Living in the End Times. Slavoj ŽižekЧитать онлайн книгу.
an “unnamable” excess threatening the stable order; the correct solution is that jouissance is in itself neutral, and the ethical problem is how to put it to use. What makes Augustine more true is his linking of excessive sexuality (and sexuality is by definition excessive) to the Fall of man: sexuality is not natural, it is the result of the denaturalization of human beings through the “original sin.” This is why, in his On Free Will, Augustine writes:
To approve falsehood instead of truth so as to err in spite of himself, and not to be able to refrain from the works of lust because of the pain involved in breaking away from fleshly bonds: these do not belong to the nature of man as he was created before the fall. They are the penalty of man as now condemned by original sin.16
Augustine here comes close to Paul’s insight into the intimate link between lust (sin) and law: lust does not come “naturally,” it is an obscene perverted “duty,” a painful drive of which we cannot rid ourselves. The entanglement of lust (sin) and law resides not only in the fact that the prohibition of sexuality makes lust desirable; one should also add that the pain and guilt we feel when, against our will, we are dragged into sexual lust, are themselves sexualized. Not only do we feel pain and guilt at sexual enjoyment, we enjoy this very pain and guilt.
It is at this precise point that perversion enters. The fateful step towards masochistic perversion is accomplished when the claim that a clean body and clean clothes may nonetheless contain a dirty mind (and vice versa) is radicalized into the claim that a clean body and clean clothes as such are the proof of a dirty mind—or, as Paula, the ascetic Roman aristocrat, put it: “A clean body and clean clothes betoken an unclean mind.”17 A similar fateful step from heroism to perverse jouissance occurred on April 25, 1915, before the battle with the British-Australian forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk told his troops: “I don’t order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time it takes us to die, other troops and commanders can come and take our places.” This “passion to die” is the last great example of the Thermopylae-Alamo logic of consciously sacrificing oneself so that one’s forces are able to regroup for the decisive battle, the last great temptation to be resisted, the last mask in which a non-ethical attitude disguises itself as ethics itself.
The Price of Survival
Here, then, is our conclusion. Common sense tells us that the actual lives of people, of real individuals with their wealth of experience and practice, cannot be reduced to a “spontaneous” impersonation of ideology. But it is precisely this recourse to the non-ideological lifeworld that one should abandon. This is why Elfriede Jelinek’s advice to theater writers is not only aesthetically correct, but has a deep ethical justification:
Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer’s task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.18
In other words, we should resist the urge to fill in the void with the rich texture of what makes us a person.19 Two half-forgotten classic films stage such an emptying of the wealth of “personality” at its most radical, rendering a subject who survives as a shell deprived of substance. First, there is Lina Wertmüller’s Pasqualino Settebellezze (itself a true counterpoint to Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella. All one has to do to see what is wrong with Benigni’s film is to carry out a simple thought experiment: imagine the same film with one change—the father fails in his “noble lie,” and his son dies. Or another alternative: at the end, the father learns that his son knew all the time where he was, namely in a concentration camp, and that he was pretending to believe his father’s story in order to make life easier for his father.) Pasqualino Settebellezze is the ultimate film on survivalism. Its climax involves a unique sex scene which, apart from the one in Handke’s The Piano Teacher, is perhaps the most painful in the history of cinema. Its perverse twist cannot but recall the weirdest moments in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. In order to survive the concentration camp, the hero (played superbly by Giancarlo Giannini) decides to seduce the kapo, a cold, ugly, and fat German “bitch.” The horror of the act lies in making love to the maternal Thing and/or Lady in a scene of courtly love, to the absolutely capricious Mistress on whose whims one’s life depends: during the act, she remains cold, unsmiling, and expresses not a moan or groan of pleasure, just yawning once—a true “netrebko.”20 After Pasqualino arouses himself through fantasizing, she sees through him, realizing that the seduction is merely an expression of this “Mediterranean worm’s” pure will to survive, and contrasts this survivalist attitude to the German ethic of risking life for honor. (The nice irony is that, in the figure of Pasqualino himself, the reality of this survivalism is opposed to the pathetic and operatic Neapolitan sense of honor, which belongs to the lineage of Italian opera from Rossini through to the films of Sergio Leone with their excess of life.) After the act, she nominates him kapo of his barrack, and immediately gives him the task of selecting six prisoners to be executed—should he fail, they will all be executed. Then, he has personally to shoot his best friend. Such is the price of his survival: he survives alone. In the film’s last scene, after the war, he returns home and proposes marriage to a young prostitute, just to have as many children as possible as a guarantee of survival. When his mother exclaims with joy: “But you are alive!”, he replies after a long silence: “Yes, I am alive!”—the last words of the film. Is he truly alive? Would not a true act of life have been, in the last scene in the camp, for him to shoot the kapo and other guards, before being shot himself? The standard idealist question “Is there (eternal) life after death?” should be countered by the materialist question: “Is there life before death?” This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs—what bothers a materialist is: am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life (Eric Santner). And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it [es]”—which the Christians name the Holy Spirit—acts through me: at this point, I reach the Absolute.
The other film is John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), a neglected companion-piece to his cult masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, shot in pure noir style. There is no space here to dwell on the film’s many outstanding features, beginning with one of Saul Bass’s best title sequences (on a par with his titles for Hitchcock’s great trilogy Vertigo, North-by-Northwest, and Psycho), composed of anamorphically distorted fragments of a face in a disfiguring mirror. Seconds tells the story of Arthur Hamilton, a middle-aged man whose life has lost its purpose: he is bored by his job as a banker, and the love between him and his wife has waned. Through an unexpected phone call from Evans, a friend whom he thought had died years earlier, Hamilton is approached by a secret organization, known simply as the “Company,” which offers wealthy people a second chance at life. After he signs the contract, the Company makes Hamilton appear as if he has died by faking an accident with a corpse disguised as him. Through extensive plastic surgery and psychoanalysis, Hamilton is transformed into Tony Wilson (played by Rock Hudson), with a fancy new Malibu home, a new identity as an established artist, new friends and a devoted manservant. (The details of his new existence suggest that there was indeed once a real Tony Wilson, but what became of him is a mystery.) He soon commences a relationship with Nora, a young woman whom he meets on the beach. They visit a nearby wine festival which develops into a full-scale drunken sexual orgy, and he reluctantly relaxes enough to participate in it. For a time he is happy, but soon he becomes troubled by the emotional confusion of his new identity, and by the exuberance of renewing his youth. At a dinner party he hosts for his neighbors, he drinks himself into a stupor and begins to babble about his former life as Hamilton.
It turns out that his neighbors are “reborns” like himself, sent to keep an eye on his adjustment to his new life. Nora is actually an agent of the Company, and her attention to