Introduction
1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 66–69.
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard Hong (New York: Harper, 1994), 75.
3. Ibid., 74.
4. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 8: Le transfert (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 186.
Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor
1. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26.
2. St. Francis de Sales in the Treatise on the Love of God writes, “nothing so much presses man’s heart as love; if a man know that he is beloved, be it by whom it may, he is pressed to love in his turn. But if a common man be beloved by a great lord, he is much more pressed; and if by a great monarch, how much more yet?” (book 7, chap. 8; www.ccel.org/d/desales/love/htm/TOC.htm).
3. When the Israelites accept the law, thereby granting it the legitimacy of consent, they say, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do and obey” (
Ex. 24:7); the word translated as “obey,” shama, literally means “to hear.” Hence, the Rabbinic tradition reads the textual order of “do” and “hear” as implying that the Israelites were committing to the commandments prior to having heard or understood them, and for this they are greatly praised. See Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, eds., The Book of Legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah, Legends from the Talmud and Midrash (New York: Schocken, 1992), 79.
4. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 17: L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 117–52.
5. “One ultimately situates oneself [in the man’s position] by choice—women are free to situate themselves there if it gives them pleasure to do so”; “If it inscribes itself [in the woman’s position] . . . it will be a not-whole, insofar as it has the choice of positing itself in Φx or of not being there” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 20: Encore, 1972–1973: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge [New York: W. W. Norton, 1998]), 71, 80).
6. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 36. For a useful overview of the idea of political theology, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, although largely from Christian perspectives, see Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). In revisions of earlier works, Schmitt (in Political Theology II) and Hans Blumenberg (in The Legitimacy of the Modern World) debate the status of “secularization.” For Schmitt, Blumenberg’s thesis merely concerns legality, not legitimacy, and hence has no historical force; for Blumenberg, Schmitt’s account of secularization is merely metaphorical, or based on a structural analogy between theology and politics, and derives its legitimacy not from an existential decision, but from a history of decisions that have already been made. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); and Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder politischen Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970). Clearly, the question of secularization will be crucial to establishing the conditions of a political theology of the neighbor, but this topic is beyond the scope of this essay.
7. Schmitt refers several times to the friend-enemy determination as a “decision” made both by the state as a whole and existentially, at the level of every soldier on the battlefield: “Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict”; “In its entirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction” (my emphasis); “The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy”; “What always matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has not arrived. That the extreme case appears to be an exception does not negate its decisive character but confirms it all the more. . . . One can say that the exceptional case has an especially decisive meaning which exposes the core of the matter” (Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 27, 29–30, 33, 35.
8. “Perhaps what we have described as the central place, as the intimate exteriority or ‘extimacy,’ that is the Thing, will help shed light on the question or mystery that remains” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter [New York: W. W. Norton, 1992], 139). Also see Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of this topology in Schmitt (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], 15–29).
9. Schmitt refers to sovereignty as a “borderline concept” precisely because the sovereign holds an ambiguous position on the border of the law: “Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it” (Political Theology, 7).
10. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 26–27.
11. In his illuminating discussion of Schmitt in Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida writes, “without an enemy, and therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self?” (Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins [New York: Verso, 1997], 77).
12. Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 207; partial translation of Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 566. Lacan argues that it is the appearance of an actual instance of a father, or a “One-father” (“Un-père”), in the place of the missing symbolic father that triggers psychotic collapse (Écrits [1977], 217; Écrits [1966], 577; translation modified).
13. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 83.
14. Ibid., 123. Derrida uses the word lovence (aimance) several times in this text, a coinage, he notes, that also appears in the work of the poet Abdelkebir Khatibi. Derrida defines lovence as love in the middle voice, between passive and active, between loving and being loved.
15. Leviticus 19:18: “You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord” (Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], 146).
16. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 89.
17. Ibid., 83.
18. Ibid., 88.
19. Schmitt argues that “a continuous thread runs through the metaphysical, political, and sociological conceptions that postulate the sovereign as a personal unity and primeval creator.” In Leibniz he locates the “clearest philosophical expression” of the “systemic relationship between jurisprudence and theology”: “Both have a double principle, reason . . . and scripture, which means a book with positive revelations and directives” (Political Theology, 37–38, 47).
20. Eric Santner has argued that the account of miracle we find in Rosenzweig and Benjamin can be seen as a critique of Schmitt’s political theology: if for Schmitt the sovereign’s power of exception is a kind of political “miracle,” for Rosenzweig and Benjamin, the miracle is precisely the interruption of the exceptionality of sovereignty. See “Miracles Happen,” p. 102, in this volume.
21. Walter Benjamin, Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 312–13. Near the conclusion of his Trauerspiel book, Benjamin suggests that the Trauerspiel’s allegories of natural decay and cultural ruin finally signify redemption: “Ultimately in the death-signs of the baroque the direction of allegorical reflection is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns, to redeem. . . . ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection” (Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama [London: New Left, 1977], 232–33). Also see Giorgio Agamben’s account of the debate between Schmitt and Benjamin in “Gigantomachy Concerning a Void,” in State of Exception, trans. Kevin Atell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 52–64.
22. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 263.
23. “The effect of the love of ‘neighbor’ is that ‘Anyone’ and ‘all the world’ thus belong together and, for the world of redemption, thereby generate a factuality which wholly corresponds to the reality effected, in creation, through the collaboration of that which is general in a limited sense with that which is distinctive in a limited sense. For the world of redemption, absolute factuality derives from the fact that whoever be momentarily my neighbor represents all the world for me in full validity” (Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985], 236).
24. Ibid., 234–35; translation of Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 262.
25. Recall the last line of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where he describes the nonhomogeneity of messianic time: “For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” This immanent messianism disrupts teleological narratives of social redemption, insisting that messianic temporality is precisely the time of the now (Jetztzeit), the moment that is no longer identical to itself or part of a teleological history (Benjamin, Illuminations, 264).
26. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 84.
27. Ibid., 100.
28. Santner writes that the Muselmann, Primo Levi’s emblem for the radical evil of the camps and Agamben’s exemplar of homo sacer, is “the ultimate—and therewith impossible—embodiment of the neighbor” (“Miracles Happen,” p. 100 in this volume). Žižek argues that the ethical act of the refuseniks, the Israeli soldiers who refused to participate in immoral acts against Palestinians, reduced to the state of homo sacer in the occupied territories, was to treat the Palestinians “as neighbors in the strict Judeo-Christian sense” (“From Homo Sacer to the Neighbor,” in Welcome to the Desert of the Real [London: Verso, 2002], 116).
29. Slavoj Žižek, however, is skeptical of Kierkegaard’s argument and suggests Kierkegaard’s preference for the dead neighbor is for the sake of avoiding the other’s jouissance: “the dead neighbor means the neighbor deprived of the annoying excess of jouissance which makes him or her unbearable. So it is clear where Kierkegaard cheats: in trying to sell us, as the authentic difficult act of love, what is in fact an escape from the effort of authentic love. Love for the dead neighbor is an easy feast: it basks in its own perfection, indifferent to its object” (Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin [New York: Verso, 2002], 214).
30. Theodor Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 8 (1939–1940): 417, 419.
31. Ibid., 420.
32. Ibid., 424.
33. Ibid., 425.
34. Selya Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 64.
35. Here Arendt comes close to Schmitt’s argument about the “total state,” which, however, as Julien Freund argues, is not a theory of totalitarianism, but “hyperstatism in the sense that the state increasingly intervenes in all domains—the economy, culture, etc.—in the form of the welfare state. It no longer deals only with politics but tends to invade all sectors of social life” (Julien Freund, “Schmitt’s Political Thought,” Telos 102 [Winter 1995]: 13). Just as much as for Arendt, the state that goes beyond its rightful business, the determination of friend-enemy distinctions, is no longer authentically political.
36. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1973), 478.
37. Ibid., 465–66.
38. Ibid., 476.
39. Ibid., 478.
40. Arendt suggests that for Saint Augustine the commandment to neighbor-love denaturalizes the mere “living together” that characterizes unredeemed life, desedimenting the social in order to allow for individuation. That is, neighbor-love paradoxically both requires and effects the “isolation” of the individual—a mode of isolation that is the condition of the higher communion of the heavenly city: “I never love the neighbor for his own sake, only for the sake of divine grace. This indirectness, which is unique to love of neighbor, puts an even more radical stop to the self-evident living together in the earthly city. . . . We are commanded to love our neighbor, to practice mutual love, only because in doing so we love Christ. This indirectness breaks up social relations by turning them into provisional ones. . . . In the city of God these relations are made radically relative by eternity. . . . The indirectness of the mutual relations of believers is just what allows each to grasp the other’s whole being which lies in God’s presence. In contrast, any worldly community envisions the being of the human race, but not that of the individual. The individual as such can only be grasped in the isolation in which the believer stands before God” (Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 111; my emphasis).
41. In seminar 11 Lacan uses the notion of holophrase, where a single term takes on a wide range of grammatical functions, to explain the psychosomatic effect: “I will go so far as to formulate that, when there is no interval between S1 and S2, when the first dyad of signifiers become solidified, holophrased, we have the model for a whole series of cases. . . . This solidity, this mass seizure of the primitive signifying chain, is what forbids the dialectical opening that is manifested in the phenomenon of belief” (Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1981], 237–38). See Alexandre Stevens, “L’holophrase, entre psychose et psychosomatique,” Ornicar? 42 (1987): 45–79; and Eric Laurent, “Institution of the Phantasm, Phantasms of the Institution,” www.ch-freudien-be.org/Papers/Txt/Laurent-fc4.pdf.
42. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 3: The Psychoses, 1955–1956 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 49, 51.
43. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1958), 1:212; Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess (Frankfort: S. Fischer, 1986), 110.
44. Lacan, Psychoses, 216.
45. In his announcement of the “secret” of delusion, Freud takes the theatrical tone he will assume when he proclaims, six months later to the day, that the “secret” of psychoanalysis had been revealed to him in his dream of Irma’s injection, which he hoped would be commemorated with a plaque.
46. For another example, see Freud’s 1896 study of defense, “Analysis of a Case of Chronic Paranoia,” where he exemplifies paranoid symptomology through the hallucinations and “interpretive delusions” that convinced a young woman that “she was despised by her neighbors” and the subject of their gossip (Freud, Standard Edition, 3:174–85).
47. Freud, Standard Edition, 1:331 (translation modified); Sigmund Freud, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse (London: Imago, 1950), 415–16. Words and phrases in square brackets, except those taken from the original German text, are interpollated by the editors of the Standard Edition.
48. Lacan comments on Freud’s articulation of the mediating function of the Nebenmensch later in the seminar: “the formula is striking to the extent that it expresses powerfully the idea of a beside yet alike, separation and identity” (Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 39, 51).
49. Ibid., 52. The Thing is both the occasion for representation and that which resists representation, an excess or leftover that informs Lacan’s developing notion of the objet a in the following seminars.
50. Freud, Standard Edition, 1:207; Briefe, 106–7.
51. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54.
52. In his late essay “Negation,” Freud describes two distinct moments of judgment: the first, “judgement of attribution,” in which the world is divided into the “good” and the “bad” by a primal act of affirmation, Bejahung; and the second, “judgement of existence,” in which the rediscovery of the lost object is confirmed by negation, Verneinung (Standard Edition, 19:235). Lacan argues that psychotic foreclosure involves the failure of the primal act of judgment as judgment of attribution in his essay “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (Écrits, [1977], 200–201).
53. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 46; Le séminaire, livre 7: L’éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 58.
54. My thinking here is informed by Eric Santner’s comments on the “constitutive ‘too muchness’ that characterizes the psyche.” Santner writes, “in the view I am distilling from the work of Freud and Rosenzweig, God is above all the name for the pressure to be alive to the world, to open to the too much of pressure generated in large measure by the uncanny presence of my neighbor” (On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 8–9).
55. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54
56. Ibid., 53–54; L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 67.
57. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54; L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 67.
58. Freud, Standard Edition, 1:207–8; Briefe, 107–8.
59. The Oxford English Dictionary argues that boarder, although originally deriving from two distinct substantives, one meaning a plank or a table and the other meaning a rim or side, was already blended into one root in Old English (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [New York: Oxford University Press, 1971], 238).
60. See Kierkegaard’s commentary on the fact that love in the injunction to love the neighbor is in the form of an imperative, a duty. According to Kierkegaard, the only love that can be eternal, free of anxiety, jealousy, and hatred, is love that is commanded. Hence, paradoxically, neighbor-love is more free, more independent, than the spontaneous love based on preferential desire, which is merely the illusion of choice (Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995], 17–43).
61. Freud, Standard Edition, 1:208.
62. Lacan, Psychoses, 218; my emphasis.
63. Lacan returns to Freud’s statement later in the psychoses seminar: “The characteristic of alienating degradation, of madness, that connotes the remnants of this practice which have been lost at the sociological plane provides us with an analogy with what takes place in the psychotic and gives meaning to the sentence from Freud I quoted to you the other day, namely, that the psychotic loves his delusion like himself. The psychotic can only apprehend the Other in the relation with the signifier, he lingers over a mere shell, an envelope, a shadow, the form of speech. The psychotic’s Eros is located where speech is absent. It is there that he finds his supreme love” (Psychoses, 254).
64. Lacan, Psychoses, 266. In the Hebrew Bible, the word translated as fear of God, yirah, is closely associated with love of God. See Psalms 118:4, “Let those who fear the Lord declare, ‘His steadfast love is eternal.’”
65. Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Écrits (1977), 218–19; Écrits (1966), 579.
66. The signifier of the “Name-of-the-Father” is equivalent to what Lacan later calls “S1,” the signifier of what Freud calls “primal repression.” In an exchange with Jean Hyppolite during his seminar of 1953–54, Lacan describes the structure of Verwerfung, the mechanism of the psychotic’s “foreclosure” of a primal signifier, in terms that are virtually indistinguishable from those of primal repression—presumably the exact opposite of foreclosure: “originally, for repression to be possible, there must be a beyond of repression, something final, already primitively constituted, an initial nucleus of the repressed . . . it is the centre of attraction, calling up all the subsequent repressions. I’d say that that is the very essence of the Freudian discovery.” It is as if in its radical exceptionality, the signifier that will become the key mark of interpellation in paternal authority for the subject, variously characterized as “The-Name-of-the-Father,” the “phallus as signifier,” and “S1,” approaches a zero degree where it is indistinguishable from its diametrical opposite, the psychotic’s lack of such a signifier (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954 [New York: W. W. Norton, 1988], 43).
67. Lacan, Psychoses, 253.
68. Freud, Standard Edition, 13:141.
69. Ibid., 143.
70. Ibid., 141.
71. Slavoj Žižek describes the theological background to Schmitt’s theory of the exception through a fine reading of the shifts in Freud’s account of the father and the genesis of the law between Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism (“Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Verso, 1999), 22–27.
72. Freud, Standard Edition, 13:144.
73. See Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 167–78; and seminar 17, L’envers de la psychanalyse, 155–66.
74. “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” 26.
75. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 176.
76. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud explains this increase in self-directed aggressivity: “The effect of instinctual renunciation on the conscience then is that every piece of aggression whose satisfaction the subject gives up is taken over by the super-ego and increases the latter’s aggressiveness (against the ego) . . . the original severity of the super-ego does not—or does not so much—represent the severity which one has experienced from it [the object], or which one attributes to it; it represents rather one’s own aggressiveness towards it” (Standard Edition, 21:129–30).
77. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 177–78.
78. Lacan argues that Freud “stops” before the commandment to love God insofar as he is able to revalue and purify it, in the manner of Spinoza, of its pathological ambivalence, as amor intellectualis Dei (Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 180). In the concluding words of seminar 11, four years later, Lacan suggests that this model of the “intellectual love of God” is an attempt to avoid sacrificing to the Other, “the dark God”: “It is the eternal meaning of the sacrifice, to which no one can resist, unless animated by that faith, so difficult to sustain, which perhaps, one man alone has been able to formulate in a plausible way—namely, Spinoza, with his Amor intellectualis Dei.” Although this is a “heroic” project, its renunciation of desire, or quietism, ultimately does not represent the way of psychoanalysis; nor does its antithesis, the project to sustain pure desire, which Lacan finds equally in Kant and Sade. Rather, the “impure desire” of psychoanalysis is “a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it. There only may the signification of a limitless love emerge, because it is outside the limits of the law, where alone it may live” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 275–76).
79. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 186–87. For more on Lacan’s comments in this seminar on the relationship between the commandments to love God and to love the neighbor, see Kenneth Reinhard, “Freud, My Neighbor,” American Imago 54, no. 2 (1997): 165–95.
80. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 184 (translation modified); L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 217.
81. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 190 (translation modified); L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 223.
82. Although Howard Caygill is more convinced of the harmonious connections between politics and ethics in Levinas’s thought than I am, he points out that the political in Levinas is not congruent with the assumptions of liberalism and, indeed, remains a troubling element in his work: “War and the political assume a proximity in Levinas’s thought that were it recognized would prove extremely uncomfortable for liberal readers accustomed to keeping war—as the alleged pathology of civility—separate from peace. The proximity of war and politics is a thought that brings Levinas closer to the thought of Clausewitz and Carl Schmitt than to the liberal ethical theory that issued from Kant” (Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political [New York: Routledge, 2002], 3).
83. Slavoj Žižek, “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face.”
84. See, for example, Lacan’s essay “The Signification of the Phallus,” Écrits (1977), 281–91.
85. “J’oserai dire que les gens avaient quand même un tout petit peu plus d’idées dans la tête quand ils démontraient l’existence de Dieu. C’est évident que Dieu existe, mais pas plus que vous! Ça va pas loin. Enfin ceci pour mettre au point ce qu’il en est de l’existence. Qu’est-ce qui peut bien nous intéresser concernant cet il existe en matière de signifiant? Ça serait qu’il en existe au moins un pour qui ça ne fonctionne pas cette affaire de castration, et c’est bien pour ça qu’on l’a inventé, c’est ce qui s’appelle le Père, c’est pourquoi le Père existe au moins autant que Dieu, c’est-à-dire pas beau-coup. . . . Donc à partir de ce qu’il existe un, c’est à partir de là que tous les autres peuvent fonctionner, c’est en référence à cette exception, à cet il existe” (Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 19: . . . ou pire, 1971–1972 [unpublished transcript, December 8, 1971], my translation).
86. Lacan, Encore, 73. Also see Lacan’s comments in his seminar of the next year, Les non-dupes errent: “‘the sexed being authorizes itself.’ It’s in this sense that, that he has the choice, I mean that by which one limits oneself, finally, in order to classify them as male or female, in the civil state, finally, that doesn’t change the fact that he has the choice” [“l’être sexué ne s’autorise que de lui-même.” C’est en ce sens que, qu’il a le choix, je veux dire que ce à quoi on se limite, enfin, pour les classer mâle ou féminin, dans l’état civil, enfin, ça, ça n’empêche pas qu’il a le choix] (April 9, 1974).
87. Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings (New York: Continuum, 2004), 112–13.
88. Ibid., 114; translation of Alain Badiou, “Conférence sur la soustraction,” in Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 192.
89. This is closely related to the logic of fetishism described by Octave Mannoni in “Je sais bien mais quand même . . . ,” in Clefs pour l’imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1968). Slavoj Žižek has commented on this logic in several places; see For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991), 245–53.
90. See Alain Badiou’s close discussion of this question in his essay “Sujet et Infini,” in Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 288–89.
91. Lacan, Encore, 72–73 (translation slightly modified); Le séminaire, livre 20: Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 68.
92. “Vous savez que le pas-tout m’a très essentiellement servi à marquer qu’il n’y a pas de la femme, c’est à savoir qu’il n’y en a, si je puis dire, que diverses et en quelque sorte une par une, et que tout cela se trouve en quelque sorte dominé par la fonction privilégiée de ceci, qu’il n’y en a néanmoins pas une à représenter le dire qui interdit, à savoir l’absolument—non. Voilà” (Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 21: Les non-dupes errent [unpublished transcript, May 14, 1974], my translation).
93. Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 19: . . . ou pire (December 8, 1971). “Our not-all is discordance. But what is foreclosure? Surely, it is to be located in a different register than that of discordance. . . . There is only foreclosure when there is speaking. . . . Foreclosure has to do with the fact that something may or may not be spoken. And of that of which nothing can be said, it can only be concluded with a question on the Real” (my translation).
94. “le pas-toute, loin qu’on puisse en extraire l’affirmation qu’existe une qui n’est pas sous l’effect de la castration, indique au contraire un mode particulier de cet effet, à savoir qu’il est ‘quelque part’ et non partout. Le pour-tout de la position homme est aussi un partout. Le quelque part, et non partout, de la position femme se dit: pas-toute” (Alain Badiou, “Sujet et Infini,” 291). Badiou is commenting on remarks Lacan makes in the first session of his seminar 19, . . . ou pire (1971–1972).
95. Alain Badiou, “Sujet et Infini,” 297–98.
96. Ibid., 304.
97. Alain Badiou, “What Is Love?” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 52.
98. Cohen uses G to symbolize the generic set. Badiou writes, “By a dilection whose origin I leave to the reader to discover, I will choose for this inscription the symbol ♀” (L’être et l’événement [Paris: Seuil, 1988], 392). I am deeply indebted here to Peter Hallward’s comments on the generic set in his book Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
99. Hallward, Badiou, 132.
100. Hallward, Badiou, 132; quoting John Randolph Lucas, Conceptual Roots of Mathematics (London: Routledge, 2000), 333.
101. Badiou’s account of the political has an interesting relationship to Schmitt’s. Badiou begins where Schmitt ends, in the sense that he posits that “a fundamental datum of ontology is that the state of the situation always exceeds the situation itself. There are always more parts than elements. . . . This question is really that of power. The power of the State is always superior to that of the situation.” But if this superiority of power over situation—an incalculable, errant, intrinsically infinite disequilibrium—echoes Schmitt’s account of the sovereign’s theological ability to declare a state of exception and to act in excess of the laws of nature and the land, the political event per se begins, according to Badiou, only at a secondary phase. It begins in its ability to interrupt “the subjective errancy of the power of the State,” which thereby configures the State as a situation, measures its power, and in doing so achieves a degree of “freedom” by putting the state at a distance from its own power.
102. Or, more precisely, through three modalities of the infinite, one of which corresponds to Schmitt’s infinite disequilibrium of the sovereign’s ability to declare the exception to the situation. Badiou’s three modalities of the infinite in politics are (1) the infinite of the situation of collectivity, (2) the infinite disproportion of state power over the collective, and (3) the infinite distance of the freedom opened by fixing a measure to state power (“Politics as Truth Procedure,” in Theoretical Writings, 157).
103. Ibid., 159–60.
104. Badiou distinguishes between “membership” and “inclusion” in a set in L’étre et l’événement: “membership” is the originary relation of set theory, whereby a multiple (a set of elements, all multiples in themselves) is counted as belonging to another multiple (another set). According to the “power set axiom” of classical set theory, however, every set is made up not only of its elements or subsets but also of the set of all its elements, which must be considered as distinct from and excessive to those elements or subsets themselves. This set of all the subsets of a set does not belong to the set but is included in that set and thereby marks an ontological gap in the set—and, for Badiou, in being itself (L’étre et l’événement [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988], 95–107).
105. The complicated question arises here as to the degree of difference between Badiou’s position and Lacan’s. For Badiou, Lacan’s account of love is “pessimistic”: he argues that Lacan’s statement that love makes up for the lack of a sexual relationship makes love into no more than a poor substitute for sexual nonrelationship. However, it is not clear to me that this fairly represents everything that Lacan says about love. I would suggest that for Lacan there are at least two modes of love, one that is an illusion that merely disguises the truth of nonrelationship and another that involves a real encounter. But this is an elaborate issue that cannot be taken up in full here.
106. Badiou, “The Scene of Two,” Lacanian Ink 21 (2003): 48.
107. Badiou, “What Is Love?” 45.
108. “The entire Freudian conceptual apparatus retains the mark of the disciplinary epoch: interdiction, repression, censorship . . . which is what permitted a junction between psychoanalysis and Marxism, in the form of Freudo-Marxism or the 1968 style of contestation. . . . Lacan conceptualized psychoanalysis during the disciplinary epoch, but . . . he also anticipated the psychoanalysis of the imperial epoch” (Jacques-Alain Miller, “Milanese Intuitions [1],” Mental Online: International Journal of Mental Health and Applied Psychoanalysis 11 [May 2003]: 13, www.mental-nls.com).
109. Describing the current postdisciplinary era, Miller writes, “Everything is now an affair of arrangement. We no longer dream of what is outside. There is nothing but trajectories, arrangements and regimes of jouissance. The Borromean knot is already an effort to find a way out of a structure based on binary opposition and the disciplinary organization that this cleavage implies” (ibid., 14).
110. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Milanese Intuitions (2),” Mental Online 12 (May 2003): 11–12, www.mental-nls.com.
111. Ibid., 12.
112. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 5–6.
113. Lacan, Les non-dupes errent, December 11, 1973. Lacan argues that when we add one signifier (or number) to another, we do not get two, but three, since we also need to take into account the “decoding” or computation that was involved. Hence, even the primary relationship that the master’s discourse describes, between S1 and S2, involves the relationship between them, indicated as $ (the subject). See Badiou, Le nombre et les nombres (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
114. Lacan, Les non-dupes errent, December 18, 1973.
115. Ibid. The name of this year of Lacan’s seminar puns on the famous undelivered seminar of ten years earlier, “Les Noms du Père,” which, after a first session, Lacan cancelled, refusing to ever take it up again. The seminar called Les non-dupes errent is a way for Lacan to put something in the place of “the Names of the Father” without literally breaking his vow to leave it unspoken. It is as if Lacan is warning us against imagining that knowledge of the paternal signifiers would allow us to escape from their grasp, reminding us that we must find a more subtle strategy if we wish not to err.
Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor
1. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389. Until recently, the accepted English title of this text was “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the title used in the collection of Benjamin’s essays edited by Hannah Arendt, Illuminations. For the sake of brevity and because this is the title most familiar to readers of Benjamin in English, I will continue to refer to this text as the “Theses.”
2. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 93. Subsequent references are given in the text.
3. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” quoted in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58.
4. Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis. Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (Frankfurt: Campus, 1993), 32. Jean-Joseph Goux has recently offered his own quite powerful genealogy of this enlightenment gesture of self-orphaning. Positing its emergence in the figure of Oedipus, who confronts the Sphinx without recourse to the traditional/mythic conventions of initiatory ordeal, he locates its modern culmination in the cogito of Descartes: “Opposed to any genealogical position that attaches the individual to a line of succession (noble or initiatory) and that bases the existence of a subject only on its relation to an ancestral chain that it continues, the Cartesian gesture is the formidable claim of a subject who has broken away from his inheritance, proclaiming his absolute autonomy and basing his legitimacy on himself alone” (Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993], 160–61).
5. One of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment is that the break with tradition needed to be cultivated and one form that this culture took was that of Freemasonry, in which one had to be initiated into the sublime mysteries revealed in this break with the illusions of tradition.
6. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Rosenzweig’s Concept of Miracle,” in Jüdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott. Festschrift für Stephane Moses, ed. Jens Mattern, Gabriel Motzkin, and Shimon Sandbank (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000), 57. This entire essay is deeply indebted to Mendes-Flohr’s discussion as well as to numerous conversations in private and in the context of a team-taught seminar on Rosenzweig at the University of Chicago in the winter quarter 2002.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 160–61. For a brilliant reading of this passage in the larger context of Nietzsche’s elaboration of the nihilism in which it culminates, see Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
8. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1999), 99; my emphasis.
9. Ibid.
10. One might argue, of course, that such was also the goal of Mann’s hero, Adrian Leverkühn, in the realm of aesthetics, in general, and music, in particular. In his essay published in this volume, Slavoj Žižek suggests that the dimension of the “demonic” in question here emerged in the wake of the Kantian revolution of thought and therewith belongs to that constellation that Rosenzweig liked to refer to as “1800.” What is in question here is “a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity,’ is inherent to being-human.” “In the pre-Kantian universe,” Žižek continues, “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.” (Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” p. 160 in this volume).
11. Rosenzweig used this term in an essay of the same name which he wrote to clarify certain points made in the Star. See “The New Thinking,” in Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000). Benjamin’s work, qua “new thinking,” cannot, therefore, be divided up into separate clusters or phases, the one metaphysical/theological, the other materialist/Marxist. The “creaturely” materiality in question for Benjamin was one that required theology to conceptualize.
12. One of Rosenzweig’s many claims about Islam is that the Koran is not organized around this semiotic structure of prefiguration and fulfillment: “Mohammed came upon the idea of revelation and took it over as such a find is wont to be taken over, that is, without generating it out of its presuppositions. The Koran is a ‘Talmud’ not based on a ‘Bible,’ a ‘New’ Testament not based on an ‘Old’ Testament. Islam has only revelation, not prophecy. In it, therefore, the miracle of revelation is not a ‘sign,’ it is not the revelation of divine providence, active in creation, as a ‘plan of salvation.’ Rather the Koran is a miracle in itself, and thus a magical miracle” (Star, 116).
13. Robert Paul has noted yet another significant feature of this episode. Emphasizing the symbolic dimension of the children of Israel’s thirst, Paul comments: “At the waters of Meribah, Moses disobeys the paternal injunction to speak, to use language, and reverts to a preoedipal demand for the breast and its withheld bounty. It is thus for a symbolic incestuous infraction of the oedipal law of the father that Moses is punished.” The “regression” from sign to sorcery is correlated here with one from oedipal to preoedipal modes of demand/desire and satisfaction (Moses and Civilization: The Meaning behind Freud’s Myth [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996], 106).
14. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 160.
15. Mendes-Flohr, “Rosenzweig’s Concept of Miracle,” 56; my emphasis.
16. Ibid., 58.
17. In the Star, Rosenzweig tends to link the notions of creation and creature to the temporal dimension of the past. As he puts it, the significance of death for the being of creaturely life is that death “first stamps every created thing with the ineradicable stamp of creatureliness, the word ‘has been’” (156). My argument here is that Rosenzweig’s “theory” of the protocosmos compels us to understand the pastness of this creaturely past as one that includes the dimension of trauma, that is, of a past that in some sense has not been. In this sense, the term “historical truth” resonates as well with Freud’s use of the term in Moses and Monotheism. There Freud argues that the Jewish tradition bears witness to a traumatic past pertaining to the inaugural violence of its origins, a violence that did not take place at the level of a verifiable event. For a detailed discussion of Moses and Monotheism, see my “Freud’s Moses and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 3–42.
18. Rosenzweig characterizes creation precisely as a lack of being: “Existence (Dasein) is in need, not merely of renewal of its existence, but also, as a whole of existence, in need of—Being. For what existence lacks is Being, unconditional and universal Being. In its universality, overflowing with all the phenomena of the instant, existence longs for Being in order to gain a stability and veracity which its own being cannot provide. . . . Its creatureliness presses under the wings of a Being such as would endow it with stability and veracity” (Star, 121).
19. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 389–90.
20. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 463.
21. Ibid., 462–63.
22. I first discussed Wolf’s novel in my Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
23. Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood, trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 151.
24. Benjamin defines one of his basic historical concepts this way: “Catastrophe: to have missed the opportunity” (Arcades, 474).
25. I think that this is what Slavoj Žižek had in mind in his own commentary on Benjamin’s Theses: “The actual revolutionary situation is not a kind of ‘return of the repressed’—rather, the returns of the repressed, the ‘symptoms,’ are the past failed revolutionary attempts, forgotten, excluded from the frame of the reigning historical tradition, whereas the actual revolutionary situation presents an attempt to ‘unfold’ the symptom, to ‘redeem’—that is, realize in the Symbolic—these past failed attempts which ‘will have been’ only through their repetition, at which point they become retroactively what they already were” (The Sublime Object of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 141). I am suggesting that symptoms register not only past failed revolutionary attempts but also, more modestly, past failures to respond to calls for action or even for empathy on behalf of those whose suffering belongs to the form of life of which one is a part. They hold the place of something that is there, that insists in our life, though it has never achieved full ontological consistency.
26. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 23.
27. Wolf, Patterns, 161 (translation modified).
28. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 214.
29. Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 130.
30. Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), 80.
31. As Lacan has put it, “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere . . . there is transference” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 232).
32. Gershom Scholem, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevre (New York: Schocken, 1989), 142.
33. Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 110, 109; my emphasis. These sentences also nicely capture why Rosenzweig both affirms and denies the “Jewishness” of The Star of Redemption. See his essay “The New Thinking.”
34. Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 138, 120. Earlier in the essay, Rosenzweig rehearses the various ways in which Western philosophy engaged in and failed at such projects of reduction (of one region of being to another): “As ever, the possibilities of the ‘reduction’ of each one to the other are untiringly permutated, [possibilities] that, seen in large, seem to characterize the three epochs of European philosophy—cosmological antiquity, the theological Middle Ages, [and] anthropological modernity” (115). Rosenzweig argues that each of these attempts at reduction is generated by the very form of the question at the heart of this philosophical tradition, the “what is it really?” question. Thus, in modernity, when subjectivity occupies the center stage, “philosophy takes reduction in general to be something so self-evident that if she takes the trouble to burn . . . a heretic, she accuses him only of a prohibited method of reduction, roasting him either as a ‘crass materialist’ who has said: everything is world, or as an ‘ecstatic mystic’ who has said: everything is God. That someone would not at all want to say: everything ‘is’ . . . does not enter into her mind. But, in the ‘what-is?’ question directed at everything, lies the entire error of the answers” (116). Ultimately, Rosenzweig claims, “Experience, no matter how deeply it may penetrate, discovers only the human in man, only worldliness in the world, only divinity in God. And only in God divinity, only in the world worldliness, and only in man the human” (116–17).
35. “True, ethos is content for this self and the self is the character. But it is not defined by this its content; it is not the self by virtue of the fact that it is this particular character. Rather it is already self by virtue of the fact that it has a character, any character, at all. Thus personality is personality by virtue of its firm interconnection with a definite individuality, but the self is self merely by its holding fast to its character at all. In other words, the self ‘has’ its character” (72). In his commentary on F. W. J. Schelling’s Weltalter, the most important philosophical precursor to Rosenzweig’s project, Žižek puts it this way: “That which, in me, resists the blissful submergence in the Good is . . . not my inert biological nature but the very kernel of my spiritual selfhood, the awareness that, beyond all particular physical and psychical features, I am ‘me,’ a unique person, an absolutely singular point of spiritual self-reference” (The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters [London: Verso, 1996], 59).
36. As Jonathan Lear has recently put it, “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that there is nothing about human life we hold less in common with animals than our sexuality. We can imagine a bird happening to make a nest out of a lady’s shoe; we cannot imagine her getting excited about it” (Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony [New York: The Other Press, 2003], 150).
37. I am deeply grateful to Irad Kimhi for helping me to fully appreciate this paradox.
38. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–34, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 807.
39. Ibid., 811.
40. Ibid.
41. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Wolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 90.
42. See Slavoj Žižek’s remarks on the Muselmann in this volume.
43. Cited in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 71. Subsequent references are given in the text.
44. Stanley Corngold, introduction to The Metamorphosis, By Franz Kafka (New York: Bantam, 1986), xix.
45. In a brilliant essay on The Tempest, Julia Reinhard Lupton has argued that one needs to understand the figure of Caliban within the framework of bare/creaturely life we have been elaborating here, i.e., as a figure embodying radical exposure to the operations of the sovereign exception. As she puts it, “the Creature represents the flip side of the political theology of absolute sovereignty.” Such exposure generates a peculiar coincidence of oppositional determinations: “From one point of view the Creature suffers from too much body, collecting in its leaden limbs the earthliness and passionate intensity of mere life uninspired by form. From another the Creature suffers from too much soul, taking flight in ‘speculation,’ as reason soaring beyond its own self-regulating parameters toward a second-order materiality of signifiers unfixed to signifieds.” What I have referred to as the “matter” of the neighbor is just this strange overlapping of two seemingly opposite forms of “too muchness.” Lupton also notes that it is melancholy, the affect that Benjamin most intimately links to creaturely life, that “identifies the psychosomatic foundations of this creaturely consciousness, its violent yoking of an excessive, even symptomatic mental production to the dejected gravity of an unredeemed body” (“Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 1 [Spring 2000]: 5).
46. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), 43; my translation.
47. I am ultimately in agreement with Jan Assmann that the concern to separate Herrschaft and Heil, political rule and salvation, i.e., the critique of political theology as understood by Schmitt, belongs within a more broadly conceived domain of politicotheological reflection. See his Herrschaft und Heil. Politische Theologie in Altägypten, Israel und Europa (Munich: Hanser, 2000). The “new thinking” represents a powerful intervention into and transformation of political theology rather than a mere passage beyond it. Put somewhat differently, the new thinking might be understood as a “deconstruction” of political theology.
48. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174–75. We find a now classical literary version of the scene of interpellation at the end of The Trial, when Josef K. hears himself addressed by the chaplain in the cathedral: “K. hesitated and stared at the floor in front of him. For the time being he was still free, he could still walk on and get out through one of the small dark wooden doors that stood close before him. To do so would simply mean that he hadn’t understood or that he indeed had understood but for that very reason paid no heed to it. Should he turn around, however, he would be caught, for then he would have confessed that he had well understood, that he really was the one who was called and that he would follow” (Franz Kafka, Der Process [Fischer: Frankfurt a.M., 1998], 221–22; my translation).
49. Here I am deeply indebted to the work of Mladen Dolar.
50. In an essay on Freud’s Rat Man case, Jonathan Lear has offered the following scenario for understanding the birth of that patient’s metaethical self around the formation of a punishing—and binding—superegoic voice, a process that yields another exemplar of das bucklicht Männlein, or hunchback: “Melanie Klein has argued that the earliest internalizations occur via phantasies of physical incorporation. In good-enough circumstances, the comfort, reassurance, and satisfaction which the child receives at the breast is taken in with the mother’s milk. That is, the milk itself becomes a concrete vehicle of meaning. Goodness is the meaning of the milk. . . . Similarly, the child may begin to form a superego around a prohibitive utterance: for the Rat Child, it may have been the voice of the father saying, ‘Don’t do that!’ The utterance is itself the physical movement of meaning. The father’s tongue has set the air around it vibrating, and a prohibitive meaning informs that vibrating air. That meaning reaches the Rat Child’s ear via its concrete vehicle and triggers a chain of neurological reactions. One outcome is that the Rat Child can hear his father; another is that he can hear the prohibitive voice over and over ‘inside his head.’ The Rat Child experiences his own rage as tremendously powerful; and one way to deal with the anxiety it arouses is, in phantasy, to move it over to invest the father’s voice. This isn’t a thought or a judgment; it is the nonrational, phantastic movement of content. However, though the phantasy-movement of content is not itself rational, it may acquire a dynamic, intrapsychic function. Rage gains some expression, phantastically expressed over there, in the voice of the father, and it is used intrapsychically to inhibit outbursts of rage. And so the movement of meaning in phantasy helps to shape intrapsychic structure. The Rat Child begins to live a life which is to be understood in significant part as an extended cringe before the voice of the Rat Dad” (Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998], 99; my emphasis).
51. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 32.
52. Ibid., 116.
53. I also hope that the following will help to clarify a bit more what is at stake in Žižek’s discussion, in this volume, of “the relationship between Judaism as a formal, ‘spiritual’ structure and Jews as its empirical bearers” (p. 154) along with the corollary matter of Jewish election.
54. Peter Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 199, 201, 202.
55. Rosenzweig attempts to articulate this singular topology in a number of ways. In one passage, for example, we read: “The very difference of an individual people from other peoples establishes its connection with them. There are two sides to every boundary. By setting separating borders for ourselves, we border on something else. By being an individual people, a nation becomes a people among others. To close oneself off is to come close to another. But this does not hold when a people refuses to be merely an individual people and wants to be ‘the one people.’ Under these circumstances it must not close itself off within borders, but include within itself such borders as would, through their double function, tend to make it one individual people among others. And the same is true of its God, man, and world. These three must likewise not be distinguished from those of others; their distinction must be included within its own borders” (Star, 305–6; my emphasis).
56. In his book Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), Jan Assmann argues that it is only with monotheism that we encounter the phenomenon of a “counterreligion,” that is, a religious formation that posits a distinction between true and false religion. Before that, the boundaries between polytheistic—or as Assmann prefers, cosmotheistic—cults were in principle open, the names of gods translatable from cult to cult because of a shared evidentiary base in nature, i.e., in cosmic phenomena. Translatability is, in such a universe, grounded in and guaranteed by ultimate reference to nature. Monotheism, by contrast, because grounded in (revealed) scripture, tends to erect a rigid boundary between true religion and everything else, now rejected as “paganism”: “Whereas polytheism, or rather ‘cosmotheism,’ rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counterreligion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated” (3; my emphasis). According to Assmann, this rupture in patterns and possibilities of cultural translation and, thus, of a genuine cultural pluralism—a rupture that has been codified in the West as the Mosaic distinction between Israel in truth and Egypt in error—must be understood as a profound historical trauma and indeed as one that continues to haunt the West in the guise of violence against racial and cultural “others.” Assmann has returned to this material in a new book in which he insists, even more emphatically, on the potential for violence opened by what he refers to as the “Mosaic distinction” (see Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung. Oder der Preis des Monotheismus [Munich: Hanser, 2003]). What I think Assmann continues to miss in his otherwise lucid and compelling account of the Mosaic innovation and its implications for ethical and political life is that this innovation was not only a trauma; it was, paradoxically, the trauma that has the potential to open us to the force of trauma in the lives of others, who thereby become our neighbors.
57. Zupancic has correlated the logic of ethical consistency with the Nietzschean concept of forgetting, in which “the point is not simply that the capacity to forget, or the ‘ahistorical condition,’ is the condition of ‘great deeds’ or ‘events.’ On the contrary: it is the pure surplus of passion or love (for something) that brings about this closure of memory, this ‘ahistorical condition.’ In other words, it is not that we have first to close ourselves within a defined horizon in order then to be able to accomplish something. The closure takes place with the very . . . opening toward something. . . . Nietzsche’s point is that if this surplus passion engages us ‘in the midst of life,’ instead of mortifying us, it does so via its inducement of forgetting” (Shortest Shadow, 59). Zupancic’s larger point is that, in the absence of such a passion, we become subject to the absolute closure of the reality principle and the concomitant disappearance of the space of creativity, which together define modern nihilism (as the ethics of the “last man”).
58. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 41. Subsequent references are given in the text.
59. Badiou speaks of the “symptomal torsion of being” (cited in Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology [London: Verso, 1999]), 131). Žižek nicely summarizes the symptomal reading of the “situated void”: “The texture of Knowledge is, by definition, always total—that is, for Knowledge of Being, there is no excess; excess and lack of a situation are visible only from the standpoint of the Event, not from the standpoint of the knowing servants of the State. From within this standpoint, of course, one sees ‘problems,’ but they are automatically reduced to ‘local,’ marginal difficulties, to contingent errors—what Truth does is to reveal that (what Knowledge misperceives as) marginal malfunctionings and points of failure are a structural necessity. Crucial for the Event is thus the elevation of an empirical obstacle into a transcendental limitation. With regard to the ancien régime, what the Truth-Event reveals is how injustices are not marginal malfunctionings but pertain to the very structure of the system which is in its essence, as such, ‘corrupt.’ Such an entity—which, misperceived by the system as a local ‘abnormality,’ effectively condenses the global ‘abnormality’ of the system as such, in its entirety—is what, in the Freudo-Marxist tradition, is called the symptom” (131).
60. Laplanche, Otherness, 80.
61. Cited in Nahum Glatzer, ed., Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 95.
62. Ibid., 95, 96. In Badiou’s terms, Rosenzweig is describing what it means to adhere to the ethic of a truth: “Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption” (Badiou, Ethics, 47).
63. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, 96–97; my emphasis.
64. One must not conflate such a “deanimation” with the narcoticization of the will that Nietzsche associated with a form of nihilism. The point here is precisely to break out of the oscillation between an active and passive nihilism—between undeadness and narcoticization—that together compose the full picture of modern nihilism. Zupancic has lucidly summarized this oscillation in the following terms: “There is, on the one hand, the imperative or the need for excitement, the need to be in touch with the ‘Real,’ to ‘feel life’ as vividly as possible, to feel awake—the imperative or need in which Nietzsche recognizes the core of the ascetic ideal. This imperative, precisely as an imperative, holds us in a kind of mortifying grip, a paralysis that can very well take the form of some intense activity while still remaining that: a paralysis. On the other hand (and in response to this), there is passive nihilism as a defense that operates by mortifying this excitement itself. In other words, one kind of mortification (the one that takes the path of surplus excitement) is regulated or moderated by another kind. The ‘will to Nothingness’ is combined with the ‘narcoticization’ of the will—exciting stimulant combines with sedating tranquilizer” (Shortest Shadow, 67).
65. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Subsequent references will be made in the text.
66. Rosenzweig, “‘Urzelle’ to the Star of Redemption,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, 60.
67. References from Paul’s letters are taken from The Writings of St. Paul, ed. Wayne A. Meeks (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972). Such a decline is, Badiou suggests, correlative to the subjective destitution Lacan associated with the position of the analyst as the key to the working through of the transference (the positing of the analyst as Master, as subject supposed to know).
68. Rosenzweig speaks of “tragically immobile vitality” [tragisch starre Lebendigkeit] (Star, 230) and Benjamin of “immobilized restlessness” [erstarrte Unruhe] (Arcades Project, J55 a, 4).
69. I am alluding here, of course, to Freud’s remark in his Project for a Scientific Psychology concerning the thingness of the neighbor, a remark taken up by Lacan to great profit. Speaking of the perceptual experience of another human being—“ein Nebenmensch,” the human being next to me, my neighbor—Freud writes: “And so the complex of the neighbor divides into two constituent parts, the first of which impresses [imponiert; my emphasis] through the constancy of its composition [durch konstantes Gefüge], its persistence as a Thing [Ding], while the other is understood by means of memory-work” (Gesammelte Werke, Nachtragsband: Texte aus den Jahren 1885–1938 [Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1987], 426–27; my translation).
70. In a new book, Jonathan Lear has addressed precisely this possibility of Umkehr in conjunction with the notion of the transference and its working through. Apropos of a case presentation involving a woman whose fundamental direction in life was organized around disappointment—who had been, as it were, sentenced to a life of disappointment—he indicates what successful therapeutic action would involve. It would require, he writes, “a moment in which the world itself shifts: there is, as it were, a possibility for new possibilities. This ‘possibility for new possibilities’ is not an ordinary possibility, like all the others, only new. The fact that Ms. C. inhabited a world meant that she lived amidst what for her were all the possibilities there were. For her, there simply was no possibility of experiencing, say, a promotion as a success rather than as a disappointment. One cannot simply add that possibility to Ms. C.’s world piecemeal, as though everything else about her can remain the same, only now it is possible for her to experience promotion as a success. Rather, the order of possibilities itself has to shift so that now success becomes an intelligible and welcome aspect of life. The possibility for new possibilities is not an addition of a special possibility to the world; it is an alteration in the world of possibilities” (Therapeutic Action, 204).
71. Rosenzweig, “Urzelle,” 56–57. For Rosenzweig and, later, for Levinas, it is just such “centrality” that is at issue in the biblical notion of “election.” As Levinas puts it apropos of this notion, Israel “knows itself at the center 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” (Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990], 177–76).
72. Rosenzweig, “Urzelle,” 63.
73. See Jacob Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1995). The following discussion of Agamben is based on the French translation of his book on Paul, Le temps qui reste, trans. Judith Revel (Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 2000). Subsequent references are given in the text.
74. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud collapses, in a sense, the old and new thinking by arguing that, in and through the scriptural tradition maintained in liturgical practices, the Jews transmit a testimony of trauma with regard to their own ethnogenesis. For a discussion of Freud’s views, see my “Freud’s Moses and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire.” Freud’s method here suggests, perhaps, that the “new thinking” can never be a simple overcoming of the “old thinking.”
75. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 471 [N 8, 1].
76. Agamben is thinking here, above all, of the parallels between Benjamin’s eighteenth thesis and Ephesians 1:10.
77. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 570 [N7a, 1].
78. See the editors’ notes to the Arcades Project, 990 n. 21.
79. Suzanne Bernard, “Tongues of Angels,” in Reading Seminar XX, ed. Suzanne Bernard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 178.
80. See Žižek’s “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” n. 21. Reinhard’s essay culminates in the claim that the concept of neighbor-love as developed by thinkers such as Rosenzweig and Levinas can be properly understood only by means of a logic of the “not-all.”
81. One will recall, in this context, that Rosenzweig’s project in the Star is, ultimately, to reconstruct a systematic understanding of the relations between worldly, human, and divine being without recourse to a concept/fantasy of a closed All.
82. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 113.
83. Ibid., 112.
84. See my On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 116.
85. It is in this sense that Rosenzweig referred to monotheism as an antireligion directed against the “religionitis” of humans. See Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Reinhold Mayer and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 1:2:770–71.
86. Here I would like to cite the final lines of Lupton’s essay on “Creature Caliban,” where she also proposes that it is precisely the creaturely dimension we have been elaborating here—the “matter of the neighbor”—that offers us the evental site for the elaboration of new forms of solidarity/community/universality. She writes that Shakespeare’s “decisive crystallization of a certain material moment within the theology of the Creature might help us to find a postsecular solution to the predicament of modern humanity, trapped in the increasingly catastrophic choice between the false universalism of global capitalism on the one hand and the crippling particularisms of apartheid, separatism, and segregation on the other” (23).
Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence
1. Bertolt Brecht, Prosa 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 24.
2. Alain Badiou, “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art,” Lacanian Ink 23 (Spring 2004): 100–119.
3. This, of course, in no way implies that art has nothing to do with the “inner Thing” that haunts and drives the artist; the point is, rather, that this “inner Thing” emerges only through a “pitiless censorship” of one’s imaginary “inner life.”
4. See Judith Butler, Kritik der ethischen Gewalt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), quoted as KEG.
5. There is a double paradox in Butler’s establishing the link between Adorno’s critique of the ethical violence of the abstract universality imposed from outside upon a concrete life-world and Hegel’s critique of revolutionary terror as the supreme reign of the abstract universality (KEG, 17). First, one should bear in mind that Hegel here relies on the standard conservative motif (elaborated before him by Edmund Burke) of organic traditional ties which a revolution violently disrupts and that Hegel’s rejection of universal democracy is part of the same line of thought. So we have here Butler praising the “conservative” Hegel! Furthermore, Hegel is not simply rejecting revolutionary terror. He is in the same gesture asserting its necessity: we do not have a choice between the abstract universality of terror and the traditional organic unity—the choice is here forced, the first gesture is necessarily that of asserting abstract universality.
6. This notion of neighbor is elaborated in detail in Ken Reinhard’s contribution to the present volume. The present text is much more indebted to the work of Eric Santner and Ken Reinhard than a couple of footnote references can indicate—it is part of an ongoing dialogue.
7. Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 9; cited as DF.
8. Quoted from DF, 48. So what about the Buddhist figure of bodhisattva who, out of love for the not-yet-enlightened suffering humanity, postpones his own salvation to help others on the way toward it? Does bodhisattva not stand for the highest contradiction: is not the implication of his gesture that love is higher than salvation? So why still call salvation salvation?
9. See, for example, Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein (Munich: Fink, 1992).
10. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 3: Les psychoses (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 48.
11. See Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären I (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998).
12. Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge 1994), 163.
13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1979), 44.
14. Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy, 164.
15. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 202.
16. Quoted from Truth and Interpretation, ed. Ernest Lepore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 331.
17. At the end of this road of the celebration of irreducible Otherness, of the rejection of closure, there is, of course, as its effective spiritual movens, the ineluctable political conclusion: “Political totalitarianism rests on an ontological totalitarianism” (DF, 206).
18. See Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillip Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985).
19. See Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminels de l’Europe democratique (Paris: Editions Verdier, 2003).
20. Which is why, when it comes to collective relations between Jews and other ethnic groups, Levinas cannot but accept the necessity of war. When he writes, “my Muslim friend, my unhated enemy of the Six-Day-War” (DF, 17), he thereby endorses the necessity to fight the war. In a move recalling the old Buddhist warrior ethic, what his position amounts to is that we have to fight the enemy without hatred.
21. The paradox of responsibility perfectly fits the Lacanian logic of not-all: if I am responsible for everything, there has to be some exception that makes me non-responsible; and, on the other side, if I am not responsible for all and everything, there is nothing for which I can say that I am simply not responsible.
22. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 73, 74.
23. See his interview reprinted in English as “On Ethnic Cleansing,” New Left Review 26 (March/April 2004).
24. The same ruthlessness, the same rejection of the easy (third) way out, should be practiced in all domains today. For example, it is not enough to oppose the U.S. military presence in Iraq—one should condone the taking and killing of Western civilian hostages.
25. One may formulate the reproach also at this level, however. Today, in our politically correct anti-Eurocentric times, one is tempted to admire Levinas’s readiness to openly admit his being perplexed by the African-Asian other who is too alien to be a neighbor: our time is marked, he says, by “the arrival on the historical scene of those underdeveloped Afro-Asiatic masses who are strangers to the Sacred History that forms the heart of the Judaic-Christian world” (DF, 160).
26. For a closer elaboration of this distinction, see chapter 3 of Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). The Lacanian objet petit a also follows the logic of indefinite judgment: one should not say that it isn’t an object, but rather that it is a nonobject, an object that from within undermines/negates objectivity.
27. At a different level, the same goes for Stalinist Communism. In the standard Stalinist narrative, even the concentration camps were a place for fighting against Fascism, where imprisoned Communists were organizing networks of heroic resistance. In such a universe, of course, there is no place for the limit-experience of the Muselmann, of the living dead deprived of the capacity for human engagement. No wonder that Stalinist Communists were so eager to “normalize” the camps into just another site of the anti-Fascist struggle, dismissing the Muselmann as simply representing those who were too weak to endure the struggle.
28. See Giorgio Agamben, What Remains of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
29. For a more detailed elaboration of this notion of the Muselmann as the zero-level neighbor, see Eric Santner’s contribution to the present volume.
30. Franz Kafka, “The Cares of a Family Man,” trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1989).
31. Isabel Allende, “The End of All Roads,” Financial Times, November 15, 2003, W12.
32. Jean-Claude Milner, “Odradek, la bobine de scandale,” in Elucidation, vol. 10 (Paris: Printemps, 2004), 93–96.
33. How can we not recall, apropos of the fact that Odradek is a spool-like creature, the spool of the Freudian Fort-Da game from “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”?
34. Stephen Mulhall, On Film (London: Routledge, 2001), 19.
35. Ibid., 101.
36. Ibid., 128, 129.
37. Ibid., 132.
38. I rely here on Joan Copjec’s ongoing pathbreaking work on the notion of shame.
39. I rely here on the excellent paper by Lilja Kaganovska, “Stalin’s Men: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body in Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered” (unpublished paper).
40. Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1979), 195–96.
41. No wonder that we find another Kafkaesque feature in the climactic scene of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Deserter (1933), which stages a weird displacement of the Stalinist show trials. When the film’s hero, a German proletarian working in a gigantic Soviet metallurgical plant, is praised in front of the entire collective for his outstanding labor, he replies with a surprising public confession: he does not deserve this praise, he says, because he came to the Soviet Union to work only to escape his cowardice and betrayal in Germany itself (when the police attacked the striking workers, he stayed at home, because he believed Social Democratic treacherous propaganda)! The public (simple workers) listen to him with perplexity, laughing and clapping—a properly uncanny scene reminding us of the scene in Kafka’s The Trial when Josef K. confronts the courts—here also, the public laughs and claps at the most unexpected and inappropriate moments. The worker then returns to Germany to fight the battle at his proper place. This scene is so striking because it stages the secret fantasy of the Stalinist trial: the traitor publicly confesses his crime out of his own free will and guilt feeling, without any pressure from the secret police.
42. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–34, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 811.
43. And does the uterus not function in the same way in the old notion of “hysteria” as a disease of the traveling womb? Is hysteria not the illness in which the partial object within the subject runs amok and starts to move around?
44. The key question of any psychoanalytic notion of society is: can one base a social link on this suppleance? The wager of the analyst’s discourse is that one can do it. And the wager of revolutionary politics is that this is how a revolutionary collective functions.
45. As such, it is linked to judgment (in the strict Kantian sense): insofar as the object-cause of desire is that which makes us desire the (direct) object of desire, it is the ground of judgment, i.e., that on account of which we make the judgment that an object is desired by us. (Thus, the “transcendental” status of objet a is again confirmed.)
46. Gerard Wajcman, “The Birth of the Intimate,” Lacanian Ink 23 (2004): 64.
47. Lacan provided a detailed interpretation of Claudel’s L’otage in his seminar 8 on transference (Le séminaire, livre 8: Le transfert [Paris: Seuil, 1982]); see also my reading of Versagung in chapter 2 of The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996).
48. See Emile Benveniste, “The Active and Middle Form in Verbs,” in Problems in General Linguistics (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1973).
49. And does the same not go for the status of the inhuman? First, there is the inhuman of constitutive exception: the (external, barbarian, etc.) other with regard to which I define my being-human. Then, there is a more radical inhumanity: there is nothing in humans which is not human, and, for this very reason, not-all is human, we are all overwhelmed by an unspecifiable excess of the inhuman.
50. We find a refined case of such a reference to the Third in the famous passage in Koran 7:163–66, which tells the story of a community of fishermen who succumbed to the temptation to fish on the Sabbath; God punishes them by changing them into monkeys. However, when the faithful ones admonish the evildoers for their transgression, a third group protests: “‘Why do you admonish people God is about to destroy or to chastise with a terrible chastisement?’ they said.” The population in question is thus divided into three groups: the first group broke the Sabbath, the second admonished them, and the third thought the admonition pointless. The enigmatic point is that, in describing God’s response, the Koran mentions only two groups, those who were punished by being changed into monkeys and those who admonished them and were saved—what became of the third group? Here commentators have agonized, since it touches a sensitive ethical question: are those who, while not participating in the evildoing, keep silent in the face of it, to be reckoned among the damned or among the saved? Are those who preferred silence guilty of implicit endorsement, or, on the contrary, are those who gleefully celebrated the terrible fate of the evildoers hypocritical conformists? The elegance of the Koran is to address this issue in absentia, through its enigmatic silence.
51. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 131.
52. Available online at www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm.
53. Quoted from Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove, 1997), 636–37.
54. Quoted from Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 27.
55. See Eric Santner’s contribution to the present volume.
56. The Fast Runner, a unique film retelling an old Inuit legend, was made by Inuits themselves. The authors decided to change the ending, replacing the original slaughter in which all participants die with a more conciliatory conclusion; they claimed that such an ending is more befitting to today’s times. The paradox is that precisely this readiness to adapt the story to today’s specific needs attests to the fact that the authors were still part of the ancient Inuit tradition—such “opportunistic” rewriting is a feature of premodern culture, while the very notion of “fidelity to the original” signals that we are already in the space of modernity, that we have lost the immediate contact with tradition.
57. For those who know Hegel, it is easy to locate this excessive element: at the end of his Science of Logic, Hegel addresses the naive question: how many moments should we count in a dialectical process, three or four? His reply is that they can be counted as either three or four: the middle moment, negativity, is redoubled into direct negation and the self-relating absolute negativity which directly passes into the return to positive synthesis.