Disparities by Slavoj Žižek

Author:Slavoj Žižek
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2016-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

A failed betrayal

If one looks for a homologous subtle subjective shift in contemporary literature, it is a waste of time to peruse the work of James Joyce. One can understand Joyce, with all the obscenities that permeate his writings, as the ultimate Catholic author, ‘the greatest visionary of the dark underground of Catholicism, an underground embodying a pure transgression, but one which is nevertheless a profoundly Catholic transgression’.7 Catholicism is legalistic, and, as Paul knew it so well, the Law generates its own transgression; consequently, the staging of the obscene underground of the Law, the travesty of the Black Mass (or, in Joyce’s case, the elevation of Here Comes Everybody into Christ who has to die in order to be reborn as the eternal Life-Goddess, from Molly Bloom to Anna Livia Plurabelle), is the supreme Catholic act.

This achievement of Joyce simultaneously signals his limit, the limit that pushed Samuel Beckett to break with him. If there ever was a kenotic writer, the writer of the utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it is Beckett. The gap that separates Beckett from Joyce is the gap between the two Reals. The Lacanian Real, in its opposition to the Symbolic, has ultimately nothing whatsoever to do with the standard empiricist (or phenomenological, or historicist, or Lebensphilosophie, for that reason) topic of the wealth of reality that resists formal structures, that cannot be reduced to its conceptual determinations – language is grey, reality is green … The Lacanian Real is, on the contrary, even more ‘reductionist’ than any symbolic structure: we touch it when we subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences, reducing it to a minimum of antagonism.

Lacan sometimes gets seduced by the rhizomatic wealth of language beyond (or, rather, beneath) the formal structure that sustains it. It is in this sense that, in the last decade of his teaching, he deployed the notion of lalangue (sometimes simply translated as ‘llanguage’) which stands for language as the space of illicit pleasures that defy any normativity: the chaotic multitude of homonymies, wordplays, ‘irregular’ metaphoric links and resonances … Productive as this notion is, one should be aware of its limitations. Many commentators have noted that Lacan’s last great literary reading, that of Joyce to whom his late seminar Le sinthome8 is dedicated, is not at the level of his previous great readings (Hamlet, Antigone, Claudel’s Coûfontaine trilogy). There is effectively something fake in Lacan’s fascination with late Joyce, with Finnegans Wake as the latest version of the literary Gesamtkunstwerk with its endless wealth of lalangue in which not only the gap between singular languages, but the very gap between linguistic meaning and jouissance seems overcome and the rhizomatic jouis-sense (enjoyment-in-meaning; enjoy-meant) proliferates in all directions. The true counterpart to Joyce is, of course, Beckett: after his early period in which he more or less wrote some variations on Joyce, the ‘true’ Beckett constituted himself through a true ethical act, a cut, a rejection of the

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