Читать книгу Living in the End Times - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 18

Here, then, is our conclusion. Common sense tells us that the actual lives of people, of real individuals with their wealth of experience and practice, cannot be reduced to a “spontaneous” impersonation of ideology. But it is precisely this recourse to the non-ideological lifeworld that one should abandon. This is why Elfriede Jelinek’s advice to theater writers is not only aesthetically correct, but has a deep ethical justification:

Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer’s task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.¹⁸

In other words, we should resist the urge to fill in the void with the rich texture of what makes us a person.¹⁹ Two half-forgotten classic films stage such an emptying of the wealth of “personality” at its most radical, rendering a subject who survives as a shell deprived of substance. First, there is Lina Wertmüller’s Pasqualino Settebellezze (itself a true counterpoint to Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella. All one has to do to see what is wrong with Benigni’s film is to carry out a simple thought experiment: imagine the same film with one change—the father fails in his “noble lie,” and his son dies. Or another alternative: at the end, the father learns that his son knew all the time where he was, namely in a concentration camp, and that he was pretending to believe his father’s story in order to make life easier for his father.) Pasqualino Settebellezze is the ultimate film on survivalism. Its climax involves a unique sex scene which, apart from the one in Handke’s The Piano Teacher, is perhaps the most painful in the history of cinema. Its perverse twist cannot but recall the weirdest moments in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. In order to survive the concentration camp, the hero (played superbly by Giancarlo Giannini) decides to seduce the kapo, a cold, ugly, and fat German “bitch.” The horror of the act lies in making love to the maternal Thing and/or Lady in a scene of courtly love, to the absolutely capricious Mistress on whose whims one’s life depends: during the act, she remains cold, unsmiling, and expresses not a moan or groan of pleasure, just yawning once—a true “netrebko.”²⁰ After Pasqualino arouses himself through fantasizing, she sees through him, realizing that the seduction is merely an expression of this “Mediterranean worm’s” pure will to survive, and contrasts this survivalist attitude to the German ethic of risking life for honor. (The nice irony is that, in the figure of Pasqualino himself, the reality of this survivalism is opposed to the pathetic and operatic Neapolitan sense of honor, which belongs to the lineage of Italian opera from Rossini through to the films of Sergio Leone with their excess of life.) After the act, she nominates him kapo of his barrack, and immediately gives him the task of selecting six prisoners to be executed—should he fail, they will all be executed. Then, he has personally to shoot his best friend. Such is the price of his survival: he survives alone. In the film’s last scene, after the war, he returns home and proposes marriage to a young prostitute, just to have as many children as possible as a guarantee of survival. When his mother exclaims with joy: “But you are alive!”, he replies after a long silence: “Yes, I am alive!”—the last words of the film. Is he truly alive? Would not a true act of life have been, in the last scene in the camp, for him to shoot the kapo and other guards, before being shot himself? The standard idealist question “Is there (eternal) life after death?” should be countered by the materialist question: “Is there life before death?” This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs—what bothers a materialist is: am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life (Eric Santner). And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it [es]”—which the Christians name the Holy Spirit—acts through me: at this point, I reach the Absolute.

The other film is John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), a neglected companion-piece to his cult masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, shot in pure noir style. There is no space here to dwell on the film’s many outstanding features, beginning with one of Saul Bass’s best title sequences (on a par with his titles for Hitchcock’s great trilogy Vertigo, North-by-Northwest, and Psycho), composed of anamorphically distorted fragments of a face in a disfiguring mirror. Seconds tells the story of Arthur Hamilton, a middle-aged man whose life has lost its purpose: he is bored by his job as a banker, and the love between him and his wife has waned. Through an unexpected phone call from Evans, a friend whom he thought had died years earlier, Hamilton is approached by a secret organization, known simply as the “Company,” which offers wealthy people a second chance at life. After he signs the contract, the Company makes Hamilton appear as if he has died by faking an accident with a corpse disguised as him. Through extensive plastic surgery and psychoanalysis, Hamilton is transformed into Tony Wilson (played by Rock Hudson), with a fancy new Malibu home, a new identity as an established artist, new friends and a devoted manservant. (The details of his new existence suggest that there was indeed once a real Tony Wilson, but what became of him is a mystery.) He soon commences a relationship with Nora, a young woman whom he meets on the beach. They visit a nearby wine festival which develops into a full-scale drunken sexual orgy, and he reluctantly relaxes enough to participate in it. For a time he is happy, but soon he becomes troubled by the emotional confusion of his new identity, and by the exuberance of renewing his youth. At a dinner party he hosts for his neighbors, he drinks himself into a stupor and begins to babble about his former life as Hamilton.

It turns out that his neighbors are “reborns” like himself, sent to keep an eye on his adjustment to his new life. Nora is actually an agent of the Company, and her attention to Wilson is designed merely to ensure his cooperation. Escaping his Malibu home, Wilson visits his former wife in his new persona, and learns that his marriage failed because he was distracted by the pursuit of his career and material possessions, the very things in life that others made him believe were important. Depressed, he returns to the Company and asks them to provide him with yet another identity; the Company agrees on condition that he directs to them some rich past acquaintances who might like to be “reborn.” While awaiting his reassignment, Wilson encounters Evans, who was also “reborn” but could not accept his new identity. At the film’s ominous end, doctors drag Wilson to an operating room, where, strapped to the table, he learns the truth: those who, like him, fail to adjust to their new identity, are not, as promised, provided with a new one, but become cadavers used to fake new clients’ deaths.

All the philosophico-ideological topics we have been dealing with reverberate in Seconds: the reduction of the subject to a tabula rasa, the emptying of all its substantial content, and its rebirth, its recreation from a zero-point. The motif of rebirth is here given a clear critico-ideological twist: transforming himself into Wilson, Hamilton realizes what he always dreamt of; but things go terribly wrong when he becomes aware that those transgressive dreams were part of the same oppressive reality from which he had tried to escape. In other words, Hamilton-Evans pays the bitter price for the fact that his negation of the past was not radical enough: his revolution failed to revolutionize its own presuppositions. Hegel had a presentiment of this necessity when he wrote: “It is a modern folly to alter a corrupt ethical system, its constitution and legislation, without changing the religion, to have a revolution without a reformation.”²¹ In a radical revolution, people not only “realize their old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams”; they have also to reinvent their very modes of dreaming. Is this not the exact formula of the link between the death drive and sublimation? Therein resides the necessity of the Cultural Revolution, as clearly grasped by Mao: as Herbert Marcuse put, it in another wonderfully circular formula from the same epoch, freedom (from ideological constraints, from the predominant mode of dreaming) is the condition of liberation, in other words, if we change reality only in order to realize our dreams, without changing these dreams themselves, then sooner or later we will regress to the former reality. There is a Hegelian “positing of presuppositions” at work here: the hard work of liberation retroactively forms its own presupposition.

In Seconds, Wilson pays the price for his “revolution without reformation”: when he rejects his old life as a banker trapped in a loveless marriage, he thinks he has escaped an oppressive social reality in which others (or, rather, the ideological “big Other”) define his dreams, telling him what he desires. What he discovers after his rebirth is that this very fantasmatic core of his being—his innermost dream of an authentic life which he felt was being claustrophobically oppressed—was no less determined by the existing order. Nowhere is this trap of “inherent transgression” more obvious than in the bacchic orgy scene with its wink to the hippy lifestyle (recall that the film is from 1966), a scene which was censored on the film’s first release, when full frontal nudity was not yet permitted. The scene drags on painfully, its depressive inertia clearly refuting the notion of a liberating explosion of spontaneous joie de vivre.

The film’s conclusion, in which Wilson is sacrificed as a stand-in body so that another subject can be reborn, restates the Hegelian-Christian lesson: the price of my rebirth is another’s annihilated body, like Christ’s.

1 We all know of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game,” designed to test whether a machine can think: we communicate with two computer interfaces, asking them any imaginable question; behind one of the interfaces, there is a human person typing the answers, while behind the other, there is a machine. If, based on the answers we get, we cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, then, according to Turing, our failure proves that machines can think. What is less known is that, in its first formulation, the test was not to distinguish the human from the machine, but man from woman. Why this strange displacement from sexual difference to the difference between human and machine? Was it a result of Turing’s simple eccentricity due to his homosexuality? According to some interpreters, the point is to oppose the two experiments: the successful imitation of a woman’s responses by a man (or vice versa) would not prove anything, because gender identity does not depend on sequences of symbols, while the successful imitation of a human by a machine would prove that this machine can think, because “thinking” is ultimately the proper way of sequencing symbols. What if, however, the solution to this enigma is much more simple and radical? What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that once sexual difference is abolished, a human being effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine?

2 In the same way, apropos the ongoing healthcare debate in the US, one should distinguish between the “constituted” level of empirical falsifications (like the absurd charge that Obama’s health-care reform will lead to the establishment of “death committees”), and the “constitutive” level of the threat to freedom of choice which informs the entire field of the attacks on Obama. Not to mention the Benjaminian distinction between constituted violence (empirical acts of violence within society) and constitutive violence (the violence inscribed into the very institutional frame of a society).

3 Silvia Aloisi, “Israeli film relives Lebanon war from inside tank,” Reuters, September 8, 2009.

4 I rely here on Andrej Nikolaidis’s outstanding “Odresujoca laz,” Ljubljanski dnevnik, August 28, 2008 (in Slovene). Nikolaidis, a younger generation Montenegrin writer, was sued by Emir Kusturica and scandalously condemned for writing a text in which he denounced Kusturica’s complicity with aggressive Serb nationalism.

5 Let us recall a similar story about Lacan: those who got to know him personally, to observe how he behaved in private, when he was not maintaining his public image, were surprised to learn that he conducted himself in exactly the same way as in public, with all his ridiculously affected mannerisms.

6 I owe this idea to Bernard Keenan.

7 There is, effectively, an early Soviet film (Vladimir Gardin’s A Spectre Haunts Europe, from 1922) which directly stages the October Revolution in the terms of Poe’s story.

8 In order to encourage peace and tolerance between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, the UN forces controlling its independence distributed posters with a photo of a dog and a cat sitting side by side in a friendly manner, accompanied by the message: “If they can live peacefully together, you can too!” If ever there was an example of multicultural racism, this is it: as we all know, in reality, dogs and cats do not tolerate each other, with the exception of circuses and other places where they are trained to do so—hence Albanians and Serbs are implicitly being treated as two different wild (animal) species who have to be properly trained to tolerate each other’s proximity.

9 To add insult to injury, two further details spoil the film’s last moments. When a member of Wade’s gang shoots Evans to death and then throws Wade his gun, Wade takes a quick glance at the gun’s handle, notices a metal relief of Christ on the cross and then changes sides, coldly and quickly killing his entire gang, as if divine intervention pushed him to betray his rescuers. Then, in the very last seconds, when the train is leaving for Yuma with Wade on board, he whistles to his horse outside the train on the station, which then starts to run after the train—a clear hint that Wade has already planned his escape, and everything will end well for him.

10 Perhaps one should link this asexual character of the Panda to the gradual abandonment of the “production of the couple” in mainstream Hollywood (Quantum of Solace as the first James Bond film in which there is no sexual act between Bond and the Bond-girl; the absence of sex in the last two Dan Brown novels [Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol] as well as in the film version of Angels and Demons).

11 Sir Richard Francis Burton, The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, New York: Random House 2001, p. 441.

12 See Fethi Benslama, La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam, Paris: Aubier 2002.

13 See Jean-Joseph Goux, Œdipe philosophe, Paris: Aubier 1990.

14 Benslama, La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’Islam, p. 259.

15 See Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, New York: Vintage Books 2005, p. 395.

16 Quoted in ibid., p. 401.

17 Quoted in ibid., p. 233.

18 Nicholas Spice, “Up from the Cellar. London Review of Books, June 5, 2008.

19 When we are pressed to do it, the only way out may be to undermine what we are forced to do with recourse to ridiculous obscenity; as with Patricia Highsmith who, when she was invited to visit an elementary school in Switzerland to give the pupils an edifying talk on how they could make a difference by helping adults, wrote down a list of ten things the children could do at home, like mixing the pills from different bottles (putting laxative pills into the tranquilizer bottles, etc.)

20 To anyone versed in Slavic languages, the irony of the family name of the voluptuously beautiful Russian soprano Anna Netrebko is fully evident: “treb” is the root of the verb “to need,” and “ne” is, of course, negation, so the message is clear: she, the erotic symbol, “doesn’t need it,” has no need of sex—and this is what makes her a Mistress who can mercilessly manipulate men.

21 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopaedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Hamburg 1959, p. 436.