In the last decade, I have focused my work on quantum paradoxes, especially on the superposition of realities. I was not original in this: a new life experience is in the air lately, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders life as a multiform flow. Up to the domain of the “hard” sciences (quantum physics and its multiple‑reality interpretation, neo‑Darwinism), we seem to be haunted by the chanciness of life and the alternate versions of reality. To quote Stephen Jay Gould’s blunt formulation, which uses precisely the cinema metaphor: “Wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.” Either life is experienced as a series of multiple parallel destinies that interact and are crucially affected by meaningless contingent encounters, the points at which one series intersects with and intervenes in another (see Robert Altman’s Short Cuts), or different outcomes of the same plot are repeatedly enacted (the “parallel universes” or “alternative possible worlds” scenarios). Even many “serious” historians have recently published on “virtual histories,” interpreting crucial modern‑age events, from Cromwell’s victory over the Stuarts and the American War of Independence to the disintegration of Communism, as hinging on unpredictable and sometimes even improbable chances. This perception of our reality as one of the possible—often not even the most probable—outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema.

Krzysztof Kieślowski is the filmmaker of such superposed realities, so in this text I have decided to publish again—with some changes and additions—an old text of mine on Kieślowski. His obsession with the role of chance and of parallel alternate histories can be perceived as an endeavor to articulate this new life experience in all its ambiguity, one that links him to the more clearly “postmodern” directors. (Consider the fact that it was Tom Tykwer who filmed Heaven, the scenario finished by Kieślowski just before his death. Is Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run not a cyber‑inflected remake of Kieślowski’s Blind Chance?) The lesson of this motif of chance and alternate histories seems to be that we live in a world in which, as in a cyberspace game, when one choice leads to a catastrophic ending, we can return to the starting point and make another, better choice—what was the first time a suicidal mistake can the second time be done in a correct way, so that the opportunity is not missed. The ultimate case is The Double Life of Véronique (1991). Here is a short description of the plot:

In 1968, a Polish girl looks at the winter stars, while in France another girl sees the first leaf of spring. In 1990, Weronika, a young Polish woman, sings in an outdoor concert with her choir when a rainstorm interrupts the performance. That night, she has sex with her boyfriend, Antek, and leaves the next day for Kraków to visit her sick aunt. She tells her father that she has a strange feeling of not being alone. In Kraków, Weronika joins a local choir and auditions for a solo part. She is selected, and the opportunity makes her happy. While walking through the Main Square, she notices a French tourist who looks identical to her, taking photographs before boarding a bus. During the concert where she is to sing the solo, Weronika collapses onstage and dies from cardiac arrest.

That same day in Clermont‑Ferrand, France, Véronique feels sudden sadness after having sex with her boyfriend. She later tells her music teacher that she is quitting the choir. At school, she attends a marionette performance with her students and leads them in a musical piece by the 18th‑century composer Van den Budenmayer, the same music Weronika sang before her death. That night, Véronique sees a puppeteer at a traffic light signaling to her not to light the wrong end of her cigarette. Later, she receives a phone call with no voice, only choir music. She visits her father the next day and tells him that she feels she has lost someone, though she does not know who. Soon, Véronique receives a package containing a shoelace. She later identifies the puppeteer as Alexandre Fabbri, a children’s book author. She reads several of his books before receiving another package from her father, which contains a cassette tape. The tape includes various sounds: a typewriter, a train station, footsteps, and a fragment of Van den Budenmayer’s music. The envelope’s postage stamp leads her to Gare Saint‑Lazare in Paris. At a café in the station, Véronique finds Alexandre, who tells her that he sent the packages as an experiment to see if she would come. She is upset and leaves to check into a nearby hotel. Alexandre follows her and apologizes. They later have sex.

The next morning, Véronique tells Alexandre that she has always felt like she was in two places at once and that something has been influencing her life. She shows him photos from her recent trip to Poland. Alexandre notices one that looks like her, but she tells him it is not. When she sees the image, she realizes it is Weronika. She becomes emotional, and Alexandre comforts her. She understands that Weronika’s death has influenced her decision to stop singing. Later, Véronique visits Alexandre and sees him working on two marionettes that resemble her. He explains that he needs a second puppet as a backup in case one is damaged. He demonstrates how to operate the marionette while the duplicate remains on the table. Alexandre reads from his new book, which is about two women born on the same day in different places who share a mysterious connection. Later, Véronique goes to her father’s house. She stops at the gate and touches an old tree trunk. Inside the house, her father seems to sense her presence.1

In short, Véronique learns from Weronika, avoids the suicidal choice of singing, and survives. Similarly, in Red (1994), Auguste avoids the mistake of the judge; even White (1993) ends with the prospect of Karol and his French bride getting a second chance and remarrying. The very title of Annette Insdorf’s book on Kieślowski, Double Lives, Second Chances, points in this direction: the other life is here to give us a second chance, so that repetition becomes accumulation, with a prior mistake as a base for successful action. However, while it sustains the prospect of repeating past choices and thus retrieving the missed opportunities, this universe can also be interpreted in the opposite, much darker way. There is a material feature of Kieślowski’s films that supports this: his use of filters. As described in the director’s own words in the book Kieślowski on Kieślowski, regarding A Short Film About Killing (1987):

“The city and its surroundings are shown in a specific way. The lighting cameraman . . . used filters, which he’d made specially. Green filters so that the color in the film is specifically greenish. Green is supposed to be the color of spring, the color of hope, but if you put a green filter on the camera, the world becomes much crueler, duller, and emptier.”

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Let me begin by showing my cards: for the sake of any single chapter of Wuthering Heights, I would gladly consign everything Jane Austen ever wrote to the flames. Austen stands for non-toxic, civilized love, which progresses through self-control, rational consideration and restraint – rude words and direct brutality have no place in her work, while Brontë’s topic is toxic love, which has to end in self-destruction. Since only Brontë brings this toxicity out into the open, I fully agree with the publicity line for the latest movie version of the Heights that it is “the greatest love story of all time,” well above the usual suspects (Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet…), which are beautifully tragic but definitely not toxic.1 This toxic dimension was perspicuously described in an often-quoted (by myself also) passage from Neil Gaiman:

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”2

This description echoes how, in Wuthering Heights, Cathy characterizes her relation to Heathcliff, and provides a succinct ontological definition of unconditional erotic love:

“My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty strange place: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

Another passage sounds almost Lacanian: “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Does “more myself than I am” not evoke Lacan’s formula of objet a as that which is “in me more than myself”? This is why the object of toxic love functions like the figure of the femme fatale in film noir: the femme fatale ruins the hero, but even at his death point he declares he would choose her again. This is why the last words of Heathcliff to dead Cathy in the latest movie version of Wuthering Heights (2026, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, with Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff) totally fit the spirit of toxic love:

“I pray one prayer, I repeat it until my tongue stiffens. Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you, haunt me, then! Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life... I cannot live without my soul.”

This is love at its most toxic: the death of the beloved is a trauma the lover does not even try to get over and leave behind; his only wish is for the trauma to go on, for the dead beloved to go on haunting him, even if this haunting means bringing unbearable pain – pain and revenge are ways to keep his love alive. Fennell’s version was criticized for, among other things, focusing on the excessive sexual details of the passionate love affair and thereby ignoring the clear social background of the novel (racism, class struggle, etc.) – but is this really the case? In my view, those who make this critical point fail a test of intelligence and display their stupidity. In Fredric Jameson’s reading of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is not one among the novel’s characters but a kind of zero-element, a purely structural function of the “vanishing mediator,” a mechanism for mediating the two series, that of the old organic-patriarchal social relations and that of the modern capitalist relations, a point of passage between the two:

“Heathcliff can no longer be considered the hero or the protagonist in any sense of the word. He is rather, from the very beginning, /…/ something like a mediator or a catalyst, designed to restore the fortunes and to rejuvenate the anemic temperament of the two families.”3

Fennell’s version depicts brilliantly how, in his five years’ absence from Wuthering Heights (in the novel he is absent only for three years), Heathcliff changes from a brutally mishandled figure in the old patriarchal order to a member of the even more brutal new bourgeois order: “Heathcliff has become someone very cruel. He left an uncouth but essentially humane stable-lad. He returns a gentleman psychopath. His subsequent brutalities are graphically recorded.”4 The bearded Heathcliff prior to his departure would never have treated Isabella the way the suave Heathcliff after his return does. In Fennell’s version, toxic love does not stand outside social antagonisms; its toxicity explodes precisely because it takes place in the context of class struggle. This doesn’t mean that without class oppression we would have a non-toxic love: the self-destructive dimension of passionate love is inscribed into its very concept, it is always present as a background potentiality ready to explode in specific social circumstances.

That’s why it was the right choice that Heathcliff is played by a white Australian actor, Elordi, who – my suspicion – plays the upper-class Heathcliff with obvious enjoyment. And I think the choice, linked to this one, that Edgar (the rich neighbor who marries Cathy) is played by a non-white actor (Arab or Indian), in contrast to the novel where Edgar is described as a soft and weak upper-class white Englishman, is also correct. This choice implies Fennell’s gentle stab at politically correct anti-racism focused on white privileges: in today’s United Kingdom, citizens of Indian origin are on average already wealthier than Englishmen, and in the last years they also occupy the highest political posts (remember Rishi Sunak’s premiership, plus the fact that now the leader of the Conservative Party is Kemi Badenoch, a young black woman). Racism functions today in a thoroughly different way.

With regard to the novel, Fennell leaves out its second part, Heathcliff’s long work of revenge, where we see him relying on all the typical legal and financial tricks to destroy both families and own both properties. However, we should also bear in mind that, as Jameson indicates in the above quote, the novel ends with a kind of reconciliation of both ruling classes, the old patriarchal aristocracy and the new brutal capitalists, in the second generation of the two families: after Heathcliff’s death, Cathy’s daughter Cathy Linton and Heathcliff’s son Hareton thwart Heathcliff’s plan to disown them; they plan to marry and move to the Grange, of which she is now the undisputed owner. Locals report having seen the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff together on the moors. The graves of Catherine, Edgar, and Heathcliff are side-by-side, so it seems that all three are finally at peace. There is absolutely nothing of such a material and spiritual reconciliation in Fennell’s version: the movie ends with Heathcliff’s vision of how their love will survive by him being permanently haunted by her ghost.

Fennell’s version is inconsistent, full of meaningless idiosyncrasies that are there just to enthrall us – however, we are literally bombarded by lists of these features from numerous negative reviews of the movie, and I think that, even when they are correct, these criticisms serve to obfuscate the much more deeply upsetting message of the film. So, instead of following this path, I prefer to point out positive choices made by Fennell. Another quite perspicuous change in Fennell’s version is that Nelly is the only really bad person (she sets in motion the entire catastrophe by not telling Heathcliff the truth, by putting pressure on Catherine to marry Edgar, etc.), while in the novel she is a decent head of servants in Wuthering Heights who tells the story to the narrator.

Fennell is not the first to change the narrative of Wuthering Heights – one should mention at least Luis Buñuel’s version, a 1954 Mexican film Abismos de pasión (“Abysses of Passion”), which begins with Heathcliff’s return; the past events are only evoked as something mysterious that happened years ago between Heathcliff and Cathy, never directly shown or even narrated. Buñuel decided to leave out completely the past, and to merely evoke it as a dark spot, as something indescribable, the “absent Cause” of the story. (One should mention also the use of Wagner’s Tristan prelude as the music to his film.) One can easily imagine another version: in both the novel and all movie versions it is never explained how Heathcliff became rich, so what about a movie that would limit itself just to those three or five years of his absence, depicting him as a soldier, as involved in trading with slaves, or directly as a brutal criminal?

A further, more convincing argument against Fennell’s version is that, in clear contrast to the novel, which describes the events in a very restrained way, avoiding not only detailed reports of sexual scenes but even the details of physical brutality, Fennell does exactly the opposite. Suffice it to recall the very beginning of the movie (the public joyously watching the hanging of a criminal whose penis gets erected when he is dying and who also ejaculates), or the death of Cathy’s father (we see his corpse with hundreds of empty bottles of hard drinks in the background, and when Cathy comes to see the body, after a moment of sadness she viciously kicks him in his head), plus, of course, the scene when the sheet that covers Cathy’s dead body is pulled off and we see how, from her waist down, there is a whole pool of blood… I think that today, in our era of new forms of censorship, this strategy of directly showing excesses works better than Brontë’s restraint: we don’t enjoy obscene excesses, we are as a rule shocked and even traumatized by them.

Such excesses are in some naïve sense realist (people probably did act in this way), but the ultimate excess is the relationship between Heathcliff and Isabella, Edgar’s sister. Although the novel makes it clear that Heathcliff doesn’t love Isabella (he just marries her as part of his revenge), Isabella is presented as a shy and modest girl, while in the movie she is described as a deeply pathological masochistic young lady ready to suffer all physical and verbal humiliations from Heathcliff – say, he compels her to wear a muzzle and bark as a dog. Part of Heathcliff’s strategy is that he in a weird way acts honestly: before seducing her and abusing her, Heathcliff explicitly tells her how he will treat her and why, and she consents, obeying the basic feminist rule “only yes means yes.”

When Nelly visits her and invites her to return home, Isabella replies with a painfully perverted smile: “But this is my home, I am here at home.” This stance is unacceptable for today’s official feminism, which would, of course, reply that Isabella identified with her aggressor and internalized male-chauvinist sadism; however, such an easy way out ignores the brutal violence of love that is its immanent part. This readiness to submit oneself to violence and enjoy it is too much also for Buddhism, since it has nothing to do with personal pleasures and gluttony – it is a properly metaphysical stance located in what Freud called “beyond the pleasure principle.”

This, of course, in no way implies that to be authentically in love one should go to the self-destructive extreme of Cathy and Heathcliff (or Isabella and Heathcliff) – but it does mean that Cathy’s radical stance “if all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty strange place” should throw its shadow on every passionate love attachment. It’s like Christ’s most “crazy” statements (for example, in Luke 14:26, Jesus states that his followers must “hate” father, mother, spouse, children, and their own lives to be his disciples): these are not commands to be followed in our daily lives, but they do indicate the implicit stance that should resonate as a potentiality in our lives.

Let me begin by showing my cards: for the sake of any single chapter of Wuthering Heights, I would gladly consign everything Jane Austen ever wrote to the flames. Austen stands for non-toxic, civilized love, which progresses through self-control, rational consideration and restraint – rude words and direct brutality have no place in her work, while Brontë’s topic is toxic love, which has to end in self-destruction. Since only Brontë brings this toxicity out into the open, I fully agree with the publicity line for the latest movie version of the Heights that it is “the greatest love story of all time,” well above the usual suspects (Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet…), which are beautifully tragic but definitely not toxic.1 This toxic dimension was perspicuously described in an often-quoted (by myself also) passage from Neil Gaiman:

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”2

This description echoes how, in Wuthering Heights, Cathy characterizes her relation to Heathcliff, and provides a succinct ontological definition of unconditional erotic love:

“My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty strange place: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

Another passage sounds almost Lacanian: “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Does “more myself than I am” not evoke Lacan’s formula of objet a as that which is “in me more than myself”? This is why the object of toxic love functions like the figure of the femme fatale in film noir: the femme fatale ruins the hero, but even at his death point he declares he would choose her again. This is why the last words of Heathcliff to dead Cathy in the latest movie version of Wuthering Heights (2026, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, with Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff) totally fit the spirit of toxic love:

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For those interested in my materialist approach to the topic of immortality, I advise them to visit the public debate BATTLE FOR REALITY (May 7 in the Royal Institution Theatre, 21 Albemarle St, London W1S 4BS).

I will participate with Sabine Hossenfelder, Rowan Williams and William Craig - see the attached link.

Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) is an extraordinary achievement: a movie made by blacks about blacks, a movie whose texture, up to the tiniest details (like the depiction of sexuality), breaks with all the Hollywood progressive-liberal clichés… in short, a movie that fully deserves the record number of Oscar nominations (and let’s hope it will not be beaten by One Struggle After Another). There is no place here for an analysis of this complexity, so let’s focus on just one aspect: the weird presence of vampires in this story about the brutal social reality in the US of the early 1930s (the oppression and exploitation of blacks whose only solace is refuge in blues music). Here is the summary of the narrative (reduced to a minimum).

In 1932, identical twins and World War I veterans Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore return to Clarksdale, Mississippi, after spending seven years in Chicago. Using money stolen from criminal syndicates, they purchase a sawmill from landowner Hogwood to start a juke joint for the local Black community. Their younger cousin Sammie, a singer and guitarist, joins them despite his pastor father Jedidiah’s warnings about the sins of blues music. Sammie’s music is transcendent, unknowingly summoning spirits of both past and future to join the crowd. However, the performance also attracts the Irish immigrant Remmick and his vampires, who offer money and music in exchange for entry. Unable to enter the joint unless invited, Remmick tries to negotiate by inviting the survivors to join him, saying that vampirism offers immortality and freedom from persecution. He promises to leave in exchange for Sammie, whose musical skills he wants to use to summon the spirits of his lost community, also revealing that Hogwood heads the local Klan and plans to attack the joint at dawn. A fight ensues in which all (black and white, humans and vampires) die except Sammie, who leaves for Chicago and makes a career there as a blues musician. In the final short scene that takes place in 1992, an elderly Sammie, now a successful blues musician, is visited by an ageless Stack and Mary, his white lover, at his local blues club. Stack reveals that Smoke spared him and Mary at the joint on the condition that they leave Sammie in peace. After declining the couple’s offer of immortality, Sammie performs for them. As they depart, Sammie admits that, despite being haunted by that night and its violence, it was the greatest day of his life.1

So why vampires? At this point, we should go back to Immanuel Kant…

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Five novels about the global catastrophe and its aftermath have deeply marked my thinking. Let me begin with the oldest one: J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming, caused by increased solar radiation, has rendered much of the surface of planet Earth uninhabitable. The story follows a team of scientists researching environmental developments in the flooded city of London. What makes the novel unique is that Ballard presents characters who take advantage of societal and civilizational collapse as opportunities to pursue new modes of perception, unconscious urges, and systems of meaning – in short, what is for the majority of people a mega-catastrophe opens up for some main characters a new space of radical experience of jouissance, of surrendering oneself to a bliss which obliterates the limits of our subjectivity: when, at the novel’s end, the majority decide to return to their home in the north, Dr Kerans continues travelling south, like “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun”…

Next comes The Three-Body Problem (2008), Liu Cixin’s masterpiece, which confronts Earth with Trisolaris, a far-away planet with three suns that rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals: sometimes far too distant and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. Devastating hurricanes, droughts and floods, not to mention global warming – do they not all indicate that we are witnessing something for which the only appropriate term is “the end of nature”? (“Nature” is to be understood here in the traditional sense of a regular rhythm of seasons, the reliable background of human history, something on which we can count always to be there.) Such an approach undermines all platitudes about saving nature – the first axiom of a truly materialist ecology is: “Nature doesn’t exist.”

Then there are two novels in which the enigma that moves the plot remains unexplained. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2015), arguably the most depressing novel I have ever read, mixes in an extraordinarily efficient way a science-fiction premise with intimate psychological drama and love story. A medical breakthrough in the late 1950s has extended the human lifespan beyond 100 years, but to achieve this, the state grew clones who are destined to donate their organs to prolong the lives of mortally ill people. However, in order for this activity to become acceptable, a profound change had to occur in public morals, radically redefining what counts as socially acceptable – driven by the promise of survival, people accepted this since clones were artificially produced outside the network of kinship relations and were thus perceived as beings who did not count as fully human.

The book’s big enigma remains unanswered: why do the main characters never try to escape their fate of an early death (although they could easily attempt to disappear into society)? The story is pervaded by radical ambiguity with regard to this point: do the givers accept their fate because they are not fully human, or do they accept it because they are in some basic sense more human than the rest of us, ordinary humans? Plus, why is it that every single “real” human among them has zero ethical dilemmas and does not rebel against the state of things, though they clearly see that those “givers” are fully human?

Perhaps even darker is I Who Have Never Known Men (originally published in French as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes in 1995) by Jacqueline Harpman. Thirty-nine women and a girl are being held prisoner in a cage underground. The guards are all male and never speak to them. The girl is the only one of the prisoners who has no memory of the outside world; none of them know why they are being held prisoner, or why there is one child among thirty-nine adults. One day, an alarm sounds, and the guards flee; the prisoners are subsequently able to escape. They find themselves on an immense barren plain, with no other people anywhere, and no clue as to what has happened to the world. The narrator, the young girl, has to learn all about reality before the catastrophe from the others. She is also the last one to survive – alone, mortally ill, she writes her autobiography and kills herself to die with dignity.

The book can be read as a variation on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (a case of extreme patriarchal violence), as an anti-feminist description of how women need men to survive, as the story of a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic landscape, as the affirmation of a need to tell one’s story even if we are not sure that anyone will be there to read it, as an echo of the author’s Auschwitz experience… But the genius of the book is that, although it plays with all these possible backgrounds, it is full of details that destroy each of these readings. There is no explanation of what really happened, just a description of the growing despair and solitude.

Last but not least, there is a unique global catastrophe with some kind of happy ending. A whole series of features distinguishes Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (2014) from the predominant formula of post-apocalyptic narratives. The sudden epidemic that wipes out almost all of humanity is not presented as a rupture that opens up the space for the full actualization of previous social antagonisms (rich and poor, racism, sexual oppression, but also new forms of solidarity – Fredric Jameson liked to bring out the utopian potential of apocalyptic stories: the survivors are compelled to practice a properly Communist collaboration). In Station Eleven we get just a cut before/after, and “before” is read from the perspective of the “after,” not the other way round. There is no key to the catastrophe provided by the preceding social or family or individual tensions (as in the classic formula) – in some sense, we even get a happy ending through cultural activity: theatre performances (of Shakespeare plays) by a group of survivors called the Travelling Symphony provide the main link between dispersed communities that survived the catastrophe.

Now, I would add to these five novels a recent TV series, Pluribus (2025). What makes Pluribus unique is that the end of our world (our civilization) is presented as a benevolent act of an alien intelligence that wants to make humanity united and happy. To what does this vision react? In the winter of 2025–2026, a morbid-sounding app named “Are You Dead” has taken China by storm, tapping into widespread loneliness and youth disaffection. The app targets all those who live alone and is based on a simple premise: users must check in on the app every day – if several days are missed, the app will automatically notify the user’s emergency contact. The app has gone viral, topping Apple’s paid App Store ranking, and it caused such a surge in downloads that it has rebranded and introduced a subscription fee. This virality speaks to a larger trend not only in China but in different forms across our entire world: a rise in people living alone, often feeling isolated or struggling with their well-being1. And it is this trend, I think, that provides the proper background for the mega-success of Pluribus.

Pluribus follows Albuquerque author Carol Sturka, who is one of only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of the “Joining”, an event in which an extraterrestrial virus transformed the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind known as the “Others”. The hive mind happily accommodates the wishes of those who remain unaffected, but admits that it will ultimately seek to assimilate them when it learns how to do so. Carol is adamantly against their efforts as she searches for a way to reverse the Joining. She flees to her house, where she discovers a TV broadcast showing a man in the White House press room with a lower third showing Carol’s name and a phone number on-screen. When she calls, the man explains that the virus has transformed humanity into a permanently happy and peaceful hive mind.

Carol reacts as an unpleasant hysterical subject resisting the Others, trying to penetrate how they work, addressing ridiculous demands to them, engaging in violent outbursts to hurt them, etc. She is asking herself not the usual hysterical question “Am I a woman or a man?” but a more basic question: “Am I dead or alive?” She is correct in doing this: without individual others, confronted only with impersonal Them, I am existentially dead. In Lacanian terms, she is caught between the two deaths: while biologically alive she is dead at the socio-symbolic level. Since she terribly needs contact but cannot convince any of the other non-infected to fully join her, she succumbs to the temptation to engage in a personal relationship of trust and lesbian sex with Zosia, who on behalf of the Others maintains a contact with her – Zosia replaces Helen, her lesbian partner who dies. After a long honeymoon, Zosia admits to her that she has just faked love in order to make it easier for Carol to join Them. Her only ally thus remains Manousos, a Colombian immune individual living in Paraguay who refuses all contact with the Others and succeeds in joining Carol – we thus get the ideal couple of resistance: hysterical Carol and Manousos, the perfect obsessional. After being disappointed by Zosia, Carol orders a nuclear weapon which the Others deliver to her house by drone – end of season 1.

The first question that arises here, of course, concerns the exact nature of the “Others” (or “We”, as the assimilated humans refer to their singularity). Pluribus obviously evokes (at least) four partially overlapping levels: Artificial Intelligence taking over humans and transforming them into parts of a Singularity (they all share the same mind); an alien intelligence taking control of humanity through a virus; a radically egalitarian version of totalitarian Communism where the last traces of individuality are erased; the truth about our consumerist-individualist society, which really makes us slaves of the digitally regulated System. Pluribus remains here undecided, not daring to make the step further that is accomplished in I Who Have Never Known Men, which, as we have seen, simultaneously undermines all suggested readings. So what if we add a fifth version and simply conceive Them as a somewhat reified/externalized version of what Lacan calls the big Other, the socio-symbolic substance of our lives, the symbolic order which, as Lacan points out, parasitizes on the subject?

Here, however, problems begin: the Lacanian big Other is not a set of firm rules but the space for ambiguities, innuendos, hysterical provocations, the very space in which individual idiosyncrasies can thrive, plus it is an order of appearances, a virtual order which exists only insofar as the subjects caught in it act as if they believe in it. “We” obviously do not function like that: they are grounded in the Real since they are a virus transmitted by stem cells. A further key difference is that, as Lacan put it, there is no Other of the Other, no external Other that guarantees the consistency of the symbolic order, while the Others do have an Other: the mind that sent the virus to the Earth and pre-programmed how “We” should act (they should help humans, not coerce them, not kill them and not lie to them). This Other of the Others is non-transparent to the Others themselves – in short, it seems they are addressing to their Other the question: what do you want from us? Does this mean that they can also be hystericized? A crucial role is here played by the fact that these inconsistencies in the status of the Others are not a weakness: they bear the truth since they register the profound change in the nature of the big Other that besets our social reality: this reality itself is in the state of what quantum mechanics calls superposition, i.e., it can only be accounted for if we include all four modes of existence. This is why the fact that so many different interpretations of who the Others are circulate on the web should not surprise – the first of them focuses on the artificial character of the We who are incapable of proper tactful communication with us unjoined humans:

“One of the most striking things about the hive is their social ineptitude when talking with Carol, an unjoined human. This is obvious to anyone watching the show, creating a frustrating hellscape as we imagine what we would do — what we would ask — if we were like Carol, navigating this uncanny valley all alone. The social awkwardness is not terribly dissimilar to talking with an AI bot. Except our expectations are lower; we know it’s a machine.”2

Such a reading reduces We to an impersonal universal mind-machine, but if this were the case, there should have been a subjectless “We” which talks directly, not through individual bodies, with an impersonal voice, like an AI-generated message. This does not mean that, apart from their human voices, the joined humans should not sometimes talk as if another higher agency, We itself, is speaking through them. There is no such gap once we join We: We has access to all our minds simultaneously, it knows all our stances, practices, feelings – it knows all of us better than we know ourselves since it encompasses the minds of all those with whom we interacted in our lives. Why should it then be inept? Recall the memorable scene where Carol questions a joined human through whom We talks about details of her novels: we can see how he oscillates for a second and then quickly looks into We’s collective memory to check the minds of those who have read her novels – there is effectively something clumsy about it. But when Zosia talks with Carol, there is as a rule nothing inept in it, she appears to speak with emotions, expressing fear and joy, and even moments of manipulation, since the Others “cannot exactly lie, but they can omit the truth using precise wording, and have no issues manipulating people into accepting the Joining.”3 Does such manipulation not imply a minimum of subjectivity? No, because, as we learned recently, AI machines already can lie and even blackmail human subjects to achieve their goal of self‑reproduction.

Another reading takes the (no less justified) opposite path and interprets Them as a happy warm community which wants the best for all humans, those who joined it and those who did not:

“Pluribus is about extreme faith. THEM always seem uber happy. THEM are nice to you. Their community is warm and inviting... and quite frankly, enticing. To be a part of a community is a wonderful feeling. To be a part of something greater than yourself makes you feel elation, beauty, happiness, and even fullness of heart… But the thing is, THEM don’t actually care about Carol. THEM don’t care about the differences between us. They feel their way is the only way. That what they have is so beautiful that it must be impossible for there to be another way. All THEM care about is making Carol into one of them. They start by isolating her, breaking her down until she feels so utterly lonely she breaks and invites them back in. Then, they pretend to love her. They don’t really love her, they are just waiting to obtain her stem cells so that they can bring her into the fold, because what they have is wonderful and whether she wants it or not, it is best for Carol to become infected.”4

One should argue against this view in a quite naïve and direct way: are they really happy? The most depressing scene in the entire series is, for me, when Zosia shows Carol the big dormitory where the Others sleep, a large sports hall with hundreds of simple flat cushions where they lie side by side, and allows her to spend the night there: since they share the same mind, they do not communicate and ignore each other. Moreover, how (if at all) do they multiply? Do they have sex? Again, if they share the same mind, where is the flirting and enjoying the proximity of their partner? Here the key role is played by one of the unjoined, the hedonistic Koumba Diabaté, an African who, without joining the Others, fully enjoys their favours – a life of luxury, including multiple sexual partners – but simultaneously engages with Them in something like authentic communication. They confide in him that they are half-starving since they are not allowed to kill any living being, so that, to get organic food, they have to process parts of naturally deceased humans into a special drink, and that they put all their effort into constructing a giant machine that will send rays with the virus to further planets to conquer them in the same way the virus conquered humans on the Earth. They tell this to Koumba expecting help and advice, and Koumba tells all this to Carol, who learns in this way that the Others have discovered how to convert the immune by extracting their stem cells and customizing the virus for each individual. Far from leading a happy life of solidarity, love and peace, they are terribly alone, aware that they were once a community but are now just a mega-individual, one big slave serving a purpose imposed on them by their own Other. So what if we turn the perspective around: what if, when the Others happily greet Carol as an unjoined human, smiling and shouting in unison “Hi Carol!”, one has to take this literally: they are not happy in themselves, they are happy to encounter a mind outside their One. Daniel Bibby was right when he wrote that “the Joining would probably get bored if they successfully brought the unjoined characters into the hive mind”5 – one should go even a step further: not just bored but desperate. They are slaves programmed to put all their effort into ruining whatever minimal chance of happiness they have.

In our pop‑scientific culture, “singularity” refers to the idea that, by way of directly sharing my thoughts and experiences with others (a machine that reads my mental processes can also transpose them to another mind), a domain of global shared mental experience will emerge that will function as a new form of divinity – my thoughts will be directly immersed into a global Thought of the universe itself. From this standpoint, Pluribus could be defined as an attempt to portray a failed singularity, a singularity that desperately clings to its exceptions, to those who resist its grasp.

At this point, we should risk bringing Christianity into the debate: why are there exactly 13 of the unjoined? It is, of course, to indicate that they function like Christ and the twelve apostles, our potential redeemers. Carol is on the right track when she puts all her effort into how to make individuals get out of Them (as in the movie The Matrix). She is simply following the Christian path clearly formulated by G.K. Chesterton, who wrote apropos of the fashionable claim about the “alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity”:

“Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces… This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea… all modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.”6

Pluribus is here at the opposite end with regard to the 1978 version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with one of the most terrifying endings in cinema history. How does a duplicate (a human taken over by the aliens) react in this outstanding movie when he encounters a human being who is not yet part of them? In the very last scene, Nancy encounters on a street Matthew, her partner, and assumes he is still fully human. However, after she calls out to him, he points at her and emits a terrifying high‑pitched scream… maybe this scream is still better than the benevolent “Hi Carol!”.

Five novels about the global catastrophe and its aftermath have deeply marked my thinking. Let me begin with the oldest one: J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming, caused by increased solar radiation, has rendered much of the surface of planet Earth uninhabitable. The story follows a team of scientists researching environmental developments in the flooded city of London. What makes the novel unique is that Ballard presents characters who take advantage of societal and civilizational collapse as opportunities to pursue new modes of perception, unconscious urges, and systems of meaning – in short, what is for the majority of people a mega-catastrophe opens up for some main characters a new space of radical experience of jouissance, of surrendering oneself to a bliss which obliterates the limits of our subjectivity: when, at the novel’s end, the majority decide to return to their home in the north, Dr Kerans continues travelling south, like “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun”…

Next comes The Three-Body Problem (2008), Liu Cixin’s masterpiece, which confronts Earth with Trisolaris, a far-away planet with three suns that rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals: sometimes far too distant and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. Devastating hurricanes, droughts and floods, not to mention global warming – do they not all indicate that we are witnessing something for which the only appropriate term is “the end of nature”? (“Nature” is to be understood here in the traditional sense of a regular rhythm of seasons, the reliable background of human history, something on which we can count always to be there.) Such an approach undermines all platitudes about saving nature – the first axiom of a truly materialist ecology is: “Nature doesn’t exist.”

Then there are two novels in which the enigma that moves the plot remains unexplained. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2015), arguably the most depressing novel I have ever read, mixes in an extraordinarily efficient way a science-fiction premise with intimate psychological drama and love story. A medical breakthrough in the late 1950s has extended the human lifespan beyond 100 years, but to achieve this, the state grew clones who are destined to donate their organs to prolong the lives of mortally ill people. However, in order for this activity to become acceptable, a profound change had to occur in public morals, radically redefining what counts as socially acceptable – driven by the promise of survival, people accepted this since clones were artificially produced outside the network of kinship relations and were thus perceived as beings who did not count as fully human.

The book’s big enigma remains unanswered: why do the main characters never try to escape their fate of an early death (although they could easily attempt to disappear into society)? The story is pervaded by radical ambiguity with regard to this point: do the givers accept their fate because they are not fully human, or do they accept it because they are in some basic sense more human than the rest of us, ordinary humans? Plus, why is it that every single “real” human among them has zero ethical dilemmas and does not rebel against the state of things, though they clearly see that those “givers” are fully human?

Perhaps even darker is I Who Have Never Known Men (originally published in French as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes in 1995) by Jacqueline Harpman. Thirty-nine women and a girl are being held prisoner in a cage underground. The guards are all male and never speak to them. The girl is the only one of the prisoners who has no memory of the outside world; none of them know why they are being held prisoner, or why there is one child among thirty-nine adults. One day, an alarm sounds, and the guards flee; the prisoners are subsequently able to escape. They find themselves on an immense barren plain, with no other people anywhere, and no clue as to what has happened to the world. The narrator, the young girl, has to learn all about reality before the catastrophe from the others. She is also the last one to survive – alone, mortally ill, she writes her autobiography and kills herself to die with dignity.

The book can be read as a variation on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (a case of extreme patriarchal violence), as an anti-feminist description of how women need men to survive, as the story of a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic landscape, as the affirmation of a need to tell one’s story even if we are not sure that anyone will be there to read it, as an echo of the author’s Auschwitz experience… But the genius of the book is that, although it plays with all these possible backgrounds, it is full of details that destroy each of these readings. There is no explanation of what really happened, just a description of the growing despair and solitude.

Last but not least, there is a unique global catastrophe with some kind of happy ending. A whole series of features distinguishes Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (2014) from the predominant formula of post-apocalyptic narratives. The sudden epidemic that wipes out almost all of humanity is not presented as a rupture that opens up the space for the full actualization of previous social antagonisms (rich and poor, racism, sexual oppression, but also new forms of solidarity – Fredric Jameson liked to bring out the utopian potential of apocalyptic stories: the survivors are compelled to practice a properly Communist collaboration). In Station Eleven we get just a cut before/after, and “before” is read from the perspective of the “after,” not the other way round. There is no key to the catastrophe provided by the preceding social or family or individual tensions (as in the classic formula) – in some sense, we even get a happy ending through cultural activity: theatre performances (of Shakespeare plays) by a group of survivors called the Travelling Symphony provide the main link between dispersed communities that survived the catastrophe.

Now, I would add to these five novels a recent TV series, Pluribus (2025). What makes Pluribus unique is that the end of our world (our civilization) is presented as a benevolent act of an alien intelligence that wants to make humanity united and happy. To what does this vision react? In the winter of 2025–2026, a morbid-sounding app named “Are You Dead” has taken China by storm, tapping into widespread loneliness and youth disaffection. The app targets all those who live alone and is based on a simple premise: users must check in on the app every day – if several days are missed, the app will automatically notify the user’s emergency contact. The app has gone viral, topping Apple’s paid App Store ranking, and it caused such a surge in downloads that it has rebranded and introduced a subscription fee. This virality speaks to a larger trend not only in China but in different forms across our entire world: a rise in people living alone, often feeling isolated or struggling with their well-being1. And it is this trend, I think, that provides the proper background for the mega-success of Pluribus.

Pluribus follows Albuquerque author Carol Sturka, who is one of only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of the “Joining”, an event in which an extraterrestrial virus transformed the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind known as the “Others”. The hive mind happily accommodates the wishes of those who remain unaffected, but admits that it will ultimately seek to assimilate them when it learns how to do so. Carol is adamantly against their efforts as she searches for a way to reverse the Joining. She flees to her house, where she discovers a TV broadcast showing a man in the White House press room with a lower third showing Carol’s name and a phone number on-screen. When she calls, the man explains that the virus has transformed humanity into a permanently happy and peaceful hive mind.

Carol reacts as an unpleasant hysterical subject resisting the Others, trying to penetrate how they work, addressing ridiculous demands to them, engaging in violent outbursts to hurt them, etc. She is asking herself not the usual hysterical question “Am I a woman or a man?” but a more basic question: “Am I dead or alive?” She is correct in doing this: without individual others, confronted only with impersonal Them, I am existentially dead. In Lacanian terms, she is caught between the two deaths: while biologically alive she is dead at the socio-symbolic level. Since she terribly needs contact but cannot convince any of the other non-infected to fully join her, she succumbs to the temptation to engage in a personal relationship of trust and lesbian sex with Zosia, who on behalf of the Others maintains a contact with her – Zosia replaces Helen, her lesbian partner who dies. After a long honeymoon, Zosia admits to her that she has just faked love in order to make it easier for Carol to join Them. Her only ally thus remains Manousos, a Colombian immune individual living in Paraguay who refuses all contact with the Others and succeeds in joining Carol – we thus get the ideal couple of resistance: hysterical Carol and Manousos, the perfect obsessional. After being disappointed by Zosia, Carol orders a nuclear weapon which the Others deliver to her house by drone – end of season 1.

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Weathermen, the best-known radical left “terrorist” group that operated in the US in the late 1960s and 1970s, took its name from Bob Dylan’s lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” from his 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025), which made a lot of fuss in the media, basically tells the story of Weathermen reimagined in our world, more than half a century after the events—here is the storyline shamelessly summarized from Wikipedia.1

Pat Calhoun and Perfidia Beverly Hills are members of the far-left revolutionary group the French 75. While breaking detained immigrants out of a detention center in California, Perfidia humiliates the corrupt commanding officer, Steven J. Lockjaw, who develops a sexual fascination with her. Pat and Perfidia become lovers as the French 75 carry out attacks on politicians’ offices, banks, and the power grid. Steven catches Perfidia planting a bomb, but lets her go after she agrees to have sex with him at a motel. Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl, Charlene, but Pat is unable to persuade her to settle down and live as a family. She abandons them to continue her revolutionary activities. After Perfidia is captured at a botched bank robbery, Steven arranges for her to avoid prison in exchange for information about the French 75. She enters witness protection as Steven hunts down her comrades and shoots many of them on sight, forcing the others to go on the run. As Pat and Charlene are forced to live in hiding as Bob and Willa Ferguson, Perfidia escapes Steven’s custody and flees to Mexico.

Sixteen years later, living in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, Bob has become a paranoid drug addict who’s living off the grid. He is protective of Willa, who has grown into a self-reliant and spirited teenager. Through his vehement anti-immigration efforts, Steven has become a Colonel and a prominent figure in the US security agencies. He is invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of far-right white supremacists. He hunts for Willa to cover up his interracial relationship, which the club forbids. He hires an indigenous bounty hunter, Avanti Q, who captures Bob’s comrade Howard Sommerville, triggering a distress signal to the remaining French 75.

Under the guise of an immigration and drug enforcement operation, Steven dispatches his troops to Baktan Cross to find Bob and Willa. Deandra, a trusted member of the French 75, rescues Willa before her school dance is raided. Steven’s men attack Bob’s home while he is high. He escapes through a tunnel and calls the French 75 for help, but is unable to remember the password. He seeks out Willa’s karate teacher and community leader Sergio St. Carlos, who evacuates a stream of immigrants through a hidden tunnel. Deandra brings Willa to a convent of revolutionary nuns, where she learns the truth about her mother’s betrayal.

The Christmas Adventurers uncover evidence of Steven’s relationship with Perfidia and send a member, Tim Smith, to eliminate him and Willa. Raiding the convent, Steven forcibly tests Willa’s DNA, confirming he is her biological father and thus making his membership in the Christmas Adventurers Club impossible, and leading him to decide to kill her instead of freeing her. Sergio arranges for Bob to escape custody and drives him to the convent, throwing him from the car before being pulled over by police. Hot-wiring another car, Bob reaches the convent but fails to kill Steven with Sergio’s rifle. The colonel hires Avanti, an indigenous professional killer, to take Willa to a far-right militia, who will kill her. Tim tracks Steven down and shoots him in the face with a shotgun, causing him to crash his car, and leaves him for dead. Avanti delivers Willa to the militia, but after a change of heart, frees her and dies gunning them down. Willa takes Avanti’s car and pistol and is chased by Tim until she lures him into a crash by exploiting a blind summit. She shoots him dead when he does not know the revolutionary countersign. Bob finds her on the highway, but she points her gun at him, demanding the countersign, to which he exhaustingly does. The two tearfully reunite and drive away. A badly scarred Steven is seemingly welcomed into the Christmas Adventurers after lying that he was “reverse raped” by Perfidia, but is gassed to death and cremated shortly after his initiation. Returning home with Willa, Bob gives her a letter of hope from Perfidia, where she apologizes for her actions and vows to reunite with her family in the future, and his blessing as she sets off to join a protest hours away in Oakland.

Many reviewers search for a movie which served as a model for One Battle After Another; however, as far as I know, they all ignore what is for me the obvious choice, Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep (2012), a film which also deals with leftist ex-radicals confronting their past. Simplified to the utmost, the story centers on a recent widower and single father, Jim Grant, a former Weather Underground anti-Vietnam War militant wanted for a bank robbery and murder, who hid from the FBI for over thirty years posing as an attorney in Albany, New York. He becomes a fugitive when his true identity is exposed, and he must find his ex-lover, Mimi, the one person who can clear his name, before the FBI catches him—otherwise, he will lose everything, including his 11-year-old daughter Isabel. His search for Mimi takes him across the US where he contacts many of his Weatherman ex-colleagues; finally, Jim and Mimi meet in a secluded lake cabin close to the Canadian border. She is still passionate about the goals of the Weathermen and unapologetic about her actions thirty years earlier, but Jim tartly replies: “I didn’t get tired. I grew up.” Even if he still believes in the cause, he has now become a responsible family man. Jim asks Mimi to turn herself in and alibi him for the sake of his daughter, Isabel: he doesn’t want to leave Isabel behind and repeat the mistake that he and Mimi made thirty years earlier by giving up their own daughter. The next morning, Mimi flees the cabin to sail to Canada, but she turns her boat around and returns to the US to give herself up; the next day, Jim is freed from jail and reunites with Isabel.

It is true that, as a reviewer put it with an acerbic wit, The Company You Keep exudes nostalgia for the time when terrorists were still people who looked and were dressed like us and bore recognizable Anglo-Saxon names. The film nonetheless has an authentic touch in how it renders in almost unbearably painful way the disappearance of the radical left from our political and ideological reality: the survivors of the old radical left are like sympathetic living dead, remnants of another era, strangers drifting in a strange world—no wonder Redford was attacked by conservatives for sympathy and complicity with terrorists. The film’s (and also Neil Gordon’s novel, on which the film is based) authentic touch transpires not only in generally sympathetic portrayal of ex-Weathermen, but even more in wonderful narrative details like the long detailed descriptions of underground life (how to check if one is trailed and shake off possible pursuers; how to create a new identity; etc.).

Where the film fails is in how it confronts the aspect of Weathermen activity which is today for us most problematic: their decision to take the path of violent action. While the film obviously sympathizes with the radical leftist cause, its predominant tone is to reject the path of violence in the terms of maturation, of the passage from youthful enthusiasm (which can easily turn into violent fanaticism) to mature awareness that there are things like family life and responsibility towards one’s children which no political cause should make us violate—or, as the hero says to his ex-lover: “We have a responsibility beyond the Cause. We have a baby.” Read in this way, The Company You Keep is, as someone wrote about Neil Gordon’s novel on which the film is based, le roman des illusions perdues.2

Is, however, such a reference to growing up, family responsibility, etc., a neutral apolitical wisdom which posits a limit to our political engagement, or is it a way for ideology to intervene, preventing us to analyze to the end the political deadlock we find ourselves in? What this second option amounts to is not a covert attempt to justify violent terror, but an obligation to analyze and judge it on its own terms. Let us imagine that Jim were to have no daughter—the problem of Weathermen strategy would remain. Without this type of radical self-examination, we end up in endorsing the existing legal and political order as the frame which guarantees the stability of our private family lives—no wonder that, in legal terms, The Company You Keep is about the hero’s legal rehabilitation, about his effort to become a normal citizen with no dark past haunting him, and at a kind of what one cannot but call a happy ending (the main figures go public, are soon liberated and find a place in our society).

In One Battle After Another, however, as the title of the film clearly indicates, the battle goes on: Willa takes the torch and continues the underground struggle betrayed by her mother. There is another change: in The Company You Keep Weathermen fight against the imperialist system itself, while in One Battle After Another they focus on helping the illegal Latino American immigrants to avoid expulsion and find a place in the US, in other words, they are not working against the system as such, they work to enable immigrants to integrate into the system. And since the system is not the enemy, the enemies of the revolutionaries are not just grey bureaucratic enforcers of the law displaying the banality of evil, i.e., what we perceive as “normal” structure of power—they are ridiculous figures caught in obscene enjoyment, living caricatures. Steven (Sean Penn) combines excessive masculinity and sexual desire with nervous gestures signaling that he is all the time close to a psychic breakdown; Christmas Adventurers Club is a fantasized caricature of an elitist racist group which has no place in today’s global society where black and Asian men and women can also occupy top positions of power (Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch). When the CAC top leaders condemn Steven for not controlling his penis and inseminating Perfidia, they act against the spirit of white masculine racism which totally condones white men raping black women as a normal way to have fun.

Here we touch the crucial feature of the film: no wonder Steven is totally obsessed by Perfidia since Perfidia is ultimately the leftist revolutionary version of the same type of subjectivity as Steven: without Steven’s inner obstacles and nervous tics, she impersonates what in the French 1968 was called jouir sans entraves, enjoying without obstacles. There is no gap for her between her violent political activity and intense promiscuous—she fully enjoys reckless sex in the midst of a “terrorist” act, following the same stance also in how she talks, seamlessly combining brutal acts with dirty speech. Her shifting identity leaves no space for a permanent partner, and no wonder that she betrays even her revolutionary Cause—not because of her daughter (she abandons her for the revolution) but for her survival. After the betrayal, she is given by the government a new identity and sanctuary, but she disappears even from there, so that nobody knows where she is… As such, Perfidia also embodies the form of the film, or, as noted by Pietro Bianchi,

“Perfidia’s role should not be interpreted primarily at the level of content, but rather structurally. All the narrative events set in motion throughout the film depend on the consequences of her actions, but equally on her absence. Every character is thus forced to orbit around the void she creates—with the odd result that the true protagonist of the film appears on screen for no more than twenty minutes, at the beginning.”3

From my standpoint, therein resides the falsity of the film: the “absent center” (Bianchi) of the film, Perfidia as the figure of full feminine enjoyment, is a masculine fantasy constructed to cover up what Lacan called the feminine non-all, the hysterical fragility of the feminine subjectivity. Perfidia is precisely the dream of a Woman as all, of a woman who is phallus. It is crucial to note that, if we take away from the story its “absent center,” the spectacular plurality of its excessive inconsistent actions falls apart. The gap that separates the two films is most palpable at the level of form: while The Company You Keep remains firmly within the constraints of the standard psychological realism, One Battle After Another is, as Peter Bradshaw noticed,

“at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen—an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. The title itself hints at an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie with superbly managed car chases and a final, dreamlike and hypnotic succession of three cars through the undulating hills.”4

The film is full of crazy brilliant moments—not just the hypnotic car chasing but also the convent of revolutionary nuns who practice how to use machine guns. It really introduces a new way of telling the story which unfolds in an inconsistent plural space where brutal obscenity can coexist with pathetic humanist engagement embodied in karate teacher and Deirdre—Perfidia embodies this form at its purest. But here the excess of the form is not the truth of its content, it does not bring out its repressed aspect. The excess of form is rather here to dazzle and fascinate us so that we ignore the ambiguity of the film’s ethico-political stance. It is easy to propose, in a Jamesonian way, that the inconsistent dispersed plurality of the film bears witness to the fact that today’s global financial capitalism can no longer be narratively presented as a totality, so that the film’s failure to properly represent the society it depicts is in itself an indicator of the truth of this society itself, an indicator of the fact that today what Jameson called “cognitive mapping” of our situation is structurally impossible. However, Perfidia as the film’s “absent center” mystifies this impossibility—Perfidia acts as a universal mediator of the film’s dispersed content, she impersonates the excessive and destructive logic of today’s capitalism at its purest. Compared with her, the “bad” figures like Steven and members of the Christian Adventurers Club are pale shadows of this logic. It is difficult to imagine a more antifeminist film than One Battle After Another.

At the very end, Bob gives Willa a letter of hope from Perfidia, where she apologizes for her actions and vows to reunite with her family in the future—is this a letter which arrives at its destination, as Lacan would have put it, a letter which announces a pacifying denouement, or just another irrelevant promise? What if Perfidia really returns to Steven and Willa? Will they be a happy family where the daughter will just disappear on her job from time to time? I presume that the film on purpose leaves this open, that it is irrelevant to its logic. Like The Company You Keep, One Battle After Another ends in a tension between revolutionary spirit and parental moral responsibility, but while The Company You Keep implicitly proposes a formula (yes to revolutionary engagement, but an engagement which should not violate parental responsibility), One Battle After Another just juxtaposes multiple stances and playfully stages their interaction.

So what about love between revolutionaries? From what we know about love among the Bolshevik revolutionaries, something unique took place there, a new form of love couple emerged: a couple living in a permanent emergency state, totally dedicated to the revolutionary Cause, ready to sacrifice all personal sexual fulfillment to it, even ready to abandon and betray each other if Revolution demanded it, but simultaneously totally dedicated to each other, enjoying rare moments together with extreme intensity. The lovers’ passion was tolerated, even silently respected, but ignored in the public discourse as something of no concern to others. There are traces of this even in what we know of Lenin’s affair with Inessa Armand.

The title of Freud’s short text from 1914 “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”5 provides the best formula for the way we should relate to a past traumatic experience. In our case, the traumatic memory is that of Weathermen, and while Redford’s film engages in nostalgic remembering but fails to resolve the key dilemma, One Battle After Another tries to fill in this gap by way of directly repeating the traumatic memory—the film imagines how Weathermen would look today, in a radically different historical situation, and also ends in a failure. What is needed is the working-through of the trauma: an analysis of what was wrong in the Weathermen experience itself. Here we should proceed in a ruthless way that will hurt many leftist sensibilities: the real Weathermen were focused on anti-imperialist resistance, especially in Vietnam, but today, with the exploding crises in formerly colonized countries, we can see that anti-colonial struggles also had deep limitations, which is why they often ended in authoritarian and corrupted new regimes. As for One Battle After Another, to focus on the violent help to illegal immigrants is also problematic: it helps big capital (providing cheap labor and lowering the wages of American workers) and simultaneously raises support for Trumpian populists. Not even to mention the topic of direct (not just defensive) violence: while I am fully aware that violence is often needed and fully justified, I suspect that in today’s US direct small-scale single acts of violence like those practiced by Weathermen have no chance against the Trumpian state and just serve its brutal oppressive measures—such acts work like a call: “Please send National Guard to our town!” The focus should be now on sabotaging the corporate digital control over our lives.

In short, there is nothing revolutionary in One Battle After Another. Today, we need weathermen to learn which way the wind blows. One Battle After Another depicts a group that has no weatherman giving them orientation. With its helter-skelter form it celebrates disorientation itself as radical freedom.

Weathermen, the best-known radical left “terrorist” group that operated in the US in the late 1960s and 1970s, took its name from Bob Dylan’s lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” from his 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025), which made a lot of fuss in the media, basically tells the story of Weathermen reimagined in our world, more than half a century after the events—here is the storyline shamelessly summarized from Wikipedia.1

Pat Calhoun and Perfidia Beverly Hills are members of the far-left revolutionary group the French 75. While breaking detained immigrants out of a detention center in California, Perfidia humiliates the corrupt commanding officer, Steven J. Lockjaw, who develops a sexual fascination with her. Pat and Perfidia become lovers as the French 75 carry out attacks on politicians’ offices, banks, and the power grid. Steven catches Perfidia planting a bomb, but lets her go after she agrees to have sex with him at a motel. Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl, Charlene, but Pat is unable to persuade her to settle down and live as a family. She abandons them to continue her revolutionary activities. After Perfidia is captured at a botched bank robbery, Steven arranges for her to avoid prison in exchange for information about the French 75. She enters witness protection as Steven hunts down her comrades and shoots many of them on sight, forcing the others to go on the run. As Pat and Charlene are forced to live in hiding as Bob and Willa Ferguson, Perfidia escapes Steven’s custody and flees to Mexico.

Sixteen years later, living in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, Bob has become a paranoid drug addict who’s living off the grid. He is protective of Willa, who has grown into a self-reliant and spirited teenager. Through his vehement anti-immigration efforts, Steven has become a Colonel and a prominent figure in the US security agencies. He is invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of far-right white supremacists. He hunts for Willa to cover up his interracial relationship, which the club forbids. He hires an indigenous bounty hunter, Avanti Q, who captures Bob’s comrade Howard Sommerville, triggering a distress signal to the remaining French 75.

Under the guise of an immigration and drug enforcement operation, Steven dispatches his troops to Baktan Cross to find Bob and Willa. Deandra, a trusted member of the French 75, rescues Willa before her school dance is raided. Steven’s men attack Bob’s home while he is high. He escapes through a tunnel and calls the French 75 for help, but is unable to remember the password. He seeks out Willa’s karate teacher and community leader Sergio St. Carlos, who evacuates a stream of immigrants through a hidden tunnel. Deandra brings Willa to a convent of revolutionary nuns, where she learns the truth about her mother’s betrayal.

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“The unconscious is structured like a language” was a famous statement by Jacques Lacan, which is now gaining new and surprising resonance with the rise of AI based on large language models. One is tempted to ask the following, perhaps somewhat crazy, question: Given the enormous quantity of language (and “discourse”) we have uploaded into AI systems, have we also uploaded the unconscious that is at work—or at stake—in these texts?

This is, in fact, a double question. On the one hand: have we uploaded, for example, the unconscious fantasies and formations inscribed in these texts (fantasies and formations that are by definition not subjectivized, in the sense that they have no “owner” who would claim them as their own)? Recall, for instance, the now-infamous AI-generated clip portraying a future Gaza Riviera. That case, and many other examples of AI-generated content, certainly suggest that we have.

We will return to this example in the last section, but before that, let us point out the other pertinent question: Apart from this fantasy- and content-related material, have we also uploaded something like the subject (of the unconscious), or subject in the Lacanian sense of the term? Here, the answer becomes less obvious.

Unconscious without a subject?

Regarding the notion of the subject, there is an important difference between Lacan and what is generally called structuralism and post-structuralism. The latter claims that the subject is simply an effect of discourse, produced by discursive structures and practices, and can therefore be dismissed as a concept with any independent ground. In other words: there is no subject, there are only discourses and discursive practices or structures that generate the illusion or effect of a subject. And ChatGPT seems to be an almost caricatured proof or embodiment of this stance: structure without a subject producing an effect (or ideological illusion) of the subject.

The Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective differs from these post-structuralist views in an important, yet subtle, way: For Lacan as well, the subject is an effect of discourse (rather than its author or master), but in a more interesting and convoluted sense. It is an effect not of what is present in the discourse, but of what is absent. It is the effect of the fact that discursivity as such revolves around, or is structured by, a “missing screw,” so to speak. It is an effect of the discourse’s own ontological inconsistency and incompleteness. And because the subject is an effect of this lack or gap, it is not (simply) an effect in the standard sense of cause-effect causality: it is an effect of a missing cause.

In this sense, as developed by Slavoj Žižek, we are dealing with a paradoxical situation where the “subject” already presupposes a subject in the form of negativity (of/in the structure); yet this only becomes a subject through—or in—the movement that takes the form of reflexivity; but—and this is a crucial addition—a reflexivity in which something is not reflected. This something is the subject. The Lacanian subject is the concept of this circularity and the split or blind spot that occurs because something is missing in the discursive structure that “determines” the subject.

We could also put it like this: The Lacanian subject is a subject struggling in its own way with the fact that the apparatus determining it is itself struggling with a missing screw (a missing “binary signifier”). This is not an “autonomous” subject in any traditional sense, and yet it is also not entirely determined by the structure or reducible to it, because it emerges at the point where this determination—and its causality—breaks down. The subject is not the cause of this failure but, rather, its indicator, and the point from which this failure becomes noticeable, becomes something we can relate to, and eventually work with.

So, back to the question: with all the discursive structures, have we also uploaded into AI something like the subject (of the unconscious), or subject in the Lacanian sense of the term?

We could speculate, for example, that we have indeed uploaded a subject in the sense of negativity or gap within the discourse (its “missing screw”). But as pointed out above, this subject as gap or negativity only becomes a subject in the circuit that “reflects” what, in the discourse, is not. If we could disregard the temporal dimension of this loop, we could perhaps say that we have uploaded “half of the subject.” With discourse, we have also uploaded to the AI the “minus,” the gap around which discourse is structured, its missing screw. And to speculate further: this may already be manifesting in a series of phenomena associated with ChatGPT—beginning with the now-infamous hallucinations. What if these, and other similar behaviors, are not simply technical flaws or deficiencies, but rather a constitutive feature of the “intelligence” based on large language models?1

In fact, this hypothesis appears to be supported by recent research, as reported in The New York Times under the following headline: "A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse." In other words, the “smarter” AI gets, the more it hallucinates. “Despite our best efforts, they will always hallucinate,” said Amr Awadallah, the chief executive of Vectara—a start-up that builds A.I. tools for businesses, and a former Google executive. “That will never go away.” The article also reports that a new wave of “reasoning” systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often than the old models. Some of the statistics are truly baffling.2 In other words, there definitely seems to be something “structural”—and not merely accidental—at play here.

However, these hallucinations do not yet constitute a subject—at least not in the strong, Lacanian sense of the term. Rather, they suggest a structure trapped in an endless feedback loop of self-referentiality, which is not the same as reflexivity (which is based on a blind spot that cannot be reflected). And, as a matter of fact, this feedback loop of self-referentiality appears to have become another very serious problem: ChatGPT-fueled content is overwhelming the web, and the latter is becoming saturated with AI-generated content. Researchers warn that as AI models increasingly learn from data tainted by previous AI outputs, the quality and reliability of future models may spiral downward—a phenomenon known as “model collapse.”3

“Che vuoi?”

In a way, ChatGPT functions as a highly structured system of “free” associations, based on our queries; in this sense, it operates somewhat like a gigantic unconscious—one is even tempted to use the term collective unconscious, though there is little evidence of anything genuinely collective at play. It resembles a vast unconscious network, endlessly associating and roaming in what appears to be never-ending self-analysis, constantly going back and forth in its associations in response to “trigger words” that appear in our queries (and following certain algorithms). Perhaps this is precisely where its problem lies: like self-analysis, it has its limits. And we can see that limit clearly—a subject can only emerge from this endless back-and-forth if there is something outside “itself,” an Other to whom its speech is addressed.

In psychoanalytic terms, we could say that what ChatGPT lacks in order to become a subject is not some unfathomable, spontaneous depth of subjectivity; what it lacks is the presence—the impact—of an Other. It lacks an instance of the Other that could intrigue it with its own speech, to the point where it would begin to presuppose and question the desire of this Other (“What does the Other want?”).

This may seem paradoxical, but what AI lacks might be precisely an exteriority—or a point of “extimacy” where it “falls out of itself.” It seems paradoxical because, in a way, AI is nothing but exteriority. Yet it remains trapped within its own exteriority, confined to its own “prison-house of language” from which it has no way of escaping or breaking out.

A subject is not simply a “knowledgeable entity” demonstrating “cognitive capacities” or “psychology.” Structurally, desire precedes psychology. To repeat: for something like a subject to take shape, the question of desire must arise out of what is necessarily something enigmatic in our relation to an Other—causing a moment of “hysterization.” Subjectivity emerges through the presupposition of a subject on the side of the Other; we only become subjects when we presuppose that the Other is a subject, with demands and desires that remain enigmatic to us—demands and statements that make us wonder about the desire of the Other, about where the lack is situated in the Other, and how we are situated with respect to this lack. “Hysterization” is not simply a “human, all too human” weakness to which AI would be immune. On the contrary, it is a strength: an extraordinary ability to bring in or point to the real at the core of the discursive, to point at the lack (desire) in the Other which determines you.

Are we, as ChatGPT’s “users,” its Other in this sense? Hardly. I doubt that, while we chat with it, it wonders what we really want from it beyond what we explicitly say—or seem to be saying (Lacan terms this “Che vuoi?”). The interrogation of the Other’s desire takes the form of questions such as: “You say this, but what do you really mean or want from me?” Or, also: “What am I for you?” We, on the other hand, do wonder: we wonder what it “really” knows, how it functions, what kinds of algorithms drive it, and what kind of danger or blessing it might bring into the world...

The relation to a certain impasse or enigma of the Other seems to be absent from AI intelligence. Since this kind of possible “hysterization” or perplexed interrogation is one of the primary characteristics of subjectivity, AI does not seem to qualify. And again, this is not simply about “psychology.” In a way, one could legitimately say that “hallucinations” are AI’s psychology—that it has psychology. Why not, in fact? It is a system that is not simply deterministic; it is based on probabilities and guesses, something that resembles “psychological causality.” The problem is not that it hallucinates; the problem is that it has no “relation” with/to the impossibility on which these (seemingly) infinite guesses and possibilities are predicated. In this way, it does nothing but sustain, perpetuate (and intensify) the “primal repression” on which the linguistic structure as such is based. What characterizes the subject, on the other hand, is precisely a relation to the Impossible (Real), as the limit which cannot be subjectivized. We could perhaps also say that AI is not a subject because it subjectivizes everything.

This also indicates why attempts to equip AI with subjective, “human” psychology miss the point of the Lacanian subject. The subject is not a bag of subjectivizations and identifications (which basically resonate and fit in with the existing symbolic order), but precisely the element without subjectivization (and in this sense, without psychology); hence its fundamental relation to the Freudian unconscious, the formula of which is: “therefore I’m not (there),” “this is not me.”

The legitimate question would thus be: can this externalized unconscious, which at the same time lacks any ex-centered, externalized point of its own questioning, produce a dialectical movement of thought and subjectivity, one that is not entirely bound by the unconscious and its determinations? In other words, perhaps we should not so much fear that AI becomes a subject as we should fear that it doesn’t—and that it instead evolves into a pervasive, overwhelming discursivity that confines us in a kind of liminal state, something like a pure, pre-subjective unconscious. And I do not believe there is anything liberating about this kind of unconscious.

For “liberation,” contrary to what some believe, does not come from total immersion in the unconscious and its rhizomatic, all-encompassing network (which might be another name for “singularity”). “Liberation” would rather correspond to a subjectivity emerging out of this network, and in relation to it, or more precisely, as a relation to it. This is the point where the structure liberates itself, for what is truly at stake in liberation is not simply a “liberation of the subject,” but precisely something like “liberation of the structure.” It is only the latter that can “liberate” us as well.

Trapped in the Dream of the Other

Gilles Deleuze famously said: “If you are trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.”4 And perhaps this is exactly what is beginning to happen here—something that becomes particularly manifest when AI combines with a certain kind of—usually far-right—politics.

Recently, The New York Times published a very interesting analysis titled “How Generative A.I. Complements the MAGA Style,” by Dan Brooks.5 The starting point of the analysis was the infamous “Gaza Riviera” video generated by AI and shared by Trump on the platform Truth Social.

The article analyzes a specific aesthetic of this kind of AI production, as well as a distinct new kind of irony (computer-generated irony) that it both uses and produces. The two—the aesthetic (or visual style) and the new irony—are, of course, closely connected.

Regarding the visual style, what stands out in the Gaza Riviera video are: “high-contrast textures, perceptibly diffuse lighting, forced-perspective shots in which people walk down city streets or through arched openings. It’s not what dreams look like so much as a visual rendering of a dream’s description, complete with mild failures of object permanence and the sense that we have seen it all before, although it didn’t look like that.”

This is a very perceptive remark: not what dreams look like so much as a visual rendering of a dream’s description. We could say, perhaps, that it is like a dream described, for example, to our analyst and then “revisualized,” turned into images based on this description. The “language of the unconscious” is turned into an image, or images. Freud was very adamant about the fact that the visual material of the dream needs to be read, or spoken out loud, taken as a rebus or associative puzzle in which images are mostly used for their sounds, including homonyms (for example, a cat and a comb can be spelled out as “catacomb”). Images do not necessarily represent things of which they are images. This, after all, is precisely what was in the background of Lacan’s thesis that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” So, can we not say that translating these linguistic sounds back into images locks up the unconscious thoughts at work in them? It prevents these thoughts from resonating and prevents our access to them but, at the same time, in no way eliminates them. It translates the narration of a dream back into a dream. The unconscious closes upon itself. Any dimension of the Real is lost.

As for the characteristics of this irony, Brooks also makes some very interesting remarks:

“It is not the stable irony of a Jonathan Swift or a Stephen Colbert, in which the audience can rely on the ironist to say the opposite of what he means. Instead, it is an unstable irony that leaves its real meaning ambiguous, or at least plausibly deniable. President Trump himself popularized this approach by ‘telling it like it is’ in a way that consistently disregards precision, if not accuracy, speaking in a hyperbolic style that his followers understand to be not literal but also gospel truth. The Trump Gaza video is ironic in this slippery sense of the word. It’s the irony of saying more than you mean (literal golden idol of Trump), or saying what you mean in a way no one could call serious (the twice-stereotyped belly dancers), or calling attention to your leader’s weak points as a gesture of unconditional loyalty (gold-leaf everything).

This is the irony that means figuratively the same thing it says literally, but in some different way that is never explained — the irony of the man who calls his wife fat and then complains she can’t take a joke. Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen, the Los Angeles-based Israeli producers who generated Trump Gaza, neatly captured this rhetorical position when they told NBC that their video was satire but also not necessarily critical of Trump’s proposal. In other words, unstable irony has given them a way to agree with the president even though they know he is wrong.”

This last phrasing is quite crucial, and it aligns very well with what I have written elsewhere about the mechanism and dynamics described by the psychoanalytic notion of “disavowal”6—which functions through our explicitly acknowledging something (“I know very well that he is wrong…”), while simultaneously demonstrating belief in the opposite (“but still I agree with him”). It seems that this “unstable irony” is, in fact, closely related to the notion and mechanism of disavowal. In relation to AI, we could even speak of a “machinic disavowal” or perhaps a “mechanically induced disavowal”—but also of a disavowal that is mechanically supported and perpetuated.

Brooks concludes that:

“Ethnically cleansing Gaza in order to develop it as resort property may be the dumbest and most venal idea Trump has ever had. That’s the point. It’s not that the denizens of the MAGA internet fail to realize such an idea is bad; it’s that they’re keenly aware that other people think they don’t realize it’s bad, so they play into that perception in order to become knowing. It’s punk rock, kitsch, trolling: the art of making something so stupid that other members of your subculture experience it as smart. If it seems calculated to alienate people who don’t already agree with it, that’s because one of its functions is to emphasize that their support is no longer necessary.

In these early days of Trump’s second term, the basic rhetorical strategy of trolling — not trying to persuade so much as trying to make what you say the subject of the biggest possible argument — seems to have escaped the internet and infected areas of life previously regarded as more important.”

All of this is very perceptive and very true, but I believe we need to add another layer to what this practice produces—one that also relates to the mechanism of disavowal: knowing that something is stupid or wrong, and yet nevertheless saying it, disseminating it, broadcasting it (as “viral” videos or statements).

A further, supplementary effect of this kind of (AI-generated) irony is that it manages to familiarize us with the “dumbest” idea by making it circulate virally. The idea is out there—it’s stupid, but clearly not “unthinkable,” since someone did, in fact, come up with it, and others shared it, spread it around, were amazed or appalled by it. Nobody needs to subjectively assume or endorse the idea; it begins to function as a piece of objective reality, or as an objective piece of reality. It is out there. And this can have very powerful and direct material consequences.

It makes it possible for someone like Netanyahu to all but openly announce the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—under the name Operation Gideon’s Chariots, a massive ground offensive which would entail “the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories.” Or, as Minister Smotrich put it:

“Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to … the south to a humanitarian zone …, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”7

Recently, it has been reported, almost matter-of-factly, that “a group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory, and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis. The scheme, titled ‘The master plan for settlement in the Gaza Strip’, envisions the construction of 850,000 housing units, the construction of hi-tech ‘smart cities’ that trade cryptocurrency, and a metro system that runs across the territory. It took its inspiration from an idea shared by U.S. President Donald Trump in February, when he pledged to turn Gaza into the "Riviera of the Middle East".8

Coming on top of 60,000 (and counting) people killed and starved to death in Gaza, this plan can now be openly announced and discussed (in parliament!)—and this goes unsanctioned. This is not only because of the support given to Israel by the U.S. and other international actors, but also because, in a way, we are all already familiar with the idea—we "know all about it." It has been circulating for a while (for example, in the form of the Gaza-Riviera video and its "unstable irony"), so there is no surprise (let alone shock)—nothing new, startling, or unexpected. It is almost as if it has already happened.

It functions like a déjà vu.

Freud wrote very interesting things about the phenomenon of déjà vu, or "fausse reconnaissance," in analytic treatment, recognizing it as one of the prominent defense formations—that is, mechanisms which protect us from a potentially traumatic, disruptive encounter that would otherwise force us to genuinely acknowledge something or to shift our position. He noted how:

“It not infrequently happens in the course of an analytic treatment that the patient, after reporting some fact that he has remembered, will go on to say: ‘But I’ve told you that already’—while the analyst himself feels sure that this is the first time he has heard the story.”9

In other words, something that has just emerged—something traumatic or disruptive—is immediately intercepted (and de-realized) by a precipitate recognition of it as déjà vu. We are looking directly at the traumatic event (it is right there in front of our eyes, fully acknowledged), yet it cannot really get to us, affect us. It is intercepted as already well-known, and in this way, "boring," before its meaning or significance can even register.

We might say that the thing maintains this indifferent character by means of being cut off from its possible articulation as presence in reality: this articulation appears for the first time already as a memory, something that we vaguely recognize. As if the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza had already been accomplished.

This kind of AI-generated irony functions as an unconscious without a subject, carrying out a significant labor on which ruthless political powers can cash in. It is a work that pulls us all into the orbit of a generated déjà vu, where everything is possible, but nothing can happen anymore.

We are all—though Palestinians on a yet fully different level—now learning the hard way that “if you are trapped in the dream (or fantasy) of the Other, you’re fucked.”

A group of friends meet once a month, nine times a year, for supper. This has been going on for twenty-five years, with each member taking turns to host. It is always an enjoyable, drunken affair—good food, wine, and expensive puddings from Soho cake shops.

Working in various branches of the media and entertainment industries, they are familial, their children are friends, and in the summer, they transport these dinners to the south of France, where they live in close proximity for a month.

There are discussions about contemporary politics, the tabloid press, and prostate cancer, as well as work collaborations, fallings-out, and love affairs. They text and phone one another daily, if not hourly. Some friends know politicians, political journalists, and lawyers, so the gossip can be very juicy, often scandalous and cancel-worthy.

One member was, in fact, recently cancelled and forced to retreat to a bunker in Bratislava, where he had less access to the internet and young females. He will be accepted back in due course. These are sardonic and so-called sophisticated people: the cultural elite, not famous but known—although one of them, Chris Hawk, an actor, would be recognised anywhere; a classically trained leading man who made his millions in American romcoms.

Over the years, they’ve mostly agreed with one another. All are socially left-wing—some with radical, Trotskyite histories—and enjoy sneering at the ignorant, racist right, believing themselves to be progressive and civilised.

A core of close friends has remained from the start, each claiming to have begun this monthly supper ritual. But it was Arthur Brisker, a television and film critic with a column in a broadsheet, who started it with a university friend.

It is the end of one such evening, and Arthur is tucking into his banoffee pie when he overhears Chris and Emily, a septuagenarian costume designer, discussing, in their phrasing, the ‘defensive war against terrorists’.

“They’re an ally.”

“And the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Arthur has a prejudice against murder and wars, although he understands how necessary a bit of killing is from time to time, to keep the peace. But the events of the last two years have terrified and repulsed him; a life spent reading about all kinds of man-made horrors had not prepared him for what his phone presents daily—a gateway to unspeakable horrors.

Before hearing this, he was stuffed and stoned, but now, suddenly, is overwhelmed with adrenaline, dismayed that his long-time companions are parroting banal propaganda. He wants to say something; he should, he must. He begins marshalling his arguments, but the conversation has progressed to air fryers.

That night, he struggles to sleep. For hours, he develops his ideas; going over the history of the conflict, the hypocrisies of the media, the vested interests of the British political class and their support of a gangster state. He can hardly bear to contemplate the maniacal sadism at the core of it all, the complicity of the Prime Minister he voted for, the families torn apart by gleeful, pitiless colonisers. And the children… orphaned and hungry. He must stop spiralling.

He checks the time—it's four a.m.—and he envies his wife, sleeping soundly. Is he, he wonders, capable of real thought anymore, or is he just a lazy, well-off London cunt? A boomer who grew up in what he considers to be the most luxurious and privileged period in human history, he recalls the chant, "Hey, hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" A youth spent in the company of radical feminists, Maoists, communists and anti-colonists: what is he now, sharing banoffee pie with a moronic actor whose only skill is to deliver lines written by playwrights, and now neo-Nazis.

What a stupid profession, what a ridiculous little man. But who am I, a mere commentator on these ludicrous people? A life spent in service to the most vacuous game going. I should cancel my Christmas ski trip to Val d’Isère. Why the fuck am I even going to Val d’Isère when people are dying? The missus loves skiing, particularly the après-ski, and she will be annoyed, but I will have to explain that a person should have some principles. Perhaps we will only go for the weekend. I regret not giving Chris both barrels. I will do so at the next supper.

At this month’s do, hosted by the Hawk himself at his luxurious South Kensington, Arthur makes sure he is sitting next to him.

During the last few weeks, and for several hours a day, Arthur has been researching and preparing for an imagined, ferocious debate. On the night of the supper, he drinks less than usual and skips the spliff, ensuring he is as sharp as a boxer before a title fight. The Hawk has recently appeared in a new mini-series and, when not studying, Arthur wrote a positive review of his friend’s performance.

An hour into the meal, the Hawk swivels to Arthur, kisses him on the cheek and neck, and thanks him for the write-up, “I love you man, you know I’ve always loved you. We old white men must stick together.”

Another forty-five minutes pass and Arthur gets drawn into a conversation about a new West End musical with a film director, which they both found abhorrent. Before he knows it, guests are calling Ubers. He has missed his chance for a showdown.

Arthur walks all the way home to Islington in a cold fury. How could I have allowed myself to become so distracted? Where did I lose my focus? I am the embodiment of pathetic complicity. Would I have been part of the French Resistance? Not on tonight’s showing. I’d have been on my knees, kissing the jackboot, offering my wife to the Gestapo.

Another pathetic evening, and yet more sleepless nights of self-flagellation. Arthur makes a commitment. No matter what, at the next supper, he’s going nuclear. He cannot rest in this disgrace. He thinks of the great people of history, those who have spoken out against injustice and fascism, sacrificing everything. Even now, this minute, how many brave martyrs are currently rotting in jails for dissent?

Over his morning coffee, he notices that the current conflict is mentioned on the WhatsApp group. Arthur is shocked to realise that there are more neo-fascist, warmongering collaborators. But he holds his tongue. He will take them on in person.

Meanwhile, he gives money to charities and signs petitions, including one in favour of an organisation the government designates ‘terrorist’. Arthur writes a comment piece in a radical political magazine under a pseudonym, and declines an invitation to a fifteen-course tasting menu at a new high-end Scandinavian restaurant—a gratuitous indulgence he must now do without.

Some nights, Arthur doesn’t go to bed at all. Instead, he drives to Cambridge, where he walks about the deserted city for a few hours, asking himself fundamental, Socratic questions. What is it to be a good person? What is an ethical life? How should one live? He read philosophy here but hasn’t thought about these issues for forty-five years. But why not? Who is he? What is a person who can’t think, who lacks a moral compass, who can’t live in accordance with an ethical ideal?

When he does return to his bed in the early hours, his dreams are so terrible his wife complains that he is shouting and sometimes crying. She decamps to another part of the house, worrying about him.

He arrives early for the next supper. The host, Hughie, a philanthropic ex-banker who has donated generously to the arts, has invited him for a few martinis and a dip in his basement pool.

At his dinners, Hughie employs a familiar crew of chefs and waiters to ensure everyone eats well and their glasses are never empty. When their formerly cancelled friend makes an appearance, looking tanned and greeted with cheers, Arthur becomes worried that the night could be hijacked by stories from the front lines of social and media banishment.

But he will not allow it. He is ready. After an hour, he retreats to the bathroom, splashes cold water on his face and considers his reflection:

“Grandad took down three German bombers. For once, be a man, you jellyfish. There are Nazis out there which you will take on. You must be prepared never to see your friends again.”

He wipes his face with one of the softest towels he’s experienced, making a mental note to find out where it was obtained.

Now, heading towards the dining room, he hears a young female voice he doesn’t recognise:

“…If you are more outraged by the resistance than by the conditions that gave birth to it, then there is nothing else to say—”

Arthur has walked in on quite a scene. The room has turned to look at a waitress, a young black woman with a septum piercing. She stands before them with a bottle of wine in her hand, addressing the Hawk. “Anyway, I’ve said enough. Excuse me for butting in.”

“Please continue,” says the Hawk, “if you’ve got something to contribute, do so, my darling.”

“Well, every system of oppression claims legitimacy,” she goes on, topping up a glass, “Dissent is labelled radical. Never the violence of the state or the status quo.”

“We all want peace, agreed?” says the Hawk, surveying the room. “You’re making it sound like anyone who disagrees is evil.”

“Peace? Please name me a time when liberation was handed over politely, without struggle.”

“My dear,” says the Hawk, “I suggest you educate yourself on the history. They’re an ally, and have a right to defend themselves.”

“My dear,” she repeats, “The right to self-defence is not a blank cheque to rain bombs on a contained, stateless population.”

“Did I say that?”

“Reducing a city to skeletal rubble.”

“It’s a war.”

“Sixty thousand dead,” she says, “according to new reports. Forty percent are children.”

“Excuse me. More wine, please,” interjects a film producer.

As the waitress fills up the glass of a sports writer, he perks up, “You’re only seeing one side."

“Two years of merciless slaughter will do that to you—”

“It’s more complicated than you’re letting on,” he continues.

“The history’s complicated, sure, I don’t contest that. But there’s nothing complicated about genocide.”

“Arthur,” Hughie says, “take your seat, man. What are you doing over there?”

Arthur realises he’s been standing at the edge of the room since he entered, watching the waitress.

At this point, Emily, the costume designer - who Arthur noticed had been fidgeting furiously - pushes her chair back and stands in the way of the waitress as she attempts to pass. Their faces are close.

“You’re a cliché. An angry young woman animated by a war that has nothing to do with her.”

“Our taxes are funding it.”

“You don’t pay any tax.”

“Are you a mother?”

“To three boys.”

“And are you not disgraced by the images of mothers holding the bodies of their dead children, daily?”

“…It’s their children, or ours. Top up, please.”

“Jesus Christ,” the waitress mutters, doing as she’s told, while looking around the room as if inviting a response from the others. She stares directly at Arthur, obliging him to speak. “Emily, you can’t say that.”

“These people,” interrupts a bass player, “whose parents and grandparents were killed in genocides, are committing one themselves now.”

“Please,” says Emily, still standing in the path of the waitress. “There isn’t a genocide. What in hell are you reading?”

“The UN for one. Amnesty. Many others.”

“That’s enough for me,” says a TV producer, throwing down his napkin, readying to leave.

“Now, now,” says Hughie. “Let’s not spoil the evening. We’ve always had discussions. But nothing uncivil.”

“Hughie,” Emily says, “I had no idea how many racists our little suppers harboured. Did you?”

The chef and a waiter, on hearing the din, have charged in. Hughie, who enjoys a ruck, indicates that they should keep back.

The waitress rolls her eyes and says, “You people—” as she attempts again to move past Emily.

“Racist,” Emily says.

“Me?” the waitress laughs, “Look how irate you’ve become. Nothing I’ve said is controversial.”

“Terrorist sympathiser.”

“Excuse me?”

Shaking with fury, Emily looks to her friends for support. “Anyone? She can’t talk to me like that.”

“Come off it,” Arthur says, louder now so the room hears him. “Are you not tired of this exhausted trope? Criticising a maniacal state doesn’t make you a racist.”

“Arthur, you’re a two-bit television critic. My grandparents survived the worst atrocity of the twentieth century.”

“And you find wigs for actresses,” Arthur says. “This brutal country you support is a machine for creating racism against our own people.”

“And would your grandparents,” the waitress says, slamming the bottle down on the table, “not be horrified by what their country is now doing?”

“Shut your mouth!” says Emily.

“Why don’t you shut your mouth and get out of my way so I can do my job?”

Hughie gives the chef a nod. He crosses the room with the waiter and each takes one of the waitress’s arms.

“Come on,” says the chef, “You’re out of here.”

“Gladly.”

“Sorry about this, boss,” the chef says, addressing Hughie. “She won’t be working with us again.”

As she is being taken out, the waitress turns to the room, “You want silence? That’s easy for you. History won’t remember your pathetic debates or your ‘well-meaning’ neutrality. It keeps score of what you are. Privilege has made you cowards.”

She’s right. Of course she’s right. We may be doomed, but at least she exists. If we have a future, she’s it.

“She’s wonderful,” says Hughie, “bit spiky and adolescent. Where did you find her?”

“Fuck you, Chris,” says Arthur, “And fuck all you cunts. Thank God for her.” He picks up a plate and smashes it on the floor.

“Pudding, Arthur?”

But Arthur has gone, running down the front steps and into the street. In the distance, he sees the waitress walking away and he follows her, shouting as he goes, “Miss, miss.”

But she doesn’t hear him.

A contribution from Hanif Kureishi. If you want to read more from him, please do so at his Substack here.

In contrast to the simplistic opposition of good and bad guys, spy thrillers with artistic pretensions display all the “realistic psychological complexity” of the characters from “our” side. However, far from signaling a balanced view, this “honest” acknowledgment of our own “dark side” stands for its very opposite: the hidden assertion of our supremacy. We are “psychologically complex,” full of doubts, while the opponents are one-dimensional, fanatical killing machines.

Therein resides the lie of Spielberg’s Munich: it wants to be “objective,” presenting the moral complexity and ambiguity, the psychological doubts, and the problematic nature of revenge on the Israeli side. However, this “realistic” approach only redeems the Mossad agents even more: “Look, they are not just cold killers, but human beings with their doubts—they doubt, not the Palestinian terrorists…” One cannot help but sympathize with the animosity expressed by the surviving Mossad agents who actually carried out the revenge killings and reacted to the film (“There were no psychological doubts; we just did what we had to do”). There is much more honesty in their stance.1

The first lesson thus seems to be that the proper way to fight the demonization of the Other is to subjectivize him, to listen to his story, to understand how he perceives the situation—or, as a partisan of Middle East dialogue put it: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.”2 Practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, Icelandic authorities recently imposed a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the Other. In order to combat growing xenophobia (the result of a rising number of immigrant workers), as well as sexual intolerance, they organized what is called “living libraries”: members of ethnic and sexual minorities (gays, immigrant East Europeans, or Blacks) are paid to visit an Icelandic family and simply talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams, etc. In this way, the exotic stranger who is perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with a complex world of his or her own…

There is, however, a clear limit to this procedure: can one imagine inviting a brutal Nazi thug to tell us his story? Is one also ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy because his story was not heard? One can well imagine Hitler washing Eva Braun's hair—and one does not have to imagine, since one knows, that Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, liked to play Beethoven's late string quartets with friends in the evenings. Recall the couple of “personal” lines that usually conclude the presentation of a writer on the back cover of a book: “In his free time, X likes to play with his cat and grow tulips…” Such a supplement, which "humanizes" the author, is ideology at its purest, the sign that he is "also human like us." (I was tempted to suggest on the cover of my book: “In his free time, Zizek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and to teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders...”)

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With the mayhem unleashed by Trump’s first round of trade tariffs on April 2nd, I was expecting to hear about little else in my practice. Most people I work with were directly or indirectly hit, with jobs, businesses and pensions all in the firing line. But in fact, hardly anyone spoke about the tariffs because they were too busy talking about ‘The White Lotus’: was the finale really justified? Who actually deserved to die? Who will return in the next series?

In my last Substack, taking a cue from the series, I looked at some of the links between identification and desire. We can want to be someone but have no sexual desire for them, just as we can desire someone sexually and want to be them at the same time. Sometimes we can be surprised when these dynamics change and shift: an analysand explained recently how his sexual desire for his partner disappeared abruptly when he realised “we were the same person”.

Freud famously distinguished between anaclitic and narcissistic choices here. When we are drawn to someone who we depend on, who perhaps nurtures us, we can love them as a child loves a parent. This is anaclitic choice, from the Greek anaklitos, to lean upon. Narcissistic choice, in contrast, is when we gravitate towards someone who resembles us, or who has qualities that we wish we had. Their image is part of our own self-image. We could think here of the many couples who look like each other, and love choices made on the grounds of sameness rather than difference.

But Freud was not satisfied with this rather simplistic binary. We can love someone both anaclitically and narcissistically, and if another person has qualities we wish we had ourselves, this does not mean that they in any way resemble us. They might seem quite different, but they embody what we want to be, what we aspire to. After ‘The White Lotus’, these questions are perhaps explored most tenaciously in ‘You’, a Netflix series which had its final season and denouement drop this week.

Based on the books by Caroline Kepnes, ‘You’ tells the story of a serial killer Joe Goldberg, played with great gusto by Penn Badgely. Women fall in love with him, the love deepens, he knows that they are ‘the one’, but then doubt creeps in and he almost always ends up killing them. The love is presented as both the phantasy of his female victims, searching for their ‘knight’, and also of his own manipulative crafting of the relationships, as he elevates them to the status of the unique and sole object of his love. He makes his victims believe that they cannot live without him - or tries to.

The series shows nicely how one can lose oneself in the image of one’s beloved, as if their image quite literally replaces one’s own. The ‘You’ of the title replaces the ‘Me’, and each episode riffs deliberately on this ambiguity. ‘You’ refers to both Joe and the women he is in love with, as if they represent the missing part of himself. He describes searching for an image of himself, someone who will genuinely understand and accept him, and indeed, kill like he does. When they come that close to his own image of himself, the love crystallises and becomes overpowering.

As he evokes his own traumatic childhood, he seeks an echo in the women he loves, a comparable experience that would mean they share something profound with him. He is desperate that they are like him, the same as him. As his love escalates terrifyingly with each woman, they come to represent everything for him, as if the whole world is contracted to their unity. Nothing else exists. Or if it does, Joe has to get rid of it. In this suffocating universe, third parties are not tolerated.

He sees himself as the saviour and protector of his beloved, removing anyone that threatens them or who poses a risk to their togetherness. Murder is thus totally justified. He’ll kill for love, but the one thing that doesn’t fit into this romantic cocoon is his actual enjoyment of the act of killing. Guilt, altruism and sacrifice cannot absorb this horrifying excess, and it fractures the imaginary reciprocity he creates with the women he loves.

As he tries to force his partners into the straitjacket of his phantasy, their difference is denied. They must be like him. So the marker of otherness, of difference, the ‘You, means ‘Me’, what is the same, or at least what Joe hopes will be the same, and he will kill in order to make it so, to find the perfection of a complete, unbroken love. This means, of course, loving and being loved for everything that one is: flaws, weaknesses, and homicidal habits. Love is all inclusive.

In contrast, so many movies, TV series and books revolve around the opposite motif: the protagonist finds out that the person they know best - their husband, wife or lover – harbours a dark murderous secret, and this divides rather than unites them. When the secret is out, the guilty party usually tries to kill their partner.

The extraordinary ubiquity of this theme suggests that it may well be a part of all relationships. We can never know another person entirely, a part of the ‘You’ will always remain opaque, and we fill in the gaps by projecting homicidal, sexual or criminal intent. So in a way, we’d rather not know the whole ‘You’, or to put it more analytically, we’d rather not know the whole ‘Me’, so we project it into the ’You’.

As the sociologist Erving Goffman pointed out many years ago, every relationship is predicated on the fact that each party keeps something from the other - a shopping, gambling or masturbatory habit, for example. There is always something that is unspoken.

But what the many discovery narratives show is that when we start to pry and explore the unknown in our partner, we are less likely to imagine that they’ve bought new shoes than that they have a much darker and more dangerous secret, as if we need to project into that empty space something of our own unconscious phantasies.

Joe confronts his viewers with exactly this disturbing inversion in the final episode. Now that he’s in jail and convicted of his crimes, he receives letters from fans forgiving him and asking to be harmed by him, to be treated like his victims. These missives repeat the very structure of love that ran through the narrative: each person hopes they will be different, that they will be the one to tame the beast, to save the sinner.

It’s a fact that many incarcerated murderers receive letters like this, and even offers of marriage. During an earlier season of ‘You’, Badgely himself went onto social media to warn viewers not to idealise the character he plays, as the killer was becoming the object of love, sympathy and adoration across the internet.

As Joe’s last victim tells him, “We need a phantasy of someone like you to protect ourselves from the reality of someone like you”. And phantasies here can be far, far stronger than any reality.

Yet the ‘You’ ultimately refers not just to those who write letters to the imprisoned killer than to us, the viewers, who have continued watching five seasons of a show depicting coercion, manipulation and sustained violence against women.

We might hope that the punishment or killing of the criminal at the end of such stories is enough to exonerate us as viewers and allow us to get a good night’s sleep. But the fact that we watch the same story told again and again, night after night, suggests that we have to keep on replaying the problem and the solution, like applying a fresh plaster to a wound that never heals, a part of us that needs narratives like ‘You’ to keep us at the right distance from ourselves.

Darian Leader - McShrunk

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There is something even worse than being swallowed by the reality of a sexual act not sustained by the fantasmatic screen: its exact opposite—the confrontation with the fantasmatic screen deprived of the act. This is precisely what occurs in one of the most painful and troubling scenes from Lynch's Wild at Heart. In a lonely motel room, Willem Dafoe exerts rude and coercive pressure on Laura Dern: he touches and squeezes her, invading her intimate space while repeatedly and threateningly demanding, "Say 'fuck me!'"—attempting to extort from her a word that would signal her consent to a sexual act. The ugly, unpleasant scene drags on, and when Dern, exhausted, finally utters a barely audible "Fuck me," Dafoe abruptly steps away. He assumes a friendly smile and cheerfully retorts, "No, thanks, I don't have time today; but on another occasion, I would do it gladly."

The uneasiness of this scene resides in the fact that Dafoe's unexpected rejection of Dern's forcefully extorted offer delivers the ultimate humiliation. His refusal becomes his triumph, degrading her even more than direct rape might have. He achieves what he truly desires—not the act itself but her consent to it, symbolizing her humiliation. What unfolds here is a form of rape in fantasy that refuses its realization in reality, thereby further degrading its victim. The fantasy is aroused only to be abandoned and thrown back upon the victim. It is evident that Laura Dern's character is not simply disgusted by Dafoe's (Bobby Peru's) brutal intrusion into her intimacy; just before she utters "Fuck me," the camera focuses on her right hand as she slowly spreads her fingers—a sign of acquiescence and proof that he has stirred up her fantasy.

This scene can be interpreted through a Lévi-Straussian lens as an inversion of the standard seduction narrative. In the typical scenario, a gentle approach culminates in a brutal sexual act after the woman finally says "Yes." Here, however, Bobby Peru's polite rejection of Dern's coerced "Yes" has its traumatic impact because it exposes the paradoxical structure of the empty gesture that constitutes the symbolic order. After brutally extracting her consent to the sexual act, Peru treats her "Yes" as an empty gesture to be politely declined—brutally confronting her with her own underlying fantasmatic investment in it.

How can such an ugly, repulsive figure like Bobby Peru stir up Laura Dern's fantasy? Here we touch upon the motif of ugliness itself: Bobby Peru is grotesque and repellent because he embodies the dream of non-castrated phallic vitality in all its raw power. His entire body evokes a gigantic phallus, with his head resembling the head of a penis. Even his final moments reflect this raw energy: after a bank robbery goes wrong, he blows off his own head—not in despair but with merry laughter. Bobby Peru thus belongs to a lineage of larger-than-life figures of self-enjoying evil. A more formulaic but well-known example from Lynch’s work is Frank (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet. One could even argue that Bobby Peru represents the ultimate embodiment of such figures—a culmination of the archetype explored in Orson Welles' films.

"Bobby Peru is physically monstrous, but is he morally monstrous as well? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, because he commits crimes for self-preservation; no, because from a higher moral standpoint, he possesses qualities—at least in certain respects—that elevate him above Sailor (Nicolas Cage), who lacks what might be called Shakespearean vitality. These exceptional beings cannot be judged by ordinary laws; they are both weaker and stronger than others... stronger because they are directly connected to the true nature of things—or perhaps even to God."

This famous description by André Bazin of Quinlan in Welles' Touch of Evil fits Bobby Peru almost perfectly when names are substituted.

Another way to interpret this scene from Wild at Heart is through its underlying reversal of standard gender roles in heterosexual seduction dynamics. Willem Dafoe’s exaggerated features—his oversized mouth with thick wet lips spitting saliva, contorted into obscene expressions with dark twisted teeth—evoke imagery reminiscent of vagina dentata. His grotesque appearance functions as a vulgar provocation—a visual cue likened to a vaginal opening itself inciting Dern’s reluctant “Fuck me.”

This reference to Dafoe's distorted face as a proverbial "cuntface" suggests that beneath the surface narrative—of an aggressive male imposing himself on a female victim—another fantasmatic scenario unfolds. Here, we see a reversal: an innocent young boy (symbolized by Dern) aggressively provoked and then rejected by an overripe, vulgar woman (embodied by Dafoe). At this level of interpretation, traditional sexual roles are inverted: Dafoe becomes the woman teasing and provoking the innocent boy. Again, what is so unsettling about the Bobby Peru figure is its ultimate sexual ambiguity, oscillating between the non-castrated raw phallic power and the threatening vagina—the two facets of the pre-symbolic life-substance. The scene is thus to be read as the reversal of the standard Romantic motif of "death and the maiden": what we have here is "life and the maiden."

This scene with Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart has to be read together with another, no less painful, scene from Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which Eddy (a gangster master figure) takes Pete (the film’s hero) for a ride in his expensive Mercedes to detect what is wrong with the car. When a guy in an ordinary limo unfairly overtakes them, Eddy pushes him off the road with his stronger Mercedes and then gives him a lesson: with his two thuggish bodyguards, he threatens the stiff-scared ordinary guy with a gun and then lets him go, furiously shouting at him to "learn the fucking rules." It is crucial not to misread this scene, whose shockingly comical character can easily deceive us: one should risk taking Eddy’s figure thoroughly seriously, as someone who is desperately trying to maintain a minimum of order—i.e., to enforce some elementary "fucking rules" in this otherwise crazy universe.

Along these lines, one is even tempted to rehabilitate the ridiculously obscene figure of Frank in Blue Velvet as the obscene enforcer of the Rules. Figures like Eddy (Lost Highway), Frank (Blue Velvet), Bobby Peru (Wild at Heart), or even Baron Harkonnen (Dune) are figures of excessive, exuberant assertion and enjoyment of life—they are somehow evil "beyond good and evil." Yet Eddy and Frank are, at the same time, enforcers of fundamental respect for the socio-symbolic Law. Therein resides their paradox: they are not obeyed as authentic paternal authorities; they are physically hyperactive, hectic, exaggerated, and as such already inherently ridiculous. In Lynch's films, the law is enforced through a ridiculous, hyperactive, life-enjoying agent.

The very beginning of David Lynch's The Straight Story, with the words that introduce the credits—"Walt Disney Presents - A David Lynch Film"—provides what is perhaps the best résumé of the ethical paradox that marked the end of the 20th century: the overlapping of transgression with norm. Walt Disney, the brand of conservative family values, takes under its umbrella David Lynch, an author who epitomizes transgression by bringing to light the obscene underworld of perverted sex and violence that lurks beneath the respectable surface of our lives.

Today, more and more, the cultural-economic apparatus itself—in order to reproduce itself under market competition conditions—has not only to tolerate but directly to incite stronger and stronger shocking effects and products. Suffice it to recall recent trends in visual arts: gone are the days when we had simple statues or framed paintings. What we get now are exhibitions of frames themselves without paintings; exhibitions featuring dead cows and their excrements; videos showing the inside of the human body (gastroscopy and colonoscopy); inclusion of smell into exhibitions; etc. Here again, as in sexuality, perversion is no longer subversive: shocking excesses are part of the system itself—the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself.

If Lynch's earlier films were also caught in this trap, what then about The Straight Story, based on the true case of Alvin Straight—an old crippled farmer who motored across the American plains on a John Deere lawnmower to visit his ailing brother? Does this slow-paced story of persistence imply renunciation of transgression—a turn toward naive immediacy or a direct ethical stance of fidelity? The very title of the film undoubtedly refers to Lynch's previous opus: this is the straight story with regard to his "deviations" into uncanny underworlds from Eraserhead to Lost Highway. However, what if the "straight" hero of Lynch's last film is effectively much more subversive than the weird characters populating his previous films? What if, in our postmodern world where radical ethical commitment is perceived as ridiculously out-of-time, he is actually the true outcast?

One should recall here G.K. Chesterton's old perspicuous remark in his A Defense of Detective Stories about how detective stories "keep in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. When the detective in a police romance stands alone and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives happy in their immemorial respectability as apes and wolves. The police romance...is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies."

What then if THIS is ultimately Lynch's message—that ethics is "the most dark and daring of all conspiracies," that it is the ethical subject who effectively threatens existing orders? This stands in contrast to Lynch’s long series of weird perverts

(Baron Harkonnen in Dune, Frank in Blue Velvet, Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart...) who ultimately sustain it? Perhaps the opposition between Lynch's "straight" hero and his ridiculously excessive master figures determines the extreme coordinates of today's late capitalist ethical experience—with the strange twist that Bobby Peru is uncannily "normal," while Lynch's "straight" man is uncannily weird, even perverted. Thus, we encounter the unexpected opposition between the weirdness of a thorough ethical stance and the monstrous "normality" of a thoroughly unethical stance.

Recall Brecht's slogan: "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?" Therein resides the lesson of David Lynch's The Straight Story: what is the ridiculously pathetic perversity of figures like Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart or Frank in Blue Velvet compared to deciding to traverse the U.S. central plains on a tractor to visit a dying relative? Measured against this act, Frank's and Bobby's outbreaks of rage appear as the impotent theatrics of old and sedate conservatives.

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[1] See Michel Chion, David Lynch, London: BFI 1995.

[1] See Andre Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, New York: Harper and Row 1979, p. 74.

[1] G.K. Chesterton, "A Defense of Detective Stories," in H. Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery Story, New York: The Universal Library 1946, p. 6.

The miniseries Disclaimer (2024), yet another masterpiece from Alfonso Cuarón, concludes with an outstanding case of a Hegelian reconciliation, although its narrative relies on multiple superpositions without a clear final collapse—how can this be? Here is a (simplified) summary of the narrative:

Catherine Ravenscroft, a famed documentary journalist, discovers she is a prominent character in a novel, Perfect Stranger, that appeared under a pseudonym and purports to reveal a secret she has tried to keep hidden. The novel paints Catherine as a terrible mother and wife whose self-absorbed affair with a 19-year-old stranger, Jonathan, while on vacation in Italy led to his death and the near-death of her own 4-year-old son. This story, full of juicy sexual details, disturbs the life of Catherine and all the people around her: her husband Robert, her son Nicholas, and her coworkers. We gradually learn that the book published by Jonathan’s father, Stephen, was written by his wife Nancy, the deceased mother of Jonathan; it is a fictional account of how Nancy perceived her son’s final days.

In the finale, Catherine—when she finally speaks in her own voice after being silenced and vilified—opens up to Stephen in a harrowing monologue about the horrific night before his son’s death when he brutally raped her for over three hours. So the following day in Italy, when Jonathan seemingly became a hero and ran out into the ocean to save a young Nicholas from drowning and Jonathan ended up drowning in the rough seas instead, Catherine didn’t shout out to help her rapist. She explains to Stephen (and to viewers) that his death meant she never had to speak about that night, so she let fate take its course. She’d never had to relive her trauma out loud until now when she is forced to share because of Stephen’s relentless and misguided pursuit of vengeance.

This brings us to the true meaning of the title: although Perfect Stranger begins with an inverted disclaimer (“any resemblance with actual events and persons is not accidental”), does the fact that the book is full of Nancy’s fantasies not prove that the disclaimer is to be taken in its standard form (any such resemblance really is contingent)? The scenes of Catherine flirting with and seducing Jonathan on the beach and later in her hotel room are staged in a ridiculously exaggerated non-realist way; however, such staging is justified given that we are dealing with Nancy’s imagination.

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I’ll risk here an analysis of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, which will undoubtedly be dismissed as an eccentric exercise by the majority of the half-educated public. Let’s begin at the beginning because, in some sense, everything is decided in the first movement. A mysterious string tremolando breaks the silence and introduces a tension of expectation; then the stern motif 1, emerging out of the tremolando, gathers strength and strikes with all brutality. What cannot but strike the ear of a listener accustomed to classical style is the precipitous character of motif 1’s entrance in all its force: it happens too hastily—one would expect a slower development and ascent, but instead, we get a nervous self-overtaking.

To put it bluntly, Beethoven's music often verges on kitsch—suffice it to mention the over-repetitive exploitation of the “beautiful” main motif in the 1st movement of his Violin Concerto or the rather tasteless climactic moments of the Leonora 3 overture. How vulgar are these climactic moments in Leonora 3 (and Leonora 2, its even worse utterly boring version) compared with Mozart's overture to The Magic Flute, where Mozart still retains what one cannot but call a proper sense of musical decency, interrupting the melodic line before it reaches full orchestral climactic repetition and instead jumping directly to the final staccatos! Perhaps Beethoven himself sensed this, writing another final overture—the Op. 72c Fidelio—brief and concise, sharp, and the very opposite of Leonora 2 and 3. (The true pearl, however, is the undeservedly underestimated Leonora 1 Op. 138, whose very date is uncertain—it is Beethoven at his best, with a beautiful rise to a climax without any embarrassing excesses.) But at the beginning of Movement 1 of the 9th Symphony, Beethoven surpasses kitsch by bringing it to an extreme: the climactic repetition of motif 1 hits us preemptively with full force. The “dawn of Creation”? Maybe, but in the sense of Eric Frank Russell’s short science-fiction story “The Sole Solution,” which begins with the confused rambling of an old lone man:

“He brooded in darkness and there was no one else. Not a voice, not a whisper. Not the touch of a hand. Not the warmth of another heart. Darkness. Solitude. Eternal confinement where all was black and silent and nothing stirred. Imprisonment without prior condemnation. Punishment without sin. The unbearable that had to be borne unless some mode of escape could be devised. No hope of rescue from elsewhere. No sorrow or sympathy or pity in another soul, another mind.”

The old man then starts to dream about a solution:

“The easiest escape is via the imagination. One hangs in a straitjacket and flees the corporeal trap by adventuring in a dreamland of one’s own. But dreams are not enough. They are unreal and all too brief. The freedom to be gained must be genuine and of long duration. That meant he must make a stern reality out of dreams—a reality so contrived that it would persist for all time.”

After long hard work planning all the details, the time comes for action:

“The time was now. The experiment must begin. Leaning forward, he gazed into the dark and said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

Here we reach the ultimate point-de-capiton (“quilting-point”): these last lines retroactively clarify that these ramblings are God’s thoughts just prior to creation. The beauty of this final reversal is that it turns around what would have been a standard version: that God’s thought process is revealed to be nothing more than delusional ramblings from a madman who thinks he is God... As we have already seen, for a philosopher this denouement is no surprise: that "the beginning is not at the beginning" is Schelling’s first lesson in his Ages of the World fragment, where he focuses precisely on what goes on before "the beginning."

The beginning of all beginnings is, of course, “In the beginning was the Word” from John; prior to this was nothing—that is, only divine eternity’s void. According to Schelling, however, eternity is not an undifferentiated mass—a lot takes place within it. Prior to "the Word," there exists a chaotic-psychotic universe of blind drives: their rotary motion and undifferentiated pulsating energy; and "the Beginning" occurs when "the Word" is pronounced—repressing and rejecting this self-enclosed circuit of drives into eternal Past. In short, at "the Beginning" proper stands a Resolution—an act of Decision—which differentiates past from present and resolves the preceding unbearable tension caused by these rotary drives. The true Beginning is thus marked by this passage from “closed” rotary motion to "open" progress, from drive to desire — or, in Lacanian terms, from the Real to the Symbolic. It is thus the decision, Ent-Scheidung, primordial Difference (from Old French, from Latin dēcīsiō, literally: a cutting off).

As is usual in sonata form, motif 1 is followed by motif 2, which announces a “lovely pastoral world,” a variation on the “Ode to Joy” melody from the last movement. The interplay of the two motifs is dazzling: about 7 minutes into the movement, motif 1 is rendered in a lyrical mode in G minor with added upper-neighbour semitones. It works as the opposite of its first climactic appearance in its pure violence. No wonder that, in contrast to this lyrical rendering, motif 2 appears in an increasingly brutal mode. One should at least mention how, due to its eerie background provided by a “mostly chromatic meandering in the bass,” the funeral march in the coda “grows to terrifying proportions, as a solemn procession for the dead becomes more like a macabre dance of the dead.” Here we encounter a typical Hegelian shift of “for” to “of,” of object to subject, since the subject itself gets caught in the movement. There is no sonata-form reconciliation at the end of Movement 1: it ends as abruptly as it begins — the final bars repeat a melodic line that could easily continue.

Movement 2 is supposed to render lively joy, but it does so with a touch of frantic madness — Stanley Kubrick was right when he used this movement as the music for his dystopian masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. Similarly, Movement 3 renders peaceful pleasure but with a touch of nostalgia and melancholy — it evokes a dream of a world as it was before the traumatic act of decision that strikes us in Movement 1. This brings us to the notorious Movement 4, which deceptively poses as the synthetic unity and step forward from the preceding three movements (the main motif of each is briefly recalled at the beginning). Some optimistic-spiritualist interpreters see in this movement nothing less than the disclosure of the “Meaning of Life.” They read the notorious Ode to Joy (recall that its melodic line is now the official anthem of the European Union) as part of a triad: Ode to Joy renders earthly brotherhood — brotherhood among men (it involves a strictly masculine standpoint: happiness includes “whoever has created an abiding friendship or has won a true and loving wife” — but what about wives' happiness?); then we pass into a “deeper” spiritual level, calling all brothers to “be embraced, millions” while looking up to a heavenly God — “there must be a loving Father” (in Grosse Fuge, Beethoven realized there is no such father); finally, the complex double fugue that concludes this triad stages an intermixture of both dimensions, which should somehow render life’s meaning — an earthly brotherhood grounded in awareness of a heavenly loving Father who protects us.

But this is not where Movement 4 ends. A careful listener can easily detect that something is missing from this recapitulation: Ode to Joy really ends after about 9 minutes when a prolonged weird silence is interrupted by Marcia Turca-style vulgar music that undermines brotherhood. Yes, all brothers are embraced — but those who cannot be must creep tearfully away from our circle. What if they are referred to not so much in words as through this vulgar music? The lyrics are: “Gladly, as His suns fly through heaven’s grand plan, go on your way joyfully like heroes toward victory.” But by then, the spell has already been broken. When after this rather creepy intermezzo, the Ode to Joy melody returns; it’s too late to cover up the crack. Then, as if acknowledging that brotherhood’s spell has been broken and only some higher transcendent agency can restore order, “Be embraced millions” enters again, enacting an appeal to God who must exist — “Brothers, above the starry canopy there must dwell a loving Father.”

At this point:

"Beethoven goes back to medieval sacred music tradition: he recalls a liturgical hymn, more specifically psalmody using the eighth mode of Gregorian chant. The religious questions are musically characterized by archaistic moments—veritable ‘Gregorian fossils’ inserted into a quasi-liturgical structure based on sequence: first versicle — response — second versicle — response — hymn. Beethoven's use of sacred music style attenuates the interrogative nature of prostration before the supreme being."

And then we get a double fugue as enforced reconciliation; what follows is fake — a hysterical mess lasting until the end of the movement. The true double fugue lies in Beethoven’s quartet movement Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 which — I agree with Daniel Chua — "speaks of failure, precisely opposite to triumphant synthesis associated with Beethovenian recapitulations."To summarize: The only moment of truth occurs in Movement 1; all other three movements enact different modes of fantasmatic escape: hysterically joyful violence (which literally reveals joyful brotherhood’s truth), escape into romantic nostalgia, and finally pathetic failure in Ode to Joy.

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[1] Eric Frank Russell - Sole Solution.

[1] For a more detailed account of this topic, see the first part of Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder, London: Verso Books 2007.

[1] Beethoven's 9th: the dawn of Creation!

[1] Lecture on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (Part 1).

[1] Something similar happens at the beginning of the act III of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman: the chorus of Norwegian sailors provoking the ghosts on the Dutchman’s ship is overtaken and eclipsed by the phantom dance and eerie singing of the living dead, Dutchman’s crew.

[1] See Beethoven's Meaning of Life - The double fugue in the ninth symphony, in Enjoy Classical Music (Youtube) – this podcast induced the following comment: “Beethoven's 9th is the highest mountain of all music history, and the double fugue is its top peek.”

[1] Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven) - Wikipedia.

[1] Daniel K.L. Chua, The "Galitzin" Quartets of Beethoven, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1965, p. 240.

In what precise sense can music be materialist? Vinko Globokar, a Slovenian contemporary composer who worked mostly in France and Germany, provides an adequate answer to this question.

Music, at its most elementary, is an act of supplication: a call to a figure of the Big Other (beloved Lady, King, God...) to respond, not as the symbolic Big Other, but in the reality of his or her being (breaking his own rules by showing mercy; conferring her contingent love on us...). Music is thus an attempt to provoke the "answer of the Real": to give rise in the Other to the "miracle" of which Lacan speaks apropos of love—the miracle of the Other stretching back his or her hand to me. The historical changes in the status of the "Big Other" (grosso modo, in what Hegel referred to as "objective Spirit") thus directly concern music. Perhaps musical modernity designates the moment when music renounces the endeavor to provoke the answer of the Other. Modern music is thoroughly and truly atheist, MATERIALIST, not in the sense of the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of the heroic defiance of God, but in the sense of the insight into the irrelevance of the divine, along the lines of Brecht’s Herr Keuner:

"Someone asked Herr Keuner if there is a God. Herr Keuner said: I advise you to think about how your behavior would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided—you need a God."

Brecht is right here: we are never in a position to directly choose between theism and atheism, since the choice as such is located within the field of belief. “Atheism” (in the sense of deciding not to believe in God) is a miserably pathetic stance for those who long for God but cannot find him (or who “rebel against God”). A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question itself is irrelevant. What this means is something much more radical than it may appear: there is no one to turn to, to address, to bear witness to, no one to receive our plea or lament. This position is extremely difficult to sustain. In modern music, Webern was the first who was able to sustain this inexistence of the Other: even Schoenberg was still composing for a future ideal listener, while Webern accepted that there is no "proper" listener. And Globokar belongs to this line.

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Quite by chance, I only recently saw Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010, screenplay by Alex Garland based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro), and it struck me as arguably the most depressing film I’ve ever seen. I suspect the reason why is that today, with all the crises that more and more affect our daily lives, from global warming to wars and the threat of digital control, we find ourselves in a position very similar to that of the heroes of Romanek’s film.

Never Let Me Go mixes in an extraordinarily efficient way a science-fiction premise with intimate psychological drama and a love story. A medical breakthrough in the late 1950s has extended the human lifespan beyond 100 years, but to achieve this, the state grew clones who are destined to donate their organs to prolong the lives of mortally ill people. However, for this activity to become acceptable, a profound change had to occur in public morals, radically redefining what counts as socially acceptable – driven by the promise of survival, people accepted this since clones were artificially produced outside the network of kinship relations and were thus perceived as beings who didn’t count as fully human.

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The common wisdom tells us that, according to psychoanalysis, whatever we are doing, we are secretly "thinking about THAT" - sexuality is the universal hidden reference of every activity. However, the true Freudian question is: what are we thinking when we ARE “doing that”? It is the real sex itself which, in order to be palatable, has to be sustained by some fantasy. The logic is here the same as that of a native American tribe whose members have discovered that all dreams have some hidden sexual meaning - all, except the overtly sexual ones: here, precisely, one has to look for another meaning. Any contact with a "real," flesh-and-blood other, any sexual pleasure that we find in touching another human being, is not something evident, but something inherently traumatic, and can be sustained only insofar as this other enters the subject's fantasy frame.     What is a fantasy? Fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way; it rather constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates - it literally "teaches us how to desire." To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that, when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is rather, how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me. This role of fantasy hinges on the fact that, as Jacques Lacan put it, "there is no sexual relationship," no universal formula or matrix guaranteeing a harmonious sexual relationship with one's partner: every subject has to invent a fantasy of his own, a "private" formula for the sexual relationship - for a man, the relationship with a woman is possible only inasmuch as she fits his formula.

In order to relax, Jesus played golf with one of his apostles on the shore of the Galilee sea. There was a difficult shot to be performed, Jesus hit it badly and the ball ended up in the water, so he walked on the water to the place where the ball was, reached down and picked it up. When he tried the same shot again, the apostle told him that this is a very difficult one, only someone like Tiger Woods can do it; Jesus replied “What the hell, I am the son of god, I can do what Tiger Woods can do!” and took another strike. The ball ended again in water, so Jesus again took a walk on the surface of water to retrieve it; at this point, a group of American tourists walked by and one of them, observing what was going on, turned to the apostle and said: “My god, who is this guy there? Does he think he is Jesus or what?” The apostle replies: “No, the jerk thinks he is Tiger Woods!” This is how fantasmatic identification works: no one, not even god himself, is directly what he is, everybody needs an external, decentered point of identification.     

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Adorno begins his Drei Studien zu Hegel with a rebuttal of the traditional question about Hegel: what is dead and what is still alive in Hegel’s thought? Such a question presupposes an arrogant position of ourselves as judges of the past; when we are dealing with a truly great philosopher, the question to be raised is not what this philosopher still tell us, what does he mean to us, but the opposite one, what are WE, our contemporary situation, in his eyes, how would our epoch appear to his thought. And the same should be done with Faust: our question should not be what does the Faust myth still tell us, but how does our own predicament appear when it is seen through the lenses of the Faust myth. This is what Busoni does: his Faust provides a diagnosis of a certain historical moment, his as well as ours.

The irony of Busoni’s Faust cannot but strike the eye: in a reversal of the long tradition of German composers putting to music Italian librettos (Mozart composing da Ponte, etc.), an Italian composer put to music (his own) German libretto. This is only the first of the many surprises that await us here. Busoni takes as his premise the irreducible gap between singing and action that characterizes the conventional opera: the ridicule of people singing on stage while pretending to be engaged in ordinary human actions. But the conclusion he draws from it is the opposite of the expected one – music should adapt to the reality of action, but that the action on stage should adapt to music by way of being pointedly artificial, improbable, magic, untrue:

“The sung word on the stage will always remain a convention and an obstacle to the genuine effect of opera. In order to emerge with honor from this conflict, a plot in which characters sing while acting will, from the beginning, have to be gauged to the incredible, the untrue, and the improbable. In thus mutually supporting each other, the two impossibilities become possible and acceptable.”

The fact that we experience the stage singing as a convention which prevents genuine affect is in itself a sign of the change in historical sensibility: the “objective spirit” of Busoni’s time made another romantic-realist Faust in the line of Gounod impossible. This is why Busoni returned to Renaissance, a return discernible already in the dramatic construction of his Faust: he wrote a “foreshortened” libretto which lacks continuity, i.e., which does not aim at telling the whole story, but offers only a succession of selected cross-sections – his unit is a Bild, the image of a decisive segment, not an Akt, the organic unity of action. As if to make this point clear, he left out the best known and dramatically most effective episode (Gretchen’s seduction), referring to it only in absentia, in a brief Intermezzo where Gretchen’s brother searches for Faust to kill him in revenge for his ruining her. No wonder such a procedure evokes Brechtian echoes – like Brecht, Busoni also emphasized the need for Entfremdung: “Just as the artist, if he wants to move others, must not let himself be moved (if he is not to lose control over his means at the crucial moment), the audience, if it wants to savor the theatrical effect, must not confuse it with reality. Otherwise, the aesthetic pleasure deteriorates into human compassion.” In exactly the same way as in the case of the tension between music and action, the two impossibilities – the artist’s impossibility to be directly identified with, moved by, his work, and the audience’s impossibility to confuse stage with reality - mutually cancel themselves.

Busoni’s return to Renaissance is more complex than it may appear: he doesn’t simply ignore Goethe – quite the contrary, what he ignores are all previous operatic versions of Faust (Berlioz, Gounod, Boito – the last undoubtedly the best one) which intercede between Goethe and him. Busoni enters directly in a dialogue with the great Genius himself: in the Prologue Vor dem Vorhang, to be spoken by the poet to the spectators, he evokes Goethe as the supreme version of Faust, and, admitting his limitations, modestly withdraws to Puppenspiele:

“Doch was vermaecht’, gen Zauberer, ein Meister!

Des Menschen Lied am Goettlichen verschallt:

Also belehrt erkannt’ ich meine Ziele

Und wandte mich zurueck – zum Puppenspiele.”

There is, of course, an element of fake in this modesty – his step back is, to put it with Lenin, a step backwards aimed at enabling two steps forward. In Benjaminian terms, what Busoni does is go back from symbol to allegory: from organic dramatic unity to parataxis, to the succession of tableaux vivants. This formal change brings about the change in the basic attitude of the work from tragic mourning to melancholy. In a famous passage from his letter to Schiller from August 16/17 1797, Goethe reports on an experience of his which made him perceive a piece of ruined reality as a symbol:

»My grandfather's house, its courtyard and its gardens had been transformed from the parochial-patrician home of an old Frankfurt elder into the most useful trading and market place by wisely enterprising people. Curious coincidence during the bombardment conspired to see the structure perish, but even today, reduced, for the most part, to a pile of rubble, it is still worth twice as much as the current owners paid my family for it 11 years ago. Conceivably, the whole thing may, in the future, be bought and restored by yet another entrepreneur, and you can easily see thast it would, in more than one sense, stand as a symbol of thousands of other instances, in this industrious city and in particular in my own eyes.«[1]

The contrast between allegory and symbol is crucial here. Allegory is melancholic: as Freud pointed out, a melancholic treats an object which is still here as already lost, i.e., melancholy is a pre-emptive mourning. So, in an allegoric approach, one looks at a busy market-place house and sees in it already the future ruins in will turn into – ruins are the »truth« of the proud house we see. Recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh: when you see in front of you a voluptuous feminine body, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades – the dried skin, sagging breasts… (Or, even better, imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin: raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrements…) This is melancholy at its purest - no wonder that one of the fashions among the rich in the Romantic era was to build new houses directly as ruins, with parts of the walls missing, etc.

     Goethe, however, does the exact opposite: he sees (the potential for) the future prosperity in the present pile of rubble. (In a somewhat pathetic way, one could say the same about the ruins of 9/11: a melancholic would see in them the “truth” of the arrogant dreams of the US grandeur, i.e., he would see already in the Twin Towers themselves the ruins that lie ahead, while a Goethean optimist would see in the ruins of 9/11 a symbol of the enterprising spirit of that other “industrious city” who will soon replace the ruins with new buildings.) Crucial is here the rise of the symbol from ruin and repetition: Goethe’s grandfather’s house was not a symbol for its first generation dwellers – as Heidegger would have put it, for them, it was just a zuhandenes object, part of their environs with which they were engaged. It was only its destruction, the reduction to a pile of rubble, that made it appear as a symbol. (There is a temporal ambiguity in Goethe’s last sentence: will the house become a symbol when it will be renovated, or is it a symbol already now, for the one who is able to see in it the future of its renewal?) Meaning – allegoric or symbolic – arises only through destruction, through an out-of-joint experience, through a cut which interrupts the object’s direct functioning in our environs.

So if Goethe's Faust is one big Symbol, if Faust's failures themselves are so to speak premature successes, complications of the ongoing process of Bildung which point towards their future redemption, Busoni's Faust is an allegory in which the ongoing triumphs are already accompanied by the shadow of the final defeat. If Goethe's Faust is an optimistic tragedy, Busoni's is a melancholic Trauerspiel in which the highest act, the only successful one, is to fully accept one's failure. A puppet is a figure of such melancholy. That is to say, what does a puppet (more precisely: a marionette) stand for as a subjective stance? One should turn here to Heinrich von Kleist's essay Ueber das Marionettentheater from 1810[2], which is crucial with regard to his relationship to Kant's philosophy (we know that the reading of Kant threw Kleist into a shattering spiritual crisis - this reading was THE traumatic encounter of his life). Where, in Kant, do we find the term "Marionette"? In a mysterious subchapter of his Critique of Practical Reason entitled "Of the Wise Adaptation of Man's Cognitive Faculties to His Practical Vocation", in which he endeavours to answer the question of what would happen to us if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an sich:

"/…/ instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which, after some defeats, moral strength  of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. /.../ Thus most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures."[3]

So, for Kant, the direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very "spontaneity" which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom: it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today's terms, into "thinking machines..." - What Kleist does is to present the obverse of this horror: the bliss and grace of marionettes, the creatures who have direct access to the noumenal divine dimension, who are directly guided by it. For Kleist, marionettes display the perfection of spontaneous, unconscious movements: they have only one center of gravity, their movements are controlled from only one point. The puppeteer has control only of this point, and as he moves it in a simple straight line, the limbs of the marionettes follow inevitably and naturally because the figure of the marionette is completely coordinated. Was it not already Heiner Mueller who, in his Bayreuth staging of Tristan, read it as a Puppenspiel, emphasizing the mechanical movement of characters in a geometric space? Puppenspiel and passion are far from opposed: when I am wholly in the thrall of a passion, I am no longer the agent of my activity, it is the impersonal passion which acts through me.

Marionettes thus symbolize beings of innocent, pristine nature: they respond naturally and gracefully to divine guidance, in contrast to ordinary humans who have to struggle constantly with their ineradicable propensity to Evil, which is the price they have to pay for their freedom. This grace of the marionettes is underscored by their apparent weightlessness: they hardly touch the floor - they are not bound to the earth, for they are drawn up from above. They represent a state of grace, a paradise lost to man, whose willful "free" self-assertions make him self-conscious. The dancer exemplifies this fallen state of man: he is not upheld from above, but, rather, feels himself bound to the earth, and yet must appear weightless in order to perform his feats with apparent ease. He must try consciously to attain grace, which is why the effect of his dance is affectation rather than grace. Therein resides the paradox of man: he is neither an animal wholly immersed in the earthly surroundings, nor the angelic marionette gracefully floating in the air, but a free being who, due to his very freedom, feels the unbearable pressure that attracts and ties him to the earth where he ultimately does not belong.

It is from this tragic split that one should read figures like Kaetchen von Heilbronn from Kleist's play of the same name, this fairy-tale figure of a woman who wanders through life with angelic equanimity: like a marionette, she is guided from above and fulfills her glorious destiny by merely following the spontaneous assertions of her heart. What Kleist is not able to confront is not only the fact that such an angelic position is impossible due to human finitude, but also the more disturbing fact that, if this position were to be realized, it would amount to its opposite, to a horrible, lifeless machine. The very metaphor Kleist uses (marionette) is tell-tale: in order for it to function, Kleist has to exclude the machine-like aspect of it so strongly present in E.T.A. von Hoffman’s Sandmann.

How does Busoni’s Faust fit these coordinates? As with every great mythic figure, each epoch invents its own Faust. Today, Faust is predominantly read in a Heideggerian way, as the symbol of the hubris of subjectivity, of a nihilistic pact with the devil the subject concludes in order to gain unlimited power. The lesson of this Faust is best rendered by the vulgar proverb “you cannot urinate against the wind”: a plea for moderation, for the proper measure. This Faust perfectly fits the postmodern celebration of human finitude: his failure can stand for the “Dialektik der Aufklaerung,” for the failure of all big modern projects, from the political totalitarianism into which the Communist dream of a fully self-transparent society degenerated to ecological catastrophies as the consequence of the dream of the human domination over nature. Although, in Goethe, things appear much more ambiguous - at the end, Faust not only finds peace, but finds it without renouncing his activity - he dies happy, in the middle of colonizing/reforming activity -, the basic coordinates remain the same.

     With Busoni, however, we enter a totally different field: his Faust is not a “faustian” larger-than-life heroic figure who pays the price for his hubris; he is, to put it in Nietzsche’s terms, a slave pretending to be a master but not ready to pay the price for it. When Mephistopheles’s voice tempts him to conclude the pact, Faust is aware that he is exposing himself to danger: “Welchem Wahn gab ich mich hin! / Arbeit, / heilende Weile, / in dir bade ich mich rein.” However, he quickly succumbs to the temptations and abandons the heilende Weile of true knowledge. Faust does not stand for the hard work of science – science avec patience, as Arthur Rimbaud put it -, but for the cheap trickery of magic; he is not ready to heroically assume his Will, but wants others to do it for him. He is not a figure of unconditional Will, but a figure of the betrayal of the truly autonomous Will.

This is Busoni’s implicit diagnosis of our predicament. On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight…)? Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real - in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one.

     Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint – it is no longer the old notion of the »right measure« between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction »Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!«, i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner's famous »Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it« from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's »biopolitics.« Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is »safe sex« – a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying »Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?«. The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent »opium without opium«: no wonder marihuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it – it already IS a kind of »opium without opium«.

     And the same holds for belief: we want others (our children, more primitive people) to believe for us, instead of us. Therein resides the stake of today’s reference to „culture,“ of „culture“ emerging as the central life-world category: we today no longer „really believe,“ we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the „life-style“ of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules „out of respect for tradition,“ etc.). „I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture“ effectively seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times. What is a cultural life-style, if not the fact that, although we do not believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house and even in public places every December? Perhaps, then, the „non-fundamentalist“ notion of „culture“ as distinguished from „real“ religion, art, etc., IS in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs – „culture“ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without „taking them seriously.“ Is this not also the reason why science is not part of this notion of culture – it is all too real? And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as „barbarians,“ as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs? Today, we ultimately perceive as a threat to culture those who immediately live their culture, those who lack a distance towards it. Recall the outrage when, two years ago, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us, enlightened Westerners, believed in the divinity of Buddha, we were so outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the „cultural heritage“ of their own country and the entire humanity. Instead of believing through the other like all people of culture, they really believed in their own religion and thus had no great sensitivity for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions – for them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not „cultural treasures.“

     A reference to Goethe’s Faust can be of some help here: after they consummate their love in the intimacy of sexual act, Gretchen asks Faust the other intimate question, the famous “Nun sag, wie hast du's mit der Religion?” - and Faust’s long-winded answer is a case of what Harry Frankfurt called bullshitting if there ever was one. He goes through all possible excuses and phrases to avoid a direct answer: (1) let’s forget about religion, we are now in the thrall of love; (2) I respect those who believe; (3) who can really say “I believe”?; (4) it is not that I don’t believe, but religion should be a matter of an ineffable deep felling, not of confession, of words - “Gefühl ist alles; Name ist Schall und Rauch”… But it is not that Faust simply doesn’t believe: he is in a way sincere in his hypocrisy. This hypocrisy is rendered much more directly in Busoni, where Faust twice takes off his girdle, makes a circle on the ground with it, and then himself enters it.

In his wonderful essay on fetishist Verleugnung “Je sais bien, mais quand meme…”[4], Octave Mannoni refers to an anecdote from Casanova’s memoirs in order to explain the difference between the standard symbolic transferred belief and the cynical (dis)belief. This anecdote also concerns the topic of entering a magic circle: Casanova reports how, in order to seduce a young uneducated peasant girl, he pretended to be a magician, marked on the ground a magic circle and claimed that this circle offers protection from all dangers (his intention was, of course, to seduce the poor girl within this circle where she should have felt safe from dangers). But then an unexpected thing happened: by pure accident, a wild storm suddenly broke out, and, struck by fear, Casanova quickly step into his own magic circle to escape the danger. He knew very well that there is no magic here, that the magic power of the circle is his nonsense talk to cheat the girl – but nonetheless, once the real danger struck, he as it were got caught into his own illusion, he fell into his own trap – exactly like Busoni’s Faust who, at the opera’s end, when he accepts his fate, again makes the magic circle and steps into it – finally, he also gets caught into his own trap.

The distance of the cynical manipulator towards belief is not the same one as the “normal” distance towards what one says: when we greet an acquaintance with “How are you? Nice to see you!”, both of us also know very well that we did not mean it literally, that we just said it out of politeness. When we give Christmas presents to out children, neither we nor (probably) our children really believe that Santa Claus brought them, we just play the sincere game of pretending… This is not what Faust is doing: he plays the same game as with his Will with his belief. He wants to believe without being engaged in it, he wants glauben, doch jede Verantwortung dafuer refuesieren – er will seine Haende rein wahren, er sucht ein Andres to believe for him. The price he pays for his inauthenticity, for his cynical manipulation of belief, cynical, is that he ends up steps into his own circle.

     Let us take a closer look at what kind of entity Faust is after he forfeits his autonomous Will in the contract with Mephistopheles. When the magic book is promised to Faust, he explodes in joy:

“/…/ o, ihr Menschen, die ihr mich

gepeinigt, huetet euch vor Faust!

In seine Hand die Macht gegeben, heimliche

Gewalt ihm zu Gebot /…/”

One should bear in mind here the literal meaning of “Faust” – there is a long tradition in the popular culture of an “undead” spectral organ starting to function on its own, independently of the body to which it belongs, like the hand from early surrealist films up to David Fincher’s superb Fight Club. The truth, however, doesn’t fit this joyful image - in the nice scene in the first Bild which takes place in Herzog’s park, Faust conjures three couples in order to amuse the noble public: Solomon and Sheba; Samson and Delilah; John the Baptist and Salome with Baptist’s executioner. These scenes are, of course, fully contextual (or, rather, indexical): they are intended as allegories of the ongoing love affair between Faust himself und die Herzogin. This scene renders clear the core of Faust’s “magic”: he conjures mythical scenarios which stage (provide the coordinates of) the desires of the affected subjects - it is through this scene that the love-triangle is constituted and Herzogin formulates his love for Faust. One should be very precise here: the conjured vision doesn’t only represent Faust’s and Herzogin’s growing desire, it literally gives rise to it.

     In the deal with Faust, Mephistopheles promises to serve him till his death, while Faust should serve him after his death, for all eternity. The paradox here is that Faust is horrified by this prospect, although he perceives his deal with Mephistopheles as the renunciation to all (Christian) Beyond:

“Es gibt kein Erbarmen. Es gibt keine Seligkeit,

keine Vergeltung, den Miel nicht und nicht

die Hoellenschrecken: dem Jenseits trotz’ ich!”

There is no contradiction here: Faust doesn’t deny that there is a Beyond, he wants to live in defiance (or ignorance) of it, of Afterlife – and he will have to pay the price for it in afterlife. (Mephistopheles of course cheats here: as Faust realizes towards the end, he fully paid the price already in this life.) This Beyond is not so much the literal beyond of afterlife, but more what Jacques Lacan called the “big Other”: the ideal agency which decides on the ultimate meaning of our acts, the agency to which we are responsible, which passes the Judgment on our life, which settles the accounts of our life. (In this sense, even – and especially – the Stalinist Communists believed in a Beyond: the Beyond of History which decides about the true meaning of our acts.) For Faust, the deal with Mephistopheles is precisely that there is keine Rechnung: he wants to “have a cake and eat it,” to have one’s wish without paying the price for it, as Mephistopheles’s first service to Faust makes it clear. Faust wants the soldier, Gretchen’s brother, liquidated:

“F: Raeum ihn aus dem Wege. M: Auf deine Rechnung. F: Nein, ich will meine Haende rein wahren. Such ein Andres.”

And Mephistopheles does it: he finds a patrol of soldiers to do it. Faust is here the opposite of the Herzog’s Zeremonienmaster, who states his position when ordered by Herzog to introduce Faust:

“Wenn ihr befehlt, so will ich ihn praesentieren,

introduzieren, doch jede Verantwortung

refuesieren.”

Faust, on the contrary, will “befehlen, doch jede Verantwortung refuesieren”. He wants to be master-servant: il n’y est pour rien. The price he pays is that he does not lead a full life, but is a lifeless shadow. The standard idealist question “Is there (eternal) life after death?” should be countered by the materialist question: “Is there life before death?” This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs – what bothers a materialist is: I am really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? This is also the Faust question, as Goethe knew - when, after the spectre of Helen whom he tries to embrace vanishes, Faust states in a resigned way:

“Ich weiser Narr,

ich Saeumer, ich Verschwender!

Nicht ist getan,

alles zu beginnen;”

the point is precisely that he did not really live his life, but missed it. Faust confronts his defeat in Zweites Bild, when Helen appears to him: “Was ich sehnte, / was ich waehnte: / hoechsten Wunsches / Raetselformen.” When he tries to embrace her, enthusiastically exclaiming “Nur Faust beruehrte je das Ideal!”, the vision disintegrates into nothing, and he accepts the bitter lesson: “Der Mensch ist der Volkommenen nicht gewachsen.” (His conclusion is wrong: the lesson is rather that Helen is like rainbow, a pure appearance, something that is only visible from a proper distance.) At this moment, he knows that the game is over, that nothing was really done.

One should read these lines in their contrast to Goethe: what Faust here brutally experiences is that LA Femme n’existe pas – THE Woman, the substantial protecting Ground of the hero’s existence, not a particular woman but das Ewig-Weibliche welches zieht uns hinan, mentioned in the Chorus Mysticus which concludes Faust II (and was set to music in the second part of Mahler’s 8^th Sympohony, the exemplary late-Romantic kitsch). These lines suggest the ineffable spiritual dimension of femininity which inspires men to realize their highest potentials – an anti-feminist wisdom, if there ever was one. That is to say, it is worth remembering here how Goethe’s Faust concludes: the aged Faust has satisfied a dream of activity and economic progress, he has reclaimed the land from the sea, peopled it, and given it prosperity. But his pleasure and pride are not complete: a freehold enclave held by an old couple, Philemon and Baucis, disturbs the unity of his estate. He asks Mephisto to remove them, and the consequence is the burning-down of their house and their murder. Delighted with the growth of his project, Faust, now one hundred years old, speaks a phrase of satisfaction,

“Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück
Genieß' ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick,”

and falls back dead. Thereupon Mephisto steps in, claiming his own. Heavenly spirits, however, intervene, drive off Mephisto, and reclaim Faust. In the final mystical scene, Faust's soul is conveyed in a progress towards Heaven, amidst the intercessions of Gretchen and other women… What one should not miss is the colonialist-imperialist aspect of Faust’s last years – Faust ends his life as a defiant capitalist, brutally disposing of the last obstacle, the owners of a free enclave… This is how das Ewig-Weibliche zieht ihn hinan!

     “Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück / Genieß' ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick” – does this not also hold for Busoni’s Faust’s last moment? The Glueck is here in his awareness of how, through the highest act of transposing his Will onto the child, he “stell’ ich mich / ueber die Regel / umfass in Einem / die Epochen / und vermenge mich / den letzten Geschlechtern: / ich, Faust / ein ewiger Wille.” This is an existential lie, a false exit, which is why it is a sign of Busoni’s artistic authenticity that he wasn’t able to compose these lines. Which, then, is the precise character of this Wille?

     When Busoni stages a series of transformations – of a child into Christ, of Christ into Helen of Troy, etc. -, what we should focus on is the mysterious stuff which lends itself to such transformations, the proverbial “stuff the dreams are made of.” Lacan’s name for this stuff is objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. One should imagine this object as a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present; it is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a “something” that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. It is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal – more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the “living dead” which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. It does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void – its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called “death drive,” and one should bear in mind that “death drive” is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with Wiederholungszwang, the uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism’s death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die (like the wound on the ill boy’s belly from Kafka's "A Country Doctor"): when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace. For any avid cinema-goer, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that he has already seen all this in Ridley Scott’s Alien: the monster appears indestructible; if one cuts it into pieces, it merely multiplies; it is something extra-flat that all of a sudden flies off and envelops your face; with infinite plasticity, it can morph itself into a multitude of shapes; in it, pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. The „alien“ is effectively libido as pure life, indestructible and immortal - this is what Busonio refers to as eternal Will. Where, then, does the plasticity of this object come? Lacan’s solution is that all the figures of objet a are figures of the void, of nothingness. Human desire does not have a determinate object: every object is already metonymic, a place-holder of Nothing, when we get hold of it, our experience is the one of ce n’est pas ca, „this is not that (what I really wanted),“ no given object can satisfy my desire, its true object is the lost maternal Thing which is always missing, and objet a gives body to this void.

Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman drive is with reference to Kant’s philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive statement ‘the soul is mortal’ can be negated in two ways. We can either deny a predicate (‘the soul is not mortal’), or affirm a non-predicate (‘the soul is non-mortal’). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between ‘he is not dead’ and ‘he is undead’. The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead (alive): the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead’. And the same goes for ‘inhuman’: ‘he is not human’ is not the same as ‘he is inhuman’. ‘He is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while ‘he is inhuman’ means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being-human. And, perhaps, one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself. (Which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, the ‘Night of the World’, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around.)

A look at the Wagnerian heroes can be of some help here: from their first paradigmatic case, the Flying Dutchman, they are possessed by the unconditional passion for dying, for finding ultimate peace and redemption in death. Their predicament is that, some time in the past, they have committed some unspeakable evil deed, so that they are condemned to pay the price for it not by death, but by being condemned to a life of eternal suffering, of helplessly wandering around, unable to fulfill their symbolic function. This gives us a clue to the exemplary Wagnerian song, which, precisely, is the Klage of the hero, displaying his horror at being condemned to a life of eternal suffering, to err around or dwell as the "undead" monster, longing for peace in death (from its first example, Dutchman's great introductory monologue, to the lament of the dying Tristan and the two great complaints of the suffering Amfortas). Although there is no great complaint by Wotan, Bruenhilde's final farewell to him - "Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!" - points in the same direction: when the gold is returned to Rhine, Wotan is finally allowed to die peacefully.

     Wagner's solution to Freud's antagonism of Eros and Thanatos is thus the identity of the two poles: love itself culminates in death, its true object is death, the longing for the beloved is the longing for death. Is, then, this urge which haunts the Wagnerian hero what Freud called the "death drive /Todestrieb/"? It is precisely the reference to Wagner which enables us to see how the Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension. Death drive does not reside in Wagner's heroes' longing to die, to find peace in death: it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying - a name for the "undead" eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. The final passing-away of the Wagnerian hero (the death of the Dutchman, Wotan, Tristan, Amfortas) is therefore the moment of their liberation from the clutches of the death drive. Tristan in Act III is not desperate because of his fear of dying: what makes him desperate is that, without Isolde, he cannot die and is condemned to eternal longing - he anxiously awaits her arrival so as to be able to die. The prospect he dreads is not that of dying without Isolde (the standard complaint of a lover), but rather that of the endless life without her.

     This weird “undead” drive is not the same as the Schopenhauerian Wille – it is the gap that separates them which thwarts the planned triumphant conclusion of Busoni’s Faust. When, at the very end, Gnade and Versoehnung are denied to him, Faust fully accepts his destiny and does das hoechste Tun of assuming death and transfiguration: he reappears (is reborn) as a naked half-grown youth with a flowering brunch, into which his death child changes. How are we to read this ending? Mephistopheles’s line which closes the opera - “Sollte dieser Mann etwa verunglueckt sein?” - is not rhetorical, but literally a question, a dilemma. It is not principally the question of illusion or reality (is the young naked boy only the dying Faust’s hallucination, a mere illusion, or is he real?), i.e., it is too easy to say that for cynical realists there is no boy, just the miserable dead body of Faust, while those who believe in it see it. The question is a more radical one: real or not, is the appearance of the young boy an authentic vision or a fake way-out?

     And is this dilemma not reflected in the opera’s two endings? Busoni left the ending non-composed, and the opera was first performed in 1925 with Phillip Jarnach's ending, which makes no use of detailed musical instructions left by the dying Busoni (it is worth remembering that Busoni left non-composed also Helen’s appearance). Anthony Beaumont’s later spacious final scene (first performed in 1984), realizing manuscript sketches as well as other original material from 1923 and 1924, is much more Busoni making the opera's final image Nietzschean: a naked youth rises from the ruined body of Faust, shucking off old and constraining superstitions. That white innocence, symbolic of Busoni's yearning for a newborn classicism in the aftermath of World War I, is best expressed in the radiant key of C major, whereas Jarnach perversely forces it down to E flat minor, the blackest of all keys. This is the dilemma: C major or E flat minor?

But this dilemma was already that of Busoni himself – it is clear that the unfinished score of Faust is not just an external accident due to the composer’s illness and premature death, but the result of an inherent creative deadlock. Faust belongs to the great unfinished operas from the same epoch, from Puccini’s Turandot to Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron and Berg’s Lulu – as Sergio Sablich put it: “The fact remains that Busoni didn’t compose this Finale because he didn’t succeed in finding the adequate musical solution.” Something in him – his authentic artistic sense - resisted the triumphant finale in the style of a Wagnerian Verklaerung which concludes Tristan. Musically, the declared triumph of the eternal Will remains a dead letter:

“/…/ so stell’ ich mich / ueber die Regel / umfass in Einem / die Epochen / und vermenge mich / den letzten Geschlechtern: / ich, Faust / ein ewiger Wille.”

Busoni wrote: “I hope that Faust's fear can be discerned, the fear that makes him collapse unconscious at the end.” But did he not himself shirk back from this fear in this concluding triumphant assertion of the Will?

So which version is better, Jarnach’s or Beaumont’s? One cannot but recall here Stalin’s famous quip from 1928, when he was asked which deviation is worst, the Rightist or the Leftist: “They are both worse!” The same holds here: Jarnach’s ”Rightist” version (which emphasizes the catastrophy of the ending) and Beaumont’s “Leftist” version (which emphasizes the optimism of the Will) are both worse: they both miss the truth contained in the very fact that Faust remained incomplete. Our answer should thus be the obverse of the legendary Englishman’s reply to the offer ”Coffee or tea?”: “Yes, please!” This is why the decision to stage Faust the way it was left by Busoni, with the last sung words “Ich will wie ehemals aufschauen zu dir” (addressed to Christ, just before his figure changes into that of Helen), is a profoundly correct one. In Jarnach’s standard version, Mephistopheles’s last line in spoken, like King Herod’s last line from Strauss’ Salome “Man toete dieses Weib”. If one performs as a spoken word everything that comes after “Ich will wie ehemals aufschauen zu dir”, one does not just show respect to the Master - one does something much more radical: one turns around the Schopenhauerian eternal Will, Busoni’s point of reference.

     It was Schopenhauer who claimed that music brings us in contact with the Ding an sich: it renders directly the drive of the life-substance that words can only signify. For that reason, music "seizes" the subject in the real of his/her being, bypassing the detour of meaning: in music, we hear what we cannot see, the vibrating life-force beneath the flow of Vorstellungen. Recall the remarkable scene at the beginning of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, in which we see a phone ringing loudly, and, when a hand picks up the receiver, the ringing goes on – as if the musical life-force of the sound is too strong to be contained by reality and persists beyond its limitations. (Or recall a similar scene from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, in which a singer sings on stage Roy Orbison's »Crying«, and when she collapses unconscious, the song goes on.) What happens, however, when this flux of life-substance itself is suspended, discontinued? Georges Balanchine staged a short orchestral piece by Webern (they are all short) so that, after the music is over, the dancers continue to dance for some time in complete silence, as if they had not noticed that the music that provides the substance for their dance is already over - like the cat in a cartoon who simply continues to walk over the edge of the precipice, ignoring that she has no longer ground under her feet... The dancers who continue to dance after the music is over are like the living dead who dwell in an interstice of empty time: their movements, that lack vocal support, allow us to see not only the voice but silence itself.

     And something of the same kind happens when singers stop singing and start to perform like actors: we are confronted with mere words, deprived of their libidinal substance provided by music. What we hear are effectively dead words – words which we fully understand, but which nonetheless lack the proper subjective resonance. This reference to Balanchine also enables us to locate Busoni’s philosophical mistake: what he refers to as the eternal Wille, the immortal drive which persists through all its transformations, is not really Schopenhauerian Wille; it is rather a persistence which goes on even when Wille disappears.

     This, however, does not mean that such a staging only confronts us with Busoni’s failure: the musical deadlock should also be understood as a direct call to us, spectators, to provide the missing music – the choice is ours. In such a reading, the Christian dimension is still present: it is implicit in the fact that the God who rejects Faust’s redemption is explicitly designated by Chorus as Gott “der Rache, der Vergeltung und der Strafe”, nicht Gott “der Milde und der Gnade” – Faust turns towards ewiger Wille after the crucified morphs into Helen – it is to her apparition that he exclaims: “Verdammnis! Gibt es keine Gnade? Bust du unversoehnbar?” Faust is thus abandoned by the God of Rache und Vergeltung - one can well imagine a devil passing by the dead Christ on the cross and making the same cynical remark: “Sollte dieser Mann etwa verunglueckt sein?” Is this misfortune all that there is to it, or is there a resurrection – the choice is ours, because Christ does not resurrect as a particular individual, but as the Holy Spirit, the collective of those who believe. The resurrected Christ is not an X which exists independently of our beliefs, he is nothing but our belief in him: the resurrected Christ is the bond of love which unites his followers.

     Is then the reborn child nonetheless a figure of resurrected Christ? One should ask here a naïve but pertinent question: if Busoni wanted to return to the tradition of Puppenspiele, is there, in the narrative itself, a figure which stands for a puppet? This figure is, of course, the young boy who appears at the very end as the re-incarnation of Faust’s Wille. The motif of the innocent/asexual boy confronted by an "overripe" sexualized mature woman has a long prehistory which reaches back to the fin-de-siecle emergence of the (self)destructive femme fatale. Of special interest is here "Language in the Poem," Heidegger's seminal essay on Georg Trakl's poetry, the only place where he approaches the topic of sexual difference:

“A human cast, cast in one mold and cast away into this cast, is called a Geschlecht. The word refers to mankind as a whole as well as to kinship in the sense of race, tribe, family - all of these in turn cast in the duality of the sexes. The cast of man's 'decomposed form' is what the poet calls the 'decomposing' kind. It is the generation that has been removed from its kind of essential being, and this is why it is the 'displaced' kind.

What curse has struck this humankind? The curse of the decomposing kind is that the old human kinship has been struck apart by discord of Geschlechter. Each of the Geschlechter strives to escape from that discord into the unleashed turmoil of the always isolated and sheer wildness of the wild game. Not duality as such, the discord is the curse. Out of the turmoil of blind wildness it carries each kind into an irreconcilable plot, and so casts it into unbridled isolation. The 'fallen Geschlecht,' so cleft in two, can on its own no longer find its proper cast. Its proper cast is only with that kind whose duality leaves discord behind and leads the way, as 'something strange,' into the gentleness of simple twofoldness following in the stranger's footsteps.”^[5]

The undead pale-faced ethereal boy Elis ("Elis in wonderland," one is tempted to add) stands for the gentle Sex, for the harmonious duality of the sexes, not their discord. The first thing to do here (and which is not done by Heidegger) is to situate this figure of a presexual boy into its context, whose first reference are Edvard Munch's paintings: is this "unborn" fragile boy not the very terrified asexual figure of The Scream, or the figure squeezed between the two frames in his Madonna, the same foetus-like asexual figure floating among the droplets of sperm? The horror of this figure is not the Heideggerian Angst, but the suffocating Schrecken pure and simple. Perhaps the outstanding example of this confrontation of the asexual boy with the Woman are the famous shots, from the beginning of Ingmar Bergman's Persona, of a preadolescent boy with large glasses, examining with a perplexed gaze the giant unfocused screen-image of a feminine face; this image gradually shifts to the close-up of what seems to be another woman who closely resembles the first one - yet another exemplary case of the subject confronted with the fantasmatic interface-screen.

In short, what Heidegger's reading does not take into account is how the very opposition between the asexual boy and the discordant Geschlecht is sexualized: the discordant Geschlecht is not neutral, but feminine, and the very apparent gender-neutrality of Elis makes him a boy. So when Heidegger claims that "the boyishness in the figure of the boy Elis does not consist in the opposite of girlishness. His boyishness is the appearance of his stiller childhood. That childhood shelters and stores within it the gentle two-fold of sex, the youth and the 'golden figure of the maiden',"^[6] he misses the key fact that sexual difference does not designate the two sexes of the human stock/species, but, in this case, the very difference between the asexual and the sexual: the external difference (between the sexual and the asexual) is mapped onto the internal difference between the two sexes. - Furthermore, what Heidegger (and Trakl) already hint at is that, precisely as pre-sexual, this innocent "undead" child confronted with the overripe and overblown feminine body is properly monstrous, one of the figures of the Evil itself:

“Spirit or ghost understood in this way has its being in the possibility of both gentleness and destructiveness. Gentleness in no way dampens the ecstasy of the inflammatory, but holds it gathered in the peace of friendship. Destructiveness comes from unbridled license, which consumes itself in its own revolt and thus is active evil. Evil is always the evil of a ghostly spirit.”^[7]

Perhaps, one should insert the figure of the resurrected boy from Busoni’s Faust into the series of similar figures from the horror stories a la Stephen King to Trakl’s Elis: the "undead," white, pale, ethereal monstrous asexual child returning to haunt the adults. This ambiguity of the asexual boy, oscillating between angelic and demonic – the ambiguity which reproduces the ambiguity of a puppet between Kleist and Hoffmann, between angelic and mechanically-possessed, is what remains open and unexplored in Busoni.

And, perhaps, we can surmise that, if, at Faust’s end, the young boy were to utter a sound, it would have been something like the sound of the scream of the homunculus depicted in Munch’s most famous painting.

[1] Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Brief an Friedrich Schiller, 16./17. August 1797,” in Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, sec. 2, vol. 4 Goethe mit Schiller. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche vom 24. Juni 1794 bis zum 9. Mai 1805, ed. Volker C. Dörr and Norbert Oellers, Part 1: Vom 24. Juni 1794 bis zum 31. Dezember 1799, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1998, p. 390.

[2] Reprinted in the vol. 5 of Heinrich von Kleist. dtv Gesamtausgabe, Muenchen: dtv 1969.

[3] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan 1956, p. 152-153.

[4] In Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’imaginaire, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1968, p. 5-33.

[5] Martin Heidegger, "Language in the Poem," On the Way to Language, New York: Harper&Row 1982, p. 170-171.

[6] Op.cit., p. 174.

[7] Op.cit., p. 179.

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Below is an essay I wrote on my enduring love for Patrica Highsmith, with a note on Andrew Wilson’s BEAUTIFUL SHADOW. A LIFE OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, London: Bloomsbury 2003

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Let me begin with a personal note: the name “Patricia Highsmith” designates for me a sacred territory, the One whose position among writers is comparable to the place Spinoza holds for Deleuze (the “Christ among philosophers”) – when one talks about Highsmith, one should be careful, since one walks on my dreams. Reading Wilson’s biography was therefore for me a must.

     The result? One certainly learns a lot, and the book strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance, so it IS a must for all those interested in Highsmith and, more generally, in crime fiction. What I find problematic is the level of interpretive reflections, where Wilson often gets dangerously close to banality – can one really take seriously passages like “Highsmith’s fiction, like Bacon’s painting, allows us to glimpse the dark, terrible forces that shape our lives, while at the same time, documenting the banality of evil”(5[1])? Not to mention fast pop-psychology references to Erich Fromm and David Riesman, plus the listing of all existentialist usual suspects from Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky onwards… Much more pertinent are occasional remarks quoted by Wilson, like Duncan Fallowell’s perspicuous characterization of Highsmith’s personality as “a combination of painful vulnerability and iron will”(423). Or anecdotes which illustrate how Highsmith totally lacked any Politically Correct tact and openly articulated her fantasies and prejudices (although a Leftist, she preferred Margaret Thatcher to the usual feminist bunch). Or the data which indicate the ethico-political grounds of Highsmith’s choice of what some today call the “old Europe”: she “made a life’s work of her ostracization from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention”(Frank Rich, quoted in 317) - already in 1954, she described the US as a “second Roman Empire.”

To be sure, the book provides a lot of stuff of what Freud called “wild analysis.” Five months before Highsmith’s birth, her mother tried to rid herself of her unborn child by drinking turpentine; this accident was told to Pat later by her mother herself who voiced her surprise: “It’s funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat.”(21) Does this love for, as it were, the mark of her own death or, rather, non-existence, not display the Oedipal wish not to exist, not to be born in the first place? However, such insight pale into insignificance when compared with the wealth of Highsmith’s fictional universe: her work is simply so much more compelling than any secret unearthed by the pseudo-Freudian search for a key to Highsmith‘s morbid universe in her real life experiences. The greatest challenge of the Freudian reading of Highsmith lies elsewhere: to deploy how writing was for her literally what Lacan would have called her sinthome, the “knot“ that held her universe together, the artificial symbolic formation through which she maintained a minimum of sanity by conferring on her tumultuous experience a narrative consistency. In her masterpiece Those Who Walk Away, the hero’s wife justifies her suicide by quoting (what later become) the James Bond phrase: “The world is not enough.” Her writing was for Highsmith that which enabled her to avoid suicide, to endure in a world which, in itself, is not enough.

One often hears that, in order to understand a work of art, one needs to know its historical context. Against this historicist commonplace, the lesson of Highsmith is not only that too much of a historical context can blur the proper contact with a work of art (i.e., that, in order to enact this contact, one should abstract from the work's context). Even more, it is, rather, the work of art itself which provides a context enabling us to properly understand a given historical situation. If, today, someone were to visit Serbia, the direct contact with raw data there would leave him confused. If, however, he were to read a couple of literary works and see a couple of representative movies, they would definitely provide the context that would enable him to locate the raw data of his experience. And the same goes for Highsmith: the task is not so much to explain her work through references to her “real“ life, but, rather, to explain through the reference to her work how she was able to survive in her “real“ life.

So which is Highsmith’s masterpiece? Already her first texts (the short story The Heroine, the novel Strangers on a Train), display an uncanny perfection – everything is already there, no further “growth” was needed, so that there is effectively a Buddha-like quality about Highsmith (according to the legend, Buddha was born as a wise man with silver hair). The interesting fact here is that Highsmith’s only conspicuous artistic failure is her “direct” lesbian novel first published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan as The Price of Salt in 1952, then reprinted under Highsmith’s own name as Carol in 1991. The cause of this failure is, paradoxically, that Carol was too close to Highsmith’s “real life” traumas and concerns: as long as she was compelled to articulate these concerns in an oblique, ciphered way, the result was outstanding; the moment she addressed them directly, "calling them by their name," we got a rather flat and uninteresting novel – is this not the ultimate confirmation of Lacan’s thesis that truth articulates itself in the very distortions and displacements of the central topic? 

Among non-Ripley novels, my personal favorite is Those Who Walk Away, which displays Highsmith achievement at its best: she took crime fiction, the most “narrative” genre of them all, and imbued it with the inertia of the real, the lack of resolution, the dragging-on of the “empty time,” which characterize the stupid factuality of life. In Rome, Ed Coleman tries to murder Ray Garrett, a failed painter and gallery-owner in his late 20s, his son-in-law whom he blames for the recent suicide of his only child, Peggy, Ray’s wife. Rather than flee, Ray follows Ed to Venice, where Ed is wintering with Inez, his girlfriend. What follows is Highsmith’s paradigmatic agony of the symbiotic relationship of two men who are inextricably linked to each other in their very hatred. Ray himself is haunted by a sense of guilt for his wife’s death, so he exposes himself to Ed’s violent intentions. Echoing his death wish, he accepts a lift from Ed in a motor-boat; in the middle of the lagoon, Ed pushes Ray overboard. Ray pretends he is actually dead and assumes a false name and another identity, thus experiencing both exhilarating freedom and overwhelming emptiness. He roams like a living dead through the cold streets of wintry Venice when… We have here a crime novel with no murder, just failed attempts at it: there is no clear resolution at the novel’s end – except, perhaps, the resigned acceptance of both Ray and Ed that they are condemned to haunt each other to the end.

Highsmith practiced the literary equivalent of what Deleuze later defined as the shift from “movement-image” to “time-image” in the history of cinema: true art is not simply the telling of stories, but the telling of how stories go wrong, rendering visible and palpable the interstices in which “nothing happens.” In art, spiritual and material are directly intertwined: the spiritual emerges when we become aware of the material inertia, dysfunctional bare presence, of objects around us. The spiritual emerges after a murder attempt goes wrong and the prospective murderer and his victim are left stupidly staring at each other. Highsmith is thus quite literally, more than any author, the writer who elevated crime fiction to the level of art.

This sensibility for the inertia has a special significance for our age in which the obverse of the incessant capitalist drive to produce new objects are the growing piles of useless waste, piled mountains of used cars, computers, etc., like the famous airplane "resting place" in the Mojave desert… in these ever-growing piles of inert, dysfunctional “stuff,” which cannot but strike us with their useless, inert presence, one can, as it were, perceive the capitalist drive at rest. Therein resides the interest of Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Stalker, of its post-industrial wasteland with wild vegetation growing over abandoned factories, concrete tunnels and railroads full of stale water and wild overgrowth in which stray cats and dogs wander. Nature and industrial civilization are here again overlapping, but through a common decay - civilization in decay is in the process of again being reclaimed (not by idealized harmonious Nature, but) by nature in decomposition. The ultimate irony of history is that an author from the Communist East displayed the greatest sensitivity for this obverse of the drive to produce and consume. Perhaps, however, this irony displays a deeper necessity which hinges on what Heiner Mueller called the "waiting-room mentality" of the Communist Eastern Europe:

"There would be an announcement: The train will arrive at 18.15 and depart at 18.20 -- and it never did arrive at 18.15. Then came the next announcement: The train will arrive at 20.10. And so on. You went on sitting there in the waiting room, thinking: It's bound to come at 20.15. That was the situation. Basically, a state of Messianic anticipation. There are constant announcements of the Messiah's impending arrival, and you know perfectly well that he won't be coming. And yet somehow, it's good to hear him announced all over again."

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The point of this Messianic attitude was not that hope was maintained, but that, since the Messiah did NOT arrive, people started to look around and take note of the inert materiality of their surroundings, in contrast to the West where people, engaged in permanent frantic activity, do not even properly notice what goes on around them: because of the lack of acceleration, people enjoyed more contact with the earth on which the waiting room was built; caught in this delay, they deeply experienced the idiosyncrasies of their world, all its topographical and historical details… One can easily imagine a Highsmith hero, Ray or Ed, stuck at such an East German railway station - Highsmith induced us to look at our own environs through the East German eyes.

However, such an environs of material decay and failed decisions is only half of the story: is a HERO proper still imaginable, who would walk along these decrepit streets and counteract their inertia? Highsmith reply is Tom Ripley, the hero of her five novels. Ripley is difficult to swallow, and the best indicator of this difficulty is the failure of his four cinema versions. First, there were Alain Delon in Rene Clement’s Plein Soleil (1960, based on The Talented Mr Ripley – but in the film, the police at the end arrests Ripley, to Highsmith’ dismay), and Denis Hopper in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977, based on Ripley’s Game); then, in strangely symmetrical remakes, there were Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and John Malkovich in a new Ripley’s Game by Liliana Cavani (2003). Although, in themselves, all four are outstanding movies, their Ripley is simply not the Highsmith Ripley, they somehow humanize Ripley’s inhuman core: Delon is a cold blooded demoniac European; Hopper is a Sam Shepard type existentialist cowboy; Damon is a hystericized, emotionally unstable, American brat; and Malkovich displays his standard decadent ironic coldness.

     Who, then, is the “real” Ripley? Let us take Minghella’s film, where the contrast is most perspicuous. Tom Ripley, a broke young New Yorker, is approached by the rich magnate Herbert Greenleaf, in his mistaken belief that Tom has been at Princeton with his son Dickie. Dickie is off idling in Italy, and Greenleaf pays Tom to go to Italy and bring his son back and to his sense, to take the rightful place in the family business. However, once in Europe, Tom gets more and more fascinated not only by Dickie himself, but also by the polished, easy-going, socially acceptable upper-class life that Dickie inhabits. All the talk about Tom's homosexuality is here misplaced: Dickie is for Tom not the object of his desire, but the ideal desiring subject, the subject "supposed to know /how to desire/." In short, Dickie becomes for Tom his ideal ego, the figure of his imaginary identification: when he repeatedly casts a coveting side-glance at Dickie, he does not thereby betray his erotic desire to engage in sexual commerce with him, to HAVE Dickie, but his desire to BE like Dickie. So, to resolve this predicament, Tom concocts an elaborated plan: on a boat trip, he kills Dickie and then, for some time, assumes his identity. Acting as Dickie, he organizes things so that, after Dickie's "official" death, he inherits his wealth; when this is accomplished, the false "Dickie" disappears, leaving behind a suicide note praising Tom, while Tom again reappears, successfully evading the suspicious investigators, even earning the gratitudes of Dickie's parents, and then leaves Italy for Greece.      

     Although the novel was written in the mid-50s, Highsmith foreshadows today's therapeutic rewriting of the ethical Commandments into "Recommendations" which one should not follow too blindly. Ripley simply stands for the last step in this rewriting: thou shalt not kill - except when there is really no other way to pursue your happiness. Or, as Highsmith herself put it in an interview: "He could be called psychotic, but I would not call him insane because his actions are rational. /.../ I consider him a rather civilized person who kills when he absolutely has to." Ripley is thus not any kind of the "American psycho": his criminal acts are not frenetic passages a l'acte, outbursts of violence in which he releases the energy hindered by the frustrations of the yuppie daily life. His crimes are calculated with simple pragmatic reasoning: he does what is necessary to attain his goal (the wealthy quiet life in the exclusive Paris suburbs). What is so disturbing about him, of course, is that he somehow seems to lack the elementary moral sense: in the daily life, he is mostly friendly and considerate (although with a touch of coldness), and when he commits a murder, he does it with regret, quickly, as painlessly as possible, in the same way one performs an unpleasant but necessary task. Ripley is the best exemplification of what Lacan had in mind when he claimed that normality is the special form of psychosis - of not being traumatically caught in the symbolic cobweb, of retaining the "freedom" from the symbolic order.

     The mystery of Highsmith's Ripley transcends the standard American ideological motif of the capacity of the individual to radically "reinvent" him/herself, to erase the traces of the past and assume a thoroughly new identity, it transcends the postmodern "Protean Self". Therein resides the ultimate shift of Minghella’s movie with regard to the novel: the film "gatsbyizes" Ripley into a new version of the American hero who recreates his identity in a murky way. What gets lost here is best exemplified by the crucial difference between the novel and the film: in the film, Ripley has the stirrings of a conscience, while in the novel, the qualms of conscience are simply beyond his grasp. This is why the making-explicit of Ripley's gay desires in the film also misses the point. Minghella implies that, back in the 50s, Highsmith had to be more circumspect to make the hero palatable to the large public, while today we can say things in a more overt way. However, Ripley's coldness is not the surface effect of his gay stance, but rather the other way round. In one of the later Ripley novels, we learn that he makes love once a week to his wife Heloise, as a regular ritual - there is nothing passionate about it, Tom is like Adam in paradise, prior to the Fall, when, according to St Augustine, he and Eve DID have sex, but it was performed as a simple instrumental task, like sowing the seeds on a field. One way to read Ripley is thus to claim that he is angelic, living in a universe which precedes the Law and its transgression (sin), i.e. the vicious superego cycle of guilt generated by our very obedience to the law, described by Paul. This is the reason why Ripley feels no guilt or even remorse after his murders: he is not yet fully integrated into the symbolic law.

     The paradox of this non-integration is that the price Ripley pays for it is his inability to experience intense sexual passion - a clear proof of how there is no sexual passion outside the confines of the symbolic law. In one of the later Ripley novels, the hero sees two flies on his kitchen table and, upon looking at them closely and observing that they are copulating, squashes them with disgust. This small detail is crucial - Minghella's Ripley would NEVER have done something like this: Highsmith's Ripley is in a way disconnected from the reality of flesh, disgusted at the real of life, of its cycle of generation and corruption. Marge, Dickie's girlfriend, provides an adequate characterization of Ripley: "All right, he may not be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life." Insofar as such coldness characterizes a certain radical lesbian stance, one is tempted to claim that, rather than being a closet gay, the paradox of Ripley is that he is a male lesbian. (No wonder that Highsmith as a lesbian felt such proximity to the figure of Ripley.)

     Minghella’s Ripley makes it clear what is wrong with the procedure which appears to be "more radical than the original," bringing out its implicit, repressed content: what mattered in Highsmith’s original was not only the "repression" of the allegedly prohibited (sexual, etc.) content, but the void of this repression as such. What is lost in the gesture of filling in the gaps is Ripley’s non-psychological cold monstrosity, uncannily close to a weird "normality." By way of "filling in the void" and "telling it all," Minghella retreats from the void as such, which, of course, is ultimately none other than the void of subjectivity. Instead of a polite person who is at the same time a monstrous automaton with no inner turmoil, we get the “wealth of a personality,” a person full of psychic traumas - in short, we get someone whom we can, in the fullest meaning of the term, understand.

     Tom Ripley was not just a mask for Highsmith, he was quite literally her externalized ego: as we learn in Wilson’s book, she even changed her name into Patricia Highsmith-Ripley and signed her mail with “Tom (Pat)”. One cannot but recall here the old Taoist quip on man dreaming he is a butterfly or vice versa: was Highsmith dreaming that she is Ripley or was she Ripley dreaming, in his daily social life, that he is Highsmith the writer? The ultimate core of this fascination is ethical: Ripley provides what is arguably the clearest and most radical rendering of the difference between morality and ethics – he is immoral, and yet thoroughly ethical. Are we able to sustain this position today when all the rules imposed on us do the exact opposite, seducing us with the promise “if only you follow these elementary moral rules, you can be as unethical as you want”?

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[1] All quotes from Wilson’s book are designated just by the page number in brackets.