–Lacan

This is the dream she had on the evening when her parents brought home, for the first time, her baby brother. A large room, blank, without any walls. Nothing grew or thrived there; instead, a pervasive sense of some organism, maleficent. She sat down, turned around, waited. She got up and started to walk. A room without any walls, she thought, I must look for my totem. She came upon a river, flowing the wrong way, and devoid of fish. She passed it. She came upon a mountain. It had a bottom, but no top. Up she went. After lunch, she talked with the man who, ostensibly, was responsible for clearing up malfunctions. They wasted no time in getting down to the substance of her visit: the lack of any objects that could possibly function as totems, fetishes, charms, what have you. “We’re working on that,” he enunciated: “there has been a downturn in generativity which should have coalesced towards the end of the first quarter; nevertheless, the sequence has been realigned according to shifts in lunar availability.” She looked askance. “What about earlier models?” “Out of the question” he replied. She resisted a mighty impulse to chuck a stone. Praying for deliverance, she cleared her throat, declared her thirst, and asked to borrow a quarter. This she pocketed and failed to remember upon waking.

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GK Chesterton has been staging something of a comeback in the last few years. While he has always been popular among Catholic thinkers who value his fresh formulations of their tradition, and also, over the past 20 years or so, with thinking Evangelicals, who have been turning to him as proof that one can keep one’s faith without losing ones mind; its only recently that his voice has been heard among the philosophers and the critical theorists, mainly through his influence on two of the most interesting representatives in these fields. One, Slavoj Zizek is a Marxist and strict Lacanian, who has annoyed his audiences by saying that he is a Christian atheist and by claiming that Lenin got it all right. The other, John Milbank, is British, a member of the Anglican church, who has become well known as the most articulate defender of a philosophical and theological movement that goes by the name Radical Orthodoxy, and emphasizes a rediscovery of patrisitic and medieval theologians while at the same time being well read in Jacque Lacan and Karl Marx. Zizek and Milbank have appeared at conferences together as well as edited volumes, and are even co-writing a book. Though they come from radically divergent points of view both Zizek and Milbank see the necessity of philosophy and theology being in close discussion with each other and both have seen Chesterton as a good way to do that.
So we’ll start with Zizek. Slavoj Zizek and GK Chesterton make strange bedfellows.  The Slovenian born philosopher is most well known for his readings of Hegel and Lacan as well as his obsession with, and acute observations of, the banalities of popular culture. His atheism is of the school of Marx and Freud but with an insight into Christian and Jewish thought that is almost always arresting. To get right to the point, its seems that what Zizek really gets from Chesterton is the idea that, in the arsenal of human language and thought,  paradox is the best weapon we have, the most effective way of getting at the truth of human existence. Chestertons description of christ’s cry from the cross is a good example of how he employs paradox:
“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

Zizek quotes these words in a book of his entitled On Belief, and when he calls himself a “Christian atheist” as I heard him do once at a talk in Philadelphia he is agreeing with Chesterton that Xity, by revealing God to have been abandoned by God, places a certain value on the atheist, as when Chesterton notes that “The next best thing to really being inside Christendom is to be really outside of it.”
For Zizek, and I think for Cheseterton as well, this brutally honest cry given by the dying Christ, is an example not only of a unique kind of God, but also sets the groundwork for a certain type of thinking, for a certain type of philosophizing. In reading Zizek a quote from Chesterton is often followed by one from Hegel, for it was Hegel, according to Zizek, who gave philosophical voice to paradox, who even constructed his entire system around it. An all powerful God, for Hegel, is revealed most truly in the moment of greatest weakness and desolation, which is a necessary moment in the revelation of that God. For Hegel the all powerful God of the Jews, inasmuch as he communicates with his creation, does so most authentically not through a revelation of words, of sacred texts, but through a revelation of Word, that is, incarnation. For Hegel and Zizek after him, far from proving that Christianity is a kind of opposite of Judaism, the fact that one of the fundamental tenets of Judaism, that against making an image of the invisible God, is overturned in the person of Christ, reveals Christianity to be the inner truth of Judaism. Zizek is then quite happy to read the Christian tradition in the way that Chesterton does, via the lens of paradox: A God who first and foremost creates—but only out of nothing. A God who allows no imitation of himself, human or otherwise, and then promptly shows up in the flesh. A God who claims ascendancy over all other Gods, and is then overpowered and murdered by the feeble beings he made.
Zizek agrees with Chesterton, against all liberal bias and political correctness, that one must affirm that Christianity does something fundamentally different from any other religion. I quote from length the very beginning of his book On Belief:
In the Larry King debate between a rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Southern Baptist, broadcast in March 2000, both the rabbi and the priest expressed their hope that the unification of religions is feasible since, irrespective of his or her official creed, a thoroughly good person can count on divine grace and redemption.  Only the Baptist—a young, well-tanned, slightly overweight and repulsively slick Southern yuppie—insisted that, according to the letter of the Gospel, only those who “live in Christ” by explicitly recognizing themselves in his address will be redeemed, which is why, as he concluded with a barely discernible contemptuous smile, “a lot of good and honest people will burn in hell.” Zizek’s comment is that it is this voice, of the fundamentalist, I think we could say, which we must follow because only it, in emphasizing the violent and exclusionary nature of redemption, maintains Christianity’s status as unique, as laying a path. . . . which for Zizek is key if we want to understand the uniqueness of the subjectivity that has developed in the West under the banner of Christianity, but also, and no less authentically, in its form as enlightened and secular. Zizek, following Lacan and also Descartes, maintains that we must accept a certain bifurcation when we are considering the subject, but it is not that the subject is split between two poles, say between the spirit and matter (as one might understand Descrates to be saying) or between conscious and unconscious (as one might understand Freud. . . ) or between the symbolic and imaginary (as one might understand Lacan); but rather, the subject is this split. So in Zizek’s reading of Lacan, the third important register, that of the Real, in a way embodies the subject, or as Zizek says, is the hard kernel at the core of the subject. Its not that the subject is divided, and must choose the path of good over the path of evil, but the subject is rather division itself, and at no point can claim to have “found the way” or seen the light. The cry from the cross shows that even God is marked absolutely by this division:
In Christianity, says Zizek, “we are not FIRST separated from God and THEN miraculously united with him; the point of Christianity is that the very separation unites us – it is in this separation that we are “like God,” like Christ on the cross, i.e., the separation of us from God is transposed into God himself. (http://www.lacan.com/zizhegche.htm)

Milbank, fictioning things
While Zizek is closest to Chesterton in their emphasizing paradox as what makes Christianity unique among world religions and thought. Milbank is closest to Chesterton at a point that is inaccessible to an atheist like Zizek, for it concerns the meaning of the resurrection. In a paper published online entitled Fictioning Things: on gift and narrative,  Milbank examines the theology of Chesterton through his writings on fairy tales and especially his understanding of the prohibitions which mark so many of them. For Chesterton the point of the negative prohibition was always  to emphasize a positive creative act, like when, arguing in support of monogamy, he says that “keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.” For Milbank what Chesterton is doing is emphasizing the status of the world as gift—it might not have been this way, there might have been nothing at all—and the seemingly arbitrary and unnecessary prohibition–you can eat from any tree in the garden except this one–only serves to emphasize that this world was created by a personal force, it was not eternal or necessary, but it was spur of the moment, and it very well could be unique in all the universe (even the language that god uses in the bible “you may eat of any tree” couches the negative in a positive. And of course if we look at the first chapter of Genesis, all the commands there are explicitly positive. Be fruitful and multiply. Have dominion over the creation. enjoy every green plant for food.) The ban, then is not fundamentally negative, but it is the only way that the positive creation can be seen for what it is from the side of creation. In the garden of eden, the reason why this prohibited fruit is connected with knowledge is because this is the nature of the temptation that our first parents, and us, always face in regards to how we understand the world. Is it going to be seen with the eyes of a child, full of wonder and surprise and new things, or is it going to be understood through the lens of knowledge, as something that fits into a system, thereby robbing it of its contingency and capacity to amaze. In one of his matchless phrases Chesterton notes that “A childe of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. A child of three is excited by being told that someone opened a door.”(ortho 42) This is not to say that knowledge in itself is fundamentally negative, for we can’t forget that prior to falling Humanity did have knowledge, to multiply and to have dominion and even to converse with God. What they didn’t have was complete knowledge, which is what the tree represents, knowledge of good and evil, of the all represented by both sides of a duality. The apples hanging from it would have half fresh and half rotten, just like in the old Disney Sleeping Beauty.
Chesterton claimed that seeing Christianity as a fairy tale was a big step in his embracing of the Catholic faith, and for Milbank the link between those tales and the faith is that both speak of a positivity behind the world and infusing it, which goes beyond the dualities of adult knowledge and mortality: “the ineliminable positivity of things has to be read as a sign of promise despite of or beyond death, unless we deliberately refuse to receive things as gifts” (13)
Fairy tales are, of course, the stories that we tell children and for Chesterton, and Milbank after him, following Jesus’ command to become like little children means understanding what it is that fairy tales do. Part of Milbanks argument that I won’t go into here is how we must see the Christian story as a fairy tale and not as myth. Christainti is not, says Milbank primarily “something to be fully grasped by adults in absttrarct terms, and then presented to children in terms of image and story that they will find more readily comprehensible” (2) To really stick to the command of Christ we must see Adults as simply the “means of transmission . . . . . conveying what they have received and must continue to receive themselves as children.” (2)
To conclude, I would just like to briefly address the aspect of revolution which is included in the title of this paper. It seems to me that a weakness of much of the best thinking today is that there is no longer any hope for revolution but only for revolt. Thinkers like Agamben, Badiou and Zizek have a subltle vocabulary of the Event, of a momentary eclipse of empire. So much of this degenerates, I feel, into the bad kind of paganism, which looks at the world with a certain resignation, sighs and says, Life does not offer us all that it pretends to. Back away from your dreams and just get what little pleasure, what little jouissance, you’ve had the luck to rescue. In two words, carpe diem. But for all Zizek gets about Chesterton and for all his keen insight into what makes Christianity unique, it seems important to me that we must side with Milbank  (and Chesterton) against Zizek here and we must demand that this revolt of the truth be turned into a revolution not through a rejection of traditional modes but precisely through a correct understanding of the stories we’ve now been listening to for two thousand years. As Chesterton notes Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.”  In affirming the voice of the southern Baptist preacher, Zizek says we must reject him inasmuch as he is bigoted but that we must affirm a materialist version of his approach. But it seems that zizek is contradicting himself here. What he is really affirming about this guy is his abstract assent to the importance of that violent cut. The title of his chapter is From Christ to Lenin. . .  and back. In other words we can accept the figure of Christ inasmuch as his actions, to bring a sword into the world, to found a new world by explicit separation from the old, can be abstracted from the material fact of his incarnation. But I would hold that the Christian view is much more materialistic than either this minister or Zizek can stomach. For the preacher, his contemptuous smile tells us that his understanding of redemption is that merely intellectual “accepting of Jesus into my heart.” which is to blame for so much of what has been bad in Christianity of the last century. For Zizek the desire to abstract a mode of reasoning from the event of the cross means that he is ultimately denied access to the materiality of the risen body, a materiality which is not simply that of the historical Jesus, that’s what his master Lacan would call a fantasy, but rather that of the second person of the Trinity who existed before the foundations of the world and whose body appears as a kind of fairy tale magical food in the sacrament of the mass.

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Have a nice weekend,

-dan

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For Lacan, Catholicism (and Rome) was closely linked with psychoanalysis, and if we look at the success of Lacanian thought it is mostly in the Latin and Catholic countries, Italy, Spain, France, and all over South America. I think there have been Japanese psychoanalysts, but the question I want to ask is, what is it about Japan that causes a difficulty, whether for the religion or the analysis closely allied with it? I will just venture one answer here, which I hope others will add to: by virtue of the doubleness of the writing and speaking system, the Japanese subjectivity does not become oriented around a center (a quilting point in Lacanese, or perhaps even the phallic signifier) but always takes on two centers. Now while this might be more “honest” in a way, just like this is the truth of our solar system’s elliptic orbits whose planets actually spin around dual centers, both of them off center (Lacan liked this and said that Kepler was more valuable than Copernicus because the latter never got over the fantasy of a controlling center), but it also never establishes a certain mode of truth-seeking that demands reconciliation and repentance at a singular altar, that demands universalization of language and being at the origin and end of all things. If the Western psyche has a clearly established One, it also (per Lacan) can define the lack and crack of that One, which is where we get the sense of split subjectivity or crucified self. If one is double from the beginning (for language and being are co-terminous) the problem is not that one can’t be One, but that one can’t fathom the split.

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Considering the importance of the Imaginary register in children’s literature, it is no surprise that the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the best selling children’s books ever, has some fairly typical imaginary/fantasy elements, such as wizards and witches with improbable powers. Rowling, though, has stated that her books are simply “about death”—the one element which fantasies seem to always miraculously avoid. While the genre of fantasy in its purest sense obviates death, and thus the dimension of theReal, Rowling’s book are structured such that the Imaginary realm is always running into its own limit, the paths of fantasy always being surprised by the stroke of death.
The structure of Harry’s fantasy world, and consequently the structure of the books themselves, is centered on the loss of his parents, but especially that of his father, whose specter makes an appearance in book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as part of a unique time travel sequence. Unlike most time travel sequences which are structured such that an alternative time thread must be created which runs parallel to the “real” time, and which functions as a powerful fantasy of how life could be “if only. . .” the sequence in this book maintains only one history—but with a twist. When Harry and his friends go back in time to ensure that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is able to elude capture, we realize that everything they go back in time to do had already been accomplished by their time traveling selves. This would merely be a typical time-traveling conundrum were it not for the intrusion of the Real in the form of an impasse within the Imaginary. At the end of the initial narration Harry is saved from a gruesome death by the apparition of a stag controlled by what he takes to be the ghost of his deceased father. In the second narration the time traveling Harry, in a moment of shock, realizes that it was not his father who had conjured up the saving image but that it is his present, time-traveling self that must take the responsibility to perform the difficult charm.

The time travel sequence reiterates a theme that is present throughout the whole series, namely, that Harry must come to terms with his desire that his father could save him, or the fantasy that he might never have lost him. When Harry steps into the place that he had reserved for his father by performing the conjuration himself, we have a moment analogous to what Lacan referred to as the “traversing of the fantasy.” At this moment the fantasy dies, yet inasmuch as Harry is able to act from the place at which his fantasies had controlled him, we witness a sublimation in the Lacanian sense, that is, a re-structuring of the relationship of the Imaginary order to that of the Real, such that the Imaginary does not function to block the Real, but to maintain it, as well as the subject’s minimal distance from it.

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When Eve, who is falling in love with him, attempts to kiss him, he can’t take his eyes off the TV, luckily enough there is a love scene at the moment on the screen and so he can imitate that with Eve and have a moment of “sexual relationship”–but the channel changes and his body goes limp. He says to her “I like to watch”; she is confused, but then falls to the floor, writhing. Is she masturbating? Is she coming? It’s hard to tell. Chance is not really interested, as he’s attempting to imitate the yoga posture on TV at that moment. The next morning she says to him that because he did not take her, did not take advantage of her, she was finally able to take advantage of herself, and she was opened, purged, renewed. Is this a sexual relationship? I would say yes, a Lacanian, non-sexual relationship, relationship. They are truly in love because they give to each other what they do not have. He, as the final Word, has no desire, and thus cannot not desire her, cannot make love to her. But he has given her desire back to herself, and she finally sees her own self-love. Is she just a narcissist? Perhaps, but she has finally seen herself as one. Will they ever make love again? Will he become the president? These questions are absurd, which is why the final scene in the movie shows him walking on water, while Ben’s funeral goes on behind him. Here the narrative breaks down, well, the movie is over for one, but our ability to look into the future of these characters is nullified, for they have no future. Their exposure to the Word has un-sutured their lives, and they have become like mad Peters, walking on water in spite of themselves.

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