(a) Fall 2000

free copy

articles by

Ariella Azoulay Gabriel Riera Bernie Lubell Kwai-Cheung Lo Alfredo Carrasquillo-Ramrez Kirsten Hyldgaard Tracy McNulty Am Luski Lyat Friedman Yannis Stavrakakis Manya Steinkoler on Hiroshima & Visibility / Badiou & The Age of Poets / The Etiology of Innocence / Face-Off / Puerto Rico & Hysteria / Sartre & Lacan / Klossowski / Horizontal Camera # 1 / Freuds Project / Laclau & Lacan / What a Woman Wants to Date

(a)
the journal of culture and the unconscious

r architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is for amour a is for is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (n r architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is for amour a is for anticipation a is for aesthetics anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor a is for antipathy a a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is for amo a is for ardor a is for antipathy a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a is for a is for art is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor a is for antipathy a is for alienation a is for a s a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for a is for object a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a i s a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for a is for (not)all a is for analysis a : a journal of culture and object aanamorphosis aa is for a is foraart for object a a is foris for architecture anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorph object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is is for a is for is for anxiety is (not)all a is for a a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is is for architecture a is for art a is for ana s for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is for amour is for art a is a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is for amour a is for a is for anxiety a is for amour a is for anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor a is for antip the unconscious tion a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor a is for antipathy a a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architec vol. I #1 (2000) hy a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a a is for anamorphosis for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for for anxiety a is for ob a is for art a is is r anamorphosis a is for anxiety a object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for a is a a is for (not)all a is for art a is is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for ana f o r art a is for analysis a architecture a is is for art a is is for architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is JULIET FLOWER MACCANNELL a is for architecture analysis a This journal responds to the for amour a is for anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor for anamorphosis a i EDITOR s dedicated to exploring how art, politics, and other formal expresis for need for a cultural analysis a is for antipathy a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a anxiety a is for objec sionsculturesolve and provoke the dilemmas that the unconarchitectur that is aesthetically, psychoana- is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is is for (not)all a is for DEAN MACCANNELL scious indexes. for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a e a is for for art a is is lytically, and otherwise is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for CO-EDITOR anamorph architecture a is for e publish work from artists and thinkers who confront the way informed. Contributors to this (not)all a is for a is for art a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is osis a is is for analysis a is concepts are linked to praxis and to parapraxis. Engagement a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for for anxiety first issue are practicing for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for anxiety a is for amou with Freuds and Lacans work is particularly encouraged. a is for anxiety a is for artists, writers, philosophers, art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a for anticipation a is a a is for (not)all ADVISORY BOARD object a a psychoanalysts, and students is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for aesthetics a is for ob ur group holds an annual symposium. To be included on our art a is fA is for SINKWAN CHENG, N EW YORK is for of sublimation in its myriad architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a a is for ardor a is announcement list, please write us: jfmaccan@uci.edu nalysis a is for AMY JAMES, BERKELEY a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a (not)all a antipathy a is manifestations . . . anxiety a is for GARY MCMANUS, B ERKELEY is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis is for a is alienation a is for au anti-Oedipus a CHRIS MEYER, IRVINE & B ERKELEY for art a a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is is for object a is ation a is for ALLAN REGENSTREIF, SAN FRANCISCO isis a is for for (not)all a is for Ais for architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety (not)all a is for a is fo (a) or alien a is for a is for amour a is for anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is ardor a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is architectur ARMANDO SILVA, BOGOT or art a is for e a is for is a publication of the California a is for antipathy a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (no for alienist a is is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is a is for a is for art a is is for architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is for amour a is for anticipa anamorph Psychoanalytic Circle. for artwork a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor a is for antipathy a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object osis a is special thanks to SUNY Buffalos We wish to thank the Office of the Chair, is for architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is for amour a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for ob pus a is for Joan Copjec and Sue Feldman of for anxiety is for anxiety a the journal Umbr(a) for their assis -a is for Program in Landscape Architecture at the for anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor a is for antipathy a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety s for Autre a is tance and co-operation in the cre -object a a University of California, Davis, for supporting a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a is for a is for art for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a isis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety analysis a is for ation of this journal a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a i is for this first issue of the journal anxiety a is for for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is fA is for at a is for analysis a is for alienist a i anti-Oedipus a object a a is a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a anxiety a is for artwork a is for anti-Oedipus a is for anticipation a is for anxiety a is for alien a is for Autre a i COVER ART ation a is for for (not)all a is is for art a is is for architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is art a is for analysis a is for alienist a is for anxiety a is for artwork a is for anti-Oedipus a is for anticipation a i or alien a is for for a is for art for amour a is for anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor anxiety a is for alien a is for Autre a is for art a is for analysis a is for alienist a is for anxiety a is for artwork a i LACANLAVERA BY VICTOR MARIO ZABALLA or art a is for a architecture a is for antipathy a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a anti-Oedipus a is for anticipation a is for anxiety a is for alien a is for Autre a is for art a is for analysis a is for alie for alienist a is a is for art a is is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is a is for anxiety a is for artwork a is for anti-Oedipus a is for anticipation a is for anxiety a is for alien a is for A VICTOR ZABALLA IS A SAN FRANCISCO-BASED VISUAL ARTIST AND MUSICIAN for artwork a is for analysis a for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a a is for art a is for analysis a is for alienist a is for anxiety a is for artwork a is for anti-Oedipus a is for anticipa ORIGINALLY FROM CUERNAVACA, M EXICO. H IS WORK HAS BEEN EXHIBITED pus a is for is for anxiety is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for a is for anxiety a is for alien a is for Autre a is for art a is for analysis a is for alienist a is for anxiety a is for artw WORLD-WIDE. is for anxiety a a is for amour (not)all a is for a is for art a is is for architecture a is for art a is for analysis a is a is for anti-Oedipus a is for anticipation a is for anxiety a is for alien a is for Autre a is for art a is for analysis s for Autre a is a is for for anxiety a is for amour a is for anticipation a is for aesthetics a is for object a for alienist a is for anxiety a is for artwork a is for anti-Oedipus a is for anticipation a is for anxiety a is for alien THIS PAINTING REFERS TO THE MEXICAN SKELETAL PORTRAIT (UNA analysis a is for anticipation a a is for ardor a is for antipathy a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a for autre A is for art a is for analysis a is for alienist a is for anxiety a is for artwork a is for anti-Oedipus a i CALAVERA) THAT HONORS DEATH-IN-LIFE AND LIFE-IN-DEATH. anxiety a is for is for is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anticipation a is for anxiety a is for alien a is for autre A is for art a is for analysis a is for alienist a is for anxie anti-Oedipus a aesthetics a is anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art is for artwork a is for anti-Oedipus a is for anticipation a is for anxiety a is for alien a is for Autre a is for art a i A ROUGH ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF ZABALLAS PORTRAIT OF LACAN WOULD BE: ation a is for for object a a a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is analysis a is for alienist a is for anxiety a is for artwork a is for anti-Oedipus a is for anticipation a is for anxiety SKELETALACAN or alien a is for is for ardor a for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is is for architecture a is for art for alien a is for Autre a is for art a is for analysis a is for alienist a is for anxiety a is for artwork a is for anti-Oed or art a is for is for antipathy a is for alienation a is for autre a is for object a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for anxiety a is for amour a is for anticipation a is for a is for anticipation a is for anxiety a is for alien a is for autre a is for analysis a is for architecture a is for alienist a is a is for analysis a is for architecture a is foranamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for aesthetics a is for object a a is for ardor a is for antipathy a is for alienation a is anamorphosis a is for anxiety a is for object a a is for (not)all a is for a is for art a is for analysis a is for architec

(a)

i w o

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(a)

a journal of culture and the unconscious

R S I

ELIGION, ART, ARCHITECTURELACAN SAYS THAT CULTURAL PRODUCTIONSIN ALL THEIR MANIFESTATIONS REFER TO THIS: EMPTY

PACE.

(A)

WAY BEYOND THE PLEASURE

&

REALITY PRINCIPLES

WHERE THE ILLUSION OF SHELTER FROM THE REAL BREAKS DOWN.

T IS OUR COMMON FATE TO MISS/RECOGNIZE THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE

REAL. WHAT SURROUNDS THE REAL IS OUR COMMON BURDEN DRIVING CULTURE

&

ITS BREAKDOWNS; CIVILIZATION

&

ITS DISCONTENTS.

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THIS ISSUE IS DEVOTED TO DRIVES,

toute vitesse...

-- Juliet Flower MacCannell, Editor San Francisco, June 2000

(a) 1 f al l 20 0 0

O N A R T A N A LY S I S P O L I T I C S

Ariella Azoulay
Tel-Aviv

You Didnt See Anything in Hiroshima Alain Badiou After the Age of Poets Etiology of Innocence From Asia to Hollywood and Back Puerto Rican Hystoire The Subject as an Ill-Timed Accident Klossowski, ce soir Horizontal Camera No. 1 Freuds Other Drive Edward Teller and the Mach I Car Laclau with Lacan What Does A Woman Want To Date?

1 10 34 47 59 67 81 104 108 121 132 154

Gabriel Riera
Princeton

Bernie Lubell
San Francisco

Kwai-Cheung Lo
Hong Kong

Alfredo Carrasquillo
San Juan

Kirsten Hyldgaard
Aarhus

Tracy McNulty
Ithaca

Am Luski
Tel Aviv

Lyat Friedman
Tel Aviv

Brad Zukovic
Los Angeles

Yannis Stavrakakis
Essex

Manya Steinkoler
New York

Many of the articles in this inaugural issue of ( a ) w e r e presented at the first annual Symposium of the California Psychoanalytic Circle (San Francisco, April 2-3, 1999) : on the Drives, politics and the arts. Additional articles were selected to complement the Symposium papers.

You Didnt See Anything in Hiroshima

Ariella Azoulay
Bar Ilan University Camera Obscura School of Art Tel Aviv

For us, a language game always and first of all means somebody speaking. But there are language games in which listening is the important thing, in which the rule applies to the listener: This is the game of justice. And we speak in it to the extent that we hear. In other words: speak as hearers, if one may put it like this, and not as authors at all. It is a game without an author. Jean-Franois Lyotard

spatial attitude towards horror stands at the basis of the ethics of the modern view. The bodywounded, mutilated, shot, beaten, disfigured, dyingis the very heart of spectacle in the public sphere. 1 It is the object of a desire to see, to see more, to penetrate into the body (corpse) and allow it to appear; to invite interiority to the surface of the screenthe screen as body and the body as screen; to let the survivorof an accident, of the Holocaust, of a massacre, of a conflagration, transform the being-there into spectacle. The spectators are desirous of seeing. There is no superfluous testimony. There is no limit to testifying. There is no end to it. Its purpose is to bring the spectator permanently close to the event, to persevere in this so that the distance between the spectator and what happened there will be maintained forever and feed the spectacle of the body on display. This spectacle is a singular phenomenon of distance, close as it may be. 2 On the threshold of the event, the

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spectator is very close but also far enough away so that the sentence You didnt see anything in Hiroshima, 3 the opening sentence of the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, can continue to be said. Is it possible to remember outside the regime of the view? Is it possible to create a commemorative community that doesnt have a common public space in which the horror and the body that bears its traces must appear as spectacle? I would like to present Marie Ange Guilleminots project Hiroshima Collection as just such a possibility of remembering. Why didnt you see anything in Hiroshima? Because you cannot see, because there is nothing to see in Hiroshima. This sentence expresses a state of differend, an unbridgeable gap between two language games: on the one hand the game of testimony, which is played by whoever was there, and on the other hand the game of art, 4 which is played by whoever wasnt there but wants to see and show, to say something about the event, to put it in a different light, to manufacture an event in which the event is endowed with a different visibility. You can visit the historical museum in Hiroshima, become familiar with every item inside it, get to the bottom of each and every exhibit, see the traces of the horror in body and space, but still, like the heroine of the film, you are distinctively the addressee of the sentence You didnt see anything in Hiroshima. However, this sentence cannot be left trapped only in the principle of the impossibility of representing horror, or in the principle of differend between whoever was there and whoever wasnt. One cannot help but see in it the traces of destruction as well as traces of the obliteration of the traces of destruction, traces which have been denied the right to appear. You didnt see anything in Hiroshima. The atom bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima wiped Hiroshima off the face of the earth. What the bomb failed to obliterate was obliterated later, during several years of occupation that silenced the witnesses and rendered the signs mute. This silencing had one clear purpose: to prevent any museumification of the event, i.e. to prevent any collecting, classification and decoding of the signs (testimonies), to prevent their transformation into comparative information which could be conceptualized, formalized, displayed and studied, from which lessons could be derived and an indictment drawn up. During the period of American occupation, which lasted until 1952, censorship and other control activities prevented the signs from turning into units of meaning and prevented their assimilation into tissues of personal, public, verbal, visual, scientific or historical story.5 An effort was made to leave the signs isolated and mute. The only place where some of the signs appeared, as a small number of photographs testify, 6 was in the bodies of the survivors, who were also forced to remain isolated and mute. During the first few years after the destruction of Hiroshima, the signs/survivors (the surviving signs and the survivors that signified) were prohibited from speaking. It took almost a decade until they were allowed to speak. But the passing time had already

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buried beneath it whole series of testimonies with respect to the present which had turned into past, with respect to the possibility of intervention and rescue in the present when it still had a certain amount of future. A body which can be healed, a life which can be saved, a memory which can be given spacethese things do not remain forever, frozen in their tracks, awaiting their day. They can turn into an incurably diseased body, a life snuffed out by death, a forgotten memory. You didnt see anything in Hiroshima because the view and what has been given to it were obliterated in Hiroshima. Several years later, after Hiroshima underwent museumification, you didnt see anything in Hiroshima because the image didnt go from an invisible to a visible state, but from a visible silenced state to a more visible state, i.e. as something spoken. But the visible became spoken within the distinctive framework of an image with a purpose: in disrupting the silence, in the cold war, in the distribution of power in the world, in the construction of a new world order. An image which constitutes packaged information about what happened, an image that conforms to the display showcase awaiting it in the museum of history, an image which is nothing other than what the French critic Serge Daney describes as the optical confrontation of a power procedure, be it technological, political, military or advertising power. The visual is a procedure that says reception perfect.7 It is hard not to think of Marie Ange Guilleminots project in the context of Alain Resnais film Hiroshima Mon Amour, with Guilleminot, a French artist, in the role of the French actress who arrives in Hiroshima to take part in the film, and with Hiromi Tsuchida, a Japanese photographer from Hiroshima, in the role of the Japanese architect. But it is also hard not to see the difference between the model of relations which develops between the hero and heroine of the film along the axis of You didnt see anything in Hiroshima, and the model of relations which Marie Ange Guilleminot would like to develop with Hiromi Tsuchida in Hiroshima, with Hiroshima, with the (im)possibility of seeing something in Hiroshima. Marie Ange Guilleminots Hiroshima Collection testifies to her relinquishing of any pretension to see, to know, to recognize, to enter into the economy of the mangling view which makes memory dependent on the spectacle of the body which bears the traces. It is a relinquishing of the pretension or desire to become an autonomous subject of the view or of knowledge with respect to the object Hiroshima. Marie Ange Guilleminots Hiroshima Collection project recedes from the arena of public spectacle in order to propose other modes of memory and of exchange that are not mediated by the (autonomous) view. Guilleminots point of departure is the clothes documented by Hiromi Tsuchida in his book Hiroshima Collection. She didnt see anything in Hiroshima. Thats a fact. She is responding to someone elses view, that of the photographer, and it is only from this point, as the addressee of a different view/nonc/imperative, that she can recapture the position of an addresser. She can only see by responding. Her view is directed toward what Hiromi Tsuchida has made

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visible for her. Her view has no wish for a white canvas upon which to impress its imprint; at the most, a white canvas out of which it can reconstruct someone elses non c/garment. Her view has attached itself to a different view, has assimilated itself to it, in order to divert the view to new territorythe territory of the gesture. Within the framework of this territory, the transmission of the seen includes the gesture of transmission, like the transmission of a story by a storyteller.8 The territory of the gesture makes it possible to interpret Guilleminots action as one of response, as action taken from the position of an addressee of a call, action which becomes addressed only by virtue of being responsive, for now it turns to you and puts you in the position of an addressee. M. A.Guilleminot has chosen several articles of clothing out of Hiromi Tsuchidas book and reconstructed them. She reconstructed the clothes of Norihiko Sasaki, Tetsuo Kitabayashi, Takeyo Hatamura and Yukitoshi Masuda and, in effect, chose to tell their story as it had been told by Hiromi Tsuchida, as he had heard it from the victims families. It is not a reconstruction of the model from which the clothes were sewed, but of their manner of preparation in connection to a hypothetical model which they may or may not have had, utilizing the vestiges of craft as indicators of time and space: Hiroshima Collection, a potential collection that was prepared not at all for display by a specific communityHiroshimas inhabitantsand has turned into an actual museal collection as a result of its contact with a different community (America) and technology (the atom bomb). The garment as nonc. In the reconstructive act, Guilleminot is not seeking after the original author of the garment as nonc. She is not trying to erase from the

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garment-as-nonc all traces of its acts of enunciation, but specifically to reconstruct those acts of enunciation which linked, in a single historic moment, the community that was erased and the community which erased it. She reconstructs the garment, not its original as prepared by a specific tailor or factory, but the concrete traces of interpretation of an original, which she has transformed into a type of original pattern. The pattern will be on sale in the museum shop. It is intended for you, inviting you to reconstruct the garment from it, to sign it as one would an nonc of memory. You are invited to reconstruct an article from the potential collection which became an actual collection, to sign itrather than to make it an act of exerting authorshipin other words, to remanufacture the gap between the pattern and the finished product to which it leads. Thus one becomes the spokesperson of the garment as nonc, enunciates it, takes part in its transmission from one person to the next, from hand to hand, from mouth to ear, from body to body. In effect, you are invited to become part of an invisible community responsible for transmitting the garment as nonc, while maintaining its standing as one nonc in a vortex of others, which doesnt enable whoever signs the nonc to become one with its author, i.e. to become the original, to be sanctified. When the signer becomes the author, the signature seals the nonc and prevents its transmission, the transmission of the experience by means of it, and the nonc is presented as the authoritative view or as knowledge. You are invited to preserve this nonc from seeking for itself a public space in which the desire to see/to be seen turns into the engine of memory, its only measure, the only testimony to its existence. This story (as experience, in Benjamins sense),

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which Marie Ange Guilleminot is passing on through her reconstruction of a garment, is being transmitted in an intimate manner devoid of words, devoid of a view. It is a transmission of savoir-faire, implemented through an object that is there to be signed, though it itself is unsigned and unfinished. The womans torn jacket on display in the museuma hole in the shoulder pad, torn sleeve, worn collarappeals to you for confirmation. You will say that youve been there, that youve seen it, you will say what needs to be said and help inflate the museums ratings. Marie Ange Guilleminot hasnt issued an invitation to see. She invites you to reconstruct the garment from the pattern, to wear it upon your body once a year, on August 6th, on the anniversary of Hiroshimas destruction. The manual reconstructive act is not undertaken in order to restore the aura to the act of manual labor, but in order to resist the transformation of the world into a surface, into a picture which puts you in the position of an addressee whose only function is to confirm the seen by a yes or no, to say, reception perfect.9 You are invited to wear the garment and display it in the public space, knowing that this space has no mirror, no museal display show-case, no glass-sided show-case inside which images flicker under a blue light. The public space offered to you is devoid of showcases inside which the image of you wearing the white garment can obtain the optical confirmation: reception perfect. Your action will not merge into a memorial ceremony. Your action is what it is, your response to the story as experience, a private gesture of response to the imperative to remember, which exists in the connection with a community devoid of a view and devoid of visibility because the partnership

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among its members does not turn into a display in the public sphere. 10 It is a quiet public sphere in which private individuals coalesce into a community that is performing a political act, not by means of rational discussion but by means of a blind, intimate, anonymous act meant to evade the political and the instrumental. You didnt see anything in Hiroshima. And just because theres nothing to see, Hiroshima is the place you must go to see what it looks like when theres nothing to see. Even though theres a museum and it is full, theres nothing to see in Hiroshima. Numerous signs scattered about the museum explain to the viewer what shes seeing. But the museum is trying to conceal the fact that theres nothing to see, that in Hiroshima the view crashed, that in Hiroshima the necessary distance for maintaining the view collapsed in destruction. The signs in the museum seem to express a fear of a state in which the spectator might notice that theres nothing to see. Therefore they dont prohibit touching the items on display. On the contrary, they explicitly invite her to touch, to ascertain for herself that indeed she is standing before eyewitness testimony. A stone that survived lies on a cushion, ostensibly eyewitness testimony to the atom bomb. But more than this testimony testifies to the atom bomb, it testifies to the eradication of the view. When theres nothing left to see it is permitted to touch. There is no longer any reason to fear that the seen might disclose its unseen side. The stone that survived the atom bomb no longer hides anything. It is the seen and the unseen together. There is no need to protect it from casual passersby, no reason to preserve it like the evidence from a crime scene. It is impervious to every view, to every contact, it has survived everything, including the eradication of testimonies. After it there is nothing. It may be touched. You didnt see anything in Hiroshima. What is there to see in Hiroshima? In Hiroshima the necessary distance for maintaining the view was completely eliminated. The object of the view has been completely captured from the pilots cockpit, so that nothing is left of it except, paradoxically, the aura; the aura of an object that can never appear, an object that will always remain an absence, an object that exists no longer. You are wearing a garment which has touched death, which is the reconstructed reflection of death. You are wearing a garment which served sometimes like a barrier against death, which has changed from an external covering for the body, one that may be replaced by another each day, into an accessory that has impressed upon the body both the imprint of destruction and the imprint of survival. The body has turned into the image of the garment. The garment functioned like a camera. Through the apertures of this camerain the form of a dcolletage, visor or sleevethe blazing light of the bomb penetrated the body and imprinted an image on it, burned it into the skin.11 This image is the other side of the mushroom cloud image of Hiroshima, its remnant which cannot be erased. The obligation not to erase it is not dependent on the presentation of this horror as spectacle. The remnant isnt the spectacle of the horror. The remnant is what cannot be erased or gotten rid of in any event. It is not

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by dispensing the spectacle that the obligation to remember is met, but by transmitting the remnant, by creating the conditions for its appearance. You are invited to wear a garment which has been snatched from death, just as the photographic image has been snatched from its object. Its nearness to death isnt visible, and yet youre aware of it. You dont need any proof. Neither are you invited to reconstruct it in its mutilated state in order to feel its nearness to death. You will reconstruct it in white cloth. You will compel the white to give up any pretense of producing an original, force it to respond to the experience of reconstruction. You will cut the cloth carefully, immersing yourself in the work. You will join one piece to another until the garment appears out of them. Suddenly, your body will recoil from contact with it. Maybe not suddenly. Maybe few minute later. This garmentwhich you have sewed yourself in response to the invitation, from new materials, using a purchased patternstinks of death. You cant get rid of the smell. It is the remnant thatll never leave. You will wear it upon your body, knowing you are not alone in this garment. All the same, you are invited to remain alone in your clothing, like a silenced sign, alone to yourself, with no visual recompense, no reflection of yourself in the mirror. It is not in order to forget the event that the position of being the author of an nonc/picture of Hiroshima is renounced, but exactly the opposite, in order to remember it silenced, lacking a view, as it happened, as it was experienced, as an event transmitted from one person to the next, from mouth to ear, from hand to hand. A memory that exists without a public space in which the horror is allowed/forbidden to be written, usually in defined formats such as forge a connection between the interiority of the bearers of the testimony and the model of authenticity into which they are invited to empty this interiority. The defined pattern of memory is a sort of meeting between a personal story and a historical date, which is effected through the agency of a scarred and burnt body that is exposed in all its intimacy and turns into the carrier of protest due to the sign placed upon it, which indicates the date of the event. You didnt see anything in Hiroshima says the reproof, but Marie Ange Guilleminots proposal seemingly rebuts: I didnt ask to see anything in Hiroshima. I didnt seek to undress witnesses. I didnt look for testimonies. I didnt cast any doubt. I didnt come to interrogate survivors. I didnt collect information. I didnt try to understand. I didnt come to tell Hiroshima about itself. I didnt propose identifying with it. I didnt try to manufacture an nonc of my own about Hiroshima. I came to add a signature to Hiroshima as a monument, and to give this signature its proper place: a signature which doesnt seal the nonc or fix it under its authority, but one at the margins of the nonc, a temporary addition; an identification tag, which by its essence is to be replaced by another, which declares its work to be unfinished, which remains an addressee while being an addresser, which transmits someone elses story, which places another in the position of addressee, in the position of one who in turn will be asked to respond, to sign the nonc and transmit it onwards.

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NOTES
Photo credits Marie Ange Guilleminot, Hiroshima Collection, Hiroshima Art Document Project, curator Yukiko Ito; Video Documentation: Table

1 Mark Seltzer terms this public sphere pathological. See his Serial Killers, New York: Routledge,1998. 2 In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction, Benjamin discusses the loss of the work of arts aura and its retreat to the portrait. Further to Benjamins discussion of the aura, in this article I suggest considering the spectacle of the survivors body as the site in which the aura is reconstituted. 3 The famous sentence spoken, in the course of their love affair, by the Japanese architect to the Frenchwoman who has arrived in Hiroshima. 4 The game of art in the traditional sense of displaying an object to the view. In this sense the game of art also approaches other discursive games such as the game of historical discourse, which employs a factual language of sight, or the language of statistics which quantifies and formalizes. 5 This control over information and the restrictions on collecting it contributed in a crucial way to the refusal of assistance to survivors, out of concern that this might be construed as an admission that dropping the bomb was an unworthy act. On the implementation of censorship during the American occupation, see John W. Dowers article The Bombed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese Memory, in M.J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory, Cambridge University Press. 6 During the initial years of occupation, the American army confiscated covertly made films and prohibited the possession of photographic equipment and products. A couple of Japanese painters named Maruki, who painted hundreds of survivors portraits, described their project as expressing their fear that there might be no visual traces left of the horror of Hiroshima. 7 Serge Daney, 1998. Before and after the image, Documenta XThe Book, Cantz. 8 In an essay on the storyteller, Benjamin claims that we have been deprived of the ability to share experience with others...Didnt they notice at the end of the war that people who came back from the battlefield were mute? Not richer - poorer in experience which can be transmitted, Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, 1936. The practice which M. A. Guilleminot proposes in regard to Hiroshima reconstructs not only the garment but the story situation as well. With Guilleminot the story has no storyteller and no wordssince no story can be transmitted any longer in words other than words which are already a novel or journalistic information, as Benjamin puts ityet all the same it preserves the structure of transmitting experience by motion, gesture and act. 9 In his essay on reproduction, Benjamin describes the history of technical reproduction. The progression is clear, from the reproduction of three-dimensional objects by means of casting and stamping, to reproduction over a surfaceprinting and photography; reproduction, which manufactures a disembodied image projected on paper within the framework of an economy of images of the same kind. 10 In a certain sense Guilleminots action can be seen as a contemporary echo of the patterns of Christian communion, which makes it possible for people who share the same faith to commune. 11 In his book War and Cinema, London: Verso, 1989, Paul Virilio compares all of Hiroshima to a darkroom in which the Japanese shades were written on the citys walls. This article is from my forthcoming book, Deaths Showcase, MIT Press, 2001.

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I shall put forth this paradox: philosophy has not known until quite recently how to think in level terms with Capital, since it has left the field open to its most intimate point, to vain nostalgia for the sacred, to obsession with Presence, to the obscure dominance of the poem, to doubt about its own legitimacy . . . Philosophy has left the Cartesian meditation incomplete by going astray in the aestheticization of willing and the pathos of com pletion, the destiny of oblivion and the lost trace. It has not cared to recognize in a straightforward way the absoluteness of the multiple and the non-being of the bond. It has clung to language, to literature, to writing just as to the last possible representatives of an a priori determination of experience, or to the preserved place of a clearing of Being . . . What has happened to philosophy for it to refuse with a shud der the liberty and strength a desacralizing epoch offered it? Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy

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Don du Pome : Alain Badiou After The Age of Poets

Gabriel Riera
Princeton University

UNE CONSTELLATION Froide doublier de dsutude Pas tant Quelle nnumre Sur quelque surface vacante et suprieure Lheurt successif Sidralement Dun compte total en formation Mallarm, Un Coup de Ds

I. Philosophy under Condition: the Coldness of the Matheme, the Heat of Rhetoric
t would have been an event.. And for us, today, like always, here, belatedly. Displaced and almost out of place, what are the implications of reading Alain Badiou in English from the dated (outdated?) heat of the Manifestos rhetoric?

Even this type of question seems out of place when approaching Badiou. First, because for Badiou philosophy is eternal and second, because no other contemporary French philosopher seems to be as far removed from rhetoric as Badiou. In fact, Badious thinking does not lead us into the paralogisms of language-games, but instead into the cold discipline of the matheme, as witnessed by the almost intractable Ltre et lvnement. A cold discipline coming once again to found philosophy and to carry on the unfinished Cartesian meditation.

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And yet, to approach the Manifesto does not imply beginning with the matheme but, rather, with rhetoric, even if for Badiou language is not a transcendental ground. Further, to approach Badiou from the perspective of the Manifestos rhetoric is to begin not with counting, as in Ltre et lvnement, but with calculating.1 In Ltre et lvnement, Badiou states:
conceptually the experience will be that of a deductive invention, one in which the result would be entirely transmissible through knowledge; language, finally, refusing the poem, will be under the authority of that which Frege called an ideography. The whole will oppose to the temptation of presence the rigor of the subtractive, in which being can only be said inasmuch as it is un-supposing to all presence and all experience.a (EE: 35; my emphasis )2

If there is invention, it is not on a conceptual level, but on one of deduction. Badious ontology revolves around the notion of the event: the presentation of the void. But this presentation can only emerge by an act of nomination: lvnementcomme exclusif destin de prsentification du videne surgit que dans le paradoxe ne pouvoir tre nome que dans lvanouissement de ce quoi il fait rfrence ( EE: 245).3 An event can only be named in the moment when that to which it refers vanishes or disappears. Its key operation is subtraction.4 Therefore, this ideographic invention does not come to add a new entity. It is not here a question of inventing new concepts (Deleuze), nor of inventing the other (Derrida).5 True, the Manifesto for Philosophy is an accessible point of entry to Badious thinking, but one wonders if its rhetoric does not come too late to try to dispel the effects of a supposed end and to put the Sophists back where they belong. 6 The Manifesto is a text in which the very question of philosophys presentation is enacted without any explicit interrogation. Which genre or mode does the Manifesto belong to? This question is legitimate inasmuch as Badiou legislates limits and establishes borders between philosophy and the poem; borders which, once re-established, are used in a diatribe against the Sophists. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been prolific in the production of manifestoes, a programmatic form of writing characteristic of artistic and political movements, whose most distinguished feature is its militant tone. Strangely, the tone of this re-founded, cold philosophy is that of the passionate militant. It could be said that the genre or mode of the manifesto is that of a certain type of suture, one taking the form x as y: art as politics (Futurist and Surrealist manifestoes), or art as positivist science (Zola), and politics as religion (Communist Manifesto). The manifesto is the space of articulation and of suturing which are produced around the concept of the end. The question of the end is crucial not only for Badious project of de-suturing philosophy from its dependency on non-philosophical configurations, but also for the Manifestos rhetoric. However, have the so-called Sophists announced the end of philosophy? We

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need to go back to Heidegger to examine the misunderstandings generated by this notion:

What is meant by the talk about the end of philosophy [Ende der Philosophie]? We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of a continuation, perhaps even as decline and impotence. In contrast, what we say about the end of philosophy means the completion of metaphysics [die Vollendung der Metaphysik].7

In Heideggers understanding of the end of philosophy there is no indication that philosophy is finished. Heidegger contests the ideas of stopping, decline and impotence, ideas that are crucial not only for Badious rhetoric but also for his historical schema. In Heidegger, rather, there is an indication of an exhaustion pertaining to all the essential possibilities of metaphysics. More than to an apocalyptic end, Heidegger is pointing to a notion of completion, an exhaustion of the possibilities of metaphysics. Furthermore, this notion of completion demands that the very concept of the end be interrogated. Nevertheless, in Badiou there is no ironic use of the discourse of the end, and even if he is well aware of mentioning and quoting other discourses of or on the end, he inhabits and uses them to proclaim another end.8 It could be argued that Badiou is interpreting the end of philosophy from an apocalyptic perspective, while at the same time retaining some of Heideggers directives regarding the completion of metaphysics. For Badiou the suturing of philosophy to non-philosophical fields produces disasters, that is, in Heideggers terms, it repeats a metaphysically dominated way of thinking, and, therefore, entails a prolongation of the danger [Gehar]. But while Heidegger and some of the so-called Sophists submit the concept of the end to a radical displacement, Badiou seems to be too dependent upon it and, for this reason, the Manifesto for Philosophy does not seem to be very different from any other type of manifesto. It takes its style of presentation from a militant tradition, it posits a program, denounces in block those against which it is attempting to clear a space of reflection. In this sense, it does not behave differently from those non-militant academic philosophical manuals that tend to group together heterogeneous styles of thinking without recognizing the singular eventful [vnementiel] production of truths. Moreover, in the presentation of its program, the militant ghosts of a non-inventive politics haunt the Manifesto since, according to Badiou, Marxism has become an academic discipline unable to produce events. This programmatic presentation is also shaped by two of the four generic procedures: art and politics. The rhetoric of the Manifesto is sutured and the stitches take the particular configuration of the aestheticpolitical avant-garde. Under the heat of its militant rhetoric, philosophys invariant, truth, suffers. And it does so for two reasons. First, the Manifestos presentation makes evident that Badious rhetoric is the venerable rhetoric of philosophy. Badious rhetoric is a question

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of calculation. In the Manifesto rhetoric is deployed in an attempt to translateor one should say trans-literatethe unfolding of the eventful truth-production of the four generic procedures achieved in Ltre et lvnement. This systematic unfolding is accomplished through a deductive invention whose language is that of an ideography (Frege). In the Manifesto this ideographic writing is rendered into a communicable, transmissible knowledge, and this translation is done within the frame of a limited repertory of conceptual personae (the Philosopher and the Sophist) and topoi (possibility, the end, the conditions, the suture, the event, etc.).9 The cold, disorienting, objectless truth of the matheme becomes the warm and reassuring knowledge of the militants rhetoric. But should it not be this way, should not one expect an orchestrated, calculated repetition of philosophys constitutive diatribe against the Sophists? Is it possible to posit a return to Plato without re-deploying the opposition between the conceptual person of the Philosopher and the Sophist? Or, in other words, if there is calculation, if there is rhetoric as calculation in Badiou, is not this the only localizable example, a punctual use, as if were? I will show how Badiou, to a large extent, operates within a classical determination of rhetoric, of rhetoric as calculation. Moreover, I will show that in strategic moments, when Badiou attempts to secure the de-suturing of philosophy from the poem (an operation upon which the possibility of philosophy depends); that is, when he attempts to clear a new space to posit a post-Heideggerian articulation of the relation between philosophy and the poem; and finally, when he makes explicit the protocols under which philosophy may have recourse to the poem, tropes are simply understood as either an illustration or as an instrument in view of a determined finality. Badious return to Plato (although inflected by a post-Cantorian mathematics) remains faithful to a classic determination of rhetoric. His philosophical decision: Platos matheme against Wittgensteins language-games, closes off any possible type of reflection on language since such a reflection, according to the Manifestos rhetoric, would fall under the jurisdiction of the Sophist, that is of Rhetoric. But, as we will see below, in Badious rhetoric there is a slippage in the tropes regulative assignation. Everything happens, regarding tropes, between knowledge and truth. Or in other words, there is a tension between the post-signifying demands of the-being-faithfulto-the-event and the classical philosophical signifying schema of conceptualization. It is this very tension, I claim, that puts stress upon Badious graphics of compossibility. Badious project is not open to a reflection on language; the rigor and coldness of the matheme decrees that. Nevertheless, what is most striking about this project is that its coldness is a legacy of the modern poem, of the poem of the age of poets. Everything takes place within the scope of the letter, a letter that obligates philosophy (it is la lettre de ltre), since it puts philosophy under condition. But, at the same time, it is a question here of a letter that seems to enjoy a certain exteriority, a certain margin of un-conditionality. A strange conditioning and at the same time un-condi-

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tioned type of letter. I will follow here some of the avatars of this strange letter and, particularly, when it is involved in the re-articulation of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. My purpose here is to follow Badiou in his formulation of a relation of the fourth type between philosophy and the poem, and to see what can be learned from his attempt to remain faithful to the poem in a non-Heideggerian articulation. 10 My reading will be guided by Badious crucial deployment of the concept of the age of poets, since it is through this concept that Badiou both contests Heideggers end of metaphysics and calls for a return to Plato. I am interested in making explicit whether the relation of the fourth type succeeds in clearing a space in which the poem is exposed and, at the same time, exposes to an absolute alterity, a space in which it is finally liberated from the hierarchical relation to which it has been submitted and subjected since Plato. Badious remarkably provocative project seems to contest the notion of the end of philosophy and asserts that philosophy is possible and necessary. However, his resituating of philosophy, including of his own philosophical project, is not achieved at once, since the very notion of end is left unthematized in the Manifesto for Philosophy and will only become fully thought in Conditions. Badious philosophical decision concerns the very question of possibility and the possible. But it also depends upon the question of grounding. An assertion of possibility that does not confront the tenets of the end of philosophy would have been untenable for Badiou. Therefore, he must confront Heideggers narrative of the end of metaphysics and its basic corollary of the forgetting of Being, as well as the Heideggerian form that the dialogue between thinking and poetizing takes. This confrontation aims at wresting the philosophical saying from the proximity to the poem and, in doing so must activate the old and venerable quarrel between philosophy and poetry. What is remarkable in Badious repetition of this by now common scene in contemporary philosophy is his claim of a return to Plato. From Nietzsche to Heidegger and beyond, this century has been anti-Platonic, according to Badiou, and the only way to re-found philosophy is through a repetition of the Platonic gesture. This return to Plato is made in the name of interrupting the Sophists proclamation of the end of philosophy, and in order to re-establishing a space of possibility for philosophy. Philosophy is possible if it returns to its roots, if it is welded not to the poem but re-articulated to the matheme. In other words, the return to Plato is the return to a mathematical Plato, one that will interrupt the postmodern sophistry of the end of philosophy and allow for a re-articulation of the project of modernity. For Badiou, modernity is an unfinished project, and he seeks to articulate a crucial concept out of its incompleteness: an objectless subject, one coming to supplement an event. A subject of the four generic procedures (the poem, inventive politics, the matheme, and love).11 The twist and turns of this return to Plato are manifold and its consequences are

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diverse. On the one hand, it aims to liberate what philosophical modernity has repressedthe mathemebut the scope of this repressive philosophical modernity is limited to a post-Nietzschean configuration. On the other, it must account for an articulation in which none of the non-philosophical fields will have dominion upon the others. There are two competing versions of the return to Plato in Badiou. The first one deploys the figure of the circle, of a circular economy of a return home, to the philosophically proper, which will assure an integral founding. In this version, the matheme will be privileged over the poem. The second version takes the figure of an ellipsis that interrupts any return to a proper ground: philosophy cannot be integrally founded. In this version the matheme and the poem will have to be conceived neither under the logic of opposition nor of compatibility: compossibility must be pushed to the limits of nomination. The return is achieved in terms of an axiomatic derived from Cantor and postCantorian mathematics. This is an axiomatic through which it is possible to deal with being qua being, with a pure multiplicity, since for Badiou the axiomatic of mathematics has a constitutive power with respect to philosophical logic. This privileging of mathematics lies in the mathemes proximity to the disseminated nature of the pure multiple. Mathematics is the thinking of the multiple purely as ontology. Moreover, the return seeks to establish a new topology of the four generic procedures and to secure a place for philosophy as the guarantor of the truths of the time. In this sense, philosophy is endowed with the power to unfold what is left unthought by mathematics. Philosophy is possible only if the free play of the four generic procedures is operative. The key element needed for this free play to be operative is the de-suturing of philosophy from any generic procedure (non-philosophical fields) asserting dominion upon the others. Suturing to one of its conditions entails for philosophy the obstructing of truths circulation and, therefore, the impeding of compossibility: the impossibility of reading the historical situation. This reading, however, will not yield a meaning, since philosophys task is not to offer a positive incarnation of truth but, rather, to offer the empty figure of those truths produced in the nonphilosophical fields. Through the turns and detours of the return to Plato, the quarrel between the poem and the matheme is revisited.

II. Poetic Suture

Est ergo compatibilitas rerum, compossibilitas propositorum. Leibniz It is only on the route of the objectless subject that we can simultaneously reopen the Cartesian meditation and remain faithful to the assets of the Age of Poets, a specifically philosophic fidelity, thus a desutured one. Badiou, Manifesto

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In the Manifesto for Philosophy Badiou introduces a key concept: the age of poets. For Badiou the age of poets is a philosophical category indicating the moment when philosophy sutures itself to only one of its conditions. By suture Badiou understands an interruption of philosophys ability to assure the compossibility [compossibilit] of the truths produced by the four generic procedures. Compossibility is a term indicating the quality of being compossible. Compossible is a classic philosophical term that refers to one things possibility of existing alongside others at the same time. In Leibniz, the term expresses a relation in which two possible terms or events can coexist without the opposition of one of the terms entailing the suppression of the other. Badiou deploys this concept in order to explain the way in which philosophy relates to the non-philosophical fields: the possibility of philosophys existence is posited alongside the simultaneous co-existence of science, politics, love and poetry. The moment indicated by the expression the age of poets is not a moment decreed from the view point of the totality of an accomplished system, one soon to be transcended and transformed into a higher ground of knowledge. Philosophy under condition names a situation in which philosophy is no longer a field of knowledge. Philosophy deals with truths it does not produceit operates under the effects of these truths. The conditionality of philosophy in Badiou names the possibility for thinking in the aftermath of Heidegger, once philosophy is disentangled from the poem and a new type of relation [d-rapport]12 is established between philosophy and the poem:
If philosophy is, as I claim it to be, the configuration of the fact that its four generic conditions (the poem, the matheme, the political and love) are compossible in the eventful [vnmentiel] form prescribing the truths of the time, a suspension of philosophy can result from the restriction or blockage of the free play required in order to define a regime of passage, or of intellectual circulation between the truth procedures conditioning philosophy. The most frequent cause of such a blockage is that instead of constructing a space of compossibility through which the thinking of time is practiced, philosophy delegates its functions to one or another of its conditions, handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure. Philosophy is then carried out in the element of its own suppression to the great benefit of that procedure. ( MP: 61; my emphasis)

In the case that concerns us, this suturing of philosophy to the poem produces a decisive effect: philosophy deserts operations proper to thinking which the poem then comes to occupy. Badious formulation unfolds a series of issues that demand closer examination. The syntagm age of poets names, from the viewpoint of philosophy and in philosophical terms, something concerning thinking and not poetizing:
In spite of the word poets, the category age of poets is not immanent to poetry. It is not the poets who have declared that this age is theirs.... In spite of the word age, it is not a historical category. It does not pretend to periodize poetry according to its own scansions.... Finally, it is not a question of an aesthetic category, or of a judgment of taste. The age of poets is a philo-

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sophical category. It organizes a particular way of thinking the knot between the poem and philosophy, such as this knot becomes visible from philosophys perspective. Age refers to an epochal situation of philosophy. And poets refers to the poem as a condition of philosophy. I call age of poets this moment proper to philosophys history when the latter is sutured, that is, handed over or submitted to only one of its conditions... b (AP: 21-2)

We are dealing here with philosophical categories and protocols that are employed to apprehend (in the sense both of understanding and of encompassing) the poem. This suture of thinking to the poem is evaluated by a double set of criteria. On the one hand, it is experienced as a negative phenomenon from the very interior of philosophy:
In a situation in which philosophy is sutured either to science or to politics, certain poets, or rather certain poems, come to occupy the place where, ordinarily, are declared strategies of thinking that are properly philosophical.c (AP: 22; my emphasis)

Philosophy relinquishes something which belongs to its jurisdiction and the poem, which was expatriated by Plato to be afterwards repatriated and regulated by Aristotle, comes to occupy (a military metaphor) operations proper to philosophy. The scene of suturing is described as a true theater of operations. To be able to speak of the poem in philosophical terms and, moreover, to gain poetic truths, that is, directives for thinking, philosophy has to declare the end of the age of poets. Badious narrative denounces the end (that of philosophy), but it also announces another end, that of the age of the poets:
I can read in Celan that, yes, the poem demands to be relieved from the poem ... or rather that the poem-thinking once it comes to the shattering of its material support, its song, demands to be re-opened to the pure dimension of its sense. Which could also mean: the age of poets is closed. d (AP: 29)

In both cases, however, he interrogates neither the notion of end nor the eschatological dimension it brings into play. There is a good end, the one declared by the Philosophers and a bad end, the one announced by the Sophists. In other words, Badious rhetoric yields here to the passion of the militant, which is always a passion of the end, for the end, in view of an end. One wonders if the return to Plato, which calls for the repeating of the poets proscription, can simply be sustained by a rhetorical sleight of hand, one that fails to interrogate the end of the end. Is it simply by re-locating the notion of end that the outcome of de-suturing will succeed in articulating a new relation between philosophy and the poem? On the other hand, the evaluation of poetic suturing provides us with another insight: poetrys occupation of philosophys originary vocationto think the epoch as the site of compossibility of the different truth-procedures (MP: 37)entails that the poem itself takes a stand regarding the question what is thinking? In other words, poetrys

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occupation of operations proper to philosophy revolves around a pivotal point: les pomes de lge des potes sont ceux o le dire potique non seulement est une pense, et instruit une vrit, mais aussi se trouve astreint penser cette pense.13 (AP: 23) Nevertheless, the negative criterion becomes a positive one: the (intra-poetic) thinking of this (poetic) thoughta non self-reflective thinking, since this thinking is always a set of operations unfolding in the poem, as poemis not something that is excessive regarding philosophical operations. Rather, it is a legacy:
The age of poets bequeaths us, in order to liberate philosophy, the imperative of a clarification without totality, of a thought of that which is at the same time dispersed and in-separated, of a non-convivial reason, cold for having neither object nor orientation.e (AP: 36; my emphasis)

Poetrys occupation of philosophys theater of operations is, in the end, a beneficial one: it produces a truth about the time, a law to be followed: that of cold reason. Badious first attempt to re-articulate the dialogue between thinking and poetizing is highly problematic. The conditioning effects of poetry upon philosophy appear to be forceful enough to provide philosophy with truths, but they are not compelling enough to re-articulate the philosophical determination of poetry. Therefore, they fail to lead to a formulation of a new type of relation, one in which the philosopher does not have the upper hand. If the de-suturing of philosophy from the poem has taken place, one does not see a new relation being established, but rather the re-activation of a classical hierarchy, even if a complicated interplay is at stake between the figures of the poem and the maxims of thinking. And this is due to two reasons: first, inasmuch as the poem comes to occupy operations left vacant by thinking, even when the poem is understood as the space of the intra-poetic unfolding [mise en oeuvre ] of maxims of thinking, these maxims are conditioning for philosophy. Second, because philosophy can read the poetic event in terms of maxims of thinking, and it can take them as a legacy. In other words, the philosopher who operates under the de-sutured condition of the poem appropriates himself from the poetic maxims and uses them as a model for thinking, and he can do so because philosophys propriety is not questioned. We will see below that the question of use is not an accidental one. The return to Plato commands that the economy of use, illustration and example be deployed. We will also see that this economy of use supposes a logic of the border and the frame able to contain the excessive errancy of poetic truth. A logic of localization will be awaiting us in the very text of philosophy. In his attempt to redraw the graphics of the dialogue between thinking and poetizing, Badious own language produces a displacement of predicates. The poem is spoken in terms of maxims and operations; it becomes a fiction of method and provides figures for what is unpresentable to thinking. The operations of the age of poets (coldness, dis-orientation, de-objectivation) are such that they can be expressed

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in the rigorous language of deductive thinking, a thinking whose unconditioned condition is the matheme. The philosopher, operating under condition, appeals to the poem in a space in which philosophy and poetry have been de-sutured. However, the de-suturing has not changed the classical hierarchy between philosophy and poetry. What gesture is constituted in this philosophical recourse to the poem? How can the matheme, the poems classical rival, come to provide philosophy with a matrix and language that, although producing the de-suturing of philosophy from the poem, would not, in its turn, reproduce the classical philosophical determination of literature, that is, a suturing of the poem to the concept?

III. On Wounds, Sutures, and Stitches [points de suture]: A relation of the fourth type?
Je tapporte lenfant dune nuit dIdume! Mallarm, Don du Pome

The return to Plato, the proclamation of the end of the age of poets, and the de-suturing of philosophy from the poem call for a new dispute with Heideggers own articulation of the relation between thinking and poetizing. This time reformuler ce qui conjoint et disjoint le pome et la discursivit philosophique est un impratif auquel Heidegger....nous oblige nous soumettre. ( RPP: 94)14 It is through this dispute that the possibility of establishing a different relation or non-relation [d-rapport] between philosophy and the poem may allow for a more rigorous articulation. Moreover, this new articulation could also provide the philosopher with guidelines for philosophically using the poems truths. It remains to be seen if both exigencies can be satisfied in a single stroke; that is, if the response to these two heterogeneous exigencies may satisfy the demand of the pure multiple. Badious critique is axiomatic: it contests Heideggers type of compossibility, his claim of the co-belonging of logos and the poetic, but it must also proceed in such a way as to not fall back into the space of aesthetics. Badious task, in the aftermath of Heidegger is to think that from which the poem proceeds, as well as to think thinking [la pense] in its operative distance. In order to achieve this goal, Badiou must distinguish between what must be either rejected or preserved in Heidegger. First, three acquired insights must be retained from Heidegger: the autonomous function of the thought of the poem [la pense du pome]; the determination of the common destiny shared by the poet and the thinker; and, finally, the risky exposure of philosophy to the poem. What is imperative to reject in Heidegger is his modality of suturing the end of philosophy to the non-argumentative authority of the poem and

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above all, the reactivation of the sacred since, according to Badiou, the German philosopher endows the poetic saying with a foundational function. This last point invites two comments that can only unfold from the viewpoint of the risky exposure of philosophy to the poem. First, we saw that, although changing grounds, Badiou remained within the scope of a foundational project. Why is the matheme then endowed with the privilege to dislodge an onto-poetics? In his evaluation of Heideggers effect in the French context, and when it is a question of the figure of the philosopher-poet, Badiou mentions two examples. Ren Char is dismissed as someone who assumes a posture, someone who embodies a prtension prsocratique, while Michel Dguy is invoked as an example whose poetic project is still dependent upon the suture of the age of poets. Therefore, when mentioning these two poets Badiou never raises the possibility of a forceful interruption of Heideggers onto-poetics from the perspective of the poem.15 When Badiou passes review of the so-called Heidegger-effect in France, there is a revealing omission: Maurice Blanchot. 16 Of course, Blanchot is not a poet in the narrow sense of the term, but Blanchot did expose Heideggers onto-poetics to a rigorous critique as early as the 1940s in La parole sacre de Hlderlin .17 Moreover, Blanchots rapport du troisime genre and his parole plurielle (both explored and produced in LEntretien Infini) are decisive in any re-articulation of the relation between philosophy and the poem. Are Blanchots rcits not responsive enough to the risky exposure of philosophy to the poem, to the excessive errancy of the poem and to the pure multiple? Although outside the scope of the present study, Badious silence on Blanchot deserves a careful analysis.18 These preliminary observations suggest that the privileges of the matheme should be taken neither at face value nor as the unique generic procedure able to undermine a metaphysics of presence and an onto-poetics. Moreover, there is a common hinge between Blanchot and Badiou: Mallarm. I will show how Badious final formulation of the relation of the fourth type echoes Blanchots formulation of Le Regard dOrphe . It is revealing that someone like Badiou, who has radically contested contemporary debates on ethics, should articulate an ethics of writing in terms that are very close to those of Blanchot.19 As I mentioned it above, Badious critique of Heidegger is commanded by a desuturing necessity, but also by a necessity not to re-lapse into any of the traditional pre-Heideggerian ways of conceiving of the relation between philosophy and the poem. The idea is that this relation of the fourth type cannot be articulated within a space belonging to aestheticsidentifying rivalry (Parmenides), argumentative distance (Plato), and aesthetic regionality (Aristotle). Badious is a twofold strategy. First, it points to those elements of the poem in which the rivalry with philosophy will be dissolved: poetry is the thinking of the presence of the present (Mallarm) and not of the compossibility of time, philosophys proper thought. Moreover, poetry is the naming of the event in the void of meaning

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(Celan). These two thoughts or donations belong to the poem. Second, these two thoughts of the poem cannot challenge the grasp of the concept because philosophy is on the hither side of meaning: philosophy deals only with that which comes to produce a hole in meaningtruth. For Badiou truth does not consist in either adequacy or disclosure; and does not pertain to knowledge: it is an empty concept. Truth is not what knowledge produces but is, rather, what, in a given situation, exceeds the sets of knowledge [savoirs] available to it. Truth is what escapes knowledge, what knowledge cannot name. Truth is the result of an event that fait un-multiple dune part de tous les multiples qui appartiennent son site, dautre part de lvnement lui-mme (EE: 200). But then why is it that there is a constitutive rivalry between philosophy and the poem, one producing anxiety, stress, pain and painful memories to the former?:
What causes philosophys constitutive displeasure regarding its conditions, the poem as well as the others, is having to depose, together with meaning, that which is determined as enjoyment, precisely at the point where a truth comes to make a hole in the forms of knowledge that produce meaning. f (RPP: 102)

Badious lexicon [dplaisir, dposition] begins to indicate that the relation of the fourth type he aims to establish is impressing its effects upon an old wound; is leaving a mark and the memory of a wound [blessure], and is starting to make sensitive a stitch [un point de suture]. If the stitching of philosophy to the poem is a painful event for the former, the de-suturing is no less so. In his critique of Heideggers poetic suture, Badiou is also contesting those he calls the postmodern thinkers:
who readily bring to the forefront the wound that would be inflicted on philosophy by the modalities in which poetry, literature, art in general, bear witness to our modernity. Art would always challenge the concept, and it is from this challenge, from this wound, that it would be necessary to interpret the Platonic gesture, according to which the royalty of the philosopher could only be established by the proscription of poets.g (RPP: 101)

The Platonic gesture, Badiou seems to imply, is not a defensive one and it cannot be so since the articulation we are dealing with is not classically Platonic. It is no longer a question of the rivalry between the intelligible and the sensible (the concept and the figure), there is a change in the terms involved:
But philosophy begins when this component shows its inconsistency. When it is no longer a question of interpreting the real procedures on which truth lies, but in founding a proper place where, under the contemporary conditions of these procedures, how and why a truth is not a meaning is uttered but, rather, that it is a hole in meaning. This how and this why, founders of a place of thinking under conditions, can only be practiced in the displeasure produced by a refusal of donation and of hermeneutics. They demand the primordial desertion of the donation of meaning, the departure from meaning [ab-sens], an abnegation regarding meaning. Or even an impropriety. They demand that the truth-procedures be subtracted from the eventful singularity which weaves them in the real, and which ties them to meaning in the mode of its traversing, of its breach.h (C: 102)

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By deposing meaning, the philosopher under conditions no longer occupies the discourse of the academic, but instead becomes exposed to the same experience as the poet: the risky exposure to the event. Everything seems to indicate that, in his attempt to secure a post-Heideggerian articulation, Badious reflection manages to articulate a relation of the fourth type between philosophy and the poem. In this relation each are exposed to the event, according to their respective truth-producing regime and, will no longer be part of a hierarchical structure. But suddenly, it is the painful stitch [le point de suture] that commands the repetition of the Platonic gesture. In spite of the re-articulation of the terms in which the positing of a relation of the fourth type will unfold, the philosophical program reserved for figurative language is the one that has always been reserved for it from the perspective of the concept. We are faced with a strange double gesture, one that divides within itself and enacts a kind of overdetermined type of denegation. The question now is the following: if philosophy and the poem are exposed in different ways to the same outside, how will the philosopher deal with the poem?
Being particularly a question about the literary act, of which the poem is the kernel, what is the always stubborn and resentful procedure of this deposition? The bond is narrower inasmuch as philosophy is an effect of language. The lit erary is specified by philosophy as fiction, as comparison, image or rhythm and as story. The deposition here takes the figure of a placing.i (RPP: 104; my emphasis)

Badiou must make a concession, an avowal stated as if it were a circumstantial fact: philosophy is an effect of language, not simply the end-product of a deductive invention. Moreover, the disturbing deposition of meaning is assigned to a still conceptual economy of placing:
In the texture of its exposition philosophy undoubtedly makes use of fictive incarnations.... Philosophy makes use of the image, of the comparison, of rhythm. The image of the sun serves to expose in the light of presence that there is something essentially withdrawn in the idea of the Good.... Finally, philosophy makes use of the story, of the fable, and of the parable. j (RPP: 104; my emphasis)

What at first appeared to be a new relation (one in which the common destiny of the poet and the thinker were established on a common abyssal ground, and therefore, one in which the dominance of the latter upon the former was dissolved), finally reverses into a symmetrical, hierarchical relation. The double exigency, the re-opening of the Cartesian meditation and the remaining faithful to the poem, cannot be answered in a single stroke. The scheme of use re-introduces the most classical and unfaithful philosophical type of response to the poem. Philosophy de-sutures itself from the poem, but once again stitches the poem to a philosophicalrhetoricalsuture, perhaps one suture whose form does not fully correspond to the de-sutured space of philosophy

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Badiou is advocating. The rhetorical stitching of the poem to philosophy indicates a relapsing into a pre-Heideggerian determination of poetic language. How has philosophy traditionally dealt with figures or tropes? A first type of discourse affirms an original figurativeness and recounts the story of its effacement or forgetting. This approach supposes the effacement of the figure as the origin of philosophical concepts and, therefore, a sensible origin of conceptual abstraction. In this type of discourse figures are affirmed at the expense of the concept (Rousseau and Nietzsche). There is, however, a second type of discourse, one that axiomatically chooses what is univocal as a philosophical ideal. Its purpose is to separate in a calculated way figuration from what is sensible so as to arrive at the pure abstraction of the concept. In this discourse a metaphor is a detour with regard to a proper reference, one that must be preserved at any cost. This reference brings a surplus of polysemy to language, one that is underwritten by propriety and universality; a surplus of meaning that philosophy may very well evacuate in delimitating the domain of proper meaning. Derrida refers to this way of dealing (without dealing) with metaphor la relve mtaphysique de la mtaphore dans le sens propre de ltre.20 What is important about this relve is that it follows a metaphorical movement, inasmuch as metaphor is defined as the elevation of a sensible referent into an ideal signification. Can Badious way of treating metaphors be included in any of these two discourses? Yes and no. Yes, because he appeals to the most traditional philosophical modality of dealing with literature: that of a localized figurality, a controlled type of use of tropes regulated through a logic of localization:
Nevertheless, these literary occurrences as such are placed under the jurisdiction of a principle of thinking that they do not constitute. They are localized in points where, in order to finish establishing a place from which to utter why and how a truth makes a hole in meaning and escapes interpretation, it is necessary, by a paradox in the exposition, to propose a fable, an image or a fiction to interpretation.k

The poem produces a truth, but the poeticliteraryelement is not turned into a concept, as one would expect to happen in the classical determination of metaphor. Instead, metaphor comes au point de limprsentable; it is localized where no concept can be invoked: around the hole produced by truth. Nevertheless, this localization is regulated from an implicit classic economy of truth that supposes a properphilosophicaluse of the figure or po em. In this sense, Badious schema is classical. However, as we indicated above, Badious treatment of tropes cannot be fully included in a classical schema. It must be stressed that Badiou attempts to accommodate a new element to the classical schema, one that this very schema cannot cope with. For Badiou truth results from an eventful [vnementiel] procedure. It is always a situational truth linked to the events site. Moreover, a truth cannot provide an exact designation of the event, since its way of relating to conceptual knowledge is one of

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subtraction. Therefore, a truth is the production, in a situation, of a non-discernible multiplicity: une vrit est cette consistance minimale (une partie, une immanence sans concept) qui avre dans la situation linconsistance qui en fait ltre. (MP: 90) A truth must bear witness to the wandering excess of being. Nevertheless, Badious theory of the philosophical use of metaphor is commanded by an implicit philosophical determination, one that is grounded in a notion of truth as adequacy [adquation]. There is a conceptual determination of metaphor [savoir], even if figurative language is mobilized in terms of that which exceeds knowledge. Is it by chance that Badious example of the localized use of metaphors is that of the sun, limage du soleil [qui] sert exposer au jour dune prsence quil y a dessentielle ment retir dans lide du Bien? There seems to be a montage of the ruling metaphor (that of the sun) upon an articulation that does not fully accommodate it. The sun, as is well known, is the very example of the sensible. In the tradition inaugurated by Greek philosophy, the sun is at the center of rhetorical theories that understand metaphor as the transport of the sensible into the non-sensible, or of the familiar into what is unknown. However, Badious reference to the metaphor of the sun is problematic. His schema is that of a re-articulation of the figurative dimension of language not to the sensible, not the concept, but to the unpresentable dimension of truth. Yet, the metaphor of the sensible, the figure determining the classical economy of signification, is invoked and inscribed into a postsignifying articulation. In other words, the classical Platonic-Aristotelian montage of metaphor is incommensurable when deployed not to illustrate but to name that which belongs to the subtractive dimension of the event. This incommensurability lies in the nature of the regime of truth. The presupposition underlying the classical deployment of the metaphor of the sun is that there is adequacy [adquatio] between the improper sensible presentation and the proper intelligible concept. The post-modern Sophists are accused through an argument that is too dependent on a pre-modern schema of signification, through an argument from which the deposition of meaning is not compelling enough. In other words, Badiou is Platonizing against the post-signifying regime of the modern poem.

IV. Au Point de lInnomable, or for an Ethics of Mystery

The positing of a relation [d-rapport] of the fourth type between poetry and philosophy, poem and matheme, is de-stabilized in Badiou. This is due to the grafting of a classical economy of signification onto a space in which it is no longer a question of the sensible presentation of the concept but, rather, one of the unpresentable dimension of truth as event. In other terms, the return to Plato could not secure a new type of relation without placing the terms of the relation into a different space. The Platonic opposition between the matheme and the poem must be re-activated this time in terms of both post-Cantorian mathematics and modern poetry. Badiou has

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to re-open the space of the modern poem, even as he declares the end of the age of poets. This re-activation and the new articulation it will yield are presented under the classical philosophical question: what is a poem? It is under the syntax of the ti esti that the Platonic metaphor of the sun will be mounted again, but this time onto a different orbit, one whose scope may put the very form of the ti esti in disarray. The guiding question will no longer be what is a poem? but, rather how the poem is possible? Lets follow Badious new formulation:
Nevertheless, this opposition in language of the mathemes transparency and the poems metaphorical obscurity presents formidable problems for us moderns. Plato cannot sustain the maxim promoting the matheme and banishing the poem. He cannot do so because he himself explores the limits of dianoia, of discursive thinking. When it is a question of the supreme principle, of the One, or of the Good, Plato must agree that we are there epkeina ts ousas, beyond substance, and consequently outside of everything that is exposed to the grasp of the Idea. He must acknowledge that the donation in thinking of Being beyond beings does not let itself be traversed by any dianoia. He him self must have recourse to images, as that of the sun, to metaphors .... In short: where what is at stake is the opening of thinking to the principle of what is thinkable, when thinking must become absorbed in the grasping of that which institutes it as thinking, Plato submits language to the power of the poetic saying. ( QP: 36; my emphasis)l

It is necessary to acknowledge [il faut avouer], through Plato, that philosophy is constituted by an effect of language. In other words, philosophy is no longer simply and incidentally under the effect of language, as was the case above: language begins to acquire a constitutive scope. Moreover, the opposition between the metaphors obscurity and the mathemes transparency is located in language. Therefore, it is necessary to admit [il faut avouer], through Plato, that what puts philosophy into motion, what opens and exposes thinking to its own principle (the gift of thinking) escapes the grasp of discursive thinking [dianoia]. Philosophys principle is not its own, or at least not fully, since it comes from an an-archic origin. This an-archic origin not only forces Plato to submit language to the power [puissance] of the poem, but also forces Badiou to submit the return to Plato to an excessive trace or point. The circular appropriating movement of the return will be interrupted in a point, by a point. After these two far from compelling avowals, the heliotropic metaphor is again invoked to bear witness to this scene, but this time by being placed in a new montage whose frame is no longer that of the page of a philosophys book. Rather, it is displaced from the traditional rhetorical context so as to signal the very opening of philosophys intelligibility. Therefore, the metaphor of the sun is invoked not only to bear witness but also to provide us with the example of its powerlessness. It should not be forgotten that the sun is also the rule for the imperfect metaphor, the best example of the failure of its property in terms of adequacy [adquatio]. It is this fail-

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ure, however, which always renews the interval or difference that philosophical discourse attempts to reduce when proposing a theory of the philosophical use of metaphor. In other words, the metaphor of the sun is not an example among others, but it is the example that, by structuring the metaphorical space of philosophy, also indicates that a reference to a proper origin is missingat its very origin.21 The metaphor of the sun, therefore, points to an excessive trace, a point that will not be fully accounted for. A point of mystery, a point that calls for an ethics of mystery. Everything revolves around this point now. And the effects of this point will be decisive because nous, modernes, endurons de tout autre faon quun Grec lintervalle langagier du pome et du mathme. ( QP : 36) This endurance will not only provide us moderns with a re-articulation of the relation between the matheme and the poem, but it will also affect the scope of Badious foundational project. Compossibility, it should be remembered, is the form that knots together philosophy to the four generic procedures. The linguistic interval between the poem and the matheme can be neither that of opposition nor that of compatibility. The possibility of composing the knot must face the impossible; compossibility must face impossibility, and consequently, Platonizing against the modern poem will be of no avail. A new articulation must be posited diagonally to the founding Platonic opposition between the poem and the matheme, one depending upon the poets proscription. What is at stake now is that pome et matheme sont, examins du point de la philosophie, lun comme lautre inscrits dans la forme gnrale dune procdure de vrit. ( QP: 39)22 The terms of the discussion are modified in order to respond in a more rigorous way to the initial determination of a philosophy under conditions. If in the first articulation the matheme was endowed with the power to protect philosophy from the Sirens song of the poem, now both the matheme and the poem are approached in view of their common feature: the general form of a truth-procedure. However, what remains to be determined is their respective regime of truth-production. This determination unfolds by situating philosophy under the double condition of the matheme and the poem and in view of a general theory of being and the event inasmuch as they are knotted together by truth, in truth. Within this frame, the determination of both the poems and the mathemes truth will be conducted in terms of the ways in which poetic and mathematical languages deal with nomination and, above all, with that which exceeds nomination, that is, in terms of a power / powerlessness [puissance / impuissance] when faced with the event, car une vrit est le travail auprs de ltre dun vnement vanoui dont il ne reste que le nom. (QP: 46)23 What are the mathematical and the poetic regimes of truth? How do mathematics and poetry deal with nomination? Both mathematics and poetry, inasmuch as generic procedures produce truths out of the pure multiple. For Badiou, any truth is a power [puissance]: from a new theorem one gathers directives to re-orient thinking; from a new poetics one derives a new program for thinking. Lets first examine mathematical nomination:

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mathematics produces truth out of the pure multiple as the primordial inconsistency of being in so far as being. Poetry makes truth out of the pure multiple as presence coming to the limits of language. Or, the song of language as gift to presenting the pure notion of there is in the very effacement of its empirical objectivity. m (QP: 39-40; see also PI)

The language of mathematics, which is characterized by a deductive fidelity, faces the challenge of consistency. But consistency, after Gdel, is its excessive point: consistency cannot be named by mathematics. The power of producing mathematical truths is intertwined with a constitutive powerlessness. The fidelity to the event, which is shaped upon a mathematical paradigm ruled by consistency, comes face to face with a point that escapes the possibility of an integral foundation. What is the situation with poetic language?
The poems power of revelation folds around an enigma so that the marking off of this enigma should make all the real of powerlessness out of the power of what is true. In this sense, the mystery in literature is a true imperative. When Mallarm claims that there must always be an enigma in poetry, he is founding an ethics of mystery that is the respect, through the power of a truth, of its point of powerlessness. The mystery lies in the fact that any poetics leaves in its center that upon which it has no power to bring into presence.n (QP: 41; my emphasis)

The interplay between power and powerlessness cannot be sublated in a dialectical way. Poetic revelation is intertwined with an an-archic enigma or, rather, poetic revelation is the intertwining of the enigma. This enigma traverses the poetic saying with an excessive trace and makes of it an ethics: a response to an impossible demand, or a demand for the impossible. Poetic mystery lies in the fact that there is a point at its very center which cannot be named. Badious formulation resembles that of another reader of Mallarm: Maurice Blanchot. It should be remembered that in the Orphic adventure referred to by Blanchot in LEspace Littraire, Eurydice is a figure that dissimulates both the profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead, as well as the instant in which the essence of the night approaches as the other night. Orpheuss task is to to bring the point into the daylight and in the daylight give it form, figure, and reality not by direct optical contact, but by a detour from it. However, we know that in Blanchots reading of this myth, Orpheus forgets the ultimate requirement of its impulse [lexigence ultime de son mouvement]. This exigency is precisely not the fact of having a work, but that someone should stand and face this point [quelquun se tienne en face de ce point], Eurydice. But she is not all what it is there to be seen; he is also faced with ce qui dissimule la nuit, lautre nuit, la dissimulation qui apparat.24 And this dissimulation that appears by disappearing can only be named by a forcing [forage] of language. It is this impossible forcing [forage] that Blanchots

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rcits produce when they approach this unnamable point indicated by Viens. For Badiou, any naming of the event is also of poetic nature, since it is able to fix that which disappears. The power of poetic language lies in its fixing of what disappears (presence), but it is this very power that poetry cannot name. Orpheus, in his descent after Eurydice comes into contact with what is unnamable, ce dont une vrit ne peut forcer la nomination ( QP: 42), but which is also a point in which the power of language is condensed, a point which Orpheus cannot name. For Badiou, Mallarms poem, for example, the Sonnet in ptyx, produces a naming: sans doute le ptyx serait-il le nom de ce dont le pome est capable: faire surgir de la langue une venue en prsence antrieurement impossible. Sauf que, justement, ce nom nest pas un mon, ce nom ne nomme pas. Mathematics and poetry are exposed to a point that subtracts itself from their respective power of nomination. They are both interrupted and open to an excess that calls for an ethics of mystery. But they also expose philosophy to operate under condition:
Between the mathemes consistency and the poems power, between these two unnamable points, philosophy renounces to establish the names clogging that which subtracts itself. In this sense, philosophy is, after the poem and after the matheme, and under their thinking condition, the incomplete thinking of the multiple of thoughts.o (QP: 46-7)

The articulation of the relation of the fourth type between philosophy and the poem calls for a deposition of philosophys magisterial position and for an exposure to the unfounded presentation of the pure multiple. However, this exposure to what is unfounded does not leave intact the scope of Badious foundational project. The graphics of compossibility supposes not only a temporality according to which philosophy comes after both mathematics and the poem, but also a topology according to which philosophical thinking becomes the discontinuous and incomplete [lacunaire] thinking of multiplicity. Badious final articulation of the relation of the fourth type allows for a point of opacity around which the knot of compossibility may be tied together. Nevertheless, for Badious graphics of compossibility to work, for the unfounded and dis-founding dimension of the poem not to disrupt the philosophical presentation of the pure multiple, he must assign the poem with the power to fix what disappears, to fix that through which a dimension of powerlessness is indicated. Yet, if Mallarm may be considered the hinge between two modes of conceiving the relation between philosophy and the poem, we must not overlook the differences between Badiou and Blanchot. Like the ptyx in Badious reading of Mallarm, the point by which the dissimulation that appears by disappearing in Blanchot indicates a pre-positional non-interval which conditions language without properly belonging to it. They indicate the mark of a lack of power which calls for an objectless subject (Badiou) or a passivity older than the distinction between active and passive (Blanchot). In the very center of the poem

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there remains this outside, this unnamable. However, while in Badiou it is still a question of fixing that which disappears, in Blanchot it would not be accurate to speak in those terms. The fixing of the point will never arrive and this deferral produces not only a disruption of nomination but its effects also alter the very presence of the event. If it is accurate to say that for Badiou poetry is unfounded, the point to which the poem must respond without being able to do so [il y a ] is not endowed with the capacity to ruin foundational projects. In Blanchot, however, this very same point supposes an erasure of manifestation, an erasure that has always already disappeared. Language no longer coincides with itself and the poem becomes irretrievable lost even for a philosophy under conditions.

FRENCH ORIGINALS OF ENGLISH CITATIONS

a conceptuellement [...] lexprience sera celle de lin vention dductive, o le rsultat...serait intgralement transmissible dans le savoir; le langage enfin, rsiliant tout pome, sera en puissance de ce que Frege nommait une idographie. Lensemble opposera la tentation de la prsence le rigueur du soustractif, o ltre nest dit que dtre insupposable pour toute prsence, et pour toute exprience. [EE 35; my emphasis]
potes nest pas immanente la posie. Ce ne sont les potes qui ont dclar que cet ge tait le leur [...] En dpit du mot ge, la catgorie nest pas historienne. Elle ne prtend pas priodiser la posie selon ses scansions propres [...] Enfin, il ne sagit pas non plus dune catgorie esthtique, ou de jugement de got. Lge des potes est une catgorie philosophique. Elle organise une pense particulire du noeud du pome et de la philosophie, tel que ce noeud savre visible du point de la philosophie ellemme. ge renvoie une situation pocale de la philosophie. Et potes renvoie au pome comme condition, depuis toujours, de la philosophie. Jappelle ge des potes ce moment propre de lhistoire de la philosophie o celle-ci est suture, cest dire dlgue ou soumise une seul des ces conditions. [AP 21-22]

pense proprement philosophiques. [AP 22; my emphasis]

d Je peux lire dans Celan que, oui, le pome demande tre relev du pome [...], ou encore que la pense pome parvenu au bris de son support, de son chant demande dtre r-ouverte la pure dimension de son sens. Ce qui se dira aussi: lge des potes est clos. [AP 29]
phie, limpratif dune clarification sans totalit, dune pense de ce qui est la fois dispers et inspar, dune raison non-conviviale, froide de navoir ni objet ni orientation [AP 36; my emphasis].

b En dpit du mot potes, la catgorie dge des e lge des potes nous lgue, pour librer la philoso-

f Ce qui fail le dplaisir constituant de la philosophie au

regard de ses conditions, le pome comme les autres, est davoir dposer, avec le sens, ce qui sy dtermine de jouissance, au point mme o une vrit vient en troue des savoirs qui font sens. [RPP 102]

h Mais philosophie commence quand cet agrgat soit la science, soit la politique, certains potes, savre inconsistant. Quand il ne sagit plus interprter ou plutt certains pomes, viennent occuper la place o ordinairement se dclarent des stratgies de les procedures relles o gt la vrit, mais de fonder

c [...] dans une situation o la philosophie est suture

g qui mettent volontiers en avant la blessure quinfligerait la philosophie le mode propre sur lequel la posie, la littrature, lart en gnral, tmoignent de notre modernit. Il y aurait depuis toujours un dfi de lart au concept, et cest partir de ce dfi, de cette blessure quil faudrait interprter le geste platonicien qui ne peut tablir la royaut du philosophe quen banissant les potes. [RPP 101]

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un lieu propre o, sous les conditions contemporaines de ces procdures, snonce comment et pourquoi une vrit nest pas un sens, tant bien plutt un trou dans le sens. Ce comment et ce pourquoi, fondateurs dun lieu de pense sous conditions, ne sont praticables que dans le dplaisir dun refus de la donation et de lhermneutique. Ils exigent la dfection primordiale de la donation de sens, lab-sens, labngation quant au sens. Ou encore lindcence. Ils exigent que les procdures de vrit soient soustraites la singularit vnementielle qui les tisse dans le rel, et qui les noue au sens dans le mode de sa traverse, de sa troue. [C 102]

i Sagissant plus particulirement de lacte littraire,

dont le pome est le noyau, quelle est la procdure, toujours rtive et offense, de cette dposition? Le lien est dautant plus troit que la philosophie est un effet de langue. Le littraire se spcifie pour elle comme fic tion, comme comparaison, image, ou rythme, et comme rcit. La dposition prend ici la figure dun placement. [RPP 104; my emphasis]

qui promeut le mathme et bannit le pome. Il ne le peut, parce que lui-mme explore les limites de la dianoia, de la pense discursive. Quand il sagit du principe suprme, de lUn, ou du Bien, Platon doit convenir que nous sommes l epkeina ts ousas, au-del de la substance, et par consquent hors de tout ce qui sexpose dans la dcoupe de lIde. Il doit avouer que la donation en pense de ce principe suprme, qui est la donation en pense de ltre audel de ltant, ne se laisse traverser par aucune dianoia. Il doit lui-mme avoir recours aux images, comme celle du soleil, aux mtaphores [...] Bref: l o ce qui est en jeu est louverture de la pense au principe du pensable, quand la pense doit sabsorber dans la saisie de ce qui linstitue comme pense, voici que Platon lui-mme soumet la langue a la puissance du dire potique. [QP 36; my emphasis]

j La philosophie use assurment, dans la texture de son exposition, dincarnations fictives [...] La philosophie use de limage, de la comparaison et du rythme. Limage du soleil sert exposer au jour dune prsence quil y a dessentiellement retir dans lide du Bien [.... ]Enfin, la philosophie use du rcit, de la fable et de la parabole. [RPP 104; my emphasis] k Cependant, ces occurrences du littraire comme tel
sont places sous la juridiction dun principe de pense quelles ne constituent pas. Elles sont localises en des points o, pour achever ltablissement du lieu o snonce pourquoi et comment une vrit troue le sens et chappe linterprtation, il faut justement, par une paradoxe dexposition, proposer une fable, une image ou une fiction, linterprtation elle-mme.

m la mathmatique fait vrit du multiple pure comme inconsistance primordiale de ltre en tant qutre. La posie fait vrit du multiple pure comme prsence venue aux limites de la langue. Soit le chant de la langue comme aptitude prsentifier la notion pure de il y a, dans leffacement mme de son objectivit empirique. [QP 39-40; see also PI] n La puissance de rvlation du pome senroule
autour dune nigme, en sorte que le pointage de cette nigme fasse tout le rel dimpuissance de la puissance du vrai. En ce sens, le mystre dans les lettres est un vritable impratif. Quand Mallarm soutient quil doit y avoir toujours nigme en posie, il fonde une thique du mystre qui est le respect, par la puissance dune vrit, de son point dimpuissance. Le mystre est proprement que toute po tique laisse en son centre ce quelle na pas le pou voir de faire venir la prsence. [QP 41; my empha sis]

l Cependant, cette opposition dans la langue de la

transparence du mathme lobscurit mtaphorique du pome, nous pose, nous modernes, de redoutables problmes. Dj Platon ne peut tenir jusquau bout cette maxim

o Entre la consistance du mathme et la puissance

du pome, ces deux innommables, la philosophie renonce tablir les noms qui obturent ce qui se soustrait. Elle est en ce sens, aprs le pome, aprs le mathme, et sous leur condition pensante, la pense lacunaire du multiple des penses. [QP 46-7]

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NOTES 1 ll ny a pas de lun, il ny a pas que le compte-pour-un; le compte-pour-un nest que le systme des con ditions travers lesquelles le multiple se laisse reconnatre comme multiple, [There is not one, there is only the count-as-one; the count-as-one is nothing but the system of conditions through which the multiple allows itself to be recognized as multiple], Ltre et lvnement, Mditation 1. 2 Except for the passages from Manifesto for Philosophy , all translations are mine. All references to Alain Badious works are given parenthetically in the body of the text as follows: EE: Ltre et lvnement, Paris, Seuil, 1988 MFP: Manifesto for Philosophy, tr. Norman Madarasz, Albany: SUNY Press, 1999 [Paris: Seuil, 1988] AP: Lge de Potes, in Rancire, Jacques, ed. La Politique des Potes. Pourquoi des Potes en Temps de Dtresse, Paris: Bibliothque du Collge International de Philosophie (Rue Descartes), 1992 C: Conditions, Paris: Seuil, 1992 RPP: Le Recours Philosophique au Pome, Conditions, Paris: Seuil, 1992 PI: Posie au Point de lInnomable, in Po&sie 64 (1994). QP: Quest-ce quun Pome et quen Pense la Philosophie? in PMI, Paris: Seuil, 1998 PMI: Petit Manuel dInesthtique, Paris: Seuil, 1998. 3 The eventinasmuch as it is the exclusive destiny of the voids presencingemerges in the paradox of being only named in the disappearance of that to which it refers. 4 La passe par le mathme autorise les vrits dire quelque chose sur ltre; elle autorise les vrits dire lexcs errant de ltre, o savre une fois son caractre soustractif. [it is the pass through the matheme that authorizes us to say something about being; it authorizes truths to say the wandering excess of being, in which its subtractive character is revealed], Franoise Wahl, Le Soustractif, Preface to Conditions. 5 See Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, and Jacques Derrida, Psych. Linvention de lautre in Psyche: Inventions de lAutre, Paris: Galile, 1987. 6 Badiou is perhaps one of the most innovative voices in contemporary Continental philosophy for several reasons. His almost transparent prose, his dry and clear-cut deductive style might make of him a sort of unique case when viewed within the context of the French philosophical scene of the last forty years, which has been dominated by linguistic and textual experimentation and for which the presentation of philosophy has been an obsessive preoccupation. Badious difficult and demanding project may explain the limited number of existing studies and his rare appearance in the histories of contemporary philosophy. For example, in his recently translated A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Christian Delacampagne devotes only two entries to Badiou, but he is always presented as a satellite revolving around some major figures, like Althusser and Lacan. Moreover, the recent Companion to Continental Philosophy edited by Critchley and Schroeder fails to include him. The same can be said of the ten-volume Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). General information about Badiou is provided in the prologues of the only two available English translations to date, Manifesto for Philosophy, translated by Norman Madarasz, SUNY Press: Albany, 1999 and Deleuze, The Clamor of Being, translated by Louise Burchill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. For an introduction to Badious thinking, once that relates Ltre et lvnement to his most recent work, see Franois Wahls Le Soustractif, the preface to Alain Badious Conditions. Ageneral overview of some of Badious key concepts is provided by Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Beckett, mme combat: The Philosophy of Alain Badiou, Radical Philosophy (1996): 6-13. 7 Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, 1973:84. 8 On this topic and these distinctions regarding apocalyptic and eschatological discourses, see Jacques Derrida, Dun ton apocalyptique adopt nagure en philosophie. Paris: Galile, 1982. 9 This ideographic writing able to guarantee the transmission of knowledge is the matheme. Here Badiou meets Lacan. The term matheme was employed by Lacan and it refers to a type of algebraic writing whose

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function is to help formalize psychoanalytic theory. In Lacan, the matheme is not a shortcut type of notation, but it aims at denoting a structure that is at play in psychoanalytic discourse. The matheme belongs to a family of formal writing and is, for Lacan, the mark of the scientific nature of psychoanalysis. The mathemes function is to assure the transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge. Examples of mathemes in Lacan are those of the four discourses developed in LEnvers de la Psychanalyse, and the mathemes of sexuation developed in Encore. The writing of the matheme combines a limited number of elements: variables, logic connectors, quantifiers, relations, punctuation marks. In Ltre et lvnement, Badiou uses this same type of writing or logical notation of the first order, but Badiou problematizes some of the crucial articulations of Lacans writing. See C, sections V and VI. 10 See below for a discussion of this concept as it is developed in Le Recours Philosophique au Pome, in C. 11 The Manifesto revolves around two premises: philosophy is possible inasmuch as it produces conceptual configurations that welcome the events in each of its general procedures. These general procedures are: the poem, to which Badiou devotes a key-essay, Lge de Potes, decisive interventions focused on Mallarm, Rimbaud, Beckett, and Pessoa in C, as well as PMI; politics, an area grounded in EE, but also interrogated in Peut-On Penser la Politique?, Dun Dsastre Obscure, Conditions, and in his most recent Abrg de Metapolitique; the matheme, the object of Ltre et lvnement, Le nombre et les nombres, sections of Conditions, and the Court Trait dOntologie Transitoire ; love, a condition in which Badiou and Lacanian psychoanalysis intersect, is dealt with in C and the Court Trait dOntologie Transitoire. 12 Alain Badiou, Le recours philosophique au pome, in C. 13 The poems of the age of poets are those in which the poetic saying is not only a thinking which informs a truth, but is also compelled to think this thinking. 14 To rethink that which joins and disjoins the poem to philosophical discourse is an imperative which Heidegger compels us to submit ourselves to. 15 Badiou considrs Paul Celan to be the poet that signals the end of the age of poets, a poet who asks for a non-philosophical articulation of the poem. See, Lge de potes. 16 In the Manifesto, Blanchot falls under the category of a fetishism of literature, MFP:60. 17 Maurice Blanchot, La parole sacrede Hlderlin, La Part du Feu, Paris: Gallimard,1949. The essay was originally published in Critique in 1946. 18 This reading will intersect Badiou and Blanchot in several common issues: the refusal of the One, and the writing of the multiple; the excessive errancy of the multiple; the critique of a religious ethics; the critique of hermeneutic reason and of Ereignis; the welcoming of the event; the thinking of an inventive politics; the poem as an outside escaping the jurisdiction of philosophical knowledge; an objectless subject (passivity). 19 Jacques Derrida, Margesde la Philosophie, Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1972:320. 20 See Jacques Derrida. White Mythology, Marginsof Philosophy, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982.and Le Re-trait de la Mtaphore, in Psych [orig.1987]. 21 When examined from philosophys perspective, poem and matheme are inscribed within the general form of a truth-procedure. 22 For a truth is the work in the proximity of being of a vanished event whose only remains is the name. 23 No doubt the ptyx would be the name for that which the poem is capable of: to produce out of language a coming into presence previously impossible. Except that precisely that name is not a name, that name does not name. 24 Maurice Blanchot, Le Regard dOrphe, in LEspace Littraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1955.

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Etiology of Innocence
Bernie Lubell
Artist, San Francisco

he problems explored in this essay were first essayed as an interactive art installation with the same title. Etiology of Innocencethe installationwas recently on display at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. It has been useful to me to clarify what I have been doing with my artwork in words. I have a great love for words and have used them extensively in my installations, but talking of interactive artwork can only be partially successful. Here I am trying to use words to describe something beyond and before words. Nevertheless, I will begin (as I often do) with the words, specifically the words of my title. Etiology is the study of causes. Its only common usage now seems to be by the medical professionas in the origins of a disease. The suggestion that Innocence is some sort of disease is intentional. Innocence is usually either shunned as unsophisticated or

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blindly embraced. it doesnt need to be this way. The possibilities for innocence are much more complex. Looking back from the end of the machine age, my Etiology of Innocence (the installation) reflects a nostalgia for a more innocent time when it seemed that simple mechanical models might explain everythingwhen the experts were generalists and the discovery of ultimate truths seemed to be just around the corner. At the same time, I recognize that any quest for an ideal requires numerous little add-ons and fix-its to deliver a resemblance to the real. And all of these fix-its lead away from that very idealism and innocence that was the stance necessary to begin. Ultimately, these add-ons and fix-its become a sort of Truth in themselves and are often considered to be the hallmark of sophistication. So simplicity is how you must start but .... There is a conundrum herea problem of causality summed up nicely in a Murphys Law calendar which I recall as: Wisdom comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgments. Everything is so interconnected and contradictory in principle that it can only be resolved by practice. It is the abstractionthe desire for principles and simple answerswhich interferes and which is at the same time absolutely essential. And how, as we learn more and are ever more sophisticated and suspicious, can we maintain our sense of wonder? The origins of my installation are in the work of tienne Jules Marey from the 1870s.1 Marey is most famous for his chronophotography and for his cameras, which were instrumental in the early development of motion pictures. His lifes work was inventing various ways to record and understand motion because movement is life. Early in his career he helped create the field of medical imagingwhat he called the Graphic Method. Marey believed that life processes could be analyzed and understood mechanically. And his great obsession was to see what couldnt be seen: that which was too small or too slow, too fast or too deep inside. What I like about Mareys early medical apparatuses is that while they reflect a naive faith in mechanical models for biology they also embody the evolutionary design necessary to get realistic results. They were designed by experience, just as we ourselves are. Mareys work is not the result of a sophisticated recognition of the complexity of how things relate but an exuberant discovery of that complexity as it forced itself on the naive idealism of the original enterprise. In 1994, on a visit to the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, I was able to see actual examples of early medical apparatus, including some instruments made by Marey. I was struck by how Marey applied his simple visualization technologies to explore everything from human speech to the human heart. About a year later, I was diagnosed with an a-symptomatic aortic aneurysm and for some reason it became imperative to make a heart simulation la Marey. Was I working my life into my art to regain control? I really dont know. The kind of clarity and control I seem to gravitate towards is more

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like the dark interconnections of Kafka and Beckett. Although words are often how I begin my work and are frequently on wood labels and tags as a part of my installations, words always seem incomplete. I have an Aphasiogram (1999) that automatically and pneumatically strips the verbal meanings away from a questionnairereplacing them with individual routesan image we couldnt see when the words were there. Another sort of meaning appears, one that is more aligned with the sense of touch. Everyone has their own Personal Path in this piece. A friend suggested that words dont work when there is no narrative. But even narrative places a limiting linear restriction on reality. Words seem to offer a magical control, acting almost as an incantation of understanding and yet ... Syntax is seductive and like most seductions, you are finally left wanting. How does the old song go?
Is it the way he talks? ... Oh No, its not the way, and youre not to listen to all I say ... Its in his Kiss. Thats where it is.

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BERNIE LUBELL THE ETIOLOGY OF INNOCENCE Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco 1999

Besides, I have an ambivalence toward magic. I keep an out of order sign handy in most installations as a talisman, but there are no aneurysms in my installation and my work seems to be so much more about how little control we have and how to find some inspiration in the fact of this. There is a story about Niels Bohr, one of the creators of quantum mechanics. Apparently he kept a horseshoe above the door to his office. His colleagues would say Niels, you are a scientist you dont really believe in this do you? No, of course not, he would reply, but they say it works whether you believe in it or not. There is no doubt that a forced recognition of my own mortality increased my need to make art. (This must be some sort of sublimated sociobiological necessity to procreate.) In all of the debate about whether computers will ever be creative and how they could be made to be so, this byproduct of our evolutionary history, this recognition of our own mortality which provides the essential motivation for creativity is frequently overlooked. I was reading recently about roboticist Mark Tilden whose machines behave startlingly like real arthropods. These machines have no programming or brain. They use what he calls a Nervous Net, which is an analog system of motors and sensors. The one thing they do have preprogrammed is a purpose. Somehow the nervous net will find ways of completing that purpose. And that is all that they need to produce complex, seemingly intelligent behavior. These are not self-contained autonomous entities. They rely on their environment to become a part of the computation. I believe it was Jacques Monod who reasoned that the key element which separated living from non-living matter was that living things had a purpose. My Etiology of Innocence (1999), like Mareys apparatus, is a simulation of the human heart. Cranking a series of cams pumps air, by pounding and garroting organs on a board. The air runs from tubes connected to the simulated aorta and ventricle to

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other rooms where it gurgles and produces a lifelike breathing of a lung in a jar. At the same time the crank winds a long canvas belt which also continues into another chamber where it makes a heartbeat sound. Because you cant see what you are making happen while you are cranking, you need to take turns with someone elsecranking and lookingso it takes two people to get the full experience which seems just right for a heart piece. All of the parts are quite fragile and made of wood. I tried to get it so that everything works, but just barelysort of like the way my ideas get me through. I think our hold on life and sanity and understanding are tenuous but tenacious. And so much of what is both good and bad are not the result of perfect plans but are adjustments to things gone awry. So I share Mareys belief in the mechanical metaphor. But not as an abstract Platonic ideal of life as perfect mechanisms. The metaphor is more like real machines in the world where things go wrong and are constantly being fixed. (But is it then still a metaphor?) In fact this is the way that my work is designed. I usually start by immersing myself intellectually within some rather grand and impossible question that I want to answer and then pick some mechanism or movement I have noticed by rummaging through outdated treatises. I may begin building by duplicating some part of some machine but since I always start by using pine, which is totally inappropriate for machinery, interesting things happen almost at once. The pine doesnt seem to want to be a machine and an analogy to the conflict between reason and romance is automatically built into my process. So I wallow semi-consciously in the frustration of how to get my mechanism to function and trust that my machinations will be guided by the ideas I have been swimming in so recently. What I seem to be doing is semi-consciously bringing several different systems of understanding together at once in an effort to resolve an issue. When I arrived at the Headlands Center for the A r t s for a residency in 1993 I was given a 35 x 55 foot studio filled only with light and was told to do what I wanted. Because I was so tired, and there were no comfortable places to sit in the entire art center, I set up a couch about halfway down the

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space. I left the door open and lay down to read and sleep and talk with anyone who happened by. The hardworking staff whose offices adjoined my room were perturbed that they were raising money so that I could sleep and they would stand in the doorway and make comments about this. The problem was easily resolved by the addition of a carpeted viewing area with a latex covered spring replacing the traditional velvet chain. This was OK because it was Art. But really I wanted to rest. And despite appearances I was working. In the course of several weeks of sleep I came up with a complex interconnected flow chart. I found it impossible to do justice to my ideas on any one linear path and working from a small portion of it, I manifested The Niche of Desire. The Niche of Desire (1993) is an Altar as a portal and as a puzzle.... The appropriate rituals would allow you to pass through. One may aspire to heaven with patience or clever-

BERNIE LUBELL

THE NICHE OF DESIRE Headlands Center for the Arts Sausalito California 1993

nessby waiting or by cheating. In a dark passage there were viewing holes which allowed distorted glimpses of possibilities beyond the confines of this claustrophobic space. Proceeding further you would come to a door. But the door

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was locked. After a moment of panic you recall the clues at the entrance. Returning to the bench seen earlier you can sit to wait. Leaning back releases the door lock but only while you continue to remain on the bench. Patience as a solution seems to require a partner. But then there is cheating. A credit card will jimmy the lock open and credit, as a route to heaven, is much like faith. Heaven turns out to be a creaky, rickety and unstable bridge which stretches across the 60 foot room with a childs chair as the goal. A 60 span did not seem long enough so I forced the perspective of the bridge. And this gesture transformed the experience because the forced perspective of the bridge made it increasingly unstable as you got closer to the end. It is almost impossible to stay on the bridge when you are close to your goal. I chose a childs chair as my symbol for Heaven because it is when a child wants a chair just like the adults that the state of grace is lost. It is that moment when we lose the innocence of childhood. And it is when we recognize the loss that the concept of heaven is born. But this talk is The Etiology OF innocence not Etiology and Innocence. And the connections are frequently more important than the things connected. What I am referring to in this instance is that in our syntax everything has a causeeven Innocence. But how, if everything has a cause, can there ever be a beginning? How can anything new ever happen? How is Creativity ... even possible? Can you ever have been innocent? I was worrying this very problemkind of like a dog worries a bonewhen I tried to determine the origins of life. In The 2nd Story; a Twice Failed Tale (1991) I thought to breathe life into a collection of sticks and bags with some hopelessly complex, wheezing wood and canvas bellows pumping air through 100 feet of leaky wood pipes. This search for the origins of life became more of a search for the origin of origins. And this piece was the occasion for one of my greatest discoveries. Because the gallery refused to remove a wall I got to separate cause and effectall the actions took place on one side and their results on the other. We cannot see what we do or do what we are seeing. We can, however, hear a whistle and balls dropping on the other side of the wall to entice us. The rolling bellows on the action side is the 1st Draft of the 2nd Story.... The handle says Apply Desire Here and operation forces air through the wood pipes blowing a whistle beyond the wall and momentarily inflating a gauge of Aspiration. Aspiration is a fleeting thing. The 2nd Draft also blows the whistle but, if there are balls ready and the bellows are depressed and released fully, then it causes a couple of balls to drop into an AccumulatorI like to think of memory as an accumulation of accidents. In the corner is my Record Station. The plaque inscription describes Ezekiel breathing life into the dry bones:

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... And as I prophesied there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: But there was no breath in them. Ezekiel 37:7,8 A little Divine Inspiration is required. A continuous roll of paper on the table recorded my efforts to resolve the technical, aesthetic and conceptual problems of installation. In the cubbyholes to the right are 119 cards comprising my Purloined Principlesvarious ideas Ive stolen that comment on the nature of origins and the paradoxes of thought. How Reality is Fundamentally Derivative, how we should Beware of Atavism as an Etiology for Innocencewhich is an essay on our proclivity for simple explanations. There are cards about faith, change, betrayal, Chaos and Catastrophe, participation and observation ... and more, culminating in a realization (which I stole from Charles Olson) that Life is preoccupation with itself. And a Willie Dixon song that a good understanding can make everything all rightbut I wondered how we can possibly understand understanding using understanding. In the opening between the two spaces, is a Choice Point with valves that direct air to different activities and tools for maintenance. Beyond is a Teleological Rack of possibilities, Means and Ends of latex-coated canvas tubes, there are tags and experimental devices which might be useful including Out of Order signs which can make any failure acceptable. On the other side of the wallthe results sidepipes lead to the sticks and bags. There is an Accumulator zig-zagging down the wall and finally the bags, sticks and whistle in the corner. When air is breathed into these bags, their futile, fitful motions against constraint are quite poignant. And the closest I came to actual life is in the way that a small latex

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covered canvas bag kind of whimpers as it dies. Only something truly alive could whimper. Earlier in this century, when science and technology promised so much, it seemed that logic might encompass everything. But Kurt Gdel showed in 1931 that such attempts at omniscience must fail. It is the liars paradox. To say that: everything I say is a lie leads you to a logical impasse. Because the system is closed it cannot refer to itself without being incomplete or inconsistent. Which is incidentally another obstacle to machines being creative. They need to be able to work on several levels at the same time. In other words, they need to learn how to tolerate ambiguity. What was forced on me in the 2nd Story ... installation and what I have used since was the discovery that cooperation can be an origin because it removes you from the system you were in and therefore allows you to be recursiveto reflect on yourself without violating Gdels theorem. One answer to the riddle of how anything new ever occurs is cooperation and the possibilities of people having to get together to complete an experience. And this, as it turns out, is an answer proposed to the riddle of lifes origins by Lynn Margulis. The standard evolutionary view is to look for a single universal ancestor which would account for all the current diversity. A more contemporary view has multiple interconnected origins. There is a similarity here to my word charts. Everything is dependent on cooperation and cross-fertilization and it always was. The past may not really be any simpler than the present. Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that our present state is a selection from the greater diversity of former eras. But it is hard for me to imagine a beginning that is highly complex although I can certainly see complexity arising really fast. And this is what Chaos Theory promisesah, another topic for another time. Someone once quipped that if you want to sound profound you should always speak in paradoxes and I wonder why this should be profound. The problem with paradoxes as answers is that they seem too ironical. And the problem with irony and other forms of suspicion is that they have this smarmy coolness which ends all discussion. Irony is far too isolatingit closes up a system. If somehow we can come to understand the contradictions in a paradox as something complementary we may be able to forge something far deeper. I have this notion that conundrums and paradoxes, which I do love, can be resolved through touch. We will have to forego an extended excursion into this realm too. But let me point out that there are understandings that are participatory and physical that may explain the logical impasses I have been alluding to. It may be that all of the great Logical paradoxes and conundrums we pose as adults find their solutions as childs play correctly framed. A childs tactile comprehensions applied to the tasks of philosophy. This brings me to Zenos paradox of motion. Zeno suggested that you can never really cross a room because for every distance you traverse you first have to cover 12 that distance and so on. And this brings me to Zenos paradox of motion. Zeno sug-

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apply desire here

BERNIE LUBELL

SECOND STORY: A TWICE-FAILED TALE

L.A.C.E. Los Angeles 1991

the whimper

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gested that you can never really cross a room because for every distance you traverse you first have to cover 1/2 that distance and so on. There are an infinite number of halves here so it should take an infinite amount of time. We do get across the room every day. It seems that this infinite series converges on a limit. So the sum of the infinite series of distances is in fact finite. But how can we understand this? Zenos paradox was recently solved through an analysis of converging series and calculus-inspired limits. Calculus has been immensely useful but is logically considered to be essentially a sleight-of-hand. Logic is independent of time but the Calculus and our paradox are not. It is how the series converges in time that resolves our dilemma. And Time is where we exist. The notions of limits and time itself are really axioms within our bodies. They are a sort of understanding which is not like understanding an argument but more like appreciating a physical fact. A friend once asked me what my first memory was. Interestingly I had no really early memories but an answer instantly jumped into my mind. Gravity should be primary to my body, whether it was in my mind or not. Gravity as a limit must have been one of our first understandings as we somehow figured out how to stand and walk. An infant faces Zenos paradox as they try to figure out how to crawl forward without collapsing. It is this sort of limits that our bodies intuitively appreciate. It strikes me (an apt analogy to a particular kind of touch) that in moments of paradox (Piaget preferred to call it disequilibrium)2 might not a regression to play and the tactile comprehensions of childhood become most useful? They are beyond the reach of our formal minds and so are most open to insightful occasions of accident and failure. And by trusting some resolutions to our bodies we may be able to understand understanding because we will leave the closed system where logic is our primary tool. Our bodies seem to be particularly good at jumping about from system to system. Perhaps this is a byproduct of having a brain embedded in a body, which is really another sort of brain. I heard an interview where Paul Auster once said something like: We are all pretty sophisticated and we know that the universe is something we have created with our minds butour minds are in our bodies and our bodies are in the universe3 Being physical is the key here. My installations frequently require cooperation but

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they always need manipulation. You must touch them and feel how they work to fully appreciate the experience. It is a question of participation rather than witnessing. As Gabriel Josipovici points outsight is free and, in a sense, promiscuous. 4 You can glance about a room at the objects and then instantly to the distant horizon and never make any commitment. To touch something you must get up, cross to it and grasp it. For so many years of our early life we understand nothing without touch. Everything around us is first grasped and then goes into our mouths on its way to our brain. This Tactile, concrete operational understanding of the world is replaced by Formal Operations but not fully supplanted. Within us all there is still a reservoir of this sort of knowledge. And it is our bodies that make communication possible. Because we are embodied and our bodies give us common access to the world. We feel we understand each other because we share this embodiment. In my work I am trying to get people to have an understanding of things because you are a part of them rather than as observer looking in from outside. Of course all art contrives to draw you in. But I am being quite literal here. Making a setting in which you might become actors and create a theatre of your own imaginings. Dry Rain Peddling (1993) was a collaboration with Paul DeMarinis. Paul invented chaotic handrails for the staircase at the Intersection and in the course of playing with them we began to think of a rainstorm. Upstairs is a mechanical analog of the handrails. People on bicycles feeding back through an overhead rope and interrupting clutches. The percussive possibilities of the handrails suggested rain tapping on the roof and brought to our minds the divergent unpredictability of memory. Just as the order within chaos appears as trajectories in phase space, so the present installation traces overlapping journeys through time and association. This interactive analogy permits viewers to inhabit time and to construct surprise. Being the rain is not the same as experiencing it-but both forms of participation are possible here.5 When you touch and are touched you become a part of the world. There is a sense that touch provides a particular mirror which allows us to be self-aware and empathetic with others. And the pleasure in this may come from a testing of boundariestaking risks like kissing.

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The final Installation I wish to discuss is a machine that allows you to test your own boundaries in unaccustomed ways. Cheek to Cheek (1999) is an installation which allows you to dance with yourself cheek to cheek. As your lower cheeks move about on a stool bladders there transmit air pressure to a smaller set of latex bladders that caress your face. The feeling is both pleasurable and disconcerting. I have this faith that our bodies provide us with another system through which we might understand our own consciousness.

NOTES 1 Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of tienneJules Marey (1830-1904). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. 2 Jean Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1966 3 Paul Auster, remarks made during a television interview. 4 Gabriel Josipovici, Touch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996 5 Paul DeMarinis and Bernie Lubell, excerpts from the Gallery statement for Dry Rain Peddling, Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, 1993 .

BERNIE LUBELL Cheek to Cheek from SUFFICIENT LATITUDE Museum of Contemporary Art Lake Worth, Florida New Langton Arts San Francisco 1999-2000

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Pacific Asias Drive to Hollywood and Back: the Jouissance of California Hong Kong Movies
Kwai-Cheung Lo
Hong Kong Baptist University

ohn Woo is most likely the first and the most popular Hong Kong filmmaker sought after by Hollywood to come to the U.S. to make American movies. So when Woos first Hollywood film, Hard Target (1993), was described by an American producer as a Chinese movie in English,1 he was devastated and determined to give up his flashy stylistic touches in the following project, Broken Arrow (1995), in order to prove that he could make a mainstream American film just like other Asian directors working in Hollywood, such as Wayne Wang or Ang Lee. The outcome was that Broken Arrow fared much better than Hard Target in terms of box office and reviews, but, for Woos diehard fans, Broken Arrow is just another American film and by no means an effective transplant of his Hong Kong action. If style is the man himself, Woos second Hollywood film is criticized for not carrying his signature style, and for thus losing himself in the global entertainment system. But the box-office success of Broken Arrow did empower Woo and enabled him to work more freely in the next project Face/Off (1997), which was largely considered the real John Woo kind of film. It seems that the paradox of having to lose ones own style in order to have it holds true to Woos Hollywood filmmaking experience. The transition from Hard Target to Face/Off through Broken Arrow may explain how Woo can become himself only insofar as he has to renounce being himself. Such a dialectical self-realizationthat is, in order to become himself, he must first lose himselfis what one might call symbol-

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ic castration for the ethnic filmmakers entry to white-dominant Hollywood. In general discussions of John Woos movies there is conspicuous consensus as to the concrete existence of a Woo film style. This style is presumed to be stable and would not vary across time and place. It is cultural capital that supposedly belongs strictly to Woo; even migration and culture shock can not transform its share holding and value. When Hard Target and Broken Arrow were criticized for lacking Woos stylistic factors, his fans on both sides of the Pacific were disappointed. With the release of Face/Off Woos fans, however, seemed happy again and believed their auteur director was back on his recognizable and respectable stylistic track. What is Woos style? In what way does the audience conceive of how Woos filmswhether they are made in Hong Kong or produced by Hollywoodwork for them? At first glance, the question one does not appear difficult. Anyone familiar with Woos Hong Kong films, such as A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989) and Hardboiled (1992), could easily identify recurring images, favored subjects and characteristic techniques that Woo has always used to achieve the emotional impact of his works. There is, for example, the posture of having both guns outstretched, characters leaping through the air while shooting, guns tossing through the air in slow-motion to be caught by the protagonist, a superhero withstanding the impact of hundreds of bullets, aestheticized violence, well-choreographed action sequences, all kinds of glorifying slow-motion, tracking shots, dramatic dolly-in, freeze-frames and dissolves, themes of friendship, loyalty, chivalry, code of honor, etc. Some of these stylistic features were transplanted to Hard Target and Broken Arrow: why then did fans and critics still see the two Hollywood films as non-Woo works? Are these stylistic particulars just appearances that cannot represent Woos real thing? With the definition of style as the man himself in mind, Lacan makes this modification: style is the man to whom one speaks. While one is defined by his style, he is also defined by his relation to the other. As Judith Miller explains, Lacans addition to this definition of style indicates that identity is divided between what style represents and the one before whom it is represented. A subject, says Lacan, by the fact that it is inscribed in the order of language, is represented by a signifier for another signifier.2 Therefore, style does not necessarily suggest the unity of the subject. On the contrary, it designates a constitutive division in the subject that is never guaranteed by an assured identity. In the eyes of his fans, Woos unique stylistic approach to violence and bloodshed has inspired American new brutalism movies,3 but its authen-

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tic being got lost in his own works under the Hollywood system. The lost object of Woos style has nonetheless returned in his third Hollywood production, the highly acclaimed Face/Off. The real Woo is back and it offers the appearance (in the fantasy of Woos fans) of being the foundation of the unity of the auteur-subject. Coincidentally, some obvious questions about subjectivity rarely raised in his previous films are addressed in Woos Face/Off: Is our identity determined by our appearance? Would I become the other person if his face were given to me? How far could I still be myself if my subject is represented by another signifier? In the film, the two main characters swap faces, exchange identities and are confronted with these very questions. Sean Archer (John Travolta) is a dedicated FBI agent who has been on the force for years and has been obsessively tracking one particular master criminal, Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage), for a long time. Archer knows everything about Troy. The reason Archer is relentlessly pursuing Troy is because, six years ago, Castor attempted to kill Archer but accidentally killed Archers son. His desire for revenge and his preoccupation with chasing Troy have alienated Archer from his wife (Joan Allen) and his teenage daughter (Dominique Swain). Troy is finally captured and left in a coma after a violent confrontation. But it seems that Troy has stashed a time bomb somewhere in downtown Los Angeles. Archers fellow officers believe that the only way to learn the location of the bomb is for Archer to masquerade as Troy and go undercover in prison in order to interact with Troys brother. Through a highly experimental surgical procedure, they take off Castor Troys face, and transplant it onto Sean Archer. While Archer is disguised as Troy, the faceless Castor wakes up from his coma in the hospital and needs a face. The only one available is, of course, Sean Archers. Now Troy becomes Archer and Archer is stuck with Troys face. Troy has found new freedom (and fun) by assuming Archers identity. It is not a complicated plot, although it is pretty far-fetched. 4 The story is easy to follow because the characters switch faces without their real identity being changed. As one critic points out, John Woo seems to suggest that the exterior of the body can be peeled off: faces, voices, body scars can be exchanged, but the inner core of being cannot be changed.5 Does Face/Off simply conform to the idea that appearance is merely an illusion or a false image of realityimplying thereby that appearance is never significant? If so, then what is the unchanged inner core of being? Is John Woo implying that he is always the same no matter which system he works for? Can we consider the film an allegorical depiction of transnational identity reconstruction for a Hong Kong filmmaker working in Hollywood? Perhaps postmodern critics would find Face/Off uninteresting precisely because it refuses to enter the age of simulacrum in which reality or authentic being is no longer distinguishable from its simulated image. The predominance of simulacra in todays world has already dissolved the distinction between reality and appearance. However, Face/Off still seems to be obsessed with unchanged being in an outrageously old fash-

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ioned way. In Woos hands, the original sci-fi plot is turned into a traditional Manichean battle between good and evil. In this plague of simulacra, Authentic Being (or the Good) that Woos films hold on to and do not let go of are values usually found in his Hong Kong productions: the old Chinese spirit of chivalry, male bonding and honor. Woo repeatedly tells interviewers that his movies are never simply about violence. His violence is always based on an ethical stance that has already vanished.6 However, if what Woo conjures up no longer exists, the so-called good or authentic being appearing in his films is then nothing but a mask or a semblance. Willingly or not, Woo and his characters are always already condemned to this world of copies and simulacra. Like his fans who anticipate the return of his unique style, Woo is a lack-in-being subject that seeks the lost object to fill out the void. Nevertheless, the old Chinese chivalrous spirit invoked in Woos films could never be authentic or original since the Hong Kong community was designated, right from the beginning, as a Westernized and colonized version of Chinese society. It is a place of lack and inconsistency. 7 Hence, the subject of lack has to seek, in the posited big Other or in tradition, the justification for its beingsome ethical mandate with which to identify. In Face/Off, however, the exchange of identities between Archer and Troy demonstrates that good/true is the mask of evil/false and vice versa. Ethico-ontological being can never be what it appears to be if it is to give some substance to the divided subject. In Face/Off the ethical stance of violence insisted upon by Woo has changed from the code of honor between men to family valuesArchers battle with Troy and their swapped identities unexpectedly help strengthen Archers relations with his wife and daughter and save Archers dysfunctional family. At the end of the film, Archer adopts Troys illegitimate son to make his family complete again. The regained unity of Archers family is constituted through the introduction of certain alien and evil elements by means of the disguised Troy. While Troy plays the role of Archer he succeeds, through his flamboyant approach, in making Archers listlessly tiresome marriage more exciting and rebuilds trust with his rebellious daughter. Troys malicious intrusion into Archers family turns out to be a great help for Archers final return to the embrace of his wife and daughter. The fine line between good and evil is further blurred as it is Archer, the good guy, who destroys an other persons family so as to save his own. The clamoring of family values, though a bit unusual in Woos previous movies, actually reinforces the mainstream American perception of Asian (Americans) as a model minority cherishing the significance of family and kinship. If the film is viewed from the perspective of family values in a scenario of the Others desire, however, it may take on a different meaning. The film could be looked at through Archers gaze as one who presumes he knows what he is meant for the Others desire. Then Archer would no longer be an innocent hero whose identity is bereft, whose wife is stolen by his enemy, and who is thus left with no choice but to fight back to retrieve what he

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has lost. On the contrary, Archer would be the great conspirator who designs the whole plot. While he is free to choose to become Troy, it is Troy who wakes up from his coma without a face and is forced to take the only available face (which is Archers). He has to settle for Archers identity. At first it appears that Archer makes an ethical decision by giving himself up and negating his identity in order to save the innocent people of Los Angeles from Troys time bomb. Apparently his rescue attempt fails because it is Troy, after taking over Archers face, not Archer, who unplugs the bomb. On the other hand, Archer succeeds in saving the innocent lives of Los Angeles at the expense of lending his face to Troy, but yet he gains credits under his own name. The mission is completed while the hero is displaced and misidentified. If, however, we consider that this rescue plan is in fact Archers desperate attempt to save his crumbling family and to pursue the ideal image of being a father, then actually nothing runs aground in the heros mission. His self-negation turns out to be a means for Archer to become what he ultimately wants to achieve being. Such a decision involves the dimension of death drive, suggesting a negative gesture of suspending the symbolic order. By inviting another man to take his place in the family, Archer lets his wife be screwed by Troy and exposes his daughter to possible paternal sexual harassment. The strategy of nothing ventured, nothing gained is of course a convention in action movies. But, Archers move also bears witness to the fact that, in cop movies, the only true transgression is always the adventure of the defender of the law, whereas the criminals, in comparison appear like indolent petit-bourgeois, careful conservators.8 Archers transgression is even subtler. His attempt to venture is a death drive that throws the Symbolic Order out of joint. Still, it is not Archer but the proxy who literally wears his face who has really made the transgression. Perhaps the unruliness and destructiveness of Troy are only the external reflection, or the extimit, realizing Archers innermost whimssuch as killing without any justifiable cause, having an extra-marital affair and sexually harassing his own daughter. His self-negation is merely an encounter with himself in the form of his opposite, a self-differentiation through a negative self-relation, or a self-referential movement of negativity. What comes into view as the threat of an intruding alien that can undermine and steal our identity is actually the inherent antagonism of the identity itself. Archers obsession with hunting Troy has already gone so far that a mere arrest cannot satisfy him. Only by changing identities and positions with Troy can Archer make himself seen to the object that attracts his gaze. In a way, he gets caught up in the picture he is looking at and he finally loses distance toward it. His hunt for the enemy transforms into getting himself hunted. When Archer falls into his own plot or picture, the gaze to which he is making himself seen reveals in him also his shadowy double, that is to say, what is in him more than him. The scene that most clearly stages this making oneself seen has Troy and Archer standing on the opposite sides of a wall with a double-sided mirror

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between them. As they point their guns, preparing to shoot the other, they see their reflections in the mirror. Since their identities have already been switched, the mirror image is not a reflection of who they are but who they are trying to kill. So the real aim of the bullet is not to hit the target in the opposite but is to return in a loop to make oneself hit. The evil Troy thus embodies the good guy Archer in the form of his opposite. And Archer then is the form of the appearance of the evilness (when Archer is being himself, he is far more monstrous and disgusting to his family and co-workers than after the evil Troy has taken up his face). Thus the hidden message in Face/Off, if there is any, is not that there is some authentic being or reality, like ethnicity, value or the Good, that could remain unchanged no matter how far it is concealed by appearance. Identity and value do change when they migrate to different cultural and social spaces, and they always adapt themselves to the new environment. What is revealed, howeverif we read Face/Off as an allegorical description of Woos own situation in the transnational crossingis that appearance or body can be separated successfully from the inner being or the soul. What Woo finally proves is that he can make a mainstream American blockbuster, thus affirming that the merging of Hong Kong filmmakers with Hollywoods global system is a deterritorializing body capable of overcoming various boundaries and crushing all barriers and resistances, such as nation, race and value. The fantasy of a man who would not be entrapped in his body and would move freely is somewhat realized. From vampire movies to alien body snatcher sci-fi, Hollywood cinema has always been populated by characters whose bodies are invaded by external forces. It is probably Hollywoods anxiety about outside ideological impactone is always exposed to the alien spectral other. In the 1990s, Hollywood films continued to portray people whose bodies have been switched. However, only the external body is drastically changed; the internal self remains all the same. Although the white male body that defines the qualities of American masculinity as violence, autonomy, possession of women and lack of emotion has been repudiated, these bodily transformations never challenge the privileges associated with white U.S. masculinity. 9 Now, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, a Chinese director accompanied by the deterritorializing forces offered by the cinematic mode of production under the global media syndicate subverts traditional codes that restrict and control social relations: e.g., racial limits, kinship systems, class structures, religious beliefs, folk customs, and so on. The multinational capital that makes Woos Hollywood success possible is precisely the fluid and hybrid body that can always change faces and, in its deterritorializing guise, set adrift fluxes of things, people, words, customs and beliefs in the global circuit. The force of deterritorialization is precisely the gist of Pacific Rim Discourse. As a matter of fact, Pacific Rim Discourse is nothing but the rim-like structure of the global capital drive. It is said that the Pacific Asia is the last frontier to the spatial

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imagination of Euro-American capitalism. It is the last thing because this object of drive can no longer be infinitely substituted for by any other objects of desire. This is it. There is no possibility of any further postponement of the encounter with jouissance. It can no longer shift from one object to another through metonymical displacement. But the final border could also be a return to its supposed origin, since Americas Pacific is only a loop of the American West. The circular movement of boundless expansion may also eliminate the frontier that separates us from them. Pacific Asia is less a geographical concept than a conceptual construct. Fantasies of immense wealth projected by Euro-American capitalism over the Pacific Rim have lured many Westerners to the mapping and domination of the region. Many Asians, at the same time, have also been attracted to California to pursue their gold mountain dreams. The gold mountain soon turned into a place of disillusionment for early Asian immigrants. Racial segregation, denial of citizenship, restrictions on landownership, physical abuse and even internment paved the ways for the immigrants from Pacific Asia to traverse their fantasy of California. Over the last four decades, however, Pacific Asia has produced new successful models of transnational capitalism which go beyond even the visions and fantasies of the Euro-American capitalist system that triggers it off. The economic growth of Pacific Asia and the potential rise of China in the region are considered a threat to U.S. hegemonic power that no longer hesitates to allow the language of the yellow peril to emerge again in its politics of culture. It does not, however, necessarily bring about a resurgence of anti-Asian sentiment. Rather it leads to a single mouth kissing itselfusing Asians to smooch the Asians on the other shore. The circuit of self-affected drive becomes a solution for curbing the excessive expansion of global capitalism. The absorption of Hong Kong film talent by Hollywood (from the 1990s on) is perhaps a good illustration of the circular movement of global capital drive. As John Woo himself remarks, [i]t is ironic that Hollywood began to imitate Hong Kong movies in the late 1980s and 1990s because Hong Kong films (to a certain degree) are imitations of Hollywood films, so Hollywood is imitating Hollywood!10 In a sense, Hollywood can get back its own message from the otherness of Hong Kong cinema. In the early 1990s, Hong Kong cinema was discovered by Hollywood for its refreshing differences, especially for its physical vitality and political mirror-effect. By looking at Hong Kong films, the American audience could once again experience such bizarre articulations of energy long gone from Hollywood cinema. Because of the 1997 political handover, Hong Kong films are largely received in the U.S. as an allegory of the citys socio-historical situation. The political relevance and function of cinematic production as the collective mode of social expression that had already vanished in Hollywood now suddenly pops up again in Hong Kong filmmaking. Not only can the style of Hong Kong action cinema be found in Quentin Tarantinos Reservoir Dogs, Robert Rodriguezs Desperado and Larry and Andy

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Wachowskis The Matrix, a number of Hong Kong directors have already thrived in American mainstream productions, including Kirk Wongs The Big Hit, Ronny Yus Bride of Chucky, Peter Chans The Love Letter and Stanley Tongs TV series Martial Law. Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li have already starred in several major features and blockbusters, such as Rush Hour, Tomorrow Never Dies, Anna and the King, and Romeo Must Die. The infiltration of Asian film talent into the white-dominant entertainment industry may imply that the new Hollywood has followed the direction of multiculturalism in order to adjust itself to California state policy and to meet the growing diversified tastes in the domestic and the world markets. Nevertheless, the transnational crossing of Asian film people to Hollywood may only offer an alibi for the continued hegemony of the Anglo-American global entertainment industry. The small-scale Asianization of Hollywood is simply a new face of the old hegemony, as white America dresses itself up in a new representation of its own self and of the world. Far from being the other of the U.S., Hong Kong cinema is rather the U.S. itself in its otherness. Presumably in such a relation, the U.S. then externalizes and transfers on to the other the dimension of jouissance that dwells in itself, thereby avoiding any confrontation with it. Such an avoidance of or a defense against jouissance still belongs, however, to the logic of desire. The inscription of Hong Kong film styles in Hollywood production is, instead, actually defined by the order of drive. The economy of drive is not founded upon the impossibility of jouissance. On the contrary, it can never act like a lizard that jettisons its own tail when it is in distress, for it is hooked too closely to it. The assimilation of Hong Kong film styles into the Hollywood system and the hiring of Asian film talent do not necessarily construct a new identification with a totality that conjoins with multiracial and multicultural California in a harmonious fashion. Right from the beginning, there is never a striving for any form of unity. There is no necessary correspondence between the thrust and the object, since the aim of Hollywoods outreach to Pacific Asia is not the consumption of any external object. It is merely a montage, in the sense that it links together two heterogeneous things. Some critics might want to believe that Hollywood is no longer the puppeteer of the global economy of images, but only a nodal point of a complex transnational construction of cinematic landscapes, and that thus a radical heterogeneity of the object as gaze is produced in Hollywood. The film industry in California is, however, not playing the role of the unique mastering subject that oversees the entire field of vision. Now, it is also in the picture. Despite the success of John Woo and Jackie Chan, Asian American movie-makers are still finding it tough to break into Hollywood. Many Asian American directors have expressed their discontent at having their works rejected by distributors and festivals, including Sundance.11 Unlike their Asian predecessors in Hollywood who had to portray a stock array of Chinese domestic servants, laundrymen, mystics, gangsters and prostitutes, the Hong

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Kong stars do play more positive onscreen roles; they appear to have more power in constructing their cinematic images, and they gain greater popularity among the mainstream U.S. audiences. Asia, in American media, long stood as a symbol for compliant and passive femininity; now the Asian stars from Hong Kong are mainly associated with the hard-fighting, gun-wielding, muscular, and heroic images of the action thriller and comedy. From one extreme to another, the discursive formation of the Asian in the U.S. media remains an object of cultural and racial fantasy. Moreover, since these Hong Kong artists mostly play alien characters from Asia onscreen, they only further confirm the prevailing prejudice that Asian Americans are forever seen as strangers in their own country. While many Americans are enjoying Hollywood productions starring or directed by Hong Kong actors and filmmakers, the Asian American community is under a humiliating cloud of suspicion. A number of Chinese Americans from California were the locus of furor that broke out over the illegal donations by Asians through a California Buddhist Temple to President Clintons 1996 re-election campaign. They all finally pleaded guilty to the charge of improper political fund-raising. Then, a Chinese American scientist at Silicon Valley, Lee Wen-ho, was charged with spying for China. At the same time as the controversies over human rights, nuclear espionage, Taiwan-U.S. military ties and bombing of Chinas embassy in Belgrade, the U.S. government continues to act on trade agreements with Beijing, which helps clear the way for China to join the World Trade Organization. In a way, while American spectators are excited by watching the aesthetic violence produced by the ethnic directors from the Asian Pacific, a different form of ethnic violence is raging in white American society. The lesson of the drive from Pacific Asia to Hollywood is that we are much too attached to jouissance and can not get loose from it. The montage of global capital drive links heterogeneous partial objects together and brings a little bit of the Real inside the Symbolic. The Real is the impossible, in the sense that it is the impossibility of any relationship that could bring different things to the formation of a whole. The circuit of global capitalism in the Pacific turns around this failed relationship and marks it in its very impossibility. The globalization process does not generate a multicultural and multiracial total order that can quilt all nations and peoples to the synchronic chain of economic operation. California is a window state that shows us how people of different racial and cultural origins can learn to live with one another. And Hollywood is the self-appointed progenitor of this multiculturalist idea by hiring diverse races and representing people of color in its globally distributed entertainment products. However, the progress of this multiculturalism in Hollywood productions is never a revolt against or a subversion of the dominant system representing whiteness. Instead, it is founded upon the very excessive strength of the worldwide image-producing syndicate. The larger the share Hollywood can get of the Asian Pacific market, the more yellow and brown faces can probably be seen in the mainstream American cinema and television.

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Under the global economy and the capital drive to the Pacific, Hollywood is renouncing its usual dimension of subjectivity by chasing a pastiched, multiple mode of representation, without fidelity to any specific subjective engagement. Hollywoods drive to Pacific Asia is only a closed circular pulsation that finds satisfaction in endlessly repeating the same. There may be no new opening to the outside or no real introduction of otherness into the system. Only the eternal return of the same is fully endorsed. But simply to condemn the multiculturalism practiced in California as nothing at heart but Eurocentrism could easily miss the point. In the eyes of those newly-immigrant Asian film people, California is still seen as a land of good health, pleasant living and open fairness to people of different ethnic heritages. Now living with his family at Los Angeles, John Woo tells his interviewer that the American lifestyle gives him a re-balancing of film career and family:
Hong Kong is a place that will drive you crazy. Its very competitive, lots of pressure, people dont respect your privacy. You always have to work faster and smarter than the other guy, or else youll get beaten down. Hong Kong people train for that. You work seven days a week, and its really unhealthy. I spent all, or most of my time, in the office and the studio. I was never able to give enough time to my children, and my family was being torn apartTheres pressure here (in California), of course, but its normal pressure. People have to work hard and do a good job, but everyone is more respectful of each others lives. I can have my own privacy, and not work on weekends to spend more time with my wife and childrenEven if I fail in the United States, I still dont want to go backI couldnt stand that kind of lifestyle anymore.12

Living in California seems to stabilize his life of madness in Hong Kong. Woos favorite leading man in his Hong Kong films, Chow Yun-fat, who has starred consecutively in Replacement Killers , The Corruptor and Anna and the King, apparently also shares Woos view of California lifestyle. Chow now resides in a lovely hillside home, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in Los Angeles and by all indications, he is here to stay. He loves California. In Chows own words: I have a lot of freedom here. I enjoy the food and the atmosphere. I enjoy the air here, its better than Hong Kong. Mostly I enjoy hiking, its kind of my hobby. Every Sunday I go for a two-hour hike; I prefer to go on the open side of the hills so I can have a view of the city and the ocean. 13 In the restructuring of global capitalism California is turned into a safe haven or a breathing zone from competitive and stressful Pacific Asia for the celebrities and the new

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rich. The general assumption that Asian migrants are displaced in Western worlds and that their families are broken up by emigration is now reversed. It is only the displacement that can save their marriage and can reposition and offer comfort to these Asian immigrants in the chaotic world on the other shore. California acts like a symbolic order, or a universe of Logos, that pulls them out of the experience of abyss and chaos. The influx of Hong Kong film people to California may be instigated by the return of the citys sovereignty to China. Their underlying motivation could be to escape from the totalitarian rule of the Communist regime. But this drive to California from Asia is unlike previous Asian immigrations, because the host country is never really their final destination. The new Asian immigrants are more interested in the Pacific shuttle, finding enjoyment in the very circular movement in the Pacific Rim. It is still more profitable to work and do business in Asia, while North America is a more ideal place for these new Asian immigrants to settle their families. To live in California helps in resolving the unbearable tension in their Asian homeland. Although Woo and other Hong Kong directors complain about rigid American film-making schemes, the Hollywood system is for them a medium of differentiation that creates order out of chaos and transforms a Hong Kong subject who has already plunged into an abyss of craziness into a free subject. But are they avoiding the abyss of life in Asia or the abyss of their pure subjectivity in the transnational world? Perhaps denying ones place of origin and clinging to ones particular cultural heritage no longer make any difference. Both only enable one to implement the process of globalization. The fantasy of California is a misrecognition of the global capital drive. The drive of Asian film talent to California has nothing to do with the flawed model of multiculturalism that essentializes particular ethnic cultures by attributing to them unity or stability. It is not about the desire for recognition of the marginal identity or tolerance of racial and cultural differences. Nor is it of any unhomely quality of dispossession that haunts with otherness. Rather, according to Lacan, it is more the color of an emptiness that is suspended in the light of a gap. The identification of the Asian element in Hollywood is only a self-reflexive turn of unrestrained global capitalism. As i ek says, the stain of particular roots is the phantasmic screen which conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly rootless, that his true position is the void of universality.14 The open mouth of the Pacific Rim does not signal a want-to-be but rather the black-hole of drive and its blissful enclosure of sucking everything in.

NOTES 1 See for example Richard James Havis, A Better Today: Hong Kongs John Woo Finally Does It His Way in Hollywood, Cinemaya 39-40 (1998):16. Woos business partner and producer, Terence

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Chang, also comments that a lot of people said [Hard Target] is a Hong Kong movie in English. See Fredric Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon: an Insiders Guide to the Hollywood of the East, New York: Hyperion, 1997:152. Apparently, it does not make any difference to American audiences that Woos first American film is a Hong Kong movie or a Chinese movie in English, though it is Terence Chang who qualifies it with the Hong Kong identity. 2 Judith Miller, Style is the Man Himself, Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie RaglandSullivan and Mark Bracher, New York: Routledge, 1991:147. 3 It is a term used by Annette Hill to refer to Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the like, whichaccording to the audienceprovide realistic representations of violence, in opposition to Hollywood action movies, such as the Die Hard series (1988, 1990, 1995) or Terminator 2 (1991), which are just fun, playful and unrealistic. See her Risky Business: Film Violence as an Interactive Phenomenon, Identifying Hollywoods Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, London: British Film Institute, 1999:175-186. 4 Face/Off was at first a sci-fi film. But Woo told the producers that he wasnt any good at making sci-fi movies. So the producers had a rewrite done to lessen the sci-fi aspect and to enhance the characters and the drama according to Woos wish. See Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover, Hong Kong to Hollywood, Cinemaya 46 (1999):37. 5 Rashmi Doraiswamy, The Spectacle of Action: John Woos Face/Off, Cinemaya 39-40 (1998):19. 6 In Woos own description, My movies have a lot of heart, passion, and emotion. They arent only about violence. I try to show something good and pure about the human spirit in them. Qualities like loyalty, honor, dignity, and a spirit of chivalry that has disappeared. See Havis, A Better Today, 12-3; Lee Server, John Woo Interview, Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999:32. 7 Such a lack in Hong Kong films may precisely invite scholars of transnational Chinese studies to interpret the popular action movies by John Woo and other Hong Kong directors as the embodiment of the spirit of Asian modernity upholding the myth of fraternal solidarity, valorizing mobile masculinity and reaffirming numbers of traditional Asian values, like kinship loyalty, gender division of labor or so in the world of capital accumulation. See Aihwa Ong, A Better Tomorrow? The Struggle for Global Visibility, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999:15881. 8 See Slavoj i ek , The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and, ed. Richard Feldstein and Henry Sussman, New York: Routledge, 1990: 93. 9 This is an argument made by Susan Jeffords when she talks about Kindergarten Cop, Robocop 2, Terminator 2, Beauty and the Beast, and Switch. See her The Big Switch: Hollywood Masculinity in the Nineties, Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins, New York: Routledge, 1993:196-208. 10 Quoted from Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover, City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, New York: Verso, 1999:309. 11 See Liz Hodgson, Frozen out in Hollywood, South China Morning Post (May 4) 2000:27. 12 See Michael Singer, John Woo, A Cut Above: 50 Film Directors Talk About Their Craft, Los Angeles: Lone Eagle Publishing Company, 1998:322. 13 See Christopher Heard, Appendix: Chow Yun-Fat, Ten Thousand Bullets: The Cinematic Journey of John Woo, Los Angeles: Lone Eagle, 2000:228. 14 See The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso, 1999:217.

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Puerto Rican Hystoire*

Alfredo Carrasquillo-Ramrez
Psychoanalyst, San Juan, Puerto Rico

The interest of the one who stud ies hysteria does not take long to move away from the symptoms in order to focus on the fantasies which produce them. Sigmund Freud

When listening to a hysteric patient we must remember that he is suffering from not knowing who he is, from not being able to interrupt, not even for a second, the unsustainable procession of characters that live within himself and through which he cannot avoid offering himself to others Juan David Nasio

The hysteric shows us that there is a subjective or unconscious strategy to recoup or cure the want-to-be and the want-toknowusing the Other. Colette Soler

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n his chronicle of Puerto Ricos first elected governors funeral, Edgardo RodrguezJuli tells the story of a radio host who, while narrating the event, made a revealing mistake: moved by the emotions of the multitudinary farewell to Luis Muoz-Marn, the radio host said: Ladies and gentlemen! Whats going on here is indescribable people are having a historic attack. The radio host immediately tried to correct his slip of tongue and put hysteric right there where his unconscious had placed historic, but as Rodrguez-Juli writes, he knew quite well that such a blunder was telling the truth, the sole truth.1 This reference to hysteriathat Rodrguez-Juli makes several times in his essaycould imply, according to literary critic Juan Gelp, an uneasiness of the narrator with the chaotic nature of the funeral, and maybe even certain willingness to control the people. For Gelp,
one might ask why the writer selects an illness ideologically referred to as feminine, to characterize Puerto Ricans. In recent studies, it is suggested that more than a condition or an illness, hysteria constitutes an ideological manipulation of psychiatric discourse. According to such an interpretation, hysteria would be one of the fictions of such a discourse. Hysteria is a history that, to a great length, is constructed to legitimize both womens marginalization and sexual stereotypes. The hysteric has a story to tell, an account that lacks order and whose signs are organized, controlled and interpreted by the psychiatrist. 2

Even when Rodrguez-Julis chronicle was published more than fifteen years ago, Gelps reading has been the only one that has shown some interest in the writers reference to hysteria. Gelps approach is consistent with his project of showing the paternalistic attitudes and positionings of different 20th Century Puerto Rican writers. While centering his criticism in the person of the writer, his apparent will to power and paternalistic and sexist reading of the funeral, Gelp misses the opportunity of following the path opened by Rodrguez-Juli with his reference to hysteria, a path that might take us to see that together with and related to a patriarchal discourseor better, to the Discourse of the Master- there might be a hysteric articulating his or her own discourse and positioning herself or himself in relation to the Other. This paper does not intend to go back to Rodrguez-Julis essay but to take it as a very provoking starting point to try to answer the following questions: Could we talk about Puerto Rican hysteria? Could we actually claim that Puerto Ricans, as a colonized nationality, place themselves in the position of the hysteric in relation to the Other? If our answers to the previous questions are yes, then, what have been the political implications of such a positioning? Thinking about these political implications is important especially when we have recently celebrated the centennial of the United States invasion of Puerto Rico. Although preceded by a strong economic presence, the landing of American Troops in the southern coast of the island on July 25, 1898 as a result of the Spanish American

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War, marked the beginning of the U.S. hegemony in Puerto Rico. The invasion triggered a period of military rule and subsequent tutelage that lasted until 1948. That year, for the first time in their history, Puerto Ricans had the opportunity to elect their own governor. The U. S. Government decision to grant the Puerto Rican people the chance to select their own governor was followed by a 1950 Congressional Bill that allowed the convocation of a Constitutional Assembly in the Island. Two years later, and as a result of that assembly, the Constitution of the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico (Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) was approved by a huge majority of the electorate and ratified by the Government of the United States of America. In his book Puerto Rico. A Political and Cultural History, the late Puerto Rican historian Arturo Morales-Carrin explains that the establishment of the commonwealth relationshippointed to new ways and possibilities, but left crucial questions unresolved.3 Some of these questions were: Does this new political status mean the end of colonialism as Puerto Ricos political condition? Is this a matter of mutual consent or does the United States remain as the final and unilateral authority in the Island? Is this new status a permanent one or a transitory stage towards independence or statehood? These questions remained as some of the unresolved aspects of the political status of the Island. As a consequence of this indeterminacy, different interpretations of the juridical status of Puerto Rico have been among the most important elements of struggle between the political forces ever since. Besides the then-hegemonic autonomists (the supporters of the Free Associated State formula), there have been two major political groups struggling in the national arenathe New Progressive Party (PNP, right wing pro-statehood party, now in power) and a minority pro-independence party (Puerto Rican Independence Party or PIP). Every four years Puerto Ricans participate in elections to select their governor, mayors and legislators, and each electoral process is also an opportunity to discuss once again the political status of the Island. The sort of in-between status of Free Associated Statethat is, a colonial formula that grants some degree of autonomy between being sovereign and being an integral part of the United States as a state of the Unionhave since then been a matter of discussion. The political options of statehood and independence have been apparently very clear for everyone: complete integration into the United States or complete separation from them. The autonomist optionthat is, the actual statushas always been the principal field of struggle and discussion. For some people it is nothing more than a perfumed colony; for others it means self-government and association with the United States of America. The Free Associated State, the autonomists insist, is the political formula that grants the most ample autonomy compatible with our permanent union with the United States.

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In all of these debates, what is usually absent is the opinion of the government of the United States of America. Before and after the United States government ratified the Constitution of the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico in 1952, silence has been a constant on the side of the U.S. Only in specific junctures a President or another important officeholder in the U.S. Government has expressed an opinion about Puerto Rico. Most opinions have been considered as lip service from government officials in the context of electoral campaigns in which, even when Puerto Ricans do not vote for the President or Congressmen, they do contribute to their campaigns with important fundraising activities. This silence would not be important if it were only because it has been unbearable for many political leaders on the Island. Why is it that for so many Puerto Ricans leaders the silence of the American Government about Puerto Rico seems to be so difficult to accept? My idea is that one way of answering this is by understanding how the colonial relation between Puerto Rico and his or her Imperial Otherthe United States of Americahas been structured. I will begin to elaborate my proposal about the structure of this relationship sharing with you a common joke in psychoanalytic circles. It tells the story of a man who is walking towards a Catholic church. He enters the temple and sees that the light of the confessional is on. He walks into the confessional, sits there and says: Father, forgive me because I have sinned. Last night I entertained myself four times. And a voice coming from the other side of the confessional says: As for me, you can cut off your dick, because I am just a painter here. As this joke shows, what is unbearable in fact, is that the Other does not care about you. And for Puerto Rican leaders, the silence of the Imperial Other is in fact unbearable because, placed in a hysterical position, Puerto Ricans leaders have been, for almost a hundred years now, trying to find a lasting and truthful answer to a basic but very important question that remainsand as we know, will always remainunanswered: what does the Other want from me? Confronted with the silence of the Imperial Otherthat is to say, faced with the enigma of the desire of the Other. Puerto Rican leaders have always been trying to put words in the mouth of the Other. Every time a Puerto Rican political leader goes back to the Island from a trip to Washington D.C. he talks to journalists and tells them lo que dijo el americano, i.e., what the American said. But we are never certain about what he said if he actually said something because no one elseexcept that political leaderhas seen him speaking. During his visit to some Latin American countries in 1997, the President of the United States participated in a television town hall meeting transmitted from Argentina to the Hispanic community around the world. In that program a Puerto Rican student from Miami questioned the president about the future of Puerto Rico and the President had to improvise a public statement about Puerto Rico, maybe for the first time since

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he got into the White House. The transcript of his answer was published some days afterwards as a political advertisement by the President of the Puerto Rican Senate in Puerto Ricos major newspapers. Let me just tell you something that you might already imagine: the very same day the program was televised, all the TV newscasts in Puerto Rico included the Presidential declaration as their first and most important news item. The day after, it was the headline in all major newspapers. The president HAD TALKED about Puerto Rico and most political leaders on the Island were trying to explain whatif anythingthe President had actually said. Hysteria, as we all know, more than an illness or a phenomenological diagnosis is understood in Psychoanalysis as a psychic structure. 4 It is a position from which certain subjects relate to the Other. Furthermore, and as Lacan has shown us in his seminar Lenvers de la psychanalyse,5 it is a discourse that as such allows for the articulation of a demand to the Othera demand that asks the Other for a certain discursive production.6 That very production demanded of the Other is an attempt of the hysteric to solve the enigma of the desire of the Other, to get a clear answer to the Imperial Che vuoi? Why is it important for the hysteric to get an answer from the Other? Is it important just to understand the hysteric way of demanding the Other or is it linked as well to hysteric desire? This is fundamental because the hysteric places himself or herself in relation to the Other as a way of solving the enigma of what the Other wants, more specifically, finding an answer to the question of what does the Other want from him or her. That is to say, getting an answer will give the hysteric the consistency that he or she lacks. Insofar as the Other is always an enigma in itself, the neurotic simply imagines who the Other is, and that, according to Willy Apollon, is our error:
The one we address, we do not know who he is. And Psychoanalysis has to deal with this. What do we address to the Other? What does the subject risk when addressing the Other? He is giving the Other the chance to abuse. We give the Other the power to answer, to refuse to answer. To say yes or no. 7

Certainly the hysteric does not accept passively the Others refusal to answer. That uncertainty is in fact what appears to be unbearable. He or she must find an answer to the enigma of the Others desire. And the answer, as Bruce Fink argues, is provided by the fundamental fantasy.8 How does this apply to the situation of Puerto Rico? If as I have said, Puerto Rican leaders are placed in a hysteric position regarding the Imperial Other, and that Other has basically remained silent for almost a century, Puerto Rican leaders must have constructed, at the level of the fundamental fantasy, an answer to the Che vuoi? As I have argued in a previous essay, an important formula repeatedly used in Puerto Rico has been, in my opinion, Puerto Ricos answer to the Imperial Che vuoi?: the formula of permanent union.9 Since the 1950s, this formula has been used to characterize the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United

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States. It has worked as a fantasy that interprets the Others desire. On December 26, 1951, the leader of the PPD (the autonomist party) and first elected governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muoz-Marn, opposed a proposal made by the pro-statehood delegate Paz Granela to include the word permanent when talking about the political relation between Puerto Rico and the United States. In his intervention against Paz Granelas amendment, Muoz-Marn argued that it was clearly expressed in front of the people that it was not our intention to close doors to any possible development in the future.10 However, on February 14, 1958, seven years after Puerto Ricos Constitutional Assembly, six years after the inauguration of the Constitution of the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico, and four years after a terrorist attack by a group of Puerto Rican nationalists at the House of Representatives in Washington D.C., governor Luis Muoz-Marn offered an important speech before the Chamber of Commerce of Puerto Rico in which the fundamental fantasy of permanent union was already in place. While enumerating the definite, simple, and clear norms for guidance in our development, Muoz-Marn mentions our permanent union with the United States; the great American Union with which we are associated on terms of equality, with pride, and in as unswerving spirit. 11 And he ends his address before the Chamber of Commerce with some words that show the role of the fundamental fantasy of permanent union in his discourse:
Regarding myself, you and all Puerto Rico have my vision and my word: Commonwealth status in my considered judgment and irrevocable conviction is the best and surest possible guarantee of our permanent ties with the Great American Union, with which we are associated through two noble and great moral forces: our citizenship and our freely expressed desire to remain forever in that union.12

Muoz-Marn, by declaring that we have been and we will always be permanently united with the United States, is assuming a specific position in relation to what he understands is the desire of the Otheran understanding that, as we have said, can only be the result of the fundamental fantasy. According to Slavoj i ek,
what we encounter in the very core of fantasy is the relationship to the desire of the Other, to the latters opacity: the desire staged in fantasy is not mine but the desire of the Other. Fantasy is a way for the subject to answer the question of what object he is in the eyes of the Other, in the Others desirethat is, what does the Other see in him, what role does he play in the Others desire?13

It is clear that hysterics adopt a certain stance as objects14 but the question that remains is what is symbolically at stake in this positioning, in this way of dealing with the enigma of the desire of the Other? What relation could be established between the desire of the Other and the desire of the hysteric? And finally, what would it mean

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for Puerto Ricans to traverse the fantasy of permanent union? Traversing the fantasy of permanent union would require, first of all, the acknowledgment of the fact that the fundamental fantasy is working there to cover an unbearable fact: the desire of the Other is enigmatic, or better, we do not even have an truthful idea of who the Other is. For i ek
the crucial break that psychoanalysis must accomplish is to induce him to realize how he is himself this other for whom he is enacting a rolehow his being-for-the-other is his being-for-himself, because he is symbolically identified with the gaze for which he is playing a role.15

So the problem here has to do with an identification of the hysteric with the gaze of the Otherthe hysteric desires, says Fink, as if she were the Other.16 If the fantasy of permanent union, as the political discussions of the last years have shown, is still in place, and such a fantasy is possible because of a symbolic identification with the gaze of the Other, one can say that Puerto Rico is fixated, fastened, pinned to the formula of permanent union and that such a fixation impedes the articulation and movement of a desire beyond identification. This finally takes me to the title of my presentation: Puerto Rican hystoire. Colette Soler, in her important lectures on Hysteria and Obsession, explains that the
French word for history is histoire (which also means story). Lacan wrote hystoire indicating that in every story there is something of the hysteric. But for Lacan, structure determines historynot every event in it- but the development of a subjective history or story is a manifestation of structure. Following Lacans orientation, I dont see anything that would allow one to say that structure is the effect of history.17

What I believe is important regarding the Lacanian idea of hystoire is that it helps us read differently the fantasy of permanent union. One could say that permanent union is the historical production of a specific juncture that has no relation whatsoever with elaborations of other historical junctures. However, when one understands that every historical production is at the same time a hysterical production as well, one is able to question the apparent contingency of a particular discursive formation and to read it as an-other articulation, as a repetition that results from a fixated positioning inside the hysterical structure. The very fixation that, as I have said, does not allow the articulation of a desire beyond identification. Thus a question remains: how could Puerto Ricans, as a nationality, move beyond the fantasy of permanent union and place themselves in a different position inside the structure? Obviously, I do not have the answer to that question. But I am sure about something, though: the place to articulate an answer to that question is not Washington D.C.

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NOTES
* Revised version of a paper delivered at the Annual Conference of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, November 7, 1997, The George Washington University, Washington D.C. I want to express my gratitude to Lourdes Adrienne Robles for her guidance in the process of translating certain quotes. I also want to thank Dr. Manya Steinkoler for reading the paper and giving me her feedback and suggestions. To her energy, enthusiasm and kindness I dedicate this paper, with gratitude and love.

1 Edgardo Rodrguez-Juli. Las tribulaciones de Jons, Ro Piedras: Ediciones Huracn, 1981:95. 2 Juan Gelp, Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico, Ro Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993:55. 3 Arturo Morales-Carrin, Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History, New York: Norton, 1983:279. 4 Thinking of hysteria as a psychic structure differs from Juan Gelps reductionist approach that centers its attention in an ideological manipulation of psychiatric discourse. That understanding, as Patricia Gherovici argues in her review of Elaine Showalters book, presents a picture in which the only villain seems to be the male doctor, which elides too easily the subjective responsibility of the hysterics. See Patricia Gherovici, Book Review, in Clinical Studies, 3:1 (1997):120. 5 Jacques Lacan, El Seminario de Jacques Lacan. Libro 17, Buenos Aires: Paids, 1992. 6 Alfredo Carrasquillo Ramrez, Lenguaje y poder en la clnica psicoanaltica: El amo, la universidad, la histrica y el analista, in Postdata 10-11 (December 1995):7. 7 Willy Apollon, The signifier and its effects, authors notes from the Annual Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Qubec, July 1997. In the context of the same lecture, Apollon makes clear that before being an imaginary Other, the Other is a site in language. He differentiates between the Other, the Imaginary Other and the others of each subjects reality arguing that there is no relation between them. 8 Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Theory and Technique, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997:122. Renata Salecl explains how in Lacanian psychoanalysis, fantasy is linked to the way people organize enjoyment (jouissance), the way they structure their desire around some traumatic element that cannot be symbolized. Fantasy gives consistency to what we call reality. Social reality is always traversed by some fundamental impossibility, by an antagonismwhich prevents reality from being fully symbolized. It is fantasy that attempts to symbolize or otherwise fill out this empty place of social reality. Fantasy thus functions as a scenario that conceals the ultimate inconsistency of society. See Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom. Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism, New York: Routledge, 1994:15. 9 Alfredo A Carrasquillo, The Logic of Permanent Union or The Structuring Fantasy of the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico, unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, December, 1994. 10 Diario de Sesiones 37th Day. December 26, 1951:1 28. 1 11 Luis Muoz-Marn, Significacin del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico en la Unin Americana. Address to the Annual Conference of the Chamber of Commerce of Puerto Rico, San Juan (February 14) 1958:4. 12 Op.cit.:9 (my emphasis). 13 Slavoj i ek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, London: Verso, 1994:177. 14 Bruce Fink, op.cit.:124. 15 Slavoj i ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989:106. 16 Fink, op.cit.:125. 17 Colette Soler, Hysteria and Obsession, in Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus, eds. Reading Seminars I and II. Lacans Return to Freud, Albany: SUNY Press, 1996:262.

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The Cause of the Subject as an Illtimed Accident: Lacan, Sartre, and Aristotle
Kirsten Hyldgaard
Center for European Cultural Studies University of Aarhus, Denmark

The concept of the subject does not occur in Freuds texts. It is first and foremost a philosophical concept. In philosophy, the subject is traditionally defined as foundation or ground, a ground that can have many names (the Idea, God)which implies that, as a concept, the subject is not and never has been identical with the ego. The modern (i.e., starting in the Renaissance) association of the subject with the empirical ego in philosophy is always problematic, never presupposed. The subject in Lacan is neither philosophical foundation nor psychological ego. The Lacanian subject is not an answer to the question of what the ground or foundation of being or of cognition might be: to answer this philosophical question via psychoanalysis one should rather look to its concept of fantasy. 1 But why, then, keep the concept of subject, and how can the Lacanian subject be understood? Understanding, to be precise, is not an issue as far as the subject is concerned; the subject does not make sensein at least two senses of the expression. The subject is, rather, what resists sense, what resists being reduced to other founding conditions like language, discourses, structures, historically variable discursive practices. The subject constitutes an anti-reductionist concept. Concerning sense, the subject poses the same problem we are faced with when we expound the various fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, namely the traditional question of their reference. What do the real, the drive, the unconscious refer to? They constitute negative concepts. The fact that they do not refer to or constitute entities or essences is the point. They are comparable to what Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, called ngatits.2

The traditional way of interpreting psychoanalytic concepts is to expound them as yet another version of determinism: psychoanalysis as a variation on the anthropological theme of mans being as determined by uncon scious drives. The Freudian concept of the unconscious and the Lacanian concept of the real serve, rather, the purpose of thinking against such determinism. The point is presented in connection with Sartres concept of freedom, Aristotles concepts of the accidental, and the question of the Others gaze in both Sartre and Lacan.

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The anthropological question of mans being is classically formulated as the question of whether everything can be explained by and reduced to teleological finality or the causality of modern sciences. The correlative conceptsdeterminism and freedomconstitute one of the eternal and undecidable questions of philosophy. If mans being cannot be conceived of as essentially different from organic and inorganic beings, if mans being is reducible to determining and causal factors, then it would be out of the question to talk about concepts like freedom, choice, and responsibility. To claim that responsibility, choice, and freedom never occur in psychoanalytic literature would be imprudent, but it would not be imprudent to claim that they are rare. The simple, trivial, explanation goes that the meaning of the subject, which freedom, choice and responsibility usually imply, indicates a concept that psychoanalysis tackles: the subject would be subject for in the sense of being the foundation of cognition, sense, and acts. The well-rehearsed counterpoint could be repeated yet again: that, on the contrary, in psychoanalysis the subject is represented by signifiers, subject to and product of the symbolic order, language, historically variable discursive practices ... and therefore anything but free and responsible. A slightly less trivial way to put this would be to ask whether the use of the concept of drive and the unconscious in psychoanalysis makes the subject reducible to a deterministic construction of mans being and thus renders the concept of freedom meaningless. Put this way, the question is, of course, rhetorical, since I intend here to show how the Freudian concept of the unconscious and the Lacanian concept of the real form an unexpected alliance with Sartres concepts of freedom, choice and responsibilityagainst variations on reductionism and determinism. Lacan agrees with the phenomenological rejection of what Sartre calls the serious mans reduction of mans being to interior psychological or exterior sociological determining factors (which today goes by the name of discursive constructions). The idea of the real is what makes Lacanian psychoanalysis resistant to a historicist, discursive interpretation of any issue, be it the question of the body, sex, subjectivity, or the social.3 The argument or discussion is as old as psychoanalysis itself. A conflict between the proponents of biologism on the one hand and culturalism on the other has haunted psychoanalysis since its beginning. Freud was careful and explicit in distancing himself from both positions. To make a very long story short, his fundamental concept of the drive makes him resistant to both biologistic and culturalist reductionism. The enigmatic status of this drive as a concept, its baffling of clear, univocal interpretations testifies to its resistance to well-known reductions. Freud himself did not make things easier for us when he called the theory of the drives our mythology.4 Once the fundamental concept of drive is mentioned, the concept of the unconscious follows in turn. And didnt Lacan define the unconscious as structured like a language and as being the discourse of the Other? So, are we not buried in dis-

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courses? No doubt. Apparently, Sartre proudly pronounced that he did not have an unconscious. And is Sartre not right when he criticizes Freud and psychoanalysis for being just another variation on reductionism, which his programme of existential psychoanalysis is supposed to reform?

Freedom
When we read Sartres extremely rich Being and Nothingness and his related exposition of freedom, his trouble defining this concept exhibits more or less the same difficulties we are faced with when we expound Lacans interpretation of the Freudian concept of the unconscious. Freedom to Sartre has to be understood in opposition to determinism. And what matters for him is to avoid tedious discussions between determinists and the proponents of free will. [libert dindiffrence ]. To be brief, Sartres concept of freedom is not a question of voluntarism, of whether man has a free will or not. What matters is to define freedom in a way that does not make it reducible to any variation on determinism. If freedom is presented as a question of voluntarism, as the free choice between alternatives, one has to look for the motive, for the interest which has determined the actual choice. If the motive is understood as cause, determinism is preserved. When freedom is a question of free will it becomes a question of whether it is me and my decisions that determine the act or a question of me being driven by external motivesmaybe even unconscious drives. Sartre presents two examples to support his point. The first belongs to the repertoire of existentialism, namely the example of the man standing in front of the abyss and deliberating the possibility of suicide. Sartres conclusion is that nothing prevents the man from jumping and nothing prevents him from not jumping. Whether he jumps or does not jump is caused by nothing. It is a question of anxiety confronted with the future, since nothing can either prevent or provoke the suicide. What you are not yet does not determine what you are. I am free to throw myself into the abyss and I am free not to do so. This is indeed a well-worn example and can lead to a lot of humanistic talk about freedom and choice, taken as a question of voluntarism. But Sartres next example ought to have immunized him against such an interpretation. The compulsive gambler is a responsible person who has decided to stop gambling, as social ruin is threatening. He is determined not to give in to his hitherto irresistible inclination. He has made a decision; he is motivatedas the therapists claim one has to be; he has all the best intentions. And then, he just has to approach the gambling joint and put down a bet or throw the dice. The very moment when his commonsensical motive and his idea of having a free will are suspended, is the precise moment where his freedom shows itself. Freedom is the very negation of determinism. Nothing prevents him from approaching the gambling joint, not even his motives, intentions, deliberations, decisions, and will. In this example, it is thus a question of anxiety

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towards the past, as prior motives, intentions, decisions, deliberations collapse and show themselves to be impotent. What you were does not determine what you are (not yet). The important point, as far as compulsion is concernedbe it gambling, smoking, alcoholism, and drug addictionis not to start asking whether it is all a matter of psychological, psychogenic compulsion of mysterious character orin the case of compulsory smokers, alcoholics, addictsa physiological addiction to nicotine, alcohol, and heroin. Nor is it a question of the pluralistic answers common today (nobody gives univocal explanations; cause is usually a combination of several factors, we are told; a bit of child psychology and a bit of biology, usually going under the name of genes). Sartres point stresses that it is exactly Nothing that makes the gambler, the smoker, the drug addict continue their fatal addiction. And here Sartre would catch you off guard, since the talk of fatality is yet another attempt to restore causality, by easing the kind of determinism called fatalism in through the backdoor. Usually moralists try to explain the situation as a struggle between common sense and passionspathological interestsand claim that anxiety is just another notwantingtoknow about monstrous unconscious motives: anxiety is really unacknowledged fear. But Sartres point is rather that the gambler, smoker, and drug addicts experience is the nothing that separates his being. Anxiety has got everything to do with freedom.5
The foritself is defined ontologically as a lackofbeing [manqu dtre], and possibility belongs to the for-itself as that which it lacks.... What we have expressed in Part Two in terms of lack can be just as well expressed in terms of freedom. The foritself chooses because it is lack; freedom is really synonymous with lack. Freedom is the concrete mode of being of the lack of being. (BN: 565; FR: 624)

Anyone familiar with Lacan will recognize this definition of the subject as manquedtre, lack-of-being which in Lacan more often is written manque tre, lack toward (a future) being. Sartres famous concept, bad faiththat you are what you are not and are not what you areis, in short, equivalent to Lacans concept of mconnaissance, misrecognition. Any identification of mans being is a misrecognition or an example of bad faith. Negativity and negation are the concepts that define mans being. The subject is always in relation to future possibilities, which again means that the subject is what it is not yet, in order not to be what it is. When one identifies oneself, the subject makes an object of the subject. To objectify is a negating activity, implying that the subject is not what is objectified; you are not what you are. An example of this mechanism: The alcoholic in Alcoholics Anonymous starts out by identifying himself as an alcoholicin order not to be one. To avert alcoholism and stay sober he identifies himself as what he is notan alcoholicto be not what he is. Sartres case is that of

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the evil man, who confesses to be characterized by all sorts of unpleasant traits of characterhe is unfaithful, a lying cheat etc. By this confession his evilness has been objectified, that is, it has become something that he is not. He can thereby continue to be what he is not, an evil man. This is bad faith; this is misrecognition. The concept of freedom seems equivalent to the concept of the unconscious. Freedom is a hole in being [trou dtre] comparable to the effects of the unconscious, Freudian slipsthose moments when well ordered chains of speech acts are broken into by something alien. Something is heard as holes and lacks in speech, something shows itself in inappropriate acts. The unconscious reveals itself in a singular (speech) act, and by singular is meant an act that takes place as if by chance and as if repetition were out of the question. The unconscious does not consist of a repertoire of contents. It is not a storehouse or repository of dreamlike images which may at times surface, or a sort of image bank. In this sense, the unconscious is not, and Sartres claimthat he does not have an unconsciousis justifiable, since the unconscious is not an entity, a latent being. It is rather a negativity, a ngatit. The unconscious is a lack of being, a hole in chains of signifiers, a singular, seemingly non-repetitive event. Lacan calls it preontological. Strictly speaking, the unconscious cannot be defined, in the sense of being delimited. One response to this could be Sartres: he remarked that this should not deter us. If the concept of freedom in the following quotation is swapped with the concept of the unconscious we find the latter clarified:
The very use of the term freedom is dangerous if it is to imply that the word refers to a concept as words ordinarily do. Indefinable and unnamable, is freedom also indescribable? Earlier when we wanted to describe nothingness and the being of the phenomenon we encountered comparable difficulties. Yet they did not deter us. This is because there are descriptions which do not aim at the essence but at the existent itself in its particularity [singularit]. ( BN: 438; FR: 492)

The psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious shows itself as a negativity, as what distorts and breaks down discursive continuities. In these moments of breakdown, in these moments when something can neither be admitted nor abolished from the discourse, the subject shows itself in its singularity. The subject is freedom, lack of determinable essence. The subject is not reducible to a structure or to a discourse. The subject and its radical singularity is in these moments of pure negativity. The unconscious is performative, it does something. The unconscious is that which could, if recognized, break down, show bad faith, and misrecognitionwhich could be the very reason why Lacan kept using the concept of subject.

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Tych and Automaton

In Lacans The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis6 drive is one of the fundamentals. In connection with drive, Lacan makes use of two Aristotelian concepts for accidental occurrences: tych and automaton.7 These have to do with the contingent, in contrast to that which happens through and repeats itself with necessity. Perhaps the reason these Aristotelian concepts came in handy for Lacan was that he could thereby express the cause of the subject as an accident or an illtimed coincidence. The subject is a matter of bad timing. As long as we stay within chains of causes and effects, everything makes sense; but the subject (in the psychoanalytical sense) is rather what resists sense. Its place is where chains of cause and effect are accidentally disrupted. To be more precise, the subjects place is both where chains of causes and effects are broken and where there is a continuous and precarious effort to deal with and make sense of this nonsensical, inassimilable real. The point is, however, not that the subject is without cause, but that its cause is placed in another scene, the scene of the drives. And this other kind of causality is the reason Aristotle can be of use to Lacan. In Aristotle tych and automaton designate causes which cannot immediately be understood within the ancient fourdimensional conception of causality (causa efficiens, causa formalis, causa materialis and causa finalis). Tych and automaton differ in that automaton is the more general term that includes tych as a special class. Automaton is reserved for accidental occurrences in nature. A stone falls and accidentally hits someone, but it does not fall in order to hit himunless, of course, it has been dropped by someone for the express purpose of hitting the other. (197b) The horse that escapes danger by accidentally coming to a place of safety is another example. The horse does not run from one place to another on purpose to avoid danger; but, fortunately, the horse actually does do this and thereby avoids the accident. Tych, on the other hand, requires in Aristotle a being that acts with consciousness and purposewhich thus excludes plants, animals and children. Tych happens unpredictably when we plan on saying or doing something meaningful and purposeful. To any act a motive may be attributed an intention, a future finality, a future purpose, lying in the background behind factual circumstances. But accidentsfortunate or unfortunate onesraise the problem of what kind of causality is at play. For instance, if a man comes to market and there chances on someone he has been wishing to meet but was not expecting to meet there, the reason of his meeting him was that he wanted to go marketing; and so too in all other cases when we allege chance as the cause, there is always some other cause to be found, and it is never really chance. (196a) The cause of the accidental is, according to Aristotle, of the efficient kind (causa efficiens, 198a), which implies that the problem first and foremost is a question of the

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causa finalis, of finding a purpose. This ought to ring a bell. Freudian slips are accidents in speech and act, seemingly senseless events without evident purpose. The traditional Freudian analytic interpretation has thus to do with restoring the idea that everything has a cause, the efficient and the final kind both: the satisfaction of an unconscious wish. The drive is at work hereseemingly by accident. The other scene or other reality of the drives shows itself in such accidental occurrences. In Lacan ( FFC: 53-64) the automaton designates the network of signifiers (rseau de signifiants): the return, the comingback, the insistence of signs. Tych, however, concerns the encounter with the real. (FFC: 53) It is something that happens by chance, as if repetition were not an issue. It is a singular encounter with the real, in distinction to the automaton which was a repetitive insistence of signs. The real may be represented by the accident, the noise, the small element of reality, which is evidence that we are not dreaming. But, on the other hand, this reality is not small, for what wakes us is the other reality hidden behind the lack of that which takes the place of representation - this, says Freud is the Trieb. ( FFC: 60; FR: 59) This other reality is what shows itself in Aristotles tych. The scene of the drives is another scene that disrupts the scene of wishes, purposes, and intentions. We know from Freud that this other scene does not respect the fundamental laws of noncontradiction and of timethe idea of a cause preceding its effect and of things happening in some kind of temporal order. The other scene is essentially bad timing or illtimed. Drive can thus be distinguished from the non-Freudian concept of desire which is timed by being a metonymic slide from one signifier to the other.

The Return of Teleology

The traditional way of telling the story of the origin of modern sciences goes that they are constituted by a break with a teleological idea of causality, in an effort to eliminate sense and purpose: only causality of the efficient kind reigns. Natural sciences have to do with functions, meaningless relations between quantifiable variables. Modern science eliminates sense. As an ideal, that is. Teleology seems to crop up like a return of the repressed. Biology, especially, has trouble getting rid of the teleological perspective due to the fact that one of its fundamental assumptions is that biological organisms, as systems, are organized towards reproductive fitness. 8 Sexuality, defined as reproductive sexuality, has as its ultimate goal the transference of the individuals genes and the survival of the species. What makes psychoanalysis extraordinary is not just that it reintroduces sense despite Freuds neuro-biological training (dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes all have a meaning, they serve the purpose of satisfying an unconscious wish), but rather that this sense goes hand in hand with sexuality, which represents a conflict in its very purposefulness. Two competing forms of teleology are at play, since drive and sexuality cannot be explained within a horizon that posits the survival of the fittest as its ultimate purpose;

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given its autoerotic and polymorphous perverse foundations sexuality cannot explain the survival of the species. In Freud, one always finds a conflictbetween the principles of pleasure and reality and later between life and death. Lacan makes the opposite move. From his structural inheritance he eliminates sense. Roughly speaking, analysis once again has to do with senseless forms and the disruption of these forms. The cause of the accidental has again become restricted to the efficient kind. The senseless accident keeps returning. The foundation of the subject is a trauma, an accidental event, a mishap, even dystychia. (Tough luck would be a colloquial translation of dystychia.) No immediate and evident reason or cause for the subject can be pinpointed. A trauma is understood as an event without necessity; a cause for the subject as an accidental, contingent event; an event without immediate purpose; an event that does not make sense, or rather a senseless event that has to be made sense of, an event that hereafter will be the foundation of sense. The cause of a trauma can only be the cause by occurring either too early or too late, as Lacan states. The trauma is inassimilable by being illtimed. The traumatic experience crucially consists in its never just being a fatal experiencean occurrence to be understood as something that came from the exterior and made a wound, a physical or psychological trauma. The accident, the tough luck, needs a choice of interpretation in order to become traumatic. So sense is yet again an issue. And the subject is responsible for this original choice of interpretation. (Sartre) One can not get rid of sense. To have a traumatic effect an event has to be interpreted. This corresponds to Aristotles point about the senseless tych: it is only seemingly accidental, it is always subordinated to sense, to the meaningful. In a psychoanalytic connection it is meaningful in two senses: the accidental event is an effect of a cause in another scene; and it is a cause of an effect that is integrated into a horizon where it is made sense of. The idea of the drive as being on the border between the somatic and the psychic, of the drive as being a psychic representation of an innersomatischen Reizquelle, never laid to rest, never at ease, could be understood as both a senseless and at the same time a represented event. Aristotle offers another possible solution to the situation that the accidental is only seemingly without purpose:
Some, moreover, hold that fortune [tych] is a genuine cause of things, but one that has a something divine and mysterious about it, that makes it inscrutable to the human intelligence. (196b)

Aristotle is not willing to take responsibility for such a hypothesisit is only some who think thisand God knows what the purpose is. It is the task of mortal psychoanalysts to bring to light this divine, mysterious and unintelligible purpose of the accidental. As we know, the positions taken by the psychoanalyst and the analytic towards a case are some of the least self-evident matters in the theoretical debate.

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Object

image

Geometral point

Point of Light

screen

Picture

The Others gaze

The concept of tych as the senseless encounter with the real crops up in Lacans discussion of perception and the eye and the gaze. The real resists sense, but it can nonetheless never be thought of without the symbolic, which gives order to the world, which makes the world a world, an oriented, ordered whole. The world is anything but a senseless chaos. Tych, however, is that which disrupts this order, that which disorganizes the perceptual field. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (FFC: 91 & 106) there are two schemata of perception. On page 106, Lacan lets them overlap.

The gaze

image screen

The subject of representation

The question is why? The first triangle schematizes the subject of cognition, a detached spectator, a purely formal pole, a subject without a body, a subject which is not a res extensa but rather a geometrical point (which by definition is without extension, without dimensions) outside the world: it is the subject of linear perspective. Here it is a question of representationsan imagea screen of pictures behind which the real world, the Ding an sich, the chose en soi is supposed to be. The relation between the subject and the world is not immediate but rather mediated by images.

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The second triangle presents the opposite point: behind the screen we do not find things in themselves but the point of light. The laws of perspective dictate that the eye is the physical point towards which the rays of light converge. To see is to be seen. To see presupposes a bodily presenceas phenomenology teaches us. The subject is here a visible, bodily object, caught and manipulated in the visual field. The subject is created in the image of the world, the subject is a tableau. The subject poses, has got an attitude, just like the ambassadors in Holbeins painting. 9 Mans being is a portrait. To be is to be seen, to be is to pose. Thus, the second schema presents the idea that just as the subject is not a subject in the philosophical sense of being the foundation of meaning; that the subject is not someone who uses language but is rather constructed in and represented by language; in the same way, the subject is not the subject of visual experience. The point of the overlapping two triangles, however, is to show that the subject which psychoanalysis speaks about is neither the transcendental, universal subject of philosophy nor a subject that is reducible to a product of representations (historically, variable constructions).
The eye and the gazethis is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field. (FFC: 73; FR: 70)

The question of tych in the visual field can make this point explicit. But to expound the point about the split between the eye and the gaze it would be useful to draw in Sartres famous passage about le regard, the gaze, from Being and Nothingness, a passage Lacan quite rightly calls brilliant. Sartres description of the Others gaze in Being and Nothingness can furthermore serve as an exposition of the need to distinguish between the other as Other (i.e., in Sartre the other as subject of the gaze), and the other as other (i.e. the other as object). According to Sartre, the other is an object who (in distinction to all other objects in the world) is the permanent possibility of turning the situation upside down (of creating a haemorrhage) by making the subject into an object of the Others gaze (regard). The Other as gaze is not necessarily represented by another concrete object, a particular other; he is rather a mere possibility, a supposition. The sound of footsteps that stop in the hallway or the slight movement of curtains might represent the possibility of an Others looking at the subject, of making the subject into an object. The Others being subject of the gaze can never be a question of knowledge, as this would imply an object. Knowledge concerns objects. The Other is an immediate experience rather than a question of cognitionas in the famous example of the shame experienced when you look through the keyhole. It is the experience without distance of being an object to the Other. The Others gaze is an intermediary which refers from me to myself.10 The Others gaze creates the recognition of being what the Other might see in you, this shameful, jealous lover bending over the keyhole or this shameful creature caught with his fingers in the candy box. Shame is the definition of

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being human, shame is the original experience of being an object for the Other, as in Genesis, when Adam and Eve see and realize that they are naked. Being an object, however, does not constitute the subject as an object for himself, but only for the Other.
In other words he does not serve as a regulative or constitutive concept for the pieces of knowledge which I may have of myself.... Thus myselfasobject is neither knowledge nor a unity of knowledge but an uneasiness, a lived wrenching away from the ekstatic unity of the foritself, a limit which I cannot reach and which yet I am. The Other through whom this Me comes to me is neither knowledge nor category but the fact of a strange freedom. (BN: 275; FR: 321-322)

This could be interpreted as a variation on the Lacanian theme of the Others not existing. Being an object to the Other is experienced with immediate evidence, but the question of whether the Others gaze is supported by actual eyes, by an actual, particular, objective presence can only be a mere possibility, a question of uneasy indetermination, never of certainty. Knowledge about objects in the world can only be probable, in contrast to the evident experience of the Other. The subject cannot know whether the moving curtain represents somebody actually looking; whereas the experience of the possibility of somebody looking is beyond doubt. The experience of the Other is nevertheless always as a concrete, particular other in a concrete, particular situation, not as a unifying regulative category of my experience since he comes to me through an encounter? (BN: 269; FR : 315) The Other is not a formal condition of possibility for being in the world. The relation to the Other is fundamentally asymmetrical, it is not a question of intersubjectivity, a question that always presupposes symmetry and reciprocity. In other words, the Other is not equivalent to the phenomenological thesis that truth and cognition are intersubjective, i.e., that the Other is what the subject can refer to as a guarantee for the objectivity of his cognition. Rather, the Other is that which makes the world disappear by making the subject into an object. Sartre stresses that the Other is not a matter of plurality, since plurality belongs only to objects, either as the multiplicity of objects or as the purely formal concept of God
[] as the omnipresent, infinite subject for whom I exist. But these two objectivations, the concrete, enumerating objectivation and the unifying, abstract objectivation, both lack proved realitythat is, the prenumerical presence of the Other. ( BN: 281; FR: 328)

The Other is an immediate experience of malaise, an uneasy indetermination in a concrete meeting.11 Sartres exposition of the Others not being a formal condition of possibility for knowledgeas the concept of intersubjectivity impliesmight be a description of a neurotic structure as the basis of mans being. The neurotic, that is, does not know what the Other wants and what he is, if anything, to the Other.

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The Others gaze is both what makes the subject into an object that is seen and what, as such, disrupts the visual field. It is something experienced as an accident, like Sartres voyeur, accidentally caught in flagranti. Another example is the famous kissing scene in Roman Polanskis Chinatown (1974). Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) has taken J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to the bathroom in order to clean a cut on his nose. His nose is an object to her eye. Suddenly he begins to talk about the colors around her pupil and she answers after a slight hesitation that, There is a flaw in my iris. She, too, has a flaw. Until then she had been in the position of looking at the object, a distanceless relation to and manipulation of the object; but when Gittes focuses on the flaw, it creates the above-mentioned haemorrhage. It is understood that this inversion of her eyes on him in favor of his gaze on her intimidates and momentarily discomposes her. He has stolen the world from her, and time stands still, as they say. To repeat: The eye and the gazethis is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field. The already eroticized scene must, due to this split, lead to a kiss performed with the perfect timing that probably only exists on film. In this, as in all famous kissing scenes in the movies, we can escape from two variations on the bad timing of the drive, hysterical forced precipitation or obsessional delayed, deferred action. When Lacan lets the two schemata overlap each other it implies that the subject is indeed a picture, a photograph: the subject is the subject of representation. The subject does pose for the Others gazeregardwhich, in the schema, is now placed both on plane of the object and on the plane of the point of light. If we forget the traditional etiquette of not staring at others in public places, something about the object has captivated one, the subject has turned into an object of the Others gaze. It is on the objects plane that the gaze resides. The world is watching the subject, the subject is visible. But it is in the split second when the subject wakes up and realizes his or her impolite staring; in this particular split second of realizing that one is an object for the Others gaze; in this very moment of moral reflection and uneasy shame, that the drive manifests itself. Reflection in general puts the subject in the position of the object. According to Sartre the ego is an object. Being self-conscious or self-reflective is to be in a state of uneasy indetermination regarding what one is to the Other. Lacan points out, adding to Sartres scenario, that it takes desire to be captivatedby what the subject can see through the

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famous key holedesire must contribute in order to make intelligible that the subject is captivated by the (gaze of the) object.the subject in question is not that of reflexive consciousness, but that of desire. (FFC: 89) But the drive manifests itself in this disruption of the desire to be lost in the object. The subject is not an empty, passive canvas for the brushstrokes of the Others gaze, the subject is not reducible to being made in the image of the world. The concept of scopic drive makes such a reduction impossible. The subject is the neithernor of the two first schemata. This is probably also the reason why it seems to be unproblematic for Lacan to draw on two traditions that are typically presented as irreconcilable: on the one hand, the subjectcentered phenomenology that does not recognize that representations or images should be a screen between the subject and the world, a world that is supposed to be out there in the exterior world. On the other hand, the formalism or structuralism that insists on the subjects status as represented, produced and constructed, a tradition that will not recognize what they consider a postulate of immediate continuity between experience and reality or the real. To the phenomenologist, a phenomenon is such because it appears immediately, without representations as a middleman. Perception is situated, determined by future possibilities, motives, intentions, purposes of ones acts on the foundation of tradition and factual circumstances. The perception, meaning and interpretation of any situation is created between what is seen as future possibilities in the background of a past that is interpreted retroactively. Perception is oriented, the world is in order, one element refers to the next, ad infinitum. Then, suddenly, something catches ones eye, something disturbs the visual field, the continuity is breached. The drive manifests itself as bad timing. The very foundation of the subject, the trauma, is such a fundamental breach.
The place of the real, which stretches from the trauma to the phantasy - in so far the phantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinant in the function of repetition.... ( FFC: 60; FR: 58-59)

This making sense of the meaningless and accidental is the Urphantasie that becomes like a philosophical category, as Freud puts it in The Wolfman. Fantasy can be understood as the unconscious response, the unconscious interpretation of this primitive scene, this accidental, contingent event; it is an original choice of interpretation that has become the screen through which the world is perceived, a screen that shows itself in the way the subject poseshis or her attitude. It is the screen through which the subject perceives the world and is interpreted by the world. To perceive anything presupposes that some kind of sense is made of it. To conclude: if it were not for drive and the function of the tych perception and beinginthe-world would form a peaceful co-existence between a world that gave itself to be seen and a subject that had an attitude, just like the ambassadors in Holbeins picture and all their vain vanitas.

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NOTES 1 Apart from in Lacan himself this point is presented in J.-A. Millers unpublished seminars, Du symp tme au fantasme et retour, lectures from 1982-1983, and Extimit, lectures from 1985-1986. Slavoj i ek is no doubt the one that throughout his work has given this philosophical point its most powerful exposition. 2 There is an infinite number of realities which are not only objects of judgment, but which are experienced, opposed, feared, etc., by the human being and which in their inner structure are inhabited by negation, as by a necessary condition of their existence. We shall call them ngatits. Jean PaulSartre, Being and Nothingness, London, Routledge 1998:2. Hereinafter: BN. [The original French is Ltre et le nant, Paris: Gallimard, 1943:58. Hereinafter FR] 3 For an important discussion of the anti-historicism of psychoanalysis, see Joan Copjecs Read My Desire. Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994. 4 Sigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einfhrung in die Psychoanalyse. Gesammelte Werke XV: London, Imago Publishing Co., 1940:101. 5 This freedom which reveals itself to us in anguish can be characterized by the existence of that nothing which insinuates itself between motives and act. It is not because I am free that my act is not subject to the determination of motives; on the contrary, the structure of motives as ineffective is the condition of my freedom. If someone asks what this nothing is which provides a foundation for freedom, we shall reply that we can not describe it since it is not, but we can at least hint at its meaning by saying that this nothing is made-to-be by the human being in his relation with himself. Sartre, BN: 34 [ FR: 6970] 6 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1978. Hereinafter FFC. [Original French: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psych analyse, Seuil, Paris 1973. Hereinafter FR.] 7 From Aristotle, The Physics, Book II, 192b, tr. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford, London: William Heineman LTD, 1929. See also Joan Copjecs exposition of this issue, op. cit.:47-50. 8 Cf. Colin Allen, Marc Bekoff, and George Lauder, Natures Purposes. Analysis of Function and Design in Biology, Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1998; especially Francisco J Ayala,. Teleological Explanations in Evolutionary Biology, 44-45. 9 On the cover of the original French version of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 10 BN: 259 [ FR: 305]. In the English translation regard is translated by look. It has, however, become customary to translate the look of the Other with gaze and the look of the subject with vision and look. 11 Sartre, BN: 275 and 281 [FR: 322 and 328]. It is therefore problematic when Kaja Silverman in The Threshold of the Visible World, New York and London: Routledge, 1996:164ff, interprets Sartres concept of the gaze as a transcendental eye, a pure and absolute subject, if by transcendental is meant a formal condition of possibility for cognition of entities as entities, as empirical objects. First, the Other does not concern the world but as already stated the immediate experience of being an object to the Other. Second, the Other is a concrete and particular condition for the subject being an object for the Other. Third, the Other may be transcendent in the sense of being that which is beyond any possible cognition. To interpret Sartres Other as a transcendental eye would be to make it exist, to make it into a concept of God, i.e. enlist it in the set of that which can be counted.

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Klossowski, ce soir
Tracy McNulty
Cornell University

o the extent that Pierre Klossowski is recognized by psychoanalytic audiences, it is as the very emblem of perversion. His art graces the cover of Serge Andrs LImposture perverse; he has been diagnosed as a pervert by psychoanalytic writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and hailed by unironic readers of his Sade, mon prochain as Sades disciple and heir.1 They probably know as well that he was the author chosen to replace Jacques Lacan when the latters Kant avec Sade was deemed unsuitable as the introduction to Pauverts edition of the Oeuvres Compltes of the Marquis de Sade, and that his work inspired two of the greatest counter-psychoanalytic works of the 1970sGilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris Anti-Oedipus, and JeanFranois Lyotards Libidinal Economy . But the seriousness of his reflections on (and also against) psychoanalysis have never been systematically explored. When his brilliant 1965 trilogy Les lois de lhospitalit was partially translated in English under the title Roberte, Ce Soir & The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, its Library of Congress classification characterized it simply as erotic fictionFrench. The larger stakes of Klossowskis work are easily obscured by his free adaptation of the stock themes of perverse literature. His fictional works, like his visual compositions (drawings of rape scenes, often on historical or mythological themesDiana and Acteon, the rape of Lucretia) explore the conflict between a womans chaste moral attitude and her gradual surrender to an assailants advances. The Laws of Hospitality

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concerns the erotic awakening of a woman that exposes a contradiction in her moral character and reveals her symbolic identity to be without foundation. Its protagonist, Octave (who bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator), is a collector of artworks that eroticize the moment of moral hesitation experienced by women submitting to the sexual advances of a chance strangeror even a spiritual apparition. His laws of hospitality are the fruit of his desire to experience this operation firsthand; they name a practice wherein the master of the house offers his wife to fortuitous guests, in order to savor the moment of her surrender. As in the great manifestoes of perversion, Klossowski proceeds implacably toward the demonstration of a thesis concerning the status of the signifieror law. 2 What he demonstrates is the unfoundedness of the law of personal identity, by virtue of the death of God. But something very different from the Sadeian project of uprooting religious morality is at stake in Klossowskis perverse meditations. Sade challenges the patriarchal and religious authorities of his day by demonstrating that the paternal signifier on which their laws are based is without foundation. In proving that the law cannot hold up against the repeated assaults of libertinage, he seeks to mount a systematic deconstruction of the symbolic order of language by the real of jouissance. But although Klossowski may share Sades perverse drive to humiliate the law with the object, 3 his target is not the signifier as such, but rather the imaginary consistency afforded by what he calls the grammatical fiction of the I, the illusion of autonomous personhood. The object with which he confronts it is not the natural truth of jouissance, but rather the feminine object who disrupts the identity of the master who offers her. Klossowskis reflections on the special status of femininityat once marginal and singularly extimatein Enlightenment culture have never been fully appreciated, despite their enormous interest for the psychoanalytic study of culture. In a way unique among contemporary authors, Klossowski sheds light on Jacques Lacans enigmatic insight that the cultural importance of the feminine object consists in its sublimated status as an object raised to the dignity of the Thing.4 His fiction underscores the close ties between the feminine and what Freud called das Ding, the Thing uncannily internal to subjectivity Lacan later identified with the function of the Nebenmensch, as the very apotheosis of the Christian idea of the neighbor. (SEM VII: 151-2) Although Klossowskis erotic scenario invites comparisons with Sades and Fouriers utopian calls to dissolve the privative boundaries between subjects, what he understands by hospitality is not the abolition of personal identity, but rather the staging of its internal contradiction.

Hospitality, at the Limits of the Law

Hospitalitywhose theological and philosophical origins this Latin scholar and former Dominican novice was intimately acquainted withconcerns a very particular tension. Etymologically, the host is the master, who eminently personifies identity: not

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only his own, but also that of the group in whose name he acts. 5 At the same time, the hosts identity is paradoxically established through dispossession: the best host is the one who has given the most, even to the point of giving away what defines him as master and host. This tension marks an aporetic limit, where identity is established at the very point of its dissolution. The patriarch Abraham, the most famous host in the Western tradition, embodies such a tension: the biblical injunction to make the stranger native among you (Leviticus 19:34) inaugurates a relation to subjectivity characterized by nomadism and estrangement, where strangeness is figured as native, or uncannily intimate, to subjectivity. The choice of a religious figure to represent the dialectic of hospitality is not incidental. If the host submits to the dispossession of his identity, it is, in almost every hospitality tradition, because of the implied promise that through his act his identity will also be realized. Hospitality becomes a uniquely religious relation, a sacred act that mandates an extreme exposure and dispossession on the part of the host, but also allows this dispossession to be successfully endured, and even to be valorized. In the ancient Greek, Jewish, and Christian traditions, the principal divinity (Zeus, YHWH, the Holy Trinity) incarnates hospitality, and evaluates the character of human hosts by appealing for hospitality disguised as a supplicant. Accordingly, the host both does and does not know the identity of his divine guest. Hospitality is motivated by the potentially sacred nature of the guest, whose true identity must nonetheless remain hidden for authentic hospitality to take place. As the absolute, unknowable Other, God represents an alterity that is affirmatively construed, since mans relation to the divine allows for identity to be realized in its dispossession, actualized by the divine stranger. Were the guest not potentially divine, or at least an occasion to gain recognition by the divine, the stranger would simply annihilateand not realizehis hosts identity. These traditional formulations, however, beg certain questions, implied in Klossowskis idiosyncratic take on hospitality. What meaning or relevance, for example, would hospitality have outside of a sacred or religious context? If God, in his unknown quality, is the ultimate guest (the stranger inassimilable in its difference) then how, in the absence of religion, can we imaginemuch less practicethe radical opening of identity that an ethics of hospitality demands? The modern era has toyed with two different answers, neither wholly satisfactory. The first replaces the absolute ethics of hospitality with formalizable laws that absorb the strangers foreignness under a common measure, such as a legal designation (national identity, community membership) or a principle of economic exchange (as in the most modern avatar of hospitality, the so-called hospitality industry of tourism). Such solutions erase the fundamental inequality between host and guest, rendering them interchangeable, reversible positions that can be designated by the same term (as in the French hte). The increasing secularization of human relations has left no place for the other to be considered sacred in its unknowability, while at the same

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time providing no compelling new reason for the host to accept the dispossession of his identity that hospitality requires. Moreover, the problem is larger than just secularization. Christian eucharistic hospitalitythe doctrinal name for the practice of communionis the transubstantive equivalent of this secular reciprocity, since it allows for the faithful to be made equal as values of the one Christ by their consumption of the host. The estrangement that characterizes Hebraic hospitality is redeemed in the brotherhood of Christ, which makes men neighbors at the expense of disavowing or even demonizing their strangeness. The Marquis de Sade suggested a second alternative, which is less the apotheosis than the repressed underside of the first: the complete erasure of privative frontiers between subjects through an imperative of universal adulteration. 6 Upholding a law of jouissance at the expense of legal identities or moral codes, Sade seeks to erase the borders not only between nations, but between the sexes, between the self and the other, and between the human subject and the jouissance precluded by the law. In the process, however, Sade does not so much revive the stakes of hospitality as disavow what is most fundamental to it: the encounter with the other as the internal limit of the subjects own identity. Klossowskis formulation of hospitality does not accept either alternative. Instead, Klossowski invents a third way, inspired by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and his doctrine of the Eternal Return. Nietzsche implies that the sacred determination of the hospitality act is not what is outdated, but the way in which the person of the stranger has been increasingly inscribed within categorical determinations. To the Christian imperative to love the neighbor, Nietzsche opposes a love of the most distantthe most distant man or man of the future, but also, more generally speaking, the foreign or the unfamiliar. 7 Where post-Enlightenment hospitality merely substitutes secular principles for religious values, the Nietzschean death of God entails the annihilation of all principles, the transvaluation of all valuesincluding the value of personal identity itself. Klossowski draws the logical conclusion from Nietzsches argument that for the transvaluation of all values to be complete, identity itself must disappear along with God.8 His thesis involves the end of the positive idea of personal identity that the monotheistic understanding of God perpetuates. 9 But while Nietzsche is critical of the notion of identity upon which hospitality is predicated, it is important for Klossowskis purposes that he does not dismiss the importance of hospitality altogether. In reworking the topoi of the stranger, the wanderer, and the uncanny, Nietzsche demonstrates that the hospitality relation is where the transvaluation of all values will take place, making way for a non-identical, dissolved subjectivity.10 Hospitality thus sketches the horizon of a modernity that can no longer appeal to a transcendental representation of identity; its dominant figure is the eternal return of

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the same as different, dispossessed of its identity to itself. Despite its apparent archaism, therefore, hospitality reemerges as an essential concern for modernity, presenting a unique challenge to metaphysical notions of identity. Although Klossowski is indebted to Nietzsche, his own conception of hospitality breaks new ground by elaborating these problems within the domain of the sexual relation. In his fictional trilogy The Laws of Hospitality, 11 he engages a relationship between a man and wife and the peculiar laws of hospitality that govern their marriage. The hostess is the key term in a hospitable relationship whose purpose is to actualize the inactual essences of host, hostess and guest, at the expense of their privative identities. The feminine traditionally occupies an essential position within the hospitality relation, but not as a subject. In the religious and cultural traditions informing Klossowskis work, the host is always male, and the many terms designating the host have no female equivalent. By making the hostess the centerpiece of his conception of hospitality, Klossowski departs from the familiar contours of the hospitality tradition and, at the same time, recovers something latent within that tradition from its archaic origins, which has been largely suppressed or overlooked in its dominant institutional forms. As modern secular relationsbrotherly love, equal rights, and legal citizenshipdisplace archaic modes of hospitality and exchange, the feminine continues to occupy a marginal and uncertain position. Klossowskis insistence on the hostess challenges these models with evidence of their limitations. But it does so not simply by giving her equal importance, allowing her to take her place alongside the men. Rather, woman contests the reversibility of an equal relation to the other with evidence of a fundamental inequality with regard to the signifier that defines the sexual relation. She exceeds the economy of exchange, having no place in the reciprocal relation established between male host and male guest. Paradoxically enough, however, Klossowskis critique is played out through a woman who is offered between men. His protagonist, Octave, is a retired professor of scholastic theology. He wants to experience the divine in a post-divine world, and he hopes to apprehend it by provoking a certain excessan unknown that eludes the conjugal gazein his wife Roberte. An unlikely match for her husband, Roberte is in many ways the supreme achievement of Enlightenment ideals, the very clich of the emancipated woman. A severe beauty who is both a high-ranking member of the Chamber of Deputies and President of the Censorship Commission, Roberte is a real Virginia Slims kind of girl, a feminist avant la lettre. She is really the last person one would expect to see involved in such an intriguewhich is part of the point. For Octave suspects that there is something more to her, something that he hopes to discover with the help of chance strangers. In the opening pages of Roberte, ce soir, the central novel in Klossowskis trilogy,

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Octaves nephew describes his uncles laws of hospitality:

THE LAWS OF HOSPITALITY The master of this house [matre de cans], having no greater nor more pressing concern than to shed the warmth of his joy at evening upon whomever comes to dine at his table and rest under his roof from a days wearying travel, waits anxiously at the gate for the stranger he will see appear like a liberator upon the horizon. And catching a first glimpse of him, though he be still far off, the master will call out to him, Come in quickly, for I am afraid of my happiness. ... For with the stranger he welcomes, the master of the house seeks a relationship that is no longer accidental, but essential. At the start the two are but isolated substances, between them there is none but accidental communication: you who believe yourself far from home in the home of someone you believe to be at home, you bring merely the accidents of your substance, such accidents as conspire to make a stranger of you, to him who bids you avail yourself of all that makes a merely accidental host of him. But because the master of this house herewith invites the stranger to penetrate to the source of all substances beyond the realm of all accident, he inaugurates a substantial relationship between himself and the stranger, which will be not a relative relationship but an absolute one, as though, the master becoming one with the stranger, his relationship with you who have just set foot here were now but a relationship of one with oneself. To this end the host actualizes himself in the guest; or, if you prefer, he actualizes a possibility of the guest, just as you, the guest, actualize a possibility of the host. The hosts most eminent gratification has for its object the

When my uncle Octave took my aunt Roberte in his arms, one must not suppose that in taking her he was alone. An invited guest would enter while Roberte, entirely given over to my uncles presence, was not expecting him. And while she was in fear lest the guest arrivefor with irresistible resolution Roberte awaited the arrival of some guestthe guest would already be looming up behind her as my uncle made his entry, just in time to surprise my aunts satisfied fright at being surprised by the guest. But in my uncles mind it was all over and done with in the blink of an eye, and once again my uncle would be on the point of taking my aunt in his arms. It would be over in the blink of an eye... for, after all, one cannot at the same time take and not take, be there and not be there, enter a room when one is already in it. My Uncle Octave would have been asking too much had he wished to prolong the instant of the opened door; he was already doing exceedingly well in getting the guest to appear in the doorway at the precise moment he did, getting the guest to loom up behind Roberte so that he, Octave, might be able to sense that he himself was the guest as, borrowing from the guest his door-opening gesture, he could behold them from the threshold and have the impression that it was he, Octave, who was taking my aunt by surprise.11

Admittedly, it isnt necessarily clear why this scenario represents a compelling alternative to Christianity or tourism. But as the novel unfolds, Klossowski reveals that the erotic awakening of the woman suspended between host and guest does nothing less than assume the place vacated by God, in maintaining the tension between identity and its dispossession.

The Laws of Hospitality

The laws of hospitality that Octave conceives, and in which his wife participates, are elaborated in an extremely dense and cryptic argument, whose hand-written pages are framed under glass and hung in the couples guest bedroom: The actualization the laws of hospitality effect assumes an essential, almost spiritual form, obvious in their heavily theological tone. (We must remember that they are composed by a Catholic theologian, albeit one who has been banned from his post due to his predilection for writing perversely erotic fiction.)

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The allegory that frames Octaves elaboration of the laws is an obvious allusion to the most famous religious narrative of hospitality, Abrahams reception of the disguised angels of God in Genesis 18. The relation between them is essential to the extent that the host is actualized through his reception of the divine, the absent cause of his own identity. The angels come to announce the transformation of Abrahams merely mortal state into a holy one, through the miraculous birth of his only son Isaac. But in Genesis, as in Klossowskis scenario, the hosts transformation can only be achieved through the actualization of an inactual possibility of his wife, the hostess. The angels promise to realize Sarahs inactual essence by giving the barren woman a child. She is the medium through which the identities of host and guest are joined in an essential relation, and for this reason is often read as prefiguring the annunciation . But when Octave describes the affect of curiosity as the potentiality of the hospitable soul, and calls for it to eclipse the masters jealousy, however, he seems to be alluding to another important paradigm. In The City of God, Augustine understands Abrahams hospitality as a prefiguration of the new covenant, which through Christ makes possible a community of grace in which many are bound together in one heart. Although the community of shared love may be whole-hearted, the precondition of its wholeness is a necessary exclusionof private will or personal interest:
Isaac, who was born as a result of a promise, is rightly interpreted as symbolizing the children of grace ... who form a community where there is no love of a will that is personal and, we might say, private, but a love that rejoices in a good that is at once shared by all and unchanginga love that makes one heart out of many, a love that is the whole-hearted and harmonious obedience of mutual affection.12

In Augustines interpretation of the hospitality bond, the host welcomes the unknown in hopes that it might not be so unknown after all, that behind the unknown name of the stranger there lies hidden an essence he does knowor at least knows how to name, to resume under the inclusive logos of the divine signifier.

actualization in the mistress of the house [matresse de cans] of the inactual essence of the hostess. Now, upon whom is this duty incumbent if not the guest? Does this mean that the master of the house expects betrayal at the hands of the mistress of the house? Now it seems that the essence of the hostess, such as the host visualizes it, would in this sense be undetermined and contradictory. For either the essence of the hostess is constituted by her fidelity to the host, and in this case she eludes him the more he wishes to know her faithful to him; or else the essence of the hostess is really constituted by infidelity, in which case the host would cease to have any part in the essence of the hostess who would be susceptible to belonging accidentally, as mistress of the home, to some one or other of the guests. The notion of the mistress of the house reposes upon an essential basis: this essence is therefore subjected to restraint by her actual existence as mistress of the house. And here the sole function of betrayal, we see, is to lift this restraint. If the essence of the hostess lies in fidelity to the host, this authorizes the host to cause the hostess, essential in the existent mistress of the house, to manifest herself before the eyes of the guest; for the host in playing host must accept the risksand these include the consequences of his wifes strict application of the laws of hospitality and of the fact that she dare not be unmindful of her essence, composed of fidelity to the host, for fear that in the arms of the inactual guest come here to actualize her qua hostess, the mistress of the household exist only traitorously. If the essence of the hostess lay in infidelity, the outcome of the game would be a foregone conclusion and

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the host the loser before it starts. But the host wishes to experience the risk of losing, and feels that, losing rather than winning in advance, he will, at whatever the cost, grasp the essence of the hostess in the infidelity of the mistress of the house. For to possess the faithless one qua hostess faithfully fulfilling her duties, that is what he is after. Hence by means of the guest he wishes to actualize something potential in the mistress of the house: an actual hostess in relation to this guest, an inactual mistress of the house in relation to the host. If the hostess essence remains thus indeterminate, because to the host it seems that something of the hostess might escape him in the event this essence were nothing but pure fidelity on the part of the mistress of the house, the essence of the host is proposed as an homage of the hosts curiosity to the essence of the hostess. Now this curiosity, as a potentiality of the hospitable soul, can have no proper existence except in that which would look to the hostess, were she naive, like suspicion or jealousy. The host however is neither suspicious nor jealous, because he is essentially curious about that very thing which, in everyday life, would make a master of the house suspicious, jealous, unbearable. Let the guest not be the least uneasy; above all let him not suppose he could ever be cause for jealousy or suspicion when there is not even anyone to feel these sentiments.... Let the guest understand his role well: let him then fearlessly excite the hosts curiosity by that jealousy and that suspicion, worthy in the master of the house but unworthy of a host; the latter enjoins the guest loyally to do his utmost; in this competition let them surpass each other in subtlety: let the host put the

In Augustines paradigm, the essential relation between host and guest subsumes them into a transcendent community that neutralizes their particular identities. For Christian theology, Abrahams hospitality becomes a figure for the Holy Trinity, since it actualizes a higher identity through communion with the absent cause. In the words of one doctrinal interpretation, the stranger becomes the pretext, the means through which we enter into eucharistic communion with the Creator. Thus, the stranger acquires a sacred character.13 The result is that individual strangers become less strange, reduced to the status of pretexts for some already familiar manifestation. In many Christian interpretations of hospitality, Christ is present in host and guest alike, and makes equality possible by mediating among the different participants, who become values of the one Christ through the act of communion. In other words, they enter into relation with one another only to the extent that they actualize the inactual essence of Christ. When Octave writes that what he seeks with the stranger is a relationship of one with oneself, upheld by laws, he seems to advocate a similar reduction to a common measure. Klossowski, however, both alludes to Christian tradition and departs from it. Hostess and guest do appear in Christ-like roles: Klossowskis hostess, as an offering, is the medium through which two distinct entities enter into a substantial relation, akin to Christs eucharistic status as a gift who is both handed over to strangers and offered in sacrifice. 14 But Klossowskis guest also serves a similar function, since he enters into the intimacy of the marriage to realize something latent within it, and in so doing he, too, acquires a quasi-divine status. Against the notion of personal or communal identity as whole or one, Klossowski makes hospitality synonymous with a conflict or division internal to identity. His three-term relation is less a trinity than a sexualized threesome, where the third term is not an agent of unification, but an intruder who introduces a fissure into a reciprocal relation between two people. As a third term heterogeneous to the reversible dyad of host and guest, the hostess facilitates the relation between them and at the same time insists on its fundamental impossibility. She does not so much mediate between the host and the guest as come between them.

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On the one hand, the wife is suspended, stuck in the middle, caught between the arms of the host and the stranger who, in the blink of an eye, looms up in such a way as to loosen her husbands hold over her. But she also comes between them in the sense that she incites a rivalry, a contest in which host and guest meet as opponents in a struggle for prestige. As a result, her role in actualizing the hospitable relation between host and guest depends not on her status as a universal value or constant (as in the example of Christ) but upon her inconstancy, in the fullest sense. A divine gift, albeit qualified by her status as an object of rivalry and even of theft, she is no agent of harmonious unity. In the same way, the guests role involves competition, prestige, and the threat of loss. Augustine appeals for a hospitable community united in one heart; but Klossowskis host invites the guest to do his utmost to incite jealous emotiona very un-Christian turn of events. He is called upon to undertake the very delicate operation of introducing a specific division into the bond between husband and wife. If he pulls it off he will be heralded as an angel; if not, the essence of each different participant will remain unrealized. Klossowski sums up the guiding principle of the laws of hospitality: In the beginning was betrayal... ( FR: 172) An originary betrayal is called upon to realize hospitality as a principle of incoherence or dissolution, displacing the Word, the Christian logos, as source of communal coherence.

guests discretion to the test, and the guest make proof of the hosts curiosity: the term generosity has no place in this discussion, since everything is generosity, and everything is also greed; but let the guest take all due care lest this jealousy or this suspicion grow to such proportions that no room is left in the host for his curiosity; for it is upon this curiosity that the guest depends for his prestige. If the hosts curiosity aspires to actualize itself in the absent cause, how does he hope to convert this absence into presence unless it be that he awaits the visitation of an angel? Solicited by the hosts piety, the angel is capable of concealing himself in the guise of a guestis it you?whom the host believes fortuitous. ... In order that the hosts curiosity not degenerate into jealousy or suspicion, it is for you, the guest, to discern the hostess essence in the mistress of the house, for you to cast her forth from potentiality into existence: either the hostess remains sheer phantasm and you a stranger in this house if you leave to the host the inactualized essence of the hostess, or else you are indeed that angel, and by your presence you give an actuality to the hostess: you shall have full power over her as well as over the host. And so, cherished guest, you cannot help but see that it is in your best interest to fan the hosts curiosity to the point where the mistress of the house, driven out of herself, will be completely actualized in an existence which shall be determined by you alone, by you, the guest, and not by the hosts curiosity. Whereupon the host shall be the master in his house no more: he shall have carried out his mission. In his turn he shall have become the guest. (E12; F 110; translation modified)

Gift and Theft

The notion that the hosts identity can be actualized only through splitting or division points to yet another field of associations evoked by Octaves laws: the logic of potlatch, a highly ritualized form of hospitality that also promises to realize or to actualize the givers sacred status through loss or expropriation. The partial surrender of his substance ultimately confirms the hosts mastery and prestige, which grows in direct proportion to the loss or destruction of his goods. The more the master gives, the more he has: because his prestations will eventually be reciprocated by others, but alsoand most importantlybecause his prestige accrues in the act of

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giving. In the same way, Octave-as-host augments his prestige by offering up his most cherished good to others. While Octaves hospitality relation approximates the logic of potlatch, it is also subtly different. He proposes to offer up his wife to chance strangers, yet he neither expects, nor gets, anything in return. He receives no monetary compensation or honor from his guests (who, in fact, dismiss him as a lecherous old pervert with a libertine wife), nor does he enjoy others wives in exchange for his own. Roberte, as hostess, is a gift who must be stolen from the host, who in turn must recognize and accept her theft by a worthy guest. To grasp the nuances of Octaves gift, we have to appreciate its continuity with theft, or what might even be called a logic of sacred expenditure. For the aim of the prestation is not merely to accrue symbolic prestige by generously bestowing goods, but to effect the forcible erosion or dissolution of the masters personal property. The guests status as an angel is thus qualified by his role as thief, a possessor as illegitimate as he is fortuitous. The uniting of these two antithetical qualities in the person of the unknown stranger has a long cultural history, that hearkens back to a context in which the offering of women is celebrated as the foundation of a prestige economy whose stakes cannot be reduced to mere commodification or exchange. Claude Lvi-Strauss showed that the aim of exogamyabove and beyond the cultural objectives of prohibiting incest or guaranteeing the spread of languageis to establish and maintain an economy of prestige, in which a family attains its status through the matches it arranges for its daughters, who function as a kind of social currency.15 Daughters must always marry up, and in principle will always do so as long as the family is on the ascent. If, on the other hand, the family has fallen from favor, the daughters are unable to marry up and the familys downward mobility is sealed. The paradox is that as a family accrues prestige and advances up the social hierarchy, it becomes harder and harder for it to find suitable matches for its daughters. This, according to LviStrauss, is what explains the phenomenon so common in legend, in which the most prized virgin in the realm (for example, the princess or daughter of the ranking chieftain) is unable to marry at all. This is where the function of the guest or outsider as thief comes in, and acquires its prestigious or even sacred dimension. 16 If the prize virgin is barricaded in a tower or consigned to God, it isnt just because there are no worthy suitors in the realm, but because no suitor is good enough for her, according to the laws of social prestige. Hence she is given to God: either literally removed from the sexual economy (by taking religious vows or assuming a sacred function, including sacrifice), or given to one who presents himself as a god, or under the sign of godlinessthe guest. In the guise of the knight errant or stranger from afar, he wanders the countryside like the gods of old, seeking out chance encounters through which he can establish his prestige. By solving a riddle, winning a joust, or otherwise establishing his worth,

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the guest wins the hand of the elite virgin or princess. The interloping stranger thus functions to steal the woman too good simply to be given away through available avenues of exchange, taking her for his wife or Lady. The stranger proves the value of the woman he takes by removing her from circulation, establishing her transcendence of all economies of exchange by introducing a gap into the reciprocity-based economy of social relations. Of course, Klossowski adds a significant twist to the basic Lvi-Straussian paradigm in Roberte, ce soir, since it is not a prized damsel or marriageable virgin who is subject to theft by a stranger/god, but rather the masters own wife. The possession Octave puts into circulation is not merely prized, or even priceless, but inalienable: something that, by its very nature, can belong to no one else. As he himself puts it later in the trilogy, the wife, even prostituted by the husband, is nonetheless still the wife: the husbands inexchangeable good, the priceless good who shows her worth when the wife surrenders to a lover chosen by her husband.17 The tension between prestige and loss is thus further complicated by a delicate balance between the claims of the host and the claims of the husband, between the faithfulness of the hostess and the fidelity of the mistress of the home, each of which appear to be mutually exclusive. How can the master become the host without simply losing his wife? In other words, how does hospitality avoid simply lapsing into adultery? Why does Klossowskis Octave need to force this limit by trying to locate hospitality both within the marriage, and in direct opposition to it? The apparent antinomy between the interests of the host and the master of the home is all the more perplexing given how inseparable the two terms are etymologically. A glance at this etymology here reveals the crisis Klossowski/Octave tries to provoke in hospitably offering the hosts own wife.

The Dissolution of Privative Personhood

In his seminal study of the Indo-European roots of hospitality, mile Benveniste identifies two primary roots in the ancient compound hosti-pets: hostismeaning guest or host, and pet- or pot-, meaning master.18 The Latin potis, source of the modern potentate, names the master of the home, the one who makes the law in the house (the casa). Whoever offers hospitality must be master at home, chez lui. But as Benveniste makes clear, this place or chez soi is not just a dwelling place, it is the fact of residing within an identity. Potis identifies not just the master with authoritative power, but the one who is eminently himself, the very personification of personal identity. The mastery of the potis is nothing other than ipseity itself, the chez soi of identity in which the master gathers together and disposes of what is proper to him. Klossowski uses an archaic French term to designate the master of the house, matre de cans, that is closely tied to Benveniste genealogy: cans is related both to the house or casa where the master makes the law and to the chez soi as the at-home-

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ness of ipseity as self-identity. The notion of personal identity is grounded in a very precise idea of personal property, which is also intimately related to the domestic sphere and to the sexual relation: many words in this linguistic family apply to both the master and the husband. The Greek psis, for example, is both a poetic term for husband and the root of desptes, the master or despot. (88) Desptes, and its Latin equivalent dominus, represent an extension of domestic authority into the field of social and symbolic power. Both terms designate the lord or head of the clan, but also the possessor, the one who has power over and is able to dispose of his subjects. (91-92) The masters ability to personify eminently his own identity (and that of the group) is upheld by his possession of and power over the human dependents defined as his property. The connotations of lord, master, and possessor are thus intimately bound up in one another, since the master is self-possessed only insofar as he is also possessed of material and human property. In archaic practice, and in biblical tradition, when the host offers his own substance to his guest it often takes the form of an ability to dispose of those female dependents who make up his personal property, and who are equated with the host by virtue of their subordinate dependence. In biblical narratives, the host often fulfills his duty toward the guest by offering up his mistress or unmarried daughters, as though this sacrifice of his chattel represented a surrender of some part of himself. However, this reasoning also implies that there is something heterogeneous about the hosts identity as a master equal to himself, since the personal identity he embodies is not self-identical or autonomous, but a kind of plurality. What then is the property of the host? And who is the host, proper? In his rich study of the concept of the person, Marcel Mauss observes that in many clan-based societies, personhood inheres in the ownership of certain ritual objects, which mark the bearers responsibility for his whole clan. For this very reason, personhood can also be acquired through inheritance, theft, or murder, which transfers to the usurping party the privative personhood of the last owner.19 Although woman as property contributes to the masters eminent personification of personal identity, she also undermines the illusion of self-sufficiency and ipseity that the master is supposed to embody. She draws attention to its dependence upon an im-proper attachment or addition that remains foreign even in being subordinated and internalized. The hostess thus attests to the presence of something improper within the hosts personal property, a foreign presence internal to the hosts eminent personification of identity. I drew attention earlier to the internal paradox of personal identity that the host embodies: the host as master personifies personal and group identity, but his identity as host is realized only through the dispossession and surrender of his substance. When Octave exposes his own wife to theft, therefore, he risks not just the loss of his property, but of his personhood as such. He wishes to strain his proprietary claims to

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the breaking point, to the point of breaking apart mastery itself, precisely because his status as master of the home stands in the way of his actualization as host. Although Klossowskis interpretation of hospitality is not unique in making a living woman the object of dispossession, it is singular in its proposition that the hosts wife occupy this roleand more so for the stakes it attaches to this dispossession. In most traditions, the loss incurred when the hosts property is expropriated gets recuperated in some way, and his dispossession is merely temporary. For example, the Hebrew Bible contains examples of women being offered up to guests, but the offer is almost never acted upon. Typically, the host is preserved from loss by some form of divine intervention, which either prevents the act from taking place (as in the story of Lot), or valorizes it after the fact. The loss of identity is thus recovered dialectically, and becomes the point of departure for a new actualization. The same holds true in the logics of potlatch or sacred theft, where the symbolic prestige of the host grows in direct proportion to the loss of his goods or human dependents. In Klossowskis scenario, however, the host desires the dispossession of identity itself, and not the dialectical recuperation of mastery. His aim is to become the guest in his own home, to savor the moment of expropriation in which he is deprived not only of his most defining property, but of the identity it guarantees. By soliciting the part of the hostess nature that exceeds the masters proprietary hold over her, the guest points to a contradiction internal to the identity of the man who possesses her, a fissure or split within the principle of personal property the master embodies. When his wife is surprised by the guest in her quality as mistress of the house and actualized as hostess, the husbands determination as master (that is, as one who is eminently equal to himself and capable of symbolically personifying the household, according to Benvenistes definition...) is rendered improper, alienated. In short, he is realized as host precisely through the loss of his identity as master. This is the logic of Klossowskis laws, which strive to maintain the paradox internal to hospitality as a simultaneous dispossession and realization of the hosts identity. Although Octave admits that one cannot at the same time take and not take, be there and not be there, enter a room when one is already in it, this is nonetheless precisely what he proposes to doby forcing the impossible limit between the fidelity of the hostess and the fidelity of the wife, and between the curiosity of the host and the jealousy of the master. For if Octaves formulation of the laws favors the affect of curiosity over jealousy, it isnt only because jealousy is a less refined emotion. Rather, it is because jealousy is structurally tied to a particular notion of privative identity, in which the integrity of the person is synonymous with his ability to keep his possessions jealously to himself, and thus maintain the unity or coherence of the personal property of the self. This relates to the singularity of the curiosity the host hopes to experience. Curiosity, as the potentiality of the hospitable soul, is the emotion that corresponds to

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the erosion of personhood. The host therefore awaits the stranger not merely as a thief, but as a liberator he calls upon to free him of the constraints of personal identity. Jealousy, as a principle of privative identity, also has a theological source. In the first commandment of the decalogue, Gods jealousy is invoked as the conditioning tenet of monotheism: For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, and thou shalt have no others before me. (Exodus 20:5) In the logic of the Hebrew Bible, hospitality is increasingly bound up in the problem of idolatry, what the metaphor of Israels marriage to God figures as the wifes adulterous welcoming of strangers in the place of her husband. 20 But the antinomy between hospitality and monotheism suggests that the hostess betrays not only a bond of allegiance, but a principle of unity: Gods jealousy is the index of his sublime singularity, the Oneness on which the doctrine of monotheism is based. This betrayal has important implications not just for God, but for the human subject whose personhood is modeled on this integral oneness. The decalogue upholds the sanctity of individual personhood by giving it jealous dominion over the things it possesses, including the wife, which are coextensive with their possessor and thus offlimits to the covetous neighbor or stranger. In his 1970 essay Protase et apodose, Klossowski describes the importance of the wifes betrayal through a gloss of the 10th commandment, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors goods:
The interdiction affirms a subject possessed of a person, who is here identified as an inalienable object. But to the extent that this object acts, it negatively reveals itself to have the quality of a subject, insofar as it consented to the possession of the first possessor. It then loses his subjective quality once again by substituting someone else for the first possessing subject. In this way, the interdiction institutes a moral agency of the object [un moi de lobjet], which only possesses this intrinsic quality to the extent that it is legitimately possessed, and that, according to the interdiction, expropriates itself of that moral quality by expropriating its legitimate proprietor, in favor of a fortuitous and illegitimate possessor. 21

Perhaps Klossowski references the commandment concerning the neighbors goods, and not the more obvious choice, the commandment against adultery, because the first implies an essential link between the thing and its proprietor, while the second implies the independent agency of a subject linked to her spouse in a merely legal or accidental way (to use Klossowskis term). In the logic of monogamous marriage the husband possesses his wife in an exclusive, inalienable way. Her susceptibility to expropriation proves, however, that he can never possess her completely. She is part of her husbands property only to the extent that she is im-proper to it, since the wife-as-object possesses a moral agency that gives her the negative quality of a subject. A subject (i.e., the mistress of the home) can commit adultery, but an object (i.e., the inactual essence of the hostess as offering) can do much more: it

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can actually expropriate its possessor. Whereas Israels adultery only destroys her marriage, but does not contaminate or dissolve the oneness of her divine husband, Robertes hospitality actually splinters her husbands oneness, since as a possessed thing she is implicated in his subjectivity. The tension between betrayal and fidelity is therefore crucial to Octaves formulation of the laws. As he says, If the essence of the hostess lay in infidelity, the outcome of the game would be a foregone conclusion and the host the loser before it starts. It is not simple infidelity (or adultery) he wants to experience, but the fidelity of the hostess within the infidelity of the mistress of the home. Or as he puts it, to possess the faithless one qua hostess faithfully fulfilling her duties, that is what [the host] is after. If Roberte is given to the guest simply as mistress of the house, and not as hostess, the hospitality act is compromised at the outset. If Octave and Roberte break through the privative constraints of the master and mistress of the home, and yet fail to find hospitality on the other side, this transgression will have been for naughtthe wife would be no more than an adulteress, and the husband would experience nothing more than the wounded narcissism of the cuckold. The jealousy of the master of the house would preclude his curiosity, preventing the inactual essence of the host from manifesting itself, and the expropriation the host seeks would be impossible. Only the hostess can let the stranger in, by admitting the guest into the intimacy of the exclusive marriage and thereby allowing estrangement to rupture the masters self-identity. In privileging this dissolution of identity over the principle of coherence it betrays, Klossowski also revalues the meaning of the hostess idolatry, making it the basis of a new ethics. Robertes hospitality dissolves monotheist integrity, giving rise to a divinity that is multiple, fragmented, and fortuitous. Her betrayal facilitates the essential actualization of the hospitality event, since it allows her to idolatrously surrender herself to the divinity of a chance stranger, and thus actualize him as a guest. Robertes disbelief in and betrayal of jealous oneness is important on a number of levels. She is an atheist of Protestant origin who finds her husbands incessant attempts to offer a theological account of her soul thoroughly absurd. One holdover from her Protestant upbringing is her refusal to accept the doctrine of divine mediation so central to Octaves scholastic Catholicism. But her disbelief is not restricted to her lack of religious faith, which is little more than a foil. More fundamentally, it is a function womans inherent infidelity or inadequation to the divine image, the unanchoring of femininity with regard to the signifier. Women, Roberte suggests, are natural atheists. ( FR: 35 ) Their atheism indexes an inherently unbelieving character, incapable of being equated with or made in the image of the divine person. Paradoxically, though, it is Robertes atheism that makes her susceptible to the angelic intervention of the guest, the illegitimate and fortuitous possessor who actualizes the hostess through a substantial appropriation.

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Hospitality after the Death of God

Klossowski develops the implications of Robertes atheism in two different ways: the first is a dense argument derived from scholastic theology, in which Octave proves Robertes susceptibility to corporal expropriation; the second operates through an allusion to Nietzsches philosophical critique of the Judeo-Christian origins of personhood. In the extended theological dialogue that makes up the body of Roberte, ce soir, Octave suggests that the privative designations of the master and mistress of the home can be ruptured only through the loss of the incommunicability of souls, the theological principle according to which an individuals being remains attributable only to itself, and which constitutes identity as such. ( FR: 127) According to this principle, the incommunicability of the person can only be suspended in death, which separates body and soul and facilitates the souls reassociation with another discreet body. But in Robertes case, Octave theorizes that disbelief has suspended her incommunicable character. (FR: 129) As a result, the integrity of her person can no longer be guaranteed. The language of accidental and substantial unions is drawn from the work of Thomas Aquinas, who derives a theological proof for the souls essential unity with the body from the doctrine of incarnation.22 According to Aquinas, the soul is able to unite substantially to the body, and retain its being even after the bodys dissolution, because the integrity of body and soul is upheld by God. Taking this Aquinian reasoning as his point of departure, Octave uses a syllogistic composite of scholastic reasoning to demonstrate that the very terms of the theological argument for discreet personhood provide justification for the dissolution of the person in those cases where the subject in question does not adhere toor cohere througha belief in the transcendental unity of the divine person. When Roberte declares that a womans body is her soul, her statement both references Aquinass argument and at the same time suggests how it might be overturned. Her disbelief means her soul and her body are only accidentally united, making her susceptible to corporal expropriation at the hands of another. In other words, the dissolution of the soul effects the dissolution of the body. This theological argument concerning privative personhood is further qualified by Klossowskis understanding of Nietzsches death of God, and his philosophy of the Eternal Return. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: Nihilism stands at the door; whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? 23 As the uncanniest of all guests, nihilism is internal to Christian individualism as its logical limit. To Nietzsche, Christianity is the dominant expression of European nihilism. But he also envisions its abolition through the ultimate nihilism, the logic of the Eternal Return, which is also the most uncanny of guests: uncanny first of all to Christian nihilism itself, whose cult

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of monotheism and the positive principle of identity that depends upon it precludes any sense of the otheror for that matter of the selfas an unknown. In Nietzsches wake, the hospitality relation paradoxically aligns itself once again with the concerns of ancient, divine hospitality: maintaining an aporetic relation to the unknown in other than compensatory, salvational modes. Like Klossowskis chance stranger, whose seizure of the masters personal property is both illegitimate and fortuitous, the Eternal Returnas the uncanniest of guestsdissolves its host in a way that is both destructive and liberating. The monotheist God reifies not only subjective boundaries, and also the unknown itself; the death of God allows the unknown to manifest itself. Although Nietzsche sees the murder of God as essential to this liberation of the unknown, he also warns that, even after God, we run the risk of preserving or instituting principles that will not transvalue nihilistic Christian values, but instead create new, equally insidious ones. To complete the transvaluation of all values, he argues, we must overcome both the monotheist understanding of God, and the positive idea of personal identity that depends upon it. This argument may explain why Klossowski makes his protagonist a Christian theologian. For isnt all of Western culture Christian in this regardthat is, in subscribing to an ontic view of personhood? In the postscript to The Laws of Hospitality , Klossowski develops the implications of Nietzsches death of God within the theological argument for discreet personhood, by demonstrating that the formal identity of the I or self is necessarily submitted to a divine order, a single God that conditions its possibility:
Any identity rests solely upon the knowledge of a thinker outside of ourselvesif we grant that there is an inside and an outsidewho agrees from the outside to think us as such. If it is God on the inside as well as on the outside, in the sense of absolute coherence, then our identity is pure grace; if it is the ambient world, where everything begins and ends with designation, then our identity is merely a grammatical joke. (FR: 337; my translation)

Although we tend to think of personhood as an innate, ontic property, Nietzsche and Klossowski both emphasize its often unacknowledged grounding in Christian theology. For example, St. Paul famously reconceives personhood as a universal attribute by identifying it with baptism in Christ: There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female; for you are all one person in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28-29) Although his verse seems to posit the inalienability of personhood, it actually makes it contingent upon playing host to the oneness of Christs person, which bestows a proper personhood by dwelling in ones heart. This is no doubt what Nietzsche has in mind when his Zarathustra declares that human beings are merely wearing the mask of the monotheist God, which gives the illusion of a coherent, privative self. As is well known, the Roman notion of the personthe personawas derived from the idea of the mask, and specifically the wax

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image of the dead ancestor. The legal concept of the person designated the one who possessed this mask, whether legitimately or not. Although Roman law gradually came to associate the concept of the persona with the true nature of the individual, its original identification with the mask also gave rise to another conception of the persona, as a simulated, artificial, or even duplicitous mask of the self. 24 Despite the best efforts of the church fathers, the survival of this genealogy continued to hint at the uncomfortable proximity between ontological personhood and its repudiated siblings, the simulacrum or theatrical personnage. In his 1957 essay Nietzsche, Polytheism and Parody, Klossowski argues that if God is the only possible guarantor of the identity of the I and of its substantial base, bodily integrity, then the death of God dissolves the grammatical fiction of the self, opening the way for a new understanding of subjectivity: as divided, multiple, dissolute, and irresponsible. 25 When the monotheist mask of God is stripped away, the artificial integrity of the self gives way to the multiplicity of the ego. In this sense, Klossowski makes clear that the declaration God is dead is not so much a call to atheism as the liberation of a polytheism that would abolish the privative constraints of the self. Paradoxically, the death of the monotheistic God also results for Nietzsche in a liberation of the divine: in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he writes: Is not precisely this godliness, that there are gods but no God? ( ibid, 201) When God dies, the ego becomes divine: but as dissolved, as conditioned not by the integrity of the one God, but by the disintegration of Dionysus, god of dismemberment and disindividuation. Klossowski adapts Nietzsches discovery to the logic of hospitality, in which the dissolution of the self is celebrated as a divine act. After the death of the eternal witness, who alone was capable of guaranteeing the identity of the self, divinity resides in a new kind of witness: the guest who takes it upon himself to liberate the master from his privative identity. As a liberator from individuation, the guest partakes of the divinity of Dionysus, the sacred guest who very literally dispossesses or even dismembers his host.26 But while Klossowskis conception of hospitality is indebted to Nietzsche, but it does not simply enact his work; it develops this thought in a particular direction. To Nietzsches discovery of the liberating potential of the Dionysian guest, Klossowski adds an insistence on the privileged role of the feminine in effecting this dissolution.

Welcoming the Unknown in the Feminine

As a Catholic who doesnt acknowledge either the death of God or the dissolution of identity that results from it, Octave can only experience this dissociation secondarily, through its effect on Roberte. Octave feels that he is too constrained by his identity, while Roberte is too little bound by hers. The dissociation from the divine foundations of what Klossowski calls the grammatical fiction of the I is more pronounced her case, intensified by the already unanchored relation between femininity

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and the signifier. In their ambivalent relation to legal rights, women have always challenged the ontic view of personhood with the evidence of its non-universality. Even as Roman law began to identify the persona with the true nature of the individual, it continued to withhold personhood from those who did not own property, most notably women and slaves. 27 As Renata Salecl has argued, woman is a symptom of the rights of man; 28 she reminds us that the mask of unified personhood has always fit some subjects much better than others. In Klossowskis trilogy, the marginal position accorded to femininity by traditional understandings of the subject appears as a singular force. It recalls the function of religion, in the particular sense in which Emmanuel Lvinas understands the term: the possible surplus in a society of equals.29 But at the same time, the feminine embodies an alterity that has no transcendent dimension, but is firmly materialist. For although the feminine approximates the divine in its excessive quality, it is in part because of its ambivalent relationship to the positive principle of personal identity that the monotheist God imparts. We see its importance in what Klossowski calls the moi de lobjet, the paradoxical agency the objectin this case the hostessassumes within the subject who possesses it. By drawing attention to the relationship between the masters eminent personification of personal identity and his jealous identification with his possessions, the hostess insists on the heteronomous underpinnings of the personal property of the self. Against the positive idea of personal identity, whose privative quality is guaranteed by the monotheistic understanding of God as a unified oneness, Klossowskis vision of hospitality affirms the division and multiplicity internal to the subject, in the form of a multiple cogito, a polytheist subjectivity that would abolish the privative constraints of the self. In the postscript to The Laws of Hospitality, he develops this notion through the idea of a divided subject, or what Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari call the cogito deux30: a cogito for whom the act of thought does not guarantee its being as a consistent subject, but rather calls it into question by suggesting that others may be thinking in me. As Klossowski writes in the postscript to the Laws,
The Word [le verbe] establishes the duration of the thinking subject through the fiction of the personal pronoun, as the source or home [foyer] of judgment, in order that thought as such always returns to one point among others. But does it always return to it? At each word I have to wonder whether it is I who am thinking or whether others are thinking in me or for me, or thinking me, or even thinking before I have really thought myself what they are thinking.... whether thought is a property, an appropriation, or even the expropriation of thought. (FR: 337, my translation)

The possibility that others might be thinking in me challenges the notion that there is a thinker outside of methe Word, or Godwho is conditioning my ego as an integral unity. If God is for Descartes the guarantor of the cogito, then the death of Godhis failure to support the fiction of the personal pronoun as the source or

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home of judgmentresults in the home of thought being susceptible to occupation by strangers: most notably the hostess. For as the moi de lobjet or Thing, the hostess is the one who thinks in the host insofar as he is not-all, revealing the uncanny dispossession of the home of judgment by a foreign object. For Klossowski, the implications of this experience of dispossession or expropriation are not at all negative, since the role of the hostess suggests how the identity of the post-Nietzschean host might be understood as other than a principle of self-adequation. It models an ethical position that is not limited to the female sex, but consists in an excessive relation to the signifier. Although Nietzsche associates Dionysus with a dissolution of the ego that is affirmatively revalued as divine, and that opposes itself to the transcendental redemption of the self embodied by Christ, he also asserts that after God, mankind must assume an authentically feminine attitude in welcoming Dionysus. He associates it with the figure of Ariadne, as the one who welcomes the transfiguring advent of the divine guest. 31 Klossowski hints at something similar in the preface to his trilogy, when he writes that for ten years now I have lived, or believe I have lived, under the sign of Roberte. To live under the sign of the hostess is, as Octave puts it in the last line of his laws, to become the guest in ones own home: to become this foreign Thing, this spot of alterity or estrangement within the chez soi of identity.

Conclusion
In its characterization of the hostess as the moi de lobjet that disrupts the identity of the master who possesses it, Klossowskis work has profound implications not only for the post-Nietzschean host, but for the subject of psychoanalysis. His work is indispensable reading for any serious study of the relationship between Nietzsches philosophy and psychoanalysis, and in particular the central place each assigns to femininity. Klossowskis understanding of the thingly agency of the hostess finds echoes in the writings of Jacques Lacan in particular, for whom femininity names a subjective stance that problematizes the very notion of the subject; its agency is that of the object raised to the dignity of a Thing. Lacans formulation is central to his work on ethics, especially as it relates to his reading of Sigmund Freuds enigmatic articulation of the egos relation to the id: Wo es war, soll Ich werden. Translated in the Standard Edition as There where id was, there ego shall be,32 the remark had traditionally been understood by the proponents of ego psychology to mean that the ego must come to dominate or subsume the id, to bring it within its parameters. But Lacan understands Freuds remark very differently. Instead of implying the colonization of the id by the ego, it points to the necessary expropriation of the ego by the id: there where ego was, the subject of the unconscious shall come into being. Lacan sees in Freuds es the primacy of the extra-subjective object or Thing for the nascence of subjectivity, the extimate agency of what Freud calls

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das Ding (the extra-symbolic, maternal object) in the intersubjective topology of the ego. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes that Freud addresses himself to the subject to say this, which is new: Here, in the domain of the dream, you are at home [chez toi]. Wo es war, soll Ich werden ( 44). In defining the subjects relation to the unconscious as one of cohabitation under the same roof, Lacan reverses the well-known phenomenological interpretation of the chez soi as the at-homeness of identity, a principle of self-adequation. But he also makes clear that the unconscious is not simply an uneasy bedfellow of the ego, an uncanny guest in the domain of the subject. Rather, he suggests that there where the subject is at home, there where it receives or plays the host, it is as unconscious, and not as a self-possessed ego. Klossowskis trilogy takes this insight to its logical conclusion, suggesting that the subject is the one who is inhabited by, or plays host to, the es: the host-es. As a thing uncannily internal to the host, the hostess insists upon the expropriation at the heart of personal property. Her importance consists in the dispossession of the host-I (the subject eminently equal to himself) by the host-es, the Thing irreducible to the identity of the host that lets the stranger in, realizing the promise of hospitality.

NOTES 1 In one of the first psychoanalytic readings of Klossowski, Michle Montrelay appraised his laws of hospitality as the expression of a narcissistic fantasy in which feminine jouissance is used to complete a narcissistic relationship between two men, and thereby disavow the wound of sexual difference (Les Lois de lhospitalit en tant que lois du narcissisme, LArc 43, 1970). More recently, Herv Castanet, LAutre sexe et la perversion, Savoir II:1-2 (mai) 1995, treated Klossowskis trilogy as a clinical case demonstrating the perverts failure to extort from his partner the jouissance of the body; although he offers interesting account of the (non)significance of feminine jouissance within the logic of perversion, Castanet mistakenly identifies Klossowski with his fictional

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protagonist. Klossowski addresses the possible parallels between his work and what he calls the logic of libertinage in Protase et apodose (LArc 43, 1970). In the third novel of his trilogy, entitled Le Souffleur (The Prompter), he offers an account of the laws of hospitality as an explicit challenge to the perverse discourse of erasing borders in favor of a universal law of exchangea discourse he puts in the mouth of a psychoanalyst, as if in anticipation of his later critics. 2 My understanding of perversion as a logic of demonstration is indebted to Willy Apollon, who in a series of recent articles and seminars has argued that the logic of perversionas one of the three subjective structures for psychoanalysisconsists in the methodical demonstration of what Apollon terms the Unfounded, the fact that the signifier is not founded in the real and therefore cannot serve as a legitimate guarantor of law. Although this specific formulation was developed in Apollons annual training seminar in Quebec, under the auspices of the cole freudienne de Qubec, Apollon makes a similar argument in his analysis of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Psychanalyse et littrature, passe et impasse, Willy Apollon, LUniversel, perspectives psychanalytiques, Quebec: Gifric, 1997:243-265. See also Gilles Deleuzes discussion of the logic of perverse demonstration in Coldness and Cruelty, New York: Zone Books,1991:25ff. 3 Willy Apollon made this comment at Gifrics Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Quebec, The Clinic of the Dream, July 1998. 4 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Dennis Porter, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992:112. 5 Emile Benveniste, Lhospitalit, in Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europennes, Paris: Minuit, 1969:88 6 Marquis de Sade, Franais, encore un effort, Philosophie dans le boudoir, Gallimard Folio, 1976:187ff. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Classics, 1969. 8 Pierre Klossowski, Un si funeste dsir, Paris: Gallimard, 1963:220. 9 Georges Bataille, Lexprience intrieure, Paris: Gallimard, 1954:16 [orig. 1943], has argued that God reifies the unknown; with the death of God, the unknown is therefore free to manifest itself in other forms. 10 See in particular Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Will to Power. 11 Pierre Klossowski, Roberte, Ce Soir & The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: [Les Lois de lhospitalit], tr. Austryn Wainhouse, London: Marion Boyars, 1989:109. All citations from the English translation will hereafter be designated as page numbers preceded with an E, while all page numbers from the French text will be preceded with FR. 12 Augustine, City of God XV: Bk. III, tr. Marcus Dods, D.D., New York: Modern Library, 1950:481. 13 Lambros Kamperidis, Philoxenia and Hospitality. Parabola XV:4 (November) 1990:5. 14 The Christian notion of eucharistic hospitality derives from the Latin hostia, which names the offering that compensates the anger of the gods, (Emile Benveniste op. cit.:93), the sacrificial victim who buys back mans salvation and the possibility of an essential relation with God. 15 Claude Lvi-Strauss, Les Structures lmentaires de la parent, Paris: Mouton, 1967. 16 For this argument I am grateful to Peter Canning, who both pointed me to Lvi-Straussanalysis of exogamy and theft and suggested its connection to Klossowskis understanding of the guest. 17 Klossowski, Roberte, FR: 304 (my translation) 18 Benveniste, op. cit.:88 19 Marcel Mauss, Acategory of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self, tr. W.E. Halls, Michael Carrithers et al, The Category of the Person 1-25, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985:8. 20 Israel as Host(ess): Hospitality in the Bible and Beyond, in Jouvert: AJournal of Post-Colonial Studies, Fall 1998.

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21 Klossowski, Protase et apodose, op. cit.:1970, 8-20:13. (my translation) 22 Specifically, from his summary and rebuttal of Aristotles argument in Book III, chapter 5 of De Anima that the intellectual principle is not united to the body as its form. In Aquinas words, Aristotles thesis is that: whatever exists in a thing by reason of its nature exists in it always. But to be united to matter belongs to the form by reason of its nature, because form is the act of matter, not by any accidental quality, but by its own essence; or otherwise matter and form would not make a thing substantially one, but only accidentally one. Therefore, a form cannot be without its own proper matter. But the intellectual principle, since it is incorruptible, as was shown above, remains separate from the body, after the dissolution of the body. Therefore the intellectual principle is not united to the body as its form. (696) The union of intellect and body is for Aristotle accidental, made possible by the fact that man, as an intelligible species, has a double subject, namely, the possible intellect and the phantasms which are in the corporeal organs. (697) The intellectual principle is capable of uniting itself to these corporeal phantasms, but it is not substantially united to them by its nature. Aquinas response to this thesis is that the intellectual soul is the very form of the body: The soul communicates that being in which it subsists to the corporeal matter, out of which and the intellectual soul there results one being; so that the being of the whole composite is also the being of the soul. This is not the case with other non-subsistent forms. For this reason the human soul retains its own being after the dissolution of the body; whereas it is not so with other forms. (699) Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, I, ed. Anton C. Pegis, New York: Random House, 1945. 23 Nietzsche, Will to Power:7. 24 Mauss, op. cit.:17. 25 Klossowski, Un si funeste dsir:220. 26 Klossowski, Don Juan selon Kierkegaard, Acphale 3-4 (juillet) 1937:28. 27 Mauss, op. cit.:17. 28 Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, London: Routledge, 1994:112. 29 Emmanuel Lvinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969:64. 30 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. See in particular Chapter 4, part IV, The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis, which is based in part on Klossowski. 31 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, tr. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, 1966:236. 32 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works XXII, ed. and tr. James Strachey et al. London, The Hogarth Press 1974:80. [Orig.1952]

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horizontal camera no.1

Am Luski
Camera Obscura, Tel Aviv

some words about horizontal camera no.1: the horizontal camera was invented in order to deconstruct the hegemonic vision of vertical-parallel view that dominates two hundred years of photography. instead of putting the negative parallel to the lenses, I put the negative as a continuation of the lenses. light that passes through the lens

practically touches the negative, so the image that is printed is a direct continuation of the image that passes into the camera obscura. butthere is no black space inside the camera, and the image does not turn upside down. the image prints itself on the negative that lies in the black box, and does not stand at the bottom of the boxas is usual.

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Pont neuf number 1

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Pont neuf number 1

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this special camera was built so as to have two lenses in front and at the back and three layers or coucheslike three beds in stagesone on top of the other (5 centimeters space between).

each negative has two lenses so altogether the pictures are facing 6 lenses at the same time. the camera is a wooden and cardboard black box that was

specially built to take a picture at the pont neuf in Paris. so this is also its name Pont Neuf 1 1999.

am luski

Pont neuf number 1

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Consciousness Dreams Deadly: Freuds Other Drive

Lyat Friedman
Tel Aviv University

What is it that wakes the sleeper? Is it not in the dream, another reality? Lacan

W
lead.1

hat follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will

With these words, Sigmund Freud introduces the fourth chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this chapter, Freud speculates 2 about the process by which the mind protects itself from external stimuli and internal excitations. He relates this protection to the evolution of consciousness, to the evolution of the feeling of pleasure and unpleasure, to the primary process of binding energy, and to the creation of a shield by which the psyche attempts to reject excitatory stimuli. Allow mebefore I let myself be led by these speculations, before I speculate about the Imaginary consciousness and the process by which the Real, and the bodily real, is transformed into reality, into a virtual reality (VR)to examine some of Freuds speculations.

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Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli, ( B: 27) says Freud, for the mental apparatus endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least constant. (B : 9) He adds, The sense organs...consist essentially of apparatus for the reception of certain specific effects of simulation, but...also include special arrangements for further protection against excessive amounts of stimulation. ( B: 28 ) That is, according to Freud, the psyche has a double function: the reception and the rejection of stimuli, as it attempts to keep the amount of excitation as low as possible. In the Project for a Scientific Psychology 3 Freud discusses two main functions of the sensory systems: to act as a threshold, so that below a certain quantity, a stimulus will not penetrate the senses, and to act as a sieve, so that not every kind of stimuli will operate on the system. ( P: 313 ) It is interesting to note that there is already a prior defense mechanism exercised by the sense organs, prior to the defense mechanisms the mind has yet to erect. It is a sensory defense mechanism, a bodily procedure, for the protection of the mind. Nonetheless, Freud distinguishes between two types of stimulus: external and internal. Freud says:
Towards the outside it (the psyche) is shielded against stimuli, and the amounts of excitations impinging on it have only a reduced affect. Toward the inside there can be no such shield; the excitations in the deeper layers extend into the system directly and in undiminished amount, in so far as certain of their characteristics give rise to feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. (B: 29)

External stimuli are the environmental forces impinging upon the psyche that excite and disturb the psyche as it attempts to reject them. Internal excitations are feelings of pleasure or unpleasure caused by internal or by external stimuli that have penetrated the protective shield and excite the internal apparatus. External stimuli, which are excessively stronger than the psychic shield, penetrate through the sense organs and produce internal excitation. Once external stimuli have penetrated the sense organs, the psyche attempts to react against the unpleasurable excitations. Freud says,
Aparticular way is adopted of dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them (the excitations) as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defense against them. (B: 29)

External stimuli that have penetrated into the psyche cause internal excitations and give rise to feelings of unpleasure against which the psyche reacts by treating the excitations as if they were external. Once the feeling of unpleasure arises within the psyche, says Freud,
There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises insteadthe

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problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of. (B: 29-30)

By binding the energy, the psyche may then master the overflow of energy that has penetrated its shields and expel it. The rejection of energy takes place according to the same process by which external stimuli are rejected: the production of a shield does not allow further penetration. Most importantly, the psyche must bind the freely flowing energy so as to bring up a shield against it. The excitations cannot be gotten rid off unless the energy that has produced a feeling of unpleasure has been bound. That is, the psyche can bring up a shield only after excitatory energy has become bound. Thus Freud, writing the Dora case, can speak of the reactivation of the primary scene, which is stored as a meaningless memory trace until it recurs. The second appearance reactivates the initial experience and allows the psyche to bind its energy, thereby forming it into a traumatic event, that can then be repressed. That is, as long as the energy is not bound, the traces of the event remain meaningless and continue to disturb the psyche. Jacques Lacan in speaking about the unconscious notes in the Ethics:4 It is there in an unconscious form before the birth of anything as far as human experience is concerned. It is there buried, unknown, not mastered, not available.... (SEM VII: 209) In Encore,5 Lacan tells us that what is written is not to be understood, (SEM XX: 34) the unconscious remains outside the boundaries of any possible understanding. Once these traces of energy are bound, the psyche can either reject the event and forget all about it, or repress it, as it attempts to bring up a shield that will protect the mind from that unpleasurable bound experience. Later, when Freud rejects the importance of a primary scene and proposes instead to explain the trauma by infantile fantasies, the process of binding energy helps elucidate the inability of the child to recall the traumatic affect of the fantasy. But let us for the moment go back to the issue of cathexis (besetzung, from the Greek katekhw which means to hold fast, bind, restrain, possess, occupy, cover) and the meaning of events, and postpone these speculations for a further while. Once a feeling of unpleasure arises in the psyche, says Freud, cathectic energy is summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of energy in the environs of the breach. (B: 30) Freud remarks, We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation that is present to the mind but is not in any way bound. (B : 7-8; my emphasis ) Unbound energy is the source of unpleasure, whether from within or from without the mental apparatus, whereas bound energy does not cause that type of excitation, since the psyche has the mechanism by which it can resist and reject the threat the energy could have posed. What the organism cannot avoid must be worked through by the mind. Lacan, notes,
It is avoidance, flight, movement, which in the beginning, even before the system starts to function, normally intervene in order to regulate the invasion of quantity in

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accordance with the pleasure principle. And it is the motor system that the function of regulating the bearable or homeostatic level of tension for the organism is handed over in the end. (SEM VII: 59)

When the organism cannot avoid contact with the stimuli, it feels unpleasure, that is pain. Pain, Lacan says, is that limit where a living being has no possibility of escape. (SEM VII: 60) The mind needs to manage the pain or excitations it has not been able to avoid by fleeing. In fact, we may perhaps suspect that the binding of the energy that streams into the mental apparatus consists in its change from a freely flowing into a quiescent state. (B: 31) For, says Freud,
The higher the systems own quiescent cathexis, the greater seems to be its binding force; conversely, therefore, the lower its cathexis, the less capacity will it have for taking up free energy and the more violent must be the consequences of such a breach in the protective shield against stimuli. (B: 30)

In the Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud attempts to describes the process by which energy becomes bound, and by which quantitative energy is transformed into a qualitative experience. There, Freud claims, the ego functions in the following way:
The ego itself is a mass like of neurons, which hold fast to their cathexis.... We may perhaps suppose that as a result of this binding precisely the external Q (quantity) remains free to flow while the cathexis of attention is bound. (P: 368; my emphasis)

He adds the cathected stimuli travel along the ego neurons to meet with other resistances which are greater than the excitations of that stimuli, thus eliminating their affect on the system (e.g., P: 322-324; 368-371 ). An excited psyche (excited either by internal stimuli or by external stimuli that have penetrated the sense organ defense system) experiences the feeling of unpleasure and attempts to lower the levels of excitations within its mental apparatus by treating the stimuli as if they came not from within, but from without. These stimuli, having penetrated the psyche, travel the way energy travels along its passagesin this case, along nerves paths, thereby penetrating the nervous system more deeply. Energy that travels along these paths has a quantitative character: it can be measured, but remains meaningless and formless. Attempts to prevent any further penetration of the traveling energy cause the psyche to erect a defensive mechanism that transforms the quantitative into qualitative experiences. It cathects the energy and arrests its movement. It discontinues its flow and stops its further intrusion. It binds the energy and converts quantity into a quality. It transforms and alters the free-flowing by erecting a fixed and fastened knotwhat Lacan terms the chaining of the signifiers. Perhaps the energy is transformed into an image the mind imagines, perhaps a perception that the mind perceives. It may be a sound that the mind can hear, or a smell to be smelled. Whichever sense organ has been breached, the energy trans-

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formed along its nerve cells produces an experience within the mind, for the mind. Lacan, following Freud, speaks of a chain of signifiers rather than bound excitations. An initial lack imposed on a child by the circumstances, like a mothers disappearance, (as Freud tells about when he describes the innocent game of his grandchild) creates a void that needs to be filled. Lacan says,
Freud tells us, by any object whose agency we know only in the form of the lost object. ... It is not introduced as the original food, it is introduced from the fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing the externally lacking object.6 (SEM XI: 180)

Lack excites the psyche; in binding the penetrating energy a signifier is erected. The cathected energy transforms quantitative excitations into qualitative signifiers in its effort to overcome the excitation. Thus Lacan claims, in the place where the unspeakable object is rejected in the Realthat which is experienced by the psyche as lack, as unbound excitatory energya word makes itself heard...coming in the place of that which has no name.7 (EE: 183) The initial excitation produces a void, an emptiness, in the infant, which cannot be filled and excites the mind internally. The lack is then overcome by a symbolic act, in which a signifier, a word which makes itself heard, emerges to represent for the child the lost object. The representation of a lost object transforms the unbound energy into something other, into a signifier, and the child learns to seek satisfaction by seeking that which represents the lost object. For this reason, a child can never achieve complete satisfaction. The initial fulfilled state is not real, or concrete, but rather marked by an unrealized, manifested by a signifier, a linguistic sign, which has emerged instead of, and represents, the lacking, missing, object of desire. Unlike the initial excited state, which is Real, the fulfilled is not satisfied in the sense that it has achieved that which it has desired; rather lack has been replaced by a signifier. For, it is the world of words that creates the world of things, (EE : 65) Lacan says and then adds,
The Freudian experience...starts by postulating a world of desires. It postulates it prior to any kind of experience, prior to any consideration concerning the world of essences. Desire is instituted within the Freudian world in which our experience unfolds.8 (SEM II: 222)

It is at this point of lack that the desire of the subject is constituted, (SEM XI: 218)9 Lacan says. Desire is not an innate given, but rather is constituted by the psyche as it attempts to rid itself of the bound energy producing a chain of signifiers as a protective shield. Desire is the psyches attempt to rid itself of its bound energy by projecting from within itself a signifier onto a world that is to be perceived by a network of signifiers. Desire drives the child to seek a representation of that which is lacking. The inner apparatus is excited by desiring that which needs to be rejected from within the psyche. Lacan claims, I have...produced the only conceivable idea of the object, that [of] the object as cause of desire, of that which is lacking.

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(SEM

XI: ix)

Chained signifiers become the source of further excitations. And he adds,

Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isnt the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. (SEM II: 223)

But let us return to Freud, for he does not end here, where the Real is converted into the Imaginary, into that for which a signifier, a concept, a word, or an image perhaps, has been produced, as Lacan argues. Freud continues to speculate. In his Project, he tells us,
Consciousness gives us what are called qualitiessensations which are different in a great multiplicity of ways and whose difference is distinguished according to the relations with the external world. (P: 308)

For it is to be expected from the structure of the nervous system that it consists of contrivances for transforming external quantity into quality. (P: 309) That is to say, consciousness arises instead of a memory trace. ( B: 25) (Or, as Lacan argues, consciousness arises instead of the excitatory traces left behind the signifier.) Freud adds,
This would mean that its elements could undergo no further permanent modification from the passage of excitation, because they had already been modified in the respect in question to the greatest possible extent: now, however, they would have become capable of giving rise to consciousness. (B: 26)

Thus, without explicitly saying so, Freud assigns the role of rejection to the system of consciousness. That is, consciousness is the process by which bound energy is rejected from within the psychic system. It is the process by which a signifier is projected by a desire for its signified, in an effort to overcome psychic lack. It is the process by which a feeling of unpleasure arises in consciousness.10 Once free-flowing excitation is bound and quantitative energy is transformed into a qualitative experience, a signifier, a word, or an image can be thought of by consciousness. By thinking a thoughtby becoming aware of an imagethe psyche can reject the experience and pull it out of its perceptual stream. In Lacans words, by desiring the lost object, by becoming aware of the object one desires, the mind is able to rid itself of those signifiers which serve as memory traces. This may explain why consciousness is unable to retain a single thought for more than a few seconds, and why a new thought arises instead. The stream of bound energy impinges upon and causes consciousness to rid itself of its ideas and images. In Freuds words:
The system Cs. is characterized by the peculiarity that in it (in contrast to what happens in the other psychical systems) excitatory processes do not leave behind any permanent change in its elements but expire, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious. (B: 25)

Consciousness has a limited capacity for containing information: by letting various conscious thoughts expire, the psyche rejects those stimuli that have penetrated its sensory shield and prepares itself for additional experiences.

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Consciousness functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli, (B: 27) says Freud, and assigns a spatial position to it. It must lie on the borderline between the outside and inside (B : 24): on the borderline between the free-flowing energy and the cathected experiences, between the quantitative excitations and the qualitative thoughts and images. It is a membrane by which the psyche can put up a shield and reject the excitations it has bound, so as to keep the level of excitation as low as possible. Consciousness is itself like a defense mechanism of the psyche rather than a given mental apparatus that thinks thoughts which are not too traumatic for the individual. It is a tool for the psyche by which it controls what may not or cannot be rejected from it. A healthy defense mechanism. Once a thought is consciously thought it can be rejected and forgotten. It is cleared from the mind. It is no secret that Freud never really paid much attention to the conscious stream of words flowing from his patients mouths. He was attentive to those traces of thoughts insofar as they indicated unconscious thoughts and desires. The world portrayed by consciousness, in Freuds eyes, was a world that had been bound by the psyche and had been rejected from its stream of thought; while the world that had not yet been bound and lay beyond the ability of the conscious speaker to uncover the meaning it could have had, remained to be explored. It was a world that had yet to be erected by a signifier. It is a world that remained beyond the grasp of the psychiccathectic-mechanism. The talking cure, the psychoanalytic method of retrieving traumatic experiences and curing the aching patient by making the repressed conscious, in fact presupposes the defensive role of consciousness. Once traumatic events are acknowledged by the patient, once the patient becomes aware and is conscious of the events, the cure is secured. It is by making an event conscious that the mind can find a moment of rest. By allowing a traumatic event to surface, the psyche can easily reject the trauma and achieve a lower level of mental excitation. The world portrayed by consciousness is not the world one perceives, but a virtual world of bound signifiers and images that the mind rejects as it attempts to achieve peace of mind. 11 Consciousness is the defense mechanism that permits the mind to reject internal excitations by treating them as if they were external to it. It produces an imaginary world, which appears real but is merely a world of bound energy, cathected images that have been rejected by the mind. The Real, on the other hand, that which the mind is unable to reject, remains within the system, suspended, free-flowing, uncontrolled; undetermined by the defense mechanism, it lingers without meaning. The imaginary realm is not all conscious. For some bound energy is such that psyche has not been able to reject by employing consciousness; it has remained within the unconscious sphere. In the Dora case, an experience that has been bound was repressed and retained by the unconscious, having at one point been made conscious.
* * *

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According to Freud, an experience is repressed when consciousness is unable to handle it. Some of the energy has not been bound in its entirety and remains free-flowing; it does not allow consciousness to put up its shield by fully thinking it, and does not permit one to become sufficiently aware of the experience. During analysis, the therapist not only uncovers hidden meaning, but he or she is made aware of experiences that have not yet become meaningful to the patientit is the Real that has not been bound, the Real that escapes signification and remains without meaning. Thus, the psychoanalytic therapist attempts not only to uncover bound energy that has been repressed, but also attempts to bind free-flowing energy, to produce meaning, to make the patient aware of it, and to allow the psyche to lower its excitatory state. 12 This explains the impasse in perceiving ones body in conscious terms. On the one hand, the body of which one becomes aware is perceived as external to the psyche and non-relevant to its functions. It supports an easy imagining of life beyond the disintegration of the body: the body is perceived by consciousness as a mere image like all external stimuli that the mind can think and forget. On the other hand, the body is not perceived by consciousness, not experienced by it in the realm of the imaginary, and as such it cannot be thought of by consciousness: it is always in excess of its bound perception. This explains the way Freud treats the distinction between mens and womens perception of their erotogenic zones. The little boy, says Freud, sees his penis and can become aware of his sexual desires and satisfactions. The little boy can look at his penis, see the effects of his sexual desires on his bodily member, and his psyche can bind the energy and perceive an image. Indeed, some boys and philosophers will learn to say that they lack control over their bodily member, that their penis has a life of its own. Their penis has been externalized by consciousness and has been detached from their psyche. In contrast, according to Freud, a little girl does not see a penis, and her reaction is one of lack. The little girl, unable to bind her sexual desire and satisfaction and perceive her body as sexually desiring, is thus led to believe she has no penis. Unable to bind her sexual energy and connect it with a particular bodily part, the little girl cannot signify an object that desires; she becomes the object of desire, rather than someone who can desire. No wonder Freud poses the question of womans desires, for her desires are not bound and cannot be rejected by consciousness. Her desires remain free-flowing, meaningless perhaps, and cannot be thought of. The penisful man who has externalized his penis, treats his body as a source of pleasurable experiences. Having bound his penis to external objects of pleasures, he seeks bodily pleasures by consuming those bodies that lack such conscious desires. The penisless woman, according to Freud, who has not bound her internal excitations to her body, becomes conscious of her internal excitation by binding internal pleasures with the externalized penis.13

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In the realm of the Imaginary, consciousness is a sieve and the gate keeper of the reality that one can think. By binding excitatory energy and treating it as if it came from without, rather than from within, a child learns to treat her or his body as external to her or his conscious thoughts, as detached from the real me. It produces images of my body, which are not truly mine, nor are they treated by me as being the real me which I find in me. In the realm of the imaginary, reality is a realm that consciousness must think as it attempts to bind and reject the Real that remains unbound. By producing an image, the psyche gains space and time (which it itself has produced) so as to distinguish between those excitations over which it has control and those which are in excess of its powers. The reality consciousness produces makes room for the psyche to busy itself with those excitations which remain beyond its powerful defense mechanism. In the realm of the Imaginary, in the chain of signifiers, reality is a realm which consciousness must think as it attempts to bind and reject the unbound, the lacking, the Real. What consciousness thinks and rids itself of is an unpleasurable sensation, that which is not bound to imaginary or hallucinatory images. Speaking of the representation the mind produces, Freud says,
Indications of discharge through speech are also in a certain sense indications of realitybut of thought-reality, and in their case a rule of this kind has not by any means come into effect, because no constant threat of unpleasure would be attached to breach it. (P: 373)

Freud identifies these signs by connecting the feeling of unpleasure to the cathected image produced by reality. No wonder so many of Freuds patients found the world of their dreams and fantasies to be void of the pain reality had inflicted upon them. No wonder, Lacan claims, these patients resisted Freuds attempts to bring reality back into their lives. Pleasure and unpleasure, determined by desire, are always within the realm of language: The pleasure principle is even characterized by the fact that the impossible is so present in it that it is never recognized as such, (SEM XI: 167) Lacan that pleasure follows the Freudian logic of the beyond 14 in which the psyche seeks the lowest possible excitation, that is, pleasure follows the attempt of the psyche to overcome an initial unpleasure. Lacan offers the notion of jouissance, that which transgresses this principle and is beyond Freuds beyond. Jouissance is the impossible possibility of achieving the lowest possible excitation, unconditional fulfillment. Jouissance is pleasur in the Real, in the unbound, that which can never be attained, that which is e unReal. Let us not forget that the reality consciousness produces protects the psyche from excess of stimuli imposed by the environment. It is a matter of life and death, says Freud, for
This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the simulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli.

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It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli....By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate. ( B: 27)

The psyche produces a defensive layer, protecting itself from external intrusion and erecting consciousness, as the membrane that lies in-between the inner deeper layers of the psyche and the external environment. Consciousness is dead, says Freudbut not totally dead. It is the surface that ceases to have the structure proper to living matter; that becomes, to some degree, inorganic. Consciousness thinks dead thoughts. By being daemonicnot yet dead and no longer aliveconsciousness serves to save the deeper layers of the psyche from a similar fate. And the bound energy, which consciousness thinks, is composed of psychic excitations that have been digested and rejected by the living psyche. Conscious thoughts are the excrement of a psyche, and as such, they are dead thoughtsin the service of the Death drive that attempts to restore an earlier state of things. (B: 36) It is a peculiar situation: the reaction of the Death drive seems to defy the very end it attempts to achieve. It is as if the Death drive, by producing consciousness, postpones the very death it attempts to gain. If the Death drive is striving to achieve its own death, then why does it not let stimuli flood the psychic system and be overwhelmed by it, so as to reach its own death? Thought in these terms, the role of Eros is just as peculiar. If conscious dead thoughts are the result of the working of the Death drive, then Eros role must manifest itself by undoing what the Death drive has achieved. Eros, working against the Death drive, pushes, so to speak, the effects of its death towards the outer layers of the psyche, and allows the Death drive to erect its monument on the borderline. Eros must unbind the bound.15 The conflict between these two drives produces consciousness. As the Death drive attempts to bind and rid itself of all stimuli, Eros pushes the bound out from within the psychic sphere, and unbinds deeper layers of unconscious thoughts. No wonder Freud speculates about Thanatos and Eros after having discussed the compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences. Perhaps the Death drive is unable to bind the excitation appropriately and the need to continue the binding process remains unsatisfied. Perhaps the excitations were bound, but Eros was successful in unbinding the Death drives tie. By repeating the experience compulsively, the child, playing the fort! da! game, manifests her or his inability to master the overflow of excitation. But the child may also manifest the attempt to unbind the scene of the mothers disappearance, to rid oneself of emotional attachment to the mother. If so, the need to continue the operation prevails until the energy has been satisfactorily bound and unbound. Recall Aristophanes myth: Death and Eros have reversed roles. 17 Once the three beings were split, once lack was imposed on them by the gods, by Zeus and by

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Apollo, Zeus assistant, it was Eros who drove those beings to seek the recomposition and reassembling of their halves, not Death drive. Love of oneself made them long and yearn for a whole. Eros, not Thanatos, brought about their fatal embrace. And it was Death that drove Zeus to tamper with their sexual parts and hamper a pleasure Eros could not have promised those scarred and aching mortals. Eros role, in the psychic sphere Freud imagines, seems the reverse of the role he assigns it. For if Eros role is to postpone the death Death attempts to achieve, Eros must undo the ties Death produces in consciousness. Working against the Death drive, it must undo the knots consciousness has brought to the fore. Eros must unbind Death drives tie.18 And repetition is the manifestation of the fusing of these two drives. By repeating the experience compulsively, the child, playing the fort! da! game, manifests her or his inability to fully master the excitations. The game the not-too precocious grandchild plays is a fatal game of mastery and control, as Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari note: Nietzsches Will to Power. Death, according to Freud, attempts to achieve its death; Eros postpones death by undoing the very death produced in consciousness. And repetition is the name of the game, as Eros unbinds deaths bind. Towards the end of the fourth chapter, Freud connects the working of dreams to the production of consciousness. Although he states that dreams conjure up what has been forgotten and repressed, ( B : 32) he also claims that dreams seem to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure (ibid.). Permit me to speculate here: dreams provide a glimpse into the unworking of conscious thoughts. Those threads of unconscious thoughts that appear, as if out of nowhere, are not only unconscious thoughts that blend together with everyday events; what appears to the dreamer in her or his dream may also be the working of Eros unbinding drive, as it attempts to postpone Deaths toil. Could it be that the threat of ones death puts the tired to sleep, if only to save her or his life? Is it not restful sleep that allows the awakened to feel fresh every morning upon getting up? Sleep rejuvenates and revives all that has been so tightly bound after a long days work. It allows us not only to forget yesterdays detailed accounts, but also takes the dreamer away from the tight constraints of space and time into a realm of the Real, into a realm where the imaginary can be undone. This explains the associative nature of the dream work. If the dream is the unbinding of conscious thought, images, sounds, words, and sensations are intermingled with each other to form an experience which is no way bound to ones external reality. Words blend with visions, images fused with bodily sensations. The dream is like reality, but a reality in the process of its own disintegrationa Virtual Reality perhaps. It is no surprise that traumatic events are compulsively repeated by an exhausted dreamer, for the possibility of untying the solid knot presents quite a challenge. Once excitations have been bound, the ability to unbind them may be as much of an exertion as the strength required to mold them.

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Eros drive is a reversal of the direction Death imposes on the aching child. David Krell, after discussing Freuds need to discover reality or quality signs that will distinguish between reality and dream, notes that in the dream, a remembering thinking has the capacity to reverse direction. 17 Indeed, the reversal of direction is a peculiarity of unconscious thoughts, but also a reversal in the direction of the binding Death that attempts to bring about. There, in the realm of the dream, reality strikes. There, beyond the talkative speech of psychoanalysis, the dreamer is free to feel alive. There the dreamer can finally dwell in a reality that is not bound. It is there, perhaps, that the girl may enjoy the pleasure of her body, while the boy attempts to uncover the boundless pleasure of his penisful desire. In a dream a woman can feel a bodily desire, not castrated, not labeled, not contained by anothers desire. Perhaps there a man may experience being the object of anothers desire. Or perhaps, there in the dream, neither man nor woman are constrained by the narrated complex of an Oedipal principle, a symbolic order guiding their desire. It is in the dream that the dreamer can unwrap the bodily signs, unbound, undetermined, unaffected by the restrained images of ones corpses might. Lacan notes, Freud...emphasizes a point of insertion, a limit point, an irreducible point, at the level of what we might call the source of the Triebe. And it is precisely that our experience then encounter in the irreducible character...of these residues of archaic forms of the libido. ( SEM VII: 93) Eros, the life drive, undoes the fixed cathexis of the erogenous zones and opens the possibility of another drive. No wonder Freud claims that dreams have the structure of wish-fulfillment. It is there that we can dream of a world not bound by the holes in our body and mouths. And if the dream is the unworking of that which is bound, then death unbound and remains in excess of Eross drive, providing a glimpse of Freuds Triebe. But as soon as the dreamer attempts to undo it, she or he awakens into another reality, a reality in which Death reigns.

NOTES 1 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud VIII: 24, tr. J. Strachey, ed. J. Strachey et al., London: The Hogarth Press, 1953. [24 volumes; orig. 1921.Hereinafter SE.] This edition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is cited as B in the present text. 2 For an examination of the structure of Freuds speculations see Jacques Derrida, To Speculate: On Freud, in The Post Card, tr. A.Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida argues that the speculation manifests Freuds attempt to avoid acknowledging his debt to philosophy, to Plato, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer in particular, in repetitive gestures. 3 Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology SE I: 295-397. [Orig.1899. Hereinafter cited as P.] 4 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, tr. D. Porter, ed. J. A. Miller, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986. Hereinafter SEM VII. 5 Jacques Lacan, Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, tr. B. Fink, ed. J.A. Miller, New York: W.W.

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Norton, 1988. Hereinafter SEM XX. 6 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, tr. A.Sheridan, New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1978. Hereinafter SEM XI. 7 Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1977, Hereinafter 8 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, tr. Silvia.Tomaselli, ed. J.A.Miller, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988. Hereinafter SEM II. 9 See also Lacan SEM IX: 118; 243; EE: 104. 10 Recall Kants attempt to establish pain as the initial a priori emotion that the mind constitutes by itself as it subjugates all bodily sensations . it is an emotion that doe not arise from the body but is formed by the mind as it attempts to overpower and regulate its initial emotions. See in particular Kants analysis of pure practical reason Critique of Practical Reason, tr. L. S. Beck, Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. I thank Hanna Freund-Chertouk for calling my attention to this section. 11 One may claim that the world consciousness produces is a virtual world, virtual in the sense of virtual reality as is produced by computerized images. However, that is not accurate, for by making this claim, one ignores the distinction between the signifiers and images the psyche conjures out of itself, out of excitation and instead of lack, as Lacan argues, and the computerized world that may only be the extension of its signifiers. Though virtual reality may appear more real than viewing a film perhaps, it relies on an established consciousness that is there to receive the images the computer may provide. 12 As Lacan claims, The function of the pleasure principle is, in effect, to lead the subject from signifier to signifier, by generating as many signifiers as are required to maintain as as low a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the psychic apparatus. (SEM VII: 119) 13 Unlike Freud who stresses the function of the penis as a sign capable of showing sexual desire and excitement as well as its fulfillment, Lacan stresses the fact that all erogenous zones are openings in the body, not enabling one to imagine their insides. Lacan says, These erogenous zones...one can consider to be generic, and that are limited to a number of special point, to points that are openings, to a limited number of mouths at the bodys surface, are points where Eros will have to find its source. (SEM VII: 93 ) 14 I.e., Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari speak of a disjunctive synthesis that has the function of unbinding. A synthesis that remains disjunctive, and that still affirms the disjointed terms, that affirms them throughout their entire distance, without restricting one by the other or excluding the other from the one, is perhaps the greatest paradox, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trs. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983: 76 (original italics). Deleuzes and Guattaris text is an attempt to unbind and disjoin desire from its Oedipal chains and to allow one to produce conjunctions, or bound excitations, that are not constituted by the Oedipal scene. 16 See Plato, Symposium, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. E. Hamilton and H. Crains, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961:189c-193d. 17 Sam Weber claims that Hephaestus, the god who appeals to the split creatures and offers to bind them together, is the god of binding and unbinding, The Legend of Freud, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982:161. His claim is supported by Socrates who appeals to the god who has been assigned [the] function of mingling (Philebus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 61c) in his own attempt to provide a grammar of the psychebut Socrates is not sure whether Hephaestus or Dionysus is the assigned god. Perhaps these gods share Eros ability to bind and unbind: Hephaestus does so by means of magical tools, Dionysus by means of intoxicating drinks, and Eros by means of the psyche and recollection. 18 David F. Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990:147.
EE .

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Edward Teller and the Mach I Car

Brad Zukovic
Writer, Los Angeles
photographs by Cole Coonce

Black Rock Desert: Thrust SSC makes a 750-760 mph pass

n the Mojave and Great Basin country there are dry lakes and long valleys where our military made atoms bloom. These are soft, mineral deserts, and the Europeans who first crossed them buried their books in dust riversthe boron flats killed all of their speeches, open-mouthed. Lakebeds distill an emptiness peculiar to the west, and where there is nothing, anything goes. This is the logic of Bugsy Siegels Vegas and the nuclear proving ground. On a lakebed there is an openness so extreme it can hide things. The largest of the mud flats are so level that objects disappear behind the curvature of the earthor appear in the case of phantom trainshovering over the playa. As a blank slate of possibility, dry lakes unhinged the Atomic Energy Commission into utopian fevers, even as aerospace tested black budget technology downwind from the blasts. On the Nevada Test Site and the Nellis Range, horizontal space has been answered: with surveillance drones and entombed radiation, yawning over basins the size of Switzerland.

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I. Muroc
When the American public was given the Model T, proto-hot rodders fell in love with engine parts in the way Ramanujan is said to have acquainted himself with the first 100 integers: knowing each as a personal friend. Hotrodders were the first to use dry lakes as proving grounds, coming to Muroc in the 1920s to run their Model T four bangers far away from the Los Angeles police. What they found out there were the flattest of natural surfaces, created when ice age lakes baked off and left half the periodic table buried in gypsum, lithium and salt. In winter, rains will sometimes flood a playa with shallow water, animating fairy and tadpole shrimp that went dormant in Mojave dust when inland seas vanished millions of years ago. In spring, the rain-finished mud flats can measure a curvature of less than 18 inches over a diameter of 30,000 feet1: ideal for speed trials, space shuttle landings and the calibration of thermonuclear air bursts. The military began its romance with dry lakes in the summer of 1938, removing the newly formed Southern California Timing Association from Muroc and replacing it with a full-scale cutout of a Japanese battleship. More troubling specters followed, including an experimental Flying Wing, with no tail or fuselage, that exploded into the desert floor with a crew of 10. Muroc became Edwards Air Force base, and a short distance through the heat waves, the exiled S.C.T.A. claimed the glassy blank of El Mirage (where it still meets today) to clock vehicles from the garages of greater Los Angeles. At first cars charged across the playa in match races, raising alkali clouds so thick that stragglers were left blinded and out of control. Bowing to the playa, the format changed to a single line of dust, floating through a heat mirage and caught in a timing trap. The attempt to streamline by eye, or eyeball aero, resulted in the box-like constructivist look of the 1932 highboy, aerospace references, and shells swept like sucked lozenges. In contrast, the dragster evolved for acceleration: a stripped down rail and exposed engine, plowing through dirty air. One depression-era pioneer of the lakes was Bob Estes, who twice shut down Clark Gables Packard while drag racing him on Sepulveda Blvd. Gable was so disturbed that Carole Lombard approached the 20-year old several days later, offering to buy his 1925 T roadster. The kid refused, and Lombard dispatched mechanics who made a disastrous attempt to copy the speed equipment. The hero is here established as a backyard engineer who cant be bought or understood and whose labor rewards him with speed. These qualities the L.A.P.D. failed to appreciate when they beat Estes senseless and auctioned off his car as a menace. Hot rods want to marry aesthetics and speed the way physicists yoke the Beautiful and the True. The aberrations known as Fuel Altereds persist on some drag strips, running up on two wheels and into the guardrail, sporting names like Pure Hell and Rat Trap. Altereds were built with high engine mounts on the mistaken premise that engine weight shifts rearward in an arc, and an engine put into that arc cuts the chassis reaction time. On

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equally murky grounds, Slingshot dragsters put the driver behind the rear axle like a rock in a slingshot. The miscalculations are beautiful, and as for the True: slingshots killed 15 drivers between 1963 and 1966, more fatalities than the Indianapolis 500.2

II. Go Fever
In December of 1947 Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in a Bell X-1 rocket plane over the dry lake that proto-hotrodders Thrust SSC at rest. The nose section is missing had called Muroc. Five years later, uranium and plutonium cores began going supercritical over Frenchman and Yucca flats, expanding at speeds which N.T.S. tour guides tell us were the fastest in the galaxy. The cold war skies buzzed with the overreaching creepiness of Pogo planes, Flying Wings, U-2s and the SR-71. Under the influence of Edward Teller, the Atomic Energy Commission lit a 104-kiloton shot exploring the peaceful use of atomic weapons to dig harbors, highways and canals while $7 billion was committed to a nuclear-powered aircraft, intended to fly almost perpetually.3 On cue, flying discs appeared over Mt. Rainierand rematerialized, wobbling in the heat waves of the Nevada Test Sitewhen all four military services were deployed within a few thousand yards of nuclear airbursts. Scuttlebutt had mental patients caged near ground zero as test subjects.4 Stranger rumors had MacArthur getting a hard-on for cobalt and lighting a shot so vicious that it put tears in the information that constitutes this world. There were zones where the sun didnt look right and the playas vibrated; stories of a Heisenberg Sedan lit under a couple of unfortunate grunts as a vehicle of discontinuous transport, and of discontinuities in the N.T.S. itself, photographed as blank spots by a commercial airline pilot.5 If hot rodders spread their share of the folklore supernatural, it is also true that years before stealth technology became known to the world they witnessed bat-winged apparitions moving over dry lakes in advance of their sound. They saw a side of the military few see, specifically, those impossibly open valleys where the inability to take it all in gives a constant impression of something missing. The military was spooked by a version of that space: by a fever that something was missing and that the Russians might have it. Post-war L.A. ran on aerospace. Redstone rockets boomed from Vertical Test Stand 1 just beyond the San Fernando valley, soon to be fixed with nuclear warheads and Alan Shepard. Lockheeds Burbank was an empty, sunny place where G-men leafed through newspapers. Hawthorne appeareddropped from the sky in the middle of a bean fieldand housewives wept to find themselves beyond the last stop of the Red Line trolley. Within months, those tract homes acquired a sense of place and mechanically-trained World War II vets had garages to work on their cars.

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Around 1945, the word hot rod was invented. Craig Breedlove supported his new family in the material and process-engineering department of Douglass Aircraft, sharing the fate of others swallowed by Lockheed, Northrop, and North American Aviation. In the late 1950s Breedlove threw himself into constructing a belly tank lakester. Made from the fuel tank of a World War II airplane, belly tanks were rear-engined; the driver sat forward, goggled like an ant, in a tear-drop bomb with no visible propulsion. Scattered through the smog-blasted junkyards of the San Fernando Valley, airplane parts often ended up in scrap or surplus stores. As a teenager, Breedlove was one of thousands foraging for parts that fit or that could be made to fit. Lakesveteran Dean Batchelor maintains that, Even rods from WW I era Curtiss OX-5 aircraft engines found their way into quite a few car engines. The 1952 cover of Hop Up magazine featured an Airoadster that ran off an inverted and reversed Ranger aircraft engine. Its Ford flywheel was mated to the crankshaft, rather than to a propeller.6 Later, there was the Bennet and Rochlitzer jet tank Slingshot, hovering between plane and cara thing of the lakebed alone. On the Bonneville salt flats, Breedloves belly tank qualified at 236 mph but he lost the clutch. With his wife Marge, Breedlove drove 110 miles to Salt Lake City and bought a new clutch, which he promptly lost on the next run, leaving them with 38 cents and no way home. Out of desperation, he then displayed what some still believe to be his greatest talent: hustling a sponsor. Breedlove soon had his man talked into a wild scheme to break the land speed record with jet thrust. Since the 19th century all land speed records had been powered through the wheels. At the age of 22, however, Breedlove was not thinking about rules. He was thinking about the speeds being realized in utter secrecy over Muroc dry lake. Scrapping plans to buy a new supercharger, Breedlove instead spent his $500 savings on a disassembled J-47 jet engine and assembled it with help from students at the Northrop Institute of Technology. Backed by Shell, Spirit of America began incubating in Breedloves garage to the horror of his neighbors, like Rodias backyard towers in Watts. It had the quicksilver of the atom and the rocket, yet it was a homemade thing: declared a tricycle in the eyes of the Fdration Motocycliste when the Fdration de lAutomobile refused to call it a car. By the time Breedlove wheeled it down the driveway, he had lost his wife, shattered his house and sawed down his neighbors hedge. Nor was he alone. The Arfons brothers coughed Green Monster out of a back yard scrap heap: named after their first homemade car, which had been sprayed with green tractor paint and steered by Craig Breedlove, age 60, meets the press a single airplane wheel. Like a primordial entity,

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the brothers divided in two and refused to speak to or acknowledge each other from the late 1960s onward, for reasons that neither would divulge. Instead they over-powered quarter-mile tracks with competing jet dragsters, incinerating the timing equipment in Florida and peeling asphalt at Lions drag strip in Los Angeles. When Mickey Thompson gunned an 800 hp slingshot up to 294 mph across the Bonneville salt flats, drag racers began seriously thinking about Englishman John Cobbs land speed record of 394 mph, unbroken since 1947. By 1960 there was Los Angeles doctor Nathan Ostich in his jet-powered Flying Caduceus, Art Arfons, and Mickey Thompson, now powered by four supercharged 1959 Pontiac V-8s counter-rotating in pairs to balance torque. From the garage of mechanic Athol Graham came the most disturbing entry: a World War II Allison aircraft engine dropped into a cleaved B-47 gasoline tank, fleshed out with Cadillac parts and junk yard pieces. Graham went first, smiling at his wife and making it two miles across the salt before going airborne and suffering fatal injuries. Nathan Ostich aborted and Englishman Donald Campbell crashed, pulling 16 Gs, or double the force experienced by an astronaut dropping into earths atmosphere. It was left for Mickey Thompson to run 406 mph one way but fail to complete the turnaround run required by the Fdration Internationale de lAutomobile. By the time Craig Breedlove wheeled his $100,000 Shell/Goodyear Spirit of America onto the Bonneville Salt Flats in the summer of 1962 he was facing a beautiful low-budget freak built by Romeo Palamides that was essentially a four-wheeler with a Ford axle underneath it...pretty much a hot rod with a jet enginethe engine being an after-burning J-47. Breedloves car refused to steer, due to a loose bearing, and he limped off the salt flats without making a serious run. He was towing his car through San Bernardino when he heard over the radio that Glen Leasher had crashed on his second full run and killed himself. Breedlove returned to the salt on August 5, 1963: the very day that a photograph of diskshaped cloud formations appeared in a section of Newsweek magazine titled Space and the Atom under the subtitle Ufology. Film of Breedloves run showed a metallic object jerking discontinuously while the camera tried to follow. Turbulent light refracted in the objects wakeas though someone had managed to stage a gedanken experiment.

III. Can a Leyden Jar be Described Much More Accurately?

Following Breedloves first 407 mph record, Art Arfons located a foreign-object damaged General Electric J-79 which never should have made it into the private sector, given its active status propelling F-104 jets in excess of 1600 mph. He somehow cut a deal with a surplus dealer for $5,000 (a savings of roughly a quarter of a million dollars) and then decided to test the device: by lashing it between two trees in his back yard. Windows smashed within a radius of blocks, and neighbors summoned the police. The military demanded their engine back, but Arfons bunkered himself in his garage, constructing a vehicle described by land speed historian Paul Clifton:
The front axle came from a 1937 Lincoln and the steering box from a 1955 Packard.

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The mechanism to fire the drag parachute was made out of sawed-off 12-gauge shotgunscost: $3.... The chutes themselves were made by a friends wife on her sewing machine....7

On the salt flats, Arfons was met by Breedlove, who was determined to break 500 mph. He didbut he also melted down his brakes, blew off his chutes, hit a telephone pole, bounced off a dike, and landed in a brine pond. When reporters reached him, legend has Breedlove saying, For my next act I will light myself on fire. Twelve days later, Arfons ran a two-way average of 536 mphblowing off his chutes and a tireand the next year his brother wheeled out a finned aberration bristling with 25 Jet Assisted Take-off rockets. With his new J-79, Breedlove broke 600 mph and Art Arfons later cart-wheeled at 580 mph, occasioning a helicopter pilot to remark: I didnt think anyone could possibly have survived...then I saw an arm move.8 On the drag strip a driver known as Jet Car Bob tore out his speedometer and installed a gauge measuring the G-forces that brought him to the brink of unconsciousness. Others blacked themselves out with hydrogen peroxide rockets, snapping awake in the middle of a run, while hot rod chemists toyed with hydrazine, a Titan II rocket fuel that blew engines apart. Deeper into the underground was Bill Frederick. He sent a car airborne near the Nellis Range where giant towtargets are sunk like darts and nuclear assembly areas strobe the playas at sundown. Witnesses to the first supersonic car Things got dark. U.S. 1 (formerly Valkyrie) killed Lucky Harris. Russell Mendez died in a rocket car. And on a terrible day in 1971, Art Arfons took a local newscaster for a jet car ride, killing the man and two track workers. The Arfons brothers creations amounted to jet engines on wheels. The basic idea was to power through turbulent, dirty air, adjusting an airfoil to keep the car earthbound. There were no wind tunnels or computers, and Breedlove would also come to dismiss such things, trusting metaphors such as the dart shape, or a snout flattened like a duckbill platypus in order to follow mother nature.9 Eyeball aero involves what Alfred North Whitehead called the self evidence of patterns of relationship in which numerical and quantitative relationships are wholly subordinate.10 Things just look rightas in the designs of Jocko Johnson, who brought full-envelope streamlining to the drag strips. The self evidence of Jockos whorls and scallops did not immediately materialize, but after enduring failure and derision, Jazzy Jim Nelson ran a record 8.35 E.T. in a body that carried the impact of a Kandinsky brush-stroke. It had down force, haunches and a swept tail with a 450 blown Chrysler dropped behind the driver. Down force eventually crushed

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Jockos shell and a second creation for Don Garlits came in heavy, handled spooky, or was sabotaged by Garlitsdepending on whom you believe. Jocko believed that center of gravity and aerodynamic pressure should live in the same place, but he created that place with short wheel bases and mid-engine configurations: a troubled idea inseparable from the beauty of his streamliners. Jocko has ended up bunkered in the desert next to a military base where his designs have become increasingly inscrutable. His latest streamliner targets a combustion-driven land speed record of 555 mph, running off of a wheel-shaped, 3-cycle engine placed around a cam wheel located next to the car wheel itself. As explained to drag racing writer Cole Coonce, the combustion engine went wrong in 1705 by using a crankshaft to convert reciprocal motion into rotary motion. Jockos solution chucks the crank and rods, weighs 40 lbs. and leaves a lot of space inside a car for other things.11 From this, it is a sideways step to late period Nikola Tesla, of death rays and the wirelesstransmission of power, swathed in a time-lapse lightning storm, calmly reading the morning paper. Ruined by the construction of a bee-hive lightning tower, Tesla prophesied to Hugo Gernsback of the science fiction pulps. Von Dutch, the hot rod pinstriper, quoted Tesla from memory and owned a giant Tesla coil that inspired his own invention of the coin-operated guillotine. No less strange are the beautiful molecular-genetic models that Lionel S. Penrose continued to carve out of woodeven after he knew that the structure of DNA had been discoveredor the flatheads that persist in speed culture after the overhead valve engine has rendered them obsolete. This is what is called technological enthusiasm12 and as it drifts from empirical test it takes a final step, literally down the road from Jocko, to a device known as The Integratron, which George Van Tassel built in the Mojave to harness piezo-electric energy according to specifications laid down for Moses tabernacle in Exodus 25-26. Van Tassel (a Hughes test pilot and Lockheed engineer) read the wings of Ezekiels angels as discharge points: what is today called an air gap. On Biblical specifications for the tabernacle Van Tassel asked, Can a Leyden jar be described much more accurately?

IV The Last Hot Rod

On October 4, 1983, on an 86-mile stretch of Pleistocene-era lake bottom north of Reno, Nevada, an English businessman named Richard Noble drove his Rolls-Royce Avon powered jet-car to a new World Land Speed Record. Clocking a two-way average speed of 633.458 mph through a measured mile, Noble barely beat the 622 mph record set in 1970 when Gary Gabelich mummified himself into a hydrogen peroxide rocket and fired himself across the Bonneville salt flats. Noble carried a European tradition of the gentlemans gauntlet, thrown down over Cognac, to sort out automotive and engineering prowess: a turn-of-the-century world of racing goggles, heroic understatement and over-engineered machinery. In contrast, Gabelich was an American drag racer so addicted to speed that he signed on at the Rockwell Corporation as a test subject, pulling G-forces formerly inflicted only on Rhesus monkeys and

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Chimps. Gabelich was killed in a motorcycle accident following his record run in Blue Flame, but carefully watching Nobles run was another former hotrodder who had been the first to drive homemade vehicles through 400, 500 and 600 mph. In 1990, Craig Breedlove met Noble on the Bonneville Salt Flats. There was an elegiac tone to the meeting, in that Noble was now a businessman committed to the production of affordable light aircraft while Breedlove was retired and sitting atop a real estate fortune. When the talk turned to speed, Breedlove astonished the Englishman by casually dropping that he had acquired two GE J-79 turbojets. Noble returned to England in a state of agitation, A telescope trained on the Black Rock Desert aware that the American had suffered a relapse of go fever and that the end game was not 700 mph, but something that lay about 60 mph further on, given the correct temperature and barometric pressure. The notion of a Mach I car had been floating around since the late sixties, though most aerodynamicists and engineers considered it to be a very bad idea. Speed culture is full of bad ideas however, including the brief and lethal career of a Volkswagen bug impaled with a solid fuel rocket; a four-wheel-drive funny car that mangled Gabelich in a horrible accident; and of course, jet dragsters, such as the one Doug Rose drove into a guardrail after a rainstorm, severing both his legs. Never losing consciousness, Rose drove back to the starting line for medical attention and several months later, he was back in the drivers seat with prosthetic limbs. It was Bill Frederick, however, who in 1979 hit the jackpot at Anheuser Busch and chickenwired together the so-called Budweiser Rocket, powered by a liquid fuel engine that torched an array of solid fuel doughnuts. For good measure, he attached a disarmed Sidewinder missile atop the power plant and, unable to sustain thrust through a two-way measured mile, hired Chuck Yeager to decree that the abomination had briefly gone supersonic. At 764 mph an unanchored object belongs in the air, not on the ground. Smelling something archaic, Los Angeles Times essayist Bill Sharpsteen wrote: A car equipped with a surplus jet engine seems crude compared to the infinitely swift, silent power of a Pentium computer chip.13 Utility is the issue herea criterion that finished the SuperCollider. What good is a hot rodor for that mattera symmetry-breaking mechanism that may as well have broken the potsherds of

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Lurianic Kabbala? Congress killed the Collider even as Teslas Wardenclyffe tower was mothballed: when investors began to suspect that the structure had everything to do with Goethes Faust and little to do with the wireless transmission of power. For his part, Tesla left his radio patent for Marconi to steal, sold the alternating current patent for cash, and got bored with dual resonating circuits in 1898: circuits which are the basis of Sharpsteens Pentium.14 In late October of 1996 a 59-year old Craig Breedlove appeared to the journalists assembled on the floor of the Black Rock desert as a dust devil, floating over the horizon. At first, Spirit of America seemed to be coming toward spectatorsan interesting optical illusion. Next, it was flashing past, out of control, having flicked onto its side at a reported 675 mph. Several days after Labor Day, 1997, a Russian Antonov cargo plane landed in Reno, Nevada and disgorged a black hallucination haunched by two Rolls Royce Spey turbo jets. Nobles driver was an RAF pilot named Andy Green, sitting between two enormous intakes which resembled, from the front, the eyes of a gas mask. At Mach I Green faced more turbulence than Yeagers Bell X-1 rocket plane, due to rebounding pressure waves. Air flow shifts over a vehicle approaching the sound barriereven with a minor increase in speedcausing pressure beneath to lift it. The Brit had spent two years interviewing designers who warned that the thing would fly. However, a chance meeting with a retired aerodynamicist named Ron Ayers convinced Noble that two jet engines might work, with the driver nestled up front where the centre of gravity and pressure would live. Gyroscopic forces necessitated rear steering and a moveable rear suspension would adjust the angle of attack. Ayers designed according to the maxim: anything that isnt lift is down force. Drag would be welcomed, and as with a fuel dragster, horsepower would compensate: 105,000 hp straining to push 13,000 lbs. of rolling drag on the front tires alone. Stability was the starting point for the Brits, with the Spey 205 engines added not for thrust as much as for weight. In contrast to Nobles Thrust Supersonic Car, Spirit of America was light, streamlined, and powered by a single GE-79 jet, placed in line with the cockpit, and out of the dirty air whorling past. Computer simulations and wind tunnels were rejected, and a series of epic misfires would plague Breedloves creation. At one point, the tire rims collected playa dust, rattling like a dryer with an unbalanced load. Trading on their national rivalry to raise money, Noble and Breedlove found themselves facing one of the great problems of applied physics. During the late stages of World War II, four out of six British and Canadian pilots died trying to break Mach I in prop-driven Spitfires during controlled dives that froze their elevators and disintegrated their aircraft. With jets and rocket planes, it became clear that severe buffeting occurs in the transonic realm, and many experts believed Mach I to be impenetrableright up until the moment that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier over Muroc. When news of Yeagers top secret flight made the front page of the L.A. Times the next day, it was a major security leak, exposing a black world whose very lack of oversight seemed integral to the oversight of democracy. The sky itself began hiding an eye, as the U2 spy plane began test flights from a remote dry lake bed of the Nevada Test Site, near an

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abandoned World War II airstrip. It was there, over Alpha-radiated hills, that Lockheeds Kelley Johnson found his fantasy space: past craters Buster-Jangle, Sedan and Dog, 12 miles down a dirt road from ground zero of the Plumb Bob series. At exactly the moment postwar hot rodders were establishing their own proving grounds on lake beds and deserted military bases, Johnson tested his U-2 on Groom Dry Lake, followed by the A-12, at speeds one pilot characterized as almost a religious experience. It was Edward Teller, however, who understood the overreaching in all of this, selling clean nuclear bombs to Eisenhower and a space-based X-ray laser to President Reagan (who did not seem to realize that a nuclear event was involved).15 Teller embraced uncertainty, feeling little of Einsteins anxiety about local causality, and no desire at all for hidden variables behind the formalism of quantum mechanics. His universe was newly created every microsecond by every atom, every star, and every living beinga prolific nature coinciding with his own. Among his final proposals was that of compressing deuterium and tritium to produce microexplosions which will allow us to study matter...in a state heretofore denied us...where pressures exceed those at the center of the earth. In this way, Teller remarked, one may construct a nuclear internal combustion engine.16 Through early October, gypsum clouds boiled over the floor of Lake Lahontan, whose mostly vanished waters once covered much of Northern Nevada. On October 13, 1997 the wind stops and Thrust SSC begins rolling, heavily coupled to the playa, whining through its first few miles. By mile five it is a lateral tornado, moving across the lakebed in dead silence, in advance of its sound. The Black Rock desert is 86 by 20 miles of mud flats between the Calico Mountains and the Seven Troughs range, but the dust tower overwhelms the mountains. It is suddenly clear that there is no road, place or use for this machine. It is built for this only. At 750 mph an ultra light pilot has photographed Thrust SSC pushing the edge of an enormous shock wave, outlined by rising playa dust. Abruptly, the dust trail rises, follows the car, and there is a lurch in the hills.
Two designs were visionary, according to land speed historian Cole Coonce: Infinity (which disintegrated, killing Glen Leasher), and this Jockeo car (scrapped after a single, record-run on a drag strip.) The front of the car is to the left.

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V. Dreamland
Ive rationalized my fascination with nuclear weapons by saying its important for the security of my country, and so there are no qualms to be had. If I went down another level in my psyche, I wouldnt know what to say Ive done it because I wanted to.17 Sam Cohen, Father of the Neutron Bomb

The dry lakes scene reached its millennial conclusion with two events. The first occurred during a 1998 Muroc reunion, when a 75-year old hot rodder killed himself within sight of the Space Shuttle landing strip. The second is more difficult to summarize: a rumored meeting between Bob Lazar, builder of a jet-powered Honda, and Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and proto-type for Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove. Over coffee, Lazar claimed to have hit it off with the old man on the subject of jet funny cars, after which Teller decided to show the kid a real hot rod. Shortly after the meeting, Lazar found himself bumping along in a school bus with blacked-out windows, deep into a box of restricted airspace with call sign Dreamland. It was there that Lazar claimed to have seen a metallic disc, jerking discontinuously in the sector of the Nevada Test Site known as Area 51. Folklore is not a T.V. show. Test site stories originated from ordinary citizens, camping out in vast, paranoid valleys north of Las Vegas, binoculars trained on the airspace of Groom and Papoose dry lakes. A few were on the inside oncehaving seen the veins of the Emigrant Mountains by atom light or flown F-16s out of Nellisbut the inside stories mostly pay off in a lizard shaking hands with a general. When the military sealed off dry lakes, the folklore supernatural saw the alienation of our brightest technical mindsKelley Johnson, Ben Rich and Edward Tellersecreted back there with virtually unlimited black budgets, creating their gloomy wonders. Flying Saucer lore is deeply mixed up with the cold war proving ground and the religiouseschatological glow of technology (now surrounding the gene and the algorithm, as it once did the atom and space travel). We can bask in this glow, but the situation is intolerable for an enthusiast whose impulses are not utilitarian, but romantic. The fantasy is to steal what is back theresomething which actually happened recently, according to a wire service report. It describes an Arizona Highway Patrol officer coming upon a smoldering metallic object, embedded high on the face of a cliff in the desert. The officer approached the object with some trepidation, sensing something very off about the situation. Gradually, he realized that he was looking at the remains of an automobile. Forensic work established what happened: a kid had gotten into a military base, stolen a JATO rocket, and strapped it to a 1967 Chevrolet Impala. He or she lit the device as an after burner, rode the brakes to no effect and struck the cliff face at 300 mph. The item, an internet myth, carries strains of bug-eyed speed addiction and the Zamora U.F.O. incident. It nonetheless ran in Reuters and international major dailies (including the L.A. Times and the Vancouver Sun) demanding to be told, facts be damned, as only the truth can. Driver and carfused.

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* * * Beyond the guard shack at Mercury, Nevada dust rivers sweep away to spectral artillery targets and cratered valleys, red with the sun like Mars. It was through the Nevada test site that a 55-year old schoolteacher hiked in to Papoose dry lake in April of 1997, somehow eluding motion detectors and security patrols (who, if theyd caught me in there would have lit me up like a Roman candle).18 The Cal State Long Beach cultural anthropology graduate was looking for trail markers of the Lost 49er emigrants, but he returned with a different story. Across the restricted perimeter he had encountered a large city of buildings strobing with light, strange vibrations in the playas, and a lighted doorway that appeared and disappeared across Papoose lake at night. He barely made it out, dehydrated and stripped, kept alive by a Department of Energy water pipe. This is no vision of hellto the contrary, Department of Energy tour guides have now opened up the Test Site as a kind of park, echoing Nevada governor Charles Russell, who effused in a 1952 speech that the sub marginal wastes of the proving ground were blooming with atoms.19 An atomic garden recalls the deserts alienated humanity. Our arms, our legs. Faces even, brooding from the lava, and unfinished thoughts, petrified in rippled badlands that take on the aspect of human brains at sundown.

Black Rock Desert: Dust rising after a pass by Thrust SSC

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NOTES 1 David Darlington, The Mojave, New York: Henry Holt, 1996:164. 2 Robert Post, High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing 1950-1990, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994:186-187. 3 The Brookings Institution, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1998:123. 4 Carole Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, Cambridge: MITPress, 1993:62 and 346. Also, see Michael DiGregorio, Human Guinea Pigs at Ground Zero: An Interview with a Cold War-Era Atomic Vet, Far Out (Winter) 1992:10. 5 DiGregorio unearths the MacArthur story in Far Out (Summer) 1993, and I collected the others at an Area 51 conference in Rachel, Nevada in 1992. 6 Dean Batchelor, The American Hot Rod., Osceola: Motorbooks International, 1995:113. 7 Paul Clifton, The Fastest Men On Earth, New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1996:211. 8 Nightmare on the Flats, Time. (November 25)1966:63. 9 Robert Post, High Performance:210. 10 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1958:47. [Orig. 1938] 11 Cole Coonce, Target Speed 29 Palms, Drag Racing Monthly, 50:3 (March) 1997:94. 12 Drag racing historian Robert Post describes hot rodding as technological enthusiasm, echoing the term technological euphoria, used by aviation writers to describe the post-war explosion of failed, experimental aircraft (see: Stephan Wilkinson, Going Vertical: Why the Straight-Up Fighter Effort Broke Down, Air and Space/Smithsonian,11:4 (November) 1996:57. 13 Bill Sharpsteen, The Fastest Car in the World? If You Cant Buy it, Why Should You Care? Los Angeles Times Magazine, (September 1) 1996:22. 14 Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time, New York: Dell Publishing,1981:160-161. 15 When Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative on March 23, 1983, he did not mention that X-Rays from a nuclear detonation were to destroy incoming missiles. Later, an administration official claimed that the president was unaware of the lasers power source, despite being briefed on the system by Edward Teller (Kevin ONeill, Atomic Audit, p. 81n). Although Tellers X-Ray was ludicrously unworkable, it sold the fantasy of a prophylactic missile shieldthe so-called Star Wars missile defense system. For Tellers role, see: The Earthly Origins of Star Wars, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 43 (October) 1987:20-28; Dan Morain and Richard E. Meyer, Teller Gave Flawed Data on X-Ray Laser, Scientist Says, Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1987:A-1; U.S. General Accounting Office, Strategic Defense Initiative Program: Accuracy of Statements Concerning DoEs X-Ray Laser Research Program, NSIAD-88-181BR (June) 1988:7-14 and 29-32. 16 Edward Teller, Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics, New York: Plenum Press, 1991:210-211. 17 Robert Del Tredici, At Work In the Fields of the Bomb, New York: Harper and Row, 1987:157. 18 Bob Pool, Trek to Forbidden Ground, Los Angeles Times, (March 25) 1988:B-8. 19 Michael DiGregorio, op. cit.

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Laclau With Lacan: Comments on the Relation Between Discourse Theory and Lacanian Psychoanalysis1
Yannis Stavrakakis
University of Essex

Prolegomena
t a recent conference devoted to the relation between Lacan and social theory, the call for papers presented Ernesto Laclaus work as one of the prime loci in which this relation becomes articulated.2 Does that mean that Ernesto Laclau is now fully committed to Lacanian theory and sees his intellectual project as an attempt to demonstrate the importance of Lacan for sociopolitical analysis and political philosophy in a way similar to that of, say, Slavoj i ek?3 In order to start answering this question it is necessary to examine in some detail the intricacies of Laclaus dialogue with Lacanian theory since, although all commentators of Laclau recognize the existence of this dialogue, its exact nature and implications are currently the object of ongoing debate. Before exploring the status of this dialogue in detail, however, let me very briefly address some preliminary historical or rather genealogical questions.4 When did this dialogue start and what is psychoanalysis contributing to the development of discourse theory? Is it one of its driving forces or a mere supplement? Is it correct to infer, for example, that
Laclaus and Mouffes project of articulating the complexities of a postmodern politics would have been just as innovative and compelling without their psychoanalytic metaphors. [Is it true that] The authors central concepts of articulation, antagonism, and radical impossibility are not especially enhanced by their recourse to Lacanianisms that although carrying with them a certain provocative charge, do not possess any further polemical value [?]5

It seems to me that there are obvious problems with this kind of argument. First, in Laclaus work the confluence between Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-marxist discourse theory was envisaged from the beginning as a project subverting any simplistic logic of supplementarity. Consider the following quote from a paper Laclau published in 1986 and in which he clearly views this confluence as an enterprise beyond any logic of supplement or articulation: this is a project conceivable, neither as the addition of a supplement to the former [post-marxism] from the latter [Lacanian theory] nor as the introduction of a new causal

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elementthe unconscious instead of the economy.6 This confluence, in other words, creates a whole new field in which new concepts and theoretical logics emerge; concepts and logics which acquire meaning only within this new terrain and thus are not reducible to neither of the two poles involved in its creation. One obvious example is the concept of the nodal point as developed in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, a central operational category in discourse theory, a concept developed at the intersection of Lacanian theory and political analysis:
Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre. We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial fixation, nodal points. (Lacan has insisted on these partial fixations through his concept of points de capiton, that is, of privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain. This limitation of the productivity of the signifying chain establishes the positions that make predication possiblea discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of the psychotic).7

This is not to argue, of course, that during the mid-eighties Lacanian theory is already the main theoretical reference in Laclaus or Laclau and Mouffes work. The relative importance of Lacanian argumentation was to increase in Laclaus subsequent work and this was something that Bellamy could not of course predict. In that sense the validity of Bellamys argument is further undermined today by the fact that it could not take into account the whole dialogue that took place after 1985between Laclau and i ek for instanceand which left its distinctive mark in Laclaus workmost notably in New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (1990), which was actually published well before the publication of Bellamys critique, and in Emancipation(s) (1996). It is really a pity that a detailed critique of Laclaus work and of its relation to psychoanalysis such as the one staged by Christopher Lane8 suffers from the same, but this time self-inflicted, limitationsself-inflicted in the sense that although he writes five or six years after Bellamy, and recognizes himself that Laclau and Mouffes work obviously has changed over the course of a decade, and Laclau has recently begun to focus on the impact of the unconscious on all forms of politics, groups, and subjectivity he nevertheless chooses without disregarding Laclaus more recent work...to limit...[his]...reading to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy....9 This is a pity because as Ernesto Laclau clearly points out in an interview conducted by D. Zeginis and myself in 1993, although Lacanian theory played an important role in...[his] theoretical trajectory at least from the beginning of the eighties...this influence has increased during these last years and led to a very important redefinition of some of the categories of his theory of hegemony, a redefinition put forward in New Reflections.10 Now, whether this redefinition constitutes a radical Lacanian shift in Laclaus work, as Anna Marie Smith arguesa shift which she seems to consider problematic11or a mere displacement which leaves intact the supposed incompatibilities between discourse theory and psychoanalysis as argued by Sean Homer,12 is something which we hope will be clarified in the course of this paper. Having established then, in this introductory section, that a serious and substantive dialogue does exist between Laclaus work and Lacanian theory and having sketched a first genealogical map of this dialogue, my aim in the main body of this paper shall be to discuss

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the exact nature and the stakes of this dialogue, addressing at the same time the most important criticisms that have been directed at this dimension of Laclaus work, that is to say, at its evolving relation with Lacanian theory. Hopefully the terms of this relation will become clearer in the process, something which will further permit, in various stages in my argumentation, the articulation of a set of points on the relation between Lacanian theory and political analysis in general. I decided to structure this paper in three sections. The first one attempts a general but brief presentation of the basic links between discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The second section addresses certain issues related to Laclaus conception of the political in its relation to the Lacanian real, while the third addresses the whole problematic of the ethical moment in Laclaus work. However, one should always keep in mind that my account is not to be construed as in any way a fixed one. Rather, it represents a kind of snapshot of the relation as it is currently developing, and this is a relation whose future form is in no way predetermined. For Laclaus project remains one of the most original and dynamic interventions in contemporary political theory, especially in the field in which political theory meets psychoanalysis.

I
At the outset, I would like to dispel a confusion which accompanies many discussions of the relation between psychoanalytic theory and sociopolitical analysis. We may approach this issue through the question: What serves to unite these two approaches? The most common but totally misleading answer is the following: But surely, the role of the individual actor in politics. Such a view has been articulated as a criticism of Laclaus and Mouffes work by Jane Bellamy:
In order to render more meaningful their invoking of psychoanalytic terms Laclau & Mouffe would need to be more specific about the precise nature of the intersection between the social...and the psychic which however fragmented, alienated and deconstructed is surely a major factor in the implementing of political actions. Their use of psychoanalytic terms to further elucidate certain ideological and political phenomena is too broadly deployed to allow for a consideration of the individual psyche as a factor in the operations of ideology.13

Here, I would like to question the conception of individual psyche that Bellamy has in mind. For her formulation seems to betray a certain resistance to giving up an ultimately essentialist perspective. What must be emphasized at this point is that, at least for Lacan, this psyche is nothing other than the pure substanceless subject as lack. Lacan is extremely clear in this respect:
in the term subject...I am not designating the living substratum needed by this phenomenon of the subject, nor any sort of substance, nor any being possessing knowledge in his pathos, his suffering, whether primal or secondary, nor even some incarnated logos.14

According to Lacan, then, the subject is not some sort of individual psychological substratum that can be reduced to its own representation. Once this is granted the way is open to develop an alternative definition of subjectivity. If there is an essence in the Lacanian subject it is precisely the lack of essence.15 The object of Lacanian psychoanalysis is not the individual,

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it is not man. It is what he is lacking.16 It is lack then which is revealed as the defining mark of subjectivity. Laclau is taking very seriously this insight in his anti-essentialist conceptualization of political subjectivity. In fact, as a result of his dialogue with Slavoj i ek during the late eighties there has been a shift in his conception of subjectivity from Hegemony (where subjectivity is understood in terms of subject positions) to New Reflections (where the subject as lack becomes dominant). In Laclaus own words in Hegemony, as Slavoj i ek has correctly pointed out, there was a tendency of reducing the subject to a subject position (a structuralist conception). Today I tend to distinguish between objective subject positions and the subject as the subject of lack.17 Contrary to what Bellamy implies it is this appropriation of the Lacanian conception of the subject as lack which gives Laclau the opportunity of reaching a more sophisticated mapping of political action beyond any psychological essentialism or reductionism. But why exactly is that? First of all because it is lack which makes necessary the constitution of every identity through a process of identification linking thus inexorably the subjective level to the objective. It seems that Laclau realizes that by introducing the conception of the subject as lack, and by recognizing the constitutive split marking subjectivity (the Ich Spaltung), Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis not only radicalizes our understanding of the subject in politics, but offers a coherent account of the relation between the subjective and the objective orders, the latter of which pertains to the level of the social. What permits this confluence is that analytic theory is not only concerned with lack but also with what attempts to fill this lack and always ends up reproducing it: Psychoanalysis is otherwise directed at the effect of discourse within the subject.18 Here, not only discourse theory meets Lacan but Lacan meets discourse theoryan encounter he would conclude with his theory of the four discourses. From this point of view, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have put it, there is no subject according to Lacan which is not always already a social subject.19 The key term for understanding this relation between the subjective and the objective is, of course, the psychoanalytic category of identification, with its explicit assertion of a lack at the root of any identity: one needs to identify with something because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of identity.20 By locating thus at the place previously assigned to an essence of the individual psyche a constitutive lack, Lacanian theory avoids the essentialist reductionism of the social to the individual level and opens the road to the confluence of psychoanalysis and socio-political analysis since this lack can only be (partially) filled by sociopolitical objects of identification. But what is even more important is that Laclau does not remain content with this schema. In my view he senses that the importance of Lacanian theory for sociopolitical analysis cannot be reduced to this, albeit important, subjective level, nor even to the relation between the subject and the social grasped through the concept of identification. Lacanian theory is equally concerned with the objective level, the level of the object of identification per se (Lacanian categories such as the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary encompass the whole of human experience and not only the so-called subjective level, and, of course, concepts such as fantasy, the Other and objet petit a display thoroughly objective logics without leading,
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however, to any kind of objectivism.) In actual fact, the more insightful suggestion that Lacan makes with respect to the realm of the objective-social, concerns what he calls the lack in the Other. As i ek has put it,
the most radical dimension of Lacanian theory lies not in recognizing [that the Lacanian subject is divided, crossed-out, identical to a lack in a signifying chain] but in realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barr, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack.21

The lack in the big Other is the big secret of psychoanalysis, as Lacan calls it already from his 195859 Seminar. Something is always missing in the Other; there is no Other of the Other. The structure of the Other is revealed as a certain void, the void of its lack of guarantee in the real. Meaning is always based on semblance; precisely because there is no last word; meaning always indicates the direction toward its failure,22 its failure to anchor itself on the real. In that sense, it becomes legitimate to argue that Lacans major contribution to contemporary theory is a new picture of the social. 23 The social field is revealed as a discursive field of representation which is articulated on the basis of the repression, the exclusion, the reduction, of an ultimately unrepresentable real; a real which is however resurfacing, making thus visible the irreducible failure inscribed at the heart of the Other of meaning: there is a fault, hole or loss therein [in the Other].24 Now, where does Laclau fit in all this?25 What I want to argue is that this lack in the Other effectively translates into the split character of every object of identificationwhat Laclau has described as the ultimate impossibility of society. In a 1983 paper characteristically entitled The Impossibility of Society he argues that society...as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility.26 If for Lacan the Woman does not exist, for Laclau Society does not exist. It does not exist as a given, necessary, extra-discursive foundation, as the depository of fullness and universality; it is only produced as an object of discourse through processes of identification which attempt to suture its lack of foundation in the real. My reference to the concept of suture in the previous paragraph was not coincidental; it highlights another conceptual link between discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Suture is used by Laclau and Mouffe as developed by Jacques-Alain Miller and as it implicitly operates in Lacanian theory in general. It designates a structure of irreducible lack but also highlights the continuous attempt to fill this lack:
It is this double movement that we will attempt to stress in our extension of the concept of suture to the field of politics. Hegemonic practices are suturing insofar as their field of operation is determined by the openness of the social, by the ultimately unfixed character of every signifier. This original lack is precisely what the hegemonic practices try to fill in. Atotally sutured society would be one where this filling-in would have reached its ultimate consequences and would have, therefore, managed to identify itself with the transparency of a closed symbolic order. Such a closure of the social is...impossible.27

For Laclau then society is impossible because the full Other is impossible. Politics comprise all our fantasmatic attempts to fill-in this lack in the Other: although the fullness and

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universality of society is unachievable, its need does not disappear: it will always show itself through the presence of its absence.28 If, in other words, the full closure of the Other is impossible this does not mean that it is not signified through its own absence. This is how empty signifiers are produceda concept which has acquired central importance in Laclaus recent texts. The articulation of a hegemonically appealing political discourse can only take place around an empty signifier functioning as a nodal point, a point de capiton. Consider, for example, a situation of radical disorder and social disintegration. As Laclau points out:
in a situation of radical disorder order is present as that which is absent [but desired; it has, in other words, an objet petit a quality]; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of this absence. In this sense, various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack. To hegemonize something is exactly to carry out this filling function.29

We used the paradigm of order but signifiers like unity, revolution etc. can function in a similar way: Any term which, in a certain political context becomes the signifier of the lack, plays the same role. Politics is possible because the constitutive impossibility of society can only represent itself through the production of empty signifiers.(ibid.)

II
In a review article for a Greek journal,30 and also in his contribution to a volume that was recently published in German,31Thanos Lipowatz stages a critique of E. Laclaus project which is articulated within the context of a certain psychoanalytic framework.32 As I understand it, Lipowatzs primary objection is that Ernesto Laclau overstresses the importance of the political (and of the related elements of antagonism and contingency) to the point that the political acquires in Laclaus discourse an absolute, omnipotent, and thus imaginary status.33 In order to help diffuse this misunderstanding, it might be useful to distinguish between, on the one hand, a theorists decision to explore the dimension of the political (recognizing at the same time its interaction with other dimensions of our experience) and, on the other, the attribution to the political of such an imaginary status. For it is apparent that, in E. Laclaus work, the political is always explored in its relation to the social, the level of sedimented practices and institutions (i.e. the level of social construction).34 For him, the political is the moment in which the social is disrupted, thereby ushering in new identificatory attempts to re-institute it by means of imaginary/symbolic rearticulations (played out in the context of hegemonic struggles attempting to suture the lack in the Other). The moment of the political is always examined in relation to the order of the social it dislocates and to the new social order articulated as a result of its irruption. In that sense, the political is never omnipotent, nor absolute. If Laclaus work focuses on the intricacies of the political dimension this is because this dimension has been historically repressed in theoretical discourse by various forms of social essentialism. To be more precise, Lipowatzs criticism regarding the use of the political is twofold. He argues that, by overstressing the political, Laclau neglects two other dimensions: (1) The material infrastructure of society, the economy, as well as other distinctive discursive domains (the cultural dimension etc.). (2) The ethical dimension. I will deal with the first criticism in this

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part of the paper and I shall leave the second one for the final part. In these two parts of my paper Lipowatzs argumentation will also serve as a general frame permitting the discussion of other critical readings of Laclaus project in its relation to Lacanian theory. I have the impression that the first criticism is based on a confusion which can be easily resolved, and which can be traced either to a misunderstanding by Lipowatz of the concept of the political in E. Laclaus work, or to a disagreement in the manner in which it is deployed. Lipowatz seems to conceive the political in the traditional sense, as one discourse among others (the religious, the economic etc.) and is thus led to the conclusion that, in Laclaus work, the importance of this discourse is overstressed in relation to all the others. But the political, as understood by Laclau, is quite definitively not a discourse. What we find at the discursive level, the level of the social (which includes all the discursive domains mentioned by Lipowatz) is what we usually call politics, that is to say, ideological discourses, political institutions, etc. The political, on the other hand, is outside (but always in interaction with, and thus inside) this socially constructed field. The political is what disrupts this discursive field and leads to its continuous rearticulation. Hence, in Laclau, the moment of the political and the space of the social (incorporating various discursive fields including our religious, economic and political constructions) belong to distinct and incommensurable orders. In mainstream political science, for instance, politics and political reality are associated with citizenship, elections, the particular forms of political representation and the various ideological families. Politics is conceived as constituting a separate system, the political system, and is expected to stay within the boundaries of this system: people, that is to say, politicians, social scientists and citizens, expect to find politics in the arenas prescribed for it in the hegemonic discourse of liberal democracies (these arenas being the parliament, parties, trade unions etc.), and also expect it to be performed by the accordingly sanctioned agents.35 Although this well-ordered picture is lately starting to show signs of disintegration, with the politicization of areas previously located outside the political system, politics can only be represented in spatial terms, as a set of practices and institutions, as a system, albeit an expanding one. Politics is identical to political reality and political reality, as all reality, is, firstly, constituted at the symbolic level, and, secondly, supported by fantasy. Not surprisingly then, it is one of the most exciting developments in contemporary political theory, and one strongly promoted by theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe, that the political is not defined as reducible to this discursive field of politics: The political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition.36 When we limit our scope within politics we are attempting a certain domestication/spatialization of the political, we move our attention from the political per se (as the moment of the disruption and undecidability governing the reconstruction of social objectivity) to the discursively constructed field of politics and society (defined as the result of this construction and reconstruction, as the sedimented forms of objectivity).37 This sedimentation of political reality (as a part or a subsystem of the social)

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requires a forgetting of origins, a forgetting of the contingent force of dislocation which stands at its foundation; it requires the symbolic and fantasmatic reduction of the real. In fact, with reference to Lacanian theory, Laclaus work permits the following conclusion: the political seems to acquire a position closely related to that of the Lacanian real; one cannot but be struck by the fact that the political is revealed as a particular modality of the real: the political becomes one of the forms in which one encounters the real. Let me sum up some of the ideas presented up to now in this paper. Underlying Lacans importance for political theory and political analysis is his insistence on the split, lacking nature of the symbolic, of the socio-political world per se, what becomes in Laclaus work the ultimate impossibility of society. Our societies are never harmonious ensembles. This is only the fantasy through which they attempt to constitute and reconstitute themselves, to suture their constitutive impossibility. Experience shows that this fantasmatic desire can never be fully realized. No social fantasy can fill the lack around which society is always structured. This lack is re-emerging with every resurfacing of the political, with every encounter with the real. In Laclaus vocabulary, we can speak about the political exactly because there is subversion and dislocation of the social (including the field of politics). The level of social construction, of human creativity, of the emergence and development of socio-political institutions, is the level in which the possibility of mastering the real makes itself visible but only to be revealed as a chimera unable to foreclose a moment of impossibility that always returns to its place. Given this context, the moment of the political should be understood as emerging at the intersection of our symbolic reality with this real, the impossible real being the ontological horizon of every play between political articulation and dislocation, order and disorder, politics and the political.38 Let us return now to the critique of Lipowatz. Lipowatz is particularly insistent that by overstressing the political Laclau neglects the level of the economy. He suggests that Laclaus radical critique of economism leads him, improperly, to privilege the political over the economy. In fact, his argument is articulated in a rather traditional wayone which highlights the material infrastructure of the economy as something that limits the political. The same confusion to which I referred earlier is at work here. Laclau is in no way a solipsist. In fact, Laclau is arguing that this material element is present and always articulated in our discourses, discourses that are not reduced to a combination of speech and writing but are seen as incorporating both linguistic and non-linguistic elements,39 a move reminiscent of Lacans insistence on the materiality of the signifier. This is not only true of the economy but of all discursive fields. And while it may be true that the economy may limit our political discourses, the discursively constructed field of politics (and vice versa) within a framework of discursive interaction, the economic space itself as a discursive construction40 is always subject to the structural causality of the political; it is limited by the political qua encounter with the real. Our economic constructions, systems, and institutions are themselves subject to disruptions and dislocations and are always rearticulated through hegemonic and not

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algorithmic processes governed by matter itself (as if it were possible to gain direct, unmediated access to it). Indeed, it would seem that Lipowatz himself accepts this fact when he speaks about the intervention of the real in economic life, equating it with the moment of dislocation or crisis of an economic system which leads to the formation of a new economic order. This fact can mean two different things. Lipowatz suspects that it means that the real is not present only in the political but also in the life of economic discourses. This is, of course, true if we understand the political in the traditional sense as only another discourse (reducing it thus to politics). There exists, however, a second logical possibility which is exactly what we find articulated in Laclaus work: as we have already pointed out, the political, far from being imaginary, is a certain way of approaching, of encircling, the real and the structural causality that it instantiates vis-a-vis all discursive fields, including the economy. In this view, therefore, Lipowatzs example about the presence of the real in the economic space, instead of forming the basis of a critique, in fact serves to vindicate Laclaus argumentation. Indeed, I would like to suggest that this line of approach reveals some common ground shared by the two theorists that could serve as the basis of further dialogue. This is not to say, however, that Lipowatzs argument is wholly misplaced. It is true, for example, that the use of the concept of antagonism in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy implies an antagonistic relation between two forces that fight the imaginary (fantasmatic) construction of each other. In that sense, an emphasis on antagonism as the defining moment of the political may be construed as privileging the imaginary dimension. The concept of antagonism thus seems, by its very nature, open to such a criticism. This was pointed out by i ek who, in Beyond Discourse Analysis,41 attempted to solve it by distinguishing the radical-real antagonism from the commonplace meaning of antagonism which clearly does not correspond to, and is not consistent with, Laclau and Mouffes intuition: We must then distinguish the experience of antagonism in its radical form, as a limit of the social, as the impossibility around which the social field is structured, from antagonism as the relation between antagonistic subject-positions: in Lacanian terms, we must distinguish antagonism as real from the social reality of the antagonistic fight.(253) Ernesto Laclau himself went even further in his attempt to remedy this problem. In the same interview to which I referred earlier (given under the auspices of the Greek journal DIAVAZO) he points out that:
There was a certain ambiguity in the way the category of antagonism was formulated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.... Today I believe that the constitution of the other as antagonistic already presupposes a certain discursive inscriptionin other words conceiving the other as an enemy presupposes a prior identification of ourselves with a particular position within the framework of the Symbolic order [It also presupposes, in most cases, the imaginary-fantasmatic construction of both antagonistic poles]. Thats why in my more recent work I moved my attention to the category of dislocation as a level prior to that of antagonism.42

Indeed the introduction of the category of dislocation in New Reflections as a centralperhaps the centralconcept in Laclaus theoretical corpus constitutes a major

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breakthrough which not only deals with Lipowatzs concerns but clearly signals a turn in Laclaus work which brings him even closer to Lacanian theory; and this because dislocation, by replacing antagonism as the kernel of the political, can only be understood as an encounter with the Lacanian real par excellence. Both are unrepresentable; both are at the same time traumatic/disruptive and productive. Dislocations are traumatic in the sense that they threaten identities and they are productive in the sense that they serve as the foundation on which new identities are constituted. 43 Similarly, the traumatic real always disrupts all attempts at symbolization; and yet it never ceases to call for new symbolizations. It is clear that the emergence of this concept of real dislocation as the kernel of the political is one of the most important products of Laclaus dialogue with psychoanalysis and one which directly links his argument on the impossibility of society with the irreducibility of the real in Lacanian discourse. If our account is accurate, if that is to say, dislocation qua encounter with the impossible real functions, in Laclaus work, as both the cause and the limit of social identity formation, then it is extremely difficult if not impossible to see why Sean Homer still attempts to reduce Laclaus argument to a negotiation of subject positioning which neglects the subjects relationship with the real itself. 44 If however Homer criticizes Laclau on the grounds that he remains attached to a supposedly non-Lacanian post-structuralist mode of argumentation, others make exactly the opposite argument. Laclau has become too Lacanian for their taste. This suspicion has created a lot of confusion, especially among those who had already categorized Laclau as a Derridean. Many scholars seem overly keen, yet unable, to discern Laclaus loyalty. In the final instance, so the operative question goes, is he loyal to Derrida or to Lacan? Needless to say, this is usually played out as a zero-sum game. Derridean and Lacanian theories seem to some academics as totally incompatible bodies of thought; what is also considered as an impossible task is to work simultaneously with both of themwhich is clearly Laclaus choice. Judith Butler for example cannot see how it is possible to articulate the Derridean idea of the constitutive outside with the Lacanian logic of lack. It is true of course that Laclaus conception of identity makes use of both these insights. Thus, in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, he refers to the Derridean idea that an identitys constitution is always based on excluding something and establishing a violent hierarchy between the two resultant poles [man/woman, black/white etc.] according to which the second term is thus reduced to the function of accident [to a mere supplement], as opposed to the essentiality of the first. 45 Here, the whole point of the deconstructive move is to show that the excluded pole is, in fact, a constitutive outside, that the accident is essential/necessary for the constitution of the identity of any essence, of any totalizing political discourse. Consequently, every identity is split since exclusion, the condition of its possibility, is also its condition of impossibility. In his work in the nineties Laclau tends to approach this split through Lacanian theory. As I have tried to show, identity construction is understood as a process of identification in the psychoanalytic sense of the term presupposing a truly constitutive lack.46 This interimplication of Derrida and Lacan is exactly what seems to

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confuse Butler: If the outside is, as Laclau insists, linked to the Derridean logic of the supplement,47 then it is unclear what moves must be taken to make it compatible with the Lacanian logic of lack. For Butler the problem is that while the supplement is outside of posited identity but inside the field of the social, the Lacanian real (which is directly related to the logic of lack) is permanently outside the social as such and thus outside the scope of socio-political analysis.48 Butlers point raises an important issue regarding the blend of Derridean and Lacanian theory in Laclaus work. It also raises more general issues such as the relation between the inside and the outside and the status of the real in contemporary theorization. Hence it deserves our immediate attention. I can think of three ways to address Butlers point; they are the following: 1. The first one has to do with her representation of the difference between the Derridean and the Lacanian moment in connection to Laclaus political theory. Simply put, in Laclaus work, contrary to what Butlers point implies, it is evident that the Derridean logic of the constitutive outside is understood as stressing the outside quality much more than the Lacanian logic of lack and of the objet petit a do. The constitutive outside is an outside which blocks the identity of the inside(and is, nonetheless, the prerequisite for its constitution at the same time); here denial does not originate from the inside of identity itself but, in its most radical sense, from outside.49 In Laclaus more recent texts the main focus is the, so to speak, internal conditions of possibility for the constitution of meaning and identity formations. What would surprise Butler is that to do that Laclau turns to Lacanian theory, precisely because the real limits of the symbolic are shown internally: any system of signification is structured around an empty place resulting from the impossibility of producing an object which, none the less, is required by the systematicity of the system. 50 For Laclau, and here the Lacanian influence becomes even more explicit, this impossibility is a real impossibility51 while the impossible object embodying the absent systematicity of the system is Jacques Lacans objet petit a, an object present within the socio-symbolic field through its absence.52 In other words, the limits Butler attributes to Lacanian and Derridean theory vis--vis their negotiation of the inside or the outside can be easily displaced with effects which seem disruptive for her either/or argument. In fact, it is this either/or mode of argumentation itself which has to be problematized now. 2. The second problem then with Butlers argumentwhich directly follows from the firstis her strict differentiation between the logic of the inside and the logic of the outside irrespective of which of the two poles is attributed to Lacan or to Derrida. This is also a central point in Linda Zerillis much more sophisticated negotiation of Laclaus relation to Lacanian theory.53 Zerilli argues that while in Lacanian theory the limits of identity are internal, in poststructuralism the antagonistic limit of every identity is an external limit: every identity encounters opposition in the form of other identities, other perspectives and opinions.54 As we have seen, this seems to be a quite accurate mapping of the theoretical terrain on which Laclaus argument operates. Now, although Zerilli does not totally discard the relevance of the

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Lacanian internal limits, it is clear from her argumentation that she considers the external limits more important and certainly closer to Laclaus schema. Thats why she seems puzzled with Laclaus positive reception of i eks point regarding the priority of the internal limits;55 according to her interpretation Laclaus argument clearly presupposes the priority of the external limits. What I want to suggest at this point is that this strict differentiation between the inside and the outside, the internal and the external, in all its different formssome of them being more justified than othersis made possible by the foreclosure of the whole field of Lacanian theorization that focuses on the question of extimit (external intimacy). Far from simply playing this zero-sum game by conveniently occupying one of the two poles of the supposed antithesis, Lacanian theory attempts to subvert the whole opposition: the neologism extimit expresses the way in which psychoanalysis problematizes the opposition between inside and outside.... For example the real is just as much inside as outside.56 The limits imposed by the reala real which always remains outside the symbolic fieldare shown internally, are marking this symbolic from within. To this point we will return shortly. For the time being let us just observe that already from the early eighties Laclau and Mouffe seem aware of this paradoxical link between the internal and the external and thus it is not legitimate to reduce their position to the priority of the external limits. For example in Hegemony they argue that although strictly speaking, antagonisms are not internal but external to society,57 the limit of the social must be given within the social itself as something subverting it, destroying its ambition to constitute a full presence.58 In my third point I will try to show that the Lacanian real is the only thing that matches Laclaus (and Mouffes) description, the only thing which albeit radically external has the force to disrupt the social internally. Before doing that, however, I suspect that we can now formulate a significant conclusion. What is generally ignored when Laclaus link to Derridean and Lacanian theories is reduced to a zero-sum game is a third possibility: that Laclau is neither Derridean nor Lacanian but mostly Laclauian. After all, Laclaus theoretical and political trajectory begins before the poststructuralist revolution and the dynamic emergence in the humanities of Lacanian discourse. It is his peculiar theoretical and political adventure that leads Laclau to the elaboration of certain conclusions and to the articulation of specific questions which create the conditions for a meaningful dialogue with both Derridean and Lacanian theoriesbut also with other philosophical and theoretical traditions. Needless to say, this dialogue has been productive both for Laclaus workwhich centers around the development of a contemporary post-foundational political theory of hegemonyand for research related to both the fields of Deconstruction and Lacanianism and there is no obvious reason why one should restrict the openness of this dialogueat least there is none presented in Butlers or Zerillis argument. Of course there is no doubt that within the framework of this dialogue the relative gravity of Lacanian theory is gradually increasing but this fact cannot be interpreted according to a zero-sum logic. 3. As I have tried to show, the whole relation between the inside and the outside is

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directly linked to the status one attributes to the Lacanian real. In fact, Butlers point is founded on a misrepresentation of the relation between the symbolic and the real in Lacanian theory. In a nutshell she seems unable to see that while lack exists because the real is not reducible to the symbolicexactly because it constitutes an exterioritythis does not mean that lack belongs to the unrepresentable real; lack is marking the symbolic internally, arising at its intersection with the real. In fact, it is necessary to address this point at the most basic level; I suspect that we can do that by turning to another objection raised by Judith Butler in connection to the status of the real and our symbolic use of it in theoretical discourse. If Laclaus argument is related to the Lacanian logic of the real then it is important to address this point and examine his response to it. Butler argues that to claim that the real resists symbolization is still to symbolize the real as a kind of resistance. The former claim (the real resists symbolization) can only be true if the latter claim (the real resists symbolization is a symbolization) is true, but if the second claim is true, the first is necessarily false. 59 What Butler is in fact reiterating here is the well known paradox of Epimenides who, as a Cretan himself, claimed that All Cretans are liars. If this statement is true then he is also a liar but if he is a liar then his statement cannot be true. In both cases the paradox is irresolvable. Yet, what these paradoxes point to is exactly the real lack in our symbolic media, the real limits of any process of symbolic signification and resolution. And although we can never symbolize the real in itself, it is possible to encircle (even in a metaphorical way) the limits it poses to signification and representation. Although it is impossible to touch the real, it is possible to encircle its impossibility, exactly because this impossibility is always emerging within a symbolization. Hence Lacans position: I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because theres no way to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet its through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.60 Beyond the imaginary ideal of absolute knowledge, Truth is nothing other than that which knowledge can apprehend as knowledge only by setting its ignorance to work.61 In that sense, Butlers claim is rather misleading because the statement the real resists symbolization is not a symbolization of the real per se but a symbolic expression of the limits it poses, a recognition of its structural causality as it is revealed in its relation to the world of symbolization.62 In this light, if the question is How do we know that the real resists symbolization in the first place? the answer must be Exactly because this resistance, this limit of symbolization, is shown within the level of symbolization itself. Psychoanalysis is based on the idea that the real is shown in certain effects persisting in discourse. As Laclau has put it, there is no direct way of signifying the limits of signification the real, if you want, in the Lacanian sense...except through the subversion of the process of signification itself. We know, through psychoanalysis, how what is not directly representablethe unconsciouscan only find as a means of representation the subversion of the signifying process.63 But Butlers point entails one more misunderstanding. It seems to imply that Lacanian discourse elevates the real to the status of a Taboo. Here i eks formulation a propos of historical analysis is very important: Lacan is as far as it is possible to be from any tabooing

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of the real, from elevating it into an untouchable entity exempted from historical analysishis point, rather, is that the only true ethical stance is to assume fully the impossible task of symbolizing the real, inclusive of its necessary failure.64 In the face of the irreducibility of the real we have no other option but to symbolize; but such a symbolization can take at least two forms: (1) a fantasmatic one which will attempt to repress the real and to eliminate once and for all its structural causality. Psychoanalysis favors the second and more complex one: (2) the articulation of symbolic constructs that will attempt to encircle the real limits of the symbolic. Moreover, this is by no means wishful thinking, for democratic discourse is one example of such a move to which I will devote the final part of this paper.

III
We can move now to address Lipowatzs second fear, that is to say, that Laclau neglects the ethical dimension, and that the primacy he attributes to the political, with all its contingent and negative connotations leads to a relativism or a nihilism that endangers every democratic project. First of all, it has to be stated that in no way is Laclau neglecting the moment of ethics, especially in the context of his radical democratic project. 65 The final chapter of Hegemony as well as a number of his papers, including God Only Knows 66 and Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity,67 to name just a few, are especially concerned with these issues. Thus, the only way to make sense of Lipowatzs point is to read it as a disagreement with the particular way that Laclau deals with these issues. Lipowatzs fear seems to be that by stressing the irreducibility and constitutivity of the political and the contingent Laclau demolishes every rational foundation for ethics and democracy thus endangering its future prospects. Similar points have been made by Bellamy and Butler. Bellamys concern is articulated at the subjective level: Can certain forms of political compromise (a collective we that must be formed out of diversity and conflict) be usefully characterized as the overcoming of psychic conflict...?68 Butlers concern is articulated at the social level. Her fear is that stressing the irreducibility and constitutivity of antagonism (or, more properly, dislocation qua encounter with the real) may preclude the very possibility of a future rearticulation of that boundary which is central to the democratic project that i ek, Laclau and Mouffe promote.69 The fear behind all these statements is common; it is that the stress on the political and dislocation, precludes the possibility of presenting a more or less stable (present or future) ground for ethics and democracy, that it undermines their universal character and the possibility of any final reconciliation either at the subjective or at the social level. Now, it is true that for Laclau such a reconciliation is impossible. No ethical project, not even democracy, is guaranteed in advance. But this is a pragmatic, political, and also theoretical, recognition substantiated by our long-term historical experience. It is not an ethical point per se; and yet, no adequate ethics can be formulated without its acknowledgment. In that sense, Laclau does not neglect the ethical element, nor the importance of democracy; rather, he attempts to ground both on the recognition of the political, of the central impossibility

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of the social.70 This is an ethics articulated not around a certain conception of the Good (which in traditional ethical discourse is conceived as guaranteed in advance, thus masking the central impossibility of the social) but around real lack. The ethical standpoint that underlies Laclaus work seems to be very close to what i ek has called an ethics of the real. The ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalize social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has been proven so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to symbolize the social might be one which recognizes the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured. This celebration by Laclau of societys ultimate impossibility caught Chris Lanes attention in the article published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society that I mentioned earlier.71 Although he is mainly referring to Laclaus work in the eighties some of his points still require a certain attention. First of all Lane doesnt seem to be questioning the descriptive part of Laclaus argument. He too acknowledges that alienation [and the impossibility of cohesion] may be subjectivitys condition par excellence.(117) He also concedes that the demand for cohesion and social harmony is but an unrealistic fantasy. His problem with Laclaus argumentation is Laclaus decision to value (in an ethical sense) and promote the recognition of the real of society, of the impossibility around which it is structured: Why does the left continue to advance contingency and alienation as if both were not simply a psychic condition par excellence but also a reason for celebration? Why does the argument that society is radically incomplete and now alarmingly fraying generate a certain optimism[?](116) According to my reading Lane is questioning the value of recognizing the effects and the structural causality of the real in society. But what are his reasons for doing so? For Lane, Laclaus argumentation does not clarify what is psychologically at stake in accepting societys impossibility, a premise which, taken seriously, may be intolerable for the most theoretically informed subject and surely traumatic for many political activists(107). Furthermore, as the condition of accepting incompletion is for many quite intolerable(115) it follows that the benefits of using politics to expound this alienation seem...strategically doubtful.(117) In other words although Laclaus description is true and the recognition of the impossibility of society is possible (even according to Lane it is not impossible for all of us but only for many of us) it should be abandoned because and only because it is difficult, because it does not engender social satisfaction(108); because it goes against certain psychic and social forces that constitute our present status quo, forces that resist political transformation (108). Going against them entails a psychic labor that is debilitating toand perhaps incommensurate withthe present organization of society (115). But is this difficulty a reason sufficient enough to lead us to conformism, to the identification with the eternal foundations of the present status quo, to the legitimization of the foreclosure of the real of society? I believe not. First of all this status quo is equally intolerable and unjust, the pursuit of harmony and satisfaction around which it is structured cannot eliminate the encounters with the real which,

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faced with such rigid fantasies, takes the form of violent eruptions (from this point of view Auschwitz and the Gulags are but results of this play between the real and the pursuit of Harmony, and Lane is mistaken when he argues that we cannot assume that embracing radical democracy...will...lessen political turmoil (116) although this cannot be guaranteed in advance). It may not be easy, and Laclau never said it would be, but the status quo has to be changed and can be changed. Historical transformation is possible and it is unfair to use Lacan in order to prove it impossible, especially as he firmly opposed any idea of adaptation that he saw as reducing psychoanalysis to an instrument of social control, as a complete betrayal of psychoanalysis regarded as an essentially subversive practice.72 As Dylan Evans argues in a recent article published in Radical Philosophy, Lacan warns us against the tendency to eternalize present-day situations. Besides, although, on the one hand, Lacans admonitions about the dangers of seeing the present in the past can equally serve to warn us of the difficulties involved in imagining the future, on the other hand, the impossibility of mapping out the future according to some grand metahistorical narrative might lead, not to political inaction, but to a series of intelligently fought tactical battles. 73 Isnt that exactly what Ernesto Laclau is also trying to do? Moving beyond the metahistorical catastrophic narrative of harmony towards an ethics of the recognition of the irreducibility of the real? Of course such an ethics is situated, so to speak, beyond the pleasure principle, and although it does not produce a satisfaction compatible with the present organization of desire it is nevertheless based on the psychoanalytic assumption that there can be an ethically satisfactory position to be achieved in encircling the real, the lack as such. 74 instead of attempting to bypass it in an imaginary/fantasmatic way (following the footsteps of the failed strategies of traditional ethical discourse). Besides, and this is something that Lane doesnt take into account, even if this ethical project goes against the socially acceptable phallic enjoyment (jouissance) entailed in filling the lack around which our world is structured, Lacan, towards the end of his teaching, speaks of another jouissancefemale or feminine jouissancewhich values this lack per se as something that entails a different kind of enjoyment. This whole ethical standpoint is evident in Laclaus democratic project. Here, the lack in the Other, the impossibility of the social, is approached through the irreducible gap between the need for a universal point of reference (i.e., for a force which acts in the name of the whole community, thus symbolically instituting society as a more or less coherent whole) and the particularism of all social forces.75 This gap, far from being an un-ethical obstacle to achieving democracy, is exactly what makes democracy possible: the recognition of the constitutive nature of this gap and its political institutionalization is the starting point of modern democracy.76 It is this recognition that makes democracy ethically superior and differentiates it from other fantasmatic, that is to say, potentially totalitarian political myths (the democratic institution of elections, for example, provides society with a needed uniting guiding force without, however, recognizing in that force a source of final or even long term harmony, and this is how a society that is impossible...produces...coherent political strategy or a collective

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will. (LANE: 110). But, and this is worth stressing, this superiority does not, and cannot, guarantee its future hegemony. Just as Derrida has argued that incalculable justice requires us to calculate.77 so too the ethics of a real democracy requires constant struggle and resolve. On the other hand democracy is not a political utopia, we see it functioning around us, we can see arrangements that institutionalize social lack (in a lesser or greater extent) functioning around us and it is our ethical duty to help them hegemonize the social terrain. It is at this point that strategy comes into play. Strategy, contrary to what is revealed in Lanes 1996 argumentation, is not here to help us accept and legitimize a status quo that we consider, and with good reasons, dangerous, unjust, fantasmatic, and unethical. It is here to help us change it. Lane doesnt seem to understand that this change which is entailed in Laclaus radical democratic project has nothing to do with the myth of a common culture (112). He even asks: to what extent are advocates of radical democracy able or willing to entertain the profound argument that emancipation, representing the free and harmonious coexistence of diverse individuals and groups, is psychoanalytically impossible? (110). Isnt this the wrong question to ask someone who, four years earlier, has concluded an article entitled Beyond Emancipation with the following words: we can perhaps say that today we are at the end of emancipation and at the beginning of freedom78 clearly locating his ethico-political project beyond any idea of a final harmonious reconciliation? Ironically, Anthony Elliott attacks Laclau for exactly the opposite reasons. To Elliott, Laclaus position (while, at least, logical in Lacanian terms) leads to the positing of an inevitable human condition which is the no-exit of lack and antagonism,79 precluding thus any substantial concern with the creativity of the psyche (ELLIOTT: 189). Elliott seems to attribute Laclaus position to the acceptance of Lacans reactionary position on psychic reality (144) which also obliterates the creativity of the psyche (153). In fact Lanes question should be addressed to Elliott. It is Elliott who doesnt recognize that the fantasy of a creative imaginary (here Castoriadiss influence is evident) enhancing ego-autonomy is psychoanalytically impossible. What they both ignore is that the recognition of this impossibility can become the nodal point for a progressive radical democratic project. This is an insight that marks discourse theory throughout and constitutes Laclaus contribution to the exploration of the importance of Lacanian theory for contemporary political theory and to the global struggle for deepening democracy.
NOTES 1 I would like to thank Ernesto Laclau, Thanos Lipowatz, Jason Glynos, Oliver Marchart, Juliet Flower MacCannell and an anonymous reader for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. One of these earlier and much shorter versions appeared in Oliver Marchart, ed. Das Undarstellbare der Politik, Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1998 under the title Laclau mit Lacan: Zum Verhaltnis von Politischer Theorie und Psychoanalyse. Some of the material included in this paper comes from my new book Lacan and the Political, London/New York: Routledge:1999. 2 To give another example, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy argues that, In recent years, there have been encouraging signs of an increasing willingness to renew the relevance of psychoanalysis for ideology critique. In particular Jean-Joseph

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Goux, Slavoj i ek, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe all deserve credit for attempting, to one degree or another, to contextualize psychoanalysis within the ideological, Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis be Political? in Diacritics 23:1 (1993):24 (my emphasis). 3 We refer, of course, to Ernesto Laclaus work during the last fifteen years, especially after the publication of his deconstructive reading of the Marxist tradition undertaken in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe London: Verso, 1985. 4 Genealogical in the sense of tracing the turning points in Laclaus theoretical trajectory, turning points which mark his text throughout. In that sense, our approach is textual and not biographical and within this context the signifier Laclau refers to a chain of theoretical interventions. In other words, we are aiming at clarifying the terms of a particular theoretical debate and not to articulate some kind of biographical apologia. 5 Bellamy, op. cit.:34. 6 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, London: Verso,1990:96 7 Laclau and Mouffe, op cit.:112. 8 Chris Lane, Beyond the Social Principle: Psychoanalysis and Radical Democracy, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society I:1 (1996). 9 Lane, op. cit.:105-106) 10 Laclau, Interview with Yannis Stavrakakis and Dimitris Zeginis in Diavazo 324 (in Greek), 1993:58. 11 Anna Marie Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary, London: Routledge,1998:81. 12 Sean Homer, Psychoanalysis, Representation, Politics: On the (Im)possibility of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Ideology? The Letter 7 (1998):20. 13 Bellamy, op. cit.:34-35 (my emphasis) 14 Jacques Lacan, crits, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Tavistock/Routledge,1977:126. 15 Gilbert Chaitin, Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996:196. 16 Jacques Lacan, Replies, tr. P. Kalias, Athens: Erasmos [in Greek];1978:26. 17 Laclau, op. cit.:1993:58. 18 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-6, ed. J-A. Miller, tr. with notes Russell Grigg, London: Routledge, 1992:135. 19 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Title of the Letter, tr. with introduction F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew, Albany: SUNYPress, 1992:30. 20 Ernesto Laclau, Introduction in E. Laclau, ed.,The Making of Political Identities, London: Verso, 1994:3. 21 Slavoj i ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London and New York: Verso, 1989:122. 22 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX. Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 19723, ed. J-A. Miller, tr. with notes Bruce Fink, New York: Norton.1998:79. 23 Steven Michelman, Sociology before Linguistics: Lacans Debt to Durkheim in Pettigrew, D. and Raffoul, F. eds., Disseminating Lacan, Albany: SUNYPress, 1996:129.. 24 Lacan, op. cit.:1998:28. 25 According to Linda Zerilli, Laclau doesnt really seem to fit here; although she provides a very intelligent account of Laclaus negotiation of universality and recognizes that the Lacanian real is relevant to discourse theory she also points out that the issues it raises concerning the status of the subject cannot be substituted for the issues raised by antagonistic social and political relations (Linda Zerilli, This Universalism which is not One in Diacritics 28:2 [1998]:13). Zerillis point as I take it is that by stressing the Lacanian real one risks the danger of psychological reductionism, since this real concerns psychic reality and not the realm of the political (Zerilli, op. cit., 1998:13-14). It is clear from our argumentation so far that Zerillis point is not taking into account the fact that the Lacanian subject is not a reductionist conception of subjectivity, and, most important, that the real in Lacan is not a category limited to the subjective level. 26 Laclau, op. cit.:1990:90. 27 Laclau and Mouffe, op. cit.:1985:88. 28 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), London: Verso, 1996:53.

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29 Laclau, op. cit.:1996:44. 30 Thanos Lipowatz, Book review for E. Laclaus New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time in Synchrona Themata 49 (in Greek), 1993. 31 Thanos Lipowatz, Das Reine Politische, oder eine (post) Moderne Form der Politischen Mystic in O. Marchart op cit., 1998. (AGreek version of this paper is forthcoming in the journal Axiologika.) 32 Lipowatz is almost unknown in the Anglo-Saxon academic arena. He is however one of the first to link Lacanian theory to political theory and political analysis already from the early eighties. See, for example, Diskurs und Macht. J. Lacans Begriff des Diskurses. Ein Beitrag zur politischen Psychologie, Marburg: Guttandin und Hoppe, 1982; Die Verleugnung des Politischen. Die Ethik des Symbolischen bei J. Lacan, Weinheim: Quadriga, 1986;. and Politik der Psyche, Vienna: Thuria und Kant. 1998. 33 Needless to say, within our psychoanalytic framework the term imaginary used this way usually entails a very critical connotation. 34 Laclau, op. cit.:1990:35. 35 Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics, tr. M. Ritter, Cambridge: Polity, 1997:98. 36 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, London: Verso, 1993:3. 37 Laclau, op. cit.:1990:35 . 38 None of these poles exists as a self-contained or autonomous entity. Disorder always disrupts a field of partial fixation and order and is never itself absolute; it always leads to a new order, a new structuration of the social. Reality cannot master the real and thus is always limited; on the other hand, however, the real cannot eliminate reality: its presence can only be felt within reality when this reality is disrupted and the desire for a new symbolization is starting to emerge. 39 Laclau, op. cit.:1990:100 40 In this regard, see G.Daly The Discursive Construction of Economic Space: Logics of Organization and Disorganization in Economy and Society 20:1 (1991). 41 i ek, Beyond Discourse Analysis in E. Laclau op. cit.: 1990:253. 42 Laclau, op. cit.:1993:58 43 Laclau, op. cit.: 1990:39 44 Homer, op. cit.: 1998:21. 45 Laclau, op. cit.: 1990:32. 46 Laclau, Introduction in Laclau Ernesto, ed., The Making of Political Identities, London: Verso. 1994:3. 47 Laclau, op. cit.: 1990:84, n. 5, 48 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, New York: Routledge,1993:194. 49 Laclau, op. cit.: 1990:17. 50 Laclau, op.cit.: 1996:40. 51 Laclau, op.cit.: 1996:40) 52 Laclau, op.cit.: 1996:53. 53 Zerilli, op.cit.: 1998. 54 Zerilli, op.cit.: 1998:14, 55 Zerilli, op.cit.: 1998:12. 56 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1996a:58. 57 Laclau and Mouffe, op.cit.: 1985:125. 58 Laclau and Mouffe, op.cit.: 1985:127 (my emphasis). 59 Butler, op. cit.: 1993:207. 60 Jacques Lacan, Television, trans. D. Hollier, R. Krauss and A. Michelson, October 40 (1987):7. 61 Jacques Lacan, crits,op.cit.:1977:296. 62 These limits are transposed all the time as symbolizations replace one another, but this ontic dimension does not change the ontological causality of the real which does not stop inscribing itself through the failure of symbolization.The

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causality of the real inscribes itself within symbolization by not ceasing not being written, that is to say by remaining always outside the field of symbolic and fantasmatic representation and thus being capable of dislocating them by showing their internal lack, by revealing the fact that it cannot be domesticated. 63 Laclau, op.cit.: 1996:39). 64 Slavoj i ek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, London: Verso, 1994:199-200. 65In this respect, we also beg to differ from Linda Zerillis view that the question of ethics is foreign to Laclau and Mouffes political theory. (Zerilli, 1998:14) 66 Ernesto Laclau, God only knows in Marxism Today (December) 1991. 67 Ernesto Laclau, Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity in October 61 (1992). 68 Bellamy, op.cit.:1993:35. 69 Butler, op.cit.:1993:206-207. 70 Stavrakakis, Ambiguous Democracy and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Philosophy and Social Criticism 23:2 1997. (In German: Die Doppeldeutigkeit der Demokratie und die Ethik der Psychoanalyse in RISS 29/30 [February] 1995). 71 Lane, op.cit.:1996. 72 Evans, Historicism and Lacanian Theory in Radical Philosophy 79 (1996):4. 73 Evans, op.cit.: 1996:38. In that sense Lacanian theory opens itself to the element of historicity. Under this light AnnaMarie Smiths criticism of Laclaus recent work is deprived of all its premises. Her main point is that by turning to Lacanian theory, which according to Smith does not permit any consideration of historical specificity and variability (Smith, 1998:75), Laclau tends to embrace an increasingly formal conception of hegemony...[a] tendency [which] is problematic because it suppresses a historically specific analysis of the success and failure of rival political discourses. (Smith, 1998:177). It seems that this whole criticism is founded on an outdated critique of Lacanian theory, a critique which, surprisingly enough, is also shared by Stuart Hall when he states for instance that the transhistorical speculative generalities of Lacanianism deny its usefulness in the analysis of historically specific phenomena (Hall, 1988:50-51). Lacanian theory is thus declared unable to provide a plausible understanding of history; this is the argument reiterated by Smith and forming the foundation of her critique of Laclaus recent work. At first this critique seems plausible: Isnt psychoanalysis always implying a negation of history, with its acceptance, for example, of the universality of the Oedipus complex? On the contrary; at least not for Lacanian theory. As Dylan Evans has shown, a close reading of Lacans texts shows that these and other features of the psyche are presented by Lacan as phenomena that arise at specific moments in history.... By grounding psychic structure in historical processes, Lacan makes it clear that no account of subjectivity, psychoanalytic or otherwise can claim an eternal ahistorical validity (Evans, 1997:142). Already in 1946, in his article Propos sur la Causalit Psychique, Lacan suggests that the Oedipus complex did not appear with the origin of man (insofar as it is not meaningless to attempt to write the history of this origin), but alongside history, historical history, at the limit of ethnographic cultures. It can clearly only appear in the patriarchal form of the family institution.... (Lacan in Evans, 1996:37) Simply put, Lacan is open to historical analysis. Furthermore, as Joan Copjec and Slavoj i ek have shown, he introduces a novel conception of historicity directly relevant for political analysis (Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge, Ma.: M.I.T. Press,1994; i ek, Enjoy your Symptom, New York: Routledge, 1992). In that sense, one could argue that it is not really Lacan who neglects historicity but Smiths critique of Laclau which neglects the insights of Lacanian theory vis a vis historicity. 74 Jonathan Scott Lee, Jacques Lacan, Amherst: The Univ. of Massachusetts Press. 1990:176. 75 Laclau, op. cit.:1991:59. 76 Laclau, op. cit.:1994:8. 77 Jacques Derrida, Force of Law, The Mystical Foundation of Authority, in Cardozo Law Review 11:5-6. (1990):971. 78 Ernesto Laclau, Beyond Emancipation in Development and Change, 23:3 (1992):137 (my emphasis). 79 Anthony Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992:191.

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What Does a Woman Want to Date?

Manya Steinkoler
Yeshiva University and Fashion Institute of Technology, New York

Performed at the April 2000 symposium on California and the Drives in San Francisco

Prologue
nce upon a time, a long time ago, at UC Irvine, during a hyperextended period of adolescence in a nothernotherno Other of the OtherneverneverDisney nomans land between university studies and Universal Studios, between University Studies and what ever comes after University Studies, between PostModern and PostToasties, when we were force fed a menu de dgustation that included such delicacies as the madness in civilization the malaise in civilization the rhetoric of cannibalism Oh my friend, there is no friend my neighbor who is not my friend the death of the subject the death of the thing being for death thrown into being for death thrown into being for being for death and the sublime beauty of Antigone between two deaths ...we were...kind of tired. These very sophisticated and exciting and compelling death theories found quite a receptive audience with a generation of graduate students, who, plagued with Oedipal guilt for being the neurotic children of immigrant parents and grandparents who had believed in the American dream and in the capitalist myth of the good of goods, who had been nursed on the old Yeoman farmer dictum that the rich are good and the good are rich rebelled. And giving up the Rockefellerlike dreams that had inspired their parents and grandparents generation, and having no war to fight, no money to earn, and no one to rebel against, since sex and love had already been made free, substituted a certain flavor of post modern theory or Postmodern Cereal for their parentsconception of a regular job. The death drive became valorized as the drive of rebellion. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were pass. Perversion and the death drive were in. This left the graduate students of the other sex, stranded and confused. Do we want a Ph.D.? an MS? an MRS? What did we want? What are we doing here? The attrition rate among women in the program was up to 85%. Apparently, perversion and the death drive

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Note the Heideggerian reference, On the Way to Language.

didnt seem a cause worth fighting for. Those of us who got by studied Lacan. At least this way, we could think about impossibility, rupture, undecidability, trauma, and repetitionand not only in the text, but underneath our sheets as well. Besides, we were tired of death death death. What about love? What about life? What about lipstick? The boys do DeMan and the girls do Lacan, we sang,rapping as we strolled through the mall at Fashion Island eating frozen yogurt and window shopping. At least this way when women graduate students were throwing themselves in the Pacific Ocean and ending up in the hospital, obviously taking the throwness into death business literally, or in an illfated hysterical identification with Virginia Woolf, we could use psychoanalytic theory to explain why metaphor and deathdrive obeisance never really worked very well with us in the first place. In the land of personal trainers, macrobiotic spas, lifetime plastic surgery memberships and all day aerobics, on the one hand, and being unto death on the other, lets say we were confused and skeptical. At Student Health we were told that our being unto death and malaise was chemical and could be effectively treated with Prozac. At the gym they told us we should build our bodies for ourselves and not for men. Your body belongs to you was the paranoid- muscle-maven-mantra, most heavily chanted by those aerobic proponents of cosmetic surgery. At least, we thought to ourselveseating frozen yogurt on the way1 to better shoeswe didnt have a metalanguage or a subjectivity to lose or to die, because we never had them in the first place! And if that was not the last straw, we saw that the category of hysteria was officially removed from the DSMIII. Things were getting serious. It was in this historicocultural context, at the place between word and thing, at the place where metaphor both sticks and falls apart, that Alices Kitchen Seminar emerged. I am pleased to present today, for the very first time in public, that is to say, outside of the happy hysteric comfortfood atmosphere of Alices kitchen in Sunny Southern California, an excerpt from what has become quite famous in its underground circulation, Alices Kitchen Seminar. I was an attendee at the seminar over the years and am a senior member. Perhaps it was my fate, since I am not a native Californian but a wandering New York Jew that I would do the painful lengthy textual and longwinded work of transcribing Alices Kitchen Seminar for publication. I have carefully footnoted the difficult passages and neologisms, and have researched the more difficult theoretical points in extensive footnotes (which Daniel MacCannell has graciously offered to read for us today). I might also add that in addition to this I have actually invented Alices entire seminar myself inspired by the mutual amour fou and myriad of identifications and other silliness between me and my best friend Alice. In addition, the kitchen seminars are inspired by Freuds lack. As you well know, Freud didnt know what women wanted. He might be happy and even relieved (since he was very

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2 It is important for our foreign readers to distinguish the popular American usage from the other meanings of date such as the oblong edible fruit of a palm. For the purposes of the seminar, date means an appointment between two persons of the opposite sex. In American English, to go on a date generally means the appointment with the member of the opposite sex has a sexual interest or aim. 3 This is called prosopopeia, the trope of melancholia, as distinct from the coronation of Poppea, which is an opera by Monteverdi. 4 See Hesiods Theogony. For Hesiod, the race of women is called gynaicon, gynos or genos depending on the pretentiousness of the translation and pronunciation.

competitive) to know that we dont know either. But we sure do like talking about it a lot. The first seminar is entitled What does Woman wantto eat? the second What does woman want to buy? The third What does woman want to date? and the last, What does woman want to know? After some consideration, I have decided to read excerpts of Seminar III, What does woman want to date? since this conference is about California and the Drives and there are a lot of guys with cars in that seminar. For the sake of time, I will only be able to read very small excerpts from the seminar.

Alices Kitchen Seminar: Seminar III What does woman want to date?2
Guynecology The lack in the Date Physique, Physics, Physis

Moi, Alice je parle3 Why do we eat and shop? Because something is lacking in the date. We have shown in earlier seminarsI resume for those of you who join us today for the first timea date with a desired man sends us flying into fantasy productivity. Why? Because of the anxiety of an imagined encounter that we know but choose to forget will fail. Thus, in the interim, while we have forgotten, we have to work as hard as we can to get as much work done for the fantasy as possible. Because during the productivity period, we agree to forget that we will be disappointed. Our subject of the date with the guy is another way of thinking about the question of the woman and can thus be written as: Guynecology4 We shall show that the question and elaboration of the Gyn that is, of the female reproductive organ, as well as the Gynous, that is to say the woman in Greek, and Greek women in general, cannot be separated from the Guy she dates at any given moment

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5 See Schopenhauer and then see all of 19th century German philosophy. 6 Alices use of volkswagen cannot be separated from the homophonic wohl/s/wagen to which she undoubtedly refers. Here the play on words suggest the wohl and the wagen, that is the possibility of daring to desire. The Volkswagen advertising campaign advertised Fahrvernugnen, the pleasure in driving. We already see the foreshadowing of what will be an extended consideration of the drives and their metaphorization into the car throughout the seminar.

There is nevertheless a distinction to be made between date and mate. Mating and dating have no necessary relation. No woman would not distinguish between the two, no matter how deeply embroiled she might find herself in a lovedeath drama with the biker dude that she brought home last Saturday night. Because even if she is producing a Homeric epic, or even a madeforTV movie, she always knows the difference between the guy and the fantasy she has slimed him with even if she pretends not to. Moreover, pretending not to know is part of the fun. It is a subset of pretending in general and thus related to femininity. In addition to the guy and the date, it is prudent to interrogate the status of the signifier want in What does woman want? that continues to produce the series of the kitchen seminars themselves as a response to a very particular kind of wanting. Those of you who attended the other seminars know that want is the English of the German will.5 We all know and I have continued to show in my teaching that a woman may want and not want as passionately as ever, the same thing at the same time. Neither are lies; both are true. Thus at the level of the signifier, want cannot be taken out of the larger semantic field of the following words: Wantwill, wollen, wunschen, wilkommen, vorstellung, and volkswagen.6 And we mustnt forgetdesire, demand, hunger, long for, crave, urge, zeal, hope for, anticipate, aspire, request, pant, desiderate, fancy, seek, solicit, require, plea, beg, search, entreat, appeal, enjoin, feel in the mood, kind of want sometimes, well, ok, No, never, yuk, gross, eeew, loathe, hate, reject, go away, not now I have a headache, when hell warms over, not if you were the last man on earth. All of these words mean wantto date. To date, women have been in wantingness. There is nothing more wonderful than when were in fullon wantingness. Even wanting wantingness can be marvelous as all our club members will attest to. Our seminar today will take us all the way from wanting to fuck him with the spirit of Leo to kind of in the mood to well, alright, to not now I have a headache to youve got to be kidding and the simple and elegant yuk. What can we say at this date of wanting to date? We know that the date puts the real of the fantasm into play. That is why wanting to date or preparing for the date is safer than the encounter with the date itself. In this sense, we could say that there has only ever been one date. And you keep going out on this date

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7 This is what Freud called the Wiederholungswang, or the compulsion to repeat. Not only is it related to the volkswagen and nolens volens, but we simply must take off our hieroglyphic bonnets to father Freud and say that Freud should be commended for having invented a phantastic word that one can say over and over again and never tire of saying it. Try itWiederholungswang-wiederholungswangwiederholungswangwho needs a man when you can walk around saying this word all day? It feels so good in your mouth. Recall here that for Kierkegaard, Wiederholungswang is called repetition the beloved wife of whom one never tires. The question for usare we Rgine? Kierkegaard? Or the beloved wife of repetition? Or married to the beloved wife of repetition? In any event, Kierkegaard is also a good word to put in your mouth. Lacan tells us that encore is the proper name of the lack (faille) in the other from which the demand for love stems. We just want it noted that encore, repetition-the-beloved-wife and wiederholungswang are not unrelated to the Jewish whine, enough already! 8 The Nutshell is an over-determined reference in Alices discourse and as such it is a signifier of the hermeneutic enterprise in general. It refers to the kernel of the real, the nut, to the kernel of the trauma, to the nutcase, i.e. the madwoman, to Doras jewel case, to the question of femininity as a casing or covering or shell. And thus finally to the gas station, Shell and thus to the economics and motor of the drives in general. 9 The ph is used by Alice to suggest its relation to the set of all words beginning with these letters including; phallus, phantom, pharaoh, pharisee, pharmakon, Philomela, philosophy and philtre, not to mention photosynthesis. 10 Note that Nachtrglichkeit, as a form of tragen is related to what we saw in Seminar II as the vestimentary drive. The vestimentary drive is the drive that Freud didnt know about because he didnt know what women wanted. (see Seminar II, What does Woman want to buy? for a detailed discussion). 11 Alice refers here to the Freudian notion of Urverdrngung or Primal Repression. She is showing that

over and over again like something out of a Twilight Zone episode.7 Nevertheless, the date comes in many flavors and colors and sizes. That is the difference between life in the world, and the one date that you go on repeatedly in that life. And that is philosophy and epistemology in a nutshell.8 The fantasm lets you have Passion: Passionate love is something to do when you are not writing your dissertation. Passionate love no longer concerns the world but him as the answer to what you want. Passionate love is the way you defend against not knowing that somewhere you dont want him. The Hysteric Subject: Split between Physics, Physique and Physis.9 Nachtrglichkeit.10 We dont have an unconscious, we are an unconscious. A well known story of virginity loss from one of our members is illustrative of the split of the hysteric subject. You date the principle violinist of the youth orchestra who has a full

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Primal Repression is never far away from Primate Repression. Indeed, it is the hysteric subject who displays this over and over again. Of course, as such, the Primate repression is an Ur repression and thus the repression of Ur himself, the Swedish body builder. (It may have been Ulf or Ut, it was definitely something with an ooo. Perhaps it was Knut. The Swedish body builder is a polar gorilla. He may also be called Anders and you really want to look at his Andere Schauplatz but usually he has taken steroids and it isnt much to look at. 12 A popular Greek sandwich. 13 Here we see the Alician reversal of the Lacanian dictum. Lacan said, Every hysteric symptom is a realized fantasy and in Alices gloss, a hysteric revolution, Every fantasy is a realized hysteric. 14 A Studebaker is a make of American car in the 50s and 60s. What is important in Alices theorization

scholarship in theoretical physics to Harvard and has won this years Westinghouse. A worldly choice, you have chosen well. He plays his violin outside your window each day for two months in the hope that by the end of the summer, you will finally agree to lose your virginity with him. One day you meet a gorilla on a motorcycle. You lose your virginity with the gorilla that afternoon. The hysteric subject is split between the theoretical physicist and the gorilla. She is split between physics and physique. The physicist could never occlude her subjectivity even though he could offer her a home, 2.3 children and a respectable position in Boston society. The hirsute physique, however, could occlude her subjectivity and send her off into the jungle.11 Here we see the absolute cultural and dramatic incongruity between Its a Wonderful Life and The last Tango of the Iguana. The big bang with the primate/physique is at the level of the Real. The physicist is the one who thinks about the big bang theoretically.Which would you choose? Physis, on the other hand, is sex with the master, that is why it is a Greek word. Because sex with the master is in Greek. As such, it is related to Gyn and Gynous as well as gyros 12 and grape leaves and thus the painted grapes of Zeuxis. It is by way of such words in Greek that we begin to wonder about origins, representation, femininity, about truth and representation, Aletheia and other Greek words. The point here is that with whatever man you have sex withwhether he occludes your subjectivity or notwith each man, you have sex one way. Every man has sex one way. And every woman has sex in a different way depending on the man she is with. The woman makes love differently insofar as she makes love with different men. This is the extended meaning of Guynocology. That being said, we shall begin next time with what will be an extended discussion of some character types met with in the amorous adventures of the hysteric subject. II. Some character types met with in the amorous adventures of the hysteric subject:13 Prinzip Charming or the Handsome Prinzip The Subject Supposed to No aka

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is the stud in Studebaker. A stud is a male horse used for breeding and a virile and promiscuous male. 15 Regretfully, there is no space for a discussion of all of these typuses in the current context. For a full discussion, see Alices Kitchen Seminar, Seminar III, forthcoming. The typus, of course, is a categorical Freudian reference: he has the Ahnlengungstypus; we have Big Harley Guy. You lean against both of them. 16 Like a big fat no not a kinda sorta no. This is not a guy you slap like Dora this is the Verneinung guy he is at the level of absolute negation. Ver-nei-nung. 17 It is useful here to compare the post-modern BSSG from say Don Giovanni. Lacan tells us that Don Giovanni is a feminine fantasy. For Lacan, the fact that Don Giovanni has the women in a series is what is

The BackSeatoftheStudebaker14Guy: Men on the way to the Man The Master The petit master, le petit matre Car Mechanics The Big Fat Harley Guy The Peruvian Guitarist The 10x World Latin Dance Champion15 (For the sake of brevity, we will only visit the Back Seat of the Studebaker Guy, the Master and the Petit Matre today). The Back Seat of the Studebaker guy is also known as the subject supposed to No. He is the guy to whom you are supposed to say No. 16 You are supposed to No him; you are supposed to No him as soon as you see him. A No is glaringly attached to him from the very beginning. Further, the BSSG is the subject not supposed to date, i.e. he is the one who has no subjectivity supposed to him to date. The back seat of the Studebaker guy is the guy who you know from before the beginning, from the very first nip of the tiniest glanceeven from a dorsal viewat the other end of the football fieldyou are not supposed to date . As such, it is important to distinguish him from your best friends husband and your high school music teacher. It is not because of his social or symbolic position that you are not supposed to date him, no one in any social position is supposed to date him. He is the type of guy that highway truck depot waitresses know to stay away from. As soon as he walks into the bar, Millie calls the manager and says, We got trouble. You, however, from you upper middle class bourgeois overeducated family, run to him in ecstasy like a gazelle let loose on the Serengeti plain, with your arms and legs wide open. Hes Americas Most Wanted, after all. You might think that this guy is out of Hysteric fantasies 101 17 the raping and killing father or any regularly encountered sexwithyourfather business in hysteria. Wrong. It is the turn of another century and the backseatoftheStudebakerguy is from another world.18 Not even a nasty Ur father; he is an Hors father. He is right out of madeforTV

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so exciting to themit is the negation of the famous desire for exceptionality of the hysteric. Lacan contrasts their being in a series with maternal Jouissance where a series is impossible and you are swallowed up in hell. (Known as the crocodiles mouth in Lacans work. In New York, known as shabbus lunch at Tante Rivkas when youre still not married.) Now the BSSG you might think is just like Don Giovanni, but after youve spent a summer in a parking lot in Torrance in a beat up Studebaker on hot torn vinyl seats, even your mother starts to look good. 18 Clearly Alice is making a reference to the soap opera by that name. 19 Alice uses the French savoir as a homophonic reference with a Voir, i.e. the Id that seesin the objective and genitive senses with regard to the BSSG. He is a walking Id and your Id sees him. He is also an Ud. 20 The Unheimlich.

movies or a dilapidated gas station on a dirt road in the American Southwest. He is the best example of the discordance between what psychoanalysis calls affect and Savoir.19 But in the traditional affect/savoir distinction something is unconsciously repressed on the order of savoir that produces the affect. Here, you know that he is a bad guy and you like it and you like to pretend to repress that you know it so that you can sustain liking it. What is deliberately omitted is the No that you know. Here, conscious repression produces affect because you are bored and you dont have anything better to do. The BSSG is subject to metonymy in terms of the make and year of car he drives. He can be the Convertible guy or, in more serious cases, the areyousureitsnotstolen pickuptruck guy. The back seat, however, is not subject to polysemy or metonymy except at his own whim. Rather, it is a symbol of the nothome,20 the noplacetogo and the No. The signifier of the car is important because the Studebaker guy is the guy who takes you both on a ride and for a ride. The ride is designed to put the whole world as we know it into question. Even if you never go anywhere and you spend a month parked in a Venice Beach parking lot in the back seat, you are nevertheless on a ride and you will pay for it. Moreover, even if you go somewhere, you wont have gone anywherewhich is the whole point. The BSSG demonstrates that the Drive exceeds the Symbolic (which you know). But he goes a step further to demonstrate to you that the Symbolic is useless (to which you are supposed to say No). Most of us fantasize about the BSSG but dont actually date him. Again, you are not supposed to actually date him, you are just supposed to talk about wanting to date him. Thus, in another world, he could have served an important fantasy function for us. Yet the postmodern world is the Real world. Fantasies are for neurotics of the last century. Today you can date the BSSG; today you can do whatever you want. This is America! The land of opportunity! Go for it! Just do it! When you actually date the Studebaker guy however, all dates are rendered meaningless. That is to say, all other men, all time, all measurement itselfbills, renewal of your drivers license, even washing the dishes are no longer important. You have no more desire; you dont need to look forward to any more dates. To actually date the BSSG is to be on your one datethe one that returnspermanently.

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21 Convertible in French is dcapotable from the verb capoter which means to put a hood on, or close a hood. The noun is capote means hood as well as condom. By way of difference between the i and o it is from the verb dcapitable from dcapiter. Thus, the thrill of the convertible is nevertheless maintained here since, as the capote is the cars condom, the dcapotable is unsafe sex. There is also the reference to the Hebrew cipa, the head covering that a man wears to show his reverence to God. The convertible is a cipaeven it is bald. The headless car further shows the hysteric position of establishing the father and cutting his head off at the same time. There is a relation here that one can see between hysteria and perversion. While the drive in the convertible with the BSSG is acphale. that is headless and assez phalle (super-phallic), for the hysteric the same drive is topless. Thus the entire hysteric-pervert scenario can be deduced at the level of the signifier dcapotable. The fact that breasts are often called headlightsthat is, his assez phalle car+you taking off your clothesin American English only further underlines this point. Please note as well the relation of under the hood to the car mechanic. The hood takes us to the question of the veil and of femininity and explains why Thelma and Louise drove a T-bird Convertible in the movie by the same name.

He is the I am your thing and you are my thing and you know it and I know it get in the car. You can live in a car with him and dine on Cheerios at convenience stores on the rest of your savings and never talk for the rest of your life. That is why he is the subject supposed to No. This brings us to a question that it would not be inappropriate to touch upon in passing, i.e., the relation of feminine Jouissance to the automobile. This is not only a question of the signifier, automobile, i.e. of something that drives itself, of the drive, in general. Take for example, the convertible. Convertible in French is dcapotable;21 it is a headless car, a car that has been guillotined. Thus in France the car can be both acphale and assez phalle. (Thus, its natural affinity with a BSSG.) For a woman, however, this nonrelation of the car to the chopped off head does not necessitate a pervert in the drivers seat or a publication of Georges Bataille. Rather for her, the headlessness of the convertible can allow for a kind of Other Jouissance, i.e., an easy access to God, sky, wind, joy, and bliss. The convertible can mark a specifically feminine relation to the Big Otherwhat Lacan calls the jouissance of the mystic. This is when you drive on Pacific Coast Highway in the morning mist with the top down. You and that sky are married forever in exhilarating bliss. There is a genuine yes in the convertible. When a BSSG is in the drivers seat, the convertible is not the same experience as when you drive on Pacific Coast Highway alone with the mist. Bliss and joy become anxiety. As hors father, the BSSG is also hors doeuvre. The BSSG is the guy you date before you do your work. He is a kind of piece of the real that produces the work that will come after him. He is both before and outside of the work of writing your thesis or your novel or even brushing your teeth.

The Master
First of all, you dont have a date with the master you have a date with death. As S1 to

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22 Pronounced as it is spelled, KN or Knuh as in the Yiddish knish, knadlech, knepel, knocker. 23 Note here that while you are always on the way, that is, coming to Infinity, the master is already there at Knowledge Infinity. He takes up a position up there at Infinity and hangs out there. After having

your $ you have a date with your structurally determined fate. The master comes not as any old date (although he is always old) but as the answer to your question in the fantasy. But whose fantasy? Where does the fantasy come from? Who started it? Are you sure its your fantasy? Or is it his fantasy? Or your mothers? Or the university ombudsmans or the United States of Americas? Where did it come fromyou want to knowand how did you get stuck with it? In yet a further gloss on the overdetermined date with the master, we can say that your date with death is also a date with debt. And this is no small pittance. With the master your debt is metamorphosed into a faute and always feel guilty. We all have debts; that is the psychic condition of the subject, not to mention the Ph.D. student in the humanities and social sciences. But in the master/hysteric scenario, the debt becomes transferred to the person of the master and ceases to be your own. Moreover, rather than guilt for original sin, masturbation, for not marrying the man your mother wanted, for being late on paying your income tax, or even for giving up on your desire, you are now guilty with regard to him. He is the Super Ego Freud said you dont have. The debt to him can never be paid. Worse than US Government federally assisted student loans, even your death cant absolve you of your debt/faute to the master. In this regard, the hysterics relation to the master is a lifetime subscription to a Giant External Super Ego. The literature tells us over and over again that we ladies fancy the master because our Super Egos are underdeveloped. And they are underdevelopedespecially because we never really believed in the Super Ego to begin with. The master makes us stop dead in our tracks because the psychic function we never really believed in is right there in front of us walking around in the flesh. You are in awe of him and his KNowledge with a big KN.22 Its so intensely sexy! After all, only someone really brilliant can be a Super Ego. Because justement as the Super Ego he has direct nononsense knowledge about your Id since Freud tells us he was formed out of the very same material. No normal Joe with a decent job who wins at Jeopardy will ever do it for you ever again, even brain surgeons and successful Hollywood screen writers are out, kaput, its over, hasta la vista. You have seen light and truth. Its Nobel or nothing! And now, having met up with your fate/death, you must spend your life in the library as KNowledges love slave. Oh most holy One of librariness and libraryosity! You are now finally on the path to KnowledgeInfinity and He is there at KnowledgeInfinity waiting for you. Im coming! Wait up! Im coming to Infinity!23 This is why the master participates in a certain hysteric fantasy of having no dates. Because once you are on the road to KnowledgeInfinity, lets face it, boys are just boring. Moreover, KnowledgeInfinity renders you undateable. Really, what kind of normal guy wants

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sex with a master once, he said, I hardly work at all. That is why he is the master and you are the hysteric. He has come Infinity and you are coming to Infinity in an envers relation. It is useful to mention Lacans reading of the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise in this regard. The tortoise can only catch up with Achilles at Infinity. I mention it, but none of us understand it because its a math thing. We just like to mention that Lacan mentions it and there is a turtle in it. 24 Considering his mission and his position, the master always does it in the missionary position. (Because this is how it is done, by the book). (The book was written by a long line of masters in which he participates). 25 Alice seems to be suggesting that this is what Lacan meant when he said that the discourse of the master accomplishes its own revolution and is a circle that completes itself. In other words, you cant fuck the master because hes already fucking himself.

to hear about castration anxiety and the Heisenberg principle over dinner and a movie? the Borromean knot? Are you kidding? Well, you dont care anymore about such people, anyway. You can finally leave these patheticunenlightenedmeagerearthlingmassenmenschen for Him and for KnowledgeInfinity, your true calling. Now, remember, that is basically all you get, honey. Because the master has better things to be doing than to spend his time screwing you. After all, he is busy there at Infinity. Hello over there at Infinity! Miss America salutes you! It is important to point out that you love him passionately precisely because he can ignore you. He can fuck you and go off on a grand mission. It doesnt matter what the grand mission is24; (he might just be going to the bathroom)25 what matters is that right after he fucks you he has to go on it. Farewell my brilliant brave hero! Addio mio speranza! Adieu! The more masters you have been with, however, the more you start to notice this funny thing, namely that they can have the same personality and structure and entirely different missions! And yet they all think that their mission is the right one. Politicians, religious figures, theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts and even big business men. Whatever club they are in shows how all the other clubs are wrong. The religious figures critique the politicians and the psychoanalysts critique the religious figures and the philosophers critique the psychoanalysts and sometimes even big business men think thinking is bunk and money runs the world. Each one shows how he renders all the others obsolete. Moreover, you can put any club in any slot and get the same result; what ever club is in the slot makes all the others obsolete. You dont really care all that much. The point is, for your fantasy to work, he can be in whatever club provided that he leave you in order to go on a big mission. Its very exciting! Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in El Cid. Roll camera! You get to have the whole before battle scene every time he leaves. Where else can you do that in this day and age? Really! The master keeps epic drama going in the era of the TV sitcom. (Think of the alternative; he turns over, Honey, Im off to the office. and pecks you perfunctorily on the cheek. Contrast withman dressing in utter silence after he has given you his sperm which he values way more than he values you. He dresses as an ancient warrior, slowly and with care. Stoic. Roman. Japanese. Kamikaze, Mishima, megalomania. You know that he now goes to give the penultimate reading of a hitherto unknown text of an unknown obscure philosopher that will change the history of thought, both known and

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26 This is our rendering of the famous, Only an immortal being can die.

unknown, forever. Amen. The scenic opportunities abound! You can sob, and implore him, grabbing him on your knees. You can play the dignified, stoic woman who shows no emotion at all, the absence of any sign being proof of your profound and eternal love. Or, you can smoke a cigarette and put on a silk bathrobe and be distant and sophisticated. Of course, you know that by their leaving you (since you are identified with them) you are also leaving you. You are also leaving you(the woman) so that you(the warrior hero) can go and fight a war and save the world. Yay youme! This is the way identification works via the master. You dont know what a woman isbut lookwhatever it is, this guy has to leave it in order to fight wars and save the world. You might not be satisfied with this answer, in fact I am sure you would not be, but it is an answer nonetheless. Lets face it, ladies, this is absolutely true, the truest and strongest love of your life ever. It is the most profound love you have ever known and there was never anything so True so True so True so True so True. Amen. At the same time, somehow you dont believe any of it. Sometimes, however, the moments of belief and disbelief are Cartesianly clear and distinct, in other words, you are not ambivalent rather you are firmly on one side or the other. Such a moment would be when the Big A, your partner in passionanxiety, becomes barred and you just cant jouir in the same way. Lacan calls this when the subject falls out of the Other. The master is no longer the grand A or the S1 or any other great big giant algebraic term or matheme. In our case material, for example, this is when there you are fucking and suddenly, you become a nonbeliever and you have a fundamentally intimate relationship with the ceiling. We further postulate that you can only fuck God and survive insofar as you are an atheist.26 As long as the ceiling will appear above the head of the master you are still with us among the living. Some of you may argue that the master is the way to the ceiling. You will argue that we do this entire stint with the master so as to get to the ceiling. This is a Christian notion of the master. Master God Father Knowledge Monster Thing of Things and Holy of Holies and his daughter, the Truth. They go together like peanut butter and jelly, Marilyn and JFK, like Monica and Bill, like Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis. I stop. In France, fatherdaughter incest is not interdicted. Thats why you seminar members who are in to this sort of thing study French theory. Rather, father daughter incest is the motor of French intellectual creativity. We may now ask some unanswerable Talmudic questions here regarding cause and effectDo you become the master so as to date the daughter or do you date the daughter in order to become the master? Do you become a daughter in as much as you date the

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27 Please see Florence Nightingale of Sex and the Statute of Liberty of Love for more elaborate treatment of the nurse.

master? Or more specifically, is dating the master a daughters pastime? Since with the masteryou are always asking the question of the woman. Does a woman ever love the master? We of course cannot fully answer this question because as we have pointed out again and again, we are only partly women. At least that is what Freud said in 1931.We can even ask this differently, does a master ever love a woman? With the master there is death, mourning and prayer. Let us pray. At the Grande Messe, the bonnes soeurs nod in pious understanding, in awe and devotion. Amen. Gesundheit. And also with you. The master knows ergo he teaches. (Or he teaches, ergo he knowsas is more often the case.) If he has any question besides, where is my soup? And, have you my photocopies? And, have you ironed my shirt? they are in the shining and inspired brilliance of his work. The master doesnt question his position. To be in the position of the master means precisely that he does not question this position. Rather he is the Superman who has had the courage to take it up. It is important to point out that todays masters are up on current mastercriticism and question their positions but this only grinds them in deeper and deeper, not to mention that its a sure giveaway. They question or theatrically put their position in question so as to pay homage to some contemporary vogue, or to make you think that they are not masters like the others. Moreover, they often do this by making you think they are unloved or unaccepted by others or that an enemy institution is against them. This way you can forget that they are the master and feel sorry for them and give them all your love and compassion. It brings out the nurse in every one of us.27 It is possible nevertheless that for the master there may once or twice have been a smidgeon of a question, perhaps in the form of a kind of itch or mild indigestion. However, it did not effect him and, passing by him it turned into the problem of that poor mad soul who killed herself. We might add here that it is due to the very fact that the master doesnt have a question, that the women around him get sick, crazy or religious. Not only does the master not have a question, but he has no esprit de vie . He will not hang out and go for coffee. He may have a coffee but on very rare occasions and only when it is properly timed and politically positioned so that others are amazed that someone of your eminences stature actually imbibeth this popular beverage. The holy one blessed be he drinketh StarbucksColombian Blend, black. Amen. And just as with strict Freudians who grow Freuds beard, smoke Freuds pipe and have Freuds daughter Anna later in life, the followers of this particular master will drink Starbucks Colombian, black. (We should add here in parentheses that this is another reason the hysteric dates the master. It would be insupportable to date some coffeedrinking epigone cognizant that he is not drinking his own master signifiers but only imitating the masters signifiers. Imagine standing there as he tries to seem important ordering the same coffee as his teacher in some wimpy identification with

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28 This is, of course, related to the absolutism and frequency of the missionary position. 29 Alice is making reference to the Land of the Lotus Eaters in The Odyssey as well as Chinese food that is tasty and delicious. 30 This can also be understood simply in terms of the car. When the Studebaker Guy is sick of you, he

the master by way of coffee Eucharist. Gross. If youre going to go out with anyone, at least go out with the one who sets the trends, Jesus Christ!) It is important to distinguish the master from the father. The father is a guy. The master is a master. If you have the misfortune to have the master for your father, you will have a very difficult and stormy adolescence. The master is fiercely Antidemocratic. The father is democratic. And the Studebaker guy cant even spell democracy. (He does, however like the legend of Robin Hood, but thats about as far as it goes.) Moreover, the Master will get you to think that democracy is for weaklings. With the master, if you are kind to the servants and restaurant waiters, you are in some absurd weak Christian misprision of your mission and role, as well as of your higher education and stature. (It is important to point out here that with the master you get to be in the were better and smarter and righter than you thing and this can often allow you to treat other people with disrespect or at least with considerable disregard and disdain). Here again the distinction from the father is apparent. The father thinks this is utter bullshit; he thinks that everyone deserves respect, including your mother and only demands once and for all some peace and quiet when he reads the morning paper. The Studebaker guy wants to fuck authority. Now in a surprise turn, there is a relation between the Master and the Studebaker guy that necessitates theoretical elaboration. With the Master you go religious28even if he is an atheist master (truth makes us all religious since it implies belief). You will be saved in the right religion and go to the right heaven. The master is your way in to the elect. Hallelujah! Praise the right Lord! The Master is all about having the right Master and the best Master and about having the best and most sophisticated way of thinking about things in the whole wide world. The BSSG, on the other hand, demonstrates that the world is unimportant. We are now in a position to advance that the relation between the No of Studebaker guy and the Know of the master is more than merely homophonic. Both the subject supposed to No and the subject supposed to Know take you out of this world. This is because both present you with a Souverain Bien with regard to your fantasy which functions as a kind of lotus food.29 Thus the similarity is that paradoxically, both the Studebaker guy and the Master offer infinite Jouissance that is out if this world. The Master offers KNowledge, complete with sect and library membership and a ticket to KNowledge Infinity and the Studebaker guy offers infinite fucking in the back seat of his car from which he derives his name.30 The choice is betweenInfinite Symbolic/Imaginary and Infinite Real/Imaginary. There is no possible knot

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kicks you out of the front seat and slams the door and drives off (he may not even stop the car). When the master has to go on a mission, before he drives off, he tells you to wait for him on the corner and stay put until he comes back. 31 The Freudian-Alician Urmahlzeit. See Seminar I for the relation between the Urmahl and the Urmale. 32 Masterdom is related to mastodon, i.e., the big prehistoric mammal. The master is the wooly mammoth of the hysterics unconscious.

and no possible tying the knot with either of them. All this to say that while they are dating possibilities, despite however grandiosely they may consider themselves, they are certainly not mating possibilities. We should note however, that the master has something the Studebaker guy doesnt havea social cachet. And this is important. If you had no relation to social cachets, you couldnt date the Studebaker guy at all. This suggests that there is a relation between the social cachet and the hors monde. Paradoxically, while you think it will protect you, your very tie to the master is precisely what allows you go to hors monde with the Studebaker guy. We might even suggest that you yourself are part of the Borromean knot that ties these two figures together. But I leave this to the topologists among you. Both figures deprive you of what you want; the master by depriving you ad misererum and the Studebaker guy by giving it to you ad nauseam. The point is that neither one can serve as a main course man.31 As an externalized Super Ego, the master is not a man, he is a dessert, an extra little something, an au-del. They give you the pure enjoyment, the pice de rsistance you deserve whether in the case of the master, by deprivation, or in the case of the Studebaker guy, by nonstop sex. In this sense, i.e. as enjoyment, they are the envers of each other. The master is a Super Ego in drag as a man. The Studebaker guy is an Id in drag as a stud. And lets face it ladies, no matter what your fantasy, and while you may date him, you are not going to marry a dangling piece of a psychic structure. What is confusing is that they both appear as answers to something you think you wantknowledge and sex. You imagine that you can have the spirit of Leo in you when fucking them. But what happens is just the opposite. You fly off into either the abyss of unbridled a or you smash head on into the S1 wall. The master can always be recognized not only in terms of publications or art exhibits, but by his imaginary traits. First of all, he has white hairat least at the temples, and second of all, he has ugly shoes. If he has nice shoes with the same hair he is not the master but a shoe salesman. The white hair of the master brings us to the questionWas the master ever young? Was he a little boy master? A toddler master? An infant master? Or did he metamorphose into masterdom at a significant Zarathustrian turning point? Or was that socalled turning point itself a press release to further ensure his eternal masterdom?32 No one really knows if the master was ever young. It is the unknowable as such.

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The Master can also be recognized by his strange habits and superstitions. These ensure that his followers will be perpetually in awe. He may count stairs, avoid cracks in sidewalks, make telephone calls from public phone booths to Socrates, Heidegger, Mozart or Leonardo (depending on his particular field of mastery) or actually make telephone calls to his own personal gnie or daemon. One of you has reported dating a master who left the bed after ejaculating to call his daemon on the phone in the adjoining room. You thought this daemon was simply his wife but you would never say so. And the fact, precisely that you would never say so shows, indeed proves that he is the master. The master is the one who makes you uncomfortable to speak. He seems to know something about you. And he has everyone around him believing that he knows something about them too. For most of us mortals who dont know even what to order on the Chinese take out menu, this is immensely relieving. Mooshoo Pork. Yes, Sensei. (Later you overhear his students talking; He knew to order Mooshoo pork! It was uncanny! He knew what I wanted and the right dish to order. Perhaps mooshoo has a mysterious and hidden signification.) Thus the master is recognizable immediately by the position of knowledge he takes regarding you. Masters do things like tell you the significance of your name in Old high Russian Gaelic. You are so impressed by the cosmic scope of his recondite erudition that you even forget that this isnt even a real language. The master exhibits strange and unusual behavior. Suddenly, he will be unresponsiveeverybody quietHe is in a trance communicating with an old dead philosopher while staring fixedly at your elbow. Evidently, your gleaming ivory elbow is the cosmic conduit. Hmm, you think, looking at your elbow now in a different light. You can be sure that you can read about it later in his new treatise on the City of God. This of course is all very exciting and participates in many a hysteric fantasy of elbow immortalization. Part of your body is now finally flying around up there in the City of God. You always knew that your elbow was waiting to go downor upor whatever way history is supposed to go nowadays. For in our fantasy, the master is in the privileged position of acknowledging our narcissistic investment in ourselves as true. Your own narcissistic belief in your own elbow is no longer your own private fantasy, rather it is immortalized as a symbolic historical fact in a famous philosophical treatise. It is important to take up the question of the elbow in terms of the question of femininity. In this context, the elbow is what separates us from Freuds narcissistic woman. I elaborate. The narcissistic woman believes that the masters investment in her elbow is entirely justified. She has a party to show off her elbow to circles of important people who count. She covers her flat with photographs of her elbow from all angles and has holes cut in her jackets to show them off. She becomes known as the elbow chick and is seen at all the important parties in New YorkParisLondonTokyo. She invents elbow jewelry and designs elbow accessories and opens boutiques all over the world and la Paloma Picasso, she designs her own

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signature fragrance called Shove. In some way, you wish you could believe in the elbow thing, but you just cant. You play a little but only with the signifier. El in Hebrew means God. God is Beau. Or then there is Elle bow. Coude in French I coude try to get a regular boyfriend. You will never make it. Give it up. It is possible to have sex with the master without having sex with the master. It doesnt mean that you are absent in hysteric hell not having any enjoyment. Rather it means quite the contraryyou have sex with a part of the master not the master himselfwithout his knowing. You are having sex with his great big Paul Bunyan chest or his Moses hair and he thinks you are having your final appointment with death. Whatever you do, dont tell him. He wont be able to come. Moreover, you can change the object each time. Thursday is thigh day. Because the rule is you cannot fuck the master; he can only fuck you. At least that is the official party line. If the incest taboo is broken then what interdiction remains? There is nevertheless an interdit, even if you crash all of them in a death drive party, there is always an interdit right there at the scene of the crime. This is not only in so far as breaking the law reinforces the law. No, this is much more fun and takes a specific form in the real. The interdiction is broken ergo it is reinforced somewhere else: Thou shalt not take a shower with the master. Thou shalt not sudseth up his hair. Thou shalt not squiggle thine wet body pleasurably against his. Thou just shalt not; (its interdit.) As soon as the incest taboo is broken, the interdit movesit breaks loose and winds up in other unexpected places. For example, the taboo against removing his belly button lint becomes all the more stringent. Thou must not squeezeth the zit on the back of the master. Rather, thou must pretendeth that thou didst not see it. You must pretend that the zit on the back of the master does not exist. The zit on the back of the master doesnt exist, donc il est et je ne suis pas. The taboo repositions itself; incest is possible; but you cannot be there to see it or to laugh about it or talk about it or have any fun. Even though he has sex with you, it seems nonetheless that your body is somehow not therenot for you but for him. The vagina nexiste pas donc je suis. The master doesnt go down; he is only up. The penis is mine and the best donc je suis. Me Tarzan You Jane. Me Me Me Me Me, You You Foowee on you. Penis Me you Nothing Nada Black Hole in space and time. There is only genital sex and One genitalthe Master is the official and final genital sex guy. He is the One, your hero, there to rescue you from your polymorphous perversity. He thinks you will come because his penis is in youbecause he would come if his penis was in

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him. So, if I would, wouldnt anybody? This is why you cannot fuck the master, because he is always already fucking himself. Now, when fucking the master, you are officially supposed to be intimidated and scared (its in the script, see master hysteric sex scene) and it is the condition of everyones jouissance. It has to megacount or he is not the master and you are not the slave. Note that this is similarly the case with the Studebaker guy. Here the interdit is reactivated in terms of a casual suggestion that he get a steady job, or with regard to any discussion at all concerning his early relationship with his mother and his childhood attachments to stuffed animals and pets. Similarly, you are also not just a little flustered when for example, all you thought you were doing was fucking and now you are driving a getawaycar being chased by the L.A.P.D. So what is the master good for? The master is usually brilliant and writes great texts. The master is the one to whom you have recourse. You can say what you want and you speaketh not in an abyss because you quoteth him. Yea that I walk through the valley of mine Ph.D. dissertation I fear no evil for thine famous master texts are with me. There is great relief in quoting him. Your thesis practically sits on him; it straddles him. (Here his chest is metamorphosed into a treasure chest of his texts.) There is great relief because he said it, or he wrote it, whatever it was. The master is the one who is always citedyou lean against him and rely on him when you speak. Citing him, you are in civilization, a long lineage. Nutcase that you are, you still have a relation to history. You can do cartwheels around his text and even snuggle up in it if you want to. You can scratch it, sniff it, critique it, pour coffee on it, fall asleep and rub lipstick on it, kiss it or throw it out the window unlike what you can do with the actual master himself. But if you are to have recourse, you cannot have intercourse. Note ladies, as the interdiction has moved, you cant lean against him if you are fucking him. Fucking signals a loss at the level of the text and at the level of leaning, i.e. at the level of love. For the master, you have no being in the world. So, paying rent, dental appointments, cleaning the house, and laundry dont exist. Neither, for that matter, does birth control. Did Jupiter ask Io if she would like him to wear a condom? Did Europa say No condom, no nookie? You are only there to sustain him in his position at his beck and call. Jouis! Even your menstrual cycle belongs to him. Its best thus if you have a maid and are independently wealthy. Bon voyage!

Le petit matre
You can always recognize these guys. First off, they want you to think they are the Grand Matre and you know very well by now that the Grand Matre doesnt want you to think at all. So the fact that they want you to think is a clear give away. Le petit matre will always be Salieri; he will never be Mozart. Moreover, whereas the Grand Matre rarely speaks (he is the origin of speech and as such, beyond speech) and he certainly doesnt speak during sex (sex with the big master guy is silentdoes God talk? It isnt about talking, honey. If you want to

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33 Another Greek word, thus certainly important. Note the relation of theory to diarrhea. (Thus the continuation of the theme of disgust) Nevertheless, the word is related to theater, so we like it.

talk, call your mother.) The petit matre says things like: Je suis le matre, tu es lesclave or the equally charming and reassuring je te tue. Similarly, the grand master doesnt have to tell you that he is killing you. He knows he is killing you. One of you was in one of Beverly Hills most famous hotels with a petit matre. She was wearing the proverbial rubber dress you have no doubt heard of in our earlier seminar and he starts yelling on about Je suis le matre. He is yelling out Kojve, Hegel and Marxhe is even citing other masters in the very act of lovemaking. You wonder to yourself, who is in bed with whom? This is the silly and embarrassing moment we referred to earlier when the Grand A becomes barred for the hysteric. There you were decked out in a rubber dress with some French genius in a fancy hotel, finding some way to recuperate a little haute culture jouissance in Tinsel Town. Youve got the dress, the guy and the grand hotel. Youve snagged your Grand A and youve slimed him with your fantasy. This is it, baby! Yes! And he goes and ruins it! How can you come when he is citing Hegel in your ear! Besides, Oh my God! Even if it is your fantasy to be killed or to think about The Phenomenology of Spirit while fucking, he is not supposed to say it! Jesus Christ! Suddenly, he falls, plummeting from his fantasmatic installation on high and as you are lying beneath him and he is panting away with Je te baise and Je te tue and so on and so forth and it is to the ceiling that you speak. Puzzled, you ask the ceilingWhy does he have to say Je te baise? Why does he say it while he is doing it or vice versa? Who is he talking to? Does saying it make up for the lack in doing it? Or is it the other way around? You give a few gratuitous uhs and ahsyou havent made up your mind what to do. You look at the ceiling and you ask God up there: What would a French woman do? What would Jeanne Moreau do? Jeanne Moreau wouldnt be in this position in the first place. I failed my ego ideal. OK, Catherine Deneuve on a lazy day on the Riviera. She might find herself in such a situation. You saw Repulsion and Belle du Jour. Thats it! Pretend! Its so French! Its so sophisticated! But the fantasy was smashed, shattered, kaput. The ceiling and sky are back in the place of the Other who doesnt answer. The rubber dress was a $500 waste. You wonder if you can return it for store credit, or a refund. Je te tue! Je te tue! he expires on top of you. I think I will try for a cash refund this time. Some More Words about Wanting To Date:

III. Theorrhoea33
The libido attacher, the piece, The Statue of Liberty of Love and the Florence Nightingale of Sex What is in a date more than a date?

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34 To be distinguished from eating and shopping libido. Dating libido is higher on the Oedipal scale. 35 When Lacan says that meaning indicates the direction towards which it fails he means that it is possible to reduce this entire kitchen seminar to the head shape of the gas station attendant. 36 The piece is where, in Lacanian terms, the real is inscribed at an impasse in formalization. In other words, the gas station attendants head shape is as close as you will ever get to the Kantian Ding-an-sich.

We attach our dating libido34 to a piece in the Other. Lacan calls this the objet petit a cause of desire. We call this simply the piece. Your libido grabs on to this piece and ties itself around it. The piece is where you drop the anchor to your libido boat. The piece is something that can never be exhausted by representation. It is because of the inexhaustibility of the representation of the piece that we are sustained in our desire and often in our love. Thank God for the inexhaustibility of the piece! While occasionally you may get tired of him, and the way he snores or eats carrots, you never get tired of the piece in him. When you are eightyeven if he has dentures you can turn over and still say, god damn I love that piece! and give him a big, giant kiss. The piece is where you say a clear Yes! which is very rare for us. For normal women it seems that either the piece doesnt exist or it takes the form of money, fame, titles or a Lamborghini. Here, the piece is conscripted into a universe of means. We really really wish we could be normal women, but alas, we cant; it doesnt work, nope, broken, vorhandensein. Our piece is not in any utilitarian economy. Rather, it is in our libidinal economy which is our favorite economy of all and which we value the most. A quick survey of our seminar members came up with the following pieces of dates: ears, rims of ears, shape of head, shape of eyes, feeling of skin, smell of skin, feeling of skin in between toes, callous on feet, biceps, voice, accent, barrel chest, nape of neck, smooth head, hairiness, softness of eyebrows, edges of cheeks, shape of hands, feeling of spleen, meatiness of buttocks, width of CroMagnon toes, shape of uvula, movement of epiglottis, to name a few. The piece is the place in the other over which you hover in awe. Because the piece carries with it what Lacan calls agalma. Agalma is a kind of hallucinogenic seaweed slime that glows on the other and makes you fall in love with him again and again. Related to algae, agalma is in the primordial soup of life and might even have freeroaming RNA and DNA. Facing the agalmated piece, you are a hovercraft, or a kind of space vehicle, suspended in wonder beholding and touching the piece that exceeds you completely.35 The awe this piece instills in you is the origin of art and religion. Even you could join a religion if it had its basis in piece worship. It is the piece that gets you out of bed in the morning to draw, sculpt, paint, write, stare at in wonder, pet it, or jog.36 Michelle asked if the penis could be a piece.

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37 Alice refers in this entire passage to the Bejahung of the hysteric subject. We say Yes! to the piece and the penisin so far as it is a piecewe say he is very well bejahung!. A reader of this manuscript asked me to distinguish penisity from penisosity. Note that Alice states that when the penis is a piece it loses penisity, that is its defining penisness however it gains penisosity. We read in this word the reference to sosie or the double it doubles as a penis and a piece. 38 See section on the master and on fucking a piece of the master. 39 Alice does not maintain as the deconstructionists that dating is a subset of rhetoric, but she does maintain that synecdoche counts. The signifier has a relation to the synagogue as well as the synapse. 40 The libido attacher is distinct from the lamella-creature discussed earlier. The libido attacher is the object (the head shape) in the guy and in us. The lamella-creature is what we slime the libido attacher with. It helps it stick. 41 See Ovids Metamorphosis, and see all of Surrealism. 42 American slang for breasts.

Why not? But insofar as the penis becomes a piece it loses some of its traditional value as a penis in terms of its penisity.37 Most men as well as male analysts want to reduce the piece to the penis. While a penis can be a piece, not all pieces are penises. Sex can have to do with the piece.38 But only insofar as it is unrepresentable. Is the penis important still as the penis? Michelle continued. Read Goldilocks and the three bears, was Alices cryptic answer. The larger point is that dating is synechdochal.39 You go on a date with a part of him. And love is based on this taking the part for the whole and the whole for the part. Dokein is Greek for to give. The possibility of a long term synecdoche is a gift. It is useful to give an example of the libido attacher40 and the piece from the psychopathology of our everyday lives. We should mention that although the libido attaches to a piece, the libido also Ovidianly emanates from the piece itself. You return to the same gas station to get the more expensive full serve super plus supreme in the hopes of encountering the gas station attendant whose headshape you love. Again, this is not because you have any cosmic calculus to prove regarding the insufficiency of the castration of the gas station attendant; the relation to the piece is not a perverted relation to this nice guy. In fact, it doesnt have to do with the gas station attendant except in so far as you are spending more and more on gasoline just to see him and his head. You are not denying his subjectivity or looking for a No in the other. Rather, and this is what I am trying to get across to you todaythe shape of his head is paramount with regards to the specificity of feminine desire and of the wanting to date. It is not simply that you want to date his head but you want to date him as well because of it. That is synecdoche. The shape of the gas station attendants head delights you. You want to touch it and fondle it. It exceeds you and your ability to symbolize it. And you throw your libido net out attaching it to his head. Moreover, your own libido emanates from his head.41 Your analyst will want you to discuss this in detail. By association, you say; giving head, head as in chief or master. Captain, Crown, King, Medusa, Zeus and Athena, migraines, frigidity, headlights42 head stand, headtohead, headgear, head phones, head cheese,

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43 Sweetbreads are actually pancreas. Thus once again we find ourselves closer to the liver and spleen and bile. 44 Alice refers to Lacans comment in Seminar XX, that the sexuated being of these not whole women does not involve the body but results from a logical exigency in speech. 45 It is well known that Florence Nightingale had a series of bad love affairs with men and then she became a full-time nurse. . . . For filmic versions of this position, see Leaving Las Vegas and Dead Man Walking. 46 His mother obviously knows your mother and they had a mother festival one afternoon. 47 The point here is that the BSSG is connected to the doctor-lawyer-dentist that your mother wants you to marry in so far as he is the i ekian obscene underside of your mothers wish. Thus we cannot extrapolate any of these guysand any of the guys in the whole seminar (except certain instances with the FNG) from the concept of Mehrlust. Lacan tells us that what Freud meant by Mehrlust was surplus enjoyment. Now Alice tells us that Mehrlust, homophonic with mre lust (i.e. mother lust, your mothers lust, your mothers desire and your mothers death drive and finally and most importantly with your mothers complaint) is the concept that relates all the guys mentioned as well as the mehr-the morethe wanting and the more wanting-the mehr wanting and the mere (as in simple) wanting of all of them.

tte, ttedeveau, pied de porc, sweetbreads,43 vermicelli, Signorelli! The analyst becomes more excited. I saw his head and I thought of his penis and of the penis of the President of the United States! you say in the climax of your long associative monologue. The analyst nods in understanding as if he has finally gotten somewhere with you. Oh my God! You exclaim! Headshrinker!! That is all for today, he says, nodding. You donate to the analytic cause once or twice a week supporting the desire of the analyst. Its so much fun. Leaving, you wonder if you can do that on TV and get paid for it. You see a TV show called The Associator in which a superhero woman vanquishes the enemies by talking at them incessantly. This brings us to the postmodern problematic; wanting to date is a problem of the failure of language itself. Language just doesnt get there.44 But its a lot of fun. We must not be satisfied with only describing the other or spending our life complaining about languages failure. Me must courageously askwhat fantasy is the modus operandi of the automaton? What is behind both the Master and the Studebaker guy in us that gives them starring roles in the continuing saga of the amorous adventures of the hysteric subject?

The Statue of Liberty of Love. The Florence Nightingale of Sex:45

The head of Ophthalmology at Beth Israel Hospital invites you to the opera and dinner at le Cirque.46 Yet you cancel at the last minute to have sex with the guy who robbed your apartment last week that you love more than anyone you have ever met in your entire life.47 So what if you have nothing in common with him! Common interests are bourgeois and have nothing to do with the sublime love you bear for him. So what if he eats fast food, watches television all day and fills your refrigerator with six packs of beer. You find this fascinating. You are riveted to watching him eat chips and drink beer, waiting for him to love you and take a step towards humanity. Why do I love thee?

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48 Foi, faith, in French is homophonic with foie, liver and of course with foie gras. The reference is clearly intentional. 49 cf. Better shoes at Saks 5th Avenue. p. 1 50 cf. Heideggers hand. Also note that this is the quintessential position of the masochist.

First of all, despite the TV watching, these guys are much more interesting and generally much smarter than your average eye surgeon. To begin with, they work very littlea small bank robbery in Torrance, a few kilos sold in Long Beach. They have tons of free time and they like sex. So, number oneyou avoid boredomthis is key. Second of all, he provides you with a fulltime past timefiguring him out and helping him. You are dying to figure him out. It is the most consuming passion of your life. He is the most interesting man you have ever met. Why did he go to the supermarket last Thursday night? Why does he only buy cigarettes only at the corner gas station? Why doesnt he have a valid drivers license? He is a suspicious character. And he really is a suspicious character. You see, if you were dating a doctorlawyerdentist and you had such habits, they would lock you up. You found a guy to be legitimately suspicious about in order to enjoy yourself. Moreover, we love these men because we think this is what the existentialists must have meant by authenticity. No mauvaise foi48 for this chick, not me, no way! Because finally, we are paying great price and suffering for an authenticI dont know what. And finally, most of all, you love yourself in this position. You are better than he isand it is not simply a position; it is trueyou are better than he is. Moreover, he wants you because you are better than he is, thereby reinforcing your betterness49 all the more. No matter how badly he treats you, you always have the upper hand.50 In this love death in DisneyNirvana land, your life becomes extended in a neverending drama. Because your life (whatever that is) is postphoned taking second place to your lovedeath. You actually get to live longer. You are fascinated by his desire to kill you. Why do you want to kill me? You want to know. It is so interesting! In part, you date him in order to figure out why he wants to kill you. You are inseparable because he is your externalized death drive. The I have found him is, to a certain extent, the jubilation of finding your own death drive in someone elseand someone who you can complain about. He wants to kill me is a big relief from figuring out what in you already wants to kill you every day. Now you can think the problem is his and not yours. Your mission is to get the death drive out of him; to detox him; to bring him to the name of the father, castration and the word. Amen. If you can bring him to the symbolic, you will have beaten your own death drive. Only you with your savoir and specialized training in psychoanalysis and sex, can do it. You can beat death. You can go out on a date with death and kick his ass. What you love in him is the lost cause. The point is that you will never understand sex or death young lady And how would you like to live while you dont understand it (your mother wants to know), In the back seat of a

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51 This is clearly a mother who has read Kierkegaard, who asks, Is it better to live in a palace or a hut when the two are facing each other? 52 To be distinguished from when you desire the master.

Studebaker or on Park Avenue?51 Here we go a step further than wanting eternal nonsatisfaction, a step beyond the silly smoked salmon of Freuds Viennese neurotics, you actually want something that you could never ever wantThe very condition of wanting it is that you dont want it at all. berhysterie, the aufhebung of hysteria itself, the beyond of nonsatisfaction. This brings us to the question: Do you believe in your own masochism? The visiting Nietzsche scholar is abusing you but do you really buy your own misery? You have the whole town in an uproar and everyone wants to burn him at the town center but you are now bored and you feel guilty. Of course he is a monster, but its not like you didnt know it. Suffering, lying prostrate on his doormat in utter hell waiting for him to not answer the door, you turn over and take a break to smoke a cigarette. You think that the fact that you dont buy your own shtick is precisely the reason that you can do it. The condition of shtick is that somewhere you dont buy it. If he is smart, he doesnt buy it either and he participates because he knows that this is the only chance he will get. How often does he get Jane Russell on the doormat? He has to take advantage of the situation as best he can. Not every one has time for this type of game. Masochism is a luxury. It is all about luxury. You can afford to be the masochist. It is a position paradoxically of infinite wealth. Even if he kills you, you win. You wonder, and this legitimately; what else is there to do? It seems commonsensical that the master could never be in this category of social unfortunates. And this is where we shall provide a stunning theoretical discovery regarding the hysteric/master relation. The master lacks lack. He is surrounded by acolytes who believe he has it. Yet the master is unhappy and he does not know why. His lack of lack gives him a perpetual air of melancholy that as the FlorenceberAufhebenStatue of Liberty, you are immensely attracted to. I posit today a revolutionary statement. You are not actually attracted to the master. You are attracted to his melancholy which originates in his lack of lack. That is where you go to work and where you love the master.52 The reason for this love is entirely unbeknownst to him. You see, he thinks that he is sad because the world hasnt heard his message, or because some of his followers have betrayed him. Moreover, he thinks you love him because he is Napoleon and that he will go down in history. And you imagine that he must be very lonely.

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53 RSI is a late seminar of Lacan that no one understands in which he discusses the knotting of the Real/Symbolic and the Imaginary. Alice uses the term RSI guy to suggest that when you find a guy that you can live with, or tie the knot with just like Lacan, you also will not understand it at all. The guy you can live with, dwell with etc., has nothing to do with understanding. (This, please note is against the American idea that we should talk about our feelings and be empathically heard by our significant other.) For Lacan, RSI is pronounced with a French accent in French, ErEsEE. This makes for all sorts of silly mispronunciationsall of which are psychoanalytically significant in terms of women and dating. For example: 1. Are Is IBasically, this means Its all about Me!all the dates are about me me me! 2. Arse/IRSI is an acronym for the ass of the subject. It is common knowledge that the subject is a hole. And here, in late Lacan, tired of all the meshugges in psychoanalysis, RSI is an Arse hole. 3. Pronounced ErErI or ErEsAheethis is for the cockney readers of Lacan.

Caroline. I notice that God comes up very often in todays discourse. Would you care to elaborate on his function regarding wantingtodate? What exactly did Lacan mean by God and the Jouissance of the woman? Alice. I think I have sufficiently elaborated on that today. I shall only add the following; God and the Jouissance of the Woman means that depending who your God is, your particular way of accessing Jouissance will differ. If Yahweh is your God you may fantasize of a loving and tender datehence the category of nice Jewish husband. If Jesus is your God, you have the luck to already have a God who loves you and forgives you so you are more apt to opt for infinite fuckmenowanywhere Jouissance with the Studebaker guy. Jesus love and forgiveness allowed for a more exciting form of transgression than the history of the church attests to. The point is that Jouissance depends on your particular God. Caroline. How does this relate to dating rabbis and priests? Alice. The Priest can be in the category of the master but sometimes in the category of the Peruvian guitarist as well. This often depends on denomination. Rabbis are not sexual objects except sometimes when they are very young. A priest is about the problem of the father. A rabbi is the father. That is the difference. Julia. Is there a love that also lets you have Jouissance as well? After you agree to know what you know and you know. Then what? Is there an RSI53 guy that is knotted in all the registers? Is there some credibility that is not absolute that we can dwell with? Alice. We shall begin the next seminar with your question. It is what we have been asking all along. It is not a hysterical question.

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About the Authors

Ariella Azoulay, curator and art critic, is Lecturer at Bar Ilan University and Camera Obscura School of Art, Tel A viv. She was formerly Director and Curator of an alternative space in Tel-Aviv. She has written three books on art and visual culture with special reference to Israeli public space; the third book, Deaths Showcase, will be published in English at MIT Press in 2001. She is also the Director of a documentary film on Rabins assassination and two other cases of murder. Alfredo Carrasquillo-Ramrez is a psychoanalyst in private practice in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer of the Corporation for the Support of Educational and Community Programs (CAPEDCOM, Inc.). He also teaches Philosophy at the University of the Sacred Heart in San Juan. Tel Aviv University, in the departments of Philosophy and Comparative Literature departments,and the Program in Gender and Womens Studies. She has published articles on The Place of the Woman--Woman as Place: Platos Chora and Talmudic Interpretations, (in Hebrew) and on Platos Phaedrus. Her edition of the full text of Simone de Beauvoirs Second Sex, newly translated into Hebrew, is underway. Kwai-Cheung Lo teaches in the Humanities Program and English Department at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of some fiction pieces and of the first book-length study of Gilles Deleuze in the Chinese language.

Bernie Lubells interactive installations have evolved from his studies in psychology and engineering. As participants play with his whimsical wood machines, they become actors in a theater Kirsten Hyldgaard holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of their own imagining. His installations have and is currently Assistant Professor at the been shown in the San Francisco Bay Area and Center for European Cultural Studies, University in Los Angeles since the early 1980s .R e c e n t l y, of Aarhus, Denmark She has published two Sufficient Latitudean environment for being books, (in Danish): Heidegger og teknikkens tid - adriftwas part of a retrospective of his work at salder (Heidegger and the Age of Technics, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, 1990) and Fantasien til afmagten. Syv kapitler Florida and was shown again at New Langton om Lacan og filosofien (From Fantasy to Arts in San Francisco, where he lives. Powerlessness: Seven Chapters on Lacan and Philosophy, 1998). Am Luski is an artist. He is trying to rewrite the history of photography through post modern Lyat Friedman is at work on a book that philosophy. He has invented different kinds of sketches the various psycho-projects in Plato, camera obscura to do philosophy with images Hume, Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari. She and not only with words. He teaches at Camera earned her doctorate in Philosophy from DePaul Obscura in Tel Aviv and is also a doctoral candiUniversity, where she wrote on Eros in Platos date in philosophy at Tel Aviv University, writing texts. She teaches philosophy, continental on The Conceptual Metaphysics of Gilles thought, psychoanalytic thought and feminism at Deleuze.

Tracy McNulty is Assistant Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. She has published essays on Jacques Lacan and on the Hebrew Bible, and is completing a book on The Hostess, My Neighbor. With Eleanor Kaufman, she is editing and translating a collection of Pierre Klossowskis writings for University of Minnesota Press. Gabriel Rieras research is situated at the frontier between literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and has published several articles on twentieth century literature and philosophy. He is now working on a full-length study on ethics and aesthetics, and is completing a project on Maurice Blanchot. Yannis Stavrakakis, Ph.D., is a teaching fellow at

the Department of Government of the University of Essex where he directed the MA program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. He has published various articles on Lacanian theory, philosophy and politics in English, Greek, German and Spanish. Manya Steinkoler teaches in the English Departments at Yeshiva University and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She is also a fiction writer, a trained opera singer, a sometimecompetitive ballroom dancer, an occasional performance artist and the editor of Alices Kitchen Seminar (forthcoming), she went to Paris to study psychoanalysis, hoping to cure the fact that she loves too many things. She was not cured. Brad Zukovic is a Los Angeles area writer.

Photo credits: pages 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41. 43, 44, 45, 46 [bottom]: photos by Bernie Lubell. page 45, 46 [top]: photos by Ann Wettrich. page 108, Homeless Dreamer: video still by Jason MacCannell, 1994.

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