Žižek, S. Parallax View MIT Press, 2006. Pages 81-84.
That is to say: how should we interpret the great feminine “No!” of Isabel Archer at the end of The Portrait of a Lady? Why doesn’t Isabel leave Osmond, although she definitely doesn’t love him and is fully aware of his manipulations? The reason is not the moral pressure exerted on her by the notion of what is expected of a woman in her position — Isabel has sufficiently proven that, when she wants to, she is quite willing to override conventions: “Isabel stays because of her commitment to the bond of her word, and she stays because she is unwilling to abandon what she still sees as a decision made out of her sense of independence.”
In short, as Lacan put it apropos of Sygne de Coufontaine in The Hostage, Isabel is also “the hostage of the word.” So it is wrong to interpret this act as a sacrifice bearing witness to the proverbial “feminine masochism”: although Isabel was obviously manipulated into marrying Osmond, her act was her own, and to leave Osmond would simply equal depriving herself of her autonomy.
While men sacrifice themselves for a Thing (country, freedom, honor), only women are able to sacrifice themselves for nothing. (Or: men are moral, while only women are properly ethical.)31
The first to accomplish an analogous gesture was Medea as anti-Antigone: she first kills her brother (her closest family relative), thus cutting off her roots radically, rendering any return impossible, putting all her bets on the marriage with Jason; after betraying everyone close to her for Jason and then being betrayed by Jason himself, there is nothing left for her, she finds herself in the Void —— the Void of self-relating negativity, of the “negation of negation,” that is subjectivity itself.
So it is time to reassert Medea against Antigone: Medea or Antigone, that is the ultimate choice today. In other words, how are we to fight Power? Through fidelity to the old organic Mores threatened by Power, or by out-violencing Power itself? Two versions of femininity: Antigone can still be read as standing for particular family roots against the universality of the public space of State Power; Medea, on the contrary, out-universalizes universal Power itself.
Sygne performs four acts in The Hostage:
1. Sygne’s and Georges’s pathetic betrothal, promise of eternal love and fidelity to preserve the traditional order—the elementary, zero-level act of asserting one’s fidelity to one’s ethical Substance;
2. her decision to marry Turelure, sacrificing everything for the Pope, symbol of the old order;
3. her suicidal act of intercepting the bullet Georges aimed at Turelure, thus saving Turelure’s life;
4. her final “No,” the refusal to inscribe this sacrificial gesture into the existing ideologicosymbolic order.
The crucial enigma here is not (4), Sygne’s “No,” but, rather, (3): why did Sygne intercept the bullet? Her “No”comes afterward; it indicates Sygne’s insistence on the radically ethical character of her suicidal gesture (in the Lacanian sense of the term), that is, her refusal to endorse the standard ideological recuperation of (3) as a gesture done out of marital duty and love (or any other reading that would reinscribe this act into the field of “pathological” motivations in the Kantian sense of the term, like the notion that, out of her natural goodness, she automatically moved to save a threatened human life).
But is her “No” really a kind of minimal resistance, the refusal of a sacrifice, in the sense of “I’ve gone far enough, but this I will not do…”?
Is it not too simple to say that her “No” signals a Pascalian answer: “I went to the end in doing what is expected of a faithful wife, I sacrificed my life for my husband, but don’t force me now, on my the deathbed, to confess that I did it out of my belief in marital or any other ideology; leave my inner life to me”? Far from indicating that she “will not tolerate this last and ultimate sacrifice to Turelure,” Sygne’s “No” rather signals her insistence on the “purity” of her sacrificial suicidal gesture: Sygne did it for the sake of it, her act cannot be inscribed into any sacrificial economy, into any calculating strategy.
In other words, this “No” is not a “No” to a particular content, a refusal to reveal the secret, to disclose the intimacy of our true motivation, some secret idiosyncratic content, but a “No as such,” the form-of-No which is in itself the whole content, behind which there is nothing.
Such an act of pure loss is constitutive of the Symbolic itself, so that, in this respect, Hoens and Pluth are right: Sygne’s gesture of separating herself from the Symbolic repeats the very form of the subject’s entry into the Symbolic.
It is crucial, however, not to confound this “No” with “No” as the zero-level symbolic prohibition, as the purely formal “No” which grounds the symbolic order (what Lacan calls the “No-of-the-Father/le Non-du-Père” as opposed to its positive articulation in the actual “Name-of-the-Father/le Nom-du-Père”): Sygne’s “No” names a more primordial negation, a feminine refusal/withdrawal which cannot be reduced to the paternal “No” constitutive of the symbolic order.
Even at the abstract level, the difference between the two is clear: while the paternal “No” is purely formal, Sygne’s “No” is, on the contrary, a “No” embodied in a little piece of the Real, the excremental remainder of a disgusting “pathological” tic that sticks out of the symbolic form. The two
“No”’s are thus like the same X on the two opposed sides of a Moebius strip: if the paternal “No” is the pure form, an empty place without content, Sygne’s “No” is an excessive element that lacks its “proper” place.
The term “separating” is to be taken here in its precise Lacanian sense: in the sense of the opposition between alienation and separation.
1. Sygne’s and Georges’s pathetic betrothal, promise of eternal love and fidelity to preserve the traditional order—the elementary, zero-level act of asserting one’s fidelity to one’s ethical Substance;
2. her decision to marry Turelure, sacrificing everything for the Pope, symbol of the old order;
The Versagung contained in the move from (1) to (2) — or, more precisely, the Versagung which occurs as the twist inherent to (2) — takes place at the level of alienation: it designates a shift from the emphatic alienation in the Cause for which the subject is ready to give everything, to the loss of this Cause itself: after I have sacrificed everything, my happiness,my honor,my wealth, for the Cause, all of a sudden I realize that I’ve lost the Cause itself — my alienation is thereby redoubled, reflected-into-itself.
What occurs in (3) and (4), on the contrary, enacts the separation from the Symbolic: we pass from the big Other to the small other, from A to a, the A’s “ex-timate” core/stain, from the symbolic order (the order of symbolic identifications, of assuming symbolic mandates-titles) to some tiny tic, some idiosyncratic pathological gesture, which sustains the subject’s minimal consistency.
3. her suicidal act of intercepting the bullet Georges aimed at Turelure, thus saving Turelure’s life;
4. her final “No,” the refusal to inscribe this sacrificial gesture into the existing ideologicosymbolic order.