Changes

In our daily lives, we deal with what Julia Kristeva calls 'abject' in a variety of ways: ignoring it, turning away from it with disgust, fearing it, constructing rituals made to keep it at a distance or constraining it to a secluded place (toilets for defecation, etc.). Disgust, horror, phobia  . . .but there is yet another way to deal with abjection which is to enact a split between abjectal objects or acts and the symbolic ritualisation meant to cleanse us from defilement, i.e., to keep the two apart, as if there is no shared space where they may encounter each other since the abject (filth) in its actuality is simply foreclosed from the symbolic. Kristeva evokes the case of castes in India where the strong ritualisation of defilement (numerous rituals, prescribed in painful details, that regulate how one should purify oneself) ["]appears to be accompanied by one's being totally blind to filth itself, even though it is the object of those rites. It is as if one had maintained, so to speak, only the sacred, prohibited facet of defilement, allowing the anal object that such a sacralization had in view to become lost within the dazzling light of unconsciousness if not of the unconscious. V. S. Naipaul points out that Hindus defecate everywhere without anyone ever mentioning, either in speech or in books, those squatting figures, because, quite simply, no one sees them. It is not a form of censorship due to modesty that would demand the omission in discourse of a function that has, in other respects, been ritualized. It is blunt foreclo­ sure foreclo­sure that voids those acts and objects from conscious representation.  A split seems to have set in between, on the one hand, the body's territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion between mother and nature, and on the other hand, a totally different universe of socially signifying performances where embarrassment, shame, guilt, desire, etc. come into play—the order of the phallus. Such a split, which in another cultural universe would produce psychosis, thus finds in this context a perfect socialization. That may be because setting up the rite of defilement takes on the function of the hyphen, the virgule, allowing the two universes of ''filth ''and of ''prohibition ''to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being identified as such, as ''object ''and as ''law.'' On account of the flexibility at work in rites of defilement, the subjective economy of the speaking being who is involved abuts on both edges of the unnamable (the non-­object, the off­-limits) and the absolute (the relentless coherence of Prohibition, sole donor of Meaning [" (''P,'' p. 74)].  Do we not find similar cases also in Christianity as well as in Islam? When, a decade ago, the (then) Iranian president Ahmadinejad visited New York to attend a UN general assembly session, he was invited to attend a live debate at Columbia University. When asked about homosexuality in Iran, his reply was rudely mistranslated into English as if he claimed that in Iran they have no problem with homosexuals since there are none there.  An Iranian friend (very critical of Ahmadinejad) who was there told me that Ahmadinejad's reply was in reality much more nuanced: what he hinted at was that in Iran they don't talk about homosexuality in public, they condemn it officially and mostly ignore its actual occurrences, thereby 'allowing the two universes of ''filth ''and of ''prohibition ''to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being identified as such, as ''object ''and as ''law'''. And does the same not hold for paedophilia in the Catholic church? Paedophilia is publicly condemned while (till recently, at least) tolerated by being ignored in practice, as if public Law and material practice of sinful filth belong to different domains. This logic at work in Hinduism, Islam and Catholicism should not be confused with repression: nothing is 'repressed' or 'unconscious' about filth or homosexuality or paedophilia, the filthy act in question is practiced more or less openly and without any qualms, its practitioners are (mostly) not traumatised by their perverse desires or haunted by any deep guilt feelings, they just simply keep the two dimensions apart. Our problem today is that, within the predominant logic of Political Correctness, such a procedure of keeping the two domains apart no longer functions: the PC stance by definition collapses the two dimensions since it aims precisely at directly controlling and regulating 'the body's territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion between mother and nature'. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 74).  In other words, there is no domain left unseen, ignored by the PC law—its law tolerates no unwritten rules, there is no space here for a transgressive behaviour that violates explicit rules and is precisely as such not only tolerated but even solicited by the law    Is the mechanism described here not a case of so-­called fetishist disavowal? Kristeva locates the most radical fetishism, fetishist disavowal, into language itself: "But is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable fetish? And language, precisely, is based on fetishist denial ('I know that, but just the same', 'the sign is not the thing, but just the same,' etc.) and defines us in our essence as speaking beings. Because of its founding status, the fetishism of 'language' is perhaps the only one that is unanalyzable." (Kristeva, 1982, p. 37). Kristeva locates the fetishist dimension of language into the implicit overcoming of the gap that separates words (signs) from things: 'I know that words are only signs with no immanent relation to things they designate, but I nonetheless . . . (believe in their magic influence on things)'.  But where, exactly, is here fetishism? In his classic text, Octave Mannoni (Mannoni, 2003 [1968]) distinguishes three modes of ''je sais bien, mais quand meme . . . '', and reserves the name 'fetishism' only for the third one. The first mode is the standard functioning of the symbolic order, namely the relation between the symbolic title of a subject and his/her miserable reality as a person: 'I know very well that this guy in front of me is a miserable stupid coward, but he wears the insignia of power, which means that it is the Law which speaks through him . . .' Is it, however, accurate to charac­terise this basic 'alienation' in a symbolic title that changes our perception of an individual as a case of fetishism? Not yet, for Mannoni. Then there is the mode of falling into one's own trap, like a guy who, in order to calm his small child when a storm is ravaging around their house, draws a circle on the floor with a chalk and assures him that one is safe if one stands inside the circle; when, soon thereafter, a lightning directly strikes the house, he in a moment of panic quickly steps into the circle, as if being there will protect him, ignoring the fact that he himself concocted the story about the magic property of the circle to calm down the child.  For Mannoni, this is also not yet fetishism proper which only occurs when we have no need for any belief at all: we know how things really stand, plus we have the object-fetish with no magic belief attached to it. A foot fetishist has no illusions about feet, plus he simply has a strong libidinal investment in feet, playing with them generates immense enjoyment. So which among these three versions pertains to language as such? Maybe, all three are activated at different levels. First, there is the disavowal that characterises the symbolic mandate ('I know very well that you are a miserable individual, but you are a judge and the authority of the law speaks through you'). Then, there is the self-­deception of a manipula­tor who, as it were, falls into his own trap. In his ''Anthropology'', Kant (Kant, 2006 [1798]) explores how the love of the illusion of the good can lead to the love of the good itself: if one loves the illusion of the good and enacts this illusion in social intercourse, one might come to appreciate its worth and to love the good itself for its own sake. Correlatively from the point of view of the spectator, loving the illusion of the good in others may make us be polite in order to become lovable, which, in turn, exercises our self­-mastery, leads us to control our passions and, eventually, to love the good for its own sake. In this sense, paradoxically, by deceiving others through politeness and social pretence, we in fact deceive ourselves and transform our pragmatic, polite behaviour into virtuous behaviour. . . .  The differ­ence between this and the first mode of disavowal is obvious: in the first mode, we are dealing with the straight confusion between an object/ person and the properties that belong to it only on behalf of its inscription into a symbolic network (to paraphrase Marx, a king is a king only because his subjects treat him as a king, but it appears to them that they treat him as a king because he is in himself a king), while in the second case, the illusion is generated purposefully and consciously (the subject produces an appearance in order to dupe another, and then he ends up falling into his own trap and believing in it himself). One should note how, although the cynical manipula­ tor manipula­tor consciously cheats and is in this sense less naïve than the subject of the first mode of disavowal, he ends up believing in a much more direct and naïve illusion: he fully falls into his own trap, in contrast to the first mode in which the subject retains to the end the distance towards his belief ('I know very well it's not true . . .').(18)