RECOGNITION, RUPTURE, AND REBIRTH

IN THE CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY

"Once I began to experience my own pain and the inevitable rage that
accompanied it, I began to change. I was less anxious. I had more compassion
for other people's pain. And, for the first time in my conscious memory, I felt fully
alive. I knew who I was and where I had been, and I felt in tune with the beating
of my own heart. All of my senses opened up, and I began to make peace with the
world."
-Harville Hendrix, Ph.D.

CAPITALISM

Perhaps no single literary moment better captures the soul-affirming ethos of American
individualism than Howard Roark’s anticlimactic confrontation with the architectural critic and
writer, Ellsworth Toohey, in Ayn Rand’s (in)famous masterpiece, The Fountainhead. In this
scene, the walking embodiment of “collectivist ethics”—Toohey—crashes against the certain
shore of his greatest adversary, the Objectivism of a human spirit pitted against no Big Other,
founded upon a dignified solitude with a momentum built to outlast comparison, competition,
and the small-minded jealousies of the collective.

“Mr Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In
any words you wish. No one will hear us.”
“But I don't think of you.” (389)

The “virtue of selfishness” cast as an empirically founded metaphysics of the human

psyche—based upon its foundational role in humanity’s self-definition—stands here in its
greatest strength. A sympathetic reader shares Roark’s effortless and unselfconscious triumph:
before the blunt carelessness of Roark’s solitude, Toohey for the first time confronts a true
reflection of his own innermost nature, his manipulation of the fortunes of others as medium for
his own self-development. Thus the objective essence of human nature—the central core of
man’s being as a psychological egoist—is revealed in its necessary wisdom: either accept its
predominance, or suffer the consequence of a life purpose fractured by the myriad demands of
the undifferentiated human masses.

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 It is perhaps best to introduce Honneth’s argument for the primacy of recognition against
this modernist, capitalist backdrop. The central claim Honneth locates within the thought of
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dewey, and Lukacs—that a form of care, existential engagement,
holistic meaningfulness, spontaneous recognition, affective sympathy, or antecedent
identification precedes the development of normal human relations and the development of
human knowledge—stands in contrast to the psychological character of Howard Roark. While
Objectivism celebrates a life characterized by focus upon a single defining feature, Honneth’s
locates “a highly one-sided praxis” as the repetitious route through which is enacted the
obviation of the most basic primordial ability upon which our sociality itself is built—affective
recognition of another human life. The antisocial and sociopathetic ramifications/dimensions of
the Roark character contrast with his celebration as America’s defender of individualism. In the
following quotation, Rand makes clear the connection between his singular focus and (the
repressed content of) the reduction of human contemporaries to faceless beings

Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own
words. He felt also that he had no hope. The twelve faces before him had a variety of
countenances, but there was something, neither color nor feature, upon all of them, as a
common denominator, something that dissolved their expressions, so that they were no
faces any longer but only empty ovals of flesh. He was addressing everyone. He was
addressing no one. He felt no answers, not even the echo of his own words striking
against the membrane of an eardrum. His words were falling down a well, hitting stone
salients on their way, and each salient refused to stop them, threw them farther, tossed
them from one another, set them to seek a bottom that did not exist. (166)

The awkward brute parallels between the two texts stick out amidst the complexities of
argumentation: Objectivism and reification; individualistic solitude and existential alienation;
singular life-pursuit and one-sided praxis; celebration and critique of capitalist modernism. We
will return to this comparison later—considering another, more pathological similarity—but let
us now short circuit this analysis back to the meat of Honneth’s text, Reification: A new look at
an old idea. Honneth begins with an exegesis of Lukacs’s concept of reification, which emerges
in the context of a Marxian elaboration of the alienating result of routine human absorption in the
logic of capitalist society—the reification of the human subject in subjective experience—and
then moves forward through the existential/phenomenological claims of Heidegger, Dewey, and
others to locate an anchor of human certainty against which to contrast the loss of value as such.

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His empirical argument provides the tools needed to sustain a strong call for the maintenance of
human empathy and intersubjective affinities in the pursuit of a modern account of ethics, and
the concerns of Butler, Geuss, and Lear attempt to grapple with complications that such an
argument would require. What these latter theorists miss in their critiques is to note the utter
absence of a commentary as to under what conditions recognition might reassert itself from out
of the midst of reified social relations. Explorations of the works of Merleau-Ponty, Jacques
Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek help to strengthen Honneth’s account of reification by elaborating its
effect in terms of the unique annihilation of the subject’s substance in reifying practice—
something we will come to define as “the loss of the loss.” They also set the groundwork
necessary to conceive of an eruption of radical otherness from out of the midst of the ossified
field of object-relations constituent of reified habitude.

RECOGNITION

In his masterwork, The Parallax View, Slavoj Zizek’s commentary on Marx’s Capital
begins with the “passage from money to capital”: wherein the first moment the inherent use-
value of a commodity is traded for money in order to acquire a new commodity; wherein the
second moment is the switch to the independent circulation of capital by means of which
“constantly renewed movement” capital takes on (fills in) the form of contingent commodities to
reproduce itself—plus a surplus-value—in an ever-broadening transcendent sweep in which the
essence of capital retroactively posits itself as its presupposition (and then some) ad infinitum.
The transcendent sweep of Capital qua Big Other plays an important role in the formation of the
modern Subject, its “pure substanceless subjectivity” of the proletariat parasitized by a pseudo-
divine Capital. Is this not precisely the matter in Roark’s claim: “I don't intend to build in order
to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build” (Rand, 26)? For Zizek, this structure is
a true fiction (an “unconscious fantasy”)—“the only way to formulate the truth of capital is to
present this fiction of its ‘immaculate’ self-generating movement”—but as such “capital’s
speculative self-generating dance has a limit, and it brings about the conditions of its own
collapse”—the Real cannot be indefinitely deferred (Zizek, 58-60). This lattermost conclusion is

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more radical; we will come back to it shortly. In the meantime, let us now go into the Honneth
text.
Honneth’s exposition of Lukacs’s position follows a similar pathway from 1) normal
human interaction; 2) to human adoption of a capitalist logic; 3) to reification of human
perception through immersion in the routine capitalist praxis; 4) to generalization of a reifying
attitude throughout the contours of human experience. Honneth maintains from Lukacs’s system
of thought the tripartite application of reification to the fields of relatedness to other people, to
one’s self (self-reification), and also to the natural world (not as an Other as such but as a field of
libidinal investment for other people in general). He differs from Lukacs in two primary ways.
First he proposes a different—less specified—social context for the occurrence of reification;
instead of the leveling force of the logic of capitalism which subsequently generalizes across all
areas of human life, Honneth suggests that a “one-sided praxis” carried out in a lasting,
repetitive, and routine manner will slowly efface recognition through a kind of forgetfulness that
elides (indefinitely defers?) recognition’s categorical primacy. Secondly he draws upon
Heidegger’s notion of “care”—a primordially meaningful openness to the world—and Dewey’s
notion of “engaged involvement” to develop his concept of recognition, a type of authenticity
distinct from the Marxian notion of a labor-value subsequently effaced by the dialectic of capital.
Honneth works out this concept of recognition at two levels of meaning, what he calls its
categorical and the temporal/genetic meanings. This distinction—and what it suggests by
omission—is critical to understanding the limitations and contradictions of Honneth’s theory.
The categorical meaning of recognition is that of its ontological primacy, a notion well
developed in Heidegger’s Being and Time, namely that there exists a holistic Being-in-the-
World, a primordial meaningfulness extending through the totality our Being-there, a thrownness
in a active and engaged context, which is ontologically prior, which is the fundamental
foundation, which is the natural core and starting place upon which any empirical, objective,
scientific, and methodically derived notions of truth and reality are secondarily formed. This
level of meaning accounts for the non-ethical characteristic of recognition. Recognition cannot
have a moral valiance; on the contrary, it forms the basis for the very possibility of cognitive-
ethical discrimination as such. The second meaning of recognition is its temporal-genetic

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meaning, and for explanation Honneth peruses various developmental psychological theories to
discern in the biographical-history of the human life an original state of empathetic attunement to
the other, an affective openness which is the very medium and potential of our entrance into the
social and linguistic institutions of the human lifeworld. As Merleau-Ponty muses, “speech does
indeed have to enter the child as silence—break through to him through silence and as silence”
(263).
Zizek’s analysis of “minimal difference” across the chiasm of the parallax in F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s two versions of Tender is the Night gives a helpful analogy to dissect the interface
between these dimensions of recognition. The first version of Tender takes the following
thematic course: 1) exposition of the glamorous love life of a psychotherapist and his love affair
with his client, a schizophrenic childhood survivor of incest; 2) jump back to the traumatic
origins of their relationship; and 3) return to the normal time of their present relationship and its
demise. For the second version Fitzgerald re-sequenced the story to follow the “actual”
chronology of the story, beginning with the flashback portion of the couple’s betrothal and then
moving through the linear rise and fall of the relationship. For Zizek, the mystery of this
doubling—why did Fitzgerald feel the need to toy this way?—is found in the parallax at the very
heart of the psychoanalytic experience:

On the one hand, there is the brutal empirical realism of the parental seduction: the
ultimate cause of later traumas and pathologies is that children were in face seduced and
abused by adults; on the other hand, there is the (in)famous reduction of the seduction
scene to the patient’s fantasy. . . . while “seduction” cannot be reduced simply to the
subject’s fantasy, while it does refer to a traumatic encounter with the Other’s
“enigmatic message,” bearing witness to the Other’s unconscious, it cannot be reduced
to an event in the reality of the actual interaction between child and his or her adults
either. Seduction is rather a kind of transcendental structure, the minimal a priori
formal constellation . . . and we are never dealing here with simple “facts,” but always
with facts located in the space of indeterminacy between “too soon” and “too late.” (20)

To translate the analogy for its impact of the Honneth reading, the transcendental aspect of the
ontogenetic nature of recognition exists in the simultaneity—in opposition but not contradiction
—of the empirical “fact” of our pre-cognitive childhood attunement to emotions, non-verbal
communication, and intersubjectivity itself vis-à-vis the retroactive remembrance (or
forgetfulness) of recognition as an ontological/categorical/structural necessity of our present

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moment being in the world. Taken in this way, the empirical and ontological dimensions of
recognition are but two sides of the mobeus strip of our strange human embodiment. What
Honneth’s account lacks is this identity itself—the minimal of the difference between the two
meanings—what Zizek calls the “umbilical” connection across the gap, or the gap itself. And it
is this bit of flesh that is precisely what we must identify if we are to inject an Honnethian
recognition into the real world domain of transformative action.
Raymond Geuss’s clear exposition of his reading and critique of Honneth focuses on the
relationship between the pre-epistemic phenomena of recognition (“ontological”) and the
cognitively-encoded praxis of the social structure (“empirical”). In doing so, Geuss distinguishes
more clearly between the onto-genetic and structural-logical levels of the meaning of
recognition. His critique bases itself upon a misunderstanding of the incommensurate nature of
these levels: demanding of recognition that it be simultaneously the fully formed actualization of
recognition in non-ossified human relationships and also the basic possibility of relationships at
all, in this case emphasizing the structural-phenomenological necessity of recognition. It is
thusly that Geuss’s critique revolves around what is most lacking in Honneth’s work without
finally pointing it out definitively.
Taking the lead from Dewey, Geuss’s primary concern (in his own work and in this
critique) is the need for a “non-moralizing” critical social theory, which would replace the
Manichean “good versus evil” logic of moral arguments proper, which according to Geuss
Dewey attributes as the cultural products of power’s defense of “inegalitarian social structures.”
As such, Geuss treats Honneth’s argument for the primacy of recognition as an (ultimately
failed) attempt at formulating such a critical theory. He accepts Honneth’s clear division
between a cognitive level of functioning and a prior level of recognition by situating Honneth’s
work within Dewey’s concept of the Western tradition of “intellectualism,” in which the human
capacity for reason is the definitive feature which guides and constrains our actions, and in
relation to whose telos our desires, wants, and impulses receive human form. Seen in this light,
Honneth’s capitulation of phenomenology’s attempt to foreground the primordial affective
background of human Being-in-the-World à la Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others poses a

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strong ontological argument against the malaise identified by another tradition: the critical social
theory of Marx’s alienation, Schiller’s fragmentation, and Durkheim’s anomie.
But for Geuss, this attempt fails: the philosophical anthropology of the human dialectic
between reason and pathos cannot solve the modern moral dilemma because the root level of
human engagement cannot be assumed to be “positive.” As Heidegger pointed out, “to love, to
hate, or to be indifferent, detached, neutral, and so on are all ways of being ‘care-fully’
engaged.” Thus, Geuss’s fundamentally anti-Kantian (and inherently Kantian) search for a non-
moralistic alternative to the caprice of power’s myriad rational moralities finds in Honneth’s
ontological/logical/structural explanation of reification no practical ramification potentially
transformative of the human lifeworld; Honneth’s conception of the ethical elaboration of
recognition’s ontological primacy in the societal norms—its sublimation into the ethical form or
its “filling out” of that form—cannot ground a positive stance toward change.
In this roundabout way, Geuss points to a significant—perhaps the significant lacuna in
Honneth’s argument. the problem is how primal recognition can be proven positive rather than
negative. Rather, how can a coming into analytical awareness of the nature of reification affect
any sort of dissolving of its ossified form? In my view, Honneth does not stir this potential; he
does not inspire. EXPLAIN THIS BETTER!!!
In a similar way, Judith Butler’s exploration and critique of Honneth’s text also confuses
multiple levels of the meaning of primordial recognition that is set against the identification of
reification as the fundamental social anomie of the modern age. Whereas Geuss sought to apply
Honneth’s strong claim—the ontological primacy of recognition—directly to a pseudo-ethical
“non-moralistic” social critical theory (of change) and by this violation of the rank order fell into
misunderstanding and lost the transformative power latent in Honneth’s exposition— Butler’s
analysis grapples with what she sees as contradictions between the empirical level of
reconciliation as studied in the pre-cognitively affective moment of infancy and the categorical
meaning of reconciliation as the latent ground or the very potentiality of social, cognitive, and
ethical praxis of adult life.
Firstly, like Geuss, Butler contrasts Honneth’s various characterizations of recognition—
empathetic reciprocity, affective involvement, interrelatedness, care, affirmation of another’s

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existence, participation—to the various negative and positive modes of affectivity in which
humans engage; and as with Geuss this rank order mistake is not an error of content—Butler is
not mistaken to identify that Honneth does not explain how the aggression, possessiveness, and
violence of an infant’s various desires (or our authentic modes of affective engagement) square
with the priority of recognition. Her mistake is rather different.

If a normative value is to be derived from involvement, it is not because involvement

presupposes a normative structure of genuine praxis, but because we are beings who
have to struggle with both love and aggression in our flawed and commendable efforts
to care for other human beings. Thus, in my view, modes of involvement bear different
moral meanings for us; they are bound by no single pregiven structure, relationship, or
bond, much less a normative one, and that is why we are under a responsibility to
negotiate among such involvements as best we can. It is not a matter of returning to
what we “really” know or undoing our deviation from the norm, but of struggling with a
set of ethical demands on the basis of myriad affective responses that, prior to their
expression in action, have no particular moral valiance. (Honneth, 104)

While Geuss cannot find in Honneth’s account of recognition a non-moralistic anchor for a
global social critical theory, Butler bypasses the contradictory and indeterminate passionate core
of human subjectivity en route to the moral quandary of cognitive-ethical life proper. This is
why she goes on to ask:

Why do we imagine that the primary structures of the social begin with the child? With
what social relations does the child begin? What social relations make possible the
emergence of the child, and what relations are in place, waiting for the child, when it
emerges into the world? (Honneth, 108)

But as Honneth’s dependence on phenomenology should make clear, what a primordial level of
affective engagement refers to is the very “being” of socialization itself; recognition is not the
positive content that Honneth employs to render it accessible—recognition “is not” the empirical
fact of an infant’s psychology and it is that it “is not” the intellectual theory of its categorical
place in Heideggerian theory—nor it is, to go further, the properly ethical application of such a
theory in the implementation of a moral system, a “struggle for recognition” or an attempt to
expand its exercise. Butler further clarifies her position (and error) on this point when she
suggests that empiricism itself cannot be placed logically prior to (inductively as the reason for)

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its schematic “place” secondary to original affectivity. How precisely could we actively “place”
our very potentiality as social creatures into any scientific methodology?
Against this, we should follow Honneth who allows recognition to exist in the
simultaneity of its multiple levels of meaning such that the deductive and inductive relationships
between empiricism and phenomenology form the two sides of a parallax. The correspondence
between these opposing faces is then the minimum of their difference: but how to entreat
ourselves to feel this? Butler herself begins to point the way toward the answer to this question,
but in order to understand how, one final addendum needs to be added to Butler’s critique of
Honneth, and again it revolves around another—more ambiguous—instantiation of the same
typological error of conflating various meanings of recognition. Until we correct this error, we
will fail to see how her explorations of psychoanalysis, child development, and attachment
theory help to make sense of the parallax of recognition’s productive potential.
These insights can be further developed through a jaunt through Merleau-Ponty and
Lacan’s philosophies of being and a Zizekian interpretation of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of
Men. This way, we will see that the unwritten puzzle of Honneth’s analysis is not: how can the
inherent positive content of primordial recognition get up and shout itself into the fabric of the
societal sphere? On the contrary, the puzzle is precisely the opposite: how does any positive
conception of recognition already lose sight of its intended object? If reification is the loss of
recognition, then it is the loss of the original loss; that is why reification is really the prototypical
positivity—the meme of a positivist empiricism born in the interfolds of its inherent nothingness
—taken to its extreme.

On the turning away Over all we have known

From the pale and downtrodden Unaware how the ranks have grown
And the words they say Driven on by a heart of stone
Which we wont understand We could find that were all alone
Don’t accept that what’s happening In the dream of the proud
Is just a case of others suffering On the wings of the night
Or you’ll find that you’re joining in As the daytime is stirring
The turning away Where the speechless unite
Its a sin that somehow In a silent accord
Light is changing to shadow Using words you will find are strange
And casting its shroud And mesmerized as they light the flame

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 Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
Its not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there’ll be
No more turning away?
- Pink Floyd

LOSS OF THE LOSS

We will encounter the paradox of the dissolution of reification soon enough, but first we
should run our anchor aground against some real life examples of what reification might be. The
myriad examples given through the Honneth text as to what precisely should and should not
count as reification include everything from the shoah to the commodification of desire. My
selections are based on the following: the fundamental orientation of reification is the
denial/repression/deferment of some unspecified openness whose lack has been closed off with
positive content, a certain stuckness-in-itself, a choking of what otherwise could be.
Between the years of 1976 and 1982 approximately 30,000 people were killed or
disappeared in what the military junta called “The National Reorganization Process.” Read
carefully the following account

The Argentine junta excelled at striking just the right balance between public and
private horror, carrying out enough of its terror in the open that everyone knew what
was going on, but simultaneously keeping enough secret that it could always be
denied. . . . After that, the junta’s killings went underground, but they were always
present. Disappearances, officially denied, were very public spectacles enlisting the
silent complicity of entire neighborhoods . . . The public character of terror did not stop
with the initial capture. Once in custody, prisoners in Argentine were taken to one of
the more than three hundred torture camps across the country. Many of them were
located in densely populated residential areas; one of the most notorious was in a former
athletic club on a busy street in Buenos Aires, another in a schoolhouse in central Bahia
Blanca and yet another in the wing of a working hospital. At these torture centers,
military vehicles sped in and out at odd hours, screams could be heard through the badly
insulted walls and strange, body-shaped parcels were spotted being carried in and out,
all silently registered by the nearby residents. . . . . All Argentines were in some way
enlisted as witnesses to the erasure of their fellow citizens, yet most people claimed not
to know what was going on. There is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox
of wide-eyed knowing and eyes-closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in
those years: “We did not know what nobody could deny.” (Klein, 110-111, my
emphasis)

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A second example, paraphrased from by Zizek in The Parallax View:

In her Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt describes the self-reflexive twist the
Nazi executioners accomplished in order to be able to endure the horrific acts they
performed: most of them were not simply evil, they were well aware that they were
doing things which brought humiliation, suffering, and death to their victims; the way
they dealt with it was to accomplish the “Himmler trick,” so that, “instead o saying:
What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What
horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task
weighed upon my shoulders!” In this way, they were able to turn the logic of resisting
temptation around: the temptation to be resisted was the temptation to succumb to the
very elementary pity and sympathy in the presence of human sufferings, and their
“ethical” effort was directed toward the task of resisting this temptation not to murder,
torture, and humiliate. (67)

In a third example, Robert MacNamara reflects on his World War II experience working to
improve “efficiency” and “proportionality” as a logistic statistician, quoted from the film, The
Fog of War.

LeMay was focused on only one thing: target destruction. Most Air Force Generals can
tell you how many planes they had, how many tons of bombs they dropped, or whatever
the hell it was. But, he was the only person that I knew in the senior command of the
Air Force who focused solely on the loss of his crews per unit of target destruction.
I was on the island of Guam in his command in March of 1945. In that single night, we
burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children. Well,
I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it. I analyzed bombing
operations, and how to make them more efficient, i.e., not more efficient in the sense of
killing more but more efficient in weakening the adversary. I wrote one report
analyzing the efficiency of the B-29 operations. The B-29 could get above the fighter
aircraft and above the air defense, so the loss rate would be much less. The problem
was the accuracy was also much less.
Now I don't want to suggest that it was my report that led to, I'll call it, the firebombing.
It isn't that I'm trying to absolve myself of blame. I don't want to suggest that it was I
who put in LeMay's mind that his operations were totally inefficient and had to be
drastically changed. But, anyhow, that's what he did. He took the B-29s down to 5,000
feet and he decided to bomb with firebombs.
I participated in the interrogation of the B-29 bomber crews that came back that night.
A room full of crewmen and intelligence interrogators. A captain got up, a young
captain said: "Goddammit, I'd like to know who the son of a bitch was that took this
magnificent airplane, designed to bomb from 23,000 feet and he took it down to 5,000
feet and I lost my wingman. He was shot and killed. LeMay spoke in monosyllables. I
never heard him say more than two words in sequence. It was basically "Yes," "No,"

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 "Yup," or "The hell with it." That was all he said. And LeMay was totally intolerant of
criticism. He never engaged in discussion with anybody. He stood up. "Why are we
here? Why are we here? You lost your wingman; it hurts me as much as it does you. I
sent him there. And I've been there, I know what it is. But, you lost one wingman, and
we destroyed Tokyo." (Fog of War, my emphasis)

“We did not know what nobody could deny.” “How heavily the task weighed upon my
shoulders!” “It isn’t that I’m trying to absolve myself of blame.” What is fundamentally
characteristic of these examples is not the lack of some positive content of human recognition—
some vacuum left in the wake of an annihilated compassion—but the presence of a false positive,
the intrusion of a smear, a stain, a blot that stands for its opposite. This perhaps gets to the heart
of David Gilmour’s ironical intent in the line from “On the Turning Away,” “Don’t accept that
what’s happening is just a case of the others suffering”: wherein the positive “suffering” stands
in as the positive content that masks itself in a double-reversal, like the man who hides behind a
mask of his own face, presenting the facile reverse psychology of “Anything but that!”
An excellent example of reification as the “loss of the loss” can be found in Susan
Bordo’s second wave feminist critique of postmodernism. In The Male Body, Bordo insightfully
explores how tacit cultural norms of masculinity such as the perennially non-flaccid penis, the
conflation of strength with violence, and sex as sexual performance dwell as embodied reality in
men’s experience of themselves, their bodies, and their potentials. In Unbearable Weight, Bordo
explore similar Foucaultian themes—the slender body aesthetic, the physiological incubator
essentialization of pregnant embodiment—but in the text’s final chapters takes a further, more
radical step in her deconstruction of women’s embodiment within—what I will call—reifying
social practices. The explicitly defined embodiment of women and men as creatural wombs or
endlessly erect and ready phalluses leaves an obvious and lucid duality between an authentic and
contrived level of human experience—confronted precisely when our failure to achieve produces
the limit of the signification. Here, what is lost with the positivist projection’s explicit content is
the very unspoken and unknown nothingness that it retains: the “real” women or man of sensual
embodiment that erupts in the negativity of emotional anguish or celebrative angst, an
undifferentiated and creative influx of desire that returns us again to the loss. Bordo’s radical
next step consists in characterizing postmodernism’s ideal of pliable, multiplicitous,

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transformative freedom itself as the positive content that blots out the inherent “substanceless
subjectivity” of its own innermost potential. Here nothingness wears the mask of nothingness
and it is the very impossibility of pure abstract freedom that finds its limit in freedom’s authentic
core. For Bordo, Madonna is the cultural icon par excellence for this ideal of pure freedom; she
is the pop-cultural embodiment of postmodernism’s language of manifold potentialities, multiple
locations, and kaleidoscopic identities, which reproduces, “on the level of discourse and
interpretation, the same conditions that postmodern bodies enact on the
level of cultural practice: a construction of life as plastic possibility and
weightless choice, undetermined by history, social location, or even
individual biography” (251). In this way, Madonna two-layered
representation reveals the parallax between Material Girl and Immaculate
Conception—between the Virgin Mary of Christian theology and Mary Magdalene of
Bethlehem:

None of this “materiality”---that is, the obsessive body-praxis that

regulates and disciplines Madonna’s life and the lives of the young
(and no so young) women who emulate her---makes its way into the
representation of Madonna as postmodern heroine. In the terms of
this representation (in both its popular and scholarly instantiations)
Madonna is “in control of her image, not trapped by it”; the proof lies
in her ironic and chameleon-like approach to the construction of her
identity, her ability to “slip in and out of character at will,” to defy
definition, to keep them guessing. In this coding of things, as in the
fantasies of the polysurgical addict (and, as I argue elsewhere in this
volume, the eating-disordered woman), control and power, words that
are invoked over and over in discussions of Madonna, have become
equivalent to self-creating. Madonna’s new body has no material
history; it conceals its continual struggle to maintain itself, it does not
reveal its pain. (Significantly, Madonna’s “self-expose,” the
documentary Truth or Dare, does not include any scenes of
Madonna’s daily workouts.) It is merely another creative
transformation of an ever-elusive subjectivity. “More Dazzling and
Determined Not to Step Changing,” as Cosmopolitan describes
Madonna: “Whether in looks or career, this multitalented dazzler will
never be trapped in any mold!” The plasticity of Madonna’s
subjectivity is emphasized again and again in the popular press,
particularly by Madonna herself. It is how she tells the story of her

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 “power” in the industry: “In pop music, generally, people have on
image. You get pigeonholed. I’m lucky enough to be able to change
and still be accepted . . . play a part, change character, looks,
attitudes.” (Bordo, 272)

In a mocking ironic twist, the loss of the loss is performed by the insertion and embodiment of
the positive content of subjectivity as such. The repressed element—workout sessions, pain—is
only hinted at by Bordo; Madonna leaves it unspoken: the pathological act of insemination
behind the Material Girl’s Virgin Birth is that certain repressed falseness of truth’s fiction. But
to regain the loss is not to replace the positive content of freedom with its positivist opposite, the
facticity of the material body. It is rather something much more radical.

SURRENDER

Butler covers similar ground in her essay, Gender Trouble. For Butler, human
experience and identity are prefigured through the conditioned limits of a hegemonic cultural
discourse. Following Foucault, Butler conceives of these limits as incorporated into the subject’s
acts, gestures, and desires through the performance of a coherent structure of gendered acts. This
“inscription” of normative acts upon the body’s surface, so to speak, manufactures the illusion of
an internal self—a soul—which is identified as a coherent unity lying behind the performance.
The importance of this explanation can be seen in Butler’s discussion of the subversive power of
dressing in drag. In the following quotation, this emancipatory potential is clear:

The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the
performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence
of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender
identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct
from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the
performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and
performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance. As much as drag
creates a unified picture of “woman” (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the
distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a
unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender,
drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its
contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the
recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face
of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and

14
 necessary. In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender
denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes
the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity. (Butler, 42)

The gender-parody of drag thusly bends the interfolds of the “loss of the loss” back onto itself—
mirroring the nothingness behind an essentialized gender in the glass of the performance’s
nothingness as (performance); and recovering the nothingness “behind” biological sex in the
further interplay of the subject’s radical self-annihilation. Now we are already beyond
reification, and on our way to understanding the radical underbelly of Honneth’s gesture to the
phenomenological tradition. The “self-annihilation” of parody follows the logic of good humor.
Consider the cathartic power of Roberto Benigni’s La Vita è Bella, in which Benigni’s character
is a father who is able to subvert the cruel totalitarian structure of a Nazi concentration camp and
thereby save his young son from the true ramifications of their victimhood through a powerful
and dignifying use of humor. As Zizek writes:

The comedy is the very opposite of shame: shame endeavors to maintain the veil, while
comedy relies on the gesture of unveiling . . . when, instead of a hidden terrifying
secret, we encounter the same things behind the veil as in front of it, this very lack of
difference between the two elements confronts us with the “pure” difference that
separates an element from itself. And is this not the ultimately definition of the divinity
—God, too, has to wear a mask of himself? . . . In this precise sense, “God” names the
supreme contradiction: God—the absolute unrepresentable Beyond—has to appear as
such. (109)

Of course, Butler’s concept of performativity and her gratitude for the transformative
power of satire do not fall within the field of a tension between the authentic object of
phenomenology and the reification of a single-minded social praxis: for Butler the signification
go all the way down. This explains her skepticism regarding Honneth’s conceptualization of an
authentic root of human experience as a space filled out by positive content—care, affective
engagement, reciprocity, taking up another’s position, etc. But it also leads to an ungenerous
reading of Honneth’s formulation of recognition, a reading that ultimately draws attention away
from her own powerful insights apropos of attachment theory and infant development. As
elaborated above, Butler conflates recognition’s meaning as a pre-epistemic category of the
human embodiment with its ramifications as an ideal to be actualized in mature adult life—
recognition’s ethical dimension that lies latent in Honneth’s very gesture. By this logic, Butler

15
presents a conflict between recognition as a “social a priori” and as an “empirically induced or
facilitated mode of relationality.” Her argument begins with a hyper-complex articulation of the
requirements of recognition, fully filling out the term with positive content:

We seem to have these options: we are recognitional if we are able to adopt the other’s
point of view. I gather that this is not the same as making the other’s point of view the
same as my own; I do no “adopt” it in that sense. And it must be possible to disagree
with another and also to be able to “adopt his or her point of view” in the course of that
disagreement. So it seems to mean only, as Honneth has suggested, “understanding
another’s reasons for action.” Raymond Geuss has suggested that it means that “I cam
compelled to take into account your desire . . . (Honneth, 111)

Butler proceeds by sharply contrasting insights from psychoanalysis and child psychology
against this moral-ethical dimension of recognition’s meaning. In early infancy, a child
experiences a state of inchoate, chaotic desires—the subject “in bits and pieces” as Lacan put it
—and it is only out of the midst of this nebulous mesh that ego-identity concretizes itself, and it
is only on the basis of the stabilization of identity that a child can in later stages come to a mature
stance of taking another’s position. As Butler writes:

There are modes of mimetic involvement on the part of the child, ways of responding to
smiles and touch, to laughter and to distress on the part of caregivers, and these primary
impressions are part of what form the affective conditions of experience itself. In fact,
the very possibility of an “I” who understands his or her own motor capacity and
articulations as his or her own is a later accomplishment . . . If that “I” is doubtless
already formed through a mimeticism that precedes and inaugurates subject formation,
then clearly that mimeticism is not the same as “adopting the perspective of the other.”
(ibid, 112)

But if we take Honneth’s gesture toward the phenomenology tradition as a way into
understanding recognition as a fundamental openness to being—not as a positive ethical-
cognitive content or even qualitatively described human experience but instead as the very
nothingness of the loss which underlies the assertion of the positive content of reification—then
the theories that Butler draws upon may provide something quite different than sharp contrast
and contradiction. Butler describes “primary modes of transitivity in which, for instance, the
infant echoes the sounds that she or he receives, sustains a certain transitive relationship to
surrounding voices;” she cites the post-Lacanian theorist Mikkel Borsh-Jakobsen’s claim that
“identification precedes the formation of the subject, and so that mimetic echo of the other . . .

16
instigates the “I” who maintains, quite unconsciously, the trace of the Other at the basis of
itself.” Butler sums up her argument with the declaration:

The kinds of moral deliberations that adults conduct when they seek to understand the
reasons why others act as they do are not analogous to what happens at the early stages
of attachment, identification, and responsiveness. Indeed, it seems not quite right to ask
an infant to be fully responsive to alterity. Nor does it seem quite right to find the
incipient structure of morality in an infant’s efforts to secure its basic needs. (ibid, 114)

But when the rational logic of the Nazi regime can only be asserted through the self-deception of
the Himmler Trick, when statistical calculations and duty cast back the firebombing of millions
into some residual existential pang, when we no longer know what we paradoxically cannot deny,
when our freedom ossifies an empty ideal—then perhaps the time is ripe for regression to the
“undifferentiated transitive receptivity” of an our original infantile experience.
And remember that this follows the structure of the parallax. The flashback interlude in
Fitzgerald’s two-edition novel was simultaneously the protagonist’s biographical beginning and
his latent dreamscape. Its divinity lay somewhere in the gap between the two—or rather, it was
the gap, the very nothingness of its self-annihilation. To laugh, as in parody or satire, to step
back from formulations, to ease up, to smile, to listen, to return to the primal rhythms of our
mutual togetherness—perhaps this is what we mean by nothingness. At any rate, the ontological
reality of recognition cannot be actively employed by a structuralist ethics. Its emergence is
rather something very different.
Honneth’s original guiding concern in the exploration of the concept of reification was
the experience of the shoah and the impossible gap maintained by Nazi soldiers between their
inherent human potential—socialized as soldiers, husbands, father, etc.—and the bleak insanity
achieved in the pursuance of their roles in the clockworks of the Nazi project. He explains that
the moral or ethical valiance of an act is a secondary element to the primordial “ontological
mistake” wherein a contemplative, detached, quantifying, and emotionless attitude casts human
life in a net of thing-like identifications as resources, objects, means, profit opportunities—as
mere terms for egocentric calculations—which, furthermore, through their routine repetition and
subsequent generalization are thereby adopted or internalized as a sort of “second nature” that—
significantly—“reaches far too deep into our habits and modes of behavior . . . to be able to be

17
simple reversed by making a corresponding cognitive correction” (25). Here we can the
ambivalence of Honneth’s gesture, which Butler was keen to exploit. Is it enough to simply
identify a logically/structurally necessary level of recognition and to demonstrate an original
human openness to being in the descriptive science of infant psychology? Is it enough to
theorize accurately the cruel “turning away” from basic human recognition? The one unspoken
commonality all of our authors share is simple. One latent desire left strangely unarticulated
(estranged) behind the verbiage of their theories: What does it take to assert the return of the
loss?
The strong question is not how it is that a primary level of recognition can actively
reassert its positive content—this is why the reality of infantile aggression does not subvert
Honneth’s basic premise. The question is far more radical and prospective: When and how does
the moment arise when a person awakens from the matrix of ossified, reified, depersonalized
relations? How and when does a rebirth of humanizing consciousness erupt from the closed
system of its pregnant latency? Under what circumstances does the network of single-minded
instrumentalism enacted through a reification of the subject break down and come undone?
When does the very being in the nothingness of an annihilated subject—caught in empty
mediation of a reifying rational system—flip over and reveal its squirming undifferentiated
plentitude, its overabundance of life? This is why the cathartic experience captured in Harville
Hendrix’s introductory quote is critical here. This is not to propose an empty circulation and a
simple duality: The desublimated Thing does not simply re-assimilate into the Law of Old
through an identically reverse sublimation: a rupture must occur, a radical break that will change
everything. The turning over reveals our creatural belly; it is a fundamentally feminine act: the
opening up of one’s soft innermost core. This is far from the proto-fascist tyranny of non-
violence “at any cost”; it is rather a break down of all cost assessment as such. Here we see the
wisdom in the Chinese Medicinal guideline that anything taken to its extreme becomes its
opposite, the Ayruvedic notion that that which is subtle is most powerful, and the Platonic
exhortation of everything in moderation. Any ethical argument for the proper sublimation of
unkempt aggressiveness must itself first be founded upon the primary human capacity of worldly
and a creaturely openness. Otherwise it is no more than an assertion of another rational-ethical

18
system of thought, potent with nascent reification—crisp with an exoskeleton of proto-fascist
potential.
This is why Honneth himself has to be carefully dealt with. What Ayn Rand and
Honneth may both share is a tendency to sacrifice their insights to the dogmatism of totalizing
rational completeness. (When, perhaps surrender is what is needed!) At least we must be
cautious with any theory that attempts to pinpoint with positive descriptive content the core of
our being. So, for example, apropos of the preceding discussion, one contrarian example Butler
employed might be duly noted:

If it is possible to be passionately detached—as it is, for instance, when one breaks off a
relation and resolves to go about one’s life without the offending person at issue—and if
it is possible to “want to be used” (that is, to be an instrument for another’s pleasure,
and to enjoy one’s instrumentality for that purpose), then it seems that we cannot
rigorously separate the instrumental from the engaged. (Honneth, 107)

We could add to these examples the violent love of the brothers in A River Runs Through It
(1992) when brothers Normon and Paul explode in a fury of fists over a complex entanglement
of desires—jealousy, admiration, sympathy, anger. We might also suggest the prototypical
violence of love exhibited in the fight between Enkidu and Gilgamesh who find everlasting
friendship tumbling in a (to modern ears) homoerotic display of power, mutual recognition, and
homicidal intend—in their fight “dancing the dance of life that hover close to death” (53). This
is why—as Honneth makes clear—the issue of recognition and reification refers to a different
sphere of human experience from, as Butler so eloquently describes, the moral struggle “with a
set of ethical demands on the basis of myriad affective responses that, prior to their expression in
action, have no particular moral valiance” (104).
In this way we can easily see the basic problem in Jonathan Lear’s uptake on Honneth’s
argument. Lear’s article, “The Slippery Middle,” plays off the apparent ambiguity of recognition
as an apparently benevolent skill set. Firstly, he questions the place of infantile aggression—
Winnicott’s exploration of neonatal hate—within the genetic case of recognition. Second, he
distinguishes “recognition-as-sine-qua-non for any development at all” (recognition1) from
recognition as a paradigm for healthy human development (recognition 2)—in terms of which
formulation a cruel narcissist could achieve on the basis of recognition 1 (the minimal conditions

19
for developing as a social animal) the ability to use affectively flat but instrumentally precise
recognition skills such as to be “deployed in the service of treating people as means to their
ends” (135). Thus, the presence of recognition 1 at the ontogenetic origins of human development
would not necessarily imply the actualization of recognition2 in its full adult maturity.
Whatever Honneth’s mistakes in the presentation of the priority of recognition—surely
he misleads readers as to the power of the phenomenological tradition by the graceless way that
he gestures at a pre-ontological realm of receptivity—a generous hermeneutic (one with a deep
understanding of the insights of the phenomenological tradition) would not so grossly
misinterpret what it means to ground the possibility of moral action: recognition does not provide
the positive content for moral choice, as if waiting dormant for a future spontaneous readymade
entrance into adult life; to the contrary, recognition opens up the very possibility of entering into
engagement with the existential moral dilemma of human life, while reification is precisely the
dogmatic turning away from the very fluidity and uncertainty of this process. Lear writes:

If we are motivated to look away from our own aggressive tendencies and conflicts,
theory—whether it be philosophy or social critique or psychology—can be unwittingly
complicit by encouraging us to think that the real problem lies not with us, but with the
current social function. (Honneth, 140)

But it is precisely this looking away that we are associating with reification. The Nazi ideology
was not one of overt and purely negative destructiveness; on the contrary, the constructive
process of nation-building which catapulted Hitler into stardom as Time Magazine’s “Man of the
Year” (1933) was the morally positive site for the fixation of German libidinal energies.
Likewise, the self-righteous narrative of America as purveyor of revolutionary freedom underlies
our nation’s continued fixation on the process of nation-building in Iraq. Like the deaths of over
one million Iraqi’s, the repressed history of fear and revolt that underlies America’s patriotic
textbook history of conquest (captured obliquely through the Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s
brilliant—and hilarious—comedic animated sketch in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11) is the
stuck element that must be obverted before any moral reconciliation can occur. Like the
textbook Modernism, it seems that Lear recapitulates the pop-Piagetian linear narrative of a child
who moves sequentially from irrationality to rationality; whereas, it is precisely an excess of
rationality which renders the pathological purely evil, as with the clearly lucid sociopath who

20
shamelessly describes his deeds. The primary characteristic which separates the egotist from the
sociopath is that the egotist is generally open to his own libidinal excesses (which he embraces
with a child’s incipient embarrassment); whereas, the sociopath has disassociated from even his
own desire (and thus consequence itself): it is precisely his lack of shame that makes him a
monster. As we will see, shame itself can announce the return of the loss, that dissolution into
receptive quaking openness.

LET’S MAKE BABIES

As in Marx, whose subject sits at the crux of its exploitation before the transcendent
cycling of Capital as such, for Lukacs the subject of reification exists at the point of its own loss
—its absorption—in the methodical cognitive routines of capitalism’s calculating logic. Is this
deconstruction of the self’s substantial qualities into the “substanceless subject” of the movement
of a transcendent dialectic not the same reduction as the Cartesian subject who knows naught but
that he knows his knowing? In Jacques Lacan’s formulation, the formation of the subject as the
“active annihilation”—the self-mediation of “I see myself seeing” (that “throws the subject
toward the transforming historical action, and, around this point, orders the configured modes of
active self-consciousness through its metamorphoses in history”)—is born from the split
(“primal separation”) within the subject when the gaze of the other takes him up as a visible
object (within the scoptic field). While “from the first moment that this gaze appears, the subject
tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with
which the subject confuses his own failure” (226)—that is, the failure to fully assimilate into the
objectifying logic of the Gaze (the adoption of the Law of the Father, the castration of the
phallus) his own enduring, inapprehensible remainder, namely my own Gaze itself, i.e., the objet
a: “It is here that I propose that the interest the subject takes in his own split is bound up with
that which determines it—namely, a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal
separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real . . .” (225). Thus,
in the folding in onto oneself through the Other’s Gaze is formed a two-part parallax of selfhood:
the punctiform vanishing point of one’s retreating ontological being before the objectifying force
of the all-consuming Gaze and one’s very failure at self-annihilation itself—between the

21
annihilation of the subject in the eternal mediation of its self-enfolded see myself seeing ($) and
the nothingness whose shadow is precisely that obtrusive and unkempt remainder (la petite objet
a). Merleau-Ponty’s notes at the end of his unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, which
Lacan references in the preceding commentary—describe this same phenomenon, this failure,
this “privileged object” awoken by the “very approach of the real.” In the following excerpt,
Merleau-Ponty explores intercorporeal interplay between the seer and the visible and notes how
out of the concentric folds of being flies a strange little creature—who to reality remains out of
step and yet its innermost part:

“The seer is of the visible (is of it), is in the longation of the signs of the visible body,
in dotted lines (visible for another)—to tell the truth even for the other is it properly
speaking visible as a seer?—No in the sense that it is always a little behind what the
other sees—to tell the truth neither behind, nor in front, nor where the other looks.
It is always a little further than the spot I look at, the other looks at, that the seer I am is
—Posed on the visible, like a bird, clinging to the visible, not in it. And yet in chiasm
with it— (261, my emphasis)

In order to understand the use of such abstract formulations for a theory of reification, we
must make note—as both Lacan and Merleau-Ponty make note—that this interplay and its
remainder is not solely a flesh of knowledge or vision, but also of our very bodily affectivity and
desire. As such, Merleau-Ponty identifies the chiasmatic structure again in the interplay between
the touched and the touching of one’s hands clasped together:

The flesh of my fingers = each of them is phenomenal finger and objective finger,
outside and inside of the finger in reciprocity, in chiasm, activity and passivity coupled .
. . Local self of the finger: its space is felt-feeling . . .” (261)

Likewise Lacan emphasizes the predominance of shame and non-visual modes of

intersubjectivity (e.g., the sound of rustling leaves at an intruders approach) in Sartre’s
discussions of the Gaze, stating that it is “not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field
of the Other” which is thoroughly interpenetrated by desire. This formulation runs parallel to
what the Mirror stage demonstrates, that every object has an anthropomorphic or “egomorphic”
character that is the externalization of the inner incoherence of perception and desire that
attempts stabilization through identification. The privileged objet a, the whittled down but ever-
irrepressible remainder (the polite but ever-disobedient excess), is that glut of shame, that

22
inescapable presence of “something more” which will not collapse into visibility (its positive
content) as a self-effacing “see myself seeing”:

At the moment when he has presented himself in the action of looking through a
keyhole. A gaze surprises him in the function of voyeur, disturbs him, overwhelms him
and reduces him to a feeling of shame. The gaze in question is certainly the presence of
other as such. But does this mean that originally it is in the relationship of subject to
subject, in the function of the existence of others as looking at me, that we apprehend
what the gaze really is? Is it not clear that the gaze intervenes here only in as much as it
is not the annihilating subject, correlative of the world of objectivity, who feels himself
surprised [startled, shamed], but the subject sustaining himself in a function of
desire? . . . It is not precisely because desire is established here in the domain of seeing
that we can make it vanish? (Lacan, 227)

Let us recall Zarathustra exhortation, “Let my pride follow my folly” and its precise
moment: after he came to the comic realization that the only man to comprehend his message
was the dead circus performer. Stepping across threshold from the restroom and to the bustling
café, my hand checks my pants zipper. More important than making objet a vanish—it is clear
that it won’t!—is the ability to laugh in its face. Lacan attests to the deep-seated human need to
maintain a stable ego-identity when he says:

Of all the objects in which the subject may recognize his dependence in the register of
desire, the gaze is specified as unapprehensible. That is why it is, more than any other
object, misunderstood, and it is perhaps for this reason, too, that the subject manages,
fortunately, to symbolize his own vanishing and punctiform bar in the illusion of the
consciousness of seeing oneself seeing oneself, in which the gaze is elided. (226)

But when our ego-identification with the Law of the Big Other beyond stability to stagnation—in
hyper-allegiance to the National Socialist Party, The National Reorganization Process, the Good
Old US of A, or masculinity itself—then we must happily admit to ourselves that there is a time
to drop the ball, to fall down, and to laugh. It is in just such a passive act of non-action that our
primal openness to the world can erupt its strange remainder. Like the yogi who accomplishes
her greatest spiritual feat by telling “inappropriate” jokes (wherein comedic divinity erupts in the
interstitial space between the “as is” and “as if” of the appropriate/inappropriate split), what if
MacNamara for a moment cast his dignity aside and mocked his own cruelty? It is precisely in
his all-too-dignified persona that he be-lies the lie of his non-dignity—the nothingness that sits

23
like a strange bird on the taught wire of his reified being. That is the gain in the return to the
loss. As Zizek writes:

First I sacrifice all I have for the Cause-Thing which is more to me than my life; what I
then get in exchange for this sacrifice is the loss of this Cause-Thing itself.” (80)

But in this connection, it is telling to distinguish surrender from sacrifice, for while sacrifice
implies duplicitous gain, surrender gives itself unto loss itself.
For me, there is no more sublime cinematographic moment than that at the apogee of
Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, when at the very peak of thematic tension, when the fragile
unnamed infant is in the arms of the character most consumed by a singular libidinal
identification (Theo says “You don’t even know what you’re doing,” and Luke replies “No, look
around you. It’s the Uprising!”), a sudden and unexpected release gives way to a profound and
perfect stillness. Is this not the same moment as when Moses with all of Pharoah’s armies at his
back parts the waves and walks calmly across the ocean bed? Or in the Bhagavad-Gita when
Arjen finally gives himself over to the great chaotic patricidal war that has divided his family and
it is at this paradoxical moment that he finds the path of compassion offered by Krshna? Is it not
the same phenomena that Paulo Coelho’s portrays in The Alchemist wherein it is precisely when
Santiago finally gives up his search that he finally finds what he has so long sought? Perhaps
this is why conversion must first take the form of a challenge: for it is the sacrificial gesture that
gives rise to its sublime result—the paradox of the Beatitudes: that the meek with inherit the
Earth. And is not the pathetic figure of the Muselman—the Jew too weak to be put to work and
so sent directly to the gas chamber or laboratory—is not she the same most damnable, shameful
remainder of our modern Capitalist myth:

Consequently, is not the paradox of the Muselmann that this figure is simultaneously
life at its zero-level, a total reduction to life, and a name for the pure excess as such,
excess deprived of its “normal” base? . . . When we are confronted with a Muselmann,
we precisely cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his or her
vunerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility—what we get is a
kind of blank wall, a lack of depth. Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level
neighbor, the neighbor with whom no empathic relationship is possible. At this point,
however, we again confront the key dilemma: what if it is precisely in the guise of the
“faceless” face of a Muselmann that we encounter the Other’s call at its purest and most
radical? What if, facing a Muselmann, we are made aware of our responsibility toward

24
 the Other at its most traumatic? In short, what about bringing together Levinas’s face
and the topic of the “neighbor” in its strict Freudo-Lacanian sense, as the monstrous,
impenetrable thing that is the Nebenmensch, the Thing that hystericizes and provokes
me? What if the neighbor’s face stands neither for my imaginary double/semblant nor
for the purely symbolic abstract “partner in communication,” but for the Other in his of
her dimension of the Real? (Zizek, 112)

The Gaze is ultimately a field of my own desire, which when lost, when folded in upon itself in
the mediation of objectivity, leaves behind its excess in the remainder of my irrepressible
subjectivity. The shaming of the irrevocable reality of the Muselmann, like the intrusion of the a
spectral eye into the mind of a clandestine voyeur, returns the subject back from his fantasmatic
deferral/repression/denial in the positive projection of the objective field, returns him back from
the mediating of abstract consciousness and introduces him (baptizes him?) in the self-
conscience-ness of shame. In this reversal, the loss of the loss is split and unraveled. Pre-
epistemic being-with surrounds me in its wake of awkward mortification.
In the psychic calculus of Cuarón’s near-future science fiction universe, it is the
revolutionary Fishes who are the furthest removed from the latent meaningfulness of the infant.
Is it not unsurprising, then, to note that their rational program to incite “The Uprising” hides this
latent meaningfulness behind a mask of itself? It is the Fishes who initiate Kee’s escape into
Britain in the name of a rendezvous with the enigmatic Human Project, but this presentation of
the baby’s value is a moralistic and positivistic “use of” which blots out most repressively its
underlying mirror opposite, the irrepressible life force that finally escapes the mechanics of
power in the film’s finale. The life-sucking hypocrisy of the revolutionary group is satirized by
their aqueous animal name and symbolized by the barn scene (superficially an image of hearty
earthiness), wherein Kee’s unveiling is juxtaposed against the milking machine and its attached
cows. The machines are designed to suck four teats so that each cow has four of its eight teats
removed to fit the machine. Kee demands, “Why not make machines that such eight titties, eh?”
This single-minded focus and its birth into positivity qua the loss folded into its own loss can be
read in the following exchange, in which the rebel leader, Luke, having looked into the baby’s
face struggles to maintain his ideological composure (pulling off his own version of the Himmler
Trick):

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 LUKE: I was carrying the baby up the stairs—I started crying. I’d forgotten how
beautiful they are! . . . [burst of gun fire; Luke shooting] . . . Julian was wrong. She
thought it could be peaceful. But how can it be peaceful when they try to take away
your dignity?! . . .[Theo attempts to leave the room with the baby and Kee] Stop right
there! [pointing gun] We need the baby—we need him!!
THEO: It’s a girl, Luke
LUKE: A girl? I had a sister . . . [Theo, Kee, and baby leave room, Luke turns and
shoots at them as they depart]

Is this not precisely the struggle within reification, which in its double enfolding contains
recognition in the nothingness of its unraveling. Here, authenticity exists in the ellipses that
follow Luke’s cathartic moments. This is the radical meaning of recognition.
Theo’s role as caretaker to the pregnant Kee and her infant—in contrast to the mask of
reification separating Luke from his own unraveling—is made possible by his external position,
his lack of indoctrination, his obstinate and dark humor, and his very resignation to the value of
life itself. Theo is drawn into game by no more than the promise of monetary compensatory—or
as he teases, sex: “You were the activist; I thought I was just trying to get laid.” Then even this
libidinal attachment is cut with Julian’s death. Meanwhile, Theo’s quick, banal wit— “You have
something on your teeth”; “Your breath stinks”—gives him the comedic distance necessary to
recuperate strength, and it is interesting that he regresses into fatalism only when Jasper is there
like a Master to bring him back to life with a joke: “You know what?” he tells Jasper, “It was too
late before the infertility thing happened for fuck’s sake.” Let us not forget in this connection
that Theo’s own child died in the Flu Epidemic of 2008. Theo’s fatalism and his humor are of
the same substance: “Why don’t you come and live with us?” Jasper asks; Theo replies, “Then I
wouldn’t have anything to look forward to.” Interestingly (and not without foreshadowing),
when this sardonic wit turns on the power structure it comes across boldly like drag:

NIGEL: That thing in Madrid was such a blow to Art.

THEO: Not to mention to people.

The minimal difference Theo asserts in not taking himself—or anything—seriously is most
apparent when exemplified by the blatant contrast in his externality to the Fishes’ ideology. It is

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only he who is stupid enough to suggest apropos of the infant’s existence: “You should make it
public. Whatever your political opinions are, it doesn’t matter.”
The difference between the aristocratic world of Nigel’s inner sanctum and the radical
hypocrisy of the Fishes’ at-any-cost mean-ends analysis, on the other hand, can be seen as the
difference between Howard Roark and Ellsworth Toohey. Whereas Toohey and Luke belong to
a world of explicit justification whose violence emerges as a kind of continually elided Freudian
slip, Roark and Nigel celebrate their power in perfect identification with subjectivity as such:
like Bordo’s postmodern subject they live an immaculate existence in a world detached from
their own materiality. Roark is a rogue, forever misunderstood in his solitude; Nigel lives in a
state of real cynicism (think “real abstraction”) in which even the meaning of Pink Floyd’s “Pig
on the Wing” is absorbed into the abstract of “art for art’s sake” (a certain play on the Cartesian
thought thought) and in which his lone companion is his autistic son—incidentally, one of
Honneth’s illustrations as to reification’s unique personality. Like Roark, Nigel has this to say to
in the face of Theo’s nausea:

THEO: You kill me. In one hundred years there won’t be one sad fuck to look at any of
this. What keeps you going?
NIGEL: You know what it is, Theo? I just don’t think about it.

In contrast to these extremes, Theo’s position is the paradox of Sid’s embodiment in the
system, perhaps its desirous remainder (Theo’s objet a to Sid’s $): the code words “You fascist
pig” are thus uttered from a position of self-sacrifice to a position of empty power. Sid does no
more than play his part while Theo exploits (by entering into) this inherent gap within. This is
where Theo’s surplus of luckiness fits into the Lacanian puzzle: dogs and cats are mysteriously
attracted to him; he wins unnecessarily as a gambler. And thus the pregnant Kee “escapes” into
the refugee camp—Kee, who considered Quietus, the commercially available suicide drug,
before her baby kicked and she said to herself, “It is alive. And me, too, I am alive!”—Kee who
has the humor to joke that she was a virgin but who (of course) is not a virgin. And then her
baby is born; that which is beyond all control erupts.
The laughter of children, featured in the film’s opening and closing credits, bookending
the narrative within a more encompassing primordial reality, takes the same position as the

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ambient sound of Argentina’s torture victims. As Miriam—midwife who was among the first to
witness the infertility—says, “As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in—very
odd what happens in a world without children’s voices.” Just as the Latin American victims
“Did not know what they could not deny,” capitalism and its revolutionary opposite both took on
reifying forms that manifested in reality the abstraction of their projected aims: on one hand,
Nigel’s art for art’s sake, the very emptiness of Capital’s subjectification of the self, its “Thou
Shalt Enjoy” (as Lacan quips elsewhere); on the other hand, the positivist abstraction of sacrifice
in the name of life. In contrast to these dis-ruptions, the unnamed child’s emergence marks the
full force gale of confrontation with the Real, of the divinity that lies in the interstitial space of
Merleau-Ponty’s flesh. A split in the field of conflict, ideology, and frantic libidinal attachment
creates from out itself the irrational, unkempt, and impolite assertion of impossibility: the
overflow from the proverbial cup. In the end, rocking in fog and waves, and dying, Theo
relinquishes everything. But through his surrender: a break, a rupture that changes everything.
The fighter jets fly overhead to put down The Uprising, but Theo’s lost son is reborn. This is the
rebirth of desire itself.

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WORKS CITED

Bordo, Susan. (2000) The Male Body: A new look at men in public and private. Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux: New York City.
Bordo, Susan. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. Regents
of the University of California: Berkeley.
Butler, Judith. (1990) Selections from Gender Trouble. In Body and Flesh: a Philosophical
Reader, edited by Donn Welton, pp. 27-44. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Children of Men. (2006) directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Universal Pictures.
Gilgamesh: A verse narrative. (1972) Trans. Herbert Mason. Signet: New York City.
Hendrix, Harville. (1988) Getting the Love You Want. Harper Publishing: New York City.
Honneth, Axel. (2008) Reification: A new look at an old idea. Oxford University Press.
Klein, Naomi. (2007). The Shock Doctrine. Picador: New York.
Lacan, Jacques. (1977) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. From The Body
(ed. Donn Welton). 1999. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964). The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press:
Evanston, Illinois.
The Fog of War: Eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. MacNamara. (2003) directed by Errol
Morris. Sony Pictures.
Pink Floyd. (1987) Momentary Lapse of Reason. “On the Turning Away.” Columbia Records.
Rand, Ayn. (1952). The Fountainhead. Signet: New York City.
Zizek, Slavoj. (1996). The Parallax View. MIT Press: Cambridge.

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