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Aubert (ed.), Navanin,Joyce avec hcan (Pans,Navarin, 1988),pp. 9-12, ar Jacques

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The original hysterical position is characterizedby the paradox of'teliing the truth in the form of a lie'. In terms of literal'truth' (the correspondence words and of things), the hysteric undoubtedly'lies'; but it is through this lie that the truth ofhis or her desire erupts and articulatesitself. To the extent that obsessional neurosis is a 'dialect of hysteria' (Freud), it impLies a kind of inversion of this relation: the always'sticks to the Acts', obsessive'liesin the form of a truth'. The obsessive 'hysterized'striving to effacethe tracesof his subjectiveposirion. He is that is, his 'succeeds desire erupts - only when, finally, by some inadvertent slip, he in lying'.

The Obscene Objectof Postmodern ity

This is a chapter from Looking Awry: An lntroduction to JacquesLacan through PopularCulture(1991,pp. 141-53), most accessible ZiZek,s the of surveys culture.The book analyses diversityof materialfrom film, of a opera,dramaand fiction,engagingLacan's thought in the process and intervening politics, in philosophy and aesthetics. The argumentisframed by a distinction Zi2ekwishes makebetween to modernism and postmodernism. detectsa false oppositionbetween He Habermas's definitionof modernism the claimthat reason ratherthan reliance traditional on authority the basis a healthy is of society:and his - as definition postmodernism an exposure the ideology thisclaim of of of throughrevealing hiddenpoweragenda 'reason,. Ziiek,s the of tn analysis,this latter, postmodernist claim is still modernist, sincemodernism is itself characterized 'a logic of unmasking',exemplifiedby the Big by Threeof a centuryago: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.lt was the achievement of anotherBig Three- Adorno,Horkheimer and Marcuse, first the generation the Frankfurtschool to havealreadysuspected of reasonin this way. for 2i2ek, this places Habermas the embarrassing in positionof finding himselfsuddenlyin the postmodernist camp, sinceHabermas locates source freedomin the rejection a modernist the of of utopia and in the divisionbetweendifferent life-worlds precisely what modernism saw as alienating. the sametoken, Habermas tsy takesdeconstruction to be a postmodern phenomenon, that for him it constitutes attackon in an reason. But in Zizek's reading,deconstruction in fact modernist, it is is as

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procedure excellencg an unmasking par with meaningproduced solelyby the movement signifiers. this reliance of In upon language, deconthe structionists still 'structuralists': is the 'poststructuralist, are it Lacan who marksthe postmodernist breakby focusingupon that which liesoutside the signifierand which is detectable only retrospectively, after language hasfailed in its reference. Zizekillustrates contrastbetweenmodernism the and postmodernism by noting a difference structure in betweena scene the modernist in film Blow Up and a 'postmodernist'scene Hitchcock's in Lifeboat. The theme of Blow Up isthe disappearance a body photographed chance, of by the film'sactioncentringupon the search what is to fill this absence. for A final sequence showsthe photographer watchinga ,tennis-match' in 'ball' rollsto his feet; which the non-existent whereuponhe throws ,it, joining in a gamewhich 'workswithout an object'.ln this fantasy, back, 'nothing'istakento be 'something' - a fantasy concealing gap. a In the postmodernist scene,however, the reversehappens:there is 'something' wheretherewas 'nothing'.In Hitchcock's film, a German U-boatsailor, while being pickedup in a lifeboat,reveals himselfas a cause horror by showingin hisfacehis response the response the of to of Britishsailors. The object of fear itself thus becomes the focus for the postmodernism camera: showsthe 'obscene object',whereasmodernism conceals it. The 'obsceneobject of postmodernity'is the Lacanian,Thing,,the incestuous maternalobject, brought into horrible proximity.This same proximity the Thingappears Kafka's menacing of in TheTrial.ZiZek picks out two modernistmisreadings the emptiness the core of Kafka,s of at (1) bureaucracy: asthe mark of an 'absentgod', (2) as the projectionof an innervoid into an 'apparition' outside. Boththesereadings makethe sameerrorin believing that there is an absence wherethereis a disgusting presence that is too present, too near. ln The Triatthe closeness of this presence irruptsin the court in the occurrence a lewd coupling of of a man and a woman at the backof the room,the Law allowingtransgression while seeming forbid it: Kafka is introducing to the punitive superego jouissance, inconthat is drivenby an obscene and anarchic the sistency which bewilders the victim unableto escape Law.Here of K., the there is a lack of consistency betweenthe (symbolic) Law and the (real) act of copulation,a 'trespassing the frontier that separates vital of the domainfrom the judicialdomain',investing the Law with a boundless enjoyment. Instead the Law possessing empty placeasthe idealof of an 'Before justice in the parable (as the Law'), is engulfed uncontrolled it by drives: the Freudian superego closer has linkswith the id than the ego does.Paradoxically, the same at time the superego presents itselfas all-

knowing, as if its prohibitions were consistentthroughout, thereby producing subject a hauntedby an infiniteguilt, ever unableto match its actsto an endless chain of demands. Kafka'stext proclaims So that the Law is 'necessary' not 'true': as K. discovers paysfor with his but and life, if you cannot investthe Law as necessary, get flooded with you jouissance. Kafka's 'postmodern'text articulatesthe threat that the poses-to superego the Law through colonizing with enjoyment. it But presumes existence the big Other as the sincethe act of speaking the of warrant for siEnification, necessary a suppositionof - rather than a fanaticalbelief in - the Other'sconsistency basicto language; is only the psychotic, who cannothandlesupposition, persecuted the symis by bolicnetwork.

The Postmodernist Break


Mo dernismuersus Postmodernism 'postmodernism' the topic of is discussed 'deconstructivist'circles,it in is obligatory - a sign of good manners,so to speak- to begin with a negarive referenceto Habermas, with a kind of distancingfrom him. In complying with this custom, we would like to add a new fwist: to propose that Flabemrasrs himself postmodernist,although in a peculiar way, without knowing it. To sustain this thesis,we will question the very way Habermas constructs the opposition betlveen modernism (defined by its claim to a universaliry of reason, its refusal of the authority of tradition, its acceptanceof rational argument as the only way to deGnd conviction, its ideal of a comrnunal life guided by mutual understandingand recognition and by the absence conof straint) and postmodemism (defined as the 'deconstruction' of this claim to universality,from Nietzscheto 'poststructuralism'; endeavourto prove that the this claim to universalify is necessarily, constiturively 'false', that it masks a particular nerwork of power relations; that universal rcason is as such, in its 'repressive' 'totalitarian'; very form, and that its truth-claim is nothing but an effect of a series rhetorical figures.t Thir opposition is simply false:for whar of Habermasdescribes 'postrnodernism'is the imrnanent obverseof the modas ernist project itself; what he describes the tension between modernism and as postmodernismis the imnrencnt tension that has defined modernism from its very beginning. Was not tlre acstheticist, anti-universa.List ethics of the individual's shapinghis life as a work of art alwayspart of the modernist projecr? Is the genealogicunnraskingof universalcategoriesand values, the calling into question of the urriversalityof reasonnot a modernist procedurepar excellence? Is not the very essencco[ thcoretical modemism, the revelation of the 'When

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contents' behind the consciousness' ideology, of moraliry, (of of the ego), exemplified by the great triad of Marx-Nietzsche-Freud? Is not the ironic, seH-destructive gesture by means of which reason recognizesin itseH the force of repression and domination against which it fights - the gesture at work from Nietzsche to Adorno and Horkheirner's Dialecticof Enlightenmenl is not this gesture the supreme act of modernism? As soon as fissures appear in the unquestionable authoriry of tradition, the tension berr,veenuniversal reason and the particular contents escaping its grasp is inevitable and irreducible. The Line of demarcation between modemism and postmodernism must, then, lie elsewhere. Ironically, it is Habermas LrimseHwho, on account of certain crucial features of his theory, belongs to postmodernism: the break berween the first and the secondgeneration of the Frankfurt school - that is, betr,veen Adomo, Horkheimer and Marcuse on the one side and Habermason the other - corresponds preciselyto the break berween modernism and postmodernism. In Adomo and Horkheimer's Dialectit of Enlightenment,2 MaF in cuse's One-Dimensional Man,3in their unmaskingof the repressive potential of 'instrumental reason', aiming at a radical revolution in the historical totality of the contemporary world and at the utopian abolition of the difference 'alienated' befween life spheres, berween art and 'reality', the modemist project reaches its zenith of self-critical fulfilment. Habermas is, on the other hand, postmodern precisely becausehe recognizes a positive condition of freedom and emancipation in what appeared to modernism as the very form of alienation:the autonomy of the aestheticsphere,the functional division of different social domains, etc. This renunciation of the modemist utopia, this acceptance the fact that freedom is possibleonly on the basisof a cerrain of fundamental 'alienation', attests to the fact that we are in a postmodernist unlverse. This confusion concerning the break between modernism and postmodernism comes to a critical point in Habermas's diagnosis of poststructuralist deconstructionism the dominant form of contemporaryphilosophicalpostas modernism. The useof the prefix 'post-' in both cases should not lead us astray (especiallyif we take into account the crucial, but usually overlooked, fact that 'poststnrcturalism', the very term although designating a strain of French theory, is an Anglo-Saxon and German invention. The term refers to the way the Anglo-Saxon world perceived and located the theories of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, etc. - in Franceitself, nobody usesthe term 'postsrructuralism'). Deconstructionismis a modernist procedure par excellence: presents it perhapsthe most radicalversion of the logrc of 'unmasking',whereby the very uniry of the experience of meaning is conceived as the effect of signifying mechanisms, effect that can take place only in so far asit ignoresthe textual an

movement that produced it. It is only with Lacan that the break occurs, in so far as he thematizes a certain real, traumatic kernel whose status remains deeply ambiguous: the Real resistssymbolization, but it is at the same time its own retroactive product. In this sensewe could even say that deconstructionists are basically still 'structuralists, and that the only 'posrstructuralist' is Lacan, who affirms enjoyment as ,the real Thing', the cenrral impossibiliry around which every signi4ring nerwork is structured.

Hitchcock as Postmodernist In what, then, does the postmodemist break consisr? Let's begin with Antonioni's BIow {Jp, perhaps the last great modernist fil,,'. As the hero cleveloos photographs shot in a park, his attention is attracted to a stain that appears on the edge of one of the photographs. when he enrargesthe detail, he discoversthe conrours of a body there. Though it is the middle of the night, he rushesto the park, and indeed finds the body. But on returning to the scene of the crime the next day, he finds thar the body has disappearedwithout leaving atrace. The first thing to note here is that the body is, accorclingto the code of the detective novel, the object of desie par excellence, causethat the startsthe interpretarive desire of the detective (and the reader): how did it happen?who did it? The key to the film is only given to us, however, in the final scene.The hero, resignedto the cul-de-sacin which his investigation has ended, takesa walk near a tennis court where a group of people - *irhorr,, tennis ball - mime a game of tennis. In the frame of this supposedgame, the imagrned ball is hit out of bounds, and lands near the hero. He hesrtat.s a moment, and then acceptsthe game: bending over, he makes a gesturc of picking up the ball and throwing it back into the courr. This scene has, of course,a metaphoricaltunction in relation to the rest of the film. It inclicates the hero's consentingto the fact that 'the gameworks without an object,: even as the mimed rennisgame can be played without a ball, so his own adventure proceedswithout a body. 'Postmodernism' is the exact reverse of this process. It consistsnot in demonstratingthat the game works without an objecr, that the play is set in motion by a central absence,bur rarher in displaying the objcct directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character. The same object can function succcssivcly a disgustingreject and as a sublime, as charismatic apparition:the diffcrence,strictly srructural,doesnot pertain to the 'effective properries'of thc object, but only to its place in the symbolic order. one can grasp this difference berween modernism and postmodernism by analysing the effect of horror in Hitchcock's fllms. At first, it seems that

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Hitchcock simply respectsthe classicalrule (already known by Aeschylus in according to which one must place the terrifying object or event The Oresteia) outside the scene and show only its reflections and its effects on the stage. If one does not see the object directly, one 6l1s out its absencewith Antasy projections (one seesit as more horrible than it actually is). The elementary procedure for evoking horror would be, then, to limit oneselfto reflectionsof or the terrifying object in its witnesses victims. this is the crucial axis of the revolution in horror movies As is well known, in accompLished the 1940sby the legendaryproducer Val Lewton (Cat People, The SeuenthWctim, etc). Instead of directly showing the terrifying monster (vampire, murderous beast),its Presenceis indicated only by means of offscreensounds,by shadows,and so on, and thus renderedall the more horrible. Let's this The properly Hitchcockian approach,however, is to reuerse process. take a small detail from Lfeboat, from the scene where the group of Allied welcome on board their boat a German sailor from the destroyed castaways when they find out that the personsavedis an enemy. submarine:their surprise for way of filming this scenewould be to let us hear the screams The traditional person gnpping the side of the boat, help, to show the handsof an unknown and then nol to show the German sailor, but to move the camera to the shipwrecked survivors: it would then be the perplexed expressionon their facesthat would indicate to us that they had pulled something unexpectedout 'W'hat? was finally built up, the camerawould When the suspense of the water. contrary finally revealthe German sailor.But Hitchcock's procedure is theexact of this: what he does not show, precisely,is the stripwreckedsurvivors. He shows the German sailor climbing on board and saying, with a friendly smile, 'Danke schon!' Then he does show the surprisedfacesof the survivors;the not cameraremains on the German. If his apparition provoked a terrifying effect, one can only detect ttby his reaction to the survivors'reaction: his smile dies Bonitzera calls what Pascal out, his look becomesperplexed.This demonstrates the Proustian side of Hitchcock, for this procedure correspondsperfecdy to to that of Proust rn [Jn Amour de Swannwhen Odette confesses Swann her Odette - that her story hasa terrif ing Proust only describes adventures. lesbian effect on Swann is evident only in the changein the tone of her story when she effect. One shows an ordinary object or an activity, but notices its disastrous themselues suddenly,through the reactionsof the rnilieu to this object, reflecting inexplicthat one is confronting the source of ar-r itself,one realizes in theobject able terror. The terror is intensified by the fact that this object is, in its completely ordinary: what one took only a moment ago for a appearance, totally comrnon thing is revealedas Evil incarnate. than the to Such a postmodernistprocedureseems us much more subversive the latter, by not showing the Thing, leavesopen usualmodemist one, because

the possibiliry of grasping the central emptinessunder the perspectiveof an 'absent God'. The lessonof modernism is that the stmcture, the intersubjective machine, works as well if the Thing is lacking, if the machine revolves around an emptiness; the postmodernistreversalshows t/re Thing ikelf as the incarnated, materialized emptiness. This is accomplishedby showing the terri$uing object directly, and then by revealing its frightening effect to be simply the effect ofits place in the structure. The terri$'ing object is an everyday object thar has startedto funcrion, by chance,asthar which fills in the hole in the other (the symbolic order). T'he prototype of a modernist text would be Samuel.tseckett's waitingfor Godot. The whole futile and senseless action of the play takes place while waiting for Godot's arrival when, finally, 'something might happen'; but one knows very well that 'Godot' can never arrive, because is just a name he 'what for nothingness, a central absence. for would the 'postmodernist'.ew.iting of this same story look like? one would have to put Godor himself onstage: would be someoneexactly]ike us, someonewho lives the samefutile, he boring liG that we do, who enjoys rhe same stupid pleasures.The onry di{ference would be that, not knowing it himserf; he has found himself by chance at the place of the Thing; he would be the incarnation of the Thine whose arrival was awaited. A lesser-known film by Fritz Lang, Secret Beyondthe Door, stagesin pure (one is almosr tempred to say distilled) form this logic of a' everyday object found in the place of dasDing. celia Barrett, a young businesswoman, travelsto Mexico after her older brother's death. She meets Mark Lamphere there, marrieshim, and moves in with him. A little later, the couple receives his intimate friends, and Mark shows them his garlery of historical rooms, reconstituted in the vault of his mansion. But he forbids their enrrance into room number seven, which is locked. Fascinated by the taboo placed on ir, ce[a gets a key made and enters the room, which turns our ro be an exact replica of her room. The most familiar ttringstake on a dimension of the uncanny when one finds them in another prace, a place that ,is not right'. And the thrill effec resulrs precisery from the fanriliar, domestic characterof what one finds in this Thing's forbidden place - here we have the perfect illustration of the fundamentalambiguiry of the Freudiannotion of das Unbeimliche. The opposition between modernism and postmodernism is thus far from being reducible to a simple cliachro.y; we are even tempted to say that postmodernismin a way prccedcs modernism. Like Kafl<a- who logically, not - the postmod ernistinconsistency only temporally,precedes Joyce of the other is retroactivelyperceivedby thc modemist gazeas its incompleteie_ss. IfJoyce is the modemist par excellencc, writer of the symptom ('the symptomJoyce,, thc as Lacan puts it), of the irrtcrprcrativedelirium taken to the infinite, of the time

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(to inteqpret) where each stable moment reveals itself to be nothing but a 'condensation' of a plural signiflring process, Kafl<a is in a certain way already postmodernist, the antipode of Joyce, the writer of fantasy, of the of space a nauseousinert presence. If Joyce's text provokes interpretation, Kafl<a's blocks it. inert presencethat is It is preciselythis dimension of a non-dialecticizable, misrecognizedby a modernist reading of Ka{ka, with its accent on the inacagency(the Castle,the Court), holding the place absent,transcendent cessible, the secret as of the lack, of the absence such. From this modernist perspective, of Kafka would be that in the heart of the bureaucratic machinery, there is only 'works by an emptiness, nothing: bureaucracy would be a mad machine that gameis playedwithout a body-object. One can itseH', asin BIow Up where the read this conjunction in tvvo opposed ways, which nevertheless share the same theoretical frame: theological and imrnanentist. One reading takes the transcendentcharacter of the centre (of the Casde, of elusive, inaccessible, 'absent God' (the universe of Kafl<aasan anguished the Court) as a mark of an universe, abandoned by God); the other reading takes the emptiness of 'illusion of perspective', as a reverse form of the this transcendence as an apparition of the immanence of desire (the inaccessible transcendence, the central lack, is then only the negative form of the apparition of the surplus of its desire,_of productive movement, over the world of objects qua representations).' These nvo readings,although opposed,miss the same point: the way this absence,this empry place, is always already filled out by an inert, obscene, The Court in The Trial is not simply absent, it is indeed revolting presence. presentunder the figures ofthe obscenejudgeswho, during night interrogations, glancethrough pornographic books; the Castleis indeed presentunder 'Which is why the figure of subservient, lascivious and cormpt civil servants. 'absent God' in Kafka does not work at all: for Kafka's the formula of the in problem is, on the contrary,that in this universeGod is toopresent, the guise phenomena.Kafka'suniverseis a world in which nauseous of various obscene, distance- has got too God - who up to now had held himself at an assured 'universe of anxiery', why not - on condition, closeto us. Ka{ka'suniverseis a however, that one takesinto account the Lacanian definition of anxiety (what object but, on the contrary,its provokesanxieryis not the lossof the incestuous too close to dasDing; that is the theological lesson of very proximity). We are 'Supreme Being of Evil', is mad, obsceneGod, this postmodernism:Kafl<a's - the differencelies only in the fact SupremeGood exactlythe sameasGod 4l,ra that we have sot too closeto him.

Bureaucracy Enjoyment and


Two doorsof the Law To specify further the statusof the Kafkaesqueobsceneenjoyment, let's take as a starting point the flmous apologue concerning the door of the Law in The Tial, the anecdote told to K. by the priest in order to explain to him his situation uis-i-uis the Law. The patent failure of all the major interpretations of this apologue seemsonly to confirm the priest's thesisthat 'the comments often enough merely expressthe comrnentator's bewilderrnent'. There is, however, another way to penetrate the anecdote'smystery: insteadof seeking its meaning direcdy, it would be preferable ro rrear it in the way claude L6vi-Strausstreats a myth: by establishingits relations to a seriesof other myths and elaborating -Where the rules of their transformation. can we find, then, in The Tial, 'myth' another that functions as a variation, as an inversion, of the apologue conceming the door of the Law? 'We do not have far to look: at the beginning of the second chapter ('First Interrogation'),JosefK. finds himself in front of another door of the Law (the entrance to the interrogation chamber); here also, the door-keeper lets him know that this door is intended only for him. The washerwornan saysto him, 'I must shut this door after you, nobody elsemust come in,' which is clearly a variation of the last words of the door-keeper to the man from the country in the priest's apologue: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.' At the sametime, the apologueconceming the door of the Law (let'scall it, in the style of L6vi-Strauss,ml) and the first interrogation (m2) carr be opposed through a whole series of distinctive features. In m1 we are in fronr of the entranceto a magnificent Court ofJustice,in m2 we are in a block of workers' flats, full of filth and crawling obscenities; mt rhe door-kecpcr is arr in employee of the court, in m2 it is an ordinary wornan washing children's clotl-res; m1 it's a rnan, in m2 a woman; in m1 the door-kecper preventsthe in nran from the country from passing through the door and entering the Cor"rrt, in rn' the washerwoman pushes him into the interrogation chamber half against his will. In short, the frontier separatingeveryday life from the sacred plece of the Law cannot be transgressed ml , but in -2 it is easily transin grcsscd. Tlrc crucial feature of rn2 is alrcedy indicated by its location: the Court is krcatccli' the middle of the vital promiscuiry of worker's lodgings. Reiner Stach is cluitejustified in recognizing in this detail a disrinctive trait of Kafka's univcrsc.'the trespassing the frontier that separates vital domain from of the

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the judicial domain'.6 The structure here, of course, is that of the Moebius strip: if we progressfar enough in our descentto the social underground, we find ourselves suddenly on the other side, in the middle of the sublime and noble Law. The place of transition from one domain to the other is a door guarded by an ordinary washerwoman of a provocative sensuality.In m1, the door-keeper doesn't know anyttring, whereas here the woman possesses a kind of advanceknowledge. Ignoring the naive cunning of K., the excuse that he is looking for a joiner caTl,edLanz, she makes him understand that his arrival has been awaited for a long time, even though K. himself only chose to enter her room quite by chance,as a last desperate attempt after a long and useless ramble: The first thing he saw in the little room was a greatpendulum clock which already 'please pointedto ten. 'Doesajoiner called Lanzlive here?' asked. he go through,'said a young womanwith sparkling blackeyes, who waswashingchildren's clothes a cub, in andshepointed damphandto the opendoor of the nextroom....'I asked a her for joiner, a man called Lanz.''I know,'saidrhe woman,just go right in.,K. might not haveobeyed shehadnot comeup to him, grasped handle the door, andsaid: if the of 'l mustshut this door afteryou, nobodyelse mustcomein.'7 The situation here is exacdy the sameas in the well-known incident from The Arabian Nights:one entersa place quite by chance, and leams that one's arrival hasbeen long expected. The paradoxical foreknowledge of the washerwoman has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called feminine intuition - it is based on the simple fact that she is connected with the Law. Her position regarding the Law is far more crucial than that of a minor functionary; K. discoversthis for himself soon afterward when his passionateargumentation before the tribunal is intemrpted by an obsceneintrusion. Here K. wasintermpted a shriekfrom the end of the hall;he peered by from beneath hishandto see whatwashappening, thereekof theroom andthe dim light together for
made a whitish dazzleof fog. It was the washerwoman,whom K. had recogriizedas a potential causeof disturbancefrom the moment of her entrance.'Whether she was ar fault now or not, one could not tell. All K. could seewas that a man had drawn lrer into a corner by the door and was claspingher in his arms. Yet it was not she who hacl uttered the shriek but the man; his mouth was wide open and he was gazing up at tl-re ceiling.8 What is the relation, then, between this woman and the Court of the Law? In Kafka's work, the woman as a 'psychologrcal rype' is wholly consistent with the anti-feminist ideology of an otto weininger: rhe woman is a being without a proper seE she is incapable of assuming an ethical attitude (even when

she appears act on ethical grounds,she is calculatingthe enjoyment she will to derive from her actions);she is a being without any access the dimension of to Truth (even when what she is sayingis literally true, she lies as a consequence of her subjectiveposition). It is insufhcient to sayofsuch a being that shefeigns her affectionsto seducea man, for the problem is that there is nothing behind this mask of simulation. . . nothing but a certain glutinous, filthy enjoymenr that is her very substance. Confronted with such an image of woman, Kaflra does not succumb to the usual critical-feminist temptation (of demonstraring that this figure is the ideological product of specific social conditions, of contrasting it with the outlines of another type of femininity). In a much 'W.einingerian more subversive gesture, Kafka wholly accepts this portrait of woman as a 'psychologrcalrype', while making it occupy an unheard-of, unprecedentedplace, the place of the Law. This is, perhaps,as has already been pointed out by Stach,the elementaryoperation of Kafka: this shortcircuit betweenthe feminirLe 'substance' ('psychological type') and the place of the I-aw. Smearedby an obscenevitaLiry,the Law itself - traditionally, a pure, neurral universaliry - assumes the featuresof a heterogeneous,inconsistent bricolage penetratedwith enjoyment.

The ObsceneLaw In Kafka'suniverse,the Court is - above all - lawless, a formal sense: is asif in it the chain of 'normal' connectionsberween causes and effectswere suspended, put in parenthesis. Every attempt to establish Court's mode of functioning the by logical reasoningis doomed in advanceto fail. All the oppositionsnoted by K. (ber\,veen the angcr of the judges and the laughter of the public on rhe benches,berween the merry right side and the severeleft side of the pubLic) prove false as soon as he tries to base his tactics on them; after an ordinary answerby K. the public burstsinto laughter:
''Well, thcn,' said the Exarnining Magistrate,turning over the leavesand addressing K. with an air of arrthoriry, 'you are a house-painter?' 'No,' said K., 'I'rn the junior nranager of a large Bank.' This answer evokcd such a hearty outburst of laughter from the Right parry that K. had to laugh too. People doubied up with thcir hands on their knees and shook as if in spasms coughing-' of The other, positive side of this inconsistency is, of course, enjoyment: it empts openly when the argument of K. is disturbed by a public act of sexual intercourse. This act, difficult to perceive because of its over-cxposure (K. has 'peer to beneath lils hands to sce what was happening'), marks the moment of the eruption of the trlunratic lleal, and the error of K. consists in

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overlooking the solidarity berween this obscene disturbance and the court. He thinks that everybody will be anxious to have order restored and the offending couple ejected from the meering. But when he tries to rush across the room, the crowd obstructs him. Someone seizes him from behind, by the collar - at this point, the game is over: puzzled and confused, K. loses the thread of his argument; filled with importent rage, he leaves the room. The fatal error of K. was to addressthe Court, the Other of the Law, as a homogeneous entity, attainable by means of consistent argument, whereas the Court can only return him an obscenesmile, rnixed with signsofperplexiry. In short, K. expectsactionfrorn the Court Qegaldeeds,decisions),but what he gers instead is an act (a public copulation). Kafl<a'ssensirivity to this 'trespassing of the frontier that separates vital domain from the judicial domain' depends the upon his Judaism: the Jewish religion marks the moment of the most radical separation thesedomains. In all previous religions,we encounter a place, a of domain of sacredenjoyment (in the form ofritual orgies, for example), whereas inJudaism the sacreddomain is evacuatedof all tracesof vitaliry and the living substance subordinated to the dead letter ofthe Father'sLaw. Kafl<atrespasses is the divisions of his inherited religion, flooding the judicial domain, once again, with enjoyment. Which is why Ka{ka's universe is eminently that of the superego. The Other as the other of the sFnbolic Law is nor only dead, it doesn't even know that it is dead (ike the terrible figure in Freud's dream): it couldn't know it, in so far as it is totally insensible to the living substanceof enjoyment. The super ego presents,.on the contrary, the paradox of a law that, according to JacquesAlain Miller,t0 'p.o...ds from the time when the Other *", ,ro, yet dead, evidenced by the superego,a surviving remainder of that time'. The superego imperative 'Enjoy!', the inversion of the dead Law into the obscene figure of the superego, implies a disquieting experience:suddenlywe become aware that what a minute ago appeared ro us a dead letter is really alive, breathing, pulsating. Let us recall a shorr scene from the filrn Aliens. The group of heroes is advancing through a long tunnel the stone walrs of which are nvisted like interlaced plaits of hair. All at once the plaits start to move and to secretea glutinous mucus; the petrified colpse comes alive again. -We must, then, reversethe usualmetaphor of 'alienation'whereby the dead, formal letter, a kind of parasiteor vampire, sucksour the living, presentforce. Living subjectscan no longer be consideredprisonersof a dead cobweb. The dead, formal character of the Law becomes now the sine qua non of our freedom, and the real totalitarian danger arisesonly when the Law no longer wants to stay dead.

The result of nrl is, then, that there is no truth about Truth. Every warranr of the Law has the status of a semblance; the_Law is necessary without being true. To quote the words of the priest in m1, 'it is not necessary accept ro everything as true; one must only accept it as necessary'.The meeting of K with the washerwoman adds to this the obverse, usually passed ovcr in silence: in so far as the I aw is not grounded in Truth, it is impregnated with enjol'rnent. Thus, ml and m2 are complementary, representing the rwo modes of lack: the lack of incompletenessand the lack of inconsistency.In mi, the other of the Law as incomplete. its very heart, there is a In "pp."r, certain gap; we can never reach the last door of the Law. Ir is the reference to m'that supports the intelpretation of Kafl<aas a'writer of absence',that is, the negative theological reading of his universe as a crazy bureaucratic machine turning blindly around the central void of an absent God. In m2, the other of the Law appears on the conrrary, as inconsistenr: nothing is wanting in it, nothing is lacking, but for all that it still is not .whole,/all'; it remains an inconsistent bricolage, collection following a kind of aleatory logic a of enjoyment. This provides the image of Karka as a 'writer of presence'- the presence of what? of a blind machinery to which nothing is lacking in so far as it is the very surGit of enjoyment. If modem literature can be characterizedas 'unreadable', then Kafl<aexemplifies this characterisricin a way that is different fromJamesJoyce. Finnegan,s wake is, of course,an 'unreadable'book: we cannot read it the way we read an ordinary 'realist' novel. To follow the thread of the text we need a kind of 'reader's guide', a cornmentary that enablesus to see our way through the inexhaustible nerwork of ciphered allusions. yet this .illegibiiiry' functions preciselyas an invitation to an unending processof reading of interpretarion (recall Joyce's joke that 'with Finnegan'swake, he hopes to keep literary scientistsoccupied for at least the next four hundred years). compared to tlis, The Tial ts quite 'readable'. The main outlines of the story are clear enough Kafka's style is concise and of proverbial puriry. But it is this very 'legrbility' that, because of its over-exposed character, produces a radical opaciry and blocks every essay interpretation. It is as if Ka{ka'stexr were a of coagulated,'stigmatized, signif,iing chain repelling significationwith an exccss of sticky enjoyment.

The superego knows too much The bureaucrary depicted in Kafka's novels - the imrnense machinery of totally useless, superfluousknowledge, ru'ning bli'dly and provoking an unbearable feeling of irrational' guilt - funcrions as a superegoic knowledge (S2 in Lacan'smathemes).This fact ru.s counter to our spontaneous understanding.

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The ObsceneObject of postmodernity

51

Nothing seems more obvious than the connection between the superego and the Lacanian.Sl, the master-signifier. Is the superego not the very model 'irrational' injunction founded solely in its own processof enunciation, of an demanding obedience without further justification? Lacanian theory, however, runs counter to this spontaneous intuition: the opposition between S1 and 52 that is, berween the master-signifier and the chain of knowledge overlaps the opposition of ego-ideal (the 'unitary trait', the point of symbolic identification) and the superego. The superego is on the side of 52, it is a fragment of the chain of knowledge whose purest forn of apparition is 'irrational what we call the feeling of guilt'. We feel guilty without knowing why, as a resuit of acts we are certain we did not comrnit. The Freudian solution to this paradox is, of course,that this feeling is well-founded: we feel guilry because of our repressedunconscious desires. Our conscious ego does not (want to) know anything about them, but the superego 'sees all and knows all', and thus holds the subject responsible for its unacknow'the ledged desires: superego knew more than the ego about the unc o n s c i o u sd ' . 1 1 i We should, then, renounce the usualnotion of the unconsciousasa kind of 'reservoir' of wild, illicit drives:the unconsciousis also (one is even tempted to say: above all) fragments of a traumatic, cruel, capricious, 'uruntelligible' and 'irrational' law text, a set of prohibitions and injunctions. In other words, we 'put must forward the paradoxical proposition that the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows'.12 'What is the precise meaning of this distinction berween belief and knowledge, produced as if by a kind of slip and lost already in the note accompanying the quoted phrase from The Ego and the Id? In this note Freud rephraseshis 'simply proposition by sayingthat it states that human nature has a far greater extent, both for good and for evil, than it thinks fglaubt: believes]it has, i.e., than ego is awareof through conscious perceptions'.t'L^."n taught us to be extremely attentive to such distinctions that emerge momentarily and are forgotten imrnediately afterward, for it is through them that we can detect Freud's crucial insights, the whole dimension of which he himself failed to notice (let us recall only what Lacan has been able to derive from a similar 'slippery' distinction bef,weenego-ideal and ideal ego). What, then, is rhe import of that ephemeraldistinction befween belief and knowledge? llltimately, only one answer is possible:if man is more immoral than he (consciously) believes and more moral than he (consciously)knows - in other words, if his relation toward the id (the illicit drives) is that of (dis)belief,and hr-is relation toward the super-ego (its traumatic prohibitions and injunctions) that of (non-)knowledge,i.e., of ignorance- must we not conclude that theid in itselfalready consists ofunconscious, repressed beliefs, andthat thesuperego of consists

an unconscious knowledge, a paradoxical knowledge unbeknown to the subof ject? As we have seen, Freud himself treats the superego as a ki'd of knowledge ('the superego knew more than the ego about the unconsclous id'). But where can we graspthis knowledge in a palpableway, where doesit acquire- so to speak- a material, externalexistence? paranoia, which this ln in agencythat 'seesall and knows all' is embodied in the real, in the person of the all-knowing persecutor,able to 'read our thoughts'. Concerning the id, we only have to remember the famous challenge made by Lacan to his audience that they show him one singlepersonwho did nor unconsciously believe in his own immortahry, in God. According to Lacan, the true formula of atheism is 'God is unconscious'.There is a certain fundarnentalbelief - a belief in the other's basicconsistency thar belongsto languageassuch.By the mere act of speaking,we suppose existenceof the big other as guarantorof our meanthe ing. Even in the most asceticanalyticalphilosophy, this fundamentalbelief is maintained in the form of what Donald Davidson called 'the principle of charity', conceiving it as the condition for successful communication.la The only subject who can effectively renounce the 'chariry principle' - that is, whose relation to the big other of the symbolic order is characterized a by * fundamental disbeLief ts the psychotic a paranoiac,for example, who seesin the symbolic network of meaning around him a plot staged by some evil Persecutor.

Notes
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 cf, Jrirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse Modernity (cambridge, Mass., of MIT Press, 1987). Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic Enlightentnent oJ (London, Allen Lane, 1.973). Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, Beacon press, 1964). Pascal Bonitzer, 'Longs feux', L'Ane 16 (1984\. ci Gilles Deleuze and F6lix Guattari, KaJka: Towarda Minor Literuture (Minneapolis, Universiry of Minnesota Prcss,1986). Rciner Stach, KaJkaserotischer Mythos (Frankfurt, Fischer Verlag, 19g7), p. 3g. Franz Kafl<a, The Tnal (New York, Schocken, 1984), p. 37. Ibid., p. 46. I b i d . ,p . 5 0 . Miller, 'Dury and the Drives', Newsletter theFreudia,Field 6 (1/2\ of Jacques-A)ain (1,992), 5-15, ar p. 13. pp. Sigmund Freud, 'The Ego and the Id', in The standardEdition oJ the complete Psychological works, (London: Hogarth press and the Institute of psycho-Analysis, 1953),vol. 19, p. 51. The nicestirony of the title of Freud's'The Eso and the Id,

52

Culture
is that it leaves out the third crucial notion that contains the real theoretical 'The Superego in its Relations to the innovation of this essay:its title should be

Ego and the Id'.

t 2 Ibid.,p. 52.
I J

rbid.

1 4 Cf, Donald Davidson,

'Mental Events',in Essays Actions Euents (New York, and on 1980). Odrrd Univenity Press,

The Spectre ldeology of

Thisis the introduction a collection to entitled Mappingldeology, edited by 2iZe*.(1994),pp. 1-33, which reassesses concept of ideology the through readings from philosophy, sociology and psychoanalysis. Here 2i2ek providesa surveyof the century's theoriesof ideology,showing how there is a basic fault-line that shows through in oppositional structuresof truth and falsity,which ideologyitselfserves conceal. to Three aspects the current approaches ideology can be distinin to (1) guished: the beliefs, arguments, basic assumptions modesof rhetand (2) oric that constituteits conceptual apparatus; the institutions, ritual practices (3) and social organizations that maintainits dominance; the ideologyemergingat the core of the socialin response its current to formations, such liberal as subjects experiencing themselves individuals as 'free choice'. with uncontrolled First, ZiZekquestions whether'true' communication bedistinguished can from'false', if discourse not depend as did on an ideological structure function at all. Second, is not correctto to it regardthe 'ldeological StateApparatus' determining as beliefs subjects, of since the Fascist experience shows that the so-called manipulators were indifferentasto whetherthey were believed not, as long asthe rituals or produced suffi<.ient a semblance solidarity. of Third,it is no simple matter to separate supposedly extra-ideological elements from'spontaneous' 'facts', ideological oneswhen the ideological hidden in self-evident is suchas laws,economic structures sexual and relations. Whatever opposition, the there is an assumption which it depends on that is neverquestioned; example, for where an oppositionbetweenan earlyand a lateform of capitalism assumed orderto dismiss is in Marx's

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