Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 132-33.

2 As Deleuze and Guattari put it (securely in the tradition of Marx), capitalism substitutes money for code or regulation, thereby pushing society toward what they call a “deterritorialization” of the social order.

3 Rather than emphasizing a shift in the relationship between the social order and money, most of those who discuss the transition to modernity point to the birth of modern subjectivity, the Cartesian cogito. The emergence of the cogito represents the nascence of modernity because of its determination to think for itself, its radical questioning of all authority. Even for someone like Michel Foucault, who tends to view the cogito negatively, its emergence is nonetheless epochal, the mark of the West’s most profound transformation. With the emergence of the cogito, according to Foucault, authority turns inward: instead of ruling externally over bodies, authority takes up a position within the individual subject, producing the subject as a subject—and thus ruling all the more despotically than the former external authority.

4 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 227.

5 I will use the terms “enjoyment” and “jouissance” interchangeably throughout the project.

6 Lacan does comment at times on this historical transformation, though never in a sustained fashion. For Lacan’s explicit mentions of it, see Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 10-30; and Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 281-312. Followers of Lacan, such as Joan Copjec, Teresa Brennan, Juliet Flower MacCannell, and Slavoj Žižek, have worked to develop psychoanalytic accounts of history that often overlap with the one taken up here. See Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994); Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1993); Juliet Flower Mac-Cannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (New York: Routledge, 1991); Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject (Min neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999).

7 Of course, in a society of prohibition, enjoyment is not entirely absent. In fact, even the sacrifice of enjoyment that it demands produces a share of enjoyment. For instance, the “organization man” who gives up his individuality for the sake of the company’s productivity derives enjoyment from his affiliation with a large and powerful collective organization.

8 The turn toward an all-volunteer army indicates an instance of the disappearance of the explicit demand for the sacrifice of enjoyment. Prior to the abolishment of the draft in the United States, the state demanded that male citizens sacrifice some quantity of their private enjoyment for the sake of the social whole. Now, however, no such demand for sacrifice exists, which helps to usher in this new epoch. Incidentally, this is precisely why Hegel, flying in the face of common sense, viewed war as an ethical activity. War forces individuals to sacrifice their private enjoyment (and even their lives) for the sake of the whole; it thereby makes subjects aware of their indebtedness to the social order, its constitutive role in their lives. As Paul Franco puts it: “There is no getting around the fact that Hegel sees war as serving a positive function. In peace, individualism is promoted at the expense of citizens’ commitment to the universal or the whole, and civil society threatens to overwhelm the state” (Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999], 332).

9 Marxism, of course, understands that we do actually act against our interests quite often, but it attributes such activity to a lack of awareness as to where our real interest lies, to “false consciousness.”

10 John Farrell, “Paranoia Methodized,” in Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, ed. Frederick C. Crews (New York: Viking, 1998), 234. Jedediah Purdy also exemplifies this line of attack in his critique of contemporary culture when he points out that “Self-aware in the extreme, we are permeated by Sigmund Freud’s view that ‘we are all ill,’ that everyone’s motivations are in some measure selfish, ignoble, or neurotic” ( Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today [New York: Vintage, 1999], 16).

11 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957-1958 (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 313, my translation.

12 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 53.

13 In one sense, Freud and Lacan’s stress on the importance of the “jouissance factor” remains within the orbit of a Marxist version of history because we can understand jouissance in economic terms. As Lacan points out in his Seminar XIV, “The value of jouissance [. . .] is in the principle of the economy of the unconscious” (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XIV: La logique du fantasme, 1966-1967, unpublished manuscript, session of 19 April 1967, my translation).

14 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), 87, her emphasis. It is in this sense that, as Lacan says, “human desire [. . .] is fundamentally perverse” (Lacan, Séminaire V, 315, my translation).

15 Though both Freud and Lacan stressed the role of enjoyment in governing our actions, neither linked this to any political project.

16 Not only the previous example but this project as a whole is greatly indebted to the work of Slavoj Žižek, whose work has made the political importance of enjoyment a prominent topic. My effort here is to provide a systematic formulation of what lies implicit in Žižek’s many works. See especially Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991).

17 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 208.

18 Hollywood director Sydney Pollack also exemplifies this turn from political to personal concerns. In the 1960s and 1970s, Pollack directed pointedly political films such as They Shoot Horses Don’t They (1969) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). But in the 1990s, larger political issues completely disappeared from Pollack’s work. His recent films Sabrina (1995) and Random Hearts (1999), like U2’s recent songs, confine themselves wholly to romance. In fact, Random Hearts explicitly devalues political commitment in the face of personal commitment in the way that it depicts a relationship between two people with opposing political views. The power of the romantic attachment completely dwarfs this political opposition, which quickly recedes from the film altogether, as if to say that politics means nothing when one has love.

19 This is perhaps why commercial trends tend to run their course so very quickly in today’s society of enjoyment: everyone is able to have direct and fast access to the product, which militates against the enjoyment of it. Two-year-old children shift their affections from Barney to Teletubbies to Elmo as fast as adults move from Jeeps to SUVs to minivans.

CHAPTER 1. FROM PROHIBITION TO ENJOYMENT

1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 43, his emphasis.

2 As Freud puts it: “Society must defend itself against the danger that the interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social units may be swallowed up by the family; and for this reason, in the case of every individual, but in particular of adolescent boys, it seeks by all possible means to loosen their connection with their family—a connection which, in their childhood, is the only important one” (Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey [New York: Basic Books, 1962], 91).

3 Enjoyment is the antithesis of productivity; as Lacan puts it: “jouissance is what serves no purpose” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink [New York: Norton, 1998], 3).

4 Freud, Three Essays, 48.

5 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XXI: Les non-dupes errent, 1973-1974, unpublished manuscript, session of 14 May 1974, my translation.

6 At the conclusion of The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter loses some of his antisocial radicality. He becomes less dangerous—more palatable for the audience. His behavior in the film’s final scene evinces a subtle character change: he announces his plan to eat his longtime doctor and tormenter not for the sake of pure enjoyment, but for revenge, revenge motivated by his animus toward the doctor. He tells Clarice Starling, in what is perhaps the most remembered line of the film, “I’m having an old friend for dinner.” This conclusion provides the audience great satisfaction not just because of Lecter’s witty pun, but because we recognize that the hateful doctor will soon get his comeuppance from Lecter. However, it also dissolves the radicality of Lecter insofar as it displays his “consideration” for the Other, a turn away from his pure enjoyment that wholly disregards the Other. Now, we see that Lecter, like all of us, doesn’t act purely for his own enjoyment but from a common, everyday motivation such as revenge. In this sense, though the ending has the subversive effect of making the audience aware of its identification with a serial killer, it also domesticates Lecter’s horrific enjoyment, transforming him into a more tolerable figure with which to identify. With this concluding scene, Lecter becomes one of us—that is, reunited with the big Other. The diminution of Lecter’s psychotic otherness becomes even more apparent in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001), when we learn that Lecter eats only those who deserve it as a result of their own sins. Lecter thus appears in this later film as a moral figure in a way that makes complete sense to us.

7 Serge André, What Does a Woman Want?, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 1999), 230.

8 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 130, my translation.

9 This is the point at which psychoanalysis challenges the foundations of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology attempts to use “natural history”—that is, history prior to the onset of the social order—to comprehend phenomena within the social order. On this basis, the predatory actions of any CEO can be understood as the natural behavior of an alpha male. When we try to understand social beings in this “natural” light, however, we see only our own ideological presuppositions, presuppositions which serve to justify capitalist exploitation. In “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan makes a similar point about Darwin: “Darwin’s success seems to derive from the fact that he projected the predations of Victorian society and the economic euphoria that sanctioned for that society the social devastation it initiated on a planetary scale, and that he justified its predations by the image of a laissez-faire system in which the strongest predators compete for their natural prey” (Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivenss in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink [New York: Norton, 2002], 27).

10 In Seminar II, Lacan uses a joke—taken from Freud—to illustrate what is at stake in this initial exchange of enjoyment for symbolic identity. He tells the story of a man who goes into a bakery and asks to look at a cake on display. After looking at the cake, the man hands it back to the baker and asks for a glass of liquor. After the man drinks the liquor, the baker asks him for payment, but the man claims that he has already given the cake in exchange for it. He pays for the glass of liquor with a cake that he hasn’t paid for. That is, in this exchange that represents the initial sacrifice of enjoyment, the man gives up what he doesn’t own in order to acquire something else. This “nothing for something” is the basic matrix of the incest prohibition and of entry into the symbolic order.

11 Lacan, Séminaire XXI, session of 12 February 1974, my translation.

12 This is why it is not difficult to understand the appeal of psychosis. Unlike the normal subject, the psychotic refuses this uneven exchange, refusing desire as a substitute for sacrificed enjoyment. To return to our earlier example from Silence of the Lambs, this refusal to sacrifice enjoyment is what makes a psychotic like Hannibal Lecter so attractive to those of us who have made the sacrifice. Lecter clearly enjoys, and even though we might shy away from the results of the way he enjoys, we are nonetheless drawn to him.

13 Even though Lacan himself formulates, in Seminar VII, an ethics of holding fast to one’s desire, he later comes to see the limitations of this position, precisely insofar as desire constantly remains in a dependent position vis-à-vis the social order, dependent upon the Law that it constitutes itself in reaction to. Later, in “Kant avec Sade” and Seminars X and XI, Lacan begins to equate desire and Law, seeing the emergence of desire as simply a manifestation of the Law. Which is not to say that he completely abandons the idea of an ethics of desire, but that it no longer occupies its former privileged position in his thought.

14 Again, this is not to say that there isn’t a kind of enjoyment consonant with the functioning of the symbolic order. Every symbolic authority relies on its obscene underside—an underside replete with enjoyment—in order to sustain its hegemony. Enjoyment’s role as a support for symbolic authority becomes clearest when we look at the importance of the festival or carnival in traditional class societies. This one day of the year during which social hierarchies were reversed and the authorities permitted subjects to indulge themselves in all kinds of transgressive enjoyment had the effect of reconciling subjects to their subjection for the rest of the year. Rather than undermining authority, such outbursts of enjoyment serve as its necessary supplement.

15 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 306.

16 Imagining a prohibited enjoyment is precisely what the neurotic does, and in this sense, neurosis is an attempt to cope with society’s demand for renunciation through an imaginary detour. The neurotic figures that as long as she or he confines her or his transgressive enjoyment to the imaginary level, it will avoid drawing the ire of social authority. Unfortunately, because this enjoyment remains only imaginary, it also avoids an act that would explicitly call symbolic authority into question.

17 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 1962-1963, unpublished manuscript, trans. Cormac Gallagher, session of 22 May 1963.

18 It is thus a mistake to think that the imaginary represents a radical alternative or a subversion of patriarchy. Though patriarchy isn’t overtly present within the functioning of the imaginary, it nonetheless exercises a determinative control over the former register.

19 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 257. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text. In Seminar V, Lacan elaborates further and insists even more emphatically on the originary status of the symbolic order. He says, “there is already symbolization—right from the origin, right from the first relations with the object, from the first relation of the infant with the maternal object in as much as it is the primordial, primitive object on which depends its subsistence in the world” (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957-1958 [Paris: Seuil, 1998], 222, my translation).

20 This accounts for the error, often made by those summarizing the difference between the symbolic order and the imaginary, of seeing the imaginary as a stage of development that exists prior to the symbolic. Nowhere is this error more widespread than in film theory’s appropriation of psychoanalysis. For instance, in the Aesthetics of Film, the authors state, as if they are only stating a commonly recognized fact, that “entry into the imaginary precedes access to the symbolic” (Jacques Aumont, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie, and Marc Vernet, Aesthetics of Film, trans. Richard Neupert [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992], 201). Kaja Silverman also takes up this position when she says of the imaginary that “within the Lacanian scheme it not only precedes the symbolic order, which introduces the subject to language and Oedipal triangulation, but continues to coexist with it afterward” (Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983], 157). This view mistakenly takes the experience of the subject at face value: the subject’s experience of the imaginary precedes her or his experience of the symbolic, but the symbolic is there from the beginning, orienting this imaginary experience (just as the imaginary is there until the end, supplementing the symbolic experience).

21 Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 87, his emphasis.

22 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 171. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text.

23 Lacan, Seminar XX, 3.

24 When those who have fled to the suburbs complain about crowding and expanding development in their suburbs, they wrongly assume that without this crowding, they would find the distance that they sought when they initially moved to this milieu. But the only distance that eliminates overproximity of the other is symbolic distance, and the number of people who move into a suburb has no bearing on this.

25 Making a mistake akin to Thoreau’s, Erich Fromm, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, 1991), sees real proximity as one of the root causes of aggression and violence, thereby missing the vital role that the symbolic order can have in procuring distance where there isn’t any.

26 Lacan, Séminaire V, 343, my translation.

27 Ironically, then, authentic privacy is only possible when we accept that privacy must be sacrificed for the sake of a public (symbolic) world. Only when there is a public world to avert the Other’s eyes can there be privacy. Hence, all of the emphasis on the protection of privacy today—especially in the wake of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal—is wholly misconceived. If we really want to protect privacy, we should place our emphasis on protecting the public world—fighting against things like private prisons, the privatization of social security, etc.

28 E. L. Doctorow, Loon Lake (New York: Vintage, 1992), 159.

29 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 51.

30 This is why the slave, not the master, attains independence. As Hegel puts it, “The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 117, his emphasis).

31 At the same time that it introduces the possibility of being conscious of our own death, however, the symbol also makes an absolute consciousness of death impossible. Because I can only think of my death through the mediation of the symbol, I can’t really grasp it, insofar as it indicates my own disappearance. The symbol conserves and preserves—providing a sense of permanence—which is the antithesis of death. This is what leads Jacques Derrida to wonder, “Who will guarantee that the name, the ability to name death (like that of naming the other, and it is the same) does not participate as much in the dissimulation of the ‘as such’ of death as in its revelation, and that language is not precisely the origin of the nontruth of death, and of the other?” (Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 76). For Derrida, any effort to arrive at one’s own death through language is doomed to run into the essentially preservative nature of language.

32 Donald Trump seems at first to refute this thesis of the inverse relationship between enjoyment and recognition. He is, unquestionably, one of the most recognized subjects in the world, and yet he is constantly parading and even trumpeting his enjoyment of many different “beautiful women.” He seems to have attained recognition without the requisite renunciation of enjoyment. However, we should not be deceived by Trump’s own protestations of enjoyment. In proclaiming how much he enjoys, Trump is in fact attesting to his complete sacrifice of enjoyment. If he were really enjoying, he would not have to display his enjoyment. He does display it, however, because enjoyment itself is immaterial to Trump; the appearance of enjoyment is everything (and this is why he continually points out the number of models with whom he has slept, etc.). In detailing his enjoyment publicly, he employs enjoyment only as a vehicle for gaining recognition. In this sense, Trump’s abandonment of enjoyment perhaps goes further than anyone else’s in contemporary American society, even that of Clinton. We can still imagine Clinton enjoying his hamburgers in a back room of the White House, but we must imagine Trump in bed with the latest model totally preoccupied, thinking only about the story he will tell of his escapades, thinking about how to transform enjoyment into increased recognition.

33 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 121.

34 Lacan, Séminaire V, 147, my translation.

35 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 49.

36 Freud, Ego and the Id, 56.

37 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings: Volume I, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 248.

38 Lacan, Seminar XX, 3.

39 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 157.

40 Historian Gary Cross marks 1900 as the beginning of consumer culture, a time that “set the course” for the century that followed. See Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

41 Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 110.

42 This sense of obligation to the social order is precisely what it has become popular to celebrate nostalgically today, in the age of the pathological narcissist who feels no such obligation. This nostalgia pervades such immensely popular works as Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998) and Bob Greene’s Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War (New York: Morrow, William, and Company, 2000).

43 For the definitive accounts of the organization man, see William Hollingsworth Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956) and David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).

44 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 102.

45 Žižek, Looking Awry, 102.

46 Dennis Prager, Happiness Is a Serious Problem (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 3.

47 Prager, Happiness, 3.

48 In his sociological study of current American morality, Alan Wolfe chronicles this turn away from the idea of duty and morality as a limit on one’s happiness, and he questions whether or not society can survive with this new “moral freedom.” See Alan Wolfe, Moral Freedom: The Impossible Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now (New York: Norton, 2001).

49 Bloom’s critique, despite the fact that it is over a decade old, remains the predominant conservative position on contemporary American culture. It has, however, been recast throughout the 1990s and 2000s in a variety of different incarnations, all of which retain Bloom’s fundamental thesis: see David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (New York: Free Press, 1999); and William Bennett, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998); just to name a few of the most notable rearticulations of this argument.

50 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 73.

51 In the discussion that follows this passage, Bloom makes clear that this focus on enjoyment is a threat to high culture, because appreciation of this culture requires a willingness to delay gratification. As Bloom says, “as long as [students today] have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf” (Bloom, Closing, 81). That is to say, one who spends her/his time only enjoying cannot but fail to appreciate anything that the great achievements of culture have to offer, because they all demand some initial sacrifice of enjoyment.

52 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991), 237, his emphasis.

53 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 176.

54 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 71.

55 Bloom’s mistake is nonetheless understandable—and actually is itself symptomatic of the predominance of the superego in contemporary society. The presence of the constant pressure to enjoy causes us to feel as if we’re doing an inadequate job of enjoying, and that the other is enjoying without restraint, even stealing the enjoyment that is rightfully ours. Bloom sees the thieves of his enjoyment everywhere—in students listening to rock music, in African Americans isolating themselves from whites, in teenagers placing no special value on their virginity. In this way, the transition to a society of enjoyment not coincidentally parallels the rise in a general sense of paranoia, as marked by Bloom’s reaction and the proliferation of so many conspiracy novels and films.

56 The functioning of the Law of the Father in no way depends on the presence of actual fathers, which is why, in Seminar V, Lacan attacks the “environmentalists” in the psychoanalytic establishment—the ancestors of Bloom, Quayle, Bennett, and the rest—who lament the damage done to children by the absence of actual fathers. According to Lacan, the paternal function operates (or fails to operate) regardless of the presence or absence of an actual father. He says, “the father is there even when he isn’t there” (Lacan, Séminaire V, 168, my translation).

CHAPTER 2. THE DECLINE OF PARENTAL AUTHORITY

1 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957-1958 (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 155, my translation.

2 Lacan, Séminaire V, 155. Lacan’s insistence on the necessity of the subject’s encounter with the Name of the Father and its interdiction seems to indicate a failure on his part to think through cultural difference. The concept itself appears to universalize a historically located and determined function. However, Lacan points out that the Name of the Father does manifest itself differently in different cultural and historical situations. What remains constant is the interdiction or prohibition itself, even as its form changes dramatically. Lacan claims: “The position of the Name-of-the-Father as such, the qualification of the father as procreator, is a matter that is situated at the symbolic level. It can be carried out according to diverse cultural forms, but it does not depend as such on the cultural form; it is a necessity of the signifying chain” (Lacan, Séminaire V, 181, my translation).

3 Paul Verhaeghe, “The Collapse of the Function of the Father and Its Effect on Gender Roles,” in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 135.

4 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 261.

5 Qtd. in Richard Bennedetto, “Quayle Slams Views of ‘Legal Aristocracy,’” USA Today, 20 May 1999, 10A.

6 David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 1.

7 Blankenhorn, Fatherless America, 45. Interestingly, Blankenhorn doesn’t fear an outbreak of female violence or of male sexuality—the former because it is unimaginable to him and the latter because it is simply an immutable biological fact of life.

8 Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999), 35.

9 Faludi, Stiffed, 328.

10 Tony Evans, qtd. in Faludi, Stiffed, 229, his emphasis.

11 Verhaeghe makes this same point: “reinstallment [of traditional paternity] is virtually impossible nowadays, because its very basis, the symbolic father function, has been destroyed.” This means, instead of restoring unity and prohibition, the reinstated father will bring even more divisiveness and struggle for enjoyment, which is why Verhaeghe calls this an “ever-failing solution” (Verhaeghe, “Collapse of the Function of the Father,” 142).

12 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 182.

13 Alenka Zupancic, “A Perfect Place to Die: Theatre in Hitchcock’s Films,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 1992), 101.

14 In one sense, Keating is not yet the anal father in full flower. His command to enjoy does spur the students on toward their various efforts at enjoyment, but he does not become a rival in enjoyment to his students. As we will see in the case of David Mamet’s play American Buffalo, the fully developed anal father is both authority figure and sexual rival.

15 David Mamet, American Buffalo (New York: Grove Press, 1977), 4. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text.

16 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symtpom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 159, his emphasis.

17 Here we see the contrast between the dead father and the living father most emphatically. The living father knows about enjoyment; there is no seedy, criminal activity that he doesn’t know about or that escapes him. The dead father, on the other hand, precisely because he is dead, knows nothing about enjoyment. This knowledge that the new living father has leads to the paranoid delusion that he controls everything. Eric Santner’s discussion of the famous paranoiac Daniel Paul Schreber suggests that Schreber’s paranoia was a response to the initial emergence of this new father who knows the secret of enjoyment. As Santner puts it: “Schreber’s soul murder becomes, from this perspective, a sustained traumatization induced by exposure to, as it were, fathers who knew too much about living human beings” (Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996], 86, his emphasis).

18 For a more detailed discussion of the figure of Mr. Eddy as anal father in Lost Highway, see Todd McGowan, “Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway, or, David Lynch’s Lesson in Fantasy,” Cinema Journal 39, no. 2 (2000): 51-73.

19 I am indebted to Joan Copjec for this point. See Copjec, Read My Desire, 141-61.

20 Even Reagan’s personal “moral” failings, such as his divorce, in no way compromised his ability to be a spokesperson for “family values” and for a return to traditional morality. The more his past seemed tainted, the stronger people’s identification with him became. The failings indicate his great strength, a strength required in order to overcome them and remain the “moral leader” that he was.

21 In terms of its commitment to revealing the process of production, the very mainstream Wayne’s World would be an exemplary work of Brechtian cinema, with its subtitles such as “gratuitous sex scene” or “product placement.” At one time, these subtitles might have distanced the spectator by commenting on the filmic diegesis, but today they serve only to increase spectator investment in the film.

22 To be fair, I should point out that Charlie Dalton’s desire here, while ostensibly subversive, actually aims at capturing the desire of Keating. That is, Dalton believes that his disobedience will please Keating. He knows that Keating desires the transgression that would indicate a moment of private enjoyment. But this in no way invalidates the point because one might make the same critique of attempts to subvert the authority of the symbolic father. No attempt at subversion entirely escapes the desire of the Other. It is just that under the reign of the anal father the subversion is the very thing that the father demands.

23 Paul Verhaeghe, Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire, trans. Plym Peters and Tony Langham (New York: Other Press, 1999), 116.

24 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 177.

CHAPTER 3. EMBRACING THE IMAGE

1 Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11. Stephens is almost alone among culture critics in viewing this change in positive terms. He claims that even though the proliferation of the image does destroy our attention span, it simultaneously increases the amount of information we can process in a brief period of time, thereby providing a net benefit.

2 Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Noonday Press, 1983), 204, his emphasis.

3 Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 30. Renata Salecl echoes this point as well: “The symbolic structure today seems more and more often to have been replaced by imaginary simulacra with which a subject identifies” (Renata Salecl, (Per)versions of Love and Hate [New York: Verso, 1998], 159).

4 In these instances, images seem either more inclusive or easier to understand than words, which is one reason they have become increasingly popular. (One does not need to understand English to grasp that the image of the person walking signifies that one may cross the street.) The symbolic order appears as a closed-off universe unto itself, accessible only to initiates (who understand the language), while the imaginary offers a sense of openness. But as we’ll see, this openness is imaginary: that is, the imaginary is every bit as exclusive as the symbolic order.

5 Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Vintage, 1982), 200, his emphasis.

6 Don DeLillo, Americana (New York: Penguin, 1989), 25. 7 DeLillo, Americana, 11. David’s relationship with his mirror image—and the enjoyment he finds in it—has many echoes in contemporary film and fiction. See, for instance, the obsession of Patrick Bateman with his mirror image in Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000).

8 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 30.

9 Stephens, Rise of the Image, 188.

10 DeLillo’s second novel, End Zone, attempts the reverse procedure—trying to reclaim the symbolic structure underlying the proliferation of images. The novel focuses on football, a game predominated by the image, but reduces football to the symbolic coordinates of its various plays. In his subsequent novels (and especially his masterpiece Underworld), DeLillo is better able (than in Americana) to sustain a narrative while drawing attention to the power of the image because he abandons the more traditional narrative structure (following a single protagonist through his development) that he tried to maintain in Americana.

11 “Excerpts from Interviews with Wenders,” in The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, eds. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemün-den (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 85, emphasis added.

12 Gerd Gemünden, “Oedi-pal Travels: Gender in the Cinema of Wim Wenders,” in The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, eds. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 215.

13 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), 92-93.

14 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 74.

15 “Looking Past the Verdict,” Newsweek, 26 April 1993, 23-24.

16 In his discussion of the beating, Frank Tomasulo rightly notes that the images on the videotape—like all images—exist within a specific symbolic context that provoked the reaction that ensued. In paying attention only to the image, we missed this symbolic context. See Frank Tomasulo, “‘I’ll See It When I Believe It’:Rodney King and the Prison-House of Video,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 69-88.

17 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 151.

18 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 155-56.

19 For Lacan’s discussion of the mirror stage, see Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 3-9.

20 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 1962-1963, unpublished manuscript, trans. Cormac Gallagher, session of 22 May 1963.

21 The Game has the effect of producing uncertainty and desire in the audience as well. Like Nicholas, we remain unsure as to what the game includes and what it doesn’t, even after the game’s ostensible conclusion. This ability to arouse the desire of the audience through dislodging all certainty is one of the salient features of all David Fincher’s films. In a Fincher film—and even after a Fincher film—one is never certain as to the desire of the Other, as Alien 3 (1992), Seven (1995), Fight Club (1999), and Panic Room (2002) all attest.

22 Lacan identifies the turn to images that obscures the objet petit a as an attempt to avoid anxiety because “in the specular image,” he notes, “anxiety is sufficiently rejected” (Lacan, Seminar X, session of 7 July 1963).

23 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext[e], 1988), 35, his emphasis.

24 The film’s most famous scene depicts Guido’s fantasy in which he does have all the women in his life at once, including women from his childhood, his wife, his mistress, and the star actress in his film.

25 In addition to illustrating the appeal of the imaginary world, the other virtue of 8½ lies in its depiction of the monotony that characterizes the imaginary. Like Guido’s film within the film, the narrative cannot move forward because Guido cannot break out of his imaginary isolation, and what results is a monotonous series of repetitions that never lead anywhere. In response to the monotony of the overwhelmingly imaginary nature of the film, a friend with whom I saw the film left the cinema at the film’s halfway point in utter boredom, and afterward he condemned Fellini for his failure to engage—or even attempt to engage—the desire of the Other, a charge that testifies to the complete success of the film in its depiction of the isolation of the imaginary.

26 Cyberspace does not only provide a kind of satisfaction modeled on the imaginary, but it also provides an image-oriented experience. This is why Paul Virilio insists that “generalized visualization is the defining aspect of what is generally known today as virtualization” (Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner [New York: Verso, 2000], 14, his emphasis).

27 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 137.

28 Walter A. Davis, Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 283. This characterization of the image is all the more significant in that it appears in a work that celebrates the traumatic and liberatory power of the image.

29 Alice Kuzniar, “Wender’s Windshields,” in The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, eds. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemün-den (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 223.

CHAPTER 4. SHRINKING DISTANCES

1 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotext[e], 1988), 12.

2 Baudrillard’s fame as a philosopher of simulation has even spilled over from the academy into popular culture. It is no accident that the one book we see in The Matrix (1999)—a film about simulation par excellence—is a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.

3 In one sense, Baudrillard sees a fundamental link between simulation and universal communication because he links the elimination of distance to the process of virtualization. When reality becomes virtualized or simulated, we no longer have to navigate distances in order to arrive at our destination: in the simulation or the virtualization, we arrive instantaneously. In this sense, the elimination of distance forms the perfect correlate to the predominance of the imaginary because images are always fully present and available. The ubiquity of images today plays a crucial role in the elimination of spatial and temporal distance. For instance, the imaginary realm of virtual reality allows anyone to experience an alternate place without moving, thereby overcoming both time and space. I can be transported elsewhere virtually without moving at all in reality. Distance proves no barrier to the virtual universe. Images overcome distance because they offer us a sense of proximity. When we see an image of an object, we experience that object as close-at-hand. Unlike a word, an image cannot convey absence. Even when an image presents absence to us (as an image of nothing), it transforms the absence itself into something present. We cannot form an image of nothing. In the image, we can see it because the image does not suggest something beyond itself. Instead, it provides an illusion of total presence; it produces plenitude rather than absence. In contrast, the word or the symbol communicates absence. The word suggests something beyond itself that it replaces or conceals. The word doesn’t pretend, unlike the image, to provide the presence of the thing.

4 Paul Virilio’s objection to universal communication and the elimination of distance has a different, more Heideggerian, focus. For Virilio, the elimination of distance threatens our very mode of being-in-the-world, endangering our worldliness itself. As he puts it, “getting closer to the ‘distant’ takes you away proportionally from the ‘near’ (and dear)—the friend, the relative, the neighbour—thus making strangers, if not actual enemies, of all who are close at hand, whether they be family, workmates or neighbourhood acquaintances” (Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose [New York: Verso, 1997], 20).

5 Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 92.

6 Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication, 21-22.

7 Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine, trans. Mark du Ry (New York: Other Press, 1999), 145.

8 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957-1958 (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 19, my translation.

9 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), 174.

10 Murray, Hamlet, 174.

11 Murray, Hamlet, 256. In addition to allowing us to fill in the holes of traditional narratives, cyberspace allows us to fill in the holes of our subjectivity as well. In cyberspace, as Sherry Turkle points out, one can construct a self that “is not only decentered but multiplied without limit” (Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999], 185). This multiplication of the self into an infinite number of fantasmatic identities has the effect of closing off the gap in which the Real makes itself felt.

12 Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 257.

13 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 182.

14 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 21-22.

15 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 143, my translation.

16 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), 7. Foucault is nonetheless among the first to recognize and detail the contours of the shift from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy. His thought in the 1970s grasps a fundamental transition in the way that power functions—away from prohibitions and in the direction of positive commandments.

17 Copjec, Read My Desire, 7. Foucault’s attempt to confine himself to immanence inevitably fails to explain what gives rise to the symbolic structure because, as Lacan notes in Seminar III, “in the symbolic nothing explains creation” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, trans. Russell Grigg [New York: Norton, 1993], 179). That is to say, the symbolic order ipso facto lacks the terms to account for its own genesis. Thus, as long as one remains dedicated to pure immanence, one will never grasp the way in which a new symbolic structure emerges.

18 Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan, et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 154.

19 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 167. We can see an instance of this historical reduction in cultural studies theorist Anne Balsamo’s claim that “Any given text within a discursive system is a symbolic enactment of the cultural preoccupations of a particular historical conjunction” (Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women [Durham: Duke University Press, 1996], 4).

20 For a standard version of this accusation, see, for instance, Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995).

21 Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1946), 34.

22 Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 33.

23 Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 34. Contemporary analytic philosophers have become a bit less dismissive of speculation about transcendence than A. J. Ayer. However, the fundamental attitude has remained the same. Rather than attack metaphysics, a philosopher such as Donald Davidson simply incorporates its speculative dimension into the structure of logic and language. In the conclusion of his essay “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” Davidson claims, “the problems of metaphysics, while neither solved nor replaced, come to be seen as the problems of all good theory building” (Donald Davidson, “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” in Inquires into Truth and Interpretation [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], 214). Speculation about transcendence is, for Davidson, not really concerned with transcendence at all. Instead, transcendence is just an illusion of perspective—another way of talking about “the problems of all good theory building.”

24 W. V. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 192.

25 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 9.

26 Adorno, Critical Models, 9.

27 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 243.

28 Because one cannot relativize death, it becomes the ground for authenticity. An authentic act remains possible for Heidegger because he stresses Dasein’s relationship to death. When this emphasis drops out of Heidegger’s thought after the so-called Kehre or turn, so does all discussion of authenticity. Not surprisingly, it is precisely for its insistence on authenticity that Derrida has attacked Being and Time. Insofar as he insists on authenticity, according to Derrida, Heidegger succumbs to the lure of transcendence. Despite his debt to Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, Derrida has been unremitting in his critique of the early Heidegger’s concept of authenticity. He says, “I have [. . .] explicitly criticized this value of propriety and of original authenticity, and [. . .] I even, if it can be put thus, started there. This fanaticism or monotony might be startling” (Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 54).

29 Baudrillard, America, 30.

30 Heidegger, Being and Time, 234.

31 Clearly, not everyone today is committed to behavior that aims to prevent death. In fact, the prevalence of this behavior—and the imperative to engage in it—has occasioned a predictable backlash. It has become commonplace to say something like, “If I’m going to die anyway, I might as well enjoy myself and smoke four packs of cigarettes a day, have unsafe sex, or eat three packages of Twinkies.” Far from being a grasp of the “nonrelational” character of death, however, this attitude also aims to transform death into a future event, something yet to come, rather than a certainty that has already been determined. It does this by attempting to sustain enjoyment, a sign of life and vitality. As long as I am an enjoying, vital being, I am not yet dead—my death is not yet assured. But the whole point of death’s nonrelational character is that from the moment of birth death is assured—and this is what the contemporary proponent of unalloyed, nonstop enjoyment necessarily misses.

32 This is not to say, of course, that smoking doesn’t increase one’s risk of lung cancer, but simply that, whether one smokes or not, one necessarily experiences death. For Heidegger, what is decisive is not how one arrives at death but that one arrives at it, and so it makes little difference whether one keeps oneself healthy or not. Heidegger has no advice to offer us about lifestyle choices, as the choices that he made during his life reveal most clearly.

33 Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 67.

34 Gregg Easterbrook, “Medical Evolution: Will Homo Sapiens Become Obsolete?” The New Republic, 1 March 1999, 21.

35 Paul Virilio, Open Sky, 119.

36 Critics have claimed that Angels represents a rediscovery of tragedy and that the AIDS epidemic has made this rediscovery possible. Upon first seeing Angels, James Miller was struck by the possibility that Angels represented “the birth of gay tragedy from the spirit of musicals (at last)” (James Miller, “Heavenquake: Queer Anagogies in Kushner’s America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997], 56). And according to Graham Dixon, “The Western world was starting to forget about death: the old infectious diseases were fading memories, one died of luxury or old age.[. . .] But now Tragedy reappears, reasserts itself as young men and women die an often terrible death” (Graham Dixon, “The Obscene Paradox: Hope and Despair in Angels in America,” in Essays on Kushner’s Angels, ed. Per Brask [Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 1995], 98). AIDS serves as a reminder that our enjoyment is not total, that barriers still remain in the way of us having everything. But despite its power as this kind of reminder (and despite the hopes of Miller and Dixon), AIDS has not produced tragedy. As we will see, Angels in America eventually embraces the very nonstop motion and progressivism that militate against tragedy.

37 Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 122. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

38 Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 11. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

39 The possibility of having his homosexuality become public knowledge is, for Roy, far more devastating than the prospect of his death. What Roy dreads more than his real death is his symbolic death, the possibility that the recognition attached to the name “Roy Cohn” might disappear. We can see other evidence for this priority of symbolic over real death in Roy’s attitude toward being disbarred. On his deathbed, Roy’s concern is not his death, but that he will die while still a lawyer, before the disbarment committee disbars him. He tells Belize, “The Law: the only club I ever wanted to belong to. And before they take that from me, I’m going to die” (2:89). As his statement about being a lawyer evinces, Roy welcomes his real death insofar as it provides respite from a symbolic one. Unfortunately for him, however, the disbarment does come before his real death, leaving him to face the latter truly alone.

40 According to Framji Minwalla, Roy Cohn is not an advocate of motion, but actually shares the angels’ investment in stasis. As he puts it, Roy’s “worldview converges with that of the Angels—resistant to any change in the social order, adamantly sustaining a power structure that even he has been ejected from” (Framji Minwalla, “When Girls Collide: Considering Race in Angels in America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997], 115). While this convergence is clearly apparent on the level of Roy’s ideology (which he shares with Reagan), through the way he lives—his frenetic activity and his flight from the diagnosis of AIDS, for instance—Roy demonstrates his belief in the power of motion. Be that as it may, however, this overlapping of an investment in stasis and an investment in motion in the character of Roy shows how they are not really at odds with each other. Motion and stasis can converge—and do, in the character of Roy.

41 It is not insignificant that the departure of God occasions one of the most memorable earthquakes in human history. Earthquakes are, in a sense, phenomena of a world in constant motion because they serve as a reminder that there is, in fact, no stable and permanent ground beneath us, that we have no secure foundation. This is why it is completely appropriate that Los Angeles, a city of motion if there ever was one, should be more prone to earthquakes than any other major city in the United States.

42 Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 12.

43 Shalit, Return to Modesty, 193.

44 Shait, Return to Modesty, 236.

CHAPTER 5. INTERPRETATION UNDER DURESS

1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 44.

2 Jameson, Postmodernism, 38.

3 Jameson, Postmodernism, 96.

4 The tendency to view the work of art as an experience rather than as a text becomes clear in the ways that both moviegoers and critics talk about film today. One often hears a film characterized as “a good ride,” an identification of the film with the experience of the amusement park, and, in fact, at Universal Studios and other theme parks, films such as Back to the Future and Jurassic Park have literally become rides.

5 Jameson, Postmodernism, 190.

6 Jameson, Postmodernism, 208-209.

7 This anti-universalizing sentiment has perhaps been most visible in the realm of feminism. Mainstream feminists, it is often asserted, violently universalized their own experience, i.e., the experience of the white woman, and ignored the experience of nonwhite women. bell hooks gives this critique of white mainstream feminism its most well-known formulation: “In most of their writing, the white American woman’s experience is made synonymous with the American woman’s experience” (bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism [Boston: South End Press, 1981], 137, her emphasis).

8 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), 191-92.

9 Hate crimes illustrate this failure perhaps even more remarkably. Whenever an area within the United States becomes the site of a hate crime, the residents of the area immediately insist that this one hate crime is an isolated phenomenon, wholly anomalous and not reflective of the attitude of the region as a whole. This attitude appeared, for instance, in full force in and around the town of Jasper, Texas, after the brutal murder there of James Byrd by white supremacists.

10 I am indebted to Hilary Neroni for this example.

11 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 60, his emphasis.

12 Hegel, Phenomenology, 66.

13 Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, or, The End of the Social, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston. and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 70.

14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), xv. Though there are, of course, obvious differences between the positions of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger vis-à-vis phenomenology, I will speak of them here as synonymous, because, on the question of the priority of experience over interpretation, they are like-minded.

15 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, vii.

16 Merleau-Ponty readily admits the inaccessibility of the immediate, direct connection with the world—“the most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction” (xiv)—and yet this is not, for Merleau-Ponty, an argument against the existence of immediate experience. It is almost as if the impossibility of accessing it serves to convince him all the more of its existence.

17 Of course, unlike the first-year literature student, the phenomenologist recognizes that the originary experience of the text is not immediately accessible to the subject. It requires work—the phenomenological reduction—to arrive at it.

18 Heidegger does rightly emphasize that Dasein’s relationship to its world remains always ecstatic or out of joint. Even though, for Heidegger, Dasein cannot be conceived beyond its connection to the world, this connection is not a connection implying identity. Dasein continually feels alienation from its life-world, which distinguishes it from other animals who find themselves completely at home in their worlds. While Heidegger does see this necessary alienation of Dasein from the world, he does not take the next step and see the possibility of a complete break.

19 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 190, his emphasis.

20 Heidegger uses the term “Dasein” rather than “subject” precisely in order to avoid this theoretical way of thinking.

21 The great theoretical achievement of Being and Time occurs in direct contradiction to Heidegger’s stated hostility to theorizing and interpretation. As Heidegger himself shows, it is only through theorizing that we can overcome whatever problems theorizing itself has wrought.

22 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hall-ward (New York: Verso, 2001), 113.

23 The very name “Beloved” represents, in fact, the power of trauma to distort the symbolic order. Sethe, the mother who kills her child to save it from slavery, refers to the daughter that she killed as Beloved, rather than using her name. “Beloved” is the only symbolic marker of the daughter’s existence: Sethe could only afford to have one word put on her tombstone—which was “Beloved”—before she ran out of money. Thus, rather than signifying the lost daughter, the name Beloved fails to signify properly, thus indicating the horror of the trauma that Sethe has endured and the inability of the symbolic order—the realm of universality—to commemorate it properly.

24 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1988), 274.

25 Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin, A World of Difference: An Intercultural Study of Toni Morrison’s Novels (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1994), 173.

26 Anthony C. Hilfer, “Critical Indeterminacies in Toni Morrison’s Fiction: An Introduction,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 33 (1991): 91.

27 Lisa Garbus, “The Unspeakable Stories of Shoah and Beloved,” College Literature 26, no. 1 (1999): 59.

28 Denise Heinze, The Dilemma of “Double-Consciousness”: Toni Morrison’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 186.

29 James Phelan, “Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved,” Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993): 714. The most famous section of Beloved recounts the Middle Passage in a way that evinces the novel’s resistance to language and its emphasis on what the universal cannot capture—what Phelan labels the “stubborn.”

30 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 119, his emphasis.

31 Many narratives produced today begin with phenomenology, as Morrison does, but, in contrast to Paradise, they remain wholly phenomenological, never making clear the presence of the universal. We can see this most clearly in a recent trend in war films, specifically Saving Private Ryan (Steven Speilberg, 1998) and The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998). In these films, plot is minimized, and the events depicted are depicted in order to isolate and capture a particular experience. Both films present a phenomenology of war, attempting to capture the war experience without regard to the symbolic frame that invisibly underlies it. This creates the feeling—which is undoubtedly the feeling of the individual soldier—that there is no significance to the battles being fought or to anything that is happening. There are only the horrible images of war, not the symbolic context in which the war exists. In this sense, both films represent the antitheses of Paradise, whose project lies in precisely the opposite direction—making evident the functioning of the symbolic structure that images, especially violent images, work to disguise.

32 The first paragraph of Jazz also depicts an act of violence that seems to emerge from nowhere: “When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church” (Toni Morrison, Jazz [New York: Penguin, 1993], 3). As in Paradise, it is long into the novel before this initial event begins to make sense. In this way, both Jazz and Paradise represent a radical departure for Morrison, away from the emphasis on the failure of universality that populated her earlier fiction and toward an emphasis on the continued existence of the universal in the face of its seeming absence. This indicates that, though both Jazz and Paradise are historical novels, Morrison has written them, at least to some extent, in response to our contemporary situation, in which the universal seems to have receded.

33 Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 3. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text.

34 J. Brooks Bouson, Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 194.

35 In a sense, every novel works in the same way—beginning with something that we can’t fully understand and then gradually providing the symbolic context. While this is no doubt the case, Morrison’s novel makes this process its actual subject matter, taking what occurs inevitably in the novel form and transforming it through the act of paying attention to it.

36 The April 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado provides a “real life” analogue. While conservatives tried to interpret the event as an index of cultural decay and liberals tried to interpret it as the product of the widespread availability of firearms, the predominant response, at least immediately in its wake, was to emphasize the event’s complete resistance to explanation. One often heard something like, “It’s a senseless tragedy” or “The horror of the event goes beyond all attempts to explain it.”

37 The method of interpretation that reduces every event to its symbolic causes and refuses the possibility of an irruption of the Real is what leads Walter Davis to claim in his Get the Guests, “We don’t need censorship; we have interpretation” (Walter Davis, Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994], 4). In order to avoid making interpretation a mode of censorship, a mode of taming the Real, one must insist upon the necessary gap between symbolic causes and the Real effect. The effect always goes beyond the cause; it is not wholly contained in embryo form in the cause, but is an effect as such only insofar as it can’t be reduced to the cause.

38 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 212.

39 Morrison’s description of how the eight-rock families received this rejection indicates the extent to which it shattered their symbolic universe: “for ten generations they had believed the division they fought to close was free against slave and rich against poor. Usually, but not always, white against black. Now they saw a new separation: light-skinned against black. Oh, they knew there was a difference in the minds of whites, but it had not struck them before that it was of consequence, serious consequence, to Negroes themselves. Serious enough that their daughters would be shunned as brides; their sons chosen last; that colored men would be embarrassed to be seen socially with their sisters. The sign of racial purity they had taken for granted had become a stain” (194).

40 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 334, his emphasis.

41 In Seminar VII, Lacan makes clear the opposition between work and jouissance. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 314-15.

42 Though this passage is in the first-person singular, it does not appear as a direct quotation in the novel. That is, Morrison does not distinguish a specific character who is speaking, allowing it to seem as if each and every man might be saying it. Clearly, this statement gives voice to the feelings of each of the men, rather than to the feelings of only the one who articulates it.

43 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 73-74. Because feminine jouissance is “beyond the phallus,” it resists every attempt to describe it or nail it down. Even women themselves cannot pinpoint this jouissance in language. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XIV, “neither man nor woman has been capable of articulating the least thing that holds up on the subject of feminine jouissance” (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XIV: La logique du fantasme, 1966-1967, unpublished manuscript, session of 7 June 1967, my translation).

44 This idea of the self-sufficiency of feminine enjoyment also explains Morrison’s decision to make the house of the women a “Convent,” rather than, say, a brothel. A convent, even more than a brothel, houses women that eschew the community of men, and thus represents even more of a threat than the latter. Morrison’s convent is doubly threatening, however, because it has the appearance of a brothel. The former owner, an outlaw, had overt sexual images built into the house, in the form of, for example, faucets shaped like women’s breasts. Though the next occupants, the nuns, tried to destroy as many of these images as possible, some proved intractable and remained in the house. Hence, the house, both convent and brothel, brings together all images of feminine enjoyment, at least in the minds of the men of the town.

45 One of the women of the town asks rhetorically, “How would you like to have somebody dancing nasty at your wedding?” (158), suggesting that it isn’t so much what the women are doing, but that they are using this special town event to do it, which outrages the people of the town.

46 Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000), 225.

47 Lacan, Seminar VII, 184.

48 Lacan, Seminar VII, 198.

49 In fact, guns, the weapons that the Ruby men employ to eliminate enjoyment, are themselves instruments of enjoyment. This is why the National Rifle Association’s claim that having more “peaceful citizens” carrying guns would limit (or eliminate) crime is flawed. The gun represents an insistence on one’s private enjoyment, and so it has the effect of accentuating the criminality of even the most lawful citizen. When I carry a gun, I am de facto saying, “if you encroach upon my private person (or my private property), great harm will come to you.” The recognition that the gun is an instrument of private enjoyment is why all public buildings—even in Texas—demand that guns be checked at the door.

50 The primary mode of obtaining enjoyment that the teenagers introduce into Pleasantville is, as one would expect, sex: soon after their appearance many of the residents are having sex for the first time. However, the enjoyment that manifests itself in Pleasantville also takes the form of an appreciation of the arts. A love of painting develops in one character, and long lines to check out great novels and books of poetry form at the library. Several scenes depict characters reading poetry to each other on the banks of the river, after or in the midst of sexual encounters. Here, art is yet not stuck in the antiseptic, desexualized world of the museum, and sex is not yet a vehicle for selling commodities. Art is sexualized, and sex is artistic. Through these utopian scenes, Pleasantville is returning us to the moment at which the society of prohibition broke down in order to show the possibilities that existed at this point, possibilities that have remained, of course, unrealized in the development of the society of enjoyment.

CHAPTER 6. THE APPEAL OF CYNICISM

1 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1969), 134, Hegel’s emphasis.

2 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3.

3 We can see both the emphasis on the mind and on mastery present in Kant’s famous description of the Enlightenment from his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant concludes the opening paragraph of this essay by proclaiming, “The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!” (Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2d ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 54).

4 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 540.

5 This is not to say that the cynic completely rejects the existence of a symbolic fiction or a public ideology. Though she herself sees through it, the cynic, in order to sustain her cynicism, must believe that it is effectively deceiving others, the dupes who have allowed themselves to be taken in. This feeling that the symbolic fiction functions successfully for others feeds the cynic’s identification with an ideal ego which is not subject to the restrictions that hamper others.

6 Renata Salecl, (Per)versions of Love and Hate (New York: Verso, 1998), 151.

7 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 323. The failure of the cynic to see the symbolic structure is what leads Lacan to insist, in the titular words of his Seminar XXI, that “the non-duped err.”

8 In the desperate effort to avoid conformity, the cynic de facto makes evident her/his investment in what she/he is trying to avoid. To be truly indifferent is thus not to eschew the fashion, but to follow it indifferently. Hegel’s comments on this, in his discussion of Cynicism in the History of Philosophy, are especially poignant today: “The cut of my coat is decided by fashion, and the tailor sees to this; it is not my business to invent it, for mercifully others have done so for me. This dependence on custom and opinion is certainly better than were it to be on nature. But it is not essential that men should direct their understanding to this; indifference is the point of view which must reign, since the thing itself is undoubtedly perfectly indifferent. Men are proud that they can distinguish themselves in this, and try to make a fuss about it, but it is folly to set oneself against the fashion. In this matter I must hence not decide myself, nor may I draw it within the radius of my interests, but simply do what is expected of me” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Greek Philosophy to Plato, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995], 484).

9 The distinction between acting-out and the authentic act, between a staged—i.e., a cynical—rebellion and a radical break from symbolic authority manifests itself within Hamlet. The play shows us both acts, acting-out and the authentic act, at different points. In Act III, when Hamlet stages the play for Claudius, he openly shows his defiance of this uncle, publicly identifying Claudius with the murderer depicted in the play. And yet, at this point, Hamlet remains wholly under the spell of symbolic authority, which is why, just after the performance of the play, he is unable to kill the king when he comes upon him in prayer. The rebellion that the play-within-a-play stages is a case of acting-out. In Act V, however, Hamlet no longer evinces any investment in how he stages his rebellion. He no longer has his former investment in symbolic authority and thus is now able to kill the king, to accomplish an authentic act, even though it means his own death.

10 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, 486.

11 The investment of Diogenes in symbolic authority illustrates the chief problem with Sloterdijk’s otherwise insightful Critique of Cynical Reason, which holds up Diogenes as a model for the properly oppositional position. Diogenes, according to Sloterdijk, represents “kynicism” as opposed to cynicism. Kynicism mocks public power by revealing its obscene underside, without cynicism’s investment in that power. But as the example of Diogenes shows, the line between kynicism and cynicism is not as easy to draw as Sloterdijk would have us believe. Every cynic considers him/herself a kynic, and very often what initially appears as kynical activity is revealed later as cynical, as occurs with Plato and Diogenes. This is because the gesture of mocking authority often sustains a fantasmatic investment in the functioning of that authority.

12 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 5, his emphasis.

13 Slavoj Žižek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 101.

14 We know that the widespread contemporary acts of transgression remain within the domain of the big Other precisely because they occasion no disruption in the identity of those doing them. An authentic transgressive act has the effect of stripping away the security of symbolic identity. One cannot accomplish such as act while retaining a “sense of self.”

15 The film demonstrates that the price for this “end of violence” is the introduction of a whole new kind of violence, as the attempted assassination of Mike and the successful assassination of Ray prove. We can end violence, the film seems to be saying, but we can only do so violently.

16 This surveillance system is, in a manner of speaking, Foucault’s worst nightmare. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the functioning of “panoptic power,” a power that utilizes widespread surveillance to see everything without allowing itself to be seen. The system that Ray develops works precisely in this way, with small cameras installed all around the city, allowing law enforcement—or whoever occupies the site of power—to have everyone constantly under surveillance.

17 This limited symbolic contact creates a misunderstanding between two sons of one of the gardeners and Mike. The sons wake him up one night to question him, because they are worried that he might be bringing trouble for their father. Mike, of course, has no such intentions, but because there is so little communication between him and the family, this suspicion on the part of the children develops.

18 Because of the power of this fantasy, we see so many films in which a disenchanted Western subject plunges him/herself into the world of the Other in order to find his or her “true self ”—a self prior to the fall. This is the primary motif in The Year of Living Dangerously, Salvador, Under Fire, and Beyond Rangoon, just to name a few.

19 It is this aspect of images—their seeming revelation of everything—that prompts Lacan to warn his students against being taken in by Freud’s imagery. Reliance on the image has, according to Lacan, played a central role in the many misunderstandings about psychoanalysis that have developed. As Lacan tells his students, “what we always see being reproduced in the most tightly argued parts of Freud’s texts is something which, while it isn’t quite the adoration of the Golden Calf, is still an idolatry. What I am trying to do here is tear you away from it once and for all. I hope that I will do enough so that one day your tendency to use highly imagistic formulations will disappear” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli [New York: Norton, 1988], 53).

20 Jacques Lacan, Seminar X: Anxiety, unpublished manuscript, trans. Cormac Gallagher, session of 3 July 1963.

21 Enemy of the State is a translation of The End of Violence into a Hollywood film. Tony Scott, the director of the former, even includes a brief homage to Wenders’s film, to let us know that he is fully conscious of the debt: Gabriel Byrne (Ray in The End of Violence) appears in a small cameo role as a cab driver who informs Robert Dean of the conspiracy at work.

22 Jacques Lacan, Seminar X, session of 28 November 1962.

23 In this sense, Foucaultian fears about a system of total surveillance are misdirected. The problem with such a system isn’t that it will see everything—and thus eliminate all sites of private resistance to public power—but that it will foster the belief that it can see everything, thereby creating even more faith in the revelatory power of the image, a faith which has the effect, as we have seen, of causing us to fail to see desire.

CHAPTER 7. POLITICS OF APATHY

1 The psychoanalytic cure is precisely a refusal of this kind of imaginary satisfaction, and so, in this sense, psychoanalysis as a practice is a mode of political contestation. The point of analysis is not to cure dissatisfaction, but to cure satisfaction, to allow the analysand to see that the satisfaction she has is purely imagined. In opening up the analysand to her Real dissatisfaction, analysis aims at the possibility of a Real transformation. If we understand analysis in this way, we can see how far the charge of “normalization” misses the mark when it is applied to analysis. Rather than adjusting analysands to accept the world or become satisfied with it, analysis works to break them from their compromise satisfaction, thus holding out the possibility of a Real enjoyment.

2 Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995), 107.

3 Lasch, Revolt, 47.

4 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 24-25.

5 E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (New York: Vintage, 1971), 140.

6 Doctorow, Book of Daniel, 289.

7 Jameson, Postmodernism, 23.

8 Carol Iannone, “E. L. Doctorow’s ‘Jewish’ Radicalism,” Commentary (March 1986): 53. Henry Claridge celebrates World’s Fair precisely because of its abandonment of the political concerns of Doctorow’s earlier novels. In his praise of the novel, he claims that “Doctorow is at his best, like so many other writers, when he ignores his manifesto” (Henry Claridge, “Writing on the Margin: E. L. Doctorow and American History,” in The New American Writing: Essays on American Literature since 1970, ed. Graham Clarke [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990], 26).

9 Carol C. Harter and James R. Thompson, E. L. Doctorow (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 118.

10 The critical reception of World’s Fair has focused almost exclusively on these two readings of the novel. According to Claridge, the novel represents a “shift to the autobiographical” which finds “Doctorow replacing the self-examining voice of Daniel with his own” (Claridge, “Writing,” 24). Douglas Fowler argues that “Doctorow’s intention was to recover the emotions of his life, deriving from those things only that which was really in them” (Douglas Fowler, Understanding E. L. Doctorow [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992], 143). Harter and Thompson claim, “however responsible [the depression] era might have been in shaping Doctorow’s own social convictions, the narrative remains that of the boy as artist, not of the writer as political radical” (Harter and Thompson, Doctorow, 118). It has become a critical commonplace to note the connections between Edgar Altschuler and the biography of Doctorow (their shared first names, birth dates, neighborhoods, etc.). Clearly, World’s Fair lures us into thinking that its primary importance is as autobiography or as description of the artist’s consciousness in emergent form, but these trails, in the last instance, disguise the novel’s underlying political significance.

11 E. L. Doctorow, World’s Fair (New York: Random House, 1985), 47. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

12 The fact that this transformation occurs at the 1939 World’s Fair is not, as one might suspect, merely coincidence. The World’s Fair represents an historical moment of epochal importance, a moment of transition in the structure of capitalism presaging the emergence of “late capitalism.” In 1939, the world, still mired in depression, stood on the verge of not only World War II, but also the Keynesian increases in state spending which would both rescue capitalism from its doldrums and forever change the nature of capitalism. The World’s Fair itself, as Michael Robertson notes, “promised its visitors a glimpse into the ‘World of Tomorrow’” (Michael Robertson, “Cultural Hegemony Goes to the Fair: The Case of E. L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair,” American Studies 33 [1992]: 31), and in Doctorow’s novel, we see a corporate vision of the future late capitalist world in the General Motors Futurama.

13 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 272.

14 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, trans. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, in The Oedipus Cycle (San Diego: Harvest, 1949), 49.

15 Rose knew all along that Norma, a “loose” woman, presented the possibility of sexual knowledge for Edgar, which is why she refused to allow him to visit Norma’s house.

16 Robertson, “Cultural Hegemony,” 38.

17 Roberston, “Cultural Hegemony,” 38.

18 Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1995), 191.

19 One reason that the subject isolated in the imaginary wants nothing to do with politics is that from his or her perspective, politics is nothing but a series of violent collisions. It involves one position attempting to impose itself on another, ad infinitum, and so, for such a subject, it is, to put it in Sartrean terms, a “useless passion.”

20 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 218.

21 And yet, this alienation of the subject is not something we can simply opt out of and still retain our status as subject. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XI, “There is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 221).

22 This is not to say, of course, that politicians don’t engage in manipulative lying as well, but even their manipulative lies almost necessarily have a constitutive dimension to them, at least insofar as they are done in response to the Other’s desire.

23 Though the subject recoils from the lie in order to remain true to his or her own subjectivity, the recoil from the lie also, ironically, calls into question the status of the subject qua subject. In Seminar I, Lacan claims that it is only on the basis of his or her ability to lie that we can recognize the subject: “We are necessarily obliged to admit the speaking subject as subject. But why? For one simple reason—because he can lie. That is, he is distinct from what he says” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester [New York: Norton, 1988], 194).

CHAPTER 8. A MISSING PUBLIC WORLD

1 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 27.

2 Ruth Rendell, Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter (New York: Mysterious Press, 1992), 263.

3 Ruth Rendell, Road Rage (New York: Dell, 1997), 71. Sherry Turkle, for one, draws the connection between this retreat into privacy and the search for jouissance. According to Turkle, “increasingly, we want entertainment (such as video on demand) that commutes right into our homes.[. . .] We seem to be in the process of retreating further into our homes, shopping for merchandise in catalogues or on television channels, shopping for companionship via personal ads” (Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999], 235).

4 The exemplary case of the “superiority” of enjoyment at home is watching movies. Watching a movie on video assures me that I won’t be stuck sitting next to a talkative person in the theater, and it allows me, even if I have to go to the bathroom during the movie, to enjoy without interruption simply by touching the “pause” button.

5 Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 49.

6 Sunstein, Republic.com, 55.

7 Another significant problem with Putnam’s work is the solution to the declining public world that he advances in the final section of the book. Despite the fact that his description of the transformation toward privacy depicts it as the result of concrete social forces, Putnam’s solution is entirely voluntarist and takes no account of these forces: he argues that we must work to facilitate civic engagement on a societal level and participate ourselves on an individual level. This line of thought reaches the point of absurdity when Putnam calls for entertainment executives to help in turning Americans away from their dependence on television: “Let us challenge those talented people who preside over America’s entertainment industry to create new forms of entertainment that draw the viewer off the couch and into his community” (Putnam, Bowling Alone, 410). Since convincing couch potatoes to abandon the television for participation in the community would have the effect of putting themselves out of business, it is difficult to imagine those in the entertainment industry responding positively to Putnam’s call.

8 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 36.

9 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 175.

10 As I write, the spread of advertising into the public world has taken yet another step forward. Some municipalities, desperate because of a lack of public financing, have begun to sell advertising on police cars. Here, the overt absence of public neutrality takes on another dimension. We might wonder if a police officer would become a bit reluctant to arrest the local business owner who was directly paying for the police car.

11 Certain private interests today are actually attempting to re-create the public world in a new, privatized way. As Renata Salecl points out in (Per)versions of Love and Hate, malls “are destroying the social fabric of suburban towns by causing small shops to go out of business and by offering new, supposedly public spaces in their stead. For the mall developers, it is essential that, on the one hand, the mall appears as the new public space in American suburbia, but on the other hand, that it is legally defined as a private place, which limits the rights of visitors to engage in activities that do not meet with the approval of the mall’s management. In the mall, people are not allowed to hold demonstrations, distribute leaflets, sign petitions, etc., without the permission of the owners. Freedom of speech, therefore, is limited” (Renata Salecl, (Per)versions of Love and Hate [New York: Verso, 1998], 94-95). What Salecl details here is the gradual transformation of public space into a privatized public space. As a result of this change in its status, public space thereby loses all of the qualities that made it distinct from private space: its guarantee of equal access, its bracketing of market laws, and its freedom from enjoyment.

12 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Phantom Pubic Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 11.

13 Fraser, “Rethinking,” 11.

14 This is not Fraser’s position. She proposes not ridding ourselves of the idea of a public sphere, but rethinking the idea in order that it take into account social inequalities, thereby achieving authentic neutrality rather than just the illusion of it.

15 Though our jury system attests to the importance of effective fictions, we are often reluctant to accept them today, preferring to “see things as they really are.” An example from my own past attests to this reluctance. I was teaching in an academic department where a dispute arose over the question of merit pay. Some members of the department, upset with the way merit pay had been awarded, expressed a desire for an objective, quantitative system for deciding which faculty members would receive merit pay. This idea encountered vociferous and widespread resistance, but it was finally dealt its deathblow when an opposing faculty member made the “obvious” point that such a system would provide the illusion of objectivity and fairness without actually achieving it. Better to have a subjective system that we know is subjective, than a subjective one that appears in the guise of an objective one, so he claimed. But what this faculty member missed was precisely the importance of the effective fiction. Even though the new system of evaluation wouldn’t actually have been objective, the illusion of objectivity would effectively produce a fairer system than the old, blatantly subjective one (where the department chair made all decisions about merit pay by fiat), which lacked even the illusion of objectivity. This very mode of argumentation exemplifies the contemporary blindness to the effective fiction.

16 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), 183, her emphasis.

17 Copjec, Read My Desire, 183, her emphasis.

18 We can see the binding power of disaster in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks. The attacks produced a widespread sense of a public bond and sense of obligation to the public world among American subjects. Properly speaking, however, the September 11th attacks didn’t change anything in American society, which testifies to the prevalence of the society of enjoyment. One of the salient, if underreported, features of the American social climate after the September 11th attacks was the absence of any increase at all in military enlistment. This marks a clear contrast with the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack that commenced American involvement in World War II, when military enlistment ballooned (even though enlistment then meant entry into a far more deadly conflict than the “War against Terror”). The outburst of post-September 11th patriotism confined itself to primarily to acts—such as displaying the flag—that left the subject safe within its private world.

19 This is the controlling idea in Independence Day (1996). In fact, the film goes out of its way to stress that the alien attack has united, among others, Israeli and Arab.

20 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 88, my emphasis.

21 The specific city in which the film takes place remains ambiguous, though it is clearly a large city in California. This ambiguity suggests that this is the story of “every city” in the society of enjoyment.

22 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), 142.

23 Hobbes, Leviathan, 88-89. I have normalized the spelling in this and the following quotation from Leviathan.

24 Hobbes, Leviathan, 89.

25 The opening shot of the wolves misleads us insofar as it suggests that the human violence that follows in the film mirrors this kind of natural violence. As we shall see, despite the seeming absence of a symbolic bond in the film, the struggle for recognition—which indicates the presence of a symbolic dimension—plays a central role in every violent encounter that we witness.

26 Here we see one of the ways in which sexual difference impacts the way in which the subject experiences the society of enjoyment. Because the ideal of noncastration haunts the male subject in a way that it does not haunt the female subject, the male subject experiences even more guilt for his failure to heed the command to enjoy. He is also more reluctant than the female subject to enter into the public world in this society because that world demands the sacrifice of his jouissance. For the female subject, the situation is not as menacing because the ideal of noncastration is not lurking behind her symbolic identity. As Lacan notes in Seminar XIV, “the woman does not have to make the same sacrifice since it is already credited to her account from the beginning” (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XIV: La logique du fantasme, 1966-1967, unpublished manuscript, session of 19 April 1967, my translation).

27 Matthew may in fact be including this preamble to his action in order to prompt Annie to ask him not to speak up. If this were true, the preamble would indicate Matthew’s reluctance to act, his fear that the other would get the better of him in the encounter. And if this were really Matthew’s intent, it fails completely when Annie seconds his proposed action.

28 The proliferation of security systems today also indicates the extent to which paranoia has become the de facto mode of relating to the other in the society of enjoyment. If there are only competing private worlds, then it becomes difficult to be anything but paranoid in relating to the other. As a result, in the last forty years paranoia and conspiracy theory has moved from the margins to the mainstream in American life. In his account of the rise of today’s paranoid culture, Peter Knight notes that “conspiracy has become the default assumption in an age which has learned to distrust everything and everyone” (Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the XFiles [New York: Routledge, 2000], 3).

29 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 230.

30 Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1993), 32.

31 In her attempt to develop a Lacanian theory of history, Brennan notes precisely the dynamic at work with the ego in the city: “the city’s spatial restrictions result in needs to escape on the one hand, and an increased social aggressiveness on the other” (Brennan, History after Lacan, 41).

32 Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 28.

33 To the extent that we are monads without windows in the society of enjoyment, this society represents an uncanny realization of Leibniz’s philosophy. Leibniz insists that the universe consists of monads and that each monad exists in utter isolation from every other monad and experiences no external influence. What allows these monads to agree about the nature of the world is not the fact that they share a common experience but that God aligns the experiences of each monad in what Leibniz calls a preestablished harmony. This preestablished harmony makes it possible for monads to feel as if they share a world, when in fact they don’t. Thus, one might say that today we have a Liebnizian universe of isolated monads in which the mediating function of God has become obscured (which would be, to translate into Lacanian terms, the Name of the Father).

CHAPTER 9. EXPLOSIONS OF INCIVILITY, AGRESSIVENESS, AND VIOLENCE

1 As Philippe Van Haute notes, this sense of not measuring up to the enjoying other is an experience that occurs on the imaginary level. It thus coincides with the predominance of the imaginary in the society of enjoyment. Van Haute says, “imaginary relations are marked by a specific form of aggressivity. The ego comes to be in and through an identification with an image: I am the other. For the ego that lives believing in its equivalence with the image, every inequivalence will be unbearable, and will provoke aggressivity” (Philippe Van Haute, Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject, trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk [New York: Other Press, 2002], 85, his emphasis).

2 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 116.

3 Stephen Carter, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 77. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text.

4 Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 60.

5 As cultural historian Kristin Ross points out, the car continues to provide an isolated, private space even when roads become overcrowded with other cars. She says, “With the actual decline in mobility brought on by mass car consumption, the inviolate shell of the car can still provide, though in a weakened form, the liberty from social constraint that speed once promised to provide” (Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995], 55).

6 The stain of incivility in Carter’s book also manifests itself in other ways as well. Carter confesses in a footnote that his family home is equipped with a burglar alarm, even though he recognizes that it might imply some incivility. The elliptical nature of this discussion reveals how the appeal of private enjoyment subtly undermines the deepest commitment to civility. The footnote says, “My Yale Law School colleague Ian Ayres points out that installing a burglar alarm, or at least affixing an alarm company’s sticker to a window (what legal theorists call ‘specific deterrence’), may be viewed as an act of incivility. Why? Because, he says, there is little functional difference between putting a sign on my house that says ‘Burglar Alarm Equipped’ and putting a sign on my house that says ‘Break into Somebody’s Else’s House, I Don’t Care Whose, as Long as It Isn’t Mine.’ On this point, I suppose my family’s commitment to civility must seem weak: our house is equipped with both a burglar alarm and a decal proclaiming its presence” (185). On one level, Carter recognizes that the burglar alarm represents an uncivil gesture and is thus incompatible with the logic of his project, but on another level, the safeguarding of his private enjoyment exerts a powerful call. It represents Carter’s own refusal to accept the precariousness of enjoyment—its inherent partiality. Like his scorn for public education, the alarm in the house indicates the nearly universal appeal of incivility in the society of enjoyment, even in the most dedicated proponents of civility.

7 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 155. Of course, the constitutive role of the state relative to the family is precisely what one misses when reading the Philosophy of Right as a chronological account of the development of right (Recht), as many interpreters do. Read in this way, the family is prior to the state, and thus it seems as if the family serves as the foundation on which the state rests, when Hegel’s point is in fact precisely the opposite. If one reads the Philosophy of Right as a history of right, one must read it as prehistory of the present, as history seen backward from the point of view of the present. Only in this sense can the family lead to the state.

8 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right, Heidelberg 1817-1818 with Additions from the Lectures of 1818-1819, trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 294.

9 Carter balks at the state’s authority insofar as it challenges his private religious beliefs. Interestingly enough, this valuing of private religious convictions over the concerns of the state earns Hegel’s particular rancor. He says, “Those who ‘seek guidance from the Lord’ and are assured that the whole truth is directly present in their unschooled opinions, fail to apply themselves to the task of exalting their subjectivity to consciousness of the truth and to knowledge of duty and objective right. The only possible fruits of their attitude are folly, abomination, and the demolition of the whole ethical order, and these fruits must inevitably be reaped if the religious disposition holds firmly and exclusively to its intuitive form and so turns against the real world and the truth present in it in the form of the universal, i.e. of the laws” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 167).

10 As president, Bush perfectly represents the attitude of the society of enjoyment toward the state. Even in the position of chief executive, the head of the state, Bush continues to experience the state as an alien, private entity, against which he must do battle. Whenever he achieves a legislative victory, he inevitably insists that it represents a triumph over the ways of “Washington.” Though wrapped in state power, Bush sees the state not as a public entity but as a private competitor he must work to best.

11 In the 1990s, this fear about the theft of enjoyment manifested itself clearly in the two landmark ballot initiatives passed in California in the 1990s. It sparked the passage of both Proposition 187 (barring “undocumented” immigrants from state social services) and Proposition 209 (outlawing state-sponsored affirmative action). The logic behind them went something like this: immigrants and minorities are enjoying services and advantages that I’m not enjoying, and I’m more deserving (because I’m a U.S. citizen, because I work hard, etc.). Both of these propositions were efforts to wrest enjoyment back from the other who had “stolen” it with the help of government social services or hiring practices.

12 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 61.

13 Here, Vinny experiences the anxiety that results from coming too close to the jouissance of the other, which he is unable to recognize as his own. As Robert Harari notes, “The subject fervently desires something, but when faced with the threat of actually carrying it out, of the Erfüllung as Freud puts it, of the desire, anxiety is not long in making an appearance: desire has reached a terrain in which the approach to and of jouissance is unbearable” (Robert Harari, Lacan’s Seminar on “Anxiety”: An Introduction, trans. Jane C. Lamb-Ruiz [New York: Other Press, 2001], 102, his emphasis).

14 Victoria E. Johnson, “Polyphony and Cultural Expression: Interpreting Musical Traditions in Do the Right Thing,” in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, ed. Mark A. Reid (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 52.

15 One might read this song as a critique of the paranoia that it seems to endorse, especially in light of its last line, which undercuts everything that has preceded it. But when George W. Bush took it as his theme song in the 2000 Presidential campaign, he was clearly not conscious of—or just ignoring—this final ironic twist. Of course, it should not be surprising that Bush, an extraordinarily representative figure of the society of enjoyment, chose “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as his theme song. Its seeming insistence of reclaiming lost enjoyment helps to underline Bush’s promise to deliver to us the enjoyment that Clinton and Gore were stealing for eight years. However, this use of the song demands the omission of its last line. Ironically, when the campaign used the song for the first few times, they allowed it to play in its entirety, thereby inadvertently including these final words—“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” They soon corrected this mistake and provided Bush supporters with an expurgated version.

16 I am indebted to Hilary Neroni for this discussion of the Columbine shooting.

17 It is perhaps emblematic of President Clinton that he linked the violence to both the availability of guns and the moral decay in the culture.

18 Ironically, the first piece of legislation proposed in the wake of the Columbine violence required child safety locks for handguns. Such safety locks, while undoubtedly effective in preventing young children from firing guns, would have done nothing to stop what happened at Columbine. The fact that members of Congress choose to begin with this particular focus, despite its tangential status vis-à-vis Columbine, reveals the widespread belief that what is needed is more authority. The child safety lock is the objective correlative of that authority.

19 Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 25.

20 During the time of the shooting, I was teaching a graduate seminar on the influence of Hegel on subsequent theorists, and we were in the midst of reading Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In this overdetermined situation, students in the class were sorely tempted to interpret Columbine in light of the struggle for recognition, seeing the shooting itself as the result of the popular students’ refusal to recognize the members of the Trench Coat Mafia, or as an act of the colonized Mafia freeing itself from the yoke of the colonizer through violence.

21 Harris and Klebold’s investment in the big Other reveals itself in the tapes that they made prior to the shooting. In the tapes, they imagine themselves as the subjects of a future film, and they discuss the recognition that that they believe their act will garner them. This information from the tapes suggests that, even if it results in their deaths, their shooting spree is driven by an investment in symbolic life and a failure to embrace symbolic death.

CONCLUSION

1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 69-70.

2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 87.

3 Throughout Seminar V, Lacan insists that the phallic signifier—the signifier of authority and law—is always there for the subject as a third party, mediating every relationship, even the seemingly private bond between the subject and the mother. The problem is, however, that the subject fails to see this mediating presence of the phallic signifier and therefore trusts in its own autonomy (and isolation). This failure becomes increasingly pronounced in the society of commanded enjoyment, where the phallic signifier disguises itself more subtly than in the society of prohibition. Thus, the role of psychoanalysis in allowing the subject to recognize its position relative to the phallic signifier becomes more exigent as well. Psychoanalysis frees the subject to the extent that it makes evident the hidden mediating presence of the phallus. According to Lacan, “The elucidation of the relation of the subject to the phallus [. . .] is the sole proper way permitting us to conceive the ideal achievement that Freud articulated in his “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957-1958 [Paris: Seuil, 1998], 486, my translation).

4 G. W. F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 91-92.