Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” Lacan: The Silent Partners Ed. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.
Far from being an abstract idea, the insistent affirmation of a negative contrary is a central fact with which modern philosophy and politics tries to come to grips. I noted earlier that the historical proposition that everything, including man, is malleable implies that he is without foundation, without roots. Deterritorialization therefore reigns, or should be expected to reign, in the scientific/capitalist world. Yet no political fact has asserted itself with such ferocity than that man is ‘not without foundation’, ‘not without roots’. Something insists on disrupting the progress of deterritorialization, time and time again.
Now, to say that one is ‘not without roots’ is different from saying that one has roots in some racial, ethnic or national tradition, as those who engineered the turn to ‘identity politics’ are wont to say. But by way of exploring this critical difference, I want to return to Lacan’s myth of the lathouses, the non-objectified objects that appear from time to time in the alethosphere. Man, the prosthetic God of this alethosphere, is uprooted from every foundation, ungrounded, thus malleable or at one with the Other, but from time to time, and without warning, he encounters one of these lathouses, which provokes his anxiety. The chiasmic intertwining of man and Other, the absorption of the former in the latter, suddenly falters; man is pulled away, disengaged FROM his foundationless existence in the Other; he grows deaf or indifferent to the Other’s appeal. This disruption is not followed, however, by a retreat from the publicity of ‘pleasure-reality incorporated’ into privacy, simply. For what we encounter in this moment is not the privacy of a self, but the other within the alethospheric. This is the moment of extimacy in which we discover an ‘overpopulated’ privacy, where some alien excess adheres to us. 99
The phrase ‘riveted to being’ is revealing. Rather than simply and immediately being our being, coinciding with it, we are ineluctably fastened, stuck to it – or it to us. (Levinas describes this being ‘adhering to’ us, just as Lacan, in his own myth of the lamella, describes the object as ‘sticking to us’.)
The sentiment of being riveted to being is one of being in the forced company of our own being, whose ‘brutality’ consists in the fact that it is impossible either to assume it or to disown it. It is what we are in our most intimate core, that which singularizes us, that which cannot be vulgarized and yet also that which we cannot recognize.
We do not comprehend or choose it, but neither can we gel rid of it; since it is not of the order of objects – but, rather, of the ‘not-without-object’ – it cannot be objectified, placed before us and confronted. 100