liar liar cross on fire

When we make fun of an attitude, the truth is often in this attitude, not in the distance we take towards it: I make fun of it to conceal from myself the fact that it actually determines my activity. Someone who mocks his own love for a woman, say, often thereby expresses his uneasiness at being so deeply attached to her.

A true Stalinist politician loves mankind, but nonetheless performs horrible purges and executions - his heart is breaking while he is doing it, but he cannot help it, it is his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity. This is the perverse attitude of adopting the position of the pure instrument of the big Other’s Will: it is not my responsibility, it is not me who is effectively doing it, I am merely an instrument of the higher Historical Necessity. The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated for what I am doing: I am able to inflict pain on others with the full awareness that I am not responsible for it, that I merely fulfil the Other’s Will. The sadist pervert answers the question “How can the subject be guilty when he merely realizes an objective, externally imposed, necessity?” by subjectively assuming this objective necessity, by finding enjoyment in what is imposed on him.

The dialectic of Law and its transgression does not reside only in the fact that the Law itself solicits its own transgression, that it generates the desire for its own violation; our obedience to the Law itself is not “natural,” spontaneous, but always-already mediated by the (repression of the) desire to transgress it. When we obey the Law, we do it as part of a desperate strategy to fight against our desire to transgress it, so the more rigorously we obey the Law, the more we bear witness to the fact that, deep without ourselves, we feel the pressure of the desire to indulge in “sin”. The superego feeling of guilt is therefore right: the more we obey the Law, the more we are guilty, because this obedience is in effect a defense against our “sinful” desire.

Habermas mobilizes the fear of the lack of a universal normative frame of reference: for him, the moment we renounce such a universal frame, the path is wide open to proto-Fascist “irrationalist” decisionism, the project of the Enlightenment is renounced…What, however, if this lack of an a priori universal frame—of a frame exempted from the contingencies of the political struggle—is precisely what opens up the space for the struggle (for “freedom,” “democracy,” and so on)? Is this not the lesson of Kierkegaard—that every translation of ethics into some positive universal frame already betrays the fundamental ethical Call, and thus necessarily gets entangled in inconsistencies? Is the only true ethical stance, therefore, acceptance of this paradox and its challenge?

Despite his radical antiphilosophical stance, Kierkegaard repeats the fundamental Cartesian gesture, so that we can designate his most elementary operation as a kind of “existential cogito.” The starting point of both Descartes and Kierkegaard is radical doubt—in Descartes, a cognitive one; in Kierkegaard, an existential one, a despair concerning the meaning of one’s entire life; in Descartes, this doubt is pushed to extremes in the hypothesis of the “evil spirit”; in Kierkegaard, this despair pushes us to “infinite resignation.” Through this doubt, a pure cogito emerges in Descartes, which, in Kierkegaard, acquires the features of the singularity of the first-person I, the insurmountable presupposition of all thinking and acting. And, in both cases, doubt is resolved through reference to god: in Descartes, a god who doesn’t cheat, and thus guarantees the truth of our ideas; in Kierkegaard, a god belief in whom alone can give meaning to my whole life. Thus Kierkegaard’s procedure remains transcendental: his question is that of the conditions of possibility leading to a meaningful life, and belief emerges as the only truly viable answer.

‘At the beginning’ of the law, there is a certain ‘outlaw’, a certain Real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of law…The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any prince, because this concealment is the positive condition of the function of the law.

Let us take the Freudian notion of the ‘death drive’. Of course, we have to abstract Freud’s biologism: ‘death drive’ is not a biological fact but a notion iundicating that the human psychic apparatus is subordinated to a blind automatism of repetition beyond pleasure-seeking, self-preservation, accordance between man and his milieu. Man is—Hegel dixit—‘an animal sick unto death’, an animal extorted by an insatiable parasite (reason, logos, language). In this perspective, the ‘death drive’, this dimension of radical negativity, cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, it defines la condition humaine as such: there is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to ‘overcome’, to ‘abolish’ it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, try to articulate a modis vivendi with it.

This, then, is what Lacan means by the subject’s decentrement, and it is not difficult to perceive the link between this decentred subject and the Kantian transcendental subject: the key feature that unites the two is that they are both empty, deprived of any substantial content. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant summarizes this paradox of cogito at its purest: ‘In the pure thought of myself, I am the being itself [ich bin das Wesen selbst], yet no part of this being is given to me thereby for my thought.’ So, in the unique point of the cogito as the intersection between being and thought, I lose thought as well as being: thought, because all and every content is lost; being, because all determinate-objective being evaporates in the pure thought—and, for Lacan, this void is the Freudian subject of desire.

This Hegelian logic is at work in Wagner’s universe up to Parsifal, whose final message is a profoundly Hegelian one: The wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it (Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der Sie schlug). Hegel says the same thing, although with the accent shifted in the opposite direction: the Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, i.e., the wound is self-inflicted. That is to say, what is “Spirit” at its most elementary? The “wound” of nature: subject is the immense – absolute - power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of “abstracting,” of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity.

All the features we today identify with freedom and liberal democracy (trade unions, the universal vote, free universal education, freedom of the press, etc.) were won through a long a difficult struggle on the part of the lower classes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in other words, they were anything but the “natural” consequences of capitalist relations. Recall the list of demands with which The Communist Manifesto concludes: most of them, with the exception of the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, are today widely accepted in “bourgeois” democracies, but only as the result of popular struggles. […] Those who claim a natural links between capitalism and democracy are cheating with the facts in the same way that the Catholic Church cheats when it presents itself as the “natural” advocate of democracy and human rights against the threat of totalitarianism—as if it were not the case that the Church accepted democracy only at the end of the nineteenth century, and even then with clenched teeth, as a desperate compromise, making it clear that it preferred monarchy, and that it was making a reluctant concession to new times.

…there is no such thing as a neutral market: in every particular situation, market configurations are always related by political decisions. The true dilemma is thus not “Should the state intervene?” but “What kind of state intervention is necessary?” […] There is a real possibility that the main victim of the ongoing crisis will not be capitalism but the Left itself, insofar as its inability to offer a viable global alternative was again made visible to everyone. It was the Left which was effectively caught out. It is as if recent events were staged with a calculated risk in order to demonstrate that, even at a time of shattering crisis, there is no viable alternative to capitalism. “Thamzing” is a Tibetan word from the time of the Cultural Revolution, with ominous reverberations for liberals: it means a “struggle session,” a collective public hearing and criticism of an individual who is aggressively questioned in order to bring about his political re-education through the confession of his or her mistakes and sustained self-criticism. Perhaps today’s Left needs one long “thamzing” session?

A supreme case of such an ontological comedy occurred in December 2001 in Buenos Aires, when Argentinians took to the streets to protest against the current government, and especially against Cavallo, the economy minister. When the crowd gathered around Cavallo’s building, threatening to storm it, he escaped wearing a mask of himself (sold in disguise shops so that people could mock him by wearing his mask). It thus seems that at least Cavallo did learn something from the widely spread Lacanian movement in Argentina—the fact that a thing is its own best mask.