Ever since James Clifford declared in 1988 that “we are all Caribbeans now living in our urban archipelagoes” there has been a rise in the theoretical cachet of creolization as a term that– along with its synonyms hybridity and transculturation–might explain the cultural diversity that has emerged with globalization. What distinguishes Clifford’s quote is its use of the Caribbean as a site whose experiences might be generalized as a universal concept. The utopian impulse behind Clifford’s phrase appears as a leitmotif in the essays edited by Charles Stewart in Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory which admirably seeks to rescue this term from its status as an epigram and recover its analytical force by turning to its origins in linguistic, anthropological, and historical theories and methodologies. While this interdisciplinary collection does not offer a single definitive interpretation of creolization, it does represent a shared concern with the specific question of what happens when a term that is meant to be descriptive becomes prescriptive. Using Clifford Geertz’s terms, they ask how and why scholars collapse a model of into a model for. In what ways is creolization different from its synonyms? These essays answer these questions by examining the fate of a creative metaphor as it travels across disciplines and takes its place within many different theoretical and conceptual models. While each of the essays makes its own particular critique of creolization, they all offer models for how it might be disentangled and more usefully deployed.
 

Traditionally, most work on creolization has been based in history, linguistics, and cultural studies of the Caribbean region, from Fernando Ortiz’s landmark work on transculturation to the early 1970s work of Kamau Brathwaite, Sidney Mintz, and Wilson Harris, where creolization emerged, to Chris Bongie’s later Islands and Exiles. Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s recent essay, “Creolization in Havana: The Oldest Form of Globalization,” is typical of recent uses in viewing the term as a synonym for globalization. The term is also used interchangeably with hybridity, and to describe global flows, as in the 1992 declaration by the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz that “this world of movement and mixture is a world in creolisation” (qtd 2). By contrast, the twelve essays in this collection follow in the wake of recent historical studies of creolization that expand our sense of the term beyond the Caribbean region, such as Megan Vaughan’s history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island and Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, both of which avoid using the term as only a metaphor for globalization. But this work is most unique in its interdisciplinary connections–returning anthropological appropriations of the term to its roots in linguistics–and in its geographical scope as it expands our sense of creolization beyond the Caribbean basin. Yet as Stewart observes in his carefully balanced and thoughtful introduction, the shared impulse of the collection to recover an original theoretical formulation stands in ironic opposition to the conventional sense of the term, which has come to signify the refusal of return to origins or of the kind of faith in etymology that underlies many of these essays.
 

Etymologically derived from the Portuguese crioulo and the Spanish criollo, creole referred to a “slave born in his master’s house” (from the Latin verb criar, “to breed,” but also “to bring up”), and was first used in the seventeenth century to describe the products of the New World. Marking geographical, not racial, difference it referred to those born in the Americas; thus, a Spanish couple could have one child born in Spain and one born in the New World and the former would be European and the latter would be creole. This classification, which resembles Linnaeus’s system for distinguishing plant life from the New World, was also used to distinguish between slaves born in the Americas and “Guinea” slaves born in Africa. With the demise of the slave trade in the Caribbean and the reduction of the European population in the nineteenth century, the term came to be associated with a largely black population. It is this sense that has informed the French Creolité movement of the 1990s which, as Mary Gallagher demonstrates in her essay, deliberately chose to ignore the etymological history and to repress its contingent meanings in mobilizing the phrase as an essentialist identity. But even this history needs to be qualified in each of its contexts. For instance, in Réunion Island creole refers to everyone born on the island, and in Trinidad the general population is called creole with the notable exception of the Asian population, who are excluded. In Suriname, a creole refers to a person of African origin, whereas in French Guyana it refers to someone who has become more European in style or language. Thus while its origin as a geographical classification is apparent in its earliest uses (outside of the Caribbean) in Brazil, Latin America, Mexico, and in the Indian-Oceanic islands of Réunion and Mauritius, its history and adaptations afterwards remain specific to each locale. These essays emphasize the ideological ramifications of ignoring the meanings that vary depending on these diverse contexts.
 

Often assumed by cultural theorists as an aspect of subaltern identity formation, creolization has also been connected to elite cultures. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra reveals through a richly textured analysis of an anonymous eighteenth-century painting of María de Guadalupe (the patron saint of creoles) being worshiped by two Hispanic and two indigenous nobles, the distinction between creoles and mestizos in Mexico and Latin America derived from ancestral “mixture.” In colonial Mexico, creole signified a mixture between Spanish and indigenous nobility that was crucial for an ideology of manifest destiny and for maintaining social divisions according to race and class; yet, as Cañizares-Esguerra demonstrates, this same conceptualization of creole identity later allowed for its ideological role in the anti-colonial Wars of Independence, when Bolívar expanded the meaning of “creole” to include those mestizos that the term was once designed to exclude by redeploying its geographical reference. While creole was part of the emancipatory project in Latin and South America, it was resented among the British colonials in North America who saw it as a particularly Iberian designation. As Joyce Chaplin notes, the colonials were anxious over what the term revealed about the instability of human differences. But what is the term “American” if not an Anglophone version of creole? These contrasting American contexts reveal how the power enjoyed by concepts of creolization and how its meaning changes from different perspectives.
 

Those of its advocates who celebrate its resistance to totalizing ideologies of the national belonging fail to recognize its history of uses as part of statist and, in the Portuguese context, colonial projects. As Miguel Vale de Almeida aptly asks, how can a theory of emancipation function at the same time as a theory of colonization? In a wide-ranging and riveting analysis of the multiple formations of creolization in the Portuguese empire from Asia to Brazil to Cape Verde, de Almeida reveals how creolization developed into a colonial policy of “Luso-Tropicalism” after World War II. This derived from the anthropological theories of Gilberto Freyre, whose argument for an exceptionalist Portuguese identity based on ethnic hybridity was adopted by nationalists to highlight the civilizing mission of the Portuguese colonization. Paradoxically, Freyre’s concept of Luso-Tropicalism became intrinsic to Cape Verdean national identity after independence, partly as a means of distinguishing Cape Verde from Africa. As many of these scholars note, we only become creole post-hoc, so that as in all of these cases–the Mexican, North American, Portuguese, Cape Verdean–creolization always becomes a rhetorical position tied inextricably to those identitarian discourses that it supposedly problematizes.
 
Where these historical and ethnographical perspectives reveal the shifting and contingent uses of the term, the theoretical essays strive to follow the example of Gregory Bateson, who cautions that “if one uses creative analogies, one ought to go back to the field from which the analogy was taken to investigate its internal logic” (156). Almost all of the essays examine the historical use of the term to describe not only racial mixture but linguistic mixtures that occur on the peripheries. The most thorough of these contributions is the essay by Philip Baker and Peter Mühläusler which surveys the history of creole linguistics; it focuses mainly on the work of Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), who was the first linguist to treat creoles as serious languages (though as a term it was not used until 1933 [93]). Schuchardt originally sought to overcome the limitations of the family model of language relationships and in the process compiled the earliest linguistic data from areas where contact languages were spoken. In contrast to the pre-existing (and in many cases, persisting) interpretations of creoles according to superstratist, substratist, and universalist modes, Schuchardt emphasizes the implicit role of pidgin languages, those go-between languages formed for trade purposes, and raised the possibility of decreolization. Linguists assume that creole language occurs to suit a particular context, taking on both aspects of the native and of the foreigner. It is a creole when it has become a single language in perpetual use, but then it can potentially devolve over time as new stratifications of class and race take place. The sole agreement that linguists find among their different theories resembles the version of creolization adopted by Stewart in his introduction, describing it as a process of “major restructuring.” Baker and Mühlhäusler distinguish this sense of “major restructuring” from what they see as the more facile uses of the term by anthropologists like Clifford and Hannerz for whom creolization functions more in terms of what linguists would call “borrowing.”
 
What then is needed? Rather than abolishing all uses of the term, most of the essays caution against its romanticized and utopian construction and call for a greater attention to both the various types of creolization and to its formation as part of a continuum. As Eriksen observes, “it is not sufficient to point out that mixing does take place; it is necessary to distinguish between different forms of mixing”:
 

sometimes, one group is absorbed into the other; sometimes it is absorbed culturally but not socially (the ethnic boundaries remain intact); sometimes the groups merge to create a third entity; sometimes a hierarchical complementary relationship or a symmetrical competitive relationship occurs; sometimes, again, one group eventually exterminates the other.
 

(167)

 

It is precisely the nuanced (or not so) power dynamics described here that make the use of creolization as a synonym for hybridity or for mixing in an abstract sense so irresponsible. A historically and ethnographically sensitive use of creolization would also recognize that as an identity it is not static, but that, as Schuchardt first observed about linguistic creoles, creolization can also lead to decreolization: the boundary between the standard language and the creole can be blurred, and the creole forms can begin to approximate the standard form. The linguist Derek Bickerton observed in Guyana that over time the Guyanese people had decreolized their speech according to class, profession, and location. Culturally, decreolization can also describe a return by mixed groups to their identitarian roots. This phenomenon among creolized communities is described in the essays here as occurring on the island of Mauritius which, since the 1990s, has seen the rise of Hindu and Muslim identified populations that travel to national homelands and form ethnically identified political parties, a process which has left the island’s Creoles behind since their history does not allow them to make the same connection to their African past. Yet these decreolizations can also be unpredictable, as Joshua Hotaka Roth observes about the children of Japanese migrants in Brazil, the Nikkei, whose return migrations to Japan have led to an increased sense of identification with their creolized Brazilian culture. Therefore, in addition to charting the types of creolization, it is important also to note histories of aggregation and disaggregation as part of an overall restructuring process.

 
It is precisely this sense of “process” that is lost in romanticized conceptions of creolization expressed by anthropologists, cultural theorists, and literary critics. Comments like Clifford’s (“We are all Caribbeans now”) are too easily taken to express an identitarian desire. But I would like to return to Clifford’s comment that, along with the work of Ulf Hannerz, is taken by many of the writers here as representative of this kind of theoretical posturing that neglects history and culture. It is worth recalling that Clifford’s purpose in Predicament of Culture was not unlike that of this essay collection insofar as he was critically re-examining anthropological history (in his case, Michel Leiris) in order to clear a rhetorical space beyond an erroneous theoretical conceptualization. Where these essays struggle against the banal uses of “creolization,” for Clifford it was Levi-Strauss’s primitivism that needed to be contextualized. In his desire to show that the native was more than a blank slate upon which westernization projects itself, Clifford sought to reverse the projection by making us “all Caribbeans.” But when conditions of power do not change as readily as academic discourses, terms such as creolization begin to appear presumptious, as Stephan Palmié argues about Clifford’s quote nearly twenty years later:
 

we need to keep matters in perspective lest we fool ourselves into believing that . . . the Caribbean region’s truly dreadful colonial history “somehow” prefigures our existential condition as cosmopolitans economically empowered to pursue hitherto unprecedented forms and degrees of consumptive eclecticism.
 

(194)

 

What Palmíe points to here–and as Françoise Vergés observes about the cruel history of Réunion Island–is what happens when we abstract too much from the conditions from which we borrow our creative metaphors. All of this is to ask, when does a theory become overdetermined? Aisha Khan believes that this occurred for creolization when its role as a model that describes historical processes of cultural change and contact became conflated with the model that interprets them (238). By instigating the reversal of this particular instance of overdetermination, this valuable collection both recovers the power of this crucial term and clears theoretical and rhetorical space for new research and forms of knowledge.

 

 

Reading Alain Badiou’s Polemics, one might initially have the sensation of having wandered into a conversation not meant for oneself. Polemics consists of an English translation of a series of three slender French books, Circonstances I-III, which themselves contain a good deal of previously published material. Two heretofore unpublished lectures (the meatiest pieces of the lot) have also been included. Except for these last two chapters, almost all the assembled pieces either pertain to topical controversies (the wars in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, the response to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s entry into the second round of the French presidential elections), or initiate such controversies (a series of articles on the word “Jew” that raised quite a furor in Paris at the end of 2005). They are thus specific to the French scene (where for example the role of France in the first Iraq war looked quite different at the time than it did here).
 
Nevertheless, the sense that one is witnessing a conversation already underway and not intended for present auditors appears wrong. Alain Badiou–do not most of us know it already?–is a philosopher of situations, of circumstances, of the event. Par excellence he seems to be the occasional philosopher, as well as the philosopher of the occasion. In addition, he is also the proponent of a new universalism and a novel and unexpected return to truth.[1] The daringness, the gamble of Badiou’s thought indeed consists in his resuscitation of the most standard philosophical reference points–truth, the universal–even as he recasts these to meet concerns that might seem to disqualify them. Truth and universals are wedded to themes to which they appear allergic: indetermination, the void, and most of all the event. Accordingly, Badiou’s is a return to truth, a standing by, a loyalty to this reference point, that also reckons on the pervasive questioning of truth that so many now take for granted.
 
On a “practical” or political plane, Badiou’s work is equally innovative. His political initiative, in fact, turns on a similar balance between the old and the new. For Badiou’s politics are at once militant–some of the most stout and innovative that we have–yet they are by no means Marxian, nor, even, dare I say, revolutionary. Working in the aftermath of twentieth-century Marxism, Badiou aims at a new understanding of political activity that can be the successor of this radical politics that shaped Badiou’s early years and so much of the last century. This endeavor gives these essays their singular importance.
 
Badiou’s radicalism’s stamp most shows through in Polemics in what Badiou stands against: left-liberal democracy in both its national and international forms. Though an affirmative strand of his thought exists, which he himself would highlight, what is plainest on Polemics‘ surface is that against which all these essays war.
 
The most provocative essays in Polemics are the final series, however, which gesture toward what politics (if not political order) Badiou would affirm in the place of the existing one. They mark an especially critical engagement, as Badiou no longer supports a recognizably revolutionary Marxian program (though he also denies that the predicates “Marxist” or “Marxian” carry any univocal semantic charge). In these two concluding pieces, Badiou returns to his Marxist roots, and reviews the history of the Paris commune and its subsequent Marxian interpretation for possible indices of a very different future radical politics.
 
The novelty of Badiou’s politics as a whole lies in its rejection of any embrace of the particular (including, for example, of every politics of an identitarian stripe), stemming from its insistence on a role for truth in politics, even as it denies that this truth can in any way be comprehensive, as in traditional Marxism. Such navigation between particularity and totality leaves Badiou closer to modern representative democracy than he often seems to realize. This form of political organization also rejects the premise that we possess all or no political truth, while itself continuing to show fealty to universals. Thus, the very features that make Badiou’s politics attractive cast doubt on his dismissal of that formation that here stands most accused.
 
In Badiou’s article on the French law banning the wearing of headscarves, the problematic character of his distance from present-day democracy becomes especially plain. This edict prohibiting the exhibition of any religious symbols in French public schools was widely understood to be aimed at a renaissance of wearing the scarf and the veil among female Muslim high school students. Badiou glosses this law as essentially a racist act aimed at the immigrant community, a form of subjugation and ultimately exclusion. And with this judgment in its concreteness, one might well concur. Badiou goes further, however. According to him, wearing the scarf essentially has no political significance at all; it is an inherently neutral practice, a matter of mere custom. Tapping into a Pauline spirit, Badiou announces:
 

Let people live as they wish, or can, eat what they are used to eating, wear turbans, headscarves, miniskirts, or tap-dancing shoes . . . not having the least universal significance, these kinds of “differences” neither hinder, nor support thought . . . . at the very most, the diversity of customs and beliefs is a surviving testimony to the diversity of the human animal.
 

(106).

 
The question arises, however, whether Badiou’s interpretation of this practice is indeed that of those who wear the scarf? Do they believe it makes no difference, has no political significance, that it is but custom? Does ” the human animal,” as Badiou puts it here and elsewhere, understand its own customs as custom–especially since, as is well-documented, wearing the headscarf and the burqa are practices often not of the most recent immigrants, but of a younger second generation that quite self-consciously dons them?
 
Badiou’s refusal to acknowledge the significance that the headscarf does have, which gives the flavor of many of Badiou’s discussions in Polemics, thus raises questions concerning the form his own universalism takes. Badiou’s casting of this practice in terms of the “human animal” distinguishes between a political realm (of the “immortal”) and an inherently apolitical one (of this “human animal”), an unexpectedly clear division that shapes Badiou’s political thinking and his militancy. Equally oddly, however, we here witness Badiou, the self-professed militant, embrace just that depoliticizing virtue, tolerance, associated with the political matrix that stands most accused in these pages–representative democracy–and doing so, clearly, with similarly silencing effects.[2] Badiou thus comes perilously close to repeating everything questionable in liberalism’s own universalism, even as he himself offers a potentially less nuanced version of this same problematic.
 
After all, not only would the majority of headscarf-wearers deny that the scarf makes no political difference, but, to take it a step further, they would deny that it has no universal significance–about relations among the sexes, as well as the truth of the human, of subjects themselves. Badiou, however, asserts that the scarf has no meaning whatsoever. Badiou, accordingly, tolerates the scarf in the fullest sense of this word: he affirms the wearing of it only insofar as he believes he knows better than these subjects what makes a difference and what doesn’t when it comes to politics and its truth.
 
Badiou’s political analysis may be less rich, less subtle, than that liberal-democratic viewpoint which he here momentarily recalls, though doubtless the latter is also already limiting and silencing. His own version of tolerance proves less nuanced, less supple than representative democracy’s. For not only is it in the teachings of actual religions that one finds many deeply held, universalist claims and a clash among these claims,[3] but the modern liberal democratic state itself (with secular, supposedly universal veridical presuppositions of its own) was at least in part conceived within this context. Representative democracy has its origins in universalist religious disagreements, and it invented a new kind of universalism, a more formal hyper-universalism in response.
 
Badiou underestimates this innovation. Badiou’s faltering at this juncture perhaps ought not surprise, however, since it is by no means on tolerance that Badiou’s politics stakes its claims to our attention. The passion and the glory of Badiou’s political thought stems explicitly from the systematic ignoring of the possibility just encountered here of principled dissensus: the eventuality of differing, albeit still fundamentally legitimate, political views. Badiou’s posture of total tolerance within the apolitical realm (“let people live as they wish”) meets up with an absence of tolerance (perfect intolerance) within the domain of the political.
 
Badiou’s stance in its totality is at once more and less tolerant than liberal democracy: both absolutely tolerant and intolerant at once. A useful contrast, indeed the other extreme (affirming still more mixing, greater tolerance than current democracies admit), is furnished by a notion found in Jacques Derrida’s late writings. Under the heading of autoimmunity, Derrida sketches how even radical democracy’s existence entails that it would never be fully democratic (never wholly open, perfectly tolerant), thus proving allergic to itself, autoimmune. Constitutively unable to sustain self-identical existence, democracy attacks itself, but also what allows it to survive, the non-democratic, the still-not-open (self and other here constantly switching places), this whole formation thus proving a spur to ever greater, albeit always imperfectly democratic practices.
 
Such an absence of a stable domain of politics with fixable political identities Badiou would clearly reject. Badiou joins up with Carl Schmitt (to whose work Derrida’s notion is in part a response) by way of reference to Rousseau. Badiou’s coincidence with Schmitt is noteworthy in its own right, moreover, since in so many other respects Badiou, a thinker of a renewed universalism, and Schmitt, a thinker of revived particularity, of just the situation, stand so deeply opposed.
 
In defense of his own militancy, Badiou explicitly refers to Rousseau’s assertion in The Social Contract that state dictatorship is permissible in the face of an existential threat to the existing regime (95). Badiou’s own non-representative militant politics, he argues, is justified, since even liberal republics may abandon democratic representation. Just this proviso was embodied, of course, in article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which Schmitt, its leading theoretician, urged Hindenberg to invoke, in order, as it happens, to prevent Hitler from coming to power.
 
Now, Schmitt, Badiou, and Rousseau may not be wrong about the absolutist character of politics, which a representative government may misprise or dissimulate; representative democracy’s inability to side with any substantive political doctrine including its own may prove a liability or simply an illusion. At the same time, this failing also confirms that a greater profundity concerning universals, if not the totality of the political, inheres in this arrangement than Badiou allows. Badiou, after all, unlike Schmitt, does not himself reject universal political truths altogether. The failure of representative government to coincide with itself harbors a final measure of uncertainty concerning such truth that Badiou lacks, an ultimate hesitation in regard to the universals it itself espouses. As a second-order political device marked by a contentlessness, a formlessness, a passivity that aggravates not only Badiou, representative democracy (doubtless without ever arriving at the extremity that Derrida affirms) already acknowledges that no final stabilization of the political is possible: that there exists no perfect tolerance, no ultimately defusing (as in its own case) nor identifying (as in Badiou’s case) what is political and what is not. The essence of politics, in sum, structurally eludes liberal-republican politics, something with which both Badiou and Schmitt in their own way would agree.
 
When one registers Badiou’s proximity to Rousseau and Schmitt, the ground of Badiou’s own militant stance becomes clearer. Badiou’s radicalism is not wholly a function of the concrete political causes that he upholds (the rights of the sans papiers or his rejection of globalizing imperialism). His militancy originates from a rejection of what liberal politics yields in terms of activity and life. Badiou prefers political presentation over representation, activity over passivity–ultimately the labor of a disciplined, active minority. He thus denies legitimacy to representative democracy owing to the passivity of this politics and of representation as such, on account of what Badiou explicitly identifies as its non-present (non-eventful) character in both a temporal as well as an agential sense.
 
Both for Badiou and for Schmitt, representative government dangerously (and perhaps disingenuously) etiolates the decisiveness of political action, and they condemn it, correspondingly, on what could be called ethical or even transcendental grounds, as making impossible the ennobling that true politics permits. Indeed Badiou, in one memorable passage, affirming this moral or transcendental difference, emphasizes the lengths to which one must go to defend it and its essentially polemical nature. He declares:
 

Every fidelity to an authentic event names adversaries of its perseverance. Contrary to consensual ethics . . . the ethic of truths is always more or less militant, combative . . . . [For, it entails] the struggle against all sorts of efforts at interruption, at corruption, at the return to the immediate interests of the human animal, at the humiliation and repression of the immortal who arises as subject.
 

(179)

 
Having earlier seen Badiou’s unexpected tolerance, here we confront his militancy. Events of “truth” and the procedures that sustain them, in Badiou’s eyes, bring with them what in other contexts would be the human difference as such: a rupture, a break between “the human animal” and “the immortal who arises as subject” (such an unwieldy hybrid perhaps being all that this creature is). Badiou’s commitment to a politics of “truth,” his universalism thus entails a split between these immortals and everyone else. One’s enemies are agents of finitude, particularity, death, and the “obscene,” as he puts it elsewhere. They resist the difference in which the whole dignity of the self has been invested (though such dignity, to be sure, always remains open to them in principle), having fallen away from the human (or here supra-human) essence.
 
The potentially toxic brew Badiou’s mixture of militancy and universalism yields thus appears at this moment. For his politics demands that one have nothing in common with those who do not hold to one’s positions. An absolute enmity necessarily results, even while such politics wages war on the basis and on behalf of humanity (or of the “immortal” in it). Badiou’s position in principle thus yields total war, victory at any price. And such a manner of conceiving politics, with just these consequences, has indeed long been thought by some to be the true Pauline political legacy. As Marc Shell memorably puts it: with and after Paul, the other is either my brother or s/he is not even an other at all. Badiou, to his credit, does not flinch from, nor dissimulate, what such absolutist politics (no matter how eventful or relativized in other respects) entails: what is demanded by his radical politics, which is also (perhaps always) a politics of truth. Badiou affirms violence, potentially even on a massive scale. For Badiou’s remarks come in the midst of a refined, and largely convincing reflection on Nazism. And Nazism, Badiou asserts, was not simply a massive aberration, an act of quasi-theological evil, but instead an essentially political crime. Nazism is isomorphic to genuine politics , according to Badiou. It is a version or simulacrum of true, affirmative politics–one turned inward, gone bad, to be sure, and, of course, unjustifiable and indefensible on the basis of Badiou’s own thinking.
 
Yet affirming such militancy in principle, himself the willing “chilled support of a universal address” (144), as he puts it in the aesthetic context, Badiou is lucid about the potentially violent effects of his politics, as well as about the alternatives to it required in the present situation. For all his unflinching resolve, Badiou’s politics are not really revolutionary. When compared to Mao’s or Lenin’s, his program is but a “militancy lite.” A gesture of retraction, a movement of tempering, also marks Badiou’s conception of the future of radical politics, the subject that occupies the final two chapters of his book. These chapters are doubtless some of Badiou’s most important. Badiou in these pieces aims to reconceptualize the very framework of politics. Arriving at the scene of his own earlier political convictions–the history of Marxism and Maoism–Badiou practices an exemplary thoughtfulness in respect to his own precursors. Badiou’s reflection on the possibility of a present and future radical politics proceeds in two phases. First, the events of the Paris commune are recounted, with an eye to its interpretation in the subsequent history of Marxism (Marx, Lenin, Mao). Second, Badiou reflects on the history and historicity of the Cultural Revolution, whose dates he limits to 1965-68. Taken together, these two events teach a single lesson, according to Badiou: true politics, radical politics, today must break with what he calls the “party-state.”
 
Thus the Commune, which indeed proved that workers were capable of inventing their own revolutionary practice (apart from the bourgeoisie and the “professional left”), according to Badiou, has also long been seen to have failed at functions (finances, military action) most proper to the state. In part as a response to this perceived failure, there emerged in Marx and in those who followed him a double demand: to capture and commandeer the state while maintaining the party alongside it, as embodying their authentic, active, and truly political goals (263-64). This conception of a “party-state,” Badiou argues on the basis of his interpretation of the Cultural Revolution, is no longer endorsable (294). It has outlived its usefulness and today can be seen to harbor a wholly irresolvable tension.
 
No matter how provocative (or correct) this analysis may be, Badiou himself at this moment, clearly backs away from the potentially more cataclysmic side of his own politics; he relinquishes any scenario in which the liberal state would be violently overthrown, not to mention “wither.” Whatever militancy will look like going forward, it will not look like what Marx, or Lenin, or Mao envisioned. To be sure, Badiou here also proves potentially prescient. His intuition that politics at its core may be transformed, that the reigning model of state revolutions in the West only appertains to a finite (and completed) historical epoch (roughly the eighteenth-twentieth century), may quite possibly be right.
 
Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder about the results of this position of diminished ardor in combination with Badiou’s still resolute militancy. This question goes beyond Badiou’s own perhaps idiosyncratic politics, as its two sides mirror some of the radical politics found in the American academy. Such politics also insists on its own militancy, while the practical organization and program allied to it remain distinctly attenuated, and its own confabulation of the future party-state remains unclear. Badiou, by contrast, is always alert to the implications of his own positions. Yet breaking with the state as a focus of any sort for his politics (a decision that runs throughout almost all his published writings since the 1980s), his future radical politics is an enterprise that in some sense now systemically fails to take into account the actual forces and structures of powers to which it is opposed. This politics dismisses the liberal-democratic site of dissensus, to the point of not even wishing to dismantle it. What can be the consequences of this approach for the struggles it actually takes up? The sheer insistence on the correctness of putatively self-evident (political) “truth” may be persuasive. Yet the views of the inactive majority having here been deemed meaningless (and any principled differences, any clash of universals impossible or ignored), what political rhetoric can Badiou and his followers mount, with what form of persuasion may they engage? Who can they talk to, other than themselves?
 
Badiou can only heed such concerns at the price of ceasing to be militant altogether. And his extreme disregard for the persuasiveness of his political prescriptions, in fact, takes a rather comic (and thus benign) form at one memorable moment in Polemics. Addressing an audience of French and German diplomats in Argentina, Badiou argues for a merger, or alliance of some sort, between Germany and France. To motivate his suggestion, he proffers world-historical (not materialist) grounds. Appealing to what he calls “a psychology of peoples” (122), Badiou claims that France today is but a “weary grandeur,” and Germany “a hackneyed question,” and to balance out their respective psychologies and destinies these nations or entities should merge (126). One can only imagine what his audience of professional politicians made of this, nor of course have signs of such a merger blossomed since Badiou’s speech.
 
It is at moments such as these that the reader may well wonder whether she has wandered into the wrong room. Nevertheless, that a first run-through of Polemics indicates that Badiou himself is unclear about just what war he wishes to fight, as well as how finally to fight it, given how lucid a thinker Badiou is, demonstrates the gravity of the situation in which all of us sympathetic to genuinely progressive political change today find ourselves. Those views of history and concepts of political change suitable to political progress no longer seem viable, even as these goals themselves continue, as they must, to be avowed. For this predicament, no one today has has an answer more convincing than Badiou’s
 

 

What went wrong? How to explain the dismal state of today’s political landscape in the U.S.–with neoconservatism and free-market triumphalism in such dominance and the left in a state of apparent haplessness? According to Timothy Brennan in Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, much of the left’s trouble can be traced back to the post-Vietnam period of the late seventies. It was during this moment of “reassessment and political fatigue” (x) that the left largely and mistakenly abandoned Marxism and the social democratic politics of the 60s for an identity politics founded on the coalescing field of “theory”–namely poststructuralism and variants of postcolonialism–which has remained dominant to this day. (A partial list of those whom Brennan includes among “theory’s . . . shared canon of sacred texts”[xii] is Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Butler, Kristeva, Arendt and the book’s chief theoretical foil, Heidegger.) Brennan claims that “theory,” while portrayed as a source of radical critique, has actually functioned as a surreptitious adjunct to the rise of free-market triumphalism and political neo-conservatism over the last several decades. It has done this by disavowing and silencing meaningful and organized social democratic politics based on discussion and debate in favor of a politics founded on the inarguable “ontological virtue” (14) of identity or being. This has led the left, in turn, to wallow in a narcissistic state of “virtuous inaction” (36) and to espouse positions that re-iterate the very neo-liberal logic and values it purports to challenge. “Theory,” in the end, does not embody a vital counter-tradition of radical thought but what Brennan refers to as an acquiescent “middle way,” testifying to a deepening convergence in this country since the dawn of Reaganism of “the cultural politics of Left and Right.”
 
Brennan develops his confrontational thesis by distinguishing between the book’s two key theoretical terms–a “politics of belief” versus a “politics of being.” To understand what these concepts mean for Brennan it is helpful to jump to the end of Wars of Position and Brennan’s concluding reading of Antonio Gramsci. Brennan argues that contemporary theory has reduced Gramsci’s work to a handful of reified terms (e.g., “hegemony,” “subaltern,” “passive revolution,” “common sense”) whose meanings have been divorced both from the larger context of his writings and from the communist intellectual and material history out of which they directly emerged. Nowhere is this more evident, Brennan argues, than in the case of “subalternity.” Within contemporary postcolonial thought, “subalternity” has come to occupy a highly privileged position; indeed the term evokes one of the central ethical imperatives of the entire field–subjugated knowledge whose recovery can provide a radical counter-narrative to traditional history. More specifically for Brennan, subalternity has become highly revered as a kind of ontological resistance or “ideational essence”–that is, as defining a philosophical perspective whose value is measured and cherished in postcolonial theory precisely to the extent to which it remains removed from public life and any political engagement.
 
For Brennan, this received wisdom is a profound and telling misreading of Gramsci’s concerns. Gramsci never intended to privilege the standpoint of subalternity but instead theorized it as a condition that needed to be overcome through political action. “Having no desire to ‘give voice’ to the essential wisdom of the subaltern, or to glorify subalternity as such, Gramsci repeatedly made clear in his writing the need for the training and discipline provided by education, national-popular literature, and other practices that would in essence eradicate subalternity” (263-64).
 
The distinction between these two versions of subalternity provides one of the more elegant examples for the book’s central polemic against the cultural left’s shift from a “politics of belief” to a “politics of being.” Gramsci’s vision of subalternity expresses a “politics of belief”; it is intimately tied to a radical social democratic vision and to specific political strategies to eradicate subalternity and the inequality it describes. This has been replaced in contemporary theory by a “politics of being”–a vision unhinged from political goals and instead devoted to subalternity as a marginalized identity whose way of knowing should be revered (and indeed preserved) for providing a form of ontological resistance to the political order from which it remains disenfranchised. So indicative of the theoretical turn Brennan traces to the late seventies and eighties, this latter version is not only devoid of any concrete democratic politics or goals but is fundamentally cynical towards such political efforts as a form of potential appropriation. “Rather than marking a condition to be overcome,” writes Brennan, “the latter portrays subalternity as a sacred refuge, a dark secret space of revelation” (256).
 
At times persuasively and always polemically, Brennan makes a similar theoretical move throughout Wars of Position, as he takes to task many of the most influential texts, writers, and discourses of current poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. Be it in his critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, postcolonial readings of Salman Rushdie, the work of Giorgio Agamben, the discourse of cosmopolitanism, the received wisdom of Edward Said’s debt to Foucault, or globalization theory, Brennan finds evidence of an overarching and pernicious pattern at work: the rewriting of the past by contemporary theory. Each of Brennan’s chapters and analyses hinges on exposing how a certain “social democratic” vision of politics–namely Marxist and Left Hegelian–has been expunged or censored by contemporary theory and replaced with a politics of ontological belonging–roughly poststructuralist–whose ethical undercurrent “stipulates that any larger ambition than the self risks an imposition on others, a transgression on alterity itself” (25). For Brennan, theory today has made a near ethical virtue out of shunning organizational politics, adhering instead to the proposition, which Brennan describes in his typically caustic fashion–“I am, therefore I resist”(159).
 
Brennan is at his most trenchant and effective in savaging contemporary theory’s abandonment of democratic political action as a public practice. Since the nineteen-eighties, he argues, an increasingly orthodox and self-indulgent academic left has become disengaged from the social and the civic–disposed against offering any programmatic goals. Without a concrete democratic political agenda, much of the language of contemporary theory has dissipated into “metaphors of irrelevance”(177). In the cultural and academic left–and the graduate seminar is one of Brennan’s favorite targets–the invocation of terms like “hybridity,” “difference,” “ambivalence,” and “pluralism” is understood in and of itself as a progressive political gesture towards freedom, requiring no real explanation and no justification. Rarely does it seem necessary even to ask how these cultural expressions might “link constituencies or organize them into a politically potent force? And once linked, around what set of goals?” (161). Instead, they have become mere ethical givens in the common sense of poststructuralist thought.
 
Brennan takes this polemical, if not completely unfamiliar line of attack, a step further to make the book’s central and most dubious argument. The turn from a politics of belief to a politics of being has not simply rendered the academic and cultural left “irrelevant”–spinning out an increasingly pre-fabricated vocabulary–it has led to a fusing of the cultural politics of left and right. Brennan makes his indictment on the charge that the cultural left in general and poststructuralism in particular have been willing accomplices in dismantling a still viable political tradition of Marxism and Left Hegelianism, in turn opportunistically stepping into its vacated position as the locus of political “dissent.” “At different levels of awareness, the practitioners of theory in the poststructuralist ascendant saw their task as burying dialectical thinking and the political energies–including the anti-colonial energies–that grew out of it” (10). Brennan suggests there has been a kind of bad faith argument taking place. The cultural and academic left is vilified by the media and government for being dangerous, out of touch, “politically correct,” communist, etc., yet all the while this hostility masks an underlying acceptance –or at least an undetected sigh of relief–for as long as the adversarial left is immersed in “theory” and advocating an identity politics devoid of any organizational imaginary, then the much more dangerous and unruly tradition of Marxism and its political energies can be left out of the discussion.
 
Conversely, “theory” has enabled the academic left to preserve its diminishing but much cherished self-image of dissent, all the while proffering a set of terms that are in point of fact largely agreeable to (and thus rewarded by) the institutions and marketplace upon whose support it depends. “I want to suggest that theory subscribes to the middle way of American liberal dogma in essential respects, reinvigorating the cliché’s of neoliberalism by substituting the terminology of freedom, entrepreneurship, and individualism for the vocabulary of difference, hybridity, pluralism, and in its latest avatar, the multitude” (11). That the academic and cultural left remains largely unaware of these convergences is evidence of how thoroughly they have dissipated the type of theories that would enable them to see them. Brennan thus sets out in Wars of Position to re-establish these connections by dialectically resituating and rereading theory in the context of the radical social-democratic historical and theoretical traditions it has helped to elide, and in so doing expose how “theory’s” “dissident” language, while packaged as a radical epistemological break, masks an underlying juncture between the cultural Left and Right.
 
To Brennan’s credit, Wars of Position provides a bracing re-evaluation of “theory’s” politics. At the same time, it is hard not to hear in Brennan’s condemnation of “theory” a certain idealization, however perversely inverted, of theory and its significance in social and civic life. “Theory” is, after all, not “dead” or “irrelevant” in Brennan’s critical picture (as others have recently pronounced), but vital and even necessary. Brennan makes statements such as the following often: “Throughout the book, I take the view that cultural scholars in universities were instrumental in shaping public sentiment and that their influence was for the most part mixed, at times even disastrous” (x). “When I summon the word ‘theory,’ I am talking about a broad social phenomenon that is essentially mainstream . . . widely practiced and believed in the culture at large, not least because of the successful dispersion of those ideas by academics” (2). “Considering the economic function of the humanities intellectual, it is very easy to misunderstand the venomous hostility toward academic theory among the journalist watchdogs and government intellectuals” (212). What is most startling about these claims is less their counterintuitive and damning conclusions than their implicit assumptions–that cultural scholars are “instrumental in shaping public sentiment,” that theory is “essentially mainstream,” that humanities intellectuals perform an appreciable “economic function.” In the end, my problem with Brennan’s caustic analysis is not that he gives “theory” too little credit but that he gives it too much.
 
Throughout Wars of Positions, Brennan exhibits a remarkable knowledge of theoretical and historical traditions, and an ability to move across them with deftness, fluently summarizing deeply complex arguments. At the same time, Brennan also shows a penchant for sweeping condemnations of the theoretical positions against which he situates himself. In his chapter on “globalization theory,” for instance, Brennan critiques its “hostility” to the nation-state and its uncritical embrace of the ethics of various forms of mobility, deploying a quasi-celebratory cadre of terms such as “migrancy” “nomadism” “hybridity” and “decentering,” which are hard to distinguish from the “myth-making” policy language of the small group of national and financial interests that are globalization’s champions. How accurate a depiction of “globalization theory” does Brennan actually present? His formulation relies on broad characterizations about what “globalization theory” (as some synthesized discourse) thinks, and what it has as its “underlying logic.” Can we really generalize so dismissively, for instance, that “globalization theory”–in some collective way–“carefully dissociates the process of globalization from national identifications . . . since unless it does so the continuities between its purportedly ‘new’ and liberatory panorama and old exploitative arrangements would be obvious and uncomfortable” (142-43)? There is discussion in cultural studies about how the relationship between globalization and the nation-state is not a zero-sum game but how the state has been transformed and in the case of certain states and state-functions strengthened through multinational capital. And what of the work on globalization by several theorists at various distances from the field of cultural studies and/or poststructuralism–Lisa Lowe, Pheng Cheah, and William Spanos come to mind–who specifically focus on exposing these uncomfortable “continuities” between globalization and national identifications and earlier forms of “exploitative arrangements”?[1]
 
Similarly, Brennan argues that cosmopolitanism’s worldly vision of open-minded freedom from national limitations aligns the political ethic of cultural theory with the pervading corporate theory of globalization. “There is, in a prima facie sense, a continuity between the discourse of globalization in government planning and the discourse of cosmopolitanism in the humanities; or between the use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ in corporate advertising and global culture in a comparative literature seminar” (211-12). Again what is questionable is not Brennan’s caustic assessment of cosmopolitanism’s synergy with corporate America but his assumption that these links are not already addressed by theories of cosmopolitanism. Brennan argues that “cosmo-theory,” as he pejoratively terms it, assumes that national sovereignty has “been transcended, the nation-state relegated to an obsolete form, and the present political situation is . . . one in which newly deracinated populations, nongovernmental organization and Web users are outwitting a new world order in the name of a bold new transnational sphere” (219). This characterization is selective at best. Recent work in cosmo-theory (see for example, Bruce Robbins’s and Pheng Cheah’s Cosmopolitics) has precisely tried to rethink cosmopolitanism as consistent with or even supportive of the nation or nation-state. Secondly, much of what makes recent efforts to theorize cosmopolitanism interesting is their attempt to keep the progressive as well as the acknowledged imperializing legacy and potential of cosmopolitanism in critical tension (see for example, Robbins’s “Some versions of U.S. Internationalism” in Feeling Global.)
 
This tendency to (over)generalize the positions of his adversaries reflects a problem with the book’s underlying thesis, namely the opposition between a politics of belief and a politics of being–and, by extension (though Brennan does not explicitly describe it as such), between post-structuralism and Marxism. Brennan’s central argument hinges on such a stark political opposition between the two that he leaves himself little or no room for negotiation. There are no partial disagreements here: one is either part of the solution–i.e., a politics of belief–or part of the problem–i.e., a politics of being. There is not even a grudging acknowledgement of what “theory” might facilitate for progressive politics, or how it might enable different political subjectivities. Ultimately, it is in order to maintain this radical and unbridgeable division between the two that Brennan constructs overly unified–or convenient–foils out of his adversaries. In this respect, Brennan’s book falls into the trap he sets for “theory”–that is, of strategically erasing histories whose recovery might serve to complicate the political purity or–in Brennan’s argument, “impurity”–of their opposition.
 
While I am sympathetic to Brennan’s trenchant critique of the cultural left’s abandonment of democratic politics as a public practice, a nagging question remains: is this depoliticization inherent to the ideas of poststructuralism or is it a result of what has happened to “theory”–i.e., how it became institutionalized? Brennan leaves the clear impression it is the former. I think, however, one might push the discussion in the other, and I would argue more compelling direction by looking more closely at Brennan’s own forceful reading of Edward Said, whose work clearly had an enormous influence on Wars of Position and whose model of intellectual and political work the book in many ways positions itself as carrying on. (Brennan was one of Said’s former students and the book is dedicated to his memory.)
 
In his chapter on Said, Brennan attempts to wrestle Said’s work away from a prevailing understanding of its deep affinity with Foucault’s and to replace it instead within the intellectual lineage of Lukács and left-Hegelianism. Brennan reads in Said’s work–from Beginnings up through Orientalism and The World, the Text, and the Critic–an increasingly staunch critique of “theory” and of Foucault. Brennan rightly praises Said for fighting against “the ‘division of intellectual labor’ that Said took to be a pernicious ‘cult of professional expertise’ designed to force intellectuals to sell themselves ‘to the central authority of a society’” (116). Instead, Said worked vigilantly to connect literature with extra-literary disciplines and forms of knowledge, in what Brennan commends as a form of “intellectual generalism” (116). Brennan argues that Said’s thinking in this regard is deeply indebted to the influence of a brand of literary Marxism, including the work of Lucien Goldmann and Georg Lukács. And it is within this dialectical tradition that Brennan, in turn, resituates Said’s Orientalism and reads it in critical opposition to, rather than as inspired by, poststructuralism in general and Foucault in particular. Lukács’s “Reification” essay, writes Brennan, “forcefully articulated the primary themes of Said’s attacks on the system thinking of theory–a theme that permeates Orientalism” (118). Brennan later concludes that Orientalism‘s success “had much to do with bringing the humanities into a battleground that poststructuralism seemed in the 1980s to be abdicating–one involving the politics of government, of network news, of political parties, of media exposes, of liberation wars” (121).
 
But here is where I would return to my question above: are Brennan’s conclusions about Orientalism intended as conceptual critiques of poststructuralist theory in and of itself (i.e., its “system thinking”) or is it a historical critique of how it was being practiced (“in the 1980s”). In the book he slips back and forth between the two points as if they were one and the same. But if for Brennan the distinction is not particularly relevant, for Said it was crucial. In his essay “Secular Criticism” from The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said describes the emergence of theory in the late 1960s as “insurrectionary.” “Theory,” he writes, “proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity” (3). Clearly one can hear in this passage the type of dialectical thrust to which Brennan rightly refers. But what is also striking is how closely Said’s depiction of theory’s “insurrection” mirrors what Brennan lauds about Said’s “intellectual generalism” and about Orientalism–but which he reads in stark opposition to “theory” and its “system thinking.” Said does go on to lament “theory’s” retreat into its own “petty fiefdoms” of “textuality” during the late seventies (singling out Derrida and Foucault) that led to the betrayal of its initial interventionist move across disciplines and into history. But this is not the same thing as saying Said’s work represents a critique of “theory” or of poststructuralism. Indeed, if we agree with Brennan that Orientalism‘s success was due to its effort to bring the humanities out of its petty fiefdom and into critical contact with the “politics of government, of network news, of political parties, of media exposes, of liberation wars”–then might we see Said’s efforts not as a renunciation of “theory” and its “system thinking” but as the fulfillment of “theory’s” potential, as Said himself envisioned it? In the end, I think it is important to distinguish between a critique of “theory’s systemization” and “the system thinking of theory.” The former–with its historical emphasis on theory’s reification–has the potential to enable a more productive and nuanced discussion about the politics of “theory,” one that could build on Brennan’s trenchant critiques while avoiding his sweeping and ideologically driven dismissals of theory as inherently conservative, which threaten to end the discussion before it has had a chance to begin.
 
This raises a final question as to where Brennan’s critique of theory leaves us politically. Does the book, to put it bluntly, suggest anything more than a dismissal of today’s bad new left identity politics of being (roughly postcolonialism and poststructuralism) for a return to the past’s good old Left politics of belief (namely Marxism)? There is nothing wrong with calling for a return to or a reinvigoration of Marxist and Left Hegelian thought and politics–on the contrary, such a call is one of the most compelling aspects of the book. Granted, the book is concerned more with exposing the underlying conservatism of theory than in detailing alternatives, but one might have hoped for some elaboration of what concrete form a “still viable” tradition of “politics of belief” might take (aside from somewhat vague appeals to “party solidarities,” “shared beliefs,” and “organizational imaginaries”), and for some consideration of the perceived blind-spots of the While Brennan argues that his book is concerned “not with the idea of turning back the clock” (xiii), it is hard to see in what other direction his polemic pitting a bad new politics of being against a good old politics of belief points us.
 

Human soul, let us see whether present time can be long. To you the power is granted to be aware of intervals of time, and to measure them. What answer will you give me? Are a hundred years in the present a long time? Consider first whether a hundred years can be present. For if the first year of the series is current, it is present, but ninety-nine are future, and so do not yet exist. If the second year is current, one is already past . . . . And so between the extremes, whatever year of this century we assume to be present, there will be some years before it which lie in the past, some in the future to come after it. It follows that a century could never be present.
 

–Augustine, Confessions 11 xv (19)

 
This essay addresses the legacy of the synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism that reached its apogee in France shortly after the events of May 1968. It attempts to delineate how this synthesis, largely abandoned by the mid-1970s, at least in its libidinal economic dimension (though certainly taken into entirely new registers by later thinkers such as Jameson and Žižek), might be said to be resurrected and reconfigured in the work of Alain Badiou. It is a reconfiguration that is in some sense unrecognizable as such, though Badiou’s 1982 Théorie du sujet explicitly addresses the conjunction of Lacan and Mao, and his most recent work returns more forcefully to some of the earlier thematics–especially that of destruction–that to a large extent fell by the wayside in his 1988 opus Being and Event. If the “libidinal economy” theory of the early 1970s might be defined by a certain defiant, even delirious energy–defiant of interpretation, localization, or even of a specific mapping onto Marxism or psychoanalysis per se–then Badiou’s reconfiguration of the conjuncture of psychoanalysis and Marxism is spoken in a tone of order and restraint that might be more characteristic of the period Badiou labels the “Restoration,” namely the last two decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps such a shift in tonality is above all symptomatic of a shift from the conjucture of Marx and Freud to that of Mao and Lacan, but the claim will be that what has shifted concerns the unconscious itself, that the early 1970s moment of libidinal economy allowed the unconscious full reign, whereas the later moment of the early 1980s and beyond demanded that the unconscious and other wayward desires be brought to full and absolute clarity. If unconscious desires served as a driving motor for libidinal economy theory, they are left aside in Badiou’s engagement with psychoanalysis, only to surface in different form around questions of number, counting, and periodization.
 
In the French tradition, the synthesis of Marx and Freud reached a heightened pace between the years of 1968 and 1974, above all in the work of Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lacan, and Pierre Klossowski, the two most significant texts ostensibly being Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974).[1] Of course, there are myriad other syntheses of Marxism and psychoanalysis, including some of Marcuse’s works and above all Althusser’s,[2] but it seems that something spectacular was at issue in the years following May 1968, a frenzy of writing that is now seen as delusional, incomprehensible, or nothing but unchecked free association–even Lyotard himself would later express great reservations about the libidinal economy project. Žižek criticizes the “flux of Life” Deleuzians for seeing in Deleuze and Guattari only a model of pervasive and libratory revolutionary energy (Organs 10). It is not surprising that the 1980s marks a renunciation of this failed free form model, and Badiou’s sobriety might be seen as a hallmark of this. Badiou himself expresses criticism of libidinal economy theory just at the moment–1975–when it starts to wane. In Théorie de la contradiction, a short book devoted to Mao’s theories of contradiction and antagonism and very much affirming the dialectic, Badiou refers to Marx’s critique of “saint Max” (Stirner) in The German Ideology and links it to Deleuze and Guattari and to Lyotard:
 

Stirner’s doctrine opposes “revolt” to the revolution in terms exactly identical to those spread all over the pestilential gibberish of the decomposition of the petit-bourgeois revolutionary movement that resulted from May 1968. The only difference lies in the small lexical variation that everywhere substituted the word “desire” for the word “egotism” used by saint Max (Stirner), and even more directly. Beyond that, saint Gilles (Deleuze), saint Félix (Guattari), saint Jean-François (Lyotard) occupy the same niche in the maniacal Cathedral of chimeras. That the “movement” is a desiring urge, a flux that spins out; that every institution is paranoid, and by principle heterogeneous to the “movement”; that nothing can be done against the existing order, but according to an affirmative schize that remains apart from this order; that it is thus necessary to substitute all organization, all hideous militancy, for the self-consumption. . . of the pure movement: all these audacious revisions, supposedly confronting the “totalitarian” Marxist-Leninism with the brilliant novelty of the dissident marginal masses–this is word for word what Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology, had to shatter–and this around 1845!–in order to clear the landscape with a finally coherent systematization of the revolutionary practices of their time.
 

(72)[3]

 

Like Lacan before him, Badiou is critical of free movement and flux, in so far as they are linked to the idea of revolt simply for its own sake.[4] Badiou reads the libidinal economists as espousing an anarchist model of pure desire and reaction in lieu of any more goal-oriented organization. Though Badiou and others may denounce the post-1968 thought of libidinal economy as maniacal, self-serving and incoherent, there is in fact a startlingly lucid nexus of arguments in these writings, and any legacy of psychoanalysis that traces its connection to Marxism must contend with it.

 
This nexus of arguments can be summarized according to three broad categories. The first is the rethinking of the hierarchy of exchange value over use value. Whereas exchange value would be something more abstract and more imbued with the complexity of money, use value would refer to a presumably immutable quality of the object or thing in itself. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean Baudrillard writes of the “fetishism of use value” and opines that “we have to be more logical than Marx himself–and more radical, in the true sense of the word. For use value–indeed utility itself–is a fetishized social relation, just like the abstract equivalence of commodities. Use value is an abstraction” (135, 131). Lyotard, following Pierre Klossowski, seeks to overturn in chiasmic fashion the hierarchy in which lofty exchange value towers above the debased level of needs underpinning use value. Lyotard cites Klossowski’s La Monnaie vivante [Living Currency], which I cite in turn from Lyotard:
 

One should imagine for an instant an apparently impossible regression: that is an industrial phase where the producers have the means to demand, in the name of payment, objects of sensation on the part of consumers. These objects are living beings. . . . What we are saying here in fact exists. For, without literally returning to barter, all of modern industry rests on an exchange mediated by the sign of inert currency, neutralizing the nature of the objects exchanged; rests, that is, on a simulacrum of exchange–a simulacrum which lies in the form of manpower resources, thus a living currency, not affirmed as such, already extant. (Klossowski 89; Lyotard, Libidinal 87)[5]

 

Following Klossowski, Lyotard proposes that both use and exchange value be seen “as signs of intensity, as libidinal values (which are neither useful nor exchangeable), as pulsations of desire, as moments of Eros and death” (Libidinal Economy 82). Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Klossowski all seek to demonstrate the extent to which “use” is caught up in an economy as abstract and affectively invested as exchange itself, and an economy which is inseparable from bodily drives and desires. Effectively, both exchange value and use value (and not just exchange value) are lodged from the outset in an economy of prostitution.[6]

 
The second thematic is that of a perverse, inhuman, or machinic desire that transfuses the human being and transforms a relation of pure exploitation or revolt into something else. The import, staged in the form of a lesson from the examples that follow is that there is a logic of desire, often masochistic, that infuses all submission and non-submission to conditions of exploitation. In Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard gives the marvelous example of the supermarket scenario where, when the store is suddenly taken over and an announcement is made that everything in the store is free and anything may be taken at will, the shoppers become paralyzed and do not end up looting the store. Baudrillard’s point is that any attempt to liberate pure use value fails because use is always bound up in a logic of desire that is more rooted in the “desire of the code” than in the specificity of the object itself (204).[7] Or, one can turn to Lacan, who tells the students attending his 1969-70 seminar during the upheaval of that period, “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will have one” (Other Side 207, translation modified).[8] Or in the most extreme case of all, Lyotard uses the example of the English proletariat to claim that a jouissance inseparable from the death drive underlies what appears as a brutally straightforward instance of bodily exploitation:
 

Look at the English proletariat, at what capital, that is to say their labor, has done to their body. You will tell me, however, that it was that or die. But it is always that or die, this is the law of libidinal economy, no, not the law: this is its provisional, very provisional, definition in the form of the cry, of intensities of desire; “that or die,” i.e. that and dying from it, death always in it, as its internal bark, its thin nut’s skin, not yet as its price, on the contrary as that which renders it unpayable. And perhaps you believe that “that or die” is an alternative?! And that if they choose that, if they become the slave of the machine, the machine of the machine, fucker fucked by it, eight hours, twelve hours, a day, year after year, it is because they are forced into it, constrained, because they cling to life? Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they–hang on tight and spit on me–enjoyed [ils on joui de] the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening. (Libidinal Economy 111)

 

This is the most exorbitant claim in all of Lyotard’s outrageous book, and one with which it may be hard not to find fault. However, at the heart of this and other of Lyotard’s rants is the basic insistence that capital conditions and thrives on the very desires that would seem to be at odds with it, and that one cannot think situations of oppression or hegemony without taking these desires into account–something that is also a lesson of Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave, of Gramsci’s model of hegemony, and of Fanon’s analysis of colonialism. In short, all of the above examples illustrate a central point that is repeatedly underscored in the range of writings by the theorists of libidinal economy: to not consider economy through the lens of desire, disjuncture, and perversion is to not understand it.

 
A corollary to attending to the desires that undergird use value (hence capital) is that one must similarly be attuned to desires in the very form and genre of Marxian analysis itself. As Lyotard puts it in memorable fashion in Libidinal Economy : “What is the desire named Marx?” He proceeds to argue that there are at least two Marxes at issues, one who is a severe critic of capital (the Big Bearded Prosecutor Marx) yet unable to dispense with his fascination for it, and the other who is caught in a juvenile state of enrapture with capital (the Little Girl Marx) yet rejects its “prostitution under the name of alienated mediation” (136). In this extreme if not obscene fashion, Lyotard raises the important question of the desiring-relation to capital of those who critique it. We might extrapolate to ask what is the desire of those on the left today who invest great energy in critiquing the United States or globalization or colonialism? Would such a critique be possible without a concomitant desire precisely for that very thing denounced?[9] And how does one name that desire (“the desire called Marx”) without both affirming and undermining the very real object that is also under scrutiny–capital?
 
This question of naming the desire underlying the Marxian analysis is particularly acute when brought to Badiou’s work. As Fredric Jameson writes in Žižek’s impressive recent collection of essays on Lenin, “Or, to put all of this in a different terminology (that of Jean-François Lyotard), if we know what ‘the desire called Marx’ is all about, can we then go on to grapple with ‘the desire called Lenin’?” (“Lenin and Revisionism” 60). Similarly, in another recent collection on Lacan, also edited by Žižek, Jameson writes about Lacan’s passion for spatial figures and “mathemes”:
 

Lacan’s formalizations–not merely the graphs, but the later mathemes and topologies, including the knots and the rings–have been thought to be motivated by a desire for a rigour, an effort to avoid the humanism and metaphysics of so much “orthodox Freudianism,” as well as an attempt to pass on a legacy of Lacan’s own immune to the revisionisms to which Freud was subjected. That may well be true; but I think we cannot neglect the spatial passion involved in the pursuit of these concentrated hieroglyphs or “characters”, nor can we avoid seeing in them a specific kind of desire, the desire called formalization, which would seem to me to be something quite distinct from scientificity and the claims made for that.
 

(“Lacan” 374)

 

Not only does Badiou share Lacan’s “desire called formalization” (something that sets him apart from the libidinal economy theorists who, with the exception of Lacan, are less inclined to formalization), but he famously links his entire philosophy to the axiomatic system of set theory, going so far as to declare that “mathematics is . . . ‘onto-logical’” (Briefings 105). The very persistence of Badiou’s orientation toward mathematics–as well as his repeated invocations of literary, philosophical, and political master-thinkers such as Mallarmé, Plato, and Mao–quite readily provokes the question of just what is behind the drive for these figures. Citing the reflections of Peter Hallward on Badiou’s “unusual fidelity to Plato,” A. Kiarina Kordela emphasizes in her probing critique of Badiou in $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan the importance of “address[ing] the desire underpinning Badiou’s exhortation to return to Plato” (49). If libidinal economy theory is under the sign of the death drive, then Badiou’s desire, be it for Plato or Mao or mathematics, is more nearly under the sign of a drive for order and formalization. Yet the intemporal aspect of this drive to order has an odd affinity with the outer limits of the theory of libidinal economy, and it is in this third dimension of libidinal economy that a connection to Badiou may be retrieved.

 
As outlined above, there is clearly a premium in libidinal economy theory on unstoppable libidinal flux and energetic machines (Žižek’s “flux of Life” Deleuzians), yet this is also a thought that pushes towards its opposite, namely inertia. This is nowhere more apparent than in some of the more difficult passages from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in which the “Body without Organs” (BwO) might be said at least partially to inhabit the form of a “desiring machine” that is in flux and moving toward somewhere. But this somewhere that the BwO approaches asymptotically is none other than the “plane of consistency” (or “full BwO”) that represents the total arrestation of desire at the zero point, the point of an immobile and undifferentiated field.[10] Lyotard builds on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and describes an organic body similarly facing the limit point of its mobility. For Lyotard, this point of the limit is also none other than theory itself, theory in its full libidinal dimension: “Medusa immobilizes, and this is jouissance . Theory is the jouissance of immobilization . . . . Ideally, a theoretical text is an immobilized organic body” (Libidinal Economy 242-43). Whether it is these evocations of immobility at the end of Libidinal Economy or Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO coming up against the plane of consistency, there is an elusive yet radical inertia that rests at the limit point of such analyses, not unlike Freud’s death drive. At issue here is that which might have the power to stop capital in its tracks (if such a thing were to be granted). In this reader’s opinion, it is the power of this radical inertia that is the greatest insight of the strain of thought that counts as the theory of the libidinal economic, a body of thought that many now largely dismiss.[11] This staging of the encounter with inertia represents a psychological libidinal counter to capital in the place where its motor force–its infinitely expansive flexibility, its second law of thermodynamics, its signifying chain dominated by the endless energy of speculation–collapses into a black hole. It is a site where what Badiou signals as the crucial space of the void, or what Lacan terms the not-all, also takes over the function of the all. Such a space of the inert abyss, which is also Nietzsche’s concept of forgetting, was soon displaced by a Marxian focus on the materiality of the object (without its concurrent energetic a-materiality) and the haunting of the psyche though trauma, memory, catastrophe, etc. What the moment of the wake of 1968 shares with Badiou is a paradoxically a-material materialism that is in no way bound up with contemporary registers such as trauma, memory, or the haunting of the past.
 
Yet such a tarrying with the practico-inert, to put it in Sartrean terminology,[12] is accessed by Badiou in a fashion diametrically opposed to that of the libidinal economy theorists. If for the latter there is a chiasmic reversal of the object and its abstraction (use and exchange value), a continual insistence on the perversion of desire, and a gesture to an inert plane of consistency that is not entirely distinguishable from excess or surplus, Badiou insists then on the unity of the object and its abstraction, admits no desire in excess of his acclaimed fidelity to a truth procedure, and in the strangest twist of all, which will be taken up in what follows, advocates a Marxian if not Maoist dialectic of contradiction, antagonism, and twoness, but in doing so develops in spite of himself a realm of atemporal inertia.
 
The question of desire is at once a common refrain in Badiou’s work–especially Théorie du sujet–and something that appears as a blind spot in his oeuvre. Whereas thinkers such as Deleuze and Foucault debate about the relative importance of desire (important for Deleuze, subordinate to power for Foucault),[13] Badiou in Lacanian fashion affirms its importance yet leaves no space for the kind of libidinal economy analysis that locates a logic of desire in the very fabric of what would appear to be the most crude materiality. In Théorie du sujet, Badiou writes:
 

for Lacan, the analytic theory holds this equivocation in the instruction of desire from which the subject apprehends itself. For us, Marxism holds it in the political practice of which the subjective point is the party. Lacan, involuntary theoretician of the political party? The Marxists, unenlightened practitioners of desire? False window. In truth there is only one theory of the subject. Lacan has a lead on the actual state of Marxism, one which it behooves us to employ, in order to improve our Marxist affairs.
 

(133)[14]

 

What Badiou denounces as a “false window” is precisely the point of entrance that the libidinal economy theorists would take, highlighting above all Lacan’s “involuntary” theory of the party and the Marxists’ “unenlightened” theory of desire. For Badiou, this confrontation between Marxism and psychoanalysis entails only one theory of the subject. But the point of the libidinal economy analysis is to retain two poles of the equation, such as use value and exchange value, and to observe how the two exchange positions in chiasmic fashion–use takes on the affective currency of exchange, while exchange has its utilitarian dimension. Indeed, Badiou adheres to and repeats the Maoist dictum of the one dividing into two, but at the level of his “theory of the subject,” Badiou reverts to an upholding of the one, the one theory of the subject.

 
For Badiou, the political itself is grounded in the category of the impossible, which is in many regards the foundational category of his 1985 Peut-on penser la politique?[15] Yet, in a particularly notable example, the thing that serves as the driving force of the impossible, that which will transform a pre-political state into a properly political one, is none other than the body of the worker and the treatment of the worker as a thing, as merchandise, as use value. Badiou writes:
 

Interpretation produces this event that, in a pre-political situation, was the statement that it was impossible to treat workers as used merchandise. Under the circumstances, this impossible is precisely the reality, hence the possibility. The possibility of the impossible is the basis of politics.
 

(78)

 

Here, the impossible takes on the status of something that is at the level of the obvious from a basic Marxian perspective, namely, that the workers cannot be treated as objects to be used and discarded. The impossible thus exists at the level of the imperative, that one must not allow this to happen. What is by far more radical if not transgressive–and Badiou will have none of this transgression–is the integration of a desiring apparatus into a thought of the situation of the workers. As with the example from Lyotard above, the question is not so much to deny the situation of exploitation, but rather to recognize that there are other contradictory processes taking place at the same time: that the body of the worker may experience a jouissance exactly at the site where it is made into an object or into a pure use value, and that the experience of the body as thing may not be perceived entirely as exploitation, but also as a reveling in the superhuman capacity of the laboring body.[16] Indeed, to see only exploitation and not the contradiction inherent in the very notion of use value–that use will always prove elusive, will always turn out to be bound up with questions of desire and economy–is still to perceive from the perspective of the bourgeois. This is the lesson of libidinal economy, and this is what Badiou resoundingly forecloses, while nonetheless continually emphasizing the import of contradiction, antagonism, and doubleness or twoness over singularity or the one.

 
The question of the desiring structure of the worker leads to a tangential yet important series of reflections, which will not be treated in detail here. At issue is the concept of the human and its relation to the categories of “masses,” “people,” “workers,” and “inexistence.” In this domain, Badiou is maddeningly difficult to pin down. On the one hand, he evinces a sort of Sartrean humanism of engagement and people-based action. In Théorie du sujet he writes that “a politics ‘without people,’ without the foundation of the structured masses, does not exist” (32). This statement is clearly at odds with the more inhuman emphasis of Lyotard and the libidinal economy theorists (emphasizing the desires, drives, and pulsions that push the human to the limit space beyond the human) and is in this formulation closer to but still some distance from Althusser’s emphasis on desubjectification in his analyses of masses and class. Yet Badiou will conclude his Peut-on penser la politique? not only with a return to the question of the impossible, but also with a call for the time of the future anterior, and this is remarkably close to both Deleuze and Derrida and their evocations of a future anterior and a people to come (107). Similarly, the emphasis on the “inexistent”–proximate to the impossible in Badiou’s early work–returns in the recent Logiques des mondes and even in Badiou’s posthumous tribute to Derrida in which he links their two otherwise disparate philosophical modes under the banner of this term.[17] In sum, Badiou’s oeuvre presents a strong paradox. While being resoundingly consistent within its own terms and within the variation of its terms over time, it nonetheless seems to offer very different positions on certain concepts depending on the text and context in which these concepts appear. Thus while Badiou concludes Peut-on penser la politique? with an appeal to the future anterior, elsewhere his work seems to eschew the register of the temporal altogether, something all the more striking given the affinity that is occasionally expressed for Marxian periodizing frameworks.[18] It is via a consideration of Badiou’s relation to temporality that I will return to the desire named Mao and the place of the psychoanalytic within Badiou’s thought.
 
Despite the concern with appearance and consequences in Logiques des mondes and increasing gestures to the question of the future in recent lectures, it is Badiou’s notion of temporality that is most incongruous with a general Marxian framework that would emphasize some form of causal relation, cyclical pattern, or mode of historical periodization. This fraught relation to Marxian temporality comes out around the notion of how to count a century and appears in the form of a logic of temporal condensation rather than periodizing expansion, in the notion of a short twentieth century rather than a long twentieth century. This is certainly in keeping with Badiou’s longstanding insistence on subtraction, or on the political import of what is subtracted from a count (in France one might think of the sans papiers, those who are subtracted or not counted with respect to the citizen but who nonetheless might have a political force).[19]
 
There are many works and declarations that pose the problem of the being and the lineage and the number of the century, including Foucault’s famous pronouncement that “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (“Theatrum Philosophicum” 165). Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century locates the origins of twentieth-century American dominated capitalism at least as far back as 1873, and moreover as a fourth and not a unique historical instance of capital accumulation. Arrighi isolates
 

four systemic cycles of accumulation . . . . a Genoese cycle, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries; a Dutch cycle, from the late sixteenth century through most of the eighteenth century; a British cycle, from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century; and a US cycle, which began in the late nineteenth century and has continued into the current phase of financial expansion.
 

(7)

 

Each of these cycles is considerably longer than one hundred years, “hence the notion of the ‘long century,’ which will be taken as the basic temporal unit in the analysis of world-scale processes of capital accumulation” (7).

 
Arrighi’s fundamental and explicit thesis is to expand, if not displace, the notion of the century: as a construct, the century is not equivalent to its name in years. Moreover, the twentieth century, along with its mode of capitalism, is in fact but a shortened repetition of previous long centuries that wax and wane according to a cyclical logic. Beyond the claim that capital, which seems to reach so distinctive an apogee in the twentieth century, is not exclusively of the century, Arrighi also–and this less explicitly–proposes a somewhat novel ontology and temporality of the century, according to which the century definitionally exceeds itself and extends beyond its temporal limitations and its number of one hundred, creating the paradox of an entity defined by its number that is nonetheless and also by definition not equivalent to its number. It is ultimately in this domain of the numerical, of the number that exceeds its number, that I would locate a certain proximity to Badiou. Still, if Arrighi’s long twentieth century exceeds the number of the century, it does not dispense with the century’s periodizing gesture. Insofar as the century marks a period in time, Arrighi’s model is entirely in keeping with this temporal structure–just the dates or number of years may not correspond.
 
In this regard, The Long Twentieth Century is of a piece with a Marxian model that would insist on breaks and ruptures, where dates become significant as points of crisis and rupture, such as the famous nodal points in France of 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, and 1962. The title of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire perfectly illustrates this disjunctive yet essentially temporal logic. The Eighteenth Brumaire refers to the day of the month in the French revolutionary calendar–time having recommenced with the revolution–when Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor (1799). The Eighteenth Brumaire of the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte (Charles Louis) is here the tragedy replayed as farce of the second declaration of empire, this time a half century later.
 
Unlike Arrighi, Badiou condenses rather than expands the twentieth century such that it starts in 1917 and ends in 1980 with what he calls the Restoration. At the same time, Badiou’s notion of Restoration operates very much at face value and without an eye to the contradictory forces of the political unconscious of the moment of restoration. If for Badiou Balzac counts as the “great artist of the first Restoration, the one that followed the French Revolution of 1792-94” (The Century 26) (and thus foreshadows the second Restoration, or the twentieth century’s last two decades), for such Marxist literary critics as Lukács and Jameson, Balzac marks a last outpost of a multifaceted system of social relations that is eclipsed by the more monochrome literary world that comes into being with the advent of monopoly capitalism–in short, the break between Balzac and Flaubert. Balzac may be politically conservative (and for Badiou the analysis simply stops there), but it is precisely this that, for a critic like Jameson, is the condition of possibility for capturing in literary form a heterogeneity of life worlds that are no longer thinkable in more advanced stages of capitalism. Thus, for Lukács and Jameson, the thought of periodization is of a piece with a dialectical notion of temporality, whereas for Badiou to think in the unit of the century is precisely to condense rather than expand, thereby flying in the face of a dialectical materialist notion of periodization.[20]
 
This is not to say that Badiou is without his own mode of periodization. Although his book The Century speaks of the short twentieth century, Badiou’s own century (never acknowledged as such) might run from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the crucial sequences of the Cultural Revolution between 1966-67, hence an interval of one hundred years, but one not synchronized with the specific period of the twentieth century.[21] Badiou’s idea of the alternative and unacknowledged century is entangled with his longstanding interest in the question of number–though he will write in Peut-on penser la politique? that “politics will not be thinkable except when freed from the tyranny of number” (68).[22] Also relevant to Badiou’s periodization is what constitutes an “event” for Badiou in the realm of politics–an event being something that is accessed through the four domains of politics, art, science, and love and that furthermore marks the success of a universalizable process of bringing to fruition what was imperceptible or inexistent in a situation in order for it to have new affirmative and revolutionary potential. (For Badiou, a model is the Apostle Paul’s radical fidelity and proclamation of the event of Christ’s resurrection and the early Christian movement that ensued.[[23]) In the passage that follows from Théorie du sujet , Badiou discusses the trajectory from the Paris Commune to the October Revolution and up through the Cultural Revolution, placing his discussion under the sign of the undecidability between three and four that concludes Hegel’s Logic . Here Badiou espouses a Marxian mode of periodization, above and beyond the “idealist” Hegel, who sees only the cyclical and the three-part movement of position, negation, and negation of the negation.[24] What is crucial about this periodization is the retrospective insight it affords (the owl of Minerva, as it were), though it is hard to establish if it is the Commune that is new in and of itself or if its newness is only perceptible retrospectively, from the vantage point of the events of October 1917. As Badiou writes,
 

any periodization must embrace its dialectical double time, for example including October 17 as the second, and provisionally final, scansion of the count. Hence the historians’ conundrum: according to the relation force/place, the Commune is new (Marx). According to the relation subjective/objective, it is October that is new, and the Commune is this boundary of the old whose practical perception, which purifies force, contributes to engendering its novelty. It is highly likely that the Chinese Cultural Revolution has the same profile, and that the question of the second time of its periodizing function is thus broached . . . . If Hegel makes a circle, it is that he always wants but a single time. In principle he is unaware of differing retroactions, although he tolerates them to an insidious degree in the detail.
 

(Théorie 64-65)

 

It appears from this that for Badiou the heart of the struggle of periodization lies in establishing what counts as new. If according to one sequence (presumably the one to which Badiou would adhere) it is the Commune that is new, then the events of October mark a second and final moment in the sequence. If, however, it is not until October that we have the true novelty of the subjective dimension (rather than simply the new possibility of the party), then the Commune would be more nearly a pre-political moment.[25] If, however, we introduce the third moment of the Cultural Revolution, then in any case it rewrites both sequences, so there are at least four possibilities, the two sequences described above, and the Cultural Revolution added to each of them: the Cultural Revolution as the third and final term in the sequence inaugurated by the Commune, or the Cultural Revolution as the second and final term in the sequence inaugurated by October 1917, thus forming two additional permutations of the two initial sequences. But by another count, the Cultural Revolution could be the first moment when the subjective dimension of politics is truly articulated, allowing for a new thought of the party, and serving as the inaugural moment of its own properly political sequence. At different points, Badiou seems to gesture toward all these possibilities. Here Hegel’s conclusion to the Logic is significant, for it signals the difficulty of counting between the three and the four, something that is a larger refrain in all of Badiou’s work:

 

In this turning point of the method, the course of cognition at the same time returns into itself. As self-sublating contradiction this negativity is the restoration of the first immediacy, of simple universality; for the other of the other, the negative of the negative, is immediately the positive, the identical, the universal. If one insists on counting, this second immediate is, in the course of the method as a whole, the third term to the first immediate and the mediated. It is also, however, the third term to the first or formal negative and to absolute negativity or the second negative; now as the first negative is already the second term, the term reckoned as third can also be reckoned as fourth, and instead of a triplicity, the abstract form may be taken as a quadruplicity; in this way, the negative or the difference is counted as a duality.
 

(836)

 

Not only is there a dizzying vacillation between the three and the four, but the very possibility of counting and knowing the count is itself brought into question. In this ability to sustain a thought of the difficulty of counting, Badiou comes closest to Lacan and by extension–at least to readers of Lacan such as Jameson and Žižek–to Hegel and the dialectic.[26]

 
Yet this overture to the complexity of the count, to something that cannot be fully accounted for due to the temporal disjuncture it represents, is, as I have been at pains to indicate here and elsewhere, at odds with the very formalism of Badiou’s work. To be sure, the problems of counting a sequence–in short, the question of the cardinal and the ordinal–can be mapped onto the framework of the set theory that underlies many of Badiou’s philosophical formulations. But what the problem of periodization reveals is the difficulty of mapping itself, the problem of the translation entailed not only in working between mathematics and philosophy but in positing any moment of newness and its appearance. Badiou provides more of a rubric for such appearance in his latest work Logiques des mondes, giving a number of possible outcomes for the taking place or failing to take place of an event.[27] But again, at issue here–and this is where psychoanalysis becomes most prominent and necessary–is not so much the concurrent mapping of Marx and Lacan, or of Mao and Lacan, or the correlation between Lacan’s notion of desire and Marx’s notion of the party,[28] but the very desire for such procedures of mapping, as noted above in Jameson’s reading of Lacan. In this fashion, there is a Badiouian desire that I would designate as numerical, a desire for the uncountable proliferation of number itself (and this despite the claim that number is not properly political).
 
While it might be debated to what extent Badiou’s interest in Mao (and that of the remainder of the French Maoists, past and present) relates to the specificity of Chinese history[29]–though it is not the goal here to reject Badiou’s usefulness for thinking this history–it is nonetheless important to distinguish the desire structure behind such a focus on Mao and the Cultural Revolution from the writings and the person of Mao as such. One can, for example, compare Badiou’s Théorie du sujet from 1982 with Samir Amin’s more economically oriented study of Maoism from the year before, in which Amin highlights the influence of the Cultural Revolution on four problematics: “equality between the city and the countryside, a compressed hierarchy of salaries, the development of national autonomy, and the option of workers’ management of economy as well as society” (129). Questions such as that of the relation between the rural and the proletarian are hardly at the forefront of Badiou’s more philosophical analyses, which center instead on dialectic, contradiction, and the question of the party itself.
 
The driving force behind Badiou’s meditations on Mao and the Cultural Revolution might be grouped into two sets of terms. One set is that of the party and the periodization of the party, which becomes visible in the difficulty of narrating what happened between Lenin and Mao. Was Lenin the one whod inaugurated the very category of the party–according to Sylvain Lazarus this was done before November, 1917–and Mao the one who pushed the party structure to its limit and ultimate failure? Or did Mao himself bring a new dimension to the form of the party, which then dissolved? Badiou’s writings seem to make a variety of claims on these counts, and even his own political involvement in France moved from membership in the Marxist-Leninist UCFML (L’union de communistes de France marxiste-léniniste) to the Organisation Politique, from membership in an essentially party-oriented group to one that espouses politics without the party. What the desire named Mao bears witness to is the intractable difficulty of locating the form of the party, indeed of making this a philosophical question per se.[30] Even in abandoning the party, it seems that there is a desire not to give up on the question of the party. If for Lacan ethics is to not give way on one’s desire,[31] then Badiou’s ethics vis-à-vis the Marxian and Maoist moments is to not give up on a thought of the party structure, even to a point beyond its dissolution.
 
In a similar and even more pointed fashion, Badiou’s Mao is a preeminent thinker of contradiction, and specifically of the two terms that refuse to be collapsed into one. If all of Badiou’s work might be fashioned, at least in its explicit formulation, as an attack on the question of the one, then for Badiou Mao represents a thinker–as opposed to someone like Deleuze, whom Badiou reads as falsely linking a theory of the multiple to that of the one[32]–who will insist that the politically progressive model is that of the one dividing into two, whereas the reactionary one is that of the two uniting into one (and this is where Badiou also criticizes a Hegelian trinitarian urge to synthesize the three into one).[33] Evoking a temporality and a problematic outside that of a recognizably Marxian periodization, Badiou goes so far as to claim in The Century that “the century is a figure of the non-dialectical juxtaposition of the Two and the One” (59). Badiou’s short century now eschews the dialectic but retains the division between the one and the two and in this fashion continues to resonate with the basic themes of Badiou’s earlier writings on Maoist contradiction. If these two periodizations, or rather non-periodizations or failed periodizations (that of the twentieth century and that of the century dating from the Commune to the Cultural Revolution), can be linked, then it is under the banner of the unconscious desire for the century itself, a thought of the century. This might be said to be the Real of Badiou’s Marxism, which in many respects does not resemble anything typically Marxian (though this claim could be made about certain aspects of Marx’s work itself).
 
Badiou’s theory is most incomplete at those points where it does not acknowledge its own unconscious, something in some sense endemic to any good theory–what de Man terms the dialectic of blindness and insight. For Badiou, this is all the more marked given his extensive indebtedness to, if not engagement with, the work of Lacan. It might be claimed that Badiou’s notion of the void or what is inexistent in a situation has affinities with the Lacanian Real. Yet for Badiou the void or inexistent is the space from which a potential event would issue, one that would recognize and deploy that aspect of a situation that lies outside the count, making that uncountable entity the conduit to a universal accessibility. In contrast, the Lacanian Real is that which is inaccessible to the subject (and for Lacan’s subject, there is no Other of the Other). For Badiou, there may be something uncountable, but it is not precisely inaccessible: it is simply in a potential process of transformation. In this respect, it is number itself that in its process of division or failure of division somehow resists the specificity of the count. If the century resists demarcation and coincidence with its number, if the one divides into two, and sometimes the two divides into four, and from the four it is possible to subtract and arrive at three, then we are left with something that might approximate an economy, if not a libidinal economy, of number.
 
In the process of seeming to move or go somewhere, the count is also what stops you in your tracks (as Lacan describes Antigone’s beauty in his seminar seven, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis). On the one hand, movement and change are at the heart of what for Badiou constitutes the political. The early Théorie de la contradiction presents Marx, Lenin, and Mao as each advocating a notion of politics as movement, but the difficulty of locating what is new in each of these thinkers proves a vertiginous exercise that may have the opposite effect of inducing more of a stupor.[34] In Théorie du sujet, Badiou also links politics to waiting, and it seems that there is a profound and unending waiting involved in the process of the recognition of the event after the fact. While there is excitement at the moment, the more significant step involves the assessment of the evental status after the fact, in what must necessarily be an interval of some more pronounced stasis. The question of immobility may seem to be of minor significance when grappling with Badiou’s oeuvre, yet it is on this count that a concluding return to the thought of libidinal economy may be proffered, in a move that would, as it were, come full circle.
 
The preceding analysis has served to underscore that Badiou’s work from the 1980s and his more recent meditations on Marxism and psychoanalysis represent an extreme departure from the work of the libidinal economy theorists. When all is said and done, Badiou is much more of a literalist. Though he may dwell on numbers and the count and the dialectic (arguably some version of Sartre’s practico-inert), he maintains the significance of such terms as the party, the workers, the masses, and the subject. By contrast, thinkers such as Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Klossowski are more decisively bent on an overt undermining of these terms–hence, on showing that precisely where you think there is practice, there is theory; where you think there is the material, there is the ideal; and above all, where you think there is a body, there is also language in a chiasmic and dialectical relation to that body. Whereas Deleuze concludes his Logic of Sense with an appendix on “Klossowski, or Bodies-Language” in which he signals the importance and interchangeability of those two terms, Badiou opens his recent Logiques des mondes with a denunciation of the conjunction of bodies and languages, which for him is symptomatic of the “democratic materialism” of our current moment, something he rejects in favor of a “materialist dialectic” (which is more resonant with his work from the early 1980s at issue here than with the more mathematical-philosophical Being and Event). Similarly, if the libidinal economists seek to foreground the desiring mechanisms that underlie not only capital but their very attempt to write it, Badiou eschews such self-reflexivity. Badiou’s work is squarely at odds with the project of libidinal economy on multiple counts, yet in different ways both bump up against something that might be described as an intemporal force of inertia. Lyotard speaks on several occasions of the immobilized body outside of time. Sylvain Lazarus, Badiou’s longstanding partner in philosophical Maoism, also writes against time and speaks of the inexistence of time.[35] As outlined above, the realm of the immobile appears as the elusive yet necessary limit point of this thought. Much of Badiou’s work has an intemporal aspect to it, and this is nowhere more central than in the waiting to decide what will have constituted the event, that is, the stasis built into the time of the future anterior. It is a strange meeting point indeed, but it seems that Marxian thought and psychoanalysis are poised to discern in the problem of the new and mobile the simultaneous presence of the old and the stuck. It will take innovative disciplinary conjunctions to broach this terrain effectively, but it is my claim that thinking the joint relation of inertia and stasis beyond simple mobility is a central concern for our time. This is the limit that fascinates both Badiou and the libidinal economy theorists; it is also the limit that stops both in their tracks, and in this fashion marks a point where they are not at odds.
 

 
A belated discovery in my case, Philip K. Dick is nonetheless the poster boy of my 1991 The Case of California. He reads California as the tech-no-future within a lexicon heavily mediated by the foreign body of Germanicity. That the German intertexts or introjects remain largely untranslated and decontextualized in Dick’s narratives redoubles the whammy of their impact as spectral. My current project, “I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick,” provides the greater context for this essay. If I sign in, once again, with my Freud, a corpus that includes Freud’s influence on or in Frankfurt School thought and deconstruction, I do so at this juncture with special emphasis on Walter Benjamin (in the setting he shares, right down to the missing list of your average university repression, with Daniel Paul Schreber and Freud). Freud’s commitment to secularism and (or as) transference does not exclude him from consideration of religion in the ruins of its former functions or inside psychotic delusional systems. Indeed, Freud’s explicit withdrawal of “worldviews” from the upper regions into the underworld of psychoanalysis, like his focus on the shifting borderline with regard to the legibility of psychosis, both contributes to and reserves a place for the Benjaminian supplement, which is vital to my Freudian approach.
 
Through Dick I discovered what was already gathering momentum in my critical sensorium: the necessity of adding Benjamin’s rereading of allegory (and all that follows from it in his diverse work) to Freud’s frame for world reading, namely endopsychic perception. The links of this alliance are at the same time the limits Freud admits in his approach to psychosis, in which, bottom line, reality testing and transference are circumvented as condemned sites under reconstruction. Mourning (or unmourning) is the third term or the summation of the borderline restrictions thus placed on passage through psychosis. For this essay’s booked passage, reality testing will be left to the side, though still subsumable, on the inside, as loss–loss conceived, that is, as the test of the reality it itself is (like no other). Endopsychic perception, as the inside view (afforded through certain psychotic delusions) of the psyche at the intersection between technology and the unconscious, grounds Freud’s inside-out analysis of the social relation that, owing to the intrapsychic bottom line subtending relationality, cannot be reduced to the interpersonal setting. In the reception of Freud’s science, only the Freudian approach I have in mind revalorizes psychotic delusional formation as “recovery” that is full of itself in the endopsychic mode of discovery. Another way to put it is that Freud and Benjamin, because they are not technophobic, prove particularly flexible and expansive readers of psychotic worlds. To read the mass-media socius it is necessary, from this Freudian perspective, to occupy (or cathect) in the same thought experiment the border with psychosis as that margin where (psychic) reality begins.
 
Following a discontinuous case of California, from here to Germany, it proves possible to fold Philip K. Dick’s trilogy Valis inside a relay of texts–by Schreber, Freud, and Benjamin–which together promote a process of secularization in the details and among the effects of haunting, while at the same time addressing and maintaining, in the big picture, the religious frames of reference, but as abandoned ruins, lexicons still deposited in our range of reference, but deposits without redemption value. As illuminated by the German intertext or introject’s Californian supplement, the overlaps and gaps between the cluster of notions Benjamin bonded to allegory and the cluster bonding between Schreber and Freud, which Freud identified as endopsychic, reflect, back in their own time, the pull of what also made them draw sparks and draw together, namely, the subtle secularization that Spiritualism introduced into the congregation of discourses, even the properly disciplined ones.
 
I have elsewhere projected an occult atmosphere of influence binding Freud’s study of Schreber and Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play over the read corpus of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.[1] My point of departure then as now is Benjamin’s short illustrated essay, “Books by the Insane: From My Collection,” which he published in 1928. Here Benjamin recalls his 1918 purchase in Bern of Schreber’s Memoirs :
 

 

Had I already heard about the book back then? Or did I only discover the study a few weeks later, which Freud published on this book in the third volume of his Short Writings on the Theory of Neurosis? (Leipzig, 1913). It’s all the same. I was immediately captivated.
 

(615-16)

 

What goes with the flow of these sentences is that his discovery of Schreber’s book and his knowledge of Freud’s study are all the same. When he next summarizes the highlights of Schreber’s delusional system, he opens up a pocket of resemblance between the psychotic’s order of the world and the stricken world of the melancholic allegorist:

 

The sense of destruction of the world, not uncommon in paranoia, governs the afflicted to such an extent that the existence of other human beings can be understood by him only as deception and simulation, and, in order to come to terms with them, he refers to “quickly made up men,” “wonder dolls,” “miraculated” people etc.
 

(616)

 

What Benjamin finally finds most compelling is the projection and consolidation of a world in the course of a kind of drama of stations, namely, in Benjamin’s words, “the stations this illness passed through all the way to this remarkably strict and happy encapsulation of the delusional world” (616-17).

 
In my own (still ongoing) reading of mad books, Schreber’s work is so far unique in its invocation of incommensurables, its combo of technoscience as well as pseudo-science with the shaken structures of religious belief over his own interminably finite corpus and its haunted sensorium. This ability of Schreber’s delusional order to contain itself in its ongoing internal juxtapositions and in cohabitation with the reality to which he by rights returns corresponds to what Benjamin refers to as the encapsulation of his delusional world. This encapsulation does not, however, like another Emperor’s new closure, refer to an allegedly completed process that, at least in the way it is maintained in the official record of the Schreber case, Freud simply sees through. Other accounts of severe mental illness are either secular psy-fi–for example Operators and Things–or religious Fantasy, whereby I mean specifically the bookstore-created genre of Fantasy, which however, at least according to Tolkien, bases its narratives of other worlds and happy ends on the one Fantasy story that is at the same time true: the New Testament. The Witnesses is a good example of this latter genre of psychotic autobiography. In either case the books tend to keep to a restricted economy of disintegration and reintegration, ending with a pervasive sense of loss of function–in other words of depletion of some form of vital energy. In both Perceval’s Narrative and A Mind That Found Itself, the recovered-mad authors take their former delusional systems with them into their restored sanity, but only as a special motivation or fervor in the pursuit of certain activities that in its proximity to the original spark of derangement leads the psychiatrist to recognize that it’s time for a booster stay in the hospital.
 
As point of comparison and inspiration, I rely, then, on Dick’s trilogy rather than on another mad book, even though the author was first diagnosed with schizophrenia during the year he attempted to attend college, and the trilogy itself can be seen as fictionalized “autobiography” relating to certain mystical or psychotic experiences that in February and March of 1974, as Dick writes in the non-fictional word outside the trilogy, “denied the reality, and the power, and authenticity of the world, saying, ‘This cannot exist; it cannot exist’” (qtd. in Sutin 214). In the trilogy, containment or consolidation of the “end of the world” resettles religious beliefs in the extended finitude of science fiction. In the first volume, also titled Valis, the protagonist, Horselover Fat, whose contact with God from outer space took the form of a “beam of pink light” fired directly at or into him (20), turns out to be the split-off double of Philip Dick, the translation into English words of his Greek/German proper name. Before the beam skewers his duo dynamic, Fat had been serving time as bystander at the deaths of a series of young women. “Tied to him,” these “corpses cried for rescue–cried even though they had died” (126). “Valis” is also the title and subject of a film flickering through the volumes of the trilogy. It is the acronym for a secret project spelled out as Vast Active Living Intelligence System and identifiably contained in and conveyed by an ancient satellite in the film and then apparently at large. Does this contradict the divine beaming, Fat wants to know. No: “that’s a sci-fi film device, a sci-fi way of explaining it” (154). But the sci-fi device also attends Christianity’s consequent immersion in finitude. Jesus was an extra-terrestrial. The original Apostolic Christians acquired immortality, the extended finitude variety, through Logos, a plasmate or living information that could be absorbed.
 
In The Divine Invasion, the second volume of Dick’s trilogy, the information conveyed by “Valis” (film, satellite, book, or trilogy) provides frame and background for the clandestine return of Yah or Yahweh to earth, a fortress Satan sealed tight against God’s influence a long time ago. At point of landing, however, the ship gets identified and blasted. The brain damage that keeps Yah from remembering that he is God is a plot point in a boy’s lifetime: the other story is that the Godhead has lost touch with part of itself. The boy’s playmate, Zina, steps into this missing place. Zina, whose name in Roumanian means “fairy,” rules a fantasy realm, the “Secret Commonwealth,” in which the real world is doubled but in which all political figures, for example, are displaced among the rank and file, their oppressive influence minimized. Zina’s fantasy genre challenges Yah to delay the day of reckoning that would scourge the world. But God will not affirm fantasy or, as He puts it precisely, wish fulfillment. According to God, the “power of evil” consists in a “ceasing of reality, the ceasing of existence itself. It is the slow slipping away of everything that is, until it becomes . . . a phantasm” (136).
 
The point of phantasmic comparison is Linda Fox, a mass music star and media image. God gives life or reality to the phantasm and to Herb Asher, the Fox’s nonstop consumer and biggest fan, He gives the outside chance of encountering her in the flesh. God thus means to prove to Zina, who had earlier miraculated up a live semblance of the singer for Asher’s sake, that what is real is always stronger than mere make believe. Asher indeed falls in love with the real Linda Fox. Zina’s fantasy alternative however succeeded in tricking God into standing by this world, an affirmation that He then cannot take back. Thus the Godhead is re-paired.
 
It turns out that Linda Fox was realized only as the ultimate medium, the medium as the message or the immedium, as the Advocate, the figure or placeholder of Jesus. This figure, as Zina earlier instructs Yah, originally performed services for the dead only, offering advocacy on their behalf against Satan’s prosecution. A bill of particulars that Satan submitted always weighed in as proof of sinfulness that could never be deducted or written off: the dead were condemned to pass through the apparatus of retribution, and ultimately pass into nothingness. But then, one day, way back in primal time, the Advocate appeared. If the soul agreed to his representation, then the Advocate would submit a blank bill of particulars and thus free the soul from an otherwise inevitable doom.
 
The doom of death, however, is never lowered in Dick’s novel, for which the secret commonwealth serves as its internal simulacrum. Yah challenges Zina: “‘You admit, then, that your world is not real?’ . . . Zina hesitated. ‘It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology; in any case we can enter retrotime and overrule mistakes in history’” (162). The ability to go back to a time when the dead are still alive is not only an option for the characters in The Divine Invasion but is the determining momentum of a narrative in which, by doubling back again and again, death, as Goethe was given to proclaim, is everywhere swallowed up by life. However life opens wide only by recycling survivors back in time. “How many lives do we lead? Herb Asher asked himself. Are we on tape? Is this some kind of replay?” (166).
 
The last installment of the trilogy, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, doesn’t share the Fantasy: the challenge of death–or rather of the dead–returns, but this time not as the pathogenic impetus for the flight into Fantasy or Christianity as the redemption of what begins as a paranoid sci-fi delusional system. Framed by a survivorship that Angel, the narrator, is hard-pressed to dedicate to mourning, the bulk of the novel transpires in the recent past when her loved ones were still around. Inside the narrative, the first to die is soon believed by two out of three survivors to be getting back in touch with them from the other world. At the same time the same two are conducting research on the anokhi, yet another substance that initiates ate and drank on Jesus’s historical turf in order to extend finitude indefinitely. When they consult a medium in Santa Barbara to find out what the ghost wants, the same two receive the forecast that their deaths are coming soon. To them, then, it is the death wish that has returned. Angel, only along for the ride, diagnoses the belief in communication with the other side as a remarkably isolated, indeed encapsulated form of fixed idea or madness, which can cohabit with all other functions or systems (113). Back inside the frame, at the end, in the wake now of all three deaths, Angel runs into another survivor, Bill, the schizophrenic son of one of the deceased, who tells Angel that now another one of the three has come back, this time inside him. Whether as her last tie to the people she loved and lost or as the ghostly return of one of them, Angel takes Bill home. She brings home, then, as she recognizes in the transmissions going through Bill, belief systems that are, says Angel, “without a trace of anything redemptive” (237), but through which they have already passed and have not yet passed.
 
In this trilogy Dick staggers as seemingly separable phases the elements he metabolizes all together now in such works as Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In Valis science fiction, psychosis, mysticism, and metaphysics occupy interchangeable places. In The Divine Invasion, Dick gives the Fantasy genre a final reckoning as the ongoing temptation he could only overcome by turning, as he does in this novel over the spectral issue of the dead, to science fiction. The final novel, which occupies the recent past of the scene of writing, is organized around the modern Spiritualist pursuit of communication with the other side, which is identified as stable formulation or even constitutive dimension of psychotic delusion–in other words, as endopsychic perception. The trilogy concludes with unmourning or melancholia, not so much as one of the psychoses (for example, in accordance with Freud’s initial theorization of narcissistic versus transference neuroses), but more importantly as the portal to and foundation of all the psychotic variations on its basic theme, that of the reality (or realities) of loss. With the Valis cross-sectioning of the psy-fi condition as illustration and inspiration, we will revisit as endopsychic allegory the stations of Freud’s and Benjamin’s crossing with or through Schreber, and conclude by considering another Dick novel that can be identified as his own Schreber narrative and reading.
 
Benjamin’s article about his collection of books by the insane concludes with a reference to another mad book that has come to his attention, which is the equal of Schreber’s Memoirs, but which remains hard to sell to a reputable press. Does Benjamin thus summon his Origin book in a setting of exchange or interchange with Schreber’s Memoirs and Freud’s study–and down the transferential corridors of dis-appointment in a former world of legitimation through which both books first had to pass before they could reach a public, published forum? What would then also be encapsulated here, at this turn of identification, is Freud’s highly reflexive performance in his Schreber case study of the staggered interchangeability of his theory, the workings of the psyche this theory uncovers and illustrates, and the delusions Schreber records in his Memoirs. The inside-out view of the inner workings of the psyche projected outwards as the delusional representation or mass mediatization of our funereal identifications is termed by Freud endopsychic perception. For Freud, this notion begins in connection with myth in a letter to Fliess dated 12 December 1897, but first makes it into his work, on an update, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
 

A large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition (the endopsychic perception, as it were) of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored–it is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy with paranoia must come to our aid–in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious.
 

(287-88)

 
When Freud enters a paranoid system he encounters analogies internal to it that are doubly endopsychic:
 

these and many other details of Schreber’s delusional formation sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have assumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to witness that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber’s book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.
 

(315)

 

Freud’s proprietary frenzy at this juncture, a paranoia of sorts, out of sorts, refers in the first place to the source of the Schreber book: it was one of Jung’s transference gifts. Freud was wary of its unconscious itinerary and purpose. Another stopover in Freud’s contemplation of such inside viewing, Jensen’s Gradiva, was also one of Jung’s gifts. If we keep in mind that the endopsychic perception first emerges in the correspondence with Fliess, it proves possible to assign this perception to a field of reference through which the transference has passed and has not yet passed. Or, in other words, endopsychic perceptions supply the gap of noncorrespondence or unfulfillment between the ruinous materiality of the transference (whether in session or in action) and the theory that would contain or caption it. Endopsychic perception drives or meets halfway Freud’s work of analogy in the latter mentioned theorization, a work commensurate with that of mourning through which, moreover, the psyche builds up to or through our ongoing technologization.

 
Once Freud sees it coming–namely, the recurring dissolution of all his same-sex friendships–he addresses the transference both as a medium of haunting whereby, in his case, each new friend is really a returning spook, and, in its reproducibility, as an effect of the printing press: each new phase of the transference is but a reprinting of the same old cliché. Where he draws the line with regard to the homosexual component, Freud identifies an early libidinal bonding with John Freud, his playmate in early childhood, which got around while encrypting the relationship to his dead brother Julius. The psychoanalytic theory of ghosts first arises to account for Leonardo da Vinci’s homoerotic disposition in the context or contest of a speed race between repression and sublimation that subtends his techno-inventiveness, and then returns in the study of Schreber’s paranoia to address the delusional order of technical media and ghosts in terms of a recovery from sublimation breakdown.[2]
 
Freud emphasizes that Schreber repeatedly reproaches God for the limits of His self-awareness. When it comes to human life, God only takes cognizance of its corpse state, at which endpoint God reclaims the rays, souls, nerves that he originally deposited when he created the life form that he apparently immediately represses. Only the afterlife of his creations (when he gets his nerves back) concerns Him. Schreber inadvertently challenges or entraps God when, passing for dead–while, perhaps, melancholically playing dead–he is beset by the deity, who starts harvesting the presumed corpse; but when the inert body comes alive, God is caught in an act contrary to the order of the world. The living nerves grab God and prove to be the kind of turn-on that God can’t readily let go. The dead cannot enter the state of bliss as long as the greater part of the rays of God are attracted to and absorbed in Schreber’s voluptuousness. Because there is such a close relationship between human voluptuousness and the state of bliss enjoyed by the spirits of the deceased, Schreber looks forward to future reconciliation with God. But Schreber holds up the afterlife above while bringing the bliss down to earth. As Freud underscores, Schreber sexualizes the heavenly state of bliss and thus, we can add, irrevocably secularizes the afterlife while allegorizing its Heavenly trappings as to be already dead for.
 
The outside chance of renewal at this crisis point that, in the eternity Schreber contemplates, happens because it recurs, will always be performed in the medium of a ghost seer: “‘a seer of spirits’ . . . must under certain circumstances be ‘unmanned’ (transformed into a woman) once he has entered into indissoluble contact with divine nerves (rays)” (45). Schreber counts himself one of the greatest ghost seers, at the head of a line drawn through the Wandering Jew, the Maid of Orleans, the Crusaders in search of the holy lance, the Emperor Constantine, and, in his own day, “so-called Spiritualist mediums” (78-80).
 
In Radio Schreber, Wolfgang Hagen carefully reconstructs the Spiritualist context of Schreber’s Memoirs, beginning with its cornerstone, footnote number 36, which drops from Schreber’s declared interest in scientific work based on the theory of evolution as evidence of his basically nonreligious sensibility which, he submits, really should give credence to his new-found relations with God. Hagen shows, however, that “evolution” in Du Prel’s cited work, for example, is linked to a basic sensibility or soul at the atomic level that causes the chaotic atomic mass to develop ordered structures on its own. Hagen’s study is filled with the details of the works Schreber explicitly includes and the inevitable intertexts he doesn’t name, like works by Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner and Gustav Theodor Fechner. The complex, situated in the overlaps between science and Spiritualism, keeps returning to two basic assumptions: that of the atomic soul already mentioned and that of a fourth dimension that makes as much possible as it openly declares unprovable. Du Prel, again, turns in the work Schreber claims to have read repeatedly to the theory of a fourth spatial dimension according to which the world we perceive is just the “projection picture of a four-dimensional world in a three-dimensional cognition apparatus.” Fechner, one of the first to formulate the theory of a fourth dimension, argues, as Hagen cites for compatibility with Schreber’s system, that because we are rolling in our three-dimensional ball through the fourth dimension, as are all the balls within the big 3-D ball, everything that we will experience is already there and everything that we have already experienced is still there. Our three-dimensional surface exists only through the fourth dimension, has already passed through it and hasn’t yet passed through it. “I dare not decide,” Schreber pauses to reflect in his Memoirs,
 

whether one can simply say that God and the heavenly bodies are one and the same, or whether one has to think of the totality of God’s nerves as being above and behind the stars, so that the stars themselves and particularly our sun would only represent stations, through which God’s miraculous creative power travels to our earth (and perhaps to other inhabited planets). Equally I dare not say whether the celestial bodies themselves (fixed stars, planets, etc.) were created by God, or whether divine creation is limited to the organic world; in which case there would be room for the Nebular Hypothesis of Kant-Laplace side by side with the existence of a living God whose existence has become absolute certainty for me. Perhaps the full truth lies (by way of a fourth dimension) in a diagonal combination or resultant of both trends of thought impossible for man to grasp.
 

(8)

 
The discourse of or on Spiritualism, pro or contra, relies regularly on analogies with media technologization. Among the scientists and theorists gathered together in Schreber’s note 36 we find immediate recourse to telegraphy and the telephone, invoked to describe the manner of communication with ghosts or to evoke the absurdity of the belief in spirits or even to signify its redundancy in our mediatized setting (with the telephone in place, for example, there is no need for telepathy, which is, in quality, a less direct connection). The conjunction of both analogies that Freud identifies as endopsychic when they are developed into a system of thought or order of the world, can be found in Schreber’s footnote underworld where, ever since the breach of overstimulation destroyed his world, Schreber consigns as introjects in flotation the very batteries running the rewired transference in the new world order of recovery. In note 58, then, Schreber gives the following two analogies as the derisive translations of the basic language by the soul of Flechsig, Schreber’s treating physician and, according to Freud, the brother of all transferences. This soul’s expression for being among fleeting improvised men is “amongst the fossils . . . following its tendency . . . to replace the basic language by some modern-sounding and therefore almost ridiculous terms. Thus it also likes to speak of a ‘principle of light-telegraphy,’ to indicate the mutual attraction of rays and nerves” (118).
 
As shorthand for my inability to follow Hagen beyond the point of contact with this Spiritualist context into his far-reaching new history of the emergence of a psychotic discourse of analogization with occult and technical media (out of the delay in the scientific understanding of the same electricity that could be more readily harnessed and made to transmit), I note that he overlooks his one colleague and precursor in the basic matter of locating the place of publication of Schreber’s Memoirs.[3] In “Books by the Insane: From My Collection,” Benjamin indeed identifies the publishing house standing behind Schreber’s Memoirs as a well-known gathering place for Spiritist or Spiritualist studies, and recognizes in Schreber’s “theological” system (with its God Who can approach only corpses without danger to Himself, Who is familiar with the concept of railways, and Whose basic language unfolds as an antiquated but powerful German) its Spiritualist provenance. But, and this Hagen indeed demonstrates, it takes one immersed in Spiritualism to see through Schreber’s discourse to the bare bones of its ghost communications.
 
Before closing Origin of the German Mourning Play, Benjamin returns to a contrast between the Baroque German mourning plays and the mourning plays of Calderón (whose successful mourning plays Benjamin associates with the exceptional case of Goethe):
 

The inadequacy of the German mourning play is rooted in the deficient development of the intrigue, which seldom even remotely approaches that of the Spanish dramatist. The intrigue alone would have been able to bring about that allegorical totality of scenic organization, thanks to which one of the images of the sequence stands out, in the image of the apotheosis, as different in kind, and gives mourning at one and the same time the cue for its entry and its exit. The powerful design of this form should be thought through to its conclusion; only under this condition is it possible to discuss the idea of the German mourning play.
 

(409)

 

This thinking-through requirement gives interminable mourning the last word. Benjamin conjures successful mourning, the kind that’s only passing through, as limit concept of the German Baroque mourning play, right after floating a Devil pageant past us, according to which allegory cannot but fall for the Satanic perspective that introduces and subsumes it, and thus in the end “faithlessly leap” (in Benjamin’s words) toward God. Benjamin describes allegory’s act of suicitation, a return to Devil and God that allegory otherwise interminably postpones: everything unique to allegory, Benjamin underscores, would otherwise be lost.

 
In his 1925 essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Benjamin attempts to generate a reading of the novel out of itself. He ends up identifying Ottilie’s withdrawal from speech and life as, verbatim, a death drive. Benjamin concluded that this is a work dedicated to adolescence, to the bottom line of the Teen Age: namely, preparedness for death. A proper death thus emerges out of the duration of young life. The only candidate for ghost of the departed in Goethe’s uncanny novel, in which haunting, however, is strictly circumscribed, is Ottilie’s ghost appearance in her handmaiden’s eyes only: in a vision she sits up in the coffin and blesses the girl, whose self-recriminations are forgiven, whose shattering fall just moments before, a momentum that is associated (even in the history of the words involved) with Trauer (mourning), is miraculously reversed. Thus in this Christian niche death captions the ghost: but then this spirit of the departed is forgotten or forgiven in a comfort zone only for those who fall for resurrection. Otherwise, the apparitions in Elective Affinities are telepathic videophone connections, two-way dreams that keep physically separated lovers in meta-touch. To borrow a term from Benjamin’s mentor, Paul Häberlin, a term cited in fact by Freud in Totem and Taboo, they are “sexual ghosts.” Häberlin, who introduced Benjamin to psychoanalysis in 1916 in a course of study at the University in Bern which settled Freud’s thought within range of occult analogies and phenomena, unpacked a couple of case studies to show that certain ghosts, even in households that count a recent death, refer only to desired but prohibited contact with living sexual objects.
 
Ottilie’s undecaying corpse is ensconced within a certain psychoanalytic reception of the endopsychic doubling between Schreber and Freud. Down this receiving line, Hanns Sachs[4] derived from Freud on Schreber and Victor Tausk’s follow-up treatment, in light of the Schreber study, of the delusional system of Natalija A., a genealogical scheduling of narcissism’s shift from body-based self-loving to the self-esteem of power surges and other strivings to the beat of self criticism. In Antiquity this shift could be deferred: the restriction of technical developments or difficulties to the invention of playthings only subtends this deferral. But the crisis point must always also be reached as the uncanniness of zomboid dependency on the dead or undead body that does not go or let go. According to Sachs, the invention of machines that undermine bodily proportions and limits skips the uncanny beat of the body by projecting its missing place way outside itself as the techno-reassembly of parts and partings. The psychotic thus projects techno delusions to get out from under the uncanny body.
 
The mill on the grounds of Eduard and Charlotte’s estate that, through its grinding, its Mahlen, doubles, says Benjamin, as emblem of death (139), offers a supplemental scenario for Ottilie’s preservation. Because as she lies there undecaying, she is in the most vulnerable spot imaginable, especially in a novel given to earmark the ambivalence toward commemoration that underlies, for example, the architect’s plans for funerary monuments based on his study of the relics he has collected by desecrating graves. Grinding, like cremation, represents then a removal of the site specific to desecration of all the contents of a complete and untouched tomb. Other than the mill, we encounter in Goethe’s novel only optical instruments and playthings, like the portable camera obscura the British traveler uses to record his landscape souvenirs. Benjamin registers a certain pervasiveness of these placeholders of a missing technologization when he notes that the pictorial elements in Goethe’s narrative are more in line with the perspective of a stereoscope.
 
The assistant comments on the way the plans of Eduard’s father, which are only now achieving fruition, are ignored by Eduard and Charlotte as they make their improvements in other parts of the estate: “Few people are capable of concerning themselves with the most recent past. Either the present holds us violently captive, or we lose ourselves in the distant past and strive with might and main to recall and restore what is irrevocably lost” (278). Charlotte is quick to understand, she says, but only up to a point of displacement, whereby she shunts to the side the direct impact of this span of attention or tension dedicated to mourning, and wonders instead whether the present tense doesn’t serve to mislead us into thinking that we are the authors of our actions while we are in fact merely cooperating with the tendencies of the times. Thus the funerary implications are lined up on the side, out of site, like the monuments she uproots from their proper places and sidelines in the cemetery she hopes to turn into the friendliest place on earth.
 
What links and separates Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” and his Origin book is contained in a translation Benjamin summons in his study of the Baroque mourning play: Gryphius deliberately replaces deus ex machina with spirit from the grave (313). The stricken world of allegory is the turf of what recently was. Signification begins once life lapses into lifelessness. It is, as in its visitation by ghosts, a world of mourners or unmourners. When they enter the stage they left ghosts shock. It is part of the nature of allegories to shock. That is how they become dated (359), how they leave a date mark. When Tolkien altogether rejects the claim that there are allegories in The Lord of the Rings, he takes issue, specifically, with the timely or tendentious reach of allegories that cannot but inscribe onward into the work’s real-time setting or context (“Forward”). The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien emphasizes, is in no wise shaped by the events of World War II otherwise surrounding his scene of writing. Allegorization thus looks forward to the gadget connection, the spin of a dial or flick of the switch that, according to Benjamin (in his essay “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”), mediates and buffers the incapacitating shock of technologization. The pushbutton control release of shock, its administration as inoculative shots, preserves or internalizes a body-proportional comfort zone inside technologization. The gadget controls also stamp moments with date marks, marking them as dated memories, emptied out but secured, and which are, as far as their determining force goes, forgettable. Thus in the forgettogether of moviegoers doubling over with sadistic laughter over Mickey Mouse’s destructive character, the realization of sadistic fantasies and masochistic delusions is prevented, just as psychotic disintegration under techno mass conditions is forestalled on the shock or shot installment plan (“Kunstwerk”).
 
Like the allegorist, the paranoid takes enigmatic pleasure, in other words a sadist’s delight, in watching the world end. The death drive is unrepresentable in all its purity. But when it mixes with eros you can recognize it striking a pose in sadism. According to Benjamin, sadism (or sadomasochism) attends allegory, the only pleasure, but a powerful one, allowed the melancholic. “It is indeed characteristic of the sadist that he humiliates his object and then–or thereby–satisfies it” (Ursprung 360). In the same way the allegorist secures an object melancholically as dead but preserved and thus as “unconditionally in his power” (359).
 
Schreber squeezed transcendence down inside finitude, but on the upbeat, by deferring the processes of completion at work upon him. Benjamin shows where the world begins for the Baroque allegorist and melancholic: with the recent passing of the narcissistically loved other–and thus inside and during the afterlife of Ottilie. In becoming a woman whose voluptuousness is derived from all things feminine, Schreber looks at narcissism from both sides now while deferring and pursuing Ottilie’s other end, the one reserved for the allegorist’s enigmatic pleasure. Being in transit still means he has to endure vivisection by the God of corpses. However, even when he’s all messed up, just like Mickey Mouse he gets reanimated, restored so he can bounce back for more.
 
When the mythic pagan world gets secularized (witness the example of Socrates), Christianity picks up the slacker as martyr, but the allegory doesn’t stop there, doesn’t stop its own process of secularization. “If the church had been able quite simply to banish the gods from the memory of the faithful, allegorical language would never have come into being. For it is not an epigonal victory monument; but rather the word which is intended to exorcise a surviving remnant of antique life” (396). While allegory thus seeks to contain and reformat the return of paganism, its ultimate issue is the secularization that thus indwells even “Christian” allegory. In Christianity’s postulation of an other world that is, by definition, too good for this world, and of the death of death (or in the Devil’s offer of uninterrupted quality time until the certain deadline) as also in the pagan or neo-pagan overcoming of death within the eternally recurring finitude of life, it is the prospect of the recent past, the era of loss and mourning, that is being shunted to the side, but thereby to the inside, as defective cornerstone of all of the above.
 
Goethe, as Schreber notes and as Freud is moved to record, is one of the longest lasting personalized souls, with a memory that can still come down to earth from the beyond for one hundred years or so. Like his Faust, Goethe receives just one more lifetime in which to be able to affirm life. After their personalized or ghostly phase ceases, a generic phase takes over whereby the former souls are absorbed within greater bodies of rays. For the most part Schreber encounters a double disappearing act of the souls of persons he has known in his lifetime and on his own person. While single nights could also always acquire the duration of centuries, growing numbers of these departed souls attracted to or through Schreber’s growing nervousness soon dissolve on his head or in his body. Many of the souls lead a brief existence on his head as little men before they too exit. While contact with ghosts led many of Spiritualism’s initiates to renew their vows with religion, faithlessly I would add, the opening up of the recent past that not only religion must repress is constitutively secular and in Benjamin’s sense allegorical. The outside chance that there are more times than a lifetime does not add up to the immortality of the soul or to reunion with God. As Schreber advises, souls otherwise still recognizable as specific individuals (in other words, ghosts) sometimes pretend to be “God’s omnipotence itself” (51).
 
In his study of Philip K. Dick, titled I Am Alive and You Are Dead, Emmanuel Carrère catches up with his subject in the act of reading Freud’s study of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. According to Carrère, Dick immediately fantasized writing up the Schreber delusional system as a science fiction novel, in other words as an event in an alternative future universe. Dick’s working title: “The Man Whom God Wanted to Change into a Woman and Penetrate with Larvae in Order to Save the World.” Carrère reconstructs thoughts crossing Dick’s mind: “What if Schreber was right? What if his supposed delusions were in fact an accurate description of reality? What if Freud was just . . . pathologizing a man who understood better what was really going on?” (39). What did come out of his encounter with Freud on Schreber was his 1959 novel Time Out of Joint, which turns on the defensive functioning of a psychotic delusional system in its encapsulated form. Dick borrows from Schreber this form of the encapsulation of his system, the unique stability of Schreber’s world and word view in or according to his Memoirs, which is precisely the quality Benjamin underscores in his reflections on Schreber’s Memoirs in “Books by the Insane: From My Collection.” Time Out of Joint, however, records and performs the doomed efforts of sustaining this encapsulated delusional world as fantastic system.
 
Since we can take Freud’s Schreber study as Dick’s point of departure, the world of 1959, the year in which the novel was published, a world that comes complete with the fraying edges and margins through which one can glimpse figures of control, manipulation, or even persecution, is Gumm’s new delusional order. It turns out that the world he lost in his psychotic break is that of the late 1990s, a world at civil war with the men and women on the moon. In the meantime “One Happy World,” a movement against outer space exploration and colonization, prevails on earth, while the “expansionists,” who at first oppose the isolationist movement on earth as in the heavens, settle on the far side of the moon so that, from the other side, they can fire missiles at earth without fear of retaliation. Gumm, world-famous for the success of his business ventures or gambles, is pressed into predicting where the next missiles from the moon would strike. Under these pressures to perform, heightened furthermore by a mounting conflict of conscience motivating him to side with the expansionists, Gumm develops what is called a “withdrawal psychosis.”
 
In the course of his withdrawal, he refers one day to his intercept predictions as “today’s puzzle.” Thus those who work with and depend on Gumm follow him into the safer world of his boyhood where the local paper runs a contest or puzzle, “Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next,” to engage his talent. His daily entry predicting the Green Man’s next appearance intercepts another missile strike. “One Happy Worlders,” who volunteer to be, in effect, test subjects, are reprogrammed to share Gumm’s fantasy as his friends and family in it together in the simulated town and time they call home. But that’s why other members of his household, who only think they are related to one another, can also share Gumm’s growing sense that their environment may be a false front concealing another world in which they in fact live, but without knowing it.
 
The daily newspaper contest is accompanied by a series of clues that engage Gumm in free association: “The clues did not give any help, but he assumed that in some peripheral fashion they contained data, and he memorized them as a matter of habit, hoping that their message would reach him subliminally–since it never did literally” (37). The associations that come to mind–“he let the crypticism lie about in his mind, sinking down layer by layer. To trip reflexes or whatever”–include sex, California, food, and homosexuality. Is this where Freud’s study and Schreber’s Memoirs part company or are part family? Are the associations Freud’s words to the vise keeping Gumm or Schreber inside the enlisted or institutionalized delusion? Gumm’s 1959 world seems suffused with a certain Freudian fluency that keeps everyone in check. “Evil suspicions” that “only reflect projections of your own warped psyche . . . [as] Freud showed” (79) and “anxiety” as “a transformation of repressed hostility” leading to one’s “domestic problems” being “projected outward onto a world screen” (183) are two examples in lieu of any number of similar exchanges in Freud’s name. One more example that brings us back to the starting point of the Freudian association: When Gumm makes up a name to fill in a blank, his sister knows that his slip is showing.
 

“There’s no random,” Margo said. “Freud has shown that there’s always a psychological reason. Think about the name ‘Selkirk.’ What does it suggest to you?” . . . These damn associations, he thought. As in the puzzle clues. No matter how hard a person tried, he never got them under control. They continued to run him. “I have it,” he said finally. “The man that the book Robinson Crusoe was based on.” . . . “I wonder why you thought of that,” Margo said. “A man living alone on a tiny island, creating his own society around him, his own world.” . . . “Because,” Ragle said, “I spent a couple of years on such an island during World War Two.”
 

(85)

 

Ragle Gumm withdraws back to the era of his own childhood but, at the same time, as his father. The father is history. His father’s war stories become Gumm’s personal history, which is also grounded in World War II. The Freudian associations that maintain Gumm’s 1959 world through the control release and recycling of tensions nevertheless will not stop short of holding Gumm’s simulated world under the sway of his internal world.

 
Gumm’s return to sanity and crossover to the side of the expansionists on the moon, also referred to as lunatics, closes the novel on the upbeat. It is an observation made in psychoanalysis, however, that the turn to politics in a setting of deep regression, no matter how commendable or rational the objective and sentiment, is always a strong sign of degeneration toward or along the narcissistic bottom line or borderline of the psyche. Sane again or just another lunatic, Gumm now recognizes, under the guidance of one of the lunatics who infiltrated his simulated world in order to trigger anamnesis, that his world of 1959 is his childhood fantasy of adulthood. He doesn’t flash on the most recent Book-of-the-Month club selection, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as continuity error because it is precisely the transitional object pulling him through his childhood:
 

Again he felt the weight of the thing in his hands, the dusty, rough pressure of the fabric and paper. Himself, off in the quiet and shadows of the yard, nose down, eyes fixed on the text. Keeping it with him in his room, rereading it because it was a stable element; it did not change.
 

(250)

 

Inside the childhood into which Ragle Gumm psychotically withdraws we find secretly etched the spot of withdrawal he was already and still is in.

 
While the anachronistic book was included, radios had to be edited out of this version of 1959 because the long-distance transmissions going through would undermine the controlled environment, the small world after all of 1959. And yet Gumm’s memories via his father include manning a radio transmitter during World War II. Thus radios in the revision of 1959 have been replaced by television sets, which are considered the same as radios only more so, with video portion added on. That the radio, constructed fantastically as superfluous in the TV era, belongs in the paternal past doesn’t stop it from serving ultimately, as it served Freud by analogy, as superego.
 
Via his nephew’s crystal set, which his uncle’s war stories inspired the boy to build, Gumm listens in on the pilot conversations transmitting from planes flying overhead. When he hears the voices above referring to “Ragle Gumm” while pointing out that he lives down there right below, he is convinced that he is breaking up along with the static on the line.
 

I’m . . . psychotic. Hallucinations. . . . Insane. Infantile and lunatic. . . . Daydreams, at best. Fantasies about rocket ships shooting by overhead, armies and conspiracies. Paranoia. A paranoiac psychosis. Imagining that I’m the center of a vast effort by millions of men and women, involving billions of dollars and infinite work . . . a universe revolving around me.
 

(119)

 

He decides he needs the break you get. But he can’t get there without running up against evidence that it’s not all in his head. Looking back upon the 1959 he leaves behind, he analyzes how the operators in charge of maintaining his withdrawal psychosis had to construct the delusion as a daydream-like fantasy, a strategy that also lowered the doom on their enterprise.

 

Like a daydream, he thought. Keeping in the good. Excluding the undesirable. But such a natural thing, he realized. They overlooked a radio every now and then. They kept forgetting that in the illusion the radio did not exist; they kept slipping up in just such trifles. Typical difficulty in maintaining daydreams . . . they failed to be consistent.

 

To stay back in time, the daydream-like fantasy must be wish-fulfilled, as always, in or as the future, but this future is also in the past. The present tense (or tension) is what must be bracketed out for the fantasy to continue to play. Thus the double lunacy of the novel’s happy ending pulls the emergency brake on the degenerative in-between-ness of Ragle Gumm’s Schreber-like worlds of intrigue, the ongoing present tension (or tense) transmitting since Gumm’s childhood.

 
Dick’s fictions therefore never include recollections of past lives. His focus is always on memories of some alternate present. Whatever else the present tense may be, it is where the dead are, which is why it is elided in day dreams, the Fantasy genre, and Christianity. The Fantasy genre is not only Dick’s first contact with and choice of fiction, it also engages him and his delegates throughout his work as fateful temptation, which, however, even Jahveh in The Divine Invasion must reject. In an interview Dick turns up the contrast between Fantasy and science fiction within their respective spans of retention:
 

In Fantasy, you never go back to believing there are trolls, unicorns . . . and so on. But in science fiction, you read it, and it’s not true now but there are things which are not true now which are going to be someday. . . . It’s like all science fiction occurs in alternate future universes, so it could actually happen someday.
 

(Cover)

 

In this life we pass in and out of Fantasy. When we die, however, we enter Fantasy, the other world, for keeps. The basis of Fantasy’s appeal, at least according to Tolkien, is Christianity: the Fantasy that is also true. The happy ending may be escapist in everyday life, but in the end (of life) it becomes the Great Escape, the overcoming of death that Christianity advertises (“On Fairy-Stories”). Although a declared Christian, Dick is also paranoid, and wary therefore of unambivalence. Even though in Ubik the interchangeable essence of consumer goods that promote perfectibility announces itself in the last commercial spot as the Christian God, nowhere does the novel admit truth in advertising, which would be the Fantasy moment in this doubly mass culture.

 
But it’s not just any history that is alternate. Time Out of Joint forecasts that, in the late 1990s, One Happy World–which consists, however, only of U.S. coordinates–will see the first phase of a struggle on earth whose winning and losing sides resemble those of the 2004 U.S. electoral map. A withdrawal psychosis must be retrofitted to keep this narrative transferentially grounded in World War II. While Dick is careful to show that the cultivation of psychosis, because it would fix its focus as fantasy, would necessarily lose control upon the return of internal objects, subsequent novels suggest that he was revising his sense of a happy ending outside delusion–in other words, outside the alterations along for the ride of alternate realities. The Man in the High Castle, Dick’s first novel explicitly employing the device of alternate history, therefore re-metabolizes the outcome of World War II across at least two post-war decades-long histories. By 1977 Dick is convinced that this novel is not only fiction. “But there was an alternate world, a previous present, in which that particular time track actualized–actualized and then was abolished due to intervention at some prior date” (“If You Find” 245). Variables undergo reprogramming “along the linear time axis of our universe, thereby generating branched-off lateral worlds” (“If You Find” 241). In writing for over twenty years about counterfeit or semi-real worlds and deranged private worlds-of-one into which, however, others too can be drawn, Dick was sensing, as he only now realizes, “the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one that the majority of us, by general consent, agree on” (“If You Find” 240). Rather than the black hole of loss, the present is in Dick’s view the neutral gear through which alternate realities shift into actualization or pass out of existence, but at the same time not in linear time. Finitude is therefore not so much foreclosed or redeemed as given all the times in the world to pass on.
 
Dick includes Christianity among all the frames of reference he traverses, sunken ruins mired in the so-called tomb world. Although Dick confounds the flat line of this underworld–in Ubik, for example, through such countermeasures as half-life, the sci-fi bio-technological recasting of haunting as the halving of any full-life that could assert that it was at last at rest–still every deposit in the frame or name of reference is without redemption value. Compatible with the overlap between allegory as conceived by Benjamin and endopsychic perception according to Freud, the notion of alternate realities (or histories or universes) fundamental to Dick’s narratives maintains all the frames of reference as throwbacks that survive in the present tense of an indefinite number of parallel settings. Alternate history suspends the dotting of the vanishing point between the recent past and the near future and thus, for the time being, forestalls the repression that otherwise scrubs down and detonates this realm of the dead, the undead, and the living.
 
Ragle Gumm is restored to a world at civil war, a war between siblings, we are told, which thus only counts victims. Dick maintained a primal sibling bond at his own origin as the break with reality constitutive of his corpus. As he also found occasion daily, by all accounts, to reveal in conversation–it was the exchange that never varied–he was born prematurely together with his twin sister who didn’t survive their head start. Dick felt throughout his life the determining influence of his survival of his twin sister. From this mythic or psychotic origin onward, Dick speculated, he had inhabited a realm of undecidability specific to mourning over the other’s death conceived as double loss: both parties to the death lose the other. Indeed Dick claimed he could not decide who had died: he could be the memory crossing his surviving twin’s mind. Dick’s signal investment in alternative present worlds derives from this unique specialization within the work of mourning or unmourning.
 
Dick’s introduction of at least two realities that occupy interchangeable places in his fiction, which he subsequently refines as alternate history in The Man in the High Castle, for example, or as half-life in Ubik, originally or primally draws its inspiration from the twin’s death that to his mind could, alternatively, have all along been his own. In losing each other, either twin could be dead or alive. Hence Carrère’s title: “I am alive and you are dead.” The span of the “and” embraces the recent past and the near future as the period of uncertainty about the reality of one’s world that both parties to one death must face.
 

The acrimonious dispute between Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau published recently in three Critical Inquiry essays turns away from the key question that it raises: Is there, today, any bond left between socialism and psychoanalysis, politics and theory? Perhaps the authors, blinded by their bitterness, cannot recognize the true subject of their contestation; or perhaps they believe that the debate actually concerns populism, which in fact is merely the skirmish’s pretext. It is certain that in the book that prompted the Critical Inquiry articles, On Populist Reason, Laclau attempts both to redefine populism–he notes that the term, used to classify so many different types of formations, has grown almost meaningless–and, through this redefinition, to illustrate that populism names not a particular kind of politics, but the political itself.[1] His central focus thus falls not on regimes that have been labeled “populist,” but on a general structure that encompasses all political interventions, including these “populist” ones. Laclau has a particular goal in offering such a thesis. He wants to show that populism, when rigorously recast, offers great possibilities for a new leftism in the wake of Marxism’s decline.
 
Zizek insists on the near opposite. Today, he argues, left-leaning populism is the great temptation that must be resisted. Its most seductive promise, the liberation of the poor from the clutches of neoliberalism, constitutes an appeal to old-fashioned liberalism, feeding the capitalist system it claims to undermine. In fact, Zizek is more intrigued by right-wing populisms than by their liberal counterparts. The former, radical and antagonist, at least disclose the objectionable elements of capitalism that the more “democratic” populisms both conceal and render palatable. Yet these right-wing movements are hardly desirable. Populism as a whole, then, is a political dead-end, a form within a contemporary “postpolitical” ( Zizek’s term), neoliberal universe that threatens to render politics itself superfluous.
 
Is populism, in the current setting, a proper name for politics or the means for its demise? There are few more pressing political questions. Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, so attractive to many on the left, so abhorred by many on the right, yet also so typical, almost banal, within a Latin American history that abounds in such populist regimes (Laclau, who cut his intellectual teeth during the Peronist period in Argentina, is quite familiar with the populist archetype), bears witness to the excitement and nervousness that populism causes, within all political camps, today as much as ever.
 
It should be noted that Zizek’s and Laclau’s opposing views on populism stand in for other fields of contention. Will a leftist politics of the future come in the form of a revamped democracy, as Laclau holds? Or, as Zizek maintains, is democracy the very political form that must be overcome for such an advent to take place? This particular, highly-intellectualized version of the argument “against or for” democracy must be situated in its proper place. For Zizek’s position is not taken merely in response to the “spreading of democracy” qua “spreading of the free market” rhetoric captained by politicians of nearly every Western–and non-Western–state. Nor does it represent a simple objection to the liberal so-called “political correctness” that today claims democracy with both hands. The more direct target for “anti-democrats” such as Zizek or Alain Badiou is a group of post-Marxist, post-Althusserian individuals: Laclau, Etienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière, to name three principals. These scholars labor to rework or re-form democracy, casting the demos, the people, as the core of a leftism-to-come. Rather than setting out novel political theories (all parties agree that these are needed) that retain the basic assumptions of Marxism, namely, the fundamental importance of class difference and economic exploitation, the “democraticists” lend a hand to the disregard of even those fundamentals by eschewing their own Marxist origins. As a consequence, the question concerning democracy emerges as synonymous with another: Are the grounds of Marxism so flawed or “out-of-date” that leftist theory demands a total reworking of the very reason for Marxism? Or is Marxism and Marxist history, albeit recast, called for now more than ever?
 
In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (which Laclau briefly references), George Bataille opens a path for thinking through these matters. The essay poses two main queries: How did fascism emerge in Europe? And why did this popular revolt yield fascism rather than socialism? Popular movements within capitalism, Bataille says, develop not in response to a monolithic state homogeneity but precisely in response to its breakdown. The homogeneity itself is sustained through the development of productive citizens, each occupying a useful place. Add up all individuals performing one useful and measurable task within one contained site, and the sum is homogeneity. The actual production is thus beneficial neither in itself nor for the citizen. It is valuable for capitalism as a whole, which the production reproduces and advances; and it is equally valuable for the state since production generates and maintains the social order. It compels each person, reduced to an occupant within the field of production, to inhabit a proper place. Homogeneity, then, is the aggregate of calculable elements, of disjointed individuals held together by an abstract common denominator: money.
 
Given the alienation of its constituents, state homogeneity can nonetheless not evade unrest and must call upon, in Bataille’s terms, “imperative agencies.” According to Bataille, the state as such is not a sovereign entity. It does not possess the rights or power of an actual sovereign, e.g., the nation, the king, or the army. The state is therefore dependent upon imperative agencies that, borrowing their power from the sovereign bodies, preserve unity and order. (One might think of a local police force.) As a consequence, the homogeneity constantly adapts to restrain strife. On the one hand, it shifts in order to assimilate the novel alienated constituents; on the other, it adjusts so as to incorporate the diverse–depending on the circumstances–imperative agents upon which it calls. The latter, in fact, eventually garner or are granted so much strength that they grow independent. Independence, in this context, has a very specific meaning. It refers to an imperative agent that emerges as useful to itself rather than to the homogeneity. For example, a rookie cop in a rogue police force can come to believe that he is useful to the force itself, and to himself as an individual who ascends the ranks, but not to the town or state the force is supposed to protect. Hence, the “independence” generates two distinct aims of production: imperative agencies (individual powers) and the state. The homogeneity, split in two, breaks down.
 
Composed largely of the petty bourgeoisie, the agencies are now dissociated from the homogeneity. They thus materialize, in Bataille’s parlance, as heterogeneous bodies. Another heterogeneity parallels them; it is composed of those who never, as themselves (as human beings, not producers), belonged to the homogeneity, namely, the proletariat. As heterogeneous or “other,” both clusters are cast by the state as dangerous outsides, as taboo. One sits above the state, as the untouchable; the other below it, as dirt. When the loftier taboo, the dissociated–who reaped their original power from the sovereign–take on a military or paramilitary presence in order to assert or maintain independence, their leader or chief assumes the place of a sovereign (in fact, of the sovereign of the sovereign–as taboo, this body is pure exteriority, without peer, indeed, sacred and divine). The proletariat, no less heterogeneous, glimpses its own image in this peerless outside, in another other (the leader). Donning the military gala that symbolizes heroic inclusion within the reign of the new sovereign, the proletariat finds its place in or through that chief. Of course, in return the proletariat receives but more alienation. The uniformed men do not “become themselves,” neither workers nor men, through their identification. In fact, they take their place in the new order as lowly, passive, subjugated soldiers. Nonetheless, the bubbling “effervescence” (Bataille repeatedly deploys this term) of the proletariat, the root of which is the perilous disintegration of the original homogeneity, has served a purpose. It has generated the popular energy that feeds the revolutionary authoritarianism and, in certain cases, fascism.
 
Bataille then asks under what conditions the two heterogeneous groups might join forces in the reverse direction, through the identification of the dissociated bourgeoisie with the excluded proletariat, thereby forming a socialist revolution. In other words, why is there fascism instead of socialism? Bataille demonstrates quite convincingly that a response cannot be derived from an examination of economic, cultural, or political factors. While these fields can account for the emergence of both a homogeneous state and the double heterogeneity that arises from the break-up of this homogeneity, they cannot yield an explanation for the identification of the excluded proletariat with the dissociated Head. That phenomenon is an issue for psychology. Deeply loyal to the Marxist cause, Bataille nonetheless intimates that no Marxist project can, of itself, demonstrate why socialism (a leftist popular front) rather than fascism (right-wing populism) should surface from either modern capitalism or democracies. In fact, Bataille insists that the democracy that the bourgeoisie instated by overcoming feudalism and absolutism, and that, in the classical Marxist framework, represents the conditions by which the proletariat will eventually overturn the bourgeoisie in the name of socialism, offers few expectations: “In fact, it is evident that the situation of the major democratic powers, where the fate of the Revolution is being played out, does not warrant the slightest confidence: it is only the very nearly indifferent attitude of the proletariat that has permitted these countries to avoid fascist formations” (159). Indeed, socialism’s advent depends not on mere socioeconomic shifts but on “forms of [psychological] attraction” that, rather than draw subordinates to powerful images of a Leader, “differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims . . . [a] system of knowledge that permits the anticipation of the affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure and perhaps even, to a certain extent, do away with it” (159). The condition of leftist, popular revolt is a novel knowledge of “affect,” one that reveals how and why the human psyche will one day shift its direction “down” (the taboo of dirt) rather than “up” (the taboo of the absolute). Bataille thereby marks out a relation of knowledge and political practice. A theory of a potential reorientation of affects “anticipates,” thus renders conceivable, a distinct society. Unveiling alternative paths for the psyche, it produces realistic hope: the sheer fact that socialism can be anticipated. Current knowledge of political events, to the contrary, frustrates in advance socialist efforts. The limited knowledge that we possess of political processes and human behavior convinces us that socialism cannot but fail, draining the energy even to commence an emancipatory process. Of course, no form of knowledge can assure the socialist advent, the empowerment of the heterogeneity “from below.” Yet nor will the advent happen without this collective expectation, that is, without the knowledge that renders such prospects thinkable.
 
The knowledge cannot be scientific. According to Bataille, science operates only through the elimination of heterogeneity. Instead, what is required is a “discipline” whose aim is heterogeneity itself. Indeed, Bataille insists that heterogeneity is not a negative chaos (in the Hegelian or phenomenological sense of the negative) but an affirmative structure than can be outlined and understood: “social heterogeneity does not exist in a formless and disoriented state: on the contrary, it constantly tends to a split-off structure; and when social elements pass over to the heterogeneous side, their action still finds itself determined by the actual structure of that side” (140). The real existing structure of heterogeneity–this is what established intellectual systems cannot grasp; these systems do not offer “even the simple revelation of its [the heterogeneous side’s] positive and clearly separate existence” (141). However, a new discipline, still embryonic, is arising to accomplish the feat: Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud introduces a domain that “must be considered as one of the aspects of the heterogeneous,” to wit, the “unconscious” (141). In fact, political heterogeneity and the unconscious enjoy “certain properties in common” (141). Although Bataille is “unable to elaborate immediately upon this point,” he manages in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” to present a notion that theory, including that of Laclau and Zizek, will broach for years to come: a Marxism supplemented by psychoanalysis opens the way for the thought of real existing socialism (141).
 
In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Bataille’s friend Jacques Lacan conducts precisely such an “elaboration.” In the aftermath of May 1968, Lacan sets out to challenge the Parisian students who question the legitimacy of his teaching and practice: “The revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome–of ending up as the master’s discourse . . . . What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one” (207). The inquiry into Bataille’s thesis actually begins, however, when Lacan posits the unconscious as a heterogeneous structure in his famous declaration that the unconscious is structured like a language. Most broadly, this signifies two things. It means that language has a particular structure, one found in no other domain, for language is the field of the other, a heterogeneous field; and it means that analysis of this heterogeneous topos exposes the structure of another, which is like it, namely, the unconscious. What structure or structures, then, are specific to language?
 
Lacan concentrates on two: rhetoric and grammar. Anyone who has learned a foreign language knows that grammar is not, as one might intuit, structured logically. That in a given idiom a certain adjective should appear after rather than before a noun is an effect unbound to any cause. The order of words is not “like” the order of logic (an order that stipulates that for every effect there is a prior cause). When one obeys or disobeys the rules of grammar, one engages codes that are of grammar alone. To be sure, grammar, like signifiers, makes possible the logical representation of phenomena–of things, ideas, emotions, messages, and so on–but grammar is not itself the logic of those representations. Indeed, grammar is not like, it does not represent, anything. It refers to no phenomenon that lies outside of it.[2] A father utters “dog” to a child, referring and pointing to an animal with four legs. If he points to the same creature and says “noun,” he still refers to a dog, not the grammatical unit, though dog may be a noun in this context. No “dog” (or sign) represents the “phenomenon” of a noun. “Noun” does not exist outside of language. Of course, a noun may be defined. It is a person, place, or thing, a given structure in a sentence, a word that patterns like a noun, and so on. In these definitions, however, the grammatical principle refers just to more language, to itself as language, not to a phenomenon.
 
What holds for grammar holds for the structure of language in general. Language is a schema that is certain to refer solely to itself. If, as many believe, language or the logos is the fundament of the being human, then such “being” necessarily follows the inhuman rules of “another scene,” the scene of language. Humans contain properties that are not proper, but heterogeneous to them, and heterogeneous to property itself. In other words, language installs in human practices and communities a template for heterogeneity that human beings cannot not follow; the schema forms an unavoidable, alien directive that is a portion of that humanity. The unconscious marks humanity in a similar fashion. It is a heterogeneous energy, whose elements refer only to itself, according to its own rules. These “guides” (mis)lead conscious activity without ever themselves becoming conscious.
 
The unconscious, then, is like language. The two domains represent two distinctive figures of heterogeneity. Yet the unconscious and language are not entirely “peerless” since they appear relative to each other. A likeness between them exists. This likeness, however, cannot be shared equally. “Likeness,” after all, belongs to the field of rhetoric, hence language. It is well known that for Freud and Lacan rhetoric (such as figures of speech, slips of tongue, stuttering, metaphors) translates the unconscious, primarily in the form of symptoms. One heterogeneous field, language, recasts and miscasts the other heterogeneity, the unconscious, into its own mold, into language. It is less emphasized that for Lacan the fact that the unconscious is structured like a language signifies that likeness–rhetoric as a scaffold of language that the unconscious is like–is an imbedded configuration inside the unconscious. Language is an internal part of the unconscious. To be sure, this language is very peculiar. While it can be translated or mistranslated into symptoms, it can translate or transform nothing but itself, into which it always already turns.
 
We can thus sum up the meaning of the adage “the unconscious is structured like a language” in two statements: 1) the understanding of the structure of one heterogeneity (language) aids in the comprehension of its likeness, another heterogeneity, the unconscious; and 2) when, in analysis, language is experienced, so too is an imbedded “piece” of the unconscious, now a source for the knowledge of the “other scene.”
 
In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan directly discloses the political ramifications of these ideas. Addressing the context in which he speaks, the Paris post-1968, Lacan lays out four discourses: of the university, the master, the hysteric, and the analyst. The seminar, however, turns on and around Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. The slave possesses both know-how, the skills that permit him to convert raw material into commodities, and comprehension, understanding of the master’s pleasure, without which he could not satisfy the master. In his quest for Mastery, the master has no choice but to appropriate this knowledge. He does so, stealing the slave’s knowledge via the medium within which it arrives at his doorstep, production. If the slave produces “things” through knowledge, those things must be containers of the knowledge. However, the appropriation (thievery) and conversion (knowledge to product) machine translates the knowledge into something other than knowledge, to wit, a series of equivalents and values, that is, into the commodity. In more Lacanian language, knowledge is turned into a system of signifiers that are “worth” something else. In other words, the master dispossesses the slave of his knowledge by translating it into the Symbolic Order. As compensation, the slave receives one of that order’s signifiers: a proper name, a useful place in the system, a value which relieves him of his slave status so as to handcuff him to the new social order, now as wage earner. Once bonded to the sovereign, the slave-slave reemerges as the worker-slave qua capitalist subject, subjected to the Symbolic Order. He moves from one master to another.
 
However, the master, as thief, errs in his quest. As Lacan emphasizes, a product, the result of knowledge, actually contains no knowledge within it (90). It is a dumb object. When the bandit master turns the slave’s production into a social order that reproduces itself through the wage-worker that materializes in the slave’s place, knowledge drops out of the equation. The slave’s knowledge disappears with the slave himself. Or rather, as we will see, knowledge remains, but outside, in excess of the capitalist conversion. Hence, the Symbolic Order cannot yield knowledge but solely truth (the master’s discourse, the University discourse, or the hysteric’s discourse), adequacy to a system. In fact, this is why the slave, who never forfeits know-how throughout the process (else he cease to serve the capitalist), does lose his knowledge. Over against the master’s discourse, which is that of truth, know-how ceases to stand as an alternative form of knowledge, materializing as less than knowledge.
 
Lacan is thereby able to define the master as the one who does not know, who has truth but no knowledge; he does not know his own pleasure, the knowledge that the slave once knew but that has been lost in translation (32). The Other Side of Psychoanalysis tracks this lost knowledge through an analysis of loss itself. When the slave is ripped off, he receives, in addition to his alienation, further compensation about which the master remains unaware: the dispossession itself, the loss. Indeed, in Lacan loss is a sort of object, the objet petit a. In the present context, three definitions of this object must be stressed: the object cause of desire , the object of the drive, and/or surplus jouissance (plus-de-jouir).
 
The objet petit a is often imagined as a substitute entity that, via fantasy, restores a forfeited wholeness, replacing a loss. Yet this presumed original loss, or former wholeness, is itself the fantasy, the fantasy of the master. The master discourse, indeed, is masterful only through this fantasy–not of the wholeness but of the wholeness’ lack. The master contains everything but one thing. In fact, the one thing may be almost anything. It is any old common noun that is taken by the subject, within a given context, as that subject’s proper name: as a signifier without a signified but endowed with a fixed, unyielding referent (for the adult, the proper name most likely serves this purpose). The collection of signifiers that composes the Symbolic Order is, by the very definition of that order, missing the one word, the phallic signifier. The master discourse thus lacks, contains a gap, an empty lot. Consequently, it is somewhat weak. The subject, taking advantage of the supposed weakness, appropriates or takes over the vacancy, claiming his freedom. Being what the master does not have, the subject (in many diverse manners, which we cannot discuss here), now the master of the master, catches himself in the Master’s fantasy.
 
For the joke is on this subject. The lack in the Other, which the subject installed through his Imaginary, is but the lure of the Master, the bait by means of which he establishes his mastery. The subject, seduced, has merely installed himself willingly into the order of capitalism and homogeneity. By taking the empty lot for himself, he finds his true place, his freedom in private property; and he finds that same self in a proper name, the name of the father, the signifier of the master. Identifying with the figure of alienation, the proper name, the I, takes a slot in the banal string of signifiers, a proper social subject enslaved to others, to society.[3] On this imaginary stage (of Lacan’s imaginary order), the objet petit a is never sufficient. It always fails as an agent of liberty. Eroticized as “the fix” qua the desired proper name, it emerges as only the object cause of desire rather than its object of satisfaction. A mere common sign, the little a has tricked the subject, raising false hopes. In Lacan, desire thus moves metonymically from object cause to object cause–desire, in this sense, is too “picky”–in search of the fulfillment it never gets.
 
However, the objet petit a is irreducible to this imaginary view of it. It is not a replacement for a loss but itself a lost object. An example of such an object, extended by Laclau, permits us to grasp the point, though I read the example in a manner that differs from Laclau’s interpretation. After weaning, a baby grows attached to milk in a nippled bottle, an erotic proxy for the mother’s now missing breast (On Populist Reason 114). The attachment has nothing to do with the recovery of a supposed lost union with the mother, since there never was such a union. The condition of the baby’s subjectivity, the “reason” it can suck at all, can function as the agent of that sucking, is an original separation, foundation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In fact, the breast itself is a objet petit a, a partial object. It is suckled, treated as an erotic object, not as part of the whole mother, but as its own autonomous thing. The point of an erotic object is that it occupies the subject in itself, as detached, even or especially as partial. The nipple of the milk bottle, replacing the breast, represents the displacement of one partial object by another, one nipple for another.
 
As object of the drive, the objet petit a opens onto an entirely different scenario, one fundamental to The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic concept of “the transference” best reveals the distinction. During the transference, the analysand restages a scene from his own past, casting the analyst as erotic object. Rather than recounting a previous, painful attachment, the analysand repeats the episode in the office, unable to remember the prior event that is being repeated. Here, the analyst as object petit a appears not as the cause or support of the drive, but as a real object of that drive. The doctor is not a substitute or representative, but the thing itself. After all, representation demands memory of the cultural conventions, the history that arbitrarily but firmly binds representation to the object it represents, the signifier to the signified, and in the transference the analysand repeats without remembering (18-25).
 
Any signifier is a coupling of forces. One is meaning. Every sign recalls, to a given subject, a signified. Although this bond of signifier and signified is not essential but conventional–the signified, therefore, can always slide–there is, as already indicated, no signifier without meaning. The second force is repetition. If meaning is habitual rather than essential, repetition lies at its source. Repetition is the key source of habit. Repetition, then, is internal to re-presentation, but not represented by it. It cannot be (represented) since it is, precisely, the other side of language. This side of language is representation, the signifier; the other side, the underside, is repetition. The word “dog” most often represents the animal in the animal’s absence, repeating the dog’s presence in another place (such as the mind). But this repetition does not appear in the signifier, in either of the two appearances (the dog before the eyes, the “dog” in the mind). Repetition, then, is a compelling component that renders language, signification, even the signifier itself, possible, yet that withdraws from signification.
 
If repetition never comes into view as such, it is at times experienced. Imagine an individual who, having not seen a hated ex-spouse for ten years, bumps into this person–each time in an increasingly awkward fashion–four times in one week. The individual feels like an automaton, a machine that, as if in the hands of a master, “does” the same thing repeatedly, apparently possessing no control over events. He or she, as would be natural, attempts to attribute a conscious or hidden motif for the coincidences. Nothing emerges. Neither party in any way intends that the encounters happen. They just keep happening. In fact, Lacan has a name for these coincidences: the “encounter with the Real.” The “Real” is the ceaseless return of a force that comes back for no good reason, from no possible history to which we might trace it. It takes over the subject in a form other than that of representation; without a history or a memory (even if unconscious), representation is impossible. The individual who collides with the ex-spouse a fifth time experiences the event as affect or mood, a sense of the weird, not as a meaning.
 
In fact, an encounter with the Real generates two fundamental feelings. One is dread, the fear that comes from a sense of being directed by an Other, a master over whom the subject enjoys no power, and that never stops imposing itself. Perhaps the force will repeat its reign of terror ad infinitum, a possibility that is itself the source of terror. The other affect is pleasure, or rather, pleasure beyond pleasure, the “beyond the pleasure principle” about which Freud speaks, defining it as the reduction of all tension to zero (46-49). Indeed, one can “get off” on the feeling of being in the hands of an unknown master, as if one were a mechanical doll, a thing without tension; one can “get off” on the nirvana of being driven while doing nothing at all, as a machine or part of a machine, as a thing that offers or experiences no resistance or tension, like a corpse–but that, unlike a corpse, is still able to “get off,” to feel a joy beyond mere pleasure.[4]
 
The Real does not return; it is that returning, the uncanny repetition. The Real, we therefore glean, is not an abstract Real. It is the Real of language, the Real of the unconscious, and the Real of the language within the unconscious. Commonly defined as that which resists symbolization, the Real nonetheless does not dwell outside of language. It is the experience of language as language, language repeating language–akin to “grammar,” as discussed above–repetition as such as language as such. This is why, as with the hypothetical encounters between ex-spouses, the Real can be “sensed” only as uncanny affect, as the uncanny itself–not as a representation, but as an unrepresentable director, agent of dread or pure joy.
 
In sum, during the transference, language, as the language of the unconscious, is experienced as jouissance. The object of the drive, as it turns out, is not the analyst (who remains on the new stage, but as object cause of desire rather than as object of the drive); it is the machine-like repetition that the subject’s encounter with the analyst brings on the scene in the form of a “weird feeling.” This is why for Lacan any signifier may re-present the object of the desire. If desire is too picky, and will accept no signifier as satisfactory, the drive is indifferent to the signifier to which it attaches, for all signifiers enclose the beat of repetition, the object of satisfaction.
 
The entire process is bound to knowledge. The analysand, during or in the transference, posits the analyst as the subject-supposed-to-know. The analysand therefore wants to occupy the analyst’s seat, to take him over bodily, so as to acquire (reaquire) that knowledge. In such a case, he would be able to allay the worst sort of anxiety, the anxiety of not knowing whether the “things” that are troubling him have a cause that can be diagnosed, this diagnosis being the condition of a cure. Are my problems so profound that they lie beyond analysis, beyond the good doctor, and hence will plague me forever? Will this repetition never cease to repeat itself? In the patient’s eyes, only the analyst knows the answer, knows what is really going on in the unconscious. Or rather, the analyst is supposed-to-know. He is supposed-to-know the unconscious. We can now introduce another term that is fundamental to Lacan’s understanding of the drive: aim. The dialectic of desire is between part and whole; the split of the drive is between object and aim. And the aim is no whole. While repetition is the object of the drive during transference–it is the force that drives the drive–knowledge of the unconscious is the aim of that drive. (The aim is also death, as in the death drive, but once more, this matter must be left aside.) This knowledge is conceivable only via analysis or reading: the reading of the language of the unconscious, in the unconscious, that appears in analysis as affect, as jouissance. The unconscious is “outed” during the transference in the form of repetition, itself “outed” as affect. The translation of representation, of the signifiers in the session that led to the transference, into unconscious affect, must now be translated back into representation or meaning if knowledge of the patient’s unconscious, his ills, is to be gathered, if “analysis” is to take place. Read my enjoyment!
 
This truth, however, cannot happen. The representation of the affect, the conversion of repetition into meaning, the translation of the other side of language into this side, is always already the repression of the jouissance, which is thus present solely under erasure. The mood has no conscious endurance. Alterity, the weird, is repressed before it surfaces, shoved back into the unconscious before it is read. This does not mean that affect is atemporal or ahistorical. It is an other time, the time of the other side. Heterogeneous time, it never comes, for during analysis it is always on the brink of coming. It is a future time or a time of the future–perhaps, as Bataille intimates, affect even portends the time of socialism.
 
In any case, the unconscious, disclosed for a viewing via the repetition that is its language–a viewing that the transference stages–closes down as soon as it opens. The event of the unconscious comes without revelation. In fact, repetition opens and shuts the Real of the unconscious largely because opening and shutting is the actual act that repeats itself.[5] Indeed, it is the erotic object, the object of the drive. The mouth is erotic because it opens and closes. The baby that sucks on the nipple of the milk bottle is attached to the rims around the pierced hole in that nipple, to his own lips as similar (closing/shutting) rims, to the teeth whose opening and shutting makes sounds comes out, to the starting (opening) and ending (closing) of those same sounds. All rhythmically repeat, opening and closing this releasing and shutting themselves.
 
During the transference, the opening and closing of the unconscious is the language (of the unconscious) as the Real object of the drive. The analysand originally posits the analyst as subject-supposed-to-know, as master. He then experiences this subject-supposed-to-know as the unconscious, as unknown force. The true master that drives the subject’s erotic and often painful attachments is not the master, not the analyst, but this “unconscious thing.” Yet even this thing is no master, for it cannot “control” itself. It cannot block from happening one of its own things, a thing beyond and inside it: the jouissance to which it gives birth. Mastery itself, not any particular master, is demastered by the taking place of jouissance, by that event. Thus, the subject is freed from the master signifier. Demastery is the joy itself. It is freedom from the tyrant that plagues, of the plague as tyrant, symptom, truth, and signifier.
 
The master, we noted, strips the slave of his knowledge, receiving in return production and reproduction. Yet production, we also said, comes to the master with a loss: the loss of knowledge, of knowledge as the master’s lost object. Yet for Lacan no object ever completely vanishes. It always only misplaced. The capitalist-master, then, must possess his lost knowledge in another form, and according to Lacan, he does: he holds his knowledge as a bonus, a surplus that was thrown into the original bargain he struck with the slave. That extra, of course, is loss itself: objet petit a now as surplus jouissance or plus-de-jouir (107-08). Indeed, within that overall excess, the master receives all the topoi mentioned above: repetition, language, and pleasure beyond pleasure. In fact, these are alien to the master, just as knowledge is alien to the master’s discourse, which is a discourse of truth. Therefore, the master is master, the subject is subject, only through “alienation” as Lacan defines this term. To be, the subject/master must incorporate the unmasterable alien into his own body. This is why the master is never a master or whole unless imagined as such by another, unless imagined as the Other who lacks. The Master is actually the Other who has too much, one thing too many. Lack is the disavowal of the plus, unbearable to both master and slave.
 
Both like and unlike surplus value in Marx (which, in capitalism, usurps the place of surplus jouissance), surplus jouissance in Lacan spells, potentially, big trouble for the master since this bonus cannot be put into circulation, gotten rid of, turned into production, reproduction, value, and/or a signifier. Surplus jouissance can only accumulate; the master, as master, cannot spend it, else he cease to be master. This is the enjoyment he cannot know and cannot enjoy, the enjoyment of the other he subjects, alien jouissance and the jouissance of the alien. It is the joy of the proletarian who, far from having nothing but his chains to lose, no more than his body to sell, possesses the very thing the master cannot have, precisely because he (the worker) is just that loss, that body, pure dispossession as erotic enjoyment.
 
In the transference, the analyst, posited by the analysand as the master or subject-supposed-to-know, returns to his patient the plus-de-jouir that the patient always already had–not the stolen knowledge but his loss qua jouissance. Enjoyment liberates the subject from his subjectivity/subjection (one is never the subject of joy; joy carries the I away), from the imagined master-subject of an imaginary prisonhouse. The analysand now locates his liberty not in the image of the chief, but in the actual sovereign, in the jouissance that comes outside of knowledge. This is the joy about which Bataille never ceased to yell his head off. Indeed, Bataille does not realize to what degree he is right in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.” If for the “proper” proletarian, as for the good analyst, the aim is heterogeneous knowledge, the object or objective of that aim is not the post occupied by the “Head” or the Master but the enjoyment, the effervescence that attracts the proletarian and that is the proletarian’s attraction. Bataille’s proletarian does not reach his aim, which is the knowledge of the other scene, heterogeneous knowledge. In its stead, he “attains” jouissance, pure expenditure, as payment for the quest. In the process, his psyche is turned away from a leader and toward a sacred heterogeneity, toward joy-until-death–the knowledge that leads to this rallying joy; and the crying out, for Bataille, is the condition of socialism and freedom within or over against either capitalism or its agent, the state.
 
The construction of the conditions for this enjoyment is the ethical responsibility of the analyst. If psychoanalysts play a role in the liberation of the slave-worker, it is solely as analysts that they do so. The analyst meets the obligation by attending to his duty, which is to be an analyst: a reader and overwriter of the language of the other. Of course, no precise rules, no manual of instruction, exist to guide the analyst in the right direction. Yet this does not mean that the analyst must operate as a subject who finds “his own way” according to the circumstances. The analyst is not a master or a subject. In fact, the analyst follows a set of rules for which there is no booklet: the rules of language. Of course, language makes itself available for following only in the conscious signifiers that conceal it (conceal language as such). Thus the signifier or stream of signifiers–though driven by language–set the agenda, the course of analysis. The analyst and analysand follow the path of the signifier, a direction without directions. The transference, consequently the liberating jouissance, “happens” if and when this task of analysis–speaking, reading, listening–is done within the sessions, most of which consist of idle chatter, but which all the same set out the conduit of signifiers, preparing the way for the event. While there is no correct time for the transference, no “objective conditions” in the history of the analysand that might “tell” the analyst that “now is the time” to coax the analysand toward the transference and action, nor will “any old time” do. The event, the subject’s liberating jouissance, occurs neither by plan nor by accident, neither by design nor by chance, but under the condition that the parties in play do their work, performing their duty, which is analysis.
 
We noted that, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan derides the Parisian students who believe that to act politically one must go out of the classroom and “onto the street” (143-49, 197-208). Lacan–who in key moments of the seminar discusses these matters after class outside on the “streets,” in “public” exchanges–suggests to the students the opposite. Students act politically only insofar as they do their duty, which is to be students, that is to say, readers and writers, analysts, whose aim is knowledge and whose object is language–not masters, academics, or hysterics. If bodies at a university, or in analysis, are to yield a politics, they can do so solely by executing the freedom from mastery and master signifiers that jouissance and knowledge grant, for that joy or “effervescence” cannot be contained within the office/classroom. It sallies forth as object of the drive and object of attraction, potentially gathering the undefined masses. Out of these masses, the happening, if it is to happen at all, occurs: the effervescence of the masses can indeed take any direction, including the direction of politics or socialism. They do not guarantee socialism, yet one can guarantee that there will be no socialism without them. As defined by Lacan, then, analysis is not a design for socialism; but absent the analytic design, no socialism has a chance to come. Hence, the student who leaves behind his responsibility as student, who abandons knowledge in favor of action, is not seeking the student-freedom that he proclaims but precisely the master who blocks that freedom–as well as himself as that master. To the brash student Lacan replies: “the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome–of ending up as the master’s discourse . . . . What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.”
 
Zizek and Laclau seem to have received this message in inverted form. They therefore ignore the knowledge Lacan strives to pass on in the form of jouissance, though their conflict is largely about knowledge of Lacan. On the basis of their debate, one would be led to believe that for them politics is precisely the avoidance of knowledge and thus of joy–indeed, that this avoidance is the condition of both action and politics. Space will permit me to address only a few key features of their dispute. At various moments, Zizek responds to Laclau’s attacks by defending the examples he (Zizek) offers of contemporary political movements that–even if they are in an incipient phase–“square” with, and perhaps validate, his political theory. To be sure, this is not any person extending or speaking about examples. Zizek’s brilliance lies in his capacity to tender captivating, frequently hilarious examples to illustrate difficult theoretical points. Zizek, one might complain, repeats examples, yet even this “annoying” maneuver discloses his canniness about exemplarity. For Zizek does not just proffer examples; he theorizes the concept of the example. In fact, he argues that the key to an example lies in repetition, but as with Freud’s dream work, in the iteration and overexposure of the same narrative. It is the repeated opening and closing of a single scene that discloses the “other scene,” the language of the unconscious, the erotic gap in representation or exemplarity that, like overexposure as such, repetition marks (“Schalgend” 200).
 
Zizek’s first example concerns the Maoist Sendero Luminoso, the Peruvian Shining Path. Zizek discusses events in the impoverished mountainous areas of 1990s Peru, where the Sendero often menaced campesinos, soldiers, and others.[6] More interesting, according to Zizek, is how the Sendero would sometimes direct its most brutal actions not at these Peruvians–not even at representatives of the Peruvian government, such as the army–but at U.N. international health workers, whose task was to aid the peasants. Forcing these individuals to confess their complicity with imperialism, the Sendero would then (at times) shoot them. Zizek does not condone or advocate such measures. Though such tactics are “sustained by the correct insight,” they are “difficult to sustain [as] a literal model to follow” (“From Politics” 512). Of course, the “correct insight” is that the true danger in Peru is liberal democracy, not the Peruvian military or government. The enemy is a false democracy “lying in the guise of truth.” It is the democratic capitalisms that created the horrible conditions in which the peasants live in the first place. Zizek cites Badiou as a radical scholar who backs this view on the matter: “Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It’s called Democracy” (“Schlagend” 193).[7] The more innocent the aid workers were, the more they served as a tool of neoliberalism, since they made the democratic capitalist system “look attractive” to the peasants, who were then more likely to endorse the very savage powers that subjected them to their own dreadful circumstances.
 
This assertion must be read over against Zizek’s claim that the “objective conditions” for a revolutionary politics are never given (“Schlagend” 189). Referring to Lacan’s “passage à l’acte,” key to the enjoyment highlighted above, Zizek emphasizes that one cannot wait for the correct moment, the perfect “setting” for the act. Such a time never comes, for the “times” never license or authorize the truly radical act, which is unprecedented, hence without “father” or authority. Because no prior examples exist, neither does the possibility of knowing precisely what to do or whether “now” is the time to do it. The radical subject acts without assurances, relatively blindly. Bravery, conviction, frustration, anger and/or charisma are the conditions of the politics that ensues. However, Lacan, who regards the transference as this sort of “act” (to reiterate, Zizek’s notion of “act” is taken from Lacan), views matters a bit differently.[8] For Lacan, the “what to do” and the “when to act” are very clear. The analyst and analysand, right now, must conduct the work of analysis. Out of that labor, the event will or will not occur–not because the conditions are or are not ripe–but because preparation (the empty chit-chat) and duty (responding), and the passage á l’acte pertain to a single movement within analysis. The “groundwork” of analysis, the laying out of stupid signifiers, is neither the act itself, nor its conditions; it is the act’s responsibility and responsibility to the act.
 
What is the equivalent within Zizek’s analysis–or politics? We just indicated that Zizek argues that liberal democracy is not the solution to our consensual “postpolitics.” In Latin America, this “postpolitics” is usually dubbed the “neoliberal consensus,” and in fact, it is especially devastating in a nation such as Peru. However, Zizek tells us, killing or harming these workers is not a “literal model to follow.” Zizek need not make this last point, for one can never literally follow an example. An example is a figure. One can only follow it figuratively, by doing something like it. Zizek’s wavering (“difficult to sustain [as] a literal model to follow”), if read literally, could be translated as follows: in practice, one should not assassinate liberal democrats, and one should not conduct actions that are like these assassinations either.
 
The latter is a bit surprising, for one can certainly imagine a “like” action that is very much along the idea of Zizek’s remarks, the idea that Zizek literally means to convey with his overstated example. Imagine that instead of making the liberal gesture of rallying against a University administration that is utterly resistant to multiculturalism, one rallies against multiculturalism itself, which is nothing if not symbolic tolerance, false democracy “lying in the guise of truth.” Zizek advises us, repeatedly, that we should not take such positions in our actual lives. Though in the end multiculturalism serves the worst of ideologies, if compelled to choose on campus, one ought to select the multiculturalist over the racist cause: “Although, of course, as to the positive content of most of the debated issues, a radical leftist should support the liberal stance (for abortion, against racism and homophobia, and so forth), one should never forget that it is the populist fundamentalist, not the liberal, who is, in the long term, our ally” (“Schlagend” 194; emphasis added). What, then, is to be done? Zizek cannot extend a picture of a hypothetical example of a political act that corresponds to his theory. Neither in practice nor in theory can Zizek show us or offer us an example of what to do in theory. I just painted a nice–not too politically correct but not terribly violent–picture, in theory, of what to do if liberalism is in fact our enemy. Yet Zizek’s writings reject such solutions to the problem, and any solution like them. Even if in practice one has the opportunity to perform a peaceful but antagonistic act against democracy (demonstrating against multiculturalism), or even if, like the Sendero’s actions, one can do something that, “sustained by the correct insight,” would in theory be proper, in both cases one should not. One must not forget to theorize about doing them, but actually doing so is another matter. In the long term, then, this is not the time for any politics but liberalism. This may not be what Zizek means to say, but it is what he says, literally. In fact, nearly all the examples found in Zizek’s work, which number in the hundreds, represent negations, however comical they may be. Most often, they display the absurdity that lies at the heart of racism, capitalism, sexism, nationalism, classism, and anti-Semitism. They also negate the common liberal, “politically correct” analysis of why these attitudes are insidious. Yet when it comes to offering an example, a picture displaying how one might affirm (à la Bataille), even if only in theory, another politics, a path toward a politics of heterogeneity, or even a path toward heterogeneous knowledge, Zizek seems lost for images and jokes.
 
We said that in general Zizek presents examples to facilitate the understanding of theory, usually psychoanalysis. Yet both the statement on the Sendero and the idea the statement is meant to reveal (that the person who owns a bank is far worse than the person who robs one–as if this were being noted for the first time!), are not theoretical, intellectual, or even psychological. Zizek’s example is literally thoughtless, for it is neither a thought nor an analysis, but a subject position that praises subjects who take positions as subjects. That is the general example that the Sendero example, perhaps not the best of examples, sets perfectly. Lacan, on the steps of the Pantheon, extends free of charge to the students a model and theory of analysis, a theory of theory that, were the students to attend to it and to analysis itself, would or could open to a student political practice. In Lacan’s name, Zizek does the opposite. He presents non-theory, non-knowledge, and non-preparation as the prerequisite for a statement on politics, and for politics itself. Indeed, this is what his example of the Sendero Luminoso really insists upon, namely, that the discard of analysis, that is, the taking of a position is the condition of even a thought (the Sendero’s “correct insight”) of politics, to say nothing of political action.
 
At another moment, Zizek turns to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, in the context of a discussion of another Brazilian issue, the famous nineteenth-century Canudos uprising (“From Politics” 511-13). Recognizing these miserable sites as effects of capitalism’s worst violence, Zizek describes how new sorts of organization, such as community kitchens and illegal electrical networks, are nonetheless emerging within and from the devastation. In this wasteland of capitalism, movements that have the potential of leading to novel political formations are happening. Laclau is especially incensed by these comments (“Why Constructing” 680). He accuses Zizek of delirium, pointing out the sheer devastation of the favelas, devastation that includes the devastating communities that are developing therein: gangs, groups of drug dealers, and so forth. In fact, Laclau attributes Zizek’s avowal of the favelas’ promise not just to insanity, but to ignorance, advising Zizek to “go and do [his] homework” (680). Zizek responds accordingly: “Well, I did my homework” (“Schlagend” 191). Against what he regards as Laclau’s misreading of his argument, he then goes on to justify his take on the favelas.
 
As readers, we do not receive a detailed account of the precise “homework” that Zizek completes. He may have visited the favelas, read first-hand reports, viewed documentaries, or talked with individuals familiar with the issues. In any of these cases, it is through empiricism that Zizek licenses himself to speak of the Brazilian situation. It is by gathering empirical evidence that he “does his assignment.” A theory of the favelas–Zizek admits that he is speculating on these zones, presenting an hypothesis about what could take place in the margins of capital, not despite but because of this marginalization–has political mettle, for Laclau no less than for Zizek, when grounded in observations that are pre-analytical. Thus, they are not theoretical at all, but entirely speculative. In fact, as with the hacker communities on the Internet that Zizek also affirms, one needs no knowledge whatsoever to take a position “for or against” the potential for communities situated in the margins of global capital (“From Politics” 514). One can do so just as well with or without knowledge. The hacker associations, for example, clearly exploit the networks that capitalism builds but that fall outside the control of both state and market, thereby forging unprecedented models of community-building, “real existing” virtual cooperatives. Consequently, they can be subversive or enjoy great subversive potential. These communities, however, are open only to those who own computers, enjoy access to the Internet, possess money for the service (which is astonishingly expensive outside “the West”), and have time to hack. This includes a very small percentage of the world’s inhabitants. As much as they undermine them, hackers reproduce capitalist structures of class difference. There is no basis for claiming that their communities offer more or less potential than any other community. However, we can always take a position that they do. Likewise, the favela inhabitants are as much alienated capitalists as they are defiant to that system. Both Laclau and Zizek know this and say so. Moreover, the favelas’ illegal networks, such as pirated electrical grids, are so common in Latin America’s urban villas miserias that they draw no attention, neither from within nor from without the community; more, they are not the result of planned communal efforts (for more on this point, see Aira 29-30). The message is clear: the political thinker, like the political actor, takes a subject position, makes a choice that demands no necessary engagement with either theory or knowledge. Take your pick, but please pick. It would seem that the political theorist not only need not theorize. He must not theorize.
 
It is thus not terribly surprising that Zizek eventually affirms the very populism that his replies to Laclau are meant to rebuff. Why not? As Bataille makes clear, when it comes to taking a useful position within the homogeneity of subjects, one position is as good as another. In fact, Zizek praises the now signature event of the Bolivarian Revolution, which exemplified populism in its purest sense, when “the poor came down from the hills” of Caracas in 2004. In the wake of a right-wing, U.S.-condoned overthrow, Venezuelans descended from the most destitute margins of the city onto the grounds of the presidential palace in order to restore Chávez to his post. One could just as well speculate that it was the army that restored Chávez, but that is a side matter. The key issue is that when one alludes to the Venezuelan poor that “came down from the hills,” one must put the statement in quotation marks, because the 2004 descent repeats the disastrous Caracazo episode of 1989, when “the poor came down from the hills” the first time. Elsewhere, Zizek suggests that Chávez’s populist regime is rather prosaic, both because it is sponsored by huge oil money, and because these sorts of populisms are common–and, in the end, not very good for “the people.” Zizek’s inconsistency is not a concern. The problem is that at the precise instant he has the chance to prod Laclau on Laclau’s grounds and home turf, in the very heart of real existing populism, Zizek misses the encounter. If populisms such as Chávez’s enjoy political potential, it is not as new movements, but as the repetition of the same movement, of the same example, hence as the overexposure of a political death drive. The thesis is not mine; it is literally Zizek’s theory, which I outline above. Yet precisely because further discussion of such a thesis would demand theory, Zizek does not “go there.” In theory, he has nothing to say about Chávez, or about contemporary politics in general. These are not topics for theory; they are affairs of the subject, the charismatic subject assuming a strong, attractive post in a public forum.
 
In his response to Zizek in Critical Inquiry, as well as in On Populist Reason (whose theses the journal article upholds), Laclau defends a theory of popular-democratic interventions. Laclau outlines the democratic nature of such interventions by challenging the Marxist narrative that, as noted, Bataille too extends. Modern democracy, Laclau argues, appears as feudalism and absolutism are defeated by the bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, then, is both an agent of democracy and a precursor to the proletariat, which arrives on the scene later, as the world subject of socialism. Yet, as Laclau points out, the bourgeoisie never vanquished feudalism in “underdeveloped” nations. Thus, no bourgeois subject emerged to forge the democracy. The space for that subject was left open, and the people or demos had and still has the opportunity to fill it. The demos remains capable of constructing the democracy that the bourgeoisie failed to accomplish–a thesis that Laclau, drawing on the history of “underdeveloped” sites, translates into a general theory of political participation in our time.
 
“The people,” Laclau further contends, designates both the whole (the nation) and a part of that whole (the non-elite, the poor), the unrepresented part. “The people,” the whole, thus fails to represent the people, one of its parts. It is an “all” that falls short of itself, of “all.” “The people” serves as a marker of an empty wholeness, that is, of an incomplete, ruined, or cracked democracy (a whole with a hole is as good as empty); it is also the force that, in the wake of our failed democracies, now enjoys the space, at least potentially, to produce a more radical politics.
 
At this juncture, one should recall the goal of Laclau’s general project. Laclau seeks to establish new grounds for leftist politics given that the classical Marxist foundation, class difference, cannot ground itself, much less a politics in general. The worker is never a worker as such but a straight or gay worker, a female or male worker, a black or white worker, and so on. The real existing worker is the worker plus these constitutive outsides, which thereby pertain to the “being-worker.” If, as Laclau suggests, all politics is initiated by a demand to an authority, the demand of the worker, when made in the name of the working class as political subject, misses the real worker for it bypasses the racial, sexual, religious (etc.) elements that are “built into” the worker’s being. In contrast, a popular-democratic demand articulates the relation among the multiple interests of the worker (or of any other subject)–straight, gay, women, black, socialist; gay rights, women’s rights, black rights, worker rights–while reflecting none of the particular interests, i.e., no position that precedes the demand. Indeed, were such reflection the goal, one subject (such as the classed subject) would stand as the ground of all the others, rendering these others, as well as their interests, epiphenomenal, inessential, “discardable” in the name of the “greater good.” In other words, the popular demand performs-into-existence, gathers into a single political body, subjects that do not preexist this demand, a manifold that, without the demand, would not form a coherent group nor have a coherent cause.
 
For Laclau, this demand or set of signifiers, if popular-democratic, disrupts the Symbolic Order or the order of patriarchy, whose structure is analogous to that of contemporary global institutions and the neoliberal state. The Symbolic Order, as I indicated above, is always missing the pure or phallic signifier. This is the proper name, the signifier without signified but with a fixed referent (such as the name “Brett Levinson,” which does not mean anything but which refers unfailingly to me whenever I encounter it). This is a signifier, accordingly, that refers to the subject regardless of context or surrounding signifiers. The pure signifier is not bound or enslaved to the system in which it appears–appears, precisely, as freedom. The democratic-popular demand, because it represents no subject–the gay-feminist-worker is neither gay nor feminist nor a worker but a subject-to-come at the moment of its articulation–materializes similarly, as a signifier without a signified. Diverse associations, which are not distinct since each overlaps the other (the women’s association and the worker association share the woman-worker as a constituent), join forces in order to produce the signifiers/demands that take into account the multiplicity of causes. The ensuing community or subject results for the first time, therefore as an event or an intervention.
 
The intervention dislocates the social order, generating popular leftist movements, for at least three reasons. First, efforts to generate the signifier create upheaval within the established social order–one in which each identity is separated from another, each occupying its proper place–and hence call for political negotiations that are both horizontal (across the contending subjects) and vertical (up against the authorial order). Second, the signifier is antagonistic by its very structure; it generates, from out of the popular sector itself, a novel element within the Symbolic Order that–at the instant of its emergence–this order cannot ignore or include, incorporate or control. Finally, not unlike the chief in Bataille’s paradigm, the demand thus articulated forms the Head (Laclau uses the Lacanian term point de caption) of a manifold, which gathers a maximum of popular identification. The signifier attracts; it leads the movement. Potentially, it turns the association of multiple groups into a mass of energy composed of cathexes, one whose political direction, while initiated by the signifier/demand, will not (as mass) necessarily answer to the demand itself. The energy can “get out of hand,” possibly yielding not reform but revolt. If Bataille’s Head is a fixed subject, Laclau’s is a signifier that displaces the stagnant Master. (In populism, Laclau insists, the name of the populist leader is more powerful than the leader himself; the name does not stand in for the cause but is the cause.)[9]
 
Moreover, the signifier itself cannot be mastered; it floats as new groups attach to, alter, and rework it, inducing still different cathexes.
 
This signifier that would head popular democratic movements has only one problem: it does not exist. As Laclau argues, there is no signifier without a signified (On Populist Reason 105). In fact, desire can only generate an object petit a, as object cause and signifier, that is not sufficiently strong, not enough of a signifier, to attract subjects in the manner outlined by Lacan. This partial object or sign represents the empty wholeness; yet, precisely as mere representative, it fails to offer the promise of fulfillment that would lure the popular subjects. Subjects of desire move metonymically from object cause to object cause, in search of the wholeness they do not receive via the partial object. They are not held or captivated by the signifier, which thus fails to gather the manifold. For Laclau’s politics, the demand that emits from desire is literally unsatisfactory.
 
Laclau, then, needs a signifier that does not represent that whole but that is the whole, i.e., a part that is the whole. His ideal signifier, while necessarily a partial object, must be a full performance of democracy. A proper name, as indicated above, could perhaps accomplish this feat–if only it existed. The object of the drive, Laclau decides, is the next best option (On Populist Reason 119-20). After all, the drive attaches to a circumscribed object that, for the “aroused” subject, is as good as any whole. The bottle is as good as the breast, which is as good as the complete mother, which in turn is as good as completeness itself. All are equally partial over against their aim, which is knowledge (or death). The object of the drive, then, is not partial relative to a whole. A missing or completed wholeness has nothing to do with the drive’s direction or aim–the aim that splits the drive, which in turn splits off, endlessly driving past its aim, while never falling short of it.
 
On the one hand, Laclau’s theory of populism requires an object petit a qua signifier that fills the empty fullness of our modern democracies-to-come. In Lacan, this signifier is the desired signifier, the signifier of desire that marks the dialectic between part and whole. The people–for Laclau, both a part within and the full body of the democratic state–thus names this name for Laclau. On the other hand, Laclau’s theory calls for an object petit a qua signifier that is the thing as such, not its mere cause or representation; it calls thus for the object of the drive, sufficient unto itself. In other words, for Laclau popular politics demands a signifier derived from a smooth blend of desire and drive. It hinges on neither the object cause of desire nor on the object of the drive, but on the object petit a as object of desire. There is only one problem with such a thing: it does not and cannot exist.
 
It is telling that Laclau derives his notion of the drive from a secondary source, not from Lacan’s actual writings (On Populist Reason 119). At the key moment when he must make Lacan work for a theory of popular democracy, Laclau has to remove Lacan’s texts from the picture. The aim of the drive is knowledge. Laclau evades that aim, evades that knowledge–which is the knowledge of Lacan–in order to cast his political net in the name of that very knowledge. It is not that Laclau’s practice abandons theory so that it can operate, potentially, “in the real world.” In bypassing theory, the practice skirts practice too. In fact, within Lacanian theory an object of desire that acts as the thing itself, as the whole, cannot be imagined, not even if that thought is utopian. It can exist neither in theory nor in practice, neither in the mind nor materially. Laclau, by offering not only a theory that is missing its theory, calls for–because it is missing its theory–a practice that cannot be practiced. Lacan holds that the division of knowledge and practice precludes both, since psychoanalysis is a practice of knowledge. Conversely, Laclau marshals this very division by throwing the Lacanian principles (the fundamental difference between drive and desire) upon which his (Laclau’s) theory of politics counts outside of that very theory. The theory of politics is a performance of the resistance to theory.
 
For Lacan, psychoanalysis is psychoanalytic, just as theory is theoretical. A psychoanalyst is a psychoanalyst; a theorist is a theorist. In their debate Laclau and Zizek, in fact, are theorists. That is their post, task, and work. Yet it is a task that they cannot cast or imagine as political. That is why they step out of theory “in the final analysis” to get to their politics. However, they end up in neither politics nor theory but dogmatism. Lacan has let us know that the analyst and theorist are obliged to and responsible for their aim, which is knowledge. That analysis or theory could one day turn into politics is certain. Yet theory cannot “be” political. That is, it cannot make itself political. For at the instant it performs this gesture, theory ceases to be theory. Precisely such a cessation is the main event of the Laclau/Zizek boxing match, a bout that exemplifies the fact that politics, for theory, is now the absence of theory. If we cannot lay this fact at the doorstep of Laclau or Zizek, it is a fact nonetheless. When it gets down and dirty, to the real, politics must do without theory, making do instead with subject positions. For better or worse, Lacanian psychoanalysis may be too formalized to continue fighting against these postures. Either theory will be done, will respond to itself, to its duty as theory, in which case a politics in theory, a theoretical act, can be anticipated; or else theory will become the absolute property of Masters, hysterics, and University dogma. In the latter case, theory’s aim cannot but be capitalist reproduction, in theory as well as in practice. Theory capitalizes on itself in an effort to rid the master of his plus-de-jouir (surplus jouissance) so that we, theory’s analysts and analysands, inherit but a stifling plus-de-jouir! (no more jouissance!) as our working conditions.
 

 
Why is Freud’s 1905 work called Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality? What makes sexuality a theoretical issue? The Three Essays are famous for their focus on a wide range of sexual expression (the perversions) and on infantile sexuality. Freud was not the first to explore the former and he did not discover the latter. The theoretical issue emerged out of their integration. The understanding that the supposedly exceptional, abnormal “perversions” are rooted in universal, normal infantile sexuality changed the assumption that sexuality is grounded in the biology of reproduction, and therefore has natural, pre-formed objects. Auto-erotic, “polymorphously perverse” infantile sexuality is the foundation of a new theory of sexuality. From the first, this theory is temporal. Freud gives sexuality a much more complex history than it had before. This history extends over a life, even determining adult neuroses. The great issue, then, is the linkage of an expanded sexuality and time in the theory of unconscious processes.
 
The temporalization of the seemingly immutable has been central to changing essentialist assumptions about nature. Species evolve. Particle emission explains how elements are transformable. Space itself can contract and expand. Sexuality changes over time. All of these changes compel rethinking time itself. They imply that time is not only a measure of duration, but shares qualities with evolution, sub-atomic processes, cosmic space, and sexuality, if they are all mutable. This means that science itself has to meet the philosophical rethinking of time.
 
In this essay, I wish to pursue this topic by extending some of the thinking about sexuality and time I elaborated in Interpretation and Difference. I necessarily synthesize some of that book (the arguments from Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze; Freud on Eros, bisexuality, and primary scopophilia). New are the dialogues with Laplanche and with the relational psychoanalysts from Gender In Psychoanalytic Space and the expansion of Winnicott’s conception of transitionality.
 

 

Sexuality, Tension, Time

 
In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud offers practical advice about the end of analysis: “Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic ‘normality,’ nor yet to demand that the person who has been ‘thoroughly analysed’ shall feel no passions and develop no internal conflicts. The business of analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has discharged its task” (250).
 
What are the “best possible conditions” in the realm of sexuality? In Freud’s early and middle periods, neurosis is a conflict between infantile sexual wishes and repression. To reverse repression is to make such sexual wishes conscious. In his later ego-psychological phase (reflected in his statement about the “business of analysis”), anxiety is the central motivating factor for repression. Neurotic anxiety is mostly a question of the super-ego’s threats of punishment should the ego ally itself with forbidden id impulses. In the realm of sexuality, “the best possible conditions” would thus be the ego’s freedom from infantile anxieties, irrational defenses, and super-ego pressures. This is the picture of an ego made stronger and more autonomous as a result of analysis, an ego not in conflict with the id and the super-ego. Such liberation is possible because psychoanalysis recognizes that all sexuality, even the most apparently “normal,” is polymorphously perverse. The successfully analyzed neurotic no longer has to repress “unacceptable” sexual impulses.
 
Yet Freud is perfectly aware that sexuality will always resist enlightenment (in all senses of the term). It is not simply illusory to think that the thoroughly analysed person will feel no passions or conflicts, and that there is no schematic sexual normality. Sexuality is conflict itself. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud said that there is “something in the nature of the [sexual] function itself which denies us full satisfaction” (104). He gives two examples of such sexual impasse in Analysis Terminable and Interminable. One is his notorious statement that the repudiation of femininity is “bedrock,” a “biological fact, a part of the great riddle [Rätsel] of sex” (252). What Freud means here is that the castration complex is the source of unmodifiable–immutable, apparently atemporal–envy and anxiety. One can justifiably criticize his phallic monism, his blind insistence on the “reality of castration” as a wound to all women and a warning to all men. And one must also note Freud’s typical inconsistency: what he is calling “biological fact” is actually the inevitable fantasy of castration. But the riddle, the mystery, is the castration complex itself. What makes it such a stubborn interference with sexuality? Why is there conflict at the heart of sexuality?
 
The other example of sexual impasse concerns something Freud calls “normal in mental life” (Analysis Terminable 243)–but normal only for an enlightened psychoanalysis. He is referring to bisexuality,[1] to the distribution of libido “either in a manifest or a latent fashion, over objects of both sexes” (244). Some people do not experience bisexuality as a problem. But for many, homo- and heterosexual trends “are in a state of irreconcilable conflict” (244). One would expect Freud to attribute this conflict to the castration complex, but he does not. Rather, he speaks of conflict itself: “An independently emerging tendency to conflict of this sort can scarcely be attributable to anything but the intervention of an element of free aggressiveness” (244). When this “free aggressiveness” is turned inward, internal conflict replaces external conflict. Freud then speaks of Empedocles’s cosmic principles of philia (love) and neikos (strife), eternally contending with each other (246). Normal bisexuality, then, is a manifestation of philia, Eros, the life drive, and is inevitably attacked by neikos, discord, destructiveness, the death drive. Why?
 
One has to recall that Eros, for Freud, is a “disturbance” because it counters the basic trend of the id toward tension reduction (Ego and Id 46-47). Sexuality as Eros raises tension by endeavoring “to combine what exists into ever greater unities” (Analysis Terminable 246). But because sexuality also serves tension reduction, attempting to “dissolve . . . combinations” (246), again sexuality is at war with itself. Laplanche comments on this aspect of Freud: “psychic conflict . . . is a drive conflict between the ‘sexual death drives’ . . . and the ‘sexual life drives’ . . . . It could be defined . . . as the struggle between two principles: binding and unbinding” (“Aims” 75). If Freud sees “normal bisexuality” as part of the sexual life drive, it must bind. It “combines” what might be thought of as two opposed entities: homo- and heterosexuality.
 
Can one interpret Freud here? Is the binding tension of normal bisexuality destructively unbound to create the apparently irresolvable conflicts of the castration complex? The castration complex then would not be “bedrock,” but rather–in Laplanche’s terms–the fantasy produced by the “sexual death drive” in conflict with the “sexual life drive.” The tension of sexual binding will always be met by the tendency to reduce tension, creating a conflicted bisexuality.
 
The relation of sexuality to the increase and decrease of tension, to binding and unbinding as Laplanche puts it, always gives Freud a great deal of trouble. He summarizes the problem in “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Here his most basic idea is that mind works to get rid of stimuli, making unpleasure an increase and pleasure a decrease of “mental tension” (159-60). The pleasure principle warns “against the demands of the life instincts–the libido” (160). (This is why Freud called Eros a “disturbance.”) But he then cedes the obvious objection: “there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of tension. The state of sexual excitation is the most striking example of a pleasurable increase of stimulus” (160).
 
How to define pleasure and unpleasure if the mind seeks tension increase and tension decrease? Freud says he does not know, but wonders whether they have to do with “the rhythm, the temporal sequences of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus” (160). In a footnote, Strachey reminds us that Freud already raises the issue of sexuality, tension, and rhythm in Beyond the Pleasure Principle . In its last paragraph, Freud says that we experience not only pleasure and unpleasure, but also a
 

peculiar [eigentümlich] tension, which in its turn can be either pleasurable or unpleasurable . . . . [I]s the feeling of tension to be related to the absolute magnitude . . . while the pleasure and unpleasure series indicates a change in the magnitude of the cathexis within a given unit of time?
 

(Beyond 63)

 

Here Freud is thinking about time and tension.[2] In itself, this is not unusual. We often call cyclic states of tension increase and decrease “biorhythms.” It is unusual, however, to think time in relation to a tension between pleasure and unpleasure.

 
We have quickly accumulated several mysteries: “the riddle of sex” in relation to the castration complex, the inevitable conflict over normal bisexuality, tension increase and tension decrease, the possibility of a tension that is potentially pleasurable or unpleasurable, and last, but hardly least, sexual tension as time and rhythm.
 
The time factor is perhaps the greatest mystery. In Freud’s early work on trauma, sexuality explains why adult neurotic symptoms are linked to the infantile past. Changing our understanding of sexuality itself, Freud then gives it a long, complicated history, beginning with birth. Although this aspect of Freud’s theory is well known, it is less well known that he thought that the infant’s original relation to the breast is simultaneously self-preservative and erotic (Three Essays 222). Sexuality emerges as a force independent of self-preservation with the infant’s exploratory stimulation of its own body–the great example being thumb sucking. Infantile sexuality is auto-erotic and spread over the entire body–polymorphously perverse. Moreover, we do not proceed directly from infantile, non-reproductive sexuality to adult reproductive sexuality. Because of the latency period and the relative repression of infantile sexuality, the sexual past is carried over into the sexual present. Infantile sexuality continues to act after the fact; it has the temporality of Nachträglichkeit, deferred action. Psychoanalysis emerged as a temporal, historical discipline at first because of Freud’s investigation of memory. But because this theory of memory became a theory of sexuality, history itself became sexual and sexuality itself became temporal.
 
When we think of history as temporal, we usually think of time as the medium in which events unfold. But Freud also occasionally thinks of a time internal to sexuality. When he writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a sexual tension that in itself is neither pleasure nor unpleasure and wonders what it has to do with rhythm, it is as if he is looking into sexuality as tension. He is envisaging a temporal process that does not act on the larger scale of connecting past and present, even by deferred effect. It is rather a pulsation within sexuality: the variable beat of sexual rhythm between pleasure and unpleasure.
 

Laplanche: Sexuality, Time, Otherness

 
The relation between historical, sexual time and the time internal to sexuality has been examined by Laplanche in “Time and the Other.” The title of the essay indicates its place in his thought. For Laplanche, there is an “uncompleted Copernican revolution” in psychoanalysis. Although Freud went very far in decentering consciousness, making the unconscious the “other” within, Laplanche thinks that he used this theory to re-center the subject. The originally auto-erotic, wishing unconscious makes everything come from within “me,” even if from a “me” I do not know. Hence, Laplanche counters Freud’s idea that sexuality is originally auto-erotic. For Laplanche, sexuality emerges in the infant’s relation to the other’s other, i.e., the mother’s unconscious. There is an inevitable “implantation” of the mother’s incomprehensible, “untranslatable” sexual wishes (enigmatic signifiers) into–or rather onto–the infantile psyche. Disturbing enigmatic signifiers make sexuality an “internal foreign body,” always acting by deferred effect (256). Deferred effect is of course a temporal concept, but Laplanche thinks that his revised sexual theory demands a more sophisticated relation to time, one that makes time itself “other.”
 
Laplanche distinguishes four “levels” of time: 1. cosmological or world time; 2. perceptual time, the time of immediate consciousness; 3. the time of memory, of “the individual project, the temporalization of the human being”; 4. the time of the history of human societies (238). Where does psychoanalysis fit into these four levels? Laplanche says that Freud mainly works at the second level, the level of perceptual time, but that he has an implicit, undeveloped theory of the third level, the temporalization of the human being. Laplanche states that “Heidegger and existentialism” have done the most to explain this level, which has the greatest potential for thinking an “other” time. Laplanche also claims that the theory of the enigmatic signifier is situated there, “on the same terrain of being” as Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality as the “ecstatic” “stretching out” between past, present, and future. (I explain what this means in the fourth section of this paper.) In other words, the inevitable deferred effect of the enigmatic signifier, which accounts for unconscious sexual history, is conceivable in Heideggerian terms. Sexuality is always “other,” and its time is the other time of Heideggerian ek-stasis, “standing outside.”
 
This is a brave attempt to integrate a theory of unconscious sexuality with perhaps the most important rethinking of time in twentieth-century philosophy. It indicates where psychoanalysis has to go if it is to come to grips with what has always been at its heart: that the mystery of sexuality is the mystery of time. However, although Laplanche asks the right question, I do not think that he comes up with the right answer. To explain why, I need to say more about the second level, perceptual time.
 
Laplanche reminds us that in “The Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” Freud offers a theory of time that he (falsely) claims to have kept secret until then. In “The Note,” Freud says that consciousness of time is a result of the unconscious stretching out of “feelers, through the medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs.” (231). The “feelers” are withdrawn “as soon as they have sampled the excitations” of the external world (231). This is a periodic, rhythmic turning on and off of consciousness by the unconscious. Freud suspects that “this discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time” (231).
 
What does this mean? Freud is saying that consciousness is transitory, because the unconscious is the greater, if invisible, permanent part of the mind. When the unconscious “samples” the external world, consciousness is “turned on.” When the “sampling” ends, consciousness is “turned off.” This explains time as periodicity. It is a different version of the rhythmic theory of time from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (This is why Freud’s claim in “The Note” that he had kept this theory of time secret was not true.)
 
In both “The Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle , time is discontinuous. Freud’s idea is that because unconscious tension states are rhythmic, consciousness is periodically “lit up.” An obvious analogy is to the baby periodically aroused by needs that can only be relieved by the “external world”; later, sexuality will function in the same way. This is the familiar picture of the cyclic increase and decrease of tension. However, this picture is too simple. As Laplanche cannily remarks, Freud is linking consciousness of time to “the time of time . . . to rhythm. Linear time . . . must be reduplicated materially as rhythm–the rhythm precisely of interruption and connection” (“Time” 239). Laplanche finds this opening to a rhythmic thinking of time intriguing, but deficient: “Not one of the major concepts of theory and practice can be found there: sexuality is absent, as are repression, defense and transference” (240). Moreover, there seems to be no way to integrate this theory of rhythmic time into the theory of “temporalization” that accounts for the “history of a life” (240), the theory that would have to be linked to Heidegger’s ecstatic time.
 
Is it possible to integrate the discontinuist, rhythmic notion of time with the notion of time as the “temporalization of the human being”? I believe so, and I believe that this integration depends upon a greater understanding of the mysteries of sexuality, for example, the riddles of “unanalyzable” castration anxiety and inevitable conflict about bisexuality. In fact, some psychoanalytic relational thinkers have already taken important steps in this direction. Although these thinkers say nothing about time, their ideas potentially open onto it.
 

Sexuality, Difference, Tension, Transitionality

 
In the collection Gender In Psychoanalytic Space, Ken Corbett, Muriel Dimen, Donna Bassin, and Jessica Benjamin all speak of sexuality as tension between what are usually taken as essential opposites. Corbett, for example, says:
 

opposites that are held in a dialectical tension are not negated through such tension. They may contradict one another. They may fold into one another, as passivity may fold into activity, and thereby be transformed. But contradiction and transformation do not neutralize the dialectical poles; rather they hold them in a qualified tension.
 

(25)

 

Corbett’s particular focus is the sexual experience of gay men. He makes the simple observation that most gay men “interchange activity and passivity in sexual relations.” He goes on to say that this takes one into

 

the heart of the mystery: gay men move between passive and active sexual aims that do not reflect the kind of binary tension falsely associated with heterosexual masculine activity and feminine passivity . . . . The deconstruction of this binary tension not only speaks to the mystery of homosexuality, but to the mystery of sexuality—the ways in which all sexualities are informed by the push and pull of activity and passivity.
 

(27)

 

When Corbett says that the binary tension of masculine activity and feminine passivity is falsely associated with heterosexuality, he is thinking of the castration complex. He wants to separate masculine and feminine identifications from the equations phallic-active, castrated-passive. Corbett says that gay men do indeed experience both masculine and feminine identifications during sex, but he claims never to have met a gay patient whose fantasy that passivity equals femininity also made him feel castrated. Fantasies of castration lead to a “shut down of sexual . . . behavior” (31).[3] Being penetrated, even if accompanied by a fantasy of feminine identification, is arousing:

 

For the man who is simultaneously penetrated and erect, orgasm is generally achieved following manipulation of his penis by his partner; this behavior is underscored by the wish for his partner to see and manipulate the penis, not deny it . . . Through their reluctance to imagine a male body that is simultaneously penetrated and erect, analysts have conflated passive phallic arousal with castration.
 

(31-32)

 

The last point is extremely important. Corbett is implying that Freud’s assumption of the castration complex as bedrock betrays the psychoanalytic project: the commitment to the kind of unblinking look at sexuality that acknowledges that penetration can be arousing for men. Such an unblinking look would have compelled Freud to think about the “mystery of sexuality” as the “push and pull of activity and passivity.”[4]

 
Muriel Dimen takes this argument one step further by focusing on gender not as masculinity or femininity, but as the difference between them. Dimen here broaches an enormous philosophical question: the nature of difference itself. She grasps a position first articulated by Nietzsche: traditional thinking is oppositional thinking (1968, passim.). Since difference always implies both separation and relation between things differentiated, it cannot be confined to oppositions.[5] Sexual difference, the relation and separation of masculinity and femininity, is a “space between.” It is transitional, in Winnicott’s sense of a “third,” “intermediate area of experiencing” (“Transitional” 230). Dimen contends that the conventional meanings of masculinity and femininity are a result of splitting, in either the psychoanalytic sense (splitting of the ego or the object), or the cultural sense (privileging of “dichotomies and dualisms”) (41-42).
 
Dimen then addresses Freud’s question about the relation between tension and pleasure. She cites Edith Jacobson–a classical ego psychologist–on the question of constancy. Jacobson redefined constancy as an axis with “‘a certain margin for biological vacillations around it’” (qtd. 55). Pleasure is paradoxical: it is an oscillating cycle of increase and decrease of tension. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud already began to think in these terms when he spoke of a potentially pleasurable or unpleasurable tension linked to rhythmicity. But Freud (apparently) does not do what Dimen does here: she links tension and oscillating rhythmicity to difference itself. If sexual difference is transitional in Winnicott’s sense (the intermediate space between masculine and feminine, active and passive), then one should think of something like transitional tension. Dimen envisions this possibility when she says that movement between positions “might be regarded as pleasurable . . . [but] when we leave the preferred polarity [i.e. occupy the space between positions] . . . we are . . . extraordinarily uncomfortable” (56). Again, this discomfort is handled by splitting, whether in individuals or in theories.
 
Dimen’s idea of “theoretical splitting” can certainly describe Freud’s position on the castration complex as bedrock. It exemplifies the “uncomfortable” response to normal–i.e., differential, transitional, tension raising–bisexuality. While Freud does not make this connection, he certainly does link bisexuality to the “tension of life,” and does give us a tool with which to rethink the castration complex as a destructive, tension reducing conflict (Laplanche’s binding and unbinding). Transitional space as “binding tension” (not part of Winnicott’s formulation of transitionality) will always be met by a tendency to tension reduction.
 
This is the point at which the intrapsychic and the cultural–the preference for fantasies of opposed positions–meet. It is why one can find the same kind of splitting in individuals as in theories. There is a potential expansion of the political implications of psychoanalysis here. Freud familiarly thinks that civilization demands repression of the drives, heightening both aggression and guilt. But when he envisions something like aggression (neikos) inevitably attacking the “life drive” (philia) manifested in normal bisexuality, we can interpret it to mean that the tension of “sexual transitionality” will also inevitably provoke an aggressive splitting response. This splitting can range from the outright murderous and persecutory, to the construction of theories designed to eliminate, marginalize or attack such transitionality, to the self-attacking manifestations of individual psychopathology. Such splitting always appears to provide relief from the disturbing tension of intermediate states; it feels like protection against the unbearable.
 
Donna Bassin also emphasizes oscillation and splitting, raising a point that is addressed in the last section of this paper. Freud does say that in fantasy, dreams, and some sexual practices–e.g., voyeurism and exhibitionism, sadism and masochism–apparently opposed active and passive positions are transformable. Bassin comments:
 

I postulate an interchangeability of positions within fantasy which Freud (1915) discussed in ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ . . . Whatever the individual choice, the opposite aim is simultaneously being realized and gratified in the unconscious. What appear to be dichotomies are merely defensive surface splits.
 

(167; emphasis added)

 

Like Corbett and Dimen, Bassin extends this idea to gender polarity conceived in terms of active and passive, a polarity that “masks the underlying oscillation” (167).

 
One might question Bassin’s emphasis on fantasy here. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud certainly does explain that active and passive, voyeuristic and exhibitionistic, sadistic and masochistic fantasies are always linked. But Freud is also interested in the fact that a voyeur can actually become an exhibitionist, a sadist a masochist, and vice versa. And “normal bisexuality” is a reality–an old theme for Freud. (The first chapter of the Three Essays counters any irreducible essentialism about homo- and hetero-sexuality by observing the movement between them in the histories of many people’s lives.) Corbett’s observation that penetration itself is arousing for men makes this reality mysterious: it is the reality of oscillation in Dimen’s transitional sexuality. Dimen could even say that transitional sexuality itself would make us wonder about a simple opposition of reality and fantasy. If both sexual fantasy, as Bassin emphasizes, and sexual reality, as Corbett and Dimen emphasize, take us to the place of oscillation, then another mystery of sexuality might be its position between fantasy and reality. This idea is part of Winnicott’s conception of transitional space. His claim that transitionality is between the subjective and the objective explains why transitionality is the possibility of “fantasy related to fact, but not confused with fact” (“Depressive” 267). He emphasizes that the baby’s relation to the famous transitional object is neither active nor passive, because the question whether the baby creates it or is given it is not to be posed (“Transitional” 239-340). However, it does not occur to Winnicott to integrate the theory of transitionality with the theory of sexuality. Corbett, Bassin, and Dimen do so, with their emphases on oscillation between active and passive as the very nature of sexuality.
 
Jessica Benjamin takes these questions in another direction. She understands difference itself as both separation and relation.[6] Relation moves toward sameness, separation toward difference. But this means that an opposition between sameness and difference, which in psychoanalytic theory generally leads to a privileging of the latter over the former, is impossible. Benjamin is well known for her position that the coexistence of sameness and difference means that we need room for identification alongside object love, which she extends to sexual difference. She argues for bisexual “over inclusiveness,” so that one can retain cross-sex identifications. Referring to Dimen on transitional sexuality, Benjamin speaks of oscillating opposites in a state of pleasurable tension. And like all these authors, she wants to overcome “split polarities.” Uniquely, though, Benjamin says that to reduce difference to the “one Difference” always implies that “identity exists on either side of the line” (182). Sexual difference itself, then, is plural. Benjamin wants to overcome the split between “the One Difference, gender dimorphism” and the “polymorphism of all individuals” (204).
 
Benjamin might be surprised to learn that her critique of the One Difference echoes some of Jacques Derrida’s thinking. In Glas (1974) Derrida devotes a great deal of attention to the way in which Hegel insists on transforming sexual difference as natural diversity into sexual contradiction, sexual opposition (168). For Derrida, Hegel’s insistence on sexual opposition is a model for the way in which all oppositions (e.g., active/passive, the example I am emphasizing) function in order to guarantee the purity, independence, and mastery of each term (223). To conceive sexual difference as something other than opposition, Derrida says, means to understand how “sexual differences efface themselves and determine themselves as the difference” (223).
 
In another context, discussing Heidegger’s insistence on the sexual neutrality of Dasein (the human mode of existence), Derrida similarly says that Dasein is “asexual” only as concerns the One Difference. He expands:
 

[Dasein’s] asexuality would be determined as such only in the extent to which one immediately takes sexuality as binarity or sexual division . . . . If Dasein as such belongs to neither of the two sexes, this does not mean that the being it is is without sex. On the contrary, one can think here a . . . pre-dual sexuality, which does not necessarily mean unitary, homogenous and undifferentiated . . . . And on the basis of this sexuality more original than the dyad, one can attempt to think a “positivity” and a “power” . . . the positive and powerful source of all “sexuality.” (“Geschlecht” 402; emphasis added)

 

For Derrida, as for Nietzsche, to think outside metaphysics is to think difference as that which makes self-enclosed identity impossible. This is why he is so interested in Hegel’s attempt to formulate sexual contradiction, or why he sees Heidegger’s sexual neutrality of Dasein as an alternative to the One Difference. Difference, for Derrida, is always the relation to an otherness that one is. Difference is the oscillation between identity and otherness. This oscillation is a binding tension. In their respective ways, Corbett, Dimen, Bassin, and Benjamin speak of the tension holding together the sexual as transitional, and of oppositional thinking as a splitting of relational difference. They can thus be said to participate in a non-metaphysical theory of sexuality. But they say nothing about time.

 
For Derrida, difference is temporal in two ways. It is always related to temporal deferral, as in Freud’s Nachträglichkeit. It is also unthinkable without repetition, as in Freud’s rhythmicity. Derrida shares the idea of difference as repetition with Deleuze, who defined difference as the interval between two repetitions, and repetition as the differentiator of difference (Difference 76). Derrida says that the most important point of intersection between the deconstruction of metaphysics and psychoanalysis is around the repetition compulsion (“Resistances” 32). Integrating the themes of time and the transitional, Derrida conceptualizes difference as the rhythmic repetition of the intermediate “zone” between apparently opposed terms (Post Card 351-52). If there is any justification to Derrida’s position, then everything Corbett, Dimen, Bassin, and Benjamin say or imply about transitionality has to be linked to a thinking of repetition.
 
Freud, we know, does begin to think the sexual in terms of a rhythmic tension between pleasure and unpleasure. We might interpret this as an opening to thinking the mystery of sex as the mystery of time, as the repetition of the intermediate. Laplanche wants to think sexuality in relation to Heidegger’s rethinking of time as “ecstatic,” but does not find a way to integrate this project with Freud’s theory of discontinuist, rhythmic time. To bring these strands together, we need a better understanding of Heidegger’s conception of time, of temporality as ecstasis and as auto-affection.
 

Ecstasis, Auto-Affection, Transitionality

 
What does Laplanche mean when he cites Heidegger on the “temporalization of the human being” as the “ecstatic stretching out” between past, present, and future?
 
Heidegger’s overall project is to develop an understanding of the history of philosophy as the history of a forgetting–the forgetting of the question of Being (Sein). Being is necessarily forgotten when it is equated with the present. In our era, the present is what is objectively present for a subject. The objective is externally there, independent of the subject whose mind functions so that the objective can be known. The scientific method emerged out of these metaphysical positions.
 
In philosophy, time has always been a problem. On the one hand, time is conceived in terms of presence. Time is the infinite series of now points, stretching endlessly backward and forward, such that every now passes into a successive now. On the other hand, time is never present itself. The difficulty is that what makes presence possible, time as the now, is not itself present. Time is somehow real, but never objectifiable. (As Heidegger says, one can take apart any device for measuring time, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, and one will never find time within it.) The question of what is, Being itself, is tied up with this problem of time and presence. The history of metaphysics conflates time with the present in order to forget other ways of thinking the “is,” ways that would disrupt the presumed certainties of philosophy.
 
From Heidegger’s point of view, Being and Time is a prolegomenon to the rethinking of the “is.” Heidegger chooses to investigate the human mode of existence–Dasein–as a way of reviving the forgotten question of Being. Dasein is his point of departure because, in however unformed and intuitive a way, Dasein always has a sense that it exists. By starting with the simplest observations about how Dasein exists, Heidegger eventually develops a complex way of thinking about time that is not confined by the metaphysics of presence. His first observation is that Dasein is not a “free floating” independent entity. It only exists in relation to others and things; it is always in a “world.” Since Dasein only exists in relation to others and things, it cannot be a self-enclosed interiority. Dasein is always open; it always has the possibility of encountering others and things, and is always related to them. For Heidegger, because Dasein is always in a “world,” it is always “outside itself.” This being outside itself makes Dasein never simply “at home” with itself. Heidegger says that “being-in-the-world” is always unheimlich , “uncanny”–a theme he conspicuously shares with Freud. “Being-in-the-world” is itself the source of Angst, existential anxiety. Dasein always flees what it “is”–open, in a world–in order to evade uncanniness and Angst. One result of this flight is the severing of the relatedness of Dasein and world. The metaphysical assumption that the world is external objectivity and the person is internal subjectivity is precisely the result of what Heidegger calls Dasein‘s evasion of itself. The discomfort and tension (uncanniness, Angst) of relatedness is split into an opposition of subject and object. Here we have a philosophical account of splitting that calls for integration with the psychoanalytic, cultural, and political ones (see Dimen et al., above).
 
This bare bones description cannot capture the complexity of Heidegger’s analysis, and what is to follow summarizes even more complex material. Heidegger calls Dasein‘s way of existing “care” (Sorge). At first, care simply means that whatever Dasein does takes time. Dasein‘s encounter with anything implies “being with” it, depends upon time. Out of this simple statement, Heidegger develops a complex structure of care. The key is that Dasein is always “outside” itself (an extension of being-in-the-world). Dasein is always “ahead of itself,” always in relation to what it is not yet, its possibilities, its future. Ultimately Heidegger articulates a temporal structure of care out of being-ahead, being-in-a-world, and being-together with things and others. Care is at once: 1) possibility, the relation to the existential future; 2) “always already” being in a world prior to Dasein, the existential past; 3) being together with others and things, the existential present. I have used the word “existential” to stress Heidegger’s point: as temporal modes of relating, future, past and present are not present themselves. Further, these modes of relating only exist together–they are what make Dasein an historical being whose present is always related to its future and its past. Time itself is this interrelation of the three coexisting temporal modes. As the non-present possibility of presence, time is their “stretching toward each other” (the phrase cited by Laplanche). Time thought beyond presence, time as the “temporalization of the human being,” is this “outsiding relation.” Time is ecstasis. Just as Dasein‘s flight from itself as being-in-the-world produces the metaphysical assumptions of subject and object, so the forgetting of the question of Being “levels down” time as ecstasis into time as the infinite series of now points.
 
One of Heidegger’s most counter-intuitive points about time as ecstasis is that it is finite. He sees the assumption that time is infinite as part of the privileging of the present–again, the infinite series of now points. However, when Heidegger says that existential, ecstatic time is finite he does not mean that time stops. He means that Dasein‘s relation to its possibilities is most of all a relation to the future it assumes as soon as it is: the possibility of its death. After Being and Time , Heidegger had serious reservations about being-toward-death. But he did not waver in his thinking of ecstatic time as finitude, as the possibility of relatedness, as openness, and as tension and uncanniness.
 
Another difficult aspect of Heidegger’s conception of time is the understanding of how it “works.” Clearly time is the possibility of all history and all change. One might call time “process” itself. If time is process, and if it is never an objectifiable entity, then how does it “temporalize”? Heidegger’s answer is that because time cannot be “acted upon” by an object or a subject, it makes history and change possible by acting upon itself. Time temporalizes itself. He elaborates the idea that time temporalizes itself in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, the immediate successor to Being and Time. Here Heidegger uses the thinking of time as “auto-affective” to develop a theory of what can rigorously be called the “transitional.” His point of departure is an explication of the problem that Kant set for himself in the Critique of Pure Reason: How do human beings, whose capacities are finite, i.e., who do not create the things they encounter, know what they do not create? Like Descartes, though more than a century later, Kant is elaborating the metaphysics of scientific method. Or so it is usually thought. For Heidegger, the Critique of Pure Reason is about the possibility of “mind’s” encounter with things. As Kant himself says, this makes the Critique a “transcendental” investigation, i.e., an investigation that is not dependent on any particular experience of objects. In Kant’s familiar terms, pure reason is experience-free, a priori. Starting from the position that empirical knowledge has two “stems,” sensory perception and concept formation, Kant seeks to elaborate a transcendental version of the sensory and the logical. At the beginning of the first Critique, this produces what Kant calls the “transcendental aesthetic” (from the Greek aisthesis, sensory), with its famous statements about space and time as the a priori conditions of all perception.
 
Throughout Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger emphasizes the relation of transcendence and the a priori to time. In the transcendental aesthetic, Kant speaks of space as the pure external sense and of time as the pure internal sense. For Kant, time as the pure internal sense is what Heidegger calls “the subjectivity of the subject,” but such that the “subject” is open to beings. As always, Heidegger is thinking time as relation, making Kant’s conception of the a priori synthesis a question of “ontological connectedness” (Being). Kant opens up this theme when he speaks of time as “synopsis,” the possibility of connectedness. Heidegger seizes upon synopsis and synthesis as two aspects of time. He pays particular attention to the way Kant himself synthesizes the transcendental aesthetic (the sensory) and transcendental logic (the conceptual). The key moment in the first Critique for Heidegger is when Kant says that the possibility of synthesizing the aesthetic and the logic is the “transcendental imagination” (44).
 
Heidegger pursues all of Kant’s references to the transcendental imagination that show it to be a) the faculty of synthesis itself; and b) intrinsically related to time as synopsis. For Heidegger, the transcendental imagination as the “third faculty” of mind, between the sensory and the conceptual, is not simply the external tying together of the other two. Rather, as synthesis itself, the imagination is the “structural” belonging together of the two stems, a “third” that is “first” in its relation to the a priori (41). It is impossible not to think here of Winnicott’s idea of the transitional as the “intermediate area of experiencing,” which is neither subjective nor objective, neither internal nor external, neither active nor passive, but that which brings them together while holding them apart.
 
This “transitionality” of the transcendental imagination is even more marked in Heidegger’s discussion of Kant on the sensory as receptive (passive) and the conceptual as spontaneous (active). As the synthesis of the sensory and the conceptual, the transcendental imagination “is the original unity of receptivity and spontaneity” (107). (In Winnicott, the baby is neither given nor creates transitional phenomena.) Here we confront the possibility of passive turning into active because of their transcendental synthesis. One must always remember that synthesis itself is time. Heidegger returns to Kant’s idea that time is the “pure internal sense,” the possibility of sensory reception, i.e., of anything affecting us. But where does time come from if it is to be an affecting yet never a present entity? Time, Heidegger says, can only be a “pure affection of itself,” auto-affection (132). Because time temporalizes itself, it is the pure possibility of anything affecting us. For Heidegger, this is the key to reframing Kant’s question about the possibility of finite knowledge. As the synthesis of the receptive and the spontaneous, the passive and the active, as pure auto-affection, time opens us–relates us–to things.
 
For Heidegger, the transcendental imagination as auto-affective time, as pure relationality, is the “abyss of metaphysics” from which Kant had to “shrink back” (Kant and the Problem 118). It is the “abyss” because it is the place where Kant’s own certainties would be undermined. As in Being and Time, this rethinking of time demonstrates that time presumed to be the infinite sequence of now points is a kind of splitting off of time as auto-affection. Kant’s own postulation of a universal, timeless cogito that produces the binding rules of thought, the very possibility of Enlightenment, is disrupted from within: the “I think” is made possible by time and by the transcendental imagination. For Heidegger, the differences between the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason demonstrate Kant’s “recoil.” In the second edition, the transcendental imagination is minimized, particularly in Kant’s transfer of the possibility of synthesis from the aesthetic to the logic. In other words, the more familiar reading of Kant, the one that sees him as the spokesman for modern science, while not incorrect, prefers his retreat from what was gained in the first edition. When in the first edition Kant describes the transcendental imagination as “a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no knowledge whatever, but of which we are seldom conscious, even once,” the psychoanalyst can only wonder what this might have to do with the unconscious (44). Given the thrust of Heidegger’s reading, however, the psychoanalyst would also have to wonder about the unconscious as transitional, intermediate, and temporal.
 
To summarize this rethinking of time: 1. Time as the infinite sequence of now points is a “leveling down” of ecstatic time. 2. Ecstatic time is the coexistence of future, past, and present as modes of relation. 3. Ecstatic time is finite. 4. Since it is not present and is neither subject nor object, time temporalizes itself; it is auto-affection. 5. Auto-affective time is both passive and active, the intermediate “third area” that precedes and links passivity and activity, subject and object. 6. Auto-affective time is the possibility of relation.
 

Primary Scopophilia

 
There is a singular moment in Freud’s theory of sexuality that integrates these six points, while opening onto a thinking of a discontinuous, eruptive time. For an instant, Freud conceives an intermediate, transitional organization of sexuality in relation to history as time. This moment gives the answer to Laplanche’s question: how to integrate the theory of sexuality with the theory of time as ecstasis and as periodicity, rhythm, repetition.
 
The moment comes toward the end of the 1915 “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (the unhappy rendering of “Triebe und Triebschicksale,” “Drives and the Fates of the Drives”). Bassin reminds us that in this paper Freud speaks of active and passive fantasies turning into each other, a familiar theme. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud had said that the “component drives” of infantile sexuality occur as pairs of opposites, i.e. in active and passive versions. Here he is interested in the genealogy of these pairs of opposites. He first examines sadism-masochism and says that originally the child simply wishes to “exercise violence or power upon some other person as object” in a non-sexual way (“Instincts” 127). This non-sexual, active aim to hurt is then turned around upon the subject, and the object is given up. The wish is now to hurt oneself. As Laplanche emphasizes, a non-sexual wish to hurt becomes sexual in the turning around upon oneself (Life and Death 89). In a third stage, an extraneous object is sought to inflict pain upon oneself. Freud calls this masochism proper. He notes that in the second stage, originally active sadism is not yet passive. Rather, the “active voice is changed, not into the passive, but into the reflexive, middle voice” (“Instincts” 128). The middle–intermediate–voice can be called the voice of auto-affective processes. Laplanche claims that because erotism emerges in this “intermediate” moment, it is sexually “primary” (Life and Death 94). However, his emphasis, like Bassin’s, is on fantasy. In Laplanche’s reading, sexuality as fantasy emerges in turning around upon oneself.
 
When Freud examines voyeurism-exhibitionism, he initially finds the same structure as in sadism-masochism. An active wish to look is turned around upon the subject, setting up the passive aim of being looked at; then one seeks an extraneous object who looks at one–voyeurism has become exhibitionism. But, says Freud, this is actually not right, because there is a stage prior to the active wish to look. He distinguishes between the genealogy of sadism-masochism and voyeurism-exhibitionism: the wish to hurt is not originally sexual, while the wish to look is. Once voyeurism is originally sexual, however, it has to be thought in relation to auto-erotism, the essence of infantile sexuality. So, says Freud, “the scopophilic instinct is auto-erotic; it has indeed an object, but that object is part of the subject’s own body” (“Instincts” 130). Moreover, the “preliminary stage is interesting because it is the source of both the situations represented in the resulting pair of opposites” (130). In the “preliminary stage,” “oneself looking at a sexual organ” equals “a sexual organ being looked at by oneself” (130). The first half of the equation (“oneself looking”) becomes active looking at “an extraneous object” (the voyeuristic subject); the second half (“at a sexual organ”) becomes a part of oneself passively being looked at by an “extraneous person” (the exhibitionistic object) (130). The preliminary stage then, is one in which the oppositions subject-object and active-passive do not hold. It can rigorously be called transitional.[7] This “intermediate” moment is now primary (131).
 
The “auto-erotic stage of scopophilia” might seem to be a purely theoretical inference. However, the idea that looking at a sexual organ equals a sexual organ being looked at by oneself exactly describes the situation of the infant and the breast. To interpret “primary scopophilia” this way, I must call upon other things Freud says about the original “baby-breast” relation. The tie to the breast is originally identificatory. In the oral phase, the baby “incorporates” the breast. For Freud, as for Jessica Benjamin, identification is the root of all love. At the end of his life, Freud expands this idea when he says that “being” the breast precedes “having” the breast (“Findings” 299). He could just as well have said that in 1914 he had described the original psychic organization as one of primary narcissism, in which there is not yet inner or outer, subject or object (74-75). In primary narcissism the baby “is” its “objects.” Even earlier, in the Three Essays, Freud says that the original relation to the breast is both self-preservative and erotic. In the state prior to the division of self-preservation and sexuality, there is always a relation to what Freud calls an “object” (222). If one factors in primary narcissism here, it is immediately apparent why “object” is the wrong word: there is not yet a subject. Rather, one can say that there is originally a relation to an other that one is. This is the structure of difference itself: simultaneous connection and separation without a subject-object structure. In primary scopophilia, reinterpreted as the baby-breast relation in an organization of primary narcissism, the infant is the breast it sees, making this a reflexive, auto-affective seeing. Because this “seeing” is not in itself self-preservative but is sexual, it is, as Freud says, auto-erotic. And because it occurs within the organization of primary narcissism, it is auto-affective. This interpretation of primary scopophilia is an attempt to link Freud on “being the breast” to Heidegger on being as relatedness without a subject-object structure, a relatedness conceivable as auto-affective process. Or more accurately, as Derrida would put it, as auto-hetero-affective process: primary narcissism is a relation to an otherness that affects one as affection of oneself.
 
If this linkage has any internal coherence, it would have to be related to time, finitude, ecstasis. Finite time for Freud is always a question of periodicity, a question he immediately raises in relation to “primary scopophilia.” He is attempting to account for the way in which voyeurism can be succeeded by exhibitionism, because both derive from “primary scopophilia.” He writes:
 

The only correct statement to make about the scopophilic instinct would be that all the stages of its development, its auto-erotic, preliminary stage as well as its final active or passive form, co-exist alongside one another . . . . We can divide the life of each instinct [Trieb, drive] into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogenous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava. We can then perhaps picture the first, original eruption of the instinct [Trieb] as proceeding in an unchanged form and undergoing no development at all. The next wave would be modified from the outset–being turned, for instance, from active to passive–and would then, with this new characteristic, be added to the earlier wave, and so on. If we were then to take a survey of the instinctual impulse from its beginning up to a given point, the succession of waves which we have described would inevitably present the picture of a definite development of the instinct [Trieb] . . . . This reference to the developmental history of instincts [Triebe] and the permanence of their intermediate stages should make the development of instincts fairly intelligible to us.
 

(130-31, emphasis added)

 

How does the “permanence” of the intermediate stages of the drives make their developmental history “intelligible”? One can read Freud to say that because the active and passive forms of looking derive from the preliminary phase, all the phases actually co-exist. (This is related to Bassin’s point that no matter what the overt sexual behavior, the opposite position is alive in fantasy. But Bassin, like Laplanche, does not raise the issue of the “primary, intermediate” drive organization as reality.) Certainly either the active or passive form can appear to dominate a given period of drive activity, like a discrete eruption of lava. The collection of discrete “eruptions” is the history of the drive. But the “source” of the “lava” is the primary, intermediate phase, which is “permanent.” Otherwise, there would be no “eruption” at all. Nor would one have a way of explaining how and why a phase of exhibitionism can succeed a phase of voyeurism, despite their apparent opposition.

 
The “permanence” of the intermediate stage, the “volcanic” source of successive eruptions, is the permanence of its periodic repetition. In Derrida’s sense, it is the repetition of the differential intermediate. Freud, of course, does not say this directly. But one can link this disruptive repetition to one of Freud’s rare considerations of a possible relation between unconscious and conscious time. For a moment in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud imagines a traumatic unconscious temporality that calls for the conscious (specifically Kantian) notion of time as a protective device, a stimulus barrier.[8] I am pushing on this metaphor of the volcano to link Freud’s idea of disruptive time to the tension of intermediate states, the tension that Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle links to periodicity and to something between pleasure and unpleasure, and to the tension of “normal bisexuality” as “life,” inevitably in conflict with tension reduction.
 
Further, because Freud explains the “developmental history” of the drive as a function of periodic “eruption” of auto-affective, primary, intermediate drives, the temporalization of the drives is the repetition of their transitional states. The apparently self-identical organization of any given period, in which one can say “I am a voyeur, an exhibitionist, a sadist, a masochist,” or–if one thinks “normal bisexuality”–“a homosexual, a heterosexual,” is the tension reducing response to the “primary intermediate.” To say, “I am now . . . ” is to privilege a presence made possible by the repetition of an intermediate state, a state that can never be present. It is always split into active-passive, subjective-objective, seemingly uniform periods. But the historical linkage of the periods, the fact that present sexuality is always in relation to its past and its future, sexuality as ecstasis, is due to the coexistence of the auto-erotic, auto-affective primary intermediate phase with the passive-active, subjective-objective, phases.
 
There is another element of the baby-breast relation that must be mentioned here, one that goes back to Freud’s very early work. From the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology on, Freud always thought that the origin of unconscious wishes is the registration of the “experience of satisfaction.” His idea was that when the baby is fed it forms an unconscious memory trace. This kind of memory formation has two axes: the opening of a pathway and the storage of an image. The opening of a pathway depends upon one tension meeting another: the force of what comes from the outside meeting the resistance of the inside. The result is a differentiation of pathways (Project 317-19). If one imagines such memory formation occurring within the organization of primary narcissism, then again one would have to think of it as an auto-(hetero)-affective process.
 
Here, the relation to repetition is clearly grounded in the rhythmic cycles of bodily need (hunger). Need is finitude. Need is originally both self-preservative and erotic. The inference is that repetitive bodily need carries the unconscious memory of primary narcissism, of the tension between pleasure and unpleasure, of the primary, intermediate, i.e., the transitional. In place of Laplanche’s theory of the enigmatic signifier of seduction, I am proposing this integration of registration of the experience of satisfaction with primary scopophilia and primary narcissism. This is the model of how transitional sexual difference temporalizes, because it is an ecstatic, auto-affective process: the needy, finite baby is other than itself in order to be itself. (This is why Derrida’s expression “hetero-auto-affective” is critical. It brings “otherness”–à la Laplanche–into the heart of auto-affection and ecstasis.) Being the breast precedes having the breast. The baby is “in the world.” And the future history of all the oppositions that will color the repetition of sexual need, sexuality as the “stretching toward” each of past, present, and future, is written in the tension of this ecstatic auto-hetero-affection. As a tension it will always be split into what appear to be opposite essences, which can actually oscillate with each other (the voyeur becomes an exhibitionist, etc). But here we also have the answer to Laplanche’s question: a conception of time as periodicity, as rhythm, is tied to a sexual time as ecstasis.
 
Derrida writes of time, rhythm, tension, and difference as the repetition of the intermediate. Deleuze, outlining the relation between difference and repetition, also integrates his conception with the temporality of need: “The repetition of need, and of everything which depends upon it, expresses the time which belongs to the synthesis of time, the intratemporal character of that synthesis. Repetition is essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance which essentially involves repetition” (Difference 77). Here Deleuze is speaking of repetition in the way that Laplanche speaks of rhythm, as the “time of time.”[9] These sentences are the bridge between “the mystery of sex and the mystery of time.” Need as repetition opens a thinking of time as temporal synthesis–essentially Heidegger’s project in Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Sexual need, the “biorhythm” of a finite body, is the repetition of the unconscious memory of the non-present, transitional tension in which need always opens us to relation, a relation that undermines self-enclosed identity and the opposition of essences.
 
The tension of what Derrida called a “pre-dual sexuality,” which is not necessarily “unitary, homogenous and undifferentiated,” will always be split into what appears to be the “bedrock” of active and passive, from which all other sexual “oppositions” derive. As finite temporal-sexual beings, we are constituted by transitional tension and by splitting. This means that psychoanalytic theory and practice have to expand. When “cultural,” or even “philosophical” splitting meets “intrapsychic” splitting, we all too easily assume that we are saying something about foundational reality. (I believe that this is Freud’s problem when he calls the repudiation of femininity–i.e., castration–“bedrock,” which implies immutability.) To take sexuality into the transitional realm is to see why psychoanalysis has to challenge assumptions about reality, if it is not to perpetuate splitting. This challenge inevitably opens onto time as repetition of a tension between pleasure and unpleasure. This is no simple affair, either for theory or for practice. But it is unavoidable, once sexuality and time inhabit each other unconsciously.
 
Above, I suggest the possible political implications of such thinking: the inevitable social, theoretical, and individual violence directed against “transitional tension.” Laplanche also says something important about the political implications of his theory of the unconscious:
 

In the face of the alterity of the other, the methods of defence are immutably the same: attempt at assimilation, denial of difference, segregation, destruction. These are quite clearly found in attitudes to cultural and ethnic differences. But what is lacking in all the analyses of ‘racism’ is any consideration of the internal split inherent in the other himself: it is this internal alterity which is at the root of the anxiety provoked by external alterity, it is this that one seeks to reduce at any price.
 

(230, n.21)

 

Laplanche here means that the “other’s unconscious,” first embodied by the mother, is traumatizing. Violence against the other is the result of anxiety about the “other’s other.” And Laplanche understands that this is also a question of time. I am stating here that seeing time and sexuality as transitional tension, embodied in all forms of relatedness not conceivable in oppositional, subject-object terms, is a more consistent way of approaching this question. Once sexuality and time inhabit each other unconsciously, the rethinking of both is a rethinking of destruction–neikos –against life as love–philia–which is disturbance, eruption, almost a volcano.

 

 

Few twentieth-century discourses have shaped the humanities and social sciences like psychoanalysis. The work of Sigmund Freud and his inheritors has been a driving force behind countless efforts to rethink the most fundamental questions of subjectivity, history, and politics. This enduring influence is readily evident in contemporary gender studies, film theory, and media studies–to list only the most obvious examples. Perhaps even more uniquely, the authority of psychoanalysis has crossed all methodological and ideological lines, impacting Anglo-American analytic as much as Continental philosophy, empirical anthropological research as well as semiotics and formalist hermeneutics. Freud himself sets the stage for these developments. Throughout his oeuvre, he routinely moves between observations about the dynamics organizing a singular psyche and broader reflections on cultural experience, considering art, literature, and religion as well as the nature of charismatic leaders, mass movements, and the possibilities for world peace. At the same time, it is in the midst of his strongest assertions of parallels between individual and sociopolitical systems that Freud betrays the most profound doubts about the explanatory reach of his work. Paradoxically, the status of psychoanalysis as a “master discourse,” its seeming ability to model everything under the sun, may be the product of the profound skepticism it directs toward its own mastery.
 
Near the close of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud asks whether his account of “the integration of a separate individual into a human group” provides a basis for understanding the “creation of a unified group out of many individuals” (21: 140).[1] Given the “similarity between the means employed and the resultant phenomena,” he writes, one can in this instance speak of “the same process applied to different kinds of objects” (140). In explaining the analogous development of the singular human psyche and civilization in general, Freud describes a cultural superego that resembles the individual superego in origin and function. Both formations establish ideal demands that lead to the creation of a conscience, and at times, they appear almost completely interdependent, as if one could not exist without the other. If the two differ, Freud suggests, it is only in that the injunctions of the cultural superego tend to be more legible than those of individual ones, whose commands largely remain unconscious and can thus be difficult to discern. In other words, even if one’s primary goal is to study the singular psyche rather than its social counterpart, focusing on the latter may still be the best means of understanding the former.
 
On the basis of these remarks, it would be a gross understatement to say that the development of the singular psyche is “mirrored by” or “reflected in” a larger communal field. Taking their cue from Freud’s characterization of these substantive parallels between individual psychological processes and social ones, several generations of cultural critics have felt licensed, if not required, to pass judgment on the mental welfare of entire societies. As Freud canonically formulates it:
 

If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization–possibly the whole of mankind–have become “neurotic”?
 

(21: 144)

 

The elaboration of “a pathology of cultural communities,” as Freud also terms it, has become a sine qua non of much contemporary research, even in disciplines in which the word “psychoanalysis” is rarely uttered. From anthropologists to art historians, from poetry critics to urban economists, scholars routinely pursue a host of different diagnoses of the psycho-logics of mass formations, implicitly and explicitly analogizing individual dynamics with groups ranging from reading or consuming publics to the populations of nations or continents.

 
Given the authority that Freud’s views on this topic have acquired, it is important to consider whether his claim that “the development of civilization” is “comparable to the normal maturation of the individual” is entirely compatible with his other views about social experience (21: 97-98). As is well known, a central concept in his later work–and a topic of considerable controversy for many of his inheritors–is the death drive. Freud maintains that both the singular psyche and civilization are structured by the same irresolvable clash between Eros and a Todestrieb, between a Lebenstrieb and a Destruktionstrieb. In fact, near the end of Civilization and its Discontents it is Freud’s confrontation with the all-permeating influence of this collision of forces that first prompts him to detail the analogy between the development of the individual and the development of culture.[2] Yet these reflections on the parallels between individual and cultural superegos take place in a book whose overarching theme–a theme that predominates in Freud’s later thought–is that “aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man” and “constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization” (122). In The Future of an Illusion, written two years before Civilization and its Discontents, Freud declares that “every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human interest,” adding that “civilization has to be defended against the individual” and that “in consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (21: 6/112). In other words, the development of the individual and the development of culture, two dynamics that proceed according to the same methods and produce remarkably similar results, are nonetheless essentially at odds with one another. Crucially, the divisive tension common to both processes, the clash of Eros and the death drive, does not explain this mutual antagonism; i.e., it is not a question of a discord internal to the individual reproducing itself as a conflict between self and other(s):
 

But this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction–probably an irreconcilable one–between the primal instincts of Eros and death. It is a dispute within the economics of the libido, comparable to the contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects.
 

(21: 141)

 

Not only does Freud avoid claiming that it is the developmental similarities between the individual and its society that inexorably bring them into conflict with one another, but he also goes to some lengths to complement the parallels he has identified between these processes with a list of their differences, ultimately concluding that the overarching aim of culture is “one great unity, the unity of mankind,” a goal to which no individual psyche even vaguely aspires (122).[3] For its part, the individual tirelessly seeks its own happiness, as a consequence of which “the development process of the individual can thus be expected to have special features of its own which are not reproduced in the process of human civilization” (140).[4] The remarkable similarities between the methods and results of individual and social development notwithstanding, it is no longer clear that communal phenomena can be understood as “extensions” or “reflections” of the individual or that one can look to a cultural superego as a way of learning something about an individual one.[5] More bluntly, it may be that despite what Freud himself argues in earlier works such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the libidinal model of an individual psyche cannot account for social dynamics.[6] As useful as Freud’s discussions of conscience, the Oedipus complex, or the relationship between sadomasochism and narcissism may be for understanding political logics, Freud is far more skeptical about the reliability of such “applied” analyses than many of his followers.

 
In fact, it could be argued that from the moment he introduces the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud’s discussions of the relations between individual and cultural processes of development are characterized by this dual–at times almost graphically divergent–emphasis on their striking parallels and their profound mutual antagonisms. The resulting aporias are well known and account for the pessimistic reputation of Freud’s later writings: the regulation of aggression becomes virtually indistinguishable from the causes of aggression; the self-destructiveness of civilization stems from the way in which it gives either too much or too little expression to libidinal forces; and, most generally, the dynamics within culture that threaten to tear it apart are also the source of its most celebrated achievements. It therefore comes as no surprise that in Civilization and its Discontents Freud asks for forgiveness for wasting everyone’s time by writing down what is simply common knowledge and yet simultaneously declines to offer an opinion on the inherent worth of culture and denies having any real insight into the problems he is exploring, as if this “common knowledge” were uncommonly obscure, even to him.
 
The presence of these stark tensions in Freud’s later work does not necessarily mean that any “pathology of cultural communities” is destined to fail, but if the processes of civilization and the dynamics internal to individuals are both identical to and antithetical to one another, it is clear that psycho-cultural research cannot proceed along the straightforward lines that Freud himself seems both to propose and to undertake. In fact, it may be that psychoanalysis has been a tremendous resource for cultural criticism because in Freud the theory of an analogy between the individual and the social is always also a critique of the authority of analogy as such. In first introducing the parallels between the development of the singular psyche and the development of civilization, Freud explicitly acknowledges that it is difficult to know what inferences can and cannot be drawn from such an alignment of systems, stressing that one may easily take the comparison too far and find that the resulting conclusions are not coherent in the original terms of the demonstration. If, for example, treating the development of culture like the development of an individual allows us to attribute psychological maladies to an entire people or epoch, we immediately see that unlike with a neurotic patient, who can be contrasted with a “normal,” non-neurotic man or woman, there is no overarching baseline of comparison that would make it possible to deem one culture “sick” and one “healthy.” Of course, this objection is far from damning. Freud casually acknowledges a solution–making comparisons across multiple cultures–which he does himself when he notes that he is working hard to avoid “the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization” (21: 116). In addressing the formal structure of analogy in abstract terms, however, Freud underscores the inherent instability of the schema. The issue is not simply that any analogy posits an implicit difference between the terms it aligns, e.g., that an analogy between the individual and the cultural is tantamount to a statement about their differences. More importantly, by according authority to a tertium comparationis, one introduces new distinctions that may not be so easily controlled. It is this question of how best to manage the conceptual implications of his comparisons that Freud, having just articulated his crucial analogy, immediately tries to resolve:
 

The process of the civilization of the human species is, of course, an abstraction of a higher order than is the development of the individual and it is therefore harder to apprehend in concrete terms, nor should we pursue analogies to an obsessional extreme [die Aufspürung von Analogien soll nicht zwanghaft übertrieben werden].
 

(140)

 

Having established foundational connections between the development of the individual and the development of human culture as a whole–indeed, having gone so far as to say that the latter process clarifies dimensions of the former that may otherwise remain invisible–Freud notably does not try to explain why this argument might be at odds with the general theme of his book, the antagonism between the individual and society, and instead pauses to warn that such an “analogy” may get out of hand. Far from being led astray by what we are (or are not) learning about the relationship between the individual and its culture, it is the seductiveness of analogical demonstration itself that arouses our obsessive impulses. If we are not careful, the analogy will take on a life of its own, compromising its reliability by saying too much. To be clear, the seductiveness of analogy in general is not grounds for worrying that any particular analogy is fallacious. To the contrary, the analogy in question here gains its potentially misleading momentum from the fact that the parallels it highlights are “true.”

 
Naturally, we are not dealing with just any analogy. On the basis of it, one can draw (or reject) countless conclusions about the parallels between social reality and the workings of singular minds. For this very reason, however, this analogy indicates why such correspondences are simultaneously vital, dangerous, and, most crucially, unavoidable. At the beginning of this essay, we noted that over the last century psychoanalysis has shown itself to have seemingly boundless explanatory powers that cross virtually all methodological and ideological borders. The irony is that for Freud doubts about the argumentative scope of psychoanalysis arise not because its models are somehow limited, but rather because they are never limited enough. In this particular instance, it turns out that once the authority of analogy is given full reign, it acquires a paradigmatic status that may undermine the articulation of the very distinctions it is intended to clarify:
 

I would not say that an attempt . . . to carry psychoanalysis over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless. But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are dealing only with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with people but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been involved.
 

(21: 144)

 

Formulated in blunter terms than anything we have to this point considered, the suggestion that using psychoanalysis as a basis for broader cultural reflections rests on what is ultimately “only an analogy” threatens to undermine much of the scholarship that has been done in Freud’s name over the last century. At the same time, Freud’s concern about the standard of comparison on the basis of which one culture could be termed “neurotic” and one “healthy” applies equally well here: By what standard is an analogy “only” an analogy? Is not psychoanalysis, of all fields, a discourse in which the ideational or intelligible content of a comparison is no more or less “real” than some physical or material phenomenon or register? What external reference point or third term allows for a clear differentiation between an analogical and a non-analogical assertion of identity between two concepts, entities, or processes? In this regard, it is important to observe that precisely what Freud has not been doing with the individual and the collective in Civilization and its Discontents is “tearing them from the sphere in which they have originated.” Indeed, his entire discussion aims to explore the parameters of their respective emergences. Moreover, by implicitly analogizing people with concepts in the very gesture of trying to qualify the demonstrative authority of analogy (“it is dangerous, not only with people but also with concepts”) Freud reveals just how obsessive our reliance on analogy actually is. Not only is his rejection of analogy indirectly made through an analogy, but it is through an analogy that repeats the error he wants to avoid. By aligning human beings and concepts, Freud, far from grounding his discussion in concrete terms, moves it to “an abstraction of a higher order,” for if the development of the individual and the development of civilization can be likened to one another on the basis of a host of similarities in their methods and results, Freud has done nothing to show that there is any justification for paralleling people and concepts along similar lines. Having just given us good reason to be concerned about the complications introduced by the fact that any analogy in effect becomes an analogy of analogy, it is Freud who seems to be the one on the verge of tearing his arguments from the sphere in which they have originated.

 
All of this suggests that the questions of logic and rhetoric raised in Freud’s treatment of analogy play an essential role in his conceptualization of cultural systems. At the start of his discussion of the relationship between the development of the individual and the development of civilization, Freud acknowledges that since these dynamics and “organic life in general” all appear to be characterized by the struggle between Eros and the death drive, “we cannot . . . avoid going into the relations of these three processes to one another” (21: 139). If the set of comparisons and contrasts that ensues is “imperative and unavoidable” (“unabweisbar“), that is, if the resulting demonstration is reliably inevitable, it is nonetheless inevitably unreliable, as well. We cannot help but undertake the analysis, yet we do so with the knowledge that we will fall prey to the seductions of analogy. To put this more prosaically, if Freud challenges us to pursue the insights garnered by the unavoidable recognition of the similarities between the development of the individual and the development of culture, we must at the same time problematize the integrity of the analogies thereby produced. The argument succeeds by generating results that it has to question rather than embrace. If psychoanalysis is a powerful paradigm of interdisciplinary research or of social experience in general, this is because it articulates a forceful critique of the claims of its own models to be exhaustive. Psychoanalysis is one discourse that will never unambiguously present itself as a master discourse, even at the points at which its doctrines acquire their most universal pretensions. In what respects, then, does the illustrative power of Freud’s analogy between the individual and culture run its course? Is our obsession with it terminable or interminable? In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud offers no definitive way to decide whether it is possible to “work through” the obsessive impulses analogy excites. If anything, he suggests that the effort to fight against such impulses may actually intensify them.
 
These difficulties are by no means unique to Civilization and its Discontents. Whenever Freud wants to coordinate the singular psyche and communal dynamics, he introduces a representational schema as a supplemental element; but in each instance, the figure in question, far from remaining marginal or secondary, generalizes to become the central semantic paradigm. The question of how insights into individual psychological processes can or should guide the study of history, aesthetics, or politics is thereby subordinated to concerns about the relationship between thought and language; e.g., the task at hand is suddenly to articulate a concept of analogy that can be distinguished from an analogy of analogy.
 
The discussion of dream symbolism in The Interpretation of Dreams and the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis is a case in point. In the first version of the Traumdeutung, Freud argues that the individual dreamer’s own associations are the core of any systematic interpretation of a dream. Emphasizing the singularity of each oneiric expression, he writes that he is “prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts” (4: 105). However, with the new material added to the book between 1914 and 1923, the discussion of the dream-work is greatly expanded, and Freud appends example after example of codified dream symbols (kings are the dreamer’s father, rooms represent women, children stand in for the genitals, and so on).[7] As fixed relations between manifest and latent contents that have not been forged by a singular dreaming psyche, these symbols are entirely resistant to interrogation through the dreamer’s associations. Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok identify this tension as a fundamental impasse in Freud’s thought, something that calls for outright repair.[8] Yet it would be equally accurate to say that it is in dwelling on the forces that organize this “impasse” that psychoanalysis becomes a discourse about the individual and the collective. From his first remarks on the topic, Freud makes it clear that symbols are not products of dreams or in any way unique to them. To the contrary, symbols are part of a broader cultural milieu, a means of expression that can be found in idioms, myths, and folklore. When symbols appear in a dream, they are highly expressive, but they are not the individual‘s expressions–to use them is akin to speaking a language one does not actually know. Initially, Freud argues that the presence of symbols in dreams is a contingency, that is, symbols are indirect representations that just happen to be available for the dream-work to take advantage of as a tool for censorship. As a consequence, Freud is adamant that the interpretation of dream symbols is to be regarded as a supplement to the main analytic focus on the patient’s own associations with the manifest dream text: “Interpretation based on a knowledge of symbols is not a technique which can replace or compete with the associative one. It forms a supplement to the latter” (15: 151). As with the obsession-inducing analogy, however, this hierarchy proves to be anything but stable. Having made the point that symbolism is only one of the techniques of indirect representation relied on by the dream-work for censorship, Freud almost immediately grants it the more substantial status of “a second and independent factor in the distortion of dreams, alongside of the dream-censorship” (168). The difficulties involved in keeping the “supplement” in its place become even more obvious as Freud tries to clarify the boundaries between dream symbolism and the other three types of relations between manifest and latent dream content: part for whole, allusion (Anspielung), and plastic portrayal (Verbildlichung). “The essence of this symbolic relation,” Freud writes, “is that it is a comparison (Vergleich), but not a comparison of any sort. Special limitations seem to be attached to the comparison, but it is hard to say what they are” (152). If some symbolic comparisons are so obvious as scarcely to qualify as indirect representations (and hence as instances of censorship), others are so obscure that the tertium comparationis remains forever unknowable. In the latter case, the symbol links two contents, but there is no way to explain why, as if on a semantic level the alignment were completely unmotivated. To make matters even messier, Freud says that there is no guarantee that any given element in the manifest content of a specific dream is functioning in its symbolic capacity, i.e., sometimes a room or a child is just a room or a child. Given the vexing character of symbolic relations–at once obvious and obscure, restricted and unrestricted, direct and indirect–“we must admit . . . that the concept of a symbol cannot at present be sharply delimited: it shades off into such notions as those of a substitution (Ersetzung) or representation (Darstellung), and even approaches that of an allusion (Anspielung)” (152). Introduced as a particular type of indirect relationship between two contents, the symbol potentially comes to infect all representations, whether by reducing them to purely contingent codifications (linked mechanically, with no substantive connections between the elements), dissolving them into fields of imprecise allusions, or transforming them into indifferent sequences in which any term can be a substitute for any other. In submitting all semantic relations to the tyranny of its “special” comparison, the symbol negates the conceptual specificity of comparison itself and threatens to undermine the very idea of the dream-work as a forging of relations between manifest and latent contents.
 
In confronting this nexus of problems, Freud argues that anthropologists and linguists probably understand the topic better than he and that it is in trying to account for this special form of comparison that psychoanalysis discovers its essential connections with and dependence on discourses such as philology, sociology, and religious studies. Once again, the bond between the individual psyche and the cultural is articulated through an analysis that is as much poetics as it is psychology. When Freud writes that symbols are part of the unconscious “Vorstellen des Volkes” (“ideation/imagination of the people”), we see more clearly why his repeated additions to the symbolism section of The Interpretation of Dreams constitute an intervention into the debates about individual and social formations and a “collective unconscious” that raged in the teens between Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, and Carl Jung (Schriften II/III: 356). By 1915, Freud was subjecting his concept of the unconscious to a series of tests that would ultimately produce the second topography and the figure of the cultural superego. To the extent that Freud accords the symbol an unusual status as unconscious knowledge (Kenntnisse) rather than unconscious impulses (Strebungen), we should regard his analysis of its complexities as a key moment in his efforts to recoordinate onto-and phylogenetic accounts of the human psyche. Whatever our conclusions about these more general points, Freud’s consideration of symbolism shows how each of his attempts to describe the relations between individual and cultural dynamics turns, or founders, on the way in which an ostensibly restricted figure–such as the symbol or analogy–comes to infect, if not to control, the representational schemas that ostensibly delimit it.[9]
 
Our discussion suggests that the abiding challenge for psychoanalytically guided criticism is to embrace both Freud’s optimism about the explanatory potential of his research for all areas of human experience and his tacit (pessimistic) acknowledgement that any theoretical articulation of the individual with the social seems fated to occur on the basis of a representational dynamic that is far from stable. This special issue of Postmodern Culture was originally conceived as an opportunity to reflect on these issues by looking at the changing aesthetic and political significance of psychoanalytic thought over the last several decades. On the one hand, the basic parameters of such a review seem clear. Any discussion of psychoanalysis and politics today almost necessarily takes as its central reference point French thought of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era in which the relations between Freudian and Marxist doctrines were explored with unprecedented vigor. Indeed, it is doubtful that the enthusiasm for Freudo-Marxism has ever subsequently waned. From Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida to Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek, efforts to come to terms with the political implications of psychoanalytic arguments have repeatedly been linked to philosophical reconsiderations of Idealism and its most prominent nineteenth-century critic, Karl Marx. On the other hand, it is easy to muddy this picture. No thinker has had more influence on contemporary debates about gender and politics than Michel Foucault, and his singular impact has arguably had a great deal to do with the extent to which he cannot be situated in a psychoanalytic camp. More specifically, one could ask whether Foucault’s ideas about bio-power and their reinterpretation in the work of Giorgio Agamben or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri mark the petering out of the Freudo-Marxist rage of the 1960s and 1970s, rather than its continuation. When it comes to the Frankfurt School, it is similarly uncertain just how crucial some conjunction of Freud and Marx is for confronting basic questions about liberalism and capitalism. Although both Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin are known for their cryptic–in Adorno’s case highly ironic–engagements with Freudian doctrines, it is far from clear how much this facet of their work influences their readings of Marx, their understandings of culture, or their theories of fascism. Finally, much could be said about the way in which historicist paradigms have gradually displaced the influence of psychoanalytic models, particularly when it comes to studies of ethnicity and globalization.
 
The essays in this issue take as their starting point these and related uncertainties about the coherence of any Freudo-Marxist synthesis. In “In Theory, Politics Does Not Exist,” Brett Levinson begins by revisiting one of this field’s founding dilemmas: why should the masses desire fascism rather than socialism? Starting with George Bataille’s claim that without the help of psychoanalysis no Marxist project can explain why modern capitalist democracies should witness the emergence of right-wing populist movements rather than left-wing ones, Levinson focuses on Lacan’s Seventeenth Seminar and his notorious challenge to the Parisian students in the aftermath of May of 1968: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.” For Lacan, argues Levinson, freedom from mastery and master signifiers occurs not by rioting in the streets, but through the jouissance and knowledge made possible by the analysis of language and the reading and overwriting of the language of the other that occurs in the transference. What is ironic, concludes Levinson, is that Slavoj Zizek, the most prominent self-proclaimed Lacanian of our day, has missed this lesson entirely. Turning to Zizek’s recent debate with Ernesto Laclau about populism as a paradigm for the political as such, Levinson shows that both writers end up claiming that political praxis is based on the avoidance of the knowledge and joy central to Lacan’s thinking. In the end, neither one of these two theorists can understand his own work–theory–as political.
 
This focus on Lacan and his reaction to the events of 1968 brings us face to face with one of the central concerns of late twentieth-century French thought: must social movements be understood in terms of dynamics of desire and energy that escape traditional categories of subjectivity and unsettle any clear opposition between the ideal and the material, or the body and language? In “The Desire Called Mao,” Eleanor Kaufman asks whether the synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism celebrated in the “libidinal economy theory” of Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard is resurrected in the work of a thinker who at first–and even second–glance could not appear to be more different: Alain Badiou. One of Kaufman’s key insights is that the interest of libidinal theorists in energistic flux is complemented by a concern with inertia, a vestige of Freud’s death drive encapsulated by notions such as the “zero point” of desire and the immobilization of the body. If Badiou shares neither the methods, assumptions, nor goals of these philosophers, he nonetheless addresses this question of stasis and its significance for his conceptualization of the event when he breaks with Marxist ideas of periodization and change and directs a great deal of skepticism toward the structuring authority of temporality itself. The consequence, Kaufman shows, is that these very different thinkers all confront an a-material materialism that contemporary discussions of trauma, memory, and the haunting of the past have failed to understand.
 
These two articles suggest that any consideration of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism must take as a central task a rethinking of the concepts of time and history. This is true both for Badiou’s concern with the waiting involved in the inevitably belated recognition of the event and for Lacan’s interest in the temporality of affect as a time “on the other side” that is forever on the brink of arriving.[10] It has been argued that Marx never subjects time to the critique he directs at the other bedrocks of bourgeois thought. But is psychoanalysis also guilty of under-theorizing time? In “The Mystery of Sex and the Mystery of Time,” Alan Bass explores this problem, starting with the deceptively simple question of why sexuality is a theoretical issue. Working from Laplanche’s effort to link the Freudian unconscious with Heidegger, Bass asks what it would mean to coordinate psychoanalytic models of sexuality with a theory of ekstasis. He focuses on the idea of “eruptive time,” the moment at which the tension defining sexual need opens up a relation to the other that cannot be grasped by a traditional subject-object opposition. The crucial thing to recognize, Bass suggests, is that this unsettling of self-enclosed identity by an unconscious memory of non-presence is a profound source of violence against the other. As an expression of anxiety about the other’s unconscious, eruptive time must therefore be central to any explanation of the relationship between the intrapsychic and the cultural. In “Endopsychic Allegories,” Laurence Rickels approaches the conceptualization of social relations in psychoanalysis from a somewhat different perspective, focusing on “endopsychic perception,” which Freud describes in a famous letter to Fliess: “The dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond. Immortality, retribution, the entire beyond are all reflections of our psychic inside” (Complete Letters 286). In an intertextual study of Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs, Freud’s case study of Schreber, and Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, Rickels considers this endopsychic perception as “the inside view (afforded through certain psychotic delusions) of the psyche at the intersection between technology and the unconscious.” Highlighting the parallels between the sadism of the allegorist and the paranoid, Rickels reads Philip K. Dick’s quasi-autobiographical final novels and his earlier Time Out of Joint as meditations on the Freudo-Benjaminian understandings of un-mourning and melancholy and the relationship between psychic reality and loss.
 
As a discourse at once enthralled by and profoundly at odds with its own explanatory powers, Freudian thought remains one of the best examples of what a genuinely critical project can be. Together, the essays in this volume offer a complex picture of what is involved in articulating a psychoanalytic theory of society or culture. In one respect, their lesson appears to be that some of the basic categories of political philosophy have to be rethought from the perspective of dynamics of repetition and mourning or stasis and ekstasis, that is, with schemas that bear little resemblance to the traditional paradigms of development, regression, or revolution. At the same time, there is a sense that the progressive potential of this kind of research is not predicated on a complete rejection of Enlightenment presuppositions about the value of knowledge and the hierarchies that inevitably obtain between intellectual and material labor. Whatever the ultimate point of emphasis, it is clear that psychoanalysis continues to be central to the way in which the historicity of theory is being explored.
 

 

Gossip and conspiracy discourse have long been epistemologically suspect, and recent critical treatments tend either to celebrate or to excoriate these social phenomena. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip heralds a new perspective, proposing that gossiping and speculating are not only defensible but also fundamental-indeed inescapable-ways of knowing. Offering a theoretical analysis that simultaneously abjures a traditional thesis, claims wide-ranging associative liberties, and insists on the groundlessness of all truth-making, Birchall engages in a tricky balancing act; the book aims to level the relationship between academic studies and popular knowledge-production and yet, almost paradoxically, to define a more radical role for cultural studies.
 
Repeatedly the book underscores that aporia haunts all knowledge-building and that the procedures of conspiracy theory and gossip-often critiqued for their sketchy grasp on confirmed truths-resemble the methods employed even by more legitimized forms of speculation, such as traditional scholarship. Early on, Birchall acknowledges fundamental debts to Michel Foucault-particularly to Foucault’s notions about the commingling of power and knowledge within discursive formations-and to Jacques Derrida, whose ideas on aporia, trace, absence, and responsibility inform the book’s deconstruction of knowledge hierarchies. Yet the text also builds on the revaluation of gossip initiated by Patricia Meyer Spacks’s 1985 Gossip, and it echoes the impulse to link conspiracy theorizing to postmodern experience that readers will recall from both Mark Fenster’s Conspiracy Theories (1999) and Patrick O’Donnell’s Latent Destinies (2000).
 
Birchall argues that cultural studies-often assailed within the university in precisely the terms used to castigate popular knowledge-has a more radical response available to it than the ultimately conservative struggle for “legitimacy” as traditional academic scholarship. Insofar as “true justified” knowledge and the social authority it enjoys are not objective facts but, rather, culturally conferred categories of convenience, to emphasize-rather than deny or displace-aporia presents a more productive cultural studies project than keeping the secret. Accordingly, traditional analyses of phenomena such as conspiracy or gossip are insufficient if they leave intact an assumed hierarchy dividing the putative experts from those whose practices are studied. On this count, implicitly, Birchall takes issue with Spacks, whose revaluation of gossip is couched within a traditional literary analysis requiring and showcasing specialized expertise. Challenging such hierarchies between the knowers and the known, this book argues that by relinquishing expert authority, by “thinking about the status of cultural studies . . . as a form of knowledge . . . we will have learned something from popular knowledges rather than just about popular knowledges” (31, emphases in original). Accordingly, gossip and conspiracy theory model the epistemological instruction popular culture can offer.
 
Birchall disclaims early on that no “Big Theory” structures this analysis; instead, she proposes an “athetic” line of investigation, operationally defined as “a kind of speculation that doesn’t involve positing a firm thesis or which operates under a stable principle” (118). This stance, she suggests, amounts to a deconstructive move toward knowledge-building, an approach Birchall defends against assaults-from both outside and within cultural studies-by commentators who propose to be anti- or post-theoretical or who reproach cultural studies for not being more “politically responsible.” Answering those who assail the “celebratory readings,” the “optimism,” the uncritical “populism,” or otherwise “speculative” approaches in cultural studies, Birchall reminds us that deconstruction has destabilized metaphysical certainties about the “political.” Sanctioning critical play instead, the book charges that scolding colleagues for their putative political irresponsibility betokens an unwittingly reactionary and destructive moralism that amounts to discursive border-patrolling. “If cultural studies is to be up to the job of understanding popular knowledges,” the author argues, it needs to avoid such prescriptions; “it has to consider the consequences of moralism displacing theory. . . . Moralism is nostalgia: it performs a politics appropriate to a different age” (26). Birchall’s response to reproaches couched in terms of an a priori “politics”-somewhat like that of the conspiracy theorist toward “official” culture-is to eschew debate with such assailants and to instead invoke an alternative discursive community. This strategy to emulate conspiracy is anything but accidental, for-true to what it advocates-the book does not simply study conspiracy theory and gossip; it also deliberately takes instruction from them.
 
The author acknowledges up front the inevitably speculative nature of the book’s contentions, but-for better and for worse-speculation, like “athesis,” means never having to argue for underlying assumptions and what some might deem arbitrary associations.¹ To mute the charge that her argument is hypothetical, for instance, Birchall asks how we can sort between causal and arbitrary connections. Capitalizing on this empirical liberty, she asserts a parallel among conspiracy theory-building, gossip, deconstruction, and cultural studies. All of these, Birchall argues, are “avatars for the undecidability . . . [and] the instability of knowledge, for the alterity that resides ‘within’ knowledge” (32). Here instability is not something to bemoan, but rather a condition to make peace with-or even make the most of-like the suspension of the gold standard or the dynamic of unfettered exchange. Not surprisingly, then, another connection that the text proposes among gossip, conspiracy theory, and cultural studies is their shared amenability to commodification. Knowledge and its marketability underpin academic anxiety about legitimacy, for
 

In order to sell knowledge, in order for it to have value, the knowledge economy has to disguise the aporetic tension between the impossibility and possibility of legitimate knowledge at the foundation of all knowledge: service providers and retailers have to convince consumers and shareholders to invest in knowledge by presenting it as useful, authoritative, unique, legitimate, and as theirs to sell in the first place. What is in fact risky speculation (investing in a knowledge that holds the trace of its own illegitimacy within it) with no appeal to a final authority, no guarantee of a profit, is presented as a safe investment.
 

(125)

 

Paradoxically, blowing the whistle on this pyramid scam promises to make cultural studies not less but more productive-hence more valuable-and this process entails learning from the market-friendliness of conspiracy and gossip. For Birchall, such cultural artifacts as The X-Files represent instances of distinct new markets for alternative explanations, exchange-sites wherein something as quaint as credence is not even required. Whereas once alternative voices had been marginalized, technological advances such as the Internet have witnessed conspiracy theory’s “emergence [as] a distinct but disparate commercial industry” (35), one whose entertainment value obviates qualms about plausibility. By now, conspiracy has metamorphosed into a generalized willingness to sell and be sold alternative stories. Like Samuel Coleridge’s ideal fiction readers, conspiracy’s “audience, in fact, is being asked to suspend its disbelief, rather than to believe” (40). In Birchall’s reformulation, conspiracy, like tabloid gossip, accrues legitimacy not as a narcissistic and presumably paranoid, “truth” system, as O’Donnell infers, and not as an impulse to make mainstream discourse more inclusive, as Fenster proposes, but simply as a diversion for proliferating separatist audiences.

 
Birchall shares with Fenster and O’Donnell the premise that conspiracy narratives trade in a refusal of contingency and randomness, preferring instead the premise that hidden but identifiable causes and effects structure what appear as discrete phenomena. These narratives authorize what some might deem wildly associative connections wherein “[r]andom events . . . are translated into components of far-reaching schemes.” These schemes are salient, not because they are persuasive, but because they fill critical coverage gaps analogous to market sectors (Birchall 45-6). For instance, Knowledge Goes Pop singles out the death of Princess Diana and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center as events in which the demand for information outstripped the supply by mainstream reportage and created the type of vacuum a market abhors, a space enthusiastically filled by alternative hawkers of the “real” story. Uniquely, Birchall speculates that legitimated mainstream discourse-be it journalistic, political, or academic-indulges similar narrative strategies. That is, the hot scoop and the groundbreaking research project attract us because they assemble a new story based on available but previously un(der)interpreted evidence. The purity of the presumably legitimate press, moreover, proves questionable once alternative reportage on Diana or 9/11 gets co-opted by “official” news producers-ostensibly for scoffing purposes-and, in effect, later retailed at a reduced risk by the mainstream media.
 
Gossip, which “trade[s] in a tension between the public and the private,” functions in much the same manner as conspiracy theories do (92): out of concealed or otherwise unconnected events it assembles and sells a new story. The market here is equally vigorous, deconstructive even, because “[g]ossips are never sated. The revelation of secrets (true or untrue) does not satisfy-the desire to reveal or receive simply gets deferred elsewhere, searching for new material in an endless exchange of signifiers parading as signifieds” (24). As with conspiracy theory, gossip privileges discussion over conclusion and prolongs iteration over closure; thus, it mobilizes deconstructive principles. The meaning of particular items of gossip is beside the point, for instance, since “even when gossip passes information on, iterability ensures that it is haunted by the trace of the possible ‘death’ of the source of the gossip, making it always ‘other’ from the ‘original’ in that repetition” (136). Like Spacks, Birchall aims to rescue gossip from the pejorative connotations historically attached to it. In an independent move, however, this book underscores the fundamentality of the gossip market. Far more than an object of scholarly analysis, “gossip is a constitutive necessity: which is . . . very different from saying that it plays an important role in society” (108). Gossip “is at the heart of cognition, conditioning any history of knowledge or claim to knowledge put forward within the socio-cultural sphere” (108). To hold forth-even about gossip-is to gossip, in other words; gossiping and professing are synonymous in that both propose to make new sense continuously out of available circumstances. Ultimately, Birchall challenges Spacks’s project, and others like it, which leave intact the expert/object of study divide.
 
Repeatedly, Birchall draws telling parallels in the stances assumed by commentators on gossip, conspiracy theory, and deconstruction; here, it might be argued, the speculative stance and canny “conspiracy” strategy come in handy, for employing these two liberates Birchall to claim premises and connections which themselves need not be exhaustively supported. Accordingly, the book posits but does not overtly argue for the idea that the very effort to maintain the purity of the separate practices of journalism, critical theory, and cultural studies implies corresponding parallels across these fields. Many descriptions of alternative discourses actually function like fences around an in-group. Memorably, in Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton paved the way for this insight by pointing out how some signifiers that pretend to name signifieds actually function to designate belonging or exclusion; “weed,” he observed, does not identify any particular plant, per se, but instead designates any number of nameless plants whose shared characteristic is mainly their unwelcomeness in one’s garden. Implicitly, Birchall mobilizes this insight, suggesting that terms such as “paranoid” or “hysteric” identify only that some forms of utterance will not count as legitimate discourse. In journalism, for instance, the book interrogates what Mark Lawson had identified as a “collapse in editorial authority” in the mainstream journalistic incorporation of popular hypotheses about Diana’s death; Birchall locates a similar conservatism in Elaine Showalter’s book, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1998). Birchall finds that these approaches-like those of people who critique cultural studies-ultimately function to narrow what can be uttered by denying legitimacy from discursive “outliers.” Showalter’s diagnosis of conspiracy theories as a form of collective hysteria itself represents, Birchall suggests, a paranoid response to paranoia. Moreover, aporia-an inescapable doubt or undecidability-underlies the psychoanalytic system upon which Showalter’s dismissal of hysteria rests since Freud himself acknowledged the speculative dimensions of psychoanalytic “science.”
 
Birchall identifies a similar discursive border-policing in Umberto Eco’s responses to deconstruction, specifically within Eco’s complaint against the “Hermetic drift” presumably implied by deconstructive approaches to truth. Taking issue with Eco’s designation of the interpretive limits of deconstruction, Birchall’s book connects these complaints to Showalter’s diagnosis of conspiracy theorists. In a critical maneuver that literary theorists might find suspect, Birchall locates Eco’s take on deconstruction partly within ideas expressed by one of Eco’s fictional characters, the suggestively named “Casaubon,” in Foucault’s Pendulum.² For Birchall, Casaubon embodies Eco’s critique of “forms of overinterpretation,” which is to say interpretations guided by an uncorroborated, everything-is-connected approach that echoes the worldview of the conspiracy theorist (77). Fictional characters are problematic sources of authorial view and propensities, however. In Eco’s work, a monolith known as social consensus enables an equally monolithic “us” to adjudicate which readings do not qualify as legitimate, to sideline, in effect, persuasive flowers from overinterpretive weeds. Eco’s overinterpreters, then-deconstructionists, that is-share the fate of Showalter’s hysterics; both get excluded from the metaphysical community of “rational” interpreters. But the exclusion in either case, Birchall maintains, is arbitrary and the community is fictional.
 
And what if “the community” were not one? Birchall questions Eco’s notion of “consensus” by recalling François Lyotard’s critique of that same category in Jürgen Habermas’s work. Lyotard’s insight had been to establish that Habermas links “consensus” to a progress narrative that we might fruitfully question-“a concept tied to a narrative of emancipation,” in Birchall’s phrase-one that Lyotard finds (in his own words) “insufficient.” Following Lyotard, Birchall proposes value-neutral terms that help detach consensus from its role in this ideological narrative; here consensus is redefined simply as “a politico-economic instrument” (80). Thus, discredited narratives and their promulgators are not silenced by an official community any more than they struggle to widen that community. Instead, they turn for their sustenance to alternative audiences. Showalter and Eco fail in related ways to conceive of the possibility that those whose interpretations are excluded-the gossip and the paranoid along with the deconstructive cultural theorist-might seek and find sympathetic communities outside the rational paradigm or interpretive community. Discourse, in this reinterpretation, involves “dissensus” at least as often as consensus. To be sure, these connections among popular knowledge, deconstructive theories, and the cultural studies enterprise involve the same kind of wildly associative leap indulged by conspiracy theorists and gossips; about this Birchall is clearly conscious and for it the author is plainly unapologetic. The implied stance is that you don’t have to buy it unless you find it productive; conversely, if you find it productive that is legitimacy enough. In short, this book is a fully conscious illustration of reality-production, not simply a “study” of it; it is an audacious and energizing implementation some of deconstruction’s most provocative implications.
 
To invoke Birchall’s economic metaphors by way of summary, the book invites cultural studies to capitalize on a situation in which speculation is all there is. Since gossip and conspiracy-along with knowledge itself-ultimately correspond only to the forces of supply and demand, the upshot is: why not sell something new and generative? Knowledge Goes Pop insists that it isn’t marketing out-and-out relativism, and it faintly acknowledges that the desire to assign or to withhold credit for individual interpretations is not wrong or unusual. Indeed, “cultural theorists have to measure the soundness of an interpretation every time they look for information on the Internet, every time . . . they review the research of peers or examine student work” (82). But the tools with which soundness might be weighed are less in evidence than the myriad prospects for operating without apprehension of such tools. Almost as an afterthought, Birchall claims that what rescues this radical freedom to posit absolutely anything from solipsism or “irresponsibility” is a deconstructive redefinition of what “responsibility” entails. Calling on Derrida, Birchall likens “responsibility” to a heightened attentiveness to that which is radically singular, a responsiveness to particularity, and rests finally in a familiar kind of paradox, the deconstructive refusal to systematically define “responsibility.”
 
Of course, generalized rules for responsible behavior can both limit and safeguard us, and the particularization of responsibility can imply either liberation or constriction. Liberating as the book’s speculations are, they also generate some reservations. In Chapter Five, “Sexed Up: Gossip by Stealth,” for instance, Birchall offers an extended application of gossip-configured both as object of study and as analytical approach-in order to assess the role played by unsubstantiated speculation in the British and American justification for the 2003 Iraq war. This chapter is intriguing and, whether wittingly or not, the particular application it offers serves to dramatize tensions otherwise masked by the book’s celebration of aporia. The book quotes N. Fairclough’s observation that ideology governs our decision whether to prioritize content or context in weighing the soundness of reportage. When a newspaper shares the ideological concerns of its sources, Fairclough posits,
 

the reported discourse is not generally demarcated from the report itself . . . there is generally a focus upon the ideational meaning (the “content“) of the reported discourse and a neglect of its interpersonal meanings and its context.
 

(48, emphases mine)

 

This observation seems persuasive; journalistic reports on official statements-press releases by political figures, say-usually do tend to focus on content and downplay context. Reports on popular and “unofficial” knowledge, on the other hand, generally do seem to focus inordinately on context. As I read through this extended chapter ostensibly showing how gossip functioned in the lead-up to the Iraq war, however, I kept returning to this tension between content and context. Following Fairclough’s logic, I reasoned that readers whose worldview coincides with Birchall’s “gossip” might be inclined to prioritize the chapter’s content; on the other hand, readers whose interpretation of events contrast with Birchall’s might be inclined to seek contextual explanations for positions expressed in this chapter (which seem to exceed their stipulated purpose) and even for the chapter’s role in Birchall’s book, in the first place. Unequivocally, I would position myself within the former collectivity-a choir member if this report on gossip’s role in a gratuitous war could be called preaching-and yet the chapter came to feel strangely out of place in the context of this book. It runs the risk of sacrificing point to case, and in doing so it recalls Birchall’s memorable insight that, in gossip, one finds “signifiers parading as signifieds.” Upon finishing the book, I ruminated again on this unusual chapter and-perhaps cynically-I find myself speculating that perhaps the reverse could be equally plausible: that signifieds can masquerade as signifiers and, in this instance, that the case might actually be the point, that the book provides a pretext for this critique even if the reverse were also true. “Gossip by stealth,” indeed.

 
Consonant with this unsettlement about gossip as a knowledge-making procedure, the jubilation over aporia which the book stirred in general is dissipated when I weigh particular instances of radical speculation. Now, the utility-nay, the sheer mischief-of outfoxing scolds of any stripe presents a bandwagon onto which many a freedom-loving soul might hop, and I’m no exception. Likewise, the idea that those with alternative perspectives may prefer to address like-minded fellow exiles before abjectly appealing to imperious insiders has a revolutionary appeal to it-all the more so, perhaps, when posed in the name of deconstructive cultural study. But the vulnerability to incaution haunts this euphoria, too; there is something vaguely sobering, for instance, about shrugging off as “dissension” the bids for narrative legitimacy posed by, say, Holocaust- or evolution-deniers, given the political ambitions sometimes associated with such alternative explanations. In his review of Spacks’s Gossip, in fact, Steven G. Kellman frames a similar reservation with respect to the politics surrounding gossip in literature. Acknowledging the breadth of the author’s celebratory references to gossip in British and American texts, Kellman underscores, just the same, the slant imposed by any highly selective application of a generalized theory. Pointedly the reviewer observes that “there is far less gossip within Nineteen Eight-Four than within Barchester Towers, Vanity Fair, or any of Spacks’ other exemplary fictions” (153). Kellman’s point is that Spacks is reading literature quite selectively, isolating only texts where freedom of speculation is a given. In the same way, one can say, Birchall’s dismissal of those who worry about the “politics” of deconstruction takes for granted the climate of discursive liberty that “politically” oriented critics assume must be guarded. Gossip and speculation flourish, in other words, in contexts where civil liberty can be taken for granted, and the scolding of politically-minded worry warts conveys useful cautions. Repeatedly, Birchall urges that we “take on board” the idea that aporia underlies all knowledge-making, that we, too-deconstructionists, postmodernists, students of culture-go ahead and capitalize on aporia. After a while, my inner copy editor wishes to see that verb varied, and yet-rightly or not-I intuit an authorial reluctance to substitute one sensible alternative: “embrace.” Like sea water or pirates-perhaps like global and theoretical currents now so pervasive as to have de-legitimized resistance more than anything else-aporia is urged on us, each paddling our disparate canoes, each presumably learning to stop worrying and love the marketplace of ideas. That the invitation is attractive is a fact simultaneously invigorating and dispiriting. I am not at all sure that this is the brand of aporia that Birchall’s book consciously endorses, but it lurks here nevertheless.
 

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two of the core texts of philosophy’s linguistic turn in the twentieth century: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus, revered as the Bible of Logical Positivism, was written by a young Wittgenstein between his studies at Cambridge and his time in the trenches of the Italian front in World War I; the posthumously published Investigations engendered the heterogeneous school of ordinary language philosophy and served as an important influence on practitioners of postmodern philosophy. That the later work was written in part as a corrective for the narrow conception of language and the metaphysical excesses of the earlier work raises the question of what led to the older Wittgenstein’s philosophical transformation. In Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space, & Architecture, Nana Last has produced an important study of this turn in Wittgenstein’s view of language. Last sheds light on the architectural experiences that led Wittgenstein from an account of language emanating from a putatively panoramic perspective based on knowledge of logical form to an interior view of language, where the spaces that compose what Wittgenstein called “the city of language” unfold before the philosopher as he walks its streets. That is, the experience of planning and building his sister’s house led Wittgenstein to a new way of seeing and describing lexical reality. As Last shows, this way of seeing is consonant with the spatial imagination of the architect.

 
The opening chapters focus on the complex relationship and transformations that occur between the Tractatus and the Investigations. As Last observes, Wittgenstein was interested in far more than simply repudiating his early work. The break from the Tractatus entails a significant and therapeutic alteration of the philosopher’s relation to language-from outside to inside. This transformation is carried out through an array of new spatial metaphors for describing the internal dynamics that constitute linguistic practices as well as the perceptual vantages that permit access to those dynamics. The new spatiality advanced in the Investigations leads ineluctably to more expansive views of language by challenging and ultimately supplanting “the attenuated and restrictive spatiality definitive of the Tractatus” (10). Last’s argument vividly engages the discipline of architecture to stage this critical encounter between the rigid sense of space in the early work and the fluidity of space and perception in the later work. The Investigations could spring from the early work thanks to the liberating spatial analogies provided by architecture. As Last shows in this rich comparative study, this immanent critique of the Tractatus can be appreciated only if we move about the overlapping boundaries between architecture and philosophy in Wittgenstein’s work.

 
Last’s approach, however, raises the question of where interdisciplinarity takes place. How is successful communication across disciplines possible? Last uses Wittgenstein’s house to offer an evocative account not only of the way the spatiality of architecture transformed his early attenuated vision of philosophy by shattering the insularity of the enterprise, but also of the way it alters Wittgenstein’s philosophizing. The work of the philosopher was no longer conceived as the product of a fixed perceptual vantage above language and all other forms of knowledge; rather, for the later Wittgenstein, philosophical seeing becomes a dynamic effect of playful, meandering travel through linguistic spaces called language-games. Ordinary language, conceived now by Wittgenstein the architect as the fluid medium of practices, invites interdisciplinarity. The resulting common ground for a philosophical architecture or an architectural philosophy is replete with conceptual tension; such friction ignites creativity while militating against transcendent and fixed claims to knowledge and authority.

 
Last begins with the vertical spatiality that informs the logical analysis of the Tractatus. This putative view from above allows the philosopher to see the logical distinction in language between the sensical realm of sayable and showable propositions and the nonsensical realm of religious and ethical utterances, which may resemble logical propositions in form but are actually meaningless. With this circumscribed view of what counts as philosophical language, the Tractatus is best understood as a work in the tradition of the Vienna Circle that sought to reform philosophy by eliminating metaphysics and speculative epistemology in service of a logical and empirical science. This line between sense and non-sense is described profitably as distinguishing science from non-science. Paradoxically, the limit of language is discernible only from above, the Tractatus contends, and therefore transgresses its own strict adherence to the immanence of logical form by climbing the ladder to this transcendent perspective. Last analyzes the “mystical,” transgressive viewer of the Tractatus in spatial and perceptual (as opposed to logical) terms, and thereby illuminates a philosophical concern with perception that unifies Wittgenstein’s early and late work. Her emphasis on seeing underscores the importance of the break from the view from above language celebrated in the Tractatus and toward the horizontal and spatial orientation of vision of the architect that is fleshed out in the Philosophical Investigations.
 
The spatiality of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations involves less a repudiation of the vertical space posited by the Tractatus than an incorporation of the early work’s vision of language into a more variegated, contingent, and context-sensitive description of how we use language. This transformation of Wittgenstein’s perspective is tied intimately to Wittgenstein’s experience as an architect. Last substantiates this relation by paying close attention to allusions to and metaphors of building, construction, and designing space-builders, materials, engines, sites, digging to bedrock, the incomplete and expanding city of language, and so on-in the Philosophical Investigations.
 
Last takes up the often repeated contention articulated by Wittgenstein’s student G.H. von Wright, that Wittgenstein’s house is “of the same simple and static kind that belongs to a sentence of the Tractatus,” and, moreover, that its static and stark elegance is in “striking contrast” to “the continual searching and changing in Wittgenstein’s life and personality” (78). That is to say, in von Wright’s view, the house is the aesthetic fulfillment of the logical form of the Tractatus; it cannot be seen as producing or contributing to the dynamic and complex descriptions of language-games in the Investigations. Last argues, to the contrary, three main points: One, that the two years Wittgenstein spent on his sister’s house were part of a decade-long search for peace and purpose outside of philosophy; two, that the spatiality of Wittgenstein’s architectural practices led to and nurtured the philosophical breakthroughs marked by the Philosophical Investigations; and three, that the Investigations themselves created a “philosophical frame” that permits comparison between philosophy and architecture generally. When the house is viewed through the philosophical lenses of the Philosophical Investigations, Last contends, both the philosophical and architectural enterprises are envisioned along dynamic lines. This entails a break from “the line of thinking” encouraged by “the Tractatus-Stonborough-Wittgenstein House association . . . that demands architecture be understood as structured, concrete, and absolute,” an opinion bolstered by the apparent numeric precision of the Tractatus that leads readers to regard the work as architectural in character (81). More significantly, conceiving the house as an innovative and intermediary architectural experience between the Tractatus and the Investigations creates new perceptual ground for comparing the works and seeing them in complementary terms that can erase any conceptual and biographical break between the young and old Wittgenstein. As Last shows, Wittgenstein’s life-long technical, aesthetic, and philosophical interests were striking and substantial, and challenge the accuracy of bifurcated depictions of his life and work.
 
The story of the design and construction of the house is intricate. Last tells how Wittgenstein appropriated responsibility for the plans from his friend Paul Engelmann. In distinguishing Engelmann’s vision of the house from Wittgenstein’s, Last makes it clear that the former’s role was at best minimal. Indeed, Engelmann himself came to regard the house as Wittgenstein’s and saw his own plan as plainly inferior to the one Wittgenstein realized. Last goes beyond Engelmann’s and others’ assessments of the quality and originality of the house’s design to consider Wittgenstein’s contributions to the practice of architecture itself, but with limited success. If Wittgenstein’s architectural work had an innovative effect on the practice of architecture, such an historical and empirical study has yet to be written. It would entail detailed descriptions of the way Wittgenstein’s house altered architectural practices from Engelmann to the present. What Last seeks to show is that in entering into the practice of architecture, Wittgenstein learned how “to overcome the idealized solipsism of the Tractatus and to reintegrate both the subject and the practice of philosophy with the wider culture” (93). Contemporary readers of Wittgenstein will recognize the porosity of the boundaries of language-games, the fluidity of grammar, and his thoughts on the end of philosophy (as a subject rather than as a practice) in this architecturally inspired act of overcoming the closed and unlivable image of philosophy behind the Tractatus.
 
Although the clean austerity of the house’s exterior seems to substantiate von Wright’s claim, Last takes us through the interior to show Wittgenstein’s use of entries and light, as well as the repeated and varied patterns in metal and clear and opaque glass that mark off public and private rooms. These features call to mind the indeterminacy of rules and boundaries, the remarks on continuous seeing and changing aspects, and the calls to the philosopher to “slow down” and return to the “rough ground” of language so central to what Wittgenstein thought of as the “involved journeyings” that compose the Philosophical Investigations. But the tour also includes an assembly of reminders of concerns associated with the Tractatus. Last’s reading of these works and her architect’s eye make her a learned, critical, and informative tour guide through the home’s interiors, as well as a dependable commentator on how aspects of the translation of a two dimensional design into a three-dimensional house illuminate spatial features uniting the entirety of Wittgenstein’s philosophical oeuvre. Consider, for example, her reflection on the spatial relation of the house’s central hall to the dining room: “Wittgenstein’s decision to place translucent glass on the dining room side and clear glass on the hall side,” writes Last, “distinguishes the two spaces even as it connects them.” She continues:
 

This decision highlights the complex nature of the boundary as connector, divider, and sign by emphasizing its materiality and location in space and allowing it to present disparate faces as it is approached from opposite sides. This last aspect literally constructs Wittgenstein’s fundamental understanding of language in the Investigations as presenting distinct images when viewed from divergent points: “Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”
 

(99)

 
The transcendence posed in the Tractatus expresses desire for an unencumbered view of language, and that freedom remains desirable even as the Philosophical Investigations operates on the assumption of transcendence’s impossibility. To create unencumbered views, open spaces, and easy access are all interior architectural problems tackled on the horizontal plane of a floor plan. For Wittgenstein, applying this horizontal perspective to philosophizing involves resisting the seductions of transcendence and icy perfection, eschewing claims to privileged knowledge and perception, and devising a provisional and expandable set of therapies to help the philosopher through the various entanglements encountered when moving from architectural plan to actual construction. For Last, the effect of these therapies can be seen also in Wittgenstein’s turn away from a picture of language to a series of studies on how language actually works. Where the fluidity of architectural vision leads to visual and traversable passages between spaces, in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language this fluidity in seeing leads to “family resemblances,” an informal network of similarities that enrich concepts and connect philosophy as one space in language to the other spaces-music, art, mathematics, etc.-we associate with wider culture. Last’s study leads to an appreciation of the fragile, provisional, and dynamic character of spatiality in both the practice of architecture and in the dynamic relations between and within language-games, as described by Wittgenstein.
 
Language is not an enclosure, for the later Wittgenstein; it is not the “house of Being,” as Heidegger posited. Rather, language is a landscape, a labyrinth, which cannot be seen as a whole: There is no Archimedean perspective available and it is in a constant process of growing and dying. No vantage within language permits a sense that the whole coheres and no boundary is solid enough to be impermeable. This melding of actual and possible in Wittgenstein’s later philosophical vision is the lasting effect of experimenting with architectural design. For any reader of the Investigations, Wittgenstein tells us, there is no single path through the landscape of language. The acts of walking and seeing are primarily creative enterprises impeded by a range of entanglements produced in the complexity of language and by the desire to rise above the uncertainty, mess, fatigue, and friction of travel by foot. For Wittgenstein, the path from architecture back into philosophy is not a linear matter of leaving one for the other. As Last argues convincingly, the path reveals heretofore unseen and unsuspected edifying relations between architecture and philosophy and their distinctive ways of seeing and thinking.
 

 

We all know that happiness is a form of stupidity. Once The Declaration of Independence promises the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, it’s difficult not to think of happiness as a form of indoctrination. Shiny happy people are, first and foremost, unthinking rubes who watch reality TV, shop at outlets, vacation at Disneyworld (or, worse, Las Vegas), and generally enjoy vapid forms of cultural entertainment. Happily engaging in these activities simply proves the lack of capacity for critical reflection. Perhaps this is why academics who have dedicated their lives to criticism have such a difficult time presenting themselves as generally optimistic. Consider how often academics in the humanities convey genuinely good news as a complaint. News about receiving tenure (which rewards scholarly accomplishment with a job for life) is followed by something like, “Now I’m stuck here forever.” News about receiving a major fellowship (finally the time to do the work one really wants to do) is followed by, “Now I’m obliged to finish this book.” It’s as if we have to cast good news within a broader, pessimistic view of the world lest we appear to be happy and, therefore, stupid. Once optimism is unmasked as naïveté, it seems to produce a backlash in which, among the smart set at least, in order to prove oneself as sophisticated and subversive, one has to be generally unhappy and perhaps a little depressed.
 
It’s this dynamic that Michael Snediker seeks to displace for queer studies. How, Snediker asks, can queer theory conceive of optimism as a useful and interesting site for critical investigation? How can one develop a queer understanding of optimism that doesn’t simply reinforce its opposite, pessimism? One way into these questions might be to explore the centrality of camp in queer culture, but Snediker doesn’t go that route. More ambitiously, his study uses optimism as a conceptual wedge to overturn queer theory as we currently know it. Snediker begins Queer Optimism with the astute observation that optimism is a centrally unthought term among the writing of the most well-known queer theorists of the past twenty or so years. Since its invention in the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer theory (and here, Snediker means theoretical work by Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman) has inadvertently produced a situation in which queer sexuality is equated with melancholia, self-shattering, shame, or the death drive-all negative, destructive, and, for Snediker, essential pessimistic concepts that foreclose analytic engagement with positive affect. Engaging with optimism reverses that situation by putting the question of queer identity back on the table. The generative movement in early queer studies was the critique of identity as the site of psychological and political normalization. Important as that critique was in the early 1990s for reimagining political agency, it also tended to idealize the destabilization of identity and the affirmation of incoherency in oneself. As Snediker puts it,
 

Dissatisfaction with a given regime of coherence [e.g. heteronormativity] might sponsor a critical commitment to dismantling coherence tout court. Such a dissatisfaction, however, might likewise productively sponsor a reconfiguration of coherence-the cultivation of a vocabulary of coherence that more precisely does justice to the ways in which coherence isn’t expansively, unilaterally destructive, reductive, or ideological.
 

(25-6)

 

Snediker uses queer optimism in order to mobilize the second possibility against the first. At his most ambitious, Snediker asks how a critical investigation of optimism might lead to a new understanding of some fundamental categories: queer desire, queer ontology, and queer representation.

 
So what exactly is queer optimism? This isn’t an easy question to answer, and not just because queering concepts tends to make them difficult to pin down. In his discussions of what queer optimism might be, Snediker is much clearer about what it’s not rather than about what it is. Snediker is very careful not to equate queer optimism with the kind of hopefulness that Lee Edelman aggressively dismantles in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman argues that a liberal politics based on hope for the future carries with it an investment in the fantasy of the innocent child. Because of this, liberalism sets in motion an ideological circuit that idealizes reproductive heterosexuality while excluding non-reproductive, queer subjectivities. In response, Edelman argues quite forcefully that queer politics must embrace a kind of negativity that refuses this investment in the future and, in so doing, breaks with this ideological circuit. For Snediker, queer optimism isn’t hopeful because it’s not futural. It’s not at all attached to the kind of heteronormative temporality that Edelman describes. (And, I should add in passing, Snediker gives an excellent critical account of the aggressive edge of Edelman’s argument, which he reads as symptomatic of a demand issuing from the super-ego.)
 
To explain what a non-hopeful optimism looks like, Snediker initially turns to Leibniz-or, better, to Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz’s claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds. It’s hard to get more optimistic than that. But, as Deleuze explains it, Leibniz’s claim needs to be understood against the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War and the effect of war on political philosophy. The baroque world is a world in crisis, a world that has to be rebuilt “amidst the ruins of the Platonic Good.” For Deleuze, and for Snediker following him, Leibniz offers a model of optimism that suspends hope for a better world because it affirms the current world as it is. “If this world exists, it is not because it is the best, but because it is rather the inverse; it is the best because it is, because it is the one that is” (Fold 68). Optimism is something like the optimal affirmation of the goodness of the world in its present state, even if that present state doesn’t actually look all that great.
 
Leibniz’s version of optimism hinges on faith, belief in the goodness of God. Understandably uncomfortable with reproducing a theological version of optimism, Snediker queers it by recasting Leibniz’s version of optimism through object-relations psychoanalysis. Snediker turns to Winnicott’s essay, “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications.” Reworking Freud’s discussion of identity-formation and the death drive, Winnicott acknowledges that once the subject uses an object for purposes of mastery, the subject destroys the integrity of that object. At the same time, Winnicott argues, this destruction is not usually total. In practice the object most often survives its own destruction, not only demonstrating the limitations of omnipotency assumed by the masterful subject but also suggesting a capacity for endurance in the object itself-in spite of the ways in which the subject may have used, harmed, or damaged it. In this way, the object can become a model for optimism. The point is not that the subject affirms the object, that the subject is optimistic about the object’s survival. Rather, it’s the reverse. The endurance of the object affirms a capacity for endurance about the subject that the subject may not see or be able to anticipate. It’s this external aspect of optimism that most interests Snediker. That is, for Snediker, optimism is much less about a subjective state in which one feels happy or hopeful and more about a sense of affirmation that comes from the outside and exists alongside a sense of pain, damage, or loneliness. For Leibniz, optimism is a form of subjective affirmation based on faith. Winnicott allows Snediker to develop a de-subjectivized version of queer optimism that doesn’t idealize or glorify a process of de-subjectification but suggests instead that optimism comes from the shards of the world in crisis, shards that must be affirmed and, in the process, transformed.
 
This provocative combination of Winnicott with Deleuze is at the heart of what I think is most interesting about Snediker’s project, which I would describe as an attempt to rethink optimism and love through two central operations: the isolation of singularity against attempts to generalize it in models of exemplarity, and the serialization of that singularity in lyric poetry. Snediker develops his claims most powerfully through literary analysis of four poets: Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop. Although Queer Optimism begins with an opening chapter that critiques Butler, Bersani, Edelman, and Sedgwick for assuming pessimistic views of queer sexuality that effectively foreclose the positive and affirmative nature of affect, the book’s most compelling claims get developed through analysis of poetry. Each of the chapters in Queer Optimism is organized around a theoretical model from queer theory that Snediker displaces through sophisticated and focused close readings. This mode of argumentation might be a turn-off to some readers who, like myself, are deeply interested in queer theory but are neither Americanists nor modernists. But Snediker handles it quite masterfully. His readings are sharp, and rarely does he lose focus on the central theoretical problems that his chapters announce. Throughout, he develops a new set of terms for thinking about queer sexuality in its intersections with poetics and literary form.
 
One of Snediker’s most salient points (a point that deserves more attention than he gives it) is that queer isn’t best understood as deviation from social norms but rather as a kind of singularity that emerges within the Winnicottian space of object relations. In this account, queer is no longer opposed to norms but becomes a moment of optimistic affirmation through which new sets of norms can be created. Snediker develops his claims for singularity through chapters on Crane and Dickinson. Chapter One of Queer Optimism focuses on the network of smiles in Crane’s poetry, reading the figure of the smile not as a sign of ironic suffering but as a singular affirmation of joy produced through its repetition. Snediker develops this thesis against the backdrop of Bersani’s writings on self-shattering, showing how the smile survives as a poetic artifact that endures beyond Crane’s suicide. Like the object in object relations that survives beyond the subject’s attempt to destroy it, Crane’s smiles are involved in a poetics that sustains “relationality” beyond all forms of anti-relational thinking (77). Chapter Two reads the figure of the smile in Dickinson in order to show how her repeated emphasis on pain highlights the surprising singularity of joy-surprising for Dickinson and, perhaps, for her readers as well. Instead of reading Dickinson’s emphasis on pain as a queer performance of masochism, Snediker reads the repetition of pain as Dickinson’s attempt to isolate and understand the feeling of joy as a positive affect that is, for Dickinson herself, only minimally understandable.
 
The other salient point that Snediker insists on is that this understanding of queer is best thought through a poetic-and not a theatrical-notion of the person. In some ways, this is Queer Optimism‘s most powerful insight, one that should stand as a serious challenge to queer studies. While a theatrical notion of the person has allowed critics to show the constructedness and naturalization of norms, it also tends to assume a vision of politics and culture that is fundamentally anti-aesthetic. The revelation that norms are artificial is revelatory only to the extent that one assumes a worldview in which art and nature are firmly separated. But, as Snediker argues, a poetic notion of the person assumes that the person is first and foremost a literary artifact (a point that could be significantly elaborated through a reading of Barbara Johnson’s account in Persons and Things of personification in lyric and law). In Chapters Three and Four, Snediker focuses on Jack Spicer and Elizabeth Bishop, respectively. Especially for modern poets working against T.S. Eliot’s poetics of impersonality, the literary nature of the person becomes the basis for exploring the persistent singularity at the heart of the person through the serial nature of lyric poetry. Although Spicer explicitly espouses Eliot’s poetics of impersonality, Snediker shows that his serial poem Billy the Kid attaches singularity and repetition to the problem of the poetic person. For Bishop, this repetition is related to love. Snediker reads submerged reference to Crane in her poetry as an attempt to develop a logic of love based on “a particular form of incomplete or imperfect repetition” (191). In a sense, both Spicer and Bishop explore the inner workings of the Winnicottian space of object relations and its implications for queer identity and love through a Deleuzian sense of repetition and seriality.
 
Queer Optimism is a book that rewards careful reading. It will no doubt be of interest to specialists in modern American poetry. But its redefinition of queer and its insistence that we rethink identity through a poetic understanding of the person make the book a major contribution to queer studies as well.
 

 

Paris, 2001: an exhibition that commemorates the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust stirs up a vehement public debate. Georges Didi-Huberman, a critic and unconventional art historian of Jewish descent who has written on European painting and the depiction of hysteria in photography, contributes an essay to the exhibition catalog highlighting four particular photographs from the exhibit, which prompts further outrage.¹ More outrage, one might wearily note, than information about the camps had caused at the time the photographs were made; but less, perhaps, than was caused when the first atrocity images of the liberated concentration camps appeared in Western newspapers and news reels in 1945. What is it about these photographs, after all these years of exposure and all our familiar outrage regarding their subject, that still prompts intense polemics?
 
Didi-Huberman’s contributions to this debate have now been translated into English. The translation includes the original exhibition catalog essay (Part 1: “Images in Spite of All”) and Didi-Huberman’s response to critics (Part 2: “In Spite of the All Image”; originally Images malgré tout, 2003). The oddly old-fashioned, elaborately detailed table of contents will make no sense to anyone who hasn’t already read the book; this questionable editorial choice appears to indulge the author, as does the decision not to present the other side of the debate, which appeared in the pages of Les temps moderns (March-May 2001), in columns by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux. The book would have benefitted from a translation of these articles, since Didi-Huberman engages in frequent exegesis with them. Clearly, without these provocations, the second half of this volume would not exist. But the choice to translate Didi-Huberman is timely. While the debate has distinctively French concerns, the larger problematic of the (limits of) representation of the Holocaust remains a fraught subject for Western scholars, and Didi-Huberman’s polemic takes the discussion in a new and productive direction.
 
The controversy over the Parisian exhibition focused on four famous photographs from Auschwitz, taken at the height of the Final Solution in 1944. The photographs were taken by members of the so-called “Sonderkommandos,” Jewish victims who were forced to participate in the genocide of their own people by removing the Nazis’ victims from the gas chambers and destroying the corpses through fire or mass burial (sometimes, in response to wartime stringencies, both). The identity of the photographer/s is uncertain; surviving records left by members of the Sonderkommandos indicate the names of those involved in making the images. These records also show that they were able to smuggle the camera into the camp and the film out again, in a toothpaste tube, with the assistance of the Polish Underground (10-11). These are the only surviving images that show any aspect of the gas chamber operations, and because they represent an act of resistance by victims of genocide, they have retained an exceptional status among Holocaust sources. However, their exhibition in Paris was considered by some to be a provocation-either to Holocaust deniers, who would challenge the veracity of these admittedly poor images, or to more sophisticated viewers who expressed affinities with Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker, whose remarkable documentary “Shoah” (1985) proscribed the use of archival images in favor of eyewitness testimony and film shot at the scenes of the crimes in the 1970s-80s. Holocaust deniers, of course, have never depended on actual evidence to promulgate their delusions. On ethical and aesthetic grounds, the second set of criticisms is more substantial and reflects a peculiarly French concern with a kind of Bilderverbot (prohibition of religious images). Wajcman accused Didi-Huberman of fetishizing these images in a perversely Christian fashion (“the passion of the image” 52). The exceptional status of the Sonderkommando photographs thus opens up debate about the memory and visual representation of the Holocaust in a nation which has not yet come to terms with its “Vichy syndrome,” to apply Henry Rousso’s term.²
 
Exceptional, unique, special: these are the English equivalents of the German prefix sonder. In the Nazis’ perversion of the German language, Sonder-nouns became hallmark euphemisms: Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) meant murder; Sonderkommandos (special operatives or units) meant surviving victims who had to perform inhumanly gruesome tasks, or die. Didi-Huberman refers to them as “living beings in spite of all, very provisional survivors,” whose extinction was always intended (106). The Sonderkommandos were regularly purged; the Nazis did not intend them to survive to offer their testimony. Victims such as Zalmen Gradowski, who could barely recognize themselves as human beings alive in the camps, existed as if perpetually “on the threshold of the tomb”-their own, their families’, their people’s (163). These uniquely suffering individuals were uniquely placed to witness genocide; they were, to coin a term, Sonderzeugen (special witnesses, all male). Given their continued presence at their intended extermination, their witnessing “in spite of all” renders their verbal and visual testimony invaluable. Didi-Huberman argues in favor of the exhibition of precisely these photographs because they depict the perspective of victims who were deliberately deprived of everything fundamental to human existence and yet, “in spite of all,” managed to resist deliberately, in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, in order to provide testimony to the crimes against them and their people. For all these reasons, Didi-Huberman argues, these images not only should but must be viewed.
 
Most provocatively, for his opponents, Didi-Huberman opens his essay with the assertion, “In order to know, we must imagine for ourselves” (3). The idea that anything about the Holocaust-surely one of the best documented and most thoroughly researched crimes in history-and particularly about the experience of the Sonderkommandos needs to be “imagined” caused an uproar of misunderstanding. Those supporting Lanzmann’s formal proscription read Didi-Huberman to be invoking an impossible kind of empathetic evidence, indeed an irresponsible form of subjective speculation. But Didi-Huberman offers a more specific and more useful understanding of the nature of this particular photographic evidence. He writes, “An image without imagination is quite simply an image that one didn’t spend the time to work on” (116). Work is required of ethically- and historically-minded viewers. He reminds us of the Nazi intention to document the genocide, which produced a massive amount of damning evidence even after they changed their minds in the midst of the war and began to destroy it. Against this intention to document successful destruction, he places the Sonderkommandos’ heroic efforts to document criminal destruction as successful resistance. Recalling the words of Sonderkommando survivor Filip Mueller (one of the most haunting witnesses in “Shoah”), Didi-Huberman argues that just as the surviving victim claims that the impossible was real and that “one must imagine” or one cannot conceive of Auschwitz, so too must we challenge the limits of the visible and our understanding. In German, this would be rendered as vorstellen: “to imagine” is “to place before oneself” what is otherwise unknowable; thus imagining is an act that bears with it an ethical imperative, because knowledge has been gained and we are therefore responsible for it. As Didi-Huberman argues, “To imagine in spite of all, which calls for a difficult ethics of the image: neither the invisible par excellence (the laziness of the aesthete), nor the icon of horror (the laziness of the believer), nor the mere document (the laziness of the learned). . . . I would say that here the image is the eye of history: its tenacious function of making visible” (39).
 
And since even the Nazis appear to have refrained from filming or photographing the actual operations of the gas chambers (though of course this evidence may have been destroyed), these images are the most proximate available. Critics have worried that the exhibition of these four images might inspire deniers or draw only perversely attracted viewers who wished to be titillated by horror. Attempting to “imagine” oneself in the midst of this most inhumane of human crimes, they argued, created an ethical risk of either dishonoring the experience and memory of the victims, or placing the viewer in the untenable position of the perpetrators. They also feared that these partially legible images depicting only a subset of the destruction process would come to be seen as representative of the entire genocide, thus reducing the scope, scale and extension of the horror to a few randomly captured moments. But the critics were, according to Didi-Huberman, creating an impossibly high bar for admissible evidence. Since there is no single image which can depict the entire Holocaust in its ghastly diversity, they refused to view any other actual images of the genocide, and turned Lanzmann’s ethical, situational decision into a dogmatic one. Critics objecting to the lack of representativeness in these images fall into a reductive trap: “Wajcman sought the all image, the unique and integral image of the Shoah; having found only not-all images, he dismisses all images” (124). Didi-Huberman plays with the notion of comprehensiveness while critiquing the possibly fetishistic delectation of iconic images-an ethical risk particularly in the case of these “special” photographs.
 
In the context of this very French debate, Didi-Huberman insists on the necessity of viewing these images, which had so improbably been created and more improbably survived: “They are infinitely precious to us today. They are demanding too, for they require archeological work. We must dig again in their ever so fragile temporality” (47). Here he adds a significant dimension to the ethics of historical memory: mere viewing is insufficient. It is not enough to look at the exhibit, in order to “never forget.” These images represent a “flash,” in Walter Benjamin’s terms: they are a rip, or a “rend” to use Didi-Huberman’s term, in the flux of time (47). Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” sees such moments as dangerous and significant; in these moments, history is recognized as a process rather than a static or given “past.” The second half of Images in Spite of All, written in response to the storm of criticism (rather like Benjamin’s famous “angel of history,” blown backwards into the future yet still looking at the past), articulates the meaning of “imagining” in response to the inspirational “rend” in time. In a certain sense, all historical understanding requires an intuitive leap into the abstraction of historical distance; R.G. Collingwood on “historical re-enactment” or Wilhelm Dilthey on subjectivity would be useful here, but Didi-Huberman speaks from within a poststructuralist, primarily Lacanian and Foucauldian critical framework. This intuitive leap is not easy; it requires imaginative “work,” which must not be confused with irresponsibly assuming that one can “feel” or “identify with” the trauma that others felt or experienced.
 
In order to imaginatively “see” the four photographs and attempt the archaeological work, Didi-Huberman argues, first of all they must be seen together rather than separately. They were taken in a sequence and they were taken under duress, which is more vivid when they are seen together. Reproductions of the images often crop them so as to highlight the figures, presumably because this is seen as the most useful documentary element, showing the victims themselves; they also realign the image so that the figures appear more “natural,” standing straight up. The photos have also been retouched to outline distinct female figures (35-6). While this ostensibly retrieves the possibility of some individual identity, these retouched images also tend to make the women look young and attractive in a disturbingly sexualized manner (it’s impossible to know the actual ages or names of these female victims, and the sexualizing of the images suggests the Nazis’ gaze rather than the photographer’s). Didi-Huberman highlights the way in which cropping out the original blackness at the edges of the images dislocates the photos from their original perspective and deletes information about their authorship: the fact that the clandestine photographer had to hide in the crematorium building and shoot the images through a doorway or window, which contributed to their blurriness and distorted angles (34-6).
 
Using the images as they were made, in a series, offers the possibility of montage. For Didi-Huberman, montage is a technique that “opens up our apprehension of history and makes it more complex. . . . it gives us access to the singularities of time and hence to its essential multiplicity” (121). No single image, however iconic, comprehends the diversity of a flow of single instants that is the human experience of reality. The films of Jean-Luc Goddard and Alain Renais suggest to Didi-Huberman a mode of expressing that diversity through motion in time (discussed at length in the last two sections). A montage of text and images can contribute to the same imaginative work in historical inquiry. Just as for the filmmaker there is no one image, but rather images working together as film, for the historically sensitive viewer no photograph should stand alone or be assumed to speak for itself. Montage is thus potentially a new ideal form for illustrated historical narrative, and histories derived from visual evidence. Didi-Huberman argues that “montage intensifies the image and gives the visual experience a power that our visible certainties or habits have the effect of pacifying, or veiling” (136), drawing an allusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Notorious, where fear is instilled via distillation (the audience knows that Cary Grant is uncovering the secrets hidden behind vintages of wine, but afraid that he will be caught in the act). Here Didi-Huberman is also alluding to an argument developed throughout his oeuvre, about a distinction between the visible and the visual, the realm of the apparent and the realm of the transcendent. The visual will only sometimes, through art, appear in traces: “With the visible, we are of course in the realm of what manifests itself. The visual, by contrast, would designate that irregular net of event-symptoms that reaches the visible as so many gleams or radiances, ‘traces of articulation,’ as so many indices…. Indices of what? Of something-a work, a memory in process-that has nowhere been fully described, attested, or set down in an archive, because its signifying ‘material’ is first of all the image” (Confronting 31). In his Confronting Images (2005), Didi-Huberman goes into greater detail about the way a Renaissance painter such as Fra Angelico could deploy “a whack of white” to signify divine miracles such as the Annunciation (24). Didi-Huberman’s attention to figuring the visual iconically, a distinctive Christian art practice, opened him to criticism once the images under scrutiny were Holocaust photographs. If the montage produced a holy icon, the critics argued, Didi-Huberman’s ethical quest to honor the memory of the victims was a failure. No “rend,” no differend, no trace, no “whack” nor any visual transcendence was to be received through the document of suffering, because none was offered to the victims.
 
These photographs haunt us, which is one way of saying that we can’t seem to see them or talk about them sufficiently to exorcise the evil that travels with them. Perhaps the sonder attribute of these four photographs can be revised, not as a statement of the limits of representation, but as an exception that provokes new rules. They remain contentious because of the ethical stakes involved in acknowledging the humanity of the crime they record. Didi-Huberman reminds us that these four exceptional images survive “in spite of all,” and as such demand imaginative work in order to be received and recorded within memory “in spite of all.”
 

 

I can’t help it: trilogies are nerd Kryptonite. My childhood library was chock-full of science fiction and heroic fantasy books organized into epic troikas, all of which made grandiose claims about their ability to forever change my sense of literary genre, if not of consensual reality itself. As a result, any three books that self-consciously present themselves as a trilogy have for me an aura of importance about them, one that requires further interrogation. Kenneth Goldsmith’s American Trilogy-The Weather, Traffic, and Sports-is no exception.
 
In the first half of the last century, Ezra Pound claimed in his ABC of Reading that “artists are the antennae of the race” (73). In a global digital economy, though, both wireless and networked signals come at such speed and quantity that a set of rabbit ears will no longer suffice. In 1980, Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney updated Pound’s metaphor in “Parasite Maintenance,” comparing contemporary artistic sensibility to the satellite dish. From such a perspective, artists are devices for the accumulation and concentration of cultural data, cool and dispassionate. The quality of the objects and texts that they produce depends in part on what “Parasite Maintenance” refers to as “the will to select” (77). The individual’s ability to receive and process the ambient signals that constantly bombard all of us helps constitute contemporary criteria for a successful artistic career.
 
As Craig Dworkin notes, self-declared “Word Processor” Kenneth Goldsmith’s ongoing personal project-which Goldsmith has successively dubbed “nutritionless writing,” “uncreative writing,” and “conceptual writing”-falls squarely into this tradition of poetry as a sort of technologized, high-volume appropriation (34). This is especially true of recent works such as the massive, audacious Day (Figures, 2003): a volume that transcribes an entire issue of The New York Times and presents it in book form. In this context, even Goldsmith’s curation of the decade-old UbuWeb <www.ubu.com>, a large digital archive of avant-garde sound recordings, concrete poetry, video, outsider art and related critical materials, is arguably part of the practice of uncreativity-perhaps even Goldsmith’s greatest work.
 
Goldsmith normally proceeds by identifying a neglected (because mundane, or, in Goldsmith’s terms, “boring”) repository of cultural discourse, such as an average edition of The New York Times (Day), or the names of artists and albums from his extensive LP collection (6799). He then transcribes the contents of that repository meticulously, reconfigures the resulting digital manuscript as a book, and attaches his name to it. Though such projects have been common in the art world since the heyday of Conceptualism, they are relatively rare in what Charles Bernstein refers to as “official verse culture” (246), where even Jackson Mac Low and John Cage (two of Goldsmith’s muses) occupy an uneasy position. By porting an established practice for aesthetic production from one field of cultural endeavour (gallery art) to another (poetry), Goldsmith has simultaneously constructed himself a career and staged an intervention that has changed the stakes of contemporary poetics.
 
As a kind of briefer epic, The Weather, Traffic, and Sports serve collectively as a formal denouement to Day, because they codify and professionalize the practice I’ve just described. The similar size, shape, and design of these books suggests what even a cursory read will confirm, that the same basic dialectical move is at work in all of them: a reframing of the “everyday” that defamiliarizes it and allows us to return to mundane moments in order to reexamine them in a new light. As such, The American Trilogy succeeds admirably, but also suggests that there are limits to the artistic shelf-life of the “uncreative” moment (more on this notion shortly). These books are united formally by more than their explorations into a series of neglected but omnipresent cultural forms (the weather report, the traffic report, the sportscast). They all have a specific relationship to a specific medium: the radio-and, for the last two books in the trilogy, to digitally streamed radio broadcasts in particular. It is relatively easy to establish a typology of Goldsmith’s work in relation to the particular medium he happens to be transcribing at the moment (and even to predict where he’ll go next by considering the gaps in such a typology-film, video, and television being the most obvious omissions), yet literary studies often overlook material media. As a result, Goldsmith’s long career as a DJ on New Jersey freeform radio station WFMU is an underexamined part of his practice as an artist.
 
The Weather, Traffic, and Sports are all profoundly aural texts, representative of particular patterns of listening to text and transcribing it. They are exercises in taking dictation, which, as Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell (in Dictations) have argued, is always in part about a kind of negation of the transcribing self, but is also always a reassertion of the amanuensis as an author in her or his own right. Paradoxically, Goldsmith’s considerable personal reputation as an “original” author is rooted in his ability to (for the most part) cleanse his transcribed texts of the most obvious signs of his own presence and, as Ron Silliman has noted in a blog post on “the Cult of Kenny,” in Goldsmith’s ability to choose which “boring” moments to transcribe (Silliman).
 
The Weather (2005), the first of the three books, was the result of a process that could have been executed at any point over the last half century. Beginning with the first day of Fall 2002 and continuing through the last day of Summer 2003, Goldsmith used a cassette tape recorder to transcribe New York City weather reports from the US’s oldest all-news radio station, 1010 WINS. In The Weather, “uh,” “er,” and “eh,” as in “We have, uh, cloudy skies, uh” (5), serve to mark the fidelity of Goldsmith’s transcription process. Even if these signs are always approximations, they suggest that every noise, hesitation, and unintentional vocalization in the recordings finds its way into the typescript. Of course, this is a fiction that marks both the limits of what the literary form can convey and the impossibility of going back to verify the transcription itself. Goldsmith’s earlier books, especially Fidget and Soliloquy, mobilize similar tropes to mark both what’s gained and what’s lost in the space between tape and print.
 
True to Silliman’s hypothesis, though, these are not just any weather reports for downtown Manhattan. Beginning in the section titled “Spring,” they also include the weather reported for downtown Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm-the US invasion of Iraq. At the moment when the announcer begins the sentence, “As for Middle East weather, it continues to be favorable for military operations” (39), the politics of the mundane become visible. This is a turning point in the book; by the next page, the announcer is referring to the “battlefield forecast” as a regular broadcast feature (40). Here are shades of Marshall McLuhan’s arguments about the radio as a medium that, without requiring much from its listeners, sutures the nation together in times of war (McLuhan 260). The Weather suggests that even radio weather reports are not innocent. After the battlefield forecasts begin, the frequent mention of RADAR, for example, points to the origins of its instruments in the military-industrial complex. That the Baghdad weather reports eventually trickle down to nothing and the war continues is, in the end, more disturbing than their abrupt appearance. The result is a kind of pathetic fallacy that connects Goldsmith to the tradition of the American Transcendentalists and likely to Romanticism itself: as much as anything else, the weather in The Weather serves as an index of the national mood.
 
As a coda, it’s worth noting that “Spring” is marked as the valuable section of The Weather in another way as well. It is an extremely limited edition of signed and numbered artist’s books from Didymus Press (2005), with wood engravings by James Siena. The alchemy of letterpress can turn even the most mundane discourse into a rarefied commodity.
 
The cover text of Traffic cites Godard’s Week-End (1967) as a major influence. This is one of many careful positionings of Goldsmith’s work in the context of the 1960s art world. The epigraph, from an interview with Andy Warhol about his beginning the “Death” series after overhearing a traffic announcer cite the projected staggering highway death tolls for a coming holiday weekend, is another. These moments of name-checking indicate that by the time the books in The American Trilogy start to appear, the inspiration for Goldsmith’s overall aesthetics had shifted from the investigations of Cage and Mac Low into boredom and the “found” poetry of Bern Porter to Andy Warhol and 60s pop’s mechanical reproductions of popular culture (I’ll be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which Goldsmith edited, was published in 2004; Andy Warhol: Giant Size, a Phaidon coffee table book to which Goldsmith contributed several essays, appeared in 2006).
 
Like The Weather, Traffic is a book that is ultimately about circulation and global-cultural flows. In terms of the emerging critical interest in circulation (after the recent work of scholars such as Benjamin Lee and Edward Li Puma, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli) this book is timely. Goldsmith’s work is about nothing if not the circulation of cultural forms, bringing tropes from 60s visual art into the realm of poetry in ways that it had not previously been, deforming and transfiguring it in the process. As with its precursor, Traffic consists of text transcribed from the radio station 1010 WINS, but there is an important difference in terms of its production: Goldsmith sourced the text in Traffic from a digital stream rather than from an audiotape. Again, there are precedents in Goldsmith’s earlier work for the transcription of large swaths of digital discourse, notably No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, which consists largely of text copied from Usenet newsgroups between 1993 and 1996 according to their adherence to an “Ә” (schwa) rhyme scheme, then arranged alphabetically and syllabically. Here, the material is audio, not text, but it is important to note that Goldsmith was and remains an innovator in terms of the use of digital discourse in poetry.
 
As with The Weather, Goldsmith’s connection to the tradition of American letters in Traffic is stronger than might initially appear. Like the previous book, and in keeping with much of Goldsmith’s output since the art project “Broken New York”, Traffic is a psychogeographic exploration of a key aspect of New York City. The concern with highways and traffic raises inevitable comparisons with the American tradition of writing about the road, even if the text that, say, Kerouac transcribed was considerably more inchoate.
 
Sports, the final volume of the trilogy, is the most ambiguous of the three. Is Goldsmith’s kind of writing a sort of athletic event, or does it attempt to lay bare the machismo of the Great American Pastime as an accountant’s recital of numbers, statistics, and trivia? The book is a complete radio transcription of the longest 9-inning Major League Baseball game on record (New York Yankees vs. Boston Red Sox, August 2006), and thus not boring or mundane at all. Brian Kim Stefans has observed that, counter to Goldsmith’s claim that he doesn’t have a readership because his books are unreadable, this is actually quite a gripping text. Like Traffic, Sports was transcribed from digital audio, more precisely from the WFAN broadcast of the game on the YES (Yankees radio) Network. Goldsmith’s original idea was to transcribe the game as a broadcast from WEEI, a Boston station, and to publish the two versions of the game as a mirror-text, but he could not locate a source for the Boston transmission. As the old cliché goes, history is written by the winners.
 
A well-developed mythology has developed about Goldsmith’s absolute refusal to alter his source material in any way. The cover text of Sports invokes Goldsmith’s “exact parsing of language,” but the idiosyncrasies of transcription and copy editing are all over the book. For example, p. 117 presents “baked lays” for “Baked Lays.” And how are we to read “$39.95 per month” (43)? Did the announcer say “thirty-nine ninety-five per month” or “thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents per month,” or something else entirely? Whether Goldsmith is concerned with or even capable of “exact parsing,” part of what makes these texts intriguing is that they demonstrate over and over again the slippage that is part and parcel of every instance of signification.
 
As media history scholar Susan J. Douglas has described, many early radio “broadcasts” were actually recreations from textual notes (201, 210 and passim). Thus, this book’s aesthetic move is already part of a long tradition; it’s easy to imagine someone using this text as a performance score. Like Goldsmith’s No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (one of the few print samples of the kind of text that was typical of the pre-Web Internet), Sports is a valuable historical document, because it includes all ads and other information normally cut out of game transcriptions.
 
In the cheeky tradition of much appropriation art (e.g. Emergency Broadcast Network’s 1992 classic Commercial Entertainment Product), Sports begins with the reproduction of the full copyright statement from the New York Yankees, explicitly forbidding reproduction or transmission in any form. Goldsmith sent copies of this book to as many people as he could identify in the Yankee organization in an attempt to provoke them, but nothing happened. Goldsmith had a similar experience when he approached the Warhol estate to secure the necessary permissions to reprint Warhol’s interviews. They laughed and told him that for all they cared, he could take the words; the multimillion dollar branding deals in which media juggernauts like the Warhol estate and the Yankees are constantly involved are in the realm of images and branding, not script. Stakes are low in poetry.
 
The Weather, Traffic, and Sports together mark an ending to the “uncreative” or “boring” phase of Goldsmith’s larger project. Goldsmith has already remarked on several occasions that his next book, whose working title is Capital, will be a spiritual sequel to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, focusing on New York in the 20^th century rather than Paris in the 19^th. In what appears to be a move away from the refusal to explicitly edit his source material, Goldsmith insists that in Capital, “all the lines are zingers.” This reiterates earlier moments in Goldsmith’s oeuvre (particularly No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96) as much as it does something new.
 
Goldsmith has always been a movement of one. His work will inevitably spark imitators as various innovative writing practices did before it, but there is a unique trajectory here-what Deleuze & Guattari call a “line of flight” constituted by nothing so much as the avoidance of what others have done before, and the careful resuscitation and poaching of moments of potential betrayed by the actual events of history.
 

 

This essay reveals key plot details of the graphic novel Watchmen and the film based upon it.

 

On March 6, 2009, Warner Brothers released a motion picture based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel, Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder and written for the screen by David Hayter and Alex Tse. The history of this project is long and contentious. Moore has insisted the work can never be filmed successfully. According to legend, when the director Terry Gilliam planned an earlier attempt, Moore offered one word of advice: don’t.¹ Several months before the release of the Snyder version, Moore declared, “I am spitting venom all over it,” and added a “magical curse” against the enterprise (Boucher).
 
Perhaps Moore’s curse lacked sufficient throw-weight to reach California; or it could be that even the cleverest wizard cannot thwart the Sauronic power of Warner Brothers, at least not without a posse. The film at this writing seems on track for profitability, primarily through strong response from the comic’s dedicated fan community (Thrill). So another effects-heavy, green-screened, $200 million epic goes into the ledgers, vindicating (or flouting) bullish (or bearish) views about the box office in hard times. Why should we care, old fan-boys who have always been watching the Watchmen?
 
On first inspection, Snyder’s film seems mainly a technical achievement, remarkable for its frame-to-panel fidelity, but perhaps not deeply engaged with the best virtues of the original, such as its notoriously non-linear narrative and its relentless interrogation of all media, including its own. Is the Watchmen movie just another Inevitable Comics Conversion, part of a cinematic tulip craze that must inevitably bring us Superbaby, or Submariner vs. Pirates of the Caribbean? On the other hand, could there be something more substantial at stake in what is, after all, a careful attempt to translate a notably difficult work into a powerful, rapidly evolving medium?
 
In fact, Snyder’s film does not belong among the hothouse flowers, and ought to be considered as much for its significant departures from Moore and Gibbons as for its uncanny ability to translate their conception to the IMAX Experience. We should take the film seriously, if only because, in the mortal words of the Comedian, “It’s all a joke.” In fact, a particular joke comes to mind.
 

(1) Check out this act!

 
The joke to which the Comedian refers (though not yet the one of which I speak) is the central crime in Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel: a massively destructive prank involving teleportation, a giant artificial organism, and psychic fallout designed to induce post-traumatic nightmares. (As will be apparent, the jokes under discussion here are not strictly speaking funny.) This horrible trick provides a gravitational center for the constellation of doublings, pratfalls, taunts, and twisted recognitions that illuminate the panels of Watchmen. In most if not all these instances, the operative trope is savage irony, as in the bloodstained smiley button with which the comic opens, resonating against the psychotic anti-hero Rorschach’s claim to know the “true face” of the city. Echoes and variations ripple through succeeding pages in passing references to faces, smiles, and bloodstains. At its most ambitious, this trope gives us the memorable moment in the Martian crater Galle, where the disintegration of Dr. Manhattan’s clockwork flying machine produces a planet-scale model of the stained icon, laid out as the point-of-view zooms steadily up from the planet, though unperceived by the figures who occupy the scene (Moore and Gibbons, chapter IX, pages 26-28).²
 
These juxtapositions and cross-cuttings, and the deep logic of double meaning to which they answer, evolve naturally from Moore’s basic approach to comics art, which he has described as a particular design idiom, or “under-language”:
 

What it comes down to in comics is that you have complete control of both the verbal track and the image track, which you don’t have in any other medium, including film. So a lot of effects are possible which simply cannot be achieved anywhere else. You control the words and the pictures -and more importantly -you control the interplay between those two elements in a way which not even film can achieve. There’s a sort of “under-language” at work there, that is neither the “visuals” nor the “verbals,” but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two.
 

(Wiater and Bissette 162-3)

 

According to Moore, comics afford unmatched opportunities both for “interplay” and other sorts of play, especially puns, doublings, echoes, and other strategies for overloading the signifier. The fifth chapter of Watchmen, for instance, represents a graphic palindrome, in which the number and placement of panels on the first page represents a mirror reversal of those on the last, the second reversing the penultimate, and so forth. The centerfold spread in this remarkable design, the two innermost pages, presents an X or chiasmus (or perhaps two mirrored Vs), a figure that simultaneously incites and frustrates interpretation.³ As Moore says, this type of design language seems unique to comics. Just try anything like it at 24 frames per second.

 
Yet that is, more or less, what Zack Snyder and company have attempted, and their remarkable feat of cinematic chutzpah sets up the dark joke to which we are coming. Despite the reputation Snyder has earned for textual fidelity from his previous film, 300, Moore remained hostile to the Watchmen project. Asked for comment a few months before its release, he offered this view of the relationship between comics and the movie business:
 

There are three or four companies now that exist for the sole purpose of creating not comics, but storyboards for films. It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise. Comics are just a sort of pumpkin patch growing franchises that might be profitable for the ailing movie industry.
 

(Boucher)

 

Those who have tuned their receivers to the resonance frequency of irony may need to drop the gain a bit, because Moore’s observation pins the needle in the red. It is hard to imagine a twist of fate quite so pure, intense, and nasty. If Moore is right (and the point seems at least plausible), the relationship between film studios and comics publishers has become more than usually corrupt. Leading publishers no longer care about comics in and of themselves, that is, as explorations of the under-language, but only as storyboards, the genetic material of films and other franchise commodities. Yet here, among the stack of stock-keeping units, we have a movie called Watchmen, a likely commercial success, and creditable on a technical level as well. Its general design and visual texture are remarkably faithful to the graphic novel. Time and again, key panels from the comic are reproduced with apparently obsessive precision. Overall, the outcome could have been much worse (see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or better yet, don’t).

 
It would seem to follow, then, that Watchmen is one of the most successful storyboards in cinematic history. The man who curses Hollywood has, entirely against his will, produced something of great value to his adversaries. This is, to one way of looking, simply our old friend the political economy of the sign: same as it ever was, infinitely capable of subsuming any impulse to critical distance, or difference. Or, if we retain some capacity for resentment, we might describe the situation as an irony worthy of Alan Moore. To find a more egregious case, we would have to turn to truly historic instances: the face of Che Guevara on a billion sweatshop T-shirts, or the relics of the saints.
 
Ironies on this scale demand an approach both cosmic and comic. On the one hand, they call to mind the phenomenon called a singularity, an infinitely dense point that swallows everything within its gravitational grasp. Welcome to late- (or end-?) stage capitalism, where as Thomas Friedman says, the world is truly flat: spun down into an accretion disk circling the central, all-devouring maw, a scenario ruled by that other great law of cultural physics: Never give a saga an even break. As noted, there seems to be a deep correspondence between cosmology and comedy. So the singularity has its correlative in the world of stand-up comedians. It is the dirtiest joke in the world, popularly known as “The Aristocrats.”
 
Here is the general form of the joke, which is traditionally told serially by a group of comedians, each trying to extend or embellish the previous effort: A family act auditions for a talent agent. The agent is unimpressed with the standard performance. When he asks what else the performers can do, family members present a series of bizarre sex acts, a sort of Homeric catalog of organs, orifices, parts, products, and possibilities, which grows more extensive with each iteration of the joke. The punchline is both obligatory and largely meaningless. When the last perversion has been performed, the agent asks what the act is called. The answer is, The Aristocrats!
 
Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza’s documentary about this joke (2005) makes two things very clear. First, the joke is not especially funny. Second, it says something profound about the entertainment industry and the culture in which it operates. The Aristocrats joke is the black hole rendered into language, a limitless accretor of charged expression. It is the very emblem of the process that spirals in from the funny papers, to the comics houses, to the movie studios, ultimately reaching the central anomaly, an infinite concentration of transnational capital. As we have said, Watchmen has now passed the event horizon of this economic catastrophe. Thus Moore’s tour de force of cosmic irony has been fed into its own trope, ironically fueling the industry its author abominates. Watchmen thus collapses into that general version of The Aristocrats, joke without end, that we call contemporary entertainment. We could say, with every measure of regret, that the joke is now on Alan Moore; but to leave matters here would minimize a complex situation that deserves further treatment. The cosmic joke is not simply on Moore, but perhaps on all of us.
 

(2) A stronger loving world

 
Several times in the graphic novel, Moore and Gibbons use the print equivalent of a match cut, where a shot of a character in one context dissolves to a new scene or point in time, the character’s position and posture unchanged. This effect, like most of Watchmen‘s semiotic signatures, answers to a general principle of similarity-in-difference which is the logical underpinning of irony. The greatest divergence between comic and film lies with the machinations of Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias), the story’s world-conquering supervillain. Both film and graphic novel include passing references to an episode of the 1960s television series, The Outer Limits, entitled “The Architects of Fear” (first aired October 30, 1963, a year after the Cuban missile crisis). In the TV episode, a scientific cabal contrives a phony alien invasion to convince the superpowers to end nuclear conflict in the interest of planetary defense. This is, of course, very like Veidt’s plot in the graphic novel.⁴ Veidt teleports a gigantic, telepathic lifeform to an address on 7th Avenue in New York. The creature dies in agony, unleashing a psychic pulse that kills every person in the vicinity, leaving millions subject to recurrent nightmares about invaders from another dimension. The apparently alien corpus delicti, and the piles of dead bodies choking the streets (as Veidt has promised in an earlier advertising slogan: “I WILL GIVE YOU BODIES BEYOND YOUR WILDEST IMAGINING”), give tangible evidence of a cosmic threat, securing the new peace.
 
If Moore’s architecture of fear is Rococco (or perhaps Deconstructionist), Hayter, Tse, and Snyder offer something more along Bauhaus lines. They eliminate the giant, cloned psychic brain, oneiric fallout, and any suggestion of interdimensional travel. Instead, the attack on New York (in the film, one of several world capitals struck simultaneously) involves a more conventional weapon of mass destruction. In the film, Veidt teleports to each of his targets a device that apparently applies the same intrinsic-field nullification that transforms physicist Jon Osterman into the superbeing called Dr. Manhattan. Veidt evidently builds his cosmic bombs from a prototype power reactor given him by the blue superman. The devices are said to leave an “energy signature” tying them indisputably to Dr. Manhattan.
 
No doubt this change in the narrative was dictated primarily by the need to keep the film’s running time under three hours; but even so, the revisions change the story in very important ways. For starters, Dr. Manhattan becomes central to the film’s plot, while in the graphic novel he remains essentially incidental, in spite of his superhuman abilities. In the comic, once Veidt has deceived him into withdrawing to Mars, Dr. Manhattan has no immediate significance for humanity. Though he makes several important appearances on the comic’s stage (silently blessing the union of Laurie Juspeczyk and Dan Dreiberg; blasting Rorschach out of existence), he plays no direct role in Veidt’s Alexandrian master-stroke, beyond failing to stop it (indeed, there is always Moore irony).
 
The situation in the film is radically different. Here, Veidt does not simply distract Dr. Manhattan in order to pull off a bizarre prank; rather, Veidt makes Dr. Manhattan the focus of the fraud, the butt of his massively murderous joke. Veidt produces Dr. Manhattan as the alien threat, appropriating the destructive component of his superpower to devastate the world’s great cities. Like his print predecessor, Veidt encourages the superman to remove himself from the new society; but the film’s Veidt goes a crucial step further, converting Dr. Manhattan’s absent presence into a source of world-dominating power, both political and thermodynamic. In the film, Dr. Manhattan is not merely tricked into exile; he is stripped of his charisma as the condition for a new world order.
 
The realignment of the plot in the film makes a considerable difference for the overall shape of the narrative. This impact is most clearly visible in the concluding scene, which is nearly identical in both versions. The last moments take place in the editorial offices of The New Frontiersman, defined in the comic as a radical right-wing tabloid. Incensed at the US-Soviet detente that has followed Veidt’s coup, and desperate for material to print, the editor assigns his assistant, Seymour, to fill a hole in the upcoming issue with an item from a “crank pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. The top item in this pile (which evidently works on a Last In, First Out basis) is the journal compiled by Rorschach and committed to the mails before his final confrontation with Veidt. The journal contains a complete account of Rorschach’s investigations, including a direct indictment of Veidt, backed up by business and financial details.
 
In the final panel as well as in the final frame, Seymour reaches for Rorschach’s book, teasing us with the possibility that the world is about to See More, though there is (in either case) no more Moore to see. Yet for all its visual fidelity, this moment reads very differently on the screen than it does on the page.
 
In the graphic novel, publication of the journal may destabilize Veidt’s balance of terror, by starting an investigation that could unravel the threads of his fraud. Once the phony alien in New York is debunked, there will be no threat from beyond the stars to constrain nuclear brinksmanship. Rorschach’s journal thus represents a terrible presence: quite possibly a truly ultimate weapon, or Doomsday Book.
 
In the film, however, prospects seem both happier and more deeply perverse. Even if we assume exposure and prosecution of Veidt (an enterprise that would likely demand cooperation of both adversarial powers), the foundation of his bloody peace would almost certainly survive. The Veidt of the film does not invent aliens from space, but rather demonstrates the murderous potential of a real superbeing, using aspects of his own power. In both comic and film, Dr. Manhattan remains at large, whereabouts unknown; but in the film, this absence constitutes an impending threat. No matter what befalls Adrian Veidt, any future geopolitics must account for his possible return. After Veidt’s horrible Halloween prank, the world will always live in fear of Dr.Manhattan’s judgment-in every sense of the word.
 
Read on this level, Snyder and company’s ending seems to improve on Moore’s fatalistic vision. The joke we have just heard may be The Aristocrats, yet we may smile all the same, at least on first presentation. Perhaps, in this regard, the Watchmen film simply reflects the enormous cultural difference between the late 1980s (Thatcher, Reagan, and the climax of the Cold War) and the post-Millennium years (the decade of 9/11). Since a visually faithful adaptation of Watchmen must include the Twin Towers in its cityscape, as well as images of mass murder in New York, some avoidance or tropism seems in order. So the film’s moment of mass murder features bodies gracefully rising from the ground, not falling from the skies, before they disintegrate without trace. After the attack, we see a giant, hemispherical crater (an image unique to the film), but none of those no-longer-unimaginable bodies that might affront audience sensibilities. The extension of Veidt’s holocaust to sites beyond New York also seems consonant with this process.
 
Yet for all its careful evasions of real, historical horror, the Watchmen film nonetheless proceeds from, and reproduces, a distinctly post-9/11 ideology. Moore insists on the implausibility of any utopia, while Snyder and company seem attuned to a different Realpolitik. By re-engineering Moore’s implausible plot, the architects of the film imagine a more durable and impenetrable balance of terror. Their world will live in constant fear of further attack even if it learns the first incidents were spurious. The implications seem clear enough. The film gives us terror absolute, terror metastatic, terror as inevitable condition of everyday life. The revelation-proof utopia of the Watchmen film thus offers a rather clear portrait of the current world order-a recognition that might wipe away our initial smile.
 

(3) Picture book strange loop

 
If these connections to 9/11 and the Homeland Security State seem too far-fetched for a discussion of popular entertainment, we might instead consider the divergence of comic and film as a matter of media and technology. Here again, the altered status of Dr. Manhattan seems crucial. In both versions, he withdraws from the world before the final scenes; but as we have seen, this fact reads differently in each. In the comic, the world becomes obsessed with invaders from beyond the stars, shifting the balance of anxiety away from Dr. Manhattan. By the end of the book, he is gone and largely forgotten. In the film there is no such displacement: Dr. Manhattan becomes World Enemy Number One, so his absence exerts a paradoxical presence. Though gone, he is unforgettable (as an ad in the comic for one of Veidt’s perfumes declares, Oh how the ghost of you lingers!). Moore subjects the superhero to something like deconstruction, laying bare the limits of his relationship to humanity, and ultimately abstracting him from our experience. By contrast, Snyder and company weave the absent superbeing into the heart of their new world order, producing something more like apotheosis.
 
Anyone who has been monitoring the development of cinefantastique over the last thirty years may detect a parable here. Dr. Manhattan is in every sense a virtual superman; and as far as the industry of spectacle is concerned, we can say actual as well. The great blue nude of Snyder’s film is an elegant amalgam of old-fashioned, carbon-based acting (Billy Crudup’s remarkable characterization) and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Close-ups featuring the character’s disconcerting, actively scintillating eyes take us deep into the so-called Uncanny Valley, where CGI efforts historically come to grief; yet Snyder’s reintegrated superman seems monstrously unstoppable, both in the world of his story, and perhaps in ours. Those eyes are deeply disturbing, but hard to erase from memory.
 
Dr. Manhattan belongs to a proliferating line of comic-book and fantasy figures (Jar-Jar Binks, Gollum, Ray Winstone’s Beowulf, most of the Marvel superheroes) who populate the leading edge of Posthuman Hollywood. Precisely where this front is headed remains a matter of speculation. The recent finale of Battlestar Galactica, with its montage of Japanese robotica insinuating that even now Cylons walk among us, may prove as prophetic as it is corny. Gibson’s Idoru comes to mind, leading one to wonder whether a state that elects character actors and other players (Reagan, Schwarzenegger) might someday be led by a Non-Player Character. So perhaps it is fitting that Snyder, Hayter, and Tse refocus the plot of Watchmen to center on their indestructible, ineluctable superman. Whether or not the Watchmen film says anything about the contemporary politics of terror, it certainly reflects a cinematic watershed. To update Super Powers and the Superpowers: the superman exists, and he’s digital.
 
Perhaps the two versions of Watchmen belong to different aesthetic contexts, divided not so much by the transition from Cold War to War on Terror, as by another Millennial passage. Consider a second offering from the discontented winter of 2009, this one by the blogger Clay Shirky:
 

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves-the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public-has stopped being a problem.
 

(Shirky)

 

As Rorschach might say, an industry died in New York last night-or in Denver, or in Seattle, and if Shirky is right, all round the networked world. This obituary for the publishing business casts stark light on many matters covered here: on the one hand, on Moore’s lament about the decline of comics into a “pumpkin patch,” and on the other, on the epiphany of the CGI superman that shines through the film’s plot changes. Above all, though, this apocalyptic note rings out over the final visual signature of both comic and film, that moment when Seymour reaches for a fatal or futile book.

 
While the book in the comic seems dire, in the film it is more of a grace note. We might extend this diegetic or literal reading to higher levels as well, turning from the message to its mediation. The final image in the comic represents a last, emphatic assertion of Moore’s ironic master-trope: the convergence of opposites, or as it is often called in Watchmen, Fearful Symmetry. Here is a picture of a book that has not been opened, completing the last page of a book that is about to close. Like most other points of convergence in the comic, this moment is haunted by Rorschach, whose “face” is marked by mirror shapes. By the end of the story, Rorschach has been revealed as the man who knew too much, so when he symbolically reappears, we should prepare for dire enlightenment. Yet the subject of this final revelation may be not so much the world, as the work itself. Though Rorschach’s journal is very different from the graphic novel in which it is imagined, it seems fair to say the final image of the book refers at least obliquely or artifactually to the comic-which is, after all, the book we are holding in our hand, as we study an image of a hand and a book. Read in this way, Moore’s Watchmen goes out with a glowering reminder of the power of reading, writing, and perhaps the “under-language” of comics.
 
By definition, the film cannot produce this immediate self-reference, since it abducts Watchmen into a very different medium. The film’s final recourse to the image of a book risks a certain nostalgia. Nostalgia (the pain of memory) implies loss or devaluation. Moore complains of cinematic “spoon feeding” (Boucher) and the writer and comics artist Adam Cadre notes that for all the visual genius of the film, its messages are thrown serially across a giant screen, not deployed in an elegant, convoluted sign-system that demands artful discovery (Cadre). Since these points seem undeniable, it is easy to feel a certain cynicism about the film’s reproduction of Seymour and the book. Perhaps the final tableau, viewed on the IMAX screen, comes down to nothing more than this: Hey kids, hope you enjoyed the movie-remember to read a book now and then: preferably a comic from the DC division of Warner Brothers!
 
Having sunk this far, those of my generation (especially academics) may slip readily into the next stage of descent, which has been named the Gutenberg Elegy (Birkerts). How sad, goes the whinging chorus, that we have fallen away from the good, old world of books-even comic books. If one were persuaded by cultural conservatives in the last, or indeed in the present administration, that reading is imperiled by new technologies, or by the collapse of commercial publishing, one might beg space for Alan Moore aboard Professor Bloom’s Ark-not that any berth would be found, even far below the waterline, or that Moore would accept such passage.
 
Not to put too fine a point on it: whinging never helps. If any past master deserves remembrance here, it is not Gutenberg the goldsmith, but William Blake the prophet, grand master of fantasy comics avant la lettre. Further, there seems no particular reason to mourn, since unlike the Blake of Watchmen (the Comedian who dies in New York), the Blake of our visionary tradition seems very much alive, at least in certain hearts and minds. Not for nothing is Alan Moore’s current work in progress a massive project called Jerusalem (Boucher).
 
One clear indication of Blake’s spiritual survival may be Alan Moore’s notoriously renegade stance toward the popular culture industry, illustrated by his staunch refusal to view any film made from his work. Who watches the Watchmen? Not Alan Moore. Moore’s refusal to participate in the industry of spectacle strikes a bright line between page and screen, in spite of all attempts to confuse them. His feud with the film business asks those of us who care about his writings to keep them out of the pumpkin patch, remembering that they are formally challenging, highly original efforts, not simply frozen embryos of movies.
 
Yet, as we have seen, for all its revolutionary consciousness, Moore’s ending is at least potentially less hopeful than Snyder and company’s. His numinous book may open to ultimate revelation or Apocalypse, evoking, as Moore quotes John Cale, “a stronger loving world to die in.” On the other hand, the film’s book seems more likely the image of a new world order, a stable dominion, albeit one of architectural terror.
 
Such is, in effect, the way we live now, and perhaps there is something to be said for making the best of it. If we swap elegy for paean, it might be possible to elicit a more hopeful reading from the final image of the Watchmen film. Where the comic offers Fearful Symmetry, perhaps, if we can avoid the pitfall of cynicism, the film might supply a less ominous pattern. Specifically, the film’s repetitious return to the book might constitute what Douglas Hofstadter calls a Strange Loop:
 

an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.
 

(Hofstadter, 101-102)

 

Applying Hofstadter’s terms, the “upwards movement in a hierarchy” would be the transition from the old medium of ink and paper to the brave new world of polygons and bits. The paradox or strangeness would manifest on two levels, literal and symbolic, the first supplied by the image of the book, the second by the mechanism of absent presence, which Snyder and company have made even more prominent in their version than in the original. In the most immediate sense, this absent presence is Rorschach, author of the Doomsday book, whose identity is always linked to his mirror opposite, Dr. Manhattan, the present absence of Watchmen‘s world order. Behind both these figures, however, lies the ultimate uninvited guest: Alan Moore, whose credit you will not find in the marathon roll that follows the final shot.

 
The “strangeness and charm” of this procedure (to borrow Moore’s borrowed language) lies in the paradoxical reassertion of primary genius against overcoming or obsolescence. No matter how plausible or faithful its appropriation, the film does not fully displace the comic book, or indeed, its author. Things might perhaps have been different had Moore signed on with the American dream machine, but to his lasting credit, he refused. So when we come back to the book, in the radically different context of Zack Snyder’s posthuman epic, we are, in Hofstadter’s sense, closing the uncanny circuit. We may not be “exactly where we started out,” but we must acknowledge certain lingering presences.
 
If we manage to see the film’s bibliophanic moment as a “level-crossing feedback loop” then perhaps there is some hope for narrative, after all, even in the Valley of the Uncanny, among all those strange faces with deeply spooky eyes. Dr. Manhattan, the latest poster-boy of CGI, is not the only spectre haunting our technological sublime. Alan Moore is out there, too, channeling William Blake, casting spells and curses, continuing to cover the page. If we have to bury Gutenberg, or newspapers and publishing houses-and perhaps someday, in these increasingly hard times, even the mighty Warner Brothers-the idea of magical, subversive texts will remain.
 
Irony survives the death of irony, if by no other process then through the perdurably perverse logic of the World’s Dirtiest Joke, whereby, the poet advises from Hell, “the most sublime act is to set another before you” (Blake 151). If absence can be presence in the Rorschach space of modern media, then obsolescence can just as well signify vitality. Snyder and company may offer what is, logically considered, an impotent parody of Moore’s book of revelation; but their inversion reminds us that other works, other worlds, and other revelations remain to be produced. No invention is final, no weapon ultimate, no act so sublime (or obscene) that it cannot be topped by the next guy. So we may imagine, in the mental frames that always roll off after the end of any film, books of the future, both wonderful and terrible.
 
Perhaps these are books of new strangeness and charm, the kind that never appear in print. In any case, we read on.
 
Who watches these watchmen?
 
We’re the Aristocrats!
 

Perhaps the most iconic cinematic image of manhood from the days of the presidency of George Bush 41 (1989-1993) is that of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular cyborg in the ad for the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, sitting atop a motorcycle, wearing a black leather jacket, black T-shirt, and black sunglasses from whose left lens a red point of light glows, an enormous phallus of a gun held in his right hand and pointed aggressively upwards, the entire image darkly swathed in an ominous blue-black neon glow. The image encapsulates the menace and might of Schwarzenegger’s newly rearticulated identity as a futuristic killing machine. Always a bit of joke in such films as Stay Hungry (1976) and Conan the Barbarian (1982) and its sequel, Schwarzenegger benefited from James Cameron’s innovative use of him as the implacable Terminator in the 1984 film of that name, a sleeper box-office hit and one of the great films of the 80s. But, as Schwarzenegger told talk-show hosts unironically when he campaigned for the 1991 sequel, he was now playing a “kinder, gentler Terminator.” This sequel, Schwarzenegger suggested, had been tailored to fit the ideological and rhetorical design of the Bush presidency. In the first film, Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, returning from a future in which machines bent on eradicating all the remnants of human life rule the earth, was an unstoppable agent sent to kill the woman, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose unborn child, to be named John, would eventually lead the human resistance against the machines. In contrast, Schwarzenegger’s cyborg killer in the sequel is the hero, programmed to save the now teen-aged John Connor. The cyborg, to be sure, retains his uncouth instincts to destroy all in his path, and must be counseled by sarcastic but sensitive John in murder-etiquette. This kinder, gentler Terminator learns not to annihilate the hapless humans who inconvenience him but, with cybernetically enhanced precision, merely to wound them in non-vital areas. The spectacle of crippled, wounded, whimpering, maimed men, lying at the feet of the looming Terminator, is an exact image of its time. As J. Hoberman writes, “Politically, Terminator 2 suggests the merging of Schwarzenegger and Schwarzkopf, techno-war and Technicolor. This is truly the Desert Storm of action flicks” (qtd. in Rushing and Frentz 201). I think that this film’s associations with war extend beyond Desert Storm to World War II and its cultural afterlife, specifically its images of fascism and the Nazi. Fusing tropes of Nazism in American popular culture with its homoerotic tableaux, tableaux embedded in the construction of fascism, Terminator 2 is a pivotal text poised between the backward-looking Reagan years, in which a Classic Hollywood star turned national leader presided over the nation, and the era of both postmodern techno-war and postgay articulations of sexual identity.
 
In his famous essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Leo Bersani argues against the utopian impulses in queer theory-as evinced by Jeffrey Weeks’s argument for the “radical pluralism” of homosexuality-to celebrate the socially progressive aspects of queer culture. Bersani writes
 

It has frequently been suggested in recent years that such things as the gay-macho style, the butch-fem couple, and gay and lesbian sado-masochism, far from expressing unqualified and uncontrollable complicities with a brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity, or with the heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power structure of male sexual and social mastery over female sexual and social passivity, or, finally, with fascism, are in fact subversive parodies of the very formations and behaviors they appear to ape. Such claims, which have been the subject of lively and intelligent debate, are, it seems to me, totally aberrant.
 

(207)

 

As Bersani points out, these claims ignore the troubling possibility that such phenomena as “the gay commitment to machismo” reveals that queer desire runs the risk “of idealizing” (208) the very forms of gendered identity that condemns queer desire in the first place. Bersani continues:

 

The logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies. . . . a sexual desire for men can’t be merely a kind of culturally neutral attraction to a Platonic Idea of the male body; the object of that desire necessarily includes a socially determined and socially pervasive definition of what it means to be a man.
 

(208-9)

 

If what we desire as queer men and women is precisely implicated in the very constructions of gendered identity we must challenge and attempt to topple in order to secure our erotic and social freedom, our path to this liberation, Bersani argues, is hardly a clear-cut one. It can only be “a struggle not only against definitions of maleness and of homosexuality as they are reiterated and imposed in a heterosexist social discourse, but also against those very same definitions so seductively and so faithfully reflected by those (in large part culturally invented and elaborated) male bodies that we carry within us as permanently renewable sources of excitement” (“Rectum” 209).

 
In this essay, I argue that films like Terminator 2 enact the queer theory debates indexed in Bersani’s essay, forcing queer desirers to acknowledge the complicity with normative standards of gendered identity in our desiring, but also exposing the queer nature of these normative standards. After all, any viewer of the film is asked to marvel at and share in the spectacle of myriad forms of masculine perfection in the film, ranging from Edward Furlong’s all-American boy ephebe to Schwarzenegger’s hypermasculine cyborg to the Aryan perfection of Robert Patrick’s more advanced T-1000 to Linda Hamilton’s futuristically jacked, hypermaculinized womanhood. The film incites desire for the varieties of male beauty, albeit in a prescribed version. Maleness-in these properly Aryan forms, of course-becomes a smorgasbord of visual delights in this film, an ever-beckoning display of queer delectation for the whole family. Terminator 2 is a family film that reoedipalizes its audience by presenting the Father as a kinder, gentler Terminator; as a perverse family film, it remakes the family in its own queer image. The film forces us to acknowledge that while queer desire may be troublingly complicit in the structures of normative power that pathologize it, those very same structures proceed from an oddly analogous fascination with the homoerotics of power, especially in its most virulent, which is to say, its fascist, form. Terminator 2 cloaks its sadomasochistic fascist fantasies in the guise of the violent, melodramatic family film. In that lies the sickening allure of this duplicitous and agonized film, an allure that promises covert queer themes within the film’s allusive system of unacknowledgeable yet undeniable fascist images.
 
The present essay emerges from a larger study of the representation of masculinity in Hollywood film of the “Bush to Bush” era-from 1989 to 2008, the period presided over by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. My study examines the fate of the figure Susan Jeffords discovers, in her important study Hard Bodies, at the threshold of the Bush I era, the “New Man,” who represents a break with 1980s hardbody masculinism. The Beast of Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast metonymically represents this new development in cinematic manhood: “He is the New Man, the one who can transform himself from the hardened, muscle-bound, domineering man of the eighties into the considerate, loving, and self-sacrificing man of the nineties” (Jeffords 153). Shifting the focus to Terminator 2, Jeffords prophetically glimpses what would be the result of this seeming innovation in manhood: “The film’s complex reasonings supply a ‘new’ direction for masculinity, not, as in the 1980s, outward into increasingly extravagant spectacles of violence and power (as Rambo and Ronald Reagan showed, these displays had become self-parody), but inward, into increasingly emotional displays of masculine sensitivities, traumas, and burdens” (172). The New Man of the 1990s, argues Jeffords, shifts “the ground away from the externalities through which [masculine] logic had been defined in the 1980s to the ‘new’ internal qualities of the more ‘human’ man” (176). “But,” she continues,
 

this is not a simple negation but rather a rewriting, a repetition, a retelling of the story of masculinity… And though that rewriting seems on its surface to be a rejection of so many spectacular identifications of masculinity of the 1980s-technology, violence, power, command, strength-its mainframe is still very similar: the reproduction of masculine authority (now freed from civil authority) through the affirmation of individualism.
 

(176)

 

If film is the language in which nations dream, and if dreams are indeed wish fulfillments, as Freud taught us, Terminator 2 is a dream of American manhood that fulfills a wish to combine the “hard, stoic, isolate” and “killer” American manhood of D.H. Lawrence (65) with a newly awakened sensitivity. This unwieldy fantasy of reconciling killer with nurturing instincts continues to play out in American movies and in the national construction of gender in the inter-Bush years.

 

The Cyborg as Queer Allegory

 
Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny has proven extraordinarily suggestive for studies of the cyborg. Following Freud’s formulation of the uncanny, Bruce Grenville writes that
 

the cyborg is uncanny not because it is unfamiliar or alien, but rather because it is all too familiar. It is the body doubled-doubled by the machine that is so common, so familiar, so ubiquitous, and so essential that it threatens to consume us, to destroy our links to nature and history, and quite literally, especially in times of war, to destroy the body itself and replace it with its uncanny double.
 

(20-21)

 

The greatest threat the cyborg poses is that its danger is too familiar to be readily recognized and “worse yet, we may be unnaturally attracted to it” (Grenville 21). Donna Haraway has described her influential feminist “cyborg myth” as being “about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (154). Haraway’s utopian cyborg emerges as the result of “three crucial boundary breakdowns”: human/animal, animal-human/machine, and physical/non-physical (151). As such, “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (154). But the Terminator films are afraid, very afraid, of a cyborg world, seeing it as decidedly dystopian.

 
The cyborg has emerged as one of the most productive topics for postmodern work on feminism, race, class, and gender. As the most important and sustained cyborg narrative in Hollywood film, the Terminator films, particularly the first two, continue to demand a considerable amount of critical scrutiny. When the highly charged allegorical power of the figure of the cyborg is added to Schwarzenegger’s star persona, now evolved into that of national political figure, this persona emerges as a welter of gendered, sexual, and racial anxieties that relate in multivalent ways. “Arnold’s ability to insinuate himself into any discourse or any metaphoric moment or any narrative thread is a remarkable feature of his stardom,” write Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz (22). Such an understanding of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator-like ability to infiltrate discourses and cultural spaces relates to an important aspect of the Terminator’s metaphorical value: the human-metal cyborg serves as an allegory for sexual “passing” and closeted homosexuality. Able to pass as human but containing within him a secret identity destructive to human life, the Terminator, the enemy of human reproductivity, is an unstable and challenging metaphor for queer people. Moreover, the cyborg-as-superman-the heightened, cartoonish version of manhood represented by the hypermasculine Terminator image-allows us to consider the nature of queer desire. Like Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” written between the release of the two Terminator films, the Terminator films themselves fuse themes of fetishism and gay desire. The queer cyborg of these films, in its utterly adamant opposition to futurity, can be read, in the paradigms of Lee Edelman, as the embodiment of the queer death drive.¹
 
Terminator 2 occupies a central allegorical position in the cultural effort to denature homoerotic imagery so that it can be redeployed for mass-consumption, in order to effect, in the words of Michael DeAngelis, the “accommodation of homosexual and heterosexual positions of spectatorial access” (157). The Terminator’s association with leather culture is the most vivid indication of its fusion of straight and gay sensibilities. As DeAngelis writes, the cultural “configuration of black leather as an element of gay culture . . . has no inherent or exclusive associations with homosexuality” (157). But the postwar leather phenomenon “was appropriated by emerging gay biker clubs in the 1950s” (157).² William Friedkin’s 1981 film Cruising appeared to associate leather-clad gay men with violence in the popular mind.³ The Terminator films draw on longstanding cultural fantasies of gay leather culture but also on the denaturing straight appropriations of this culture to produce a hybrid new masculine identity that embraces hypermasculinity while attempting to keep homoerotic energies and associations at bay-a wobbly enterprise, indeed. Adding to its leather-daddy themes, the film’s dependence on tropes of biker masculinity corresponds to overlapping fixations in gay S/M subcultures. “Images of bikers started cropping up in homoerotic physique magazines of the 1950s,” writes Juan A. Suárez, in “elaborate fetishistic scenarios” (156): “the physicality of the biker contrasted with the effeminacy, frailty, and neuroticism attributed to homosexuals both in popular representations and medical and psychological discourses” (158). In addition to representing fused straight and gay iconographies of manhood, Terminator 2 provides extraordinarily vivid evidence of the resurgence of an interest in fascist iconography in Bush-to-Bush films, which here bears directly on its appropriation of homoerotic imagery. Discussing his difficulty in explaining his project of the linkages between fascism and homosexuality in modernity, Andrew Hewitt notes the response he would sometimes receive: “Oh, now I get it! You mean leather and S&M, and all that stuff!…” (3). Hewitt’s project reminds us that fascism used homosexuals as objects and victims; Terminator 2 redeploys gay leather and S&M imagery appropriations of fascist iconographies for newly proto-fascist purposes. Indeed, all the Terminator films, but especially the first sequel, revisit the imagery of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s disturbing Scorpio Rising (1964), another film that may be said to fuse leather, biker, and S/M iconographies in a manner suggestive of the controversial overlap between Nazism and homosexuality. “The Nazi imagery in the film,” writes Suárez, “assimilates the bikers to Nazi troopers on the basis of their violence and gang-like structure” (164). If juvenile delinquent John Connor stands in for the “nihilistic and mutinous young outlaw” in search of a leader, the two Terminators stand in for the leaders whose guidance may result in fascism. Like Anger’s film, Cameron’s demonstrates the “connection between totalitarianism and kitsch” (Suárez 165). Indeed, Terminator 2 can be described as, to use Andrew Hewitt’s phrase, “fascist kitsch” (206).⁴
 
Schwarzenegger’s star image provides the fascist logic of the Terminator films. As Yvonne Tasker writes, Schwarzenegger embodies “two poles, of excess and narcissism on the one hand, ‘heroic health’ on the other, [that] can be seen to provide the limits for the meaning of the muscular body” in cinema and popular culture. He has been widely admired by the American public for the latter qualities. Yet admiration
 

quickly shifts into unease, which shifts into speculation about the appeal of Schwarzenegger to the masses of America. In particular Schwarzenegger’s foreignness, his immigrant status, carries [for critics like Ian Penman, who sees Schwarzenegger as “American Fascist art exemplified, embodied,”] disturbing associations of a Nazi past, a Europe from which so many fled . . . . [reminding] us of the appeal that Nazi art made to an idealized classical culture.
 

(Tasker 81-2)

 

Terminator 2 signals that along with an increasingly less covert deployment of homoerotic imagery in Hollywood films came the volatile cultural baggage associated, most often perniciously, with this imagery. Given that Schwarzenegger’s own star manhood synthesizes fascistic and homoerotic themes, Terminator 2 represents an overdetermination of linkages among hypermasculine bodies, homoeroticism, and the fascist manifestations of both.

 

Homoerotics of The Fascist Male Body

 
We can consider Terminator 2 as a recent example of the fictions of eroticized fascism created by nonfascists (if Cameron can be given the benefit of the doubt) treated by Laura Frost in her discussion of modernist texts. Frost distinguishes between historical fascism, with its ever present real-world threat, fictionalized modernist fascism, and the “pure literary masochism on the Sacher-Masoch model” (36). The chief fascist figures of Terminator 2, like those in modernist novels, undergo “transformations, often switching from aggression to submission”-this is clearly the case in Schwarzenegger’s cyborg and to a certain extent of Sarah and even the T-1000. These transformations, however, never occur in Sacher-Masoch:
 

when the masochist’s manipulations are unmasked or the “torturer” is submissive, the scene is over. . . . In Sacher-Masoch’s texts, the “tormentor” must always be coaxed into playing her role; in fictions of eroticized fascism, the fascist figure is historically circumscribed as unremittingly cruel. However, in [fictional erotic scenarios], a passive or sexually compelling fascist can be imagined.
 

(36)

 

These works of “imaginatively distorted fascism” “play masochistically with fascism . . . . Fantasy makes possible a sexually responsive fascism and can transform enacted political violence into erotic sadomasochism” (Frost 36).⁵

 
In a particularly striking moment in the first Terminator, Kyle describes post-apocalyptic life in the machine-world hell to Sarah, and explains why the machines have targeted her for termination:
 

Most of us were rounded up, put in camps for orderly disposal. [Pulls up his right sleeve, exposing a mark.] This is burned in by laser scan. Some of us were kept alive… to work… loading bodies. The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor. Your son, Sarah, your unborn son.

 

The mark Reese shows Sarah, burnt into his skin, resembles a concentration-camp number. His description of the machines’  
relentless campaign to “exterminate” human life parallels the Third Reich’s program in WWII Germany to exterminate social undesirables like Jews, gypsies, the infirm, the mentally retarded, and homosexuals. Terminator 2‘s aesthetic constructions of manhood also informed the rise of fascism in World War II Germany. I would argue that the films’ uses of Schwarzenegger draw upon collective, popular images of Nazi masculinity, the image of the Nietzschean superman that the Nazis distorted for their own purposes. Terminator 2 all but explicitly develops these implicit themes in the first film, threatening to reveal the films’ secret-that they enshrine and fetishize fascist manhood-drawing upon as they disavow the homoeroticism that undergirds it.

 
In his essay “The Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich,” gay filmmaker and scholar Stuart Marshall reminds us of the overvaluation of Aryan masculinity and male friendship in the Nazi era in Germany. Aestheticizing and eroticizing “the masculine fighting man,” the Nazis “produced endless representations of male beauty for the populace to identify with or to idealize, most notably through their official art, which made frequent references to Hellenic Greek art and culture” (Marshall 79). The Hellenic masculine colossi of Arno Breker, the Official State Sculptor of the Nazi era, emblematized this interest. The German state did not equate the eroticism that undergirded the socially and politically necessary institutionalization of male friendship with sexuality but rather with “desexualized” and “cosmological love.” “But homoeroticism can easily become transmuted into homosexual desire, and this was the root of the Nazis’ problem” (Marshall 79-80). The homoerotic history of Nazi ideology demands a far denser scrutiny than can be provided here, but we can focus on a few salient points. All the Terminator films share Nazi Germany’s simultaneous adulation for and anxiety over the idealized nude form, and a desire to return to origins. The first three films open with sequences that depict the barren, laser-lit nightmarish nighttime world of our post-apocalyptic, machine-run future, in which enormous death-machines crunch their immense tires over rows of human skulls. We then see Terminators being born into our present, crouching in fetal positions that also resemble the cool tranquility of classical sculpture. (In sharp contrast, cries of anguish and a quivering body accompany human Reese’s “birth.”) Invited to admire their form without succumbing to baser voyeuristic impulses, what Freud called the “tormenting compulsion” to look at others’ genitals, we see nude Terminator bodies but no full-frontal nudity. (After repression sets in, the desire to see others’ genitals becomes a “tormenting compulsion.” Even more independent an impulse than scopophilia, cruelty comes easily to the child, for the affect of pity, like shame, develops late [Freud Three Essays 58-9].⁶) This device extends even into the time-travel-free Terminator Salvation (2009), which, through the wonders of digital technology, restores the massive Schwarzenegger-cyborg to his younger 1984 form, which we are invited to gape at anew in all of its naked perfection even as male frontal nudity remains decisively obscured.
 
Considering the work of art critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) as the foundation of the German cult of male beauty that culminated in the fascist movement, George L. Mosse describes the ways in which the Nazis resolved the problems posed by the fetishized image of the male nude, which threatened to inspire homoerotic feeling. Winckelmann “had already attempted to make his Greek sculptures acceptable to middle-class sensibilities by raising his naked youths to an abstract plane, transforming them into a stylistic principle.” Key to the minimization of these figures’ erotic impact was their “transparent whiteness” and tranquility. “Reese, what’s it like to go through time?” asks Sarah in the first film. “White light,” he responds, adding that he alone, being human, experiences pain in time travel. The white light of transparent classical beauty rendered potentially disturbingly erotic nudity into “universally valid and immutable symbols. The Nazis took up this argument and extended it,” making sure that when the male nude was displayed, male skin was always “hairless, smooth, and bronzed,” the body rendered “almost transparent,” in hope that “with as few individual features as possible, it would lose any sex appeal,” becoming an “abstract symbol of Aryan beauty, not unlike the athletes in Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Olympics” (Mosse 172-3). Given the supreme and idealized whiteness of all the Terminators, including Reese’s anti-Terminator human protector, the films may be said to constitute a revisiting of the Nazi problematics of beauty, with much the same result, an abstraction of nude physicality into mythic symbol. In the first film, the Schwarzenegger Terminator’s first confrontation, with punks in shabby clothes and Mohawk haircuts, pits his idealized form against their degenerate masculinity. When he dons their clothing, however, he symbolically merges his ideal form and their degeneracy, giving his first version of the Terminator a kind of punker trashiness, a hobo chic, one adumbrated by Reese’s stealing of a homeless man’s pants. But in Terminator 2, Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, though he steals clothes from a redneck-typed tough in a country and western bar, appears sleek and blemishless, a rarefied abstraction of his punk-trash former self. In fact, with his newly refined, cut-down physicality, no longer bulgingly Mr. Universe but now much more humanly proportionate, Schwarzenegger is, in some shots, very beautiful, almost, relatively speaking, femininely soft. His massive bulk a sign of vulnerability, Schwarzenegger provides an incoherent, disorienting sign of manhood here.
 
One of the commonplaces of the Hitler biography is that, as an Austrian with dark hair and features, he himself did not embody the model of Aryan perfection he promulgated as the universal standard. As an Austrian with dark hair and features, Schwarzenegger does not fully represent the master race of the Nazi ideal, either, even if he otherwise embodies the “superman.” For this reason, the T-1000 of Robert Patrick is especially fascinating as an upgrade of masculine perfection, the ideal Aryan “often compared to the ancient Greek ideal type,” who exemplifies heath in mind and body, pointing backward to a “healthy world before the onset of modernity.” The T-1000 comes closer than Schwarzenegger’s Terminator to copying the Nordic perfectionism of the ideal Nazi male, “tall and lean, with broad shoulders and small hips” (Mosse 169). Schwarzenegger’s cut cyborg body here seems like an attempt to match Patrick’s ideal measurements, but still emerges as a less perfect model of male physicality from a fascist perspective. It is little wonder that the T-1000 is a more advanced model, and Schwarzenegger, however hulking, the underdog; this conceit only makes sense from a racist perspective.
 
Terminator 2 draws on two of the most familiar images in gay iconography, both of which have fascist undertones: the leatherman and the cop. Given Schwarzenegger’s status as a cartoon of manhood, it is easy to see in Terminator 2 a kind of parodistic disposition towards the fascist male ideal, precisely because of its homoerotic overtones. The depiction of both Schwarzenegger’s and Robert Patrick’s bodies, competing perfectionist models of male physicality, recalls the classically chiseled bodies of Nazi art, but also of gay artists like Tom of Finland, who incorporates such iconography in his drawings of hypermasculine (yet strangely softened) men engaged in various baroque configurations of gay sex. Like Tom of Finland’s work, and also the theoretical work of queer theorists like Leo Bersani, Terminator 2 engages in the dangerously unstable project of drawing out the appeal of fascist manhood for gay men, an appeal then remanufactured as a spectacle for straight audiences. As such, the kinder, gentler Terminator 2 is a much less reassuring film than it would appear.
 
“Military life, as glorified by the Nazis, did indeed attract gay men,” writes Micha Ramakers in a study of Tom of Finland’s work, “the best-known example being Ernst Röhm’s doomed SA corps, which, at Hitler’s command, and with his personal involvement, was destroyed during the Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934). The attraction German soldiers-and their outfits-held over gay men also is clear from the work of a number of gay writers” (161). (We should note that while Röhm was gay and so were some SA officers, the SA eventually had around 3 million soldiers, so not all of its members can be assumed to have been gay.) Ramakers, in an exculpation of charges frequently brought forth against Tom of Finland, argues that his work cannot be equated with Nazi iconographer Arno Breker’s: “Tom’s work is dedicated to the glorification of the male body,” Ramakers argues, “in all its vulnerability: his bodies are constantly being penetrated in every possible way and through every orifice. In that sense they form the antithesis of the Nazi body, which was in every way a closed, impenetrable body” (165). If Breker’s “anti-bodies” express the Nazi fear and loathing of the corruptible body, the bodies in Tom’s work glorify, for Ramakers, “an abject form of corruption, indeed one persecuted by the Nazis” (165). Even if we appropriate Terminator 2 as a queer work that plays with the transgressive appeal of fascist forms of masculinity-the leatherman, the cop, and also the butch woman; even if we treat the film precisely not as Schwarzenegger and company would have us see it, as some kind of weirdly hyperviolent but resolutely sentimental family-values film (which framing of the film is also a disavowal of the violence and eroticism of sentimentalism as a genre), the film’s fascist imagery cannot be defended in the terms Ramakers uses to defend Tom of Finland.
 
Cameron’s work indulges in and explores fantasies of the corruptible, vulnerable male body to a degree that is unseemly and transgressive for a conventional Hollywood film, but there is no celebration of this explosion of the confines of the representation of male physicality. Rather, there is something else: a fascinated, wonderstruck desire to see this explosion again and again, in ever more ingenious and voyeuristic ways. The film exhibits, in the ample imaginative license for dark fantasy it gives the viewer, a fascination with precisely the most volatile, potentially pernicious tropes of gay male identity. For example, in one shot of the T-1000 in silver liquid metal form, we see him fall from the ceiling of an elevator on to the ground. The shot unmistakably suggests falling excrement. The T-1000 returns cyborg masculinity to the anal/excremental/sadistic stage of Freud’s theory of childhood psychosexual development, a regression related to fantasies in the popular imaginary of homosexuality as regressive returns to childhood sexuality or to arrested development. Phobic associations such as these abound. Yet the film also truly does disturb its solicited straight audience in its sustained suggestion that all forms of manhood and masculinity are inherently fascistic and homoerotic in their appeal. In its own bizarrely self-conflicted and bombastic way, it’s a radically de-minoritizing movie, making homoerotic desire universal.
 

Pedophilic Fantasies

 
Kristen Thompson writes of Terminator 2 that “although there is no romance, John’s friendship with the Terminator and that relationship’s humanizing effect on the latter provide considerable emotional appeal” (42). I would go further to argue that it is precisely in the nature of the John-Terminator relationship as a romance that the film’s emotional appeal lies. If Terminator 2 is diabolical fun for the whole family, perhaps the film’s most awesomely perverse touch is its family-unfriendly foregrounding of pedophilic themes which organize all of the other themes we have examined.⁷ Even more perversely, Terminator 2 is a pedophilic fantasy from a child’s perspective.⁸
 
The fascist fantasies circulating in the film center upon young male John Connor’s body, which both Terminators war over. In classical Greek culture, the eromenos is the young male object of desire for the erastes, the older man, who initiates the eromenos into intellectual and sexual knowledge. As played by Furlong, John Connor is a surprisingly vulnerable young man, an ephebe who suggests the eromenos of Greek pederasty, even as the Terminators, with their secret reserves of knowledge past and future, suggest the erastes. The battle of two military “men” over the vulnerable young John also recalls a popular image in gay appropriations of Nazi masculinity. In a typical Tom of Finland construction-it should be noted that this artist always fiercely denied any associations with Nazism (which, unlike Ramakers, I do not find convincing)-“two men are depicted, an army officer and an undressed, muscular young man. The military man penetrates the youngster and at the same time jerks him off. The young man uses both hands to push the soldier’s buttocks towards him, to enable him to enter his rectum as deeply as possible.” So intense is their passion that they fail to notice “a second soldier,” of lower rank, spying on them, and “clearly aroused by the performance” (Ramakers 162). Terminator 2 replicates this Tom of Finland scenario by having two “soldiers” war over the possession of a young male’s body. In one deleted scene, the T-1000 investigates John’s room, running his hands fetishistically over John’s possessions; numerous shots of John riding a motorcycle with the T-800 suggest sodomitical intercourse. But Terminator 2 also suggests desire on the part of the pedophilic object. After the first encounter with the T-1000, after which the T-800’s body is riddled with bullets, John examines the T-800’s body, uttering such suggestive lines as “This is intense” and “Get a grip, John” as he runs his own hands over the Terminator’s supple leather-clad body. The running theme of the Terminator’s education by John, his obeisance even to orders from the boy such as “stand on one leg,” continue this theme of switched-tables in the erastes-eromenos relationship, the eromenos initiating the innocent erastes into knowledge.
 
Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” corrects the oddly utopian streak in queer theory, its often uncritical celebration of homosocial brotherhood, as exemplified by Michael Warner’s work.⁹ One point Bersani fails to note, however-and which Terminator 2 makes spectacularly apparent-is straight culture’s appropriation of homosexual iconography and homoerotic themes. If gays have sometimes disquietingly fetishized the very contours and textures of a murderous sexual regime, this regime has also acted upon its fascination with our own fascinations, seen our appropriation of its own form as a form of inimitable worship it itself seeks to imitate. Terminator 2 gives us a series of prismatic lenses through which to view mythic masculinity, gay, straight, homoerotically heterosexual, even heteroerotically queer (if we think of Sarah’s multivalently phallic sexiness).¹⁰Terminator 2 is as steeped in homoerotic desire as an Alan Holingshurst novel.¹¹
 

The Fascist Family

 
E.T.A. Hoffman’s 1817 short story “The Sand-Man” is the central literary work that Freud analyzes in his essay on the uncanny. In one particularly harrowing episode in the story, the young boy Nathanael surreptitiously observes a nighttime discussion before a blazing hearth between his father and an odious friend, Coppelius: “Good God! as my old father bent down over the fire how different he looked! His gentle and venerable features seemed to be drawn up by some dreadful convulsive pain into an ugly, repulsive Satanic mask. He looked like Coppelius” (175). Nathanael’s terror allows him to be discovered. Coppelius first threatens to take away his eyes, but after the father’s desperate protestations, instead unscrews the boy’s hands and feet, realizing in the process of reattaching the appendages that “the old fellow”-presumably God-knew what he was doing after all. The Oedipal confusion between his kindly old father and loathsome Coppelius, the two men’s subsequent war over the body of the boy, and the images of castration-not just eyes but hands and feet, a parodistic orgy of the castration-complex Freud will theorize a century later-illuminate the battle between the Terminators in Terminator 2.
 
Rushing and Frentz argue that the Terminator of the first film is “the technological telos of the ego, the sovereign rational subject of modernism,” the “eradication of the inferior [human] shadow” that appears to us as “unspeakably Satanic,” “a macabre caricature of the obsolete human self” (168-9). In their view, Terminator 2 “rehabilitates its central commodified icon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, from a demon into the savior of humanity-thus effectively stealing John Connor’s destiny” as the messiah, as his initials would suggest (184). The transformation of Schwarzenegger from Satan to messiah in Terminator 2 brings us back to the confusion between the kindly father and Satanic Coppelius in Hoffman’s “The Sand-Man.” Terminator 2 represents a fantasy of oedipal father-son relations in which the “Satanic” nature of the Father can be controlled, deployed at will, and rendered a secondary sub-routine, as evinced in the scene in which John both orders the Terminator to brutalize some musclebound dudes who have rushed to John’s defense and teaches the cyborg not to kill. Transforming the cyborg into the murderously benign father relies upon an understanding of the Father as inherently murderous, far from benign.
 
Sarah’s speech in the sequel makes this view astonishingly explicit: “Of all the would-be fathers that came and went over the years, this ‘thing,’ this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.” In the “family values” era of Reagan and Bush I, Sarah’s speech has a powerfully surprising resonance. She exposes the family-values myth as such by arguing that a crisis in fatherhood exists pervasively, suggesting it cannot be limited to, say, the poor black community. Clinton, the child of a single mother whose brutalization he witnessed and fought, would make a war against “Deadbeat Dads” a feature of his Presidency. (Evincing the incoherency of his presidency, he would also demonize the so-called “Welfare Queen.”) The uncanny resonance of Terminator 2 for many viewers is precisely its re-deployment of the killer cyborg as killer father-protector. As the adult John says movingly to the “obsolete” T-800 model in the 2003 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, “Do you know that you were the closest thing to a father that I ever had?” The dark joke in this film is that Skynet sent this T-800 to kill John’s future self precisely because John’s emotional attachment to the model allows the model to infiltrate John’s stronghold. The futuristic machines understand the enduring power of oedipal attachments. In the Terminator films, it is the father who is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer-and in Terminator 2, we get the father who finally melts, a symbolic wish literalized in the climax.
 
This longing for a loving father whose innate brutality is reprogrammed for protectiveness is parodied in the T-1000, whose ardent interest in John is no less intense than the T-800’s, but also in the figures of Sarah and Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the African-American scientist at Cyberdyne who will be the catalyst for Skynet’s take-over. Sarah’s fearsome phallic mother pointedly withholds emotional love from John, admonishing him for having rescued her from the asylum as she checks his body for injuries, her stinging words making him cry. With her taut body and black military gear, she looks like a rogue commando and, as many critics have pointed out, very much like a Terminator. The movie struggles over whether or not to affirm Sarah’s phallic motherhood. In large part, it revels in her musculature and fierce martial prowess, but it also makes the scene in which she finally breaks down, hugs John, and tells him that she loves him an especially wrenching moment. It has her sacrificially lower John into safety at the refinery at the end so that she can face off the T-1000 herself, and, though it gives her a thrilling near-triumph at the climax when, like Ripley in Aliens, she shoots volley after volley of bullets into the T-1000’s disoriented form, it also refuses to allow her to destroy the T-1000, reserving the final heroic stroke for Arnold. Thrillingly taut and courageous an action heroine though she is, Sarah is the most highly ambivalent figure in the film, because according to the homoerotic logic of the film the phallic mother is an inadequate compensation for the tender toughness of the cyborg father.
 
Dyson is depicted as a loving but absent father. In a scene in the Special Edition DVD, his wife (S. Epatha Merkerson) chastises him for not wanting to spend more time with the kids; he smilingly relents and agrees to take them to an amusement park. While Dyson represents both the absent father and the evils of cold, rationalist science-Sarah accuses him from a maternalist standpoint of not “really knowing what it is to create a life, to feel it growing inside you”-he is nevertheless in many ways a warmer, more humane figure than Sarah, more malleable, less inflexible, as his decision literally to trash his life’s work to avert nuclear holocaust shows. The film also locates in this upwardly mobile black family a sensuality not present elsewhere in the film. In a scene with disquietingly racist overtones, Dyson’s wife licks his neck as she greets him clad in a bathing suit: even if middle-class aspirers, blacks sign sex. The implication is that the white family-John’s loveless adoptive parents, phallic Sarah who stands alone and refuses affection-is bereft of love, emotion, and sexuality, whereas the black family risks losing their ties to and claims on such affectional intensities in their pursuit of white middle-class ideals. They’re in danger of becoming white machines, losing their sexual and emotional vitality. If Sarah represents a fantasy of transforming into the ultimate white machine-masculinist and devoid of emotion-when her uncomputerized yet no less efficiently murderous, Terminator-like vision takes in the Dyson family, she fuses gendered modes of white supremacist gazing at the objectified black body. “White surveillance, incorporating both male and female gazes, of black bodies is sexualizing and dehumanizing,” writes Janell Hobson (39). Capturing this black family within her phallic gaze, fascistic-leather-garbed Sarah objectifies them as freaks of sexual appetite despite their middle-class, aspirationist trappings.
 
Sharon Willis considers the relationship between Dyson and Sarah Connor, particularly in light of the speech in which Sarah accuses Dyson of being one in the line of masculinist scientists who create destructive technologies (“Men like you built the hydrogen bomb…You don’t know what it’s like to create a life, to feel it growing inside you,” says Sarah to Dyson, in a triumph of the essentialist, maternalist rhetoric that runs uncomfortably alongside masculinist violent ideologies throughout Cameron’s increasingly constrictive oeuvre). The film’s association of traditional scientific power and its disturbing potentialities with the African-American Dyson endures as a troubling, underexplored feature of the film’s more overtly articulated gender politics and implicit racial politics. Dyson, like Charles S. Dutton’s supporting character in Alien 3 (1993), is the African-American who must sacrifice himself so that the white, female hardbody-heroine may live, as his self-sacrifice in the destruction of the Cyberdyne offices evinces. As Willis writes, “why do white women’s hardbodies seem to be propped on the ‘ghosts’ of African-American men? [This is a] displacement of one difference onto another . . . . that should alert us to the mixed and ambiguous effects of our popular representations, where figures of social and sexual ambivalence” and of “undecidable identity” are all intensely eroticized. Because of race’s ongoing difficulty for culture, its difficulties can be more reassuringly “siphoned off” onto sexuality (126). But surely this is only in relative terms-sexuality proves to be a highly disturbing figure in the film, especially when seen in the context of race.
 
Sarah’s paramilitary look and skills adumbrate the film’s larger connections to the world of military might and its ramifications for social “others.” Combat-geared Sarah, like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, parodies the uniformed authority of T-1000’s cop, himself (itself) the parodistic version of military authority. The figure of the cop as the incarnation of “formless evil” comes across, in Fred Pfeil’s words, as a “particularly pungent if fortuitous maneuver, given national exposure of the racist brutality of Police Chief Gates’ Los Angeles Police Department a scant few months before this film’s release” (239). The Los Angeles Riots inspired by the beating of an African-American man, Rodney King, by police officers and their subsequent acquittal provide an eerie backdrop for the film’s figuration of villainy as “steely-eyed Aryan form” (Pfeil 238). Though Dyson and his family never come into contact with the T-1000, Sarah’s suggestively fascist look signals that she, too, embodies the T-1000’s connection to the fetishization of military power and phallic form. If this film appears to be suggesting a resurgence that must be disavowed as fascist imagery, then Sarah’s home invasion of the Dyson family reminds us, chillingly, that Africans have been available as targets of not only United States racism but also of the murderous ideologies of other nations, most pertinently that of Nazi Germany. We tend to think, understandably, predominantly of the annihilation of the European Jewish population in this period. “The sheer magnitude of crimes against Jews has tended to obscure the issue of state-sponsored violence against Black Germans,” Heide Fehrenbach notes in a book on the subject (87-8). Terminator 2 eerily recalls the themes of the Nazi regime in all of its frightening dimensions.
 
The role of the phallic mother-domineering and dominant-in the national imaginary was pivotal to fascism in Nazi Germany, as Andrea Slane has demonstrated. Though I am in complete disagreement with her assessment of Hitchcock, her discussion of his 1946 film Notorious, whose chief villains are Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a European Nazi living in a secret Nazi stronghold in Brazil, and his mother, sheds light on the representation of Sarah here. Parsing the views of Philip Wylie, who in his 1942 study Generation of Vipers compared the domineering Nazi “mom” who destroys the men of the nation to Hitler, Slane writes that “Domineering mothers might not only cause their sons to become fascist but in fact act like fascists themselves. Madame Sebastian is a fascist by virtue of her suffocating mothering in Wylie’s sense as much as she is a suffocating mother by virtue of her fascism” (130). Slane points out that the effeminate Alex Sebastian is presented not as the violent, frightening oedipal Nazi father but instead as the victim of the “masculinized, domineering mother Madame Sebastian…As a result of this emphasis, Alex emerges as surprisingly sympathetic for a Nazi character in 1946, precisely because he is less to blame for his politics than his mother is” (131).¹²
 
Sarah’s masculinized sexuality serves several functions, one of the most important of which is to accommodate the retooled Schwarzenegger/Terminator image to the reshaped Terminator mythos of this film. Sarah is the split-off, “bad” mother-father to the good Terminator’s new benevolent, masochistic father-mother; her aggression highlights his vulnerability and emotional accessibility. The Aryan fantasy of the T-1000 everywhere suggests a transforming social world for which Sarah prepares her son, a new fascist state in which all is warfare, aggression, and fetishized military surfaces. The relevance of these configurations for queer theory lies in the ways in which the T-1000 bears the residues of queer sexual appropriation of images of masculinist power. Moreover, the character demonstrates the endurance of cultural erotic fixations upon these very images, libidinal investments that are to a certain degree sublimated but are also explosively prominent. Sarah functions as a queer sexual fetish object as well as a disciplining force. She is the Law of the Father as much as its enemy, chastising sensitive John for his sensitivity, conditioning him always to be more properly masculinist, not to care about her or to care about anything at all except his mission (this is why Sarah’s breakdown, in which she hugs John as she weeps, is heartbreakingly moving rather than some kind of concession to essentialist gendered stereotypes of motherhood, or at least not only a concession: this is the moment in which Sarah finally relents in her unyielding campaign to masculinize John). She is both the Law of normalization and its perverse undermining, in that it is precisely the hypermasculinity she adopts to socialize John properly that lends her an air of sadomasochistic, queer sexuality as exciting as it is disturbing. (This hypermasculinism can also be said to have a resistant quality in that it allows her to defy her hystericization by the phallocratic psychoanalytic institution that incarcerates and brutalizes her. The extraordinarily unpleasant scenes of her abuse at the hands of smug psychiatrists and lascivious and violent security guards stand in for the discourse of hysteria that attends to the construction of womanhood from the late nineteenth-century forward.¹³) Sarah seems the fulfillment of the maddeningly indecipherable, haunting final image of Karen Allen in the gay S/M leather gear get-up in William Friedkin’s disturbing, distasteful, and brilliant film Cruising (1981), about an undercover cop (Al Pacino) investigating a serial killer’s murders within the gay S/M subculture of late-70s New York City. Sarah’s narrative arc transforms her from the Sacher-Masoch model of the icy, sadistic female tormentor into the proper Oedipal mother, nurturing and disciplining John. If, as we noted earlier, Terminator 2 can be described as fascist kitsch, the figures of the good Terminator as leather-daddy, the evil Terminator as cop, and the Terminator-like phallic mother correspond to S/M culture’s fetishistic appropriation of fascist tropes. And in its redeployment of these themes, the Terminator franchise has lost none of its popular culture appeal, as evinced by the fourth installment of the film franchise, Terminator Salvation (2009), starring Christian Bale as an adult John Connor, and the FOX television series version of the films, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which extends the mythos to its rightful place as fascist kitsch’s double, sentimental family drama, albeit in often challenging, daring ways (which may account for the series’ abrupt 2009 cancellation after only two seasons).
 

Cyborg Narcissus: Or, the Queerness of Cyborgs

 
While Susan Jeffords’s argument in Hard Bodies was oracular in many respects, on a key point it was not: Hollywood’s depiction of individualism from the end of the Reagan era forward has turned out to be much less than affirming. The masculine individualism that Hollywood has represented since the late 80s has been a fissured one, as demonstrated by the roaming identities of Carter Nix in De Palma’s Raising Cain (1992), the bifurcated male psyche in Fight Club (1999), and the collective male ego of Zodiac (2006), representations that defy any notion of a structural masculine coherence. I propose that this split in the Hollywood representation of masculinity reflects a sustained conflict between narcissistic and masochistic modes of male identity. A narcissism/masochism split informs the conflict between Schwarzenegger’s masochistic Terminator-protector and the narcissistic villainous Terminators of the sequels, a split that epitomizes the larger one that runs through Bush-to-Bush films.
 
In Slavoj Žižek’s view, the Terminator of the 1984 film represents the mindlessness and relentlessness of the drive: “The horror of this figure consists precisely in the fact that it functions as a programmed automaton who, even when all that remains of him is a metallic, legless skeleton, persists in his demand and pursues his victim with no trace of compromise or hesitation. The terminator is the embodiment of the drive, devoid of desire” (22). This point is intensified and literally articulated in the 2003 sequel Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, when the short-circuiting Terminator rather desperately shrieks at John (Nick Stahl), now a man in early adulthood: “Desire is irrelevant. I am a machine!” On the face of it, Žižek is right. If the Terminator represents the desireless machine, then it most successfully embodies that American fantasy of an inviolate male body, now not only resistant to but utterly devoid of desire. Yet how irrelevant is desire to the Terminator films, especially the sequels? I would argue that part of the Oedipal drama of the films, especially its sequels, is the growing and plangent desire on the part of the Terminators, not just Arnold but the villainous ones as well: Terminator 2‘s sleekly upgraded T-1000 (Robert Patrick), whose liquid metal body can morph into new shapes, and Terminator 3‘s T-X, more commonly referred to as the Terminatrix (Kristanna Loken), an even more advanced robot whose human-looking mimetic liquid metal exterior covers a lithe endoskeleton. The Terminator comes to seem not a figure of desirelessness but of queer desire that is typed as narcissistic.
 
In section VII of his famous 1836 essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that “man is a god in ruins” (231). To consider this suggestive phrasing within the parameters of a new narcissistic/masochistic split in American masculinity, we can say that Hollywood manhood, shown as fundamentally split, in its masochistic mode corresponds to this Emersonian view, representing the ruination of the chief American god, the normative white male. With this theme of ruination also comes a desire for wholeness, to see the destroyed male body reconstituted. The first sequel to Terminator establishes the Bush-to-Bush pattern of the destruction and restoration of the white male body. Again and again, Schwarzenegger’s body undergoes physical assault: he is bashed into walls, riddled with bullets, punctured with an iron spear that goes completely through his prostrate body. His head is pounded by a movable anvil into the wall; half of his face gets torn off in combat, revealing the pulsing-red-eyed metal man beneath; his arm gets caught in the grinding wheel of a metal press that recalls Industrial Age accidents. Shorn of arm and deficient of face, the cyborg delivers his final, deadly blow to his enemy while lying on a conveyor belt.
 
Panning the film, Terrence Rafferty locates the central flaw in the “insane conceit” of making Schwarzenegger the underdog. Schwarzenegger’s T-800 model is outmatched by the T-1000, “a more advanced Terminator model.” “This new Terminator isn’t a brute: he’s made of some sort of liquid metal, with shape-shifting properties, and he’s sleeker and more versatile than the old Arnold model” (316). In contrast, the “T-800 is almost human here: since he’s been superseded by the spiffier model, we can see him as a vulnerable guy (or guyoid), and shed a tear when he sacrifices himself to save humanity from nuclear holocaust” (317). Pace Rafferty’s view, there are several interesting implications in the film’s refit of Schwarzenegger. One of these is the disorganization of the traditional male spectatorial position-instead of exclusively looking through Schwarzenegger’s eyes, we also look at him, invited to gape at his dismembering even as we marvel at his body’s endurance and prowess. The first Terminator effected this same spectatorial disorganization, inviting us to gawk at Schwarzenegger’s cyborg as a cartoon spectacle of manhood, but in the sequel we are asked also to sympathize. We are asked to sympathize with the taciturn Terminator’s increasingly masochistic availability as an icon of stoic suffering. As Brett Farmer writes in a reconsideration of Freudian theories of masochism, masochism, while highly conventional for the female subject position, is “profoundly disruptive for male subjectivity, in which it subverts the moorings of an active phallic identification” (242), and however motivated by opportunistic commercial desires on the part of director and star to present Schwarzenegger as a family-values hero, the film’s make-over of Schwarzenegger as a suffering and violated machine-body has some unsettling implications.¹⁴
 
Terminator 2 brings out the Christian core of masochism, the destruction and restoration of the body of a beautiful white man. When John holds up the cyborg’s bullet-riddled leather jacket to the sunlight, the pattern of light through the bullet holes recalls the purported image of Christ on the Shroud of Turin. The T-800 sacrificially gives up its life at the end of the film, countermanding John’s tearful demands that he remain alive-the cyborg father dying for the teenage delinquent’s would-be Christ. In this film, the good cyborg’s destruction at the end, endlessly anticipated in a series of brutal physical pulverizations, is a kind of restoration, an honorary achievement of humanity upon the killing machine.
 
There is an extraordinarily plangent moment (in the Special Edition DVD) when the cyborg submits to a special operation in which the chip in his “learning computer” brain is removed to allow for adaptability and change-in other words, to allow him to become more human, “and not such a dork all the time,” as John puts it. In full phallic woman mode, Sarah, like a postmodern Judith, the biblical heroine who cut off the head of the evil ruler Holofernes, attempts to smash the chip, thus rendering the Terminator inert. Like the angel staying Abraham’s hand, John prevents her from destroying the chip, screaming “No!” Noticing the delay when reactivated, the Terminator asks very simply, “Did something happen?” The vulnerability and the innocence of the Terminator here matches the refinement of his physical image. The cyborg is D.H. Lawrence’s hard, isolate, stoic, killer American manhood as New Age man, as vulnerable as he is murderous.
 
Maintaining a tortuous tension between the simultaneous murderousness and vulnerability of Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, the film expresses and fulfils the desire to see a male body violated and destroyed, but then reconstituted. This film innovates the now-ubiquitous computer-generated imagery (CGI) technique of morphing, which allows one image to blend or melt seamlessly into another. The god in ruins theme is expressed not only through the endurance and suffering of the T-800 but also through the endless reconstitutions of the morphing T-1000, whose constant physical transmogrifications connote his liquid properties-the essential softness of his hard, chiseled body, which nevertheless looks diminutive and even fragile in comparison to Schwarzenegger’s hulking own. In addition to being able to simulate the surfaces it touches-human bodies, checkerboard-pattern linoleum floors-the T-1000 can recover from almost any injury. Though the T-1000, who can turn parts of its body into deadly phallic instruments-long, protuberant, knifelike blades an especial favorite-routinely punctures and pulverizes human victims (to say nothing of other machines), its own body is a site of constant injury. Robert Patrick’s cop experiences as much trauma as he delivers. Routinely the recipient of furious rounds of machine-gun bullets, turned into crumbling ice by an oceanic tide of liquid nitrogen, his head punctured by bombs that leave gaping holes in their wake, his torso sheared in half, the cyborg cop absorbs recurring rude shocks, displayed as gaping silver-edged wounds in his hard/soft flesh that swell and then fade away, restoring his Teflon-smooth body to pristine perfection. Oscillating between modes of male power and violability, switching from phallic murderousness to pliant malleability, the T-1000 is both god and ruin.
 
Masochism and narcissism have both been associated with queer masculinity. In “Homo-Narcissism: Or, Heterosexuality,” Michael Warner critiques the psychoanalytic construction of homosexuality as narcissistic desire. “Imagining that the homosexual is narcissistically contained in an unbreakable fixation on himself,” Warner writes, “serves two functions at once: it allows a self-confirming pathology by declaring homosexuals’ speech, their interrelations, to be an illusion; and more fundamentally it allows the constitution of heterosexuality as such” (202). The queerest aspect of cyborg manhood in Terminator 2 is the T-1000’s narcissism, his unbreakable fixation on his own infinitely malleable body. A mimetic poly-alloy, this morphing cyborg can resemble any surface it touches, but no matter how many permutations it undergoes or the alterity of its myriad forms, the T-1000 always reverts back to its own primary image, that of a lean, chiseled white man. One would expect to see, in this scene of his birth in our present, the T-1000 initially appearing as a silver blob of liquid metal, but from our first glimpse of him he is his white male self. We never see the mimetic T-1000 assume the shape of this man; he is always already this white male body. The T-1000 appropriates an unfortunate cop’s professional identity, but not, significantly, the cop’s physical body; the implication is that the T-1000 already has a perfect body all his own. A copy with no original, the T-1000, no matter how many other bodies he copies, always reverts back to his first image, as if he were constantly attempting to capture an imaginary illusion of wholeness. Though pounded, pummeled, punctured, perforated, and pulverized, the T-1000 always restores his own image, surveying his own recreated form, staring at parts of his body, getting a charge from his own endlessly renewed cohesion.
 
The homo-narcissism of the T-1000 fully conveys itself only in a scene that appears to carry the opposite message. In a purely excessive, extraneous moment in the psychiatric hospital where Sarah is imprisoned, the T-1000, phallically rising up in the form of a tiled linoleum floor, duplicates the form of a portly, plug-ugly security guard as he gets an automated cup of coffee. Duplicated, the guard stares at his own replicated image; but the T-1000 is also staring at itself now in the original model of the guard. Suggesting that it feels it has unsatisfactorily replicated itself, the T-1000 pointedly shoots its phallic finger into the guard’s eye, as if retaliating against an original yet inferior image. The phallus through eye serves as a kind of phallus-restoring castration, the narcissistic cyborg’s rebellion against an original that utterly lacks the clone’s smooth and sleek perfection.
 
In an especially striking scene in which the T-1000 transforms into ice in the nitrogen-tide, he looks like a piece of postmodern art. (One imagines a title: “Untitled [Cop in Ice].”) Parts of his body break off, and he stumbles to the ground, losing limbs. When his forearm breaks off, he looks at it with horror and shock: this is Narcissus’s despair at the loss of his idealized image, the stared-at stump no less graphic a sign of castration than the boy Nathanael’s twisted-off hands and feet in Hoffman’s story. Now Schwarzenegger’s T-800 utters his famous line, “Hasta la vista, Baby,” as he shoots the frozen and maimed T-1000, blowing him to smithereens. We see not only the T-1000’s narcissistic trauma, the loss of his ideal image, but also the masochistic T-800’s satisfying vengeance, a vengeance that confers a kind of masculinist integrity upon the older, less advanced, but more honorable model.¹⁵
 
If masochistic manhood has emerged in psychoanalytically inflected queer theory as a radical break with normative manhood, films made during the Terminator 2 era, such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and Schindler’s List (1993)-and later films as disparate as Fight Club (1999), The Passion of the Christ (2004), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), and A History of Violence (2005)-make clear that masochism can have normalizing as well as disruptive effects. In these works, the ravaged, ruined male body, writhing in masochistic pain, can destabilize audience expectations and spectatorial positions, forcing an audience to see normative manhood in highly unusual and challenging ways that defy and disrupt normativity. But they can also, by fulfilling the audience’s own masochistic fantasies and ennobling theatrical, self-conscious suffering, restore the model of normative masculinity with an unflinching resolve that results in this model’s greater cultural and social entrenchment. If the normative male body is left vulnerable in the face of challenges to it in the form of new, probing, questioning critiques from feminism, culture and race studies, and queer theory, masochism emerges as an ingenious method for fatiguing this vulnerability, subjecting manhood to an apparent critique that leaves it wounded and thrashing but ultimately restored, better for the challenge, stronger for having demonstrated its resilience. Masochism provides normative manhood with a regimen that ensures its resilient health.
 
As Suárez writes of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, “masochism and self-immolation are the subject matter of the last section of the film, which features bikers riding at night through a city,” as the “sound of roaring engines and screeching tires” punctuates their revels. These revels become more and more dangerous as the bikers lose control of their bikes and crash: we can see that “the sadism of [previous sequences] appears introjected by the group and leads to self-annihilation in the final climactic shattering of man and machine.” Again, these could be descriptions of Cameron’s film. Like Anger’s film, Cameron’s culminates with an image of “final self-annihilation”: Schwarzenegger’s sacrificial demand for his own termination (Suárez 171). Schwarzenegger’s masochism cannot, however, be called the introjection of a previously exhibited sadism; rather, his position has been masochistic all along, the images of the maimed police officers allegorizing his own masochistic subjectivity. Schwarzenegger’s self-immolation at the end does not represent resistance but rather the ultimate acquiescence to the normative order, albeit one that he sanctions through his death: the restoration of the family, his exclusion from which renders the restoration poignantly bittersweet. Masochistic self-sacrifice emerges here as a way of purging difference on all registers-foreignness, outsize bodies, homoerotic associations, cyborg bodies, the damaged, irreparable body-leaving the properly heterosexual, if pointedly fatherless, human family intact.
 
The queer subject position in Terminator 2 emerges not in the vulnerable, underdog, masochistic Terminator but in the sleeker, craven, implacably cruel, narcissistic T-1000, shaking his finger in disciplinary dismissal of the phallic mother and writhing in anguish at the climax in his enforced destruction in a hellfire that suggests punitive, Dantean torment. In this spectacular climax, Terminator 2 exposes the masochism inherent in reactionary, normative manhood as it revels in the queer heroism of the cruelly narcissistic villain. In the equally ideologically wobbly but also vastly underrated Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), the advanced Terminator’s narcissism is depicted even more directly: after a bathroom bout with Schwarzenegger’s once again fumbling, even more masochistic Terminator [“I’m an obsolete model!”], the sleekly sinister Terminatrix eyes herself approvingly in a row of mirror-stage bathroom mirrors. The dull and cumbersome Terminator Salvation (2009) does away with the delicious narcissism of the diabolically advanced Terminator altogether, instead aiming to restore the might and menace of Schwarzenegger’s T-800 model when it was an unstoppable killing machine of humans in the original Terminator, and to go back even further by introducing the bulky, rough-hewn, skull-faced T-600 line. Accordingly, the 2009 reboot, with its endless array of styles of masochistic manhood, is the least queer-toned of all of the films, though in its sub-plot depiction of the trio of Kyle Reese (the human hero of the first Terminator) as a younger version of himself that suggests the ephebe, a new human-machine hybrid named Marcus who appears to be a sculpted human male for most of the film, and the mute but resourceful young African-American female child they care for, the film suggests yet another new-style queer family. Terminator 2, however, remains unsurpassed in the volatility and potency of its unwieldy brew of themes. The film suggests the centrality of queer identity in constructions of masculinity in the inter-Bush years, even or especially when those constructions reveal their ambivalence towards fascistic monumentality, raising new questions in turn about the implications of such gender constructions for queerness as well.