|
apparition of the Other, provides the ultimate horizon of ethics. According to Derrida, the metaphysical ontologization of spectrality is rooted in the fact that the thought is horrified at itself, at its own founding gesture; that it draws back from the spirit convoked by this gesture. Therein resides in nuce his reading of Marx and the history of Marxism: the original impulse of Marx consisted in the Messianic promise of justice qua spectral Otherness, a promise that is only as avenir, yet-to-come, never as a simple futur, what will be; the 'totalitarian' turn of Marxism that culminated in Stalinism has its roots in the ontologization of the spectre, in the translation of the spectral Promise into a positive ontological Project . . . . Lacan, however, goes a step further here: spectre as such already bears witness to a retreat, a withdrawal -from what?
Most people are terrified when they encounter freedom, like when they encounter magic, anything inexplicable, especially the world of spirits. 33 This proposition of Schelling can be read in two ways, depending on how we interpret the comparison -- in what precise sense is freedom like a spectre? Our -- Lacanian -- premiss here is that 'freedom' designates the moment when the 'principle of the sufficient reason' is suspended, the moment of the act that breaks the 'great chain of being', of the symbolic reality in which we are embedded; consequently, it is not sufficient to say that we fear the spectre -- the spectre itself already emerges out of a fear, out of our escape from something even more horrifying: freedom. When we confront the miracle of freedom, there are two ways of reacting to it:
| • |
• EITHER we 'ontologize' freedom by way of conceiving it as the terrestrial apparition of a 'higher' stratum of reality, as the miraculous, inexplicable intervention into our universe of another, suprasensible universe that persists in its Beyond, yet is accessible to us, common mortals, only in the guise of nebulous chimera; |
| • |
• OR we conceive this universe of Beyond, this redoubling of our terrestrial universe into another Geisterwelt, as an endeavour to gentrify the act of freedom, to cope with its traumatic impact -spectre is the positivization of the abyss of freedom, a void that assumes the form of quasi-being. |
Therein resides the gap that separates Lacan from Derrida: our primary duty is not towards the spectre, whatever form it assumes. 34 The act of freedom qua real not only transgresses the limits of what we experience as 'reality', it cancels our very primordial indebtedness to
-27- |
|
