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{{BSZ}} What is an act in the strict [[Lacanian ]] [[sense ]] of the term? [[Recall ]] C.S. Lewis' description of his [[religious ]] [[choice ]] from his <i>Surprised by Joy</i>—what makes it so irresistibly delicious is the [[author]]'s matter-of-fact "[[English]]" skeptical style, far from the usual pathetic narratives of the mystical rapture. C.S. Lewis' description of the act thus deftly avoids any ecstatic pathos in the usual style of Saint Theresa, any multiple-orgasmic penetrations by angels or God: it is not that, in the divine mystical [[experience]], we step out (in ex-stasis) of our normal experience of [[reality]]: it is this "normal" experience which is "ex-static" ([[Heidegger]]), in which we are thrown [[outside ]] into entities, and the mystical experience [[signal ]] the [[withdrawal ]] from this ecstasy. Lewis thus refers to the experience as the "odd [[thing]];" he mentions its common location—"I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus"—the qualifications like "in a sense," "what now appears," "or, if you like," "you could argue that... but I am more inclined to [[think]]...," "perhaps," "I rather disliked the [[feeling]]"):</font></p>
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Since the function of the [[obscene ]] [[superego ]] [[supplement ]] of the (divine) Law is to mask this impotence of the [[big Other]], and since [[Christianity ]] <tt><b>REVEALS</b></tt> this impotence, it is, quite consequently, the first (and only) [[religion ]] to radically leave behind the split between the [[official]]/public [[text ]] and its obscene initiatic supplement: in it, there is no hidden untold story. In this precise sense, Christianity is the religion of Revelation: everything is revealed in it, no obscene superego supplement is accompanying its [[public ]] [[message]]. In old Greek and Roman [[religions]], the public text was always supplemented by [[secret ]] initiatic [[rituals ]] and orgies; on the other hand, all attempts to treat Christianity in the same way (to uncover Christ's "secret teaching" somehow encoded in the New Testament or found in apocryphal Gospels) amounts to its heretic reinscription into the pagan Gnostic tradition.<br> <br>
Apropos Christianity as "revealed religion," one should thus ask the inevitable stupid question: what is effectively revealed in it? That is to say, is it not that <tt><b>ALL</b></tt> religions reveal some mystery, through the prophets to carry the divine message to humans; even those who insist on the impenetrability of the <i>dieu obscur</i> imply that there is some secret which resist, revelation, and in the Gnostic versions, this mystery <tt><b>IS</b></tt> revealed to the selected few in some initiatic ceremony. Significantly, Gnostic reinscriptions of Christianity insist precisely on the [[presence ]] of such a hidden message to be deciphered in the official [[Christian ]] text. So what is revealed in Christianity is not just the entire [[content]], but, more specifically, that <tt><b>THERE IS NOTHING</b></tt> - <tt><b>NO SECRET</b></tt> - <tt><b>TO BE REVEALED BEHIND IT</b></tt>. To paraphrase [[Hegel]]'s famous [[formula ]] from his [[Phenomenology]], behind the curtain of the public text, there is only what we put there. Or, to formulate it even more pointedly, in more pathetic [[terms]], what God reveals is not his hidden power, but only his impotence as such.<br>
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A crucial line of [[separation ]] is to be drawn here between the Jewish fidelity to the disavowed ghosts and the pagan obscene initiatic wisdom accompanying the public [[ritual]]: the disavowed Jewish spectral narrative does not tell the obscene story of God's impenetrable omnipotence, but its exact opposite: the story of His <tt><b>IMPOTENCE</b></tt> covered by the standard pagan obscene supplements. The secret to which the Jews remain faithful is the horror of the divine impotence—and it is <tt><b>THIS</b></tt> secret which is "revealed" in Christianity. This is the [[reason ]] why Christianity can only occur after Judaism: it reveals the horror first confronted by the Jews. It is thus only through taking into account this line of separation between [[paganism ]] and Judaism that one can properly grasp the Christian breakthrough itself.<br>
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What this means is that, in forcing us to face the abyss of the Other's [[desire ]] (in the guise of the impenetrable God), in refusing to cover up this abyss with a determinate fantasmatic scenario (articulated in the obscene initiatic [[myth]]), Judaism confronts us for the [[first time ]] with the paradox of human freedom. There is no freedom outside the traumatic [[encounter ]] with the opacity of the Other's desire: freedom does not mean that I simply get rid of the Other's desire—I am as it were thrown into my freedom when I confront this opacity as such, deprived of the fantasmatic cover which tells me what the Other wants from me. In this difficult predicament, full of [[anxiety]], when I know <tt><b>THAT</b></tt> the Other wants something from me, without [[knowing ]] <tt><b>WHAT</b></tt> this desire is, I am thrown back into myself, compelled to assume the risk of freely determining the coordinates of my desire.<br>
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The same ethical [[struggle ]] to sustain the meaninglessness of the catastrophe is the topic of Atom Egoyan's masterpiece <i>The Sweet Hereafter</i>, arguably <tt><b>THE</b></tt> film about the impact of a trauma on a community. Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer, arrives in the wintry [[hamlet ]] of San Dent to [[sign ]] up the [[parents ]] of [[children ]] who died when their [[school ]] bus plunged into an ice-covered lake. His motto is "there are no accidents": there are no gaps in the causal link of [[responsibility]], there always <tt><b>HAS</b></tt> to be someone who is guilty. (As we soon learn, he is not doing this on account of his professional avarice. Stephens' [[obsession ]] with the [[complete ]] causal link is rather his desperate strategy to cope with the private trauma, to sort out responsibility for his own daughter Zoe, a junkie who despises him, although she repeatedly calls him demanding [[money]]: he insists that everything must have a [[cause ]] in order to counteract the inexplicable gap which separates him from Zoe.) After Stephens interviews Dolores Driscoll, the driver of the bus, who says the accident was a fluke, he visits the families of the dead children, and some of them sign up with him to file a lawsuit. Among them are the parents of Nicole Burnell, a teenager who survived the crash as a paraplegic but [[remember ]] [[nothing]]. Stephens' case depends on proving that the bus company or the school board were at fault, not Dolores' driving.<br>
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Nicole, estranged and cynical since the accident, sees her parents succumbing to greed and Stephens' dark influence. Her father has been molesting her for years; where she once believed in his [[love]], she now sees only exploitation. At the inquest, she decides to lie, testifying that Dolores was driving too fast—Stephens' case is thus ruined. While Nicole is now forever isolated from the community, she will be from now on able to [[guide ]] her own [[future]], In the film's last scene which takes [[place ]] two years later, Dolores, now driving a minibus at a nearby airport, meets Stephens on his way to rescue his daughter yet again; they recognize each other, but prefer not to [[speak]]. In the film's final lines, Nicole's [[voice]]-over accompanies this encounter of Stephens and Dolores: "As you see each other, almost two years later, I wonder if you realize something, I wonder if you realize that all of us—Dolores, me, the children who survived, the children who didn't—that we're all citizens of a different town now. A town of [[people ]] living in the sweet hereafter."<br>
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At first glance, Stephens looks like the film's protagonist: the film begins with his arrival in town, he is involved with the climax, and much of the first half is seen from his point of view. It is Stephens, [[passion ]] which [[drives ]] the lawsuit, the dramatic spine of the story—it thus seems that we shall get the standard Hollywood narrative in which the larger [[tragedy ]] (the bus accident) just offers the background for the true focus, the protagonist's coming to terms with his own trauma. However, halfway through, Egoyan lifts our expectations with a major shift in point of view: when Nicole leaves the hospital as a paraplegic, the story becomes <tt><b>HERS</b></tt>, and Stephens is re-positioned as her antagonist. Is, then, Nicole's lie an act of saving the community, enabling the townspeople to escape the painful judicial examination which would have torn their lives apart? Is it not that, through it, the community is allowed to absolve itself, i.e. to avoid the <tt><b>SECOND</b></tt> trauma of the [[symbolization ]] of the accident, and to enter the fantasmatic bliss of the "sweet hereafter" in which, by an unspoken pact among them, the catastrophe is silently ignored? Is it in this sense that her lie is an <tt><b>ACT</b></tt> in the strict sense of the term: an "immoral" lie which answers the unconditional call of Duty, enabling the community to start again from zero? <tt><b><a name="4x"ref>I owe this point to Christina Ross, McGill [[University]], Montreal.</a><a href="#4">4</a></b></ttref> Is this not the basic lesson of the film, namely that our [[social ]] reality as such is a "sweet hereafter" based on a constitutive lie? The young incestuous girl, with her lie, enables a community to reconstitute itself—we all live in a "sweet hereafter", [[social reality ]] itself is a "sweet hereafter" based on the [[disavowal ]] of some trauma. The townspeople who survive as a community connected with a secret bond of the disavowed knowledge, obeying their own secret rules, are not the [[model ]] of a pathological community, but the very (unacknowledged) model of our "normal" social reality, like in Freud's [[dream ]] about [[Irma]]'s injection, in which social reality (the spectacle of the three doctors-friends proposing contradictory excuses for the failure of Freud's [[treatment ]] of Irma) emerges as the "sweet hereafter" following the traumatic confrontation with the trauma of Irma's deep throat.<br>
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However, such a reading simplified too much the film's [[texture]]. Does the traumatic accident derail the idyllic life of the small town community~ It seems that the opposite is the case: before the catastrophic accident, the community was far from idyllic—its members indulged in adultery, [[incest]], etc., so that the accident, by way of localizing the violence in the [[external]]/contingent traumatic bus accident, by way of displacing it onto this accident, [[retroactively ]] rendering the community edenic... However, such a reading also misses the point. The key indication of the community life is provided by the way the daughter/father incest (which went on before the accident) is presented: strangely, this ultimate [[transgression ]] is rendered as totally <tt><b>NON-TRAUMATIC</b></tt>, as part of everyday intimate relations. We are in a community in which incest is "normal." Perhaps, then, this allows us to risk a Levi-Straussian reading of the film: what if its [[structuring ]] opposition is the same as the one which Levi-[[Strauss ]] identities in his famous [[analysis ]] of XI the Oedipus myth, <ttref><b><a name=See Claude [[Lévi-Strauss]], "5xThe [[Structural]] Analysis of Myth,">in </ai><a href="#5">5Structural [[Anthropology]]</a></bi>, New York: Basic Book, 1963.</ttref> namely the opposition between overvaluation and undervaluation of the kinship ties, concretely: between incest and losing children in an accident (or, in the case of the lawyer Stephens, losing ties with a junkie daughter)? The key insight of the story concerns the link between the two opposites: it is as if, since parents are so attached to their children, following the proverbial [[obsessional ]] strategy, they prefer to strike preemptively, i.e. to stage themselves the [[loss ]] of the child in order to avoid the unbearable waiting for the moment when, upon growing up, the child will abandon them. This notion is expressed clearly by Stephens in a side story not used by Egoyan, when he muses on his disavowed decision to let her young daughter in a store: "I must have known that if my child was indeed to be lost to me, then I would [[need ]] all my strength just to survive that fact, so I had decided ahead of time not to waste any of my strength trying to save what was already lost." <tt><b><a name="6x"></aref>Russell Banks, <a href="#6"i>6The Sweet Hereafter</ai>, New York: Harper 1992, p. 54.</b></tt><br> <brref>
The reference of the film is, of course, Robert Browning's famous [[poem ]] <i>The Pied Piper of Hamelin</i>, repeatedly quoted through the film by Nicole, with the longest quote occurring when father takes her into the barn for sex. And the ultimate proto-[[Hegelian ]] paradox ([[identity ]] of the opposites) is that it is Stephens himself, the angry outsider, who is the true Pied Piper in the film. That is to say, the way the community survived the loss was to replace the dead child with the dreamed one: "It's the other child, the dreamed [[baby]], the remembered one, that for a few moments we think [[exists]]. For those few moments, the first ch ld, the [[real ]] baby, the dead one, is not gone; she simply never was. <ttref><b><a name="7x"i>ibid</a><a href="#7">7</ai>, p. 125-6.</b></ttref> What the successful litigation pursued by Stephens would have brought about is the [[disturbance ]] of this fragile solution: the pacifying specter of the dreamed child would have disintegrated, the community would have been confronted with the loss as such, with the fact that their children <tt><b>DID</b></tt> [[exist ]] and now <tt><b>NO L0NGER DO</b></tt>. So if Stephens is the Pied Piper of the film, his threat is that he will snatch away not the real children, but the dreamed ones, thus confronting the community not only with the loss as such, but with the inherent [[cruelty ]] of their solution which involves the [[denial ]] of the very [[existence ]] of the lost real children. Is, then, this the reason Zoe lied? In a true stroke of a [[genius]], Egoyan wrote an additional stanza in the Browning style, which Nicole recites over a close-up of her father's mouth after she has falsely implicated Dolores:<br>
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These frozen lips, of course, stand not only for the dead children, but also for Nicole's [[rejection ]] of being further engaged in the incest: only her father knew the [[truth ]] about why she lied at the hearing—the truth of her lie being a <tt><b>NO</b></tt>! to her father. And this <tt><b>NO</b></tt>! is at the same time a <tt><b>NO</b></tt>! to the community (<i>Gemeinschaft</i>) as opposed to [[society ]] (<i>Geseilschaft</i>). When does one belong to a community. The difference concerns the netherworld of unwritten obscene rules which regulate the "inherent transgression" of the community, the way we are allowed/expected to violate its explicit rules. This is why the subject who closely follows the explicit rules of a community will never be accepted by its members as "one of us": he does not participate in the [[transgressive ]] rituals which effectively keep this community together. And society as opposed to community is a collective which can dispense with this set of unwritten rules—since this is [[impossible]], there is no society without community. This is where the theories which advocate the subversive character of [[mimicry ]] get it wrong; according to these theories, the properly subversive attitude of the Other—say, of a colonized subject who lives under the domination of the colonizing culture—is to mimic the dominant [[discourse]], but with a distance, so that what he does and says is like what the colonizers themselves do... almost like it, with an unfathomable difference which makes his [[Otherness ]] all the more palpable. One is tempted to turn this [[thesis ]] around: it is the foreigner emulating faithfully the rules of the dominant [[culture ]] he wants to penetrate and [[identify ]] with, who is condemned forever to remain an outsider, because he fails to [[practice]], to participate in, the self-distance of the dominant culture, the unwritten rules which tell us how and when to violate the explicit rules of this culture. We are "in," integrated in a culture, perceived by their members is "one of us," only when we succeed in practicing this unfathomable <tt><b>DISTANCE</b></tt> from [[the symbolic ]] rules—it is ultimately only this distance which exhibits our identity, our belonging to the culture in question. And the subject reaches the level of a true ethical stance only when he moves beyond this [[duality ]] of the public rules as well as their superego shadow; in John Irving's <i>The Cider-House Rules</i>, these three levels of [[ethics ]] are staged in an exemplary way. First, we get the straight [[morality ]] (the set of explicit rules we choose to obey—Homer obey—[[Homer]] Wells, the novel's hero, chooses never to perform an abortion); then, we experience its obscene underside—this is what takes place in the "cider house" in which, while on seasonal [[work ]] there, Homer learns that explicit rules are sustained by more obscene implicit rules with which it is better not to mess); finally, when, based on this experience, Homer acknowledges the necessity to <tt><b>BREAK</b></tt> the explicit [[moral ]] rules (he performs an abortion), he reaches the level of ethics proper. And does the same not go also for Nicole in The Sweet Hereafter? Is Nicole's act not the gesture of asserting her distance towards both poles, the larger society as well as the "sweet hereafter" of the traumatized community and its secret rules?<br> <br> <b>Notes</b>:<br> <br> <tt><b><a name="1"></a><a href="#1x">1</a></b></tt>. C.S.Lewis, <i>Surprised by Joy</i>, London: Fontana Books, 1977, p. 174-5.<br> <tt><b><a name="2"></a><a href="#2x">2</a></b></tt>. For a closer elaboration of this crucial point, see Chapter 4 of Slavoj Zizek, <i>On Belief</i>, London: Routledge 2001.<br> <tt><b><a name="3"></a><a href="#3x">3</a></b></tt>. See Eric Santner, "Traumatic Revelations: Freud's Moses and the Origins of Anti-Semitism," in Renata Salecl, ed., <i>Sexuation</i>, Durham: Duke UP 2000. For my own Lacanian elaboration of this point, see Slavoj Zizek, <i>The Fragile Absolute</i>, London: Verso Books 2000.<br> <tt><b><a name="4"></a><a href="#4x">4</a></b></tt>. I owe this point to Christina Ross, McGill University, Montreal.<br> <tt><b><a name="5"></a><a href="#5x">5</a></b></tt>. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Analysis of Myth," in <i>Structural Anthropology</i>, New York: Basic Book, 1963.<br> <tt><b><a name="6"></a><a href="#6x">6</a></b></tt>. Russell Banks, <i>The Sweet Hereafter</i>, New York: Harper 1992, p. 54.<br> <tt><b><a name="7"></a><a href="#7x">7</a></b></tt>. <i>ibid</i>, p. 125-6.<br>
==Source==* [[The Act and Its Vicissitudes]]. ''The [[Symptom]]''. Volume 6. Spring. May 26, 2005. <http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/zizek.html >.