|
|
superego obverse -- that is, the set of unwritten-unacknowledged rules that guarantee the cohesion of a community. (As to this opposition, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, London: Verso 1994.) Suffice it to recall the mysteriously obscene institution of fraternities--sororities in the American campuses, these half-clandestine communities with their secret rules of initiation where the pleasures of sex, drinking, and so on, and the spirit of authority go hand in hand; or the image of the English public school in Lindsay Anderson's If: . . . the terror imposed by the elder students upon the younger, who are submitted to the humiliating rituals of power and sexual abuse. Professors can thus play the role of good-humoured liberals, amusing students with jokes, entering the classroom on a bicycle, and so on -- the true support of power lies elsewhere, in the elder students whose acts bear witness to an indiscernible mixture of Order and its Transgression, of sexual enjoyment and the 'repressive' exercise of power. In other words, what we find here is a transgression that serves as the ultimate support of Order, an indulgence in illicit sexuality that directly grounds 'repression'. |
|
|
| 26. |
See Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris: Galilée 1993. |
|
|
| 27. |
This gap that separates the real from reality is what opens up the space for performative in its opposition to constative. That is to say, without the surplus of the real over reality that emerges in the guise of a spectre, symbolization would merely designate, point towards, some positive content in reality. In its most radical dimension, performative is the attempt to conjure the real, to gentrify the spectre that is the Other: 'spectre' is originally the Other as such, another subject in the abyss of his or her freedom. Lacan's classic example: by saying 'You are my wife!', I thereby oblige--constrain the Other; I endeavour to entrap her abyss into a symbolic obligation. |
|
|
| 28. |
This notion of antagonism comes, of course, from Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. |
|
|
| 29. |
What gets lost in the notion of social classes qua positive entities that get enmeshed in struggle only from time to time is the genuinely dialectical paradox of the relationship between the universal and the particular: although the whole of history hitherto is the history of class struggle (as Marx claims at the beginning of Chapter 1 of The Communist Manifesto), there exists (one is almost tempted to write it: ex-sists) stricto sensu only one class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class. Prior to capitalism, classes were not yet 'for themselves', not yet 'posited as such'; they did not properly exist but 'insisted' as the underlying structuring principle that found its expression in the guise of states, castes, moments of the organic social edifice, of society's 'corporate body', whereas the proletariat stricto sensu is no longer a class but a class that coincides with its opposite, a non-class -- the historical tendency to negate class division is inscribed into its very class position. |
|
|
| 30. |
For this Hitchcockian analogy I am indebted to Isolde Charim and Robert Pfaller. |
|
|
| 31. |
In the case of sexual difference, the theological name for this third asexual position is 'angel'; for that reason, the question of the sex of angels is absolutely crucial for a materialist analysis. |
|
|
| 32. |
This point was developed by Robert Pfaller in his intervention 'Zum Althusserianischen Nominalismus' at the colloquium Der Althusser-Effekt. |
|
|
| 33. |
F. W.J. Schelling, 'Clara', in Sämtliche Werke IX, Stuttgart: Cotta 1856-61, p. 39. |
|
|
| 34. |
Or, to put this distance of ours towards Derrida in a different way: does not Derrida himself, apropos of the spectre, get caught up in the logic of conjuration? According to Derrida, the ultimate 'source of evil' resides in the ontologization of the spectre, in the reduction of its undecidable status (with reference to the couple reality/illusion) to a 'mere appearance' opposed to some (ideal or real) full existence. Derrida's entire effort is directed into ensuring that the spectre will remain the spectre, into preventing its ontologization -- is not Derrida's theory itself, therefore, a conjuration destined to preserve the spectre in the intermediate space of the living dead? Does not this lead him to repeat the classic metaphysical paradox of the conjunction of impossibility and prohibition that he himself articulated apropos of the supplement (the supplement cannot endanger the purity of the Origin, which is why we must fight against it): the spectre cannot be ontologized, which is why this ontologization must not happen, one should fight against it . . . . |
|
|
-32- |
| |
