There is no neutral reading of Freud – by “neutral” I mean approaching Freud directly by way of ignoring later interpretations. We have a Lacanian Freud, a Winnicott-Kleinian Freud, the American ego-psychological Freud, and (what comes closest to hegemonic position) the Anna-Freudian reading which predominated in the International Psychoanalytic Association. My position is, of course, Lacanian, as the title of this text indicates: as is usually the case with “returns to” the original figure, Lacan’s “return to Freud” approaches Freud’s texts from a tradition totally foreign to Freud himself (Hegelian dialectics, structural linguistics, and anthropology), in the same way as Martin Luther’s return to original Christianity depicts an image of Christ which is totally foreign to original Christian texts.

This is in no way meant as a critical remark: since a founding figure by definition is not aware of the true dimension of its discovery, a return to this figure is possible only from an external position. To take a different example, the same holds for Marx: to properly understand his notion of commodity fetishism, one has to read him through Freud – as Adrian Johnston pointed out, Marx did not discover only symptom but also drive in the Freudian sense of these two terms.1 And the same holds also for Hegel – “everything you wanted to know about Hegel but were afraid to ask Lacan.” Only if we read Hegel through Lacan do we get the key point that Hegel’s Absolute Knowing is his name for absolute openness of history to contingency.

The general formula we are dealing with here is: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask – with the implication: because you already knew it but did not really want to know it, so that you preferred to act as if you are still in search of it. In contrast to positive sciences where we are always in search of the final result and cannot ever be sure that we’ve reached it, a properly dialectical approach turns the relationship between searching and finding around: we pretend to search for something because we do not want to admit that we’ve already found it.

Since I am a Lacanian, I will begin with a different (tautological) version of this formula that holds for Lacan himself: everything you wanted to know about Lacan but were afraid to ask Lacan. When all too many of us talk about Lacan, we rely on some well-known interpreter of Lacan and refer to Lacan only to reconfirm our claims. Such a situation is quite normal when we are dealing with a really big name difficult to read like Lacan himself or Hegel or…, but from time to time, at least, we should take a close look at Lacan himself, at what he says or writes, literally.

However, we will focus on reading Freud through Lacan since the Lacanian reading of Freud’s texts has an almost magic effect of bringing out distinctions which, once we become aware of them, seem self-evident: “How was it possible that I didn’t already see it myself?” At the same time, we will also be attentive to the other side of such an approach: is there an important dimension of Freud which gets lost in Lacan’s reading, or does Lacan just ignore in Freud what deserves to be ignored, like his occasional naturalist naiveties?

Let’s take the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Étienne Balibar is fully justified in pointing out that, in his description of the formation of a crowd and the genesis of the superego, Freud doesn’t provide a “psychoanalysis of politics” (an explanation of the political dynamic of crowds through libidinal processes which are in themselves apolitical) but rather its opposite, the politics of psychoanalysis (the explanation of the rise of the triadic structure of Ego-Id-Superego through the familial “political” power struggles) – or, as Lacan put it, the Freudian Unconscious is political.

The Unconscious as political means that the Unconscious is not some kind of primordial domain of instinctual archetypes (as in Jungian theory) but a proto-political space of contingent struggles grounded in a primordial abyss. We have two main terms for this abyss: what Hegel calls absolute (self-relating) negativity and what Freud called death drive. So where do we stand today with negativity? The least one can say today about negativity in all its aspects is that it has seen better days – it definitely has shot its bolt, its philosophical potentials seem to be exhausted. In philosophy of the last two centuries it was mostly valued as positive (negativity as a permanent feature of subjectivity in all its guises, from Hegel through Marx to Freud), while positivity relates to the existing order that should be undermined, transcended, etc. Already in a letter to Ruge from 1843 Marx demanded “die rücksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden“ (“the reckless critique of all that exists”) not only in theory but also in social practice. Along the same lines, Engels wrote in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: “all that exists deserves to perish” – an implicit reference to what Mephistopheles said in Goethe’s Faust, part 1:

“I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
‘Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent—
That is my proper element.”

But when Mephisto was asked by Faust, “Well now, who are you then?” (“Nun gut, wer bist du denn?”), he gave the well-known answer, “Part of that force that always wills the evil and always produces the good” (“Ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft”). There is an obvious link here to Mandeville and Smith, to the invisible hand of the market which makes the egotism of individuals work for the common good. However, from today’s (but also already Hegel’s) experience, the opposite also holds: “that force that always wills the good and always produces the evil” – Rousseau definitely wanted the good but his disciples produced political terror, Communists wanted solidarity but produced paranoiac suspicion… There is a further ambiguity in Faust: the very last lines pronounced by Chorus Mysticus are:

“Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche, / Hier wird’s Ereignis; / Das Unbeschreibliche, / Hier ist’s getan; / Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.” / “Everything transient / Is but a simile; / The insufficient / Here finds fulfilment; / The indescribable / Here becomes deed; / The eternal-feminine / Draws us on high.”

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There are stupid popular songs where the melody, although you find it disgusting, continues to haunt you for days or even weeks. In my own country, such a song is “Šmentana reč” (performed by the band of Boris Brank,1 words by Albert Papler and music by Boris Frank). First two explanations. “Šmentana reč” is a popular expression designating some annoying but pleasurable crazy/damned thing, and Gadova Peč (the “viper’s oven”) is a well-known inn in central Slovenia; “going to viper’s oven” is also used as a general term for going out to get drunk. So here is (my own clumsy) translation of the lyrics:

“I went to the viper’s oven to drink that thing, and now my head hurts, wow, that crazy thing.” / “Don’t do it, friend; if you go to viper’s oven drink just a little bit of that thing.” / “I came home to embrace my wife but I got a slap, wow, that crazy thing.” / “Don’t do it, friend, if you get too much of it, it is better not to meet your wife. Life, a wise teacher, instructs us every day: what is too much is not good. This is why you should never get too much of anything, and this holds especially for that thing.” / “OK, from now on when I’ll go to the viper’s oven, I will pour into myself just a little bit of that crazy thing.” / “My friend, this is how your wife will also like you more if you will drink that thing more wisely.”

Why losing time with such a ridiculous (disgusting even) song? Because it renders palpable in the most elementary way the gap between enjoyment (jouissance) and surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir). Enjoyment is the climactic point included into the dominant symbolic economy. In our traditional societies, the climactic point of enjoyment is the sexual act of a married couple. Surplus-enjoyment disturbs this official hierarchy by way of introducing a lateral practice of enjoyment which potentially threatens to bring down the entire order: it can be drugs, excessive perverse “unnatural” sex or even obsession with work. In the case of our song, it is alcohol, excessive drinking of wine.

The problem is, of course, that jouissance is in itself a surplus, so there is no temperate jouissance that would properly fit the symbolic system: there is no “proper” or “normal” enjoyment, instability is inscribed into its very notion. In the case of sex and alcohol, this means that, yes, too much wine makes a man unable to perform, but a small amount of wine can make him more potent. In (not only) today’s politics it is easy to find quite brutal examples of this paradox.

What IDF is doing in Gaza and on the West Bank is justified as a war against anti-Semitic terrorism, as an attempt to bring safety and peace to the Middle East. It is obvious that one cannot account for the excesses that occur all the time (murder of children, massive torture, destruction of the entire infrastructure) in this way; one needs a dose of “that crazy thing,” i.e., one has to get drunk with direct brutal violence, and the attempts to keep the “crazy thing” under control fail again and again, all of Israel is now in the thrall of the genocidal thing.

The formal structure at work in such cases is that of inherent transgression: every ideological edifice relies on its own repressed. Say, it is obvious that pedophilia is the repressed of the Catholic Church, not to mention the obscene dimension of the new Rightist populism. If we take away pedophilia from the Catholic Church, it disintegrates, because it would be deprived of its obscene supplement that produces the surplus-enjoyment sustaining the Church edifice. We can easily imagine the lyrics of our song adjusted to this case: a young priest says to his confessor, “Today I seduced a couple of young boys and my head hurts. Wow, that crazy thing!” “My friend, when you seduce young boys, do it moderately and secretly, and everyone will like you! Life teaches us that what is too much is not good…”

Back to our song, this is also the reason why the singing is accompanied by a Slovene popular clown who calls himself “Mama Manka” (literally translated: “mother is missing”), a man with a short beard dressed up as a woman (with a wig, etc.) making strange obscene gestures and sounds to accompany the song. There is absolutely nothing subversive in this accompanying act; it functions as an obscene supplement which makes more spicy the boring common sense message of the song. He is a supplement in the Derridean sense, a controlled excess.

And I was surprised to discover exactly the same structure in “Žižek on Iran’s Water Crisis: Why Markets Fail When Resources Fall Out”,2 a 17 minutes video deep fake created by AI where I address the public on the topic indicated in the title. My argument3 is correctly summarized, although the words are mostly not mine, but a whole series of features makes it clear that we are watching an AI fake. Every viewer acquainted with my appearances on podcasts immediately notices that I don’t wave with my hands but keep them firmly crossed on my lap, that I speak in a continuous stable voice, with no sudden jumps from one line of thought to another, no confusions and repetitions; with no sniffing, spitting, no touching my nose with my hand… in short, what you see in this fake video clip is myself deprived of all the crazy things that bear witness to my surplus-enjoyment, myself without that crazy thing, a boring, correct version of myself. As that correct guy, I wish you a happy new year, while the crazy thing in me is sending you all to hell.

Traversing Abjection

Up to now, we have been dealing with the main modes of avoiding the abject. There are, however, two privileged ways of traversing abjection—of going through it and purifying ourselves of it: religion and art (poetic catharsis). “The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion” (17).

The whole of modern literature and art, from Artaud to Céline, from Kandinsky to Rothko, confronts and tries to sublimate the abject. Following Rilke’s famous formula, “beauty is the last curtain before the horrible,” it weaves a screen that renders the abject not only tolerable but even pleasurable: “On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border—borderline cases—where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so: double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject” (207).

In a detailed analysis, Kristeva presents the work of Céline as a long and tortuous confrontation with the abjectal dimension. This is what “the long voyage to the bottom of the night” (the title of his masterpiece) alludes to—the night of the abject, which suspends not only reason but the universe of meaning as such, not only at the level of content (describing extreme states of dissolution) but also at the level of form (fragmented syntax, etc.), as if some pre-linguistic rhythm—“the ‘entirely other’ of significance”—were invading and undermining language:

It is as if Celine’s scription could only be justified to the extent extent that it confronted the “entirely other” of signifiance; as if it could only be by having this “entirely other” exist as such, in order to draw back from it but also in order to go to it as to a fountainhead; as if it could be born only through such a confrontation recalling the religions of defilement, abomination, and sin.

Céline carefully walks on the edge of this vortex of ecstatic negativity, like the hero of Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” flirting with it but avoiding complete immersion in it, which would have meant a descent into madness. Here, of course, Kristeva confronts the big problem: one would have expected that such a confrontation with the abject and its libidinal vortex, allowing it to penetrate our universe of meaning, would have a liberating effect, allowing us to break out of the constraints of symbolic rules and to recharge ourselves with a more primordial libidinal energy; however, as is well known, Céline turned into a full-fledged fascist, supporting Nazis to their very defeat—so what went wrong? At a general level, Kristeva’s reply is to avoid both extremes: not only is the total exclusion of the abject mortifying, cutting us off from the source of our vitality (when the abject is excluded, “the borderline patient, even though he may be a fortified castle, is nevertheless an empty castle” ), but the opposite also holds: every attempt to escape the patriarchal/rational symbolic order and enact a return to the prepatriarchal feminine rhythm of drives necessarily ends up in anti-Semitic fascism: “Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Celinian anti-Semitic fantasy?” (180).

The reason is, of course, that Judaism enacts in an exemplary way the monotheistic rejection of the maternal natural rhythms. However, Kristeva’s account of Céline’s move to fascism is more complex: fascist anti-Semitism is not just a regression to the domain of the abject, but a regression controlled/totalized by Reason. The return to what Reason has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.) is in itself liberating; it brings about an inconsistent bubble of fresh insights. Problems arise when this anarchic schizo-disorder, its mad dance, is totalized through a paranoiac stance that totalizes/unifies the entire field, generating a spectral object like “the Jew,” which allegedly explains all antagonisms and dissatisfactions:

One has to admit that out of such logical oscillations there emerge a few striking words of truth. Such words present us with harsh X-rays of given areas of social and political experience; they turn into fantasies or deliriums only from the moment when reason attempts to globalize, unify, or totalize. Then the crushing anarchy or nihilism of discourse topples over and, as if it were the reverse of that negativism, an object appears—an object of hatred and desire, of threat and aggressivity, of envy and abomination. That object, the Jew, gives thought a focus where all contradictions are explained and satisfied.

To clarify this paranoiac totalization (in which it is easy to discern echoes of Deleuze/Guattari’s opposition of schizo-analysis and paranoia), let us invoke a couple of cases which exemplify the opposite process, a liberating detotalization of the paranoiac unity. Three decades ago, in Carinthia (Kärnten), Austria’s southern province which borders on Slovenia, German nationalists organized a campaign against the alleged Slovene “threat” under the motto Kärnten bleibt deutsch!, to which Austrian leftists found a perfect answer. Instead of rational counterargument, they simply printed, in the main newspapers, an advertisement with obscene, disgusting-sounding variations of the nationalists’ motto: Kärnten deibt bleutsch! Kärnten leibt beutsch! Kärnten beibt dleutsch! etc. Isn’t this procedure worthy of the obscene, “anal,” meaningless speech spoken by Hynkel, the Hitler figure in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator? We should avoid here a fateful conclusion and distinguish this direct penetration of language by obscene enjoyment from the signifying mechanisms of wordplay, displacement, and condensation elaborated by Lacan. Let us take an example from Freud. In a letter to Fliess from 1897, he reports on two sessions with his patient “E.”: the word for beetle, Käfer, reminded E. of that for ladybug, Marienkäfer, which he associated with overhearing that his deceased mother, Marie, had been undecided about her marriage. Freud noted that in Vienna a woman might be referred to as a “beetle” and reported that E.’s “nurse and first love was a French woman.”:

Mr E., whom you know, had an anxiety attack at the age of ten when he tried to catch a black beetle, which would not put up with it. The meaning of this attack had thus far remained obscure. Now, dwelling on the theme of “being unable to make up one’s mind,” he repeated a conversation between his grandmother and his aunt about the marriage of his mother, who at that time was already dead, from which it emerged that she had not been able to make up her mind for quite some time; then he suddenly came up with the black beetle, which he had not mentioned for months, and from that to ladybug [Marienkäfer] (his mother’s name was Marie); then he laughed out loud and inadequately explained his laughter by saying that zoologists call this beetle septem punctata or the equivalent, according to the number of dots, although it is always the same animal. Then we broke off and the next time he told me that before the session the meaning of the beetle [Käfer] had occurred to him, namely, que faire? = being unable to make up one’s mind.1

So we get here the usual network of overdetermined associations: from the French maid who often did not know what to do to his mother, unable to make up her mind about marrying his father—but the key is that we arrive at the meaning of E.’s anxiety attack not by way of focusing on the associations (even less at the “deeper psychic meaning”) of the image of the beetle. The bridge between explicit content and the unconscious meaning of the scene is provided solely by the signifier (not meaning) “Käfer,” which sounds like “que faire?” (The further thing to note is that a question, “What to do?,” is embodied in an object, the beetle, so that the first gesture of interpretation is to see a question lurking in the fascinating/disgusting object.) These signifying mechanisms remain firmly within the symbolic order and do not enact a regression into what Kristeva calls the Semiotic.

The limitation of Kristeva’s theory of the abject resides in the fact that she conceives the symbolic order and abjection as the two extremes between which one has to negotiate a middle way;2 what she neglects to do is to inquire into what the symbolic order itself is in terms of the abject. The symbolic order is not just always-already embedded in the feminine hora (or what Kristeva in her earlier work referred to as the Semiotic), penetrated by the materiality of its immanent libidinal rhythms which distort the purity of the symbolic articulations; if it is here, it had to emerge out of hora through a violent act of self-differentiation or splitting. Consequently, insofar as we accept Kristeva’s term “abjection” for this self-differentiation, then we should distinguish between hora and abjection: abjection points towards the very movement of withdrawal from hora which is constitutive of subjectivity. This is why we had to further specify Kristeva’s diagnosis: every “unilateral call to return to what [the Judeo-Christian compound] has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.)” generates Fascism (as in Céline’s work) not because it regresses from the Symbolic but because it obfuscates abjection itself, the “primordial repression” which gives rise to the Symbolic. The dream of such attempts is not to suspend the Symbolic, but to have the (symbolic) cake and eat it, that is, to dwell in the Symbolic without the price we have to pay for it (“primordial repression,” the subject’s ontological derailment, antagonism, out-of-jointness, the violent gap of differentiation from natural substance)—the ancient dream of a masculine universe of meaning which remains harmonically rooted in the maternal substance of hora. In short, what Fascism obfuscates (forecloses even) is not the Symbolic as such but the gap that separates the Symbolic from the Real. This is why a figure like that of the Jew is needed: if the gap between the Symbolic and the Real is not constitutive of the Symbolic, if a Symbolic “at home” in the Real is possible, then their antagonism has to be caused by a contingent external intruder—and what better candidate for this role than Judaism, with its violent monotheist assertion of the symbolic Law and rejection of earth-bound paganism? The Jew as the enemy allows the anti-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital: by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate. This is also why Kristeva is right to link the phobic object (the Jew whose plots anti-Semites fear) to the avoidance of a choice: “The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision” (42). Does this proposition not hold especially for political phobia? Does the phobic object/abject, on the fear of which the rightist-populist ideology mobilizes its partisans (the Jew, the immigrant, etc.), not embody a refusal to choose—what? A position in the class struggle. This is how anti-Semitism relies on a paranoiac totalization of playing with abjection: the anti-Semitic fetish-figure of the Jew is “the last thing a subject sees” just before he confronts social antagonism as constitutive of the social body.

Éric Laurent discussed (in his blog post on “racism 2.0”)3 how the onset of post-’68 hedonist permissiveness, which was part of the prospect of integrating nations into larger communities held together by the global market, did not give rise to universal tolerance but, on the contrary, triggered a new wave of racist segregation:4 “Our future as common markets will be balanced by an increasingly hard-line extension of the process of segregation.” Why? Those who understand globalization as an opportunity for the entire earth to be a unified space of communication, one which brings together all humanity, often fail to notice this dark side of their proposition. Since a Neighbor is, as Freud suspected long ago, primarily a Thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life (or, rather, way of jouissance materialized in its social practices and rituals) disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, when the Neighbor comes too close, this can also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder. As Peter Sloterdijk put it: “More communication means at first above all more conflict.”5 This is why he is right to claim that the attitude of “understanding-each-other” has to be supplemented by the attitude of “getting-out-of-each-other’s-way,” by maintaining an appropriate distance, by implementing a new “code of discretion.” European civilization finds it easier to tolerate different ways of life precisely on account of what its critics usually denounce as its weakness and failure, namely, the alienation of social life. One of the things alienation means is that distance is included in the very social texture of everyday life: even if I live side by side with others, in my normal state I ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others. I move in a social space where I interact with others, obeying certain external “mechanical” rules, without sharing their inner world. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that, sometimes, a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life. Sometimes alienation is not a problem but a solution.

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What happens when we stumble upon a decaying human corpse or, in a more ordinary case, upon an open wound, shit, vomit, brutally torn-out nails or eyes, or even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk? What we experience in such situations is not just a disgusting object but something much more radical: the disintegration of the very ontological coordinates that enable us to locate an object in external reality “out there.” The phenomenological description of such experiences is Julia Kristeva’s starting point in her elaboration of the notion of the abject: the reaction of horror, disgust, withdrawal, ambiguous fascination, and so on, triggered by objects or occurrences that undermine the clear distinction between subject and object, between “myself” and reality “out there.” The abject is definitely external to the subject, but it is also more radically external to the very space within which the subject can distinguish itself from reality “out there.” Maybe Lacan’s neologism “extimate” can be applied here: the abject is so thoroughly internal to the subject that this very over-intimacy makes it external, uncanny, inadmissible. For this reason, the status of the abject with regard to the pleasure principle is profoundly ambiguous: it is repulsive, provoking horror and disgust, but at the same time exerting an irresistible fascination and attracting our gaze to its very horror: “One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not its submissive and willing ones.”1 Such a mixture of horror and pleasure points towards a domain beyond the pleasure principle, the domain of jouissance: “One does not know it, one does not desire it, one enjoys it [on en jouit], violently and painfully. A passion” .​

Is the abject, then, close to what Lacan calls objet petit a, the “indivisible remainder” of the process of symbolic representation that functions as the always-already lost object-cause of desire? Objet petit a as the object-cause of desire is, in its very excessive nature, an immanent part of the symbolic process, the spectral/eluding embodiment of lack that motivates desire sustained by the (symbolic) Law. In contrast to objet a, which functions within the order of meaning as its constitutive blind spot or stain, the abject “is radically excluded [from the space of symbolic community] and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (: “Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” . The experience of abjection thus comes before the big distinctions between culture and nature, inside and outside, consciousness and the unconscious, repression and the repressed, etc. Abjection stands not for immersion into nature, the “primordial Mother,” but for the very violent process of differentiation; it is the “vanishing mediator” between nature and culture, a “culture in becoming” that disappears from view once the subject dwells within culture. The abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order; what does not respect borders, positions, rules,” but not in the sense of the flow of nature undermining all cultural distinctions; it renders palpable the “fragility of the law,” including the laws of nature, which is why, when a culture endeavors to stabilize itself, it does so by referring to the laws (regular rhythms) of nature (day and night, regular movement of stars and sun, etc.) The encounter with the abject arouses fear, not so much fear of a particular actual object (snakes, spiders, height, etc.), but a much more basic fear of the breakdown of what separates us from external reality: what we fear in an open wound or a dead body is not its ugliness but the blurring of the line between inside and outside.​

The underlying conceptual matrix of the notion of the abject is that of a dangerous ground: the abject points towards a domain that is the source of our life-intensity—we draw our energy out of it, but we have to keep it at the right distance. If we exclude it, we lose our vitality, but if we get too close to it, we are swallowed by the self-destructive vortex of madness—this is why abjection does not step out of the Symbolic but plays with it from within: “The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or law, but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts, uses them, and takes advantage of them, the better to deny them”.​

This abjectal excess can also appear in the guise of an “indivisible remainder” of the Real that resists the process of idealization/symbolization—in this sense Kristeva mentions the pagan opponents of Western monotheism who praise the notion of remainder as that which prevents the teleological closure of creation, keeping the movement forever open: “the poet of the Atharva Veda extols the defiling and regenerating remainder (uchista) as precondition for all form. ‘Upon remainder the name and the form are founded, upon remainder the world is founded. . . . Being and non-being, both are in the remainder, death, vigor’”2. The remainder is here the support of the cyclic notion of the universe: it enables the rebirth of the universe. (We find the last traces of this logic even in the Kaballah, where the evil in our universe is accounted for as the remainder of the previous universes created and then annihilated by God, since he was dissatisfied with the result of his creation—remainder thus grounds repeated creation.) Hegel and Christian monotheism are here easy targets: they allegedly tend to abolish the remainder in a complete sublation of Evil in the Good, in a fulfilled teleology that redeems all previous, lower stages.3

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I want to take the risk and draw an unexpected parallel between Antigone and Bertolt Brecht’s learning plays, especially the three versions of Jasager and Die Maßnahme (The Measure Taken). In both plays, the hero freely chooses his death in accordance with the great timeless custom (der große Brauch). In reaction to the negative reviews of the first version from across the political spectrum, Brecht added two further versions of Jasager: Neinsager, in which the boy refuses to follow the old custom and, through rational argumentation, convinces the group to establish a new custom (he will not be thrown into the valley), and Jasager 2, in which the boy consents to be thrown into the valley, but only after rational argumentation—not just because the old custom must be followed. Thus, we have as the zero level a self-sacrificial gesture performed solely out of respect for the old custom, and then two versions based on rational argumentation: one that negates the custom and another that confirms it. Maßnahme is closer to Jasager 2: the killing of the young revolutionary is justified by quite convincing argumentation. However, it is clear that the zero-level self-sacrifice is not only the most traumatic act but also logically the starting point; other versions are grounded in it, and even in Maßnahme, the trauma persists. What Maßnahme adds is that it brings the self-sacrificial gesture to its self-negation: the boy must not only be killed—his disappearance itself must disappear; his face must be erased from history.

So where does Brecht himself stand with regard to this topic? His position is doubly neutral. First, he treats the three versions of Jasager as equal—more precisely, with equal indifference. One is almost tempted to claim that Brecht’s stance resembles that of Groucho Marx when he said, “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.” My principle is that the boy should accept his death in accordance with the old custom, but if you don’t like it, I have two others: the boy should reject the old custom; or the boy should accept his death, not because it is demanded by the old custom, but because it can be rationally justified. However, there is a second point that ruins this appearance of neutrality: Brecht presents the basic traumatic choice of self-sacrifice grounded only in itself (in the old custom), not as a deep, shattering insight but as a neutral fact of human life, with no reference to any ideological or political stance. Brecht totally ignores the incompatibility between the Rightist pathos of self-sacrifice for one’s nation (which, according to the Left, effectively means sacrifice for the ruling class and its continued reign), the Leftist pathos of sacrifice for the freedom of the exploited, and the liberal-centrist rational suspicion of any sacrifice not grounded in clear pragmatic logic. All he does is bring out the pure form of sacrifice in its (apparently) apolitical core—and in doing so, he does something unacceptable for all major political options. Liberals perceive him as a propagandist of extreme irrational violence; Leftists as too close to Fascism; Fascists as ignoring the patriotic greatness and meaning of sacrifice. Mladen Dolar1 succinctly formulates the focal point of Brecht’s learning plays:

“Is there a left discourse on sacrifice? Are not all the slogans of ‘teaching pieces’—sacrifice, consent, renunciation—the paramount ideological mechanisms? Wouldn’t one have to oppose them in the name of autonomy, integrity, the critique of ideology? Is Brecht’s demand for sacrifice in contradiction with debunking all renunciation as ideological? This is where Brecht’s gesture appears clearest: at the time of the fateful rise of the ideology of sacrifice, with its fatal fascination—a rise that the Left was unable to confront and prevent—he didn’t fight the central slogans of that ideology but espoused them as his own. He doesn’t take the line of critical distance or rational argument against it, but proceeds, so to speak, in a way more ideological than the ideology. The bottom line is rather: ideology demands too little sacrifice; it doesn’t impose enough renunciation. It demands giving up the part that is at odds with the existing order in order to keep it going, but one should push this further by demanding to give up also the part that supports it and is in congruence with it, in order to dismantle and transform it.”

And where is Antigone here? The contrast is obvious: while Antigone is about unconditional fidelity to the old custom of the proper ritual of burying a corpse—independently of who the dead was while alive—Brecht’s Jasager and Maßnahme are about a self-sacrificial death without a proper burial: death should leave no trace in memory or history; it should itself disappear. (One can speculate that Brecht unites here two aspects that could, in principle, be separated: the gesture of saying yes to self-sacrifice and the disappearance of disappearance itself. One can easily imagine a version of Jasager in which the boy who was thrown into the valley is posthumously celebrated as a hero who made it possible for the medicine to be brought to his town from beyond the mountains—or a comrade is liquidated and his disappearance itself disappears without his consent.) But there is nonetheless a parallel between Brecht’s three versions of Jasager plus Maßnahme and my three plus one versions of Antigone: in both cases, the variations are grounded in a basic traumatic version—Brecht’s Jasager 1, and my own fourth version of Antigone that I added on the suggestion of Alenka Zupančič.2

In her path-breaking Let Them Rot, Zupančič[[ii]] provided a reading of Antigone (Sophocles’ original version) which doesn’t fit any of my three versions.3 Antigone insists on burying Polynices and is condemned to death; Antigone convinces Creon to allow the proper burial of Polynices and the town of Thebes is ruined; the Chorus intervenes, arrests both Creon and Antigone, and puts them to death. For the new edition of my Antigone, to appear on the 10th anniversary of the first edition (in 2026), I thus decided to supplement the text with another version in which Antigone’s act is presented in its truly subversive and traumatic dimension: Antigone is not just following the rule that every human being, independently of his or her crimes, deserves a proper burial; she does it because Polynices is an exception, an incestuous monster. So, what is so traumatic about her act, and what finds an echo in Jasager 1? Here is a summary of Jasager 14:

ACT I: The chorus announces the theme of the work: It is important to learn the art of consent, since many people give consent to a wrong act and many refuse to give consent to a right act. The teacher, who keeps a school in the city, enters. He hopes to bid farewell to one of his students before he goes off on a trip over the mountains. At the house, he asks the boy why he has not been to school recently, and the boy replies that his mother has been ill. The teacher describes his trip to the mother, who suggests that he should bring the boy along, and the boy also asks to join the trip. The teacher forbids it—the journey is too long and difficult, and he should stay home. But the boy reminds him that he is visiting a great physician, who might be able to help his mother. His mother reluctantly allows the boy to make the trip. The chorus reinforces the decision.

ACT II: The chorus explains that the teacher, the boy, and three older students are on the way up the mountain, and the boy is exhausted—he confesses that he is not well. The teacher tells him it is forbidden to say such things on the journey, but the three students have overheard and demand to speak to the teacher. He admits that the boy is ill, and the students remind him of the strict old custom that whoever falls ill during the journey over the mountains must be hurled into the valley. The teacher reminds them that the sick person may also demand that the entire party turn back; the students admit this but point out that, according to the same custom, the sick person should be hurled into the valley independently of how he answers—i.e., if he agrees with it or not (this detail is often not mentioned in the summaries of the play). Then, the teacher goes to the boy and offers him the choice; after a moment of reflection, the boy decides that he knew the risks and should not impede the expedition. He asks only that the three students fill his jar with medicine and take it to his mother, and they agree. Then the three students bear him gently to the cliff and throw him over. The chorus reiterates the theme of the importance of learning consent.

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When I am asked by friends to mention a truly intense sexual experience—real or imagined—what pops into my mind is always a scene from John Huston’s Night of the Iguana (1964), based on a play by Tennessee Williams, a scene that I already interpreted in one of my books. Despite the sexual tension between Shannon (played by Richard Burton) and numerous other women in the decrepit Mexican hotel, the scene that steals the show is the chaste Hannah’s (Deborah Kerr) delicate description to Shannon of what she calls her “love experience” with an Australian underwear salesman:

HANNAH: I noticed that he became more and more...
SHANNON: What?
HANNAH: Well... agitated... as the afterglow of the sunset faded out on the water. Well, finally, eventually, he leaned towards me... we were vis-a-vis in the sampan... and he looked intensely, passionately into my eyes. And he said to me: “Miss Jelkes? Will you do me a favour? Will you do something for me?” “What?” said I. “Well,” said he, “if I turn my back, if I look the other way, will you take off some piece of your clothes and let me hold it, just hold it?”
SHANNON: Fantastic!
HANNAH: Then he said, “It will just take a few seconds.”
“Just a few seconds for what?” I asked him. He didn't say for what, but...
SHANNON: His satisfaction?
HANNAH: Yes.
SHANNON: What did you do—in a situation like that?
HANNAH: I... gratified his request, I did! And he kept his promise. He did keep his back turned till I said ready and threw him... the part of my clothes.
SHANNON: What did he do with it?
HANNAH: He didn't move, except to seize the article he'd requested. I looked the other way while his satisfaction took place.1

We should note details in this story: the event was an intense experience (a “love experience”) also for Hannah, who didn't know the salesman closely. This is how sexuality works: a rather ridiculous scene in which there is no physical contact can be experienced in a much more intense way than even the most hardcore bodily interaction—what sexualizes bodily movements is their fantasmatic context, and this fantasmatic context that regulates my sexual life is something that has to be learned, constructed through hard work.

When one talks about sexual education, my first association is, of course, the episode from Monty Python's Meaning of Life in which a teacher examines his pupils on how to arouse the vagina. Caught in their ignorance, the embarrassed pupils avoid his gaze and stammer half-articulated answers, while the teacher reprimands them severely for not practicing the subject at home. With his wife's assistance, he then demonstrates the penetration of penis into vagina; bored by the subject, one of the schoolboys casts a furtive glance through the window, and the teacher asks him sarcastically: "Would you be kind enough to tell us what is so attractive out there in the courtyard?"... This scene is uncanny because it exhibits, in broad daylight, the way sexual enjoyment is sustained by a superego imperative: it doesn’t come spontaneously, it is a duty to be learned, and this is why sexual education is needed, especially for adults. What they have to learn is not the technique of the act, but what to fantasize while they are doing it. Each couple has to invent their own specific formula, as did Hannah and the anonymous underwear salesman in Huston’s film. And is cyberspace, in which an infinite amount of (mostly anonymous) sexual fantasies circulates, not the best educational instrument one can imagine? One just has to surf it and make a choice... However, I think that the level at which Hannah’s and the salesman’s brief interaction occurs is something that gets lost in the digitalization of sex—there, sex is just sex in all its vulgar brutality. Instead of the banality of evil, we get the banality of sex.

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Critics of Hamlet from Goethe onwards perceive Hamlet as a modern intellectual who, instead of passing directly to (a required) act, endlessly procrastinates and ponders the pro et contra. Hamlet himself, however, makes it clear repeatedly why he postpones his act: it is not simply that Claudius has committed a sin and now, to restore balance to the kingdom, the sin must be punished. Hamlet's father returns as a ghost because he was murdered by Claudius "in the blossoms of my sin":

"I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away."

The "foul crimes" mentioned here are the father's own crimes, and the retributive justice demanded by the ghost is here a very strange one: since I was murdered in the blossoms of my sin, without finding peace in confessing my sins to God, Claudius should be killed in the same way, in the blossoms of his sin. That's why, later in the play, when Hamlet observes Claudius in a moment of spiritual reflection, fully aware of his sins, he doesn't kill him although he could have done it easily: if he were to do it at that moment, Claudius would not be condemned to wander around as a ghost; he would rejoin God instantly. Recall the title of Kurosawa's version of Hamlet from 1962, set in contemporary Japan: "The Bad Sleep Well" – Shakespeare's Claudius certainly doesn't sleep well – which means that, with the performance of the play within the play, Hamlet is not just trying to prove Claudius's guilt; he also presumes that Claudius is not a thoroughly bad person but is haunted by his conscience.

As Lacan explains, this oscillation is grounded in the fact that Hamlet is never able to live in his own time: the "time out of joint" is ultimately his own time; he is "constantly suspended in the time of the Other, throughout the entire story until the very end," never able to define the coordinates of his own time. It is only towards the end of the play, when he refers to himself as "Hamlet the Dane," that he fully assumes his symbolic identity and is thus able to act. (Incidentally, one should note that when Hamlet first encounters his father's ghost, he says: "I'll call thee 'Hamlet,' 'King,' 'Father,' 'Royal Dane'" – exactly the same terms in which he refers to himself at the play's end when he subjects himself to the name-of-the-Father.) But even as "Hamlet the Dane" he fails in his act:

"When he [Hamlet] does it [act], it is too late; his act no longer means anything, it no longer has its ethical edge. The murder of Claudius is an afterthought, which Hamlet, as Lacan said, can only accomplish when he is dying, when he will not have to bear responsibility for his act. Even more important is the fact that Hamlet acts when he learns that the wretched Claudius is responsible for Hamlet's impending death. Hamlet can avenge himself because he is an egoist to the end, especially at the end. With his dying breath, he asks Horatio to tell his story. [...] Hamlet is clearly a failure—he cannot act on his desire; he can only perform the act he is obliged to perform when it is no longer his desire—and his success is to convince the audience that it is no failure at all, that we can still love him."

The final duel is effectively weird: in it, Hamlet fights Laertes, not Claudius, who even supports him, and there is no real hate between Hamlet and Laertes - just prior to their deaths they are even reconciled. Hamlet kills Claudius later, not in a fair duel but when he is already dying of poison. So Hamlet is not only not a good hero who tragically fails; to put it in naïve moral terms, he is a really bad guy – just recall how he treats Ophelia, whom he associates weirdly with his mother. What really bothers him is neither Claudius's crime nor his mother's guilt but the enigma of her desire – what does she want?

Lacan is right again: Hamlet's problem is not his desire for his mother (incest) but the desire OF his mother, the "Che vuoi?" (what does the Other want from me?) at its purest, which resists getting caught in a fantasy. In Hamlet's perception, Gertrude not just wants to have sex with Claudius; she doesn't choose Claudius against Hamlet's father, her choice is not the one between a noble husband and evil Claudius – in a kind of general voraciousness, it doesn't matter who it is, she craves enjoyment, or, as Lacan renders her stance: "I'm the kind of woman who needs to be getting it all the time, I'm a true genital personality; I know nothing of mourning." The enigma is thus the one of the (m)Other's desire to which Hamlet is enslaved (more precisely, not so much desire as gluttony), i.e., which he is not able to exchange-substitute for the Name-of-the-Father. There is a vulgar Serbian phrase "What for a prick is fucking you?" ("Koji kurac te jebe?") which perhaps best encapsulates Hamlet's question to Gertrude – not concretely which penis is penetrating her (now it is obviously Claudius's) but a more general disoriented gluttony. One should go to the end here: ultimately it is not Claudius's murder of the old Hamlet that throws time out of joint; it is his mother's formless desire that does it. But how do we pass here to Ophelia? We shouldn't be surprised that this focus on Gertrude and Ophelia in Lacan's reading of Hamlet enrages many feminist critics – here is a typical case:

"When Lacan in Seminar VI makes the following statement 'to be or not to be...the phallus,' this sounds like an obscene gesture, especially for people not already deeply in love with psychoanalysis. My first gut reaction was also a kind of violent refusal, please, come on... It sounds like the typical libidinal reductionism, now simply without any tact for the greatest work of literature and its most famous phrase. We can almost hear the typical literary critics: 'Couldn't he at least leave Hamlet alone...?'"

As a card-carrying Lacanian, I want to add some qualifications here. Lacan is one of the few interpreters of Hamlet for whom the true focus of the play is neither revenge for his father's murder nor the desire of his mother but Ophelia herself. So why is Ophelia phallus? One should note that Ophelia does not have a phallus, she is phallus, plus Lacan doesn't yet use the term "phallus" in his later fully elaborated sense (the signifier of castration) but in an almost opposite sense (Ophelia as a bearer of all sins, as a generator of new and new sinful lives). Plus – a crucial detail – this characterization is not an "objective" description of Ophelia, it is clearly presented as Hamlet's depreciating fantasy of Ophelia, i.e., it is the way Ophelia appears to Hamlet after he learns of his father's murder by Claudius. (After Ophelia dies, she changes into an idealized love object.)

So what is the difference between Gertrude and Ophelia in terms of libidinal economy? For Hamlet, Gertrude is a Thing and Ophelia objet a – although in his Seminar VI where he deals with Hamlet he had not yet fully elaborated either his classic notion of phallic signifier as the signifier of castration or his notion of objet a as the object-cause of desire which gives body to a lack. (One should also note that, after Ophelia's death, Gertrude no longer traumatizes Hamlet; he is indifferent towards her.) Lacan sometimes even almost confuses objet a and phallus, identifying Ophelia with both. Let's try to clarify this confusion by shifting attention to another detail: why does Ophelia, at a key moment in the play, start to sing? What shift in her subjective stance is signaled by her singing? Are we following here the standard feminist line? Not quite - the standard feminist reading of Ophelia was summarized by James Marinaro:

"Every great theory is founded on a problem it cannot solve. For psychoanalytic criticism, that problem is Ophelia. [...] While psychoanalytic reading objectifies all of Hamlet's supporting characters, Ophelia is not even allowed to be an object in her own right. Insistently demoted to a secondary or surrogate object, Ophelia becomes mysteriously superfluous, like a symptom unconnected from its cause. Ophelia is the foundational problem, the nagging flaw in psychoanalytic criticism's cornerstone. The play becomes very different if Ophelia is decoupled from the Queen and read as an independent and structurally central character, as a primary object of desire, and even as a desiring subject in her own right."

This reading was best presented by Elaine Showalter, for whom Ophelia is "an absence, a voice with no sense and therefore no selfhood. When Ophelia first appears on-stage, her speech is purely reactive; she replies to questioning. Ophelia is more than a blank canvas; but her selfhood is imperiled by the insistence of others on ignoring, defining or denying her speech. If her speech is denied (Gertrude: 'I will not speak with her!' IV.v.1) or dismissed as unintelligible ('her speech is nothing' IV.v.7) then she lies dangerously open to interpretation by her audience, both on-stage and off." So the very fact that she remains enigmatic and solicits interpretation is held against the play – interpretation is implicitly identified with (male) domination.

Following this line, some feminist critics see Ophelia's descent into madness as a form of empowerment, with Ophelia at last finding her own authentic voice. Maurice Charney and Hanna Charney (1977) argue that "her madness... enables her to assert her being; she is no longer forced to keep silent and play the dutiful daughter." Rutter also notes how Ophelia's journey mirrors that of Hamlet: Ophelia "performs... the psychic journey of Prince Hamlet and the big themes of the play. Hamlet is thinking about madness; Ophelia plays it for real.... Hamlet toys with the idea of suicide; ...Ophelia commits suicide." Ophelia is bullied and betrayed by every person in the play: her father and brother, Claudius, and Hamlet. Along these lines, Simonetta Falchi proposes a Jungian reading of "the central function ascribed to Ophelia's madness in Heiner Müller's destruction and reconstruction of Shakespeare's Hamlet":

"The new Ophelia ('the one the river didn't keep') refuses Yorick's grave to accept his role as the Fool 'who' – to say it with the words of Jungian analyst W. Willeford – 'violate[s] the human image and who come[s] to a modus vivendi with society by making a show of that violation.' Consequently, Ophelia will 'demolish the instruments of [her] captivity' and 'go out on to the streets, dressed in blood.' Society's attempt to inhibit her irrational power (secluding her in a mental hospital) will fail: Ophelia/the Fool will disown her old Self to turn into Elektra – mythical heroine of logic and revenge – thus obtaining the power to merge extremes ('long live [...] death') and to silently communicate with everyone's archetypal side through images. From the analysis of the text, supported by categories from depth psychology, I demonstrate that Hamletmaschine promotes Ophelia's madness as a revolutionary gesture against the logic of oppression: a means to trigger chaos on stage in order to generate a new cosmos in the audience's world of conventions.

With all my admiration for Heiner Müller, I think he totally misses the point here. Ophelia's madness is not an act of empowerment and resistance, of finding her own voice – on the contrary, at that moment even her unconscious is ruined and turns chaotic, identifying her father and Hamlet. When Ophelia sings in madness, she is a living dead, not as a ghost or vampire but as biologically alive with a disintegrated psyche, which is why after her death she will definitely not be returning as a ghost. After Ophelia dies,

"Hamlet's love, because completed, can be considered perfect. And again, as Hamlet moves physically onstage toward Ophelia's body, his language identifies him with his father's spirit: 'This is I, / Hamlet the Dane', using his spectral father's royal title."

So, again, why is Ophelia singing? We have to introduce here sexual difference. In an opera, man's aria functions as a call to the big Other to break the law, to do something out of joint. Woman sings as a sign of madness, when she is lost, when her self is disintegrating, when she is unable to subjectively endure contradiction. All madness arias in operas are feminine, the most famous being the one from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Why was the story of Orpheus THE opera topic in the first century of its history, when there are recorded almost one hundred versions of it? The figure of Orpheus asking Gods to bring him back his Eurydice stands for an intersubjective constellation which provides, as it were, the elementary matrix of the opera, more precisely, of the operatic aria: the relationship of the subject (in both senses of the term: autonomous agent as well as the subject of legal power) to his Master (Divinity, King, or the Lady of the courtly love) is revealed through the hero's song (the counterpoint to the collectivity embodied in the chorus), which is basically a supplication addressed to the Master, a call to him to show mercy, to make an exception, or otherwise forgive the hero his trespass. The first, rudimentary form of subjectivity is this voice of the subject beseeching the Master to suspend, for a brief moment, his own Law. A dramatic tension in subjectivity arises from the ambiguity between power and impotence that pertains to the gesture of grace by means of which the Master answers the subject's entreaty. As to the official ideology, grace expresses the Master's supreme power, the power to rise above one's own law: only a really powerful Master can afford to distribute mercy. There is nothing like this in a typical feminine aria: no appeal to a master for mercy, just joy or despair about unfortunate love which can occasionally lapse into madness.

Does Ophelia really access her desire in her madness, does she formulate what she wants? Is she a hysteric who wants a master? Does she want to get married? Obey her father who blocks this? I think she is just an average young woman, deeply "normal" with regard to her social position: she has sexual desires but wants to get married to satisfy them, she is subordinated to her father but at the same time disturbed by how he manipulates her, and after her father's death she breaks down in madness because she no longer can cope with all the pressures on her.

Yes, Ophelia is "mysteriously superfluous" - it is easy to imagine Hamlet without Ophelia as a perfectly consistent shorter play: a father-ghost appears to Hamlet ordering him to revenge his death; to test Claudius's conscience, Hamlet uses the group of actors who stage the scene of murder in front of Claudius who loses nerves; Hamlet visits his mother and has the big confrontation with her; Claudius orders Hamlet observed and Hamlet stabs Polonius to death behind a curtain, which provokes Laertes, Polonius's son, to challenge Hamlet to a duel, and then we get the same denouement as in Shakespeare's Hamlet… no place for Ophelia here. (Ophelia is present in other earlier versions of the story, reduced to a marginal role.)

But the opposite also doesn't work: recall Ophelia (2018, directed by Claire McCarthy and based on the novel by Lisa Klein) which retells the story of Hamlet from Ophelia's perspective. It introduces another person, the healer Mechtild who lives alone deep in the forest. Ophelia learns that Mechtild is not only Gertrude's twin sister but also Claudius's former lover - he ruined her by accusing her of witchcraft when she miscarried their son, but she escapes persecution by faking her own death with a special poison. A further change: Hamlet and Ophelia secretly marry, and she is pregnant with his child. Ophelia escapes the castle but returns just before the final duel, and Hamlet is overjoyed to see his beloved alive and well. Ophelia pleads with him to leave with her, but he is still consumed by vengeance, though promises to follow her to the convent. Ophelia sadly bids him goodbye and leaves Elsinore for good. Both Hamlet and Laertes are killed, wounded by the poisoned sword. Enraged and grief-stricken, Gertrude grabs Hamlet's sword and kills Claudius, just as the Norwegians storm the castle, accompanied by Mechtild who poisons herself with Claudius' venom and dies in her sister's arms. The film closes with Ophelia living peacefully in exile with her daughter, fathered by Hamlet.

This movie is a noble attempt to give Ophelia full presence and to assert her as an active agent, telling the story from her standpoint. However, all the despair and even oppression of women takes a secondary place; the situation is normalized in a misguided feminist way. What gets lost is the fact that "Ophelia is very obviously one of the most fascinating creations which has been proposed to human imagination. Something which we can call the drama of the feminine object, the drama of desire."

What Hamlet "brings into play before the very eyes of Ophelia is all the possibilities of degradation, of variation, of corruption, which are linked to the evolution of a woman's very life insofar as she allows herself to be drawn into all the actions which little by little make a mother of her. It is in the name of this that Hamlet rejects Ophelia in a fashion that appears in the play extremely sarcastic and extremely cruel."

When Laertes jumps into the grave to embrace the dead Ophelia one last time, "Hamlet, literally, not only cannot tolerate this manifestation towards a girl whom, as you know, he had very badly mistreated up to then, but he precipitates himself after Laertes after having given a great roar, a war cry." When conflict with Laertes explodes, "Hamlet the Dane" assumes his desire; procrastination is over. Although after Ophelia's death Hamlet is ready to enact the ghost's order, "the father's ghost has a rather strange injunction. First, he says, 'avenge me,' and Hamlet says he is ready to do so. Then the father adds a strange surplus, namely that whatever Hamlet does, he should not concern himself with his mother, and that she should be left alone with her own repulsive desire. This strikes Hamlet as rather odd. Let's imagine that old Hamlet (the ghost) had not given him this surplus. If so, we would just have a rather classical revenge tragedy."

The same reversal occurs towards the end of Hamlet's long conversation with his mother in Act III, in the course of which Hamlet addresses his mother with a demand which is obviously made "in the name of something which is the order not simply of the law, but of dignity, and which is delivered with a force, a vigor, even a cruelty, of which the least one can say is that it causes some embarrassment." At this very point, the father's ghost appears again with an ambiguous message: yes, put pressure on your mother, but not too much. This is followed by Hamlet's "sudden collapse which makes him say: And then after all, now that I have said all that to you, do whatever you want" – in short, go on as usual.

Furthermore, one has to raise an obvious question regarding the father-ghost's first appearance to Hamlet: how did the ghost-father know how he was murdered (by Claudius who poured poison in his ear) if he was deeply asleep while it happened? He could have learned this only in the Beyond, after his death. We are dealing here with an impossible knowledge which occupies the place of the Other of the Other.

Regarding Ophelia, Lacan makes a crucial remark: "No one has ever yet been able to declare if she is innocence itself, who speaks about or who alludes to her most carnal movements with the simplicity of a purity which does not know modesty, or if on the contrary she is a shameless hussy who is ready for anything. Hamlet behaves towards her with quite exceptional cruelty, which is embarrassing, which people describe as painful, and which makes a victim of her; on the other hand, one senses that she is not at all, and far from being, the disincarnated or uncarnal creature of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings."

It is of no real interest whether Ophelia was "really" a virgin or not. Hamlet twice sends her to a nunnery, a word which in Elizabethan times designated a secluded place for nuns (monastery); however, in everyday language, it also functioned as an ironic term for a whorehouse, and this ambiguity perfectly fits Hamlet's figure of Ophelia as both whore and asexual saint.

"If Hamlet is sexually indifferent, his disgust for sexuality—and contempt for women who display it—seems like a logical (if unforgivable) outlet of that frustration. Hamlet fears that his sexual indifference makes him worthless, so he cruelly punishes Gertrude and Ophelia for their lack of indifference." More precisely, in Hamlet's eyes, Ophelia stands for the vision of "life ready to blossom, and of life which carries all lives." It is thus that Hamlet qualifies it, situates it, in order to reject it: 'you will be the mother of sinners'" – Girl as Phallus, but in the standard pre-Lacanian sense of phallus. Perhaps she is a little bit like Bobby Peru in Lynch's Wild at Heart. How can such an ugly, properly repulsive figure like Bobby Peru stir up Laura Dern's fantasy? We touch here the motif of the ugly: Bobby Peru is ugly and repulsive insofar as he embodies the dream of the non-castrated phallic vitality in all its power - his whole body evokes a gigantic phallus, with his head the head of a penis... Even his final moments bear witness to a kind of raw energy which ignores the threat of death: after the bank robbery goes wrong, he blows off his own head not in despair, but with merry laughter... (although we should recall here Groucho Marx's saying that the only real laughter comes from despair).

After seeing the Ghost, Hamlet stumbles upon Ophelia and vacillates in his relation to her – more precisely, his fantasy vacillates because she now appears to him as a Bobby-Peru-like monstrosity:

"It is linked to this sort of disequilibrium which is produced in the fantasy, and insofar as the fantasy, breaking through the limits which are first of all assigned to it, is decomposed."

Ophelia becomes a symbol of the rejection of desire as such by Hamlet, an object of disgust at sexuality: Ophelia "is no longer treated as she should be, as a woman. She becomes for him the bearer of children and of every sin, the one who is designated to engender sinners, and the one who is designated afterwards as having to succumb to all sorts of calumnies."

She becomes the pure and simple support of a life which in its essence is condemned by Hamlet. "Ophelia is completely dissolved qua love-object. 'I did love you once,' says Hamlet, and a little bit later: 'I never loved you.'" Here Hamlet undergoes the disintegration of the fantasy which sustained his desire – the space of fantasy is still here, but its elements fall apart and block his capacity to desire. Once Ophelia dies, she is restored to a full object - but not an object of sexual love or hatred but as an idealized point of reference – as they say in Latin, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum dicendum est, "Of the dead nothing but good is to be said."

The subtle paradox is that, after Hamlet kills Ophelia's father, her fantasy also disintegrates and she regresses into madness, but a madness different from Hamlet's. Hamlet acts mad because he knows; Ophelia is really mad because she doesn't know. In her last appearance after her father's death, Ophelia sings – again, how are we to interpret her singing? Here are a couple of passages which advocate the standard anti-patriarchal feminist reading:

"Ophelia's next appearance, after her father's death, she has gone mad, due to what the other characters interpret as grief for her father. She talks in riddles and rhymes, and sings some 'mad' and bawdy songs about death and a maiden losing her virginity." / "Ophelia laments about patriarchal society and the way she had been controlled and used. In her first song, Ophelia addresses her mourning and a recent loss, singing, 'He is dead and gone, lady, / He is dead and gone, / At his head a grass-green turf, / At his heels a stone.'" "She's a fallen character, she gave herself to Hamlet and thus lost her standing. When Hamlet kills her father, insanity and death are the only options left to her as a character in those times."

Ophelia was brutally manipulated and used by three men around her: Hamlet, Polonius, and Claudius (maybe also by Gertrude and Laertes). At the level of humiliation, Hamlet is the worst, and at the level of manipulation, the primacy goes to Polonius: "A daughter helping her father deceive her lover rather than the other way around is a shocking perversion of theatrical convention. It simply is not done." Was Ophelia's death a suicide or not? This is not a key point – the most probable version is that she did not intend to kill herself, but she put herself into a dangerous situation, passively exposing herself to the possibility of drowning, i.e., her stance was something like "if it has to happen, let it happen..."

It is a commonplace shared by many commentators to claim that the famous Millais's Pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia singing just before drowning in a stream is false, presenting a very traumatic event as a moment of sublime beauty – even Lacan expresses his dissatisfaction with the painting. But I think there is much more in Pre-Raphaelites than meets the eye: their work deserves a closer look (which, in this case, is meant literally). We should remember that Millais was working on his Ophelia at the same time that his friend William Holman Hunt was finishing his Hireling Shepherd. Hunt is usually dismissed as the first Pre-Raphaelite to sell out to the establishment, becoming a well-paid producer of sweetish religious paintings (The Triumph of the Innocents, etc.). However, a closer look unmistakably confronts us with an uncanny, deeply disturbing dimension of his work; his paintings produce a kind of uneasiness or indeterminate feeling that, in spite of their idyllic and elevated "official" content, there is something amiss. "Hireling Shepherd" appears as a simple pastoral idyll depicting a shepherd engaged in seducing a country girl, and for that reason neglecting to care for a flock of sheep (an obvious allegory of the Church neglecting its lambs). The longer we observe the painting, the more we become aware of a great number of details that bear witness to Hunt's intense relationship to enjoyment, to life-substance, i.e., to his disgust at sexuality. The shepherd is muscular, dull, crude, and rudely voluptuous; the cunning gaze of the girl indicates a sly, vulgarly manipulative exploitation of one's own sexual attraction; the all-too-vivacious reds and greens mark the entire painting with a repulsive tone, as if we were dealing with turgid, overripe, putrid nature. The sexuality radiated by the painting is damp, "unwholesome," and permeated with the decay of death. Perhaps this is how we should also de-sublimate the figure of Ophelia.

Ophelia's singing is an exception - not even a full song, just some fragments intercepted by talk. What she says and sings is not anything deep; what is important is the fact of singing, which signals her total mental breakdown. When she sings, she definitely does not regain power and speak for herself: her singing bears witness to a total subjective disintegration; it is just confused babbling, a mixture of ideas and wishes. If, before her fall into madness, she was a victim of multiple interpellations which imposed conflicting subjective identities, she is now a subject without a symbolic identity provided by some form of big Other. In this sense, she is now more than just a victim of feminine oppression: she is deprived of the very X of subjectivity which could be experienced as a victim of oppression. All forms of authority that exerted pressure on her are now cancelled, not in the sense of liberation but in a much more terrifying sense of her Self transformed into a selfless space in which confused phantasmagorias circulate – something that Hegel, following the German mystic tradition, described in the following often-quoted passage:

"The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity - an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him - or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here - pure self - in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head - there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye - into a night that becomes awful."

One can argue that this experience of the "night of the world" is the moment of madness that precedes reason: reason is "magic power that converts the negative into being." This is what neither Ophelia nor Hamlet is able to do – yes, he tarries (procrastinates), but he is not able to convert the negative into being. Even when he assumes his symbolic identity (as "Hamlet, the Dane"), he overtakes himself and gets caught in a wrong duel (with Laertes, not with Claudius).

And what about Ophelia? Paradoxically, although she is much more disintegrated than Hamlet, practically selfless in her madness, I think she is closer to the act of liberation called by Lacan "traversing the fantasy." To see this, it is crucial to distinguish between disintegration of fantasy and traversing fantasy. The disintegration of fantasy incapacitates our ability to desire, and in Hamlet this happens in two ways: either as a confused mixture of fragments in which a selfless subject floats (Ophelia) or as an unbearable self-sabotaging tension (Hamlet). The reason is that Hamlet remains in the Oedipal domain: as we have already seen, the ghost-father emphasizes in his injunction to revenge his death that this revenge does not encompass Gertrude - mother remains untouchable.

Traversing fantasy has nothing whatsoever to do with the naïve idea of getting rid of fantasies and gaining direct access to reality the way it is: in traversing the fantasy, we are even more in its space; we traverse it when we over-identify with it in the sense of explicitly formulating it, bringing it out. This is the key point missed by Leftist critics of Rammstein's music like Thomas Blaser:

"The German metal band Rammstein's video for 'Ausländer' wants it both ways: a critique of colonialism and sex tourism, but right-wing neo-Nazis can also enjoy the fascist iconography [...] even though the meaning is ironic. In a mass-consumer democracy, the audience makes their own interpretations. Far-right neo-Nazis are reportedly equally attracted to the martial, neo-fascist mise-en-scène as are those who 'simply' enjoy the spectacle. Real fascists can ignore the ironic subtlety of the show and lyrics yet indulge in the spectacle that celebrates fascist aesthetics, including black people as happy, naïve savages. In this role as spectators of black ridicule, mainstream audiences join neo-Nazi, alt-right extremists."

The mistake of this reading is obvious: when Rammstein stage totalitarian rituals, the viewer doesn't need to detect any "ironic subtlety": these rituals are "extraneated" in their very ridiculous over-presence, in the very disgusting/disturbing excess of enjoyment. As for the obvious fact that in the Auslander video clip, blacks are portrayed in the mode of white racist clichés: of course, because Auslander is not about real Blacks but about Blacks as part of White racist fantasies – the point is to ruin these fantasies from within, displaying their disgusting ridiculousness.

A couple of decades ago in Carinthia (Kärnten), Austria's southern province which borders Slovenia, German nationalists organized a campaign against the alleged Slovene "threat" under the motto "Kärnten bleibt deutsch!" Austrian Leftists found a perfect answer. Instead of rational counter-argumentation, they printed paid advertisements in the main newspapers with obscene, disgusting-sounding variations of the nationalists' motto: "Kärnten deibt bleutsch! Kärnten leibt beutsch! Kärnten beibt dleutsch!" Isn't this procedure worthy of the obscene, "anal," meaningless speech spoken by Hynkel, the Hitler figure in Chaplin's The Great Dictator?

This is what Rammstein does to totalitarian ideology: it de-semanticizes it and brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality. Does Rammstein's music not perfectly exemplify the distinction between sense and presence, the tension in a work of art between the hermeneutic dimension and the dimension of presence "this side of hermeneutics," a dimension which Lacan indicated by the term sinthom (formula-knot of jouissance) as opposed to symptom (bearer of meaning)? The identification with Rammstein is a direct over-identification with sinthoms which undermines ideological identification. We should not fear this direct over-identification – what we should fear is the articulation of this chaotic field of energy into a (Fascist) universe of meaning. No wonder Rammstein's music is violent, materially present, invading, and intrusive with its strong volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it.

Rammstein thus de-semanticizes totalitarian ideology: it brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality. No wonder Rammstein's music is violent, materially present, invading, and intrusive with its strong volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it. In short, Rammstein liberates Nazi sinthoms from their Nazi articulation: they are offered to be enjoyed in their pre-ideological status of "knots" of libidinal investment. So when, while watching a Rammstein video clip depicting a blonde girl in a cage and dark uniforms evoking Nordic warriors, some Leftist liberals fear that the uneducated public will miss the irony (if there is any) and directly identify with the proto-Fascist sensibility displayed here, one should counter it with the good old motto: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

This brings us to Lacan: it is interesting to note which example of traversing the fantasy Lacan elaborates in more detail. According to him, none other than Marquis de Sade gave us a traversal of the fantasy:

"He did not present this fantasy in his work, of course. Basically, in his work, he comments on his fantasy, he puts it on the stage, he multiplies it, and at the same time he gives us a schema. 'It is in his life,' Lacan said, 'that Sade passed beyond his fantasy'; he adds 'that is what permits him to give us a reading of his fantasy in his work,' which is coherent with his idea that Sade, definitively, was not the dupe of his fantasy. He was not the dupe of his fantasy and he tried very little to literally realize his fantasy. We do not mean, then, that he dedicated himself to realizing his fantasy. On the contrary, his life obeys a comparable structure, but he himself is in another place than his fantasy."

In contrast to Sade (and Rammstein), when Hamlet refers to himself as "Hamlet, the Dane," he again assumes his fantasy, falls back into it, or, as Lacan put it, he becomes again the dupe of his fantasy. Another detail is worth noting here: Hamlet acts not just when he learns that Ophelia is dead but at a more precise moment: when he sees that her brother Laertes overtakes him in mourning and jumps into her grave to embrace her – Hamlet jumps after him and starts a fight. Is this not a clear case of imaginary competition sustained by envious rage? Ophelia, on the contrary, is in her mad babble and singing very close to traversing her fantasy by way of staging her sinthoms – all she needed to get there would have been just a barely perceptible act of subjectively assuming the flow of her sinthoms.

Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero, Cambridge: Harvard UP 1983, p. 153-4.

Hamlet and the invention of the inhuman | by Psychotic's guide to memes | Medium.

See Ophelia's Desire (Youtube).

See Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilites of Feminist Criticism,” in Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, edited by Susanne L Wolford, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's 1994.

Microsoft Word - HOBBS OPHELIA.doc.

“Maddening Endurance”1 Post-modern Images of Ophelia’s Madness.

THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-VI_desir_et_interp-.pdf. All non-attributed quotes that follow are from this source.

Resumed from Ophelia (2018 film) - Wikipedia.

Hamlet Was a Bro Who Didn’t Even Like Sex ‹ Literary Hub.

See Michel Chion, David Lynch, London: BFI 1995.

G.W.F. Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie," in Fruehe politische Systeme, Frankfurt: Ullstein 1974, p. 204; translation quoted from Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel's Recollection, Albany: Suny Press 1985, pp. 7-8.

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1966, p. 19.

Quoted from Is Rammstein racist? (africasacountry.com).

From Symptom to Fantasy and Back Jacques-Alain Miller.

When, in his famous essay on Hamlet, T.S. Eliot dismissed it as a failed play much inferior to Romeo and Juliet, lacking basic consistency, he was right for the wrong reason (to paraphrase his own famous line from Murder in the Cathedral): true, Hamlet is inconsistent, lacking basic dramatic unity, but its true achievement resides in this inconsistency itself[1]. It is this very inconsistency which compels almost all philosophers to write something – a brief comment, at least – on Hamlet.

Eliot correctly notes that in the earlier versions of the Hamlet myth, Hamlet uses his perceived madness as a guise to escape suspicion, while in Shakespeare's version, his madness is meant to arouse the king's suspicion rather than avoid it[1]. However, what out-of-joint state does Hamlet react to? What does a true out-of-joint state amount to, at whichever level it takes place? The shortest formal definition is: it doesn't merely change local events within a situation; it changes the coordinates of the situation itself.

Let me paraphrase here an old joke from the GDR: Putin, Xi, and Trump meet God, and each is allowed to ask him a question. Putin begins: "Tell me what will happen to Russia in the next decades?" God answers: "Russia will gradually become a colony of China." Putin turns around and starts to cry. Xi asks the same question: "And what will happen to China in the next decades?" God answers: "The Chinese economic miracle will be over; it will have to return to a hard-line dictatorship to survive while asking Taiwan for help." Xi turns around and starts to cry. Finally, Trump asks: "And what will be the fate of the US after I take over again?" God turns around and starts to cry... This is true change, when God himself (who stands here for the big Other, the neutral frame that encompasses the situation) breaks down.

In this case, it is, of course, a catastrophic change: our basic coordinates for measuring the quality of public life are suspended and will have to be rethought. So, back to Hamlet, what is the catastrophic change that sets the plot in motion? The first reply is that it is not Claudius's murder of the old Hamlet that throws time out of joint; it is the mother's formless desire that does it.

"Hamlet's mother's desire is something that threatens the world as such. It is excessive (it defies the natural order; she has an impossible desire) – but the true libidinal stakes of Hamlet are shown in that her desire is claustrophobic for him; it 'stains' the world as such and makes the world a ruin. It is not simply that Hamlet's mother has a desire that is a problem for Hamlet, but the world outside is indifferent. It is precisely an indication of Hamlet's 'private world' (still under the sway of mother's desire) that the rest of the world can only seem tainted by the private (if my mother has an obscene desire, the world as such must be out of joint)."

A more attentive reading makes it clear that we should go even a step further – as Lacan pointed out, the central enigma of the play is the figure of Ophelia. But we will not follow this path here and rather begin with a popular pseudo-scientific myth about Hamlet, that of the "Hamlet's mill." The central claim of Hamlet's Mill, while problematic with regard to facts, turns around the usual relationship between myths and science: first, there are myths, and through the progress of human knowledge, they are gradually replaced by scientific knowledge. Hamlet's Mill, on the contrary, postulates an original scientific insight (precession) which was then translated into multiple mythic narratives about complications in a royal lineage.

At the core, ancient myths serve as cosmic allegories, reflecting humanity's attempts to comprehend and chart the movements of celestial bodies. Different cultures, from the Inuit of the Arctic to the Egyptians along the Nile, embedded their understanding of the heavens within their mythological frameworks. These myths encapsulated critical astronomical phenomena, chiefly the precession of the equinoxes—a slow, gradual shift in the orientation of Earth's rotational axis, which significantly influences global climate and the timing of seasons over millennia. The precession of the equinoxes holds paramount significance in ancient cosmology, as its recognition indicates a highly advanced level of observational astronomy.

The ancient scholars knew that the stars do not remain fixed in the sky but shift their positions over extended periods. This knowledge was meticulously chronicled and preserved through myth. For instance, the Great Year, a concept famously associated with Plato, is a reflection of this precessional cycle, illustrating an ancient awareness of astronomical cycles spanning approximately 25,920 years, a period during which the Earth's axis completes a full rotation. In this way, myths from various cultures can be seen as different layers and facets of a unified astronomical science, each story illuminating aspects of celestial phenomena and their impact on human life. Thus, ancient myths are not only cultural artifacts but also sophisticated vessels carrying astronomical knowledge across generations. The true enigma is not if there is a deep cosmic scientific insight beneath the myths but exactly the opposite: why does this scientific insight about planets assume in its mythic appearance a very precise familial form: after a king is killed by his brother, who then marries the queen, the king's son fakes madness to gain time for revenge... As Freud repeatedly pointed out, the true secret of a dream (the unconscious desire staged in it) does not reside in the dream's thought but in the form this thought assumes.

As Lacan pointed out, Oedipus doesn't have the Oedipus complex, but Hamlet does have it fully - witness his long confrontation with his mother in the middle of the play. Both stories, Oedipus's and Hamlet's, are universal myths found from Africa and Polynesia to Nordic countries, but in Sophocles and Shakespeare, they get a different spin. In Sophocles's version, Oedipus answers the Sphinx's riddle and thereby pushes it to destroy itself – a unique "philosophical" turn of the myth. (Moreover, Oedipus's answer is strictly wrong in the sense of false philosophical universality which obfuscates the singularity of truth: the correct answer is not "man" (in general) but Oedipus himself who, as a young child, crawled on all fours because he was crippled and who, as an old blind man, had to lean on Antigone to be able to walk.)

Hamlet's myth is also universal – as we have just seen, there are even interpretations which indicate that it originally referred to precession in the circular movement of planets, i.e., to a glitch, an imbalance, in the circular movement of our cosmos itself. But in premodern versions, Hamlet's revenge simply re-establishes the harmony disturbed by the uncle's murder of the father: like in The Lion King, the son kills the uncle and takes over the throne, and time is thereby no longer out of joint but set straight again - we are firmly in the circular movement of a disturbance and its correction. In Shakespeare, however, the deadlock remains; there is no return to the lost balance. In a way that is homologous to Oedipus's wrong answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, Hamlet doesn't see that he himself is ultimately the element "out of joint" in his world, so it is quite logical that at the end, order is restored only when the dying Hamlet proclaims the new king.

Perhaps one could even risk the hypothesis that the bitter split between the two main sects within Islam, Sunni and Shia, echoes the Hamlet's mill topic. The divide originated with a dispute over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the Islamic faith he introduced. After Muhammad's death in A.D. 632, most of Muhammad's followers thought that the elite members of the Islamic community should choose his successor, while a smaller group believed only someone from Muhammad's family—namely his cousin and son-in-law, Ali—should succeed him. This group became known as the followers of Ali; in Arabic, the Shiat Ali, or simply Shia. Eventually, the Sunni majority (named for sunna, or tradition) won out and chose Muhammad's close friend Abu Bakr to become the first caliph, or leader, of the Islamic community. Ali eventually became the fourth caliph (or Imam, as Shiites call their leaders), but only after the two that preceded him had both been assassinated. After Ali himself was assassinated, in 681 his son Hussein led a group of 72 followers and family members from Mecca to Karbala (present-day Iraq) to confront the corrupt caliph Yazid of the Umayyad dynasty. A massive Sunni army waited for them, and by the end of 10 days of skirmishes, Hussein was killed and decapitated, and his head brought to Damascus as a tribute to the Sunni caliph – an act intended by the Umayyads to put the definitive end to all claims to leadership of the ummah as a matter of direct descendance from Muhammad. But it's not what happened: Hussein's martyrdom at Karbala became the central story of Shia tradition – the crime which threw the Muslim community out of joint. Shia enacted the original act which put the Muslim community out of joint, and a similar situation (an Imam being violently deposed and killed) repeats itself a couple of times in later Shia history. From today's perspective, the paradox is that although Shia are more royalist (the bloodline decides who the next leader will be), their politics is, as a rule, much more populist-revolutionary.

However, in interpreting Hamlet, we are not caught between the two extremes: the familial one (Denmark was thrown out of joint with Claudius killing the old Hamlet) and the cosmic one (the ultimate reference of the "out of joint" is the precession in the movement of planets around the Sun). There are clear hints in Hamlet that, even at the familial level, things went wrong and were thrown out of joint already before Claudius killed Hamlet's father: the true source of evil in the play, the one on account of whose acts there is something rotten in Denmark, is the allegedly good old king, Hamlet's father, who defeated Fortinbras in a big battle and liberated Denmark from Norway to whom it was subordinated. Towards the end of the play, we are informed that this took place on the very day of Hamlet's birth. The day of Hamlet's death, we are told by the grave-diggers, is also the 30th anniversary of his birth. On this day, by the nomination of the dying Hamlet, these lands return to the young Fortinbras, "the restorer of order," as Lacan puts it, together with the Kingship of Denmark:

"Mortally wounded, Hamlet assumes his independent political authority for the first time, giving Fortinbras his 'dying voice' as next king. In so doing, Hamlet endorses the figure of his own disavowed potential; Fortinbras represents the obverse of Hamlet's choice, renouncing revenge in exchange for life and the continuation of the family dynasty. Hamlet's dying vote also serves to end Hamlet's own dynastic line, moving the crown outside his extinguished bloodline.

Here are Hamlet's last words: 'I do prophesy the election lights on Fortinbras. He has my dying voice. So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less, which have solicited. The rest is silence. O, O, O, O.' (dies)

'The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!' – Hamlet does set it right, but not directly by killing Claudius and becoming king. Things are set straight with Fortinbras taking over. Hamlet's 'I was born to set it right' is to be taken literally: we learn that Hamlet was born 30 years ago, exactly on the day when his father won the battle against the Norwegians and thus perturbed the legitimate order of royal succession[2]. The dying Hamlet sets it right by proclaiming Fortinbras the new legitimate king[4]. Hamlet sets things straight by obliterating his entire bloodline. The only alternative reading is that when Hamlet gives his voice to Fortinbras as a new king, he acts like a traitor to his country, collaborating with a foreign conqueror.

There are thus good arguments for the premise of John Updike's 'Gertrude and Claudius' that Hamlet's father is the truly evil person in the play, and that his injunction to Hamlet is an obscenity. Updike's novel is a prequel to Shakespeare's play: Gertrude and Claudius are engaged in an adulterous affair (Shakespeare is ambiguous on this point), and this affair is presented as passionate true love. Gertrude is a sensual, somewhat neglected wife, Claudius a rather dashing fellow, and old Hamlet an unpleasant combination of brutal Viking raider and coldly ambitious politician. Claudius has to kill the old Hamlet because he learns that the old king plans to kill them both (and he does it without Gertrude's knowledge or encouragement). Claudius turns out to be a good, generous king; he lives and reigns happily with Gertrude, and everything runs smoothly until Hamlet returns from Wittenberg and throws everything out of joint. Whatever we imagine as the (fictional) reality of Hamlet, Gertrude is the only kindhearted and basically honest person in the play.

This brings us to Eliot's basic argument against Hamlet, which is based on his concept of the objective correlative: for him, the greatest contributor to the play's failure is Shakespeare's inability to express Hamlet's emotion in his surroundings and the audience's resultant inability to localize that emotion. The madness of Shakespeare's character, according to Eliot, is a result of the inexpressible things that Hamlet feels and the playwright cannot convey. Because Shakespeare cannot find a sufficient objective correlative for his hero, the audience is left without a means to understand an experience that Shakespeare himself does not seem to understand.

Here's the corrected version with fixes for spelling, grammar, and punctuation:

While in principle agreeing with this description, one should return here to none other than Hegel, to his notion of the end of art with the rise of modern subjectivity. What Eliot designates as the lack of objective correlative perfectly fits Hegel's idea that, in contrast to Ancient art in which the spirit and its bodily representation are in harmony, with modernity the subject turns into something that exceeds every sensual representation. In other words, what Eliot deplores as Shakespeare's failure is the very fact (demonstrated by Cutrofello) that Hamlet is the first great figure of modern subjectivity, a subjectivity defined by the gap that separates it from external reality. In contrast to Harold Bloom's designation of Shakespeare as the inventor of the human, Todd McGowan ironically pointed out that, in Hamlet, Shakespeare rather invented the inhuman core of subjectivity, something that cannot be constrained by the space of interacting humans.

That's why Hamlet's "to be or not to be" has to be read differently, not as a simple alternative. In a quite Hegelian way, Lacan pointed out that we should imagine someone saying "to be or not...", making us expect some determination to follow, a determination which in this case would stand for a symbolic identity that the subject is interpellated into ("... a lover, a man, a woman, a hero"); however, since the subject (Hamlet) is not able to find a symbolic identity that would constitute him as an agent, he stumbles and simply returns to the beginning: "to be or not... to be." So for Lacan, the cut is not between "to be" / "not to be" but between "to be or not" and the second "to be" – the second "to be" is not the same as the first one since it includes negation, negativity that forms the core of a subject.

Such an inhuman subject by definition cannot sing, which is why there cannot be Hamlet as an opera. This cannot be, although there are a dozen or so operas based on Hamlet. Apart from the last one by Brett Dean (a moderate success which premiered at New York Met in 2017), one should mention the big hit, the Ambroise Thomas version from 1868 (based on the French translation by Dumas the elder!) at the end of which Hamlet lives and is proclaimed king. (This is not an innovative attempt by the opera's librettists to rewrite Shakespeare, but a reflection of a highly popular version of Hamlet that was all the rage with nineteenth-century Parisian audiences.) In the final scene, as Gertrude, Claudius, and Laertes are dying, the ghost of Hamlet's father reappears and condemns each of the dying characters. To Claudius it says: "Désespère et meurs!" – "Despair and die!"; to Laertes: "Prie et meurs!" – "Pray and die!"; and to the Queen: "Espère et meure!" – "Hope and die!" When, at the very end of Thomas's version, the wounded Hamlet asks: "Et quel châtiment m'attend donc?" – "And what punishment awaits me?", the ghost responds: "Tu vivras!" – "You shall live!", and the curtain falls... Before we break out in laughter, we should admit that this ending is quite logical. As expected, Ophelia's madness scene is the most popular part of Thomas's version, but it is done more in the style of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor where Lucia descends into madness, and on her wedding night, while the festivities are still being held in the Great Hall, she stabs her new husband, Arturo, in the bridal chamber. Disheveled, unaware of what she has done, she wanders in the Great Hall, recalling her meetings with Edgardo and imagining herself married to him... there is no complex ambiguity here, just a violent act committed due to a series of misunderstandings which led Lucia to think she was betrayed by her true love.

Such utter artistic failures offer negative proof that Hamlet cannot be made into an opera. Many critics of Cartesian modernity like to insist that we need to bring out what distinguishes a human being from a subject – Hamlet does the exact opposite, he brings out a dimension of subjectivity that cannot be constrained by the space of humanity. And inhuman subjects don't sing.

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Citations:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_and_His_Problems

[2] https://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=StudiesInBiblio%2FuvaBook%2Ftei%2Fsibv009.xml

[3] https://literariness.org/2020/07/04/analysis-of-t-s-eliots-hamlet-and-his-problems/

[4] https://targetliterature.com/hamlet-and-his-problems-summary-and-analysis/

[5] https://interestingliterature.com/2017/03/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-hamlet-and-his-problems/

[6] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69399/hamlet

[7] https://tseliot.com/prose/hamlet

[8] https://hunter220.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/eliot-hamlet-and-his-problems.pdf

The Pelicot rapes deservedly caught public attention – here are the basic facts. Over a period of nine years, from July 2011 to October 2020, Dominique Pelicot, a man from Mazan in southeastern France, repeatedly drugged his wife, Gisele, raped her, and invited strangers to rape her while she was unconscious. Gisele, who was unaware of the abuse being perpetrated against her, was raped 92 times by 72 men while her husband filmed them. When questioned by police about her sex life, she stated that she had never participated in wife-swapping or threesomes. She was shown a photograph but did not recognize the sleeping woman or the man raping her. It was only when shown further images that she recognized herself. She later testified that she had asked the police officer to stop showing her the images: "It was unbearable. I was inert, in my bed, and a man was raping me. My world fell apart.”

Her world fell apart because, until that moment, she fully trusted her husband and believed she lived in a happy marriage:

“It is difficult for me to listen to this. For 50 years, I lived with a man who I would have never imagined could be capable of this. I trusted him completely."

The shocking implication of this statement is that when Dominique refused to accept the harm he had done, he was in some bizarre sense correct: the trial had "destroyed his life," and if he hadn't been arrested, he "would still be happy, and she too – everything would have continued the same way." It is crucial to fully confront this disturbing fact and not attempt to explain it away.

The dilemma here is: what was Dominique’s real intention? Was it to continue living happily as he did or to eventually make Gisele aware of what was happening to her without her knowledge and thereby shatter her world? The second option aligns with the standard notion of sadism (the sadist wants their victim to become aware of their horrible predicament and thus have their world ruined, potentially leading them to die of shame). However, the first option is far more unsettling: Dominique wanted to create a radical division in Gisele’s life – between her normal daily existence as a happily married woman and her brutal mistreatment when she was drugged and unaware of herself. It is incredible how, for so many years, these two domains were successfully kept separate. It seems likely that Dominique’s goal was this division – simply to perpetuate it. (One cannot know if he also compartmentalized his own life; my presumption is that he did not.)

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Andrew Wyeth’s masterpiece Christina’s World (1948) gave birth to a whole series of more optimistic versions—so many attempts to cancel its traumatic impact. Two exemplary new versions are photographer Alex Thompson’s tribute to Christina’s World, taken in 2005 at the site of the Olson house in South Cushing, Maine, and the Modern Recreation of Christina's World by Wyeth (30" x 40", acrylics, paintingsbyjoshua.com). The main feature of these new versions is the use of much more lively colours, which obfuscate the monotone grey-brown tones of the original. One should also mention another key fact: the two buildings we see in the background are moved much closer together, with almost no space between them.

Why is this last feature so important? Read properly, it belies the predominant interpretation of the painting, according to which “Wyeth portrays the countryside as an escape, an arcadia. Christina leans toward her farmhouse. She longs to be home again; she wants us to come with her.” Really? The gap between the two buildings forms the lower part of a screen onto which we expect the crawling woman to project her fantasies—it is this frame, not the two buildings of her home, that attracts Christina. And yet, the frame remains empty. Wyeth-the-realist, working in the age of Rothko and Pollock, was right to claim that he is also an abstractionist: its colours and formal dispositions are more important than the painted content.

Let us draw another analogy here: consider the uniqueness of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, described as “the first modernist painting” by T. J. Clark. The oddity of the painting’s overall structure is seldom noted: its upper half is almost totally black. (This is not a realistic detail—the room in which Marat actually died had lively wallpaper.) What does this black void stand for? The opaque body of the People? The impossibility of representing the People? It is as if the opaque background of the painting (the People) invades it, occupying its entire upper half.

What happens here is structurally homologous to a formal procedure often found in film noir and Orson Welles movies, where the discord between figure and background is mobilized. When a figure moves in a room, the effect is that the two are somehow ontologically separated, as in a clumsy rear-projection shot where one can clearly see that the actor is not really in the room but merely moving in front of a screen onto which the image of a room is projected. In The Death of Marat, it appears as if we see Marat in his bathtub in front of a dark screen onto which the fake background has not yet been projected. This is why the effect can also be described as one of anamorphosis: we see the figure while the background remains an opaque stain. To see the background, we would have to blur the figure. However, what is impossible is to bring both the figure and the background into the same focus.Is this not also the logic of the Jacobin Terror? Individuals must be annihilated to make the People visible; the People’s Will can be made visible only through the terrorist destruction of an individual’s body. Therein resides the uniqueness of The Death of Marat: it concedes that one cannot blur the individual to represent the People directly. All one can do to approximate an image of the People is to show the individual at the point of their disappearance—their tortured, mutilated dead body against the blurred background that “is” the People.

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The story is well known: in Metz, an incident occurred at the exposition of art works linked to Jacques Lacan. Two feminists staged a protest in front of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World owned by Lacan; Deborah de Robertis wrote ‘MeToo’ on the painting which depicts a headless torso of a sexually aroused naked woman’s body, focused on her hairy vulva. The title of a predominant feminist reaction tells it all: “Hurrah for the Courbet vandals: defacing the vulva painting is basic feminism” – de Robertis “is right to think the painting is misogynistic: the model doesn’t even have a face!”[1]

Are things really so clear and simple? While fully respecting the feminist objections as well as rejecting the traditionalist academic disdain for the de Robertis’s act, I think things are more complex. Yes, there is a long history of a woman’s dismembered by a (male) painter. Recall “A Woman Throwing a Stone” (Picasso, 1931): the distorted fragments of a woman on a beach throwing a stone are, of course, a grotesque misrepresentation, if measured by the standard of realist reproduction; however, in their very plastic distortion, they immediately/intuitively render the Idea of a “woman throwing a stone,” the “inner form” of such a figure. Upon a closer look, one can easily discern the steps of the process of (what Husserl would have called) “eidetic reduction” of the woman to her essential features: hand, stone, breasts… this painting thinks, it performs the violent process of tearing apart the elements which, in their natural state, co-exist in reality. However, the problem is WHAT does this painting think – one should not forget that it was made by a male painter tearing apart a woman’s body…

So let’s begin with politics. Courbet was imprisoned for six months in 1871 for his involvement with the Paris Commune and lived in exile in Switzerland from 1873 until his death four years later. As for the fact that the torso is headless, we should remember that back in 2014, de Robertis already performed a feminist act in Musee d’Orsay: in front of the same painting, she sat down with her legs widely spread, fully exposing her vulva to the spectators.[2] This confrontation of the real displayed vagina with her fantasmatic double on a painting produces the effect of "This is not a vagina," like that of "This is not a pipe" in the famous Magritte painting - the scene in which a real person is shown side by side with the ultimate image of what she is in the fantasy for the male Other. But is a woman really more “objectivized” when painted as a headless torso?

To grasp what is happening here, on should recall the paradigmatic hard-core sexual position (and shot) which is easy to identify: the woman is lying on her back with her legs spread wide backwards and with her knees above her shoulder; the camera is in front, showing the man’s penis penetrating her vagina (the man’s face is as a rule invisible, he is reduced to an instrument), but what we see in the background between her thighs is her face in the thrall of orgasmic enjoyment. This minimal “reflexivity” is crucial: if we were just to see the close-up of penetration, the scene would soon turn boring, disgusting even, more of a medical showcase – one has to add the woman’s enthralled gaze, the subjective reaction to what is going on. Furthermore, this gaze is as a rule not addressed at her partner who is doing it but directly at us, viewers, confirming to us her enjoyment – we, spectators, clearly play the role of the big Other who has to register her enjoyment. The pivot of the scene is thus not male (her sexual partner’s or the spectator’s) enjoyment: the spectator is reduced to a pure gaze, the pivot is woman’s enjoyment (staged for the male gaze, of course). The sad irony here is that the very fact that the woman is not “objectivized” but rendered as a subject makes her humiliation worse: she has to fake her enjoyment. Being compelled to enact fake subjective engagement is much worse than being reduced to an object.

So, back to the photo of the painting and the “real” de Robertis displaying her vulva: the paradox is that, no matter what her intentions were, the real de Robertis displaying her vulva is much closer to pornography than Courbet’s painting precisely because her vulva is accompanied by her gaze (her head looking at us), while the effect of Courbet’s painting is much more disturbing – why, precisely? While it is not, of course, a feminist painting in any sense (it clearly addresses a male gaze), it clearly renders the deadlock (or dead end) of the traditional realist painting, whose ultimate object - never fully and directly shown, but always hinted at, present as a kind of underlying point of reference - was the naked and thoroughly sexualized feminine body as the ultimate object of male desire and look. The exposed feminine body functioned here in a way similar to the underlying reference to the sexual act in the classic Hollywood, best described by the famous instruction of the movie tycoon Monroe Stahr to his scriptwriters from Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon:

"At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard. ... Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough strentgh to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified."

The exposed feminine body is thus the impossible object, it functions as the ultimate horizon of representation whose disclosure is forever postponed - in short, it functions as the Lacanian incestuous Thing. Its absence, the Void of the Thing, is then filled in by "sublimated" images of beautiful, but not totally exposed, feminine bodies, i.e. by bodies which always maintain a minimum of distance towards That. But the crucial point (or, rather, the underlying illusion) of the traditional painting is that the "true" incestuous naked body nonetheless waits there to be discovered - in short, the illusion of traditional realism does not reside in the faithful rendering of the depicted objects; it rather resides in the belief that, BEHIND the directly rendered objects, there effectively IS the absolute Thing which could be possessed if we were only able to discard the obstacles or prohibitions that prevent access to it.

What Courbet accomplished in his “Origin” is the gesture of radical desublimation: he made the risky move and simply went to the end by way of directly depicting what the previous realistic art was just hinting at as its withdrawn point of reference - the outcome of this operation, of course, was the reversal of the sublime object into abject, into an abhorring, nauseating excremental piece of slime. (More precisely, Courbet masterfully continued to dwell at the very blurred border that separates the sublime from the excremental: the woman's body in "L'origine" retains its full erotic attraction, yet it becomes repulsive precisely on account of this excessive attraction.) Courbet's gesture is thus a dead end: the dead end of the traditional realist painting - but precisely as such, it is a necessary "mediator" between traditional and modernist art, i.e. it stands for a gesture that had to be accomplished if we are to "clear the ground" for the emergence of the modernist "abstract" art. How?

With Courbet, we learn that there is no Thing behind its sublime appearance, that if we force our way through the sublime appearance to the Thing itself, all we get is a suffocating nausea of the abject - so the only way to reestablish the minimal structure of sublimation is to directly stage THE VOID ITSELF, the Thing as the Void-Place-Frame, without the illusion that this Void is sustained by some hidden incestuous Object. One can now understand in what precise way, and paradoxical as it may sound, Malevitch's "Black Square" as the seminal painting of modernism is the true counterpoint to (or reversal of) "L'origine": in Courbet, we get the incestuous Thing itself which threatens to implode the Clearing, the Void in which (sublime) objects (can) appear, while in Malevitch, we get its exact opposite, the matrix of sublimation at its most elementary, reduced to the bare marking of the distance between foreground and background, between a wholly "abstract" object (square) and the Place that contains it. The "abstraction" of the modernist painting is thus to be conceived as a reaction to the over-presence of the ultimate "concrete" object, the incestuous Thing, that turns it into a disgusting abject, i.e. that turns the sublime into an excremental excess.

So far from being a simple male-chauvinist depiction of the object of desire, Courbet’s “Origine” confronts the male desire with its deadlock: what you really desire is a headless monster, and it is your gaze (sustained by desire) which decapitates the woman.

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[1] Hurrah for the Courbet vandals: defacing the vulva painting is basic feminism | Painting | The Guardian.

[2] See Centre Pompidou: Deborah de Robertis en remet une couche à Metz | Bilan.

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The Birth of Fascism out of the Spirit of Beauty

If we are in search of the origins of Fascism in modern thought, we should look into the work of one of the most celebrated poets of freedom, Friedrich Schiller. Following Marx, who said that the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of monkey, let’s begin at the end, with “The Song on the Bell,” the proto-Fascist Schiller offering his model of aestheticized politics as the way to overcome revolutionary violence. Then we’ll take a look at how Schiller arrived at this point, what antagonisms were obfuscated in this solution.

If there is a song that deserves to be publicly burned Goebbels-style, it is “The Song on the Bell.” Everything is in it, all the basic coordinates of a Fascist-style counterrevolution. It begins with the idealized image of a patriarchal family where man is a benevolent master who goes out, works, and takes risks, bringing home wealth, while the wife stays at home and wisely manages the household:

The man must go out / Into hostile life, / Must work and strive / And plant and produce, / Calculate, gather, / Must wager and risk, / To hunt for fortune. / There streams to him the endless gift, / The warehouse fills with precious goods, /
The rooms grow, the house expands. / And inside rules / The modest housewife, / The children's mother, / And reigns wisely / In the domestic circle, / And teaches the girls, / And guides the boy, / And stirs without end / The industrious hands, / And multiplies the gains / With orderly mind.

What enters then is the key metaphor of blazing fire, the source of productive energy—but only insofar as it is controlled by the man: if it runs out of control, it can bring horror and destruction:

Benevolent is the fire’s might, / If the man tames and watches it, / For what he builds, what he creates, / He owes to this heavenly power, / But terrible this heavenly power is, / If she, casting off her shackles, / Strides along on tracks her own / This free daughter of nature. / Beware when she is let loose / Growing without hindrance / Through the much populated by-streets / Rolls the monstrous blaze!

So where does this explosion come from? The feminization of fire as the “free daughter of nature” already indicates the answer: when, within the family, mother is no longer loyally subordinated to her husband, when “the tender bonds of the house are loosened”: 

Alas! it is the loyal mother, / Which the black prince of shadows / Leads away from the arm of her husband, / Away from the children’s tender flock, / Which she bore him while in bloom, / Which she on her faithful breast / With motherly love watched grow— / Alas! the tender bonds of the house / Are loosened evermore, / She now lives in the land of shadows, / She who was the mother of the house, / Now her faithful reign is missing, / Her care watches no more, / In the orphaned place a strange one / Shall direct, lovelessly.

Another metaphoric level is then added: the glowing ore which liberates itself is first equated with the women liberated from family ties, and then the two are equated with the people (citizenry) breaking their chains and liberating themselves:

The master may break the mold / With knowing hand, if the time is right, / But beware when in fiery, spouting brooks / The glowing ore liberates itself! / Blindly raging, with the roar of thunder / It bursts the broken house, / And as out of the maw of Hell / It spews out, igniting destruction; / Where brute force rules mindlessly, / No design can emerge, / When the people liberate themselves, / Then wellbeing can’t thrive.

The political stakes are made explicit here: when “the citizenry, breaking its chains, frightfully seizes arms to help itself,” destructive violence explodes:

Freedom and Equality! one hears proclaimed, / The peaceful citizen is driven to arms, / The streets are filling, the halls, / The vigilante-bands are moving, / Then women change into hyenas / And make a plaything out of terror, / Though it twitches still, with panthers teeth, / They tear apart the enemy’s heart. / Nothing is holy any longer, loosened / Are all ties of righteousness, / The good gives room to bad, / And all vices freely rule. / Dangerous it is to wake the lion, / Ruinous is the tiger’s tooth, / But the most terrible of all the terrors, / That is the man when crazed. / Woe to those, who lend to the eternally-blind / Enlightenment’s heavenly torch! / It does not shine for him, it only can ignite / And puts to ashes towns and lands.

The French Revolution is thus feminized: the figure that embodies revolutionary terror is a woman changed into a madly laughing hyena. Plus, in the standard early liberal Enlightenment way, the full light of Reason should be constrained to the educated few: if Enlightenment’s heavenly torch is allowed to shine directly on the poor uneducated crowd who are condemned to eternal blindness, we get “the most terrible of all the terrors”. . . Schiller passes over the details of how one should crush this revolutionary explosion, and moves directly on to the idealized image of the collective production process which runs organically and harmoniously after order is restored:

Thousands of busy hands stir, / Help each other in happy union, / And in this fiery movement / All powers become known. / The master stirs and journeyman too / Within the holy protection of freedom. / Everyone enjoys his place, / Offering defiance to contemptors. / Work is the adornment of the burgher, / Blessing the reward for toil, / If dignity honors the king, / We are honored by industriousness of hands.

Although freedom is restored here, it is the protective freedom in which “everyone enjoys his place”—one is free insofar as one fully identifies with a specific place within the organic Whole. What such a vision prohibits is any kind of direct link between the individual and the universal dimension, bypassing the particular: the perfect utopian image of such freedom is the harmonious collaboration of individuals in an organically structured hierarchic Whole.

One should also note here that the same feminization of the revolutionary fury took place in the German conservative reaction to the October Revolution: we regularly encounter the myth of a wild Bolshevik woman, promiscuous and cruel, in Freikorps memoirs of the defenders of the Eastern borders of Germany after the Great War:

Anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism and a distinct hate for the other woman characterize these texts. The women of the enemy army are described as savage and uncivilized female warriors. These women took a very active part in the “butcheries,” thus wrote Georg Heinrich Hartman in his description of the time he spent in a Freikorps, published in 1929. The texts display an intense feeling of revulsion against Communist women, who, according to Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalytical study of the Freikorps-literature, symbolized “a horror” that “had no name in the language of the soldierly man.” “At the hands of seductively smiling, gun-toting women” one received “the longest death. . . the most bitter and the most cruel which one could suffer,” wrote the Freikorps author Thor Goote. At the same time, these descriptions of the other women are ambivalent: the sensuality and the sexual prowess imputed to them are seductive and tempting. The way in which these descriptions are placed in the texts illuminates their function as a legitimization for the following violent excesses. Communist and Latvian women are desired but at the same time mutilated beyond recognition. The depictions of their executions are bloody, cruel and sadistic; they refer to the dangers of desire. Sexuality here uncovers the instable process of the construction of borders.[1]

Back to Schiller, is the ultimate laughing hyena not Caroline von Schlegel, the promiscuous Jacobin who wrote in 1799: “Yesterday at noon we almost fell from our chairs, we laughed so much at a poem by Schiller on the bell.”[2] No wonder she was referred to in the circle of Schiller’s friends as the “Dame Lucifer” or “the Evil [or Misfortune: das Übel]”. . . How did Schiller arrive at this point? Let’s move from this end point back to the beginning: in his first big success, The Robbers, Schiller already deals with the topic of the “Song on the Bell,” the danger of excessive unconstrained freedom. While he condemns the revolutionary attempt to “maintain law by lawlessness,” that is, to impose a new, just law through “illegitimate” change, Schiller symptomatically fails to raise the obvious question: But what if it is the existing law itself which maintains itself by lawlessness? What if the restoration of the “majesty of the law” restores also its lawless dark side? Furthermore, while, in his final speech, Karl, the play’s hero, generously offers himself as the exemplary victim ready to declare before all mankind how inviolable that majesty of the law is, he passes over in silence the true sacrificial offering, his love Amalia who convinces him to kill her. Although the logic of her demand seems rational (he cannot leave his gang and she cannot live without him), the killing remains a weird act branded by mysterious ambiguity, a true symptomal point of the play.[3] A woman is here an obstacle to men’s murderous gang, an agent of the stability of a home, not the revolutionary woman-hyena as in “The Song on the Bell”: revolutionary violence is here male bonding without women who stand for order and stability, not the murderous excess embodied in a free woman. The murder of the woman who disturbs male collaboration belongs to the antifeminist space of “The Song on the Bell”; it is precisely the moment Schiller passes over in silence in the poem, as the means to restore harmonious order—so it is as if the repressed of the poem returns here, in the opposite constellation where the woman should have been celebrated. . . Does this weird return not indicate that there is somethimg deeply wrong in the entire logic that underlies Schiller’s work? To cut a long story short, is the implication of the weird killing of the woman not that the lawless male bonding (in Robbers) is the obscene obverse of the noble male friendship and collaboration celebrated in “The Song on the Bell”? So how do we pass from the one to the other?

The answer is provided by Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” where, in a clear reversal of The Robbers, he asserts the brotherhood of man bonded by friendship as opposed to the gang of outlaws:

Be embraced, millions!
This kiss to the entire world!
Brothers—above the starry canopy
A loving father must dwell.
Whoever has had the great fortune,
To be a friend’s friend,
Whoever has won the love of a devoted wife,
Add his to our jubilation!
Indeed, whoever can call even one soul
His own on this earth!
And whoever was never able to must creep
The account of our misdeeds be destroyed!
Reconciled the entire world!

No wonder this poem provided the words for the anthem of the European Union: it describes the vision of global reconciliation with all debts written off—except those owed to big banks, as in the case of Greece, but the Greeks are then offered the choice of creeping away tearfully from the European circle. . . The difference from Robbers is that, in contrast to the gang led by a rebel against his father, her the circle of friends is sustained by the belief that “above the starry canopy a loving father must dwell.” We get here Schiller’s dream: a fraternal bond of friendship under the protective care of a benevolent father—an impossible combination, for sure, and this impossibility explodes in (is the theme of) Don Carlos, Schiller’s masterpiece which brings all these motifs together: friendship, love, political power and freedom.[4]

Don Carlos between Authority and Friendship

At the beginning of the play, the King Philip and his son don Carlos are rivals for the affections of Queen Elisabeth of Valois, but when Philip meets Carlos’s friend Marquis of Posa, he feels that he has found a true friend for the first time in his life. In a new love triangle, don Carlos and Philip are rivals for Posa’s love and friendship; however, Posa cares more about achieving political freedom in the rebellious Netherlands, and when his ruthlessly manipulative plan fails he sacrifices himself in order to save Carlos. Philip is affected more seriously by Posa’s betrayal than he is by Elisabeth’s presumed infidelity. At the end of act 4 the audience is informed by Count Lerma that “Der König hat / Geweint” (“The king has wept”) (lines 4464–65). In an ingenious cinematic detail, we never see Philip crying, it is just reported as an hors-champ detail, which makes it all the more effective. Later, in act 5, scene 9, after Marquis of Posa has died at his orders, Philip confesses that he loved him: “I loved him, loved him a lot. . . . He was my first love.” One should bear in mind here that, in a normally functioning monarchy, the problem of the humanization of authority (of how to provide the monarch with ordinary human features) doesn’t arise: for a true king, a patronizing friendship with selected courtiers is part of his image.[5]

It would be totally wrong to read this love in homosexual terms: the topic is that of friendship, friendship of equals in the sense of full mutual recognition and trust. The main tension of the play, its principal contradiction, to use the old Maoist term, is between (male) friendship and (political) power, while the topic of love remains at the level of comical intrigues; the king steals the bride from his son and then indulges in another affair, etc. Marcel Reich-Ranicki noted apropos of Don Carlos that one cannot take fully seriously a drama in which the plot relies on a love letter reaching a wrong addressee, and there are even three such letters in Schiller’s play (Carlos’s letter to the queen reaches Princess Eboli, the king’s letter to Eboli reaches Posa, Posa’s letter to the Dutch rebels is intercepted by the king’s police). Don Carlos who is the focus of love intrigues “might have been more successful as a comic figure.”[6] He is thoroughly immersed in the tensions of friendship and love, that is, he oscillates between two particular contents, which is why he doesn’t participate in any authentic tragic conflict. Posa is also outside the tragic conflict: he oscillates between Carlos and Philip, but at a purely tactical level, i.e., he has to choose whom to manipulate through friendship for his universal political cause. The only properly tragic character in the play is the king (as in Antigone where the only tragic character is Creon, not Antigone): Posa moves at the level of the universal, he is fully dedicated to his cause, don Carlos moves at the level of conflicting particulars, only the king is torn between the Universal and the Particular, State and friendship. The queen is also identified with the political cause (freedom for the Dutch), and her message to don Carlos is to pass from the Particular (his love for her) to the Universal (political freedom), so the ideal emancipatory couple would have been the one of Posa and the queen.

In contrast to this sometimes ridiculous melodramatic imbroglio, the play’s three crucial scenes all concern friendship and power. The first scene is the long conversation between the king and Posa in act 3. Posa tells him (twice) “Ich kann nicht Fürstendiener sein” (“I cannot be a servant of princes”), and it is precisely through this asserion of autonomy that he seduces Philip into friendship. Immediately using this friendship, Posa asks Philip to grant his subjects Gedankenfreiheit, the freedom of thought—he wants to use Philip immediately for his political cause. Predictably refusing this, Philip asks Posa to meet with Carlos and Elisabeth and find out their true intentions, enlisting him in his private affairs: “Marquis, so far / You've learned to know me as a king; but yet / You know me not as man.” Posa warns Philip that the price for being the king is that, since friendship requires mutual recognition of friends as equals, he has to remain alone in a friendless world: “Once degrade mankind, / And make him but a thing to play upon, / . . . You thus become / A thing apart, a species of your own. / This is the price you pay for being a god.” Furthermore, Posa reminds Philip that in a monarchy, not only can the king not have friends but friendship is thwarted even among his subjects: since they fear the authority, they are suspicious of each other and pushed into egotism, each possessed by fear and care for himself: “I dearly love mankind, / My gracious liege, but in a monarchy / I dare not love another than myself.” What Schiller stages here is the fundamental deadlock of the relationship between Master and Servant analyzed a decade later in the famous chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology: the Servant’s recognition of the Master is worthless since the Servant is not recognized by the Master as an equal. Does this mean that Schiller is ready to renounce monarchy? As we have already seen, his solution is the utopia of the friendly bond of equals dominated by a loving father (Master) who “above the starry canopy must dwell.” In the famous declaration of his view of god, Posa further elaborates this vision:

Look round on all the glorious face of nature,
On freedom it is founded—see how rich,
Through freedom it has grown. The great Creator
Bestows upon the worm its drop of dew,
And gives free-will a triumph in abodes
Where lone corruption reigns. See your creation,
How small, how poor! The rustling of a leaf
Alarms the mighty lord of Christendom.
Each virtue makes you quake with fear. While he,
Not to disturb fair freedom’s blest appearance,
Permits the frightful ravages of evil
To waste his fair domains. The great Creator
We see not—he conceals himself within
His own eternal laws. The sceptic sees
Their operation, but beholds not Him.
“Wherefore a God!” he cries, “the world itself
Suffices for itself!” And Christian prayer
Ne’er praised him more than doth this blasphemy

Schiller’s formula of how to combine the reign of the Father-God with the freedom of His creatures is to render the Father invisible. This God is neither the Pascalean deus absconditus, the obscure withdrawn god whose impenetrable will causes anxiety among his subjects, nor the God of deism who just triggers the mechanism of the world and then lets it roll itself: Schiller’s God is acting all the time, but hidden behind his own laws. In contrast to the Christian god, a visible master who lives in fear, alarmed by the prospect that his subjects might misuse the freedom of their will, but at the same time allowing the evil to happen in the world in order to maintain the appearance of freedom, the true Creator lies concealed behind the immanent growth of creation, so that the more we are bewildered by the autonomous growth of the world, ignoring God, the more we praise God, his creativity. The political equivalent of this vision would be a benevolent paternal ruler who allows his subjects all their freedom, wisely steering their activity in order to prevent freedom to run amok and turn into a self-destructive fury. But does this idea work, theologically and politically?

With Posa himself, the advocate of this view, things quickly take a wrong turn. After his first plan of how to use his influence on the king fails, he decides to sacrifice himself: he writes a letter to William of Orange in Brussels, the leader of the Protestant rebellion there, knowing that it will be intercepted and brought to King Philip. He will be arrested, but suspicion will be diverted from Carlos who should escape to Netherlands and lead the rebellion. After Posa is shot down, he tells Carlos with his dying words to save himself by way of escaping. But instead of escaping, Carlos wants to confront his father courageously out of fidelity to Posa: when Philip and his noblemen arrive, Carlos blames his father for ordering Posa’s murder. (There is a nice ethical paradox at work here: in refusing to escape out of fidelity to Posa, don Carlos precisely betrays his friendship with Posa—he betrays the true point of Posa’s friendship/sacrifice out of friendship.) Carlos’s accusations are interrupted by the news that the people are rioting, clamoring to see him. Upon hearing the word “rebellion,” Philip is overcome by panic; he surrenders his royal insignia, faints, and is carried out.

When Philip divests himself of the royal insignia, he offers them to his son don Carlos whom he considers the leader of the rebellion, provoking him to take the insignia and become the new king, but the hysterical don Carlos is not ready or able to do it. In this act, Philip realizes his earlier declaration to Posa: “Marquis, so far / You’ve learned to know me as a king; but yet / You know me not as man.” Now everyone around him can see and know him as a man—but what, precisely, does one see? Recall the classic scene (so powerfully staged by Shakespeare in his Richard II) of the deposed king, a king deprived of his royal title: all of a sudden the charisma dissipates and we have in front of us a weak and confused man. . . But are we “really” just what we are, miserable individuals? What remains of Richard II after he is deprived of his insignia of royal power? Not an ordinary miserable person but a subject traumatized by the void of what he is now.[7]  When he is deprived of his royal title, his bodily and psychic existence appear to him broken, inconsistent, lacking any firm ground or foundation, so that it is as if his symbolic insignia were not masking the miserable reality of a person to whom these insignia were attributed but the void or gap of subjectivity, of the Self irreducible to physical or psychic properties. And it is, of course, the same with Philip deprived of his insignia: we do not see an ordinary human being but, precisely, an extraordinary—crippled, panicked—human being. How, then, do the insignia of power transubstantiate our miserable bodily reality into the vehicle of another dimension, so that what we “really are” is magically transformed into a medium of power? The paradox is that it is only against the background of insignia (whatever they are, from those of a king to those of an office cleaner) that make a subject’s immediate reality visible as that of an “ordinary person”: how we perceive a person’s direct reality, the reality of his or her actual properties, is always-already mediated through the lenses of the insignia. If a king is crippled, it is not the same thing as a beggar who is crippled.

Back to Don Carlos: after the rebellion is crushed, the king survives, remains in power, but as a broken man and a broken king. What Philip loses when he renounces his insignia (and what he remains deprived of even after he later regains his insignia) is his main royal prerogative, his capacity to decide, to confer the performative dimension on his counselors’ advices, to make them acts. Hegel described this unique position of a king in clear terms:

In a fully organized state, it is only a question of the highest instance of formal decision, and all that is required in a monarch is someone to say “yes” and to dot the “i”; for the supreme office should be such that the particular character of its occupant is of no significance. . . . In a well-ordered monarchy, the objective aspect is solely the concern of the law, to which the monarch merely has to add his subjective “I will.”[8]

This “highest instance of formal decision,” this pronouncement of S₁, a Master Signifier, which supplements the series of S₂, of the knowledgeable proposals of his advisors and ministers, is what Philip is now deprived of, and this is why he sends for the Grand Inquisitor—not for advice about how to make the right decision but to decide instead of him. In the great confrontation between the broken king and the Inquisitor, the latter reprimands Philip for his leniency towards Posa which put in danger the very survival of monarchy. Philip asks him to decide Carlos’s fate and the Inquisitor decrees that Carlos must die.

This deeply disturbing dialogue between the king and the Inquisitor opens up upon a totally new terrifying, post-tragic, domain. The deadlock in which the King finds himself can be resolved only by the Inquisitor who enters almost as a deux ex machina, absent till now in the play.[i] The Inquisitor is blind but as such all-seeing and all-knowing—his blindness stands for his total ignorance of human passions and affairs, people are for him just numbers to be manipulated from a cold distance: “KING. I sought a human being. GRAND INQUISITOR. How! human beings! What are they to you? / Cyphers to count withal—no more! Alas! / . . . An earthly god must learn to bear the want / Of what may be denied him. When you whine / For sympathy is not the world your equal? / What rights should you possess above your equals?” The castrative dimension of supreme power is here clearly stated: the monarch “must learn to bear the want / Of what may be denied him.”

The Inquisitor knows in advance the answers to the questions he asks: “INQUISITOR. What was the reason for this murder? KING. ’Twas a fraud unparalleled—— INQUISITOR. I know it all.” Far from being the remainder of some dark past, the Inquisitor is the most modern figure in the play, he stands for the agency which takes over when the king’s authority disintegrates—in short, he stands for the big Other of the state bureaucracy, a pure superego-knowledge, not a crazy brutal Master. Apropos of Posa, the Inquisitor emphasizes precisely this complete knowledge: “All his life is noted / From its commencement to its sudden close, / In Santa Casa’s holy registers.” And when Posa is killed on the king’s orders, the Inquisitor deplores merely the spontaneous and brutal character of Posa’s death: Posa “is murdered—basely, foully murdered. / The blood that should so gloriously have flowed / To honor us has stained the assassin’s hand.” When he decides for the king, the Inquisitor does not simply appropriate the prerogative of the king, he is not a new S₁ (Master), but an S₂ without S₁—the very definition of modern bureaucracy. Already the reasoning of the Inquisitor, the way he answers Philip’s queries, is subtle in an obscene way, a model case of senseless bureaucratic legalism. In in order to calm the king’s conscience troubled with how one can “justify / The bloody murder of one’s only son?”, the Inquisitor draws a weird parallel with God who sacrificed Christ, his own son, in order to redeem humanity: “To appease eternal justice God’s own Son / Expired upon the cross.” But if we draw this parallel to the end, what we get in Don Carlos is something like God asking Holy Spirit for permission/decision to deliver Christ to his death.

In contrast to the Inquisitor, the King-Master doesn’t “know it all,” but in an ambiguous way, leaving to others (his faithful servants) to do discretely the dirty job that has to be done but which cannot be admitted publicly. When, in the fall of 1586, Queen Elizabeth I was under pressure from her ministers to agree to the execution of Mary Stuart (the topic of another of Schiller’s plays), she replied to their petition with the famous “answer without an answer”: “If I should say I would not do what you request I might say perhaps more than I think. And if I should say I would do it, I might plunge myself into peril, whom you labor to preserve.”^[10] The message was clear: she was not ready to say that she doesn’t want Mary executed since saying this would be saying “more than I think”—while she clearly wanted her dead, she did not want to publicly assume upon herself this act of judicial murder. The implicit message of her answer is thus a very clear one: if you are my true faithful servants, do this crime for me, kill her without making me responsible for her death, i.e., allowing me to protest my ignorance of the act and even punish some of you to sustain this false appearance.

Schiller versus Hegel

The true counterpart of the Inquisitor is thus not Philip but — who? None other than Posa. When the king is betrayed by Posa, he merely gets his own message back from him: he thought that, while he remains a king, Posa is now his equal, a friend to whom he is bound by mutual recognition, but he discovers that in the same way he looked down upon others, Posa now looks down upon him, just exploiting him for his own political purposes. And Posa is fully justified to ruthlessly manipulate his friendship with don Carlos and Philip in order to realize his political goal. Even when he sacrifices himself to save don Carlos (by way of sending a secret letter to the Dutch rebels he knows will be intercepted), he doesn’t do this out of friendship but again for a political purpose (to enable don Carlos to escape and lead the Dutch rebellion). There effectively is a weird parallel between Inquisitor and Posa: they are both cold functionaries fully dedicated to their cause, the only difference is that, while the Inquisitor is the functionary of the existing order, Posa is, to quote Reich-Ranicki, “the functionary of the revolution,” in short, a kind of proto-Leninist.

Schiller’s effort is to keep at a distance this friendless world whose two faces are the Inquisitor and Posa; he desperately tries to save friendship, although he is fully aware that the fraternal bond of friendship has to be discreetly controlled by a Master who has to remain friendless, as is made clear in a short poem “Die Freundschaft” (Friendship), written after Don Carlos and which recapitulates the king’s deadlock in the play, the need of an absolute Master for equal friends bound by mutual recognition. Here is the poem’s original version of 1782:

Friendless was the great world-master
Felt a lack—and so created spirits,
Blessed mirrors of his own blessedness
But the highest being still could find no equal.
From the chalice of the whole realm of souls
Foams up to him—infinitude.

Schiller describes here a lonely Creator who cannot overcome the gap that separates Him from his creation: the spirits He creates remain his own mirror images, shadowy insubstantial others, so He remains alone, caught in his own narcissistic game. Interestingly, the last two lines are quoted at the very conclusion of Hegel’s Phenomenology, but they are slightly changed; what is the meaning of this change? The standard approach to Hegel is that the Idea can afford extreme self-externalization since it is merely playing a game with itself, knowing full well that, at the end, it will safely return to itself, reappropriating its otherness. The difference between Hegel and Schiller is that Hegel fully endorses this view of the Absolute encountering only its own shadows and thus playing a narcissistic game with itself, while Schiller saw the deadlock of the Absolute: it cannot find any equal, so it remains lonely. . . But does this (standard) objection hold? Was Hegel not fully aware of the deadlock of a Master position? To clarify this point, let us take a look at the conclusion of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which a dense description of Absolute Knowing is “sutured” by a quote from Schiller:

The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their. . . comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History [begriffene Geschichte], form alike the inwardizing-memory [Erinnerung] and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without which it would be lifeless and alone. Only

from the chalice of this realm of spirits
foams forth for Him his infinitude
[aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches
schäumt ihm seine Unendlichkeit].[11]

The last two lines are a (subtly transformed) quote from Friedrich Schiller’s poem—so what does Hegel achieve with theses changes? When Hegel quotes the same two lines again in his Philosophy of Religion, he supplements them with another poetic quote, the two lines from Goethe’s “An Suleika” (from West-östlicher Divan) where, apropos of the torment of the endless striving of love, Goethe writes: “Ought such torment to afflict us, / since it enhances our desire?”^[12] The link between the two quotes is clear: what appears in the “chalice of this realm of spirits” is, as Hegel says two lines before, the “Calvary of absolute Spirit,” and insofar as the Spirit is able to recognize in this path of torment his own infinitude, traversing this path brings joy, that is, pleasure in pain itself.

If we read the infinite “foaming forth” from the chalice of spirits in this way, as the repetitive movement of the drive, then it also becomes clear how we can read it in a nonnarcissistic way, not as the philosophical covering up of the gap (conceded by Schiller) that separates the divine Absolute from the realm of finite spirits. In Hegel’s version, God is not just playing a game with Himself, pretending to lose Himself in externality while fully aware that He remains its master and creator: infinity is out there, and this “out there” is not a mere shadowy reflection of God’s infinite power. In short, the divine Absolute is itself caught up in a process it cannot control—the Calvary of the last paragraph of the Phenomenology is not the Calvary of finite beings who pay the price for the Absolute’s progress, but the Calvary of the Absolute itself. One should note how Hegel says here the exact opposite of the famous passage on the cunning of reason from his Philosophy of History:

The special interest of passion is thus inseparable from the active development of a general principle: for it is from the special and determinate and from its negation, that the Universal results. Particularity contends with its like, and some loss is involved in the issue. It is not the general idea that is implicated in opposition and combat, and that is exposed to danger. It remains in the background, untouched and uninjured. This may be called the cunning of reason,—that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that which develops its existence through such impulsion pays the penalty and suffers loss. For it is phenomenal being that is so treated, and of this, part is of no value, part is positive and real. The particular is for the most part of too trifling value as compared with the general: individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. The Idea pays the penalty of determinate existence and of corruptibility, not from itself, but from the passions of individuals.^[13]

Here we get what we expect the “textbook Hegel” to say: Reason works as a hidden substantial power that realizes its goal by deftly exploiting individual passions; engaged individuals fight each other, and through their struggle the universal Idea actualizes itself. The conflict is thus limited to the domain of the particular, while the Idea “remains in the background, untouched and uninjured,” at peace with itself, as the calm of the true universality: subjects are reduced to instruments of historical substance. This standard teleology is, however, totally rejected by what Hegel sees as the fundamental lesson of Christianity: far from remaining “in the background, untouched and uninjured,” the Absolute itself pays the price, irretrievably sacrificing itself.

We should remember here that Schiller was the main proponent of the German aesthetic reaction to the French Revolution: his message was that, in order to avoid the destructive fury of the Terror, the revolution should occur with the rise of a new aesthetic sensibility, through the transformation of the state into an organic and beautiful Whole (Lacoue-Labarthe located the beginnings of Fascism in this aesthetic rejection of the Jacobin Terror).[14] Since Hegel clearly saw the necessity of the Terror, his reference to Schiller could be paraphrased as: only from the chalice of this revolutionary Terror foams forth the infinitude of spiritual freedom. (And, taking a step further, we can even propose a paraphrase concerning the relationship between Phenomenology and Logic: only from the chalice of phenomenology, which contains the Calvary of the Absolute Spirit, foams forth the infinitude of logic, pure logic.)

This brings us back to Schiller’s aestheticization of politics which should protect us from revolutionary terror: with regard to the French Revolution, he “expresses the wager of an entire generation: we don’t need that kind of revolution. Only through aesthetic revolution can we forestall the explosion of politics into terror. Only through beauty do we inch our way towards freedom.”[15] This is how Fascism begins—in contrast to Hegel who does not forestall explosions of terror but accepts the necessity of passing through it. In other words, Schiller—although he presents himself as the poet of freedom—effectively pleads for the restoration of a discreet, benevolent Master who can only prevent the explosion of politics into terror. There are two modes of “ugly” freedom that Schiller rejects: the destructive revolutionary freedom and the “mechanic” chaos of unorganic market relations where each individual pursues only egotist goals. They are perceived as the two sides of the same process which can be countered only through the aestheticization of politics. It is this aestheticization which renders Schiller blind to the new forms of domination which, already in his lifetime, began to replace the classic disposition of power which is sustained by symbolic castration.

The Self-Debased Authority

More precisely, what Schiller was not able to see is how contemporary authority is split into two: on one hand a pure blind knowledge (embodied in the Inquisitor), and on the other hand a friendly boss “like us,” with all ordinary human weaknesses—the necessity of this second figure is what Schiller couldn’t see. Philip is at the end of the drama not just playing castration in order to retain his full actual power, he really is broken and impotent—Schiller wasn’t yet able to imagine the figure of a master who rules through a display of his castration. The only “castration” he clearly saw was the alienation of the monarch who is unable to engage in authentic friendship.

Symbolic castration is the price to be paid for the exercise of power. How, precisely? One should begin by conceiving of phallus as a signifier—which means what? From the traditional rituals of investiture, we know the objects which not only “symbolize” power, but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effectively exercising power—if a king holds in his hands the scepter and wears the crown, his words will be taken as the words of a king. Such insignia are external, not part of my nature: I don them; I wear them in order to exert power. As such, they “castrate” me: they introduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (i.e., I am never fully at the level of my function). This is what the infamous “symbolic castration” means: not “castration as symbolic, as just symbolically enacted” (in the sense in which we say that, when I am deprived of something, I am “symbolically castrated”), but the castration which occurs by the very fact of me being caught in the symbolic order, assuming a symbolic mandate. Castration is the very gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic mandate which confers on me this “authority.” In this precise sense, far from being the opposite of power, it is synonymous with power; it is that which confers power on me. And one has to think of the phallus not as the organ which immediately expresses the vital force of my being, my virility, and so on, but, precisely, as such an insignia, as a mask which I put on in the same way a king or judge puts on his insignia—phallus is an “organ without a body” which I put on, which gets attached to my body, without ever becoming its “organic part,” namely, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive supplement.

However, this gap between the symbolic title (its insignia) and the miserable reality of the individual who bears this title tends to function today in a radically different way: it underwent a weird reversal noted by Badiou apropos of Jean Genet’s Balcon: “We encounter here an imaginary feature of democracy. Democracy means precisely that there are no costumes. Inequality no longer wears a costume/dress. There are dramatic, gigantic inequalities, but their laicization leaves them without a costume.”[16] On a simple descriptive level, this means that, in a democratic-egalitarian society, masters (those who exert power over others) no longer have to wear insignia or costumes that would performatively constitute them as bearers of power: they can dress and act “naturally” like everybody else, renouncing all dignity. The message of the way they dress and act is: “See, we are common people like you, with all weaknesses, fears, and limitations like everyone else!”—in short, their “castration” is no longer covered up by the splendor of their insignia but is openly displayed. However, this “honest” operation should in no way deceive us: for all their common appearance they continue to assert their full power, perhaps even more directly than the traditional master: “Let the image be castrated in all possible ways, while I can do more or less whatever I want. . . . In a strange reversal of the classic logic of castration (as a means to access symbolic power), we are dealing here with the castration of the symbolic (public) image as a means to execute and perpetuate limitless power.”[17]

Castration (the display of weakness) thus “becomes part of the public image,” but not in the simple and straightforward sense that it simply masks the actual exercise of ruthless power—the point is rather that this mask of castration is the very means (instrument, mode) of how power is exercised.[18] The mystification is here redoubled: beneath the gesture of demystification (“You see, I dropped all masks and costumes, I am an ordinary guy like you!”), the exercise of power (which is a symbolic fact, not a “real” property of its agent) remains intact. When confronted with a boss who talks and acts as an ordinary man, his subordinate would thus be fully justified in addressing him with a paraphrase of the well-known Marx Brothers phrase: “Why are you talking and acting as an ordinary man when you really are just an ordinary man?” (The paradox is that, if the agent of power were to put on the masks of insignia, this would not increase his power but undermine it, making it appear ridiculously pathetic.) The matrix of je sais bien mais quand même is here given a specific twist formulated by Zupančič: it is no longer just “I know very well that you are an ordinary weak guy like me, but I still accept you as a master,” it is rather something like “I know very well you are a miserable weak guy like me, and for that very reason I can continue to obey you like my master.” Knowledge is here not an obstacle to be suspended but a positive condition of the functioning of what it discloses in its gesture of “demystification.” The mystification persists not in spite of its denunciation but through it, because of it. (In a strictly homologous way, Freud demonstrates how repression can persist through the very knowledge [conscious awareness] of the repressed content—repression remains active even when we “know it all.”)

So, back to Don Carlos, Philip is at the end of the drama not just playing castration in order to retain his full actual power, he really is broken and impotent—Schiller wasn’t yet able to imagine the figure of a master who rules through a display of his castration. What he wasn’t able to imagine is the totally new link between authority and friendship that we can observe in today’s power figures: a Master who claims he is “our pal,” who renounces his insignia and presents himself as our equal friend while retaining all his authority with the help of this very self-debasement. In other words, what Schiller was not able to think is the reversal of the status of castration in the functioning of power: in the traditional power, castration that sustains it resides in the fact that the phallic insignia which provide power are decentered with regard to the subject; in contemporary power, the castration that sustains power is the very fact of being deprived of the insignia of power.

[1] Sandra Mass, “The ‘Volkskörper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic,” in New Dangerous Liasions: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, ed. Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander Geppert (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 233–50.

[2] Quoted from http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=8062&ausgabe=200505.

[3] Incidentally, there is a similar weird turn in David Fincher’s putstanding thriller Seven in which John Doe, a religiously obsessed serial murderer, executes the plan of killing seven people each of whom is punished for one of the deadly sins. At the film’s end John Doe himself is shot by detective Mills who, out of anger, kills him because Doe killed his pregnant wife; Doe’s sin is envy (he envied Mills for his ordinary happy family life), and Mills’s sin is anger. . . but why then did Doe decapitate Mills’s wife? Her death clearly doesn’t fit the series: she committed no sin, she is killed just to awaken uncontrollable anger in Mills. We have here a temporal reversal: Mills is punished for something (anger) that explodes after he is punished for it, and is even triggered by this punishment. So it is as if woman’s death doesn’t count for itself, she can be killed just to punish her man.

[4] One should mention also Verdi’s Don Carlo, his absolute masterpiece where he comes very close to a Wagnerian musical drama, with almost no traditional arias—except the famous duo on friendship.

[5] We can also clearly see the difference between Philip’s search for a friend and Prince Hal’s friendship with Falstaff in Shakespeare: Prince Hal engages in this friendship for purely manipulative reasons and rejects Falstaff the moment he ascends the throne.

[6] Mark William Roche, Tragedy and Comedy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 125.

[7] I rely here extensively on Alenka Zupančič, “Kostumografija moči” (manuscript in Slovene, July 2014).

[8] Quoted from Hegel's Philosophy of Right (marxists.org). If the king is only a formal point of decision—all the content is provided to him by his expert counselors, and he only has to sign his name—is there nonetheless a level at which he can act arbitrarily also at the level of content and not only confer the form of an abyssal decision onto a prepared content? Would such a level not be necessarily, by definition, illegal, a space in which the king not only can but is even expected to violate the law? Frank Ruda noted that there effectively is such a level: one of the prerogatives of the king is his right to clemency, to arbitrarily pardon criminals who were condemned by the law.

[9] It is well known that Dostoyevsky modeled his figure of the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov on Schiller’s Inquisitor; however, one can immediately see the superiority of Schiller’s figure.

[10] Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spy Master (London: Orion Books, 2006), 168.

[11] Quoted from Hegel - Phenomenology of Mind (marxists.org).

[12] Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University press 2007, p. 111–12.

[13] G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, available at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/.

[14] See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (London: Blackwell, 1990).

[15] Rebecca Comay, “Hegel’s Last Words,” in The End of History, ed. A. E. Swiffen (London: Routledge, 2012), 234.

[16] Alain Badiou, Pornographie du temps présent (Paris: Fayard, 2013), 37.

[17] Alenka Zupančič, op.cit.

[18] Is then Jesus on the Cross not the ultimate castrated King/Authority, the one who exerts absolute power on behalf of his very “castration” (humiliating death on the Cross)? But if this is the case, whose power does this display of castration sustain?

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Let me begin with the standard stupid question: if I were allowed to take only one piece of music to an island, what would it be? For decades, my answer has been the same: Arnold Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. What makes Gurrelieder really unique is the mirroring between its musical line and the history of music itself: the shift from the late-romantic Wagnerian heavy pathos to atonal Sprechgesang is rendered in the very progress of the piece.

Otherwise, my tastes are classical, and definitely ‘eurocentric,’ with a preference for chamber music... seriously? How to bring this together with my total dedication to Gurrelieder which demands around six-hundred musicians for a proper performance? Schoenberg’s preferences for chamber music are well-known: in a nice swipe at American vulgarity, he said that everything in music can be told with a maximum of five or six instruments – we only need orchestras so that Americans get it… How, then, to account for Gurrelieder, which demands soloists, a full orchestra and three choruses? In the notes to his recording, Simon Rattle proposed a wonderful formula: Gurrelieder is a chamber-music piece for orchestra and chorus – this, effectively, is how one should approach it.

So here we go with Bach: while I cannot follow any of his Passions without yawning, I find his solo violin and cello sonatas irresistible. Take the second movement (fugue) of Bach's three sonatas for solo violin, in which the entire polyphonic structure is condensed in one instrumental line, so that, although we "effectively" hear only one violin line, in our imagination we automatically supplement it with other unheard implicit melodic lines, and seem to hear the multitude of melodic lines in their interaction. However, the actual condensation to one single line is by no means simply suspended: the key element of the artistic effect is that we are all the time aware of how we effectively hear only one line - it is for that reason that the transcriptions of Bach's solo sonatas for organ or the string trio or quartet, even when they are of the highest quality, retain an element of "vulgarity," obscenity even, as if, when we "hear it all," some constitutive void is filled in, which is the elementary definition of kitsch.

     With Mozart, it's similar: my first choice are his string quintets and, among his operas, Cosi fan tutte. I love Peter Sellars’s video version of Cosi which takes place in the present (a US naval base, with Despina as a local bar owner, and the two gentlemen—naval officers—returning not as “Albanians,” but as violet-and-yellow-haired punks). The premise is that the only true passionate love is that between the philosopher Alfonzo and Despina, who experiments with two young couples in order to act out the impasse of their own desperate love. This reading hits the very heart of the Mozartean irony which is to be opposed to cynicism. If, to simplify it to the utmost, a cynic fakes a belief that he privately mocks (preaching sacrifice for the fatherland, say, while privately amassing profits...), an ironist takes things more seriously than he appears to—he secretly believes in what he publicly mocks. Alfonzo and Despina, the cold philosophical experimenter and the corrupt, dissolute servant girl, are the true passionate lovers using the two pathetic couples and their ridiculous erotic imbroglio as instruments to confront their traumatic attachment. And it is only today, in our postmodern age, allegedly full of irony and lacking all belief, that the Mozartean irony reaches its full actuality, confronting us with the embarrassing fact that—not in our interior lives, but in our acts themselves, in our social practice—we believe much more than we are aware of.

     With Beethoven, things change – for personal reasons, Fidelio is my choice. This was the first opera I listened to in its entirety in my early teens and it impressed me deeply – even now, over half a century later, I shiver at the simple but sublime beauty of the moment when the trumpet announces the Minister’s arrival at the very point when Leonora puts her life at stake to save Florestan… I also think that the usual suspects for Beethoven's greatest achievement - the Late string quartets, inclusive of the Great Fugue – are grossly overrated. (The only great thing about the Great Fuguge is that it seems to announce Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock music.) From an immanent musical standpoint, Beethoven's late piano sonatas are much superior...

To put it bluntly, Beethoven's music undoubtedly 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 Leonore 3 ouverture. How vulgar are the climactic moments of Leonora 3 (and 2, the more utterly boring version) in comparison with Mozart's ouverture to Magic Flute, where Mozart still retains what one cannot but call a proper sense of musical decency, interrupting the melodic line before it reaches the full orchestra climactic repetition and, instead, jumping directly to the final staccatos! Perhaps, Beethoven himself sensed it, writing another, final, ouverture, the Op. 72c Fidelio – brief and concise, sharp, the very opposite of Leonora's 2 and 3. (The true pearl, however, is the undeservedly underestimated Leonora 1 Op. 138, whose very date is not sure – it is Beethoven at his best, with the beautiful rise to a climax without any embarrassing excesses.)

Is, then, Wagner really the kitsch-extension of what is worst in Beethoven? No: Wagner's true achievement was precisely to provide a proper artistic form for what, in Beethoven, functions as a kitschy excess. (This is exemplary in Rhinegold, THE key Wagner opera, the zero-level ‘music drama’ which clears the slate and thus renders possible the return of ‘transubstantiated’ operatic element from Walkure onwards (already in Act 1), which culminates in the revenge-trio of The Twilight.) Rhinegold is the first and only pure music drama, the first and only work which fully follows the precepts of the music drama (no free melodic improvisations, the music closely follows the drama, etc.)

This brings us to the great duo: Schubert and Schumann. The first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata No 18 in G major (D 894) is a piece I am ready to listen to again and again, I never tire of it. As for Winterreise, yes, who can resist it, but it is crucial to listen to it in its entirety and not just privilege popular hits like “Der Laienmann.“ I've downloaded around 50 versions of Winterreise and my secret wish is to write a kind of history of the shifts in the European ideological mood in the last century as reflected in these versions – for example, Hans Hotter's outstanding 1942 recording of Schubert's Winterreise seems to call for an intentionally anachronistic reading: it is easy to imagine German officers and soldiers listening to this recording in the Stalingrad trenches in the cold Winter of 42/43. Does the topic of Winterreise not evoke a unique consonance with the historical moment? Was not the whole campaign to Stalingrad a gigantic Winterreise, where each German soldier can say for himself the very first lines of the cycle: "I came here a stranger, / As a stranger I depart"? Do the following lines not render their basic experience: "Now the world is so gloomy, / The road shrouded in snow. / I cannot choose the time / To begin my journey, / Must find my own way / In this darkness."

As for Schumann, I am almost pathologically obsessed by his piano masterpieces – I’ve written extensively about Humoresque, which is not a simple piano piece but a song without the vocal line, with the vocal line reduced to silence, so that all we effectively hear is the piano accompaniment. This disappearance of the voice is strictly equivalent to the "death of man," and what is crucial here is not to confuse man ("person") with the subject: the Lacanian subject qua $ is the very outcome of the "death of man." In clear contrast to Foucault, for Lacan, humanism is something which emerged in the Renaissance, and was disposed of with the Kantian break in philosophy - and, we might add, with Schumann in music. This is how one should read the famous "inner voice /innere Stimme/" added by Schumman (in the written partiture) as a third line between the two piano lines, higher and lower: as the vocal melodic line which remains a non-vocalized "inner voice," a kind of musical equivalent to the Heidegger-Derridean "crossed-out" Being. What we actually hear is thus a "variation, but not on a theme," a series of variations without the theme, accompaniment without the main melodic line (which exists only as Augenmusik, music for the eyes only, in the guise of written notes). (No wonder that Schumann composed a "concert without orchestra," a kind of counterpoint to Bartok's "concert for orchestra.") This absent melody is to be reconstructed on the basis of the fact that the first and third levels (the right and the left hand piano lines) do not relate to each other directly, i.e. their relationship is not that of an immediate mirroring: in order to account for their interconnection, one is thus compelled to (re)construct a third, "virtual" intermediate level (melodic line) which, for structural reasons, cannot be played. Its status is that of an impossible-real which can exist only in the guise of a writing, i.e. physical presence would annihilate the two melodic lines we effectively hear in reality (as in Freud's "A child is being beaten," in which the middle fantasy scene was never conscious and has to be reconstructed as the missing link between the first and the last scene). Schuman brings this procedure of absent melody to an apparently absurd self-reference when, later in the same fragment of Humoresque, he repeats the same two effectively played melodic lines, yet this time the score contains no third absent melodic line, no inner voice - what is absent here is the absent melody, i.e. absence itself.

     But enough of heavy theory – let's return to our chronology and confront my biggest love, Richard Wagner, my obsession from my early teens. Even today, my secret dream is to be invited to stage Tristan or Parsifal in Bayreuth or another great opera house. Imagine, along these lines, – my private dream - a Parsifal taking place in a modern megalopolis, with Klingsor as an impotent pimp running a whorehouse; he uses Kundry to seduce members of the “Grail” circle, a rival drug gang. “Grail” is run by the wounded Amfortas whose father Titurel is in a constant delirium induced by too many drugs; Amfortas is under a terrible pressure from the members of his gang to “perform the ritual,” i.e., deliver the daily portion of drugs to them. He was “wounded” (infected by AIDS) through Kundry, his penis bitten while Kundry was giving him fellatio. Parsifal is a young inexperienced son of a single homeless mother who does not get the point of drugs; he “feels the pain” and rejects Kundry’s advances while she is performing fellatio on him. When Parsifal takes over the “Grail” gang, he establishes a new rule for his community: free distribution of drugs…

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     It took me years to move from the fascination with Wagner’s big hits to his true greatness which is most clearly discernible in the second acts of his works (Lohengrin, Walkuere, Twilight of Gods…). Act II of the Twilight is musically infinitely superior to the much more popular Acts I and III. (The exception is Tristan where the absolute masterpiece is Act III.) But it takes years, decades even, to really penetrate a Wagner opera – even now I cannot really relate to his Meistersinger…    

And Verdi, Wagner's great counterpart? I don't exclude him completely – I am quite fond of some of the operas from his late-middle period like Don Carlo where, for example, the big confrontation between the King and the Great Inquisitor is superb. The third name to be mentioned here in Mussorgsky whose Khovantschina is for me something absolutely unique. Already in Boris Godunov, Mussorgsky sees ‘people’ as the impenetrable Real which a human agent/hero tries in vain to penetrate and master — no matter how decisively we act, “all around is darkness and impenetrable gloom,” as Boris Godunov sings in his great monologue in the opera which ends with the Simpleton evoking this same darkness: “Let bitter tears flow. / Weep. . . weep. . . unhappy soul! / The enemy here shall come. / So much blood shall flow. / And the fire shall destroy. . . . Oh, terror! oh, terror! . . . Allow thy tears to flow, / Wretched people!” So what if “People” doesn’t exist as a single agent with a collective Will but is precisely the name for the chaotic density of humanity which thwarts all plans for liberation imposed on it by human agents, the chaotic density which can actualize itself only in the guise of self-destructive fury? Khovantschina brings this insight to its logical extreme, concluding with a collective suicide as the only imaginable act of redemption…

Now comes a bad surprise for most of my readers: no Mahler, no Richard Strauss in my universe (I agree with the old Viennese saying ‘When Richard, then Wagner; when Strauss, then Johann’). My ultimate anti-Adornian sin: I prefer Sibelius's fourth symphony to all of Mahler. And, in the same confessional mode, I have to admit some further guilty pleasures: Shostakovich's symphonies 8, 10, 14 and his first violin concerto, plus SOME of his string quartets (No 3 with its wonderfully Hitchcockian third movement but NOT the vastly overrated No 8 which is too close to kitsch), Prokofiev's first violin sonata plus his film music (Aleksandr Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible), and, why not, Rossini's Cenerentola and Donizetti's Elisir d'amore, a love potion which again clearly functions as the Lacanian objet a. There are many other wonderful moments in this Donizetti's masterpiece – say, towards the end of the Act 1 there is a passage which exemplifies in a musical way the basic thrust of the Hegelian Aufhebung (“sublation,” or retroactive re-positioning). It is basically a trio sustained by a chorus; the love triangle is composed of Adina, a beautiful and wealthy farm owner, Nemorino, a simpleton who deeply loves her, and Belcore, an arrogant and boasting sergeant who also wants to marry Adina. Upon hearing the news that Adina is ready to marry Belcore the same evening, Nemorino entreats her to postpone marriage, and Belcore brutally tells him to fuck off: “Thank heaven dolt, that you are mad / or drunk with wine. / I would choked you, reduced to shreds / if at this moment you were yourself. / So that I can keep my hands under control / go away, fool, hide from me.” The magic, of course, resides in how this simple exchange is put into music: the most impressionable phrase - “va via, buffone, ti ascondi a me” (to be translated as “casse toi, pauvre con” or “fuck off, jerk”) is first sung in an aggressive mode, but is later re-positioned as the background of the predominant love duet. 

Back to more serious waters, although I think Ravel's big hits like Bolero should be publicly burned, I admire very much his chamber music (I shamelessly admit I discovered it through a film, A Heart in Winter from 1992) which should in no way be dismissed as an expression of the intense sense of privacy of the French bourgeoisie. I think that Ravel's chamber music is to be read in the same way as the piano pieces of Eric Satie – and one should bear in mind that, in early 1920s, the last years of his life, Satie was not only a member of the newly constituted French Communist Party, but even a member of its Central Committee – a fact which is absolutely not a mere personal idiosyncrasy or provocation. Recall that Ravel also rejected membership in the Academie Francaise in protest against the way France treated the Soviet Union; he furthermore set to music North African protest songs against French colonial power. So what if, in order to get the most elementary idea of Communism, one should forget all about the extra-Romantic explosions of passion and imagine the clarity of a minimalist order sustained by a gentle freely-imposed discipline? Satie used the term “furniture music (musique d’ameublement)”, implying that some of his pieces should function as a mood-setting background music. Although this may seem to point forwards to the commercialized ambient music (“Muzak”), what Satie aims at is the exact opposite: a music which subverts the gap that separates the figure from the background – when one truly listens to Satie, one “hears the background.” This is the egalitarian Communism in music: a music which refocuses the listener’s attention from the big Theme to its invisible background, in the same way that Communist theory and politics refocuses our attention from big Heroes to the immense work and suffering of the invisible ordinary people.

This brings me finally back to my starting point: Schoenberg and the second Viennese school. I remain here an old Adornian Stalinist: class struggle in music - Schoenberg yes, Stravinsky no. For obvious Freudian reasons, I love Erwartung, the first great musical setting of the feminine hysteria, but also the painfully-beautiful melodic line of his Violin concerto (a (proof, if one is needed, that Schoenberg was far from a cold rational manipulator), and the absolute mastery of his trio. Of Shoenberg's pupils, one should absolutely insist on adding to the great two (Berg, Webern) Hanns Eisler, a great master of what I call (following Schelling) “spiritual corporeality,” the deployment of the spiritual dimension immanent to matter itself. The supreme case are here his Fourteen Ways of Describing the Rain (Op. 70), a twelve-minute exercise in dodecaphony for flute, clarinet, string trio, and piano, first written as a musical accompaniment to Joris Ivens’s documentary Regen (Rain, 1929), a portrayal of Amsterdam during a rainfall. Rewritten in 1941, this piece was premiered in 1944 at Arnold Schoenberg’s home in Los Angeles as part of the celebration of his seventieth birthday, and was highly admired by Shoenberg and Adorno who were otherwise opposed to Eisler’s Communist political engagement. Two other pieces of Eisler’s putatively belong to the same series: the six “Hölderlin Fragments” from his Hollywood Songbook (1942–44, characterized by Matthias Goerne as “the Winterreise of our times”), and his last work, finished a couple of weeks before his death, Serious Songs (1962).

I have to admit this is my limit – I cannot really enjoy what comes after, with some exceptions like Olivier Messiaen, another master of spiritual corporeality whose religious chamber and solo music (Sept versions d'Amen, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus...) is the closest one can get to what I call materialist theology.

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Comrades,

Welcome to the desert of the real.

Zizek Goads and Prods has been up and running for four months. This week, I am holding a flash sale.

The price for a yearly subscription will be $30, less than a dollar a week.

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More than half a century after the May ’68 events in Paris (and elsewhere), the time has come to reflect upon similarities and differences between the sexual liberation and feminism of the 1960s and the protest movements that flourish today.

In the aftermath of ‘68, the French “progressive” press published a whole series of petitions demanding the decriminalization of paedophilia, claiming that in this way the artificial and oppressive culturally-constricted frontier that separates children from adults will be abolished and the right to freely dispose with one’s body will be extended also to children, so only dark forces of “reaction” and oppression can oppose this measure – among the signatories were Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Aragon, Guattari, Deleuze, Lyotard… Today, however, paedophilia is perceived as one of the worst crime and, instead of fighting for it in the name of anti-Catholic progress, it is rather associated with the dark side of the Catholic church, so that fighting against paedophilia is today a progressive task directed at the forces of reaction… The comic victim of this shift was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, still living in the old spirit of the 60s, recently described in an interview how, while, in his young years, he worked in a kindegarten, he regularly played masturbatory games with young girls; to his surprise, he faced a brutal backlash, demanding his removal from the European parliament and prosecution.

This gap that separates the ’68 sexual liberation from today’s struggle for sexual emancipation is clearly discernible in a recent polemical exchange between Germaine Greer and some feminists who swiftly reacted to her critical remarks on MeToo. Their main point was that, while Greer’s main thesis – women should sexually liberate themselves from male domination and assume active sexual life without any recourse to victimhood – was valid in the sexual-liberation movement of the 1960s, today the situation is different. What happened in between is that sexual emancipation of women (their assuming social life as active sexual beings with full freedom of initiative) was itself commodified: true, women are no longer perceived as passive objects of male desire, but their active sexuality itself now appears (in male eyes) as their permanent availability, readiness to engage in sexual interaction. In these new circumstances, saying brutally NO is not a mere self-victimization since it implies the rejection of this new form of sexual subjectivization of women, of demanding of women not only to passively submit to male sexual domination but to act as if they actively want it.

While there is a strong element of truth in this line of argumentation, one should nonetheless also admit how problematic it is too ground the authority of one’s political demands on one’s victimhood status. Is the basic characteristic of today's subjectivity not the weird combination of the free subject who experienced himself as ultimately responsible for his fate and the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status of a victim of circumstances beyond his control? Every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat - if the other smokes, if he casts a covetous glance at me, he already hurts me; this logic of victimization is today universalized, reaching well beyond the standard cases of sexual or racist harassment - recall the growing financial industry of paying damage claims… This notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the extreme Narcissistic perspective: every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject's precarious balance. The paradox is that, in today's predominant form of individuality, the self-centred assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.

One cannot get rid of the suspicion that the Politically Correct cultural Left is getting so fanatical in advocating “progress,” in fighting new and new battles against cultural and sexist “apartheids,” to cover up its own full immersion into global capitalism. Its space is the space in which LGBT+ and MeToo meet Tim Cook and Bill Gates. How did we come to this? As many conservatives noticed (and they are right here), our time is marked by the progressive disintegration of a shared network of customs which ground what George Orwell approvingly referred to as “common decency” - such standards are dismissed as a yoke that subordinates individual freedom to some proto-Fascist organic social forms. In such a situation, the liberal vision of minimalist laws (which should not regulate social life too much but just prevent individuals to encroach upon - to “harass” - each other) reverts into an explosion of legal and moral rules, into an endless process of legalization/moralization called “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores that are allowed to influence the law, only the fact of “harassing” other subjects, who – in the absence of such mores – will decide what counts as “harassment”? There are, in France, associations of obese people which demand that all public campaigns against obesity and for healthy eating habits be stopped, since they hurt the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the “specieism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal – for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegetophobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And so on and so on: incest-marriage, consensual murder and cannibalism…

The problem is here the obvious arbitrariness of the ever new rules – let us take child sexuality: one can argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one can also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on here: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest against the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies, worry when someone condemns members of foreign cultures who live among us for doing exactly this (say, the Roma people preventing children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case of meddling with other “ways of life”… It is thus for necessary structural reasons that this “fight against discrimination” is an endless process endlessly postponing its final point, a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Jean-Claude Michea put it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.”

SEX, CONTRACTS, AND MANNERS

Yes, sex is traversed by power games and violent obscenities, but the difficult thing to admit is that this dimension is immanent to it. Some perspicuous observers have already noticed how the only form of sexual relation that fully meets the Politically Correct criteria would have been a contract drawn between sado-masochist partners. The rise of Political Correctness and the rise of violence are thus two sides of the same coin: insofar as the basic premise of Political Correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual consent, Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which stipulate extreme forms of sado-masochist sex (treating a person like a dog on a collar, slave trading, torture, up to consented killing). In such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of contract negates itself: slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of freedom. It is as if Jacques Lacan’s motif “Kant with Sade” (Marquis de Sade’s brutal hedonism as the truth of Kant’s rigorous ethics) becomes reality in an unexpected way. Before we dismiss this motif as just a provocative paradox, we should reflect upon how this paradox is at work in our social reality itself.

    The declared aim of proposals for sexual contracts which are popping up all around, from the US and UK to Sweden, are, of course, clear: to exclude elements of violence and domination in sexual contacts. The idea is that, before doing it, both partners should sign a document stating their identity, their consent to engage in sexual intercourse, as well as the conditions and limitations of their activity (use of condom, of dirty language, the inviolable right of each partner to step back and interrupt the act at any moment, to inform his/her/their partner about his health (AIDS) and religion, etc.). Sounds good, but a series of problems and ambiguities arise immediately.

    The right to withdraw from sexual interaction at any moment opens up new modes of violence. What if the woman, after seeing her partner naked with erected penis, begins to mock him and tells him to leave? What if the man does the same to her? Can one imagine a more humiliating situation? Clearly, one can find an appropriate way to resolve such impasses only through manners and sensitivity, which by definition cannot be legislated. If one wants to prevent violence and brutality by adding new clauses to the contract, one loses a central feature of sexual interplay which is precisely a delicate balance between what is said and what is not said.

Although I am not a fan of Sex and the City, there is an interesting point made in one of the episodes where Miranda gets involved with a guy who like to talk dirty all the time during sex, and since she prefer to keep silent while making love, he solicits her to also talk whatever dirty things pop up in her mind, with no restraint. First she resists, but then she also gets caught in this game, and things work well, their sex is intense and passionate, till… till she says something that really disturbs her lover, makes him totally withdraw into himself, and leads to the break of their relationship. In the middle of her babble, she mentions that she noticed how he enjoys when, while he makes love to her, she pushes her finger into his ass. Unknowingly, she thereby touches the exception: yes, talk about anything you want, spill out all the dirty images that pop up in your head, except that.

The lesson of this incident is important: even the universality of talking freely is based on some exception, not in the sense of extreme brutality. The prohibited detail is in itself a minor and rather innocent thing, and we can only guess what the guy is so sensitive about it – in all probability, it is because the passive experience it involved (anal penetration) disturbs his masculine identification. Sexual interplay is full of such exceptions where a silent understanding and tact offer the only way to proceed when one wants things done but not explicitly spoken about, when extreme emotional brutality can be enacted in the guise of politeness and when moderate violence itself can get sexualized. 

    Last but not least, should such contracts be legally binding or not? If not, what prevents brutal men just to sign it and then violate it? If yes, can one even imagine the legal nightmare its violation may involve? This does not mean that we should endorse the French letter signed by Catherine Deneuve and others which criticizes the “excesses” of MeToo “puritanism” and defended traditional forms of gallantry and seduction. The problem is not that MeToo goes too far, sometimes approaching witch hunt, and that more moderation and understanding are needed, but that the way MeToo addresses the issue. In downplaying the complexity of sexual interaction, it not only blurs the line between lewd misconduct and criminal violence but also makes invisible forms of extreme psychological violence masked as politeness and respect.

In replying to those who insisted on a difference between Weinstein and Louis CK, MeToo activists claimed that those who say this have no idea about how male violence works and is experienced, and that a masturbation in front of women can be experienced as no less violent than physical imposition. Although there is a moment of truth in these claims, one should nonetheless pose a clear limit to the logic that sustains this argumentation: what one feels cannot be the ultimate measure of authenticity since feelings can also lie – if we deny this, we simply deny the Freudian unconscious. In a truly effective patriarchal domination, a woman doesn’t even experience her role as that of a humiliated and exploited victim, she simply accepts her submission as part of the order of things.

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    One should also bear in mind that patriarchal domination corrupts both of its poles, inclusive of its victims – or, to quote Arthur Koestler: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.” Consequently, one should also talk about feminine manipulation and emotional brutality (ultimately as a desperate reply to male domination) – women fight back any way they can. And one should admit that, in many parts of our society in which traditional patriarchy is to a large extent undermined, men are no less under pressure, so the proper strategy should be to address also male anxieties and to strive for a pact between women’s struggle for emancipation and male concern’s. Male violence against women is to a large extent a panicky reaction to the fact that their traditional authority is undermined, and part of the struggle for emancipation should be to demonstrate to men how accepting emancipated women will release them of their anxieties and enable them to lead more satisfied lives.

    The main problem with contractual sex is not only its legal form but also its hidden bias: contractual form obviously privileges casual sex where partners don’t yet know each other and want to avoid misunderstandings about their one-night stand. One needs to extend our attention also to the long-term relationship permeated with forms of violence and domination in much more subtle ways than the spectacular Weinstein style enforced sex. 

Ultimately, no laws and contracts help here, only a revolution in mores. But why talk about politeness and manners today when we are facing what appears to be much more pressing “real” problems? In doing it, do we not regress to the level of de Quincey’s famous quip about the simple art of murder – “How many people began with unleashing terror and economic catastrophes, and ended up with behaving badly at a party?” But manners DO matter – in tense situations, they are a matter of life and death, a thin line that separates barbarism from civilization. There is one surprising fact about the latest outbursts of public vulgarities that deserves to be noted. Back in the 1960s, occasional vulgarities were associated with political Left: student revolutionaries often used common language to emphasize their contrast to official politics with its polished jargon. Today, vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical Right, so that the Left finds itself in a surprising position of the defender of decency and public manners.

Politeness (manners, gallantry) is more than just obeying external legality and less than pure moral activity – it is the ambiguously imprecise domain of what one is not strictly obliged to do (if one doesn’t do it, one doesn’t break any laws), but what one is nonetheless expected to do. We are dealing here with implicit unspoken regulations, with questions of tact, with something towards which subject has as a rule a non-reflected relationship: something that is part of our spontaneous sensitivity, a thick texture of customs and expectations which is part of our inherited substance of mores. Therein resides the self-destructive deadlock of Political Correctness: it tries to explicitly formulate, legalize even, the stuff of manners.

A LESSON FROM SUMMA THEOLOGICA

In the West, at least, we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However, we should bear in mind also the (no less massive) fact millions of people on a daily basis flirt, play the game of seduction, with the clear aim to get a partner for making love. The result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an active role in this game. When women dress provocatively to attract male gaze, when they “objectify” themselves to seduce them, they don’t do it offering themselves as passive objects: they are the active agents of their own “objectification,” manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including the full right to step out of the game at any moment even if, to the male gaze, this appears in contradiction with previous “signals.” This active role of women is their freedom which bothers so much all kind of fundamentalists, from Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and playing with bananas and other fruit which resembles penis to our own ordinary male chauvinist who explodes in violence against a woman who first “provokes” him and then rejects his advances. Feminine sexual liberation is not just a puritan withdrawal from being “objectivized” (as sexual object for men) but the right to actively play with self-objectivization, offering herself and withdrawing at will. Will it be still possible to proclaim these simple facts, or will the Politically Correct pressure compel us to accompany all these games with some formal-legal proclamation (of consensuality, etc.)?

    This marginal but crucial moment is what Lacan called surplus-enjoyment, and we find another unexpected example of it in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica where he draws the conclusion that the blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful for them (and St. John Bosco draw the same conclusion in the opposite direction: the damned in Hell will also be able to see the joy of those in Heaven, which will add to their suffering). Aquinas, of course, takes care to avoid the obscene implication that good souls in Heaven can find pleasure in observing the terrible suffering of other souls: good Christians should feel pity when they see suffering — will the blessed in Heaven also feel pity for the torments of the damned? Aquinas’s answer is no: not because they directly enjoy seeing suffering, but because they enjoy the exercise of divine justice… But what if enjoying Divine Justice is the rationalization, the moral cover-up, for sadistically enjoying the neighbor’s eternal suffering? What makes Aquinas’s formulation suspicious is the surplus enjoyment it introduces: as if the simple pleasure of living in the bliss of Heaven is not enough, and has to be supplemented by an additional surplus enjoyment of being allowed to take a look at another’s suffering—only in this way, the blessed souls “may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly” … We can here easily imagine the appropriate scene in Heaven: when some blessed souls complain that the nectar served was not as tasty as the last time, and that blissful life up there is rather boring after all, angels serving the blessed souls would snap back: “You don’t like it here? So take a look at how life is down there, at the other end, and maybe you will learn how lucky you are to be here!” And the corresponding scene in Hell should also be imagined as totally different from St John Bosco’s vision: far away from the Divine gaze and control, the damned soul enjoy an intense and pleasurable life in Hell—only from time to time, when Devil’s administrators of Hell learn that the blessed souls from Heaven will be allowed to observe briefly life in Hell, they kindly implore the damned souls to stage a performance and pretend to suffer terribly in order to impress the idiots from Heaven … In short, the sight of the other’s suffering is the objet a, the obscure cause of desire which sustains our own happiness (bliss in Heaven)—if we take it away, our bliss appears in all its sterile stupidity. (Incidentally, does the same not hold for our daily portion of Third World horrors – wars, starvations, violence – on TV screens? We need it to sustain the happiness of our consumerist Heaven…) So, perhaps, this would be the way to read Lubitsch’s title “Heaven can wait” – let’s stay in Hell… Heaven can wait because the only true heaven is a moderate pleasant hell.

As Laurent de Sutter demonstrated, chemistry (in its scientific version) is becoming part of us: large aspects of our lives are characterized by the management of our emotions by drugs, from everyday use of sleeping pills and anti-depressants to hard narcotics. We are not just controlled by impenetrable social powers, our very emotions are “outsourced” to chemical stimulation. The stakes of this chemical intervention are double and contradictory: we use drugs to keep external excitement (shocks, anxieties, etc.) under control, i.e., to de-sensitize us for them, and to generate artificial excitement if we are depressed and lack desire. Drugs thus react to the two opposed threats to our daily lives, over-excitement and depression, and it is crucial to notice how these two uses of drugs relate to the couple of private and public: in the developed Western countries, our public lives more and more lack collective excitement (exemplarily provided by a genuine political engagement), while drugs supplant this lack with private (or, rather, intimate) forms of excitement - drugs perform the euthanasia of public life and the artificial excitation of private life.

But why talk about politeness and public manners today when we are facing what appears to be much more pressing “real” problems? In doing it, do we not regress to the level of de Quincey’s famous quip about the simple art of murder – “How many people began with unleashing terror and economic catastrophes, and ended up with behaving badly at a party?” But manners DO matter – in tense situations, they are a matter of life and death, a thin line that separates barbarism from civilization. There is one surprising fact about the latest outbursts of public vulgarities that deserves to be noted. Back in the 1960s, occasional vulgarities were associated with political Left: student revolutionaries often used common language to emphasize their contrast to official politics with its polished jargon. Today, vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical Right, so that the Left finds itself in a surprising position of the defender of decency and public manners. Politeness (manners, gallantry) is more than just obeying external legality and less than pure moral activity – it is the ambiguously imprecise domain of what one is not strictly obliged to do (if one doesn’t do it, one doesn’t break any laws), but what one is nonetheless expected to do. We are dealing here with implicit unspoken regulations, with questions of tact, with something towards which subject has as a rule a non-reflected relationship: something that is part of our spontaneous sensitivity, a thick texture of customs and expectations which is part of our inherited substance of mores (Sitten). Therein resides the self-destructive deadlock of Political Correctness: it tries to explicitly formulate, legalize even, the stuff of manners.

DO SEXBOTS HAVE RIGHTS?

The Politically Correct moralism reached one of its peaks in the recent debate about the need to regulate the human–sexbots (sexual robots) relations – here is a report on this weird phenomenon:

“Last year a sex robot named Samantha was ‘molested’ and seriously damaged at a tech industry festival; the incident spurred debate on the need to raise the issue of ethics in relation to machines. / While the developers of sexbots have claimed that their projects will do anything to indulge their customers’ desires, it seems that they might start rejecting some persistent men. /…/ people ignore the fact that they may seriously damage the machine, just because it cannot say ‘no’ to their ‘advances’. /…/ future humanoid sex robots might be sophisticated enough to ‘enjoy a certain degree of consciousness’ to consent to sexual intercourse, albeit, to their mind, conscious feelings were not necessary components of being able to give or withhold consent. /…/ in legal terms, introduction of the notion of consent into human-robot sexual relationships is vital in a way similar to sexual relations between humans and it will help prevent the creation of a ‘class of legally incorporated sex-slaves.’”[1]

Although these ideas are just a specific application of the proposal of the EU to impose the basic “rights” of AI entities, the domain of sexbots brings out in a clear way the implicit presuppositions that determine such thinking. We are basically dealing with a laziness in thinking: by adopting such “ethical” attitude, we comfortably avoid the complex web of underlying problems. We should avoid the trap of getting caught in the debate about the status of sexbots with AI: do they really possess some kind of autonomy or dignity and therefore deserve some rights? The answer to this question is, at least for the time being, obviously negative: our sexbots are just mechanic dolls with no inner life. The heart of the matter lies elsewhere: the first suspicion is that the proponents of such demands do not really care about AI machine (they are well aware that they cannot really experience pain and humiliation) but about aggressive humans: what they want is not to alleviate the suffering of the machines but to squash the problematic aggressive desires, fantasies and pleasures of us, humans.

This becomes clear the moment we include the topic of video games and virtual reality: if, instead of sexbots (actual plastic bodies whose (re)actions are regulated by AI), we imagine games in virtual reality (or, even more plastic, augmented reality) in which we can sexually torture and brutally exploit persons – although, in this case, it is clear that no actual entity is suffering, the proponents of the rights of AI machines would nonetheless in all probability insist on imposing some limitations on what we, humans, can do in virtual space. The argument that those who fantasize about such things are prone to do them in real life very problematic: the relationship between imagining and doing it in real life is much more complex in both relations. We often do horrible things while imagining that we are doing something noble, and vice versa, we often secretly daydream about doing things we would in no way be able to perform in real life. We enter thereby the old debate: if someone has brutal tendencies, is it better to allow him to play with them in virtual space or with machines, with the hope that, in this way, he will be satisfied enough and not do them in real life? We encounter here the structure of fetishist disavowal: while the offender brutally mistreats his sexbot, he knows very well that he is just playing with a mechanic plastic doll, but he nonetheless gets caught in his fiction and enjoys it for the real (the simple proof: his orgasm, if he reaches it, is real, not his fiction). The implication of this fetishist structure is not that the subject who participates in it is naively stupid but, on the contrary, that even in our real sexual interaction with another living human being, fiction is already at work, i.e., I use my partner as an object through which I stage my fictions. Concretely, even a brutal sadist who mistreats an actual woman uses her to enact his fictions.  

    Another question: if a sexbot rejects our rough advances, does this not simply mean that it was programmed in this way? So why not re-program it in a different way? Or, to go to the end, why not program it in such a way that it welcomes our brutal mistreatment? (The catch is, of course, will we, the sadistic perpetrators, still enjoy it in this case? The sadist wants his victim to be terrified and ashamed.) Yet another question: what if an evil programmer makes the sexbots themselves sadists who enjoy brutally mistreating us, its partners? If we confer rights to AI sexbots and prohibit their brutal mistreating, this means that we treat them as minimally autonomous and responsible entities – so should we also treat them as minimally “guilty” if they mistreat us, or should we just blame their programmer?

    But the basic mistake of the advocates of rights of AI entities is that they presuppose our, human, standards (and rights) as the highest norm. What if, with the explosive development of AI, new entities will emerge with what we could conditionally call a “psychology” (series of attitudes or mind sets) which will be incompatible with ours, but in some sense definitely “higher” than ours (measured by our standards, they can appear either more “evil” or more “good” than ours)? What right do WE (humans) have to measure them with our ethical standards? 

    So let’s conclude this detour with a provocative thought: maybe, a true sign of ethical and subjective autonomy of a sexbot would have been not that it rejects our advances but that, even if it was programmed to reject our brutal treatment, secretly starts to enjoy it? In this way, the sexbot would become a true subject of desire, divided and inconsistent as we humans are.      

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[1] Quoted from https://sputniknews.com/science/201804101063394315-sex-robots-reject-humans/.

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The work of Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, seems to lend itself to a teleological reading, progressing towards its dark conclusion. It began with Bergfilme which celebrated heroism and bodily effort in the extreme conditions of mountain climbing; it was followed by her two »Nazi« documentaries, celebrating the political and sport bodily discipline, concentration and strength of will; then, after World War II, in her photo albums, she rediscovered her ideal of bodily beauty and graceful self-mastery in the Nubi African tribe; finally, in the last decades, she learned the difficult art of deep sea diving and started shooting documentaries about the strange life in the dark depths of the sea.

We thus seem to obtain a clear trajectory from the top to the bottom: we begin with the individuals struggling at the mountain tops and their gradual descent, untill we reach the amorphous thriving of Life itself at the bottom of the sea - is not what she encountered down there her ultimate object, the obscene and irresistibly thriving eternal Life itself, what she was searching for all along? And does this not apply also to her personality? It effectively seems that the fear of those who are fascinated by Leni is no longer »When will she die?«, but »Will she EVER die?« - although we rationally know she will soon die, we somehow do not really believe it, secretly convinced that she will go on forever…

     This continuity is usually given a »proto-Fascist« twist, as is the case in the famous Susan Sontag essay on Leni »Fascinating Fascism«. The idea is that even her pre- and post-Nazi films articulate the vision of life which is »proto-Fascist«: Leni's Fascism is deeper than her direct celebration of the Nazi politics, it resides already in her pre-political aesthetics of Life, in her fascination with the beautiful bodies displaying their disciplined movements… Perhaps, it is time to problematize this topos. Let us take Das blaue Licht: is it not possible to read the film also in exactly the opposite way? Is Junta, the lone and wild mountain girl, not an outcast who almost becomes the victim of a pogrom by the villagers – a pogrom which cannot but remind us of the anti-Semitic pogroms? Perhaps, it is not an accident that Bela Balasy, Leni's lover at that time who co-wrote the scenario with her, was a Marxist…

     The problem is here much more general, it goes far beyond Leni. Let us take the very opposite of Leni, Arnold Schoenberg: in the second part of Harmonienlehre, his major theoretical manifesto from 1911, he develops his opposition to tonal music in terms which, superficially, almost recall later Nazi anti-Semitic tracts: the tonal music has become a »diseased,« »degenerated« world in need of a cleansing solution; the tonal system has given in to »inbreeding and incest«; romantic chords such as the diminished seventh are »hermaphroditic,« »vagrant« and »cosmopolitan«… nothing easier than to claim that such a messianic-apocalyptic attitude is part of the same »spiritual situation« which gave birth to the Nazi »final solution.« This, however, is precisely the conclusion one should AVOID: what makes Nazism repulsive is not the rhetoric of final solution AS SUCH, but the concrete twist it gives to it.

Another popular topic of this kind of analyses, closer to Leni, is the allegedly »proto-Fascist« character of the mass choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies (parades, mass performances on the stadiums, etc.); if one finds it also in Socialism, one immediately draws the conclusion about a »deeper solidarity« between the two »totalitarianisms.« Such a procedure, the very prototype of ideological liberalism, misses the point: not only are such mass performances not inherently Fascist; they are not even »neutral,« waiting to be appropriated by Left or Right - it was Nazism who stole them and appropriated them from the workers' movement, their original site of birth. None of the »proto-Fascist« elements is per se Fascist, what makes them »Fascist« is only their specific articulation – or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould's terms, all these elements are »ex-apted« by Fascism. In other words, there is no »Fascism avant la lettre,« because it is the letter itself (the nomination) which makes out of the bundle of elements Fascism proper.

Along the same lines, one should radically reject the notion that discipline (from self-control to bodily training) is a »proto-Fascist« feature - the very predicate »proto-Fascist« should be abandonned: it is the exemplary case of a pseudo-concept whose function is to block conceptual analysis. When we say that the organized spectacle of thousands of bodies (or, say, the admiration of sports which demand high effort and self-control like mountain climbing) is »proto-Fascist,« we say strictly nothing, we just express a vague association which masks our ignorance. So when, three decades ago, Kung Fu films were popular (Bruce Lee etc.), was it not obvious that we were dealing with a genuine working class ideology of youngsters whose only means of success was the disciplinary training of their only possession, their bodies? Spontaneity and the »let it go« attitude of indulging in excessive freedoms belong to those who have the means to afford it – those who have nothing have only their discipline. The »bad« bodily discipline, if there is one, is not the collective training, but, rather, jogging and body-building as part of the New Age myth of the realization of the Self's inner potentials – no wonder that the obsession with one's body is an almost obligatory part of the passage of ex-Leftist radicals into the »maturity« of pragmatic politics: from Jane Fonda to Joschka Fischer, the »period of latency« between the two phases was marked by the focus on one's own body.

So, back to Leni, what this means is not that one should dismiss her Nazi engagement as a limited unfortunate episode. The true problem is to sustain the tension which cuts through her work: the tension between the artistic perfection of her procedures and the ideological project which »co-opted« them. Why should her case be different from that of Ezra Pound, W.B. Yates, and other modernists with Fascist tendencies who long ago became part of our artistic canon? Perhaps, the search for the »true ideological identity« of Leni is a misleading one: there is no such identity, she was genuinely thrown around, inconsistent, caught in a cobweb of conflicting forces.

Is then the best way to mark her death not to take the risk of fully enjoying a film like Das blaue Licht which contains the possibility of a political reading of her work totally different from the predominant one?

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No, I never fasten – and for a simple reason. I am a workaholic and I do not want to spend time worrying about my eating habits. I do not fasten not because I like eating but because I don’t care about it – it’s an unpleasant duty to be done as quickly and painlessly as possible. This is why my favoured places for eating are small fast food corners in provincial gas stations in Island where defrozen pizzas or hamburgers are the top offer.

My dream of the ultimate food is: take totally different elements like chocolate cake, fresh fruit, pork chop with creamy sauce, etc., mix them into a monotonous paste, and then cut the paste into small pieces that you eat till you are full. In such a way, you can eat a universal meal that defies all categorization. (For this reason, I also hate meat where you can see directly that it was of an animal, like kidneys or tongue. Meat must be “abstract,” it has to look like it was made in a factory – I cannot even imagine eating something like the Scottish haggis - a sausage full of entrails - or a boiled goat’s head as they do it in Island.) As for the accompanying drink, a mixture of diet coke and expensive wine is my first choice, just to ruin the taste of the vine… no wonder my friends joke that if there will ever be a Hague tribunal of crimes against food, I will be the first one arrested and delivered to it!

I can eat exquisite food, but it must be in a company, so that the point is not to enjoy food but the accompanying conversation. To do it alone is like masturbating in public. This, however, does not mean that I do not follow certain rituals in eating. When I am alone, my favorite ritual is that of a 10-minutes lunch. I open a can of ordinary food (like beans with cheap sausages), spill it out into a casserole, and while the food is getting warm, I am already eating it with a spoon (I begin on the edges where it first warms). When I am finished, I quickly wash the casserole, so that the entire meal takes a maximum 10 minutes.

While abroad in a hotel, my ritual is to eat cheap and fast – I go to the nearest supermarket and buy the “lowest” local products – in the UK, it is pork pies or canned beef; in the US, it is spam or a can of chicken with corn. I always eat them cold.

What I hate most is the Politically Correct politicization of eating. Recently, in Germany, I got into a conflict with my friends who wanted to go to a Lebanese place – but I hate humus which reminds me of the food prepared by cows for their young offspring (they first make it warm and soft by munching it in their mouth and then they feed to their offspring). So I insisted on a traditional German plate with pork chops and onions, and I was treated by them almost like a neo-Nazi racist…

My secret pleasure is in violating rules. When in Israel, I like to go to an Italian place and order spaghetti carbonara which violate all kosher rules (they mix cream with meat which is pork ham, of course). In India, I got into trouble when I insisted that I want a mixed beef-pork stew, to embarrass both Hindus and Muslims in my company.

But a place that I really want to visit is an expensive restaurant in Paris where, so I was told, the waiter rejects your order if it is not a correct one. If you order a wrong wine with your main course, the waiter coldly informs you that he cannot serve you this combination, without indicating what would be the appropriate drink – you have to work hard to guess it…

This is why I do not fasten. Would you accept my invitation and eat with me?      

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Comrades,

Welcome to the desert of the real.

I am new to Substack, but already feel at home. I can publish what I want, when I want, and communicate directly with you, my readers.

This year, I will endeavour to publish twice a week; Politics midweek, Culture or Bonus Obscenities on the weekend.

Below, a small essay about two version of the same joke.

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Sometimes a key conceptual difference is best explained by two different versions of the same joke. I knew for years a classic vulgar joke about an American who seduces a Japanese lady during a business trip to Tokyo; they end up in bed, and during their passionate love-making, the woman repeatedly shouts two words in Japanese that the American doesn’t understand but presumes they express her full pleasure. The next day he goes to play golf with his business partners and after he hits the ball, his partners shout the same words as the lady the previous night. Perplexed, he asks them what these words mean, and they explain it to him: “Wrong hole!”

Recently I was told another version: after he hits the ball on the golf course, all his partners applaud passionately because he put the ball into a hole with the first strike. He wants to join their celebration and repeats loudly the two words he heard during the love-making, presuming they express pleasure and satisfaction, but his partners’ faces consternate in surprise. He asks one of them what was wrong, and gets the answer: “Are you making fun of us? Why are you shouting ‘Wrong hole!’ when you put the ball into the right hole?” The vulgarity of the joke notwithstanding, the difference between its two versions is worth a closer look. In both cases, the first act is a double failure: not only with regard to what went on (he penetrates the wrong hole of the lady) but also a misunderstanding (the American misreads the woman’s cries as praise); the misunderstanding is clarified in the second act, but in the opposite direction. In the first version, the American’s golf partners repeat the same words because, as with the Japanese lady, he missed the proper hole; in the second version, he himself repeats the two words he doesn’t understand because this time he did hit the right hole, and he thinks he is joining the celebration of his success. You do the wrong thing (miss the proper hole), and the words are used (by the partners) in its right meaning; you do the right thing (ball in the hole), and you use the words in the wrong meaning.

As in hardcore movies, the penetrated woman is presumed to enjoy it ecstatically even if the male partner put it into a wrong hole – and in some sense, since “there is no sexual relationship,” sexual encounter is always a failed one, the hole is always a wrong one, the man misreads his act as a triumph. If the man repeats the act of filling a hole in a non-sexual context (like playing golf), there are two options. If you miss the hole again, the big Other (embodied here in your partners on the golf course) will repeat the women’s words, and you will finally get the message that your “triumph” was a painful fiasco. If you hit the right hole, you appear an even greater idiot because, unknowingly, you declare it a failure, and the big Other is offended…The key feature here is that this joke works only when the first act is sexual and the second is asexual (playing golf). Let’s try to reimagine it in the opposite order: I play golf with my partners, I miss the hole and I hear them shouting two words that I don’t understand; the same evening, I make love with a Japanese woman and hear her shouting the same two words which I don’t understand, so I ask her what they mean… but wouldn’t it be more logical to ask already my partners on the golf course than to raise the question in the middle of (what was for me at least) a passionate intercourse?

So the joke works because (due to a vulgar association of the two holes to be filled in) in sex the hole is always in some way missed and the communication misunderstood, while in asexual life (overdetermined by sexual innuendos) I may hit the right hole or not, but the misunderstanding persists. We can speculate that this is the general structure of our lives as sexed beings: sex remains a mess, and the only way to introduce a little bit of order into this mess is through engaging in non-sexual activities which, although they remain overshadowed by sex, allow us to escape the vortex of sex. My reading is thus that the second version of the joke is the right one: I hit the right hole, but my mistake (shouting “Wrong hole!”) is also right at the level of sexuality because there is no sexual relationship - I am right without knowing it, of course, and the big Other which corrects my misunderstanding is wrong.

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Comrades,

Welcome to the desert of the real.

I am new to Substack, but already feel at home. I can publish what I want, when I want, and communicate directly with you, my readers.

This year, I will endeavour to publish twice a week; Politics midweek, Culture or Bonus Obscenities on the weekend.

Today, I am mixing it up with a midweek Bonus Obscenity.

Enjoy! But not too much!

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The impasses of today’s consumerism provide a clear case of the Lacanian distinction between plaisir and jouissance: on the one hand we have the consumerist calculating his plaisirs, well-protected from all kinds of harassments and other health threats; on the other hand we have the drug addict (or smoker or…) bent on self-destruction. The basic strategy of enlightened consumerist hedonism is to deprive enjoyment of its excessive dimension, of its disturbing surplus, of the fact that it serves nothing. Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it is healthy, that it doesn't threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate yes, but fat free, coke yes, but diet, coffee yes, but without caffeine, beer yes, but without alcohol, mayonnaise yes, but without cholesterol, sex yes, but safe sex...

We are here in the domain of what Lacan calls the discourse of University, as opposed to the discourse of the Master: a Master goes to the end in his consummation, he is not constrained by petty utilitarian considerations (which is why there is a certain formal homology between the traditional aristocratic master and a drug-addict focused on his deadly enjoyment), while the consumerist's pleasures are regulated by scientific knowledge propagated by the university discourse. The decaffeinated enjoyment we thus obtain is a semblance of enjoyment, not its Real, and it is in this sense that Lacan talks about the imitation of enjoyment in the discourse of University. The prototype of this discourse is the multiplicity of reports in popular magazines which advocate sex as good for health: sexual act works like jogging, strengthens the heart, relaxes our tensions, even kissing is good for our health.

However, there seems to be one big exception in this happy universe of healthy enjoyment: cigarettes. Smoking is more and more threated as a lethal addiction, and this feature obliterates all its other characteristics (it can relax me, it helps to establish friendly contacts…). The strengthening of this prohibition is easily discernible in the gradual change of the obligatory warning on cigarette boxes: years ago, we usually got a neutral expert statement like the Surgeon General’s warning: “Smoking may seriously endanger your health.” More recently, the tone gets more and more aggressive, shifting from the university discourse to a direct Master’s injunction: “Smoking kills!” - a clear warning that the excess enjoyment is lethal; furthermore, this warning is getting larger and larger and accompanied by hardcore photos of open lungs black from tar, etc.

No wonder, then, that the prohibition of smoking expands almost exponentially. First, all offices were declared "smoke-free," then flights, then restaurants, then airports, then bars, then private clubs, then, in some campuses, 50 yards around the entrances to the buildings, then - in a unique case of pedagogical censorship, reminding us of the famous Stalinist practice of retouching the photos of nomenklatura – the US Postal Service removed the cigarette from the stamps with the photo-portrait of blues guitarist Robert Johnson and of Jackson Pollock. These prohibitions target the other's excessive and risky enjoyment, embodied in the act of "irresponsibly" lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply with an unabashed pleasure (in contrast to Clintonite yuppies who do it without inhaling, or who have sex without actual penetration, or food without fat) – indeed, as Lacan put it, after God is dead, nothing is anymore permitted.

The best indicator of this new status of smoking is, as usual, Hollywood. After the gradual dissolution of the Hays code from the late 1950s onwards, when all the taboos (homosexuality, explicit sex, drugs, etc.etc.) were suspended, one taboo not only remained but was newly imposed as a new prohibition, a kind of replacement for the multiplicity of the old Hays code prohibitions: smoking. Back in the classic Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s, smoking on the screen was not only totally normal, it even functioned as one of the great seduction techniques (recall, in To Have or to Have Not, Laureen Bacall asking Humphrey Bogart for fire). Today, the only rare people who smoke on screen are Arab terrorists, other criminals and anti-heroes, and one considers even the option of digitally erasing cigarettes from old classic movies.

Symptomatic is here the ambiguous role of the electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) which functions like sugarless sugar: an electrical device that simulates the act of tobacco smoking by producing an inhaled mist bearing the physical sensation, appearance, and often the flavor and nicotine content of inhaled tobacco smoke; though without its odor, and intended to omit its health risks. Most e-cigarettes are portable, self-contained cylindrical devices the size of a ballpoint pen, designed so that they resemble actual cigarettes or cigars. Sometimes they are prohibited on planes because they show addictive behavior; sometimes they are even sold on planes. The E-cigarette is difficult to classify and regulate: is it itself a drug? a medicine?

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But who is this Other whose “addictive behavior” – in short, whose display of excessive enjoyment – disturbs us so much? It is none other than what, in Judeo-Christian tradition, is called the Neighbor. A neighbor by definition harasses, and “harassment” is another of those words which, although it seems to refer to a clearly defined fact, functions in a deeply ambiguous way and perpetrates an ideological mystification. At its most elementary, the term designates brutal facts of rape, beating, and other modes of social violence which, of course, should be ruthlessly condemned. However, in the predominant use of the term “harassment,” this elementary meaning imperceptibly slips into the condemnation of any excessive proximity of another real human being, with his or her desires, fears and pleasures. The other is OK insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as the other is not really other. Tolerance coincides here with its opposite: my duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, not to intrude into his/her space.

The courts in most Western societies now impose a restraining order when someone sues another person for harassing him or her (stalking him or her or making unwarranted sexual advances). The harasser can be legally prohibited from knowingly approaching the victim, and must remain at a distance of more than 100 yards. Necessary as this measure is, there is nonetheless in it something of the defense against the traumatic Real of the other's desire: is it not obvious that there is something dreadfully violent about openly displaying one's passion for and to another human? Passion by definition hurts its object, even if its addressee gladly agrees to occupy this place.

What one should focus on is what kind of subjectivity is implied in the obsession with the different modes of harassment: the "Narcissistic" subjectivity for which everything others do (address me, look at me...) is potentially a threat, so that, as Sartre put it long ago, l'enfer, c'est les autres. With regard to woman as an object of disturbance, the more she is covered, the more our (male) attention focuses on her and on what lies beneath the veil. The Taliban not only forced women to walk in public completely veiled, they also prohibited them wearing shoes with too solid (metal or wooden) heels, and ordered them to walk without making too loud a clicking noise which may distract men, disturbing their inner peace and dedication. This is the paradox of surplus-enjoyment at its purest: the more the object is veiled, the more intensely disturbing is the minimal trace of its remainder. This is why the ultimate Politically Correct sex is cybersex – the attraction of cybersex is that, since we are dealing only with virtual partners, there is no harassment.

Another way to avoid harassment is to reduce our sexuality to pleasures provided by partial objects: we are more and more bombarded with objects-gadgets which promise to deliver excessive but effortless pleasure. The latest fashion is here the Stamina Training Unit, a counterpart to the good old vibrator: a masturbatory device that resembles a battery-powered light (so we're not embarrassed when carrying it around). You put the erect penis into the opening at the top, push the button, and the object vibrates till satisfaction. The product is available in different colors, levels of tightness, and forms (hairy or without hair, etc.) that imitate all three main openings for sexual penetration (mouth, vagina, anus). What one buys here is the partial object (erogenous zone) alone, deprived of the embarrassing additional burden of having to deal with another entire person.

How are we to cope with this brave new world which undermines the basic premises of our intimate life? The ultimate solution would be, of course, that each of us brings to our date the appropriate gadget (one a vibrator, the other a Stamina Training Unit), and so, after politely greeting each other, we push a vibrator into the Stamina Training Unit, turn them both on and leave all the fun to this ideal couple, with us, the two real human partners, sitting at a nearby table, drinking tea and calmly enjoying the fact that, while the two machines are buzzing and shaking in the background, we have without great effort fulfilled our duty to enjoy. So maybe, if our hands brush against each other while pouring tea, and we slowly descend into intimacy, we can sit up in bed having actual intense sex without any superego pressure – and romance is thus born again…

One thing is sure in all this. If, today, Thomas de Quincey were to rewrite the opening lines of his famous essay Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, he would have undoubtedly replaced the last word (procrastination): »If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and smoking in public.«

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Comrades,

Welcome to the desert of the real.

I am new to Substack, but already feel at home. I can publish what I want, when I want, and communicate directly with you, my readers.

This year, I will endeavour to publish twice a week; politics midweek, culture or bonus obscenities on the weekend.

For the time being, my writing on here will be entirely free. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Below, an essay on the stupidity of winter sports, and my desire to live more like a hibernating bear.

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How do I survive the winter? Barely. The worst thing about winter is the pressure to go out and participate in the imbecilic rituals called “winter sports.” It is difficult for me to imagine something more stupid. Think about skiing: is it not the closest human equivalent you can get to a hamster running on a wheel? You climb (or are dragged) to the top of a hill – why? To come back down on your skis… Wouldn’t it be better to simply stay down and read a good book?

When I think about winter, I always dream about bears and their long sleep. I heard they go to sleep for a couple of months, awaken once a month or so just to urinate and have a little drink, and then quickly go to sleep again… certainly better than skiing!

I was told in Portugal that, in the early XXth century, poor farmers in the south were doing something similar. For reasons of profit, landowners largely abandoned growing corn on their fields there and replaced them with cork oaks which require much less work. So how did the poor farmers survive the long winter months with no work to do? They got accustomed to lay in bed and sleep most of the time, thereby reducing their bodily needs to a minimum – just some wine with water and bread crumbs every couple of days. This was called economic progress in Portugal – no wonder southern Portugal was a hotbed of the Communist Party which organized the farmers’ resistance.

But since we increasingly live in regulated and controlled places where natural seasons are a thing of the past, this way is closed to us. Perhaps our version of the poor Portuguese farmer in winter is to spend long hours in front of a computer screen, half asleep in digital pseudo-excitement.

     So what should I do, since I hate video games and think Facebook and X (Twitter) should be prohibited? The most viable solution for me is to visit a traditional summer resort (like a city on the Spanish or Italian coast) in winter – a new world opens up to you. One sees the place out of its tourist glitter, in all its drabness, dark alleys with crumbling facades, stupid old local people, closed hotels, abandoned parks and beaches, etc. It’s like seeing a squid on a dry table, outside water. But sometimes a new kind of magic emerges, that of freedom – freedom from the superego pressure to enjoy vacations. One is free to spend time wandering around, to catch up on reading and working, to watch old movies and TV series one never had time to see at home…

     Working is what life is about, so for me as a philosopher, the ideal winter vacation place is nonetheless somewhere far up north, something like a suburb of Reykjavik. Why? Hegel said that the owl of Minerva (a symbol of wisdom) takes off and flies at dusk - and there is dusk (or even darkness) all the time there in winter, except for a couple of mid-day hours. So in Reykjavik, the owl of Minerva takes off in early afternoon, giving you long hours to think. In such a situation, one happily forgets the stupid saying “Don’t just think, act, do something!” – the motto of a winter vacation in Reykjavik is: “Don’t just act, take time to think!”

     Another no less stupid saying is: “Be careful not to throw out the baby with bathwater!” On a Reykjavik winter vacation, you follow exactly the opposite motto: One should happily throw out the annoying baby and keep only the bathwater, pondering its secrets.     

Slavoj

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Comrades,

For the time being, my writing on here will be entirely free. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Below, a weekend essay on the origin of the name Häagen-Dazs.

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What Lacan called lalangue (“llanguage”), language in all its non-intended ambiguities and wordplays, opens up the space in which we can resist the hegemonic discourse of power. In today’s China, the Grass Mud Horse or Cǎonímǎ is an internet meme based on a pun: it is a play on the Mandarin words cào nǐ mā, literally "fuck your mother." Caonima is an exemplary case of the resistance discourse of Chinese internet users, a mascot of netizens in China fighting for free expression, inspiring poetry, photos and videos, artwork, lines of clothing, and more. As such, it is part of a broader Chinese internet culture of spoofing, mockery, punning, and parody known as e'gao, which includes video mash-ups and other types of bricolage.[1] From our own culture, suffice it to mention the Häagen-Dazs brand of ice-creams – how did this name emerge? Reuben Mattus, a Polish Jew who emigrated to the US and founded the Häagen-Dazs ice-cream company in 1959, engaged;

“in a quest for a brand name that he claimed was Danish-sounding; however, the company's pronunciation of the name ignores the letters ‘ä’ and ‘z’ and letters like ‘ä’ or digraphs like ‘zs’ do not exist in Danish. According to Mattus, it was a tribute to Denmark's exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War, and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels. Mattus felt that Denmark was also known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the United States. His daughter Doris Hurley reported that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked.”[2]

Is “Häagen-Dazs” not lalangue at its purest? The name condenses a reference to alleged historical facts (Denmark’s treatment of the Jews, Denmark as a country known for its dairy products), imagined associations which are false at the level of facts (letters like ‘ä’ or digraphs like ‘zs’ do not exist in Danish although they “sound” Danish… for us, not for the Danes themselves, of course), up to the enjoyment in pure vocal nonsense. Such phenomena are far from being limited to ordinary language: many philosophical or scientific terms are formed in a similar way, chosen because of their pleasantly-obscene sound or their improper associations? Just think about quantum mechanics: “degeneracy” as a quantum concept, anyons, quarks (which also designated a healthy soft cheese), up to the Big Bang itself…

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Such an infection of scientific concepts with the “degenerate” obscenities of lalangue in no way relativizes science into a historical phenomenon: true universal science easily survives its transposition from one to another ordinary language which affects its discourse with different kind of obscenities. What this case clearly demonstrates is that lalangue should not be reduced to some kind of subversive poetic playfulness which liberates the speakers from the confines of the hegemonic ideology – lalangue also (and maybe even predominantly) serves as an instrument of violent humiliation and oppression. A typical act of racists is to designate its enemies with an apparently “neutral” term whose obscene echoes deliver a clear racist message – and, when the attention is drawn to it, the perpetrator claims that his hands are pure since he used the term in its neutral sense… A true act of liberation resides in our ability to extract a pure universal concept from its obscene contaminations. Try to formulate a racist/sexist notion in its pure logical structure and its absurdity immediately becomes clear.

We are thereby raising the old Freudian question: why do we enjoy oppression itself? That is to say, power asserts its hold over us not simply by oppression (and repression) which are sustained by a fear of punishment, but by bribing us for our obedience and enforced renunciations – what we get in exchange for our obedience and renunciations is a perverted pleasure in renunciation itself, a gain in loss itself. Lacan called this perverted pleasure surplus-enjoyment: there is no “basic enjoyment” to which one adds the surplus-enjoyment, enjoyment is always a surplus, in excess. It is the reference to Marx, especially to Marx's notion of surplus-value /Mehrwert/, that enabled Lacan to deploy his »mature« notion of objet a, the object-cause of desire, as surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir, Mehrlust). Freud made the first step in this direction when he talks about Lustgewinn, a “gain of pleasure,” which does not designate a simple stepping up of pleasure but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject’s effort to attain pleasure. Exemplary is here the already-mentioned reversal that characterizes hysteria: renunciation to pleasure reverts into pleasure of/in renunciation, repression of desire reverts into desire of repression, etc. Such a reversal lies in the very heart of capitalist logic: as Lacan pointed out, modern capitalism began with counting the pleasure (of gaining profit), and this counting of pleasure immediately reverts into the pleasure of counting (profit).

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[1] Grass Mud Horse - Wikipedia.

[2] See Häagen-Dazs - Wikipedia.