Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.
Smashing the Neighbor’s Face
How does subjectivity relate to transcendence? There seem to be two basic modes exemplified by the names of Jean-Paul Sartre and Levinas.
(1) The “transcendence of the ego” (Sartre), in other words, the notion of subject as the force of negativity, self-transcending, never a positive entity identical to itself.
(2) The existence of the subject as grounded in its openness to an irreducible -unfathomable- transcendent Otherness — there is a subject only insofar as it is not absolute and self-grounded but remains in a tension with an impenetrable Other; there is freedom only through the reference to a gap which makes the Other unfathomable …
As expected, Hegel offers a kind of “mediation” between these two extremes, asserting their ultimate identity. It is not only that the core of subjectivity is inaccessible to the subject, that the subject is decentered with regard to itself, that it cannot assume the abyss in its very center;
it is also not that the first mode is the “truth” of the second (in a reflexive twist, the subject has to acknowledge that the transcendent power which resists it is really its own, the power of subject itself), or vice versa (the subject emerges only as confronted with the abyss of the Other).
This seems to be the lesson of Hegel’s intersubjectivity — I am a free subject only through encountering another free subject— and the usual counterargument is here that, for Hegel, this dependence on the Other is just a mediating step/detour on the way toward full recognition of the subject in its Other, the full appropriation of the Other.
But are things so simple? What if the Hegelian “recognition” means that I have to recognize in the impenetrable Other which appears as the obstacle to my freedom its positive-enabling ground and condition? What if it is only in this sense is that the Other is “sublated”?
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The topic of the “other” is to be submitted to a kind of spectral analysis that renders visible its imaginary, symbolic, and real aspects — it provides perhaps the ultimate case of the Lacanian notion of the “Borromean knot” that unites these three dimensions.
First, there is the imaginary other — other people “like me,” my fellow human beings with whom I am engaged in the mirrorlike relationships of competition, mutual recognition, and so forth.
Then, there is the symbolic “big Other”— the “substance” of our social existence, the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our coexistence.
Finally, there is the Other qua Real, the impossible Thing, the “inhuman partner,” the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible.
And it is crucial to perceive how these three dimensions are hooked up. The neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the Thing means that, beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be “gentrified.”
In his seminar 3, Lacan already indicates this dimension:
And why “the Other” with a capital O? For a no doubt mad reason, in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. Here the mad reason is the following. You are my wife — after all, what do you know about it? You are my master — in reality, are you so sure of that? What creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message, as well as what is manifest in the pretence, is that the other is there qua absolute Other. Absolute, that is to say he is recognized, but is not known. In the same way, what constitutes pretence is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s a pretence or not. Essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which charac-terizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other. [Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 3: Les psychoses (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 48.]
Lacan’s notion, from the early 1950s, of the “founding word,” of the statement which confers on you a symbolic title and thus makes you what you are (wife, master), is usually perceived as an echo of the theory of performative speech acts …
However, it is clear from the above quote that Lacan aims at something more: we need the recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and only insofar as the other whom we encounter is not only the imaginary semblant, but also the elusive absolute Other of the Real Thing with whom no reciprocal exchange is possible.
In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a “normal human fellow” cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves — there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order.
So no axis between the two terms can subsist without the third one one: if the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone);
if there is no neighbor to whom I can relate as a human partner, the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing which directly parasitizes upon me (like Daniel Paul Schreber’s God who directly controls me, penetrating me with the rays of jouissance).
If there is no Thing to underpin our everyday symbolically regulated exchange with others, we find ourselves in a Habermasian “flat,” aseptic universe in which subjects are deprived of their hubris of excessive passion, reduced to lifeless pawns in the regulated game of communication.
We can clearly see, now, how far psychoanalysis is from any defense of the dignity of the human face. Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public (to the analyst, who stands for the big Other) one’s most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one’s face in the most radical sense of the term? This is already the lesson of the very material dispositif of the psychoanalytic treatment: no face-to-face between the subject-patient and the analyst; instead, the subject lying and the analyst sitting behind him, both staring into the same void in front of them. There is no “intersubjectivity” here, only the two without face-to-face, the First and the Third. 148