Gilles Deleuze’ün felsefesi üzerine kaleme aldığı Theatrum Philosophicum adlı makalesinde, “belki de bir gün yüzyılımız Deleuze’ün yüzyılı diye anılacak,” demekte zerre kadar tereddüt etmeyen Michel Foucault’yu haklı çıkaran o kadar çok sebep var ki, bu sebepleri tek tek sıralamaya kalksak ne ömür yeter herhalde, ne de kâğıt. Lâkin yurdumuzdaki son derece düzeysiz, niteliksiz ve de niceliksiz gündelik siyasetin boğucu tahakkümüyle mücadelede yeni bir döneme girmek maksadıyla bu konuda bir şeyler söylemeye cüret ve teşebbüs etmenin ne denli gerekli olduğu göz önünde bulundurulursa, sanırım her şeyi olmasa bile en azından bazı şeyleri dile getirmek zarureti de yadsınamayacak bir gerçek formunda zuhur edecektir akıl ihsan olunmuş her fâninin zihninde.

Aklın sınırlarını zorlamanın gerekliliğine inanmış büyük bir filozof olduğunu düşündüğüm Deleuze’ün felsefesini kısaca özetlemeye kalkmayacağım bu yazıda, zira böyle bir çabanın Deleuze’ün düşüncesine son derece ters düşmekle kalmayıp, aynı zamanda faydasız da olacağını düşünüyorum. Özetlemek fiilinin literatürden kaldırılması gerektiğine inanmış olan Deleuze’ün felsefesi, özetlenmesi namümkün bir düşüncenin çekirdeğinin çatlamasıyla açığa çıkacak düşünce parçalarından oluşmakla beraber, söz konusu çatlama neticesine ortaya çıkması kuvvetle muhtemel yarılma hattı boyunca son derece tutarlı bir seyir izler kanaatimce. Konuya açıklık getirecek olursam diyebilirim ki Deleuze yaşamı boyunca sadece tek bir fikri geliştirmek için didinip durmuş ve bunu bir ölçüye kadar da olsa başarabilmiştir, ki o fikir varlığın farklılıkla, farklılığın da yaratıcılıkla aynı şey olduğudur. Bundan hareketle varlığın fark yaratmak mânasını taşıdığını söylemeye gerek olduğunu ise hiç sanmıyorum.

Bergson’un “her büyük filozof yaşamı boyunca tek bir fikir üzerinde düşünür ve sadece o fikri geliştirmeye çabalar,” sözüne sadık kalmayı seçmiş olan Deleuze, kariyerine Kant, Bergson, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Spinoza gibi filozofları tek tek ele aldığı kitaplarla başlamış ve Felix Guattari’yle beraber yazdığı Felsefe Nedir? kitabından bir süre sonra, trajik ölümündense çok kısa bir süre önce kaleme aldığı Katıksız İçkinlik: Bir Hayat kitabıyla noktalamıştır söz konusu kariyeri. Benim özellikle sevdiğim bu son kitapta Deleuze en başa dönerek Hume ve Nietzsche’yi yeniden, ama bu sefer farklı bir biçimde ele alır. Nietzsche ve Hume’un hayatlarıyla felsefeleri arasındaki derin ve karmaşık ilişkiyi gözler önüne sermek maksadıyla kaleme alındığı aşikâr söz konusu kitap, adeta Deleuze’ün kendi felsefesinin de bir özeti gibidir aslında. Yaşamı boyunca ele aldığı filozofları özetlemekten ziyade dönüştürmeye ve kendi felsefesine hizmet eder hale getirmeye cüret ve teşebbüs etmekten çekinmeyen Deleuze, bu kitabında da aynı yola baş vurur ve Nietzsche ile Hume’un yaşamlarını ve felsefelerini kullanarak kendi felsefesinin bir özetini sunmaya yeltenir okuyucularına. İtiraf etmeliyim ki benim kendime en yakın bulduğum Deleuze kitabı olan Katıksız İçkinlik: Bir Hayat bana “keşke ben yazmış olsaydım bunu,” dedirten bir kitaptır. Kitabın dili o kadar sadedir ki bir insanın bilincinin nasıl olup da bu derece berraklaşabileceğini sordurur bir başka insana.

Peki ama nedir Deleuze’ü yüzyılımızın filozofu kılan? Bu soruyu yanıtlayabilmek için belki de Deleuze’ün kendi eserlerini şimdilik bir tarafa bırakıp bir süreliğine Alain Badiou’nun Yüzyıl (The Century) adlı yapıtına atıfta bulunmalıyız. Bulunmalıyız ki Deleuze’ün, kıyımlar ve felâketler yüzyılı olarak anılagelen yirminci yüzyılla ilişkisini daha iyi idrak edebilelim.

Yüzyıl adındaki bu sıradışı kitabında Badiou yirminci yüzyılın sadece bir kıyımlar ve felâketler yüzyılı olarak anılagelmesine karşı çıkarak, söz konusu yüzyılın aynı zamanda bir yaratılar ve yeni yaklaşımlar yüzyılı olarak da okunması, okunabilmesi gerektiğinin altını çizerek, Brecht, Breton, Beckett, Pessoa, Mallarmé gibi pek çok büyük sanatçı, yazar ve düşünürün, “Gerçek tutkusu” diye nitelendirdiği bir tutkuya sahip olduğunu öne sürer. Jacques Lacan’ın Hayâli-Sembolik-Gerçek üçlemindeki Gerçek kavramını, yani bilinçdışını kasteden Badiou’ya göre Gerçek tutkusu, Lacan’ın da altını çizdiği üzere, bir nevi ulaşılmazın peşinde koşma eğiliminin hem sebebi, hem de sonucudur. Ulaşılmaz olanın insana çekici gelmesi ve arzunun kaynağını elde edilemeyene yönelik bir isteğin oluşturması ise Deleuze için geride bırakılması gereken bir arzulama biçimidir. Zira Deleuze’e göre arzulamak, ulaşılmaz bir arzu nesnesinin peşinde koşmaktan ziyade, doğrudan nesneler üreten etkin bir eylemdir. Bu hesaba göre bilinçdışının ulaşılmaz bir şey olmayıp, bilâkis üretken arzuyu üreten bir boşluk olduğunu bilmiyorum söylemeye gerek var mı, ama gene de söylüyorum işte, belki vardır diye.

Belli ki Deleuze pek çok kitabında arzunun kendine karşı dönüşünün nasıl gerçekleştiğini deşifre etmekle kalmamış, aynı zamanda arzunun üretici bir eylem olduğunun da altını çizmiştir. Özdeşleşmeye karşı duruşuyla tanınan, özdeşleşme nesneleri ve arzu nesneleri arasındaki ilişkiyi sıradışı bir yaklaşımla ele alan Deleuze arzunun ve bilinçdışının üretkenliği konusuna ilginç bir biçimde, en olmadık yerden parmak basar. Ona göre arzulamak nesnesini kendisi üreten yaratıcı bir eylem biçimidir. Deleuze varlığı yaratıcılıkla eş tutar. Yaratıcılık olabilecek her şeyi var kılandır.

Bu bağlamda sanat Deleuze için yaratıcılığın en radikal biçiminin yaşama geçirildiği bir etkinlik, değişim sürecinin en uçta yaşandığı bir eylem, sanatçı ise statükoya düşünsel dinamizmiyle direnen, kendi varoluş alanını kendisi yaratmak zorunda olan radikal bir varlıktır. Sanatçının görevi ise gerek geçmişi yeniden yazan, gerekse geçmişi ironik bir şekilde yücelten, geçmişte kullanılan dilin yapısını bozan, hem biçimsel, hem de içeriksel olarak yeni tarzlar deneyen, içerik-biçim ilişkisine yeni boyutlar katan, kısacası anlam aktarımında kullanılan araç gereci ve teknikleri değiştirmek suretiyle anlam kavramına da yeni anlamlar katan deneysel eserler üretmektir. Bu tür eserler bizi içinde bulunduğumuz mevcut-duruma hapsolmuşluktan kurtarmakta işe yarayabilir. Durum dışında düşünce üretip duruma dıştan müdahale etmek, ona içindekileri tersyüz ederek dışa dönmesini sağlayacak şekilde yaklaşmakla mümkün kılınabilir. Kendimizi kaybedene kadar kendimizden kaçmaya değil, bilâkis bu durumun olanaksızlıklarını birer olanak haline getirip değerlendirmek arzusuna meyletmeliyiz bence. İmkânsızlıklar elimizdeki imkânlardır, dolayısıyla da eldekini en iyi şekilde değerlendirmek bir sorumluluktur. Elimize baktığımız zaman gördüğümüz ise Slavoj Zizek’in Bedensiz Organlar adlı kitabıdır. Söz konusu kitapta Zizek’i Deleuze’ü yanlış okurken okuyoruz. Bu arada Zizek, Deleuze’ü zaten herkesin yanlış okuduğu Hegel’i yanlış okurken okuyor. Bu yanlış okumalar silsilesi içerisinde doğru kalan tek şey eleştirel teorinin ilk şartının yanlış okumayı bilmek olduğu ortaya çıkıyor. Zizek’in bir dizi histerik provokasyondan ibaret Deleuze eleştirisi Deleuze’ün felsefesinin temel emelini tespit ederek başlıyor işe. Zizek’e göre Deleuze’ün felsefesinin temel emeli yeninin ortaya çıkış sürecini teorik olarak açıklamaktır. Bu doğru tespitten sonra Zizek, Deleuze’ün felsefesini Deleuze I ve Deleuze II diye ikiye ayırıyor. Deleuze I, Deleuze’ün Guattari’yle birlikte yazdığı Kapitalizm ve Şizofreni adlı kitaba kadar olan dönemi kapsarken, Deleuze II, Deleuze’un Guattari’yle işbirliği içerisinde kaleme aldığı kitapları kapsıyor. Gilles Deleuze ve Felix Guattari iki ciltlik Kapitalizm ve Şizofreni (Anti-Oedipus ve Bin Yayla) adlı kitaplarında Marx-Nietzsche-Freud üçgeni içerisinde değerlendirdikleri geç kapitalizmin kendine karşı güçleri hem üretip hem de yok ettiğini yazacaklardır yetmişlerin sonlarına doğru. Her ne kadar şizofreninin sadece kapitalizmin bir ürünü olduğuna katılmasam da Deleuze ve Guattari’nin kapitalizmin ürettiği anormallikleri bastırarak canına can kattığını ve radikal anormalleşmeye götüren bir üretim-tüketim ilişkileri kısır-döngüsüne dayandığını itiraf etmek durumunda hissediyorum kendimi. Zizek, Deleuze’ün felsefesine siyasi bir bağlam oluşturmak maksadıyla kendi özgün felsefesini Guattari’nin politik anti-psikiyatri söyleminin süzgecinden geçirmek suretiyle kolaycılığa kaçtığını iddia ediyor. Zizek, Deleuze’ün felsefeyi siyasileştirme çabasına denk gelen bu ikinci dönemi bir talihsizlik olarak nitelendiriyor ve Deleuze’ün Hegel’ci diyalektiği aşma çabalarının başarısızlığa mahkûm oluşunun göstergesi olarak lânse ediyor. Zizek’e göre Deleuze hem Hegel’ci diyalektiğin ötesine geçemiyor, hem de Hegel’i olduğundan farklı gösterip çarpıtıyor. İşte bu noktada “farklılığın filozofu” olarak bilinen Deleuze’ün Nietzsche tarafından ortaya atılan etkisel güçler ve tepkisel güçler kavramlarını geliştirmek yönünde yazdığı Nietzsche ve Felsefe kitabının temel tezine değinmemiz bir zaruret hâlini alıyor.

Gilles Deleuze

Etkisel güçler söyleyeceklerini ötekinin söylediklerinden hareketle söylemek yerine kendi içlerinden hareketle söylerler. Yani etkisel güçlerin söyledikleri ötekine verilmiş bir tepki olmaktan ziyade öteki üzerinde yeni bir etki yaratmak maksadını taşır. Tepkisel güçlerinse aslında söyleyecek orijinal bir şeyleri olmadığı için tüm söyledikleri hep ve sadece ötekinin söylediklerine verilmiş tepkilerdir. Yani etkisel güçler içten belirlenen varlıklarken, tepkisel güçler dıştan belirlenen varlıklardır. Bu derece karmaşık bir sorunun çözüme kavuşması için gerekli bilgi ve beceriden yoksun olduğumuz için olsa gerek, işin içindeki bir yeniklerini bir süreden beridir ihmâl ediyoruz. Bilmediğimiz şeylerin ortaya çıkabilmesi için bildiklerimiz üzerinde boşluklar yaratmanın gerekliliği üzerinde durmak durumundayız. Söz konusu kitapta Deleuze’ün öncelikle değinmek istediği konu hepimizin yakından tanıdığı ünlü bir düşünür olan Nietzsche’nin felsefesinin günümüz dünyasını anlamlandırmak ve eleştirmek için kullanılabilir bir yanı olup olmadığı ve şayet böyle bir yan mevcutsa söz konusu yanın nasıl açık edilebileceği, nasıl görünür kılınabileceği konusudur. Yani Deleuze, Nietzsche’yi, Felix Guattari’yle birlikte yazdığı Bin Yayla adlı kitabın önsözünde belirtildiği üzere bir alet-edavat çantası olarak ele alır ve işine yarayan aletlerle baş başa kalabilmek için işine yaramayan aletleri çantadan çıkarır. Belli ki Deleuze bir nevi yaratıcı çıkarma işlemine tabi tutma niyetindedir Nietzsche’nin külliyatını. Bu bağlamda öncelikle Nietzsche’nin yazılarında işine yaramayan yerleri silerek işine yarayan kısımların kendiliğinden ortaya çıkmasına zemin hazırlayabileceğini düşünür Deleuze. Denebilir ki Deleuze’ün maksadı Nietzsche’yi kendini eleştirir bir pozisyona sokup kendi kendisini budamasına, veya psikanalitik bir terim kullanacak olursak kastre(hadım) etmesine olanak sağlamaktır. Deleuze’ün ilk bakışta vahşice gelebilecek bu eleştiri yöntemini kullanmasının sebebi ise Nietzsche gibi bendini sığmayıp taşmaya meyilli bir filozofun eserlerinden taşan pek çok genellemeyi bir tarafa bırakıp, teferrutlarda bile bulunamayacak fikirleri, yani metinlerde hâlihazırda olanlardan ziyade olmayanları okumaya teşebbüs etme niyetini taşıyor oluşudur.

Deleuze’ün Nietzsche üzerine yazdığı Nietzsche ve Felsefe adlı kitabı okumuş olan okuyucularımızın gayet iyi bileceği üzere orada Nietzsche’nin trajedisinin neşeden veya bilemediniz en azından kaynağı belirisiz bir sevinçten kaynaklandığını söylediği bir kısım vardır. Deleuze o kısmı, “işte trajik olan da bu neşedir zaten,” sözleriyle noktalar.

Nietzsche’yle ilgili kitabında Deleuze özellikle belirtir ki tepkisel güçlerin en belirgin özelliği tepkisel olduklarının farkında olmayışlarıdır. Onları zincire vuran da zaten işte bu kendilerine yönelik körlükleridir. Yaptıkları eylemlerin ve sarfettikleri sözlerin anlamından olduğu kadar etkisinden de uzaktırlar. Kendilerinden kopuk bir yaşamı anlamlı bir bütünlük oluşturuyormuş izlenimi verecek şekilde sürdürmeye çalışırlar. Ne var ki bu çaba sonuçsuz kalmakla kalmaz, aynı zamanda onları kendilerinden iki kat, üç kat daha uzaklaştırır. Gittikçe ne dediklerinin ve ne ettiklerinin farkında olmaktan uzaklaşarak son derece anlamsız ve yersiz sözler sarfederler. Niyetleri kötü değildir; onları şeytanın köleleri olarak göstermeye çalışmıyorum burada ve/fakat bu onların kötülüğe hizmet etmedikleri anlamını taşımaz. Kötü niyetli değildirler belki, ama idrak kabiliyetleri ve kendileri ile çevreleriyle ilişkilerine dair bilgi düzeyleri o denli cüzidir ki, tepkisel güçler kaçınılmaz olarak kötü yola düşüp hem kendilerine hem de çevrelerine zarar verirler. Çevrelerindeki hadiseleri okuma biçimleri son derece acayiptir tepkisel güçlerin. Tepkisel güçler etkisel güçleri her zaman için karalamaya ve yok etmeye çalışırlar. Onlar için etkisel güçlerin emeli iktidarı parça parça etmektir. Bu konuda haklıdırlar. Etkisel güçler iktidarın çözülerek öznelere dağılması ve pek çok daha başka güç merkezinin birbiriyle ilişki içerisinde ama birbirinin farklılığını manipüle etmeksizin sürekli değişim geçirmeyi varoluş biçimi haline getiren bir yapının varlığını sağlamak ve sürdürmek için didinip durur. Etkisel güçlerin bu emeli elbette ki tepkisel güçleri çok kızdıracak ve tepkisel güçler kızgınlık ve tedirginlik içerisinde bas bas bağırarak sinirden ne dediklerini bilmez bir hale gelecektir. Kızgınlık, sinir bozukluğu, bunalım, bunlar hep olumsuz reaksiyonlardır. Tepkisel güçler etkisel güçlerden nefret eder, etkisel güçler ise nefretten nefret eder. Tepkisel güçler nefret üzerine kurulu bir dünya düşlerken, etkisel güçler herhangi bir dünya düşlemek yerine farklı dünyaların dünyamız içerisinde bir arada var olabilmesi ve farklı yaşam biçimlerinin birbirlerini yemek yerine besleyecek şekilde iletişime geçmesini arzular. Bu arzu o kadar güçlüdür ki etkisel güçlerin bazıları içlerinden akan bu enerjiden ötürü zaman zaman zayıf düşer ve hastalanırlar. Ama etkisel güçlerin var oluş amacı zaten bu hastalanmalara, acı, keder, elem ve ıstıraplara karşı direnmek oluğu için bunun pek bir önemi yoktur onların gözünde. Onlar olumsuz şeyleri olumlu şeylere dönüştürmek için yaşar. Her türlü negatif tepkiye karşı direnç, umutsuzluğa, iktidarın merkezileşmesine, ölüme, hastalıklara karşı direnç etkisel güçlerin yaşam biçimidir. Etkisel güçler direnişi bir yaşam biçimi haline getirmiş, çürümeye yüz tutmuş bir dünya düzeninin karşısına yaşama sevincini, ölüme karşı hayatı ve nefrete karşı arzuyu diken, her türlü otoriter ve totaliter dünya görüşüyle son derece hayat dolu biçimlerde dalga geçen, yaşamın oluşum olaslıklarının çoğalımına yönelik eylem söylemlerle yaşamı kıstlayan ve kısırlaştıran iktidar akışlarının önüne set çeken birer enerji deposudurlar. Etkisel güçler daha güçlü olmalarına rağmen iktidarda olan hep tepkisel güçlerdir. Bunun sebebi tepkisel güçlerin yaşam olanaklarını kısıtlayarak, gücü bireylere yaymak yerine tek merkezde toplamasıdır. Birlikten kuvvet doğduğu doğrudur ama etkisel güçler miltarist bir mentaliteyle birlikler kurup kendileri dışındakilere karşı bir kuvvet doğurmak düşüncesine hiç sıcak bakmazlar. Tepkisel güçlerin aksine etkisel güçler hep aynı renk ve aynı model elbiseler giyip kendilerinden farklı olanları yok etmek arzusunda değildirler. Etkisel güçler toplumun her yönde ve her şekilde sürekli değişim ve gelişiminin dinamosudurlar, tepkisel güçler ise bu dinamoların başındaki belâ… Nitekim Deleuze’e göre yaratıcılığın önündeki en önemli engel iktidar karşısında tepkisel düşünceler üreten bir öznedir. İşte bu tepkisel özne ölmeli ve etkin bir ölümsüz olarak yeniden doğabilmelidir ki yaratıcı özne içindeki sonsuzluk potansiyelini hayata geçirmek suretiyle bir ölümsüz haline gelebilsin.

Atıf Nesneleri

Badiou, Alain. The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007)

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988)

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: The Viking Press, 1977)

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 1983)

Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: A life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001)

Žižek, Slavoj. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London: Routledge, 2004)

Here is a rough draft of a conference paper I want to get back to and possibly, hopefully, publish:

My current research involves the continuation of my master’s thesis. As I was working on my thesis a friend lent me the documentary Derrida. In this movie, Derrida is asked about love. He tells us the question of love is the basic question of philosophy, the question of Dasien, and that is the question of the que or the qua? (the who or the what?)

This idea that the question of love is the same question of being stuck with me. The other influence here is a class in which I read Derrida’s “The Politics of Witnessing” and I noticed how love and identity and the identity the characters in Palahniuk’s work all correlate in some ways.

That is to say: Jacques Derrida states, “all responsible witnessing engages a poetic experience of language,” (66) which is to say that the most responsible way to bear witness to an event is through a poetic language that does not claim to grasp the moment, capture it, or totalize it. Derrida then goes on to conclude his essay, “The Politics of Witnessing” by stating how the poetic experience is the most ethical way of bearing witness by showing itself to be false and not claiming to actually capture the moment. The poem does not claim to represent any actual event as Derrida says:

Revealing its [poetic experience] mask as a mask, but without showing itself, without presenting itself, perhaps, presenting its non-presentation as such, representing it, it thus speaks about bearing witness in general, but above all about the poem that it is, about itself in its singularity, and about the bearing witness to which every poem bears witness (96).

Derrida also states (in his documentary) that love is a question between “who” one loves or “what” one loves (Derrida documentary). The question is: does one love the other or some quality about the other. The idea of loving something about the other or a specific someone (with a self-same identity) leads me to contend that the way one bears witness is also the way one loves. Derrida explains that in bearing witness:

…I affirm (rightly or wrongly, but in all good faith, sincerely) that that was or is present to me, in space and time (thus, sense-perceptible) and although you do not have access to it, not the same access, you, my addressees, you have to believe me, because I engage myself to tell you the truth, I am already engaged in it, I tell you that I am telling you the truth. Believe me. You have to believe me (76).

Isn’t this what one is saying when one is in love? It is an affirmation to the other that, “I love you, you have to believe me.” This is, after all, what is so scary about love. You are left asking yourself, “What is it that this person loves about me?” And then as Lacan would put it, desire becomes my desire to want to fulfill what the other wants of me. I outline these thoughts because it is my belief that these statements can inform a certain reading of Chuck Palahniuk’s texts.

Palahniuk’s characters embrace an ephemeral, non-definable identity that take the form of Martin Heidegger’s conception of identity (Being as Dasein) as always moving ahead of itself, as being-in-the-world-towards-others, rather than a static, non-moving self-identity. I would say that Palahniuk’s novels, specifically Invisible Monsters and Fight Club, can be interpreted as (post)modern day love stories. But these are love stories that describe a love that holds no claim to a who or a what, but rather, a love that speaks in these Heideggarian and Derridian terms.

My contention is that in Chuck Palahniuk’s work, the characters come to a foundational apprehension that their identities and choices in life are all organized by artificial, social constructions, especially the construction of language. Upon achieving this realization, the characters will take steps to challenge this overriding discourse that is ruling their lives, and they will try to break free of their socially imposed identity. Ultimately realizing that they cannot escape the “trap” that is society’s discourse, they fall back on love, but again, this love expresses itself through a poetic expression of language and is towards others who do not have any fixed, fully present identity.

In Fight Club, the narrator’s identity (let’s call him Joe, as in “I’m Joe’s total lack of surprise”) is established by his lack of identity. Joe is an insomniac, and because of the insomnia, Joe has no identity that can connect him to the world around him. Joe says, “This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you” (Palahniuk Fight Club 21).

This distance Joe describes is the same distance from experience anyone feels because of the gap in meaning in language, and since as Terry Eagleton points out:

…language is something I am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am stable, unified entity must also be a fiction. Not only can I never be fully present to you, but I can never be fully present to myself either (112).

And this postmodern conception of identity is what Joe describes in insomnia. Joe’s insomnia seems to be his awareness of how language is all around him, constructing his identity—which means he has no “real” identity that is his. Joe realizes how his identity is caught up in not only the language of society that is just “a copy of a copy of a copy, ” but also in the things he feels he needs to own in order to be “complete.” Unable to break free of societal constraints by himself, Joe creates Tyler Durden (there are other reasons Tyler manifest that will be discussed in a moment) and Joe implores, “Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.[…] Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me form clever art” (Palahniuk FC 46). Tyler is the manifestation of Joe’s unconscious desire to break free from the ruling societal discourse that tells him to buy clever art to be complete.

Furthermore, we come to the apprehension that Joe has come to these realizations about his identity, partially, because of and through Marla, who is the love interest, and this realization is the even more important reason Tyler manifest. Joe explains, “I know why Tyler occurred. Tyler loved Marla. From the first night I met her, Tyler or some part of me had needed a way to be with Marla” (FC 198). Tyler Durden, then, is the manifestation of love. It is Joe’s poetic expression—his way of being able to fall in love with Marla. Tyler is Joe’s “bearing witness” in that bearing witness as Derrida states, “…attest, precisely, that some “thing” has been present to him. This “thing” is no longer present to him, of course, in the mode of perception at the moment when the attestation takes place” (77). This attestation is rather a matter of “you have to believe me”. Love is not “present” and any attempt to explain love and thematize love, only totalizes love, as love is not a thing that can be perceived or that is graspable. Love is, rather, a thing that, “you just have to believe me.” The narrator, Joe, has created this barrier between himself and his love so that he does not have to be present when he falls in love. The reason that Joe creates this barrier is because Marla reflects his lie. Marla in reflecting this lie has pointed out to Joe his insufficiency, his lack—she has castrated him in a Lacanian sense.

Marla castrates Joe in that he feels less of a man because of his “nesting instinct” as he puts it, and therefore has to go to these support group meetings in order to feel complete, in order to get emotional release, in order to sleep, but Marla is a reminder of his lie—her presence there reminds Joe of his lie and his inability to cope in the world. He is castrated by his “lack”—his un-maniliness. Joe has come to realize that he no longer has a manly identity with which to confront Marla and have a loving relationship with; rather, as Joe puts it, “…I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalog” (FC 43). Later, Joe goes on to admit, “Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you” (Ibid 44).

It is this idea of lack (Joe’s lack of manhood) that is what Lacan means by castration. Joe feels an anxiety of confronting Marla without his phallus, his “thing” he can offer her; his desire is to be desired by her, but as Renata Selecl explains Lacan’s idea of castration, “The major problem of male and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them” (Salecl 93 Reading Seminar XX). She goes on to explain (and again, here, this relates to what is happening with Joe):

For men, the way they desire…is conditioned by the fact that castration has marked them by a lack, which also means that their phallic function has been negated. As a result of this negation, men are constantly anxious that they might not be able to do it: that their organ might disappoint them when they need it most, that others might find them powerless, and so on…. Anxiety often arises precisely when a man encounters a woman who becomes an object of his desire (Ibid. 93-94).

Tyler Durden is the symbolic phallus. Tyler is what Joe thinks that Marla desires.

There is an Oedipal triad going on in as well, in which Tyler is the father (the one with the symbolic phallus that the mother desires and the child longs for); Joe is the child, who longs for the phallus, rather, to be the phallus (the thing) that the mother desires. Lacan states in his seminar, “What the child wants is to become the desire of desire, to be able to satisfy the mother’s desire…. To please the mother…. It is necessary and sufficient to be the phallus” (Lacan seminar of Jan. 22, 1958). And Joe, throughout the novel, is constantly comparing the relationship of Marla and Tyler to his parents, and Joe is constantly fighting for their attention.

Tyler opens Joe up to everything that Joe is lacking, and everything Joe wishes he had (the phallus) in order to attract Marla. Joe has an unconscious desire for Marla, and Marla has a strong attraction to Joe. But the attraction between these two goes even beyond this somewhat reductive conception of desire. What is happening here in this triad is beyond language. What happens in the fight clubs is beyond language, and the love that is expressed between Marla and Joe/Tyler is beyond any fixed conception of language. If Marla does desire Tyler (what is lacking in Joe) she is also, at the same time, desiring something in Joe (what Tyler is lacking).

Either way, or rather, both ways, the two of them (Tyler/Joe) do not have any fixed identity. If we are made out of language (as Eagleton says), and if identity is only possible through language, as it is in Dasien—the being which questions itself, which is in the world with others towards death, then there is no set identity to either one of the two characters that have a relationship with Marla.

This is why it is so easy for Marla to accept that Joe is not Tyler and to still love Joe regardless. Furthermore, Joe realizes that love is beyond words like fight club is beyond words. Fight club and Tyler are examples of training wheels (and this idea of training wheel will be explored in Invisible Monsters as well) for Joe to realize that identity is constructed by society, and that he has to go beyond a desire for Marla that will leave him castrated. As Joe himself says, “It happens that fast. I say, because I think I like you. Marla says, “Not love?” This is a cheesy enough moment…Don’t push it” (FC 197). The reason it is “not love” is because it is not in a conventional idea of love.
It is rather love as bearing witness—as a “you have to believe me—I like you even if I have no identity and do not know your identity.”

A violent love as Zizek would put it—the idea of I love you all or nothing—or as Derrida would say, the idea that I love a who, and that when that who changes (or if I do not love you “all), then I will no longer love you. This love between Marla and Joe is more like that love which is expressed in poetic language—even if she tells Joe before the big final scene of the novel, “It’s not love or anything…but I think I like you, too” and Joe hesitates thinking that Marla means she loves Tyler, and Marla reassures him, “No, I like you…I know the difference.” Even in this moment of doubt, this is a love beyond the conventional conception because the two “in love” have a precarious relationship with their identity.

Joe, after losing everything that defined his identity in the explosion and in his psychosis (Tyler), is still “liked” by Marla, and Joe, who only knows Marla as a “big faker” can still love her even if he has no concrete idea of her identity. Unable to find anything real in the “real world” Joe finds something real in love, but this is a love that is ungrounded—not like real reality. As Joe says of the fight clubs, “This is better than real life.”

In the end of the novel, Palahniuk shows us how Tyler (and all his masculine posturing and axioms) is just a manifestation of a psychosis, and that it is not Tyler that saves Joe in the end, it is Marla and community that saves him. It is love that is undefinable—that like bearing witness is best expressed through poetic expressions of love.
((((Kalvado quote)))))

Think of a valentine’s day gift—in order to show your loved one you love them you give them a superfluous, non-sense gift—candy or flowers. You do not—you cannot– put a price on love as love is not a thing that can be bought and sold.

This is what one sees in Invisible Monsters as well. The main character of the novel is Shannon Macfarland, a model who has purposely disfigured her pretty face to break free from societal constraints put on her because of her beauty. Her brother, also disfigured himself as a teen and is now going through a sex change operation just to break free from what society tells him he should do. In essence, I argue that Palahniuk’s characters deconstruct soceity’s discourse to show how what is natural is not so natural. But in the end, like Fight Club, what is left is a sister and a sister/brother who love each other completely even if they don’t have any identity to love or any thing to love.

Albert Camus said that he wanted to change people but not the world, which he saw as divine , and it seems that Brandy and Shannon feel the same way. They do not want to change the world; they just want to change the way people think about the world around them and about the way people are in the world. Chuck Palahniuk, also, does not seem like he wants to change the world but only the story about the world. It is hard to say what these characters achieve by disfiguring themselves and challenging the dominant discourse other than the awareness they have of societal constraints, and they know that by doing these things they will not be easily defined by society any longer.

Although Palahniuk deconstructs society to show how the natural attitude towards the world we have is not essentially natural, he is also giving his readers a story about community and love. The most astute reading of Palahniuk’s underlying themes can be seen in Jesse Kavadlo’s essay when he states, “Each novel…egregiously violent even by Palahniuk standards—ultimately proposes that what their characters, and all of us, need is—love” (Kavadlo 6). This is seen in IM as the novel ends with Shannon giving up her identity to Brandy. So often people are classified as “giving of themselves” to signify how much they care about community, and arguably there is no better way to express that giveness but to give away identity; especially when one thinks of how long it takes to come up with an identity and how much work is put into that identity. Shannon has worked hard to become a fashion model that can get steady work, and now she will give that over to Brandy so that Brandy can live out her dreams. Presumably, in the process, Brandy will continue to influence others and teach others how society is controlling and defining. She will continue to show how a transgender person can be the object of males’ gazes and desires, and she will continue to subvert the “natural” idea of sexual desires and gender roles. And all this is possible because of the loving gift from Shannon.

Shannon is left looking for something “real,” and for her that something real is love in a world of simulacra which moves forward like plot lines in a book or movie, “The fire in Evie’s clothes is just more and more every second, and now the plot moves along without you pushing” (Palahniuk IM 273). Shannon chooses love over the radical Baudrillardian postmodern idea of the loss of refrenciality as she states:

Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.
Flash.
Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!
Flash.

Here, again, there is the intertextuality of her feelings being tied into a photographer telling her how to feel and “pose.” It also shows how, more and more, Shannon nostalgically wishes for something that has a direct, straight meaning, which is why she clings to Brandy. Later, Shannon says:

Give me release.
I’m tired of this world of appearances. Pigs that only look fat. Families that look happy.
Give me deliverance.
From what only looks like generosity. What only looks like love.
Flash (Ibid. 291).

Shannon is tired of empty signifiers, ‘things that only look like things.’ The only real thing that she can cling to is love and community—the being-with-others, which happens in a transcednt, out of language state. Denzin can insightfully comment on what Shannon is going through. He states:

All knowledge is narrative. Today, more than ever in the history of western civilization multiple, local narratives, framed within larger interpretive patriarchal frameworks, daily circulate through the currents of popular culture, from film to soap operas, comic books, popular music, and romance novels. No, the loss of meaning and the mourning come from the very condition that Jameson and Baudrillard have identified. The cultural logics of late capitalism keep the unattainable (the real, the past, romantic love, true happiness) alive, attempting over and over again to reconcile the image with its referent, the concept with the sensible, the transparent with the communicable experience (Denzin 40).

Unable to find any material reality, she finds something real in the love she has for her brother, Brandy. Shannon, as a model, is surrounded by things that are fake in her work; as the daughter of a farmer who falsely fattens up pigs, she was surrounded by artifice as a child; as the sister of a closeted homosexual, she was surrounded by fake gender roles; and as a friend of Evie, she is surrounded by friends who are not what they seem; and as the girlfriend of Manus, she is surrounded by fake emotions (his fake emotions towards her). All of these things are aspects of identity and the things that influence identity, so it is no wonder that she rebels against these things the first chance she gets. Ultimately what Shannon returns to is: love . The novel ends in her total devotion and love for Brandy, “Completely and totally, permanently and without hope, forever and ever I love Brandy Alexander. And that is enough” (Palahniuk IM 297).

Chuck Palahniuk has been known as the writer of the book that became the famous movie Fight Club, but I hope to shows that Palahniuk is more of a satirist as Kavaldo explains, “More than an existential philosopher, however, Palahniuk is an American ironist…” (7). Kavaldo does an excellent job of closely reading Palahniuk and of not taking Palahniuk’s fiction in the dogmatic fashion some of Palahniuk’s fans have done, which leads critics to condemn Palahniuk for being too violent, too sexist, and too crass. The problem is that the violence is always contrasted by the humanity of his characters. Again, to quote Kavaldo:

A careful reader will, like the narrator [of Fight Club], be left unconvinced by Tyler’s sophistry and instead notice that only his language, exemplified by Palahniuk’s pumped up, brutally funny style, is powerful. His solutions…are not (13)

The same is true of IM, where the reader might side with the drug induced, road trip musings of Brandy’s brutal and harsh rebellion against society. Rather than rebel against society in the extreme way Shannon and Brandy do, the reader must remember that there is no getting outside of society, “Anything we want we’re trained to want” (Palahniuk IM 259). The reader must also remember that this only looks like rebellion, as Shannon repeatedly explains how things only “look like love, generosity, like she is crying” etc. what they are supposed to be. The point is, to reiterate again, to find community and love in a world where everything is false, and society is all just a copy of a copy, powerless vocabulary, just discourse, and makes you feel like you are severely fingering yourself.

After a recent experience of watching the deconstructive-qua-ideologico-critical ethos applied in the realm of interpersonal relations, I stumbled upon this quote and found it quite fitting:

“We learn … that when one looks for too long at reality through critico-ideological glasses, one gets a strong headache: it is very painful to be deprived of the ideological surplus-jouissance.”(1)

Critique, in the end, may also lead one back into the (vicious) hermeneutic circle… For all it’s illuminating insights, I suppose its always also important to remember the deplorable clinical track record of psychoanalysis. All the more so before plunging headlong into dismantling one’s own predilections.

If happiness is neither the end nor the aim of psychoanalysis, what does this imply for the political and social ends of the critique of ideology?

Good time (also, incidentally, for all us, in face of political-economic crisis) to mull over and meditate on Kierkegaard’s old axiom (2):

“Despair is to be understood as the sickness, not the remedy”

—

(1) Zizek, Slavoj “Denial: The Liberal Utopia” @ lacan.com (http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=397)

(2) Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death

Slavoj Žižek begins his book Violence with a relatively simple but striking tale: “[t]here is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected.  The guards find nothing.  It is always empty.  Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing is the wheelbarrows themselves…”[1] The moral of the story?  Things are not always as they appear.  The story is simple and makes us chuckle, yet (hopefully) it is a nervous laughter.  The story is also striking; the notion and role of deception in it haunts us.  It makes us uncomfortable to think of the possibility that crime (something we refer to as violence) could go unnoticed in the banality of our lives.  Things are not always as they appear.  Žižek is not trying to cultivate anxiety; rather, our discomfort ought to set us on a journey.  A journey on which our task is to study the factory, the worker, the wheelbarrow, or more accurately, what they might represent, in order to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on (of which the deceptive crime of the worker is a sign).

It is with this illustration that we approach the topic of violence.  That is to say, while violence certainly includes concrete events in space and time and clearly identifiable agents, it is certainly not limited to such exteriorities.  Violence[2], as Foucault offers, “[is] immanent in the sphere in which [it] operates.”[3] Furthermore, this illustrates that the task of the pacifist/peace-builder is neither limited to urgent acts of resistance (such as filing petitions), nor to acts of resolution (such as building relationships through community programs).  Rather, “[p]acifism is a habit of thinking and being which requires the skills necessary to identify and negotiate” different forms of violence (and peace).[4] It is with the aforesaid task that we enter a discourse of the violence(s) immanent in two particular forms of society, and the shift from the first to the second.  The first, a society of discipline, largely put forward by Foucault, and second, a society of control, drawing mainly on the work of Deleuze.  In addition, we will discuss some of the implications, of what we learn regarding the two societies, for the pacifist.

Although capitalism was already well underway at the beginning of the nineteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution is a helpful gesture towards what Foucault calls a society of discipline.  The pursuit of economic growth with the maturation of capitalism led to the creation of mines (extraction of resources), factories (manufacturing of goods), railways (transportation of resources and goods), etc.  The interest of capitalism in the production of goods required a utilitarian workforce.  This workforce was created by two significant moves: one, the move of farmers off the land and into the disciplines of economic growth in the cities (also known and urbanization), and two, the import of people from “poorer” countries as cheap labour (i.e. the Chinese who constructed the Canadian Pacific Railway).

Another way to narrate the creation of a society of discipline (in what is perhaps more explicitly theoretical/political language rather than historical/economic) is by carefully examining how the institutions of discipline, such as the factory, function.  “Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the idea project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimensions of space-time whose effects will be greater than the sum of its component forces.”[5] Reiterating an earlier citation of Foucault, violence and manipulations of power are not only wielded by external, top down, explicitly oppressive agents, groups, and forms of government.  As we have observed, violence is also very much immanent, internal, and woven into the structures and institutions of a society of discipline.  Moreover, we have observed this within institutions (factories, schools, hospitals, barracks, etc.) which are generally considered neutral to questions of violence and peace.  In studying the society of discipline, the pacifist cultivates skills in identifying forms of violence present in the banalities of our daily practices and experiences.  It is then namely the pacifist who notes that the wheelbarrows are being stolen.  The talk of the pacifist, in one sense, is to uncover the violence hidden to the unsuspecting and untrained eye.  Basically, it is similar to the children’s game of hide and seek: the disciplines of society hide, the pacifist seeks.

The second form of society which I want to call attention to is what Deleuze calls “a society of control.”[6] The name “society of control” is perhaps misleading as it might conjure up images of sovereign rule or dictatorship.  What Deleuze wants to gesture towards with the name, however, is a second significant shift from societies of sovereignty.  The first major shift was towards the aforementioned societies of discipline.  While the society of discipline wove into its structures manipulations of power and violence, the society of control seeks to grasp these, to gain a handle on their movement and direction.  The goal is that the power running through the veins of the institutions can eventually power itself.  Instead of being embodied in a structure, the powers are codified and become free-floating, anonymous, and autonomous.  The ideal efficiency is one of perpetual motion.  The purpose of societies of control is not production, but the regulation, engineering, and manipulation of goods and services, for example.[7] Societies of discipline and their pursuit of production are thus “generously donated” to developing countries, which societies of control will then administrate.  One can see then, how Societies of control become increasingly difficult to identify, particularly in terms of identifying their violence and power manipulations.  Deleuze offers an apt and helpful remark: “[p]erhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as a numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.”[8] Or, in terms of our children’s game, hide and seek has metastasized into hide and seek tag.  The implications of hide and seek tag are, of course, clear: those who are hiding are now also allowed to move from place to place freely, making it increasingly difficult to identify them in any particular space and time.

Pointing towards ourselves as perpetrators of violence, and towards the structures and codes which order and govern our everyday lives, is no easy task.  It is also, most commonly, a foolish undertaking because the assumption is that a society in which violence is not commonly manifested physically (that is, violence that is embodied in flesh and blood and broken bones) is a society that is considered peaceful.  Moreover, the elements of structure and order in such societies are simply that—structure and order; they are neutral and irrelevant to questions of violence and peace.  And yet, the factory worker leaves each day with another wheelbarrow, suspected of crime, but one that is hidden.  Thus, upon further questioning and scrutinizing of the two forms of societies, we being to notice that, indeed, they are not exempt of violence and power manipulation.  In summary of our preliminary investigation we have come to some conclusions, but the task, the journey of cultivating skills of identification and negotiation of various forms of violence always continues.

[2] Or power, as Michel Foucault refers to it in chapter 2 of The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978).

[3] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 92.

[4] Chris Huebner, “Whose Violence? Which Peace?” (Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, MB, 10 September 2009).

[5] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.3-7: http://roundtable.kein.org/node/541.

[6] See Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control.”

[7] Summarizing Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control.”

[8] Ibid, paragraph 6, http://roundtable.kein.org/node/541.

Just picked up Žižek’s new short book on the economic crisis, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, and it struck me while reading it last night that perhaps, even though 2012 was in production far before the “economic downturn” which struck in the Fall of 2008, the real horizon of the film is in fact the “seemingly out of nowhere,” “once-in-a-century credit Tsunami” (Greenspan).[1] (I am indebted to Kirk Boyle for making me recall this insight, as he made much the same point about 2012 on a panel we were both on last fall in NY.  Check out his abstract for “Metaphors that Destroy Us: Projections of the Financial Crisis,” and his very interesting article “Children of Men and I am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood.”)

The lack of any concrete, “real” cause of disaster in 2012, the fact that the films just spirals out-of-control between one seemingly unrelated disaster to the next (i.e. how could Yellowstone turning into a Volcano and the San Andreas Fault be related. . .), that drastic measures must be taken immediately w/ little to no concern for the constituency of the country, that the leaders in power ignore any other solution to the problem other than vast influxes of capital into abstract arks—rather than say mobilizing the workforce to save itself (the economy)—all these point toward the fact that 2012 may in fact be (metaphorically) dramatizing the global economic disaster.  And yes, this is perhaps to give Emmerich too much credit, that the film seems far more enamored w/ its special effects and lackluster narrative, but despite all this, what is on display in 2012 is the disaster at the heart of capitalism itself.  Not some pseudo-scientific excuse to blow up the world again, but an acknowledgment that the apocalyptic rhetoric spread around the financial collapse was far more extreme than for real natural disasters; only a film like 2012 could actually give us an image of what was being imagined in the minds of bankers, financiers, and government officials at all levels: total global destruction.

Strikingly, and I’m inclined to not wholly agree w/ him on this, Žižek focuses on various sites of apocalyptic threats as the only sites which could give the communist “Idea a practical urgency.”[2] In his latest book more clearly than ever before, capitalism contains a multitude of apocalyptic scenarios in the heart of itself—it is apocalyptic.  And it is the very ways in which it is apocalyptic which could create new antagonisms for the universality contained w/in communism, not a hearkening back to the past, either its successes or failures, but rather reinventing the lines along which the battle must be waged entirely.  He is very clear that there are four such sites of impending capitalist disaster which may in fact provoke such a reinvention:

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction?  There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. . . . What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a free run.[3]

Prior to the release of 2012, there was a viral marketing campaign of videos (even though they were also OnDemand) which showed Woody Harrelson’s character running through the list of possible scenarios that would “prove the Mayans right” (including nanobots, the Hadron collider, aliens, nukes, eco-disaster, etc. etc.—all the usual suspects and more).  What is interesting about these, is that 2012 could have made use of any of these threats, most of them a result of capitalism (or its future).  They are all contained w/in the logic of the film.  So the fact that 2012 had to pull a magical-rabbit-disaster out of its pseudo-scientific hat proves all the more what is at stake.  For Emmerich, and for Žižek as well, we are living at the end times.  And, whether acknowledged or not, capitalism is the horizon in which we experience what that actually means.  Of course, knowing that one is living near the end of the world is nothing new, but notice Žižek’s conviction that we are in fact there:

We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito.  For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents.  What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.  This triple threat to our entire being renders us all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity,” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse.  The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure—in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.  Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to stop that from becoming a reality is to act preventatively.  If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.  It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives. . . At all these levels, things are approaching a zero point; “the end of times is near.”[4]

And this is the whole problem.  If on the one hand, we have Bush, McCain, and Obama declaring the end of the world as we know it unless we push through the stimulus package, and Žižek saying that it is the very threats capitalism introduces which would cause the end of the world and may become sites for radical political upheaval, AND Roland Emmerich getting us all collectively “off” w/ abstract spectacles of some vague disaster-reality—do we not need to dial it back a bit?  Yes, 2012, you may be “about” the Fall of 2008, but that simply puts you (and Žižek and all the rest) in a ridiculously long tradition of this sort of thing.  A tradition that has at the heart of itself the fact that this apocalypse never happens! We are always living in the end times.  This is why all these rhetorical eschatologies are so effective.  If in fact what 2012 is enacting is financial meltdown, thank god it looks so familiar, that it is just another rhetorical disaster which will never occur, but whose effects will have real world consequences—i.e. more banking corruption, etc.  Perhaps the real lesson here is that we should just multiply possible rhetorical apocalypses, all so to insure that none of them ever happen.

[2] Žižek, Slavoj.  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.  New York: Verso, 2009.  90.

[3] ibid., 90-1.

[4] ibid., 92.

En el documental Examined Life:

En Atenas:

Y en un artículo.

I’ll start with a loose follow-up to last post’s Marxism/liberalism issue. I finished reading Zizek and came across a brilliant quotation from Samuel Beckett’s ‘Worstward Ho’:

“Fail. Try again. Fail better”

In the context of Zizek’s book it is understood as ‘call to arms’ for Marxists to continue the effort to once more rise from the ashes. Time is important, as financial crisis opened the window of opportunity for radical change and for Marxists to try again – despite a probable failure. But hopefully a better one. I’ve put the quotation as my facebook status (without any context) and the reply I’ve got is quite symptomatic. A friend countered with corporate humour – Dilbert:

“If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a fool about it.”

I found it ominously intriguing. When Marxism says “Try again. Fail better.” corporate culture says: “Try again. Then quit.”

It may seem that the ‘Fail better’ part is defeatist and shows hopelessness of the situation. But it is not. As Dupuy says: ‘[a catastrophe’s] actualization – the fact that it takes place – … retroactively creates its necessity’. Therefore to be prepared and avoid another catastrophe we need to act as if it was inevitable. One needs to think beyond ‘now’. Interestingly, there’s a strong parallel with bushido – samurai’s code. The main tenet of the way of the samurai is to live as if one was already dead – nicely showed in Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Ghost Dog’. As a side note, Jarmusch in his other movies was inspired by Beckett. Coming back to bushido, dying without achieving one’s aims is regarded as cowardice and is therefore the worst sin. So while ‘Fail better’ is about constant reinvention and struggle, ‘Then quit’ is a call for immediate seppuku of ideas contrary to corporate capitalism.

Since Samuel Beckett seems to be a sponsor of this post I have to mention a brilliant commission for Tate’s Turbine Hall by a Polish artist Miroslaw Balka.

How It Is – a giant box filled with almost complete darkness. An absolute must-see, or rather must-can’t-see. Check out the photo and you’ll know what I mean.

What does this work have to do with Beckett? It’s titled ‘How It Is’ – the title taken from Beckett’s novel as according to Balka they share a similar sense of minimalism.

I have taken these shots on a recent walk along Thames and was thinking of temporal inconsistency – breaking away from ‘now’, not only in the context of a catastrophe – at least not a world-threatening one – but more prosaically in the context of peeing.

Peeing is, of course, very important when you walk a lot and the ever-present issue is ‘where?’. I always have reservations before walking into a pub/restaurant to pee. Even if I have been there before. Assuming you have the same, I find it interesting that we struggle to break away from ‘now’ and feel it’s not appropriate to use a toilet without being a customer ‘now’. But what if you’ve been a customer before? And probably will be one in the future? I think we struggle to see ourselves in the totality of time and put too much emphasis on ‘now’. So in a radical spirit I say: let’s stop! Past actualization and future probability means we have paid our toilet dues and will continue to pay them in the future! Let’s take our moral reservations and flush them with vengeance! In my personal call to arms I say:

If you have ever ‘Failed’ your bladder because of misguided morality fuelled by limitations in perception of time ‘Try again!’. As if you knew next time you’ll ‘Fail better’.

This is the true way of the walking samurai.

 Text

John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), one of the neglected masterpieces of the Hollywood Left, is a true lesson in critique of ideology. It is the story of John Nada – Spanish for “nothing”! -, a homeless laborer who finds work on a Los Angeles construction site, but has no place to stay. One of the workers, Frank Armitage, takes him to spend the night at a local shantytown. While being shown around that night, he notices some odd behavior at a small church across the street. Investigating it the next day, he accidentally stumbles on several more boxes hidden in a secret compartment in a wall, full of sunglasses. When he later puts on a pair of the glasses for the first time, he notices that a publicity billboard now simply displays the word “OBEY,” while another billboard urges the viewer to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” He also sees that paper money bears the words “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Additionally he soon discovers that many people are actually aliens who, when they realize he can see them for what they are, the police suddenly arrive….

See also:
They Live! Hollywood as an Ideological Machine

Zizek’s Unbehagen In Der Nature addresses current discussions surrounding ecology and nature. Right off the bat however Zizek’s conceptualization of nature is limited – seeming to be nature as it appears to us, nature as we can manipulate it. The anxieity or uneasiness that Zizek discusses seems more to be more about the loss of a certain concept of nature or the natural and not the loss of nature itself.

Zizek writes:

“It is this horror at the unforeseen results of our own acts that causes shock and awe, not the power of nature over which we have no control; it is this horror that religion tries to domesticate. What is new today is the short-circuit between these two senses of ‘second nature’: ‘second nature’, in the sense of objective Fate, of the autonomized social process, generates ‘second nature’ in the sense of artificially created nature, of natural monsters.”

The disasters that Zizek warns about are all human-caused natural disasters and not the destructive capacity of nature itself. Furthermore while Zizek denounces an ecology of fear he also connects a view of nature in which are finitude is asserted to viewing nature as sacred and so forth. I find this connection troubling since nature as sacred allows for a separation and comfortable return to nature (in a pre-Oedipal sense) and the dominant ideological use of  nature (if it is negative) is not about nature over us but nature as a problem for our future – we must save the environment for our children etc.

Zizek continues with the following:

“‘terror’ means accepting the fact of the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count. It means fully accepting that ‘nature’ does not exist. It means fully consummating the gap that separates the life-world notion of nature and the scientific notion of natural reality: ‘nature’ qua the domain of balanced reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing off the rails its circular motion is man’s fantasy; nature is already in itself ‘second nature’. Its balance is always secondary, an attempt to negotiate a ‘habit’ that would restore some order after catastrophic interruptions.”

For Zizek nature must be non-all or barred, but this nature never goes beyond the range of the earth. Zizek those go on to argue that the appearence of the whole in nature, that the very possibility of nature-in-itself is merely a result of subjective experience, an argument he ties to the experience of the sublime. Zizek then argues for ecology without nature thereby following Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature.  I have unfortunately not yet read his text of the same name. From what I have read it seems that what he attacks as the concept of nature is a dominant mode of nature – one stemming from the rationalist tradition where is an immense but separate entity. Zizek writes: “what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on.”

Here my largest issue (which seems to come up with many commentators on nature and ecology) is that the ecology of concepts of nature is severally narrowed for the sake of argument. Zizek seems to make a reversal when discussing the films of Tarkovsky and in particular Stalker but then shifts back to focus on transcendental subjectivity.

The ontological priviledge of the subject remains a serious stumbling block for any approach to nature that is not too shallow or too obfuscated. The finitude of the subject has become increasingly transcendentalized at the expense of nature, nature becomes merely an elaborate background. Nature goes right through the subject.

* You can listen to a segment of the Slavoj Žižek essay on contemporary apocalypticism that will appear in our upcoming issue of Polygraph here. (via Verso)

* The headline reads, Cigar-Shaped “Mothership” Plunges Argentinian Town Into A Blackout.

* 15 Toys Not to Buy Your Child This Christmas. Of course, science proves you shouldn’t buy anyone gifts at all. (Both links via Neil.)

* Is the public option now too watered-down to fight for? Matt Yglesias and Steve Benen join Josh Marshall in thinking this over. I feel exactly how I did on Monday: the point is to pass anything so it can be improved without a filibuster.

* North Carolina in the news! Kay Hagan is the Senate’s 17th wealthiest senator (via), while Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina has gotten itself in big trouble for improper issue advocacy against the public option.

* Other politics quick hits: HIV travel ban finally lifted. The national GOP has money problems. They’re talking about a war tax. Despite what you may hear in the press, Obama is pretty good at this whole international diplomacy thing. And Dubai is collapsing; couldn’t have happened to a nicer country.

* The New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2009″ list is already out.

* ‘Are Fake Academic Conferences the New Nigerian Prince Scam?’

* Little-used geek measurements.

Sheppey (distance)
I have to include Douglas Adams’ co-creation (with John Lloyd) here — It’s from The Meaning of Liff, their dictionary of things there aren’t any words for yet. All the words in the dictionary are British place names (the Isle of Sheppey is off the Kent coast). One sheppey is the closest distance at which sheep are still picturesque, and is about seven-eighths of a mile.

* Thor, a Marvel comics character I’m still pretty sure has to be an elaborate joke, will redefine what a superhero movie can be.

* Black Friday LEGO nostalgia.

* Ah, that explains it: that badly timed Dollhouse ARG turns out to be the work of overzealous fans.

* Paging George Michael Bluth. (via)

Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, speaks on the topic of charity as an integral part of contemporary capitalism, by bringing consumption and charity together within the same gesture of redemption as an ethics light.

You can listen to the audio here, at RSA Events. From 24 November 2009.

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2009/11/27/consumer-zhu-zhu-pets-hamster.html

The next great Christmas toy for children (and the inner child) is the Zhu Zhu Pets mechanical hamster. This little guy drives cars, runs around in hamster wheels, and shits everywhere like a real hamster. Back up, it doesn’t actually shit everywhere like a real hamster and you don’t have to place it in a cage full of wood shavings where it will live out its years in sorrow.

I think it’s interesting that this is the biggest toy this Christmas as it follows the oft mentioned Zizekian argument that in a post-modern world we want to consume products but we want the products to have their malignant aspect removed: God without belief, Coke without calories, Chocolate laxatives, hamsters without a mess. We want the same great taste sans the consequences.

When I was a kid I had a hamster named squeakers. When he died I secretly cried in my bedroom and then moments later buried him in an empty sour cream container in the alley. When he was buried I placed a cross over his grave thinking that if I gave him a Christian burial I would see him in the next life. I still hold on to that hope.

I don’t know what I want to say exactly. I lament the fact that children aren’t getting real hamsters and are instead getting an ersatz of a hamster. I lament that lazy parents who don’t want their kid to have the responsibility of a real hamster will buy them this fraudulent simulacrum and deprive their kid of all the joys and pain of having and losing a living being.

Al Jazeera English – Empire – Europe: A fast-track superpower?
Video | Info

Europe has finally adopted a new treaty to strengthen its union, and chosen a president and foreign minister to speak with one voice for the continent.

Twenty-seven countries, with more than 500 million people, a combined economy bigger than the US and almost two million soldiers under arms, the European Union is to all intents and purposes, a superpower.

However, Europeans remain divided on central issues. Its cheerleaders, and foremost the dominating Franco German alliance, are celebrating the supranational Union they expect to lead globally, just as its detractors warn of a giant leap toward a federalist Europe that looks to compromise their national sovereignties and weakens their democracies…

The video is about 45min long.

Today I visited the Post Office to send some letters to discover they had implemented a new system. At the door you took a number and then when your number was called out you went to the window to post your letter, or whatever you needed to do. But this is precisely the same as it is before with the queuing in lines – we are called in the order that we arrived, still have to wait just as long, especially at busy times. The difference is that we could wander around the comfortably seated area, maybe taking a walk around, or reading a leaflet until the number was called. And that a computer controlled the system, with pleasing graphics.

Is this not precisely the kind of authoritarian freedom one experiences in neoliberal capitalism? Queuing without queuing – the impression of freedom while you are still waiting in a well ordered line. There is no real difference between this queuing and the old system apart from the vague experience of freedom of movement a ticket system gives. It is the same system, the same problems, but with a new veneer.

“La superación filosófica del mito no es un simple dejar atrás lo mítico, sino una pelea constante con (cabe) ello: la filosofía necesita el recurso al mito, no sólo por razones externas, sino inherentemente, para ’suturar’ su propio edificio conceptual allí donde falla en su intento por alcanzar su núcleo más ínitmo, desde el mito de la caverna de Platón hasta el mito freudiano del padre originario y el mito lacaniano de lamella. El mito es, pues, lo real del logos: el intruso extranjero, imposible de quitárselo de encima, imposible de permanecer del todo cabe ello. Aquí reside la lección de la Dialéctica de la Ilustración de Adorno y Horkheimer: la Ilustración siempre ya ‘contamina’ la ingenua inmediatez mítica; la Ilustración misma es mítica, esto es, su propio gesto fundante  repite la operación mítica. Y qué es la ‘posmodernidad’ sino la derrota definitiva de la Ilustración en su mismísimo triunfo: cuando la dialéctica de la Ilustración alcanza su apogeo, la sociedad posindustrial dinámica, desarraigada, genera directamente su propio mito. El ‘reduccionismo’ tecnológico del ciberespacio (la mente misma es reducida en último término a una ‘máquina espiritual’) y el imaginario mítico pagano de la brujería, de los poderes mágicos y misteriosos, etc., son estrictamente las dos caras del mismo fenómeno: la derrota de la modernidad en su mismo triunfo.”

Slavoj Zizek, Amor sin piedad, pp.19-20.

Me parece que Zizek ha visto que ya el libro del Génesis había visto: la caída. El pecado original no es otra cosa que el fracaso de la Ilustración: “¡Entended, hombres necios, no son absolutos!”, y la Ilustración es el arrogante intento por negar esa frase. O, más bien, una cierta Ilustración. A mi juicio, por ello, solo una concepción racional religiosa del hombre es capaz de asumir esta ‘filomitía’ (culto al mito): seamos francos, la ciencia como ideal, la razón como capacidad eterna es inexistente. Lo que hay, lo que tenemos, es finitud, y necesidad, y precariedad, y Caída.

Por eso hay quien dice que el problema con la modernidad fue olvidarse del pecado original. Es decir, comer ‘manzanas’.

* Bill Simmon has links on how to argue with your relatives about climate change over Thanksgiving. (If you have a smartphone, just queue up How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic and wait.) As I wrote over at Bill’s place, Matt Taibi’s recent piece on Sarah Palin—describing how she uses her endless interpersonal conflicts to generate political capital that is totally independent of anything so mundane as “ideas” or “positions”—really opened my eyes on how this Climategate nonsense is doing its work. Climategate shifts the field of debate from statistics and facts, which only a small minority are qualified to discuss, to the field of interpersonal relations and “bad behavior,” on which we can all have an opinion. It’s being pushed as a “huge scandal” precisely because it remakes climate change into a moral question about how smart people sometimes turn out to be arrogant jerks. That this moral question is totally irrelevant to the facts isn’t a bug, it’s the whole point.

* Also on the climate front: Obama will go to Copenhagen to commit to 17% under 2005, California introduces its cap and trade plan, and (via Alex G.) rich nations are not following through on promised climate change funds for developing nations. Surprise surprise.

* Elsewhere on the arguing-with-relatives front: Steve Benen has your charts that show the stimulus worked.

* BLDGBLOG goes inside Yucca Mountain.

* Another second-hand report on a recent Žižek talk, this one on ecology. There’s even more ecologically informed theory at Australian Humanities Review.

* History’s first entry in the things-that-make-me-kind-of-like-Bill-O’Reilly file.

* One of America’s most loathsome politicians may be about to stage a comeback.

* Stephen King may write a sequel to The Shining. Cynical-C says this must be stopped; maybe I’m getting soft, but it sounds to me like it actually could be decent.

* And, via How the University Works, UC Davis student activists have extracted limited concessions from the administration. The crisis, of course, remains ongoing.

Slavoj Zizek - rubbish agony aunt – great philosopher, cultural theorist and film critic. Currently International Director for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London,  I just missed him lecture at the RSA and LSE this week. Annoyed. I missed him a couple of years ago at the ICA too. Luckily you can watch his documentary, the eponymous Zizek, or fill your boots for free via the abundant teet of YouTube.

In one long example below you can play the game – how many times can one intellectual touch his face in just over an hour? Despite Zizek’s ungainly presence this lecture on violence is fantastic. So lucid it hurts, the brain is forced into a dizzying game of paying attention. I love the weaving of Donald Rumsfeld’s superb unknown-unknown’s rhetoric into the definition of ideology before then instantly introducing Western toilet variants into the explanation. Beats most of the lectures I got in school.

Part 2
Part 3

My main interest in the first part of this interview is that it proves me right yet again, this time with regard to his stance toward Stalinism. Coming on the heels of his appearance with Altizer on AAR, this is almost more vindication than my system can take.

[The interviewer sits, playing with his tape recorder. Zizek enters. They shake hands, and Zizek sits. He drinks from the glass of water already prepared for him.]

Mr. Zizek, I’d like to jump straight in, if you don’t mind.

Certainly. I actually have a plane to catch later, and I always like to be there at least four hours ahead of the flight. An irritating habit of mine, I’m afraid.

Not that strange though. I can’t fly at all.

[The interviewer laughs. Zizek doesn’t.]

An extreme…interesting.

The flying?

Yes, your fear of it. Not that you’re alone, but there is, I believe, a construction of weakness within the anxiety of an extreme, or someone who has withdrawn into such an anxiety.

[The interviewer puts his right leg on his left knee. Zizek takes a sip of his water.]

Well, like you said, it’s not an unusual state…

Yes, I agree. But there is still a position of weakness involved, an almost pathetic self abuse or unravelling.

I think…I’d say pathetic might be a little strong…

Not in the philosophical sense.

Still, I’m not sure about the terminology of ‘self abuse’…Jung, I think, said that it wasn’t so much the conscious self that was responsible, but more like a trigger that…

Oh yes, the mind is a terrible master, that old debate. I believe I stand with Popper on that one, I’m afraid. There is control, or can be control.

Really…Popper…

Yes, Karl Popper. A remarkable thinker, wouldn’t you say?

[The interviewer smiles and switches his left leg onto his right knee. Zizek stares at him.]

Ok, if we can leave Popper for another time and move onto the film. I’ve been told you watched it for the first time last night?

Yes, on cable.

First impressions?

You mean did I like it?

[The interviewer laughs, awkwardly?]

Not exactly, but that probably should’ve been the question.

Debate often gets in the way of the fundamentals.

Yes, agreed.

So…yes, I did like it. On an emotional level, very much so. On a technical level, it was very well composed by the director, McTiernan, I believe…a lot of the angles were well constructed, the low shots, the Homeric delineation of McClane as he first enters the building. It was very accomplished.

Yes, it was. Did you also notice the portrayal of the terrorists, the size of Hans Gruber positioned against his men as they walk up to the party?

Hans Gruber?

Yes, the main villain. The antagonist.

Yes, I noticed it. The thinker and the brutes. I actually recognised it a little earlier than you, perhaps…when the terrorists arrive outside the building, and the two vehicles come together in what you might call antagonistic unity…and they drive parallel to each other before separation…the larger, more sinister looking van goes down out of shot, and the smaller, more acceptable public face of the threat, the car, stays on ground level.

Interesting. A representation of duality perhaps?

Well, yes, that’s quite obvious. The van is the true nature of the threat, and the car is merely the facilitator, a thing to be discarded once parked. And furthermore, there is the schematic of the environment itself, which is of course never an accident in film, where the road leads directly to the building, the castle of the city, we can presume, as the structure is shown in long shot throughout the film, dominating the landscape, which implies that the corporation, the entity boasting its success, is also inviting its doom. This, of course, applies to any object with an entrance, but is especially pronounced when the subject matter is capitalism, and as a consequence the endgame it begs for, which is destruction.

Well, you might have to consider the security guard and CCTV cameras in the building. There is always a defence somewhere in the invitation…

Yes and no. In this film, the security guard is the first to die. He doesn’t even move, or doesn’t have time to move. Therefore the defence is not sufficient, it is reactive, a shop dummy.

But it is inherent in its nature to be reactive, is it not?

Yes, and that is its failing.

But defence as a warning can be very effective…

Until the one time the warning is not heeded and, in this film, is the destruction of the building, or potentially so. And this is the interesting aspect, the placement of defence, any defence against potential intrusion of destruction of the concept…and the building in this film is very much an embodiment of concept, of ideal, an abstract wearing glass and concrete and wondrous fountains…and it is doomed from inception. As soon as you create an ideal it becomes finite and the inevitable outcome is destruction, not necessarily the end, but an end. To quote Spinoza, ‘belief and comprehension of an idea occur at the same moment,’ so once the ideal is comprehended it can only be negated, and the final negation is destruction.

I see. So you would argue defence is ultimately superficial?

Actually, it’s not an argument, it’s theoretical fact.

Really? But aren’t we debating it now?

Not at all. You merely do not understand the full complexity of it. I do.

I’m not sure I’d agree with that…

I’m sure you wouldn’t. In the same way, a 12^th Century scholar wouldn’t agree the earth was round. Never mind.

[The interviewer takes a sip of his water and spills a little.]

Ok, so how about the defence that works, John McClane? How do you place him in your dialectic?

McClane is particularly interesting as a protagonist as, naturally, he shares a lot of characteristics with the antagonists, with Gruber especially.

Is each a mirror to the other?

Not exactly, but they are similar. They are both willing to kill to achieve their endgames, and neither of them are what you would call socially adept. Gruber seems to play that part, but it is an illusion. The best illustration of the point is his similarity in appearance to the man he shoots…I forget his name…

Ellis?

Perhaps. The second man he shoots, holding the cola…

Yes, Ellis.

Ok, so Gruber is costumed in a similar way to Ellis, the beard, the grin, the suits…both men represent the face of a concept. Ellis, the smooth face of capitalism, even drinking capitalism when he is shot, and Gruber the face of politicized violence. The difference between them is the truth underneath, the inner stream of self. Ellis’ face is genuine as it is a construction of what he believes, what he loves, which is capitalism, the system which allows him to drink, have sex, take drugs. The procedure of the act is false, of course, but the act is easy enough to unravel. Gruber, in contradiction, is the many layered fraud, the Babushka doll of true intention. He acts out the political terrorist role yet it is later revealed he is a thief. He practises violence yet seems to have no real love for it. To him, it is simply a means to an end.

So what is the truth of Gruber? Is it revealed?

I would say, yes. If you look closely enough you can see what he is.

Which is?

Simply, he’s the Edmond of capitalism. Its worst face if you will. A man who is cold, detached, who can act out the face of political reason and empathy, but has no real attachment to it. And as the film’s antagonist it is implied that he is intent on destroying the capitalist ideal, the balance to the excesses of the ideal, yet as the film turns, ultimately he reveals himself to be the concept itself.

The concept stealing from the concept?

Not precisely, more like the concept eating itself. The idea eats me or I eat the idea, that kind of problematic. In this case, it’s probably the case that the idea has eaten Gruber, possibly without his cognition, as he reveals his classical education and his knowledge of industrialisation and fine suits. This is a man who knows and lives the concept and ultimately is so informed by it that he can only be its destroyer. The concept invites participation and is constructed in such a way as to prevent any kind of final victory, as it is a concept designed for the individual and one victory for one individual makes no difference to the system, a system which has, in fact, been manufactured by its first successes, and forced into compatibility with a very selfish, individualistic ideal.

Yes, one success, I suppose, means many losses for others…

Well, yes, obviously. So the stakes get higher and higher until you have a Gruber type, the macro-sized snake’s tail trying to eat the rest of the body.

Ok, so, following this logic, McClane would play the role of…?

A flake of the snake’s skin, I believe. The small man, the flea taking little chunks out of the antagonists.

 Little chunks? He does kill them all…

Yes, clearly, but look at the technique, the choreography of the violence. The first man he kills proves the point. McClane is dwarfed physically, and the only way for him to succeed is to jump on the man’s back like a child. Then a later kill, he hides under a table and shoots from behind his shield. And this is very recognisable, in fact, as an extension of guerrilla warfare. Hit the enemy and run, hit and run, constant mobility and devious, sudden violence, this is the strategy of McClane.

Does that mean he is anti-capitalist?

Not at all. Anti-system perhaps, as all guerrilla warriors are, but if you consider what he is defending then it would be difficult to promote him as anti-capitalist. He’s the defender of the castle, the quick thinker, the barbarian, the survivalist who does whatever it takes to succeed, which is inherently capitalist. And, tellingly, all actions from both characters occur inside the building, the physical actualisation of the ideal, and not from external threat…the police and FBI are shown to be impotent throughout the film…which suggests, of course, an inevitability of implosion, of the ideal eating itself.

In that case, both Gruber and McClane are pro-capitalist?

Yes, and not just the theory of it, the good and the bad, they are the totality of it. They are the practising nature of its ideal, one must win, the other must lose, but they’re both fighting under the guidelines of the system. Gruber wants his wealth, McClane, ironically, wants the preservation of the building, the hostages, the cogs or hardware of capitalism, and the continuation of the system itself which will inevitably lead to the creation and introduction of another Gruber, many more Grubers in fact.

McClane is the reason for Gruber…

Almost. A constituent part, at least. He kills him, but wants no change to the system, so more will come. Like cutting down a tree and planting another, if you can stomach such a simplified metaphor.

[The interviewer takes some more water. Zizek watches him.]

Moving on to another part of the film, what did you make of the representation of McClane’s marriage?

Ha, moving on, you say, but this could be argued as an extension of the capitalist theme.

In what way?

[Zizek pauses. He stares at the interviewer, no smile then takes some water.]

In the way that the wife is an important part in the company, in the ideal, and it is her watch that Gruber hangs onto at the end, just before he falls to his death. A Rolex, I believe, which is interesting in itself not only as a symbol of McClane’s, the hero’s,  recapture of her from the corporate…a slightly misogynistic problematic, if I may say…but also as a superficial act. The fact that the watch is gone is essentially meaningless as they walk outside at the climax still very much entrenched in the system, the ideal. One might suggest…hope even, for her sake…that there will be another Rolex in the future, under different conditions, of course, but still constituent of the system.

So their marriage is a representation of the system?

In a sense it is, yes, but in another sense it isn’t. The capitalism aspect is just one of many readings we could attribute to that marriage, or at least what we know of the marriage.

You mean, as it’s a film we can only know so much?

Clearly. It is well established that the principle of modern film is to show, not tell, and, certainly, film cannot express any part of the interior condition, not successfully at least. I suppose they could do voiceover, but it is still limited as those thoughts have to be linear and servile.

Servile?

Yes, servile to the plot.

The character has to think about the plot, I see…

Perhaps, you do. It’s really not that complex in itself. The character is not interior in the sense that he has control of his conscious self. No, the control is applied from the form of the medium, the limitations of plot and film character. In this film, to elucidate the point, McClane is sometimes shown talking to himself, supposedly an elaboration of self that tells us a little more about how he acts when in isolation, yet adds nothing to what we already know. In that sense, it is not an elaboration, but a stretching of, or a further repetition of, previously established attitude.

I don’t know, I always find it interesting when characters talk to themselves…

No, it’s not interesting at all. It’s a fraud, a false projection of the inner condition. How do we know this? Simply, because it is impossible to show on film the interior mind in isolation. The actor is not alone, he is surrounded by cameras. If it is improvisation then it is specious, as no actor would reveal anything of his own interior state, not the truth of it at least. What he would show would be a false cognitive state, a repetition most probably of something he has read or seen elsewhere. There would be no truth to the presentation. However, if you argue that it is the writer’s expression, which I sense you were about to do…

[The interviewer switches position again. Zizek smirks.]

Ha, when you’ve been interviewed as many times as I have you learn to read the other quite accurately…

[The interviewer looks at his tape recorder, flushed?]

…helped by the conditions of the environmental construct we are in, of course…by that I mean, the interviewer and the interviewee, and there are only so many scenes which can be constructed from that…but, back to the text, where were we?

The writer’s expression…

Oh yes, the writer…if we reject improvisation on the actor’s part then what remains is the writer’s expression. Now, we’ll forget for the moment that film is often written by committee, and, for our own theoretical agenda, follow the line of a sole authorial voice in the script…well, in this case, it is also impossible for the writer to express any internal truth of McClane, simply because McClane and the writer are undermined by the form. The form demands story, and character that is chained to such a story. This is why the internal thoughts that are expressed en audio are still censored, and we know this because all the thoughts are related to the plot.

I’m not sure I’d agree with that theory…

Please, it’s not theory, young man. It’s theoretical fact.

Ok, well…I’m not sure if it’s true either way.

Really.

It seems to me that McClane, when he speaks out his thoughts, is revealing himself. When he’s about to jump off the roof he tells himself, ‘I’ll never go inside a tall building again,’ which I think is a legitimate thought, and it shows his anxiety…

Yes, yes, I’m aware of what it does, but it is not truth, it is not the internal revealing itself in the external. It is plot, nothing more.

[The interviewer puts his hand under his thigh and pinches himself hard.]

Ok. If it is plot, nothing more, then what would true internal thought be if you were standing on top of a…a forty storey building?

No, that’s not it. You’re moving sideways, not forwards.

McClane should move sideways?

[Zizek pauses, puts his head in his hands. The interviewer shakes his head.]

Dear Lord…

It was a joke, Mr. Zizek.

[Zizek comes out of his hands and says ‘dear Lord’ once more.]

Well, joke or not, the point is still invalid. McClane cannot reveal internal thought at this point because he is a character within his setting. He is unaware he is being watched or listened to, of course, but the actor and the writer are not. And you could argue that the configuration of a setting, a false world environment, allows the writer to transplant the internal, the truth, onto this environment…after all, they might say, it’s McClane who said it, not a real person…but such an argument is unsustainable if you run it to its end, as, simply, this false world environment has been established to entertain an audience, and not just an audience, but a mass audience, which by its nature invites a limited amount of truth, if any…and ultimately, the false world environment of the Nakatomi Plaza must be governed and accepted by the rules of the real world environment, and therefore real truth, the real internal condition cannot be revealed as the real internal truth is absurd…or as Sartrellian theory would have it, the real world environment is absurd and real internal thought is normal. And all of this is separated, of course, from the Deleuzean reading of the film, which would argue that any externalisation or performance of the internal condition automatically renders it false. Therefore in film, and perhaps in fiction too, the internal is an impossibility.

Really? Even in novels?

Yes. And you don’t need to ask your next question, I already know it. Yes, there are internal narratives, novels done entirely in “voice”, and you would argue that it is the extension of the writer and by relation the extension of their internal condition, yet there is a fallacy involved in that assumption which leads to a cul-de-sac…how could any writer continue to exist in the real world environment if he revealed the internal truth? If the truth was written then the only realistic option for the writer would be suicide.

But…I disagree…truth has been revealed in novels, surely. What about Camus’ ‘L’etranger’?

That wasn’t truth, it was theory.

But he killed someone, and couldn’t connect with the world. Doesn’t that jar with the real world environment?

No, no…the character was disconnected, yes, but he could only go so far. As Camus himself said, ‘There is a limit to thought, and a point at which you cannot relate to yourself or the others around you as an object.’ You can show character deeds, and define him on a basic level, you can show feelings and thoughts, and define him further, but such thoughts must be censored to prevent complete alienation of the audience…what you cannot do is show everything, the absolute truth of the mind. Therefore, Camus’ character represents a state, but not an absolute truth, as it is impossible for the writer to do so. Or perhaps I should say, almost impossible. Like I said earlier, if a writer did manage to write the truth then he would have to kill himself because life would be impossible.

I’m sorry, I’m not really sure I understand why that would be so…

It is unimportant whether or not you understand it.

Perhaps you could explain further…

[Zizek looks at his watch.]

I think that would be unnecessary. We’ve talked about this more than enough.

If you think so…though I believe the point is still inconclusive…

Really.

[Zizek takes a sip of water. The interviewer looks at the clock.]

Ok, final question. Is there anything else you noticed about the film? The hero complex perhaps?

No. I’m not really interested in heroes.

Fine. No heroes then.

[The interviewer picks up his tape recorder. Zizek coughs.]

There was another aspect of the marriage that was interesting…

[The interviewer pauses then puts the tape recorder back down.]

Ok…

From a gender-sociological viewpoint, I think it was very important how McClane functioned with his wife before the crisis of the plot was introduced.

Really. And how did they function?

It was very discreet, you may not have noticed it, but there was a brief argument between the two of them in the office, when McClane was cleaning his face.

I noticed it…

Well, the actions perhaps, but did you understand it?

Yes.

Well?

[The interviewer looks at his hands, reading the answer? Zizek waits, arms folded.]

It showed, I believe, the troubles in their marriage up to that point.

And?

And…I don’t know…I don’t think there was any more to it, really. They were fighting, he didn’t respect her as a successful woman…this is what they would deal with in the film.

Interesting. That’s probably ten percent of it, maybe a little more.

Ten percent? Really…

Yes, from the actions, that was the detail we were obviously intended to pick up as the audience. However, as is common with film, it is what is implied by its absence that provides more of the detail. The state of their marriage before, for example…we know they were fighting, or a little distanced from each other, but we can suspect no more from the action as presented. However, if you take McClane’s actions as a starting point, and the socio-psychological viewpoint implied by his resistance to his wife’s career then it becomes clear that this is a man who can only function in a crisis. When the antagonistic force asserts itself on the plot, McClane becomes heroic through the same qualities that make him misogynistic in the stasis period between crises. His endgame, as we see through his actions over the course of the film, is not simply to oppose the antagonists, but to oppose his wife…to get her back in the kitchen, if you will. And it is successful…he wins her trust by killing the threat to her life, the heroic impulse other writers love to intellectualize over, despite such an impulse indulging violent and pathological fantasies, which will clearly erupt again when threatened by other external agency, most probably his wife, I believe, and her desire to prove the ‘I’ in ‘wife’…a desire which acutely conflicts with McClane’s view of the world.

So their marriage is doomed?

Yes. Destroyed by two incompatible world-views.

Well, I like to be a little more positive about things…I believe their marriage will be fine…this was their crisis, they overcame it.

You would be wrong.

Or maybe not…remember, McClane is aware of his own failings…at one point, after the argument in fact, he bangs his head against the door, calling himself ‘an idiot.’

It is unimportant. An awareness of one’s failings is not a cure.

Yeah, but people do change. That’s undeniable…

A narrow change, if any, but mostly not.

Nah, they do change…

No, they don’t.

They do.

They do not.

[The interviewer looks at the clock. He puts his hand on his thigh and pinches again.]

Ok, it’s running late, and you have a flight to catch…

Yes, I do.

So, thanks for your time, Mr. Zizek.

[They shake hands. No smile from either man.]

Yes, thank you.

[Zizek gets up and walks to the hotel room door.]

Have a good flight.

Yes, thank you.

[Zizek pauses, his hand on the door.]

I do enjoy flying.

[The interviewer smiles, turns, grips a cushion in his hand.]

Goodbye.

[The Interviewer mutters ‘enjoy your four hour wait, motherfucker.’]

[Zizek exits. He stops by a water fountain in the corridor, takes a breath, and drinks. He puts his hand on his shirt, where his heart is, and puts his other hand over his eyes. A few moments later he stops, breathes out and leaves.]

The Great Debate | Info | Source

Soon after the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, treatise “Das Kapital” saw a resurgence in popularity throughout eastern Germany. The 1867 critical analysis of capitalism by Karl Marx became a bestseller for academic publisher Karl-Dietz-Verlag, as a rejection of capitalism set in following intense financial turmoil. More than a year later, questions over the validity of the capitalist economic system remain in focus amid ongoing concerns about the cost to society of bank bailouts, high unemployment and stimulus measures. If anything, the financial crisis has made capitalism more lean and mean, author and philosopher Slavoj Žižek told Reuters ahead of a talk at the London School of Economics. Žižek suggests that those in power should be undermined via “patient ideologico-critical work” rather than direct confrontation.