy are entirely overshadowed by the unanimous voice (laughter) of what marx had already envisioned with the term “vulgar economics”: in m-m’ we have the irrational form of capital, the misrepresentation and objectification of the relations of production, in its highest power: the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it is taken as logically anterior to its own production process; the ability of money or a commodity to valorize its own value independent of reproduction—the capital mystification in the most flagrant form. for vulgar economics, which seeks to present capital as an independent source of wealth, of value creation, this form is of course a godsend, a form in which the source of profit is no longer recognizable and in which the result of the capitalist production process—separate from the process itself—obtains an autonomous existence.13 the obscenity of vulgar economics consists in the fetishisation of the highest capitalist abstraction—capital itself—which is equivalent to the self-fetishisation of capitalists as producers of value and vulgar political economists as scientists of value (this branch of “positive” science falls also statistics, one of the central factors in the distortion of social reality behind abstract numerical data). incidentally, marx shows that this condition displays the two tendencies that freud ascribes to a certain type of tendentious joke: violence and obscenity. the cynical joke remains stuck in this perspective. there is, however, another tendency, which goes against 13. karl marx, capital, vol. iii, trans. david fernbach (london: penguin books, 1992) 516-17. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 37 the established mechanism and which makes an unusual exception to freud’s classification, the sceptical joke, with the rightly famous example: two jews met in a railway carriage at a station in galicia. “where are you going?” asked one. “to cracow,” was the answer. “what a liar you are!” broke out the other. “if you say you’re going to cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to lemberg. but i know that in fact you’re going to cracow. so why are you lying to me?” (standard edition viii 115) freud immediately recognises in this verbal absurdity a complication, which contains a valuable epistemological lesson with direct political implications for a noncynical notion of critique: but the more serious substance of the joke is the problem of what determines the truth. the joke, once again, is pointing to a problem and is making use of the uncertainty of one of our commonest concepts. is it the truth if we describe things as they are without troubling to consider how our hearer will understand what we say? or is this only jesuitical truth, and does not genuine truth consist in taking the hearer into account and giving him a faithful picture of our own knowledge? i think that the jokes of this kind are sufficiently different from the rest to be given a special position. what they are attacking is not a person or an institution but the certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative possessions (ibid.). while the capitalist’s joke targets persons, more than anything else, the sceptical, or one could also say the critical-political joke, attacks and problematises the structure behind them. if marx claimed in a letter to engels that capital was the biggest bomb ever dropped on the head of the bourgeoisie, we could justifiably claim that it was also an attempt to produce the deadliest joke in history (one can think of the matching monty python sketch), to create something like a politics of comedy, or at least to ground politics on a non-capitalist humour. indeed, in marx, but also in lacan, the notion of critique comes to overlap with comedy. critique qua comedy: this would be the marxian discontinuity in the history of critique, its first revelation being that the capitalist’s laughter concerns the fact that a web of social appearances (freedom, equality, property and the hypothesis of private interest) successfully camouflages the constant invention of ever-new forms of inequality, which help to keep profits growing. both the critique of political economy and psychoanalysis assume a status that is homologous to that of the sceptical joke: one that appears absurd from the perspective of the dominant regime of knowledge and thought, but which, nonetheless, sabotages the joke called capitalism. the political explosive that freud’s sexual aetiology of neuroses and his theory of sexuality dropped on the head of bourgeois puritanism also consisted in demonstrating that libidinal economy comes down to constant deviations, without a natural sexual norm in the background. enjoyment is not so much a sign of perversion as the privileged indicator that there is no such thing as normative sexuality. capitalism has been only partially successful in intetomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 38 grating these lessons, for what it cannot digest is the point that lacan so vehemently accentuated: “there is no sexual relation.” capitalism needs fetishist fantasies of positivity, vital forces and creative potentials, for only in this way can it sustain the illusion that everything works just fine in this best of all possible political worlds, and continue making exploitation acceptable for the majority of its subjects. s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 64-80 p i e r r e b r u n o t h e c a p i t a l i s t e x e m p t i o n 1 translated by john holland a discourse without loss b elow is the matheme of the capitalist discourse:2 the matheme is constructed by inverting the terms found in the places of the semblance (or of the agent) and truth in the discourse of the master:  is now in the position of s 1 and vice versa. the direction of the arrow between  and s 1 remains unchanged, so that, in the capitalist discourse, it now moves from the top to the bottom. as a final modification, the arrow that had gone from a to s 1 moves from a to . the consequences of these changes require some comments. pleasure, like unpleasure, is a physiological reality. jouissance is of a different order; if it does not not exist without the body—the body as organism—it also does not exist without knowledge. in skipping the barrier of jouissance, it also skips an obstacle, the nature of which gives rise to a promise that can be kept only through annihilation. jouissance is a “negative substance.” this means that by speaking, i destroy myself as thing and that this self-virtualization would provide me with jouissance precisely if i were not, as a candidate for jouissance, annihilated by this very candidacy.3 how can we get out of this—infernal—circle, even though those tormented by satan (and this may well be satan’s hope) have the chance to participate in jouissance through his dark side; this dark side, in turn, is not as bad as vanity, abandonment, or an emptiness of affect, to use the most common vocabulary. the central thread of this questioning has been woven in and out through the space/time of thought, and the relief, even the enthusiasm of the postwar period was degraded through its emphasis on the absurd, the herald of which was albert camus, in the rebel. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 65 §§§ the milan lecture, in june 1972, entitled, “on the psychoanalytic discourse,” introduces the matheme of the capitalist discourse; through it, lacan, brings out this impact of this use of language and suggests a way out of this nightmarish moebius strip, provided that we are able to seize upon this exit. perhaps an example—an unusual one for this context—may help us grasp what is at stake in this problem. in an analytic session, you go deliberately against freud’s advice not to look for information about how things “really” happened, and say to a female analysand, “you could ask your mother about this.” during the next session, she tells you, “i couldn’t ask my mother anything,” and then adds, “it’s like the time when my mother asked me, ‘whom do you prefer: your father or me?’” nothing could stop her from hearing the analyst’s speech as coming from the other of the transference. the analyst’s enunciation was reduced to the mother’s, who, by her question, had closed the child up in a transferential cage: either you prefer me, or you don’t really love me. for this analysand, to ask the mother anything, no matter how small, meant answering in a way that she had not wanted to do at the time: i prefer you. as a result, she could only see her analyst as her mother’s ally. the analyst, whom she had wanted to become her liberator, became her jailer. by starting with this slippage (which was not as unfortunate as it may seem, since it helped the analysand to say something new about the closing-off of her relation with her mother) we can look for the prototype of the exit from the capitalist discourse. how? let’s examine things more closely. the demand contained in the analyst’s initial suggestion has its own signification: this demand can be understood “objectively” by approaching it simply in terms of its vocabulary and syntax. the analysand, however, hears it on a plane that is not empty, and which modifies its “objective” signification, so that following this suggestion would be the equivalent of accepting what she has always refused the mother: to mold herself into a transferential relation with her that would not be exclusive, but would take precedence over others. this is not far from this analysand’s remark that she had thought that the analyst was asking her, indirectly, to treat her relation with him as more important than everything else. let us say that every signification is heard on a plane that always affects the message: a meaning [sens] is produced that was not contained in the signification. the “skidding of the signifier” means that the latter is received on a plane that is always itself slippery. it is slippery because receiving a message is a function, on the one hand, of its content and its emitter, and on the other hand, of the relation between the receiver and the emitter, a relation called transference. if we consider this fact in all its breadth, we conclude, as lacan notes, that it is possible to make a word say something very different from what it says. someone who claims to be an atheist can be shown to believe in god, or—and this is my example— psychoanalytic theory can be shown to say something that is, in reality, the opposite of what one thinks it says, etc. now, although in my first example, this sliding may seem to be a disadvantage—perhaps an unacceptable one—for the treatment, bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 66 it is really quite the contrary. through this misunderstanding, the subject can preserve, or rather bring into existence, the margin of indeterminacy that will enable her to grasp the forced choice of alienation and make it the symptomatic means of her emancipation. for the neurotic, this will be through the separation produced by the fantasy; for the psychotic, it will be through the specific space that authorizes him/her to have a delusion. true separation can be encountered, however, only once the fantasy has been dismantled and “stabilized in a delusional metaphor.”4 what does this have to do with the capitalist discourse? it takes us to the very heart of the question: hollywood films, such as the truman show or being john malkovitch, portray people’s efforts to escape from a virtualization that seeks to program them entirely; this virtualization turns a stage or film set into reality, and thus reduces it to nothing more than the application (in the mathematical sense) of a linguistic function forged by an other. it is as if the capitalist discourse were capable of turning itself into a universe: me, clone; you, hologram. escaping from this virtualization involves making the barrier of jouissance—which the capitalist discourse has scrapped—function again. in psychoanalytic terms, this would dissolve the drive into the unconscious. from jean baudrillard to the multimedia artist, tony oursler, the theme of the cunning triumph of virtualization has now been fully sketched out. this may also be what a psychoanalyst, jean-claude maleval, is aiming at when he uses the expression, “foreclosure of reference.”5 i myself especially like the french children’s show, bonne nuit les petits [good night, children], in which oscar, the nephew of nounours, the teddy bear, turns himself off with the remote control; this shows us that virtualization can only succeed through the initiative of the agent who is also its object. let us look at it from a different perspective, that of orwell’s 1984. winston smith begins to fall in love with what he ascribes to big brother: both the command to submit to a sacrificial castration and its enactment. here it seems as though love itself, the emotion of love, can emerge alchemically from an annihilation to which one consents. this is not a baseless notion, provided that we see that this transformation of the emotion does away with big brother, since big brother is nothing other than the great persecutor as such.6 as we have seen, the unrestrained skidding of the signifier is connected with the fluctuations of all signification. let’s examine this in terms of meaning [sens]. how can this be understood? in this lecture, lacan reminds us that s 1 , the one of the signifier, rotates through each of the places in the discourse: those of the semblance, the other, the production and the truth. because it can be translated from one discourse to another, a meaning [sens] can be born. this thesis is found explicitly in “l’étourdit.”7 meaning, as distinct from signification, implies that the signifier can be translated. there is meaning only to the extent that there exists something that is outside a purely denotative language; this “outside” is speech itself, inasmuch as it supposes a subject. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 67 a question can be raised here. was lacan correct to use the term, “discourse,” in describing the functioning of capitalism? a first error must be eliminated here—let us remember that a discourse is not a set of words, but, in the phrase “capitalist discourse,” designates the social bond that stems from the domination of the capitalist mode of production. in a way, the term “discourse” has been substituted for that of “mode of production,” and throws light on certain aspects of the latter. nevertheless, does the absence of the disjunction that is internal to jouissance discredit the expression, “discourse,” in the lacanian sense? this objection is more difficult. in order not to respond too hurriedly, i will simply remark that the barrier of jouissance is not really the condition sine qua non of discourse. another condition stands in this place: as lacan reminds us in this lecture, there is no discourse that is not of the semblance [semblant]. the unchecked skidding of the signifier allows us to exit from the aporia of jouissance, but discourse, because it involves the semblance, prevents this skidding from becoming so uncontrolled that it would destroy the bond assured by the function of language. if language gives prominence to the skidding of the signifier and the signifier’s claim to make an absolute meaning of the whole, the semblance [semblant] or sens blanc [white meaning], is different; its separation from these tendencies allows us exchanges that can have an acceptable level of misunderstandings. the objective of theater is to make this semblance implode, or rather to reveal the conditions that allow it to function, conditions that would otherwise remain unperceived.8 it happens that, in the capitalist discourse,  occupies the place of the semblance. if the absence of the barrier of jouissance has a major consequence for this subject, the very fact that it occupies the place of the semblance has a stabilizing effect: it enables the discourse to ward off the inordinate skidding of the signified. the semblance is what, despite the complete impossibility of jouissance and of the slipping of the signifier, enables language, through discourse, to create a bond and ensure a regulation and circulation of jouissance; it is able, in principle, to distance us from the specters of mania or of a passage à l’acte, both of which are ways of putting an end to this bond. the price of this is the conventionality and artificiality of linguistic exchange, which makes the search for the truth of meaning into a bargain; we get it at a cut price. there is a touch of the vacuum when truth goes on sale. in this context, i would like to introduce another unusual but, i hope, suggestive example: the pharmacist plays a major role in this discourse, for the capitalist subject believes that this figure can reveal what s/he desires. surprisingly, the pharmacist becomes important by refusing to sell a product.9 through this trick, the capitalist discourse demonstrates its superiority in its grasp of desire. it substitutes desire for need, which it does not satisfy; the proletarian, who would like to have public housing, is offered an estate, thereby placing the consumer as subject in command. from then on, the subject’s desire—as consumer and customer—becomes the effect of the reformulation—or interpretation—of the demand by the other, the pharmacist, who is located in s 2 . in the matheme of the capitalist discourse, this circuit goes from  to s 2 , by way of s 1 , and thus by means of a master signifier. this principle of authorbruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 68 ity is concealed (since it is under the subject), but it is always necessary, in order to certify the kind of knowledge that is in question. in experimental psychology, its trace can be found in the stockholm syndrome as well as in those chilling experiments that show how submission to authority can turn almost anyone into a torturer. in the matheme, the rising diagonal of the arrow that goes from s 1 to s 2 points to this power, which can be found at any moment. throughout history, only the discourse of science forged by descartes’ dubito, sum has been able to make it totter or tremble, without abolishing it. the arrow, a→ , is found in both the capitalist and the analytic discourses, but it functions in them in completely opposed ways.10 in the analytic discourse, it is marked by an impossibility. in the capitalist discourse, however, surplus-jouissance (a) is supposed to saturate the lack-of-jouissance [manque-à jouir]. whereas the capitalist discourse promotes the submission of knowledge to a masked authority, the discourse of the analyst writes a permanent disjunction between the master signifier and knowledge, a disjunction that could only be removed if jouissance were to fill up the place of the signifier.11 one can note, finally, that in the analytic discourse (as in the other three original discourses), one place—truth—has a special status. in the four discourses, you can start out from this place, but you cannot reach it, since the two arrows move away from it. this inaccessibility of truth in discourse does not mean that it does not exist. truth exists. it speaks, but you cannot speak it. the capitalist discourse, on the other hand, is constructed in order to miss this inaccessibility of truth. not only is the place of truth accessible, but it must also be passed through in order to reach knowledge. truth, in the capitalist discourse, has the same status as it does in astrology; it cannot be falsified. the capacity of the mathemes to generate such readings and consequences may be surprising, and this is especially true of the capitalist discourse, which seems a bit cobbled together. lacan himself emphasized that these mathemes only “imitated mathematics, and he sought later, in topology, to find a means of judging that is not subjected to the caprices of language; it is nevertheless true that the choice of a (mathematized) writing is, in itself, a choice in favor of science.12 writing, with its terms, its signs, its punctuation, its rules for placement in space, imposes orientations and leads to conclusions that limit, a priori, the skidding of the signifier, on the condition that one resists any instrumentalization—which would finally be magical—of writing. it is therefore false to say that psychoanalysis, as popper claimed, is unfalsifiable (an objection that freud had already perceived). if it creates a problem, it is by always being falsifiable, up to the point when it ends. indeed, the end of analysis could be called the end of the jouissance that comes from falsifying it: will and determination then become the notch of desire, the indestructibility and discontinuity of which are not recognized. it would not be too extreme to say that the analytic discourse is constructed on the principle of the inaugural and irremediable loss of jouissance, and that the nostalgia for falsifiability is only the ghost of this loss. the capitalist discourse presents itself as a discourse that has no loss and no entropy. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 69 in this discourse s 2 is the slave-servant, whose knowledge can be activated. the relation s 1 → s 2 (the diagonal arrow that goes from the bottom left to the top right) can be transposed onto the capitalist/worker couple, since what intervenes in production is the savoir-faire of the labor force: the highly variable degree of the worker’s skill, which goes from the status of being semi-skilled to that of engineer. if the s 1 does not possess knowledge, what gives it the capacity to command? the answer is financial power. the worker obeys and produces. s/he produces what marx discovered the secret of: surplus-value. we know that for marx, whom no one challenges on this point, capitalism is characterized by the fact that laborpower has become a commodity, just like wheat or iron. thus, with capitalism, surplus-jouissance (a) takes the form of surplus-value. surplus-jouissance also calls to mind freud’s lustgewinn, the “yield of pleasure,” and already in freud, this yield makes up for the structural failure of jouissance, as is demonstrated by the fact that humor produces a lustgewinn.13 mehrwert, then, is the extra value produced by the salaried worker, throughout the working day, after having first reproduced the value or his/her labor-power. in order to reproduce her/his ability to work (education, food, lodging), a worker needs to create a value of, let’s say, four daily hours of labor. if s/he works eight hours, however, the difference—eight minus four—constitutes the mehrwert. in this sense, capitalism precedes and conditions psychoanalysis by providing the means of shaping jouissance through value. this value is exchange-value, not the use-value that must be renounced in order to make the primitive accumulation of capital possible. something makes our ears prick up here: it is the “surplus,” the gewinn (yield), rather than the lust (pleasure). lacan retroactively introduces into marx’s discovery of surplus-value the element that explains the capitalist discourse’s efficiency. without this substitution of surplus-jouissance for surplus-value, it is impossible to explain the gap between the “real” economy (which follows the principle of surplus-value) and the economy that functions through financial globalization. surplus-value, indeed, only constitutes the motive force of the capitalist mode of production as long as it enables there to be jouissance; if it did not do so, no one would care about it. yet who gets off? a marxist could retort that the proletarian sells his/her laborpower simply in order to survive: “eat to live rather than live to eat.” “the jouissance that you’re talking about,” this marxist might say, concerns the capitalist. this objection cannot simply be brushed off, for it comes from the real of the class struggle. however, the “cunning” of the capitalist discourse involves interesting the proletarian in jouissance, and in order to do so, it transforms the proletarian into a consumer, a capitalist subject: the  is in the place of the agent. thus, money no longer serves as an instrument of measurement or as the general equivalent; instead, it is only valuable to the extent that it engenders itself or seems to engender itself, in a parthenogenesis that excludes the productive process. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 70 marx, according to lacan, completed the capitalist discourse by giving it “its subject, the proletarian, thanks to whom the capitalist discourse is flourishing wherever the marxist state-form prevails.”14 this rather daring judgment rectifies his assessment two years earlier, in the other side of psychoanalysis, that the soviet system functioned through the discourse of the university: knowledge, taken as a unified whole, was its agent, and the “new man” was supposed to be produced.15 in my opinion, this judgment is correct, but the later collapse of this system gives support to the later thesis. concerning this collapse, it would be comic, but fair, to argue that with the dissolution of the soviet union, the capitalist discourse experienced its first real defeat. why not say that the soviet system was the supreme stage of capitalism, for its axiom did not call the functioning of the capitalist discourse into question? the extortion of surplus-value did not stop. it was distributed differently, and apparently—or, in any case, according to the ideology—s 1 and s 2 , the capitalist and the worker, were no longer in an antagonistic relation: the former tried to get people to work too much, and the latter to diminish the amount of labor. otherwise, the slogan, “we are all capitalists” sapped the soviet system like the “old mole.” since the system was never able to acknowledge that this was its slogan, jouissance tended to get a lot of bad publicity; the proletarians had to renounce it in order to have a better future, while the bureaucracy transformed itself into a bureaucracy of jouissance. in all this, there are strategies for obtaining jouissance. what differentiates them is how one conceives of two couples within the discourse: with  – s 2 , we have the proletarian whose desire gives in to surplus-jouissance (work more to get off more)16 and the worker as producer (work less in order to be less exploited); the other couple is  – s 1 , since the capitalist is also sundered [scindé] between the one who recuperates surplus-value and commands the process, and the one who, as subject, consumes.17 once this relation has been established, it cannot be revoked. the worker (in s 2 ) can go on strike, but the capitalist, in s 1 , cannot. the capitalist philanthropist or patron will never go so far as to indict the capitalist discourse itself. on the other hand, the capitalist can put him/herself in the ascetic position of subject, without thereby modifying the process. if the proletarian withdraws, as far as possible, from the position of subject of consumption, this will not have much of an effect. it is obvious, finally, that within the framework of the capitalist discourse, the proletarian’s increase in consumption, which involves going against the grain of the capitalist mode of production, never dries up the production of wealth. from this, one must conclude that only the strike, a work stoppage, can constitute the symptom. one must also conclude that highlighting the contradiction between and s 2 reveals not a splitting but a sundering. since this is the case, finding the key to this discourse implies recognizing that the necessity of surplus-jouissance is founded on the status of jouissance as a “hole that must be filled” (“radiophonie,” 434). bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 71 marx fills this hole through surplus-value. this is why lacan says that mehrwert [surplus-value] is the marxlust, marx’s surplus-jouissance. surplus-value is the cause of desire, which the capitalist economy makes into its very principle, that of extensive production. now, if capitalist production—the cycle m-c-m (money— commodity—money + money)—implies that consumption is always increasing, then this production would come to a sudden stop if it actually led to a consumption that could procure jouissance; consumption would then be halted, production would slow down, and this cycle would end. if this is not the case, it is because this economy, through a reversal that marx had not foreseen, produces a lack-ofjouissance [manque-à-jouir]. the more i consume, the greater the gap between jouissance and consumption becomes. thus there is a struggle involving the distribution of this surplus-value, which “only induces those who are exploited to act as rivals on principle, in order to shelter their obvious participation in the thirst of the lackof-jouissance” (“radiophonie,” 435). pareto, one of the theorists of neoclassical economics, forged an exquisite expression: the “ophelimity” of a glass of water. on the basis of an incontestable observation—that a drinker takes less pleasure in a third glass of water than from the first—pareto deduces a law: the value of the water decreases in proportion to its consumption. the opposite law, however, governs the capitalist economy. beyond drinking without thirst, this law can be stated as follows: “the more i drink, the thirstier i get.” the choreography of love as we have just seen, in the capitalist discourse, the accessibility of truth is combined with the disjunction between the places of truth and the production (on the bottom left and right). this suppression exonerates the capitalist discourse from a requirement that was believed to constitute all discourses. the other structural characteristic that we have examined is the creation of an arrow, a→, which does not exist in the discourse of the master, from which the capitalist discourse derives. this arrow is also not found in the discourse of the hysteric, and although it does appear in the discourse of the analyst, it is marked explicitly by an impossibility. only in the discourse of the university, which has a special kinship with the capitalist discourse, does this arrow function. within this framework, we can now approach another aspect of the capitalist discourse. as lacan stated on january 6, 1972, in le savoir du psychanalyste [the knowledge of the psychoanalyst]: “what distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is this ― the verwerfung, the rejection, the throwing outside all the symbolic fields... of what? of castration. every order, every discourse that has capitalism in common sets aside what we shall call simply the matters [choses] of love. it’s for this that, two centuries after this sliding [glissement], let’s call it calvinist—why not?—castration has finally stormed back in, in the form of the analytic discourse” (je parle aux murs, 96). bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 72 the heart of this statement is its connection between the setting aside of “matters of love” and the foreclosure of castration; before we approach it directly, a few remarks can place it in perspective. first, according to lacan, love is what makes up for the nonexistence of the sexual relation (whereas the mere addition of man + woman would give one access to a jouissance that is primary and absolute). there is no sexual relation because of castration, and the acceptance of this nonexistence can authorize a contingent sexual encounter.18 the foreclosure of castration, on the contrary, has a very different consequence: it makes the sexual relation possible (which can then be indicated by the arrow, a→, which can be read as “a woman fulfills a man”). in consequence, love, as something that makes up for this impossibility, becomes obsolete. the mechanics of sex would then become the physics of love, and there would be no need to differentiate sex and love; a manual of sexology would be the same as the map of tendre.19 what is more subtle and difficult is an equivalence that lacan posits in “l’étourdit,” a text from the same year (1972): “death [la mort] is love [l’amour].” this reminds us, of the romance of iseut and tristan, in which death does indeed signal love. either there is love or there is death. or again, if love, which makes up for the nonexistence of the sexual relation, is an inaccessible outcome, death will do quite nicely; only it will have the power to make up for the situation in which castration has left us. let us note, to strengthen this reading, that lacan attributes this equivalence between love and death to freud. what appears more directly in freud’s work, however, is the equivalence between death and jouissance. this has an intrusive effect of double exposure. if, for freud, jouissance is impossible for the living being, and is always lost (whatever the status of primary jouissance may be), the sole virtue of love, as distinct from desire, is that it brings with it the promise of a substitute that overcomes this loss. its narcissistic structure lends itself to this, including in its lethal foundation, since anyone can get bogged down in seeking this specularity of love. as for the other term involved, the foreclosure of castration is distinct from that of the name-of-the-father, the expression upon which lacan had based the distinction between psychosis and neurosis. he uses the arrow, a → to indicate a subject that is completed by its surplus-jouissance, in an asymptotic countability. at the limit of this countability, we can hope to have an unbarred subject: the “new man,” who will soon be joined by the most precious capital, woman. what must be seen, indeed, is that the cycle money-commodity-more money, which marx had so impeccably taken apart, is homologous to the easter computus; by virtue of money, capitalism virtualizes all living things through coining. in such an economy, even the cost of death would serve for something, and, in contrast to freud’s interpretation, the world would be loveless, with the exception of a religious love for that highly abstract other, the capitalist system. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 73 what is in question here is the status of death. on the side of psychoanalysis, this is the for-nothing that makes it equivalent to the for-nothing of love, thwarting any full counting of the real (what would it cost to buy the universe and who would want to buy it?). on the side of capitalism, death would be transformed into a substance through its commodification, founded on an unlimited linguistic virtualization; the real would be equal to reality and the sexual relation would be necessary as the law by which the world works. this world would be nothing more than the reflection of the sexual relation. as a result, when lacan speaks of how castration storms back in through the analytic discourse, we should take him at his word: castration, as revealing the absense of the sexual relation, only becomes for itself with freud. it had already been indicated, more or less, through the oedipus complex, which was not, however, enough to permit the bejahung (the yes to....) of castration, even if this consent is already present with language. with the coming of capitalism, everything concerning the action of castration is foreclosed from discourse, starting with “matters of love”: this could cause difficulty for the oedipus complex itself. to mention sexual criminality, which, in changing forms, has always constituted something of the scandal of mores, there are two ways of struggling against it: reintroducing castration or transforming the oedipus complex into law. the effectiveness of the second solution is limited; only an acceptance of castration can enable the subject to accept such a law. in counting on law, one ends up forging a pseudo-castration, which would be complete and total. this pseudo-castration would only feed the misunderstanding of sexual difference, since it would reduce the feminine to a binary negative term in relation to the masculine. the foreclosure of castration does not mean the manufacturing of psychotics, for it also concerns neurotics, pushing both of them to seek in power— either as masters or as those who benefit from the latter’s trusts or entailments—a way to keep castration foreclosed. can the hysteric and the obsessional neurotic be said to foreclose castration? freud, in his case history of the wolf man, threw light on the foreclosure of castration in a way that can accommodate neurosis.20 this suggests that castration cannot be brought wholly and totally into the field of the symbolic. the capitalist discourse transforms this partial restriction into a general rule. it must be insisted that a misunderstanding of castration is a structural, and not an accidental, part of the castration complex. such a misinterpretation is inevitable when femininity is not apprehended as being beyond castration. being beyond it means that castration is necessary, but not sufficient. now let us examine the context. lacan mentions a poem by paul fort: “if all the girls in the world wanted to join hands, all around the sea, they could make a round.”21 lacan does not content himself with pointing out that the “girls” themselves never dreamed of this. unlike boys, they do not need to make a circle: a circle, for example, of officers or even a freudian circle. boys go around in circles because they are afraid of finding themselves alone with one girl. for this reason, it is up to the girl to separate the boy from his circle, from his “masse.” nothing is bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 74 missing from this choreography of love, not even the fact that before she succeeds in taking a boy out of his circle, a girl goes together with another girl, whom she will then leave on the sidelines, as soon as she has accomplished her abduction, when she will have kidnapped a boy. if girls tend to go “two by two,” this has its foundation in what lacan, in his “guiding remarks for a convention on female sexuality,” refers to as a jouissance that is “enveloped in its own contiguity.”22 in this respect, feminine homosexuality could be particularized as a relation of other to other, and not of same to same. this is the case with the relation between lol v. stein and tatiana, in marguerite duras’ novel, the ravishing of lol stein.23 how are these “matters of love,” when they are approached from the feminine side? first of all, there is a gap between it and freud’s conception of eros, as it is found especially in civilization and its discontents: “eros and ananke [love and necessity] have become the parents of human civilization too. the first result of civilization was that even a fairly large number of people were now able to live together in a community.”24 here, eros proceeds by means of vereinigung, to make it one that we know well: unification. it contributes to civilization, by constituting circles that become larger and larger, going from the clan to humanity. in freud’s words: since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely-knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. what began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. if civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then—as a result of...the eternal struggle between the trends of love and death—there is inextricably bound up with it an increase in the sense of guilt (civilization and its discontents, 133). according to lacan, love does the opposite: it dissolves the circle by removing an element from it. he thus envisions “matters of love” as a disunification, and situates love more on the side of thanatos than of eros. the mythography of eros is not at all unilateral. claude lévi-strauss deserves recognition for having emphasized the positive character of the oedipal prohibition in the elementary structures of kinship: “if these modalities can be subsumed under the general term of exogamy...this is conditional upon the apperception, behind the superficially negative expression of the rule of exogamy, of the final principle which, through the prohibition of marriage within prohibited degrees, tends to ensure the total and continuous circulation of the group’s most important assets, its wives and its daughters.”25 however, lévi-strauss thereby covers over matters of love in his own way. he reduces women to values or goods and neglects exoandry, in which men leave their group and join their wives’ bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 75 group. this kinship structure should take priority, as soon as women are considered as subjects, rather than as goods. the feminine requirement of a minus-one (which may serve as the basis of its monandry) and of an “homoinzun”26 who will be her own, rather than being a boy from the regiment, is not symmetrical with masculine exogamy. we will understand this distinction better if we remember that in order to bear leaving the circle, a man needs to transform a woman—the one who has chosen him—into woman, quite simply by locating the name-of-the-father in her. this is a law: in order for a man—in this case, a neurotic man—to be able to attach himself to a woman, he must discern a paternal signifier in her. this is how he deals with the trauma of the encounter with the other sex.27 in psychosis, this transformation of a woman into woman cannot be effected through the name-of-the-father as operator and therefore implies that man himself must become woman, “the woman that men are missing,” without whom, let us add, they are doomed to remain in the circle (which the psychotic will not fail to denounce) (“on a question,” 472). for a woman, it should be emphasized that she awakens the man by separating him from the group. this dissymmetry between masculine exogamy and a woman’s choice of a man is a part of the dissymmetry between what is generally attributed to man—the fantasy of the vereinigung—and what a woman reveals: love as an election, which implies a dissolution. we know the extent to which, for freud, the question of understanding femininity was both decisive and insoluble. he considered anatomical and psychological determinations to be insufficient and concluded with an observation that—although it does not give us a positive definition of what a woman is—does provide a differential assessment: a woman differs from a man because she is not a woman from the moment of her birth, but becomes one. man as being is opposed to woman as becoming. this is freud’s final lesson. why did freud, who had written about the choice of love-objects, not try to define women through their mode of choosing them? in any case, this is what lacan did. it can even be claimed that, in the sexuation table in encore, lacan provides a matheme for this mode of choice: the wall—erected by language—between the sexes can be crossed over from left to right—from the phallic side to the side that is notwhole—by following an arrow: → a (encore, 78). lacan’s comments on this arrow leave us in no doubt about how he schematizes mens’ choice of a love-object: “he is unable to attain his sexual partner, who is the other, except inasmuch as his partner is the cause of his desire” (encore, 80). after this, if we had the idea—and may god protect us from this—that there is a symmetry between the sexes (which would suppress their differences) we would expect a woman’s love-choice to be written as a →; this could be the matheme for the masculine cliché of woman as seducer. this is not at all, however, what lacan writes. through her choice of sexual partner, a woman inscribes herself in the phallic function:  woman→ ф. yet, on the other hand, she has a relation with the other, not through the intermediary of the a, but as radically barred. it does not seem risky to me to read the arrow, bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 76  woman→s() as indicating the feminine choice in love: it dissolves the set by extracting an element from it. beyond this, it should be noted that the capitalist discourse introduces the arrow, a →, in terms of the possible, as if the movement went from the not-whole to castration, and as if we could read it as a sketch of a supermarket of love and desire, offered up for the subject’s consumption. thus the capitalist discourse forecloses castration and, when all is said and done, also calls sexual difference into question. the capitalist discourse is jungian. this consideration opens up a path for assessing how this setting matters of love aside can be related to castration in the capitalist discourse. lacan, in his “guiding remarks for a convention on female sexuality,” recognizes the anti-entropic effects of feminine homosexuality, as they can be observed, for example, in the précieuses. he also notes in passing that the précieuses differed from the cathars, who in sundering good absolutely from evil, anticipated the capitalist paradise, or—and this may be the same thing—fueled a millenarianism, the effects of which are not always cheering. among the précieuses, who organized themselves in salons at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there is no doubt that women took the initiative in choosing a love-object. according to the classical analyses, such as paul bénichou’s, men who were admitted into the salon had been taken from the group of knights.28 this is a fair, if cavalier view. knights were gradually disappearing, thanks in part to the précieuses (and had, of course, been given their deathblow by cervantes, who had mocked the knight errant’s desire to preserve chivalry singlehandedly). in the salon, such knights were taught how to speak, rather than to kill or rape. it may well have been this “borrowing” of men to which molière objected, but this does not discredit the mode of choosing love-objects that the précieuses promoted. they are a perfect example of the civilizing work of women, which freud had glimpsed: the dissolving of the group of men and the constructing of a community that acted through dissemination. the amazons, the other example that comes to mind, raise thornier questions. they are known through greek mythology, beginning with homer. historians have said less about them, since they do not know who their historical prototypes were, or even whether they existed. one journalist-historian, lyn webster wilde, in on the trail of the women warriors, hypothesizes that they had been displaced from the southern to the northern edge of the black sea and beyond, towards ukraine, where numerous tombs of female warriors have been found.29 in this connection, i find it interesting that the oldest tomb (around 1200) of a female warrior to have been discovered was in colchis, in present-day georgia, the home of medea. the latter was accused of killing her two sons, just as certain greek authors had accused the amazons of infanticide. whether or not this is the case, there is one constant in this mytheme: the women chose the men whom they have defeated in battle, after which there was a celebration, the feast of roses, where each woman married the man whom she had conquered. the best-known of the amazons is penthesilia, bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 77 their queen, who fell in love with achilles at the siege of troy, and would have done anything to defeat him and take him away from the circle of the greeks. if, according, of course, to ancient greek authors, this circle represented the progress of civilization, then it is interesting that it was a barbarian who introduced matters of love into civilization. this is the paradox in which thanatos civilizes eros, which giorgio agamben seeks to account for in his stimulating work, homo sacer. in the myth, it is penthesilia who is defeated and dies; achilles, defeated in his turn by his love for her, embraces her, a rather sensational case of male necrophilia. heinrich von kleist’s play, penthesilia, reverses this situation by having penthesilia kill achilles. once he is dead, she eats him raw, having the honesty to do so herself, instead of giving this task to her dogs, as artemis had done with actaeon. how many a maid will say, her arms wrapped round her lover’s neck: i love you, oh so much that if i could, i’d eat you up right here; and later, taken by her word, the fool! she’s had enough and now she’s sick of him. you see, my love, that never was my way. look: when my arms were wrapped around your neck, i did what i had spoken, word for word: i was not quite so mad as it might seem.30 in such a context, it can be said that “a kiss, a bite,/the two should rhyme” (kleist, 145). the radical character of these actions provides a luminous insight into the mysterious cannibalistic primary identification (“medusa’s head,” 103). these women, in the throes of disgust, and whom penthesilia judges correctly to be mad, are not exempt from a condition that we find in bulimia: bulimics eat the father again and again, because they have not dared really to eat him, as penthesilia does. we know that in psychosis this “remake” of primary identification can take the form of psychotic ingestion. a moment ago, i mentioned agamben’s homo sacer, which is as important a reference now as michel foucault’s the birth of the clinic was in the 1960s. this book discovers a logical paradox that can only be solved topologically. homo sacer refers to a very specific roman law, which agamben found formulated in festus: the sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. it is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.” this is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred.31 bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 78 agamben thus brings out a contradiction: death is a judicial punishment on the condition that it not take the form of a judicial punishment. now, to understand the logic at work here in as simple a way as possible: an element is subtracted from a set in such a way that it becomes impossible to reintegrate it into any set at all. this logic is the same as what presides over a woman’s amorous choice of a man. once achilles has been chosen by penthesilia, he can no longer be the greek whom he had once been.32 notes 1. this is a translation of the chapter entitled “la dérogation capitaliste” from pierre bruno, lacan, passeur de marx: l’invention du symptôme (toulouse: érès, 2010) 201–224. 2. this uses the schema of discourse from “television” which differs from the writing of the discourses found in “radiophonie” in the use of the crossed arrows. the specific matheme of the capitalist discourse can be found in lacan in italia. see jacques lacan, television: a challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment, ed. by joan copjec, trans. by denis hollier, rosalind krauss, and annette michelson (new york: norton, 1990) 13, jacques lacan, “radiophonie,” in autres écrits (paris: seuil, 2001) 403–447, and jacques lacan, “du discours psychanalytique,” in lacan in italia 1953 1978 (milan: la salamandra, 1978) 40. 3. the definitive form of this thesis may perhaps be found in lacan’s caracas seminar of august 1980: “what language can do best is to prove itself to be in the service of the death instinct.” see nicolas francion, almanach de la dissolution, (paris: navarin/seuil, 1986). 4. jacques lacan, “on a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, trans. by bruce fink, héloïse fink, and russell grigg (new york: norton, 2006) 498. 5. jean-claude maleval, “elements pour une apprehension clinique de la psychose ordinaire,” janvier 2003. retrieved from <http://w3.erc.univ-tlse2.fr/pdf/elements_psychose_ordinaire. pdf>. 6. orwell, who worked as part of the british secret services after spending the spanish civil war in the international brigades, was not unambiguous in terms of his choice of camp. 7. “this touches on the fact that meaning [sens] is never produced except through the translation from one discourse to another.” jacques lacan, “l’étourdit,” in autres écrits, 480. 8. [see pierre bruno’s analysis of bertolt brecht’s saint joan of the stockyards in lacan, passeur de marx, 85-98 (translator’s note).] 9. [in france, pharmacists still have a role in suggesting medications to their customers (translator’s note)]. 10. in his book, comment taire le sujet [how to silence the subject], serge lesourd emphasizes the rising diagonal of a → and relates it to the matheme for perversion, thus connecting capitalism with the epiphany of a subject who is “capable of experiencing jouissance without any constraints.” without discussing directly this identification of the two mathemes, i would note that in the matheme of perversion, the ◊ of alienation/separation is placed between a and , rather than an arrow that is oriented in a single direction. it bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 79 should also be recalled that, according to lacan, perversion involves a logical protest that goes against normalizing identifications. see lesourd, serge, comment taire le sujet ?: des discours aux parlottes libérales. (toulouse: érès, 2006) and jacques lacan, le séminaire de jacques lacan. livre vi, le désir et son interprétation, 1958-1959, ed. by jacques-alain miller (paris: la martinière, 2013) 569. i thank marie-jean sauret for pointing out this passage to me. 11. in this respect, moreover, the discourse of the master, as the discourse of the unconscious, shows us the impossibility of commanding knowledge, while the analytic discourse works to “grip this [impossible] real.” 12. this writing can, moreover, be independent of any transcription of the spoken word, as can be seen in the use of the little arrows in quantum physics. see richard feynman, qed: the strange theory of light and matter, (princeton: princeton university press, 1985). 13. sigmund freud, the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud (london: hogarth press, 1953-1974), xxi (1960): “jokes and their relation to the unconscious,” 28. 14. jacques lacan, je parle aux murs: entretiens de la chapelle de sainte-anne, ed. by jacquesalain (paris: seuil, 2011) 96. 15. jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis, ed. by jacques-alain miller, trans. by russell grigg (new york: norton, 2007) 206. 16. [this is a play on nicolas sarkozy’s campaign slogan during the presidential campaign of 2007: “work more to earn more” (translator’s note).] 17. [for a discussion of “sundering,” see pierre bruno’s article, “hyde and seek,” in this issue of s (translator’s note).] 18. jacques lacan, on feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge, ed. by jacquesalain miller, trans. by bruce fink (new york: norton, 1998) 145. in further references, this text will be cited as encore. 19. jacques lacan, “the freudian thing,” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, 339. 20. marie-jean sauret, malaise dans le capitalisme (toulouse: presses universitaires du mirail, 2009) 171–213. i am, of course, not unaware that certain analysts consider the wolf man to be psychotic. 21. paul fort, “the round,” in jardin illustré de fables et de poésies: édition bilingue français/ anglais, trans. by jean-pierre lefeuvre (paris: publibook, 2011) 141. 22. jacques lacan, “guiding remarks for a convention on female sexuality” in ecrits: the first complete translation in english, 619. 23. marguerite duras, the ravishing of lol stein, trans. by richard seaver (new york: pantheon, 1986). lacan’s reading of this work can be found in “hommage fait à marguerite duras du ravissement de lol v. stein,” in autres écrits. 24. sigmund freud, xxi (1961): “civilization and its discontents,” 97. 25. claude lévi-strauss, the elementary structures of kinship, ed. by rodney needham, trans. by james harle bell and john richard von sturmer, (boston: beacon press, 1969) 479. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 80 26. “hommoinzun” is a play on “au moins un [at least one],” which introduces a reference to homme, man. 27. in “medusa’s head,” freud describes what he calls the “apotropaic” function: an image of castration, as terrifying as it may be, is better than the unthinkable confrontation with a hole that has no boundaries, which would be an absolute absence. see sigmund freud, xviii (1955): “medusa’s head,” 274. 28. paul bénichou, morales du grand siècle, (paris: gallimard, 1948). 29. lyn webster wilde, on the trail of the women warriors: the amazons in myth and history, (new york: thomas dunne, 2000). 30. heinrich von kleist, penthesilea: a tragic drama, trans. by joel agee (new york: harper perennial, 2000) 146. 31. giorgio agamben, homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, trans. by daniel hellerroazen, (stanford: stanford university press, 1998) 71. 32. in psychoanalysis, there is the example of an element that serves as exception to the set: this is the real father, who as agent of castration, re-imposes the primacy of the living being over language. chattopadhyay.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique s13: 119-137 a r k a c h a t t o p a d h y a y l o g i c a l s p a c e i n l a c a n : f r o m p o e ’ s l e t t e r t o v a l d e m a r ’ s b o d y i. spaces: imaginary-symbolic-real t his article attempts to build on the somewhat underdeveloped theme of spatial dynamics in jacques lacan’s “seminar on ‘the purloined letter’” in order to make a larger argument about the logical approach to real space in his later teachings.1 the purpose of this intervention is to promulgate a notion of ‘logical space’ in lacan, analogous to his construction of ‘logical time’ that underwrites the reading of edgar poe’s story, “the purloined letter.” by evoking another poe tale also admired by lacan, namely, “the facts in the case of m. valdemar,” i wish to show how we can situate ‘logical space’ as a corporeal aspect of the real that responds to the category of ‘logical time.’ developing freud’s characterization of the unconscious as timeless, lacan suggests that unconscious time is not chronological but logical. in his 1945 essay on the subject, “logical time,” lacan presents an inter-subjective modulation of temporality in which the subject encounters the tension between hesitation and haste in the logic of the unconscious. the three scansions of logical time, mapped through the problem of the prisoners’ dilemma are: “the instant of the glance,” “the time for comprehending” and “the moment of concluding.” as lacan concludes, the subject anticipates a certainty in the logical form of an assertion, expressing different modulations of time. but what about space in all this? in other words, is there a logic of space in lacan’s thought that connects back to logical time and its complex moments, suspending anticipation between hesitation and haste? this question is of interest to this article. let me begin by approaching this logical space through the lacanian topology of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real as three registers of this spatial logic. to clarify, when i relate logic to the three lacanian orders, i refer to the operative principle or principles by which the imaginary, the symbolic and the real orders may work. having said that, there is a special status of logic for the real order. as the later lacan repeatedly observes, the real can only be approached through logic. arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 120 he engages with frege’s mathematical logic to arrive at a notion of ‘+1’ or the ‘onemultiple’ that has real written all over it. this ‘+1’ creates an impasse in the system by adding itself to the number series as the signifier of inexistence or the originary zero, counted as one. in a similar way, lacan’s use of aristotle’s propositional logic produces a real logic of the ‘not-all’. to echo the definition of the real from seminar xx, it is “an impasse of formalization” (1998, 93). to put it in another way, the real is the impossible of mathematical and logical formalizations. in seminars xix and xx, lacan relates the real to a logic of writing. moving through aristotle’s modal categories of necessity, possibility and contingency, he inscribes a fourth modality, i.e., the real as the impossible through a logic of double-negation: “what doesn’t stop not being written” (1998, 59). moreover, the borromean triad itself is established as a real knot in seminars xxi to xxiii. so, there is quite evidently a logic of the real. however, what interests me in this article is a spatial dynamic of this logic of the real, or in other words, what i am calling ‘real space’ in lacan. in what follows, i will treat lacan’s late work with the geometry of warped surfaces in the borromean knot as a topo-logical extension of his interest in the mathematical and the logical. the borromean topology provides lacan with a final paradigm of logical inscription to approach the unconscious topography (the spatiality of the unconscious as a freudian legacy). he writes the knotting of the three orders of the psyche (real-symbolic-imaginary) in the topological form of the brunnian link/ chain, i.e. the borromean knot. this topology offers a logic for the real writing that happens in the unconscious. stated differently, the borromean clinic yields a real unconscious in final lacan. in this article i will mobilize the implication of the borromean knot as a space and connect it with a real spatial logic. when i call this real space, a ‘logical space’, it does not mean that there cannot be imaginary and symbolic spaces that are logical in their own rights. i will spell them out as we proceed. however, given the special connection between logic and the real, i am more interested in real logical space than the avatar of logic in the spatiality of the other two orders. in his “commentary on the graphs” at the end of écrits, jacques-alain miller articulates a certain logic of space for the unconscious subject. he reflects: “there is no longer any occultation of the symbolic in the topology that lacan establishes because this space is the very space in which the subject’s logical relations are schematized” (lacan, 2006, 858; emphasis original). in this remark, there is a nestled notion of ‘logical space.’ this topological space schematizes the subject’s logical relations. it does not hide the symbolic anymore. as miller suggests, in its symbolic over-determination, this logical space “prohibit[s] imaginary capture” (858). miller’s logical space is primarily a reference to lacan’s graphs. it cuts out the imaginary through the symbolic. miller is quick to differentiate this “symbolic space” from a kantian “space of intuition” (862), but in his thinking, this space is dominated by the symbolic and he remains silent on the real here. is the logical space just symbolic then? what about its purchase on the real? stated differently, how does logical space relate to the real? as we know, for the lacan of seminar xxi, logic is arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 121 the unmistakable “science of the real” (session of 12.2.1974)? in what follows, i will trace a real logic of space in lacan. just as there is a symbolic dimension of space that becomes dominant in the graphs, there is also another, i.e., imaginary aspect of space, which lacan thinks at some length across many essays in écrits. this is the space of the mirror, of course. lacan calls this a “kaleidoscopic” space “in which the imagery of the ego develops and which intersects the objective space of reality” (2006, 99). this notion of space emerges from mirrorical projection. but, as lacan contends, this imaginary space is not the be-all and end-all of the subject. he underlines how the mirror may not reflect anything to the subject on certain occasions: [w]hen man, seeking to empty himself of all thoughts, advances in the shadowless gleam of imaginary space, abstaining from even awaiting what will emerge from it, a dull mirror shows him a surface in which nothing is reflected (2006, 153; emphasis mine). how does this absence of reflection alter the imaginary space? does it not introduce a bit of real into it? when the subject is at the limit of its thinking, an emptying out of thought installs the real as that which cannot be thought. it is interesting to note that lacan moves from this mirror without reflection to an enigmatic glimpse of “unextended” and “indivisible” space that speaks back to logical time (153).1 though lacan still thinks through this space in gestalts or images, one can see a cut of the real in it precisely because this space interrupts imaginary reflection or mirroring. it is the real dimension of the lacanian unconscious that has been foregrounded in recent studies as well as in the practice of 21st century lacanian psychoanalysis.2 as i see it, the later-lacan’s project of situating the unconscious in and through borromean logic and topological geometry bespeaks a real logic of space. this spatial aspect of the real in the logic of the unconscious has remained underexplored and hence this attempt to construct a real logical space in lacan. for instance, in the essay, “position of the unconscious,” lacan grounds the unconscious as a real logical space in topological terms. this is a space, built on gaps and holes, rather than any solid substance. talking about this “open sesame” of the unconscious that opens and closes in the same breath, lacan observes: “[t]he structure of what closes [se ferme] is, indeed, inscribed in a geometry in which space is reduced to a combinatory: it is what is called an ‘edge’ in topology” (2006, 711). this topological space is reduced to a combinatorial logic of the “edge” that flattens out the 1. lacan’s expression—a “kind of time that is caught between expectation and release, a time of phases and repetition” (153)—gestures towards the logical time, caught between hesitation and haste. 2. for example, see colette soler’s book, lacan—the unconscious reinvented in which she discusses the real unconscious at length. arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 122 distinctions between inside and outside. we will return to this liminal notion of the edge through the geometry of point as hole. ii. space in “seminar on ‘the purloined letter’” let me turn to the dynamic of space in lacan’s reading of poe. to state that “the purloined letter” is a story about spatial displacement is to speak the obvious. lacan himself highlights that the story demonstrates how “the signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate” (21). though this sounds self-evident, space has been tackled primarily as a signifying position for the subject in this story and not so much as an independent entity in itself. in other words, the critical move has been from the signifier to its changing loci and not space in its real dimensions. in his reading of poe’s story, lacan famously distinguishes between the symbolic and the real functions of spatiality: for it can literally [à la lettre] be said that something is not in its place only of what can change places—that is, of the symbolic. for the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always and in every case in its place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing that can exile it from it. (17; emphasis original) while lacan’s reading has elicited a lot of discussion on spatial displacement through the logical metonymy of the signifier, i would focus on this other functionality of space as real wherein stasis rules over motility. this motionless real space that remains immune to the signifier’s gymnastics will be our object of attention. in seminar x, lacan makes a telling distinction between lack and hole to talk about the real in spatial terms. he says that “the real is teeming with hollows” and in the same breath, he clarifies that “the real doesn’t lack anything” (185). what is this real space that is full of holes and yet does not lack anything? lack belongs to the symbolic order while the real is unlacking, so to speak. on the other hand, this unlacking space of the real, is full of holes, drilled by the letter as it writes itself in the real. the fact that the real does not have any lack ensures that it remains immovable. if there were lacks in the real, they would have triggered a movement, akin to the metonymy of desire that runs through the lacking chain of signifiers. this static space is full of holes but they do not allow it to generate motion in any way. to address the theme of space in some of the existing literature on lacan’s reading of “the purloined letter,” we find it only as a passing reference. for norman holland, the story is a “study in the way we use spatial metaphors for states of mind” (320). he considers the movement of turning the inside into the outside vis-à-vis the letter as the principal operation of the story. but he does not mark this out as a topological operation. we shall see how lacan’s topological externalization of the inside and vice versa ultimately erases the distinction between interiority and exteriority and generates an “extimacy.” it is key to this spatial dynamic. while this might seem arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 123 to contradict the immovability of the real, it is not a contradiction because the topological movement that flattens out the partition of inside and outside makes the real space unlacking. it is this topological movement of mathematical inscription that enables us to arrive at this real space that is undifferentiated, unlacking and unmoving. we will come back to lacan’s mobilization of this topological space as a non-euclidian space of the real in his later teachings. to return to the existing figuration of space in “seminar on ‘the purloined letter,’” barbara johnson’s famous essay on lacan’s reading of the poe-story touches upon the question of space in terms of what she calls “frame” and “framing.” she treats the frame as a borderline space and appreciates lacan’s project of testing “limits of spatial logic” and “breaking out of” the euclidean model (481). as johnson acknowledges, “breaking out of” spatiality is itself a spatial metaphor and hence, what we are looking at is not so much a flat renunciation of spatial logic but, more of an attempt to find a new logic of space. we will see how lacan’s late thoughts on a real logic of space, if not a real logical space, grapples with its ontological dimension. does this ‘logical space’ of holes have any being (in the ontological sense)? we will return to this question through lacan’s recourse to the borromean chain as a support for topological space. discussing the police’s search in the minister’s apartment in “the purloined letter”, lacan thinks through the question of space in the register of exhaustion. for the police, it is important to cover every nook and crevice. their imaginary programme is premised on this totalistic “exhaustion of space.” it is interesting that lacan calls this spatial exhaustion more than “literal.” he calls it a “theoretical” concern (16). his question about space at this point triggers the movement from a depth model of psychic space to a psyche of surfaces: the division of the entire surface into numbered “compartments,” which was the principle governing the operation, is presented to us as so accurate that “the fiftieth part of a line,” it is said, could not escape the probing of the investigators. are we not then within our rights to ask how it happened that the letter was not found anywhere, or rather to observe that nothing we are told about a higher-caliber conception of concealment ultimately explains how the letter managed to escape detection, since the field exhaustively combed did in fact contain it, as dupin’s discovery eventually proved? (16; emphasis original) the principle of spatial exhaustion, operating at the level of an imaginary-symbolic complex fails when an encounter happens with the real space as inexhaustible surface, rather than exhaustible depths of compartmentalized space. lacan draws our attention to poe’s meticulously detailed descriptions of this spatial structure of investigation: from the division of that space into volumes from which the slightest bulk cannot escape detection, to needles probing soft cushions, and, given that they cannot simply sound the hard wood [for cavities], to an examination arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 124 with a microscope to detect gimlet-dust from any holes drilled in it, and even the slightest gaping in the joints [of the furniture]. (17) lacan gives a certain independence to space as an entity here: “as their network tightens to the point that, not satisfied with shaking the pages of books, the police take to counting them, don’t we see space itself shed its leaves like the letter?” (17). when space sheds its own leaves, we realize “the imbecility of the realist” that restricts space to a realistic idea of hiding where something is hidden in unfathomable depths. as opposed to this realist’s space, we encounter the real space wherein the hidden is “not in its place.” the letter has been hidden by making sure that it is not in its place. this elsewhere is no impenetrable depth but an evident surface which displaces depth. just as there is no distinction between inside and outside in the real, there is no difference between depth and surface in the real. in the real logic of space, depth is transformed into surface. the letter is in the same place. the police scan exhaustively and yet they cannot find it because there are two different subjective approaches to space at work within the same locus. miller spots this in his notes to seminar xxiii: “a euclidian metrical space, the only space that the police in ‘the purloined letter’ move about in. the police fail to spot the paradoxical relationships, even the singularities, that are authorized by topology” (2016, 200). as he rightly observes, topological space is a non-euclidian entity and the borromean nodality that lacan adopts in his later teachings is characteristic of his emphasis on this other kind of space. the letter is right there and elsewhere at the same time. it is in a real point on that space that has zero dimensionality. hence it does not exist for the policeman’s symbolicimaginary framework which involves a linear compartmentalization. for them, space starts from the line which has one dimension but in the real, as we shall see, space concerns the zero-dimensionality of the point. iii. real borromean space: point to hole in ontology let me sketch out here, the real ‘logical space’ in the later-lacan’s emphasis on the true hole in the real. we will investigate this real logic of space by considering whether or not it has a solid ontological dimension. in seminar xxi, lacan talks about the “three dimensions of the space inhabited by the speaking being” as “dit-mansions” (constructions/mansions of what is said/dit) of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real (session of 13.11.1973). this means there is an imaginary, a symbolic and a real space for the speaking body of the subject. lacan also points out in the same session that this is neither the intuitive space of greek geometry, nor is it the cartesian coordinates. this is a new geometry of borromean knots—the so-called “rings of string.” he calls this a space of points and this is how he defines the borromean point: “if you pull somewhere on any one of these rings of string, you see that there is a point, a point which is somewhere there where the three are squeezed” (session of 13.11.1973). arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 125 in seminar xx, lacan has another defi nition of the point: what cuts a line is a point. since a point has zero dimensions, a line is defi ned as having one dimension. since what a line cuts is a surface, a surface is defi ned as having two dimensions. since what a surface cuts is space, space has three dimensions. (1998, 122) lacan calls this a cut-centric approach to space—a “sawing technique” (131) and qualifi es the point which does not have a dimension as a mark of inexistence or, shall we say, real ex-sistence: “it is even refl ected in the notion of the point, for the fact that it qualifi es as one that which has, as is clearly stated, zero dimensions that is, that which doesn’t exist says it all” (131). th e real logical space thus takes aft er the knott y topology of points where the principle of spacing lies in what lacan calls “wedging.” th e real point is not just a point. in the borromean space, the real point is a real hole. when the three rings are not squeezed together to form a knot, we can see three points: th ese three points are wedged together when the rings are squeezed and we get a “threefold point” in the borromean knot. th e important detail is that this point does not hark back to the one-dimensionality of the line. as lacan clarifi es, this triple-point is not just an ordinary point: “th is point is not constituted here by the convergence of three lines, if nothing else because there are two diff erent points – a right and a left ” (132). th is is a point made of other points. th is is a space of holes that are points and vice versa. in seminar xxii, it is this triple-point that lacan goes on to call the “inviolable hole” (session of 11.3.1975). he makes a further distinction between true and false holes (see seminar xxiii, 67). a true hole is that which an infi nite line has passed through while a false hole is not constituted by an infi nite line. in other words, the borromean holes are true holes insofar as the knot cannot be formed without infi nite lines and circles. for me, this true hole that helps constitute the borromean knot through an equivalence of the infi nite line and the circle is the logical space of the real. it is a space of points that lead to further points, wedged together. most importantly, these points are also holes, ratifi ed by an infi nite straight line, running through them. as lacan says in seminar xxii, without a hole, one cannot make a borromean knot (session of 17.12.1974). in the seminar xx, 132 arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 126 same seminar, he also draws a necessary connection between the hole of the real and the order of ex-sistence. as rona cohen, reading lacan’s spatial being, suggests, “[w]ith topology, lacan addresses this dimension of space, as real” (219; emphasis original). in agreement with her derivation of real space, let me state that while her focus is on the functions of object and being in this real space, i am more concerned with the logic of the real that governs this spatiality vis-à-vis the hole and the point. the hole of the triple-point in the borromean link is a space that has no solid being. it is not a space shared by the three rings and yet it is a twist around the central hole that makes the knot of three. it is not a space in a foundational and ontological sense because it has no presence without the rings and their knotting. the squeezing tightens the three points into one hole but none of the three rings can ontologically claim that space to be its own. without that hole, the borromean or brunnian link will cease to exist but at the same time, this hole-point of real space does not have any ontological status as a space in itself. it has no being but as the logical cause of the entire borromean structure, this real space has an inexistence that is etched out nevertheless. being devoid of being, it is a motionless space. having no existence, it cannot move. the things that move in and around this hole-point are the infinite lines that have formed rings while the hole-point as an index of real space remains immovable. having no being, this space cannot lack anything. for it to lack something, it has to have some substantive being. this space is unmoving and unlacking, not to mention that it does not have an ontological dimension. it is the zero-dimensionality of the hole-point. this is the fundamental difference between cohen’s and my critical positions on the matter. while she is interested in developing lacanian topology as a consolidation of spatial ontology, for me, it is the topological or logical space of the borromean chain that creates an impasse in ontology.3 in a spatial sense, topology creates warps in ontological solidity. cartesian and euclidian space might have a certain degree of ontological solidity but topological space introduces heterogeneity into that consistency. to say this in another way, ontological space is more imaginary than anything else while topological space is dominated by the real. the locus of the hole-point, generated in this non-euclidean space, jettisons the affirmation of space that has any solid ontological being. the real logical space that makes a hole of a point and a point of a hole does not have any being. it does not exist. the only thing, it has, is ex-sistence. in my argument, it is the point as hole that stands for a real locus of ex-sistence and unlike the symbolic-imaginary space of volumes, this is a space of zero-ontology. the point that enables the twist around the central hole of the borromean knot does not have a being because that space only comes into being as a hole when the twisted third ring goes through the points on the two other wedged rings, to form a knot. this hole is not a point, shared by any of the three rings insofar as 3. one may consider alenka zupančič’s arguments on sexuality as an impasse in ontology in freud and lacan as a parallel and complementary approach to the complex question of lacanian ontology. for more, see her book, why psychoanalysis? three interventions. arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 127 they do not go into one another. in the borromean knot, the three constituent rings only lie side by side or, in other words, one on top of the other. the point-hole of the real logical space thus has no shared being. this is a space that bores holes in being. this is the logical, rather than onto-logical space where the minister keeps the letter hidden in poe’s story. it will never be found in any examination that is premised on a solid ontology of depths. it can only be approached through the logic of the zero, operative in the logical ex-sistence of real space as a locus of hollows. in seminar xx, lacan defines “pure space” as a space “based on the notion of the part, as long as one adds to that the following, that all of the parts are external to each other – partes extra partes” (23; emphasis original). this is not the cartesian space of extensionality where one part extends into another. as lacan clarifies, all the parts are extraneous to one another. this is a fragmentary space where parts have replaced any notion of wholeness. lacan calls this real space, a “mathematician” who knows how to go beyond an intuitive understanding of spatiality (135). this is the logical space of the real which knows how to count. counting numbers are connected to counting holes in the rings of string that make up a borromean space of chains and knots. 4 seminar xxi evokes “vector space” and “fibred space,” taking the plot from seminar xx where lacan discusses the space of jouissance as a “compact” topological space. in seminar xxi, he emphasizes the heterogeneous character of topological space by dwelling on the notion of ‘neighbourhood,’ intrinsic to topology. as he suggests, this is not a homogeneous neighbourhood. it is marked with an ‘axiom’ of otherness: “everything that forms part of a topological space, if it is to be put in a neighbourhood, implies that there is something else in the same neighbourhood” (session of 15.1.1974). this something else is the trace of heterogeneity in real topological space. in seminar xx, lacan continues to talk about this set-theoretical heterogeneity in terms of cracks, faults and holes in topological space: nothing is more compact than a fault, assuming that the intersection of everything that is enclosed therein is accepted as existing over an infinite number of sets, the result being that the intersection implies this infinite number. that is the very definition of compactness. (1998, 9) we are back to the space of “faults” or “holes” and these holes indicate an infinite locus of the real. lacan notes that this is not a homogenous space but an “intersection extending to infinity” (9). this logico-mathematical heterogeneity is a pointer that there is no singular or uniform logic of the real. the logical space in its real incarnation is all about fragmentation, ambivalence and antinomy. this space is intersectional as well. it is poised on cusps, edges and holes. the extensional presence of the infinite line makes this into a true hole of the real. lacan goes on to call this a space of open sets that exclude their own limits and constitute a 4. the zero-dimensionality of the borromean point connects with the number zero and what lacan makes of it by mobilizing the work of frege and the logic of the plus-one where the originary zero of the number series comes back to haunt numerical succession. arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 128 finite series that can only be counted one by one (10). approaching each of these open spaces one by one in the domain of sexual jouissance is not what this article is concerned with. but the movement of the one-by-one echoes lacan’s topological evocation of the borromean knot which constitutes three ones that are alone in themselves, i.e., without any one-on-one rapport. the borromean structure highlights the agency of this one, insofar as releasing any one ring dissolves the entire chain. this space is a space of the one in the sense that each of the rings is one-all-alone. thus, we have to go one-by-one in the borromean space. this one is also the one of the speaking body. iv. logical space and body in what follows, i will connect the real logical space with corporeality. extending freud’s point that the subject is not aware of psychic space, rona cohen observes that the subject of the unconscious lacks knowledge about its embodiment and spatiality (216). she makes an argument about being that is homologous to my own, regarding the body. for cohen, being does not occupy a place. being is itself a place. she addresses the body as a structure that goes beyond the imaginary specularity of the mirror and charts real space. the connection between body and space is given a thought in seminar xx: “[i]n their complexity, knots are well designed to make us relativize the supposed three dimensions of space, founded solely on the translation we give for our body in a solid volume” (1998, 133). solid geometry provides a corporeal modality that goes well with the borromean spatial logic of the real. for lacan, the three dimensions of space are founded on embodiment in terms of how the body occupies a solid volume in space. but the borromean knot relativizes this dimensionality and changes the notion of embodied space as well. in seminar xxiv, lacan makes a gesture towards this other kind of space that the body inaugurates: “space seems to be extension when we are dealing with descartes. but the body founds for us the idea of another kind of space” (session of 16.11.1976). he grounds this corporeal space in a torus which produces a tube when turned inside out. torus, in this seminar, becomes lacan’s preferred topological shape to discuss the real of the body. a tube appears when the torus is cut open and topologically turned inside out through continuous deformation and transformation. the tube disappears when the torus is reconstituted with its inside on the outside and vice versa. this tube is a figure for the body in its real structure. this is the real spatial structure of the body that is susceptible to cutting and “extimacy.” let me highlight the intersectional nature of this real body. if the tube presents the real of the body in some sense, it is precisely because it is a result of the topological operation of cutting and turning inside out. the real of the body appears and disappears in these corporeal transitions, i.e. the operation of cutting open the torus. with the torus, we are looking at multiple holes: the hole at the heart of the torus and the hole inside it through which we can run a series of other tori (see fig. i-1, seminar xxiv, session of 16.11.1976, opposite). arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 129 seminar xxiv, session of 16.11.1976 arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 130 according to lacan, the human body has an asymmetrical relation with space. the asymmetry of the signifier and the signified translates into the asymmetry of the container and the contained, which has a particular corporeal function (session of 21.12.1976). the speaking body as container contains space that is asymmetrical visà-vis the body and vice versa. instead of thinking embodied space, we are thinking of body itself as real space here. it has its hollows, surfaces and topological movements of internalization and externalization. in his “seminar on ‘the purloined letter,’” lacan connects space with body when he compares the letter with “an immense female body, sprawl[ing] across the space of the minister’s office when dupin enters it” (2006, 26). without going into the sexual identification of the body as female which relates to the letter’s feminizing features, let us continue to think the human body which has a real structure, i.e. a logical space in itself. v. reading valdemar: the space of death let me now turn to the other poe story, “the facts in the case of m. valdemar” to show how the real logical space of the human body reacts to ‘logical time.’ to clarify, this article is less about logical time which is an established lacanian notion and more about establishing a new notion from lacan, i.e., logical space. i am not claiming any simplistic space-time coordinate here but only registering the kind of reaction logical space might have on logical time. i will do this by going back to poe whose “the purloined letter” was a story that helped lacan in thinking through logical time. the story in analysis is “the facts in the case of m. valdemar” and it is a story lacan was more than aware of. it is interesting to note how the standard interpretations of this 1845 gothic story have almost inevitably centred around the protagonist’s impossible articulation of his own death and complications of identity.5 roland barthes reads into the story the relation between death and language, among other things, while jacques derrida considers death/exclusion of the ‘i’ as a pre-requisite for speech act. in a significantly different reading, hannah murray approaches the story from a medical humanities perspective and reads into it the politics of control over the other’s body in the context of medical processes. there are queer as well as deconstructivist readings foregrounding ‘telegraphy.’6 the final state of the human body as mess and the torsions it produces in space as well as time have been largely ignored in these readings. this is the aspect i will try and unlock through the lacanian installation of speaking body as ‘logical space’ here. we will see how the subject-body of valdemar, caught in a limbo between life and death and uttering the linguistically impossible sentence, “i am dead” speaks 5. see barthes’ essay “textual analysis of poe’s ‘valdemar’” or derrida’s reference to the story in speech and phenomena (1973, 97). they dwell on the structural impossibility of the sentence “i am dead” and ground their notions of subjectivity on its basis. see also derrida’s comments on the story in the structuralist controversy (155-156). 6. for a queer reading of valdemar, see suzanne ashworth’s piece and for a derridean reading of writing in the story, see adam frank’s article. arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 131 to lacan’s notion of logical time and the disintegrating corporeal space as a real refers back to temporality. ‘the facts in the case of m. valdemar’ is a story that draws lacan’s attention as early as 1954-55, during seminar ii. in the story, the narrator who practices hypnosis, is able to freeze his friend valdemar in the borderline zone of life and death in the body. he mesmerizes him on the verge of death and thereby stalls the decay of the body. in the shocking final moment, when the ethically troubled narrator withdraws the hypnotic spell, valdemar’s body becomes a putrid pool of liquid within a second. the arrested post-mortal decay of the body is expedited in this time warp that is hardly chronological but logical. after hypnotizing valdemar, the narrator keeps asking him whether he is asleep and the three answers he gives at three different points in time are as follows: 1. “yes; —asleep now. do not wake me! —let me die so!” 2. “yes; still asleep—dying.” 3. “yes; —no; —i have been sleeping —and now —now —i am dead ” (79-81; emphasis mine). these three answers chart a movement from consciousness to the most radical point in a paradoxical state where death has eliminated consciousness and yet, due to the arrested time of hypnosis, a distinctly dead voice remains in the body. we could compare these three statements with the three moments of lacan’s logical time: instant of the glance, time for comprehending and moment of concluding. lacan’s subjective logic of time finds a linguistic mode of expression here in valdemar’s three sentences. they bring us back to the body as a speaking-body and logical space as a space bodily “inhabited by the speaking-being”, to echo lacan’s aforementioned quote from seminar xxi. poe evokes the image of distance and touch to give a peculiar attribute of deadness to this voice that can say, “i am dead.” to quote his analogies: in the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears –at least mine –from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. in the second place, it impressed me (i fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch. (81) the voice is said to come from some hellish under-earth and it feels like jelly on touching. these images create a sense of space (‘cavern’) and materiality (‘glutinous matters’) for the voice. they also have a paradoxical implication of corporeality. though the voice does not have a physical body, the aforementioned images of touching and gelatinous feel create an impossible sense of corporeality for it. here we have the climax of a triadic scansion of logical time. to place the three symbolic acts in logical time, the first articulation that said valdemar is sleeping and wants to die in sleep is, in lacan’s language, “the instant of the glance” that frames the predicament. the second utterance solidifies “the time for comprehending” when arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 132 the subject surmises that he is still asleep and will soon die. the final speech presents the “moment of concluding” in encapsulating the previous two temporal scansions. it hesitates to articulate the state of death in language, the linguistic impossibility that, for barthes, is the psychoanalytic core of this story.7 instead of dwelling on speaking the unspeakable sentence “i am dead” which introduces a bit of real into the symbolic structure of utterance, i would argue that the speech-sequence whereby valdemar announces his changing state is located in logical time. hypnosis has put an end to chronos for valdemar. in other words, for hypnotized valdemar, there exists no chronological time anymore. but time still remains in a strange subjective way. valdemar keeps saying things that are located in time. these articulations are logically frozen in inter-subjective temporality—a time that remains in the form of a gap between the narrator and valdemar. valdemar initially says that he feels no pain; so, the narrator feels less troubled about his experiment from a moral perspective. but, as we proceed and he asks the question again and again, valdemar’s voice twists in suffering and implores the narrator either to restore his consciousness or end it altogether. it is at this point that the narrator offers his reverse passes and the temporal warp is neutralized. logical time returns to chronological time and we encounter the carrion — the scrap that the human body is and that which it becomes: his whole frame at once – within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk – crumbled – absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity (83). in seminar ii, while referring to the valdemar story, lacan dwells, on the real and unnamable aspect of this corporeal waste. this is a liquefaction of the subjectbody into a real mass of unspeakability. poe himself links space with time in the expression “the space of a single minute” and his use of the word “shrunk” presents a specifically topological movement in the matrix of space and time. lacan reflects on this final state of the body in the following way: m. valdemar 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 life – the bubble bursts and dissolves down into inanimate putrid liquid (1988, 231-232). lacan makes the real character of this dead matter quite obvious in this passage. to note the fundamental but important point, this real “putrid liquid” is a 7. barthes reads this sentence as a paradox of affirmation and negation, i.e. “i am dead and i am not dead.” he also reads it as a return of death as the primally repressed into the order of language (see 1981, 154). arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 133 transformation of corporeal space. it is nothing but a topological transformation. what was inside the body and invisible has become visible by coming out. this externalization of corporeal inside lends a topological dimension to this decay. the body has become this real space for which the metaphysical-ontological language does not have a signifier. it is a space that cannot be named by the symbolicimaginary semantics. this is the space of the real that is strictly senseless and silent. the silence of the putrid liquid is a memory of corporeal solidity. it is the terminal limit of the body that speaks. this is a once-body, suffused with the silence of unspeakable real. it is a corporeal counterpart to the telling speech of “i am dead.” it is interesting to note that poe wrote another piece on mesmeric practices in 1849, titled “mesmeric revelation.” it involved a discursive and philosophical dialogue between the mesmerist and his subject, someone whose name reminds us of the tale in analysis: vankirk. the text goes into meditations on matter and space among many other things. at one point in the dialogue, vankirk says to the mesmerist: there are many things on the earth, which would be nihility to the inhabitants of venus – many things visible and tangible in venus, which could not be brought to appreciate as existing at all. but to the inorganic beings – to the angels – the whole of the unparticled matter is substance that is to say, the whole of what we term “space” is to them the truest substantiality; – the stars, meantime, through what we consider their materiality, escaping the angelic sense, just in proportion as the unparticled matter, through what we consider its immateriality, eludes the organic. (poe 2005, 73) the above passage on space from a text that rewrites valdemar in a different form of the essay bolsters my argument about body as space. as we can see here, vankirk, the spectral double of valdemar, relativizes the ideas of matter and space, claiming that what we human beings call “space” might have the material substantiality of a body for non-human beings. following the same logic, we can say that the human body is, from another perspective, nothing but space. to make the connection with logical time clearer at the level of troping, let us look into the passage from lacan’s essay on logical time: […] we witness the reappearance of the objective time of the initial intuition of the movement which, as though sucked up between the instant of its beginning and the haste of its end, had seemed to burst like a bubble. owing to the force of doubt, which exfoliates the subjective certainty of the moment of concluding, objective time condenses here like a nucleus in the interval of the first suspended motion, and manifests to the subject its limit in the time for comprehending that, for the two others, the instant of the glance has passed and that the moment of concluding has returned (171; emphases original). let me emphasize the figurative similarity between lacan’s two passages—the one above from écrits and the aforementioned one from seminar ii. they both deploy arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 134 the same metaphor of bubble-bursting. when lacan talks about the return of chronological time after a logical scansion, the time that was logically sliced in between, bursts like a bubble. this is the same metaphor lacan uses to describe the final transformation of valdemar’s body into the real space of dead matter. the bubble-burst in lacan’s essay signals the return of chronological time. it is the same return of temporal chronology that allows us to see the transformation of valdemar’s body-space into unnameable matter. valdemar’s body had already undergone the putrid liquefaction in the chronological order of decay in the human corpse. but thanks to the narrator’s hypnotic spell, this condition was frozen in time. with this logical time of hypnosis withdrawn, we could see the carrion in the resurfacing of chronological time in the final moment of the story. but what i want to emphasize here is the mutation of logical time into space as valdemar’s body in its real fragmented formlessness. the real body-space thus becomes the locus to subtly situate logical time in this story. as poe’s description implies, the body that “within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk–crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands” is inextricably knotted with space and time. we come back to a moment in seminar xxi in which lacan melts logical time into space: “time is perhaps nothing other, precisely, than a succession of instants being pulled out […] time is, it is perhaps that, finally, the trinities of space; what emerges there from a squeezing without remedy” (session of 11.12.1973). this dissolution of time into space has to be counterpointed with any notion of time-space coordinate. moreover, we can spot the borromean figure of squeezing in this passage. lacan here subordinates logical time to the three dimensions of space that lead us to the squeezed point in the knot. this is the point of valdemar’s body as dead matter. the unnamable real body is produced due to a hypnotic arresting of time that stops chronology and makes time logical in a subjective sense. like the tube we saw forming while the torus is cut and turned inside out, this is a real body that does not stay forever. it is fragmented and transitional. it appears but only to disappear. in fact, in valdemar’s case, this is the final remainder of the body, soon to melt into thin air. once the hypnotism is taken out, what remains as corporeal space of a dead real matter is the ruins of the body as logical space. this putrid liquid hardly occupies the space that the solid body of valdemar would. the carrion is thus body turned inside out. this body-space is homologous to a chronological time that was squeezed into a zero-point earlier. the chronos that had burst out, bursts back in, but, not by way of temporality. it comes back in and through space. this is time’s becoming into space. the logic of time speaks in to a logical space of death here. the radical decomposition of the body makes the latent, patent, i.e., the body does not simply occupy space; body is space. it is a space from which dead matter reveals itself in an expression that is impossible to be captured through the symbolic order. ironically, this is a body that ceases to exist as body and becomes pure space. does this space have a being? i would argue that this is a space of holes. as the body bursts, what is left is a real locus, teeming with hollows. it does not have an affirmative existential value more than a hole. the body as a porous entity melts arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 135 into a space that is suspended between embodied and disembodied loci. death as a signature of real non-knowledge is key to this figuration wherein the unnamable remains of a body situate logical space as a homology of logical time. this is also a space of absolute stasis as deathly immobility dwells here. lacan in seminar xxiii, is more than aware of this real aspect of death: “this imponderable is death, whose real grounding is that it cannot be pondered” (106). the real of death is not only the unthinkable or the inexpressible, it is also a real aspect of bodily transformation as it turns into dead matter. it is this movement that makes it an incarnation of real logical space. as valdemar’s decomposition into uncountable but fragmented corporeal matter indicates, logical space is nothing uniform or singular. its logic is one of hollows, tensions and fragmentary multiplicity. to conclude, what i have done in this article is to foreground space as a logical incarnation of the real in lacan’s reading of poe’s “the purloined letter.” i have established a connection between this static spatiality and lacan’s multiple evocations of a real logical space in the later seminars. we have seen how the topological space of the borromean chain that dissolves the distinction of inside and outside formalizes a real logical space of the point as hole with zero-dimensionality. as opposed to the euclidean space of point-line-surface, this is a space of points that lead to further points. these points are holes and vice versa. building on this, i have zoomed in on lacan’s late thoughts on the structure of the human body as real space, rather than simply an item that occupies cartesian space. i have then taken this corporeal space of hole-points through yet another poe story on valdemar’s hypnotized state between life and death, and his subsequent liquefaction once the hypnotic spell is withdrawn. my reading has situated the real logical space of the body as a parallel to lacan’s notion of logical time. this is a real corporeal space that becomes an inscription of the movement from chronological to logical time and vice versa. this real space bores holes into ontology by remaining grounded in a hole-point that defies positive existential status. death as a perennial figure of the unknowable adds to the real of the situation as we see the deathly transformation of corporeal space. acknowledgements i would like to thank the peer reviewers and the editors, sigi jöttkandt and dominiek hoens, for their careful reading and robust suggestions that significantly helped this essay in the process of revision. works cited ashworth, suzanne, “experimental matter, unclaimed death, and posthumous futures in poe’s ‘valdemar,’” poe studies 49 (2016): 52-79. arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 136 barthes, roland, “textual analysis of poe’s ‘valdemar’”, untying the text: a poststructuralist reader, ed. robert young. routledge and kegan paul, 1981, pp. 133-161. cohen, rona, “the spatiality of being: topology as ontology in lacan’s thinking of the body.” in psychoanalysis: topological perspectives, ed. michael friedman and samo tomšič. verlag, 2016, pp. 227-249. derrida, jacques, speech and phenomena and other essays on husserl’s theory of signs, trans. david b. allison and newton garver. northwestern university press, 1973. frank, adam, “valdemar’s tongue, poe’s telegraphy”, elh 72: 3 (2005): 635-662. holland, norman, n., “re-covering ‘the purloined letter’: reading as a personal transaction.” the purloined poe: lacan, derrida and psychoanalytic reading, ed. john p. muller and william j. richardson. john hopkins university press, 1988, pp. 307322. johnson, barbara, “the frame of reference: poe, lacan, derrida.” yale french studies literature and psychoanalysis. the question of reading: otherwise, 55/56 (1977): 457-505. lacan, jacques, book ii: the ego in freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, trans. sylvana tomaselli, ed. jacques-alain miller. cambridge university press, 1988. lacan, jacques, écrits, trans. bruce fink, heloise fink and russell grigg. norton, 2006. lacan, jacques, the seminar of jacques lacan: book x: anxiety (1962-1963), ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. a.r. price, cambridge: polity, 2015. lacan, jacques, the seminar of jacques lacan: book xxiii: the sinthome (1975-1976), ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. a.r. price, cambridge: polity, 2016. lacan, jacques, the seminar of jacques lacan: book xx: on feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge (1972–73), ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. bruce fink. norton, 1998. lacan, jacques, the seminar of jacques lacan: book xxi; the names of the father, (1973–74), trans. cormac gallagher, unpublished. http://www.lacaninireland.com/ web/ wp content/uploads/2010/06/book-21-les-non-dupes-errent-part-1.pdf [last accessed 10 march 2014]. lacan, jacques, the seminar of jacques lacan: book xxii; rsi (1974–1975), trans. cormac gallagher, unpublished. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/ uploads/2010/06/rsi-complete-with-diagrams.pdf [last accessed 10 march 2014]. lacan, jacques, the seminar of jacques lacan: book xxiv l’insu que sait de l’unebevue s’aile a mourre (1976–1977), trans. cormac gallagher, unpublished. http:// www. lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/insu-seminar-xxivfinal-sessions-1-12-1976-1977.pdf [last accessed 10 march 2014]. arka chattopadhyay: logical space in lacan s13: 137 macksey, richard and eugenio donato (eds.), the structuralist controversy: the languages of criticism and the sciences of man. baltimore and london: john hopkins university press, 1972. murray, hannah lauren, “‘i say to you that i am dead!’: medical experiment and the limits of personhood in edgar allan poe’s ‘the facts in the case of m. valdemar’” in the irish journal of gothic and horror studies 16 (2017), pp. 22-40. poe, edgar allan. collected works of poe, volume ii. icon classics, 2005. soler, colette, lacan—the unconscious reinvented, trans. esther faye and susan schwartz. karnac, 2014. zupančič, alenka, why psychoanalysis? three interventions. aarhus university press, 2008. kolenc.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 10 & 11 (2017-18): 90-108 b a r a k o l e n c t h e p a r a d o x e s o f t h e l i m p i n g c a u s e i n k i e r k e g a a r d , h e g e l a n d l a c a n at this point, i should define unconscious cause, neither as an existent, nor as a ουχ ον, a non-existent... it is aμη ον of the prohibition that brings to being an existent in spite of its non-advent, it is a function of the impossible on which a certainty is based.1 t he constitution of the psychoanalytic subject is essentially determined by a certain leap of causality. this leap does not take place as an effect of the signifying chain, automaton, but rather as an effect of the automaton always already being barred by tyche, the impossible encounter with the real, or the encounter with the real as impossible. it is precisely this inherent impossibility, which does not allow for things to combine in a causal chain, but also does not let them surrender to coincidence, that determines the function of the limping cause operating in the unconscious. the limping cause is a lost cause, but not a cause that was lost—precisely as lost it is essentially at work. it grounds the subject, but it grounds it by way of undermining the ground itself. it grounds it in the gap that always establishes a certain delay between cause and effect and thereby prevents the subject from arising as an effect of a causal series structuring its history. repetition in psychoanalysis means exactly this: in the moment the subject emerges in the signifying chain, it retroactively produces its own cause, but is at the same time prevented from establishing itself as the effect of this cause. the psychoanalytic conception of repetition and the limping cause as articulated by lacan through his reinterpretation of aristotle’s coincidental causes automaton and tyche can be read through kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition. by introducing this paradox, kierkegaard carries out a surprising tour de force: it is exactly the structural impossibility of repetition that is the only condition of its possibility. he thereby delineates a subversive ontology that departs from the classical ontology of being: instead of the strict delimitation of the area of being and the area of non-being, he claims that they mutually condition each other and structurally bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 91 belong to one another. through the prism of the limping cause we can read also hegel’s dialectics: negation is the constitutive moment of repetition as a co-determination of determinacy and indeterminacy, being and nothing, indistinction and distinction, finitude and infinity. the double paradox of repetition in kierkegaard’s famous book on repetition, published in 1843 under the pseudonym constantin constantinus,2 we can trace a certain double paradox of repetition, which kierkegaard himself did not expressly articulate, but whose exceptional structure practically offers itself to thought, as it were. this paradox consists of two premises, with each premise itself being a paradox. the first premise of kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition is established when kierkegaard faces a fundamental failure of repetition—the radical impossibility for a given event to be repeated in the same form. this was precisely why he was disappointed with his experimental trip to berlin, which ended with his finding that repetition is not possible: after several days’ repetition of this, i became bitter, so tired of repetition that i decided to return home. i made no great discovery, yet it was strange, because i had discovered that there was no such thing as repetition. i became aware of this by having it repeated in every possible way.3 repetition, says kierkegaard, the pure repetition of the same, is not possible. all that constantly and stubbornly keeps returning is merely the failure of repetition. there is a paradox here: nothing can be repeated, but this is also precisely what keeps repeating. at this point, kierkegaard carries out an unexpected and key tour de force that determines modernity: it is exactly the failure of repetition, says kierkegaard, that is the key to its success. the fact that it is merely the impossibility of repetition that keeps repeating is what first even establishes the actual terrain of repetition, whose condition of possibility is nothing but its fundamental impossibility: this stubborn return of the failure of repetition is already repetition itself. kierkegaard thereby traces a new, modern logic of failure that does not bring resignation and destruction, but is rather constructive insofar as it operates as the condition of possibility of every kind of motion or change. failure is not a hindrance to the perfect repetition of the same, but is itself the very constitutive moment of repetition. in psychoanalysis, the failure of repetition is the constitutive moment of repetition as the movement of the signifying structure and the logic of alienation through which the subject emerges in this signifying structure: “the function of missing lies at the centre of analytic repetition. the appointment is always missed – this is what constitutes, in comparison with tyche, the vanity of repetition, its constitutive occultation.”4 bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 92 the second premise of kierkegaard’s double paradox consists of another contradictory situation traversing the logic of repetition: difference, the exception, will not be reached beyond repetition, it will not be discovered in pure transgression, deviation or variation, but will be produced only where it is impossible to look for it—in the pure repetition of the same. the paradox here is that the deviation from the repetition of the same is possible only through the repetition of the same: hope is a pretty girl, who slips away from one’s grasp. recollection is a beautiful older woman who never quite suits the moment. repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires because it is only the new of which one tires. one never tires of the old, and when one has it before oneself, one is happy, and only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy.5 here, kierkegaard again carries out a speculative twist similar to the first premise, turning the impasse of the paradox into the stem cell of thought: the new, says kierkegaard, is not something we must look for beyond repetition, beyond the structures we are inscribed in. the greatest diversity, claims kierkegaard, is the greatest boredom—what is more boring than buying a different yoghurt every day, sleeping with a different person every night, and changing our political affiliation every month? is not this the pure routine of the same? for kierkegaard, diversity is merely what is externalised, designated as interesting, which does not establish difference, but forms the order of the general. the interesting, which kierkegaard’s aesthete indulges in—is nothing but exchangeability, which does not have the subversive power of exception: exception, the kierkegaardian impossible moment of the ultimate realization of existence in repetition, precisely cannot be captured in variations, but takes place through a radical repetition of the same. the new will not be reached with its—always different—designation, or the variation of meaning, for, the moment we try to name difference, we necessarily lose it. the new is not marked, named new, but always emerges behind our backs as an uncodifiable and uncontrollable moment of repetition itself, as its inherent surplus— lack. if we want to reach the movement of true repetition, we have to persist in its paradoxical structure, the impossible repetition of the same, which in itself produces difference, the new. the possibility of repetition lies precisely in its own impossibility: this is the realization that elevates kierkegaardian existence from an ethical to a religious level. the double kierkegaardian paradox binds together its two premises, two commitments of the impossible as the condition of possibility of repetition, which are themselves paradoxes, that is: the paradox that repetition as repetition of the same is not possible, and yet this impossibility keeps repeating, and, on the other hand, the paradox that the condition of possibility of the emergence of difference is precisely the perfect repetition of the same. the double paradox, the paradox of two paradoxes, is therefore the following: although the repetition of the same is impossible, although difference cannot be eliminated in order to achieve a perfect repetition, the condition of bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 93 possibility of the emergence of difference is, on the other hand, exactly the perfect repetition of the same. behind this exceptional supposition lies kierkegaard’s theory of paradox as developed in repetition and in philosophical crumbs. kierkegaard does not consider paradox as such to be a hindrance to thought, but rather a revelation of the only legitimate field of thought: a paradox is nothing but the very liveliness of thought— it is only in a paradox that thought actually comes across itself (but precisely in coming apart): one should not think ill though of paradoxes, because the paradox is the passion of thought and a thinker without a paradox is like a lover without passion: a poor model. but the highest power of every passion is to will its own annihilation. thus it is also the highest passion of the understanding to desire an obstacle, despite the fact that the obstacle in one way or another may be its downfall. this is the highest paradox of thought, to want to discover something it cannot think.6 with the double paradox of repetition kierkegaard carries out a twist that determines the modern subject—it is the fundamental, structural impossibility of repetition that is the only condition of its possibility. consequently, kierkegaard’s ontology differs from the classical ontology of being in that the area of being and the area of non-being are not strictly delimited, but mutually condition each other and structurally belong to one another. non-being is not beyond being, but is its inner incision. difference as the absolute other, as non-identity, is not ejected from the field of the identity of one as its external limit, but determines it from within. because the ontology of being builds on a strict delimitation of identity and nonidentity, it can understand repetition only as reproduction of identical elements where non-identity cannot enter. difference as negation is ejected from the system: non-identity is beyond the series, beyond the field of the thinkable. that is why classical ontology can think difference only in the form of variation, as a specific difference that establishes variety within the very identity of being, without thereby curtailing the formal division between the area of being and the area of non-being. however, in order for the ontology of being to think difference that does not introduce negation into the system, that does not desecrate the field of being with the traces of non-being, it has to establish another delimitation: the delimitation between the general and the particular, the universality of form and the particularity of its individual material realisations. the identity of one establishes pure form that, as such, is unchangeable and absolutely reproducible, but insofar as it is realised in material particularities, it generates diversity, an innumerable multiplicity of variations. thus, difference is inscribed in the ontology of being as variation, as a positive material differentiating moment, which does not influence the form of being itself—it cannot stand against it as negation, as non-being. kierkegaard’s theory of repetition brings a critique of two mechanisms of the ontology of being: the critique of the mechanism of reproduction as the repetition of bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 94 identical elements, which, at the level of form, perpetuates the unchangeability of the one, and the critique of variation as merely material diversity, which does not have the power of difference as negation, an exception that would cut into the very identity of the one, the very form of being. repetition is not reproduction insofar as a certain difference is always already inscribed in every turn of the repetition of the same and a priori undermines any pretension to identity from within, but, at the same time, difference is not variation insofar as it does not operate merely in the material area of positive diversities, but cuts into the very form of identity as a subversive power of exception, as its internal other, as its constitutive negation. however, kierkegaard’s ontology, insofar as it turns away from the ontology of being, is not an ontology of non-being, an ontology of an eternally flowing becoming of non-identities, an ontology of substitutivity and groundlessness, as traced in a certain postmodern theory of simulacra. in kierkegaard’s conception of repetition, a certain identity is established—but this identity does not persist in time: in every moment, the subject is born anew through the dialectics of repetition that retroactively posits every identity as an identity of identity and non-identity and, through it, a priori generates its history. non-being is always already inscribed in being or, as lacan puts it, the one of the unconscious is precisely the one of the rift, gap. the unconscious is not the field of one, being. but it is also not the field of non-being. the unconscious, says lacan, opens the gap, which is pre-ontological; it is neither being nor non-being, but belongs to the register of the un-realized. as such, the unconscious is essentially a discontinuity, inconstancy. there is no closed one here, no whole that precedes this discontinuity and into which a difference cuts subsequently, making a fissure, a break in the original oneness. but, on the other hand, just as there is no pre-existing identity, there is also no pre-existing non-identity; absence is also not the basis. lacan stresses this with his famous metaphor of silence and voice: there is no initial silence into which a voice shouts, he says, but it is the shout that yet establishes the silence.7 being and non-being as co-determining are produced at once with the original cut: the unconscious is, says lacan, “in profound, initial, inaugural, relation with the function of the concept of the unbegriff—or begriff of the original un, namely, the cut.”8 the double critique of reproduction and variation can also be found in hegel, in the rare passages where he discusses repetition. even though hegel does not develop a theory of repetition, his theses on repetition concern the core of his dialectics. the dialectics of repetition hegel very rarely talks about repetition, but we nevertheless have to say that hegelian dialectics is nothing but repetition par excellence. the classical field of reflection on hegel’s theory of repetition is related to his famous idea of historical repetition, which—in line with the retroactive logic of the productive conception of repetition9—was first actually inscribed in the history of thought by marx’s (but in bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 95 reality engels’) retort on repetition in history.10 instead of the classical discussions on repetition that draw on hegel’s perception of history, we will here proceed from his the science of logic. there is a passage in which hegel briefly, but very clearly says something about repetition as a purely structural matter. this passage can be found in volume one of the science of logic, in remark 3 of the section on becoming. this is how hegel defines becoming: the unity, whose moments, being and nothing, are inseparable, is at the same time different from these moments. it thus stands as a third with respect to them—a third which, in its most proper form, is becoming.11 hegel’s development of the initial hypothesis of the science of logic that pure being and pure nothing are the same, and as such basically inseparable, which is also the fundamental point of his dialectics, is that it is precisely this inseparability of being and nothing that constitutes their difference. it is exactly this difference, this necessary shift within every statement of identity, that is the inner motor that establishes his dialectics as the dynamism of becoming and transition. being and nothing, says hegel, do not exist for themselves, but are present only through becoming or transition. wherever there is talk of being and nothing, this third, becoming, which is the truth of pure being and pure nothing, must be present as their condition of possibility. this third, hegel continues, has different empirical shapes that abstraction sets aside or neglects for the sake of “holding fast to its two products, being and nothing, each for itself, and showing them as protected against transition.”12 the most eloquent accounts of the impossibility of advancing from an abstraction to something beyond it, and of uniting the two, claims hegel, are given by jacobi in support of his polemic against the kantian a priori synthesis of self-consciousness, in his treatise concerning the undertaking of critique to reduce reason to the understanding (jacobi, werke, vol. iii). jacobi defines the task as follows: […] demonstrating the originating or the producing of a synthesis in a pure somewhat, be it consciousness, space or time. let space be a one; time a one; consciousness a one. now, do say how any of these three ‘ones’ purely turns itself internally into a manifold: each is a one and no other. what brings finitude into these three infinitudes? what impregnates space and time a priori with number and measure, and turns them into a pure manifold? what brings pure spontaneity (‘i’) into oscillation? how does its pure vowel sound come to its concomitant sound, the consonant, or better, how does its soundless, uninterrupted sounding interrupt itself and break off in order to gain at least some kind of self-sound, an accent?13 hegel comments on jacobi’s task as follows: bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 96 one sees that jacobi very distinctly recognized that abstraction is a nonentity, whether this nonentity is the so-called absolute (only abstract) space, or the equally abstract time or abstract pure consciousness, the “i.” he insists on this nonentity for the sake of maintaining the impossibility of any advance to an other, which is the condition of a synthesis, and to a synthesis itself.14 especially graphic is jacobi’s description of the procedure for attaining the abstraction of space: for a time i must try clean to forget that i ever saw anything, heard, touched or moved anything, myself expressly not exempted. clean, clean, clean must i forget all movement, and let precisely this forgetting be my most pressing concern, since it is the hardest. just as i have thought all things away, so must i also get perfectly rid of them all, retaining nothing at all except the intuition, which violently held its ground, of the infinite immutable space. i may not, therefore, think even myself back into it as something distinguished from it yet equally bound to it; i may not let myself even be merely surrounded and pervaded by it, but i must rather give myself over to it totally, become a one with it, transform myself into it; i must allow no leftover of myself except this my intuition itself, in order to behold it as a truly self-subsisting, independent, single and sole representation.15 in this void, states jacobi, he encounters the opposite of what should happen to him according to kant’s assurance. he does not find himself to be a many and a manifold but to be rather a one without any plurality and manifoldness; even more, he himself is nothing but the impossibility itself, the nihilating of all things manifold and plural. this is how jacobi concludes: “any manifoldness and plurality … are revealed in this purity as a pure impossibility”16. hegel responds that “the meaning of this impossibility is nothing else than the tautology: i hold fast to abstract unity and exclude all plurality and manifoldness; i keep myself in indistinctness and indeterminacy, and look away from anything distinguished and determinate.”17 kant’s a priori synthesis of self-consciousness, says hegel, is diluted by jacobi to pure abstraction. he reduced the synthesis in itself to “the copula in itself;—an ‘is, is, is’ without beginning and end, without ‘what,’ ‘who,’ or ‘which.’”18 this, says jacobi—and here we finally arrive at repetition—“this repetition of repetition ad infinitum is the one single occupation, function, and production of the purest of all pure syntheses; the synthesis is itself this mere, pure, absolute repetition.”19 the copula ‘is, is, is’ expresses abstract being, which allows no advance to the other, is completely indeterminate, has no predicate and is not even a substance, but rather a pure void, an empty space, a soundless sounding, a highly general sameness. for jacobi, repetition is thus precisely a sort of a stubborn persistence in the same, a movement that produces nothing, a reproduction of the identical, whose most perfect form is possible precisely as a reproduction of the void, pure contentless form. however, notes hegel—and we must be careful here—“since there is no pause in it, bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 97 that is, no negation, no distinguishing, the synthesis is not a repetition but rather undifferentiated simple being.”20 what jacobi names the purest repetition of repetition itself—the return of the copula ‘is, is, is’ as the supposed absolute identity is for hegel precisely not repetition, but is, quite the opposite, an a priori structural abolishment of any possibility of repetition. if mental abstraction that tries to conceive something pure, for example, pure being (or pure consciousness or pure space or pure nothing), gets stuck in absolute indeterminacy and cannot advance to anything determinate, cannot descend from infinity to finitude, and if all that this abstraction manages to repeat is merely its identity with itself, an ‘is, is, is’ or ‘i, i, i,’ then what we have here, says hegel, is precisely not repetition. the correlation of content and form repetition is a process of the identity of identity and non-identity, within which every identity is always the identity of identity and non-identity—in dialectical transition, a difference is always at work. because this difference is nothing but negation, the minimal mark of this difference is not substantive, but quite formal—it does not concern any special signifier but the signifying logic itself. difference is not designated, named, bonded with a signifier (it does not name a void, absence etc.), but appears merely in mediation, through the form of the repetition of dialectical structure. and, yet—and herein lies the fundamental twist of hegel’s concept of repetition—it is precisely difference as contentless and merely structural, as a connective-separative bond between being and non-being, that can produce a meaning on its flip side and enable the descent of the indeterminate to the determinate, the infinite to the finite. that repetition is not reproduction, that repetition as reproduction is not possible, therefore means for hegel that there is no pure form. it is exactly in this vein that hegel’s criticism of jacobi continues. first, says hegel, when jacobi assumes his position in an absolute, abstract space, time and consciousness, he transposes himself into something which is empirically false: there is no such thing as a spatially or temporally unlimited space or time, that is, none is empirically at hand which would not be filled with continuous manifold of limited existence and of change, so that these limits and these changes would not belong, unseparated and inseparably, to spatiality. consciousness is likewise filled with determinate sensation, representation, desire, and so forth; it does not exist in concreto apart from some particular content or other. … consciousness can indeed make empty space, empty time, and even empty consciousness or pure being, its intended object and content, but it does not stay with them. rather, from this emptiness it passes over—more than that, it forces itself over to a better content, that is, one bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 98 which is somehow more concrete and to this extent, however bad as content, still better and truer. precisely such a content is the synthetic as such, “synthetic” understood in its more general sense. … the synthesis contains as well as exposes the untruth of those abstractions; in it they are in unity with their other, are not therefore as self-subsistent, not as absolute but strictly as relative.21 hegel goes on to say that it is the thought of pure space etc. (that is, pure space etc. taken in themselves) which is to be demonstrated to be null, that is, what must be demonstrated is that, as such a thought, its opposite has already forced its way into it, that by itself it is already being that has gone outside itself, a determinateness.22 it is precisely through the perversion of the relation between abstraction and determinateness, the classical differentiation between form and content, that the logic of the signifier is unfolded in hegel. this is something that žižek also points out: what is supposed to be the internal content expressed or externalised in form is actually always already form, an effect of a decentralised process, a surface effect; and, vice versa, what is supposed to be form, the medium of the externalization of content, is actually the only content, i.e., a network of mediations that produces the interior of meaning as its effect.23 form and content always already correlate in the sense that the law of their correlation is always established retroactively, as the product of the signifying chain. jacobi, who abstracts one and its other, avoiding their empirical shapes in order to, as hegel puts it, keep them far apart, cannot advance from one to many, from pure indistinction to diversity. he presupposes pure formal being-in-itself of one and the other, subject and object, and then tries to connect them from the outside, subsequently. in this way, he excludes difference from the relation between one and the other, which is why he conceives difference itself, that is, the distinction between one and the other, being and non-being—as something in itself, something external. however, in kant’s a priori synthesis, one and the other, for example, i and the world, concept and the thing in itself, subject and object, do not correlate a priori as fixed given entities—which is what hegel points out when he says that synthesis must not be taken as a tying together of external determinations already at hand. on the contrary, one and the other, that is, i and the world, concept and the thing in itself, subject and object, correlate in mutual co-becoming: the synthesis of beingin-itself and being-for-itself, says hegel, is not external, subsequent, but immanent: the synthesis which is the point of interest here must not be taken as a tying together of external determinations already at hand. rather, the issue is twofold: one of the genesis of a second next to a first, of a determinate something next to something which is initially indeterminate, but also one of imbara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 99 manent synthesis, of synthesis a priori—a unity of distinct terms that exists in and for itself. becoming is this immanent synthesis of being and nothing.24 difference is not external to being and nothing, it is not established as their distinction in itself that puts them in an impossible relation from the outside, but is inscribed in being itself as its internal gap: being is always already nothing, being is fundamentally subjected to its own negation.25 being as one already refers to its other—and precisely herein lies the logic of hegel’s dialectics. being is its own other and it is exactly this transition of one out of itself into its other, of indeterminacy into determinacy and infinity into finitude (and vice versa) that is for hegel the true movement of repetition. the hegelian formula of dialectics as the transition of being-in-itself into its otherness and of this otherness back into being-for-itself is therefore nothing other than the fundamental formula of repetition. hegel precisely defines the double critique of reproduction and variation in an exceptional sentence, which is also the only sentence in the phenomenology of spirit that explicitly addresses the problem of repetition. we find this sentence in paragraph 14 of the preface. the sentence about repetition is placed in the context of the critique of scientific culture, which has not yet realised that pure knowledge is precisely the path to it. thus, says hegel, one side “boasts of its wealth of material and intelligibility,” that is, loses itself in pure empiricism and collecting examples, while the other side, on the contrary, “scorns this intelligibility, and flaunts its immediate rationality and divinity.”26 the first side thus deals with variation, the collection of diversity, while the second side is the absolute as pure abstraction separated from any content. the two poles are then externally reconciled and the principle of the masters of scientific culture is that: they appropriate a lot of already familiar and well-ordered material; by focusing on rare and exotic instances they give the impression that they have hold of everything else which scientific knowledge had already embraced in its scope, and that they are also in command of such material as is as yet unordered. it thus appears that everything has been subjected to the absolute idea, which therefore seems to be cognized in everything and to have matured into an expanded science.27 it is at this point that we come across the key sentence: but a closer inspection shows that this expansion has not come about through one and the same principle having spontaneously assumed different shapes, but rather through the shapeless repetition of one and the same formula, only externally applied to diverse materials, thereby obtaining merely a boring show of diversity.28 the real difference, difference as form that introduces negation into being itself and, precisely through change, which pertains to substance as such, also has an effect in the material, will not be found in the boring show of diversity, which is bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 100 only an external application of the shapeless repetition of one and the same, it will not be found in the diversity of the interesting, as kierkegaard would say, rather, difference as pure otherness can happen only as an inherent moment of repetition that twists the same from within, changes it into a new relation between determinacy and indeterminacy. dialectics does not unfold through the reproduction of the identical, which in the sense of variation imprints its unchangeable form in always diverse materiality, but through the inner negation of the very form of identity, which on its flip side, as a sort of a side effect, produces a novum, a difference as an exception that has an effect in the material. it is exactly this material effect that triggers a new change of form, a new turn of the dialectics. repetition beyond reproduction and variation kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition can be discerned in lacan’s conception of repetition as the double movement of automaton and tyche, which establishes the return of signs, repetition at the level of the symbolic, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the elusive circling of the non-representable remainder, gap, repetition that circles the field of the real. in lacanian theory, automaton refers to a network of signifiers established in the register of the pleasure principle, while tyche operates “beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.”29 tyche, says lacan, is the encounter with the real. repetition traces the return of structure, but only in constantly perverting the structure itself, turning it through its own failure, through the slip of representation that appears as its insufferable remainder, as that whose meeting is essentially failed for the subject. however, this failure is also the condition of possibility of representation and subject as such. automaton and tyche are two inclinations of the same process; they condition each other and are inseparable. or, as dolar writes in a pithy formula: “tyche is the gap of the automaton.”30 repetition results from the endeavour to abolish difference, to establish indistinction between both objects of repetition, but it is the very endeavour to do away with difference that produces something that a priori terminates sameness and that causes there to always be too much or too little repetition. the difference that emerges as something superfluous, something that sticks out and as such prevents the repeated to coincide with its own repetition is at the same time also a lack, a complex of the repeated driven to another repetition. but what from the viewpoint of the repeated is its unhealable wound is from the viewpoint of repetition its condition of possibility. we must refrain here from, on the one hand, jumping to the conclusion that assigns reproduction to the symbolic repeatability of signs and, on the other, reserving the thesis that repetition is not reproduction for ‘real’ repetition beyond the symbolic. it is not the case that there is automaton as reproduction, on the one hand, and tyche, which is beyond reproduction, on the other. on the contrary, tyche and automaton are two sides of one and the same movement of repetition—repetition bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 101 that is not reproduction. the repetition of difference is involved in the movement of the signifying structure, while, on the other hand, the signifying structure can establish the platform for repeatability only through difference. or, put differently: it is precisely their intertwinement—tyche as gap is automaton—that separates repetition from reproduction. observing children at play, freud discovered something unusual—in their games and activities, adults always search for something new, while children tirelessly repeat the same game: “if a joke is heard for a second time it produces almost no effect; a theatrical production never creates so great impression the second time as the first; indeed it is hardly possible to persuade an adult who has very much enjoyed reading a book to re-read it immediately. novelty is always the condition of enjoyment. but children will never tire of asking an adult to repeat a game that he has shown them or played with them, till he is too exhausted to go on.”31 adults always demand something new, different, and in this demand extend the symbolic field in which they are placed by varying meanings. but this demand for the new, says lacan, precisely “conceals what is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition in itself.”32 variation, the designation of the new as interesting, precisely does not produce anything new: “whatever, in repetition, is varied, modulated, is merely alienation of its meaning.”33 the child’s “requirement of a distinct consistency in the details of its telling signifies that the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization to succeed in designating the primacy of the significance (signifiance) as such. to develop it by varying the significations is, therefore, it would seem, to elude it. this variation makes one forget the aim (visée) of the significance by transforming its act into a game, and giving it certain outlets that go some way to satisfying the pleasure principle.”34 insofar as repetition is not reproduction, variation as a possible way out of the vicious circle of the supposed reproductive repetition turns out to be a pointless task—a sort of a quixotic struggle with windmills. variation stands against reproduction as a malevolent representative of a repressive instance of repetition, which is nothing but an illusory notion of repetition as a pure repetition of the same (sign, example, event) and is therefore itself illusory in its stand. even more—insofar as variation operates at the level of the return of signs where it wants to capture the new in the field of meaning—it not only creates a phantom representative of difference, but thereby also annuls every possibility of difference. meaning here is not established as one of the walls of the subject’s impossibility, which within the movement of separation and alienation is again and again established only in the form of an empty signifier, but as an ossified signifier, a sort of a signifying buffer that embeds itself in the gap of the signifying structure and precisely prevents for something new in itself and as a necessary remainder to be produced in the movement of the return of signs, in (the necessary and at the same time necessarily impossible) return of the same. variation as a signifying representative of difference is not only its lookalike, but actually operates as its uncanny double—it takes its place bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 102 and drives it out of its field: variation with a supposed departure from reproduction not only stops the uncanny return of the same, but abolishes the very possibility of difference. the zufall and the limping cause aristotle “manipulates two terms that are absolutely resistant to his theory, which is nevertheless the most elaborate that has ever been made on the function of cause,”35 says lacan. those two terms are tyche and automaton. and their stubbornness, their inherent resistance towards aristotle’s system, functions exactly within the realm of what lacan calls the resistance of discourse: it is the indicator that points to the flip side of discourse itself, where a certain compulsion is always at work. a compulsion of thought, which has to deal with its own surplus, with something standing out, something that cannot be incorporated into the system, but which precisely in this deviation from itself defines the system as such. from one perspective, what has emerged in the system appears as an interposition, but at the same time it also functions as a gain: without the concept of coincidence (as privation), aristotle’s theory would not be what it is since it is what it is exactly in the difference, the addition, the turns it brings in relation to plato and the eleatics. here, precisely through the most resistant concepts, the theoretical repetition producing a novum, a difference, takes place. the eleatics believed that non-being cannot come out of being, which is why there is no motion or becoming. aristotle gets out of this conceptual squeeze, which plato also followed, by positing different ways of talking about being. he suggests two possibilities (of talking about being in several ways): 1. introducing the aspects of potentiality and actuality—this theoretical crutch helped the history of philosophy get out of many an ontological quandary, and 2. introducing the concept of privation (στέρησις), which in aristotle is not merely the name for absence, but also for something that is hardly or barely present. it is precisely the idea of privation that the concept of coincidence draws on. among coincidental causes (κατα συμβεβηκόϛ), aristotle points out two that stand out, almost become independent and take the place of causes in themselves. they are tyche (τυχη), fortuna in latin, chance, and automaton (τό αυτόματον), casus in latin, spontaneity. while automaton operates as a coincidental cause for all beings and events in nature, tyche is a coincidental cause only for those things that can be chosen and for those being capable of choice: “however, these events are said to be chance events if they are choice-worthy and happen spontaneously to agents who are capable of exercising choice.”36 chance is actually a type of spontaneity: “the difference between chance and spontaneity is that ‘spontaneity’ is the more general term, in the sense that every chance event is a spontaneous event, but not every spontaneous event is a chance event.”37 chance and spontaneity are something inexplicable and indeterminate: “it is also correct to say that chance is inexplicable (paralogon), because explanations can bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 103 only be given for things that happen either always or usually, but the province of chance is things which do not happen always or usually. since these kinds of causes are indeterminate, chance is indeterminate as well.”38 despite their indeterminate status and inexplicability, automaton and tyche in aristotle are nevertheless defined as causes. even though it operates beyond a clear end and purpose, coincidence clearly has a certain key. coincidence, as that which is neither necessary nor usually, neither determinate nor itself, but something fundamentally different, differentiating, is aristotle’s great (and of course heretic) invention, which resolves hamlet’s dilemma—from the viewpoint of becoming, to be or not to be precisely cannot be the question: “nothing comes in an unqualified sense from what is not, but we maintain that there still is a sense in which things do come from what is not—that is, coincidentally: they come to be something from the privation, which is in its own right something that is not, and which does not remain.”39 with the concept of chance, zufall, says lacan, freud takes us to “the heart of the question posed by the modern development of the sciences, insofar as they demonstrate what we can ground on chance.”40 repetition is always something, says lacan, that happens as if by chance. but analysts do not let this deceive them. why? lacan’s point here is not that nothing is coincidental, in the sense of predetermination that does not allow for deviation. if we must not let ourselves think that something happened as if by accident, then there must be something in the background, something that precisely makes a coincidence appear as a coincidence. this is precisely what coincidence wants—to seem as a coincidence, a split, a mistake, a failure. however, claims lacan, this must not deceive us—us slipping or misspeaking is not innocent, there is a cause behind this apparent coincidence. there is a cause, but this cause is not a law. on the other hand, this cause is also not the key to the puzzle, it is a key that opens lynch’s blue box in which we will not find meaning. coincidence must not deceive us in a triple sense: firstly, it must not deceive us that there is nothing behind it, that it is merely a coincidence—for we know that it is always a coincidence according to something; secondly, it must not deceive us that—because we do not believe in coincidence as such—there is a necessity as determination, a sort of a law, behind it; and thirdly, it must not deceive us into believing that there is meaning behind coincidence revealing the actual truth. what essentially determines the constitution of the psychoanalytic subject is neither a pre-given cause, which relates the subject and its history to a story about the origin, the original trauma, nor any kind of a purpose that saves the subject from its unpredictable emergence in the structure. on the other hand, however, the emergence of the subject is not left to pure chance. within the return of signs, there is something that resists the causal logic and wants to seem like a coincidence, but exactly where something wants to seem as a coincidence, says lacan, a cause is at bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 104 work. however, this cause is itself a limping cause: the constitution of the psychoanalytic subject is essentially determined by a certain leap of causality. freud’s theory of repression is an attempt at conceptualizing the logic of the lost cause, which essentially determines the human psychic apparatus and is established through a specific temporal and topological mechanism of repetition. in psychoanalysis, the constitution of the subject does not involve repetition that is a consequence of repression, repetition as a return to the originally repressed, missing signifier, that is, the failure of representation does not trigger repetition, but it is also not the case that we repress because we repeat—as deleuze would have it—that we are always already in the field of the ever present quasi-causal asubjective becoming into which the process of repression is subsequently included. rather, as alenka zupančič points out, repetition and repression are part of the same process. just as in lacanian alienation the signifying pair emerges in the place of the first signifier, which means that the signifying logic first starts with the dyad—logic that is, the moment it is established, already bound to repetition—and that the first signifier exists only in its own fall, so too, in freudian repression, the vorstellungsrepräsentanz41 as a minimal signifying mark is established only with the repetition compulsion, while repetition takes place precisely at the moment of the always already occurred repression of the vorstellungsrepräsentanz.42 the function of freud’s hypothesis of primal repression, which proceeds from the structure of substitutivity, is not to reveal the ultimate foundation that the analysis is supposed to reach after peeling off all the layers of “real repressions,” but, as alenka zupančič points out, to “ground the unconscious in the leap of causality itself, in its gap.”43 that there is no original event functioning as the first cause in a signifying series, to which clusters of shifted and repressed representations are then attached, means not only that any signifier can assume the role of a supposed origin and that there is no deeper meaning behind this, but also that we are always already in a language, that, at the unconscious level, the subject emerges merely in a signifying field and that there is no pre-signifying thing in itself, that is, that it exists merely as non-existent, as a lack, a loss. moreover, what is important here is that we do not look at the fixation itself as an original signifying gesture established in childhood, to which the patient returns throughout their life through repressions and resistances, but that, looking from a slanted perspective, we see that, through shifts, through repeating substitutive forms and their repressions, in short, through the movement of repetition, the original itself is retroactively produced. fixation is not a past event, it is not a signifying origin and it is not the cause of repression, it is rather the other way round: the repetition of repression itself operates as a fixer that simultaneously produces and solidifies its supposed origin. however—and this is crucial,—this process does not involve only retroactivity, nachträglichkeit, which retroactively establishes every cause as its own effect, as a cause of a cause, it does not involve only the subject constantly producing its hisbara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 105 tory anew. the point here is rather that it is precisely within retroactivity, where a certain presence (the presence of the now) retroactively produces its own origin, that a certain causal hole, gap is established, which a priori prevents this presence—that is, the subject—to establish itself as a real effect of the origin that it produced as its own cause. as lacan puts it: “what is realised in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what i am, but the future anterior as what i will have been, given what i am in the process of becoming.”44 kierkegaard writes something similar in repetition: “repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards.”45 within the logic of nachträglichkeit, a certain intentionality towards the future is established, a forward recollection, which does not only (retroactively) fabricate the cause itself (as the cause of the cause), but also shifts, again and again (and in advance), the return to it. the consequence of this is not a retroactive phantasmatic fabrication of a traumatic event that would nevertheless somehow ground it in its function of the origin, but an avant-garde forward movement of shifting within which the phantasmatic fabrication of the origin does not operate only as a (retroactively produced) trigger of a causal chain, but also as its unpredictable side effect. and it is exactly within this side effect that a certain aspect, a certain real is established, which, as lacan emphasises, keeps psychoanalysis from turning into an empty idealism of ‘life is a dream.’46 envoi with the double paradox of repetition which can be traced in his book repetition, kierkegaard, on the one hand, delineates a new theory of the subject and its temporality and, on the other hand, legitimises a certain logic of failure, which lacan posits as the constitutive moment of repetition in terms of the movement of the signifying structure, in which the subject emerges through the mechanism of alienation. kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition carries out a tour de force that determines the modern subject: the structural impossibility of repetition is the only condition of its possibility. kierkegaard thereby delineates a subversive ontology that departs from the classical ontology of being: the area of being and the area of non-being are not separated, but they mutually condition each other. because the ontology of being builds on a strict delimitation of identity and non-identity, it can understand repetition only as a reproduction of identical elements and difference only in the form of variation, as a specific difference that establishes variety within the very identity of being. what is essential both for the constitution of the modern subject and the modern understanding of the historical moment is that repetition is structured in the conceptual departure both from the idea of reproduction as pure bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 106 formal repetition of the same, on the one hand, and the idea of variation as a substantive articulation of difference, on the other. the critique of repetition as reproduction and difference as variation, which can be found in kierkegaard, hegel and lacan, delineates the theory of the subject that, on the one hand, turns away from every teleology or the theory of pre-given origin established by the classical ontology of being, while, on the other hand, it also moves away from the postmodern theory of non-being, pure substitutivity, simulacra, the absence of origin. by turning away from the idea of telos and the origin, kierkegaard’s double paradox of repetition doesn’t abolish causality as such but rather establishes a new causality, which, so to say, accounts with a certain slip, with a leap that is inscribed in its very structure. it is precisely this leap of causality what lacan calls an unconscious cause, a limping cause. within the function of the limping cause, something is at work. and what is at work is nothing but the gap—the gap, inscribed in the very movement of repetition as its impossible condition of possibility. notes 1. jacques lacan, four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (new york: w. w. norton & company, 1998) 128. 2. repetition, subtitled as an essay in experimental psychology and organized around the experimental trip to berlin and the correspondence between constantin constantinus and the young man (who are, as constantinus admits by the very end of the book, the two faces of the same person) reveals an exceptional structure: through the carefully planned formal composition of the book, which realizes the complex concept of repetition that it presents, and through the hidden progress of the main character (who is itself split) through the three levels of existence (the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious), kierkegaard’s theory of repetition overturns the traditional ontology of being as well as the realistic, newtonian conception of time. 3. søren kierkegaard, repetition and philosophical crumbs (oxford: oxford university press, 2009) 38. 4. lacan, four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, 128 5. kierkegaard, repetition, 3-4. 6. kierkegaard, repetition, 111. 7. “where is the background? is it absent? no. rupture, split, the stroke of the opening makes absence emerge just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence.” lacan, four fundamental concepts, 40. 8. lacan, four fundamental concepts, 43. here, lacan captures the one of the rifts in the following play on words: unin french signifies one, while in german it means a negative prefix nonor un-. bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 107 9. in relation to the thesis on the productive conception of repetition as one of the four fundamental matrices of repetition, cf. bara kolenc, ponavljanje in uprizoritev: kierkegaard, psihoanaliza, gledališče [repetition and enactment: kierkegaard, psychoanalysis, theatre] (ljubljana: analecta, dtp, 2014) 21–28. 10. this is marx’s famous reference to hegel’s statement on repetition, which has become established as an indestructible aphorism, as an eternally returning sentence on the hegelian problem of repetition: “hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” marx, karl, the eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ 11. georg wilhelm friedrich hegel, the science of logic (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010) 69. 12. hegel, the science of logic, 69-70. hegel’s examples of such a conceptual—and necessarily abstract—“protection against transition” are parmenides’ doctrine of being and spinoza’s and fichte’s philosophy. 13. hegel, the science of logic, 71. 14. the science of logic, 71-72. 15. the science of logic, 72. 16. the science of logic, 73. 17. the science of logic, 73. 18. the science of logic, 73. 19. the science of logic, 73. 20. the science of logic, 73. 21. the science of logic, 74. 22. the science of logic, 74. 23. slavoj žižek, hegel in označevalec [hegel and signifier], (ljubljana: analecta, ddu univerzum, 1980) 170. 24. the science of logic, 72. 25. in the notes to the sections on being, nothing and becoming, hegel explained his conception of the relation between being and nothing also by referring to parmenides’ identity philosophy. as gregor moder wrote: “hegel declares that pure being, without any further determination, is a parmenidian concept. but at the same time, he argues, parmenides failed to see that pure being has already become pure nothingness.” (gregor moder, “held out into the nothingness of being: heidegger and the grim reaper,” in filozofski vestnik, ljubljana, 2 (2013): 97-114, 105. 26. hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, trans. a.v. miller (oxford university press, 1977) 8. 27. hegel, phenomenology, 8. 28. hegel, phenomenology, 8. bara kolenc: the paradoxes of the limping cause s10 & 11 (2017-18): 108 29. hegel, phenomenology, 53. 30. mladen dolar, “comedy and its double” in stop that comedy!: on the subtle hegemony of the tragic in our culture, ed. rober pfaller (wien: sonderzahl press, 2005) 184. 31. sigmund freud, beyond the pleasure principle, (new york: norton, 1961) 29. 32. lacan, four fundamental concepts, 61. 33. lacan, four fundamental concepts, 61. 34. lacan, four fundamental concepts, 61-62. 35. jacques lacan, four fundamental concepts, 52. 36. aristotle, physics (oxford: oxford university press, 1996) 47. 37. aristotle, physics, 46. 38. aristotle, physics, 45-46. 39. aristotle, physics, 29. 40. lacan, four fundamental concepts, 39. 41. there is a series of misunderstandings regarding freud’s term vorstellungsrepräsentanz, originally named die psychische (vorstellungs)repräsentanz des triebes, and its preinterpretation by lacan. an extensive elaboration on this problem can be found in: michael tort, “v zvezi s freudovskim konceptom ‘zastopnika” (repräsentanz), in problemi, 157/158 (ljubljana): 105-108. 42. repression is a complex process: on the border between consciousness and the unconscious, the mechanisms of the return of the repressed, which demands constant creativity from the psychic in forming substitutes, and repression, performed by the ego, demanding a constant use of force to be able to produce new and new resistances, since the primary struggle against the repressed continues in the secondary struggle against the substitute— the symptom, are involved in a double movement. on another border, on the edge of the signifying and the pre-signifying, in the impossible contact between the drive and representation, a movement whirling around the undetermined point of vostellungsräpresentanz takes place, driving the movement of repression and the return of repressed at a level fundamental for the constitution of the psychic apparatus—this is a compulsion to repeat the very act of the repression. this repetition compulsion is basic and we cannot get rid of it, for it is a constitutive function of the psychic apparatus itself. 43. alenka zupančič, “ponavljanje [repetition],” filozofski vestnik 1( 2007): 57-79, 69. 44. lacan, four fundamental concepts, 300. 45. kierkegaard, repetition, 3. 46. lacan, four fundamental concepts, 53. kukuljevic.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 12 (2019): 67-84 a l e x i k u k u l j e v i c s c r e a m i n g w i t h o u t s o u n d writing isn’t just telling stories. it’s exactly the opposite. it’s telling everything at once. it’s the telling of a story, and the absence of a story. it’s telling a story through its absence.1 marguerite duras o ne expects water to freeze at 0° celsius. just as one might expect misery to be miserable, a scream to be audible, or a communist to believe in communism.2 one expects a woman to suffer if betrayed by her fiancé (the ravishing of lol v. stein) or a disgraced diplomatic official to tender his resignation (the vice-consul).3 if a family cannot pay their water bills, ought they not to expect that the water will be cut off? “an oak in every acorn.”4 such is the case… for the most part. when expectations are met, when the affairs of life unfold in accordance with “that celebrated ‘thread of the story,’” to quote robert musil’s the man without qualities, one utters a sigh of relief.5 “lucky the man who can say ‘when,’ ‘before,’ and ‘after’!” lucky the man, in other words, that can appeal to a “narrative order,” for “the basic law of this life, the law one longs for” is that of a sequence that makes sense, that allows one to plot out a course of action, which is to say, represent “the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things” within a “unidimensional order.” this is the metaphysical function of the “thread of the story.” it guarantees a sense of direction, a promise of completion, in short, a sense of wholeness. most people relate to themselves as storytellers. they usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional “because” or “in order that” gets knotted into the thread of life, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has the look of necessity, and the impression that their life has a “course” is somehow their refuge from chaos. having a likely, or better, a necessary story to tell allows one to forget life’s elementary uncertainty “as an actor who forgets the scenery and his makeup, and believes that he is really living his part.”6 kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 68 in the poetics, aristotle defines the story (muthos), which he claims is the ground (archê) and soul of poetic art, as “the composition of the things done.”7 events that “seem to have happened as if by design,” he claims, make for better, more wondrous and “more beautiful” stories.8 the foundational function of the story guarantees that what happens does not happen by “chance or luck” but in accordance with an end. this end is guaranteed if and only if the story accords with what is natural, which is to say, what happens for the most part.9 unlike the historian who speaks of “things that have happened,” the “work of the poet” is to speak of things that “might happen and the possibilities that come from what is likely or necessary [tò eikòs ḕ tò anankaĩon].”10 the story is not merely a sequence of actions, but a composition that makes out of them a whole.11 the meaning of this whole may indeed be obscure and difficult to comprehend, but it is not itself in question. yet, literature, or what marguerite duras often prefers to simply call writing, begins when the part leveraged to determine the most gives way. it no longer holds. the story comes unhinged. it becomes unbearable. one can no longer make sense of things, because one’s sense of expectation must forgo an expected sense. one finds oneself like musil’s ulrich bereft of “this elementary, narrative mode of thought.” ice does not form at 0° celsius. to write, for duras, is a matter of pitting oneself at the heart of this calamity, reaching that point when misery is no longer miserable: the wonderful misery is perhaps that torture, that entreaty which allows no respite, that uprooting of self which leaves you forsaken and lost when it ends with the book. you know too. to be the object of one’s own madness and not to go mad, that could be it, the wonderful misery. all the rest is beside the point.12 ••• duras likens the loss of the feeling of being whole to watching a poorly dubbed film that lacks even the semblance of a plot. you never know, in life, when things are there. you can’t grasp them. you were saying the other day that life often seems as if it were dubbed. that’s exactly what i feel: my life is a film that’s been dubbed – badly cut, badly acted, badly put together. in short, a mistake. a whodunnit without either murders or cops or victims; without a subject, pointless. it could have been a real film, but no, it’s a sham. but who’s to say what one would have had to do for it to be otherwise? i suppose i should have just stood there in front of the camera without saying or doing anything; just being looked at, without thinking about anything in particular. yes, that’s it.13 life without a story to make of it a whole falls mute. duras posits something like a fundamental lack of synchronization at the heart of being.14 words and things kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 69 are fatally partnered but mismatched. life is thus hopelessly awkward, lopsided. it limps. “a reality that’s ragged and hollowed out.”15 duras might occasionally fantasize about such literal muteness. just as she dreams of a book that would have no raison d’être other than the meandering drift that she calls the motorway of the word: “i’d like to write a book the way i’m writing at this moment, the way i’m talking to you at this moment. i’m scarcely conscious of the words coming out of me. nothing seems to be being said but the almost nothing there is in all words.”16 however, duras recognizes that such a book is strictly speaking “impossible.”17 a book about nothing,18 without a story or direction, a book that like a motorway goes “in all directions at once” is no book at all. “the only alternative is to say nothing. but that can’t be written down.”19 so the writer’s conundrum is how to write down nothing, the nothing that cannot be said. duras attends to this problem by listening to what remains unsaid or to that which is said but not heard: moments in which language loses its fluency and writing its polish. born marguerite donnadieu, her decision to adopt the pen name duras – the name of the village in lot-et-garonne where her father was born – with its pronunciation of a regionally specific “sibilant s,” as rachel kushner reminds us, acts as an insistent reminder of the importance of this positive lack of refinement.20 duras makes us hear the “s’s” silence. her writing resonates with awkward silence, socially awkward presences…the kind of silences that social etiquette seeks to dispel or at least to smooth out. duras’ “aesthetics of awkwardness,” as julia kristeva aptly formulates, consists in the manner in which she sheds the presumption that writing ought to minimize abnormality. as kristeva stresses, this is not a result of duras’ interest in formal concerns. “if there is a formal search,” she writes, “it is subordinate to confrontation with the silence of horror in oneself and in the world.”21 duras’ singular distaste for polished writing is more visceral than intellectual, an almost physical disgust with the effort to eliminate imperfection and regulate life’s crippled cadence. her writing preserves a certain untidiness that can make one question the veracity of a memory: is it indiana song or india song, s. thala or s. tahla, richard or richardson?22 her sentences are frequently mere syntactical fragments as if an incumbent meaning has been aborted. the overall effect is that of the carefully indefinite. things are messy but not careless. the reader is thus in doubt as to what is being said, left with nothing but a residue, the remains, of a story.23 “the longing for a story.”24 ••• not a story but not not a story, duras’ books are tasked with the contradiction of not just telling a story, but its opposite. the opposite of the story is not just life but life devoid of sense. what she terms “the fundamental futility of life.”25 writing that is equal to life’s futility proceeds without the assurance of a sheltering sky. the sky, rather, is “unwholesome-looking,”26 as duras describes the sky of calcutta in the vice-consul. the lack of such assurance lends writing, like the “white residents” kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 70 of calcutta, a liverish hue. it is sickly intelligent. without a story to assure it, writing is dispossessed of an identity, haunted by an indigency just as the story of the vice-consul is haunted by the beggar woman from the village of battambang. she is a figure of absolute abandonment. a human living without the assurance of humanity. destitute beyond anything one might expect. nameless because she has forgotten her own name. a stranger amongst strangers, a cambodian amongst the calcutta lepers, sleeping along the banks of the ganges river.27 “she grows more and more confused, until at last, suddenly, all confusion ceases, because she no longer seeks to understand anything.”28 she has become a cipher of life’s futility, of its scattered remains: “‘meaningless utterances and profound silence,’ says michael richard.” all that is left of her in calcutta is her laugh, “drained of all color” and the song, “the word ‘battambang’ that she repeats incessantly.”29 prompted to speak of this “odd creature” by charles rossett, the vice-consul says: “death in the midst of life…death following but never catching up.”30 what is not just life but its opposite is not death, but, perhaps, death in the midst of life. the character of peter morgan, a “young” writer – “twenty-four years of age. on his first visit to india”31 – is the one whose ambition is to tell her story. “[d]runk on the sufferings of india,” he believes it is his task, the task of the writer, to become one with her suffering and to explain why the reader ought to be interested in her. to the question – “why her in particular?” – he answers, “because nothing more can happen to her, not even leprosy.” 32 the vice-consul begins with his effort to free and indirectly enter the beggar woman’s story: she walks on, writes peter morgan. how to avoid going back? get lost. i don’t know how. you’ll learn. i need some signpost to lead me astray. make your mind a blank. refuse to recognize familiar landmarks. turn your steps towards the most hostile point on the horizon, towards the vast marshlands, bewilderingly crisscrossed by a thousand causeways.33 yet, to be precise, the novel does not begin with his effort. it begins, rather, inelegantly by marking a disjunction between two narrative positions, ensuring that the reader read his writing, position its story in relation to another writing, a different narrative voice. the story thus begins with a disidentification. peter morgan wants to tell the story of her madness. he does not allow madness to truly enter into the writing of her story. his writing may speak about the hostile point of the horizon, but it fails to evoke it. and as he announces much later in the novel in a discussion with george crawn, michael richard, and charles rossett, he seems careful to avoid such a slippage: “i shall abandon her before madness overtakes her…that’s for sure; but all the same i need to understand the nature of her madness.”34 i do not believe that duras thinks that we should read him derisively. but we misunderstand what is at stake in the novel if we do not think the gap that kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 71 she institutes at the book’s beginning. duras’ book thus has a delayed beginning. it begins with the interruption of morgan’s efforts. it is this interruption that enables duras to pose the problem of the novel, which touches on writing as such, namely the relation between the song of battambang and the vice-consul’s screams. we must attend to the inscription of the difference between what peter morgan knows – “this is what he knows.” – and how he imagines. by establishing this gap within the narrative, the reader is shown what he fails to grasp or take interest in: the relation between the embassy and its outside, the vice-consul and the beggar woman. “peter morgan has followed her through the streets of calcutta,” but he fails to see what is written, which only we readers are in a position to see: “there she is, opposite the residence of the former vice-consul of france in lahore. in the shade of an overhanging bush, her dress of coarse sacking still sopping wet, she lies asleep.”35 whereas peter morgan is absorbed in india’s miseries – “misery and yet more misery, he thinks” – duras’ novel poses the problem that only appears when this gaze is interrupted and the beggar woman is placed opposite the vice-consul. it is this interruption that makes it possible for duras to shift the problem of the book from the ambition to tell a story (the story of india) to the task of writing about a figure – jean-marc de h., the french vice-consul of lahore – who has no story to tell. peter morgan talks about india and its suffering, about “the mad beggar-woman,” but he maintains a safe distance from his object, between himself and the immensity of india’s suffering. the difference between the embassy grounds and city of calcutta is preserved despite spending his night following her through the streets. his interest in “the mad beggar-woman” blinds him to the conundrum of the vice-consul, his embarrassing and disturbing presence, to the “truth” that will “hit” charles rossett “blindingly”: “it’s impossible, it’s absolutely impossible to dwell on. . . the fact of his existence. . . . how can one possibly feel human affection of any kind for the vice-consul of lahore?”36 for a storyteller like peter morgan, the vice-consul is, no doubt, too close to home, too disruptive to all and any peace of mind. to grasp the truth of the vice-consul is to grasp an i that has annihilated all distance from the suffering that surrounds it and within which it is immersed. this truth has to be blotted out in order for peter morgan to maintain his fictitious transgression, his fictitious journey outside the compound. peter morgan’s declaration “that’s enough of him!” is a bit too insistent.37 the difference between writing and storytelling becomes the object of the novel only once peter morgan’s fictional gaze is itself positioned as an object. we then glimpse that the “young” writer’s desire “to shoulder the misery of calcutta,” “plunge into its depths…to get it over, so that wisdom may start to grow out of bitter experience”38 is itself fictitious and radically opposed to the vice-consul’s altogether fundamental incapacity to shoulder the misery of lahore. his inability to get used to lahore finds outlet through an unfathomable violence: randomly shooting from his embassy balcony into the shalimar gardens. the vice-consul’s screams are the screams of the writing of literature. kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 72 that which screams in writing is the silencing of sense. these silences mark a break-down in cohesion, in synchrony, a collapse of “the correlation between cause and effect”39 that makes one question the story as such and as a whole. in all of duras’ writing, the story turns around a resistant kernel.40 cause is absent: that essentially awkward man – “a man at a distance from other men”41 – the french vice-consul of lahore shoots at the lepers in the shalimar gardens. the beggar woman from tonle sap emerges from a lagoon near the prince of wales hotel with a live fish and bites its head off. “laughing more than ever, she chews the fish head. the decapitated fish jerks in her hands.”42 in l’amante anglaise, claire lannes kills and dismembers her deaf-mute cousin, marie-thérèse. where the head is hidden will remain a mystery. andré berthaud commits suicides. “now as then, when the events took place, i see berthaud’s gesture not as his only way out but as a refusal to take part in the deadly comedy staged by the police. in this instance his mental incapacity served him well: he chose his own death.”43 lol v. stein at the ball in s. thala forgets to follow the thread of her own story: “so carried away by the sight of her fiancé and the stranger in black,” as duras puts it, “that she forgets to suffer.”44 she forgets what we expect from the story of a girl in love. “she had forgotten the age-old equation governing the sorrows of love.”45 lol incarnates a gap between the story and its absence and “her whole life will unfold around that very loss, that very void.”46 she is unable to forget this moment of forgetting. by forgetting her storyline, she forgets herself.47 duras’ stories are not stories, but stories born of their interruption, of the suspense of an expected sense: like a phenomenon related to the freezing of water. water turns to ice at zero degrees, but sometimes, when the weather’s very cold, the air is so still that the water forgets to freeze. it can descend to minus five degrees and freeze only then.48 water too, like stories, can deviate from its script. ••• one begins to write, not when one begins to tell a story, but when one’s sense of expectation is absent. when water forgets to freeze. such a deviation has its scientific explanations. it may be caused by the impact of an increase in barometric pressure on water’s molecular structure or may be the result of water being very pure and still. in such cases, ice crystals cannot form since there is nothing for them to bind to: no flecks of dust, no tiny vibrations, no impurities to catalyze the change. yet, such explanations aid the cause of meaning. they explain the reason why water does not conform to our expectation. the form of expectation itself is thus not in peril. the explanation allows a sense of reality to be preserved. yet, the event itself, water’s failure to conform to expectation, shows that reality is untenable. it is this untenability that fiction must respect. the suspense of water’s sense must become interminable. kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 73 duras’ metaphor, “water forgets…”, is not an explanation. it fails to explain. the failed form of an explanation is substituted for the form of expectation. water’s forgetfulness forces us to ascribe an identity to water that it lacks. water is itself absent minded. it forgets itself; it loses its sense. it forgets just as lol v. stein forgets to suffer. the metaphor seeks a language in the face of language’s inadequacy to determine the loss of water’s identity, of its relation to an expected sense. something unbecoming comes to pass. water’s awkward beauty. water retains its form when it ought not to have. perhaps, we can say that it is a form that has shed its identity. forgetful of itself, it does not live up to expectation. for a brief spell water fails to register the fact that it ought to be ice. but it is not. and having lost the limits defining the stability of its form, water loses the assurance of its identity, haunted by the anomaly of this not. within this suspended interval, as water dips below 0° without freezing, it encounters the loss of its sense. shorn of its sens (sense and direction) and the end to which its story ought to conform, it must suddenly confront itself as nothing but a relation to this absence, as nothing but this forgetting. water parts way with itself. “in a solitary confrontation with change.”49 water remains water but has shed the expectation of its form. it occupies the hollow place of an absent sense. having lost a relation to its signification, it becomes nothing but a shell of a word. a block of signifying material: w-a-t-e-r. the metaphor here directs the mind to an absent sense. water can only forget to freeze in language. but the metaphor prompts language to say nothing: “nothing seems to be being said but the almost nothing there is in all words.”50 duras’ metaphor stresses that the event that could indeed so easily go unnoticed befalls language, specifically the sense that accrues to the word water. its signification is held in suspense. it is presently absent. the word’s non-sensical place is substituted for the word’s signification. water is not water by retaining its form when it ought not to. when it no longer aligns with what we expect from its physical properties, the word persists without sense. in forgetting to freeze, water for a brief stint forgets what it is: a word that has a meaning. it becomes a mere thing in relation to a word whose sense can no longer seize it. such a seizure is after all what we expect from language. it ought to mean something,51 but language here fails to act as it ought. and duras suggests as much through a violation of its meaning: water is too cold to freeze. a proposition whose truth does not make sense. in the lover, duras describes a scene while sitting with her mother in which she suddenly loses her sense: i looked at my mother, i could hardly recognize her. and then, in a kind of sudden vanishing, a sudden fall, i all at once couldn’t recognize her at all. there, suddenly, close to me, was someone sitting in my mother’s place who wasn’t my mother, who looked like her but who’d never been her. she looked rather blank, she was gazing at the garden, a certain point in the garden, it looked as if she was watching for something just about to happen, of which i could see nothing. there was a youthfulness about her features, her expreskukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 74 sion, a happiness which she was repressing out of what must have been habitual reticence. she was beautiful. dô was beside her. dô seemed not have noticed anything. my terror didn’t come from what i’ve just said about her, her face, her look of happiness, her beauty, it came from the fact that she was sitting just where my mother had been sitting when the substitution took place, but that that identity irreplaceable by any other had disappeared and i was powerless to make it come back, make it start to come back. there was no longer anything there to inhabit her image. i went mad in full possession of my senses. just long enough to cry out. i did cry out. a faint cry, a cry for help, to crack the ice in which the whole scene was fatally freezing. my mother turned her head.52 just as the event of water’s failure to conform to what we expect of its sense is not a concern of water as such but the language tasked with its signification, here it is duras, the i of the narrator, who “goes mad in full possession of her senses.” speech fails her and the only response to her mother’s substitution is a cry. to write this cry is to substitute its silence, the muteness of the word, for its demand to be heard. a silent cry cannot be heard, but only read. “screaming without sound.”53 this is one of duras’ formulas for writing. the anomalous event of water’s forgetting to freeze demands that its relation to lack, the void of its identity, be exhibited. language’s sense falls silent. the writer has to exhibit water that has forgotten to freeze. but to do so, he or she must produce a silent scream. ••• “a writer is an odd thing,” duras writes. “he’s a contradiction, and he makes no sense. writing also means not speaking. keeping silent. screaming without sound.”54 writing positions the voice as absent. written words do not speak but are spoken. when one speaks words are animated by a voice which always lends whatever has been articulated a singular inflection. aristotle defines the voice (phônê) as “a sound belonging to something with a soul.” yet, sound need not be meaningful. speech itself, which is to say, speech about something, can always be obliterated by the voice when it, for example, is screamed. to describe writing’s contradictory relation to sense and speech, to logos, as screaming without sound suggests that writing is overloaded by the voice’s absence, by this absence’s amplification. speech can always be upset by the voice: in screams, cries, or laughter. one might think here of the vice-consul’s “curiously toneless delivery, the voice pitched a fraction too high, as though he were with difficulty restraining himself from shouting.”55 a certain kind of writing, which reaches its fulfillment in bureaucratic writing, the writing of officialdom, opposes the written not simply to the voice but its absence. it does not want us to hear what has been evacuated. it believes that writing can be kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 75 the compliment of a perfectly measured voice, geared toward frictionless communication. this is to confuse writing, according to duras, with “good form, in other words the most banal form, the clearest and most inoffensive.” “good form,” for duras, can only result in “prim books…charming books, without extension, without darkness. without silence. in other words, without a true author.”56 duras insists on writing’s abnormality. not only the writer but writing itself is “odd.” writing is abnormal. this is something that everybody who has learned to write knows, but promptly forgets. a forgotten knowledge that returns insistently, however, each time one must confront its beastly difficulty.57 such forgetting is requisite for learning how to write tout court, let alone to write well. “well” meaning the kind of writing that makes it possible to believe that one can indeed make oneself understood, that missives and other communiqués can meet their mark. such “writing” strives toward a conformity between the object represented (what one wants to say) and its means of expression (how it is said). for duras, however, this has nothing to do with writing, true writing, “the writing of literature.”58 strictly speaking, one never learns to write. as soon as one learns it, something else is substituted in its place which domesticates it, turning an altogether “savage” practice into the most normal thing in the world.59 writing is something that can only be unlearned. it makes of the written a thing that always will have been abnormal. writing, then, restores to the written its oddness, that all too material reminder that language is not one with the sense of what is uttered. something that is so palpable in those who write poorly, those who feel betrayed by language, who do not, as duras puts it, have a way with words. lack of facility always makes one feel in the wrong, “the typical, incurable attitude of the poor.”60 this feeling is most acute when one is summoned to explain oneself, to give an account. duras is interested in those who refuse to explain themselves. figures like andré berthaud or claire lannes, as already mentioned, but also figures like simone deschamps who “has nothing to say, because the court forces her to say it in its language.”61 like christine villemin62 or the nameless, “backward” women described in “the cutter-off of water” who decides with her husband after their water has been shut off by some bureaucrat to take their two children and lie down on the tracks of the high-speed train line. they all died together. just a hundred yards to go. lie down. keep the children quiet. sing them to sleep perhaps. people say the train stopped. well, that’s the story.63 the journalists that report on this story attend to the functionary’s actions and statements, the family’s sensational response, even the fact that the woman in the interim went into the village with her two children and into café. but they pass over what does not make sense to tell, because the woman herself left it unsaid. kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 76 they focus on just the story and fail to mention what duras calls “the incident.” “by incident i mean what happened when she went out with the two children after she decided the whole family must die. when she went off for some reason we don’t know, to do or say something she had to do or say before she died.”64 in this interval, a second story unfolds populated by words that nobody remembers and nobody cares to remember, because they are deemed irrelevant to what is to come: “the implementation of death.” these are words consigned to silence. yet, duras claims: “whatever she said to the owner of the café,” – even if only a remark about the heat – “her words said everything.”65 these banal words become the equivalent of the silence to which her life had been consigned. to attend to these words is to hear a scream that cannot be heard: a scream that would have warned those who heard them of the “unfathomable violence” to come. these words, screamed silently, even though uttered by a woman “who everyone said was retarded” contain the whole intelligence of literature: what duras calls the “illness of intelligence.”66 she grasps with extreme lucidity her own utter and complete abandonment: she knew she couldn’t count, now any more than ever, on anyone’s helping her and her family out. she knew she was abandoned by everyone, by the whole of society, and that the only thing left for her to do was to die. she knew that. it’s a terrible, fundamental, awful knowledge. so the question of her backwardness ought to be reconsidered, if anyone ever talked about her again. which they won’t.67 ••• jean-marc de h., the french vice-consul in lahore, is the embodiment of such a “terrible, fundamental, awful knowledge.” “what sort of a man is he?” “oh! a dead man.”68 in his “written statement regarding the incidents in lahore” (my italics) he too refuses to explain himself: i cannot go into the reasons for my conduct at lahore, nor explain why i feel obliged to remain silent on this subject. i do not believe that anything i could say would be of interest either to the department or to any outside agency. i trust that my refusal to speak will not be misunderstood. i suspect no one. i condemn no one. i can do no more at this stage than simply assert that i find it impossible to give an account, in terms that would be understood, of what took place in lahore.69 he neither explains nor resigns. the ambassador, the husband of anne-marie stretter, does not know what to do with him, with this “unhappy business,” with his awkward, ungainly presence, nor does anybody else. what to do with a man kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 77 who nobody can stand: “it’s a terrible thing to say, but i just can’t stand him.”70 his mere presence destroys everybody’s peace of mind.71 like the death of a fly, he is death unhinged from any significance.72 in the essay, “writing,” duras claims: “the vice-consul is the one i believe in. the vice-consul’s scream, ‘the only true politics.’”73 with this qualification of his scream, she links this scream to le camion and the woman’s declaration: “let the world go to ruin. it is the only politics.” it is a statement that in my view attempts to unhinge what we expect from an expected sense. ruin here is unhinged from ruination, happy from happiness. despair loses its sense just as misery is not miserable. duras speaks thus of the path of joyful despair. the vice-consul himself links his utter despair to hope.74 as he tells anne marie stretter as they dance: “lahore was also, in a sense, hope.”75 yet, the vice-consul’s hope appears unexpectedly. she writes, as one might pray each day, he screamed. it’s all true: he yelled very loud, and in the lahore night he would fire on the shalimar gardens in order to kill. kill anyone, but kill. he killed simply to kill. so long as “anyone” was all of india in a state of decomposition. he screamed in his home, his residence, and when he was alone in the dark night of deserted calcutta. he’s mad, the vice-consul, mad with intelligence. every night he kills lahore.76 the vice-consul’s struggle is at once naïve and revolutionary.77 the vice-consul is declaring the end of the world with the shots which he directs at the lepers, at leprosy, at himself, at his mirror image. with these shots he wants to, above all, kill killing, to kill that difference between those who kill and those killed, those who have the power to kill and those who can be killed indifferently without consequence. he kills because he quite simply cannot bear the world’s very existence. he is thus trying to kill in himself the demand that the world itself have a meaning and the belief that we can make sense of the difference between life that is killable and life that ought not to be killed. “we’ve been taught from childhood on,” according to duras, “that all our efforts ought to go toward finding the meaning of life we lead, of the one offered to us. we must find a way out. and it should be joyful.”78 the vice-consul is a catastrophe to the story as a whole, to stories as such. as anne-marie stretter answers charles rossett’s query after her dance with marc de h.: “is he the catastrophe?” “yes. admittedly, it’s the central concept of classical drama, but none the less true for that. no need to look any further.”79 the vice-consul is a catastrophe, as he suggests during their dance, not simply because “there is nothing that he can say about lahore, nothing,” but that it is of necessity that there is nothing to say, because his actions had to take an unforeseekukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 78 able course. he could no longer do what was expected of him, namely adjust to misery. get used to it. in lahore, the vice-consul finds himself trapped within the confines of his own story with the expectation that he would adjust himself to the circumstances, to the climate, to the poverty, to the colonial context, that he would do his job like the cutter-off-of-water. it is this plot that he destroys. he finds himself in a situation not unlike the situation of the old woman that duras describes in her treatment of charles laughton’s night of the hunter. tasked with having to defend the group of orphaned children from the murderous figure of the father (played by robert mitchum) with insufficient means, whilst beset with a character whose typology bars her from killing; “classed with goodness and love in the american myth,” as duras suggests, she is forced to improvise. “the old woman improvises by singing ‘moses’.”80 she sings the tune that the “killer-father” so ominously whistles. and as he begins to sing along, he sheds, if only for the duration of the night, his murderous identity. he forgets himself. he forgets that he is there to kill the children, to commit a crime. so the crime forgets to kill, just like water forgets to freeze. unhinged by the song, which erects “an insurmountable barrier for the crime,” he is dis-identified, and the crime begins to drift from its expected place: “it will be distracted, forgetting to kill, and relieving the criminal for a moment of the weight of his insanity. so that he will leave it alone for the time of a night.”81 duras describes this as a “miracle” that serves to derail the story from its expected sense: what is suddenly established among these people is a connection which up to then is impossible to predict and which escapes all classification, all analysis. first it’s a question of a way of behaving that the old woman invents and the criminal then repeats. these people, so different, suddenly agree to take the film in hand and decide its fate, as if an author were finally getting into the act and, liberating the movie, carrying it off, free. suddenly, we don’t know anymore what we are seeing, what we have seen. so accustomed are we to seeing in the same way. suddenly there’s a switch. all the narrative elements of the movie appear to have put us on the wrong track. where are we? where is the good, the bad? where is the crime? the movie progresses with no morality. it ceases to be the classic fiction of fifty years of american cinema. it has no predetermined outcome, we have no indication of the way it’s going to go. we no longer know what we are supposed to think of what we are seeing…82 this is writing’s promise which promises nothing. one gets nothing in return for one’s losses. nothing in return is not something, but is not nothing. it is the almost nothing in all words. if the despair of the vice-consul is also hope, it is not because he has something to hope for. it is only when he has nothing to hope for, in the pit of despair, that he can hope without being hopeful. he finds love without either being lovable or demanding that he be loved. writing’s silent scream touches upon song: sound without sense. such an account is not blind to the hell in which we kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 79 live, but we ought not to think of it as tragic. as jean-marc de h. tells anne-marie stretter: “it may help you to see the man who is waking up as a clown.”83 notes 1. marguerite duras, practicalities, trans. barbara bray (new york: grove weidenfeld press, 1990), 27. 2. in a late interview, duras states, “i’m still a communist who doesn’t recognize herself in communism. to join a party, you have to be more or less autistic, neurotic, deaf and blind. for years, i stayed in the party as a branch secretary, without realizing what was happening, without seeing that the working class was a victim of its own weakness, that even the proletariat was doing nothing to overcome the limitations of its own condition.” marguerite duras, suspended passions: interviews with leopoldina pallotta della torre, trans. chris turner (london: seagull books, 2016), 28. 3. “‘i was expecting he would tender his resignation,’ says the ambassador, ‘but he hasn’t done so.’” marguerite duras, the vice-consul, trans. eileen ellenbogen (new york: pantheon books, 1968, 27). 4. marguerite duras, l’amante anglaise, trans. barbara bray (new york: pantheon books, 1968), 110. 5. duras cites this passage from musil’s novel in a conversation with leopoldina pallotta della torre to illustrate her following claim: “in my films i don’t gloss over or suppress those things that are not functional or organic to the expressive unity of the fiction – they are made up of a material that’s lacerated, superimposed, offset in time; there are gaps and breaks – that whole imaginary that is meant to render the heterogeneity and irreducibility of life” (suspended passion, 100). 6. robert musil, the man without qualities, trans. sophie wilkins and burton pike (london: picador, 1995), 709. 7. aristotle, poetics, trans. joe sachs (newburyport, ma: focus publishing, 2006), 1450a 2-3. 8. aristotle gives the following example in the poetics: “an instance is the way the statue of mitys in argos laid out flat the person responsible for mitys’s death, when it fell on him as he contemplated it, for it seems that such things have not happened randomly; and so necessarily stories of this sort are more beautiful” (1452a 8-15). 9. aristotle defines what occurs for the most part as what is likely (to eikos). in a note to chapter 7 of his translation of aristotle’s poetics, joe sachs writes, “what is likely (to eikos) is explained above, in the account of beginnings, middles, and ends, as what happens naturally, when it does so not by invariable necessity but for the most part. in the physics (198b 34-36), aristotle treats the latter criterion as sufficient evidence that nature is at work. likely sequence in the story, then, is an image of some aspect of nature working itself out in human action.” see aristotle, poetics, trans. joe sachs (newburyport, ma: focus publishing, 2006), note 20, 31. 10. aristotle, poetics, 1451a 38-40. 11. aristotle also claims that unlike history which speaks “of things that are particular,” poetry “aims at” what is “universal”: “the sorts of things that a certain sort of person kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 80 turns out to say or do as a result of what is likely or necessary [tò eikòs ḕ tò anankaĩon]” (aristotle, poetics, 1451b 8-10). poetry grasps the causes of actions and the effects they produce. jacques rancière argues that aristotle’s distinction between poetry and history is fundamental for grasping his conception of mimêsis: “aristotle asserted the superiority of invented logical sequences over the unfolding of empirical events.” the politics of literature, trans. julie rose (cambridge, uk: polity press, 2011), 174. 12. green eyes, 129. 13. practicalities, 125. for the new edition of green eyes, published in 1987, duras chose this passage from la vie matérielle (practicalities) as the epigraph. 14. this is certainly akin to friedrich hölderlin’s notion of a “categorical reversal,” in notes on oedipus, where “the beginning and the end by no means rhyme.” in “the caesura of the speculative,” philippe lacoue-labarthe interprets hölderlin’s notion of caesura and of categorical reversal as an interruption of the dominance of aristotle’s treatment of catharsis within the tradition. catharsis is what allows for the resolution of the story. it is important in this regard to also mention julia kristeva’s suggestion that duras’ writing leads to a “noncathartic literature.” “lacking recovery or god, having neither value or beauty other than illness itself seized at the essential place of its rupture, never has art had so little cathartic potential…we are in the presence of the nothing of meaning and feelings as lucidity accompanies them to their dying out, and we bear witness to the neutralization of our own distress, with neither tragedy nor enthusiasms, with clarity, in the frigid insignificance of a psychic numbness, both the minimal and also ultimate sign of grief and ravishment.” black sun: depression and melancholia, trans. leon s. roudiez (new york: columbia university press, 1989), 228. 15. this how duras describes the reality captured in le camion and son nom de venise dans calcutta désert. see suspended passions, 102. 16. practicalities, 125. 17. practicalities, 8. 18. in jacqueline risset’s obituary, she suggests: “perhaps marguerite duras was the one to fulfill, better than other writers of the twentieth century, flaubert’s desire to “write a book about nothing,” to submit the possibility of the act of writing to the utmost scrutiny, to define what might be called the primary cell, the atom of literature.” suspended passions, n. 3, 161. 19. practicalities, 8. 20. in her introduction to a collection of duras books, rachel kushner writes, “the language of gascon, from which this practice of a spoken ‘s’ derives, is not considered chic. more educated french people not from the region might be tempted to opt for a silent ‘s’ with a proper name. in english, one hears a lot of duraaah – especially from francophiles. duras herself said durasss, and that’s the correct, if unrefined, way to say it.” the lover, wartime notebooks, practicalities (new york: everyman’s library, alfred a. knopf, 2018), vii. 21. kristeva, black sun: depression and melancholia, 225. 22. in the vice-consul, the song that jean-marc de h. whistles and whose sheets of music are on his piano is called indiana’s song. in the film and the play india song, this is forgotkukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 81 ten or altered. in the ravishing of lol v. stein, one read s. tahla and the name of lol’s lover is michael richardson. in india song the “son” is preserved. however, in the novel l’amour s. tahla is spelled s. thala and in the vice-consul, michael richardson becomes “michael richard.” 23. this is taken to its extreme in l’amour. the characters in the novel do not have proper names. all we have to work with are the impersonal pronouns “he” and “she.” however, one can infer through cross-referencing of her work that the three “characters” are lol v. stein, michael richardson, and anne-marie stretter. in the “afterword” to the english translation of the novel, sharon willis writes, “reducing characters to figures as residues, remnants, fragments, this book produces a textual relay that becomes its own internal memory and dissolves its narrative frame, substituting its memory of the previous texts for the reader’s own, implanting memories in us. but like the dead dog on the beach to which l’amour returns with unsettling frequency – as if this corpse structures the narrative space – these are figures in the course of deterioration.” marguerite duras, l’amour, trans. kazim ali and libby murphy (rochester, ny: open letter, 2013), 101-102. 24. suspended passions, 53. 25. in an interview with jacques grant and jacques frenais about le camion, she says: “cinema has never been equal to the fundamental futility of life. the viewer wants someone to tell him a story about this life in such a way that the inanity on which the story is based is never apparent. it has to be far away, camouflaged, inaccessible, separate. but progress has come, terrible and terrifying: the whole earth is more and more apparent. we know its shape, its dizzying spin. we have seen it from the moon. it’s in everyone’s imaginary. that earth, that new earth and its fundamental futility across the dead planets. i have the impression that i showed in le camion that there is no more sky above the land we see, just interstellar space, the new sky.” “an act against all power” in duras by duras, trans. edith cohen and peter connor, san francisco: city light books, 1987, 112. 26. “an unwholesome-looking sky in the morning ensures that white residents, unused to the climate of calcutta, will wake up looking liverish. he himself [the vice-consul] does, he notices, as he examines his reflection in the mirror.” the vice-consul, 20. 27. “she sleeps among the lepers, and wakes every morning among them, untainted, still not one of them.” the vice-consul, 124. 28. the vice-consul, 53. 29. the vice-consul, 146. 30. the vice-consul, 139. 31. the vice-consul, 122. 32. with allusion, perhaps, to baudelaire’s flowers of evil, duras writes, “peter morgan laughs: ‘i am drunk with the sufferings of india. aren’t we all, more or less? it’s impossible to talk about such suffering unless one has made it as much a part of oneself as breathing. that woman stirs my imagination. i note down my thoughts about her.’ ‘why her in particular?’ kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 82 ‘because nothing more can happen to her, not even leprosy.’” the vice-consul, 124125. 33. the vice-consul, 1. 34. the vice-consul, 147. 35. the vice-consul, 18. 36. the vice-consul, 155. 37. the vice-consul, 123. interestingly peter morgan’s desire to shift the conversation from the vice-consul comes as a response to anne-marie stretter’s description of him as a person “who does not know where he’s going, or what he’s looking for” (122). in other words, the very thing, given how morgan starts his tale about the beggar woman, that one would imagine would pique his interest. 38. the vice-consul, 18. 39. the vice-consul, 154. 40. “it’s true, all my books are born and move around a just such a point that’s always evoked yet always missing.” (suspended passion, 53). 41. the vice-consul, 102. 42. the vice-consul, 163. 43. outside: selected writings, trans. arthur goldhammer (boston: beacon press, 1986), 79. 44. practicalities, 27. 45. the ravishing of lol v. stein, 9. 46. suspended passion, 52. 47. duras suggests “that all the women in my books, whatever their age, derive from lol v. stein. derive, that is, from a kind of self-forgetting. they all see quite clearly and lucidly. but they’re imprudent, improvident. they all ruin their own lives. they’re very timid, they’re afraid of streets and public places, they don’t expect to be happy.” practicalities, 27-28. 48. marguerite duras, practicalities, trans. barbara bray (new york: grove weidenfeld press, 1990), 27. 49. marguerite duras, green eyes, trans. carol barko (new york: columbia university press, 1990), 16. 50. practicalities, 125. 51. as the eleatic stranger remarks in plato’s dialogue the sophist: “whenever there is speech, it’s necessary that it be speech about something [légein tì], and impossible for it not to be about anything.” sophist or the professor of wisdom, trans. eva brann, peter kalkavage, eric salem (newburyport, ma: focus philosophical library, 1996), 262e. 52. marguerite duras, the lover, trans. barbara bray (new york: alfred a. knopf (everyman library), 2018, 61-62. kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 83 53. marguerite duras, writing, trans. mark polizzotti (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2011), 17. 54. writing, 17. 55. the vice-consul, 97. 56. writing, 23-24. 57. in green eyes, duras speaks thus of the singular torment of writing: “writings that seem the most polished are but very distant faces of what has been glimpsed, that inaccessible totality which escapes all understanding, which yields to nothing but madness, to what destroys it. but to give, give yourself – it’s probably that too – this effort worked out in a dark room you do not enter but whose existence you have sensed, if only once, through the transports and ebbing of desire. the wonderful misery is perhaps that torture, that entreaty which allows no respite, that uprooting of self which leaves you forsaken and lost when it ends with the book. you know too. to be the object of one’s own madness and not to mad, that could be it, the wonderful misery. all the rest is beside the point” (142). 58. “the writing of literature is what poses a problem to every book, to every writer, to every writer’s every book. and without that writing there is no writer, no book, nothing. from there, it seems one can also tell oneself that because of this fact, there is perhaps nothing more.” writing, 75. 59. “writing has always been done without references, or else it is…it is still as it was on the first day. savage. different.” writing, 20. 60. practicalities, 103. 61. “horror at choisy-le-roi” in outside, 94. 62. duras says, “i’m passionately interested in christine villemin because she can’t put two sentences together; because like the other woman she is full of unfathomable violence. there’s an instinctive behaviour in their two cases that one can try to explore, that one can give back to silence.” practicalities, 92. 63. practicalities, 91. 64. practicalities, 92. 65. practicalities, 93. 66. green eyes, 143. 67. practicalities, 93-94. 68. the vice-consul, 100-101. 69. the vice-consul, 26. 70. the vice-consul, 101. 71. the vice-consul, 155. 72. in writing, duras recalls a story of the death of a fly that she had told to michelle porte, the director of les lieux du marguerite duras (1976), and to which she compares writing: “when michelle porte arrived, i showed her the spot and i told her a fly had died there at kukuljevic: screaming without sound s12 (2019): 84 three twenty. michelle porte started to laugh. she couldn’t stop laughing. she was right. i smiled at her to put an end to the story. but no: she kept on laughing. and when i tell you this story, plainly, in all truth, in my truth, it’s what i just told you: what took place between the fly and me, which is not yet fit to be laughed at … it’s also good if writing leads to that, to that fly – in its death agony, i mean: to write the horror of writing” (30-31). it is also worth noting, as dominiek hoens reminded me, that robert musil opens the collection, posthumous papers of a living author, with a story titled, “flypaper” in which he describes the final agonies of a fly caught in “[t]angle-foot flypaper” from canada. see posthumous papers of a living author, trans. peter wortsman (brooklyn, ny: archipelago books, 2006), 3. 73. writing, 9. 74. “i’ve never gotten over the despair of politics. it’s through this naïveté that i became a writer. for sartre and the others, there was too little activism, you had to get there by teaching. to spread an idea, that’s what works best because people are hungry for justifications. that’s what naïveté is. happiness is being aware of the fundamental dissatisfaction we exist in and also its unsolvability. it’s a non-problem.” marguerite duras, me & other writings, trans. olivia baes & emma ramadan (dorothy, a publishing project, 2019), 46. 75. the vice-consul, 99. 76. writing, 9. 77. writing, 42. 78. “the path of joyful despair: an interview with marguerite duras by claire devarrieux,” in duras by duras, 105-106. 79. the vice-consul, 101. 80. green eyes, 93. 81. green eyes, 94. 82. green eyes, 91. 83. the vice-consul, 99. kaufmann.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 9 (2016): 105-121 v i n c e n t k a u f m a n n b e l i e v e t h a t i t w a s t o b e v e r y b e a u t i f u l ( m a l l a r m é a n d b a u d e l a i r e ) an anti-philological tale translated by robert boncardo in memory of barbara johnson h ow did mallarmé read baudelaire? what does he owe him? in what sense is he his heir, as it is often acknowledged he is? we will attempt to respond to these complex and multifaceted questions, which bring into relation two veritable continents of french literature, by setting out once again from literary symphony, a sort of “critical poem” avant la lettre, published in 1865 and devoted to gauthier, baudelaire and banville, all three of whom were admired by the young mallarmé. in the pléiade edition of 1945, literary symphony figures under the rubric “proses de jeunesse”. in the new edition curated by bertrand marchal (2003), it is integrated into the dossier of divagations. however, the latter postdates literary symphony by more than twenty years. marchal’s choice is nevertheless justified by the fact that a part of this text — the part on baudelaire, precisely — is reprised in the divagations (long ago, in the margins of a copy of baudelaire).1 by its rigour, bertrand marchal’s critical edition is a model of the genre. the fact remains that this specific choice constitutes an anomaly, or at least an exception, since all the other pieces from the dossier of divagations are contemporaneous with it. should literary symphony have been included or not in the dossier from divagations, for the reason of its partial republication? whatever the case may be, marchal’s decision should not make us forget that besides some extensively reworked motifs, the texts from 1865 and 1888 have very little in common. what has changed? what is striking is first of all the difference in size between the two texts. long ago, in the margins of a copy of baudelaire is, in accordance with the mallarméan “style” of the 80’s and 90’s, a sort of condensation of the first. a certain number of terms and images return, but with the syntactical shortcuts typical of vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 106 später mallarmé. where in 1865 he wrote: “no sooner have i opened my baudelaire than i am drawn into a stunning landscape that strikes my eyes as if created by some marvellous opiate”, we now read: “a landscape haunts like opium” (d 49 — modified trans.). the example can be generalized: from one version to the other, all of the markers of enunciation and, therefore — as impersonality demands — all of the markers of subjectivity have notably disappeared, except in the first sentence of the text to which we will return. baudelaire is still there, in a vision combining a livid sky, leafless trees, gloomy pools, a sunset, tears, satan, crime and remorse. there are still figures, things to see, and perhaps it is still the same vision, even if everything happens as if there were no longer anybody there to see it. no more subjective positioning: by the same stroke, the young and admiring mallarmé of 1865 is nowhere to be found. no longer is it baudelaire and i (baudelaire for me, my baudelaire, etc.), but baudelaire such as into himself at last, which is to say without me in order to sustain him. i am no longer there to claim an inheritance. in 1888, there is no longer “my baudelaire” (oc, 282), no more “i dip with delight into the dear pages of the flowers of evil” (oc, 282). the text from 1865, by contrast, is that of a young and admiring poet, apparently fated to impotence by this very admiration, as per a well-known topos that mallarmé revives, no doubt in an ironic way given the grandiloquence (though it is possible that irony is part of this very topos).2 it functions as a declaration of filiation (as we would say a customs or a tax declaration), as a search, if not for paternity, then at least for a homeland [patrie], a rare term, to say the least, under mallarmé’s pen and one which occurs, precisely, in the section devoted to baudelaire: what, then, is the homeland? i closed the book and the eyes, and i seek the homeland. before me there arises the apparition of a learned poet who points to it for me in a hymn that comes forth mystically like a lily. the rhythm of this song resembles the rose window of a cathedral: amongst the ornamentation of the ancient stone, smiling in a seraphic lapis-lazuli which seems to be a prayer emerging from their blue eyes rather than from our vulgar azure, white angels sing like a host their ecstasy accompanied by harps imitating their wings […] – and i can look no higher than their theological virtues, such is their holiness ineffable; but i hear ring out these words in an eternal fashion: o filii et filiae (oc ii, 283). would baudelaire thus take the place of the homeland for mallarmé? in any case, the means of accessing this homeland are themselves very baudelairean, since it is reached by closing the book and the eyes, which is to say by giving oneself over to the force of the imagination, so central in baudelaire. and if reading baudelaire does not give us access to any homeland, not even to an exclusively imaginary homeland, then it at least compensates for the possible absence of a homeland by substituting for it a place whose connotations are clearly religious. the baudelairehomeland is an “old church” at the same time as being the song of the angels that vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 107 invite us to gather there. it brings about an effect of communion, of invitation and thus of belonging (o filii et filiae). if we set out again from a question as essential to mallarmé as that of the “religion of letters”, which his entire œuvre confronts, in particular by reposing in every possible way the question of the place proper to a religion of letters,3 we can thus say that, in 1865, nothing permits us to doubt the fact that mallarmé believes in the possibility of salvation or redemption by literature, with eyes closed to the world, and that in 1865 this salvation passes by way of a relation of admiration for — as well as an appropriation of — baudelaire. in sum, the latter is the exponent of mallarmé’s belief in a “religion of letters”. this does not mean, of course, that baudelaire himself can be identified, above all in 1865, with such a religion, since for a number of years he had ceaselessly deconstructed its idealist presuppositions; we will return to this. but mallarmé perhaps does not yet know this, or at least is not ready to acknowledge it. for the time being, he follows baudelaire with his eyes closed — and this blindness is, to my mind, at the centre of the complex relation between mallarmé and baudelaire and constitutes one of the keys for comprehending, if not the ambivalence, then at least the considerable discretion, which commentators have often remarked upon, of the young poet in relation to his senior. all of this is amputated from the reprise of 1888. nothing here evokes any admiration, any belief in salvation, any mystical communion, any angels. the invocation of the homeland has disappeared and has been replaced by a question bearing upon the sky, confirming a posteriori the religious implications of the interrogation of 1865 concerning the homeland — that is, the proper place of the poetic. but unlike the question posed in 1865, that of 1888 remains without a response and is combined with a vision of nightmare and of exile: or is this torrent of tears lit up by the fireworks of that artificer satan moving behind the scenes? night only prolongs crime, remorse, and death. therefore you veil your face in sobs, less because of this nightmare than because of the fragments of attempts to go free implied in any exile; what, oh, what is the sky? (d 49) is this simply to say that, between 1865 and 1888, mallarmé lost faith and renounced a certain religion of literature of which baudelaire would have been the representative? that it was necessary for him to detach himself from baudelaire and cease to be his admiring son in order to become mallarmé? must we frame this scene in oedipal terms, or in terms of an “anxiety of influence”, as harold bloom would no doubt suggest,4 an anxiety explicitly visible at the beginning of literary symphony and more generally in the excessively laudatory tone of this text?5 this is one possible avenue of inquiry: the evidence for it is not lacking, nor indeed are the discrete admissions of mallarmé himself, who wrote in 1867 to his friend henri cazalis: “dierx’s book is a beautiful development of leconte de l’isle. will he separate himself from him as i have from baudelaire?”6 indisputably, for mallarmé, baudelaire had been a master from whom it was necessary to detach himself. and he was all the more so since he remained a mute master who mallarmé never knew and from vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 108 whom he never obtained anything more than an approving silence following a reading of ‘les fenêtres’ and ‘l’azur’,7 and later a remark on le phénomène futur in la belgique déshabillée.8 it is equally possible to assess mallarmé’s ambivalence by taking a detour past poe, of whom he wrote in 1864: “all the same, the further on i go, the more i will be faithful to these exacting ideas that my great master edgar poe has bequeathed me”.9 from one master to another: poe is perhaps all the more respectable since he allows mallarmé to avoid recognizing his other master, baudelaire, who is nevertheless the first to translate these “exacting ideas”. the relation of mallarmé to poe, who he will also go on to translate, is a relation of re-appropriation that occasionally involves the disavowal of what his knowledge of poe owed to the translations (or the appropriations) of poe by baudelaire. taking into account the admiration he claims he has for the one and the other, it is all the same surprising to read in a letter to lefébure, written in 1865 at the moment baudelaire’s translation of tales of the grotesque and arabesque appeared: “i have no money with which to buy the grotesque or serious tales, and moreover i am not currently reading”.10 it is true that two years later recognition is apparently in the offing, since he writes to villiers de l’isle-adam, who asks him for translations of poems by poe for a journal: “you will have in one of the first editions some poems by poe that i will work on: i accept this task as a legacy from baudelaire”.11 but in the meantime baudelaire has died, and we know that it is always easier to be the inheritor of a dead man than a living one. other evidence would no doubt confirm the hypothesis of an anxiety of influence that mallarmé had to overcome. but is this not a too simple and too obvious hypothesis, which, in the final analysis, does not explain much at all? in any case, it does not allow us to explain the transformation-reprisal of literary symphony twenty years later, nor indeed the tomb of charles baudelaire, which dates from 1893. if mallarmé detaches himself from baudelaire in the 60’s, it is also clear that he returns to him and that the texts from 1888 and 1893 have the value of a recognition of debt that, moreover, has not been entirely paid back in the text from 1888 and which continues to haunt it: “muse of impotence, who dries up the sources of rhythm and forces me to reread; opposed to inebriants, i give you the intoxication that comes from others” (d 49). here, in the first sentence, is the only “i” still present in the text, and it is not for nothing that it is an “i” who is there precisely to offer up “the intoxication that comes from others”.12 from what intoxication or alienation is mallarmé seeking to disentangle himself? what remains for him to render unto baudelaire in 1888 or in 1893 and which could not have been recognized or declared in 1865? it is to this question that we must attempt to respond, at least if we hypothesize that mallarmé’s relation to baudelaire cannot be summed up in what would after all be a relatively banal history of a necessary detachment, beyond which something new would come to be; that is, if we depart from the principle that baudelaire is still at work in (in the work of) mallarmé, whatever the quite systematic silence of the latter from 1867 onwards — the date of the death of his prestigious predecessor. vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 109 ◆ ◆ ◆ in the spring of 1866, baudelaire is struck down in namur after an attack that leaves him hemiplegic and above all aphasic. mallarmé evokes these facts and the sadness that they provoke in him in a letter to cazalis, which is famous for other reasons. indeed, this famous letter is the one in which mallarmé recounts his discovery of nothingness: unfortunately, in hollowing out verse like this, i have encountered two chasms, and they make me despair. one is nothingness, which i came to without knowing about buddhism and i am still too distressed to believe even in my poetry and to return to the work that this crushing thought has made me abandon. yes i know, we are just pointless forms of matter, and yet thoroughly sublime ones for having invented god and our soul.13 there is thus a coincidence between baudelaire’s aphasia, who had before this been silent on the subject of mallarmé’s first poems, and the discovery of nothingness, of which we could say, taking into account this letter and everything that we know of mallarmé’s trajectory and of his relation to religion, that it also corresponds to the abandonment of the belief the situation of the lyrical poet is steeped in: i have hollowed out verse and, at the bottom of this hollow, there is nothing, there is no salvation to hope for. at the very moment baudelaire is condemned to silence, mallarmé ceases to believe not so much in god, since he never believed in him, but in poetry; or, more precisely, no doubt — for as such the formula does not mean much — in the redemptive function of poetry, in the possibility of salvation through poetry. the baudelairean position involves mourning for the world, a renunciation of the world (baudelaire writes with his eyes closed), a position of exile by turns glorious and cursed and which, despite everything, it is up to poetry to redeem, as leo bersani has shown.14 to this mourning for the world to which he is initially faithful in an almost dogmatic fashion, more baudelairean than baudelaire himself,15 mallarmé now adds the mourning for poetry itself. salvation is thus precisely confused with shipwreck.16 it is not that he ceases to write, even if there is indeed in mallarmé’s trajectory a period of almost twenty years, between 1867 and 1885, to be brief, in the course of which he writes remarkably little (a few articles, some fragments of igitur, ‘l’aprèsmidi d’un faune’, la dernière mode, les mots anglais, that’s about all). the discovery of nothingness, contemporaneous with baudelaire’s aphasia, will almost have made him aphasic as well. but above all he does not write, and will no longer write, in the same manner. if he still has, at least provisionally, one foot on the side of nothingness to be hollowed out (with hérodiade then igitur), the other tends more and more towards the circumstantial: not towards the insignificant, far from it, but towards a form of writing as if lightened of the load of the pathos of transmission, a formal writing, at once play and ritual, an effect of, or the foam of, the mourning for belief as such.17 the despairing mallarmé has ceded place to a histrion, a clown vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 110 who sometimes plays at the faun. and it is necessary to wonder whether it is possible to be the inheritor of a clown or a faun, or what such a heritage would consist in, especially if this clown simultaneously and perpetually touts a sublime total book — a null heritage, mere drafts that he recommends his inheritors burn. from nothingness to the ironic assumption of the “nothing” — such would be mallarmé’s trajectory since baudelaire’s aphasia. or since the death of his older sibling, for we cannot resist noting here another coincidence. mallarmé’s biography is in fact placed under the sign of two great intellectual adventures, if we can call them that: the first, as we have seen, consists in exploring nothingness at the moment baudelaire becomes aphasic. the second immediately follows: an effect of the first, it is evoked one year later, that is, almost precisely at the moment of baudelaire’s death. this is the famous experience of impersonality, recounted in a letter to cazalis, of which it is necessary to recall the following points, which appear essential: i have just had a terrifying year: my thought has thought itself and has arrived at a pure conception. everything my entire being suffered as an aftereffect during this long agony is indescribable, but fortunately i died completely, and the most impure region where my spirit may venture is eternity […] i am now at that point, after a supreme synthesis, of slowly gaining strength — incapable, you see, of distracting myself. but how much more so i was a few months ago, first of all in my terrible struggle with that old and wicked plumage, now crushed, fortunately, god. this tells you that i am now no longer a person, no longer the stéphane you have known — but a means by which the spiritual universe can see and unfold itself through what was once me.18 baudelaire dies, but mallarmé, in his own way, also becomes impersonal, a pure aptitude of spirit reflecting on itself. there is in the mallarméan experience of nothingness and impersonality something like an imitation of baudelaire’s death, and i take as proof of this the fact that the other “abyss” that mallarmé encounters while hollowing out verse is the “void of his chest”, a sickness which there is every reason to believe will lead to his death thirty years later. whatever the real state of mallarmé’s health, whatever role hypochondria played (but all of this is even more significant if it is a case of hypochondria), it is necessary to point out that at the moment of baudelaire’s death mallarmé begins to be sick, to die — as if he were contaminated by baudelaire’s death. to be convinced of baudelaire’s implication in the mallarméan “adventure”, for all of this to not appear as a mere coincidence, it is necessary to redefine the central issue of mallarmé’s strange intellectual adventure, the only one he would have known. having followed the different declarations from mallarmé cited above, we can now summarize them in the following way. in striking down god, that “old and wicked plumage”, which is to say by experiencing the absence of any form of vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 111 transcendence — “god is dead” is certainly all the rage at the time — mallarmé is simultaneously confronted with his own disappearance, with his own becoming-impersonal. “we are nothing but vain forms of matter — and yet thoroughly sublime ones for having invented god and our soul”, he writes to cazalis. in order to escape nothingness, we have invented not only god but also our soul, that is, our existence as a subject. take away god and there is no longer any subject that holds. the other must die, but so must the subject. i am a subject only insofar as there exists a transcendental other who assures me that i can be a subject, an other i can rely on. what remains, then, if the other is absent? nothing, or more precisely language, words to which the poet must “cede the initiative”, within or beyond a problematic of meaning that ultimately corresponds, as all readers of mallarmé know by experience, with an effect of belief. meaning does nothing more than gleam, it comes to the reader henceforth in the form of a question, indeed of an enigma — of an “is this really it?” a cascade of disappearances: god, the subject, meaning.19 mallarmé’s poetics come down in their entirety to the unbinding — the deconstruction, as we used to say — of this trinity, which is obviously not without a relation to the trinity, and from which it is impossible to dissociate the very constitution of 19th century lyrical poetry. we can thus minimally define the latter as the expression — or the song — of a subject.20 it is this question that determines that the “coincidences” of 1866 and 1867 are not, precisely, mere coincidences. the crisis that mallarmé lives through in the course of these years is very much a crisis of the “subject” of poetry, that is, of a cultural construction that is taking on water from all sides, which is sinking at the moment of baudelaire’s death, who had made it his question. the question of the subject, or more precisely its questioning, its permanent state of crisis: in the history of poetry, baudelaire represents the crisis of poetry, a crisis that has since never ended; he represents a systematic indictment of everything that, in the course of the first half of the 19th century, sanctioned the convergence of the poetic and the theological in the lyrical. let us recall some of the procedures or figures through which the baudelairean crisis passes. on the side of god, these are almost too obvious: blasphemy, of course, the denial (of saint peter, for example), the choice of perversion and voluptuousness, of evil, of satan. amidst the perfume of a corpse. on the side of a subject we can note exile, identification with those who are marginalized and with those who are excluded from society — an identification whose real counterpart will be the famous trial lost in 1857 — but also the self-destitution, the overturning of (poetic) charity to become violence. if i had to characterize with a single term the baudelairean operation carried out on the poetic tradition, i would readily resort to that of denunciation, as we speak of a sin or a crime, but also of a contract: baudelaire denounces a specific poetic contract signed by god, the (charitable) poet and meaning (the good), a contract which has had its glory days and its romantic predecessors, hugo in particular. vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 112 these themes are central, particularly in les tableaux parisiens, which were added to the flowers of evil after cuts prompted by the trial of 1857, and then of course in le spleen de paris. the following examples could be developed (and certain of them already have). assommons les pauvres, le gâteau, les yeux des pauvres, or also le mauvais vitrier — all of these critique the motifs of charity, of love for one’s neighbour, the veritable stock in trade of romanticism, and unveil or denounce the latter as both violent and hypocritical.21 la corde is at once a denunciation of a relation of violence (between the painter and his model) hidden behind another denunciation, that of the illusions of maternal love.22 numerous texts from tableaux parisiens expose the mechanism of identification with the others as being a surplusvalue created by the poet, who thus poses as a charitable swindler: this operation is “theorized” in les foules and radicalized in la solitude, which it is possible to read as a denunciation of the fundamental christian “contract”, which demands that the other be similar to my fellowman, my brother, my neighbour. perte d’auréole refers almost explicitly to the loss of the aura (of the poet) dear to walter benjamin. le galant tireur overthrows the woman as muse and thus as a mediator of the divine. as for texts (in prose) like l’invitation au voyage and un hémisphère dans une chevelure, barbara johnson has shown that they are based upon an operation of a defiguration (and thus of a destitution) of poetics that baudelaire carried out, starting with his texts in verse.23 upon the death of baudelaire, lefébure writes to mallarmé “that genius is a magnificent sickness and that one can die from it”.24 mallarmé could certainly have subscribed to such a statement, above all if the genius of baudelaire consisted in the destitution of the subject, in denouncing and sacrificing it, before transmitting this problematic to him. mallarmé also dies, in his way, from baudelaire’s genius. he begins to truly become mallarmé (“no longer the stéphane that you knew”) at the point where baudelaire ceases to be baudelaire, where the adventure of lyricism ends in its own renunciation. from the aphasia of one to the “nothing, this foam, virgin verse” of the other: the whole question is, in a word, to know how poetry is possible after the baudelairean denunciation; how to come after a poetry infected by a pathology; how to be cured of it. it is not insignificant that in long ago, in the margins of a copy of baudelaire, it is a question of opium and of “the intoxication that comes from others”: baudelaire is toxic, and this ultimately leaves one outside, “in the sinister fragments of all exile” (oc ii, 110). how is it possible to come after this? almost thirty years ago baudelaire died, and yet his shadow is itself a poison: celle son ombre même un poison tutélaire toujours à respirer si nous en périssons (oc i, 39) [being his shade a tutelary poison we breathe in deeply though we die of it]25 until the end, until the ‘tomb of charles baudelaire’ written in 1893, mallarmé will therefore have remained faithful to the baudelairean poison, to what is toxic in his lesson. until the end, this is what he will have chosen to remember: the poison, vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 113 actualised also in the figure of the prostitute, so emblematic of a baudelaire associated with “the horribly dribbling / sepulchral sewer-mouth loosening mud and rubies”,26 and who chose the mud of the real against poetic charity; a figure now as if snuffed out since it had been too well illumined (by the modern illumination of gas) and destined to be nothing more than a shadow caused by the very absence of shadow. baudelaire: a shadow, a revenant, perhaps, and for this precise reason always toxic. we cannot separate ourselves from revenants. ◆ ◆ ◆ god, myself, the good: the denunciation of this little ménage à trois on which the position of his lyrical seniors was based also leads baudelaire to disqualify all forms of community. the other is no longer my fellowman and even less a brother, if not by hypocrisy. his œuvre is anti-communitarian, it is written in mourning for the hopes which were his at the moment of the 1848 revolution: mourning for the people, mourning for an active community, the disavowal of saint peter. at the political as at the literary level, 1848 would have truly marked the end of an epoch.27 fraternity has become “fraternal prostitution”28 and universal communion is the privilege of the solitary walker slipping in almost as a voyeur amongst the crowd. in this context we could also evoke the question of dandyism, which is at the very least the index of a desire for absolute singularisation29 just as much as it is a renunciation of the great tasks of transmission that the preceding generation had assigned itself (summarized by bénichou under the term of prophétisme). at this level, whose religious connotations are manifest, it is tempting, even if it is too simplistic, to describe things in terms of a dialectic, with hugo — the contrary of the dandy — in the role of the thesis, baudelaire in that of the antithesis and mallarmé in that of the synthesis, with the following particularity: namely, that in strictly historical terms the thesis (hugo) extends his reign beyond the antithesis (baudelaire). in any case, we can remark that if mallarméan “silence” and impersonality coincide with the disappearance of baudelaire, he is back in business at the death of victor hugo (1885), as if he had to wait, as barbara johnson has observed, for he who was “verse personified” (oc ii, 205) to also die in order for there to emerge the possibility of an alternative to baudelairean solitude, which is to say of a new form of community destined also to be translated into a new poetical form — precisely that or those invented by the later mallarmé. it is necessary to reaffirm, in order to avoid any misunderstanding concerning the mallarméan “religion” of literature, that this community is destined to remain virtual. it has nothing to do either with a return to the people of 1848, to its prophets or its self-proclaimed spokespeople, or with the different versions of romantic socialism or a socialist romanticism that constituted its backdrop. mallarmé perfectly understood the lesson: there is no possible return to a configuration anterior to the baudelairean denunciation. how, then, or with what, can a community be made when one is mallarmé, someone so familiar with nothingness, unbelief vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 114 and the death of god? how can impersonality and community be conjugated? of what is a community made if there are no subjects to constitute it? there remains language, given to and shared by all; there remain the twenty-four letters of the (french) alphabet and their infinite combinations, which lead, according to mallarmé, to the book, to a total book attempted by all, albeit unwittingly.30 beyond the baudelairean destruction, there is community, there is meaning. these are almost the same thing since there is only meaning if meaning is transmissible, shared, if it exists for more than one, if there is language. there is some community, even if it is unaware of itself, even if it remains reserved, secret, virtual, and as a result perfectly compatible with mallarmé’s discreet anarchism, with his indifference at turns amused and contemptuous with respect to any social link, which he considered fundamentally as a fiction (an illusion, a belief).31 from this viewpoint, almost the entirety of mallarmé’s œuvre would have to be reread, or at least the quasi-totality of the texts from divagations, in which the conditions of possibility for a community founded on a poetic (rather than a musical, theatrical or religious) ritual are made explicit. this cannot be envisaged here and i will content myself with one or two particularly relevant examples with respect to the inversion of baudelaire’s position. to texts like assommons les pauvres, les yeux des pauvres, etc., which denounce the identification of the poet with the poor (with the people, the proletariat, etc.), mallarmé responds with texts like ‘conflict’ and ‘confrontation’. in both cases, it is a question of encounters between the poet and proletarians, and in both cases this encounter remains virtual, impossible to express, mute, whether the workers are “upright”, as in the first example, or sleeping like a “blind herd” after their working day, as in the second example: my look pressed limpidly on his confirms, for the humble believer in these riches, a certain deference, oh! how a mute handshake makes itself felt — since the best that happens between two people always escapes them as interlocutors (confrontation, d 278). constellations begin to shine: i wish that, in the darkness that covers the blind herd, there could also be points of light, eternalizing a thought, despite the sealed eyes that never understood it — for the fact, for exactitude, for it to be said (d 46).32 the best — the common thought — escapes the interlocutors, and by the same stroke the community escapes them. it is the role of poetry to provide despite everything a place for this community, or more precisely to designate such a place, to avow its existence, not in order to effect a return to religion, to belief and to identification, but “for the fact, for exactitude, for it to be said”. this expression links up with the famous “i imagine, following an unextractable and no doubt writerly prejudice, that nothing will remain without being proffered” (d 209-210). thus is programmed the reversal of an entire problematic — a romantic problematic, even if it continues to resonate until sartre and beyond — of transmission and of the “engagement” of the writer. in order for there to be engagement, there must be a subject, comvincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 115 munication, and even an other — god, the people, the proletariat, etc. — in whose name the poet speaks: a tradition or, if one prefers, an inheritance that mallarmé declines, not with a baudelairean passion for sacrifice, but by commenting on it in its entirety with an ironic “we can always pretend”. let us insist upon the following point: the mallarméan reversal of the hugolian position is not thinkable without the preliminary traversal of baudelairean negativity. it is because he integrated, indeed swallowed, baudelaire melancholically that mallarmé is finally ready, in 1885, to untie himself from hugo, as well as from any form of “engaged”33 literature. as if to finally do “justice” to the poet who, as a lost child, died too soon, twenty years before his senior (hugo), over whom he will only triumph posthumously. ◆ ◆ ◆ it is in ‘crisis of verse’, one of his most decisive texts, that mallarmé evokes hugo, for reasons that are only indirectly linked to what we have just seen. here it is a question of verse, of the difference between verse and prose, and therefore of the identity of the poetic, which is said to have broken at the death of hugo, the veritable incarnation of poetry, at least in france: verse, i think, respectfully waited until the giant who identified it with his tenacious and firm blacksmith’s hand came to be missing, in order to, itself, break. all of language, measured by meter, recovering therein its vitality, escapes, broken down into thousands of simple elements (d 202). with hugo gone, verse “breaks” and free verse comes to be. but we know that mallarmé never practiced free verse, that for him it was not the central issue, even if he pays tribute to its advent, notably in ‘crisis of verse’. what is truly at stake is specified in the response to an inquiry by jules huret on literary evolution: verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in posters and on the fourth page of newspapers. in the genre called prose, there are verses, sometimes admirable ones, of all rhythms. but in truth, there is no prose: there is the alphabet and then more or less tight verses: more or less diffuse. every time there is an effort towards style, there is versification (oc ii, 698). mallarmé displaces the debate. the question is not that of knowing whether the small transgressions of the alexandrine by the adepts of free verse are tolerable or not. they are, of course; it is not mallarmé who should be asked to bring order to this crisis of verse. but his position consists above all in accentuating and in radicalizing this crisis so as to transform it into a crisis of the identity of poetry, which is only timidly announced by free verse. by affirming that “verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm”, mallarmé makes impossible any simple identification of poetry, any assignation of a form to poetry, whether it be institutional or not. verse is everywhere in language, and by the same stroke it is nowhere, or more precisely it is nowhere for certain. there is verse in prose, even in newspapers, and vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 116 inversely perhaps not all alexandrines are real verses. it is a question of the eyes, of the ear, and for whoever has neither one nor the other, of belief, but there is now no more official form susceptible to support it. the crisis of the identity of the poetic is also, ultimately, a crisis of the belief in poetry.34 “verse is everywhere in language”: it is not only a question of a theoretical affirmation, but also of one of the keys allowing us to understand the diversity of literary “genres” practiced by mallarmé from 1885 — a diversity prophesied, incidentally, by the very important stage of la dernière mode (1874): poems in verse, but also in prose, as well as the “critical poems” that make up the divagations, the very numerous circumstantial texts (dons, loisirs de la poste, eventails, tombeaux, etc.), of which a certain number count amongst the most difficult of mallarmé’s texts, articles, conferences, reports, translations, without forgetting the coup de dés, or the never-published fragments of the “book”. in a discrete but systematic fashion, mallarmé anticipates the great undermining of official artistic forms by the avantgardes of the 20th century.35 this is an often unremarked paradox: he who has for a long time been made the champion of a “pure” conception of poetry, which would arise only from what he himself qualified as “essential speech”, is also he who would have done the most to shuffle the cards, to subvert the identity of poetry, notably by producing multiple supposedly minor writings. yes, there no doubt exists an “essential speech” in mallarmé, but clever is he who can say where to find it, since it is true that the essential endlessly takes on the allure of the circumstantial. just as there is at the heart of mallarmé’s poetics an operation of the suspension of meaning, we can also speak in his case of a disidentification of the poetic — or, to use a less barbarous term and to render homage to barbara johnson, a defiguration of poetic language.36 this leads us back once more to baudelaire, since what is most essential in barbara johnson’s book is devoted to him, and for good reason. for the great defigurator, he who opened the path of disidentification followed by mallarmé, is precisely baudelaire and in particular the baudelaire of the spleen de paris, whose denunciation of the “lyrical” contract thus finds its equivalent at the level of form. as a literary form — and this is also the entire point of a form in lockstep with modernity — le spleen de paris implies a destitution, a loss of poetry’s aura (or halo); or, to propose a more barbarous term, a prosaification of poetry, perceptible notably in the prose version of the poems from the flowers of evil (invitation au voyage, la chevelure). numerous critics, who are unconditional adepts of the flowers of evil, have not failed to reproach these texts for their unpoetic, or, to speak frankly, prosaic character: baudelaire is no longer what he was; he is no longer at his height. it is thus that the entire critical operation carried out by baudelaire on the lyrical configuration is often occulted, indeed repressed, in favour of a baudelaire who incarnates “true” poetry — a bitter or ironic victory over hugo. as for mallarmé, it is not only certain that he perceived perfectly well the scope of the baudelairean defiguration, but also that his own strategy, above all in his “critical poems”, engages with that of baudelaire. from spleen de paris to divagations, there plays out the entirety of the critical adventure of french poetry, that is, of what is vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 117 also just as much a reversal of its religious underpinnings. later on, this will not always be well understood. there are often inheritances that are lost.37 ◆ ◆ ◆ let us begin again, one last time, at a more biographical level. the baudelairean heritage is toxic: less than any other, baudelaire was never at home, he could never have been; he was perpetually in forward flight so as to escape his debts, both symbolic and financial.38 note his problems with property, from his endlessly abandoned hotel rooms to the maternal house at honfleur, which was in the process of collapsing. after him, how can one occupy a place, how can one inherit from baudelaire, from he who swallowed and spent his inheritance in a few months, who destroyed himself as an heir before being placed under supervision by the “family counsel” for the rest of his days? baudelaire’s œuvre is written in the guilt and jubilation of an inheritance refused, squandered. it is also this destruction, an accident of transmission that, in a word, he transmits to mallarmé, intoxicated as he is from his youth onwards; but time will be needed in order for him to realize it, or to bring this inheritance to fruition. this is what happens with the inheritances of revenants: they incubate for a certain time. in any case, the predispositions are not lacking in mallarmé. recall here that everything in his world is made in order that families and inheritances collapse. his mother disappears when he is five years old, his father remarries and loses interest in him, entrusts him to his grand-parents, who send him to boarding school. at age fifteen he loses maria, his child, his sister, and at age thirty he loses his son anatole. geneviève, his daughter, remains, and she devotes herself almost exclusively to her father and will never herself have children: a definitively interrupted descendance, a short circuit. certainly, none of this is truly uncommon in the 19th century, but it must be admitted that in order to inherit or to transmit a heritage, we haven’t gotten off to a good start. in short, there is nothing surprising if we find, at the other end, at the moment where the chasm of his chest becomes a spasm and grips his entire body, those words hastily scribbled by a mallarmé close to death, words addressed to his wife and his daughter and which concern notably the fragments of his famous book, the impossible total book that he did not cease to tout: “the terrible spasm of asphyxiation suffered just now can recur during the night and prevail over me. thus do not be surprised that i think of the demi-centennial heap of notes, which will become only a great embarrassment to you; because not a page therein can be of use. i alone could draw from it what it contains… i would have done had the final absconded years not betrayed me. burn, therefore: there is no literary heritage there, my poor children. do not even submit it to anyone for appraisal; and forbid all inquisitiveness and friendly meddling. say that nothing there would be distinguished, it is true anyway, and, you, my poor prostrates, the only beings in the world capable at this point of respecting an entire life of a sincere artist, believe that it was to be very beautiful”. vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 118 believe that it was to be very beautiful. because it was not? because they were worth nothing, those fragments of the book published formerly by jacques scherer, which have fascinated generations of researchers? but what precisely were they searching for? was it only time that he lacked to leave a total work, an absolute heritage in the face of which one could only submit for all eternity? we could consider, as many have done, that here there was an inheritance that would finally give their full meaning to now-completed works. or on the contrary we can think that absence of an inheritance left by mallarmé retrospectively destines his published works to the same uncertainty: are they fragments of nothing, or of something? are they beautiful? would they have been beautiful? believe it, or not. notes 1. stéphane mallarmé, divagations. translated by barbara johnson (cambridge/massachusetts/london: the belknap press of harvard university press, 2007) p. 49 (d). all the citations from mallarmé will refer to this edition, unless noted otherwise. volumes on my divan does not appear in the edition of 1945, henri mondor, ed., (paris: bibliothèque de la pléiade, gallimard, 1945). let us also note that in 1888, mallarmé is correcting the proofs of a new edition of the ensemble of literary symphony, which will be abandoned as such in favour, one might say, of long ago, in the margins of a copy of baudelaire. banville and gautier are thus scrapped. 2. see in particular the preamble to literary symphony, which evokes the three “masters”: “modern muse of impotence, who has long prohibited me the familiar treasure of rhythms, and who condemns me (pleasant torture) to do nothing more than reread — until the days where you will have enveloped me in your irremediable net, ennui, and everything will then be finished — the inaccessible masters whose beauty makes me despair; my enemy and yet my enchantress of malicious potions and melancholy drunkenness, i dedicate to you, as a taunt or — i know it — as a token of love, these few lines of my life written during clement hours during which you will not have inspired in me a hatred of creation and a sterile love of nothingness’ (oc ii, 281). let us also note that numerous commentators of literary symphony have not failed to point out the imitative, indeed plagiaristic, character of this text: in 1865 — and this is the other side of “impotence” — the relation of mallarmé to baudelaire is still a relation of appropriation, even if it is not reducible to it. 3. recall that mallarmé’s œuvre is indissociable from a problematic of place, and thus of staging or performance, which determines its value as a (potentially) religious ritual. see on this point mary shaw, performance in the texts of mallarmé. the passage from art to ritual (university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, 1993). see also diana schiau-botea’s recent doctoral thesis le texte et le lieu du spectacle de la plume au mur. stéphane mallarmé parmi les avant-gardes, thèse de doctorat (rutgers university — paris iii) (2010); and of course bertrand marchal, la religion de mallarmé: poésie, mythologie et religion (paris: corti, 1985). 4. the anxiety of influence. a theory of poetry (new york/oxford: 1973, oxford university press). 5. the excessive nature of the praise, and thus its fundamental ambivalence, is more evident still in the parts of literary symphony devoted to banville and gautier who, in any vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 119 case, play a less important role than baudelaire in the history of the ‘influences’ undergone by mallarmé. in terms of influence, an essential difference seems to reside in the fact that from the point that mallarmé truly becomes mallarmé — in the second half of the 1860s precisely — the works of banville and gauthier will cease to be at work in mallarmé, in contrast to baudelaire, whose heritage is in some sense infinite and never-ending. 6. correspondance. lettres sur la poésie, éd. bertrand marchal (paris: gallimard, 1995) coll. ‘folio’, p. 346. 7. ibid., p. 177. to be precise, it would be necessary to speak of a reported silence: the reading in fact took place in the salon of baudelaire’s cousin, without mallarmé being there. 8. ibid., p. 286. 9. ibid., p. 161. 10. ibid., p. 246. 11. ibid., p. 368. 12. on the basis of the thesis of ambivalence, we can also note the fact that mallarmé refused to preside over a banquet that la plume organized in 1893 in memory of baudelaire, before announcing, almost at the last moment, as if he were ravished by the idea, that he would all the same write a text for this circumstance: le tombeau de charles baudelaire, a poem which we know has left many readers and commentators perplexed, as if it were not fully-formed, or as if there were something in the relation of mallarmé to baudelaire that was not clear. 13. correspondance. lettres sur la poésie, op.cit., p. 297. 14. the culture of redemption (cambridge, mas: harvard university press 1990), pp. 63-86. 15. in 1863, mallarmé writes the following to cazalis in criticism of the “simplicities” of emmanuel des essarts: “he confuses too often the ideal with the real. the stupidity of a modern was to write that ‘action was not the sister of dream’ — emmanuel is one of those who regrets this” (correspondance. lettres sur la poésie, op. cit., p. 143). the modern poet evoked here is baudelaire, who expresses this regret in le reniement de saint-pierre with respect to the “betrayal” of christ by god. in other words: mallarmé does not follow baudelaire at the point where he criticizes god on the basis of a position of identification with a christ who is come to save the world and who has been betrayed. radical melancholy, which is assumed as such, with neither renunciation nor revolt being possible: mallarmé will always be resolutely on the side of what he calls ‘restricted action’, which is to say theatre. 16. it is not necessary to venture very far into mallarmé’s work to realize this, since the poem placed as an introduction to poésies, entitled salut, opens with an evocation of a shipwreck: “rien, cette écume, vierge vers / a ne désigner que la coupe/ telle loin se noie une troupe / de sirènes maintes à l’envers” (oc, i, 4). on this poem, see the exhaustive reading by lucette finas, in le bruit d’iris, paris, 1979, librairie des méridiens-klincksieck, p. 44-48. the salut dossier benefits by being completed by the poem à la nue accablante tu (see equally vincent kaufmann, op. cit., p. 103-109), the two poems taken together constitute what inspired jacques rancière in choosing the title of his important book on mallarmé: la politique de la sirène (paris: hachette, 1996). vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 120 17. see vincent kaufmann, le livre et ses adresses, op.cit.; marian zwerling sugano, the poetics of the occasion. mallarmé and the poetry of circumstance (stanford: stanford university press, 1992). 18. correspondance. lettres sur la poésie, op.cit., pp. 342-343. 19. julia kristeva, la révolution du langage poétique (paris: editions du seuil, 1974). 20. on the religious foundations of lyrical poetry in france, see the unsurpassable works of paul bénichou: le sacre de l’écrivain (paris: librairie josé corti, 1973); le temps des prophètes (paris: gallimard, 1977); l’ecole du désenchantement, (paris, gallimard, 1992); selon mallarmé (paris: gallimard, 1995). 21. jérôme thélot, violence et poésie (paris: gallimard, 1993). 22. pierre pachet, le premier venu. essai sur la politique baudelairienne (paris: 1976, denoël). 23. défigurations du langage poétique (paris: flammarion, 1980). 24. mallarmé, correspondance. lettres sur la poésie, op.cit., p. 299. 25. mallarmé, the poems in verse. translation and notes by peter manson (ohio: miami university press, 2012) p. 171. 26. ibid. 27. see dolf oehler, le spleen contre l’oubli. baudelaire, flaubert, heine, herzen (paris: éditions payot & rivages, 1988) payot; as well as ross chambers, mélancolie et opposition: les débuts du modernisme en france (paris: josé corti, 1987). 28. la solitude, oeuvres complètes, éd. le dantec et pichois (paris: gallimard, bibliothèque de la pléiade, 1961) p. 264. 29. roger kempf, dandies (paris: éditions du seuil 1977). 30. in music and letters, it is precisely language which now appears as the place of the poetic, as the equivalent of what mallarmé used to think of in terms of the homeland. the alphabet provides the poet, “our civilized inhabitant of eden”, with “a doctrine as well as a country” (d 186). 31. see also philippe lacoue-labarthe, musica ficta (figures de wagner) (paris: christian bourgois, 1991). the analyses of lacoue-labarthe, which bears in particular upon the relation of baudelaire and mallarmé to wagner, an unsurpassable exponent at the end of the 19th century of a problematic of the community “produced” by art (or by art returning to religion), confirm the hypothesis affirmed here, namely that the passage from baudelaire to mallarmé plays out the question of the abandonment of the subject in favour of a virtual form of community, a hypothesis with which both jacques rancière (la politique de la sirène, op. cit.) and alain badiou (théorie du sujet (paris: editions du seuil, 1982), p. 116, sq) agree. 32. on conflit, see also vincent kaufmann, ‘de l’interlocution à l’adresse (la réception selon mallarmé)’, poétique 46, 1981, pp. 171-182. 33. engaged literature, about which it cannot be repeated enough that was not invented by sartre, constitutes notably the target of mallarmé in l’action restreinte (oc ii, 214-218). vincent kaufmann : believe that it was to be very beautiful s9 (2016): 121 34. in other terms, the responses to the question “what is poetry?” will always arise, from our historical point of view, which is at once post-baudelairean and post-mallarméan, from an effect of belief. poetry is everything that we believe it is, its “particularity is to escape ontological categories”. daniel oster has shown this in passages de zénon, (paris: editions du seuil, 1983). 35. this point is documented in a convincing fashion by diana schiau-botea, le texte et le lieu du spectacle de la plume au mur. stéphane mallarmé parmi les avant-gardes, op. cit. 36. op. cit. 37. i am thinking here notably of the surrealist movement, which would have represented in the history of french poetry a restoration of the rights of the subject and of expression. there is nothing surprising if this restoration occurs via (1) a relative indifference to the baudelaire of the spleen de paris; (2) an even more obvious indifference to mallarmé, who the surrealists don’t quite know what to do with; (3) an immense misunderstanding of the two other great post-baudelairean “disfigurers” of french poetry, namely rimbaud and ducasse-lautréamont, to whom the surrealists will give a mythical dimension by forcefully re-injecting, one is tempted to say, some subjectivity into them3, a lyrical consistency, neither of which are at stake in rimbaud or in lautréamont. 38. vincent kaufmann, l’equivoque épistolaire (paris: minuit, 1990), p.55 sq. tazi-s2-2009 s j o u r n a l o f t h e j a n v a n e y c k c i r c l e f o r l a c a n i a n i d e o l o g y c r i t i q u e 2 ( 2 0 0 9 ) islam and psychoanalysis, edited by sigi jöttkandt and joan copjec editorial 2 cogito and the subject of arab culture julien maucade 6 to believe or to interpret jean-michel hirt 10 the veil of islam fethi benslama 14 jannah nadia tazi 28 four discourses on authority in islam christian jambet 44 the glow fethi benslama 62 dialogues translations of monotheisms fethi benslama and jean-luc nancy 74 the qur’an and the name-of-the-father keith al-hasani 90 reviews reading backwards: constructing god the impossible in psychoanalysis and the challenge of islam benjamin bishop 96 the powers of the negative: the mathematics of novelty benjamin noys 102 s is on the web at www.lineofbeauty.org n a d i a t a z i j a n n a h f all the myths in islam, jannah―the paradise promised to the righteous in the qur’an―is certainly the most ineffable. indeed, it is the very definition of the unimaginable. in the orthodox tradition, jannah is the essence of that which is beyond words as it is beyond mortal experience. surpassing any form of representation or comparison, it can be thought of only as “the end,” in every sense of the word: the end of thought itself, if not a transcendental idea of the conditions under which the end is possible, as a release expedited by faith. nevertheless, this apophatic extreme has constantly been subverted; after all, the delights proclaimed in the qur’an―splendors, light and lavish sensual pleasures―irresistibly invite expatiation. jannah’s dual function, at the same time sublimational and retributive, and also the contentious issues it raises, places it right at the heart of the faith and of islamic religious thought. paradise has permeated every form of discourse, from theoretical musings to erotic fantasies by way of legal quibblings, mystical quests and the polemical or deviant interpretations of the heresies. from the ninth century onwards (the third century after the hijrah), the gardens of paradise were presented as an essentially strategic topos in the order of knowledge, power and their relationship with pleasure. a place not so much situatable as situative: you are instantly identifiable by how you approach, debate or catalogue it. for anyone with half an ear, this paradise is a revelation. it exposes the stages of being as progressive states of knowledge. it defines frontiers, not only between believers and non-believers but also between disciplines (theology and philosophy, in particular) and between schools of thought. it articulates ideological positions and political differences. and, of course, it has its own songs and stories, pretexts for bawdy escapism and popular merrymaking. tell me what jannah is to you, and i will tell you who you are and what you desire. i will know if you are a libertine, a scholar, a philosopher or a mystic. without seeking to appraise your spiritual standing or moral fortitude, i will know the extent of your understanding, the nature of your intellectual and religious affinities and the historical tradition upon which you draw. last but not least, if you are a man i will know how you view women and the sexual order in general. and from all that i will be able to divine where you stand in relation to modernity. o somewhere in these compellingly problematic realms, classical islamic thought lost its way, entangling, embellishing and compromising itself. with that, the theme sank into the dogmatic slumber of theology and entered the base, ribald naiveties of popular culture. how unlikely that it should resurface now under the darkest of s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 2 (2009): 28-42 t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 29 auspices, against the background of the martyrology, islamic revolution, wars and advanced degeneration which the muslim world has been experiencing for the past few decades. spun out in the past by metaphysicians and poets, it demonstrates the remarkable impoverishment of state islams before marking the upheaval effected by the islamists on the back of that. the hyperbole of jannah is already etched into the shattered face of our century, underpinned by death, as if the afterlife were utterly suffused with extreme violence. as if, in having secured the eternity of the hereafter, one’s death were signifying a climactic moment of an entirely different kind: the total sublimation of the spiritual by the temporal, the conversion of religious faith into a political belief. jannah apparently becomes less inherently unfathomable when seen as expediting an otherwise untenable clash of two different realities, by becoming an instrument of terror. how else to attain the life everlasting, since it goes hand in hand with violence? a violence, moreover, which absolutely demands death in the name of god and which receives it with the pledge of immediate coronation in paradise, without delay, without having to await the end of time. a violence, in other words, which scandalously promises a hyperbolic continuity between this world and the next, between the most mortal of deaths and eternal life. this vision attests to the fatal disorientation of a religion falling prey to political degeneration, to juridism and to a return in strength of the most inept literalism; but also, and indissociable from all that, to the indigence of today’s globalized culture. this withdrawal into a nonspace of hostility devoid of all sense, an alarming region of psychological reversal, today represents islam’s most vertiginous divide from itself and from the rest of the world. if it is true that jannah can only offend modernity on the dual grounds of the latter’s christian heritage and its killing of god, then we now recognize in this paradise something other than a slightly kitsch fable. it articulates the eschatological anticipation enshrined in totalitarian slogans, a sectarian messianism and a pathological view of the masculine and the feminine which is quite specific to islamism. shrouding an essentially political fracture in its obscurantist sacrality, it rejoices in disaster and paralyzes thought. i shall only tackle this fascinating theme indirectly, steering well clear of the numerous questions it raises and instead confining myself a very brief and general examination of certain aspects related to virility―a quality i should distinguish from masculinity right at the outset, in that it always (and not only in the hereafter) masks hubris, hyperbole and excess. since paradise is essentially situative, significative, expressive and scandalous, there could be no better context in which to look at this notion. it thus appears as seen in the mirror held up by jannah, reflected through a series of circular arguments and structural aporiae which pervert sexual politics―and, indeed, politics in general. in passing, i shall also address some other questions of topical relevance. by focusing the human condition upon the idea of judgment, the islamist doxa―true to the dogma―promises to the righteous, sex, sex and more sex, ad infinitum. they pass straight from jouissance to the beatific vision just as they pass through death, with its overtones of martyrdom, from this world to the next in a kind of permanent ecstasy. the discourse is stripped of all hidden meaning: gone are the allegorical dimension and the imaginal landscape which, in the great tradition, reveal t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 30 themselves during the long spiritual journey the believer embarks upon down here on earth. no longer is the eschatological promise framed in a metaphorical representation of the hereafter. and certainly not in esoteric terms, such as the powerful image in islamic mysticism of an infinity spent fulfilling spiritual desires. yet neither do these representations incorporate the extravagances of the past. what remains is a vision wide-eyed with fantasy, with exasperation even. on the internet, for example, the exhortation to take the right path―the straight line to paradise―relies upon the defense and illustration of the sharia. shrouded in modesty and mist, no longer are the houri depicted down to the smallest anatomical detail as they once were, with lustrous eyes, translucent skin and erect nipples. modernity and puritanism (wahhabist or shi’ite) oblige one another in this. in fact, we hardly recognize the houri at all beneath the halo of metaphor and circumlocution surrounding them. but their voluptuous silhouettes are still revealed to the heroes and the just, even under seventy veils, and still they sing their wedding songs so loud that there is no doubting their reality. one thing is certain: the presence of the houri only adds to the dissymmetry between women embarking upon the path of righteousness and their male counterparts. we cannot but note that the discourse is considerably less explicit as far as female prospects of sensual pleasures in paradise are concerned―and that despite all its entreaties they play their part in the “islamic” revolution or renaissance. when it comes to the garden of delights, the same tradition that so forcefully invites women to don the veil, cloaks itself in a chastity, striking in its contrast with the wild stories reveled in by popular culture. we can only suppose that they expected to enjoy a glorious, perhaps even elevated perpetuation of their earthly condition, their bodies incorruptible and their eternal lives spent surrounded by pearls and precious stones. modesty enjoins silence. god moves in mysterious ways. and the religious authorities have rejected muhammad rashid rida’s interpretation, identifying man’s spouse in this world with the houri in paradise. her pale skin notwithstanding, the houri is no less appealing as an example to the pious woman as she is enticing for the male believer seeking the abode of peace. but what do opuscules and sermons have to say about this perfect maiden, whom we have rather quickly consigned to the world of erotic fables and songs? her title conjures up an image of blazing eyes, since its meaning is most exact: the contrast between the clear white of the eye and the blackness of the pupil. the pure beauty with which she is endowed, the presumed intensity of her passion (although it is only presumed), her generally restrained manner, and her number, with all the exciting variety that implies―everyone will have at least two houri with faces as bright as the full moon, and some seventytwo―not to mention the virtual qualities she is able to derive from her divine medium: all these modern-day embellishments only serve to amplify her mechanical dimension and the submissiveness which has always defined her. the only remaining certainty is her virginity―a quality which, even if it restores an aura of purity, also denotes very prosaically that she belongs exclusively to the blessed―to those men, fulfilled at last, to whom she pledges her total and absolute availability as befits her functional nature and chattel status. there are none of the descriptions, the details, the admiration which once revealed her; she has become a mere shadow, a pure promise of flesh. so much so in fact that, paradoxically, this houri could be to t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 31 woman what, in that most far-removed of traditions, patristic christology, the almost immaterial body of the resurrection is to the mortal body: the faintest, subtlest expression of human incarnation, a spectre representing the stubborn will of a few bearded old men, and ultimately one of the qur’anic mysteries. her evanescent contours shaped entirely for male sexual pleasure, like the body glorious she exists for no other reason than to serve as a vehicle (for the desires of the righteous) or a rattle to be brandished during ideological disputes. we can no longer discern the houri’s chimerical character from her physical form, nor even from the fascinating mix of chastity and crudity still surrounding her, but it is there nonetheless, in that dyschronous combination of cybersexuality and dogmatic regression which she displays under the guise of the sacred. the fact remains that, since nothing is removed from the qur’anic imagery itself,1 the other world retains all its materialism in the eyes of the moralists. we encounter there none of the imaginary figures, intelligible interlocutors or apparitions from dreams found in avicenna, ibn arabî or mulla sadrâ, only at most a few injunctions to caution. the revelation of paradise is lethargic, with its shady valleys, its rivers, its gold and fine fabrics and its perfumes of arabia, and with all its sensual imagery invoked with a curious blend of excitement and prudery (it cannot be by chance the tone is set by the perfume, an essence rather than a substance, which better than anything else combines subtlety with sensuality). it would be an understatement to say that the righteous triumph; no, they strut and they pose, gleaming with a plethora of astounding qualities. and more: popular belief unashamedly identifies the excesses inherent in virility with the passage to transcendence. ascribed the virtues of the prophets, the righteous―all of them―achieve the selfsame identity in perfection. and each of them may contemplate his power by exercising it. that is, through sexual enjoyment. as if to redouble the fetishization of the female body, the scopic tropism usually rendered off-limits to the male by the interdictions of the faith now envelops the unspeakable (hence the fact that the houri of the past literally was a chimera: a monster composed of an entirely disparate assemblage of parts to be gazed upon eagerly). not content with conjuring up the power of the second sex, the righteous see themselves in the full glare of their holy predation. without dwelling upon the erotic, the islamist discourse still manages to feed upon a male narcissism of utterly unquenched vanity. islamic culture may harbor the arts of love in its past, amongst them an exquisite courtliness, but they have no place in this paradise: when the sexual act is not hushed up altogether, it is only ever presented as coitus of neverending arousal2 at a level of absolute intensity without quite reaching orgasm―or rather as a permanent orgasm―in which the woman’s only involvement is to reflect male power. when one ventures to question devotees on this topic, its edenic vision tends to produce nothing more than troubled silence followed by some kind of wild, unstoppable version of the discourse in which the polemical codes inflate, stutter and then collapse in the face of the mental image, which itself degenerates into congealed stereotypes. the pleasure supposedly represents the absolute: more, always more, 1 see 44:54, 55:72 and 52:20, which refer to the houri. 2 see aziz al-azmeh, “rhetoric for the senses: a consideration of muslim paradise narratives,” journal of arabic literature 26.3 (1995): 215-31. t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 32 infinitely more. the boundlessness of the sexual act being expressible only in quantity, the seventy houri articulate never-ending excess. or, to put it another way, the most eagerly awaited expression of virility. a virility taken to the absolute extreme, redundant in its very power and yet feeding that power, where ultimately it represents nothing more than an ipseity nourished not by some insubstantial notion (that of absolute submission to the absolute, as implied by the name islam) but by quite the opposite: by the unbridled plenitude born of fantasy. it is all as if, up there in the sky, the supermale finally manages to lay claim to his true essence, at last fulfilling the dream of unicity, of sovereignty and of self-finality his virility has always pursued: the ability to take pleasure and to dominate forever, beyond all limits and beyond the laws of nature. to reason the unreasonable in this way, as a bloated tautology, is to smother the other with the self, the spiritual with the carnal (or the intelligible with the sensitive, the hidden with the obvious), the ideal with the fantasy, masculinity with the essentialized identity of the real. in short, paradise with the misery of world. quite obviously, this vision is rooted in a militant disposition of a kind defended by islamism, in all its manifestations, in much the same way as fascist cultures still like to celebrate machismo. this is an ideology which does not confine itself solely to this one patriarchal assumption, and in its pursuit of a return to the supposed origins of islam neither does it claim any noble values―the sovereignty of the desert, the chivalry of the great age―in the name of the muslim man, nor share the principles of civility and level-headedness enshrined in classical thought. in a context of conflict and general dereliction (upon which we should dwell at greater length), the preoccupation of the “brothers” with virility derives from a temptation towards austerity which is always lying in wait for them. by acquiring puritan and combative traits, that virility can operate in the most brutal of ways, trapping strength, purity and judgment. fed by reactionary passions and a narrow juridism, by certainty and resentment, it expresses itself in the most cursory of ways at or close to the freezing point of thought, by dictating the visibility of bodies and the fixing of minds. here, where the virile word and the virile face come together, the one―being the antithesis of the face as understood by levinas―summons and redoubles the other within their confines; although not without casting itself into exteriority, to the detriment of sirr (interiority), and overcoming a system of essentialized identity, which in nature would be given as destiny. pledged to give tangible rewards in return, and to kill and to cage in the name of an authority established by god, these institutions (the word and the face) arm and steel themselves to suppress thought and life. mortal reification. islamism sweepingly disavows the intelligibility, rooted in both philosophy and mysticism, which identifies the real, the true and the invisible. its great leap backwards begins with the repudiation of the zâhir (the apparent) and the bâtin (the esoteric), two fundamental states without which the eschatology―and hence the road to the hereafter―lose their sense. it would be no exaggeration to say that this literalist and juridist reduction eliminates islam’s most brilliant speculative legacy. all to benefit a public display that brings together populism, machismo and the modern mass media. the lazier the thinking, the more ostentatious the channels through which it is presented. t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 33 the more unimpressive the virility, the greater its tendency to show off with its codes and its posturings: veils, beards, minarets, mass movements, spectacular atrocities . . . and islamism does not attack knowledge alone, it strikes at the very principle of equilibrium and consensus which has for centuries formed the basis of broad community concordance. that is, the moral and political tenet that the just man or the good caliph is he who takes up jihad against passions and who governs himself and others in total justice, finding the via media.3 this self-mastery in submission to god is accompanied in principle by a duty of obedience and attendance to one’s prince, just as that prince is himself bound to set an example. it is often forgotten that, by contract, the muslim subject is to the good caliph what the wife is to her husband: a comparable premodern dissymmetry sanctifies the siyasa authority of the prince and that of the husband―to wit, the art of governing either the family or the city in accordance with considered principles. in supposedly fighting tyranny and in denouncing apostasy and moral corruption in the community, the islamists are actually intent upon restoring a dirisible virility in the name of the law. before continuing these introductory comments, it is worth briefly reminding ourselves of how paradise was presented in the past. and to begin by recalling that jannah was a significant battleground in the great struggle for the truth fought by the philosophers and the theologians. to a great extent, the dispute centered on the delicate question of corporeal resurrection. like christianity, in this matter orthodox islam has had to deal with contradictions between two fundamental sources of inspiration: on the one hand, the jewish tradition, in which the body is saved, and on the other, the hellenistic―and above all platonic―idea that death marks the liberation of the soul from the body. since islam recognizes neither original sin nor the earthly incarnation of a god who is himself called upon to rise from the dead, the disputations of its theologians on this issue proved rather less tortuous than they were for the fathers of the church. muslims have never been forced to condemn the flesh or to return at the end of time to a “glorious” body which isn’t one at all, and which remains suspended in a sublime state like that of the angel, nourished only by the contemplation of god. not that the scholars of the islamic law did not have to fight on several fronts at once. for one thing, in spirited listeners jannah evoked a catalog of libertine entertainments, infused with irreverence and irony. the theologians also had to challenge the vaticinations, from the lewd to the partisan, of clergy brazen in packing their sermons at will with embellishments to the qur’anic imagery of the hereafter. it is distressing to believe in this day and age, but at one time islamic preaching could be explicit in the extreme. the erotic frenzy provided a welcome relief from the rigors of everyday life, and proliferated under the guise of a faith claiming to offer less mystery than simplicity for the masses. but how to reconcile this pleasure with the sovereign good? the exuberance of the flesh, the luxury and glitter surrounding it, the liberty and eloquence with which this parade of 3 “the word ‘justice’ means a satisfactory balance, be it in one’s own character, in relations with others or in the elements of the administration of a nation,” ghazâlî, mizan al ’amal (criterion for action) (cairo, 1964). t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 34 delights was presented, barely any more ethereal than those of the here and now . . . all this erotic incitement inevitably profaned the very dignity of the religious message, undermining both its soteriological meaning and its practical dimension. it was no easy matter to propitiate these two worlds without indulging them. these theological scholars also had a hard fight on their hands countering the abstraction defended by the majority of philosophers in the name of an allegorical interpretation of the holy book. at stake was the whole edifice of the revelation in its divine provenance. the theologians engaged in controversies with those who often frequently shared the same greek sources, but found it easy to denounce the incoherence and vulgarity of literalist interpretations. how could believers be persuaded to adopt the temperance and moderation demanded by the law when the hereafter was being depicted as an orgy, albeit one bathed in glory? and how could the faith stress the intent (niyya) of the moral act, its intrinsic value regardless of its effects, while at the same time backing the law of god with a promise―even, as avicenna put it, belittling it with the supply of merchandise? as well as the “vile pleasures” of jannah, the scholars found themselves arguing about the “market” and the accusation that they had allowed faith to become a “childish toy” through their facile interpretations. these intellectual disputes were limited in range, admittedly, but the underlying notions of salvation and retribution are intrinsic to faith―all faith.4 to continue: if this perilous yet desperately attractive theme, without equivalent in the other religions of the book, could put the faith to the test, then it was supported neither by reason (jannah runs counter to any representation of the cosmos) nor by experience (only the prophet had ascended into heaven). and if, even more fundamentally, it engaged morality and the idea of judgment, then it drew support from the expectation professed by every faith. what does a master of orthodoxy like ghazâlî, for example, have to say about paradise? shifting between the theological, the juridical and the mystical, his thought still merits consultation, even by the islamists. in his exploration of the next world, ghazâlî typically manages to retain room for the measure, good sense and conciliation which define the sunnah. as a good theologian who must simultaneously excite, persuade and reason in the service of the faith, he skilfully shifts the emphasis of the problem: if there is continuity from one world to the next, then that exists not from the point of view of the object―which, by definition, is unknowable―but in respect of the subject: the perceptive subject and his works. paradise becomes a horizon, at once a normative point of reference and a place of intelligibility which allows the establishment of a hierarchy (ontological, spiritual, moral, and so on) and the process whereby the soul is elevated, starting from the points of contacts between the visible and the invisible. in the double opposition of divine transcendence and human weakness, of the soul and the body, it is a central 4 see emile benvéniste, “the act of faith always includes certainty of remuneration,” indoeuropean language and society (coral gables, florida: university of miami press, 1973) 143. t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 35 region which―by analogy or by anticipation―can impart understanding of regulating idealities, spiritual stations and pure bodies, as well as prolonging the states achieved in this world, be they sensual pleasures or the inspirations derived from visions, dreams or revelations. the fact remains that jannah is to each according to his desires and level of knowledge. those whose belief is led by their bodies will know a carnal paradise, whereas those who believe according to the spirit will experience the beatific vision of god and will come to understand that it is this world, not the next, which is pure evanescence. and it is they who will develop spiritual senses that allow them to hear the voices of angels, to smell the enchanting perfumes and to see god. the physical body is no way guilty in itself, but as the seat of animal passions it must know its place and not seek to usurp the supremacy incumbent upon the soul. nothing in this regime of self-control is anything but extremely classical. as the entire oeuvre of christian jambet shows, for their part eastern thinkers have gone much further, by way of the concept, based upon the neoplatonist tradition, of an interiorization representing “birth into the afterlife.” in paradise, relieved of corporeal preoccupations and sensory limitations, the soul is finally able to reveal itself, to become aware of itself in its transparency to the divine, its delight flowing out unchecked in proportion to the perfection of its power, which is the power of knowing. in this sense, paradise represents the crowning experience of the intimate; it is an undisguised and unlimited experience of intimacy, so intense an effusion of bâtin that it reveals the essence of the divine. but seen from this world, there is a bestial destiny, the manifestation of moral perversion and ignorance, as well as an angelic one. as sadrâ says, placing himself in the same tradition as ghazâlî and fârâbî, “man becomes an angel in this world if knowledge and higher consciousness (taqwa) triumph in him.” if concupiscence triumphs he becomes a brute, and if overwhelmed by violence and anger, a wild beast. “the dog is a dog because of his form, not his substance; the pig is a pig because of his form, not his substance.” the dualist polemic, with all its moral psychology and political extensions, fits into the hierarchy―which is still accepted to this day―between the islam of the vulgar and the religion of the initiated, enamored of knowledge and wisdom. there is one truth, but in this respect, as throughout ontology, it has its gradations.5 5 although it allows itself a certain elasticity, that is conditional upon the intention at the individual level being pure, or at least striving to be so, and that collectively it avoids fitna. in this respect, ghazâlî does not shy away from tailoring his language to suit the occasion, legalistic or pragmatic, and yet still manages to map out a mystical path which finds its crowning glory in the face-to-face encounter with god. ambiguity prevails to a certain degree, as it has always done, and as so often in islam we found ourselves in an area of constant negotiation and recomposition through which sharia (in its literal sense, “the way”) is supposed to be found, but where, in practice, a structure favoring fiqh (jurisprudence) and consensus has grown up, although in so doing it raises some formidable questions of demarcation. where does paradise begin? where does the world end? where is the boundary between the political and the religious? and, in the modern context, where does islam end and islamism begin? t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 36 if jannah does not quite let go of this world, if it does not necessarily manifest itself as an ideal horizon retaining all its powers of sublimation, then that is not only because its sensual gleam can legitimately be rendered figuratively and discursively. it is also, of course, because it requites loss and death, and because it reflects a remarkably contradictory sexual regime. the theologians having marked time on the philosophers, their burgeoning literalist accounts treated sex with justice and confidence. subject to moderation, the ethical destiny of the heterosexual6 male does leave room for desire. freely binding that state to the law, reference is made to a future intoxication representing god’s generosity and his love for his favorite creation. none the less, he who exults in the hereafter will more than likely be caught in the grip of want and prohibition in this world. where the sexual promise is made, so arises the question of woman and all that goes with wanting her, segregated and off-limits as she is. where the invitation points, that is where the wall of the harem is raised, with all the fantasies and pangs for forbidden fruit that it arouses. the muslim man’s relationship with the carnal thus puts him in a double bind. the prophetic tradition does not hold out for him the chastity saint paul so longed for in paradise, but quite the opposite: the pleasure of sex and the pleasure derived from sex within the legitimate―and polygamous―framework of marriage. the flesh can and must be pursued for its own sake, be cultivated like an art, be celebrated, be decorated . . . providing, of course, that the rules of decency and a certain amount of moderation are observed. and not forgetting that its idyllic innocence must be reasserted, if there still be need to do so, according to the example decreed by the prophet, the impeccable model of sensuality and virility. or, to be more exact, according to the hagiography―still in full force―of a virility noble enough to tread the full length of the lofty line between unfailing power and flawless justice, and passing a series of wonderful, tumultuous acts of love along the way. that would be the unicity of the prophet, we are told: the ability to steer the course of virtue even through sexual life. the profusion of such discourses on jannah illustrates the extent of the ars erotica admitted by islam―indeed, encouraged by it through the application of this model. as in other eastern wisdoms, the body, and sex in particular, can achieve transcendental status and heuristic value. in fact, even those like sohravardî and mulla sadrâ who posit a strict dualism of soul and body, presenting the latter as the place of darkness and non-being which stands in the way of a introspective relationship with the one, do not insist upon the condemnation of sexual enjoyment. “even sexual pleasure issues from true delights.”7 “there are no sexual relations,” comments jambet, “there is a corporeal light, which animates the bodies in their desire and comes to them from their souls.” in paradise―that is, in the world of 6 with all its abundance and complexity, the question of homosexuality deserves separate treatment. relatively tolerated, sublimated and lauded in courtly poems and stories, it is nonetheless subject to a strict physical prohibition. 7 sohravardî, quoted by jambet in le caché et l’apparent (l’herne, 2003) 91 and onwards, developing the complex themes, ill-treated by this brief account, of processive ontology through sadrâ’s notion, after ibn arabî, that quiddity screens the inherent singularity of being, and sohravardî's idea, inspired in its way by avicenna, of a hierarchy of celestial bodies with their light arrayed in two dimensions: “triumph” and “indigence.” t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 37 intelligences―the soul unmasked will finally experience the union it gained a prescient awareness of through the act of love in this world, a happiness it previously only knew as the muffled and incomplete echo of a departure from itself. from the substance, in other words. and more precisely for sadrâ, from the principle of quiddity which obstructs pure existence―that is, the act of being in its total singularity and full power. expressions of virility such as the pursuit of sovereignty, hyperbolism, the face as narcissistic monstration and the use of force as a physical negation of power run strictly counter to these classifications, as they do to the mystical element in general, inasmuch as it assumes the immanence of the divine. based upon a metaphysics of power and in accordance with the opposition of the visible and the invisible, we can categorize the inversions almost trait for trait: sovereignty versus seigniory or spiritual chivalry (futuwwa), narcissistic ritual versus self-effacement in pursuit of the divine face, ostentation versus discretion, virility-led identity fixation versus infinition into the other . . . this is not the place to show the extent to which dogmatism and the institutional order in islam have been unable or unwilling to disabuse virilist abrogation of its via media and its spiritual direction, both of them highly sensitive when it comes to accommodating the feminine. suffice it to say that everything leads us to believe that much of the responsibility rests with politics. we shall note only that islamists can most often content themselves with radicalizing a “phallocentric” predisposition which already inflicts its diktats everywhere. as far as woman herself is concerned, while it is true that islam has never disputed her possession of a soul, on the other hand it instituted the harem (as the name suggests) as a sacred place for protection of the weak by the strong―a virilist argument par excellence. the presumed sanctity of the private domain is translated into an act of confinement which shaped the islamic city and sealed the fate of the inmates. to put it systematically, by imposing incarceration and isolation, the harem and its corollary, the veil, contributed significantly to reducing women to the status of purely physical beings. thus they came to be seen as creatures of passion and instinct, complete with all the stereotypes that inferiority evokes. the veil in this context is not the means of depropriating the female body generally portrayed, since to dispel that is simply a matter of noting its ambivalence―of seeing in it, as even the best authors like to do, as the instrument of every incitement, seduction and infidelity. inasmuch as it represents a means of confinement, the hijab signifies this appointment of women to domestic duties, to the domain of emotions, sensations and physical attributes. denied access to the world and to education (or to very much of it), she can find accomplishment only in her role as lover and, above all, as childbearer. to men, conquest (of the world and of history), to women, preservation (of the species, of the home and of tradition). to men, destiny and adventures of the mind, to women, the permanence of seasons and days and the dullness of the body. the old aristotelian and galenic order, which imprisons woman in matter alone, could not have found a better illustration: the feminine finds expression only as a lesser being, in passivity, or, in total contrast, through all-powerful motherhood. associating patriarchy with polygamy, this means of confinement can only induce power games, rivalries and two-way resistance. the women becomes the power, the mother fulfilled through her son, who in return endows her with virility. a t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 38 dangerous, almost untameable creature who must be protected from her own desire and from whom society must be protected. an insatiable being―cunning, says the qur’an―who conspires with the forces and the occult and the night, who becomes obsessed and anguished when gazed upon by others. and so we enter an endless hyperbological8 circle: the more a wife is denigrated, the more she raises her son in the cult of virility, and so the less potent and independent he becomes. the more the flesh is accentuated, the less fulfilled she can be. the wilder this forbidden women becomes, the less satisfied she is in return. and, coming full circle, the more virility is vindicated . . . ethos deploying its exaggerations and disjunctions in hubris and mimetic rivalry. it is these pesterings and interdictions, these turns of the screw, each one more prohibitive than the last, these schizze and serial paradoxes (all-powerful slave, fettered or deceived master, ceremonial virility, and so on) that dominate the psyche and poison domestic life. we can imagine that jannah must seem to men like the ultimate harem: a haven of peace and relaxation, free of all malice, in the sovereignty of rediscovered innocence as it was at the beginning of time. people have even wondered whether this garden is the same as adam’s eden. without lingering on this lovely qur’anic story, we must remember that adam was a caliph: literally, “he who comes after god.” after the fall, he repented and was pardoned. in other words, this is a matter of sovereignty from the outset and everything can be inverted depending on how the notion is interpreted: on the one hand, islam presents jannah as man’s edenic condition; on the other, it is placed in absolute obedience to transcendence, with sovereignty belonging to god. man is placed at the summit of creation before the fall, even above the angels. but the absolute separates the beginning from command, creating an infinite chiasmus between them by means of a submission, seigniorial or servile, to the divine. in honor of his caliphal rank, god gives adam not only language, which elevates him above the angels, but also woman and the world. his relationship with the world is thus shaped by a favor; it has been entrusted to him in order that he may praise his god, acknowledging the signs of his presence. in making the world a place of hospitality, rather than one of exile or delinquency (dasein), here again islam is in total opposition to the christian tradition, and to a certain extent modernity.9 for man, the world is a garden rich in offerings and in words. it is this remarkable conjunction between the desired, the given and the thought which defines the domain over which he may reign, as long as he agrees to serve: to serve god as a being endowed with responsibility. as for adam’s companion, that shadow unnamed in the qur’an, she seems simply to subscribe to a regime of general subordination―with the one exception that she retains her dignity as a believer. he “created me (from you) so that your heart may find rest”, al-tabari has her saying. and so she remains the subordinate of a subordinate, serving god by entertaining his appointed caliph. responsible for the fall, but not guilty of it, she submits to adam and is at his disposal, but is not so much stigmatized at the ontological level as permanently marked with a kind of ancillary inferiority. 8 a term coined by philippe lacoue-labarthe. 9 see the idea of man as the “curate of nothingness” in heidegger. t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 39 however, this prevalence of strong sex and of the hyperbological chains constraining it does not explain the over-determination of the virile. affixing itself to the law is the element of history, a political provision bringing with it a second double bind. in deferring to despotic power, this fundamentally separates islamic society from the classical greek tradition with which it appears to be allied. the caliphs, shadows of god on earth, played their full part in this division: inherently first of all, in supposedly representing paragons of virility (through their warrior-prince image, as men of strength, sensuality and lavish hospitality, full of vitality, magnanimity, and so on); but also by virtue of the political destitution that they brought about. all too often, these despots took to its apex that inversion that sees word, face and force triumph in the affairs of state, rather than spirituality and justice as originally posited by fârâbî in his model of the philosopher-king. it should suffice to note here that the prince derives his power from his paternal authority, his religious aura and his distance from his subjects. he embodies a politics of a visibility which demands admiration: an outward appearance and swagger that, on the face of it, make up for the weaknesses stifling virility to display unparalleled pleasure―the pleasure of command, but also that of possession and of consumption as in paradise, with a libidinous fury presented as the most obvious manifestation of divine sanction. we know what inventive storytelling and arcane discourse the theme of the seraglio has inspired, and continues to inspire, in east and west alike. aziz al-azmeh10 has shown how, ever since the time of the umayyads, a supposedly egalitarian and aniconic culture has adopted the old, despotic ways of the east as its own―in so doing compromising the sovereignty of the unique and representing the harem as something close to the hereafter. the luxury of this palace aspires to an aesthetic explicitly derived from jannah:11 plentiful and perfect are the houri, the boys, the servants and messengers, the gold and jewels, the fountains, the gardens, the exotic fruits, the banquets, the pavilions and the sanctuaries. the monarch’s distance places the political scene on a supernatural plane, one of rapture and dread, where orders and points of reference blur as they pass from one world to another and so bring about an insidious decline of language and customs. he is by right the best of men, the wisest and the bravest, god’s appointed one, who hears, judges, guides and protects his subjects. his face is everywhere. from the moment he is hidden from the people and assumes all his powers, his attributes can reflect the image of god―unicity, grandeur, majesty, sovereignty, omnipotence, the source of all gifts and providence. ultimately, the caliph expresses himself through nothing but signs and effusion. he is surrounded by silence even when pouring forth. he sees all, knows all and is capable of everything, yet remains inscrutable and unassailable. miracles and prophecies are attributed to him. ordinary mortals kiss the ground he walks on, even though islam forbids prostration before anyone but god. this preeminence is scrupulously imputed to the caliph’s superior sense of justice and power of thought, it is true, but the fact remains that the vocabulary used in the panegyrics lauding the works and wonders of kingly dynasties, for example, is more or less 10 aziz al-azmeh, muslim kingship (london: i. b. tauris publishers, 1997). 11 see gülru necipoglu, architecture, ceremonial and power (cambridge, mass.: mit press, 1991). t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 40 interchangeable with the lexicon of the divine: curacy, imitation, emanation, covenance and parity of function, and adulation of a sublime, evanescent master ruling in absentia. while the incantatory approach has retained the mystique of this power, as it has that of virility, we can nevertheless measure its strength by the disastrous extent of its effects. removed from public life and stifled, the masculine subject concerned has no choice but to turn his back on politics and, in order to assuage his manly vocation, withdraw forever into the domestic sphere. even today, although states tyrannize men in one respect, in another they confirm their patriarchal authority through the sharia (or equivalent law). this relieves them to some extent of the burden of being tyrannized, by granting them a semblance of recognition and power. in this sense, every authoritarian regime on islamic soil has a despotic dimension to it: “domesticating” man in such a way that he is at once emasculated in the public domain and empowered in the private, with each aspect determining the other. few and far between are the regimes that have freed themselves from this dual straitjacket and sought to guard against a machismo and a domestic delinquency that both have the potential to ambush the state. most discriminate against women in the name of islam at the same time as eliminating or controlling the spaces in which men can prove themselves: the arenas of warfare, of chiefdom, of brotherhood and of exertion where self-esteem is cultivated; the places of bravado and parity which once served as fields of honor. now shaped in the private domain alone, the male secludes himself within the limits of “ordinary life” (arendt). here, his virility directs his power into the enslavement of woman, and even into the hatred of all things feminine. humbled, the man can be virile only by default, through the subjugation he imposes upon others: not only women, but also sons and more generally anyone perceived as inferior for whatever reason (ethnicity, religion, professional or patronage relationship, and so on). the duty of obedience to parents, spouses and princes taught by the qur’an ends up migrating and morphing into a whole constellation of power relationships and urges to control. the macho, as we know, becomes more intractable in his perpetual effort to prove himself to himself the more he is put down and humiliated by his own lords and masters. the more he exercises his power, the more he arouses and exposes himself to resistance, and hence the less able he is to prove himself. and so, once again, we encounter the antinomies and the crazy excesses of hyperbology. in all this there is a circular causality linking the sovereign and his subjects: it is only because the prince abuses his power that the “domesticated” male is able to define himself in terms of the patriarchal norm and the subjugation of the feminine. but, conversely, it is also because this subject is permitted to set himself up as a despot in miniature within his own four walls that he submits to the greater authority. and that in god and his law he primarily discerns attributions of power and ideas of judgment. it is because he finds himself emasculated that he cannot stop seeing power relationships everywhere, and always in binary terms: licit and illicit, good and evil, strong and weak, friend and foe . . . machismo, dogmatic islam, political oppression: all are bound together, and they can sustain themselves only under the aegis of the one. t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 41 our modern age has done nothing to remove these obstacles confining the male to an alien domestic environment. he remains caught in a whole set of traps related to his desires, to authority in all its forms, to woman, to his parents . . . the hyperbological complications hem him in on all sides, affecting his points of references, his formal roles and his abilities, without his machismo ever letting up on its demands for satiation. it is primarily due to the violence of dictatorships, expert in adopting its coercive techniques and its technologies of control from modernity, that the great male game involving conquests of the self and parity of the masters has ceased, and also that there has, to all intents and purposes, been no modernization (read: democratization) of political life. in the private domain, where the oppressed male is supposed to find refuge and regain authority, his patriarchal position has been undermined by changes to the family, to the moral climate and, above all―with her emergence from the harem―to woman. for all this, and unremitting in their submission to hyperbolic and disjunctive logics, macho values are all the more resilient now that they are focused upon the domestic arena. the newspapers are full of stories relating how these constraints and dyschronic developments torment society. what a wretched picture all of this reveals, of a masculinity and a gender politics pushing the world into reverse. in all the countless dramas affecting the islamic world―its civil and regional wars, its poverty and the knock-on effects, its failed revolutions and bankrupt ideologies, its “west-hate” (in both senses, as subject and object), its arab-iranian propaganda battles―in all this, we can interpret the islamist position based upon the devastating aporiae of virilist hyperbology and its countereffects. there comes a time when, caught in the asymptote of the virile, dialectics cease to function and, in response to political tragedies, we allow relationships to be invested by fascist impulses. fed by a vicious circle of impotencies and humiliations, the game of double bind becomes the consuming male passion; the means whereby he, wounded, is able to wound life in return. as has been said often enough, these islamist movements are essentially reactive. effectively, as far as they are concerned, the point is to oppose dictatorships and masters, and―in order to restore virility (by whatever name it goes: honor, authority, sacrificial heroism, patriarchy, fraternity, male bonding . . .)―to impose themselves upon those women who seek to emancipate themselves. it has to be pointed out, though, that the logic in which they are imprisoned actually imposes a systematic dependence upon woman. desired, feared, hated and adulated, she is an inherent part of their virility by default. a virility that substitutes honor with a morality of hatred, public affirmation of the self and parity with domination of the weak behind closed doors, self-expression and self-exposure with the veiling of the other. and so, against her will, woman finds herself situated at the heart of male subjectivation. it is no surprise, then, that since she can no longer be confined to her own body and to the home, she must show―that is, visibly display―her submission to the androcentric order. this is the core principle shared by islamists of all shades, the one they reassert incessantly, the one from which we can distill the essence of their politics: sexual identity and moral policing. inasmuch, of course, as they do not find it in simply reflecting other macho integrists, like bush and his sinister acolytes, to perpetuate the mechanics of their antithesis. that, too, reveals the extent of the shifts needed to escape from this t a z i : jannah s2 (2009): 42 infernal logic. we must substitute the identity-based terminologies with the ideas and experiences of liberty. and we must take belief into our own heart of hearts while at the same time opening our house wide. remember that the political question involves the emancipation of both sexes, who are inextricably bound together in the domestic arena. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 6-7 (2014): 74-94 o r i t y u s h i n s k y j o u r n e y t o t h e e n d o f i d e o l o g y ideology and jouissance in céline’s journey to the end of the night t he sensational publication of l.f. céline’s novel, journey to the end of the night,1 in 1932 was accompanied by a vigorous dispute regarding the “political leaning” “ideology” or “worldview” of the novel and its author. some critics, including jean-paul sartre, identified socialist and communist elements in the novel; some, such as léon daudet, regarded it as tending towards right-wing, whereas others pointed out the dreadful tone and the dehumanization, specifically of the proletariat in the novel.2 this dispute was not renounced, even with the publications of céline’s pamphlets, beginning with mea culpa (1936), which disappointed some of the critical evaluations and hopes for a new socialist writer, and continuing with the atrocious lyric of his subsequent pamphlets,3 which, for some critics (godard; murray; butler)4, stained the reading of céline’s first novels: are there fascist or anti-semitic elements in journey? can, or should, one discern between the anti-semitic author and his literary text? from the mid-nineties of the twentieth century, studies on céline tend to concentrate on his intrinsic anti-semitism and racism and connect between the political ambiance in france in the twenties and thirties and céline’s personal life, political pamphlets and literary texts.5 a recent study by sandrine sanos anchors céline’s racism and anti-semitism in a new configuration of french virility which, claims sanos, céline constructs in his writings.6 conversely, in the eighties and nineties, some critics tried to go beyond the political reproaches against céline, as well as the attempts to gentrify and defend the author and his literary texts in the name of what they termed an “anti-idealistic” and antiideological approach allegedly found in céline’s texts. as one critic asserts: the overall theme of céline’s early novels, journey to the end of the night and death on the installment plan, is that the struggle of human life to realize itself reveals the deadly, dominating nature of the idealistic claims of society, culture, and civilization. in their common forms, these claims assert that human life must be directed by abstract values as expressed in moral, intellectual, political, economic and community standards; that such values yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 75 are necessary for the proper organization of society and, subsequently, for the full realization of human life. all these claims for the necessity, rationality and desirability of social domination, céline’s novels undercut. what is exposed is not only the fact of human domination and its full meaning in terms of the individual human being, but equally all the domination’s claims to legitimacy.7 céline himself denigrated ideas as false and misleading and ideologies as deceitful formations, useful and lethal tools for realizing the sovereign interests and whims. as he declared, “i have no ideas, myself! not a one! there’s nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas!”8 this essay differs from both approaches—the “ideological” approach, which focuses on céline’s infamous ideas to be found in his writings, and the “anti-ideological” approach, which claims to an apparent anti-idealism in céline—in that it deals with the way ideology structures céline’s journey, not as a manifest content of particular ideas and beliefs, but as an unconscious formation that produces speech-acts, acts and practices. what this essay looks for is the way in which ideology structures and functions in céline’s journey, in spite of the claims against the legitimacy of ideologies as domineering and oppressive structures, and before focusing on the author’s racism and anti-semitism. moreover, the recent researches on céline’s political views in the context of his contemporaries may benefit from an analysis of the form of the ideological fantasy which supports reality in céline’s texts and the way his protagonists retain this fantasy. a relation between the interwar period in germany, national socialism and cynical reason had already been established by peter sloterdijk.9 as to the “anti-idealistic” approach, it refers to a specific definition of ideology, one that, following žižek, i will criticize hereafter, while proposing a more updated and steadfast definition. the “anti-idealistic” approach regards ideology as a set of ideas and beliefs that underlie a social structure, a set which may be endorsed, opposed or denied. yet this approach fails to acknowledge, while at the same time testifies to the way that ideology unconsciously structures the social reality, that “in ideology ‘all is not ideology (that is, ideological meaning)’, but it is this very surplus which is the last support of ideology.”10 that is, what the anti-ideological critiques of céline and, even more significantly, céline’s disgust with “ideas” deny and at the same time attest, this is the way this denial itself, this misrecognition of ideology, is what constitutes ideology. by ideology i mean, following althusser, lacan and žižek, an unconscious formation attached to the fundamental fantasy of the subject and to the way this fundamental fantasy organizes the enjoyment (jouissance) of the subject. the subject disavows the fantasy that organizes enjoyment, and this disavowal of the fantasy and enjoyment enables the functioning of ideology and, at the same time, protects and sustains the fantasy and enjoyment.11this mechanism of disavowal enables subjects to uphold certain ideological theoretical claims, while, in practice, maintain their yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 76 disavowed beliefs. the acts and practices of subjects in ideology attest to their adherence to ideology as an unconscious fantasmatic formation, without which they will be engulfed by the ghastly and senseless real.12 i propose to view journey as a case study of the connection between ideology and (surplus) enjoyment, and to consider bardamu, the hero-narrator, as the epitome of this connection, that is, an embodiment of ideological jouissance. i will analyze the way ideology and enjoyment maintain each other in the novel, so that enjoyment is the last support of ideology and ideology functions as both a protection against enjoyment and a source of it. in addition, i will examine the way bardamu is formed as a cynical figure and outline the connection between bardamu’s cynical reason and perversion as a clinical structure, according to lacan. this essay will hopefully shed some light on the way ideology functions in céline’s journey, against the background of céline’s critique, in which the discussion of ideology in the novel was discarded or, alternatively, dealt with from a specific conceptual standpoint.13 i will begin with the analysis of bardamu as a cynical / kynic subject, according to žižek’s definitions of cynicism and kynicism, which are based on sloterdijk’s work, critique of cynical reason (1983). žižek defines the kynic as a subject who consciously undermines the apparatuses of the dominant ideology, in order to expose the corrupt interests that lie behind the ideological statements. conversely, the cynical subject is well aware of the particular interests that underlie the ideological truisms, and yet, practically, he sustains and reproduces the ideological apparatuses, as if unaware of their deceitful meaning. i will claim that bardamu holds these two contradictory approaches simultaneously and raise the questions, (1) of the possibility of a subject retaining cynical and kynical reason at the same time, and (2) what brings the cynical subject to maintain the very same ideological practices that he dismisses in his statements and conversations? subsequent to my attempt to settle the contradiction in (1), i will rely on žižek’s answer to (2) and try to extend his explanation with lacan’s and his followers’ definition of the perverse structure. thus i will discuss ideology in the novel as both a defense and a source of surplus enjoyment, and bardamu as a cynical and perverse subject of ideology. the first chapter of céline’s book, which is a microcosm of the text as a whole, delineates bardamu’s journey to the heart of the bourgeois ideology. this journey exposes the dreadful shame of the bourgeois ideology. the belief in progress, in rationality and science, nationalism and patriotism, the family, capitalism and the distribution of work—this is revealed as a collection of mad human inventions whose single aim is to reinforce the position of the rich and strong, beef up the full, and abuse unto death the resources of the poor. and yet the disclosure of the contrasts of ideology does not mean a way out of it, and bardamu’s rejection of the dominant orders does not lead to a replacement of ideology with a new order. conversely, every disclosure and rejection of ideology yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 77 leads bardamu into the darkest heart of ideology. the journey to the end of the night is a journey to the heart of the night. bardamu is, on the one hand, what žižek calls the kynical subject, that is, the subject who undermines the dominant ideology, reveals its apparatuses and suspends or rejects them. while, as a cynical subject, bardamu is caught in the net of the dominant ideology and its practices—as a soldier, an agent of french colonialism, a worker at “ford” (an agent of capitalism), an extra in the capitalist entertainment industry (in the tarapout cinema) and finally, as a doctor, an agent of the modern institutions of mental health—as a kynical subject—bardamu acts according to the ideological apparatuses only in order to “go and find out if that’s what it’s like!” (journey 4). that is, bardamu acts as a subject of the ruling ideology so as to undermine the ideological apparatuses and neutralize their power from within. how is it possible that bardamu is simultaneously a cynical subject who is not aware, as žižek writes, of the ideological fantasy that lies in the heart of his everyday practices, and a kynical, rational subject who is aware of the falsehood of ideology? as žižek explains, the gap between the kynic and the cynic resides in the place of fantasy and in an interpretation of the concept of ideology. following žižek, we can think of the kynic as a figure who lives in the ideological world, sometime between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with the sprouting of capitalism and the growth of rationalism as a dominant philosophy. marx defined ideology as “false consciousness,” naïve misrecognition of the presuppositions which construct social reality. some of marx’s followers (for example, the frankfurt school) added that this false consciousness is indispensable; reality itself is structured and reproduced as “ideological”: “the mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence” (žižek, sublime 28). in any event, these two conceptions refer to ideology as knowledge which one can discard and convert, or as a symptom, the awareness of which may dissolve.14 the kynic mocks and satirizes the ruling ideology, and thus exposes “the egotistical interests, the violence, the brutal claims to power” (29). he acts as an enlightened consciousness which is aware of the ideological mystification. as i will show hereinafter, bardamu uses kynic practices—irony and sardonic sarcasm—in his conversation with arthur ganate in the first chapter and throughout the novel. in contrast to that, the cynic lives in a “post-ideological” era. as žižek explains, our time is not an indication of the end of ideologies, but a desperate disavowal of them. that is the time of the cynical reason. the cynic is well aware of the ideological lie, but acts as if he believes in ideology. as žižek writes: cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it. (29) yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 78 and he later adds: it is clear, therefore, that confronted with such cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works. we can no longer subject the ideological text to ‘symptomatic reading’, confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency— cynical reason takes this distance into account in advance. (30) consequently, we can no longer interpret ideology as a symptomatic formation, but turn to the level of ideological fantasy, that is, the way in which ideology structures the social reality itself. in this respect, ideology is no longer conceived as knowledge that can be transferred or demystified, but as “actions inserted into practices,” as althusser put it.15 ideology is an unconscious fantasy, inscribed in the very daily material practices of the subject. this unconscious fantasy is in fact what is termed by lacan le phantasme (the phantasm or fundamental fantasy), that is, the scene that stages an unconscious desire and in which the subject finds its idiosyncratic way to relate to the big other. the big other, the representative of symbolic order— parent, priest, president, or any other position to which the subject himself has given the mandate to function as an authoritative agent of ideology16—is the support of the subject’s reality, without which the consistency of the subject would not be possible. ideology as an unconscious fantasy is what enables the cynical subject to retain his ironical distance from ideology, while in practice acting according to it. without this reality-supporting fantasy the cynic would have to confront reality in its ghastly disintegration, as the impossible-real. in the light of this, i will analyze bardamu as a cynical and kynical figure. bardamu as a cynical and kynical subject at the beginning of the first chapter of the novel bardamu is interpellated by his friend, arthur ganate: “it all began just like that. i hadn’t said anything. i hadn’t said a word. it was arthur ganate who started me off. […]. he seemed to want to talk to me. so i listened” (journey 1). but the other who compels bardamu to speak does not interpellate him into the dominant ideology, but provokes bardamu to resist it. on first reading bardamu seems to be portrayed as a kind of secular leftist anarchist who scorns the grandiloquence of the right wing-nationalistic-conservative ruling ideology, while arthur appears as a naïve patriot who supports the existing order. bardamu appears to be arthur’s kynic rival: ‘now there’s a really great paper for you [le temps]!’ said arthur, trying to get a rise out of me. ‘there isn’t another paper like it for defending the interests of the french race.’ ‘and i suppose the french race needs it, seeing that it doesn’t exist!’ said i promptly, to show that i knew what i was talking about. yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 79 but of course it exists! and a very splendid one it is too!’ he insisted. ‘it’s the finest race in the world, and don’t you believe any fool who tells you it isn’t!’ he had started in to harangue me for all he was worth. i held my ground, of course. […]. ‘you’re right, arthur, you’re right there. venomous yet docile, outraged, robbed, without guts and without spirit, they [our fathers] were as good as us all right. you certainly said it! nothing really changes. habits—ideas—opinions, we change them not at all, or if we do, we change them so late that it’s no longer worthwhile. we are born loyal, and we die of it. soldiers for nothing, heroes to all the world, monkeys with a gift of speech, a gift which brings us suffering, we are its minions. we belong to suffering; when we misbehave it tightens its hold on us. […]. ‘talk about yourself ; you are nothing but an anarchist !’ always the little devil, you see, and just about as advanced as possible. ‘you said it, fathead! i am an anarchist! and to prove it here’s a sort of social prayer for vengeance i’ve written. […]. ‘that little piece of yours doesn’t make sense in actual life. personally i’m for the established order of things and i’m not fond of politics. moreover, if the day should come when my country needs me, i certainly shan’t hang back; it will find me ready to lay down my life for it. so there.’ that was his answer to me. (1-3) there are, nevertheless, clues that the conversation between the two is no more than an intellectual game, well aware of the political zeitgeist. these clues lead to bardamu’s acting out of volunteering for the army marching off to war, while his patriot friend remains seated in the café. in the beginning, before the argument between arthur and bardamu starts, arthur pronounces an “opinion” later conveyed by his rival during the argument. it describes how “nothing has really changed” (1); how the french people remain the same, despite the widespread view of the industrial revolution turning society on its head. acknowledging that these phrases are themselves common truisms, borrowed from the current ideological reserve, bardamu says, “very proud at having come to these important conclusions [“ces vérités utiles” (voyage 7)], we sat back feeling pleased with life and watched the ladies of the café” (journey 1). subsequently, arthur incites bardamu to negate him, in what turns out to be false piety for the sake of the ruling ideology, proving ironically that nothing really changes: arthur “trying to get a rise out of [bardamu],” and bardamu answers him “to show yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 80 that i knew what i was talking about.” then, when arthur accuses bardamu of anarchism, the latter remarks, referring to arthur, “always a little devil, you see, and just about as advanced as possible.” these phrases indicate that bardamu and arthur are aware, not only of the function of the bourgeois ideology apparatuses, but primarily of the discourse which applies to them and uncovers them. bardamu knows well that his “opinions” prove nothing other than he is well informed, (“documenté” [voyage 8]), familiar with the discourse that uncovers ideology, and arthur is “a little devil” with the most advanced opinions. this theoretical game of uncovering ideology leads bardamu to the heart of the ideological practices –recruitment to the army, the colonial apparatus, the capitalist industry and the medical establishment. in other words, bardamu (and arthur) know well that their arguments are not their own, but commonly held “opinions,” part of the prevailing public discourse; they also know well that they are, as bardamu says, “singes parlants” (voyage 8)17 who do not change either their masters or their opinions, and yet, they all but stick to their unconscious beliefs: the “patriot” arthur adheres to his chair, and the “subversive” bardamu joins the regiment that marches to war. that is why the ineffective argument finally tires out both of them, so that “i made it up with arthur so as to put a stop to all this nonsense, once and for all. we agreed about almost everything, really” (journey 3). bardamu seals the argument with the slave ship parable. it vividly portrays the class struggle in the french society and the manner in which the ideological presuppositions and fabrications are “poured into [the] ears” of those located in the bottom of the social food chain (3). likewise, it satirically describes the puerile yet effective techniques of martial interpellation summoning the masses to war: “they have you up on deck. then they put on their top-hats and let fly at you as follows: ‘see here, you set of sods!’ they say. ‘war’s declared. you’re going to board the bastards on country no.2 yonder and you’re going to smash them to bits! now get on with it. there’s all the stuff you’ll need aboard. all together now. let’s have it—as loud as you can make it! ‘god save country no. 1!’ you’ve got to make them here you a long way off. there’s a medal and a cough-drop for the man who shouts the loudest! god in heaven! and if there’s any of you who don’t want to die at sea, why, of course, you can go and die on land, where it takes even less time than it does here.’” ‘you’ve just about hit it,’ agreed arthur, who’d certainly become very easy to convince. whereupon, damn me if a regiment of soldiers didn’t come marching past the café where we were sitting, with the colonel in front of his horse and all, looking simply fine and as smart as you make them. i gave just one great leap of enthusiasm. ‘i’ll go and find out if that’s what it’s like!’ i cried to arthur, and off i went to join up, as fast as my legs would carry me. (4) yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 81 how is one to understand bardamu’s act of enlisting in the regiment? from one aspect, the proclamation, “i’ll go and found out if that’s what it’s like!” is part of bardamu’s kynical reason, an attempt to put his slave galley speech into practice, to expose the opportunism and crude interest lying behind the nationalistic slogans. but at the same time, and from another angle, this phrase reveals bardamu’s ideological fantasy. that is to say, bardamu knows well what he is doing; that enlisting will put him in the third class of the galley and wreck his life, and yet, off he goes and straight away. there is, however, a third aspect. bardamu’s enlisting turns about to be a whim, an acting out directed to the big other (personified in arthur). the meaning of this acting out is that there is something arthur qua other missed, “deaf” to bardamu’s discourse, and on account of which bardamu sends his non-verbal message to arthur, while being himself unconscious of the meaning of that message. we can assess that the message encrypted in the acting out was that bardamu was not exactly what he claimed to be, that he is not necessarily an anti-nationalist anarchist. yet, later on, bardamu realizes that he made a mistake when enlisting and does not stand behind his acting out. what, then, is bardamu’s belief? apparently, bardamu does not know what he believes and the journey, from its beginning to its end, appears to be a quest for an inalienable belief, for a signifier that will be the subject’s own: and yet i hadn’t gone as far in life as robinson had… i hadn’t made a success of it, that much was certain; i hadn’t acquired one single good solid idea like the one he’d had, to get himself bumped off like that. an idea as large as my own clumsy great head, greater than all the fear that was in it, a beautiful idea, some splendid, some really comfortable idea to die with… […]. it was all no good. my own idea, the ideas i head, roamed loose in my mind with plenty of gaps in between them; they were like little tapers, flickering and feeble, shuddering all through life in the midst of a truly appalling, awful world. (538-39) for the (both neurotic and perverse) cynic, there are always “others” who believe, while the pervert cynic himself “knows” (the neurotic is not usually sure that he knows, and he casts doubt). as i have pointed out, bardamu and arthur “know” the widespread popular opinions and can, therefore, play with them without, allegedly, being tricked into them, whereas “others” actually believe in these opinions. žižek writes about: [t]he tension of knowledge versus the disavowed belief embodied in external ritual—the situation often described in the terms of cynical reason whose formula, the reverse of marx’s, was proposed decades ago by peter sloterdijk: i know what i am doing; nonetheless, i am doing it….” this formula, however, is not as unambiguous as it may appear—it should be supplemented with: “…because i don’t know what i believe.”18 yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 82 as we shall see, bardamu’s ambiguity regarding the war persists as our non-duped narrator is captured in his own trick / acting out. when the festive parade of the regiment subsides and the cheers become silent, bardamu comes back to his senses and says, “it’s not such fun, after all. i doubt if it’s worth it” and is about to leave (journey 5). but unfortunately, it is too late. “they’d shut the gate behind us, quietly; the civilians had. we were caught, like rats in a trap” (5). later on, throughout the whole section on the war, bardamu continues to express his repugnance towards the war and what it represents: inherent hatred, violence and cruelty of men toward their fellow beings; self-interest and selfpreservation; mad competitiveness and conceit. he describes the war as the arena where, in freud’s language, the death drive and the pleasure principle take part in a jumble.19 he emphasizes his will to escape, to evaporate from this madness and repeats incessantly his “cowardice” as the only sign of sanity in a furnace of lunacy. as the war advances, bardamu’s reactions of physical, as well as moral and psychic repulsion increase and he finally collapses and is admitted to observation (journey 58-59), suffers from what seems to be post-traumatic stress and is hospitalized (60), and, later on, is dismissed from the army (114). nevertheless, the war yields in bardamu mixed feelings of repulsion and attraction. these affects call to mind kristeva’s concept of abjection, the vertigo of hovering borders and collapsed meanings. the abject points at what were cast away from the body as a secretion, yet it keeps alluring and repelling. it undermines identities, systems and orders, and transgresses borders and laws. at first glance, it seems that bardamu’s reaction to the war, as well as other later occasions, for example, examining his patients, has to do with abjection, the feeling of loathing and fascination. according to kristeva, the symbolic agency in céline’s oeuvre is “a fleeting, derisory, and even idiotic illusion, which is yet upheld.”20 instead of the symbolic father, there is an imaginary clownish, ridiculous one. auguste, the father in céline’s second novel, death on the installment plan, is an absurdly mad figure.21 this flaccidity of the symbolic may pertain to the disavowal mechanism of the pervert, in which the subject knows well the law of the father, and yet does not act according to it. in contrast to the psychotic, whose foreclosure rejects the law completely, the pervert acknowledges the existence of the law, but denies his own submission to it, or, according to fink’s version, the pervert endeavors to bring the law into being in order to delimit jouissance.22 yet, kristeva’s analysis cannot be integrated with this study for at least two reasons. firstly, kristeva does not necessarily locate céline in the perverse structure. rather, her analysis of céline’s hallucinatory language and his “delirium” suggests the latter is a borderline more than a pervert. although abjection is related to perversion—the abject distorts the law, uses it in order to deny it,23 the phenomenon of abjection, according to kristeva, appears essentially in borderline, that is, psychotic rather than perverse, subjects. kristeva describes abjection as an intersection of phobia, obsession and perversion. the symbolic authority is not met with denial or yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 83 disavowal, but with a hallucination which makes it both ideal and dreadful (kristeva 44-51). consequently, the other is not the borderline’s object, but his abject, clownish, fallen and repulsive, and the borderline cannot be constituted as a subject: “no subject, no object: petrification on one side, falsehood on the other” (47). this leads to the second reason for the inadequacy of relating abjection to this study of journey, ideology and jouissance. the term abjection indicates kristeva’s distancing from lacan, while upholding a lacanian vocabulary, and her turning to the theory of object relations: the abject replaces the object, who, for kristeva, personifies the other. conversely, for lacan, the other is not an object, but the locus of speech. the other may be only represented by another person in so far as the latter occupies the function of the symbolic order for the subject.24 contrary to kristeva’s analysis, i will prove that bardamu is clinically and structurally perverse, since, at least in journey, he is using the other as an instrument of jouissance, or, put alternatively by lacan, he “makes himself the instrument of the other’s jouissance.”25 back to the war in journey, the feelings of (self) repulsion and disenchantment with the latest object of jouissance increase and bardamu’s only wish becomes to get away and quit the battlefield (7). what the cynic (and the pervert) most despise is being taken in.26 bardamu feels deceived: “i couldn’t make it out. i was a cuckold in everything—in women, in money, in ideas. i was being deceived and i was unhappy” (journey 76). being deceived is unbearable for the pervert. as fink and mannoni explain, the pervert’s schemes and manipulations produce a scene where he has the upper hand, and where he initiates and controls the jouissance of the other.27 since he disavows the law of the big other, he stages a scene where an other (o lower case) plays the role of the other who coerces the law, or where the pervert himself plays the role of the father instead of the disavowed signifier nomdu-père. but when the pervert encounters what he interprets as the law itself, his whole plot collapses. instead of being the master of the situation, he becomes the fool, the deceiver deceived, the non-duped who has erred.28 this collapse means a fall from the status of the subject, extreme destitution, where a real hole gapes in the pervert’s structured reality. this hole may be filled only by the restoration of the fetish or the role of the plotter. as will be clarified later on, for bardamu, the “knowledge” of life is the fetish which fills the hole. knowledge is gained by living and / as suffering, picking one’s wounds or the wounds of others. that is, knowledge is equivalent to the infinite, unlimited jouissance: this is how i had figured it out: i’ll discover, by way of experiment, just how much of a flare-up you can start with yourself if you try. but the thing is you’re never through with an excitement and to-do, you never know quite how far you’ll have to go if you start being really outspoken. or what people are still hiding from you… or what they’ll show you yet… if you live long enough, if you look far enough into their sillinesses. it all had to be begun all over again. (journey 289) yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 84 along with the detestable duty to fight, it is the war that enables bardamu to “entrer dans le fond de la vie” (240),29 to experience and know “life, the one and only mistress of all men” (245). getting into the thick of life, into its bone marrow and blood capillaries is not only bardamu’s safety valve against the lack in the other, that is, his fetish, or as he puts it, “this confounded fate of mine,” “my raison d’être” (243). in this darkness of life, where the ugly truth about people, apparatuses and beliefs is revealed, bardamu finds his aspiration, satisfaction and jouissance: truly everything that is really interesting goes on in the dark. one knows nothing of the inner history of people (63). studying changes you, it makes a man proud. before one was only hovering round life. you think you’re a free man, but you get nowhere. too much of your time spent dreaming. you slither along on words. that’s not the real thing at all. only intentions and appearances. you need something else. with my medicine, though i wasn’t very good at it, i had come into closer contact with men, beasts and creation. now it was a question of pushing right ahead, foursquare, into the gist of things. death comes chasing along after you, you’ve got to get a move on, and you have to find something to eat too, while you’re searching, and dodge war as well. that makes an awful lot of things to do. it isn’t easy. (254) it’s nice to touch the precise moment when matter becomes life. you soar out to the infinite plains, which stretch out before mankind. ‘ooo!’ you say, and ‘ooo!’ as much as you can, you enjoy riding that moment, and it’s like great, wide desert sands… (508) ideology as a sublime object being fascinated by the exposed ugliness of the dark heart of life and human beings becomes bardamu’s pattern, his own private law, a sublime object, a fetish. why? here i will draw on mannoni’s distinction between neurotic and perverse disavowal and his explanation of the difference between faith and belief (mannoni).30 belief belongs to the imaginary register, for example, belief in gods, spirits, a specific ideology, etc. conversely, faith is related to the symbolic register, the commitment to the big other and the pact between the subject and the big other. the neurotic may disavow his belief in the imaginary level, yet he puts faith in the symbolic, whereas the pervert disavows that he believes in the imaginary level and cannot have faith in the symbolic. the neurotic represses the castration or the name-of-the-father, yet accepts them unconsciously, due to the “compensation” he receives by entering the symbolic order and acquiring the status of a subject (son, parent, citizen, etc.).the neurotic has faith in ideology as an indispensable symbolic and social order, and although he does not believe in a particular ideology, he has (an unconscious) faith in “ideology in general,” as althusser put it, that is, ideology as an unconscious eternal formation (althusser 120-22). yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 85 on the contrary, the pervert, as mannoni points out, is not ready to be deceived. he is not capable, structurally, of “playing the game,” participating in the symbolic pact. what the pervert disavows is the lack of the mother, the lack which enables (the mother’s and the infant’s) desire. as fink clarifies, it is not the mother’s demand of the child to be the object that fills her lack which produces the perverse structure, but the failure and insufficiency of the paternal function. in the perverse structure, the paternal function exists as a prohibition of incest—le non du père, but it is disavowed as the law which inscribes the prohibition, names the lack and opens up the way for desire—le nom du père. thus the pervert knows well that mother does not have a phallus, and yet he acts as if she has one (by conferring an object, a shoe or a piece of cloth, the status of the phallus—this pattern holds specifically in fetishism). in relation to ideology or the symbolic order, the pervert may provide the same ambivalent statement as the neurotic, but his unconscious reason for adhering to ideology will be different from that of the neurotic. ideology is (unconsciously) conceived by the pervert not as a dimension of the symbolic law, but as another law, which replaces the impotent law of the father. the pervert’s ideology is not ideology in general, but a particular ideology, elevated to the level of ideology in general, attempting incessantly to replace it. the pervert will hold on to his ideology because it is the last frontier that covers the traumatic lack, the same lack which is unbearable for the pervert, and which, at the same time, he is eager to ascribe to the other, enjoying the latter’s lack / wound. the pervert will treat ideology as a sublime object, an object raised “to the dignity of the thing,”31 that is, a fetish, with its entire eroticized rituality. ideology is thus conceived as objet petit a, an element of jouissance and the object which blocks and, at the same time, sustains the lack in the other. in light of this, bardamu enlists in the army and goes to war because war, as a practice of the dominant militaristic and nationalistic ideology, signifies, on the one hand, the lack, impotence and insufficiency of the other, a lack which the pervert believes that he himself is not subject to. on the other hand, war provides jouissance which conceals and seals the lack in the other. in any event, the pervert insists on the other’s jouissance, and ideology in journey turns out to be a resource of jouissance. this may also explain why bardamu is not a revolutionary, as trotsky pointed out.32 in certain conditions, for example, the end of the analytic treatment, the neurotic can replace the current dominant order and “change the coordinates of the constellation,” as žižek puts it, that is, affect the symbolic.33 this is due to the symbolic being the instance of the obligatory law, the exception which enables the exchange of different signifiers or particular ideologies. according to freud’s myth of totem and taboo, the murder of the primal obscene father who enjoyed all the women of the horde, constituted the law of castration, which established the primal father as the prohibited exception and allowed the exchange of permitted spouses. for the pervert, conversely, the symbolic is not obligatory and its vacancy is filled with a representation of the primal obscene father. that is, the pervert’s world is filled yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 86 with jouissance and not with desire and with a futile law which does not enable the exchange of signifiers and ideologies. the pervert is enslaved to another law (and not to the law of the other), to an ersatz ideology that endeavors to replace the ideology-in-general and without which the pervert would have to confront the impossible real. bardamu eventually (mis)recognizes the dominant exploitative capitalist, colonialist, chauvinist and nationalistic ideology as the ultimate prototypical ideology, thus becoming an impostor entangled in his own trick. a pattern of jouissance the proceedings that bring bardamu to enlist in the regiment delineate a recurrent pattern to be found before any new adventure in the novel. firstly, there is a process of expectations and hopes regarding the forthcoming adventure, fantasized by bardamu and encouraged by an ideological propaganda. bardamu apparently neither believes in nor relies on the ideological promises, and yet typically anticipates them with excitement. then, when the expectations and promises are not fulfilled, disenchantment and disappointment follow, sometimes accompanied with the symptomatic phrases, “c’est tout à recommencer!” (voyage 10),34 “it all had to be begun all over again” (journey 289), “tout était à recommencer” (voyage 470).35 bardamu expresses his disappointment: he has been deluded again; he knew that his hopes and fantasies would be smashed and he nevertheless went eagerly for them. then the world of the pervert temporarily collapses, before returning to its original state. as mannoni writes regarding casanova’s entrapment by the big other (embodied in the forces of nature of the storm and thunder), “[w]e rather frequently encounter similar moments of panic among perverts in analysis; they do not necessarily have a therapeutic effect. once the panic subsides, there is a return to the status quo.” and this is due to disavowal being “a system of protection” against castration (mannoni 87). the recurrence of the discussed structural pattern is significant, since it unfolds the meaning of the contradiction “i know well, but all the same.” bardamu does not draw any pleasure or satisfaction from the discouraging adventures, but the recurrence implies that he extracts jouissance from them. his enjoyment is combined with pain, abjection and terror. he rejoices in suffering. for example, when he sails to africa, after his release from the army: ‘i’ll go to africa,’ i said to myself. ‘the further away i go the better.’ […]. they put me on this boat then, for me to go and try to make a new man of myself in the colonies. they wished me well and were determined that i should make my fortune. personally i only wanted to get away, but as one only ought always to look useful if one isn’t rich […], it couldn’t very well last. […]. so ‘africa has it’ i said and i let myself be bounded towards the tropics, where i was told you only had not to drink too much and to behave fairly well to make your way at once. yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 87 […] for a packet of pilett blades they were going to barter fine, long pieces of ivory with me, and birds of bright plumage and slaves under age. that’s what i’d been promised. i was going to really live, so they told me. (journey 114-15) bardamu is sent to africa with ex-military men and colonial officers in an old rickety boat named admiral bragueton. at first their cruise is peaceful, but later on the weather changes, becoming sultry and disquieting. the heat and humidity are followed by disintegration and melting of objects and passengers alike. bardamu, the only passenger who paid for his ticket, is harassed by crazy and enraged colonials and army officers, and turned into the scapegoat of the ship, “infamous unworthy wretch” (118). bardamu overcomes their hatred and intended violence by again becoming an impostor: he shams a spectacle of patriotism, praises the “heroic officers” and tops it off by listening to and recounting fabricated tales of bravery from the war. but this deceptive way of self defense causes bardamu to be filled with self-hatred. the deception here is intended to cover the terror and disintegration bardamu undergoes when facing the enraged passengers. in contrast to other occasions, he does not have the upper hand in this situation: bit by bit, while this humiliating trial lasted, i felt my self-respect, which was about to leave me anyway, slipping still further from me, then going completely and at last definitely gone, as if officially removed. say what you like, it’s a very pleasant sensation. after this incident i’ve always infinitely free and light; morally, i mean, of course. (125) when night falls, bardamu takes the opportunity to flee into the darkness to his next adventure. the same pattern occurs again, with bardamu’s arrival to new york, and later on, with his return to france. murray notes too the recurrent pattern of enthusiastic expectations for spectacular adventures and the disenchantment in the novel, but he identifies it as a facet of ideological subversion in the satirical genre to which the novel belongs (murray 158, 160). he claims that the depiction of the events on the ship and, subsequently, on land, where bardamu is degraded and turned by the representatives of imperialism into an “unworthy wretch” are meant to undermine the imperial enterprise. yet, murray’s survey does not provide a complete explanation of bardamu’s course of action. a lacanian perspective brings up the question of the subject’s jouissance—what does bardamu enjoy when he enters with all his might an adventure from which he will narrowly escape? i claim that, more than the uncovering of the ideological discourse, bardamu enjoys the unveiling of the crude interests that lie behind the ideological claims. bardamu enjoys, additionally and particularly, his becoming an “unworthy wretch,” the sublime object of enjoyment which ideology feeds on, the plug in the hole of the big other. it is this jouissance which bardamu’s adventures at the heart of darkness of ideology provide, and which crosses his yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 88 cynical reason: he knows well that the passengers of the admiral-bragueton will victimize him, and yet he chooses to play the role of the victim, while carefully plotting a position that will finally save his life. as a pervert, bardamu wishes to control the jouissance of others. he does not want that jouissance to control him so as to endanger his life, but rather, to put others in a state of enjoyment / suffering. in their tortured enjoyment he finds his jouissance. bardamu posits himself as objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, the object which incites the others’ violent and sexual drives, and is not only caught up in the network of the relationships on the ship, but also provides the others with the mandate to treat him as objet petit a, the remainder:36 although it seems that bardamu does not have the upper hand in the orgiastic events of the ship , this is bardamu, the (anti) hero and narrator, who is plotting his role as object a, the object of the other’s jouissance. inscribing himself as the victim of the other’s jouissance, he ignites a masochistic orgy, where the other becomes a spectacle of enjoyment: “a general moral rejoicing [réjouissance] was imminent aboard the admiral bragueton. this time the evil-eyed one wasn’t going to get away with it. and that meant me” (journey 118). [t]here was one young governess who led the feminine element of the cabal. […]. she was hardly ever separated from the colonial officers, resplendent in their gorgeous tunics and armed with the oath they had sworn that they would annihilate me. […]. in fact, i was a source of entertainment. this young lady spurred them on, invoked the wrath of heaven on my head, wouldn’t rest until i had been picked up in pieces, until i’d paid the penalty for my imaginary offence in full, been punished indeed for existing and, thoroughly beaten, bruised and bleeding, had begged for mercy under a rain of blows and kicks from the fine fellows whose pluck and muscular development she was aching to admire. deep down in her wasted insides she was stirred at the thought of some magnificently blood-bespattered scene. the idea was as exciting to her as being raped by a gorilla. […]. i was the victim. the whole ship clamored for my blood, seemed to tremble from kneel to rigging in expectation. (121-22) 37 and after bardamu reconciles the enraged group of soldiers with his cajolery discussion, he says: by gad, i was the fellow to make a party go! they slapped their thighs in approbation. no one else could make life so enjoyable in spite of the moist horror of these latitudes. the point is that i was listening beautifully. (128) as a cynical pervert, bardamu knows well what the other(s) desire is, and he hastens to fulfill that alleged desire and to become the objet a. he is interested in the jouissance of others, and thus portrays so well the sexual-violent vibrations and frissons of the ship and its passengers who are excited to see his downfall. after he manages to escape his lot, bardamu functions as objet a, the object of enjoyment, for the officers who recount their tales of bravery. yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 89 bardamu describes a similar ecstatic violent-sexual experience when he works at “ford.” here, as on the admiralbragueton though in a different material reality, everything solid melts into one piece of steel, men and machines become one, and in this catastrophic copulation bardamu (as well as the other workers) serves as object a, plugging the real of the capitalist other and becoming its object of jouissance: the whole building shook, and one’s self from one’s soles to one’s ears was possessed by this shaking, which vibrated from the ground, the glass panes and all this metal, a series of shocks from floor to ceiling. one was forced to become a machine oneself, the whole of one’s carcase quivering in this vast frenzy of noise, which filled you within, and all round the inside of your skull and lower down rattled your bowels and climbed to your eyes in infinite unending strokes. (238) jouissance as the capitalist injunction the will of surplus enjoyment and obtaining objet petit a, the object that fills the lack in the other, urges bardamu to taste repeatedly “a desire for fresh adventures and new worlds to conquer” (201),38 even when it costs him his love (molly) and well-being. in addition, every adventure merges with a mode of production and ideology that characterizes the epoch: the first world war, the colonial enterprise, mass production and industrialization, the constitution of the establishments of science and medicine. bardamu draws his jouissance from getting into the thick of things and wallowing in the dust and blood of life, and his unstoppable will-toenjoy (volonté-de-jouissance) is supported, encouraged and induced by the different ideologies and modes of production which structure modern life. bardamu’s last major adventure is the medical escapade, the exploration of the sick and dying body, of flesh and blood, both supported and constituted by the medical establishment. i will conclude with this experience, and show how the ends of jouissance, the perverse structure and the capitalist ideology meet. as a doctor, bardamu mostly watches his patients passively, witnessing their suffering and decay. he faces their torments helplessly, unable neither to better their condition nor save them. he is intrigued and amazed by their pain and dying. instead of being the other, the authoritative doctor who conducts the session, bardamu carefully observes every moment of their deterioration, and participates in the patients’ and their relatives’ jouissance. the enjoyment of others astounds, overwhelms and paralyzes him, and he cannot react against it and restrict it. for example, in the case of the pregnant young woman and her horrific mother, the latter is ashamed of the conduct of her reckless daughter and refuses to hospitalize her, playing “the leading part as intermediary between her daughter and myself. she didn’t give a damn what happened to the play, she was all set, and having a wonderful time” (journey 275-76). yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 90 bardamu, weary and depressed by the mother’s boisterous scene, silently listens to the girl’s drops of blood fall onto the floor: too great a humiliation, too much trouble leads to absolute inertia. the world is too heavy a burden for you to lift. you give up. all the same i did ask, timidly, whether the placenta had come away entirely yet. the girl’s pale hands, bluish at the tips, hung down loose on each side of the bed. my question was answered by the mother with a further flood of awful lamentations. but to pull myself together was really more than i could do. i had been so long overcome by depression myself, i’d been sleeping so badly, that in this chaos i was no longer in the least interested as to whether any one thing happened before anything else. i only reflected that is was easier listening to this mother’s wailings sitting down than standing up. (276) sitting down passively also enables bardamu to reflect and compare the mother’s and daughter’s bygone sexual qualities and build a “psychological” profile of the mother (276-77). this scene as a whole may serve as a paradigm of a perverse social relation. bardamu, knows well what he has to do, and yet betrays his vocation—the doctors’ oath, playing again the part of the victim, watches the daughter dying and the mother exclaiming her moralistic vows. the mother, ignoring her daughter’s condition, enjoys the scene she has made for the doctor at the expense of her daughter. and, finally, the daughter is enjoyed by the two living persons who will do nothing to help her. how is this scene related to the dominant capitalist ideology? bardamu’s occupation is attached to the scientific and medical establishment. it is, thus, part of the discourse of the university, which according to žižek, is the characteristic discourse of capitalism. the scientific discourse and the discourse of capitalism share the structure of the university discourse: fig.1 the discourse of the university in the discourse of the university s2, that is, knowledge or the chain of signifiers, is in the dominant position, that of the speaking agent. this knowledge claims to be factual and scientific, although it hides its foundation in a master (s1) which is in the position of truth. bardamu’s scientific knowledge is not (only) impartial, but draws its authority from the scientific establishment, which is full of contradictory interests and power struggles, as described lengthily by the narrator (journey 294-301). turning to the discourse of capitalism, this means that “the facts… are not integrated into comprehensive symbolic arrangement; instead they are the ever-conflicting guidelines and opinions of myriad experts” (dean 98). as parapine, yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 91 bardamu’s teacher and colleague, asserts, when the latter asks him for an advice on the treatment of the dying boy, bébért: “amid so many unstable theories, so much contradictory data, the reasonable thing, when it comes down to it, is to make no definite choice. do the best you can, my friend!” (journey 300). the decline of symbolic efficiency is one of the features that žižek finds in nowadays capitalist ideology (dean 98-99). it pertains to the subject’s perplexity regarding any ideology and “truths,” and his cynical reason and deficiency of belief. back to the university discourse, s2, knowledge, addresses a, who is in the position of the other. in the scientific discourse the subject is considered an object of investigation. recall bardamu’s statements about his insatiable “curiosity” regarding the human body and mind, quoted here previously. in capitalism the subject is addressed as an object of excess, a kernel of enjoyment (dean 98). he is referred to as a capricious and unstable set of needs, desires and drives, that is, as the object of jouissance. žižek defines the second characteristic of capitalism as an injunction to enjoy that addresses the subject by the obscene dark shadow of the symbolic order—the superego. the injunction to enjoy is contradictory, inconsistent and impossible to fulfill, and thereby defines enjoyment. for example, the encouragement to consume fatty and salty food, and at the same time to maintain strict diet and fitness, is conflicting. in journey the superego’s injunction to enjoy may be seen, for example, in bardamu’s experience at “ford,” when the doctor who examines the candidates for the job says to bardamu: ‘your studies won’t be any use to you here, my lad. you haven’t come here to think, but to go through the motions that you’ll be told to make… we’ve no use for intellectuals in this outfit. what we want is chimpanzees. let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. we will think for you, my friend. don’t forget it.’ (journey 237) soon after, bardamu merges with the other workers and machines in the factory into one vibrating piece of jouissance. the pervert, bardamu, may be considered as capitalism’s ultimate consumer and distributer—an ideal counterpart to the university and scientific discourses of capitalism. that is why he is thrown from one capitalist enterprise to another. he fits into a society whose symbolic mandate is inefficient, where the name-of-the-father is not taken seriously. in this society, equipped with scientific knowledge and authority, he can position himself in the place of the symbolic shadow, the superego, enjoining others to enjoy, and participating in their enjoyment. bardamu’s mission of exploring the human body and soul strays away from the mere curiosity and the benefitting of humanity that may characterize the doctor or the scientist. rather, as a representative of the scientific establishment, the medical profession serves as an axe for bardamu to grind, a vocation behind which he can hide his particular interest: to be present at the other’s jouissance and be the object of jouissnace, which fills the lack in the other. yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 92 notes 1. louis-ferdinand céline, journey to the end of the night, trans. john marks (london : chatto and windus, 1934). voyage au bout de la nuit. 1932, dossier par phillip destruel (paris: gallimard, 1996). henceforth cited in the text as journey or voyage. 2. jack murray, the landscapes of alienation: ideological subversion in kafka, céline and onetti (california: stanford up, 1991), 128-130. 3. bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), l’école des cadavres (1938), les beaux draps (1941). 4. henri godard, poétique de céline (paris: bibliothèque des idées, éditions gallimard, 1985). butler, gerald j., “three contributions to the reading of céline” in james flynn ed. understanding céline (seattle: genitron p, 1984) 133-186. see, for example: “[f]or how could those two novels [voyage au bout de la nuit and mort à crédit] so full of compassion (as they are often described now) be written by—an anti-semite?” 157. 5. david carroll, french literary fascism: nationalism, anti-semitism, and the ideology of culture (new jersey: princeton up, 1995). scullion, rosemary and solomon philip h. (eds.), céline and the politics of difference (new hampshire: up of new england, 1995). roussin, philippe, misère de la littérature, terreur de l’histoire : céline et la littérature contemporaine (paris : gallimard, 2005). 6. sandrine sanos, the aesthetics of hate: far-right intellectuals, anti-semitism, and gender in 1930s france (california: stanford, 2012). 7. james flynn, ed, understanding céline (seattle: genitron p, 1984) 5. 8. louis-ferdinand céline, conversations with professor y, trans. stanford luce (champaign : dalkey archive press, 2006) 13. 9. peter sloterdijk, critique of cynical reason. 1983, trans. michael eldred (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987). specifically in the last part of his book, 384-533. 10. slavoj žižek, the sublime object of ideology (london: verso, 1989) 124. 11. jodi dean, žižek’s politics (ny and london: routledge, 2006) 190. 12. žižek, sublime 28-33. 13. nevertheless, there are few exceptions to this corpus of particular ideological / antiideological criticism: jack murray concentrates on the ideological subversive and satirical effect of céline’s novel. his account of ideology is based on fredric jameson’s, who saw ideology as a constant (and unconscious) production of “symbolic acts,” constitutive meanings and ideas, and emphasized the subversive political effect of literary products (murray 2-3). yet what jameson and murray’s accounts lack is the way the ruling ideology persists, in spite of subversive and satirical effects in literary texts, as well as other cultural products, and the way in which ideology structures the social reality and is indispensable. another study that takes into account the question of ideology as an unconscious structure is andreas bjørnerud’s doctoral dissertation, beckett, céline, lacan: the death of ‘man’. bjørnerud’s work can be considered a major contribution to the study of bourgeois consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and especially between the two world wars. bjørnerud points out the transformation of bourgeois ideology “from liberal to monopoly capitalism” during the interwar period, when the enlightened autonomic subject enslaves himself willingly, “masochistically,” as bjørnerud writes, to the ruling ideology although he knows that it will eliminate him. nevertheless, this submissive subject believes himself to be free. yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 93 although bjørnerud does not develop this idea according to the lacanian-žižekian analysis of enjoyment as the surplus of ideology, he does describe here, without articulating it, the cynical reason of the late capitalism. see bjørnerud, andreas, beckett, céline, lacan : the death of ‘man’, diss. oxford u (bodleian), 1992 (oxford: oxford u, 1993) 25-26. 14. “‘ideological’ is not the ‘ false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘ false consciousness’. thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only in so far as its logic escapes him—the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.” (žižek, sublime 21). italics in original. 15. louis althusser, “ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)” in slavoj žižek ed., mapping ideology (london: verso, 1994) 127. 16. “i am only what i am for the others, yet simultaneously i am the one who self-determines myself, i.e., who determines which network of relations to others will determine me. in other words, i am determined by the network of (symbolic) relations precisely and only insofar as i, qua void of self-relating, self-determine myself this way.” (žižek, tarrying with the negative: kant, hegel, and the critique of ideology [durham: duke up, 1993] 131-32). 17. “monkeys with a gift of speech” (journey 2). 18. slavoj žižek, the puppet and the dwarf: the perverse core of christianity (cambridge, ma: the mit p, 2003) 5. 19. sigmund freud, “beyond the pleasure principle,” in james strachey et al. eds., the standard edition of the complete works of sigmund freud. vol. 18. (london: hogarth and the institute of psychoanalysis, 1953-1974) 7-64. 20. julia kristeva, powers of horror: an essay on abjection (new york: columbia up, 1982) 135. 21. kristeva powers 170-73. 22. bruce fink, “perversion,” in molly ann rothenberg, dennis foster and slavoj žižek eds., perversion and the social relation (durham and london: duke up, 2003) 38, 43-44. 23. kristeva powers 15-16. 24. evans, dylan, an introductory dictionary of lacanian psychoanalysis (london: routledge, 1996) 135-6. 25. jacques lacan, “the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious,” trans. bruce fink, héloïse fink and russell grigg, in ecrits: the first complete edition in english (new york: w. w. norton and co., 2002) 697. 26. octave mannoni, “i know well, but all the same…” trans. g. m. goshgarian, in molly ann rothenberg, dennis foster and slavoj žižek eds., perversion and the social relation (durham and london: duke up, 2003) 90. 27. bruce fink, “perversion,” in molly ann rothenberg, dennis foster and slavoj žižek eds., perversion and the social relation (durham and london: duke up, 2003) 38-67. 28. based on lacan’s pun, le nom-du-père/les non-dupes errent. 29. meaning “to enter into the bottom of life” (my translation). this phrase is missing from marks’s translation. see journey 254. yushinsky: journey to the end of ideology s6-7 (2014): 94 30. see also: žižek, on belief (london: routledge, 2001) 109-10. 31. jacques lacan, the ethics of psychoanalysis (seminar vii), trans. dennis porter (new york: w. w. norton, 1992) 112. 32. leon trotsky, “céline and poincaré: novelist and politician” in paul n. siegel ed., art and revolution: writings on literature, politics, and culture (new york: pathfinder p, 1970) 191-203. 33. žižek, the parallax view (cambridge, ma: mit p, 2006) 342. 34. in marks’s translation: “i doubt if it’s worth it” (journey 5). 35. in marks’s translation: “it hadn’t been any good” (journey 504). 36. the definition of objet petit a depends on the development of lacan’s teaching. i will not follow here its definition throughout all the stages of lacan’s teaching, but only mention the elaborations relevant to this essay. in 1957 lacan presents the matheme of fantasy ($ ◊ a) where a represents the object of desire. this is an imaginary partial object, which is imagined to be separated from the rest of the body. there are four part-objects: breast, excrement, voice and gaze. in a later elaboration objet a is a real remainder that falls during the constitution of the subject as a speaking being. in seminar viii, on transference (1960-61) lacan connects the objet petit a with the greek term agalma, a precious object imagined to be found in the other. this unattainable object is an object of lack, and as an object of lack it renders the other desirable. in seminar x, on anxiety (1962-63), objet a becomes connected with the real, and it is the object which causes the anxiety. from 1963 onwards object a becomes the object-cause of desire, that is, an unattainable object that incites the desire of the subject, and not the object toward which the desire aims. in seminar xx (1969-70), objet a is defined as a remainder, the remains that has been left in the process of symbolization. objet a is grasped as a surplus meaning and surplus-enjoyment. in addition, objet a plays the part of the analyst in the analytic treatment, when the analyst places himself as the object-cause of desire of the analysand. see evans 128-29; glowinski et al. 122-29. 37. the sexual connotation of the scene is also maintained in the name of the captain who leads the confrontation with bardamu: captain frémizon. frémir means to shake and shudder, usually in sexual exaltation or disgust. 38. “le goût de l’aventure et des nouvelles imprudences” (voyage 190). s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 4 (2011): 71-90 s t é p h a n e l o j k i n e “ s o m e t h i n g w h i t e … ” lacanian theory and the theory of operative devices e ver since the beginnings of psychoanalysis, the analysis of the processes involved in artistic creation and of the imaginary structures that the work of art inscribes in representation has given rise to constant solicitations and important borrowings. besides sophocles and his oedipus, freud has solicited jensen’s gradiva, michelangelo’s moses, leonardo’s work, shakespeare, the folklore of tales, and he has borrowed unreservedly from the common inheritance of german literature, from goethe to heine. the development of literary criticism as a specific scientific field does not seem to have received much benefit from a potential constitution of psychoanalysis in return. the purpose here will not be to raise the question of the legitimacy, in literary analysis, of an analytical investigation aiming at the discovery of a neurosis or a particular complex in a character or an author. in france, this type of analysis, if not totally banned, has fallen into discredit with the university institution that has now taken its stand in stark denial of psychoanalysis, which it hardly tolerates as a separate field, entirely cut off from the other social sciences and humanities. yet, this is also the time when a new theory has come into existence, the theory of operative devices,1 which is a priori foreign to psychoanalysis as far as its themes of investigation are concerned, but which has in fact been deeply influenced by its proceedings and methods. this influence is manifested in the apprehension of the text as scene rather than as statement, in the analysis of the point of view as fascination/abjection rather than as focalisation, in the taking into account of the unsaid, the elliptical, viewed as lack and screen, i.e. as symptom and as structure, rather than as gap or fault. the space and the timelessness of the scene, the system 1. one should here distinguish a first use of the term “dispositif” by m. foucault, g. deleuze and j.-f. lyotard, in the late sixties, from the theoretical construct (here translated as “operative device”) that has been developed in toulouse since the beginning of the new century (la scène. littérature et arts visuels, m.-th. mathet ed., paris: l’harmattan, 2001). though this second theoretical development has been carried out independently from the first, we do not think that they should be radically dissociated. see philippe ortel, “vers une poétique des dispositifs,” discours, image, dispositif (paris: l’harmattan, 2008) 33-58. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 72 and the function of the gazes that cross it, the interposition of a screen that structures them, define an operative device of representation. through a case study of a passage from flaubert’s sentimental education, i shall demonstrate what those notions owe to the freudian and lacanian models, but also how, conversely, once they are apprehended as a comprehensive operative device, they call these models into question and invite to new developments in the theoretical debate, at the very heart of psychoanalysis itself. 1. narrative collapse and scenic superimposition the shot fired by père roque flaubert’s dazzling virtuosity is well-known, his skilful ingenuity in always thwarting the dramatic continuity of his narrative, as if the very essence of his technique consisted in making his reader expect terrible effects which he eventually eludes, displaces, or withholds, thus frustrating him of the pleasure he had anticipated. the account of the revolutionary events of june 1848 in sentimental education is characteristic of this deceptive strategy. flaubert stages père roque’s arrival in paris. père roque is a nouveau riche man from nogent whom the national guards have posted as sentinel on the terrace of the tuileries palace to guard the insurgents imprisoned below him. a young man asks him for bread, soon followed by all the other prisoners: other prisoners presented themselves at the vent-hole, with their bristling beards, their burning eyeballs, all pushing forward, and yelling: ‘bread!’ père roque was indignant at seeing his authority slighted. in order to frighten them he took aim at them; and, borne upward by the crush that nearly smothered him, the young man with his head thrown backward, once more shouted: ‘bread!’ ‘hold on! here it is!’ said père roque, firing a shot with his gun. there was a huge howl — then nothing. at the side of the bucket something white had been left.2 the account of père roque’s dramatic blunder does not trigger any development, any judgement. père roque goes home in the evening to the lodgings he has kept for himself in his paris house where he joins his daughter, who is secretly in love with frédéric in search of whom she has vainly sent their maid catherine. not only does the text establish no link between the father’s blunder and his daughter’s 2. my translation. the first official english translation is by d. f. hannigan sentimental education (london: h. s. nichols, 1898). lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 73 sentimental intrigue, but also each of the two narratives comes to an end without either catastrophe or sudden change. there is no wrapping up that seals off a narrative event. what keeps the representation together, what ensures the coalescence of this inchoative discursivity, is not of a textual order; it is the image, which is both perfectly clear and yet impossible to semiotize, the strangely disturbing remainder of this “something white” left on the side of the prisoners’ bucket. sharing soup with louise there is something in the order of discourse that cannot go down. père roque understands neither historic change nor the personal tragedy of his daughter. and yet what remains impossible to put into words returns as what this white spot is a symptom of, whether it is nothing more than a forgotten handkerchief or the horrible splashings of an exploded brain, at the moment when père roque, at supper, experiences indisposition: louise reappeared, shaking all over, unable to utter a word. she leaned against the furniture. — ‘what’s the matter with you? tell me’ — ‘what’s the matter with you?’ exclaimed her father. she gestured that it was nothing, and with a great effort of will she regained her composure. the caterer from across the street brought the soup. but père roque had undergone too violent an emotion. ‘it couldn’t go down’, and when dessert was brought he had a sort of fainting fit. there is no means for louise to signify the suffering of her heart: the sign she makes says nothing. likewise her father cannot signify the horror of the crime he has probably committed and, beyond that, the abjection of his connection to the revolutionary thing.3 as a consequence, what signs cannot declare settles into things related to bodily functions and becomes somatic: it is contained in that soup that cannot go down. the soup is of the order of the “id ”; it is the “something white” that, despite all the protests of his good conscience, père roque cannot digest. here the text gets its organization from something that is not of a textual order, from an image that is impossible to semiotize, i.e. that cannot be integrated within a differential system of signs, and yet that, in a different fashion, through indigestion and a heaving stomach, turns into a symptom4 through bodily spasm, even though it does 3. “das ding (la chose) is originally what we shall call the outside-the-signified. it is on account of this outside-the-signified and of a pathetic relation to it, that the subject keeps at a distance and constitutes himself in a mode of relation, of primary affect, anterior to all repression.” jacques lacan, séminaire vii, l’ethique de la psychanalyse 1959-1960 (paris: seuil, 1986) 67-68) (my translation) 4. see séminaire xxiii, referred to as le sinthome, about james joyce (paris: seuil, 2005) where lacan states that “language is connected to something that functions like a hole […]. it is from this function of the hole that language gets its hold upon the real.” (31) this hold is defined as a borromean knot, which implies three pieces of string, only one of lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 74 not make sense. a sublime fit of weakness of the daughter and an abject indigestion of the father are both displayed within the framework of the insurrection of june, a double convulsion of the body within the convulsion of history. elided scenes in flaubert’s writing, critics usually insist upon the introspective work of the wording rather than on its relationship to the world.5 yet this embodiment of the sense as a detail that it is impossible to identify is not essentially meant to signify an inner depth inaccessible to speech. there is nothing of an intimate kind, nothing psychological in this something white that is left there “on the side of the bucket”; the use of the definite article (the, not a bucket), though this is the only place where this bucket appears in the text, implies that it is meant to define a scene that the narration has subsequently elided. this same monstrative effect reappears in the evening scene, when “the caterer from across the street brought the soup.” the definite articles refer to an environment that is familiar, with its habits and rules, yet this caterer and this soup appear only this time and never again in the novel. flaubert is pointing to a familiar scene, but cuts it out precisely because it is familiar. thus the novelist has arranged the spaces, the objects, the circumstances of one and even two scenes: the shooting in front of the terrace at the water’s edge in the tuileries and the supper of père roque with his daughter, two scenes that are erased, so to speak, since nothing remains of the shooting, “a huge howl, then nothing” and the supper in fact does not take place, “it could not go down” and it is concluded by a fainting fit. the medicine prescribed by the doctor is substituted for the soup, just as the gun shot had been substituted for the bread. narrative lure, spatial arrangement, operative device it is of course the sequencing of these two barred out scenes that makes sense, their chronological succession, and most of all their logical superimposition. the sense is born from the superimposition of the soup on the bread and of the absent which keeps the other two tied together: “the borromean knot does not constitute a model however, though there is something about it that causes the imagination to collapse. what i mean is that as such it resists the imagination of the knot.” (42) the “something white” is exactly the kind of thing that lacan defines as a symptom: it appears in the hole of the vent and knots père roque’s world with that underworld. but it ties it up in a fashion that cannot be imagined, and cannot even be put into words. 5. “the large number of descriptions in his work is not related essentially, as with balzac for instance, to necessities of a dramatic order, but mostly to what he does himself call the love of contemplation. one can of course find a few descriptive tableaux […] whose presence is justified by the need to give the action and the feelings some kind of clarifying framework […] but most of the time the description unfolds on its own account, at the expense of the action which it serves less, or so it seems, to clarify than to suspend and to push into the background.” gérard genette, “flaubert’s silences”, figures i (paris: seuil, 1966) 234. (my translation) lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 75 frédéric on the young man that was shot, from the incapacity of père roque to see, to confront, with his own eyes, the first as well as the second tragedy. thus it is not by means of narration that flaubert manufactures his meaning. the arrangement of the theatrical and scenic props ought to lead to a dramatic narrative, to a dicursive sequence. instead of that, the unfolding of time is used as an alibi for a mere juxtaposition: “after that, mr. roque returned home”; “then, when he was in his bed, mr. roque demanded as many blankets as were available.” the unfolding of time is here a mere lure: there is neither duration, nor any event in that succession; flaubert passes from one sequence, one arrangement, to the next. time is the alibi of the editing process. time is the instrument of scenaristic juxtaposition. what i am primarily trying to show is that, within the technique of novel writing, narration is always a lure. this is not what writing is made for and it is not with such an instrument that the novelist creates. what is being used in a novel is spatial arrangements;6 these arrangements are themselves offered to the imagination of the reader to be superimposed upon each other and to make sense from this superimposition. the arrangement of the various spaces, their imaginary superimposition, and finally the construction of sense from this superimposition, constitute what is referred to as an operative device. the analytical device: a precursory model indeed we can approach literature in that manner only because we are the heirs of psychoanalysis. not that it has invented the operative devices any more than the oedipus complex has come into existence with freud… but it was psychoanalysis that first called attention to these devices, explored the way they operate, put their mode of operation to use in the cure and, by this means, placed them at the heart of a theory of representation and significance. what is an operative device for psychoanalysis? to start with one should distinguish two levels. on the one hand the external device of the cure (the analyst’s 6. genette rejects this dimension of literature: “one can, even should, also consider literature in its relationships to space. not only — and that would be the easiest and least pertinent way of considering these relationships — because literature, among other ‘topics’, also speaks of space, describes places, dwellings, landscapes […] transports us in imagination to unknown countries, which for a time it gives us the illusion that we are travelling through or inhabiting […]. those are aspects of spatiality that may occupy or inhabit literature, but which may not be part of its essence, of its language.” gérard genette “literature and space,” figures ii (paris: seuil, 1969) 43-44. genette defines the space of literature as “spatiality of language”, which he identifies as the space of the text, and then as the rhetorical interplay of figures, and finally as the meta-space of the library. in contradistinction to this, thanks to the notion of scene, the theory of operative devices places back the spatial arrangement at the heart of artistic creation as a whole, and of literary creation in particular. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 76 consulting room,7 the relative position of analyst and analysed person in that room, the mechanism of transference that this relative position is meant to frame, to regulate). on the other hand the internal device, that consists of the phantasmatic material that the cure unearths and to which it is brought to assign a meaning. there are therefore two scenes or, more precisely, two levels in the launching of a scene, first in the real, in the patient’s past as he has lived it8 and then in the cure, i.e. in what takes place in the consulting room. the patient’s speech does, in some way or other, articulate those two levels by inserting a verbal representation of the past scenes into the analytic scene: between the traumatic release of the real, in the past, and the symbolic elaboration of the cure, in the consulting room, the analyzed person’s discourse weaves an imaginary interface and it is all that put together that constitutes the analytic device.9 flaubert’s operative device the episode of père roque, in the sentimental education, does not function differently: a first level releasing a scene, in the tuileries, “in front of the riverside terrace” in the real and in history, is superimposed, thanks to flaubet’s narrative, 7. this relative position was experimented for the first time by freud, or rather it imposed itself to him, so to speak, in the course of a treatment by hypnosis of “frau emmy von n…, age 40. from livonia. […] may 1, in 1889. — this lady, when i first saw her, was lying on a sofa with her head resting on a leather cushion. she still looked young and had finely-cut features, full of character. […] every two or three minutes she suddenly broke off, contorted her face into an expression of horror and disgust, stretched out her hand towards me, spreading and crooking her fingers, and exclaimed, in a changed voice, charged with anxiety: ‘keep still! – don’t say anything! – don’t touch me!’ she was probably under the influence of some recurrent hallucination of a horrifying kind and was keeping the intruding material at bay with this formula.” (sigmund freud and joseph breuer studies on hysteria. the standard edition. vol. 2, ed. james strachey (london; hogarth press, 1955-1964) 48-49. 8. it is the primal scene, as theorized by freud in “the wolf man” (1918). freud insists on the part of lived reality that there is in that scene, even if later it has given rise to a phantasmatic elaboration which makes its relationship to the event that has caused it unrecognizable. see “from the history of an infantile neurosis”, the standard edition, vol. 17, 33ff. 9. this function of the patient’s speech appears as early as in the case of fraülein anna o.: “she aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously, as a ‘talking cure’, while she referred to it jokingly as ‘chimney sweeping’.” (studies on hysteria, 30) freud speaks of “assuaging by telling” (ibid). in “the function and respective fields of speech and language in psychoanalysis” (ecrits (paris, seuil, 1966), 254), lacan shows that, in that work of putting into words, what is at stake is not the restoration of a sequence of time (such as that implied in the bergsonian model of remembrance) but the construction of a truth. the analysand’s discourse, captured in the “vacillation of its content between the imaginary and the real” (p. 255), should not therefore be taken as a narration, but as the “material” for the analysis. the revindication of the narrative lure, the jobbing together of the discursive material, the superimposition of the primal scene, the obsessive scene (see note 16) and the analytic scene characterize the experience of the cure as operative device. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 77 upon a second level of scenic release, in the intimate space of père roque’s pied-àterre in the rue saint-martin. it is in that intimate space, and only there, that well after the event, what is left of the traumatic horror of the real can be discharged, after being first reinvested in the symptom (“it couldn’t go down”) and then in its verbal representation, a wording susceptible of weaving the structural articulation of the two levels: mr. roque demanded as many blankets as were available, to induce a sweat. he kept sighing and moaning. — ‘thank you my good catherine!’ — ‘kiss your poor father, my little hussey! ah! those revolutions!’ and, as his daughter scolded him for making himself sick by worrying on her account, he replied: — ‘yes! you are right! but i can’t help it! i am too sensitive!’ this dialogue of father and daughter does not merely represent the misunderstanding of two tragedies that cannot communicate. without any didactic explanation of this misunderstanding, it provides all the necessary elements for its uncoding. père roque and his daughter seem to share the same anguish but whereas mr. roque is sick from discharging his shot, louise is suffering from frédéric’s absence. yet neither of them is ready to let the other know the real cause of his or her suffering. when mr. roque transmutes his guilt into indigestion, louise interprets her father’s selfish anguish as concern for her in an apparently more generous spirit which is in fact totally self-centred and therefore exactly symmetrical with her father’s. the dialogue objectifies for the reader a misunderstanding that it does not dramatize, that it does not invest into discourse. it is left to the reader, as he uncodes the misunderstanding, to tie the knot that links the two scenes. thus it is the dialogue that closes this chapter that, despite its appearance of saying nothing, of eluding the essential, delivers the structure of the narrative that clinches two rigorously opposed wounds to the intimate self. the signifier’s play and the verbal screen flaubert’s narrative brings to light the analyzed person’s discursive strategies in their fully perverse subtlety, an apparent insignificant discourse at first, a defensive discourse which lures or deceives but, in its very denial, objectifies, through the signifier’s play, what the discursive intent refuses to formulate. the exclamation “oh! those revolutions!” displaces, sinks the “something white” which “had remained” into the sententious power of the deictic “those”. thus language transforms the traumatic event into something collective, it turns the unshareable white thing into a shared suffering, that is not even that of those unnameable days of june, but that of a general truth, universally experienced in all revolutions. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 78 this displacement, this partial covering up of the original signifier by discourse then creates a signifying link, establishes a “step-beyond-sense”10 whose function it is to interpret père roque’s suffering in the light of louise’s. the father transfers the abjection that belongs to him upon his daughter, turns over the hatred and the cowardice of the shot he has fired into an act of love, which is perhaps even more revolting: “but i cannot help it! i am too sensitive!” the paternal metaphor this reversal gives us something else to read: if the analytical device, as lacan suggests, must always be referred back to plato’s symposium and the couch to alcibiades’ bed for love-making,11 père roque’s bed does indeed unveil a terrifying primal scene when, like the simpleton he is, he orders his “little hussey” to “kiss” him. behind the vent-hole in the tuileries, the father has killed all the eventual pretenders to his daughter’s love, thus preserving for himself the devouring exclusivity of paternal enjoyment. symptomatically, the shot he has fired has not produced the red spot of a wound, of a consummation, but “something white” that is a mark of virginity, which removes louise from the circuit of desire, which excludes her beforehand and irremissibly from the others’ gaze. in the next chapter, when the roques find themselves again with frédéric for an evening party at the dambreuses’ house, mme arnoux is wearing “something red in her hair, a sprig of lilac entangled in its coils,” mirroring frédéric’s first dinner 10. lacan elaborated this notion of “pas de sens” (which i render here as “step-beyondsense” in an attempt to render the pun on “pas” which signifies both “step” and “no”) when he gave his reading of freud’s jokes and their relation to the unconscious. “for an instance of wit to exist, the other must have perceived what it contains of […] a demand for sense, i.e. of an evocation of a sense beyond — beyond what has been left unfinished […]. i do not think that the term nonsense should be kept […]. i propose to use the formula: step-beyond-sense […]. this step-beyond-sense is properly speaking what is realized in metaphor. it is the intention of the subject, his need that, beyond the metonymic usage, beyond what finds its satisfaction in common use, in the well-worn received values, introduces the stepbeyond-sense into metaphor […]. what is wit doing there ? it does not indicate anything more than the very extent of the step as such, properly speaking […]. it is the step emptied of any kind of need.” jacques lacan séminaire v, 1957, les formations de l’inconscient (paris: seuil, 1988) 98-99. in flaubert’s episode, louise’s desire is authenticated by her father, her father’s abjection is authenticated by louise, but in the empty form of “it couldn’t go down” and of the flaubertian irony of “i am too sensitive”. these vague and false formulations are emptied out of the need which motivates them so that this need is so to speak authenticated on the side. it is this sleight of hand that lacan refers to as “step-beyondsense”: beyond the nonsense, the ridiculous absurdity of the words that are exchanged, the step-beyond-sense brings out their metaphorical bearing. they have only been displaced and hollowed out. 11. “the final articulation of the symposium, this fable, this scenario which confines to myth, allows us to structure the situation of the analyzed person in the presence of the analyst around the position of two desires.” jacques lacan séminaire viii, le transfert, 1960 (paris: seuil, 1991) 212. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 79 with the arnoux. mme arnoux had then been wearing “in her hair, a long algerian purse in red silk network which, entangled in her comb, was hanging over her left shoulder.” to the red thing of desire is opposed the white thing of prohibition; to the network or net of seduction, the unnameable and formless “it” of “it couldn’t go down”. 2. scenic fiction and its modelization through the act of looking here one is confronted with the fundamental paradox of the juxtaposition of those two flaubertian scenes: both come to nothing because of the indefinite nature of what pretends to structure them, “something white” and “it couldn’t go down.” at the same time it is this very indefiniteness that clinches them together and crystallizes the “step-beyond-sense” of their superimposition. flaubert makes discourse come to nothing and shatters the narrative sequences (“a huge howl, then nothing”; “she gestured that it was nothing”) in order to make manifest the powerful fictional coherence of his narrative at another level, which could be called visionary. there is a stability of what the text gives us to imagine, an obviousness of the identity of the something white, of the soup and of the potion, and also an obviousness of their equivalence with what is thus pointed out, beyond the brutality of the counterrevolutionary repression, as a lack opposed to louise’s desire, as a lack opposed to père roque’s desire. the cartesian interpretation of the act of looking as a geometrical triangle this is modelized in lacan’s séminaire xi, the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. after bringing to light the paradigmatic character of the anamorphosis in holbein’s the ambassadors in order to explain how the act of looking is an outward movement that is reversed under the action of the scopic impulse, lacan draws upon the blackboard “this little triangular diagram” which dissociates the two fundamental levels of the act of looking on the one hand and of seeing on the other: figure 1: the little triangular diagram (jacques lacan, séminaire xi, 1964, du regard comme objet petit a (paris, seuil, 1973) 85) lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 80 the first triangle defines looking in terms of the cartesian optics which are based on geometry.12 the object is apprehended by the eye in the abstract, mathematically, as a series of points connected by lines. between the real object and the mathematical system of points that will represent it, the image is what the eyes reconstruct as object for the subject. thus the image reduces the absolute otherness of the object that is settled in the real to an interiorized representation, made subjective by the eyes. in flaubert’s scene, père roque, standing in front of the “riverside terrace” in the tuileries, is looking through the vent-hole at the prisoners of the june insurrection: there, at any rate, he had them under his feet, these brigands! he enjoyed their defeat, their abjection, and couldn’t refrain from uttering invectives against them. one of them, a lad with long fair hair, put his face to the bars, asking for bread. the observed object is caught by the observing eye through the bars of the venthole, which divide the image into geometric squares in the manner of alberti’s intersector, or of the machine to calculate the right perspective imagined by dürer. this cross-ruling by the bars of what becomes the portrait of a “young lad with long fair hair” ensures the mastery of the looking subject over the object he is looking at: “there, at any rate, he had them under his feet, these brigands!” the image that is framed by the vent-hole, reducing the object to a set of points, degrades the brutal and anguishing otherness into a solipsist enjoyment, the joy of mastering a tamed, domesticated object, this yoyo of the fort-da that lacan names the small a object. père roque is looking at the prisoners, but in his looking at them, he misinterprets them entirely. the scopic interlacing the enjoyment of the looking eye is however extremely short-lived, as it is placed at the hinge of a reversal of situation that will crystallize the novelistic scene. “as for us, lacan says, the dimension of geometry makes it possible for us to catch a glimpse of how the subject we are concerned with is caught, manoeuvered, imprisoned in the field of vision.” (séminaire xi 86) the geometry-based field of looking is 12. “you should also note that if each of the two hands, f and g, hold a stick i and h, with which they touch the object k: though the soul has no knowledge of the length of these sticks, yet, as it will know the distance there is between the two points f and g, and the extent of [the angles] fgh, and gfi, it will be able to know, as by a kind of natural geometry, where the object k is situated. likewise, if the two eyes l and m are turned towards the object n, the length of the line lm and that of the two angles lmn, mln, will allow it to know where the point n is situated.” (rené descartes l’homme (paris: garnier, (1664) 1988), 428-9. my translation. see also p. 459 and la dioptrique, 1637, ‟de la vision”, ibid. 704) the image of the man with two sticks, which illustrates both the dioptrics and the treatise on man, will be taken up again by diderot in his letter on the blind (1749). lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 81 then reversed into the scopic field of vision, which defines the second triangle. in flaubert’s scene, this change is characterized by a reversal of the relations between the characters. père roque does not master anything any more. he no longer is the spectator looking at defeated revolutionaries from above; he is now himself a prey to the fiery eyes of the prisoners: other prisoners appeared in the vent-hole, with bristling beards and fiery eyes, all pushing forward and yelling: — ‘bread!’ we have passed from an economy of looking (and drawing the portrait of the young lad behind the bars) to an economy of the eye (where père roque finds himself under the fiery shafts of the prisoners’ eyes). the geometry of the image has been replaced by the interlacing of the screen, in which père roque is, in some way, made a prisoner. in that interlacing, there is no question of perspective, of depth, of lines. it is all either light or opacity: on one side, the fiery glow of the eyes in the semi-darkness of the tuileries’ vent-hole; on the other, père roque standing against the light, a black sentinel screening the light from the insurrectionists, like a sign of the death that is awaiting them. between the horror of the vent-hole and the external world, père roque plays the part of the screen, a function that requires the object that is being looked at turning opaque. at the same time as the prisoners’ point of view is reduced to a scream for bread, the image, the young lad’s portrait, becomes indistinct and disappears: père roque was indignant at seeing his authority slighted. in order to frighten them, he took aim at them; and, borne upward to the roof of the vault by the crush that nearly smothered him, the young man, with his head thrown backward, once more yelled: — ‘bread!’ one has passed from looking to seeing; a seeing that is directly linked to the collapse of the symbolic structures. what père roque sees is “his slighted authority” or, in other words, the disappearance of the mastery and the position of superiority that had at first organized the space of the scene and made it meaningful. (“there, at any rate, he had them under his feet, these brigands!”) seeing obscures the capacity to look and flaubert shows us how the young man’s portrait dissolves at the very moment when père roque himself is reduced merely to an eye governed by the scopic impulse, an eye that takes aim at the prisoners. as he takes his aim, he ceases to look at them as distinct objects: they are no more than vague forms mixed with howling voices, a “crush”13 bearing them upward to the roof of the vault and smothering the portrait, whose head, thrown backward, loses its shape and disappears. 13. flaubert’s word “flot” almost suggests a tidal-wave. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 82 the pictorial device in the economy of seeing, the screen is the first solicitation that manifests itself, no longer as a verbal but as a scopic screen. it is the screen that brings into play the pictorial device, which lacan defines as follows: the pictorial device — in connection with whomever the painter literally gives his painting to see — is related to the act of looking […]. to the person that must be standing in front of his painting, the painter gives something that, for a great number of paintings at least, could be summed up as — you want to look? well then see this! he gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom the painting is thus presented to lay his eyes upon it, as one lays down one’s weapons.” (séminaire xi, 93) the device deconstructs the act of looking by exhibiting a “something” which is pure visuality, luminous but without lines, irreducible to geometry. this “something” that lacan elsewhere refers to as a spot, is the “something white” of the scene, which constitutes, at the back of the screen, the spot of light from which the picture will be structured at the front. the act of looking is then restored in the pacified, distanced form of aesthetic contemplation. the painter’s activity described here is but an instance of what is at work in any situation of representation, in social life as well as in the artistic field, which brings into play a scopic impulse, and from which a pictorial device comes to light for the subject. but what is striking is that the very terms that lacan uses to characterize this pictorial device are exactly those used by flaubert in his scene. first there is the challenge from the painting to the eye: “you want to look? well then, see this!” the pictorial device does indeed answer a demand, but it answers it in its own terms, which are both displaced and in excess of the demand, giving something “for the eye to feed on.” in flaubert’s scene, the demand is for bread: you want bread? well then “here it is! said père roque, firing his shot.” the point here is indeed exclusively to feed the demand, and to feed it in a decisive manner so-tospeak: with death, which always lurks below the scopic impulse and which is the only means to resolve it.14 14. we have suggested earlier that the parallelism of the two scenes of père roque confronting the insurgents of june 1848, and then facing louise mourning her loss of frédéric, created an imaginary identity between the prisoners in the tuileries and the pretenders to louise’s love, so that the “step-beyond-sense” which articulates the whole operative device does indeed constitute a paternal metaphor. it is the father that one asks for bread, for a morbid totemic feast in which it is the pretenders, not the father, that are reduced to “something white”. the scene contains this epic, hugolian so-to-speak, potentiality that flaubert hollows out, reducing it to the purity of a line. yet the two moments of this episode do indeed bear, though in an attenuated, almost unrecognizable form, the prohibition to consummate first the father’s bread and then his daughter’s body, in other words “the two principal ordinances of totemism”, which “coincide in their content with the two crimes of oedipus” (sigmund freud, totem and taboo. the standard edition vol. 13, 132) this lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 83 the scenic reversal: petit-jean’s revolted eye one lays down eyes as one lays down arms, says lacan. if, by firing his gun, père roque in a way makes the insurgents lay down their weapons, silences their demand for bread, we can right away note that this revolting, horror-filled pacification of the eye is by no means apollinian. manoeuvered by flaubert, the reader’s eye, that at this point relays père roque’s blinded eye, frames a scene which is the very reverse of what he chooses not to see. here we are close to what lacan tells of petit-jean’s story, and of the sardine tin which, as it floated by, did not see lacan on his boat: first, if there is any sense in petit-jean’s statement that the sardine tin does not see me, it is because, in some sort of sense, the tin is nevertheless staring at me. it is staring at me at the level of the spot of light, where all that stares at me is situated, and this is no metaphor. (séminaire xi, 89) the “something white” which reduces the object that is looked at to a mere spot of light, which deconstructs reality into the primary dazzling force of the real for père roque’s eye, is nevertheless staring at him, implicating him despite himself. it is staring at him, but not merely in a metaphorical fashion, it is staring him in the eye, in the sense of a political, or a penal responsibility. from this spot of light, père roque triggers off the pictorial and then the whole scenic device in which he will be involved in his house, rue saint-martin. a pure, radically non-theatrical, act of brutality, the shot fired by père roque nevertheless conditions the whole representation of the supper, of the fit of sickness and of the verbal exchange with his daughter. a schematic diagram of the scenic device the model for this representation is the superimposition of the “two triangular systems” formerly introduced, a superimposition that does not define the lacanian pictorial device (as one might erroneously be induced to think by the title of chapter ix, “qu’est-ce qu’un tableau?”15), but very precisely the freudian scene, that is of course a typical example of tracing and analyzing unlooked for points of similarity that deeply hurts the academic habits of thought. the academic establishment finds the idea of a flaubertian totemism absolutely revolting: the text does not say that, flaubert has never wanted that. the obscenity does not only concern the matter (the obscene meaning of the text); it is an obscenity of principle (a methodological aberration). it comes from the fact that what is being tracked down here does not concern a mode of discourse or an intention, not even an unconscious one. whether anything is indicated of the flaubertian unconscious is of no great import. the operative device is more detached from the author, more immersed into the submerged configurations of culture and representation. this fundamental, so-to-speak totemic feature, is what, in the classical economy of representation, articulates the two triangles of “the little triangular diagram.” 15. here we understand “qu’est-ce qu’un tableau ?” as “qu’est-ce que faire tableau ?”, so that the title should be translated as “what is a pictorial device ?”. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 84 is the superimposition of the shock, the psychic trauma (which can be identified as corresponding to the first triangle, the triangle of geometry) and the neurotic repetition of the symptoms (which is so-to-speak manifested in the second triangle or scopic triangle).16 figure 2: the scenic operative device is made of the superimposition of the prospective triangle (turned to the left) and of the scopic triangle (turned to the right). the staring refers to the person that is looking at the picture, here père roque confronting the prisoners on the other side of the vent-hole. but what lacan means by “staring” (which, in this particular case could even be considered as “glaring”) does not refer so much to the act of looking (as we usually think of it), as to its position as little a object, in other words the fact that what is confronting the looking person’s eye is something that is staring back at him, something that concerns him, something that is pointing at him. it reaches something deep in him, something that is not an otherness, but the very reverse, something that is part of the intimate self. the lacanian look (or stare, or glare etc.) is this intimate self that is reached in the looking subject at the moment of his looking. confronting “the looking eye,” “the subject that is represented” is what, in the spectator’s eye, triggers off a pictorial device, i.e. collapses as subject in order to remain in the spectator’s eye only as a spot of light. this collapse however gives rise to something in excess, a “something white” opening the onlooker’s eye to a device that exceeds the exclusively intimate impact of the scene. it is the real, it is the revolution, this wordless brutality, that submerges and dismays père roque. the vent-hole articulates the scenic operative device between the looking eye as little a object (père roque) and the collapsed subject of representation (the group of prisoners). through the mere distribution of light and shade,17 one can understand 16. for the dissociation of a primal scene and an obsessive scene, see séminaire xi, v, tuchè & automaton. we are coming here to a fundamental dimension of the device, which is the superimposition of different layers of representation: the processes of condensation and displacement, that freud has brought to light in the interpretation of dreams, can be detected only after those superimpositions have been put into evidence in the discourse of the dreamer, then of the patient. 17. in la princesse de clèves, the scene of the cane from india relies on a similar operative device, with a reversed distribution of light and shade. the duke de nemours is standing in the darkness of the park and gazing at madame de clèves musing in her closet. nemours is nothing but pure gaze. all that madame de clèves, herself the subject of representation, sees from her lighted place, is a shade emerging from the night. the window lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 85 how père roque elaborates what is less a point of view on the scene than a picture, framed by the vent-hole and lighted from outside, whereas the prisoners are confronted with père roque’s silhouette standing against the light, like a screen that obscures their vision. the vent-hole serves as both frame for the image and place for the screen; it represents and obscures at the same time.18 the theatrical and the photographic models lacan describes the way the looking subject (here père roque), caught by the reversed gaze of the visible that is looking at him (the prisoners), himself triggers off a pictorial device: here lies the function that is at the most intimate of the institution of the subject in the visible. what fundamentally determines my presence in the visible is the gaze that comes from outside. it is through that gaze that i come into light, and it is from that gaze that i receive its benefit. which means that the gaze is the instrument through which light is incarnated, and through which — if i am allowed to use a word in a way that i often favour, i.e. by splitting it into its component parts — i am photo-graphed.” (séminaire xi, 98) in this instance, in flaubert’s text, if, symbolically, the insurgents’ glare comes from outside, this symbolic outside is an inside from the point of view of geometry, i. e. not a stage but a cellar, a place of darkness. we are here in the presence of an historical specificity of the flaubertian operative device: its imaginary model for representation is not the window of perspective that opens onto an outside, a landscape. it is the dark room, which the real enters in order to be printed. as a result, frames a picture for nemours who is standing outside, but is a screen for mme de clèves who is sitting inside. this function of the screen is later materialized in the narrative by nemours’ scarf which gets caught in the knob of the french window when he attempts to enter the lodge. mme de la fayette, les oeuvres de mme la fayette (paris: garnier, 1964), 367; my translation. the operative device is the same again in the scene at montjouvain, in du côté de chez swann: the narrator is posted behind an embankment and spying, from outside through a window, upon mlle de vinteuil and her girlfriend, going through the preliminaries of a sadic scene that goes to the quick of his intimate self: “the memory of that impression was to play an important part in my life.” the scene itself however escapes the narrator’s gaze for “mlle de vinteuil, with weary, clumsy, busy, honest and sad eyes came over and closed the shades and the window”. marcel proust, à la recherche du temps perdu (paris: gallimard, pléiade, 1987) 157 and 161 ; my translation. 18. modeling the text as an operative device brings into light the autonomy of fiction with respect to representation. flaubert’s text does not scrutinize père roque’s point of view and that of the prisoners successively. but he relies upon a spatial arrangement that, in a way, preexists the narration and is used as a prop for the reader’s imagination. the antecedence of this fictional world gives the reader the illusion that the narration has an autonomous non textual life susceptible of any imaginary extension. the power to suggest this autonomy of the fictional world manifests itself in the sometimes passionate speculations of our students about what the characters may have done or thought “when the text was not there to give us a record of it”… lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 86 the gaze does not make the subject come into light, it makes him detach himself in the negative as a shade, which the lacanian formula eventually catches up by referring to the subject trapped in the net of optical representation as a photo-graphed subject. these are in fact two distinct models: the theatrical model, which delimits a scene of representation on the lighted stage, and the photographic model, which, conversely, establishes in the dark a space of invisibility where the real is secretly printed: to the institution of the subject in the visible is opposed the constitution of the unconscious reserve. 3. the structural articulation of the narrative operative device as the first scene of père roque in the tuileries collapses upon itself and leads to the pointing of an invisibility (“a huge howl, then nothing. on the edge of the bucket something white had remained.”), the theatrical performance itself is delayed and eventually transferred to the evening meal. only then does père roque step into the light of social interplay, and literally incarnates this play by bodily experiencing the revolution in his fit of sickness. the screen as theatrical mask louise and her father are play-acting to each other; they are wearing the mask of the bourgeois social conventions: louise acts the part of the accomplished daughter, whereas père roque sets himself up as the imaginary invalid. it was his daughter herself who opened the door for him. she immediately told him that his prolonged absence had made her uneasy; she had feared he had met with a misfortune, a wound. this mark of filial love softened père roque’s heart. he was surprised that she should have set out without catherine. — ‘i sent her on an errand’, louise answered. and she enquired about his health, about one thing and another; then, with an air of indifference, enquired whether by any chance he had come across frédéric. a bourgeois home, conventional politeness, all to hide a quasi-murder and something close to a lover in the closet: here flaubert is flirting with the vaudeville, introducing poor theatrical play within the novelistic scene. father and daughter are parading in this variety ritual, and putting into full play the luring effect of the scopic field they are involved in. however the subject — the human subject, the subject of desire which is the very essence of man — contrarily to the animal, is not entirely caught in this imaginary net. he finds his bearings. by what means ? in so far as he isolates the function of the screen and uses it. indeed man can play with the lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 87 mask as that beyond which looking takes place. the place of mediation here is the screen. (séminaire xi, 99) contrary to the peacock’s spreading out its tail or to the nuptial parades of the insects, in human representation the luring effect is only partial. neither the person that gives a picture of himself as subject of representation, nor the other person that, through his gaze, sends back his image to him, is a complete dupe of the theatrical game in which they are implicated. reality is on the margin the real spills over the margin; on the periphery of masks, the subject as well as the object of the scopic exchange manifest, point out, a reality that escapes the lure, an external dimension of desire that is irreducible to the tricks of stage-play. lacan figures this peripheral dimension of reality in the pictorial device as follows: figure 3: the screen and the reality in the scenic operative device (lacan, séminaire xi, 91) reality does indeed manifest itself on the margin of the text, as an absence kept out of the scenic space where the dialogue is taking place: louise tells her father “that his prolonged absence had made her uneasy.” this absence sends us back to the revolutionary reality and to the gunshot, which is screened off by the conviviality of the verbal exchange. père roque’s answer also points out an absence: why has louise set out to the small flat of the rue saint-martin “without catherine?” the absence of catherine is a symptom of the search for frédéric, the real object of louise’s uneasiness, over which her concern for her father is a mere façade. louise’s last question to père roque is about frédéric’s absence, which is indeed the one absence that is covered up by all the others: but she asks her question “with an air of indifference” and introduces it with “if by any chance.” moreover, her question is not formulated in terms of absence, but in those of a possible meeting, in other words not as the expression of a lack, upon which any chain of meaning, any linguistic message, is built, but as an illusive satisfaction of desire, as a parade and a lure which is no less than an embodiment of her own desire to meet frédéric.19 19. strictly speaking, one should distinguish two successive lacanian topics here. the first ones are centered on a lack and unfold according to a linguistic model. at the basis of the constitution of the subject, lacan places this demand which is articulated upon a paralojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 88 flaubert’s narrative device: façade as structural articulation between his gunshot in the tuileries and his entrance in his rooms in the rue saint-martin, mr. roque stops in front of the façade of his house which has been damaged by the mob in the riots: after that mr. roque returned home; for he owned a house on the rue saintmartin in which he had kept rooms for himself; and the damage caused by the riots to the front of his house had in no slight degree contributed to excite his rage. it seemed to him, on seeing it again, that he had exaggerated the injury. the act he had just committed had a soothing effect, like an indemnity. flaubert establishes an explicit link between “the front of the house” and “the act just committed,” i.e. the shooting of a gun. this explicit linkage invites us to see an implicit link with the dialogue that follows, in which louise says that she has feared “some misfortune, a wound” for her father. the front of the house is therefore a means to introduce the façade play of the dialogue between the lover and the murderer. on this house front, the trace of “the damage caused by the riots” both makes an image with reference to the frame, to the marginal reality of the revolution, and is at the same time a screen, hiding the horror of the crime, or at least providing an alibi for it, since it is “like an indemnity” for it. there is no circulation of signifiers20 without a concomitant setting the scopic impulse21 into action, no verbal dialectics of the demand and of the message without triggering off a pictorial device. to the verbal screen of the “something”, of the “id”, both for the revolution and for frédéric, correspond the scopic screen of the venthole, and that of the front of the house. to the game of masks of the dialogue between louise and her father, based on “the dialectics of desire and demand”22 corresponds the visual game of gazes in which are interchanged the roles of subject of the gaze (of spectator encircled by the “id” which is looking at him) and of subject of the representation (of the pictorial device that is triggered off for the spectator by a symptom, something white, traces of bullets on the house front). doxical signifier, “the signifier of the point where the signifier is lacking”, which he calls “capital φ”. as signifier of the phallus, borne upon the castration complex, φ is the “warrant” of “the whole chain of signifiers” but “always keeps hidden, always keeps veiled” (jacque lacan, séminaire viii, le transfert, 272 and xvii, 286-287) the second topics of the subject, which are iconic, appear in séminaire xi and are centered on the image/screen reversal. the screen replaces φ and it is no longer the chain of signifiers, but all representations that are established from the shadow, from the spot, the lack, which it sets visually in the center. the parade and the lure assume a place in these second topics, in addition to the sole unfolding of the chain of signifiers. 20. this refers to the first lacanian topics, which lacan represents by “the graph of desire”. see séminaire v: les formations de l’inconscient, 1957 (paris, seuil, 1998), 511. 21. this setting into action is modeled on “the small triangular diagram”. see illustration 1 22. this is the title of the third part of séminaire v. see p.353. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 89 the articulation of those structures takes place at the meta-level of the operative device. lacan does not use the term of “dispositif” and it is striking that the word “scene,” that was recurrent in freud, disappears from lacan’s vocabulary at the very moment when, in séminaire xi, he theorizes the scopic impulse. splitting up the symbolic indeed lacanian discourse prepares the way for the new theories of scene and operative device. caught in the linguistic schematism, against which he is at the same time constantly rebelling,23 lacan keeps exploiting word-play and contorted discourse supposedly capable of making language work against the formal structuralism of instituted discourse. the torus, the knot, the padding stitch, moebius’s ribbon are as many attempts to get out of this linguistic circle with which the theory of the operative device means to break more radically, by splitting up the lacanian category of the symbolic. for in the same way as the imaginary runs through both the fictional constitution of the geometrically organized space of the scene and the scopic circulation of the gaze and the eye, of looking and seeing, likewise it is the symbolic that structures both the discourse of masks, in the lure of the scenic dialogue and the institution of the screen, in the scenic system of gazes and visibilities. such transversality implies a split up and a dialectic. 24 the screen that articulates the scenic device materializes this split up: on the side of the “spot of light” there is the thing, which holds an immediate, brutal, compulsive and revolted relationship with the symbolic; on the side of the “point of intersection” there is the subject of representation, which is mediated by the rules and frames of representation, whether this mediation takes place in the order of discourse, by means of rhetoric and decorum, or in the order of image making, by means of perspective and the codes of scenic representation. 23. “[f]or, let me tell you, i don’t care a fig for linguistics. what i am directly interested in is language, because i think it is that that i have to deal with in my practice of psychoanalysis. it is the business of the linguists to define the linguistic object. in the sciences, each field progresses from defining its object. they define it as they understand it and they add that i make a metaphorical use of it. (jacques lacan, séminaire xviii, d’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971 (paris, seuil, 2006) 45) it is the same accusation of being arbi-it is the same accusation of being arbitrarily metaphorical that has been borne, in its beginnings in toulouse, against the theory of operative devices. because the modeling of the scenic operative device postulates the collapse of the logics of discourse, in the scene, the language of the text ceases to be discursive language, and must of necessity be described metaphorically, from the instruments and visual categories it is using. each time a new epistemological field comes into existence, the metaphorical nature of the new concepts and the suspicion of arbitrariness that their use suscitates from its elders are unavoidable. even when the older, institutional field pretends to be newer than the new one, which the institution is incapable of assimilating… 24. stéphane lojkine, image et subversion (paris: j. chambon, 2005) 87-91 and 2nd part, “le dédoublement symbolique”. lojkine: something white… s4 (2011): 90 in the extract from flaubert, the prisoners’ howl and the white thing, but also the desire for frédéric which has pushed louise to send catherine in search for him, do not belong only to the order of phantasm, of impulse, of imaginary fascination and abjection. on the contrary, they serve to set the very principles of the symbolic, the revolution on one side and marriage on the other, those two realities in the order of the symbolic that père roque refuses to see. to those symbolic principles, which are manifested as thing, spot of light and symptom, is opposed the symbolic institution of language, the verbal scene that père roque and his daughter play for each other, with its deceitful dialogue and its bourgeois decorum. the symbolic institution however can make a stand against the symbolic principle only because it proceeds from it: the bourgeois republic proceeds from the revolution, the loving daughter’s little game proceeds from louise’s desire for frédéric, père roque’s indigestion proceeds from the shot fired in the tuileries. the scenic procedure consists in turning the symbolic institution upside down, that is in calling back the symbolic principle and thus causing the defeat of the symbolic institution. this turning upside down, this revolt, is operated from the screen of representation: the vent-hole in the tuileries, the house front in the rue saint-martin and, to crown it all, père roque’s face about to throw up his soup. here, therefore the screen appears as a third instance of the symbolic, articulating the institution and the symbolic principle. in the space of the scene, the screen structures the representation by establishing a difference between a before and a beyond, thus a polarity generating a semiotic system. the principle, the institution and the screen are visually manifested in the scenic device and they make us immediately sensitive to the different layers and articulations of the operative device of representation. but outside the scene, within the unfolding of the narrative itself, they keep operating, though in a non visual form: the fiction understood as a world, the narration defined as succession of events and the overall structure of the narrative are the abstract forms of the thing, the discourse and the screen. what is at stake in these modelizations of the scene and of the narrative as operative devices is the possibility to account not only for the fundamentally layered dimension of the symbolic, but also for the right about-turn, the revolt, that any representation, be it ever so apparently consensual, or commercial, and even and above all when it is aristocratic and proper, operates from these layers. this will lead us, in psychoanalysis, to such a radical reconsideration of the symbolic constitution of the subject as lacan himself has constantly been practising, first with the thing, das ding, in the ethics of psychoanalysis, and then with the symptom in the last seminars. aren’t the thing and symptom precisely what flaubert invites us to contemplate, with this “something white” which, decidedly, “couldn’t go down”? jottkandt-s1-2008 s j o u r n a l o f t h e j a n v a n e y c k c i r c l e f o r l a c a n i a n i d e o l o g y c r i t i q u e 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) table of contents editorial 2 the gaze of pygmalion bernard baas 4 missing the point: reading the lacanian subject through perspective thomas brockelman 16 montaigne in the “garden of earthly delights”: the image of the corps morcelé in the essays jonathan kim-reuter 36 the real imaginary: lacan’s joyce juliet flower maccannell 46 dialogues intimate extorted, intimate exposed gérard wajcman 58 response: the politics of “atopia of the intimate” in contemporary art: the view from lacanian psychoanalysis lieven jonckheere 78 reviews hitchcock’s cryptonomies, by tom cohen sigi jöttkandt 100 s is on the web at www.lineofbeauty.org b o o k r e v i e w s e x b o m b t h e b o o k in(ter)sectal wars of reinscription in hitchcock’s cryptonymies s i g i j ö t t k a n d t tom cohen, hitchcock's cryptonymies: volume i. secret agents minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2005. isbn 0-8166-4205-2 (cloth), isbn 0-8166-4206-0 (paper). 376pp. $24.95 paper, $74.95 cloth tom cohen, hitchcock's cryptonymies: volume ii. war machines minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2005. isbn 0-8166-4171-4 (cloth), isbn 0-8166-4170-6 (paper). 360pp. $24.95 paper, $74.95 cloth hat rumbling you hear? it’s the sound of the universal reading room crashing down in a epoch-shattering “gran mal d’archive,” taking along with it the whole of the “tele-technic principles, auratic habits, prehistorial and enlightenment epistemes” that, according to tom cohen, constitute the aesthetic as a biopolitical program.1 dropping all pretense of being “mere play,” the aesthetic over the past century has increasingly revealed itself as what cohen regards as the arche-site of our sensory programming―the pre-cognitive motherboard onto which the technologies of our perception and memory are hardcoded and where, accordingly, the very concepts of agency and the human itself are pre-defined. it is hard to imagine a clearer accounting of the aesthetic’s ideological and political potential. it ought not to surprise, then, that it is at this faculty three of the most powerful thinkers of the twentieth century―friedrich nietzsche, walter benjamin and paul de man―have, in different ways, trained their theoretical arsenal. the spectral presences of each of these anti-aestheticians can readily be felt behind cohen’s ravaging of the traditional categories of mimetic humanism, as he continues his deconstruction of the aesthetic programs lurking behind such terms as “aura,” “nature,” “earth,” “sun,” “memory,” “personification,” “anthropomorphism,” “home,” “identity,” “the state,” the “non-human other,” “family,” “time,” and “sexuality” that t 1 tom cohen, “climate change in the aesthetic state (a memory (dis)order), parallax 10.3 (2004): 83-98. hereafter, climate change. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 1 (2008): 100-117 b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 101 he began with anti-mimesis from plato to hitchcock and ideology and inscription: “cultural studies” after benjamin, de man, and bakhtin.2 in his latest offering, the two-volume set, hitchcock’s cryptonymies (secret agents and war machines), cohen’s target is ironically modest: in cohen’s sights is nothing less than the aesthetic state itself, which he describes in shorthand as the “regime of the book.” hitchcock, by cohen’s own admission, serves him as a sort of “rosetta stone” for re-inspecting the event of cinema, one whose re-citation of the image―the key site of mimetic identification―will decisively transform and alter the anthropomorphic horizon we have inherited from the literary era. privileged figure of romantic transcendence and saturated with the quasi-religious concept of “aura,” the image unexpectedly finds itself in cohen’s destructions the locus of a battle over reading, comprising a “pan-graphematic and performative site in which forces of legibility compete to access contesting pasts and alternative temporal configurations” (climate change, 87). the image, arch figure of aesthetic ideology, will find itself the unwitting agent of what cohen, following benjamin, calls cinematic “deauraticization.” hitchcock’s cryptonymies thus offers an implicit response to a call we have been hearing for while now in a variety of circles for a “return to the imaginary”―the register in lacanian psychoanalysis linked to the senses (among which the visual holds a special place), narcissism and identification. as a result of the imaginary subject’s constitutive tendency toward miscognition (of the other and itself) through which it engages its destructive relations of rivalry and aggression, the imaginary is most often regarded as the infantile bad boy of the three psychic registers (imaginary, symbolic, real) whose mis-identifications, according to the standard psychoanalytic narrative of the subject’s ethical trajectory, require overcoming by symbolic recognition. nevertheless, there is a growing feeling―which the number of recent books concerned with beauty and affect (especially love) suggest is not just confined to lacanian circles―that more focused attention needs to be paid to this imaginary sphere, and precisely for the reasons that cohen cogently remarks above.3 for to the extent that the imaginary is the original register in which the ego constitutes itself as a narcissistic subject, on top of which all other subsequent identifications are built, it is the ur-site of the subject’s cognitive and, as i will suggest later, sexual programming. it is in the imaginary―or to go back to cohen’s term, the aesthetic―after all, that we learn to make “wholes” out of the bundle of sensory impressions that constitute us in lacan’s famous mirror stage. one might be justified, 2 tom cohen, anti-mimesis from plato to hitchcock (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1994); cohen, ideology and inscription: “cultural studies” after benjamin, de man, and bakhtin (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998). 3 see for example, elaine scarry, on beauty and being just (princeton: princeton university press, 1999), rei terada, feeling in theory: emotion after the death of the subject (cambridge, mass: harvard university press, 2001) and marc de kesel,’s forthcoming ethics and eros: a close reading of lacan’s seminar vii (albany: suny press). b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 102 then, in claiming that the interests of the imaginary are precisely those of classical aesthetics, namely, a concern with the delineation of outlines or, form. considering what is at stake―nothing less than the constitution of our world as representation―cohen’s figure of war to describe the contest taking place over the image must be taken, i believe, completely literally. this is a war waged not only at the level of epistemology, that is, over the cognitive and sensory ordering that has given us our habitual platonic models of light, subjectality, reason, sight. it is simultaneously a war within the image itself to the extent that this battle will be reflexively doubled, re-folded into hitchcock’s narratives in the shape of a counterlogic that assaults the “home state’s regimes of identification” (secret agents, 239) from the inside. throughout secret agents, cohen tracks an assortment of villains who, like hitchcock, employ the traditional metaphorics of light against itself, this time as a medium of benjaminian “shock.” “at different sites,” cohen notes, “hitchcock will identify his cinematic assault with a nuclear blast, a boy’s futuristic raygun, a mock worship of asolarity” (climate change, 89). at the beginning of his first volume, cohen helpfully provides a “user’s guide” of these “secret agents,” embodiments of a counter-aesthetic program that surreptitiously perforates the edges of our anthropomorphic horizon. here, along with black cats, cartoon birds, silver wrapped chocolate bonbons, buttons, rotating black suns, eggs, small persistently underfoot dogs, one finds an entry on “teeth,” which he glosses in typically deadpan fashion: “the eye metonymically transcoded as site of masticulation, ingestion, the lips as eyelids, teeth as shredders, where the white skeleton protrudes” (secret agents, 62). or again, “fire”: “empedoclean inversion: the nonidentity of the spectral cinematic subject emerges from the ashes of an incineration of lights” (secret agents, 55). or yet again “legs, steps”: “couriers of signification, including the phonetic or graphematic mark, footsteps without feet” (secret agents, 56). in addition, as if behind or beyond (to use a contested term for cohen) each such “zoomorphemic” figure, cohen detects the presence of even stranger visual objects―letters and marking systems that seem to serve as each creature’s conceptual wire-frame. while of necessity a “secret agent” occupies (at least temporarily) a place within the mimetic regime, albeit always as the disturbing and destructive “other” of a platonic binarism, cohen discovers in hitchcock an alternative representational system that supplies what i propose to call the “laws” on which his corporealized traces subsist: the letters, bar slashes, relay systems, writing, reading, telepathic and telegraphic communication structures that cohen unveils as operating a hidden, alternative graphic and/or phonetic system in each of the films he discusses. hence the entries in the user’s guide on reading (“almost always women. almost always interrupted,” secret agents, 61), on the letter x (“an operative chi or chiasmus isolating the systemic exchange of binary values, including referents,” secret agents, 63), on the phrase “sounds like” (“alerts to phenomenatic relays and structure of dialogue or sound, of its role in networks of punning connectives and scriptive b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 103 agencies,” secret agents, 62)―not to mention his entire, indeed stupendous cogitation on the numbers 1 and 3, the letters m, a, r, and c, a, the triangle, and so on. although each volume’s umbrella title “cryptonymies” seems intended to reference the entirety of hitchcock’s underhand signifying system, these “citational” or metalinguistic markers clearly most mesmerize cohen as they dodge prescriptive meaning and weave alternate histories, temporalities, perceptual and cognitive systems out of the twisted bars and letteral rubble thrown up by their animatic double-agents’ bombs. here, at the border of the aesthetic state, in the badlands “beyond roads and transit” (climate change, 97) where all our habitual technologies of perception and cognition are cast into the smithying empedoclean fire, cohen declares war. it is a declaration that i sincerely hope will put decisive end to the lingering question of whether deconstruction is or can be “political,” for long before 9/11 cohen has been reporting word from the front-lines of “coming wars of reinscription”: successions of cognitive guerilla skirmishes that are to decide what constitutes “time [. . .] representation, mnemonic management, experience, gender, perception” (secret agents, 244) in the aftermath of the nuclear “event” he calls hitchcockian cinema. as cohen’s terminology implies―he frequently describes it as a “prefigural” (secret agents, 82), or, in a nod to benjamin, “prehistorial,” “aterra” (war machines, 137) or “atopos” (war machines, 89)―this (non-)site of reinscription will be no round-table gathering in some habermasian-declared green zone―as if hostilities could momentarily cease while we formulate a new constitution that meets the barest minimum of the demands of the multiple warring parties, as we fracture into smaller and smaller political units, each claiming our unique individual traditional “rights.” as cohen’s term “war” cannot fail to make us keenly aware, any “political” institutions that might emerge from the hitchcockian cinematic asault must be the spoils of a victory, a wresting away of perceptual and cognitive territory from the other by force. for cohen, at least, has never lost sight of the original “scandalon” of the law and the founding act of violence on which its power rests: to cohen, all police are mafia, all banks brothels. one recalls paul de man’s arresting statement, which never seems far from cohen’s mind: “history [. . .] is the emergence of a language of power out of a language of cognition,” which the author of hitchcock’s cryptonymies seems to gloss thus: history (understood as the programming “technologies” of perception and understanding) falls to the last man standing once every traditional cognitive and sensory framework has been pulverized by the collapse of the regime of “the book.”4 the event that triggered this―the assassin’s bullet that brought down the administration of our “universal reading room”―is cinema, hitchcock. despite my pacifist tendencies, i feel prompted to pick up cohen’s gauntlet, since one cannot count on others to fight one’s own battles. here is the claim i propose to stake on a plot of cohen’s strange new (a)territory: the coming wars he speaks of are sex 4 paul de man, aesthetic ideology, ed and intro. andrzej warminski (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1996) 133. b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 104 wars. or, more accurately, the war of reinscription is sexuation. clearly this will require some unpacking. one might begin by performing a sort of “diagnostics” of cohen’s reading practice, to which the title of the volumes, hitchcock’s cryptonomies, already points the way. put simply, cohen reads paranoiacally. he discovers hidden signifiers, trans-coded meanings, the presence of yet-undetonated linguistic bombs in the folds of the hitchcockian landscape. referencing one another across hitchcock’s oeuvre, these “cryptonyms” generate a secret language or “citational network,” as cohen calls it, whose ultimate signified comes to be located in a central “figure,” hitchcock, whose cameo famously appears in each film. as he thereby re-marks the border separating film and life, fiction and reality, “hitchcock” parabasitically dismantles the enframing four corners of our representational home, to reconstitute them in other shapes and forms, most notably, for cohen, into the letter h of hitchcock himself that cohen detects criss-crossing the director’s oeuvre. h, for example, in the first letter of many of the characters’ names: huntley, haverstock, henriette, harry, henry, harriet, h.h., hugheson (secret agents, 55). h, more subliminally, repeated in the inevitable shots of train tracks (the train itself always being a “cinematic topos” says cohen, secret agents, 63). h, finally, arriving at its most stripped-down form in what cohen, following william rothman, calls the “bar series”: a pattern of vertical slashes that turns up without fail in all of hitchcock’s films: in the form of banisters and spiked fences, for example, or in rows of trees or a fabric’s design, or again in the bars of a musical score (secret agents, xvi). for rothman, who is credited as having been the first to identify it, the bar series must be regarded as hitchcock’s “signature.” once one becomes alert to this citational pattern it is hard to avoid, as cohen finds. whenever it appears, it alerts one to the presence of a ghostly other haunting the crytonymist’s strangely pregnant universe, an other we ordinarily fail to sense but which cohen, more acute to slight glitches in the matrix, unerringly draws into our line of vision. what enables cohen to detect these “cryptonymic” clues is a strangely lazy kind of eye that lingers uncomprehendingly on bare outlines and forms. where one ordinarily “sees” say, a tree with norman bates beside it (in the famous still image from psycho that cohen examines in the fifth chapter of war machines), cohen discovers the letter j, an umbrella, a fish-hook or, ominously in the case of another tree on the horizon, a mushroom cloud. the way cohen views hitchcock, in other words, is with what de man would call “material” vision: a “way of seeing” that momentarily suspends cognitive categories―or rather precedes them―to view the world “as poets do.” this expression is of course the famous phrase that de man, in his essay “phenomenality and materiality in kant,” filches from kant while developing his own enigmatic notion of “aesthetic vision.” here, first, is the passage from kant’s critique of judgment that de man cites in this essay: if, then, we call the sight of the starry heaven sublime, we must not place at the foundation of judgment concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 105 and regard the bright points, with which we see the space above us filled, as their suns moving in circles purposively fixed with reference to them; but we must regard it, just as we see it [. . .] as a distant, all-embracing vault [. . .]. only under such a representation can we range that sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment ascribes to this object. and in the same way, if we are to call the sight of the ocean sublime, we must not think of it as we ordinarily do, as implying all kinds of knowledge (that are not contained in immediate intuition). [. . . ]. to find the ocean nevertheless sublime we must regard it as poets do, merely by what the eye reveals―if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by the heavens; if it is stormy, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything” (aesthetic ideology, 80). de man comments on kant thus: the predominant perception, in the kant passage, is that of the heavens and the ocean as an architectonic construct. [. . .]. [in kant’s passage] the sky does not appear in it as associated in any way with shelter. it is not the construct under which, in heidegger’s terms, we can dwell. in a lesser-known passage from the logic kant speaks of “a wild man who, from a distance, sees a house of which he does not know the use. he certainly observes the same object as does another, who knows it to be definitely built and arranged to serve as a dwelling for human beings. yet in formal terms this knowledge of the selfsame object differs in both cases. for the first it is mere intuition [blosse anschauung], for the other both intuition and concept.” the poet who sees the heaven as a vault is clearly like the savage [. . .]. he does not see prior to dwelling, but merely sees. (aesthetic ideology, 81) de man concludes that “the critique of the aesthetic ends up, in kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, including the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and the sublime as described by kant and hegel themselves.” blosse anschuung, “mere intuition,” as de man reads kant, amounts to a vision that “to the same extent that [it] is purely material, devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication, it is also purely formal, devoid of semantic depth and reducible to the formal mathematization or geometricization of pure optics” (aesthetic ideology, 83). permit me then an initial observation: cohen’s cryptonymic eye is a scanner that “takes in” sensory data from a pre-cognitive position analogous to kantian aesthetic vision in de man’s account. but, different from the machine-like figures that habitually close out de man’s and de man-inspired symphonies of illegibility (bizarre kleistian robotic dancers, stuttering hegelian automatons, kantian “flat, thirdperson” worlds etc.), the chief feature of cohen’s roving, almost whitmanesque eyeball is that it is “alive,” albeit in a most disconcerting kind of way. for, as a second observation, one might say that cohen’s is a perceptual apparatus that, at the same time as it atomizes conventional representational schemas―our usual, platonic, anthrocentric “frames” for thought―is also engaged in a sort of recombinant therapy. b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 106 for this eye not only “kills” what both de man and lacan in their in differing yet isomorphic ways have taught us has been dead all along, namely, the solar, anthropomorphic, sheltering “house” of symbolic representation. in the bare rattling playgrounds of a symbolic stripped of all imaginary lures and feints―stripped, that is, of all the fleshly cladding that the word “beauty” or the “aesthetic” has traditionally encompassed―cohen discovers a yet more disturbing form of “life” radiating out in fractal patterns to infect what is left of the planet. hearing the “matter” in deconstruction’s much vaunted “materiality,” cohen uncovers a bizarre prehistorial parallel world where, stripped of their butterfly wings of symbolic meanings, signifiers regress beyond every silken form of imaginary cocooning and begin to crawl, caterpillar-like, across the screen in an uncanny letteral animation. the closest conceptual equivalent i can think of is lacan’s myth of the lamella in the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the mobile lip or rim of the drive that slithers revenant-like in advance or behind any symbolically-defined form.5 in cohen’s case, this lip or rim, this cut that is neither dead nor alive (because it is too much alive) is nothing but language itself or, perhaps more accurately, the archaic stuff or building blocks of language: the pre-figural, pre-letteral shapes and sounds that gather under the most embracing use of the term “inscription.” like the cheshire cat’s gashed smile, these free-floating recombinant signifiers appear, vanish and reemerge as impossible spectral forms whose eerie, bio-inorganic “life” precedes all corporealized clothing or (aesthetic-ideological) “phenomenalization.” accordingly, this provides a convenient landing-point to examine cohen’s critique of slavoj žižek’s reading of hitchcock which only at the most superficial level concerns the old complaint of žižek’s own paranoiac compulsion to “find” lacan, avant la lettre, anywhere he looks. rather, for cohen, žižek’s real failure lies in overlooking or, in the cryptonymist’s stronger words, “evading” any allusion to language whatsoever (secret agents, 46). when cohen locates this uncanny vitality in the form of language itself―in the “heart” of the symbolic, to momentarily lapse back into organic metaphors―he is thus clearly trying to distance himself (if a little too rapidly to my mind) from any easy comparison one might make between his cryptonymic or, if i may risk a pun (since he certainly would), impossible or “koanic” vision and the lacanian real―or at least žižek’s particular brand of it. briefly, cohen’s main problem with žižek (admittedly a fairly early žižek) lies in certain of the latter’s formulations regarding something that lies “beyond” the reach of the symbolic. cohen notes how žižek “assumes that any evocation of linguistic elements leads only to the metonymic chains of the symbolic,” and he observes how the psychoanalytic theorist “is determined to demonstrate that he, or ‘lacan’ is ‘beyond the wall of language’” (secret agents, 46). žižek is thus, for this reason, incurably idealist to cohen’s mind―a reproach that encompasses in shorthand the usual deconstructive criticism of lacanian psychoanalysis, (that is, that the phallus is 5 lacan, the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, trans. alan sheridan (new york: w. w. norton & company, 1977) 187. b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 107 a transcendental or “theological” category).6 but what differentiates cohen from the majority of his deconstructive cohorts, all of whom share the same scrupulous refusal to grant anything “beyond” or outside linguistic structures, is precisely the “life” cohen discovers in language’s purely formal properties themselves―the strange, hidden, coded linguistic forms and significations that surreptitiously assemble alternative representational frameworks under the nose of the law itself. in place of the still disquieting but by now somewhat familiar robotic figures who, stripped of their reassuring imaginary masks, populate the post-de manian landscape, the symbolic left by cohen’s reading event is inhabited by an as-yet unthinkable biolinguistic-technicity that virally attacks and infects every attempt at boundary definition, including and most especially the dividing line between “life” and “death.” my earlier description of what i was calling cohen’s “paranoia” thus requires further nuance in light of his critique of žižek. although there is a demonstrably formal pattern to the cryptonymic citational network cohen detects that clusters around the central node of hitchcock’s signature (in its imaginary guise, the cameo; in its symbolic form, the bar slash series), such a signature is about as far away as one can get from conventional notions of the auteur director for which hitchcock, within a certain vein of film criticism, has traditionally stood. despite his ground-breaking discovery of the bar series, rothman, for example, inevitably lapses back into the imaginary trap of trying to give mimetic content to this purely formal marking system, cohen says, when he interprets it as “associated with sexual fear and the specific threat of loss or control or breakdown,” attempting in this way, as cohen puts it “to pile up another auteurist coup” (secret agents, xvii). offering a considerably more unsettling vision, cohen describes this formal pattern as something that precedes “the coalescence of perception, image or sound, or even letter” (secret agents, xvii), while in its imaginary guise as the cameo, hitchcock’s signature “marks the disarticulation of the mimetic protocol by the very logic that should uphold its program” (secret agents, 243). to the extent that the h signature marks purely “a point of repetition,” it cannot be enlisted in the service of a mimetic humanism revolving around a solar metaphorics of light, home, earth, time, identity, memory and so on. it cannot, in other words, be the signing of an imaginary counterpart of the viewing subject―albeit bigger, cleverer, more powerful, etc.―who surreptitiously pulls the strings behind the curtains, proffering intentional clues concealed in chocolate bonbons for the most astute of his audience to decode at their leisure. cryptonymy, in cohen’s usage, in other words, is not a psychosis. 6 cohen comments how “in surpassing metonymy en route to the real or ‘the thing,’ žižek unwittingly returns to metaphor, much as in superseding the signifier he invokes a ‘sign’ that contains in itself the ‘answer of the real.’ in moving ‘beyond’ one form of signifying practice he only moves to another, and triggers regressions to suspect or precritical figures: metaphor, or what might translate his use of ‘sign,’ symbol” (war machines, 177). cohen also notes how as soon as “the problem of material signs” returns in žižek, they generate a crisis of reading that produce symptomatic “sinthomes” which, while intended to break with “a merely intersubjective model,” end up inverting and perpetuating its “theological model.” see war machines, 175-78. b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 108 cryptonymic “paranoia” is something entirely different whose distance from psychotic paranoia can be summed up in this way: to the extent that the psychotic is haunted by an other whose malevolent traces she detects in the most seemingly innocent of scenes, it is always a complete other who pre-exists the psychotic subject (even as it assumes new shapes and guises to try to trap the canny psychotic). in cryptonymic paranoia, on the other hand, the other is definitively incomplete. it is, accordingly, the other’s lack the cryptonymist seeks out, pressing as he does against the weak spots in the other’s structural foundations, tapping for hidden passages between seemingly solid symbolic walls in which to plant his pulverizing bombs. hence although both psychotics and cryptonymists operate in some sense on the outskirts of the law, their psychic structures (and hence strategems of “political” resistance) are completely different. to use lacanian terms now to pick up some speed, insofar as the psychotic “forecloses” the master signifier―the phallus, the cut of castration, the original marker of difference―she inhabits a purely imaginary world. the symbolic, with its life-sustaining metaphor is out of bounds for her such that every signifier immediately―that is to say, unmediatedly―points back to a small other, the inevitable persecuting figure with whom she engages in a life or death struggle for mastery. with the cryptonymist, however, it is not a question of foreclosing the cut of the phallic signifier but, rather, of creating new shapes out of the representational fabric that his unbuttoning of our habitual symbolic quilting points has worked loose. the two volumes of hitchcock’s cryptonymies formalize this two-pronged strategy rather neatly: first, secret agents―the uncovering of the hidden meanings, codes, secret messages that will blow up the official regime of the book. then, war machines: the war that ensues over who will control the symbolic reconstruction (as well as its imaginary/aesthetic re-upholstering) and, in the process, determine the coming definition of “history.” let us take a closer look at one such “cryptonymic” reading, the eighth chapter from secret agents, on hitchcock’s sabotage, where the territory contested is precisely the future of words, letters, reading and where the warring parties are none other than literature (in the classical allegorical form of the british seventeenth century poet edmund spenser referenced in detective ted spenser’s name) and cinema (the bijou theater in whose anterooms the anarchist verloc plots his terrorist assault on london). but if one imagines this a merely formal or aesthetic contest between two competing and soon to be obsolete media, i must warn in advance that the ultimate stakes of this war will be nothing less than the constitution of “the human” and, more generally, of “life” itself. the sabotage plot, in both senses of the word, revolves around a conspiracy to blow up picadilly circus, named several times in the film as “the center of the world.” instigated by a “certain foreign power,” the terrorist act is to be carried out by carl verloc (oskar homolka) who exploits a movie theater as a front for his terrorist plans. verloc is married to “mrs v” (sylvia sydney) whose principal romantic interest in him seems to be the fact that he is kind to and looks after her little brother stevie. b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 109 stevie himself is a bumbling preteen who, in what would be an unthinkable move in the logic of ordinary representational narrative (that is, the narrative logic of “the book”) is blown up by the bomb verloc has him carry into london. hovering at the fringes of this strangely inert and desexualized family is the detective ted spenser who tries to inveigle his way into mrs v’s affections by posing as a neighborly greengrocer in an attempt to get closer to and hopefully to interfere with verloc’s terrorist plans. cohen does not find it difficult to see in sabotage an allegory of hitchcock’s filmmaking practice of the time. released in 1936, at the end of the filmmaker’s “british period,” sabotage is found to reflect a certain impasse or deadlock confronting the director who, like verloc’s first attempt at causing a politically disruptive event that opens the movie, generates merely entertainment out of his cinematic “bombs.” people simply laugh when the lights go out in verloc/hitchock’s initial filmic act(s) of sabotage. to hit effectively at the state will require more overt, “sturdier” acts of terror if one is to keep ahead of the official regime’s seemingly infinite ability to enfold and colonize potentially revolutionary activity back into its existing armature by deeming it mere play, “aesthetic.” hitchcock’s solution to this impasse, as cohen notes, is simply to speed up, to accelerate. in sabotage, we are given a film that begins with an ending (a blackout), a “family” that has been cut off in advance from any reproductive promise, a female love interest whose asexual screen presence in her sailor boy outfit compromises in advance all of ted’s attempts to fold her allegorically into conventional romantic narratives. failing the anticipated love story, we have what might otherwise be an alternative narrative interest in the boy stevie but he is, as i said, astonishingly blown up. as cohen puts it, in sabotage hitchcock “suspends ‘suspense’” itself (secret agents, 149), that is, he suspends the temporal dimension of narrative that traditionally powers the representational engine in the regime of the book. hence time, according to cohen, is one of the key figures that hitchcock attacks in this film with his cinematic “time-bombs.” the other is nothing less than definition itself, whether of the meaning of “sabotage” or “act” or, meta-reflexively, the definition of definition. the film’s opening titles of the dictionary entry on “sabotage” bring this “problem of semantics” to center stage: (mech. shoe or armature of pile, boring-rod, &c. hence sa-boted (-od_ a [[f. cf. satae shoe, stym. dub] sa-botage, sa-bo-tarj. willful destruction of buildings or machinery with the object or alarming a group of persons or inspiring public uneasiness. sa-bre (-er), n. & v.t. cavalry sword with a curved blade (the s., military . . . to raise the question of definition in this way is to launch an assault on words and their meanings comparable to verloc’s bombs, claims cohen. as he puts it, “by displaying in advance a dictionary definition of sabotage, hitchcock puts the word, its definition, and definition itself, in question. words are all sabots, ‘mech[anical] b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 110 shoes’ (says the barely legible opening text) or steps, suggesting by their dismemberment another definition (of definition)” (secret agents, 153). the principal definition sabotage will call into question, the word the film will “sabotage,” will be “life.” in a series of moves traceable back to a more recognizable form of deconstruction, cohen identifies a number of cross-overs between seeming binary oppositions, showing how what appeared to be a firm distinction between two opposites collapses under scrutiny. the first of these is the border separating man from animal found, for example, in the aquarium sequence where the explosion of picadilly circus is imaged onto a fish tank that, serving as he says as a “deanthropomorphizing screen,” displaces “the human” as such (secret agents, 156). next, the division between the sexes will be called into question when, in the same sequence, we overhear a man commenting to his girlfriend how “after laying a million eggs the female oyster changes her sex.” the existence of this “counternatural ‘nature’―a sabotaging within the premise of natural signs and generation” (secret agents, 156)―accordingly cuts off “generation at its source,” revealing “nature” to cohen as “another front” (secret agents, 156), whose creatures “are examples of technicity, animation, changelings belonging to a proactive mimesis without model or copy, a semiophysical morphing―that is, what is fully dissociative from the ‘human’ archive” (secret agents, 156-7). last, cohen interrogates the border separating organic and inorganic “life” by way of an analysis of the famous disney cartoon sequence that takes place just after mrs verloc has heard of stevie’s death. featuring a bird drawn to look like mae west, the cartoon performs the musical number, “who killed cock robin?” the first thing cohen notes is something very odd about mrs. v’s laughter while she watches the film; it seems distinctly hysterical, “hallucinatory”―cohen calls it “homeric” (secret agents, 159). distinct from the “aesthetic” laughter that accompanied verloc’s first attempt at sabotage, cohen sees mrs. v’s convulsive laughter heralding a catastrophic morphing of both animal and human into sheer graphematicity. watching the cartoon, mrs. v. is thus like us, hitchcock’s filmgoing public, viewing a “sheer phenomenalization of form” (160), says cohen, whose “spectral animation” produces a “life” that is nothing but a “sheerly technical script” (160). the arch figure cohen finds for this in sabotage is the shorthand a reporter uses to note down the name of the film stevie was carrying when the time-bomb went off. cohen observes how “the reporter records the film’s title, bartholomew the strangler, but he does so in shorthand as the camera watches the paper fill with unreadable squiggles―figural traces neither mimetic nor letteral” (151). these “squiggles,” cohen claims, trope “the graphematics of sabotage itself: seemingly mimetic, a mere recording action, it is yet a mode of sheer graphematics whose implications cannot at once be read or accessed” (158). traced back to such “squiggles,”―nothing but pure form―hitchcockian cinema empties out all existing definitions of “life,” “nature,” the “human,” “gender,” “sex,” “agency,” “memory,” “personification,” “identity,” “the archive,” “home,” “the family,” “the state”; in a word, “aura”―to use the benjaminian concept that serves b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 111 cohen as an umbrella term―along with the aesthetic-ideological program embodied, or rather, seemingly embodied in the era of the book. ♦ ♦ ♦ given the scale and virtuosity of cohen’s cryptonymic readings, it seems perhaps a little churlish to take him to task but this is nevertheless what i am compelled to do. for what i am about to say reaches into the heart of a central difficulty when assessing the respective “political” efficacy of psychoanalytic and deconstructive stratagems.7 let me repeat my earlier assertion: the war of reinscription is sexuation. cohen’s immediate response to this statement would likely be to say that, like rothman, i have slipped back into the aesthetic program of the book, insofar as i am attributing content to what is purely a formal event or disinscription, as he ultimately names it, a little unwillingly, at the end of war machines (war machines, 263). (recall how for rothman the bar series is associated with “sexual fear and the specific threat of loss or control or breakdown.”) yet this is far from what i mean for the simple reason that sexuation, understood in the psychoanalytic sense, has nothing to do with the attribution of content (whether biological or social) but rather, quite literally, with form. let me put it as unambiguously as possible: the cut of (dis)inscription is the sexuating act. or again, there is no inscription that is not sexed because the cut is always a phallic cut. i would like now to fast-forward to the second volume, war machines, for it is here we find cohen’s most extended meditation on the cut, whose most powerful formalization is detected in hitchcock’s the birds. in the terrorizing starlings, cohen discovers “a cut, a black hole or zero converted into proactive assault” (war machines, 139) that, pecking out eyes, assaults the entire ocularcentric program. for the cryptonymist, it is as if the eviscerating techno-linguistic program of which all of the other animemes are mere phenomenalizations shatters into digital points and now, bent on destruction, returns as sheer avenging marks and cuts (although in the name of what blind “justice” we will never know). hence, far from being the avatars of an avenging “nature” or, in another nod to žižek, tippi hedren’s sexuality, the birds for cohen are allied with the pulverizing of any possible “interpretation” and attribution of content, that is, of every possible re-citation within existing signifying networks. attacking the schoolhouse, the key site of cultural transmission, cohen finds the birds “interrupt[ing] human programming at the site of collective memorization, inscription” (war machines, 151). such dematerializing inscriptions 7 i am implicitly following the distinction alain badiou makes between le politique and la politique in peut-on penser la politique? ed pluth glosses the difference thus: “the political [le politique] is characterized by consensus building and the achievement of an adequate representation of the will of the people,” whereas “politics” [la politique] must be thought of as “something that does not fit into the kinds of social connections (representations) sought after by the political.” it is the second sense of politics [la politique] i intend to reference here. see ed pluth, signifiers and acts (albany: suny press, 2007) 149. b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 112 are nothing but technicity itself, “flying cuts [that] precede and supercede any epoch of the book past or to come as if en route to, and in excess of, a coming digital culture” (war machines, 154). anterior to “nature,” these terrorist technomemes thus also assault reproduction in its most mythological and fantasmatic form of sex as the ur-site of origin, taking with it an entire metaphorics based on distinctions between the organic and the inorganic, species and individual, genetics versus environment and so on, in the process. born not of sexual coupling but of graphematic cuts, the birds slice through “the idea of nature as natural, as the originary, as ground, as mother, as reference” (152) so efficiently as to “bar” any possible aesthetic relapse (155). still, and rather interestingly, such technomemes do appear to have some odd kind of derivation or “origin” in what cohen calls “the black hole of black holes” (war machines, 102) into which the various black cats and black suns and acephalic black birds emerge and disappear as if through fleeting worm holes. this inky black bog serves cohen as the prime site of the “prearchival, preoriginary ‘archival’ site, atopos” called in psycho, “mother” (war machines, 92), even if this is a “mother” who voids “all origins [and] transforms genealogical procedures” (war machines, 94). cohen likens this “mother,” or rather “mothers,” (war machines, 253) to the derridean khora, an “(a)material site or atopos of inscription before all phenomenality” (94) where language, letters “disaggregate into their composite of inscriptions.” although initially apparently femininely gendered, “mother,” in cohen’s usage, presents precisely a neutral non-site of sheer anteriority into which all of the binary oppositions spawned by a certain enlightenment tradition dissolve, including and especially the original marker of difference itself, sex. hence cohen’s descriptions of “mother” as “detached from romance or sex” (war machines, 78), “not necessarily a she, not of a gendered binary or origin” (war machines, 77). accordingly, at the very heart of the ocularcentric program, cohen uncovers a (non-)figure who evacuates the entirety of what “she,” as the key embodiment of cultural transmission, generation, family, origin, nature, earth, and so on, once was thought to represent. in the repetition “mother/mother” (heard in the children’s chant in marnie: “mother, mother i am ill”), one inaudibly shifts backwards from mother (as maternal figure, both gendered and sexed) to mother with a capital m whose three triangles in her letter disarticulate―triangulate―all binary divisions such as male and female, man and woman. to enable us to hear this desexualization, cohen frequently refers to mother as “it,” in which we must also recognize the most reduced and stripped down version of the bar series. desexing “mother” in this way, cohen goes a long way towards exploding one of the common myths in certain strains of gender theory which holds that sex is a socially constructed difference and can thus be attacked on the symbolic level (that is, by performing different symbolic meanings). by identifying sexual difference as a purely formal, that is, letteral difference, cohen in fact shows up performative gender theory as the chiefly imaginary (rather than symbolic) strategy that it is. for when we play with and “perform” the signifiers of gender (in the sense of socially coded meanings), b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 113 we invariably invest them with content―content that admittedly may go some way towards reorganizing relations of power within the existing symbolic system. however, because it is imaginarily attached to the signifiers for which it produces signifieds, performative gender theory is unable to undertake genuine changes at the structural level, for this demands a conception of sexual difference as a purely formal difference. cohen is, in fact, very close to this formal (psychoanalytic) conception of sex as a certain relation to the signifier as such (rather than to its imaginary signifieds) when he locates sexual difference at the level of the letter. in his fourth chapter in war machines, cohen engages in his most detailed discussion of sex and gender which revolves around the figure of mae west. in it, i find the most exacting and illuminating account i have yet read of one side of the feminine subjective position as it is condensed in lacan’s formulas of sexuation. as is well-known, in lacan masculine and feminine identities are decided by the distinction of having or being the phallus (which, one recalls, is not the penis but the signifier of lack. biological men can be feminine subjects just as readily―if not as easily―as biological women can be masculine subjects). to “have” the phallus is to be marked by lack as a masculine subject, whereas to “be” the phallus, as a feminine subject, is to embody lack itself. with admirable subtlety, cohen interrogates this feminine “being” of the phallus in the shape of mae west, the “‘female’ female impersonator” whose “copying” of woman reveals a fault in the mimetic program of western metaphysics. for as a woman in drag, “mae west” can never reference an “original” woman without revealing how this original is already a repetition, a mask or pantomime over whose interior void the integument of a heterosexual norm has stretched and spread itself. “how long,” cohen asks, “for how many centuries or millennia, has ‘woman’ been this, a performative effect of another’s eye mimed within its own prosthetics, an impersonation of another as itself which supplants any original it claimed to be reciting inversely?” (war machines, 71). to avoid any misunderstanding that all cohen is doing is rehearsing the familiar trope of gender as a performative category, at this point one must recall how in sabotage mae west was allied with cinematic animation. as the object of masculine desire, the mae west “bird” inflates and contracts in sync with the trilling notes of cock robin’s wooing serenade in the disney sequence. yet as her cartoon stature cannot fail but bring home to us, this “performance” is based on nothing that has its source in the natural world. “mae west”―woman―is simply a projection of recurring marks (cohen called them “squiggles”) whose illusion of “life” is owed solely to the speed at which they flit through the masculine desiring light-apparatus to become projected onto an imaginary bodily surface or “screen.” such squiggles or inscriptions are quite literally “nothing” which, if we hear in this word the psychoanalytic term “lack,” we find a persuasive way of understanding lacan’s famous statement, “ woman does not exist”:  being the phallus, that is, the purely b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 114 formal, that is, letteral inscription of difference, she has no actual existence, no “life” beyond what is (imaginarily) projected onto her purely symbolic frame. for this reason, then, any change one might think one creates by reassigning different content to these projections (through their “queering” or through gender inversion) remains purely aesthetic (that is, of the order of the imaginary). genuine “political” change, on the other hand, must take place at the level of symbolic inscription itself, which i emphasize is not of the order of symbolic or socially coded meanings but, rather, of the cut itself. a choice of a masculine or a feminine subjectivity comes down to the way one permits the cut of castration to be carved into one’s psyche. as i said previously, cohen’s is a deeply illuminating discussion of one aspect of the feminine position, but where i cannot follow him―or rather, find it unnecessary to follow him―is in his next move, which is to ascribe an unsexuated status to the (non-)site of this (dis)inscriptive process cohen follows hitchcock in calling “mother.” for i am convinced that the cut is always, inevitably a phallic cut to the extent that it is necessarily a representation. cohen himself seems to allow this point when he asks if anything precedes this prosthetic “woman” who emerges from a “male-shaped discourse,” troped tellingly, perhaps, in the filmmaker’s first “talkie,” blackmail, as originating from a policemen’s restroom, that is, in the toilet of the law. as cohen puts it, “a certain order of ‘talk’ is homosocially and male inscribed” (war machines, 71). to put it quickly now, my sense is that cohen’s insistence that “mother” must present as a non-sexuated concept is what drives him into a neo-schellingian language of progressively more archaic figures―the “prephenomenal,” the “prehistorial,” the “preoriginary,” etc.―that, for all of the careful and subtle nuancing that cohen gives them, could nevertheless be vulnerable to the very charge he levels at žižek: that the thing, the real, the “khora,” mother―however we wish to name it―occupies an anti-space, a bubbling non-site beyond or outside, or at the very least prior to the limits of the symbolic. the chief reason cohen needs to rhetorically resort to this “reverse aufhebung,” i submit, is because he uncharacteristically misses something crucial about sexual difference itself which, as joan copjec never fails to remind us, is not a binary opposition.8 it is only when man and woman are conceived as two opposing or contradictory halves that we need to seek out a “third” position, an “it” that would be “prior” to an enlightenment program founded on the oppositions of light/dark, self/other, human/animal, literature/cinema, man/woman and so on. understood, however, as two different modes of failure (to assume a full identity, for there to be a sexual relation), the problem disappears, for if man and woman are not binary oppositions engaged in an imaginary struggle for mastery, there is no need to seek recourse either in the reconciliatory, aestheticizing tropes of 8 see for example joan copjec, “m/f, or not reconciled,” in the woman in question, ed. parveen adams and elizabeth cowie (cambridge, ma.: mit press, 1990) 10-18. see also her chapter “sex and the euthanasia of reason” (from which the graph of the formulas of sexuation has also been adapted) in read my desire: lacan against the historicists (cambridge, mass.: mit press, 1994). b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 115 love and marriage that furnish the “universal reading room,” or in cohen’s reverse hegelianism―the positing of an archaic non-site of disinscription that destroys this binary logic before it even “begins.” as i stated, to my mind there can be no cut, no inscription that is not already sexed, for any act of representation always takes place, by definition, within the sphere of the phallically-drawn symbolic. nor can there be any voluntary opt-out clause from this phallic economy, at least if we wish to speak and become part of a community of subjects. hence the definitions of masculine and feminine are inevitably subject to phallically-drawn definitions (such as “having” or “being” the phallus). but while lacan’s famous “formulas of sexuation” proposed in his encore seminar expose the impossibility of ever escaping being defined by the phallus, we must recall that they define sexual difference each time not in one but two ways. masculine side feminine side __ __ __ ∃ x φ x ∃ x φ x __ ∀x φ x ∀x φ x there is at least one x that is not submitted to the phallic function all x’s are (every x is) submitted to the phallic function there is not one x that is not submitted to the phallic function not all (not every) x is submitted to the phallic function. table 1: lacan's formulas of sexuation the left-hand side requires little in the way of explanation, describing as it does the masculine logic of the founding exception, the one who, in escaping the phallic law, serves as its ultimate support. an entire literature has been based on this romance logic whose purest form, implicitly cited in the figure of detective ted spenser in sabotage, is often thought to be edmund spenser’s allegorical poem the faerie queene.9 we have already seen cohen devoting his unfailing energies to the deconstruction of this logic that he tropes through the regime of the book. on the 9 amusing evidence of spenser’s place in the english romance tradition is found in anthony trollope’s archaic miss thorne who regards the allegorical poet as “the purest type of her country’s literature,” see barchester towers ( london: penguin, 1994) 189. b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 116 feminine side, however, we read the following: there is not one feminine subject that is not subject to the phallic function; nevertheless, not all are subject to the phallic function―two contrary statements that i am tempted to gloss thus: although there is not one cut that is not phallically drawn (insofar as woman, “being” the phallus, strictly speaking does not “exist” as cohen already so aptly demonstrated. as the phallus, woman “is” nothing but the pure lack that is inscription, the very cut itself), this is not to say, with the other side of the formula, that there would therefore be one cut that escapes the cut (as is the case in the masculine logic). rather, i gloss it as saying the cut is itself cut from within. how do you cut a cut? this sounds like a very odd proposition, but it has in fact a fairly simple answer. in what is starting to sound a bit like a phallic parlor game of paper, scissors, stone (which incidentally formalizes the lacanian triad rather well―paper/imaginary, scissors/symbolic and stone/real), the cut of (symbolic) inscription is itself “cut” by the “stone” phallus of the real. i propose, in other words, to take hitchcock at his word when he calls “mother,” mother. for this real phallus, this medusa that freezes all symbolic binaries and turns its inscriptive cuts to stone pillars is the maternal phallus, the very same maternal phallus that haunts and torments the psychotic throughout all of her paranoid delusions. but we can now see the key difference between the psychotic and a neurotic’s paranoia (which, as freud points out, is frequently indistinguishable from psychosis in its earliest flowerings10). herself uncut by castration, the psychotic misreads the maternal phallus as a fullness, a complete other―that is to say, she mistakes the “not all” of woman for the masculine exception. the psychotic, in other words, makes a sexual category error when, on hearing the double negative “there is not one woman that is not subject to the phallic function” she draws from its contrary a positive statement. as we know from the most elementary mathematical logic, however, a double negative does not produce a positive: a lack of lack doesn’t necessarily imply a plenitude.11 what cohen, on the other hand, albeit without naming it as such, enables us to see is how, intersecting every symbolically-drawn inscription, maternal phallus ceaselessly slices and dices the phallic cut from the inside. the neurotic is perfectly right, then, to feel paranoid since what this implies is a certain vertigo that comes from finding every fixed point, every ground, every handle or grip, every definition and orienting “quilting point” melting away not so much like quicksand but sandstone beneath our fingers, a devouring dissolve that never stops eating away at every law and limit, including and most especially the dividing line between “life” and “death.” subatomic mater, it is with good reason we run as fast as we can from her into the arms 10 freud observes how the onset of a psychosis resembles that of neurosis. see his account of the schreber case, “psychoanalytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoids),” standard edition 12, trans. james strachey (london: hogarth, 1978) 3-82, .esp. 49 and 56-7n.3. 11 in contrast to classical mathematical logic, intuitionist logic requires only a proof of noncontradiction in the contrary of a double negative statement. b o o k r e v i e w : hitchcock’s cryptonymies s1 (2008): 117 of the paternal metaphor, for there is no castrating cut he can inflict that could possibly be as bad. on the failed honeymoon in marnie that seems to ironically mime the lacanian phrase “there is no sexual relation,” sean connery tells tippi hedren about a species of insect called “phatid bugs” who “escape the eyes of hungry birds by living and dying in the shape of a flower.” these bugs, i suggest, illustrate the logic of the maternal phallus. tiny little living points, they gather into imaginary floral clusters to deceive the soaring graphematic cuts of cinematic deconstructions which, like hitchcockian birds or roving nazgul, remain to their peril blind to beauty and insensitive to love. trusting that even if detected, such sauronic agents of what cohen calls “cinema” will take them for one of their own―that is, nothing but “pure” cuts, the formal inscription of sexual difference (as the reproductive organs of plants)―these tiny beating units of jouissance hide in full view of the symbolic law. intersecting inscription at every point, such living, pulsating, feminine jouissance discovers its securest and most effective site from which to launch its corrosive attack in the enveloping petals of the aesthetic and the confabulating leaves of the book. hence my parting shot: by situating “mother’s” de-auratic powers in a non-sexuated, non-site associated with pure techné, cohen risks losing sight of the “aesthetic” origin of de manian mater-ial vision in which word we must also hear the insistent buzzing or humming of a specifically feminine jouissance. nevertheless, one of the supreme values of cohen’s achievement lies in the way he decisively counters a disturbing tendency one occasionally finds in lacanian readings to ascribe an almost transcendental status to this “other jouissance,” as lacan calls it, associated as it is with the jouissance of female saints, or an absolute other that might be mistaken for a religious concept. for by identifying it precisely as inscription or “writing,” cohen rightly re-situates this incomprehensible, in-scene (as opposed to her obscene paternal counter-part) mother of enjoyment right in the bones of the symbolic itself: mother, a living if not necessarily breathing écriture, a dna marrow of sheer enjoyment that traverses every phenomenal form and dissolves all symbolic definitions from within. for this mother, what we call “birth” and “death” are irrelevant. far stranger and more dreadful than any possible technicity is this “life” that transects all divisions of speciation, re-marking an “i” that is not so much an other as a multiple: we, the uncounted and perhaps uncountable communities of interconnected sub-dermal ecosystems in the cycles of whose flowerings a paranoid neurotic might briefly rest and refuel. jambet-s2-2009 s j o u r n a l o f t h e j a n v a n e y c k c i r c l e f o r l a c a n i a n i d e o l o g y c r i t i q u e 2 ( 2 0 0 9 ) islam and psychoanalysis, edited by sigi jöttkandt and joan copjec editorial 2 cogito and the subject of arab culture julien maucade 6 to believe or to interpret jean-michel hirt 10 the veil of islam fethi benslama 14 jannah nadia tazi 28 four discourses on authority in islam christian jambet 44 the glow fethi benslama 62 dialogues translations of monotheisms fethi benslama and jean-luc nancy 74 the qur’an and the name-of-the-father keith al-hasani 90 reviews reading backwards: constructing god the impossible in psychoanalysis and the challenge of islam benjamin bishop 96 the powers of the negative: the mathematics of novelty benjamin noys 102 s is on the web at www.lineofbeauty.org c h r i s t i a n j a m b e t translated by sigi jöttkandt f o u r d i s c o u r s e s o n a u t h o r i t y i n i s l a m ike the other monotheistic religions, islam, in a sole act of faith, affirms the absolute unicity, transcendence and authority of god.1 psychoanalysis, which is what brings us back together again today, lends no support to any figure of unicity, position of transcendence, legitimacy of authority in itself. no reality is accorded to the one, if this number has pretensions to some kind of theological validity. unity, unicity, unification: these concepts, which we find at every stage of muslim thought, are held by psychoanalysis to be imaginary. no transcendence, if the real is the real of the unconscious. no legitimation of authority of any kind, if it is true that psychoanalysis flushes out and desacralizes every form of the ideal ego. it ruins political belief, the belief in a subject supposed to know, who would unveil the truth in action and determine justice within the political bond. psychoanalysis sustains propositions inverse to those of monotheism, for the same reasons it critiques the political conception of the world. how could a practice and a doctrine, freud’s, which aims to liberate the subject of identifications from representations of collective mastery, allow for an identification that founds the faithful’s collective link to their scriptural revelation? l freud deduced two propositions about the status of religion from his conception of the unconscious. for freud, religion can be taken back to an obsessional neurotic representation of the law, guaranteeing an illusion of a brilliant future. religious illusion, precisely symmetrical to the imaginary inflation of the paternal figure, is not unlike revolutionary illusion. revolutionary illusion condenses elements from two mirages, those of the political and the religious illusions. without any exaggeration, one could say that freud discredits all revolutionary discourse for the same reasons he made religious hope an illusion. freud sought to dissipate what he held to be illusion, while explaining its power and the necessity of its rule. this is why psychoanalysts who have sought to account for the meaning and depth of islam have had difficulties finding their marks. are they referring to a group of imaginary representations that to a greater or lesser extent structure the discourse of the 1 originally published as “quartre discours de l’authorité en islam” in la psychanalyse dans le monde arabe et islamique, ed. chawki azouri and elisabeth roudinesco (beirut: presses de l’université saint-joseph) 39-63. translated with kind permission of the pusj. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 2 (2009): 44-61 j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 45 analyst? would they submit the dogmas of this religion to a freudian interpretation? in both cases, they treat as a miscognition something that the believer, to the contrary, holds to be the real par excellence, god, the unique, whose speech heralds a promise and issues commandments, the essential conditions of salvation. exposing the causes of such a belief, they force truth’s appearance to vanish. but in so doing, do psychoanalysts not dodge the proper mode of existence of the religious phenomenon? in revealing the truth of the unconscious, the truth that belief represses and consciously modifies, do they not neglect the ontological stakes of truth to which belief testifies? but in consenting to such a positioning of the religious problem, would they not have to renounce freud? introducing psychoanalysis to the muslim world is a noble ideal, evocative of the enlightenment. does it not possess the same weakness, always characteristic of the aufklärung, the division of truth between a consciousness that analyzes its illusions and an objective real stripped of all certainty? is it a question of summoning muslims to an analytic praxis whose axioms are atheist? the analysand will have ceased to believe absolutely, such that his or her certainty of faith appears, finally, only as a subjective certainty, and no longer as objective truth, such that the truth of the faithful is reduced to the truth of his or her conscience, to his or her singular anchoring in the truth of the unconscious. this is essential, if analytic praxis is not to be reduced to an inoffensive psychotherapy. but if the testimony of the revealed truth holds firm, not the subject’s truth but the objective truth of god’s speech, how will one grant the analyst his well-known paradoxical authority, which throws the discourses on authority into turmoil? speaking here as a philosopher and not as a psychoanalyst, my question is not whether the various contents of the muslim faith are true or illusory, or whether or not the enlightenment ideal is preferable to these dogmas. even if the notion of truth, the concept of truth, were to merit a more profound examination here, it is enough to admit, as a provisional postulate, that the dogmas of the muslim religion correspond to what kant, rightly, maintained is one of the fundamental constitutions of man, without which, neither moral questions, nor the most basic questions of subsistence could sustain themselves. kant resumes his account of the enduring question of hope in the christian heritage and demonstrates its connection with faith. if philosophical critique could only make hope in a sovereign good vanish from the horizon of reason and freedom of the moderns, it remains a fortiori at the heart of reason and liberty in the foreign thought systems of this modern reason. our intention, in the following, is not to decide in favor of freud’s irreducible atheism nor, on the contrary, of the philosophies that accord some weight of truth to religious phenomena. philosophy and psychoanalysis both accord the greatest importance to the status of authority and, more specifically, to the following question: which subject is supposed to decide what constitutes legitimate authority? without pretending to an exhaustive inquiry, such is the question we wish to pose here regarding authority in islam. let us begin, then, with several elementary observations. islam is often presented, correctly, as a legalistic religion. however, to translate the expression “al-sharîa’a” with “the law” does not clarify the meaning given to this term. to understand by this the exercise of jurisprudence would be to forget that the j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 46 legislation elaborated by the major juridical schools, sunni or shî’ite, is not the whole of the law and even less the whole of religion, but only a part of them. it would be to neglect the horizon of the law, without which the law loses all meaning, namely, eschatology. belief in the day of judgment, hope in just retribution, god’s satisfaction and what the faithful receive in return are the ultimate reasons and first notions of the mohammedan revelation. on the other hand, like all religion, islam poses the question of being in its own way. who has the right to be? what is the authentically subsisting being? what is it to be? without examining religion from an ontological perspective, one inevitably misses the seriousness of that religion; it is reduced to a number of superstitions, rites and modes of obedience that have nothing at stake. the law may well lie at the heart of a revelation that offers a number of commandments one must respect. but it is not the whole of revelation. before it prescribes, and in order for its prescriptions to be authoritative, the revelation states what the real is, existence par excellence, and who the real is. it is from this decision that touches the real, the division between the real and the unreal, that the law draws its authority. consequently, it is worth keeping the distinction between the three terms―revelation, law, jurisprudence―in mind. hope, which is a revealed certainty for islam, is expressed in numerous apocalyptic verses in the qur’an, heralding the day of judgment, paradise and hell. it is intrinsically bound to the presentation of human nature, the fitra or original conception of man. this original nature is that of a respondent. in the seventh sura, al-’a’raf, which is a condensation of the entire prophetic revelation, a celebrated verse states, “when thy lord drew forth from the children of adam―from their loins―their descendants, and made them testify concerning themselves, (saying): ‘am i not your lord (who cherishes and sustains you)?’―they said: ‘yea! we do testify!’ (this), lest ye should say on the day of judgment: ‘of this we were never mindful’ (7: 172).2 what constitutes man, the thing that confers him with both original, non-adulterated, authentic existence and suitable essence is testimony, often called the “primordial pact.” testament to divine lordship, man is fundamentally a servant, al-’abd, according to a definition that retains biblical connotations, insofar as it contains an eminent dignity in the idea of divine service that the angels themselves have no part in. is the messiah not announced in the biblical prophecy of the “suffering servant”? in the highly complex notion of “servant,” we find obedience to the law, of course, but also all that it circumscribes, interprets and amplifies in eschatological meanings or spiritual variations. we must now recall this fundamental relation between the servant and the master so as to illuminate the difficulty one encounters in approaching the question of authority in islam. are our conceptions of auctoritas entirely adequate to the concepts at stake here? i do not think so. they rely too much on the structures of public law and christian political theology, on the legacy of roman law and the reforms carried to these structures, both by the doctrines of natural law and its adversaries. if one is looking for an equivalent to authority in terms such as al-ri’asa, the political commandment, al-sultân, political and religious power, or al-molk, royal authority, one restricts one’s field of examination to the phenomena of authority. the 2 the holy qur’an, trans. yusuf ali. j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 47 use of the unique term, “authority,” seems to me to be legitimate and essential only on two conditions: to greatly expand this concept and, consequently, grant it a large number of different meanings; to define authority in its most generally accepted form: as the legitimacy accorded by the faithful to that which is for them the correct interpretation of revealed speech. far preferable to looking exclusively to juridical devices, the question of authority, taken in this sense, enables the psychoanalyst to penetrate the thickets of islamic religious discourses with greater clarity and distinction. it seems to me that the first move of the psychoanalyst, the first impulse, which involves a certain familiarity with freud, is not always the best. often, it reduces the complexity of islamic obedience to a love of the law, in the sense of the catholic obedience distilled by pierre legendre according to the schema of a “love of the censor.” such a reduction presupposes an implicit juridical definition of the law. now, despite the apparent synonymy that the french language introduces, it is not true that the law of islam is ipso facto a juridical representation of religion. its ordinary meaning is much more expansive, and it enables one to understand how the subject is determined by the juridical interpretation of more complex legalistic injunctions, and what the stakes are between the law and non-juridical norms. beginning from this false step, the psychoanalyst cannot help but err: he will want to subject the stakes of the relations between the servant and his master to this love for the law, for the deciphered sharî’a exclusively in terms of the discourse of jurisprudence. either law will be the truth of islam and its diverse forms of nonjuridical spirituality relegated to an unessential “interior” religion, or this interior religion will pass as superior to external religion, that which determines legislation. whichever we choose, we will subject exterior religion and interior religion to a logical relation between two terms that are mutually exclusive. this scenario exists, of course, but it is not unique, general, prevalent. those who reduce the essential core of the law to jurisprudence, like those who challenge all “legalistic” approaches in the study of spiritual phenomena, agree on a common postulate, what it means, without doubt, to put it in question. we risk becoming victims of polysemy, the word “law” meaning “scriptural revelation,” “norms of behavior and thought,” “divine commandments,” “human jurisprudence deduced from revelation. one would do well to recognize that variations in the meaning of expressions “al-shar’” or “alsharî’a” often authorize such homonymic effects. to this disastrous impulse, i shall oppose a number of prudent arguments. sharî’a has concentric meanings. it designates, in its widest sense, the path traced by a brook, the path which leads to god. in this first meaning, sharî’a is not the discourse of legislation but the revealed guide to the prophet. sharî’a is identified with the right path, al-sirât al-mustaqim. we must therefore distinguish between norms of conduct, guidance, and jurisdiction. prophecy can be very strictly normative, without originarily being legal. it is the source of legality and of legitimacy without being anything other than a system of norms. it may well generate norms of behavior that will nevertheless aspire to be extra-legal, that is to say, which do not pretend to juridical speech. in another sense, by the force and authority acquired by the illustrious founders through precise historical conditions issuing from thousands of j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 48 sunni traditionalists, the integral sharî’a, which was first conceived as a divine knowledge (hikma), found itself identified with a rational exercise of juridical deduction, usûl al-fiqh. it is notable―to cite only one major example―that in his risâla, shafi’î maintains that the essential core of the book, the qur’an, lies in its naming of the “statutes,” in other words, the juridical articulations of the divine law. that it makes the contents of knowledge from the science of these “divine statutes,” and from this knowledge all authentic jurisdictional illumination of the heart of the faithful. shafi’î interprets the pact of adoration that binds the servant to his lord in the following way: obligations, devotions instituted by the qur’anic letter, duties imposed by the prophet, the obligation to make one’s own ruling (ijtihâd). to speak of obligation, is it to speak of law (droit)? yes, but on two conditions: first, that obligation is the concept translating the sovereignty of the divine commandment; second, that the jurist is the subject who expresses the meaning (bayân) of this obligation. shafi’î contends that the knowing jurist is entitled to explain these four categories of adoration, of the worship rendered to god. it makes the jurist the preeminent authority, institutes a hermeneutic filter for the book, of the sunna of the prophet and the practice of ijtihâd. the inversion is striking: sharî’a, reduced to revealed “statutes” and rationales of muslim law, has become the foundation of hikma, of knowledge and expresses the totality, in the space which contains wisdom, as one of its regions, the juridical statutes. to comprehend knowledge as adequating to the integral revelation accorded to the prophet as essentially constituted through duties and obligations is to prepare the ground for juridical interpretation in this precise sense: the jurist will, more than others, have access to the true meaning, prescriptive of the book and of the law. such is the decision of the discourse of the jurist’s authority. it appears only to state what the book is, what the sunna is, what ijtihâd is, and doing so, seems to say nothing other than what the theologians, mystics of other readers of the qur’ran say. but through the turn it gives to the reading of duties and obligations, it surreptitiously introduces a juridical turn that has a very precise function: to situate eminent authority in the jurist himself. today, it passes as self-explanatory, for a selfengendered reality. it is permitted as such by a number of exegetes, it governs the reflexes of certain psychoanalysts. thus its genealogy is forgotten, its history occulted, and its validity sacralized. now, there is no shortage of counter interpretations. one will not be surprised to find them in spiritual exegeses of the qur’an above all. thus, hikma, knowledge, is considered something much greater than sharî’a, which constitutes a degree, but only a degree, seldom the most elevated. another imprudent reflex: it is often said that in islam, political power and authority are not distinguished from each other, and neither can be analyzed without the other. consequently, islam would necessarily be a political religion, and the interior life of the muslim would be governed by the exercise of a public worship indissociable from the organization of the state. now, we can make an objection to this representation, which has dominated the debates following its adoption by certain contemporary islamic political theories. it neglects numerous recognized authorities who by no means aspire to to be “political.” these non-political authorities are not without producing some effects, and consequently they are accompanied by a certain power. j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 49 but this power is reversible, it can have a secondary political facet and a principal non-political facet, or vice versa. both stakes must therefore be studied with precision. we can mention, for example, the figure of the master in the sufi brotherhoods or even certain paradoxical figures in the shi’îte theory of the imamat. at base, this reminds us that the chief historical fact, namely, prophecy, unifies a state by chance, but unifies a community by essence. if one speaks of the social effects of the muslim religion, the modes of religious authority in public life, one must employ the concept of community rather than that of the state. it would only be to illuminate the difficulties confronting the various muslim states following the confounding of the caliph with state power, in the delicate exercise of the two, often incompatible, functions: the government of men and of things, on the one hand, and the spiritual guidance of the community of the faithful, on the other. here, too, we should be attentive to the history of these concepts. political science, in classical islam, distributes itself across several disciplines, and it has never enjoyed the independence and unity that we encounter in the west since antiquity. one must recognize this, one comes across it a little everywhere: in certain philosophers, theologians, in the hadîth, in the writings of “councils,” in the poets or the authors of fables and stories, in the art of the novel, even in the mystics. dispersed and multiple, veiled and discreet as in the court poets, systematically in the philosophers, it is always a science of the foundation of authority, but often a moral reflection on the rules and exercise of power. it is thus not a matter of a general theory of the state but a reflection on the qualities and on the essence of the man of government. moreover, the state is not the indispensable horizon of these reflections, but only a step between the economy and the postulated universal human community “faithful to god.” downstream of the state, the refinement of moral rules, the counsel of good management; upstream of the state, the universal theory of guidance, the link between authority and truth. the political would only boil down to the image offered by our modern reflections on the sovereignty of the state. islam is not hobbesian. let us come to what pertains more specifically to the muslim city. when hellene philosophers study various political regimes, it is in platonic terms, respecting plato’s classifications, combined with the moral lessons of aristotle without the least bit drawn from experience. their object is not a theory of the islamic state but the refoundation, in an apparently muslim frame, of the institutions of justice bequeathed by the sages. there is no explanation of how the infidel state passes into the islamic state because the question does not arise, resolved by the facts, if one understands by this that the world where such a passage would be judged necessary does not exist at times when islam has legal preeminence, and the hostile world that surrounds it is entirely a foreign world, a world outside the world of political reflection. when the atheist is an exception, when the polytheist is a species on the way to extinction, how could one consider the necessity of the islamic state? one questions the essence of the perfect city, the perfect mode of consent between the classes, the political and spiritual guidance of the political man, the corruption of this model, etc. when it became obvious to fârâbî or to nasîr al-dîn tûsî that their thoughts concerned people already living in the dâr al-islam, their aim was to conceptualize the traits of a community ruled by justice and not the conditions under which an islamic state should be installed. it is today that the concept triumphs, on the ruins of a j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 50 community become improbable or “ideal,” like a strange fruit on the tree of western science, to which are grafted modern speculations issuing from the triumph of the jurist’s authority. no speculation, in the classical ages of islam, has ever treated the qur’an as if it pertained to a code of public law which replaced infidel constitutions. never, at least until the situation changed, when islamic territory appeared existentially threatened, until the supreme authority in public law, that of the caliph or the “keeper of the book” faded gravely or entirely, in short, until the contemporary revival of the solitary, and contested in its time, work of the great hanbalite reformer ibn taymmiya. it was necessary for the models of western political representation to be the occasion for rejection, belief and, consequently, the source of a new interrogation, in view of contesting this representation. thus it was that a political thought invited the faithful to an exclusive valorization of the qur’an in its literality and turned this literality, like that of the sunnah of the prophet, into a political code. a man such as al-ghazâlî would simply not be able to write in such an episteme. these are the sunni religious reformers of the 20th century, quickly followed by certain shî’ite intellectuals, who constructed a theological-political system where sharî’a, understood as the wise jurist’s reading of the qur’an, has pretensions to the status of the sovereign decision in matters of public law. it has often been rightly remarked that the shî’ite concept of “government by the wise jurist” strictly appropriate to the thesis that emerged from the sunni milieu according to which the qur’an must become the constitution of the state, is an innovation. this innovation of course has its history, which is that of the slow and sure appropriation of power by the jurists, to the detriment of the traditionalists, mystics, theologians and spiritual philosophers, to the detriment, also, and above all, of the great sovereign figures of the imamat. it has a reality: but no intrinsic sacrality in itself. it is strictly dependent on what it opposes, the modern political episteme, liberal philosophies of political representation, whereas the question of political representation, and thus its contestation, were incompatible with the classical islamic episteme. nothing of the least political consequence, in the modern sense of this term, is expressed in the qur’anic revelation of divine sovereignty. it is correct to say that only in god do authority and power make one, as certain theologians have had no difficulty in sustaining the thesis of the fundamental unity of the attributes of god: in him alone, science, the will and power essentially make one, distinguishing themselves from each other only in words (bi l-i’tibâr) and not in reality (bi lhaqîqat). but what about in man? more generally, how can the absolute sovereignty of god ever found the legitimacy of human authority? the hypothesis of a delegation, of a representation of the divine authority in human authority seems impossible a priori. no space opens up between the exercise of divine authority, revealed in prophetic speech, and that of the faithful servant’s obedience. nothing that resembles a minister or a pope, even less the secularization of religious authority under the leader of a sacralization of the political body. this apparent difficulty was not absent from islam’s situation at its origins. when compared with christianity, the contrasts are striking. whereas christianity has operated pretty much according to the schema of orthodoxy/heresy, one finds j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 51 nothing like this in islam. of the numerous heterodox christian currents, as numerous as they were, as resurgent and renascent as they appear, there was nothing in the theological desire for truth that was and remains a desire for orthodoxy in the ecclesiastical sense of the term. one can deplore or approve of this desire of the ecumenical councils, of the fathers and intellectuals, one can recall the violent excommunications of the theologians and christologians. one can mention the multiplicity of rites and beliefs. what remains is that the schema that orders this variety, that of orthodoxy, designating and stigmatizing heresy, is nothing other than the exercise of the truth in a precise context, that of the revelation of the set of divine truth and a way, a life and a truth that concentrates itself entirely in the figure of christ, opening the way to the incorporation of the truth. “who has seen me has seen the father”: the mediation between the hidden and the apparent, the divine world and the supersensible and the access to the divine is guaranteed by the fleshly manifestation of the word and the divine man in such a way that this incarnation is conducted in the mode of manifestation of the subject of the truth that is the “church.” there are no christian sects, but only expressions of the “church phenomenon,” as reduced and marginal as they may be. inversely, and even if the diverse currents of islam mutually refute and condemn, or even curse each other, if each has pretensions as the sole sect that will be saved at the day of judgment, this does not play out according to the schema of orthodoxy/heresy, because the problem is not, cannot be, that of the orthodox constitution of the church phenomenon, of a church as subject of truth. on this, islam presents an astonishing face to our inquiry. whatever the divisions that separate and oppose them, muslims today are conscious of belonging to the single and the same community. the multiplicity of beliefs does not affect this universality of the communal consciousness. unhappy consciousness, living the drama of the fitna, of discord, as a permanent drama. consciousness avid to make an end of things, and anxious to force an historical destiny that dooms it to an intolerable pluralism. among the simple faithful, this nostalgia for the lost unity encourages attachments to literalist preachings, which promote the return to the letter of the book and to the sunnah. which book? which sunnah? immediately the division returns, the one sole, inevitable fact of the interpretation of texts. depending on whether the corpus of the sunnah is constituted by this master of truth or that, sunnite or shi’ite, we will have a different text. despite the recognition that has amassed to a unique text, with some variations, the qur’an is not exempt from this multiplicity, if it is true that the text never stands on its own but always in the weave of a commentary, a literal explication or a mystical or moral exegesis whose principle of validity is an authority that itself requires foundation, and which frequently only sublates itself. the unity of consciousness thus goes hand in hand with the multiplying proliferation of the figures of authority: the prophet, the imâm who succeeded him, either in the various senses that the different schools of shî’ism give him, or in the general sense, admitted in the sunnite world, of the guide of believers, the caliph or successor of the prophet, the preacher, the missionary, the traditionalist, collector of the sunnah, itself variable, the jurist, the wali, the friend of god whose qualifications come from j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 52 the sanctity of his life or the predestination of testimony, the sage (al-hakîm), whether in the strict philosophical sense or inspired by a more globally encompassing knowledge of the secrets of revelation, the ascetic, the scapegoat, the diverse varieties that one conveniently regroups under the heading of ahl altasawwuf, of sufism, the inspired poet, the astrologist, the commentator, the rationalist theologian (al-mutakallim), etc. nevertheless, four main types of authority seem to me to dominate this infinite plurality: the prophetic guide, prophet or imâm, the theologian, the jurist and the sage. which authority prevails respectively amongst them, what kind of authority diffuses from them further downstream? the prophet or imâm authorizes himself through divine inspiration, or the connaturality that unites him with some emanation from the divine world. the theologian invokes the omnipotence of the rational intelligence, itself founded in the truth of divine intelligence. it was necessary that this gesture, this decision by which the greek logos, the mode of deduction of the demonstrative intellect, was identified with the ‘aql and with certain processes of science that god eternally possesses of the beings he created, in order for theology to affirm its legitimacy. the jurist sometimes invokes a double source of authority: the literal tradition and the deductive intellect. it is the same intelligence, understood in the sense of contemplative intelligence, which founds the activity of the sage. it culminates in a direct vision of the intelligible, and a proximity or a unification with the intelligible. the intelligence, its problematic union of the intelligible and the act of intellection, thus seems to me to be at the heart of the validatory devices of authority, whether of the sage, the jurist or the theologian. one cannot overestimate the problems posed by the theory of intellectual knowledge, when one interrogates the principles of authority in islam. it is through the mediation of such problems that the question of the juridical norm, the moral norm and proximity to the divine decree becomes receptive to various constraining solutions. the authority of the spiritual masters of sufism, like those of the saints, requires a slightly different foundation, visionary imagination, the power of unveiling, vision of the supersensible presence, which moreover does not exclude the power of intelligence. this principle, which we find as well at the origin of prophetic authority or imamology, is the walâya. this term is very difficult to analyze, since it designates a “friendship” with god which has a very rich meaning. it signifies as well a perfect conformity to the divine order of a science that is supernatural to the secrets of revelation. it is a symptom of what constitutes, at the end of time, the problem posed by human authority: how to adequately reflect the sole authority that exists, god’s authority? let us examine this in the context of the caliphate. we know this difficulty was resolved in various ways. for the omeyyade caliphs, the substitution of the name “caliph of god’s envoy” for “caliph of god” enables us to suppose that the function of the prophet’s “successor” in the temporal order, the absolute authority of decision of the caliph, was an authentic exegete of god and of his sovereignty. this, designated by the term al-amr, the imperative, the command, the order, is summarized, by a process of rarefaction, with the exercise of a command in the order of the confusion between religious life and civil life, and the successor of j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 53 the prophet found himself named “commander of believers” in both a secular and a religious sense. in this way, the exercise of authority in exterior exoteric matters could not miss carrying it over to spiritual guidance, and the caliph of the prophet very quickly became confounded with figures of royalty. it is this that originally caused the rebellions and uprisings of the various partisans of ‘alî ibn abî tâlib, known under the generic term shî’ite. the very idea of expressing divine authority under the auspices of a state caliphate power seemed to them to be in contradiction with the authentic, primitive notion of prophecy and of the just imamat, the authority of the guide. in their eyes, this had to have its foundation in god itself, if human authority was to have any chance of avoiding becoming a substitute for god’s authority. more generally, it imposed a division between exterior authority and interior authority, the dimension of the exterior, of the apparent, the exoteric, and that of the interior, the hidden, the esoteric. there are thus three main options possible: an equilibrium between the apparent, the exoteric, exterior prescriptions and the hidden, esoteric; a disequilibrium, weighted in favor of interiority, eventually leading to an indifferent, or even explicitly anti-legislative, authority to the letter of the law; finally, a repudiation of all esoteric dimensions. it is impossible to address these questions of authority without encountering this haunting and at times meticulous discussion of the possible roles of the zâhir and the bâtin, of the exoteric and the esoteric. but, from another perspective, the protests of the kjarijites or hanbalite traditionalists and their disciples are no less revealing. every time an all too human authority threatens to substitute itself for the divine imperative, seeming thereby to ruin the eschatological vocation of prophecy, voices calling for a return to the true sense of the prophecy and of the caliphate are raised. the exercise of authority is like living a contradiction. absolute divine authority is in itself non-participatory. now, in order to found human authority, a man of excellence must be able to participate in it, by virtue of his divine election. here i am choosing to employ terms that are foreign to the qur’an’s scriptural universe, but which rapidly became familiar to islamic thinkers, terms which belong to the platonic lexicons: participation, participatory, participated, non-participatory. i feel authorized to do so by the fact that a number of islamic metaphysical theologians employ them when they find it useful to think in these hellenic neo-platonist terms, along with those from the beginning of the third century of the hijra. nonparticipatory is a predicate of god’s absolute unity. the divine one is not the first term of a numeric chain of multiples, but his unity is fundamentally separated from all multiplicity. it involves an ineffable unity, indescribable, hidden and revealed but simultaneously reserved and veiled by the names that god gives himself in his holy books. now, according to the qur’ran, it is only with the inexpressible essence of god that divine authority makes one. authority and creation belong to god (see the qur’an, 7: 54: “ is it not his to create and to govern?”)―to god in his pure identity, in his mysterious unity. the exercise of divine authority is the foundation, no less mysterious, of what god decrees when he decrees. the notion of foundation encompasses the following meanings: instantaneity, incomprehensible on first examination by human reason, separation from the power that founds, eminent, transcendent, and the founded reality, which is neither necessary in itself nor of the j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 54 same ontological rank as the founder. if god founds and exercises his authority in this act of foundation, he remains transcendent to what he founds, which thus does not succeed him in the way an effect succeeds its cause, and encompasses the reality of a part of its cause. but, being non-participatory in what he founds, god thus remains inimitable in the exercise of his authority and all human authority becomes, by definition, contradictory. the divine real disjoins itself from the symbolic order it founds. from this perspective, there would be nothing to efface the distance between the divine act and human history. nothing, if not prophetic discourse. the first discourse on authority, which islam never stops referring to, in multiple forms, is prophetic discourse. in effect, it is prophecy that manifests a sacred history, situated between the eternity of the divine imperative and the historical progress of the world. this prophetic history has its origin in adam’s pact of obedience and its end in the resurrection (al-quyâmat al-kubra). its historical curve bestows the authentic caliphate with the right to endure until the end of time. but, all the other discourses of authority, the jurist, the theologian, the spiritual master, will have to justify themselves before him as well. let us recall that the qur’an only employs the term caliph, al-khalîfa, plural alkhalâ’if or al-khulafâ’, in the context of a different register to prophetic authority. more properly, the verses 2.30 do not specify what the caliphate is, except by default, or rather through the protest it generates among the angels: “behold, thy lord said to the angels: ‘i will create a vicegerent on earth.’ they said: ‘wilt thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood?―whilst we do celebrate thy praises and glorify thy holy (name)?’ he said: ‘i know what ye know not.’” the authority god confers upon man differs from the angels’ worship of perpetual adoration. the angels are ignorant of the ends of divine providence, and, consequently, the necessity of prophetic history, while maintaining that they know the evil that man will sow. the caliphate authority of god exercises itself “on the earth.” this successional authority entrusted to adam is not a simple potestas. it is not only directed at things below, but also at the realities of the other world. it connects this nether world, evanescent, temporal, illusory, with the real, eternal world, which is the divine world, that of the throne of god, of “reconciled” archangels, of the throne, of paradise, and hell. it makes one only through obedience, in such a way that man’s authority is a paradoxical authority: it exerts much better than it submits to its lord. it is the opposite of temporal omnipotence, although at its lowest level it includes temporal power. we know this theme has been fed by every contestation of established power, either through the testimony of spiritual leaders and mystics, or through the support given to the call (al-da’wa) launched by various individuals claiming a certain form of participation in prophetic destiny, most notably in shi’ism, or by traditional discourses refusing any concession to innovation and laicisation. to cite just one example, let us consider this protest, this appeal to the destination and essence of prophecy in the prologue of the book of oriental theosophy by sohravardî: “if in a given epoch there is someone who is profoundly devoted to the j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 55 divinization of self (al-ta’âlluh) and study (al-bahth), authority (al-ri’âsa) is returned to him and it is he who is the caliph of god.”3 thus spiritual authority asserts its origin in its proximity to the god of the prophets, better yet, an apotheosis, a divinization of self that effaces the distance between the divine world and the world of creation, accompanied by “study,” by which we understand the study of truth through gnostic paths, through spiritual knowledge. the non-political, indeed antipolitical aspiration of this authority, sohravardî makes explicit: “speaking of the authority returned to the perfect sage, i do not mean the exercise of triumphant temporal power (taghallub). far from it because if the imam invested with mystical experience (or divinization of self) sees his authority publicly recognized, he also remains hidden.” we recognize here the division that political knowledge and sufism have maintained between taghallub, the tyrannous temporal dimension (in the platonic sense, and greek term) and the true work of spiritual guidance. it is equally valid that the conceptual content of prophetic authority is hierarchically distributed across humankind in its totality. whence the burning questions of election and hierarchy which never cease to pose themselves once the discourse of prophecy must be relayed through other discourses following the death of the prophet of islam. the following verse testifies to this: “it is he who hath made you (his) agents, inheritors of the earth: he hath raised you in ranks, some above others: that he may try you in the gifts he hath given you” (qur’an, 6:165). the meaning of the elect community is thus the following: to be the caliph in the earth through respect of the primordial pact, and to recognize a hierarchy in itself which is not temporal but essentially prophetic, guarantor of the meaning of the prophecy in its unity. the close relation between the exercise of this authority and the care taken to purify its spiritual interiority are emphasized by the proximity of several major notions: “verily allah knows (all) the hidden things of the heavens and the earth: verily he has full knowledge of all that is in (men's) hearts. he it is that has made you inheritors in the earth” (35: 38-39). of course, by way of the eminent example it makes of the two prophets preceding muhammad, the qur’an indicates that this authority has two essential missions. the case of david must interest us in particular, because it bears in itself all the biblical promise of the messianic future, entirely synthesizing the function of the judge with the prophetic function. he “judges people based on the real” says the qur’an (36: 26). the case of noah is of no less importance. he is invoked to show how the caliphate is eternal, even when the greater part of humanity perishes through the wrath of god. muhammad invokes his example in dramatic circumstances, when he is himself the victim of his peoples’ mockery and incredulity: “he said: ‘o my people! i am no imbecile, but (i am) an apostle from the lord and cherisher of the worlds! i but fulfill towards you the duties of my lord’s mission: i am to you a sincere and trustworthy adviser. do ye wonder that there hath come to you a message from your lord through a man of your own people, to warn you? call in remembrance that he made you inheritors after the people of noah, and gave you a stature tall among the 3 shihâboddîn yahyâ sohravardî, kitâb hikmat al-ishrâq, opera metaphysica et mystica, ed. henry corbin, vol. 2 (tehran: mu’assasah-yi mutali‘at va tahqiqat-i farhangi, 1993 [reprint of the 1945]) 12. j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 56 nations. call in remembrance the benefits (ye have received) from allah. that so ye may prosper’” (7: 67-69). the juridical authority attributed to david evidently founded prophetic authority in a specific domain: to discriminate the faithful from the rebels in accordance with the highest justice, that designated by the term al-haqq, which signifies both the real and the law, not in the sense derived from jurisprudence, but in the sense of the law to which god has the right, in short, obedience to his commandments and to the letter of the book. noah’s exemplariness consists in that prophetic authority is transhistorical. from this transhistorical perspective, the caliphate is no longer a temporal responsibility, posing the well-known problems of dynastic succession, but a constant presence, rejuvenating itself age after age, a responsibility of the envoy that, around this envoy, is returned to humanity at large. it is easy to recognize here the judeo-christian notion of the true prophet, through which the transhistorical reality passes from age to age before ultimately being revealed in jesus. persuaded of his paraceltic mission, muhammad applies the idea to himself, but not without combining it with the notion borrowed from the mani, that of the seal of the prophecy. it is impossible to give an account here―this was extremely brief―of the considerable number of works by muslim intellectuals that, in the service of successive imperial powers called caliphates, have borrowed from these original concepts. what we can insist on, however, is the repeated process by which they have tried to emphasize the moral qualities, specific gifts, familial or clan connections, anything that could justify the legitimacy of power, that is to say, the omnipotence of the sovereign. it is clear that the sunnites, faithful to omeyyades, made no fewer claims to supersensible powers, to extraordinary powers, than the shî’ites when it came to justifying the authority of the man of power. this mystique of authority was nowhere more developed than in the shî’ite world, particularly in the insurrections that led to the establishment of the fatimid caliphate. the imâm, keeper of the book, possesses an enlightened nature, and this suprasensible essence makes him the theologian par excellence. of course, he is not the essence of god, but the manifestation of god, or better, the manifestation of the reality originally founded by god, the universal intelligence. thus identified with the temporal manifestation of god’s absolute knowledge, he mysteriously possesses the original expression of the divine imperative in himself. the absolute authority he exercises over the faithful is the authority of the divine “kun,” the speech by which god gives existence to things. there is a lesson for us in the very significant speculations of the ishmaelite shî’ite intellectuals regarding this authority of the man of god. this authority has a tendency to distribute itself across two different registers, both opposing and interdependent: interiority (al-bâtin) and exteriority (alzâhir). if the legitimate guide has authority over the community’s affairs, if he has the right to govern the community, in anticipation of governing the world, it is because he possesses an exterior authority, corresponding to the exterior dimension of reality. j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 57 this is why the shî’ite messianic movements, as rebellious as they were with respect to existing power, could succeed only by means of what they had themselves rejected: a community governed by the power of the elite wise initiated by the supposed science of the imâm. divine universal intelligence, manifested in the person of the imâm, henceforth transmits itself across different gradations and levels of the esoteric hierarchy, and transforms, metamorphoses, into unlimited temporal power. but this temporal authority supports itself on the esoteria of the prophecy, taught by the imâm, who is the exclusive custodian of it. the tragedy of power in the islamic world, in my eyes, finds its truth in this ambivalence of authority, which the imâmat shî’ite has experimented with from the 10th century until our era. on the one hand, liberatory authority tended toward the reign of ends, with despotic authority governing, on the other hand, in an indefinite power, according to the double register of the apparent―the exoteric―and the hidden, the esoteric. this reversibility of authority even constituted the essence of shî’ite political theology, and it explains the more general fate of the theologies of the true prophet. it is tragic because it expresses two contradictory requirements: either the legitimate guide devotes himself primarily to exteriority, and holds the secret of the esoteric back for an elite. thus, final ends, the ultimate triumph of prophecy’s essential truth in the reign of the awaited resurrector, all this is put off until a later time, perhaps never. or, the esoteric triumphs, and authority aspires to be authority over hearts and minds, without any concrete historical effectuation. either absolute power, or pure spirituality. we may well still be at this point. it strikes me, in effect, that in posing itself in terms of the mediation between the inferior world and the divine world, prophetic authority inevitably bisects between spiritual and temporal authority, in such a way that the different figures of authority who prop themselves up by it assume in a specific way one or other of these missions. i would like to highlight this contradictiosn, which animates the muslim experience. on one side, the inevitable pretension of every discourse which particularizes authority. we have seen an instance of this in shafi’î, when he accomplishes this decisive gesture that reduces and identifies universal knowledge to the exercise of the sharî’a, understood in a juridical sense. on the other side, the prevalence of what one could call the taste or desire for the beautiful totality. nowhere more than in islam is it affirmed that the true is the all. truth, founder of legitimate authority, is everything, must be everything. one will say that this is the hallmark of religion as such. undoubtedly. it is also the hallmark of philosophy, when it merits its name, at least from aristotle to hegel. it is certainly not the conviction of experimental science, or of psychoanalysis, for whom the truth can only be half-said, to borrow jacques lacan’s expression. whence this immediate, profound, constant accord between greek philosophy and islam, despite all the oppositions coming from the traditionalist or juridical worlds. the true is the all. this is the guiding ideal. it would be well for us to remember that, in the islamic world, the phenomena of intolerance, exclusion, or aggressive identification are often born from the miscognition of this statute of truth which is nevertheless unique to it. contrary to what one all too often imagines, it is not a sectorial reading of the qur’an and the j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 58 texts devoted to the sunnah, sunnite or shî’ite, which founds a freedom and a certain form of detachment between the world of temporal power and that of divine spiritual authority. on the contrary, it often upholds the exclusive choice of a world, that of the exercise of juridical power or, in response, that of the interior life and the interior experience. certain theologians, today, maintain that it is enough to choose, in the totality of revelation, what seems compatible with “modernity” in order to save islam while reforming it. now, this gesture was always, precisely, what was going to engender the violent conflict between theological or juridical authorities, and i would like to draw attention to a strategy that is a little different. this consists in silencing the human authorities who authorize themselves through one part of revelation or another, on behalf of extolling the beautiful totality constituted by the phenomenon of the book. to thereby void the violence men exercise against one another, the violence of the man who decides he is the authority over other men in religious affairs, who are supposed to grant him their obedience. this is accomplished by a return, in appearance very conservative, to the “beautiful totality” of the book. it is quite striking that the thinkers responsible for a certain skepticism, or outright opposition, to the omnipotence of the jurist and the political laicization of islam, its reduction to politics, are those who insist on the laws of the “beautiful totality.” these men call themselves ahl al’irfân, often translated as “gnostics,” which is a little misleading. let us call them more properly: holders of integral knowledge. their master, a man who was acutely aware of the paradox we are describing, was the grand master of sunnite sufism, ibn ‘arabî. the success, like the attacks, that the andalusian master’s works are known for these days, like those of his disciples, sunni or shî’ite, testify to how he has touched a nerve. i would like, in closing, to give some indications of this, appealing to a work of qur’anic exegesis, edited in the 17th century by one of the his most faithful readers, who is also, after avicenna the greatest metaphysician of islam, sadroddîn shîrâzî, commonly known as mullâ sadrâ. the work in question is titled mafâtîh al-ghayb, keys to the divine mystery.4 it opens with a very thorough examination of the status of the qur’an. more specifically, of the integral qur’an, that of which, in the sayings of our author concerning the traditions transmitted by the collections of shî’ite authority, the prophet muhammad would have said: “the qur’an is complete. nothing is needed after it, and nothing suffices without it.” such is the status of the “beautiful totality,” of the true totality. one might believe that it implies a “totalitarian” discourse. we will see that it is the total opposite of this. as the integral truth, the qur’an is not simply jurisdictional. to illustrate the effect of its beautiful totality, sadrâ employs the concept of spiritual medicine. it is a question of curing, of delivering one from the slavery of the passions, which are “the iron necklaces of burden”: the love of people, children, country, riches, passionate attachment to the female sex, cupidity and love of power. here is the qur’an thus interpreted in its totality, and on condition of being integral, like an ascetic guide with respect to the bonds that hamper man’s existence, and this is done in terms that a disciple of socrates would find difficult to disown. not coercion, therefore, but liberation. not legal exterior norms, but integral moral norms. placing the greatest emphasis on the letter of qur’anic writing leads to the 4 sadr al-dîn shîrâzî (mullâ sadrâ), mafâtîh al-ghab, ed. muhammad khâjâvî (teheran 1984). j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 59 inverse of juridical literalism: if the qur’an is integral, each letter is a universe of symbols: “in each of the letters of the qur’an, there are a thousand symbols, coquetries and signs.” this is why, following the example of a woman, the letter seduces the heart of the faithful, attracts it to the internal meaning that, in restoring his personal secret, the true identity of the subject, liberates him. this is why the letter separates him from the overpowering demands that come to him from others, and from the suggestions made above. it brings him back to himself and to the recognition of how, singularly in him, lies and resides the other beautiful totality, which corresponds to the beautiful qur’anic totality, perfect man. my conviction is that the meditations on the perfect man have posed a significant challenge by qur’anic revelation to the regime of authority. they encompass the theory of the legitimate imamat, the doctrine of the gradations of authorities, and above all a certain re-evaluation of speech, of man as being of language. we see a good example of this here. the perfect man is the true caliph of god, he is thus created according to god’s form. his authority is primarily an authority of speech. he converses with god, he speaks of spiritual discourses, he has the hearing of the heart. in achieving intelligence in action, he becomes, says sadrâ, a “speaking substance.” this accession to speech is identification with the imperative power that is god’s authority. the perfect man bestows existence on himself, because he participates, by way of meditation on speech, in the act of donation of existence, which is the divine act par excellence it is not a matter of exercising an authority that runs the danger of becoming a collective potestas, but of discovering himself in his position of pure singularity. sadrâ gives an example of this in the exegesis he proposes of a tradition attributed to alî ibn abî tâlib: “the totality of the qur’an lies in the bâ’ of bismillâh and i am the point under the bâ.’” here is sâdra’s commentary: “the whole of the revealed pages is in the point of the bâ of bismillâh. better yet, the collection of beings is in this point. if you want an example, here is one that will bring you closer to an aspect of this truth. when you say, “to allah belongeth all that is in the heavens and on earth” (2:284), the totality of what is in heaven and on earth is understood in a single word. but when you try to refer to them by distinguishing one from another, you need numerous books, then you try to connect the expressions and the meanings among them, although the extension of the world of significations, thus the mutual distinction of its unities, are not analogous with the extension of the world of expressions and their distinction. but if it happens that someone leaves this sensible metaphorical existence and heads towards the effective realization of self, by certain intelligible existence, if he would unite himself with the spiritual realm at the point of contemplating the meaning of the verse, “it is he that doth encompass all things!” (41:54), if he saw his own actual self encompassed in this signification, dominated by it, thus he would contemplate his own existence in the point which is beneath the bâ’, and he would see this bâ’ that is in bismillâh in a place where the eminent greatness of this signification manifests itself.”5 this coincidence between the eminent dignity of each person and the infinite totality of the book is the emancipated response to the challenge of the collective authorities. 5 sadr al-dîn shîrâzî, 21. j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 60 this coincidence of the “self” with the first letter of the book, in which the total and infinite truth intertwines, has an evidently spiritual meaning: what the infallible imâm says to himself realizes itself in each of the faithful. this realization of the totality of divine worlds in man is his maximum perfection, his mysterious identification with freedom and the divine lord. of course, it presupposes an annihilation of god in order to become a permanence in god. consequently, there is no trace of the individual as natural law thinks it, pertaining far more to an effacement of the partial and superficial consciousness in the ocean of letters and their significations. the subject discovers that he is nothing other than an effect of the letter, that his consistency only makes one with the infinite meaning borne by the letter. the effacement of the i is thus proportionate to the progress of the exegesis, which traces the book from sensible darkness to intelligible light, and which passes the fidelity of inferior degrees where it tests all constraints of the matter up to the pure immaterial condition. but since we are questioning the discourse of authority, i would like to put the emphasis on another aspect of these pages. our author, sadrâ, combines his fidelity to the unique authority of the prophet and the imâm with an intuition which he owes to his long meditation on some texts by ibn ‘arabî. from it, he takes the following lesson: unique authority, that of the prophecy in its double dimension, expressed by muhammad and ‘ali, is the letter of the book. it enables one to dismiss all other authority (aside from the exegete of these pages, one will say, who is the ‘ârif, the philosophical spiritual sage). the authority that safra asserts thus resides in his fundamental conviction: not to consent to any human authority, if it is not that of the perfect man, who sustains the law of the “beautiful totality.” now, this perfect man realizes himself in everyone, if he carries out the exegesis of self and of the book, guided by the imâm. and respectively, everyone, the semblance of each singular letter, of which the symbol is the total letter, the bâ. the book is not a guide that addresses everyone collectively, like a political or juridical bond, but all and everyone according to principles of selection and hierarchy. it is helpful to compare this model to that which michel foucault recognized in the christian pastoral tradition: omnes et singulatim, each and everyone singularly.6 this model differs on one essential point: “all” here designates the invisible community of practicing faithful, effectively the knowledge of self and of god, and not the visible community of a church. invisible community, it has reality only in god, erasing itself from this world in order to exist solely in the supreme world of god, the jabarût. on the other hand, singularity affirms itself, emphasizing its rights. not on the model of the christian pastoral tradition addressing each sheep of the flock of course, but on its own model of spirituality in islam, of a self which is indifferently the divine self revealing itself to creation or the creaturely self absorbing itself in god. such is the gnostic model by which the stakes of authorities finds itself subverted, in a face-to-face “alone” with the one, which is the essence of neoplatonism. here, in closing, is sadrâ’s exposition, following the text which we cited earlier: 6 “‘omnes et singulatim’: towards a critique of political reason,” reprinted in dits et ecrits (paris: quarto gallimard, 2001) 953. see also michel foucault, securité, territoire, population. cours au college de france. 1977-1978, “hautes etudes” (paris: gallimard seuil, 2004) 233. j a m b e t : four discourses on authority in islam s2 (2009): 61 “we others, and those who are like us, we only contemplate the darkness of the letters of the qur’an, because we are in the world of darkness. . . consequently, sight only sees the colors and the meaning only obtains sensible realities, the imagination only configures imaginable things, the intelligence only knows the intelligible. it is thus that light is perceived by each, only by the light and “for any to whom allah giveth not light, there is no light!” (qur’an, 24: 40). because of this blackness of sight here down below, we only see the darkness of the qur’an. but when we leave this existence of the semblance, this dark sight, emigrating towards god and his prophet, when we perceive the death of this condition subjected to sensible, imaginative, estimated, intellectual, practical forms, when we remain, by our existence itself in the act of existing in the speech of god, then when we head towards the stability, in an eternal stability, of death toward life, then we see more than blackness in the qur’an. we see only pure whiteness, pure light and an actual realization, according to this verse: “we have made the (qur’an) a light, wherewith we guide such of our servants as we will” (qur’an, 42: 52). roger.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 9 (2016): 58-81 t h i e r r y r o g e r a r t a n d a n a r c h y i n t h e t i m e o f s y m b o l i s m mallarmé and his literary group translated by robert boncardo the best literature is a form of propaganda by the deed. pierre quillard, ‘l’anarchie par la littérature’, les entretiens politiques et littéraires, april 1892 there is no need to be an anarchist as long as one can write. mallarmé, according to henri de régnier, cahiers inédits a s jacques rancière recalls in the politics of the poets, there are two principal ways of conceiving the relation between literary and public affairs.1 at the ideological level, in the broadest and most neutral sense of the term, we could concern ourselves with the politics of the writer by describing their opinions and their activities within society. in a manner at once more semiological and more philosophical, we could also seek to define what a politics of writing could be.2 in this case, it would be a matter of showing how an aesthetics can be a politics; how “literature does politics as literature”.3 it is within this framework that rancière situates himself with respect to his concept of the “distribution of the sensible”, a concept elaborated in the wake of schiller’s letters on the aesthetic education of man. for the author of proletarian nights, aesthetics is not a theory of art but a thought of the configuration of the sensible that institutes a community. now, what must be emphasized here is that this conception of a community of sense seems to come, in part, from a certain reading of mallarmé, an author rancière has a particular fondness for and to whom he has devoted articles4 as well as a short but dense monograph: the politics of the siren (1996). indeed, there is without a doubt a thought of the community in mallarmé. let us stress, first of all, that this has only recently been acknowledged by critics; moreover, it remains poorly disseminated in the public sphere, though it marks an important point of thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 59 renewal in mallarmé studies. this image of a new mallarmé, freed from the paradigm of intransitivity and self-referentiality, marks a significant rupture with the idealist and aestheticist reading of thibaudet, as well as with valéry’s reformulation of the master’s poetics, which had a staunchly formalist and rationalist bent. it also breaks with sartre’s reading, which made mallarmé the great solipsistic poet who had severed literature from the instrumental language without which no engagement was possible. finally, this re-inscription of the poet’s work in its historical period updates a long-dominant post-structuralist discourse that was tributary to blanchot’s catastrophist reading and the indeterminist approaches born with “deconstruction”. thus, a “political mallarmé” emerged during the tel quel years — years which were also those of change and “la pensée 68”. at this point, the assessment made in 1957 by jacques schérer begins to no longer be pertinent: “mallarmé’s attitude towards society remains to be studied”.5 as is well known, in a time that has too hastily been defined as that of the linguistic turn, with sollers, kristeva, faye, but also with barthes or straub, interpretations of mallarmé’s work followed a revolutionary paradigm. for the first time in the history of mallarmé’s reception, the political texts from the divagations were cited.6 the roland barthes of the leçon, identifying the “literary” with a “language exterior to power”, sums up quite well the spirit of the reading of this time: “‘to change language’, that mallarméan expression, is a concomitant of ‘to change the world’, that marxian one’. there is a political reception of mallarmé, of those who have followed him and who follow him still”.7 during the 1980’s, this thesis of the existence of a thought of the community proper to mallarmé will then be deepened and presented in a less ideological and more philological manner in the works of bertrand marchal, which are centred on an unprecedentedly close reading of the divagations, along with the exhumation of the “alimentary work” that was les dieux antiques. rancière and marchal, while agreeing on the question of utopia, do not for all that propose an identical reading. the dream of an ideal society sketched by the author of ‘the court’ and ‘confrontation’ raises a certain number of sensitive questions: what kind of thought of living-together can be read in the divagations? what are the precise contours of this community? is it a matter of a new aristocracy at the heart of democracy? what place does this communitarian thought accord to the sacred? what, precisely, would the role of the poet be once he has been placed back within the walls of the city?8 for marchal, who makes of the author of ‘catholicism’ and les dieux antiques a contemporary of the ancient city by fustel de coulanges, this vision of the community is above all a “religion”. poetry must contribute to the edification — on critical, fictive and self-reflexive foundations — of the new superstructures of society. by contrast, in the eyes of rancière, who opposes mallarmé to feuerbach9 so as to align him with marx,10 this chimerical vision of the common remains a politics tied to the exposure of the infrastructures of society. but in both cases, mallarmé, who is no longer to be situated in a history of pure literature but in the history of the great social utopias, is a man of the future — a future that is in the first case relithierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 60 gious, and in the second political. for the bourdieu of the rules of art, the author of the divagations is perceived, for reasons of his “obscurity”, as a partial or elitist agent of a veritable critique of culture, and is less a utopian than a sociologist.11 the mallarméan project of the “impious dismantling” of fiction would thus anticipate the mission of the sociologist, understood as the unveiling of the mechanisms of the illusio, which ground the literary as well as the social game.12 finally, we can identify a fourth main reading, which would see in this poetry a radical contestation of institutionalized politics: that is, a “literary anarchism” close to a nihilism. this was sartre’s thesis, who saw in the work — as in the entire being — of mallarmé, a “terrorism of politeness”13 inseparable from a “sad mystification”.14 this was also — in a quite different mode, of course — kristeva’s thesis, who made mallarmé a “prudent writer-anarchist”.15 it is this fourth thesis that i would like to re-examine here, by returning to the complex links between the literary and libertarian milieus during what jean maitron has called “the era of the bombings [l’ère des attentats]”.16 before going into depth, let us be clear that the study of the relations between literature and anarchy have been enriched by numerous works since the pioneering article of jacques monférier,17 to which we nevertheless are indebted. the first observation it is worthwhile making is that the anarchist reception [écoute] of mallarmé does not date from the “tel quel years”. it is precisely contemporaneous with the time of those bombers who terrorized a france that had been “ravacholized” [ravacholisée] from top to bottom. in fact, gustave lanson, who, in contrast to brunetière or lemaître, agreed to read mallarmé and to comment on him at some length, published, in la revue universitaire on the 15th of july, 1893,18 one year after the bombings of ravachol and a few months before that of auguste vaillant, an enthralling article, irrespective of its value judgements, which aimed to establish a parallel between political subversion and linguistic subversion. after stating — and not without some irony — that “what makes the work of monsieur mallarmé interesting is that it is not understood”, the academician establishes two points of contact between political and linguistic subversion by drawing on a phrase that was then in the process of becoming famous and which was to be found in the recent publication of vers et prose (1893): “the pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words”. at the theological level, what lanson describes as a quest for a literary absolute recalls a form of quietism. through a passive poetry that takes place outside of all intellect and will, mallarmé repeats and transposes madame guyon and fénelon. he reduces language to its purely sensible dimension, making the word a sonorous and no longer an intelligible sign, while the poetic consciousness is transformed into a simple “recording apparatus”.19 this leads to a “spontaneous organization of words that occurs well below the level of consciousness”.20 mallarmé would thus seek to establish an immediate and unimpeded relation between the ego and the infinite, thus awakening a heterodoxy proper to a mystical perspective. however, at the sociological level, this literary absolute is an anarchism. this time, mallarmé repeats and transposes max stirner. it is interesting to highlight the fact that it is precisely this thinker thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 61 who is evoked here, and not proudhon, bakunin or kropotkin. lanson draws on an article by jean thorel published in the edition of april 15, 1893 of la revue bleue.21 in fact, in a fragmentary, allusive manner, the author of the ego and his own (1844) had just been discovered by french readers. his magnum opus will only be translated by henri lasvignes in 1900, a publication followed by victor bash’s pioneering study, l’individualisme anarchiste: max stirner, published in 1904. this, then, is the earliest moment of the french reception of stirner, which follows shortly after the contemporaneous reception of nietzsche.22 from this perspective, the poet of the “penultimate is dead” succeeds in “blowing up” the “intellectual institutions”23 bequeathed by society, namely the lexicon, semantics and logic. he concludes: mallarmé is a literary anarchist […] his art is the literary equivalent of anarchy […] his doctrine represents the final stage at which aesthetic individualism can blossom, just as anarchy is the extreme end that social individualism can attain. there is nothing more sociable in us than our intelligence, and through our ideas all of us are in one, and one of us is in all.24 thus, with his violently anti-discursive poetry, mallarmé broke the contract of communication, and by breaking this verbal contract he broke the social contract. there is no longer any community since there is no longer any common measure, but only a singular speech cut off from common language. a quite similar analysis of the mallarmé case will be found amongst anti-romantic thinkers of the right, above all maurras at the moment of the poet’s death. in any case, lanson sees in mallarméan poetry, and in a dazzling form, a veritable politics of writing, and not a politics of the writer: “let me not be accused of having said that monsieur mallarmé is complicit with ravachol, and that his work has inspired layers of dynamite”.25 what should be made of this idea of mallarmé the literary anarchist? of course, such a precisely dated and situated reading relies upon two implicit, indeed unthought, ideas: a certain idea of anarchism, equated here with the thought of stirner, which is brandished as an interpretative grill in the very midst of the era of bombings; and a certain idea, frozen in 1893, of mallarmé’s work. mallarmé, who is here discussed on the basis of the anthology vers et prose as well as the 1887 photo-lithographic edition of the poésies,26 is not the author of the ten ‘variations on a subject’ given to la revue blanche (1895), nor the author of ‘music and letters’ (1894-1895), these being the “critical poems” in which he will, precisely, clarify his “politics” so as, perhaps, to respond in part to this lansonian attack.27 this raises a series of question. with respect to politics, can we speak of literary anarchism without indulging in an abusive analogy? is it possible to be an anarchist in literature and in politics? can we speak of an “anarchist aesthetics”, to take up the title of a study by andré reszler, published in 1973? can anarchist literature be anything other than a militant or didactic literature, and thus tributary to traditional artistic forms? can “modernism” be defined as the successful aesthetic transfiguration of the political failure of the anarchist movement? of course, anarchism does not necessarily mean aesthetic modernity, or avant-gardism.28 then thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 62 there is another bundle of problems: how should mallarmé be situated with respect to certain mardistes like fénéon, vielé-griffin, mauclair, bernard lazare, octave mirbeau and pierre quillard, all of whom publicly and explicitly took up the cause of anarchy? let us begin by recalling that, if one dives into the periodicals and the journals of the 1890’s, the link between the libertarian and literary milieus constitutes an undeniable fact of the time. thus, recalling for the readers of la plume the history of anarchism in a special edition of may 1st 1893, emile joannès notes: “1893: a prodigious extension of the anarchist movement since the acts of ravachol. les intellectuels sont à l’idée”.29 on september 1st 189230 the same journal published the opinions of a number of writers on anarchy: zola, coppée, barrès, maeterlinck, scholl, but also mallarmé (we will come back to this). it would also be necessary to highlight a key moment in this convergence between anarchism and symbolism, namely the entrance of elisée reclus in july 1892 into vielé-griffin and paul adam’s journal, les entretiens politiques et littéraires, a journal that published bakunin, proudhon, stirner, but also reflections on free verse. in this journal the militant geographer published a text addressed to “the comradely editors”, to whom he pays tribute as follows: “you throw out all of the dogmas with all of the formulas and prosody”.31 it has since been a commonplace of the majority of histories of symbolism to mention this ideological proximity between the different apostles of freedom: “free verse” and “free theatre” rhyme with “free association”. in his histoire de la littérature from 1936, thibaudet defined symbolism as an “artistic blanquism”.32 how should we interpret this politico-aesthetic encounter? is “literary anarchism” anything other than a category used in reports from police headquarters at a time when the man of letters is under close surveillance?33 at any rate, it will be necessary to carefully distinguish between this formula and its purely polemic avatar, in the sense of dilettantism, that is, an “anarchy of taste”, an absence of any criteria for evaluating the new literature. this latter is the prevailing meaning given to anarchism by anatole baju (l’anarchie littéraire, vanier, 1892),34 or charles recolin (l’anarchie littéraire, perrin, 1898), a defender of brunetière and doumic. the misunderstandings if we synthesize contemporary scholarship, two dominant ideas emerge: a superficial encounter; and a fundamental discrepancy. let us begin with this. according to the first, this apparent convergence would mask a deep misunderstanding, or at the very least a superficial and short-term agreement. with the exception of some personalities who demonstrated a sincere, profound and durable engagement, such as mirbeau, quillard, lazare or fénéon, the majority of young symbolists swiftly left the movement. this was the case with paul adam, camille mauclair, francis vielé-griffin and adolphe retté, who turned towards nationalism, militarism, l’action française, and even the ivory tower, as soon as anarchism, thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 63 following the enforcement of the so-called “villainous’ laws”, changed political strategy and oriented itself towards unionism. thus “literary anarchism” means an anarchism of the men of letters or of the salon; an “infatuation” situated at the intersection of dandyism, snobbism and dilettantism. mauclair, reflecting on his anarchist past, waxes ironical: “i imagined an anarchism that was aristocratic and yet a friend of the people […] we were anarchists because it had an allure, a romanticism, because this attitude suited our situation as scorned writers”.35 likewise, another renegade, retté, in his promenades subversives from 1896, stigmatizes “the fashion of calling oneself a rebel” that is inseparable from all of the “backtrackings of the bourgeois caste”.36 in fact, we can only highlight two principal points of divergence between the two sides. symbolism, which essentially developed against a backdrop of pre-raphaelism, is characterized by a forgetting of the social question. it was, if we subscribe to valéry’s analysis for instance, a displacement of the literary towards mysticism and occultism. in contrast to the numerous avant-garde manifestos of the 20th century, what was at stake in moréas’ manifesto was nothing but literature. furthermore, a discrepancy appears at the level of the philosophy of history. symbolist thought, which in this case is a twilight thought permeated by schopenhaurism, is characterized by a pessimism close to nihilism. on the contrary, anarchist thought, which is progressive and which aimed during its constructive stage at social regeneration, affirms itself as the thought of a dawn. thus la plume publishes in 1893 chants lyriques pour le monde à venir by jean carrère, a poet who celebrates the rise of the “great morning” and the death of the darkened world,37 once the bloody test of the “great evening” has been surmounted. we are here at the opposite end of the spectrum from theories of decadence, complacency and morbidity. denouncing this anarchist posture cum imposture is a commonplace of the time, as much on the left as on the right of the politico-literary spectrum. fashionable anarchism, an obvious target of satire, will become a character in the novel les trois villes by zola. in paris (1898), the very aristocratic princess of harth will make the anarchist cause her latest plaything. likewise, her accomplice in petty gossip, hyacinthe, the son of the very rich duvillards and a parody of the young “fin-desiècle” man, will say: “but sir, it seems to me that in these times of degradation and universal ignominy, a man of some distinction cannot but be anarchist”.38 in léon daudet we find — but from a completely different perspective — a virulent denunciation of this artificial anarchism, incarnated by the hollow men the novelist calls the “kamtchatka” or the “primitives”.39 of course, such a misalliance is attacked by certain militant anarchists themselves. the social origin of writers is treated with irony. pierre kropotkin, in la conquête du pain from 1892, judges that the modern artist remains too bourgeois. for anti-intellectual reasons, writers are treated with suspicion. thus the italian anarchist group the intransigeants, founded by pini and parmeggiani, partisans of “individualist reprisals”, held that “whoever signs a book or a journal article cannot be an anarchist”.40 however, it is necessary to highlight the fact that anarchism, as a multifaceted movement, remains a nebula with poorly thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 64 defined contours and, like all movements, is traversed by internal tensions. an important distinction must be made between the anti-intellectual group of père peinard and emile pouget and jean grave’s group la révolte, grave being a militant who edited a journal equipped with a “literary supplement” that published prince kropotkin and the reclus brothers. nevertheless, in these columns we also find polemical tracts against writers, as well as the expression of a form of hatred for “literature”. emile renoult, in ‘gendelettres’, an article from 1891, proclaims loud and clear that “literature is not revolutionary” it is nothing but a “sham”.41 furthermore, aesthetic arguments that reduce all “literature” to ideas of verbal obscurity, of elitism or of formalism, are frequently advanced. in fact, in conformity with proudhon’s theory of art, the majority of anarchists take social art as their model. jean grave, in the chapter ‘anarchy and art’ from his 1895 book la société future, attacks autonomous artistic practices that are cut off from the people. the same jean grave, reporting on mallarmé’s divagations in 1897 for les temps nouveaux, judges that the poet wrote his sentences in english before translating them into french… here it is necessary to recall a little-known point, namely that this era of bombings also saw a resurgence of the debate, inherited from romanticism, between the tenants of “social art” and the tenants of “art for art’s sake”. this dual categorization is still at work at this date, as evidenced by the foundation in 1891 of the journal l’art social. in a programmatic text, gabriel de la salle argues that “socialist poets do not have to busy themselves with the exterior form they are to give their work”.42 as for symbolist and decadent writers, they are representatives of “arts of bourgeois decadence”.43 let us add, however, that such a vision remains the subject of debate even within literary anarchist milieus: what would, it is asked, a properly anarchist art be? pierre quillard denounces didactic deviations; bernard lazare takes aim at formalistic deviations; and camille pissaro decides without deciding in a letter to mirbeau on september 30th 1892: “all the arts are anarchist when they are beautiful and good!”.44 before the beginning of the dreyfus affair, the debates show us that in france these “anarchist years” play a determining role in the birth of the figure of the “intellectual”. we witness here a “general repetition” of the affair, to take up a formula of christophe charle.45 a vague terrain of agreement as a counterpoint to this failed encounter between anarchy and literature, which requires us to distinguish clearly between sympathy and militancy, the existence of a certain number of more or less general points of contact have been noted, all of which can be grouped around the following axis: a certain spirit of revolt. in fact, as bertrand marchal notes, the symbolist youth “willingly claim for themselves a form of intellectual anarchy that satisfies, by proxy, a contempt for society”.46 at the ideological level, these two milieus share the same hatred of capitalist society and the same refusal of bourgeois thought and morality — grievances to which thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 65 there can be added a condemnation of the commodification of literature. but this remains quite vague. on the side of the symbolists, the texts of the anarchist theoreticians seem to be little known. amongst the writers, but not including paul adam, touched as he was by the crash of the union générale, we encounter no true knowledge of economic issues, nor of the complex problem of the distribution of wealth, which underwrites debates around collectivism, corporatism and federalism. maeterlinck, who declared himself to be “completely ignorant of sociology” and who claimed nothing more than the “right to silence”47 on this subject, represents well the general tendency. at the socio-literary level, the anarchist temptation becomes the new name of the artistic liberalism of 1890. to be an anarchist means to claim the freedom of art, the independence of the artist and a “pure art”, that is, an art that is autonomous with respect to justice, morality and the economy. thus, lucien muhlfeld writes: “there is the tradition, the tradition which recommends to the literary avant-garde that they adopt the most left-leaning opposition of the romantics who welcomed the novelty of 1848”.48 finally, at the aesthetic level, there exist the “barbarous nuptials”,49 which take place more on the terrain of images than of ideas, between the fin-de-siècle spirit and anarchist thought, through the emergence of an “imaginary in crisis” more than an “anarchist imaginary”.50 thus anarchist-like literature develops an imaginary of catastrophe, that “eternal black poetry” of which zola speaks in an interview on anarchy published in le figaro on april 25 1892. the end of the century rhymes with the end of the world, the bomber bringing with him the exterminating angel through a common fascination with murder or sacrifice. anarchism is coupled with decadentism, this latter being a legacy of the 1880’s when links were established between anatole baju and louise michel, rather than with symbolism. furthermore, there is an evident interest amongst certain novelists for the novelistic form of the anarchist, which offers multiple narrative possibilities.51 but this means leaving symbolism, which for the most part turned its back on the narrative novel by poeticizing it,52 to turn towards naturalism and its margins, even if there are obvious exchanges between the different movements. on the side of the symbolist milieus, an anarchist spirit can be felt in fairy tales (bernard lazard), scandinavian (ibsen, strindberg) or german theatre (hauptmann), which had only recently been introduced, or the mystery novel (mauclair). if there is a work that thematizes these complex relations between art and anarchy, it is without doubt le soleil des morts — a novel on symbolism and not a symbolist novel — which, like paris by zola, appeared in 1898, two works that it would be suggestive to compare. mallarmé’s disciple, who took his distance from the master, shows the impossible union between symbolism and anarchism on the basis of the broad opposition between (pure) art and action, which is allegorized via calixte armel and claude pallat, both of whom are “excommunicated prophets”.53 the narrator writes: “the intellectual isolation preached by the poet required the absolute individualism of the anarchist; between them there was a world, but they only had to make a movement in order to join hands”.54 at the end of the story, regeneration in the form of the riot fails, while the shadow of armel is buried, “laid low in the mud by the livid dawn”.55 for mauclair at this time, anarchism thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 66 constitutes the underside of symbolism, its negative. he portrays two extremisms, both destined to encounter an impasse, both dismissed, and both made gangrenous by the decomposition of the elite as of the crowd: there will be no great morning and the only solar light will come, perhaps, from posthumous glory. yet the entire novel is founded upon the oscillations of the hero, de neuze, torn as he is between these two postulations. later on, in servitude et grandeur littéraires, as we have seen above, mauclair will return to the desire to reconcile the irreconcilable: “i imagined an anarchism that was aristocratic and yet a friend of the people”.56 let us add that this novel has no doubt played a far from negligible role in the emergence of an image of mallarmé as a paradoxical anarchist, tempted not by direct action but by a “white anarchy, or an anarchy by abstention”.57 as we will now see, it is the cardinal notion of the individual that for a moment allowed this dream a union between revolts. the question of individualism: from agreement to disagreement if the symbolists willingly subscribe to the anarchist cause, it is because they perceive it as a radical individualism that supports their vision of society. but misunderstandings again arise as soon as we try to define this fin-de-siècle individualism. this individualism is, first of all, as is well known, an “idealism” in a sense that gourmont, a reader of schopenhauer, gave it: that is, a subjectivism, indeed a perspectivism. the author of sixtine explains this to jules huret in 1891. the true name of this new literature is “idealism” and not “symbolism”: “so many thinking brains, so many diverse worlds, and when we wish to represent them, so many different arts […] therefore, again, an unlimited freedom in the domain of artistic creation, literary anarchy”.58 gourmont will return incessantly to this idea. a little later, in la revue blanche, he takes up the equation again: … symbolism, cleansed of the extravagances that shortsighted weaklings have given it, is translated literarily by the word liberty, and for those who are violent, by the word anarchy, […] idealism signifies the free and personal development of the intellectual individual in the intellectual domain; symbolism could (indeed should) be considered by us as the free and personal development of the aesthetic individual in the aesthetic domain.59 likewise, in the same epoch, vielé-griffin puts forward a “literary anarchy for which [he] has fought” and whose ideal is “the freedom of the individual in the expression of his very individuality: poetry”.60 from an identical yet this time theatrical perspective, victor barrucand, a collaborator of l’endehors, applauds the author of a doll’s house: “ibsen is a unvarnished champion of individual independence; it is in this sense that he is an anarchist, and with him the intellectual elite of the time — of our time”.61 conversely, and in a convergent manner, mirbeau will define political anarchism as the “reconquest of the individual”, or “the freedom of the individual’s development in a normal and harmonious direction”.62 thus when thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 67 re-situated in its time, the thesis that lanson applied to mallarmé, and which we presented above, does nothing but reformulate the positions of certain symbolists, above all gourmont, so as to denounce them. moreover, symbolist individualism undeniably hides an aristocratism. it constitutes the corollary of the hatred of a “leveling socialism”63 that we encounter in the writings of mauclair, mirbeau or retté at a time when the majority of writers subscribe to the theory of the artist as a “superior man”. sometimes, this hatred is such that bourgeoisisme will be preferred to communism, egotism to the evangels of “saint marx”.64 thus mirbeau, at the time of the fénéon affair, wonders if the man of letters is an “anarchist”; he responds in the negative by invoking the absence of propagandistic activities, then adds: “certainly, he must come up with some aristocratic and free philosophy of society”.65 we encounter the same attitude in tailhade, who mixes cynicism, dandyism and elitism: “i take from anarchism on the one hand what amuses me, and on the other what favours my intellectual egotism. the whole aristocratic part of it pleases me”.66 adolphe retté also multiples similar affirmations: “the duty of poets is to affirm the aristocracy of the idea, the only legitimate artistocrcy, for artists are the arists [car les aristes sont les aristes]”.67 such an exaltation of artistic and political individualism leads to serious confusions and misunderstandings between libertarian individualism, anti-state and properly anarchist libertarianism on the one hand, and an aristocratic, anti-democratic and anti-modern, indeed reactionary, individualism on the other. one attacks institutions and authority, while the other attacks the people, universal suffrage and equality understood as egalitarianism. one is auroral, while the other is crepuscular. the true-false encounter between anarchism and symbolism takes place on this ambiguous terrain. this is the reason such radically opposed readings of the cult of the ego of barrès will be proposed — a cult that will be anarchist for certain symbolists, but which, for militant anarchist intellectuals, will be, in the best of cases, nothing but a refined egotism. in the same way, the question of anarchy will encounter that of the initial reception of nietzsche, as edouard schuré’s long study, published in la revue des deux mondes in 1895, suggests.68 now, this libertarian individualism, as georges palante points out in 1907 in anarchisme et individualisme, is nothing but the first moment of anarchist thought, which itself is founded upon an altruistic principle oriented towards social harmony, solidarity, and reciprocal help dear to kropotkin, and which seeks to promote free association: “freedom of all through agreement between all”,69 sébastien faure proclaims in l’encyclopédie anarchiste. the symmetry between the two special editions of the journal la plume at this time should be highlighted. the edition of may 1st 1893 is devoted to “anarchy”, while the edition of 15th june 1894 studies “aristocratism”. thus could be clarified to some degree jean maitron’s thesis according to which the influence of stirner’s thought was “insignificant” for the intellectual development of anarchism in france, in contrast to that of proudhon, which was “permanent and profound”.70 for jean thorel, tribute was to be paid to stirner as the veritable father of anarchism: bakunin had “borrowed a lot”71 from him. in any case, this thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 68 long promotion of artistic individualism, itself an inheritance of the conquests of militant romanticism, constitutes a fertile ground which, as a counterpoint to the development of socialism, will make possible the effortless adoption of stirner in france at this time, as is true for nietzsche as well. let us end with jean grave: the individual had interested the anarchist “well before the bourgeois men of letters had discovered nietzsche and stirner”.72 mallarmé the anarchist? from our perspective, it is this question of individualism, which up to now has been insufficiently taken into account,73 that allows us, if not to decide the debate concerning mallarmé, then at least to properly envisage it. all of mallarmé’s equivocations over aristocracy and democracy, individual and community, literature and politics, modernity and anti-modernity, can be summed up in the following lines from john payne, addressed to mallarmé in october 1886: i am sending you a short article from the newspaper the globe that deals with you: it will amuse you, as it amused me. it must have been very amusing to have heard louise michel speak of literature. you are right: she must have taken the decadents to be anarchists. you see, you villain, the misunderstandings to which you expose yourself by feigning, through pure love of paradox, to be a republican and a striker, you who are a refined, even aristocratic, conservative, hating from the bottom of your delicate soul this dirty kitchen of smoke and willful obscurantism that is named (lucus a non lucendo) liberalism.74 the question remains delicate, and we can agree with antoine compagnon when he says that it constitutes a “large dossier”.75 two radical theses seem to us to be inadmissible. on the one hand, we cannot subscribe to the approach of caroline granier, who hastily excludes the author of the divagations from her field of reflection on the basis of a rather banal mallarméan vulgate (that of intransitivity and autotelism), which has been undermined since the works of bertrand marchal. the anarchist ideal, she writes, is situated “at the opposite end of what seems to be mallarmé’s project: life neither begins nor ends except in the book”.76 she makes the claim, without demonstration, that his “public opinions are in no way proximate to anarchism”.77 the historian adds that if the poet subscribed to the literary journal la révolte, then this was only because of its “high literary quality”.78 on the other hand, given the positions adopted by the poet, to which we will return, we cannot be satisfied with a pure and simple identification of mallarmé with the phenomenon, if not the cause, of anarchism, such as critics from julia kristeva79 to pascal durand80 have done. must we for all that subscribe to the idea formulated by antoine compagnon according to which “mallarmé played with anarchy, in any case with the word, and it was a risky and provocative game”?81 for our part, it seems to us that it is not a question of a game, or of an undecidable “between-two” thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 69 dear to compagnon, but rather of displacement. the same goes for anarchy as for aristocracy: “i fear that i have displaced the question”,82 we read in the 1895 version of ‘the court’. in fact, mallarmé displaced all of the polemical concepts of his time, whether they be literary (“verse”, “music”, “fiction”, “idea”, “theatre”, etc.) or sociological (“divinity”, “society”, “the crowd”, etc.). this is what we would now like to show by distinguishing between two levels of analysis: the intention of the author, to the degree that we can reconstitute it, and the intention of the reader, which is tied to the effect produced by the text. intentio auctoris: correspondence, responses to inquiries, speeches and “critical poems” let us attempt to group together here the explicit — and notorious — mallarméan references to anarchy, by treating them in a chronological manner, which implies making a distinction between prepublications in journals and the collection divagations from 1897. we will see that it is quite imprecise to write, as eisenzwieg does, that in mallarmé we find nothing but a “constant, obstinate and recurrent silence”83 on anarchism. everything “begins”84 in february 1892, a little before the “veritable epidemic of terror”85 that was unleashed in paris, and not long before the first bombing by ravachol, with mallarmé being solicited by the journal la plume via paterne berrichon to comment upon current anarchist affairs. the poet receives the following letter: “…we would be pleased to known your opinion on the ideas that kropotkin, elisée reclus, oscar wilde, camille pissarro, grave, etc., will develop in this edition; ideas with which, moreover, you are familiar”.86 mallarmé responds as follows: when i hold in my hands the edition of la plume, which i congratulate you for having placed into the hands of kropotkin, elisée reclus, oscar wilde, camille pissarro, grave and others, i will read, admire and sympathize with it; but before? and do not ask me to deal in the space of a note a subject on which, to get a word in, one would need all of the special authority of these saints and martyrs.87 the editors of this correspondence make the following comment; “a very awkward letter; we understand mallarmé’s refusal”.88 and in fact, lacking a clear position, the journal will only publish this response in the rubric ‘letters on anarchy’ on september 1st 1892; nothing from mallarmé will appear in the special edition of may 1st 1893. but it is at the moment of the banquet of february 15th 1893 of this same journal that the poet will declaim his ‘toast’, rebaptized ‘salut’ for the poésies. at the same time, during the panama scandal and the trial of de lesseps, mallarmé publishes, in february 1893 a text in the national observer, a first version of the “critical poem’ ‘gold’ from the divagations. we read in these lines, which are, as always, sinuous and which will be tightened further still in 1897, no doubt because of their too-circumstantial anchorage, the following: thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 70 the salons have conversed correctly. many hands, in some sense anarchist, of otherwise conventional people, holding back their élan from fear of appearing to protest against the arrest only just read out, shake in a dignified, spontaneous, grave manner the hand of the condemned, as if nothing had happened, effacing the trace of the slanderous litigation: they have signified something unconscious and supreme. judges, pronounce: to us, a tribute paid by the imprudent, and to give pain back to them, no; at least, some intimate and superior consequences.89 even if it would be necessary to refer to the whole of this text, it seems that here mallarmé is attacking a republican, indeed a human-all-too-human form of justice, which has no real efficacy: “do not lose from view that the function of justice is a fiction, for the sole fact that it does not give out money”.90 lesseps, “a statue laid low”,91 seems here to be defended by mallarmé, and the undermining of the official, which is to say fictive, judgement, has an “anarchist” twist. jean grave’s la société mourante et l’anarchie appears during the summer of 1893, a book prefaced by mirbeau and which will earn its author a conviction in 1894 during the procès des trente.92 mallarmé received a copy of the book, but the poet’s response has been lost. a letter from the director of la révolte from july 5th thanks the poet for his “clear appraisal”93 of the book, without saying anything more; what he says immediately after bears on the publication of a summary in la révolte of villiers’ nouveaux contes cruels. there then occurs vaillant’s bombing of the chamber of deputies on december 9th, 1893. the journalist paul brulat, profiting from the presence of writers groups together at a banquet of la plume, obtains the following opinion from the poet, which will be published the day after in le journal: “i know of no other bomb, than a book”.94 as is well known, mallarmé will, moreover, be concerned with the political trajectory of félix fénéon, in whose favour he will testify after the foyot restaurant bombing in april 1894.95 mallarmé’s defence will consist in insisting on the gentle character of this man of letters, as well as on the “pure” dimension of his intellectual and strictly artistic preoccupations. fénénon was acquitted, and we can suppose today that “mallarmé obviously did not know, like the court, that fénéon was in fact the author of the bombing”.96 let us add that at the moment of the arrest of the suspect, mallarmé, in a response to a journalist, judged that “for fénénon there is nothing more dynamite-like than his articles”,97 a formula that alludes directly to the famous line just cited. finally, the most precise and developed stance taken by mallarmé is to be found in ‘music and letters’, the conference given in april 1894 in the context of an anarchist effervescence: the opposite insult stutters forth from the newspapers, for lack of audacity; this leaves a barely articulated suspicion: why the reticence? the devices, whose explosion lights up parliament with a summary illumination, but pitifully disfigures the curious bystanders, would interest me, because of the light — with the brevity of its instruction, which allows the legislator thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 71 to claim internal incomprehension; but i’m against adding bullets and nails to the bombs. like an opinion; and to blame all the damage only on the fact that there are writers, a little out of the spotlight, who believe, or not, in free verse, captivates me, especially by its ingenuity.98 mallarmé ironizes over the amalgamation the press have created between terrorist anarchism and free verse, all the while condemning the murderous violence, as zola did too, as well as the inefficacy of the method. in a very precise manner, these judgements recall the theses defended by a close companion of mallarmé, pierre quillard,99 two years earlier in les entretiens politiques et littéraires: it must be admitted that the explosion of some bombs of dynamite strikes vulgar minds with terror. yet this surprised panic hardly lasts the time necessary to furnish a pretext for the reprisals carried out by the police and judiciary […]. on the contrary, the destructive power of a poem cannot be dispersed in one go: it is permanent and its deflagration is certain and continuous; shakespeare or aeschylus prepare as infallibly as the boldest of our anarchist comrades the collapse of the old world.100 but this is a double-edged argument; it can also be used to call for and justify censorship. thus during the trial of jean grave, the public minister declares: “the accused today is a book […] this book is an explosive; we must strike it as if it were a bomb”.101 we also encounter this commitment to the book and to a revolt that would endure by virtue of the efficacious ideality of thought in a statement made my mallarmé and reported by régnier in his cahiers in may 1894: at mallarmé’s place. he is surprised that the youth today are anarchists, that they have a taste for vulgar protests, for this condescendence to brutal means on the part of people who have at their disposition superior means for protest like the book. he adds that there is no reason to be an anarchist, as long as one allows oneself to write, and, to whomsoever objects to such restrictive laws, he responds that to know how to write is to know how to say anything despite everything, and that tyranny requires the only interesting things, namely allusion and periphrasis.102 let us cite lastly a final testimonial, drawn once again from régnier’s very precious notes, dated april 1894: “there is only one man who has the right to be an anarchist, me, the poet, for i alone make a product that society does not want, in exchange for which it does not give me enough to live on”.103 what can we conclude from this? if the master of the rue de rome “was surrounded by anarchy between 1893 and 1893”,104 the interpretation of his position remains difficult. mallarmé, in his response to berrichon, certainly uses hyperbolic praise to characterize the theoreticians of anarchy (“these saints and these martyrs”), but above all he admits in an indirect manner that he has not read them, and calls upon his responsibility as a writer: namely, to judge the works as individual pieces and thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 72 to be able to reflect before responding. furthermore, as caroline granier suggests, his relations with jean grave, given the letters we have, seem to be of a far more literary than political nature, even if it is necessary to not overly separate these two domains. let us be clear that mallarmé did not sign the letter of defence of the author of la société mourante, and that, in distinction to mirbeau, elisée reclus or paul adam, he was not a witness at his trial. faithful to his ideal of “restricted action”, as régnier’s testimonial confirms, mallarmé foregoes militant activism and limits the engagement of the writer, who is a man with only a pen in hand, to the book-form: “your act is always applied to paper”.105 furthermore, following the analyses of bertrand marchal, if mallarmé certainly manifests an interest for the bomb, it is insofar as his poetic gaze carries out a double reduction: on the one hand, of light reduced to ideality, and on the other, of an unveiling reduced to a coming-to-consciousness.106 from protestation to revelation. mallarmé displaces anarchism by metaphorizing it, that is, by spiritualizing it, without for all that defusing it, no doubt. it is not a matter of “mining”107 the foundations of the city, but of illuminating the repressed resource of being-together: namely, language. thus, in the mallarméan imaginary, such as it is formulated in precise terms in ‘music and letters’, the festival is substituted for a bombing, pyrotechnics for dynamite. as for the circumstantial mallarméan image of the book-bomb, we believe it should not be accorded too much importance. mallarmé does not say that the book is a bomb: he responds to the question: “what do you think of bombs?” by displacing it onto the terrain of literary forms. for the author of ‘restricted action’, the book is above all a “spiritual instrument”, an essential formula and not an explosives device. this leads us to adopt the other, less historical, point of view on this question. intentio lectoris: the case of a coup de dés would mallarmé be, as lanson was the first to argue, an anarchist in and through language? it appears that the best realization of this anarchist idea would be the coup de dés, as has recently been argued: “it is here, in any case, that in mallarmé the bomb of the text explodes in full light”,108 pascal durand wrote in 1999, seeing in the spacialized poem of 1897, which contains the world “deflagration”, a veritable “typographical explosion”. this is to link up with all of the avant-gardist and modernist readings of the poem, from tzara to barthes109 and kristeva. such an interpretation overdetermines the visible aspects of the text and the surface that strikes the retina at the expense of the readable aspects and its intellectual layering, while by contrast the poet presented his text as a “precise spiritual staging” that layers the “prismatic subdivisions ofthe idea”. 110 let us not confuse a prism with a bomb, nor hierarchy with anarchy. on a number of counts, the coup de dés, as poem-score and poem-stamp, presents itself in terms of depth as a constructed crystal, certainly a mobile and spaced one, much more than as a fire, whether explosive or implosive. this structural text, which is more like cézanne than the cubists or the futurists, thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 73 and which produces a relational and constructive poetics, aims to link up, via reading, terms (the star-word) with relations between terms (the text-constellation), or indeed the points of the face of a die with the total figure. furthermore, as a poem of “spacing” and not of pulverization, it arises from a poetics of play and a logic of the “fold” in which, as always in mallarmé, syntax remains a “pivot”. between “grand politics”, cosmopolitanism and the politics of silence the mallarméan “displacement” of the anarchist question seems to us to be concentrated in the following formula from ‘music and letters’, which we have purposefully kept until the end and which has been little commented on up until this point, even if it seems decisive for attempting to clarify this situation: “a government, in order to have value, will mirror that of the universe. which is it? monarchical? anarchical? … all conjectures are welcome”.111 this declaration directly echoes the response given by the poet to the inquiry undertaken in 1893 by the journal l’ermitage regarding “the best condition of social good”. confronting, with the words of henri mazel, a “free and spontaneous organisation” with a “disciplined and methodical organisation”, mallarmé arrives at the following conclusion: “social theories, almost opposed to one another, are equivalent”.112 thus, the poet sends back to back libertarianism and social authoritarianism, as if there were no stable and definitive social state but rather processes which can transform into their contrary. likewise, the end of ‘music and letters’ renders identical, in order to go beyond them, voting and rioting, universal suffrage and direct social confrontation.113 thus, for mallarmé, as marchal emphasizes, the social question seems essential while the question of politics remains contingent.114 the whole of mallarmé’s project could be summed up in this question: how can the social link be re-established, given that the political link, which is exclusively horizontal, cannot suffice and that we must take into account, vertically, the “sky instinct in each of us”?115 the author of the grands faits divers would thus aim at a sort of ‘grand politics’ that would be capable, as in the ideal journalism of ‘an interrupted spectacle’, of “recount[ing] events from the particular perspective of dreams”.116 as a result, from the perspective of this permanent displacement, it is no longer be possible to think politics using the categories of real politics. it is thus that we can understand the following epigraph from the first version of ‘the court’: “for alienating the nations [pour s’aliéner des patries]”.117 mallarmé is neither engaged nor disengaged; his “critical poetry” would only have delimited this space at a distance that allows us to think.118 anarchy remains one of the modalities of the actualization of a real politics, while mallarmé aims to link up again with the articulation between the human and the cosmic, which existed in other epistemes. the government and the terrestrial city and that of the cosmos must once again be thought in a specular manner; life in common must be organized by this “law, seated in all transparency, naked and marvelous”.119 mallarmé retains the idea of “law” with a capital letter, just as he conserves the idea of the “nation” [patrie] with, once again, a capital letter, and just thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 74 as he remains faithful to the concept of the state and of taxation with his project for a “fonds littéraire”.120 such traditionalism would no doubt horrify an anarchist nominalist like stirner. finally, if the social relation is a “fiction” that arises from belles-lettres, we arrive at a certain overturning of platonism. the res publica rests on an essentially literary essence, the res litteraria, and the mallarméan republic must be governed by the poet-king. such would be the lesson of ‘safeguard’: the true guardian of the city is the writer, the scribe, the man of letters. the revolution would come from an ideal académie française, and would be an invisible revolution. with mallarmé, very far from the noise and fury of bombings, it is necessary to lend one’s ears and one’s mind to a “grand politics” of silence, and to wait. notes 1. reprinted with the kind permission of fabula. thierry roger, ‘art et anarchie à l’époque symboliste : mallarmé et son groupe littéraire’, fabula / les colloques, de l’absolu littéraire à la rélégation: le poète hors les murs, url http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document2443.php 2. it is a matter of account for “the belonging of the very concept of poet to the conceptualization of politics as a disposition of human action and of the human community anterior to any and all constitution”, jacques rancière, ‘préface’, la politique des poètes, dir. jacques rancière, (paris: albin michel, 1992), p. 9. 3. jacques rancière, politique de la littérature (paris: galilée, 2007), p. 11. 4. see in particular ‘la rime et le conflit. la politique du poème’, mallarmé ou l’obscurité lumineuse, dir. bertrand marchal and jean-luc steinmetz, (paris: hermann, 1999), p. 115-141. 5. jacques schérer, le ‘livre’ de mallarmé (paris: gallimard, 1957), p. 108. 6. for an approach at once descriptive and critical of this ‘mallarmisme’ from the years of french structuralism, we take the liberty of referring to our own work: thierry roger, l’archive du coup de dés. etude critique de la réception de un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard de mallarmé (1897-2007), (paris: classiques garnier 2010). 7. roland barthes, ‘inaugural lecture, collège de france’, in a barthes reader (london: vintage, 2000), p. 466. 8. two other works of very different nature and tone, but which deal with the same question, should be mentioned here and should be situated in the lineage of bertrand marchal’s reading, which made both of them possible. on the one hand, there is antoine compagnon’s pleasantly titled article ‘la place des fêtes: mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’ (in mallarmé ou l’obscurité lumineuse, op. cit., pp. 39-86), which offers a panoramic view of the eminently ambivalent relations mallarmé had with the republic by evoking the significant positions of the poet at different critical moments of this period. let us note that for compagnon, who dismisses both sartre and kristeva, all the while demonstrating his skepticism with respect to rancière’s interpretation, mallarmé was neither reactionary, nor revolutionary, nor a “good democrat”, nor a “workerist”. he adds, however: “nothing allows us to decide whether he was anti-democratic” (p. 75). on the other hand, ludwig lehnen, in mallarmé et stefan george. politique de la poésie à l’époque du symbolisme, (paris: pups), 2010, sets out to criticize in a systematic manner the concept thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 75 of “fiction”, such as it was put forward by bertrand marchal. this book, which is in part influenced by the german critic of mallarmé, kurt wais, wages war against a reading judged to be too “negativist” or too “ludic” and highlights the clearly anti-modern – and in particular anti-democratic – orientation of mallarméan thought. 9. ‘mallarmé’s “humanizing” of religion thus runs counter to the dominant tendency of the century’, jacques rancière, mallarmé: the politics of the siren (london/new york: continuum), 2011, p. 59. for rancière, in fact, the mallarméan gesture would not consist in folding the divine back onto the human, but rather in unfolding in a “chimerical” mode that which is divine in the human, all within the framework of a “religion of artifice” (ibidem.) but in this essay, the passage from the religious to the political, or the articulation of the two, remains quite vague. 10. ibid., p. 64. 11. see pierre bourdieu, les règles de l’art (paris: editions du seuil, 1998), pp. 450-455. 12. for a discussion and for what is in part a lacanian reorientation of the bourdieusian use of mallarmé, see patrick thériault, le (dé)montage de la fiction : la révélation moderne de mallarmé (paris: champion, 2010), in particular pp. 7-29. 13. jean-paul sartre, ‘mallarmé’, mallarmé. la lucidité et sa face d’ombre (paris: gallimard, 1986), p. 151. 14. ‘there is, in mallarmé, a sad hoaxer’, ibid., p. 165. 15. julia kristeva, la révolution du langage poétique (paris: editions du seuil, 1985), p. 428. 16. jean maitron, le mouvement anarchiste en france. 1. des origines à 1914 (paris: gallimard, 1992), p. 206. 17. jacques monférier, ‘symbolisme et anarchie’, rhlf, april-june 1965. in fact, it would be necessary from hereon to mention the following works: pierre aubery, ‘l’anarchisme des littératuers au temps du symbolisme’, le mouvement social, october-december 1969, pp. 21-24; julia kristeva, ‘l’anarchisme politique ou autre’, la révolution du langage poétique, pp. 421-420; joan ungersma halperin, félix fénénon. art et anarchie dans le paris fin-desiècle (paris: gallimard, 1991); philippe oriol, ‘des sympathies anarchistes de quelques littérateurs’, ravachol. un saint nous est né ! textes établis et rassemblés par philippe oriol (paris: l’equipement de la pensée, 1992), pp. 99-112; david weir, anarchy and culture: the aesthetic politics of modernism, (amherst: university of massachussets press, 1997); alain pessin, patrice terrone (dir.), littérature et anarchie (toulouse: presse universitaires du murail, 1998); ‘anarchisme et création littéraire’, rhlf, may-june, 1999; uri eisenzweig, fictions de l’anarchisme (paris: bourgois, 2001); philippe oriol, ‘vive l’anarchie ! vive le vers libre !’, bernard lazare (paris: stock, 2003), pp. 93-118; jean-pierre lecercle, littérature, anarchies, (paris: editions place d’arme, 2007); caroline granier, les briseurs de formules. les écrivains anarchistes en france à la fin du 19ème siècle (villiers-cotterêts: ressouvenances, 2008); eduardo febles, explosive narratives. terrorism and anarchy in the works of emile zola (amsterdam/new york: rodopi, 2001). let us add the recent essay by guliette sapiro on the la responsabilité de l’écrivain (paris: editions du seuil, 2011), which is surpassed by the information given by jean maitron on the question of anarchism under the third republic. 18. see gustave lanson, ‘la poésie contemporaine. m. stéphane mallarmé’ (1893), stéphane mallarmé, coll. ‘mémoire de la critique’, (paris; pups), pp. 269-278. thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 76 19. ibid., p. 275. 20. ibidem. 21. jean thorel, ‘les pères de l’anarchisme. bakounine, stirner, nietzsche’, la revue bleue, april 15 1893, pp. 449-454. 22. we should also highlight the important article by théodore randal, the pseudonym of the famous germanist charles andler (1866-1933), ‘le livre libérateur’, published in september 1892 in les entretiens politiques et littératires. stirner’s text is presented as “the most complete manual of anarchism that is possible” (p. 128). la revue bleue also commented in the person of jean throel on stirner’s work by comparing it with that of bakunin, as well as with nietzsche, (‘les pères de l’anarchisme’, april 15 1893, pp. 449-454). furthermore, the edition of la plume devoted to anarchy on may 1 1893, titled ‘historique des faits’ and curated by emile joannès, mentions the name of stirner amongst the list of the theoreticians of the moment (p. 213). let us add that henri albert, who moreover was the translator of nietzsche, published the full translation of the introduction to the ego and his own (‘all things are nothing to me’) in may 1894 in the mercure de france (no., 53, pp. 28-31). he accompanies the text with the following note, which takes into account the displacement of the horizon of expectation: “‘le livre qu’on quitte monarque’ appeared just a half century ago. let us say provisionally that that which now seems to be pure anarchy was not then considered as anything other than a work of the extreme left of hegelian philosophy… the title of this chapter is also that of a very well known poem from goethe” (p. 28). 23. gustave lanson, ‘la poésie contemporaine. m. stéphane mallarmé’ (1893), art. cit., p. 276. 24. ibid., p. 277. 25. ibidem. 26. in particular, lanson comments in particular in the direction of radical idealism, the ex libris of félicien rops (ibid., pp. 274-275) 27. antoine compagnon sees here, for instance, and without doubt correctly, a ‘ripost’ to lanson. ‘la place des fêtes: mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’, art. cit., p. 62. 28. on these questions, see in particular david weir, anarchy and culture, op. cit., and wolfgang asholt, ‘entre esthétique anarchiste et esthétique d’avant-garde: félix fénéon et les formes brèves’, rhlf, may-june 1999, pp. 499-513. 29. emile joannès, ‘historique des faits’, art. cit., p. 214. 30. see the ‘lettres sur l’anarchie’, la plume, september 1 1892, p. 377. 31. emile reclus, ‘aux compagnons rédacteurs’, les entretiens politiques et littéraires, july 1892, p. 3. 32. albert thibaudet, histoire de la littérature (1936), cnrs éditions, 2007, p. 513. 33. jean-pierre lecercle, littérature, anarchies, op. cit., p. 53. 34. it would nevertheless be necessary to cite here the paragraph devoted to the ‘anarchists’: ‘those who preach the right to existence and the laziness by all means are the anarchists. the majority are disgruntled bourgeois who have more bitterness to quell thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 77 than convictions to argue for. they demand liberty, which is to say the right to oppress in turn. excessively individualist, they do not want to admit that the egalitarian society of tomorrow is a machine where everything will be ruled by the movements of a clock. up to now they have made more noise with dynamite cartridges than with their literary works. the best known are: louise michel, kropotkin, sébastien faure, charles malato, paterne berrichon, henri cholin, octave mirbeau, élisée reclus, pouget, veidaux, émile gautier, chincholle, ernest gégout, alexandre tisserand, lucien mühlfeld, andré gide, zo d’axa, guillaume le rouge, alain desveaux, la purge, chansonnier plein de verve, michel zévaco, hamon’. 35. camille mauclair, servitude et grandeur littéraires, ollendorf, 1922, p. 115. 36. cited by jean-pierre lecercle, littérature, anarchies, op. cit., p. 10. 37. la plume may 1 1893, p. 208. 38. emile zola, paris, jean noiray (ed.), gallimard, 2002, p. 78. 39. for more details, see denis pernot, ‘léon daudet et le roman de l’anarchiste’, rhlf, may-june 1999, pp. 423-437. 40. cited by jean maitron, le mouvement anarchiste en france, tome 1, op. cit., p. 187. 41. la révolte, december 5-11 1891. 42. gabriel de la salle, ‘prises d’armes’, l’art social, november 1891, p. 3. 43. ibid., p. 5. 44. on this eternal question of the means and ends of art from the 1890’s, see caroline granier, les briseurs de formules, op. cit. 45. christope charle, naissance des ‘intellectuels’ (1880-1900) (paris: les editions de minuit, 1990), p. 129. 46. bertrand marchal, la religion de mallarmé (paris: josé corti, 1988), pp. 368-369. 47. ‘lettres sur l’anarchie’, art. cit., p. 377. 48. lucien muhlfeld, ‘des sympathies anarchistes de quelques littérateurs’, l’endehors, july 27 1892. 49. we take this formula from pierre glaudes, at the same time as referring to his very rich clarification of the subject: ‘“noces barbares”: les écrivains de la belle-epoque et l’anarchisme’, in littérature et anarchie, op. cit., pp. 171-189. 50. ibid., p. 185. 51. on this question, see in particular uri eisenzweig, fictions de l’anarchisme, op. cit., and eduardo febles, explosive narratives. terrorism and anarchy in the works of emile zola, op. cit. 52. see the anthology by guy ducrey and its rich critical commentary, romans fin-de-siècle (paris: robert laffont, 1999). 53. camille mauclair, le soleil des morts (1898), in romans fin-de-siècle, op. cit., p. 950. 54. ibidem. thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 78 55. ibid., p. 1026. 56. bertrand marchal, la religion de mallarmé, op. cit., p. 369. 57. bertrand marchal, la religion de mallarmé, op. cit., p. 369. 58. rémy de gourmont, responses to jules huret, enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (1891), daniel grojnovski (ed.), 1999, p. 166. 59. rémy de gourmont, ‘le symbolisme’, la revue blanche, june 25 1892, pp. 322-323. 60. francis vielé-griffin, ‘réflexions sur l’art des vers’, les entretiens politiques et littéraires, may 1892. 61. victor barracund, ‘un ennemi du peuple’, l’endehors, july 10 1892. 62. octave mirbeau, ‘preface’ to jean grave, la société mourante et l’anarchie, 1894, cited by louis deschamps, la plume january 1 1894, p. 1. 63. edouard schuré, ‘l’individualisme et l’anarchie en littérature. frierich nietzsche et sa philosophie’, revue des deux mondes, august 15 1895, p. 766. 64. a. veidaux, ‘philosophe de l’anarchie’, la plume, may 1 1893, p. 192. 65. octave mirbeau, ‘potius!’, le journal, may 7 1894, cited in p. michel and jean-françois nivet (eds.), combats littéraires, l’age d’homme, 2006, p. 385. 66. ‘m. laurent tailhade et l’anarchie’, le gaulois, april 6, 1894. 67. a. retté, ‘l’art et l’anarchie’, la plume february 1 1893. 68. edouard schuré, ‘l’individualisme et l’anarchie en littérature. friedrich nietzsche et sa philosophie’, art. cit., pp. 775-805. 69. s. faure, la douleur universelle (antony: editions tops, 2009), p. 165. 70. jean maitron, le mouvement anarchiste en france. tome 1, op. cit., p. 41. 71. jean thorel, ‘les pères de l’anarchisme’, art. cit., p. 451. 72. jean grave, mémoires d’un anarchiste, (paris: editions du sextant, 2009), p. 356. 73. since julia kristeva’s revolution in poetic language, critics have seldom explored this question in a direct and extensive manner. let us highlight the follow works, which deal with it at greater or lesser length: bertrand marchal, la religion de mallarmé, op. cit., pp. 368-370; a. c. aubert, ‘mallarmé et la bombe de zola’, romantisme, no. 87, spring 1995, pp. 69-74; antoine compagnon, ‘la place des fêtes: mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’, art. cit., pp. 59-66; pascal durand ‘“la destruction fut ma béatrice”. mallarmé ou l’implosion poétique’, rhlf, may-june 1999, pp. 373-389; uri eisenzweig, ‘poétique de la bombe’, fictions de l’anarchisme, op. cit. , pp. 188-205; jean-pierre lecercle, littérature, anarchies, op. cit., passim; patrick macguinness, ‘mallarmé and the poetics of explosion’, mln, september 2009, pp. 797-824. 74. henri mondor, vie de mallarmé, gallimard, 1941, p. 492. 75. antoine compagnon, ‘la place des fêtes: mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’, art. cit., p. 59. 76. caroline granier, les briseurs de formules, op. cit., p. 379. thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 79 77. ibid., p. 14. 78. ibid., p. 38. 79. kristeva, in revolution in poetic language, all the while aligning mallarmé with political anarchy, insists on the radical divergence that exists between the formally conservative tracts of the militants and the always-already transgressive poems, whose form consecrates the primacy of the ‘semiotic’ over the ‘symbolic’, independently of the political opinions of its author. 80. pascal durand judges first of all that, because of his sense for forms and formalities, as well as his anti-individualist aesthetics of the impersonal and his distance-taking with respect to prose-based anarchy, “nothing can lead us a priori to see in mallarmé an anarchist” (p. 374). yet he continues by pointing out the “incendiary declarations” (p. 376) from the time of the tournon crisis and of his poems published in the parnasse contemporain, and by recalling the virulence of a poet railing against a certain bourgeois materialism. the academician then insists on what he calls mallarmé’s “calm, and for this reason quite worrying, violence” (p. 379), a violence which attacks thematism and, above all, language in its referential function (‘meaning-and-having-to-say [le vouloir-devoir dire]’” p. 379). durand reprises here lanson’s thesis by radicalizing via the reading of la musique et les lettres proposed by bourdieu in les règles de l’art. it is the “impious dismantling of fiction” – “propaganda by theoretical deed” (p. 386) – that would make of him an anarchist par excellence. let us clarify that the distinction from the time between individualist anarchism and socialist anarchism is not taken into account, just as the notion of anarchy is not questioned historically. 81. antoine compagnon, ‘la place des fêtes : mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’, art. cit., p. 65. 82. oc, tome ii, p. 325. 83. uri eisenzweig, fictions de l’anarchisme, op. cit., p. 194. 84. of course, there cannot be a pure beginning: we could go infinitely, with privileged stopping points at the time of the commune or in the years of baudelaire’s formation… 85. jean maitron, le mouvement anarchiste en france, tome 1, op. cit., p. 212. 86. p. berrichon, letter to mallarmé, february 11 1892, stéphane mallarmé, correspondance, henri mondor and l. j. austin (eds.), t. vi, p. 201. 87. mallarmé, letter to p. berrichon 16 february 1892, ibid., pp. 44-45. 88. ibid., p. 44. 89. stéphane mallarmé, ‘faits divers’, the national observer, february 25 1893, oc, t. ii, p. 312. 90. ibid., p. 311. 91. ibidem. 92. see stéphane mallarmé, correspondance, henri mondor, l. j. austin (eds.), 1981, vol. vi, p. 201. 93. ibid., p. 115. thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 80 94. oc, t. ii, p. 660. bertrand marchal, citing and clarifying the account of this episode such as it is given in the book of souvenirs by brulat (lumières et grandes ombres, 1930), we learn from the manuscript version of this note that mallarmé corrected a first formulation of his response, which was: ‘i know of no other bomb, than a beautiful book’, oc, t. ii, p. 1723. 95. for more clarifications, see bertrand marchal’s note in oc, t. ii, p. 1741. 96. ibidem. the “obviously” here might seem excessive, given the information available to us. it should be read in conjunction with the following formula from la religion de mallarmé, which proclaims, with respect to the journalistic equation between free versists and posers of bombs: “here is mallarmé, who is above suspicion, suspected of being complicit with propaganda by the deed” (p. 368); or in conjunction with the other formula that waxes ironic about the “complacency” of the symbolist milieus with respect to anarchy. now, as we have seen above, it is the symbolists themselves – vielé-griffin, gourmont in particular – who build bridges between these different forms of freedom and revolt, without devolving, of course, into an apology for terrorism. on the other hand, dandyism does not explain everything: there were indeed militant engagements. in other words, marchal, like caroline granier, but for different reasons, decides a little too hastily, in our view, the answer to this question. 97. le soir, april 27 1894, oc, t. ii, p. 709. 98. stéphane mallarmé, divagations, op. cit., pp. 192-193. this text, an extract from the conference, will be published in 1897 in divagations in the series ‘grands faits divers’ under the title ‘accusation’. 99. if mauclair is to be believed, the author of la fille aux mains coupées, who would be a future dreyfusard, was a frequent attendee of the mardis. camille mauclair, mallarmé chez lui, (paris: grasset, 1935), p. 45. 100. pascal quillard, ‘l’anarchie par la littérature’, les entretiens politiques et littéraires, april 1892, p. 150. 101. cited by uri eisenzweig, fictions de l’anarchisme, op. cit., p. 197. 102. cited by antoine compagnon, ‘la place des fêtes: mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’, art. cit., p. 60. 103. henri de régnier, cahiers inédits, pygmalion, 2002, p. 385. 104. antoine compagnon, ‘la place des fêtes: mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’, art. cit., p. 60. 105. oc, t. ii, p. 215. 106. see bertrand marchal, la religion de mallarmé, op. cit., p. 382-383. 107. ‘mine those substructures, when obscurity invades your perspective; no! – string up some lanterns, in order to see’, stéphane mallarmé, divagations, op. cit., p. 195. 108. pascal durand ‘“la destruction fut ma béatrice’, mallarmé ou l’implosion poétique’, art. cit., p. 381. 109. pascal durand subscribes to the analyses from degré zéro de l’écriture relative to the mallarméan ‘destruction’ of language. thierry roger: art and anarchy in the time of symbolism s9 (2016): 81 110. oc, t. i, p. 391. 111. stéphane mallarmé, divagations, op. cit., p. 198. 112. oc, t. ii, p. 660. 113. ibid., p. 74. with respect to the question of mallarmé’s political opinion properly speaking, which is difficult to determine, we refer to antoine compagnon’s clarificatory remarks, antoine compagnon, ‘la place des fêtes: mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’, art. cit., as well as to the works of bertrand marchal. 114. bertrand marchal, la religion de mallarmé, op. cit., p. 378. 115. stéphane mallarmé, divagations, op. cit., p. 195. 116. ibid., p. 23. 117. oc, t. ii, p. 325. 118. bertrand marchal, ‘poésie et droit de cité’, mallarmé 1842-1898. un destin d’écriture (paris: gallimard/rmn, 1998), p. 38. placed back within the framework of the religious, linguistic and mythographic thought of his time, mallarmé’s politics, according to the author of la religion de mallarmé, moves towards anthropology and a thought of ‘symbolic forms’. 119. stéphane mallarmé, divagations, op. cit., p. 195. 120. see antoine compagnon, ‘la place des fêtes : mallarmé et la troisième république des lettres’, art. cit., pp. 80-86. s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 96-124 j o h n h o l l a n d t h e c a p i t a l i s t u n c a n n y i n may 1972, during a lecture entitled “du discours psychanalytique [on the psychoanalytic discourse],” delivered at the university of milan, jacques lacan announced to his listeners that “the crisis, not of the discourse of the master, but of the capitalist discourse, which is its substitute, has begun.”1 the capitalist discourse is a “modern” modification of the discourse of the master, and in making this statement, lacan was marking out certain limits of a particular trajectory of his teaching, one that had enabled him to develop his theory of the four discourses: a theory of the ways in which jouissance and the unconscious inhere within particular social practices. this article seeks to provide a broad sketch of the workings of the fith, capitalist discourse, lightly etching in certain arguments that would deserve to be developed more fully elsewhere. i shall argue that this discourse is a particular mode of the compulsion to repeat, and gives rise, at its heart, to an experience that could be called a capitalist uncanny. let desperate by such a compulsion, the “capitalist” will make an attempt to impose stability upon this movement by recreating the weltanschauung of his/her predecessor, the master. such efforts, however, will be rendered vain by the confrontation with the force of a new superego. 1. discourse and ideology the fith of lacan’s discourses immediately raises the question of how a discourse can be called “capitalist.” a discourse is a particular social formation in which the existence of speech establishes places from which one can act; to define capitalism as a discourse is to relate it to the internal logic of this structure. the precondition for answering this question is an understanding of what discourse itself is. the particularity of lacan’s discourse-theory can be approached by examining how it differs from its closest theoretical “relation”: the lacanian-inspired ideology-analysis initiated by slavoj žižek and others. their treatment of ideology diverges somewhat from lacan’s discourse-theory, most notably in their account of the relation between fantasy and reality. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 97 in his relatively early work, žižek set out certain premises of a valuable and subtle theory of ideology; his essay, “che vuoi?,” which appeared in the sublime object of ideology, the first book that he published in english, can, for the present purposes, be taken as the founding act of this theory.2 by drawing on lacan’s graph of desire and emphasizing the role of fantasy, he produced a theory of the way in which jouissance and the unconscious insinuate themselves into configurations of signifiers, configurations that involve conceptions of society, economics, politics or sexuality. one of the starting-points of žižek’s analysis is his treatment of the limits of the work of louis althusser, for whom ideology “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” a relationship that is established when agents of the ideological state apparatuses “hai[l] or interpellat[e] individuals as subjects.”3 žižek states that …the crucial weakness of hitherto (post-)structuralist essays in the theory of ideology descending from the althusserian theory of interpellation was to limit themselves to the lower level, to the lower square of lacan’s graph of desire—to aim at grasping the efficiency of an ideology exclusively through the mechanism of imaginary and symbolic identification.4 althusser’s formulations involved only the first two of the four levels of the graph of desire, the ones dominated by the symbolic and imaginary. žižek’s innovation is therefore to show how the third and fourth levels, which bring in jouissance and the unconscious, affect ideology. according to žižek, the person who interpellates us opens up, without knowing that s/he is doing so, a dimension that has nothing to do with consciousness; contained within this call is the che vuoi?—what do you want—addressed to us by the s(), the point of impasse, of silence, of “inconsistency” in the other (123). because of this unknown and uncalculated dimension of the call, an ideology finds the source of its power in the unconscious and jouissance; “the last support of the ideological effect (of the way an ideological network of signifiers ‘holds’ us) is the non-sensical, pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment,” which is “structured in fantasy” (124). fantasy thus becomes one of the principal elements of ideology. it stages a relation between two terms ( ◊ a), a relation that provides an answer to the che vuoi? this response tells me what the other wants of me, and therefore what i myself want. as conceived in this way, fantasy becomes linked inextricably with another category: reality. žižek follows lacan in presenting fantasy as the frame by which we perceive reality; the “fantasy framework” provides the coordinates by which we choose the particular elements of our “reality” that become important to us, the elements that we include in our account of what occurs around us (47).this strict connection between fantasy and reality is one of the most fruitful aspects of žižek’s theory of ideology; it marks a radical departure from any conception of ideology as a “false consciousness” that can be dissipated by a fuller understanding of reality. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 98 their linkage becomes a powerful tool for explaining the stasis of ideology, the persistence of highly problematic ideologies, in which we claim no longer to believe. this connection also provides ideology-analysis with a reliable way of locating the coordinates of fantasy within any particular ideology. although both  and a are fundamentally ungraspable, their position can be found by paying close attention to the ways in which people describe their experiences of reality. in “che vuoi? ” the most important example of the ideological functioning of the object a is the figure of “the” “jew” in anti-semitic corporatist ideologies, which contend that all elements of society should function in harmony, in the way that the organs in a healthy body supposedly do. “the jew” becomes the scapegoat for the inevitable failure of such a conception, the explanation of why society is actually “split by antagonistic struggles”; for anti-semites, this figure becomes a sort of “fetish,” a foreign body that “marks the eruption of enjoyment in the social field,” and therefore serves as a perfect example of the object a (126). “reality” becomes the principle that enables analysts of ideology to locate the constituents of the fantasy. like the theory of ideology, lacan’s work on discourse also seeks to specify the unexpected implication of the subject and jouissance within our everyday lives; in this case, it looks for them less in the various networks of “ideas” than in a series of social practices. this change of focus will sometimes involve radical reformulations of the roles played by fantasy and reality. the elaboration of the four discourses, and later of the capitalist discourse, marks something of a change in lacan’s teaching: until that moment, he had devoted himself to theorizing a specific practice—that of psychoanalysis—in its autonomy; whenever he referred to historical or social questions, he had done so only to illuminate analytic practice. his theory of discourse, on the other hand, is based on a sort of wager: that the letters that he had elaborated in order to think through psychoanalysis can also throw light upon other practices, which may differ radically from it. as he argues, “through the instrument of language, a certain number of stable relations are established, inside which something that is much larger and goes much further than actual utterances (énonciations) can, of course, be inscribed.”5 lacan’s wager, in developing a theory of these positions, involves an hypothesis that concerns history: that the letters by which he formalized analytic experience can also illuminate social relations that existed long before freud invented analytic practice. in comparison with the complexity of terms that he had employed with the graph of desire, his approach to discourse is radically simplified, and even minimalist, for he uses only four terms: , a force that exists outside the symbolic, and about which we can only learn retroactively, through the signifiers that it underlies; s 1 , the signifier that represents the subject; s 2 , the network of signifiers upon which s 1 intervenes; a, the surplus-jouissance that cannot be lodged within the s 2 . not only do all the letters—i(a), m—that had designated the imaginary in the graph of desire disappear, but also the very term that marks the point of impasse within holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 99 the unconscious— s(), the signifier of the lack in the other—is not written as such. its absent presence can only be inferred by means of the changing relations within the four terms used in writing the discourses. these letters can occupy four places, which neither disappear nor change their order in the movement from one discourse to another:6 in the discourse of the master, which was, in historical terms, the first to emerge, one encounters a series of relations in which the signifier represents the subject for another signifier, to which surplus-jouissance is added. he writes it in the following way in “du discours psychanalytique” (40): here, the s 1 occupies the place of the agent, the s 2 of the other, the a of the production and  of truth. the three other discourses are then made to appear through what lacan, in the other side of psychoanalysis, calls a quasi-mathematical operation of “circular permutation,” by means of a series of counter-clockwise rotations: when s 2 becomes the agent, the discourse becomes that of the university; the analytic discourse emerges when the a serves as the agent; the discourse of the hysteric occurs when  acts as agent (39). each discourse is marked by a series of vectors, which indicates the ways in which one term acts upon and establishes a “relation” with another; each is also, however, characterized by incapacities and impossibilities, where these relations fail, either completely or in part. here will be found one of the most important differences between lacan’s discourse-theory and the ideology-critique inspired by his teaching: the discourses show the way in which specific social practices render particular functions of the psyche unavailable for us when we find ourselves caught up in them. the discourse of the master is particularly important in the present context, both because it will mutate into the capitalist discourse, and because its manner of operating will place it in stark contrast with some of the theoretical assumptions of ideology-analysis. the master who dominates this discourse is a figure who operates not only in hegel’s master-slave dialectic, but also, and more importantly, in classical philosophy and especially in aristotle’s thought. although lacan only formulated this discourse and its operation in 1969, he was preoccupied with the master throughout his teaching, and in the ethics of psychoanalysis, he refers specifically to the nicomachean ethics, a work that tells us much about the master’s metaphysical, epistemological, and libidinal stance; the master, as lacan argues, derives his authority to command by “enter[ing]…and submit[ting] to an established and eternal ‘order’ which has been set in motion by the ‘unmoved mover.’”7 holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 100 within the theory of discourse, this master intervenes upon the slave, establishing a relation of command and obedience, hierarchy, and domination. if, in d’un autre à l’autre [from an other to the other], lacan had referred to the master as a “dumb ass [con],” he progressively delineates a more complex status for him, first in the other side of psychoanalysis and then in encore, showing that if this figure is separate from knowledge, he nevertheless embodies a somewhat sinister epistemological position.8 in sketching out the master’s role in the seventeenth seminar, lacan emphasizes that his power derives from his definition of himself as being “identical with his own signifier” (90). this very simplicity enables him to intervene switly upon the slower-moving slave, who is encumbered by the complex relations of signifiers that constitute knowledge. animated by a desire for “things [to] work,” the master commands the slave to do his bidding. he would like, in particular, to take possession of this knowledge and to have it used for his own purposes. as lacan says, this knowledge is to be “transmitted from the slave’s pocket to the master’s— assuming that they had pockets in those days”; in this way, the slave is gradually dispossessed of “this knowledge in order for it to become the master’s knowledge,” an operation that would pave the way for the establishment, first, of classical philosophy and then of the discourse of the university, in which the s 2 takes the place of the agent (22). at the center of the discourse of the master is a cluster of psychic and libidinal positions: the slave’s transference towards the master, and the latter’s exclusion of his own jouissance in favor of his ability to control the slave. in intervening upon the slave’s knowledge, the master unfortunately acquires a position of great psychic significance for the slave. with the master’s advent, the slave loses a more or less direct relation to his own body, which becomes the master’s property (89). as a result, from the slave’s perspective, the master’s action comes to stand in for the primal loss of an unmediated relation to his body, a loss that we all experience, and which lacan, in the four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, had called “alienation.” alienation designates, first, the operation of primal repression and then of secondary repressions, in which the living being has to make a “forced choice” between its own being and “meaning,” which lacan would later write as s 2 . this being, in consenting to being represented by these signifiers, loses not only a direct access to its body, but also a specific signifier with which it had identified and which can be written as s 1 , and which is no longer accessible to consciousness. this operation can be represented as follows:9  holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 101 the master, in making the slave submit to him, brings the s 1 to bear upon an “already constituted” field of knowledge, a set of signifiers that are “already articulated with one another” (other side, 15). through its operation, the master signifier will come to stand in for the signifier that has already been eclipsed by primal repression, the term that “freud defined by placing it between the enigmatic parenthesis of the urverdrängt” (90). in this way, each signifier that is part of the slave’s “headless knowledge” acquires a new resonance, precisely because it has come to refer to the signifier that had been “split off” from the others. this resonance exacts a heavy price upon the slave, for it binds him in a transferential relation to the master. in conjunction with this new relation, the , “the subject as divided, emerges” in the place of the “truth of the master” (15, 90). this  becomes the subject-supposedto-know for the slave and the master acquires a power over him because something in this master is presumed to know about his unconscious. this transference, just as much as the master’s ability to punish the slave, seals the latter’s submission to him. despite the subjective roots of the slave’s subservience, the master is not all-powerful; not only are there limits to his ability command the slave, but this very capacity is based upon an acceptance of severe restrictions on his own psyche. the master’s discourse is marked by both “impossibilities” and incapacities or even “impotences [impuissances]” (encore, 16). the impossibility inheres in the relation between the master signifier and knowledge; although it is true that the signifier’s intervention has an enormous psychic effect upon the slave, from the master’s own perspective, its results are inevitably disappointing. although the master may want things to function smoothly, what his experience will show him is that this will not occur through his commands, either in the field of knowledge or in more practical matters. as lacan asserts, “it is effectively impossible that there be a master who makes the entire world function. getting people to work is even more tiring, if one really has to do it, than working oneself. the master never does it” (other side, 74). nothing is less certain than that the slave elaborates knowledge expressly at the master’s command, in part because the master signifier, when it first intervenes upon the slave, acts upon a “network” of knowledge that has already been formed (13). if the slave brings forth any further knowledge, it is not as a result of a successful command from the master, but because the structure of the discourse has instituted a transference that is directed to , rather than to s 1 .10 the impuissance that inheres within the discourse of the master will have an even more far-reaching effect, for it will render inoperative, within this discourse, the relations upon which žižek’s first formulations of ideology-analysis depend. if the vectors in the discourses mark the existence of certain sorts of connections, which allow an agent, for example, to act upon an other, and for this other to produce a third element, there is, on the contrary, a “barrier” between surplus-jouissance, located in the place of the production, and the , the master’s truth. because of this barrier, “the master is castrated” (97). if the slave is bound by transference to the master, the latter, in turn, “is only able to dominate” him “by excluding” both phallic jouissance and the fantasy that serves as its precondition, from his experience; holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 102 he does so, in part because this jouissance could expose him both to the subversive effects of the sexual non-relation and to the contradictions inherent within his own particular desire (97). such an exposure would sap his ability to dominate the slave, for this ability depends upon his capacity to define himself as identical to himself. this conclusion, as lacan notes, is unexpected, for “what people usually say” is the opposite: “that jouissance is the privilege of the master” (22). the master, however, is radically unlike the primal father in freud’s totem and taboo, just as he differs from the term that figures in lacan’s mathemes of masculine sexuation: , the at-least-one element that has not submitted to castration. if fantasy does not operate for the master, then this structural particularity raises a question about the role of reality in his discourse: how can reality manifest itself here, if it has been defined as what frames a psychic formation that no longer operates? if the master has no fantasy, then what kind of reality does he have? to my knowledge, lacan never gives an explicit answer to this question, but i shall argue that he provides an implicit response, and leaves us the coordinates that can enable us to understand the character of the master’s reality.11 this reality will turn out to be the opposite of the one that lacan describes in encore as being approached through “apparatuses of jouissance”; instead, it can be conceived of as a particular variation of the reality principle, one in which the hope of refinding the hallucinated object of satisfaction has disappeared (55). certain indices concerning the master’s relation to reality can be found in encore, in the passage in which lacan discusses what he calls a “conception of the world,” an expression that he employs as a way of rethinking freud’s remarks about the weltanschauung (41-43). in his essay, “the question of a weltanschauung,” in the new introductory lectures on psycho-analysis, freud defines a weltanschauung as “an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.”12 the expression that interests lacan in this definition is “fixed place,” and he will take up freud’s formulations by employing the term, “world,” in a way that is reminiscent of alexandre koyré’s use of it: it denotes a stable aristotelian cosmology and metaphysic, which is based upon a bounded system of spheres, in which the master himself comes to be located at its “center.”13 lacan’s interest in the “world” and the topological qualities of the sphere is of long standing, and an important aspect of his concern with them derives from their connection with a particular understanding of what reality is. he occupied himself with the sphere because it permits a clear and simple demarcation between inside and outside, one that provides the condition for what he calls “cosmological thinking” in his seminar, problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse [crucial problems for psychoanalysis]: a form of thought that is characterized by an adequation between macrocosm and microcosm, in such a way that the latter comes to be seen as the result of the former, and will correspond to it point-by-point. this microcosm can be conceived of in several ways: “as subject, soul, ηούς (nous),” while the determiholland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 103 nant macrocosm can be called “reality” or the “universe.”14 the sphere thus becomes the basis of a theory of knowledge in which reality can be divided into a thousand separate atoms, each of which will exist in a more or less perfect correspondence with the mental presentation that we make of it. it is this sort of epistemology that underlies the master’s position; he locates himself at the center of the system of spheres and bases his power upon his “clearsighted” access to reality, the condition of which is his acceptance of castration. as lacan argues in encore, the stability of the conception of the world as a series of spheres is guaranteed by “a view, gaze or imaginary hold” that remains outside the system: that of the unmoved mover, who has set the spheres in motion. the master is able to occupy the center of this system because he defines himself as the figure who is able to discern and submit to this external and constitutive gaze; in lacan’s words, “some-one—a part of this world—is at the outset assumed to be able to take cognizance of” this gaze and the imaginary hold that it provides (43). lacan’s use of the expression “take cognizance” is significant, for it denotes an operation that is the condition for the master’s assumption of his status, an operation that will have a crucial effect on the ordered set of knowledge. this expression is not at all absent from freud’s work, for it is a central element of his concept of disavowal, with the crucial difference that, with the latter, it is always marked by a sort of negation, a “refus[al] to take cognizance” of something. this is the case with fetishism, for example, which arises when a boy refuses “to take cognizance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis.”15 by contrast, the master’s affirmation, his action of taking cognizance is much less familiar to us as a concept than disavowal; it had to wait until 1972 to be formulated, in encore, and it is marked by what is, for us, the radical strangeness of the master’s exclusion of his own jouissance, an exclusion that is unfamiliar for us and is difficult for us to grasp. the master’s taking of cognizance is not the symmetrical opposite of the budding fetishist’s refusal to do so. the latter refuses to recognize what is empirically available to him in sense perceptions; the master, however, acknowledges something that is never present to the senses as such: something of which the gaze as object a—which lacan defines as “unapprehensible”—is itself the index (four fundamental concepts, 83). the master recognizes not a sense-perception, but a logical position that is located beyond the object a: this position is that of the unmoved mover, which stands outside, and thus constitutes an exception to the system of spheres. for the master, this figure has the status of the at-least-one element outside castration——and his acknowledgement of it becomes something like the primordial bejahung, the “judgment of attribution” that marks him as radically castrated and constitutes his position as master.16 the master can then claim that he has the “right” to command others because he believes that his affirmation—his bejahung—is a sign of his strength. as a consequence, he claims to be unlike the fetishist; he supposedly does not allow psychic holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 104 and libidinal concerns to prevent him from affirming the correctness of his perceptions. he presents his own subjective and libidinal impasses as virtues, by using his “clear-sighted” perception of reality as the source of his power. such a choice gives the master a very particular relation to the freudian “reality principle.” lacan had always argued that, as he says in the ethics of psychoanalysis, “the world of perception is represented by freud as dependent on the fundamental hallucination without which there would be no attention available”; reality would not interest us if we did not believe that we could locate in it an hallucinated representation of what has once satisfied us (53). the master, however, seeks to approach the reality principle more directly, in a way that is not oriented by the search for an hallucinated satisfaction; in freud’s words, his goal is to “form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and…make a real alteration in them,” without needing this world to be “distorted” by his own jouissance.17 if this construction of the master’s fundamental epistemological position is correct, then it will affect our understanding of his connection with the slave’s knowledge. his conception of the world provides him with a relation to reality that underlies his domination of the slave and determines his relation to knowledge. he himself knows “nothing,” for he does not occupy the place where knowledge is to be found; his position as bearer of the master signifier does, however, enable him to intervene upon and judge this knowledge: to prescribe the characteristics that the signifiers in this set should possess. the master becomes a sort of “policeman” of reality: he patrols the border between reality and our presentations of it, acting to ensure that each signifier corresponds to its atom of reality. he thereby upholds the preeminence of reality over the knowledge that presents it. this species of surveillance becomes an integral part of the process by which the master takes possession of the slave’s knowledge, and will thereby gradually enable the discourse of the university to emerge, in a form that lacan characterizes, in the other side of psychoanalysis, as a “pure knowledge of the master, ruled by his command” (104). the discourse of the master thus presents us with a social practice that has constraining effects upon the unconscious and libidinal positions of its participants. the position of the master does not correspond directly with the graph of desire, which presents relations of speech in which fantasy plays an almost necessary role; the master’s exclusion of fantasy and his very different relation to reality are not parts of a theory of ideology based upon the graph. this significant difference will bring us back to the question with which i began this discussion: what is the capitalist discourse and what does it mean to qualify a discourse as “capitalist”? for the moment, an answer to this question remains impossible, but several preliminary observations can be made. first, with the capitalist discourse, it is not at all clear that the two mainsprings of the lacanian theory of ideology, fantasy and the reality that it frames, will be able to operate at all. if the capitalist discourse is the modern “substitute” for the discourse of the master, then in spite of the radical differences between the two, it is uncertain that it reholland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 105 stores the operation of the fantasy. the capitalist mode of production would then be obliged to gain and keep its hold on us by some other means. second, it is also uncertain that the “capitalism” in question in this discourse is even fundamentally a mode of production. as we shall see, when lacan defines the structural particularity of the capitalist discourse, he does so by emphasizing the very specific character of the jouissance and the unconscious relations of those who are entrapped within it; he claims that it is marked by a foreclosure of castration. any direct or indirect connection between this “capitalist” characteristic and the capitalist mode of production will therefore not be apparent from the start. it would itself have to become the object of an investigation. 2. the capitalist discourse lacan, indeed, himself required a fairly long time to define the particularity of both the capitalist discourse and the specificity of the jouissance that is to be found within it. in the other side of psychoanalysis, he sometimes locates capitalism within the discourse of the master, positing that marx’s worker is a direct descendant of hegel’s slave; just as “the slave will, over time, demonstrate [the master’s truth] to him,” so the worker will spend his/her time in “fomenting [the capitalist master’s] surplus-jouissance” (107). lacan’s writing of the capitalist discourse as such, and the rather spare comments that he made about it, would have to wait another two years, until 1972. they will enable us to take the measure of both the similarity and the difference between this discourse and that of the master. what these two discourses have in common, as the seventeenth seminar suggests, is the way in which surplus-jouissance is produced. unlike the discourse of the master, however, “capitalism,” for lacan, institutes a series of relations in which this force of the plus-de-jouir makes the unconscious—to the extent that the latter can be grasped in terms of signifiers—cease to operate. this radical change has several consequences: a compulsion to repeat that may never cease and new forms of the superego and the trauma. the two discourses share a common account of the production of the plus-de-jouir, one that lacan had begun to formulate as early as november 1968, before he had even presented his theory of discourse. he gave his first exposition of this concept in the opening sections of his seminar, d’un autre à l’autre, by means of a reference to marx’s account of surplus-value. for marx, the production of a surplus-value is synonymous with the creation of capital. in the second part of volume i of capital, marx sets himself the task of tracing “[t]he [t]ransformation of [m]oney into [c]apital” and thus of showing how money, which had been exchanged in both the ancient and the medieval worlds, had mutated into something that would become the basis of a new mode of production.18 in this new mode, the capitalist uses the money that is at his disposal in order to buy both the means of production and labor-power. the latter is purchased at its current exchange-value, but its use-value holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 106 oten proves to be much greater; in the course of a day, workers may produce a value that is, for example, “double what the capitalist” has paid them (301). the capitalist appropriates this “increment or excess” and the appearance of this new “surplus-value” is crucial: marx locates in it the point at which money is changed into capital and the element upon which capitalism is founded (251). the capitalist appropriates this new value that has been produced, and uses a part of it to repeat and expand the process. he buys more material and hires more workers in order to obtain an even greater surplus-value, thus instituting a process that could, in theory, continue forever. within this system, the production of surplus-value “takes place only within [a] constantly renewed movement. the movement of capital is… limitless” (253). lacan’s claim that marx was the inventor of the symptom is well-known.19 it could just as well be argued that he was also the inventor of the concept of the compulsion to repeat; the capitalist mode of production’s continual pursuit of profit becomes the endless movement of an infernal machine. within the domain not of the psyche but of economics, marx delineated a process by which the production of something new would institute a sort of automatism, a structural necessity in which this new value “forms of itself the starting-point for a new cycle” (253). in d’un autre à l’autre, lacan’s recognition of this structural necessity becomes the basis of a new definition of the genesis of the objet petit a. in this seminar, he no longer―as he had done earlier, in seminars such as anxiety and the four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis―uses the mathematical term, “remainder,” as a way of theorizing this object (four fundamental concepts, 154). he ceases to treat it as an element of the real that has been let over from the process of transforming the latter into signifiers, and instead, referring explicitly to marx, defines it as a real object that is gradually produced by the repeated elaboration of signifiers. playing upon the french translation of mehrwert, surplus-value, as “plus-value,” he dubs the object a as the plus-de-jouir, a “surplus-jouisance,” and argues that the production of the object a is “homologous” to that of surplus-value (d’un autre, 29, 45–46).20 just as labor produces surplus-value, so the gradual establishment of knowledge― the elaboration of a set of traits, each of which fixes a part of our jouissance and satisfaction―produces something else: a certain kind of precipitate or sediment (180). the latter would not exist if there were no process of creating signifiers, but it is not itself a signifier: it cannot give rise to meaning by being enchained with other signifiers. this generation of knowledge is a process that is repeated many times, and with each repetition, more of the precipitate is generated, with the result that ater a certain point, it coagulates into a consistent object, which stands in relation to knowledge as a surplus-jouissance. this object, as some of lacan’s formulations make clear, does not comfort us and palliate our lack; instead, he links it explicitly to freud’s concept of the death drive. it is produced by the “renunciation of jouissance,” a renunciation that is presented less as a deliberate choice than as a consequence of a structural impossibility: that of translating jouissance into signifiers. the attempt to do so inevitably results in holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 107 the loss of a part of it, a loss that gradually solidifies into the plus-de-jouir. the result of this renunciation is that the surplus-jouissance assumes the status of a cause of the “discontents of civilization” (40). this direct reference to civilization and its discontents indicates the profound connection between this jouissance and what freud formulated concerning the superego. in this work, freud had argued that the effect of what the standard edition translates as the “renunciation of instinct” is the “erection of an internal authority”―the superego―that watches over and torments the ego.21 the repetition that characterizes the production of surplus-value in marx thus provides lacan, in the opening sessions of d’un autre à l’autre with a way of beginning to rethink the death drive. although this conception of the object a was presented shortly ater the events of may 1968, an understanding of some of its mortal effects would only come during the winter and spring of 1972, in the course of several presentations that were made outside the framework of his regular seminar. here, he began to speak of a fith, “capitalist” discourse, a paradoxical one, for its very existence disrupts the logic of discourse. this discourse is marked by precisely the action that is unavailable to the master in his own discourse: the appropriation of surplus-jouissance. lacan pinpointed one of the central characteristics of the capitalist discourse in an aside that he made in the course of a lecture given january 6, 1972 to the interns at the at hôpital de sainte-anne. there he claims that “what distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is this―the verwerfung, the rejection, the throwing outside all the symbolic fields… of what? of castration. every order, every discourse that has capitalism in common sets aside what we shall call simply the matters of love.”22 then, four months later, in a lecture delivered in milan entitled “du discours psychanalytique,” lacan continued these reflections by providing a writing of the structure of the capitalist discourse (40): this writing shows that this discourse is a mutation of that of the master; the foreclosure of castration is written as an inversion of the two terms that are located on the let side of the latter—s 1 and —so that the place of the agent is now occupied by the  and that of truth by the s 1 . one of the major effects of this inversion is the breaking through of the barrier between a and , which characterizes the discourse of the master. because the  has ceased to be located in the position of truth, and is found, instead, at that of the agent, the plus-de-jouir can reach it directly. the , rather than the capitalist, appropriates surplus-jouissance, and the gap between subject and object is thereby abolished. if, in the discourse of the master, the a had been rendered so radically unavailable that the  could obtain no sense of it, here it is too fully present. the  is violently “completed” by its object, and through this encounter, castration ceases to exist. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 108 this foreclosure of castration—the inundation of the  by the a—is the opposite of the situation that lacan had described in the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, in his discussion of the trompe l’oeil, as the “taming” of the gaze. in that seminar, in telling the anecdote concerning the hellenistic painters, zeuxis and parrhasios, he was concerned with showing the result of the introduction of castration—of the -φ—into the object a. ater zeuxis had painted a bunch of grapes that was so convincing that birds tried to eat it, parrhasios painted “a veil so lifelike that zeuxis, turning towards him said, well, and now show us what you have painted behind it” (103). the revelation of the trompe l’oeil—that there is nothing behind the veil—however, has a calming effect upon this impulse; it reduces the invasive quality of the wish to look, thereby lessening the violence of a tendency that, when let to itself, would have the “effect of arresting movement and…of killing life” (55). the trompe l’oeil thus introduces a mode of castration that is not as radical as what determines the master’s position; the  has access to a, while also maintaining a distance from it, so that it is not overwhelmed by the libidinal object. in the capitalist discourse, on the other hand, the relation between the  and the a is precisely the opposite: the a is unmarked by the -φ, and the  is stricken by the encounter with it. since this subject is not the psychological “subject” of consciousness, but is, instead, related to the unconscious and its chain of signifiers, it is “stricken,” however, in quite a particular sense. what is stunned and overwhelmed is the very status of the unconscious; the absence of castration will involve something like the disappearance of unconscious formations. this disappearance can occur because one of the roles of castration is to enable jouissance to be ciphered into what we can apprehend as the signifiers of the unconscious. such a role is implied by lacan’s very broad claim that every signifier ciphered by the unconscious refers to castration and has a phallic “signification.” the latter term, as he explained, is to be understood in the sense of the fregean “bedeutung”; it concerns a word’s reference and denotation.23 each signifier can be taken to refer directly to castration, for that is the action that has made its production possible. castration enables the unconscious to generate signifiers by introducing a distance with respect to the overpowering quality of jouissance; if jouissance is too present, there is no need—or possibility—of symbolizing it. such symbolization can only take place when this jouissance is lessened, and this is what castration does, at the cost of leaving the subject with a jouissance that can only be experienced as “insufficient” (encore, 105). in other words, signifiers denote castration in part because the latter constitutes the condition for their possibility. it is within this context that one of the implications of the inversion of the s 1 and the  starts to become apparent. in the discourse of the master, the slave’s sinister subjection to the master’s supposed unconscious is based upon the formula that lacan used frequently in order to describe one of the fundamental structures of unconscious formations: the signifier represents the subject for another signifier. in this formulation, the problematic term is not “signifier,” for in analysis, we can apholland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 109 prehend very specific signifiers directly; we extract them from our dreams and our parapraxes, connect them with other signifiers, and thereby learn something about a desire whose existence we may well not have expected. the term that has a more difficult status is “subject,” for we can never have direct access to it. in explaining it, lacan frequently uses the aristotelian term, “hypokeimenon,” for it underlies the signifying chain, but its nature is fundamentally different from that of any signifier, and therefore its existence can only be a logical “supposition”; we can infer that it exists because of the effect of our encounter with the chain (other side, 13). it is a force that would seem to generate signifiers through a chiffrage, a ciphering, of jouissance; only by examining the chain can we form any hypothesis concerning its jouissance, an enjoyment that would seem to derive a part of its satisfaction through the very process of ciphering. none of these signifiers, however, is identical with the subject and none can encapsulate it; each of them tells us something about it that seems too partial that it ends up being little more than a “lie” about this subject. in the capitalist discourse, the consequence of the inversion of the s 1 and the  is that the signifier no longer represents the subject for another signifier. the capitalist discourse disarticulates the subject from both this signifier and knowledge. as a result, the  now precedes the signifier that had once represented it and ceases to be the subject of the unconscious; knowledge, in turn, is no longer presumed to be touched by such an unconscious. within this discourse, the unconscious ceases to operate. if this is the case, then we can answer in the negative the question of whether fantasy functions within the capitalist discourse. fantasy exists no more here than it does in the discourse of the master, but for a very different reason. the master knows nothing about his fantasy because the point of arrest between a and  prevents these two terms from communicating. what is paradoxical in the capitalist discourse is that it is precisely the absence of this point of arrest that renders the fantasy inoperative. the vector, a → , does not write the relation between the divided subject and the “external” object in which it locates its “being.” instead, it writes a violent breach of that delicate relation of “externality.” what had been the subject of the unconscious encounters the jouissance of the death drive; overwhelmed, it becomes merely an empty place. as a consequence, not only castration, but also much of the psychic apparatus of which the fantasy had been part are now abolished; this abolition renders the operation of this discourse very different from that of the graph of desire. in the graph, the fantasy had provided an answer to the question, che vuoi?, posed by our dim sense of the existence of the s(); when, however, the unconscious ceases to confront us with signifiers that disturb us because of their enigmatic quality, the s() disappears, along with any need to provide a response to it. the answer given by the fantasy provides us with a supple way of dealing with our castration, for it allows the -φ to be “switched from one of its terms to the other”: from  to a and holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 110 then back.24 with the foreclosure of this castration, not only the fantasy but also the very reason for its existence disappear. in a context in which the unconscious and fantasy cease to exist, one may wonder what would be the status of knowledge in the capitalist discourse, since it would no longer be linked to a supposed subject. in what follows, i will suggest that such knowledge can take various forms, which will have in common only the cutting of this link with the . as a first approach to its status—one that highlights its disconnection from the unconscious—let us imagine how a cognitive psychologist might conceive of one of the phenomena that has served as a foundation of analysis: the dream. this psychologist could well isolate in a dream elements that we would call signifiers, but s/he would not assume that they point enigmatically to an ungraspable term that underlies them, and about which we can only know partially and imperfectly. instead, this network of signifiers would be taken to be little more than the day’s residues, which are now being “processed” and laid to rest by the giant computer that is our mind. the elimination of the stopping-point between the a and the  in the discourse of the master has another consequence: it transforms the capitalist discourse into a sequence that, once one enters it, will become extremely difficult to exit. in the other discourses, these points of arrest between the places of the production and of truth help make it possible for anyone who is traversing a particular discourse to pause, take a distance from it, and try to move into another discourse. with the capitalist discourse, this pause does not occur. because of this change, one can move, without impediment, from starting-point back to the same point:  → s 1 → s 2 → a → ….25 this discourse thus “succeeds” in a way that the other discourses, marked as they are by the impasses between production and truth, do not. it reproduces, in the field of the psychic and the social bond, the limitless movement that characterizes capital; both domains are dominated by the same sort of infernal machine. once the circuit has been traversed and one returns to the beginning at , nothing favors one’s escape from this discourse and everything leads one, instead, to repeat the same path that has only just been taken. commenting on this circular motion in “du discours psychanalytique,” lacan notes that the inversion makes the discourse “work like a charm, like skids that have been fully greased, but that’s just it: it goes too fast, it consumes itself [ça se consomme], and it does this so well that it uses itself up [ça se consume]” (48). a sequence that moves faster and faster until its very efficiency leads to collapse and destruction: what lacan is describing can easily be understood as a specific mode of what freud calls the compulsion to repeat, and thus of the death drive. in “the uncanny,” freud describes this repetition as “the constant recurrence of the same thing,” a recurrence that points towards “a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic quality.”26 our entrapment within the capitalist discourse can take on a similar character; the sense of being caught within its continual movement constitutes a part of its nightmarish quality. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 111 if the capitalist discourse is indeed a form of the compulsion to repeat, then it can only be characterized as one in which the passion for ignorance is particularly aggravated, because of the destruction of the signifier’s capacity to represent the subject. freud, in elaborating his conception of this compulsion in beyond the pleasure principle, had been seeking to resolve a problem that had been brought to the fore by soldiers who had been traumatized during the first world war: they dreamed repeatedly about the experiences that had traumatized them. freud theorized that this constant repetition in dreams was part of an attempt to “bind” the trauma: to symbolize it, to translate something of it into signifiers, thus depriving it of some of its force.27 what distinguishes the capitalist discourse from the process that freud theorized is the way in which the former disables the attempt to transform trauma into signifiers. if one of the hallmarks of freud’s uncanny and the death drive is a compulsion to repeat, then one can speak of a capitalist uncanny in which repetition and jouissance take a very particular form. repetition does not enable the real to be symbolized; instead, this discourse becomes the site of an uncanny repetition in which a traumatic jouissance keeps recurring and can never be symbolized. in the capitalist discourse, the , rather than being the hypokeimenon, thus becomes the place of the trauma that is inseparable from this repetition.28 the vector, a → , writes this capitalist uncanny: the traumatic overwhelming of the subject by jouissance occurs over and over because this subject, wrenched out of its position as what is represented by the signifiers, is unable to lessen the force of the trauma by transmuting it into new signifiers. in this discourse, the endless movement of the machine becomes the machine’s very raison d’être and traumatic jouissance becomes the fuel that enables this repetition to continue. in treating capitalism as a discourse in which a signifier ceases to represent the subject for another signifier, lacan is departing somewhat from freud’s own formulations. as samo tomšič remarks in his analysis of the homology between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance, freud frequently approached the ciphering effected by the unconscious in terms of metaphors borrowed from the field of capitalist production; he used expressions such as “traumarbeit, dream-work, witzarbeit, jokework, etc.” this could be read as implying that the proletarian is precisely the “subject of the unconscious” and that the unconscious is an eminently capitalist enterprise (“homology,” 99, 111). i would like to take a slightly different tack, by suggesting that the capitalist discourse marks lacan’s departure from these formulations of freud’s. at least insofar as it delineates the conditions under which the unconscious ceases to operate, and is, indeed, rendered impossible, the  can now no longer be employed in just this way. if the  becomes the mark of a new form of trauma, the a becomes that of a new form of superego. at the beginning of d’un autre à l’autre, in sketching out the way in which surplus-jouissance is produced, lacan had likened it to freud’s account of the genesis of the superego in civilization and its discontents. the plus-de-jouir acts holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 112 as a superego, and this superego can function, for example, as the voice, which is linked to a call that lacan characterizes in a famous passage in encore: “the superego is the imperative of jouissance—enjoy!” (7). this object calls upon us to pursue an “absolute” jouissance, an injunction that is impossible for castrated figures to obey. this command, as lacan argues at the end of his seminar d’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant [on a discourse that would not be of the semblance], is “the origin of everything that has been elaborated in terms of moral conscience”; the push towards an unreachable jouissance comes, paradoxically, to clothe itself in a voice that demands that one obey traditional morality (178). in the capitalist discourse, surplus-jouissance also acts as superego, but its role is different, for it commands us to submit to a jouissance that has ceased to be impossible. because the command, “jouis!” or “enjoy!” is no longer a “correlate of castration,” it becomes imbued with a devastating power (encore, 7). the subject, in encountering the a, is required to lend itself to—to become the habitation of—a jouissance that contains too much excitation, and is therefore more or less impossible to bear. in this way, jouissance itself becomes a sort of authority, to which the subject is compelled to submit, and the effect of which will be traumatic.29 3. capitalist knowledge at this point, it still remains unclear why this discourse is qualified as capitalist. a compulsion to repeat has been initiated by surplus-jouissance, a term that is homologous to surplus-value, which itself begins a different process of repetition; the latter occurs within the infrastructure. this homology does not, in itself, suffice to enable us to qualify this discourse as specifically “capitalist” in the economic sense. if lacan’s discourses are attempts to theorize the fate of the unconscious and jouissance within specific social practices, then does this discourse provide us with a way of understanding the effect of certain capitalist structures? as a first, approximate, response to this question, one can consider  and s 2 as two aspects of the proletarian. the , overwhelmed and deprived of everything—especially its status as the term that underlies a chain of signifiers connected with the unconscious—has no recourse other than to solicit the capitalist, s 1 . submitting to the latter’s orders, the proletarian becomes a “worker” in the place of knowledge, thus producing surplus-jouissance, which will then lead to a repetition of the cycle. one way of theorizing the process by which this knowledge can become related to capitalism as a mode of production is provided by capitalist thinkers themselves. they do so through their concept of the homo œconomicus, the “subject” that they believe would be the correlate of capitalism in its various forms: one that obtains satisfaction by acting on the market. christian laval, in l’homme économique: essai sur les racines du néoliberalisme [homo œconomicus: an essay on the roots of neoliberalism], his intellectual history of the genesis and consequences of this concept, has shown how, for capitalist thinkers, a market cannot exist unless each participant holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 113 in it—each instance of homo œconomicus—has elaborated a sort of capitalist knowledge: a catalogue of what provides satisfactions or causes pain.30 the basis for such a catalogue was given its classical expression by jeremy bentham, at the beginning of his book, an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation: “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”31 building upon this foundation, each economic actor will rank the degree of satisfaction that various objects provide him or her, a procedure that is made possible by considering them purely in quantitative, rather than qualitative terms (laval 159). according to bentham’s notorious calculus of pleasures and pains, the “value” of any object is its “force,” the intensity of the satisfaction or sense of discomfort that it provides (bentham 29). this value can be calculated in a quasi-mathematical fashion by taking into account the intensity and duration of the pleasure or pain that is expected, along with its “certainty or uncertainty” and its “propinquity or remoteness” (29). as bentham states, whenever people have had “a clear view of their own interest,” they have always followed precisely this practice (32). in other words, such calculations are supposed to provide the basis for all trade and contracts (laval 158). the medium of such exchanges is money, which becomes the means par excellence of measuring the intensities of anticipated satisfaction in a way that would correspond to bentham’s calculus of pleasure. armed with such a conception of self-interest, individuals would be able to compete with each other in the market, each seeking to accumulate as much satisfaction for him/herself as possible. homo œconomicus, the figure who arranges the objects that provide such satisfactions according to their “values” is, as samo tomšič remarks, a purely “psychological” subject.32 calculations are conscious and satisfaction is judged on the basis of criteria that make no appeal to the split subject. such satisfaction, indeed, is not complicated by the considerations of any insuperable gaps between need and demand, between demand and desire, or between desire and jouissance; in the formulations of the earliest utilitarians and the classical economists, the object that i ask is, in effect, the one that will satisfy, in a seamless and unproblematic way, the goals that i have set for myself. for example, “jewelry…and fine clothing” will, without any great difficulty, succeed in “making us loveable or impressive” (laval 159). the goals of being loveable or impressive are not, in turn, considered to harbor discontents within themselves, discontents that would then render them less satisfying than had been foreseen.33 homo œconomicus, in cataloguing of objects in terms of the degree of satisfaction that they procure, shows us one of the principal forms taken by capitalist knowledge; grouped together, these rankings of intensity of satisfaction can comprise one of the most important and widespread instances of the s 2 in the capitalist discourse. as laval has noted, however, such a catalogue can only be constructed under one condition: all such objects are to be considered to be commensurable holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 114 with each other (158). in order for them to be compared, they must all provide a satisfaction—or a pain—that differs only in degree, and not in quality; certain satisfactions must not be so fundamentally different from the others that they can no longer even be compared with them. for psychoanalysis, this necessary commensurability of the satisfactions included within capitalist knowledge must be considered as one of the weakest elements of the capitalists’ formulations: it does not take into account the incompatibility between the pleasures recorded in the catalogue and surplus-jouissance. if the objects in this catalogue can be measured and ranked in a way that is considered to be fundamentally unproblematic, then they have the status of signifiers. lacan argued that each signifier in the place of knowledge has something like the status of a 1; the more that we speak of it within an analysis, the more it has the appearance of a relatively clear and distinct entity and it can therefore be theorized as a positive integer. on the other hand, surplus-jouissance stands radically apart from such a catalogue of satisfactions, for lacan has explicitly theorized, there is a non-relation between the signifiers collected in s 2 and the object a. the two are precisely incommensurable with each other. the object a, rather than being like a positive integer, is something like an irrational number; its boundaries, instead of having an integer’s distinctness, can never be marked out fully, and can only be written with an endless and nonrepeating decimal, such as 0.618 (d’un autre, 131).34 a number possessing this quality cannot be written in terms of a relatively neat proportion with other numbers; it thereby falls outside the utilitarian attempt to relate the numerical values of anticipated satisfactions to each other. for it, bentham’s calculus of pleasures and the various systems of currency would be nothing more than so many procrustean beds, which can only misapprehend the character of its jouissance. such systems are unable to take into account a surplus-jouissance that overwhelms the subject. if the preceding account of the functioning of the capitalist discourse is more or less correct, then it enables us to entertain some rather dire hypotheses concerning the effects of the calculations made by homo œconomicus. when the unconscious functions, every attempt to cipher jouissance into a knowledge about our satisfaction must necessarily miss a part of what is being aimed at, and the result is the production of the plus-de-jouir, which is linked to the death drive and the superego. the elaboration of capitalist knowledge made through utilitarian calculations of interest is necessarily cruder than the operations of the unconscious; what these calculations miss regarding jouissance is far more radical and therefore one may suppose that the production of surplus-jouissance—the violent embodiment of what cannot fit into knowledge—will be accomplished with an even greater rapidity and efficiency. if surplus-jouissance must remain alien to the catalogue of satisfactions, then one can well wonder about the particular forms through it will manifest itself in this discourse. if the object a is set apart radically from our usual satisfactions, then it is holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 115 not at all clear that consumer objects come to embody it and that the fith discourse is fundamentally a way of theorizing a “drive of consumption.”35 in most cases, consumer products would seem to be more closely related to the catalogue of capitalist knowledge than to surplus-jouissance; since the arrival of consumer capitalism, peoples’ calculations have come to be occupied more and more with the satisfaction that such items are expected to bring. the object of surplus-jouissance would presumably, for the most part, be somewhat different: it would be located anywhere the four objects of the drives—the breast, feces, the gaze and the voice—have taken up residence. if the consumer object may sometimes harbor the object a, the latter may also be found in a thousand places that have nothing to do with consumption. the distinguishing feature of this surplus-jouissance, instead, will be that it lacks lack; the inversion of the positions of s 1 and  enables the latter to encounter an object a that is not marked by the -φ. in 1968, lacan had suggested that this surplus-jouissance provides us with a way of conceiving of the superego, as freud had presented it in civilization and its discontents: it is produced through a structural “renunciation” of jouissance. lacan’s somewhat later formulations about the capitalist discourse place freud’s work in a certain perspective: they show the extent to which freud both grasped and fell short of understanding various mutations in the social bond. despite his important formulations about the production of the superego, he had perhaps not anticipated some of the effects of capitalism; the constant self-purification and radicalization of this mode of production may well have made certain of its features clearer to us now than they had been to him in 1930. freud had argued that civilization is based on an “internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closelyknit group,” but which can be “disturb[ed]” and imperilled by the aggression that arises from the death drive (133, 112). such formulations do not take into account the way in which capitalism seeks to transform this aggressiveness into an integral part of the system: universal competition, in which we are all compelled to take part, and the effect of which can only be psychic violence. perhaps more importantly, freud does not quite see the way in which this superego, created by the attempt to renounce the aggressive drives, not only creates a sense of malaise in us but also becomes the precise element that makes the repetition of the discourse possible. the object-superego ensures the death of the subject and the impossibility of the unconscious, thus allowing our minds to be colonized by a capitalist theory of knowledge and a new production of the object. for this discourse, our discontent is our excessive, tormenting jouissance, which enables capitalism to perpetuate itself. 4. looking into you if the plus-de-jouir, the superego’s push towards a jouissance that is not marked by castration, is not usually located in the object of consumption, this does not mean that it is rarely present in our everyday lives. on the contrary, it can be found everywhere, and can catch us at any time. one of the areas where we can learn holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 116 about this object is art and literature; these fields constantly mark out a place for it, soliciting its attention and charting its effects. don delillo’s cosmopolis36 takes as its theme the financial forces that now dominate the capitalist mode of production, but it is also a complex meditation upon the capitalist discourse itself. if lacan had imagined that this discourse could end up in exploding, delillo’s novel presents us with what is perhaps a somewhat optimistic dramatization of this event (du discours psychanalytique, 48). it also, and more importantly, shows, both in its themes and its form, the production of a lethal surplus-jouissance that has the potential to destroy the subject. this jouissance manifests itself not only in the novel’s characters, but in the very process of reading it. finally, it also approaches the difficult question of the relation of continuity and discontinuity between the master and the capitalist. it shows the latter’s doomed attempt to lend stability to this discourse by continuing and extending the master’s weltanschauung. the feverish attempt to ensure that language corresponds to an ever-changing reality will, however, have the opposite effect: it will induce a vertigo that will help precipitate the capitalist’s collapse. these processes, and the novel itself, begin with an activity that will finally become enmeshed within the capitalist discourse: reading. eric packer, the novel’s main character, is dominated by a sense of malaise. he is tormented by insomnia, finds “every act” to be “self-haunted,” and feels that the “palest thought carried an anxious shadow”; ruling out any psychic source of this dread, since “freud is finished,” he can only try to stabilize his reactions by “read[ing] his way into sleep” (6, 5). he thus becomes a sort of stand-in for those who read the pages of delillo’s own novel. a literary text is a very particular elaboration of knowledge, in the sense in which this term has been used throughout this essay: it consists of a set of signifiers which are articulated with each other in complex ways. well before the appearance of the object a as surplus-jouissance, packer discerns some elements of jouissance in these literary arrangements of knowledge: less in the meanings that may be produced, but in their very appearance upon the page, which calls upon the reader to look at it. when he reads a poem, his feelings “float in the white space around the lines,” and he is enchanted by the appearance of “spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper” (66, 5). what calls out to packer when he reads a text is a series of abstract shapes: the “eloquence of alphabets” (24). with these abstract letters, we are not far from lacan’s reminder that the alphabet began as representations of commonplace objects; the capital, “a,” for example, was first the drawing of the head of a bull or cow, which was then turned upside-down, and gradually ceasing to be an image, became an abstract figure.37 now, as we read, it is as if the very abstractness of the letters grasps our attention and draws us into a text, soliciting us to continue reading. such reading is an activity: it mobilizes a part of our bodies—our eyes—as well as something that is incorporeal—the gaze—which is connected with our jouissance and which may well show its first inchoate stirrings at the initial moment of our encounter with a text. what packer does not note, in looking at the volumes of holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 117 poetry, is that if our attention is to continue to concern itself with the text, our minds must work upon these letters; letters fix words, and as we move through the text, we subject them to a deciphering that turns them into sentences. in certain cases, this grammatical structure will enable us to give these sentences a relatively simple signification, but such words will also confront us with enigmas to which it will be more difficult to respond. if a text acts upon us, it will have particular effects that we cannot calculate from the beginning; what cosmopolis itself will suggest is that the capitalist discourse can involve a specific mode of reading. even before this mode reveals itself, however, cosmopolis shows us another, rather surprising aspect of reading; its suggests that the lover of literature’s initial fascination with a text is not as different as we might hope from a financier’s interest in a very different arrangement of knowledge. eric packer is a speculator, and his concern with poetry is dwarfed by his interest in the columns of numbers that formalize the fluctuations in the “value” of currency and goods on international markets. in his opinion, “it was shallow thinking to maintain that [the] numbers and charts” that record the fluctuations of capital “were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets” (24). instead, for those who believe that goods provide satisfaction and that money measures the latter, these numbers are irradiated by the jouissance that they condense within themselves; “data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process” (24). such jouissance exerts an attraction both upon those who read these data and those—located in the s 2 of the capitalist discourse—who work to formalize it. money is already an abstract entity, and such knowledge-workers, who focus on its importance, experience a certain jouissance in formalizing it even further and increasing its abstractness; this is part of what replaces the jouissance of ciphering, the process by which something of our unconscious comes to be symbolized. this formalizing is eric packer’s particular interest; inhabiting the place of the capitalist, s 1 , he commands his workers to elaborate knowledge. such knowledge concerns, in particular, the relative values of various currencies, but it also extends to other areas. certain employees, for example, analyze security threats made against packer, putting under a microscope each movement that he may make in order to assess his vulnerability to an attack. packer, in turn, shows a particular interest in critiquing the limits of such analyses, pointing to their blind spots and pushing his employees to expand and deepen their analyses. in hearing his security analyst announce with certainty that “our system’s secure—we’re impenetrable… there’s no vulnerable point of entry,” packer immediately pinpoints the weak spot in this expert’s knowledge: “where was the car last night ater we ran our tests?” (12). for packer, knowledge and its formalization never reach a point where they can be complete. what complicates his project is an inheritance from the discourse of the master, for he seeks to use his position as capitalist to recreate and extend the master’s “world.” he attempts to locate capitalist financial patterns within a system of “spheres”; he holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 118 then induces his workers to show that such patterns respond to the same sort of analysis that the natural world does and conform to mathematical patterns that can be found in nature. the most advanced techniques of formalization are put at the service of discovering a system of correspondences, a method that one of his former employees will describe: you tried to predict movements in the yen by drawing on patterns from nature…. the mathematical properties of tree rings, sunflower seeds, the limbs of galactic spirals…. the way signals from a pulsar in deepest space can describe the fluctuation of a given stock or currency…. how market cycles can be interchangeable with the time cycles of grasshopper breeding, wheat harvesting (200). one of the consequences of this newly formalized reintroduction of the master’s system is the very approach to language that lacan had criticized: the assumption that there is an adequation between it and reality. packer’s concern with this correspondence, however, will manifest itself in a particularly violent way, since he seeks to make the world exist in a situation that is radically different from the one in which the master commanded the slave. the master had inhabited a world that was believed to be fundamentally stable and eternal, and in which it was not difficult to grasp a reality that did not change. packer’s relation to reality is very different: his goal is to render it as unstable and mutable as possible: to intervene upon it, altering it with each new “advance” in technology and financial capitalism. such constant mutation, however, brings about a radical instability in the language that is supposed to exist in adequation to reality; each time that an atom of reality changes, the signifier that had corresponded to it is rendered more or less obsolete. as a consequence, packer finds himself preoccupied by the conviction that particular common nouns or compound nouns should be destroyed and then be replaced with words that would be more fully adequated to the most recent reality. at the beginning of the novel, he brings his dissatisfaction to bear upon the word, “skyscraper,” which disturbs him because of its anachronistic quality. in the contemporary world, where such towers are the norm rather than a rarity, there is no longer any sky that can be “scraped” in such a manner; the word belongs only “to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born” (9). similarly, the expression, “automated teller machines” seems out-of-date; it is “aged and burdened by its own historical memory,” suffering because it retains a reference to “fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts,” both of which belong to a past that has now become so distant that even mentioning it seems irrelevant (54). indeed, in the course of the novel, the common nouns, “walkie-talkie” and even “computer,” among others, come in for the same criticism (102, 104). by the end of the book, it is apparent that this vertiginous procedure has become so generalized that no common noun can escape it; any of them can become the object of packer’s automatic suspicion and will to destruction. when he enters the building where he will die, he notices that “a man lay dead or sleeping in the vestibule, if this is still a word” (182). the willed impermanence of reality has a corrosive effect holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 119 upon both a language that packer would like to make into its mere reflection and the capitalist’s attempt to perpetuate the master’s world. a project of such complexity must inevitably encounter stumbling blocks, and both the thematics and the form of the novel give body to a violence that is produced by failures and impasses of formalization; the attempt to revivify the master’s world leads to catastrophe. cosmopolis takes place on the day when the limits of packer’s system of calculation become apparent and bring him to a ruin that is not merely financial. having been “borrowing yen at extremely low interest rates and using this money to speculate heavily in stocks that would yield potentially high returns,” he has let himself vulnerable to the eventuality that the value of the yen would rise; “the stronger [it] became the more money he [would] nee[d] to pay back the loan” (84). he has done so because every element of his complex system of formalization has led him to believe that “the yen could not go any higher”; nevertheless, “it did go higher time and again,” and in this result that he had deemed to be impossible, he discerns the failure of his own process (84). cosmopolis thematizes the results of this failure: the repetitive workings of the machine of calculation results in the production of a plus-de-jouir that is marked by a lethal violence. this object is the gaze, and it arises with a strength and violence that seems directly connected with the novel’s repeated concerns with formalization and destruction; it is as if the elaborating of knowledge has been precipitating a kind of sediment, which now assumes consistent form, in the look of a former employee, richard sheets. the latter describes with great lucidity the effect upon him of packer’s method of formalization. “you made this form of analysis horribly and seductively precise,” and its very complexity destabilizes workers, causing a sense of vertigo in them: “your system is so microtimed that i couldn’t keep up with it. i couldn’t find it. it’s so infinitesimal. i began to hate my work, and you, and all the numbers on my screen, and every minute of my life” (200, 191). while falling gradually into madness, sheets became more and more fascinated with packer himself, becoming the steady, determined presence through which something of the ungraspable and “evanescent” object that is the gaze can flash out (four fundamental concepts, 77). he becomes dominated by the impulse to seek packer out, and all the technology that the latter has used to show himself has had the effect of catching sheets’s gaze: “i used to watch you meditate, online…. i couldn’t stop watching…. i watched every minute. i looked into you” (delillo, 198). this look is not the tamed gaze, the intensity of which would be lessened by castration. instead, it is marked by violence and aims at packer’s destruction; in comparison with it, the gun with which sheets shoots him is little more than the tool by which this look can meet its goal. richard sheets’s look is the surplus-jouissance of the capitalist discourse. if one effect of this method of formalization is to locate sheets as marking the place of the object a, another is to put packer in the position of the . the financier embraces his own destruction; having, at the beginning of the novel, located the quesholland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 120 tion of where the limousines are kept at night as the limit of his security experts’ knowledge, packer places himself on a trajectory that leads to this place, where, as if by chance, he falls into the hands of his murderer. sheets, himself, struck by this coincidence, remarks, “we want to know why you’d willingly enter a house where there’s someone inside who’s prepared to kill you.” packer, as his antagonist surmises, could only have experienced “some kind of unexpected failure. a shock to your self-esteem” (190). the financier’s response is that “i couldn’t figure out the yen” and therefore “became halfhearted,” and determined, as sheets says, to “bring everything down” (190). in this way, packer marks himself out as the , the place of the element that will be annihilated by the force of surplus-jouissance. this encounter is an instance of the capitalist uncanny: the experience of the violent shock of the a and the , an overwhelming of the subject that carries with it undertones of horror. in the case of cosmopolis, this repetition goes beyond that of the novel’s plot, in which packer thinks obsessively about the fall of the yen and recurrently bets his and other people’s funds on it. it also comes to involve the reader, whose look will acquire something of the violence associated with the plusde-jouir. if, in much of the novel, eric packer stands in for the reader, experiencing the way in which the attraction of black marks on a white page draws him/her into a text, by the end, richard sheets becomes the figure who embodies the violence of reading. cosmopolis is a text—and it is not the only one—that leads us to read within the capitalist discourse, and to do so is, finally, to become a part of the destruction that reigns at the end of the novel. reading this novel is a process in which packer’s very preoccupations teach us what to look for as we read; if, at first, the abstract beauty of the novel’s letters played a part in capturing our attention, we are gradually drawn into a would-be world in which even the bizarre theory of the adequation between reality and language, which is a part of capitalist knowledge in this novel, can have a constraining effect upon us. reading can become violent, in part, because it comes to be touched by the will to destruction that is characteristic of packer’s approach to language: the determination to efface the existence of an entire series of words that no longer corresponds to the reality that he is struggling to bring into existence. his constant concern can affect the way in which we read this novel; his will to obliteration becomes part of our own way of approaching the words on the page. to read cosmopolis is to imagine that the words that we see before our eyes at any particular moment can cease to exist. this process can also, however, be extended; to follow, page ater page, the main character’s determination to “bring everything down” is also to imagine that such destruction could be applied to a very particular proper name: “eric packer” itself can disappear. at the end of this novel, this will to destruction, as applied to packer, becomes divorced from any attempt to maintain the capitalist’s “world” and becomes a jouissance that can be imputed to the process of reading. eric packer’s self-engineered death is designed to call to the gaze; my thesis is that it has the potential to attract the reader’s look, the small, incorporeal element that is distinct from the eye, holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 121 and which becomes the invisible incarnation of the reader’s jouissance. the will to destruction that the reader has been “trained” to apply to the “obsolete” vocabulary becomes detached from the “world” and brought to bear upon parker himself. within the fiction, the murderous gaze of richard sheets comes thereby to stand in for that of the reader. the more the reader imagines such a destruction, the more fully does his/her own look come to be represented by, and even to identify itself with this look.38 within the capitalist discourse, the activity of reading, like the most common activities of everyday life, thereby becomes marked by violence. this violence is the inevitable result of the annihilation of the subject that had been represented by one signifier for another. notes 1. jacques lacan, “du discours psychanalytique” in lacan in italia/lacan en italie (19531978), ed. by giacomo contri (milan: la salamandra, 1978) 10. 2. the following discussion of žižek’s work is necessarily very partial. for example, it does not take into account later developments of this theory of ideology, including his increasingly complex engagement with marxism. it also does not enter into his discussions of the symptom, his important treatments of the act, or his own considerations on discourse. for more extensive examinations of his ideology-analysis, see ronan de calan and raoul moati, žižek, marxisme et psychanalyse (paris: presses universitaires de france, 2012) 47–100; fabio vighi and heiko feldner, žižek: beyond foucault (basingstoke; new york: palgrave macmillan, 2007) 29–40. 3. louis althusser, “ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation),” in lenin and philosophy and other essays, trans. by ben brewster (new york: monthly review press, 1972) 162, 173. 4. slavoj žižek, the sublime object of ideology (london: verso, 1989) 124. 5. jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis [seminar xvii], ed. by jacques-alain miller, trans. by russell grigg (new york: norton, 2007) 13. when lacan speaks here of “relations,” he is referring to the ability of a particular term to act upon the next term in the series: a master, for example, commands the slave, who then produces the plus-de-jouir. such relations, if they occur, are indicated by vectors. the term, “relation,” is thus used in a somewhat different sense than it is in lacan’s later discussions of the sexual relation, or rather, lack of it. in the latter sense, the term refers, instead, to questions of the logical commensurability or incommensurability of certain terms. this is not to say, however, that the discourses are untouched by problems of commensurability; knowledge and surplus jouissance are incommensurable with each other. 6. jacques lacan, on feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge, ed. by jacquesalain miller, trans. by bruce fink (new york: norton, 1998) 17. 7. jacques lacan, the ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 [seminar vii], ed. by jacques-alain miller, trans. by dennis porter (new york: norton, 1986) 22. 8. jacques lacan, le séminaire, livre xvi: d’un autre à l’autre 1968-1969, ed. jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 2006) 385. since the master and the slave are, first of all, historical roles held by men, i have used the masculine pronoun for both throughout this discussion. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 122 9. see colette soler, “the subject and the other (ii),” in reading seminar xi: lacan’s four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: including the first english translation of “position of the unconscious” by jacques lacan, ed. by richard feldstein, bruce fink, and maire jaanus (albany: suny press, 1995). this venn diagram marks a further formalization of the diagram that appears in jacques lacan, the four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, ed. by jacques-alain miller, trans. by alan sheridan (new york: norton, 1978). also see bruce fink, the lacanian subject: between language and jouissance, (princeton: princeton university press, 1995). there is an especially useful discussion of primal repression in fink’s article “alienation and separation: logical moments for lacan’s dialectic of drive,” newsletter of the freudian field. 4.1 & 2 (1990). 10. it is here that one can locate the imposture that lies behind the best-known depiction of the master’s relation to the slave’s knowledge: plato’s portrayal of socrates’ dialogue with the slave in the meno. claiming that the slave already possesses a knowledge of incommensurable numbers, but has simply forgotten it, socrates asks him a series of questions that are supposed to lead him to remember it. however, as lacan remarks, the slave is simply answering what “the questions already dictate as their response,” and perhaps more importantly, a true master could not ask these questions, since he is defined precisely as lacking the knowledge that they presuppose (other side, 22). 11. for a discussion of the master’s relation to reality, see john holland, “la fin du monde,” psychanalyse. 28 (2013): 62–66. 12. sigmund freud, the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud (london: hogarth press, 1953-1974), xxii (1964): “the question of a weltanschauung,” 158–84. 13. alexandre koyré, from the closed world to the infinite universe (baltimore: johns hopkins, 1957) 41–2. 14. jacques lacan, “séminaire xii : problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964-1965,” n.d., staferla, 75. available at <http://staferla.free.fr/s12/s12%20problemes.pdf>. 15. sigmund freud, xxi (1961): “fetishism,” 153. 16. jacques lacan, “on a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis,” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, trans. by bruce fink, héloïse fink, and russell grigg (new york: norton, 2006) 465. in this écrit, the bejahung concerns the judgment that the signifier of the name-of-the-father exists, and is thus directly opposed to the psychotic’s verwerfung, foreclosure of this signifier. although the master has no access to fantasy, he can affirm the existence of a gaze through the vector that goes directly from a to s 1 in the writing of this discourse in “du discours psychanalytique.” 17. sigmund freud, xii (1958): “formulations on the two principles of mental functioning,” 219. 18. karl marx, capital: a critique of political economy, trans. by ben fowkes (london: penguin books in association with new let review, 1981) 245. 19. for example, see jacques lacan, le séminaire de jacques lacan, livre xviii, d’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant 1970-1971, ed. by jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 2006) 164 and pierre bruno, lacan, passeur de marx: l’invention du symptôme (toulouse: érès, 2010) 227–254. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 123 20. for fuller discussions of this homology, see samo tomšič, “homology: marx and lacan,” s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 5 (2012): 98–113. also see alenka zupančič, “when surplus enjoyment meets surplus value,” 155–178, and juliet flower maccannell, “more thoughts for the times on war and death: the discourse of capitalism in seminar xvii,” 195–215, both of which can be found in jacques lacan and the other side of psychoanalysis: reflections on seminar xvii, ed. by justin clemens and russell grigg (durham: duke university press, 2006). 21. sigmund freud, xxi (1961): “civilization and its discontents,” 40. 22. jacques lacan, je parle aux murs: entretiens de la chapelle de sainte-anne, ed. by jacquesalain miller (paris: seuil, 2011) 96. see also pierre bruno, “the capitalist exemption,” in s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 63-79. 23. jacques lacan, le séminaire, livre xix: ...ou pire, 1971-1972, ed. by jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 2011) 55. for frege, the “bedeutung” of a name is its reference, as distinguished from its sense. because the planet venus was referred to as both the “morning star” and the “evening star,” frege argues that “the bedeutung of ‘evening star’ would be the same as that of ‘morning star,’ but not the sense.” gottlob frege, “on sinn and bedeutung,” in the frege reader, ed. by michael beaney, trans. by michael beany (oxford: blackwell, 1997) 152. 24. jacques lacan, “the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious,” in ecrits: the first complete translation in english, trans. by bruce fink, héloïse fink, and russell grigg (new york: norton, 2006) 699. 25. see marie-jean sauret, “psychopathology and fractures of the social bond,” s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 38-62. 26. sigmund freud, xvii (1955): “the uncanny,” 238. 27. sigmund freud, xviii (1955): “beyond the pleasure principle,” 62. 28. for a different view of the relation between capitalism and trauma, which highlights the increasing fragility of the psyche and the difficulty of surmounting trauma in the contemporary world, see colette soler, l’époque des traumatismes/the era of traumatism, ed. by diego mautino, trans. by berti glaubach and susy roizin (rome: biblink, 2005) 68–73. 29. another consequence of the capitalist discourse is its radical incompatibility with the other jouissance, which is related to the pas-tout and femininity (encore, 71-74). the particularity of the feminine is that it offers a way to go beyond the phallus and castration. the capitalist discourse would seem to lay a trap on this path; in preventing the advent of castration, it also eliminates the possibility of surpassing the latter. 30. christian laval, l’homme économique: essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme (paris: gallimard, 2007) 159. for a žižekian treatment of homo œconomicus, see heiko feldner and fabio vighi, critical theory and the crisis of contemporary capitalism (new york: bloomsbury, 2015) 42–60. 31. jeremy bentham, an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation (oxford: clarendon press, 1907) 1. available at <https://ia700406.us.archive.org/0/items/princmoralsleg00bentuot/princmoralsleg00bentuot.pdf> 32. samo tomšič, “laughter and capitalism,” s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 22-37. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 124 33. as a result of the ever-increasing radicalization of capitalist practices over the course of the last two centuries, bentham’s successors have, of course, found themselves obliged to explain why the implementation of their suggested policies has not let us all awash in joy. such attempts have not stopped with marginal utility theory, and have, in recent years, involved the creation of more and more complex epicycles in an attempt to save the appearances of capitalist utilitarianism. my article “la fin du monde,” 68-74, discusses recent work by gary becker and luis rayo, who have used evolutionary biology and psychology to explain the stubborn persistence of unhappiness. 34. for more on irrational numbers in lacan, see guy le gaufey, hiatus sexualis: du nonrapport sexuel selon lacan (paris: epel, 2013) 13–32 and guy le gaufey, “towards a critical reading of the formulae of sexuation,” trans. by cormac gallagher (2008), available at <http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/le-gaufey.pdf>. 35. pietro bianchi, “from representation to class struggle: reply to samo tomšič,” s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 5 (2012): 120. 36. don delillo, cosmopolis: a novel, (new york; london; toronto: scribner, 2003). 37. jacques lacan, “séminaire ix: l’identification, 1961-1962,” n.d. session of december 20, 1961. available at <http://staferla.free.fr/s9/s9%20l%27identification.pdf>. 38. this account of the violence of reading within the capitalist discourse emphasizes its origin and growth in terms of a problematic of reading that is internal to cosmopolis: the relation between, on the one hand, the attraction exerted by the letter, and, on the other, a meaning that is concerned with, and encourages thoughts about the destruction of elements of language. one can also mention a simpler and more commonsensical aspect of the reader’s destructiveness: i suspect that many readers find packer to be a reprehensible character and are rather pleased when sheets murders him.