The Life Death Drives

Cengiz Erdem

Supervisors

Jon Cook and Denise Riley

A thesis in The School of Literature and Creative Writing submitted to The Faculty of
Arts and Humanities in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy at The University of East Anglia.

May 2009
Acknowledgements

I glorify the following names with praise for teaching, helping, and guiding me in

a perilous time: Jon Cook, Denise Riley, Kate Campbell, Anthony Gash, Andreas

Dorschell, Patricia Duncker, Sean Matthews, Sarah Churchwell, Aileen Davies, Colleen

Clayton.

I would also like to thank for different reasons, Claire’s heart, Braindance,

Mustukillah Sound Squad, Dread Entertainment Agency, Genetica, The Wall of Sound,

CzechTek, Alaturka Breaks, and all Soma Recordings personnel.

That said, though, an essential party would have been left unthanked and

unpraised, unless The University of East Anglia’s International Office was glorified too,

for funding this project.

On the whole in the absence of all these people, institutions, festivities, organs,

collective bodies, and establishments, I would have never been able to finish this work.

At times of despair their presence gave me the strength to go on; even when there was

nowhere to go on. They acted out for me, in and through their presence, how one

becomes what one is. For me this signified nothing but the necessity of patience. It was

only through patient labour that, to put it in a phrase Zizek used for Badiou, “one could

shake the foundations of one’s own mode of being.”

2
© Cengiz Erdem, London, May 2009

ISBN: 978-1-4092-9886-1
Publisher: Lulu.com, London
Rights Owner: Cengiz Erdem
Copyright: © 2009 Cengiz Erdem
Standard Copyright License

3
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..…....2

Table of Contents………………..…..…………….........……………………………........4

Abstract…………………………...…….……………………………………………....…7

Introduction: The Cont®act Between Deconstruction and Affirmative Recreation

1. Overview……………………………..………… ……………………….……………..8

2. Objective……...……………………….………………………………………………14

3. Method………..………………...…….……...…………………………………….….17

4. The Cont®act……….…………………..……………………………………….....….24

5. Structural Summary of The Thesis…...…….………..……...…………………….…..26

PART ONE: Twilight Psychedelia

Chapter I: Life and Death in a Raving New World….................…………..………….33

1. Freud and Einstein………………………………………………..…...……………....33

2. The Void, Drives, Automata……………………………...…………………………...37

3. The Subject and Power………………………………………………………...……...41

4. The Imprisoned Creators of Our Times…….…………………………………….…...43

5. The Nietzschean Subject………………...…………………………………….………49

Intermediation 1….……………………………………………………………………..53

Chapter II: The Controversy…………………………………………………………...54

1. Nature, Culture, and Lacan……………………………………………………...…….55

2. No Replica?.................................……………………………………………………...61

3. The Significance of Klein’s Fantasies………………………………..………….……63

4. Klein, Lacan, and Psychosis…………...…………………………………….…...…...66

5. Klein, Derrida, Deconstruction...……………………………………………………...73

4
Conclusion of Part I………………………………...…………………………………..78

PART TWO: Crafty Cuts

Chapter III: Cinema and Psychoanalysis ……………………………………….…….84

1. Cinematic Apparatus and The Psyche.....……………………………………………..84

2. Dream, Fantasy, and Film....…………………………………………………………..89

3. Projective Identification and Introjection ..…………………………………………...95

4. Cinema and Fetishism…………………………………………………………………99

5. Butterfly Effect….......………………………………..………………………...…....104

6. The Island…………………………………………….………………..………..……108

Intermediation 2……………………………………..…..………………………..…...111

Chapter IV: Cronenberg, Burroughs, Deleuze……...…...…….………….…...…...…112

1. Passing Across The Dead Zone and Moving Towards The Dread Zone…………….112

2. Narcissus Revisited…….....……………....…………..……………………………...117

3. The Mantle Twins…...……………………………..………………………………...119

4. Consequences of Messing With Nature………………………………..……….........125

5. Naked Lunch and The Body Without Organs………………………………………..131

6. The Evil Spirit and The Spiritual Automaton………...……………...………………140

7. From Metaphor an Towards Metamorphosis…………………………………...……145

Conclusion of Part II..………………………………………………………...………152

PART THREE: Post-traumatic Writing Disorder

Chapter V: Creativity and The Unconscious….…….….…….……………………………155

1. Surreal Faces of The Unconscious……………………….………..…………………155

2. A Pineal Eye Soliloquy...…………………………………...…….………………….162

3. Is Pineal Eye an Organ Without a Body?………………………....…………………166

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4. Artaud, Deleuze, and the Will to Nothingness…………..……………..……………170

5. Artaud and The Shaman……………………………………………...………………180

6. Beckett……………………………………………………………………………….181

7. Krapp’s Last Tape………………………………………………….…...……………189

Intermediation 3…..………………………………………………………..………….194

Chapter VI: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma………………….........………195

1. Architecture of The White Hotel………………...……………………………...……195

2. Is Everyman an Island?……...…………………………………………….…………205

3. Projection-Introjection Mechanism in Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans....…. …..210

Conclusion of Part III…………………………………………………..….………….219

Consequences Beyond The Life Death Drives..……………………………….....…. 221

1. The Immortal Subject Beyond The Life Drive......……………………………..……221

2. The Immortal Subject Beyond The Death Drive.……………………….....………...227

3. Expulsion of the Negative and Affirmation of Life are Mutually Exclusive………..233

4. Cont®action is not the same as imposing one order upon another…………………..236

5. Epictetus? Yes..............................................................................................................237

6. To What End Last Words? To what end suffering…...……………...………………240

AFTERWORD...………………………………………………………………………244

1. The Unhappy Consciousness.......................................................................................244

2. Conversation Around Nietzsche..................................................................................254

Filmograpy & Bibliography...……………..……………………………………...…...282

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 ABSTRACT

Throughout the thesis I propose that the life drive and the death drive, each

divided within itself, constitute the two sides of a single projection-introjection

mechanism. For the emergence of a new truth from within this projection-introjection

mechanism in which the contemporary subject finds itself caught, a critical apparatus

taking its driving force from death within life is required. The affirmative recreation of

the concepts of the life drive and the death drive aims at turning these concepts from

forms of knowledge to modes of being and thinking. As modes of being and thinking

life/death drives emerge as the two components of a dynamic and mobile critical

apparatus born of and giving birth to a fragile contact between immanence and

transcendence, as well as between affirmation and negation. This critical apparatus is

dynamic and mobile; it is capable of changing its shape according to the requirements of

the situation presented by the cultural product. It exposes the operation of the life drive

and the death drive within the cultural product and then shows how the life drive and the

death drive are produced, exploited, and/or oppressed as the two sides of a disjunctive

synthesis. I invert and put this disjunctive synthesis into the spotlight as the cause and the

effect of a contact which splits life/death drives, or affirmative recreation and

deconstruction, as it unites them in the way of a practical theory of cont(r)action for a

theoretical practice.

The thesis proposes that the life drive and the death drive are rooted in

transcendence, whereas immanent critique requires conscious desiring to produce new

modes of being and thinking as yet not conceivable from within the dominant model of

projection-introjection mechanism based on identification.

7
 INTRODUCTION

The Cont®act Between Deconstruction and Affirmative Recreation

1. Overview

The fragile title of the introduction, which splits as it unites deconstruction and

affirmative recreation, should not discourage the reader from even beginning to engage in

an encounter with this thesis. This thesis is the product of an intense meditation on the

relevance of Freud’s concepts of the life drive and the death drive for contemporary

cultural and critical theory in the light of Melanie Klein’s projection-introjection

mechanism. I consider Bentham’s Panopticon to be the material form taken by the life

and death drives as well as by the concepts of projection and introjection, since

Foucault’s interpretation of it in his Discipline and Punish as the model of modern

Western societies started to manifest its effects.

I propose that these concepts, both the Freudian (life drive and death drive) and

the Kleinian (introjection and projective identification), are becoming more and more

relevant with the recent developments in technology. As an inorganic realm, the realm of

technology forms a transparent sheet that blurs the line between life and death, the

organic and the inorganic. But rather than develop a paranoid and reactive attitude

towards technology, which would be a ridiculous thing to do at this stage of its

development, I attempt to find a way of affirming life attached to technology in the face

of the truth that affirmation of life requires affirming death within it.

There is no reason to interpret this attitude as a stance against technological

development. On the contrary, my problem is not only with the content of the
8
developmental process; technology remains a transitional object for me. My concern is

also the form of the developmental process, the ways in which the failures of this

developmental process manifest themselves, and where this developmental process is

heading as seen in particular works of literature and cinema.

This thesis does not project an apocalyptic vision of existence. My will is highly

optimistic, it is my intellect that is pessimistic.

One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the

willing that has received its direction from the ascetic ideal

actually expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of

the animal, still more of the material, this abhorrence of the

senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and of beauty,

this longing away from all appearance, change, becoming,

death, wish, longing itself—all of this means—let us grasp

this—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion

against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it

is and remains a will!… And, to say again at the end what I

said at the beginning: man would much rather will

nothingness than not will… 1

During the course of my investigation first I distinguish two distinct forms of the

will to nothingness. The first one is the death drive and the second one is the life drive.

As we will see, I used Freud’s drive theory to split Nietzsche’s will to nothingness, or

what might be called nihilism, into two separate but contiguous forms. These two forms

of nihilism, that I distinguish using Freud and Nietzsche under the guiding hand of

1
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, transl. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 118
9
Melanie Klein, are perpetually in conflict with one another. At times they put on one

another’s masks and costumes; they act out one another’s roles, and they keep the show

business going on.

Perhaps what was at stake was the confrontation between Eros and Thanatos, the

yet to be discovered life drive and death drive within him, when Nietzsche proclaimed

himself Christ and Dionysus at the same time in one last cry. In this light I see the life

drive and the death drive as the two constituent parts of the will to nothingness, two

driving forces behind the will to nothingness, which give birth to the two different forms

of contemporary nihilism: “Civilized progress” and “barbaric regress.”

But that I don’t find the resolution of the conflict between them satisfying does

not mean that I am dreaming of a higher form of reconciliation. What I mean is that these

two are always already reconciled, and yet that the only way to actualise this

reconciliation is to think their separation through introducing a difference between them

that unites them as it splits them.

I see the failure of the relationship between civilised progress and barbaric regress

as something becoming increasingly relevant for an analysis of cultural and natural

transformations of life. The ongoing conflict between what we started to understand from

civilized progress and barbaric regress after Hegel and since his three different

applications to the study of culture, embodied by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, does not

seem to have been a sufficiently fruitful one.

As Foucault put it in his essay Nietzsche, Marx, Freud with these three thinkers a

new form of interpretation emerged in three different practices. Following Nietzsche,

Foucault asserts that the dominant discourse of the classical period is “the history of an

error.” According to Nietzsche this is a history written by the ones who hold the power

10
but who are at the same time “the weak.” Nietzsche says that these have a slave mentality

and this mentality subjects them to being reactive forces that multiply themselves by

contaminating the others who are treated as inferior but are in fact “the strong.” In pursuit

of escaping from that history of an error written by the slaves and which is a product of

slave mentality, Foucault attempted to practice a new way of reading history which he,

borrowing the term from Nietzsche, calls “genealogy.” In Foucault’s words from another

essay in the same compilation,

Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and

profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the

molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it

rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations

and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for

“origins.”2

Where the soul pretends unification or the Me fabricates a

coherent identity, the genealogist sets out to study the

beginning—numberless beginnings, whose faint traces and

hints of colour are readily seen by a historical eye.3

Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are they who set the task and determined the

objective. This task is to learn from the past and sustain the conditions of impossibility

for suffering to repeat itself. In other words, the task is to supply the subject with

practical tools for living a long, healthy, and happy life. But the health of the subject is

not separable from the improvement of the other’s conditions of existence. Horkheimer

and Adorno, and Marcuse followed this line of thought.

2
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, from “Essential Works vol.2: Ethics,” ed. Paul Rabinow,
trans. Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin, 1998), 370
3
Foucault, 374
11
 Writing for different reasons, in a different way, and in a different context, the

solutions of the past are my problems. My aim is to show that what seems to be a

liberating attitude turns into its opposite and becomes a restrictive and paralysing

theoretical approach. In other words, the symptom which is the non-reason inherent in

reason turns into the cure when in fact it is the manifestation of the illness. This dynamic

of a vicious cycle will be the major object of this study.

To stay alive in a state of conflict what one needs to learn to do is to write and

rewrite a law for oneself as one goes along the way; a law that is permanently in touch

with the others within and without. One is to become capable of imagining another world

and still live in this world in such a way as to turn life into a movement towards a new

life. Death as Law is interior to the subject as much as it is exterior to it.

The Satyr, at his first sight of fire, wished to kiss and embrace it,

but Prometheus said, “You, goat, will mourn your vanished beard,”

for fire burns him who touches it, yet it furnishes light and heat,

and is an instrument of every craft for those who have learned to

use it.”4

At the root of every progressive movement Nietzsche sees a traumatic incident,

and for that reason the real is always touched through a surface event. Nietzsche sees

progress as an effect of regress and regress as an effect of progress. Nietzsche confuses

causes and effects. For Nietzsche the event that manifests the change of roles between

cause and effect always takes the form of a conflict between the causes and effects of

regress and progress on/of one another. This unrepresentable and unnamable event,

which, for Nietzsche, goes beyond the gap between the psychic and the somatic, is itself

4
Plutarch, Moralia Vol.2, transl. F.C. Babbitt (Harvard University Press; Cambridge, 1971), 8-9
12
the cause of a traumatic effect the transcendence of which is at the same time a process of

passing through the state of being governed by a superior and yet unknown force, death,

which is interior and exterior to the life of the subject at the same time. For me this

process involves passing through the walls of one’s wound rather than being caught up in

an endless process of climbing over it and falling back in again.

Slavoj Zizek points out that Lacan calls this process of passing through

“traversing the fantasy.”5 Deleuze would have said, it is, at the same time, traversing the

symbolic, in that it is a passage across the field of affective intensities and partial objects

where there remains no gap between fantasy and reality, psychic and somatic, part and

whole, organ and body, self and world, transcendental and empirical. Traversing the

fantasy is the process of becoming in and through which Nietzsche feels himself to be

“all the names in history.” Where transcendence and immanence become one, there one

experiences a sublimation of sublimation, and learns to affirm life as it is by affirming the

negative contact, and lives on as pure immanence surviving psychic death.

All this, of course, requires a realization that the external forces, having become

interior to the subject, themselves create the conditions of negative contact, and yet the

affirmation of the negating subject is itself constitutive of the affirmative contact.

Nietzsche had failed in surviving this process of realization. The confrontation

with the unconscious, the Real forces of the outside, had become so intense that a

spiralling of his thoughts into nothingness became inescapable. His painstaking process

of writing against himself caused a turning against itself of his desire to immerse himself

in the chaos of the Real. When this condition of impoverishment and exhaustion

coincided with his will to write he found the strength to say what he may: “And, to say

5
Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), 51
13
again at the end what I said at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness

than not will…”6

2. Objective

The principal objective of this thesis is to point out the continuing, and even

increasing relevance of the concepts of life drive and death drive for contemporary

cultural and critical theory. When Freud created the concepts of life drive and death drive

he was influenced not only by Nietzsche, but also by Darwin’s theory of evolution and

the neuroscience of his day. In the light of the recent developments in neuroscience

Freud’s drive theory may appear to have lost its relevance, and yet this does not mean

that it cannot be affirmatively recreated and put to use in the critique of contemporary

cultural products and the psychoanalysis of the world in general. The use of these

concepts should not mean that I am reducing being human to a dualistic vision of life, for

I am not ignoring the existence of other drives such as the drive to play, but trying to

show that many cultural products still operate at the level of a Freudo/Cartesian dualism,

and are based on the production, exploitation and/or oppression of the life drive and the

death drive.

I situate the concepts of the life drive and the death drive in the context of

philosophy and rethink these concepts through their relation to immanence and

transcendence, affirmation and negation. It would, however, be too simplistic to equate

the life drive with transcendence and the death drive with immanence. That, precisely, is

not the case in this thesis. To my mind the life drive unifies the multiple by transcending

death and the death drive splits the given unities by transcending life. So life/death drives

are both transcendence and negation oriented, whereas immanence and affirmation

6
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, transl. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 118
14
signify and are signified by life/death without unconscious drives, but conscious desiring.

This form of being in relation to the concepts of life drive and death drive enables me to

see these drives not as unchanging constituents of human nature and life, or as solidly

defined concepts constitutive of a certain kind of knowledge about human nature and life

but as modes of being and forms of thinking produced and projected onto human nature

by cultural products. In the light of this, I propose that these concepts can be used as

components of a mobile and dynamic critical apparatus targeting the works in and

through which the myths of life drive and death drive are not only produced, but also

exploited and/or oppressed.

I attempt to show how the life drive is exploited as the death drive is oppressed in

some literary and filmic texts, while the death drive is exploited and the life drive is

oppressed in some others. The condition of possibility for the oppression/exploitation of

the life/death drives to take place is sustained by a manipulation of the ambiguous

relationship between these two; they can easily reverse the roles and disguised as their

opposites, the life drive and the death drive become enemies working in the service of

destroying the subject whose life, with the advance of global capitalism and the

increasing abuse of the recent developments in technology, has literally become an

oscillation between them. For instance, the subject takes on the characteristics of Eros as

his persona, becomes a virtual Eros in a chat-room on the internet, but has to act like a

Thanatos at work, and becomes someone who pretends to be a Thanatos in ordinary

social reality, when in fact he prefers to be a descendant of Eros, or inversely.

My aim in this study is to look for traces and investigate the implications of this

paradoxical situation in particular works of philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural and

critical theory, literature, and cinema produced during the twentieth century. At present

15
this situation in which the subject finds himself/herself has become not only imposed on

the subject but also willed by the subject.

As I already said, while in some cases the death drive becomes the target of

exploitation/oppression, in some other cases the life drive becomes this target. I use texts

from, cinema, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in order to explicate this theory

of the emergence of the new forms that power, embodied by and embodying the Big

Other, takes.

Unless one splits the past and the present, the self and the other, the theory and the

practice, the life drive and the death drive, the subject of enunciation(conscious desire)

and the enunciated content(the unconscious drive), the critical and the clinical, it becomes

impossible to create a space out of which a new and practical truth emerges, and hence

the conditions of existence cannot be developed. All these binaries are separate but

contiguous to one another, they are always already reconciled but the only way to

actualize this reconciliation is to introduce a split between them which unites them as it

exposes the gap inherent in their relationship. We are in the process of realizing this

precisely because we have started to see that if theory is not practical it serves nothing.

This realization should bring with it a will to split theory and practice, for their unity

means the destruction of both of them; already before the beginning of the process of

becoming one they start destroying one another. Their oneness is their death, for one dies

as much, more than one lives as such. For me theory aims at developing practical ways of

practicing freedom, and its goal is to sustain the conditions for the possibility of its own

destruction. On this both Adorno and Foucault agree.

In the light of the result of my investigation I propose that a practical theory of

progress based on an interaction between deconstruction and affirmative recreation is not

16
only possible but is also already at work within the contemporary psychosomatic and

sociopolitical realms of experience.

3. Method

The nature of this study requires an interdisciplinary and a multi-methodological

attitude which goes beyond the opposition between merely conceptual and merely

empirical approaches. It is based on a mode of enquiry which takes its driving force from

thought-experiments that open paths to a new field in which various perspectives interact

and form an intra-subjective dimension of theoretical practice situating psychoanalysis,

cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy in the context of cultural and critical theory. For

the emergence of a new truth out of the old knowledge one must pose new questions

concerning the workings of the human mind. In the light of the recent developments in

cognitive neuroscience, for instance, especially the works of Antonio Damasio and

Gerald Edelman, Freud’s concepts of the life drive and the death drive, Klein’s concepts

of introjection and projective identification, and Wilfred Bion’s affirmative recreation of

Klein’s theories in the way of a theory of thinking become extremely relevant for the

development of a universal cultural and critical theory.

Cognitive neuroscience proposes that the quality of an external object is always

already projected onto that object by the neuronal activity of the brain. What cognitive

neuroscience lacks is a historical context, likewise what cultural studies lacks is an

organic basis. An interaction between psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, cultural

studies, and cognitive neuroscience can break out of the closure of the humanities and

give birth to the link which has come to be considered missing, between nature and

nurture, organic and inorganic, empirical and conceptual, epistemological and

ontological, transcendental and immanent, the objective and the subjective.

17
 Because of the dynamic and parallel nature of re-entry and
because it is a process of higher-order selection, it is not
easy to provide a metaphor that captures all the properties
of re-entry. Try this: Imagine a peculiar (and even weird)
string quartet, in which each player responds by
improvisation to ideas and cues of his or her own, as well
as to all kinds of sensory cues in the environment. Since
there is no score, each player would provide his or her own
characteristic tunes, but initially these various tunes would
not be coordinated with those of the other players. Now
imagine that the bodies of the players are connected to each
other by myriad fine threads so that their actions and
movements are rapidly conveyed back and forth through
signals of changing thread tensions that act simultaneously
to time each player’s actions. Signals that instantaneously
connect the four players would lead to a correlation of their
sounds; thus, new, more cohesive, and more integrated
sounds would emerge out of the otherwise independent
efforts of each player. This correlative process would alter
the next action of each player, and by these means the
process would be repeated but with new emergent tunes
that were even more correlated. Although no conductor
would instruct or coordinate the group and each player
would still maintain his or her style and role, the player’s
overall productions would lead to a kind of mutually
coherent music that each one acting alone would not
produce.7
The model of mind conceptualized by Gerald Edelman shows us that the mind is

an embodied substance which has the ability to adapt to changes surrounding it. If we

7
Gerald Edelman, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic
Books, 2000), 49

18
keep in mind that cinema, literature, art, and music show how the mind works at a

particular moment in history, as well as the emotional state of that particular moment, it

becomes clear why a mode of enquiry rather than a specific method is required for the

analysis and critique of human consciousness and its relation to the environment

surrounding it. In this context, the plot driven critique of the literary and filmic texts aims

at distinguishing between the world of consciousness and the world of appearances. My

claim is that it is only through looking at the mortal world of appearances with the eyes

of an immortal consciousness that we can see that which is present as an absence in the

predominant symbolic order. By looking at “what happens when” in a movie or a book as

well as “how that thing happens,” I sustain the conditions of impossibility as the

conditions of possibility for cont(r)action to take place and give birth to an immortal

subject. Needless to say, this subject is also an object encountering and encountered by

the unknown within the known, the chaos inherent in the order itself, that calls forth he

who has died so many times and is yet to die again and be reborn many more times so as

to live as dead again. The reader might be disappointed because I will not have pursued

and incorporated Edelman’s neural Darwinism and further developed the idea of a

context-bound cognitive neuroscience and a matter(brain) based cultural and critical

theory. The reason for this is that I discovered Edelman’s work towards the end of

writing my thesis, and then rewrote the Introduction. As a matter of fact, after this

discovery the whole thesis itself could have been rewritten. Just as the Law changes its

object and is in turn changed by that object, my critical apparatus, too, changes and is

changed by its objects, in this case cultural products, be they filmic, literary or

philosophical texts. It is such that this theoretical narrative moves on in such a way as to

19
cut itself from its own past and unite with its own future at the same time, that is, in one

simultaneous movement in two directions at once.

Hence it becomes clear why I pay attention to “what happens when” and “how

that thing happens,” at the same time. For this I am indebted to Edelman who shifted the

perspective of cognitive neuroscience from “how the brain makes sense,” to “when the

brain makes sense.” If one reads the writings on film and literature in this thesis with the

conscious naivety of their plot based critique in mind, one can sense the underlying

current of humour and the erratic undertone of irony, both of which knock down the

serious tone of the critique based on a linear reproduction of a circular plot – as we see in

the investigation of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive for instance.

In his Critique of Judgement, Kant distinguishes between the determinative and

the reflective modes of judgement.

If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given,

the judgement that subsumes the particular under it... is

determinative. If, however, only the particular for which

the universal is to be found is given, judgement is merely

reflective.8

If we keep in mind that the reflective mode of judgement reflects on particulars in

such a way as to produce universals to which they can be subjected, and that the

determinative mode of judgement determines a particular by subjecting it to a universal,

it becomes understandable why among these two I shall be using the reflective mode

which splits as it unites the subject of enunciation and the enunciated subject. But it must

be kept in mind that the subject of enunciation which refers to the universal is itself a

8
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (London: Wilder Publications, 2008),
13
20
constitutive illusion, or a regulatory idea necessary for the emergence of the immortal

subject as the enunciated content. It is only in and through a position of non-mortality

within and without mortal life at the same time that the exploitation of mortality can be

brought into the spotlight. A critique of the exploitation of mortality inherent in

particularly exemplary cultural products will be achieved through putting them in a

perspective that analyzes the life death drives in such a way as to expose the exploitation

of the fear of death as the driving force inherent in them. The point is that it is indeed

necessary to fantasize being what one is not, in our case being non-mortal, to be able to

become self-conscious of one’s self-reflexivity in the way of creating an order of

signification not caught up in the rotary motion of drives locked in Klein’s projection-

introjection mechanism, but rather one which breaks this vicious cycle and at least

attempts to subtract death from life in a counter-act to the post-structuralist idea of life as

a process of dying and death as an absent presence in the midst of life. It is only through

such a subtraction of the absent presence of death within life that the productive

interaction between Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, Foucault’s bio-politics,

Badiou’s theory of infinity, and Kant’s reflective mode of judgement give birth to the

immortal subject as the womb of a new thought, a new life, and a new mode of being,

free of the exploitation of mortality and engagingly indifferent to this mortal, all too

mortal life.

Let us imagine a subject who finds himself in a certain situation which appears to

have no escape route; a situation which nails him to a painful existence and brings him

closer to extinction with every move he makes. What he needs is Bion’s theory of

creative process and the emergence of new thought from within the dominant projection-

introjection mechanism. In his Theory of Thinking Bion says that dismantling is as

21
important in creative process as integration, that is, introjection and splitting are as

necessary as projective identification and unification. Bion pays special attention to the

process of introjection and projective identification and recreates Klein’s paranoid-

schizoid position as a way of showing that it has two forms; one is healthy and the other

is pathological. For Klein it was only with the attainment of the depressive position that

the formless experience was given a form, the thoughts were invested with symbolic

meanings. Bion sees introjection and projective identification as the two separate but

contiguous halves and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as the

complementary parts of one another in the creative process. Now, if, following Bion, we

think about Klein’s introjection and projective identification in the context of Derrida’s

technique of deconstructive reading, we see that deconstruction is a mobile and dynamic

mode of critique which moves between fragmentation and integration of the meaning of a

text. Although deconstruction, as practised by Derrida himself, adapts itself to the

internal dynamics of the text as the object of critique, it still lacks the affirmative and

immanent fluidity which is necessary to open up holes, or passages, through which a new

truth in touch with the requirements of the present situation can slip. This is because

Derrida’s practice of deconstruction is still a negating activity and a transcendence

oriented practice, which remains within the confines of the antagonistic relationship

between the life drive and the death drive. To become affirmative, deconstructive practice

needs to produce and incorporate its own difference from itself, that is, it has to become

immanent to itself and the text it interprets.

As a mode of thinking, deconstruction attempts to erase the gap between the life

drive and the death drive, but always fails, and this failure eternally confines

deconstructive practice to the domain of antagonism between the life drive and the death

22
drive. And if we keep in mind that deconstruction as a mode of thinking has become the

dominant way of being creative we can understand why a critique of deconstruction is a

critique of contemporary culture.

In this thesis I try to expose the workings of the deconstructive practice in certain

works of art, literature, and cinema, which, consciously or unconsciously, exploit the

ambiguity of the relationship between the life drive and the death drive, hence oppressing

the one or the other. Needless to say this oppression of the one or the other necessarily

exploits the one or the other, for oppression of the one requires exploitation of the other.

As a consequence of this dynamic inherent in contemporary nihilistic culture projected

onto the subject, the reader/spectator is removed out into the transcendental world of

unconscious drives, leading to an illusory sense of omniscience on behalf of the

reader/spectator.

The difference between deconstruction and affirmative recreation is that in the

former an interaction between the destruction of a structure based on metaphysics of

presence and creation of an opening, production of a void within the meaning of the text

based on logocentrism is at work, whereas what is at work in the latter is a simultaneous

dismantling of meaning, opening up of a void in the context of the text, and sustenance of

the conditions for the possibility of the meaning’s flow in and through this void and out

into the outside of the dominant context.9 Derrida’s well known proposition that “there is

nothing outside the text” is not the basic assumption of affirmative recreation; quite the

contrary, a hole is opened within the context, and the meaning of the text flows through

9
It is important to note that here context signifies the dominant projection-introjection mechanism. To go
outside this projection-introjection mechanism requires what Bion calls “the binocular vision.” Binocular
vision means that the subject is still within the dominant context and yet he is also in touch with another
mode of being which he is able to project onto the present and future. Binocular vision is the first step
towards creating a new situation out of the present situation. Wilfred Bion, A Theory of Thinking, Second
Thoughts, (London: Karnac Books, 1984).
23
this hole. The meaning of the text is made to move on progressively, not just left without

any foundations on which to stand and consequently fall. Deconstruction is concerned

with exposing the rigidity and the solidity of rigid structures and solid constructions as is

clear from its name. In a nutshell this is what Derrida’s self-reflexive reading strategy

called deconstruction does: the socially and historically constructed and generally

accepted dominant meaning of the text is explicated. And then this meaning is shown to

be self-contradictory through the opening of a gap between what the author intended to

say and what he has actually said. In affirmative recreation what’s at stake is a melting of

the meaning and its continuous reshaping like a sculpture. The text is turned from a solid

state into something like lava or clay and kept hot for further and perpetual reshaping, not

into another completed sculpture. For me sculptures are products of an attempt to freeze

life and/but a frozen life is no different from death.

4. The Cont®act

The word cont(r)act in the title of the introduction means two things at the same

time. The first one is counter-act and the second one is implosion. When these two

meanings intersect we get a contact without a contract. In this new form of contact the

parties involved agree on the necessity of the absence of a contractual relationship in their

contact. For the two meanings of the cont(r)act, counter-act and implosion, to function

interactively in the way of sustaining the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a

contact without a contract between the self and the other, an affirmative attitude is

required. When and if the cont(r)act becomes affirmative, the counter-act and the

implosion of the pre-dominant projection-introjection mechanism, which we can also

refer to as the pre-dominant context based on negation and transcendence, intervenes in

24
the situation and interrupts the order of things. Cont(r)action opens a hole in the internal

structure of the projection-introjection mechanism and initiates change in the way of

opening up new paths towards new modes of being, thinking, and creation.

It is important to note here that every projection-introjection mechanism belongs

to the world of unconscious drives. Opening a hole in the world of unconscious drives

makes the good objects and the bad objects spiral into the void and the subject escapes

oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position, or

between the life and death drives. This also means that the subject’s world turns from

being governed by the metaphysical mode of production based on unconscious drives and

into the social mode of production based on conscious desiring.

The concept of cont(r)act is the product of an interaction between deconstruction

and affirmative recreation. The cont(r)act produces an outside within the pre-dominant

projection-introjection mechanism, or context. Cont(r)action connects the counter forces

of the inside with the unnameable forces of the outside. The inward explosion creates a

turbulence within the projection-introjection mechanism causing the good objects and the

bad objects to spiral into the outside within created by the counter forces of the inside and

into the void constituted by the unnameable forces of the outside. We must remember

that good and bad are concepts that belong not to the material world but to the

metaphysical world, not to life but to the beyond of life. As we know, psychotics see

everything in terms of a struggle between the forces of good and evil. If we apply this

psychotic vision to the polarity of the life drive and the death drive we can understand

what I actually want to mean when I make a distinction between the world of

unconscious drives and the world of conscious desiring. But by doing this am I not, in a

psychotic fashion, dividing the world into two; the bad world of unconscious drives and

25
the good world of conscious desiring? Am I not, in a way, trying to transcend the state of

being governed by the unconscious drives? I am indeed, for I still am within the

psychotic world of metaphysics trying to create an outside, or an opening to loving

without interpretation and identification. To achieve this I have to act self-reflexively,

which I think is what I do when say it is necessary to pass from the state of being

governed by unconscious drives to the mode of being productive of conscious desiring.

This self-reflexivity and these paradoxical statements are the forms this passage takes and

they lie at the decentred heart of my epoch.

To sum it up and to clarify it all I shall now say what I merely hinted at right at

the beginning. The theory of cont(r)act employs deconstruction and affirmative recreation

with the aim of sustaining the conditions of possibility for a fragile and yet affirmative

contact not based on a contract between the self and the other, between the old and the

new, between illness and health, between the clinical and the critical, and even between

life and death. The counteract and the implosion are the complementary positions of

cont(r)action, that is, of the theoretical practice demonstrating an interaction between

deconstruction and affirmative recreation.

5. Structural Summary of The Thesis

The thesis is composed of three parts divided into six chapters, each of which is

divided within itself into several subsections, followed by the consequences and an

afterword. The three major parts concentrate on three different discursive forms

(theoretical, filmic, literary) and each part stands for one of the three different positions in

the course of the developmental process of a practical theory of cont(r)action composed

of two complementary actions counter to one another which are deconstruction and

26
affirmative recreation. These three positions in the developmental process of a practical

theory of cont(r)action, which is constituted by and is constitutive of a theoretical practice

demonstrating the interaction between deconstruction and affirmative recreation, are

worked through application to contemporary theoretical(part I), filmic(part II), and

literary(part III) texts.

The enunciated content of the thesis is not one, but three. If one of these is

missing, however, the other two cannot persist. For the enunciated content to stand firm

and manifest itself they have to remain separate from but contiguous to one another at all

times.

In each chapter the relationships between progress and regress, creativity and

destruction, projection and introjection, identification and alienation, the life drive and

the death drive, as well as theory and practice, are analyzed in various ways and using

varying means. There is not one way of looking at things here, but three; for each part

requires its own way of being looked at.

The theoretical, literary, and filmic texts studied can be considered partial-objects

interacting with one another where a fragile contact between illness and health,

psychoanalysis, philosophy, post-structuralism, and critical theory, and even East and

West, North and South, West and North, the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic takes

place. These theoretical, literary, and filmic texts are transitional objects in the service of

explicating the relevance of Kleinian concepts of projective identification and

introjection, and Freudian concepts of the life drive and the death drive, for contemporary

cultural and critical theory.

The first chapter opens with the summary of the encounter between Freud and

Einstein upon a call from the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in 1932.

27
This first chapter aims at defining and analyzing the formation of certain concepts, such

as the life drive and the death drive, introjection and projective identification, which will

play dominant roles throughout the thesis. In this chapter I also compare the projects and

critical strategies of post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School drawing on sources from

Adorno and Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. The

first chapter attempts to lay the foundations of a healthy conflict between philosophy and

psychoanalysis, as well as psychotherapy, or clinical theory and critical theory. It also

sets the grounds for the analysis of the relationship between creativity, automatism, and

the Real in the following chapters.

In the second chapter I intend to show the relevance of Lacan’s theory of subject

formation to the thesis and link it to Klein’s pre-verbal - if not pre-linguistic - stage of

development. Lacan’s critique of Klein for being too biological is reconsidered through a

look at their altering theorizations of the emergence of schizophrenia which can be

translated from Greek as “split-soul,” or, “broken-heart.”

The third chapter investigates the cinematic apparatus and how it is able to

directly communicate with the unconscious and shape it. I tend to believe that in its

present state cinema is a machinery that populates the spectator with “bad objects,” and

following Christian Metz, I argue that it is not by saying that cinema is the “good object”

that cinema will get better, on the contrary, my critique of the cinematic apparatus targets

its use as a tool for manipulating the unconscious; my critique of cinema is aimed at

criticizing a particular use of cinema which gives birth to a larval fascism by constantly

provoking projective identification.

The fourth chapter concentrates on David Cronenberg’s films including The Dead

Zone, Dead Ringers, Videodrome, eXistenZ, The Naked Lunch, and is aimed at

28
explicating Deleuze’s version of the relationship between creativity and destructivity. In

Cronenberg’s movies we usually have an artist, a writer, or a scientist who undertakes a

creative task and/but whose project turns against itself in the process through the

domination of his psyche with the non-symbolizable aggressive impulses. Cronenberg

portrays creative people who in time turn into agents of destruction through science and

art. And Deleuze has often mentioned the possibility of an interruption of the creative

process by the entry of a traumatic kernel which should remain non-symbolized and

unconscious if one were to be able to go on creating consciously without becoming self-

destructive.

The fifth chapter looks at the Surrealist movement and how Breton tried to use the

unconscious in a productive way and failed in doing so. To show the shortcomings of

Surrealism I use Bataille’s comparison of Nietzsche and the surrealists and his criticism

of Dali’s Lugubrious Game. This is followed by a brief comparison of Artaudian theatre

of cruelty and Shamanism. We will have seen that Surrealists and Artaud laid the

foundations of two differently conceived techniques of manipulating the unconscious

drives and exploiting the ambiguity of the relationship between the life drive and the

death drive. The next section of the fifth chapter is on Beckett and analyzes Beckett’s

generic thought as pointed out by Alain Badiou in his book On Beckett. I try to show how

Beckett not only represents the human-condition through subtraction of the Symbolic

from the Real, but also to portray a Beckett explicating the dynamics of the unconscious

as a hole in the subject in his plays such as Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and

Endgame.

The sixth chapter investigates the relationship between literature, psychoanalysis,

violence and trauma. My intention in this chapter is to investigate the ethical and the

29
political implications of trying to represent the traumatic kernel which resists

symbolization. I especially concentrate on D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel which is a

post-structuralist novel about the Holocaust and a problematization of the truth of

psychoanalysis. Working through The White Hotel I attempt to put under a critical and

clinical magnifying glass the foundations of the contemporary understanding of “healthy

living.” In this chapter I also analyze the interaction between the life drive and the death

drive in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies and the workings of projective

identification and introjection in Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. This last chapter

prepares the grounds on which I can finally show, via Slavoj Zizek and Friedrich

Nietzsche, how illness is presented as health in today’s transglobal capitalism, how the

roles of affirmation and negation, immanence and transcendence, the life drive and the

death drive are reversed, turning them into their opposites.

Following the consequences, which uses Alain Badiou’s theory of infinity and the

immortal subject to break the vicious cycle of the life and death drives in the way of

opening the realm of love beyond the rotary motion of drives and the law of capital, the

thesis ends with an Afterword entitled and composed of A Conversation Around

Nietzsche Between a Stoic and a Sceptic. Before the conversation, however, there is a

note on the context of this conversation and its connection to Klein’s projection-

introjection mechanism as well as Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. In other words, the

first section of the afterword links the conversation to the theories of the subject in the

works of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Klein. Entitled The Unhappy Consciousness,

or, the Stoics and Sceptics Locked in Klein’s Projection-Introjection Mechanism, it is a

theoretical explication of the relationship between Hegel’s concept of the unhappy

consciousness and Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position and manic-depressive position. It is

30
essential to the nature of this study that it ends with a division between a Stoic and a

Sceptic embodied by Nietzsche. This division is, at the same time, the one between Eros

and Thanatos, or Oedipus and Narcissus; and Nietzsche conceived this division within

himself in the form of a division between Christ and Dionysus. But what about the Stoic

and the Sceptic, where do they enter the scene?

Today Stoicism is considered a therapeutic philosophy of life and Scepticism is

considered a critical attitude. Stoicism adapts the subject to the existing order and

Scepticism detaches the subject from it. These two attitudes are embodied by Nietzsche,

whose life consisted in an oscillation between illness and health. Therefore, a

conversation around Nietzsche between a Stoic and a Sceptic is actually a conversation

between clinical theory and critical theory taking place within Nietzsche’s head.

31
 PART ONE

Twilight Psychedelia

which is the asymmetrically dialectical narrative of a time of despair and in

which the presence of dark thoughts dominate the scene. In and through it the

reader learns that the strength of one time becomes the impoverishment of

another time. And at the end of an intense and yet condensed meditation in the

form of an interaction between Post-Structuralism and Critical Theory, I find

myself standing firm outside in a perilous time. In this part it looks as though

there is nowhere to go on, no one to go on, and that with each sentence the writer

is moving further away from what he is trying to say. And yet, out of the blue, an

unexpected truth emerges and the conditions for the possibility of going on are

sustained. The voyage turns out to be more perilous than it at first appears to be.

Once the end of this first part of the voyage is reached my visions sharpen and

turn against their subject. This sharpening of visions and turning against their

subject is looked at through Lacan’s and Klein’s theories

32
CHAPTER I: Life and Death in a Raving New World

1. Freud and Einstein

In 1931 the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation invited certain

intellectuals to communicate and think about the solutions to the problems facing the

world. The First World War was over but the second one was already knocking on the

door. The developments in central Europe were signs of the approaching disaster.

Einstein was one of the intellectuals the Institute got in touch with, and he proposed

Freud as a participant in this collaboration. In 1932 Einstein wrote a letter to Freud and

asked him how the tendency of humanity to war, destruction and violence could be

overcome, if it could be overcome. Einstein expected Freud to come up with some

practical solutions. Einstein wanted revolution, but a great admirer of Darwin, Freud

talked about evolution.10

Freud responded to Einstein after about a month. Throughout the letter Freud

emphasized that he couldn’t do what Einstein expected him to, that it was impossible for

him to come up with practical solutions to the problem of aggression inherent in human

nature.

In his response to Einstein’s letter Freud interrogated the relation between the

aggressive impulse in human nature and the organization of society and concluded that in

the organization of social order aggression was unavoidable.

In the second part of his letter Freud mentioned the role played by drives in the

inner world of human beings and summarized his theory of drives. According to Freud

the polarity between the forces of attraction and repulsion, which Einstein was familiar

10
Einstein on Peace, ed. Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), 186-203
33
with as a physicist, also existed in the human psyche. One of these forces was the life

drive which aimed at self-preservation and unification, the erotic force represented by

Eros. The other force was the death drive which aimed at destruction and splitting,

represented by Thanatos.

But we must not be too hasty in introducing ethical judgements of

good and evil. Neither of these instincts is any less essential than

the other; the phenomena of life arise from the concurrent or

mutually opposing action of both. Now it seems as though an

instinct of the one sort can scarcely ever operate in isolation; it is

always accompanied—or, as we say, alloyed – with a certain quota

from the other side, which modifies its aim or is, in some cases,

what enables it to achieve that aim. Thus, for instance, the instinct

of self-preservation is certainly of an erotic kind, but it must

nevertheless have aggressiveness at its disposal if it is to fulfil its

purpose. So, too, the instinct of love, when it is directed towards an

object, stands in need of some contribution from the instinct for

mastery if it is in any way to obtain possession of that object. The

difficulty of isolating the two classes of instinct in their actual

manifestation is indeed what has so long prevented us from

recognizing them.11

For Freud the death drive was targeting the living organism, aiming at turning the

organic into inorganic. Because of the intervention of the self-preservative force of the

11
Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Society, and Religion, trans. Angela Richards (London: Pelican, 1985), 357
34
life drive, the death drive was turned towards the external world by a psychic operation,

so that the self-destruction of the organism was prevented.

It is important to note here that the death drive does not correspond to self-

destruction. The death drive postpones the self-destruction of the organism by projecting

aggression onto the external world and hence can be said to serve self-preservation. The

self-destructive impulse turns against itself and manifests itself as violence and

aggression against the others. The subject kills the others not to kill the self. “The death

instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is

directed outwards, on to objects. The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by

destroying an extraneous one.”12 It is this scenario that makes it possible to say that there

is a disjunctive synthesis at work here. A term coined by Gilles Deleuze, disjunctive

synthesis defines the operation in and through which the two components of an apparatus,

a psychic apparatus in this case, appear to be two differently conceived constituents of

the same thing.

The influence of Nietzsche’s concepts of the will to nothingness and eternal return

is pervasive in Freud’s later work. Freud’s turn towards metapsychology and his

consequent creation of the concept of the death drive is rooted in his need for something

to fill in the gaps in his scientific and empirically observable theories owing much to

Darwin. Freud was uneasy with the concept of the death drive on account of its non-

scientific nature, but nevertheless he had to conceptualize the death drive as the

counterpart of the life drive in order to be able to go beyond the pleasure principle.

Educated as a neuroscientist, Freud was aware that he was contradicting himself and

perhaps even turning against his earlier attitude towards the human psyche by showing

12
Freud, Civilization, Society, and Religion, 357
35
that at the beginning was the death drive and that the life drive was only an outcome, a

kind of defence against the death drive.

In his Civilization and Its Discontents Freud talked about the oceanic feeling, a

sense of oneness with the world which he admits to have never experienced personally.

Perhaps his creation of the highly speculative concept of the death drive was Freud’s

attempt to fill the gap opened by the absence of this oceanic feeling for him.

Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the

dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first

lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he

was safe and felt at ease.13

In his An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud had put forward the idea that drives

produce affects and so drives are at the root of all actions. I agree with Freud that drives

are at the root of all actions at the beginning, but contrary to what Freud says of them, I

think affects are not mere manifestations of the drives. Rather, affects emerge as a

response to the changes in the level of the intensity of external stimuli. The external

stimuli create affects towards objects and the drives “find” their satisfaction through the

affective quality of the objects produced to match the drive. But it is precisely this

matching process that produces the desire for the object, so the unconscious drive turns

into “conscious” desire.

In his 1920 essay Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud revised his drive theory

and introduced his concept of the death drive. In this revised drive theory Freud

conceptualized the life drive as inclusive of both the libidinal impulses and the self-

preservative impulses. As for the death drive, Freud conceptualized it as the self-

13
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1985), 279
36
destructive impulse. So, at the beginning Freud argued that libidinal impulses contain

sadistic elements as well. While in his first drive theory in On Narcissism (1914), Freud

suggested that aggression should be included within the life drive, in his second drive

theory in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, he says that aggression is the will to return to

the inorganic state and is therefore directed against the self and serves self-destruction.

According to this picture, if adaptation is essential to survival then aggression is against

life and is a manifestation of the death drive.

In the face of the present situation I project a few alterations onto Freud’s drive

theory in the light of Lacan’s theory of the subject. Since thought is a product of the brain

and since most psychoanalysts agree that metaphysical phenomena are composed of

psychosomatic events, there is nothing other than a fantasy that fills the space between

the soma and the psyche. This fantasy (‘I,) stands in for the nothingness in between them;

it unites them as it splits them apart. I disagree with Freud’s theory concerning the source

of drives. But I do make a distinction between the conscious desires and the unconscious

drives.

Lacan’s contribution to the field is his realization that the unconscious drives are

shaped by the external circumstances and turned into conscious desire. For me Lacan’s

theory, however, just like Hobbes’s metaphor of modern power, the Leviathan, remains,

to use Donald Winnicott’s terms, a mere transitional object, which helps to situate the

psychosomatic events in the context of sociopolitical theory.

I now return to Hobbes through Foucault, whose thoughts on death and its relation

to power become relevant to the subject of drives, their source, and their processes of

formation.

37
 2. The Void, Drives, Automata

The most important thing that Hobbes says in Leviathan, which I think is still

relevant to a considerable extent, is that death is the absolute master, and the fear of death

forces the subject to adapt to the existing social order. Leviathan feeds on this fear of

death, and it is Leviathan itself that instills the fear of death in people.14 If we keep in

mind that in Western societies death is associated with nothing/ness, it becomes clearer

why and how Foucault’s use of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish

as a metaphor of the modern power structure which has nothing/ness at its centre gains

new significance.

At the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this

tower is pierced with white windows that open onto the inner side

of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of

which extends the whole width of the building; they have two

windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the

tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell

from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a

supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman,

a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the

effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing

out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the

cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small

theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and

constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities

14
Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan,” in Law and Morality: Readings in Legal Philosophy, eds. David
Dyzenhous and Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1996)
38
 that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize

immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or

rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to

hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full

lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness,

which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.15

Foucault, without directly referring to him, shows that Hobbes’s monster has

become a machine. I argue that this machine is itself in a process of transformation today,

and is in the way of taking the form of something that is neither organic nor inorganic,

neither visible nor invisible, but felt. This is power as affective force. Power can no more

be represented by metaphors. For metaphor is a concept that belongs to the world of

metaphysics which exists only as a fantasy world, whereas today power has a more

material existence than it has ever had and its materiality splits as it unites the

psychosomatic and the sociopolitical realms of experience.

The automatization of power, that is, transformation of power from an organic

state, as demonstrated by Hobbes, towards an inorganic state, as demonstrated by

Foucault, has been studied in a different way and in a different context by Mark Poster in

his Foucault, Marxism, and History. Influenced by Poster’s interpretation of Foucault in

relation to Marxism, and in the context of the relationship between discourse and power, I

reassert, in a different way and for different reasons, that Foucault’s conceptualization of

the Panopticon is useful and yet insufficient in understanding the workings of power

today in the face of the recent developments in technology.

15
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 200
39
 In this new situation the subjects know that they are still locked in the Panopticon,

but pretend that they are free floating across the Superpanopticon. This is because they

are being locked deeper into the Panopticon; and there finding themselves dismembered,

losing themselves in the terrible condition of being pushed further into the hitherto

undiscovered corners of their own rooms, in their cells.

A new formulation of Foucault’s concept of bio-power, the Superpanoptic

discourse reverses the roles of Eros and Thanatos; abuses our understandings and

misunderstandings of the life drive and the death drive, as well as manipulating our inner

conflicts and turning us into antagonists. It does this by erasing the necessary boundary

between life and death, the organic and the inorganic, so as to create the conditions of

possibility for manufacturing an illusory sense of oneness with the world, hence uniting

the subject of statement (the enunciated) and the subject of enunciation which should

remain separate from and/but contiguous to one another for the perpetual transformation

and multiplication of life forms to take place at the same time.

Now I will attempt to make a leap forward in the direction of theorizing a

practical way of handling the conflict between material production and metaphysical

production. In what follows, therefore, I try to show how this conflict arises and how it

turns into an antagonism.

It is the projection-introjection mechanism operating within and through the

capillaries of the body without organs across the new Earth only to reproduce that which

it had attempted to expel as an organ without a body on the old Earth that produces the

two poles of the unhealthy conflict. One being social and the other metaphysical, and

being against one another, these two are feeding neither themselves nor the other, but

contributing to the production of otherness as negativity, hence taking part in the setting

40
of the very vicious trap in which they find themselves against each other and out of which

they both come dismembered. They are locked in an agonizing process, which is

destroying both of them. It is impossible for one to survive without the other, and yet they

prefer to eat one another. Social production produces exclusion of the other, metaphysical

production produces an illusory image of the other. When these two modes of production

work together they create the conditions of impossibility for a non-illusory and non-

antagonistic mode of being.

We shall add to this, that although the problem is inherent in the projection-

introjection mechanism itself we are looking for the source of our maladies outside. We

are projecting all our bad qualities onto the others and then accusing them of being

negative towards us. In turn we are giving birth to the negativity of the other, or otherness

as negativity. The negative within and without us is being created by us since we introject

what we have projected and inversely.

3. The Subject and Power

The relationship between the subject and power is a theme that has played a

significant role in determining the direction of European thought since Nietzsche, Marx,

and Freud. Both the Frankfurt School thinkers such as Horkheimer and Adorno, and the

poststructuralists such as Deleuze and Foucault, took on this subject as one of the objects

of their studies in different ways. Although I was deeply influenced by Adorno’s

Negative Dialectics and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution before the beginning of this

thesis, I later on turned towards Deleuze and Foucault to find tools for repairing the

restrictive implications of the early Frankfurt School thought. I think post-structuralism

and critical theory have a lot more to offer to one another that can be used in practical

41
critique of the predominant order in particular and nihilisms in general, than many, such

as Habermas, suggest.

Having taken what I wanted from both parties, I asymmetrically placed them into

one another’s contexts with the aim of analyzing the relationship not only between post-

structuralism and critical theory, but also between theory and practice. I projected these

two forms of thought onto one another. My aim was to theorize a practical way of

looking at the world which could be turned into action in accordance with the demands of

the present. I used practical Kleinian looking glasses and what I saw was and remains

uncanny. I found Thomas Hobbes and Michel Foucault in the form of a snake biting its

own tail in a cell, with Marcuse standing firm outside the cell as the guardian angel under

the guiding hand of Reich and his orgasm theory. Upon the emergence of this image that

in time took shape on the stage of my internal theatre, I finally managed to determine my

direction and object of study.

The point of departure of this thesis is the modern discourse on power that

emerged with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. A response to metaphysics

and Christian dogmatism, Enlightenment is a system of thought which proclaims itself to

be governed by universal reason alone. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and

Adorno situate Marx and Freud, together with themselves, in this tradition. I situate

Foucault himself in this same tradition of Enlightenment.

Foucault’s interpretation of the Panopticon, and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan

become relevant here precisely because they present us with metaphors representing an

idealized model of modern power structure which takes its driving force from the

exploitation of the conflict between the psyche and the soma, reason and non-reason, the

life drive and the death drive.

42
 This power structure is not only still dominant, but also increasing its dominance

as it decreases its visibility. It does this by making the subjects believe that they are

governed by the reality principle when in fact they are governed by the pleasure

principle. This situation causes a shift in the subject’s conception of health. I’ll come

back to this in the future, but now I have to mention something else which is very closely

linked to this shift in the subject’s conception of health.

Enlightenment signifies the secularization of the authority of the Big Other, and

erection of instrumental reason in the place of the absolute authority of the Bible. In this

light Enlightenment appears to be merely a change of roles between the masters and the

slaves; the problem inherent in the metaphysical world of representation remains the

same. Walter Benjamin, for instance, warns against this trap set by the panoptic

mechanism which creates a Leviathan within the subject. In his essay, “The Work of Art

in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin argues that cinema can turn out to be

a fascist propaganda machine if it falls in the wrong hands. Benjamin is not only against

the aestheticization of politics but also the politicization of aesthetics. What remains

unthought in Benjamin’s essay, though, is the ideology of representational and

metaphysical conceptions of non-reason, which is itself the problem inherent in the

structure of the system.

Here it is also important to emphasize my difference from Herbert Marcuse.

Marcuse considered modern western capitalist societies to be sick. He thought himself as

the healthy subject outside a sick society and determined his goal as the healing of this

sick society. Marcuse’s political philosophy as therapy is no more sufficient for the

increasingly sophisticated problems of today. For power has become more than

oppressive/repressive.

43
 4. The Imprisoned Creators of Our Times

If we look at the contemporary electronic music scene we see that the three

dimensional sounds created are non-representational to such an extent that it is as though

there is a living organism from a completely other dimension making organic noises in

the room. I will return to the relevance of electronic music in a little while, but first let me

revisit Herbert Marcuse’s theory of how capitalism keeps itself alive by feeding on the

death of the counter-subjectivities and the life of the dominant consuming subject

governed by the life drive which is itself externally constituted within the subject.

In a nutshell, Marcuse’s theory in One-Dimensional Man was that the one

dimensional market society absorbs and turns the counter-cultural products into its own

agents, reducing the two-dimensional to the one-dimensional, hence making the forces of

resistance serve the purpose of strengthening what they are counter to. Marcuse’s

problem was the dissolution of the two-dimensional sphere of counter-cultural production

and its domination by one-dimensional relations. He suggested using mythological

imagery not only to make sense of the pre-dominant social reality, but also to create a

counter-social reality which would at the same time be a critique of the existing social

reality. What Marcuse said is still relevant to a certain extent, but to be able to use this

theory one has to adapt it to the demands of the present situation. What I will attempt to

do, therefore, is to ignore the irrelevant parts of Marcuse’s theory and try to find out those

parts of it that matter for my concerns. It is true that Marcuse’s theory is no more

sufficient in understanding and solving the problems of our Superpanoptic societies. And

yet in it there are lots of insights with high potential for development in the service of

psychosomatic and sociopolitical progress today.

44
 Today even Madonna’s latest release, Confessions on the Dance Floor, is

produced in a DJ’s room in London. The electronic dance music products are mostly

produced in people’s bedrooms on a personal computer donated with software especially

produced for making electronic music. The recent shift in the gears of electronic dance

music, of course, is a cause of the amazing possibilities the digital sound machines

present. These machines have no material existence; they are loaded on the computer in

the form of digital data. One can have a studio loaded into one’s computer by pressing a

few buttons on the keyboard. In this context, making music requires technical knowledge

of the tools of production more than the knowledge of the rules of what is called making

music. With electronic music the sounds are already there, loaded into the computer; all

one needs to do to become a music producer has become putting these sounds together,

making them overlap with one another in a positively disordered way and produce

something that is neither the one nor the other.

If we imagine for a moment Beethoven making his music after the orchestra plays

it, composing the piece after it is materialized, we can see how paradoxical the situation

the producer is caught up in inherent in the production process of electronic music is. It is

as if Beethoven wrote the notes of his music as he listened to the orchestra play it. We

can see that this is in fact exactly the opposite of what Beethoven did. For in the case of

Beethoven, unlike the electronic music producer, it is the internal orchestra in the psyche

that plays the piece as Beethoven writes it, not an actual orchestra in its material

existence. With electronic music that internal orchestra is not in the creator’s mind, but in

the computer.

Some of the more creative and experimentalist logics in this field record the

noises coming from within their bodies, or from within other animals’ bodies, load them

45
into the computer, and with the aid of synthesizers and effects units, turn these noises into

the basic rhythms and melodies of their music. Heartbeat, for instance, can be used as

drum and bass at the same time in some electronic music recordings. It is possible to dub-

out, echo, delay, deepen, darken, lighten, slow down, or fasten up the sound of heartbeat

with the computer. And after a proper mastering process you get something that sounds

neither totally organic, nor totally inorganic. These products are not only digitally bought

and sold on the internet, but also exchanged with similar other products.

The affective qualities of these products are extremely high. The producers of the

five most developed forms of electronic music, which are Techno, House, Electro,

Trance, and Breakbeat, claim that they are the beholders of the threshold between the

soma and the psyche, that with their walls of sound they keep them separate and yet

contiguous to one another.

What we witness in this time is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World turning into

Rave New World. A world in which the well known and the so called lines between mind

and body, fantasy and reality, nature and culture, organic and inorganic, life and death,

are not just blurred, but have completely disappeared. And yet, at the same, these lines

are in the process of reappearance.

The recent developments in electronic music present us with a good example of

how the inorganic has become, at least in sound, more organic than the organic. With the

rapid development of sound-producing machines it has become possible to create such

sounds that while listening to it one feels like there is a living organism from a strangely

familiar realm making noises in the room, or worse still, that the noises are coming from

within one’s mind and body. Listening to this kind of music makes the mutual

exclusiveness of the somatic and the psychic irrelevant. Especially after the three

46
dimensional medium presented by CDs and DVDs it has become possible to present the

sound to masses in a form that sounds more real than the original, live recording.

It would be wrong to assume, as many have done, that this kind of music is in

touch with only a few listeners. On the contrary, since not only the listeners but also the

producers of this kind of music have started to occupy dominant positions in the

advertisement production business, it is not surprising that electronic music, and

especially the underground minimal techno, is increasingly being used as the background

music surrounding the object advertised in many advertisements on radio and T.V. Based

on the erasure of the boundary between the psychic and the somatic, or between the

inorganic and organic, the use of minimalist electronic music in the advertisements of

today’s hectic life-styles is a very good example of the exploitation of the life/death

drives inherent in contemporary nihilistic culture driving and driven by what has almost

become transglobal capitalism. The LG U880 ultra-slim mobile phone advert on T.V. is

precisely the hard-core of how this exploitation of the life/death drives takes place. In the

advert there is heart beating in the phone. Or, the heart is shown to have a transparent

phone surrounding it. And with the minimalist techno at the back, that is, sounds that are

neither organic nor inorganic but both at the same time. The beating heart in the phone

creates the deep and dark bass sound with extremely electronic and yet organic sounding

noises coming from within the phone. It’s as though it is one’s own heart beating in the

phone; this phone is you, so it’s yours... If we keep in mind that the transparency of the

phone is fleshy, for there are capillaries of the phone, the overall impression created is

one of ultra minimalist life reduced to its bare bones when in reality the LG U880 mobile

phone is itself the product of exactly the opposite of an ultra minimalist attitude. The

message is that this mobile phone is what attaches you to life, when in fact it detaches

47
you from life as it is. The finishing words, “Life is Good,” only confirms my critique of

this advertisement, of this marvellous sound-image which is an inorganic object disguised

as a living organism. It is obvious that what’s at work here is the exploitation/oppression

of the life/death drives, as the inorganic replaces the organic, and the real of death in the

midst of life is expelled.

In this situation in which I found myself Benjamin’s and Marcuse’s theories are

insufficient in that they do not realize that it is precisely the reversing of the roles policy,

that is, presentation of something as its opposite, of an inorganic entity as an organic

entity for instance, or of that which is inside as if it is outside, that has to be left behind,

for Panopticon and Leviathan are within and without the subject at the same time, and a

reverse of the roles of the inside and the outside means nothing in this perilous time.

For the solution of problems posed by the advanced projection-introjection

mechanisms of what have become Superpanoptic societies, I attempt to show that post-

structuralism and critical theory have never been as mutually exclusive as many suggest,

especially in terms of the wrong and right questions that they left unanswered. If we look

at Adorno’s and Foucault’s writings we can see that most of their thought is directed

towards finding how to reconcile theory and practice. Just as theory and practice, post-

structuralism and critical theory, too, are always already reconciled, because they come

from Nietzsche, Marx, Freud. They may be always already reconciled but the only way to

actualize this reconciliation is to realize their common goal; to put theory in the service of

ordinary life, to develop the conditions of existence, and to practise freedom.

It will almost sound offensive to say that the new emerges only if some people

become traitors and shake the foundations of their own mode of being, or at least

undertake opening up spaces so that light can shine among all, or death can manifest

48
itself. But one must take the risk of offending some others, for every situation requires its

expression, every problem bears within itself at least half of its own solution. It is all a

matter of putting theory and practice in the service of one another. Theory that does not

match the truth of its time is for nothing. It is important to theorize practical ways of

dealing with the banal accidents of an ordinary life. I think what I have just said is one of

the things that both Foucault and Adorno would have agreed on.

5. The Nietzschean Subject

Here I turn to Nietzsche who creates the concept of bad conscience as the

generator of illness, which is in turn fed by the illness it generates, giving birth to the man

of ressentiment.16 Nietzsche’s ressentiment is what Klein calls envy. To be able to see the

link between envy/ressentiment and the will to nothingness/the life-death drives, I shall

start from the beginning, from the first year of life.17

In a world where everything is new for the subject, nothing is symbolic. The

subject is born into the symbolic order, and yet there are many other symbolic orders

totally different from the one into which it is born. The subject, in a nomadic fashion,

moves from one symbolic order and into another. The shift from one and into the other is

so sudden that it is almost unrecognisable. In its new symbolic order, the subject is

experiencing everything for the first time; just like the child in the first year of life. The

child becomes the mediator between an external reality and an internal one. Nothing is

good or evil yet. The inner world is composed of part-objects which are fluctuating bits

and pieces of imagery, a mass of misery. The child, through its actions, not only subverts

the symbolic order but also produces some new reality. There are many questions the

16
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New
York: Random House, 1969), 33-6
17
Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), 29-
32

49
infant knows not how to ask as yet. For Melanie Klein this is the paranoid-schizoid

position of the child through and after which the child learns to make a distinction

between the good objects and the bad objects. The paranoid-schizoid position is followed

by the manic-depressive position; that is when the child becomes an unhappy

consciousness because it learns that the mother’s breast is good and bad at the same time.

Lacan’s mirror-stage –a period of Imaginary identifications-- is a version of Klein’s

manic-depressive position, which consists in a series of Narcissistic illusions and

imaginary identifications through which the child learns to act upon the objects

surrounding him/her.

The Nietzschean subject is always at the periphery and perpetually in touch with

the objects surrounding him. In fact he is not only in touch but also is defined by them.

This subject is produced through what it consumes. The subject buys things and those

things determine the subject’s identity which is a non-identity. The subject becomes what

it consumes, it projects what it has introjected. In a world full of violence, destruction and

death, or “madness in every direction,” as Kerouac would have said, the subject becomes

nothing but a projector of the evil within society. This paradoxical nature of the

contemporary Nietzschean subject is a result of the turning of self into the other within in

the process of becoming. The self of the present has not only become a prison-house of

the others within itself but also it itself has become a self-contained monad with no

relation to the outside and no awareness of the external world populated by the others’

selves.

The relation of a subject to the objects surrounding him/her shows us something

about the subject’s relation to death. In a world in which use value as opposed to

exchange value is important, the subject gets to know the nature of the objects and death

50
more profoundly. But today use value is itself determined by exchange value. The world

today is almost exactly the opposite of a world in which nothing is a substitute for

another thing.

With societies based on exchange value the relationship between the subject and

the object is confined in the paranoid-schizoid position. There remains no gap between

the subject and the object when in fact there should be. Everything becomes a substitute

for another thing and everything is substitutable. With the advance of global capitalism

the subject itself becomes an object. The subject begins to act itself out as an object for

the desire and consumption of the other. The subject becomes a substitute of itself. With

global capitalism the subject starts to feel itself as a machine; it becomes inorganic for

itself when in fact it is essentially organic. In other words organs start to operate like non-

organs, all organicity is replaced by inorganicity, life with death, and in this kind of a

society everyone is always already dead.

Global capitalism indeed appears to have rendered everyone equal in relation to

each other. They all have the equal rights to consume but in no way have all the means to

do so. This status of the subject as a mere consumer, objectifies the subject as a subject of

consumption. The subject is reduced to a consuming-excreting machine(naturally), or a

mechanism of introjection-projection(culturally). That makes everyone substitutable by

anyone else; they can take on each other’s roles, act themselves out as they are not, as

someone else is. In other words rather than become no-one, no-body, imperceptible, they

become something exchangeable and expendable. And yet it is only on the condition of

feeling oneself as nothing rather than something, feeling of self as nothingness, can one

go beyond one’s symbolic life driven by striving for security and omniscience. The

subject should start to see the reduction of self to nothingness as a gain when from the

51
perspective of the already existing symbolic order it is a loss of the difference of

everything in relation to a subject or an object. In the absence of this kind of a subject

who does not want to become an ordinary symbolic person, herd-instinct dominates all

subjects. With the advance of global capitalism this herd-instinct can be said to have

become nothing but a result of the exploitation of the life and death drives to reduce life

to a struggle for and against life/death. The subject no longer has to carry the burden of

being different. In this light and in this time we can see global capitalism creating not

only the conditions of possibility for the subject to forget itself but also the conditions of

impossibility for a remembrance of self, producing the non-knowledge of self as the

counter-knowledge.

Now that Nietzsche’s autobiographical book Ecce Homo has become a symptom,

an effect of his previous books, the other within of his oeuvre, in most parts of Europe,

but especially in the United States of America and Britain, this book is considered to be a

prescription for the predominant way of “healthy living.” It will almost sound offensive

to say that the other within of the past has become the self of the present, the non-reason

inherent in reason has become the reason itself, and yet the questions remain:

1. What can be learned from Nietzsche’s failure, which caused and continues to

cause many other failures?

2. What are the conditions of possibility for a non-antagonistic and yet non-

illusory relationship between the self and the other and how can they be

sustained?

52
 Intermediation 1

In the previous chapter I tried to introduce certain Freudian concepts in relation to

post-structuralism and critical theory. The importance of this first chapter lies in its

attempt to link the concepts of the life drive and the death drive created approximately a

century ago to contemporary cultural and critical theory. In the next chapter I will try to

frame the context of the disagreement between Klein and Lacan in relation to Freud. The

aim of this second chapter is to link the life drive and the death drive to the processes of

introjection and projective identification. The chapter also includes an analysis of

Derridean deconstruction in relation to the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive

position in the context of introjection and projective identification. On the whole the

following chapter aims at connecting psychoanalytic theory and practice to more

philosophical issues concerning creative and critical processes.

53
CHAPTER II: The Controversy

Now, the history of depths begins with what is most

terrifying: it begins with the theatre of terror whose

unforgettable picture Melanie Klein painted. In it, the

nursing infant is, beginning with his or her first year, stage,

actor, and drama at once. Orality, mouth, and breast are

initially bottomless depths. Not only are the breast and the

entire body of the mother split apart into good and bad

object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces,

broken into crumbs and alimentary morsels. The

introjection of these partial objects into the body of the

infant is accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness

onto these internal objects, and by a re-projection of these

objects into the maternal body. Thus, introjected morsels

are like poisonous, persecuting, explosive, and toxic

substances threatening the child’s body from within and

being endlessly reconstituted inside the mother’s body. The

necessity of a perpetual re-introjection is the result of this.

The entire system of introjection and projection is a

communication of bodies in, and through, depth.18

Gilles Deleuze.

18
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, (London: Continuum, 2003),
187
54
 1. Nature, Culture, and Lacan

According to Lacan a psychoanalysable subject’s drama is an outcome of the

conflict between nature and culture. As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, this conflict arises

from the incest taboo, which is a result of the prohibition of marriage among family

members who are tied to one another by blood.

It is modern structuralism that has brought this out best, by

showing that it is at the level of matrimonial alliance, as opposed

to natural generation, to biological lineal descent—at the level

therefore of the signifier—that the fundamental exchanges take

place and it is there that we find once again that the most

elementary structures of social functioning are inscribed in the

terms of a combinatory.19

From the perspective of structuralism the incest taboo produces the cultural

family and separates it from the natural family. The incest taboo is the effect and the

cause of the conflict between nature and culture. Oedipus delivers the subject’s role in

society and hence gives the subject its cultural and sexual identity. This separates the

subject from its non-identity and forms the basis for the conscious desires to flourish. All

that is repressed in this process gives birth to the unconscious. But the unconscious is not

a pool in which the repressed waste material is accumulated; rather, it is a theoretical

construct to explain what happens to the repressed material but which nevertheless has

discernible effects in everyday life and behaviour.

19
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XII, The For Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 150
55
 For Freud, with the resolution of the Oedipus conflict the period of primary

narcissism comes to an end. All that the subject wants is to get back what it had lost upon

entry into the symbolic order through Oedipus. The subject loses the sense of

omnipotence and is in pursuit of a narcissistic sense of oneness. Each time the subject

steps it tries to step towards the pleasures of narcissistic satisfaction of the first step, and

yet with each step moves further away from it.20 Lacan’s narcissistic period, the mirror

stage, is the period after the period of an unmediated relationship between the child and

the mother and it is in the mirror stage that the child identifies himself with his whole

image on the mirror to become what his mother wants him to be. Identification with the

mother turns into identification with the self’s whole image on the mirror which is

assumed to be the object of mother’s desire. Since the child cannot yet make a distinction

between the me and the not-me, and sees himself as one, the child is as yet a mere

(subject), that is to say a subject that is not a subject of culture.21

The child exits the order of nature and enters the order of culture through

symbols. It is a symbolic entry to the world of symbols in which a subject becomes the

subject. A symbol fills the space in-between the child and the mother and is the third

world, the imaginary world between the symbolic and the real, which takes the place of

the unmediated relationship between the other two.

The reflection on the mirror sets in motion the numberless introjective-projective

processes that the subject will experience throughout his/her life. Seeing the whole image

of self on the mirror helps the subject to develop a self-consciousness as a separate being

neither in-itself nor for itself. The awareness of selfness brings with it the awareness of

20
Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction, trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth Press, 1964)
21
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977)

56
otherness. The subject distinguishes between the me and the not-me. This situation cuts

the subject in two halves; one half is the omnipotent exhibitionist and the other half is the

object of the gaze of others. Realizing that the subject is not only the observer but also the

observed produces a self-conscious consciousness; being conscious of self as that which

can never be fully conscious of itself.

The subject is produced in and through language. When the subject says I the

symbol becomes the mediator between the internal and the external worlds, which means

that language splits the subject and the object as it unites them. Following the mirror

stage The Name of the Father completely ends the unmediated relationship between the

child and the mother and establishes its own laws and institutions. The symbolic father is

he who has what the mother lacks and to whom the mother is subject. The father deprives

the mother and the child of their unmediated relationship and deprives the mother of the

phallus. For Lacan, the civilizing castration, the castration that turns the human child into

a cultural subject, does that by directing the child from being to having. Rather than being

the phallus the child begins to want to have the phallus. It is the absence of the phallus

that is established rather than the phallus itself. In pursuit of the phallus as a substitute for

the unattainable mother, the subject obeys the father’s law. The constitution of the

phallus as a lack opens a gap between the subject and the object. It is this gap, this lack,

this absence that is the unconscious and renders the conscious subject possible. What man

lacks is a mythological totality symbolized by the phallus. And this lack is a condition of

the subject. The subject and its unconscious are produced at the same time. Language

turns the human child into a non-subject, it gives him his sexual identity, at the same time

produces unconscious drives and situates the subject in the symbolic order and induces

pain.

57
 Oedipal discourse forms the basis for the deliverance of the subject’s sexual

identity and is the discourse of the other, the unconscious. For the subject to be able to

use language, first he has to acquire language. In the learning process the unconscious

manifests itself in and through slips of the tongue, jokes, and dreams. Slips of the tongue

and jokes reveal the real of the speaking subject’s desire. The unconscious is the

condition of conscious discourse.

For Lacan, language is the condition of the unconscious. The symbolic order

constitutes the unconscious drives. That which the subject wants is the unmediated

experience of existence lost upon entry into the symbolic order. The rupture between

being and non-being opens with language and in the unconscious the symbol of the

fullness of being, completeness of the subject, is the phallus. And the phallus is that

which the subject had lost upon entry into the symbolic order. But since the subject has to

use language to attain the lost object, his striving for wholeness is in vain, which renders

him tragic and exhilarating. For as I said earlier on, as the subject thinks that he is

stepping towards the real of the desired object he is in fact moving further away from it

with each word he adds to his vocabulary.

Here I would like to tell the most known of the Oedipus myths, but at the same

time the one that is least known as an Oedipus myth, the story of Adam and Eve. We

shall listen to Adam and Eve’s story as though it is our own story. For man perpetually

runs after his dreams, and as he does this he moves on through disappointments. I shall

therefore stress the significance of disappointment and frustration in psychoanalytic

discourse.

Adam eats the forbidden apple given to him by Eve. Counter to what Genesis and

Milton say, I think the relationship between male and female is built on a prohibition.

58
Adam eats the apple. Adam is expelled from paradise for doing that which shouldn’t have

been done. He is banned from the heaven on earth (Eden) and is nailed to pain and

suffering. And he is promised paradise after death. But why is an apple prohibited in

paradise? Because as a cultural fantasy, paradise is the other of something forbidden, it is

the product of this forbidding. If the law, the symbolic, is removed from the scene, all

symbolic meaning collapses. And since it is law that produces the unlawful, since it is

repression that forms the unconscious, there can be no symbolic order without the fantasy

supporting it and keeping the unconscious drives at bay.

It is the sense of primary Narcissism that is the desired object of fantasy, a sense

of oneness with the world, omnipotence, and completeness. So life doesn’t end with

death, it reaches its most complete form in the womb, it begins with a death. Life is a

striving for a death oscillating between a forbidden death and a promised death. Death

pulls the subject towards itself with all the attraction of its staticity, or stasis. Eros and

Thanatos are twin brothers.

Expulsion of Narcissism is a condition of cultural life. Narcissus, this beautiful

man, falls in love with his own image on the water. His love for himself prevents him

from seeing the love presented to him by culture--Echo’s love. Narcissus leans forward to

touch his image and leans so much that he falls and drowns in the water, dies in his own

image.22

22
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of The Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (The University of Nebraska Press:
Lincoln and London, 1995), 126-27-28 “The Greek myths do not, generally, say anything; they are
seductive because of a concealed, oracular wisdom which elicits the infinite process of divining. What we
call meaning, or indeed sign, is foreign to them: they signal without signifying; they show, or they hide, but
they always are clear, for they always speak the transparent mystery, the mystery of transparence. Thus all
commentary is ponderous and uselessly verbose—all the more so if it employs the narrative mode, and
expands the mysterious story intelligently into explanatory episodes which in turn imply a fleeting clarity.
If Ovid, perhaps prolonging a tradition, introduces into the fable of Narcissus the fate—which one might
call telling—of the nymph Echo, it is surely in order to tempt us to discover there a lesson about language
which we ourselves add, after the fact. Nevertheless, the following is instructive: since it is said that Echo
loves Narcissus by staying out of sight, we might suppose that Narcissus is summoned to encounter a voice
59
 This period of primary Narcissism is what Lacan calls the mirror stage. As I have

shown in the previous pages, at this stage there is a conflict between the Ideal-I and the I

as the object of the other’s desire. It is this that splits the subject. In other words every

individual re-experiences the tragedy of Narcissus at the back of his/her mind throughout

life. And it is this regressive re-experiencing that produces and is produced by the real of

the subject’s desire.

The father’s law forbids identification with the mother and promotes

identification with the object of the mother’s desire. The father’s law is the law of the

culture. If the child doesn’t obey the father’s law, that is, when the child refuses to leave

the mirror stage behind, the child cannot move on to the next stage and distinguish itself

from the others; it resists codification. This is what a schizophrenic is. To be locked in the

mirror stage is to be a schizophrenic. Here the subject experiences existence as an

illusory reality. He can do nothing to act upon the world for he doesn’t know what use the

objects surrounding him have. The schizophrenic who refuses to pass from father’s

civilizing castration, is he who escapes cultural codification. And culture locks away the

mad into a cell with mirrors on all walls that hide the secrets. A chain of identifications

with the objects of others’ desires begins when and if the subject passes through the

without body, a voice condemned always to repeat the last word and nothing else—a sort of nondialogue:
not the language whence the Other would have approached him, but only the mimetic, rhyming alliteration
of a semblance of language. Narcissus is said to be solitary, but it is not because he is excessively present to
itself; it is rather because he lacks, by decree (you shall not see yourself), that reflected presence—identity,
the self-same—the basis upon which a living relation with life, which is other, can be ventured. He is
supposed to be silent: he has no language save the repetitive sound of a voice which always says to him the
self-same thing, and this is a self-sameness which he cannot attribute to himself. And this voice is
narcissistic precisely in the sense that he does not love it—in the sense that it gives him nothing other to
love. Such is the fate of the child one thinks is repeating the last words spoken, when in fact he belongs to
the rustling murmur which is not language, but enchantment. And such is the fate of lovers who touch each
other with words, whose contact with each other is made of words, and who can thus repeat themselves
without end, marvelling at the utterly banal, because their speech is not a language but an idiom they share
with no other, and because each gazes at himself in the other’s gaze in a redoubling which goes from
mirage to admiration.”
60
fantasy world of the mirror stage and becomes rational. It all ends with an idealized war

culture, when and if culture is built on and through the Name of the Father.

We can see this in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The order of culture has two poles:

On one pole is the unmediated love, on the other pole is the idealized war. In War and

Peace Prince Andrey, although he loves his wife very much—or rather because he loves

her so much—chooses to leave her behind and go to war to fight Napoleon’s armies. He

follows greater ideals, for the future of Europe, and leaves behind the little world of the

females; he chooses to go in search of his Oedipal destiny.

2. No Replica?

Klein is the first psychoanalyst to analyse a pre-verbal and pre-Oedipal stage of

development, that is, before the child starts to hate the father and wants to unite with the

mother whom he believes to contain the father’s penis. In her Psychoanalysis of Children

Klein gives a good example of how this adaptation to reality takes place:

The small patient will begin, for instance, to distinguish between

his make-believe mother and his real one, or between his toy

brother and his live one. He will insist that he only meant to do this

or that to his toy brother, and that he loves his real brother very

much. Only after very strong and obstinate resistances have been

surmounted will he be able to see that his aggressive acts were

aimed at the object in the real world. But when he has come to

61
 understand this, young as he is, he will have made a very important

advance in his adaptation to reality.23

Klein analyses the process of adapting to reality in terms of the child’s relation to

his mother’s body. In the first year of life it is through introjection of the mother’s body

as the embodiment of the external world that the child learns to relate to reality. At this

stage the child sees the breast as the representative of the mother. The child projects his

own reality onto the external world and believes that the mother’s breast belongs to him.

When the flow of milk is interrupted the child becomes aggressive towards the mother

and bites the breast. According to Klein this is the paranoid-schizoid position

characterized by oral sadism.

Klein associates this attitude of the child with the dynamics of an adult

schizophrenic mind. A child who cannot yet make a distinction between the inner reality

and the external world is like a psychotic adult who cannot make a distinction between

what belongs to his fantasy life and what to the external world.

A good example to this situation can be selected from the Hollywood horror

scene. What we see in the Red Dragon, for instance, is a man who over-identifies with

Hannibal Lecter, and becomes what Hannibal Lecter identified with in the first place; a

psychotic serial killer who identifies himself with Blake’s Red Dragon.

The psychotic serial killer who believes himself to be constructing a work of art

with stories of his murders, sees his criminal acts as the actualization of a prophecy, an

incarnation of the myth of Red Dragon. It is through William Blake’s painting, Red

Dragon, that the character is familiar with the myth of Red Dragon. Towards the end of

the film we see him literally eating, incorporating, Blake’s original painting. That is when

23
Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975), 11
62
his total transformation from bodily existence to a mythological dimension beyond the

flesh takes place. Until that point in the film he is governed by the Red Dragon, now he is

the Red Dragon, which means that he no longer takes the orders from a force outside of

himself. He has introjected the source of power and has become his own master against

himself. And perhaps he even believes that his becoming is complete now.

3. The Significance of Klein’s Fantasies

It was Klein who emphasized the importance of fantasies and playing in the

process of development. In her Psychoanalysis of Children Klein brought to light that as

humans we perpetually oscillate between paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive

position throughout life. Klein categorized the death drive as more dominant in the

paranoid-schizoid position and life-drive as more dominant in the depressive position.

For Klein a successful therapeutic procedure would result in maintaining a contact with

the intermediary realm between phantasm and reality. Klein’s importance lies in her

acceptance and affirmation of our most primitive drives’ role throughout life. The need

for satisfaction of those drives sometimes reaches to such inordinate measures that we

become aggressive in the face of reality. Frustrations arise and things get worse, for we

don’t know how to turn our frustrations into fuel for the life drive, and eventually fall

victim to the death drive in search of omnipotence.24

According to Freud, as he puts it in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,

drives were governed by the pleasure principle and the object of satisfaction of these

drives was not very important. In other words, between the drive and its objects there was

24
Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975)

63
no natural tie.25 But for Klein, who prefers the word instinct instead of drive, from the

beginning of life onwards instincts are connected to certain internal objects. From the

beginning of life the human subject is in pursuit of object relations in the way of

satisfying the instincts such as hunger and thirst.26

Klein’s shifting conceptualisation of the process of subject formation can be

clearly observed in her analysis of the relationship between “The Early Stages of the

Oedipus-Conflict and Super-Ego Formation.” Klein takes the beginning of socialization

to a pre-Oedipal stage, a pre-verbal if not pre-linguistic stage, to the first year of life.

When a baby is born it immediately is in the world of objects. And language, being the

extension of the world, that is, being one of the objects surrounding the subject, is

immediately at the disposal of the subject just like any other object. We must keep in

mind, however, that from language Klein understands not only the words but also the

objects such as a toy soldier, or a ball, or any other object. Now, the baby as the subject

throws its toy soldier at the mother to get her attention, or to articulate that it is hungry.

This action of the baby is similar to someone sending a letter to his/her lover to articulate

that he/she has missed him/her and wants to have sex soon. It is in this larger context that

we understand language not only as words but also as everything that is at hand.27

According to Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Lacan, the formation of the subject begins

with the appearance of the Name of the Father and his law prohibiting incest. It is only

with the father saying, “No, you shall not desire the mother, but try to be the object of

25
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality, trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth Press,
1964)

26
Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984)
27
Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975)

64
mother’s desire,” that the child experiences his first confrontation with the symbolic

order. But in Klein this process is related to the development of object relations in a time

where there is imaginary meaning and not symbolic meaning.

Klein attributes great significance to the unconscious phantasmatic workings of

the mind. The unconscious which for Freud and to some extent Lacan is a static state of

being becomes the site of a continuity in dynamism and the time of a perpetual

phantasmatic production. For Klein, the object of psychoanalysis may be the

Unconscious, but the object of psychotherapy is this unconscious process of phantasm

production. Klein’s therapeutic technique involves bringing the patient face to face with

the Real of his/her desire. In this process very primitive and archaic aspects of the human

subject are put into the spotlight.

Early analysis offers one of the most fruitful fields for

psychoanalytic therapy precisely because the child has the ability

to represent its unconscious in a direct way, and is thus not only

able to experience a far-reaching emotional abreaction but actually

to live through the original situation in its analysis, so that with the

help of interpretation its fixations can to a considerable extent be

resolved.28

When a child creates imaginary characters, pretends that they are real and talks

with them, this is considered as playing, but when an adult does the same thing he is

considered to be a schizophrenic, a subject of psychosis. Schizophrenia is a term coined

by Bleuler to designate a set of symptoms such as loss of memory and excessively

regressive behaviour usually associated with old age. The schizophrenic experience, as

28
Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press,
1975),9
65
understood by Bleuler, is the reliving of childhood near death in the form of a

disorganizaton and loss of the pieces constituting the memory.

[…] by projecting his terrifying super-ego on to his objects, the

individual increases his hatred of those objects and thus also his

fear of them, with the result that, if his aggression and anxiety are

excessive, his external world is changed into a place of terror and

his objects into enemies and he is threatened with persecution both

from the external world and from his introjected enemies.29

Klein describes schizophrenia as the “attempt to ward off, master or contend with

an internal enemy.”30 This theme is linked to Klein’s discussion about the dynamic of

envy. For Klein, the child, not yet capable of making a distinction between what is inner

and what is outer, attacks the source of possible gratification. Envy is a product of a

fantasy that the breast is good all the time because it supplies the child with milk

whenever he wants. When the milk is denied to the child the child believes that the

mother is bad because she is withholding the source of good. The child splits the object

into good and bad to save the good breast from possible damage caused by his attacks on

the bad breast. Klein goes on to say that it is at this stage that the child develops a sense

of external reality by beginning to see the mother as another person, and the breast as a

whole object which is good and bad at the same time. This is the depressive position in

which the same object has conflicting significations for the child. Understanding that he

has been attacking not only the bad breast but also the source of good induces guilt in the

child who in turn learns why not to be envious. Klein sees guilt as therapeutic of envy.

What appears to be the illness turns out to be the source of good in Klein’s therapeutic

29
Klein, 143-4
30
Klein, 144
66
procedure. With Klein therapy is reaffirmed as the process of reconciliation through

which a rational subject is created.

4. Klein, Lacan, and Psychosis

For Lacan there is this solipsistic period of life at the beginning. The subject

becomes capable of making a distinction between himself and others after the Narcissistic

period of the mirror stage. The subject’s ability to interpret and adapt shows signs of

progress. Once the mirror stage is passed through and the fantasy is traversed, the subject

becomes capable of controlling the unconscious drives and touching reality. The child

learns to postpone gratification and finds other ways of satisfying himself. The function

of the I shows itself when the child feels the need to act upon the external world and

change things in the way of attaining pleasure and satisfaction of desires. When the child

gives up desiring his mother and realizes that he has to identify with his father the

foundations of the super-ego formation are laid. It is the fear of castration that leads the

male child to give up the mother. The sexual desire turns away from the forbidden object

and moves towards finding ways of expressing itself in and through metaphors supplied

by the predominant culture.

According to Klein the formation of the super-ego begins in the first year of life.

For Klein the “early Oedipus conflict” is at the root of child psychoanalysis. Klein says

that Oedipal tendencies of the child start with oral frustrations and this is when the super-

ego takes its course of formation.

These analyses have shown that oral frustrations release the

Oedipus impulses and that the super-ego begins to be formed at the

same time. […] This is the beginning of that developmental period

which is characterized by the distinct demarcation of genital trends

67
 and which is known as the early flowering of sexuality and the

phase of the Oedipus conflict.31

It is Klein’s legacy to have taken the beginning of development to a stage earlier

than the appearance of the Name of the Father. In this world the castrating father figure

doesn’t yet exist. And the child has at least three years ahead to become capable of using

language. Klein’s journey into a zone before language, a zone before the child finds itself

in the signifying chain, is valuable especially for showing the lack of the role of fantasy

and phantasmatic production in Lacan’s story of the formation of the subject. And Gilles

Deleuze uses Klein’s insight to make the necessary connections between literature and

the unconscious. But before moving on to Deleuze I would like to show from where

Klein is coming and hint at the direction she could possibly be heading towards.

Klein attributes as much importance to the death drive as she does to the life

drive. For Klein, already in the first year of life there are object relations and these

relations involve expression of libidinal and aggressive impulses.

[…] unfavourable feeding conditions which we may regard as

external frustrations, do not seem to be the only cause for the

child’s lack of pleasure at the sucking stage. This is seen from the

fact that some children have no desire to suck—are ‘lazy

feeders’—although they receive sufficient nourishment. Their

inability to obtain satisfaction from sucking is, I think, the

consequence of an internal frustration and is derived, in my

experience, from an abnormally increased oral sadism. To all

appearances these phenomena of early development are already the

31
Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, 123
68
 expression of the polarity between the life-instincts and the death-

instincts. We may regard the force of the child’s fixation at the oral

sucking level as an expression of the force of its libido, and,

similarly, the early and powerful emergence of its oral sadism is a

sign that its destructive instinctual components tip the balance.32

The child projects his aggressive impulses onto the external world and sees the

object (the mother’s breast) as an enemy trying to destroy him. The frustrations that take

place in the first year of life cause anxiety and lead the child to express his aggressive

impulses through oral sadism (biting the breast). The fantasy that the mother contains the

father’s penis leads the child to want to tear apart the mother’s body and introject the

object hidden in it through oral sadism. After oral frustration the attention of the child

shifts from the mother’s breast to the father’s penis. The aggression against the father’s

penis and the response this aggression gets plays a dominant role in the formation of the

super-ego. As it develops the super-ego becomes more and more important in the way the

subject handles his relation to the world.

[…] by projecting his terrifying super-ego on to his objects, the

individual increases his hatred of those objects and thus also his

fear of them, with the result that, if his aggression and anxiety are

excessive, his external world is changed into a place of terror and

his objects into enemies and he is threatened with persecution both

from the external world and from his introjected enemies.33

An aggressive attitude towards the external world damages the relationship with

the external world; the external world is regarded as hostile, which leads to aggression,

32
Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, 124
33
Klein, 143-4
69
and this aggression in turn provokes hostility against the child. It is this kind of a vicious

cycle in which many psychotics and neurotics find themselves. Klein describes

schizophrenia as the “attempt to ward of, master or contend with an internal enemy.”34

For Klein, the force of aggression as a result of oral frustrations can reach to such levels

that the subject feels obliged to project the super-ego ideal onto the external world. The

super-ego is terribly ruthless and aggressive. The projection of the super-ego onto the

external world turns reality into an enemy. The subject becomes ill and shuts himself up

into his fantasy world and, detached from reality, suffers inordinately. Lacan sees

schizophrenia in a similar way; for Lacan what produces schizophrenia is the exclusion

of the Name of the Father.

With Klein we learn that the sense of reality is gained through oral frustrations.

Lacan, too, thinks that frustrations have a role to play in the constitution of the reality

principle. But according to Lacan what’s important is not the natural frustrations

themselves, but how they are symbolized, how they are represented in and through

language, how they manifest themselves in the form of cultural products. Lacan finds

Klein’s theories too biological.

To explicate where Lacan and Klein disagree I would like to give their opinions

on Dick who is a four years old boy suffering from “psychosis.” Dick, who hardly ever

talks, is permanently indifferent towards the external world. In Dick’s world there is no

good and bad, there is nothing to be afraid of and nothing to love. It is as though Dick

lives in a world apart, in another reality. Dick’s world is not structured like language,

there is no differentiation, and where there is indifference there can be no difference, in

Dick’s world all objects and subjects are one.

34
Klein, 144
70
 Dick has a toy train which he repetitively moves to and fro on the floor. Klein

says, “I took the big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them ‘Daddy train’

and ‘Dick train.’ Thereupon he picked up the train I called Dick and made it roll [toward

the station]… I explained: ‘The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.’35 At the

end of this first session of therapy Dick begins to express his feelings. It is after Dick

becomes capable of situating himself within the symbolic order in relation to his mother

and father that he becomes a human. He begins to play his role given to him by Klein.

Human reality is a mediated reality. We can see in Dick’s case that the biological

turns into cultural through Oedipalisation. Lacan thinks Klein’s therapeutic technique is

correct but her theory wrong. What Lacan thinks Klein’s theory lacks is the castrating

father figure who says “No.” Lacan complains that the castrating father figure is not

given a role in Klein’s scenario. It is true that father is not given a role in the process of

subject formation, but Lacan’s assumption that Klein is Oedipalizing the child is wrong.

For if the father is excluded from the scene how can the Oedipal triangle be formed. All

Klein does is to tell Dick that mummy and daddy copulate. Klein’s world is entirely

biological, whereas Lacan is talking about the subjectivation of the individual in and

through symbols. For Lacan the unconscious is nothing other than a chain of signifiers.

There is nothing before the symptoms manifest themselves in and through metaphors. So

metaphors are the products of repression which splits the subject into two separate but

contiguous sides; the biological self and the cultural self. Psychoanalysis is about a

regressive process which goes back in time through a chain of signifiers and tries to reach

the Real of the subject’s desire. A symptom is the manifestation of the Real of the

subject’s desire in the form of metaphors.

35
Melanie Klein, quoted from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, 45
71
 In advancing this proposition , I find myself in a problematic

position—for what have I taught about the unconscious? The

unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject,

it is the dimension in which the subject is determined in the

development of the effects of speech, consequently the

unconscious is structured like a language. Such a direction seems

well fitted to snatch any apprehension of the unconscious from an

orientation to reality, other than that of the constitution of the

subject.36

When Lacan says that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” what he

wants to say is that if the unconscious is a web of metaphors the signifiers behind the

metaphors are interacting with one another just like the signifiers in language.

In psychosis the subject’s fantasy of unmediated omnipresence resists

symbolization. The subject cannot turn his feelings and thoughts into symbolic acts, he

cannot make a distinction between the me and the not me, cannot engage in

intersubjectivity. Introversion dominates the psychotic and he finds himself in a world

where nothing matters for nothing is differentiated. The psychotic experiences his inner

reality as though it is the reality of all, he cannot separate the inner from the outer. The

psychotic’s reality escapes cultural codes. The psychotic doesn’t know the symbolic

meaning of the father’s law. The law of the father establishes the order of culture, but the

psychotic refuses to come to terms with the father’s law and eventually cannot overcome

his frustrations. The mother’s role is determinant in the formation of psychosis. If the

36
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 149
72
mother doesn’t recognize the role of the father the child remains locked in the imaginary

world, outside signification.

Psychosis appears when all the signifiers refer to the same signified. Language

and meaning dissolve. Locked in the mirror stage the subject identifies everything as me,

and the me as the phallus. But the reality is that the “I” is not the phallus inside the

mother’s body. The psychotic is deprived of nostalgia, of the feeling of loss which is

constitutive of the subject. Lacking lack the psychotic subject lacks what Lacan calls

“lack in being.” And lacking lack in being the subject cannot identify his natural self as

being separate from the cultural objects of identification. By entering the symbolic order

the narcissistic sense of oneness, “the oceanic feeling,” is lost. And this loss opens a gap

within the subject, which the subject tries to fill with the objects of identification

presented to it by the predominant culture. Identification is a way of compensating for the

emptiness within the subject caused by the loss of sense of oneness. But the unconscious

desires can never be satisfied by metaphors. To overcome the frustration caused by the

loss of his fantasy world, the subject turns towards symbolic acts in the way of climbing

up the social ladder. The subject becomes a doctor, pilot, teacher; all to endure the pain of

not being able to satisfy one’s unconscious desires, or the Real of one’s desire. It is in this

context that Lacan sees repression as productive of the subject as a split subject. Because

the psychotic has lost nothing, lacks nothing, he has no motivations for such pursuits as

becoming a doctor, pilot, or teacher. The psychotic has no sense of nostalgia and he is

therefore extremely indifferent to the external world. Experiencing no frustrations in the

face of the harsh reality of not being one, the psychotic desires nothingness.

73
 5. Klein, Derrida, Deconstruction

According to Klein we all oscillate between the paranoid-schizoid position and

the depressive position throughout our lives. This means that none is normal since the

world is a place in which all kinds of abnormalities take place all the time and nobody

can be a normal person independently of all these abnormalities. One may choose

withdrawal and indifference in a Stoic fashion, but who can claim that this is normal?

The only thing that is normal is that nothing is normal.

Klein used the word ‘position’ as she was creating her concepts to designate

moods which one finds oneself in throughout life. It is necessary to underline the word

‘position’ because the word ‘position’ is especially chosen to signify psychic conditions

rather than stages of a linear course of development. The paranoid-schizoid position and

the depressive position are complementary situations of the subject in a non-linear

course of development which attaches to the death drive, as much important a role as it

does to the life drive in the course of development. It is obvious that for Klein the

relationship between regress and progress is not in the form of a symmetrical binary

opposition.37

If we keep in mind that creativity means creating a meaning out of the

meaningless chaos we can see how Klein’s theory can be used in the service of a critical

theory aiming at destroying the static unities and recreating non-static formations.

Influenced by Klein, Wilfred Bion developed a theory of thinking concentrating on what

Keats called negative capability. Negative capability is the ability to remain intact in the

face of not-knowing throughout the thinking process. While Klein emphasized the

negative aspects of the paranoid-schizoid position and gave a more important role to the

37
Melanie Klein, Our adult world and other essays (London: Heinemann, 1975)
74
depressive position in the developmental process, Bion argued that fragmentation of

previous theories is as important as the reintegration process for the emergence of new

thought. For Bion the subject’s oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid

position(splitting) and the depressive position(synthesizing) is necessary for a healthy

creative process to take place giving birth to new thought.38

Counter to the reparative and reconciliatory tendencies towards reconstructing the

pre-dominant symbolic order, the poststructuralist subject of the death drive aims at

explicating the problems inherent in the structure of the existing symbolic order. It is a

response to the loss of an imagined future and involves a negation of the existing order

which is based on negation and in which the subject finds/loses itself. The subject as the

death drive is simultaneously the effect and the cause of splitting. The subject as the

death drive occupies the other pole of faith. Its domain begins where belief ends. Its

domain is a realm where silence and non-being confront the daily banalities of symbolic

societies. In this realm nothingness and substance confront each other.

As the subject’s intensity of self-consciousness increases, so does its pain and

anxiety in the face of death. This causes hopelessness and despair which may or may not

lead to a total devastation of the project of inverting and putting into the spotlight the

nothingness at the centre of the subject. Heidegger repeatedly puts all this down in Being

and Time when he says that “being-towards-death is angst.” One cure for expelling

anxiety has been to believe in god, any other metaphysical construct, or in some cases it

has even taken the form of a materialist system of thought; in all these cases, however, an

escape is seen as a solution when in fact it is the problem itself. For our concerns, an

38
Wilfred Bion. “A Theory of Thinking,” Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London:
Karnac, 1967)

75
escapist attitude, and especially one that tries to go beyond the physical, does not work at

all, for what we are looking for is a way of learning to make use of the reality of the death

drive as an interior exteriority constitutive of the subject as a creative agent.

The self-conscious subject questions itself. With the thought of death the subject

gets in touch with the death drive and pushes itself further towards the periphery of the

symbolic order and becomes its own persecutor in the service of a critique of the status

quo. The subject of the death drive shakes the foundations upon which is built its own

mode of being. Its mode of being becomes its movement towards non-being. It is the

perceiver and the perceived of its own, the subject and the object of its actions, the

persecutor and the persecuted at the same time. Through the death drive one can go

beyond one’s symbolic role and become conscious of its time and place in the world. The

use of the death drive requires recognition of death as the absolute master. That way one

can become reconciled to life as it is.

In critical theory we usually have to read the text at hand in an unorthodox way so

as to create a new meaning out of it. The critical theorist breaks-down the meaning of the

text and out of the pieces recreates a new meaning, which is to say that creativity bears

within itself destructivity and inversely. It may not be necessary to destroy something

intentionally to create something new, but to have destroyed something is usually a

consequence of having created something new. Jacques Derrida’s reading strategy called

deconstruction exposes how a text writes and unwrites itself against its dominant

meaning and in contrast to common sense perception. I see Derrida’s corpus as an intense

meditation on the meaning of meaning itself. First Derrida shows the dominant meaning

of the text as perceived by the majority and then he exposes the other within of the text,

the minor meaning which contradicts the major meaning. By doing this Derrida makes

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not only the absolute meaning of the text collapse in on itself but also causes the concept

of absolute meaning itself to explode from within. In Kleinian terms what Derrida does is

to start from the depressive position and then move to the paranoid-schizoid position and

there apply the splitting process peculiar to the paranoid-schizoid position to the text. It

can be said that in a way Derrida exposes the paranoid-schizoid position within the

depressive position. By doing this Derrida shows that the life drive and the death drive

are within and without one another at the same time. This means that for Derrida creation

and destruction are one. It is for this reason that I find deconstruction insufficient for

effective critique to take place. For without the affirmative recreation of the destroyed

text there remains nothing outside the ruins of the past. But that the new is inconceivable

from within the pre-dominant context does not mean that it is impossible. What Derrida’s

deconstructive practice lacks is the active intervention in the predominant order which

would create the conditions of possibility for change, out of the conditions of

impossibility. Derrida remains paralyzed in the face of the infinity of possibilities for

change by declaring that the chain of signifiers is infinite and therefore nothing is outside

the text when in fact nothing is this infinity itself since when there is infinity then

everything disappears and nothing conceivable remains within the text. It is true that

deconstruction dissolves the transcendental signified but the question remains: What is

the price paid when the transcendental signified is deconstructed rather than affirmatively

recreated and turned into an immanent sign here and now. In Derrida there is the waiting

for the new to arrive but no action is taken in the way of making this arrival possible

now. We shall ask why not recreate oneself as the new, why not do it now and give birth

to the new here and now, why not be the new in action? In a fashion similar to Hamlet,

Derrida perpetually postpones the action by playing with language and ends up locking

77
himself up in an endlessly deferred self-perpetuating, self-consuming, and self-reflexive

endgame with no beginning and no end, making it impossible for conscious desire to

engage in effective action.

Conclusion of Part I

Barbaric Regress and Civilised Progress contra Deconstruction and Affirmative

Recreation

In Homer’s Odyssey the call of the sirens is a sign addressed to men who can only

survive this seductive call by turning a deaf ear to it, by ignoring, not acknowledging and

repressing their desire for it. If the desire is of a visual object then you can turn a blind

eye on it, or you may prefer not to close your eyes and just look at the object of desire;

you can be a voyeur or an innocent witness if you wish. But the sexual sign that targets

the ear is much more dangerous. The ears don’t have lids. And the voyeurism by ears, in

contrast to normal voyeurism, can only give pain rather than pleasure. In Leonard

Cohen’s song, Paper Thin Hotel, the man’s pain listening to the sexual intercourse next

door is immeasurable; but if there was a hole on the wall, things could have been

otherwise.

Odysseus’ way of protecting himself from the call of the sirens is different from

his companions’. He doesn’t stop his ears with wax; quite the contrary, he is more than

willing to hear the call. But against the danger of following the call he has himself tied on

the mast. The oarsmen’s stopping their ears to the call, and Odysseus’ having himself tied

to the mast so as not to follow the call, are the two different versions of resisting the

sirens. While the former is a measure taken by the ego against the object of desire, the

latter is that of the super-ego. In stopping one’s ears with wax what’s at stake is a will not

78
to hear, pretending as though the object of desire didn’t exist, the desire is repressed, and

the object is forgotten. Whereas by having oneself tied to the mast one hears the sirens,

the desire is accepted but not pursued; the object is consciously resisted. But what is this

thing that is so forcefully prohibited, which when adhered to leads to death, and when

ignored makes life so boring and existence so banal? To this question there are two

answers which in the end become one.

The first answer is Lacanian: the call of the sirens represents the desire for the

mother. This desire for the mother is neither totally instinctive, nor totally sexual. It

belongs to a period where the instinctive and the sexual are one. This desire is prohibited

by the father. And the acceptance of the impossibility of uniting with the mother causes

growth. Every child desires the whole of the mother, not just parts of her. The mother,

however, is fragmentary from the beginning; in Adam Phillips’ words, the mother is

promiscuous. So there is the tragedy: on the one hand there is the obsessive attachment,

and on the other hand there is the paranoid reaction.

There is an abundance of texts depicting the tragedy born of the tension between

promiscuous women who are openly open to other relationships at all times and

obsessively in love men who are hypocritically monogamic throughout the history of

literature. The femme fatale is nothing but the archetype of the unsatisfied desire for the

mother.

With the law of the father the desire for the mother becomes a real call of the

sirens. If the child obeys the call, the result is death, or a psychotic existence signifying

death. In psychosis the subject builds his life on an obsession for the unattainable mother,

and his every act will be in the way of attaining the warmth, security, and protective

environment of the womb. Not to become a psychotic the child chooses another way; he

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chooses to close his ears to the call and obey the law of the father; but then he becomes

an ordinary neurotic. Perhaps the best way to choose is to face and accept the desire for

the mother, acknowledge the call of the sirens, but not to follow it.

The second answer to what the sirens signify is Freudian. Following Freud’s later

work one can say that the call of the sirens represents the death drive. If the oarsemen of

Odysseus hadn’t stopped their ears with wax, the voyage would have ended in death. The

bee that is seduced by the colourful flower which feeds on insects flies to its death.

Following Freud, Herbert Marcuse says that the drive to reproduce the species, the life

drive, and the drive to destroy, the death drive, are both for and against one another, that

is, the life drive and the death drive are within and without one another at the same time.

There are many forms in which the death drive manifests itself. These vary from

melancholia to aggression, from self-destruction to paranoia. What is common to all these

form of appearance is a kind of revolt against having been born. The death drive wants

jouissance, a condition in which infinite satisfaction is possible and in which repression

and release, pain and pleasure do not exist. Freud explains this obsessive and neurotic

desire with the concept of the compulsion to repeat; a desire to return to a previous state

of being in the history of being. And needless to say, this is a desire to return to the

womb, to the state of being before birth. So we can see that the death drive and the desire

for the mother signify and are signified by the same will; the will to nothingness. The

refusal to accept having been detached from the mother, the will to reunite with her, and

the will to return to the womb, signify and are signified by the same desire. Unless

accounts are settled with the will to nothingness the subject remains trapped somewhere

between paranoid schizophrenia and obsessive neurosis and cannot reach the point zero

which is where the real love and affirmation of life flourish.

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 In contemporary nihilism a mentally healthy person is defined thus: the one who

has managed to repress the death drive, who has attained inner harmony and who has

been able to project this inner harmony onto the external world in the way of healthy

social life, in other words, one who has established a perfect balance between the ego, the

id, and the superego, and who knows how to control the destructive impulses and even

direct these impulses to professional life. This healthy subject has become capable of

reconciling himself with life and with others, who has become a part of the world of

goodness. This is the typical healthy subject as defined by the pre-dominant discourse of

contemporary nihilism.

From the perspective of contemporary nihilism the exact opposite of this type of a

healthy individual would be from the world of badness. Someone whose ego cannot be

reconciled to the external world, and who is undergoing a fragmentation. His death drive

has become so dominant that he has become aggressively destructive of both the self and

the other. He is at a loss. His emotional ties with the external world have been cut. He has

no sense of value, truth, meaning. He feels nothing for the world of goodness. Eventually

the death drive produces the most aggressive response imaginable to the conflict between

civilized progress and barbaric regress constitutive of contemporary nihilism. But that the

response of the death drive is the most aggressive one does not mean that it is destructive,

on the contrary, it gives aggression a new form. It is not aggression that is bad in-itself,

rather, what’s important is the form aggression takes.

Unfortunately today many forms of critical attitude towards global capitalism take

on a nihilistic, reactive, and slavish role, rather than an affirmative and active response,

and fall victim to their own ressentiment, or what Klein would have called envy. I think a

critical attitude towards this nihilism produced by the conditions of global capitalism

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should be in the way of developing a practical theory of theoretical practice for change,

driven by and driving an interaction between deconstruction and affirmative recreation --

a cont(r)action -- rather than total negation leading to barbaric regress and violence.

It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which

occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with

what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous

conformity: the Event. It is in this sense that the amor fati is one

with the struggle of free man. My misfortune is present in all

events, but also a splendor and brightness which dry up misfortune

and which bring about that the event, once willed, is actualized on

its most contracted point, on the cutting edge of an operation. All

this is the effect of the static genesis and of the immaculate

conception.39

That at the root of every progressive movement there is a traumatic incident, war,

destruction, suffering, pain, is as yet a commonly held opinion. What we see through the

opposition between “civilized progress” and “barbaric regress” is that both these

attitudes, these two differently conceived forms of nihilism, have at their core the life

drive disguised as the death drive and inversely: they are towards totalitarianism and

stasis rather than dynamism and multiplicity. Both ignore the foundational question

which is how to be and let the other be rather than to be or not to be. The problem today

is to know how to become what one is without confining the other into the realm of non-

being. How to create the self in such a way as not to be destructive of the other and itself

at the same time?

39
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, transl. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 149
82
 PART TWO

Crafty Cuts

in which I find myself and my sharpened visions turned against their subject. Here is

there where I might have said, if I had a voice to say, how the sharpening visions of the

subject turn against their subject. And would go if I could have gone, to the culmination

point of all these directions, where there is one marvelous sign. I see that the more

affirmative one’s attitude towards life gets the more fragile the contact with the other

becomes. Paradoxically, as I show myself to have found myself standing firm outside in a

time of derangement and loss of oneness, the reader witnesses that as the contact

becomes more fragile and affirmation more difficult, maintaining the conditions for the

possibility of affirmative cont(r)act becomes more essential to the continuation of a life of

self in touch not only with the death of the other but also with the death of oneself.

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CHAPTER III: Cinema and Psychoanalysis

1. Cinematic Apparatus and The Psyche

Ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to

their real conditions of existence.40

Ideology has a material existence.41

For Freud dreams are the beholders of the sleeping subject; dreams prevent

waking up by turning a repressed desire into images.42 How does the dream do that? To

be able to answer this question we have to look at Freud’s concept of the Unconscious

and how the repressive mechanism works.

With Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America the civilized were brought

face-to-face with primitive groups of people. In the case of Freud’s concept of the

unconscious, the civilized were facing their own wild side, the other within them. By

discovering the unknown continent Columbus opened new fields for exploitation. As for

Freud’s concept of the unconscious, it was its inescapable destiny to be subjected to

exploitation. And with the advance of technology it becomes easier and easier to exploit

the unconscious. Hollywood, political strategists, advertisement writers and many others

burning with desire for more money and power thought it was a merit to develop

technologies for the manipulation and exploitation of the unconscious. But Freud’s

discovery was aimed at serving almost exactly the opposite purpose. Freud meant the

40
Louis Althusser, “The Ideological State Apparatuses,” from Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek
(London: Verso, 1994), 123
41
Althusser, 125
42
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books,
1965),101-8
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unconscious to stand in for the other of a way of thought that tended to explain and define

everything in terms of its exchange-value and conformity to the established order. Freud

aimed at bringing people face to face with the truth of their being; that their rationality

couldn’t exist without its opposite, the unconscious. In the unconscious, the drives that

resist symbolization are in constant interaction with one another and yet without this

chaotic interaction between the unconscious drives there can be no reason. How hard

civilization tries to escape from the Real of desire by establishing truths with no basis and

how hard it must have been for them to face the non-reason inherent in their reason,

which they so proudly prohibited. Freud not only opens the way of access to that

forbidden zone, but also names the unconscious mental processes, and calls this long

forgotten forbidden zone the unconscious. So, in a way, Freud is not only Columbus but

also Amerigo Vespuci.

Freud calls the content of the unconscious the latent dream-thoughts.43 That

which one sees in a dream is already a translation of this primal scene. The images in a

dream stand in for the gap in the symbolic order; they symbolize the latent content of the

dream, which are the unconscious drives. A dream turns these unconscious drives into the

manifestations of the subject’s objects of desire. The subject’s dream is already a semi-

symbolized form of the unnameable traumatic kernel, the Real of the subject’s desire. In

the unconscious there is no desire, but only an oscillation between the life-drive and the

death drive. What the dream does is to supply the unconscious with objects to which it

can attach its drives, give them a meaning and turn the unconscious drives into conscious

43
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965),
101-8

85
desire. Dreams keep the natural and the cultural separate but contiguous to one another.

Dream language is closer to the dynamics of the unconscious than the logic of fantasies.

Fantasies are more social than dreams and are the supports of the symbolic order, they are

the products of a desire to fill the gap between the Real and the social reality. So the

objects of desire, with which the subject finds itself bombarded by, shape the subject’s

unconscious drives and determine what the subject will desire, what it will not.

The object of one’s desire plays a dominant role in the subject’s identification

processes. But there remains a gap between the object of desire and the object of

identification. This split between the subject’s objects of desire and objects of

identification, the choice the subject makes at this very moment determines the subject’s

identity, and yet the subject is not conscious enough to make the simplest choices, so this

choice always turns out to be a forced choice.

We can see an example of this forced choice in Levity directed by Ed Solomon

(2002). It is a film about a murderer who kills a young cashier and consequently gets

jailed for life. He is released on good behaviour but when it comes to getting out of the

prison he refuses to do so. They tell him that he has no choice but to choose freedom, the

life outside the prison. He unwillingly leaves the prison. This man was feeling so guilty

that being in prison was his only way of surviving the anxiety caused by his aggressive

behaviour in the past. He believed he deserved this punishment and was happy to

participate in its execution. He was, if not his own persecutor, at least his own executor.

He became his own crime and punishment at the same time. It was his free choice to be

in prison, that way he fantasized he was being redeemed. And with this phantasm he was

cutting himself off from carrying the burden of his crime as a free man. With the jury

telling him that he is now free, he does not have to be punished anymore, his fantasy

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collapses. He realizes that redemption requires an external source. That by believing he

was being redeemed didn’t mean that he was really being redeemed. He has to be

redeemed in the eyes of another, in the eyes of the ones who suffered the most because of

his crime.

In a standard process of development the subject is expected to choose the objects

of desire from the opposite sex and the objects of identification from the same sex. The

subject introjects the objects of the same sex as objects of identification and the objects of

the opposite sex as objects of desire. In turn the subject projects his introjected objects of

identification onto his objects of desire, the other sex, strengthening his image of self in

the eyes of the objects of the same sex who are his/her objects of identification.

What turns the latent content into the manifest-content and manifest-content into

symbols is called the transference mechanism, or the dream-work. The analyst becomes

the machine interpreting the patient’s free associations, which is what the dream-work

does to the unconscious drives and turns them into metaphors.

For, owing to the fact that dream-interpretation traces the course

taken by the dream-work, follows the paths which lead from the

latent thoughts to the dream-elements, reveals the way in which

verbal ambiguities have been exploited, and points out the verbal

bridges between different groups of material—owing to all this, we

get an impression now of a joke, now of schizophrenia, and are apt

to forget that for a dream all operations with words are no more

than a preparation for a regression to things.44

44
Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin,
1984), 237
87
 Freud’s technique of interpretation aims at a reversed metamorphosis; the

analytical process tries to reach the hidden-content through the manifest-content. So

Freud has to retranslate the manifest content as close to the hidden content as possible.

The hidden content is unattainable, and yet the reversed metamorphosis at least makes

some progress in the way of initiating a backward motion, a regressive process. To

initiate this regressive process Freud uses the technique of free association. Free

association is used to make hitherto unmade connections between the manifestations of

the unconscious in the way of translating the unconscious into conscious or semi-

conscious terms. Repression produces the hidden content of the unconscious. Free

association aims at making the hidden content manifest itself in and through metaphorical

constructions of reality. If the therapeutic process is successful the subject begins to use

metonymies.

From cinema we have the example of a pair of black leather shoes stepping up the

stairs. In this context “the black leather shoes” is a metonymy, and signifies that the

murderer is approaching. Murderer’s shoes stand in for the murderer as a whole person.

This is also how Klein’s partial-object takes the place of the object as a whole. Or, the

body without organs turns into an organ without a body. The objet petit a stands in for the

master-signifier, just like the breast stands in for the whole of mother. The operation at

work is similar but objet petit a and the partial-object are not the same thing. Object petit

a is the fantasy of something that is considered to be lost and/but which actually no one

has ever had. Whereas the partial-object is the fantasy of the part as the whole, the subject

does not yet know that the wholeness is lost, it feels that the part is the whole. In the

fantasy of the objet petit a there is less consciousness than there is in the fantasy of the

partial-object.

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 With Freud’s free association and Klein’s play therapy, the subject learns to give

a voice to the traumatic kernel, the Real of his unsatisfied desires. The subject’s

realization of the unnamability of the Real is a sign of progress in the therapeutic process.

So in a way the therapeutic process has to fail for progress to take place. The quality and

the quantity of gaps, black holes, or white spots within a discourse produced by free

association show the extent of loss and dissatisfaction of the subject.

According to Freud the dream-work deforms the unconscious drives and turns

them into a more acceptable form so that the subject can come face to face with them.

This is like an actor who changes his costume and appears with a different identity in the

second stage of a play. There are two psychic processes involved in the dream-work.

These are displacement and condensation. For Freud the process of displacement

involves a kind of change of roles between cultural values and libidinal energy. The aim

of displacement is to project substitutes for the unnamable and disowned aspects of the

self so that the subject can reintroject those split off parts of the self in more acceptable

forms. This process of displacement can be clearly observed in fetishism. A fetishist

directs his/her desire to an object other than the real object of desire. For instance if the

object of desire is the penis the subject of desire replaces the penis with a shoe; the shoe

stands in for the real object of desire.

As for condensation, it involves a concentration of secret thoughts at one single

point, a kind of movement towards one single object, so all the thoughts intermingle and

disappear, they become an unrecognisable multitude of thoughts. Condensation is a kind

of unconsciously willed confusion; a defence mechanism to keep the unwanted qualities

of the self at bay.

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 2. Dream, Fantasy, and Film

If the film and the daydream are in more direct competition than

the film and the dream, if they ceaselessly encroach upon each

other, it is because they occur at a point of adaptation to reality –

or at a point of regression, to look at it from the other direction –

which is nearly the same; it is because they occur at the same

moment: the dream belongs to childhood and the night; the film

and the daydream are more adult and belong to the day, but not

midday – to the evening, rather.45

In The Imaginary Signifier Christian Metz emphasizes a very important aspect of

the relationship between cinema and the unconscious. The dream belongs to childhood, to

the night, to the unconscious, the Real; whereas film and fantasy belong to adulthood, the

symbolic, and consciousness; and yet, this consciousness itself belongs to the evening.

What Metz actually wants to say is that even though cinema has shown us a lot it has at

the same time hidden a lot of things from us; for each film is a veil on the Real, a single

beam of light comes out of the projector and in the dimness of the cinematic apparatus

one is almost hypnotized, looks semi-consciously at what he is being shown.

Imagine yourself sitting in a cinema auditorium on a rather comfortable seat. This

is one of the very rare occasions when you would agree to sit quietly in the dark with a

crowd of other people. The only source of light is the projector projecting the images

onto the white wall. The white wall turns the projected light into motion pictures and you

are looking at the pictures in wonderment. On your comfortable seat you are relaxed,

passive, and your ability to move is restricted by an external force. This condition of

45
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl
Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzetti (London: Macmillan, 1982), 136-7
90
yours is very similar to the condition of a half-asleep person between reality and the

dream world. Watching a movie is like a passage from being awake to being asleep. As a

spectator you are aware that what you are watching is not real and still you make yourself

believe that it is not totally fictional. Watching a movie you are like someone who is just

about to wake up or just about to fall asleep.

The dream materials are visual and audio images, just like the matter of cinema.

Nevertheless, there are three fundamental and semiological differences between dreams

and films. In The Imaginary Signifier Christian Metz distinguishes these three differences

between dream and film as follows:

[…]first, the unequal knowledge of the subject with respect

to what he is doing; second, the presence or absence of real

perceptual material; and third, a characteristic of the textual

content itself(text of the film or dream), about which we are

now going to speak.46

All of these differences are linked to the degree of wakefulness of the subject. In

sleep there is total illusion, the subject may play a role in the dream’s text. But in cinema

the subject cannot see itself on the screen, unless, of course, he is an actor or an actress

who has taken part in the film. In cinema there is a sense of reality which puts a distance

between yourself and what you see. When you are awake you are to a certain extent

aware of the fact that what you are watching is fictional.

The second difference which Metz points out is concerned with the existence of

the matter of perception. The cinematographic image is a real image, an image that is of a

46
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl
Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzetti (London: Macmillan, 1982), 120
91
material: visual, audio. But in dreaming there is no matter of the dream, dream material is

completely illusory, it doesn’t exist as an external object.

The third difference involves the textual content of the film itself. Compared to a

dream the fictional film is much more logical. If we keep the likes of David Lynch

movies apart the plot of the film mostly develops with a certain order conforming to the

expectations of the spectator. But in dreams there is no plot for no one is telling anything

to another person. The dream belongs nowhere.

After distinguishing these differences between cinema and dream Metz introduces

another term. This is what Freud called ‘Tagtarum,’ or the daydream, a conscious

fantasy.47 The daydream is closer to film in that there is a certain degree of consciousness

operating within the subject when he/she is daydreaming, or fantasizing. Daydreams too,

are experienced when one is awake. The reason why film has a logical structure is that

the actors, directors, and spectators are all awake. Making and watching a film involves

conscious, pre-conscious, and sub-conscious psychic processes. Fantasizing also involves

these three psychic processes, and yet since a film is produced by conscious choices, it

has a certain purpose, a certain meaning to convey; what it will become is planned

beforehand, its every detail is written down. But fantasizing is a totally psychic process

which has gaps and disconnections in it. When we are fantasizing our intention is not to

convey a certain meaning to another person. In both processes Metz sees at work a kind

of voluntary simulation. Both the daydreamer and the film spectator know that what they

are seeing or imagining is not real; but they still make themselves believe that the case is

the opposite.

47
Metz, 43-9
92
 Both the film spectator and the daydreamer replace the reality principle with the

pleasure principle. In both cases there is a willed belief in an illusion that what one is

seeing or imagining is actually taking place. Without this belief the subject cannot take

any pleasure in fantasizing and watching a film. The sole purpose of these activities is to

compensate for an unsatisfying reality. Fantasies and films are the supports of social

reality, with them the Real is kept at bay, and the gap between the subject and

nothingness is maintained. Nothingness is internal to the symbolic order. Just as the

dreaming subject is governed by the unconscious the cinema spectator and the fantasizing

subject are turning the Real into a source of pleasure, translating it into the symbolic

order. The filmmakers try to communicate directly with the unconscious of the spectator.

The unconscious is their target and they find images to match the unconscious drives. It is

precisely this matching process that forms the unconscious, for there is nothing prior to

the naming of the unconscious drives. Cinema turns the object of drives into socially

acceptable and symbolically comprehensible forms through metaphor and metonymy.

According to Lacan metaphor is a product of condensation and metonymy is a

product of displacement. The reason why these two forms of expression are so effective

is that they are closer to the workings of the unconscious than the literal. So Lacan is able

to say, “the unconscious is structured a like language.”

You see that by still preserving this "like" (comme), I am

staying within the bounds of what I put forward when I say

that the unconscious is structured like a language. I say like

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 so as not to say-and I come back to this all the time-that the

unconscious is structured by a language.48

In this light the concept of metaphor appears as a product of repression and

involves the replacement of an image with another image that will have a stronger effect.

Metonymy is the product of using a part of the object to stand in for the whole of it.

Metaphor and metonymy fill the gap between the unconscious and the social reality.

They are the mediators between the two worlds.

“The ordinary reality we know dissolves into the proto-ontological Real of raw

flesh and replaceable mask.”49 Zizek is referring to a film, Face/Off, starring John

Travolta and Nicholas Cage. In this film Travolta and Cage find themselves in a situation

where whatever they do they act against themselves. They have each other’s faces. The

message is that behind our faces there is the Real, the raw flesh, nothing to identify us as

and with ourselves. The gap between the social reality and the Real is opened and two

men find themselves playing the role of their enemy. The face becomes the mask veiling

the Real. What we have here, is rather than the mask being a metaphor standing in for the

Real, is the face as a metonymy standing in for the Real.

Before this unveiling of a lack (we are already close to the cinema

signifier), the child, in order to avoid too strong an anxiety, will

have to double its belief (another cinematic characteristic) and

from then on forever hold two contradictory opinions (proof that in

spite of everything the real perception has not been without

effect).50

48
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and
Knowledge (New York: Norton, 1998), 48
49
Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 183
50
Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 70
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 In some movies the failure to keep apart two contradictory positions is itself the

cause of these movies’ good effect. A process through which the ordinary reality

dissolves into the Real can be seen in David Lynch movies. In Mulholland Drive we have

a young actress at the beginning of her Hollywood career. The movie narrates her process

of dispersal. The imaginary, the symbolic, and the real progressively dissolve into one

another and she becomes incapable of distinguishing between what is fictional, what is in

her mind and what is social. It is only at the end of the film that we understand her real

situation, namely, that she has lost the plot of her life, and she has lost it in the fictional

world of Hollywood. To fill the space opened by this loss she becomes addicted to drugs

and alcohol, and the more drugs she takes the bigger the internal space grows, the more

the internal space grows the less she is able to make conscious choices.

3. Projective Identification and Introjection

Klein makes a distinction between introjected objects and the internal objects. The

internal objects include the introjected objects as well as the objects of identification and

the a priori fantasy images. According to Klein introjection is a defence mechanism

against the anxiety and the fear of the horrible inner world of the child. The child

assumes itself populated by bad, aggressive, and tormenting objects and attempts to

introject the external good objects. In other words the child tries to replace the internal

bad object with the external good object. So introjection is a defence mechanism to

protect not only the me but also the internal good objects.51

For Klein the unconscious fantasy sets the foundation of all psychic processes.

But Freud had said fantasizing is a defence mechanism to compensate for the frustrating

51
Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975)
95
and unsatisfying reality. Klein thinks that the unconscious fantasmatic production is the

manifestation of instinctive processes. In Klein’s hands the unconscious becomes a much

more active and productive dynamism in touch with what’s going on in the social reality.

The importance of Klein’s discovery is that she shows how intimately related the child is

with the social reality from the beginning of life. The child is turned towards the mother

and the unconscious moves towards consciousness in and through relating to the objects

surrounding him/her. For Klein one of the first external objects the child relates to is the

mother’s breast. In the face of hunger the child starts crying for he/she has no other

means of communication. The mother understands that the child wants milk. Presented

with milk from the mother’s breast the child comes to realize that there is an external

good object that is the solution to the problem of hunger. But when the flow of milk is

interrupted the child becomes confused, with the effect of hunger. The child considers the

breast as a bad object and becomes more aggressive. When the milk comes the child

realizes that he/she had been attacking not only the source of bad but also the source of

good. So the child understands that every object is good and bad at the same time, and it

is the use into which the object is put that determines its particular goodness or badness.

It is the way in which one relates to social reality that matters.

In the first year of life introjection and splitting are dominant; the child is

governed by the death drive, which is the drive that emerges as a response to the

frustration in the face of the impossibility of going back into the enclosed space and time

of the womb in which all that the organism needs is supplied without the organism

having to make any effort to obtain it.

To be able to cope with the death drive the subject projects some of his/her

aggressiveness onto the external world represented by the mother. Resultantly the child

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recognizes the external world as divided within itself and populated by good and bad

objects which are not good and bad in-themselves but become good or bad in relation to

the other objects. Projective identification is another defence mechanism the child uses to

cope with the difficulties of life. With projective identification, to protect the me and the

internal good objects from a possible attack from the external bad object, the child

projects the internal bad objects onto the external good object. The child confuses the

external good objects, external bad objects, internal good objects, and internal bad

objects. Everything is intermingled so the child becomes aggressive towards

himself/herself and towards the external world. To cope with this difficult situation the

child projects unities onto the external world and makes no distinction between the good

and the bad. This means that the child has passed from the state of being governed by the

death drive, to the state of being governed by the life drive.

In the third stage of development there is the depressive position. With the

depressive position the child feels guilty for attacking not only the good object but also

the bad object in the paranoid-schizoid position of introjection and projective

identification. The child realizes that the loving and caring mother had been the target of

paranoid attacks all this time. To compensate for the damage caused the child strives to

make reparations to the relationship with the mother embodying the social reality. For

Klein depressive anxiety is a sign of progress.

These psychic processes go on until the end of life. The child identifies his/her

image on the mirror as himself/herself. Lacan calls Klein’s depressive position ‘the

mirror-stage.’

In the Lacanian sense, too, in which the imaginary, opposed

to the symbolic but constantly imbricated with it,

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 designates the basic lure of the ego, the definitive imprint

of a stage before the Oedipus complex (which also

continues after it), the durable mark of the mirror which

alienates man in his own reflection and makes him the

double of his double, the subterranean persistence of the

exclusive relation to the mother, desire as a pure effect of

lack and endless pursuit, the initial core of the unconscious

(primal repression). All this is undoubtedly reactivated by

the play of that other mirror, the cinema screen, in this

respect a veritable psychical substitute, a prosthesis for our

primally dislocated limbs.52

In the mirror stage, a period of imaginary and narcissistic identifications, the child

believes in the illusion which he/she sees on the mirror. He/she sees himself/herself as a

totality and believes that that’s what he/she really is. It is a period of conflict between the

self as the other’s object of desire and the self as the subject sees it. The reflection on the

mirror starts the process of introjection and projective-identification that will go on until

death.

[…] the experience of the mirror as described by Lacan is

essentially situated on the side of the imaginary

(=formation of the ego by identification with a phantom, an

image), even if the mirror also makes possible a first access

to the symbolic by the mediation of the mother holding the

child to the glass whose reflection, functioning here as the

52
Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 4
98
 capitalized Other, necessarily appears in the field of the

mirror alongside that of the child.53

The screen is the site of projective identification. I put myself in the place of the

character and try to see the film from his perspective. In a way I narcissistically try to

situate myself in the context of the film as a whole person. But as soon as the screen

gains this mirror-like quality it loses it. With the screen there is a more advanced process

at work, and this process is called projective-identification, not merely identification. The

subject is aware that he is not the character in the movie, but still takes on this other

identity on himself as though he is the one experiencing all those adventures.

When I am watching a movie I become the eye of the camera. Everything

happens around me and I am a mere observer of all these things. In a way, as I’m

watching a movie I become a semi-god-like creature, seeing not-all hearing not-all from a

position not above all; from a position which renders the binary opposition between the

transcendental and the immanent irrelevant. I am within and without the events and I am

at once here and somewhere else with my body and everything else. It is the eye of the

other that makes the eye of the self possible.

4. Cinema and Fetishism

Even shit has a commercial value, depending of course, on whose shit it is. While

in the case of human shit you have to pay to get rid of it, in the case of animal shit it is

said to be a very efficient and sufficient fertilizer for one who has learned to use it, rather

than seeing it as something worthless because it cannot be eaten. “Inversely, it is this very

53
Metz, 6
99
terror that is projected on to the spectacle of the mother’s body, and invites the reading of

an absence where anatomy sees a different conformation.”54

Since even the instincts are produced by the superpanoptic projection-introjection

mechanism in which the subject finds himself/herself, giving free rein to the unconscious

to express itself only produces projections of the evil within onto the without. For Freud

the death drive is the effect of a striving for infinity, nothingness, and death. I would say

it is also the cause of it.

Commodity fetishism is equal to will to nothingness in that it is the desire for the

inorganic objects to stand in for nothingness, the Real of the subject’s desire. Capitalism

replaces the use value of the objects with two-dimensional commercial value, so the

subject desires to be desired, and he/she can only do that by adapting to the two

dimensional sphere of commodity fetishism; by becoming a fetish object himself. If we

recall Marcuse complaining that the one-dimensional is absorbing the two-dimensional

and also keep in mind that Marcuse’s two-dimensional culture has become the pre-

dominant culture of today, we can see why the solution is to say, “I don’t see myself as

you see me,” to the big Other in whatever form it appears in our lives.

In our opinion fetishism only occurs in sadism in a

secondary and distorted sense. It is divested of its essential

relation to disavowal and suspense and passes into the

totally different context of negativity and negation, where it

becomes an agent in the sadistic process of condensation.55

54
Metz, 69
55
Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1989), 32
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 So the death drive produces new objects of desire by splitting the already existing

objects. The subject as death drive, by splitting the symbolic, opens up spaces for the

emergence of new objects of desire to stand in for nothingness and death.

The good object has moved to the side of knowledge and

the cinema becomes a bad object (a dual displacement

which makes it easy for ‘science’ to stand back). The

cinema is ‘persecuted’, but this persistence is also a

reparation (the knowing posture is both aggressive and

depressive), reparation of a specific kind, peculiar to the

semiologist: the restoration to the theoretical body of what

has been taken from the institution, from the code which is

being ‘studied.’56

Writing about cinema is essentially a criticism of the symbolic order, for both

writing and cinematic production are themselves symbolic social activities. Since cinema

exploits the life drive by satisfying the desire for something covering nothing, writing

about cinema is essentially governed by the death drive which tries to expose the

nothingness behind the symbolic. That which a film veils is nothing other than nothing;

and exposing this nothingness behind the film introduces a split between the subject and

the signifier. When looked at like that psychotherapy becomes critical of the existing

social order, for by criticizing the film the critic heals the film industry hence having a

healing effect on the spectator.

It is clear that fetishism, in the cinema as elsewhere, is closely

linked to the good object. The function of the fetish is to restore the

56
Metz, 80
101
 latter, threatened in its ‘goodness’ (in Melanie Klein’s sense) by

the terrifying discovery of the lack. Thanks to the fetish, which

covers the wound and itself becomes erotogenic, the object as a

whole can become desirable again without excessive fear.57

According to Metz cinema is a fetish object. Films stand in for an object that is

absent. The reflection of images on the screen veil the nothingness behind them without

which they would not have been seen. “The fetish is the cinema in its physical state. A

fetish is always material: insofar as one can make up for it by the power of the symbolic

alone one is precisely no longer a fetishist.”58

Cinema produces unattainable objects of desire. By filling in a gap they render the

nothingness more unattainable. They give the impression that there is something they are

hiding and that way they produce the desire for nothingness. Cinema’s power of

exploiting the will to nothingness, however, is the only tool one has at hand to criticize

the cinematic apparatus as a form of ideology.

Sublimation of the objects of desire takes place through cinema and television.

The more they are rendered unattainable the more sublime they become. What cinema

does is to create the illusion of presence. Cinema shows an absent object through

presenting an object to substitute for the nothingness. So it is the presence of an absence

that we see on the screen. To enjoy cinema the subject has to know that what he/she is

watching is only a presence covering an absence, that it is that which stands in for the

Real of the subject’s desire. So Metz can say, “the fetish is the cinema in its physical

sense.”59 Looked at that way fetish is that which is produced to stand in for the Real

57
Metz, 75
58
Metz, 75
59
Metz, 75
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object of desire, which is nothingness, and is therefore produced to satisfy the will to

nothingness.

Cinematic narrative doesn’t show events in their real sequence. There are cuts,

gaps, spaces between the scenes. All those, cuts, gaps, spaces between the scenes are

openings to an external reality; they give the impression that there is something external

to that which is actually being shown. The spectator is made to believe that there is

something he/she doesn’t know as to what’s really going on in the film. This curiosity for

that which is unknown inherent in every human is that which cinema exploits. By making

the spectator simultaneously believe and not-believe what he/she is seeing on the screen,

cinema creates an ambiguous relationship with itself and the spectator.

By leaving gaps within the narrative, cinema invites projective identification. The

spectator projects what he has inside him onto the absence within the filmic text. He fills

those gaps with his internal partial objects and imposes a unity and continuity on the split

narrative of the film.

The death drive involves splitting and introjection. The subject as death drive

splits given unities and continuities. It is impossible for a spectator governed by the death

drive to identify with the characters in the film. On the contrary, he desires nothing,

identifies with nothing, without which he knows there can be no meaning. Rather than

filling in the gaps within the narrative death drive puts them into the spotlight, it shows

that those gaps are interior to the narrative itself. The incompleteness of the narrative is

the condition of possibility for its meaning.

We can differentiate these two different types of spectatorship, one governed by

the life drive and the other by the death drive, as associationism and dissociationsim.

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 In associationism the subject immerses himself/herself in the medium of the

imaginary and identifies with the characters in the movie. In dissociationsim the subject

introduces new splits between the internal and the external objects and hence renders

identification impossible for himself/herself.

The life drive is the will to become one with the world, it is the force behind

mimicry and associationsim. It is wrong to associate the death drive with mimicry and

associationism. The subject as death drive dissociates and splits given unities and

continuities. In horror movies the absence of the knowledge of truth for the spectator, that

is, not being given the role of the omniscient eye, the spectator becomes curious and to

understand what’s really going on in the movie he/she identifies with the characters. In

the face of the abundance of gaps to be filled in the process of watching the film the life

drive grows less and less strong for doing all the job throughout the watching process,

while the death drive is oppressed and because of this very oppression it grows more and

more strong. Eventually the life drive collapses and the death drive overflows the

auditorium.

Although it is itself a product of the death drive, horror film exploits the life drive,

that is, the spectator’s will to form unities, bind the action, desire to get rid of all gaps and

inconsistencies within the narrative. The death drive negates negation and reaches the

highest possible degree of affirmation. Thanatos wills nothing, whereas Eros wills

nothingness. We can see that the Thanatos case is the reverse of what Nietzsche says,

“man would much rather will nothingness than not will.” Eros wants to want nothing; and

strives to form such unities that everything will fit in its place; the system will lack

nothing, so Eros will want nothing. Thanatos introduces splits, and tries to reach the

nothingness behind the symbolic. Thanatos wants nothing rather than nothingness. He

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wants nothing to show the nothingness in the midst of everything, that there is nothing

behind all that there is.

While Eros wants to lack nothing, wants the lack of lack, Thanatos affirms life as

it is and wants lack, wants something to lack, wants that lack to remain after all is said

and done, so that he can desire the nothingness which that lack presents. Thanatos doesn’t

want something to replace nothing, but rather wants the lack in everything. By negating

negation the death drive affirms life as it is, that is, in its incompleteness, and with

nothingness and death in its midst.

5. Butterfly Effect

The main character in the Butterfly Effect “seizes hold of a memory as it flashes

up at a moment of danger.”60 Butterfly Effect is a film from 2004 directed by Eric Bress

and J. Mackye Gruber, in which Chaos Theory is applied to history and psychoanalysis.

According to Chaos Theory an event which seems to be very insignificant in a sequence

of events is in fact as important as any other event and the effects of a minor cause

require some time to manifest themselves in relation to the macro situation.

With the Butterfly Effect the audience sees everything from the perspective of a

young man who not only has flashbacks in the form of dreams, but who is also able to

travel in time through reading his journals. As he reads the journal, first the words, then

himself, and finally the whole room starts shaking and immediately after this falling into

pieces of the scene the subject travels in time, or perhaps only in his personal history, and

wakes up at another period of his own life. His aim is to change something so crucial to

the present but which has taken place in the past, and so that way make some things a

60
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1973), 257
105
little bit better for the people surrounding him. But to be able to be present in the past he

has to occupy the place of his presence in that particular slice of the past. That is why, as

a child he has occasional blackouts during which disastrous things happen, such as a

mother with her baby in her arms being blown up. His gift of travelling in time turns out

to be his curse locking him up in a mental hospital as a hopeless case who believes he has

journals through the reading of which he can go back and forth in time and put things

right or wrong when in fact there are no journals and he has simply made all these things

up in his mind. Each time he goes back in time to fix something bad, he causes something

worse to happen. But that worse thing which happens takes place because of his

intervention in the first place. Caught in this vicious cycle of a self-fulfilling prophecy he

finally strikes the right chord, he goes back to the right time and fixes the right thing.

Where he goes is not in the journals this time, for he is in the mental hospital, in a time

where his journals do not exist or are not recognized as such. This time he goes back in

time through an amateur home movie recorded when he and his girlfriend were kids, that

is, before the girl makes the decision to stay with her father rather than her mother who

moves to another city after their divorce. Her decision to stay with her father leads to her

friendship with the boy and to the eventual disasters. In this time they are at a garden

party. When the girl approaches him he says, “If you come near me again I’ll destroy you

and your family.” And the little girl runs and hides behind her mother. What he is

actually doing there is giving a voice to the evil at the right time, hence causing less

worse things to happen in the future. Bringing out that repressed and anti-social

behaviour at the right time, or situating this free floating sign beneath the social reality,

turns out to be less evil than the most good of society. It is all a matter of situating the act

in the right time and the right place.

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 To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it

“the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a

memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical

materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which

unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of

danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its

receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool

of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew

to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to

overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he

comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have

the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly

convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he

wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.61

Intervention in history, seeing in the past something which has never taken place,

is itself an act opening up spaces for new possibilities to emerge. The fear of serving that

which one thinks one is struggling against prepares the grounds for the realization of

what the subject was afraid of.

A potential for change that has never initiated actual change cannot be a lost

chance for a change. For since it has never taken place it cannot be a lost possibility.

Benjamin’s point when he says, “only that historian will have the gift of fanning the

spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from

the enemy if he wins,” is that “even the dead will not be safe” unless the enemy loses.

61
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1973), 257
107
How can even the dead not be safe? For when the enemy loses the lives of the dead will

have been wasted for nothing, for these now dead people will have struggled and suffered

for nothing. For then, not the enemy but “we, the friends of those who died for a good

cause” will have written the history. For Benjamin it’s all a matter of who represents

what happened.

“The spark of hope” that is to be fanned is not the hope of redemption, but the

hope that redemption has already taken place. That we are already redeemed and yet it is

precisely this state of being redeemed that makes it a forced-choice and yet a

responsibility to tell the story of the past in such a way as to introduce a split between the

past and the future which generates a new mode of being and initiates change. It is out of

the space between the past and the future, or the subject of statement and the subject of

enunciation, that something new emerges ex nihilo. The subject writes its difference from

itself, all writing is writing the difference of the subject from the void. And yet since the

void against which the subject writes is the subject itself, with each word the subject

moves further away from itself. This performative contradiction inherent in language is

the way things are in the world. The outside, the unconscious, is the shadow of language

and the social reality.

6. The Island: Waiting for a day that will never come

The Island is a science-fiction movie directed by Michael Bay. Our hero, Lincoln

Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) wakes up from a nightmare in which he sees himself

drowning. What we, the spectators don’t know yet is that Lincoln has actually woken up

to a sterile world which has nothing do with the real world. Lincoln wakes up from a

nightmare to what appears to be an unreal reality. As Lincoln wakes up he sees a screen

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in front of him on which is written “Erratic REM Sleep Cycle Detected,” followed by

“Please Report to Tranquility Center.” Lincoln gets out of his bed and goes to the toilet.

As he urinates, another screen appears in front of him with the words “Sodium Excess

Detected, Advising Nutritional Control.” On top of all these a speaker intervenes: “A

healthy person is a happy person.”

Lincoln is living in an environment in which he is surveilled and controlled at all

times. This environment is in fact an underground factory which produces human clones.

Lincoln is nothing but a clone produced to be consumed when the time comes. We, the

spectators, will later on learn that this environment was an institution used by the

American Ministry of Defence for military research. Now it has been passed on to a

medical corporation sponsored by extremely rich people to produce clones. These clones

are the copies of those rich people who have various illnesses. Lincoln Six-Echo, for

instance, is the clone of a Scottish man named Tom Lincoln who suffers from Hepatitis

and who is expected to die in two years. This means that in two years time Lincoln Six-

Echo will be killed and his organs will be transferred to his sponsor Tom Lincoln.

The DNA samples taken from the sponsors are used to produce clones. These

clones are then grown in a womb-like environment until they reach the age of their

sponsors. Some of the clones are grown for their hearts, some for their eyes, skins, and

some for their internal organs. As they are grown they are almost injected a memory

through audio-visual imagery, their consciousness is completely artificial just like

themselves. Although they look no different from a normal human being they are in fact

programmed to desire to go to The Island. They are continually told that they are the

chosen ones, that they are the only survivors from a terrible epidemic which destroyed

almost all life on earth, that they are lucky for being where they now are. Of course these

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clones need some kind of motive to be able to bear their monotonous existence. Their

motive is waiting for the day on which they will win the lottery and go to the last piece of

beauty left on earth after the epidemic; an exotic island, a heaven on earth. Through this

lottery business the life in this institution is invested with a meaning. Educated to the

level of fifteen year old children, the clones do not question their lives. They think that

they really are chosen and they really want to go to the island. But Lincoln is unhappy

and unsatisfied. He thinks there should be more to life than waiting for the departure

towards the island. When he talks with his psychiatrist who is in fact the manager of the

corporation, his psychiatrist tells him this: “You can’t see how lucky you are Lincoln.

You have survived the epidemic, you are comfortable here, what else do you want?”

Lincoln is not satisfied with this answer and goes to places he shouldn’t, sees things he

better not. Following an insect Lincoln finds himself at a hidden section of the institute, a

hospital, where he sees that those who are chosen to go to the island are in fact killed for

their organs. Lincoln understands that there is no such thing as an epidemic, and no such

place as the island, that all this island business is merely a fantasy to keep the clones

operating efficiently as they wait.

On the night of the day that Lincoln learns the truth his lover Jordan Two-Delta

(Scarlet Johansson) wins the lottery. Realising that the turn of death has come to Jordan,

Lincoln goes to her room to warn her. After that the movie turns into a typical adventure

movie in which many cars explode and many people die. At the end our hero and heroine

destroy the corporation and save all the clones from their miserable existences.

The importance of this movie derives from the way in which it criticizes modern

power structures which produces subjects in such a way as to serve the system which

consumes them. The subjects are subjectified so as to feel happy and content with being

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locked in hopeful dreams. The Island shows that even what we call the unconscious is a

construct, that the drives are not natural, but rather cultural products.

What we see here is how the life drive turns out to be the death drive. As the

clones wait for the day they will finally start living a real life full of pleasures, they are in

fact waiting for the day they will die. As they die the system in which they are locked

gains strength. Through the death of the subjects the system prolongs its own life.

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 Intermediation 2

In the previous chapter I attempted to analyze the cinematic apparatus in relation

to psychoanalysis. Although I haven’t mentioned his name, Deleuze’s influence was

pervasive in the previous chapter. Already in Difference and Repetition Deleuze

understands the brain as a screen. To my mind Deleuze’s understanding of the brain as a

screen is rooted in his recreation of the concept of the death drive in Difference and

Repetition. His argument against the representational mode of being is actually an attack

on the transcendence oriented conceptualizations of Freud’s drive theory. Deleuze’s

corpus can also be read as an enquiry into the relationship between unconscious drives

and conscious desires. In this context fidelity in Deleuzean philosophy requires a re-

conceptualization of the brain not only as a screen, but also as a projector.

I think the cinematic apparatus stimulates not only the conscious mind, but also

the unconscious drives, hence producing not only consciousness, but also the

unconscious. I agree with Deleuze that the unconscious is productive of desire, but what I

think to be missing in Deleuze is that the unconscious itself is always already produced

by external forces such as cinema, media, and television. So the desire produced by the

unconscious is always already adaptive to the predominant form of desiring which serves

the reproduction of the predominant order of things.

In the next chapter I shall attempt to provide a detailed analysis of Cronenberg’s

movies in relation to the concepts of projective identification, introjection, creativity and

destructivity.

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CHAPTER IV: Cronenberg, Burroughs, Deleuze

1. Passing Across The Dead Zone and Moving Towards The Dread Zone

It is early 1974, “in Washington, Richard Nixon was being pressed slowly into a

corner, wrapped in a snarl of magnetic tapes. […] In Room 619 of the Eastern Maine

Medical Center, Johnny Smith still slept. He had begun to pull into a fetal shape.”62

In Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone, adapted to cinema by David

Cronenberg, the main character Johnny Smith stays in a coma for five years. He wakes

up to a cold winter to find himself with a limp, and separated from his girlfriend. Johnny

starts to see evil everywhere; he reads the consequences of the evil thoughts in people’s

minds across time. A sense for evil, together with an ability to see the past, the present

and the future, means it becomes impossible for Johnny to bear the burden of being in the

world. He comes to realize that what he thought was an extraordinary psychic power is in

fact an evil curse which makes life inordinately painful. Willing to escape from this

unbearable situation that is turning him into the playground of good and evil, he falls

deeper into the trap of a monstrous man, Gregg Stillson, the embodiment of evil in the

world, who finds out Johnny’s secret and wants to abuse it. Johnny takes the wrong turn,

because he didn’t know that “the dreadful had already happened.” Directed by the

monstrous man he “wills nothingness rather than not will,” and dies a tragic death at the

end.

Little by little this brawny young dock-walloper had severed his

connections with the world, wasting away, losing his hair, optic

nerves degenerating into oatmeal behind his closed eyes, body

62
Stephen King, The Dead Zone, (London: TimeWarner, 1979),100
113
 gradually drawing up into a fetal position as his ligaments

shortened. He had reversed time, had become a fetus again,

swimming in the placental waters of coma as his brain

degenerated. An autopsy following his death had shown that the

folds and convolutions of his cerebrum had smoothed out, leaving

the frontal and prefrontal lobes almost utterly smooth and blank.63

Johnny’s rearrival, his return from the unconscious to the conscious state, from

the land of the dead to the world of the living, with extraordinary psychic powers, a sense

of omnipotence which turns out to be the source of death, is described by King in terms

of a rebirth, a coming out of the womb after the second (nearer) death experience.

Johnny Smith is at first almost exactly the opposite of a clinical and criminal

psychotic. Johnny does not identify, he refuses to believe in other worldly things, there is

no struggle between good and evil in his world, in his world there is no evil, no third

party. In Johnny’s world there is only him, Sarah, and their “eternal love.” Living in an

illusory heaven, Johnny is unaware of the dangers surrounding him, but in King’s world

the evil shall surely show his multiple faces to scare the hell out of those people.

After the tragic and yet banal accident Johnny becomes a clinical but not a

criminal psychotic. Johnny identifies himself with Jesus, he refuses to believe in the

world as it is, there begins a constant struggle between good and evil in his mind. He has

lost Sarah and their eternal love, and the evil forces surrounding their earlier happiness

prevail. Johnny’s illusory heaven becomes an illusory hell. As usually happens in King’s

world the evil shows his multiple faces and scares the hell out of the reader.

63
King, 82
114
 King’s novels are cathartic in a very Aristotelian sense of the word. And yet it’s

precisely this cathartic effect disguised as subversive and critical of the established order

that reproduces the order and produces psychotic replicas. King is a very unique example

of how monstrous a unification of the therapeutic and the critical can be. There are two

traumatic incidents leaving their traces on his life as Johnny goes along the way towards

death. In this novel which is difficult to categorize as “horror” unless that is what horror

actually is, Johnny Smith finds himself in an unbearable situation that sends him to an

early grave. What seems to him to be a gift of life turns out to be a gift of death. Johnny

is cursed by a “second sight” after two banal accidents, one in early childhood, one in

adolescence, which submit him to the domination of the “power” of his wounds. And

with the already there circumstances, that is, a society dying to believe in “the power of

the wound,” “apocalypse,” “return of the living dead,” “transcendental experiences” and

so on, Johnny becomes a tragic, Christ-like hero who feels compelled to sacrifice himself

for the deliverance of salvation to the people. His mother sees it as an occasion for

celebration that Johnny is mortally wounded when they tell her that he is in a coma: “God

has put his mark on my Johnny and I rejoice.”64

Choose, something inside whispered. Choose or they’ll choose for

you, they’ll rip you out of this place, whatever and wherever it is,

like doctors ripping a baby out of its mother’s womb by cesarian

section.65

And in accordance with the demands of his “inner voice,” Johnny Smith, in The

Dead Zone, chooses resurrection. After five years of deep coma Johnny wakes up to a

nightmare and finds himself as the one whose destiny it has become after two banal

64
King, The Dead Zone, 71
65
King, 111
115
accidents of life to set things right and prevent heaven’s becoming hell. King knows that

the reader’s assumption is that there is something inside to be protected from the external

threats. The desire of the reader is the desire of the threat as external rather than internal

to the self. King satisfies the reader’s desire by giving him/her the most beloved son

Johnny as the gift: “the gift of death” as Derrida would have put it. Johnny fulfils the

reader’s desire not only for an external threat but also for a saviour hero from within, one

of “us.” Johnny emerges from his coma as the embodiment of the Christ-like figure,

King’s son, whose mission it is to die and preserve the heaven-like qualities of this small

American town in particular, and the universe in general.

Upon his return to the symbolic order, from the unconscious state of coma,

Johnny finds himself surrounded by people who are trying to exploit his extraordinary

psychic powers, confronted with what Freud, in On Narcissism, calls “hallucinatory

wishful psychosis” on a social level. It’s as though the whole society is in the grip of a

paralysis and through their collective hallucination they cling to life. And Johnny

becomes not only the thread tying them to their illusions, but also the one who preserves

those illusions by sacrificing himself. Since this aspect of Johnny’s melodramatic story is

more precisely expressed in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the novel, I now turn to

Cronenberg’s film.

Cronenberg emphasizes that Greg Stillson is the man who is the manipulator, the

one who creates and sells illusionary images of himself. In Cronenberg’s film Johnny’s

visions are placed directly in opposition to Stillson’s fantastic images of self. Towards the

end of the film, Johnny, no more able to stand the half-dead life he is living in isolation,

decides to put his visions to a good use. He attends one of Stillson’s campaigns and

shakes Stillson’s hand to see into him. What Johnny sees is Stillson as the evil president

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of the future, who has the fate of the whole world in his control. Johnny sees him

pressing the button of a nuclear bomb behind closed doors. Finally Johnny makes up his

mind and at a later Stillson campaign, this time in a church, attempts to assassinate

Stillson. Sarah is there with her baby, and she notices Johnny just as he is about to pull

the trigger. Distracted by Sarah’s cry, Johnny misses the target. Stillson takes Sarah’s

baby and holds it up as a shield against Johnny’s bullets. Meanwhile Johnny is being shot

by Stillson’s guards. A photographer takes Stillson’s picture while he is using the baby as

a shield and this picture becomes the front cover of the Time magazine, not only ending

Stillson’s career as a politician but also leading him to suicide.

In the film the atmosphere is extremely melancholic. Johnny is portrayed as a

much more repressed, melodramatic individual who at the same time has a romantic

vision of life. The traumatic incident, the time he spends in the dead zone, magnifies his

will to transcend his body which he sees as a source of agony. He pushes himself further

towards isolation to escape from the increasingly sharpening visions. Remember that

Johnny sees in the past, present, and future of other people through touching them.

Touching another person is a cause of pain for Johnny. As his visions sharpen and turn

into sources of pain he moves away from intersubjectivity and towards introversion. It is

one of the characteristics of Romanticism to consider trauma, suffering, pain, disaster as

possibilities of transcending the flesh. In Cronenberg’s “romanticism turned against

itself” we see exactly the opposite. In Cronenberg after the traumatic incident it is a

regressive process that starts taking its course, rather than a progressive movement

towards eternal bliss. The problem with Cronenberg’s inversion of romanticism is that he

still sees the movement towards eternal bliss, towards jouissance as progressive; the

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difference between the classical romanticism and Cronenberg’s inverted neo-romanticism

is that Cronenberg considers that progress to be impossible.

It is at the sight of their condition, upon the realization of the situation they are

caught in, that Cronenberg’s characters recoil in horror. And it is at the sight of this that

Cronenberg expects the spectator to recoil in horror in a fashion similar to his characters.

2. Narcissus Revisited

Narcissus can see his other only through an image of himself. In Narcissus the

governor of the self is interior to the self. There is projection and introjection but not

identification in Narcissus. However, this is not enough to save Narcissus from an early

death. As soon as he identifies himself as his own object of love he kills himself.

Narcissus is a-social and at the same time he is afraid of seeing the world through eyes

that see the world before identification; he cannot see his eye prior to its reflection on the

water. Although he sees not through an external authority, the internal authority thinks

itself to be the only authority, becomes an introjection of an absent external authority and

eventually takes the place of the external authority. Narcissus should learn to see himself

and others as they are before identification, before individuation, before personalization,

before the guilt, before the vision of existence created by the absent presence of a

panoptic eye. He has to retain sanity in the face of the tragedy that he has been the subject

and the object of his desire at once all this time. Narcissus fails in doing this and dies an

untimely death.

Narcissus cannot stand the thought that the subject and the object are one. And

instead of directing his death drive against this unity of the subject and the object he

directs it against himself and dies. This death, however, is a product of the nothingness

that Narcissus wills, rather than being an outcome of his preferring not to will at all.

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 3. The Mantle Twins

With Dead Ringers (1988) Cronenberg shows the consequences of an attempt to

get rid of the space between the me and the not me. The illusory absence of difference

between Mantle twins Beverly and Elliot is their own creation. They identify with one

another so much that they think they are one split soul living one life in two different

bodies. When they are discussing the deteriorating condition of Beverly, Claire says to

Elliot that he shouldn’t identify with Beverly, distance himself from him, and live his

own life separate from Beverly. In response to Claire’s suggestion Elliot says, “But the

drugs he takes are running in my veins.” Beverly and Elliot are twice split. They are not

only split from their mother by birth, but also from one another. They are divided within

and against themselves. Let us start from the beginning to make more sense of what

happens in Dead Ringers.

Right at the beginning of the film we see Beverly and Elliot, in childhood, talking

about the difference between the copulation of fish and humans. One of them suggests

that fish are able to reproduce without having sex, and that if humans were living under

the water they wouldn’t need to have sex to copulate. They would simply internalise the

water through which they would copulate. At the prospect of copulation without

touching, the other twin responds by saying, “I like the idea.” The next scene shows

Beverly and Elliot approaching a girl and asking her if she wanted to have sex with them

in a bathtub as an experiment. They are aggressively rejected and accused of talking

dirty.

From the very beginning Beverly and Elliot see science as a means to attain sex

objects and sex objects as means to carry out their scientific projects. A further hint at

their tendency to see the female body as something to be experimented upon is given in

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the following scene where they are seen operating on a plastic doll pinned down on the

table. This is their play. For them the object of desire is at the same time the object of

science, and science is a form of play. Their diagnosis concerning the patient is intra

ovular surgery.

From the year 1954 we shift to the year 1967. Beverly and Elliot are in the faculty

of medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We see them applying their surgical

instrument, their own invention, on a cadaver in the autopsy room. In stark contrast to the

professor’s negative attitude towards their radical new instrument, the next scene shows

Elliot receiving a gold plate model of their instrument as a prize for their contribution to

gynaecology. At home Beverly is working on their future contributions to the field.

The differences between Beverly and Elliot become more obvious with the entry

of Claire to their life. Beverly comes to understand that he is different from his brother

through his different way of being in relation to Claire. While Elliot sees Claire as merely

an object of play (sex and science), rather than as another person, Beverly is more

affectionate and wants to sincerely engage in a profound interaction with Claire. And yet

Claire’s sexual identity, that is, her masochistic tendency to occupy a passive and

submissive position in the relationship makes it impossible for Beverly to escape from

the double bind situation he finds himself in. The whole film is a narrative of how one

falls into a double bind situation and why it is impossible to escape from this double bind

without having to die.

In Dead Ringers the Mantle twins are locked in the mirror stage. Death emerges

as the only way to escape from this entrapment in an endlessly self-perpetuating process

of projective identification. Their minoritarian nature, having been born identical twins,

leads them to study the womb as the monster that gave birth to them. The Mantle twins’

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fascination with deformed wombs, and the instruments they invent to act upon those

deformations reflect their deviant relation to birth, motherhood, and sexuality.

At the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to

recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and

in the anxiety of the individual confronting the ‘concentrational’

form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort,

existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the

subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom

that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a

prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a

pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic

idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself

only in suicide; a consciousness of the other than can be satisfied

only by Hegelian murder.66

In the relationship between Beverly and Elliot, the other consciousness is at the

same time the consciousness of the self. Beverly and Elliot think that they are the same

and yet different from one another at the same time. An impossible situation is situated in

the context of gynaecology and the psychic life of a male gynaecologist’s relation to a

female patient is used to show what happens when art-sex-science become one. The

“voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of sexual relation” Lacan is talking about is precisely

the Mantle twins’ relation to the female body and sex. Because they see themselves as a

deviation from the norm, they see their mother as the birth giver of an abnormality. Their

66
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1977), 7
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fascination with the ill-formed female body thus gains a significance in terms of their

relation to their mother and birth.

The very existence of imagination means that you can posit an

existence different from the one you’re living. If you are trying to

create a repressive society in which people will submit to whatever

you give them, then the very fact of them being able to imagine

something else—not necessarily better, just different—is a threat.

So even on that very simple level, imagination is dangerous. If you

accept, at least to some extent, the Freudian dictum that civilization

is repression, then imagination—and an unrepressed creativity—is

dangerous to civilization. But it’s a complex formula; imagination

is also an innate part of civilization. If you destroy it, you might

also destroy civilization.67

Cronenberg is a much more Freudian director than he would dare to admit.

Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the

dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first

lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he

was safe and felt at ease.68

Freud says that reality and fantasy, external and internal, the self and the world,

the psychic and the material are in conflict and that this conflict is always experienced as

pain. To compensate for the pain of this fragmentary existence man writes and tries to
67
David Cronenberg, Croneberg on Cronenberg, ed. Chris Rodley (London; Faber and Faber, 191992),
169
68
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1985), 279
122
form a unity which he believes to have once been present and after which he is destined

to strive. In Freud’s vision the subject is always in pursuit of an unattainable sense of

wholeness, what he calls the “oceanic feeling.” And yet, Freud says, the subject can turn

this negative situation into a positive one by creating works of art and literature in the

way of producing at-one-ment with the world, although for Freud, this at-one-ment is

impossible to attain, and if literature has any therapeutic effect at all, it is only to the

extent of turning indescribable misery into ordinary unhappiness. Freud says, “the

substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality, but they

are none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in

mental life.”69

Freud’s idea that imagination in general and writing in particular is a desperate

attempt to return to the womb, to the state of being before birth, is clearly manifest in

Dead Ringers. In the womb Beverly/Elliot was one and their choice of profession is a

sign of their striving for that long lost oneness within themselves, with each other, and

with their mother. What Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, calls the “oceanic

feeling,” that is, the security of existence within the womb, tied to the mother with the

umbilical cord, and swimming in the placental waters in foetal shape without the danger

of drowning, is what the Mantle twins are striving for. According to Cronenberg they

wish they were fish. Cronenberg sees barbaric regress as an inevitable consequence of

progress.

This gives us our indication for therapeutic procedure – to afford

opportunity for formless experience, and for creative impulses,

motor and sensory, which are the stuff of playing. And on the basis

69
Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 262
123
 of playing is built the whole of man’s experiential existence. No

longer are we either introvert or extrovert. We experience life in

the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of

subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is

intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the

shared reality of the world that is external to individuals.70

Freud’s and Winnicott’s methods of therapy are based on the pursuit of a lacking

sense of unity of self and the world. This form of therapeutic procedure forces the subject

to ego formation, normalization, and submissiveness to the existing order of meaning.

Freud considers the state of being in harmony with the world as the sign of health and

development of the capacity to repress the drives and making sharp distinctions between

the internal and external worlds, and between the conscious and the unconscious mind as

a sign of progress. Although Winnicott, like Freud, assumes that there is an originary

split between the internal and the external worlds, he at the same time differs from Freud

in that his therapeutic process involves some kind of a journey that the therapist takes

with the patient. In this kind of therapeutic relationship the therapist engages in a

spontaneous interaction through playing with the rules of the game itself. In this process

the role of the therapist is to render the patient capable of learning to play. In turn the

therapist himself learns to relate to the patient through a kind of unconscious

communication.

What we have both in the Mantle twins and Freud and Winnicott then, is a will to

transcend the material world through material tools. Mantle twins’ aim is to go beyond

the material world and unite with one another in a dimension where the psychic and the

70
Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality, (London: Tavistock, 1971), 64
124
material, the self and the other become one. The surgical instruments Beverly invents

after Claire goes away for two weeks, are parallel to his mental deterioration. As he turns

against himself, so do the surgical instruments turn into weapons against the patients. The

sharp and pointed instruments represent Beverly’s regressive movement towards

aggressive barbarism. The Mantle Retractor is replaced by objects to dig into the body.

These instruments are a result of Beverly’s attempt to externalise the illusory space

created by loss of the object of love. By digging holes he thinks he will have restored

himself. The instruments he creates eventually turn against him and his brother,

destroying both in the process.

It is a recurrent theme of Cronenberg films that what the subject himself created

turns against the subject and becomes the very cause of the subject’s death. In

Videodrome (1982) for instance we see Max, the victim of a video program which is

inserted into the subject’s body and possessed, the subject acts unconsciously in the

service of the monstrous forces behind the screen. All Videodrome tapes do is to bring

out what’s already in the subject. That is, make the subject’s unconscious fantasies

appear on the surface of the screen. In other words it turns the subject into a projection-

introjection mechanism. At the end of the movie we see Max’s hand turning into the gun

he was holding. He is seeing himself on the screen killing himself, and in the next scene

he is killing himself in front of the screen onto which he had already projected the

scenario of his own death. He introjects what he himself projects, and what he projects is

already an effect of what he had introjected. What we have here is a deconstruction of the

relationship between the screen and the mirror. Not only the screen is a mirror, but also

the mirror is a screen. The Videodrome tapes are the partial-objects which when united

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through the subject’s body, take over the body and manifest themselves in the actions of

the subject. The subject becomes, in a way, an object of violence against itself and others.

4. Consequences of Messing With Nature

With the aim of changing the past, an impossible thing to do, the subject messes

with nature, and his intrusion causes the very event which he was trying to prevent from

happening. Just like Oedipus’s father who, in escape from a prophecy, falls victim to his

choice of way to escape, and becomes the victim of his own choice. And his choice is, in

the first place, to believe in the prophecy. It is as soon as he puts his belief into action that

he prepares the grounds of his subjection to an external force. His own construct, that

external force, governs his actions independently of his intentions. There still is a

governor but this governor is an internally constituted external force.

What Lacan calls the unconscious is the dead zone in-between the subject and the

signifier. Or the state of non-being in the space between the state of being governed by

drives and the entry into the symbolic order. The unconscious understood as the dead

zone in between the subject and language, is at the same time the gap between being and

becoming. Entry into the symbolic is associated with a passage from the state of being,

through non-being and into the symbolic order of becoming.

Melanie Klein takes the beginning of becoming to as early as the first months of

life. In her analysis of the “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict and of Super-ego

Formation,” Klein looks for the causes of aggression and sadistic impulses in the normal

development of the child.

The child also has phantasies in which his parents destroy

each other by means of their genitals and excrements which

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 are felt to be dangerous weapons. These phantasies have

important effects and are very numerous, containing such

ideas as that the penis is, incorporated in the mother, turns

into a dangerous animal or into weapons loaded with

explosive substances; or that her vagina, too, is transformed

into a dangerous animal or some instrument of death, as,

for instance, a poisoned mouse-trap. Since such phantasies

are wish phantasies, the child has a sense of guilt about the

injuries which, in his phantasy, his parents inflict on each

other.71

Absence of the feeling of guilt causes the sadistic impulse to dominate the child.

The external world is considered to be dangerous and the child attacks the mother whom

he believes to contain the father’s penis. As he is attacking the mother the child is in fact

attacking the father. Formation of the super-ego, or entry into the symbolic requires the

acceptance of loss of innocence, purity, security, omniscience and recognition of one’s

own guilt. The importance of what Klein is saying here lies in her realization that there is

more evil and less evil, but there is no absolute good and evil. We are all, in a way, mad,

but some are more so than the others. According to Klein, most subjects experience a

certain neurosis during normal development, but in some children the neurotic experience

is stronger, more intense, and lasts a longer time. In the Mantle twins for instance, we

have seen that it lasted quite a long time, so long as to enable them turn their pathology

into their object of study and make a profession out of themselves.

71
Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis of Children, 132
127
 Creativity going wrong and producing weapons rather than surgical tools is a

recurrent theme in Cronenberg films. What we see in Dead Ringers and Videodrome is

the same process of degeneration, a worstward movement of the experiment undertaken,

in different fields of knowledge. Just as Max’s sadistic fantasies turn against him, the

Mantle twins’ surgical instruments turn into sharp edged weapons which they direct

against themselves at the end. What is portrayed is the characters’ inability to pass from

the state of being governed by the unconscious drives, to conscious desiring. The passage

from death drive to the desiring production is never achieved in Cronenberg’s films. As

we have seen in eXistenZ the subjects only become capable of desiring when they are in

the virtual world of the game, attached to an organic bio-port with an umbilical cord. In

escape from the realists Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) hides in her own game. At

the end of the film we learn that even her escape from the realists was part of the game, a

construct of her own psyche, her own creation. We also learn that eXistenZ is only a

game within another game called transCendenZ and that the realists trying to annihilate

the project turn out to be Allegra Geller and her security guard (Jude Law). As it was in

Videodrome so too it is in eXistenZ; what the virtual world of another reality does is to

sustain the subject with the environment in which he/she can act out his/her fantasies in a

virtual realm beyond the flesh. Within the game Allegra and the security guard can make

love, outside it they have a purpose; they have to free desire from the confines of

virtuality and restore it to its true place, that place being the material world.

When Jude Law refuses to undergo the operation of being penetrated by what

looks like a big machine gun, so that the bio-port can be plugged into him, Allegra Geller

says, “this is it, you see! This is the cage of your own making. Which keeps you trapped

and pacing about in the smallest space possible. Break out of the cage of your own, break

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out now.” Allegra Geller sees the physical world as limiting and unsatisfying. To go

beyond this limited existence she creates an illusory time-space in which the player is in

the service of his/her unconscious drives which are themselves represented in material

objects. When the bio-port is plugged into the subject the subject’s five senses are

governed by the sensual effects the game creates on the subject. The illusion of safety and

security is the result of the depersonalization of experience; it is the Other that plays the

game through me. A fantasy world which keeps death at bay, an impersonal

consciousness that thinks through me, and a body that never dies. What the game

eXistenZ does, then, is to promise immortality in a spiritual realm beyond the flesh. And

yet it does this through stimulating the centres of reception in the body which activate the

five senses. When Jude Law licks Allegra Geller’s bio-port hole she immediately

withdraws and asks, “what was that?” Surprised at his own act, Jude Law says, “That

wasn’t me, it was my game character. I couldn’t have done that!” After a very brief

silence they realize that since they are in the game they can’t be held responsible for their

actions and start kissing passionately.

The umbilical cords in eXistenZ, which seem to connect the subject with a world

beyond the physical, in which there is no guilt, no responsibility, and no death, turn out to

be the chain of negativity chaining the subject to a detached, meaningless, inauthentic

existence. It was Hegel who pointed out that freedom without society is meaningless and

not freedom as such. For freedom to become freedom it should be situated in a historical

context and hence gain its meaning in relation to time. What Heidegger borrows from

Hegel is this idea of the necessity of the social for any meaningful activity to take place.

Heidegger’s attitude is very different from the Romantic understanding of freedom as

something that can only be experienced in isolation, where, detached from his social

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environment, the subject bonds in a more profound way with nature, and unite with all

the forces of nature in a state of euphoria.

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the

infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling

dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the

symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form,

before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the

other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its

function as subject.72

Lacan’s Mirror Stage describes the child’s first confrontation with its image of

itself on the mirror. Lacan says that the child is not as unified as it sees itself on the

mirror. But the child needs this illusion of unity to be able to see itself as a being in the

world. This is when the sense of omnipotence begins in the child.

The primary process—which is simply what I have tried to define

for you in my last few lectures in the form of the unconscious—

must once again, be apprehended in its experience of rupture,

between perception and consciousness, in that non-temporal locus,

I said, which forces us to posit what Freud calls, in homage to

Fechner, die Idee anderer Lokalitat, the idea of another locality,

another space, another scene, the between perception and

consciousness.73

72
Jacques Lacan,, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1977), 2
73
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 56
130
 If we keep in mind that the primary process is the death-drive then we can see that

Lacan’s shift is away from Cartesian dualisms of subject and object, mind and body,

nature and culture. In Lacan there is an opposition to a Heideggerian attitude towards the

world and its relation to the self. A third world is introduced in addition to the imaginary

and the real. And this third world is the symbolic. For Lacan, between the illusory sense

of omnipotence and the symbolic loss of self with the acquisition of language, there is a

dead zone, a space in-between, a gap between the symbolic and the imaginary. That

space is the Lacanian Unconscious, the Real which refers to what Descartes called

Cogito, Freud Ego, and Heidegger non-being.

What Descartes and to some extent Freud presuppose is that there is a cogito

before anything else, that there is an ego that says “I.” There can be no self in relation to

an external world before language. There is nothing before the subject says “I.” For the

ego to begin to exist and develop it has to acquire language and say “I” first. The real

entry into the symbolic takes place when the subject is sufficiently equipped with

language and capable of realizing that “I” is an illusion, that the self who is to say “I” is

lost upon entry into the realm of language. This illusion, however, this imaginary self

who says “I,” should be preserved at least to a minimal extent, otherwise the Real slips

through and life becomes painful. It is a necessary illusion, the subject, if one wants to be

able to do things. Fantasies are illusions we need to keep the Real of our desire at bay.

Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience,

the real should have presented itself in the form of that which is

unassimilable in it—in the form of the trauma, determining all that

follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin? We

are now at the heart of what may enable us to understand the

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 radical character of the conflictual notion introduced by the

opposition of the pleasure principle and the reality principle—

which is why we cannot conceive the reality principle as having,

by virtue of its ascendancy, the last word. 74

So the Real is in-between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The

conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle takes place when and if

the subject falls victim to the drives and the pleasure principle by letting himself be

governed by the unconscious drives.

For Lacan progress takes place when and if the subject passes from the state of

being governed by unconscious drives to becoming capable of desiring and being desired.

Since for Lacan desire is the desire of the Other, desire is essentially social and symbolic,

which means that it is the drive that is prior to the symbolic, and the imaginary is the

support of the reality principle, without which the Real would enter the scene and destroy

the subject. Lacan forgets that death-drive is the cause of conflict as well as being its

effect. The death-drive preceeds and proceeds the conflict at the same time. But with the

traumatic incident the subject’s relation to the Real changes. The direction of this change

may lead to destruction as much as it may lead to creation. It is a matter of becoming

capable of using the unconscious drives in the way of producing new forms of life.

5. Naked Lunch and The Body Without Organs

The Naked Lunch I am concerned with here is David Cronenberg’s film about

William Burroughs’ writing process of Naked Lunch. The film, rather than being a direct

adaptation of the novel, is a distillation of Burroughs’s life as he strives to write himself

74
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 55
132
out of the past. We see Burroughs progressively deteriorating to the level of a dumb beast

as he tries to make sense of his sufferings in and through writing. In the introduction he

wrote for the 1985 edition of his earlier novel Queer, the writing of which dates back to

1953 following the two years period of depression, guilt, and anxiety ridden self-hatred

after his accidental shooting of his wife Joan in September 1951, Burroughs, in an almost

confessional manner, explicates the sources of his compulsion to write. Writing, for

Burroughs, represents his lifelong pursuit of getting out of consciousness and reaching

the area between fantasy and reality.

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have

become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the

extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my

writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant

need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan

brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and

maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no

choice except to write my way out.75

The death of Joan creates a space within Burroughs into which he escapes, and

attempts to fill with his writings. Cronenberg explicates what Burroughs had already

implied in his introduction to Queer. In the film writing in particular and creativity in

general is shown to be a response to a traumatic incident, that is, production of fantasies

to compensate for the horrors of life. As the film proceeds so does the mental

deterioration of Bill Lee who represents Burroughs in the movie. The first signs of Lee’s

split come when he is arrested by two policemen for “the possession of dangerous

75
William Burroughs, Queer (New York: Penguin, 1985)
133
substances.” What they are talking about is the bug-powder which, Lee, who has given

up writing to become a bug exterminator, uses to kill insects. The two policemen ask him

to demonstrate his profession. One of them puts an insect the size of a hand on a pile of

bug powder to see if the insect will die. As the insect begins moving its wings, arms, and

legs they leave the room and Lee with the insect. As soon as they leave the room the

insect tells Lee through a mouth-anus at its back that it has instructions for him, that it

comes from the Interzone, that his wife Joan is not actually human and that he has to kill

her. The insect asks Lee if he could put some bug powder on its mouth-anus upon the

application of which it starts to make noises and movements as if in an orgy. In the next

scene we are in reality and Joan is asking Lee to put some bug powder on her lips. As

wee see a few scenes later that the mouth-anus turns out to be the abyss, the bottomless

depth, or the space in-between fantasy and reality in which Lee loses himself and shoots

his wife.

This presentation of fantasy and reality side by side occurs throughout the film. It

is when the gap between fantasy and reality disappears that the Unconscious manifests

itself. In the case of Bill Lee the undesired event is pushed back into the unconscious in

turn causing an accumulation of sadistic impulses in him. These sadistic impulses are

then externalized in and through writing. For Burroughs writing was cathartic in that it

liberated the untamed drives and prevented the manifestation of aggression in the external

world. In Cronenberg what we see is almost the opposite of this attitude to writing. As we

know from Dead Ringers, Videodrome, and eXistenZ, for Cronenberg writing and

creativity have destructive rather than therapeutic effects on the writer. In the film Bill

Lee emerges as the culmination of these two opposing views on not only the creative

process but also the relationship between the creator and the creation, the subject and the

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object, mind and body. As the arena of this conflict Bill Lee’s world is that of the one in-

between the internal and the external worlds, the Interzone, or in psychoanalytic terms

the Unconscious, the Real, where there is no self or not self.

Interzone is Tangiers on the North African coast where Burroughs wrote

Naked Lunch in 1953. In those days it was a place of escape for the self-exiled artists and

artisans. At Interzone everyone has their own particular universality in one big universal

cesspool and that cesspool is Lee’s fantasy world. The Real, or the Unconscious, is

impossible to represent and all those monsters, bug-typewriters, and disgusting images

are only the creations of Lee’s hallucinating mind. In it every universality is surrounded

by many other universalities and each universality is a body without organs. Upon arrival

at the Interzone Lee starts to see his typewriter as an insect resembling the one which he

had first encountered in the interrogation room at the police station. The bug-typewriter

becomes the mouth-anus mechanism, the partial object opening a gap through language

in-between the body without organs and the organ without a body.

Orality is naturally prolonged in cannibalism and anality in the

case of which partial objects are excreta, capable of exploding the

mother’s body, as well as the body of the infant. The bits of one

are always the persecutors of the other, and, in this abominable

mixture which constitutes the Passion of the nursing infant,

persecutor and persecuted are always the same. In this system of

mouth-anus or aliment-excrement, bodies burst and cause other

bodies to burst in a universal cesspool.76

76
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 187
135
 Here Deleuze is referring to Melanie Klein’s Psychoanalysis of Children. The

state of being which Deleuze summarizes is the paranoid-schizoid position of the child,

the world of simulacra. At this stage, which preceeds Lacan’s mirror stage, the child is

not yet capable of identification. There is an introjection-projection mechanism going on

but the objects, internal and external, are experienced as bad objects. The conception of

goodness has not yet developed in the child. Since there is no good object for the child to

identify with there is no condition of possibility for the identificatory process with a good

or a bad object, there is no self or not self.

The paranoid-schizoid position is followed by the manic-depressive position in

which identification with a good object takes place. The passage from paranoid-schizoid

introjection-projection to manic-depressive identification is the process of passing

through the Interzone, or in Lacan’s words “traversing the fantasy.” In Deleuze’s terms

this process is the hovering of an impersonal consciousness over the transcendental field

of partial objects. The bug-typewriter is Lee’s impersonal consciousness manifesting

itself in the form of a paranoid fantasy through the bug-typewriter, a body without organs

which is pretending to be an organ without a body. In fact it is neither a body without

organs nor an organ without a body and yet it is both at the same time. It is a becoming in

between being and non-being.

Cronenberg’s move is away from Burroughs’s Kafkaesque understanding of the

body as metaphor and towards a Deleuzean narrative of the metamorphosis of the body in

a literal sense. All those self-destructive creators are inverted into the spotlight in and

through Croneberg’s films and this enables Cronenberg to contemplate on the creative

process as an inversion of destructive process and fill the film with this contemplation.

What we see in Naked Lunch is the death drive in conflict with the life drive.

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 In Deleuze the body without organs is the metaphor of the death drive. And since

the death drive is a response to the fragmentation of the self, it can only take the form of a

paranoid fantasy projected onto the Real. The body without organs is the partial objects

brought together in a totalizing way, in a way that deprives them of their partialities.

What the schizoid position opposes to bad partial objects—

introjected and projected, toxic and excremental, oral and anal—is

not a good object, even if it were partial. What is opposed is rather

an organism without parts, a body without organs, with neither

mouth nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and

being complete, at this price.77

The body without organs, then, is the absence of a connection between the

subject’s inside and outside. The subject, in a state of total negation, neither eats nor

excretes. It eats nothingness itself and becomes the catatonic (w)hole. It is not out of the

body without organs that the subject is born but from the paranoid-schizoid position

which consists of a not yet formed consciousness, an impersonal consciousness violently

attacking the external world and splitting the given unities. As opposed to the body

without organs it consists of projection and introjection of the partial objects surrounding

the subject to create fantasies such as an illusionary ego, and learns to keep the body

without organs, or the Real at bay. The paranoid-schizoid position is followed by the

manic-depressive position which corresponds to the formation of the super-ego and the

sustenance of a balance between id, ego, and super-ego.

Burroughs’s cut-up and fold-in techniques appear to be the two constituent parts

of his defense mechanism against the spectre of Joan haunting him. To escape from the

77
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 188

137
paralyzing state of being haunted by the spectre, that is, not to turn into a body without

organs, he carries the projection-introjection mechanism to its furthest and literally and

unconsciously puts words and sentences, partial objects, next to and within each other to

make up discontinuities, cause ruptures and keep the Real at bay. Through giving a voice

to the Real as it is before symbolization, Burroughs’s intends to prevent it from becoming

real, from being actualized hence submitting the governance of his actions to an external

force. It is this mechanism of repression inherent in the cut-up technique that causes what

it tries to cure. The cut-up technique involves literally cutting-up passages and putting

them together as a new text which would be neither the one nor the other, hence

deforming the syntax. The fold-in technique involves folding into each other the different

parts of the same text, hence distorting the order of time. In both states what is at stake is

a total negation of the external world as a result of its being considered as hostile. In

Burroughs the paranoid fantasy projected on the real replaces reality with its inverted

version, that is, Burroughs turns what he imagines the external world to be against itself

by creating a paranoid fantasy involving a scenario in which the subject believes itself to

be governed by an internally constituted external and evil force. Burroughs discovered

cut-up and fold-in techniques as a defense mechanism against the paranoid fantasy he

constructed around himself. To get out of this mad symbolic world, he decided to slash it

into pieces and connect it with other texts that are themselves torn apart.

Burroughs’s cut-up technique is a result of his search for a way of desymbolizing

the paranoid symbolic world he had constructed and projected onto the external world.

Burroughs thought resymbolization was therapeutic in that it gave voice to the evil within

in the way of expelling it. Cut-up technique aims at desymbolizing the totalitarian system

surrounding the subject and was a defense against the totalitarian nature of this

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resymbolization. Burroughs himself admits in a letter written to Kerouac shortly after

beginning to use the cut-up and fold-in techniques that “writing now causes me an almost

unendurable pain.”78 In Naked Lunch the movie, the theme of the materiality of language

recurs through the encounters between the bug-typewriter and Bill Lee. Bill Lee creates

an insect within, projects it onto his typewriter, and talks with it. His creations have

taken on lives of their own and are doing and saying things mostly against him.

In Nova Express, Burroughs’s 1964 text, The Invisible Man says, “These

colourless sheets are what flesh is made from—Becomes flesh when it has colour and

writing—That is Word and Image write the message that is you on colourless sheets

determine all flesh.”79 Burroughs had a strong sense of the materiality of language. When

he has The Invisible Man say “becomes flesh when it has colour and writing” he is in a

way referring to the Unconscious as the invisible man who is striving to become visible

to himself and to others in and through language.

Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s Panoptic mechanism becomes relevant

here. In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault presents the Panopticon as a metaphor of

how power operates within modern western society. A revolutionary apparatus for its

time (19th century), the Panopticon was more than just a model of prison for Foucault, it

was a mechanism to keep an absent eye on the prisoner, to keep them under control at all

times.

The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks

to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the

ability to penetrate into men’s behaviour; knowledge follows the

78
William Burroughs, Letters (New York: Penguin, 1994), 286
79
William Burroughs, Nova Express, (London: Panther, 1982), 30
139
 advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all

the surfaces on which power is exercised.80

The formulation of the concept of the Panopticon involves not only seeing without

being seen, but also a mechanism that imposes both their differences and their

resemblances upon the subjects. So the subject’s difference from other subjects is itself

externally constituted, but is also internal to the subject. The subject is the product of the

mechanism in which the subject finds/loses itself, and participates in the setting of the

trap. Some subjects are produced in such a way as to act on an illusory sense of

consciousness, that they are in control of their lives and events surrounding them, that

they are freely choosing their destiny, when in fact all the rules and possibilities of action

are always already set. In a panoptic mechanism taking on passive and submissive roles

brings wealth, love, health, and even happiness. In a panoptic mechanism everyone is a

slave, but some are less so than the others. In a panoptic mechanism submissiveness

brings power. The system is such that the subject, to feel secure, takes on a passive role.

In return the subject is recognized as worthy of a higher step on the social ladder, which

brings an illusionary sense of security. The efficiency of the panoptic mechanism

depends on its ability to produce submissive/adaptive/rational subjects.

Burroughs’s mind works exactly like a panoptic mechanism. And I think this has

been one of the major concerns of Cronenberg throughout the shooting of the Naked

Lunch. What we have in the movie is a man who has been caught up in a trap that he

himself set. Bill Lee projects the construct of his psyche onto the external world and it is

by doing this that he finds/loses himself in the trap, dismembered. The paranoid fantasy

he constructs becomes so powerful that it engulfs him causing his detachment from the

80
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 204
140
external world and leading to the eventual loss of the gap between fantasy and reality. It

as this point that the Real slips through and tears him apart. He, in his mind, literally

becomes a slashed monster, sees himself thus, as he is not, and becomes other than

himself. His becoming-other, however, is in the wrong direction, or rather results in a

confusion concerning the relationship between the subject and the object.

Burroughs believed that literature gives birth to action. He also saw writing itself

as an action. At the end of the film we see Bill Lee at the border on his way back to

Annexia from the Interzone. Two guards ask him what his occupation is. He says he is a

writer. They want him to demonstrate. He takes out the gun from his pocket. Joan is at

the back of the car. It’s time for their William Tell routine. Joan puts a glass on her head.

Lee misses the glass and shoots Joan on the head. The guards are satisfied. The spectator

witnesses this crime and remembers the person irrelevantly looking out of the window

when they were slaughtering Kafka’s K. at the end of The Trial. Who was that person?

Was it God? Was it a single man? Was it all of humanity?

6. The Evil Spirit and The Spiritual Automaton

It is a recurrent theme in science-fiction-thriller movies that in time humanity

turns into the slave of its own creation, namely of machines. It is precisely because of this

fear of being replaced that humanity attempts to get out of time, out of the physical, and

eventually falls on the side of what it was attempting to escape from; be that which they

fall in the direction of metaphysics or pure-physics, in both cases their thought itself

becomes machinic.

The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for

supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the

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 director may spy on all the employees that he has under his

orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders […] and

it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An

inspector arriving unexpectedly at the center of the

Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without

anything concealed from him, how the entire establishment

is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed as he is in the

middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the director’s

own fate entirely bound up with it?81

Panopticon, then, is a mechanism that disperses power as it produces submissive

subjects. The transparency of the building makes it a model for the exercise of power by

society as a whole. The subject becomes one with the mechanism surrounding it and so

becomes the effect and the functionary at the same time. In short, the subject starts

operating like and feeling itself as a machine. The body is not replaced by a machine but

starts to work like the machine it is connected to. This is the contamination of the subject

by the object.

Slavoj Zizek points out Deleuze’s emphasis on the passage from metaphor and

towards metamorphosis in terms of the difference between “machines replacing humans”

and the “becoming-machine” of a man.

The problem is not how to reduce mind to neuronal “material”

processes (to replace the language of mind by the language of

brain processes, to translate the first one into the second one) but,

rather, to grasp how mind can emerge only by being embedded in

81
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 204
142
 the network of social relations and material supplements. In other

words, the true problem is not “How, if at all, could machines

imitate the human mind?” but “How does the very identity of

human mind rely on external mechanical supplements? How does

it incorporate machines?”82

In Cronenberg’s films we see the theme of machines replacing humans in the

process of being replaced by the theme of humans connected to machines, or machines as

extensions of humans providing them with another realm beyond and yet still within the

material world; the psychic and the material horizontally situated next to each other. In

eXistenZ, for instance, we have seen how the game-pod is plugged into the subject’s

spine through a bio-port and becomes an extension of the body. In Naked Lunch the

typewriter becomes Lee’s extension. In Burroughs’s the obsession was still with the

machine taking over the body. In Cronenberg’s adaptation of Burroughs the obsession is

with body and machine acting upon one another. What Burroughs experienced with his

body but was unable to express becomes possible to express with the film. As we know

from his writings on his routines Burroughs himself was becoming-machine internally,

he was incorporating the dualistic and mechanical vision of the world surrounding him,

but he thought his body was being attacked by external forces and the space he occupied

was being invaded by forces that belonged to an altogether different realm, an external

world. In Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch we see Bill Lee becoming a spiritual automaton to

keep the Evil Spirit within at bay. The paradox is that the Evil Spirit is itself his own

construction which in turn constructs him as a spiritual automaton constructing an

external Evil Spirit.

82
Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 16
143
 In what follows I will attempt to show that Cronenberg’s films are caught in a

vicious cycle, that they are self-deconstructive, and that if one thinks too much about

them they not only turn back on themselves but also collapse in on themselves. This is

because they are shut up in themselves in a highly solipsistic fashion and are the victims

of the way they attack what they consider to be dangerous for humanity. In short I will try

to show how Cronenberg’s films deconstruct themselves and invalidate their own stance

before what they criticize, and this turns them into suicidal rituals before which the

spectator is expected to recoil in horror.

One example of what I have said concerning the self-deconstruction inherent in

Cronenberg’s films is in the middle of Naked Lunch where Tom Frost, also a writer, who

appears to be Joan’s husband in Interzone, tells Bill Lee that he has been killing his wife

everyday for years.

Tom: There are no accidents. For example, I have been killing my

own wife slowly, over a period of years.

Lee: What?

Tom: Well, not intentionally, of course. On the level of conscious

intention, it’s insane, monstrous.

Lee: But you do consciously know it. You just said it. We’re

discussing it.

Tom: Not consciously. This is all happening telephatically. Non-

consciously.[close-up of Tom’s mouth, his lips moving in

disharmony with what he is actually saying] If you look carefully at

my lips, you’ll realize that I’m actually saying something else. I’m

not actually telling you about the several ways I’m gradually

144
 murdering Joan. About the housekeeper Fadela whom I’ve hired to

make Joan deathly ill by witchcraft. About the medicines and drugs

I’ve given her. About the nibbling away at her self-esteem and sanity

that I’ve managed, without being at all obvious about it. [the

movement of his lips become harmonious with what he is saying]

Whereas Joanie finds that she simply cannot be as obsessively

precise as she wants to be unless she writes everything in longhand.

We have to keep in mind before engaging in analysis that all this is happening in

Lee’s mind, that Interzone is a construct of his psyche, that he is actually in New York,

that he is hallucinating all this Interzone business, and that the year is 1953. What we

have here is the loss of the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

However, this is not a real loss of the boundary because we, the spectators, are informed

beforehand that all this is happening in Lee’s mind. There is only the inside of Lee’s

mind, and if there is anything lost it is the reality of the external world. Lee only hears the

echoes of his projections. The murder of Joan has had such an impact on Lee that he is

hearing nothing that the other says and he is replacing this nothing with his own scenarios

concerning what’s actually going on outside.

What does the disintegration between Tom’s words and actions signify? It

signifies the double-bind situation in which Cronenberg’s films are caught. In other

words he is unconsciously communicating that which he thinks he is not saying. He is

unconsciously doing what he thinks he is arguing against; that creativity brings with it

destruction, that progress and regress are complementary. In Naked Lunch writing is

identified with killing one’s wife. To keep the actual killing of the wife at bay, Lee writes

145
not to rationalize the murder but to irrationalize not-killing one’s wife, and we know this

from the fact that Tom Frost’s words are only projections of Lee’s psyche.

This scene also explicates Cronenberg’s attitude towards the recurring theme of a

psyche-soma split in his films. But more importantly, since Naked Lunch is mainly

concerned with the activity of writing and what happens to someone who is in the process

of creating something, this scene deals with the relationship between body and language.

Here I will leave aside the exhausted subject of a mind-body split who cannot make a

distinction between appearance and reality and move towards the more recent theme of

the relationship between bodies and languages, with the hope of opening up a field across

which one passes and in the process of this passage becomes the embodiment of a new

possibility of signification, another sign, neither within nor without the old mode of

signification. For this a third dualism is required, and that third dualism, being that of

language and Event, has already been worked through by Deleuze.

7. From Metaphor and Towards Metamorphosis

With Deleuze the Cartesian mind-body dualism has been replaced by body-

language dualism. Without being too insistent about it at this stage I would like to hint at

where the relationship between these dualisms is heading. I propose, therefore, what

Deleuze has already pointed out, namely a new possibility of analysing the nature of

dialectics in the context of the relationship between language and its affective quality,

what he calls the sense-event. As he puts it in his Time-Image, Deleuze thinks that neither

the grounds of mind-body dualism nor those of body-language dualism are sufficient to

theorize a progressive movement towards a new mode of signification.

These are no longer grounds for talking about a real or possible

extension capable of constituting an external world: we have

146
 ceased to believe in it, and the image is cut off from the external

world. But the internalisation or integration in a whole as

consciousness of self has no less disappeared.83

There is no longer any movement of internalisation or

externalization, integration or differentiation, but a confrontation

of outside and an inside independent of distance, this thought

outside itself and this un-thought within thought.84

Deleuze invites exploration of a text in the way of explicating a progressive

potential within the text which had hitherto been consciously or unconsciously ignored or

neglected, or even repressed. This theme is linked to Deleuze’s life-long concern with

Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence and difference qua repetition. The emergence of

the unthought within thought requires an encounter with the already thought in such a

way as to expose its inner dynamics and hence show what’s inside it as its outside. That

is, what the thought seems to be excluding as its other constitutes its subject as self-

identical. It is through the exclusion of the other that the subject becomes itself. If we

apply this to subject-object relations it becomes obvious that the split between the subject

and the object is itself a construct, but nevertheless a necessary construct for the subject’s

subsistence. In-between the subject and the object, then, there is an unfillable gap that is

constitutive of both the subject and the object.

[…]thought, as power which has not always existed, is born from

an outside more distant than any external world, and, as power

83
Gilles Deleuze, Time-Image, (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 277
84
Deleuze,, 363
147
 which does not yet exist, confronts an inside, an unthinkable or un-

thought, deeper than any internal world […]85

For Deleuze new thought can only emerge as a curious absurdity, as in the

Beckett case. That is because the new thought, although it comes from within the old

thought, is beyond the interiority and the exteriority to a context in its primary

emergence. This means that new thought always appears to be a non-sense, for no

thought can be meaningful without a context. But non-sense is not the absence of sense.

It is, rather, sense with its own particular context which it creates in the process of

emergence from out of the old context. Being without the predominant context makes the

thought seem absurd, non-sense, but not meaningless, for meaningless means absence of

thought.

What is a transcendental field? It can be distinguished from

experience in that it doesn’t refer to an object or belong to a

subject (empirical representation). It appears therefore as

stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive

impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of

consciousness without a self. It may seem curious that the

transcendental be defined by such immediate givens: we

will speak of a transcendental empiricism in contrast to

everything that makes up the world of the subject and the

object.86

Joe Bosquet must be called Stoic. He apprehends the

wound that he bears deep within his body in its eternal truth

85
Deleuze, 273
86
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 25
148
 as a pure event. To the extent that events are actualised in

us, they wait for us and invite us in. They signal us: “My

wound existed before me, I was born to embody it.” It is a

question of attaining this will that the event creates in us; of

becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us,

the Operator: of producing surfaces and linings in which

the event is reflected, finds itself again in incorporeal and

manifests in us the neutral splendour which it possesses in

itself in its impersonal and pre-individual nature, beyond

the general and the particular, the collective and the private.

It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world.87

In this light we now see more clearly what Deleuze is aiming at with his

disjunctive synthesis of transcendence and immanence leading to his transcendental

empiricism. Empiricism starts from the material world rather than from the metaphysical

world which it sees only as a product of the representations of experience through

language. In fact, it knows no world other than the material world, and even if it does it

prioritizes the physical world over the metaphysical world. Experience of the world

before subjectivation is what Deleuze is trying to access. Since reaching the pre-

subjective field of partial objects is possible only through language, and he knows that, he

says that we have to produce that pre-subjective field which is called the transcendental

field of immanence.

87
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 148
149
 The event considered as non-actualized (indefinite) is lacking in

nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants: a

transcendental field, a plane of immanence, a life, singularities.88

What we encounter with Deleuze is therefore a replacement not only of body-

mind dualism with body-language dualism, but also a beyond of both, a triplicity; body-

language-event. The event is the sense-event. It is the emergence of new sense not out of

non-sense but out of the old sense, that is, a simultaneous explication of a new sense

within the old sense. The new sense always appears in the form of an absurdity at first,

but in time, through repetition and persistence this absurdity starts to appear in a new

light and becomes new sense. Absurd is not the same as non-sense or absence of sense,

but explicates the non-sense inherent in sense, and hence is in-between non-sense and

sense. Through the absurd the unconscious manifests itself revealing another realm of

consciousness which goes beyond the subject and the object and yet that is at the same

time in-between them. This consciousness is the becoming of being. Being is a whole in

process, that is, being is its own becoming whole, therefore it is always incomplete and

yet whole. Being is an incomplete idea of wholeness which is in the process of becoming

present. Since presence can only be at present, and since time is only at present, the pre-

subjective impersonal consciousness is in between past and present, that is, in-between

non-being and being. The event is the emergence of being out of becoming, what Deleuze

calls a static genesis. This emergence, however, has neither a beginning nor an end, and

therefore being is the becoming of an impersonal consciousness; “I am all the names in

history,” says Nietzsche.

88
Deleuze, 31-2
150
 This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may

be one to another, but only between-times, between-moments; it

doesn’t just come about or come after but offers the immensity of

an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already

happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.89

At this moment in time, and in this place all the wounds of humanity of the past

are incarnated. One has to feel the pain of all the past times, empathize with all those

sufferings and learn from them for progress to take place. It is not the individual

sufferings of a single person that Hegel, Nietzsche, or Deleuze talk about. Theory,

cinema, and literature are not personal affairs. What is at stake is the “presence” of all the

already dead bodies that have to be turned into fertilizers. How to make use of the already

dead bodies in the service of progress as opposed to the ones who kill in the service of

progress? Suffering and pain indeed weaken the subject and yet there is no way other

than turning this weakness, this impoverishment of thought into an affirmative will to

power beyond the life/death drive. Perhaps a more than banal accident of life but just like

Bosquet “my wound existed before me.” I am always already injured and if there are

many more wounds awaiting to be embodied by me, well then, this indeed signifies that it

has always been, still is, and will never cease becoming a time of passage from homo

sapiens across homo historia and it appears to be towards homo tantum.

89
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 29
151
 Conclusion of Part II

The unconscious of the subject is a product of cultural products such as

advertisements, films, and books. Since the unconscious is itself a cultural product,

giving free rein to the unconscious to express itself serves the reproduction of the cultural

context in which the unconscious is itself produced. To be able to create difference

without having to die the subject has to turn the unconscious into a void within the

symbolic out of which a new way of looking at the world can manifest itself. A subject is

he/she who actively submits to the unknown in such a way as to create the condition of

possibility out of a condition of impossibility for the creation of a new beginning.

In a world which the subject loses itself surrounded by lies and illusions it is very

difficult for one to become a subject since a subject is nothing but a void lost upon entry

into the symbolic. Finding of itself of a subject means finding itself of a subject as a void,

that is, a pre-symbolic hole, or a hole within the symbolic. This means that finding itself

of a subject is its losing itself as a symbolic being. And this means that what is found by

regressing to the pre-symbolic is nothing. So a subject is that which cannot be found, it

can only be created in and through the destruction of its symbolic self. In this context

becoming a subject refers to the process of creation of a self-conscious consciousness out

of the void.

We must keep in mind that the pre-symbolic void is not actually before the

symbolic but beneath it. Opening a hole within the symbolic through cont(r)action creates

the condition of possibility for the contact between the known and the unknown, between

the subject and its a-subjective self, between the conscious desiring and the unconscious

drives.

152
 This may sound strange but the death drive and the life drive are both of the

symbolic world. They are symbolic constructs, results of a will to reduce life to a

mechanistic dualism. It is the conscious desiring that is capable of clearing a space for the

emergence of the new.

Creativity and destructivity are not mutually exclusive. For the creation of

something new one must destroy something that already exists. This destruction of

something that already exists should simultaneously be a creation of nothing that already

exists. Since negation is a process that necessarily depends on that which is negated, it is

impossible for negation to create something completely new. The negated contaminates

the negator. It is the affirmative recreation of that which already exists that truly destroys

it. But what exactly is affirmative recreation? Affirmative recreation is the exposition of

the negating quality of that which already exists. By exposing the transcendence oriented

negating quality of that which already exists, affirmative recreation exposes the

fictionality of knowledge; hence affirms knowledge as it is and opens a gap between

knowledge and truth. This gap is also a gap between the the past and the present; a space

between the known and the unknown out of which a future generates itself.

153
 PART THREE

Post-traumatic Writing Disorder

in which I, and with me the reader, hand in hand, come to a realization that sometimes

the only way to keep affirming is to affirm the fragility of the affirmative cont(r)act itself.

It is only by affirming a broken and irregularly beating heart in its broken irregularity

that it becomes possible for one to relate to it. Affirmation of life as it is, the reader is

invited to practice, is only the beginning of a fragile and yet beautiful friendship

154
Chapter V: Creativity and The Unconscious

He has me say things saying it’s not me, there’s profundity for you, he has me

who say nothing say it’s not me.90

Samuel Beckett

1. Surreal Faces of The Unconscious

In 1916 a group of artists and writers established Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and

started the aesthetic movement now known as Dada. This word was found randomly from

a dictionary. But Dadaists did not choose Dada for its meaning, they were completely

indifferent to the meaning of the name of the movement. They used the Cabaret Voltaire

for their gatherings. The artists known as the Zurich Group involved Jean Arp, Tristan

Tzara, and Hugo Ball. An outcome of the loss of meaning in the defeated countries after

the First World War, Dada was iconoclastic. It was against all kinds of conservatism,

traditionalism, holiness, and everything else that could be an obstacle for individual

freedom, including Dada itself. “Do not trust Dada” had said Tristan Tzara. “Dada is

everything. Dada doubts everything. But real Dadas are against DADA.”91 Dada does not

believe in absolutes. It does not accept any kind of system. It ridicules every kind of

methodology. Tzara’s recipe to write a Dadaist poem is a proof of this.92 But more

importantly, it is in fact an attack on art itself.

90
Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing (London: John Calder, 1999), 23
91
C. W. E Bigsby, Dada and Surrealism (London: Methuen, 1972), 7
92
Tzara: “Take one newspaper. Take one pair of scissors. Choose from that newspaper an article of the
length desired for the poem you intend to write. Cut out the article. Next cut out with care each of the
words forming that article. Next put them in a bag. Mix gently. Take out one by one each excision in the
order they fall from the bag. Copy carefully. The poem will resemble you. Voila, there you are , an
infinitely original poet of a seductive sensibility, even if still not understood by the vulgar.” Quoted by
Renato Poggioli, The Theory of The Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Massachussetts and London:
Harward University Press, 1982), 190
155
 Dada, the most radical movement within the European avant-

garde, no longer criticizes the individual aesthetic fashions and

schools that preceded it, but criticizes art as an institution: in other

words, with the historical avant-garde art enters the stage of self-

criticism.93

Dada is anti-dogmatic in its strict sense. However, its anti-dogmatism turns into

dogmatism. Although Dada had challenged almost everything, it was incapable of

liberating imagination because it didn’t take into consideration the role of consciousness

and the importance of making conscious choices in the process of creation.

It is obvious that Dada trusts no values. It does not trust language. For it, language

is a barrier rather than a bridge. Even André Breton’s claim, who is not exactly a Dadaist,

expresses this scepticism.

Language is the worst of conventions because it imposes upon us

the use of formulas and verbal associations which do not belong to

us, which embody next to nothing of our true natures: the very

meanings of words are fixed and unchangeable only because of an

abuse of our power by the collectivity.94

For Breton our true natures, if there is such a thing, stand outside language and is

often distorted by it. Influenced by Dada and driven by Breton’s theories, Surrealists tried

to give imagination free of reason the central role in their works. The Surrealist

movement aimed at seeing and showing a superior reality through the unconscious with

total disregard to reason. Breton deliberately drew on Freud’s concept of “free

association” and theorized a way of making the unconscious accessible without

93
Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of
Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7
94
Quoted by Bigsby, 26
156
translating its contents into the familiar forms of conscious mind. At the heart of Breton’s

theory is the idea that the psychic and the material are one and that the conscious and the

unconscious are in constant interaction with one another.

It is not merely that I think there is almost always a complexity in

imaginary sounds. (The question of the unity and speed of

dictation remains on the order of the day.) I am also certain that

visual or tactile images (primitive, unpreceeded or unaccompanied

by words, like the representation of blankness or elasticity without

intervention previous, concomitant or even subsequent to the

words that express them or derive from them) give free access to

the unmeasurable region between the conscious and the

unconscious. But if automatic dictation can be obtained with a

certain continuity, the process of unravelling and linking these

images is extremely difficult to grasp, presenting, to the best of our

knowledge, an eruptive character.95

Breton aimed at putting to use Freud’s method of “free association” to bring to the

surface the repressed contents of the unconscious. For Breton the unconscious is a

continuous flow beneath consciousness where fantasy and reality dissolve into one

another. Breton applied to writing and painting what Freud called the dream-work and

free association. For Breton, just as the dream makes the unconscious drives accessible

through an operation that produces visual images, automatic writing, in a fashion similar

to free association, produces verbal images. Accordingly, automatic writing operates like

a dream and provides access to the unconscious without translating the unconscious
95
André Breton, “The Automatic Message”, in What is Surrealism? Ed. and trans. Franklin Rosemont
(London: Pluto Press, 1978), 105-9, quoted from Poetry in Theory, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004), 190
157
contents into conscious forms. Breton called this “the real process of thought.” Breton’s

attitude towards the unconscious was based on the idea that the unconscious itself is not a

stage on which certain drives are visualized but that the brain is a “poetry making organ”

that functions as a machine producing words and images in such a way as to render the

unconscious drives capable of manifesting themselves in and through language. Breton

did not say that what the writer does by automatic writing is representing an always

already existing form but that there is nothing accessible to the mind before the

unconscious contents are given form. For Breton, giving form to the unconscious

contents was not essentially a process of translating one order of meaning into another,

but rather, that it is the goal of automatic writing and Surrealism to provide the means to

make the unconscious contents accessible. With Surrealism the form itself became the

content and inversely. For the Surrealists reason was incapable of representing reality,

and there was a superior reality in higher forms of expression. It has been a recurrent

theme since Plato that there is a realm that art and poetry provides access to through the

madness of the artist or the poet. Surrealists’ suspicious attitude towards reason lead them

to an idealization of madness, irrationality, and unconsciousness.

To define Surrealism Breton used two words: Automatism and dream. Breton

believed that only automatically recorded dream-visions could give a voice to the

unconscious. One should not look at a dream as though one is looking outside a window;

one should rather portray the movement of the dream by being inside and outside it at the

same time. What is needed is a technique in love with the movement of the hand in touch

with the dream. The thought within the dream can only be accessed through a

spontaneous and automatic writing. A dreaming thought is not a representation; it is a

pure thought uncontaminated by the symbolic order of signs. Dream-thoughts do not

158
make a distinction between raw and cooked, wild and tamed; it shows that a cube has six

sides, an eye comes out of its socket, and the dead rise from the grave. Its raw materials

are the memory traces manifesting themselves in and through dreams. Erasing the trace

of a memory is erasing innocence. And even an erased memory shows itself in the dream

as its own negative. It is this showing itself of a memory trace as its own negative that

automatic writing helps carry out.

Breton was inspired by Freud’s idea of a “mystic writing-pad” which contains the

writing of memory-traces, thoughts coming from somewhere distant and unknown, their

movements, their disappearances, and the reappearance of new traces.

It (the Mystic Writing-Pad) claims to be nothing more than a

writing-tablet from which notes can be erased by an easy

movement of the hand. But if it is examined more closely it will be

found that its construction shows a remarkable agreement with my

hypothetical structure of our perceptual apparatus and that it can in

fact provide both an ever-ready receptive surface and permanent

traces of the notes that have been made upon it.96

What is most interesting about the mystic writing-pad is that in it are not the

traces themselves that are of value but the traces of traces after they are erased. And the

dream of Surrealists was precisely recording the traces of dreams. How could one write

something that belongs to a completely different medium without altering it?

The texts produced by automatic writing are dream-narratives in their processes

of formation. If the dream-world is where all control over consciousness is absent, if the

dreams take place in a space-time not yet sacrificed to the symbolic, which, for the

96
Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Penguin, London:
1984), 431
159
Surrealists it always already is, then the automatic creator should strive to unite the self

and the space-time and not only write the contents of the dream but also give the texts

forms of dreams. With his technique of automatic writing Breton aimed at filling the gap

between the signifier and the signified, the subject of statement (enunciated) and the

subject of enunciation, the form and the matter of form, with his dreams; and as he

strived for uniting the process of giving form and the form given, he, in a Cartesian

fashion, deepened the cut between the subject and the object.

Automatic writing is in pursuit not of turning the subject into the signifier, it is in

pursuit of turning the subject into an absolute presence, “the immaculate conception.”

Automatic writing destroys the distinction between the signifier and the signified and

replaces both of them with itself as the total sign. It goes beyond the difference between

the form and the matter; it wants to erase the difference between process of giving form

and the form given to the matter. For Breton, the unconscious is not a signified, it is

itself a signifier. And the unconscious is beyond the gap between nature and culture.97

Breton called the products of automatic writing “the unity of rhythm.”98 The

surrealist text and the surreal reality itself have been rendered the same. What is already a

signified is imposed upon that which cannot be included in the signifying chain. What

Breton didn’t realize is that the unconscious and language are essentially separate from

each other, and yet at the same time they are constitutive of one another. They are

separate and/but contiguous to one another. Without the one the other cannot be.

97
Lacan thinks differently on the same subject. For Lacan the split between nature and culture, the subject
and the object are constitutive of both the subject and the object. The object of psychoanalysis, according to
Lacan, is the unconscious. There have been criticisms against Lacan’s idea of the unconscious as the object
of psychoanalysis. One of these could be saying that The unconscious is itself a product of the
psychoanalytic discourse, how can it be thought separate from psychoanalysis?
98
André Breton, Der Surrealismus und die malerei, 76
160
Breton wanted to re-establish the unmediated relationship between the object of

perception and its representation. To do this he had to remove all consciousness and

connect the writing process to an absent cause which would govern the automatic writing

process. Instead of imagining, automatism turns the eye into the object of imagination

and the subject becomes blind to itself. The subject can touch the psychic only by being

blinded by it. The unconscious engulfs the eye and breaks-down the projection-

introjection mechanism; for it leaves nothing between the projected and the introjected

objects.

The surrealist image juxtaposes the past and future possibilities; an undivided

chain of operations connects the truth of the dream to the truth of the image. The true

image is the fingerprint left on the table, or the trace of water left by the glass on the table

and since it is always in the form of a trace from the past it has the potential for opening

the subject up to illusions and miracles. The eye looking at the dream or the recording of

the dream regresses in time towards a primal state of things.99 It not only brings out the

trauma, it traumatizes the looking eye, and turns the life of trauma into beauty.

The automatic dream is the true beauty, because beauty of the dream neither

knows reasons, nor the causes and effects, it is a product of chance and randomness. In

this beauty there is something that wants to lose itself in nature instead of merely

representing nature. The texts want to turn into the underground caves themselves, the

eye wants to go beyond the limits of the visible and see through nature. Surrealism is the

text not only of nature and but also of that which is behind or beneath the visibility of

nature.

99
Breton, What is Surrealism?, ed. trans. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto, 1978), 121
161
 2. (‘,)A Pineal Eye Soliloquy(‘,)

Mimicry is another definitive word for the operations of Surrealist aesthetics and

it enters the scene through the Surrealist publication Minotaure. Roger Caillois defines

mimicry as the activity through which the eye becomes a camera reproducing itself as a

camera.

[…] life seems to lose ground, to blur the line between organism

and environment as it withdraws, thereby pushing back in equal

measure the bounds within which we may realize, as we should,

according to Pythagoras, that nature is everywhere the same.100

Mimicry tries to regress to a world before the separation between nature and

culture, the signifier and the signified. The desire to play with spectres results in a

becoming spectre. The subject leaves behind all individuality and becomes one with the

world. Mimicry wants to take the shape, colour, and the structure of nature. And it wants

to do this through cultural products. Mimicry erases the boundary between life and

literature and even when there is no head, there is the subject automatically doing what it

has to do.

According to the Surrealists, mimicry is able to deconstruct high and low.

It is the Cartesian hierarchy that is under attack. In Descartes the eye is given priority

over the foot. Mimicry aims at turning the hierarchical organization of the body against

itself. Mimicry automatically submits to the environment and that way, the subjects of

mimicry believe, the Cartesian subject is turned upside down. Descartes wanted to be

certain of everything, and his will to certainty lead him to suspicion and scepticism. To

100
Roger Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism, ed. Caludine Frank, trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish
(London: Duke University Press, 2003), 102-3

162
overcome his scepticism Descartes had to question everything around him first. So as

soon as he started thinking he was actually thinking against himself. When he said, “I

think, therefore I am,”101 his inner voice was saying this: “To be sceptical requires

thinking, and since I am sceptical about everything I must be thinking, and for me to

think requires being, therefore I must be.”

Descartes came to realize that he cannot be suspicious about his suspiciousness.

For if he were to be so, he would again be suspicious. But why did Descartes think that

he was telling the truth when he said “I think therefore I am”? I can be sceptical about

everything but not about the “I think.” Therefore I cannot be sceptical about “I am.” “I

am” cannot exist without the “I think.” So thinking is a precondition of being and since I

am thinking then I must be. But what if I were to say, “I am fishing, therefore I am.” You

cannot say this, because fishing is not a sign of being. You might be thinking that you are

fishing, but might in fact be sleeping and having a dream in which you see yourself

fishing. But thinking is different from fishing and dreaming; being and thinking are

preconditions of one another.

What happens when Descartes is thinking of being is consciousness conceiving

itself as a thinking being. In Descartes the subject can say “I” outside of language.

Descartes does not distinguish between the speaking subject and the object being spoken

about. Lacan’s theory that language splits the subject and this split is constitutive of both

the cultural subject and the unconscious explains Descartes’ paradox. Descartes thought

consciousness could conceive itself directly, without the mediation of language. But this

is impossible, says Lacan, for before the acquisition of language there can be no-thought.

The subject regresses to Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position and acts on his/her primitive

101
René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes vol. II,
eds. and trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
163
drives. In Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position the dominant drive is the death-drive which

pulls the subject towards inorganicity and nothingness under the guise of oneness,

Nirvana, and omnipresence, it promises a life at a superior realm of being. Descartes was

imagining that he was conscious of his thought, but he was in no way conscious of what

his thought symbolically meant.

When consciousness closes in on itself and thought becomes its own object, the

subject and the object are imagined to be integrated. The gap between the subject and the

object is filled with language, which actually splits the subject and the object. What

Descartes is not conscious of is that language has a role to play in his thinking process.

Descartes is not aware that he needs language to even begin to think. And through

exclusion of language from the thinking process the Cartesian subject remains locked in a

stage almost prior to the mirror stage, a fantasy world of oneness with the universe.

Just like Christopher Columbus who didn’t realize that he had discovered a new

continent, Descartes opens a new field for philosophical thinking but was not aware of

what he had done. He didn’t name this new field. In this new field Cogito was

establishing itself upon the principle that consciousness is one with itself and at all times

thought reveals itself to itself. For Descartes God was a priori to the human subject

because for God to exist it has to situate itself in the subject’s mind as God first.

Descartes had no thoughts about the role of culture in the formation of the concept of

God. And if there was a God that God couldn’t be telling lies for that wouldn’t fit in with

the symbolic idea of God. So all the naïve truths Descartes was sceptical about at the

beginning, such as that there is a transcendental world beyond consciousness, must have

been true. With this thought in mind Descartes declared that being and thinking are one

and the same thing.

164
 The Surrealists who see themselves beyond Hegel and Nietzsche intend to

overcome the Cartesian mind-body dualism, but do, and fail in achieving, that which is

almost exactly the opposite of what they intended to do. Instead of stressing the gap

between the signifier and the signified, the subject and the object, they ridiculously act

out what they say they are criticizing. Their only difference from Descartes is their

attempt to freeze the movement of thought while for Descartes there was no movement of

thought at all, the thought was always already static. While Descartes was saying, “this is

one,” and pointing himself out, the Surrealists are saying, “this one is not the one it

appears to be.”

Although the Surrealists borrowed the concept of pineal eye from Descartes, they

used it against him. With this pineal eye One looks outside and feels like what One sees

is inside. The distance between One’s eye and the object of vision does not exist. That

which you see on the surface of the outside is the depth of the inside. The depth of the

inside is at the same time the depth of the outside. The depths and surfaces of the insides

and outsides are one and there is no boundary of this “one.” This One creates its limits as

it goes beyond them. It is its crime, punishment, and prize at once. The constitution and

the breaking of the law that it writes for itself take place at the same time. The crime and

the execution of the punishment are one. The limit, the law, the wall, the borderline, the

boundary, the edge do not exist prior to the act that breaks through them. The diversions

created in and through language set the limits of what language can do to one, and what

One can do with language, to language, to the world, to oneself. One becomes an act of

contemplation in the process of opening up new passages through which language can

flow through and fill one. Full with and surrounded by language, one as language,

contemplates itself and fills itself with what it contemplates. Words flow through the

165
passages opened up by the movements of thought and time created by and creating new

contents of expression. The new contents of expression are at the same time new forms of

thought. The forms of thought are at the same time the contents of thought. Language

practices what it preaches. The expression and the expressed are one. Language is a sea

the shores of which are the edges of language. This, however, does not mean that there is

nothing conceivable beyond the shore. The shores and their extensions are the homes of

others’ ways of being in relation. And neither in nor through language can One reach that

which is beyond for there is no going beyond of language as such but as much. Language

perpetually dissolves into not nothingness but into something inconceivable. That

inconceivable is the void that one attempts to render conceivable as it goes along the way

in and through language and yet does the reverse of what it is aiming at.

3. Is Pineal Eye an Organ Without a Body?

The pineal eye is not the organ that turns two different perspectives into one. But

rather it attempts to turn the reality inside out so that the objects, instead of becoming

visible through reflecting light, themselves overflow their objectivities and generate light.

The Surrealists aimed at precisely this kind of a process through automatic writing. They

aimed at replacing the objective reality with another subjectivity that would go beyond

the polar opposition between the subject and the object. Surrealism tries to attain

inorganicity through becoming inorganic. It desires nothing, rather than willing

nothingness. It is a movement governed by the death drive rather than being the governor

of the death drive.

Bataille at first looked at the Surrealists with sympathy, but before long he came

to understand that it was nothing other than a false pretentiousness. Bataille says,

166
 If we were to identify under the heading of materialism a crude

liberation of human life from the imprisonment and masked

pathology of ethics, an appeal to all that is offensive,

indestructible, and even despicable, to all that overthrows, perverts,

and ridicules spirit, we could at the same time identify surrealism

as a childhood disease of this base materialism: it is through this

latter identification that the current prerequisites for a consistent

development may be specified forcefully and in such a manner as

to preclude any return to pretentious idealistic aberrations.102

To understand why Bataille is so angry with the Surrealists, and especially with

Dali, we have to go back to the roots of this distress caused by the attempt to show that

the subject and the object are one. Bataille compares the prefix Sur at the beginning of

Surrealism and Nietzsche’s Surhomme. For Bataille, what is common to both Nietzsche

and the Surrealists is that they both in vain strive for a higher world, and yet since

Nietzsche at least inverts his attitude and attempts to revalue all values including his own.

Whereas Surrealism is a hopeless case in that all they do is to devalue everything

valuable. For Bataille, the Surrealists are merely a group of people making themselves

ridiculous and being the objects of nervous laughter.

Bataille doesn’t agree with the Surrealists’ understanding of beauty and meaning

in art and literature. It is true, both the Surrealists and Bataille are obsessed with turning

things upside down, turning the low into high and the high into the low. The difference

between the Surrealists and Bataille is not only aesthetic but also ethical, a stance linked

102
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and
Surrealist,” ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994), 32
167
to Bataille’s concept of transgression as he puts it in parenthesis in his critique of

Salvador Dali’s Lugubrious Game.

(If violent movements manage to rescue a being from profound

boredom, it is because they can lead—through some obscure

error—to a ghastly satiating ugliness. It must be said, moreover,

that ugliness can be hateful without any recourse and, as it were,

through misfortune, but nothing is more common than the

equivocal ugliness that gives, in a provocative way, the illusion of

the opposite. As for irrevocable ugliness, it is exactly as detestable

as certain beauties: the beauty that conceals nothing, the beauty

that is not the mask of ruined immodesty, the beauty that never

contradicts itself and remains eternally at attention like a

coward.)103

For Bataille what the Surrealists do is to provoke the pre-dominant authority in

such a way that can only be considered as the manifestation of ill-will. Bataille,

consciously or unconsciously, uses Nietzsche against the Surrealists although he seems to

be putting them in the same category for their aspirations to higher Ideals. Although

Bataille sees idealisation both in Surrealism and Nietzsche, he nevertheless underlines the

different means they employ to attain those higher Ideals. In both Nietzsche and the

Surrealists the unconscious is filled with archaic images of Ancient Greek Mythology,

but in Nietzsche these are adjusted to the demands of the present, whereas even in

Breton’s writings we see sheer rage manifesting itself through exploitation of the death-

103
Bataille, 27
168
drive in that the process of slashing myth and language into pieces aims at attracting

punishment.

What Bataille does in his Critique of Surrealism and Nietzsche is to turn the

human subject upside down and instead of idealizing higher realms he, in a way, idealizes

the lower realms. Bataille situates himself in a realm lower than the realm of the law.

By excavating the fetid ditch of bourgeois culture, perhaps

we will see open up in the depths of the earth immense and

even sinister caves where force and human liberty will

establish themselves, sheltered from the call to order of a

heaven that today demands the most imbecilic elevation of

any man’s spirit.104

Bataille’s main target is the Icarian flight which he sees both in Nietzsche and the

Surrealists. As we know, Icarus didn’t obey his father’s No, and tried to fly and touch the

sun. Eventually he burnt himself up. The Icarian conception of imagination as flight from

reality leads to an idealization of the bourgeois values disguised as the proletarian values,

and the real lower world is pushed further down. For Bataille, the reason why people see

the foot as inferior to the head is their habit of attributing a higher status to the vertical

forms of thought. Man should fall on his four legs, otherwise he will never be able to

write himself out not only as the writer but also as the written, not only as the seer but

also as the seen.

Bataille’s attitude reminds Lacan’s theory of the passage from the imaginary to

the symbolic. For Lacan the Symbolic law, the Name of the Father who says No to the

desiring child plays a dominant role in participation in the symbolic order and eventually

104
Bataille, 43
169
becoming a sexed subject who is able to distinguish between the me and the not me. In

Lacanian terms, Nietzsche and the Surrealists are locked in the mirror stage where

Descartes is a respected inmate. As Breton says, “There, the atmosphere and light begin

to stir in all purity the proud uprising of unformed thoughts. Man, restored to his original

sovereignty and serenity, preaches there his own eternal truths, they say, for himself

alone.”105

4. Artaud, Deleuze and the will to nothingness

I close the eyes of my intelligence and, giving voice to the

unformulated within me, I offer myself the sense of having wrested

from the unknown something real. I believe in spontaneous

conjurations. On the paths along which my blood draws me, it

cannot be that one day I will not discover a truth.106

Artaud does not call for destruction of reason through the imaginary but an

affirmation of reason’s self-destruction on the way to self-creation. There is a knowledge

which Artaud is in pursuit of without knowing what that knowledge is and what purpose

it serves. Artaud is always in pursuit of this unattainable and ungraspable knowledge and

he knows that, as he is trying to give it a voice, he is moving away from and towards it at

the same time. This movement of the action and the intention in opposite directions, that

is, this turning against itself of desire, is a thought that Artaud feels with his body but

cannot express through articulable forms. Artaud makes the inarticulable visible through

costume, lighting, etc., and tries to create a psychic materiality.

When you will have made him a body without organs,

105
André Breton, What is Surrealism?, ed. trans. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto, 1978), 28
106
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California, 1975), 92
170
 then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions

and restored him to his true freedom

then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out

as in the frenzy of dancehalls

and this wrong side out will be his real place.107

Artaud feels the body as an externally organized structure and experiences

existence as pain because he feels his body to be restricted and subjected to forms it is not

willing to take at all times. By disorganizing the body through putting its organs to

different uses, to uses other than they have come to be put, within the organizing

structures, Artaud induces agony in himself. Desiring to become inorganic, and this is a

desire for an impersonal death, an “ungraspable” knowledge, this striving for infinity

within the finite, is, paradoxically, at once the product and the producer of his affirmation

of life as it is, that is, as “a process of breaking down…” as the American novelist F.

Scott Fitzgerald puts it in his The Crack Up. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze reads

Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up with Kleinian eyes and says that identification is peculiar to

manic-depressive states. In The Crack Up Fitzgerald says,

I only wanted absolute quiet to think about why I had developed a

sad attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the

objects of my horror or compassion… Identification such as this

spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that

keeps insane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure

the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor

Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such

107
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (University of California: Berkeley, 1975), 570-1
171
 merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake

and a failure…108

Deleuze affirms Fitzgerald’s manic-depressive attitude towards the relationship

between life and death in the Porcelain and Volcano chapter of his The Logic of Sense.

If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable,

it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges

thought occurs, that anything that is good and great in humanity

enters and exits through it, in people ready to destroy themselves—

better death than the health which we are given. Is there some

other health, like a body surviving as long as possible its scar, like

Lowry dreaming of rewriting a “Crack Up” which would end

happily, and never giving up the idea of a new vital conquest?109

In a world ruled by fools full of ill-will war becomes inescapable. Since war,

conflict, violence and destruction are interior as much as they are exterior affairs, it is

hardly a matter of bad luck that we will be wounded at some point if we haven’t been

already, not that I wish it to be that way. An injury either creates a possibility of relating

to the world as it is, or turns into an obsession with the self, into a delusional and rigid

vision of existence projected onto the real, giving birth to neurosis or psychosis.

We do not write with our neuroses. Neuroses or psychoses are not

passages of life, but states into which we fall when the process is

interrupted, blocked, or plugged up. Illness is not a process but a

stopping of the process, as in “the Nietzsche case.” Moreover, the

writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician

108
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up (New York: New Directions, 1945), 69
109
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, (London: Continuum,
2003),
172
 of himself and of the world. The world is a set of symptoms whose

illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of

health.110

If we have a look at “the Nietzsche case” once again with Kleinian eyes through a

Deleuzean looking glass we see that the mechanism of projection-introjection is itself the

illness of which resentment and bad conscience are the causes and the symptoms at the

same time. In the case of projection the subject’s illness is manifested as aggressiveness

and hostility towards the external world, always accusing the others for his weaknesses.

This is the paranoiac who is afraid of being persecuted and sees the external world as a

threat to his unity. Afraid of the external world, he himself becomes hostile towards it in

turn provoking hostility against himself, thus giving birth to the actualisation of what he

was afraid of. And in the case of introjection the subject internalises the fault and turns

against itself. This is the psychotic who identifies with everything and everyone, and who

has too many points of view together with a divergent coherency of thought and action.

Intending to take a spoon from the drawer he might break a plate on the floor. In the first

case there is a detached hostility and in the second case there is an immersed attachment.

In both cases the subject becomes the victim of his own actions against and toward

himself and others.

Nietzsche says that the will to nothingness eventually turns against itself and

becomes creative and revalues all values to survive death.111 It is through writing as the

patient and the physician, as the analyst and the analysand at the same time that Nietzsche

is able to turn resentment, bad conscience, fear, and guilt against themselves and produce

110
Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, transl.Daniel W. Smith and Michale A. Greco (London and
New York: Verso, 1998), 3
111
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 116-8

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desire as affirmation of the world as it is after a conflict that is interior as much as it is

exterior to the self. This conflict is the crack up that happens to the body of the organism.

It is neither interior nor exterior, but a “surface event.”

There was a silent, imperceptible crack, at the surface, a unique

surface Event. It is as if it were suspended or hovering over itself,

flying over its own field. The real difference is not between the

inside and the outside, for the crack is neither internal nor external,

but is rather at the frontier.112

It was on and through his disorganized body, or body without organs, that Artaud

traversed the realm of affective intensities and the field of partial objects and produced

desire without an object. For Deleuze the process of traversing the affective intensities

felt through body rather than grasped by the mind may be the returning of a “great

health.” Here objects are related to in such a way as to produce desire not as lack but as

production. For Deleuze it is the production of fantastic visions of the world that are the

causes and effects of certain pathological conditions. Bombarded with unattainable

objects of desire the subject becomes mad.

In both Freud and Lacan the attitude toward the object of desire is Platonic in that

the object of desire is the object of desire as long it remains unattainable. To put it in

Lacanian terms, with the acquisition of language the subject starts to enter the symbolic

order and loses touch with the Real which is the unconscious. His desires and drives are

shaped and organized according to the Symbolic order of the language game in which he

finds himself. So the direction the subject’s becoming will take depends not only on the

way in which the subject relates to language but also how he relates the unconscious to

112
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, (London: Continuum,
2003), 155
174
language, since it is one’s production of a sense of oneness for oneself in and through

language that determines one’s way of being in relation to language. Language is neither

internal nor external to the subject and yet it is equally internal and external to the subject

since language is the surface in-between. Beyond language there is nothing. Deleuze

observes a movement of language towards its outside, not to reach the outside of

language, but to create an outside language within language in writers such as Kafka,

Beckett, and later Kerouac(The Subterraneans, Big Sur). For Deleuze, their subversions

of syntax become their passage through the fleshy transparency of signification unless the

process of production through the unconscious forces of the outside is blocked.

All writing involves an athleticism, but far from reconciling

literature with sports, or turning writing into an Olympic event, this

athleticism is exercised in flight and in the breakdown of the

organic body—an athlete in bed, as Michaux put it.113

Deleuze sees the goal of literature as giving a voice to those unconscious forces

that belong to a realm outside of language and those forces can only be given a voice by

creating an impersonal consciousness through a new language within language - an

outside language inside the language - that traverses the field of partial representations of

the human condition and produces an other sign that is itself at once internally exterior

and externally interior to the major order of signification. The outside of language is the

realm which Deleuze calls “the transcendental field of immanence.” It is through this

synthesis of transcendence and immanence that Deleuze is theoretically able to touch the

material through the psychic, and the real through the fantasy. But the problem persists,

113
Gilles Deleuze, Essays: Critical and Clinical, transl. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Verso:
London and New York, 1998), 2
175
for the question remains: how are we going to practice this theory? Is it practical enough

to be applied to the banalities of ordinary life?

In his book, On Deleuze and Consequences, Zizek bases his critique of Deleuze

on his use of Artaud’s concept of the body without organs. As is clearly understood from

the subtitle of his book, Organs Without Bodies, Zizek’s aim is to reverse the Deleuzean

order of things. With his well known 180 degrees reversals, Zizek uses Deleuze’s idea of

a resistance to Oedipalization against him, and that way shows that Deleuze’s assumption

that Oedipalization is something to be resisted is based on false premises. For Zizek,

Oedipalization takes place when and if there is a failure in the system. Zizek considers

Anti-Oedipus to be a book in which Deleuze and Guattari situate a psychotic and an

Oedipalized subject on the opposite poles of one another. For Zizek a psychotic is the

Oedipalized subject par excellence, rather than being an anti-Oedipe who escapes the

codes of capitalist axiomatics.

[…] far from tying us down to our bodily reality, “symbolic

castration” sustains our very ability to “transcend” this reality and

enter the space of immaterial becoming. Does the autonomous

smile that survives on its own when the cat’s body disappears in

Alice in Wonderland also not stand for an organ “castrated,” cut off

from the body? What if, then, phallus itself, as the signifier of

castration, stands for such an organ without a body?114

What for Deleuze is traversing the symbolic becomes traversing the fantasy in

Lacan as Zizek pointed out first in The Sublime Object of Ideology and later in The

Ticklish Subject. Traversing the fantasy is a stage in the process of progress and it is only

114
Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London:
Routledge, 2004), 83
176
upon entry into the symbolic that the subject becomes capable of initiating change in the

symbolic order. In Lacan’s mirror stage where a series of imaginary Narcissistic

identifications prepares the subject for the symbolic order, the child has an illusory sense

of oneness and yet this illusion is necessary only in so far as the child will traverse this

fantasy and will have learned to look at the world without identification.

A detachment from identification is common to both Deleuze and Zizek and in

this sense they are both Lacanians. Lacan is the one that unites them as he splits them.

For Deleuze the Lacanian symbolic is that in which the subject finds itself upon birth, so

to initiate change the subject should try to introduce an exterior inside, a new language

within language. Deleuze tries to put language in touch with a pre-verbal, if not pre-

linguistic stage. It is to Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position that Deleuze attributes

importance. Deleuze takes the schizoid part of the paranoid-schizoid position and extracts

from schizophrenia all apart from introjection and splitting processes. Following Klein

Deleuze makes a distinction between introjection and identification. According to

Deleuze introjection and splitting are useful tools for creating difference, whereas

identification not only preserves but also serves the system. Zizek agrees with him on the

usefulness of introjection and splitting. In both cases the revolutionary-becoming is

associated with the death drive. But Zizek disagrees with Deleuze’s association of

introjection and splitting with schizophrenia.

For Zizek there must be a distance between reason and non-reason. One should

not try to name the unnamable, but rather one must show the nothingness outside

everything, to do this one must introduce a split into the symbolic continuity of things.

An interruption of the system from within is the aim of both Zizek and Deleuze, and yet

while Zizek affirms non-representability of the unconscious, Deleuze sees the

177
unconscious as the producer of difference and initiator of change. For Deleuze the

unconscious is dynamic, but for Zizek it is static and it is this static state outside time that

manifests itself in the form of gaps within the symbolic order; it splits and interrupts the

flow of things, rather than participate in it.

What does Oedipalisation mean? It means the production of a subject who would

willingly blind himself to the social reality. Who would rather see nothing rather than see

the truth. An Oedipalised subject is he who blinds himself to the symbolic meaning of

things and chooses to see the nothingness before or after the symbolic. It is the symbolic

that Oedipus represses by blinding himself to it. That he has engaged in sexual

intercourse with his mother and killed his father, induces such guilt in Oedipus that he

punishes himself by cutting himself off from the external world. This Oedipal

introversion of the subject leads to a weakening rather than a strengthening of the

subject’s fantasy world. With the exclusion of reality, fantasy has nothing to mediate.

Unconscious drives cannot attach themselves to external objects so as to turn into desire.

Left hanging in the air the unconscious drives turn against the subject and the subject

becomes self-destructive, blinding himself to the symbolic, thus opening himself up to

the nothingness behind it by choosing to see nothing. An Oedipal subject closes his eyes

and seeing the nothingness inside says there is nothing outside. He is Nietzsche’s man, as

he puts at the beginning and the end of On The Genealogy of Morality, who “would much

rather will nothingness than not will.” For he still wills, otherwise he wouldn’t want to

blind himself to it all. It is because he cannot help willing although he doesn’t want to

will that his will turns against itself and wills nothingness rather than something to stand

in for it.

178
 It is Nietzsche’s legacy to have made a distinction between the subject and the

signifier, knowledge and truth. By exposing the absence of an origin of knowledge he

exposed the absence of truth in knowledge. Nietzsche inverted into the spotlight the

nothingness inherent in knowledge which is constitutive of a truth outside scientific

knowledge. Truth can take many forms and one of these is poetic truth, which Nietzsche

considers to be closer to the absolute truth, which is the truth of the absence of truth at the

center of scientific knowledge.

For Nietzsche there is no relation whatsoever between the object of knowledge

and the truth of experience. Perhaps what Deleuze would years later call transcendental

empiricism explains the production of truths alternative to the scientific truth which

claims to be objective and absolute. For Deleuze literary activity involves creation of

impersonal consciousnesses within the subject of writing. The subject of writing should

detach himself/herself from the object of writing; that is, the writer should make a

distinction between the enunciated and the subject of enunciation. As Deleuze puts it in

his essay, Life and Literature, “literature is not a personal affair.” Literature is not about

writing down one’s personal experiences as they actually took place, which is impossible

anyway. Literature involves selecting from experience and giving form to formless

experience which is yet to take the shape of new forms of experience. Out of the old

experience one creates new experience.

The writer turns unnameable drives into new symbolic meanings and new objects

of desire. With Deleuze the unconscious is given a very important role to play in the

process of cultural production. The non-symbolizable drives interacting with one another

and forming what is called the unconscious are turned into comprehensible and desirable

forms through literature. Literature contributes to the symbolic order by producing not

179
only new symbolic meanings of the already existing objects but also new objects which

didn’t previously exist within the symbolic order. Literature, therefore, turns the

unconscious drive into the symbolic desire. So Deleuze could say the unconscious

produces desire. Literature is about turning the pre-verbal -- if not pre-linguistic -- objects

into verbal objects with symbolic meanings attached to them. Literature constructs a

world in which the objects gain new significance.

5. Artaud and The Shaman

A shaman is he who makes the patient identify with himself through the use of

certain devices which activate the unconscious. The shaman takes the patient on a

journey through himself; he plays the role of the mediator between the symbolic and the

real. The shaman populates the unconscious with monsters and evil creatures, in other

words with bad objects, and teaches the patient to struggle with them. In a way what a

shaman does is to traverse the fantasy and take the patient with himself/herself to the

realm after the fantasy is traversed. Once the fantasy is traversed his/her unconscious

drives start to make sense for the patient. The shaman’s therapeutic procedure, therefore,

involves reattaching the patient to the signifying chain, by giving him/her objects to

represent his suffering. To be attacked by a monster with flames coming out of its mouth

stands in for the unnamable internal bad object. For a shaman the most important thing

in therapy is to help the patient get in touch with the unconscious which is populated by

mythological monsters. What a shaman actually does is to invite projective identification

and show the way out of the field of partial bad objects. At the end of the journey the

patient becomes capable of seeing a continuity in his life and therefore gains a sense of

illusory oneness.

180
 Artaud was deeply involved in finding ways of manipulating the unconscious.

Just like a shaman Artaud aimed at directly communicating with the spectator’s

unconscious. To achieve this Artaud advocated the use of physical objects in the way of

touching the psyche. Artaud’s materialism paradoxically transcends the physical. The

concept of the Theatre of Cruelty implies a cruelty on the psyche through the affective

use of the physical objects on the stage. These included, audio and visual imagery,

costumes resembling slashed open bodies, unorthodox lighting, unnamable voices

coming from nowhere, representing pain. Artaud’s attitude was so aggressive that he

even surpassed the Surrealists. Although at the beginning he was close to the Surrealist

movement, and he carried the project of automatic writing to its limits in his poems,

Artaud was soon expelled from the Surrealist movement. For Artaud they were only

game players rather than actors. They failed in acting upon the world and fell victim to

their pursuit of a superior realm beyond the physical.

Artaud’s vision is a much more materialist one than that of Surrealists who

populated the unconscious with figures from Ancient Greek Mythology. For Artaud

Breton’s literary and theoretical texts were not radical enough, they could even be

considered conventional. Artaud’s objective was to dissociate the spectator from the

social reality and make it impossible for him/her not to associate himself with the action

on the stage. In a way, Artaud wanted to take the spectator into the act, rather than

merely play a solipsistic game excluding the role of the spectator. Artaud showed the

third eye between the eye seeing the inside and the eye looking outside. For Artaud

identification is the key to the heart and the soul of the spectator, for identification

process surpasses rational thought. For Artaud even the breathing of the actor is

important to create affective intensities.

181
 […] (Breathing) allows the spectator to identify himself

with the performance breath by breath, and bar by bar…

All emotion has organic bases. It is in cultivating his

emotion in his body that the actor recharges the density of

its voltage. Knowing in advance which parts of the body

one wants to touch means putting the spectator into magic

trances.”115

Artaud was trying to find a means to affect the spectator. He expected the actors

to act in such a way as to invite projective identification just like a shaman. Artaud gave

obscure directions such as “retain breath as you speak,” or “your voice should be in your

head as you speak,” to the actors. His goal was to make the pain manifest itself. The

spectator was immersed in the action to such an extent that even his/her

breathings(exhalations and inhalations) became one with those of the actors. Through

sustaining the conditions for the possibility of total projective identification Artaud

strived to render the action, the audience, and actor one; the real intent was to erase the

boundary between life and theatre. For Artaud there is no good object in life and theatre

should show nothing but that.

6. Beckett

Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be,

what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this saying it’s me?

Answer simply. It’s the same old stranger as ever, for existence, of

his, of ours, there’s a simple answer. It’s not with thinking he will

115
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California, 1975), 163

182
 find me, but what is he to do, living and bewildered, yes, living,

say what he may.116

Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost

restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I’m far again.

With a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to

end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That’s where I would go,

if I could go, that’s who I would be, if I could be.117

In Texts For Nothing the narrative voice turns its resentment in the face of having

no-identity, that is, for being incapable of changing the course of events in the way of

having an identity, and prefers not to will at all, to will nothing, rather than will

nothingness. Beckett conforms to Nietzsche’s famous saying about Nihilism: “man

would much rather will nothingness than not will.” This is not an impoverishment of the

will, rather, it is itself a will to nothing which turns Beckett’s writing into a motionless

flight, a static genesis, and at the same time a movement of thought which spirals around

and within nothing, in the process turning the absence of something conceivable into a

neutral voice through which silence eternally speaks and engages in a non-identical

relation with the world surrounding it.

In Waiting for Godot there is nothing at the centre of the subject; no one comes,

no one goes, nothing takes place. That place is the side of a road where there is a barren

tree, and there Vladimir and Estragon share an aloneness, an intimacy. They give the

impression that they have been there for hundreds, or even thousands of years,

associating by their clothes with Charlie Chaplin’s persona, “the universal vagabond.”

116
Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing (London: John Calder, 1999), 22
117
Beckett, 24-25
183
 Vladimir: […] To all mankind they were addressed, those

cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at

this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it

or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let

us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a

cruel fate consigned us. […] But that is not the question.

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are

blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in

this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are

waiting for Godot to come--118

In Waiting for Godot Beckett continues his project of purgation, or purification

through reduction of life to its bare bones. According to Alain Badiou, as he puts it in his

book On Beckett, to achieve this reduction of life and truth to their most naked forms, in

his novels Beckett had to write thousands of pages in the way of wiping the slate clean

and getting rid of the non-generic details of daily social life. To open up a space within

the existing order Beckett had to unwrite the symbolic order in the way of subtracting the

Symbolic from the Real. By situating Vladimir and Estragon in the middle of now-here,

which he shows to be nothingness, Beckett gives voice to the Real of being, which is

non-being. Beckett shows that at the centre of the subject there is a hole. The split

introduced by Beckett in-between the subject and the signifier shows the subject and the

signifier as constituted by a lack of a third party outside them. There is the absence of

something in-between the fantasy and the social reality and the subject is this non-being

constituted through and as the gap separating them. The subject is an effect of language,

118
Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot,” The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990),
74
184
and yet this effect manifests itself only in the form of gaps, absences, cuts. That is, the

subject manifests itself only in the form of a negativity from the perspective of the big

Other. For the big Other excludes nothingness and death. The big Other wants subjects

that are something within the symbolic order.

What Alain Badiou has written about Beckett’s writing at the time of Texts for

Nothing becomes relevant here.

With extraordinary lucidity, they tell us of the nothingness

of the attempt in progress. They come to the realisation, not

that there is nothing (Beckett will never be a nihilist), but

that writing has nothing more to show for itself. These texts

tell us the truth of a situation, that of Beckett at the end of

the fifties: what he has written up to that point can’t go on.

It is impossible to go on alternating, without any mediation

whatsoever, between the neutrality of the grey black of

being and the endless torture of the solipsistic cogito.

Writing can no longer sustain itself by means of this

alternation.119

It is in this context that Beckett’s Texts For Nothing, Waiting for Godot and

Lacan’s theory of the subject coincide. At the root of this coincidence is a shared way of

being in relation to the unconscious and death.

After being subjected to purgatory in his novels, Murphy, Watt, Moran, Molloy,

Malone and Mahood are finally shown to be the embodiments of a split subject

constituted by two clowns who have no role to play, their selves separate from their

119
Alain Badiou, On Beckett, ed. and trans. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (Manchester: Clinamen
Press, 2003) 15
185
consciousnesses, talking to but not with one another. Vladimir and Estragon are both no

one and everyone, none of the existing things and yet all that there is left.

The relationship between Vladimir and Estragon is in the form of a conversation

with no centre, for both of the subjects of this conversation are constitutive of one

another. The gap that separates them is the constitutive non-relation between them.

Beckett has taken almost all the measures required to concretely present the journey of

being in time as being outside time. It is from Vladimir and Estragon’s perspectives that

we see the nothingness outside the frozen image of two vagabonds in their immobility. It

is from this gap that new thought emerges; out of this nothingness arises a generic

multiplicity. Beckett stages this generic multiplicity by employing the asymmetrically

dialectical encounter with the other. To do this he had to remove the character

configuration and logical plot development, if not the pattern, from the scene of theatre.

Reduced to their minimal needs the Beckettian characters confront the symbolic order

and challenge the immutability of Cartesian discourse. Of the One, there is almost

nothing left in Beckett’s work.

Man has nothing left to say and yet if he stops saying this nothingness the sublime

objects will fill the unconscious and occupy a space that should remain empty. Vladimir

and Estragon know that although they are not integral parts of each other they

nevertheless cannot do without one another. They are doomed to share this irreconcilable

and endless movement against themselves. As they speak they are moving further away

from their intended meaning, and yet if they ever stopped saying words they would be

immediately in touch with the Real which would be inordinately painful.

The Real of desire is a mystery even to the subject which can only be spoken

around and yet never about; this nothingness at the centre of the subject should remain

186
unoccupied for the subject to survive trauma and get free of the past. Freedom cannot be

freedom if it is not experienced as a forced-choice. For freedom is the right not to choose

to do something; saying, “This is not it!” And yet what is there to do but choose the least

worse of all the alternatives. And rather than not will, for that would be total destruction

for them, Vladimir and Estragon choose to will nothingness; as empty shells they shall

remain free of the symbolic order by introducing a split between one another, within

themselves, and between themselves and the social reality.

What’s at stake in Beckett’s project is finding the ways and the means of

presenting a time outside time, another space, something unnamable outside the existing

symbolic order. Beckett’s meaning is very fragile and it is precisely this fragility that

makes a new beginning possible. Governed by the death drive the subject splits the given

unities and continuities, introduces splits between the past and the present, and out of this

tireless and yet exhausted activity of splitting new signs, signs of other signs, emerge.

Vladimir: […] Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the

hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We

have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. [He

listens.] But habit is a great deadener. [He looks again at

estragon.] At me too someone is looking, of me too

someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let

him sleep on. [Pause.] I can’t go on! [Pause.] What have

I said?120

Pozzo: [Suddenly furious.] Have you not done tormenting me with

your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One

120
Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot,” The Complete Dramatic Works, (London: Faber and Faber,
1986), 84-5
187
 day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day,

one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day he’ll

go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, in the

same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?

[Calmer.] They give birth astride of a grave, the light

gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. [He jerks the

rope.] On!121

Only in one single instant all is lived and died. But this single instant takes a

lifetime to pass. For Beckett its end comes when one confronts death. The characters in

his Trilogy, Molloy, Malone, and finally the Unnamable, are all narrating their processes

of deterioration, they are trying to give a voice to that time-space where it all ends and yet

something other than the all of life in the symbolic order begins. Beckett writes how

subject and the death-drive overlap. But he writes this event in such a way that this

overlapping of the subject and the death-drive turns into a life force and splits the given

unities including the Cogito. After all is said and done away with there emerges the not-

all, that which remains after all is said. To say this not-all one has to expose the void

within the symbolic order, to show that this void is constitutive of the symbolic order,

and that without it all meaning would collapse. What happens in Beckett, therefore, is the

process of self-deconstruction which shows the inconsistencies within the text and uses

these inconsistencies against the intended meaning of the text. In Beckett we see that in

the place of the transcendental signifier there is nothing. The subject is portrayed empty

and the subject becomes a signified itself, an empty signifier, a signifier that signifies

nothing but is itself signified. So where there was the transcendental signifier now there

121
Beckett, Waiting For Godot, 83
188
is nothing. As itself a signifier. We can see how it becomes possible to say the

unconscious is a signifier, or as Lacan would say, “the unconscious is structured like

language.”

7. Krapp’s Last Tape

It is a characteristic of Beckett’s plays to give the impression that there is nothing

outside the stage. In Beckett’s plays God is never allowed to die altogether, but rather

God is made to be felt by the audience as his absence, as the nothingness outside the

stage. Krapp's Last Tape is a good example of this recurring presence of God as an

absence in Beckett’s plays. It is very rare not to have a couple, or more than one couple in

Beckett’s plays, and Krapp's Last Tape comes especially handy as a Beckett play with a

single individual in it; locked in the past and trying to figure out not only how he has

become what he is, but also why he is in general. There is no concern at all with the

future in Krapp's Last Tape, unlike Endgame for instance, where Hamm and Clov,

although they don’t seek salvation from misery, they at least, just like in Waiting for

Godot, expect a message from without, from some unknown external source about which

they know nothing as to its relation to their future. They do strive for the unattainable

knowledge of the nothingness outside. It is as though all their thoughts, actions, and

speeches are governed by the nothingness off the stage. Whereas in Krapp’s Last Tape

there is no sign of will, rather than willing nothingness, Krapp prefers not to will at all.

The tape recorder is the projection-introjection machine in Krapp’s Last Tape.

Krapp is now introjecting what he had projected over the years, likewise the tape recorder

is projecting what it had introjected over the years. This change of roles between machine

and man reflects a perhaps often-neglected aspect of Beckett’s work, that aspect being the

ambivalence of Beckett’s relation to projection-introjection mechanisms as exemplified

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by the tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape. Krapp oscillates between rejecting the past

and affirming it.

During the sixties we see Beckett’s plays getting shorter and shorter, and the

subject deprived of the unity of mind and body, the conscious self and the unconscious.

Beckett’s progressively shortens the text and moves towards theatrical, or visual

expression. The characters’ experience on the stage is limited to people once able to live

dramas and capable of remembering those dramas. Dispersal of the subject,

disappearance of the body, the subjects reduced to bodies in jars, to a mouth, or merely a

voice, are some of the characteristics of Beckett’s final period of writing. Now his

characters are no more capable of doing anything other than trying to remember those

days in which they could still express their thoughts and feelings on stage.122

At the beginning of Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett announces that it is “a late

evening in the future. Krapp’s Den. Front centre a small table, facing front, i.e. across

from the drawers, a wearish old man: Krapp.”123

Krapp is an old and lonely man. He is shown on his 69th birthday listening to

tapes he had recorded on his previous birthdays. As usual he will listen to the tapes and

then record his voice telling what happened throughout last year. Krapp is the analyst and

the analysand at the same time. He listens to his past from his own mouth through the

speakers. The play opens with Krapp who has always lived alone, reducing his life to a

few physical actions carried out in a ritualistic way. This is Krapp’s daily routine; a few

meaningless actions. Sometimes Krapp goes inside and drinks, eats a few bananas, takes

a few steps in his “den,” and as he says, he sleeps with the old bitch who comes around

once in a while.

122
Linel Abel, Metatheatre (New York: Hill and Wang), 82
123
Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 215
190
 Krapp lives his life neither by writing his mind games as Molloy and Malone do,

nor talks as Hamm and Clov do. Krapp has no memory at all. Besides, he does not

construct stories for himself. His tapes are his memory. But like all the other Beckett

characters engaged in a play of consciousness Krapp deconstructs his story by using the

rewind, play, and f.forward buttons. All that remains is a mass of misery pieces of which

are not even imperfectly remembered, a multitude of unrelated and disconnected thoughts

and impressions about the past.

Throughout the play we watch the three stages of Krapp’s life. The most

important stage is the one narrated by the voice of Krapp at 39. The tape he recorded at

the age of 39 contemplates the tape that he had recorded at 29, and Krapp at the age of 29

contemplates the period corresponding to his youth. And all the past periods of his life

are judged by Krapp at the age of 69, which is “the present.”

Krapp at the age of 29 looks down on his youth and at times mocks himself for

being the way he was. He is very happy to have done with that earlier period of his life.

That Krapp at the age of 39 does not remember that he used to sing shows that he does

not want to remember those unhappy days of childhood and adolescence. Krapp at the

age of 29 is at a stage in his life where he has to make choices and decide what to do with

his life. (This is matter of laughter for Krapp at the ages of 39 and 69).

One of the most important decisions Krapp has to make is the one concerning

breaking his habit of drinking and giving up alcohol. At this stage we see young Hamm

from Endgame meeting Krapp. Krapp tells his story using numbers and statistical

information. A numerical exactitude in his narration is clearly discernible. One other

important decision that Krapp has made at 29 is about reducing the intensity of his sexual

life. Perhaps that is why he broke up with Bianca. (However, Bianca’s loving gaze is

191
remembered by Krapp even when he is 39). Krapp’s 29th year passes in search of

happiness and eventual frustrations. 29 years old Krapp’s tape ends with a call to God to

show himself? To this call to God Krapp at 39 (on the tape) and 69 (on the stage) laugh.

According to Krapp at 39, from that miserable year there is nothing left apart from that

lost lover.

In Endgame Hamm and Clov are the father and son repelled and yet attracted by

one another at the same time. They can do nothing with or without one another, or they

can neither do, nor not do anything with and without one another.

The stage decoration is such that considering the on-stage activity as taking place

within a head is easy and helps to understand what Beckett and we with him are dealing

with here. The portrait hanging on the wall is turned towards the wall and the two

windows facing the external world are sufficient signs to associate the stage as the inside

of a man’s head, with the spectators watching the play from behind the split open head.

This is signified by the portrait of the father on the wall looking towards the wall with the

nothing behind the picture turned towards the stage and the spectators. At some point in

the play Clov even attempts to communicate with the spectators, he turns towards and

addresses the spectators, which shows us that Beckett was trying to make this point

clearer by making the audience aware of the inverted projection-introjection mechanism

that they are caught in. In all his plays and novels, one way or another, Beckett achieves

inverting the projection-introjection mechanism into the spotlight. And he achieves this

precisely by putting under a magnifying glass the failures within the projection-

introjection mechanism.

What Beckett wants to say by employing these unorthodox techniques in theatre

is simple and yet sophisticated. He wants to say that to escape from the Cartesian mind-

192
body dualism and the mechanistic view of the world associated with it one has to create

an imbalance between the projecting side and the introjecting side, between apprehension

and comprehension.

The creation of imbalance can take the form of either an excessive projection of

the imaginary and the symbolic onto the real, or a lack of projection resulting in total

introjection. In the first case the subject loses himself in the chaos of the real, and in the

second case the subject loses touch with the real and becomes a totally imaginary and

symbolic construction. In both cases there is a loss of gap between the imaginary and the

symbolic. And when the imaginary and the symbolic become one the real in-between

them becomes impossible to be in touch with. In Dissymetries Badiou repeatedly and

recreatively points out that Beckett is not divided into two but into three. To use

Derrida’s words, “one plus one makes at least three.”

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 Intermediation 3

In the previous chapter we have seen how the Uncosncious has been put to use in

literary creativity by various movements. In this time of fragmentation and loss of

oneness, the stable identity is replaced by a subject who embodies the life drive and the

death drive in a state of conflict with one another which causes inordinate anxiety in the

subject as a result of the antagonism producing structure of the pre-dominant symbolic

order. And this subjectivity is as yet not capable of investigating the source of its inner

conflict for fear is continually instilled in the subject through the capillaries of the pre-

dominant symbolic order. Unless we realize that it is the fear of death that lies at the heart

of this anxiety we cannot come to terms with death and reconcile ourselves to life. Once

the subject comes to terms with death and is reconciled to life, it becomes possible for the

subject’s critique of the existing social order to subsist within the intersubjective field

beyond objectivity and subjectivity. I think this critique would be much more effective

than the one that is directed, at all costs, against the “external world” in general.

If people think about the same subject with the same words all the time, then they

are using the same part of their brains in the same way at all times. This means that while

many neurons in their brains remain unused, inactive for a long period of time, always

and only the same neurons interact in the same way all the time. Needless to say in time

stupidity and narrow-mindedness dominate their thought processes. To solve the problem

of narrow-mindedness a sort of short circuit between the neurons is required. In the next

chapter I shall attempt to show how literature helps to break down the already existing

neural connections and form new neural and synaptic connections in the brain.

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CHAPTER VI: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma

I philosophise only in terror, but in the confessed terror of going mad.124

Jacques Derrida.

The circle of the eternal return is a circle which is always excentric in

relation to an always decentered center.125

Gilles Deleuze.

1. Architecture of The White Hotel

Published in 1981, D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel is a post-structuralist novel

which employs parody to expose the absences of meaning inherent in itself. In Prologue

D.M. Thomas gives the impression that he is publishing the real letters written by Freud

and his friends. Written in the form of a documentary this part is followed by a surrealist

poem giving voice to Lisa Erdman’s dreams and fantasies. Here we look at the world

with the eyes of a young man and a young woman. They have no identities, their world is

not separated from themselves, and nothing is categorized. There everything can turn into

something else including its opposite, everything is replaceable with another thing, and

everything is intermingled, no distinction is made between internal and external objects:

Stars fall from the sky like rain, trees mix with the sea, young woman turns into

Magdalene, and drinks the wind. The consciousness and the body of the man and the

woman become one with the universe in this Surrealist poem. In this first chapter the gap

124
Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” from Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 76
125
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas
(London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 264
195
between what is real and what is not is filled, the boundary between the fictional and

social reality is erased, and a fantastic vision of the world is presented. In the part

following this poetic part the same events are narrated in prose employing the techniques

of the symbolists and abstract expressionists.

The third chapter is the case study of Lisa Erdman, aka Frau Anna. Frau Anna’s

illness and the therapeutic process are narrated in such a way as to give the impression

that we are reading Freud’s notebook. The language of this chapter is scientific and

conforms to the norms of scientific objectivity. There are occasional footnotes and

scientific documents. It is only through a footnote that the reader is given a hint that all

this is actually fictional and has nothing to do with what has actually happened. In this

footnote it said that Freud’s notebook containing the case studies was burnt in 1933. If

the text is based on facts so too must the footnote be based on facts; so what we have

been reading cannot be Freud’s own writing. In other words the text is not taking itself

seriously, the text is deconstructing itself, shifting the ground beneath his feet and

eventually collapsing in on itself. The text negates what it claims to be the truth and turns

into a parody of itself.

In the fourth chapter all the forms and contents of narrative in the previous

chapter are brought together under the roof of traditional and realistic forms of writing.

Events are situated in their proper historical contexts and are presented linearly with all

the cause-effect relationships in order. The characters are presented in accordance with

the symbolic order and show signs of progress in time. In this context science, art, and

life seem to be interconnected and the reader is given the impression that rational

discourse on them and their relationship with each other is possible.

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 The fifth chapter is almost exactly the opposite of the second chapter. The subject

who had become one with the universe and was continually changing in harmony with

nature in the second chapter, becomes the subject of death, alienation, trauma, and

separation. This chapter is about the Ukrainian Jews who thought they were being taken

to Jerusalem by train, but soon found themselves naked and about to be killed. Lisa is

among these Ukrainian Jews. Alienation, detachment, instability, human destroying

human, fear and violence are all analyzed in terms of their relations to death and

nothingness. The narrative form is mostly naturalistic, and yet touched by a little bit of

symbolism here and there.

The sixth and the last chapter of The White Hotel resembles the second chapter in

that it is composed of dream-visions. Here all events and all sensations are accepted

without questioning, and even without comprehension. This unmediated knowledge is

articulated through a surrealistic narrative.

As a whole The White Hotel is an attempt to find a way of expressing the trauma

of the Holocaust. In his The Holocaust and The Literary Imagination, Lawrence Langer

investigates the representability of the traumatic experiences and their effects.

How should art – how can art? – represent the inexpressibly

inhuman suffering of the victims, without doing an

injustice to that suffering? If art, as Adorno concedes, is

perhaps the last remaining sanctuary where that suffering

can be paid honest homage, enshrining it permanently in

the imagination of the living as the essential horror that it

197
 was, the danger also exists of this noble intention sliding

into the abyss of its opposite.126

For Langer, trying to represent the Holocaust invites the negation of the real

situation by tranquilizing the reader with a kind of aesthetic sublimation resulting in

temporary satisfaction. So the writer should find a suitably disturbing form to be able to

make the reader feel the pain of the suffering. The writer should aim at such a way of

expression as to disturb the reader, rather than provide him/her with fetish objects to

stand in for the Real of the Holocaust. The Real may be unattainable, it may be that

which is non-symbolizable, the unnameable truth of what really happened, and yet

splitting the narrative, interrupting the continuity, dissolving the structure, may

themselves turn out to be the very qualities that render it possible for the reader to touch

the Real without really touching it.

In The White Hotel we only glimpse at the extent of loss and get a sense of the

inordinate measure of suffering involved in traumatic experiences.

The mind resists what it feels to be imaginatively valid but

wants to disbelieve; and the task of the artist is to find a

style and a form to present the atmosphere or landscape of

atrocity, to make it compelling, to coax the reader into

credulity – and ultimately, complicity. The fundamental

task of the critic is not to ask whether it should or can be

done, since it already has been, but to evaluate how it has

126
Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and The Literary Imagination (London: Yale University Press, 1975),
1
198
 been done, judge its effectiveness, and analyse its

implications for literature and society.127

How can you make someone feel the other’s pain through language, especially

when this pain is unnameable? For Langer identification is necessary for ethical action.

So the writer should find the proper way of saying what he means to say, in such a way as

to create the conditions of possibility for the reader’s identification with the character.

Langer thinks that making the reader identify with the holocaust victims invites ethical

questioning of the situation. Langer seems to be blind to what is really at work in an

identification process.

The Real, the traumatic kernel resists signification, it is an irruption which exists

in the form of an absence. Creating gaps within the text itself helps to create the effects of

absence and loss on the reader. But there is also a negative aspect of producing absence

of meaning and presence of obscurity in the text. The writer may find himself/herself

inviting projective identification with his/her characters. Creating absences of meaning

within the text does not always alienate the reader from the text, quite the opposite may

be the case; it leaves spaces within the text onto which the reader can project his/her

narcissistic image of self.

It is only in the shape of such novels as The White Hotel that we can reconcile

ourselves to being caught up in an irresolvable conflict-situation between the life drive

and the death drive. It is this antagonism inherent in the human condition itself that

fascism exploited, and has not ceased to exploit in the way not only of murdering masses,

but also of making the masses murder themselves and one another.

127
Langer, 22
199
 At a first glance The White Hotel looks like a poetic novel about the Jewish

Holocaust feeding on the mythological imagery of psychoanalysis. In the Author’s Note,

D.M. Thomas says,

One could not travel far in the landscape of hysteria – the terrain of

this novel – without meeting the majestic figure of Sigmund Freud.

Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer

of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By

myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and

in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the

scientific validity of psychoanalysis.128

The Prologue of The White Hotel is composed of five letters written by Freud,

Sandor Ferenczi, his lover Gisela, and Sachs. The first letter is written by Ferenczi to his

lover Gisela on 8th September 1909. In this letter Ferenczi talks about his feelings and

fantasies and as he does this he mentions the disagreement between Freud and Jung.

According to Ferenczi, Jung has interpreted one of Freud’s dreams in such a way as to

cause anxiety in Freud. And upon this Freud said to Jung that he would never ever give

any information to him about his personal life. What Thomas does in the third chapter to

criticize Freud becomes relevant here. Thomas tells of the basic principles and techniques

of psychoanalysis using the discourse of psychoanalysis in a dramatic way, that is, by

dramatizing psychoanalysis and parodying Freud. The relationship between the Id, the

ego, and the super-ego, together with the external factors influencing this relationship are

narrated through Freud’s notes on a case study. Frau Anna, who is in fact Lisa Erdman, is

the object of study. Freud interprets Lisa’s writings and speeches, and the reader reads

128
D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel (London: Victor Gollancz, 1981), 6
200
this interpretation as part of the novel. From what Freud writes about Lisa the reader gets

the message that Freud is a human, as you see he is in error about Lisa, his interpretations

are misinterpretations and are limited by his desires, anxieties, and obsessions; he cannot

be objective, he can never know the truth of Lisa’s words, which Thomas will tell us later

in his novel.

At the beginning of his career Freud did think that the cause of mental illnesses is

the return of the repressed contents of a personal unconscious, which were mostly of a

sexual nature. Jung, on the other hand, linked the cause of mental illnesses to what he

called a collective unconscious which was the accumulation of the experience of

humanity throughout history as a whole. For Freud the cause of illness had something to

do with a past personal event, whereas for Jung mental illness had something to do with

the present and its relation to the future. Jung concentrated on the present moment in

which the past and the future dissolved into one another, but Freud insisted on looking for

the cause of illness in the personal history of the patient. Throughout the novel Freud

links Lisa’s mental and physical problems to some traumatizing sexual experiences she

had when she was a young girl. According to Freud every metaphorical image Lisa uses

in her surreal poems is a translation of Lisa’s unconscious desires, they are the returned

forms of a repressed memory, symptoms of a traumatic event. For instance Freud

interprets the imagery of white hotel in Lisa’s dreams as a manifestation of her will to

unite with the maternal body, and perhaps a will to go back into the secure environment

of the womb in which nothing is required of the organism. Nietzsche would have said

that Lisa’s will is a will to nothingness, rather than willing nothing. Lisa does get better

after Freud’s therapy, she returns to music, she even gets married. But Lisa soon realizes

that this is only a temporary period of happiness. Lisa thinks that her mental problems

201
have something to do with the future, rather than the past. The reference to Jung is

obvious. In a letter she writes to Freud she confesses that she told lies to Freud about her

past. As for the reason behind her lies Lisa says,

Is there any family without a skeleton in the cupboard?

Frankly I didn’t always wish to talk about the past; I was

more interested in what was happening to me then, and

what might happen in the future. In a way you made me

become fascinated by my mother’s sin, and I am forever

grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to delve into

it. But I don’t believe for one moment that had anything to

do with my being crippled with pain. It made me unhappy,

but not ill.129

The difference between Jung and Freud is a difference in method. Freud asks why

this dream, why has the patient had this particular dream rather than any other? But Jung

says that his own aim is the purpose of the dream, what the dream introduces to the

patient’s world. Although Thomas doesn’t bring Jung and Lisa together at this stage of

the novel, he implies that Jung’s attitude is more convenient for Lisa’s therapy. That

Lisa’s symptoms, rather than being the manifestations of a sexually oriented neurosis as

Freud assumed, are related to the Holocaust to come, that his symptoms are themselves

the emotional response she gives to the aggressive impulses haunting Europe is very

similar to what Jung experienced in 1910s. In the 1910s, Jung, just like Lisa, was having

hallucinations and was relating these to his personal life. But later it became clear to Jung

that these hallucinations were a result of the approaching violence on a massive scale. In

129
Thomas, 171
202
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes that following the death of some of his

friends he suffered from mental and physical problems similar to those of Lisa.

The couples Eros/Thanatos, Heaven/Hell, love/hate, Venus/Medusa in Lisa’s

poem are references to Jung’s theories. For Jung the archetypes in the collective

unconscious of humanity is made of a series of oppositions. Among these good and evil

are the most important ones and are the two inseparable absolutes. In the novel Lisa says,

What torments me is whether life is good or evil. I think often of

that scene I stumbled into on my father’s yacht. The woman I

thought was praying had a fierce, frightening expression; but her

‘reflection’ was peaceful and smiling. The smiling woman (I think

it must have been my aunt) was resting her hand on my mother’s

breast (as if to reassure her it was all right, she didn’t mind). But

the faces – at least to me now – were so contradictory. And must

have been contradictory in themselves too: the grimacing woman,

joyful; and the smiling woman, sad. Medusa and Ceres, as you so

brilliantly say! It may sound crazy, but I think the idea of the incest

troubles me far more profoundly as a symbol than as a real event.

Good and evil coupling, to make the world. No, forgive me, I am

writing wildly. The ravings of a lonely spinster!130

Jung’s answer to Lisa’s question is in his Psychology and Alchemy. According to

Jung,

[…] in the self good and evil are indeed closer than identical twins!

[…] Hence the truth about the self – the unfathomable union of

130
Thomas, 171
203
 good and evil – comes out concretely in the paradox that although

sin is the gravest and most pernicious thing there is, it is still not so

serious that it cannot be disposed of with probabilist arguments.131

From Ferenczi’s letter to Freud at the beginning of the novel we learn that Jung

offends Freud by interpreting the imagery of “peat-bog corpses” as the “bodies of

prehistoric men mummified by the effect of the humic acid in the bog water.”132 Jung

connects these “peat-bog corpses” to the primitive “pre-historic monster” running free in

the unconscious. Freud almost faints upon hearing Jung’s interpretation and furiously

accuses Jung of being full of envious feelings toward him.

At the end of the novel, however, the “peat-bog corpses” turn out to be something

completely other than what Freud and Jung thought they were. Thomas questions not

only Freud’s but also Jung’s theories of the unconscious. The “peat-bog corpses” are

neither symptoms of neurosis, as Freud says, nor are they signifiers of the primitive side

of man as Jung says. The “peat-bog corpses” refer to the traumatic kernel of what

happened during the holocaust, the thousands of holocaust victims massacred at Babi

Yar. Neither Freud’s nor Jung’s theories can interpret and cure Lisa’s illness, because

they both impose a symbolic meaning upon the Real of Lisa’s experiences.

Just like psychoanalysis, literature too tries to symbolize the Real and translate the

unconscious drives into conscious and desirable forms. The forms, however, are false

representations of the unconscious, and usually give false forms to percepts and affects;

literature is a falsification of the Real. In accordance with this, Thomas often refers to

other literary and non-literary texts, makes connections between them to expose their

self-contradictions, his meaning itself dissolves in this web of relations; meaning

131
Carl G. Jung, “Problems of Alchemy,” Selected Writings, ed. Anthony Storr (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1983), 270-1
132
Thomas, 10
204
proliferates. Finding himself/herself in this hubris of intertextuality, in this abundance of

meaning, the reader thinks that he/she has understood the novel, when in fact he/she is

drowning in the meaninglessness overflowing the text. All these illusions collapse with

the chapter about Babi Yar. It becomes clear to the reader that it was all an illusion, and

behind this illusion there is nothing but a big, black, hungry spider waiting for him/her.

Where there should have been a void, death, there is this black spider to stand in for it.

This black spider is the Lacanian objet petit a par excellence. In The White Hotel the

objet petit a is a life consuming monster projected onto the Real.

Lisa sighed. “Why is it like this, Richard? We were made to be

happy and to enjoy life. What’s happened?” He shook his head in

bafflement, and breathed out smoke. “Were we made to be happy?

You’re an incurable optimist, old girl!”133

2. Is Everyman an Island?

Islands are either from before or after humankind.134

Gilles Deleuze

William Golding’s Lord of The Flies is an allegory of the death-drive inherent in

human nature. It is a reversal of Ballantyne’s The Coral Island. In direct opposition to

The Coral Island in which three young men establish the British culture on an island after

their ship sinks in the Pacific Ocean, in Lord of The Flies we have children who become

deranged and lose control of their aggressive impulses on a deserted island. In the

absence of an external authority they become more and more violent. Golding is implying
133
Thomas, 239-40
134
Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2004), 9
205
that humankind is violent by nature and the absence of symbolic order initiates a

regressive process governed by the unconscious drives leading to violence and

destruction.

People prefer security and certainty to truth, they want an unshakable, stable order

in which they can feel secure. They want object relations that sustain the conditions of

impossibility for dispersal and death. Their will is a will not to truth but to security of the

womb. And yet this striving for security itself brings calamities on the subject. For being

in pursuit of the past is a product of will to nothingness and will to nothingness is nothing

but the desire for death disguised as desire for the mother’s womb. Science attempts to

construct the relationship between the subject and its objects in such a way as to serve the

ideology, which subjects the individual to certain rules and regulations in the way of

manufacturing an illusory sense of security. This is the definition of ideology in a

nutshell. For Socrates, as Nietzsche points out in The Birth of Tragedy, one has to be

judged before the courts of Logos, become nameable, become an object of knowledge, to

be able to become nice and good.

How can the good principle win over the bad principle? To answer this question I

turn back to Lord of The Flies and Deleuze’s definition of an island as it appears in

Desert Islands. An island is the proper place for horror fiction. An island is detached

from the external world; it is surrounded by water and is closed in on itself. On an island

the subject is alone and this aloneness in the absence of a symbolic order brings the

subject closer to its primordial form which is the state of being governed by the death-

drive. On an island everything starts anew and progresses in time. A generic singularity is

like an island to be sown with the seeds of new forms of life. The concept of island has

for a long time been an object standing in for either the dark side or the brighter side of

206
civilization. In Thomas More’s Utopia for instance, we see a better world contrasted with

the dark world of the dominant symbolic order in More’s day. Likewise, in Aldous

Huxley’s Island we see all the social problems of humanity solved on an Island called

Pala. In Pala, family structure, habits of consumption-production, relation to body,

healthy living, etc. all take a new form. In Brave New World Huxley had portrayed an

exact opposite situation in which a knowledge based on the principles of totalitarianism

was the regime governing life, love, and truth.

The island in Lord of The Flies becomes the stage on which the children regress

to a primitive state and all their aggressive impulses come to the fore as a result of the

absence of certain governing principles imposed on them. Golding’s attitude can easily

be considered conservative, or even as advocating the goodness of totalitarianism.

Golding’s pessimism is divided within itself. It is his intellect that is pessimistic,

as for his will it’s highly optimistic. With the pessimism of his intellect he controls his

will and keeps optimism at bay. When the intellect is pessimistic it strives to make things

better and if the will is ill then this striving to make things better turns into a will to

nothingness. Although the intellect seems to be the uniting force, the life-drive,

represented by Eros, the reverse is the case, for it is will that is the uniting force and the

intellect is the splitting force. Intellect splits objects surrounding the subject in the way of

attaining an indivisible remainder. Atomization of thought stops when one reaches that

indivisible remainder, which is the unsymbolizable traumatic kernel, the real of one’s

desire, which is the death-drive. It is only through entry into the symbolic order that the

death-drive turns into the life-drive. In this context, we can say that the life-drive belongs

to the depressive position and the death-drive belongs to the paranoid-schizoid position.

On a deserted island the subject regresses to the paranoid-schizoid position and in its

207
detachment becomes aggressive towards the objects surrounding it. Since there is no

object at which the subject can direct its aggressiveness the subject turns against itself.

On an island there is no object to which the subject can project his bad objects. The bad

objects explode like shit and poison the subject which increases the rapidity of

deterioration and regress to a state before birth, which is the same state as that of after

death. It is on an island that the conflict between the life drive and the death drive

emerges on the surface in the form of conflict-events. These conflict-events give birth to

symptoms. In the process of turning these symptoms into objects of knowledge the

psychoanalyst, philosopher, artist, or scientist, all translate them into acceptable forms,

that is, they give forms to affects, percepts, and concepts in the way of making the subject

get rid of this fundamental antagonism. All life is conflict and on a deserted island this

conflict and the suffering it causes are magnified by inordinate measures. An island is a

microscopic setting for the exposition of the other within, the evil, the tyrant, the fascist

in everyone of us, to which, according to Nietzsche, not only the intellect but also the will

submit.

Perhaps Nietzsche’s most important contribution to philosophy is not only the

distinction he makes between knowledge and truth, but also the asymmetrical relationship

he establishes between will and intellect, a reversal of Schopenhauer’s symmetrical

model in which the will is portrayed as the exact opposite of intellect. When Nietzsche

says “man would much rather will nothingness than not will,” what he wants to say is

that man would prefer to want to contain nothingness, that is, introject the emptiness

opened by the death of God, rather than prefer not to have anything, which would mean

projecting everything in him onto the object cause of desire, hence disqualifying it as

bad-object. This also means that the subject ceases to be a subject, but becomes an object

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of the life-drive. Life-drive, with its unificatory and binding force, constitutes not the

subject but the absence of the subject. By imposing a unity on the infinity of the subject

as death-drive, Eros subjectivizes the subject in process and turns it into a static entity, an

object of desire. It is from then onwards that the subject is shaped as an object of desire

under the rule of the symbolic order. To escape from the condition of being caught up in

this system which the subject reproduces even when he thinks he is negating it consists in

surviving the conflict between the life-drive and the death-drive, in other words, passing

across the gap separating knowledge and truth, and filling a space in time as a

symbolically self-identical subject, while the Real subject is oppressed and strives to

signify the gap inherent in the symbolic order. It is only through splitting the given

unities and continuities that the Real subject can manifest itself. This Real can only

manifest itself in the form of absences, gaps, splits, which are themselves the openings to

the Real of the subject as the death-drive.

It is the vicious cycle of the life and death drives that is being produced and

exploited by global capitalism today. Through a manipulation of the healthy conflict, the

relationship between the life and death drives is turned into antagonism. Undecidability,

absence of foundational truth procedures, loss of principles, and declarations of the end

of history are all manifestations of a discursive disease which is very rapidly

contaminating the relationship between humans and their own health. In a world where a

normal person must have a therapist, where having a therapist is a sign of normalcy, there

can be no other choice but to shake the foundations of the illusions on which the health of

many generations to come depends.

209
 3. The Projection-Introjection Mechanism in Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans

The consequences of projection of fantasies onto the Real can be clearly observed

in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, which was quite a subversive book in its time, carrying

Kerouac quite high up the cultural ladder, and in Burroughsian terms “causing thousands

of Levi’s sold”.

In The Subterraneans we see Jack Kerouac’s persona Leo oscillating between

attraction to and repulsion by Mardou who is a Cherokee American. One half of Leo

loves Mardou and the other half is afraid of this love. If in one chapter Leo declares his

love for Mardou, in the next chapter we see him resenting her. Leo’s oscillation between

the life drive and the death drive constitute a movement between negation and the

transcendence of this negation. Affirmation always remains at bay for Kerouac and his

character Leo. Perhaps only at the beginning of the novel he gets a bit closer to

affirmation, but this affirmation is in no way an affirmation of Mardou as she is. Rather,

it is the affirmation of what has happened throughout the novel, an affirmation of that

which has lead to the break-up of Mardou and Leo, as if what has taken place was what

actually happened, rather than a projection of Leo’s paranoid fantasy on what has actually

happened. At the end of the novel it becomes clear that all that has been lived had been

lived for this novel to be written, rather than for its own sake.

[…] this was my three week thought and really the energy behind

or the surface one behind the creation of the Jealousy Phantasy in

the Grey Guilt dream of the World Around Our Bed.)—now I saw

Mardou pushing Yuri with a OH YOU and I shuddered to think

something maybe was going on behind my back – felt warned too

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 by the quick and immediate manner Yuri heard me coming and

rolled off but as if guiltily as I say after some kind of goose or feel

up some illegal touch of Mardou which made her purse little love

loff lips at him and push at him and like kids.135

Upon having the dream Leo begins to see everything through the keyhole of his

obsession that one day Mardou will sleep with Yuri if she hasn’t already done so. I would

like to read this story with the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from Heaven to Earth in

mind, or the passage from the old Earth to the new Earth. What’s at stake here is the

conflict between what’s going on in Leo’s mind as to what’s going on in Mardou’s mind

and what’s really going on in Mardou’s mind. There is, in reality, nothing going on in

Mardou’s mind. It is Leo projecting what he read in the Bible onto Mardou’s mind, what

he read in the Bible being that it was Eve who caused the fall, for it was her who tempted

Adam to eat the apple. So Leo is projecting what he has introjected from the Bible. And

the Bible was the representation of women in general and his mother in particular for

Kerouac. The preconception in Leo’s mind that women are evil, sinful, and guilty by

nature both attracts and repels Leo. This state of being caught in a movement between

repulsion/attraction ties the subject with an endless chain of negative associations to his

own fear of being betrayed, pushing him further towards madness and death. The final

words of the book bring the end which Leo was from the beginning of the relationship

more than willing to reach: separation and through writing it down reunification with the

lost object. For as we know from Freud, “writing was in its origin the voice of an absent

person.”

And I go home having lost her love.

135
Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans (Penguin: London, 2001), 69
211
 And write this book.136

Leo believes that he has had the dream and that if he has the dream of it the

sexual intercourse in real life has either taken place or will take place in the future.

Kerouac/Leo is, “at present,” writing The Subterraneans. And everything has already

taken place; the sequence of events follows this way: Leo has the dream, Mardou engages

in sexual intercourse with Yuri, Mardou and Leo break up, Leo continues the daydream,

laughs to retain sanity in the face of this tragedy, and goes home and writes this book. In

it there is no true story; and it doesn’t matter whether there is or not a true story other

than the story of an unhappy consciousness running towards its death in and through a

story of love, affection, resentment, guilt, and compassion, which exposes the symptoms

of a life as it unceasingly wills its subject’s end.

[…]still making no impression on my eager impressionable ready-

to-create construct destroy and die brain – as will be seen in the

great construction of jealousy which I later from a dream and for

reasons of self-laceration recreated…137

Now, Leo sees Mardou in bed with Yuri and obsessively believes that his dream

will come true. Leo believes himself to be a clairvoyant, that he has the ability to know

things prior to seeing them actually taking place before his eyes. This he has introjected

from Mardou herself, who, in a Nietzschean fashion, believes, does, and says things

which simultaneously repel and attract Leo. There is no linear narrative in Mardou’s story

about her adventures with the subterraneans of San Francisco and Leo likes it because

there remain lots of gaps for him to fill with his fantasies later on when he is writing his

story. Say what she may,

136
Kerouac, The Subterraneans, 93
137
Kerouac, 39
212
 I got nervous and had some kind of idea about Mike, he kept

looking at me like he wanted to kill me – he has such a funny look

anyway – I got out of the house and walked along and didn’t know

which way to go, my mind kept turning into the several directions

that I was thinking of going but my body kept walking straight

along Columbus altho’ I felt the sensation of each of the directions

I mentally and emotionally turned into, amazed at all the possible

directions you can take with different motives that come in, like it

can make you a different person – I’ve often thought of this since

childhood, of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually

did I’d turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is

insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my

whole life in the end? – What’s in store for me in the direction I

don’t take? – and all that, so if this had not been such a constant

preoccupation that accompanied me in my solitude which I played

upon in as many different ways as possible I wouldn’t bother now

except but seeing the horrible roads this pure supposing goes to it

took me to frights, if I wasn’t so damned persistent –’ and so on

deep into the day, a long confusing story only pieces of which and

imperfectly I remember, just the mass of the misery in connective

form –138

What, then, is this “connective form”? Who, then, is the subject of this “mass of

misery pieces of which are imperfectly remembered”? There is a different way of

138
Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans, 20
213
remembering in action here, a different way of being in relation to time and language in

this “imperfect remembrance” of the lived experiences. The problem with Kerouac’s

writing is that he is not separating his introjected object from the projecting subject.

Kerouac wants to represent Mardou as she is and yet he at the same time wants to prove

that Leo was the one pulling the strings from the beginning. What Mardou is actually

trying to convey is veiled by Kerouac who makes it impossible for the reader to

distinguish between fiction and reality, self and other, subject and object, projected and

introjected. His voice dissolves into the voice of Mardou and Mardou’s story remains

unheard. Rather than unveiling, Kerouac’s writing not only veils but also manipulates the

truth of the other for his abusive purposes. All his life Kerouac struggled to traverse this

field of partial representations of the other, but being an innocent fascist he repeatedly

fell into his own traps and failed in affirming the real as it is. If he could have loved the

real as it is, he could have “delivered himself from his automatic reactions,” and thus he

could have become “a body without organs.”139

While most of us live by the time of good sense, the Nietzschean

subject is able to defy such sense and experience the creative

evolution of self in exploration of a deeper memory – the virtual

memory of the pure past as the event of events of the eternal

return. Rather than a self-identical self, the self of the third

139
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (University of California: Berkeley, 1975), 570-1
“When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom
then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dancehalls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.”

214
 synthesis of time is a creatively evolving self who is able to

genuinely affirm life as metamorphosis.140

Leo chooses to become partially mad, for Mardou is the other half of his madness.

The internal theatre of Leo stages a sexual intercourse between Mardou and Yuri and/but

although this intercourse has not yet taken place, Leo is assured that one day it will. Leo

had started plotting ways of getting rid of Mardou three weeks prior to their split. Is this

will a will to end the relationship that makes Leo see this dream? In other words, is the

source of this dream a will-to-nothingness-oriented-hope, a wish that Mardou will engage

in sexual intercourse with Yuri and the relationship will end that way? Or is the dream

based on a will-to-nothingness-oriented-fear that Mardou does not, and has never loved

Leo? These questions can be asked if one wants to know what the dream means, in other

words these questions are interpretation oriented questions and my aim here is not to

interpret Leo’s dream and understand what it means but rather to make use of this dream

in understanding why this dream matters not only for The Subterraneans, but also for

twentieth century philosophy, literature, cultural and critical theory, and psychoanalysis.

Both Oedipus and Leo see themselves as innocent victims “caught in a trap set by

the God.” Fiction and reality give birth to one another in each case. In Oedipus’ case the

prophecy turns into truth, in Leo’s case a dream turns into reality. Leo believes in what he

sees in his dream and he sees Mardou in bed with Yuri. And his strong belief, almost an

obsession, that one day Mardou will sleep with Yuri gives birth to the actualisation of this

event at the end of the novel. Leo tells everyone about his dream. He tells Mardou almost

every day following his dream that he is worried about the future of their relationship.

Leo’s paranoid-schizoid attitude prepares the grounds for the actualization of what he

140
Tamsin Lorraine, “Living a Time Out of Joint,” Between Deleuze and Derrida, eds. Paul Patton and
John Protevi (Continuum: London and NY, 2003), 39
215
was afraid of. At the end of the story, the only thing left at hand for Leo to make the best

of is to write his experiences down and turn his loss into a gain in and through language.

Leo is such a tragic character that in order to remain sane he has to laugh at himself by

considering the “whole host and foolish illusion and entire rigmarole and madness we

erect in the place of one love, in our sadness...”141 to be a joke. When Leo learns that

Mardou has actually slept with Yuri, when the truth is finally established, when fiction

turns into reality, he addresses the reader:

“[...]but I continue the daydream and I look into his eyes and I see

suddenly the glare of a jester angel who made his presence on earth all a

joke and I realize that this too with Mardou was a joke and I think, ‘Funny

Angel, elevated amongst the subterraneans.’

‘Baby its up to you,’ is what she’s actually saying, ‘ about how

many times you wanta see me and all that – but I want to be independent

like I say.’

And I go home having lost her love.

And write this book.142

Kerouac writes through love, but through a love that Leo is afraid of falling in.

And his writing is the product of a sick desire, it is driven by a love of love, a desire to be

desired. Kerouac exposes himself through Leo in such a way as to show why it is

necessary to create something without becoming destructive of either the self or the other.

Something that he himself doesn’t know how to do. It is an ill will that drives Kerouac

towards manic-depressive, self-destructive alcoholism. His consciousness of the absence

of “eternal love” in this finite life together with his immortal longing for an eternal love

141
Kerouac, The Subterraneans (Penguin: London, 2001), 77
142
Kerouac, 93
216
turn him into “a shipwreck on the shores of lust.” What Kerouac lacks in life is what is

necessary to operate the war-machine in Kerouac. Love is the force that drives the war-

machine and Kerouac is afraid of loving with a greater love, without projective

identification. He is a paranoid love-machine because his love is in the form of a spark

given birth by the struggle between the superiority and the inferiority complexes he

simultaneously harbors within himself.

In the absence of a war–machine, war dominates the world. And when war

dominates the world there is nothing left for one to write but that although his books are

among the most important examples of a different way of being in relation to time,

language, and life, Kerouac is “locked into an attenuating endgame, playing himself, with

each move, further into a corner and into defeat.”143 He, suffering inordinately from an

irrecoverable loss, an irreparable deterioration of psychic and somatic health, pays a high

price to render us the witnesses of his fantastic experiences.

Kerouac died in 1969 and/but long ago, in 1951, eighteen years before ceasing to

exist among the living, in On the Road, he writes this:

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I

always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across

chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the

bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at

my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and

myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew

into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and

inconceivable radiances shining in bright Mind Essence,

143
J.M. Coetzee, Youth (Secker and Warburg: London, 2002), 169
217
 innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of

heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething soar which wasn’t

in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I

realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just

didn’t remember especially because the transition from life to

death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for

naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the

utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only

because of the stability of the intrinsic mind that these ripples of

birth and death took place, like that action of wind on a sheet of

pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a

big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in

the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought

I was going to die the very next moment.144

What Kerouac enjoys is death from pleasure, what he desires is suffering. In

Kerouac’s writing there is a multiplication of the directions towards which it becomes

possible for the subject to head as the subject goes along the way creating new life forces

out of his Dionysiac regress. In time, however, Kerouac’s revolutionary becoming takes

such a direction that his desire turns against itself turning him into a reactive force

drowning in his own resentment. The Kerouac image represented by the media

(newspapers, TV, radio), is in conflict with Kerouac’s image of himself, and this relation

to himself of Kerouac through a media, through an external force, through a panoptic eye,

locks Kerouac into the projection-introjection mechanism through which he constantly

144
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, 1957), 173
218
breaks and is beaten by as he beats. This operation is more than Kerouac can actively

handle, and turns him into a reactive and anti-social person making him “rather will

nothingness than not will,” destroying him in the process.

Conclusion of Part III

In Julio Cortazar’s short story Axolot, we read the main character realizing that

the type of fish called Axolot stand still in water with no movement at all, a kind of

motionless flight. With this realization the character commits himself to becoming like

those fish himself. At the end of the story he sees everyone outside of himself as an

Axolot fish. He has become an axolot himself. He has gone beyond the finitude of his

existence. He becomes altogether immobile, merely an observer, watching people, life,

opportunities, and time pass by. Eventually he becomes imperceptible. Here and now

everything is continually changing towards becoming-imperceptible. Time turns

something into nothing. Everything is in time only for a short period of time. Then

everything disappears in a neutral light.

To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone

and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A

clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become

like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only

for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be

anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.145

It is the ambiguity of the relationship between the life drive and the death drive

that is being manipulated by global capitalism (contemporary nihilism) today.

145
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota
Press: Minnesota, 1988), 197
219
Undecidability, absence of foundational truth procedures, loss of principles, and

declarations of the end of history and the subject are all manifestations of a discursive

disease which is very rapidly contaminating the relationship between humans and their

own health. In a world where a normal person must have a therapist, where having a

therapist is a sign of normalcy, there can be no other choice but to shake the foundations

of the illusions on which the health of many generations to come depends.

Carrying out an intervention in the course of events, introducing a split into the

continuity of things requires learning how not to be produced by the image factory which

captures desire in a certain order of signification mechanism so as to turn the subject into

a copy of the products of the image factory, or into the object of the other’s interpretation

and identification processes. To become capable at least to subvert the codes of the

capitalist axiomatics which produces desire as the desire of nothingness and death, this

subject should come to a realization that he/she is already caught up in the projection-

introjection mechanism. So the subject has to learn to use the projection-introjection

mechanism in such a way as to sustain the conditions for the impossibility of wickedness

in the form of exclusive and illusory constructions of the Real. Surviving the absence of a

transcendental signified in a “time out of joint” requires learning to love the object of

desire for what it is rather than for what it resembles. This is to love and live without

projective identification, without paranoid reactions to the other, without possessing the

other, or without confining the other within the boundaries of the self. One has to cease to

be somebody and learn to become nobody so as to create a difference in and for itself and

affirm this difference by affirming the difference of that which is “not I.”

220
 CONSEQUENCES: Beyond The Life Death Drives

1. The Immortal Subject Beyond The Life Drive

In our daily lives we create little worlds of our own and invest them with various

meanings. These worlds have their own logics, orders repetitively staged every day; this

gives us a sense of continuity in time and hence a sense of security. Objects and subjects

surrounding us, everything fits in its proper place in this microcosmic self-consciousness

of ours.

The thought of being a tiny spot in the middle of nowhere, however, or

somewhere in the vast universe is too unbearable to be thought through for many people

because it reminds us of death. If one thinks this thought for too long all meaning

collapses and life falls apart, the established symbolic order of object relations become

disorganized. This is when the journey of the subject towards nothingness begins. If the

subject manages to maintain integrity throughout the passage from self-consciousness to

an impersonal consciousness reconciliation of self with life and the world takes place.

With the advance of this macrocosmic impersonal consciousness in time everything

symbolic loses meaning and credibility only to lead to an opening up of a space for the

emergence of a new meaning. The new is not independent from the old. But is that which

had hitherto been unseen, unrealised, unthought as a new possibility of a progressive

movement.

Authentic fidelity is the fidelity to the void itself—to the very act

of loss, of abandoning or erasing the object. Why should the dead

be the object of attachment in the first place? The name for this

fidelity is death drive. In the terms of dealing with the dead, one

should, perhaps, against the work of mourning as well as against

221
 the melancholic attachment to the dead who return as ghosts, assert

the Christian motto “let the dead bury their dead.” The obvious

reproach to this motto is, What are we to do when, precisely, the

dead do not accept to stay dead, but continue to live in us, haunting

us by their spectral presence? One is tempted here to claim that the

most radical dimension of the Freudian death drive provides the

key to how we are to read the Christian “let the dead bury their

dead”: what death drive tries to obliterate is not the biological life

but the very afterlife—it endeavours to kill the lost object the

second time, not in the sense of mourning (accepting the loss

through symbolization) but in a more radical sense of obliterating

the very symbolic texture, the letter in which the spirit of the dead

survives.146

So, neither the work of mourning nor melancholia are progressive. It is the work

of death drive to kill death, to cause a loss of loss, to destroy the symbolic texture causing

death to take place; death drive is the only weapon against death in life. Rather than

symbolizing and then accepting death, the subject as death drive contemplates death as

nothingness and fills the space of death within the symbolic with nothing.

Zizek points out that there is a great difference between willing nothing and

willing nothingness.

What we are implicitly referring to here is, of course, Nietzsche’s

classic opposition between ‘wanting nothing’ (in the sense of ‘I

don’t want anything’) and the nihilistic stance of actively wanting

146
Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies (London: Routledge, 2004), 13
222
 Nothingness itself; following Nietzsche’s path, Lacan emphasized

how in anorexia, the subject does not simply ‘eat nothing’ – rather,

she or he actively wants to eat the Nothingness (the Void) that is

itself the ultimate object-cause of desire. (The same goes for Ernst

Kris’s famous patient who felt guilty of theft, although he did not

actually steal anything: what he did steal, again, was the

Nothingness itself.) So – along the same lines, in the case of

caffeine-free diet Coke, we drink the Nothingness itself, the pure

semblance of a property that is in effect merely an envelope of a

void.147

The object that takes the place of the Real is what Lacan calls the objet petit a.

The objet petit a is that which the master-signifier causes to be signified. There is nothing

to signify the objet petit a, it is that signifier itself. The master-signifier signifies the objet

petit a as its own signifier. Without the objet petit a the nothingness behind the master-

signifier would become manifest. Master signifier generates signs that signify their own

autonomous existence. That is, they hide the latent content of the master-signifier which

is nothingness. By manufacturing the illusion of its own non-being the master-signifier

signifies itself as the transcendental signified. It does this through signifying the objet

petit a as the transcendental sign, (signifier and signified at once). The sublime object

which stands in for nothingness behind it is the object of desire of masses who fantasize

that they are drinking something good, when in reality they are drinking the void and

their own life/death.

147
Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), 23
223
 One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the willing that

has received its direction from the ascetic ideal actually expresses:

this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the

material, this abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of

happiness and of beauty, this longing away from all appearance,

change, becoming, death, wish, longing itself—all of this means—

let us grasp this—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a

rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but

it is and remains a will!… And, to say again at the end what I said

at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness than not

will… 148

In The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Zizek gives the example of Diet-Coke as a

symptom of will to nothingness inherent in contemporary society.

So, when, some years ago, the advertising slogan for Coke was

‘Coke is it!’, we should note its thorough ambiguity: ‘that’s it’

precisely in so far as that’s never actually it, precisely in so far as

every satisfaction opens up a gap of ‘I want more!’. The paradox,

therefore, is that Coke is not an ordinary commodity whereby its-

use value is transubstantiated into an expression of (or

supplemented with) the auratic dimension of pure (exchange)

Value, but a commodity whose very peculiar use-value is itself

already a direct embodiment of the suprasensible aura of the

ineffable spiritual surplus, a commodity whose very material

148
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, transl. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 118
224
 properties are already those of a commodity. This process is

brought to its conclusion in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke –

why? We drink Coke – or any drink – for two reasons: for its

thirst-quenching or nutritional value, and for its taste. In the case of

caffeine-free diet Coke, nutritional value is suspended and the

caffeine, as the key ingredient of its taste, is also taken away – all

that remains is a pure semblance, an artificial promise of a

substance which never materialized. Is it not true that in this sense,

in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, we almost literally ‘drink

nothing in the guise of something’?149

By drinking Diet-Coke, the subject, rather than being really healthy, is being

merely less ill, since Diet or not, Coke is itself unhealthy. Coke as we know it is miles

away from its medicinal uses for which it was invented in the first place. The measure of

health is not Coke without caffeine and sugar. So the Diet-Coke cannot be a sign of

healthy living. Worse than being unhealthy, it is death disguised as an object of desire,

that object of desire being healthy living. So we can see the process through which the

Real of the subject’s desire, which is the death-drive, is turned into desire for healthy

living. As the subject thinks he/she is moving towards greater health, he/she is in reality

moving towards death. We have to be clear about where exactly the life-drive and the

death-drive become separated from themselves and hence their roles are reversed, turning

them into their opposites. It is precisely at this point of separation- unification of the life-

drive and the death-drive that the conflict-event takes the place of the place itself.

149
Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 22
225
 This place is a playground on which this conflict-event between the life-drive and

the death-drive is played out as a confrontation between the therapeutic society and

critical theory. If the aim of psychotherapy is to adapt the subject to the environment,

then it is by definition a normalizing practice. But asks critical theory, what is the

definition of health? On which grounds are we talking about health? What are the values

that make health? All these questions may lead down to the big question of ontology:

“What is the meaning of life?” There is no meaning of life. It is my actions and words

that invest my life with a particular meaning. What determines the meaning of objects

surrounding me is the use I put them into. In this context, progress in therapeutic

procedure is signified by an increase in the subject’s ability to use the objects surrounding

him/her.

But critical theory says: you are confusing use-value and exchange-value. You are

forgetting the need to remember that in your world the exchange-value preceeds the use-

value. You are always already born into the world of objects with their values attached to

them, how can you say that you are healing these people by telling lies to them

concerning the cause of their desire and the Real of the objects they choose to put to use.

Isn’t their choice already determined by the pre-dominant symbolic order?150

Critical theory agrees with psychotherapy that it is the use value of the object that

is important. But what critical theory wants to say is that what psychotherapy presents the

subject with, as the use-value, is already the exchange-value, so psychotherapy is

presenting the subject with death disguised as life. It is there that there has been a shift in

the gears, where Nietzsche conceived of himself as the stage of confrontation between

150
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964)

226
Christ and Dionysus, as the conflict-event that shifted the gears at a certain moment in

history. At this precise moment in time negation and affirmation change roles for the very

reason that negating the symbolic order becomes the same as affirming the Real. One

creates a fantasy which negates the symbolic and affirms the Real as it is, that is, with all

its inconsistencies, internal conflicts, imperfections, and incompleteness. Something in

the symbolic order is caused to fail by these interventions of the affirmative subject. Here

a question awaits us: Does that mean that for creation to take place destruction is

necessary? The answer to this question is a yes and a no at the same time. Because

destruction causes a split in the order and yet this split’s consequence depends on the

future of the response to it. Destruction is not essential to creation but is an inescapable

result of it. 151 So there may or may not be cases where there is something in the process

of being created without anything being destroyed. For when one thinks about it, creation

is not a subtraction from nature, but quite the contrary, an addition to it. For subtraction

to become creative it should be a subtraction from culture, that is, from knowledge, or

from the already existing symbolic order. Badiou’s subtraction opens a void within the

already existing symbolic order and through this void a new truth flows. It is only in so

far as the mortal human animal chooses fidelity to this truth-event that it becomes a

subject, that is, an immortal indifferent to death.

2. The Immortal Subject Beyond The Death Drive

The creature called human can cease being a passive non-being and become an

active being only insofar as it produces love against the negative power of the already

existing capitalist law. As we all know, the laws’ negative impositions give birth to the

151
Alain Badiou, InfiniteThought, trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum,
2005), 132
227
vicious cycle of the life and death drives, which is in turn exploited in the way of more

money.

With the domination of nihilist global capitalism all over the world social life has

become a masquerade. The silence diminishes and noise pollutes the lives of all. This

noise is what Nietzsche calls “the noise of the marketplace.” The subject neither

questions its being in itself nor its being for itself. The system provides the subject with

innumerable facilities to keep boredom at bay so as to sustain the conditions for the

possibility of the non-being of thought to take place. The subject simply does not feel the

need to think and in time the subject loses the ability not only to think but also to act

consciously. It all becomes an empty and meaningless spectacle to live. Every subject

takes on a role, or an identity in accordance with the demands of the show business and

hides behind this role turning into a solipsistic monad acting itself out in the way of

satisfying the big Other. Just like Judge Schreber who had to endure inordinate measures

of suffering to satisfy the demands of those cruel gods he populated himself with… And

Schreber, satisfied as he was with the mere pleasure of sharing the high profile mission of

satisfying cruel and invisible gods, becomes a madman when in fact he was a woman

enduring privation.152

In the banality of ordinary social reality the subject forgets to think of its death as

its own. Absence of the thought of death brings with it the presence of the thought of

being, which means that the subject has lost his/her sense of self/other distinction, and is

governed by his/her unconscious drives. This leads to the subject’s ignorance of an

152
Sigmund Freud, Psycho-analytic Notes On An Autobiogrophical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia
(Dementia Paranoids), trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth Press, 1986)

228
external world, or perhaps an unintentional neglect of an external reality other than the

one it imagines, for it has itself become exterior to itself.

When death is thought about, this thought never takes place in terms of the death

of the self. It is always through the death of the other that the subject thinks of death. It is

always a “they” who die. Death is conceived as a symbolic incident. The reason of that

reductive attitude towards death is the will to preserve the banality of ordinary reality and

sustain the conditions for the possibility of an illusory sense of oneness with the world.

All this, of course, is done to keep the Real of the external world at bay.

Global capitalism produces subjects who cannot stand the thought of the outside;

they cannot conceive the absence of an external world within them. The fear of death is

so strong that with the force of its negativity it totally negates death in life, erases the

slash in life/death, and vainly erects statues to attain immortality.

It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering

about over the body without organs, but always remaining

peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of

the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere

a reward in the form of a becoming an avatar, being born of the

states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state. “It’s

me, and so it’s mine…” Even suffering, as Marx says, is a form of

self-enjoyment.153

Today the purpose of life has become keeping the subject busy for the sake of the

business of not thinking death. The subject is bombarded by objects of introjection to

such extent that it has no time for feeling anxious about its own death. The objects form a

153
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 16
229
transparent sheet between the subject and its death. As inorganic substances the objects

fill the space of death within life. What we witness in this time is life turned into a project

aiming at erasing the silence necessary for thought; and not only erasing but also

replacing it with an unceasing noise causing nausea.

The infinite, then, is within finitude, so in order to think the infinite we have to

think the finite, that is, the thought of death. Although the thought of death has a high

price which the subject pays by a loss of mental and physical health, it is nevertheless

useful in opening up the way to limit experiences. The death drive devastates the

predominant conceptualisations of the “good” of civilized progress and the “bad” of

barbaric regress. The subject of the death drive situates itself as the traitor on the opposite

pole of belief and faith in immortality. In the place of statues representing immortality, it

erects nothing. That way it confronts the promised land of total security and harmony

with a world governed by the anxiety of the feeling of being surrounded by nothingness.

In this world there remains no ground beneath the symbolic order. Death is in the midst

of life; it is life that surrounds death.

How would our lives change if we were to become capable of imagining

ourselves as immortal beings? If we keep in mind that we are always already locked

within the vicious cycle of the life and death drives governed by the law of capital, it

becomes easier to understand why we need to break this vicious cycle of Capitalism and

its governor, liberal-democracy, based on unjust representations, in order to create,

produce or present the realm of love beyond the rotary motion of drives. But it must also

be kept in mind that when we say beyond, we are talking about a beyond which is always

already within the pre-dominant symbolic order and yet not within the reach of mortal

beings. It is a beyond only from the perspective of the present state. In our scenario,

230
immortality is not something to be attained, rather, it is a virtual potential or an actual

capacity within every mortal being, awaiting to be realised. The realisation of the

immortality within us, or the realisation of the infinite potential that life contains,

depends on our proper use of our powers of imagination. Let us imagine ourselves as

immortal beings then, which we already are, but cannot enact because of the finitude

imposed upon us by the already existing symbolic order. Would we need to get out of this

order to become immortal? Yes and no. Yes, because the within which we said infinity

resides is a within which is exterior only from the point of view of the already existing

order. No, because only from within the already existing order can we present an outside

of this order, “an outside” in Deleuze’s words apropos of Foucault and Blanchot, “which

is closer than any interiority and further away than any exteriority.”

In his Theoretical Writings Alain Badiou attempts to separate himself from the

Romantic understanding of infinity, and the pursuit of immortality. According to Badiou,

contemporary mathematics broke with the Romantic idea of infinity by dissolving the

Romantic concept of finitude. For Badiou, as it is for mathematics, the infinite is nothing

but indifferent multiplicity, whereas for the Romantics it was nothing more than a

“historical envelopment of finitude.” Behind all this, of course, is Badiou’s strong

opposition to historicism and temporalization of the concept. It is in this context that

Badiou can say, “Romantic philosophy localizes the infinite in the temporalization of the

concept as a historical envelopment of finitude.”154

Mathematics now treats the finite as a special case whose concept

is derived from that of the infinite. The infinite is no longer that

sacred exception co-ordinating an excess over the finite, or a

154
Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, (London: Continuum,
2006), 38
231
 negation, a sublation of finitude. For contemporary mathematics, it

is the infinite that admits of a simple, positive definition, since it

represents the ordinary form of multiplicities, while it is the finite

that is deduced from the infinite by means of negation or limitation.

If one places philosophy under the condition such a mathematics, it

becomes impossible to maintain the discourse of the pathos of

finitude. ‘We’ are infinite, like every multiple-situation, and the

finite is a lacunal abstraction. Death itself merely inscribes us

within the natural form of infinite being-multiple, that of the limit

ordinal, which punctuates the recapitulation of our infinity in a

pure, external ‘dying.’155

The political implications of the move from Romantic infinity to mathematical

infinity can be observed in Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. In

this little book Badiou criticizes the hypocrisy of human rights for reducing being-human

to being a mortal animal. Of course Badiou admits that what is called human is indeed a

mortal animal, but what he objects to is the exploitation of this state of being. Against this

deprecative attitude, Badiou pits the immortal subject, or rather, the subject who is

capable of realising his/her immortality.156

Badiou says that “being is inconsistent multiplicity.” As an advocate of

immanence, unlike Heidegger, he doesn’t think that there is an ontological difference

between Being and beings. As a matter of fact, he altogether refuses that there is such a

thing as Being transcending the multiple beings, or beings as inconsistent multiplicities.

To understand where Badiou is coming from we only need to look at his critique of
155
Badiou, 38
156
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso,
2001), 41
232
Heidegger’s equation of being in the world and being towards death. For Badiou there is

no such thing as being in the world, because for him there is not one world but multiple

worlds and consequently being in the world as being towards death is a rather

impoverished idea doomed to result in the mistaken assumption that consciousness of

human finitude is self-consciousness. And I agree with Badiou that consciousness of

human finitude merely serves to justify a life driven by death.

I therefore propose a consciousness of infinitude rather than of finitude for a

sustenance of the conditions of possibility for an ethical life and for an ethical death. For

when you think about it, if we were immortal, that is, if our lives were eternal, we

wouldn’t be so destructive of the environment, not so harsh on nature and one another,

because no one would want to live in such a hell eternally. Since it is obvious that as

humans we have been turning the world into a hell in the name of progress for a while

now, and since death has been the end from which we have come to think we have been

striving to escape in this progressive process, it is obvious that a forgetting of death, or

rather, a remembering to forget our mortality would make us fear an eternal life in hell,

rather than a finite life in an illusory heaven.

If we keep in mind that the global capitalist system, as we have tried to explicate,

takes its governing force from its exploitation of life and death drives, that it is based on

our fear of death and consciousness of finitude, it becomes clearer why a subtraction of

death from life not only shakes, but also annihilates the foundations of capitalism.

3. Expulsion of the Negative and Affirmation of Life are Mutually Exclusive

To valorize negative sentiments or sad passions—that is the

mystification on which nihilism bases its power. (Lucretius, then

233
 Spinoza, already wrote decisive passages on this subject. Before

Nietzsche, they conceived philosophy as the power to affirm, as

the practical struggle against mystifications, as the expulsion of the

negative.)157

Purgatory, purification, extraction of the positive, expulsion of the negative,

projection, introjection... Throughout his discursive life Deleuze conceived of

purification of the self as the goal of literature. He believed that through an exposition of

the evil within one was healing the society. But this theory can only produce otherness as

negativity and that is almost exactly the opposite of what affirmative critique ought to be.

Nietzsche’s project of “the expulsion of the negative” is a recurrent theme in Deleuze’s

writings. Like Nietzsche he thought that it is only through regression that one could be

purified and get outside the confines of the Cartesian cogito. Deleuze’s attempts at

escaping from the Cartesian dualism, however, can only cause an interruption of the

splitting process and slides towards overcoming the split to attain oneness. Giving a voice

to the other creates the conditions of impossibility for the other’s finding his/her own

voice.

It is at this mobile and precise point, where all events gather

together in one that transmutation happens: this is the point at

which death turns against death; where dying is the negation of

death, and the impersonality of dying no longer indicates only the

moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment

157
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 84
234
 when death loses itself in itself, and also the figure which the most

singular life takes on in order to substitute itself for me.158

With Deleuze it is always one dies rather than I die, or as the Cynic saying goes,

“when there is death I am not, when I am there is no death.” Instead of accepting the state

of being wounded as a perpetually renewed actuality, instead of affirming death within

life, the other within the self, Deleuze climbs over the walls of his wound, and looking

down on the others, he loses the ground beneath his feet, and eventually falls into the split

he was trying to get rid of.

A wound is incarnated or actualised in a state of things or of life:

but it is itself pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads

us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of

the wound in a higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality

always within a milieu (plane or field).159

Affirming the mutual inclusiveness of introversion and intersubjectivity means

preferring an a-sociality, what Blanchot calls “being in a non-relation,” to the symbolic

order. Blanchot’s attitude is exactly the opposite of the symbolic market society that

dissolves the most fundamental questions of being human in a pot of common sense. The

subject of the market society is continually in pursuit of increased strength and self-

confidence. And for that reason governed by what Nietzsche called the herd instinct, the

will to nothingness, this subject becomes a reactive and adaptive subject. The symbolic

order loses the ground beneath itself when and if the majority starts to see living with the

thought of death not only as a natural necessity, but also as something to be affirmed.

158
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 153
159
Deleuze, Pure Immanence: A Life, 31-2

235
 Death has an extreme and definite relation to me and my

body and is grounded in me, but it also has no relation to

me at all—it is incorporeal and infinitive, impersonal,

grounded only in itself. On one side, there is the part of the

event which is realized and accomplished; on the other,

there is that “part of the event which cannot realize its

accomplishment.”160

4. Cont(r)action is not the same as imposing one order of meaning upon another which

is considered to be lacking in something essential to healthy living.

So I eventually arrive where I could possibly have arrived; the end of this voyage,

which is at the same time the beginning of another one. And here I find out that the more

affirmative one’s attitude towards life gets the more fragile the contact with the other

becomes. But as the contact becomes more fragile and affirmation more difficult,

maintaining the conditions for the possibility of a perpetually recreated affirmative

cont(r)act becomes more essential to the continuation of healthy life of self in touch not

only with its own death but also with the death of the other.

Sometimes the only way to keep affirming is to affirm the fragility of the

affirmative cont(r)act itself. It is only by affirming a broken and irregularly beating heart

in its broken irregularity that one can relate to it. But to affirm this heart one must detach

oneself from it, not identify with it, not become broken and irregularly beating itself, so

that one can find in oneself the strength to undertake repairing the broken heart.

Affirmation of life as it is, I think, is only the beginning of a fragile and yet beautiful

friendship.

160
Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 151-152
236
5. Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to

happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.161

We continually have to work on turning everything that happens to us in this life

into “for the good.” For everything good or bad to become for the good we have to affirm

that which has happened to us. But how are we going to affirm something so terrible that

nails us to a painful existence indefinitely? First of all, we have to accept that, that which

has happened is not changeable, it has already taken place and we cannot go back there to

unlive it. But at the same time the meaning, value, and significance of what has

happened is never fully established. Only death accomplishes the event’s significance,

only through death is established the truth of what has happened to us.

For the Stoics one has to have a perfect understanding of the workings of cosmos

and nature to be able to live in harmony with the world surrounding one. It is such that

everything is a cause and an effect at the same time and everything is linked to one

another. Everything that happens causes other things to happen. To a certain extent what

happens to us is not in our control but at the same time if we know what the consequence

of a certain action would be we could choose what to do, and so what happens to us, to a

certain extent, becomes our own doing. We have to figure out how to act, which words to

use in the way of affecting the external world so as to maintain ourselves as an active

agent in any circumstance.162

Let us imagine an example. If we have done something so terribly wrong that it is

causing us great distress, before drowning in our sadness we have to find a way of

reading it in such a way as to turn it into something that was necessary for our present

and future happiness. If we let ourselves go after a disappointing incident, if we let things

161
Epictetus, The Encheiridion, trans. Nicholas P. White (Hackett: Cambridge, 1983), 13
162
Epictetus, 11-3
237
happen to us and not do something to change the course of events we might as well find

ourselves in an irresolvable situation at the end, which would lead to madness and death.

At every moment throughout our lives we are confronted with obstacles that keep

us from accomplishing certain desired ends. And yet there is also always a certain

potential of accomplishing something even better because of the very obstacle that caused

the desired end to become unattainable. The Stoic solution to this problem is simple and

yet sophisticated.

So detach your aversion from everything not up to us, and transfer

it to what is against nature among the things that are up to us. And

for the time being eliminate desire completely, since if you desire

something that is not up to us, you are bound to be unfortunate,

and at the same time none of the things that are up to us, which it

would be good to desire, will be available to you.163

What we have here is not a total negation of desire but a rejection of certain

objects of desire that one must know from past experience are bad for us to desire. If we

want something to happen to us, something that would satisfy a certain desire, and if the

desired event cannot be accomplished through our actions then there is no point in

striving for the attainment of an unattainable object of desire. Instead one should make

the best of what is at hand and accomplish other events that render possible the

attainment of objects of desire that are within reach. If we don’t know what and how to

work for, we get nothing out of life, find ourselves locked in a room on the door of which

death continually knocks.

163
Epictetus, 12
238
 Epictetus’ philosophy is a very practical one. In it we find ways of coping with

the difficulties of life. And it is adaptable to the present state of the human condition in

which we find ourselves face to face with the exploitation of the life drive and the death

drive through a manipulation of the mutual dependence of these two based on the

ambiguous, because a-symetrical, conflict inherent in the relationship between them.

If we know not how to choose what to desire, if we allow the objects of our desire

to be shaped by the capable hands of the big Other represented by the global capitalists,

we also let the ways in which we desire be determined by a source other than ourselves,

hence become puppets trying to satisfy an external force rather than ourselves and our

lovers. We have to know what to desire and how to make it happen, otherwise nothing

happens and where there is nothing happening there can be neither creativity nor

communication; for what is one to create or communicate if there is nothing to create and

communicate.

Once it is realized that there is nothing other than nothing to be struggled against,

it becomes clearer how it would be possible to detach oneself from external

circumstances and act in the way of maintaining an impersonal vision of what happens

around us. One dissociates not the events themselves, but dissociates oneself from the

events surrounding one. The Stoic indifference requires a subject in the form of an

impersonal consciousness who maintains its dissociating function at all times. For this

dissociation to take place, however, the subject has to know how to associate events that

have led to the present, that is, one has to immerse oneself in the plurality of the past

events, and extract from this multiplicity a combination of events so as to enable oneself

to constitute oneself as an autonomous, free agent. This attitude emphasizes the

importance of each instant. At every instant we have to act in such a way as to make the

239
future better than the past. And this brings us to Nietzsche’s eternal return. According to

Nietzsche, we have to act at every present moment in such a way that we will regret

nothing in the future. Every present is an eternal moment in-itself and it is at times in our

control to turn the present into for-itself, and at times it is not.

As you aim such great goals, remember that you must not

undertake them by acting moderately, but must let some things go

completely and postpone others for the time being.164

So, at every present we have to consider the possibilities from different angles and

decide which way to go and which way not to go as if we were immortal. What Epictetus

seems to be suggesting is that once a choice is made the only way to make it work for us

is to push it to its limit where it either turns against us or against itself and creates another

possibility of choice. Epictetus is not in favour of an individuality that would be

constituted through moderation, but in a subject that would be indifferent to lack or

excess. In Epictetus’ world there is no lack or excess; what there is lacks nothing and

nothing in what there is is excessive. If one is satisfied by what there is with its lacks and

excesses one needs no moderation of one’s actions, for there is nothing lacking or

excessive to be moderated in one’s actions. Lack or excess can only be determined by a

whole external to the already existing. But there is only that which is, which never lacks

anything in relation to something outside itself. The concepts of lack and excess belong

to the world of metaphysics which exists only in imagination.

6. To What End Last Words? To What End Suffering...

Throughout this thesis I have tried to develop a mode of critique in and through

which nothing is excluded and/or determined. This reflective mode of critique itself

164
Epictetus, 11
240
enabled me to situate myself in the middle of the reflective and the determinative modes

of judgment. The critical mode employed in this thesis is still context-bound to a certain

extent, and yet it tries to restrictively dissociate itself from the predetermined context,

rather than freely associate within it. A new field is opened, the conditions are created for

the possibility of a decision beyond the Law of Militarist Capitalism and the Welfare

State driven by and driving the exploitation of mortality on a massive scale. There is this

transcendental field that requires a non-mortal mode of being in the world, neither for nor

against it, but indifferent to it in such a way as to turn its own alienation from mortality

into its driving force in its attempt to demolish the faculty of finite judgment and create

the conditions of possibility out of the conditions of impossibility for an infinite judgment

to take place beyond the subject/object of a Law that is mortal, all too mortal.

A truth comes into being through those subjects who

maintain a resilient fidelity to the consequences of an event

that took place in a situation but not of it. Fidelity, the

commitment to truth, amounts to something like a

disinterested enthusiasm, absorption in a compelling task or

cause, a sense of elation, of being caught up in something

that transcends all petty, private or material concerns.165

The immortal subject within and without the pre-dominant symbolic order is not

only the cause, but also the effect of its own alienation from mortal life. This regulatory

idea of immortality, which is also a constitutive illusion, is inspired by the post-

structuralist theme of becoming non-identical as we see in Deleuze and Derrida. If one

could become non-identical, why would one not also become non-mortal? If one could
165
Peter Hallward, “Introduction” in Alain Badiou, Ethics (London: Verso, 2002), x

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become alienated from one’s identity, why would one not also become alienated from

one’s mortality? Why not become immortal so as to become capable of criticizing the

exploitations of this mortal, all too mortal life? But what motivated me to take

immortality as a virtual mode of being was Badiou’s theory of infinity which aimed at

secularizing the concept of truth. Badiou’s technique of secularizing the truth is inspired

by the 19th century mathematician Georg Cantor’s technique of secularizing the infinite.

As Badiou claims, the secularization of infinity started with Cantor who stated that there

was not one, but many infinities varying in size and intensity. From then onwards it

became possible to link Deleuze’s concepts of impersonal consciousness and

transcendental empiricism with Badiou’s theory of infinity and Kant’s assertion that for

reflective judgement to take place and turn the object into a subject a transcendental

ground is necessary. Now I can say that for me a transcendental ground is necessary only

to the extent that it enables the subject to shake the foundation of its own mode of being

and opens a field for immanent critique to take place. In other words, the untimely

indifference of immortality is required in order to actively engage in an exposition of the

exploitation of mortality in this time.

I don’t know if it is worth mentioning that in this time we are all slaves and yet

some slaves dominate the others. Where time goes no one knows. There are necessary

illusions in this life, some for life, some not. Both the extreme belief in civilized progress

and barbaric regress are good for nothing. These two are now in the process of being left

behind. A third possibility of developmental process is emerging in the form of a

becoming-reconciled which is based on the recognition of the otherness of the other as it

is, that is, prior to the additions and the subtractions imposed upon the self and the other,

nature and culture, life and death. For a non-normative and progressive work it is

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necessary for the participants to become capable of making distinctions between their

natures and cultures, their cliniques and critiques. It is a matter of realizing that theory

and practice are always already reconciled and yet the only way to actualise this

reconciliation passes through carrying it out and across by introducing a split between the

subject of statement (the enunciated) and the subject of enunciation.

It is indeed true that sometimes it takes a long journey to get there, where one

eventually got to, and realise that one is other than one thinks itself to be. Apparently the

numbers indeed start with zero and continue with two, but it takes time to realise this

actuality and become capable of actualising this reality. Perhaps we should indeed know

that absolute reconciliation is impossible and yet still strive to reconcile ourselves as

much as we can to all the living and the dead.

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 AFTERWORD

1. The Unhappy Consciousness, or, Stoics and Sceptics locked in Klein’s projection-
introjection mechanism
In Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel attempts to write a mythology of creation and a

creation of mythology in one simultaneous movement in two opposite directions at once.

Intimately implicating the process of creation in error and misrecognition,

Phenomenology of Spirit is a narrative of the subject’s endless process of negotiating

with the world and with itself; in this context the subject is a process of settling accounts

without end.

Hegel’s first object of thought is the thought of the object itself. For the

negotiation of thought with the self and the world to begin taking its course, the subject

has to take its own thought as that which is the other within itself, that is, as its own

object. Through this separation between the subject and the object the subject becomes

capable of seeing itself through its own thought and its own thought through itself. The

thought of the subject is at the same time the object of thought. Thought as the subject

and the object at the same time journeys through consciousness towards the unconscious.

As soon as the subject becomes conscious of its own division within itself it becomes the

Unhappy Consciousness. The Unhappy Consciousness is a consciousness that is

conscious of its own unconsciousness. It is not only conscious of itself as the unconscious

inherent in consciousness, but is itself that consciousness in which it inheres as the

unconscious. It is a consciousness that knows itself to be other than what it thinks itself to

be and yet being conscious of itself as always already other than itself it is never present

to itself. It is a (w)hole in its own consciousness.

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 But although the Unhappy Consciousness does not have the

enjoyment of this presence, it has at the same time advanced

beyond pure thinking in so far as this is the abstract thinking of

Stoicism which turns its back on individuality altogether, and

beyond the merely unsettled thinking of Scepticism—which is in

fact only individuality in the form of an unconscious contradiction

and ceaseless movement. It has advanced beyond both of these; it

brings and holds together pure thinking and particular

individuality, but has not yet risen to that thinking where

consciousness as a particular individuality is reconciled with pure

thought itself. It occupies rather this intermediate position where

abstract thinking is in contact with the individuality of

consciousness qua individuality. The Unhappy Consciousness is

this contact; it is the unity of pure thinking and individuality; also

it knows itself to be this thinking individuality or pure thinking,

and knows the Unchangeable itself essentially as an individuality.

But what it does not know is that this its object, the Unchangeable,

which it knows essentially in the form of individuality, is its own

self, is itself the individuality of consciousness.166

The Unhappy Consciousness consists in and of two separate but contiguous parts:

Stoicism and Scepticism. Knowing itself to be both and none of these at the same time,

the Unhappy Consciousness turns towards the Unchangeable, of which Hegel identifies a

particular manifestation appropriate to the stage of the Unhappy Consciousness. What the

166
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1977), 130-1
245
Unhappy Consciousness wants is to see itself as part of the Unchangeable, to realize that

there is something unchangeable for itself and in itself. But the only unchangeable is the

perpetually changing way of change itself and so the Unhappy Consciousness, to become

the Unchangeable itself, turns against itself and changes; it becomes for and against itself,

which it always already was, thus actualizing the Unchangeable which is its state of being

divided against itself. Perpetually changing, it is unchangeable, and again changes itself

and becomes changeable to remain unchangeable.

The middle term is self-consciousness which splits into the

extremes; and each extreme is this exchanging of its own

determinateness and an absolute transition into its opposite.167

Each self-consciousness is divided within itself. It is divided within itself, against

itself and the other self-consciousness. For it to be able to actualise its self-consciousness

it has to be recognized by the other self-consciousness. But the other self-consciousness

is itself in the same situation. Without one another none is self-consciousness. To proceed

from consciousness to self-consciousness they need the other which is always already

within themselves. What they need to do is to recognize the other within themselves for

them to be recognized as they are to themselves. For the self to be what it is for itself it

first has to become what it is for the other, that is, one loses itself in the other within itself

in order to find oneself dismembered.

Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled

ferment of {the divine} substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil

over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding they

become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep;

167
Hegel, 112
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 and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their

sleep, is nothing but dreams.168

Hegel’s is a way of writing that proceeds through sustaining the conditions for the

possibility of a productive interaction between the conscious and the unconscious. His

narrative process is driven by forces that Hegel himself produces out of an activity

creating and sustaining a tension between the conscious and the unconscious forces

within himself. Hegel never stops writing against himself. And yet this writing against

himself of Hegel is at the same time his writing for himself. By writing not for the other

but before the other he becomes capable of keeping an eye on himself through the eye of

the other within himself. The eye of the other that keeps an eye on the eye of the self is

simultaneously interior and exterior to Hegel. By being addressed to himself in such a

way as to be addressed to the other Hegel’s writing becomes the fragile contact and a

simultaneous separation between the self and the other.

As he puts it in his On the Genealogy of Morality, for Nietzsche, too, there are

masters and slaves, which he calls active and reactive forces, but those who play the role

of the masters are in fact the slaves and the slaves the masters. So what Nietzsche wants

to say is that the slaves dominate the masters because of the false values upon which

human life is built. Reactive forces are the slaves who occupy the master position and

active forces are the masters who occupy the slave position. It is always the reactive

forces who win because their reactions are contagious and it is extremely easy for them to

multiply themselves and degenerate the others. The active forces, however, although they

are the strong ones, are always crushed under the false value system created by the

reactive forces. If Hegel is saying that everything eventually turns into its opposite and

168
Hegel, 6
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the roles are reversed only after a struggle to death, Nietzsche is saying that the roles are

always already reversed and the way to set things right, rather than passing through

reversing the roles, passes through a revaluation of all values on the way to a new game.

Now I will attempt to think through the separation between Hegel and Nietzsche

by imagining the way in which Nietzsche could have possibly read Hegel now. These

words by Nietzsche are addressed directly to Hegel:

“Will to truth,” you who are wisest call that which impels you and

fills you with lust?

A will to the thinkability of all beings: this I call your will. You

want to make all being thinkable, for you doubt with well-founded

suspicion that it is already thinkable. But it shall yield and bend for

you. Thus your will wants it. It shall become smooth and serve the

spirit as its mirror and reflection. That is your whole will, you who

are wisest: a will to power—when you speak of good and evil too,

and of valuations. You still want to create the world before which

you can kneel: that is your ultimate hope and intoxication.169

Nietzsche reads Hegel in terms of the disintegration between Hegel’s actions and

intentions. In a way Nietzsche implies that Hegel is the very unhappy consciousness he is

trying to overcome. Hegel himself is interpreting the unhappy consciousness as a split

subject whose actions and intentions do not form a coherent unity. This means that

Nietzsche is trying to criticize Hegel with Hegel’s very own logic of conceptualization of

the subject as split.

169
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from The portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter
Kaufman (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 225
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 In both Hegel and Nietzsche the relationship between the subject and the object is

problematized. In both cases the resistance to contamination by the object of thought

through its introjection is not only hand in hand but also drives and is driven by the fear

of being contaminated by the object. There is, however, no fear of contaminating the

object through projecting onto it that which is always already introjected from it, namely

that it is a narrative of the processes of projection-introjection mechanism.

As the narrative of the relationship between the subject and the object,

Phenomenolgy of Spirit, against which, according to Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche in

Nietzsche and Philosophy, Nietzsche was writing, is itself written for and against itself,

and is indeed a narrative of the unhappy consciousness’s difference from itself.

For Nietzsche, the subject’s creations with and through the objects surrounding

him/her is driven by a movement towards self-destruction in that the subject relates to the

objects it creates in a way that is against itself. An example of that at present would be in

terms of the relationship between humanity and technology. If the subject is being

governed by fear he/she will see technology as bad in itself, hence taking on a paranoid

attitude towards technology, ignore its good uses, reject it completely, and eventually

actualize what he/she was not even afraid of; death. But the opposite is equally true in

that if the subject has no trace of fear within, then he/she will lose himself/herself in what

he/she creates and actualize what he had no fear of.

Negativity gives birth to negativity. Negativities form an infinite chain chaining

the subject to an infinite process of regress. Aggression is negative and as it multiplies

itself it destroys both the object and the subject. Reactive attitudes are produced by and

produce aggression. It is very easy for aggression to dominate the world and/but it is very

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difficult to sustain the conditions for the possibility of channelling aggression towards

healthy conflict without antagonism.

In Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel presents Stoics and Sceptics as the two

constitutive parts of the unhappy consciousness. Now let us try and imagine a subject as

defined in the subtitle. Situated in the present context, a subject as the two sides of the

same coin that contained a sceptic and a stoic side at the same time would be the

Nietzschean/Hegelian subject par excellence in that it would see everything in terms of a

dualism, or a struggle between the forces of good and evil. In fact he would himself

become the stage on which a confrontation between good and evil takes place. He would

read every sign in the external world in terms of this struggle to the point of replacing the

external reality with his internally constituted reality. What he introjects would be always

already his own creation, which he would still consider to be what’s really going on

outside, and consequently would himself become the nodal point of the conflict between

the internal and the external, the psychic and the somatic.

The sceptic exhausts the projection-introjection mechanism to the point of

turning against all claims to know the truth, whereas the stoic refuses to take part in the

projection-introjection mechanism. It is not that the sceptic sees evil everywhere but that

he projects the evil within and onto the evil without that he has introjected from the

external world in the first place. As for the stoic, he is so indifferent that he thinks there is

no gap between the internal and the external worlds and so there can be no such thing as a

projection-introjection mechanism that would simultaneously be the cause and the effect

of a struggle between good and evil.

On one pole of this interactivity which constitutes contemporary nihilism is the

reactive sceptic and on the other the indifferent stoic. Neither of these are satisfying for

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themselves nor satisfying in-themselves to produce reconciliation which would be called

an intersubjectivity. A reactive force sees everything against itself and an indifferent

force sees no point in engaging in an intercourse in the way of an interaction with a

reactive sceptic who sees stoics as nihilists.

Sceptics and stoics are, by being against one another, feeding neither themselves

nor the other, but contributing to the production of otherness as negativity, hence taking

part in the setting of the very vicious trap in which they find themselves against each

other and out of which they both come dismembered. They are both finding themselves

locked in an agonizing process, which is destroying both of them. It is impossible for one

to survive without the other. Although the problem is the projection-introjection

mechanism inherent in them, they are looking for the source of their maladies outside

themselves. We are projecting all our bad qualities onto the others and then accusing

them of being negative towards us. In turn they are giving birth to the negativity of the

other, or otherness as negativity. The source of the negative within and without us is

being created by us since we introject what we have projected and inversely.

***

One tries to fill the gap created by the absence of truth with the words which

he/she attempts to construct an explanation which makes sense, and which is called

knowledge. It is for this reason that knowledge emerges as the negation and destruction

of the truth, that truth being nothing, or in a Lacanian interpretation the Real. So

knowledge is like a veil put on the void to cover the meaninglessness of life. That veil

which serves as a cover from the nothingness behind itself is what we know as

knowledge. The tragic consciousness is conscious of this fictional quality of knowledge

and knows too, that this is something that has to be done for life to win over death. But

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this consciousness simultaneously carries within itself an unnamable joy and happiness,

what Lacan calls jouissance. This unhappy consciousness does not negate life, on the

contrary, it affirms it, it is the motor of affirmative becoming that turns a state of mind,

unhappy consciousness, into a mode of being, being affirmative. The figure that feels

knowledge as the deformation of truth most deeply is Dionysus. By whipping his own

pain like whipping horses running a carriage, Dionysus turns his impossibilities into

possibilities, his incapability into his capability. An Ancient Greek God, Dionysus,

unlike Hamlet, does not get caught up in desperation and become passive because of his

tragic knowledge. On the contrary, Dionysus considers loss of consciousness,

drunkenness and dancing to the rhythm of cosmos meritable actions. Unlike Hamlet

Dionysus doesn’t become inactive but still his actions are doomed to be lost in the

labyrinths of death drive. With his excessive destructivity Dionysus is only one of the

steps on the way to creating something new. If Apollo’s creative and ordering actions that

give a form to the chaos and turn the unconscious drives into conscious desire don’t

intervene, however, Dionysus’ self-destructive passage through the void, his unconscious

exploration of the world of drives, do not mean a thing. Apollo carries out the creativity

phase of this passage through the process of change towards the new by giving a form to

Dionysus’ formless insights. The attainment of the impersonal consciousness of the

creator can only be possible by this process of change carried out by co-operative

interaction of Apollo and Dionysus. Human helplessness in the face of death and

nothingness can only be overcome by a special form of relationship between the

creative/destructive powers of Apollo/Dionysus.

We are familiar with these ideas from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. For

someone to write these he must be in a deep depression. Nietzsche whose writings carry

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the stamp of his pain and suffering never said anything like creativity requires pain and

suffering. For Nietzsche the creative process necessarily bears within itself a certain pain.

When he says “that which does not kill me renders me stronger,” what Nietzsche wants to

mean is that rather than fall into despair and hopelessness in the face of the bad things

that happen to us, we should keep in mind that that which has happened to us will gain its

meaning in time, so with this knowledge in mind we should try to act in such a way as to

make this bad thing gain a positive meaning in time. That is, relate to the bad thing in

such a way that it will have happened for the good in the future. Yes, this terrible thing

has happened to me, and yet I shall act so as to make this terrible thing that has happened

to me and which I cannot change render me stronger rather than weaker. So this is how

Nietzsche becomes a philosopher not striving for pain and suffering, but welcomes pain

and suffering as they come, and knows that they are not to be excluded from life of which

inescapable consequences they are. Nietzsche is not saying that suffering is the cause of

creativity, rather, Nietzsche is saying that the creative person is he who suffers a lot, but

suffering is not the motor of creativity. Perhaps if we try to say the exact opposite of what

Nietzsche says we understand more clearly what he means: That pain and suffering

renders the subject stronger, so it is a must that one brings as much calamities upon

oneself as possible in the way of more and greater sufferings.

Nietzsche is not only not in favour of killing the self or the other, he is also

obviously against self/other destruction. This resistance to death is driven by the will to

power, which affirms life in all its inconsistencies, surprises, incompleteness, finitude,

with its happiness and sadness, the bad things and the good things in it, as it, with all its

inner-conflicts and paradoxes, is.

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 2. A Conversation Around Nietzsche Between a Stoic and a Sceptic

Stoic: I found some interesting stuff as I was messing about today, you may have come

across it before; Nietzsche responds to Flaubert’s idea that one can only think and write

while one is sitting by saying that only those thoughts we think while we walk are worthy

of thinking. Unfortunately at the moment we are in the position of Flaubert, we will have

to think and talk as we sit. But we could as well have talked as we walked. Perhaps we

would have had problems with recording what we said, but still, when you think about it,

it would be great if we were on the hills with a third party to put down what we say.

Sceptic: I don’t think what’s important is whether you sit or walk as you think. I don’t

know how Plato used to think, but I think I know that Aristotle used to walk a lot.

Stoic: Heidegger liked walking. Who else is there from the walkers? Nietzsche is one.

Anyway, I want us to talk about our personal experiences of Nietzsche a little bit. How

did you come across Nietzsche, did you experience him differently in different periods of

your life? I was thinking about that this morning, I met Nietzsche quite early in life. It

was a crooked encounter of course, as is usually the case in those ages, but this encounter

had a peculiarity to it. Perhaps the first reading is the most truthful reading.

Sceptic: It is difficult to feel the same excitement later on.

Stoic: One does not know the context that well at first. So the text is free floating, one can

invest it with almost any meaning one wants, a kind of projective identification operates

which doesn’t always have fruitful consequences.

Sceptic: And yet sometimes it does. One has no idea about the context at all. One doesn’t

even know that there is such a thing as context. I don’t know which one of his books you

read first but I read Zarathustra. It came as a shock to me; it wasn’t like anything I had

ever read before, a total confusion. It was out of the question to agree or disagree, I

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remember having been crushed under the book. And as you said, then you don’t know the

context, where he is coming from and where he is heading towards and all that, and all

meaning remains hung up in the air. You can’t situate it, it was like a burning meteor

coming towards me and I couldn’t do anything other than stare at it blankly.

Stoic: I don’t exactly remember from where I started Nietzsche, but as far as I can

remember it was an unauthorized French edition of some fragmentary writings. I was

talking about my problems with one of my teachers, thoughts were circulating in my

mind, and when I tried to express myself not much made sense. My teacher gave me

some names, one of which was Nietzsche. He said German philosophers gave a lot of

thought to anxiety causing problems of life, their concerns were very similar to your

anxieties; Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger. So I checked out Nietzsche and as I said

it was like a crash, a way of expression I had never come across before, an attitude so

extraordinary… It’s only now I realize that I was undergoing a very dangerous

experience. The danger with Nietzsche is, you know, I had a period of reading Nietzsche

through other writers. When I was in my twenties I read Deleuze’s Nietzsche,

Klossowski’s Nietzsche, Blanchot’s Nietzsche, and all kinds of other Nietzsches, others’

Nietzsches. In a way their attitudes served as a kind of directory, they were guides to

Nietzsche, they open paths as they close some others, and yet they teach you what and

how to look for, what really matters in Nietzsche, but in another way they deprive you of

the possibility of one to one, direct encounter with Nietzsche. I remained under the

influence of what I had seen through those glasses for a long time.

Sceptic: Did you keep on reading Nietzsche in-between your periods of depression?

Stoic: I was reading, but always within the fields they opened, not beyond their horizon. I

still didn’t have my perspective on Nietzsche. And after that period came to an end, the

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period of reading Nietzsche from the others’ perspectives, I didn’t read Nietzsche for at

least ten years. I had a really serious depression in 1988. I looked for remedies in the

books; I looked in vain for therapeutic writers. I looked at Kafka, Dostoyevski, I didn’t

want to read them, after three-four pages I threw them away, it was all very upsetting.

But when I discovered Ecce Homo, I considered it as the deliverance of my salvation, it

really came as a relief, and I finished the book in one sitting during a cold and rainy

night. To some extent it cured me. When after a while I recovered completely I turned

back to Nietzsche only to find out what we all know: one understands what one had read

at twenty in a completely different way when one gets to thirty because one changes and

with one the book’s meaning changes. The text remains the same perhaps, but we move

on to another place and another time.

Sceptic: Even the meanings of words change, free from us, independently of our personal

change.

Stoic: In different periods of my life Nietzsche had different effects on me. When I look

back now, to what extent can Nietzsche be considered a philosopher, how far out is he

from ordinary philosophy? Of course it would be very difficult not to consider Nietzsche

a philosopher, but there are many cases where you see academic philosophers turn a blind

eye on him, but that’s their problem of course, it’s their loss, not Nietzsche’s. And the

reason why he has been so influential especially outside academic philosophical

discourse, in literary, critical and cultural studies for instance, is that he has written such

exciting texts that one may die of pleasure. You don’t get the same effect from Hegel for

instance, you don’t die from the magnificence, the splendour… Nietzsche has a massive

poetic potential. Not that I’m fond of all of what I have just said of him, of course…

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Sceptic: But I do get immense pleasure from reading Hegel. I even find him extremely

humorous at times. Phenomenology of Spirit gives me hope, when I’m too desperate it

even fills me with an irrational bliss. Can’t you hear the laughter in Hegel? Or maybe it’s

just my laughter which I think comes from Hegel. I can see your point about Nietzsche

though, he is much more affective. You can read Nietzsche isolated from his

philosophical thoughts, as a writer of literary texts, texts on life itself rather than life

reduced to knowledge. It is Nietzsche’s style that gives you the kicks. How about

Nietzsche’s poems?

Stoic: To be honest, I don’t like them.

Sceptic: I agree, but there are many admirers of his poems too. Some even see his poetry

as prophecy, a kind of expansive message from beyond. But I think Nietzsche’s prose is

much more beautiful, especially when read in German.

Stoic: Perhaps. Unfortunately I don’t have the privilege of reading original Nietzsche, I

haven’t had that privilege.

Sceptic: That’s the dangerous aspect, he can tempt you, put you off the rails, as he has

done and continues to do to many.

Stoic: He has quite an asphyxiating effect. I can’t think of Nietzsche having an ordinary

effect on anyone; he either makes you hate him, or love him with a great passion, at least

at the beginning.

Sceptic: I believe my attitude was a bit more cautious than yours. I didn’t really get into

Nietzsche, or perhaps I should say Nietzsche didn’t penetrate me as much as he did you.

Nietzsche came to me naturally and is now in the process of leaving me naturally. I

haven’t had a Nietzschean drama, he has never been a writer I turned towards out of

hunger and thirst for a way out; I tried to comprehend him and when I finally thought I

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comprehended him I realized that it is almost impossible to come to a total understanding

of Nietzsche, for if one does figure out what Nietzsche really wants to say one becomes a

victim of Nietzsche and hates him, and with him, hates oneself. I have never really come

to a total understanding of Nietzsche, because he disapproves of so many things, and it is

impossible to know what exactly it is that he is disapproving of, so you see, it becomes

difficult to follow his story. I was a Wagnerian when I was twenty for instance, and I

couldn’t see why he was so reactively critical of Wagner. I had no idea about the history

of the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche, and without this background story

you don’t get Nietzsche’s point in Nietzsche contra Wagner. There is always a lot more

going on behind what Nietzsche writes than one could possibly imagine, he is the iceberg

and his writings are his tips.

Stoic: You still are a bit Wagnerian, you like it that way?

Sceptic: Yes I like it… Nietzsche objects to the whole of European thought from Plato

through Hegel and Schopenhauer and why he does so is linked to his personal

experiences of this collective history of European thought. And we are not born with the

knowledge of Nietzsche’s experiences. His critique of Christianity, I don’t know, I’m not

a believer, but I don’t approve of Nietzsche’s reactive aggressiveness as he attacks the

Christian God. As I said one has to know Nietzsche’s life but how possible is that?

Unlike you I have never read the secondary literature on Nietzsche, I’m only familiar

with the names you mentioned earlier, but I don’t know what they are up to with

Nietzsche. For me Nietzsche is one of those who do philosophy departing from a wound,

from a deep-seated internal problem… The wound is internal to Nietzsche but the source

of this wound is external, so you see, he is in-between. He attacks both sides at the same

time, there is a profound neither/nor relationship, an endless struggle between the life

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drive and the death drive in Nietzsche’s books. As for Hegel, I’m not so sure what kind

of a man he was. His philosophy doesn’t seem to give me “the kicks” as you say. But to

me Hegel is sobering, and that is what I require. In Kant’s books you see everything

divided and subdivided into sections and subsections. And you see Kant’s idea is there in

three books. I find the life philosophy-academic philosophy distinction ridiculous and

luxurious for our times. It deprives us of many great philosophers. Nietzsche’s is neither

academic nor life, but a kind of open philosophy; philosophy without the final judgment.

Nietzsche has never said and will never have said his last word.

Stoic: Never?

Sceptic: And that there is no such last word or final judgment is itself Nietzsche’s last

word and final judgment. It is with Nietzsche that we come to realize this paradoxical

situation, this vicious cycle, within which we have come to be entrapped.

Stoic: But Nietzsche also makes us ask, what would be the price paid to escape from this

vicious cycle?

Sceptic: That’s indeed another thing that he does. It is precisely because of these endless

questions leading to one another, each question the answer of another, and this

incompleteness of his philosophy is only one of the reasons that make Nietzsche

attractive for many. The second is this: Nietzsche has four-five teachings, the first one is,

which for me is the most important, that “knowledge is perspectival by nature.” As soon

as he says this, his philosophy becomes an opening up to a new field for thought and life.

Everyone can enter Nietzsche’s new space and take what they want, it is like a toolbox.

There is something for Hitler in that work, something else for Bataille, for Heidegger,

Freud, so you see how clear it all becomes in this context, what he means when he says

on the title-page of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “A book for no one and everyone.” You can

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translate this as a book for everyone who will understand but at the same time for no one,

since no one can completely understand what exactly Nietzsche means. This formula is

applicable to his philosophy as a (w)hole, a philosophy for none and all at the same time.

And there is no (w)hole of Nietzsche’s philosophy to be comprehended as a (w)hole

anyway. This attitude would reduce “Nietzsche” to its bare bones when in fact it is a very

fleshy writing. It wouldn’t be fair on Nietzsche. Mine is a stance from which I try to

justify Nietzsche, save him. It is the tendency of most readers of Nietzsche to be his

advocate. And yet I now realize that this attitude, too, is not so true to the spirit of

Nietzsche. And this is the reason why I distanced myself from Nietzsche, after witnessing

what has been happening in the world for the last one hundred years, since Nietzsche’s

death. You might as well read “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” as “there can be

no philosophy after Auschwitz.” Or you at least become compelled to admit, “after

Auschwitz it becomes very difficult, almost impossible to unconditionally affirm

Nietzsche’s philosophy.” You might, and you should, feel the need to introduce a

distance between yourself and Nietzsche.

Stoic: Another paradoxical situation emerges here, for Nietzsche is himself against

himself in this respect and on this subject.

Sceptic: Yes, he is indeed.

Stoic: And this indicates a self-deconstructive reading at work, that is, you are already

deconstructing your own reading as you read Nietzsche.

Sceptic: But isn’t this a natural outcome of philosophical thinking? I think Nietzsche’s

grandest illusion was his excessive self-assurance, a pathological self-confidence which

led him not to use his critical eye in relation to himself as much as he did in relation to

others. He perspectivizes truth but he never situates himself in the nineteenth century as a

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priest who had been influenced by the likes of Wagner and Schopenhauer; he never

comes to terms with his finitude, and so he never manages to reconcile himself to life.

Stoic: In 1889, when his passage to the other side is semi-complete he is about forty-five.

Sceptic: Yes.

Stoic: The most interesting aspect of his work is its posthumousness. He left behind a

multiplicity of texts in complete silence and yet all his work, this multiplicity of texts, is

itself an unceasing and singular voice at times causing nausea. When one is looking at

this oeuvre one wonders what kind of a will to power is Nietzsche’s, it’s not clear, some

say it should be translated as will towards power. I think will to power and will to

nothingness are one and the same thing. Will towards power and being towards death are

the two constituent parts of becoming what one always already is. And what use of a will

to truth if it is not in the service of becoming true to one’s being. Perhaps if his work had

not been interrupted by illness, he, and we with him, would have been better able to make

sense of these circular movements of thought.

Sceptic: Nietzsche’s working method involves taking notes as he walked… And then

revising those notes…

Stoic: …Organize those thoughts, put them in order? But it’s different when Zarathustra

speaks. He wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra locked in a room, sitting in a chair in front of a

table on the mountains after his devastating Lou Andreas-Salomé experience. There is a

close relation between aphorisms and steps, fragmentary writing and walking. It is the

same in the case of other aphorism writers, there are flashes of insight involved, always

fragmentary, little thoughts complete in themselves and yet to be formulated in relation to

one another. Nietzsche’s process of thinking is itself discontinuous, fragmentary; it’s an

attempt to give birth to partial objects without relation to an external idea of wholeness.

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As soon as something strikes him he feels as though if he doesn’t put it down

immediately he never will. And since he thinks about the same thing from different

perspectives through a period of time, the result is a plurality of partial objects all

somehow linked to one another rather than to a whole outside them. He didn’t have time

to make sense of all he thought. His thought was larger than his life. He used to write so

rapidly but still his infinite speed of thought always left his writing behind.

Sceptic: If only he had lived longer and thought with less speed.

Stoic: Perhaps he could have finished the work of his life in a much more precise way. If

he were able to write a second Ecce Homo at sixty years old, he could have survived his

thought. But of course I’m assuming too much here.

Sceptic: Actually it is good to throw some light on where Nietzsche is coming from and

where he is heading towards. It makes visible the great potential of Nietzsche’s thought;

explicates the possibilities of new ways of thinking and living it has to offer.

Stoic: In a new light everything becomes other than itself.

Sceptic: Plato criticized his own concept of the Idea later in life. Perhaps if Nietzsche had

lived longer he would have had a critical look at his earlier work.

Stoic: The other day I had a look at On The Genealogy of Morality as a preparation for

our conversation. In it I saw Nietzsche thinking about two hundred years ahead of his

time. And this prophetic stance is not very common among philosophers. Usually poets

tend to tell of the future.

Sceptic: Poets do tend to have messianic expectations.

Stoic: Yes, poets too operate at messianic levels but Nietzsche is assured that what he

thinks will take place in the future will actually take place; he believes in the truth of

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what he assumes. And worst of all, we now see that what he thought would happen is

really happening. Have a look at what he says:

What meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us

this will to truth has come to a consciousness of itself as a

problem? … It is from the will to truth’s becoming conscious of

itself that from now on—there is no doubt about it—morality will

gradually perish: that great spectacle in a hundred acts that is

reserved for Europe’s next two centuries, the most terrible, most

questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles…170

He sees the rise of Nihilism. And we see him say this in Genealogy published in

November 1887. It has been 117 years and we can say that his prophecy has proved to be

true for the first 117 years out of 200. On this account we can bet that this truth will

increasingly maintain its truth status in the remaining 83 years. Looking backwards he

tells of the future. With a messianic force he writes Ecce Homo in which he proclaims

himself Christ and Dionysus. What he means by that self-fashioning is that he has passed

across the Nihilism, went through the will to nothingness and reached the point after the

fantasy is traversed where Christ and Dionysus confront one another. But Nietzsche

never says that he is the overman. Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, fashions himself as the one

who remains the man who wants to die. In Gay Science we see the theme of God’s death

merging with the story of a madman wandering around with his lamp, looking for God.

He distinguishes two forms of Nihilism: one is an active nihilism he associates with

destruction, the other is an exhausted and passive nihilism he identifies as Buddhism.

Sceptic: Perhaps it’s true; today we know the West is turning towards the East.

170
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen
(Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), 117
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Stoic: He sees not one, but two distinct futures of a Nihilist Europe. But I don’t really get

what he means when he says he has himself overcome nihilism. Has he really overcome

nihilism or is it just wishful thinking?

Sceptic: I don’t know whether he has or he has not overcome nihilism, but what I can say

concerning why he thinks in that way is this: In a nut-shell nihilism is the absence of

“where” and “why,” or “direction” and “intention.” Nietzsche is convinced that he is

showing humanity a new direction towards which to head. His project of revaluing the

values is itself an attempt at overcoming nihilism, but this attempt only partially

overcomes nihilism, for even after all the values are devalued there remains the new

values to be created out of the ruins of the old. Revaluation cannot be completed unless

destruction is left behind and creation takes its course.

Stoic: Absolutely. Nihilism is necessary for the devaluation of values, but should be left

behind before revaluing the values. So nihilism is a useful tool in turning the existing

order against itself but when it comes to creating the new it is nothing other than an

enemy. Nietzsche’s discourse is almost a Marxist discourse without Marxist terminology.

To see this aspect of Nietzsche more clearly let me give you a brief account of the

master-slave relationship in Hegel and Nietzsche. For Hegel everyone is a slave and some

slaves, out of a dissatisfaction with slavery, fight to death for mastery, win the fight, and

through recognition by the slaves as the masters, become masters, and dominate the

slaves. Dialectical process, however, does not end there and in the next stage, and “as

history has shown us” in Marx’s words, since in time everything turns into its opposite,

slaves eventually become masters. Whereas for Nietzsche from the beginning there are

masters and slaves, which he calls active and reactive forces, but the ones who play the

role of masters are in fact the slaves and the slaves the masters. So what Nietzsche wants

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to say is that slaves dominate the masters because of the false values upon which human

life is built. Reactive forces are the slaves who occupy the master position and active

forces are the masters who occupy the slave position. It is always the reactive forces who

win because their reactions are contagious and it is extremely easy for them to multiply

themselves and degenerate the others. The active forces, however, although they are the

strong ones, are always crushed under the false value system created by the reactive

forces. If Hegel is saying that everything eventually turns into its opposite and the roles

are reversed only after a struggle to death, Nietzsche is saying that the roles are always

already reversed and the way to set things right, rather than passing through reversing the

roles, passes through a revaluation of all values on the way to a new game. How would

you respond to that?

Sceptic: Well, Nietzsche looks at things otherwise. Through eternal recurrence everything

is continually inverted into the spotlight and everything turns into something other than

itself in time. So he comes to the conclusion that everything is so reversed that the weak

wins. That’s what he sees as the outcome of nihilism. In Nietzsche’s world what

everyone understands from improvement is in fact the opposite of the real meaning of

improvement. Look what he says,

One should at least be clear about the expression “be of use.” If by

this one intends to express that such a system of treatment has

improved man, then I will not contradict: I only add what

“improve” means for me—the same as “tamed,” “weakened,”

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 “discouraged,” “sophisticated,” “pampered,” “emasculated” (hence

almost the same as injured…)171

Stoic: I admire him for what he achieved but at times doesn’t he become more than self-

confident. I occasionally feel that he saw himself as a prophet.

Sceptic: Well, it is obvious that he suffered from a certain megalomania. No doubt he

lacked self-critical eyes.

Stoic: Does he give you the feeling that he regarded himself a prophet from time to time?

Could he have thought he was revealing the word of God?

Sceptic: The thinker talking through Zarathustra’s mouth has that prophetic quality.

Zarathustra is himself a prophet. There are various speculations concerning Nietzsche’s

entry into the realm of madness. When it occured and so on. Some say when his books

are read with a clinical intent there is no trace of madness in his work. I don’t agree with

this. Already in Zarathustra there is a deterioration of his thought processes. An

exaggerated self-confidence appears in Ecce Homo. But to be considered a prophet is

what Nietzsche dreaded most. He says it in Ecce Homo: “I have a terrible fear that one

day I will be pronounced holy.”

Stoic: One still wonders whether he is the first prophet without a God, if he thought

himself to be the first prophet without a God, and with this thought he went off the rails?

Sceptic: Are you listening to what I’m saying?

Stoic: He also sees himself as the disciple of Dionysus.

Sceptic: Have you heard what I’ve just said?

Stoic: He signed Dionysus the last letter he wrote to Strindberg.

171
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen
(Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), 103
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Sceptic: And Crucified at the same time. Nietzsche’s thought is full of paradoxes.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why it is a philosophy for everyone. On any topic, on

this or that subject, there is this perspective and there is that. You can choose whatever

works for you and ignore the others. But that’s not what I’m really concerned with. The

contradiction at the heart of Nietzsche is that his theory of eternal return and the

becoming of overman cancel each other out. There are two distinct layers of time at

which Nietzsche’s teaching operates. First is the linear time of history, the time in which

animals live, it is a measurable time. Birth, reproduction, internalisation, metabolism,

dissolution all take place in this time; it is the time of life and death. The exact opposite

of this time is the circular time of the spirit. It is a time that transcends the linear time and

the physical world. It is a product of man’s dissatisfaction with the physical world; a will

to go beyond the physical and/or outside time. He conceived of both of these forms of

time (Aeon and Chronos) and he existed in both at the same time. He was a man who

knew that there is nothing outside physical time and/but who still strived to go beyond

this time.

Stoic: How agonizing is that? I think it is none other than himself he is talking about

when he says,

Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was

lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know

how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself: he suffered from the

problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for

the most part a diseased animal: but the suffering itself was not his

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 problem, rather that the answer was missing to the scream of his

question: “to what end suffering?”172

All his life he tried to make sense of the inordinate measure of suffering and

privation he had to endure. In vain he looked for a way of exposing “the vanity of all

human wishes.” He was dissatisfied with his life and he hated himself for that. He kept

resisting the Stoic within himself. But his Sceptic side was incapable of putting

something other than the teachings of Socrates in the place left empty by the demolition

of his Stoic side. He equally resented having remained under the shadow of Socrates. To

escape from Socrates he attacked Plato’s metaphysics of presence and did this with the

tools he borrowed from Heraclitus; a pre-Stoic philosopher who has deeply influenced

both the Zeno of Citium, who was the founder of Stoicism, and the Zeno of Elea, who

explained how it could be possible for a tortoise to pass Achilles in a race. If you look at

the latter Zeno’s paradox carefully you see that what he wants to say with all his arrow

business is that there can be no motion out of immobility. Yes, the arrow is at rest at

every instant and the mind unites those individual instants each a picture in itself. What

the eye receives is already what the mind’s synthesizing force creates. We see the arrow

in motion when in fact it is, at every instant of its existence, at rest. You see where Zeno

is coming from there. He is coming from Heraclitus’ idea that “one cannot step into the

same river twice.” The river which is stepped into is a different river at each instant of its

flow. You can see that Heraclitus is making a distinction between the flowing water and

the bed in which it flows. It is Heraclitus who first splits time. So Zeno finds himself in a

split time and can say that before rational thought unites time there is no movement to be

perceived.

172
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen
(Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), 117
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Sceptic: But this means that Zeno thinks reason creates something out of nothing, or

movement out of immobility.

Stoic: And this is very similar to the foundational truth upon which Epictetus builds his

therapeutic philosophy. Epictetus says that we create our history, our past, present, and

future. It is up to us to change the way we perceive things, put them in a new light, see

ourselves differently, and act in way which would be in harmony with nature, in

accordance with reason, and for the benefit of all. Epictetus doesn’t see the care of the

self as other than the care for the other, he reconciles the interior and the exterior of the

subject. So knowledge is a construct of the synthesis of the internal and the external; we

project what we have introjected. Between projection and introjection there is a synthetic

activity that unites the internal and the external, or the psychic and the material. And a

balance between the truth of what’s really going on outside and how the subject perceives

this truth is a sign of health. An internally constituted external authority, the truth of

universal humanist rationalism, governs the subject in harmony with nature. Listen to

what nature says to you and you will know the right thing to do, truth is of nature, say the

Stoics. But Plato says: “I, the truth, am speaking.” How megalomaniac is that?

Sceptic: It is quite megalomaniac indeed. And that is the Platonic side of Nietzsche, an

exaggerated self-confidence.

Stoic: But with the thought of eternal return Nietzsche is shattered. He realizes how

random and chaotic life is and I think his thought of eternal return is a response to his

fragmentation at the time he was in Turin. The contingency of all things led him to

formulate the eternal return, a circular time with no beginning or an end. In this circular

time “a throw of the dice will never abolish the chance,” as Mallarmé put it. So after the

nihilistic fantasies and Dionysian hallucinations are traversed the new age of bliss begins

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for the ones who have learned to learn from what happens to them in this life and rather

than fall into the wound pass across it and affirm life as it is. Amor fati is both the driving

force and the outcome of the eternal return. Everyone is born free. One who loves one’s

fate whatever happens is free. It is a very Stoic thought; as long as the mind is free who

cares about the body in chains. But this is not to despise the body, on the contrary, Stoics

do care about their bodies; cleanliness, appetite, health, good behaviour, humour,

kindness, affirmative attitude; it is a very naturalist social philosophy.

Sceptic: I didn’t know that you were so off the rails. If I understood you correctly, in

eternal return there is no room for Darwinist linear evolution. Evolution is peculiar to

linear time. Nietzsche is after finding a new form of progressive movement in complicity

with the circular movement of time. The idea of eternal return is a very vague

formulation of what he was really after. It is Bergson who came closer to saying what

Nietzsche wanted to say. In his Creative Evolution Bergson investigates Zeno’s paradox

and comes to the conclusion that Zeno’s idea that there can be no movement in-itself

because time is infinitely divided within itself is not sufficient to theorize a practical and

creative evolutionary process other than a linear progress. Bergson says that cinema

achieves what Zeno thought was impossible. By creating motion pictures out of pictures

at rest at every instant he introduces mind as a projection-introjection mechanism just like

a camera. “But while our consciousness thus introduces succession into external things,

inversely these things themselves externalise the successive moments of our inner

duration in relation to one another.”173 Bergson doesn’t differ from Zeno as much as he

thinks he does, in that, it was Zeno who said mind projects what it had introjected. And

173
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, 228
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this projection-introjection mechanism is a binding-splitting force at the same time. It

binds the subject to the social as it splits the subject within itself, right?

Stoic: Well, almost. It is a matter of working through ways of dealing with history, with

the contingency of every event and the randomness of what happens to us in time. Stoics

look down on death and suffering. They say that which has happened cannot be changed

in linear time, but in circular time everything can be changed in perception and then

projected onto the present so as to leave behind the traumatic incident and move on

towards becoming present. So, you see, you are always already present and yet this

presence is always changing in relation to your past and future, and hence while you are

always present you are never present, you are always a non-presence becoming present.

So the way in which you relate to your past, the way in which you read your history,

determines your actions at present, so why don’t you read your past in such a way as to

enable yourself to become self-present. It is about creating the self so as to create itself as

a perpetually renewed self-presence. It is not out of nothing that something is created,

there never is nothing for the self. You can see that it is all very closely related to the

thought of death in Stoics. “Let death and exile and everything that is terrible appear

before your eyes every day, especially death; and you will never have anything

contemptible in your thoughts or crave anything excessively.”174 It is one of his principal

doctrines always to start from sense-experience. Life is a process of breaking down and

remaking the sense of experience.

Sceptic: And after his intense sense-experiences Nietzsche dies, leaving behind words

that have long ago ceased to be his. Writing is a process of transforming the sense-

experience to make it visible for the others. But at the same time writing is itself a sense-

174
Epictetus, The Encheiridion: The Handbook, trans. Nicholas P. White (Cambridge: Hackett, 1983), 16
271
experience. And in Nietzsche we very occasionally see writing about the experience of

writing. There is an intense meditation on the affective quality of language in Nietzsche.

Sceptic: But he is partly blind to what’s going on not only inside him but also outside

him.

Stoic: He gets too excited about the affect of language. And together with the will to

experience more of it he falls on the side of total dissolution. He pushes his thought to its

limit after which there is nothing, but he goes on and in utter dismemberment he finds

himself. But when he finds himself he is already dismembered and so finds that there is

no self outside the social. To find that out he had to push his thought to its limit and pay

the price with the loss of his mental health. Perhaps he was a bit too aggressive towards

the Stoics who could have shown him a way out of his dilemma: “Remember that what is

insulting is not the person who abuses you or hits you, but the judgement about them that

they are insulting. So when someone irritates you be aware that what irritates you is your

own belief. Most importantly, therefore, try not to be carried away by appearance, since if

you once gain time and delay you will control yourself more easily.”175 But Nietzsche

was busy with struggling with Stoics for their rationality and universality.

Sceptic: Well, Nietzsche’s aim has never been to write therapeutic prescriptions for the

ill. He sees this as taming. And yet this is what he is doing. With Nietzsche therapy and

critical theory confront each other. “With priests everything simply becomes more

dangerous, not only curatives and healing arts, but also arrogance, revenge, acuity,

excess, love, lust to rule, virtue, disease; though with some fairness one could also add

that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly

form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul

175
Epictetus, 16
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acquire depth in a higher sense and become evil—and these are, after all, the two basic

forms of the superiority of man over other creatures!…”176 Here he is talking about

Christianity and Buddhism, but you can imagine the same criticism directed against not

only Plato but also the Stoics. Nietzsche’s sees the Jews as the beginners of “the slave

revolt in morality.”177 You see, he is after an attitude to life that would be neither Jewish

nor Greek. And the common ground on which both the Greek and the Jewish civilizations

are built is an assumption that man is superior to other animals. It is not difficult to see

where he is coming from if you remember that Christians thought Jews to be as inferior

as animals. As for Buddhism, it is passive nihilism, a will to nothingness, for what is

Nirvana if not a mystical union with God, with nothingness. After dissolving all these

belief systems in a universal cesspool Nietzsche moves on to a revaluation of all values in

the light of the Genesis in The Old Testament: “At the beginning was the word.” But

what God is, for Nietzsche, is precisely this: nothingness. It doesn’t start from

nothingness, it starts with language, and everything comes from language which has

neither a beginning nor an end.

Stoic: But I think you are missing Nietzsche’s point there. For there is a pre-linguistic

domain which is not nothingness, but something in between nothingness and everything

that there is, that space between is the realm of partial objects which serve the purpose of

relating to the world even before the language is acquired. And with this he comes back

to what Zeno was saying. At the beginning there is no-motion, but that state of the being

of things is not perceivable, for the mind unites partial-objects to form a sequence of

events, before which there is nothing perceivable. Zeno says, movement in-itself and for

itself is impossible because there can be no movement prior to the synthesis of the

176
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genalogy of Morality, 15-6
177
Nietzsche, 17
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individual states of being at rest. But with cinema we see that motionless pictures are put

one after the other in a particular sequence and when the film revolves a continuity of

images, a flow of pictures is created. There is the illusion of one continuous motion of

events when in fact each event is a motionless picture in itself.

Sceptic: But if it cannot be perceived how can you say that at the beginning there is

nothing and immobility?

Stoic: Well, that’s not what I’m saying. There is nothing at the beginning precisely

because nothing can be perceived before the beginning. You see, there is the absence of

something, there is nothing as the object of perception. You have to assume that

beginning itself has no beginning so that you can begin living, acting, and doing things.

Otherwise how can you live with the thought of being surrounded by nothingness and

death at all times? Death is where you cannot be. It is absolutely other to you, its

presence signifies your absence and inversely. Perhaps we should have said there is

nothing before the beginning and after the end. That fits in better with everything.

Sceptic: Yes, and with this sentence the riddle is solved to some extent; it is not a matter

of beginning or ending; everything is in the middle, and nothing is before the beginning

and after the end. The eternal return has neither a beginning nor an end.

Stoic: Even when you die your body is still in the process of dissolving; you dissolve into

other things and become something else. It is not resurrection I’m talking about here. Nor

is resurrection what Nietzsche attempted to theorize with the thought of eternal return,

but a very materialist understanding of nature and its relation to man. Nietzsche never

says what exactly the eternal return means but from what he says we come to a grasp of

what it might mean. Let me quote Nietzsche at length. In this one of the best descriptions

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of what the eternal return might mean we see Zarathustra talking with a dwarf about time,

the moment as a gateway to possibilities, and the passage of time.

‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdainfully.

‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.’

‘Spirit of Gravity!’ I said angrily, ‘do not treat this too lightly!

Or I shall leave you squatting where you are, Lamefoot—and I

have carried you high!

‘Behold this moment!’ I went on. ‘From this gateway Moment

a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind us.

‘Must not all things that can run have already run along this

lane? Must not all things that can happen have already

happened, been done, run past?

‘And if all things have been here before: what do you think of

this moment, dwarf? Must not this gateway, too, have been

here—before?

‘And are not all things bound fast together in such a way that

this moment draws after it all future things? Therefore—draws

itself too?

‘For all things that can run must also run once again forward

along this long lane.

‘And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and

this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering

together, whispering of eternal things—must we not all have

been here before?

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 ‘—and must we not return and run down that other lane out

before us, down that long, terrible lane—must we not return

eternally?’178

You see, what renders the eternal return possible is saying yes to difference in repetition.

The eternal return is Nietzsche’s grand conception which excludes all binary opposition

and defies the binary logic of being and non-being. You can see that it is far away from

what Diogenes Laertius was saying concerning the relationship between absence and

presence. For Laertius where there is absence there can be no presence and inversely. But

Nietzsche thinks that being and non-being, presence and absence are intermingled, are the

two constitutive parts of becoming. One side of becoming accomplishes its movement

while the other fails to accomplish its movement. So the persistence of being can only

take the form of becoming. It is the becoming of being that counts as the immaculate

conception of the eternal return. The eternal return is not a metaphysical concept, rather it

renders possible attachment to the material world, the world as it is before turning into a

fable in and through a linear narrative of history. The eternal return is a tool for

interpreting the world in its infinity and finitude at the same time, and its legacy lies in its

rejection of both a purely transcendental and a purely immanent interpretation of the

world. When Nietzsche makes the dwarf say “everything straight lies[…] all truth is

crooked, time itself is a circle,” he is pointing towards an ethical imperative, namely, that

one must give free rein to the unconscious drives so that in time, as these drives are let to

manifest themselves in and through language, it becomes apparent that it is ridiculous to

repress them for it is repression itself that produces them; so the more one represses them

the more one contributes to their strengthening. As you see what at stake here is a way of

178
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 178-9
276
governing the self in relation to others. Eternal return is will to power and will to

nothingness at the same time, it is the name of the process of becoming through which

the subject becomes other than itself. This becoming other than itself of the subject is in

the form of an emergence of the new out of the old, that is, realization of an already

existing possibility and will towards its actualisation through this realization. So the

subject assumes what it was in the past and upon this assumption builds its present as

already past and yet to come. It is in this context that Foucault says genealogy is “a

history of the present.”

Sceptic: Very interesting. You seem to have figured out the ways of passing across the

avenues Gilles Deleuze opened in the way of explicating the meaning of eternal return

and its use. Look at what he says in a passage, perhaps the most lucid articulation of

Deleuze’s conception of time and its passage in Nietzsche and Philosophy:

What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither

starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which

becomes. “That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a

world of becoming to world of being—high point of the

meditation.” [Will to Power, 617] This problem for the meditation

must be formulated in yet another way; how can the past be

constituted in time? How can the present pass? The passing

moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to

come—at the same time as being present. If the present did not

pass of its own accord, if it had to wait for a new present in order

to become past, the past in general would never be constituted in

time, and this particular present would not pass. We cannot wait,

277
 the moment must be simultaneously present and past, present and

yet to come, in order for it to pass (and to pass for the sake of other

moments). The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to

come. The synthetic relation of the moment to itself as present,

past and future grounds its relation to other moments. The eternal

return is thus an answer to the problem of passage. And in this

sense it must not be interpreted as the return of something that is,

that is “one” or the “same.” We misinterpret the expression

“eternal return” if we understand is as “return of the same.”179

Stoic: It is true. Let me explain. With the big-bang a substance of infinite intensity begins

its still ongoing process of expansion-contraction. And this process must always already

be complete for it to even begin taking its course of becoming; everything happens at

present and for that reason there is neither a beginning nor an end of time. The force

combinations are infinitely repeated but because of its previous repetition the quality of

the forces themselves change and give birth to its becoming different from itself through

repetition of what it assumes itself to be in relation to time. So the subject always already

is what it strives to become and yet the only way to actualise this becoming what one is is

this: one has to realize that what one is striving to become is already what one is. All the

configurations have to repeat themselves eternally for the return of the same to take

place. But when this same returns one sees that it has never been the same but always

already different from itself. When the future comes it becomes present, the subject is

always at present and can never know what it would be like to exist in another present.

There is nothing and the present.

179
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 48
278
Sceptic: Eternal return is the first conceptualisation of the death drive. It is not death

drive but it operates the way death-drive operates, and since none of these have any

existence outside their operations they are the two different forms the same content takes.

The subject of the eternal return wills nothingness and this willing nothingness always

returns as a will to power. You can see that Nietzsche uses this grand conception of the

relationship between creation and destruction to invert destructive and reactive Nihilism

into the spotlight; he turns Nihilism against itself through the thought of eternal return as

the thought of becoming other than what one thinks one is. What was repressed and

locked into the unconscious once turns into its opposite and becomes the order of the day

in a new light and in another time. In this light time is itself the fourth dimension of

space. That is how Nietzsche can see the rise of Nihilism in its material, historical

conditions. We all come and keep coming from inorganic substance and will end up

there. Nietzsche’s confrontation with truth was the confrontation of brain with chaos.

And out of this confrontation emerges the truth of the death drive, the will to nothingness

disguised as the will to truth, the internally constituted external governor of a Nihilistic

Europe.

Stoic: Yes. They are in our midst and yet exterior to us. We are surrounded and governed

by nothingness and death which have neither a beginning nor an end. Well, at least not

for us, who are those governed by them. For when we die we are nowhere to see our dead

bodies or experience death as our own. Death occurs where there is the absence of my

self’s sense-experience, all the rest is a process of being towards death, dying, becoming-

dead. When death finally arrives even my name ceases to be mine, or rather, it is realized

that even my name has never been mine. There remains no one to carry out my life in my

name once death is here.

279
Sceptic: Death and nothingness are interior and exterior to us at the same time. Most of

us, however, keep the thought of death at bay at all times; those of us are the ones who

live their lives without thinking about death, for they think, in a Spinozan fashion, that

“he who is free thinks of nothing less than of death and his meditation is a wisdom not of

death but of life.” This is the time of good-sense where everything is identical and

everything can be substituted by something else.

Stoic: The will to power and the will to nothingness reverse the roles. We break down as

we go along the way towards the completion of passing across the field of partial objects.

Sceptic: Precisely. You told me what I was trying to tell you. And what is thought worth

if it is not in the service of the present? Sacrificing the present by scarfacing yourself for

the sake of a better future face is itself the worst thing that can be done to your face at all

times. In vain is he/she who strives for immortality.

Stoic: Let us move on to the subjects of finitude and infinity, then. Here is a question for

you: Are we finite becomings or infinite beings?

Sceptic: We might as well be neither or both of these. It’s a matter of taste depending on

whether you see being alive as a process of dying or a process of living.

Stoic: I think we who are alive, or at least think we are, are infinite beings by nature, but

turn into finite becomings in and through our cultures. I say we are infinite beings

because infinity has no beginning or end, so it’s impossible for an infinite entity to be a

becoming, only a being can be infinite, whereas a finite entity has a beginning from

which its becoming starts taking its course and comes to a halt at the end. Since the

concept of time is a cultural construct imposed on nature by human beings, because we

see other people die, we have come to imagine that we are limited by finitude and

surrounded by infinity, when in fact it is the other way around; that is, we are infinite

280
beings and death constitutes an internal limit to our being in the world, giving birth to our

idea of ourselves as finite becomings. Do you understand?

Sceptic: Yes I do. We don’t have to strive for immortality, for we are always already

immortals who are incapable of realising their immortalities.

Stoic: Shall we leave it at that, then?

Sceptic: Let’s do so.

Stoic: No last words?

Sceptic: None at all.

Stoic: No worst of all words.

Sceptic: None worse than last words.

Stoic: Well then, the end to which we are all devoted shall be to raise our glasses to this

worsening suffering!

Sceptic: To what end last words?

Stoic: To what end suffering?

Stoic and Sceptic: Oh, dear!

281
Filmography

Cronenberg, David (dir.) The Dead Zone (Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, 1983)
--- Dead Ringers (The Mantle Clinic II Ltd, 1988)
---Videodrome (Guardian Trust Company, 1982)
---eXistenZ (Screenventures and Alliance Atlantis, 1999)
---Naked Lunch (Optimum Releasing, 2004)

Bress, Eric and Mackye, Gruber (dirs.) The Butterfly Effect (PRA Film, 2004)

Lynch, David (dir.) Mulholland Drive (Universal Studios, 2002)

Solomon, Ed (dir.) Levity (Studio Canal, 2002)

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