{"id":8838,"date":"2012-02-27T17:52:20","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T22:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8838"},"modified":"2013-04-12T07:06:52","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T12:06:52","slug":"parallax-ethics-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/02\/27\/parallax-ethics-real\/","title":{"rendered":"parallax ethics real"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, S. Parallax View<\/em> MIT Press, 2006. Pages 81-84.<\/p>\n

That is to say: how should we interpret the great feminine \u201cNo!\u201d of Isabel Archer at the end of The Portrait of a Lady<\/em>?\u00a0 Why doesn\u2019t Isabel leave Osmond, although she definitely doesn\u2019t 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 \u2014 Isabel has sufficiently proven that, when she wants to, she is quite willing to override conventions: \u201cIsabel 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, as Lacan put it apropos of Sygne de Coufontaine in The Hostage<\/em>, Isabel is also \u201cthe hostage of the word<\/strong>.\u201d So it is wrong to interpret this act as a sacrifice bearing witness to the proverbial \u201cfeminine masochism\u201d: 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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 \u2014\u2014 the Void of self-relating negativity, of the \u201cnegation of negation,\u201d that is subjectivity itself<\/span>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sygne performs four acts in The Hostage<\/em>:<\/p>\n

1. Sygne\u2019s and Georges\u2019s pathetic betrothal, promise of eternal love and fidelity to preserve the traditional order\u2014the elementary, zero-level act of asserting one\u2019s fidelity to one\u2019s ethical Substance;<\/p>\n

2. her decision to marry Turelure, sacrificing everything for the Pope, symbol of the old order;<\/p>\n

3. her suicidal act of intercepting the bullet Georges aimed at Turelure, thus saving Turelure\u2019s life;<\/p>\n

4. her final \u201cNo,\u201d the refusal to inscribe this sacrificial gesture into the existing ideologicosymbolic order.<\/p>\n

The crucial enigma here is not (4), Sygne\u2019s \u201cNo,\u201d but, rather, (3): why did Sygne intercept the bullet? Her \u201cNo\u201dcomes afterward; it indicates Sygne\u2019s 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 \u201cpathological\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

But is her \u201cNo\u201d really a kind of minimal resistance, the refusal of a sacrifice, in the sense of \u201cI\u2019ve gone far enough, but this I will not do…\u201d?<\/p>\n

Is it not too simple to say that her \u201cNo\u201d signals a Pascalian answer: \u201cI went to the end in doing what is expected of a faithful wife, I sacrificed my life for my husband, but don\u2019t 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\u201d? Far from indicating that she \u201cwill not tolerate this last and ultimate sacrifice to Turelure,\u201d Sygne\u2019s \u201cNo\u201d rather signals her insistence on the \u201cpurity\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In other words, this \u201cNo\u201d is not a \u201cNo\u201d to a particular content, a refusal to reveal the secret, to disclose the intimacy of our true motivation, some secret idiosyncratic content, but a \u201cNo as such,\u201d the form-of-No which is in itself the whole content, behind which there is nothing.<\/p>\n

Such an act of pure loss is constitutive of the Symbolic itself, so that, in this respect, Hoens and Pluth are right: Sygne\u2019s gesture of separating herself from the Symbolic repeats the very form of the subject\u2019s entry into the Symbolic.<\/p>\n

It is crucial, however, not to confound this \u201cNo\u201d with \u201cNo\u201d as the zero-level symbolic prohibition, as the purely formal \u201cNo\u201d which grounds the symbolic order (what Lacan calls the \u201cNo-of-the-Father\/le Non-du-P\u00e8re\u201d as opposed to its positive articulation in the actual \u201cName-of-the-Father\/le Nom-du-P\u00e8re\u201d): Sygne\u2019s \u201cNo\u201d names a more primordial negation, a feminine refusal\/withdrawal which cannot be reduced to the paternal \u201cNo\u201d constitutive of the symbolic order.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even at the abstract level, the difference between the two is clear: while the paternal \u201cNo\u201d is purely formal, Sygne\u2019s \u201cNo\u201d is, on the contrary, a \u201cNo\u201d embodied in a little piece of the Real, the excremental remainder of a disgusting \u201cpathological\u201d tic that sticks out of the symbolic form. The two
\n\u201cNo\u201d\u2019s are thus like the same X on the two opposed sides of a Moebius strip: if the paternal \u201cNo\u201d is the pure form, an empty place without content, Sygne\u2019s \u201cNo\u201d is an excessive element that lacks its \u201cproper\u201d place.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cseparating\u201d is to be taken here in its precise Lacanian sense: in the sense of the opposition between alienation and separation.<\/p>\n

1. Sygne\u2019s and Georges\u2019s pathetic betrothal, promise of eternal love and fidelity to preserve the traditional order\u2014the elementary, zero-level act of asserting one\u2019s fidelity to one\u2019s ethical Substance;<\/p>\n

2. her decision to marry Turelure, sacrificing everything for the Pope, symbol of the old order;<\/p>\n

The Versagung contained in the move from (1) to (2) \u2014 or, more precisely, the Versagung which occurs as the twist inherent to (2) \u2014 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\u2019ve lost the Cause itself \u2014 my alienation is thereby redoubled, reflected-into-itself.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cex-timate\u201d 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\u2019s minimal consistency.<\/p>\n

3. her suicidal act of intercepting the bullet Georges aimed at Turelure, thus saving Turelure\u2019s life;<\/p>\n

4. her final \u201cNo,\u201d the refusal to inscribe this sacrificial gesture into the existing ideologicosymbolic order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, S. Parallax View MIT Press, 2006. Pages 81-84. That is to say: how should we interpret the great feminine \u201cNo!\u201d of Isabel Archer at the end of The Portrait of a Lady?\u00a0 Why doesn\u2019t Isabel leave Osmond, although she definitely doesn\u2019t love him and is fully aware of his manipulations? The reason is not … Continue reading “parallax ethics real”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,79,21,24,106,41,70,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-ethics_real","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-traversing-the-fantasy","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8838"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10797,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8838\/revisions\/10797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}