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Katerina Kolozova’s The Real and the “I” is a brilliant text which complicates Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy with post-structuralist feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and various continental philosophies. Like Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, Kolozova’s project is a heretical reading of Laruelle’s philsopy which, while maintaining the basic tenets of his system (unilateral duality, vision in one, the Real, transcendence and immanence as distinct) pollutes the non-ness of his arguments. Unlike Brassier however, Kolozova is ultimately concerned with the experiential, with the aspects of non-philosophy which touch on existence as experienced by subjects (or strangers in Laruelle’s parlance). Jumping from Judith Butler, to Rosi Bradotti, to Drucilla Cornell, to Derrida, to Lacan (with thinkers such as Badiou, Derrida and Deleuze sprinkled throughout) Kolozova formulates a breathtakingly lucid and powerfully political, theoretical and social system or, at least, the possibilitly of such. My goal here is to introduce and problematize (albeit slightly) Kolozova’s text which deserves serious interpretation and continued engagement.
After critiquing the rampant textuality and playfulness of postructuralism as “hysterical denial” (p. 6) Kolozova goes on to point out how the much hated One (or Real) is cautiously encircled but ultimately denied across a broad spectrum of feminist texts. Kolozova claims that not only do theorists such as Butler and Bradotti unconsciously invoke the Real, but that they unknowingly perpetuate dualism by opposing deconstruction to traditional metaphysics (p. 7). Berrating Butler for her overly cautious rhetoric (which seems in line with Zizek’s humorous comments in Astra Taylor’s documentary film) Kolozova points out that Butler’s disavowal of Real returns in her placing the Real (of power and deconstruction on the whole) in the body itself (21-22). [I have, in the past, critiqued Butler along similar lines here]. In many ways, Kolozova appears as a Speculative Realist version of Joan Copjec.
Kolozova, via an engagement with Laruelle, goes on to show that Butler’s various oppositions are exploded via Laruelle’s vision-in-one which, is always already a unilateral two (42-48). Echoing Brassier’s critique of correlationism, Kolozova points out that all crisis, whether dyadic or not, is domesticated by deconstruction, purported as non-discursive and hence impossible (p. 52). Kolozova then goes on to articulate the dominating political problematic of our era that, in a deep echo of Zizek, is the name and existence of democracy (p. 65) and, in the most interesting passages, discusses how, the non-philosophical subject (as the stranger, the human in human) interracts with the Real via transcendental materialism (the being of language and experience).
While Speculative Realism has been more than slightly ambigious as to its relation to psychoanalysis and its derrivative transcendental materialism (save Brassier’s two swipes at Zizek in the footnotes of Nihil Unbound), Kolozova is clear in that the two doctrines are not opposed but that Laruelle’s system works with the Real whereas transcendental materialism (or what Laruelle denotes as non-analysis or non-psychoanalysis) thinks the human once it has been caught in the worldliness of the world. Whereas Brassier discusses the Real as only impossible, Kolozova acknowledges the varying modalities of the Real (a la Zizek and Zupancic) and how the Real is captured in our singular fragments of being.
One troubling ambiguity is exactly the role of the unconscious, a term that is limply deployed in Brassier’s texts and absent from the works of other Speculative Realists. While Kolozova discusses Butler’s dismissal of a romanticized unconscious as a wellspring of radical intervention (p. 23), she does not herself comment on its use or being. Reading between the lines of Kolozova’s Laruellian formulation, I would argue that the unconscious would be the moment where the human in human is first experienced as an exteriority (and therefore becomes being or transcendental in Laruelle’s formulation) and the Real speaks to this transcendental material (the symbolic) but in a language the subject doesn’t understand (p. 102). The unconscious may also speak to the lived-ness of the stranger, that life is a fiction which escapes language and both allows for and restricts our freewill (p. 44).
Kolozova argues that, despite Laruelle’s objections, some interface is needed in which transcendence operates on the Real - that the transcendental material of a specified subject (stranger) carries a particular formulation of the Real which, in the end, means that our various subjective anxieties are both Real and Transcendental (101-103). The political implications of this formulation seem to fall somewhere between Badiou (whose concept of evental sites Kolozova utilizes) and Zupancic/Zizek in trying to act according to or be an instance of the Real (p. 65). This formulation is what allows Kolozova to make claims about the aforementioned Real of democracy, which appear similar to Brassier’s comments about capital in his works prior to Nihil Unbound as well as Zizek’s discussion of capitalism in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality.
If, as Kolozova suggests, the body is the nearest bearer of the Real of our being, how do we articulate a politics which is different from the tired attempts of identity politics? If we carry the real with us, and our experiences can touch upon the real, what is to separate a politics of the embodied Real versus an identity politics? The difference that Kolozova ends on is that since identity is always a failure to grasp the Real and sense the World, as experiential, is what forces and faxes the Real of such materialism, we can only remind ourselves that such a world is not-All, that the World can never grasp identity as such let alone any singular human in their automatic solitude. The strength here is that Kolozova seems bolder than Badiou in dismissing the pre-Evental non-subject and more optimistic than Transcendental Materialism in that not only can the subject think the gap that it is but that the gap does the thinking, that the Real itself desires to be transcendental to, in a sense, be political.
Kolozova gives as a subject that is both always already in tune with the possibility of the evental and the dishiscence of the drive.
Several points in the post are indebted to discussions here and here.
Derrida’s notion of language play and the purported death of the transcendental signifier seems to have anchored narratology, as it is understood in cultural studies and many veins of literary studies, in the swamp of post-structuralism. Furthermore, the phenomenological and post-Kantian articulation of experience as existence can, as Ray Brassier indirectly argues, can be construed as an ongoing attempt to narrativize being. In the beginning of Nihil Unbound, Brassier works through Paul Churchland’s Eliminative Materialism pointing out that while attempting to stream line human subjectivity (by erasing folk psychology - the understanding of human interiority through exterior observation) Churchland runs into a problem when he has to relate neurochemically caused consciousness to the outside world. The problem is that since all we are is a neurochemical network that represents the world - something outside that network must allow for that network (since the network, as any set, cannot contain itself).
Whereas thinkers such as Churchland envision a world where philosophy is gradually subsumed by developments in science, the problem of science’s limit, immediately raises the question of the place of reason, observation and transcendence in scientific naturalism. Brassier engages Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of the arche-fossil - the idea that there is a time prior to time - that events which occurred prior to the possibility of experience (by way of consciousness) such as the big bang, seriously challenge the phenomenological purchase on reality. While Brassier seems to support a theory of objects in themselves, that is that certain things pre-exist our experience, he is critical of Meillassoux’s fossil because it maintains the distinction between anthropocentric time and cosmological time thereby allowing phenomenolgists to disregard pre-experiential time as not existing properly until it was grasped by thought thereby placing Meillassoux’s ancestral realm as a reservoir ‘waiting’ to be intuited. The common thread here is that the mythical view of man, the view that any experience prior to the emergence of humanity only has value as it is researched or dug up through our experience, allows for a narrative which is contingent only to serve the centrality of human experience. It is for this reason that correlationist philosophy, philosophy that pays particular heed to Heidegger, is damaging to philosophy proper.
Brassier’s argument about the need for philosophy proper, in many ways, mirrors Copjec’s discussion of the Real as the self effacing quality that must exist in order to maintain consistency of any discursive construction. Copjec uses Deleuze’s discussion of Foucualt’s use of power - for power to be the force that it is in history Deleuze points out that it must trip over itself or else it risks becoming totalizing in such a way that it would be undifferentiated from existence itself. Meillassoux’s necessity of contingency falls in place here as well - the universe is necessary contingent and, this contingency refers to the law of contingency as well thereby showing not that all is flux but that flux itself is in flux. Here we can look back at Churchland’s problem of relating the network to the world and how it is supposedly solved by Speculative Realism:
Brassier argues that thought and being must be integrated without recourse to transcendentalism or phenomenology by way of Meillassoux and he accomplishes this by working through the thought of Francois Laurelle’s non-philosophy. Brassier adapts Laurelle’s definition of the Real as the zero point of being against defining it as the impossible (which he attributes to Lacan) and stating that it is what Badiou attempted to construct, via subtractive ontology as ‘being-nothing.’ While Brassier’s critique of Badiou seems rather apt, his quick dismissal of Lacan appears problematic. Copjec’s, as well as other Lacanians’, reading of the real is that it is what guarantees consistency via a self sabotaging which dismisses the myth of totality a la Godel and Russel. Here is where Transcendental Materialism and Speculative Realism come to a head - the the discussion of the narrative.
In a footnote Brassier writes:
“In Zizek’s Hegelianism, the subject achieves its autonomy by retroactively positing/reintegrating its own contingent material determinants: freedom is the subjective necessity of objective contingency. But by dissolving the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, Meillassoux’s absolutization of contingency not only destroys materialist ‘determinism’ understood as the exceptionless continuity of the casual nexus, but also the idealist conception of subjective ‘freedom’ understood in terms of the second-order reflexive causality described by Zizek. The subject cannot ‘choose’ or determine its own objective determination when the contingency of all determination implies the equal arbitrariness of every choice, effectively erasing the distinction between forced and unforced choice. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between objective compulsion and subjective reflexion, phenomenal heteronomy and noumenal autonomy. The principle of factuality collapses the distinction between first and second order levels of determination, thereby undermining any attempt to distinguish between objective heteronomy and subjective autonomy” (Nihil Unbound, p. 247 n15).
Speculative realism. as it is articulated by Ray Brassier, suggests that because the determinism is voided by the hyper chaos of existence, because every situation is incomplete (a la Russel/Godel) there can be no definite chain of events that allows us to reflect on, to retroactively assert our freedom as Zizek argues. Brassier use of Meillassoux’s necessity of contingency in relation to the laws of nature to damage Zizek’s claims about retroactive freedom due to the fact that freedom is automatic and not reflexive due to the place of the object in Brassier’s thinking. Because, for Brassier, the object must be thought through, and thereby precedes thought, and because these objects make up a reality that is not all due to the fact that the laws of nature are themselves contingent (here Adrian Johnston’s reading of Zizek’s reading of Schelling appears useful).
While Brassier’s final reflections on the death drive in Nihil Unbound suggest a subjectivity that essentially ‘clears the field’ by way of its ‘being-nothing’ this sense of freedom seems indebted to the object (of the brain in this case?) as a kind of filter for our particular individuation - our own worthless repetitious response to the knowledge of extinction. Brassier’s discussion of freedom, as a kind of agency, appears to be missing from the text, and his strongest rejection of Zizek’s assertion would most likely lie in keeping being and thought separate without relying on transcendentalism. The question becomes: Is Brassier’s use of Laurelle’s Unilateral Dualism (a twoness in the void where one side runs amok, becomes an excess of the other) that different from Johnston’s articulation of Transcendental Materialism - where consciousness runs away from gray matter?
For Brassier, transcendence is only operative on the side of the object which is given (without relation, without givenness) by the real whereas Transcendental Material operates in an almost backwards fashion - transcendence is operative via giveness which the object gives from the real. Put in terms of consciousness: for Brassier the real gives us the brain which allows thinking but through a disjunction whereas for Johnston/Zizek, thought escapes the limits of the brain and goes to work on it.
Both Brassier and Zizek are attempting to write a narrative of humanity that is meaningless and yet useful, at least, until the stars go down and the heat death (or perhaps the big rip) of the universe begins. One has to wonder how irksome Brassier would find the extent which the human race would go to, pointlessly, exist beyond the death of the universe. The distinct possibility that, in the cold days of the degenerate era, trillions of years in the future, that humans, then huddled around a white dwarf, the universe’s last light, opened a quantum bubble and hopped into another universe.
/1/ - Zizek in Love
Previously, I have discussed the following, but while the initial concerns are the same, the passage thereafter diverges greatly.
At the start of Astra Taylor’s Zizek!, the manic philosopher, clearly over heated, explains how love is “formally evil.” Zizek points out that in love, a subject picks out another imperfect subject to raise above all else; everything in the universe is forfeit for the sake of the object of love.
Zizek also comments on how he finds the concept of “‘universal love’ disgusting” and that the only proper attitude towards the world is hatred or apathy. In his essay “A Plea for Ethical Violence,” Zizek goes as far as to say that a kind of radical violence, which cuts universally, is necessary to break through the false sense of universal love, of vacuous tolerance that dominates current discourse.
Sigi Jottkandt, in an essay in Lacan: The Silent Partners, writes that the response to this tolerant and empty form of universal love should not be an ethical violence as Zizek suggests, but more love. Jotkandt suggests that the sentimentality of a kind of ethical love takes the form of a superegoic demand of ‘Love me!’ Here the parallel to Zizek’s comment in Zizek! and elsewhere in his work that capitalism demands us to enjoy is of great interest.
Ultimately, Jottkandt’s response to the call for more love is to respond with ‘I will love you no matter what’ (p. 284). In the collection Sexuation, Alenka Zupancic states that Lacan’s definition of love is when the object you look at, the object of your affection, looks back at you, when it ‘winks’ at you. “You either run away or fall, that is, resubjectivize accordingly” (p. 283, Sexuation). To discuss love as a threat proper, we must move to the loving two.
/2/ -Object…
Discussing love outside the broader social context and speaking only of the two loving subjects: love is a violent act. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek states that love is a forced choice, meaning that it is a choice but one that only happens in retro. What is meant by a forced choice? Clearly love cannot be forced, you cannot be threatened into loving someone; what you would get is the appearance of love, the actions that accompany it without the actual state of love. Nor can love be a free choice; we cannot decide to love someone. Returning to Zizek, all we can say is that when we love someone we know that we have already fallen in love with them (p. 166).
The knot of love and freedom here is plopped awkwardly on the table of analysis. The question that arises is whether love is the very embodiment of free will or the very loss of freedom itself, albeit willingly. Here my commonly made point about freedom and Kant appears relevant yet again. As Kant put it, humans are born into a state of fundamental bondage, we are, whether we like it or not, at the mercy of space, time and a whole other range of phenomenal ravages. What gives us our freedom and makes us simultaneously noumenal and phenomenal is that we can choose, to some degree, which phenomenal things are affecting us at any given moment.
Now the complication rears its head: do we see our love as object or subject, do we say no to the object which demands us to love it, or do we as Jottkandt suggests, tell the hostage taker that we will love them beyond death?
As is well known, Lacan first articulated love as a narcissistic fiction which covered over the truth of one’s desire, which aggrandizes the plain, stupid objet petit a, the odd uncomfortable thing which strangely gives us enjoyment with romantic platitudes which wax transcendentally towards the eternal. Or, as the quote goes: “Love is when you give away something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t exist.”
Alenka Zupancic’s “The Case of the Perforated Sheet” in the collection Sexuation opens with a depiction of the moment of love from Lacan’s Le Séminaire livre VIII: Le Transfert:
“Lacan depicts what he calls the ‘metaphor of love’ with this poignant image: a hand reaches out toward a fruit, a flower, or lips which suddenly blaze; its attempt to attain, to draw near, to make the fire burn, is closely connected with the ripening of the fruit, the beauty of the flower, the blazing of the lips. But when, in this attempt to attain, to draw near, to make the fire burn, the hand has moved far enough toward the object, another hand springs up from the fruit, from the flower, from the lips, and reaches out to meet our hand, and at this moment our hand freezes in the closed fullness of the fruit, in the open fullness of the flower, in the explosion of the blazing hand. That which occurs at this moment is love.”
As was stated before, love for Lacan is a kind of subjectivizing of the object. Or, apropos Zizek’s statements in the opening pages of The Parallax View, ‘the object objects,’ and it does so in such a way that we must subjectivize it and recode ourselves.
/3/ - …or Subject?
For Badiou, while the objet petit a is imperative to love it is not the ultimate end of it; the object is completely subsumed by the event and the fidelity that potentially results. This is not to say that Badiou rejects the object completely as he designates it “the obscure star” that guides the encounter, but that the object is ‘beneath’ the scene or the dual interpretation of the world. Further explanation of Badiou’s system is necessary here.
According to Badiou, love is always a process of investigations that occurs between two indeterminate, incomplete and non-symmetrical entities which he designates man and woman. Love begins with a chance encounter, eyes meeting across the crowded subway et cetera, and then leads to a declaration of ‘I love you.’ The declaration of love for Badiou begins the labor of love which is neither “trivial nor sublime” (”The Scene of the Two,” p. 7). This labor takes the form of a shared investigation of the universe (p. 6). The “indeterminate disjunction” of the two is the dance of the subjects tarrying with the real of sexual difference as well as the fundamental gap between their separate beings.
In terms of mathematical formulae, Jottkandt and Badiou also clash over the connection between love and politics. Jottkandt states that love is a political act because it transforms the very relations of power. Badiou states a different relation at the end of his text Metapolitics: he states that politics begins where love ends (p. 151). Whereas love proceeds from the one to the infinite, politics moves from the infinite to the one of equality (Ibid.).
/4/ - What is Love?
Following the Lacanian positing and the Badiouian themes, love is somewhere between a trickery of semblance which covers over the vulgarity of desire and the pursuit of a pseudo-transcendental truth. In the first example, love is a form of hallucination whereas in the second it is a militant attitude. In both cases the experience of being in love, the feelings of love, fall out of our analysis - love as affect is lost. To love as Lacan describes means to love something ‘in you more than you,’ but what does that mean for me, the subject? And, in Badiou’s case, the two headed march of love is militant but what does it entail affectively? What we find here is an interplay of affect and sublimity. To address the former we have to loop back to Kant by way of Brian Massumi.
In Parables of the Virtual, Massumi discusses the relation of affect to the body through various thought and body experiments. Apropos cognitive science, Massumi points out that thoughts in the brain are backdated, that there is always a half second delay between our thoughts and our actions but our brains trick us into thinking that the two coincide in the same moment. The radical conclusion of Benjamin Libet was that the brain, in a sense, already thinks the feeling; it already takes steps towards experience prior to experience.
At first, as Massumi discusses, it seemed that Libet had conducted a study which had grossly threatened free will. Making a Kantian move, Libet found that free will was possible in the form of a veto, the mind’s ability to stop the unconsciously created thought from becoming action. It is in this sense that human beings are both noumenal and phenomenal - we are betrayed and saved by the kernel of our being which is directly inaccessible to us (p. 29).
This balance may be why love is love, to put it naively. The affect of love, to assume that affect is a ‘discharge of thought,’ as Copjec puts it, may suggest that love is the very experience of thought, the act of a truly novel idea, a realization of what has been in front of us the whole time. While such an experience is usually aggravating because the knowledge of what we don’t know limits our action, it is not so in the case of love because the lack of that knowledge propels us to act. This is where love as affect comes into play. Massumi again:
“Love: the driving quality of a person’s self-activity that cannot be contained without remainder in any particular domestic context (even in monogamist terms, where love still figures as a kind of qualitative life-glow, a global excess of desired and desiring effect in essential surplus over the banal actuality of life’s conjugal details)” (p. 249).
/5/ - The Sublime labor of love
At the end of “The Scene of the Two,” Badiou quotes the poet Fernando Pessoa: “love is a thought.” As mentioned above, love is, paradoxically, what could be called an obvious novelty, functioning as a kind of unconscious happiness, as Massumi’s ‘glow.’ Or, looking at another definition of affect via Massumi, love is an unconscious openness to emotion (p. 220). While Zizek’s connection of love to a retroactive choice does well for initiation of love, it is Badiou’s work which discusses love’s ongoing relevancy. If we settle with Lacan, love remains, as Copjec points out in Read My Desire, a deception, an ongoing belief that the Other has ’something more’ to offer us, that strange glow Massumi was talking about (p. 148-149). Or worse still, as Copjec discusses by way of Freud in Imagine There’s No Woman, love is at base narcissistic (p. 62). Copjec goes on to say that love, as narcissistic, places the subject in between their drive and the object of their desire.
Narcissism, as Alenka Zupancic has shown, is deeply tied to sublimity, and it is through sublimity that we can end up at Badiou’s view of love. As Zupancic argues, narcissism is not about thinking that one is better than everyone else but that they are better than themselves. In Kant’s description of the sublime, the viewing subject seeing something horrible (an approaching tidal wave, hurricane et cetera) experiences it as sublime because he is at a safe distance. This distance allows the subject to see themselves as above themselves, to effectively separate their consciousness from their body, to imagine their body as being subjected to the powerful force of unbounded nature.
Here is where Badiou and Kant meet. The self distancing, or what could be called mental evacuation, happens because the subject forfeits their mortality, or at the very least recognizes the weakness of their self. Badiou’s definition of love as a march effectively extends this motion of distancing outwards. Where the Lacanian reading of love can only be viewed in terms of subject to object or semblance to semblance, Badiou argues that love is an investigation into the very terms of subjectivity. For Badiou, subjectivity is not the empty form it is for Lacan but is the operator in a procedure, a chaser of errancy.
What separates this from Lacan’s remark that love is a deception covering over the stupidity of desire is that Badiou’s amorous subjects are pursuing the truth of their encounter via an investigation of the world. Such an investigation is objectless since for Badiou, the world is not an object that can be grasped by thought because, contra to Kant, the world is fundamentally incomplete. But, against our discussion of love, love is not at a distance as the sublime object is, but as close as possible. At such close proximity it becomes possible for the loving subjects to see through one another’s being.
Perhaps it is here that Zizek and Badiou come to agreement against Lacan. In a recent video circulating the net, Zizek, strangely dressed in construction worker attire, rambles briefly about love, that we love not despite faults but because of them. The subject is a subject of love because they do the work of love towards an interpretation of the world, and because they recognize, at some level, that the other’s love goes beyond their status as object, and that the subject’s love does the same.
/1/ - Kant’s Nightmare?
The question that (arguably) haunted Kant, that, according to some critics he could not face, was the possibility of radical evil. For Kant, evil is, in the most general sense, when one chooses their will over the moral law. It is when pathological or self-interest overcomes our sense of duty, of doing that which we should do because we should do it.
Radical, or diabolical evil for Kant on the other hand was the possibility of doing evil deeds simply because they are evil, because they infringe upon moral law. Kant denies that humans are capable of radical evil, that they cannot do evil simply for the sake of it, that that is a strictly a demonic capability.
Nightmarish evil
In her wonderful text Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation Joan Copjec states that most critiques see this declaration as a defensive move, that the possibility of radical evil sent Kant in a shuddering retreat and that he stated its human impossibility to defend human will (p. 138). Against this Copjec argues that in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone Kant shifts evil from being a lack or result of human finitude to being a choice, to a result of free will (Ibid. p. 139). The radical result of Kant’s shift could is that instead of evil being a failure, a weakness of the fabric of humanity, evil can be pure decision, it can be a bad choice and simply a failure constituted by weakness and temptation. The conclusion that Kant draws from this is that all our actions, even those that are in alignment with the good, with our duty, are tainted by pathological desire, poisoned by self interest. It becomes, more then a little difficult, to attempt to draw out the possibility or non-possibility of radical evil.
Copjec
An easy example here would be one of the Holocaust. As Slavoj Žižek states in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? there is a desire to find an explanation for the holocaust but at the same time to say that it was diabolical evil (p. 64-66). The horrifying fact of the matter is that while one can tarry with the enigma of the holocaust endlessly and poke through the personal life of Hitler ad infinitum, historicism breaks down, it encounters the real, the irreducible negativity of being in all its horrendous weight. The point though is not to take this kind of silence as a depoliticization of the event, of the void, but that it is a silence that needs to constantly be enunciated not as justification for various political attacks etc, but as a truth of the negativity of being.
/2/ - Guilt’s erasure
But, still what is the problem with diabolical evil? Against Žižek and his friend Zupancic, who has also written on Kant, Copjec argues that radical evil is an internal split in the will of the subject and that through projection onto an outside other, one is capable of radical evil. The infinite possibility of the ‘evil person’ is created through the subreption (concealment, disavowal) of the split of their being, of the guilt of freedom. The nazi, torturer etc, by assuming complete finitude sees its infinite capacity through a fantasy - of being part of the Third Reich, of fighting terrorism and so forth (Imagine There’s No Woman p. 149-150). However, as I have stated in other entries, both Žižek and Zupancic argue that the highest good, and diabolical evil have the same form, in that in both cases the subject is to act with a certain disregard for their surroundings (Ethics of the Real p. 91). Žižek, in “Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple” points out that the Sadeian fantasy of the indestructible body, of the girl who can endure endless brutality, calls to mind the immortal soul needed by Kant so that the work towards the highest good can be completed after death in the eyes of God. Copjec’s position regarded evil could be validated through the following comment made by Žižek:
“The decisive question is: is the Kantian moral Law translatable into the Freudian notion of superego or not? If the answer is yes, then “Kant with Sade” effectively means that Sade is the truth of the Kantian ethics. If, however, the Kantian moral Law cannot be identified with superego (since, as Lacan himself puts it in the last pages of Seminar XI, moral Law is equivalent to desire itself, while superego precisely feeds on the subject’s compromising his/her desire, i.e. the guilt sustained by the superego bears witness to the fact that the subject has somewhere betrayed or compromised his/her desire), then Sade is not the entire truth of Kantian ethics, but a form of its perverted realization. In short, far from being “more radical than Kant,” Sade articulates what happens when the subject betrays the true stringency of the Kantian ethics.”
Sadeian bodies
Copjec’s claim that Sade is not the truth of Kant (p. 208) can be found in the latter part of the above quote - in that Kant remains more radical than Sade because, for Copjec, Sade’s transgressions do not show the crack in the law itself but only gain enjoyment from the irreducibility of that law. Put another way - if one allows the super ego victory by violating the law only to the point where it remains intact structurally or one could say in spirit, then one has not followed through on one’s desire.
As Žižek goes on to argue in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, the act of ‘diabolical evil’ is not to violate the maxims of good for the sake of it but to follow the maxims for pathological reasons, to enjoy the letter of the law as such. Opposed to Sadeian violation, this form of evil violates the spirit of the law while sustaining it formally to the T (p. 171). Copjec, on the other hand, in the introduction to her text Radical Evil, Copjec seems to differentiate between diabolic and radical evil (opposed to Žižek’s conflation of the two). Radical evil for Copjec is, to borrow from The Shadow ‘the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.’ It is to disregard the guilt of freedom, I had no choice. Diabolical evil on the other hand, which is impossible for Kant, is indeed impossible for Copjec because there is no ultimate One-All of the law. Ultimately, for Žižek, diabolical evil is possible because one can enjoy the law as law whereas for Copjec, this is only at the level of radical evil because the law is ruptured by the subject’s own enjoyment and law as law cannot be enjoyed as such because it has no content. I would argue that the problematic possibility of this complete adherence to law can be seen in Javert’s suicide in Hugo’s Les Misérables . Javert kills himself because he cannot decide between legality, which he has always treated as absolute, and respecting Valjean because he saved him.
Les Misérables
/3/ - Villiany!
So, through villains, we can discuss of typology of classic, radical and diabolical evil. The classic villain is the one who is evil, who commits evil acts because of his attachment to external objects. Darth Vader is evil in this sense: he turned to the dark side because he feared his wife and children would die and so be agreed to betray his teachers and friends to gain immortality for his loved ones etc.
Radical evil (for Copjec anyways) can be summed up by the disturbing villain who utilizes the ‘Nuremberg defense - “I was only following orders.” If we follow Copjec, there shouldn’t be any true examples of diabolical evil. Even being very literal and looking and demons, looking at the brooding and querulous creatures in Milton’s Paradise Lost the very fact of the matter is that Satan and his generals are violating the specific content of the divine law. Of course the very phrase diabolical evil can arise from the fact that there is no difference between the content of God’s law and and the form of law as such since his will is purportedly universal and total.
Joss Whedon’s Serenity
The limitations of radical evil as, in a superegoic way, ‘enjoying the law’ are complicated by several characters we can point out. For example in Joss Whedon’s excellent science fiction film Serenity the villain known as The Operative (he has no name or rank) appears at first, as the mindless tool of the Alliance (a totalitarian parliamentary government with which several of the film’s heroes waged war against in a battle for independence). The Operative (played by the exceptional Chiwetel Ejiofor) kills because he believes in a greater good but he has no illusions about the evil he does and he states that, as kind of a dark Moses, that he will never see nor should be exist in the world he is hoping to create. After the Operative realizes that the alliance’s concept of a better world is not his own, Mal warns him that he would kill him if he saw him again. The Operative responds “There is nothing left to see.”
Isn’t there a difference here between the Operative and the nameless Nazi who is ‘tortued’ by the weight of his ‘duty’ to massacre? The superegoic injunction does not require any reasoning or any actual belief. Several times in the film it is pointed out that the Operative is ‘a believer.’ As evidenced in Hitler’s last days, when the fantasy was faltering, when the Red Army was breaching the outskirts of Berlin, almost everyone turned against Hitler. Here the possible cause of Nazism didn’t outweigh the possibility of death. For the Operative, prior to his conversion, death was worse than failing to work towards the dream of the alliance. The Operative’s actions match the ethical declaration of Lacan “Do not give up on your desire!” which is why formally, there is no difference between good and evil.
/4/ - What of the Good?
To discuss the good we must make a bit of a detour back through guilt. In Ethics of the Real Zupancic shows the differing versions of guilt. As the aforementioned comparison to Kant and Sade suggests, the ethical is always in excess of legality (p. 12). To demonstrate this Zupancic sets up a scenario which we find over and over again in thrillers and comedies. Instead of using her scenario we can use the form it takes in The Simpsons titled “The Boy who knew too much.” For those unfamiliar - Bart, while playing hooky, witnesses a clumsy waiter clumsily injure himself and blame it on the affluent and obnoxious Freddy Quimby. According to Zupancic, via Kant, Bart has three options:
1 - He can do nothing because Freddy Quimby is a bad person and he does not owe him anything. For Kant this is to act pathologically.
2 - Bart can testify because he believes he has to, this sacrifice will perhaps force Skinner to not punish me for playing hooky. This is also self interested and therefore pathological.
3 - Bart can testify (as Lisa suggests) because it is ‘the right thing to do’ because it matches the form of the moral law. This is the ethical act because it does not rely on the content of the situation (it doesn’t do it out of possible benefits) but only to serve the very form of that situation.
This is why, for Kant, there is no connection between the ethical and the legal. The ethical always takes the form of an excess. Alain Badiou agrees with Lacan that the ethical statement is to not give up on one’s desire, but where he differs from the aforementioned thinkers in that he does not accept the concept of radical evil.
This is because for Badiou there is no concept of pre-existing evil. As Badiou writes in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil “there can be Evil only in so far as there proceedes a Good” (p. 71). For Badiou Evil only exists as a form of failed/flawed truth.
So the question is one that many of us faced way back in early highschool or middleschool, one that draws to the old debate between Rousseau and Locke and the like: are humans bad or good? Are they corrupted, do they become evil or do certain ideological and material apparatuses simply magnify that which is already present in human faculties? In this case, and to borrow Badiou’s language, we have the relationship between two excesses: that of the state (the apparatus) and that of the ethical (the act). This is why when Badiou’s sense of politics is discussed the relation to the state is pinnacle. Does one work with or directly against the state or is it necessary to create a kind of separation from the state, to create a state within the state, a sub-state? Badiou answer to this has become less distinct as he initially stated that complete separation was necessary.
What Badiou’s thought illuminates in Kant’s work is the tension of how the good relates to the subject in the following way: Is the good, the non-pathological action a little interior voice or is the good always in the form of an ultimate Law coming from the voice of the Other?
/1/ - Cavernous Bodies
Neil Marshall’s horror film The Descent is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the movie is almost completely devoid of male characters nor is there is any of the juvenile ’sexing up’ of the film’s female cast. Here is the film’s synopsis from IMDB:
“After a tragic accident, six friends reunite for a caving expedition. Their adventure soon goes horribly wrong when a collapse traps them deep underground and they find themselves pursued by bloodthirsty creatures. As their friendships deteriorate, they find themselves in a desperate struggle to survive the creatures and each other.”
Marshall’s masterpiece
There seems to be two large themes going in the the film. The larger theme is the interplay between trauma and guilt. Sarah, the main character, looses her daughter and husband at the beginning of the film and it is evident that Juno, one of her friends, was having an affair with him. Repeatedly, while unconscious, Sarah sees her daughter blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. The deconstruction of the myth of ‘feminine unity’ that kind of ‘girls look out for each other’ kind of illusion which still seems prevalent in some places. One could also connect this myth to the mythical pre-Oedipal state, where the child and mother exist in a fabled harmony. In Speculum of the Other Woman Luce Irigaray argues that Plato’s allegory of the cave is masculinist in that it suggests an abandonment of the cave [the body, the womb] for the male codified realm of the outside, intellectual world. The prisoner’s in the cave, chained forced to gaze upon the masquerade of shadows, for Irigiray, this speaks to ‘feminine sexual passivity’. Slavoj Žižek argues that the allegory should be twisted in that the cave is that which presents itself, there is no external reality it is keeping the prisoners from (The Parallax View, p. 162).
Plato’s allegory
Judith Jack Halberstam in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters claims that the exploitation of ‘female passivity’ is a undeniable part of contemporary horror films. Halberstam also notes that: “[the] postmodern Gothic warns us to be suspicious of monster hunters, monster makers, and above all, discourses invested in purity and innocence. The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities” (p. 27).
There is no purity at the outset or end of The Descent, the always-already broken social between the films characters simply deteriorates further with the introduction of the crawlers - cannibalistic prehistoric humans who have adapted to living in complete darkness. The only boundary in the film that is disrupted is that of trust amongst friends which is destroyed on multiple levels before the six even enter the cave. Not only Juno’s betrayal of Sarah but the fact that Juno lied to the rest of the group and took them to an unexplored cave system.
The Six before their expedition
/2/ - Silent Screams
Another way in the which the film has something to say, or more specifically not say, about feminist criticisms towards horror film is in regards to voice. Kaja Silverman as well as film theorist Michel Chion have pointed out that in horror films women are reduced to a panicked scream before they are mutilated for the pleasure of the (assumed male) viewer.
[In some recent horror films this could be connected to the larger shift from thriller to horror in that the suspense is far less important then the satisfyingly gruesome death of the film's protagonists, particularly the female ones. The most prevalent example of this is the 2005 remake of the Vincent Price classic film House of Wax. One of the film's major selling points was the fact that one could see Paris Hilton (who plays Paige) die.]
Scream for me!
There is little screaming in The Descent not only because the characters are strong, cool-headed people, most of the time, but because the creatures that hunt them, the crawlers, are completely blind and hunt by sound. Silence becomes the main act of the female characters. This is in contrast to the Crawler’s constant purring/clicking/hissing and growling noises. In A Voice and Nothing More Mladen Dolar argues that language can be attributed (in psychoanalytic terms) to desire whereas the voice can be connected to the the drives. The two prominent screams emitted by Sarah are both primal screams: one of violence - where she kills a slew of crawlers and one of relief - when she escapes the cave.
Sarah’s escape?
Dolar writes: “Silence seems to be something extremely simple, where there is nothing to understand or interpret. Yet it never appears as such, it always functions as the negative of the voice, its shadow, its reverse, and thus something which can evoke the voice in its pure form. We could use a rough analogy to start with: the silence is the reverse of the voice just as the drive is the reverse side of desire, its shadow and its “negative” (p. 152).
Silence speaks volumes particularly when Sarah wounds Juno and leaves her to the crawlers upon learning of her past relationship with her dead husband. There is a passage from symbolic or calculated silence (in this case tactical silence) to one of the Real, the kind of clamor of the entire universe, where the deafening nonsense of the universe is a horrible silence. The silence of the Real hear emanates from Sarah’s actions which, in a sense, speak to the redoubled loss of her husband - lost life and then lost fidelity (retroactively). The social relation, as such, is made apparent as a void which words can only be lost in. One here is tempted to invoke the tagline of the first Alien film - “In space, no one can hear you scream” of course here we are not talking about outer space but inner space the constitutive lack of (social) being.
/3/ - Gazes, bloody gazes
One scene that is strangely absent from the film is the ‘lights go out scene.’ This is incredible based on the setting - ‘no natural light’ - and the fact that dying batteries, supply of flares etc is mentioned prominently. What is interesting is that the women ’see too much’ whether through their own eyes or that of their camera screen, which is equipped with infrared. One of the more disturbing scenes is when Sarah, in order to keep silent, is forced to watch one of her fellow cavers eaten by the monsters through the handheld camera. In her book Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists Joan Copjec argues against the contemporary (and often times feminist) reading of the subject in film theory. Copjec points out that film should be more of screen then a mirror. Put most simply, film theory focuses on the imaginary identifications one has with the film rather then the symbolic ones.
The Horror of seeing too much of the not-there
She writes: “The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore wants to see. The gaze, the object-cause of desire, is the object-cause of the subject of desire in the field of the visible. In other words, it is what the subject does not see and not simply what it sees that founds it” (p. 35-36). We could say then that Sarah’s terror is not ‘I will end up like her’ (the one being eaten) but ‘I do not see how I cannot end up like her.’ With this example we can see how for Lacan, as Copjec argues, the gaze is not identified with the subject and therefore in the thing being looked at, but is instead behind the image. The horrifying aspect of the gaze then is that it always sees right through you, it is that of a blind eye.
How perfect then that the film contains an incredibly intense eye gouging scene. Sarah’s brutal blinding/killing of one of the crawlers is interesting because the creature is blind, literally, and its gaze does not ’see’ see Sarah, as Other, and hence there is no recognition and Sarah remains only a source of food for the creatures. Paradoxically then Sarah blinds/kills the blind creature because it cannot see her.
/4/ - Camera Fodder?
Discussing Krzysztof Kieslowski’s move from documentary to fictional films Žižek discusses how fiction explodes the very concept of documentary facticity. There is a limit to the documentary which can only be filled with a kind of fiction in order to, in a sense, fill in the gaps. (The Parallax View. p. 30-31). But, still, the very concept of documentary has a kind of appeal to it, for instance take for example the fictional documentary The Blair Witch Project. The assumed/advertised ‘reality’ of the film brought in (speaking in terms of cost/profit ratio) insane amounts of money. We could see the obverse here as well with The Descent taking into account some of the films negative reviews. Bill Westbrook writes:
“[A]s with other such films, The Descent seems less about female empowerment than female misery. One wonders if Marshall has issues. No males suffer here, just women who, even if they survive, won’t ever be the same again.”
Earlier in the review Westbrook also notes, disparagingly, how the women become violent while in the cave. Here what stands out more then the supposed reality of Marshall’s ‘issues’ (fiction being exploded by non-fiction) is Westbrook’s presumed fragility of women. If half a dozen athletic risk-taking people (regardless of gender/sex/etc) are attacked and have weapons, why wouldn’t they fight back? Taking Copjec’s definition of the gaze couldn’t we say that what Westbrook sees in the film is what is lacking. Westbrook’s critique of horror film for violence and trauma really reveals his view that violence and trauma cannot be endured/caused by strong female characters.
The last minute or so is cut in the US version so that we see Sarah escape only to find that she is now haunted by the ghost of Juno. In the British cut we then discover that Sarah never really escaped and is joined by her dead daughter as the crawlers approach. What is tortured and destroyed is not primarily the characters but the sense of their collectivity. To go back to the beginning, this sense of collectivity is, like the pre-Oedipal connectivity, mythical, non-existent. One of the promotional posters for The Descent is a take on Phillip Halsman’s photo In Voluptas Mars:
Dali and the Pleasure of Death
To reiterate the function of the Lacanian gaze we could utilize Nietzsche’s words in Beyond Good and Evil: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” The horror comes from the void that looks into our void which refuses to see what we are symbolically, materially. What is missing, is missing only in our view and that is when the gaze is returned - the eyes of the skull, the twisted jaw, the toothy grimace…..
