Changes

Nowhere is this constellation staged in a more clear way than in the Matrix trilogy. <i>The Matrix</i> movies should be read not as a work sustained by a consistent philosophical discourse, but as a work whose very inconsistencies point towards the antagonisms of our ideological and social predicament. What, then, is the Matrix? Simply what Lacan called the "big other," the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This dimension of the "big Other" is that of the constitutive alienation of the subject in the symbolic order: the big other pulls the strings, the subject doesn't speak, he "is spoken" by the symbolic structure. The paradox, the "infinite judgment" of <i>The Matrix</i> is the co-dependence of the two aspects: the total artificiality (the constructed nature) of reality, and the triumphant return of the body in the sense of the ballet-like quality of fights with slow motions and defiance of the laws of ordinary physical reality.<br><br>