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Looking Awry An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture Slavoj Zizek Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Slavoj Zizek
ISBN(s): 9780262740159, 026274015X
Edition: Revised ed.
File Details: PDF, 1.49 MB
Year: 1992
Language: english
Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping
Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Zizek inverts current
pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the
French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He
approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture,
from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An
Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead - a strategy of "looking
awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.
Zizek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real,
the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject - at work in
horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of
ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Zizek's
text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive
approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what
he is not saying, Zizek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists
who so often claim him.
Slavoj Zizek is a Researcher in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana,
Yugoslavia. His work has been published in France and in Yugoslavia where, running
as a proreform candidate, he narrowly missed being elected to the presidency of the
republic of Slovenia.
About the Author
Slavoj Zizek is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy, University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Codirector of the Center for Humanities, Birkbeck College,
University of London.
Preface
Walter Benjamin commended as a theoretically productive and
subversive procedure the reading of the highest spiritual products
of a culture alongside its common, prosaic, worldly products. What
he had in mind specifically was a reading of the sublime ideal of
the love couple represented in Mozart's Magic Flute together with
the definition of marriage found in Immanuel Kant (Mozart's
contemporary), a definition that caused much indignation within
moralistic circles. Marriage, Kant wrote, is "a contract between two
adult persons of the opposite sex on the mutual use of their sexual
organs." It is something of the same order that has been put to work
in this book: a reading of the most sublime theoretical motifs of
Jacques Lacan together with and through exemplary cases of
contemporary mass culture: not only Alfred Hitchcock, about
whom there is now general agreement that he was, after all, a
"serious artist," but also film noir, science fiction, detective novels,
sentimental kitsch, and up—or down—to Stephen King. We thus
apply to Lacan himself his own famous formula "Kant with Sade,"
i.e., his reading of Kantian ethics through the eyes of Sadian
perversion. What the reader will find in this book is a whole series
of "Lacan with . . . ": Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Ruth Rendell,
Patricia Highsmith, Colleen McCullough, Stephen King, etc. (If,
now and then, the book also mentions ''great" names like
Shakespeare and Kafka, the reader need not be uneasy: they are
read strictly as kitsch authors, on the same level as McCullough and
King.)
The intention of such an enterprise is twofold. On the one hand, the
book is conceived as a kind of introduction to Lacanian
"dogmatics" (in the theological sense of the term). It mercilessly
exploits popular culture, using it as convenient material to explain A word or two concerning the general outline of the book's
not only the vague outlines of the Lacanian theoretical edifice but theoretical argument. Lacan's "return to Freud" is usually
sometimes also the finer details missed by the predominantly associated with his motto "the unconscious is structured like a
academic reception of Lacan: the breaks in his teaching, the gap language," i.e., with an effort to unmask imaginary fascination and
separating him from the field of poststructuralist reveal the symbolic law that governs it. In the last years of Lacan's
"deconstructionism," and so on. This way of "looking awry" at teaching, however, the accent was shifted from the split between
Lacan makes it possible to discern features that usually escape a the imaginary and the symbolic to the barrier separating the real
"straightforward" academic look. On the other hand, it is clear that from (symbolically structured) reality.
Lacanian theory serves as an excuse for indulging in the idiotic
enjoyment of popular culture. Lacan himself is used to legitimize So, the first part of the book—"How Real Is Reality?"—attempts
the delirious race from Hitchcock's Vertigo to King's Pet Sematary, to develop the dimension of the Lacanian real, first by describing
from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Night of how what we call "reality'' implies the surplus of a fantasy space
the Living Dead. filling out the "black hole" of the real; then by articulating the
The solidarity of these two movements could be exemplified by a different modalities of the real (the real returns, it answers, it can be
double paraphrase of De Quincey's famous propositions concerning rendered via the symbolic form itself, and there is knowledge in the
the art of murder, propositions that served as a regular point of real); and finally by confronting the reader with two ways of
reference to both Lacan and Hitchcock: avoiding the encounter with the real. This last will be exemplified
by the two main figurations of the detective in crime novels: the
If a person renounces Lacan, soon psychoanalysis itself will appear classic "logic and deduction" detective and the hard-boiled
to him dubious, and from here it is just a step to a disdain for detective.
Hitchcock's films and to a snobbish refusal of horror fiction. How
many people have entered the way of perdition with some fleeting Although it might seem that all has already been said in the endless
cynical remark on Lacan, which at the time was of no great list of literature on Alfred Hitchcock, the second part of this book—
importance to them, and ended by treating Stephen King as "One Can Never Know Too Much about Hitchcock"—takes the
absolute literary trash! risk of proposing three new approaches: first an articulation of the
dialectic of deception at work in Hitchcock's films, a dialectic in
If a person renounces Stephen King, soon Hitchcock himself will which those who really err are the non-duped; then a conception of
appear to him dubious, and from here it is just a step to a disdain the famous Hitchcockian tracking shot as a formal procedure whose
for psychoanalysis and to a snobbish refusal of Lacan. How many aim is to produce a "blot," a point from which the image itself looks
people have entered the way of perdition with some fleeting cynical at the spectator, the point of the "gaze of the Other"; and, finally, a
remark on Stephen King, which at the time was of no great proposal that would enable us to grasp the succession of the main
importance to them, and ended by treating Lacan as a stages in Hitchcock's development, from the Oedipal journey of the
phallocentric obscurantist! 1930s to the "pathological narcissism,'' dominated by a maternal
superego, of the 1960s.
It is for the reader to decide which of the two versions he or she
would choose.

2
The third part—"Fantasy, Bureaucracy, Democracy"—draws 1
some conclusions from Lacan's late theory, concerning the field of HOW REAL IS REALITY?
ideology and politics. First, it delineates the contours of the
ideological sinthome (a superegoic voice, for example) as a core of
1—
enjoyment at work in the midst of every ideological edifice and
From Reality to the Real
thus sustaining our "sense of reality." Then it proposes a new way
The Paradoxes of Objet Petit a
of conceptualizing the break between modernism and
Looking Awry at Zeno's Paradoxes
postmodernism, centered on the obscenity of the bureaucratic
What is at stake in the endeavor to "look awry" at theoretical motifs
apparatus as rendered in Kafka's work. The book concludes with an
is not just a kind of contrived attempt to "illustrate" high theory, to
analysis of the inherent paradoxes that pertain to the very notion of
make it "easily accessible,'' and thus to spare us the effort of
democracy: the source of these paradoxes is the ultimate
effective thinking. The point is rather that such an exemplification,
incommensurability between the symbolic domain of equality,
such a mise-en-scène of theoretical motifs renders visible aspects
duties, rights, etc., and the "absolute particularity" of the fantasy
that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Such a procedure already
space, i.e., of the specific ways individuals and communities
has a respectable line of philosophical predecessors, from late
organize their enjoyment.
Wittgenstein to Hegel. Is not the basic strategy of Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit to undermine a given theoretical position
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
by "staging" it as an existential subjective attitude (that of
Preliminary versions of some of the material have appeared in
asceticism, that of the "beautiful soul," etc.) and thus to reveal its
"Hitchcock," October, no. 38 (Fall 1986); "Looking Awry,"
otherwise hidden inconsistencies, that is, to exhibit the way its very
October, no. 50 (Fall 1989); "Undergrowth of Enjoyment," New
subjective position of enunciation undermines its "enunciated," its
Formations, no. 9 (1989); and "The Real and Its Vicissitudes,''
positive contents?
Newsletter of the Freudian Field, no. 5 (1990).
To demonstrate the fecundity of such an approach, let us turn to the
Since it is needless to add that Joan Copjec was present from the
first proper philosopher, Parmenides, who asserted the sole
very conception of this book, encouraging the author to write it,
existence of Being as One. What are of interest are the famous
that her work served as a theoretical point of reference, or that she
paradoxes by means of which Zeno, his disciple, tried to prove his
spent considerable time improving the manuscript, we will not do
master's thesis a contrario, by disclosing the nonsensical,
so!
contradictory consequences that follow from the hypothesis of the
existence of multitude and movement. At first sight—which is, of
course, that sight which pertains to the traditional historian of
philosophy—these paradoxes appear as exemplary cases of pure,
hollow, artificial logomachy, contrived logical trifling attempting to
prove an obvious absurdity, something that goes against our most
elementary experience. But in his brilliant essay "The literary

3
technique of Zeno's paradoxes,"1 Jean-Claude Milner effectuates a distance. The crucial feature of this inaccessibility of the object was
kind of "staging" of them: he gives sufficient reasons to allow us to nicely indicated by Lacan when he stressed that the point is not that
conclude that all four of the paradoxes by means of which Zeno Achilles could not overtake Hector (or the tortoise)—since he is
tried to prove the impossibility of movement originally referred to faster than Hector, he can easily leave him behind—but rather that
literary commonplaces. The final form in which these paradoxes he cannot attain him: Hector is always too fast or too slow. There is
became part of our tradition results moreover from a typical a clear parallel here with the well-known paradox from Brecht's
carnevalesque-burlesque procedure of confronting a tragic, noble Threepenny Opera: do not run after luck too arduously, because it
topic with its vulgar, common counterpart, in a manner recalling might happen that you will overrun it and that luck will thus stay
later Rabelais. Let us take the best known of Zeno's paradoxes, the behind. The libidinal economy of the case of Achilles and the
one about Achilles and the tortoise. Its first point of reference is, of tortoise is here made clear: the paradox stages the relation of the
course, the Iliad, book XXII, lines 199–200, where Achilles tries in subject to the object-cause of its desire, which can never be attained.
vain to catch up with Hector. This noble reference was then crossed The object-cause is always missed; all we can do is encircle it. In
with its popular counterpart, Aesop's fable about the hare and the short, the topology of this paradox of Zeno is the paradoxical
tortoise. The version universally known today, the one about topology of the object of desire that eludes our grasp no matter
"Achilles and the tortoise," is thus a later condensation of two what we do to attain it.
literary models. The interest of Milner's argument lies not solely in The same may be said of the other paradoxes. Let us go on to the
the fact that it proves that Zeno's paradoxes, far from being purely a next: the one about the arrow that cannot move because at any
game of logical reasoning, belong to a precisely defined literary given moment, it occupies a definite point in space. According to
genre; that is, that they use the established literary technique of Milner, its model is a scene from the Odyssey, book XI, lines 606–
subverting a noble model by confronting it with its banal, comical 607, in which Heracles is continually shooting an arrow from his
counterpart. What is of crucial importance from our—Lacanian— bow. He completes the act again and again, but in spite of this
perspective is the very contents of Zeno's literary points of incessant activity on his part, the arrow remains motionless. Again,
reference. Let us return to the first, most famous paradox it is almost superfluous to recall how this resembles the well-known
mentioned; as already noted, its original literary reference is the dream experience of "moving immobility": in spite of all our
following lines from the Iliad: "As in a dream, the pursuer never frenetic activity, we are stuck in the same place. As Milner points
succeeds in catching up with the fugitive whom he is after, and the out, the crucial characteristic of this scene with Heracles is its
fugitive likewise cannot ever clearly escape his pursuer; so Achilles location—the infernal world in which Odysseus encounters a series
that day did not succeed in attaining Hector, and Hector was not of suffering figures—among them Tantalus and Sisyphus—
able to escape him definitely." What we have here is thus the condemned to repeat the same act indefinitely. The libidinal
relation of the subject to the object experienced by every one of us economy of Tantalus's torments is notable: they clearly exemplify
in a dream: the subject, faster than the object, gets closer and closer the Lacanian distinction between need, demand, and desire, i.e., the
to it and yet can never attain it—the dream paradox of a continuous way an everyday object destined to satisfy some of our needs
approach to an object that nevertheless preserves a constant undergoes a kind of transubstantiation as soon as it is caught in the
dialectic of demand and ends up producing desire. When we
1
demand an object from somebody, its "use value" (the fact that it
Jean-Claude Milner, DéDections fictives, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1985, pp. serves to satisfy some of our needs) eo ipso becomes a form of
45–71.

4
expression of its "exchange value"; the object in question functions Where do we detect the libidinal economy of the last of Zeno's
as an index of a network of intersubjective relations. If the other paradoxes according to which it follows, from the movement of
complies with our wish, he thereby bears witness to a certain two equal masses in opposite directions, that half of a certain
attitude toward us. The final purpose of our demand for an object is amount of time equals its double amount? Where do we encounter
thus not the satisfaction of a need attached to it but confirmation of the same paradoxical experience of an increase in the libidinal
the other's attitude toward us. When, for example, a mother gives impact of an object whenever attempts are made to diminish and
milk to her child, milk becomes a token of her love. The poor destroy it? Consider the way the figure of the Jews functioned in
Tantalus thus pays for his greed (his striving after "exchange value") Nazi discourse: the more they were exterminated, eliminated, the
when every object he obtains loses its ''use value" and changes into fewer their numbers, the more dangerous their remainder became,
a pure, useless embodiment of "exchange value": the moment he as if their threat grew in proportion to their diminution in reality.
bites into food, it changes to gold. This is again an exemplary case of the subject's relation to the
It is Sisyphus, however, who bears on our interest here. His horrifying object that embodies its surplus enjoyment: the more we
continuous pushing of the stone up the hill only to have it roll down fight against it, the more its power over us grows.
again served, according to Milner, as the literary model for the third The general conclusion to be drawn from all this is that there is a
of Zeno's paradoxes: we never can cover a given distance X, certain domain in which Zeno's paradoxes are fully valid: the
because, to do so, we must first cover half this distance, and to domain of the subject's impossible relation to the object-cause of its
cover half, we must first cover a quarter of it, and so on, ad desire, the domain of the drive that circulates endlessly around it.
infinitum. A goal, once reached, always retreats anew. Can we not This is, however, the very domain Zeno is obliged to exclude as
recognize in this paradox the very nature of the psychoanalytical "impossible" in order that the reign of the philosophical One can
notion of drive, or more properly the Lacanian distinction between establish itself. That is, the exclusion of the real of the drive and the
its aim and its goal? The goal is the final destination, while the aim object around which it circulates is constitutive of philosophy as
is what we intend to do, i.e., the way itself. Lacan's point is that the such, which is why Zeno's paradoxes, by means of which he tries to
real purpose of the drive is not its goal (full satisfaction) but its aim: prove the impossibility and consequently the nonexistence of
the drive's ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive, to movement and multitude, are the reverse of the assertion of One,
return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal. the immovable Being, in Parmenides, the first proper philosopher.3
The real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this Perhaps we can now understand what Lacan meant when he said
closed circuit.2 Therein consists the paradox of Sisyphus: once he
reaches his goal, he experiences the fact that the real aim of his
activity is the way itself, the alternation of ascent and descent.
3
In other words, we could pin down the ultimate paradox of Zeno's paradoxes
2
"When you entrust someone with a mission, the aim is not what he brings by means of the Hegelian distinction between what the subject "intends to
back, but the itinerary he must take. The aim is the way taken. . . . If the drive say" and what he "effectively says" (the distinction that, incidentally,
may be satisfied without attaining what, from the point-of-view of a coincides with the Lacanian distinction between signification and signifiance).
biological totalization of function, would be the satisfaction of its end of What Zeno "wants to say," his intention, is to exclude the paradoxical nature
reproduction, it is because it is a partial drive, and its aim is simply this return of our relationship to object small a by proving its nonexistence; what he
into circuit." (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- effectively does (more properly: says) is to articulate the very paradoxes that
Analysis, London, Hogarth Press, 1977, p. 179.) define the status of this object as impossible-real.

5
that the object small a "is what philosophical reflection lacks in things over before making up his mind. All the way home, Wayne
order to be able to locate itself, i.e., to ascertain its nullity."4 thinks about it; but at home, his wife and son are waiting for him,
and soon he is caught up in the joys and small troubles of family
Goal and Aim in Fantasy life. Almost daily, he promises himself that he will visit old
In other words, what Zeno excludes is the very dimension of Tompkins again and afford himself the experience of the
fantasy, insofar as, in Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the fulfillment of his desires, but there is always something to be done,
subject's "impossible" relation to a, to the object-cause of its desire. some family matter that distracts him and causes him to put off his
Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes the subject's visit. First, he has to accompany his wife to an anniversary party;
desire. This elementary definition is quite adequate, on condition then his son has problems in school; in summer, there are vacations
that we take it literally: what the fantasy stages is not a scene in and he has promised to go sailing with his son; fall brings its own
which our desire is fulfulled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a new preoccupations. The whole year goes by in this way, with
scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental Wayne having no time to take the decision, although in the back of
point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in his mind, he is constantly aware that sooner or later he will
advance, but something that has to be constructed—and it is definitely visit Tompkins. Time passes thus until . . . he awakens
precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject's suddenly in the shack beside Tompkins, who asks him kindly: "So,
desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject how do you feel now? Are you satisfied?" Embarrassed and
assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is perplexed, Wayne mumbles "Yes, yes, of course," gives him all his
constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.5 To worldly possessions (a rusty knife, an old can, and a few other
exemplify this crucial theoretical point, let us take a famous science small articles), and leaves quickly, hurrying between the decaying
fiction short story, Robert Scheckley's "Store of the Worlds." ruins so that he will not be too late for his evening ration of
Mr. Wayne, the story's hero, visits the old and mysterious potatoes. He arrives at his underground shelter before darkness,
Tompkins, who lives alone in a shack, ruined and tilled with when flocks of rats come out from their holes and reign over the
decaying waste, in an abandoned part of town. Rumor has it that, devastation of nuclear war.
by means of a special kind of drug, Tompkins is capable of This story belongs, of course, to postcatastrophe science fiction,
transposing people into a parallel dimension where all their desires which describes everyday life after nuclear war—or some similar
are fulfilled. To pay for this service, one was required to hand over event—has caused the disintegration of our civilization. The aspect
to Tompkins one's most valuable material goods. After finding that interests us here, however, is the trap into which the reader of
Tompkins, Wayne engages him in conversation; the former the story necessarily falls, the trap upon which the whole
maintains that most of his clients return from their experience well effectiveness of the story is based and in which the very paradox of
satisfied; they do not, afterward, feel deceived. Wayne, however, desire consists: we mistake for postponement of the "thing itself"
hesitates, and Tompkins advises him to take his time and think what is already the "thing itself," we mistake for the searching and
indecision proper to desire what is, in fact, the realization of desire.
4
Jacques Lacan, "Résponses à des étudiants en philosophie," in Cahiers pour That is to say, the realization of desire does not consist in its being
l'analyse 3, Paris, Graphe, 1967, p. 7. "fulfilled,'' "fully satisfied," it coincides rather with the
5
For an articulation of such a notion of fantasy in regard to cinema, see reproduction of desire as such, with its circular movement. Wayne
Elizabeth Cowie, Sexual Difference and Representation in the Cinema, "realized his desire" precisely by transposing himself, in a
London, Macmillan, 1990.

6
hallucination, into a state that enabled him to postpone indefinitely screen for the projection of desires: the fascinating presence of its
his desire's full satisfaction, i.e., into a state that reproduced the positive contents does nothing but fill out a certain emptiness. The
lack constitutive of desire. We can in this way also grasp the action takes place in a small American town where men gather in
specificity of the Lacanian notion of anxiety: anxiety occurs not the evenings in the local saloon and revive nostalgic memories,
when the object-cause of desire is lacking; it is not the lack of the local myths—usually their youthful adventures—that are always
object that gives rise to anxiety but, on the contrary, the danger of somehow associated with a desolate old building on a hill near the
our getting too close to the object and thus losing the lack itself. town. A certain malediction hangs over this mysterious "black
Anxiety is brought on by the disappearance of desire. house"; there is a tacit agreement among the men that one is not
Where exactly, in this futile circular movement, is the objet a? The allowed to approach it. Entering it is supposed to involve mortal
hero of Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, narrates danger (it is rumored that the house is haunted, that it is inhabited
the story of his being hired to find a man who had suddenly left his by a lonely lunatic who kills all intruders, etc.) but, at the same time,
settled job and family and vanished. Spade is unable to track him the "black house" is a place that links all their adolescent memories,
down, but a few years later the man is spotted in another city, the place of their first "transgressions," above all those related to
where he lives under an assumed name and leads a life remarkably sexual experience (the men endlessly retell stories of how, years
similar to the one he had fled when a beam from a construction site ago, they had their first sexual encounter in the house with the
fell and narrowly missed hitting him on the head. In Lacanian terms prettiest girl in the town, how they had their first cigarette in it).
this beam became for him the mark of the world's inconsistency: s(). The hero of the story is a young engineer who has just moved into
In spite of the fact that his "new" life so closely resembles the old, town. After listening to all the myths about the "black house," he
he is firmly convinced that his beginning again was not in vain, i.e., announces to the company his intention of exploring this
that it was well worth the trouble to cut his ties and begin a new life. mysterious house the next evening. The men present react to this
Here we see the function of the objet petit a at its purest. From the announcement with silent but nonetheless intense disapproval. The
point of view of "wisdom," the break is not worth the trouble; next evening, the young engineer visits the house, expecting
ultimately, we always find ourselves in the same position from something terrible or at least something unexpected to happen to
which we have tried to escape, which is why, instead of running him. With tense anticipation, he approaches the dark, old ruin,
after the impossible, we must learn to consent to our common lot climbs the creaking staircase, examines all the rooms, but finds
and to find pleasure in the trivia of our everyday life. Where do we nothing except a few decaying mats on the floor. He immediately
find the objet petit a? The objet a is precisely that surplus, that returns to the saloon and triumphantly declares to the gathered men
elusive make-believe that drove the man to change his existence. In that their "black house" is just an old, filthy ruin, that there is
"reality," it is nothing at all, just an empty surface (his life after the nothing mysterious or fascinating about it. The men are horrified
break is the same as before), but because of it the break is and when the engineer begins to leave, one of them wildly attacks
nonetheless well worth the trouble. him. The engineer unfortunately falls to the ground and soon
afterward dies. Why were the men so horrified by the action of the
A Black Hole in Reality newcomer? We can grasp their resentment by remarking the
How Nothing Can Beget Something difference between reality and the ''other scene" of the fantasy
Patricia Highsmith's story "Black House" perfectly exemplifies the space: the "black house" was forbidden to the men because it
way fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of functioned as an empty space wherein they could project their

7
nostalgic desires, their distorted memories; by publicly stating that discerning the fascinating contours of the object of desire where a
the "black house" was nothing but an old ruin, the young intruder normal view sees nothing but a trivial everyday object, is literally a
reduced their fantasy space to everyday, common reality. He gaze capable of seeing nothingness, i.e., of seeing an object "begot
annulled the difference between reality and fantasy space, by nothing," as Shakespeare formulated it in a short scene in
depriving the men of the place in which they were able to articulate Richard II, one of his most interesting plays. Richard II proves
their desires. 6 The gaze of the men in the saloon, capable of beyond any doubt that Shakespeare had read Lacan, for the basic
problem of the drama is that of the hystericization of a king, a
6 process whereby the king loses the second, sublime body that
In this respect, the role of the cleared cornfield, transformed into a baseball makes him a king, is confronted with the void of his subjectivity
diamond in Phil Robinson's Field of Dreams is exactly homologous to the
"black house": it is a clearance opening the space where the fantasy figures
outside the symbolic mandate-title "king," and is thus forced into a
can appear. What we must not overlook apropos of Field of Dreams is the series of theatrical, hysterical outbursts, from self-pity to sarcastic
purely formal aspect: all we have to do is to cut out a square in the field and and clownish madness.7 Our interest is limited, however, to a short
enclose it with a fence, and already phantoms start to appear in it, and the dialogue between the Queen and Bushy, the King's servant, at the
ordinary corn behind it is miraculously transformed into the mythical thicket beginning of act II, scene II. The King has left on an expedition of
giving birth to the phantoms and guarding their secret—in short, an ordinary
field becomes a "field of dreams." In this it is similar to Saki's famous short
story "The Window": a guest arrives at a country house and looks through the interrupted in a moment of intimacy by their sudden awareness that they are
spacious French window at the field behind the house; the daughter of the being watched by the artificially created monster (their "child"), a mute
family, the only one to receive him upon his arrival, tells him that all other witness of its own conception: "Therein lies the statement of the fantasy that
members of the family had died recently in an accident; soon afterward, when impregnates the text of the words "Look at him! He's got his whole life in
the guest looks through the window again, he sees them approaching slowly front of him and I'm not even a gleam in his eye!," which offer a concise
across the field, returning from the hunt. Convinced that what he sees are definition of the elementary skeleton of the fantasy scene: to be present, as a
ghosts of the deceased, he runs away in horror . . . (The daughter is of course pure gaze, before one's own conception or, more precisely, at the very act of
a clever pathological liar. For her family, she quickly concocts another story one's own conception. The Lacanian formula of fantasy ( àa) is to be
to explain why the guest left the house in a panic.) So, a few words encircling conceived precisely as such a paradoxical conjunction of the subject and the
the window with a new frame of reference suffice to transform it object qua this impossible gaze; i.e., the "object" of fantasy is not the fantasy
miraculously into a fantasy frame and to transubstantiate the muddy tenants scene itself, its content (the parental coitus, for example), but the impossible
into frightful ghostly apparitions. gaze witnessing it. This impossible gaze involves a kind of time paradox, a
What is especially indicative in Field of Dreams is the content of the "travel into the past" enabling the subject to be present before its beginning.
apparitions: the film culminates in the apparition of the ghost of the hero's Let us simply recall the famous scene from David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where
father (the hero remembers him only from his later years, as a figure broken the hero watches through a fissure in the closet door the sado-masochistic
by the shameful end of his baseball career)—now he sees him young and full sexual play between Isabella Rossellini and Denis Hopper in which he relates
of ardor, ignorant of the future that awaits him. In other words, he sees his to her now as son, now as father. This play is the ''subject," Frankenstein: to
father in a state where the father doesn't know that he is already dead (to be the gaze that reflects the enjoyment of one's own parents, a lethal
repeat the well-known formula of a Freudian dream) and the hero greets his enjoyment. . . . What is the child looking at? The primal scene, the most
arrival with the content of the fantasy, whereas the hero himself, reduced to archaic scene, the scene of his own conception. Fantasy is this impossible
the presence of a pure gaze, is the object. The basic paradox of the fantasy gaze." (Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Frankenstein: Mythe et Philosophie, Paris,
consists precisely in this temporal short circuit where the subject qua gaze Presses Universitaires de France, 1988, pp. 98–99).
7
precedes itself and witnesses its own origin. Another example is found in Cf. the classical study of Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies,
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where Dr. Frankenstein and his bride are Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965.

8
war, and the Queen is filled with presentiments of evil, with a contradiction. First ("sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, /
sorrow whose cause she cannot discern. Bushy attempts to console Divides one thing entire to many objects"), he refers to the simple,
her by pointing out the illusory, phantomlike nature of her grief: commonsense opposition between a thing as it is "in itself," in
reality, and its "shadows," reflections in our eyes, subjective
Bushy: Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, impressions multiplied by our anxieties and sorrows. When we are
Which show like grief itself, but are not so. worried, a small difficulty assumes giant proportions, the thing
For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, appears to us far worse than it really is. The metaphor at work here
Divides one thing entire to many objects; is that of a glass surface sharpened, cut in a way that causes it to
Like perspectives, which rightly gaz'd upon reflect a multitude of images. Instead of the tiny substance, we see
Show nothing but confusion; ey'd awry its "twenty shadows.'' In the following lines, however, things get
Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty, complicated. At first sight, it seems that Shakespeare only
Looking awry upon your lord's departure, illustrates the fact that "sorrow's eye . . . divides one thing entire to
Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail; many objects" with a metaphor from the domain of painting ("like
Which, look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows perspectives which rightly gaz'd upon show nothing but confusion;
Of what is not. Then, thrice-gracious queen, ey'd awry distinguish form"), but what he really accomplishes is a
More than your lord's departure weep not: more's not seen; radical change of terrain—from the metaphor of a sharpened glass
Or if it be, 'tis with false sorrow's eye, surface, he passes to the metaphor of anamorphosis, the logic of
Which for things true weeps things imaginary. which is quite different: a detail of a picture that "gaz'd rightly," i.e.,
Queen: It may be so; but yet my inward soul straightforwardly, appears as a blurred spot, assumes clear,
Persuades me it is otherwise: howe'er it be, distinguished shapes once we look at it "awry," at an angle. The
I cannot but be sad, so heavy sad, lines that apply this metaphor back to the Queen's anxiety and
As, though in thinking on no thought I think, sorrow are thus profoundly ambivalent: "so your sweet majesty,
Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink. looking awry upon your lord's departure, finds shapes of grief more
Bushy: 'Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady. than himself to wail; which, look'd on as it is, is nought but
Queen: 'Tis nothing less: conceit is still deriv'd shadows of what is not." That is to say, if we take the comparison
From some forefather grief; mine is not so, of the Queen's gaze with the anamorphotic gaze literally, we are
For nothing hath begot my something grief; obliged to state that precisely by "looking awry," i.e., at an angle,
Or something hath the nothing that I grieve: she sees the thing in its clear and distinct form, in opposition to the
'Tis in reversion that I do possess; "straightforward" view that sees only an indistinct confusion (and,
But what it is, that is not yet known; what incidentally, the further development of the drama fully justifies the
I cannot name; 'tis nameless woe, I wot. Queen's most sinister presentiments). But, of course, Bushy does
not "want to say" this, his intention was to say quite the opposite:
By means of the metaphor of anamorphosis, Bushy tries to by means of an imperceptible subreption, he returns to the first
convince the Queen that her sorrow has no foundation, that its metaphor (that of a sharpened glass) and "intends to say" that,
reasons are null. But the crucial point is the way his metaphor splits, because her gaze is distorted by sorrow and anxiety, the Queen sees
redoubles itself, that is, the way Bushy entangles himself in

9
cause for alarm, whereas a closer, matter-of-fact view attests to the object-cause of desire is a pure semblance, this does not prevent it
fact that there is nothing to her fear. from triggering a whole chain of consequences that regulate our
What we have here are thus two realities, two "substances." On the "material," "effective" life and deeds.
level of the first metaphor, we have commonsense reality seen as
"substance with twenty shadows," as a thing split into twenty The "Thirteenth Floor" of the Fantasy Space
reflections by our subjective view, in short, as a substantial It was no accident that Shakespeare was so attentive to these
"reality" distorted by our subjective perspective. If we look at a paradoxes of "something begot by nothing" (the same problem lies
thing straight on, matter-of-factly, we see it "as it really is," while at the very heart of King Lear), for he lived in a period of the rapid
the gaze puzzled by our desires and anxieties ("looking awry") dissolution of precapitalist social relations and of the lively
gives us a distorted, blurred image. On the level of the second emergence of the elements of capitalism, i.e., in a period when he
metaphor, however, the relation is exactly the opposite: if we look was able daily to observe the way a reference to "nothing," to some
at a thing straight on, i.e., matter-of-factly, disinterestedly, pure semblance (speculating with "worthless" paper money that is
objectively, we see nothing but a formless spot; the object assumes only a "promise" of itself as "real" money, for example), triggers
clear and distinctive features only if we look at it "at an angle," i.e., the enormous machinery of a production process that changes the
with an "interested" view, supported, permeated, and ''distorted" by very surface of the earth. 8 Hence Shakespeare's sensitivity to the
desire. This describes perfectly the objet petit a, the object-cause of paradoxical power of money which converts everything into its
desire: an object that is, in a way, posited by desire itself. The opposite, procures legs for a cripple, makes a handsome man out of
paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., a freak, etc.—all those memorable lines from Timon of Athens
the object a is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze quoted again and again by Marx. Lacan was well justified in
"distorted" by desire, an object that does not exist for an "objective" modeling his notion of surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) on the
gaze. In other words, the object a is always, by definition, Marxian notion of surplus value: surplus enjoyment has the same
perceived in a distorted way, because outside this distortion, "in paradoxical power to convert things (pleasure objects) into their
itself," it does not exist, since it is nothing but the embodiment, the opposite, to render disgusting what is usually consid ered a most
materialization of this very distortion, of this surplus of confusion pleasant "normal" sexual experience, to render inexplicably
and perturbation introduced by desire into so-called "objective attractive what is usually considered a loathsome act (of torturing a
reality." The object a is "objectively" nothing, though, viewed from beloved person, of enduring painful humiliation, etc.).
a certain perspective, it assumes the shape of "something." It is, as Such a reversal engenders, of course, a nostalgic yearning for the
is formulated in an extremely precise manner by the Queen in her "natural" state in which things were only what they were, in which
response to Bushy, her "something grief" begot by "nothing." we perceived them straightforwardly, in which our gaze had not yet
Desire "takes off" when "something" (its object-cause) embodies, been distorted by the anamorphotic spot. Far from announcing a
gives positive existence to its "nothing," to its void. This kind of "pathological fissure," however, the frontier separating the
"something" is the anamorphotic object, a pure semblance that we two ''substances," separating the thing that appears clearly in an
can perceive clearly only by "looking awry." It is precisely (and objective view from the "substance of enjoyment" that can be
only) the logic of desire that belies the notorious wisdom that perceived clearly only by "looking awry," is precisely what
"nothing comes from nothing": in the movement of desire,
"something comes from nothing." Although it is true that the 8
Cf. Brian Rotman, Signifying Zero, London, Macmillan, 1986.

10
prevents us from sliding into psychosis. Such is the effect of the universal art critic. (With Hoag, there was a short circuit; he forgot
symbolic order on the gaze. The emergence of language opens up a who he really was and has to ask for the services of Randall.) The
hole in reality, and this hole shifts the axis of our gaze. Language members of the mysterious committee interrogating Randall were
redoubles "reality" into itself and the void of the Thing that can be only representatives of some evil lower divinity striving to interrupt
filled out only by an anamorphotic gaze from aside. the performance of the real "gods," the universal artists. Hoag then
To exemplify this, let us refer again to a product of popular culture, informs Randall and Cynthia that he has discovered in our universe
a science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, The Unpleasant some minor defects that will be quickly repaired in the next few
Profession of Jonathan Hoag. The action takes place in hours. They will never even notice, if they simply make sure that
contemporary New York where a certain Jonathan Hoag hires the when they drive back to New York, they do not—under any
private investigator Randall to find out what happens to him after circumstances and despite what they might see—open the window
he enters his working premises on the (nonexistent) thirteenth floor of their car. Thereafter Hoag leaves; still excited, Randall and
of the Acme building—Hoag is totally unaware of his activity Cynthia start to drive home. Things proceed without mishap as they
during this time. Next day, Randall follows Hoag on his way to follow the prohibition. But then they witness an accident, a child is
work, but between the twelfth and fourteenth floors Hoag suddenly run over by a car. At first the couple remain calm and continue to
disappears and Randall is unable to locate the thirteenth floor. The drive, but after seeing a patrolman, their sense of duty prevails and
same evening, a double of Randall appears to him in his bedroom they stop the car to inform him of the accident. Randall asks
mirror and tells Randall to follow him through the mirror where he Cynthia to lower the side window a little:
is called by the committee. On the other side of the mirror, the She complied, then gave a sharp intake of breath and swallowed a
double leads Randall to a great meeting hall where the president of scream. He did not scream, but he wanted to.
the committee of twelve informs him that he is now on the Outside the open window was no sunlight, no cops, no kids—
thirteenth floor, to which he will be called from time to time for nothing. Nothing but a grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if
interrogation. During these subsequent interrogations, Randall with inchoate life. They could see nothing of the city through it, not
learns that the members of this mysterious committee believe in a because it was too dense but because it was—empty. No sound
Great Bird supposed to breed small birds, her offspring, and to rule came out of it; no movement showed in it.
the universe together with them. The denouement of the story: It merged with the frame of the window and began to drift inside.
Hoag finally becomes aware of his real identity, and he invites Randall shouted, "Roll up the window!" She tried to obey, but her
Randall and his wife Cynthia to a picnic in the countryside where hands were nerveless; he reached across her and cranked it up
he relates to them the whole plot. He is, he tells them, an art himself, jamming it hard into its seat.
critic—but of a peculiar kind. Our human universe is just one of the The sunny scene was restored; through the glass they saw the
existing universes; the real masters of all worlds are mysterious patrolman, the boisterous game, the sidewalk, and the city beyond.
beings, unknown to us, who create different worlds, different Cynthia put a hand on his arm. "Drive on, Teddy!"
universes as works of art. Our universe was created by one of these "Wait a minute," he said tensely, and turned to the window beside
universal artists. To control the artistic perfection of their him. Very cautiously he rolled it down—just a crack, less than an
productions, these artists from time to time send into their creations inch.
one of their own kind, disguised as an inhabitant of the created
universe (in Hoag's case disguised as a man), who acts as a sort of

11
It was enough. The formless grey flux was out there, too; through emptiness of the screen, with the "place where nothing takes place
the glass, city traffic and sunny street were plain, through the but the place," if we may be permitted this—sacrilegious in this
opening—nothing. context perhaps—quotation from Mallarmé.
This "grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate This discord, thus disproportion between inside and outside is also
life," what is it if not the Lacanian real, the pulsing of the a fundamental feature of Kafka's architecture. A series of his
presymbolic substance in its abhorrent vitality? But what is crucial buildings (the block of fiats in which the court has its seat in The
for us here is the place from which this real erupts: the very Trial, the uncle's palace in America, etc.) are characterized by the
borderline separating the outside from the inside, materialized in fact that what appears from the outside a modest house changes
this case by the windowpane. Here, we should refer to the basic miraculously into a endless maze of staircases and halls once we
phenomenological experience of discord, the disproportion between enter it. (We are reminded of Piranesi's famous drawings of the
inside and outside, present to anyone who has been inside a car. subterranean labyrinth of prison staircases and cells.) As soon as
From the outside, the car looks small; as we crawl into it, we are we wall or fence in a certain space, we experience more of it
sometimes seized by claustrophobia, but once we are inside, the car "inside" than appears possible to the outside view. Continuity,
suddenly appears far larger and we feel quite comfortable. The proportion is not possible because the disproportion (the surplus of
price paid for this comfort is the loss of any continuity between the "inside" in relation to the "outside") is a necessary, structural
"inside" and "outside." To those sitting inside a car, outside reality effect of the very barrier separating inside from outside. The
appears slightly distant, the other side of a barrier or screen disproportion can be abolished only by demolishing the barrier, by
materialized by the glass. We perceive external reality, the world letting the outside swallow the inside.
outside the car, as "another reality," another mode of reality, not
immediately continuous with the reality inside the car. The proof of "Thank God, It Was Only a Dream!"
this discontinuity is the uneasy feeling that overwhelms us when we Why, then, does the inside surpass the outside in scale? In what
suddenly roll down the windowpane and allow external reality to does this surplus of the inside consist? It consists, of course, of
strike us with the proximity of its material presence. Our uneasiness fantasy space: in our case, the thirteenth floor of the building where
consists in the sudden experience of how close really is what the the mysterious committee has its seat. This "surplus space" is a
windowpane, serving as a kind of protective screen, kept at a safe constant motif of science fiction and mystery stories, and is visible
distance. But when we are safely inside the car, behind the closed in many of classic cinema's attempts to evade an unhappy ending.
windows, the external objects are, so to speak, transposed into When the action reaches its catastrophic peak, a radical change of
another mode. They appear to be fundamentally "unreal," as if their perspective is introduced that refigures the entire catastrophic
reality has been suspended, put in parenthesis—in short, they course of events as merely a bad dream of the hero. The first
appear as a kind of cinematic reality projected onto the screen of example that comes to mind is Woman in the Window by Fritz
the windowpane. It is precisely this phenomenological experience Lang: a lonely professor of psychology is fascinated by the portrait
of the barrier separating inside from outside, this feeling that the of a female fatale that hangs in the window of a store next to the
outside is ultimately "fictional,'' that produces the horrifying effect entrance to his club. After his family has gone away on vacation, he
of the final scene in Heinlein's novel, It is as if, for a moment, the dozes off in his club. One of the attendants awakens him at eleven,
"projection" of the outside reality had stopped working, as if, for a whereupon he leaves the club, casting a glance at the portrait, as
moment, we had been confronted with the formless grey, with the usual. This time, however, the portrait comes alive as the picture in

12
the window overlaps with the mirror reflection of a beautiful between "hard reality" and the "world of dreaming." As soon as we
brunette on the street, who asks the professor for a match. The take into accunt that it is precisely and only in dreams that we
professor, then, has an affair with her; kills her lover in a fight; is encounter the real of our desire, the whole accent radically shifts:
informed by a police inspector friend of the progress of the our common everyday reality, the reality of the social universe in
investigation of this murder; sits in a chair, drinks poison, and which we assume our usual roles of kind-hearted, decent people,
dozes off when he learns his arrest is imminent. He is then turns out to be an illusion that rests on a certain ''repression," on
awakened by an attendant at eleven and discovers that he has been overlooking the real of our desire. This social reality is then nothing
dreaming. Reassured, the professor returns home, conscious that he but a fragile, symbolic cobweb that can at any moment be torn
must avoid ensnarement by fatal brunettes. We must not, however, aside by an intrusion of the real. At any moment, the most common
view the final turnaround as a compromise, an accommodation to everyday conversation, the most ordinary event can take a
the codes of Hollywood. The message of the film is not consoling, dangerous turn, damage can be caused that cannot be undone.
not: "it was only a dream, in reality I am a normal man like others Woman in the Window demonstrates this by means of its looplike
and not a murderer!" but rather: in our unconscious, in the real of progress: events progress in a linear way until, all of a sudden,
our desire, we are all murderers. precisely at the point of catastrophic breakdown, we find ourselves
Paraphrasing the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian dream again at an earlier point of departure. The path to catastrophe turns
about the father to whom a dead son appears, reproaching him with out to be only a fictional detour bringing us back to our starting
the words "Father, can't you see that I'm burning?,'' we could say point. To bring about such an effect of retroactive fictionalization,
that the professor awakes in order to continue his dream (about Woman in the Window makes use of the repetition of the same
being a normal person like his fellow men), that is, to escape the scene (the professor dozes off in a chair, the attendant awakens him
real (the "psychic reality") of his desire. Awakened into everyday at eleven). The repetition retroactively changes what happened in
reality, he can say to himself with relief "It was only a dream!," between into a fiction, i.e., the "real" awakening is only one, the
thus overlooking the crucial fact that, awake, he is "nothing but the distance between the two is the place of the fiction.
consciousness of his dream." 9 In other words, paraphrasing the In a play by John B. Priestley, The Dangerous Corner, it is a
parable of Zhuang-Zhi and the butterfly, which is also one of gunshot that plays the role of the professor's awakening. The play is
Lacan's points of reference: we do not have a quiet, kind, decent, about a rich family gathered round the hearth of their country house
bourgeois professor dreaming for a moment that he is a murderer; while its members are returning from the hunt. Suddenly, a shot is
what we have is, on the contrary, a murderer dreaming, in his heard in the background and this shot gives the conversation a
everyday life, that he is just a decent bourgeois professor.10 dangerous turn. Long-repressed family secrets erupt, and finally the
This kind of retroactive displacement of "real" events into fiction father, the head of the family who had insisted on clarifying things,
(dreaming) appears as a "compromise," an act of ideological on bringing all secrets to the light of day, retires, broken, to the first
conformism, only if we hold to the naive ideological opposition floor of the house and shoots himself. But this shot turns out to be
the same as the one heard at the beginning of the play and the same
conversation continues, only this time instead of taking the
9
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 75–76. dangerous turn, it remains on the level of the usual superficial
10
Like Jim in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun who is really an airplane family chatter. The traumas remain buried and the family is happily
dreaming to be Jim, or like the hero of Terry Gillian's Brazil who is really a reunited for the idyllic dinner. This is the image of everyday reality
giant butterfly dreaming that he is a human bureaucrat.

13
offered by psychoanalysis: a fragile equilibrium that can be ''paranoid" story is the implication of the existence of an "Other of
destroyed at any moment if, in a quite contingent and unpredictable the Other": a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great Other
way, trauma erupts. The space that, retroactively, turns out to be (the symbolic order) precisely at the points at which this Other
fictional, the space between two awakenings or between two shots, starts to speak its "autonomy," i.e., where it produces an effect of
is, according to its formal structure, exactly the same as the meaning by means of a senseless contingency, beyond the
nonexistent thirteenth floor of the Acme building in Heinlein's conscious intention of the speaking subject, as in jokes or dreams.
novel, a fictional space, "another scene," where alone the truth of This "Other of the Other" is exactly the Other of paranoia: the one
our desire can be articulated—which is why, according to Lacan, who speaks through us without our knowing it, who controls our
truth "is structured like fiction." thoughts, who manipulates us through the apparent "spontaneity" of
jokes, or, as in Heinlein's novel, the artist whose fantasy creation is
The Psychotic Solution: The Other of the Other our world. The paranoid construction enables us to escape the fact
Our mention of Kafka apropos of the disproportion between outside that "the Other does not exist" (Lacan)—that it does not exist as a
and inside was by no means accidental: the Kafkaesque Court, that consistent, closed order—to escape the blind, contingent
absurd, obscene, culpabilizing agency, has to be located precisely automatism, the constitutive stupidity of the symbolic order.
as this surplus of the inside in relation to the outside, as this fantasy When faced with such a paranoid construction, we must not forget
space of the nonexistent thirteenth floor. In the mysterious Freud's warning and mistake it for the "illness" itself: the paranoid
"committee" that interrogates Randall, it is not difficult to construction is, on the contrary, an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull
recognize a new verson of the Kafkaesque Court, of the obscene overselves out of the real "illness," the "end of the world," the
figure of an evil superegoic law; the fact that members of this breakdown of the symbolic universe, by means of this substitute
committee worship the divine Bird only confirms that in the formation. If we want to witness the process of this breakdown—
imagery of our culture—up to and including Hitchcock's The the breakdown of the the barrier real/reality—in its pure form, we
Birds—birds function as the embodiment of a cruel and obscene have only to follow the path of the paintings produced in the 1960s,
superegoic agency. Heinlein eludes this Kafkaesque vision of a the last decade of his life, by Mark Rothko, the most tragic figure
world ruled by the obscene agency of a "mad God," but the price he of American abstract expressionism. The ''theme" of these paintings
pays for it is the paranoid construction according to which our is constant: all of them present nothing but a set of color variations
universe is the work of art of unknown creators. The wittiest of the relationship between the real and reality, rendered as a
variation on this theme—witty in the literal sense, because it geometrical abstraction by the famous painting of Kasimir
concerns wit itself, jokes—is to be found in Isaac Asimov's short Malevich, The Naked Unframed Icon of My Time: a simple black
story "Jokester." A scientist doing research on jokes comes to the square on a white background. The "reality" (white background
conclusion that human intelligence began precisely with the surface, the "liberated nothingness," the open space in which
capacity to produce jokes; so, after a thorough analysis of objects can appear) obtains its consistency only by means of the
thousands of jokes, he succeeds in isolating the "primal joke," the "black hole" in its center (the Lacanian das Ding, the Thing that
original point enabling passage from the animal to the human gives body to the substance of enjoyment), i.e., by the exclusion of
kingdom, i.e., the point at which superhuman intelligence (God) the real, by the change of the status of the real into that of a central
intervened in the course of life on earth by communicating to man lack. All late Rothko paintings are manifestations of a struggle to
the first joke. The common feature of this kind of ingenious save the barrier separating the real from reality, that is, to prevent

14
the real (the central black square) from overflowing the entire field, specific parts of the body's surface—the so-called "erogenous
to preserve the distance between the square and what must at any zones"—which, contrary to the superficial view, are not
cost whatsoever remain its background. If the square occupies the biologically determined but result instead from the signifying
whole field, if the difference between the figure and its background parceling of the body. Certain parts of the body's surface are
is lost, a psychotic autism is produced. Rothko pictures this struggle erotically privileged not because of their anatomical position but
as a tension between a gray background and the central black spot because of the way the body is caught up in the symbolic network.
that spreads menacingly from one painting to another (in the late This symbolic dimension is designated in the matheine as D, i.e.,
1960s, the vivacity of red and yellow in Rothko's canvases is symbolic demand. The final proof of this fact consists in a
increasingly replaced by the minimal opposition between black and phenomenon often encountered in hysterical symptoms where a
gray). If we look at these paintings in a "cinematic" way, i.e., if we part of the body that usually has no erogenous value starts to
put the reproductions one above the other and then turn them function as an erogenous zone (neck, nose, etc.). This classic
quickly to get the impression of continuous movement, we can explanation is, however, insufficient: what escapes it is the intimate
almost draw a line to the inevitable end—as if Rothko were driven relationship between drive and demand. A drive is precisely a
by some unavoidable fatal necessity. In the canvases immediately demand that is not caught up in the dialectic of desire, that resists
preceding his death, the minimal tension between black and gray dialecticization. Demand almost always implies a certain dialectical
changes for the last time into the burning conflict between mediation: we demand something, but what we are really aiming at
voracious red and yellow, witnessing the last desperate attempt at through this demand is something else—sometimes even the very
redemption and at the same time confirming unmistakably that the refusal of the demand in its literality. Along with every demand, a
end is imminent. Rothko was one day found dead in his New York question necessarily rises: "I demand this, but what do I really want
loft, in a pool of blood, with his wrists cut. He preferred death to by it?" Drive, on the contrary, persists in a certain demand, it is a
being swallowed by the Thing, i.e., precisely by that "grey and ''mechanical" insistence that cannot be caught up in dialectical
formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life" that the two trickery: I demand something and I persist in it to the end.
heroes of the Heinlein novel perceive through their open window. Our interest in this distinction concerns its relation to the "second
Far from being a sign of "madness," the barrier separating the real death": the apparitions that emerge in the domain "between two
from reality is therefore the very condition of a minimum of deaths" address to us some unconditional demand, and it is for this
"normalcy": ''madness" (psychosis) sets in when this barrier is torn reason that they incarnate pure drive without desire. Let us begin
down, when the real overflows reality (as in autistic breakdown) or with Antigone who, according to Lacan, irradiates a sublime beauty
when it is itself included in reality (assuming the form of the "Other from the very moment she enters the domain between two deaths,
of the Other," of the paranoiac's prosecutor, for example). between her symbolic and her actual death. What characterizes her
innermost posture is precisely her insistence on a certain
2— unconditional demand on which she is not prepared to give way: a
The Real and Its Vicissitudes proper burial for her brother. It is the same with the ghost of
How the Real Returns and Answers Hamlet's father, who returns from his grave with the demand that
Return of the Living Dead Hamlet revenge his infamous death. This connection between drive
Why is the Lacanian matheme for the drive SàD? The first answer as an unconditional demand and the domain between the two deaths
is that the drives are by definition "partial," they are always tied to is also visible in popular culture. In the film The Terminator,

15
Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a cyborg who returns to Night of the Living Dead, where the "undead" are not portrayed as
contemporary Los Angeles from the future, with the intention of embodiments of pure evil, of a simple drive to kill or revenge, but
killing the mother of a future leader. The horror of this figure as sufferers, pursuing their victims with an awkward persistence,
consists precisely in the fact that it functions as a programmed colored by a kind of infinite sadness (as in Werner Herzog's
automaton who, even when all that remains of him is a metallic, Nosferatu, in which the vampire is not a simple machinery of evil
legless skeleton, persists in his demand and pursues his victim with with a cynical smile on his lips, but a melancholic sufferer longing
no trace of compromise or hesitation. The terminator is the for salvation). Apropos of this phenomenon, let us then ask a naive
embodiment of the drive, devoid of desire. In two other films, we and elementary question: why do the dead return? The answer
encounter two versions of the same motive, one comical, the other offered by Lacan is the same as that found in popular culture:
pathetic-tragic. In George Romero's omnibus Creepshow because they were not properly, buried, i.e., because something
(screenplay by Stephen King), a family is gathered around the went wrong with their obsequies. The return of the dead is a sign of
dinner table to celebrate the anniversary of their father's death. a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization;
Years earlier, his sister had killed him at his birthday party by the dead return as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt. This is
hitting him on the head in response to his endlessly repeated the basic lesson drawn by Lacan from Antigone and Hamlet. The
demand, "Daddy wants his cake!" Suddenly, a strange noise is plots of both plays involve improper funeral rites, and the "living
heard from the family cemetery behind the house; the dead father dead"—Antigone and the ghost of Hamlet's father—return to settle
climbs from his grave, kills his murderous sister, cuts off the head symbolic accounts. The return of the living dead, then, materializes
of his wife, puts it on the tray, smears it with cream, decorates it a certain symbolic debt persisting beyond physical expiration.
with candles and mumbles contentedly: "Daddy got his cake!"—a It is commonplace to state that symbolization as such equates to
demand that has persisted beyond the grave until satisfied. The cult symbolic murder: when we speak about a thing, we suspend, place
film Robocop, a futuristic story about a policeman shot to death and in parentheses, its reality. It is precisely for this reason that the
then revived after all parts of his body have been replaced by funeral rite exemplifies symbolization at its purest: through it, the
artificial substitutes, introduces a more tragic note: the hero who dead are inscribed in the text of symbolic tradition, they are assured
finds himself literally "between two deaths"—clinically dead and at that, in spite of their death, they will "continue to live" in the
the same time provided with a new, mechanical body—starts to memory of the community. The "return of the living dead" is, on
remember fragments of his previous, "human" life and thus the other hand, the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the
undergoes a process of resubjectivation, changing gradually back latter implies a certain reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the
from pure incarnated drive to a being of desire. return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place
The ease with which examples from popular culture can be found in the text of tradition. The two great traumatic events of the
should come as no surprise: if there is a phenomenon that fully holocaust and the gulag are, of course, exemplary cases of the
deserves to be called the "fundamental fantasy of contemporary return of the dead in the twentieth century. The shadows of their
mass culture," it is this fantasy of the return of the living dead: the victims will continue to chase us as "living dead" until we give
fantasy of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns them a decent burial, until we integrate the trauma of their death
again and again to pose a threat to the living. The unattained into our historical memory. The same may be said of the
archetype of a long series—from the psychotic killer in Halloween "primordial crime" that founded history itself, the murder of the
to Jason in Friday the Thirteenth—is still George Romero's The ''primal father" (re)constructed by Freud in Totem and Taboo: the

16
murder of the father is integrated into the symbolic universe insofar myth of the primal father in Totem and Taboo complements—or,
as the dead father begins to reign as the symbolic agency of the more precisely, supplements—the Oedipus myth by embodying this
Name-of-the-Father. This transformation, this integration, however, impossible enjoyment in the obscene figure of the Father-of-
is never brought about without remainder; there is always a certain Enjoyment, i.e., in the very figure who assumes the role of the
leftover that returns in the form of the obscene and revengeful agent of prohibition. The illusion is that there was at least one
figure of the Father-of-Enjoyment, of this figure split between cruel subject (the primal father possessing all women) who was able to
revenge and crazy laughter, as, for example, the famous Freddie enjoy fully; as such, the figure of the Father-of-Enjoyment is
from Nightmare on Elm Street. nothing but a neurotic fantasy that overlooks the fact that the father
has been dead from the beginning, i.e., that he never was alive,
Beyond Pet Sematary except insofar as he did not know that he was already dead.
The Oedipus myth and the myth of the primal father of Totem and The lesson to be drawn from this is that reducing the pressure of the
Taboo are usually apprehended as two versions of the same myth, superego is definitely not to be accomplished by replacing its
that is, the myth of the primal father is conceived as a philogenetic supposedly "irrational," "counterproductive," "rigid'' pressure with
projection into the mythic, prehistorical past of the Oedipus myth rationally accepted renunciations, laws, and rules. The point is
as the elementary articulation of the subject's ontogenesis. A close rather to acknowledge that part of enjoyment is lost from the very
look reveals, however, that the two myths are deeply asymmetrical, beginning, that it is immanently impossible, and not concentrated
even opposed. 5 The Oedipus myth is based on the premise that it is "somewhere else," in the place from which the agent of prohibition
the father, as the agent of prohibition, who denies us access to speaks. At the same time, this allows us to locate the weak point of
enjoyment (i.e., incest, the sexual relationship with the mother). the Deleuzian polemic against Lacan's "oedipalism."6 What
The underlying implication is that parricide would remove this Deleuze and Guattari fail to take into account is that the most
obstacle and thus allow us fully to enjoy the forbidden object. The powerful anti-Oedipus is Oedipus itself: the Oedipal father—father
myth of the primal father is almost the exact opposite of this: the reigning as his Name, as the agent of symbolic law—is necessarily
result of the parricide is not the removal of an obstacle, enjoyment redoubled in itself, it can exert its authority only by relying on the
is not brought finally within our reach. Quite the contrary—the superego figure of the Father-of-Enjoyment. It is precisely this
dead father turns out to be stronger than the living one. After the dependence of the Oedipal father—the agency of symbolic law
parricide, the former reigns as the Name-of-the-Father, the agent of guaranteeing order and reconciliation—on the perverse figure of
the symbolic law that irrevocably precludes access to the forbidden the Father-of-Enjoyment that explains why Lacan prefers to write
fruit of enjoyment. perversion as père-version, i.e., the version of the father. Far from
Why is this redoubling necessary? In the Oedipus myth, the acting only as symbolic agent, restraining pre-oedipal,
prohibition of enjoyment still functions, ultimately, as an external "polymorphous perversity," subjugating it to the genital law, the
impediment, leaving the possibility open that without this obstacle, "version of," or turn toward, the father is the most radical
we would be able to enjoy fully. But enjoyment is already, in itself, perversion of all.
impossible. One of the commonplaces of Lacanian theory is that In this respect, Stephen King's Pet Sematary, perhaps the definitive
access to enjoyment is denied to the speaking being, as such. The novelization of the "return of the living dead," is of special interest
figure of the father saves us from this deadlock by bestowing on the to us insofar as it presents a kind of inversion of the motif of the
immanent impossibility the form of a symbolic interdiction. The dead father returning as the obscene ghost figure. The novel is the

17
story of Louis Creed, a young physician, who—together with his Pet Sematary is, then, a kind of perverted Antigone in which Creed
wife Rachel, two small children, six-year-old Ellie and two-year- represents the consequent logic of the modern, Faustian hero.
old Gage, and their cat Church—moves to a small town in Maine Antigone sacrifices herself so that her brother will get a decent
where he will manage the university infirmary. They rent a big, burial, whereas Creed deliberately sabotages normal burial. He
comfortable house near the highway, along which trucks pass intervenes with a perverted burial rite that—instead of leaving the
continually. Soon after their arrival, Jud Crandall, their elderly dead to their eternal rest—provokes their return as living dead. His
neighbor, takes them to visit the "Pet Sematary" in the woods love for his son is so boundless that it extends even beyond the
behind their house, a cemetery for the dogs and cats run over by barrier of ate *, into the domain of perdition—he is willing to risk
trucks on the highway. On the very first day, a student dies in eternal damnation, to have his son return as a murderous monster,
Louis's arms. After dying, however, he suddenly rises up to tell just to have him back. It is as if this figure of Creed, with his
Louis, "Don't go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to. monstrous act, were designed to give meaning to these lines from
The barrier was not made to be broken." The place designated by Antigone: "There are a lot of dreadful things in the world, but none
this warning is precisely the place "between two deaths,'' the is more dreadful than man." Lacan noted, apropos of Antigone, that
forbidden domain of the Thing. The barrier not to be crossed is Sophocles gave us a kind of critique of humanism avant la lettre,
none other than the one beyond which Antigone is drawn, the that he outlined in advance, before its arrival, humanism's self-
forbidden boundary-domain where "being insists in suffering" (like destructive dimension.
the living dead in Romero's film). This barrier is designated in
Antigone by the Greek term ate*, perdition, devastation: "Beyond The Corpse That Would Not Die
ate we could stay only for a brief period of time, and it is there that Happily for us, the dead can also return in a more amusing, not to
Antigone strives to go." The sybilic warning of the dead student say benevolent way, as in Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry.
soon acquires meaning when Creed is irresistibly drawn into this Hitchcock called The Trouble with Harry an exercise in the art of
space beyond the barrier. A few days later, Church is killed by a understatement. This fundamental component of English humor is
passing truck. Aware of the pain that the cat's death will cause little present in the film's ironic subversion of the basic procedure of
Ellie, Jud initiates Creed into the secret that lies beyond the Pet Hitchcock's other films. Far from diverting a peaceful, everyday
Sematary—an ancient Indian burial ground inhabited by a situation into the unheimlich, far from functioning as the eruption
malevolent spirit, Wendigo. The cat is buried, but returns the very of some traumatic entity that disturbs the tranquil flow of life, the
next day—stinking, loathsome, a living dead, similar in all respects "blot," Harry's body—which serves in this film as Hitchcock's
to its former self except for the fact that it seems to be inhabited by famous "McGuffin"—functions as a minor, marginal problem, not
an evil spirit. When Gage is killed by another passing truck, Creed really all that important, indeed, almost petty. The social life of the
buries him, only to witness his return as a monster child who kills village goes on, people continue to exchange pleasantries, arrange
old Jud, then his own mother, and is finally put to death by his to meet at the corpse, to pursue their ordinary interests.
father. Yet Creed returns to the burial ground once again with the Nevertheless, the film's lesson cannot be summed up in a
body of his wife, convinced that this time things will turn out all comforting maxim—"Let's not take life too seriously; death and
right. As the novel ends, he sits alone in his kitchen, playing sexuality are, in the final analysis, frivolous and futile things"—nor
patience and waiting for her return. does it reflect a tolerant, hedonistic attitude. Just like the obsessive
personality described by Freud toward the end of his analysis of the

18
Other documents randomly have
different content
and Susquehannah, whispering yes-yes, no-no, and a hesitating
stutter halfway between yes-yes, and no-no, always hesitating.
 10. Three Stories About the Letter X and
How It Got into the Alphabet.

People: An Oyster King

Shovel Ears
Pig Wisps
The Men Who Change the Alphabets

A River Lumber King

Kiss Me
Flax Eyes
Wildcats

A Rich Man
Blue Silver
Her Playmates, Singing
There are six hundred different stories told in the Rootabaga
Country about the first time the letter X got into the alphabet and
how and why it was. The author has chosen three (3) of the shortest
and strangest of those stories and they are told in the next and
following pages.
 Pig Wisps
There was an oyster king far in the south who knew how to open
oysters and pick out the pearls.
He grew rich and all kinds of money came rolling in on him
because he was a great oyster opener and knew how to pick out the
pearls.
The son of this oyster king was named Shovel Ears. And it was
hard for him to remember.
“He knows how to open oysters but he forgets to pick out the
pearls,” said the father of Shovel Ears.
“He is learning to remember worse and worse and to forget better
and better,” said the father of Shovel Ears.

Now in that same place far in the south was a little girl with two
braids of hair twisted down her back and a face saying, “Here we
come—where from?”
And her mother called her Pig Wisps.
Twice a week Pig Wisps ran to the butcher shop for a soup bone.
Before starting she crossed her fingers and then the whole way to the
butcher shop kept her fingers crossed.
 If she met any playmates and they asked her to stop and play
cross-tag or jackstones or all-around-the-mulberry-bush or the-
green-grass-grew-all-around or drop-the-handkerchief, she told
them, “My fingers are crossed and I am running to the butcher shop
for a soup bone.”
One morning running to the butcher shop she bumped into a big
queer boy and bumped him flat on the sidewalk.
“Did you look where you were running?” she asked him.
“I forgot again,” said Shovel Ears. “I remember worse and worse. I
forget better and better.”
“Cross your fingers like this,” said Pig Wisps, showing him how.
He ran to the butcher shop with her, watching her keep her fingers
crossed till the butcher gave her the soup bone.
“After I get it then the soup bone reminds me to go home with it,”
she told him. “But until I get the soup bone I keep my fingers
crossed.”
Shovel Ears went to his father and began helping his father open
oysters. And Shovel Ears kept his fingers crossed to remind him to
pick out the pearls.
He picked a hundred buckets of pearls the first day and brought
his father the longest slippery, shining rope of pearls ever seen in
that oyster country.
“How do you do it?” his father asked.
“It is the crossed fingers—like this,” said Shovel Ears, crossing his
fingers like the letter X. “This is the way to remember better and
forget worse.”
It was then the oyster king went and told the men who change the
alphabets just what happened.
When the men who change the alphabets heard just what
happened, they decided to put in a new letter, the letter X, near the
end of the alphabet, the sign of the crossed fingers.
On the wedding day of Pig Wisps and Shovel Ears, the men who
change the alphabets all came to the wedding, with their fingers
crossed.
Pig Wisps and Shovel Ears stood up to be married. They crossed
their fingers. They told each other other they would remember their
promises.
And Pig Wisps had two ropes of pearls twisted down her back and
a sweet young face saying, “Here we come—where from?”
 Kiss Me
Many years ago when pigs climbed chimneys and chased cats up
into the trees, away back, so they say, there was a lumber king who
lived in a river city with many wildcats in the timbers near by.
And the lumber king said, “I am losing my hair and my teeth and I
am tired of many things; my only joy is a daughter who is a dancing
shaft of light on the ax handles of morning.”
She was quick and wild, the lumber king’s daughter. She had never
kissed. Not her mother nor father nor any sweetheart ever had a love
print from her lips. Proud she was. They called her Kiss Me.
She didn’t like that name, Kiss Me. They never called her that
when she was listening. If she happened to be listening they called
her Find Me, Lose Me, Get Me. They never mentioned kisses because
they knew she would run away and be what her father called her, “a
dancing shaft of light on the ax handles of morning.”
But—when she was not listening they asked, “Where is Kiss Me to-
day?” Or they would say, “Every morning Kiss Me gets more
beautiful—I wonder if she will ever in her young life get a kiss from a
man good enough to kiss her.”
One day Kiss Me was lost. She went out on a horse with a gun to
hunt wildcats in the timbers near by. Since the day before, she was
gone. All night she was out in a snowstorm with a horse and a gun
hunting wildcats. And the storm of the blowing snow was coming
worse on the second day.
 Out into the snowstorm
Flax Eyes rode that day

It was then the lumber king called in a long, loose, young man with
a leather face and hay in his hair. And the king said, “Flax Eyes, you
are the laziest careless man in the river lumber country—go out in
the snowstorm now, among the wildcats, where Kiss Me is fighting
for her life—and save her.”
“I am the hero. I am the man who knows how. I am the man who
has been waiting for this chance,” said Flax Eyes.
On a horse, with a gun, out into the snowstorm Flax Eyes rode that
day. Far, far away he rode to where Kiss Me, the quick wild Kiss Me,
was standing with her back against a big rock fighting off the
wildcats.
In that country the snowstorms make the wildcats wilder—and
Kiss Me was tired of shooting wildcats, tired of fighting in the snow,
nearly ready to give up and let the wildcats have her.
Then Flax Eyes came. The wildcats jumped at him, and he threw
them off. More wildcats came, jumping straight at his face. He took
hold of those wildcats by the necks and threw them over the big rock,
up into the trees, away into the snow and the wind.
At last he took all the wildcats one by one and threw them so far
they couldn’t come back. He put Kiss Me on her horse, rode back to
the lumber king and said lazy and careless, “This is us.”
The lumber king saw the face of Flax Eyes was all covered with
cross marks like the letter X. And the lumber king saw the wildcats
had torn the shirt off Flax Eyes and on the skin of his chest,
shoulders, arms, were the cross marks of the wildcats’ claws, cross
marks like the letter X.
So the king went to the men who change the alphabets and they
put the cross marks of the wildcats’ claws, for a new letter, the letter
X, near the end of the alphabet. And at the wedding of Kiss Me and
Flax Eyes, the men who change the alphabets came with wildcat
claws crossed like the letter X.
 Blue Silver
Long ago when the years were dark and the black rains used to
come with strong winds and blow the front porches off houses, and
pick chimneys off houses, and blow them onto other houses, long ago
when people had understanding about rain and wind, there was a
rich man with a daughter he loved better than anything else in the
world.
And one night when the black rain came with a strong wind
blowing off front porches and picking off chimneys, the daughter of
the rich man fell asleep into a deep sleep.
In the morning they couldn’t wake her. The black rain with the
strong wind kept up all that day while she kept on sleeping in a deep
sleep.
Men and women with music and flowers came in, boys and girls,
her playmates, came in—singing songs and calling her name. And
she went on sleeping.
All the time her arms were crossed on her breast, the left arm
crossing the right arm like a letter X.
Two days more, five days, six, seven days went by—and all the time
the black rain with a strong wind blowing—and the daughter of the
rich man never woke up to listen to the music nor to smell the
flowers nor to hear her playmates singing songs and calling her
name.
 She stayed sleeping in a deep sleep—with her arms crossed on her
breast—the left arm crossing the right arm like a letter X.
So they made a long silver box, just long enough to reach from her
head to her feet.
And they put on her a blue silver dress and a blue silver band
around her forehead and blue silver shoes on her feet.
There were soft blue silk and silver sleeves to cover her left arm
and her right arm—the two arms crossed on her breast like the letter
X.
They took the silver box and carried it to a corner of the garden
where she used to go to look at blue lilacs and climbing blue morning
glories in patches of silver lights.
Among the old leaves of blue lilacs and morning glories they dug a
place for the silver box to be laid in.
And men and women with music and flowers stood by the silver
box, and her old playmates, singing songs she used to sing—and
calling her name.
When it was all over and they all went away they remembered one
thing most of all.
And that was her arms in the soft silk and blue silver sleeves, the
left arm crossing over the right arm like the letter X.
Somebody went to the king of the country and told him how it all
happened, how the black rains with a strong wind came, the deep
sleep, the singing playmates, the silver box—and the soft silk and
blue silver sleeves on the left arm crossing the right arm like the
letter X.
Before that there never was a letter X in the alphabet. It was then
the king said, “We shall put the crossed arms in the alphabet; we
shall have a new letter called X, so everybody will understand a
funeral is beautiful if there are young singing playmates.”
 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as
printed.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROOTABAGA
PIGEONS ***

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