Happiness and Torture in the Atonal World - Slavoj Žižek

Human, all too human 

In contrast to the simplistic opposition of good guys and bad guys, spy-thrillers with artistic pretensions display all the "realistic psychological complexity" of the characters from "our" side. Far from signaling a balanced view, however, this "honest" acknowledgment of our own "dark side" stands for its very opposite, for the hidden assertion of our supremacy: we are "psychologically complex," full of doubts, while the opponents are one-dimensional fanatical killing machines. Therein resides the lie of Spielberg's /Munich: it wants to be "objective," presenting moral complexity and ambiguity, psychological doubts, the problematic nature of revenge, of the Israeli perspective, but, what its "realism" does is redeem the Mossad agents still further: "look, they are not just cold killers, but human beings with their doubts—they have doubts, whereas the Palestinian terrorists . . ." One cannot but sympathize with the hostility with which the surviving Mossad agents who really carried out the revenge killings reacted to the film ("there were no psychological doubts, we just did what we had to do") for there is much more honesty in their stance.


The first lesson thus seems to be that the proper way to fight the demonization of the Other is to subjectivize her, to listen to her story, to understand how she perceives the situation — or, as a partisan of (he Middle East dialogue put it: "An enemy is someone whose story you have uot heard." Practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, Iceland's authorities recently imposed a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the Other. In order to fight growing xenophobia (the result of increasing numbers of immigrant workers), as well as sexual •intolerance, they organized what they called "living libraries": members °f ethnic and sexual minorities (gays, immigrant East Europeans or blacks) are paid to visit an Icelandic family and just talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams, and so on — in this w-ay, the exotic stranger who is perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with a complex world of her own . . ,

There is, however, a clear limit to this procedure. Can we imagine inviting a Nazi thug to tell us his story? Arc we ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy because his story hadn't been heard? A Serb journalist recently reported a strange piece of news from the politician who, after long painful talks, convinced Slobodan Milosevic in his villa to surrender to the police and let himself be arrested, Milosevic said yes and then asked to be allowed to go to the first floor of the villa to attend to some business. The negotiator, afraid that Milosevic was going to commit suicide, expressed his doubts, but Milosevic calmed him down, saying that he had given his word to his wife, Mira Markovic, that he would wash his hair before leaving. Does this personal-life detail "redeem" the horrors that resulted from Milosevic's reign, does it make him "more human"? One can well imagine Hitler washing Eva Braun's hair — and one does not have to imagine, since we already know that Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, liked to play Beethoven's late string quartets with friends in the evenings. Recall the couple of "personal" lines that usually conclude the presentation of a writer on the back cover of a book: "In his free time, X likes to play with his cat and grow tulips . . ."—such a supplement which "humanizes" the author is ideology at its purest, the sign that he is "also human like us." (I was tempted to suggest for the cover of one my books: "In his free time, Zizek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and to teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders . . .")

Our most elementary experience of subjectivity is that of the "richness of my inner life": this is what J "really am," in contrast to the symbolic determinations and mandates I assume in public life (father, professor, philosopher). The first lesson of psychoanalysis here is that this "richness ol our inner life" is fundamentally a fake: a screen, a false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance, to render palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic identity. One of the ways to practice the critique of ideology is therefore to invent strategics to unmask this hypocrisy of "inner life" and its "sincere" emotions, in the manner systematically enacted by Lars von Trier in his films:

My very first film, The Orchid Gardener, opened with a caption slating that the Film was dedicated to a girl who had died of leukaemia, giving the dates of her birth and death. That was entirely fabricated! And manipulative and cynical, because 1 realized that if you started a film like that, then the audience would take it a lot more seriously.

There is much more than manipulation at work here: in his feminine trilogy {Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, DogviiU), von Trier provokes us in our innermost being, stirring up automatic sympathy with the ultimate archetypal image of the victimized woman who, with her heart of gold, suffers pain. Through his "manipulation," he displays the lie of this sympathy, the obscene pleasure we gain from seeing the victim suffer, and thereby disturbs our self-satisfaction. Does this mean, however, that my "truth" is simply in my symbolic identity obfuscated by my imaginary "inner life" (as a simplistic reading of I^acan seems to indicate, opposing the subject of the significr to the imaginary ego)?

Let us take a man who, deep down, cultivates sadistic fantasies while in public life he is polite, follows rules, and so forth; when he goes online to express those fantasies in a chat room, say, he is showing his truth in the guise of a fiction. But is il not the case, on the contrary, that the polite persona is the truth here and the sadistic fantasies serve as a kind of defense? As in a new version of the old Jewish joke: "You are polite, so why do you act as ilyou were polite?" Is not, then, the internet, where we supposedly express on screen our deepest truths, really a site for the playing out of defensive fantasies that protect us from the banal normality* that is our truth?'1

Two cases are to be distinguished here. When 1 am a brutal executive who, deep within myself, feel that this is just a public mask and that my true Self discloses itself in my spiritual meditations (and imagine my friends telling people: "His brutal business efficiency shouldn't deceive you~he is really a very refined and gentle person . , ,"), this is not the same as when 1 am, in real interactions with others, a polite person who, on the internet, gives way to violent fantasies. The site of subjective identi­fication shifts: in the internet case, I think that I really am a polite person, and that I am just playing with violent fantasies, while, as a New Age businessman, J think that 1 am just playing a public role in my business dealings, while my true identity is my inner Self enlightened through meditation. In other words: in both cases, truth is a fiction, but this fiction •s differently located. In the internet case, it is imaginable that, at some point, I will "take off the mask" and explode, that is, carry out my violent fantasies in real life—this explosion will effectively enact "the truth ol my Self." In the case of the New Age businessman, my truth is my public persona, and, here, "taking off the mask," enacting my New Age self in reality, namely, really abandoning my businessman traits, would involve a real shift in my subjective position. In the two cases, "taking off the mask" thus works differently. In the internet case, this gesture is what Hitler did with actual anti-Semitic measures (realizing anti-Semitic fantasies), a false act, while in the New Age businessman case, would be a true act.

In order to resolve the apparent contradiction, one should reformulate the two cases in the terms of Lacan's triad Imaginary—Symbolic—Real: we are not dealing with two, but with three elements. The dirty fantasies I am playing with on the net do not have the same status as my "true Self" disclosed in my meditations: the first belong to the Real, the second to the Imaginary. The triad is then I—S—R. Or, more precisely, in the internet case, my polite public persona is Imaginaiy—Symbolic versus the Real of my fantasies, while, in the New Age executive case, my public persona is Symbolic—Real versus my Imaginary "true Self."J (And, to take a crucial further theoretical step, in order for this triad to function, one has to add a fourth term, none other than the empty core of subjectivity; the Lacanian "barred subject" (S) is neither my Symbolic identity, nor my Imaginary "true Sell," nor the obscene Real core of my fantasies, but the empty container which, like a knot, ties the three dimensions together.)

It is this complex "knot" that accounts for a well-known tragic figure from the Cold War era: those Western leftists who heroically defied anti-Communist hysteria in their own countries with utmost sincerity. They were ready even to go to prison for their Communist convictions and their defense of the Soviet Union. Is it not the very illusory nature of their belief that makes their subjective stance so tragically sublime? The miserable reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union renders the fragile beauty of their inner conviction all the more majestic. This leads us to a radical and unexpected conclusion: it is not enough to say that we are dealing here with a tragically misplaced ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable, terrifying reality of its ethical point of reference. What if, on the contrary, such a blindness, such a violent gesture of rcfusing-to-see, such a disavowal-of-reality, such a fetishistic attitude of"! know veiy well that things arc horrible in the Soviet Union, but I nonetheless believe in Soviet socialism," is the innermost consti­tuent part of every ethical stance? Kant was already well aware of this paradox when he deployed his notion of enthusiasm for the French Revolution in his Conflict of Faculties (1795). The Revolution's true significance did not reside in what actually went on in Paris—much of which was terrifying and included outbursts of murderous passion — but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe:

The recent Revolution of a people which is rich in spirit, mav well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity, it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators (who are not themselves caught up in it) a taking of sides according to desires \eine Tcilnehmunq dem Wtuuche. iwcb\ which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race.6

The real Event, the dimension of the Real, was not in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to observers and in the hopes thus awakened in them. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to Eternity . . . And, mutatis mutandis, the same applies for the Western admirers of the Soviet Union. The Soviet experience of "building socialism in one country" certainly did "accumulate misery and atrocity," but it never­theless aroused enthusiasm in the heart of the spectators (who were not themselves caught up in it).

The question here is: docs every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? Is even the most universal ethics not obliged to draw a line and ignore some sort of suffering? What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? Who would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting an industrial farm in which pigs are half blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, the torture and suffering of millions about which we know but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect on one of us if we were forced to watch one single snuff movie of what goes on thousands of rimes a day around the earth — brutal torture (plucking oul of eyes, crushing of testicles, for example)? Would we continue to go on living as usual? Yes—if we Were able to somehow forget (suspend the symbolic effi­ciency) of what we had witnessed.

So, again, does not every ethics have to relyon such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal '!7 Yes, every ethics — wtib the exception of the ethics ofpiychoanalysut which is a kind oi anti-ethics: it focuses precisely on what the standard ethical enthusiasm excludes, on the traumatic Thing that our Judeo-Christian tradition calls the "Neighbor." Freud had good reasons for his reluctance to endorse the injunction "Love ihy neighbor! "—the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the Neighbor. This is what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the Neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates: he thereby obfuscated the monstrosity of the Neighbor, the monstrosity on account of which Lacan applied to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used b3' Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear m this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the Neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face, like the hero of Stephen King's The Shining, a gentle tailed writer, who gradually turns into a killing beast and, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family.

When Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the basic Judeo-Christian injunction to "love thy neighbor," they are thus not just making the standard critico-ideologica! point about how every notion oi universality is colored by our particular values and thus implies secret exclusions. They are making a much stronger point about the incompat­ibility of the Neighbor with the very dimension ot universality. What resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbor. This brings us back to the key question: does every univcrsahst ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answrer is: every ethics that remains "humanist" (m the sense of avoiding the inhuman core of heing-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbor. "Man," "human person," is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbor.

Consequently, when one asserts the Neighbor as the impenetrable "Thing" that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards this unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality. Following Alain Badiou, one should assert that, on the contrary, only an "inhuman" ethics, an ethics addres­sing an inhuman subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true univers­ality. The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity oi the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard "general" universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.

We should celebrate the genius of Walter Benjamin which shines through in the very title of his early work: On Language in General and Human Language in Particular. The point here is not that human language is a species of some universal language "as such" which comprises also other species (the language of gods and angels? Animal language? The language of some other intelligent beings out there in space? Computer language? The language of DNA?): there is no actually-existing language other than human language—but, in order to comprehend this "parti­cular" language, one has to introduce a minimal difference, conceiving it with regard to the gap which separates it from language "as such" (the pure structure of language deprived of the insignia of the human finitude, of erotic passions and mortality, of the struggles for domination and the obscenity of power).8 This minimal difference between inhuman lan­guage and human language is clearly a Platonic one. What if, then, we have to turn the standard relationship around: the obverse of the fact that, in Christ, God is fully human, is that we, humans, are not. O.K. Chesterton began The Napoleon of Nothing Hill with: "The human race, to which so many of my readers belong . . ."■—which, of course, does not mean that some of us are not human, but that there is an inhuman core in all of us, or, that we are "not-all human."


The screen of civility

The predominant way of maintaining a distance towards the "inhuman" Neighbor's intrusive proximity is politeness—but what is politeness? There is a gentle vulgar story that plays on the innuendos of seduction: A boy and a girl are saying goodbye late in the evening, in front of her house; hesitantly, he says: "Would you mind if I come in with you for a coffee?", to which she replies: "Sony, not tonight, I have my period ..." A polite version would be the one in which the girl says: "Good news, my period is over—come up to my place!", to which the boy replies: "Sorry, I am not in a mood for a cup of coffee right now . . ." This, however, immediately confronts us with the ambiguity of politeness: there is an unmistakable dimension of humiliating brutality in the boy's polite answer—as John I.ennon put it in his "Working Class Hero": "you must learn how to smile as you kill."

The ambiguity- of politeness is best rendered in Henry James's masterpieces: in this universe where tact reigns supreme, where the open explosion of one's emotions is considered as the utmost vulgarity, every­thing is said, the most painful decisions are made, the most delicate messages are passed over — however, it all takes place in the guise of a formal conversation. Even when I blackmail my partner, T do it with a polite smile, offering her tea and cakes ... Is it, then, that, while the brutal direct approach misses the Other's kernel, a tactful dance can reach it? In his Minima Moralui, Adorno pointed out the utter ambiguity of tact clearly discernible already in Henry James: the respectful con­sideration for the other's sensitivity, the concern not to violate her intimacy, can easily pass over into the brutal insensitivity for the other's pain.9 The same spirit, elevated to the level of absurdity, wras displayed by Field Marshall von Kluge, the commander of the Army Group Centre on the Russian front. In January 1943, a group of German officers in Smolensk, where the headquarters of the army group was based, was planning to kill Hitler during the latter's visit; the idea was that, during a meal in the mess, some two dozen officers would simultaneously draw their pistols and shoot him, thus rendering the responsibility collective, and also making sure that Hitler's bodyguards would not be able to prevent at least some of the bullets hitting their target. Unfortunately, von Kluge vetoed the plan, although he was anti-Nazi and wanted Hitler dead. His argument was that, by the tenets of the German Officer Corps, "it is not seemly to shoot a man at lunch."

As such, politeness comes close to civility. In a scene from Break Up, the nervous Vince Vaughn angrily reproaches Jennifer Anniston: "You wanted me to wash the dishes, and I'll wash the dishes — what's the problem?" She replies: "I don'twantyou to wash the dishes—I want you to want to wash the dishes!" This is the minimal reflexivity of desire, its "terrorist" demand: I want you not only to do what I want, but to do it as if you really want to do it — I want to regulate not only what you do, but also your desires. The worst thing you can do, even worse than not doing what I want you to do, is to do what 1 want you to do without wanting to do it. . . And this brings us to civility: an act of civility is precisely to feign that 1 want to do what the other asks me to do, so that my compliance with the other s wish does not exert pressure on her. The movie Borat is at its most subversive not when the hero is simply rude and offensive (for our Western eyes and ears, at least), but, on the contrary, when he desperately tries to be polite. During a dinner party in an upper-class house, he asks where the toilet is, whence he then returns with his excrement carefully wrapper! in a plastic bag, and asks his hostess in a pushed voice where he should put it. This is a model metaphor of a truly subversive political gesture: bringing those in power a bag of excrement and politely asking them how to get rid of it.

In a perspicuous short essay on civility, Robert Pippin elaborates the enigmatic in-between status of this notion which designates all the acts that display the basic subjective altitude of respect for others as free and autonomous agents, equal to us, the benevolent attitude of transcending the strict utilitarian or "rational' calculation of costs and benefits in relations with others and engaging in trusting them, trying not to humiliate them, and so forth." Although, measured by the degree of its obligatory character, it is more than kindness or generosity (one cannot oblige people to be generous), but distinctly less than a moral or legal obligation. This is what is wrong in politically correct attempts to moralize or even directly penalize modes of behavior which basically pertain to civility (like hurting others with vulgar obscenities of speech, and so on): they potentially undermine the precious "middle ground" of civility, mediating between uncontrolled private fantasies and the strictly regulated forms of intersubjective behavior. In more Hegelian terms, what gets lost in the penalization ol un-civility is "ethical substance" as such: in contrast to laws and explicit normative regulations, civility is, by-definition, "substantial," something experienced as always-already given, never imposed/instituted as such.12 Which is why civility participates in all the paradoxes ol the "states-that-are-essentially-by-products": it can­not be purposefully enacted—if it is, we have the full right to say that it is fake civility, not a true form. Pippin is right to link the crucial role of civility in modern societies to the rise of the autonomous free individual — not only in the sense that civility is a practice of treating others as equal, free, and autonomous subjects, but in a much more refined way: the fragile web of civility is the "social substance" of free independent individuals, it is their very mode of (inter)dependence. If this substance disintegrates, the very social space of individual freedom is foreclosed. The properly Marxist notion of the "base" (in contrast with the superstructure") should not be understood as a foundation which determines and thus constrains the scope of our freedom ("we think We &re free, but vve are really determined by the base"); one should rather conceive it as the very base (frame, terrain, space) of and for our freedom. The base" is a social substance which sustains our freedom — in this sense, the rules of civility do not constrain our freedom, but provide the only space within which our freedom can thrive; the legal order enforced by state apparatuses is the base for our free-market exchanges; the grammatical rules are the indispensable base for our free thought (in order to "think freely," we have to practice these rules blindly); habit as our "second nature" is the base for culture; the collective of believers is the base, the only terrain, within which a Christian subject can be free, and so on. This is also how one should understand the infamous Marxist plea for "concrete, real freedom" as opposed to the bourgeois "abstract, merely formal freedom": this "concrete freedom" does not constrain the possible content ("you can only be truly free if you support our, Communist, side"); the question is, rather, what "base" should be secured for freedom. For example, although workers in capitalism are formally free, there is no "base" that would allow them to actualize their freedom as producers; although there is "formal" freedom of speech, organization, and so forth, the base of this freedom is constrained.

The theoretical point of civility is thus that free subjectivity has to be sustained by feigning. Contrary to what we might expect, however, this is not feigning to perform a free act when one is simply doing what one is under pressure or obliged to do (the most elementary form of it is, of course, the ritual of "potlatch," exchange of gifts, in "primitive" socie­ties). How, then, does civility relate to the set of unwritten rules which de facto constrain my freedom while sustaining its appearance? Let us imagine a scene in which, to be polite and not to humiliate the other, I formulate my order to him (since I am in the position of authority towards him, so that he has to obey my orders) as a kind request: "Could you perhaps be so kind as to . . ." (Along the same lines, when powerful or famous people receive an unknown individual, one of the polite forms is to pretend that it is the unknown individual who is doing them a favor by visiting them — "Thank you for being so kind as to pay me a visit, . .") This, however, is not true civility: civility is not simply obligation-feigned-as-frcc-acl; it is rather its exact opposite: a free act feigned as an obligation. Back to our example: the true act ol civility from someone in power would be for him to feign that he is simply doing something he has to do when, in reality, it is an act of generosity on his part. Freedom is thus sustained by a paradox that turns around the Spinozan definition of freedom as conceived necessity: it is freedom which is feigned necessity.

To put it in Hegelian terms, freedom is sustained by the ethical substance of our being. In a given society, certain features, attitudes, and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked, they appear as "neutral," as the non-ideological common-sense form of life; ideology is the explicitly posited ("marked" in the semiotic sense) position which stands out from/against this background (like extreme religious zeal, dedication to some political orientation, etc.). The Hegelian point here would have been that it is precisely this neu­tralization of some features into the spontaneously accepted back­ground which is ideology par excellence (and at its most effective)—this is the dialectical "coincidence of the opposites"; the actualization of a notion (ideology, in this case) at its coincides with (or, more precisely, appears as) ils opposite (as non-ideology). And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for violence: social-symbolic violence unadulterated appears as its opposite, as the spontaneity of the milieu in which we dwell, of the air that we breathe.

This notion of civility is at the very heart of the impasses of multi-culturalism. A couple of years ago, there was a debate in Germany about Leitkultur (the dominant culture): against abstract multiculturalism, conservatives insisted that every state is based on a predominant cultural space which the members of other cultures who live in the same space should respect. Although liberal leftists attacked this notion as covert racism, one should admit that, if nothing else, it offers an adequate description of the facts. Respect of individual freedoms and rights, even if at the expense of group rights, full emancipation of women, freedom of religion (and of atheism) and sexual orientation, freedom to publicly attack anyone and anything, are central constituent elements of Western liberal Leitkultur, and this can be used to respond to those Muslim theologians in Western countries who protest against their treatment, while accepting it as normal that in, say, Saudi Arabia, it is prohibited to practice publicly religions other than Islam. They should accept that the same Leitkultur which allows their religious freedom in the West, de­mands of them a respect for all other freedoms. To put it succinctly: freedom for Muslims is part and parcel of the freedom for Salman Rushdie to write what he wants—you cannot choose the part of Western freedom which suits you. The answer to the standard critical argument that Western multiculturalism is not truly neutral, that it privileges specific values, is that one should shamelessly accept this paradox: universal openness itself is rooted in Western modernity.

And, to avoid any misunderstanding, the same applies to Christianity "self. On May 2, 2007, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official news­paper, accused Andrea Rivera, an Italian comedian, of "terrorism" for criticizing the pope. As a presenter of a televised May Day rock concert, Rivera attacked the pope's position on evolution ("The pope says he doesn't believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved.") He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a victim of muscular dystrophy who campaigned for euthanasia and died in December 2006 after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator ("I can't stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn't the case for Pinochet or Franco"). Here is the Vatican's reaction: "This, too, is terrorism. It's terrorism to launch attacks on the Church. It's terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man." It is the underlying equation of intellectual critique with physical terrorist attacks which brutally violates the West European Lettkullur, which insists on the universal sphere of the "public use of reason," where one can criticize and problematize every­thing—in the eyes of our shared Tjeitkuttar, Rivera's statements are totally acceptable.

Civility is crucial here: multicultural freedom also functions only when it is sustained by the rules of civility, which are never abstract, but always embedded within a Lettkidtur. Within our Lettkidtur, it is not Rivera but L'Odderi'atore Romano which is "terroristic" with its dismissal of Rivera's simple and reasonable objections as expressions ol "blind and irrational rage." Freedom of speech functions when all parties follow the same unwritten rules of civility telling us what kind of attacks are improper, although they are not legally prohibited; civility tells us which features of a specific ethnic or religious "way of life" are acceptable and which are not acceptable. If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, then multiculturalism turns into legally regulated mutual ignorance or hatred.

One of the Lacanian names for this civility is the "Alaster-Signifier," the set of rules grounded only in themselves ("it is so because it is so, because it is our cuslom")—and it is this dimension of the Master-Signifier which is more and more threatened in our societies.



Gift and exchange

So what is a Master-Signitier? Apropos school exams, Lacan pointed out a strange fact: there must be a minimal gap, delay, between the procedure of measuring my qualifications and the act of announcing the result

(grades). In other words, even if I know that I provided perfect answers to the exam questions, there remains a minimum element of insecurity, of chance, till the results are announced—this gap is the gap between the constative and the performative, between measuring the results and taking note of them (registering them) in the full sense of the symbolic act. The whole mystique of bureaucracy at its most sublime hinges on this gap: you know the facts, but you can never be quite sure of how these facts will be registered by bureaucracy. The same holds for elections: in the electoral process the moment of contingency, of hazard, of a "lottery," is crucial. Fully "rational" elections would not be elections at all, but a transparent objectivized process.

Traditional (pre-modern) societies resolved this problem by invoking a transcendental source which "verified" the result, conferring authority on it (God, King . . .). Therein resides the problem of modernity: modern societies perceive themselves as autonomous, self-regulated; that is, they can no longer rely on an external (transcendental) source of authority. But, nonetheless, the moment of hazard has to remain operative in the electoral process, which is why commentators like to dwell on the "irrationality" of votes (one never knows which way votes will swing in the last days before elections . , .). In other words, democracy would not work if it were reduced to permanent opinion-polling—fully mechanized and quantified, deprived o( its "performative" character. As Claude Lefort pointed out, voting has to remain a (sacrificial) ritual, a ritualistic self-destruction and rebirth of society.1'1 The reason is that this hazard itself should not be transparent, it should be minimally externalized/reified: the "people's will" is our equivalent of what the Ancients perceived as the imponderable will of God or the hands of Fate. What people cannot accept as their direct arbitrary choice, the result of a pure contingency, they can do if this hazard 18 referred to a minimum of the "real" —Hegel knew this long ago, this is the entire point of his defense of monarchy. And, last but not least, the same goes for love: there should be an element of the "answer of the Real" m it ( we were forever meant for each other"), I cannot really accept that my falling in love hinges on a purely aleatory process.

It is only against this background that one can properly locate the function of the Master. The Master is the one who receives gifts in such a way that his acceptance of a gill is perceived by the subject wrho provided the gift as its own reward. As such, the Master is thus correlative to the subject caught in the double movement of what Freud called Vemagung (renunciation): the gesture by means of which the subject gives what is most precious to him and, in exchange, is himself turned into an object of exchange, is correlative to the gesture of giving in the very act of receiving. The Master's refusal of exchange is correlative to the re­doubled, self-reflected, exchange on the side of the subject who ex­changes (gives what is most precious to him) and is exchanged.

The trick of capitalism, of course, is that (his asymmetry is concealed in the ideological appearance of equivalent exchange: the double non-exchange is masked as free exchange. This is why, as was clear to Lacan, psychoanalysis—not only as a theory, but above all as a specific intersubjective practice, as a unique form of social link—could have emerged only within capitalist society where intersubjective relations are mediated by money. Money—paying the analyst — is necessary in order to keep him out of circulation, to avoid getting him involved in the imbroglio of passions which generated the patient's pathology. This is why a psychoanalyst is not a Master-figure, but, rather, a kind of "prostitute of the mind," having recourse to money for the same reason some prostitutes like to be paid so that they can have sex without personal involvement, maintaining their distance — here, we encounter the func­tion of money at its purest.

There are similarities between analytic treatment and the ritual of potlatch. Marcel Mauss, in his "Essai sur !e don,"lj first described the paradoxical logic of potlatch, of the reciprocal exchange of gifts. Gilt and exchange are, of course, opposed in their immanent logic: a true gift is by definition an act of generosity, given without expecting something in return, while exchange is necessarily reciprocal — I give something, expecting something else in exchange. Potlatch is a short-circuit (inter­section) of the two sets: an exchange in the form of its opposite, of two acts of voluntary gift-giving (and the point is, of course, that such acts are not secondary with regard to exchange, but precede and ground it). The same holds for psychoanalytic treatment, in which the analyst is not paid for the work he does in a set of equivalent exchanges (so much for an interpretation of a dream, so much for the dissolution of a symptom, etc., with the ironic prospect of offering a special discount: "buy three dream interpretations and get one for free . . .")—the moment the relationship starts to function like this, we are no longer in the analyst's discourse (social link). But neither is the analyst restoring the patient's mental health out of the goodness of his heart, for free: the analyst's acts have nothing to do with goodness, with helping a neighbor—again, the moment the patient perceives the analyst as acting out of goodness, this can lead even to a psychotic crisis, and trigger a paranoid outburst. So, as Jn potlach, the exchange between the analyst and the analysand is between two incommensurable excesses: the analyst is paid lor nothing, as a gift) his price is always exorbitant (typically, the patients oscillate between complaining that the price is too high and bouts of excessive gratitude — "how can 1 ever repay you for what you did . . ."), and the patient gets some help, an improvement in his condition, as an unin­tended by-product. As Lacan makes clear, the underlying problem here is how to determine the price of that which has no price.

How, then, are we to resolve the enigma of potlatch? Alauss's solution is a mystical X which circulates in exchange. Claude Levi-Strauss reduced the mystique to its "rational core"; reciprocity, exchange as such—the meaning of reciprocal exchange of gifts is e-xebanpe itselj as the enactment of social link.16 There is, however, something missing in this Levi-Straussian solution;17 it was Pierre Bourdieu18 who asked here the crucial "Marxist" question as to why (in Marx's words) "Political Economy has indeed analyzed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labor is represented by the value of its product and labor-time by the magnitude of that value."1'* If the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the "mystified" form of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. (If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other's gift—recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year's present once again . . .) However, Bourdieu's solution remains all too vulgar Marxist: he evokes hidden economic "interests." It Was Marshall Sahlins who proposed a different, more pertinent, solution: the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most rundarnental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit ror tat. To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person's gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the "pre-economy of the economy," its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non­productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlatch is thus simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely.



Ulysses' realpolitik

The obscene underside that haunts the dignity of the Master-Signifier from its very inception, or the secret alliance between the dignity of the Law and its obscene transgression, was first clearly outlined by Shake­speare in Troilus and Cressida, his most uncanny play, effectively a postmodern work avant la lettre. In his influential Shakespearean Tragedy, which set the coordinates of the traditional academic reading of Shake­speare, A.C. Bradley, the great English Hegelian, speaks of  a certain limitation, a partial suppression of that clement in Shake­speare's mind which unites him with the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one or two of his plays, notably in Troilus and Cressida, we are almost painfully conscious of this suppres­sion; we 1 eel an intense intellectual activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest, were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in The Tempest, we are constantly aware of the presence of this power.

There is truth in this perception: it is as if, in Troiltu, there is no place for the redemptive quality of metaphysical pathos and bliss which somehow cancels the horrible and ridiculous events that took place. The first difficulty is how to categorize Troilus: although arguably the bleakest of Shakespeare's plays, it is often listed as a comedy— correctly, since it lacks dignified tragic pathos.22 Tn other words, if Troilus is a comedy, then it is for the same reason that all good films about the Holocaust also are comedies: it is a blasphemy to claim that the predicament of prisoners in a concentration camp was tragic —their predicament was so terrifying that they were deprived of the very possibility of displaying tragic grandeur, Troilus plays the same structural role in Shakespeare's opus as Cast fan ttttte among Mozart's operas: its despair is so thoroughgoing that the only way to overcome it is through the retreat into fairy-tale magic {The Tempest and other late Shakespeare plays; Mozart's Magic Flute).

Many ol Shakespeare's plays retell an already well-known great story (of Juhus Caesar, of English kings); what makes Troilus the exception is that, in retelling the well-known story, it shifts the accent to what were in the original minor and marginal characters; Troilus is not primarily about Achilles and Hector, Priam and Agamemnon; its love couple is not Helen and Priam, but Cressida and Troilus, In this sense, Troilus can be said to prefigure one of the paradigmatic postmodern procedures, that of re­telling a well-known classical story from the standpoint of a marginal character. Tom Stoppard's Rosencranx and Gitdenstern Are Dead docs it with Hamlet, while here, Shakespeare himself carries out the move. This displacement also undermines Shakespeare's standard procedure, from his royal chronicles, of supplementing the "big'' royal scenes staged in a dignified way with scenes figuring common people who introduce a comic common-sense perspective. In the royal chronicles, these comic interludes strengthen the noble scenes through their contrast to them; in Troilus, everybody, even the noblest of warriors, is "contaminated" by the ridiculing perspective which makes us see them either as blind and stupidly pathetic or as involved in ruthless intrigues. The "operator" of this undoing of the tragic dimension, the single agent whose interventions systematically undermine tragic pathos, is Ulysses—this may sound surprising in view of Ulysses' first intervention, at the Greek war council in Act I where the Greek (or "Grecian," as Shakespeare put it, in what now maybe called "Bush mode") generals try to account for their failure to occupy and destroy Troy after eight years of fighting. Ulysses inter­venes from a traditional "old values" position, locating the true cause of the Greeks' failure in their neglect of the centralized hierarchical order where every individual is in his proper place:

The specialty of rule hath been neglected. And look how many Grecian tents do stand Hollow upon this plain: so many hollow factions.

[. . .] O when degree is shaked. Which is the ladder to all high designs. Then enterprise is sick. How could communities, Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string.

And, hark, what discord follows. Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe;

Strength should be lord of imbecility.

And the rude son should strike his father dead.

Force should be right —or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then every thing includes itsell in power [- • •]

(I. 3)

What, then, causes this disintegration which ends up in the democratic horror of everyone participating in power? Later in the play, when Ulysses wants to convince Achilles to rejoin the battle, he mobilizes the metaphor of time as the destructive force that gradually undermines the natural hierarchical order: in the course of time, your old heroic deeds will soon be forgotten, your glory will be eclipsed by the new heroes — so if you want to continue shining in3*our warrior glory, rejoin the battle:

Time hath, my lord, A wallet at his back, wherein he puts Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster Of ingratitudes.

Those scraps are good deeds past, Which are devoured as fast as they are made, Forgot as soon

As done. Perseverance, dear my lord,

Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail

In monumental mock'ry. [. . .]

O, let not virtue seek

Remuneration for the thing it was;

For beauty, wit,

High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,

Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time.

(HI, 3)

Ulysses' strategy here is profoundly ambiguous. In a first approach, he merely restates his argumentation about the necessity of "degrees" (ordered social hierarchy), and portrays time as the corrosive force which undermines old true values —an arch-conservative motif. How­ever, on a closer reading, it becomes clear that Ulysses gives to his argumentation a singular cynical twist: how are we to fight against time, to keep old values alive? Not by directly sticking to them, but by supplementing them with the obscene realpolitik of cruel manipulation, of cheating, of playing one hero against the other. It is only this dirty underside, this hidden disharmony, that can sustain harmony (Ulysses plays with Achilles' envy, he refers to emulation —the very attitudes that work to destabilize the hierarchical order, since they signal that one is not satisfied by one's subordinate place within the social body). Secret manipulation of envy—that is, the violation of the very rules and values Ulysses celebrates in his first speech —is needed to counteract the effects of rime and sustain the hierarchical order of "degrees." This would be Ulysses' version of Hamlet's famous "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!" — the only way to "set it right" is to counteract the transgression of Old Order with its inherent tran,ujre,>-*ion, with crime secretly committed to serve the Order. The price we pay for this is that the Order which thus survives is a mockery of itself, a blasphemous imitation of Order.

This is why ideology is not simply an operation of closure, drawing the line between what is included and what is excluded/prohibited, but the ongoing regulation of non-closure. In the case of marriage, ideology not only prohibits extramarital affairs; its crucial operation is to regulate such inevitable transgressions (say, the proverbial Catholic priest's advice to a Promiscuous husband; if you really have needs that your wife cannot satisfy, visit a prostitute discreetly, fornicate and then repent, as long as you do not divorce). In this way, an ideology always admits the failure of closure, and then goes on to regulate the permeability of the exchange "^tth its outside.

Today, however, in our "postmodern" world, this dialectic of the Law aod its inherent transgression is given an additional twist: transgression is ^ore and more directly enjoined by the Law itself.

The atonal world

Why does potlatch appear so mysterious or meaningless to us? The basic feature of our "postmodern" world is that it tries to dispense with the agency of the Master-Signifier: the "complexity" of the world should be asserted unconditionally, every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it should be "deconstructed," dispersed, "disseminated": "The modern apology for the 'complexity' of the world [. . .] is really nothing but a generalized desire for atonality." ' Badiou's perspicuous example of such an "atonal" world is the politically correct vision of sexuality, as promoted by gender studies, with its obsessive rejection of "binary logic": this world is a nuanced, ramified world of multiple sexual practices which tolerates no decision, no instance of the Two, no evaluation (in the strong Nietzschean sense). This suspension of the Master-Signifier leaves as the only agency of ideological interpellation the "unnameable" abyss ot jouiijance: the ultimate injunction (hat regulates our lives in "postmoder-nity" is "Enjoy!"—realize your potential, enjoy in all manner ol ways, from intense sexual pleasures through social success to spiritual self-fulfilment.

However, far from liberating us from the pressure of guilt, such dispensing with the Master-Signifier comes at a price, the price signaled by Lacan's qualification of the superego command: "Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouLwanc-e-— Enjoy I"'24 In short, the decline of the Master-Signifier exposes the subject to all the traps and double-talk of the superego: the very injunction to enjoy, in other words, the (often imperceptible) shift from the permission to enjoy to the injunction (obligation) to enjoy sabotages enjoyment, so that, paradoxically, the more one obeys the superego command, the more one feels guilty. This same ambiguity affects the very basis of a "permissive" and "tolerant" society: "we see from day to day how this tolerance is nothing else than a fanaticism, since it tolerates only its own vacuity."2o And, effectively, every decision, every determinate engagement, is potentially "intolerant" towards all others.

In his LogiqMti des mondes, Badiou develops the notion of "atonal" worlds (memde alone),26 worlds lacking a "point," in Lacanese: the "quilting point" (point de caption), the intervention of a Master-Signifier that imposes a principle of "ordering" into the world, the point of a simple decision ("yes or no") in which the confused multiplicity is violently reduced to a "minimal difference." None other than John F. Kennedy provided, a concise description of this point: "The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself." This gesture which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master —or, as O.K. Chesterton put it in his inimitable manner: "The purpose of an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it upon something solid."

If the fight against a world proceeds by way of undermining its "point," the feature that sutures it into a stable totality, how are we to proceed when (as is the case today) we dwell in an atonal world, a world of multiplicities lacking a determinate tonality? The answer is: one has to oppose it in such a way that one compels it to "tonalize" itself, to openly admit the secret tone that sustains its alonality. For example, when one confronts a world which presents itself as tolerant and pluralist, dis­seminated, with no center, one has to attack the underlying structuring principle which sustains this atonality — say, the secret qualifications of "tolerance" which excludes as "intolerant" certain critical questions, or the secret qualifications which exclude as a "threat to freedom" questions about the limits of the existing freedoms.

The paradox, the sign of hidden complicity between today's religious fundamentalisms and the "postmodern" universe they reject so fero­ciously, is that fundamentalism also belongs to the "atonal world" — which is why a fundamentalist does not believe, he knows directly. To put it ■ in another way, both liberal-skeptical cynicism and fundamentalism thus share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while skeptical cynics mock them. What is unthinkable for them is the "absurd" act of a decision which establishes even.' authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of "reasons," in positive knowledge: the "sincere hypocrisy" of somebody like Anne Frank who, tn the face of the terri lying depravity of the Nazis, i n a true act of credo quo dwurdum asserted her belief in the fundamental goodness of all humans. No wonder then that religious fundamentalists are among the most Passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion wJth the latest findings of science: for them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge. (In this sense, the status of "universal human rights" is also that of a pure belief: they cannot be grounded in our knowledge ol human nature, they ^ an axiom posited by our decision.) The occurrence of the term

"science" in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects (Christian Science, Scientology) is not just an obscene joke, but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge. The case oi the Turin shroud is here symptomal: its authenticity would be awful for every true believer (the first thing to do then would be to analyze the DNA of the blood stains and thus solve empirically the question ol who Jesus' father was . . .), while a true fundamentalist would rejoice in this opportunity.

We find the same phenomenon in some forms of contemporary Islam: hundreds of books by scientists "demonstrate" how the latest scientific advances confirm the insights and injunctions of the Koran ^the divine prohibition of incest is confirmed by recent genetic knowledge about the defective children born of incestuous copulation, and so on and so forth. (Some even go so far as to claim that what the Koran offers as an article of faith to be accepted because of its divine origin is not finally demonstrated as scientific truth, thereby reducing the Koran itself to an inferior mythic version of what has acquired its appropriate formulation in contemporary science. )2/ The same goes also for Buddhism, where many scientists vary the motif of the "Tao of modern physics," that is, of how the contem­porary scientific vision of reality as a desubstantiahzed flux of oscillating events finally confirmed the old Buddhist ontology . . ."s One is thus compelled to draw the paradoxical conclusion: in the opposition between traditional secular humanists and religious fundamentalists, it is the humanists who stand for belief, while fundamentalists stand tor knowl­edge— in short, the true danger of fundamentalism does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself.

What we should bear in mind here is how the opposition of knowledge and faith echoes the one between the constative and the performative: faith (or, rather, trust) is the basic ingredient ol speech as the medium of social bond, of the subject's engaged participation in this bond, while science—exemplarily in its formalization—reduces language to neutral registration. Let us not forget that science has, for Lacan, the status ol the "knowledge in the real": the language of science is not the language of subjective engagement, but the language deprived of its performative dimension, desubjectivized language. The predominance of scientific discourse thus entails the retreat, the potential suspension, of the very symbolic function as the metaphor constitutive of human subjectivity'. Paternal authority is irreducibly based on faith, on trust as to the identity of the father: we have fathers (as symbolic functions, as the Name-of-the-

Father, the paternal metaphor), because we do not directly know who our father is, we have to take him at his wore) and trust him. To put it pointedly, the moment 1 know with scientific certainty who my father is, fatherhood ceases to be the function which grounds social-symbolic Trust. In the scientific universe, there is no need for such faith, truth can be established through DNA analysis . . . The hegemony of the scientific discourse thus potentially suspends the entire network of symbolic tradition that sus­tains the subjects identifications. Politically, the shift is from Power grounded in the traditional symbolic authority to biopolitics.

The "worldlcss" character of capitalism is linked to this hegemonic role of scientific discourse in modernity, a feature clearly identified already by Hegel who wrote that, for us moderns, art and religion no longer obey absolute respect: we can admire them, but we no longer kneel down in front of them, our heart is not really with them —today, only science (conceptual knowledge) deserves this respect. "Postmodernity" as the "end of grand narratives" is one of the names for this predicament in which the multitude of local fictions thrives against the background of scientific discourse as the only remaining universality deprived of sense. Which is why the politics advocated by many a leftist today, that of countering the devastating world-dissolving effect of capitalist moder­nization by inventing new fictions, imagining "new worlds" (like the Porto Alegre slogan "Another world is possible!"), is inadequate or, at least, profoundly ambiguous: it all depends on how these fictions relate to the underlying Real of capitalism —do they just supplement it with the imaginary multitude, as the postmodern "local narratives" do, or do they disturb its functioning? In other words, the task is to produce a symbolic fiction (a truth) that intervenes into the Real, that causes a change within it.29

It is only psychoanalysis that can disclose the full contours of the shattering impact of modernity (in its two aspects: the hegemony of scientific discourse and capitalism) on the way our identity is performa-tively grounded in symbolic identifications, on the manner in which the Symbolic order is counted on to provide the horizon that allows us to locate every experience in a meaningful totality. The necessary obverse of modernity is the "crisis of meaning," the disintegration of the link — identity even—between Truth and Meaning. Since, in Europe, moder­nization was spread over centuries, we had the time to accommodate to this break, to soften its shattering impact, through Kulturarbeit, through the formation of new social narratives and myths, while some other societies — exemplarily the Muslim ones —were exposed to this impact directly, without a protective screen or temporal delay, so their S3'mbolic universe was perturbed much more brutally, they lost their (symbolic) ground with no time left to establish a new (symbolic.) balance. No wonder, then, that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of "fundamentalism," the psychotic-delirious-incestuous reassertion of religion as direct insight into the divine Real, with all the terrifying consequences that such a reassertion entails, up to the return with a vengeance of the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices. The rise of the superego is another feature that postmodern permissiveness and the new fundament­alism share; what distinguishes them is the site of the enjoyment de­manded: our own in permissiveness, God's own in fundamentalism.

From all sides, Right and Left, complaints abound today about how, in our postmodern societies composed of hedonistic sohpsists, social bonds are progressively disintegrating: wc are increasingly reduced to social atoms, as exemplified by the lone individual hooked on the computer screen, preferring virtual exchanges to contacts with other flesh-and-blood persons, preferring cyber sex to bodily contact, and so forth. However, this very example renders visible what is wrong with the diagnosis on suspended social ties: in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise ol cyberspace itself, this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen.

It may seem that Lacan's doxa "there is no big Other" has today lost its subversive edge and turned into a globally acknowledged common­place—everybody seems to know that there is no "big Other" in the sense of a substantial shared set of customs and values, that what Hegel called "objective Spirit" (the social substance of mores) is disintegrating into particular "worlds" (or life styles) whose coordination is regulated by purely formal rules. This is why not only communitarians but even liberal leftists advocate the need to establish new ties of solidarity and other shared values. However, the example ol cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism — digital solipsists need a very complex global machinery to be able to persevere in their splendid isolation.

Was not Richard Rorty the paradigmatic philosopher of such an Other without a privileged link to others? His big Other is the set of neutral public rules which enable each of the individuals to "tell her own story" of dreams and suffering. These rules guarantee that the "private" space of personal idiosyncrasies, imperfections, violent fantasies, and so on, will not spill over into a direct domination of others. Recall one of the latest upshots of sexual liberation: the "masturbate-a-thon," a collective event in which hundreds of men and women pleasure themselves for charity, raising money for sexual- and reproductive-health agencies, and —as the organizers put it — raising awareness and dispelling the shame and taboos that persist around this most commonplace, natural, and safe form of sexual activity. The ideological stance underlying the notion of the masturbathon is marked by a conflict between its form and content: it builds a collective out of individuals who are ready to share with others the solipsistic egotism of their stupid pleasure. This contradiction, how­ever, is more apparent than real. Freud already knew about the con­nection between narcissism and immersion in a crowd, best rendered precisely by the Californian phrase "sharing an experience." And what is crucial is the underlying symbolic pact which enables the assembled masturbators to "share a space" without intruding on each other's space. The more one wants to be an atomist, the more some figure of the big Other is needed to regulate one's distance from others. Perhaps this accounts for the strange, but adequate, impression it is difficult to avoid when one encounters a true hedonist sohpsist: in spite of her uncon­strained indulgence in personal idiosyncrasies, she strikes us as w*eirdly impersonal—what she lacks is the very sense of the "depth" of a person.

What, then, is missing in today's social bond, if it is not the big Other?30 The answer is clear: a small other which would embody, stand in for, the big Other—a person wrho is not simply "like the others," but who directly embodies authority. In our postmodern universe, every small other is "finitized" (perceived as fallible, imperfect, "merely hu­man, ridiculous), inadequate to give body to a big Other — and, in this way, preserves the purity of the big Other unblemished by its failings. When, in a decade or so, money will finally become a purely virtual point of reference, no longer materialized in a particular object, this demater-•alization will render its fetishistic power absolute: its very invisibility will render it all-powerful and omnipresent. The task of radical politics is therefore not to denounce the inadequacy of every small other to stand in for the big Other (such a "critique" only reinforces the big Other's hold 0ver us), but to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to untie social bond the big Other sustains. Today, when everyone complains about dissolving social ties (and thereby obfuscating their hold over us, which is stronger than ever), the true job of untying them is still ahead of us, more urgent than ever.

Lacan's standard notion of anxiety is that, as the only allect that does not lie, it bears witness to the proximity of the Real, to the inexistence of the big Other; such anxiety has to be confronted by courage, it should lead to an act proper which, as it were, cuts into the real of a situation. There is, however, another mode ol anxiety which predominates today: the anxiety caused by the claustrophobia of the atonal world which lacks any structuring "point," the anxiety of the "pathological Narcissus" frustrated by the fact that he is caught in the endless competitive mirroring of his fellow men (a-a'-a"-a"' . . .), of the series of "small others" none of which functions as the stand-in for the "big Other." The root of this claustrophobia is that the lack of embodied stand-ins for the big Other, instead of opening up the social space, depriving it of any Master-figures, renders the invisible "big Other," the mechanism that regulates the interaction of "small others," all the more all-pervasive.


Serbsky InslittiSe, Malibit

With this shift towards the "atonal world," the obscene solidarity between the f.^aw and its superego underside is supplanted by the hidden solidarity between tolerant permissiveness and religious fundamentalism. A recent scandal in Malibu not only displayed the obscene pact between the biopolitical "therapeutic" approach and the fundamentalist reaction to it, but also the catastrophic ethical price we have to pay for this pact.

In good old Soviet times, the Serbsky Institute in Moscow was the psychiatric flagship for punitive political control; its psychiatrists devel­oped painful drug methods to make detainees talk and extract testimony for use in national security investigations. Underpinning the ability of psychiatrists to incarcerate people was an invented political mental disorder known as ("sluggish v'dolekashcbaia schizophrenia"). Psychia­trists described symptoms thus: a person might appear quite normal most of the time but would break out with a severe case of "inflexibility of convictions," or "nervous exhaustion brought on by his or her search for justice," or "a tendency to litigation" or "reformist delusions." The treatment involved intravenous injections of psychotropic drugs that were so painlully administered that patients became unconscious. The overriding belief was that a person had to be Insane to be opposed to

Communism. Is this psychiatric approach to politically problematic positions a thing of the past? Unfortunately, no: not only is the Serbsky Institute today happily thriving in Putin's Russia, but, as a recent incident with Mel Gibson indicates, it will soon open a branch in Malibu! Here is Gibson's own description of what happened to him on Friday, July 28, 2006:

I drove a car when 1 should not have, and was stopped by the LA County Sheriffs. The arresting officer was just doing his job and I feel fortunate that I was apprehended before I caused injury to any other person. I acted like a person completely out ol control when 1 was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable.


It is reported that Gibson said, "F------------------------------ Jews . . . The Jews are

responsible for all the wars in the world," and asked a deputy, "Are you a Jew?" Gibson apologized, but his apology was rejected by the Anti-Defamation League. Here is what Abraham Foxman, director of the League, wrote:


Mel Gibson's apology is unremorseful and insufficient. It's not a proper apology because it does not go to the essence of his bigotry and his anti-Semitism. His tirade finally reveals his true self and shows that his protestations during the debate over his film The Passion of the Christ, that he is such a tolerant, loving person, were a sham.


Later, Gibson offered a more substantial apology, announcing through a spokesman that he would undergo rehabilitation for alcohol abuse. He added: "Hatred of any kind goes against my faith. I'm not just asking for forgiveness. 1 would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-onc discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing." Gibson said he is "in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display." This time, Foxman accepted his apology as sincere:


Two years ago, I was told by his publicist that he wants to meet with nie and have an understanding. I'm still waiting. There is no course, there is no curriculum. We need in-depth conversation. It's therapy — and the most important step in any therapy is to admit that you have a problem, which is a step he's already taken.


Why waste precious time on such a vulgar incident? For an observer of the ideological trends in the US, these events display a nightmarish dimension: the mutually reinforcing hypocrisy of the two sides, the anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and the Zionists, is breathtaking. Politically, the reconciliation between Gibson and Foxman signals an obscene pact between anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and ag­gressive Zionists, whose expression is the growing support of the fundamentalists for the State of Israel (recall Pat Robertson's claim that Sharon's heart attack was divine retribution for the evacuation of Gaza). The Jewish people will pay dearly for such pacts with the devil — can one imagine what a boost anti-Semitism will receive from Foxman's offer? "So if I now say something critical about Jews, I will be forced to submit to psychiatric therapy . . ."

What underlies the final reconciliation is, obviously, an obscene quid pro quo, Foxman's reaction to Gibson's outburst was not excessively severe and demanding; on the contrary, it let Gibson all too easily off the hook. It accepted Gibson's refusal to take full personal responsibility for his words (his anti-Semitic remarks): they were not really his own, it was pathology, some unknown force that took over under the influence of alcohol. However, the answer to Gibson's question "Where did those vicious words come from?" is ridiculously simple: they are part and parcel of his ideological identity, formed (as far as one can tell) to a large extent by his lather. What sustained Gibson's remarks was not madness, but a well-known ideology (anti-Semitism).

In our daily life, racism works as a spontaneous disposition lurking beneath the surface and waiting for a "remainder of the day" to which it can attach itself and color it in its own way. I recently read Man. Is Wolf to Man, Janusz Bardach's (a Polish Jew) memoirs ol his miraculous survival in Kolyma, the worst Stalinist camp, in the worst of times when conditions were especially desperate (during World War II).32 In early 1945, as the result of an amnesty to celebrate the victory over Germany, he was freed but not yet able to leave the region. So, in order to pass the time and earn some money, he accepted a post in a hospital. There, on the advice of a colleague, a doctor, he organized a desperate method of providing the sick and starving prisoners with some vitamins and nutritious loodstuffs. The camp hospital had too large a stock of human blood for transfusions which it was planning to discard; Bardach re­processed it, enriched it with vitamins from local herbs, and sold it back to the hospital. When the higher authorities learned about this, he was almost rearrested: they banned him from practicing what they designated as "organized cannibalism." But he found a way out, replacing human blood with the blood of the deer killed by the Inuit living nearby, and soon developed a successful business . . . My immediate racist association was, of course: "T3'pical Jews! Even in the worst gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for maneuver, they start trading—in human blood!"

The stakes are much higher when this obscene underside is institu­tionalized, as in the case of the Catholic priests' pedophilia, a phenom­enon that is inscribed into the very functioning of the Church as a socio-symbolic institution. It is therefore not a matter of the "private" uncon­scious of individuals, but rather of the "unconscious" oi the institution itself; not something that happens because the Church has to accom­modate itself to the pathological realities oi libidinal life in order to survive, but rather an inherent part of the way the institution reproduces itself.33 This institutional unconscious has nothing to do with any kind of Jungian "collective unconscious," a spiritual substance that encompasses individuals; its status is thoroughly non-psychological, strictly discursive, correlative to the "big Other" as the "reified" system of symbolic coordinates. It is the set of presuppositions and exclusions implied by the public discourse. Consequently, the response to the Church's reluc­tance to acknowledge its crimes should be that these are indeed crimes and that, if it does not fully participate in their investigation, the Church ts an accomplice after the fact; moreover, the Church as such, as an institution, must be made to recognize the ways it systematically creates the conditions for such crimes to take place. No wonder that, in contemporary Ireland, when small children have to go out alone, it is becoming standard for their mothers to supplement the traditional warning "Don't talk to strangers!" with a new and more specific one, • • • and don't talk to priests!"

Consequently, what Gibson needs is not therapy; it is not enough for him to simply admit that "he has a problem" so long as he fails to accept responsibility for his remarks, asking himself in what way his outburst is linked to his Catholicism and functions as its obscene underside. When Fox-nan offered to treat Gibson's outburst as a case of individual Pathology which needs a therapeutic approach, he not only committed the same error as those who want to reduce cases of pedophilia lo individual pathologies; much worse, he contributed to the revival of the Serbsky Institute's manner of dealing with problematic political and ideological attitudes as phenomena that call for psychiatric intervention. In the same way that the overriding belief underlying the Serbsky Institute's measures was that a person had to be insane to be against Communism, so Foxman's offer implies that a. person has to be insane to be anti-Semitic. This easy way out enables us to avoid the key issue; that, precisely, anti-Semitism in our Western societies was—and is — not an ideology displayed by the deranged, but an ingredient of spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly sane people, of our ideological sanity itself. This, then, is where we stand today: a sad choice between Gibson and Foxman, between the obscene bigotry of fundamentalist beliefs and the no less obscene disqualification of problematic beliefs as cases of mental illness that require therapy.


Poland as a symptom

This hidden complicity between the postmodern "atonal world" and the fundamentalist reaction to it explodes when a society enters a crisis of its symbolic, identity. A scandal ripped Poland apart in March 2007, the so-called "Oleksy-gate," when a tape of a private conversation was made public. Josef Oleksy, die former Prime Minister and one of the Demo­cratic Left Alliance's (SLD, ex-Communists) leading figures, was re­vealed to have made disparaging remarks about the SLD politicians, calling them "a bunch of losers and swindlers," cynically boasting that the SLD had really introduced capitalism into Poland, and claiming that the SLD leaders cared nothing about Poland, but just about their own survival and wealth. The truly shocking feature of these tapes is a certain coincidence: Oleksy used exactly the same words as the rightist anti-Communist opponents of the SLD who refused to admit its legitimacy, claiming that it was a party without a proper program, just a network of ex-nomenklatura swindlers looking after their own business interests — this harsh external characterization was now confirmed as the inner cynical self-designation of the SLD itselJ ... a sure sign that the first task of the new Left in post-Communist states is lo reject all links with the ex-Communist "left" parties which, as a rule, are the parties of big capital.

The counterpart to this scandal is the fact that Poland has the distinction of being the first Western country in which the anti-modernist backlash has won, effectively emerging as a hegemonic force: calls for the total ban on abortion, anti-Communist "lustration," the exclusion of Darwinism from primary and secondary education, up to the bizarre idea of abolishing the post of the President of the Republic and proclaim­ing Jesus Christ the Eternal King of Poland, and so forth, are coming together into an all-encompassing proposal to enact a clear break and constitute a new Polish republic unambiguously based on anti-modernist Christian values. Is, however, this backlash really so dangerous that the Left should accept the liberal blackmail: "the time has come for all of us to unite forces, thwart this threat and reassert liberal-secular moderniza­tion"? (Something, incidentally, which cannot but recall the memory of Social-Democratic evolutionists who claimed that, in not yet fully devel­oped countries, the Left should first support the bourgeois project of the modern democratic state, and only in the "second phase" should it move on to radical politics proper, to the overcoming of capitalism and bourgeois democracy ... It is good to remember that Lenin was thoroughly opposed to this "stageist" approach, remstituted in later Stalinism with its scholastic distinction between the "lower" and the "higher" stages of Communism.)

The task of the Left is, on the contrary, more than ever to "subtract" itself from the entire field of the opposition between liberal modernization and the anti-modernist backlash."3'* In spite of their zealous pursuit of a positive project of installing stable Christian values into social life, one should never forget that the anti-modernist fundamentalist backlash is a profoundly reactive phenomenon (in the Nietzschean sense): at its core, there is not a positive politics, actively pursuing a new social project, but a politics of fear whose motivating force is defense against a perceived threat. Here, reduced to its most elementary contours, is the conservative view of our predicament, whose central feature is that "secular-progres­sive culture has swept away traditional beliefs":


To replace this loss of spirituality, millions of Europeans have embraced the secular concept of "relativism." According to this way of thinking, there is no absolute truth, no certain right and wrong. Everything is relative." What is wrong in my eyes might not be wrong in your eves. By this logic, even heinous acts can be explained, so they should not — in fact, they cannot—be condemned. In other words, no definite judg­ments about behavior should be made because there are always extenuating circumstances to justify not taking a stand,

The wide acceptance of relativism has rendered Europe weak, contused, and chaotic. Socialist or quasi-socialist governments now provide the necessities of life to their citizens, allowing many Europeans to live entirely within themselves. When that happens to a person, it is hard to rally him or her to a greater cause. Thus, nothing is worth lighting for outside of one's immediate well-being. The only creed is a belief in personal gratification.'50


How are we to unite this opposition (of traditionalism versus secular relativism) with the other great ideological opposition on which the entire legitimacy of the West and its "War on Terror" relies: the opposition between liberal-democratic individual rights and religious fundamental­ism embodied primarily in "Islamo-fascism"? Therein resides the symp­tomatic inconsistency of the US neoconscrvatives: while, in domestic politics, they privilege the fight against liberal secularism (abortion, gay marriages, and so on), that is, their struggle is the so-called "culture of life" against the "culture of death," in foreign affairs, they privilege the very opposite values of the liberal "culture of death." One way to resolve this dilemma is the hardline Christian fundamentalist solution, articulated in the works of Tim LaHaye et consortes: to unambiguously subordinate the second opposition to the first one. The title of one of I^aHaye's latest novels points in this direction: The Ettropa Conspiracy. In this account, the true enemy of the US is not Muslim terrorism, the latter is merely a puppet secretly manipulated by European secularists, who are the true forces of the Antichrist intent on weakening the US and establishing the New World Order under the domination of the United Nations. Op­posed to this minority view is the predominant liberal-democratic view which sees the principal enemy in all kinds of fundamentalisms, and perceives US Christian fundamentalism as a deplorable homegrown version of "Islamo-fascism."

The reactive nature ol religious fundamentalism is discernible in its hidden reflexive position. I^et us take a look at this reflexivity at its (artistic) highest, in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky himself, and not only the heroes of his (late) films, stands for the regained immediacy of authentic belief, as opposed to the Western intellectual's doubt and self-destructive distance. But what if the constellation is more complex? The ultimate figure of this direct belief is Stalker — to quote Tarkovsky himself:

I am often asked, what this Zone stands for. There is only one possible answer: the Zone doesn't exist. Stalker himself invented his Zone. He created it, so that he was able to bring there some very unhappy persons and impose on them the idea of hope. The room of desires is equally Stalker's creation, yet another provocation in the face of the material world. This provocation, formed in Stalker's mind, corre­sponds to an act of faith.36

What, however, if we take the claim that Stalker invented the Zone literally? What if Stalker, far from directly believing, manipulates, feigns belief, in order to fascinate the intellectuals he brings to the Zone, arousing in them the prospect of belief? What if, far from being a direct believer, he assumes the role of a subject supposed to believe for the eyes of the decadent intellectual observers? What if the truly naive position is that of the intellectual spectator, of his fascination with Stalker's naive belief? And what if the same goes for Tarkovsky himself, who — far from being the authentic Orthodox believer in contrast to Western skepti­cism—acts out this role in order to fascinate the Western intellectual public?37 John Cray is therefore right to say that "Religious fundamen­talists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure.

To put it in Nietzsche's terms: they are the ultimate nihilists, since the very form of their activity (spectacular medialic mobilization, and so forth) undermines their message. One of the first exponents of early literary modernism, Lautreamont (Isidore Ducasse), followed his pro­vocative ChanU of Maldoror with Poe'sieo, a weird reassertion of traditional morality. At the very beginning of artistic modernity, he thus stages its final paradoxical reversal; when all sources of transgression are ex­hausted, the only way to break out of the suffocating weariness of the Last Men is to propose traditional attitudes themselves as the ultimate transgression. And the same goes for our popular culture:


What will happen when we run out of new vices? How will satiety and idleness be staved off when designer sex, drugs and violence no longer sell? At that point, we may be sure, morality will come back into fashion. Wc may not be tar from a time when "morality" is marketed as a new brand of transgression.s9

One should be very precise here: this reversal is not the same as the one, described by Chesterton, in which morality itself appears as the greatest transgression, or law-and-order as the greatest (universalized) crime. Here, in contrast to Chesterton's model, the encompassing unity is not that of crime, but that of the law: it is not morality which is the greatest transgression, it is transgression which is the fundamental "moral" injunction of contemporary society. The true reversal should thus occur within this speculative identity of opposites, of morality' and its transgres­sion: all one has to do is to shift the encompassing unity' of these two terms from morality to transgression. And, since this encompassing unity has to appear as its opposite, we thus have to accomplish a shift from a society in which the Law rules —in the guise of a permanent transgression—to a society in which transgression rules — in the guise of a new I jaw."*"



Happy to torture?

This elevation of transgression itself into a moral injunction has a precise name: happiness as the supreme duty. No wonder that, over the last decade, the study of happiness emerged as a scientific discipline of its own: there are now "professors of happiness" at universities, "quality o( life" institutes attached to them, and numerous research papers; there is even the Journal of Happiness Studies. Ruut Veenhoven, its editor-in-chief, wrote:



We can now show which behaviors are risky as far as happiness goes, in the same way medical research has shown us what is bad for our health. We should eventually be able to show what kind of lifestyle suits what kind of person.41



This new discipline has two branches. On the one hand, there is a more sociological approach, based on data gathered from hundreds of surveys measuring happiness across different cultures, professions, religions, social and economic groups. One cannot reproach these researches for cultural bias: they are well aware of how the notion of what constitutes happiness depends on the cultural context (it is only in individualistic Western countries that happiness is seen as a reflection of personal achievement). One also cannot deny that the data collected are often interesting: happiness is not the same thing as satisfaction with one's life (several nations that report low or average life satisfaction at the same time report high percentages of very happy people); the happiest nations'—mostly Western and individualistic ones — tend to have the highest levels of suicide; and, of course, the key role of envy—what counts is not what you have so much as what others have (the middle classes are far less satisfied than the poor, for they take as their reference point the very wealthy, whose income and status they will be hard-pushed to match; the poor, meanwhile, take as their reference point the middle earners, who are more within their reach).

On the other hand, there is a more psychological (or, rather, brain-sciences) approach, combining cognitivist scientific research with occa­sional incursions into New Age meditation wisdom: the exact measuring of brain processes that accompany feelings of happiness and satisfaction, etc. The combination of cognitive science and Buddhism (which is not new—its last great proponent was Francisco Varela) is here given an ethical twist: what is offered in the guise of scientific research is a new morality that one is tempted to call biomomlity — the true counterpart to today's biopohtics. And indeed, was it not the Dalai Lama himself who wrote: "The purpose of life is to be happy"^^ —this is not true for psycho-analysi), one should add. In Kant's description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject's homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act "beyond the pleasure principle," ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a

realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic

, . . 43 superego injunction.

Consequently, if one sticks to the end to the "pleasure principle," it is difficult to abandon a radical conclusion. The artificial-intelligence philosopher Thomas Metzinger considers artificial subjectivity possible, especially in the direction of hybrid biorobotics, and, consequently, an empirical, not philosophical" issue.41* He emphasizes its ethically pro­blematic character: "it is not at all clear if the biological form of Consciousness, as so far brought about by evolution on our planet, is ^.desirable form of experience, an actual good in itself."4b This problematic feature concerns conscious pain and suffering: evolution



has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none. As not only the simple number of indivi­dual conscious subjects but also the dimensionality of their phenom­enal state spaces is continuously increasing, this ocean is also deepen-mg.



And it is reasonable to expect that new artificially generated forms of awareness will create new "deeper" forms of suffering . . . One should be careful to note how this ethical thesis is not an idiosyncrasy of Metzinger as a private person, but is a consistent implication of his theoretical framework: the moment one endorses the full naturalization of human subjectivity, the avoidance ol pain and suffering cannot but appear as the ultimate ethical point of reference. The only thing one should add to this is that, if one follows this line of reasoning to the end, drawing all the consequences from the fact that evolution "has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none," then one should also renounce human subjectivity itself: we would have had much less suffering if we had remained animals . . . and, to push it yet further, if animals had remained plants, if plants had remained single cells, if cells had remained minerals.

One of the great ironies of our predicament is that this same biomor-ality, focused on happiness and on preventing suffering, is today invoked as the underlying principle for the justification of torture: we should torture — impose pain and suffering—in order to prevent more suffering. One is truly tempted to paraphrase lie Quincey yet again: "How many people began with committing a little act of torture, and ended up embracing as their cause the fight against pain and suffering!" This definitely holds for Sam Harris whose defense of torture in The End of Vaitb is based on the distinction between our immediate state of being impressed by the suffering of others and our abstract notion of others suffering: it is much more difficult for us to torture a single person than to drop a bomb from a great distance which would cause the more painful death of thousands. We are thus all caught in a kind of ethical illusion, parallel to perceptual illusions. The ultimate cause of these illusions is that, although our power of abstract reasoning has developed immensely, our emotional-ethical responses remain conditioned by millennia-old instinctual reactions of sympathy to suffering and pain that is directly' witnessed. This is why shooting someone point-blank is, for most of us, much more repulsive than pressing a button that will kill a thousand absent persons:

Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before. The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. , . . It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky.47

No wonder that Harris refers to Alan Derschowitz and his legitimization of torture.48 In order to suspend this evolutionary conditioned vulner­ability to the physical display of others' suffering, Harris imagines an ideal "truth pill," an effective torture equivalent to decaffeinated coffee or diet coke:

a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour's nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Alight we not be tempted to call it a "truth pill" in the


The very first lines — "a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment" —introduces the typically postmodern logic of the chocolate laxative: the torture imagined here is like decaf coffee—we get the result without having to suffer unpleasant side effects. At the Serb sky Institute in Moscow, the already-mentioned psychiatric outlet of the KGB, they did invent just such a drug with which to torture dissidents: an injection into the prisoner's heart zone which slowed down his heart beat and caused terrifying anxiety. Viewed from the outside, the prisoner seemed just to be dozing, while in fact he was living a nightmare.

There is, however, a much more disquieting prospect at work here: the proximity (of the tortured subject) which causes sympathy and makes torture unacceptable is not his mere physical proximity, but, at its most fundamental, the proximity of the Neighbor, with all the Judeo-Chris-ttan-Freudian weight of this term, the proximity of the Thing which, no matter how far away it: is physically, is always by definition "too close."

What Harris is aiming at with his imagined, "truth pill" is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the Neighbor. The tortured subject is no longer a Neighbor, but an object whose pain is neutralized, reduced to a property that has to be dealt with in a rational utilitarian calculus (so much pain is tolerable il it prevents a much greater amount ol pain). What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject. It is thus significant that the booh which argues for torture is also a book entitled The End of Faith — not in the obvious sense of "You see, it is only our belief in God, the divine injunction to love your neighbor, that ultimately prevents us from torturing people I" but in a much more radical sense. Another subject (and, ultimately, the subject as such) is for Lacan not something directly given, but a "presupposition," something presumed, an object of belief—how can I ever be sure that what I see in front of me is another subject, not a biological machine lacking any depth?

There is, however, a popular and seemingly convincing reply to those who worry about the recent US practice of torturing suspected terrorist prisoners, ft is: "What's all the fuss about? The US are now only (half) openly admitting what not only they were doing all the tune, but what all other states are and were doing all the time — if anything, we have less hypocrisy now ..." To this, one should retort with a simple counter-question: "If the senior representatives of the US mean only this, why, then, are they telling us this? Why don't they just silently go on doing it, as they did up until now?" That is to say, what is proper to human speech is the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and its act of enunciation: "You say this, but why are you telling me it openly now?" Let us imagine a wife and husband who coexist with a tacit agreement that they can lead discreet extra-marital affairs; if, all of a sudden, the husband openly tells his wife about an ongoing affair, she will have good reason to be in panic: "If it is just an affair, why are you telling me this? It must be something more!"J° The act of publicly reporting on something is never neutral, it affects the reported content itself.

And the same goes for the recent open admission of torture: in November 2005, Vice-President Dick Cheney said that defeating terror­ists meant thai "we also have to work . . . sort of the dark side ... A lot ot what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion"—was he not talking like a reborn Kurtz? So when we hear people like Dick Cheney making their obscene statements about the necessity of torture, we should ask them: "If you just want to torture secretly some suspected terrorists, then why arc you saying it publicly?"

That is to say, the question to be raised is: what more is there hiding in this statement that made the speaker enunciate it?

We could note (more than) a hint of what there is when, in the middle of March 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession dominated the headlines of our media. Moral outrage at the extent of his crimes was mixed with doubts. Can his confession be trusted? What if he confessed even more than he did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist Mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop being subjected to water-boarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques"? What attracted much less atten­tion was the simple fact that, for the first time, torture was normalized, presented as something acceptable. The ethical and legal consequences of it are something to think about.

With all the outcry about the horror of Mohammed's crimes, very little was heard about the fate our societies reserve for the hardest criminals — to be judged and severely punished. It is as if, by the nature of his acts (and by the nature of the treatment to which he was submitted by the US authorities), Mohammed is not entitled to the same treatment as even the most depraved murderer of children, namely to be tried and punished accordingly. It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, hat also fight against them has to proceed in a grey zone of legality, using illegal means. We thus de facto have "legal" and "illegal" criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers etc.), and those who are outside legality. Mohammed's legal trial and punishment are now rendered meaning­less—no court which operates within the frames of our legal system can deal with illegal detentions, confessions obtained by torture, and so on.

This fact says more than it intends. It puts Mohammed almost literally into the position of the living dead, occupying the place oi what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer. legally-dead (deprived of a determinate legal status) while biologically still alive—and the US authorities which treat them in this way are also of an in-between status which forms the counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law—they operate in an empty- space that is sustained by the law, and yet not regulated by the rule of law.

So, back to the "realistic" counter-argument: the "War on Terror" is dirty, one is put in situations where the lives of thousands depend on '^formation we can get from our prisoners. (Incidentally, the torturing of -Mohammed was not a case of the "ticking-clock" situation evoked by the advocates of torture as the reason for its legitimization: Mohammed's confession saved no lives.) Against this kind of "honesty," one should stick to the apparent hypocrisy. 1 can well imagine that, in a very specific situation, 1 would resort to torture — however, in such a case, it is crucial that I do not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle. Following the unavoidable brutal urgency of the moment, I should simply (h d. Only in this way, in the very impossibility of elevating what I had to do into a universal principle, do I retain the proper sense of the horror of what I did.

In a way, those who, without outrighthy advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. iVlorality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It only thrives if it is sustained by what Hegel called "objective spirit," the set of unwritten rules which form the background ol every individual's activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. For example, the sign of progress in our societies is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is "dogmatically" clear to everyone that rape is wrong, and we all feel that even arguing against it is too much. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy ol rape, it would be a sad sign if one had to argue against him — he should simply appear ridiculous. And the same should hold tor torture.

This is why the greatest victims of publicly admitted torture are all of us, the public that is informed about it. We should all be aware that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization's greatest achievement, the growth ot our spon­taneous moral sensitivity.

Nowhere is this clearer than in a significant detail ol Mohammed's confession. It was reported that the agents torturing him submitted themselves to water-boarding and were able to endure it for only ten to fifteen seconds before being ready to confess anything and everything, while Mohammed gained their grudging admiration by enduring it lor two and a half minutes, the longest time anyone could remember someone resisting. Are we aware that the last lime such statements were part of public discourse was way back in the late Middle Ages when torture wras still a public spectacle, an honorable way to test a captured worthy enemy who gained the admiration of the crowd if he bore the pain with dignity? Do we really need this kind of primitive warrior ethics?



Are we, then, aware of what is at the end of this road? When, in the fifth season a(24, it became clear that the mastermind behind the terrorist plot was none other than the President of the US himself, many of us were eagerly waiting to see if Jack Bauer would also apply to the president — "the most powerful man on earth", "the leader of the free world" (and other Kim-Yong-II-esque titles that he possesses)—his standard procedure for dealing with terrorists who do not want to divulge a secret that may save thousands of lives. Will he torture the president?

Unfortunately, the authors did not risk this redeeming step. But our imagination can go even further, making a modest proposal in Jonathan Swift style: what it part of the procedure to test the candidates for the US presidency were also the public torture of the candidate? Say, a water-boarding of the candidates on the White House lawn, transmitted live to millions? Those qualified for the post of the leader of the free world would be those who could last longer than Mohammed's two and a half minutes.

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