Читать книгу Living in the End Times - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 17

When even products of an allegedly “liberal” Hollywood display the most blatant ideological regression, is any further proof required that ideology is alive and kicking in our post-ideological world? It should not surprise us, then, to discover ideology at its purest in what may appear to be products of Hollywood at its most innocent: the big blockbuster cartoons.

“The truth has the structure of a fiction”—is there a better exemplification of this thesis than those cartoons, in which the truth about the existing social order is rendered in such a direct way that it would never be allowed in narrative cinema with “real” actors? Recall the image of society we get from violent cartoons in which animals fight: the ruthless struggle for survival, brutal traps and attacks, the exploitation of others . . . if the same story were to be told in a feature film with “real” actors, it would undoubtedly be either censored or dismissed as ridiculously negative. Kung Fu Panda (2008, John Stevenson and Mark Osborne), the recent Dreamworks animated hit, is ideology at its most embarrassingly pure. Here is the story: Po is a panda who works in a noodle restaurant owned by his goose father Ping, in the Valley of Peace in China. He is a kung fu fanatic with secret dreams of becoming a great master in the discipline; his weight and clumsiness, however, seem to make this goal unattainable. Ping hopes instead that Po will one day take over the restaurant, and waits for the perfect opportunity to disclose the secret ingredient of his family’s noodle recipe. The tortoise Master Oogway, the spiritual leader of the Valley, has a premonition that the evil leopard warrior Tai Lung—a former student of his own protégé, the red panda Master Shifu—will escape from prison and return to threaten the Valley of Peace. Oogway orders a formal ceremony to choose the mighty Dragon Warrior who will be capable of defeating Tai Lung. Po arrives too late and finds himself locked outside the walled palace square. In a last-ditch attempt to get in, he ties several fireworks to a chair and ignites them, which sends him crashing into the center of the arena. Inspired by this sudden appearance, to everyone’s shock the old master tortoise designates Po the Dragon Warrior. Meanwhile, Tai Lung escapes from prison; upon learning of this, Po confesses to Shifu his deep self-loathing due to his obesity and his belief that he will never be a match for Tai Lung. Shifu is at a loss for a solution. The following morning, Shifu discovers that Po is capable of impressive physical feats when motivated by food. Shifu leads Po to the countryside for an intensive training regime in which Po is offered food as a reward for learning his lessons. Po excels. Shifu now decides he is ready to face the villain and gives him the sacred Dragon Scroll, which promises great power to the possessor. But when Po opens it, he finds nothing but a blank reflective surface. Both are stricken with despair at the scroll’s apparent worthlessness. Wandering alone in the city, Po meets his father, who tries to cheer him up by revealing the secret ingredient of the family’s noodle soup: nothing. Things become special, he explains, because people believe them to be special. Realizing that precisely this is the very point of the Dragon Scroll, Po rushes off to challenge Tai Lung. Despite Po’s skill, Tai Lung temporarily stuns him and takes the Dragon Scroll, but is unable to understand its symbolism. Po counter-attacks and defeats him in an explosion of light that ripples through the valley. The villagers, including Po’s father, hail Po as a hero. In the very last scene, Po rests on the floor with Shifu; after a few seconds, Po suggests that they get something to eat and Shifu agrees.

The first thing that strikes one about the film is a linguistic detail: the abundance of ironically tautological statements, from the trailer’s claim that the film is about “the legend of a legendary warrior,” to the father’s reference to the “special ingredient of my soup with special ingredient.” In the Lacanian “logic of the signifier,” tautology stands for the point at which, as Lacan put it, the signifier falls into its signified. Recall the old Polish anti-Communist joke: “Socialism is the synthesis of the highest achievements of all previous historical epochs: from tribal society, it took barbarism; from antiquity, it took slavery; from feudalism, it took relations of domination; from capitalism, it took exploitation; and from socialism, it took the name. . ..” Does the same not hold for the anti-Semitic image of the Jew? From the rich bankers, it took financial speculation; from capitalists, it took exploitation; from lawyers, it took legal trickery; from corrupted journalists, it took media manipulation; from the poor, it took indifference towards personal hygiene; from sexual libertines it took promiscuity; and from the Jews it took the name . . . Or take the shark in Spielberg’s Jaws: from the immigrants, it took their threat to small-town daily life; from natural catastrophes, it took their blind destructive rage; from big capital, it took the ravaging effects of an unknown cause on the daily lives of ordinary people; and from the shark it took its image . . . In all these cases, the “signifier falls into the signified” in the precise sense that the name is included in the object it designates.

What this means is that, to be a true anti-Semite, it is not enough to say that Jews are dirty, exploitative, manipulative, and so on: one has to add that they are dirty, exploiting, manipulative, etc., because they are Jews. What accounts for these visible positive properties is the mysterious je ne sais quoi which makes them Jews—this mysterious ingredient, “what is in a Jew more than a Jew” (or, in Kung Fu Panda, “what is in the soup more than the soup itself, more than its usual ingredients”), is what Lacan called the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. Here, we encounter the first paradox of the objet a: the X beyond words is a pure effect of words. This object which is, by definition, ineffable—the je ne sais quoi which cannot be adequately translated into any explicit positive determinations, whose transcendence only shines through the flow of speech—is, with regard to its genesis, totally immanent to language, the product of a signifying reversal or self-relation. It emerges at the point where “the signifier falls into the signified,” in other words, its transcendence is the inverted mode of appearance of its immanence. This is why its presence is indicated by tautology: the two terms in a tautology are not at the same level: the first occurrence of the term is as a signifier, and the second as a signifier within the signified. In the statement “A Jew is a Jew,” one expects, after the first occurrence (“A Jew is . . .”), an explication of its signified, a definition of the term, an answer to the question “What is a Jew?”; but, when one gets the same term repeated, this signifying repetition generates the specter of an ineffable X beyond words. The paradox is thus that language reaches “beyond itself,” to the reality of objects and processes in the world, when it designates these objects and proceeds by means of clear denotative/discursive meanings; but when it refers to an ineffable transcendent X “beyond words,” it is caught in itself. The specter of radical Otherness is the mode of appearance of pure immanence, or, to put it in Hegelese, the truth of the relation to transcendent Otherness is self-relating.

Should we then read Kung Fu Panda as a somewhat naïve, but nonetheless basically accurate illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory? When Po opens the Dragon Scroll and sees nothing, only the empty surface, does he not thereby confirm Lacan’s thesis that the objet a is a lure, a stand-in for the void at the very heart of the symbolic order, that it has no positive ontological consistency? When Lacan proposes as the formula of fantasy $-a, does he not thereby indicate that the objet a is ultimately the fantasmatic object? The elementary feature of fantasy is the belief in the actual positive existence of the objet a, of the “special ingredient,” the quintessence, the sublime “fifth element” over and above the ordinary four (earth, fire, water, air); so when Po realizes that “there is no special ingredient. It’s only you. To make something special you just have to believe it’s special,” does he not thereby accomplish a kind of wild traversée du fantasme, breaking its spell?

There are indeed some surprisingly complex moments in Kung Fu Panda. When Po enters the forbidden hall in which the Dragon Scroll is kept, he sees a precious sacred painting and exclaims with awe: “I’ve only seen paintings of this painting”—an authentically Platonic moment, with its reference to the distinction between the copy and the copy of a copy. Furthermore, there is an interesting moment of psychological (and narrative) vacillation in the great confrontation between Shifu and Tai Lung: aware of his responsibility for Tai Lung’s failure to become a Master, Shifu apologizes to him, confessing how, due to his love for Tai Lung, he blinded himself to the dangerous path Tai Lung was taking and thus contributed to his downfall. At this moment, Tai Lung’s expression changes: taken aback, he looks at Shifu with a perplexed gaze mixed with sympathy, and we (the viewers) are led to believe that a moment of authentic existential contact has taken place, well beyond the simplistic confrontation of good and evil characters. However, the moment passes quickly and Tai Lung explodes in rage, once again ferociously attacking the paternal figure of Shifu. It is as if, at the level of the narrative logic, the offer Shifu makes to Tai Lung is: “Let us change the rules and move from this stupid cartoon confrontation to authentic drama!”, an offer which is rejected by his opponent.

So, again—is the film’s insight into the illusory nature of the object-cause of desire, into the primacy of the void over every object that occupies the place of the void, effectively proto-Lacanian? It is—but only if we misread Lacan’s notion of “traversing the fantasy” as a new version of traditional wisdom. That is to say, what is wisdom at its most elementary? In the film, it is embodied in the old tortoise Oogway, whose ultimate wisdom is that there is no objet a, no quintessence, every object of our desire is a lure, and we have to accept the vanity of all reality. But what about the obvious opposite of wisdom, the sarcastic denunciation and unmasking of all pretense to sublimity which abounds in the film? Kung Fu Panda continuously oscillates between these two extremes: serene wisdom and its cynical undermining by commonsense, with reference to common needs and fears. Such undermining becomes almost a running gag throughout the film—for example, when Shifu runs to Oogway to tell him he has some bad news, Oogway replies with the standard wisdom “There is no good or bad news, there is just news.” But when Shifu informs him that Tai Lung has escaped, Oogway says: “Well, this is bad news . . .” Or when, as mentioned, in the final scene of the film, Shifu and Po are laying on their backs meditating in silence, and Po, becoming agitated, says: “What about getting something to eat?”, to which Shifu agrees. But are these two levels (wisdom and everyday commonsense) really opposed? Are they not the two sides of one and the same attitude of wisdom? What unites them is their rejection of the objet a, of the sublime object of passionate attachment—in the universe of Kung Fu Panda, there are only everyday objects and needs, and the void beneath, all the rest is illusion. This, incidentally, is why the universe of the film is asexual: there is no sex or sexual attraction in the film; its economy is the pre-Oedipal oral-anal one (incidentally, the very name of the hero, Po, is a common term for “ass” in German). Po is fat, clumsy, common, and a kung fu hero, the new Master—the excluded third in this coincidence of opposites is sexuality.¹⁰

In what, then, does the ideology of the film reside? Let us return to the key formula: “There is no special ingredient. It’s only you. To make something special you just have to believe it is special.” This formula renders the fetishistic disavowal (split) at its purest—its message is: “I know very well there is no special ingredient, but I nonetheless believe in it (and act accordingly).” Cynical denunciation (at the level of rational knowledge) is counteracted by the call of “irrational” belief—and this is the most elementary formula of how ideology functions today. (Note how, by merely “believing in himself,” Po becomes the superior warrior after just a couple of training sessions, leaving behind his co-warriors who have been training for years—the magic of belief really works . . .)

This, however, is not the lesson of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is firmly entrenched in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, not only against Oriental spirituality but also against Islam, one of the religions of the Book, which, like Oriental spirituality, endorses the thesis of the ultimate vanity, the illusory nature, of every object of desire. In the Thousand and One Nights, on the 614th night, Judar, following the orders of a Moroccan magician, had to penetrate seven doors that would lead him to a treasure. When he came to the seventh door,

there issued forth to him his mother, saying, “I salute thee, O my son!” He asked, “What art thou?” and she answered, “O my son, I am thy mother who bore thee nine months and suckled thee and reared thee.” Quoth he, “Put off thy clothes.” Quoth she, “Thou art my son, how wouldst thou strip me naked?” But he said “Strip, or I will strike off thy head with this sword”; and he stretched out his hand to the brand and drew it upon her saying, “Except thou strip, I will slay thee.” Then the strife became long between them and as often as he redoubled on her his threats, she put off somewhat of her clothes and he said to her, “Doff the rest,” with many menaces; while she removed each article slowly and kept saying, “O my son, thou hast disappointed my fosterage of thee,” till she had nothing left but her petticoat trousers. Then said she, “O my son, is thy heart stone? Wilt thou dishonor me by discovering my shame? Indeed, this is unlawful, O my son!” And he answered, “Thou sayest sooth; put not off thy trousers.” At once, as he uttered these words, she cried out, “He hath made default; beat him!” Whereupon there fell upon him blows like raindrops and the servants of the treasure flocked to him and dealt him a funding which he forgot not in all his days.¹¹

On the 615th night, we learn that Judar was given another chance and tried again; when he came to the seventh door,

the semblance of his mother appeared before him, saying, “Welcome, O my son!” But he said to her, “How am I thy son, O accursed? Strip!” And she began to wheedle him and put off garment after garment, till only her trousers remained; and he said to her, “Strip, O accursed!” So she put off her trousers and became a body without a soul. Then he entered the hall of the treasures, where he saw gold lying in heaps . . .

Fethi Benslama points out how this passage indicates that Islam knows what our Western universe denies: the fact that incest is not forbidden, but is inherently impossible (when one finally gets to the naked mother, she disintegrates as a bad specter).¹² Benslama refers here to Jean-Joseph Goux’s Œdipe philosophe,¹³ where he demonstrates how the Oedipus myth, far from being universal, the underlying arche-myth, is an exception with regard to other myths, a Western myth, its basic feature being precisely that “behind the prohibition, the impossible withdraws itself”:¹⁴ the very prohibition is read as an indication that incest is possible. From the standard position of commonsensical wisdom, Oedipus is a Western aberration, a confusion of the ontic object with the ontological void; it is a blinding short circuit, the elevation of an ontic object into the ontological Absolute, where the goal should be to distance them, to see the vanity of all objects. Here, however, one should remain faithful to the Western “Oedipal” tradition: of course every object of desire is an illusory lure; of course the full jouissance of incest is not only prohibited, but is in itself impossible; however, it is here that one should fully assert Lacan’s claim that les non-dupes errent. Even if the object of desire is an illusory lure, there is a real in this illusion: the object of desire in its positive nature is vain, but not the place it occupies, the place of the Real, which is why there is more truth in unconditional fidelity to one’s desire than in a resigned insight into the vanity of one’s striving.

There is a parallax shift at work here: from illusion as mere illusion to the real in illusion, from the object which is a metonym/mask of the Void to the object which stands in for the void. This parallax shift is, in Lacanese, the shift from desire to drive. The key distinction to be maintained here can be exemplified with reference to the (apparent) opposite of religion: intense sexual experience. Eroticization relies on the inversion-into-itself of movement directed at an external goal: the movement itself becomes its own goal. (When, instead of simply gently shaking the hand offered to me by the beloved person, I hold onto it and squeeze repeatedly, my activity will be automatically experienced as—welcome or, perhaps, intrusively unwelcome—eroticization: what I do is change the goal-oriented activity into an end-in-itself.) Therein resides the difference between the goal and the aim of a drive: say, with regard to the oral drive, its goal may be to eliminate hunger, but its aim is the satisfaction provided by the activity of eating itself (sucking, swallowing). One can imagine the two satisfactions entirely separated: when, in hospital, I am fed intravenously, my hunger is satisfied, but not my oral drive; when, on the contrary, a small child sucks rhythmically on the comforter, the only satisfaction he gets is that of the drive. This gap that separates the aim from the goal “eternalizes” the drive, transforming the simple instinctual movement which finds peace and calm when it reaches its goal (a full stomach, say) into a process which gets caught in its own loop and insists on endlessly repeating itself.

The crucial feature to take note of here is that this inversion cannot be formulated in terms of a primordial lack and a series of metonymic objects trying (and ultimately failing) to fill the void. When the eroticized body of my partner starts to function as the object around which the drive circulates, this does not mean that his or her ordinary (“pathological,” in the Kantian sense of the term) flesh-and-blood body is “transubstantiated” into a contingent embodiment of the sublime impossible Thing, holding (filling out) its empty place. Let us take a direct and “vulgar” example: when a (heterosexual male) lover is fascinated by his partner’s vagina, “can never get enough of it,” is obsessed not only with penetrating it, but with exploring and caressing it in all possible ways, the point is not that, in a kind of deceptive short-circuit, he mistakes this bit of skin, hair and muscle for the Thing itself—his lover’s vagina is, in all its bodily materiality, “the thing itself,” not the spectral appearance of another dimension. What makes it an “infinitely” desirable object whose “mystery” cannot ever be fully penetrated is its non-identity with itself, that is, the way it is never directly “itself.” The gap which “eternalizes” the drive, turning it into the endlessly repetitive circular movement around the object, is not the gap that separates the void of the Thing from its contingent embodiments, but the gap that separates the very “pathological” object from itself, in the same way that Christ is not the contingent material (“pathological”) embodiment of the suprasensible God: his “divine” dimension is reduced to the aura of a pure Schein. It is this self-separation of the object that makes it sublime: wisdom cannot grasp sublimation proper.

Lacan’s les non-dupes errent should thus be read at two levels: against the cynic who dismisses symbolic fiction on account of the real of jouissance being the only thing that counts; and against the sage who dismisses the real of jouissance as itself transient and illusory. How, then, does psychoanalysis stand with regard to enjoyment? Its great task is to break the hold over us of the superego injunction to enjoy, that is, to help us include in the freedom to enjoy also the freedom not to enjoy, the freedom from enjoyment.

The opposition between the Pelagians and Augustine with regard to (sexual) lust is instructive here. For the Pelagians, lust was in itself a good thing which might be put to bad use, while, for Augustine, lust was a bad thing which might, in marriage, be put to good use.¹⁵ Did the Communist movement not face exactly the same dilemma in how to deal with “sexual liberation,” oscillating between the two extremes: on the one side, the Wilhelm-Reichian “Pelagians” who emphasized the liberating potential of free sexuality; on the other, the ascetic “Augustinians” who castigated “free sexuality” as the exemplary phenomenon of bourgeois decadence, destined to confound people and divert their energy away from revolutionary objectives? Although the Pelagian view may appear more sympathetic, “progressive” and “life-affirming,” there is more truth in the Augustinian position: lust (jouissance) is formally “evil,” an “unnamable” excess threatening the stable order; the correct solution is that jouissance is in itself neutral, and the ethical problem is how to put it to use. What makes Augustine more true is his linking of excessive sexuality (and sexuality is by definition excessive) to the Fall of man: sexuality is not natural, it is the result of the denaturalization of human beings through the “original sin.” This is why, in his On Free Will, Augustine writes:

To approve falsehood instead of truth so as to err in spite of himself, and not to be able to refrain from the works of lust because of the pain involved in breaking away from fleshly bonds: these do not belong to the nature of man as he was created before the fall. They are the penalty of man as now condemned by original sin.¹⁶

Augustine here comes close to Paul’s insight into the intimate link between lust (sin) and law: lust does not come “naturally,” it is an obscene perverted “duty,” a painful drive of which we cannot rid ourselves. The entanglement of lust (sin) and law resides not only in the fact that the prohibition of sexuality makes lust desirable; one should also add that the pain and guilt we feel when, against our will, we are dragged into sexual lust, are themselves sexualized. Not only do we feel pain and guilt at sexual enjoyment, we enjoy this very pain and guilt.

It is at this precise point that perversion enters. The fateful step towards masochistic perversion is accomplished when the claim that a clean body and clean clothes may nonetheless contain a dirty mind (and vice versa) is radicalized into the claim that a clean body and clean clothes as such are the proof of a dirty mind—or, as Paula, the ascetic Roman aristocrat, put it: “A clean body and clean clothes betoken an unclean mind.”¹⁷ A similar fateful step from heroism to perverse jouissance occurred on April 25, 1915, before the battle with the British-Australian forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk told his troops: “I don’t order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time it takes us to die, other troops and commanders can come and take our places.” This “passion to die” is the last great example of the Thermopylae-Alamo logic of consciously sacrificing oneself so that one’s forces are able to regroup for the decisive battle, the last great temptation to be resisted, the last mask in which a non-ethical attitude disguises itself as ethics itself.