亚龙湾吃饭攻略

Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (October Books) PREFACE Walter Benjamin commended as a theoretically productive and subversive procedure the reading of the highest spiritual products of a culture alongside its common, prosaic, worldly products. What he had in mind specifically was a reading of the sublime ideal of the love couple represented in Mozart's Magic Flute together with the definition of marriage found in Immanuel Kant (Mozart's contemporary), a definition that caused much indignation within moralistic circles. Marriage, Kant wrote, is "a contract between two adult persons of the opposite sex on the mutual use of their sexual organs." It is something of the same order that has been put to work in this book: a reading of the most sublime theoretical motifs of Jacques Lacan together with and through exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture: not only Alfred Hitchcock, about whom there is now general agreement that he was, after all, a "serious artist," but also film noir, science fiction, detective novels, sentimental kitsch, and up—or down—to Stephen King. We thus apply to Lacan himself his own famous formula "Kant with Sade," i.e., his reading of Kantian ethics through the eyes of Sadian perversion. What the reader will find in this book is a whole series of "Lacan with . . . ": Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Colleen McCullough, Stephen King, etc. (If, now and then, the book also mentions ''great" names like Shakespeare and Kafka, the reader need not be uneasy: they are read strictly as kitsch authors, on the same level as McCullough and King.) The intention of such an enterprise is twofold. On the one hand, the book is conceived as a kind of introduction to Lacanian "dogmatics" (in the theological sense of the term). It mercilessly exploits popular culture, using it as convenient material to explain not only the vague outlines of the Lacanian theoretical edifice but sometimes also the finer details missed by the predominantly academic reception of Lacan: the breaks in his teaching, the gap separating him from the field of poststructuralist "deconstructionism," and so on. This way of "looking awry" at Lacan makes it possible to discern features that usually escape a "straightforward" academic look. On the other hand, it is clear that Lacanian theory serves as an excuse for indulging in the idiotic enjoyment of popular culture. Lacan himself is used to legitimize the delirious race from Hitchcock's Vertigo to King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The solidarity of these two movements could be exemplified by a double paraphrase of De Quincey's famous propositions concerning the art of murder, propositions that served as a regular point of reference to both Lacan and Hitchcock: If a person renounces Lacan, soon psychoanalysis itself will appear to him dubious, and from here it is just a step to a disdain for Hitchcock's films and to a snobbish refusal of horror fiction. How many people have entered the way of perdition with some fleeting cynical remark on Lacan, which at the time was of no great importance to them, and ended by treating Stephen King as absolute literary trash! If a person renounces Stephen King, soon Hitchcock himself will appear to him dubious, and from here it is just a step to a disdain for psychoanalysis and to a snobbish refusal of Lacan. How many people have entered the way of perdition with some fleeting cynical remark on Stephen King, which at the time was of no great importance to them, and ended by treating Lacan as a phallocentric obscurantist! It is for the reader to decide which of the two versions he or she would choose. A word or two concerning the general outline of the book's theoretical argument. Lacan's "return to Freud" is usually associated with his motto "the unconscious is structured like a language," i.e., with an effort to unmask imaginary fascination and reveal the symbolic law that governs it. In the last years of Lacan's teaching, however, the accent was shifted from the split between the imaginary and the symbolic to the barrier separating the real from (symbolically structured) reality. So, the first part of the book—"How Real Is Realitty?"—attempts to develop the dimension of the Lacanian real, first by describing how what we call "reality'' implies the surplus of a fantasy space filling out the "black hole" of the real; then by articulating the different modalities of the real (the real returns, it answers, it can be rendered via the symbolic form itself, and there is knowledge in the real); and finally by confronting the reader with two ways of avoiding the encounter with the real. This last will be exemplified by the two main figurations of the detective in crime novels: the classic "logic and deduction" detective and the hard-boiled detective. Although it might seem that all has already been said in the endless list of literature on Alfred Hitchcock, the second part of this book—"One Can Never Know Too Much about Hitchcock"—takes the risk of proposing three new approaches: first an articulation of the dialectic of deception at work in Hitchcock's films, a dialectic in which those who really err are the non-duped; then a conception of the famous Hitchcockian tracking shot as a formal procedure whose aim is to produce a "blot," a point from which the image itself looks at the spectator, the point of the "gaze of the Other"; and, finally, a proposal that would enable us to grasp the succession of the main stages in Hitchcock's development, from the Oedipal journey of the 1930s to the "pathological narcissism,'' dominated by a maternal superego, of the 1960s. The third part—"Fantasy, Bureaucracy, Democracy"—draws some conclusions from Lacan's late theory, concerning the field of ideology and politics. First, it delineates the contours of the ideological sinthome (a superegoic voice, for example) as a core of enjoyment at work in the midst of every ideological edifice and thus sustaining our "sense of reality." Then it proposes a new way of conceptualizing the break between modernism and postmodernism, centered on the obscenity of the bureaucratic apparatus as rendered in Kafka's work. The book concludes with an analysis of the inherent paradoxes that pertain to the very notion of democracy: the source of these paradoxes is the ultimate incommensurability between the symbolic domain of equality, duties, rights, etc., and the "absolute particularity" of the fantasy space, i.e., of the specific ways individuals and communities organize their enjoyment. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Preliminary versions of some of the material have appeared in "Hitchcock," October, no. 38 (Fall 1986); "Looking Awry," October, no. 50 (Fall 1989); "Undergrowth of Enjoyment," New Formations, no. 9 (1989); and "The Real and Its Vicissitudes,'' Newsletter of the Freudian Field, no. 5 (1990). Since it is needless to add that Joan Copjec was present from the very conception of this book, encouraging the author to write it, that her work served as a theoretical point of reference, or that she spent considerable time improving the manuscript, we will not do so! 1 HOW REAL IS REALITY? 1— From Reality to the Real The Paradoxes of Objet Petit a Looking Awry at Zeno's Paradoxes What is at stake in the endeavor to "look awry" at theoretical motifs is not just a kind of contrived attempt to "illustrate" high theory, to make it "easily accessible,'' and thus to spare us the effort of effective thinking. The point is rather that such an exemplification, such a mise-en-scène of theoretical motifs renders visible aspects that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Such a procedure already has a respectable line of philosophical predecessors, from late Wittgenstein to Hegel. Is not the basic strategy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit to undermine a given theoretical position by "staging" it as an existential subjective attitude (that of asceticism, that of the "beautiful soul," etc.) and thus to reveal its otherwise hidden inconsistencies, that is, to exhibit the way its very subjective position of enunciation undermines its "enunciated," its positive contents? To demonstrate the fecundity of such an approach, let us turn to the first proper philosopher, Parmenides, who asserted the sole existence of Being as One. What are of interest are the famous paradoxes by means of which Zeno, his disciple, tried to prove his master's thesis a contrario, by disclosing the nonsensical, contradictory consequences that follow from the hypothesis of the existence of multitude and movement. At first sight— which is, of course, that sight which pertains to the traditional historian of philosophy— these paradoxes appear as exemplary cases of pure, hollow, artificial logomachy, contrived logical trifling attempting to prove an obvious absurdity, something that goes against our most elementary experience. But in his brilliant essay "The literary technique of Zeno's paradoxes,"1 Jean-Claude Milner effectuates a kind of "staging" of them: he gives sufficient reasons to allow us to conclude that all four of the paradoxes by means of which Zeno tried to prove the impossibility of movement originally referred to literary commonplaces. The final form in which these paradoxes became part of our tradition results moreover from a typical carnevalesque-burlesque procedure of confronting a tragic, noble topic with its vulgar, common counterpart, in a manner recalling later Rabelais. Let us take the best known of Zeno's paradoxes, the one about Achilles and the tortoise. Its first point of reference is, of course, the Iliad, book XXII, lines 199–200, where Achilles tries in vain to catch up with Hector. This noble reference was then crossed with its popular counterpart, Aesop's fable about the hare and the tortoise. The version universally known today, the one about "Achilles and the tortoise," is thus a later condensation of two literary models. The interest of Milner's argument lies not solely in the fact that it proves that Zeno's paradoxes, far from being purely a game of logical reasoning, belong to a precisely defined literary genre; that is, that they use the established literary technique of subverting a noble model by confronting it with its banal, comical counterpart. What is of crucial importance from our—Lacanian— 1 Jean-Claude Milner, DéDections fictives, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1985, pp. 45–71. perspective is the very contents of Zeno's literary points of reference. Let us return to the first, most famous paradox mentioned; as already noted, its original literary reference is the following lines from the Iliad: "As in a dream, the pursuer never succeeds in catching up with the fugitive whom he is after, and the fugitive likewise cannot ever clearly escape his pursuer; so Achilles that day did not succeed in attaining Hector, and Hector was not able to escape him definitely." What we have here is thus the relation of the subject to the object experienced by every one of us in a dream: the subject, faster than the object, gets closer and closer to it and yet can never attain it—the dream paradox of a continuous approach to an object that nevertheless preserves a constant distance. The crucial feature of this inaccessibility of the object was nicely indicated by Lacan when he stressed that the point is not that Achilles could not overtake Hector (or the tortoise)—since he is faster than Hector, he can easily leave him behind—but rather that he cannot attain him: Hector is always too fast or too slow. There is a clear parallel here with the well-known paradox from Brecht's Threepenny Opera: do not run after luck too arduously, because it might happen that you will overrun it and that luck will thus stay behind. The libidinal economy of the case of Achilles and the tortoise is here made clear: the paradox stages the relation of the subject to the object-cause of its desire, which can never be attained. The object-cause is always missed; all we can do is encircle it. In short, the topology of this paradox of Zeno is the paradoxical topology of the object of desire that eludes our grasp no matter what we do to attain it. The same may be said of the other paradoxes. Let us go on to the next: the one about the arrow that cannot move because at any given moment, it occupies a definite point in space. According to Milner, its model is a scene from the Odyssey, book XI, lines 606– 607, in which Heracles is continually shooting an arrow from his bow. He completes the act again and again, but in spite of this incessant activity on his part, the arrow remains motionless. Again, it is almost superfluous to recall how this resembles the well-known dream experience of "moving immobility": in spite of all our frenetic activity, we are stuck in the same place. As Milner points out, the crucial characteristic of this scene with Heracles is its location—the infernal world in which Odysseus encounters a series of suffering figures—among them Tantalus and Sisyphus—condemned to repeat the same act indefinitely. The libidinal economy of Tantalus's torments is notable: they clearly exemplify the Lacanian distinction between need, demand, and desire, i.e., the way an everyday object destined to satisfy some of our needs undergoes a kind of transubstantiation as soon as it is caught in the dialectic of demand and ends up producing desire. When we demand an object from somebody, its "use value" (the fact that it serves to satisfy some of our needs) eo ipso becomes a form of expression of its "exchange value"; the object in question functions as an index of a network of intersubjective relations. If the other complies with our wish, he thereby bears witness to a certain attitude toward us. The final purpose of our demand for an object is thus not the satisfaction of a need attached to it but confirmation of the other's attitude toward us. When, for example, a mother gives milk to her child, milk becomes a token of her love. The poor Tantalus thus pays for his greed (his striving after "exchange value") when every object he obtains loses its ''use value" and changes into a pure, useless embodiment of "exchange value": the moment he bites into food, it changes to gold. It is Sisyphus, however, who bears on our interest here. His continuous pushing of the stone up the hill only to have it roll down again served, according to Milner, as the literary model for the third of Zeno's paradoxes: we never can cover a given distance X, because, to do so, we must first cover half this distance, and to cover half, we must first cover a quarter of it, and so on, ad infinitum. A goal, once reached, always retreats anew. Can we not recognize in this paradox the very nature of the psychoanalytical notion of drive, or more properly the Lacanian distinction between its aim and its goal? The goal is the final destination, while the aim is what we intend to do, i.e., the way itself. Lacan's point is that the real purpose of the drive is not its goal (full satisfaction) but its aim: the drive's ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal. The real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit.2 Therein consists the paradox of Sisyphus: once he reaches his goal, he experiences the fact that the real aim of his activity is the way itself, the alternation of ascent and descent. Where do we detect the libidinal economy of the last of Zeno's paradoxes according to which it follows, from the movement of two equal masses in opposite directions, that half of a certain amount of time equals its double amount? Where do we encounter the same paradoxical experience of an increase in the libidinal impact of an object whenever attempts are made to diminish and destroy it? Consider the way the figure of the Jews functioned in Nazi discourse: the more they were exterminated, eliminated, the fewer their numbers, the more dangerous their remainder became, as if their threat grew in proportion to their diminution in reality. This is again an exemplary case of the subject's relation to the horrifying object that embodies its surplus enjoyment: the more we fight against it, the more its power over us grows. The general conclusion to be drawn from all this is that there is a certain domain in which Zeno's paradoxes are fully valid: the domain of the subject's impossible relation to the object-cause of its desire, the domain of the drive that circulates endlessly around it. This is, however, the very domain Zeno is obliged to exclude as "impossible" in order that the reign of the philosophical One can establish itself. That is, the exclusion of the real of the drive and the object around which it circulates is constitutive of philosophy as such, which is why Zeno's paradoxes, by means of which he tries to prove the impossibility and consequently the nonexistence of movement and multitude, are the reverse of the assertion of One, the immovable Being, in Parmenides, the first proper philosopher.3 Perhaps we can now understand what Lacan meant when he said that the object small a 2 "When you entrust someone with a mission, the aim is not what he brings back, but the itinerary he must take. The aim is the way taken. . . . If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what, from the point-of- view of a biological totalization of function, would be the satisfaction of its end of reproduction, it is because it is a partial drive, and its aim is simply this return into circuit." (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, London, Hogarth Press, 1977, p. 179.) 3 In other words, we could pin down the ultimate paradox of Zeno's paradoxes by means of the Hegelian distinction between what the subject "intends to say" and what he "effectively says" (the distinction that, incidentally, coincides with the Lacanian distinction between signification and signifiance). What Zeno "wants to say," his intention, is to exclude the paradoxical nature of our relationship to object small a by proving its nonexistence; what he effectively does (more properly: says) is to articulate the very paradoxes that define the status of this object as impossible-real. "is what philosophical reflection lacks in order to be able to locate itself, i.e., to ascertain its nullity."4 Goal and Aim in Fantasy In other words, what Zeno excludes is the very dimension of fantasy, insofar as, in Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the subject's "impossible" relation to a, to the object- cause of its desire. Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes the subject's desire. This elementary definition is quite adequate, on condition that we take it literally: what the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfulled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed—and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject's desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through