The Apocalypse is (still) disappointing
Alenka Zupančič S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 10 & 11 (2017-18): 16-30
When caught in the threat and fear of “losing it all” we are in fact held hostages of something that does not exist—yet. And is this kind of blackmail not in fact the very means of making sure that it never will exist? It makes us focus on preserving what is there, and what we have, but excludes any real alternative, any means of really thinking differently.
The totality or whole that Blanchot defends and argues for here is clearly not some kind of organic, harmonious totality, but simply a totality which does not disavow its own antagonism(s). The crucial passage in the quote above is this: “Reason is totality itself at work, but because it is achieved not through the effect of some quiet goodwill but through antagonism, struggle, and violence, it risks provoking, as it realizes itself, the unreasonable event against which and also, in some ways with the help of which it rises itself.” The Bomb is part of this totality, as are the struggle and violence. But such is the nature of a true totality.
Yet things are far from moving in this direction, so what is the problem? The configuration of “the Bomb” also tells us something about what is usually perceived as an encouraging (liberating) dimension of some fatal threat. The acute consciousness that we may actually die at any moment is supposed to liberate us from our everyday petty little fears, and give us courage to pursue things that we would otherwise fear pursuing….
What happens in reality is something very different: the possibility of universal catastrophe does not produce an opening to the new dimensions of the possible, but usually incites either apathy and depression, or an anxiety-ridden inclination to “realize” the existing possibilities (and as many of them as possible, so as not to miss out on anything). Yet these are clearly possibilities that are determined by the parameters of the already existing configuration (take a mistress, yell at your boss, steal something from the store….). In other words, and to link this back to Blanchot’s argument, when confronted with an impending doom, we usually don’t say to ourselves: “We will all die very soon anyway, so we may as well engage in the struggle for communism!”
The fact that this kind of suggestion is most likely to incite laughter tells us a lot about the ideological consolidation of the “possible” as based on the existent. We hear a lot about the necessity of creative thinking, and thinking outside the box” has become a fashionable bon mot of entrepreneurship. But why does nobody even remotely consider taking the above example as an illustrious example of a true “thinking outside the box”? If everything is going to hell anyway, why not introduce communism first? Why is it that an impending doom usually encourages only a commonplace nihilism: all is meaningless, nothing is worth fighting for; or a pathetic, that is, pathos-ridden “courage” of claiming a few last indulgences for oneself in the face of the inevitable…?
we are not facing an approaching apocalypse, but rather already standing within it. Apocalypse is already here, we cannot “prevent” it. Or, put in a slightly different way:
Giorgio Agamben said in an interview that “thought is the courage of hopelessness”— an insight which is especially pertinent for our historical moment, when even the most pessimistic diagnosis as a rule finishes with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice, functioning as a fetish that prevents us from thinking through to the end of the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction.
(Žižek 2017, xi-xii)
The perspective opened by our apocalypse is no longer the perspective according to which we can lose it “all” in a single unfathomable event. The fantasy of this possibility is still alive, of course: the predictions and expectations of, for example, this or that planet crashing to the earth and totally destroying it continue to excite the imagination. But in spite of their catastrophic character there is something perhaps too optimistic about them. Because we know all too well that we won’t get off so lightly, and that dying will most likely be gradual, long and painful…
Our immanence to the apocalypse is at the same time precisely that which enables the functioning of this normalization. What does this mean? Just think about that advice we usually get when something terrible happens to us, say that we lose a loved person. If we start thinking about all that we lost with this person, this perspective can break us totally (we will never again do this, and that, and…—the whole picture is unbearable). This is why we are advised not to think in this way, but rather to try to survive through one day first, and then take it one day at a time, focus on the tasks at hand… What else is this but an invitation to start with the work of mourning, to step inside our mourning, to inhabit it, precisely without trying to comprehend its totality? Every day something happens that just a day ago we would have considered impossible or unbearable, but slowly we adjust to the new situation. But if, in our example, we first lose the beloved person and this (concrete) loss opens the perspective of all that we have lost with her, the perspective of a whole into which we then step and start our work of mourning, the contemporary apocalypse functions differently. We start with the survival strategies, we take the losses one at a time, and only at “the end” will we find out what exactly it was that we lost, in total. Today we get used to this, tomorrow to something else; we’ll manage somehow, as long as we don’t see the whole picture, which is actually being created in this way.
This is not simply and necessarily bad, if we knew what exactly we had lost and were mourning. But this is precisely what, for structural reasons, we cannot know, because this “something” is being created as we go along, with our daily adjustments. Our apocalypse is a loss without the lost,
a mourning that precedes the loss and actually creates it with its work (that of mourning). It is a mourning without object.
The standpoint of reason (Hegelian Vernunft) to which Blanchot calls us is in fact precisely a standpoint which is interior, and not exterior, to the whole. The fact that apocalypse is already here, that it has already started, does not mean that everything is over. The problem is that, for the most part, we haven’t yet accepted that this change is already operative—we still think of the world as pre-apocalyptic, we are expecting the catastrophe, are afraid of it, and hope that perhaps it won’t happen.…
Understanding, Blanchot continues, is cold and without fear. It analyses the danger, subjects it to its measures, looks for the solutions, strategies, adjustments. This work is useful: it demystifies the apocalypse, and shows that it is possible to live with it (and the normalization we talked about is precisely this: we have learned how to make do with the apocalypse.)
The loss of fear that Blanchot talks about does not mean that we have become so brave that we are no longer afraid of anything; it does not speak about our courage, but rather about our perspective on the world in which, with necessary adjustments, everything can be solved… It does not speak about the presence of courage, but rather of its absence, in the sense given to it by Agamben and Žižek: “the courage of the hopeless,” the courage to admit that we don’t have a solution and that there is none visible on the horizon. Instead, we would quite literally “rather die” than admit this.
Reason does not feel up to its task, to the work which is already its own. The question is perhaps whether reason could, at any point, feel that it is up to this task; or whether it is rather that taking the risk and making the first step would be the only possible proof of its being up to its task?
This risk is properly speaking “existential,” because it is not covered by any guarantee, by any symbolic mandate. And this risk, this step into the unknown, is not necessarily a matter of (premeditated) decision—we can also be pushed to make it.
Many years ago, I saw on TV a beginning of a horror movie in which a depressed woman decides to commit suicide. She is about to swallow a whole bottle of sleeping pills when a werewolf climbs up the wall of the house, entering through the bathroom window. And the woman who was about to die anyway starts screaming for help and does everything in her power to escape the werewolf. At the time I thought this was ridiculously funny, she obviously shouldn’t have cared one way or another, she should have looked the beast straight in the eye and said: come on, be my guest! But on second thought, my reaction was perhaps wrong. The scene is
funny, of course, but that is because the truth is funny. It’s not that upon seeing the werewolf, the woman suddenly realized that her meaningless life had a meaning after all. And it is also not simply that the sheer instinct of survival prevailed over depression and metaphysical considerations of the meaninglessness of it all. No, at that moment she was simply frightened to death, as we say. And it woke her up.
We should return to Hegel on this point, and stress the difference between the moment of the life and death struggle that inaugurates the master/slave dialectic, and this dialectic itself. In mortal fear the slave chooses life, yet this does not mean that he thereby forever condemns himself to vegetating (survival), without any idea or truth. The master is prepared to go all the way and die, yet this also doesn’t entail that he is henceforth immune to the logic—and the straitjacket—of survival.
Hegel’s point is rather that actual freedom (in respect to the demands of survival, for example) cannot be chosen directly, and in this sense the master’s choice is no more “correct” than the slave’s. They are both forced choices.
Trembling of pure negativity
This is also not simply about the fact that we first have to choose life, if we want to make something with it; it is about the fact that we need first to experience the trembling of pure negativity, the mortal fear.
If the choice of life is not a forced choice (forced because of mortal fear), but appears natural and immediate, then we have no means of accessing it and repeating the choice; since there is nothing to repeat here, we can only cling on to our lives. The problem is not a slave who, in mortal terror, has bent before a master—for him there is still a possible escape, a future, even freedom.
Problem with neutral man idea
The problem is with the idea of a“neutral man,” who is neither a master nor a slave, but “freely” creates his life, changes roles etc.
Subjectivation of the cut
Paradoxically, what condemns us to the logic of survival without any idea or truth is not the experience of mortal fear, but rather the absence of this experience, of the (also symbolic) cut it represents, and of the subjectivation—in one way or another—of this cut.
Choice of freedom is a second, repeated choice
I emphasize subjectivation, because as psychoanalysis teaches us, this kind of cut can also result in its foreclosure, that is to say in psychosis, which is precisely a way to avoid its subjectivation. Differently from both “master” and “slave,” the psychotic “chooses” freedom directly; but the price of this direct choice is that he lives as the helpless prisoner of his freedom, enslaved to it, so to speak. Both Hegel and Lacan emphasize that the choice of actual freedom can only be a second, repeated choice.
Returning for a moment to our example of the suicide interrupted by a werewolf, we can relate this situation to the logical and temporal dialectics emphasized by Blanchot. The woman who decided to commit suicide made this decision following an understanding-based insight according to which everything was meaningless.
Werewolf makes her start fighting for a life she never had
The surprise in the form of the “invasion of the negative” (the werewolf) makes her start fighting for her life—the life that she never really had, and was hence ready to give up. But perhaps she will now get it, precisely through this fight.
Perhaps—for there are no guarantees here. In our apocalyptic world, in the smooth running of normalization and adaptation to one problematic thing after another, when our attitude toward the world is so “sound” that it is actually all too sound, there are of course also werewolves that appear from time to time. After all, Donald Trump is such a werewolf. But can they scare us to death?
Can they scare us so much that we start fighting for our lives and switch from the survival mode of coping with things one day at a time (and as comfortably as possible), to a passionate struggle for our lives?
For the struggle for life is not the same as clinging on to life and to the status quo; it is much more than this, and it derives its force from the encounter with the negative, from the utmost distress which can also be a birthplace of ideas, and even truths.