SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence

Critique of Ethical Violence?

In one of his stories about Herr Keuner, Bertolt Brecht ruthlessly asserted the Platonic core of ethical violence: “Herr K. was asked: ‘What do you do when you love another man?’ ‘I make myself a sketch of him,’ said Herr K., ‘and I take care about the likeness.’ ‘Of the sketch?’ ‘No,’ said Herr K., ‘of the man.’”1 This radical stance is more than ever needed today, in our era of oversensitivity for “harassment” by the Other, when every ethical pressure is experienced as a false front of the violence of power. This “tolerant” attitude fails to perceive how contemporary power no longer primarily relies on censorship, but on unconstrained permissiveness, or, as Alain Badiou put it in thesis 14 of his “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art”: “Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become pitiless censors of ourselves.”²

Today, we seem effectively to be at the opposite point from the ideology of 1960s: the mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, and so on, are taken over by the System; in other words, the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channeling the subject’s spontaneous impetuses is left behind. Nonalienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all directly serve the system, which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics. Especially in the domain of poetic art, this means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying one’s innermost emotional turmoil, desires, and dreams. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with disgusting emotional exhibitionism—insofar as the standard notion of “poetic spirit” is the ability to display one’s intimate turmoil, what Vladimir Mayakovski said about himself with regard to his turn from personal poetry to political propaganda in verses (“I had to step on the throat of my Muse”) is the constitutive gesture of a true poet. If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene of a close friend opening up his heart, spilling out all the dirt of his inner life. Consequently, one should totally reject the standard opposition of “objective” science focused on reality and “subjective” art focused on emotional reaction to it and self-expression: if anything, true art is more asubjective than science. In science, I remain a person with my pathological features, I just assert objectivity outside it, while in true art, the artist has to undergo a radical self-objectivization, he has to die in and for himself, turn into a kind of living dead.3

Can one imagine a stronger contrast to today’s all-pervasive complaints about “ethical violence,” in other words, to the tendency to submit to criticism ethical injunctions that “terrorize” us with the brutal imposition of their universality. The (not so) secret model of this critique is an “ethics without violence,” freely (re)negotiated—the highest Cultural Critique meets here unexpectedly the lowest of pop psychology. John Gray, the author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, deployed in a series of Oprah Winfrey shows a vulgarized version of the narrativist-deconstructionist psychoanalysis: since we ultimately “are” the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, the solution to a psychic deadlock resides in a creative “positive” rewriting of the narrative of our past. What he had in mind is not only the standard cognitive therapy of changing negative “false beliefs” about oneself into a more positive attitude of the assurance that one is loved by others and capable of creative achievements, but a more “radical,” pseudo-Freudian notion of regressing back to the scene of the primordial traumatic wound. That is to say, Gray accepts the psychoanalytic notion of a hard kernel of some early childhood traumatic experience that forever marked the subject’s further development, giving it a pathological spin. What he proposes is that, after regressing to his primal traumatic scene and thus directly confronting it, the subject should, under the therapist’s guidance, “rewrite” this scene, this ultimate fantasmatic framework of his subjectivity, in a more “positive,” benign, and productive narrative. Say, if your primordial traumatic scene that insisted in your Unconscious, deforming and inhibiting your creative attitude, was that of your father shouting at you, “You are worthless! I despise you! Nothing will come out of you!” you should rewrite it into the new scene with a benevolent father kindly smiling at you and telling you, “You’re OK! I trust you fully!” (In one of the Oprah Winfrey shows, Gray directly enacted this rewriting-the-past experience with a woman who, at the end, gratefully embraced him, crying from happiness that she was no longer haunted by her father’s despising attitude toward her.) To play this game to the end, when the Wolf Man “regressed” to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development—witnessing the parental coitus a tergo—the solution would be to rewrite this scene, so that what the Wolf Man effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel? Ridiculous as this procedure may appear, let us not forget that it also has its politically correct version, that of the ethnic, sexual, and so on minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein (African-Americans claiming that long before European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology, etc.). Along the same lines, one can even imagine a rewriting of the Decalogue itself: is some command too severe? Let us regress to the scene on Mount Sinai and rewrite it: adultery—yes, if it is sincere and serves the goal of your profound self-realization. . . . What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subsequent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the “hard facts,” but the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in the subject’s psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting.

The ultimate irony is that this “critique of ethical violence” is sometimes even linked to the Nietzschean motif of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting their life-assertiveness: moral sensitivity, bad conscience, and guilt feeling are internalized resistances to the heroic assertion of Life. For Nietzsche, such “moral sensitivity” culminates in the contemporary Last Man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for “happiness” without stress, and who, for this very reason, rejects “cruel” imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance. No wonder, then, that the latest version of the critique of ethical violence was proposed by Judith Butler, whose last book,4 although it does not mention Badiou, is de facto a kind of anti-Badiou manifesto: hers is an ethics of finitude, of making a virtue out of our very weakness, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility. The question one should ask concerns the limits of this operation.

Butler’s elementary move is the standard Derridean turn from condition of impossibility to condition of possibility: the fact that a human subject is constrained in its autonomy, thrown into a pregiven complex situation which remains impenetrable to him and for which he is not fully accountable, is simultaneously the condition of possibility of moral activity, what makes moral activity meaningful, since we can be responsible for others only insofar as they (and we) are constrained and thrown into an impenetrable situation. (The paradox is that Butler, who is generally anti-Lacanian, reproaching Lacan for not allowing for change, is here asserting the inertia of human existence—against Lacan, who allows for a much stronger subjective intervention.) Butler describes how, in every narrative account of myself, I have to submit myself to the foreign temporality of my language tradition and thus have to accept my radical decenterment. The irony of this description is that Butler, the sharp critic of Lacan, renders here (a somewhat simplified version of) what Lacan calls “symbolic castration,” the subject’s constitutive alienation in the decentered symbolic order. Is, then, the subject totally determined by the signifying structure, or does it dispose of a margin of freedom? In order to account for this resistance to the rule of symbolic norms, Butler turns to Foucault: norms rule only insofar as they are practiced by subjects, and the subject disposes here of a minimum of freedom to arrange itself with these norms, to subvert them, to (re)inscribe them in different modes, and so on. Lacan, on the contrary, allows for a much stronger subjective autonomy: insofar as the subject occupies the place of the lack in the Other (symbolic order), it can perform separation (the operation which is the opposite of alienation), and suspend the reign of the big Other, in other words, separate itself from it.

The impossibility of fully accounting for oneself is conditioned by the irreducible intersubjective context of every narrative reconstitution: when I reconstruct my life in a narrative, I always do it within a certain intersubjective context, answering the Other’s call-injunction, addressing the Other in a certain way. This background, including the (unconscious) motivations and libidinal investments of my narrative, cannot ever be rendered fully transparent within the narrative. To fully account for oneself in a symbolic narrative is a priori impossible; the Socratic injunction, “know thyself,” is impossible to fulfill for a priori structural reasons. My very status as a subject depends on its links to the substantial Other: not only the regulative-symbolic Other of the tradition in which I am embedded, but also the bodily-desiring substance of the Other, the fact that, in the core of my being, I am irreducibly vulnerable, exposed to the Other(s). And far from limiting my ethical status (autonomy), this primordial vulnerability due to my constitutive exposure to the Other grounds it: what makes an individual human and thus something for which we are responsible, toward whom we have a duty to help, is his/her very finitude and vulnerability. Far from undermining ethics (in the sense of rendering me ultimately nonresponsible: “I am not a master of myself, what I do is conditioned by forces that overwhelm me.”), this primordial exposure/dependency opens up the properly ethical relation of individuals who accept and respect each other’s vulnerability and limitation. Crucial here is the link between the impenetrability of the Other and my own impenetrability to myself: they are linked because my own being is grounded in the primordial exposure to the Other. Confronted with the Other, I never can fully account for myself. And when Butler emphasizes how one should not close oneself off to this exposure to the Other, how one should not try to transpose the unwilled into something willed (KEG, 100), is she not thereby opposing the very core of Nietzsche’s thought, the stance of willing the eternal return of the Same, which involves precisely the transposition of everything unwilled, everything we are thrown into as given, into something Willed?

The first ethical gesture is thus to abandon the position of absolute self-positing subjectivity and to acknowledge one’s exposure/thrownness, being overwhelmed by Other(ness): far from limiting our humanity, this limitation is its positive condition. This awareness of limitation implies a stance of fundamental forgiveness and a tolerant “live and let live” attitude: I will never be able to account for myself in front of the Other, because I am already nontransparent to myself, and I will never get from the Other a full answer to “who are you?” because the Other is a mystery also for him/herself. To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (“I recognize you as . . . rational, good, lovable”), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable.

Butler’s central “Hegelian” reflexive turn here is that it is not only that the subject has to adopt a stance toward the norms that regulate his activity—these norms in their turn determine who and what is or is not recognized as subject. Relying on Foucault, Butler thus formulates the basic feature of critical tradition: when one criticizes and judges phenomena on behalf of norms, one should in the same gesture question the status of these norms. Say, when one holds something to be (un)true, one should at the same time question the criteria of “holding something to be true,” which are never abstract and ahistorical, but always part of a concrete context into which we are thrown. This move, of course, is the elementary Hegelian move formulated in the introduction to the Phenomenology: testing is always minimally self-relating and reflexive, in other words, when I am testing the truth of a statement or an act, I am always also testing the standard of testing, so that if the test fails, the standard of success or failure should also be problematized.

This reference to Hegel is mediated by Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s idealism, a critique which Butler submits to critical reading.5 When Adorno claims that “the true injustice is always located at the place from which one blindly posits oneself as just and the other as unjust” (KEG, 251), does he thereby not basically repeat Hegel’s old argument about the Beautiful Soul: “The true Evil is the very gaze which sees evil all around itself”? Recall the arrogance of many West Germans in 1990, when they condemned the majority of East Germans as moral weaklings corrupted by the Communist police regime—this very gaze which saw in East Germans moral corruption was corruption itself. (Symptomatically, although many DDR files were opened to the public, the ones that remained secret are the files recording contact between East German and West German politicians—too much West sycophancy would be revealed here.)

The limit of such a reference to the impenetrable background into which we are thrown and on account of which we cannot be taken as fully accountable and responsible for our acts is the negativity of freedom: even when the entire positive content of my psyche is ultimately impenetrable, the margin of my freedom is that I can say No! to any positive element that I encounter. This negativity of freedom provides the zero-level from which every positive content can be questioned. Lacan’s position is thus that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical autonomy. Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do is, in an act of negativity, “cleanse the plate,” draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a “suicidal” gesture of a radical act—what Freud called “death drive” and what German Idealism called “radical negativity.”

What gets lost in this “critique of ethical violence” is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy. Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic—in short, as an impossible/real Thing that “makes the law.” What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious-ideological interpellation—the pronouncement of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai—is the very opposite of something that emerges “organically” as the outcome of the path of self-knowing and self-realization: the pronouncement of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest. The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment, and the cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor: far from brutally disturbing a preceding harmonious social interaction, the imposition of the Law endeavors to introduce a minimum of regulation onto a stressful “impossible” relationship. When the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing. In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization (like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalizations-projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor—the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the Other’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the Other itself.6 For this reason, the Lacanian “Che vuoi?” is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?”—in Serb, there is a vulgar expression which perfectly renders this meaning: when somebody is getting on one’s nerves, one asks him, “What for a prick is fucking you? [Koji kurac te jebe?]”

It is against this background that one should approach the topic of iconoclasm. The Jewish commandment which prohibits images of God is the obverse of the statement that relating to one’s neighbor is the only terrain of religious practice, of where the divine dimension is present in our lives—“no images of God” does not point toward a Gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality, a divine which is beyond any image; on the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta: you want to be religious? OK, prove it here, in the “works of love,” in the way you relate to your neighbors. Levinas was therefore right to emphasize how “nothing is more opposed to a relation with the face than ‘contact’ with the Irrational and mystery.”⁷ Judaism is anti-Gnosticism par excellence. We have here a nice case of the Hegelian reversal of reflexive determination into determinate reflection: instead of saying “God is love,” we should say “love is divine” (and, of course, the point is not to conceive of this reversal as the standard humanist platitude). It is for this precise reason that Christianity, far from standing for a regression toward an image of God, only draws the consequence of the Jewish iconoclasm through asserting the identity of God and man—or, as it is said in John 4:12: “No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” The radical conclusion to be drawn from this is that one should renounce striving for one’s own (spiritual) salvation as the highest form of egotism. According to Leon Brunschvicg, therein resides the most elementary ethical lesson of the West against Eastern spirituality: “The preoccupation with our salvation is a remnant of self-love, a trace of natural egocentrism from which we must be torn by the religious life. As long as you think only salvation, you turn your back on God. God is God, only for the person who overcomes the temptation to degrade Him and use Him for his own ends.”8 This is, in theological terms, the extreme of “pitiless censorship” Badiou talks about, and it is only through such a censorship that the dimension of what one is tempted to call ethical transcendence opens itself up.

Smashing the Neighbor’s Face

How does subjectivity relate to transcendence? There seem to be two basic modes exemplified by the names of Jean-Paul Sartre and Levinas. (1) The “transcendence of the ego” (Sartre), in other words, the notion of subject as the force of negativity, self-transcending, never a positive entity identical to itself. (2) The existence of the subject as grounded in its openness to an irreducible-unfathomable-transcendent Otherness—there is a subject only insofar as it is not absolute and self-grounded but remains in a tension with an impenetrable Other; there is freedom only through the reference to a gap which makes the Other unfathomable (according to Manfred Frank and others, this is what Hölderlin, Novalis, Schelling, etc., knew in their critique of idealism⁹). As expected, Hegel offers a kind of “mediation” between these two extremes, asserting their ultimate identity. It is not only that the core of subjectivity is inaccessible to the subject, that the subject is decentered with regard to itself, that it cannot assume the abyss in its very center; it is also not that the first mode is the “truth” of the second (in a reflexive twist, the subject has to acknowledge that the transcendent power which resists it is really its own, the power of subject itself), or vice versa (the subject emerges only as confronted with the abyss of the Other). This seems to be the lesson of Hegel’s intersubjectivity—I am a free subject only through encountering another free subject—and the usual counterargument is here that, for Hegel, this dependence on the Other is just a mediating step/detour on the way toward full recognition of the subject in its Other, the full appropriation of the Other. But are things so simple? What if the Hegelian “recognition” means that I have to recognize in the impenetrable Other which appears as the obstacle to my freedom its positive-enabling ground and condition? What if it is only in this sense is that the Other is “sublated”?

The topic of the “other” is to be submitted to a kind of spectral analysis that renders visible its imaginary, symbolic, and real aspects—it provides perhaps the ultimate case of the Lacanian notion of the “Borromean knot” that unites these three dimensions. First, there is the imaginary other—other people “like me,” my fellow human beings with whom I am engaged in the mirrorlike relationships of competition, mutual recognition, and so forth. Then, there is the symbolic “big Other”—the “substance” of our social existence, the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our coexistence. Finally, there is the Other qua Real, the impossible Thing, the “inhuman partner,” the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible. And it is crucial to perceive how these three dimensions are hooked up. The neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the Thing means that, beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be “gentrified.” In his seminar 3, Lacan already indicates this dimension:

And why “the Other” with a capital O? For a no doubt mad reason, in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. Here the mad reason is the following. You are my wife—after all, what do you know about it? You are my master—in reality, are you so sure of that? What creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message, as well as what is manifest in the pretence, is that the other is there qua absolute Other. Absolute, that is to say he is recognized, but is not known. In the same way, what constitutes pretence is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s a pretence or not. Essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which characterizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other.10

Lacan’s notion, from the early 1950s, of the “founding word,” of the statement which confers on you a symbolic title and thus makes you what you are (wife, master), is usually perceived as an echo of the theory of performative speech acts (the link between Lacan and J. L. Austin, the author of the notion of the performative, was Emile Benveniste). However, it is clear from the above quote that Lacan aims at something more: we need the recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and only insofar as the other whom we encounter is not only the imaginary semblant, but also the elusive absolute Other of the Real Thing with whom no reciprocal exchange is possible. In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a “normal human fellow” cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves—there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order. So no axis between the two terms can subsist without the third one: if the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone); if there is no neighbor to whom I can relate as a human partner, the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing which directly parasitizes upon me (like Daniel Paul Schreber’s God who directly controls me, penetrating me with the rays of jouissance). If there is no Thing to underpin our everyday symbolically regulated exchange with others, we find ourselves in a Habermasian “flat,” aseptic universe in which subjects are deprived of their hubris of excessive passion, reduced to lifeless pawns in the regulated game of communication.

More precisely, one can distinguish three stages in Levinas’s account of the emergence of the Ethical. The subject emerges as an ego by way of appropriating alterity through labor and possession, thereby creating a realm of familiarity in which he can dwell—such a domesticated Other with whom I can share a home is for Levinas the “feminine Other” (one can, of course, raise here the question of what happens with the nonfamiliar, properly uncanny, dimension of femininity). After this first “alienation” in an established particular life-form comes the separation from my familiar world: when I am addressed by the absolutely Other beyond my world, I am shattered from the complacency of my life-world, and, in answering this address, I have to renounce my egotism and the safety of my Home (of what Peter Sloterdijk calls my “Sphere”11). This call is not an empirical spatiotemporal event, but rather a kind of ethical transcendental a priori—it does not happen to (a preexisting) me, it makes me into a subject, and, as such, it always-already happens, in a past which never was present: “This summons, as always having taken place no matter what actual response I make, is without limit, infinite, and so summons me to infinite responsibility for the Other. Such a summons can only come from ‘an absolutely heteronomous call,’ one which commands me, and so comes from a height, and before which I am absolutely responsible, unable to be replaced by anyone else.”¹²

My elementary situation is thus that of an eternal struggle against myself: I am forever split between egotistic rootedness in a particular familiar world around which my life gravitates and the unconditional call of responsibility for the Other: “The I which arises in enjoyment as a separated being, and has in itself the center around which its existence gravitates, is only confirmed in its singularity when it purges itself of this gravitation; and since the I’s roots in separation are ineradicable, this process of purging is interminable.”13 (Would this version of what Badiou calls “pitiless censorship of oneself” not make the heart of every Stalinist lover of purges beat with joy?) The entire domain of laws and universality is grounded in this responsibility to and for the nonfamiliar Other: I enter the domain of justice and universal laws when I renounce my small world and its possessions and offer to see things from the standpoint of the Other. Concepts and their universality are thus grounded in my responsibility to the Other—ethics preexists and grounds ontology. In this domain of justice and laws, we are always dealing with a “third party,” the multitude of empirical others, which raises the problem of justice, of rules of how to treat them, and thus compels us to “compare the incomparable”: “The notions through which that prior structure has been articulated become through the command to justice the more familiar concepts of the structure of rationality: the infinite responsibility of the I for the Other becomes co-existence concretized as responsibilities in an historical world.”¹⁴

The difference between this Levinasian account and Kierkegaard is crucial; it is not only that Levinas’s account remains a philosophical one, a “transcendental” turn toward what is always-already here as the condition of possibility of ethics (the ethical call which precedes all empirical encounters of others), while Kierkegaard is dealing with decisions, “leaps of faith” into a New. More radically, perhaps, for Levinas, the Other who addresses me with the unconditional call and thus constitutes me as an ethical subject is—in spite of the fact that this is an absolutely heteronomous call which commands me and so comes from a height—the human other, the face, the transcendental form of neighbor as radical Other, while, for Kierkegaard, God does not mediate between me and my neighbors. God is the primordial Other itself, so that all neighbors, all “empirical” others with whom I interact, are primordially figures of the third, a “third party.” It is for this reason that there is no place, in Levinas’s edifice, for the Kierkegaardian theological suspension of the ethical. The paradox is that it is precisely because Levinas asserts the relation to my neighbor, my unconditional responsibility for him, as the true terrain of ethical activity that he still has to cling to an “impersonal” God (God is for him, ultimately, the name for the Law itself that enjoins me to love my neighbor), while Kierkegaard, because he asserts the gap between my direct responsibility to God and my love for (human) neighbors (the gap which becomes palpable in the case of Abraham and Isaac), has to endorse the Christian dogma of Incarnation, of positing God Himself as identical to a man like others (Christ). And it is from here that one should approach the key Levinasian notion of encountering the other’s face as the epiphany, as the event that precedes Truth itself: “To seek truth, I have already established a relationship with a face which can guarantee itself, whose epiphany itself is somehow a word of honor. Every language as an exchange of verbal signs refers already to this primordial word of honor. . . . deceit and veracity already presuppose the absolute authenticity of the face.”15

One should read these lines against the background of the circular, self-referential, character of the Lacanian “big Other,” the symbolic “substance” of our being, which is perhaps best rendered by Donald Davidson’s “holistic” claim that “our only evidence for a belief is other beliefs. . . . And since no belief is self-certifying, none can supply a certain basis for the rest.”¹⁶ Far from functioning as the “fatal flaw” of the symbolic order, this circularity is the very condition of its effective functioning. So when Levinas claims that a face “can guarantee itself,” this means that it serves as the nonlinguistic point of reference that also enables us to break the vicious circularity of the symbolic order, providing it with the ultimate foundation, the “absolute authenticity.” The face is thus the ultimate fetish, the object which fills in (obfuscates) the big Other’s “castration” (inconsistency, lack), the abyss of its circularity. At a different level, this fetishization—or, rather, fetishist disavowal—is discernible also in our daily relating to another person’s face. This disavowal does not primarily concern the raw reality of flesh (“I know very well that beneath the face there is just the Real of the raw flesh, bones, and blood, but I nonetheless act as if the face is a window into the mysterious interiority on the soul”), but rather, at a more radical level, the abyss/void of the Other: the human face “gentrifies” the terrifying Thing that is the ultimate reality of our neighbor. And insofar as the void called “the subject of the signifier” ($) is strictly correlative to this inconsistency (lack) of the Other, subject and face are to be opposed: the Event of encountering the other’s face is not the experience of the abyss of the other’s subjectivity—the only way to arrive at this experience is through defacement in all its dimensions, from a simple tic or grimace that disfigures the face (in this sense, Lacan claims that the Real is “the grimace of reality”) up to the monstrosity of the total loss of face. Perhaps the key moment in Jerry Lewis’s films occurs when the idiot he plays is compelled to become aware of the havoc his behavior has caused: at this moment, when he is stared at by all the people around him, unable to sustain their gaze, he engages in his unique mode of making faces, of ridiculously disfiguring his facial expression, combined with twisting his hands and rolling his eyes. This desperate attempt of the ashamed subject to efface his presence, to erase himself from others’ view, combined with the endeavor to assume a new face more acceptable to the environs, is subjectivization at its purest.

So what is shame, this experience of “losing one’s face”? In the standard Sartrean version, the subject, in his “For-Itself,” is ashamed of the “In-Itself,” of the stupid Real of his bodily identity: am I really that, this bad smelling body, these nails, these excrements? In short, “shame” designates the fact that “spirit” is directly linked to the inert vulgar bodily reality—which is why it is shameful to defecate in public. However, Lacan’s counterargument is here that shame by definition concerns fantasy. Shame is not simply passivity, but an actively assumed passivity: if I am raped, I have nothing to be ashamed of; but if I enjoy being raped, then I deserve to feel ashamed. Actively assuming passivity thus means, in Lacanian terms, finding jouissance in the passive situation in which one is caught. And since the coordinates of jouissance are ultimately those of the fundamental fantasy, which is the fantasy of (finding jouissance in) being put in the passive position (like the Freudian “My father is beating me”), what exposes the subject to shame is not the disclosure of how he is put in the passive position, treated only as the body. Shame emerges only when such a passive position in social reality touches upon the (disavowed intimate) fantasy. Let us take two women, the first, liberated and assertive, active; the other, secretly daydreaming about being brutally handled by her partner, even raped. The crucial point is that, if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second one, on account of the fact that it will realize in “external” social reality the “stuff of her dreams.” Why? There is a gap which forever separates the fantasmatic kernel of the subject’s being from the more “superficial” modes of his or her symbolic and/or imaginary identifications—it is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being. When I approach it too closely, what occurs is the aphanisis of the subject: the subject loses his or her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates. And the forced actualization in social reality itself of the fantasmatic kernel of my being is, perhaps, the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence which undermines the very basis of my identity (of my “self-image”) by exposing me to an unbearable shame.

We can clearly see, now, how far psychoanalysis is from any defense of the dignity of the human face. Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public (to the analyst, who stands for the big Other) one’s most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one’s face in the most radical sense of the term? This is already the lesson of the very material dispositif of the psychoanalytic treatment: no face-to-face between the subject-patient and the analyst; instead, the subject lying and the analyst sitting behind him, both staring into the same void in front of them. There is no “intersubjectivity” here, only the two without face-to-face, the First and the Third.

How, then, do the law, courts, judgments, institutions, and so on enter? Levinas’s answer is: by way of the presence of the third. When face to face with the other, I am infinitely responsible to him. This is the original ethical constellation. There is always a third one, however, and from that moment new questions arise: How does my neighbor whom I face relate to this Third? Is he the Third’s friend or his foe or even his victim? Who, of the two, is my true neighbor in the first place? All this compels me to compare the infinites that cannot be compared, to limit the absolute priority of the other, to start to calculate the incalculable. However, what is important for Levinas is that this kind of legal relationship, necessary as it is, remains grounded in the primordial ethical relationship to the other.17 The responsibility for the other—the subject as the response to the infinite call embodied in the other’s face, a face that is simultaneously helpless, vulnerable, and issuing an unconditional command—is, for Levinas, asymmetrical and nonreciprocal: I am responsible for the other without having any right to claim that the other should display the same responsibility for me. Levinas likes to quote Fyodor Dostoyevsky here: “We are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others.” The ethical asymmetry between me and the other addressing me with the infinite call is the primordial fact, and “I” should never lose my grounding in this irreducibly first-person relationship to the other, which should go to extremes, if necessary. I should be ready to take responsibility for the other up to taking his place, up to becoming a hostage for him: “Subjectivity as such is primordially a hostage, responsible to the extent that it becomes the sacrifice for others” (DF, 98). This is how Levinas defines the “reconciliatory sacrifice”: a gesture by means of which the Same as the hostage take the place of (replaces) the Other. Is this gesture of “reconciliatory sacrifice,” however, not Christ’s gesture par excellence? Was He not the hostage who took the place of all of us and, therefore, exemplarily human (“ecce homo”)?

Far from preaching an easy grounding of politics in the ethics of the respect and responsibility for the Other, Levinas instead insists on their absolute incompatibility, on the gap separating the two dimensions: ethics involves an asymmetric relationship in which I am always-already responsible for the Other, while politics is the domain of symmetrical equality and distributive justice. However, is this solution not all too neat? That is to say, is such a notion of politics not already “postpolitical,” excluding the properly political dimension (on account of which, for Hannah Arendt, tyranny is politics at its purest), in short, excluding precisely the dimension of what Carl Schmitt called political theology? One is tempted to say that, far from being reducible to the symmetric domain of equality and distributive justice, politics is the very “impossible” link between this domain and that of (theological) ethics, the way ethics cuts across the symmetry of equal relations, distorting and displacing them.

In his Ethics and Infinity, Levinas emphasizes how what appears as the most natural should become the most questionable—like Spinoza’s notion that every entity naturally strives for its self-perseverance, for the full assertion of its being and its immanent powers: Do I have (the right) to be? By insisting on being, do I deprive others of their place, do I ultimately kill them?18 (Although Levinas dismisses Freud as irrelevant for his radical ethical problematic, was Freud also in his own way not aware of it? Is “death drive” at its most elementary not the sabotaging of one’s own striving to be, to actualize one’s powers and potentials? And for that very reason, is not death drive the last support of ethics?) What one should fully acknowledge and endorse is that this stance of Levinas is radically antibiopolitical. Levinasian ethics is the absolute opposite of today’s biopolitics, with its emphasis on regulating life and deploying its potentials. For Levinas, ethics is not about life, but about something more than life. It is at this level that Levinas locates the gap that separates Judaism and Christianity—Judaism’s fundamental ethical task is that of how “to be without being a murderer”:

If Judaism is attached to the here below, it is not because it does not have the imagination to conceive of a supernatural order, or because matter represents some sort of absolute for it; but because the first light of conscience is lit for it on the path that leads from man to his neighbor. What is an individual, a solitary individual, if not a tree that grows without regard for everything it suppresses and breaks, grabbing all the nourishment, air and sun, a being that is fully justified in its nature and its being? What is an individual, if not a usurper? What is signified by the advent of conscience, and even the first spark of spirit, if not the discovery of corpses beside me and my horror of existing by assassination? Attention to others and, consequently, the possibility of counting myself among them, of judging myself—conscience is justice. (DF, 100)

In contrast to this admission of terrestrial life as the very terrain of our ethical activity, Christianity simultaneously goes too far and not far enough: it believes that it is possible to overcome this horizon of finitude, to enter collectively a blessed state, to “move mountains by faith” and realize a utopia; and it immediately transposes the place of this blessed state into an Elsewhere, which then propels it to declare our terrestrial life of ultimately secondary importance and to reach a compromise with the masters of this world, giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. The link between spiritual salvation and worldly justice is cut short.

Along these Levinasian lines, Jean-Claude Milner recently elaborated the notion of “Jews” in the European ideological imaginary as the obstacle that prevents unification and peace, that has to be annihilated for Europe to unite, which is why Jews are always a “problem/question” demanding a “solution”—Hitler is merely the most radical point of this tradition.19 No wonder that the European Union is getting more and more anti-Semitic in its blatantly biased criticism of Israel. The very concept of Europe is tainted with anti-Semitism, which is why the first duty of Jews is to “get rid of Europe,” not by ignoring it (only the United States can afford to do that), but by bringing to light the dark underside of European Enlightenment and democracy. The truly problematic part of Milner’s argument concerns his “Lacanian” grounding of this notion of anti-Semitism inscribed into the very European identity: the European dream is that of parousia (Greek and Christian), of a full jouissance beyond Law, unencumbered by any obstacles or prohibitions. Modernity itself is propelled by a desire to move beyond Laws to a self-regulated, transparent social body; the last installment of this saga, today’s postmodern, neopagan Gnosticism, perceives reality as fully malleable, enabling humans to transform themselves into a migrating entity floating between a multitude of realities, sustained only by infinite Love. Against this tradition, Jews, in a radically antimillenarian way, persist in their fidelity to the Law. They insist on the insurmountable finitude of humans and, consequently, on the need for a minimum of “alienation,” which is why they are perceived as an obstacle by everyone bent on a “final solution.” The weakness of Milner’s argument is obvious: Is one of the key roots of European modernity not the tradition of secularized Judaism? Is arguably the ultimate formulation of a “full jouissance beyond Law” not found in Spinoza, in his notion of the third, highest, level of knowing? Is the idea of modern, “total” political revolution not rooted in Jewish messianism, as Walter Benjamin, among others, made it clear? Furthermore, is all we find beyond the Law really only the dream of a full jouissance? Is not the fundamental insight of the late Lacan precisely that there is an inherent obstacle to full jouissance operative already in the drive which functions beyond the Law? The inherent “obstacle” on account of which a drive involves a curved space, gets caught in a repetitive movement around its object, is not yet “symbolic castration.” For the late Lacan, on the contrary, Prohibition, far from standing for a traumatic cut, enters precisely in order to pacify the situation, to rid us of the inherent impossibility inscribed in the functioning of a drive.

Blut ohne Boden, Boden ohne Blut

The determination of Judaism as the religion of the Law is to be taken literally: it is the Law at its purest, deprived of its obscene superego supplement. Recall the traditional obscene figure of the father who officially prohibits his son casual sex, while the message between the lines is to solicit him to engage in sexual conquests—prohibition is here uttered in order to provoke its transgression. And, with regard to this point, Paul was wrong in his description of the Law as that which solicits its own violation—wrong insofar as he attributed this notion of the Law to Jews: the miracle of the Jewish prohibition is that it effectively is just a prohibition, with no obscene message between the lines. It is precisely because of this that Jews can look for the ways to get what they want while literally obeying the prohibition. Far from displaying their casuistry and externally manipulative relationship to the Law, this procedure rather bears witness to the direct and literal attachment to the Law. And it is in this sense that the position of the analyst is grounded in Judaism. Recall Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master,” in which Paul Overt, a young novelist, meets Henry St. George, his great literary master, who advises him to stay single, since a wife is not an inspiration but a hindrance. When Paul asks St. George if there are no women who would “really understand—who can take part in a sacrifice,” the answer he gets is: “How can they take part? They themselves are the sacrifice. They’re the idol and the altar and the flame.” Paul follows St. George’s advice and renounces the young Marian, whom he passionately loves. However, after returning to London from a trip to Europe, Paul learns that, after the sudden death of his wife, St. George himself is about to marry Marian. After Paul accuses St. George of shameful conduct, the older man says that his advice was right: he will not write again, but Paul will achieve greatness. Far from displaying cynical wisdom, St. George acts as a true analyst, as the one who is not afraid to profit from his ethical choices, in other words, as the one who is able to break the vicious cycle of ethics and sacrifice.

It is possible to break this vicious cycle precisely insofar as one escapes the hold of the superego injunction to enjoy. Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented him or her the access to “normal” sexual enjoyment. Today, however, when we are bombarded from all sides by the different versions of the superego injunction “Enjoy!”—from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening—one should move to a more radical level: psychoanalysis is today the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy (as opposed to “not allowed to enjoy”). (And, from this vantage point, it becomes retroactively clear how the traditional prohibition to enjoy was sustained by the implicit opposite injunction.) This notion of a Law that is not sustained by a superego supplement involves a radically new notion of society—a society no longer grounded in shared common roots:

Every word is an uprooting. The constitution of a real society is an uprooting—the end of an existence in which the “being-at-home” is absolute, and everything comes from within. Paganism is putting down roots. . . . The advent of the scriptures is not the subordination of the spirit to a letter, but the substitution of the letter to the soil. The spirit is free within the letter, and it is enslaved within the root. It is on the arid soil of the desert, where nothing is fixed, that the true spirit descended into a text in order to be universally fulfilled.

Paganism is the local spirit: nationalism in terms of its cruelty and pitilessness. . . . A humanity with roots that possesses God inwardly, with the sap rising from the earth, is a forest or prehuman humanity. . . .

A history in which the idea of a universal God must only be fulfilled requires a beginning. It requires an elite. It is not through pride that Israel feels it has been chosen. It has not obtained this through grace. Each time the peoples are judged, Israel is judged. . . . It is because the universality of the Divine exists only in the form in which it is fulfilled in the relations between men, and because it must be fulfillment and expansion, that the category of a privileged civilization exists in the economy of Creation. This civilization is defined in terms not of prerogatives, but of responsibilities. Every person, as a person—that is to say, one conscious of his freedom—is chosen. If being chosen takes on a national appearance, it is because only in this form can a civilization be constituted, be maintained, be transmitted, and endure. (DF, 137–38)

We are so used to the syntagm Blut und Boden that we tend to forget the split signaled by the und, in other words, the fact that the relationship between the two is that of what Gilles Deleuze called “disjunctive synthesis”—what better proof than Jews themselves, who are precisely the people of Blut ohne Boden, supplementing the lack of land with the excessive investment into blood relations? It is as if the first and foremost effect of migration is to foreground even more the blood relations, thus violating the basic territorial definition of a modern state. The member of a state is defined not by his or her “blood” (ethnic identity) but by being fully acknowledged as residing in the state’s territory. And the state’s unity was historically established by the violent erasure of local blood links. In this sense, the modern state is the outcome of an “inner migration,” of the transubstantiation of one’s identity: even if, physically, one does not change one’s dwelling, one is deprived of a particular identity with its local color—or, to put it again in Deleuze’s terms, a state’s territory is by definition that of a reterritorialized deterritorialization. And, perhaps, as was made clear in Fascism, violence explodes precisely when one tries to deny the gap and bring together the two dimensions of blood and soil into a harmonious unity. This bringing-together accounts for the “innocent” tautological formulas of today’s neoracists: le Pen’s entire program can be summed up in “France to the French!” (and this allows us to generate further formulas: “Germany to Germans!” etc.)—“We do not want anything foreign. We want only what is ours!” (to put it in more pathetic terms, the ultimate counterargument of a nationalist is the disarming question “Is it a crime to love one’s country?”).

Jews are constituted by the lack of land, of territory—however, this lack is reinscribed into an absolute longing (“Next year in Jerusalem!”). What about an unconditional uprooting, renunciation of territory? In other words, does the Jewish identity not involve the paradox of the being-uprooted itself functioning as the foundation of ethnic roots and identity?20 Is there not, consequently, the next step to be accomplished, namely, that of forming a collective which no longer relies on an ethnic identity, but is in its very core the collective of a struggling universality? Levinas is right in locating Jewish universalism in their very nonproselyte stance: Jews do not try to convert all others to Judaism, to impose their particular religious form onto all others; they just stubbornly cling to this form. The true universalism is thus, paradoxically, this very refusal to impose one’s message on all others—in such a way, the wealth of the particular content in which the universal consists is asserted, while all others are left to be in their particular ways of life. However, this stance nonetheless involves its own limitation: it reserves for itself a privileged position of a singularity with a direct access to the universal. All people participate in the universality, but Jews are “more universal than others”: “The Jewish faith involves tolerance because, from the beginning, it bears the entire weight of all other men” (DF, 173). The Jewish man’s burden. . . . In other words, insofar as Jews are absolutely responsible, responsible for all of us, at a meta or reflexive level, are we not all doubly responsible to the Jews? Or, in an inverted way, if they are responsible for all of us, isn’t the way to get rid of our responsibility to annihilate them (those who condense our responsibility)?²¹ What is still missing here is the notion (and practice) of antagonistic universality, of the universality as struggle which cuts across the entire social body, of universality as a partial, engaged position.

The relationship between Judaism as a formal, “spiritual” structure and Jews as its empirical bearers is difficult to conceptualize. The problem is how to avoid the deadlock of the dilemma: either Jews are privileged as an empirical group (which means their spirituality, inaccessible to others, is also ultimately of no relevance to them), or Jews are a contingent bearer of a universal structure. In this second case, the dangerous conclusion is at hand that, precisely in order to isolate and assert this formal structure, the “principle” of Jewishness, one has to eliminate, erase, the “empirical” Jews. Furthermore, the problem with those who emphasize how Jews are not simply a nation or an ethnic group like others and side by side with others is that, in this very claim, they define Jews in contrast to other “normal” groups, as their constitutive exception.

The standard humanist-humanitarian answer to Levinas’s ethic of radical responsibility would have been that one can truly love others only if one loves oneself. However, at a more radical level, is there not something inherently false in such a link between the responsibility for/to the other and questioning one’s own right to exist? Although Levinas asserts this asymmetry as universal (every one of us is in the position of primordial responsibility toward others), does this asymmetry not effectively end up in privileging one particular group that assumes responsibility for all others, that embodies in a privileged way this responsibility, directly stands for it—in this case, of course, Jews, so that, again, one is ironically tempted to speak of the “Jewish man’s (ethical) burden”: “The idea of a chosen people must not be taken as a sign of pride. It does not involve being aware of exceptional rights, but of exceptional duties. It is the prerogative of a moral consciousness itself. It knows itself at the centre of the world and for it the world is not homogeneous: for I am always alone in being able to answer the call, I am irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility” (DF, 176–77).

In other words, do we not get here—in a homology with Marx’s forms of the expression of value—a necessary passage from simple and developed form (I am responsible for you, for all of you) to the general equivalent and then its reversal (I am the privileged site of responsibility for all of you, which is why you are all effectively responsible to me.)? And is this not the “truth” of such an ethical stance, thereby confirming the old Hegelian suspicion that every self-denigration secretly asserts its contrary? Self-questioning is always by definition the obverse of self-privileging; there is always something false about respect for others which is based on questioning of one’s own right to exist.

A Spinozistic answer to Levinas would have been that our existence is not at the expense of others, but a part of the network of reality. For Spinoza there is no Hobbesian “Self” as extracted from and opposed to reality. Spinoza’s ontology is one of full immanence to the world; in other words, I “am” just the network of my relations with the world, I am totally “externalized” in it. My conatus, my tendency to assert myself, is thus not my assertion at the expense of the world, but my full acceptance of being part of the world, my assertion of the wider reality only within which I can thrive. The opposition of egotism and altruism is thus overcome: I fully am, not as an isolated Self, but in the thriving reality, part of which I am. When Levinas writes that “enjoyment is the singularization of an ego. . . . it is the very work of egoism” and when he concludes from it that “giving has meaning only as a tearing from oneself despite oneself. . . . Only a subject that eats can be for-the-Other,”22 he therefore secretly imputes to Spinoza an egotistic “subjectivist” notion of (my) existence. His anti-Spinozistic questioning of my right to exist is inverted arrogance, as if I am the center whose existence threatens all others.

So the answer should not be an assertion of my right to exist in harmony with and tolerance of others, but a more radical claim: Do I exist in the first place? Am I not, rather, a hole in the order of being? This brings us to the ultimate paradox on account of which Levinas’s answer is not sufficient: I am a threat to the entire order of being not insofar as I positively exist as part of this order, but precisely insofar as I am a hole in the order of being. As such, as nothing, I “am” a striving to reach out and appropriate all (only a Nothing can desire to become Everything). Friedrich Schelling already defined the subject as the endless striving of the Nothing to become Everything. On the contrary, a positive living being occupying a determinate space in reality, rooted in it, is by definition a moment of its circulation and reproduction.

Recall the similar paradox that structures the politically correct landscape: people far from the Western world are allowed to fully assert their particular ethnic identity without being proclaimed essentialist racist identitarians (native Americans, blacks, etc.). The closer one gets to the notorious white heterosexual males, the more problematic this assertion is: Asians are still OK; Italians and Irish maybe; with Germans and Scandinavians, it is already problematic. However, such a prohibition of asserting the particular identity of White Men (as the model of oppression of others), although it presents itself as the admission of their guilt, nonetheless confers on them a central position: this very prohibition to assert their particular identity makes them into the universal-neutral medium, the place from which the truth about the others’ oppression is accessible.

The figure of Benny Morris, this symptom of the falsity of the liberal-benevolent-peacenik Israelis,23 is to be conceived as the concealed obscene supplement to Levinasian ethics. After bringing to the light the “dark” side of the emergence of the State of Israel (the aim of David Ben-Gurion and the first generation of Israeli leaders in the 1949 war was to provoke the Arab population to leave Palestine, and in order to achieve this goal, they resorted to an albeit limited amount of terror, including raping and killing innocent civilians), for which he was shunned by the Israeli academic establishment, Morris surprised everyone by the position he adopted toward his own discoveries: he stated that these “dark” acts were necessary for the constitution and survival of the State of Israel. And his logic is convincing in its ruthless sincerity: if Arabs were not a clear minority in Israel, Israel would never function as a state; Ben-Gurion’s mistake was that he did not complete the ethnic cleaning, including expelling Arabs from the West Bank—in this case, there would have been peace today in the Middle East. The merit of this reasoning is that it thoroughly avoids the standard liberal hypocrisy: if you want the State of Israel, you have to accept the price of ethnic cleansing; there was never any third way of living peacefully side by side with the Palestinians in a Jewish or even secular democratic state. All the liberal complaints about the unfair harshness in the treatment of Palestinians, all their condemnation of the terror of the West Bank occupation, avoid the key issue by sustaining the illusion that a little bit more tolerance and withdrawal will bring peace. Of course, Morris is full of the usual racist clichés (the clash of civilizations with the barbarian Arabs, etc.), but these clichés are not the gist, the essential part, of his argument, which is that the State of Israel was possible only through the ethnic cleansing of the majority of people living there prior to the Jewish resettlement. One should effectively read Morris as anti-Levinas par excellence, as the truth of Levinas’s hope that the State of Israel will be a unique state directly grounded in the messianic promise of Justice; to retain his vision of Israel, Levinas has to deny what Morris ruthlessly admits. Morris’s attitude, his cold acceptance of the fact that we have to kill others in order to survive, is the truth of the Levinasian questioning of one’s own right to exist.²⁴

Odradek as a Political Category

The limitation of Levinas is not simply that of a Eurocentrist who relies on a too narrow definition of what is human, a definition that secretly excludes non-Europeans as “not fully human.”25 What Levinas fails to include into the scope of “human” is, rather, the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-to-face relationship of humans. In a first approach, Butler may seem to be more sensitive to this aspect—say, when she provides a subtle description of Adorno’s ambiguity with regard to the “inhuman” (KEG, 109–10): while Adorno is well aware of the violence involved in the predominant definition of what counts as “human” (the implied exclusion of whole dimensions as “nonhuman”), he nonetheless basically conceives “inhuman” as the depository of “alienated” humanity—ultimately, for Adorno, “inhuman” is the power of barbarism we have to fight. What he misses here is the paradox that every normative determination of the “human” is only possible against an impenetrable ground of “inhuman,” of something which remains opaque and resists inclusion into any narrative reconstitution of what counts as “human.” In other words, although Adorno recognizes that being-human is constitutively finite, nontotalized, that the very attempt to posit the Human as “absolute subject” dehumanizes it, he does not deploy how this self-limitation of the Human defines “being-human”: Is being-human just the limitation of human, or is there a positive notion of this limitation which constitutes being-human?

The same paradox is at work in the core of the “dialectic of Enlightenment”: although Adorno (and Horkheimer) conceive the catastrophes and barbarisms of the twentieth century as inherent to the project of enlightenment, not as a result of some remainder of preceding barbarism to be abolished by way of bringing “enlightenment as an unfinished project” to its completion, they insist on fighting this excess-consequence of enlightenment by the means of enlightenment itself. So, again, if enlightenment brought to the end equals regression into barbarism, does this mean that the only concept of enlightenment that we possess is the one which should be constrained, rendered aware of its limitation, or is there another positive notion of enlightenment which already includes this limitation? There are two basic answers to this inconsistency of Adorno’s critical project: Jürgen Habermas or Lacan. With Habermas, one breaks the deadlock by formulating a positive normative frame of reference. Through Lacan, one reconceptualizes the “humanity” of the deadlock/limitation as such; in other words, one provides a definition of the “human” which, beyond and above (or, rather, beneath) the previous infinite universal, accentuates the limitation as such: being-human is a specific attitude of finitude, of passivity, of vulnerable exposure.

Therein resides, for Butler, the basic paradox: while we should, of course, condemn as “inhuman” all those situations in which our will is violated, thwarted, or under the pressure of an external violence, we should not simply conclude that a positive definition of humanity is the autonomy of will, because there is a kind of passive exposure to an overwhelming Otherness which is the very basis of being-human. How, then, are we to distinguish the “bad” inhumanity, the violence which crushes our will, from the passivity constitutive of humanity? At this point, Butler compromises her position, introducing a naive distinction which recalls Herbert Marcuse’s old distinction between “necessary” repression and “surplus” repression: “of course we can and must invent norms which decide between different forms of being-overwhelmed, by way of drawing a line of distinction between the unavoidable and unsurpassable aspect here and the changeable conditions there” (KEG, 110).

What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the “inhuman” in Kant’s transcendental turn. Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (“the soul is not mortal”) and when a nonpredicate is affirmed (“the soul is nonmortal”). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between “he is not dead” and “he is undead.” The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” are neither alive nor dead; they are the monstrous “living dead.”26 The same goes for inhuman. “He is not human” is not the same as “he is inhuman.” “He is not human” means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely, that he is neither simply human nor simply inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as “humanity,” is inherent to being-human. And perhaps I should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, but since Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the surrounding darkness). So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, in other words, the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.

This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas (with all his celebration of Otherness) fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, “inhuman” Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the “living dead” in the concentration camps. This is why, although Levinas is often perceived as the thinker who endeavored to articulate the experience of the Shoah, one thing is self-evident apropos his questioning of one’s own right to be and his emphasis on one’s unconditional asymmetrical responsibility: this is not how a survivor of the Shoah, one who effectively experienced the ethical abyss of Shoah, thinks and writes. This is how those think who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance.27

Agamben posits the Muselmann as a kind of absolute/impossible witness: he is the only one who fully witnessed the horror of the concentration camp and, for that very reason, is not able to bear witness to it. It is as if he was “burned by the black sun” of the horror he saw. “Authentic” witnessing can thus be defined as involving the mediation of an invisible Third embodied in the Muselmann: in it, it is never just me and the event I am witnessing; my relationship to this event is always mediated by someone who fully witnessed it and is, for that very reason, no longer able to report on it. That is to say, insofar as, in his description of the ethical call, Levinas reproduces the basic coordinates of ideological interpellation (I become an ethical subject when I respond with “Here I am!” to the infinite call emanating from the vulnerable face of the other), one could say that the Muselmann is precisely the one who is no longer able to say “Here I am!” (and in front of whom I can no longer say “Here I am!”).28 Recall the big gesture of identification with the exemplary victim: “We are all citizens of Sarajevo!” and such; the problem with the Muselmann is that this gesture is no longer possible. It would be obscene to proclaim pathetically, “We are all Muselmänner!” Agamben should also be supplemented here by transposing the same gap into the counterpart of the witness, the receiver of its testimony, the big Other whose full acceptance of my testimony would permit me to exorcise my inner demons. In an exactly symmetric way, I never encounter a “true” receiver who would fully authenticate my witnessing: my words of witnessing are always received by finite others who fail to authenticate them. Is this structure not that of the so-called L scheme of communication from the Lacan of the early 1950s, in which the “true communication” (the diagonal S-A) is cut across by the diagonal a-a' of the imaginary relationship? S would be here the Muselmann, the ideal-impossible witness; A his ideal-impossible receiver authenticating his words; a the survivors as imperfect witnesses; and a' the imperfect receivers of their words. The tragedy of witnessing is thus not only that the ideal witness (the Muselmann who would himself bear witness, report on what he went through) is impossible, but also that there is no ideal receiver, such that, when we are aware that our testimony is safely deposited there, we get rid of our demons—there is no big Other.

Consequently, is the paradox of the Muselmann not that this figure is simultaneously a zero-level, a total reduction to life, and a name for the pure excess as such, excess deprived of its “normal” base? This is why the figure of the Muselmann signals the limitation of Levinas: when describing it, Primo Levi repeatedly uses the predicate faceless, and this term should be given here its entire Levinasian weight. When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind wall, a lack of depth. Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible.29 However, at this point, we again confront the key dilemma: what if it is precisely in the guise of the “faceless” face of a Muselmann that we encounter the Other’s call at its purest and most radical? What if, facing a Muselmann, one hits upon one’s responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic? In short, what about bringing together Levinas’s face and the topic of the “neighbor” in its strict Freudo-Lacanian sense, as the monstrous, impenetrable Thing that is the Nebenmensch, the Thing that hystericizes and provokes me? What if the neighbor’s face stands neither for my imaginary double/semblant nor for the purely symbolic abstract “partner in communication,” but for the Other in his or her dimension of the Real? What if, along these lines, we restore to the Levinasian “face” all its monstrosity: face is not a harmonious Whole of the dazzling epiphany of a “human face,” face is something the glimpse of which we get when we stumble upon a grotesquely distorted face, a face in the grip of a disgusting tic or grimace, a face which, precisely, confronts us when the neighbor “loses his face”? To recall a case from popular culture, “face” is what, in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, the heroine gets a glimpse of when she sees for the first time the Phantom without his mask (and, as a reaction to the horror that confronts her, immediately loses her consciousness and falls to the ground).

The problem with this solution, acceptable in itself, is that it undermines the ethical edifice Levinas is trying to build upon it: far from standing for absolute authenticity, such a monstrous face is, rather, the ambiguity of the Real embodied, the extreme/impossible point at which opposites coincide, at which the innocence of the Other’s vulnerable nakedness overlaps with pure evil. That is to say, what one should focus on here is the precise meaning of the term neighbor: is the “neighbor” in the Judeo-Freudian sense, the neighbor as the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor, the same as the neighbor that we encounter in the Levinasian experience of the Other’s face? Is there not, in the very heart of the Judeo-Freudian inhuman neighbor, a monstrous dimension which is already minimally “gentrified,” domesticated, once it is conceived in the Levinasian sense? What if the Levinasian face is yet another defense against this monstrous dimension of subjectivity? And what if the Jewish Law is to be conceived as strictly correlative to this inhuman neighbor? In other words, what if the ultimate function of the Law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor? In short, the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical “gentrification” of the neighbor, the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-Thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates.

This topic agitates the very heart of Kafka’s universe. Reading Kafka demands a great effort of abstraction—not of learning more (the proper interpretive horizon to understand his works), but of unlearning the standard interpretive references, so that one becomes able to open up to the raw force of Kafka’s writing. There are three such interpretive frames: theological (modern man’s anxious search for the absent God); sociocritical (Kafka’s staging of the nightmarish world of modern alienated bureaucracy); and psychoanalytic (Kafka’s “unresolved Oedipus complex,” which prevented him from engaging in a “normal” sexual relationship). All this has to be erased. A kind of childish naïveté has to be regained for a reader to be able to feel the raw force of Kafka’s universe. This is why, in Kafka’s case, the first (naive) reading is often the most adequate one, and the second reading is the one which tries to “sublate” the first reading’s raw impact by way of forcing the text into the frame of a given interpretation. This is how one should approach “Odradek,” one of Kafka’s key achievements:

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.

He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him—he is so diminutive that you cannot help it—rather like a child. “Well, what’s your name?” you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. “And where do you live?” “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.30

Odradek, as an object that is transgenerational (exempted from the cycle of generations), immortal, outside finitude (because outside sexual difference), outside time, displaying no goal-oriented activity, no purpose, no utility, is jouissance embodied: “Jouissance is that which serves nothing,” as Lacan put in his seminar 20, Encore. There are different figurations of Thing-jouissance—an immortal (or, more precisely, undead) excess—in Kafka’s work: the Law that somehow insists without properly existing, making us guilty without us knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that won’t heal yet does not let us die; bureaucracy in its most “irrational” aspect; and, last but not least, “partial objects” like Odradek. They all display a kind of mock-Hegelian nightmarish “bad infinity”—there is no Aufhebung, no resolution proper; the thing just drags on. We never reach the Law; the Emperor’s letter never arrives at its destination; the wound never closes (or kills me). The Kafkan Thing is either transcendent, forever eluding our grasp (the Law, the Castle), or a ridiculous object into which the subject is metamorphosed and which we cannot ever get rid of (like Gregor Samsa, who changes into an insect). The point is to read these two features together: jouissance is that which we cannot ever attain and that which we cannot ever get rid of.

Kafka’s genius was to eroticize bureaucracy, the nonerotic entity if there ever was one. In Chile, when a citizen wants to identify himself to the authorities, “the clerk on duty demands that the poor petitioner produce proof that he was born, that he isn’t a criminal, that he paid his taxes, that he registered to vote, and that he’s still alive, because even if he throws a tantrum to prove that he hasn’t died, he is obliged to present a ‘certificate of survival.’ The problem has reached such proportions that the government itself has created an office to combat bureaucracy. Citizens may now complain of being shabbily treated and may file charges against incompetent officials . . . on a form requiring a seal and three copies, of course.”31 This is state bureaucracy at its craziest. Are we aware that this is our only true contact with the divine in our secular times? What can be more “divine” than the traumatic encounter with the bureaucracy at its craziest—when, say, a bureaucrat tells us that, legally, we don’t exist? It is in such encounters that we get the glimpse of another order beyond the mere terrestrial everyday reality. Kafka was well aware of this deep link between bureaucracy and the divine: it is as if, in his work, Hegel’s thesis on the State as the terrestrial existence of God is “buggered,” given a properly obscene twist. It is only in this sense that Kafka’s works stage a search for the divine in our deserted secular world—more precisely, they not only search for the divine, they find it in state bureaucracy.

There are two memorable scenes in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil that perfectly stage the crazy excess of bureaucratic jouissance perpetuating itself in its autocirculation. After the hero’s plumbing breaks down and he leaves a message to the official repair service for urgent help, Robert De Niro enters his apartment, a mythical-mysterious criminal whose subversive activity is that he listens in on the emergency calls and then immediately goes to the customer, repairing his plumbing for free, bypassing the inefficient state repair service’s paperwork. Indeed, in a bureaucracy caught in a vicious cycle of jouissance, the ultimate crime is to simply and directly do the job one is supposed to do. If a state repair service actually does its job, this is (at the level of its unconscious libidinal economy) considered an unfortunate by-product, since the bulk of its energy goes into inventing complicated administrative procedures that enable it to invent ever-new obstacles and thus postpone the work indefinitely. In a second scene, we meet—in the corridors of a vast government agency—a group of people permanently running around a leader (big shot bureaucrat) followed by a bunch of lower administrators who shout at him all the time, asking him for a specific opinion or decision, and he nervously spurts out fast, “efficient” replies (“This is to be done by tomorrow at the latest!” “Check that report!” “No, cancel that appointment!” etc.). The appearance of a nervous hyperactivity is, of course, a staged performance that masks a self-indulgent nonsensical spectacle of imitating, of playing “efficient administration.” Why do they walk around all the time? The leader is obviously not on the way from one to another meeting—the meaningless fast walk around the corridors is all he does. The hero stumbles from time to time on this group, and the Kafkaesque answer is, of course, that this entire performance is here to attract his gaze, staged for his eyes only. They pretend to be busy, not to be bothered by the hero, but all their activity is here to provoke the hero into addressing a demand to the group’s leader, who then snaps back nervously, “Can’t you see how busy I am!” or, occasionally, does the reverse and greets the hero as if he was waiting for him for a long time, mysteriously expecting his plea.

Back to Odradek: in his concise analysis of the story, Jean-Claude Milner first draws attention to a peculiarity of Odradek: he has two legs, he speaks, laughs; in short, he displays all the features of a human being. Although he is human, he does not resemble a human being, but clearly appears inhuman.32 As such, he is the opposite of Oedipus, who (lamenting his fate at Colonus) claims that he became nonhuman when he finally acquired all properties of an ordinary human: in line with the series of Kafka’s other heroes, Odradek becomes human only when he no longer resembles a human being (by metamorphosing himself into an insect, or a spool,³³ or whatever). He is, effectively, a “universal singular,” a stand-in for humanity by way of embodying its inhuman excess, by not resembling anything “human.” The contrast with Aristophanes’ myth (in Plato’s Symposium) of the original spherical human being divided into two parts, eternally searching for its complementary counterpart in order to return to the lost Whole, is crucial here: although also a “partial object,” Odradek does not look for any complementary parts, he is lacking nothing. It may be significant, also, that he is not spherical. Milner deciphers odradek as an anagram of the Greek dodekaedron [dodecahedron], an object of twelve faces, each of them a pentagon (in his Timaeus [55c], Plato claims that our universe is a dodecahedron); it is an anagram divided by two, so Odradek is half of a dodecahedron. Odradek is thus simply what Lacan, in his seminar 11 and in his seminal écrit “Positions de l’inconscient,” developed as lamella, libido as an organ, the inhuman-human “undead” organ without a body, the mythical pre-subjective “undead” life-substance, or, rather, the remainder of the life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization, the horrible palpitation of the “acephal” drive which persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal authority, nomadic, with no fixed domicile. The choice underlying Kafka’s story is thus Lacan’s “le père ou pire,” “the father or the worse”: Odradek is “the worst” as the alternative to the father.

Although they are not to be directly identified, there is a link between Odradek and the “alien” from Ridley Scott’s film of the same name: “The alien’s form of life is (just, merely, simply) life, life as such: it is not so much a particular species as the essence of what it means to be a species, to be a creature, a natural being—it is Nature incarnate, a nightmare embodiment of the natural realm understood as utterly subordinate to, utterly exhausted by, the twinned Darwinian drives to survive and reproduce.”34 This disgust at Life is disgust with drive at its purest. And it is interesting to note how Ridley Scott inverts the usual sexual connotations: Life is presented as inherently male, as the phallic power of brutal penetration which parasitizes on the feminine body, exploiting it as the carrier of its reproduction. “The beauty and the beast” is here the feminine subject horrified at the disgusting immortal Life. As Mulhall points out, Aliens, James Cameron’s sequel, is the weakest link in the series because of the way it reinscribes the force of the pure fantasy deployed in Alien into four interconnected standard Hollywood ideological matrixes: (1) the commando war adventure narrative (a group of Marines goes on the expedition to finish off the alien); (2) the very form of the linear adventure narrative as such; (3) the family ideology (at the end of Aliens, Ripley is “cured” when she finds her part in the reconstituted nuclear family of herself, Corporal Hicks, and Newt); and, last but not least, (4) the underlying therapeutic structure of the narrative (in order to get rid of her nightmares, Ripley had to return to her traumatic past and confront it). Truly, as they say it in Slovene, when the Devil has youngsters, he has them en masse. Mulhall is also right in emphasizing how David Fincher’s superb and much underrated Alien³ (incidentally, his first feature film) restores the proper balance by erasing these ideological references and returning to the force of the elementary “metaphysical” fantasy of Alien. With regard to the opposition between fantasy (nightmarish dream) and reality, relations are inverted: the same scene—that of Ripley being “raped” and impregnated by the alien—is presented in Cameron as a nightmare and in Fincher as the unbearable reality. Cameron’s Aliens

begins with Ripley enduring a hypersleep nightmare in which she has been impregnated by, and is about to give birth to, an alien. Cameron presents his film as giving Ripley the therapy she needs to wake from such nightmares; Fincher presents his film as awakening Ripley from Cameron’s dream, his fantasy of what constitutes a fulfilled existence for his protagonist, and his fantasy of human life as something that with the right degree of effort on our part can be made to come out right.35

Mulhall also detects a caricatural, exaggerated, childish, if not outright comic, character of the alien monstrosity in Jean Pierre Junet’s Alien Resurrection, the fourth and last installment of the series: the alien universe is here “skewed or off-key, an uncanny parody or caricature of the one we have come to know over the years through the adult human eyes of Ripley’s original.” And does this not signal that “the vision of human fertility and sexuality which the alien species embodies is best understood as embodying the fantasies and fears of a child”³⁶? Thus, one should not be surprised to discern in the overall structure of the Alien series the matrix of the old Greek theater performance: three tragedies plus a comedy. What can follow the suicidal tragic act of Ripley at the end of Fincher’s Alien³ can only be a comedy, a total change in register, a fairy-tale narrative with children as its main heroes, like Shakespeare’s last plays.

There are two properly sublime moments in Junet’s Alien Resurrection. In the first one, the cloned Ripley enters the laboratory room in which the previous seven aborted attempts to clone her are on display. Here she encounters the ontologically failed, defective versions of herself, up to the almost successful version with her own face but with some of her limbs distorted so that they resemble the limbs of the Alien Thing. This creature asks Ripley’s clone to kill her, and, in an outburst of violent rage, the clone effectively destroys the horror-exhibition by torching the whole room. Then there is the unique scene, perhaps the shot of the entire series, in which Ripley’s clone “is drawn down into the embrace of the alien species, luxuriating in her absorption into the writhing mass of its limbs and tails—as if engulfed by the very lability of organic being that she had earlier attempted to consume in fire.”³⁷ The link between the two scenes is thus clear: we are dealing with the two sides of the same coin. However, this fascination with the monstrous alien should not be allowed to obfuscate the anticapitalist edge of the Alien series: what ultimately endangers the lone group on a spaceship is not the aliens as such but the way the group is used by the anonymous earthly Corporation, which wants to exploit the alien form of life. The point is here not to play the card of the superficial and simplistic “metaphoric meaning” (the vampiric alien monster “really means” Capital), but to move at the metonymic level: how Capital parasitizes and exploits the pure drive of Life. Pure Life is a category of capitalism.

The Inhuman Excess

In City Lights, one of Charlie Chaplin’s absolute masterpieces, there is a memorable scene (commented on by Levinas, among others) which establishes the link between this object and shame. After he swallows a whistle by mistake, the Tramp gets an attack of hiccups, which leads to a comical effect—because of the movement of air in his stomach, each hiccup makes the whistle blow and thus generates a weird sound of whistles coming from inside the body; the embarrassed Tramp desperately tries to cover up these sounds, not knowing what exactly to do. Does this scene not stage shame at its purest? I am ashamed when I am confronted with the excess in my body. It is significant that the source of shame in this scene is sound: a spectral sound emanating from within the Tramp’s body, sound as an autonomous “organ without body,” located in the very heart of his body and at the same time uncontrollable, like a kind of parasite, a foreign intruder—in short, what Lacan called the voice-object, one of the incarnations of objet petit a, of the agalma, that which is “in me more than myself.”38

We find this object even where one would not expect to find such a thing. If there is a novel which is the absolute classic of literary Stalinism, it is Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered. In it, Pavka, a Bolshevik fully engaged first in the Civil War and then, during the 1920s, in the construction of steel mills, ends up his life in dirty rags and totally crippled, immobilized, deprived of limbs, thus reduced to an almost nonbodily existence. In such a state, he finally marries a young girl named Taya, making it clear that there will be no sex between them, just companionship, with her function being to take care of him. Here we in away encounter the “truth” of the Stalinist mythology of the Happy New Man: a dirty desexualized cripple, sacrificing everything for the construction of socialism. This fate coincides with that of Ostrovsky himself, who, in the mid-1930s, after finishing the novel, was dying crippled and blind; and, like Ostrovsky, Pavka—reduced to a living death, a kind of living mummy—is reborn at the novel’s end through writing a novel about his life.39 (In the last two years of his life, Ostrovsky lived in a Black Sea resort house as a “living legend,” on a street named after himself, his house a site of countless pilgrimages and of great interest to foreign journalists.) This mortification of one’s own treacherous body is itself embodied in a piece of shrapnel that has lodged itself in Pavka’s eye, gradually blinding him; at this point, Ostrovsky’s bland style suddenly explodes into a complex metaphor:

The octopus has a bulging eye the size of a cat’s head, a dull-red eye, green in the center, burning, pulsating with a phosphorescent glow. . . . The octopus moves. He can see it almost next to his eyes. The tentacles creep over his body; they are cold and they burn like nettles. The octopus shoots out its sting, and it bites into his head like a leech, and, wriggling convulsively, it sucks at his blood. He feels the blood draining out of his body into the swelling body of the octopus.⁴⁰

To put it in Lacanian-Deleuzian terms, the octopus stands here for the “organ without body,” the partial object which invades our ordinary biological body and mortifies it. It is not a metaphor for the capitalist system squeezing and choking workers in its tentacles (the standard popular use of the metaphor between the two world wars), but, surprisingly, a “positive” metaphor for the absolute self-control that a Bolshevik revolutionary has to exert over his body (and over the “pathological,” potentially corrupting, bodily desires). As Kaganovska put it, the octopus is a superego organ which controls us from within. When Pavka, at the low-point of despair, reviews his life, Ostrovsky characterizes this moment of reflection as “a meeting of the Politburo with his ‘I’ about the treacherous behavior of his body.” This is yet another proof of how literary ideology cannot ever simply lie: truth articulates itself in it through displacements. One cannot but recall here Kafka’s “Country Doctor”: is Ostrovsky’s octopus not another name for the Kafkan “undead” wound which, while parasitizing upon my body, prevents me from dying?41

However, this is not the whole story: Lacan’s formula of the fetishist object is a over minus phi (castration)—objet petit a fills in (and simultaneously bears witness to) the gap of castration. This is why Lacan specifies shame as respect for castration, as an attitude of discreetly covering up the fact of being castrated. (No wonder women have to be covered more than men: what is concealed is their lack of penis.) While shamelessness resides in openly displaying one’s castration, shame displays a desperate attempt to keep the appearance: although I know the truth (about castration), let us pretend that it is not the case. This is why, when I see my crippled neighbor “shamelessly” pushing toward me his disfigured limb, it is I, not he, who is overwhelmed by shame. When a man exposes his distorted limb to his neighbor, his true target is not to expose himself, but the neighbor: to put the neighbor to shame by confronting him with his own ambiguous repulsion/fascination with the spectacle he is forced to witness. In a strictly homologous way, one is ashamed of one’s ethnic origins, of the specific “torsion” of one’s particular identity, of being caught into the coordinates of a lifeworld into which one was thrown, with which one is stuck, unable to get rid of it.

The father’s/narrator’s final words in Kafka’s “Odradek” (“the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful”) echo the final words of The Trial (“as if the shame will survive him”): Odradek is effectively the shame of the father of the family (the story’s narrator). What this indicates is that Odradek is the father’s sinthome, the “knot” onto which the father’s jouissance is stuck. This, however, seems to complicate the link between shame and castration: for Lacan, is such a partial object, lamella, the “undead” organ without a body, not precisely that which escapes castration? Lacan defines lamella as an asexual object, as the remainder of sexuation. For a human being to be “dead while alive” is to be colonized by the “dead” symbolic order; to be “alive while dead” is to give body to the remainder of Life-Substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization (lamella). What we are dealing with here is thus the split between Other and Jouissance, between the “dead” symbolic order which mortifies the body and the nonsymbolic Life-Substance of jouissance. These two notions are in Freud and Lacan not what they are in our everyday or standard scientific discourse. In psychoanalysis, they both designate a properly monstrous dimension—Life is the horrible palpitation of the lamella, of the nonsubjective (acephal) “undead” drive which persists beyond ordinary death; death is the symbolic order itself, the structure which, as a parasite, colonizes the living entity. What defines death drive in Lacan is this double gap: not the simple opposition of life and death, but the split of life itself into “normal” life and horrifying “undead” life, and the split of the dead into “ordinary” dead and the “undead” machine. The basic opposition between Life and Death is thus supplemented by the parasitical symbolic machine (language as a dead entity which “behaves as if it possesses a life of its own”) and its counterpoint, the “living dead” (the monstrous life-substance which persists in the Real outside the Symbolic). This split which runs within the domains of Life and Death constitutes the space of the death drive.

In his reading of Kafka, Benjamin focuses on “a long series of figures with the prototype of distortion, the hunchback”: “Among the images in Kafka’s stories, none is more frequent than that of the man who bows his head far down on his chest: the fatigue of the court officials, the noise affecting the doormen in the hotel, the low ceiling facing the visitors in the gallery.”42 It is crucial to remember here that, in the encounter of the man from the country and the guardian of the Door of the Law, it is the guardian, the figure of authority, who is hunched, not the man from the country, who stands upright. (This point is noted by the priest in his debate with Josef K. that follows the parable on the Door of the Law in The Trial: the priest makes it clear that it is the guardian who is subordinated here, playing the role of a servant.) One should thus not idealize the disfigured “creature” into a pathetic figure of the marginalized, excluded from full humanity, the object of solidarity with the victim—if anything, the creaturely hunchback is the prototype of the servant of Power. Let us not forget who are “creatures” par excellence: woman is more “creaturely” than man; Christ on the cross is the creature; and, last but not least, the psychoanalyst is an inhuman creature, not a human partner (and the wager of the discourse of the analyst is precisely that one can establish a social link based directly on this creaturely excess, bypassing the master signifier). Recall here Lacan’s le père ou pire, “father or the worse”: insofar as the analyst is not a father figure (a figure of paternal symbolic authority), insofar as his presence signals and enacts the suspension of this authority, is there not in his figure also something of the “primordial” (one is tempted to say anal) father, the One exempted from symbolic castration?

This is how we should approach the topic of Eucharist: what exactly do we eat when we eat the body of Christ? We eat the partial object, the undead substance which redeems us and guarantees that we are raised above mortality, that, while still alive here on earth, we already participate in the eternal divine Life. Does this not mean that Eucharist is like the undead substance of the indestructible eternal life that invades the human body in a horror movie? Are we not, through Eucharist, terrorized by an alien monster which invades our body?43 In the fall of 2003, a weird case of cannibalism was discovered in Germany: a guy ate his partner. What was so weird was the strictly consensual nature of the act: there was not the usual secret abduction and torture; the killer put announcements on the Web, asking for somebody who was willing to be killed and eaten, and found a volunteer. The two first ate together the cooked penis of the victim; then the victim was killed, cut into pieces, and gradually eaten. If ever there was an act of Eucharistic love, this was it.

Shame thus appears to be precisely what overwhelms the subject when he or she is confronted with what, in him or her, remains noncastrated, with the embarrassing surplus appendage which continues to dangle out. Is Odradek not the reminder/remainder of the failure of the father to accomplish his work of imposing the Law (of “castration”)? Or are we dealing here, yet again, with the structure of parallax? That is to say, what if the lack and the surplus refer to the same phenomenon and are simply two perspectives on it? In his “structuralist” Logic of Sense, Deleuze developed how, as soon as the symbolic order emerges, we are dealing with the minimal difference between a structural place and the element that occupies (fills out) this place: an element is always logically preceded by the place in the structure it fills out. The two series can, therefore, also be described as the “empty” formal structure (signifier) and the series of elements filling out the empty places in the structure (signified). From this perspective, the paradox consists in the fact that the two series never overlap: we always encounter an entity that is simultaneously—with regard to the structure—an empty, unoccupied place and—with regard to the elements—a rapidly moving, elusive object, an occupant without a place. We have thereby produced Lacan’s formula of fantasy $ a, since the matheme for the subject is $, an empty place in the structure, an elided signifier, while objet a is, by definition, an excessive object, an object that lacks its place in the structure. Consequently, the point is not that there is simply the surplus of an element over the places available in the structure or the surplus of a place that has no element to fill it out. An empty place in the structure would still sustain the fantasy of an element that will emerge and fill out this place; an excessive element lacking its place would still sustain the fantasy of some yet unknown place waiting for it. The point is, rather, that the empty place in the structure strictly correlates to the errant element lacking its place: they are not two different entities, but the front and the back of one and the same entity, that is, one and the same entity inscribed onto the two surfaces of a Möbius strip. At its most formal, “castration” designates the precedence of the empty place over the contingent elements filling it; this is what accounts for the elementary structure of hysteria, of the hysterical question “Why am I what you are saying that I am? Why am I at that place in the symbolic order?” However, correlative to it is the fact of being stuck with an object with no (symbolic) place, an object which escaped castration. One should therefore not be afraid to draw the ultimate paradoxical conclusion: castration and its disavowal are two sides of the same coin, castration has to be sustained by a noncastrated remainder, a fully realized castration cancels itself. Or, to put it more precisely: lamella, the “undead” object, is not a remainder of castration in the sense of a little part which somehow escaped unhurt the swipe of castration, but, literally, the product of the cut of castration, the surplus generated by it.

This link between castration and sinthome means that the “undead” partial object is the inscription on the body of what Eric Santner calls “signifying stress”: the wound, the disfiguration/distortion, inflicted upon the body when the body is colonized by the symbolic order. This is why animals are not “creatures” in this precise sense, they are not stuck onto a sinthome. However, one should avoid here the temptation to translate this feature into the terms of the traditional philosophical anthropology, according to which, animals are immersed in their environs, their behavior regulated by innate instincts, while humans are “homeless” animals deprived of immediate instinctual support, which is why they need a master to impose on them their “second nature,” symbolic norms and regulations. The key difference is that the “cringe” of the sinthome is not a cultural device destined to impose a new balance onto the uprooted human being which threatens to explode into untamed excess, but the name of this excess itself: a human being (to come) loses its animal instinctual coordinates by way of getting transfixed/stuck onto an “inhuman” sinthome. What this means is that the differentia specifica which defines a human being is, therefore, not the difference between human and animal (or any other real or imaginary species, such as gods), but an inherent difference, the difference between human and the inhuman excess that is inherent to being-human.

So what does psychoanalysis do with shame? The first association that pops up is, of course, that the aim of analytic treatment is precisely to dissolve the “knot” (the specific “pathological” formula onto which the subject’s jouissance is stuck). That is to say, is such a stuckness onto a symptom not the most elementary form of the blockade psychoanalysis is dealing with? What prevents us from “freely enjoying sexuality” is not a direct repression, the so-called internalization of inhibitions, but the very excess of enjoyment coagulated into a specific formula which curves/distorts/transfixes our space of enjoyment, closes off new possibilities of enjoyment, condemns the subject to err in the closure of a vicious cycle, compulsively circulating around the same point of (libidinal) reference. And, within this framework, the function of psychoanalysis would be to bring the subject to fully assume castration: to untie the knot, to dissolve this stuckness, and thus to liberate his or her desire. Or, in Deleuzian terms: “stuckness” is the elementary form of libidinal territorialization, and the aim of psychoanalysis is to deterritorialize the subject’s desire. However, the late Lacan proposes an exactly inverted formula: the aim of psychoanalysis is to get the subject to come to terms with the sinthome, with his specific “formula of enjoyment.” Lacan’s insight here is that of the full ontological weight of “stuckness”: when one dissolves the sinthome and thus gets fully unstuck, one loses the minimal consistency of one’s own being—in short, what appears as obstacle is a positive condition of possibility.

What happens in psychoanalysis is thus not the dissolution of symptom, but the shift in perspective which inverts the condition of impossibility into the condition of possibility. The mode of functioning of lamella is therefore that of suppleance. When, in his seminar 20, Lacan proposes the formula “Y’a de l’Un” (the colloquial French for “There is something of the One”), this One is not the One of a harmonious Whole, or the One of some unifying principle, or of the Master-Signifier, but, on the contrary, the One that persists as the obstacle destabilizing every unity. This One—which is ultimately what Lacan calls the “object small a”—has the structure of what Lacan calls suppleance: supplementing the lack of what is in itself impossible. Thus, suppleance has nothing to do with the standard—false—reading of “suture” as the gesture of filling in the structural lack and imposing a false unification onto the multitude. It is, rather, what Badiou calls the “symptomal knot,” the “supernumerary” element which renders palpable the inconsistency of the social totality.44 Therefore, is suppleance not (also) another name for the object-cause of desire qua surplus-enjoyment and, simultaneously, what Freud called the supplementary bonus of forepleasure?⁴⁵

What if, however, this very choice between the dissolution of a symptomal knot and its acceptance as a positive condition is, again, a false one? What if the very structure of a drive (as opposed to instinct) provides a solution? We are stuck on a knot around which drive circulates, yet it is this very stuckness that pushes us again and again forward to invent ever new forms to approach it. Every “openness” has thus to be sustained by a “knot” which stands for a fundamental impossibility. The excess of humanity with regard to the animal is not (only) an excess of dynamism, but rather an excess of fixity: a human remains “stubbornly attached,” fixated, to an impossible point, returning to it on account of a compulsion to repeat, unable to drop it even when it reveals itself as unattainable. Consequently, is the “theological” dimension—without which, for Benjamin, revolution cannot win—not the very dimension of the excess of drive, of its “too-muchness”? Is a solution, then, to change the modality of our being-stuck into a mode that allows, solicits even, the activity of sublimation?

Shame and Its Vicissitudes

Lacan’s theory effectively outlines a series of “vicissitudes of shame.” There is the cynical position (not that of the modern cynicism, but of the cynicism of the Ancients, that of Diogenes), the position of shamelessness, of displaying one’s obscene excess publicly (Diogenes, it is reported, used to masturbate in front of others). Then there is the sadist pervert who displaces shame onto his other/victim (the sadist assumes the position of the object-instrument of the other’s jouissance, in other words, the aim of the sadist’s activity is not primarily to impose pain onto the other, but to put the other to shame by way of confronting him or her with the unbearable knot of his or her enjoyment). It is a key fact here that the formula of the discourse of perversion is the same as that of the analyst’s discourse: Lacan defines perversion as the inverted fantasy, in other words, his formula of perversion is a $, which is precisely the upper level of the analyst’s discourse. The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a in Lacan, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure. So, when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void that provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire.

It would be all too easy to establish here a link between shame and the Levinasian notion of responsibility toward the neighbor’s face; however, the ultimate limitation of shame is the same as that of Levinas: it relies on some figure of “big Other” whose presupposed gaze makes us ashamed. For example, in City Lights the Tramp is ashamed because his hiccup-whistles are noted by those around him. Recall the key moment in a Jerry Lewis film which occurs when the idiot he plays is compelled to become aware of the havoc his behavior has caused. And this holds even for Oedipus: why did he blind himself after discovering the truth about himself? Not to punish himself, but to escape the unbearable gaze of the Other, the gaze which, as Lacan put it in seminar 11, is outside—it does not belong to an eye but to an all-seeing world which photographs me all the time. This is what Oedipus was not able to sustain: the shame of the truth of his being disclosed to the world to see it. What, then, happens to shame once the subject assumes the inexistence of the big Other?

When Lacan defines the Freudian drive as reflexive, as the stance of “se faire . . .” (visual drive is not the drive to see, but, in contrast to the desire to see, the drive to make oneself seen, etc.), does he not thereby point toward the most elementary theatricality of the human condition? Our fundamental striving is not to observe, but to be part of a staged scene, to expose oneself to a gaze—not a determinate gaze of a person in reality, but of the nonexistent pure Gaze of the big Other. This is the gaze for which the ancient Romans carved the details in the reliefs at the top of their viaducts, details invisible to the eye of any human standing below; the gaze for which the ancient Incas made their gigantic drawings out of stones whose form could be perceived only from high up in the air; the gaze for which the Stalinists organized their gigantic public spectacles. To specify this gaze as “divine” is already to “gentrify” its status, to obfuscate the fact that it is a gaze of no one, a gaze freely floating around, with no bearer. The two correlative positions, that of the actor on the stage and that of the spectator, are not ontologically equivalent or contemporary: we are originally not observers of the play-stage of reality, but part of the tableau staged for the void of a nonexisting gaze, and it is only in a secondary time that we can assume the position of those who look at the stage. The unbearable “impossible” position is not that of the actor, but that of the observer, of the public.

Along these lines, Gerard Wajcman recently proposed a Lacanian version of the rise of modern subjectivity. According to Wajcman, the medieval human remained inscribed into the field of the Other’s gaze, into creation under the protection of God’s gaze; this gaze is a secondary version of the original fact that, prior to seeing, we are objects of the Other’s gaze. Against this background, the break of modernity, the rise of the modern subject, equals the emergence of the space of intimacy: the subject asserts itself as the subject of a gaze who masters the world by first seeing it from a safe distance, from a dark place beyond the Other’s gaze. Unseen, I see. This is what the Cartesian cogito ultimately amounts to: I am insofar as I am not seen, insofar as the core of my being dwells in an “intimate” space that escapes the Other’s public gaze. This exemption is an illusion, however, a screen against the fact that, prior to seeing, I am here for the Other’s gaze:

Lacan will lift the final veil on all this in order to show the truth: that there is nothing to see. In other words, what is elided in the visible, outside of the gaze and with the gaze, is that nothing in truth looks at the spectator, except himself, his own gaze in the field of the Other. His own gaze ex qua, placed outside. But it seems to me that this should be added: that one can do nothing with such a truth except to know it. It would be better for the health of a subject if he had nothing to do with this truth in the real, if he never encountered it, if he never came up against the unveiling of the gaze which would thus be that of his phantasm. Between lie and undesirable truth, Lacan advocates a path for the subject, the path of the subject, ethical, that of a choice of being duped. Choosing the illusion nevertheless implies knowing the truth, not losing the view that it is an illusion. But a vital illusion.46

On the next page, Wajcman refers to a psychotic case of a patient of his, Madame R., who lived in a terrifying Real, outside illusion: totally exposed to the Other’s gaze, flattened, desubjectivized by it, transparent, deprived of any substance, invisible precisely because she is totally open to the Other’s gaze. This is Wajcman’s version of Lacan’s les non-dupes errent: the nonduped—those who refuse to get caught in the illusion of being able to see from a safe distance, to be exempted from the world, and to elude the Other’s gaze—pay for this a terrible price of psychotic closure.

However, Lacan’s les non-dupes errent can (and should) be read in a different, opposite almost, way, as a formula against cynicism: the “nonduped” are not psychotics but cynics who refuse to get caught in the symbolic fiction and reduce it to a mere superficial mask beneath which the “real thing” dwells (power, jouissance, etc.). What cynics do not see is that, as Lacan emphasized (paraphrasing Alphonse Allais), we are naked only beneath our dress. And, effectively, Wajcman himself comes dangerously close to a cynical position insofar as his version of Lacan’s “ethical path” (allow yourself to be duped, while knowing that it is only an illusion) cannot but function as another je sais bien mais quand meme: I know the truth but I choose illusion. In other words, I choose to act as if I believe in the illusion. This is an “empty” knowledge, a knowledge deprived of symbolic-performative efficiency. It is false because it remains disconnected from truth; the truth is not on the side of my knowledge, but on the side of the illusion in which I let myself get caught. This is how today’s ideology functions: a successful businessman who, deep in himself, thinks that his economic activity is just a game in which he participates, while his “true Self” expresses itself in spiritual meditation that he regularly practices, is not aware that this “true Self” is a mere delusion enabling him to successfully participate in the economic activity. He is like a Jew who knows there is no God, but nonetheless obeys the kosher rules.

Here I must raise a series of questions. Is a psychotic really the one who heroically assumes the unbearable truth (that I am seen, exposed; or that I am spoken), in contrast to the “normal” seeing/speaking subject who relies on an illusion? If the nonpsychotic space in which we are exempted from being exposed to the Other’s gaze emerged only with the rise of modern subjectivity, and even constitutes that subjectivity, in what way were premodern humans not psychotics, although—according to Wajcman—they were fully exposed to the Other’s gaze, perceiving themselves as dwelling within the created world sustained by the divine Gaze? Furthermore, is Lacan’s point not also that I am only as seen through a blind spot in what I see, through the stain in the field of the visible which is strictly correlative to the subject’s existence? Is this not what Lacan’s formula $ a (the “impossible” correlation between the void of subjectivity and the stain of the object) amounts to? Is this not also the antipanopticon lesson of the recent trend of “-cam” Web sites, which realize the logic of “The Truman Show”? (On these sites, we are able to follow continuously some event or place: the life of a person in his or her apartment, the view on a street, etc.) Do they not display an urgent need for the fantasmatic Other’s Gaze serving as the guarantee of the subject’s being: “I exist only insofar as I am looked at all the time”? (Similar to this is the phenomenon, noted by Claude Lefort, of the TV set that is all the time turned on, even when no one effectively watches it. It serves as the minimum guarantee of the existence of a social link.) Thus, the contemporary situation is the tragicomic reversal of the Benthamic-Orwellian notion of the panopticon society in which we are (potentially) observed all the time and have no place to hide from the omnipresent gaze of the Power. Today, anxiety arises from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his or her being.

And, last but not least, is the only position outside illusion really the impossible position of a totally desubjectivized self-exposure? Does Wajcman not confound here two quite distinct experiences: the psychotic exposure to the all-seeing gaze of the Other and the experience that nothing in truth looks back at me because “there is no big Other,” because the Other is in itself inconsistent, lacking? In Lacan’s perspective, it is wrong to say that the subject exists only insofar as it is exempted from the Other’s gaze; rather, the subject’s ($) existence is correlative to the lack in the Other, to the fact that the big Other itself is barred. There is a subject only insofar as the Other is itself traversed by the bar of an inherent impossibility. (Here, we should bear in mind that l’objet petit a signals and simultaneously fills in the lack in the Other, so that saying that the subject is correlative to a equals saying that it is correlative to the lack in the Other.) Far from assuming this lack, the psychotic persists in the illusion of a consistent (noncastrated) Other who is not just a fiction, in other words, who is not just “my own gaze in the field of the Other.”

What this means is that the subject’s opacity is strictly correlative to his or her total self-exposure. The first act of Sygne, the heroine of Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie Claudel’s The Hostage, is that of what, following Freud, Lacan calls Versagung: the radical (self-relating) loss/renunciation of the very fantasmatic core of her being. First, I sacrifice all I have for the Cause-Thing that is for me more than my life; what I then get in exchange for this sacrifice is the loss of this Cause-Thing itself.47 In order to save the Pope hiding in her house, Sygne agrees to marry Toussaint Turelure, a person she despises. Turelure is the son of her servant and wet nurse and has used the Revolution to promote his career; as a Jacobin local potentate, he ordered the execution of Sygne’s parents in the presence of their children. Thus, Sygne sacrifices everything that matters to her—her love, her family name, and her estate. Her second act is her final No! to Turelure. Turelure, standing by the bed of the fatally wounded Sygne, desperately asks her to give a sign which would confer some meaning on her unexpected suicidal gesture of saving the life of her loathed husband—anything, even if she didn’t do it for the love of him but merely to save the family name from disgrace. The dying Sygne doesn’t utter a sound. She merely signals her rejection of the final reconciliation with her husband by means of a compulsive tic, a kind of convulsed twitching that repeatedly distorts her gentle face. There is a key difference between the facial tic which stands for the “non de Sygne” (Lacan), for her refusal to confer meaning on her suicidal act, and the Tramp’s hiccups in City Lights. His uncontrollable hiccups make the Tramp ashamed in the eyes of the public, while there is no shame in Sygne. Her shattering experience deprives her of that fantasmatic core, the exposure of which would put her to shame; so her tic is just that, a feature that provides the minimum of consistency to her devastated/voided subjectivity.

Thus, it is totally misleading to try to “interpret” Sygne’s No! so as to see in it some desperate strategy of retaining a minimum of dignity or privacy, or to perceive it as conditioned by some psychopathological compulsion. Sygne’s fate makes it clear how total exposure equals opacity: it is precisely when a subject exposes himself totally to me that I experience him as thoroughly impenetrable—although there is no content hidden from me, the enigma is that of the form itself, of the status of the very gesture of exposure.

Love, Hatred, and Indifference

We should therefore assume the risk of countering Levinas’s position with a more radical one: others are primordially an (ethically) indifferent multitude, and love is a violent gesture of cutting into this multitude and privileging a One as the neighbor, thus introducing a radical imbalance into the whole. In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the One. Justice and love are thus structurally incompatible: justice, not love, has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I “really understand.” What this means is that the Third is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship, the one in shadow, like the absent child of a love-couple. This not simply the Derridean-Kierkegaardian point that I always betray the Other because toute autre est un autre, because I have to make a choice to select who my neighbor is from the mass of the Thirds, and this is the original sin-choice of love. The structure is similar to the one described by Emile Benveniste regarding verbs: the primordial couple is not active-passive, to which the middle form is then added, but active and middle (along the axis of engaged-disengaged). The primordial couple is Neutral and Evil (the choice which disturbs the neutral balance) or, grammatically, impersonal Other and I—“you” is a secondary addition.48

To properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred, and indifference, one must rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception which only introduces existence. The truth of the universal proposition “Humans are mortal” does not imply the existence of even one human, while the “less strong” proposition “There is at least one human who exists (i.e., some humans exist)” implies their existence. Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from universal proposition (which defines the content of a notion) to existence only through a proposition stating the existence of—not the at least one element of the universal genus which exists, but—at least one which is an exception to the universality in question. What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition “I love you all” acquires the level of actual existence only if “there is at least one whom I hate”—a thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is the “truth” of universal love, in contrast to true love which can emerge only against the background—not of universal hatred, but—of universal indifference: I am indifferent toward All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love you, the unique individual who stands/sticks out of this indifferent background. Love and hatred are thus not symmetrical: love emerges out of universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love. In short, we are dealing here again with the formulas of sexuation: “I do not love you all” is the only foundation of “there is nobody that I do not love,” while “I love you all” necessarily relies on “I really hate some of you.” “But I love you all!”—this is how Erich Mielke, the boss of the East German secret police, defended himself. His universal love was obviously grounded in its constitutive exception, the hatred of the enemies of socialism.49

This brings us to the radical anti-Levinasian conclusion: the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary. Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background.⁵⁰ It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it “embedded” in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper. When Levinas endeavors to ground ethics in the Other’s face, is he not still clinging to the ultimate root of the ethical commitment, afraid to accept the abyss of the rootless Law as the only foundation of ethics? Thus, truly blind justice cannot be grounded in the relationship to the Other’s face, in other words, in the relationship to the neighbor. Justice is emphatically not justice for—with regard to—the neighbor.

What is at stake here is not primarily an external critique of Levinas, targeting its problematic sociopolitical consequences, but the deployment of the inherent insufficiency of his rendering of the encounter of the Other’s face as the primordial face. This rendering is wrong in its own terms, as a phenomenological description, since it misses the way the Third is always-already here. Prior to encountering the Other as a face in front of us, the Other is here as a paradoxical background-face; in other words, the first relationship to an Other is that to a faceless Third. The Third is a formal-transcendental fact; it is not that, while, in our empirical lives, the Third is irreducible, we should maintain as a kind of regulative Idea the full grounding of ethics in the relationship to the Other’s Face. Such a grounding is not only empirically impossible, it is a priori impossible, since the limitation of our capacity to relate to Others’ faces is the mark of our very finitude. In other words, the limitation of our ethical relation of responsibility toward the Other’s face which necessitates the rise of the Third (the domain of regulations) is a positive condition of ethics, not simply its secondary supplement. If we deny this—in other words, if we stick to the postulate of a final translatability of the Third into a relation to the Other’s face—we remain caught in the vicious cycle of “understanding.” One can “understand” everything; even the most hideous crime has an “inner truth and beauty” when observed from within (recall the refined spiritual meditations of the Japanese warriors). There is a weird scene in Hector Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. In German-occupied France, a high Gestapo officer explains to his French mistress the inner truth of the Nazis, how they are guided in what may appear brutal military interventions by an inner vision of breathtaking goodness. We never learn in what, exactly, this inner truth and goodness consist; all that matters is this purely formal gesture of asserting that things are not what they seem (brutal occupation and terror), that there is an inner ethical truth which redeems them. This is what the ethical Law prohibits: justice must be blind, ignoring the inner truth. Recall the famous passage from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how their hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”51

However, what this means is that, in order to practice justice, one has to suspend one’s power of imagination; if hate is a failure of imagination, then pity is the failure of the power of abstraction. Recall how colorblind people proved useful in World War II: they were able almost immediately to see through camouflage and to identify a tank or a gun behind the protective cover—a proof that this cover worked at the level of color, by reproducing colors that extended smoothly into the surroundings, not at the level of shapes. In the same way, justice is color-blind: in order to perceive the true contours of the act to be appreciated, justice must ignore the entire camouflage of the human face. Far from displaying “a quality God’s image carried with it,” the face is the ultimate ethical lure, and the passage from Judaism to Christianity is not the passage from blindly applying the harsh law to displaying love and pity for the suffering face. It is crucial that it was Judaism, the religion of the harsh letter of the Law, that first formulated the injunction to love thy neighbor: the neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is, as we have seen, in his or her fundamental dimension a faceless monster. It is here that one has to remain faithful to the Jewish legacy: in order to arrive at the “neighbor” we have to love, we must pass through the “dead” letter of the Law, which cleanses the neighbor of all imaginary lure, of the “inner wealth of a person” displayed through his or her face, reducing him or her to a pure subject. Levinas is right to point out the ultimate paradox of how “the Jewish consciousness, formed precisely through contact with this harsh morality, with its obligations and sanctions, has learned to have an absolute horror of blood, while the doctrine of non-violence has not stemmed the natural course towards violence displayed by a whole world over the last two thousand years. . . . Only a God who maintains the principle of Law can in practice tone down its severity and use oral law to go beyond the inescapable harshness of Scriptures” (DF, 138).

But what about the opposite paradox? What if only a God who is ready to subordinate his own Law to love can in practice push us to realize blind justice in all its harshness? Recall the infamous lines from Che Guevara’s testamentary “Message to the Tricontinental” (1967): “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”52 And it is crucial to read these lines together with Guevara’s notion of revolutionary violence as a “work of love”: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”⁵³ One should confer to the words “beyond the natural limitations of man” their entire Kantian weight: in their love/hatred, revolutionaries are pushed beyond the limitations of empirical “human nature,” so that their violence is literally angelic. Therein resides the core of revolutionary justice, this much misused term: harshness of the measures taken, sustained by love. Does this not recall Christ’s scandalous words from Luke (“if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes even his own life—he cannot be my disciple” [Luke 14:26]), which point in exactly the same direction as another famous quote from Che? “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness. You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the Spring.”⁵⁴ This Christian stance is the opposite of the Oriental attitude of nonviolence, which—as we know from the long history of Buddhist rulers and warriors—can legitimize the worst violence. It is not that the revolutionary violence “really” aims at establishing a nonviolent harmony; on the contrary, the authentic revolutionary liberation is much more directly identified with violence—it is violence as such (the violent gesture of discarding, of establishing a difference, of drawing a line of separation) which liberates. Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the violent act which disturbs this balance.

Marx said about the petit-bourgeois that he sees in every object two aspects, bad and good, and tries to keep the good and fight the bad. One should avoid the same mistake in dealing with Judaism: setting the “good” Levinasian Judaism of justice, respect for and responsibility toward the other, and so on, against the “bad” tradition of Jehovah, his fits of vengeance and genocidal violence against the neighboring people. This is the illusion to be avoided; one should assert a Hegelian “speculative identity” between these two aspects and see in Jehovah the support of justice and responsibility. It is here that one should recall Lacan’s formula of the ultimate choice facing us: le père ou pire. Against fatherly love, against father as the figure of universal, all-embracing justice, the one who “loves us all,” we should gather the courage to choose “the worse,” to make a difficult bet on the “other father” (in the same way that Miller speaks of the “other Lacan”), father as a divisive figure of struggle.

Judaism is the moment of unbearable absolute contradiction, the worst (monotheistic violence) and the best (responsibility toward the other) in absolute tension—the two are identical and simultaneously absolutely incompatible. Christianity resolves the tension by way of introducing a cut: the Bad itself (finitude, cut, the gesture of difference, “differentiation,” as the Communists used to put it—“the need for ideological differentiation”) as the direct source of Good. In a move from In-Itself to For-Itself, Christianity merely assumes the Jewish contradiction. So if I seem to argue for the step from Judaism to Paulinian Christianity, one should be fully aware that Paul is here conceived as “the first great German-Jewish thinker, equal in stature to Rosenzweig, Freud, and Benjamin.”55 At what point in the historical development of Christianity did this Paulinian moment reemerge most forcefully?

Do the three main versions of Christianity not form a kind of Hegelian triad? In the succession of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism, each new term is a subdivision, split off of a previous unity. This triad of Universal-Particular-Singular can be designated by three representative founding figures (John, Peter, Paul) as well as by three races (Slavic, Latin, German). In the Eastern Orthodoxy, we have the substantial unity of the text and the corpus of believers, which is why the believers are allowed to interpret the sacred Text. The Text goes on and lives in them; it is not outside the living history as its exempted standard and model.⁵⁶ The substance of religious life is the Christian community itself. Catholicism stands for radical alienation: the entity which mediates between the founding sacred Text and the corpus of believers, the Church, the religious Institution, regains its full autonomy. The highest authority resides in the Church, which is why the Church has the right to interpret the Text; the Text is read during the mass in Latin, a language which is not understood by ordinary believers, and it is even considered a sin for an ordinary believer to read the Text directly, bypassing the priest’s guidance. For Protestantism, finally, the only authority is the Text itself, and the wager is on every believer’s direct contact with the Word of God as it was delivered in the Text; the mediator (the Particular) thus disappears, withdraws into insignificance, enabling the believer to adopt the position of a “universal Singular,” the individual in direct contact with the divine Universality, bypassing the mediating role of the particular Institution. This reconciliation, however, becomes possible only after alienation is brought to the extreme: in contrast to the Catholic notion of a caring and loving God with whom one can communicate, negotiate even, Protestantism starts with the notion of God deprived of any “common measure” shared with humans, of God as an impenetrable Beyond who distributes grace in a totally contingent way.57 One can discern the traces of this full acceptance of God’s unconditional and capricious authority in the last song Johnny Cash recorded just before his death, “The Man Comes Around,” an exemplary articulation of the anxieties contained in Southern Baptist Christianity:

There’s a man goin’ ’round taking names

And he decides who to free and who to blame

Everybody won’t be treated all the same

There will be a golden ladder reaching down

When the man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up

At the terror in each sip and each sup

Will you partake of that last offered cup

Or disappear into the potter’s ground

When the man comes around

Hear the trumpets hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singin’

Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum

Voices callin’ and voices cryin’

Some are born and some are dyin’

It’s Alpha and Omega’s Kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn trees

The virgins are all trimming their wicks

The whirlwind is in the thorn trees

It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks

Till Armageddon no shalam no shalom

Then the father hen will call his chickens home

The wise men will bow down before the thorn

And at his feet they’ll cast their golden crowns

When the man comes around

Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still

Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still

Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still

The song is about Armageddon, the end of days, when God will appear and perform the Last Judgment, and this event is presented as pure and arbitrary terror: God is presented almost as Evil personified, as a kind of political informer, a man who “comes around” and provokes consternation by “taking names,” by deciding who is saved and who lost. If anything, Cash’s description evokes the well-known scene of people lined up for a brutal interrogation, and the informer pointing out those selected for torture. There is no mercy, no pardon of sins in it, no jubilation in it. We are all fixed in our roles: the just remain just and the filthy remain filthy. In this divine proclamation, we are not simply judged in a just way. Rather, we are informed from outside, as if learning about an arbitrary decision, whether we were righteous or sinners, whether we are saved or condemned. This decision appears to have nothing to do with our inner qualities. And, again, this dark excess of the ruthless divine sadism—excess over the image of a severe, but nonetheless just, God—is a necessary negative, an underside, of the excess of Christian love over the Jewish Law: love that suspends the Law is necessarily accompanied by arbitrary cruelty that also suspends the Law. This is also why it is wrong to oppose the Christian god of Love to the Jewish god of cruel justice: excessive cruelty is the necessary obverse of Christian Love. And, again, the relationship between these two is one of parallax: there is no “substantial” difference between the god of Love and the god of excessive-arbitrary cruelty; it is one and the same god who appears in a different light only due to a parallactic shift of our perspective.

One might designate this intrusion of radical negativity as the “return of the Jewish repressed” within Christianity: the return of the figure of Jehovah, the cruel God of vengeful blind justice. And it is when one is faced with this violent return that one should assert the ultimate speculative identity of Judaism and Christianity: the “infinite judgment” is here “Christianity is Judaism.”