Randy Martin’s Empire of Indifference deploys the concept of “securitization”–with its double reference to financial and military processes–as a way of approaching the seeming convertibility of the economic and the political calculus of risk in the U.S.’s most recent imperialisms. If the revolving door between the two now seems as intimate as that between the Republican dynasty and its donors, Martin is not so much interested in these contingent alliances as in the temporality that unites their imperial investments. The leveraged, hyper-volatile investments afforded by the financial derivative thus offer a parallel perspective on the apparent flightiness of recent U.S. imperial strategy. This is a terrain of investigation that seems to be opened up by the philosophy of the event in its different genealogies (Deleuze and Negri, via Lucretius, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and pragmatism; Derrida and the later Althusser, via Heidegger and Machiavelli; Badiou via set theory). But whereas the evocation of the event in these philosophies seems to point to a horizon of ontological resistance or even messianism, in some sense beyond the politics of state and capital, Martin places his whole strategy firmly within the field of the event. Event-based capitalism thereby becomes the terrain in which power struggles are to be conducted. The promise and the gift of an unknowable futurity with which the event is associated in recent French theory is nothing more or less than the promissory future of speculative capital. The question then becomes how to think through a counter-politics of the event. With its clean departure from state-based and political theological accounts of power, it seems to me that Martin’s book represents one of the first political philosophies to offer a thorough critique of the political economy of the event.
 
Martin’s previous book, Financialization of Daily Life (2002) is concerned with the intimate psychology of risk in an era when the barriers between public and private financial spheres were being deliberately dismantled. Standard histories of financialization point to the breakdown of Bretton Woods, the turn to monetarist anti-inflation strategies, and the Clinton-era repeal of the Glass Steagall Act as defining moments in the ascent of finance to a commanding position in the U.S., and global, economy. Less attention is paid to the process by which personal finance in the form of pension savings, education loans, household debt, and mortgages were transferred to the global capital markets over the same period. The liquidity of these markets presupposes the availability of a mass of personal finance that was previously sequestered from the vagaries of speculative capital. In Financialization of Daily Life, Martin is concerned with the resounding effects of such a shift on everyday life. What happens when the worker/consumer is invited to manage his or her life risks with the same opportunism as the financial investor? And when the Fordist utopias of progressive growth, the middle class, and the standard of living give way to the normalization of indebtedness and credit-based upward mobility? In post-Fordism, the savings plan, with its promise of deferred gratification, is replaced by the leveraged investment and its demand that we valorize the future before it gets a chance to bankrupt us. Nowhere is the precariousness of this situation more visible than in the securitization of the home mortgage, as the sub-prime mortgage crisis has once again made clear.
 
Empire of Indifference, which can be read as a sequel to this work, looks outward to the effects of financialization on U.S. foreign policy and imperial intervention, and inward to the parallel militarization of the domestic front. Here it is no longer the “home” but the “homeland” that is subject to the risks and opportunities of securitization. And it is not the home mortgage but escalating governmental indebtedness that provides the leverage for proliferating financial and military opportunism. Martin offers no attempt to discern the “real” reasons underlying the war in Iraq–the oil reserves of Iraq no more determine the risks and gains of war than the market price of energy futures are decided by the fundamental value of oil. Rather he situates the war within the context of an overall shift in U.S. foreign policy that aspires to displace the strategic value of geographic locale and long-term territorial appropriation with the risk-opportunism of short-term investment. This shift, he argues, is visible both in the ongoing reconstitution of the U.S. armed forces and in the changing face of imperial intervention itself. The doctrine of force transformation (otherwise known as the revolution in military affairs) has covered for a thoroughgoing restructuring of the armed forces in perfect alignment with the precepts of corporate outsourcing, asset-stripping, and self-government. The generative effects of pre-emptive warfare have been well documented–the fact for example that Iraq has become a training ground for al-Qaeda as a consequence of U.S. intervention or that the possibility of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the Taliban has been made more likely by the alliance with Pakistan. Most importantly, the declaration of a war on terror seems to have provoked a certain unity of purpose amongst various denominations of militant Islamism, crystallizing alliances that would otherwise have lain dormant. Whatever the costs, pre-emption will have at least succeeded in generating “relations at a distance” and risk opportunities where none existed before. This mode of intervention is curiously indifferent to its own “success” or “failure,” since both eventualities open up a market of future risk opportunities where even hedges against risk can be traded for profit. “Fighting terror unleashed it elsewhere, just as well-placed put or call (sell or buy) of stock would send ripples of price volatility through the market. Drops in price can be hedged against, turned into derivatives, and sold for gain. The terror war converts both wins and losses into self-perpetuating gain” (98).
 
Among other things, this book offers a powerful reflection on method. Martin is particularly illuminating on the limitations of Foucault’s enormously influential account of biopower in Society Must be Defended, which makes the unfortunate move of opposing the dynamism of a relational account of power to a substance-based view of economic exchange and property relations. Addressing himself to the more reductive strands in political Marxism, Foucault ends up deserting the whole field of economic analysis, a surprising move given Foucault’s early attention to the simultaneous development of the modern life sciences and political economy. “While certainly not so in Foucault’s earlier writing such as The Order of Things (1966), in later work the matter of life and money is typically written about as if active consideration of one precluded critical attention to the other. While political economy seems moribund, biopower is money-free” (132). Even in his follow-up lecture series, La naissance de la biopolitique (1978-79), where Foucault offers his first and last analysis of Chicago school neoliberalism, his analysis of the “economisation” of life is limited to the more reductive neoclassical attempts to measure life’s value in economic terms. Not only is Foucault’s method inadequate to the contemporary co-penetration of domestic and commercial economic relations, argues Martin, it is also singularly unsuited to dealing with the event-based dynamics of financial capital. “Of course Foucault is not reading Marx in these lectures but Hobbes, although he is clearly arguing against a particular version of Marxism” (135). Hence one of the unexpected consequences of Foucault’s account of biopower is that in spite of its intentions, it ends up reorienting contemporary debate around the question of sovereign power and political theology (Agamben’s work, which responds to Foucault via Hobbes, is representative here).
 
The power of Martin’s method is that it gives space to perplexity, putting it to work rather than resolving it. This is a welcome move when, in the protracted “aftermath” of the Iraq intervention, we are left wondering “what was that all about?” Martin steers a course between what he calls the “functional” and the “figural” approaches in theoretical critique. On the one hand, he wants to avoid the functionalist extremes of a certain kind of systems theory. That is, the overly rationalist account of imperialism that ends up endowing the independent variable–intervention in Iraq–with a sense of predestined purpose, as “if capitalism always knew what was best for it,” and its mirror image, the current of imperial “irrationalism” that sees contemporary U.S. imperialism as a kind of descent into pure chaos, an empire of “incoherence.” These approaches are closer than they might at first seem. On the other hand, Martin is convincingly critical of the “figural” approaches of Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, who step straight into the sovereign void opened up by Foucault in his late work and end up reducing all power dynamics to the figure of state violence in absentia. These approaches have their temptations, not least because they offer a kind of all-purpose filler for the unexplained. As soon as some democratic rule is presumed missing, one has only to declare that a state of exception has been installed. And in case some historical detail were needed, it will be agreed that the state of exception has become “more and more” the norm since about (ummm) the Declaration of the Rights of Man or the early Roman Empire. The appeal to the state of exception simplifies the complexity of power relations at least as much as the liberal triumphalism that accompanied the end of the Cold War. “The normalization of the camp allows the mind to race in affirmation from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib” (141) yet the reduction of these instances of power to a state sovereignty affirmed by way of exception paradoxically ends up rigidifying the figure of the state at the precise moment when the state is undergoing a complex force transformation of its own. In the North American context, this transformation has included the outsourcing of both welfare and security functions to the transnational service conglomerate, a dispersed privatization of state power that goes someway towards explaining the proximities between the racialized abuse carried out in domestic prisons and the torture at Abu Ghraib. By paying attention to these shifts, Martin is able to account for the fluidity with which imperial interventions can invest such geographically dispersed locations as Iraq and New Orleans, displacing surplus populations with extraordinary rapidity and indifference to their long-term management. In its domestic interventions, contemporary U.S. imperialism replaces strategies of permanent segregation with wave-like mobilization events–the forcible removal of urban minorities from the metropolitan centers becoming a pretext for “urban regeneration” and “creative destruction.” Racism here becomes a function of errant, forcible homelessness rather than permanent relegation to a state-administered camp or reserve. As Martin writes,
 

Shaving off the portion of the population from the body of an electorate or citizenry is certainly a venerable form of divide and rule. But the fluidity with which one entity or another may become the excluded other speaks to a more active principle of circulation that now informs self-government, in an ever stranger convergence of foreign and domestic.

 
In Martin’s account, the derivative war is relentlessly and prematurely triumphant, but nevertheless trapped in a loop of temporal self-sabotage that is endemic to finance-based capitalism too.
 

In practice, the only thing that turned out to be discretionary in the Iraq war was its timing: when to begin something that had already begun and end something that could not be stopped. . . . The preemptive empire of indifference consumes its own futurity, expending its assets in advance, delivering its promises before they are made, announcing its successes before its failures can catch up with it.
 

(160)

 

This is not a messianism of revelation, but a state of emergent premonition coupled with incurable attention deficit disorder. Ultimately, Martin suggests, pre-emptive warfare is crippled by its constitutive indifference, its inability to sustain confidence when returns aren’t immediately forthcoming. When war requires the mobilization of consumer confidence to the same extent that financial markets demand the faith of the investor, it exposes itself to the dangers of affective disengagement. The permanent recruitment difficulties faced by the U.S. defense forces, the volatility of public support for the war, and the gross on-the-ground failures of logistics in Iraq and Afghanistan are all symptoms of an imperial interventionism that even by its own opportunistic calculus, reveals an extraordinary indifference to consequences and results.

 
Martin explains the self-sabotaging tendencies of pre-emptive warfare in terms of the uncomfortable alliance between neoconservative and neoliberal philosophies of power in the U.S. polity. While the proliferation of derivative contracts and the chronic indebtedness of the government undermine any semblance of fundamental value, the pre-eminence of U.S. government bonds and hence the magnetic force of its financial markets is predicated, in the last instance, on the threat of U.S. military violence. Hence the neoconservative tendency in American politics periodically intervenes to reassert the rights of imperial nationhood in the most belligerent of ways. Financial securitization, which works to undermine fundamental value, is sustained by military securitization, which aspires to refound it. Martin notes in passing that this reassertion of force is particularly concerned with the moral tenor of nationhood.
 

The risk-driven accumulation of finance that neoliberalism offered as its political economy would meet its moralizing faith in the neoconservative commitments to evangelizing intervention. . . . The revolution in international finance yielded a “new geography of money” that looked amoral for all its mathematical sophistication but relied heavily on various forms of warfare to restore the moralism lost to the vanishing ideals of the unified nation.
 

(24)

 

And as the father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, has suggested, the nostalgia for lost nationhood has everything to do with the fear of “frank female sexuality” (151). Quite apart from the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has given ample support to the Office of Faith-Based and Community initiatives, it would seem that the project of homeland security is intimately concerned with the reimposition of sexual law and order. This is a point that Martin makes in passing but doesn’t explore in detail.

 
But to return again to the question of Foucault and method, I’m left wondering what Martin would make of Foucault’s lecture series of 1977-78, Security, Territory and Population, which seems to avoid the reductive binarization of political economy and political power that we find in Society Must be Defended (1975-76). Here Foucault argues that the contemporary problematic of “security” emerges from the history of urbanism and the problems of circulation, infrastructure, and contingency that beset the modern, capitalist city. It is the practical management of the event and its unpredictabilities, he asserts, that informs the rise of such conceptual innovations as field theory in mathematics, differential calculus, and hydrodynamics, not to mention the bureaucratic arts of statistical analysis. This, it would seem, offers a more productive field of concepts for Martin’s analysis than Foucault’s account of biopower. It is a genealogy of the evental that is at once more attuned to the nonreductive Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari, Antonio Negri, and the late Althusser, while also introducing the potential for critique–notably around the problematic of desire. Taking stock of Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that the production of money and desire are continuous, Foucault also seems to conclude that the politics of the “event” needs to be thought as the hinge term between the economic, the genealogical, and the political. If early theories of population discern a contiguity between the flows of money and those of desire, then what of the encounter between moral and political economy today, when neoconservatism seeks to reestablish the proper value of the genealogical–the proper articulation of sex and race–in the figure of the securitized homeland (72-73)?
 
Martin touches on this question sporadically and intriguingly. I wish he had gone further. This is not so much a criticism as a feeling of wanting more.
 

 

 

An essay’s swerve can make the trip. First sky. Then the waves. Sky. The edge of the water. Sudden breathless teeming immersion. Then sky again and pray you’re not becalmed since the doldrums are an exploration’s true danger. Rachel Blau Duplessis’s striking new collection of essays, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, is at its best when it is roving at a clip, when she’s doing what she says “interesting essays” do, “offering knowledge in passionate and cunning intersections of material, in ways excessive, unsummarizable, and (oddly, gloriously) comforting by virtue of their intransigent embeddedness and their desire, waywardly, to riffle and roam” (37). Duplessis’s is a poetics both of the riffle and of the riff, where an ecstatic, disordering, referential page-flipping and a musical, utopic cat’s-paw play with literary and linguistic surface effects long to disrupt more deeply embedded ideological structures, primarily those of gender. Whether readers will find Duplessis’s essays “comforting” will depend on their finding comfort in some discomfort, particularly in her challenges to familiar forms of subjectivity and writing.
 
With this volume, DuPlessis continues the prose work begun in her first collection of essays, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, and extends the work of her long poem series, Drafts. All of the essays here concern women writers, feminist politics, a feminine poetics, gendered personal and literary histories, or some combination of the above. Many do so in ways that manifest her desire for writing that could be, as DuPlessis writes,
 

a poem, an essay, a meditation, a narrative, an epigram, an autobiography, an anthology of citations, a handbill found on the street, a photograph, marginalia, glossolalia, and here we go here we go here we go again.
 

(210-11)

 
This giddy and densely satisfying mélange of scholarship and melos typifies Duplessis’s best work. Rich hybridity is especially evident in “f-words; An Essay on the Essay,” where she both asserts and performs the inherently transgeneric and transgressive nature of the essay itself. Here Duplessis’s yoking of selves, aesthetic forms, and gendered identities cross-implicates her topics and their discourses. In this essay, more than in any other in the collection, her urgent language and condensed analyses propel us through her text, constantly reminding us of the indissoluble relationships among writing, representation, and thought. “f-words” functions as a kind of ars poetica for much of the volume, certainly for the best of it.
 
Duplessis’s essay is propelled by the partially submerged engines of Theodor Adorno and Virginia Woolf. She moves from Woolf’s claim that the self is “the essayist’s most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool” (38) to Adorno’s statement that the essay’s “structure negates system” (40). Her essay engages at least two different understandings of Woolf’s assertion of the “dangerous” nature of the self as guide and heuristic. First, there is danger in the sense of something fraught with problems, specifically the danger of offering a reified Subject that remains static, a represented self that participates in his or her own cultural constraints rather than cracking through them with the force of linguistic disruptions. There is also the sense of the “dangerous” as a value, a weapon, something that makes the essay powerful by forcing the reader to stand back, to witness an intimate revolt, an explosion, perhaps something akin to Glissant’s disruptive aesthetic of turbulence or chaos (and its gesture toward a contingent ethics).
 
Turning to Adorno’s contention that the essay “negates system,” DuPlessis suggests that the genre itself might be a useful agent in the struggle to undermine rigid and oppressive systems of gender and language. Indeed, one of Duplessis’s major aesthetic, theoretical, and, ultimately, political contributions is to apply to a feminist project Adorno’s understanding of form as sedimented content and his insistence on the critical need for innovative, defamiliarizing, and complex modes of writing to disrupt normative representations of emergent political or ideological problems and thus make them visible. DuPlessis is both keenly aware of and capably performs the contradictions of historical realities and experimental linguistic representations. In the bracketed space between Woolf and Adorno, DuPlessis enacts the idea that “‘subject position’ is ‘language position’” through a mode of writing where “the digression is the subject” (39) and where “Essay is always opposite” (35).
 
Toward the end of “f-words,” DuPlessis swerves to link genre explicitly to écriture feminine:
 

to call nonlinear structures, cross-generic experiment, collage, non-narrative play with subjectivity, temporality, and syntax by the name of feminine follows the French feminism of Cixous and Irigaray.
 

(45)

 

For DuPlessis, connecting this work to the word feminine is both necessary and problematic. What follows is a brilliantly nuanced tracing of the term and its valences, a tracing that puts her in a productive dialogue with the work of Joan Retallack. Among the many moments of discovery in this dense unpacking, perhaps the two most salient are 1) that that it might be most useful to “leave the terms feminine and masculine in the category of the to-be-sublated” (that which must be simultaneously preserved and brought to an end) and 2) that “any call for the ‘feminine’ in discourse is only interesting when crossed with a feminist, or otherwise liberatory, critical project” (46).

 
As the sweep of “f-words” comes to a close, DuPlessis names the contents of her now full net as a “collectivity, heterogeneity, positionality, and materiality (although veiled under the terms personal, autobiographical, and feminine)” that
 

buoy the essay–give it the density of texture, the sense of implication, the illusion of completeness–in a form that embodies its own fragmentation. The essay is the mode in which material sociality speaks, in texts forever skeptical, forever alert, forever yearning.
 

(47)

 

She offers a coda-like paragraph of thirty-nine “f” words (including “fugitive,” “fissured,” “finding,” “freely,” and “fold”) that allows us to linger in a lingual fade-out and lets us make sense in the wake where meanings emerge.

 
Throughout Duplessis’s project of blurring the boundaries between poetry and prose, or between so-called “creative” and critical work, what may look like her greatest fault, a kind of mess that seems, at first, to come from trying to do too much in too many different ways, almost always turns out to be one of her greatest strengths. She offers a diversity of approaches to her subjects that cohere just enough to offer analysis and conclusion as well as space for the reader to drift and decide. Some of the essays are pocked by the eruption of verse, and while these moments are a kind of mar or blemish, the essays would not be more beautiful without them, but less interesting. The same is true for her sometimes vertiginous shifts of topics and discourses from the autobiographical to the aesthetic.
 
Often in these essays, there is a sense of mind as drift, chaos, reach, and failure that is also thematically and affectively present in her poetic work. The second volume of her long poem project Drafts opens with this line from Wallace Stevens:
 

“The confusion and aimlessness of thoughts.”

 

This reference and its sensibility echo throughout both her serial poems (which also function as critiques and essays) and the essays of Blue Studios. The more one reads of DuPlessis, the more this wandering and wondering begins to loop back on itself, tracing and retracing certain paths. Questions get reworked, issues revisited, references (including self-references) start to pile up, and in this work of the palimpsest, confusion and aimlessness begin to abate. Elsewhere, DuPlessis and her reviewers write on this deliberately midrashic approach in her poetry, but it is evident in the essays as well. In Blue Studios‘ final essay, “From Inside the Middle of a Long Poem,” DuPlessis describes some of the central concerns of her Drafts, which overlap substantially with the paths traced in these essays. She writes of being “haunted by moral nightmare, ambiguities about authority, and the demand for awe . . . haunted by Unitedstatesness, given the compromises, failures, and misuses of that global privilege . . . [and] by the losses of many people in the Holocaust and holocausts of modernity” (237). Duplessis attempts to capture what she calls “the endless / Sense of reality” through a poiesis wherein the musical effect of language known in our bodies is inseparable from both our corporeal sense of the world and our understanding of it through analysis, reason, and abstraction.

 
Duplessis’s wide-ranging work engages the particularities of personal life, world politics, and literature and insistently returns to investigate the structure of gender and its histories. In “Manifests,” another essay in Blue Studios, she writes:
 

“Sometimes I have said that this is the reason I don’t write ‘poetry,’ taking ‘poetry’ polemically to mean the gender fantasy structure” (95). In “Manifests,” she stakes a claim to write “otherhow,” as a “determined walk away from the claustrophobia of some gender narratives” (95).

 
Duplessis’s essays work with multiple, and sometimes contradictory, roots and routes. (She tends to pun, a tactic that occasionally feels a bit coy or clever, but really works when she lets the aural association ring strange.) As for roots, her insistence that “digression is the subject” follows Montaigne’s rhetoric of meandering, of which he wrote, “I like . . . my formless way of speaking, free from rules and in the popular idiom, proceeding without definitions, subdivisions, and conclusions” (724-25). This sense of the struggle to represent the nascent aspects of subjectivity is very much alive in Duplessis’s essays. A more directly engaged route runs through the work of George Oppen, with whom she was friends. Like him, she refuses to seek a totality, a closed, positivist work. But digression and the refusal of closure are very different matters; they can coexist, as they do in DuPlessis, but neither Montaigne’s nor Oppen’s work is characterized by both at once–making for a marked tension with these forerunners.
 
In these essays, DuPlessis moves away from the writers she names as mentors and influences, particularly Oppen. Clearly, she maintains an allegiance to what Stephen Cope calls Oppen’s “poetics of veracity,” and she has taken to heart Oppen’s personal injunction to her to work investigatively or, as she paraphrases him, to “make poems of thinking. Use poems to think with” (191). Her desire to stay close to Oppen’s focus on a suturing of ethics and a “saturated realism” is evident when she writes, “there is always a documentary aspect to my poetics. Trying to live in historical time and give some testimony, to bear some (direct or indirect) witness.”
 
And yet her method and aesthetics are significantly different from Oppen’s. Whereas Oppen saw words as “the enemy” and both stopped writing literally and sought to stop down, or to reduce, the aperture in his process of editing and winnowing out anything extraneous, Duplessis’s work is infatuated with words and her writing tends more toward a kind of combinatoire (but without surrealism). She relates how Oppen’s early influence reduced her writing, for a while, to “the tiniest seedlike works” (193), but many of her essays now, as with her Drafts, are an explosion of seeds from the pod, a cattail detonation of thoughts.
 
Analogously, DuPlessis diverges from Loraine Niedecker, another objectivist in her pantheon and subject of an essay in Blue Studios. Niedecker’s urge to “concentrate / compress / condense,” to put words through her “condensary,” stands starkly against Duplessis’s “expansery,” where her most interesting work flowers. This is not to say that her work is chaotic, but rather that while she might condense or spin down to a thread, she then lets the thread spool out, a line of sound and thought sent out to test the void. For example, in the title essay, “Blue Studio,” after walking us through 14 “Arcades” on “gender and poetry and poetics” (948), she offers a bulleted list of definitions of “feminist poet” that includes twenty-nine possibilities that scroll down for nearly three pages and includes:

• • Feminist poet = angry woman, writing poetry.
• • Feminist poet = [woman] poet who is “disobedient” (Alice Notley’s term for herself); transgressive (like Carla Harryman); “resistant” (my term about myself); imbuing knowing with its investigative situatedness (like Lyn Henjinian’s “La Faustienne”) in full knowledge of gender normativities (Notley 2001; Harryman 1995; Hejinian 2000).
• • Feminist poet = poet making antipatriarchal analyses of culture when much of culture is patriarchal; that is, a poet throwing herself/himself into the abyss.

The list is complex and can be read as central to this collection. The essays in Blue Studios that take a more traditional approach (the ones on Ezra Pound and on Barbara Guest in particular) feel competent, useful, but thinner, more predictable. These examples, including all of the “Urrealism” section, contribute to literary analyses of gender, power, and the work of Guest, Niedecker, and Oppen, but they do so without the powerfully estranging language and structures of the other essays in the collection, and thus undermine, to some degree, the project she undertakes in the more experimental essays. Given her significant disruptions in the innovative essays–disruptions that seem to avow that language makes meaning and that when it is used unreflexively it simply remakes the power structures one might seek to reveal and critique–her use of normative language as referential, descriptive, and transparent in the “Urrealism” essays feels like a failure to participate in her own critique and its praxis.

 
Throughout the collection, DuPlessis weaves together autobiographical or biographical anecdotes with expositions of aesthetics and poetics in a way that turns the second-wave feminist dictum that the personal is the political into an epistemology of polyvalent discourses. She examines her ambivalence about the uses of the personal, as in the opening lines of the first essay, “Reader, I married me: Becoming a Feminist Critic”:
 

no innocence in the autobiographical. What with its questions of saying “I” and the issue of “what I” and how that “I” negotiates with various “selves”; and the question of how much (a lot) is unsaid or repressed. With resistance to the cheerful myths of disclosure; with suspicion of narrative in the first place, and no self-justifying memories to legitimate “me” rather than anyone else.
 

(15)

 

Her subsequent move to a fairly straight autobiography provokes some queasy negotiations, but once she gets to her engagement with feminist politics of the 1960s and 1970s, her assertion that “this is a historical exercise, not a confessional one” is compelling.

DuPlessis also points out the particular pull towards the autobiographical engendered by texts that are themselves oeuvres, collections, or ongoing works. In “On Drafts,” one of three essays that look explicitly at her own work, DuPlessis writes that
 

after a while an ongoing long poem will be read as a kind of “Bildung” as “the growth of the poet’s mind” and so latches onto autobiographical readings or calls forth the body and life of the poet even more than a discrete series of books might.
 

(216)

 

In some sense then, Blue Studios might be more productively titled Open Studios in that it offers a peek into the messy workshop where we experience the voyeuristic lure of seeing the artist at work even as reader and author distrust the shift of focus from painting to painter, from form to individual, from public to personal, from product to producer. An open studio might also, here, be a boundless one, not limited by a single genre, or subject, or subjectivity, a single history or understanding of history. An open studio could be a place where, as DuPlessis writes, “the test of the essay is whether it opens a space for the reader, rather than closing one” (39-40). An open studio is a utopic space of invention where we see DuPlessis exploring aesthetics, politics, and language.

 
Beginning with her groundbreaking book, The Pink Guitar, and continuing here in Blue Studios, DuPlessis offers a major contribution to a tradition of creative/critical and innovative work that pays equal attention to cultural critique and to literary form, a tradition that includes Theodor Adorno, Hélène Cixous, Denise Riley, Eve Sedgwick, and most of the Language poets, among others. In particular, Blue Studios shares a space, and I find myself tempted to say a faith, with Nathaniel Mackey’s recent Paracritical Hinge. In the title essay, Mackey quotes himself on “the emancipatory potential of ‘discrepant engagement,’ . . . ‘practices that, in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity” (207). Mackey describes his project of discrepant engagement as a “critique and a complication” of categorization, as availing itself of “aspects of conventional as well as experimental narrative, essayistic analysis and reflection, diaristic and anecdotal elements,” as well as literary-critical techniques (210).
 
Although Mackey and DuPlessis seem to be engaged in related aesthetic endeavors, they hardly end up sounding alike, and their attendant political projects, while related, are distinct. Mackey’s “emancipatory potential” deals more with questions of inclusion and reception primarily in relation to racial and ethnic minorities (also important to DuPlessis vis-à-vis feminist women’s writing) than with the structural, conceptual, and ideological shifts through linguistic experiment that DuPlessis yearns for and that I hear in Bruce Andrews’s claim that
 

the political dimension of writing isn’t just based on the idea of challenging specific problems or mobilizing specific groups to challenge specific problems, it’s based on the notion of a systemic group–not of language described as a fixed system but of language as a kind of agenda or system of capabilities and uses.

 

It is hard at this point in history not to be skeptical about the social and political efficacy of innovative writing, but I am attracted to these claims, to these longings. It helps that DuPlessis is fully aware that the literary is only one site in any struggle for social transformation. (Remember her insistence that “any call for the ‘feminine’ in discourse is only interesting when crossed with a feminist, or otherwise liberatory, critical project; rhetorical choices are only part of a politics” [46].) But I suspect I am also being seduced a bit by some sense of engagement as optimism in Duplessis’s writing that moves her away from Adorno’s thorny double binds (despite her frequent invocations of him) and away from Mackey’s more guarded sense of what he terms a “post-expectant futurity,” which he writes, “stands accused of harboring hope” but where hope is clearly suspect, toward a more Blochian, utopian recovery of hope.

 
The crux here seems to me to be not whether experimental writing can be shown to be liberatory, but how DuPlessis’s versions represent a particularly optimistic, reformist, political poetics. This sense of yearning for change, if not revolution, distinguishes DuPlessis from more ironized poetic movements such as the contemporary Google-based Flarf school where the paratactic pasting of discourse appropriations offers a related linguistic disruption and cultural critique–one that uses what Jacques Rancière in The Future of the Image calls “dialectical montage” to “invest chaotic power in the creation of little machines of the heterogeneous,” where “what is involved is revealing one world behind another: the far-off conflict behind home comforts” (56-57). Flarf and certain other post-avant writings often lean toward the knowing shrug or wink; weaned as they are on cynicism, they no longer retain despair’s normative posture of the fetal crouch, and, in fact, might be said to retain only a primal optimism, one to keep going, participating in neither abjection nor optimism. Theirs is a poetics perhaps more comfortable with Mackey’s “post-expectant futurity,” while Duplessis’s essays maintain some attachment to expectancy, although it is hardly naïve. What DuPlessis does throughout her writing is keep the reader focused on moments of (not to get too recursive about it) possibility’s possibility.
 

 

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.