JAC Volume 21 Issue 3

I am proud to have such good and attentive readers as those who read and publish in JAC, and so I'd like to respond to the three essays that examine my interview with Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham.

With regard to Jeffrey Nealon's "The Cash Value of Paradox," I am tempted to claim that there is a well-known paradox that retains its full "cash value" today and that provides the answer to both of Nealon's critical points—namely, the well-known Jewish story quoted by Freud about one Jew reproaching his friend: "Why are you telling me that you are going to Cracow when you are effectively going to Cracow?" I find it a little bit too easy to score points by arguing that every denial of rhetoric is already in itself a rhetorical gesture—true, but the problem for me is that a thorough assertion of rhetoricity is no less inconsistent. So, the Freudian version here would be: "Why are you arguing that rhetoricity is all-pervasive when rhetoricity is effectively all-pervasive, including your own argumentation?" I continue to believe that in every instance of proper philosophical or scientific reasoning there is always the Real of a line of argumentation that cannot be dismissed as an effect of rhetorical mechanisms.

As to the idea that the procedure of Ideologiekritik is no longer operative in today's conditions of cynical fetishism, since the fetishist ideology lacks the tension between surface and depth that opens up the space for the critico-ideological unmasking ("things are not what they seem"), I claim that the fetishist transparency is false: what gets lost in it is the fetishist belief itself. For example, concerning commodity and money fetishism, if we read Marx carefully, we see that the fetishist does not claim that money is a special mysterious object; for the fetishist, money is just an object that materializes a set of social relations, and this is what money effectively is. What the fetishist does not see is not the "real state of things," but the fact that he himself, in his social activity, acts as if he believes in the fetish, as if money is a special magical object. So when Nealon renders the formula of today's fetishist functioning of ideology ("it's supposed to be x, and, dammit, that's exactly what it is"), my answer is that this, precisely, is the greatest surprise. To quote the Marx Brothers' version: "This man looks like an idiot and acts like an idiot, but this should not deceive you—he is an idiot!"

The critical focus of Robert Miklitsch's "Passing on Popular Culture" is my (from his perspective) all too "negative" notion of fantasy in my last writings. As a positive counter-example, he points to my Looking Arwy with its notion of the "ethics of fantasy," of the respect for others' fantasy. For theoretical reasons with which I cannot deal here, I am now thoroughly opposed to the very notion of the "ethics of fantasy"; crucial here is the opposition between the common level of fantasizing and the inaccessible fundamental fantasy. Let me elaborate on this point with an example from (why not?) popular culture.

In the good old days of the Hays Office censorship, the proverbial Hollywood practice was to change the sad ending of the literary or dramatic source of a film into the obligatory upbeat happy ending. With Ridley Scott's Hannibal, the circle is in a way closed: it is Thomas Harris' novel that ends with Hannibal Lecter and the FBI agent Clarice Starling living together as a couple in Buenos Aires, while the film censored this ending, opting for a more acceptable one. Such a strange reversal of the standard procedure calls for a closer analysis; it bears witness to extremely strong ideological investments. (The only similar case is City of Angels, the Hollywood remake of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire: in the German original, the angel turns into an ordinary human and lives happily ever after with his love, while in the Hollywood version the woman on behalf of whom he gave preference to the ordinary mortal life over immortality is run over by a truck at the film's end.) Why, then, did it occur? When Scott agreed to direct Hannibal, he immediately approached Harris: "The ending was a very touchy question, so the first thing I did was call Tom Harris. I said I didn't quite believe it. Suddenly it was this quantum leap from this character I thought was incorruptible and unchangeable. It couldn't be. Those qualities were the thing that made her the most fascinating to Hannibal. If she'd have said yes to him, he'd have killed her" (qtd. in "Passions" 127). What, then, is so inadmissible in this "most bizarre happy ending in the history of popular fiction"? Is it really just psychology, just the fact that "this resolution is completely out of character for Clarice"?

The correct answer is rather the opposite one: in Hannibal, we are served a direct realization of what Freud called the "fundamental fantasy": the subject's innermost scene of desire which cannot be directly admitted. Of course Hannibal is an object of intense libidinal investment, of true passionate attachment: in The Silence of the Lambs, we (and, in the couple of Hannibal and Clarice, Clarice stands for this "we," the common spectator, the point of identification) love him; he is an absolute charmer. Hannibal fails precisely because, at the novel's end, it directly realizes this fantasy which must remain implicit; the result is thus "psychologically unconvincing" not because it is fake, but because it gets too close to our fantasmatic kernel. For a girl to be devoured by the charmingly devilish paternal figure, is this not the mother of all happy endings, as they would have put it in Iraq? The ultimate cause of Hannibal's failure is thus that it violates the prohibition of the fundamental fantasy that renders the cinematic universe psychologically "palpable." Therein resides the truth of Adorno's aperçu: "Perhaps, a film strictly obeying the Hays Office code could succeed as a great work of art, but not in a world in which there is a Hays Office" (216). Fundamental fantasy is not the ultimate hidden truth, but the ultimate, founding lie, which is why the distance toward the fantasy, the refusal to stage it directly, does not simply bear witness to a force of repression but also enables us to articulate this fantasy's falsity.

So, Hannibal's fundamental lesson thus concerns the uncanny abso-lute proximity of trauma and fantasy: the two are never simply opposed (with the fantasy serving as the protective shield against the raw Real of a trauma). There is always something utterly traumatic about directly confronting one's fundamental fantasy—such a confrontation, if not properly managed by the analyst, can easily lead to complete subjective disintegration. Conversely, there is always something fantasmatic about the trauma: even the utmost trauma of collective rape, of the suffering and humiliations of the concentration camp, can find strange resonances in our deepest disavowed fantasies, which is why, after being compelled to undergo such a horrible ordeal, the subject as a rule feels "irrationally" guilty or at least besmirched—the ultimate proof of an unbearable jouissance. (In short, fantasy is not primarily the mask that conceals the Real behind it, but, rather, the fantasy of what is hidden behind the mask. Say, the fundamental male fantasy of the woman is not her seductive appearance, but the idea that this dazzling appearance conceals some imponderable mystery.) So while the "classic" structuralist Lacan solicits me to dare the truth, to subjectively assume the truth of my desire inscribed into the big Other, the late Lacan is much closer to something like truth OR dare: (the symbolic) truth is for those who do not dare. Dare what? To confront the fantasmatic core of (the Real of) their jouissance. At the level of jouissance, truth is simply inoperative, something that ultimately doesn't matter.

Since Peter McLaren's "Slavoj Žižek's Naked Politics" raises a whole series of detailed observations, let me address at least the crucial ones. I am well aware of the danger of claiming that Native Americans are "as bad as we," of how this can introduce a kind of false symmetry into our (white) interaction with them ("we all did our share of horrors"). However, I still find it even more dangerous to ground analysis of our (white imperialist) historical crimes against them in any notion of their "nobility" and superiority with regard to us, in exactly the same way that I reject a feminism that refers to some alleged spiritual "superiority" of women (they are more holistic, less inclined toward domination). Any such reasoning is inherently anti-democratic, since it legitimizes the right of some group of people in their specific qualities.

Again, concerning "Eurocentrism" and Cartesian subjectivity, I am well aware of the risks of asserting these two notions, but I am no less convinced that the entire Marxist edifice collapses if we drop this legacy. As Marx repeated endlessly, capitalist dynamics create global civilization, and it is only within this scope that universal liberation is thinkable. Any resistance that grounds itself in the defense of particular local traditions has nothing whatsoever to do with Marx's idea of the prole-tariat. I think this point is worth repeating precisely today with regard to the anti-globalization movement: in its core, this movement is not against globalization as such; it is against the present capitalist globalization which, precisely, is not global enough, since it generates its own exclusions.

Apropos to McLaren's claim that I fail to "articulate the contradictions between Lenin's view of the state and revolution and his concept of vangardism and discipline from above," I can only answer that while I am well aware of the interpretation of Lenin that focuses on the tension between the Lenin of What Is to Be Done? (the vanguard party) and the Lenin of State and Revolution (millions of workers participating in the running of the state apparatuses), I do not subscribe to it for a series of reasons, one of them being that I do not accept the pertinency of the opposition between "dogmatic" and "humanist" Marxism.

In a critical footnote about my stance toward the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, McLaren claims that I do not elaborate how this bombing was part of the "U.S. policy of global military intervention against socialist countries who refuse to make sufficient room for international finance capital." I must say that I find such an argument to be too direct and simplistic; if nothing else, I do not see how one can consider Milosevic's Serbia to be, in any meaningful sense of the term, a "socialist country." Let's not forget that Tito's Yugoslavia was dealt a mortal blow precisely by Milosevic's ascendancy to power.

When McLaren makes the claim that my discussion fails to provide "convincing strategies" for contesting the rule of capital—a claim heard so often in today's discussions that it's become almost a kind of mantra—my immediate counterclaim is: I agree, but who does provide them? Which political force today does have such strategies?

The problem with those few remaining orthodox "Leninists" who behave as if one can simply recycle the old Leninism and who continue to speak of the betrayal by the corrupted leaders of the working masses' revolutionary impulses, is that it is not quite clear from which subjective position of enunciation they speak. They either engage themselves in passionate discussions about the past (demonstrating with admirable erudition how and where the anti-communist "leninologists" falsify Lenin, and so on), in which case they avoid the question of why (apart from a purely historical interest) this matters at all today, or, the closer they get to contemporary politics, the closer they are to adopting a purely jargonistic pose that threatens no one. When, in the last months of 2001, the Milosevic regime in Serbia was finally toppled, many Marxists in the West raised the question: "What about the coal miners whose strike led to the disruption of the electricity supply and thus effectively brought Milosevic down? Was that not a genuine workers' movement that was then manipulated by the politicians, who were nationalist or corrupted by the CIA?" The same symptomatic point emerges apropos of every new social upheaval (like the disintegration of the Real Socialism ten years ago): in each of these cases, they identify some working-class movement that allegedly displayed a true revolutionary or, at least, socialist potential, but that was first exploited and then betrayed by the procapitalist and/or nationalist forces. This way, one can continue to dream that revolution is around the corner: all we need is the authentic leadership that would be able to organize the workers' revolutionary potential. If one is to believe them, Solidarnosc was originally a worker's democratic-socialist movement, which later was "betrayed" by its leadership which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA. There is, of course, a bit of truth in this: the ultimate irony of the disintegration of communism was that the great revolts (GDR in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Poland in 1981) were originally workers' uprisings which only later paved the way for the standard "anti-communist" movements; before succumbing to the "external" enemy, the regime got a message about its falsity from those whom these "workers' and peasants' states" evoked as their own social base. However, this very fact also demonstrates how the workers' revolts lacked any substantial socialist commitment: in all cases, once the movement exploded, it was smoothly hegemonized by the standard "bourgeois" ideology (political freedom, private property, national sovereignty, and so on).

This mysterious working class whose revolutionary thrust is repeatedly thwarted by the treacherous nationalist and/or liberal politicians is the fetish of some of the remaining Leninists or Trotskyites—the singular point of disavowal that enables them to sustain their overall interpretation of the state of things. Their fetishist fixation on the old Marxist-Leninist frame is the exact opposite of the fashionable talk about "new paradigms," about how we should leave behind the old "zombie-concepts" like working class, and so on—the two complementary ways to avoid the effort to "think" the New which effectively is emerging today. The first thing to do here is to cancel this disavowal by fully admitting that this "authentic" working class simply does not exist. (Their other fetish is the belief that things took a bad turn in the Soviet Union only because Lenin did not succeed in joining forces with Trotsky in his effort to depose Stalin; this fetish is discernible already in Trotsky himself who, precisely because of his "structural dogmatism"—his sticking to the global "Marxist" scheme of historical development—cannot but understand Stalinism as the product of Stalin's personality.) And if we add to this position four additional ones, we get a pretty full picture of the sad predicament of today's Left: the acceptance of the culture wars (feminist, gay, anti-racist, multiculturalist struggles) as the dominant terrain of emancipatory politics; the purely defensive stance of protecting the achievements of the welfare state; the naive belief in cyber-communism (the idea that the new media are directly creating conditions for a new authentic community); and, finally, the Third Way, the capitulation itself.