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<blockquote><i>The only weapon is rebellion and [[destruction]], as the recently deceased apostle [[Jacques Derrida]] taught us. Wherever you see a window, throw into it a brick. Where there is a building, there must be a mine. Where there is a high-rise building, a bin Laden should come. Where there is any kind of institution, law, or link, one should find a falsification, a "law" of the street or of the underground.<a href="#fn1" [[name]]="cfn1"><sup>1</sup></a></i></blockquote>
Are lines like these not an indication of the rise of a new barbarism in today's intellectual [[life]]? Phenomena like the one quoted above are not limited to marginal countries like Slovenia. In the homeland of the [[empire]] itself, theories are emerging that, say, explain how the [[Frankfurt School|Frankfurt school ]] appeared on the [[scene]] at a precise historical [[moment]]: when the failure of the socioeconomic [[Marxist]] revolutions became [[apparent]]. The conclusion drawn was that this failure was due to underestimating the depth of Western Christian spiritual foundations, so the accent of subversive activity shifted from politico-economic struggle to "[[Cultural Revolution|cultural revolution]]," to the patient intellectual-cultural work of undermining national pride, family, religion, and spiritual commitments, and the spirit of sacrifice for one's country was dismissed as involving the "authoritarian personality"; marital fidelity was supposed to express pathological sexual repression; following Benjamin's motto on how every document of culture is a document of barbarism, the highest achievements of Western culture were denounced for concealing the practices of racism and genocide, and so on. The main academic proponent of this new barbarism is [[Kevin MacDonald]], who, in <i>The Culture of Critique</i>, argues that certain twentieth-century intellectual movements led by [[Jews]] have changed European societies in fundamental ways and destroyed the confidence of Western man; these movements were designed, consciously or [[unconsciously]], to advance [[Jewish]] interests even though they were presented to non-Jews as universalistic and even [[utopian]]. One of the most consistent ways in which Jews have advanced their interests has been to promote pluralism and diversity<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">but only for [[others]]. Ever since the nineteeth century, they have led movements that tried to discredit the traditional foundations of gentile [[society]]: patriotism, racial loyalty, the Christian basis for [[morality]], social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. MacDonald devotes many pages to <i>The Authoritarian Personality</i> (1950), a collective project coordinated by Adorno, the purpose of which was, for MacDonald, to make every group affiliation sound as if it were a sign of mental disorder; everything, from patriotism to religion to family<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">and race<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">loyalty, is disqualified as a sign of a dangerous and defective "authoritarian personality." Because drawing distinctions between different groups is illegitimate, all group loyalties<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">even close family ties<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">are "prejudice." MacDonald [[quotes]] here approvingly Christopher Lasch's remark that <i>The Authoritarian Personality</i> leads to the conclusion that prejudice "`could be eradicated only by subjecting the American [[people]] to what amounted to collective [[psychotherapy]]<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">by treating [[them]] as inmates of an insane asylum.'"<a href="#fn2" name="cfn2"><sup>2</sup></a> However, it is precisely the kind of group loyalty, respect for [[tradition]], and [[consciousness]] of differences central to <i>Jewish</i> identity that, according to MacDonald, [[Horkheimer]] and Adorno described as mental [[illness]] in gentiles. These writers adopted what eventually became a favorite Soviet tactic against [[dissidents]]: anyone whose [[political]] views were different from theirs was insane. For these Jewish intellectuals, [[anti-Semitism]] was also a sign of mental illness: Christian [[self]]-[[denial]] and especially sexual repression caused [[hatred]] of Jews. The Frankfurt school was enthusiastic [[about]] [[psychoanalysis]], ac<a></a><a></a>cording to which "`[[oedipal]] [[ambivalence]] toward the [[father]] and [[anal]]-[[sadistic]] relations in early [[childhood]] are the anti-Semite's irrevocable inheritance'" (<a href="#fn2" name="cfn2"><i>CC</i></a><i>,</i> p. 145). In addition to ridiculing patriotism and racial identity, the Frankfurt school glorified promiscuity and bohemian poverty: "Certainly many of the central attitudes of the largely successful 1960s countercultural revolution find expression in <i>The Authoritarian Personality</i>, including idealizing rebellion against parents, low-investment sexual relationships, and scorn for upward social mobility, social status, family pride, the Christian religion, and patriotism" (<a href="#fn2" name="cfn2"><i>CC</i></a><i>,</i> p. 194). Although he came later, Derrida followed the same tradition when he wrote: "`The [[idea]] behind [[deconstruction]] is to deconstruct the workings of strong [[nation]]-states with powerful [[immigration]] policies, to deconstruct the [[rhetoric]] of [[nationalism]], the [[politics]] of [[place]], the [[metaphysics]] of native land and native tongue.... The idea is to disarm the bombs... of identity that nation-states build to [[defend]] themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants'" (<a href="#fn2" name="cfn2"><i>CC</i></a><i>,</i> p. 201). As MacDonald puts it, <i>"Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the [[United States]] to view concern about their own </i><i>demographic and cultural eclipse as [[irrational]] and as an indication of [[psychopathology]]"</i> (<a href="#fn2" name="cfn2"><i>CC</i></a><i>,</i> p. 195). This project has been successful; anyone opposed to the [[displacement]] of whites is routinely treated as a mentally unhinged hatemonger, and whenever whites defend their group interests they are described as psychologically inadequate<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">with, of course, the silent exception of the Jews themselves: "the [[ideology]] that ethnocentrism was a [[form]] of psychopathology was promulgated by a group that over its long [[history]] had arguably been the most ethnocentric group among all the cultures of the [[world]]" (<a href="#fn2" name="cfn2"><i>CC</i></a><i>,</i> p. 232). We should have no illusions here. Measured by the standards of the great [[Enlightenment]] tradition, we are effectively dealing with something for which the best designation is the old orthodox Marxist term for "bourgeois irrationalists": <i>the self-destruction of [[reason]]</i>. The only [[thing]] to bear in [[mind]] is that this new barbarism is a strictly [[postmodern]] phenomenon, the obverse of the highly reflexive self-ironical attitude<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">no wonder that, [[reading]] authors like MacDonald, one often cannot decide if one is reading a satire or a "serious" line of argumentation. <p></p>
But the saddest surprise of them all is to see some of the [[theoretical]] descendants of those who are amalgamated by MacDonald into the same Jewish plot with Derrida<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">some late representatives of the Frankfurt school<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">propose a kind of symmetrical [[reversal]] of the same story, which ends up in no less atrocious slander. Instead of [[being]] castigated as an [[agent]] of the Jewish plot, Derrida is here, together with [[Baudrillard]] and others, thrown into the "postmodern" melting pot that, so the story goes, opens up the way for [[proto-Fascist]] irrationalism, if not directly providing the intellectual background for [[Holocaust]] denial. This brutal [[intolerance]], which masks as high [[moral]] concern, found its latest exponent in Richard Wolin, whose <i>The [[Seduction]] of Unreason</i> is a worthy successor to Lukács's most Stalinist work, the infamous <i>Die Zerstörung der Vernunft</i> from the early 1950s. Wolin bombastically locates me, together with Baudrillard, among those who claimed that the U.S. got what it deserved on 9/11:
One of the minimal definitions of a modernist painting concerns the function of its frame. The frame of the painting in front of us is not its true frame; there is [[another]], invisible frame, the frame implied by the [[structure]] of the painting, the frame that enframes our perception of the painting, and these two frames by definition never overlap. There is an invisible gap separating them. The pivotal [[content]] of the painting is not rendered in its [[visible]] part but is located in this dis-location of the two frames, in the gap that separates them. This dimension in-between-the-two-frames is obvious in Kazimir Malevich (what is his <i>Black Square on White Surface</i> if not the minimal marking of the distance between the two frames?), in Edward Hopper ([[recall]] his lone [[figures]] in office buildings or diners at night, where it seems as if the picture's frame has to be redoubled with another window frame, or, in the portraits of his wife close to an open window, exposed to sun rays<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">[[remember]] the opposite [[excess]] of the painted content itself with [[regard]] to what we effectively see, as if we see only the fragment of the [[whole]] picture, the shot with a [[missing]] countershot), and, again, in Edvard [[Munch]]'s <i>Madonna</i> (the droplets of semen and the small fetuslike [[figure]] from <i>The Scream</i> squeezed in between the two frames). The frame is always already redoubled; the frame within "reality" is always linked to another frame enframing "reality" itself.<a href="#fn11" name="cfn11"><sup>11</sup></a> Once introduced, the gap between reality and appearance is thus immediately complicated, reflected-into-itself; once we get a glimpse, through the Frame, of the Other Dimension, <i>reality itself turns into appearance</i>. In other [[words]], things do not simply appear, they <i>appear to appear</i>. This is why the [[negation]] of a negation does not bring us to a simple flat [[affirmation]]. Once things (start to) appear, they not only appear as what they are not, creating an [[illusion]]; they can also appear to just appear, concealing the fact that they <i>are</i> what they appear. </p>
This [[logic]] of the "[[Minimal Difference|minimal difference]]," of the constitutive noncoincidence of a thing with itself, provides the key to the central Hegelian [[category]] of [[concrete]] [[universality]]. Let us take a "mute" abstract universality that encompasses a set of elements all of which somehow subvert, do not fit, this [[universal]] frame. Is, in this case, the "true" concrete universal not this distance itself, the universalized exception? And, vice versa, is the element that directly fits the universal not the true exception? Universality is not the neutral container of [[particular]] [[formations]], their common measure, the passive (back)ground on which the particulars fight their battles, but <i>this battle itself,</i> the struggle leading from one to another particular [[formation]]. Recall Krzysztof Kie<img src="/ucp-entities/sacute.gif" alt="&sacute;" align="bottom" border="0">lowski's passage from documentary to fiction [[cinema]]. We do not have simply two [[species]] of cinema, documentary and fiction; fiction emerges out of the inherent limitation of the documentary. Kie<img src="/ucp-entities/sacute.gif" alt="&sacute;" align="bottom" border="0">lowski's starting point was the same as the one of all cineasts in the socialist countries: the conspicuous gap between the drab [[social reality]] and the optimistic, bright [[image]] that pervaded the heavily censored [[official]] media. The first reaction to the fact that, in [[Poland]], social reality was "unrepresented," as Kie<img src="/ucp-entities/sacute.gif" alt="&sacute;" align="bottom" border="0">lowski put it, was, of course, the move towards a more adequate [[representation]] of the real life in all its drabness and ambiguity<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">in short, an authentic documentary approach:
</p><blockquote><i>There was a [[necessity]], a [[need]]<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">which was very exciting for us<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">to describe the world. The [[Communist]] world had described how it should be and not how it really was.... If something hasn't been described, then it doesn't officially [[exist]]. So that if we start describing it, we bring it to life.<a href="#fn12" name="cfn12"><sup>12</sup></a></i><p></p>
Or, to put it in a different way, the reproach to Paul's universalism misses the true site of universality. The universal dimension he opened up is not the "neither [[Greeks]] nor Jews but all Christians," which implicitly excludes non-Christians; <i>it is rather the difference Christians/non-Christians itself which, as a difference, is universal</i>; that is, it cuts across the entire social [[body]], [[splitting]], dividing from within every kind of [[ethnic identity]]: Greeks are cut into Christians and non-Christians, as well as Jews. The standard reproach thus in a way knocks on an open door. The whole point of the Paulinian notion of struggling universality <i>is</i> that true universality and partiality do not exclude each other and also that <i>universal [[Truth]] is only accessible from a [[partial]], engaged, [[subjective]] position</i>. </p>
For strategic reasons, my master [[signifier]] for the "minimal difference" is not <i>différance</i>, but <i>parallax</i>. The common definition of parallax is the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background) caused by a [[change]] in observational position that provides a new line of [[sight]]. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply subjective, because the same object is seen from two different stations or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently "mediated," so that an "[[epistemological]]" shift in the subject's point of view always reflects an "ontological" shift in the object itself. Or, to put it in Lacanese, the subject's [[gaze]] is always already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its "blind spot," that which is in the object more than object itself, the point from which the object itself returns [[The Gaze|the gaze]]. Sure, the picture is in my eye, but me, I am also in the picture.<a href="#fn18" name="cfn18"><sup>18</sup></a> The first part of this Lacanian statement designates [[subjectivization]], the [[dependence]] of reality on its subjective [[constitution]], while its second part provides a [[materialist]] supplement, reinscribing the subject into its own image in the guise of a [[stain]] (the objectivized splinter in its eye). [[Materialism]] is not the direct assertion of my inclusion into the [[objective]] reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of [[enunciation]] is that of an [[external]] [[observer]] who can grasp the whole of reality); it rather resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included into the picture constituted by me. It is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary <i>redoubling</i> of myself as standing outside <i>and</i> [[inside]] my picture, that bears witness to my [[material]] [[existence]]. Materialism means that the reality I see is never whole<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">not because a large part of it eludes me but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which signals my inclusion in it. </p>
Nowhere is this structure clearer than in the case of [[Lacan]]'s <i>[[objet]] [[petit a]]</i>, the object-[[cause]] of [[desire]]. The same object can all of a sudden be "transubstantiated" into the object of my desire. What is to you just an ordinary object is for me the focus of my [[libidinal]] investment, and this shift is caused by some unfathomable <i>x,</i> a <i>je ne sais quoi</i> in the object that cannot ever be pinned down to any of its particular properties. <i>[[Objet a]]</i> is therefore close to the Kantian [[transcendental]] object because it stands for the unknown <i>x,</i> the noumenal core of the object beyond appearances, for what is "[[in you more than yourself]]." <i>L'[[objet petit a]]</i> can thus be defined as a pure parallax object: not only do its contours change with the shift of the subject; <i>it only [[exists]]<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">its [[presence]] can only be discerned<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">when the landscape is viewed from a certain perspective</i>. More precisely, the object <i>a</i> is the very <i>cause</i> of the parallax gap, that unfathomable <i>x</i> which forever eludes [[the symbolic]] grasp and thus causes the [[multiplicity]] of symbolic perspectives. The [[paradox]] here is a very precise one: it is at the very point at which a pure difference emerges<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">a difference that is no longer a difference between two positively existing objects, but a minimal difference that [[divides]] one and the same object from itself<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">that this difference as such immediately coincides with an unfathomable object. In contrast to a mere difference between objects, <i>the pure difference is itself an object</i>. The parallax gap, the minimal difference, is a pure difference that cannot be grounded in positive substantial properties. In Henry [[James]]'s "The Real Thing," the painter-narrator agrees to hire the impoverished "true" aristocrats Major and Mrs. Monarch as models for his illustrations of a deluxe book. However, although they are the "real thing," their drawings appear fake, so the painter must rely more and more on a vulgar couple, Miss Churm and the lithe Italian Oronte, whose imitation of high-class poses works much better. Is this not the unfathomable "minimal difference" at its purest? </p>
Jacques-[[Alain]] [[Miller]] recently proposed a Benjaminian [[distinction]] between "constituted [[anxiety]]" and "constituent anxiety," which is crucial with regard to the shift from desire to [[drive]]. While the first one designated the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety that haunts us, its infernal circle that threatens to draw us in, the second one stands for the "pure" confrontation with <i>objet petit a</i> as constituted in its very loss.<a href="#fn19" name="cfn19"><sup>19</sup></a> Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference that separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to [[fantasy]]. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we only get the constituent anxiety when the subject "traverses the fantasy" and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object. As Mallarmé put it in the famous parenthetical lines of his so-called sonnet <i>en <img src="/ucp-entities/ndash.gif" alt="–" align="bottom" border="0">yx, objet a</i> is "ce seul objet dont le Neant s'honore" ("this sole object with which Nothing is honored"). </p>
Clear and convincing as it is, Miller's formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of <i>objet a</i>. When he defines <i>objet a</i> as the object that overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to [[voice]] and gaze, are [[metonymic]] figurations of the void, of nothing), he remains within the horizon of <i>desire</i>. The true object-[[cause of desire]] is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, <i>objet a</i> is also the object of drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different: although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of <i>objet a</i> as the object-cause of <i>desire</i>, we have an object that is originally lost, that coincides with its own loss, that emerges as lost; in the case of <i>objet a</i> as the object of drive, the "object" <i>is directly the loss itself.</i> In the shift from desire to drive, we [[pass]] from the <i>[[lost object]]</i> to <i>loss itself as an object</i>. That is to say, the weird movement called drive is not driven by the "[[impossible]]" quest for the [[Lost Object|lost object]]; it is <i>a push to directly enact the "loss"<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">the gap, cut, distance<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">itself</i>. There is thus a <i>[[double]]</i> distinction to be drawn here: not only between <i>objet a</i> in its fantasmatic and postfantasmatic status but also, within this postfantasmatic domain itself, between the lost [[object-cause of desire]] and the object-loss of drive. </p>
This is why one should not confuse the [[death drive]] with the so-called [[nirvana]] principle, the thrust towards destruction or self-obliteration; the [[Freudian]] [[Death Drive|death drive ]] has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the [[return]] to the inorganic [[absence]] of any life tension. It is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">a name for the "undead" eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless [[repetitive]] cycle of wandering around in guilt and [[pain]]. The paradox of the Freudian death drive is therefore that it is [[Freud]]'s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an [[uncanny]] <i>excess</i> of life, for an "undead" urge that persists beyond the ([[biological]]) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never just life. [[Humans]] are not simply alive; they are possessed by the strange drive to [[enjoy]] life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus that sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things. </p>
What this means is that it is wrong to claim that the "pure" death drive would have been the impossible "[[total]]" will to (self)-destruction, the ecstatic self-annihilation in which the subject would have rejoined the fullness of the [[maternal]] Thing but that this will is not realizable, that it gets blocked, stuck to a "[[partial object]]." Such a notion retranslates death drive into the terms of desire and its lost object. It is in desire that the positive object is a metonymic stand-in for the void of the impossible Thing; it is in desire that the aspiration to fullness is transferred to [[partial objects]]. This is what Lacan called the [[metonymy]] of desire. One has to be very precise here if we are not to miss Lacan's point (and thereby confuse desire and drive): drive is not an infinite longing for the Thing that gets fixated onto a [[Partial Object|partial object]]; a drive <i>is</i> this [[fixation]] itself in which resides the "death" dimension of every drive. A drive is not a universal thrust (towards the incestuous Thing) braked and broken up. It <i>is</i> this brake itself, a brake on [[instinct]], its "stuckness," as [[Eric Santner]] would have put it.<a href="#fn20" name="cfn20"><sup>20</sup></a> The elementary [[matrix]] of drive is <i>not</i> that of transcending all particular objects towards the void of the Thing (which is then accessible only in its metonymic stand-in) but that of our [[libido]] getting "stuck" onto a particular object, condemned to circulate around it forever. </p>
The basic paradox here is that the specifically human dimension<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">drive as opposed to instinct<img src="/ucp-entities/mdash.gif" alt="—" align="bottom" border="0">emerges precisely when what was originally a mere by-product is elevated into an autonomous aim. Man is not more "reflexive"; on the contrary, man perceives as a direct [[goal]] what, for an [[animal]], has no intrinsic [[value]]. In short, the zero-degree of being human is not a further "mediation" of animal activity, its reinscription as a subordinated moment of a higher totality (say, we eat and procreate in order to develop higher spiritual potentials), but the radical narrowing of focus, the elevation of a minor activity into an end in itself. We become humans when we get caught in a closed, self-propelling loop of [[repeating]] the same gesture and finding [[satisfaction]] in it. We all recall one of the archetypal scenes from cartoons: while dancing, the cat jumps up into the air and turns around its own axis; however, instead of falling back down towards the earth's surface in accordance with the normal laws of gravity, it remains for some time suspended in the air, [[turning around]] in the levitated position as if caught in a loop of time, repeating the same circular movement on and on. (One also finds the same image in some musical comedies that make use of the elements of slapstick; when a dancer turns around in the air, he or she remains up there a little bit too long, as if, for a short period of time, he or she had succeeded in suspending the law of gravity. And, in essence, is such an effect not the ultimate goal of the art of dancing?) In such moments, the "normal" run of things, the "normal" process of being caught in the imbecilic inertia of material reality, is for a brief moment suspended; we enter the magical domain of suspended animation, of a kind of ethereal rotation that, as it were, sustains itself, hanging in the air like Baron Munchhausen who raised himself from the swamp by grabbing his own hair and pulling himself up. This rotary movement, in which the liberal [[progress]] of time is suspended in a repetitive loop, is <i>drive</i> at its most elementary. This, again, is "humanization" at its zero-level: this self-propelling loop that suspends or disrupts linear temporal enchainment. </p>
