Cogit o a n d t h e Se x u a l D iffe r e n ce

2 Cogit o a n d t h e Se x u a l D iffe r e n ce

1. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

2. On radical Evil see Chapter 3 of the present book. This notion of the Sublime provides

a new approach to Lacan's "Kant avec Sade," i.e., his thesis on Sade as the truth of Kant. Let us begin with an everyday question: what accounts for the (alleged) charm of sexual manuals? That is to say, it is clear that we do not really browse them to learn things; what attracts us is that the activity which epitomizes the transgression of every rule (when we are engaged in "it," we are not supposed to think, but just to yield to passions...) assumes the form of its opposite and becomes an object of school-like drill. (A common piece of advice actually concerns achieving sexual excitement by imitating -- during the foreplay, at least -- the procedure of cold, asexual instrumental activity: I discuss with my partner in detail the steps of what we will do, we ponder the pros and cons of different possibilities -- shall we begin with cunnilingus or not? -- assessing every point as if we are dealing with an elaborate technical operation. Sometimes, this "turns us on.") What we encounter here is a kind of paradoxically inverted sublime: in the Kantian Sublime, the boundless chaos of sensible experience (raging storm, breathtaking abysses) renders forth the presentiment of the pure Idea of Reason whose Measure is so large that no object of experience, not even nature in the wildest and mightiest display of its forces, can come close to it (i.e., here, the Measure, the ideal order, is on the side of the unattainable Idea, and the formless chaos on the side of sensible experience); whereas in the case of "bureaucratized sexuality," the relationship is reversed: sexual arousal, as the exemplary case of the state which eludes instrumental regimentation, is evoked by way of its opposite, by way of being treated as bureaucratic duty. Perhaps, it is (also) in this sense that Sade is the truth of Kant: the sadist who enjoys performing sex as an instrumentalized bureaucratic duty reverses and thereby brings to its truth the Kantian Sublime in which we become aware of the suprasensible Measure through the chaotic, boundless character of our experience.

3. In this precise sense, the Kantian distinction between the constitutive and the regulative dimension corresponds to the Lacanian distinction between knowledge and supposed knowledge: the teleological regulative idea has the status of "knowledge in the real," of the inherent rational order in nature which, although theoretically unprovable, has to be presupposed if our positive knowledge (structured through constitutive categories) is to be possible.

4. The choice of Raymond Massey for the role of the superego-driven governor is deeply significant if we bear in mind his screen persona: he also played John Brown, whose name epitomizes (in the eyes of the predominant ideology) the obsession with justice which, on account of its overzealous character, turns into ravaging Evil.

5. If we are not to miss this paradox of the Christian Sublime, it is of crucial importance that we bear in mind the structure of the Möbius strip that pertains to judgment in Hegelian theory. The judgment of reflection, for example -- "Socrates is mortal" -- renders the identity of the two moments: the (logical) subject, a certain nonconceptual "this" pointed out, designated, by a name (standing for the immediate, indeterminate, unitywith-itself of an entity), and the predicate which is this same unity in its mode of alienation, i.e., separated, torn from itself, opposed to itself in the guise of a universal "reflective determination" under which the immediate "this" is subsumed ("reflective determination" of an entity is its very essence, the innermost kernel of its identity, yet conceived in the guise of its opposite, of a totally indifferent and external universal determination). Consequently, we do not have two elements united, tied up, in the common space of the judgment, but one and the same element which appears first in the mode of immediate-nonreflected unity-with-itself ("this," the logical subject), then in the mode of its opposite, of self-externalization, i.e., as an abstract reflective determination. Perhaps even more appropriate than this metaphor of the two surfaces of the Möbius strip is the science fiction paradox of the time-travel loop where the subject encounters a different version of itself, i.e., runs into its own later incarnation. Therein consists Hegel's point: subject and predicate are identical, the same thing, their difference is purely topological.

6. The same paradox is repeated at the very end of the chapter on Spirit, where we pass from the objective Spirit to the sphere of the Absolute (religion, philosophy) via the 6. The same paradox is repeated at the very end of the chapter on Spirit, where we pass from the objective Spirit to the sphere of the Absolute (religion, philosophy) via the

7. In the history of modern cinema, the progressive modes of how to present "pathological" libidinal economies (hysteria, etc.) perfectly follows the matrix of this "downwardsynthesis." Up to a certain point, formal procedures -- extravagant as they may appear -remain "anchored in the diegetic reality, i.e., they express the "pathology" of a diegetic personality. In the films of Alain Resnais, for example, the formal convolutions (timeloops, etc.) render the paradoxes of the memory of a diegetic personality; in John Cassavetes' work, the diegetic content -- the hysteria of everyday American married life -- contaminates the cinematic form itself (the camera gets "too close" to the faces, rendering in detail the repulsive facial convulsions; shots from a hand-carried camera confer upon the very cinematic frame the precipitous trembling that characterizes hysterical economy; etc.). At a certain point, however, the diegetic underpinning "explodes" and the film sets out to render directly the hysterical economy, bypassing altogether the diegetic content. It is thus impossible to distinguish three phases:

-- "realism": the form is not yet contaminated by the hysterical, etc. content; no matter how pathological the diegetic content, it is rendered from a neutral distance of an "objective" narrative.

-- its first negation: the hysterical content "contaminates" form itself. In many a modernist film, the form seems to narrate its own story, which undermines the film's "official" diegetic content; this antagonism between diegeric content and form, the surplus of the latter over the former, is what the standard use of the term "writing" designates. Suffice it to recall the famous Cahiers du cinema analysis of John Ford The Young Lincoln in which the form registers the ominous, superego, monstrous-inhuman side of the main character, and thus runs counter to the patriotic elevation of Lincoln, the "official" theme of the film.

-- the "negation of the negation": the modernist "abstract cinema" which renders its "pathological" content directly, renouncing the detour through a consistent diegeric reality.

8. See section 3 of Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime ( Berkeley: University of California, 1991). What is of special interest here are the perverse paradoxes Kant gets involved in when he endeavors to articulate the interaction of a beautiful woman and a sublime man: man's ultimate message to a woman is "even if you do not love me, I shall force you to respect me by the sheer force of my sublime grandeur," whereas woman's counter-claim is "even if you do not respect me, I shall force you to love me for my beauty." These paradoxes are perverse insofar as their underlying premise is that, in order to discover the sublime grandeur of man's moral stance, woman must cease to love him, and vice versa, man must disdain woman for her lack of proper moral attitude if he is to experience the true character of his love for her. Along these lines, Kant even provides his own formulation of the impossibility of sexual relationship: in sexuality, man's object is either the nonspecified universality of "any woman" (if he is driven by raw bodily passion) or the fantasy-image to which no actual woman can ever correspond in reality (the romantic notion of sublime infatuation). In both cases, the real object -- the actual woman in her uniqueness -- is annihilated.

9. I am indebted to Joan Copjec for the crucial notion of the structural homology between Lacan's "formulae of sexuation" and the Kantian opposition of mathematical and dynamical sublime. This book in its entirety is a token of my theoretical debt to her. Cf. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

10. Lacan's F of course means the function of (symbolic) castration: "man is submitted to castration" implies the exception of "at least one," the primordial father of the Freudian myth in Totem and Taboo, a mythical being who has had all the women and was capable of achieving complete satisfaction. For an explication of these "formulae of, sexuation," see Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, book 20: Encore ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975); the two key chapters are translated in Jacques Lacan and the Ecole freudienne, Feminine Sexuality ( London: Macmillan, 1982). For a compressed 10. Lacan's F of course means the function of (symbolic) castration: "man is submitted to castration" implies the exception of "at least one," the primordial father of the Freudian myth in Totem and Taboo, a mythical being who has had all the women and was capable of achieving complete satisfaction. For an explication of these "formulae of, sexuation," see Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, book 20: Encore ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975); the two key chapters are translated in Jacques Lacan and the Ecole freudienne, Feminine Sexuality ( London: Macmillan, 1982). For a compressed

11. It is the recent revival of the "human rights" problematic which offers an opportunity to demonstrate how Lacan's opposition of masculine and feminine formulas can be of "practical use." The "masculine" approach to human rights is based on universalization: "every human being must enjoy the rights to...(freedom, property, health, etc., etc.)," with an exception always lurking in the background. It is easy, for example, simply to proclaim that every x has to enjoy these rights insofar as she or

he fully deserves the title of "human being" (i.e., of our idealized-ideological notion of it), a move which allows us to exclude covertly those who do not fit our criteria (insane, criminals, children, women, other races...). The "feminine" approach, on the other hand, seems much more appropriate to our "postmodern" attitude: "there must

be nobody who is denied his or her specific rights" -- a move which guarantees that specific rights, the only ones which really matter, will not be excluded under the guise of an apparently neutral, all-embracing universality. See Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom ( London: Routledge, 1993).

12. Or, to put it in the Lacanian way, man and woman "are split differently and this difference in splitting accounts for sexual difference" ( Bruce Fink, "There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship," Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 5, nos. 1 -- 2 [ 1992 ]:78).

13. There seem to be grounds for an opposite reading which would link dynamic antinomies to the feminine side of the formulae of sexuation and mathematical antinomies to the masculine side: as pointed out by Jacques-Alain Miller, feminine antinomies are antinomies of inconsistency, whereas masculine antinomies are antinomies of incompleteness -- and are dynamic antinomies not about the inconsistency between universal causal links and the fact of freedom? On the other hand, do mathematical antinomies not hinge on the finitude, i.e., incompleteness, of our phenomenal experience? (See Jacques-Alain Miller , Extimité [unpublished seminar], Paris, 1985-86.) However, the "not-all," incomplete character of the phenomenal field in Kant does not imply that something lies beyond or outside this field; instead, it implies the field's inherent inconsistency: phenomena are never "all," yet for all that there is no exception, nothing outside them. It is only the dynamic antinomy which deals with the opposition of phenomena and their noumenal Beyond.

14. It is on the contrary man for whom it can be said that "a part of him eludes the phallic function" -- the exception constitutive of the Universal. The paradox is therefore that man is dominated by the phallic function insofar as there is something in him which evades it, whereas woman eludes its grasp precisely insofar as there is nothing in her which is not submitted to it. The solution to this paradox is that the "phallic function" is, in its fundamental dimension, the operator of exclusion.

15. For a more detailed account of it, see Chapter 3 of the present book.

16. See chapter 16 of Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis ( New York: Norton, 1977).

17. See The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959- 1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 7,

ed. Jacques-Alain Miller ( London: Routledge / Tavistock, 1992).

18. See Jacques Lacan, "Kant avec Sade," in Ecrits ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966).

19. This ethics of desire, for example, would compel us to reject Lars von Trier Europa ( Zentropa), a film which seems to realize fully Hans-Jürgen Syberberg anti-Semitic program of aesthetics as the only medium for the reconciliation of Germany with its Nazi past. (In his recent work, Syberberg claims that those truly responsible for the German inability to "work through" their Nazi past are Jews themselves with their antiaesthetic prohibition -- Adomo's "no poetry after Auschwitz.") The aesthericist myth of Europe offered by the film is that of a continent caught in the vicious circle of selfindulging decadent jouissance: it is this very over-proximity of jouissance which suspends the efficiency of the performative, of the social link of symbolic authority. (Injunctions are inoperative: when the young American working on a German train undergoes examination for the post of the sleeping-car steward, the committee, instead of provoking anxiety, acts ridiculously with its meaningless questions and out- of-place punctuality.) The ultimate lesson of the film is that even the innocent American gaze cannot escape the decadent whirlpool of the European jouissance which finally draws him into itself. Although the film takes place in the autumn of 1945, immediately after the German defeat, the ruined Germany is clearly presented as a timeless metaphor for "Europe" as a continent caught in the circle of its decadent jouissance. The entire film is staged as a kind of hypnotic trauma masterminded by an 19. This ethics of desire, for example, would compel us to reject Lars von Trier Europa ( Zentropa), a film which seems to realize fully Hans-Jürgen Syberberg anti-Semitic program of aesthetics as the only medium for the reconciliation of Germany with its Nazi past. (In his recent work, Syberberg claims that those truly responsible for the German inability to "work through" their Nazi past are Jews themselves with their antiaesthetic prohibition -- Adomo's "no poetry after Auschwitz.") The aesthericist myth of Europe offered by the film is that of a continent caught in the vicious circle of selfindulging decadent jouissance: it is this very over-proximity of jouissance which suspends the efficiency of the performative, of the social link of symbolic authority. (Injunctions are inoperative: when the young American working on a German train undergoes examination for the post of the sleeping-car steward, the committee, instead of provoking anxiety, acts ridiculously with its meaningless questions and out- of-place punctuality.) The ultimate lesson of the film is that even the innocent American gaze cannot escape the decadent whirlpool of the European jouissance which finally draws him into itself. Although the film takes place in the autumn of 1945, immediately after the German defeat, the ruined Germany is clearly presented as a timeless metaphor for "Europe" as a continent caught in the circle of its decadent jouissance. The entire film is staged as a kind of hypnotic trauma masterminded by an

20. I.e., symptom. As to this notion of "sinthome," see Chapter 5 of the present book.

21. See subdivision 3 Introduction in Marx Grundrisse, selected and edited by David McLellan ( London: Macmillan, 1980).

22. See Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness," in "Writing and Difference" ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

23. Among the numerous variations on this motif of "death and the maiden," suffice it to mention the death-accident of Karen Silkwood in Mike Nichols Silkwood: Meryl Streep behind the wheel of a car on a night drive, occupying the right side of the screen, her gaze intensely fixed on the car mirror above her head through which she observes the light of a giant truck approaching her car from behind, and, on the left side of the screen, seen through the rear window of the car, the light of the truck gradually spreading into a formless dazzling spot overflowing the entire screen.

24. For a more detailed description of it, see Miran Božovič, The Man behind His Own Retina, in Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) ( London: Verso, 1992).

25. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 5( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 248.

26. The Kantian split between the pure form of "I think" and the unknowable "Thing which thinks" is therefore not yet the Freudian Unconscious: the Unconscious stricto sensu takes place only with the choice of being; it designates the "it thinks" which emerges the moment I "am," the moment the subject chooses being. In other words, Lacan's two versions of cogito enable us to distinguish clearly between the Unconscious and the Id (Es): the Unconscious is the "it thinks" in "I am, therefore it thinks," whereas the Id is the "it is" in "I think, therefore it is."

27. It is against this background that computer phobia can be properly situated: the fear of a "machine which thinks" bears witness to the foreboding that thought as such is external to the self-identity of my being.

28. Is not the exemplary case of such an object qua self-consciousness the Hitchcockian object? Is its traumatic impact not due to the fact that it gives body to an unbearable gaze which catches sight of the unbearable truth about the subject? Let us recall the victim's pair of glasses in the first murder in Strangers on a Train: while Bruno is strangling Miriam, Guy's promiscuous wife, we see the distorted reflection of the crime in her glasses, which fell to the ground when Bruno first attacked her. The glasses are the "third party," the witness to the murder, the object which gives body to a gaze. (Six years later, in The Wrong Man, the same role is assumed by the big table lamp, the witness of Rose's outburst against Manny See Renata Salecl, "The Right Man and the Wrong Woman," in ėDižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan ( But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). For that reason, it is essential to read this scene together with the later unique scene of Bruno strangling an old society lady at a party. Bruno first engages in what is a simple, if somewhat tasteless, social game: he demonstrates to an elderly lady (who willingly offers her bare neck) how it is possible to strangle somebody so that the victim is unable to utter the slightest sound. However, things get out of control when the dual relationship is supplemented by a "third party," i.e., when Bruno perceives behind the lady he mockingly is strangling a girl with glasses (the sister of Ann, Guy's love). At this point the game suddenly takes

a serious turn: as indicated by the musical score, the girl's glasses recall to Bruno's mind the scene of the first murder, and this short-circuit pushes Bruno to begin to strangle the old lady for real. This girl (played by Hitchcock's daughter Patricia) is made into "the woman who knows too much" purely on account of her glasses. What triggers the murderous drive in Bruno is the unbearable pressure exerted on him by the glasses; they are the object which "returns the gaze," i.e., because of the glasses, Bruno sees in the poor girl's surprised gaze "his ruin writ large."

29. See Mladen Dolar, "The Father Who Was Not Quite Dead," in Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan ( But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock).

30. Patricia Highsmith masterpiece The Cry of the owl stages perfectly the delicate balance that defines the perverse position. A woman living alone in a country house suddenly becomes aware that she is observed by a shy voyeur hidden in the bushes behind the house; taking pity on him, she invites him into the house, offers him her friendship and finally falls in love with him -- thereby inadvertently trespassing the invisible barrier that sustained his desire and thus provoking his repulsion. Therein 30. Patricia Highsmith masterpiece The Cry of the owl stages perfectly the delicate balance that defines the perverse position. A woman living alone in a country house suddenly becomes aware that she is observed by a shy voyeur hidden in the bushes behind the house; taking pity on him, she invites him into the house, offers him her friendship and finally falls in love with him -- thereby inadvertently trespassing the invisible barrier that sustained his desire and thus provoking his repulsion. Therein

31. The difference between neurotic and perverse symptom hinges upon this same point (see Colette Soler, "The Real Aims of the Analytic Act," Lacanian Ink 5 [ 1992 ]: 53- 6o). A neurotic has nothing but troubles with her symptom; it inconveniences her; she experiences it as an unwelcome burden, as something which perturbs her balance -- in short, she suffers on account of her symptom (and therefore turns for help to the analyst), whereas a pervert unabashedly enjoys his symptom. Even if he is later ashamed of it or disturbed by it, the symptom as such is a source of profound satisfaction; it provides a firm anchoring point to his psychic economy and for that very reason he has no need for an analyst, i.e., there is no experience of suffering which sustains the demand for an analysis.

32. See chapter 14 of Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, book 8: Le transfert ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991).

33. An example can be provided by the author of these lines who is unable to indulge alone in a rich meal in an expensive restaurant. The very idea of it gives rise to the feeling of an obscene, incestuous short-circuit; the only way to do it is in company, where having a good meal becomes part of a community ritual, i.e., where enjoying good food coincides with displaying to others that I enjoy it. An obsessional neurotic's ethic can be further exemplified by a patient who, apropos of every woman he tried to seduce, went to excessive pains to please her (and thus again and again succeeded in organizing his failure). When he endeavored to seduce a woman who loved deep sea diving, he immediately enrolled in a diving course (although he was personally repulsed by the very idea of it); even after this woman left him for good and he was devoting his amorous attention to a new woman who was totally indifferent toward diving, he nonetheless out of a sense of duty continued to participate in the diving course!

34. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and ideological State Apparatuses," in "Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays" ( London: Verso, 1991).

35. An exemplary case of how somebody can "look alike" is to be found in Lubitch's To be or not to be: a Polish actor, as part of an intricate plot to deceive the Nazis, impersonates a notorious Gestapo butcher; he wildly articulates and laughs, so that we, the spectators, automatically perceive his acting as a caricatural exaggeration; however, when, finally, the "original" himself -- the true Gestapo butcher -- enters the stage, he behaves in exactly the same way, acting as it were as his own caricature -- in short, he "looks alike [himself]."

36. See Jacques Lacan, "Logical time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty," in Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 2, no. 2( 1988).

37. And, perhaps, the (future) master is simply the one who takes a chance and is the first make the move, i.e., to say "I am white": he becomes a new master if his bluff pays off.

38. At a different level, Rosa Luxembourg discerned a homologous anticipatory move in the matrix of a revolutionary process: if we wait for the "right moment" of a revolution, it will never occur; the "right moment" emerges only after a series of failed "premature" attempts, i.e., we attain our identity as a revolutionary subject only by way of "overtaking" ourselves and claiming this identity "before its time has arrived." For a more detailed reading of this paradox, see chapter 5 of Slavoj U=017Dižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology ( London: Verso, 1991).

39. See Lacan crucial remarks in his Séminaire, book 20: Encore ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), pp. 47-48. In this sense, hysteria designates the failure of interpellation: the hysterical question is "Why am I what you are saying that I am?", i.e., I question the symbolic identity imposed on me by the master; I resist it in the name of what is "in me more than myself," the object small a. Therein consists the anti-Althusserian gist of Lacan: subject qua $ is not an effect of interpellation, of the recognition in an 39. See Lacan crucial remarks in his Séminaire, book 20: Encore ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), pp. 47-48. In this sense, hysteria designates the failure of interpellation: the hysterical question is "Why am I what you are saying that I am?", i.e., I question the symbolic identity imposed on me by the master; I resist it in the name of what is "in me more than myself," the object small a. Therein consists the anti-Althusserian gist of Lacan: subject qua $ is not an effect of interpellation, of the recognition in an

40. See Paul Grice, "Meaning," in Studies in the Way of Words ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 377-88.

41. In our everyday experience, this gap separating different levels of intention is at work in what we call "politeness": when, upon engaging in a conversation, we say "How are you today?", we of course "do not mean it seriously"; we just offer an empty conversational form which calls for a ritualistic "OK" (the best proof of this emptiness of form is the uneasiness that emerges if our partner takes the question "seriously" and proceeds to offer an elaborate answer). It is nonetheless totally out of place to denounce this question as an insincere feigning of our concern: although its literal, first level of intention is not "meant seriously," i.e., although I am not really interested in how are you today, the question bears witness to my absolutely "sincere" intention to establish a normal, friendly communication with you.

42. In Hitchcock's films, such an element is the notorious "MacGuffin," the secret which sets in motion the narrative, although it is in itself "nothing at all": its meaning is purely self-referential; it amounts to the fact that the subjects involved in the narrative ascribe a meaning to it.

43. Phil Patton, "Marketers Battle for the Right to Profit from Malcolm's 'X,'" New York Times, Monday, November 8, 1992, B1 and 4.

44. Lacan's notion of Oedipus is to be opposed here to the "anti-Oedipal" notion of Oedipus qua the "repressive" force which canalizes, domestifies, the polymorphous perversion of partial drives, straining them to the Procrustian triangle of Father- Mother-Child. With Lacan, "Oedipus" (i.e., the imposition of the Name-of-the-Father) stands for a purely negative logical operator of "deterritorialization" (see his pun in French on the homophony between Nom-du-Père and Non-du-Père): "Name-of-the- Father" is a function which brands every object of desire with the sign of a lack, i.e., which changes every attainable object into the metonymy of lack; apropos of every positive object, we experience how "That's not it!" (And "Mother" qua incestuous object is nothing but the reverse of this same operation: the name for that x missed by every given object.) What can be of help here is the reference to the Wittgensteinian motto "the meaning of a word equals its use": "father" qua paternal metaphor is used only and simply to introduce this gap which lurks in the background of every object of desire. We should therefore not be fascinated by the imposing presence of the father: the positive figure of the father merely gives body to this symbolic function, without ever fully meeting its requirements.

45. As to this virtual character of capitalist economy, see Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing ( London: Macmillan, 1987).